Following Up “Hotel Rwanda”

Several months ago my wife and I got around to watching Hotel Rwanda. If you haven’t seen or heard of it, here is a synopsis: During the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 in which 800,000 men, women, and children were murdered with machetes, a manager of a hotel saves several hundred lives with nothing but his wits. It’s very moving, and I highly recommend it.

After seeing it, my wife and I were quite affected so I wanted to follow up with some reading - typically, movies stretch the truth to tell a better story, but I like to know the history. So I got the story of the UN general who was in charge of the failed peace-keeping mission (if you’ve seen the movie, the Nick Nolte character is loosely based on this general). His name is Romeo Daillaire, and his book is called Shake Hands With the Devil. He is hard on western nations, and after what he saw in Rwanda, he is right.

Daillaire had met with the principal enemies in Rwanda, and they had told him what he wanted to hear. He later realized he had been played by both sides. This is his what he says about the views of the two sides:

They had judged that the West was too obsessed with the former Yugoslavia and with its peace-dividend reductions of its military forces to get overly involved in central Africa. Were they in fact already betting that white Western nations had too much on their hands to attempt another foray into black Africa? Were the hard-liners playing us, and me, for fools? I think so. I believe they had already concluded that the West did not have the will, as it had already demonstrated in Bosnia, Croatia and Somalia, to police the world, to expend the resources or to take the necessary casualties. They had calculated that the West would deploy a token force and when threatened would duck or run. They knew us better than we knew ourselves. (italics mine)

Basically, Daillaire rightly says that we in the west would not spend money or resources to protect people that had no strategic interest. The principal players in Rwanda knew that. As a result, 800,000 people died over several weeks in 1994.

I was one of the people who thought we should not be involved in Rwanda. I have reconsidered that, and now I think I was wrong. All of the 800,000 who were murdered in Rwanda were image-bearers, they were oppressed, and we are called to help such people. Moreover, many of the 800,000 were my brothers and sisters in Christ - Rwanda had been heavily evangelized.

I don’t believe the UN can save every person or every situation, and I don’t think very highly of the UN’s ability to do anything productive. But Daillaire believes he could have prevented the genocide with only a few thousand well-equipped troops. The West was not even willing to do that.

Perhaps we need to reconsider when we should support intervention, and when we shouldn’t. I tend to see intervention through the lense of patriotism and national interest, rather than protection of the poor and oppressed. Perhaps I should consider intervention through the lense of biblical values.