The Heemer Essay examples

The socio/cultural cause of the genocide in Rwanda came from the German and Belgian colonization, bringing along with them an idea of social science. Both colonial powers reinforced the Tutsi’s political power, which further oppressed the Hutus. This reinforcement caused the Hutus to envy the Tutsi’s aristocracy because they were privileged to all things, while the Hutus were privileged to nothing (Kapuscinski). This oppression led to many Hutu revolutions that the Hutus were successful in over the unprepared Tutsis. These victories of the Tutsis incidentally reversed the Rwandan apartheid system. The reversion of the system then gave

1. What are the main themes, politically and socially, that are portrayed in the film?

Main Ideas: The most important themes are hatred, mercy and friendship because they have a significant meaning and help advance the plot.

In my belief, the civil war couldn't have been avoided. The biggest cause of the civil war was the dispute over the future of the slavery. Without the was, there was no possibility for the southern state to abolish slavery because slaves were a;ready being used for a large variety of jobs. Southerners believed that slaves were cheaper and more manageable form of labor who could be trained to work in the factories. Slavery was economic foundation for the south, which meant they wouldn't have ended slavery without the war.

These themes that are portrayed, include materialism, the corruption of dreams and idealism, which all come under the larger theme of searching for human fulfilment.

One interesting theme that is developed

Hatred, relationships, and conflict are the most important topics in both Night and Hotel Rwanda because in both events there was a conflict due to a strong hatred from one side to another. The relationships between the characters also played a significant role as the characters sacrificed many things for their loved ones and felt anguish for each other throughout both stories. The main characters in both Night and Hotel Rwanda portrayed the story from their own experience and point of view about the genocide and conflict of both devastating events. During the Holocaust and the crisis in Rwanda, the German and Hutu harbored a lot of hate and used extreme and brutal measures to get rid of the jews and tutsis. The themes of anguish, inhumanity

John A. Ausink establishes the actors within the confines of Rwanda. These actors include the Tutsi and the Hutu. The Tutsi are looked at as elite in a sense but the Hutu make up the majority of the Rwandan population. Ausink also establishes the government of Rwanda early in the piece. “In 1973, General Juvenal Habyarimana seized power in Rwanda and established a government that only allowed political participation by the Republican Movement for Democracy and Development” (Ausink 1997, pg.2). This is important within the context because it leads to the introduction of the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) in 1986. Their presence within Rwanda leads to political unrest and eventually violence. “After the government forces had killed two senior rebel commanders, the RPF resorted to guerrilla warfare . . . “(Ausink, pg. 2, 1997). Habyarimana’s

The year is 1994, and Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of Hôtel des Les Milles Collines and a Hutu, lives a happy and successful life with his Tutsi wife and three kids. During the conflict against the Hutu militia in Rwanda, Paul struggle to house over one thousand Tutsi and Hutu refugees from being slaughtered by the Hutu militia. The two primary causes of genocide as portrayed in the movie are the RTML radio station and the UN lack of support.

The Rwandan Genocide was one that will never be forgotten. It occured from April 7, 1994 to July 1994. Rwanda was mainly separated into three different ethnic groups. The Hutus, the Tutsis, and the Twa. The population of the Hutus in Rwanda was about 84 percent of the country, the Tutsis group was 15 percent, and the Twa ethnicity was only a trivial 1 percent. The start of the country’s civil war was triggered by the killing of the Rwandan president. The country was having difficulties before the assassination, and the killing only initiated the anger. The Rwandan Genocide left the country struggling to reconstruct the relationships between its people.

Hotel Rwanda is a powerful and heart-breaking film about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Terry George, the screenwriter could have chosen to make a documentary about what took place in Rwanda, but instead related it to the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the manager, who sheltered thousands of refugees in the Belgian-owned Mille Collines hotel in Kigali. Paul risk his life with his family only to protect and save the Tutsi refugees from the violent rebel troops in the city by keeping them in the hotel. The film allows us to analyse the situation that caused the conflict in Rwanda during those times which often referred to us evil, in the sense that it was not only on the part of the Hutu militia that perpetrated the atrocities, but also of the international community and the UN in particular, which did not intervene to stop the slaughtering.

In just one hundred days, almost one million people were murdered in the genocide rampage that swept through Rwanda, Africa in 1994. Hotel Rwanda, a film directed by Terry George in 2004, is a story based on the tragedy that occurred ten years prior. The massacre is a result of the Hutu tribe’s prejudice and discrimination of the Tutsi tribe and the world’s lack of intervention. George’s depiction of the event is less about the massacre itself though because of his choice to portray it from the view of Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu hotel manager married to a Tutsi woman.

In Hotel Rwanda, the stages of genocide are made apparent through the escape of our protagonist, Paul, and his family during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The first stage of genocide is classification. The movie begins already past the stage of classification, but the two groups of Hutus and Tutsis are already identified from the rule they once had from Belgium. The Hutus are described as having dark skinned, having broader noses, and looking less European, whereas the Tutsis are more European looking, have lighter skin, and slimmer noses. The Tutsis were originally in power when the Belgians were ruling, but when they pulled out they left the Hutus in power. The Hutus after years of being put down rose up with anger against the oppression they had from when the Tutsis were in power.

Therefore, poor individuals do not have the same opportunities as the wealthier individuals. Land ownership was hard to maintain if you were poor; however, if you were a woman and your family had land, you would have the choice to inherit the land. Hutus realized that if they killed the Tutsi farmers, they would gain land. Some poor women had to work unpaid hours, making their lifestyle feel as if they were slaves. The poorer individuals proved to be of lesser value to those above them. Because of this, they were some of the first people to be killed in the war due to genocide. In the Hotel Rwanda movie, the Tutsi group was those being targeted for genocide. At this time, the Hutus were the group that mainly controlled agriculture and the other industries. They killed Tutsi farmers in order to steal their land for themselves. According to the article, “Extreme Poverty Led to The Rwanda Genocide,” they note the Hutu need for the land for agricultural purposes, “landless Hutu wanted those very lands, marginal as they may have been for agriculture, to build homesteads on and to farm,” (Magnarella,

The second thing that stood out to me was the dialectic of history past, present, and future. These ideal shapes the plot of the movie, creating tensions and civil war between the two battling cultures. The past between the two cultures creates uneasiness, leading to an unbalance of power and eventually civil war where an estimated 800,000 people were killed. Hotel Rwanda describes the history between the two cultures, and how it came to be that the Tutsi had control of the state rather than the Hutu. The struggles for the Tutsi during the genocide were enormous, and due to the little aid from other allied states, the cultures were clashing on their own without help from other states.