It seems like everybody’s buzzing about Rwanda these days.
Too bad it’s more than a decade too late.
Last year’s critically acclaimed film “Hotel Rwanda,” starring Don Cheadle, brought the horrific events of genocide back into our consciousness, or planted them there for the first time.
Now HBO presents an original film, “Sometimes in April,” that chronicles the slaughter of more than 800,000 people in 100 days in Rwanda. It premieres Saturday at 8 p.m.
While the film portrays the incredible courage it took for many to survive the genocide, this is not a story of heroes.
It’s one that should embarrass every American who stood by and ignored the bloodshed while bureaucrats bickered over the difference between “acts of genocide” and actual genocide.
This is homework-assignment television at its finest. No one wants to watch this movie, but everyone needs to.
Shot on location in Rwanda, “Sometimes in April” blends fictional dialogue and story lines with real news reports and TV coverage of government briefings.
The top story here in the United States was the suicide of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain while thousands of people were exterminated in the small African nation.
We simply didn’t care.
The story of the Hutu majority’s deliberate slaughter of the Tutsis is told mainly from the perspective of Augustin, a one-time Hutu soldier.
Augustin, like Paul Rusesabagina, portrayed by Cheadle in “Hotel Rwanda,” has a wife and many friends who are Tutsi. Augustin, too, winds up on the assassination list because he married a Tutsi.
While he struggles to lead his friends and family to safety, his brother is spewing hateful radio broadcasts intended to encourage the Hutu rebels.
The story switches from 2004, with Augustin attending his brother’s criminal tribunal for his role in inciting the violence, back to the events of 1994 as he recalls the terror.
While watching “Sometimes in April,” as with “Hotel Rwanda,” you can’t help but hope that at least in this semi-fictionalized account some moral responsibility will prevail and the carnage will end. But you know it won’t.
Why not?
The answer may lie in a phone conversation in the film between Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state played by Debra Winger, and Rwandan Col. Theoneste Bagosora.
When Bushnell threatens Bagosora, saying the United States will take action if he doesn’t stop the killing, Bagosora replies, “Really? You will send the Marines? We have no oil here; we have no diamonds. We have nothing you need in Rwanda. Why would you come?”
Perhaps fearing a repeat of the “Black Hawk Down” incident, in which 18 American soldiers died in Somalia, President Clinton declined to send in troops.
He later said, “Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence.”
Sadly, we still are.
More genocide is happening as you read this in Darfur, Sudan, where, “every single day you go out to see another burned village, and more dead bodies,” a former Marine captain told The New York Times this month.
Brian Steidle was a military adviser for an African Union monitoring team there.
“And the children – you see 6-month-old babies that have been shot, and 3-year-old kids with their faces smashed in with rifle butts,” he told The Times. “And you just have to stand there and write your reports.”
The Rwanda film is difficult to watch and at times seems heavy-handed.
Deal with it. The least we can do now is watch a two hour and 20 minute movie and ask our leaders to not fail us again.
Columnist Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.
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