The 20% - Gone - Hotel Rwanda

Genocide by knives, by machete, by blacks, by millions. It was mostly ignored by Clinton and the UN until the next African Genocide in Darfur, which was pretty much ignored. There was no high level graft or corrupt gains to be made. There was just risk, danger and anonymous honor.
Those are not the things the UN is made of. m/r

Hotel Rwanda :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn May 24, 2014
Mark at the Movies

Twenty years ago, the Rwandan genocide was, machete-wise, in full swing: They were about halfway through their seven-figure mass murder. There being no hashtags in those days, President Clinton, the Pain-Feeler-in-Chief, had to slough off the victims with a rather brusquer soundbite nixing international intervention: "The UN has to learn how to say no." And so 20 per cent of the population of Rwanda was slaughtered, a number so huge that the world chose to hold it at a big, woozy, blurry distance. To mark the tenth anniversary, the editors of the Economistasked, 'How many people can name any of the perpetrators?' I'd say it's more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? C'mon, take a guess, without looking it up.

Well, it was the Hutu energetically hacking the Tutsi into oblivion, while the rest of the globe sat back and watched that decade's "never again" genocide as it would the next one (Darfur): Toot, toot, Tutsis, goodbye! In 2004, when Hotel Rwanda was released, I didn't think you could pull off a movie "about" this subject. It's really an anti-story — it's about the cavalry not showing up. And how do you find any human interest in it? These fellows killed a million of their neighbors, in the lowest-tech way possible — with knives — and taking especial care over the murder of the children, in order to wipe out the next generation of Tutsi. They'd slash open three kindergartners and then move on to the house next door. It's a story of lack of human interest.

But, remarkably, the director Terry George and his co-writer Keir Pearson almost pull it off, rooting the big picture of anonymous murder in one small precise close-up: the more or less true story of a dapper hotel manager at the four-star Milles Collines in Kigali. Paul Rusesabagina is a Hutu married to a Tutsi, which sounds at first like one of those Hollywood contrivances, but in fact is real - unfortunately real, as it proved for Mr Rusesabagina. In 1994, Paul was an heroic figure in a story with few others, and you can see why, if you're going to do Rwanda: The Movie, this is the tale to tell. The Hôtel des Mille Collines was at that time owned by Sabena, the Belgian airline. It caters to important local bigshots (government ministers, generals) and visiting grandees (UN officials, western media correspondents). Paul knows them all by name, and knows the little extras they like, too — their favorite Scotch and Cuban cigars. He is, naturally, post-tribal, a man who moves ingratiatingly through the highest circles. Don Cheadle, whom I'd hitherto associated with the Sammy Davis gig in theOcean's Eleven remakes and as Sam lui-même in an agreeably awful Rat Pack karaoke biopic, gives a marvelous performance as a man who defines himself by his sense of style, which in this case is the somewhat generic sophistication of international hotels. As Cheadle glides with faintly oleaginous attentiveness among the tables on the hotel terrace, you see him, without thinking, adjusting his tie, his cuffs, his jacket. These are important things, part of his self-definition. …

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