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I n t e r n a t i o n a l D e v e l o p m e n t R e s e a r c h C e n t r e ( P O B o x 8 5 0 0 , O t t a w a , O N , C a n a d a K 1 G 3 H 9 ( H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / i n f o @ i d r c . c a " w w w . i d r c . c a / i n f o @ i d r c . c a ( I S B N 1 5 5 2 5 0 3 3 8 0 ( e - b o o k )
F o u n t a i n P u b l i s h e r s L t d ( F o u n t a i n H o u s e , 5 5 N k r u m a h R o a d , P . O . B o x 4 8 8 , K a m p a l a , U g a n d a ( H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . f o u n t a i n p u b l i s h e r s . c o . u g / " w w w . f o u n t a i n p u b l i s h e r s . c o . u g ( E - m a i l : f o u n t a i n @ s t a r c o m . c o . u g ( I S B N - 1 0 9 9 7 0 0 2 5 9 5 3 ( I S B N - 1 3 9 7 8 9 9 7 0 0 2 5 9 5 4
C o p y r i ght Allan Thompson, 2007. Statement by Kofi Annan, 2007
The right of Allan Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ( A c a t a l o g u e r e c o r d f o r t h i s b o o k i s a v a i l a b l e f r o m t h e B r i t i s h L i b r a r y
H a r d b a c k ( I S B N - 1 3 9 7 8 0 7 4 5 3 2 6 2 6 9 ( I S B N - 1 0 0 7 4 5 3 2 6 2 6 9
P a p e r b a c k ( I S B N - 1 3 9 7 8 0 7 4 5 3 2 6 2 5 2 ( I S B N - 1 0 0 7 4 5 3 2 6 2 5 0
L i b r a r y o f C o n g r e s s C a t a l o g i n g i n P u b l i c a t i o n D a t a a p p l i e d f o r
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C o n t e n t s
M e s s a g e t o S y m p o s i u m o n t h e M e d i a a n d t h e R w a n d a G e n o c i d e ( K o f i A n n a n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ i x " i x P r e f a c e H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ x i " x i N o t e s o n C o n t r i b u t o r s H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ x i i i " x i i i 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n ( A l l a n T h o m p s o n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 " 1 2 T h e M e d i a D i c h o t o m y ( R o m o D a l l a i r e H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 2 " 1 2 3 R w a n d a : W a l k i n g t h e R o a d t o G e n o c i d e ( G e r a l d C a p l a n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 0 " 2 0 P A R T O N E : H A T E M E D I A I N R W A N D A 4 C a l l t o G e n o c i d e : R a d i o i n R w a n d a , 1 9 9 4 ( A l i s o n D e s F o r g e s H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 4 1 " 4 1 5 R T L M P r o p a g a n d a : t h e D e m o c r a t i c A l i b i ( J e a n - P i e r r e C h r t i e n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 5 5 " 5 5 6 K a n g u r a : t h e T r i u m p h o f P r o p a g a n d a R e f i n e d ( M a r c e l K a b a n d a H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 6 2 " 6 2 7 R w a n d a n P r i v a t e P r i n t M e d i a o n t h e E v e o f t h e G e n o c i d e ( J e a n - M a r i e V i a n n e y H i g i r o H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 7 3 " 7 3 8 E c h o e s o f V i o l e n c e : C o n s i d e r a t i o n s o n R a d i o a n d G e n o c i d e i n R w a n d a ( D a r r y l L i H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 9 0 " 9 0 9 R T L M : t h e M e d i u m t h a t B e c a m e a T o o l f o r M a s s M u r d e r ( M a r y K i m a n i H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 1 0 " 1 1 0 1 0 T h e E f f e c t o f R T L M ' s R h e t o r i c o f E t h n i c H a t r e d i n R u r a l R w a n d a ( C h a r l e s M i r o n k o H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 2 5 " 1 2 5 1 1 J o u r n a l i s m i n a T i m e o f H a t e M e d i a ( T h o m a s K a m i l i n d i H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 3 6 " 1 3 6 P A R T T W O : I N T E R N A T I O N A L M E D I A C O V E R A G E O F T H E G E N O C I D E 1 2 R e p o r t i n g t h e G e n o c i d e ( M a r k D o y l e H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 4 5 " 1 4 5 1 3 W h o F a i l e d i n R w a n d a , J o u r n a l i s t s o r t h e M e d i a ? ( A n n e C h a o n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 6 0 " 1 6 0 1 4 R e p o r t i n g R w a n d a : t h e M e d i a a n d t h e A i d A g e n c i e s ( L i n d s e y H i l s u m H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 6 7 " 1 6 7 1 5 L i m i t e d V i s i o n : H o w B o t h t h e A m e r i c a n M e d i a a n d G o v e r n m e n t F a i l e d R w a n d a ( S t e v e n L i v i n g s t o n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 8 8 " 1 8 8 1 6 M i s s i n g t h e S t o r y : t h e M e d i a a n d t h e R w a n d a G e n o c i d e ( L i n d a M e l v e r n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 1 9 8 " 1 9 8 1 7 W h a t D i d T h e y S a y ? A f r i c a n M e d i a C o v e r a g e o f t h e F i r s t 1 0 0 D a y s o f t h e R w a n d a C r i s i s ( E m m a n u e l C . A l o z i e H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 1 1 " 2 1 1 1 8 E x h i b i t 4 6 7 : G e n o c i d e T h r o u g h a C a m e r a L e n s ( N i c k H u g h e s H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 3 1 " 2 3 1 1 9 M e d i a F a i l u r e o v e r R w a n d a ' s G e n o c i d e ( T o m G i l e s H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 3 5 " 2 3 5 2 0 A G e n o c i d e W i t h o u t I m a g e s : W h i t e F i l m N o i r s ( E d g a r R o s k i s H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 3 8 " 2 3 8 2 1 N o t e s o n C i r c u m s t a n c e s t h a t F a c i l i t a t e G e n o c i d e : t h e A t t e n t i o n G i v e n t o R w a n d a b y t h e M e d i a a n d O t h e r s O u t s i d e R w a n d a B e f o r e 1 9 9 0 ( M i k e D o t t r i d g e H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 4 2 " 2 4 2 2 2 T h e M e d i a ' s F a i l u r e : a R e f l e c t i o n o n t h e R w a n d a G e n o c i d e ( R i c h a r d D o w d e n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 4 8 " 2 4 8 2 3 H o w t h e M e d i a m i s s e d t h e R w a n d a G e n o c i d e ( A l a n J . K u p e r m a n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 5 6 " 2 5 6 2 4 A n A n a l y s i s o f N e w s M a g a z i n e C o v e r a g e o f t h e R w a n d a C r i s i s i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s ( M e l i s s a W a l l H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 6 1 " 2 6 1 P A R T T H R E E : J O U R N A L I S M A S G E N O C I D E T H E M E D I A T R I A L 2 5 T h e V e r d i c t : S u m m a r y J u d g e m e n t f r o m t h e M e d i a T r i a l H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 2 7 7 " 2 7 7 2 6 T h e P r e - G e n o c i d e C a s e A g a i n s t R a d i o - T l v i s i o n L i b r e d e s M i l l e s C o l l i n e s ( S i m o n e M o n a s e b i a n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 0 8 " 3 0 8 2 7 T h e C h a l l e n g e s i n P r o s e c u t i n g P r i n t M e d i a f o r I n c i t e m e n t t o G e n o c i d e ( C h a r i t y K a g w i - N d u n g u H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 3 0 " 3 3 0 2 8 ' H a t e M e d i a ' C r i m e s A g a i n s t H u m a n i t y a n d G e n o c i d e : O p p o r t u n i t i e s M i s s e d b y t h e I n t e r n a t i o n a l C r i m i n a l T r i b u n a l f o r R w a n d a ( J e a n - M a r i e B i j u - D u v a l H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 4 3 " 3 4 3 2 9 A L o s t O p p o r t u n i t y f o r J u s t i c e : W h y D i d t h e I C T R N o t P r o s e c u t e G e n d e r P r o p a g a n d a ? ( B i n a i f e r N o w r o j e e H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 6 2 " 3 6 2 P A R T F O U R : A F T E R T H E G E N O C I D E A N D T H E W A Y F O R W A R D 3 0 I n t e r v e n i n g t o P r e v e n t G e n o c i d a l V i o l e n c e : t h e R o l e o f t h e M e d i a ( F r a n k C h a l k H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 7 5 " 3 7 5 3 1 I n f o r m a t i o n i n C r i s i s A r e a s a s a T o o l f o r P e a c e : t h e H i r o n d e l l e E x p e r i e n c e ( P h i l i p p e D a h i n d e n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 8 1 " 3 8 1 3 2 T h e U s e a n d A b u s e o f M e d i a i n V u l n e r a b l e S o c i e t i e s ( M a r k F r o h a r d t a n d J o n a t h a n T e m i n H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 3 8 9 " 3 8 9 3 3 C e n s o r s h i p a n d P r o p a g a n d a i n P o s t - G e n o c i d e R w a n d a ( L a r s W a l d o r f H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 4 0 4 " 4 0 4 3 4 P G P a r e n t a l G u i d a n c e o r P o r t r a y a l o f G e n o c i d e : t h e C o m p a r a t i v e D e p i c t i o n o f M a s s M u r d e r i n C o n t e m p o r a r y C i n e m a ( M i c h a e l D o r l a n d H Y P E R L I N K " h t t p : / / w w w . i d r c . c a / o p e n e b o o k s / 3 3 8 - 0 / # p a g e _ 4 1 7 " 4 1 7 3 5 T h e R e s p o n s i b i l i t y t o R e p o r t : a N e w J o u r n a l i s t i c P a r a d i g m ( A l l a n T h o m p s o n H Y P E R L I N K "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#page_433"433BibliographyHYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#page_447"447IndexHYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#page_455"455This page intentionally left blank
UNITED NATIONS NATIONS UNIES ( T H E S E C R E T A R Y - G E N E R A L ( - - - ( M E S S A G E T O S Y M P O S I U M O N T H E M E D I A ( A N D T H E R W A N D A G E N O C I D E
C a r l e t o n U n i v e r s i t y S c h o o l o f J o u r n a l i s m a n d C o m m u n i c a t i o n O t t a w a , 1 3 M a r c h 2 0 0 4
W h e n , o n 7 A p r i l , p e o p l e a r o u n d t h e w o r l d c o m m e m o r a t e t h e 1 0 t h a n n i v e r s a r y o f t h e R w a n d a g enocide, that observance should be filled not only with remorse, but with resolve.
We must remember the victims the hundreds of thousands of men, women and children abandoned to systematic slaughter while the world, which had the capacity to save most of them, failed to save more than a handful, forever sullying the collective conscience. We must also help the survivors still struggling with the physical and psychological scars. But most of all, we must pledge to ourselves as moral beings and to each other as a human community to act boldly, including through military action when no other course will work, to ensure that such a denial of our common humanity is never allowed to happen again.
The United Nations has now had ten years to reflect on the bitter knowledge that genocide happened while UN peacekeepers were on the ground in Rwanda, and to learn lessons that all humankind should have learned from previous genocides. We are determined to sound the alarm about emerging crises and to help countries tackle the root causes of their problems. I expect soon to appoint a United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide, and to make other proposals for strengthening our action in this area.
It is encouraging to know that the news media are also undertaking a process of self-examination as we collectively remember this tragedy. Media were used in Rwanda to spread hatred, to dehumanize people, and even to guide the genocidaires toward their victims. Three journalists have even been found guilty of genocide, incitement to genocide, conspiracy and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. We must find a way to respond to such abuses of power without violating the principles of freedom, which are an indispensable cornerstone of democracy.
I am glad that you are confronting these and other questions, including the role of the international media, especially at a school where future journalists are being trained. Such training must include reflection on the responsibilities of their chosen profession.
There can be no more important issue, and no more binding obligation, than the prevention of genocide. The world has made some progress in understanding the responsibility to protect. Yet it is still not clear, were the signs of impending genocide to be seen somewhere today, that the world would mount an effective response. I hope that all of us, as diplomats, journalists, government officials or just concerned citizens, will act promptly and effectively, each within our sphere of influence, to halt genocide wherever it occurs or better still, to make sure there is no 'next time'.
Preface
It was the French philosopher, Voltaire, who wrote: 'We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth.'
In the case of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the news media accomplished neither of Voltaire's admonitions. Confronted by Rwanda's horrors, Western news media for the most part turned away, then muddled the story when they did pay attention. And hate media organs in Rwanda through their journalists, broadcasters and media executives played an instrumental role in laying the groundwork for genocide, then actively participated in the extermination campaign.
On the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa hosted a one-day symposium on 13 March 2004, entitled 'The Media and the Rwanda Genocide.' The symposium examined in tandem the role of both the international media and Rwanda's domestic news organizations in the cataclysmic events of 1994. The Carleton symposium brought together for the first time an international collection of experts as well as some of the actors from the Rwandan drama; it also inspired this collection of papers. Many of the contributions found here are based on papers delivered at the Carleton event, but others were commissioned or have been reprinted here because of their valuable contribution to the debate.
The symposium was made possible by generous contributions from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Government of Canada, through the Global Issues Bureau of the Foreign Affairs department and the Canadian International Development Agency. The IDRC has also played a key role in the publication of this collection; it continues to support Carleton's efforts to build a Media and Genocide Archive and to establish a partnership with the School of Journalism and Communication at the National University of Rwanda in Butare through a project called The Rwanda Initiative.
I would like to thank all those who contributed to the symposium and to this collection, most notably the authors of the papers you are about to read. Special thanks are due to Chris Dornan, who was director of the School of Journalism and Communication when this project began, Pamela Scholey and Bill Carman from the IDRC, Romo Dallaire, who lent considerable moral support to this project, and Sandra Garland, who did wonderful work as a copy-editor. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Roula El-Rifai and our son, Laith Rifai-Thompson. My passion for Rwanda has often consumed time and energy that should have been devoted to my family.
For my part, I came to Rwanda late. Before joining the faculty at Carleton in 2003, I was a career journalist with the Toronto Star. I was not in Rwanda in 1994. I first visited in 1996 to report on the repatriation of Hutu refugees from the Goma region of what was then eastern Zaire. But Rwanda does get inside you and, since then, I think I have been trying to some degree to make amends for not having been there in 1994. Reviewing the Toronto Star archives, I found an article of mine published on 9 April 1994. I had forgotten ever having written it; perhaps it left my memory because it was such a dreadful piece of journalism. Written three days into the genocide, the article focused entirely on the evacuation of Canadian expatriates from Kigali and invoked every clich of tribal conflict, chaos and anarchy.
Two months later, in early June, while Romo Dallaire and his beleaguered contingent watched helplessly as the slaughter continued in Rwanda, I reported for the Star from Normandy, France, where then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrtien was participating in ceremonies to mark the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. In my experience, major events taking place elsewhere in the world often become a preoccupation for the journalists reporting on such international gatherings. But as I recall, during that weekend of speeches and press conferences in Normandy commemorating a war that ended half a century earlier, there was nary a mention of what was going on at that moment in Rwanda. None of the leaders mentioned the Rwanda genocide. Nor did any in the media throng covering the D-Day commemorations ask about Rwanda.
The collection you are about to read explores the role of hate media in the Rwanda genocide and examines international media coverage of the genocide. Then it turns to an assessment of the guilty verdict in the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda's 'Media Trial' and finally concludes with a section on the aftermath, examining the current media climate in Rwanda, media intervention strategies and the place of the Rwanda genocide in popular culture.
The purpose of looking back at the media's role in the Rwanda events is not just to remember. We still have some learning to do on this subject and examining the way journalists and news organizations conducted themselves in 1994 is not just a historical exercise. Sadly, we don't yet seem to have fully discerned or absorbed the lessons from Rwanda.
Ultimately, this collection is dedicated to those who perished in 1994. To underline the point, I would like to borrow a comparison used by British journalist, Scott Peterson. To understand the number of dead, imagine that every word in this book is the name of a victim. This entire volume would list only 200,000 of the dead, a fraction of the estimated toll of nearly one million people. As you read this collection, look at every word. Then think of someone you know.
Allan T h o m p s o n ( O t t a w a , 2 0 0 6
N o t e s o n C o n t r i b u t o r s
E m m a n u e l C . A l o z i e i s u n i v e r s i t y p r o f e s s o r o f m e d i a c o m m u n i c a t i o n s a t G o v e r n o r s S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y , U n i v e r s i t y P a r k , I l l i n o i s . H i s r e s e a r c h i n t e r e s t s a r e i n d e v e l o p m e n t c o m m u n i c a t i o n , i n t e r n a t i o n a l / c u l t u r a l j o u r n a lism, advertising and public relations. Alozie is former assistant editor with Democratic Communiqu, author of Cultural Reflections and the Role of Advertising in the Socio-economic and National Development of Nigeria (2005, Edwin Mellen Press), and co-edited, Toward the Common Good: Perspectives in International Public Relations (2004, Ally & Bacon).
Jean-Marie Biju-Duval is a Paris-based lawyer who was engaged as the defence counsel for Ferdinand Nahimana, the former Rwandan media executive who was convicted in the Media Trial.
Gerald Caplan is a leading Canadian authority on genocide prevention. He is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, the 2000 report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the 1994 Rwanda genocide. He is also founder of Remembering Rwanda, the Rwanda genocide tenth anniversary memorial project and has developed and teaches a course on the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide.
Frank Chalk is a professor in the Department of History, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and the co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. He is co-author (with Kurt Jonassohn) of The History and Sociology of Genocide.
Anne Chaon is a journalist with Agence France-Presse (AFP). In the first weeks of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, she was based in Paris, working on AFP's Africa desk. She reported from Rwanda for AFP in June, before heading to eastern Zaire in July of that year. She testified against RTLM media executive Ferdinand Nahimana in Paris and before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in the Media Trial.
Jean-Pierre Chrtien is a historian and co-author of Rwanda: les mdias du Gnocide. He has held teaching positions at l'cole normale suprieure du Burundi, l'Universit de Lille III, and since 1973 has been a researcher in African history at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris.
Philippe Dahinden is a Swiss journalist who is cofounder of and former editor-in-chief at the Hirondelle Foundation, an international organization of journalists that establishes media operations in crisis areas. He founded and managed the independent radio station, Radio Agatashya, which covered Rwanda, Burundi and the Kivu after July 1994 in an attempt to counter the destructive messages of hate radio. He also set up and managed Radio Okapi in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Romo Dallaire is a retired Lieutenant-General. He led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) to help implement the Arusha accords. He is the author of Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda and now sits in the Senate of Canada as a member of the Liberal party.
Michael Dorland is professor of communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. A former film critic before his return to the academy in 1992, his current research concerns the medical aspects of Holocaust survival.
Mike Dottridge was a desk officer with Amnesty International during the 1980s, covering Rwanda and other countries in the Great Lakes region. At the time of the genocide (and until 1995) he was supervising Amnesty's work throughout sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently a consultant on human rights issues.
Richard Dowden was Africa editor for a British newspaper, the Independent, in 1994. He is now director of the Royal African Society.
Mark Doyle has worked for the BBC since 1986 and was its east Africa correspondent in 199394. He spent much of the period of the genocide in Rwanda and, on several occasions, he was the only foreign reporter in Kigali.
Alison Des Forges is senior advisor to the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. She is also the author of Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda and has served as expert witness in genocide proceedings at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, U.S. Federal Court, and in Belgian and Swiss courts.
Mark Frohardt is Internews Network's regional director for Africa and former deputy chief of mission for the United Nations Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda (May 1995 to June 1997).
Tom Giles covered the Rwanda genocide as a producer for BBC News. He won a Royal Television Society award in 'international current affairs' for his Panorama production on the war in Iraq In the Line of Fire.
Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts. From 31 July 1993 to 6 April 1994, he was director of the Rwandan Information Office (ORINFOR) in Kigali.
Lindsey Hilsum was one of only two Western journalists on the ground in Rwanda at the time of the genocide and is in a unique position to describe media coverage of the genocide and the disproportionate attention paid to the plight of Hutu refugees who had fled to Goma. She is China correspondent for Channel 4 News in Britain.
Nick Hughes is a British director/cameraman who captured some of the only known media images of killings during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He later testified as a prosecution witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, where his footage was entered as a piece of evidence, exhibit 467, in the trial of George Rutaganda. Hughes later produced the film 100 Days, the first cinematic treatment of the Rwanda genocide.
Marcel Kabanda is a Rwandan historian and a consultant with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. He is also a co-author of Rwanda: les mdias du Genocide.
Charity Kagwi-Ndungu is a trial attorney with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and was a prosecutor in the Media Trial.
Thomas Kamilindi is a former Radio Rwanda journalist, based in Kigali. He resigned a few months before the genocide started. He was among the many liberal Hutus accused of sympathizing with the Tutsi-led rebel forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front and narrowly escaped death during the genocide. In 2005, he left Rwanda, where he had been working as a BBC correspondent, to accept a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
Mary Kimani is a journalist who covered the Media Trial and conducted a series of interviews with an RTLM journalist. The work reported in this volume formed part of a thesis completed for a master's degree in communication psychology at the University of Warnborough, Canterbury, United Kingdom.
Alan Kuperman is assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin.
Darryl Li is completing a PhD in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and a JD at Yale Law School. In three months of fieldwork, he explored the impact of RTLM on its listeners by interviewing dozens of Rwandans who were part of the station's audience and who admitted to taking part in the genocide.
Steven Livingston is associate professor of political communication and international affairs and director, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University.
Linda Melvern is an investigative journalist and author of A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide and Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide.
Charles Mironko is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on genocide perpetrators. He was formerly Associate Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, and chief of the Culture Section at the Organization of African Unity. He is currently a Humanitarian Officer in Darfur, under the African Union Mission in Sudan.
Simone Monasebian was a trial attorney with the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and one of the prosecutors in the Media Trial. Later, she was principal defender at the Sierra Leone tribunal before her appointment as chief of the New York office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime as well as a CourtTV legal analyst.
Binaifer Nowrojee is Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. She was counsel with Human Rights Watch/Africa and the author of the Human Rights Watch report, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath. She has testified as an expert witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on sexual violence and in 2005 became director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa.
Edgar Roskis (19522003) was a journalist with Le Monde diplomatique and a senior lecturer in the Department of Information and Communication, Universit Paris-X, Nanterre, France.
Jonathan Temin is a senior programme officer with the CHF International and former programme associate with Internews Network.
Lars Waldorf is currently affiliated with the World Policy Institute at The New School. From 2002 to 2004, he ran Human Rights Watch's field office in Rwanda. He is now writing a book on the genocide trials before Rwanda's community courts (gacaca).
Melissa Wall is a journalism professor at California State University, Northridge. A former journalist, she has trained journalists in Ethiopia and researched township newspapers in Zimbabwe.
Allan Thompson is a professor at Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication. He joined the faculty at Carleton in 2003 after spending 17 years as a reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation daily newspaper. He worked for a decade as a correspondent for the Star on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and also undertook frequent reporting assignments in Africa, reporting from Rwanda a number of times. At Carleton, he leads the Rwanda Initiative, a media capacity-building partnership with the journalism school at the National University of Rwand a .
1 ( I n t r o d u c t i o n
A l l a n T h o m p s o n
T h e i m a g e s a r e s o d i s t u r b i n g t h e y a r e d i f f i c u l t t o w a t c h . T w o w o m e n k n e e l a m i d t h e b o d i e s o f t h o s e w h o h a v e a l r e a d y b e e n s l a i n . T h e y a r e a t t h e s i d e o f a d i r t r o a d i n K i g a l i , t h e c a p i t a l o f R w a n d a . T h e i r f i n a l m o m e n t s a r e captured on video by a British journalist, one of only a few foreign reporters left in the country, who is recording clandestinely from the top of a building nearby.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch1not1"1 Remarkably, during a genocide that claimed as many as a million lives, this is one of the only times a killing is recorded by the media. In the footage, one of the women is pleading, first clasping her hands in front of her, as if in prayer, then throwing open her arms, appealing to the throng of men who are milling about nearby, holding machetes and sticks. Further along the road are the bodies of others who have been dragged out of their homes and killed. The woman continues to beg, but the men seem to be oblivious to her. A young boy dressed in a T-shirt strolls past, giving the women only a backward glance. At one point, you can see a man in the crowd clutching something in his left hand. It appears to be a radio.
Minutes go by and the woman continues to plead for her life. The other figure crouched beside her barely flinches. Men wielding sticks in one hand and machetes in the other move forward and begin to pound the bodies that are strewn around the two women, striking the corpses again and again. One man gives the bodies a final crack, as if driving a stake into the ground, then slings his stick over his shoulder and ambles off. All the while, the woman continues to wave her arms and plead. A white pickup truck approaches and drives through the scene. The windshield wipers are flopping back and forth. One of the men huddled in the back of the vehicle waves a hand at the woman who is kneeling on the ground. He taunts her with a greeting.
Finally, two other men approach. One, dressed in dark trousers and a white shirt, winds up to strike the pleading woman. He has the posture of someone who is about to whip an animal. She recoils. Then he strikes her on the head with the stick he is clutching in his right hand. She crumples to the ground, then suffers more blows from her murderer. Almost at the same moment, the other woman is struck down as well by another assailant, her head very nearly lopped off by the initial blow. Finally, the two men walk away casually, leaving the bodies to squirm. In the distance, there is the sound of birdsong.
The date is 18 April 1994, nearly two weeks after the 6 April plane crash that claimed the life of Rwandan President Juvnal Habyarimana and plunged Rwanda into the abyss. The tiny central African country, a mere dot on the world map, garnered virtually no international media attention before the killing spree that followed the president's death. No one had paid much attention to a fledgling peace accord signed in Arusha, Tanzania in 1993, setting out the details for a power-sharing arrangement between the majority Hutu population and the minority Tutsi, represented in the talks by the rebels from the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). An international peacekeeping force, commanded by a Canadian general, Romo Dallaire, was dispatched to oversee implementation of the accord. Dallaire and his peacekeepers were only vaguely aware of the mounting tensions in the autumn of 1993, but heard rumblings about a 'third force' Hutu extremists who opposed the power-sharing arrangement.
The voice of Hutu Power was the private radio station RTLM, established by extremists who surrounded the president. And RTLM was an echo of other extremist media, notably the newspaper Kangura. Once the president's plane was shot down by unknown assailants, the message from RTLM was unmistakable: the Tutsi were to blame; they were the enemy and Rwanda would be better off without them. The killings began almost immediately in Kigali through the night of 67 April. Hutu moderates, who were willing to share power, were among the first targeted, along with Tutsi marked for extermination in a campaign that eventually fanned out across the country. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans who were slaughtered had huddled in churches for sanctuary. Death squads lobbed in grenades. In their frenzy, killers severed the Achilles tendons on the heels of their victims, so they could return and finish the job later. Teachers killed students, neighbours slaughtered neighbours as local officials helped organize the killing.
In its 2003 verdict in the 'Media Trial' of executives from RTLM and Kangura, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) confirmed the undoubted role of Rwandan hate media in the killing:
The newspaper and the radio explicitly and repeatedly, in fact relentlessly, targeted the Tutsi population for destruction. Demonizing the Tutsi as having inherently evil qualities, equating the ethnic group with 'the enemy' and portraying its women as seductive enemy agents, the media called for the extermination of the Tutsi ethnic group as a response to the political threat that they associated with Tutsi ethnicity. (ICTR 2003: para. 72)
(The full text of the judgement summary can be found in HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#part3"Part Three of this collection.)
Most international news organizations initially misunderstood the nature of the killing in Rwanda, portraying it as the result of tribal warfare, rather than genocide. Much of the international coverage focused on the scramble to evacuate expatriates from the country. In mid-April, when the killing intensified, the volume of news reports actually declined. Most journalists had left along with the other foreigners.
The grainy video captured on 18 April by Nick Hughes, who was positioned on the top floor of the French School, is truly the exception that proves the rule. Hughes looked first through the scope of a rocket launcher, borrowed from a Belgian soldier stationed in the school. Then he trained his camera on what he saw taking place in the road below. Hughes would recount later that he had to stop shooting at several points for fear that his lone remaining battery pack would expire and, as a result, there are 'jump cuts' in the video at points when he briefly turned off his camera. Because he was shooting from such a distance, the sound on the audio track is the background noise in the school and, occasionally, the voice of Hughes and an associate. 'She's praying over the person that has just been killed,' he comments at one point. 'They're going to kill her, you can see that,' he says later.
Eventually, the international media reports on Rwanda were replete with images of bloated corpses, strewn at the roadside or choking Rwanda's rivers. But because there were so few foreign journalists on the ground at the height of the killing and because the domestic media had either been cowed or co-opted into the massacres, there are no other known images of the crime itself, the crime of genocide. Would the world have reacted differently if confronted daily by images of people being slaughtered rather than the static, disembodied pictures of disfigured corpses? More informed and comprehensive coverage of the Rwanda genocide, particularly in those early days, might well have mitigated or even halted the killing by sparking an international outcry. The news media could have made a difference. But within Rwanda, the only news media making a difference were hate media, such as RTLM, which proved instrumental in fanning the flames and implicating tens of thousands of ordinary people in the genocide.
Journalists could have had an impact in Rwanda a sort of Heisenberg effect had there been a significant enough media presence to influence events. The Heisenberg effect, named for German physicist Werner Heisenberg, describes how the act of observing a particle actually changes the behaviour of that particle, its velocity or direction. Arguably, more comprehensive and accurate reporting about the Rwanda genocide could have changed the behaviour of the perpetrators, mitigating the slaughter. Instead, the lack of international media attention contributed to what I would call a sort of inverse Heisenberg effect. Through their absence and a failure to adequately observe and record events, journalists contributed to the behaviour of the perpetrators of the genocide who were encouraged by the world's apathy and acted with impunity.
At every turn, it seems, we return to this troubling equation, implicating news media both within Rwanda and internationally in the genocide. In looking back on this period, it is important to examine the role of domestic hate media and the international media in tandem in one collection of papers. As uncomfortable as this connection may seem, we cannot separate the two. We are looking at the role of the media, the power of its message and the impact of an information vacuum.
There is a considerable and growing body of literature on the Rwanda genocide in general and the role of the media in particular. Indeed, a number of authors have focused intently on the role of hate media in fostering and fomenting the genocide and that important work is reflected and elaborated upon in the collection of papers you are about to read. This collection takes the crucial step of juxtaposing analysis of the Rwandan media with analysis of coverage by the international media, thus encouraging a broader reflection on the role of the media as a whole. No other publication brings together both sides of the topic in this way. The role of hate media in the Rwanda genocide is in some ways self-evident. But it is not so clear, or at least not as universally accepted, that international media played a role in the genocide as well.
In the autumn of 1994, French journalist Edgar Roskis, wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique of 'un genocide sans images', a genocide without images. His article, translated and reprinted in this collection, underlines the point that because most foreign journalists fled the country, the indisputable crime of genocide very nearly went unrecorded. Roskis cites French photographer, Patrick Robert, who was working in Rwanda at the time for the Paris-based Sygma photo agency. 'There were six American correspondents,' Robert recounted. 'They had scarcely arrived when their editors gave them all orders to come home. At the Htel des Mille Collines, I picked up snatches of their conversations: "Too dangerous, not enough interest ... deep Africa, you know ... middle of nowhere."'
From 6 April until the middle of May, when the bulk of the genocide took place, Rwanda was still relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers, Roskis notes. The photos that were published were small and often old, the accounts second-hand, with little if any news appearing for days at a time.
The international media really only began to pay attention once Hutu refugees began to pour out of Rwanda into neighbouring countries. As Roskis contends, it was the 'humanitarian melodrama' of Goma that finally garnered the full attention of the international media. The Rwanda genocide was a media event, without question. And yet, it never quite graduated to the rank of 'mega-event', the kind of sensation that frequently attracts hundreds of international reporters, camera crews and satellite uplinks.
There is irony here. Dallaire continues to insist that with an intervention force of 5,000 troops, he could have put a halt to the killing. But the world's power brokers chief among them the United States, Great Britain and France used their positions on the United Nations Security Council to argue against intervention. The lack of focused, persistent media coverage of events in Rwanda only served to help the cause of those foot-draggers who did not want to get involved. Many blame American unwillingness to be drawn into Rwanda on 'Somalia fatigue', a reference to its humiliating withdrawal from Mogadishu in 1993 after 18 US rangers died in an abortive mission. The bodies of some of the helicopter pilots were later mutilated and dragged through the streets of the Somali capital by a jeering crowd. Canadian journalist, Paul Watson, then working for the Toronto Star, captured a Pulitzer-prize-winning photograph of the body of one of the American pilots as it was being hauled through the streets. That searing media image was published by many US newspapers and is widely credited with prompting the Clinton administration to withdraw from Somalia.
A media image contributed to US withdrawal from one African mission. A year later, at the height of the Rwanda genocide, the lack of media images probably helped the cause of those in Washington, London, Paris and other major capitals who wanted to avoid mounting an international intervention in another African country. As Dallaire puts it in his overview chapter in this collection, the world turned its back on Rwanda, not least because international news organizations initially downplayed the story. The Rwanda genocide, as a news event, simply did not break through.
By most accounts, there were only two foreign journalists in Rwanda on 6 April 1994, when Habyarimana's plane was shot down: Katrin van der Schoot, a freelance Flemish reporter for Belgian radio, and Lindsey Hilsum (the author of 'Reporting Rwanda: the Media and the Aid Agencies', in HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#part2"Part Two of this collection). Hilsum was in Rwanda on a temporary contract for UNICEF, although she also worked as a freelance reporter for the BBC, the Guardian and the Observer. As Hilsum recounts in her paper, some Nairobi-based journalists managed to move southward from Uganda with the RPF. Others among them the BBC's Mark Doyle, who recounts his experiences in this volume persuaded a World Food Programme official in Entebbe to fly them into Kigali on a plane being used to evacuate foreigners. A few others drove up from Burundi, but for most of April, there were no more than 10 to 15 reporters in the country at any time.
As Hilsum describes, most of the journalists were Africa specialists, but even they did not understand what was happening at first. 'With a shooting war in the east and the north and massacres in much of the country, for most of April it was genuinely confusing,' Hilsum writes. The journalists who did remain were mainly British, French and Belgian. Most US reporters had been ordered to leave by their employers because it was too dangerous. Although a significant number of reporters arrived on the scene shortly after the killing began, most were there with instructions to cover the attempts to rescue foreign nationals. And all but a handful left along with the evacuees in mid-April. There was virtually no 'real time' TV news out of Rwanda for the first weeks of the genocide because it was too risky to send an expensive satellite uplink into the country. The first satellite uplink was erected in Kigali only in late May, after the RPF had secured the airport.
As French journalist, Anne Chaon, notes in her contribution to this collection, the media muddled the story from June onward, when the French military began 'Operation Turquoise' in southwest Rwanda. 'Dozens of reporters returned to Rwanda. And while they were able at that time to discover the enormity of the killing campaign in this area ... they reported also on the humanitarian and military intervention from abroad. The result was that the reality of genocide was, once again, submerged in too much information.'
* * *
This collection of papers grew out of the 13 March 2004 symposium at Carleton University, organized by Canada's best-known and oldest journalism school. The purpose of the event was to make a direct and explicit connection between the conduct of Rwandan media in the genocide and the role played by the international media. Like the symposium, the collection of papers follows the same structure, with an added focus in the final section on events since 1994 and the current state of the media in post-genocide Rwanda.
A substantial introductory section includes a historical overview by Gerry Caplan, author of the Organization of African Unity report, Rwanda: the Preventable Genocide (IPEP 2000). Retired Canadian General Romo Dallaire speaks from the unique vantage point of a key player during the period, with first-hand knowledge of the role of the media, his failed attempts to shut down or jam RTLM hate radio and his efforts to attract international media attention to the genocide in Rwanda. Dallaire argues that hate media were essentially the soundtrack of the genocide and were deployed as a weapon. He also recounts how, in his view, the international media influenced events by their absence, at a time when so much attention was focused on the war in the Balkans, where white Europeans were the victims.
This central contention that local hate media fomented the genocide and international media essentially facilitated the process by turning their backs is the crux of this collection of papers. This collection is, in essence, a journey through the media role in the events in Rwanda, a journey that has not yet reached its destination.
HATE MEDIA IN RWANDA
It is logical to begin with an examination of the evolution of hate media in Rwanda and the particular role played by radio station RTLM and the newspaper Kangura. Alison Des Forges, senior advisor to Human Rights Watch's Africa Division and the author of the definitive work Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (Des Forges 1999), sets the scene with a broad historical overview of the development of hate media in Rwanda and the world's failure to deal effectively with the phenomena. French historian Jean-Pierre Chrtien, co-author of Rwanda: les Mdias du Gnocide (Chrtien et al. 1995), traces the evolution of RTLM in Rwandan society. He describes how the organizers of the genocide plotted to use the airwaves to instill the notion of 'the democratic alibi', justifying the extermination of the Tutsi on the grounds that they posed a threat to the majority Hutu. Marcel Kabanda, a Rwandan historian and also co-author of Rwanda: les Mdias du Gnocide (Chrtien et al. 1995), focuses on the role of print media in the lead-up to the genocide, specifically the bimonthly newspaper Kangura. Jean-Marie Higiro, now an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Western New England College in Springfield, Massachusetts, was director of the Rwandan Information Office in Kigali from 31 July 1993 to 6 April 1994. He examines the impact of the private print press on Rwandan politics before the genocide. Darryl Li, explores more fully the impact of RTLM on its listeners by interviewing dozens of Rwandans who were part of the RTLM audience and admitted to taking part in the genocide. Charles Mironko uses data from interviews with nearly 100 confessed genocide perpetrators to analyze critically the relationship between the rhetoric of ethnic hatred so prevalent among Rwandan political elites and the forces that propelled ordinary Rwandan Hutu to participate in killing Tutsi. Kenyan journalist Mary Kimani, who worked for a number of years with Internews Rwanda, uses a detailed content analysis of recordings of RTLM broadcasts to make the case that individual broadcasters not their guests or government officials were most likely to use the airwaves to disseminate hate.
And finally we hear from Thomas Kamilindi, a former Radio Rwanda journalist based in Kigali, who later worked as a freelance correspondent in Rwanda for the BBC and other media outlets. In a personal reporter's memoir, he recounts how he resigned from state-run radio in Rwanda a few months before the 1994 genocide started because he had sometimes been asked to broadcast news repugnant to him.
INTERNATIONAL MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE GENOCIDE
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#part2"Part Two turns to the other side of the equation to examine the role of international media coverage of the genocide. The contention is that while hate media in Rwanda contributed to the genocide by playing a proactive role, the international media also played a role by, in essence, acquiescing to the killing campaign by downplaying it. But that is the critique writ large. Through a combination of journalistic memoirs from reporters who were in the field and academic studies by observers of the international media coverage, this section canvasses such issues as the responsibility of individual journalists and the constraints faced by journalists reporting from war zones.
The first contributor is Mark Doyle, the BBC journalist who spent more time on the ground in Rwanda during the genocide than any other foreign reporter. His paper navigates the first days of the genocide through the eyes of a reporter and, notably, includes numerous extracts from the transcripts of his crucial broadcasts from Rwanda in the midst of the killing. He discusses his own deliberations over when and how to use the word genocide to describe what was going on around him. Anne Chaon is a journalist with Agence France-Presse, who worked on AFP's Africa desk in Paris during the first weeks of the genocide, then reported from Rwanda in June before heading to eastern Zaire in July. Chaon takes issue with the conventional wisdom that individual journalists missed the story in Rwanda and, instead, argues that journalists did the best they could under the circumstances and that the problem was that readers and decision-makers didn't care about a tiny country in Africa. As one of only two foreign reporters on the ground when the genocide began, Lindsey Hilsum is in a unique position to describe media coverage of the genocide and the disproportionate attention paid in July and August to the plight of Hutu refugees who had fled to Goma, in eastern Zaire. She contends that the complex political causes of the exodus to Goma were not understood by the public nor by many of the journalists who covered Goma as a humanitarian story. Steven Livingston, associate professor of political communication and international affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, analyzes American television coverage of the genocide and concludes that the US stood at arm's length from events in Rwanda in the spring of 1994 because policymakers believed their predecessors in the George H.W. Bush administration were lured into Somalia by television pictures. Linda Melvern, investigative journalist and author of A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide (Melvern 2000) and Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide (Melvern 2004), argues that international media contributed directly to the genocide by misconstruing the killing in the first weeks as spontaneous, tribal warfare rather than a systematic campaign to exterminate a minority. Nigerian-born researcher Emmanuel Alozie is one of the few to seriously examine African media coverage of the genocide. Alozie, professor of media communications at Governors State University in Illinois, analyzes coverage of the Rwanda genocide in The Nation newspaper in Kenya and Nigeria's Guardian and makes some comparisons with African media coverage of Darfur a decade later. Nick Hughes, the British cameraman and later film producer, describes the important footage he captured in Rwanda, one of the only known instances of a killing during the genocide recorded by the media. Mike Dottridge, who was a desk officer with Amnesty International at the time of the genocide, takes a step back from the issue of media coverage to explore the fact that so little attention was paid to events in Rwanda before the genocide, particularly in the late 1980s and between 1990 and 1994, despite abundant evidence of unrest. His paper situates the three and a half years of inaction, as RTLM broadcast its messages of hate, in a broader context in which journalists and others based outside Rwanda share responsibility for this inaction.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#part2"Part Two also reprints accounts by several journalists who reported from Rwanda during the genocide, including Tom Giles, who was a BBC producer in Rwanda in 1994, and Richard Dowden, who was Africa editor for the British newspaper the Independent at the time. It also includes the piece by French journalist Edgar Roskis, who wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique in the autumn of 1994 about the impact of the lack of images from the Rwanda genocide. We also reprint a paper by Alan J. Kuperman, now assistant professor at the University of Texas. Kuperman argues that international media were guilty of several key lapses: they mistook the killing for a resumption of the civil war, grossly underestimated the death counts, left en masse at a critical moment and those who remained focused almost exclusively on Kigali. The exploration of international media coverage of the genocide is rounded out with an analysis by Melissa Wall, a journalism professor of news magazine coverage at California State University, Northridge. Wall, whose paper was first published in Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies, discovered several disturbing themes in coverage: Rwandan violence was the result of irrational tribalism, Rwandan people were little better than animals, the violence was incomprehensible, neighbouring countries were just as violent and only the West was capable of solving Rwanda's problems.
JOURNALISM AS GENOCIDE THE MEDIA TRIAL
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#part3"Part Three explores the 3 December 2003 guilty verdict in the so-called 'Media Trial' before the ICTR. The tribunal convicted Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze of genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity (persecution and extermination). Nahimana and Barayagwiza were the directors of RTLM, which was found to have fanned the flames of hate and genocide in Rwanda. Ngeze was the editor of the extremist newspaper Kangura. The full text of the summary of the verdict, issued by judges Navanethem Pillay, Erik Mse and Asoka de Zoysa Gunawardana, is included in this section as a key reference document.
The rest of the section explores the Media Trial from four key vantage points. Simone Monasebian, who was one of the trial attorneys with the ICTR and a prosecutor in the Media Trial, focuses specifically on RTLM broadcasts before 6 April 1994. She argues that the world community had grounds to intervene well before RTLM used its broadcasts to goad the killers and that RTLM broadcasts after 6 April could not have had the impact they did without the several months of conditioning of the population. In a direct retort to Monasebian, Jean-Marie Biju-Duval, a Paris-based lawyer who served as defence counsel for Ferdinand Nahimana, takes issue with the legal arguments that were central to the guilty verdict in the Media Trial. Biju-Duval attacks the tribunal's ruling on the question of the criminality of the propaganda that was broadcast and published before 6 April 1994, when the attack on the president's plane precipitated the massacres and genocide of April to July 1994, during which he concedes the media did make direct calls for extermination. Charity KagwiNdungu, who was also a prosecutor in the trial, examines the difficulty of prosecuting the crime of incitement to genocide in print media. She argues, 'The challenge is how to counter war propaganda and speeches in the future that jeopardize the lives of minority groups.' Finally, Binaifer Nowrojee, author of Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath (Nowrojee 1996) focuses on the direct link between the sexually graphic and offensive depiction of Tutsi women in the pages of Kangura before the genocide and the brutal sexual violence and rape that became a stock in trade of the killers during the genocide. Nowrojee takes issue with the Rwanda tribunal's failure to prosecute journalists specifically for inciting sexual violence.
AFTER THE GENOCIDE AND THE WAY FORWARD
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#part4"Part Four of this collection explores issues that emerged after the Rwanda genocide such questions as appropriate strategies for media intervention in such a situation, the role of the media in peace-building and in cases where the media in vulnerable societies are being abused. This concluding section also looks at the media climate in Rwanda and, finally, the portrayal of the Rwanda genocide in popular culture.
Frank Chalk, co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies and co-author of History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990), makes blunt recommendations for aggressive intervention in situations where media are being manipulated. Chalk recommends three possible forms of intervention: early-stage interventions in conflict situations where mass killing has not begun; medium-stage interventions in societies just beginning to suffer genocidal massacres; and late-stage interventions launched when genocide is underway, which could require actually destroying the transmitters and printing presses of the hate media outlets.
Philippe Dahinden, a Swiss journalist, focuses on his experience founding and managing the independent station Radio Agatashya, which covered Rwanda, Burundi and the Kivu after July 1994 in an attempt to counter the destructive messages of hate radio. This led to the creation of the Hirondelle Foundation, an international organization of journalists that establishes media operations in crisis areas.
Mark Frohardt, Africa regional director for Internews and former deputy chief of mission for the United Nations Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda (May 1995 to June 1997), describes a groundbreaking analysis on the role of media in vulnerable societies. According to Frohardt and co-author Jonathan Temin, vulnerable societies are highly susceptible to movement toward civil conflict or repressive rule or both. They advocate structural interventions, such as strengthening domestic and international journalist networks; content-specific interventions, such as issue-oriented training; and aggressive interventions, such as radio and television jamming.
The current media climate in Rwanda is the subject of a paper by Lars Waldorf, a former Human Rights Watch staffer in Rwanda. He describes how an authoritarian regime in Rwanda continues to justify censorship and propaganda as a necessary safeguard against the recrudescence of genocide. Waldorf contends that after the RPF stopped the genocide and took control in July 1994, it retooled the previous regime's information agency and the official media to disseminate its own propaganda.
Carleton University professor Michael Dorland writes about the place of the Rwanda genocide in popular culture, with particular reference to the film 'Hotel Rwanda'. Dorland, an expert on the Holocaust film genre, reflects on what happens to this genre when the subjects are not Jewish.
Finally, in an epilogue written in 2006 some twelve years after the genocide I reflect on what, if anything, has changed in the meantime. If we can't figure out the structural flaws in the news media that resulted in the failure to provide adequate coverage of the Rwanda genocide or the more recent crisis in Darfur, surely that difficulty should not prevent us from trying to change the structure one small piece at a time, through the work of individual journalists. The collection ends with a rallying cry to journalists, to assume their responsibilities.
It is our hope that this collection of papers will foster a more critical and comprehensive examination of the role of the news media in the Rwanda genocide. The stark reality is that all these years later, we have barely begun to learn the lessons of Rwanda.
NOTES
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch1not1"1. A copy of the raw footage shot by journalist Nick Hughes has been deposited in the Media and Genocide Archive at Carleton University. The footage was also entered as Exhibit 467 at the trial of Georges Rutaganda before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.
REFERENCES
Chalk, F. and K. Jonassohn. 1990. History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 624 pp.
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier and M. Kabanda. 1995. Rwanda: les Mdias du Gnocide. Karthala, Paris, France. 397 pp.
Des Forges, A. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, New York, NY, USA. Available at (accessed 30 August 2005).
ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda). 2003. Summary judgement. In The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze. ICTR-9952-T. ICTR, Arusha, Tanzania, 3 December. Available at (accessed 30 August 2005).
IPEP (International Panel of Eminent Personalities). 2000. Rwanda: the Preventable Genocide. Organization of African Unity, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Melvern, L. 2000. A People Betrayed: the Role of the West in Rwanda's Genoci d e . Z e d B o o k s , L o n d o n , U K .
2 0 0 4 . C o n s p i r a c y t o M u r d e r : t h e R w a n d a n G e n o c i d e . V e r s o , N e w Y o r k , N Y , U S A . 3 5 8 p p . N o w r o j e e , B . 1 9 9 6 . S h a t t e r e d L i v e s : S e x u a l V i o l e n c e D u r i n g t h e R w a n d a n G e n o c i d e a n d i t s A f t e r m a t h . H u m a n R i g h t s W a t c h , N e w Y o r k , N Y , U S A .
2 ( T he Media Dichotomy
Romo Dallaire
The news media both domestic and international played a crucial role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide. From my vantage point as commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), I was able to watch the strange dichotomy of local media, on one side, fuelling the killing while international media, on the other side, virtually ignored or misunderstood what was happening.
The local media, particularly the extremist radio station Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), were literally part of the genocide. The genocidaires used the media like a weapon. The haunting image of killers with a machete in one hand and a radio in the other never leaves you.
The international media initially affected events by their absence. A tree was falling in the forest and no one was there to hear it. Only those of us in Rwanda, it seemed, could hear the sound, because the international media were not there in any appreciable numbers at the outset.
And my mission, especially in those early days, was ill equipped to monitor what was being broadcast in the local media or to counteract it with strong messages of our own about the UN and its role in Rwanda.
To step back for a moment, it is important to set the scene in Rwanda in 199394, then to look at the ways in which the media were involved, both locally and internationally. This was a time when Rwanda had, in theory, finished a civil war. Enemies had signed a peace agreement, some of them under duress. In the course of a year, the country moved from a peace agreement through political stagnation to assassinations, massacres, civil war and, ultimately, genocide. In the end, the Tutsi minority actually won the war, gained control of the whole country and is now on a different path.
In my view, 199394 was an era in the 'new world disorder', not the 'new world order', as George Bush, Sr, called it. No new military thinking, no new diplomatic thinking was coming to the fore.
We were entering an era of conflict into which many diplomats, politicians, soldiers and humanitarian relief workers stumbled. They did a lot of on-the-job training, a lot of crisis management. In some cases they applied too many resources, at a terrible cost of life. In Rwanda, they didn't want to get involved at all, creating an orphan nation, where the people simply didn't count.
The American experience in Mogadishu in October 1993 significantly changed the will of the Western world to commit itself to the betterment of the developing world. Eighteen American soldiers were killed. They were professional soldiers who knew that every day when they woke up, they risked their lives. It was part of their way of life, their professional commitment. But after 18 military deaths in Somalia, the imperial power turned tail and ran.
The Americans had entered Somalia, along with Canadians and soldiers from many other countries, because hundreds of thousands of Somalis were dying of thirst and lack of food and medical supplies. When the Americans eventually pulled out and pulled the heart out of the mission leaving it in the hands of Pakistanis, Italians, Canadians and the UN there were still hundreds of thousands of Somalis dying. But for the United States, the price had become too high. The price of 18 soldiers was too high for the American government to continue with its stated aim of helping Somalia.
In Rwanda, in the first 24 hours of the genocide, the death of ten Belgian soldiers was too much for Belgium, the ex-colonial power, to sustain. It was a massive shock, I agree, and the Belgians pulled out and tried to convince everybody else that we should leave. They said we would all be massacred and nobody wanted to get involved in another African escapade where the risk of soldiers' lives was too high.
A representative of one major power came to me within the first weeks of the genocide and said quite clearly that, after doing an assessment, they had decided that they were not going to come and stop the carnage. There were bodies all over. We were already burning bodies with diesel fuel, because of the fear of disease, the smell and the wild dogs. This representative said, 'You know, this country is of no strategic value. Geographically, it provides us nothing. It's not even worth putting a radar station here. Economically it's nothing, because there's no strategic resources, only tea and coffee, and the bottom is falling out of those markets.'
This person said, 'In fact what there's too much of here is people. Well, we're not going to come because of people.' In quantifying that, he went on to say that his government could only reconsider its decision not to intervene if for every one if its soldiers either killed or injured, there would be an equivalent of 85,000 dead Rwandans.
Are all humans human or are some more human than others? Do some count more than others? Millions of dollars were pouring into Yugoslavia in 1994 along with tens of thousands of troops. Everybody was looking at Yugoslavia. Nobody came to Rwanda. They pulled everything out and abandoned us in the field. There were more people killed, injured, internally displaced and turned into refugees in 100 days in Rwanda than during the six years of the Yugoslav campaign. And yet, the powers that be ripped the heart out of the possibility of stopping, or at least curtailing, the killing or saving of black Africans. It was as if those people didn't count.
In Yugoslavia, the problems were portrayed as long-standing divisions that educated people had debated. It was religious and ethnic conflict, something studied and analyzed. As such, we brought in new terms, like 'ethnic cleansing' to describe Yugoslavia. In Rwanda, it was just a bunch of tribes going at each other, like they always do. Rwanda was black. Yugoslavia was white European.
And where were the media? Where were the media in that debate? How many were taken in or set up? In terms of humanity, the real crisis at that time was in a small country in black Africa that nobody was interested in. The media for the most part travelled down the road of the mainstream thinking of the world powers it was Yugoslavia that mattered, not Rwanda.
While the killing raged on in Rwanda, the O.J. Simpson case dominated the airwaves. Tonya Harding's kneecapping of her figure skating competitor was there as well. You had Nelson Mandela's election in South Africa. You had Yugoslavia. And, oh yes, somewhere in there, a bunch of black tribesmen in Africa were killing each other. During the 100 days of the Rwanda genocide, there was more coverage of Tonya Harding by ABC, CBS and NBC than of the genocide itself. Was that because of a love of pathos? Was it because of the excitement? Was it because the Harding story was on CNN's radar screen? Or was it the hand of someone above, guiding the media and getting across the subtle message, 'Listen, we have absolutely no interest in going into another hellhole in Africa. We do not want to get involved in Rwanda. So don't get us involved.'
The media, like so many others in Rwanda, failed. The world powers failed. Individually we failed.
Major news agencies devote fewer resources to Africa to begin with and virtually ignore small countries like Rwanda, which are deemed to be of little strategic value. There is no context, no general understanding of situations like the one that evolved in Rwanda. As I say in my book, when I was asked to go and serve as commander of the mission in Rwanda, I had to ask, 'Rwanda, that's in Africa isn't it?'
Before the genocide, the media scene in Rwanda was essentially internal with some local stringers, who were responding more often than not to the international journalists based in Nairobi. Until the start of the war, international media involvement amounted to: 'Is there an event? Do we go or do we just get the stringer?'
Months before the genocide, when we opened our mission headquarters with President Habyarimana in attendance, a number of journalists from international agencies were there. When the president was sworn in as part of the new government, there was international media coverage. When there was a massacre in the northwest of the country, there was international coverage.
But in essence, the international press were neophytes when it came to Rwanda. In fact, one international media organization was using a Rwandan stringer in Kigali who was part of the extremist movement. I had a call from a London journalist, who asked questions that were clearly based on false information. Thank God a person like Mark Doyle of the BBC spent considerable time on the ground and worked to set the record straight.
In my view, most of the journalists who came into Rwanda after the war started knew little or nothing of the country. Those who did know a lot were not necessarily listened to. Many stories were simply gruesome accounts of killings. There was little analysis of why we let a potential peace process fall into disarray.
After years of ignoring the place, after 6 April, all of a sudden every journalist wanted to jump on whatever aircraft or truck was available to get to Kigali. They didn't know what they were looking for, but there was excitement and it had reached the CNN radar screen. So, in the first days, a number of journalists did appear; within the first week, more than 200 were sitting in Nairobi.
They came to report that people were being slaughtered. Platoons of journalists would come in for three or four days, then leave so I could bring more in. We guaranteed their safety and provided them with transport, food and lodging. To me it was absolutely essential that they get their story. I put the lives of my troops on the line to guarantee that people got their daily story. Not only to get to the places where the catastrophe was evolving, but also to get their stories out. I had officers and soldiers run the gauntlet to get television tapes to my headquarters in Uganda, then to Kampala and then Nairobi where the technology existed to transmit images.
It took some time before the big media outfits arrived and set up their international capabilities. Within the third week of the genocide, when the UN had buckled under and decided that it was not only not going to reinforce the mission, but that it was also going to abandon Rwanda, the only voice, the only weapon that I had, was the media. If, through the media, I could shame the international community into acting, then I would have achieved my aim. But despite the courageous work done by reporters in the field, the stories often didn't get past the editor's desk. The story never really got told and that's why O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding got a lot more press than 800,000 human beings being slaughtered.
The media can be a two-way street. I tried to give journalists what they required and some of them were instrumental in providing me with information. Many journalists were courageous enough to go between the lines. I opened my headquarters to them. The only time I didn't want them there was when we were planning operations. At other times, I would see journalists standing at the big map boards with my operations duty officers. They would be marking the map and saying, 'Yes, I've been through there and, yeah, there is a massacre site there and, yes, there are about 50,000 people on the side of that hill over there.' The exchange was transparent.
But after the initial flurry of attention in the first few days of April, most international media representatives were evacuated with the other expatriates and it seemed like there was no one left, like no one cared.
When news reaches the general population, it shapes public opinion. When there is a lack of statesmanship, public opinion can force a government to make decisions. Getting information out to the general population and holding decision-makers accountable by continuously berating them about what is going on and what they are doing or not doing is more crucial than a few talk shows and a couple of newscasts. In the case of Rwanda, that's where the process broke down. The events in Rwanda simply did not break through to such an extent as to create momentum.
From mid-April into the beginning of May, only a handful of international reporters were on the ground to witness the genocide. I went to great lengths during that period to attract international media attention. I wanted journalists to get their stories and, as I said, I used UNAMIR resources to get tapes up to the Ugandan border, so that they could eventually reach Europe. The BBC's Mark Doyle used my satellite phone from time to time. I felt that one good journalist on the ground was worth a battalion of troops, because I realized they could bring pressure to bear.
I had a policy of taking all media calls in the evening and gave instructions to my staff to facilitate those interviews. I had frequent conversations with Michael Enright on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio programme 'As it Happens'. But the media coverage wasn't enough to create an outcry in the international community. The ambivalence of the great powers toward Rwanda was too imbedded; they had reason to be disinterested, to turn away, because of 'Somalia fatigue'.
Ironically, the news media finally descended in hordes once the genocide was over and the 'refugee crisis' occurred in Goma. A clouded picture of the suffering appeared, as genocidaires were among those who fled and were now getting ten times the media attention given to the genocide itself.
I have been asked why I didn't leak the famous 11 January cable, with its warning about Interahamwe militia training to kill thousands, making lists and hiding weapons. There has been much debate about my message to the UN in New York, about an informant who provided information about arms caches and the preparation of lists of people to be exterminated. I informed New York of my intention to raid some of the arms caches, but was ordered not to intervene. Once it was clear the UN system was not going to act on those warnings, should I have leaked the information to The New York Times or the Washington Post?
If the media had come and asked me what was going on, if they had come and queried me about the stagnation and the political and security process and asked me what we were doing, they would have got the answer. And they could have reported what was happening. But I was not going to leak that document. You cannot be ethical and fiddle with the media.
Within the country, Rwandan media played an exceptionally important role in the genocide. The country is known as a radio country. In some villages, radio was like the voice of God. At the height of the killing, in the camps for the displaced and refugees, you could still find people with portable radios. I wondered where they got the batteries. We couldn't even get batteries for our flashlights.
RTLM was created specifically as a tool of the genocidaires to demonize the Tutsi, lay the groundwork, then literally drive on the killing once the genocide started.
A great handicap for UNAMIR (in effect the representative on the ground of the world community) was our initial ignorance of what was really happening and of the mixed media messages. We had so little capacity to monitor broadcasts, particularly those in the local language, Kinyarwanda. For a long time, we didn't notice the difference in tone between RTLM broadcasts in French and those in Kinyarwanda. We missed this vital early-warning sign of what was to come because, in effect, we weren't listening properly to local media and what it was telling people in January, February and March 1994.
I still believe it would have made a significant difference if we had had the capacity to monitor local media comprehensively from the outset. This was one of the lessons learned from Rwanda that part of the role of an international force is to get the whole picture, to realize the importance of media messaging.
In the first few days after 6 April, it was Rwanda's prime minister designate, Faustin Twagiramungu, who was in hiding in my headquarters, who acted as my media monitor, listening to RTLM and translating from Kinyarwanda. Later, we hired a young man who could speak English and French and trained him to perform the same task.
Missions such as ours need people with media and linguistic skills. You ignore the local media at your peril. And there was another lesson in this volatile situation: UNAMIR desperately needed its own media outlet, its own radio station. We were unarmed in the media war that was going on and had virtually no capacity to explain ourselves to the local community to whom radio was so important. People were turning to the extremist RTLM, the state-run Radio Rwanda and the rebel-controlled Radio Muhaburu. In Cambodia, for example, the UN's use of radio was essential. But in our case, the equipment was unavailable, so it was dropped from the budget for our mission. In January and February, when it became apparent that we needed a media outlet to explain ourselves, we begged the UN for that facility. We knew that equipment from the UN station in Cambodia was in storage in Italy, but although we pleaded for it, we didn't receive the gear until well after the genocide.
We did not have a radio station to take part in the debate or to sell our 'product'. It became clear to me that none of the radio stations in Rwanda actually told people why we were there. No information from us was being passed on. People saw a white vehicle with a blue flag going by at 70 kilometres an hour, but many Rwandans had no idea why we were there. Those who did know were led to believe that we could do much more than our mandate actually permitted.
In fairness, before 6 April, at the behest of Jean-Marie Higiro, then the director of Radio Rwanda, we were allowed 30 minutes a week on the air. But we discovered that no one in our small mission had the skill to do 30 minutes of programming. In fact, some weeks we didn't even go on the air. Without interpreters or media analysts, we didn't even have the ability to present a lucid programme.
Once the killing started, I would meet displaced people and Rwandans would always have this sort of look of astonishment with regard to the Blue Berets. They believed that the UNAMIR mandate was to protect and defend the Rwandans, whereas, in fact, the Security Council limited it to assisting in establishing an atmosphere of security. The limitations of our mandate were never really explained to the whole of the nation, and that is one of the great tragedies of the mission.
Another tragedy was our failure to intervene early to shut down RTLM, which had become the voice of the devil in Rwanda. Through January, February and March 1994, before the genocide began, the radio station stepped up its campaign, delivering the message that there were people who should not live in Rwanda. It even described ways to eliminate them. Failing all else, we should have shut down RTLM. I repeatedly asked for the capability to jam RTLM, but the request was denied. The argument was that this would amount to a violation of state sovereignty and that there was also a very high cost attached to maintaining jamming equipment.
In my view, it was time to question the absolute of state sovereignty and to ask whether it was becoming an impediment to humanity. When RTLM started to attack not only the mission, but also myself, when RTLM was launching its descriptions of how to kill, it was obvious to everyone that RTLM was operating without any rules. It was beyond rules. It was beyond limits. And it was an overt instrument of genocide. I went to the UN and the big powers, and said, 'I need two things. One is a radio station and, second, I need somebody to find that RTLM emitter and close her down, either by jamming it or ultimately destroying it.' At the height of the genocide, the response was that Rwanda is a sovereign state, the airwaves belong to that sovereign state and we cannot intervene. Sovereignty became an instrument for not doing something.
In fact, on 25 May 1994 in a convocation speech at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, President Clinton said the US could not be the policeman of the world and would only participate in and fully support UN peacekeeping operations that were deemed to be in the vital interests of the US. 'We cannot solve every such outburst of civil strife or militant nationalism simply by sending in our forces,' Clinton said. 'We cannot turn away from them. But our interests are not sufficiently at stake in so many of them to justify a commitment of our folks.'
This doctrine was spelled out in Presidential Decision Directive 25, unveiled that same month, even as the killing went on unabated across Rwanda. That directive codified and complicated US participation in peacekeeping operations. Indeed, it is my understanding that weeks earlier, on 7 April, in the working room of the Security Council, Madeleine Albright and her colleagues said bluntly about Rwanda, 'The Americans are not going to intervene, and they're not going to help anybody who wants to.'
The world failed utterly to deal with one of the century's most clear-cut examples of abuse of the media. Sadly, we dealt with it only in hindsight through the 'Media Trial', the important prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
As for the international media, I think we need to ask ourselves, did the lack of attention and understanding by the international media actually contribute to the genocide? Did the decision to ignore Rwanda border on complicity by letting this atrocity go unreported?
The media can be both a weapon and a conscience to humanity. Journalists can be powerful, individually and collectively. But they can also be manipulated very easily if the depth of the subject is not there. For future journalists, my advice is get yourselves a lot more cultured, learn some geography, some anthropology, some sociology and maybe even some philosophy. Bring more depth to your questions and to your analysis. And stay dynamic in the search for the truth, for you are an instrument of the absolute called 'justice'. If you abdicate or if you are perfunctory, then we will all be weakened.
3 ( R w a n d a : W a l k i n g t h e R o a d t o G e n o c i d e
G e r a l d C a p l a n
B E F O R E I N D E P E N D E N C E
I t i s n o t d i f f i c u l t t o i s o l a t e t h e k e y s t e p s t h a t l e d f r o m t h e l a t e p r e - c o l o n i a l p e r i o d i n R w a n d a t o t h e g e n o c i d e a f u l l c e n t u r y l a t e r . T h e r e w a s n o t h i n g i n e x o r a b l e a b o u t t h i s p r o c e s s . At its heart was the deliberate choice of successive elites to deepen the cleavages between the country's two main ethnic groups, to dehumanize the group that was out of power and to legitimate the use of violence against that group. In hindsight, two almost competing historical evolutions can be seen: the series of building blocks that paved the way to the point where genocide became conceivable; and the numerous occasions when it was not yet too late to reverse this destructive pattern.
It was under Mwami (King) Rwabugiri, a Tutsi who ruled during the late 1800s, that the chief characteristics of modern Rwanda were fixed for the next 100 years. A powerful head of a centralized state, he provided firm direction to an elaborate series of subordinate structures. In the colonial era, under German and then Belgian rule, Roman Catholic missionaries, inspired by the overtly racist theories of nineteenth-century Europe, concocted a bizarre ideology of ethnic cleavage and racial rankings that attributed superior qualities to the country's Tutsi minority. This 15 per cent of the population, it was announced, were approaching, however gradually, the exalted level of white people, in contrast with the declared brutishness and innate inferiority of the 'Bantu' (Hutu) majority. Because the missionaries ran the colonial-era schools, these pernicious values were systematically transmitted to several generations of Rwandans along with more conventional Catholic teachings.
The alleged differences between ethnic groups were arbitrary and baseless, yet they soon took on a life of their own. The Belgians made the Mwami's complex structures more rigid and ethnically inflexible. They institutionalized the split between the two groups, culminating in the issuance to every Rwandan of an ethnic identity card. This card system was maintained for over 60 years until, with tragic irony, during the genocide it became the instrument that enabled Hutu killers in urban areas to identify the Tutsi who were its original beneficiaries.
While it served them, the Tutsi elite were only too pleased to believe in their own natural superiority and to run the country for their Belgian patrons. The majority Hutu were treated with harshness appropriate to a lower caste. Soon many Hutu came to agree that the two ethnic groups, distinguished mostly by vocation in prior centuries, were indeed fundamentally dissimilar in nature and irreconcilable in practice. The Tutsi came to be demonized as a foreign invading power with no entitlements in Rwanda.
As the colonial era drew to a close, democracy in the colonies became synonymous with majority rule. The tragedy of Rwanda is that the majority came to be defined by ethnicity alone. A national independence movement, an umbrella under which all citizens united to oppose colonial rule, failed to thrive in Rwanda. Voices of moderation and inclusiveness were drowned out by extremists advocating ethnic exclusivity.
Yet, there had been little open violence before independence. Hutu were unquestionably considered the 'serfs', but only some Tutsi benefited from colonialism; many led lives no better than the Hutu peasantry. Then, as always, the notion of ethnic homogeneity was contradicted by the actual divisions within both Hutu and Tutsi communities.
Although Hutu surely resented their status and treatment, considerable intermarriage took place between the two groups, which after all shared a common language, religion, geography and, often as not, appearance. Tutsi cattle herders and Hutu farmers complemented each other. Hatred between the two groups needed careful nurturing. Until political parties formed on the basis of ethnic origins, there were no massacres of either ethnic group by the other.
Instead of an independence struggle directed against their colonial masters, the Hutu party targeted their masters' Tutsi surrogates. Surprisingly enough, Hutu politicians now found themselves actively supported by the Belgians and the Catholic Church, both reversing their original stance once they realized that Hutu rule was inevitable. This support continued even when anti-Tutsi violence broke out. Between 1959 and 1967, 20,000 Tutsi were killed and 300,000 fled in terror to neighbouring countries. In the eyes of some Tutsi today, these attacks constitute either a prelude to genocide or genocide itself.
THE FIRST AFRICAN GOVERNMENTS
The newly independent government of Grgoire Kayibanda made its colours apparent from the start. As early as 1961, the United Nations reported that 'the developments of these last 18 months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party ... An oppressive system has been replaced by another one.' The Hutu government pleased no one, not even the large majority of its fellow Hutu. Life for the peasantry remained precarious, while a small Hutu elite from the north and northwest grew increasingly dissatisfied with their marginal role in Kayibanda's southern-dominated government.
As pressure on Kayibanda grew, he unleashed ethnic terror once again, hoping to save his regime by uniting the Hutu against the common Tutsi enemy. At the same time, ethnic cleavages were reinforced, neither for the first nor last time, by events south of the border in Burundi. In 1972, after an appalling massacre of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi government there, terrorized Burundian Hutu flooded into Rwanda to inflame ethnic tensions and to join in anti-Tutsi attacks. Although relatively few Tutsi were killed, many thousands were driven out to join their ethnic kin in exile.
But Kayibanda's exploitation of ethnic fears failed to save his regime and, in 1973, he was replaced by Juvnal Habyarimana, head of the Rwandan army. For the next 15 years, Rwanda enjoyed relatively good times and little ethnic violence. Habyarimana opened the country to the world and efficient, stable little Rwanda soon became the darling of the West's burgeoning development industry. As for the Tutsi, they were now safe for the first time in almost 15 years. It is true they suffered significant institutional discrimination. They were allowed to play only a marginal role in politics, were shut out of the military and were limited by quota to 10 per cent of education placements. But they thrived in the private sector and were successful in the liberal professions as well as some public service institutions.
More than 60 per cent of Rwandans were Catholic, and the church remained a trusted ally and reliable bulwark of the regime, giving it legitimacy and comfort literally until the end. In common with the foreign governments and aid agencies that were involved with Rwanda, church leaders rarely challenged the ethnic basis of public life or Habyarimana's one-party military dictatorship; indeed, they embraced without reservation the notion of demographic democracy based on the Hutu's overwhelming majority.
By the late 1980s, however, economic progress stalled. Government revenues declined as coffee and tea prices dropped. International financial institutions, indifferent to the social and political consequences of their demands, imposed programmes that exacerbated inflation, land scarcity and unemployment. Young men were hit particularly hard. The mood of the country was raw.
It was at this vulnerable moment, on 1 October 1990, that the children of the Tutsi refugees who had earlier fled into English-speaking Uganda re-emerged as a rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Often made scapegoats and persecuted in exile, Rwandan Tutsi also remained unwelcome back in Rwanda. According to Habyarimana, the country was too poor, too crowded and had too little land to accommodate the exiled community all plausible propositions.
The RPF invasion and the government's response constituted a giant step on the road to genocide. The RPF was not constrained by the knowledge that incursions by Tutsi exiles in the 1960s had led to great brutality against other Tutsi. As for Habyarimana, he had a choice in October 1990. Contrary to RPF expectations, few Rwandans of any background welcomed these unknown 'Ugandan' soldiers. A united front among all Rwandans against outside invaders was perfectly plausible. But an opportunistic and threatened government chose the opposite course; with great deliberation, to further their own self-interest, they reawakened the sleeping dogs of ethnic division. All Tutsi, both citizens and RPF soldiers, were portrayed as alien invaders, while divisions among Hutu had to be submerged in a common front against the intruders. All Tutsi were denounced as fifth columnists, secret supporters of the RPF. Anti-Tutsi propaganda, largely muted for the previous 17 years, was unleashed anew.
At the same time, Habyarimana called on his foreign friends for military help. The French responded most positively. Their forces prevented a swift RPF victory over the hapless Rwandan army, and French soldiers and advisors remained in the country counselling Habyarimana's people politically and militarily on keeping these 'anglo-saxon' interlopers at bay. The government learned that, whatever it did, it could always count on the unconditional public and private support of the French government.
Immediately after the RPF raid, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) threw itself into peacemaking and attempts to resolve the conflict. For the OAU in Rwanda and then the Great Lakes region, the 1990s were a time of well-meant initiatives, incessant meetings, commitments made and commitments broken. In the end, the OAU had only enough resources and power to bring adversaries together, hope they agreed and pray they did not violate their agreements.
The impact of the RPF raid was devastating in every way. Its advances, together with the government's anti-Tutsi propaganda, drove terrified Hutu into internal settlement camps. In a short time, close to 300,000 Rwandans had been driven from or fled their land to become 'internally displaced persons' (IDPs). In early 1993, another large-scale RPF attack led to a further million, mostly Hutu, IDPs. The country was in turmoil. The ailing economy had little chance to recover. Anti-Tutsi violence, organized by the government or its allies, spread like wildfire, while the RPF insurgents similarly showed little restraint in dealing brutally with Hutu civilians in the areas they 'liberated'.
Within the Habyarimana government, real power increasingly resided with a small faction of insiders from the northwest called the Akazu, 'the little house'; it was also widely known as 'le Clan de Madame', as its core was the president's wife, family and close associates, who were the chief beneficiaries of the corruption that characterized the regime. As the economic collapse significantly reduced the available spoils of power and called into question the very legitimacy of the regime, the Akazu began playing the ethnic card to divert attention away from serious divisions among the Hutu.
This should not be taken to mean that planning of the genocide was initiated at a precise moment. Both physical and rhetorical violence against the Tutsi continued to escalate from the RPF incursion until the genocide actually started in April 1994. There is no question that this campaign was organized and promoted and that at some point it turned into a strategy for genocide. But that exact point remains unknown. For Rwanda, the 'smoking gun' that nails the perpetrators and their fanatical plot is not a single meeting or a particular letter, but rather a cumulative series of events.
Rwanda endured three and a half years of violent anti-Tutsi incidents. In retrospect, most of these can be interpreted as deliberate steps in a vast conspiracy culminating in the shooting down of the president's plane on the evening of 6 April 1994 and the unleashing of the genocide. But this interpretation remains somewhat speculative. No one yet knows who shot down the plane, nor can it be demonstrated that every one of the countless manifestations of anti-Tutsi sentiment in these years was part of a diabolical master plan. The evidence most plausibly suggests that the idea of genocide emerged only gradually through 1991 and 1992, accelerating in determination through 1993 and into 1994.
Later, when it was finally over, a great international argument broke out over who knew what about the events unfolding in Rwanda. There can be no debate here; the facts speak for themselves. The world that mattered to Rwanda its Great Lakes neighbours, the United Nations, all the major Western powers knew exactly what was happening and that it was being masterminded at the highest levels of the state. They knew that this was no senseless case of 'Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu', as it was sometimes dismissively described. They knew that a terrible fate had befallen Rwanda. They even knew that some Hutu Power extremists were talking openly of eliminating all Tutsi, although few could then conceive that an actual genocide was being plotted.
Anti-Tutsi violence, it was widely known, was revived immediately after the RPF invasion when organized anti-Tutsi massacres began and ended only when the genocide itself ended. Massacres of Tutsi were carried out in October 1990, January 1991, February 1991, March 1992, August 1992, January 1993, March 1993 and February 1994. On each occasion, scores of Tutsi were killed by mobs and militiamen associated with various political parties, sometimes with the involvement of the police and army, incited by the media, directed by local government officials and encouraged by some national politicians.
As the terror heightened, the organizers learned that they could not only massacre large numbers of people quickly and efficiently, they could get away with it. Wholehearted backing of the regime by the French government and general indifference to the escalating racism by the churches reinforced this feeling. A culture of impunity developed as the conspirators grew bolder. Extremist army officers colluded with the circles surrounding Habyarimana and the Akazu to form secret societies and Latin American-style death squads known as 'Amasasu' (bullets) and the 'Zero Network'. They did not long remain secret; in 1992, their existence and connections were publicly exposed.
But contrary forces were at work at the same time. Pressure for democratization from both within and outside the country forced Habyarimana to accept multiparty politics. The apparent advance toward democracy, however, had several unanticipated consequences, all of them unwelcome. A host of new parties emerged, most of them Hutu, wanting to participate in the process. One of these new parties, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic, represented Hutu radicals and had links to the death squads. What was worse, parties organized their own youth militias, the most notorious being the Interahamwe formed by Habyarimana's own Mouvement Rpublicain National pour la Democratie et le Dveloppement (MRND). At the same time, new hate-propagating media sprang up, most infamously a private radio station calling itself Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), which was financed and controlled by the Akazu faction. While his militia terrorized opponents and beat up Tutsi and his radio station incited ethnic hatred and violence, Habyarimana, with great reluctance, agreed to accept a coalition government.
Immediately, the new ministers joined with the OAU and Western powers to pressure Habyarimana to agree to negotiations with the RPF in Arusha, Tanzania. In August 1993, after long, drawn-out sessions, agreement was reached on a series of key issues. But these were never implemented. Ultimately, Arusha backfired. The more it appeared that power and the limited spoils of office would have to be shared not only with other Hutu parties but also with the RPF, the more determined the Akazu insiders grew to share nothing with anyone.
At the same moment, a deadly new weapon was unexpectedly delivered into the hands of the Rwandan Hutu. The assassination in October 1993 by Tutsi officers of Burundi's democratically elected Hutu president and the appalling massacres that followed were taken by many Hutu as final proof that power-sharing between Tutsi and Hutu was forever doomed; the Tutsi could never be trusted. The emergence of Hutu Power, an explicit and public organizing concept, was the immediate consequence of the Burundi upheaval. Large Hutu Power rallies attracted members of all parties, attesting to the new reality that ethnic solidarity trumped party allegiances. Political life, in these last turbulent months before the genocide, was reorganized strictly around the two ethnic poles.
As the conspiracy widened and deepened, so did knowledge of the conspirators' intentions. Virtually everyone in Rwanda associated with the United Nations, the diplomatic community or human rights groups knew about death lists, accelerating massacres, arms proliferation and threats to opposition politicians. The UN military mission uncovered a high-level Interahamwe informant, whose revelations led its commander, Major General Romo Dallaire, to send his famous 11 January 1994 message the so-called 'genocide fax' to New York headquarters: 'Jean-Pierre,' Dallaire reported, 'has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1,000 Tutsi.' Dallaire's superiors at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations replied with the perverse instruction to inform the president and take no further action. Another opportunity to expose the conspiracy was lost.
When it was finally unleashed only three months later, hours after Habyarimana went down with his plane, the violence was organized and coordinated. Its goal was explicit: genocide. A clique of Rwandan Hutu planned to mobilize the Hutu people with the explicit intention of exterminating all Tutsi in the country, including women and children. The rest of the world knew that a great disaster loomed for Rwanda, but few envisaged the possibility that the radicals would resort to outright genocide. It was a prospect simply too appalling to contemplate. But for the extremist Hutu leadership, no other response to their situation any longer seemed adequate.
THE EXTERNAL ACTORS BEFORE THE GENOCIDE
Several outside actors carried a heavy responsibility for the events that were now unfolding. Some were guilty of crimes of commission, others crimes of omission. But one way or another, as they had for the entire century, outsiders had great influence on Rwanda's fate, much of it malevolent.
Within Rwanda itself, the chief culprits were the Catholic and Anglican hierarchies and the French government, all active supporters of the Habyarimana government. Church leaders failed to use their unique moral position among the overwhelmingly Christian population to denounce ethnic hatred and human rights abuse. The French government was guilty of the same failure at the elite level. Its public backing constituted a major disincentive for the radicals to make concessions or to think in terms of compromise. Although some French officials knew that many of their clients at the highest echelons of the Rwandan regime were guilty of human rights violations, they failed to use their influence to demand that such violations stop. At the same time, they continued to act as senior political and military advisors to the government. The radicals drew the obvious lesson: they could get away with anything.
At the United Nations, the Security Council, led unremittingly by the United States, simply did not care enough about Rwanda to intervene appropriately. There were no economic or strategic interests at play. What makes this betrayal of their responsibility even more intolerable is that the genocide was in no way inevitable. It could have been prevented entirely. Even once it was allowed to begin, the destruction could have been significantly mitigated. All that was required was a relatively modest international military force, perhaps 5000 properly trained troops, with a strong mandate to enforce the Arusha agreements. Nothing of the kind was authorized by the Security Council before the genocide, and the force that was approved during the genocide was not permitted to intervene until the slaughter was over.
The United States has formally apologized for its failure to prevent the genocide. President Clinton insisted that it was a function of ignorance. The evidence shows that the American government knew precisely what was happening, not least during the months of the genocide. Domestic politics took priority over the lives of helpless Africans. After losing 18 soldiers in Somalia in October 1993, the US was unwilling to participate in further peacekeeping missions and was largely opposed to the Security Council authorizing any new serious missions at all, with or without American participation.
In October 1993, the first UN mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) was set up; it was notable mostly for its weak mandate and minimal capacity. No amount of credible early warnings could persuade the members of the Security Council to treat the mission seriously or the UN Secretariat to interpret its mandate flexibly. In fact, the single occasion on which UNAMIR was authorized to go beyond its passive observer mandate was at the very outbreak of the genocide. Several European nations flew planes in to evacuate their nationals, and UNAMIR was authorized not only to assist the evacuation, but also to go beyond its mandate, if required, to assure the safety of foreign nationals. Never was such permission granted for the protection of Rwandans. And none of the 2,500 European and American troops used in the evacuation or on standby in the region offered to work with UNAMIR to stop the genocide.
The significance of the Security Council's action should not be underestimated: its refusal to sanction a serious mission made the genocide more likely. The feeble UN effort helped persuade the Hutu radicals that they had nothing to fear from the outside world, regardless of their deeds. This assessment proved only too accurate. Once the genocide began, the US, backed most forcefully by Britain, repeatedly and deliberately undermined all attempts to strengthen the UN military presence in Rwanda.
Belgium became an unexpected ally in this goal. On day two of the crisis, ten Belgian soldiers were murdered by Rwandan soldiers. As the radicals had anticipated, Belgium swiftly decided to pull out all its troops, leaving the 2,500 Tutsi they were protecting at a school site to be slaughtered within hours. The Belgian government decided that its shameful retreat would be at least tempered if it were shared by others, and strenuously lobbied to disband UNAMIR entirely. Although the US supported the idea, it was too outrageous to pursue. Instead, with the genocide costing tens of thousands of lives daily, and ignoring the vigorous opposition of the OAU and African governments, the Security Council chose to cut the UN force by 90 per cent at the exact moment it needed massive reinforcement. For most of the 100 days of the genocide, General Dallaire commanded a force of only 400, many of them inadequately trained or equipped. As horror stories accelerated, the council authorized a stronger mission, UNAMIR II, but once again the US did all in its power to undermine its effectiveness. In the end, not a single new soldier or piece of military hardware reached the country before the genocide ended.
THE GENOCIDE
The two rockets that brought down President Habyarimana's plane became the catalysts for one of the great calamities of our age: a genocide and a civil war, separate but simultaneous. To this day, controversy reigns over the responsibility for this attack. Most students of the genocide believe the finger most plausibly points to Habyarimana's extremist allies, fed up with his attempts to placate outsiders. Deniers of the genocide still active to this day insist it was the RPF leadership. There has been no investigation and no one can say with certainty.
A certain chaos reigned for the few days following the crash, although the conspirators had control enough to begin systematic search-and-murder missions against their leading opponents, both Hutu and Tutsi. But soon enough, all sense of uncertainty ended. The government's military structure that had been built since 1990 was now swiftly mobilized to execute the genocide as well as to fight a civil war. It could now be seen clearly that its creators had an overall strategy that it implemented with scrupulous planning and organization, control of the levers of government, highly motivated soldiers and militia, the means to kill vast numbers of people, the capacity to identify and kill the victims and tight control of the media (specifically RTLM) to disseminate the right messages both inside and outside the country.
When the genocide ended little more than 100 days later, perhaps as many as a million women, children and men, the vast majority of them Tutsi, lay dead. Thousands more were raped, tortured and maimed for life. Victims were treated with sadistic cruelty and suffered unimaginable agony.
The attacks had many targets. A clear priority list for elimination included anti-Habyarimana government and opposition members; Hutu who opposed the extremists, thousands of whom were slaughtered without mercy in the first days; critics such as journalists and human rights activists; any Tutsi seen as community leaders, including professionals, political activists, lawyers and teachers; as well as priests, nuns and other clergy who were Tutsi or who sheltered intended victims.
Together, military leaders and the new interim government of Hutu Power supporters that was sworn in after the plane crash made the overall decisions, while Rwanda's elaborate governing structure implemented the genocide with remarkable efficiency. The Hutu leadership of the Catholic and Anglican churches, with a few notably courageous exceptions, played a conspicuously scandalous role in these months, often directly complicit in aiding the genocidaires, at best remaining silent or explicitly neutral. This stance was easily interpreted by ordinary Christians as an implicit endorsement of the killings, as was the close association of church leaders with the leaders of the genocide. Perhaps this helps explain the greatest mystery about the genocide: the terrible success of Hutu Power in turning so many ordinary people into accomplices in genocide. In no other way could so many have been killed so swiftly.
It has always been difficult to establish the numbers killed in the genocide. The highest persuasive figure for Tutsi killed seems to be near one million, the very lowest, 500,000. Government spokespeople have often used a figure of 'more than a million', while a new official figure is 937,000 dead. More research is needed to be certain. Even if the most conservative figure is used, it still means that over three-quarters of the entire population registered as Tutsi were systematically killed in just over 100 days. As well, millions of Rwandan Hutu became internally displaced within the country or fled to become refugees in neighbouring countries.
THE WORLD DURING THE GENOCIDE
Until the day it ended with the RPF's military victory, the UN, the governments of the US, France and Belgium, most African governments and the OAU all failed to define the events in Rwanda as full-blown genocide and all continued to recognize members of the genocidaire government as legitimate official representatives of their country. All except the French government remained publicly neutral between a government that was executing the genocide and their RPF adversaries, the only force fighting that government.
Throughout the genocide, France remained openly hostile to the RPF. After two months of conflict, the French government, in a so-called humanitarian mission known as Operation Turquoise, sent a force to create a safe zone in the southwest of the country. It probably saved the lives of 1015,000 Tutsi, although it jeopardized other Tutsi by giving them a false sense of security. Far more consequentially, as the RPF advanced, many government and military leaders responsible for the genocide and many government soldiers and militia escaped to the safety and protection of this zone. They were then permitted by the French force to cross the border into eastern Zaire, joining fellow genocidaires who had escaped through other routes, all of them ready to resume their war against the new Kigali government. When the French troops pulled out in August 1994, not a single genocidaire had been arrested in their safe zone. The consequences for later conflict in the Great Lakes Region can hardly be exaggerated.
The facts are not in question: a small number of major actors could have prevented, halted or reduced the slaughter. They include France in Rwanda itself; the United States at the Security Council, loyally supported by Britain; Belgium, whose soldiers knew they could save countless lives if they were allowed to remain in the country; and Rwanda's church leaders. In the bitter words of the commander of the UN's military mission, the 'international community has blood on its hands'.
In the years since, the leaders of the UN, the United States, Belgium and the Anglican Church have all apologized for their failure to stop the genocide. Yet none has suggested that Rwanda is owed restitution for these failures, and in no single case has any responsible individual resigned in protest or been held to account for his or her actions. Neither the French government nor the Roman Catholic hierarchy (including the late Pope John Paul II) has apologized or accepted responsibility for its role.
RWANDA SINCE THE GENOCIDE
When the war and the genocide ended on 18 July 1994, the situation in Rwanda was almost indescribably grim. Rarely had a people anywhere had to face so many seemingly insuperable obstacles with so few resources. Their physical and psychological scars were likely to linger for decades.
The country was wrecked a wasteland. Of seven million inhabitants before the genocide, as many as 15 per cent were dead, two million were internally displaced and another two million had become refugees. Many of those who remained had suffered horribly. Large numbers had been tortured and wounded. Many women had been raped, tortured and humiliated, some becoming infected with AIDS. Of the children who survived, 90 per cent had witnessed bloodshed or worse. An entire nation was brutalized and traumatized. They were, in their own phrase, 'the walking dead'. Yet killers and survivors had no alternative but to resume living side-by-side on Rwanda's hills.
This was the situation a new inexperienced government had to face. Its challenges were monumental and its strategies not always convincing. Although it has always called itself a government of national unity and included prominent Hutu in high-profile offices, most observers believe that real power in the land political and military has been exercised by a small group of the original 'RPF Tutsi', the English-speakers from Uganda. Paul Kagame, leader of the RFP forces during the civil war and genocide, and vice-president and minister of defence until he became president in 2000, has universally been seen as the government's indispensable man.
Some saw it as a government that was not trusted by its people and a people not trusted by its government. Under the circumstances, neither was surprising. A major insurgency by genocidaires based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) into northwestern Rwanda caused havoc through the late 1990s. The government, suspicious of all Hutu, responded with brute force, frequently failing to distinguish between genocidaires and ordinary peasants. The latter, in turn, were reinforced in their belief that the RPF government was not theirs.
Nor, for very compelling reasons, did the new government trust the international community, although it immediately found itself overwhelmingly dependent on Western nations and international agencies and financial institutions to begin reconstruction. Given its past record, the world's response to Rwanda's needs ranged from modest to disappointing to downright scandalous. Although the government eventually began to find favour among various Western countries, notably the US and United Kingdom, which led to somewhat more generous aid packages, nothing like restitution or the cancellation of the odious debts incurred by the Habyarimana regime has ever been contemplated.
To make matters worse, only months after the genocide ended, many of the foreigners who had come to 'help' the country began to argue that Rwandans ought to get on with the task of rebuilding their society. 'Quit dwelling on the past and concentrate on rebuilding for the future,' they were advised. Within six months of the end of the genocide, relief workers were already telling a traumatized people, 'Yes, the genocide happened, but it's time to get over it and move on.' Rwandans believed, not without reason, that such insensitivity and lack of empathy could only be directed at Africans. In fact, as research from the Holocaust and Armenian genocides has shown, the traumas from a disaster of this order are multi-generational in their impact. Certainly today, for survivors and perpetrators alike, Rwanda remains very much a traumatized nation.
'Getting over it' is an enormously difficult task. As with all societies in transition from tyranny and terror, among an endless host of problems that continue to bedevil Rwanda are highly complex questions and dilemmas of justice, guilt and reconciliation. In the insightful words of scholar Mahmood Mamdani (2002),
The Tutsi want justice above all else and the Hutu want democracy above all else. The minority fears democracy. The majority fears justice. The minority fears that the demand for democracy is a mask for finishing an unfinished genocide. The majority fears the demand for justice is a minority ploy to usurp power forever.
As hundreds of thousands of ordinary Rwandans had picked up their machetes and actively participated in the genocide, Rwanda faced an unprecedented situation. The UN set up an International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, aimed at trying 'the big fish', while Rwanda is now experimenting with two parallel judicial systems. In all of these, the process of trying accused genocidaires is long, laborious and frustrating. But if there are more effective ways to deal with this issue, they are not readily apparent.
The ICTR has been a source of controversy from its inception. Foes, not least the Rwandan government, must acknowledge its groundbreaking jurisprudence, while supporters have difficulty justifying its huge budget and enormous staff in 200405, US$ 231 million and 1,042 authorized posts. Although 60 people have been detained, as of mid-2005, after almost a decade of work, the court has convicted only 22 people and acquitted 3 others. Nevertheless, even within this almost derisory number, the ICTR's achievements must be recorded:
The court interpreted the definition of genocide as presented in the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
It defined the crime of rape as a crime against humanity.
It convicted, for the first time, a leader of a government for the crime of genocide.
It ruled that the media can be a tool of genocide for which those in charge are responsible.
In Rwanda, a decimated judicial system had the responsibility for dealing with some 120,000 Hutu rotting in prisons in appalling circumstances, often without proper charges. The task defied capacity. As of 2004, some 6,500 had been tried. At this rate, it was estimated, it would take two to four centuries to clear the backlog. The government resorted to two dramatic steps. To the chagrin of the voluble survivors' umbrella organization, Ibuka, it released some 20,000 of those charged with lesser crimes or for whom no credible documentation existed. Beyond that, it embarked on one of the most remarkable social experiments of our time: local courts called gacaca, an attempt to blend traditional and contemporary mechanisms to expedite the justice process in a manner that is meant to promote reconciliation. To clear the enormous backlog of cases, 12,000 gacaca courts have been appointed, each made up of 19 locally elected judges. A staggering 250,000 Rwandans have been trained for their roles.
Some human rights advocates are concerned that these grass-roots courts will operate as a kind of mob justice, with no properly trained professionals and no capacity to adhere to international standards. However, most observers feel there was little practical alternative and are watching the gacaca panels with much interest. Already unexpected consequences are emerging. Ordinary Rwandans are accusing their neighbours of participating in the genocide, adding thousands of new names to the lists of those to be tried. Equally dramatic, Rwandans prominent in public life today have been accused of genocidal activities, most notably the minister of defence, and they too will be obligated to make their case before a gacaca panel. It will be some time before a balanced judgement about the effectiveness and fairness of this bold innovation can be made.
In the meantime, questions of justice and reconciliation, perplexing in any post-conflict situation let alone a genocide, will remain to bedevil official actions and popular expectations. The government has created a series of structures and institutions designed to foster reconciliation and unity, but on its own terms. Ethnicity can no longer be recognized except as a destructive aberration of the past a radical proposition given the past century. There can be only one identity Rwandan and any attempt to resurrect old ethnic issues is pounced on as unacceptable 'divisionism'. Government argues this is the only way to forge a united people. To the government's opponents, it is merely a convenient excuse to suppress legitimate democratic opposition. What the vast majority of Rwandans in the hills think, what young Rwandans think, whether traditional stereotypes have evaporated because they are no longer legal is not easy to say.
THE REGIONAL CONSEQUENCES
While these questions absorbed Rwandans internally, beyond its borders the genocide had created another monumental crisis. By the end of the 100 days, two million citizens had fled the conflict in every direction more than half a million east to Tanzania, more than a quarter million south to Burundi and, most dramatically, at least 1.2 million west to the eastern Kivu region of Zaire. As the fighting and genocide drew to a close, thanks to France's Operation Turquoise much of the leadership and many of the troops and militia of the genocide had escaped from Rwanda into eastern Zaire, where they had unlimited access to weapons. This was a sure-fire formula for disaster.
The international media had first ignored, then largely misinterpreted the genocide as nothing more than another example of African savagery; now they made the Kivu refugee camps a universal cause clbre. Foreign aid and foreign aid workers flooded in, vastly more than went to Rwanda itself. Unfortunately, the genocidaire army (former Forces Armes Rwandaises (FAR)) and the Interahamwe militia had almost completely taken over the camps and were benefiting enormously from the work of the humanitarian community; genuine refugee needs could be met only when the NGOs finished meeting the demands of the military controlling the camps.
The goals of Hutu Power were transparent and well known to everyone involved in dealing with the Kivu crisis: to overthrow the new government in Kigali and return to power. Almost immediately they began raids back into the country, providing yet another major emergency for the new Rwandan rulers to deal with. Widespread demands for the 'international community' to disarm the killers went nowhere. Once again, the leaders of the Security Council badly failed Rwanda. In some ways, they actually added to Rwanda's woes. The French government, with tacit American approval, supported Zaire's President Mobutu as the only person who could help with the refugee crisis in his country. In fact, Zairian groups associated with Mobutu's notoriously corrupt government became the primary suppliers of arms to the ex-FAR and militia in the Kivu camps, although many other countries and groups were involved in weapons trading as well.
The consequences of these international decisions for Africa were largely foreseeable and wholly disastrous. The post-genocide Rwandan government had long made it abundantly clear that it would not continue to tolerate the use of the camps in Zaire as launching pads for the genocidaires' return. By late 1996, they had had enough. Hostility toward the many former Rwandan Tutsi who lived in the Kivu region had increased ominously, and the Rwanda government had secretly begun training them. Under the flag of an alliance of anti-Mobutu Zairians headed by the dissolute Laurent Kabila, and with the active support of Uganda, the Rwandan army launched a vicious attack on the entire complex of Kivu camps in October and November. The cost in human life was enormous and a flood of refugees swarmed back into Rwanda. But substantial numbers of camp dwellers fled deeper into Zaire. Some of these were genuine refugees, some ex-FAR and Interahamwe. Led by the Rwandan army, the anti-Mobutu alliance pursued them ruthlessly, killing large numbers including women and children. In the process, they perpetrated atrocious human rights abuses whose actual magnitude is still not known.
But the military action soon spread far beyond eastern Zaire. The emboldened anti-Mobutu alliance, still led by the Rwandan army and bolstered by the forces of Uganda, Angola and Burundi, now set its sights on Mobutu himself. Within nine months, Mobutu fled and Kinshasa fell to the rebels. But there was to be no happy ending to the saga. The new head of the rechristened Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Laurent Kabila, soon clashed with his Rwandan advisors, and in July 1998, little more than a year after they had helped him become president, Kabila threw the Rwandan and Ugandan military out of the DRC.
Within days they returned as an enemy force. The second Congo war in two years now began, but almost immediately escalated to continental dimensions. It became Africa's first great war. Directly or indirectly, more than a fifth of all African governments or armies from across the continent have been involved, as well as perhaps a dozen or more armed groups; the alliances between and among these groups, with their varied and conflicting interests, have been bewildering. Kabila's major military allies were Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia; facing them were the Rwandans, Ugandans and Burundians. The situation is further endlessly complicated by the DRC's enormous mineral resources, an irresistible lure for governments, rogue gangs, warlords and powerful foreign corporations alike, and by the continuing problem of arms proliferation sponsored by governments throughout the world as well as a multitude of unscrupulous private hustlers.
One year after the new war began, the Lusaka agreement on a ceasefire and peace process was signed. Although the ceasefire was repeatedly violated, attempts to implement a genuine peace continued and in 2000 the Security Council sent a small peacekeeping mission (MONUC) to the Congo.
Violence continued, however. Although most of the DRC remained beyond the control of government, in eastern Congo full-scale anarchy and terror was unleashed. Rwanda and Uganda found the pursuit of mineral wealth at least as compelling as the destruction of the remaining Interahamwe fighters, and fought the DRC army and various armed gangs over these riches. Coltan, a metal ore used in cell phones and computers, previously unknown except to experts, became everyone's favourite plunder. Soon open warfare broke out between erstwhile allies Ugandan and Rwandan troops over control of territory and resources. While a truce was eventually reached, the bitterness between the rulers of the two countries has not entirely dissipated and remains a source of potentially serious instability.
Through these years ordinary Congolese died in huge numbers. Including those killed in conflict and those who died of the famine and disease spread by the conflict, they may now number close to four million (although all statistics are very rough approximations). Gang rape of girls and women on a mass level, often followed by further torture and violent death, has become commonplace. By all accounts, this constitutes the greatest human-inflicted disaster since World War II. Those directly responsible include the governments of the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda and an assortment of proxy gangs and warlords all competing for mineral resources. Those indirectly responsible are the Western countries backing the various belligerent governments and the Western mining companies who have moved into the middle of the action. Many have been named in UN investigative reports. What all have in common is a refusal to acknowledge the slightest responsibility.
Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and replaced by his son, Joseph. The following year, peace negotiations led Uganda and Rwanda to promise to withdraw their armies and the DRC promised the demobilization and disarmament of Rwandan Hutu rebels in eastern Congo. By the end of 2002, Rwanda and Uganda claimed they had fully withdrawn from the DRC, although their proxies remained. At times it was difficult to tell which proxies were which. At all times, innocent Congolese paid the cost in suffering and death.
In Kinshasa, a power-sharing unity government was set up under Joseph Kabila in 2003, but it is now stalled and is at risk of failure. Meanwhile, a long-simmering conflict over land and mineral wealth in the northeastern Ituri region broke into widespread interethnic violence and massacres in 200203. Once again Rwandan and Ugandan proxies were said to be involved, although the two countries vehemently denied the charges. But recent history shows that today's denial has often enough become tomorrow's acknowledgement. Although a strengthened UN mission (MONUC II) has now been deployed in the Congo, various armed groups continue to threaten its stability.
The Congo's neighbours continue to perceive the situation as a threat to their interests and have taken interventionist actions that further destabilize the fragile process of transition. Some 8,000 to 10,000 anti-RPF Rwandan rebels, including the remaining Interahamwe, still operate in eastern DRC under the umbrella of the Forces Dmocratique pour la Liberation du Rwanda. The Kigali government will never let its guard down as long as their threat continues. The events in Kivu in 2004, when Rwandan troops crossed into the DRC (an action formally denied and universally believed in Kigali), the current violence in Ituri, ongoing tensions in Kinshasa and other parts of the DRC are stark warnings that the conflict in the Congo could quickly spiral into another large-scale war.
Burundi too remains unpredictable. The civil war that effectively began in 1993 with the murder by Tutsi officers of the first democratically elected president, a Hutu, has now largely ended, although some rebels refuse to give up their arms. A great international effort has been invested in ending this murderous conflict and getting all factions to agree to multiparty elections with both Hutu and Tutsi guaranteed representation and influence. The late President Nyerere of Tanzania and Nelson Mandela were both immersed in the process for some time, and the government of South Africa continues to play a central role. Efforts at reconciliation and nation-building have been extensive and there is real reason for optimism. But given its bloody and violent history, the future of Burundi, ranked 173rd of 177 countries on the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP's) human development index, remains very much an open question.
Although each of these Great Lakes nations has its own multiple challenges to meet, their interconnectedness can hardly be overestimated. Tensions between Rwanda and Uganda, which has its own intractable conflict in the north of the country, merely aggravate the situation. It hardly needs saying, but without peace the futures of Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and the DRC are all jeopardized, with incalculable consequences not only for their own citizens, but also for the entire continent.
RWANDA TODAY AND TOMORROW
Predicting the future of Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region is not easy. Looking at Rwanda itself, it is possible to be either mildly optimistic or quite pessimistic.
In many ways, the progress the country has made since 1994 is remarkable. The ubiquitous devastation has completely vanished, manifested now only in the damaged walls of the National Assembly and the genocide memorial sites with their eerie skeletons throughout the country. Yet both the assembly and the sites have been left deliberately as memories of the genocide. Kigali now boasts a new expensive luxury hotel, high-rise office buildings, a large new estate of mansions and an elite that crowds the clubs and hotels on Saturday night. Economic growth has been relatively strong. To the superficial observer, Rwanda has returned to normality, even to a certain prosperity.
At best, however, that means it has returned to the status of being a desperately poor underdeveloped country, now ranked 159th of 177 countries on the UNDP's human development index. The gap between the small privileged elite and the vast majority is great and growing. Life expectancy at birth is 39 years and 60 per cent of the population lives on less than US$ 1 a day. Of the eight million population, close to 90 per cent live in rural areas, most of them very poor.
Yet Rwanda's challenges go well beyond the usual litany of deep-rooted social and economic problems faced by any poor country with scarce land and a swelling population. There is the onerous and 'odious' debt, meaning that it was incurred largely by the previous government for weapons that were used in the genocide. (Some debt relief has just been announced.) Then there are the enormous funding needs that spring directly from the genocide: for assistance to survivors, for orphans, traumatized children, street children, children-headed households, for widows, for violated women, for women with HIV/AIDS, for the great burdens of the two parallel justice systems, for programmes to inculcate national reconciliation and human rights, for resettling the millions of refugees and IDPs, for demobilizing and re-educating ex-FAR troops, for ex-child soldiers, for the army, for the battered education and health systems, for continuing research on the genocide the list is limitless. This burden is the consequence of a tragedy that could have been prevented or mitigated. Yet Rwanda today is dependent on foreign sources for much of its meagre budget, while most initiatives crucial to rehabilitation, reconciliation and a culture of rights depend for their viability on outside funding sources.
Views on Rwanda today remain remarkably diverse. Hutu Power advocates, still thriving outside the country, continue perversely to deny the genocide with a series of self-contradictory propositions. It never happened. Or, Hutu were enraged that the RPF murdered Habyarimana and spontaneously lashed out. Or, people were killed in a civil war. Or, if there was a genocide at all, it was perpetrated by the RPF both in Rwanda and in the DRC. Or, there was a 'double genocide'. The ugly phenomenon of denial is particularly widespread in the French-speaking countries of Europe and Africa and in Quebec. It would be useful to expose the network of European politicians, priests and academics who continue to fund and support this malignant force and who actively foment hatred against the present government of Rwanda.
Hostility to Rwanda for its human rights abuses is also widespread. Some prominent former foreign friends of Rwanda have emerged as bitter critics, sometimes describing the country as virtually a totalitarian dictatorship. Instances of intimidated human rights activists, jailed reporters, threatened media and opponents of the government forced to flee the country are not hard to come by. The presidential election of 2003, the first since 1994, was won by Paul Kagame with an almost unbelievable 95 per cent of the vote. But there was criticism of the way the 'divisionist' card was played against Kagame's main opponent, and his opponents accused the RPF of beating up their campaign workers.
Yet, typical of Rwanda, others insist that such attacks are excessive. Some see an unfair double standard imposed on the RPF government. Corruption is a great deal less widespread than among its neighbours. Security obtains in most of the country. The election process appeared to be mostly fair. In the subsequent elections for the National Assembly, opposition parties won a credible 25 per cent of the vote. Beyond that, almost half the legislators are women, the largest proportion of any parliament in the world. This should have positive repercussions for all Rwandan women. Within certain boundaries, mostly understood, the media are cut a good deal of slack; in any event, the BBC and Voice of America are now easily available in the three national languages. Although some accuse Kagame and his government of exploiting the genocide for their own self-interest, others argue the opposite: considering that it has been only twelve years since the genocide, the number of Interahamwe still active in eastern Congo and the uncertain loyalty of the country's 85 per cent Hutu majority, it can just as convincingly be argued that the government allows a substantial amount of freedom and openness. But no one, on any side, doubts Kagame's steely determination and his readiness to take whatever steps are necessary, barring none, to keep his country secure and his government in power.
Eleven years after the genocide, Rwanda remains impenetrable, opaque, mysterious, a source of puzzlement and controversy to all who know it a country that found itself making history that it never sought and is now attempting to forge a new path in the face of spectacular odds. Terribly poor, badly traumatized, deeply divided, a precarious entity in a fragile and explosive region, Rwanda is a country that is now bound to make history once again. It has only two paths to choose. It can once again succumb to its history and regress to yet another unspeakable conflict. Or it can transcend its past and attempt to defeat poverty and underdevelopment as a united, secure and stable country. As has been true for more than a century, both Rwandans and outsiders will play central r o l e s i n d e t e r m i n i n g t h e f u t u r e .
T h i s p a g e i n t e n t i o n a l l y l e f t b l a n k
P a r t O n e ( H a t e M e d i a i n R w a n d a
T h i s p a g e i n t e n t i o n a l l y l e f t b l a n k
4 ( C a l l t o G e n o c i d e : R a d i o i n R w a n d a , 1 9 9 4
A l i s o n D e s F o r g e s
E l e v e n y e a r s a f t e r t h e e n d o f t h e R w a n d a n g e n o c i d e , t w o f i l m s were released for popular audiences, greatly increasing widespread realization of the horror that had taken the lives of more than half a million Tutsi. In both cases, the film-makers highlighted the importance of radio in mobilizing people to kill. Audiences leave the theatre wondering how it was possible for genocide to occur in full public view at the end of the twentieth century and why no action had been taken to halt the broadcasts that were promoting the worst of all crimes.
LEAD-UP TO GENOCIDE
At the end of the 1980s, Juvnal Habyarimana saw his power slipping after nearly 20 years. Even though he was a member of the Hutu ethnic group, who formed some 90 per cent of the population, he had lost much of his popular base. For years he had favoured his own region and, even more, his own family circle, as the rest of the country experienced an economic crisis due to the falling prices of coffee and tea, the country's major exports. The voices of dissent grew, taking the form of a demand to end the monopoly of power held by the president's political party, the Mouvement Rpublicain National pour la Dmocratie et le Dveloppement (MRND).
In 1990, Rwanda was attacked by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a movement consisting mostly of refugees and children of refugees of the Tutsi ethnic group. Once the ruling elite of Rwanda, the Tutsi had been overthrown in a revolution beginning in 1959 and many had fled the country. In the early 1960s these Tutsi refugees had led a series of incursions into Rwanda, each of which provoked reprisals against the Tutsi who still lived in the country. After Habyarimana came to power in 1973, there was a period of calm with neither attacks from the outside, nor killings of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda.
With the 1990 attack by the RPF, Habyarimana and some around him saw the chance to stop the erosion of their popularity and to try to craft a new Hutu solidarity by turning against the Tutsi minority inside the country, labelling them traitors and accusing them of supporting the RPF attackers. Within days of the first attack, the government had rounded up thousands of Tutsi and Hutu opposed to the regime; it would hold some for months without trial in inhumane conditions. Many were tortured and scores died. Two weeks after the RPF attack, government officials carried out the first of a series of massacres of Tutsi civilians, killing hundreds at the commune of Kibilira. Over the next three years, there would be another 15 such massacres before the genocide of 1994 began (Des Forges 1994: 87; International Commission 1993: 1129).
From the opening days of the war, the government understood the importance of using media to rally Rwandans around the regime. Believing that the government-controlled media were not up to the task of carrying forward a vigorous propaganda campaign, Habyarimana named a promising young intellectual and university professor, Ferdinand Nahimana, to take over the official information office, a post that included authority over the national radio station (Chrtien et al. 1995: 512).
THE ROLE OF RADIO
A large number of Rwandans could not read or write and, as a result, radio was an important way for the government to deliver messages to the population. In addition to the usual news, the radio broadcast official notification of appointments to and dismissals from government posts, announcements of government meetings and lists of candidates admitted to secondary schools. It also broadcast daily reminders from the president, exhorting Rwandans to work hard and live clean, moral lives. So long as Rwanda was a single-party state that is until June 1991 the radio also disseminated propaganda for the president's party, the MRND. Not just an official voice of the state and a propaganda channel for the single party, the national radio also helped link families whose relatives were distant, broadcasting news of deaths so that relatives could return home for funerals.
In March 1992, Radio Rwanda was first used in directly promoting the killing of Tutsi in a place called Bugesera, south of the national capital. On 3 March, the radio repeatedly broadcast a communiqu supposedly sent by a human rights group based in Nairobi warning that Hutu in Bugesera would be attacked by Tutsi. Local officials built on the radio announcement to convince Hutu that they needed to protect themselves by attacking first. Led by soldiers from a nearby military base, Hutu civilians, members of the Interahamwe, a militia attached to the MRND party, and local Hutu civilians attacked and killed hundreds of Tutsi (International Commission 1993: 1314).
The role of the radio in inciting killing demonstrated the importance of controlling the media. Opposition parties, having proved their strength in massive street demonstrations, were able to push Habyarimana into conceding to them the right to participate in government and one of the ministries they wanted to control was a newly created ministry of information. In the new coalition government formed just after the Bugesera massacre, a member of one of the opposition parties was named to head this ministry. He gradually instituted policies meant to end the MRND monopoly on the media and to guarantee equal access to members of other political parties. Nahimana was removed as head of the information office and so lost control of the radio as well (Chrtien 1995: 61).
Other voices were also beginning to be heard. The RPF broadcast through a station called Radio Muhabura, although its signal did not reach all of Rwanda. Some civil society groups also drew up proposals for independent radio stations, such as one to serve the rural poor.
RADIO AS PART OF THE 'SELF-DEFENCE'
The war dragged on through 1991 and 1992, punctuated by occasional ceasefires and sporadic negotiations, but without any real settlement. In January 1993, the RPF was able to force some major concessions on the government during a negotiating session, a diplomatic success they followed by a stunning military advance in early February in violation of an existing ceasefire agreement. Until this time, Habyarimana had been able to count on France as a reliable supplier of arms and political support. French troops, supposedly in Rwanda to protect French citizens, were decisive in stopping the RPF advance on several occasions, including in early 1993. But some French authorities were becoming convinced that the Rwandan government would need substantial additional support if it were to continue to resist the RPF and the French were increasingly unwilling to supply this.
In that atmosphere of growing RPF strength and weakening French support, some Habyarimana supporters and perhaps Habyarimana himself turned to the idea of mobilizing large numbers of civilians as a 'self-defence' force to back up the national army. Military correspondence, as well as propaganda, had made clear in the preceding months that the 'enemy' included Tutsi civilians as well as RPF combatants. Thus the self-defence force was apparently meant as much to attack these civilians as to confront the soldiers of the RPF force.
The general outlines of the self-defence force were sketched out by Colonel Thoneste Bagosora in the first pages of his 1993 engagement book. Bagosora, who would take the lead in national affairs after President Habyarimana was killed on 6 April 1994, was known for his hostile attitude toward Tutsi. Many of the details jotted down in his 1993 engagement book were later replicated in a secret national self-defence plan drawn up in the early months of 1994, then implemented in April 1994 when the civilian population was mobilized to kill Tutsi civilians. Even in his preliminary notes, Bagosora suggested that the radio should be used in the self-defence effort. He even noted the name of Simon Bikindi, one of the most popular musicians in Rwanda, who would become famous for his songs extolling Hutu solidarity and denouncing supposed Tutsi crimes (Bagosora 1993).
AN END TO WAR: THE ARUSHA ACCORDS
Nearly four years of war between the Rwandan government and the RPF ended with the signing of the Arusha accords in August 1993. At that time the signatories already recognized the importance of propaganda in contributing to tensions between parties and agreed to end such propaganda.
But despite the carefully detailed accords, some elements in both the Rwandan government and the RPF were not ready to make peace and continued preparations for further war.
As part of the accords, a United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force was created to help implement the agreement. Known as the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), it arrived later than expected most of the peacekeepers came only in December and was smaller than thought necessary by its commanding officer, Canadian General Romo Dallaire. UNAMIR was poorly equipped and poorly supplied throughout its time in Rwanda. Taking into consideration its weaknesses, the UN Security Council gave the force a mandate that was far less robust than originally envisioned in the accords.
RTLM MAKES ITSELF HEARD
Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) began its broadcasts just after the accords were signed. In the context of multiplying voices, adamant supporters of the MRND and of a new, related party called the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR) decided to launch a radio station to broadcast the message that used to be the only one heard on Radio Rwanda. Nahimana, well acquainted with the power of radio, did much of the work organizing the new station. Habyarimana himself was the most important of its backers, which comprised many of the ruling elite, including ministers and other government officials, bankers and high-ranking military officers. But the station was meant to be the voice of the people and the price for a single share was kept low to attract ordinary citizens to support the effort (ICTR 2003: para. 4.2).
RTLM was also meant to reach out to the ordinary citizen in its programming. It aired the latest music, especially popular Congolese songs, while Radio Rwanda was still broadcasting old standard tunes. Unlike the official Radio Rwanda, which spoke in the ponderous tones of state officials, RTLM was informal and lively. Several of its announcers were known for their quick wit, which was appreciated even by those who were the butt of their humour. According to one Rwandan well-acquainted with the media in his country, RTLM offered comments that sounded like 'a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of Primus in a bar' (Higiro 1996).
RTLM brought the voice of ordinary people to the airwaves. Listeners could call in to request their favourite tunes or to exchange gossip with announcers and a wider audience. RTLM journalists went out into the streets and invited passers-by to comment on topics of the day. This populist approach allowed RTLM to claim a legitimacy different from that of Radio Rwanda; it still broadcast official voices often enough to continue to enjoy the authoritativeness of national radio, but to that it added the appeal of being the station to speak for the people.
But in late October 1993, the president of neighbouring Burundi and the first Hutu to hold that post, was assassinated by military officers who had seemed to accept his popular election by majority vote several months before. As soon as the news of the assassination became known, Burundian Hutu in some cases led by local government officials or political leaders began attacking Tutsi. The Tutsi-led army then carried out extensive reprisal killings of Hutu civilians, sometimes in areas where Tutsi had not actually been killed. The final death toll was tens of thousands of dead in both groups.
These events in Burundi further polarized Rwandans, many of whom were quick to draw lessons from the neighbouring state, whose HutuTutsi population mirrored their own. For many Tutsi, the attacks on other Tutsi in Burundi demonstrated the vulnerability of a minority in situations of ethnic conflict and made them even more afraid to put their trust in a Hutu-led government. Meanwhile, some Hutu speculated that the RPF had assisted Burundian Tutsi soldiers in the assassination and claimed that the crime proved that Rwandan Tutsi could not be trusted to implement the Arusha accords as they had agreed to do.
Two important opposition parties split over the question of the desirability of continuing with efforts to implement the accords, while their anti-Arusha accord members formed a new coalition with Habyarimana's MRND and the CDR. The coalition became known by its rallying cry 'Hutu Power' and its voice became the RTLM.
RTLM reported the assassination of the Burundi president in a highly sensationalized way to underline supposed Tutsi brutality and heighten Hutu fears of Tutsi (RTLM transcripts: 25 October; 20, 29, 30 November; 12 December 1993). The president was actually killed by a bayonet blow to the chest, but RTLM reported details of supposed torture, including castration of the victim. In pre-colonial times, some Tutsi kings castrated defeated enemy rulers and decorated their royal drums with the genitalia. The false report of the castration of the Burundi president was intended to remind Hutu listeners of this practice and to elicit their fear and repulsion; it did so with great success.
From late October on, RTLM repeatedly and forcefully underlined many of the themes developed for years by the extremist written press, including the inherent differences between Hutu and Tutsi, the foreign origin of Tutsi and, hence, their lack of rights to claim to be Rwandan, the disproportionate share of wealth and power held by Tutsi and the horrors of past Tutsi rule. It continually stressed the need to be alert to Tutsi plots and possible attacks and demanded that Hutu prepare to 'defend' themselves against the Tutsi threat (RTLM transcripts: 25 October; 12, 20, 24 November 1993; 29 March; 1, 3 June 1994).
In addition to the increasingly virulent propaganda against Tutsi, the radio spewed forth attacks on Hutu who were willing to continue cooperating with them. In some cases, the radio moved from general denunciations to naming specific people, including the Hutu prime minister, as enemies of the nation who should be eliminated one way or another from the public scene. It used increasingly violent language, saying, for example, that the Interahamwe militia might rip into little pieces those thought to support the RPF (Article 19 1996: 923, 967, Snat de Belgique 1997: 70).
In February 1994, RTLM showed that it could be used just as Radio Rwanda was used at the time of the 1992 Bugesera massacre, to pinpoint targets for attack. An opposition politician was assassinated and, in reprisal, the head of the CDR party was lynched by militia members of the opposition party (Snat de Belgique 1997: 389, 712). RTLM warned that the RPF were going to attack the capital, a report that was false. It demanded that listeners protect themselves against RPF supporters in certain parts of the city. Hutu in those neighbourhoods, led by militia, killed about 70 people, thus foreshadowing the bloody events to come two months later (Article 19 1996: 97).
FEAR AND FOREBODING
In December 1993, some 600 RPF soldiers moved into Kigali, implementing a provision of the accords that allowed the RPF to station troops in the capital to protect their political leaders during the period of transition to a new government. At the same time, preparations for renewed war increased. Political leaders of Hutu Power parties recruited thousands of militia members and arranged for their training. Officials and military officers distributed thousands of weapons to civilians, an effort so widespread and public that it drew condemnation from a Catholic bishop who asked authorities to explain why the firearms were being handed out (Kalibushi et al. 1993). In December and throughout the early months of 1994, RTLM stepped up the pace and bitterness of its attack on Tutsi, Hutu opposition figures, leaders of civil society and even the UN peacekeepers, all of whom it accused of favouring the RPF. In several cases, the peacekeepers did behave badly toward Habyarimana supporters, thus providing a kernel of truth on which RTLM expanded very successfully (Belgium 1994).
Rwandan and international human rights organizations and other members of Rwandan civil society denounced these preparations publicly while diplomats cabled their capitals more discretely, warning of the growing risk of renewed war and violence (Snat de Belgique 1997: 41, 856). Dallaire notified UN headquarters in New York about caches of arms hidden in the capital and he reported that militia were highly organized and prepared to kill 1,000 Tutsi in the first 20 minutes after the signal for attack was given. His warnings, like his efforts to win permission to confiscate arms and his pleas for more supplies and equipment, went unheeded.
Those who tried to raise the alarm about the preparations for violence frequently drew attention specifically to the radio. Dallaire, who had once hoped for radio equipment to permit the UN force to inform the public in a responsible fashion, notified New York about the broadcasts against his force, but to no avail. One RTLM announcer warned that the UN peacekeepers from Belgium particularly disliked because Belgium, the former colonial power, had refused to provide arms to the Rwandan government would face 'a fight without pity' and 'hatred without mercy' unless they gave up and returned home (Snat de Belgique 1997: 49). The Belgian ambassador told authorities at the Belgian Foreign Ministry that RTLM was disseminating 'inflammatory statements calling for the hatred indeed for the extermination' of Tutsi. Days before the start of the genocide, the German ambassador, then serving as head of the European community in Rwanda, called attention to the 'unacceptable role of some media' (Adelman and Suhrke 1996: 32, Prunier 1995: 209). When diplomats protested to Habyarimana and other officials about the broadcasts, they claimed that the radio station was a private enterprise, merely exercising its right to free speech.
The minister of information, under whose authority the radio station operated, tried to call the directors of RTLM to account for the content of its broadcasts. In correspondence and in meetings, he insisted that the incitement to fear and hatred must stop. On at least one occasion, RTLM leadership promised to moderate the tone of the broadcasts, but did not do so. The attorney general registered civil complaints against RTLM but, under pressure from the president, had not yet taken action on them by early April (ICTR 2003: para. 4.3).
Critics of RTLM all asked for changes in the content of the broadcasts; none went so far as to ask for the station to be closed down completely.
RADIO IN THE GENOCIDE
President Habyarimana, the president of Burundi and leading military and civilian officials of the Rwandan government were killed on the evening of 6 April 1994 when their plane was shot down on its approach to Kigali airport. Within hours, military, administrative and political authorities ordered the killing of leading members of parties opposed to Hutu Power and of Tutsi. Under the guidance of Colonel Bagosora and other Hutu Power officers and officials, a new interim government was installed. It included political leaders ready to implement a 'self-defence' plan that included widespread killing of Tutsi civilians.
The killings began first in the capital and some outlying areas where Hutu Power leaders were strongest; authorities in other regions, particularly the south and centre of the country, resisted the killing for the first two weeks. On 7 April, the RPF attacked the Rwandan government army, thus beginning full-scale war once again. From this time forward, the war and the genocide were intertwined, making it easier to direct the killing of Tutsi civilians as if it were part of the war effort.
Assailants searched out Tutsi, moving from house to house in a neighbourhood; they massacred them by the thousands in churches and other public buildings where Tutsi sought refuge; and they picked them out at barriers set up to impede their flight on roads and paths throughout the country.
Authorities used RTLM and Radio Rwanda to spur and direct killings both in those areas most eager to attack Tutsi and members of the Hutu opposition and in areas where the killings initially were resisted. They relied on both radio stations to incite and mobilize, then to give specific directions for carrying out the killings (RTLM transcripts: 13, 29 April; 15, 20 May; 1, 5, 9, 19 June 1994).
Incitement
As RTLM had forewarned, it turned its full force against the Belgian peacekeepers, accusing them of having shot down or helping to shoot down the president's plane. Under the stimulus of these broadcasts, some soldiers of the Rwandan army brutally murdered ten UN troops of the Belgian contingent. Some Hutu Power leaders had foreseen that the Belgian government would withdraw its troops from the peacekeeping force should some of its soldiers be killed, and it did just that soon after the murders. This withdrawal so badly weakened the force that the Security Council initially favoured the withdrawal of the whole force, although it finally permitted a token force to remain in the country with orders to keep a low profile, concentrating on protecting itself and taking no risks to save Rwandans (UN 1996: 3744).
After 6 April, RTLM called on all Hutu to 'rise up as a single man' to defend their country in what was said to be the 'final' war. One announcer predicted that the war 'would exterminate the Tutsi from the globe ... make them disappear once and for all' (Chrtien et al. 1995: 205). RTLM staff carried forward all the themes so vigorously developed in previous months, emphasizing the cruelty and ruthlessness of the Tutsi (RTLM transcripts: 15 May; 9, 14, 19, 20 June 1994). As one announcer said, using the term inyenzi or cockroach to refer to the RPF and its supporters, 'the cruelty of the inyenzi can be cured only by their total extermination' (Chrtien et al. 1995: 204; RTLM transcript: 3 June 1994).
RTLM used terms like inyenzi and Tutsi interchangeably with others referring to RPF combatants, leading listeners to believe that all Tutsi were necessarily supporters of the RPF force fighting against the government. RTLM announcers warned specifically that combatants dressed in civilian clothes were mingling among displaced people fleeing combat zones, and they encouraged people along their route to be vigilant in searching out any refugees who looked like they might be RPF in disguise, that is, who looked like they might be Tutsi (RTLM transcripts: 1, 2 February; 29 April; 46, 20 June 1994).
After 6 April, the director of Radio Rwanda, himself a member of the political opposition, fled and the national radio station took up the anti-Tutsi messages of RTLM. One RTLM announcer commented that Radio Rwanda had changed from 'rival' to 'sister' (Chrtien et al. 1995: 79). On 21 April, Radio Rwanda broadcast a debate by political leaders, during which one politician insisted that Tutsi returning from exile abroad intended to 'exterminate, exterminate, exterminate, exterminate'. Tutsi, he said, were going to 'exterminate you until they are the only ones left in the country so that they can keep for a thousand years the power that their fathers had kept for four hundred years ... You must not let up in your efforts,' he told his listeners (Chrtien et al. 1995: 300).
On some occasions, national authorities were heard on Radio Rwanda, delivering a similar message but one that carried additional weight because of the respect attached to their offices. In an effort to force the people of the southern prefecture of Butare to begin killing, the government removed the prefect (governor) in a humiliating way that left no doubt about why he had lost his post. At the ceremony installing his successor, broadcast by Radio Rwanda, the interim president of Rwanda, who had been set up by the Hutu Power faction, exhorted all citizens to see killing Tutsi as their responsibility. He said that any not ready to do so should step aside for those ready to 'work', a common euphemism for killing. He warned further that those not willing to 'work' should be eliminated by others, by the good 'workers who want to work' for their country (Sindikubwabo 1994).
Directives
Authorities used both radio stations to give instructions and orders to listeners. RTLM announcers identified specific targets to attack, sending assailants on 8 April to the home of Tutsi businessman Antoine Sebera and later to the home of Joseph Kahabaye. One identified a hill in the capital where Tutsi were said to be hiding in the woods and another provided a list of 13 people and their locations. On one occasion, an announcer urged people guarding a barrier in Kigali city to eliminate Tutsi in a vehicle just nearing that checkpoint. Notified soon after that the Tutsi had been caught and killed, the announcer congratulated the killers on the air. In yet another case, the station directed assailants to attack a mosque in Kigali where Tutsi were seeking shelter and on another day, urged an attack on a convoy that was attempting to evacuate Tutsi and Hutu opponents of Hutu Power from the Hotel Mille Collines, a gathering point for people at risk (RTLM transcripts: 13, 29 April; 15, 20 May; 1, 5, 9, 19 June 1994). Later in May, RTLM said that General Dallaire should be killed, identifying him as a white man with a moustache (Dallaire 2004: 37980). Leaders of the militia used RTLM to call their men to meetings in the capital or to send them off to other parts of the country (Kamanzi n.d.: 146).
Radio Rwanda conveyed orders from the authorities, including a message from the prefect of Kigali telling residents to 'close ranks, remember how to use the usual tools [weapons] to defend themselves' (Kayishema 1994). He went on to specify that citizens should clear the brush in which Tutsi might hide. He directed them to 'search houses, beginning with those that are abandoned, to search the marshes of the area to be sure no inyenzi have slipped in to hide there ... and to search the drains and ditches.' He said that 'reliable' people should be chosen for these tasks, meaning those who supported the Hutu Power line, and that they should be given what they need for the work, meaning weapons. Radio Rwanda served to summon drivers of bulldozers needed to dig mass graves for the thousands of bodies (Chrtien et al. 1995: 298).
Authorities relied on the radio stations to congratulate those who were 'vigilant' and performed well and to castigate those who hesitated to join in the killing. On occasion, when they wanted to limit the violence, authorities used radio to deliver this message as well. In early May, when the UN commissioner for human rights was about to arrive, RTLM told listeners to abstain from attacks on Tutsi. In another incident a short time later, the interim government was seeking to win renewed French support and found the French unwilling to commit much assistance to a government then beginning to come under criticism for its genocidal policy. To help persuade the French that the genocide would not pose a problem to the delivery of aid, RTLM told listeners to please behave in a more dignified fashion. Listeners were told to make sure that bodies were not left on the roads to be seen by foreigners and to please not stand around barriers laughing when someone's throat was cut (Chrtien et al. 1995: 31617; Human Rights Watch 1994).
The impact of the radio
Authorities supporting the genocide urged citizens to listen to the radio. One official even told the residents of his area that they should regard what the radio told them as having the same importance as direct orders from him. In some cases, authorities picked up radio messages and used them to mobilize local people more effectively. Thus when the radio claimed that supporters of the RPF had hidden weapons in or near churches, local authorities staged incidents in which they 'discovered' planted weapons to give credence to the reports of secret preparations for attacks against Hutu.
Conversely, authorities who tried to resist or limit the killings asked national officials to halt the broadcasts or moderate their content; in one case, two prefects advised the people in their prefectures to listen to the radio with a very critical ear.
In addition to this indication of the importance that authorities attached to the radio, there is considerable evidence from the perpetrators themselves about the impact of radio and RTLM, in particular. One foreign religious sister crossed dozens of barriers as she moved across Rwanda during the genocide; at each one, she found the guards listening to the radio. Others have testified that bands of killers set off to 'work', singing the anti-Tutsi songs they had learned from RTLM. One witness said that it was RTLM who said that the Tutsi were to be killed and another said the radio had taught people that they must 'kill them before they kill you' (Human Rights Watch/International Federation of Human Rights Leagues interviews: Kigali, 16 July 1995; Musebeya, 7 June and 28 August 1995; Butare, 19 October 1995).
Throughout the genocide, RTLM continued the interactive broadcasting that it had begun in the months before. Its journalists went out around the city of Kigali, interviewing ordinary people at the barriers, giving them an opportunity to explain on air what they were doing and why they were doing it. This confirmation by ordinary people of the 'rightness' of what they were doing contributed to the legitimacy of the genocide for radio listeners.
When foreign observers began to criticize the genocide, RTLM sought to bolster the legitimacy of the authorities by discounting all negative comments and by reminding its listeners that all they had to do was to win the war and then foreign critics would forget any crimes they had committed (Chrtien et al. 1995).
Demands for action
As the death toll mounted, human rights and humanitarian organizations sought without success to persuade leading UN members to increase the number of peacekeeping troops in Rwanda. On 30 April, the Security Council did direct the Secretary General to examine ways to expand the force, but it was another two and a half weeks before the resolution calling for an enlarged force was approved. Because of the difficulties securing, equipping and transporting the new peacekeepers, the reinforcements did not arrive in Rwanda until the interim government had been defeated by the RPF and had fled the country.
Unable at first to obtain assurance of reinforcements, activists sought help from the United States (US), France and the UN with the more limited objective of closing down the radio stations that were inciting and directing the violence.
The argument developed by Human Rights Watch and followed by some other international nongovernmental organizations was that international silence on the genocide and failure to interrupt the broadcasts made it possible for the interim authorities to continue to claim that they constituted a legitimate government, recognized by other governments. The fact that Rwanda continued to sit as a non-permanent member of the Security Council throughout the genocide reinforced its claim to international legitimacy. Human Rights Watch argued that jamming radio broadcasts would disrupt incitements to genocidal violence and would limit the delivery of genocidal directives. And, argued the human rights group, jamming the broadcasts would deliver a broader message as well: it would make clear international condemnation of the genocide, thus weakening the claim of the authorities to legitimacy and perhaps encouraging resistance against the killings.
In early May, US State Department staff who shared concern over the role of the radio stations in the genocide had their legal staff consider the implications of jamming the radio. In accordance with the usual strong US support for freedom of speech as guaranteed by international conventions and telecommunications law, the State Department lawyers concluded that the US should not interrupt RTLM broadcasts. At a congressional hearing on 4 May, George Moose, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said that the issue was moot because a military attack by the RPF had silenced RTLM, an assertion contradicted immediately by a Human Rights Watch representative who said that the station had resumed broadcasting from a mobile transmitter (Des Forges 1994). On the same day, national security advisor Anthony Lake, who had been pressed by human rights activists to interrupt the radio broadcasts, raised the issue with the secretary of defence. Within 24 hours, the Department of Defence replied that the radio could be jammed from a specially equipped aircraft, but that it would be 'ineffective and expensive', costing about US$ 8,500 for each hour (Wisner 1994).
On 1 June, Ted Kennedy, an influential senator, made a new effort to get action and asked the US Secretary of State to cooperate with the UN in ending 'the unconscionable incitement to genocide' being carried out by radio stations in Rwanda. Once again the official response described jamming as 'legally contentious', an assertion to which officials again added arguments concerning the cost and supposed ineffectiveness of jamming the radios (Acting Undersecretary of Defence for Policy 1994).
In fact, the legal arguments against jamming could have been countered by another set of arguments in its favour arguments used previously by the US when it silenced radio broadcasting in Haiti and during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Had the US lawyers been willing to recognize the killings in Rwanda as genocide an action delayed until June lawyers could also have justified halting the broadcasts by referring to that part of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UN 1951) that prohibited 'direct and public incitement to commit genocide' (Metzl 1997).
Arguments concerning cost and effectiveness could also have been debunked had officials with sufficient clout wished to do so. In the end, the ultimate consideration was simply to avoid getting involved in what US officials saw as becoming a complicated conflict and especially to avoid becoming enmeshed in a conflict that might require the deployment of US forces. From that perspective, jamming the radio carried a significant risk: if the US judged that the situation was serious enough to merit this first step, it would find it difficult not to move to a further stage of involvement if the jamming itself proved insufficient to stop the killings. It was probably this consideration that moved a defence department official to advise that jamming could be a very 'dangerous and open-ended prospect' (Acting Undersecretary of Defence for Policy 1994). Having suffered the loss of 18 soldiers in a peacekeeping operation in Somalia the previous year, US officials were determined to avoid any 'dangerous and open-ended' commitments, especially on the African continent.
The UN Security Council was finally moved to action by RTLM threats against General Dallaire and the peacekeeping troops under his command. In late June, the president of the council asked the interim government to close down RTLM. At first the Rwandan representative, still sitting as a nonpermanent member of the council, put forward arguments about the private nature of the enterprise and guarantees of freedom of speech. After further pressure, he agreed to end the broadcasts, but they continued, his commitment notwithstanding (Haq 1994).
In late June, the French government sent a military force to Rwanda, purportedly to protect civilians. At first, interim government officials expected that the deployment, known as Operation Turquoise, would support its troops in opposing further RPF advance. RTLM and Radio Rwanda hailed the arrival of the French soldiers and gave instruction on how to welcome the troops warmly. By the first week of July it was clear that the French did not intend to support the interim government and its army at least not openly and French soldiers began protecting Tutsi and dismantling some of the barriers. The tone of RTLM commentary changed abruptly and the radio began criticizing the French presence. The French, with experienced, highly qualified troops on the ground, lost little time in destroying at least one and possibly more radio transmitters used by RTLM and the national radio. When RTLM continued to broadcast, although apparently to a more limited area, French officials were able to oblige the stations to halt verbal attacks on French troops. They also brought in equipment to jam the radio, although they did not use it.
NEW ATTITUDES TOWARD JAMMING RADIO
In mid-July the RPF defeated the Rwandan army and both army and interim government officials led a massive exodus of nearly two million Rwandan Hutus into neighbouring countries. This caused an enormous humanitarian crisis and the loss of even more human lives, this time mostly Hutu. Recognizing that the outflow threatened to destabilize the entire region and cause far larger problems, the UN and the US hoped to limit the crisis by persuading the refugees to return home rapidly; but RTLM, still broadcasting from a mobile transmitter, encouraged the refugees to remain outside Rwanda. In late August, the US asked the French to jam the radio and offered to help them do it; however, the French had sent their equipment home (Quiles et al. 1998: 32930). In October, the US and the UN discussed cooperating in jamming the broadcasts, but before they could act, the radio vanished from the airwaves.
Having seen the power of hate radio in Rwanda, US officials were ready to act in 1995 when a Burundian station called Radio Rutomorangingo began broadcasting anti-Tutsi messages. A policymaking group decided that the US could 'technically and legally contribute to silencing the radio' (Young 1994). In the end, the station moderated its broadcasts and the US took no action against it, although the Burundian government jammed its broadcasts a year later, using equipment from Israel. As a result of the Rwandan experience, President Bill Clinton issued a policy directive in 1999 permitting US interventions in any future cases in which radio stations called for violence (Clinton 1999).
The importance of the radio, which was recognized by policymakers in the United States in the years after the Rwanda genocide, was spread to wider audiences with the showing of the popular films in 2005. Perhaps this recognition of the role of the radio by a broader audience will help ensure that policymakers actually act to stop the voices of hate in similar tragedies in the future.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Memoranda originating in the Department of Defense were provided by the National Security Archive, an organization that assists researchers in obtaining access to previously classified US government documents. I thank William Ferroggiaro of the archive for his kind assistance.
REFERENCES
Acting Undersecretary of Defence for Policy. 1994. Senator Kennedy: Letter on jamming of Rwandan radio broadcasts: memorandum for secretary of defence and deputy secretary of defence, June 9. Department of Defence, Washington, DC, USA.
Adelman, H. and Suhrke, A. For Steering Committee of the Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda. 1996. The international response to conflict and genocide: lessons from the Rwandan experience. Study 2: Early warning and conflict management. Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, March. Available at (accessed 23 August 2005).
Article 19. 1996. Broadcasting Genocide, Censorship, Propaganda and State-Sponsored Violence in Rwanda, 19901994. Article 19, London, UK. Available at (accessed 23 August 2005).
Bagosora, T. 1993. Agenda 93 (personal appointment book). Kigali, Rwanda. Examined and copied by Human Rights Watch.
Belgium. 1994. Military intelligence reports: 7 (9 January); 14 (27 January); 16 (1 February). Government of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium.
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier and M. Kabanda. 1995. Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Karthala, Paris, France. 397 pp.
Clinton, W.J. 1999. Presidential decision directive NSC-68. Government of the United States, Washington, DC, 30 April.
Dallaire, R.A. 2004. Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Random House, Toronto, Canada.
Des Forges, A. 1994. Testimony on the crisis in Rwanda. Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Washington, DC, USA, 4 May, 103rd Congress.
1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, New York, NY, USA. Available at (accessed 30 August 2005).
Haq, F. 1994. Rwanda: close down anti-Tutsi radio, says the U.N. Security Council. InterPress Service, Rome, Italy, June.
Higiro, J.M.V. 1996. 'Distorsions et omissions'. In Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Dialogue, 190 (April-May): 171.
Human Rights Watch. 1994. Press release, 11 May. Human Rights Watch, New York, NY, USA.
ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda). 2003. The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze. Case no. ICTR-9952-T: Judgement and sentence. Arusha, Tanzania, 3 December.
International Commission of Investigation on Human Right Violations in Rwanda since October 1, 1990. 1993. Final report. Africa Watch, International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, Interafrican Union for Human and Peoples' Rights, and the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development, New York and Paris, March.
Kamanzi, N. n.d. Rwanda: du genocide la dfaite. dition Reberoi, Kigali, Rwanda.
Kalibushi, W. and priests of Kibuye and Gisenyi. 1993. Press release. 28 December.
Kayishema, C. 1994. Kibuye prefecture, Kigali, Rwanda, 2 June.
Metzl, J.F. 1997. Rwandan Genocide and the International Law of Radio Jamming. American Journal of International Law, 91(4): 628651.
Prunier, G. 1995. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, New York, NY, USA.
Quiles, P., P. Brana and B. Cazeneuve. 1998. Enquete sur la tragdie rwandaise (19901994). Assemble Nationale, Paris, France.
RTLM. Transcripts of RTLM broadcasts are held by the Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
Snat de Belgique. 1997. Rapport du groupe ad-hoc Rwanda la Commission des Affaires Etrangres. Government of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium, 7 January.
Sindikubwabo, T. 1994. Discours du Prsident Thodore Sindikubwabo prononc le 19 avril la Prfecture de Butare. Government of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda.
UN (United Nations). 1951. Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) of the UN General Assembly, 9 December. 1948. UN Treaty Series no. 1021, vol. 78: 277. Available at (accessed 6 September 2005).
1996. The United Nations and Rwanda, 19931996. UN Department of Public Information, New York, NY, USA. Blue Book vol. X.
Wisner, F.G. 1994. Memorandum for deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs, National Security Council, 5 May. Department of Defence, Washington, DC, USA. Available at (accessed 23 August 2005).
Young, C.D.R. 1994. Memo to deputy director, Pms and Chief MEAF Div. Subject: peace-keep i n g c o r e g r o u p S V T S , 2 1 J u l y , 1 9 9 4 . N a t i o n a l S e c u r i t y A r c h i v e , G e o r g e W a s h i n g t o n U n i v e r s i t y , W a s h i n g t o n , D C , U S A .
5 ( R T L M P r o p a g a n d a : t h e D e m o c r a t i c A l i b i
J e a n - P i e r r e C h r t i e n
A m o n g t h e t e s t i m o n i a l s o f p a r t i c i p a n t s i n t h e R w a n d a g e n o c i d e g a t h e r e d b y j o u r n a list Jean Hatzfeld is this passage:
Killing is very discouraging if you must decide to do so yourself ... but if you are obeying orders from the authorities, if you are adequately conditioned, if you feel pushed and pulled, if you see that the carnage will have absolutely no adverse effects in future, you feel comforted and revitalized. You do it without shame ... We envisaged this relief with no reluctance whatsoever ... we were efficiently conditioned by radio broadcasts and advice we heard. (Hatzfeld 2003: 85)
This psychology of killers perpetrating mass slaughter makes the most sense not when it is seen as some kind of exotic, ethnocultural way of thinking, but rather when situated among the methods of an eminently modern propaganda. The psychology is explained in a handbook written by French psychosociologist Roger Mucchielli (1972), Psychologie de la Publicit et de la Propagande: Connaissance du Problme, Applications Pratiques. A training handbook in the field of humanities designed for psychologists, facilitators and leaders, it can be found along with the rest of Mucchielli's works in the library of the National University of Rwanda, Butare. The handbook inspired a note 'regarding expansion and recruitment propaganda', written by a Butare intellectual and later found by the team headed by human rights researcher Alison Des Forges (1999: 656). The Mucchielli manual explains without moral or ideological expectation the mechanisms of mass conditioning and mobilization required to create a mass movement. It describes methods for moulding a good conscience based on indignation toward an enemy perceived as a scapegoat. It describes such tactics as 'mirror propaganda' or 'accusations in a mirror', the notion of ascribing to others what we ourselves are preparing to do. The good conscience would legitimize collective action based on widespread certainty of being on the side of the strongest and the just. In other words, the collective action would be the embodiment of the 'people'.
The fascination that some genocide organizers displayed for Mucchielli's work is quite understandable. All the ingredients for such conditioning existed in Rwanda: a low literacy rate, a proclivity for a unanimous partisan approach surrounding moralistic assertions, a well-established potential scapegoat in the Tutsi minority and enduring references to the 'majority people' (rubanda nyamwinshi).
From an ideologic point of view, this socioethnic populism entailed the preeminence of the 'Hutu people', whose absolute right was based on the fact that this community constituted the majority (perceived as homogeneous). The right was also based on the assertion of the community's indigenous character, in contrast with the so-called foreign nature of the Tutsi community (also seen as naturally homogeneous).
From the early 1960s, this ideology had infiltrated all spheres of public life in Rwanda, evolving from a distinctive pre-colonial and colonial history and the subsequent process of decolonization. It is impossible here to review the details of twentieth century Rwandan history; however, it seems important to recognize that the roots of the extremist propaganda that prepared and accompanied the genocide are twofold. First, the propaganda is set within a traditional socioracial policy that had been refined for a generation. Second, changes within Rwanda's political and social conditions in the generation since independence meant that, after 1990, the sense of belonging among the Hutu was no longer the sole factor leading to political mobilization. As a result, this propaganda was grounded in the sheer efficiency of its arguments (combined with sufficient provocation and violence) and became a tool for disqualifying all opponents and for uniting the Hutu masses around the so-called Hutu Power movement, thus facilitating 'recruitment and expansion'. From then on, the use of democratic language became a 'technology' designed for totalitarian mobilization, under the guise of freedom of speech the democratic alibi.
A review of the propaganda themes exploited by Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) highlights its obvious inclination to play on two fronts. The first is associated with racist ardour against the Tutsi 'cockroaches' and the second pertains to the legitimacy of the elimination of these 'cockroaches' by the 'majority people'. The first front, which is ethnoracial, surfaces when journalists use epithets such as 'dogs' or 'snakes' when referring to Tutsi, accusing them of cannibalism and mercilessly welcoming their disappearance. It is also apparent when journalists start theorizing about the primacy of ethnic considerations, about the final battle of the Bantu and HimaTutsi and about the need to eliminate people who do not have an identity card at checkpoints. In fact, the 'interethnic' aspect of the conflict was emphasized near the end of the massacres and in the aftermath of the genocide as growing awareness of international disapproval set in. When he was questioned in Goma in July 1994, Gaspard Gahigi, editor-in-chief of RTLM, invoked his right to speak about the 'ethnic problem' as this problem led to the 'humanitarian catastrophe' that was then unfolding in the refugee camps in eastern Zaire. On 3 July 1994, Kantano Habimana, the most popular journalist host on RTLM, was still advising his audience to 'keep this small thing in your heart', meaning the intent to eradicate the arrogant and ferocious 'hyenas' (Chrtien et al. 1995: 317).HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch5not1"1
When the French Operation Turquoise reached Rwanda in June, RTLM dispensed advice from 'our intellectuals' on the need to legitimize, for the benefit of these foreign friends, the role of barriers during 'a war'. The station also advised of the necessity to approach foreign journalists with great caution. 'Today, everyone knows that it was an ethnic war,' Gahigi explained on 15 May 1994 (Chrtien 1995: 137). In other words, racism is either coded or benignly portrayed as natural, in accordance with ethnographic beliefs prevailing among Europeans. According to this way of thinking, hatred was quite natural between these ethnic groups, public anger was spontaneous and authorities did everything in their power to prevent the worst from happening. This would become the central theme of information campaigns led by those who had close ties to the genocidal regime and oversaw the refugee camps of Kivu between 1994 and 1996.
In the months preceding the genocide from October 1993 to April 1994 and during the slaughter in April and May 1994, the essential reference is that of the majority people and the legitimacy of self-defence against a 'feudal clique'. The reference normalized the massacre perpetrated by the majority, which becomes an expression of democratic anger. 'If the Hutu who represent 90 per cent in our country ... if we can be defeated by a clique of 10 per cent, the Tutsi population, it means that we have not demonstrated our full strength,' said the leader of MRND, Joseph Nzirorera, on 28 May 1994 (Chrtien 1995: 11819). Just two weeks earlier, on 14 May, Kantano Habimana talked about the fact that 'the small-size family in Rwanda' is that of the Inkotanyi [the RPF guerrillas symbolizing all the Tutsi] ... 'It is a minuscule group descending from those we call Tutsi. The Tutsi are few, estimated at 10 per cent,' he added. Already, on 23 March 1994, Kantano Habimana was defending the logic of Hutu Power to fight the logic underlying the Arusha accords. 'This Rwanda is mine. I am of the majority. It is I, first and foremost who will decide, it is not you.'
The aim of this thesis regarding Hutu majority is very clear: to achieve, through propaganda methods identified earlier, a massive and violent mobilization of the Rwandan Hutu in support of extremist factions, such as the Coalition pour la Dfense de la Rpublique (CDR), which was the soul of RTLM. On 3 April 1994, Nol Hitimana spelled it out very clearly:
The people are the actual shield. They are the truly powerful army ... On the day when people rise up and don't want you [Tutsi] anymore, when they hate you as one and from the bottom of their hearts, when you'll make them feel sick, I wonder how you will escape.
Hence, it was freely recognized that the systematic slaughter of Tutsi was legitimate: 'The proof that we will exterminate them is that they represent only one ethnic group. Look at one person, at his height and physical features, look closely at his cute little nose and then break it,' Kantano Habimana proclaimed on 4 June 1994 (Chrtien 1995: 193). As early as 13 May, he observed:
The Tutsi are very few. They were estimated at 10 per cent. The war must have brought them down to 8 per cent. Will these people really continue to kill themselves? Do they not risk extermination if they persist in this suicidal behaviour of throwing themselves against far more numerous people? (Chrtien 1995: 205)
Three days later, Habimana proclaimed the expected victory of the 'Sons of the Cultivators' (Benesabahinzi, meaning the Hutu) who 'slowly exterminate' their enemies. These types of declarations of war, labelling the disappearance of the Tutsi a 'mass suicide', were widespread. They weave together the notions of demographic strength, the certainty of victory and the good conscience of a citizen's struggle. As it had claimed since October 1993, RTLM aimed to 'tell the truth' the truth of numbers and the truth of right. Georges Ruggiu, Belgian announcer for French-language broadcasts on RTLM, calmly explained at the end of June that, as reported by Radio France International, 50 people killed in a commune merely represent 9 per cent of the population of the commune, which is 'approximately the proportion of individuals who might have helped the RPF'. In other words, their eradication was normal. Hence, we should be talking about the 'media of genocide' rather than the 'hate media' because they were conveying and justifying cold and deliberate propaganda.
The democratic alibi that this propaganda so busily sustains is also discernible in historical references. For example, on 23 May 1994, RTLM, via Ananie Nkurunziza (closely associated with the police and acting as an intellectual analyst), linked the prevailing circumstances with all that happened in Rwanda between 1959 and 1967, that is, the way in which a so-called 'social' revolution had been accompanied by populist movements against the Tutsi (including the acts of genocide of December 1963 to January 1964, perpetrated in Gikongoro). In his view, these acts arose from 'a realization' or 'an awakening'. That is precisely what RTLM, pursuing the work of the periodical Kangura, was trying to do: to restore the logic of socioracial mobilization, which had been so efficient 30 years earlier.
As Parmehutu did in the 1960s, the extremists in 199394 likened their actions to those that took place during the great European revolutionary and liberation movements, such as the French Revolution. For example, on 17 June 2004, just as the French government had announced its plan to intervene, Kantano Habimana compared 'the final war in progress' to the French Revolution (Chrtien 1995: 331). On 30 June, Georges Ruggiu, referring to the 'furious population', stated: 'Has Robespierre not done exactly the same in France?' (Chrtien 1995: 204). On 3 June, RTLM editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi awaited international assistance, which he equated to the Normandy landings of 1944 (Chrtien 1995: 331). It would also be appropriate to consider the divine justifications that were invoked, whereby God, the Holy Family and the Virgin Mary were all mobilized for the sacred cause of the Hutu people (Chrtien and Rafiki 2004: 283).
This calculated populism was designed to 'awaken' the Hutu masses. It also served to comfort the usual biases that prevailed in France and in Belgium, notably within democratic-Christian circles and also among leftists, about the nature of the Rwandan regime. In Western media there is an apparent intertwining of ethnographic analysis (atavistic antagonisms, etc.) and a 'democratic' interpretation of 'majority power', to the extent that during the 1980s, President Habyarimana was often portrayed as a democratic state leader, a representative of the Hutu majority. Other factors defining democratic culture (human rights, respect for minorities, refusal to recognize the exclusion of communities, rule of law, social justice) were considered to be ancillary under the tropical sky.
Georges Ruggiu's biography is mainly the account of a young Third World activist who, when he first landed in Kigali, compared the suburbs of the capital to the Brazilian favelas he had visited.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch5not2"2 In Belgium, he had had the opportunity through the social-Christian movement to mingle with Rwandan militant students who were members of the sole party (MRND). As if spontaneously, without possessing an extensive knowledge of Rwandan history, he adhered to the dogmas of the majority people and of a democracy that in his view would be set back by the Arusha compromise. His populist beliefs almost naturally connected with the racial ideology of the extremists with whom he associated.
From a broader standpoint, we know that this belief was also brought forth by President Mitterrand to vindicate France's steadfast support for Habyarimana and later for the Kambanda government, including the Operation Turquoise endeavour. When surveying the French written press in May and June 1994, one notices that various articles printed in Le Monde, Libration or Le Nouvel Observateur combine ethnographic factors (under the 'old demon' of HutuTutsi antagonism) with suggestions of 'popular defence'. One Belgian media report plainly condemned the 'sanctioned racism' prevalent in Rwanda and within a number of the country's Western partners (Cros 1994). On 26 June, reporter Jean Hlne from Le Monde, who was on site in Cyangugu with the French army, alludes to 'popular exultation', 'the relief of villagers' and the concern of 'Rwandan authorities' to 'track down the enemies of the nation who threaten the population' (Hlne 1994). On 4 July, French missionary Father Maindron, even though he had witnessed events in the Kibuye region, declared to a French journalist that the killing was 'a spontaneous popular rage' (Luizet 1994). He was echoed by the prefect of Cyangugu, when he talked to French soldiers about 'legitimate self-defence ... against an enemy from within' (Smith 1994).
What is manifest today is the obvious continuum from the propaganda devised by RTLM through to current theses denying the genocide. In fact, these viewpoints do not attempt to deny the massacres, but rather to justify them in terms of 'ethnic hatred', 'spontaneous rage', 'legitimate popular uprising' or 'international disinformation'. An editorial by Jacques Amalric (1994) was prescient:
Are we next going to lend credence to Capitaine Baril's utterances, who would have Tutsi being responsible for their own extermination ... We can fear the worst, after hearing the content of some private conversations, supposedly held confidentially: 'Things are not as simple as you believe. It is not a question of all innocents on one side and culprits on the other.'
In fact, racist propaganda wearing the mask of democracy the common thread of extremist media was also voiced by official channels and managed to find assent, whether through distraction or genuine conversion, among Western partners. This would largely explain why it took two months to clearly identify, in Western media, the nature of the events taking place in Rwanda. The president of Mdecins Sans Frontires very adequately summarized the situation: 'Neither France, nor the international community gave themselves the means to characterize the genocide and to promptly assume its implications' (Biberson 1994).
Alfred Grosser (1989) wrote: 'No, it is not true that the slaughter of Africans is felt in the same way as is the slaughter of Europeans.' This rings terribly true in the case of Rwanda. Although this could be blamed on a level of indifference toward far away tragedies, more likely it is due to significant exotic ethnographic factors that still hinder a more sensible perception of African societies. But first and foremost in this case, it is because of the effectiveness of modern propaganda propaganda that was well thought out, constructed, refined and of unyielding efficiency, both within and outside the country. This propaganda succeeded in camouflaging genocide and making it appear to be a vast democratic mobilization, consequently trapping an entire population.
NOTES
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch5not1"1. The RTLM broadcasts cited in this article were transcribed from tape recordings used during preparation of expert testimony for the Media Trial in 2002 by J.F. Dupaquier, M. Kabanda, J. Ngarambe and J.P. Chrtien. The tapes that remain are part of the documentation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. We have noted variations in the numbering of the tapes between 2000 and 2002. Thus citations are based on the date of broadcast and the name of the journalist. When the transcripts were also mentioned in our book les mdias du gnocide (Chrtien et al. 1995), we indicated the appropriate page number.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch5not2"2. Ruggiu, G. Dans la tourmente rwandaise. Unpublished journal. 127 pp. This journal was presented as evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on 16 June 2003 as exhibit no. K0269165K0269292.
REFERENCES
Amalric, J. 1994. Gnocide et neutralit. Libration, 5 July.
Biberson, P. 1994. Rwanda: le pige humanitaire. Le Figaro, 15 July.
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier, M. Kabanda and J. Ngarambe. 1995. Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Karthala (with Reporters Sans Frontires), Paris, France.
Chrtien, J.P. and U. Rafiki. 2004, L'glise de Kibeho au Rwanda, lieu de culte ou lieu de mmoire du gnocide de 1994? Revue d'histoire de la Shoah, 181, July-December (Gnocides lieux et non-lieux de mmoire): 27790.
Cros, M.F. 1994. Un racisme de bon aloi. La Libre Belgique, 1 June.
Des Forges, A. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, New York, NY, USA.
Grosser, A. 1989. Le crime et la mmoire. Flammarion, Paris, France.
Hatzfeld, J. 2003. Une saison de machettes. Le Seuil, Paris, France.
Hlne, J. 1994. Liesse chez les Hutus, soulagement chez les Tutsis. Le Monde, 267 June.
Luizet, F. 1994. Le 'journal de guerre' du pre Maindron. Le Figaro, 4 July.
Mucchielli, R. 1972. Psychologie de la publicit et de la propagande. Les ditions ESF, Paris, F r a n c e .
S m i t h , S . 1 9 9 4 . I m L a n d d e r M a s s e n g r b e r . D e r S p i e g e l , 4 J u l y .
6 ( K a n g u r a : t h e T r i u m p h o f P r o p a g a n d a R e f i n e d
M a r c e l K a b a n d a
I n R w a n d a ' s p r i n t m e d i a o f t h e 1 9 9 0 s , t h e p u b l i c a t i o n t h a t h a d t h e m o s t i m p a c t o n t h e c o u n t r y w a s t h e b i m o n t h l y n e w s p a p e r K a n gura. It was well known for its hysterical hatred of Tutsi and any Hutu who expressed a desire for change, freedom and democratic openness. Established in May 1990, and headed from beginning to end by Mr Hassan Ngeze, Kangura soon became famous for its publication of what was commonly referred to as the 'Ten Commandments' of the Bahutu (Anon. 1990: 6). Through these commandments, the paper strongly exhorted the Bahutu to understand that the Tutsi were first and foremost an enemy and that they should break all ties with them, whether those links derived from marriage, business or professional relations.
Kangura also called for the dissolution of the historical, political and cultural community of Rwanda and for the building of a new community, one that would supposedly be authentic and pure. Alongside this new community could subsist a nonindigenous category that would be tolerated, but closely monitored, because its ambition was to dominate. To convince its readers, Kangura proceeded to display flagrant exhibitions of a mummified, pre-revolutionary Rwanda albeit wearing its best modern attire so that it would have some appeal to readers. Deliberately overlooking all changes that had taken place in the previous 30 years with regard to distribution of power and national wealth, Hassan Ngeze delved into history's attic and revealed a picture that was initially put to use by the Parmehutu Party. Essentially, this representation was one of a country dominated, indeed 'colonized', by Tutsi. Kangura brought the Rwanda of the 1990s back to its 1957 version, when Hutu leaders wrote the Bahutu Manifesto denouncing their exclusion.
In 1990, Rwanda was at a crossroads. Refugees who had lived outside the country for 20 or 30 years were asking to come back. They insisted on the abolition of ethnic quotas between groups and between regions. Within the country, more and more people were demanding a multiparty system. Opposition to refugee repatriation, and the stronghold on state governance and markets exercised by a few people close to the president's family, were in clear contradiction to the principles that legitimized the revolution of 1959, namely democracy. Thus, a sense of asphyxia within the country and a feeling of abandonment by those who were exiled converged to condemn the hypocrisy of a system that, while claiming to be republican and democratic, overtly practiced discrimination and tyranny.
Faced with war and requests for political openness, the regime reacted by alluding to the 1959 revolution, which had brought a dual benefit. It allowed the branding of armed opponents as nostalgic feudal groups and called on the majority to mobilize and fight to keep the advantages it had gained. On the other hand, it served to remind people of the populist resistance movement and the first aggression by refugees in December 1963, an event used to justify the most extreme violence. From 1990 to 1994 but particularly during 1991 Kangura contained a number of articles that repeatedly agitated against the Tutsi scapegoat. The Tutsi became those 'who took everything', 'who are everywhere', who control the business sector, who govern despite appearances, who constitute the majority in the school system, both in terms of teachers and students, in the church and within all spheres that symbolize progress.
Kangura aimed to awaken the Hutu, not from a sleep, but from what Kangura saw as a state of unconsciousness that made them unaware of the fact that the Tutsi had secretly led a contra-revolution. Hassan Ngeze attempted to demonstrate that through relentless erosion, the Tutsi had managed to reverse the former position of the Hutu on the social, cultural and political fronts. But the Ten Commandments were not enough to draw in followers. Kangura worked to provide its readers with reasons to believe in its credo, to convince them of imminent danger and to persuade them that they needed messiahs.
Kangura was active in a context wrought with undeniable difficulties, where increasing poverty hindered access to education, health care and employment and within a society that lived by agriculture, while land became less and less available and fertile. Within this setting, accusing Tutsi of grabbing all privileges and identifying them as scapegoats was a sure-fire mobilization tactic. It successfully mustered the support of a majority of young people who were non-schooled, unemployed and without hope for a better future. It also appealed to a great number of graduates who could no longer be hired by a government that was complying with structural adjustment programmes set up by the International Monetary Fund. Kangura revived the Bahutu Manifesto of 1957. This document, considered to be the soul of the Hutu emancipation movement, described the MuhutuMututsi social problem:
First and foremost, the problem is one of political monopoly enjoyed by one particular race, the Mututsi: political monopoly that under existing structures, develops into social and economic monopoly, which in turn, because of de facto selection in education, becomes a monopoly that pigeonholes the Bahutu as perpetual unskilled subordinates.
Attempting to superimpose 1957 values on 1990 Rwandan society, Kangura denounced the so-called Tutsi hegemony and the perceived injustice toward the Hutu, the majority people. First, it insisted that the Hutu remember the revolution of 1959 and the conditions under which democracy could continue.
The fact that the Batutsi are fighting to restore monarchy should incite a number of Bahutu to fight for democracy, to remember the roots of the 1959 revolution. If they do not fully appreciate this fact, then the revolution loses its purpose. And, as the majority people well know, the revolution was justified. They will have to live with the consequences. (Anon. 1990: 6)
The paper pointed out that the contra-revolutionary war conducted by the Tutsi had never stopped.
Remember also, at the beginning of November 1959, the Batutsi provoked inter-ethnic massacres in trying to eliminate the Hutu elite who were calling for democracy and social justice for the benefit of the Bahutu masses, until then crushed under the feudal and minority power of the Batutsi ... Since the revolution of 1959, the Batutsi have not for one moment relinquished the notion of reconquering power in Rwanda, of exterminating intellectuals and of dominating Bahutu farmers ... The war declared against Rwanda in October 1990 is undoubtedly aimed at achieving what the Batutsi had attempted to accomplish through guerrilla warfare and terrorism, from 1962 to 1967, harassing the Hutu population through nocturnal Inyenzi attacks. (Anon. 1990: 67)
The paper suggested that, on this path to conquest and power, the Tutsi had made considerable progress, and that they were monopolizing areas such as the workplace, trade and finance.
The Batutsi comprise 50 per cent of government officials, 70 per cent of private business employees, 90 per cent of staff in embassies and international organizations, and they hold prominent positions everywhere. However, this ethnic group constitutes 10 per cent of the population. National wealth, trade and industry are in the hands of the Batutsi, who often use civil and military authorities as a cover-up. It is to the Batutsi that banks award substantial loans, it is them who benefit from considerable tax exemptions, import and export licences, etc. (Anon. 1991a: 3)
Immediately before the 1959 revolution, one of the central factors that polarized the debate around social relations between Tutsi and Hutu was schools. At the time, research was being conducted to ascertain the proportion of Hutu and Tutsi youth who were educated. According to the Rwandan Comit d'tude du Conseil suprieur du pays (1958):
Twenty-nine elementary establishments of 114 responded, which is 24 per cent of the total: total numbers in these schools: 29,953 Bahutu, which represents 67.81 per cent; 14,211 Batutsi, or 31.70 per cent; 32 Batwa, or 0.01 per cent. Secondary institutions: 29 of 47 establishments responded: 1,116 Bahutu, 39.20 per cent; 1,740 Batutsi, that is 60.80 per cent; 0 Batwa.
In the 1990s, extremist propaganda spoke as if these circumstances still prevailed and education had remained a Tutsi monopoly:
Regarding completed education, the minority remains in the lead ... They have fought incessantly and with courage for their people to massively pursue their education, in such high proportion, when compared to the percentage of the population they represent, which is 10 per cent. Through their cold and calculated expansion, the Tutsi managed to so condition the Second Republic that policies now privatized foreign student scholarships. It is obvious that it was not privatization of scholarships per se, but rather the unprecedented and official award of scholarships to the minority ... Since the 1960s, the Hutu have clumsily directed the conquest of administration, while the Tutsi concentrated on teaching so as to retain a positive image of their people. They have advised their little Tutsi brothers to seek higher education, which is so important in the workplace, particularly in English and computer sciences, among other fields. As soon as they left their classrooms and auditoriums, the Tutsi laureates overwhelmed the Hutu within international projects and organizations, not to mention the administrative sphere. As for trade! Nothing more to say. It is their preserve. Whose preserve is it? The Tutsi's, of course. Their secret lies in that their refugee brothers facilitate imports and they don't have to leave the country. They also benefit more than the Hutu from loans awarded by Rwandan banks ... With this overall intellectual and economic might, the Tutsi progresses without obstacles on the road to his moral revolution. Vague and nebulous are the means chosen by the 1959 revolution to force him to back off, because at the time when the majority was liberating itself, the minority was aiming at the mortal target that is the human psyche. And it is precisely there that we must look for the causes of the October war. (Anon. 1992a: 11)
In another article published in the international issue:
Supposing that statistics relative to teaching at all levels of secondary and superior education were carefully recorded, one would unfortunately be surprised to recognize that the Tutsi is omnipresent. Those who are in establishments of higher education well know the actual situation. Ethnic proportions are unequal and crystal-clear. In public and private affairs, power is undoubtedly secured. The minority managed to seduce Rwandan society and it is now clustered around its core. Some areas have become Tutsi strongholds, namely the Rwandan clergy, etc ... Everywhere, members of the Tutsi ethnic group are united and are forever faithful travellers forming networks, aiming to conquer power. (Anon. 1992b: 3)
Kangura blamed the 'negligent manner with which ethnic classification was carried out' for the increasingly prominent positions held by Tutsi within the realm of Rwandan social and economic spheres. It criticized the country's authorities for a lack of vigilance and for providing Tutsi with identity cards attesting that they were Hutu, which made control and discrimination impossible.
Due to the practice of identity falsification, the policy aiming for ethnic balance has failed. This explains why the Tutsi those who kept their identity and those who modified it now make up 80 per cent of staff in our schools. But who would be surprised by this? Those who should implement this policy are themselves Tutsi, pretending they are Hutu. (Anon. 1991b: 13)
The impact of this lack of control on Tutsi movements is considered to be equivalent to the 'programmed disappearance' of the Hutu from all sectors that symbolize modernity including cities and setting the Hutu back to rural life, which in turn leads to unequal distribution of the fruits of progress. If the programmed disappearance succeeded, the Hutus would lose everything they had gained during the revolution:
Did you know that Tutsi represent 85 per cent of the population living in the city of Kigali? When all those who had no job were sent away, only the Hutu left. As for the Tutsi, they managed to obtain work certificates through their brothers who attested that they used them as maids and servants. Furthermore, after their liberation, their accomplices piled into Kigali in order to be better protected by the international community. What is missing that would unite the Bahutu in such a way? If the Hutu are not careful, they will soon be sent back to the countryside, leaving only the Tutsi to reside in cities. Just look at Kigali, Bujumbura, Kinshasa and Kampala. (Anon. 1991c: 10)
The reference to 1959 is also used against opposition parties but, in this case, the receding timeline is supplemented by role inversion. Some facts might improve understanding of the scope of a campaign that is more akin to a political swindle than to a normal public debate. Historically, the leader of the social revolution is considered to have been President Grgoire Kayibanda. Co-signer of the Bahutu Manifesto, in 1959 he established the Mouvement Dmocratique Rpublicain (MDR) Parmehutu party that would spearhead the revolution. In 1960, elected representatives from the Parmehutu proclaimed the advent of the republic.
In July 1973, President Kayibanda was deposed by a military coup led by Major Juvnal Habyarimana, who later became a major general. Kayibanda and a number of his collaborators were arrested and tried for treason. Some were executed. The death sentence proclaimed against Kayibanda was later commuted to life imprisonment. Held in residence in Kavumu, in his native prefecture of Gitarama, Kayibanda died in 1975 under suspicious circumstances. In the 1980s, Kayibanda's name was revived and the international airport in Kigali was named after him. But his political party remained prohibited. In 1991, during overtures to a multiparty system, a number of political leaders from the centre and south of the country attempted to reinstate the party. Kangura accused them of treason.
These cowardly traitors have succumbed to the temptation of using the people against themselves, in collusion with the unfortunate aggressor who has already lost the battle in the ground. In doing this, they usurped the glory of the MDR-Parmehutu party and lured the people who spearheaded the 1959 Revolution to free the Rwandan people from the yoke of feudalism, into the trap set by the Inyenzi. That is how they hurriedly adopted the name MDR, making sure they removed 'Parmehutu,' in order to appease the Tutsi extremist who had in the past preferred exile to being led by a Hutu elected by the majority, in accordance with the principles of democracy. Through this trickery, they managed to lure to their side some of the citizens who fondly remember ... At a time when the Bantu people of our sub-region are fighting a legitimate battle to free themselves from the tutsi hegemony; at a time when the blood is filling the Akanyaru and its tributaries in the South; it is not the time to fool anyone. The war is between the Tutsis and the Hutus and the only solution is public awakening. (Anon. 1991d: 4)
In so clearly usurping heritage and patrimony, Hassan Ngeze strove to depict President Habyarimana as the legitimate representative of Kayibanda. In a politically skewed message, published in January 1991, the international issue of Kangura stated that the leader of the 1973 coup and gravedigger of the Parmehutu was the best person to incarnate the ideals of the man he had left to die 15 years earlier in devastating isolation and destitution.
Kangura informs you that the RDP (Republican Democratic Party) is born
After witnessing the need for the majority people to have its own party, able to lead it towards authentic democracy, a party through which it can express itself and speak in the name of those who cannot, we ask that all Rwandans, whatever their religious beliefs, adhere to the RDP. This party already has a large number of members in Rwanda, notably those who support the beliefs of Dr. Grgoire Kayibanda to protect the interests of the majority and those of Habyarimana, who promotes a policy based on peace and development. It is not customary for Rwandans to denigrate. You are well aware of the fact that some say successive governments, whether led by Habyarimana or by Kayibanda, have brought us nothing. In our opinion, the most important issue is to appreciate the good that was accomplished by those who have presided over Rwanda since the end of monarchy and to examine together the means for us to do better. (Anon. 1991e: 7)
At a time when the country faced war and others discussed the possibility of moving toward a multiparty system, Kangura ignored current affairs and problems. It was mainly preoccupied with convincing Rwandans that they were still living under the circumstances prevailing in 1957. Consequently, it forced those who wanted change to position themselves with respect to the only worthwhile battle, that is, the battle fought by their ancestors. So as to highlight how clearly this debate was rooted in the past, Kangura not only repainted the present with archaic colours, but it also strove to revive the feelings and emotions that inspired revolutionary action, by giving a voice to those who, from 1957 to 1960, acted as charismatic and uncontested leaders of the Hutu cause.
These men were called on because of their knowledge of Rwanda and their expertise on the issues at hand. In the December 1990 issue of Kangura, Hassan Ngeze, as though wanting to support the decalogue of Tutsi hatred by drawing on the perspective of a wise man, well-versed in HutuTutsi relations, published a text supposedly written in 1976 that he attributed to Joseph Gitera. In response to President Habyarimana who, at the time, had allegedly interrogated him on ways to facilitate reconciliation among Rwandans, this early leader of Hutu emancipation apparently depicted the Tutsi as a Mugome:
It is the pretentious Tutsi, with his Muhutu slave and his Mutwa clown and hunting dog, who chose exile from Rwanda because of his misdeeds and is now scheming against Rwanda and Rwandans. Again, it is this grudge-holding Mututsi who, with his courtesan Muhutu and his subservient Mutwa, is nesting like a snake ready to devour Rwanda and oblivious Rwandans. This one and the other are constantly communicating and co-operating, to eventually take revenge on the Rwandan Republic, its authors and its perpetrators of insult and lese majesty: 'Banze Umwami.' This is the two-headed dragon, one head outside Rwanda and the other inside. Here then is the 'Umugome.' Is he merely a fantasy? Absolutely not. (Gitera 1990: 12)
Kangura's diagnosis of the Hutu situation in Rwanda was catastrophic. The solution it put forward was radical and unyielding. In November 1991, Hassan Ngeze asks one question: 'What tools will we use to defeat the Inyenzi once and for all?' The answer is in the adjacent illustration where Kayibanda and a 'beautiful' machete appear alongside each other (Anon. 1991f). This allegory intends to demonstrate the rationale for the elimination of Tutsi by means of murder, implying that this is inscribed in the republic's history and that it is based on the need to protect the Hutu from the permanent threat of feudal bondage. Kangura refers to past violence as examples to follow. The bloodbath of December 1963 is prominently highlighted. In Hassan Ngeze's opinion, this event holds information that would offer a final resolution to the Tutsi problem within the republic.
In fact, there are similarities between the 1963 episode and the 1990 crisis. On the night of 20 December 1963, a few hundred Tutsi refugees armed with bows and makeshift guns arrived from Burundi, entering southeast Rwanda (in Bugesera). They proceeded to attack the military camp of Gako where they killed four soldiers, then took the road to Kigali after stealing weapons, ammunition and two jeeps. Along the way, they recruited displaced Tutsi at camp Nyamata and their ranks grew to approximately 1,000 men. They were arrested on the Nyabarongo bridge, south of the capital city, by the army aided by Belgian advisors (Segal 1964). This raid, led by 'cockroaches' (inyenzi) to borrow a term they were given to characterize their nocturnal activities was followed by similar fruitless ventures. But this time, retaliation tactics were such that the crisis renewed the atmosphere of 1959.
It seems that Ngeze was fascinated by the way in which the Kayibanda government handled that crisis. Reprisal tactics were of unprecedented magnitude. All influential Tutsi were arrested. Some were released after being mistreated, while others were executed without trial in Ruhengeri (in the north of the country). This was the case for senior officials and leaders of both the UNAR party (Union Nationale Rwandaise) and the moderate Rassemblement Dmocratique Rwandais, well known for their opposition to Mwami Mutara Rudahigwa and for their struggle for a political system that would be more respectful of human dignity and personal freedom.
Tutsi who remained in the country were considered, as a whole, to be suspect and accomplices of enemies from the outside justification for taking them hostage and legitimizing retaliation against them. Members of Parliament and government were sent back to their prefectures to plan the people's 'self-defence', with prefects and burgomasters. These events were truly foreboding of the 1994 genocide. Particularly in Gikongoro, in the south of the country, more than 10,000 people were atrociously massacred between 24 and 29 December that year, their bodies thrown in rivers. According to witnesses, the man orchestrating these massacres, who was frequently seen on site and whose statements were more favourable to the killers than to the victims and escapees of the murders, was then minister of agriculture Nkezabera Damien, an early militant within the Parmehutu.
At the time, Bertrand Russell spoke of the 'most horrible and systematic massacre since the extermination of Jews by the Nazis' (Le Monde, 6 Feb. 1964). On 6 February 1964, the French periodical Tmoignage Chrtien published an account of the mass murders that occurred in Gikongoro. Following are two excerpts attesting to the fact that in Rwanda, even after a generation had passed, we could not ignore what would eventually emerge from the propaganda devised by the media:
In the afternoon of December 25th [1963] would begin a 'plan of repression' that, simply put, consisted of exterminating all Tutsi residents from the prefecture of Ginkogoro.
The entire population Christians and Pagans alike, catechisers and catechumens in groups of roughly one hundred, led by propagandists of the Party and with the authorities' blessings, attacked the Tutsi. This time, the goal was not to loot but to kill, to exterminate all that bore the Tutsi name. In order to prevent potential humanitarian reactions, organizers of the massacre had avoided targeting the killers' immediate neighbours; hillside residents killed people from a faraway hill, and vice versa.
Giles-Denis Vuillemin, a Swiss professor who was in Rwanda through UNESCO, witnessed the events and recorded entries in his journal:
January 3rd, I travel to Kigeme where I meet Dr. Hendersen. At the hospital, there are only a few refugees and authorities are attempting to chase them off. Dr. Hendersen tells me that the hill of Kigeme was spared because of the influence of the director of schools, a respected member of Parmehutu. On the other hand, trucks are preventing access to the hospital. Dr. Hendersen estimates a total of 5,000 dead in the region. From Kigeme, I go to Cyanaka. The mission is full of refugees (1,500 to 2,000). The Fathers there are clearly talking about genocide; in their opinion, only international pressure could prompt authorities to change their policy. In the long term, they say, Rwandan Batutsi are doomed. They would have to be provided with another country, under international control and assistance. (Vuillemin 1964)
In December 1990 (Kangura issue 7: 5) and December 1991 (Kangura issue 28: 3), Hassan Ngeze republished a declaration made in April 1964. In it, Grgoire Kayibanda, president of the First Republic warned Rwandan Tutsi:
You have witnessed the unrest from which we are only now emerging, that was caused by the provocative and irresponsible meanness of the refugees inyenzi. Residents of Nyamata know, those from Burundi witnessed it: blame it on the secular (and incurable) meanness of what is the true essence of the Buhake. Gashaka-Buhake and the footmen who followed him in his flight are still digging the trenches they had started in 1959 ...
We have told you what we expect from you in our 1963 speech: awaken to democracy, follow the new custom in Rwanda. What we want is brotherhood amongst citizens ... Goodness and wisdom will be our weapons. But if you resist the wisdom of democracy, you can blame no one. (Kayibanda 1964)
In February 1991, Kangura republished a speech given in Paris, on 3 April 1964, by Anasthase Makuza, at the time president of the National Assembly of Rwanda, in which this great militant of Parmehutu attempted to justify the aforementioned massacres:
The population did not succumb to panic. It did not extend its neck so that the Inyenzi could cut its throat, according to plan. As soon as the Hutu became aware of the atrocities perpetrated in Bugesera, they understood the great danger of returning to prior circumstances. They remembered the abuse they endured under feudal rule. They glanced at the scars the Tutsi regime had left on their bodies. They remembered hard labour, the contempt they withstood and the practice by which a Tutsi could ask another to lend him a Hutu to murder. They then felt a great anger and vowed not to fall victim to the fate of losers. This anger was intensified by the fact that the former servant had, for four years, experienced the flavourful treats of democracy and that it is those he had called upon invited to do so by his leaders to share in the delights, that threatened to deprive him of his satisfaction. (Makuza 1991: 4)
Reference to the anger of parents is meant to inspire that of their children. Thus, Kangura is highlighting what it is normal to expect from sons who are worthy of their fathers.
It is incredible and intolerable, but here all limits have been transgressed. We have to show these accomplices that it is not they who govern us. It is troubling and it is a genuine problem to consider that the national army has just spent more than a year in the maquis, fighting against the Inkotanyi opponent. In the meantime, the brothers of this enemy come and go freely inside the country, spreading false information, thus demoralizing the national army and the majority people. Obviously, if this is allowed to go on, the people will engage in a battle using alternative means. All is fair in war. How is it that newspapers published by the Inkotanyi draw false lists of their alleged dead and that the Hutu keep silent even though they were killed in greater numbers since the beginning of this war? (Ngeze 1991: 2)
In revisiting these articles, one is particularly struck by the publisher's interest in history. Why did Kangura need to refer to the speeches made in 1964 by Kayibanda and Makuza, or by Joseph Gitera in 1976? In a society where age and experience bestow authority, the voices of elders constitute an excellent argument. The past provided evidence that violence against the Tutsi was normal and legitimate. However, it is clear that those historical references favoured a particular trend, that of the Parmehutu.
In reading these documents, one is amazed by the precision with which the logic of genocide is exposed: identification of the Tutsi from within, as being obvious accomplices in any action undertaken by refugees; a whole component of the population whose members are taken hostage and accused of being, through heredity, enemies of the republic; the justification of massacres if these people would not 'obey'.
They are, in fact, a call to kill, sanctioned by arguments drawn from past experience. In the end, reference to the revolutionary period, both in the print media and in RTLM propaganda (see Chrtien, HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch5"Chapter 5), demonstrates that the genocide bloomed on the soil planted by the 'Barwanashyaka' of the Parmehutu and abundantly irrigated by MRND militants.
REFERENCES
Anonymous. 1990. Appel la conscience des Bahutu. Kangura, 6 (December).
1991a. Si on demandait au gnral pourquoi il a favoris les Batutsi. [What if we asked the general why he favoured the Batutsi]. Kangura, 25 (November).
1991b. N'est-ce pas une infraction que de changer d'ethnie? [Is it not a crime to change one's ethnicity?]. Kangura, 12 (March).
1991c. [No title]. Kangura, 18 (July).
1991d. Le comit de concertation MDR-PL-PSD coince sous la ditature de l'alliance FPRUPR des Inkotanyi. Kangura (international edition), 3 (January).
1991e. Publicit. Kangura (international edition), 3 (January): 7.
1991f. Cover. Kangura, 26 (November).
1992a. vos armes, Hutu [Take up arms, Hutu]. Kangura, (international edition), 10 (May).
1992b. Rwanda: pourquoi la solicarit de la majorit doit-elle provoquer des insomnies? Kangura (international edition), 10 (May).
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier, M. Kabande and J. Nagarambe. 1995. Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Karthala, Paris, France.
Comit d'tude du Conseil suprieur du pays. 1958. Compte rendu, session spciale, 47 juin. Government of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda.
Gitera, J.H. 1990. Par qui et comment reconcilier les twa, les Hutu, les Tutsi du Rwanda entre eux? Kangura, 6 (December).
Kayibanda, G. 1964. Ubutegetsi ni demokarasi. Imvaho, II-96 (special ed.), April.
Makuza, A. 1991. Repubulika ya mbere nayo yagombye guhatana itazuyaza n'ibinyo m a b y ' i n y e n z i n k o t a n y i . G a t u t s e - n y e n z i y a t e y e y i y a h u r a ! K a n g u r a , 1 0 ( F e b r u a r y ) : 4 9 .
N g e z e , H . 1 9 9 1 . E d i t o r i a l . K a n g u r a , 2 5 ( N o v e m b e r ) .
S e g a l , A . 1 9 6 4 . M a s s a c r e i n R w a n d a . F a b i a n S o c i e t y , L o n d o n , U K .
V u i l l e m i n , G . D . 1 9 6 4 . P e r s o n a l j o u r n a l , 3 J a n u a r y .
7 ( R w a ndan Private Print Media on the Eve of the Genocide
Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro
In April 1994, I was director of the Office Rwandais d'Information (ORINFOR), a government agency that managed public media: Radio Rwanda, Rwandan Television, Agence Rwandaise de Presse and the government-published newspapers, Imvaho and La Relve. I had been appointed by the coalition government led by Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana on 31 July 1993 and, in this role, I collected a significant volume of information about the media.
Early in the morning of 7 April, when I realized that the Forces Armes Rwandaises (FAR) had taken over Radio Rwanda and that my assassination and that of my family was likely and potentially imminent, my family and I left our residence to hide at a friend's house; we took only the clothes on our backs. A group of presidential guards sent to kill us arrived about 30 minutes later.
On 9 April, I called the United States embassy, in Kigali, to evacuate my daughter, who was born in Austin, Texas, when I was in graduate school there. We rushed into the car the embassy sent and drove to Bujumbura, Burundi, where we boarded a plane to Nairobi, Kenya, accompanied by US marines.
My exhaustive documentation on the Rwandan media was totally lost. For this paper, I have to rely on my memory and the messages I exchanged with some Rwandan newspaper editors after the genocide. (For their security, I cannot disclose their names.) [Editor's note: The author also referred to the material listed in the bibliography at the end of this paper to refresh his memory.]
TYPES OF PUBLICATIONS
The privately owned print media in pre-1994 Rwanda can be divided into four categories based on their political bias:
Newspapers aligned with the Mouvement Rpublicain National pour la Dmocratie et le Dveloppement (MRND) and the Coalition pour la Dfense de la Rpublique (CDR);
Political opposition newspapers;
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) newspapers;
The print media of the Rwandan Tutsi diaspora.
Pro-MRND and CDR newspapers
Newspapers in this group were: Akanyange, Umurwanashyaka, cho des Mille Collines/Impanda, Intera, Interahamwe, Kamarampaka, Kangura, La Mdaille Nyiramacibili, Umurava, Le Courrier du Peuple and Shishoza. Most of their editors were Hutus from northern Rwanda.
They praised the MRND and President Juvnal Habyarimana's leadership and offered space to MRND leaders to respond to criticism levelled at them by the editors of other newspapers and leaders of opposition parties. They depicted Habyarimana as the guarantor of peace and the MRND as the political party of true patriots.
Opposition leaders were portrayed as RPF puppets, traitors and embezzlers of public funds, demagogues, opportunists and idiots motivated by the desire to settle scores with President Habyarimana. The papers saw the RPF as Tutsi supremacists whose goal was to restore the Tutsi monarchy and enslave Hutus. To them, the invasion by the RPF from Uganda was an attempt to roll back the social and economic progress made by Hutus since the social revolution of 1959. In these pro-MRND media, Tutsi leaders were portrayed as cunning, bloodthirsty, untrustworthy and natural power mongers.
These negative representations tap into Rwandan history and old stereotypes exemplified in such sayings as 'Umututsi umucumbikira mu kirambi akagukura ku buliri' (You give shelter to a Tutsi in your living room, he chases you out of your bedroom) and 'Umututsi umuvura imisuha akakwendera umugore' (You cure a Tutsi of inflammation of the genitals, he makes love to your wife).
Kangura stands out among these newspapers. From its inception, its mission was the defence of Hutu interests and it published many articles dehumanizing Tutsis and depicting them as the enemy. Kangura articulated pan-Hutuism and strived to raise the awareness of the Hutus of Rwanda, Burundi and the eastern part of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) about the perceived threat presented by the Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi and the Himas of Uganda.
These newspapers were funded by northern Hutus who viewed the birth of a private press as an assault on the social and economic accomplishments of the Habyarimana regime. For example, Seraphin Rwabukumba, President Habyarimana's brother-in-law, and Pasteur Musabe, the director general of the Banque Continentale Africaine, launched Intera after Kinyamateka (the newspaper owned by the Catholic Church) and Umuranga (a newspaper founded by Flicien Semusambi) published articles criticizing the Habyarimana regime. The Service Central de Renseignements launched Kangura with Hassan Ngeze as the cover to counter the articles published by Kanguka, a newspaper funded by Valens Kajeguhakwa, a Tutsi businessman and a member of the RPF. High-ranking northern Hutus believed that some southern Hutus, along with some Tutsis, were attempting to destroy the Habyarimana regime and that it was important to counter their attacks. As the name suggests, Intera's objective was to convince the public of the economic progress made by the Habyarimana regime since it came to power in 1973.
Opposition newspapers
Opposition political parties, particularly the Mouvement Dmocratique Rpublicain (MDR) and the Parti Social Dmocrate (PSD), were associated with Agatashya, Ibyikigihe, Ikindi, Ijambo, Intwali-Ijwi rya J.D.R., Intumwa/Le Mssager, Isibo, Izuba/Le Soleil, La Griffe, L're de Libert, Umuranga, Nouvelle Gnration, Nyabarongo, Republika, Rukokoma, Soma, Verits d'Afrique, Umuturage w'U Rwanda, Urumuli rwa Demokarasi and Umurangi. Their editors came from southern Rwanda. After the split of the MDR into two factions in 1993, Umurangi and Umuranga went along with the MDR power faction, a group who felt that the Arusha agreement between the RPF and the Rwandan government gave too much power to the RPF.
Pro-opposition newspapers presented MRND leaders as evil and corrupt: liars, idiots, animals, bloodthirsty murderers and warmongers. Some published drawings of President Habyarimana covered with blood. Intumwa/Le Mssager (no.10, 30 December 1991) published a cartoon featuring Prime Minister Sylvestre Nsanzimana carrying a hyena on his shoulders; the hyena stood for the MRND. In its 25 July 1992 issue, the newspaper depicted the secretary general of the MRND as a bird with a snake around its wing and neck, biting his head; the MRND is the snake in this cartoon. Ijambo (no. 54, 31 May 1993) published a cartoon featuring a gorilla wearing the hat of the CDR. In other words, these newspapers dehumanized the MRND and the CDR, and the newspapers associated with the MRND and CDR responded in kind.
Umurangi frequently published cartoons portraying Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana as a prostitute or sexual object and other opposition political leaders as dogs. In Rwandan culture a person considered dishonest, untrustworthy, cowardly and corrupt is usually labelled 'imbwa' or dog.
These newspapers portrayed opposition leaders as peace-loving people capable of ending the war. They disseminated the view that expansion of the war was something that President Habyarimana and the MRND wanted to keep them in power. According to these newspapers, opposition leaders had a solution to the war: peace with the RPF. Some represented opposition leaders as medical doctors administering medicine to a confused patient, President Habyarimana. Intumwa/Le Mssager (no. 20, 15 August 1992) ran a cartoon of Habyarimana lying on a hospital bed and being forced to drink a medication administered by the leaders of the MDR, PSD and Parti Libral.
Pro-RPF newspapers
Buracyeye, Kanyarwanda, Kanguka, Kiberinka, Le Flambeau, Rwanda Rushya and Le Tribun du Peuple (also known as Umuvugizi wa Rubanda et Le Partisan) strived to be the voice of the Tutsi. Their founders and editors were all Tutsi and members of the RPF living in Rwanda.
These newspapers denounced the MRND regime and its human rights records. They too contended that President Habyarimana and his party, the MRND, did not want peace. Examples of dehumanization of ideological opponents were also found in these papers. For instance, Kanyarwanda (no. 1, 23 September 1992) and Rwanda Rushya (no. 18, 22 February 1992) published cartoons depicting the MRND and the CDR as monsters that thrive on human flesh. Kanguka (no. 58, May 1992) published a cartoon showing the members of the CDR as monkeys. A cartoon published by Kiberinka (no. 8, April 1992) warns Prime Minister Nsengiyaremye not to carry the hyena (meaning the MRND) on his shoulders. In these newspapers MRND and CDR leaders and supporters were depicted as killers.
These papers hailed the RPF armed struggle. They published interviews with RPF leaders, and provided information about its political agenda and the territory the RPF had conquered. They never published stories about the assassinations, the abductions or the destruction for which the RPF was responsible as it advanced from southern Uganda in its quest for power. If they printed stories about violence in the demilitarized zone or buffer zone separating Rwandan government forces and RPF forces, they attributed it to 'the army of Habyarimana', a derogatory label for the FAR.
The front page of Le Flambeau, Rwanda Rushya, Kanguka and Le Tribun du Peuple quite often carried a photograph of RPF soldiers. Furthermore, the editors of this group of newspapers were the only ones allowed to visit the Rwandan Patriotic Army. Jean Pierre Mugabe, the chief editor of Le Tribune du Peuple, frequently visited the zone occupied by the RPF in Rwanda. He even produced a video documentary depicting the RPF military living in the areas under its occupation at a time when the Rwandan government was telling the world that there were no RPF soldiers on Rwandan territory, that they were in Uganda. The government strategy was to refuse to negotiate with the RPF, but rather to deal with the government of Uganda. This video omits any discussion of the destruction of villages and displacement of populations resulting from the war, and instead glamourizes the RPF and its leaders.
In 1993, Jean Pierre Mugabe fled Rwanda and joined Radio Muhabura, the radio station of the RPF. Charles Kanamugire, the chief editor of Le Flambeau, always wore around his neck a photograph of General Fred Rwigema, a founder and commander of the RPF. Vincent Rwabukwisi, the chief editor and owner of Kanguka, wrote in every issue of his paper that he could not get along with a person who did not call him an RPF militant or inkotanyi. His paper even organized a contest to promote the political platform of the RPF. Andr Kameya, the editor-in-chief of Rwanda Rushya, published many articles supporting the RPF and, as one of the leaders of the Parti Libral, he repeated RPF messages at press conferences.
The media of the Rwandan Tutsi diaspora
Rwandan Tutsi refugees had their own publications: for example, Alliance edited by Alliance National Unity (RANU), an organization that later changed its name to the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF); Congo Nil, edited by Francois Rutanga in Belgium; Impuruza, edited by Alexander Kimenyi in the United States; Inkotanyi, edited by the RPF; Intego, edited by Jose Kagabo in France; Munyarwanda, edited by the Association of Concerned Banyarwanda in Canada; Avant Garde; Le Patriote; Huguka; and Umulinzi. These publications were circulated clandestinely in Rwanda.
The best known paper in this group is Impuruza, published in the United States from 1984 to 1994. Tutsi refugees and Roger Winter, the director of the United States Committee for Refugees, provided financial assistance to the publication. Impuruza is the name of a drum, which in pre-colonial Rwanda was beaten to call able men to war. In the first issue of Impuruza, its editor, Alexander Kimenyi, a Rwandan national and a professor at California State University, explained, 'The reason why we chose this name is to remind us that we too are at war and that we have to continue to show heroism.'
Impuruza published articles on the condition of the Rwandan Tutsi diaspora and on the authoritarian nature of Habyarimana's regime. It accused Belgium and the Catholic Church of being responsible for ethnic conflict in Rwanda because of their colonial policies and called for a round table between the Rwandan government and the representatives of the Tutsi refugees.
Although this paper was not sold in Rwanda, it circulated among Hutu and Tutsi elite in the country. Some Hutu elite saw it as the true reflection of an agenda for Tutsi hegemony in the Great Lakes of Africa even though the publication purported to defend the rights of Rwandan refugees to a homeland. Examples of statements suggesting Tutsi hegemony may be found in the name Impuruza and in the article written by Festo Habimana, the president of the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA in the first issue:
A nation in exile, a people without leadership, 'the Jews of Africa,' a stateless nation, all these could very well make wonderful titles to depict the 'saga' of our people. A nation in exile because we are a group of people who are of the same origin, speak the same language distinct from the rest of the surroundings; a people who have been victimized for a long period of time yet survived and excelled under oppression ... It is no secret, as it is not our fault that we happen to be scattered in five or six different countries in which we are outnumbered, and the consequent problems are not of our making that the partition of Africa left us in such dilemma we find ourselves in.
He calls for the unity of Tutsi refugees saying:
But our success will depend entirely upon our own effort and unity, not through world community as some perceive in 25 years, what have they achieved for us in terms of concrete settlements for those who were displaced in [the] late 50s and early 60s? It will be only when they see us in charge of ourselves, and in control, that they will respond and listen. As long as we are scattered, with no leadership, business as usual on their part shall always be their policy. We are a very able and capable people with abundant blessings. What are we waiting for? Genocide?
It should be noted that the Association of Banyarwanda in Diaspora USA assisted by Roger Winter organized the International Conference on the Status of Banyarwanda Refugees held in Washington, DC, in 1988. It was at this conference that Tutsi refugees presumably chose armed struggle as the solution to the refugee problem. Winter, two US State Department officials and a Ugandan diplomat participated in the conference. At the invitation of the president of the association, I attended the opening session. I was then a graduate student in the United States.
After the RPF launched the war in October 1990, pro-MRND and CDR newspapers frequently reminded their readers that the ultimate goal of the RPF was the creation of a TutsiHima empire in the Great Lakes of Africa.
To Hutu elite, Impuruza articulated a racist ideology that predated colonial rule. They particularly singled out a poem Alexandre Kimenyi wrote to honour General Fred Rwigema, the commander-in-chief of the RPF who died in the early days of the invasion of Rwanda in 1990. The poem, called 'Nsingize Gisa umusore utagira uko asa' (A tribute to Gisa, a young man wit h a n i n d e s c r i b a b l e b e a u t y ) , a p p e a r e d i n I m p u r u z a ( n o . 1 7 ) i n D e c e m b e r 1 9 9 0 . H e r e i s a n e x c e r p t t r a n s l a t e d i n t o E n g l i s h b y D r F r o d u a l d H a r e l i m a n a :
Y o u a r e a b u l l f i g h t e r w h o l a u n c h e d a w a r t o f r e e t h e N o b l e s [ T u t s i ] ( S i n c e y o u d e c i d e d t o u s e t h e e n t i r e a r s e n a l ( T h e t e r m i t e s [ H u t u ] w i l l r u n o u t o f t h e c o u n t r y ( J u s t a f e w d a y s b e f o r e t h e f i r s t s h e l l h a s l a n d e d ( T h o s e w i l d r a t s , c o r r u p t e d c r o o k s [ H u t u ] a r e a l r e a d y p a n i c - s t r i c k e n ( T h e y a r e l o o t e r s , h o o l i g a n s , a n d k i l l e r s [ H u t u ] ( I s e e t h o s e t r a i t o r s w i t h b l o a t e d c h e e k s [ H u t u ] r u n n i n g i n p a n i c a n d d i s a r r a y ( T h o s e t h i e v e s [ H u t u ] a r e t r o u b l e m a k e r s . ( T h e u g l y c r e a t u r e s [ t h e T u t s i m y t h o l o g y p r e a c h e s t h a t p e o p l e o f H a m i t i c o r i g i n a r e g e n e r a l l y h a n d s o m e , w h e r e a s p e o p l e o f B a n t u o r i g i n a r e u g l y ] a r e i n s a n e a n d f u r i o u s ( T h e y a r e t he enemies of Rwanda; they are nothing but a bunch of dishonorable dirt.
The Hutu elite regarded Impuruza as the voice of the Tutsi refugees and its editor as the ideologue of the RPF. Kimenyi, the editor, served as the director of research of the RPF: Rwandan officials took this publication very seriously.
JOURNALISM AND POLITICAL ACTIVISM
Except for the government journalists, most journalists in Rwanda did not have college degrees or professional training. Many editors and journalists were militants in the political parties they worked for and were well respected in those political parties. The journalists who were on the side of the ruling party, the MRND, behaved as intelligence agents of the state: ordinary citizens were afraid of them.
Some journalists held positions in political parties. Gaspard Gahigi, editor-in-chief of Umurwanashyaka and Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), was a member of the central committee of MRND; Ngeze, owner and director of Kangura, was an advisor to the CDR; Sylvestre Nkubili, a journalist at Kinyamateka, was vice-president of the Union Dmocratique Populaire de Rwanda (UDPR); Andre Kameya, owner and director of Rwanda Rushya, was the director of the commission of information of the Parti Libral; Vincent Rwabukwisi, owner and director of Kanguka, was president of the UDPR.
Rwandan newspapers looked very similar in format and presentation. Most of them were tabloids; they published articles in Kinyarwanda (the language spoken in Rwanda) and used cartoons to portray political leaders. They watched each other closely and tried to emulate or outsmart each other.
Some cartoons looked alike. For example, Izuba/Le Soleil (no. 12) of 1 April 1992 published a cartoon that had already appeared in Le Tribun du Peuple (Umuvugizi wa Rubanda). It showed the minister of public works, Joseph Nzirorera, hanged by dogs for corruption and embezzlement. Kanguka (no. 51) of 13 January 1992 published a cartoon showing Flicien Ngango and Flicien Gatabazi, respectively first vice-president and executive secretary of the PSD, hanged by dogs for corruption and embezzlement. Finally, La Griffe (no.6) of 11 April 1992 printed a cartoon showing Ferdinand Nahimana, then director of ORINFOR, caught by dogs for his use of public media to spread hatred against Tutsi.
Examples of dehumanization could be found in many of these papers, including those associated with political opposition and the RPF.
To improve the quality of the Rwandan press, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a German organization, included independent journalists in its international training programmes. In the mid-1980s, this foundation initiated a training programme for journalists of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes, of which Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are members. After the legalization of political parties, the American and Belgian embassies also organized seminars for Rwandan journalists. These seminars attracted many editors very eager to learn. After the signing of the Arusha peace agreement, organizers of these seminars even invited journalists from Radio Muhabura, the clandestine radio station of the RPF. I was an instructor at these seminars. Instructors always insisted that the media not be used to promote war, hatred or racist ideology. Such messages went unheeded.
PROFIT AND THE NEWSPAPER BUSINESS
According to some editors, the financial viability of a newspaper depended on its readers. The number of readers a newspaper had depended on its political leanings. The buyers of the newspaper and the financial supporters were members of the political party the newspaper had chosen to support. The newspapers that sided with political parties that had money were the ones that were viable and published regularly. Those supporting the MRND and the RPF fall into this category.
Newspapers supporting the MRND included Kangura, Umurwanashyaka, Interahamwe, Kamarampaka, cho des Mille Collines and La Mdaille Nyiramacibili.
Among those supporting the RPF were Kanguka, Rwanda Rushya and Le Flambeau. These newspapers and their editors had financial resources that came from wealthy Tutsis, such as Valence Kajeguhakwa, the director of planning of the RPF. The three newspapers had an office, a telephone and other office equipment.
Other editors frequently published articles supporting RPF views, usually from RPF supporters living inside Rwanda. To have these articles published, RPF supporters had to pay substantial sums of money. Some editors who received such funding were Elie Mpayimana of L're de Libert, Theoneste Muberantwali of Nyabarongo, douard Mutsinzi of Le Mssager, douard Mpongebuke of Umuturage and Augustin Hangimana of Ijambo.
A former Rwandan editor who now lives in exile wrote to me:
When we launched independent news organizations in 1990 (I launched mine in June 1990) we had many contacts with RPF milieus. However, at that time, these milieus were called Rwanda National Unity. There were individuals who gave us articles to publish using Tutsi channels (business people) and there were individuals who gave us money for subscriptions of support (for instance a person would say I have read your articles and I liked them, here is a contribution to publish in the next issue of your newspaper). I later found out that there was also some confusion since there were powerful Tutsi who knew there was something in preparation but did not have necessary contacts and thought we had them, and they asked us for them. Some would ask to meet with me and whenever they saw me and realized I did not look like them, they were disappointed. After the war broke out, some people accused me of supporting the enemy; there were powerful Tutsis who were convinced I was a member of the RPF, and they asked me for contacts ... However later they found the proper channels of establishing links with the RPF.
Some newspapers received financial assistance from people who were only motivated to bring about democratic change in the country. Among them are Isibo and Ikindi, which received financial assistance from the United States embassy and wealthy supporters of the opposition MDR. Some received a budget from their founders. Among these were state-run newspapers; Kinyamateka, a Catholic-owned newspaper; Imbaga, a newspaper owned by Centre Iwacu, a private nongovernmental organization (NGO); and the newspapers owned by political parties. Other newspapers and their editorial staff did not make a profit and journalists who worked for them were poor.
Selling newspapers was a major problem. Every editor had to find a market and organize a distribution system. In Kigali, newspapers were sold at the central bus station and children sold newspapers on the street. Usually the editors did not receive the money collected by these street children. Quite often I visited kiosks where newspapers were sold to observe reading behaviours and talk to newspaper boys. I could see many unsold issues.
When the private press was first established, a newspaper sold for 50 Rwandan francs (about US$ 0.30). After devaluation of the Rwandan franc by 67 per cent in November 1990, under an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programme, the cost of a copy doubled. Reading a newspaper became very expensive even for me, the director of a state agency. It was too costly to buy all the newspapers that were published in Kigali. I observed that a reader could give 50 Rwandan francs to a newspaper boy, read a copy standing at the kiosk and return it.
Based on discussions with many of the editors of these newspapers, whom I met at seminars and other events in Kigali, the circulation of a newspaper was 2,0003,000 copies. When an issue sold well, the editor would order another printing. Hassan Ngeze of Kangura told me on several occasions that the circulation of his newspaper was 10,000 copies and sometimes 30,000. I always doubted these figures; visiting the kiosks in Kigali, I found many unsold issues of Kangura.
DISTRIBUTION IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
There were many obstacles to the distribution of these newspapers outside Kigali. The first was the high illiteracy rate. To emphasize the impact of Rwandan media on the genocide, Professor Alison Des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and an expert on Rwandan history, wrote:
Some 66 per cent of Rwandans are literate and those who knew how to read were accustomed to reading for others. In many cases, the written word was underscored by cartoons, most of which were so graphic that they could not be misinterpreted. (Des Forges 1999)
However, the general census of the population conducted on 15 August 1991 indicates that: 'The population that cannot read nor write represents 44 per cent of people who are more than six years.'
In other words, only 56 per cent of the population could read and write in 1991. The same general census adds: 'In comparison to 1978, this represents a decrease of 13.4 per cent, since the illiteracy rate was 57.4 per cent for the entire country.' Des Forges' literacy figure suggests that there had been a dramatic change of 10 per cent between August 1991 and 6 April 1994. However, during that time there was no documented campaign to increase the literacy level of the population.
Buying a paper was expensive: the cost of a newspaper was 100 Rwandan francs before 6 April 1994 (US$ 0.75) or the average day's salary of a migrant worker in rural areas of Rwanda. The drop in coffee prices on the world market and the IMF's structural adjustment programme worsened the situation. Potential consumers, such as elementary school teachers, did not have money to spend on print media. In fact, the Rwandan government was not even paying the salaries of teachers on time because it was almost bankrupt.
The newspapers of the government, the Catholic Church and the political parties reached rural areas. The political parties sent their papers to their supporters in the prefectures and communes. Others reached rural areas through people who travelled to Kigali. People living outside the capital did not realize that many newspapers existed.
Editors could put advertisements on Radio Rwanda to announce that a new issue of their newspaper was available, but they could not hint at the content. For publicity, they had to count on the weekly review of the print press, a Radio Rwanda programme produced by Tharcisse Rubwiliza. Those who did not like this weekly review regarded this journalist as an accomplice of the RPF; in April 1994 Interahamwe killed Rubwiliza at his house in Gikondo.
There were no places in the provinces or communes where newspapers could be sold. The administrative structure of Rwanda was still dominated by the MRND and did not allow easy dissemination of any information opposed to it. However, political parties that had organizational structures in the countryside used them to distribute newspapers to local leaders and supporters free of charge.
FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
With the sudden emergence of an aggressive press early in 1990, the government reacted by issuing statements broadcast by Radio Rwanda asking journalists not to abuse the freedom of the press. When those statements went unheeded, the chief of the Service Central de Renseignements (SCR), an agency based in the president's office, called a meeting with journalists in early 1990 and dictated issues that were off limits for discussion. Such issues included the head of state and his family, regionalism or relations between southerners (abanyenduga) and northerners (abakiga), religion and government officials. The SCR chief even designated an intelligence officer to serve as an advisor to the press. His restrictions would have left little freedom and no one accepted these injunctions.
The regime engaged in persecution of the private press, particularly newspapers that were critical of the MRND and its leaders. Editors were frequently jailed, interrogated by the SCR or beaten by its agents. Among those who were jailed were Thadde Nsengiyaremye of Ikindi, Thoneste Muberantwali of Nyabarongo, Janvier Afrika of Umurava, Julien Uwimana of Ibyikigihe and Urumuli rwa Demokarasi and Sixbert Musangamfura of Isibo.
Many issues of some newspapers were not allowed to leave the print shop because they contained articles critical of the Habyarimana regime. Politicians took editors to court. Joseph Nzirorera, a minister of public works sued Sixbert Musangamfura because he had published an article on mismanagement in the ministry. Other editors were targeted by car 'accidents', that is, attempted assassinations. Flicien Semusambi survived a car accident, while Father Silvio Sindambiwe did not.
To silence dissent in the private print press, Nahimana Ferdinand, then director of ORINFOR, convened a meeting of all Rwandan journalists. His idea was to create an association of journalists supposedly to defend their interests, but in fact he wanted to use it to influence the content of newspapers. The journalists affiliated with opposition papers and the representatives of Kinyamateka, a Catholic newspaper, and Imbaga, a newspaper funded by Centre Iwacu, walked out of the meeting and created the Association des Journalistes du Rwanda (AJR). Those who remained formed a pro-regime government association, the Union des Journalistes du Rwanda (UJR).
In June 1991, a new constitution legalized multiparty democracy, and political parties began to publish their own newspapers. Some politicians and parties provided funds to newspapers and used them to defend themselves against political attacks or to disseminate their views. Thus, these newspapers were published regularly. For example, the pro-MRND and pro-CDR newspapers Kangura, Umurwanashyaka, Interahamwe, Kamarampaka, cho des Mille Collines/Impanda and La Mdaille/Nyiramacibili came out at least twice a month; pro-RPF newspapers Kanguka, Rwanda Rushya and Le Flambeau, and pro-MDR newspapers, Isibo and Umurangi, were also published at least twice a month. Their resources came from political parties or their supporters, who were very often wealthy businessmen. Some newspapers had two or three people working for them, an office and a telephone; others were a one-person operation without a known address.
Finally, a law of the press was promulgated in 1992. While claiming to recognize the freedom of the press, its emphasis was on how to restrict that freedom. The Rwandan law on the press recognized the right of any Rwandan to publish a newspaper. It stated that a person who wanted to launch a newspaper had to write a letter to the minister of information and the local prosecutor informing them of his intentions and providing the name of the newspaper, its goals and the identity of the editorial team. Once the person received authorization from both officials, he could begin publishing. If after 30 days the minister of information and the local prosecutor had not responded to the letter, the person could start a newspaper anyway. The law also provided that the owner of the newspaper had to send three copies of each issue to the minister of information and the local prosecutor.
IMPACT OF THE PRIVATE PRINT PRESS ON RWANDAN POLITICS
Erosion of power
The private print media represented the first political opposition to the Habyarimana regime. Until 1989, only Kinyamateka under the leadership of Father Silvio Sindambiwe and Andr Sibomana could publish articles critical of the regime. Under government pressure, Silvio Sindambiwe was replaced by Andr Sibomana, who used the newspaper as a platform to defend human rights. The regime used all sorts of intimidation tactics, including taking him to court. The birth of independent newspapers followed his example.
The resistance of these editors to the authoritarian regime of Juvnal Habyarimana convinced the Rwandan elite that if they needed political change they had to fight for it. The negative representation of Habyarimana and his associates as warmongers, murderers, monsters, liars and embezzlers lifted all the taboos that had surrounded the regime. The regime lost its essential attribute of instilling terror in the population. When multiparty democracy became legal, opposition supporters in Kigali chanted 'navaho impundu zizavuga' (when he [Habyarimana] is removed from office cries of joy will resonate throughout Rwanda). In Rwandan political culture, this type of discourse was previously unthinkable.
Influence on the political process
I believe the private print media influenced the Rwandan political elite. For instance, in 1991 pro-opposition media called for the abolition of the annual compulsory contribution each public- and private-sector employee was obligated to pay as a member of the MRND. (According to the country's constitution of 1978, all Rwandans were members of the MRND.) The contribution was deducted from the pay cheque at the beginning of a new year. Although the constitution was not changed until June 1992, the secretary general of the MRND abolished the annual compulsory contribution.
During the coalition government led by Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiyaremye, pro-MRND and pro-CDR newspapers monitored and denounced many abuses committed by some members of his cabinet who belonged to opposition parties. At the time, the media accused the members of the PSD of diverting public resources toward their political party. The accusation of mismanagement put these ministers on the defensive.
The dehumanization practices mentioned earlier made the political discourse vitriolic. For example, when a newspaper published a cartoon depicting a political leader as a dog, a murderer or a monster, a newspaper favourable to this political leader would retaliate by publishing a cartoon depicting an opponent as a dog or a monster, or he would dehumanize the other or the other's political party during a speech at a political rally. These dehumanization practices found in the media led to the escalation of conflicts between the MRND and the CDR and opposition parties, and it caused the escalation of conflicts among opposition parties themselves. It was common to see politicians depicted in newspapers as a cow, goat, dog, hyena, lion, monkey, gorilla, pig, snake, shark, eagle or mouse. In other words, the media were used as proxies in the struggle for power and reflected the anger and even hatred the political parties harboured toward each other.
To illustrate the impact of dehumanization on the escalation of violence, I have selected three examples mentioned earlier to relate them to Rwandan political culture.
Inyenzi: Inyenzi means cockroach, which is of course demeaning. Originally the word inyenzi had a positive connotation, to do with the Tutsi rebel movement that devastated Rwanda throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In a BBC interview broadcast on 8 November 2003, Aloys Ngurumbe explained that Inyenzi is the acronym of 'Ingangurarugo yemeye kuba ingenzi.' Ingangurarugo was an army division under Kigeli Rwabugili, a Tutsi king who ruled Rwanda at the end of the nineteenth century. Hence, Inyenzi means 'a member of Ingangurarugo who has committed himself to bravery.' Rwabugili, the son of King Rwogera belonged to this division. The word ingangurarugo comes from 'kugangura urugo rw'ibwami' or to provoke trouble at the king's court. When Rwabugili was a child, he and his friends attacked Rwogera's court and took away his cattle. More broadly, ingangurarugo then means troublemakers. During his reign, Rwabugili waged war throughout the Great Lakes of Africa until his death in 1895. Ngurumbe stated that his supporters chose the label, not extremist Hutus, to whom it is attributed in many writings on the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Inyenzi would attack at night and kill innocent civilians. Then they would rapidly vanish in the countryside or retreat into Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda or Zaire. Due to this ability to terrorize the country and to disappear, the population associated the attackers with cockroaches instead of bravery. Cockroaches are annoying insects that disappear when somebody turns on the light. The only way to get rid of them is to kill all of them. Inyenzi became a generic term for Tutsis. By extension, the supporters of the Habyarimana regime and other Hutus opposed to the RPF applied the label inyenzi to their political opponents.
By virtue of this exclusionary practice, during a political rally held in October 1993 to remember the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye, the first democratically elected Hutu president of Burundi, Froduald Karamira, the second vice-president of MDR declared that Radio Rwanda had fallen into the hands of inyenzi and that inyenzi Higiro should be fired. Karamira was referring to me. Given the volatile political climate of the time, labelling a person or a group of people cockroaches was similar to sentencing somebody to death. The Radio Rwanda reporter informed me of this hate language and I ordered him to omit that part of the speech from his report. In compliance with the Arusha accord between the Rwandan government and the RPF, I had ordered state-run media not to use the word inyenzi when referring to the RPF and to avoid all language that incited violence. This policy applied to the news coverage of political rallies, the broadcast time allocated to political parties and all press releases sent to ORINFOR, including those of MDR, the party to which I belonged. Whenever a news release of a political party came across my desk and contained language inciting violence or dehumanizing a group of people, I would cross out that language and initial the crossed out paragraphs or sentences before sending it to the news desk of Radio Rwanda. My family and I almost lost our lives because of this policy.
Hyena: In Rwandan culture a hyena is the worst animal. Rwandans use the name to label a dirty person or a person who has a bad look. Saying that a person is a hyena is to wish him death. It is a very bad insult. In Rwanda it is common to carry a baby or a person one likes or who needs care on one's back or shoulders. Showing someone carrying a hyena like that is the worst possible insult.
The editor who published the cartoon portraying Prime Minister Nsanzimana carrying a hyena on his shoulders wanted to express empathy with him. I think he meant that Nsanzimana was sentenced to death because he was given the tough responsibility of leading Rwanda during a political and economic crisis. I doubt that in the volatile situation Rwanda was undergoing, MRND members decoded this intended meaning. I rather think that they saw the cartoon as very offensive.
Monkey or gorilla: Likening the rally of the CDR to a bunch of monkeys or gorillas is to draw on deep stereotypes or even the hatred that Tutsi supremacists felt for Hutus. There is a Rwandan tradition known as 'kwishongora' an oratory skill consisting of either putting down a speaker or a group of speakers, or deflecting an attack from a speaker or group of speakers. Tutsi aristocrats had to master this skill to be able to socialize with their peers. Tutsi supremacists compared Hutus to monkeys or gorillas as part of this oratory practice because they were confident that they were superior to Hutus and the indigenous Twas. Since the CDR was made up of Hutus, a rally of gorillas was a rally of Hutus. Again the editor's intended message was to ridicule the emphasis on Hutu identity, but it rekindled deeply seated racism. In a politically charged atmosphere, such as the one prevailing in Rwanda at the time of publication, the cartoon was very provocative.
Role in the genocide
Many newspapers welcomed the signing of the Arusha peace agreement between the Rwandan government and the RPF. Interahamwe, a pro-MRND newspaper devoted a special issue to the Arusha talks, with many photos of the representatives of the RPF. The political atmosphere was one of relief and hope. However, the positive news coverage did not last long, for opposition parties split into pro-MRND and pro-RPF factions, and newspaper editors aligned themselves accordingly.
During the genocide these newspapers stopped publication. Most of the journalists were killed.
Did the content of these newspapers serve as the catalyst of the genocide? The media have the potential to shape the views of their readers. As said earlier, Rwandan newspapers reached a small proportion of the population because of their high cost and the high illiteracy rate. They certainly shaped the world view of the political elite, as evidenced by the example regarding the abolition of the compulsory annual contribution to the MRND, and they probably contributed to the escalation of violence.
Having said that, the Rwanda genocide cannot be solely attributed to Rwandan media. The media tapped into a context of social discontent, war, high population growth rate, economic crisis, regionalism, historical ethnic conflict opposing Hutus to Tutsis, bad leadership and such external forces as the structural adjustment programme and the rivalries between foreign powers. It is the combination of these factors that led to the genocide.
CONCLUSION
Basic human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press should be guaranteed to Rwandan citizens, otherwise underground networks will channel social discontent and an explosion of violence will likely occur again. These basic human rights should be sustained by economic development.
Economic development that favours one group over others will inevitably create social inequalities and discontent and, in the long run, likely lead to violence. The MRND regime favoured northern Hutu elite; today the RPF regime favours Tutsi refugees who returned from Uganda.
Journalism is an established academic discipline. It is important that Rwandan journalists learn the professional values of this field and understand the requirements and responsibilities of the profession.
Foreign donors should support the development of a free press by funding the training of professional communicators in Rwanda and by encouraging the Rwandan government to open up the political arena and the state-run media to pluralistic ideas.
Alternative media, such as Internet newspapers or magazines, may reach only those Rwandan elite with access to this technology. It is these elite who are involved in the struggle for power. Cultural centres and libraries may play a major role by making the Internet accessible at a low cost.
For the majority of the population, radio remains the medium through which news and ideas are disseminated most widely. As long as Rwanda is ruled by authoritarian regimes, broadcasting will remain under government control. That is why international radio stations that broadcast in Kinyarwanda and Kirundi such as the BBC and the Voice of America are essential to provide information on topics that are off limits in Rwanda. I realize that these radio stations have their own political agenda; however, it is my conviction that so far they have offered space to political diversity in their programming. Providing space in which differences are articulated is one way to prevent conflicts.
To prevent abuses perpetrated in the name of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, there is a need for local independent NGOs to defend these basic freedoms. These organizations may monitor violations of these freedoms by both the government and journalists and remind them of their obligation to maintain a free society.
Some 'experts' on Rwanda relay the RPF propaganda according to which a racist ideology originated from the teaching of Catholic missionaries, the policies of Belgian colonizers and the social revolution of 1959 that overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. These 'experts' then emphasize the role of Kangura and the RTLM in the mobilization of Hutus around a racist ideology that instilled hatred in Rwanda before 1994. These experts create only two social categories among Hutus: Hutu 'extremists' and Hutu 'moderates'.
In 1992, my parents fled our village near the RwandaUganda border as a result of the RPF 'scorched earth' policy. They moved from one internally displaced camp to another until they reached Zaire, then Kenya. They returned to Rwanda in 1998 only to find the ruins of their home. In which category do they fit? During this entire period they were always on the run. Many other people like them just ran to save their lives. The narrow social categories of 'extremist' and 'moderate' are, therefore, meaningless.
When it comes to the media as well, some experts adopt a binary analysis: the media of hate and the media of democracy. Such a representation of events is, of course, valuable in Western movies or other artistic creations. Rarely do these experts realize that practices of racism and exclusion in Rwanda have indigenous seeds in Rwandan proverbs that stereotype ethnic groups, myths that legitimize the superiority of Tutsis over Hutus and Twas and other social practices.
When I was growing up, no Hutu or Tutsi drank at the same jar of ikigage (beer of sorghum) or urwagwa (banana wine) with a Twa or partook of the same meal in a basket with a Twa. This exclusionary practice was still alive in 1994. Likewise, before the social revolution of 1959, Tutsi aristocrats never socialized with Hutus. Only impoverished Tutsis mixed with Hutus impoverished Tutsis and Hutus made up of what the Hutu leaders of the social revolution of 1959 called 'rubanda rugufi' or the low or oppressed people. Racism and exclusionary practices are not confined to one ethnic group or one group of media as the Hollywood approach suggests.
Before the social revolution of 1959, Tutsi supremacists called Hutus 'ibimonyo' or ants. Ibimonyo are a type of ant that lives in colonies of thousands. They are big and work very hard tilling the soil, but they are considered worthless. If a person steps on them and kills them, it does not matter. The Rwandan name 'Sekimonyo' means the son of an ant or the son of a Hutu. To my knowledge only Hutu parents gave this name to a child. This suggests that Hutus had internalized their oppressor.
As discussed earlier, after Tutsi rebels launched the Inyenzi movement in the 1960s and 1970s to retake power, Hutu elite turned the acronym on its head and labelled all Tutsis inyenzi or cockroaches. Under the RPF regime, Tutsi elite labelled Hutus 'genocidaires' or genocide perpetrators. Unlike Hutu elite, Tutsi elite are careful not to use such a label in writings and speeches at public events. Since the victory of the RPF, Tutsi elite have added a new label to the Rwandan dictionary of exclusionary practices, the word 'ibipinga' from a Swahili word 'kupinga', which means to reject what another person says. Thus ibipinga means those who reject RPF policies, and the word has become a generic term used by the RPF to mean Hutus. By extension, the label also applies to Tutsis who oppose the RPF. As a consequence of this exclusionary discourse, ibipinga have to be eliminated in the elite pro-Tutsi regime by assassinating them or forcing them into exile.
Rwandans who are committed to building a democratic society in Rwanda and to understanding the racism and exclusionary practices that have both historically and contemporarily pervaded Rwandan society, should beware of the limited narratives of experts and the discourse of the RPF. An open discussion on this issue may result in the adoption of policies and behaviours that will lead to peaceful coexistence among the three Rwandan ethnic groups: the Hutus, the Tutsis and the Twas. Shifting the blame on to foreigners and ignoring deep-seated racism will only lead to cyclical violence as each ethnic group strives to achieve a zero-sum solution to oppression.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Keith Harmon Snow, a researcher at Survivor's Rights International, for his editorial suggestions and insight into the politics of the Great Lakes of central Africa. I also thank Ms Maya Graf for providing many of the cartoons I referred to in writing this article. Ms Graf, a Swiss national, helped launch Makuru ki i Butare? the first independent newspaper that existed in Butare, Rwanda, before the war broke out in October 1990.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Centre Culturel Americain. 1992. Media situation in Rwanda. Embassy of the United States of America, Kigali, Rwanda.
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier and M. Kabanda. 1995. Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Karthala, Paris, France. 397 pp.
Des Forges, A. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, New York, NY, USA. Available at (accessed 30 August 2005).
Government of Rwanda. 1993. Recensement gnral de la population et de l'habitat au 15 aot 1991. Analyse des principaux rsultats. Government of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda, July.
Guichaoua, A. (ed.). 1995. Les crises politiques au Burundi et au Rwanda (19931994). Karthala, Paris, France. 790 pp.
Habimana, F. 1984. A Nation in Exile. Impuruza, 1. Sacramento, California.
Hall, S. 1980. 'Encoding and decoding' (revised extract). In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, P. Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language. Hutchinson, London, UK.
Kelman, H.C. 1998. Social-psychological Dimensions of International Conflict. In W. Zartman and J. Rasmussen (eds). Peacemaking in International Conflicts: Methods and Techniques. United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, USA.
Kimenyi, A. 1984. Editorial. Impuruza, 1. Sacramento, California.
1990. Nsingize Gisa umusore utagira uko asa. Impuruza, 17. Sacramento, California. Ministre des Finances et de la Planification conomique. 2004. Recensement 2002 en bref. Government of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda.
Ministeri y'Amashuli Makuru n'Ubushakashatsi mu by'Ubuhanga. 1988. Ingoma ya Kigeli Rwabugili na Nyirayuhi Kanjogera. Government of Rwanda, Kigali, Rwanda.
RSF (Reporters Sans Frontires). 1994. Rwanda: mdias de la haine ou presse dmocratique. RSF, Paris, France.
1995. Rwanda: l'impasse? La libert d'expression aprs le gnocide. RSF, Paris, France.
2004. Rwanda 2004, Annual Report. RSF, Paris, France.
Staub, E. 1989. The Roots of Evil. Cambridge University Pre s s , C a m b r i d g e , U K .
8 ( E c h o e s o f V i o l e n c e : C o n s i d e r a t i o n s o n R a d i o a n d G e n o c i d e i n R w a n d a
D a r r y l L i
F o r 1 0 0 d a y s i n t h e s p r i n g a n d s u m m e r o f 1 9 9 4 , m i l l i o n s o f R w a n d a n s w i t n e s s e d , p a r t i c i p a t e d i n o r o t h e r w i s e l i v e d t h r o u g h a n a t i o n w i d e c a m p a i g n o f e x t e r m i n a t ion a collective effort whose rhythm was in many ways regulated by the broadcasts of Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM). 'The graves are only half empty; who will help us fill them?' an RTLM announcer is reputed to have wondered out loud in one of the station's less subtle moments. The semi-private radio station, reportedly linked to a circle of high-ranking Hutu extremists, has achieved an infamous, if not legendary, reputation for allegedly inciting Rwandan Hutu to participate in massacring the country's Tutsi minority on a scale and scope without precedent in the country's history.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not1"1
Aside from acting as a surrogate information network for the Interahamwe militia and other organized groups dedicated to the killing, RTLM was also the most popular station in the country during the genocide;HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not2"2 it was perceived as a reliable political barometer, a source of entertainment and a provider of breaking news. Yet in many ways, despite a burgeoning literature on the Rwanda genocide (notably African Rights 1995; Des Forges 1999; Gourevitch 1998; Mamdani 2001; Prunier 1995) and even specific studies on radio's role (Chalk 1999; Chrtien et al. 1995; Kellow and Steeves 1998; Kirschke 1996; Nkusi et al. 1998), its impact on listeners remains relatively unexplored and its overall place in encouraging mass participation in the killings largely under theorized.
This enquiry, based in part on three months of fieldwork conducted in Rwanda in the summer of 2000,HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not3"3 seeks to integrate the perspectives and experiences of radio listeners with broader considerations about the study of the Rwanda genocide and mass atrocity more generally. Specifically, I will argue that the question of RTLM's role in the genocide can be elucidated through three aspects: ideologically, it played on existing dominant discourses in Rwandan public life for the purposes of encouraging listeners to participate in the killings; performatively, the station's animateursHYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not4"4 skilfully exploited the possibilities of the medium to create a dynamic relationship with and among listeners; and, finally, RTLM helped the Rwandan state appropriate one of the most innocuous
This paper originally appeared in the Journal of Genocide Research, 6(1), March 2004.
aspects of everyday life in the service of the genocide. Taken together, these three aspects make radio a useful prism through which one can approach the question of mass participation in a genocide that was diffuse, routinized and intimate in nature.
OPENING QUESTIONS
An enquiry into the Rwanda genocide and RTLM's role in it reveals parallel questions and gaps in the existing literature on collective violence and media studies, both essentially revolving around the question of subjectivity and action. Commentators have frequently remarked on the highly centralized and labour-intensive nature of the killing campaign, involving the direct or indirect efforts of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens working under the direction of a strong state using a dense network of local administration and parastatal entities. Although it was spearheaded and guided at the local level by bureaucrats, party cadres and armed elements (military, police, militia), what sets the Rwanda genocide apart from many other contemporary mass atrocities was the participation of such a sizeable and heterogeneous portion of the population (farmers, businessmen, journalists, nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers, clergy, teachers) as killers, lookouts, informants, looters, logisticians and cheerleaders.
The fact of mass participation in the genocide, however, needs to be further understood through three particular aspects that frequently elude systematic enquiry. First, the killing was highly diffuse. Although it did not unfold evenly or simultaneously across the country, it left no region untouched, and the killing itself was carried out in spaces both public and private, including churches, roadblocks, homes, schools, fields and government office buildings, obviating the need to relocate and concentrate large numbers of victims to distant, secluded institutions such as camps or prisons. Second, in the vacuum left by the absence of much cultivation, business and study, the genocide established its own rhythm; participation (construed broadly, not necessarily killing) was routinized. Although orgiastic massacres did occur, many of the day-to-day activities of the genocide (primarily roadblock duty, patrols and searches) were carried out by work crews rotating according to set schedules, sometimes electing their own leaders. Third, the genocide was a project in which mass violence relied on social intimacy. Systematic identification and pursuit of Tutsi depended on the compilation of comprehensive lists at the local level; such surveillance, coupled with movement restrictions, made escape and anonymity extremely difficult. Moreover, the killing involved widespread denunciation and betrayal of friends, neighbours and loved ones.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not5"5
Scholars have drawn from many of the existing theories of collective violence to explain the Rwanda genocide. So-called 'primordialist' approaches, based on the idea of reified 'ancient ethnic [or tribal] hatreds' (teleologically drawing on earlier episodes of anti-Tutsi violence in the late 1950s and 1960s), initially dominated much of the media coverage of and some of the scholarship on the genocide. However, these have been widely criticized to the extent that they now serve as little more than an academic pinata, although their political potency cannot be underestimated (and their potential analytical value, if properly revised, is perhaps under-appreciated at this time). Primordialist approaches have been largely displaced by explanations that emphasize the historicity/contingency of ethnic identities, the role of manipulative and self -serving political elites, crushing economic and demographic pressures, the importance of racist anti-Tutsi ideologies or often some combination thereof. Although these diverse theories (at times grouped together as 'instrumentalist') have provided a useful critique of primordialism and have made a number of positive contributions to the study of the genocide, the question of how mass participation was secured and sustained is often effaced (notable exceptions include Mamdani 2001 and Uvin 1998).HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not6"6 Indeed, in the face of such widespread participation in diffused, routinized and intimate killing, it seems difficult to rely on existing explanations ideas such as cultural norms of obedience, elite-driven manipulation and socio-economic pressures without somehow speaking of Rwandans as easily open to manipulation and control. Yet at the same time, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the genocide came immediately after the period of multipartyism, which was marked by unprecedented political openness and opposition to the state, including intra-Hutu violence.
Interestingly, the holes in the extant literature on RTLM and the genocide are similarly shaped. Pictures of Interahamwe militia with their ears glued to radios and stories of RTLM's more gory announcements were easily incorporated into atavistic explanations of the genocide. The first in-depth studies (Chrtien et al. 1995; Kirschke 1996) reviewed the kinds of racist stereotyping used in the station's broadcasts or unearthed the overlapping networks of power, money, patronage and ideology that brought RTLM and other extremist media to life. Others have analyzed the question from the perspective of sociolinguistics (Nkusi et al. 1998) and media studies (Kellow and Steeves 1998). In exten sively cataloguing and analyzing the broadcasts of RTLM, these works highlight the station's role in disseminating racist stereotypes and inciting specific killings. However, they say little about how media messages were received by their intended audiences and how such broadcasts interacted with other factors at the local level (especially state coercion and mobilization). This empirical gap often allows analyses to fall back on older 'magic-bullet' theories of media studies in which, as Jean-Marie Higiro, a Hutu opposition journalist, put it, 'human beings are considered as automatons' (Higiro 1996: 170). Chrtien's thorough catalogue of ideological themes and tropes in newspapers and radio, considered the authoritative work on media in the genocide, essentially relies on this theory: 'Two tools, one very modern, the other less so, were particularly used during the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda: the radio and the machete, the first to give and receive orders, the second to carry them out!' (Chrtien et al. 1995: 191). He says little of the perspective of listeners or their immediate contexts. In a similar vein, Kellow and Steeves write: 'some African countries have strong traditions of hierarchy and authoritarianism, which increase the likelihood of blind obedience to the orders of officials on the radio. Norms of rote obedience were and continue to be, exceptionally strong in Rwanda' (Kellow and Steeves 1998: 116). Yet such an argument is undermined by the fact that RTLM, started just months before the genocide, was younger than both the familiar state-controlled Radio Rwanda and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front's (RPF) Radio Muhabura. Moreover, many of the Rwandans I interviewed recalled actively debating, comparing and doubting broadcasts from different radio stations, including RTLM, and still do. At the same time, however, it is clear that media audiences do not exist in a cultural vacuum that allows them to 'objectively' evaluate different radio stations; although RTLM was popular and many Rwandans did indeed obey orders to kill, the connection between these two facts must be analyzed rather than taken for granted.
Accounts of the genocide and of radio's role in it share a problematic approach to the role of the human as subject; both tend to assume uncritically the existence of an ordinary farmer/citizen/radio listener, open to manipulation, mobilization and stimulation. These perspectives can find their parallels in the rich and long-running tradition of scholarship that seeks to explain collective action, especially in relation to violence. It is of little surprise, then, that the old dyads of structure versus agency and materialism versus idealism that have long dogged social science research should re-emerge here.
RADIO AND THE IDEOLOGY OF GENOCIDE
There is little disagreement that RTLM propagated a racist anti-Tutsi ideology, drawing on historical myths, stereotypes of the Tutsi and appeals to Hutu unity and that it often did so in a thinly veiled code referring to 'work' instead of killing and 'cockroaches' (inyenzi) instead of Tutsi. Furthermore, the station described gruesome acts of violence attributed to Tutsi as a means of implying what should be done to them (the so-called 'accusation in a mirror' technique: see Des Forges 1999: 656). Yet accounts of RTLM's ideological role that focus solely on racist aspects do not explain why the station's particular ideological world views caught on more than those of other stations; moreover, they fail to show how RTLM transcended ordinary propaganda, from simply propagating certain beliefs or feelings about Tutsi as an ethnic category, to encouraging and facilitating participation in the murder of friends, neighbours and relatives.
To address these two points, the analysis of the ideology of the genocide as propagated through RTLM needs to be widened beyond its amply documented anti-Tutsi imagery. In light of the near-absence of anti-Tutsi propaganda or policy in Rwanda from the early 1970s to the 1990s, I would like to draw attention to how RTLM appropriated and transformed elements of three dominant public discourses of post-colonial Rwandan modernity: history (as a particular way of thinking of the past); democracy (as a particular way of thinking about governance); and development (as a particular way of thinking about economy and work). RTLM built on these discourses while responding to the particular contingencies of the post-1990 political situation in a way that neither Radio Rwanda nor Radio Muhabura appeared to match. Moreover, RTLM helped Rwandans make sense of their active participation in the genocide in terms that were broader than simple hatred or fear of Tutsi by creating a context in which euphemisms such as 'work' and 'cockroaches' could be easily understood through an indirectness that left nothing unsaid.
The discourse of history in Rwanda was a product of late colonial modernity, a particular way of looking at the past based on a unified national narrative incorporating the lives of all its people past and present and cast in the mould of linear progress, whose dominant theme was Hutu victimization (in the colonial era) and emancipation (1959 onward). In this formulation, the 'Hutu revolution' of 1959 that precipitated the end of elite Tutsi hegemony (many Tutsi were as poor as their Hutu neighbours) and Belgian rule represented a radical and emancipatory leap forward, the raison d'tre of the post-colonial Rwandan state that had always implicitly legitimized itself in opposition to the past.
During the genocide, however, RTLM portrayed the progress achieved since the revolution as under threat from the RPF, collapsing past into present and calling on Rwandans to re-enact the do-or-die moment of 1959. Georges Ruggiu, RTLM's Belgian animateur, recalled that the station's management issued explicit instructions to make such historical comparisons and that he said on the air that 'the 1959 revolution ought to be completed in order to preserve its achievements' (ICTR-9732-DP2000., paras 110, 186). Kantano Habimana, arguably RTLM's most popular animateur, once told listeners: 'Masses, be vigilant ... Your property is being taken away. What you fought for in '59 is being taken away' (RTLM, 21 January 1994). Venant, a 69-year-old Tutsi, told me that RTLM 'made [people's] heads hot [ashyushe imitkwe]' when speaking of how the RPF intended to restore the monarchy and reinstate dreaded colonial-era clientship institutions, while another farmer said he feared a repetition of the events of 1959 (interviews, 8 and 11 August 2000).
I do not wish to imply, however, that the simple invocation of specific historical memories had a predetermined effect. What is important about the examples above is not simply that they alluded to the past (after all, one could easily mention a past characterized by HutuTutsi cooperation or even indistinction, as official RPF rhetoric does), but that they built on the discourse of history while undermining its structure as a discourse, specifically by removing the element of progress.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not7"7 The linear shape of history, implying inevitable teleological progress, had long been used to legitimize the regime through implicit comparison with the colonial era. By disrupting linearity and folding 1959 into 1994, not only did RTLM evoke negative historical memories of colonial rule but it also contributed to a deep sense of crisis, in which the nation was suddenly and violently derailed from the path it had been on. While the state had earlier evoked a fear of the past based on comparison to produce assent, RTLM brought the past into the present, producing a more profound horror intended to prompt action.
The discourse of democracy was built around a congruence between ethnicity and nation (specifically the Hutu as the Rwandan nation, with the Tutsi transformed from exotic aristocrats to parasitic outsiders) and a notion of ethnic majoritarianism, in which the president rules by virtue of his membership in and representation of an ethnic majority that will always be entitled to rule by virtue of its numerical preponderance. Not only did this allow the state to demonize the Tutsi as a hostile minority bent on restoring its old dominance (especially early years of the post-colonial state, when monarchist Tutsi guerrillas continued to launch raids from neighbouring countries, prompting bloody reprisals against the Tutsi who stayed behind), but more importantly, it squelched economic, regional and ideological differences between Hutu in the name of ethnic solidarity.
During the genocide, RTLM, the self-styled voice of the rubanda nyamwinshi ('numerous people', that is, majority or masses), drew on this discourse of democracy in its frequent appeals to ethnic majoritarianism, while at the same time attempting to channel the participatory potential of opposition politics rather than simply suppress it. Because the genocide was preceded by a period of multipartyism that witnessed intense and at times violent opposition by various Hutu parties, a priority of the regime was to co-opt or split the opposition as a means of promoting ethnic solidarity (or vice versa). The many such 'conversions' I was told about included a Hutu opposition activist called Ngerageze who, according to an acquaintance, 'heard on RTLM that you had to forget about parties and think only of ethnicity' and became a local militia leader during the genocide (interview, 9 August 2000). Although it may be impossible to say how much Ngerageze's decision was influenced by RTLM, it is clear that re-establishing ethnicity as the supreme principle of democracy was a priority of the genocidal regime. It is in this context that one can make sense of the following remark by RTLM animateur Valrie Bemeriki, a sample typical of the station's broadcasts:
Now, we seem to have forgotten political parties and it is understandable since the enemy who harasses us is unique ... In the meantime, we have put aside matters of political partie s even if the international community is shouting: 'lnterahamwe! Interahamwe!'... But for us, we apply that word to all of us, to all Rwandans who stood up together, at the same time, who got united in order to beat the Inyenzi Inkotanyi. (RTLM, 22 June 1994)
The station also played on the idea of democracy by reminding people of the numerical weakness of the country's Tutsi minority, which would not only guarantee their defeat but absolve Hutu of any blame, since an enemy resisting in the face of such odds could be nothing but suicidal. 'These are Inkotanyi [nickname for RPF fighters or Tutsi generally], they come from a very tiny minority called the Tutsi,' Kantano once explained. 'Will those people truly continue to commit suicide against the majority? Will they not be exterminated?' (RTLM, 12 May 1994).
The discourse of development in post-colonial Rwanda defined the relationship between state and economy after the abolition of colonial-era forms of often coercive 'customary' clientship. It was especially important in legitimizing President Juvnal Habyarimana's regime from the early 1970s onward (Uvin 1998: 234).HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not8"8 The consequences were both symbolic (Habyarimana's party called itself Mouvement Rpublicain National pour la Democratie et le Dveloppement (MRND);the rubber-stamp parliament of the regime was the Conseil National pour le Dveloppement) and material (foreign aid inflows comprised 22 per cent of the country's GNP by 1991 (Prunier 1995: 79). The centrepiece of development was umuganda, obligatory communal labour mandated on nearly the entire population on a weekly basis, enforced through dense administrative networks of both state functionaries and party cadres (umuganda was officially an MRND activity) at the local level.
RTLM's notorious use of 'work' as a euphemism (with machetes as 'tools') needs to be understood in the context of development, with participation (manning roadblocks, taking part in night patrols, conducting house searches, clearing fields) being likened to umuganda on a number of occasions. RTLM's invocation of work drew upon the existing discourses of development while simultaneously recasting communal labour as an exercise in national survival (sometimes described as 'civil defence') at a moment of crisis. 'Mobilize yourselves,' animateur Georges Ruggiu told listeners during the killings. 'Work you the youth, everywhere in the country, come to work with your army. Come to work with your government to defend your country' (RTLM, 5 June 1994). A Western missionary who spoke fluent Kinyarwanda recalled: 'Every morning, RTLM was in the habit of asking listeners, "Hello, good day, have you started to work yet?"' (interview, 29 April 1997, supplied by an anonymous source). It is important to emphasize that work had a value beyond umuganda, which was so burdensome that it more or less fell into disuse during the era of post-1990 multipartyism. The value of work was also tied to the virtues espoused by the Catholic Church (Prunier 1995: 77; Verwimp 2000: 338) and to the dignity of being associated with the activities of the state (Taylor 1999: 141).
It is also important to note that state-controlled Radio Rwanda, which had been broadcasting since the eve of independence in 1962, played a pivotal role in propagating each of these discourses (history, democracy, development) in post-colonial Rwanda; the majority of those I spoke to learned much of their country's past through the radio. Radio was a key site for the articulation of democracy, and Radio Rwanda regularly exhorted listeners to work harder and advised them on agricultural techniques.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not9"9
Yet in the context of instability caused by the RPF invasion in 1990, Radio Rwanda's reticence about the progress of the war began to raise listeners' suspicions that it was withholding the full extent of the truth; this stiltedness was amplified in the opening weeks of the genocide, when the station was largely paralyzed by internal power struggles between MRND supporters and opposition sympathizers. Radio Rwanda's inability to adjust to the fluid political situation in the early 1990s is best captured by the memory of many Rwandans of Habyarimana's death; Domitille, 57, an accused gnocidaire, recalled listening to the radio the morning after the crash in which Habyarimana was killed: 'While Radio Rwanda played classical music, RTLM gave news about the situation' (interview, 11 July 2000).
On the other hand, the RPF's Radio Muhabura remained limited (although it sought to tap into anti-regime sentiment and many of the people I spoke to listened clandestinely out of curiosity, despite potential repercussions). Aside from its dull and propagandistic style (even RPF soldiers were said to prefer RTLM), its ideological vision was perhaps too radical for much of the Rwandan population; not only did it espouse a view of politics that entirely ignored ethnicity (or reduced it to an imperialist plot), but it also raised fears of a radical change in the country's demographic, economic and political makeup by billing itself as the 'voice that repatriates' (Kirschke 1996: 50) a reference to the diaspora of predominantly Tutsi refugees in neighbouring states who fled Rwanda in 1959.
While Radio Rwanda appeared mired in the past and Radio Muhabura seemed to foreshadow a frightening future, RTLM somehow struck a balance between continuity and change, positioning itself in relation to dominant discourses while departing from them in specifically compelling ways. At the same time, it appropriated ideologies that had previously produced acquiescence and depoliticization and gave them a participatory, mobilizational edge, which resonated with the dynamism of political plurality that marked the period of the early 1990s.
RADIO AND PERFORMANCE IN THE GENOCIDE
RTLM did more than merely articulate the ideological world view of genocide; after all, there were dozens of Hutu newspapers that did so as well. Also important was its use of radio's specific properties as a medium of broadcast performance, where oral texts are perfectly reproduced but uniquely received in thousands of different locales as specific events in time.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not10"10 With a virtuosic flare, RTLM's animateurs played off and around the ideological agenda they sought to promote, developed distinctive on-air personalities and sought to implicate listeners in the project of the genocide.
Although the extant literature on the genocide has cited RTLM's informal atmosphere, lively style, good music, off-colour jokes and the introduction of 'western-style interactive broadcasting' to explain its appeal (Chrtien et al. 1995: 734; Des Forges 1999: 70; Higiro 1996: 1; Kirschke 1996: 845; Prunier 1995: 189), it has often been understood simply as a means by which the station could easily 'manipulate' audiences, a kind of Rwandan breads and circuses.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not11"11 Instead, it is also necessary to grasp how listeners interacted with RTLM's broadcasts, and how animateurs consciously or unconsciously exploited the possibilities and limits of the medium.
One key performative aspect was the skill with which RTLM's animateurs played off the ideologies of the genocide, giving an impression of frankness and trustworthiness that also gave the ideology resilience in dealing with contingency. In doing so, RTLM did what any good propaganda must do: provide specific responses to opposing arguments ('balance'), even if they are based on non-falsifiable assumptions. On 6 January 1994, RTLM broadcast an interview with Tito Rutaremara, a high official in the RPF, in which he was allowed to voice harsh criticism of the MRND. Yet Kantano prefaced the interview with a long monologue peppered with numerous jokes and attempts to discredit Rutaremara, referring to him as 'that tall Tutsi' and reporting that he was surrounded by other Tutsi drinking milk (milk, metonymous with cattle, is often considered a symbol of Tutsi refinement or snobbery); after playing back the recording, Kantano noted that Rutaremara 'was of course answering [the questions] in the Inkotanyi way'. RTLM also corrected itself, especially in cases where it retracted denunciations (which were effectively death warrants), paradoxically bolstering its claims to tell 'only the truth'. The performative contingency of the moment allowed RTLM's animateurs to depart from the ideological script of the genocide to strengthen it.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not12"12
RTLM animateurs themselves became personalities, known and invested with certain meanings by many of their listeners, often fitting into typecast roles: for example, Ananie Nkurunziza, a former intelligence officer, as the serious political analyst; and editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi as political pundit. However, Kantano Habimana was by far the most popular animateur ('Kantano talked as if people were right in front of him, which was good for getting their attention,' recalled James, a 41-year-old farmer (interview, 6 August 2000)), a sentiment echoed by many others I spoke to, both Hutu and Tutsi.
Perhaps the most interesting example of the personal authority of animateurs is the strange case of Georges Ruggiu, a Belgian citizen newly arrived in Rwanda, hired at Habyarimana's behest despite having barely any journalism experience and no knowledge of Kinyarwanda (ICTR-9732-DP2000:, para. 8790). Although there has been speculation as to why Ruggiu was hired, most Rwandans I spoke to believe it was because he was white.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not13"13 Both Hutu detainees and Tutsi survivors I spoke to said that the presence of a muzuungu (white man) at RTLM gave it the appearance of strength, perhaps even international sanction. Indeed, some of Ruggiu's monologues seem to serve little purpose other than to leverage his Europeanness for credibility. Several weeks before the genocide, Ruggiu engaged in one of RTLM's routine denunciations of the Arusha accords before adding a unique twist:
Then, this evening in order to feed your thoughts, we thought of searching in our library. We then chose for you two extracts from The Prince by Nicholas [sic] Machiavelli. That book about government and political principles was written in 1514, that is more than 490 years ago now. But good ideas don't die ... These two extracts are going to feed your thoughts and we remain open to others; dialogue and mutual listening seem to us profitable to everyone and if you have written comments, we remain always available to be acquainted with them and perhaps even to broadcast them if they are worth it. Here then is Nicholas Machiavelli who speaks through my voice. (RTLM, 15 March 1994)
After relaying Machiavelli's advice about how a prince must learn not to be good (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch15"Chapter 15) and that he must be loved and feared (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch18"Chapter 18), Ruggiu signed off in a din of classical European music. In this performance, one can see how the invocation of a founding treatise of modern Western political thought, the emphasis on its age, the use of European classical music (probably not contemporaneous with The Prince), and the alignment of Machiavelli the author with Ruggiu the performer ('speak[ing] through my voice') were brought together to create an inter-textual narrative linking the political situation in Rwanda to a construction of European thought and authority, dangling the weight of centuries of 'civilization' in the air before RTLM's listeners.
The power of the myth of whiteness in sub-Saharan Africa is a thing that cannot be discarded, yet, at the same time, must be invoked with the greatest caution. A priori, Ruggiu's authority or credibility as a white man with Rwandan farmers who could not understand his words would seem at best dubious, one must recall that radio often feeds into the dynamics of other enduring social hierarchies and relations. As Immacule, 36, a detainee accused of participation in the genocide, explained: 'Those who understood French liked to listen to the muzuungu and said he was on the side of the Hutu, and that he spoke well and was against the Tutsi. Educated people and bourgmestres would explain the French broadcasts to others' (interview, 11 July 2000). Here, one can see radio broadcasts as events in which different actors create multiple meanings. In a mutually reinforcing process, local elites could play upon and enhance their credibility as educated Francophones vis--vis those who could not speak French, while Ruggiu's reach was extended and his own authority strengthened by the endorsement of such notables.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not14"14
Besides apparently alerting listeners to specific targets and hiding places,HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not15"15 RTLM's animateurs also implicated ordinary listeners in the activities of the genocide; farmers at roadblocks or on the street were frequently interviewed, and RTLM employed techniques that acted on relations among listeners. During an interview at a roadblock, a man once told Kantano that he and his colleagues had killed five inyenzi. After encouraging them to 'keep it up,' Kantano asked: 'When testing if people like a radio station, you ask the following question: who are the speakers of that radio whom you know? Who are the RTLM speakers you know? ... If you do not know them that means that you do not like this radio' (RTLM, 29 May 1994).
In another instance, Kantano called on Tutsi who were not RPF accomplices to man the roadblocks with the Hutu. The following day, while addressing the people manning the roadblocks, he sug gested, 'look around you, the enemy is among you' (interview, 18 September 1995, supplied anonymously). Whether intended or not, such tactics probably indirectly pressured people to listen to RTLM or at least to conceal any opposition to it. 'Some people were against RTLM but didn't have the strength to say so in public,' recalled Jamad, 48, a mason (interview, 17 August 2000); one Tutsi I met was so afraid that he went so far as to purchase a recording of the music of Simon Bikindi, whose anti-Tutsi songs were played repeatedly on RTLM before the genocide, to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime (interview, 11 August 2000).
RTLM explicitly informed conversations that took place away from the physical contexts of listening as well. Broadcasts were often reincarnated elsewhere as rumour, where the possibilities for exaggeration or reinterpretation could only expand. According to one of his neighbours, a militia member named Hakiri used to spend mornings on the roof of his shop with a radio clutched to his ear, listening to RTLM. When he listened, 'his mood changed' and he would climb down and gather people to tell them what he had heard (interview, 22 July 2000). Even if one assumes that Hakiri relayed the content and tone of these broadcasts as faithfully and uncritically as possible, he was still engaging in a process of performance, acting as a medium through which the project of the genocide manifested itself and could possibly be shaped. Across the country, thousands of listeners were relaying, embellishing and even misrepresenting RTLM's broadcasts. One prominent Hutu extremist, taking pity on some Tutsi children at a roadblock, reportedly admonished the militiaman harassing them: 'Don't you listen to the radio? The French said if we don't stop killing children they'll stop arming and helping us' (Gourevitch 1998: 130).
The process of re-performance is even more interesting in the case of oral texts, such as songs, which are repeatedly played and thus more likely to be remembered and passed on in everyday speech. The music of Simon Bikindi, with its rousing tunes and anti-Tutsi lyrics, was part of RTLM's regular fare and provided many of the anthems of Hutu Power. Many Hutu sang along with Bikindi's songs on RTLM in bars and in streets, and even after 'work' shifts. Bikindi's songs, however, could somehow take on a life of their own in different contexts of performance. Immacule told of an old Tutsi woman who was hiding in a cassava field when some passing militia, ignorant of her presence, started singing one of Bikindi's songs. 'When the old woman heard the song, she thought she had been found and so she ran from the bush,' Immacule explained; the old woman barely managed to relay her story to Immacule before being found and killed by the militia (interview, 11 July 2000).
As the old woman's 'accidental' interpretation suggests, each context of re-performance beyond the physical site of listening presents opportunities for different mean ings to be derived, thus adding a crucial dimension of versatility to the circulation of oral texts. Although the Hutu were not reshaping the message of the song (in the way that a rumour may mutate), the old woman's behaviour was not a reaction to a song per se, but to an oral text relayed by particular actors (a gang of armed Hutu) and heard in a particular context (while hiding in a cassava field). In short, she was shaping meaning in the context of performance, however inadvertently. In this way, ordinary people became a medium through which the inescapability of the genocidal project manifested itself, and the old woman's 'mistaken' interpretation serves as a reminder of how contextualized creativity can work in unpredictable and unintended ways.
RTLM sustained the larger edifice of the ideology of the genocide on a continuously shifting foundation of smaller truths, performative moments that rendered animateurs endearing or familiar or otherwise authoritative to listeners. Moreover, the animateurs did not simply perform the genocide before captive audiences, but indirectly implicated them in the performance of the project itself.
RADIO IN THE TIME OF GENOCIDE
In contemplating the question of obedience in the genocide, it is important to note that the capture and mobilization of state resources by its orchestrators mirrored a gradual appropriation of the cornerstones of collective life for the purposes of the killing. The genocide extended beyond bureaucracies to other everyday routines and contexts. From the point of view of most Rwandans, it was not simply that the priest, the schoolteacher and the radio animateur spoke of the same necessity to work, but that they sometimes did so as part of the weekly sermon, the daily lesson, the hourly bulletin. Indeed, one of the most pervasive and overlooked aspects of RTLM's influence on listeners was its quotidian role.
Radio, which bookends and punctuates the daily routine of many ordinary Rwandans, continued to do so during the genocide. RTLM did not simply whip Hutu into a frenzy to channel fear and anger into sudden attacks. Rather, through the daily diet of informational updates, operational details (not to leave bodies on the road in view of Western journalists, for example) and encouraging monologues, it contributed to the framing of schedules and the routinization of 'work'. According to one survivor, local Hutu would gather at the nearby government office, then spend the day performing the mundane tasks of the genocide, occasionally coming upon and killing Tutsi. During that time, many people would listen to RTLM at roadblocks, in homes and in bars during breaks. Sometimes they would listen outdoors in groups as large as 100, closely following the information relayed to plan the next day's activities. When asked if this took place every day, one man replied, 'Of course. It was work. It was to know what to do' (interview, 18 August 2000). Regardless of whether all of the news it passed on was true (and many Rwandans recognized that at times it was not), those who killed still built their schedules in part around RTLM and used its broadcasts to help guide the details and schedules of work. 'Kantano said there are no RPF here, so we can continue our work,' one Hutu cultivator recalled hearing some locals say (interview, 6 August 2000).
Even Rwandans who did not kill still arranged their activities around and took advantage of the rhythms of 'work'. Knowing when certain teams would be called up could help some Hutu evade roadblock duty by hiding or feigning illness. And, as in ordinary times, listening schedules were also shaped by gender. While the men were at work, women often listened and followed RTLM's advice in other ways. Bonfride, a 21-year-old Tutsi, spent several weeks sheltered in the homes of sympathetic Hutu neighbours, often with families that had no sons. Although they risked their lives to hide a Tutsi, women in these families also liked RTLM's broadcasts and heeded the station's entreaties to go out and pillage the belongings of those who had been killed (interview, 2 September 2000).HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not16"16
One of the most apparent ways in which RTLM placed itself in the daily routines of listeners was through one of its star animateurs, Nol (Noheli) Hitimana, who had become a household name after working at Radio Rwanda from the late 1970s until the early 1990s. During the early shift when farmers rose to tend the fields, one of Hitimana's trademarks was to call out to the furthest mountains in the country, issue personal greetings to specific regions of Rwanda and salute named individuals with whom he had met or shared a drink the night before. He was also known for his quick wit, his adroit word play (alluding to his name while giving Christmas greetings, for example) and his fondness of alcohol (he was supposedly fired from Radio Rwanda after insulting President Habyarimana during an inebriated on-air gaffe). Despite (or perhaps because of) these antics, Hitimana was well liked by radio listeners throughout the country.
During my time in Rwanda, I knew professionals of both ethnicities who spoke highly of him as a kind man with no particular hatred or animosities for anyone before the period of multipartyism. Moreover, people appreciated his recognition of and speaking to audiences while on the air. 'He showed that Radio Rwanda was interested in its listeners,' said Elie, 30, imprisoned after the genocide, adding that being mentioned by name over the radio was a small honour for anyone, a moment's celebrity and recognition for hard work (interview, 5 July 2000). Philip, 56, also awaiting trial, claimed that two of his own friends were once saluted by Hitimana on Radio Rwanda. 'He would say hello to this secteur and hello to that secteur. He had his own style, and people liked him and knew his voice' (interview, 10 July 2000). Listening to Nol Hitimana at dawn while heading out to the fields was itself a cultural practice, part of the daily process through which meanings pertaining to the nation as an imagined community, or to the value of hard work as frequently extolled on Radio Rwanda were brought to life.
Whether as a deliberate strategy or out of habit, Hitimana's work at RTLM continued in the vein of many of his old practices at Radio Rwanda. For example, in response to criticisms of RTLM broadcast over Radio Muhabura, he responded with a litany of areas that had experienced RPF attacks:
It's ridiculous to hear them declaring on their radio: 'That murderer, Noel!' Ha! Ha! If you go to Ruhengeri or Byumba and walk around to the communes of Butaro, Kidaho, Cyeru, Cyumba, Kivuye, Mukarange, until Muvumba, if you come back to Kigombe or even to Mukingo, or up to Kora, you'll understand who has suffered and who's the murderer. You'll understand how deep their sorrow is. Their sorrow! When you go on until Base, Nyamugali, or Nyakinama and Nyamutera, you find sad people everywhere. Sad. Really sad. Ask them who's responsible for their sorrow. (RTLM, 1 April 1994)
Here, one does not simply see an animateur invoking the names of specific locales; it is Noheli Hitimana, who for years has been known to salute and greet individuals in all of the country's communes and secteurs. Hitimana's invocation of locales capitalizes on the earlier variants of the practice to convince listeners of a particular world view (in this case, that the Hutu are the victim of the Tutsi) while simultaneously implicating listeners in the areas cited as fellow sufferers. Once the genocide began, the naming of places by Hitimana and other animateurs became associated with exhortations to rush to specific areas where there were still Tutsi to be found.
Similarly, Hitimana's habit of saluting individuals also shaped his work on RTLM. Several days before the genocide, during a commentary on an unrelated subject, he suddenly launched into an attack on opposition journalist Joseph Mudatsikira:
Let me say hello, child of my mother. Let me salute you, as you are the same as Noheli [i.e., also a journalist] ... If you die just as everyone has been speaking about you, it is not like dying like a sheep, without having been spoken of. When we have spoken about you, you have effectively been spoken of. (Kirschke 1996: 93)
The playful familiarity adopted vis--vis Mudatsikira is typical of Hitimana's style, even in the context of a death threat (Mudatsikira was killed several days after the broadcast). Kirschke adds that Hitimana 'joked about the fact that he was singling out a journalist, as if it were an honour to be mentioned on RTLM'. Yet if one considers Hitimana's longstanding relationship with Rwandan radio listeners and his habit of naming personal acquaintances, then such an attitude may seem almost normal, which became the case as Hitimana began threatening individuals with increasing regularity. In the above examples, Hitimana converts his everyday habit of naming, recognizing and saluting individuals into a means of denouncing, targeting and threatening them, all within the boundaries of the same style and the same medium. In his invocation of names and places, Hitimana's broadcasts at RTLM exploited a quotidian familiarity established over a decade's worth of performative participation in the lives of listeners, casting the genocide in the mould of a daily routine.
More important, however, the reliance on familiarity made Hitimana's actions more than mere threats. It made them betrayals, signals to listeners that underneath all that defines their social world, even routines followed in the privacy of the home, lies the possibility of treachery, of being attacked by a Tutsi neighbour or falsely accused of treason by a Hutu friend. Providing an example of what to emulate and a warning of what to avoid, Hitimana showed that it was better to denounce than to be denounced, and that even personal ties of mutual benefit or affection could be subordinated to the imperatives of the genocide. By setting this example in the intimacy of the home and implicitly telling Hutu that they too should denounce friends if need be, Hitimana was, ironically, educating listeners in the rules of the genocide, helping them build trust in a world that was built on the mistrust of others.
Based on available information, I would like tentatively to suggest that the appropriation of the rhythms of everyday life by the proponents of the genocide was part of a dialogic process through which Rwandans actively sought to understand and confront a social world disrupted by four years of civil war, political instability and economic crisis, now coming to a head with the assassination of Habyarimana and the eruption of widespread violence. The process of balancing predictability and possibility is central to any notion of human subjectivity, for the complete absence of either renders human action impossible. Thus, just as RTLM's ideological tropes and performative aspects successfully mimed the familiar while resonating with the contingent, its appropriation of everyday routines contributed to a context that shaped the incentives and categories of thought behind choices but did not determine them.
Although they do not directly involve radio, two sharply contrasting anecdotes may shed light on this idea. In early 1995, researchers for the NGO African Rights interviewed Zakia Uwamugira, then 42, from Gisenyi, in northwestern Rwanda. Having just returned from a refugee camp in Zaire, she admitted to having encouraged Interahamwe through song during the genocide:
I am accused of being there when people were being killed and singing. I admit I did this. I was there when people were being killed. Many people. I joined the [animasiyo] just as I would join any other choir ... I decided to come back because I realised I had not done anything that was wrong. (African Rights 1995: 72)
In full awareness of the murders being committed around her, Uwamugira repeatedly insisted that she had done nothing wrong, justifying her actions through the lens of the weekly state-sponsored ritual of animasiyo (in which farmers were obliged to sing songs in praise of the state, the MRND or the president, often after participating in umuganda). Similarly, many who opposed the genocide also carried out their struggles in the vein of normality rather than nobility. Philip Gourevitch grapples with this apparent blandness in his profile of Paul Rusesabagina, the Hutu manager of the Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali who saved hundreds of lives through his resourceful use of contacts in the regime, money and alcohol. 'Paul is a mild-mannered man, sturdily built and rather ordinary-looking a bourgeois hotel manager, after all and that is how he seemed to regard himself as well, as an ordinary person who did nothing extraordinary in refusing to cave in to the insanity that swirled around him' (Gourevitch 1998: 127).HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch8not17"17 Rusesabagina's resistance of the genocide on its own terms and from within its own structures required a degree of trust in the system itself and in his ability to manipulate it.
Even as everydayness came to be defined according to the imperatives of the project of extermination, different paths of action carved out by circumstance and will remained open: 'under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not ... Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation' (Arendt 1964: 233). Despite the impossibility of morally comparing the actions of Zakia Uwamugira and Paul Rusesabagina, it is their common appeal to normality in a shared social world defined by such 'conditions of terror' that is so striking. Indeed, while it is often noted that the road to genocide is paved with smaller massacres, it may be more appropriate in this case to say that rather than violence becoming normal, it was normality itself that was co-opted in the service of violence.
REVERBERATIONS
This paper hardly represents a comprehensive study of RTLM radio's role in the genocide; at the very least, that would require extensive analysis of Kinyarwanda rhetoric in the broadcasts, more in-depth fieldwork with listeners and more research on Radio Rwanda and Radio Muhabura. Nevertheless, I hope that this enquiry has helped shed some light on issues of relevance to the study of mass atrocity and mass media. In the above arguments, a broad theme emerges of radio implicating rather than manipulating its listeners, informing but not determining their choices. In its various aspects, RTLM's activities intertwined with Rwandans' efforts to make sense of and navigate the world in which they lived during such difficult times. Radio served as a medium through which Rwandans experienced and enacted the genocide, its broadcasts reverberating in the thoughts and actions of millions of people, both participants and witnesses, alongside and at times in opposition to other social forces based on coercion, interest or fear. Its intangible power did not rest solely in words, memory, the psyche, the state or some combination of causal factors, but was produced in the process of articulation and rearticulation by animateurs and listeners.
Such a perspective on radio's role is possible only if one regards listeners (or farmers or killers) as constituted subjects rather than through a concept of agency that depends on unitary, autonomous actors, for whom radio is simply a source of information or misinformation, a stimulus eliciting a certain response. If the subject is permeable to mediated discourses, firmly embedded in an ever-shifting set of forces, structures and meanings, it may be that choices are shaped by and made in the spaces and tensions between these currents. Although this is hardly a novel insight given the contemporary trajectories of much of Western philosophy and social theory (and, subsequently, in some areas of anthropology and history), such developments including the diverse and rigorous critiques of positivism in social science have yet to be adequately confronted by much of the comparative and theoretical literature on mass atrocity. The fact that this literature takes such important human events as its object of study only makes this gap more saddening and only makes bridging it more urgent.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With the greatest appreciation to all of those who agreed to speak to me in the course of research in Rwanda. Thanks also to Alison Des Forges, Samba Diop, Shakirah Hudani, Mahmood Mamdani, Pauline Peters and Sayres Rudy for their comments and the Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Harvard Committee on African Studies, and the Harvard College Research Program for generous research funding.
NOTES
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not1"1. Though not without precedent in the region, unfortunately, given large-scale massacres of Hutu in Burundi in the early 1970s and 1990s. It is important to interpret Rwanda's history of violence in non-teleological terms. The 1959 'Hutu revolution' was marked by violence aimed at driving out Tutsi chiefs; after independence, monarchist Tutsi guerrillas attacked the new state from neighbouring countries, providing a pretext for pogroms against Tutsi in the country. Before such violence subsided in 1967, up to 20,000 Tutsi were massacred and 300,000 were forced to flee (Prunier 1995: 62), creating one of the first major refugee crises in Africa. In 1973, President Grgoire Kayibanda's largely unsuccessful attempt to incite violence against Tutsi was the last card he played before being overthrown in a coup by Juvnal Habyarimana, who remained president until his death in 1994. Although Tutsi were excluded from public life and faced harsh discrimination, little ethnic violence was directed against them until the 1990 civil war; between 1990 and 1994, tens of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a series of tightly focused and planned massacres.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not2"2. Kirschke (1996) argues that 'outside Kigali and other urban centres, the station is reported to have attracted people from urban backgrounds ... rather than peasants from rural areas,' a claim which is not supported by the fieldwork undertaken for this essay. As one imprisoned Hutu told me, 'it's a lie if a farmer says he didn't listen to RTLM' (interview, 8 July 2000). The station began broadcasting in late 1993, with range limited to the Kigali area; from early 1994 onwards, its reach was more or less nationwide.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not3"3. This research is based on a number of sources, including interviews and documentation. Interviews were conducted in the summer of 2000 with approximately 30 inmates in Rwandan prisons who had already pleaded guilty to some form of participation in the genocide and approximately 60 farmers living in rural Rwanda; conversations also took place with various Rwandan academics, activists and officials. Interviews in the first two groups were conducted through interpreters speaking French and Kinyarwanda. Other interview transcripts were provided by anonymous sources. The documentation reviewed included several dozen transcripts of RTLM broadcasts translated into English and French, documents of the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and relevant writings by Rwandan public figures and academics. ( ( I n t h i s e s s a y , s u r n a m e s o f i n t e r v i e w e e s a r e o m i t t e d . A g e s l i s t e d a r e t h o s e a t t h e t i m e o f t h e i n t e r v i e w . I t i s i m p o r t a n t t o p o i n t o u t s e v e r a l e m p i r i c a l a n d m e t h o d o l o g i c a l l i m i t a t i o n s t o t h i s e n q u i r y . I h a v e b e e n u n a b l e t o l o c a t e e x t e n s i v e d o c u m e n t a r y e v i dence (including transcripts) on RTLM's competitors, namely, Radio Rwanda and Radio Muhabura (although the rival stations were often discussed in interviews). My lack of fluency in Kinyarwanda, the short timeframe of field research and security considerations (regarding the prison) made it impossible for me to achieve the level of trust and familiarity with interviewees ideal for ethnographic work. Indeed, I would be the first to acknowledge the limitations of studying radio in a language one does not understand.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not4"4. In describing on-air radio workers, especially those of RTLM, I decided to employ the French animateur/animatrice to emphasize the crucial performative and directive aspect of their work. The English equivalents of 'journalist', 'broadcaster', 'disc jockey' and 'personality' do not capture this dimension, nor does the Kinyarwanda word 'umunyamakuru' (literally, 'one of the news' or 'newsman'). RTLM's best-known animateurs included Kantano Habimana (who allegedly died of AIDS in the Congo), Valrie Bemeriki (currently in detention in Rwanda), Nol Hitimana (who died in a Rwandan prison), Georges Ruggiu (who pleaded guilty to the ICTR and was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment in 2000) and Ananie Nkurunziza (missing?). Other participants included editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi (missing?), manager Phocas Habimana (dead?), alleged founder and leading Rwandan historian Ferdinand Nahimana (sentenced to life in prison in 2003). The singer Simon Bikindi, whose music was featured regularly on RTLM, was arrested in the Netherlands in the summer of 2001 and is awaiting trial at the ICTR.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not5"5. At the same time, it is crucial to recall the extent to which Rwandans either resisted the genocide or merely sought to avoid it. Numerous Hutu risked their lives to save Tutsi, whether out of altruism or greed, while many avoided work for reasons of disgust, laziness or conscience. Indeed, it was not uncommon for individuals to have both taken lives and saved them, severely testing the familiar categories of perpetrator, victim and bystander.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not6"6. Mahmood Mamdani sums up these difficulties well in noting the application of these arguments to hostel violence in apartheid South Africa: 'All of these explanations contain a grain of truth, and none can be ignored. The argument of [manipulative elite] forces is compelling, but it cannot by itself explain the violence: conspiracies exist, but that fact on its own cannot explain why some succeed and others fail. Sociological conditions ... do explain why [people] are more disposed towards mobilization, as economic conditions in deprived communities explain the acute desperation that marks the quest to sustain life, but neither explains the ways in which people actually mobilize or act. Although material conditions do explain the constraints under which we make real choices in real life, they cannot by themselves explain the choices we do make within those constraints. The old argument between structure and agency, between sociological and historical constraint and human will, cannot be resolved simply by holding up one end of the pole' (Mamdani 1996: 22526).
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not7"7. Rwandan elites, casting themselves in the mould of Jacobins, emphasized progress in nearly all discussions of the past. School textbooks cleanly segment the Rwandan past into the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial stages, each new phase foreclosing any possibility of returning to the previous ones. A book by the son of a prominent Hutu revolutionary charting the anti-monarchist struggle and the subsequent achievements of the post-colonial state (complete with a timeline from 1884 to 1994) is dedicated to those who fought for the 'grands principes de Libert, de Justice, et de Progrs pour nous' (Mbonyumutwa 1990: 5).
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not8"8. The Rwandan state dedicated entire years to specific development goals, such as the augmentation of production (1975), education (1979) and soil conservation (1980). In addition, state-controlled mass media were actively used to sensitize the population to such campaigns (Mfizi 1983: 57).
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not9"9. Indeed, one cannot underestimate radio's importance as the dominant medium of orality and communication in the post-colonial era. In a country without a daily newspaper and few television sets, radio was the dominant mass medium, one whose emergence marginalized earlier forms of orality to reflect a new sense of nationness, making radio a dynamic site for the creation of 'imagined communities' in ways beyond the nexus of 'print capital' envisioned by Benedict Anderson in his discussion of how newspapers contributed to the rise of nationalism: 'The significance of this mass ceremony Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?' (Anderson 1991: 35). In Rwanda, the answer to Anderson's rhetorical question is radio.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not10"10. As I do not speak Kinyarwanda and my work is based mostly on RTLM transcripts rather than tapes, the analyses of performance here are obviously biased toward forms amenable to textual interpretation and are, therefore, far from comprehensive.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not11"11. Interviews indicate that the station's popularity and importance during the genocide stem from other reasons as well. Some of those I spoke to recalled being drawn to RTLM's liveliness, but only when specifically asked about it; more general questions about the sources of the station's popularity almost never received replies such as 'because it was funny' or 'because the animateurs spoke well'. This suggests that RTLM's entertaining style was not necessarily its most important aspect. Interestingly, educated Rwandans, primarily Tutsi, always pointed out RTLM's 'street style' as the primary reason for its appeal. It is possible that the reliance of some published accounts on educated, urban informants magnified or reproduced certain presumptions shared by elites.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not12"12. At times, they were even forced to contradict the code of their rhetoric to avoid the pervasive influence of euphemism. As news spread that France was preparing to intervene in Rwanda, Valrie Bemeriki instructed Hutu to welcome them with flowers and greetings of 'bon jour' and 'soyez le bienvenu'. Still, after months of whipping up hatred against whites in general and Belgians in particular, and mixing anti-Tutsi invective with superficial reassurances that not all Tutsi were bad, it was only sensible to make the instructions absolutely clear. 'If you are told to do something, you are not told to do the opposite,' Bemeriki announced to listeners. 'If we are saying that we should welcome the French, that does not mean that we should throw stones at them' (RTLM, 22 June 1994).
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not13"13. Ruggiu made some 60 hours' worth of confessions to ICTR prosecutors, during which he presumably discussed in detail how he was hired and the nature of his work at RTLM, as both topics are featured in his plea agreement. The content of these sessions, however, remains confidential. My numerous requests to ICTR for access to the tapes and to Ruggiu himself received no official replies.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not14"14. Ruggiu's case also provides an example of the oversights that can come with an overly textual perspective in understanding radio. In June 2000, Ruggiu was sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment by ICTR after pleading guilty to inciting genocide. In the judgement, the tribunal's judges cited Ruggiu's European background and consequent ignorance of the complexities of the situation in Rwanda as mitigating factors in the sentencing. The significance of his European background to his involvement with RTLM was not mentioned.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not15"15. In one incident, the station issued the licence plate number of a red van reported to be 'full of accomplices'; the passengers of the vehicle, Hutu dissidents, were stopped at a nearby checkpoint the same day and executed (Kirschke 1996: 121). Interestingly, Ruggiu also told ICTR prosecutors that at the behest of the Rwandan military, he once relayed a message to have a red Volkswagen stopped, giving registration number and general location, but did not know the result of the broadcast (ICTR9732DP2000: para 171).
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not16"16. The ones who needed most to adapt to the rhythms of work crews were the Tutsi who managed to go into hiding. Observing patrol patterns while hiding in the fields during the day, they came out at night to find food, new sanctuaries or to get news from friends. In exploiting the regularity of schedules, even these Tutsi seem to have developed some sense of mastery over how the system of the genocide worked, even if it was working against them.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch8not17"17. Resistance, of course, took on multiple and diverse forms, of which only some occurred in the framework of the genocide. In some instances, large groups of Tutsi were able to organize and defend themselves for some time, fending off multiple attacks before succumbing to superior military force (Des Forges 1999: 21620).
REFERENCES
African Rights. 1995. Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance. African Rights, London, UK.
Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, London, UK.
Arendt, H. 1964. Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin Books, New York, NY, USA.
Chalk, F. 1999. Hate Radio in Rwanda. In H. Adelman and A. Suhkre (eds). The Path of a Genocide: the Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier and M. Kabanda. 1995. Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Karthala, Paris, France. 397 pp.
Des Forges, A. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, New York, NY, USA. Available at (accessed 30 August 2005).
Gourevitch, P. 1998. We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we Will be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, USA.
Higiro, J.M.V. 1996. 'Distorsions et omissions'. In Rwanda, les mdias du gnocide. Dialogue 190 (April-May):16078.
ICTR-9732-DP (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda). 2000. Le Procureur contre Georges Ruggiu: convention de plaidoyer aux fins de donner acte d'un accord d'aveu entre Georges Ruggiu et le Bureau du procureur. ICTR, Arusha, Tanzania, April.
Kellow, C. and H. Steeves. 1998. The Role of Radio in the Rwandan Genocide. Journal of Communication, 48(3): 10728.
Kirschke, L.1996. Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda and State-Sponsored Violence in Rwanda, 19901994. Article 19, London, UK. Available at (accessed 23 August 2005).
Mamdani, M. 1996. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA.
2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Mbonyumutwa, S. 1990. Rwanda: gouverner autrement. Imprimerie Nationale, Kigali, Rwanda.
Mfizi, C. 1983. Les lignes de faite du Rwanda indpendant. Office Rwandais d'Information, Kigali, Rwanda.
Nkusi, L., M. Ruzindana and B. Rwigamba. 1998. The Kinyarwanda language: its use and impact in the various media during the period 19901994: a sociolinguistic study. Report commissioned by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Arusha, Tanzania.
Prunier, G. 1995. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, New York, NY, USA.
Taylor, C. 1999. Sacrifice as Terror: the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. Berg, Oxford, UK.
Uvin, P. 1998. Aiding Violence: the Development Enterprise in Rwanda. Kumarian Press, West Hartford, CT, USA.
Verwimp, P. 2000. Development Ideology, the Peasantry, and Genocide: Rwanda Represented in Habyarimana's Speeches. Journal of Genocide Research, 2(3): 32561. Available at (accessed 5 Sept e m b e r 2 0 0 5 ) .
9 ( R T L M : t h e M e d i u m t h a t B e c a m e a T o o l f o r M a s s M u r d e r
M a r y K i m a n i
T h e b i r t h o f R a d i o - T l v i s i o n L i b r e d e s M i l l e s C o l l i n e s ( R T L M ) i n 1 9 9 3 c o u l d n o t h a v e c o m e a t a b e t t e r t i m e f o r R w a n d a ' s H u t u e l i t e . F i n a l l y , h e r e w a s a r a d i o s t a t i o n t h e y c o u l d use as a mouthpiece for their ideals and a means to propagate their ethno-political war against the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
A detailed analysis of the content of RTLM broadcasts makes clear that individual broadcasters not their guests or government officials were most likely to use the airwaves to disseminate hate. Based on a sample of taped broadcasts, individual journalists dominated the station's programming and accounted for most of the inflammatory statements. In a departure from usual radio programming, monologues by the station's personalities were the most common format of RTLM broadcasts, followed by interviews. News items took up less than 2 per cent of airtime, whereas instructions and directives issued by the station took up less than 3 per cent.
Three-quarters of the time used to make inflammatory statements occurred when there were no guests in the studio; that is, RTLM's on-air personalities were responsible for most of the station's inflammatory statements.
It is important to remember that RTLM broadcasts were not responsible for introducing the language and ideology of hatred into the Rwandan community. Such language and the ideology of ethnic conflict and polarization already existed in Rwanda in the form of a powerful social construct involving ethnic identity. The language had been further developed in 199093 by Kangura and other media allied with Hutu Power.
RTLM, coming at the very end of the conflict, drew its commentary, arguments and interpretation of issues from this existing framework. For example, certain words initially used by Kangura over its four years of publication, 199094, would become popular and the vocabulary of the ensuing genocide. According to the testimony of language expert Matthias Ruzindana at the ICTR on 21 March 2002, Kangura popularized words like kurimbura and gutsemba (to massacre), gutsembatsemba (to exterminate), kumara (to eat up), gutikiza and gusakumba (to clean), kumarira kw'icumu (to spear), gutema (to cut); others related to 'working', such as gukora (to work), ibikorwa (the work), ibikoresho (the working), abakozi (the workers), umuganda (communal work); and words for nocturnal patrols, irondo, and the people's war, intambara y'abaturage. In those four years Kangura set a trend. By 1994, the media had a language and tools with which to convince the population to undertake violence as a form of 'self-defence'.
The media served the narrow political ends of their owners by playing on the ordinary Hutu's fear of dispossession, violence and displacement. To do this the media relied heavily on half-truths and sometimes-outright lies and threats. The media defined who the enemy was, and why. Later on, they would also explain what was to be done to this enemy.
By 1994, history and reality had been skewed by both politicians and their media to the maximum effect, as the late Archbishop of Rwanda and former journalist Andr Sibomana outlines, resurrecting patterns of ethnic conflict and making them a norm.
Through a game of repetition, drop by drop, the media build up moral and cultural constructs which eventually become permanent features ... This failure on the part of party officials and media to stem the progress into the abyss contributed significantly to fuelling a climate of intolerance and turned them into agents of destruction of Rwandan society. (Sibomana 1999: 49)
It was into this politically charged environment that RTLM was born in July 1993, a few months before immense international pressure was brought to bear on the parties in the conflict. The result was that the combined weight of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and opposition party representation in the new government seemed to effectively marginalize the former ruling party, Mouvement Rpublicain Nationale pour la Democratie et le Dveloppement (MRND), and its allies.
The composition of the parliament meant that agreement from at least four parties was required to reach a majority. From a government's perspective, it was clear that the RPF would have an easier time mastering the opposition votes than would MRND. (Jones 1999: 139)
In the following months, tensions increased. In particular, the assassination of Burundi's first Hutu president would be a turning point. Melchior Ndandaye was assassinated by soldiers in the almost exclusively Tutsi Burundi army barely four months after winning a landslide election victory. The assassination gave Hutu politicians in Rwanda reason to wonder if the RPA (another largely Tutsi army) would be satisfied with a negotiated solution to power sharing in Rwanda or if it would seek to extend its control. The assassination was also a convenient example that media such as Kangura used to illustrate the 'power hungry nature' of the Tutsi.
What RTLM clearly did was to reach a greater number of people than Kangura or other media had access to. It popularized the Kangura version of reality. Indeed as the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda stated in their judgement against the founders of RTLM and Kangura: 29. ... RTLM broadcasts exploited the history of Tutsi privilege and Hutu disadvantage, and the fear of armed insurrection, to mobilize the population, whipping them into a frenzy of hatred and violence that was directed largely against the Tutsi ethnic group.
99. ... Unlike print media, radio is immediately present and active. The power of the human voice, heard by the Chamber when the broadcast tapes were played in Kinyarwanda, adds a quality and dimension beyond language to the message conveyed. Radio heightened the sense of fear, the sense of danger and the sense of urgency giving rise to the need for action by listeners. The denigration of Tutsi ethnicity was augmented by the visceral scorn coming out of the airwaves the ridiculing laugh and the nasty sneer. These elements greatly amplified the impact of RTLM broadcasts. (ICTR summary judgement, see HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch25"Chapter 25)
Through RTLM, the Hutu elite of the time created an environment in which the 'Tutsis of the past' and the 'Tutsis of the present' became the same. The 'Tutsis of the past', who had according to mistaken beliefs of the past and contemporary histories ruled Rwanda with an iron fist and exploited the Hutu mercilessly, and the 'Tutsis of the present', who were allegedly invading and trying to take over power, were one and the same. They had to be fought and they had to be taught that the Hutu would never submit to them again.
The general picture painted of the Tutsi community by RTLM was that of a treacherous people, people who had hoodwinked the Hutu, living with them in apparent peace while all the while planning an attack.
In the last months before the genocide, RTLM emphasized the similarity between what was happening in 1994 and what had happened in 1959. It was a choice of going back to the slavery that preceded 1959 or rising up and protecting one's freedom, even one's life. For that, one could not trust any Tutsi civilian because it was not possible to know how deeply the RPF had infiltrated such people.
On 23 May 1994, Ananie Nkurunziza, responsible for political analysis in RTLM, made one of these comparisons between the past and the present. He drew on comments made by a politician in one of the parties formed during independence.
Recently, I am always dealing with similarities; those Tutsis killed the president of the Republic. Therefore the masses got up. The population stood up at once. With the attacks of 1966, which are similar to those of 1994, the population has always been vigilant. In addition, Thaddeus Bagaragaza (of APROSOMA) was asked the reason why, during the 1959 revolution, so many Tutsis were killed, whether they all were on the king's side. He well answered that even Tutsis who were not chiefs were all on the king's side. Here we have to see the similarity of things.
Kantano, we've already said it, Tutsis, Rwandan Tutsis, will understand later perhaps that they shouldn't cling on one fixed idea. Clinging to their Tutsi hood is not a sort of loneliness but a constant will to dominate, a feeling of being special, supreme beings. That's why according to Bagaragaza, a so big number died, because even those who weren't chiefs considered themselves as superior to Hutus.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9not1"1
Five days later, Kantano Habimana, another RTLM journalist adds:
Wait until we get enough bullets to chase them away, they will regret what brought them here. They said they will kill all Hutus but what can they use to decimate Hutus? One Tutsi may kill one Hutu, but in the end 6 million Hutus can survive, then what ethnic group would be injured the most? (Kantano Habimana, RTLM broadcast)
After 6 April, RTLM criticized and gave instructions and orders to people in the government. RTLM journalists and government officials sent out mutually reinforcing statements targeting sections of the population that were alleged members of RPA or its political wing RPF and anyone believed or suspected to be supporting it. The political elite made sure that people understood that the government supported the message of RTLM. Prime Minister Jean Kambanda called on the station and in a broadcast told the population that RTLM was 'one of the key weapons in the war'.
The station and government officials reinforced each other's call for all able-bodied people in Rwanda to actively participate in the campaign to find the RPF, the RPA and all persons associated with them. Participation was made an imperative. Those who did not participate and wanted to flee the war were mocked by RTLM and sometimes targeted for death. RTLM, as well as political leaders, made it clear that killing 'the enemy' was the duty of every Rwandan.
RTLM's role in the genocide was to reinforce distorted notions of Rwandan history. It used these notions to describe to the ordinary population the 'threat' posed by RPA and an amorphous group of supporters that ranged from innocent Tutsis to the commander of the UNAMIR forces. It used these mythical images of Tutsi cruelty and treachery to spur people into action by presenting a fait accompli; participate or be subjected to slavery and extermination by the blood thirsty RPA. Kill or be killed.
ANALYSIS OF RTLM BROADCASTS
As part of a master's degree in communication psychology, I conducted a content analysis of RTLM broadcasts. Written transcripts of a selection of broadcasts were used; in some instances, the transcripts were compared with audio recordings. I relied on a database created by the International Monitor group, which contained transcripts of 99 tapes, 56 of which were RTLM broadcasts. The recordings varied in length from 60 minutes to several hours. I also had access to a CD-ROM database used by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) prosecution team, which contained more than 100 transcripts of other broadcasts. Of the transcripts obtained from the ICTR, 16 were examined as part of the content analysis. Thus, in total, 72 transcripts of RTLM broadcasts, ranging in length from one to three hours were examined. The tapes had been transcribed into English and French. I am fluent in English and read French with relative ease.
CLASSIFICATION OF DATA AND DEFINITION OF TERMS
The broadcasts were classified according to the following characteristics:
Format of broadcast;
Name of broadcaster;
Name of guest or interviewee;
Theme or subject of the broadcast;
Group targeted for violence or hatred by the particular broadcast;
Type of statement that targets a group or person for violence or hatred.
Format of broadcast
The format of RTLM broadcasts included monologues, dialogues, group discussions, interviews, speeches or statements, songs, news, interrogations, instructions.
'Dialogue' is defined as a conversation between two people while 'group discussion' involves three or more people.
An 'interview' is a formal question-and-answer session, making it different from a dialogue, which is an informal exchange of views. RTLM broadcasts used the interview format with guests, but broadcasters also discussed issues with each other. 'Discussion' has, therefore, been used to describe programmes in which two members of the team are talking about an issue while 'interview' applies when questions are put to outsiders.
'Instructions' are directives on what to do and how to act.
Certain broadcasts were difficult to categorize. For example, like other African radio stations, RTLM often broadcast programmes in which the broadcaster read out greetings and messages from the audience, often interspersed with music and the broadcaster's own commentary and witticisms. I have categorized all such broadcasts as 'other' (see HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab1"Table 9.1).
Name of broadcaster
Only seven RTLM journalists were well known. However, other freelance journalists could be heard from time to time. The staff who transcribed the tapes were sometimes unable to identify the journalist; these are grouped under 'unknown' as opposed to 'other' who were not regular journalists but were recognized. Jean Baptiste Bamwanga is a Radio Rwanda journalist, for example; however, RTLM borrowed Radio Rwanda material and he is included because of the frequency with which he appeared (see HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab2"Table 9.2).
Name of guest or interviewee
Those interviewed by RTLM are of particular importance to this research as this is where we begin our study of the interaction of the message and the authority figures. The list (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab3"Table 9.3) includes a number of known political and military figures and certain persons linked to the launch of RTLM and Kangura newspaper, in addition to representatives of important parties and groups. This is accurate only insofar as these people speak on behalf of the party or militia they claim to represent.
Theme or subject of the broadcast
From study of an initial sample, it was apparent that the classification in this area should indicate the general tone in which the subject matter was discussed. In addition, certain subjects are classified as general, as the subject matter, which was not political, was neither positive nor negative, but purely information, e.g., sports news, news of other countries, etc. (see HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab5"Table 9.5).
Group targeted for violence or hatred
This category deals with whether the broadcast called for action against a particular group of people and what kind of action was called for. I classified the data into two broad areas: a broadcast that warned people to beware, watch closely for, be vigilant and wary of infiltration by targeted persons; and directives. In the latter, the broadcaster asks for violent action to be taken against the targeted group (beaten, killed, exterminated) or gives instructions for people to go to a certain area and take similar action against a targeted group (see HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab6"Table 9.6).
I distinguished between use of the words Inyenzi and Inkotanyi. Inyenzi has connotations that go beyond meaning the RPA and could mean a Tutsi or an associate of the RPF. Broadcasts targeting the Inkotanyi are classified as targeting the RPF.
Type of statement that targets a group or person for violence or hatred
Broadcasts including statements used to target people for harm or violence were more difficult to categorize. In deciding what to call a broadcast likely to create hatred or harm, I relied heavily on Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (UN 1966). I also considered what would be considered provocative in the Rwandan context.
The definition I have come up with in describing what I was looking for is: a statement that was likely, not only to portray a group, issue or person in a threatening light, but also likely to impute ill or anti-social motives to a group or person, thereby justifying a response for self-defence, or any direct call for negative action, such as killing, and justification for such action.
In some cases, the broadcast may be justified; for instance the negative portrayal of the RPA after a spate of crippling bombing raids by that group cannot be called calls to hatred. However, these have also been identified and classified as they form part of the debate on what role the RTLM played.
I classified insults and allegations of social deviancy separately. Allegations of social deviance imply that a group or person is no longer acceptable in society and is a threat; for instance allegations of cannibalism have very different implications compared with calling a person a dog.
By the end of the research, I found that some of the categories had no entries or that the type of content I had found in a category did not have any relevance to the research, such categories were subsequently removed from the results (see HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab7"Table 9.7).
RESULTS
Format of broadcast
The most common format of RTLM broadcasts was monologues by the station's own journalists (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab1"Table 9.1). This type of broadcast took up 66.29 per cent of instances. Second to monologues, RTLM relied on interviews. It is interesting to note that news items accounted for only 1.52 per cent of all formats, and instructions and directives issued by the station accounted for 2.56 per cent.
Speeches and statements were also more common than news items, taking up 5.84 per cent of segments. The station also aired interrogations of alleged soldiers of the RPA conducted by officers of the Rwandan Armed Forces. These make up 1.28 per cent of the broadcasts, and one of the interrogations featured an alleged RPA member.
RTLM's format is a bit unusual for a news organization. One ordinarily expects to find news, interviews and other forms of programming taking more airtime than monologues by journalists. Standard practice on many broadcast stations is not to have a person talk on air for longer than a few seconds. Even news bites are short and are structured in that manner on the assumption that lengthy monologues lose audience attention.
Table 9.1 Format of broadcast
CategoryNo. of segments% of totalMonologue82866.29Interview23618.90Speech or statement735.84Instructions322.56Dialogue252.00News191.52Interrogation161.28Group discussion151.20Other40.32Song10.08Total1,24999.99**Total may not equal 100% due to rounding
Name of broadcaster
In the research sample, Kantano Habimana was the broadcaster on air most frequently (33.51 per cent of instances), almost twice as often as his editor-in-chief, Gaspard Gahigi (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab2"Table 9.2). The second most frequent broadcaster was Valrie Bemeriki, followed by Gahigi. RTLM political analyst Ananie Nkurunziza was the broadcaster in 10.65 per cent of instances. These four RTLM journalists account for 75.76 per cent of appearances by broadcasters.
Ruggiu, broadcasting only in French, accounted for 7.97 per cent of appearances, while Nol Hitimana, who left the service in April after being wounded in a mortar explosion, accounted for 5.02 per cent. Unidentified journalists make up 4.16 per cent, and other journalists visiting RTLM take up 4.24 per cent of the total.
Nkomati does not feature much, which can be explained by the allegation that he was sacked in May for failure to appear at work. It is unclear why Rucogoza is not on air more frequently. Mbilizi, a Congolese national, left RTLM in April and attempted to go back to his home country. Ruggiu probably fails to feature prominently because he could not broadcast in Kinyarwanda.
Table 9.2 Name of broadcaster
CategoryInstances% of totalKantano Habimana38733.51Valrie Bemeriki19516.88Editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi17014.72Ananie Nkurunziza12310.65Georges Ruggiu927.97Nol Hitimana585.02Other494.24Unknown484.16Emmanuel Rucogoza141.21Phillipe Mbilizi110.95Nkomati60.52Jean Baptiste Bamwanga20.17Total1,155100.00Name of guest or interviewee
Analysis of the data on interviews indicates that 74.91 per cent of the time, there was no guest at the station. Kambanda accounted for 2.53 per cent of interviews; government officials, 3.34 per cent; unidentified militiamen and women, 2.17 per cent; CDR militia official Stanislas Simbizi and MDR party official Frodould Karamira accounted for 1.53 and 0.99 per cent, respectively; while 1.45 per cent of interviews were with members of the RPA and RPF. Ordinary civilians took up 7.76 per cent (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab3"Table 9.3).
To give a clearer picture of how much airtime each interviewee was given, I recalculated the data based on the proportion of interviews of each as a percentage of total interviews (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab4"Table 9.4), that is, I excluded the 830 instances reported in HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab3"Table 9.3 in which there was no interviewee.
Theme or subject of the broadcast
Analysis of the content of the study sample indicates that 16.32 per cent of RTLM broadcasts studied contained statements alleging atrocities carried out
Table 9.3 Name of guest or interviewee
CategoryInstances% of totalNo guest83074.91Other867.76Government official373.34Prime Minister Jean Kambanda282.53Ferdinand Nahimana272.44Unidentified militia member242.17CDR militia official171.53Rwanda Patriotic Army officer151.35MDR party official110.99Rwanda Armed Forces officer110.99Hassan Ngeze80.72Jean Bosco Barayagwiza60.54President Thodore Sikubwabo40.36PL party official10.09Gendarmerie officer10.09UNAMIR representative10.09Juvnal Habyarimana10.09Total1,10899.99** Total may not equal 100% due to roundingTable 9.4 Time spent interviewing various people as a proportion of total interview time
CategoryInstances% of total interview segmentsOther8630.93Government official3713.31Prime Minister Jean Kambanda2810.07Ferdinand Nahimana279.71Unidentified militia member248.63CDR militia official176.11Rwanda Patriotic Army officer155.39MDR party official113.96Rwanda Armed Forces officer113.96Hassan Ngeze82.87Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza62.16President Thodore Sikubwabo41.44PL party official10.36Gendarmerie officer10.36UNAMIR representative10.36Juvnal Habyarimana10.36Total27899.98** Total may not equal 100% due to roundingby the RPA (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab5"Table 9.5), including indiscriminate bombing of civilians, hospitals and orphanages, indiscriminate killings of civilians and extermination of Hutu populations in areas and zones occupied by the RPA. No inflammatory content was found in 13.21 per cent of the broadcasts studied.
Table 9.5 Inflammatory content of broadcasts
CategoryInstances% of totalAllegations of RPA atrocities29416.32Encouragement to Hutus to fight, kill25213.99No inflammatory content23813.21Direct calls for extermination1659.16Allegations that RPA wants power and control over Hutu1065.89Allegations that Tutsis in the region are helping those within1277.05Insults to Tutsis and RPA884.89Description of how the past influences present events703.89Congratulations to FAR603.33Allegations that Tutsis plan to subjugate the Hutu573.16Allegations that RPA killed Habyarimana502.78Allegations that political parties are supporting RPA452.50Broadcast insults/slurs against Hutus sympathizing with the RPA412.28Tutsis, RPA are social deviants, abnormal412.28Allegations that Tutsis are exterminating Hutus392.17Attack or harm Belgians or UNAMIR personnel362.00Threats to Hutus sympathizing with RPA, fleeing war241.33Allegations that invalids, women, old men armed, support RPA241.33Broadcast justifies massacres201.11Not all Tutsis are enemies; should live together with Hutus160.89Allegations that Tutsis killed Habyarimana80.44Total1,801100.00A clear reminder that Tutsi civilians are not necessarily linked to the RPA and its activities and that the two groups should live together peacefully took up only 0.89 per cent of all broadcasts studied. The call on Hutu civilians to fight for their country, look out for infiltrators, avoid re-enslavement and kill all RPA members and their accomplices took up 13.99 per cent. Direct calls for the extermination of members of the RPA and all its supporters, as well as congratulatory messages on the extermination of RPA members and supporters Inyenzi, Inkotanyi, accomplices took up 9.16 per cent of the broadcasts.
Allegations that RPA members were not Rwandans and formed part of a regional conspiracy to dominate Tutsis and set up a TutsiHima empire in central Africa took up 7.05 per cent of the broadcasts; allegations that the RPA wanted to take over the country and reinstate the monarchy, subjugating all Hutus accounted for 5.89 per cent.
Other allegations included statements that Tutsi civilians were part of the regional plan by Tutsis to take over power, or that they were actively helping RPA in this cause and stood to benefit from it (3.16 per cent); that Tutsi civilians were actively exterminating Hutus, making such plans, or supporting them (2.17 per cent); that RPA members killed president Habyarimana, precipitating the unrest in the country (2.78 per cent); and that some political parties were helping the RPA (2.50 per cent).
Insults and ethnic slurs directed at the RPA and Tutsis took up 4.89 per cent, and comments depicting the RPA and Tutsis as social deviants cannibals, sorcerers, vampires accounted for 2.28 per cent. Reminders about the history of Rwanda, the fall of the monarchy in 1959 during the Hutu revolution and similarities of those events with the present occurred in 3.89 per cent of the broadcasts. Threats of death or harm to the Belgian contingent of UNAMIR and the UNAMIR commander Romo Dallaire made up 2.00 per cent. Death threats to Hutu supporters of the RPA or those accepting the fact that RPA was winning the war took up 1.33 per cent of the time, while slurs and insults directed at the two groups made up 2.28 per cent.
In the tapes studied, a total of 69.24 per cent of inflammatory messages were linked to either the RPA or Tutsis.
Group targeted for violence or hatred
Calls for the audience to be on the look out for Tutsis accounted for 10.59 per cent of all warnings and directives (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab6"Table 9.6). Words that characterized this type of statement were: look out for, tricks, malice, activities of the Tutsi, Tutsi accomplices, Inyenzi-Tutsi and Inyenzi wherever it was not qualified by the addition of Inkotanyi.
Table 9.6 Group targeted for violence or hatred
CategoryInstances% of totalWarningsSeek, watch out for RPF, RPA, Inkotanyi59838.61Seek, watch out for Inyenzi, Tutsi16410.59Seek, watch out for individual764.91Seek, watch out for members of particular party90.58DirectivesNo targeting of any group for harm28718.53Harm or kill members of RPA/Inkotanyi1499.62Identification of person/groups as accomplices of Inyenzi895.75Kill or harm Inyenzi, Tutsi553.55Identified accomplice should be sought352.26Kill or harm individual251.61Specific targeting of Tutsi females as tools of RPA to be resisted or harmed211.36Specific and direct call for restraint140.90Targeting Belgians for hatred or violence140.90Identified accomplice should be harmed or killed90.58Encouragement of Hutu females to participate at roadblocks/fighting40.26Total1,549100.00Directives included targeting of Tutsis for murder or extermination (3.55 per cent); calls to kill or harm RPA soldiers (9.62 per cent); identification of individuals as supporters or accomplices of the RPA (5.75 per cent); instructions to seek out accomplices named on RTLM (2.26 per cent); and instructions to kill such accomplices (0.58 per cent). Warnings to watch the activities of named individuals took up 4.91 per cent of the total, while instructions to kill such individuals accounted for 1.61 per cent.
Broadcasts citing Tutsi women as spies and asking people to watch out for them occurred in 1.36 per cent of all cases, while those calling on Hutu women to actively participate at roadblocks and in fighting the enemy took up 0.26 per cent.
Statements targeting the Belgian UNAMIR contingent took up 0.90 per cent.
The content analysis indicates that 75.14 per cent of all inflammatory statements occurred when there were no interviewees. Consequently, it is accurate to say that RTLM journalists, rather than their interviewees, made most of the inflammatory statements.
Inflammatory comments by civilian interviewees accounted for 6.44 per cent of the total. Out of the total airtime taken up by inflammatory comments, Prime Minister Jean Kambanda accounts for 3.66 per cent; Ferdinand Nahimana, 2.33 per cent; CDR member and militia man Stanley Simbizi, 2.50 per cent; MDR official Frodouald Karamira, 2.00 per cent; unidentified militia, 1.89 per cent; and government officials (mostly burgomasters), 2.33 per cent.
Out of the 7.16 per cent of airtime taken up by comments that RPA members were not Rwandans and formed part of the regional conspiracy to take over central Africa, 5.99 per cent were made in the absence of any interviewees. Similarly, during the 9.32 per cent airtime when direct calls for extermination were made, there were virtually no interviewees present. It is important to note that only 0.06 per cent of the airtime was taken up by Rwanda government officials participating in RTLM interviews to explain that Tutsis were distinct from RPA and not necessarily linked with its activities, and to encourage coexistence.
Out of the total airtime devoted to allegations of RPA atrocities, those made by government officials during interviews account for 0.50 per cent. Out of the calls alleging that Tutsis as a group were planning or committing extermination campaigns against Hutus, Kambanda was responsible for 0.11 per cent.
Of the 9.35 per cent of airtime taken up in direct calls for extermination, RTLM journalists were responsible for 8.10 per cent while Kambanda accounts for 0.11. Allegations that Tutsis and RPA were social deviants, namely cannibals, vampires, or unfit for society took 2.28 per cent of the airtime; RTLM journalists accounted for 2.00 per cent of this airtime while Kambanda accounted for 0.06 per cent.
The call for all Hutus to participate actively in the events accounts for 14.10 per cent of the airtime. Of this, RTLM journalists were responsible for 9.05 per cent, government officials for 0.78 per cent and Kambanda for 0.62 per cent.
Of 3.27 per cent of the time taken up by allegations that the Tutsi community was planning to take over power and subjugate Hutus, 2.16 per cent can be allocated to RTLM journalists, while Kambanda was responsible for 0.06 per cent.
A study of the types of statements used to rouse the Hutu population to fight, defend themselves and actively participate in the events (HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9tab7"Table 9.7) showed that 33.33 per cent were accompanied by allegations of RPA atrocities claims of indiscriminate bombing, massacres and extermination of Hutus. These allegations also included claims that RPA was eviscerating people. In 24.24 per cent of cases, they were accompanied by the allegation that RPA were not Rwandans and were part of a conspiracy to establish a HimaTutsi monarchy in the region; 16.16 per cent included allegations that the RPA wanted power and control over the Hutu and might reinstate the monarchy. Reminders of past evils of the monarchy and links with the armed insurgencies of the 1960s accompanied 14.14 per cent of the calls to violence. These also included reminders of how the Hutus had freed themselves from slavery and subjugation.
Table 9.7 Context in which inflammatory statements were made
CategoryInstances% of totalReports of RPA atrocities3333.33Allegations that Tutsis in the region were2424.24involved in the war or a conspiracyAllegations that RPA wants power and control1616.16over HutusReminders of Rwanda's past and its relation1414.14to the presentClaims that Tutsis, RPA are social deviants77.07Allegations of Tutsis are exterminating Hutus33.03Allegations that Tutsis plan to subjugate Hutu22.02Total99100In 7.07 per cent of the airtime, calls on the Hutu were accompanied by descriptions of Tutsi civilians and RPA as social deviants. This included claims of cannibalism, drinking victims' blood, sorcery, and unredeemable evil natures that did not belong to normal society. In 2.02 per cent, allegations were made that Tutsi civilians were out to subjugate Hutus, were actively helping the RPA in that cause or hoped to benefit from it. In 3.03 per cent, it was announced that Tutsi civilians were killing Hutus, or planning to do so.
CONCLUSIONS
Those who argue that RTLM was set up with the express aim of instigating mass murder right from the start miss the point. They fail to see the frightening process by which a station that was set up merely to air the political views of one group became the megaphone through which people were incited to mass murder.
The content analysis revealed that each time the RPA made advances, the tenor of the broadcasts would change, becoming more extreme, and more blatantly so, as time went on. The level of inflammatory content began climbing in January 1994 as it became obvious that implementation of the Arusha accords had floundered and rose steadily until March. With the April assassination of President Habyarimana, the level reached new heights and continued to rise steadily through June as it became evident that the RPA was winning the war.
Until about the beginning of April, RTLM broadcasts tended to focus on anti-RPA, anti-Arusha peace accords propaganda. Broadcasters focused on renditions of the history of TutsiHutu antagonism and allegations that the opposition parties were helping the RPA block installation of the negotiated government. There was a clear change in tone after the assassination on 6 April and even more so after 11 April as the RPA took over parts of Kigali, forcing the provisional government to flee to Gitarama.
During this second phase, which lasted until mid-May, there were clear calls for extermination of the RPA and elimination of Tutsis and all other accomplices. Names of people were broadcast, sometimes along with instructions on what to do to them. The word extermination was used repeatedly during this period. RTLM also broadcast allegations that Tutsi children, women and old men were being armed, making them legitimate targets.
The messages were very clear: the RPA was advancing to take over the country, Tutsis were helping them and they were working together with the Hima and other Tutsis in the region to install a monarchy in the central African region with the intention of subjugating the Hutu. To achieve their end, the RPA and their Tutsi supporters were willing to do anything including exterminating all Hutu.
RTLM told its listeners that the only way to avoid what was coming was for everyone to look out for the 'enemy in their midst' and work with the authorities to ensure the extermination of the RPA and all its accomplices. It was a fait accompli kill or be killed. Faced with this constant message and the follow-up actions of their leaders, who organized and led militia in attacks against Tutsi, many ordinary civilians believed the propaganda and actively took part in the killing campaign. Those who were not convinced were often coerced and threatened, sometimes even treated as accomplices to 'the enemy'.
Extermination became a project in which lack of involvement or even fleeing into RPA-controlled sectors signified support for the target group.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch9not2"2 Radio had become a tool for directing mass murder.
NOTES
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch9not1"1. It is likely that RTLM was actually mistaken in the identity of the person they quoted. I have been told that Thaddeus actually belonged to MDRParmehutu and not APROSOMA. It is also likely that the spelling is Thade and not Thaddeus.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch9not2"2. 'I have always told you. All the people who joined the part controlled by the Inyenzi Inkotanyi are Inyenzi themselves. They approve the killings perpetrated by Inyenzi. They are criminals like the Inyenzi Inkotanyi. They are all Inyenzi. When our armed forces will get there, they will get what they deserve. They will not spare anyone since everybody turned Inyenzi. All those who stayed there are all Inyenzi since those who were against Inyenzi have been killed by Inyenzi. Those who suceeded to escape run away to Ngara, Burundi and to the western part of our country. Those who stayed are accomplices and acolytes of the Inyenzi.' (Valrie Bemeriki, RTML broadcast, 28 June 1994)
REFERENCES
Jones, B. 1999. 'The Arusha Peace Process'. In H. Adelman and A. Suhkre (eds). The Path of a Genocide: the Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, USA.
Sibomana, A. 1999. Hope for Rwanda: Conversations with Laure Guilbert and Harve Deguine. Pluto Press, London, UK, 205 pp.
UN (United Nations). 1966. International Covenant on civil and political rights. General Assembly Resolution 2200A (XXI), 16 December. Available at (accessed 6 September 2005).
10 ( T h e E f f e c t o f R T L M ' s R h e t o r i c o f E t h n i c H a t r e d i n R u r a l R w a n d a
C h a r l e s M i r o n k o
B e c a u s e o f i t s i n f l a m m a t o r y r h e t o r i c a n d e x t r e m i s t v i e w s , m u c h h a s b e e n m a d e o f t h e r o l e o f R T L M i n t h e g e n o c i d e o f 1 9 9 4 . A c c o r d i n g t o D e s F o r g e s ( 1 9 9 9 : 7 1 ) , i t w a s t h e ' s o l e s ource of news as well as the sole authority for interpreting its meaning' during the genocide. Although no one really disputes the genocidal overtones of RTLM's broadcasting, there is disagreement about the causal link between the words on the air and the violence on the ground.
Some feel that without the assistance of RTLM, the genocidaires could not have succeeded to the extent that they did. Mahmood Mandani's thesis about Tutsi as a racialized political identity cites RTLM as one of 'two propaganda organs [that] were central to this effort [recasting Tutsi as a race]' (Mandani 2001:190). The US State Department asserted that RTLM broadcasts 'ultimately had a lethal effect, calling on the Hutu majority to destroy the Tutsi minority. Experts cite RTML as an important factor in the spread of genocide in the hours and days following Habyarimana's death' (Chalk 1999: 97). Chrtien and his colleagues, authors of the most comprehensive analysis of the role of media in the genocide to date, give central importance to radio (including RTLM), saying, 'Two tools, one very modern, the other less [modern] were particularly used during the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda: the radio and the machete. The former to give and receive orders, the second to carry them out' (Chrtien et al. 1995: 191).
But some scholars have contested the role of radio, specifically RTLM, in the genocide. For example, Richard Carver writes that:
Most commentary on Rwandan hate radio has worked on the simple assumption that since RTLM broadcast propaganda for genocide and genocide did indeed occur, there must be a causal relationship between the two ... the notion that people could be incited to acts of extreme violence by the radio is only tenable if it is accepted that RTLM propaganda unlocked profound or even primordial hatred. [Milles Collines] may have produced propaganda for the genocide but it did not incite it. (Carver 2000:190, emphasis added)
Carver identifies the leap of logic in relating hate speech to murder, without more compelling evidence that the murderers were, in fact, somehow motivated or crucially affected by the radio's message. Carver makes an interesting observation:
RTLM broadcast hate propaganda, there was genocide, and therefore one caused another. If we were talking about almost any other issue violence on television, pornography or whatever those arguing in favour of a ban would attempt to demonstrate at least a cursory link between the broadcast and the action. There is now an abundant research to suggest that it is impossible to draw a linear causal link between what people see or hear in the media and how they behave. But because it is genocide we abandon our critical faculties. (Carver 1996)
The purpose of this paper is to explore the relation between the rhetoric of ethnic hatred so prevalent among Rwandan political elites and the forces that propelled ordinary Rwandan Hutus to participate in killing Tutsis. Information was collected in conversations conducted in 2000 with nearly 100 confessed perpetrators held in six Rwandan prisons: Kigali, Butare, Rilima, Gitarama, Gisenyi and Ruhengeri.
OVERVIEW OF RTLM, FORM AND FUNCTION
The RTLM signal originally reached only greater Kigali and part of the surrounding countryside, but from 8 July 1993 it could also be heard throughout the country and in the north of Burundi. RTLM broadcast every night on FM 106 for a few hours more if there were major events to report but it also used FM 94, one of Radio Rwanda's transmitter frequencies.
RTLM was especially popular among the youth, because it played up-to-date music from Zaire. RTLM recruited the best Kinyarwanda and French speakers and journalists including foreigners. These journalists promoted the station, which they called 'Radio Sympa' (lovely radio), claiming that it was the radio 'of the people, for the people.' For example, one broadcaster, Gaspard Gahigi, welcomes ordinary citizens:
We have a radio here, even a peasant who wants to say something can come, and we will give him the floor. Then, other peasants will be able to hear what peasants think. Personally, I think what complicates things is that ordinary citizens have no forum where they can speak. Normally, for ordinary citizens to speak, they speak through elections and elections are impossible. So, in fact, ordinary citizens have been deprived of a say but RTLM is there, we will give them the floor. (Gaspard Gahigi, RTLM, 19 March 1994)
What makes us happy here at RTLM is that we broadcast your announcements quickly, very quickly, I mean, it is just like making wood fire glow [kwenyegeza]. You bring a message any time and you say: 'Ha! Put it now, and then we put it in very quickly so that your messages reach ... whoever you want.' (Gaspard Gahigi, RTLM, 15 December 1993)
Kantano Habimana, a popular RTLM broadcaster, bragged that people could not follow foreign news because it was in French or English. In contrast, RTLM's Ananie Nkurunziza monitored foreign news for 'our RTLM' (31 May 1993). Nkurunziza's spin on international reports was an analysis that justified RTLM hate speech, discredited the Arusha peace talks and condemned the international community because it was supposedly on the side of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Likewise, Kantano spoke against the rival RPF radio station, Muhabura.
I don't understand how a Rwandan can follow what Muhabura radio says ... Muhabura radio broadcasts from far away in the bush. Instead of trusting RTLM radio, which broadcasts near him, they are together and they are also together with journalists whom he can see and even ask them the situation. So, those people who listen to Muhabura radio, let them get lost [mentally lost], let them get lost but they will regret it for a long time. (Kantano Habimana, RTLM, 25 May 1993)
RTLM broadcasts also trumpeted a version of Rwandan history that pitted Hutu against Tutsi in a story of foreign invasion and ethnic domination.
Tutsi are nomads and invaders who came to Rwanda in search of pasture, but because they are so cunning and malicious, the Tutsi managed to stay and rule. If you allow the TutsiHamites to come back, they will not only rule you in Rwanda, but will also extend their power throughout the Great Lakes Region. (RTLM, 2 December 1993, author's translation from Kinyarwanda)
ETHNIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF CONFESSED PERPETRATORS
My line of questioning in interviews with confessed genocide perpetrators focused on the practices of media consumption in Rwanda. Ideally, I would have observed people listening to the radio, discussing its content and circulating these ideas in their everyday lives, but this was not possible during the genocide. Instead, I collected the comments and reflections of low-level perpetrators six years after the fact, during interviews conducted in 2000.
During the interviews, I discerned differences between the possible impact of RTLM on people in urban areas and on ordinary peasants (abaturage) who lived in remote villages (ibyaro). RTLM appears to have been especially effective in Kigali, where it issued vehement instructions to foment violence at roadblocks, broadcast names of escaped Tutsi and their hiding places, threatened Tutsi youth, broadcast lists of 'accomplices' (ibyitso) to kill and encouraged listeners to 'get rid of the dirt' (gukuraho umwanda).
Interviews with genocide perpetrators also led me to make a distinction between the responses to RTLM hate speech and propaganda of two distinct audiences. One audience was the urban jobless youth, trained and operating under the umbrella of the Interahamwe. These young people held portable radios to their ears on roadblocks and around commercial centres. The other was progovernment middle-class urban dwellers, including civil servants, professionals and businessmen.
According to Debra Spitulnik's approach to understanding the role of media in social life, it is important to
factor in what is happening at the levels of reception and lateral communication, such as the social circulation of media discourse outside of contexts of direct media consumption. I suggest ... that the repeating, recycling, and recontextualizing of media discourse is an important component in the formation of community in a kind of subterranean way, because it establishes an indirect connectivity or intertextuality across media consumers and across instances of media consumption. (Spitulnik 2001: 98, emphasis added)
In the cities in the former Belgian colonies, lateral communication took place via a broad urban gossip network called radio trottoir (sidewalk radio), which transmitted 'counter-hegemonic' popular discourses that often contested information dispensed by official media. Writing with respect to Kinshasa, Schoepf (1993) talks about radio trottoir, an urban version of the 'bush-telephone' that used talking drums to carry news to settlements separated by long distances.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch10not1"1 Bourgault (1995: 2013) describes the radio trottoir alternative to the official press in the francophone West African countries of Togo and Cameroon. He suggests that even if masses at the bottom of society are passive, they have evolved their own discursive means to resist oppressive discourse from above. In densely populated rural Rwanda, a 'bush-telephone' operated with great efficiency using word-of-mouth, without recourse to drums.
By exploring the theme of radio and radio consumption with groups of prisoners, I have been able to glimpse some of this 'lateral communication' and 'circulation' in a newly fashioned community the community of confessed perpetrators. For my analysis, I drew on three key concepts from Spitulnik's (1996) article 'The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of communities': consumption, circulation and community.
Examining radio and language in contemporary Zambia, Spitulnik argues that radio today achieves what newspapers did in the colonial world. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's (1983) concept of 'imagined communities', she writes that it creates a shared cognitive space, a community of listeners who incorporate its linguistic elements into their everyday lives in both conscious and unconscious ways. Spitulnik focuses on the circulation of language lexical items, catchphrases, semantic fields, and discourse styles as evidence of this community of people who cannot see each other. I will consider the additional possibility that radio might affect more than symbolic behaviour, that is, speech, and actually contribute to the commission of violent actions, that is, murder.
Spitulnik locates radio within a broader discursive context and seeks to understand the inter-textualities or cross-linkages between mass media and other forms of discourse. It has been established that the ethnically divisive rhetoric that characterized RTLM broadcasts overlapped with, and borrowed from, the social scientific discourse from the colonial period and with political speech from the first and second republics. The importance of radio in a place like Zambia, as in Rwanda, is related to the fact that it is the most widely consumed medium in the country and 'the same broadcasts are accessible to the entire national population at the same time and, thus, allow for the possibility of producing a degree of shared linguistic knowledge across a population of roughly 9.1 million' (Spitulnik 2001: 99, emphasis added).
If we substitute the word 'ideological' for 'linguistic', we begin to see the potential for RTLM to serve both as 'reservoir and reference point' for ideas of ethnic hatred and violence for five or six million Rwandans. If we add that radio audiences were well aware that they were audiences (not individuals), that millions of others were simultaneously listening as well, the intensity of their potential is increased.
However, Spitulnik advances the idea that language broadcast on the radio is not passively consumed by listeners, but is actively re-centred, reinterpreted and re-circulated. The listeners are 'active decoders ... of media messages, who accept, reject, or resist what is conveyed based on their own class position within society' (Spitulnik 1993: 297). This latter point is crucial to understanding the listenership of RTLM and prevents us from assuming that what elites, professionals and townspeople 'heard' on RTLM is the same as what rural dwellers 'heard'.
This could not have been made more clear to me in my interviews with confessors. The first response to my questions was often a claim of ignorance of RTLM. Some professed to know nothing of its message or its role in inciting violence. Many informants told me that they did not listen to RTLM at all, either because they did not own radios (or had no batteries) or because they did not perceive themselves to be part of the target audience for this radio station. Radio technology in general was presented by the perpetrators as something alien to the rural peasantry, a medium of information that requires special education or political credentials to make sense of its messages.
I was a cultivator, so what can I tell you about it? I don't know anything about the radio. (Interview, Kigali prison, 20 September 2000)
In the countryside, things of radio do not exist. (Interview, Kigali prison, September 2000)
I don't know anything about it. This is the first time [I am hearing about this]. (Interview, Rilima prison, 21 September 2000)
We had a radio but I did not hear anything. (Interview, Rilima prison, September 2000)
Except that I am a peasant and it does not concern me. Do you think I even know what RTLM stands for? Not at all! (Interview, Gitarama prison, 9 September 2000)
How can you listen to the radio when you did not go to school? When you can't read and write? (Interview, Butare prison, 29 September 2000)
Given these informants' apparent lack of identification with the political message of RTLM, it was interesting to explore their awareness and understanding of the messages broadcast on Radio Muhabura, the station run by the RPF, from the National Park (Parc National des Volcans) at the RwandaUganda border. Radio Muhabura broadcast in full AM frequency and could be heard in most parts of Rwanda except the south (Chrtien et al. 1995). In separate interviews, all the confessors expressed the same thing: it was strictly forbidden to listen to Radio Muhabura in Rwanda, and anyone found doing so was beaten or otherwise punished.
One informant told me that I should have an equal or greater understanding of RTLM's broadcasts than he did, as if it broadcast to educated elites around the world, but was somehow opaque and foreign to Rwandan peasants:
Q: Now, do you think that in the situation you went through there is something, which could be attributed to what the radio broadcast?
A: Peasants [Abaturage] like us did not even have any radios.
Q: Why do they say it anyway? So, you never heard anyone saying it?
A: Radio? A person who did not have a radio heard it from someone else. For example, RTLM said that ...
Q: But what do you think? Telling you: 'kill or do this' or hearing it from the radio, is it the same thing?
A: No. Hearing it only could not have any impact. People were forced to kill by those soldiers. But simply hearing from the radio could not do anything.
Q: You heard it from the radio and you saw people killing?
A: I mean, soldiers brought it [the killing] and then RTLM reported it. For example, I had a small radio. The radio used to broadcast it. You found out that what it broadcast was what the soldiers were doing. So, it was necessary that we do it too. Because the leadership supported it, we accepted it. (Interview, Ruhengeri prison, 27 September 2000)
By claiming ignorance of the radio and its message, by suggesting that they were essentially incapable of participating in the political project that the radio represents, these perpetrators position themselves as bystanders or even victims of the larger struggle between Hutu political elites in Kigali and the invading force of Tutsi exiles in the RPF. This idea of being caught between two powerful and dangerous forces pervades the perpetrators' narratives and finds expression in a well-known proverb: 'In a war between elephants, it's the grass that gets trampled. We are the grass' (Interview, Gisenyi prison, 25 September 2000).
Far from being unable to understand what RTLM was exhorting them to do, though, these perpetrators offer ample evidence that they understood the radio's message and that they themselves were, in fact, a specifically targeted audience, precisely because they were seen as being on the margins of ethnic politics and not naturally inclined to take up arms against their Tutsi neighbours. In other words, the radio messages were needed to involve them in killings that many were not initially inclined to perform. The interviews offer further emphasis against the primordial hypothesis.
Q: Sure, I understand you. So, there is the issue ... of RTLM? I would like to understand also how a radio announces something and people do it. Can you give me an example?
A: In fact, I don't own a radio because I am a cultivator [umuhinzi]. From the fact that I was a cultivator, I had no radio. But in fact, [some people] used to say that radio RTLM was urging us [idushishikarije] to kill people ... killings. It said: 'the enemy is Tutsi.' And when a peasant hears that, that person has no choice ... When he meets a person he doesn't know, he says to himself: 'this is the one who came to eradicate us, he came to fight us.'... You understand that, this also brought a bad atmosphere [umwuka mubi; literally, bad air] among people. (Interview, Ruhengeri prison, 27 September 2000)
Another genocide confessor confirmed:
A: RTLM? You mean that radio? People who owned radios are the ones who listened to it.
Q: No, you can tell me what you heard from other people.
A: The so-called radios [ibyo biradiyo] of RTLM ... [implies a bad thing. With a dismissive tone, he looks away.] Except that they announced: 'find out who the enemy is.' Then they announced that: 'the Tutsi is the enemy.' (Interview, Gisenyi prison, 25 September 2000)
The same informant recalled a particular announcer on RTLM encouraging peasants to cultivate and to be armed and vigilant while waiting for the enemy from outside.
Then they said: 'Look, while a Hutu is cultivating, he has a gun because they were distributed to them. You should have them with you when you are cultivating. When the enemy comes up, you shoot at each other. When he retreats, then you take up your hoe and cultivate!'... Such things were also announced. That is, they were doing sensitization about those things [kubisansibiliza] among peasants. They told them: 'Follow what the radio is saying.' (Interview, Gisenyi prison, 25 September 2000)
Did RTLM get its message of hatred across to different audiences to the same degree? Mindful of Spitulnik's idea of a mass-mediated community of active consumers or, put differently, with common reference points but the potential for different reactions to them, let us turn to the perpetrators' reflections about radio.
Beyond the initial claims of ignorance of RTLM's presence, its mission and its intended audience, a closer analysis of the perpetrators' reflections suggests that they had a clear understanding of what they were being told to do.
On 6 April 1994, when the president's plane was shot down, RTLM announced that Habyarimana had been killed by the RPF and that everyone in the country should stay where they were. In interview after interview, nearly every informant recalled this directive disseminated via the radio. Subsequently, RTLM, aka 'Radio Rutwitsi' (the radio that sets fire) encouraged the Interahamwe in their mission of defeating the Inkotanyi (Rwandan Patriotic Army). It emphasized the message that all Hutu were at risk of being attacked, overwhelmed, recolonized and exploited by all Tutsi and that appropriate measures should be taken to prevent this.
According to the interviewees, RTLM preached fear of and hatred toward Tutsi and told its listeners to avenge the 'head of the nation'. Some recalled that RTLM insisted that Hutu should separate themselves from Tutsi because of war. They remembered that the Tutsi were identified as their enemies, outsiders, invaders and cunning manipulators. They recalled that RTLM said that the only way to defend the nation in general, and one's own safety and security in particular, was to pre-emptively destroy not only the Rwandan Patriotic Front, but also every Tutsi, even the unborn.
Don't you know that after Habyarimana's death, radios announced that: 'Inkotanyi are barking ... hohoohohooo!!!' Also that: 'Inkotanyi attacked before us. They [Tutsi] had said that they would kill Hutu and now they have pre-empted us. Women should go nowhere.' (Interview, Rilima prison, 21 September 2000)
Many of the perpetrators I spoke with expressed ambivalence about RTLM's message that 'cultivators' (understood to be synonymous with 'peasants') stood for all Hutu and the only legitimate Rwandans. One man stated: 'RTLM talked about Hutu as cultivators, the children of cultivators' (Benesebahinzi) and said that 'everyone should join in the violence against the enemy.' The enemy was not limited to the RPF alone. 'RTLM said that the enemy was your accomplice neighbour (icyitso), so you must be vigilant.'
To the extent that these perpetrators bring into the discussion the ideological conflation of the Hutu extremist elites with all Hutu and the rebel army of Tutsi exiles with all Tutsi, they are implicitly resisting the interpretation that the genocide was fundamentally rooted in primordial ethnic sentiments and hatred. In fact some explicitly stated the opposite:
In fact, the way everything came up, we were not ... we appeared like people who did not know beforehand. We were all united together. We even started to fight what is known as Interahamwe. We were defeated later because Interahamwe had guns. At that point, they started convincing us [kutwinjizamo; literally, to push into us] that Tutsi are our enemies.
We shared, we were the same, we intermarried [and] there was no problem between us. Then, it happened just like that, eh ... even when that radio RTLM was talking about 'ethnicity' [ubwoko], Interahamwe had already been killed in Kamonyi. They were killed by villagers and commune police. They were fighting together ... even bourgmester was fighting ... fighting Interahamwe at Taba in Kamonyi.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch10not2"2
When RTLM broadcast that Tutsi have finished off Hutu, then we started being afraid. So, how did it happen? We noticed that it came from Runda. They came saying that ... in fact, we spent the day on the hill waiting for Interahamwe in order to fight them. At around 3 p.m. people from Igihinga came and ordered us to eat cows belonging to other people. We took cows belonging to a Tutsi who was there. His cattle keeper had fled with them for security, but he lived in Runda. So, they forced us to eat them. Eeh! They then took four, we took three. Good. At dawn they came back and took another cow. Then they killed the first person. They killed him because of people from Igihinga. That is how things started and then it grew tougher [ibintu birakomera; literally, it became hardened, i.e., more serious] from there onwards. (Interview, Gitarama prison, 29 September 2000)
Informants suggest that the rhetoric of the radio implicitly acknowledged the lack of ethnic division among rural peasants. The messages recalled by the perpetrators seem designed to induce rural dwellers to break the bonds of neighbourhood solidarity (see also Longman 1995). Perhaps in an effort to appeal directly to those who were less willing to kill their neighbours, this rhetoric often took the form of agrarian metaphors:
The radio told us to clear the bushes. There was no person who did not hear that! (Interview, Gisenyi prison)
RTLM said to 'separate the grass from the millet' [i.e., weed out the Tutsi]. (Interview, Gisenyi prison, 25 September 2000)
Bikindi told people 'to pull out the poison ivy together with its roots.' (Interview, Gisenyi prison, 25 September 2000)
In another interview that began with denial, the informant shared euphemisms learned through lateral communication.
Q: Uuh, so, did you listen to RTLM radio in you area?
A: Radio, where?
Q: Uuh ...
A: I didn't even own a radio then.
Q: No, you did not listen to radio RTLM. So, you didn't hear anything from other people. Is it the first time you hear about it?
A: RTLM?
Q: Uuh, of Kantano, etc. No ... is this the first time you hear about it?
A: RTLM was that radio which broadcast hot news [yashyushyaga amakuru], telling people: 'Work!'[Mukore] I heard about it from what people told me, because I did not own a radio. Or from people in a place where I would be staying because I did not own a radio at that time.
Q: Uuuh, uuh, telling people to work [gukora]?
A: It told people to kill Tutsi. After all, wasn't [it] explained openly? ... Through conversations with other people, I heard that [RTLM] had very hot news during that period of killings. (Interview, Butare prison, September 2000)
Although these comments buttress arguments about the power of radio to demonize, incite and perhaps even direct violence, they also yield evidence that as active (re)interpreters of RTLM's message, many ordinary peasants in the ranks of the low-level perpetrators did not swallow everything they heard whole. Even as they reflected on the role of the radio six years after the fact, these people make it clear that for most ordinary Rwandan peasants (abaturage), radio was viewed as a medium for the urban, the educated and the elite.HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#ch10not3"3 This resonates strongly with Spitulnik's argument that 'the communities mediated by radio broadcasting are several. Since media discourse is not uniformly accessible or even uniformly seized upon and interpreted in the same ways, all kinds of outcomes are possible' (Spitulnik 2001: 113).
Similarly, while some Rwandan villagers may have listened to broadcasts, many stated that they did not. They heard the messages from others, however, and understood the ideological significance of certain songs, speeches and the reporting of current events from others. Nevertheless, this information alone did not cause them to kill. It is, therefore, necessary to explore other reasons why these Rwandans took part in the genocide.
NOTES
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch10not1"1. The Connaissida Project in Kinshasa, in which I participated in 198598 highlighted the importance of radio trottoir in changing perceptions of AIDS.
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch10not2"2. Survivors' testimony collected by African Rights from Gikongoro and Butare prefectures also mentions initial flight and fighting by Hutu and Tutsi neighbours against Interahamwe from outside. The Hutu who were with them, they said, did not understand that only Tutsi were being targeted for killing (African Rights 1995: 329, 330, 332).
HYPERLINK "http://www.idrc.ca/openebooks/338-0/#rch10not3"3. To some extent, however, it seems likely that some confessed perpetrators were seeking to distance themselves from the local rural elites who were leaders of genocide.
REFERENCES
African Rights. 1995. Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance (2nd edn.). African Rights, London, UK.
Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities. Verso, London, UK.
Bourgault, L.M. 1995. Mass Media in sub-Saharan Africa. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, USA: 2013.
Carver, R. 1996. Speech delivered at the Annual General Meeting of the Freedom of Expression Institute, Johannesburg, South Africa, 23 May 1996.
2000. 'Broadcasting and Political Transition: Rwanda and Beyond'. In R. Fardon and G. Furniss (eds). African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition. David Philip, Capetown, South Africa. 239 pp.
Chalk, F. 1999. 'Hate Radio in Rwanda'. In H. Adelman and A. Suhrke (eds). 1999. The Path of a Genocide: the Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire. Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. 414 pp.
Chrtien, J.P., J.F. Dupaquier, M. Kabanda and J. Ngarambe. 1995. Rwanda: les mdias du gnocide. Karthala, Paris, France.
Des Forges, A. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, New York, NY, USA. Available at (accessed 30 August 2005).
Longman, T. 1995. Genocide and Socio-Political Change: Massacres in Two Rwandan Villages.Issues, 23(2): 1821.
Mandani, M. 2001. When Victims become Killers. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Schoepf, B.G. 1993. AIDS Action Research with Women in Kinshasa. Social Science & Medicine,37(11): 140113.
Spitulnik, D. 1993. Anthropology and Mass Media. Annual Review of Anthropology, 22: 293 315.
1996. The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of c o m m u n i t i e s . J o u r n a l o f L i n g u i s t i c A n t h r o p o l o g y , 6 ( 2 ) : 1 6 1 8 7 .
2 0 0 1 . ' T h e S o c i a l C i r c u l a t i o n o f M e d i a D i s c o u r s e a n d t h e M e d i a t i o n o f C o m m u n i t i e s ' . I n A .
D u r a n t i ( e d . ) . L i n g u i s t i c A n t h r o p o l o g y : a R e a d e r . B l a c k w e l l P u b l i s h e r s , O x f o r d , U K .
1 1 ( J o u r n a l i s m i n a Time of Hate Media
Thomas Kamilindi
I have been a journalist in Rwanda for 20 years; the only time I stopped working was during the 1994 genocide. I think the first question we should ask is should journalists be put on trial? Should they be judged? My answer is yes. And that's why I chose to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda as a prosecution witness. I testified because I consider journalists to be citizens like any other members of society. They should be held accountable for their actions and if need be prosecuted. I also testified because of my belief that journalists have a major role to play for the good of society and should be held to account when, instead, they cause harm. Grave problems were created in my society. Evil took place and journalists played an important role.
Before dealing with my own experience, I think it is important to provide some background on the media in Rwanda, to place it in context. When we talk about the media, people in the West think in terms of what the news media are like in the Western world. That is simply not the case with Rwanda.
The written press has existed in Rwanda only since 1933, when the first newspaper was established a newspaper still published by the Catholic Church, which is a very important institution in my country. Decades later, in the 1960s, a government newspaper was set up. Both of these were published in Kinyarwanda, my mother tongue and the native language of Rwanda. Other attempts to create newspapers were short-lived until 1991, when there was a kind of democratic explosion, and a large number of newspapers were established.
Until the creation of RTLM in 1993, there was only one radio station: the government-run Radio Rwanda, which began operations in 1961. Radio Rwanda was the voice of authority, and authority is respected in Rwanda. People are raised and taught to take what they hear on the radio as gospel truth.
In 1992, the first television station emerged and remains the only one. It too belongs to the government.
RTLM (Radio-Tlvision Libre des Milles Collines) was created in 1993 by people who were, for the most part, close to or from the stronghold of President Habyarimana. They presented it as a commercial venture. Indeed, to be a member, it was necessary to purchase a share valued at 5,000 Rwandan francs (RWF), about US$ 30 at the time. But RTLM's programming was not commercial; it was all about politics and centred on ethnic cleavages. RTLM followed directly from Kangura, the extremist newspaper created by a former bus driver, Hassan Ngeze. Kangura was backed by financiers who were well placed in the army and the civil administration. It is known particularly for its publication of the famous Hutu 'Ten Commandments'.
No one succeeded in combating these hate media in Rwanda. They were very powerful and entrenched with those who held power in the military, in government and in business. Even the information minister, Faustin Rucogoza, failed in his efforts to sanction or close down these hate media outlets. He was among the first assassinated by the Interahamwe militia, on the morning of 7 April 1994.
As a simple journalist, the only weapon I had was to report the facts and only verifiable facts. But even that was difficult because it brought me many problems.
In 1991, I was suspended from my job at Radio Rwanda. I learned later that this suspension was intended to be permanent. But I managed to get my job back, thanks to some good legal work by a friend who was a lawyer and also because of intense diplomatic and political pressure on President Habyarimana, who was the ultimate authority for Radio Rwanda.
In 1992, the head of the Conseil d'Administration of l'ORINFOR (Office Rwandais d'Information), which was responsible for all of the state-owned media in Rwanda (Radio Rwanda, Tlvision Nationale Rwandaise and the written press), called me into his office. He told me I was going to be arrested and that he couldn't protect me. This was after broadcasts I had made about an attempted coup against the prime minister of the day. Once again, I was saved by political and diplomatic pressure, because the coup attempt was very real.
Another way to fight against hate media as a journalist is to have no part of it. In my case, I could have bought shares in RTLM because it was the first private radio station that was going to break the monopoly of the state; to support it could have been seen as supporting the emergence of pluralism in the media. But I did not get involved because I saw who the real instigators of this new station were. The editor-in-chief, Gaspard Gahigi, who had been my boss at Radio Rwanda, asked me many times to come and work with him at RTLM. He said I was a good journalist who could add a lot of credibility to the new station. But time and again I refused because I would not use my professional talent or influence to stigmatize the Tutsi.
Then, in April 1994, came the genocide. What could the media have done? The media are not there to fight, but to set things right, to provide accurate information. Instead, there was much propaganda and people received messages of hate. You simply cannot imagine it.
For example, on 3 May 1994, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) came looking for a group of us at the Hotel Mille Collines. We were about 40 and UNAMIR wanted to evacuate us from the country. We hadn't even left the lobby of the hotel when RTLM began to broadcast a list of our names, including that of my daughter and even a newborn child. RTLM called on the Interahamwe not to allow these inyenzi to be evacuated by UNAMIR, because 'they would come back with weapons in their hands'. In fact, the militia blocked us on the road to the airport. We were attacked and some of us were injured. In the end, after many hours of negotiations, UNAMIR brought us back safely to the hotel.
I have a daughter. She's twelve now but she was very small at the time. One day, somebody said, 'That one is a snake. They have to kill her.' She wasn't even two years old. My daughter asked me, 'Am I a snake? Am I a snake?' Is that the role of the press? Is it the role of the media to harm people?
Imagine journalists who would enthusiastically applaud militia for the good work they had done at such and such a location. The journalists from RTLM did this each time a Tutsi family was killed. And they regarded as cowards the militiamen and soldiers who did not have as much zeal for the massacres.
It was a hard time to work as a journalist. In fact it seemed as if the only journalists who could function properly were the ones who were in the camp of the killers. I wasn't in their camp, so I had to give up my job. But there were still ways to be a journalist someone who bears witness to events and informs others.
I resigned from Radio Rwanda a few months before the genocide started and, as it happened, my last day was 6 April. In a sense, I think I knew what was coming. As a journalist, I had been asked to broadcast news that was repugnant to me.
Radio Rwanda was in effect the voice of President Habyarimana. It was difficult to do truly professional work as we were constantly faced with demands from the authorities on the manner in which we should work, right down to the formulation of a phrase.
I recall one time when the director of ORINFOR came to the studio with a text that he had written about a meeting of the central committee of the president's party the only party allowed at the time the MRND (Mouvement Rpublicain National pour la Democratie et le Dveloppement). Instead of reading this statement word for word, as he wished, I reworked the text. I hadn't even left the studio after the broadcast when the phones began to ring. The members of the central committee, including their leader, the upper ranks of the army and the director of ORINFOR were furious with me and some insulted me personally.
In 1992, we rebelled against this situation. The journalists of Radio Rwanda organized a series of strikes and I was appointed to head this protest movement. It was following these strikes, which resulted in many threats against me, that I decided to leave Radio Rwanda because it seemed impossible for me to bring about any change. The pro-Habyarimana forces had an enormous influence.
During the massacres that followed President Habyarimana's death in the plane crash on 6 April, I was among many liberal Hutus accused of sympathizing with the Tutsi-led rebel forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
I had grown up Hutu. That is what was marked on my identity card. But I was born to a Hutu mother and a Tutsi father, who had taken steps to change his ethnicity in 1959 (he was 21 years old at the time) to survive the first pogroms against Tutsis. I was born in the south of the country, considered at the time to be a largely Tutsi region and later supportive of the RPF. I was married to a woman whose parents were also in a mixed marriage. These conditions, among many other factors, meant that after 6 April, I was one of the targets of the Hutu militia, directed notably by RTLM. Journalists like Kantano and Bemeriki who knew me very well didn't hesitate to say over the air, 'Does Kamilindi think the Mille Collines hotel is a bunker?' They revealed to the militia where I was in hiding and how to find me.
As it happened, on the evening of 6 April, I was in high spirits. My wife, Jacqueline, had baked a cake for a festive dinner at our home in Kigali. It was my 33rd birthday and that afternoon I had completed my last day of work at Radio Rwanda. After ten years at the government radio station, I had resigned in protest against the lack of political balance in news programming.
I remember very clearly, I was taking a shower that evening when Jacqueline began pounding on the bathroom door. 'Hurry up!' she shouted. 'The president has been attacked!' I locked the doors of the house and sat by the radio listening to RTLM. Of course I detested RTLM's violent propaganda, but the way things were going in Rwanda, that propaganda often served as a highly accurate political forecast.
RTLM reported that President Habyarimana's plane, returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had been shot down over Kigali and had crashed into the grounds of his own palace. The new Hutu president of Burundi and several of Habyarimana's top advisors had also been on board. There were no survivors.
In the days before, I had heard through sources about preparations for large-scale massacres of Tutsis nationwide by the president's extremist entourage and about lists of moderate Hutu that had been drawn up for the first wave of killings. But I never imagined that Habyarimana himself might be targeted. I thought to myself, if Hutu Power had sacrificed him, who was safe?
Along with 700 others, I took refuge in the Mille Collines hotel, where manager Paul Rusesabagina negotiated to save our lives, using the liquor from the hotel basement to buy off bands of killers who showed up with lists of victims. Leaving the hotel meant you risked dying.
But, as I said, as a journalist, there are many ways in which you can work. As a refugee at the Mille Collines, I asked people, 'What are you doing so that people will know that you're here?' They said, 'We're not doing anything.' So I worked with other refugees who had contacts, like Franois-Xavier Nsanzuwera. He was a human rights activist and had a lot of fax numbers, telephone numbers, all sorts of contacts. We sent fax after fax, one on top of the other when the telephone worked. We informed the world of what was happening. That was how we spoke out. We did something.
There has been a lot of discussion about the role of the international media. For the most part, the international media weren't there. On 12 April 1994, all foreigners were evacuated. All international public servants, aid workers, journalists they were all evacuated. The genocide began in earnest in those first two weeks and nobody knew anything about it. It was done in secrecy at a time when what we needed were a few courageous people to come and report on this country this country, which, for many news organizations, didn't seem to exist.
But there was no structure left. You can't imagine what it was like. By the time the world began to learn about what was happening in Rwanda, it was too late. Thousands and thousands of people were killed. I can't help thinking that if the media had been there, maybe the harm would have been less.
In their absence, I took it upon myself to try and get the word out. On 26 April, when the telephones were briefly restored, I called some friends at Radio France International (RFI) in Paris and I said, 'We're still alive.' They said, 'We have no news, what's going on? Can we interview you? Can you explain to us what's going on?' I said, 'Yes.'
So they asked me how we were living, how many of us were there. I told them there were about 700 refugees, and we were drinking water from the swimming pool, the same pool the soldiers were using to wash their clothes and which eventually turned into a toilet. We had to drink that water without being able to boil it.
They asked me, 'What's going on in military terms?' I said that government forces were, in fact, losing ground. There were defeats everywhere. I spoke about the massacres, although as I explained to them, they were indescribable. There were no words to use.
As a journalist, I wanted the world to know about the atrocities taking place inside Rwanda. I probably signed my own death warrant by calling attention to the massacres during the RFI interview.
After that, local radio started calling the Hotel Mille Collines a home for 'cockroaches'. I was told they were coming for me. But the others there stopped me from giving myself up. I wanted to go out because I was the source of the problem and I thought that if I left, maybe they wouldn't kill the others. If I were to be killed, maybe the others wouldn't be bombed.
The day after that interview was broadcast, a soldier arrived at the hotel to kill me. But as was often the case in the genocide where most people knew their killers, the man who had been sent to kill me had been a friend since childhood. He explained that the military command wanted me dead. Then he said, in effect, 'I don't know who's going to kill you. I can't do it. But I'm leaving the hotel and they'll send someone for sure to kill you.' Nobody else came for me, at least not to my knowledge. Some years later I heard Paul Rusesabagina say in a radio interview that an army colonel had come to see him at one point to establish whether I was alive. Paul refused to tell him anything, then negotiated with the soldiers, gave them drinks and, in the process, saved my life.
It became clear to me that the message I managed to get out through RFI was something that the government didn't want the world to know. If the media had played its role, things probably wouldn't have happened the way they did.
At another point, when I was facing death, they gave me a piece of paper and a pen and told me to write. I wrote to my wife saying I loved her, that she should be strong and look after the children and that I was leaving everything behind for her spiritually and materially. That was one of three times that I was nearly killed; that time, the soldiers who had come to kill me allowed me to write a message before putting the gun to my head.
My wife was pregnant with our third child, and I wrote, if God wishes, you will have the baby. By that time I didn't know about my firstborn because she was not with us. I mentioned my three children and told my wife to start her life again if she survived. I said don't be alone, carry on, keep going.
The soldier told everyone to get back because he was going to finish me off. Curiously, I was not scared. I was prepared for death. It was like a dream. This guy cocked the pistol and just then miraculously a tank arrived while the gun was at my temple. It was like a movie. The commander in the tank shouted 'Thomas what's going on?' I turned to look at him and said 'They want to kill me.'
The commander stopped the killing. But while I survived, my firstborn daughter did not. I later discovered that she had been murdered while on a visit to her grandparents.
It is very difficult to put my life experiences behind me and to forget. My wife and I live with it all the time. It is part of me. Sometimes I shut myself in a room and cry when I think about my little girl. It's difficult when you know you could have been killed and you survived, but your child was killed. Every time I go to the memorial sites and see the skulls, I can't help myself. When I look at them, I cry because I remember my daughter. Maybe her skull is somewhere, but I don't know where.
But I cannot give up my career as a journalist because life has to go on. I have to keep living. After all, I survived. I returned to full-time journalism in December 1994, once the phone lines in Rwanda started to work again and I was able to do freelance work for foreign news outlets. Since then I've worked for Voice of America and the BBC. I think one of the reasons I have to continue my work as a journalist is so that I can contribute toward preventing genocide from ever happening again.
I do believe that despite the genocide and the media's role in inciting the mass violence, there is still a new generation who want to become journalists. I have spoken to students and they have sought my advice. But there are still many troubling questions. How does a journalist become a criminal? It's extremely difficult to answer that question, because journalists are human like everyone else. Sometimes reporters think they are supermen or women, but we are human beings. We have feelings like everyone else, and we are members of society. We can be caught up in the circle of violence like anyone else. We can identify with the group responsible for violence. That is why, as reporters, we should be more objective.
In April 2003, I was in Cte d'Ivoire as a guest at a seminar on 'Conflict, Peace and Media', and I spoke to journalists about what we lived through in Rwanda. I said that certain reporters participated in the violence, while others spoke out against it. I reminded them that 48 journalists had been killed in Rwanda because they spoke out. The reporters in Cte d'Ivoire asked me, 'How can we know if what we're doing is wrong?' They didn't know the answer to that question. Some of them had already gone too far. They had become part of the hate media without knowing it. So I told them, 'look at what you write. Listen to what you say, and analyze yourself. If you are demonizing people, if you are stigmatizing other tribes, other clans, you're involved in violence.'
'How did you go this far,' I asked. They didn't know. So I said, 'You're no longer reporters. You're no longer journalists, and I would like to congratulate the politicians who managed to co-opt you, and co-opt you without your knowing it. I congratulate these politicians. They're good politicians, very effective. Now stand up and be reporters, do your job, report the facts objectively.' And one of them replied, 'Well there was a politician who has said we want Cte d'Ivoire for the people from Cte d'Ivoire. Can we repeat that?' Well yes, you can say that, you can say that this politician said that. You can report that, and public opinion will know how to react to this politician. You can report the facts, but don't get involved.
I have to admit, it's hard to know as a reporter when you've taken the wrong turn. All I can say is, be brave and stand up for your work.
Part Two ( I n t e r n a t i o n a l M e d i a C o v e r a g e o f t h e G e n o c i d e
T h i s p a g e i n t e n t i o n a l l y l e f t b l a n k
1 2 ( R e p o r t i n g t h e G e n o c i d e
M a r k D o y l e
I t w a s l a t e A p r i l 1 9 9 4 . I w a s i n K i g a l i , d o i n g a q u e s t i o n - a n d - a n s w e r s e s s i o n w i t h a B B C p r e s e n t e r i n L o n d o n a n d t h e p r e s e n t e r a s k e d m e t o clarify what all this shooting and killing was about. I found myself saying,
Look you have to understand that there are two wars going on here. There's a shooting war and a genocide war. The two are connected, but also distinct. In the shooting war, there are two conventional armies at each other, and in the genocide war, one of those armies the government side with help from civilians is involved in mass killings.
That may seem simplistic, but I think it is a useful way of understanding what happened.
I am writing about my own experiences reporting the war and the genocide for the BBC, filing both radio and television reports. Normally based in Nairobi, Kenya, I spent much of the 100 days after 6 April 1994 reporting from Rwanda, at times, as one of the only Western reporters still in the capital. In this paper, I won't draw comparisons with other media reporting, because, quite frankly, I was so busy during those 100 days that I didn't catch much of it. But I think it is important to go into some detail about what I did before I started reporting on the genocide as genocide.
I have to admit that during the first few days, I, like others, got the story terribly wrong. Down on the ground, up-close if you could get close enough, safely enough it did look at first like chaos. I said so. I used the word chaos. What I could see clearly in the first few days was the shooting war between the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the government, and the dead bodies. It was not clear who had killed whom, not at first, and the shooting war appeared chaotic with shifting front lines, a lot of noise and a lot of red hot lead flying around.
In a way, the shooting war was easy to describe. The genocide war took a little longer to confirm. But I got there in the end. In fact, looking back now at the scripts of my reports broadcast on the BBC, within little more than a week of the beginning of the killing on 67 April, there were clear references to government-backed massacres of ethnic Tutsis and Hutu opponents of the regime. In other words, within the first few weeks of the killing, there was reportage from the field sketching out the true nature of the massacres.
My focus here will be on what I know best: the reporting I did on the ground.
My first two trips to Rwanda were in late 1993 and early 1994, before the genocide. The installation of the broad-based transitional government was continually postponed. I didn't really understand why this was happening until I visited an African embassy in Kigali and asked the ambassador if he would give me an off-the-record briefing on the political situation. I can't identify which ambassador it was, of course, because he spoke off the record.
This ambassador astonished me by not only explaining in some detail and very frankly how the various extremist Hutu parties were blocking the installation of the power-sharing government, but also by keeping me there, in his private office, for more than four hours.
I was a bit embarrassed at first. I didn't even have an appointment. But every time I looked at my watch or started to leave, the ambassador said, 'No no, sit down. I want to make sure the BBC understands this do you understand it? Do you realize now what is going on and how dangerous it is?' Thanks to that ambassador, I was just beginning to realize.
The ambassador kept me so long because he was frustrated that the world didn't seem to be paying attention to Rwanda or realizing the dangers. When I left his office he said something like 'Don't forget Rwanda, Mark, something big could happen here.'
There are some events that make us all remember exactly what we were doing at the time. For my parents' generation, it was John F. Kennedy's assassination. For me, it was the day the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvnal Habyarimana and President Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was brought down late on the evening of 6 April 1994.
I was working late in the BBC office in Nairobi. At about 11 p.m., the phone rang. It was one of the editors in London, a man by the name of David Eades, who is now a BBC-TV presenter. David said they were getting news agency reports that a plane carrying the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda had crashed. I remember with crystal clarity what I said. 'Oh my God,' I said, remembering the ambassador's warning. 'Oh my God, this is going to be a huge story!' David was taken aback by my response.
I told David I had to go to Rwanda immediately, because this event was going to have major ramifications.
That night, I filed a report based on information that I could gather by phone from Nairobi, citing information from United Nations (UN) and diplomatic sources and residents on the ground in Rwanda.
My first report focused, not surprisingly, on the reports of the plane crash and 'urgent discussions' between the UN commander, Romo Dallaire, and members of the Rwandan government.
The next day, the machinery was set in motion. Colleagues from Reuters news agency chartered a plane from Nairobi to Mbarara in southern Uganda and I bought a seat. Kigali airport was closed, of course, so that destination was out of the question. Heading for northern Rwanda, for the RPF-held zone, seemed the best way to get some sort of angle on the story immediately. It took us most of the day and night to get to Mbarara, then most of the next day to reach Kabale on the UgandaRwanda border. After many hours waiting at the border, we negotiated entry into the RPF-held zone and Paul Kagame's headquarters in the manager's offices of an old tea estate in Mulindi in northern Rwanda.
My memory of arriving there has a digital clarity. I remember looking down from the hill where Kagame had his headquarters, down to the old, long-abandoned tea plantations. The field of bright green tea bushes was in such stark contrast to the dark green trees around the edges of the valley that the expanse of tea looked like a placid lake of green water.
I stayed for a couple of days near Mulindi and saw the start of the shooting war between the RPF lines just north of the town of Byumba and the government lines on the outskirts of the town. On 8 April, I reported on an interview with the RPF Secretary General Theogene Rudasingwa, who said the RPF intended to take military and political action to restore order in Kigali and throughout Rwanda. A report on 9 April, from Byumba, focused on the RPF attack against government troops and the RPF plan to send a detachment into Kigali to shore up the rebel garrison there. I signed off this way:
The strategic outcome of the current hostilities is impossible to predict, but it's a certainty that the ordinary Rwandan people, who have suffered years of ethnic and political violence, will be adversely affected in the short term.
When it became clear from what I saw around Byumba that the shooting war had started again in earnest, I decided I had to try to get to Kigali. There was no way I could get through those front lines and travel south toward the capital by land, so I took a risk and went back north into Uganda, driving through the night to Entebbe airport.
By an extraordinary fluke and some negotiations, a few other journalists and I met an aid worker at the airport who had a plane, which he was going to fly from Entebbe to Kigali. It was half empty, except for some food supplies, and he agreed to give us a lift. Again, I don't think I'll tell you the aid worker's name, because he got into a furious argument with General Dallaire when he turned up in Kigali, unannounced, with a planeful of journalists.
I don't think General Dallaire was in a particularly good mood at the time. After months of asking for more and better troops for his UN mission and being told none were available, he suddenly saw hundreds of them arrive, but not to help in his mission of pacifying Rwanda, but to take part in an entirely different mission saving expatriates.
The scene at Kigali airport was extraordinary. The shooting war was clearly in full flow. We could hear constant small arms and mortar fire from inside the town. At night, we could see tracers and explosions. On the apron of the airfield, there were numerous French, Italian and Belgian military planes disgorging European paratroopers who had come to save European lives.
I spent a few nights sleeping on the airport floor and eating French military rations which are, by the way, infinitely superior to those of most other countries. By day, I went on short trips with the French military as they drove into town to rescue French and other European citizens. I went on these trips not because I thought rescuing Europeans was the main story, but because it was the only story I could cover safely, or at least relatively safely. It was the only way I could get into town to see what was going on. No one in their right mind would have voluntarily gone into the city of Kigali in those early days without a serious armed escort.
On 11 April, I filed this report from Kigali:
The capital of Rwanda is in chaos. Three main military groups are contesting positions in the centre of the city: the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front and two components of the government forces, regular army troops and elements of the Presidential Guard, loyal to the late head of state. Reinforcements [plural] for the rebels are moving towards Kigali from their stronghold in the north. In addition to those military forces, various militias are settling ethnic and political scores, which broadly reflect animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. But this is not just a tribal war. The Hutu are split politically and former neighbours are now at each other's throats. I have definite evidence that at least a dozen people were killed this morning. The total for those few hours alone is certainly many more. An experienced aid worker said tens of thousands of people had died in the last five days. Foreign residents are being evacuated from Rwanda in an air bridge to Nairobi and other regional capitals. The United Nations forces, which came here to monitor a ceasefire between government and rebels, have found themselves in the middle of a vicious war. Loud explosions, believed to be mortar fire, could be heard sporadically throughout the day near the airport compound, which is controlled by UN forces and French troops brought here to evacuate their nationals. It is not thought that the airport is being targeted, but it is close to positions held by the three main military groups.
It was on one of those evacuation trips with the French military that I realized something other than just the shooting war was going on. Standing on the back of a truck I looked down to see a Rwandan man attacking another Rwandan, in the head, with a screwdriver, clearly intent on killing him. I saw several dead bodies of people who had been killed with machetes. Colleagues at the other end of the convoy of trucks saw someone being attacked with machetes. The French soldiers controlling the convoy just drove past all these incidents, heading for the house of a European who was to be rescued.
In a contribution to another news package broadcast 11 April, I filed this report:
As the convoy left the airport to collect its mainly Belgian passengers, snaking its way through outlying suburbs and farms, I counted three recently killed people, probably Rwandans, lying in a pool of blood. Large groups of men armed with clubs and machetes stood around. An hour later as the convoy returned, there were at least eight bodies. Reporters at the front of the convoy saw at least two people being hacked to death. The killing is continuing.
It wasn't until about a fortnight after the plane went down that we started piecing together a clear picture of what happened starting on the night of 6 April. We all know now, of course, thanks to the various inquiries, that the Interahamwe and the army set up roadblocks within hours or even minutes of the signal, if it was a signal, of the plane going down. And we all know now the purpose of those roadblocks.
In a live interview on 12 April, I relayed news that the interim government of Rwanda had reportedly fled to Gitarama and that thousands of refugees were apparently leaving Kigali by road, heading south in the direction of Burundi. Another report that day quoted Dallaire as confirming that the RPF force sent down from the north had now linked up with the RPF battalion based in Kigali.
A report from 13 April focused on the fight for Kigali:
The battle for Kigali continues. Small arms, automatic weapons and grenades are being used as rebel and government forces struggle for advantage. On Tuesday (April 12), the UN commander in Rwanda said the rebel forces were not encountering strong resistance. However, there was heavy fighting at dawn on Wednesday. The conflict began when the president's plane was shot down seven days ago. The president's supporters blamed rival tribal and ethnic groups and the massacres of civilians began. Tens of thousands of people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced by the unrest. Now the fighting has a more military aspect with two highly trained armies attacking each other. The rebels say they are fighting to restore order in Kigali and then in the longer term to introduce democracy to Rwanda. The government army may be fighting for its own survival. The government it was supposed to be protecting fled on Tuesday for a regional town. Different groups are in charge of various parts of Kigali, while much of the population has fled. Whichever group comes out on top will have to manage a huge humanitarian crisis. Over a million people were critically short of food before the Rwandan civil war resumed because of drought and earlier conflict. Hundreds of thousands of others will now be dependent on food aid.
Later the same day, in a report about ceasefire negotiations, I referred to the RPF contention that it had no interest in a ceasefire 'while innocent people were being killed in Kigali'. I reported on:
... rebel allegations that thousands of political opponents of the late president, who died when his plane was shot down last week, have been systematically murdered by the government army and militias loyal to the former head of state. These allegations are supported by numerous eyewitnesses. However, the RPF advance has also undoubtedly led to many deaths. The main army base in western Kigali and the area that surrounds it is still firmly in government hands. The streets around the base are patrolled by government soldiers in armoured cars and tanks. Several evacuated foreign embassies in the zone are untouched by looters. In other parts of the west of the city, however, thugs mounting roadblocks are continuing to kill people they consider to be their ethnic or political opponents.
Many reports, including my own, made reference to the 'tribal' nature of the conflict and militias settling scores. But the outlines of genocide began to appear in news reports, even before we first used the word to describe the killing. Here is a report from 14 April that began with the sound of gunfire:
One of the many front lines in Kigali. The city is now divided into rebel and government-held zones. Where there aren't soldiers from one side or the other, militias with machetes and clubs rule the streets. Neighbourhood boundaries are defined by roadblocks, often with piles of bodies next to them. Militias loyal to the government have killed many ethnic Tutsis. Militias loyal to the rebels have killed Hutus. Before the rebels came to Kigali a few days ago, what appears to have been a deliberate plan by Hutu militias to massacre Tutsis or rebel supporters was instigated thousands were executed by bullet or by knife. There have been some reports that rebel soldiers are taking revenge. This afternoon, a reliable eyewitness saw an RPF soldier force five people into a house and shoot them dead. The rebels hold positions near the United Nations headquarters and several other areas. The government holds the western zone, where empty foreign embassies stand, positions around the airport and other areas. The deafening sound of gunfire and mortar echo around the misty valleys of this once beautiful city. The sickening stench of bodies on the streets is common, despite the mass graves some containing thousands of bodies which have been filling up. The United Nations operation in Rwanda was helpless as the carnage gathered pace. Now its commander, General Dallaire, is shuttling between the two sides trying to arrange a meeting, which might lead to a ceasefire. The rebels have vowed to capture the whole city, but they have failed to take several key points because of government resistance. The battle for the Rwandan capital continues.
On 15 April, I reported on the decision by the International Committee of the Red Cross to suspend its operations in Rwanda following an attack on a Red Cross ambulance, during which six wounded being carried in the ambulance were killed at a roadblock. The report also noted the continued intensity of the military battle:
The fighting is fierce. Mortar and heavy-calibre automatic weapons were heard at various times throughout the night. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the last week in clashes, which have involved tribal militias at least as much as regular government and rebel troops. The capital of Rwanda is anarchic. UN peacekeepers have failed to stop the fighting but are trying at least to organize a meeting between the two sides.
Another report on 15 April painted a more detailed picture of the suffering on the ground:
The displaced people I have been able to see in the capital are undoubtedly but a drop in the ocean of human suffering caused by the political and military unrest. Five thousand Rwandans have taken refuge in a football stadium in which Bangladeshi UN soldiers are billetted and a similar number fled to a UN hospital. Thousands more are in churches or in other places of refuge. The 5,000 displaced in the main Kigali football stadium are being protected by the Bangladeshis, but have very little food, no running water and no medical supplies. Many of them were wounded in the fighting or are suffering from malaria and other easily preventable diseases. There are several Rwandan doctors in the football stadium, but they have no drugs or bandages. The Bangladeshis have shared some of their combat rations with the refugees. At a makeshift clinic under one of the main spectator stands, a Rwandan volunteer was handing out small sachets of apricot jam to sick people. 'It's all we've got,' he said. 'I know it's not medicine but I've got to give them something.' With almost all United Nations civilians and other aid personnel evacuated from Rwanda, there are virtually no foreign aid organizations here to address the catastrophe caused by the war. The main exception is the International Committee of the Red Cross, but even this organization has had considerable difficulties operating. Several aid groups are said to be standing by in Nairobi to bring in much-needed food and medical supplies, but until the fighting dies down and airport security is guaranteed by the UN, aid flights can't come in. The UN force commander said improving airport security was one of his top priorities.
My reports over the next few days focused on the withdrawal of Belgian troops, the appointment of Augustin Bizimungu as the new Rwandan army chief of staff, the government's claim that two million people had been displaced by the fighting and the intense battle for strategic hilltops south of Kigali.
But a dispatch on 16 April, about attempts at ceasefire talks, cited senior UN officers who said the killing of the president's political opponents began soon after the 6 April plane crash:
The immediate aim of the talks is clearly a ceasefire so a semblance of order can be restored to the capital. Currently, apart from the two warring military sides, there are militias, bandits and looters on the streets. Near-anarchy prevails and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the war. There is no effective government and the RPF rebels don't recognize the interim administration, which has now fled the capital and is based in the town of Butare in the south. Meanwhile, for the first time since the president's plane was brought down over a week ago, a clearer picture is emerging of what United Nations peacekeepers think happened after the crash. Senior UN officers say massacres of the president's political opponents from both Tutsi and Hutu tribes began just a few minutes after the plane was brought down. UN officers said they appealed to the presidential guard to stop the killing, but failed. According to the UN officers, it was this mass killing which prompted the rebels to break out of their United Nations designated cantonment to mount what the rebels described as a rescue mission. The city is now divided into government and rebel-held zones which ethnic and political militias are protecting as a first line of defence. UN military officers said the rebels were also fighting for the northern towns of Ruhengeri and Byumba, which are held by government soldiers but which have come under rebel shelling. The UN asked for a pause in the shelling, so it could pull back some of its units to the capital.
A report the next day, 17 April, repeated the summary, by stating:
It's estimated that tens of thousands of people have been killed in Kigali since the president's plane was brought down by still unknown gunmen. First the president's supporters massacred his political opponents, then the rebels marched on the city and military clashes began ...
An 18 April report gave some credence to the Rwandan army claim that the RPF had rounded up 250 civilians and killed them. But the report also stated that:
Most independent eyewitness accounts of killings in the Rwandan capital in the last few weeks have accused government soldiers and militias loyal to the government of killing political opponents in very large numbers. The presidential guard in particular is accused of massacring ethnic Tutsis and Hutu members of political parties opposed to the late president who died when his plane was shot down almost two weeks ago by unknown gunmen.
Another file that day contained this reference: 'Camps full of ethnic Tutsis, fleeing violence from government-sponsored ethnic Hutu militias, are said by Rwandan army officers to have been created in several parts of the country.'
In a 19 April report about the withdrawal of UN military observers, I stated that:
On the streets leading to the main government army base, militias armed with machetes are directed by soldiers and form a first line of defence against rebels and rebel sympathizers, who are often taken by the militia to include any ethnic Tutsis.
Monitoring events from Nairobi on 20 April, I reported that 'thousands of people have been killed with machetes and clubs by the government militia, who have targeted opposition sympathizers and members of the minority Tutsi tribe who dominate the rebels forces.'
And again on 22 April, I made a reference to 'militias loyal to the memory of the Rwandan president who was killed in a plane crash two weeks ago. The militias are killing political and ethnic opponents of the late president in large numbers.' The same tone permeates my 23 April report, once again from Kigali, which is bolstered by information from the Red Cross:
Massacres of ethnic or political opponents of the late president, who died in a plane crash which rekindled the war, are continuing. Most of the massacres are committed by militias loyal to the late president's memory sometimes with government army soldiers present. The Red Cross estimates that up to 100,000 people have been killed in the past two weeks.
My report from Kigali on 24 April painted a clear picture of what was happening on the ground:
It's difficult to imagine the scale of the human disaster in Rwanda unless you've seen some of the many piles of bodies heaped on the streets of Kigali and on roadsides in the rural areas. There is little dignity for the main victims of this war which General Dallaire reluctantly believes still has some time to run. The Canadian commander is keeping lines of communication open, is protecting those civilians that he can and is working hard for a ceasefire. But he said it was not clear to him that the tactical aims of the two armies had yet been achieved. Most of the killing is being done not by soldiers or rebels, but by machete-wielding militias who seek out ethnic and political opponents. The worst killing so far has been in the capital and the worst culprits have been militias opposed to the ethnic group from which the rebels are drawn, the Tutsi. Other political opponents from the Hutu tribe have also been killed. While this slaughter continues, there is a more conventional war between the government and rebel armies taking place ...
Short of using the word genocide, my report from Kigali on 26 April, echoing charges levelled by Amnesty International, challenged the notion that the killing was a simple tribal conflict.
Amnesty's main charge is that the killings have been part of a deliberate political plan, rather than pure tribal violence. The main culprits, according to the human rights organisation, have been supporters of the late president who have systematically executed known or suspected opponents of his former rule. This thesis fits broadly with the facts. It was only a matter of minutes after the late night plane crash three weeks ago before elements of the former leader's presidential guard began killing opponents of their late head of state. By morning the next day, militias loyal to President Habyarimana's party were on the streets seeking out opposition sympathizers. They included members of the Tutsi tribe, from which the rebels draw most of their support and ethnic Hutus from opposition parties. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, up to 100,000 people have been killed. Despite the undoubted political motivation behind many of the killings, it is nevertheless probable that the majority of those to have died are Tutsi. Politics and ethnicity are inextricably linked in Rwanda. While many Rwandan intellectuals, particularly opponents of the former president's military rule oppose tribal politics, it is still a factor in most political calculations and is likely to be for some time to come.
Looking back through my reports, it appears I didn't use the word 'genocide' until 29 April, in a report filed from Nairobi that noted that the British aid agency Oxfam had described the killing in Rwanda as 'genocide'. But my reports had for some time been replete with references to the massacres of Tutsi civilians and moderate Hutus by government-backed militias.
After that, as it became clear to me what was happening, I used the word genocide more often. But one of the problems we faced in reporting the genocide as genocide apart from, of course, confirming the facts on the ground was that it took the rest of the world, including some of my editors in London, some time to take it in. I'm not saying I was censored, or anything like that. Far from it. I think every word I sent to London was rebroadcast. But the BBC often uses sources of information and interviewees other than its own correspondents on the ground. That's quite right and healthy, of course, but it sometimes meant parts of the BBC were at odds with what I was saying.
The first problem was a general one. There is a general tendency to portray Africa as chaotic, the Dark Continent, and so on. Sometimes indeed, it is very dark. It was in Rwanda in 1994. But Rwanda was not, after a while, chaotic or impenetrable. It was, as we now know, a very well planned political and ethnic genocide. That didn't really fit the media image of chaotic Africa and various things flowed from that.
For example, I used to take regular calls from BBC editors in London asking me to make sure I 'put the other side'. The implication, of course, was that the RPF must be killing as many as the Interahamwe and the government army, and that I should be reporting this. During calls like this, I had to control my inner fury at the implication that I was somehow biased. But, from a London perspective, I could see why they were asking the question. I told them what I knew, that this was not a balanced picture in terms of killings, and that was that whether it fitted what we might have expected or not. My editors trusted me and used my material, but I still had a feeling they were a bit uneasy.
Sometimes, if I took my eye off the ball and didn't carefully monitor the output from London, I found that BBC newsrooms in London would revert to using phrases like 'chaos' and 'indiscriminate mass killings'. It wasn't chaotic, on the whole, and it wasn't, on the whole, indiscriminate. I sometimes found myself sending my editors what for me were highly unusual memos, not for broadcast, asking them please to stick to my words. In response they usually did.
I sent one such memo on 20 June, headed 'Rwanda/Guidance.' It read as follows:
It is a very serious misrepresentation of the situation in Rwanda to describe the killings simply as 'the slaughter of civilians' or 'the mass killings,' without explaining who is killing whom. The vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of killings in Rwanda have been committed by the government militia and government army who have been implementing a well-organized plan of genocide of Tutsis, the tribe from which the rebels draw most support, and ethnic Hutu government opponents. These killings preceded, or coincided with, the military offensive by the main[ly] Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels. The BBC should not fall into the trap of bland and misleading descriptions of Africans massacring Africans without explaining why, as the news agencies are doing most of the time. The killings in Rwanda are political as well as ethnic. A BBC correspondent who has spent much of the last three months in Rwanda says the government militia and the government armed forces are responsible for most of the bodies being found in mass graves in Rwanda and floating in rivers leading from Rwanda to Lake Victoria in Uganda.
Nevertheless, the 'spin doctors' sometimes won bizarre victories. In July 1994, a few dozen British and American soldiers arrived at Kigali airport to help distribute some aid. The United States and British army media relations staff promptly announced to the world, in keeping with the usual image of Western troops arriving in Africa, that they had 'taken control' of the airport. This was, of course, ridiculous. The RPF was by this time in control of almost the whole country, and had been in complete control of the airport for many weeks. A few lines of this 'taken control of the airport' rubbish crept into BBC news bulletins written in London. The phrase gave the desired impression, of course, that the United States and the United Kingdom had finally arrived to sort out the squabbling natives, when this was complete nonsense.
There were more serious attempts to 'balance' what was essentially an unbalanced story. A few weeks into the genocide, some RPF soldiers killed five churchmen. I'm not sure of the exact circumstances, but it was public knowledge soon afterward because the RPF leadership publicly denounced it. Newsrooms around the Western world seized on the killings with undisguised glee it was as if here, at last, was proof that the 'other side' was just as evil. The problem was, this was not the proof of moral equivalence that could make the world feel okay about dismissing the whole Rwanda business as African chaos. This was not the balancing item that would make it okay to forget about the genocide and say, with the warring parties at each other's throats, nothing could be done. Five murders, condemnable and awful though they may be, cannot, in my book, equate with 5,000 or 50,000 or however many had been committed by the other side by that time. I believe that highlighting this case, giving it the prominence it got, was misleading.
On another occasion, a senior spokeswoman for a UN agency told a press conference in Geneva that the Hutus in southwest Rwanda, who were mainly fleeing the shooting war, had good reason to fear being massacred by the advancing RPF. At this point there was, to my knowledge, no evidence of mass killings by the RPF, and this UN spokeswoman was simply wrong. Perhaps she, too, was seeking a moral equivalence. But she had clearly not understood the difference between the shooting war and the genocide war, and who was doing what to whom. And yet, as a senior UN official, she surely should have done. Her remarks were given wide credence, but again, were misleading.
I filed this copy on 1 May:
The statement by the UNHCR spokeswoman, Sylvana Foa, to the effect that the mainly Hutu people in southeastern Rwanda are in danger of being massacred appears to be based on mis-information. Ms Foa said that the Hutus are desperately afraid of the RPF and that tens of thousands of them are in danger of being massacred. The clear implication was that the rebels would do the massacring. A BBC correspondent who has spent much of the last three weeks in Rwanda, said there had been no convincing evidence of the RPF massacring civilians. The RPF have openly admitted to killing government militias whom they consider armed combatants. Our correspondent says it is likely that the Hutus in southeastern Rwanda are scared of the RPF military advance, because they don't want to be caught in the crossfire with government troops, but that the allegation that they fear being massacred by rebels does not appear to have any evidence to back it up. The vast majority of the killing in Rwanda has been done by government militias, murdering ethnic Tutsis and Hutu members of the opposition parties.
In addition to filing the news copy, I added this guidance to the desk: 'I suggest that we do not broadcast Sylvana Foa's statement about the alleged fear of massacres by the RPF until some convincing evidence emerges to back it up.'
After the front lines began to stabilize a bit in Kigali, I ventured out of the airport and away from the protection of the French military. I went into town on my own. My first stop was the Mille Collines hotel.
I managed to get a share of a room in the hotel and decided rather foolishly, in retrospect to go to the Red Cross hospital. It was a rather dangerous thing to do. But I suppose I'm pleased I ventured out because I learned a lot that day about the genocide war. There were about six roadblocks between the Mille Collines and the Red Cross, with militiamen and soldiers on them. As we made our way toward the hospital, there was a comparatively small number of bodies next to each roadblock. (This is of course an extraordinary way to describe dead fellow humans. But Rwanda seemed to change the way we all saw things, including the scale. Never before then would I have used a phrase like 'a comparatively small number of bodies.')
With some bluffing we managed to get past the militiamen and reached the hospital. I was with fellow journalist Catherine Bond. We did the necessary interviews with Red Cross officials and patients and, after about two hours, started to make our way back to the hotel. The piles of bodies at the roadblocks had grown. For the first time, I had personal eyewitness evidence that pro-government militias were killing people. There was no doubt about it. I remember Catherine turning to me in the car and saying we should describe that road between the Mille Collines and the Red Cross as 'Machete Avenue'. 'If they can have "Sniper Ally" in Sarajevo,' she said, 'we can have "Machete Avenue" in Kigali.'
I think I stayed at the Mille Collines for a few more days, then I became too scared by the militias at the doors, and I sought a kind of refuge at the Red Cross offices. The incredibly brave Red Cross representative, Philippe Gaillard, who used to cross the front lines every day doing his humanitarian work, tolerated me on his floor for a few days. But Philippe made it clear that I would be kicked out if any of my reports ever compromised his neutrality. I didn't like putting him in this position, so I moved out when I realized that the Meridien Hotel, on the other side of town, had some UN officials staying in it and, consequently, had a few Tunisian UN soldiers on guard.
Staying at the Meridien was surreal. The hotel was actually on the front line when I moved in and, again in retrospect, it was absurdly dangerous being there. The RPF had dug trenches in the road just outside the entrance lobby and we used to actually watch them exchanging fire with the government forces. It was also surreal staying there because although two of the floors were full of refugees, one of the managers of the hotel had stayed on and still had the keys to the kitchens and the wine cellar. Every night she served us a meal, which we paid for in dollars and ate while the shooting war raged, literally, outside our front windows.
A colleague from Reuters news agency had a bullet come through his window and into his bathroom. The most sought-after rooms were at the back.
Gradually, the RPF won the initiative in the shooting war in the capital and took the area encompassing the UN headquarters at the Amahoro stadium, the Meridien Hotel and the airport. This meant that there was some freedom of movement in this area, and fairly quickly the UN headquarters became a focus of my activity it was a relatively safe place to be and the UN was a good source of information. Not all of the UN officials were happy for me to be there, but most came round after a bit of persuasion. Some of them let me go on trips with them and briefed me about their version of events. Ceasefire meetings were held at the Amahoro and that meant I had regular access to both RPF and Rwandan government officials. This would have been impossible without the UN.
General Dallaire himself was quite canny with the press. He would talk to us when he could and was quite friendly. I remember once going to his room to interview him. I hadn't shaved for several days, and the first thing he did was to open his personal suitcase and give me a disposable razor. But at the same time, I realized that Dallaire was using the press. If he turned up at a meeting with, say, Kagame or Bagasora, with a posse of journalists in tow, it allowed him to get the belligerents to say, on camera when they wanted to of course that they agreed with this or that ceasefire proposal.
I was quite happy to be used in this way if it meant I got better access to the key actors in the two wars.
But on one occasion I deeply regretted travelling with Dallaire to a ceasefire negotiation. He went across Kigali, across the front line, to meet with the government side in the Mille Collines hotel. The top government army and gendarmerie brass were there. After the talks, the press were invited in to record some prepared statements. At this ceremony, a senior gendarmerie officer suddenly started publicly berating the press, especially the BBC, for spending too much time with the RPF and not telling the government side of the story. Now, let's be clear. There were very good reasons why we didn't spend much time on the government side. It was hostile and extremely dangerous. For one thing, the RPF were winning the shooting war and the government positions were being overrun. For another, the genocide war was taking place on the government side and it was a distinctly unhealthy place to be, of course for Rwandans, but also for foreign journalists. I'd been there many times and it was, quite frankly, terrifying.
Nevertheless, some misplaced pride in my objectivity persuaded me to answer the gendarmerie officer's complaints by saying, in public, that I would welcome the opportunity to accompany him on a visit to the government front lines. I regretted it almost as soon as I had opened my mouth, but I realized that once I had said it, I had to go through with it.
And so I set off, very reluctantly, again with my colleague Catherine Bond, on a tour of government positions near the centre of Kigali and in the district of Nyamirambo. I deeply regretted our itinerary, in a government military vehicle, because I knew, from independent sources, that the RPF had firing positions in the hills above Nyamirambo.
At one point a mortar round landed quite near to us, quite possibly targeting the officers I was travelling with. But, on the other hand, I did learn some important things that day. One, the killing was continuing. I saw a deep well full of bodies. And, two, the government military were working in direct collaboration with the civilian militia. I knew this because I saw it for myself. I saw the barriers with bodies next to them, and I drove in a car with army officers who ordered the civilian militiamen to let them through. I also saw a senior civilian militiaman give orders to men in uniform. It was direct collaboration.
Once the RPF had more or less firm control of most of Kigali, more and more journalists started arriving in the capital by road from the north, and the RPF began showing us things for themselves, especially genocide sites. I went with them a few times including, once, to the church at Nyamata where several hundred people were killed. But on the whole I preferred to stay near the UN because that way I could get parts of both sides of the story, hitching rides with UN officers as they shuttled between the two sides. I travelled, for example, to Gitarama to interview Theodore Sindikubwabo, the man who was briefly appointed interim president after the remnants of the government had fled the capital. I got there thanks to some friendly Ghanaian military observers. I also made many trips outside the capital independently.
My last trip before leaving Rwanda in late July 1994 was an independent journey to the town of Gisenyi on the border with what was then known, and I still think of, as Zaire. The RPF had claimed to have taken Gisenyi, and since it would be the last major town to fall to them, meaning they would have won the shooting war, I decided to go and check.
Again, there is a crystal clear picture in my mind. Gisenyi was littered with red beer crates, which had been looted from the brewery, and the hills around the town were dotted every few metres with the little piles of stones Rwandans use to balance their cooking pots. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus had camped there, in the open, before flooding into Zaire as the genocidaires made what I am convinced they thought of, at the time, as a tactical retreat.
There was a petrol tanker on fire at a crossroads in Gisenyi where I met a tall RPF officer called Bruce Munyango. Someone had told him I was coming and he greeted me. As we shook hands, I noted that one finger was missing on his right hand. 'I'm going to take you right up to the border,' he said, 'to show you we're in full control.'
He did just that. The RPF had won one of the wars, the shooting war. But it didn't feel like a triumph, because the other side had almost won the genocide war.
13 ( W h o F a i l e d i n R w a n d a , J o u r n a l i s t s o r t h e M e d i a ?
A n n e C h a o n
D i d t h e m e d i a f a i l i n R w a n d a ? O r d i d i n d i v i d u a l j o u r n a l i s t s f a i l i n R w a n d a ? I n h i s a n a l y s i s o f t h e w o r l d ' s r e a c t i o n t o t h e g e n o c i d e i n R w a n d a , A l a n K u p e r m a n ( 2 0 0 0 ) w r o t e i n a n I n t e r n a t i o n a l P r e s s Institute report:
Western media blame the international community for not intervening quickly, but the media must share blame for not immediately recognizing the extent of the carnage and mobilizing world attention to it.
Kuperman says the media must share the blame for the world's failure to stop the genocide. I would like to be the devil's advocate, to explain a bit about how we worked as reporters in Rwanda in 1994.
Before I take issue with Kuperman's point, let me cite a few words written by my friend and colleague Annie Thomas, the first and principal Agence France-Presse (AFP) special correspondent in Rwanda. She was based in Nairobi at the time, but left Kenya immediately after the 6 April 1994 attack on President Juvnal Habyarimana's plane and took the first flight to Bujumbura. Then she drove north into Rwanda and made her way to Kigali through Butare. (Annie is still with the AFP, now based in Dakar.) Here is what she wrote:
You ask me if I think about Rwanda sometimes: much more than sometimes. It has become a kind of obsession.
An obsession because of the event itself: massacres, mutilated children; people I met on both sides: victims and killers. I still have some faces before my eyes. I had nightmares every night for at least two years and, since then, occasionally.
An obsession because of our inability to describe properly those events during the first few days. Being caught in Kigali for a long time, first on the Hutu side, and then on the RPF side, it was simply impossible to say that hundreds of thousands of people were killed. 'Acts of genocide,' or 'genocide' are words, which only came later.
An obsession because of the accusations that arose later against journalists who were there, especially those who were with the 'genocidaires.' As journalists, as an agency, we couldn't avoid listening to them and quoting them. Jean Helene (Radio France International correspondent, killed in Abidjan in the autumn of 2003) suffered a lot because of those accusations and even AFP, afterward, has been described as 'Interahamwe.' (Annie Thomas, AFP, personal communication, February 2004)
Annie spent weeks in Rwanda in 1994, at least three weeks a month for the first three months. She spent most of her time in Kigali or in Gitarama and Butare. She was an eyewitness to a massacre at Kigali hospital on 11 April, when soldiers entered the premises, dragged injured young men from their beds, pushed them toward a pile of corpses in the yard and killed them with bayonets. She reported that scene the very same day on the wire.
Later, she crossed the front line and joined other journalists who had come from Uganda to reach the RPF zone. 'Honestly,' she writes, 'for my intellectual comfort, I would have been much more comfortable on that side than being with militiamen, their machetes still dripping with blood, professing how much they loved France' (Annie Thomas, AFP, personal communication, February 2004).
In the first weeks of the genocide, from April to late June 1994, I was still in Paris, working on the desk at AFP, editing Annie's copy. In late June, I went to Rwanda to report, mainly in the northwest of the country, the heartland of the former President Habyarimana, where militias were acting as the real authority.
It is important to understand what it was like to work as a journalist in Rwanda. There was shelling. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the roads. There were bombs. There was a civil war. There were roadblocks with militias, drunk or stoned, with grenades, machetes, AK-47s.
The militia would come to get Tutsis. They would ask people for their ID cards and check journalists' papers. They were looking for two RFI French journalists, Monique Mass and Jean Hlne, to kill them just because they were able to understand their broadcasts, which were in French (they may not have heard the BBC broadcasts or read the newspapers). They also described their position very simply: Hutu majority; Tutsi minority. That's what we worked on reporting every day, every hour for radio.
Did the media fail in Rwanda? Yes, definitely. Did journalists fail in Rwanda? No.
Journalists who went to Rwanda were very strongly committed to being there to report and to testify. Even journalists from France, where the authorities were so involved with the Habyarimana regime, did as much as they could.
During three months of genocide, from 7 April to the beginning of July when the rebels came into Kigali, AFP was one of the rare media outlets to speak out. Sometimes, we were virtually the only international agency on the ground. Mark Doyle from the BBC also stayed most of the time, as did Radio France International (RFI). But very few media were there all the time. Why? Aspiring young journalists should not forget that the media are businesses. Media companies want to be profitable and such reporting costs a lot of money, particularly if it involves the use of satellite phones.
Another factor was the international situation at the time, the global context. In Bosnia, Gorazde was under siege and was bombed for weeks. South Africa was holding its first multiracial elections, celebrating the end of apartheid. In the United States, people were more interested in O.J. Simpson than Rwanda. The French were concerned by the death of Ayrton Seyna, the Brazilian formula 1 driver.
At the international level at that time, people were more interested in Bosnia than Rwanda. The conflict in Bosnia had started in 1992 and in Yugoslavia in 1991. The genocide in Rwanda would have to have lasted for two or three years to garner as much media attention as Bosnia. What we saw in the media in France was similar to that in North America. There was very little coverage of the genocide.
Nonetheless, AFP kept at least two people in Rwanda, usually more. After the expatriates had been evacuated, in mid-April, most of the media pulled their journalists out for safety reasons. They would come back later, especially in June, with the French intervention. But AFP's Annie Thomas stayed, along with representatives from RFI, the BBC and a handful of others. At times, AFP was the only wire service on the ground in Rwanda.
In a 1996 study, Garth Myers and colleagues (1996) compared news coverage of Rwanda and Bosnia in six major American newspapers: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Boston Globe. In April 1994, there were twice as many articles about the conflict in Bosnia as Rwanda.
In all of 1994, the French daily Le Monde published 1,665 articles on Bosnia and only 576 on Rwanda. And the Rwanda tally includes coverage of the evacuation of foreigners and the outbreak in June and July of cholera in the Zaire refugee camps (Rabechault 2000). Among the articles in Le Monde, more than 60 per cent were short pieces, mainly news agency dispatches. In other words, some 220 articles on Rwanda that appeared in Le Monde that year were not bylined pieces by the newspaper's own journalists, nor their own analysis or commentary.
Most journalists are not experts in genocide. Many of them myself included arrived in Rwanda with very little knowledge of the country. So, it was tempting, especially at the beginning, to speak of the civil war, of these massacres as a perverse return of a civil war, and to link these massacres to previous massacres since 1959. We failed to understand that the killing was something totally new, that this was not a continuity of what had happened before.
During those first few days in April, special correspondents were much more likely to use words like 'chaos', 'anarchy' and 'furore'. They were reporting on a resumption of the civil war. In the field, it was easy to be confused and view the massacres as a 'side effect' of the fighting.
Then, on 12 April, the main story became the evacuation of foreigners and the closing of embassies. A special correspondent for the French public TV channel recalls that he had very strict orders: cover the evacuation of the French people, then get out. Actually, most of the TV teams came and left with the military planes.
Newspapers generally gave the same amount of space to the evacuation as to the massacres, then reduced their coverage of Rwanda to focus on Bosnia and the elections in South Africa. Photographers arrived quickly, but what they got were pictures of corpses, never photos of massacres at the moment they took place. To my knowledge, there is only one video image of a massacre taking place (the film shot by British camerman, Nick Hughes, in April 1994).
Patrick Robert, from Sygma Corbis Agency, explained that a month after he returned to Paris from Rwanda, he had still sold almost none of his pictures from Rwanda. He was there, but no one wanted to see. Journalists were there: but who would listen to them, or read their stories?
The first time AFP used the term 'genocide' was on 20 April. In the weeks before, AFP referred to 'massacres', 'killings', 'ethnic cleansing'. It was all too easy to link the situation with the past, to recall the waves of killings in Rwanda since 1959 and also in Burundi with massacres that followed the October 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye.
AFP's use of the term 'genocide' was in the context of a report quoting Human Rights Watch, which had warned the United Nations (UN) against reducing the extent of its mission in Rwanda. The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said in New York that 'Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, could face certain death in what would amount to genocide.'
AFP used the term again on 28 April, this time quoting Mdecins Sans Frontires, and again on 3 May, quoting the Council of Europe. On 16 May, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, referred to 'genocide' in Rwanda. Finally, 'genocide' came into common media usage when the UN Committee for Human Rights adopted a resolution on 25 May acknowledging that genocide was being perpetrated in Rwanda.
We all know now why the international community was so reluctant to qualify the situation so strongly. Using the word genocide would have necessitated action, under the genocide convention (UN 1951). For weeks, AFP and other media used the word only if it was able to quote a source using that term. Thanks to Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Mdecins Sans Frontires and others, the reality of the genocide finally made its way into the media. As journalists, we probably avoided many errors because of these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In my view, the NGOs and independent organizations did an excellent job, conducting inquiries and producing reports. But for weeks, the media underestimated what was actually going on in Rwanda.
Is it the reporter's fault? I would say no. Even if they did not have the complete picture of what was going on in the whole country, they described what was happening. Reporting on a daily basis on an hourly basis for a wire service, if you consider that you're almost always on a deadline for some part of the world they had to provide an overall picture of the situation: fighting between government troops and the RPF, rebel progress, attempts to reach a ceasefire agreement, political developments, refugees and displaced people and also, of course, killings.
In my view, the media failure came much more from those who were out of the country, in Paris, London, Washington and Ottawa. Given all the material coming in from the field, editors should have the responsibility to qualify the events. But news agencies are very careful about the use of words. At AFP we have a strong policy about the use of words and we have often been too cautious. In 1989, in Timisoara, northern Romania, some reporters described mass graves, with dozens of corpses, including babies. The truth was far from this: the graves actually contained dead from a nearby hospital, the baby was stillborn. After this outrageous mistake, editors at AFP, like others, too often decided that emotional factors were overwhelming a reporter in the field.
Another glaring failure of the media occurred at the very end of the genocide, when the French began 'Operation Turquoise' in southwest Rwanda. Dozens of reporters returned to the country. Although they were able at that time to discover the enormity of the killing campaign in this area in such places as Kibuye, Cyangugu and Bisesero they also reported on the humanitarian and military intervention from abroad. The result was that the reality of genocide was, once again, submerged in too much information.
It became worse in mid-July, when a million Hutus crossed the border into Zaire and cholera flared up in the camps. The humanitarian catastrophe overwhelmed the real story of the genocide. Everybody ran to Goma, because the story there was so easy to cover. After months of genocide, the issue of good guys and bad guys disappeared completely. The enemy was cholera, but no political issue surrounded cholera in the camps. It seemed as if journalists were more comfortable covering cholera than genocide.
But there are some other basic facts to remember. There is what one would call in French 'le concept du rapport mort/kilometre' in essence, the notion that deaths at home or close to home seem to matter more than those at a distance. So five French dead are more important to French readers than ten German dead and more important than one hundred African dead. In this sense, the news media reflect the public's state of mind.
As well, during the spring of 1994, while events were unfolding in Rwanda, those who wanted to know what was going on, knew. The details arrived late, but those who wanted to know, knew. Reporters were there, not all the time, but often. And their testimony was emerging from Rwanda. AFP was almost always there. The BBC was there. Individual reporters in the field showed their determination. They wanted to report, to bear witness to the killing.
To answer Alan Kuperman, I would say, 'Yes we missed the Rwanda genocide.' But Kuperman wrote in 2000, six years after the event. Journalists are neither historians nor sociologists. They do not work in the quiet of their study. Their reports become part of history, but history is knitted day by day, before their eyes. They don't benefit from the distance required to quickly understand the whole scene.
To their credit, individual journalists kept on working in Rwanda in the months and years that followed the genocide. American newspapers were eventually able to tell the truth about the UN and Rwanda, about Lieutenant General Romo Dallaire's famous 11 January fax. French newspapers were able to push for the establishment of an information mission on Rwanda in the national assembly. It was far from a full commission of inquiry, but it was the first time that parliament questioned the presidency and the government about foreign policy. And a clear picture emerged of the ties between Paris and Kigali in the early 1990s and well into the spring of 1994.
A final word: what can the media do when the world doesn't want to listen or to hear?
And what about Africa itself, so silent except for the Organization of African Unity's attempts to convene a summit to achieve a ceasefire? In mid-May 1994, we asked all the AFP offices in Africa to send to Paris press reviews and remarks in the African media on the Rwanda issue. What reactions had they picked up in the press and among intellectuals? What actions, if any, were undertaken? Were there any demonstrations? Any concerts like the Band Aid effort years earlier for Ethiopia?
But our survey of African media coverage found the same troubling apathy that was prevalent in the Western media with only a few exceptions. In the end, we wrote a synthesis of the African reports under the headline: 'The deepening silence in Africa on the drama in Rwanda' (Anon. 1994).
After the genocide, we all tried to understand how the world missed the Rwanda story. But in the end, I can only conclude that for those of us who thought their work could change something in the world, Rwanda was a cruel disillusionment, a major failure. Reporters were there. Pictures were available. Stories were filed. But if readers, if the people you speak to do not want to listen, you can't force them. They can just turn the dial. And editors can refuse to publish your reports.
A final example: some time ago, in early 2004, Romo Dallaire gave a terrific interview to TF1, the most popular French TV channel. It was broadcast in prime time. For such a channel, it was a very courageous move to broadcast the interview, but the audience declined. The number of people listening decreased during the programme.
Those who don't want to listen shut their ears. That's what happened for Rwanda. We can say, 'Oh it's the fault of the United States that didn't want to intervene. It's the fault of the government of France.' But the public could have done something.
When I returned from Rwanda in 1994, I went to my little village in eastern France. A fisherman said, 'Oh were you there? Well, don't talk about it any more. We've had enough. We see these terrible pictures at 8 p.m., right when we're eating. But what can we do? We can't do anything.'
For a long time I never spoke to anyone about Rwanda and when I did it was when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda called on me three years later to ask me for details about some of my reporting. In the meantime, I understood that no one else wanted to hear from me about Rwanda. I could not force them to listen, nor did I want to.
REFERENCES
Anonymous. 1994. The Deepening Silence in Africa on the Drama in Rwanda. AFP International, Paris, France, 29 May.
Kuperman, A. 2000. How Media Missed Rwandan Genocide. IPI Report, 6(1).
Myers, G., T. Klak and T. Koehl. 1996. The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia. Political Geography, 15(1): 2146.
Rabechault, M. 2000. La presse au Rwanda: des massacres la mission d'information parlementaire: une analyse dans la presse franaise de la couverture mdiatique du conflit rwandais et du rle que la France y a jou. Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Universit de Strasbourg III, Strasbourg, France.
UN (United Nations). 1951. Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) of the UN General Assembly, 9 December 1 9 4 8 . U N T r e a t y S e r i e s n o . 1 0 2 1 , v o l . 7 8 : 2 7 7 . A v a i l a b l e a t <