Rwanda Film Analysis

During the 20th century, approximately 174 million people have been killed by the government only and mostly by the communist governments (Dominic & Abimbola, 39). The figures are quite shocking. This clearly depicts that government exploits the innocent people and incite them to stand against their brothers and sisters. The same story happened in Rwanda, It was the Habyarimanian government, who planned the genocide a long time before to retain their political power. The magnitude of the genocide was so intense that on the very first day 30,000 people were mascaraed in Kigali only, a rate far faster than the Holocaust. To prove this reality, towards the middle of the movie there is a scene when Paul was coming back from George’s warehouse after
According to the Rothe and Mullins genocidal rape is defined as “ A systematically organized military tactic of terror and genocide used to (1) generate fear in subdued population, (2) humiliate the population (both men and women), (3) derogation of women (spoilage of identity), (4) create a cohort of mixed-ethnic children to maintain the humiliation/spoilage/domination. Such a use of sexual assault is an orchestrated tactic of warfare”( Kruger, 2). In Rwanda after the assassination of president, all the roads were blocked by Hutu militia; these blocked roads and Hutu barriers eventually became the base of executions and rapes. The major aim of this sexual violence was degradation and humiliation of the Tutsi. Tutsi women were brutally raped and their sexual organs were injured with spears, gun barrels, machetes and acids too. According to the Amnesty International report of 2004, approximately 250,000 to 500,000 Rwandan women were raped during the genocide (Mukamana and Brysiewicz, 380). It is the matter of argument that systematic, government planned rape and sexual enslavement proves to be an
How could a government think of this? Is this fair to destroy the life of rape victim for ever ? Mullins argues that genocides always produce high levels of sexual violence. In order to prove this, he conducted a detailed research on Rwanda rape survivors, he found that most of the rapes during genocide were opportunistic, as most of the common men took advantage of the social disorder and raped innocent women. (Mullins 23).The director shows this in a scene, when Paul saw hundreds of naked women, inside the Hutus military camp, being raped and sexually abused by the Hutu militia and other activist as they were prostitutes. This scene shows the massive sexual violence at macro level. Moreover, it was very difficult for victims to prove that they were raped due to the stigma associated with it. Rape has a long lasting physical, physiological and mental effects on the victims. From a psychosocial perspective, many scholars have stressed on psychosocial effects such as dissociation, psychotic symptoms, self-harming behaviors, and sexual dysfunction, etc, which are even more fatal than physical effects. For instance, social death of the victim is the most profound mental effect. It is the condition in which the victim