The “Hotel Rwanda” guy saved 1,200 Tutsis. Paul Kagame saved ALL Tutsis.

It’s odd that the movie Hotel Rwanda is somehow as famous now as the actual Rwanda Genocide, but that’s the way of things. So when the the real-life inspiration for the film received a 25-year prison sentence on terrorism charges by the Rwandan government this month, filmgoers of the world wished to know: why is our brave silver screen hero now in jail?

Our story here centers around two Pauls. On the one hand, there is Paul Rusesabagina, the subject of the film, who was a Hutu manager of the swankiest hotel in Kigali who used his wiles to shelter more than 1,200 Tutsis—his wife among them—while the genocide swirled around him. The other is Paul Kagame, a Tutsi refugee turned rebel military commander whose army ended the genocide by winning the war and throwing the genocidaires out of the country. (If you’ve seen the movie, Kagame’s forces are the ones in red berets who save the civilian convoy at the very end. The sequencing is a Hollywood embellishment, but the overall outcome is not.)

Kagame has run Rwanda ever since, while Rusesabagina became a cab driver in Belgium. The movie made Rusesabagina an international celebrity—George W. Bush awarded him the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005—and he used this platform to become an increasingly outspoken critic of Kagame’s authoritarian government. Eventually, fed up with peaceful protest, he released a video pledging support to an armed rebel movement, and Rwandan security forces responded by tricking him onto a private flight which was then diverted to Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. That’s how he ended up in a Rwandan courtroom being sentenced to a quarter century behind bars.

It’s a shame that these two Pauls are now adversaries. Both wanted to protect civilians in their own way. Rusesabagina envisions a democratic Rwanda where Tutsis are protected by minority rights and, when necessary, by brave and resourceful individuals like himself. Kagame dreams of a Rwanda where the Tutsis are safe because they defeated the group that was trying to destroy them and got to run their own state.

Rusesabagina's vision means well, and it looks better in the cinema. But for minority groups that were victims of genocide, Kagame’s vision is the only one that has ever actually worked.

We’ve seen this movie before

Hotel Rwanda, as far as Hollywood is concerned, is a remake. It’s Schindler’s List in Africa. It’s a story we love to hear about… the good samaritan who sheltered terrified minorities when an evil army came to kill them all.

And so to understand the limits of Rusesabagina's well-intentioned vision here, let’s consider how things turned out in real-life Poland, where the bulk of Schindler’s List took place. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and Nazi Party member, saved more than a thousand Jews by employing them in his factories during the Holocaust. He put himself at great risk to save these people, and is rightly remembered for his bravery and compassion. Today, Schindler is buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the only former Nazi Party member to be so honored.

But ultimately, Schindler’s efforts did not save Judaism in Poland. His measures could only be a stopgap until Nazi Germany’s defeat on the battlefield. And even this was a Pyrrhic victory for Jewish life in Poland, because, after the war, those who survived knew they could never again safely live in Poland, and nearly all of them fled. And they were wise to do so; Poland was still ethnically cleansing most of its surviving Jews as late as 1969, and today, in a country that ought to have 4 million Jews, there are instead 3,000.

As for a country, so too for a continent. Europe in 1939 had 10 million Jews. In 1945, it had four million Jews. And in 2015, it had 1.4 million, and that number is falling. Most of Europe’s Jews were killed, and most of those who survived fled forever. Individual people saved individual people, but collectively the cleansing was near total.

And so Schindler saved the Jews in his factories to a fate of being exiled rather than slaughtered. This is heroism of the highest order—for the people he saved, literally the difference between life and death. But it is no way to protect minority rights. We simply cannot rely on individual heroism to save minority groups from genocide, because by the time such heroics are necessary, it is far too late for the group in question to ever again live safely at the mercy of their persecutors.

And so what ultimately saved the few Polish Jews who survived the 20th century? Israel. Jews, like dozens of other ethnocultural groups in the aftermath of Eurasia’s collapsing empires, congregated in a sliver of their ancestral homeland, carved out a state for themselves, and successfully defended it. And when 99 percent of the Sephardim and Mizrahi Jews were subsequently cleansed from the entire Middle East and North Africa region, Israel was waiting for them, and so, unlike their European brethren, the vast majority of them survived.

That’s why the Jews of the Old World survived as a people to the present day. They got a state. They got self-determination. There is no other reason.

Those who suffer genocide must get their own state

We’ve seen this movie before too. A cursory glance at the victims of genocide in the 20th century reveals a clear moral: those who got their own state were saved, and those who did not continued to be persecuted. The Armenians, Greeks, and Jews suffered genocides, each got their own state, and each endured. The Assyrians suffered a genocide, did not get a state, and on the centenary of their genocide at the hands of the Turks suffered another genocide at the hands of Daesh. This is what happens to targeted groups who do not get their own state.

The Bosnian Muslims suffered a genocidal act at Srebrenica in 1995. They did not get a state, but the Dayton Accords gave them a half-state. They are thus half-free, but their state is dysfunctional and unstable, forever at the precipice of dissolution, a republic at the end of the universe.

The independence-or-bust principle holds even for groups who suffered persecution that falls short of genocide. The Tigrayans of Ethiopia were starved in the 1980s by Mengistu and are being starved again today by Nobel Peace Laureate Abiy Ahmed. The Kurds suffered chemical weapons bombardment by Saddam Hussein, but today there is no Kurdistan, and so the Kurds continue to be persecuted in every country in which they reside, including by the genocidal Daesh campaign. The Rohingya were ethnically cleansed out of Myanmar, they do not have a state, and so they are indefinite refugees in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. The Maya suffered horrible abuses at the hands of the Guatemalan government during the country’s civil war—some indeed consider this to have been genocide—and they are still oppressed today, and so they flee their homeland in droves, seeking refuge in the United States, where they are often denied entry, and when they do speak to US immigration officers, they must often do so in Spanish, a language they often cannot speak as it is the language of their oppressor. This is what happens to targeted groups who do not get their own state.

Even a group that has engaged in oppression of other groups needs self-determination. The Turks committed three separate genocidal campaigns in the 1910s, but Turks were also viciously ethnically cleansed out of the Balkans and survived only because they had Turkey to flee to. All 12 million ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe were cleansed after World War II in revenge for what the Nazis had done, and most survived only because they had Germany to flee to. Even as Srebrenica was unfolding and Sarajevo was besieged, all of Croatia’s Serbs were cleansed in the summer of 1995 and most survived only because they had Serbia to flee to. The French settlers in Algeria had France to flee to when Algeria got independence. And while none of them engaged in anything remotely resembling the extermination campaigns to which they were subjected, the Armenians, Jews, and Greeks all violently displaced others in their state creation efforts, and members of their group abroad faced retaliation in turn. There are many more of these. State creation is very often an ugly business.

Did the Tutsis get a state?

And this brings us back to Rwanda. One hundred days and some 800,000 deaths after the genocide began, Paul Kagame’s Tutsi rebel army had remarkably won the war and taken over the country. They run it to this day. But once again, as ever, demography drives conflict. The Tutsis are a tiny minority, only 15% of the population, and they are diffuse, scattered across the Great Lakes Region of Africa and persecuted everywhere. Carving out a homeland state, like Armenia or Greece or Israel, was not an option for them.

Nor was accepting a democratic outcome where Hutus, being more numerous, would run Rwanda. The defeated genocidaires didn’t magically wink out of existence or repent. Instead, they set up shop across the border in Zaire, running vast refugee camps through a regime of terror, commandeering humanitarian aid from guilty Westerners, and gaining the backing of aging Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Ultimately, Kagame’s forces stormed these refugee camps, and for good measure overthrew Mobutu and fought much of Sub-Saharan Africa to a draw in the Second Congo War. (Not for nothing do they call Kagame the Napoleon of Africa. Rusesabagina may have been portrayed by Don Cheadle onscreen, but if the tactically brilliant and ruthlessly efficient Kagame has a cinematic equivalent, it’s probably Grand Admiral Thrawn from Star Wars.)

Even a power-sharing agreement would not be enough. This was tried with the Arusha Accords in 1993… and ended with the genocide the following year.

And so this is the great tragedy of Rwanda: it was demographically impossible for the Tutsis to achieve self-determination in a way that didn't deprive the Hutu majority of theirs. Because of the market-dominant minority status of Tutsis, only one of these groups could rule the country. There was no way to create a Tutsi state mostly populated by Tutsis, or to guarantee Tutsis’ security in a Hutu-run state after what had happened.

And so upon taking power, Kagame did the next best thing: he outlawed the use of the ethnic affiliations completely, destroyed ethnic identity cards, deleted mention of ethnicity in school textbooks, and insisted on crafting a common Rwandan identity. And in the meantime, until the words “Hutu” and “Tutsi” could be erased from the minds of the citizenry, he has ruled Rwanda as a hyper-competent autocrat who has overseen dramatic development gains but brooked no dissent.

This identity deletion would be a horrifying act in almost any other country, but Hutu and Tutsi aren’t normal ethnic affiliations. They are strictly class-based and historically much closer to a caste system, with the Tutsis being an elite class that Hutus could join if they were successful. Hutus and Tutsis speak the same language, practice the same religions, and have no significant cultural differences. And while there are stereotypical Hutu and Tutsi physical archetypes, most people’s identity cannot be distinguished on looks alone. This isn’t like China destroying Uighur identity, it’s more like India trying to do away with its caste system.

That’s the long-term goal, but for now, identities die hard and a great many people still think of themselves as Hutus and Tutsis, and as long as that is the case, the Tutsis are still a tiny minority who within living memory were nearly exterminated and survived only because they won. It’s not like the threat of Hutu genocide has gone away. The genocidaires are still out there in the lawless eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo; they were in fact just accused of murdering an Italian ambassador in February. They call themselves the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, and the name is telling. With Hutus being 85% of the population, they know they are one election away from their side being in power again. Convicted genocidaire Théoneste Bagosora is dead; Hutu Power lives on.

This is why Paul Kagame cannot give up power, at least until the identity transformation of his country is completed. (And who knows how long this will take… generations?) If Kagame allowed free elections, Hutus would win because there are more of them, and the Tutsis would immediately feel existentially threatened. The Tutsis know they aren’t safe because of the benevolence of a Hutu hotelier, rather they are safe because their army won and because their group controls the Rwandan state, its military and intelligence services, and its political machinery. That is the only reason they are safe.

And so Kagame must remain in power, no matter if you consider him a murderous tyrant or a wise and far-sighted savior of a nation. And Rusesabagina’s efforts to toss Kagame from power must fail, regardless of whether Rusesabagina is a heroic humanitarian jailed by a hard regime, or whether fame got to his head and he allowed himself to be red-pilled by Hutu Power. It doesn't matter who these people are. The outcome must be the same.

Ceci n'est pas un hôtel.

Image by User:Lemurbaby - File:RPF advance Rwandan Genocide 1994.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90051220

Credit for top-of-article image: TSgt. Marv Krause. United States Air Force - Official Photograph, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The world entire?

Near the end of Schindler’s List, the eponymous protagonist is deeply moved when he is given a ring with the Talmudic quotation: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Up until this point, Schindler has largely maintained a mask of businesslike competence, and it is only here that he finally breaks down, lamenting that he could have done more, saved more people. He looks at his few remaining possessions—a gold pin, his car—and wonders how many people the money he could have gotten by selling them could have saved. It is here that we understand, if we have not already done so, what living through such an historical moment does to those who are attempting to be good. Those who do the greatest service often suffer terribly for their labors. One is reminded of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian force commander for the UN’s doomed Rwanda peacekeeping mission—Nick Nolte’s character in Hotel Rwanda is vaguely based on him but decidedly does not do him justice—whose skeleton crew saved tens of thousands of lives during the Rwanda Genocide but who was traumatized by all he had seen and all those he could not save. Schindler keeps saying, “I could have done more.” This is probably not true, and perhaps he knows it—the car he wishes he had sold to finance the rescue of perhaps 10 Jews was, earlier, used to frantically drive to Auschwitz to save several hundred. What Schindler is saying is that there was so much more to be done… more than one person ever could manage. In such times, we ask entirely too much of our heroes.

“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire” is thus an exhortation to each of us to respect the sanctity of human life and preserve it, and as individual humans we each would do well to remember it as we seek to be moral agents in the world. But this quotation is not, and cannot be, an instruction on how to create an international order that protects whole peoples from extermination. And it must be balanced with the somewhat more blunt words of Stanley Kubrick, who had long considered making a movie about the Holocaust but felt it couldn’t be done; when asked if Schindler’s List was a good representation of the subject, Kubrick reportedly responded, “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. ‘Schindler’s List’ is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?”

Kagame’s Rwanda is progressive in many respects—the highest percentage of women in parliament in the world, eg.—but it isn’t a liberal democracy. It can’t be. So it is easy to understand Rusesabagina’s frustration with the status quo, and it is a tragic turn that he is now behind bars. But in the end, Rusesabagina’s form of heroism works on an individual level only, and offers no path to safety and freedom for the Tutsis as a group. For now, at least, only Kagame’s Rwanda can give them that. To demand that a group who has suffered a genocide live as a minority under a government run by the group that tried to wipe them out is more than can be reasonably asked of any group, anywhere. Hotel Rwanda may be holding at 91% on Rottentomatoes, but the real Rwanda isn’t a hotel, it’s a country.