The Rwandan Genocide had more violence involved than most of us can imagine. Sometimes in April portrayed violence in the events going on during the genocide, but one question to ask ourselves, is: How accurate are these events in the movie, compared to real life? Sometimes In April has a number of scenes that shows murder through the use of guns. There were also weapons shown in the movie, but they were rarely used to torture and murder. These weapons included: clubs, maces, machetes and knives. One scene shows these extra weapons in the hands of men riding in the back of a truck chanting and whistling while getting ready to attack, but never show them using the weapons. Taking into consideration the rating of the movie, (TV-MA)(T.V. Parental Guidelines) (this was a movie made for Television) there could only be so much graphic violence included. There were many other torture, murder and rape tactics used by the Hutu. The difference between real-life accounts and the scenes portrayed in Sometimes In April are astounding. A man by the name of Gerard Prunier described the genocides in the following words:
“The killings were not in any ways clean or surgical. The use of machetes often resulted in a long and painful agony and many people, when they had some money, paid their killers to be finished off quickly with a bullet rather than being slowly hacked to death with a panga. Sexual abuse of women was common and they were often brutally killed after being raped. If some children joining the interahamwe became killers, others were thrown into pit latrines. Mutilations were common… In some cases, they became part of macabre rituals which would have puzzled a psychiatrist. Brutality here does not end with murder. At massacre sites, corpses, many of them those of children, have been methodically dismembered and the body parts stacked neatly in separate piles. … In some cases, militiamen tried to force women to kill their children in order to save their own lives. Some people were burnt alive as their relations were forced to watch before being killed themselves. In other cases the interahamwe told families that if they would kill a certain relation the rest of the family would be spared.” (Kahn, 2000)
Many of the killings were done by machete, but automatic rifles and hand grenades were commonly used as well. The Tutsi acquired small arms such as small cannons and rocket launchers from Uganda. To counter the invasion, the Hutu acquired automatic rifles from Belgium, and armored vehicles from France. Belgium, at the time, had a policy against providing weapons to a country at war. This didn’t stop the french, and they continued to provide mortars and artillery guns. They french also provided troops on top of that. (Goose & Smyth, 1994).
“An arms race was under way. More than a dozen nations helped fuel the Rwandan war, and both sides appear to have purchased considerable weaponry through private sources on the open market.” (Goose & Smyth, 1994).
(Start clip at 2:00, watch until 6:42)
In Sometimes In April the road blocks are portrayed accurately, At least as accurately as they could and keep the movie acceptable for television. The scenes in the movie show people being stopped on their way out of the cities. They were asked to show their ID cards. If they did not have their cards or if they were Tutsi, they were taken from their cars and shot, tortured, raped or slaughtered. Killings at the roadblocks occur at more than one point in the movie. Realistically, roadblocks were places where many Tutsi spent the last few minutes of their lives.( Fullerton, D. 2011). A journalist by the name of Fergal Keane, stated that he remembered the stories of what happened to the Tutsi at the roadblocks. They would single out, beat and humiliate the people before they killed them. Often, women were raped before being killed. “I knew that somewhere near each of these barriers there was a mass grave, perhaps several graves holding the bodies of the local Tutsi population.” -Fergal Keane. ( Fullerton, D. 2011).
(Start clip at 9:35, watch to the end)
In one scene in Sometimes In April, Two dump trucks drive past carrying loads of dead bodies, as if they were being carried away to be buried in a mass grave. Although, the trucks of bodies may have been dramatized, they were a good representation of how thousands of Rwandan Bodies were moved into mass graves and buried there. According to the New York Times, in some cases, there were thousands of bodies buried in the same graves. (New York Times, 1994).
(Start clip at 7:35, watch until 8:10)
In the movie, the Hutu call the Tutsi cockroaches, or inyenzis. This was actually a very common thing to be said during the Rwandan Genocide. Much like the holocaust in Nazi Germany, where the Nazis were trained to believe that the Jews were less human than themselves, the Hutu were convinced by their leaders that the Tutsi were not human beings. They believed that they were vermin that deserved to be walked on; Like cockroaches. (Montgomery & Smith, 2012)
Sometimes In April 