Editor's Note: Into Africa

2004 was a fine year for movies. Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, which won the top honor at Sunday's Academy Awards, was brilliant. Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, which took home five awards, was amazing. Ray, starring acting honoree Jamie Foxx, was mesmerizing. Finding Neverland was enchanting, Sideways hilarious. And beyond the best-picture nominees, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Super Size Me were both funny and sobering, while other top finishers on my list were Spider-Man 2, Before Sunset, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Twilight Samurai, Friday Night Lights, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite.

But all of these movies followed my No. 1 choice of 2004: Hotel Rwanda. This movie, which received two much-deserved acting nominations, vividly and poignantly illustrates what happened in that east African nation in 1994--and what didn't happen.

What happened was genocide--one ethnic group, the Hutus, sought to eliminate another, the Tutsis, from the earth. The movie tells the true story of a Hutu hotel manager (Don Cheadle) who saved more than 1,200 Tutsis from the slaughter by allowing them to take refuge in the hotel. The Oskar Schindler of Africa.

This all occurred while the Western world sat on its hands.

There were reasons, none of them good. The Rwanda genocide happened at roughly the same time as the Bosnian civil war, in which Western troops were heavily engaged, and it happened just after American troops were killed in Somalia (see another good movie, Blackhawk Down). The world was skittish about committing troops to quell a savage civil war in godforsaken Africa.

But we should have gone in. Rwanda needed us, and, as Hotel Rwanda shows, the peace-loving people of that country could not begin to understand how the world could stand idly by while innocent people were being hacked up with machetes in their homes and in the streets. Forget President Bill Clinton's Oval Office shenanigans; his greatest shame was not acting in Rwanda.

Of course, Clinton was not the first and not the last head of state to make political and military choices that forfeit innocent lives. Because while President Bush has taken a special interest in the well-being of the Iraqi people, he has all but ignored the plight of people in two other African countries, Sudan and Congo, where civil conflicts have left tens of thousands dead, thousands living in refugee camps and many on the verge of starvation.

The U.N. Security Council is considering a proposal to send 10,000 peacekeeping troops to Sudan to maintain a cease-fire and protect civilians from violence. But the measure has been held up because of a dispute between the Bush administration and the European Union over how war crimes should be prosecuted. The Europeans want the International Criminal Court to have jurisdiction in prosecuting war criminals in Sudan, but the United States opposes the court. Although 97 nations are members of the court, the United States does not want to recognize it for fear that one day Americans could be tried there for war crimes.

The issue is worthy of debate, but it should not delay action in bringing peace--and food--to Sudan.

The reality is that Africa is a low priority for the United States and the rest of the international community. Most of the continent is not strategically important to us, but let's be honest: That's not the real issue. The real issue is that the vast majority of people in Africa are black. When conflicts arose in Kosovo a decade ago, we elected to get involved, in no small part because the persecuted people there looked a lot like us. But when civil war erupted in Rwanda--fighting, by the way, that continues and has claimed an unfathomable 3.8 million lives--we did not respond.

In Hotel Rwanda, Nick Nolte plays a blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeeper who is frustrated that he does not have the authority or the personnel to do more to stop the massacre. At first he holds out hope that military aid will come, but when he learns that no help is coming, he explains to the hotel manager, Cheadle, why. "We think you're dirt," he says. "You aren't even a nigger. You're an African."

Never again, right? Look to Sudan and Congo for the answer.

--GEOFF SCHUMACHER