The penetration of Telecommunication services in sub-Saharan Africa remains minimal on average. For some nations like Rwanda, penetration is as low as 4 percent when compared to the country's total population figures. Some times limited telecom penetration in sub-Saharan Africa can be as a result of lacking basic telecom infrastructure in place but also simply failure, on the part of those countries with the right infrastructure, to design ample and affordable telecom products for the rural poor.

The Project Manager will have responsibility for overall management and development of ARC’s GBV programs in Byumba (Gihembe Camp) and Gituza (Nyabiheke Camp). He/she will collaborate with the Health Program Coordinator, GBV Community Coordinators and the Community Health Education Coordinators in the Gihembe and Nyabiheke Camps in the planning, implementation, budgeting, monitoring, evaluation, reporting and review of ARC’s GBV prevention and response program in Rwanda.

Rwanda is a small sub-Saharan African nation that is learning to adjust to global warming and the effects of climate change. Decreasing water levels have contributed to loss of agricultural productivity and an energy crisis due to loss of power generated by hydropower stations.I n this Development Gateway interview, Patricia Hajabakiga, Rwanda Minister of State in Charge of Lands and Environment, talks about how Rwanda is adjusting to, among other things, unpredictable climate patterns.

Minority Rights Group International released a report on Batwa lifestyles and identity. The Batwa forest people of Rwanda (also known as Pygmies) are recognized as having been the first inhabitants of the land. Traditionally the Batwa were forest hunter- gatherers, living throughout Rwanda. According to recent estimates, however, out of Rwanda’s total population of just over 8 million people, only between 20,000 and 27,000 are Batwa.

The Ministry of Education has accepted to admit hundreds of students with disabilities who have been pressing for university admissions. Certainly, the decision is a great step in education. It makes a lot of sense when the Education Minister, Jean d’Arc Mujawamariya, accepts that the students were excluded from mainstream education. A lot of students with disabilities were forgotten and denied their right to education for the last years.

There are a number of beautiful art items Rwanda can make by using local materials and hands. They are promoted through associations and trainings. Women can use the chance of the advanced skills and wide markets to advance in their standard of living. They have come together, organised themselves and formed associations. They are preaching the results.

Rwanda's The Treatment and Research Aids Centre (TRAC) was this week internationally recognised for ensuring real time access of information on HIV/AIDS and Anti-Retroviral drugs (ARVs) nationwide through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Speaking to HANA, Dr. Anita Assimwe, the Managing Director of TRACnet said "the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) awarded TRACnet for its efforts in improving the health of Rwandans through the use of information technology."

The Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) is looking to recruit a representative in Rwanda DIHR works primarily with The Legal Aid Forum: a membership based structure encompassing national and international NGOs, international organizations, professional bodies (the Rwandan Bar Association and the Corps of Judicial Defenders) and university and faith based initiatives. The closing date for applications is 15 May 2007l.

French troops advised Rwandan Hutu extremists how to hide their gruesome work from spy satellites, the author of a new book on the central African nation's 1994 genocide said on Thursday. Silent Accomplice, by British researcher and author Andrew Wallis, gives what the author says is new evidence of French complicity in the 1994 slaughter of Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus, by militias formed by the Paris-backed Hutu government.

"GBV Offices" reads a small sign on a door of the Rwandan National Police Headquarters. These three letters hold great significance, designating the Gender Based Violence Desk Office, where police personnel are specifically trained to address sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

A Kigali court has imposed a one-year sentence on Agnès Nkusi Uwimana, the editor of the fortnightly Umurabyo, after she pleaded guilty to charges of “creating divisions,” “sectarianism” and “defamation.” Uwimana had been held since 12 January for writing a column headlined “You have problems if you kill a Tutsi, but you go free if you kill a Hutu.” She recognised in court “the gravity of my writings” and promised to “publish a correction.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi have relaunched a regional economic bloc that is seen as a key step in restoring peace and stability in the turbulent central African region.

Rwanda is set to export 3D graphic drawing computer system to manufacturing companies in the United States (US). Dr Raphael Mmasi, the Director of National Computing Centre (NCC)of Rwanda Information and Technology Authority (RITA) told HANA recently that the 3D graphic drawing computer system would help manufacturing companies in US and around the world streamline product development, cut costs and re-use design data.

Pasteur Bizimungu, the ex-President of Rwanda, was allowed to walk a free man from prison last week after he was pardoned by President Paul Kagame. Rwandan officials said the release, which came a day before the 13th anniversary of the start of the 100-day genocide, was done in good faith. It is expected to foster reconciliation in a society that has gone through the pains of genocide.

As a contribution to this year’s commemoration, African Rights is publishing a book dedicated to Murambi. “Go. If You Die, Perhaps I Will Live”: A Collective Account of Genocide and Survival in Murambi, Gikongoro, April-July 1994 weaves together the testimonies of 91 survivors, witnesses and perpetrators to create an intricate and nuanced narrative.

As we approach the 13th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide we should not only remember the horrors that took place, but focus our attention on the failure to halt the developing genocide in Darfur.

April marks the 13th anniversary of the start of the genocide in Rwanda during which approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days. When celebrating the anniversary of this horrific tragedy let us take a moment to remember those who were slaughtered so unmercifully. More attention should be focused on how to prevent future heinous crimes to occur in Africa and elsewhere.

‘Never again’ – an international commitment or a rhetorical sound bite?

After the horrors of the holocaust, the international community drafted the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and pledged 'never again' to such evil. The United Nations was founded with the objective that humanity should be spared the scourge of war forever. The pledge proved empty as numerous heinous crimes followed. In fact, civilians in Africa bear the heaviest brunt of acts of terror, civil wars, violent suppression of political opponents and criminal violence.

The most glaring and heinous examples of the failure of civilian protection in Africa are the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the war in the DRC between 1998 and 2003, which resulted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with over 3,400,000 persons displaced from their homes and an estimated 4 million killed and, the Darfur conflict that started in 2003, with estimates of deaths ranging from 180,000 to 400,000. At least 2,000,000 people have been forced to flee from their homes and are displaced in Sudan or in camps in neighbouring countries. These cases are particularly relevant: they happened in our lifetimes and continue to happen now.

Never say never again?

They are a tragic part of Africa’s contemporary history. One may easily say that 'never again' has lost its meaning. While Rwanda was supposedly the scar on our conscience that would be the last incident of mass atrocities allowed to occur, it provided a foreshadowing of things to come. That is true especially in Africa where, despite leaders’ pledge to never let another Rwanda happen again, they have not demonstrated the will to exercise the African Union’s right to intervene to stem gross human rights violations in a concerted or consistent manner.

Even if there is controversy about the definition of genocide in Darfur, there is little doubt that despite the hair-splitting of the proper description of the unfolding tragedy, there is a developing genocide in Darfur which is being met by a similar reaction or lack of action from the world community. Equally, the current situation in Zimbabwe - where the state is oppressing its own people - is another case for the agenda of actions to end this cycle, and move us to finally realise the call of 'never again'.

As 7 April has been designated by the UN as 'international day of reflection on the genocide in Rwanda', the profound sense of 'never again' should be reflected in the prevention or action in the event of of heinous crimes and other violations of human rights. Prevention of such crimes through swift and effective action will send us a clear message. Maybe, thus inspired, we can someday make 'never again' more than a mere slogan.

In so doing, responses to protect civilians would immensely benefit from President Paul Kagame’s sagacious words:

'Never again should the international community’s response to these crimes be found wanting. Let us resolve to take collective actions in a timely and decisive manner. Let us also commit to put in place early warning mechanisms and ensure that preventive interventions are the rule rather and the exception.'

To achieve the broad goal here expressed will certainly take more than rhetoric. Political commitment must be expressed, not only in establishing the required mechanisms but also in triggering them to act when action is required.

The case of Darfur aptly demonstrates the futility of establishing legal regimes which cannot be effectively utilised. In providing for intervention in internal affairs of member states when massive human rights violations are perpetrated without action from the government concerned, or when the government itself is involved in such atrocities, the Constitutive Act of the African Union has codified an important principle of international law. This principle as holds that while states have the responsibility to protect their citizens in recognition of their sovereignty, the default responsibility falls upon the international community, in this case the AU, which can intervene to forestall atrocities.

The cases of Darfur and Zimbabwe are the latest in a string of similar situations to pose unanswered questions to our rhetorical commitments. It is one thing for the silence to be ruptured for lack of preventive mechanisms. But our deafening silence in the face of continuing atrocities is quite another. Empty diplomatic gestures without concrete action in places like Darfur long recognised as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is a damning indictment of the international community, in particular the leading nations at global and continental levels.

As the world commemorates the commencement of the tragic events of 1994 in Rwanda, our leadership and those who shape opinion and policy must rethink our commitment to a world and continent free of human suffering, a continent committed to furthering the aspiration of a peaceful world, a world in which human life and dignity are embedded in state policy and interactions between nations. This would allow us, when necessary, to discard parochial notions of sovereignty and to act accordingly when another Rwanda or Darfur threaten.

To achieve this, we must bring together the institutions and collective powers we have established to construct a world in which ‘never again’ means what it should.

* Joseph Yav is a lecture at the Faculty of Law, University of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. He is also the executive director of the Centre d’etudes et de recherche en droits de l’homme, democratie et justice transitionnelle/Centre for Human Rights, Democracy and Transitional Justice Studies. Email: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

As the first feature length film covering the Rwandan genocide, Hotel Rwanda had the opportunity to contextualise the genocide and act as an informative piece of work.

Instead, the producers choose to focus on the drama of one individuals attempt to save a group of people. Thereby they made the film more commercially acceptable. In doing so the truth is compromised and an opportunity missed.

Hotel Rwanda is based on the true story of Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), house manager at the luxurious Hotel des Milles Collines in Kigali, who used his position and influence to save the lives of nearly 1300 victims who had sought refuge at the hotel during the Rwandan genocide.

In what many rank as the most horrifying episode in African history, an estimated 800,000 people, mainly Tutsi, were massacred by their Hutu countrymen in little more than three months between April and July 1994.

Most victims were hacked to death with machetes, spiked clubs or farming implements. A unique and disturbing feature of the Rwandan genocide was widespread popular participation in the killing.

A further 500,000 people died as a result of disease, famine and military action. While over 2,000,000 Hutus fled to neighbouring countries for fear of reprisals when a Tutsi-dominated government was installed by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that took control of the country in July 1994.

These casualty figures are enormous if one considers that the population of Rwanda was in the region of 7,000,000 at the start of the genocide and that Tutsis formed about fifteen per cent or just over one million of this total.

At the start of the film, Rusesabagina is depicted as a suave, stylish man. Through a combination of deference, flattery and canny bribery consciously he stores up favours with the rich and powerful and, through his charm and resourcefulness manages to keep the hotel’s clientele happy.

Although Hotel Rwanda is well-intentioned and is moving, even potent, in parts, it has serious flaws and its execution is at times below par. A central weakness of Hotel Rwanda is that the film makes little more than a cursory attempt to explain why the genocide happened or to sketch the political and historical context in which it unfolded.

The film instead focuses on the intense drama around Paul Rusesabagina’s heroic attempts to save his charges. The choice of a strong dramatic centre clearly did not preclude director, Terry George, from also providing sufficient background to make the slaughter more comprehensible to viewers because the film carries a lot of flab.

Simply replacing some of the superfluous and repetitious scenes, especially those involving a frightened and tearful Tatiana, with ones clarifying some of the complexities of the Rwandan situation would have gone a long way toward achieving this objective.

Appropriate contextualization would thus have helped strengthen the flaccid plot line and improved the coherence of the film. This disembodiment of Rusesabagina’s story from the complexity of its context deprives the film of much of its power to provoke, enlighten or simply to raise critical questions.

More importantly, being the first feature-length offering with mass appeal on the genocide, it would not be unfair to regard the film as having some duty to inform, perhaps even educate, viewers to a greater extent than it does. Some people might think that this places an unfair burden on the film-makers but one could argue that Hotel Rwanda is, after all, not a movie viewers are likely to want to see purely for entertainment.

This is not to advocate an overt didacticism but to ask for better contextualisation. Hotel Rwanda’s simplistic approach to the genocide is, in my opinion, more likely to perpetuate than dispel stereotypes of Africa as a place of senseless violence and roiling tribal animosities.

The absence of a well-founded explanation of the genocide is bound to result in many viewers falling back on shop worn, racist conventions of Western attitudes toward Africa. Indeed, the film inadvertently reinforces such mystification. When Dube (Desmond Dube) asks Rusesabagina how such cruelty could be possible, Paul simply replies, ‘Hatred… insanity’, as if the mass killing defies logical explanation.

The failure to contextualise the story properly is symptomatic of a wider problem, namely, the director and script-writers’ flawed commercial strategy for dealing with the challenge of representing the extreme violence of the Rwandan genocide.

Terry George’s overall approach may be summed up as one of evading the key issues at stake in the Rwandan genocide. As Keith Turan, the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, very neatly put it; ‘One of the ways filmmakers have traditionally tried to make unpleasant scenarios more palatable to audiences is by changing the focus from the awfulness of events to individual acts of bravery, from the complicity of the many to the heroism of the few. Hotel Rwanda saw the opportunity to take this path and did not hesitate’ (Cape Times, 2005).

Many viewers will have been enticed into seeing the movie in the expectation of gaining insight into one of the most heinous crimes of the recent past. Instead they come away with little real insight but a formulaic story about the triumph of the human spirit in which the focus is diverted from the dire human cost of the carnage and the troubling questions it raises, to the noble actions of a single hero.

In celebrating the relatively minor triumph of Rusesabagina’s extraordinary courage, Hotel Rwanda promotes a simplistic morality of good conquering evil and has little of substance to offer by way of elucidating why the greater evil of the Rwandan genocide was possible in the first instance.

This is not to criticise Hotel Rwanda for focusing on an individual, for individual experiences can indeed be a most effective vehicle for illuminating broader social, even global, experiences and truths. The trick in doing this successfully is to bring into a simultaneous frame of reference localized detail and broader social structures and experience.

Hotel Rwanda fails to do this through a lack of proper contextualisation of its subject matter and choosing to focus on a set of experiences that were atypical of the Rwandan genocide. Rusesabagina may well have succeeded in saving all of the refugees at the Milles Collines Hotel but we can’t ignore that about 80 per cent of the internal Tutsi population succumbed in the genocide.

This is also not in the least to argue that the film is not justified in reinforcing the optimistic message that the actions of individuals of conscience can make a big difference, even in the face of overwhelming odds and the most abominable evils imaginable. After all, like its most obvious parallel, Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda is based on a true story and the real-life Rusesabagina deserves to be lauded for his bravery, his integrity and his altruism.

But to communicate this message as ineptly as Hotel Rwanda does, represents a missed opportunity to disseminate a cogent understanding of the Rwandan genocide to an expectant world-wide viewership which has had little opportunity of grappling with the meaning of this atrocity through the popular media.

Given its box-office strategy it should not come as any surprise that Hotel Rwanda deliberately shies away from realistic representations of the violence perpetrated during the Rwandan genocide. In an interview in Johannesburg to promote the movie Terry George answered critics of his evasion of graphic violence by making clear that; ‘… there was no way I was going to shoot a bloodfest film with people being hacked to death with machetes... I set out to create a political entertainment story rather than a pornographic depiction of the terror and violence’ (Sunday Times, 2005).

So the only actual killing one sees is a short, indistinct sequence of people being hacked by machete, filmed at a distance and replayed on a tiny television screen by members of the news crew stationed at the Milles Collines.

For the rest, the slaughter is presented indirectly. For example, a few corpses are strewn about the front gardens of houses and Rusesabagina’s blood spattered son serves as evidence of the murder of one of his neighbours.

The high point of horror in the movie does not show actual killing. It occurs when Paul and Gregoire (Tony Kgoroge) encounter the victims of a massacre after being deliberately sent along the ‘river road’ by George Rutaganda. Driving along, their van suddenly seems to hit an exceptionally bumpy and deeply rutted stretch. Thinking that they had strayed from the road, Paul gets out of the vehicle only to fall onto mutilated bodies that had been left lying in their path. The camera then pans upwards to reveal corpses carpeting the outstretched thoroughfare in the gathering light.

Depicting mass violence in ways that do not diminish its reality for the viewer yet do not denigrate victims or trivialize the pain of survivors is one of the core challenges movie-makers of genocide face. Films about mass violence will always raise vexing questions about the ethics of creating entertainment out of mass murder, of appropriate ways of commercializing atrocity, of engaging viewers with visual representations of unspeakable cruelty without desensitizing or alienating them.

Finding a balance between these sorts of tensions lie at the heart of making feature films about genocide. The specific circumstances of the Rwandan genocide demands a degree of engagement with human depravity and mass violence that is lacking in Hotel Rwanda. Terry George gets the balance wrong. There is too much heroism and too little horror in Hotel Rwanda, too much romanticism and too little reality.

Hotel Rwanda has a decided tendency to understate the horrors of the Rwandan genocide and even to romanticize aspects of the story it tells. This is mostly due to a box-office strategy that seeks to make the genocide more tolerable to a mass audience. It is, however, also partly a result of trying to communicate an optimistic message about the ultimate triumph of human benevolence and partly a product of the decision to focus on a case that is unrepresentative of the Rwandan catastrophe.

The tendency for romanticism is nowhere more marked than in the clumsy wrapping up of the story at the end of the film. The improbable saving of the UN convoy from an Interahamwe mob through a fortuitous RPF ambush is inept and the subsequent depiction of an all too orderly refugee camp with its all too ample medical facilities is a good example of the movie’s tendency to underplay the wretchedness of the Rwandan situation. Most conspicuously, however, the film succumbs to a cloying sentimentality with its conventionally Hollywood ending.

Hotel Rwanda could, however, have done a far better job, given the constraints of the medium and the opportunities offered by the Rusesabagina story, of informing a receptive audience about the Rwandan holocaust and of raising consciousness about the scourge of genocide.

The feature film is an extremely powerful medium and the Rwandan genocide a potentially explosive issue but Hotel Rwanda comes nowhere close to fully exploiting their potential.

* Mohamed Adhikari, University of Cape Town

* * Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The White African blog reports on a move by Google to provide free access to their Google Apps to Kenya and Rwanda. "Google is starting to stake a claim in Africa by giving away software applications to educational elements. I wouldn’t be surprised if this effort spreads to more African countries very quickly. This is good news for students, and will really increase awareness for Google’s non-search products in Africa. Overall, a very strong strategic move," says the blog.

An estimated 10,000 civilians have fled the village of Burumba in North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after violence erupted between the national army and a Rwandan Hutu rebel group, officials said on Tuesday.

Records from the Rwanda National Examination Council (NEC), indicate that the performance of girls has improved. The total number of girls who registered for Primary Leaving Examinations in 2005 was 54,558, an equivalent of 50.99 per cent, whereas in 2006, the total was 61,764, making a per cent of 51.63 per cent.