While these lines are powerfully poignant, they help mask the fact that there was heavy direct involvement in the events that unfolded in Rwanda and later in the Congo from neighboring states, especially Uganda, as well as Western countries particularly France and the United States.
I've always suspected that but know next to nothing about it. What's the story?
Doug
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I don't pretend to have *the* story, but I do have a view of the events that transpired in the Great Lakes region in the last decade of the 20th Century that is at variance with what has become the mainstream narrative that has informed movies like Hotel Rwanda. Several key dynamics were at play in that country and in the region: Uganda under Yoweri Museveni was (re)emerging as a regional military and economic power; Zaire's (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko and his ally of convenience Jonas Savimbi in Angola were no longer useful to the Americans and were desperately seeking to find their bearings in the ambiguous post-cold war dispensation. Rwanda (and Burundi) itself had been experiencing a civil war pitting revanchist Rwandan-Tutsis based in Uganda against the Hutu controlled government in Kigali. Meanwhile the United States had largely taken over Britains sphere of influence in Africa or at least was the senior partner in the Anglo-American Africa-enterprise and the French were losing ground to the Lion and Eagle. The French saw the Great Lakes as part of their bailiwick (having superceded Belgium in its former African colonies) and were very wary of growing US influence in the region.
In the 1990s Uganda increasingly became a major partner of the United in Africa. English/Swahili/Kiyarwanda speaking Rwandan-Tutsis in Uganda who had fled the anti-Tutsi pogroms of the 1960s had comprised key elements of the Tanzanian-sponsored liberation army that ousted Idi Amin from Uganda, key among them Paul Kagame (now President of Rwanda) who went on to became commander of the Uganda Army. While serving as commander of the Ugandan Armed forces military intelligence Kagame was also coordinating incursions into Rwanda by the revanchist Ugandan-based Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), indeed when the RPF launched its initial invasion of Rwanda in 1990, there was a mass desertion by Rwandan troops, and the Ugandan President had to order a closure of the border to mitigate the hemorraghe of Ugandan Army military equipment.
France, which has a military pact with many Francophone nations intervened. In retaliation to the RPF incursions, the French backed regime of Juvenal Habyarimana assasinated over 2000 Tutsi civilians over the next 3 years. It is during these three years that the ground was laid for what was to become the Rwandan bloodbath.
In the larger geopolitical schema the United States and France were in competition for control of the region, with the Congo being much more important than relatively poor Rwanda. Meanwhile the French were enjoying the renewed fealty of the beleagured and cancer-ridden Mobutu, who the US had recently discovered was in fact a dispicable tyrant they would have nothing to do with and the MPLA in Angola had found a happy accomodation with the West, especially the US and the old crocodile Savimbi was becoming mere annoyance to everybody (he was killed in 2002).
That the Hutu regime was planning to massacre tens of thousands of Rwandans was well known. Whether or not the peace talks in Rwanda would have diffused the situation we will never know as the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed when their plane was shot down as they returned to Kigali from Arusha. This was the event that sparked the mass killings. There are different theories as to who shot down the plane and why. One view Kagame did it to create a raison d'etre for a full scale invasion of Rwanda from Uganda. Another view is that Hutu extremists did it in order to doom the peace talks.
Either way, the RPF invaded, the massacares took place hundreds of thousands died.
Less well known in the West is that having taken over Rwanda. The RPF in conjunction with the Ugandan Army then launched an invasion of the Congo, (with the US supportig Uganda/Rwanda and the French supporting Mobutu) ostensibly to pursue Hutu militants and overthrew Mobutu, committing counter-genocide on Hutu refugees and Congolese as they went and spaking a messy war that claimed over 5 millions lives.
In short the story of Rwanda cannot really be understood without putting it in geopolitical perspective - but then you couldn't really make a movie about that, could you?
Joe W.