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The Failure of the International Community in Hotel Rwanda

Molly O’Hagan Hardy, English Department, University of Texas, Austin
mollyohardy@mail.utexas.edu

Released a decade after what many consider to be the greatest humanitarian crises of the second half of the twentieth century, Hotel Rwanda (2004) dramatizes the effects of the international community’s1 unwillingness to intervene in the slaughter of almost a million people in the Rwandan genocide. The movie also portrays the role of non-state actors as protectors of human rights. In contrast to the international community that abandons the people of Rwanda, an international corporate entity, the Des Mille Collines Hotel under the direction its hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, becomes over a thousand people’s sanctuary. This paper will examine the depiction of human rights violations in the film, the failure of the United Nations to thwart those violations, and the role of non-state actors in protecting human rights, a role that challenges traditional definitions of sovereignty. When the Des Mille Collines can no longer protect people’s right to life, Paul Rusesabagina saves them. The film depicts how the concept of individual responsibility in international law as defined in Nuremberg is more potent than either humanitarian intervention or non-state actors in protecting human rights. Though the international community fails to save the people of Rwanda, Hotel Rwanda portrays the international human rights legal system as having preventative power.

1. I use “international community” to refer to national and supranational actors, as is done in Hotel Rwanda. The United Nations (UN) is one of these supranational actors, but at times, I will specify that I am talking about the UN exclusively.