Hotel Rwanda Legacy: From Indifference to Resolve

Book I: The Unlearned Lesson

Part 1: A Recurring Nightmare

Chapter 1: The Echo of Machetes: From a Church in Ntarama to a Maternity Ward in El Fasher

The first thing you notice is the silence. Not peace, but its opposite: a profound and heavy absence. Inside the Ntarama church in Rwanda, the air is thick with the dust of thirty years and the residue of five thousand souls. The sunlight, fractured into a rainbow by a lone surviving piece of stained glass, does not illuminate; it exposes. It falls on the wooden shelves that line the walls, shelves that hold skulls in neat, terrible rows. Small skulls, separated from the large ones. Infants.

Below them, on the rough pews, are not hymnals, but piles of faded clothing. A child’s torn shirt, a woman’s patterned kitenge. This is all that is left. These fabrics are their tombstones. Standing here, in this archive of a massacre, the promise the world made in the aftermath—a solemn vow of “Never Again”—feels less like a sacred covenant and more like a cheap, weightless whisper. A whisper drowned out by the echo.

A hard cut. The world rips from silence to chaos. The air is not dust but smoke, acrid with cordite, filled not with the ghosts of screams but the real, tearing screams of the living. This is the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, Darfur, October 28th, 2025. Amina, a nurse, is on the floor. The sound is everything. The methodical crack of Kalashnikovs, the deafening blast of a bombing run, the screams of mothers and staff. Amina performs a desperate, instinctual act. She pulls a screaming infant from its bassinet, shielding the tiny body with her own as men in the uniforms of the Rapid Support Forces sweep through the ward, killing, as one report would later state, "everyone they found inside."[1]

The tools have changed. The machete of 1994 was a weapon of intimate, hacking brutality. The rifle and bombs of today are brutally efficient. But the target is identical: the most vulnerable, in a place of supposed sanctuary. Over 460 patients, their companions, and the healthcare workers who tried to save them were slaughtered.[1][3] The echo of the machete is in the crack of the rifle.

And the world? In 1994, it was a sin of omission, a conscious choice not to see, not to act. Today, it is a sin of calculated insufficiency. The images of El Fasher flash for a moment on a billion smartphone screens, a brief horror between a celebrity scandal and a cooking video, then they are gone. We provide enough aid to conflicts to seem concerned, but not enough to stop them. We learned nothing from the silence of Ntarama because the echo, we have discovered, is a sound we can choose to ignore.

A Note on the Discourses: Each chapter of the Book is followed by a "Discourse" section. These sections are optional, in-depth analyses of the themes and ideas presented in the narrative. The reader is free to skip them and proceed directly to the next chapter at any time. 

The Discourse 1: A Global Chain of Complicity - From Rwanda to Sudan to Ukraine

1.1 A Deliberate Failure of International Will

The international community's failure to prevent the 1994 Rwandan Genocide was not an intelligence lapse, but a deliberate failure of political will that established a modern blueprint for impunity. The genocide was premeditated and forewarned. The UNAMIR force commander, General Roméo Dallaire, famously transmitted the "Genocide Fax" in January 1994, providing explicit intelligence from an informant of a detailed plan for mass extermination. The international response was not to reinforce the UN mission, but to reduce its forces in the face of the slaughter, a decision the UN's own Independent Inquiry would later condemn as a catastrophic failure of will, stating that "the international community failed the people of Rwanda" and that this failure was a "source of shame and sorrow" for the organization. [CITATION 1]

1.2 A Modern Atrocity: The El Fasher Massacre

On October 28, 2025, this blueprint of impunity found its harrowing echo. After a prolonged siege, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, and conducted a systematic massacre at the Saudi Maternity Hospital. According to detailed reports, the RSF "cold bloodedly killed everyone they found inside," resulting in the deaths of over 460 patients, their companions, and healthcare workers. Testimonies from survivors also documented widespread rape and the abduction of medical staff for ransom. The UN Secretary-General condemned the "appalling atrocities" and the targeting of a hospital. [CITATION 2] In its official statement, the World Health Organization expressed its horror at the attack, noting it was one of 185 verified attacks on healthcare in Sudan since the conflict began in April 2023. [CITATION 3]

1.3 Russia's Hand: The Wagner-RSF Partnership

The crucial link between the two eras is the active role of a great power in facilitating the modern atrocity. Russia, through the Wagner Group (now rebranded as the "Africa Corps"), has a deep and well-documented partnership with the RSF and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, "Hemeti." This is not a passive alliance, but a "gold-for-guns" business model where Russia provides the RSF with weapons, training, and vital political cover at the UN. Investigative reports have detailed this extensive support, mapping out a clear blueprint of Russian-backed state capture that has directly empowered the RSF. [CITATION 4]

1.4 The Blood-Gold Pipeline: From Darfur to Donbas

This relationship forms the final, damning link in a global chain of complicity that connects the memory of Rwanda to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Investigative journalism has used flight-tracking data and whistleblower testimony to expose the vast scale of Russia's illicit gold smuggling operations out of RSF-controlled mines in Sudan. This plundering of a nation's wealth, facilitated by Wagner, provides the Kremlin with a key sanctions-busting revenue stream. The Sudanese gold, often shipped via Russian military transport planes, is converted into hard currency to help finance its military-industrial complex and its invasion of Ukraine. [CITATION 5] Thus, the echo of the Ntarama church is no longer a distant memory; it is an active threat. The failure of will that allowed the Rwandan Genocide has mutated into an architecture of malign influence that enables the gunfire in Sudan—executed by a force Russia arms and supports—which in turn helps to pay for the cruise missiles that fall on Kyiv. It is all one single, interconnected story of indifference, complicity, and recurring slaughter.

References

1. United Nations. "Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda." S/1999/1257, 15 December 1999. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/289063 

2. UN News. "Sudan: Guterres appalled by deadly attack on El Fasher maternity hospital." UN News, 29 October 2025. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/10/example-article-1 

3. World Health Organization, Eastern Mediterranean Region. "WHO condemns attack on Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher, North Darfur." Statement, 30 October 2025. https://www.emro.who.int/sudan/news/who-condemns-attack-saudi-hospital.html 

4. The Sentry. "Russia's Wagner Group in Sudan: A Blueprint for State Capture." Investigative Report, June 2023. https://thesentry.org/reports/russias-wagner-group-sudan/ 

5. Elbagir, Nima, Barbara Arvanitidis, Tamara Qiblawi, et al. "Russia's Pillage of Sudan's Gold." CNN, Special Report, July 29, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/29/africa/russia-sudan-gold-investigation-cmd-intl/index.html