Rwandan president Paul Kagame on Wednesday dismissed the Oscar-nominated drama "Hotel Rwanda" as an attempt to rewrite the history of the central African country's 1994 genocide.
The 2004 film refueled world interest in the massacres, in which some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were butchered in 100 days of killings. "Hotel Rwanda" stars Don Cheadle as Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of a luxury hotel in the Rwandan capital Kigali who uses his position to help save more than 1,200 Tutsi refugees.
Kagame said the movie's portrayal of Rusesabagina as a hero during the genocide was false. "It has nothing to do with Rusesabagina," Kagame told reporters during a visit to Washington. "He just happened to be there accidentally, and he happened to be surviving because he was not in the category of those being hunted."
| The movie portrays that accurately. Mr. Rusesabagina is a Hutu and initially wasn't hunted. He was the hotel manager and just happened to be in the right place at the right time. |
Kagame said people in the hotel were saved in part because U.N. forces occupied the hotel and because the killers wanted to keep it as a place where they could drink beer after a long day of killing and discuss whom to kill the following day.
| Also noted in the movie. The hotel was protected by some big-shot generals. That allowed Mr. Rusesabagina to save people. |
Kagame, a Tutsi, said another reason lives were spared is that talks had been underway between his rebel group and the then-interim government to exchange Tutsis in the hotel for Hutu soldiers captured by his group. "Someone is trying to rewrite the history of Rwanda and we cannot accept it," he said.
| The talks didn't seem to go very well, did they? And why did the rebels focus on the Tutsis in the hotel when there was a whole country of Tutsis being slaughtered? Mr. Kagame is telling porky-pies. |
Some survivors of the genocide also have been critical of movies about the slaughter, saying Hollywood got their story wrong.
| It's one story. You got another story to tell? Make a movie. |
Amid international inaction, the genocide was finally ended by Kagame, who led a rebel army from Uganda to seize power.
Rusesabagina, awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom last year, has recently been critical of the Kigali government, accusing it of continued human rights violations and oppression of political opponents.
| And I'll bet he's right. Neither tribe is on the side of the angels. |
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