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10 Years On, Hollywood assigns blame for Rwanda Genocide
EFL "Give him another kick," film director Raoul Peck orders an actor playing a militiaman at a roadblock in a scene recreating Rwandaâs genocide. Urged on, a group of men give an horrific portrayal of attackers beating and hacking their victims with machetes, simulating slashing their Achilles tendons to prevent escape. "We donât waste bullets on cockroaches like this," says one of the actors, raising a club to bludgeon a man already on his knees. The scene being shot in the capital Kigali evokes some of the worst slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu extremists killed some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in 100 days. -snip- "When itâs too near, people are still hiding from the truth or trying to hide the fact that people knew about it and did nothing to stop it," said Peck. "Ten years later, we have the tremendous chance to do a film that may stay as a witness and as a tool for others to explain what really happened here." For Peck, a Haitian-American, another motive for making a film about genocide is to show that what happened in Rwanda was driven more by politics and history than by ethnicity. (Cue the drum roll, please) And the verdict by the Hatian born American film director is.... "Belgiumâs racist policies during the colonial era are much to blame, he says, as is the Westâs failure to act once it became clear that genocide was underway. The West is totally implicated in what happened here," he said. "The United States, England and France were all pushing the U.N. to get out of Rwanda. Nobody has clean hands on this." The mystery is solved. Hutu extremists are exonerated. On to the next revisionist project.
Posted by: Super Hose 2004-02-25 |
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