As the calendar turns to April, so too comes another anniversary of those hideous days of carnage and brutality now known as the Rwandan Genocide. It was at this same time in April 1994 that the attention, if not the diplomatic efforts, of the world was focused on this small East African nation. It was not the first genocide of my lifetime- the early years of my childhood conflate neatly with Pol Pot’s attempt to press the reset button on Cambodian history- but it certainly was the only one I watched happen every night on the news. I myself had emigrated from Zimbabwe only a few years before and felt both a kinship and what I now recognize as a smug pity.

How ironic then that fifteen years later Zimbabwe teeters on the brink of complete economic, social and political collapse and Rwanda is hailed as a model for Africa, for reasons as varied as it’s startling economic growth, national-ethnic reconciliation or simply Kigali’s clean, orderly streets. Tourism is flourishing, corruption is low, the HIV epidemic is relatively under control, and the credit for much of this is laid at the feet of Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame. Kagame, the Tutsi general lauded as a hero when his rebel army drove the Hutu genocidaires from power and- publicly, at least- embraced rapprochement, instead of vengeance. 

Deborah Scranton, director of the innovative documentaries The War Tapes and Bad Voodoo’s War, eschews the “virtual embed” tactic she pioneered for more a more traditional approach with Earth Made Of Glass. Filmed during several trips to Rwanda, this time she takes us from the active battlefields of her earlier work and asks what happens after the shooting is over and one has to balance between justice and peace, between revenge and reconciliation. Earth Made Of Glass opens with Jean Pierre Sagahutu, a Rwandan Tutsi, explaining how he survived the genocide by hiding in a Kigali septic tank for more than three months, subsisting on two or three smuggled meals a week. Now, fifteen years later, he is an affable, middle class resident of Kigali with a wife and four young children.  But, like Rwanda itself, the ghosts of the gibbering ghosts of genocide still lurk behind this façade of normalcy. Jean Pierre’s entire family was murdered in the countryside, in the same town where his father had worked as a doctor for many, many years, treating some of the same people who would later take his life, and that of his wife and all but one of his children. Jean Pierre has still never heard the story of how his father, who was separated from his family during the chaos, was killed. Nor has he ever been able to locate the body and give his the burial he deserves. His journey back to the countryside to find his father’s body and confront the killers is the emotional backbone of this film. 

The rest of the narrative concerns itself with the history of the Rwandan genocide and relies heavily on the filmmakers’ unprecedented access to none other than the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. With the help of some talking head scenes from Kagame, the documentary attempts to expose France’s complicity in both the 1994 genocide and the escape of its perpetrators across the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is considerable focus on the events of late 2008, when President Kagame unveiled a the results of a Rwandan inquiry that found the French guilty of training and colluding with genocidaires before and after the 1994 ethnic cleansing. Shortly after the report was released, one of the RPF’s leading figures, Rose Kabuye was detained in France on terrorism charges, charges that the film portrays as undoubtedly trumped up. 

This particular issue, and how it is handled by the filmmakers, encapsulates my problem with what is otherwise a powerful, haunting documentary. To a casual observer, or even one with some background, it seems very straightforward; France was willing to work with the new government, as long as they “stayed in their place” but when President Kagame pulled the curtain back on French culpability in the genocide, the French retaliated by taking Rose Kabuye hostage. The problem is, although all of the events depicted are accurate, the complete picture is obscured and a complicated situation is made to seem very cut and dry. In reality, the relationship between the French and Kagame were uneasy from the start, and it was arguably the French who first upset the applecart, indicting several high-ranking RPF members for their alleged role in the assassination of Rwanda’s former Hutu strongman Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994. Paul Kagame immediately responded by cutting diplomatic ties with France and convening a commission of dubious independence, to provide the report on France’s involvement in the genocide. These sorts of omissions, willful or otherwise, dangerously obscure the truth. I have no doubt that the French, fearing Anglophone intrusion by the U.S. trained, Ugandan backed RPF, provided political and military support to the genocidal Hutu regime. But the film’s credibility suffers when it leaves out inconvenient facts, i.e. that the French also were the first to intervene and stop mass killings on the ground, or that upper-echelon members of the RPF had been indicted for the shooting down of President Habyarimana’s plane prior to Kagame’s convenient report on French collusion during the genocide. 

Minor details, perhaps, but is that not where one always finds the devil? In dealing with something like the genocide in Rwanda, it is important to make clear that there is no way to excuse or justify the cold blooded murder of 800,000 people. It is, however, also very important to place the events within a historical context if we are ever to hope to prevent them from happening again. Earth Made Of Glass does some of this quite well, delving into the Belgian introduction of rigid racial/ethnic classifications and identity cards, French fears of an Anglophone plot, and far too briefly, the Rwandan pogroms of the 60’s and 70’s. Unfortunately, the omissions are costly ones; at least as far as providing the sort of context the 1994 genocide needs if it is to be understood as something other than spontaneous evil. 

While we are briefly informed the Belgian racial policies which greatly exacerbated ethnic conflict in Rwanda, we are not in any way enlightened as to the resulting social structure of Rwanda leading up to the genocide [and it bears noting that science has recently found minor DNA differences between the Hutu and the Tutsi). There is no mention of the Tutsi minority’s 400 yearlong monarchies, their privileged status under colonial rule, nor the relative impoverishment of the Hutu majority.  So while it is true that the Tutsi’s and Hutu’s, who speak the same language and have long intermarried, have more in common with each other than any other nationality is true…but it also misses the point. To dismiss Tutsi and Hutu classifications as purely “colonial creations” is to both deny the pre-colonial history of the region and ignore the realities of the day. “White” and “Black” are social constructs here in the U.S., but how could one attempt to tackle the racial strife of America in the 1960’s and 70’s without addressing the historical realities that these social constructs brought to bear on the situation. Surely the historical interactions of these two groups are crucial to understanding how they came to such a horrific point of conflict? 

Equally, or perhaps more worrying is the lack of context to the immediate events of 1994. It has become commonplace for those discussing the Rwandan genocide to speak of the RPF invading in order to stop the mass killings of that year. But in fact, the RPF had been attempting to overthrow the Rwandan dictatorship since 1990. Furthermore, the RPF troops were primarily composed of Tutsi refugees from Hutu pogroms of the 1960’s and 70’s. Many thought they could return home once Juvenal Habyarimana took power in Rwanda and brought relative stability to the country, but it quickly became clear that the despot Habyarimana could barely tolerate the Tutsi he had, let alone allow the many exiles to return. Accordingly, those who would later form the Rwandan Patriotic Front grew up disenfranchised, marooned in squalid refugee camps, until a revolution in Uganda provided them with a reason for hope. The Rwandan exiles would form a crucial part of a Ugandan rebel movement led by a Ugandan Tutsi, Yoweri Museveni. 

The guerrillas were known as the National Resistance Movement, and by the time they toppled the Ugandan government, there were more than 4, 000 Rwandan Tutsi serving in the NRA ranks. Once the war was won many of them were in prominent positions within the new Ugandan military, Kagame himself was the head of Military Intelligence at one time. But the prevalence of these “foreigners” became a millstone of sorts for Museveni when “native Ugandans” began to grumble.  Thus, it is not hard to imagine why Museveni encouraged his Tutsi allies when they decided upon forming the RPF with the aim of the Rwandan exiles returning home by force of arms. Thus the Rwandan Patriotic Front detached itself from the new Ugandan military and made clear their desire to return to the Rwanda that they and their parents had been forcibly ejected from. They sought direct and indirect Western support, mediated by Museveni, in fact, Paul Kagame was undergoing training courtesy of the U.S. Army when the RPF launched it’s 1990 invasion of Rwanda. Both the 1990 and ’91 invasions of Rwanda displaced huge numbers of people on both sides of the border as the disorganized Rwandan Army was battered by the tactical superiority and battle-readiness of the RPF. If not for the intervention of French forces determined not to let the Habyarimana regime fall to what they perceived as an Anglophone proxy, it’s quite possible the RPF would have taken Kigali long before 1994. Being that we get none of this, rest assured that there is no mention of Hutu flight from the Tutsi military regime next door in Burundi that, along with the internal displacement of Hutu’s due to the RPF invasion, had created a sort of racialist siege mentality amongst the already radicalized Rwandan Hutu population. 

Obviously, Earth Made Of Glass is a documentary about the individual and collective search for truth in the aftermath of genocide, not an 8-hour miniseries on East African history. To expect the filmmakers to exhaustively chronicle and analyze all of this background would be asking them to have made a different movie. But they also could have simply made a movie about Jean Pierre Sagahutu’s search for answers as to his family’s killing, instead of involving a controversial figure like Paul Kagame. But not only did they involve the President, he is a narrator of sorts and at no point is anything he asserts even remotely challenged, nor is any background provided on who he and the RPF are, nor is any mention made of their invasion attempts preceding the 1994 genocide. 

One has to remember that although they are rightly lauded for halting the killing and expelling the bloodthirsty Hutu regime, once in power the RPF were heavily involved in two of the bloodiest conflicts since WWII, the First and Second Congo Wars. Under the auspices of suppressing a cross-border insurgency by remnants of the Hutu paramilitaries groups responsible for the genocide, Rwanda sponsored and armed a 1996 rebellion that ultimately toppled the corrupt Congolese government. Once again, as in Uganda, ethnic Tutsis and Rwandan nationals had a disproportionate role in securing the military victory but once the war was won, found themselves shunted aside by their former partners. When the Congo’s new president, Joseph Kabila, tossed his Rwandan military advisors out of the country, the Kagame regime wasted no time in backing a Congolese Tutsi rebellion against his regime. Within two years, the Congolese government was under siege as Rwandan and Ugandan troops joined their proxies in the field in battle against the overmatched Congolese national army and it’s Interahamwe allies. A total Rwandan victory was avoided only by the military intervention of several other African nations on Kabila’s behalf. The resulting conflict killed millions, with widespread violations of human rights by all sides. It was widely acknowledged that the Rwandans and their proxies were guilty of civilian massacres as well as illegal and highly lucrative exploitation of the Congo’s natural resources. Questions about Kagame’s veracity and commitment to an inclusive Rwanda do not begin outside Rwanda’s borders either, as his government has quietly suppressed a free media, intimidated and jailed political opponents, and even engaged in purges of it’s own ranks. Rwanda is clean, quiet and orderly, yes, but beneath the surface and behind the curtains, shadows lurk and many important questions remain unanswered. 

In light of all this, the decision to put Paul Kagame front and center but never once questioning his assertions or interpretations of events is detrimental to the integrity of what is otherwise a powerful film. I spoke to Earth Made of Glass director Deborah Scranton by phone, and when asked if she was concerned about Kagame’s role in the documentary, she was quick to defend the decision, asserting that “We made three different trips, about a month each time, and I can only speak to my experiences…this is a film about Rwanda, there are other films about the Congo.” Acknowledging that she was right that the film she was making was not about the Congo, I pointed out that many questions about Kagame revolve around his conduct in Rwanda, both as a rebel commander and as the President. She declined comment on the most recent election- where many opposition parties were banned- saying that since she was only in Rwanda for the previous Presidential election, she could only speak on that experience. As to the banned opposition parties, the director pointed out that in Germany, you couldn’t fly the swastika or engage in certain types of speech even now, sixty years after the Holocaust. That being the case, she posited, is it not a double standard to expect Rwanda to allow candidates who have been accused committing acts of genocide to run for office?

We talked for a bit and covered her decision not to put the question of who shot down the plane in the film- it would obscure the central points of the film without providing any new evidence- as well as her conviction the plane was brought down by Hutu Power insiders who felt betrayed by Habyarimana’s negotiations with the RPF. As to the current political situation in Rwanda, Ms. Scranton made it clear that given the circumstances in which he took power and the shattered society he has had to shepherd to some kind of equilibrium, it is too early to judge President Kagame. Instead she looks to his promise to step aside at the next election as the marker that the international community should use in judging Kagame’s commitment to forging an inclusive, democratic path in Rwanda

While it is hard for me to discount Deborah Scranton’s personal experiences with President Kagame, it is perhaps even more difficult to ignore my own history.  After all, it was not so long ago that I was growing up in an African nation recovering from a bloody civil conflict. And, as in Rwanda, the leader was rightly lauded for his efforts at reconciliation and inclusive democracy.  Contrary to the popular stereotype, I do not believe Robert Mugabe was always a ruthless megalomaniac, I lived under his rule and saw a regime that, on balance, truly made an effort to better the lives of it’s citizens. But good will cannot, by itself, resolve inequality. The best intentions will not create a free press. A democracy must be judged by the strength of its institutions, not the words of its functionaries. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It rots the guts of a government and nullifies the social contract; it replaces compromise with mandate and turns heroes of revolutions into enemies of the people. 

In January 2010, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, a former General in the RPF who fled into exile in South Africa, was shot in what most sources view as a Rwandan assassination attempt.  A Rwandan journalist who was critical of the Kagame regime was murdered in Kigali while investigating the attempted assassination. In July of the same year a major opposition figure was brutally killed and several opposition parties were not allowed to participate in the elections. The reality is that press, personal and political freedom in Rwanda is ranked extremely poorly by groups like Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders. In fact, the only thing relatively free in Rwanda is the market, which along with the paucity of good options, is a part of the reason the West is reluctant to turn it’s back on Kagame. The polarization of Rwandan society, of course, leads also to a polarization of international opinion. One can hardly blame Deborah Scranton for not giving much voice to Kagame’s opponents when some of the most vocal are ardent genocide deniers. So while there are many who eager to airbrush the underbelly of RPF rule out of the picture, there are just as many revisionists who tirelessly contend that the “genocide” was actually a double-genocide, where both Hutus and Tutsis are equally to blame, or that the killings were a spontaneous eruption, not something plotted and prodded by the Hutu government. As ridiculous as those claims are, I also believe that those who are friends of Rwanda do a disservice to its people when they put on blinders regarding the activities by the current regime.

To tackle a subject as complex and as grave as the Rwandan genocide is to take a great risk as a filmmaker. After all, this is one of mankind’s darkest moments, the brutal extermination of millions of people in a matter of days. Add to that the fact that you are a Westerner reporting on Africa and the edges of the precipice upon which your integrity is balanced grow markedly steeper. One can either succumb to the sanitized apolitical “triumph-of-the-human-spirit” pap of the Hotel Rwanda set or risk the opposite, a lurid Vice Magazine-esque high-definition disaster safari. To her credit, Scranton keeps her balance on that vaulted high wire and manages to make something both sad and optimistic that never feels manipulated or dishonest. Rwandans are front and center in this film, the filmmakers wisely realizing that this story is best told by those who are still living it. 

Earth Made of Glass’s greatest achievement may be that it does indeed succeed despite its flaws, despite the omissions, despite the fact that telling this story in 87 minutes is a Sisyphean proposition. It succeeds because it is a great piece of documentary filmmaking, lucid and arresting without melodrama, informed and focused but not polemical. It succeeds because of Jean-Pierre; his struggle is truly the struggle of the nation. Through him we realize both the incredible capacity for forgiveness and redemption that human beings have, but also never lose sight of the enormous challenges that lie ahead.