“Throughout history, wars have been declared and fought in the name of man-made concepts, yet are often tragically reduced to struggles to simply preserve one’s humanity.”
The American Civil War, when traced back to its very core, simply started with plain racism. It all started because of an ideology that made some of the white people think of their own race as the naturally superior race in all mankind, and that they were born with the right to chain up and enslave their much darker counterpart. World War I, likewise, began with nations that wanted to prove themselves as the most powerful in a world engrossed in an imperial battle. The world has already witnessed many great wars and in many of these great wars, the issue of race seems to always recur.
The film Hotel Rwanda is a film about the 1993 Rwandan genocide. The genocide was rooted from not a different cause. The reason behind it mirrors the same ideology that caused the American Civil War and the World War I. The Hutus and the Tutsis- the two ethnic groups of Rwanda, were both subjected to the same kind of desire to prove themselves as the superior group of people. A desire that came from the kind of thinking that may have had come naturally to humans yet is the same kind of thinking that is killing humanity.
The animosity between the Hutus and the Tutsis had long been harbored and strengthened by certain events that happened throughout the history of the nation of Rwanda. The genocide was not something that only begun a few years or a few months before it actually happened. It is the result of a long-existing tension between the two ethnic groups that can be traced back from earlier or as far as the year 1916 when the Belgians arrived in Rwandan soil with the aim of conquering it.
The arrival of the Belgians in Rwanda finalized a division that had long been building up between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis. Although the two groups are quite similar, as they share the same traditions, land, and language, the Belgians made the locals use identification cards to set apart the Hutus and the Tutsis from each other. The Tutsis, who were physically slightly thinner and taller, found themselves favored by their European colonizers as the superior group among the two. This supremacy of the Tutsis was not well-received by the Hutus and what it did was only to further the rift between the ethnic groups. The conflict resulted to several Hutu-led rebellions in 1959, the foundation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by the Tutsis, the assassination of Hutu Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, and finally, the genocide.
One of the Hutu leaders in the movie, George Rutuganda, said in a radio voiceover, “When people ask me, good listeners, why do I hate all the Tutsi, I say, ‘Read our history.’ The Tutsi were collaborators for the Belgian colonists, they stole our Hutu land, they whipped us.” What the European colonizers really brought to Rwanda is an ideology that in a way mirrors the racial distinction between blacks and whites that existed in Europe and America. This ideology that was unfortunately introduced to these African groups cultivated in the minds of the Hutus a kind of hatred that only an oppressed can feel.
For so many years the tension that the Belgians have created between the Tutsis and the Hutus resulted to riots, rebellions, and fighting that never stopped. Rwanda had been a place of turbulence for so many years where there never had been peace. The Hutus and the Tutsis were two ethnic groups whose only true dividers were the labels that they had on their identification cards, but for years they had been killing each other. Countless lives were lost; all for the sake of a long-prevailing hatred brought about by a kind of thinking that never should have existed.
Every blood that is shed in war does not only mean that a human life is lost, it also signifies how, little by little, humanity is diminishing. During the war in Rwanda, every Hutu that killed a Tutsi lost a part of his or her humanity in the act of taking a human life. Humanity simply means being human. What distinguishes humans from animals is that humans are granted with all the capability in the world to be humane. If that is lost, then humanity is too.
On the other hand, every Tutsi that was killed by a Hutu had his or her humanity stolen. Not only was life lost, but it was lost because of race. A Tutsi orphan in the movie promised as she begged for her life that “she won’t be Tutsi anymore.” But no human being is given a chance to choose the race or the kind of life he or she will be born to. To be deprived of life simply because of the race or the ethnic group that one belongs to, to take from one human being the freedom to live simply because he or she was born a certain way is taking from that person his or her humanity.
Wars have been fought in the name of problems that humans have made for themselves. The aim of the Hutus was to eliminate all Tutsis and they claimed that they were halfway into achieving that. But, humanity was lost along the way and nothing good ever comes out when humanity is lost.For those people who knew this but could do nothing to stop the war, it became a struggle, not just to save lives but to also preserve humanity. Paul Rusesabagina was one of those people. Though he was at first only interested in protecting no one but his family, the worsening state of his nation forced him into becoming a refuge to his family, to his neighbors, and to everyone struggling to keep humanity.
There had been a struggle too in the part of the peace-keeping white people of the UN and the Red Cross. One of the most powerful scenes of the film was when the whites were being evacuated back to their home countries while the blacks watch them all go from across the road. The real conflict of the war might be between the Hutus and the Tutsis, but the white-skinned people cannot be cancelled out from the equation. They have struggled too in the dilemma of whether they should interfere or not, because even during those times, there was still a tiny bit of the old line that divides them from the black-skinned people. In the end, they interfered, but a fact still remains that it took them long enough before doing so.
Throughout history, wars have been fought. Humans have fought, humans have died, humans have struggled in wars for concepts they believe to be true. And now, it has been long since the great wars of history ended, but still, humans remain to struggle. To this day, people are struggling to be allowed to be human without being judged because of their race. A war can only result to struggles because there should never have been a war in the first place. A war can end, but humans will remain to struggle, because humans have fought for the wrong fights. Humans have fought in great wars for concepts they believe in, when they should have been fighting against those.
*This is a reflection paper I wrote for history class last semester. I'm planning to post two more reflection papers from the same class, but I don't want to post them yet since those two may make me seem like I'm preaching something that I I'm not practicing. (Basta!haha) I'm posting this to save my blog from the word vomiting that I have been doing in my past few posts. haha
