The roots of hatred

I have just watched Shooting Dogs. The film covers the true events of a school caught up in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. During the genocide that lasted from April to July over 800,000 Tutsis were massacred by Hutu extremeists. The school (L'Ecole Technique Officielle) became a refuge for over 2500 local Tutsi people because UN peace keepers were stationed there and seemed to offer protection. The title of the film refers to the action or rather inaction of the UN peace keeping forces. The UN mandate did not allow the UN forces to fire on the Hutu extremists that were camped outside the school with guns and machetes screaming for blood unless they were fired upon first. They were not able to act to defend Tutsis in the surrounding area. However they were able to shoot the dogs that were feeding on the bodies of killed Tutsis and therby posing a health risk.

Shooting Dogs covers a small slice of what is one of the worst attrocities of the later half of the 20th century and shows the UN's inability and unwillingness to do anything to prevent it. The film was filmed in the actual locations were the events happened and many of the production crew roles and smaller parts were filled by survivors of the massacre. Much more information can be found here

During the genocide people who had lived side by side went from being neighbours to a relationship of murderer and victim. I feel that this brutal and tragic twist in the human spirit is not as uncommon as we like to imagine. The human race has the ability to split the world into two halves and does this at almost every opportunity. Those halves can be male & female, rich & poor, black & white, gay & straight, christian & muslim, faithful & godless, rational & crazed, group A & group B. However it ultimatley comes down to the very simple idea of "Us & Them". Once we have taken a group of people and seperated them into the group called "Them" it allows us to abdicate moral responsibility for participating or being complicit in the most brutal and barbaric acts: inequality, bigotry, hatred, murder, torture, imprisonment, starvation, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, apartheid, war. The list is as long as the human imagination chooses to make it. I believe this driving instinct to break the world into "Us & Them" has caused and enabled us to heap more misery and suffering on ourselves than anything else.

I think there must be something terribly wrong with us.