The World on Fire

[obcordate]

Tonight was a lecture delivered by Mr. Paul Rusesabagina about his experiences during the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. The movie Hotel Rwanda is based on his story

Comments

[twoparentheses]

I actually don't believe that the crisis in Darfur is a genocide. It doesn't break my heart any less because of that, though.

At a certain point, activism becomes a part of yourself; you feel it so much, every day, and it's not something that you can truly separate yourself from. I'm glad that it's starting to become a part of you, too. If you ever have questions about involvement or anything (although you live in NYC, so I imagine that's not too likely), please ask.

I actually recommend Sometimes in April over Hotel Rwanda. Both are worth seeing, though.

yes

[obcordate]

The technical distinction of genocide is for a large part just a rhetorical and political device. I liked Dallaire's words, where he was reluctant to indulge the interviewer's questions about whether or not he knew it was going to be genocide or not. Mass murder is mass murder irregardless of any application of race. In his transcript Dallaire was very saddened that the policy makers were reserving the word to draw a line that had to be crossed before anyone took action. What are words like that in the face of an overwhelming reality? Bodies lying mutilated in the broad daylight, people ready to jump from buildings when they realize that their only protection are going to abandon them-- what the hell can the word "genocide" or any word so abstracted, really, mean to people in these situations? It's silly

Re: yes

[twoparentheses]

Yeah, I agree that the word is largely irrelevent--killing civillians on a mass scale is a human atrocity on any level, whether ethnic, or religious or not. I have run into a lot of activists who overemphasize the importance of the term--who feel that by not calling it a genocide, the UN, and NGOs, are failing to "act". I just feel that it's more or less irrelevent to the conflict. What worries me though is that I read an article in the Economist recently that talked about how Arabs were afraid to travel in Darfur for fear of being identified with the janjawid--and I've heard that Doctors Without Borders very directly criticized the Unites States' use of the term, because they considered it reemphasizing ethnic relationships that are really more or less dead, and also because they felt it was a political platform to draw attention away from Iraq. I don't know if I believe that, exactly, but I think it's a bad idea to oversimplify a conflict, although I can see that it can be a good tool to draw more attention to the issue--I've used