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Remembering the Rwandan Genocide:
Reconsidering the role of Local and Global Media
Jolyon Mitchell
University of
Edinburgh
Prologue
Not long
ago I found myself in the back of a battered old car, juddering down
a long bumpy road in Rwanda. It was dusty and hot. The journey was
longer than expected. We were in search of one particular building.
When we finally arrived at the small village of Ntarama, barefoot
children dashed out of their houses, waving and laughing at us. It
was a relief to get out of the car. I felt shaken up by the journey;
but I would be far more shaken by what we found.
We were
confronted by large metal gates, with purple and white ribbons
dangling from the railings. Walking into a tree-lined enclosure, we
found ourselves facing three buildings. I stooped to go inside the
largest of these. The church was smaller than I had expected. Above
low wooden benches drab clothes were hanging from the rafters. There
was a musty smell of rotting fabric. As my eyes became accustomed to
the darker interior, I could make out flowers on an altar at the
front. On the wall, next to where we had come in, there were the
remains of a poster of John Paul II. It was in tatters. To the left
of this picture, there were ordinary metal shelves, reminiscent of
those that you might find at a home improvement store. On these
shelves, neatly organised in rows were skulls. They stared out
silently. One still had a metal rod protruding from its forehead.
Beneath them were layers of differently sized bones.
This was
one of the many churches in Rwanda where thousands of Tutsis had
fled for safety. Here in Ntarama, about 25 miles South of Kigali,
over five thousand Tutsi women, men and children sought sanctuary in
or next to this place of worship. That was before many of their Hutu
neighbours came, aided by gangs of young men, the Interahamwe,
mostly from Kigali. They carried tools intended for the farm -
machetes, hoes or clubs - along with a few guns, tear gas and
grenades. These were thrown into the church. In a few hours almost
everyone was killed. Like many of the other ‘killing churches’ it
has been ‘tidied up’ and turned into a genocide memorial.
Rwanda, a
country famous for its ‘thousand hills’, its gorillas in the mist
and its beauty, is now becoming better known for its hundreds or
perhaps thousands of genocide memorials. For many Rwanda has become
inextricably connected with, even defined by, the 1994 genocide. Our
guide in Ntarama hardly smiled once as she showed us around, even 13
years on. Hardly surprising, given she had lost her parents, her
brothers and her sisters nearby. It is strange how small details can
haunt you, shake you, and inscribe themselves into your memory: an
open wooden chest full of children’s note-books, several biros
hanging on a line above a pile of shoes, a woven communion cup lying
in the dust.
Walking
around this and other memorials in Rwanda, it is hard to appreciate
the sheer scale of the killing. Here was a quiet, shaded and
tranquil space bearing solemn witness to one among thousands of
unimaginable nightmares. Even though pictures of this church, both
carpeted in bodies and after it was ‘tidied up’, are now easily
available around the world on the web, there were no obvious signs
of global or local media presence. On our way out, I asked the guide
what I could do. Her response has stayed with me ever since,
resonating with the stated aim of other genocide memorials and
museums around the world. Her exhortation to action has informed my
own reflection, teaching and research: ‘Make sure you tell people
what happened here. So it never happens again. Never Again.’
Introduction
My aim in
this article is to go beyond simply describing what happened in
Rwanda, as this has been done in detail elsewhere.1 My focus is
upon the actual communicative process of ‘telling’. I will therefore
investigate some of the ways that people both inside and outside
Rwanda were told about what happened in 1994. Behind this analysis
is a simple question: What can be learnt from the uses of the local
media in Rwanda at this time and the subsequent global coverage of
the Rwandan Genocide? As we shall see the case of ‘telling people
about’ the Rwandan genocide raises a number of important questions,
including what is the relation between local and global media in
moments of confusion and violence? Given the importance attributed
to religion, especially Catholicism in Rwanda’s recent history, it
also raises questions about how religious expression and themes are
drawn upon, adapted or ignored in the process of telling. In the
discussion which follows I analyse different kinds of telling: radio
broadcasting, subverting and claiming, chatting and singing,
publishing and naming, directing and inciting, reporting and
interpreting, judging and assessing, and in the conclusion
displaying.
Radio
Broadcasting
‘I tell you that the Gospel has already
changed in our movement. If someone gives you a slap, give him two
in return, two fatal ones’.2
Some of the
most chilling broadcasts in the history of radio emerged from Rwanda
in the 1990s. Radio-TÈlÈvision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM),
One Thousand Hills Free Radio, is frequently blamed for inciting the
genocide that claimed over eight hundred thousand lives during a
hundred days in 1994.3 In ‘its scale and apparent impact, hate radio
in Rwanda seemed to have no parallel since the Nazi propaganda for
genocide’.4 At the genocide’s peak there were more than five deaths
every minute in Rwanda: the rate of killing was three times as rapid
as the murder of the Jews in the Second World War.5 Unlike in
Germany where people were mostly transported to die in gas chambers
away from their home communities, many Rwandan women, children and
men died from masu (nail studded clubs) or machete blows at
the hands of neighbours in their own homes, or nearby, in local
churches, hospitals, schools and at roadblocks. But what role did
radio actually play in these intimate mass murders? Some early
accounts claim that much ‘of the responsibility for the genocide in
Rwanda can be blamed on the media’.6 Others suggest that the Rwandan
genocide would have happened without the broadcasts of RTLM, and
that blaming radio is one way of denying responsibility for what was
an ethnocide.7 The precise role of radio in the genocide is a
contested phenomenon, and while it is neither a new nor unique
occurrence, the use of radio to express racial hatred and attempt to
inspire ethnic violence remains one of the most disturbing examples
of how the wireless can be misused.
This radio
station was by no means the only local media expressing hatred
towards an ethnic minority, but it soon became one of the most
popular. In the midst of both a civil war and genocide, RTLM offered
listeners an account of reality, and increasingly blatant
exhortations to act violently, that were profoundly at odds with the
encouragement to love your enemy. By stereotyping, scape-goating and
demonising the Tutsi and some moderate Hutus, as well as portraying
RTLM as the defender of the previously victimised Hutu majority,
this radio station helped to legitimise the slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of innocent people. Many were murdered simply because they
carried one wrong word in their identity card: ‘batutsi’. The role
of radio in the Rwandan genocide may sometimes have been overstated
as a way of deflecting legitimate criticism of previous colonial
regimes, post-colonial governments and the non-intervention of
powerful nations in the UN. Nevertheless, RTLM’s broadcasters found
fertile ground upon which to sow seeds of hatred. Many Rwandans
appear at best to have turned a deaf ear on the call to hate their
neighbour or to have given active support by assisting or even
participating in the killing. RTLM is no more, but hate speech is
far from extinct.8 The problem: ‘In what ways can mediated hate
speech be resisted?’ remains a pressing one for anyone concerned
with global media. Rwanda provides an important case for reflecting
on both past and current uses of media for promoting hatred and
violence.
In a
country where nearly fifty percent of the population could not read
nor write, radio was and remains a vital form of public
communication.9 Radio appears also to have been widely trusted in
Rwanda, with several surveys in the 1980s showing that the vast
majority of the population believed that ‘radio tells the truth’.10
Television was expensive, and given the hilly terrain it was almost
impossible at that time to receive a clear terrestrial signal. By
contrast radio could reach nearly 90% of the country. During the
1980s, the production of radios was subsidised by foreign donors and
the MRND government,11 who both sold sets at a reduced price and
gave them away to party administrators, as well as more widely
during elections. Some of these radios could only receive FM,
thereby preventing many listeners from hearing international
broadcasters based outside the country who used Short Wave. In 1970
there was about one radio to every 120 people, but by 1990 this had
increased to one radio to every 13 people.12 With this greater
availability, increasingly radio became a focal point for
entertainment, information and discussion in Rwanda.13 With the
founding of RTLM in July 1993, Rwanda’s airwaves were filled with a
new sound. It soon became Rwanda’s most popular radio station, and
in the months preceding the genocide, radios tuned to RTLM were to
be found both in homes and ‘in offices, cafes, bars and other public
gathering places, even in taxis’.14 In the midst of what some saw as
a civil war and others an invasion, RTLM contributed to the
development of an increasingly tense public sphere, which provided a
forum for extremist speakers to articulate old grievances and new
anxieties.
Given this
context it is not surprising that subsequent journalistic accounts
of the Rwandan genocide pointed to locally produced radio broadcasts
as a significant catalyst for the explosion of violence.15 Other
media particularly the Hutu extremist newspaper Kangura
(‘Wake him up’) were also blamed, but it was the radio broadcasts of
RTLM, and to a lesser extent Radio Rwanda, that were deemed to be
particularly culpable. One Canadian journalist described how ‘Hutus
could be seen listening attentively to every broadcast… They held
their cheap radios in one hand and machetes in the other, ready to
start killing once the order had been given’.16 Other journalists in
the West also highlighted the part played by RTLM in the genocide.
The Washington Post, for example, as early as April 7 quoted
a RTLM broadcast that warned Tutsi in Rwanda, ‘You cockroaches must
know you are made of flesh! We won't let you kill! We will kill
you!'’ Associated Press on April 25 quoted a UN spokesman in
Kigali claiming that ‘Radio RTLM is calling on militias to step up
the killing of civilians.’ Such reports did little to galvanise
action against the station in the West. They also reflect a
presupposition expressed in many parts of the Western press that the
media inevitably have a powerful influence on how people behave. The
belief that radio was partly culpable for the Rwandan tragedy has
been reinforced in other contexts. For example, a short French film
Itsembatsemba: Rwanda One Genocide Later (Alexis
Cordesse and Eyal Sivan, 1996) depicts how RTLM began to broadcast
with the assistance of the government and then played a central part
in ‘the unleashing and the coordination’ of the genocide. Recent
feature films about the genocide, such as Hotel Rwanda (2004)
also highlight the role of the radio. Nevertheless, the
actual role that RTLM played in the Rwandan genocide remains not
only a contested phenomenon, but also a point of judicial inquiry.
Subverting
and Claiming
The power
of radio to break down barriers of space and time has long been
recognised.17 It is by no means a unique characteristic, but given
the dominance of radio in the Rwandan media environment it takes on
greater significance. For example, one local politician, LÈon
Mugesera, made a now infamous speech over sixteen months prior to
the genocide on 22 November 1992, warning his audience to remain
vigilant. He referred to the Tutsi as Inyenzi [cockroaches]
and asserted that they had ‘threatened the security of the nation’
by sending their children to join the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front).
They should be exterminated, and if the justice system fails to
punish them then people should ‘take the law into their own hands’
and ‘we ourselves will take care of massacring these gangs of
thugs’. His desire to see them sent home, on an ‘express trip’ back
to Ethiopia via the river Nyabarongo,18 is particularly haunting
given that many Tutsi were killed and then thrown into rivers during
the genocide.19 Mugesera encourages his listeners to overlook
Matthew 5:39, so that if they are: ‘provoked, they should forget the
biblical notion of turning the other cheek and instead should meet
violence with greater violence.’ Mugesera ‘corrects’ biblical texts
to suit his own purposes, asserting that the lessons of the Bible
had been transformed, and in the words cited earlier: “I tell you
that the Gospel has already changed in our movement. If someone
gives you a slap, give him two in return, two fatal ones”.’
Mugesera’s sentiments were frequently repeated on RTLM. His speech
was also tape-recorded and broadcast on national radio, while
cassettes of his speech were copied and circulated in Kigali.20
Through recording and radio technologies his words attempting to
incite violence were able to travel further and last longer. A
decade later the web makes it possible for similar local hate speech
to be made available globally.
Mugesera’s
corruption of a specific biblical text by Hutu power propagandists
was by no means an isolated incident.21 The Ten Commandments
published in several extremist newspapers, including Kangura,
with extracts regularly repeated on air, exemplifies how a biblical
text is mimicked, corrupted and reversed in order to heighten
mistrust of the Tutsi people. It is an extremist manifesto: any Hutu
who marries or befriends a Tutsi woman, or does business with a
Tutsi is to be called a traitor. The attack upon intimate relations
between ethnic groups also recurred on RTLM, where Tutsi women were
often represented as agents for the RPF. According to these
‘commands’ the education system must be dominated by Hutu and the
army ‘should be exclusively’ Hutu. An end of mercy towards the Tutsi
and loyalty to the Hutu cause are marks of solidarity against the
common enemy of the Tutsi.22 ‘Hutus must cease having any pity for
the Tutsi’, according to the eighth command. Any sense of love or
empathy for your Tutsi neighbour is to be erased, and replaced by a
cold distance because the Tutsi is the enemy within.23
One witness
at the so called ‘media trial’, who had worked at the ministry of
information, described hearing the ten commandments broadcast and
commented upon several times on RTLM.24 He believed that the aim of
broadcasting them was to encourage all Hutus in Rwanda to unite
around ‘a single fighting goal’ and not to develop relationships
with Tutsis. He also thought that these commandments were one of the
reasons why some ‘men started killing their Tutsi wives, or children
of a mixed marriage killed their own Tutsi parents.25 One of the
journalists who worked for
Kangura,
believed that the promotion of The Ten Commandments actually
led to the Hutu ‘perceiving the Tutsi as enemies instead of seeing
them as citizens, and the Tutsi also starting seeing the Hutu as a
threat’.26 It is not possible to prove that the publication of
The Ten Commandments were such a pivotal moment in ethnic
relations, but other local observers recognised that their
publication sent shock waves among the people.27
RTLM was
not the only medium to try to subvert traditional religious belief.
For example, one cover of Kangura (no. 3, January, 1992)
consists of a deceptively peaceful picture of the holy family. Mary
looking down at her son says: ‘Son of God, you were just born at
Christmas. Do all that you can to save the Hutu of Burundi from
death.’ A childlike and angelic looking Jesus replies: ‘I will tell
them to love each other as God loves them.’ In response, Joseph on
the right of the picture retorts: ‘No, rather, tell the Hutu of the
world to unite.’ The headline above the image leaves little doubt
who has won the argument: ‘God is mobilized for the worldwide battle
of the Hutu.’ The encouragement to love your neighbour, on the basis
of God’s love for humanity, is portrayed as a force not a powerful
enough to protect the Hutus in Burundi. Joseph’s statement, ‘tell
the Hutu of the world to unite’, takes precedence over the words of
both Mary and Jesus. Joseph offers Hutu unification as the only real
solution to preventing a rerun of the 1972 extermination of over
100,000 Hutus in Burundi. Reminding the reader of past crimes
against the Hutu people, the traditional Catholic iconography is
subverted by the captions, showing that the male Joseph has
authority over the virgin Mary. Joseph’s forceful assertion
resonates with the extreme violence perpetrated against thousands of
women during the genocide. The headline unequivocally enlists God to
the Hutu cause.
Several
radio broadcasters would also later claim God’s support for the
defence of the Hutu regime. In contrast to the image discussed
above, Marian piety was sometimes used to support the Hutu cause.
‘RTLM announcer Bemeriki maintained that the Virgin Mary, said to
appear from time to time at Kibeho church, had declared that “we
will have the victory”. In the same vein, the announcer Kantano
Habimana said of the Tutsi, “Even God himself has dropped them”.’28
In another broadcast towards the end of the genocide Habimana
celebrates: ‘Come let us sing: “Come, let us rejoice: the
Inkotanyi have been exterminated! Come dear friends, let us
rejoice, the Good Lord is just.” The Good Lord is really just, these
evildoers, these terrorists, these people with suicidal tendencies
will end up being exterminated.’29 Here name calling and demonising
the enemy is fused into a mock liturgical chant. The manipulation of
theistic language and religious symbols for violent ends is by no
means unique to the Rwandan genocide, but the broadcasting of an
inverted ‘turn the other cheek’, the Hutu ‘ten commandments’ and
claims that God has deserted the enemy and justly supported their
extermination, illustrates how religious expression was manipulated
for violent ends.
Chatting
and Singing
Radio-TÈlÈvision
Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) began broadcasting on 8 July 1993,
nearly a year before the start of the genocide. The first three
months of RTLM’s broadcasting (July until October, 1994) was
dominated by music. RTLM started by ‘endearing itself to the people’
by using popular music to help win an audience. This music was
referred to as ‘hot’, and was predominantly Congolese in origin.30
The music, which also originated from Cameroon and the Caribbean,
was complemented by some light-hearted and comparatively innocuous
comment. The former director of Radio Rwanda, Jean-Marie Higirio,
explained RTLM’s early success in the following terms:
The
broadcasts were like a conversation among Rwandans who knew each
other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of
Primus [the local beer] in a bar. It was a conversation without a
moderator and without any requirements as to the truth of what was
said. The people who were there recounted what they had seen or
heard during the day. The exchanges covered everything: rumours
circulating on the hills, news from the national radio, conflicts
among local political bosses… It was all in fun. Some people left
the bar, others came in, the conversations went on or stopped if
it got too late, and the next day took it up again after work.31
At first
RTLM employed eight educated and experienced journalists who
skillfully adapted a Western disc jockey style presentation and
talk-show format for a Rwandan context. Globalisation was put to
local uses. The broadcasters had links with or were members of
extremist parties, but initially their approach was far more subtle
than the often quoted and possibly mythical cry: ‘The grave is only
half full; who will help us to fill it up?’32 RTLM’s airtime was
filled by a mixture of popular music interspersed with coarse jokes,
banter, laughter, personal reflections, extended interviews and
phone-ins from the audience. It ‘revolutionised radio in Rwanda’.33
Often eschewing French, RTLM employed the slang of the Rwandan
street and the language of Rwanda’s two main ethnic groups:
Kinyarwanda.34
A relaxed,
informal approach pervaded the station’s output, and as such it had
no real competition in Rwanda. Given the more formal and somewhat
slow style of Radio Rwanda it is not surprising that RTLM rapidly
grew in popularity, particularly among the under twenties. It was
widely listened to in Kigali, often by workers during office hours.
‘Outside Kigali and other urban centres, the station is reported to
have attracted people from urban backgrounds, administrators and
teachers, rather than peasants from rural areas’.35 One witness at
the media trial described how young people were ‘always’ to ‘be seen
on the street with a radio listening to RTLM and that the broadcasts
were a common topic of conversation’ both at home and in public.36
Even some fighting members of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) chose
to listen to RTLM over their own Radio Muhabura (‘Radio Beacon’),
which tended towards being over formal, explicitly propagandistic
and simply countering the claims of Rwanda Radio. RTLM’s
light-hearted approach was balanced with more serious interviews
with academics or politicians. Throughout RTLM’s short broadcasting
life many of its broadcasters made skillful use of apparently
authoritative sources to endorse their informal commentaries about
the problems facing Rwanda.
Another way in which Tutsis were demonized by RTLM was through
different forms of subtle stereotyping. In the same way that during
the Holocaust the Jews were accused of owning an ‘unjustifiable’
share of the wealth in Germany, so the Tutsi were also inaccurately
portrayed on RTLM as ‘the ones having all the money’.37 The kernel
of truth here was that socio-economic exclusion had been used by
both colonial and post-colonial rulers as a form of control over the
majority of the population.38 With the crash of the coffee market in
1987, a resulting famine in 1989, overpopulation and a 40% currency
devaluation in 1990, many Rwandans were suffering from serious
economic hardship in the years before the genocide. References to
economic disparity, in a country where approximately 16% of the
people held 43% of the cultivated land in 1991, would have further
accentuated feelings of injustice.
Beneath
this apparently peaceful surface, lay a growing body of anti-Tutsi
rhetoric. Through songs, and later through comments and interviews,
it echoed the extremist paper Kangura who suggested that the
Tutsi had infiltrated positions of power like ‘snakes’ in order to
restore the old pre-1959 feudal regime where the Tutsi would once
again control the country.39 RTLM would often play songs that
highlighted this supposed danger, such as the popular singer Simon
Bikindi’s Bene Sebahinzi (‘The Descendants of Sebahinzi’40).
In this song Bikindi affirmed the importance of the 1959 revolution,
where the Tutsi leadership was overthrown, as ‘a heritage that
should be carefully maintained… and transmitted to posterity’. The
reason: ‘the servitude, the whip, the lash, the forced work that
exhausted the people, that has disappeared forever’. He exhorts the
‘great majority’, the descendants of Sebahinzi to ‘remember this
evil that should be driven as far away as possible, so that it never
returns to Rwanda’.41 Bikindi’s songs distorted the history and
politics of Rwanda to advance Hutu unity against the Tutsi. For
example, another of his popular compositions was Twasezereye,
composed in 1987, which meant ‘we said good bye to the feudal
regime’. It was regularly played on Radio Rwanda in 1992, as well as
on RTLM in 1993. ‘Twasezereye was a public call for Hutu
solidarity in opposition to the Arusha [peace] accords’.42 Accounts
of RTLM which pay little attention to songs and music as both a
persuasive force and expression of ethnic division are omitting a
highly significant component in the station’s popular appeal.
Many of
Bikindi’s compositions have a subtext, and are not explicitly
violent, though for Rwandans the intended meaning is clear. For
example, one of his songs that was repeatedly broadcast on RTLM,
though banned before the genocide on Radio Rwanda, was his
Nanga Ba-Hutu
or Je dÈteste ces Hutu (I
Hate the Hutu). He sang: ‘I hate these Hutus, these de-Hutuized
Hutus, who have renounced their identity, dear comrades.’ He is
referring here to those Hutus who married Tutsis. He then goes on to
sing: ‘I hate these Hutus, these Hutus who march blindly, like
imbeciles. This species of naive Hutus who join a war without
knowing its cause.’ His target here is almost certainly a Hutu
colonel and his force who changed sides and joined the RPF. ‘I hate
them and I don’t apologize for that. Lucky for us that they are few
in number…’43 In short Bikindi is referring to his own hatred for
the Hutu who support the Tutsi. The tune of this song was extremely
popular. According to one witness the lyrics ‘broadcast ethnic
hatred’ and later became a ‘hymn’ for the killings.44 In March 1994,
‘Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi youth in their uniforms
with the radio to their ear were omnipresent, singing songs very
loudly, songs of Bikindi and others saying “We shall exterminate the
enemies of the country”.’45
Publishing
and Naming
Kangura, described by
one reader as ‘The Bell of Death’,46 lived up to this name with its
front page in the November 1991 edition (issue 26). On this cover
there is a question in a vertical black box: ‘What weapons shall we
use to conquer the Inyenzi [cockroaches] once and for
all?’ This is answered by the stark picture of a machete.47 The
first President of Rwanda, GrÈgoire Kayibanda, and one of the
leaders of the 1959 Hutu revolution, is in the center page and
occupies most of the space. Beneath the picture of the former
President is the text: ‘How about re-launching the 1959 Bahutu
revolution so that we can conquer the Inyenzi-Ntutsi?’ In
1959 machetes had been used to kill many Tutsis and this cover
appears to be calling its readers to a second revolution which will
eradicate the enemy once and for all. At the top of the page is a
simple headline: ‘Tutsi: Race of God?’ In this issue the Tutsi were
actually characterised not as God’s race, but as thieves,
hypocrites, liars and killers. This cover was distributed to
soldiers in Bugesera, free of charge in February 1992, only a few
weeks before the Bugesera massacres.48
Other
editorials, articles and cartoons published in Kangura echoed
the contempt and hatred for Tutsi found in this notorious
edition. The tone is a long way from detached or reflective
journalism. One striking example is the article: ‘A Cockroach Cannot
Give Birth To A Butterfly’ (Kangura, No. 40, February 1993).
This article calls Tutsis Inyenzi, cockroaches, claiming that
just as cockroaches cannot change, so too Tutsis will always remain
wicked.49 In 1960-3 Inyenzi was the name given to the Tutsi
guerrillas, both as a term of abuse and because, like cockroaches,
they often moved at night. After 1990 it was used for the RPF
fighters who invaded Rwanda, and later RTLM and the interim
government would use it to refer to the Tutsi in general. In the run
up to the genocide Kangura and RTLM regularly employed the
word Inyenzi to describe the Tutsi people, as the Nazis used
the term ‘vermin’ to describe Jews. This name substitution or name
calling was another common technique employed by RTLM broadcasters.
Part of the danger of such language is that naming has a descriptive
force that dehumanises perceived opponents, turning them into a
subhuman species, who also completely lose their individuality. It
may be deemed easier to stamp on a cockroach or to poison vermin
than to extinguish a human life. During the actual genocide, RTLM
claimed that ‘the cruelty of the Inyenzi [cockroaches] is
incurable, the cruelty of the Inyenzi can only be cured by
their total extermination’.50 The term Inyenzi had come to
mean: a person or animal to be killed.
A Hutu civil servant who
worked for the Ministry of Information, and was responsible for
monitoring all private press between September and November 1993,
described Kangura as ‘the most extremist paper’. He suggested
that, in spite of the comparatively low literacy rates, it was due
to the strong oral tradition in Rwanda that Kangura
became a topic of conversation: those who could read discussed its
contents with those who could not read. ‘Because Kangura was
extremist in nature, everyone spoke of it, in buses and everywhere.
He said, “thus, the news would spread like fire; it was sensational
news”.’51 These popular discussions of the paper and the exposure on RTLM ensured that while Kangura had a comparatively small
print run of only about 1500 to 3000, both its Kinyarwanda and
French editions attracted wide public attention.52
I have gone into some
detail about Kangura to highlight that RTLM was by no means
operating in a communicative vacuum. It was not the only voice
inciting racial hatred. Like Radio Rwanda, the content of RTLM’s
news broadcasts were often significantly different depending on
whether they were broadcast in French or Kinyarwanda, with reports
in the local language being more explicit in their incitement to
racial hatred.53 The hate media found in Rwanda in the early 1990s, epitomised by RTLM and Kangura, helped prepare the ground for
the explosion of extreme violence. They were part of a wider
coalition, whose purpose ‘was to mobilize the Hutu population
against the Tutsi ethnic minority.’54 Up to this point I have
suggested that RTLM’s popularity was derived partly through its
broadcasting style and partly because its broadcasts resonated with
popular anti-Tutsi sentiment. The hate speech found on this station
was symptomatic of the growing ethnic fear and abhorrence of the
‘other’, which the RPF invasion had exacerbated. Many of these
broadcasts and writings caricatured the Tutsi as an outsider, an
alien, or a settler who was inherently ambitious and wicked, intent
on returning Rwanda to a monarchial Tutsi dominated past. In the
months before the start of the genocide on 6 April broadcasters
increasingly used language which was intended to fan the flames of
fear, anger and resentment against the Tutsi population.
Directing
and Inciting
What RTLM did was
almost to pour petrol – to spread petrol throughout the country
little by little, so that one day it would be able to set fire
to the whole country .
55
Before 6
April some people described RTLM as ‘Radio Rutswitsi’, which means
‘to burn’,56 implying that this was a station that fanned the flames
of hatred. Within a few weeks of the start of the genocide on 6
April other listeners had begun to call it ‘Radio Machete’,57 with
one person even describing it as ‘Vampire Radio’, which was ‘calling
for blood and massacres’.58 Several accounts, written soon after the
genocide, failed to represent the sharp intensification of hate
speech being broadcast after 6 April 1994.59 Later descriptions
demonstrate that these and other journalistic accounts also failed
to distinguish between broadcasting before April 6 and after the
start of the genocide.60 It was easier to paint RTLM as a station
that had always engaged in such patterns of speech, when there had
in fact been an evolution of hate speech. How then did RTLM’s role
develop during the genocide itself?
Within half
an hour of the shooting down of the Falcon jet carrying the
Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (Cyprien Ntaryamira) on 6 April
1994 roadblocks had been set up in Kigali. RTLM was the first to
break the news of his death, less than an hour after the ‘plane
crash’. This event was not so much the spark as the signal for a
highly organised and pre-planned killing campaign to begin. On April
10 RTLM had demanded that Hutus should remain vigilantly at their
roadblocks.61 The commands to ‘be vigilant’ and to ‘take action’
were repeated regularly. These were places where thousands of Tutsis
and moderate Hutus were stopped, questioned and killed. Several
witnesses described seeing militia at road blocks listening to RTLM.
A French lawyer and journalist, Philippe Dahinden, described how at
roadblocks he frequently came across militia with radios, listening
to RTLM. He was particularly struck by how much the militia relied
on the radio for directions and information. They were clearly
following orders to keep listening to the radio for instructions
from the interim government. Radio had become an important tool in
the genocide.
One
broadcast from a member of the CDR militia stated: ‘Whoever does not
have his identity card should be arrested and maybe lose his head
there’. (29 May) Other broadcasts encouraged listeners not simply to
fight in a battle, but to ravage and to punish. RTLM would
congratulate listeners for their ‘heroic’ efforts, affirming the
efforts of women alongside men.62 On 23 May, for example, Kantano
Habimana promised rewards after the war was finished for those who
helped on the roadblocks. ‘Those very active within the government
and the army and who really ‘work’ are well known. They will get
very nice rewards. Those who do not ‘work’ will receive no reward at
all. This is not the time to fall ill’.63 Rewards were often
promised, so too were punishments for those who failed to carry out
what was euphemistically known as the ‘work’. Several of the
monologues or conversations on RTLM included explicit encouragement
to fight: ‘take your spears, clubs, guns, swords, stones,
everything, sharpen them, hack them, those enemies, those
cockroaches, those enemies of democracy, show that you can defend
yourselves’.64 Repeated calls to action were based upon the
impending threat of the ‘enemy’, which was combined with the claim
that everybody was involved in this war against these ‘foreigners’,
‘terrorists’ or ‘wrong-doers’.65
One of the survivors
from the Ministry of Information stayed at home after 6 April,
monitoring RTLM’s output:
RTLM was constantly
asking people to kill other people, to look for those who were
in hiding, and to describe the hiding places of those who were
described as being accomplices. I also remember RTLM programmes
in which it was obvious that the people who were speaking were
happy to say that there had been massive killings of Inyenzi,
and they made no difference between Inyenzis and Tutsis.
And they said that they should continue to search for those
people and kill them so that the future generations would have
to actually ask what Inyenzis looked like, or,
ultimately, what Tutsis looked like.66
The
blurring of descriptive terms became far more acute during the
genocide. It was clear that inyenzi and inkotanyi had
in many cases come to mean Tutsi. These broadcasts also set the
imaginative divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ into concrete.
Many
broadcasts would go further than simply these generalised
incitements to kill, and provide specific details of where
particular individuals were to be found. For example, during the
‘first week of the genocide, RTLM described a red van which it
claimed was “full of accomplices”, and provided its number-plate’.67
It is believed that it was stopped the same day and all its
occupants were killed on the spot. Similar accounts of ambulances,
cars and buses being stopped following announcements illustrate how RTLM worked closely with the militias. Names and locations of Tutsis
in hiding, especially in Kigali, were also frequently broadcast,
with fatal consequences. ‘Urgent! Urgent! Calling the militia
members of Muhima! Direct yourselves to the Rugenge area…’.68 This
broadcast referred to Dr Gafaranga, a leader of an opposition party
the PSD, who was hunted down, arrested and executed later the same
day. Early in the genocide RTLM appears to have been used to
encourage Tutsis to leave their hiding place, either to show their
loyalty by going to the roadblocks or to protect their property by
returning home. Those Tutsi’s who followed these instructions were
invariably killed.69
The
priests who actually took a stand against the killing also became a
target for RTLM, who claimed that churches were being used by RPF
troops as military bases. For example on RTLM Valerie Bemeriki named
several priests as being involved in the armed conflict:
We know that in
God’s Place, there is a place where the body of Christ is kept,
which is known as the tabernacle. So? Could Father Ntagara
explain to the Rwandan people the reason why the Eucharist has
been replaced by ammunition? And the sacristy? Isn’t it there
that good priests – the ones we swamp with praise – keep their
sacred vestments when they go to say mass, and also keep their
consecrated items? Therefore, since when have these items been
intermingled with guns? You, Father Modeste Mungwarareba, I have
seen you ever since you were rector of Karubanda Minor Seminary.
God looked at you and said: “No. What belongs to me cannot be
mixed up all these instruments, which are used for shedding
blood!” Can you therefore tell us a little bit about the small
secrets in the sacristy? So all of us Hutus must remain
vigilant.70 (20 May
1994)
Bemeriki’s broadcast both questions the
peacefulness of specific priests and identifies churches as places
where arms might be hoarded. In fact, thousands of people around the
country fled to them as places of sanctuary. Tragically, ‘many of
the largest massacres took place in churches because, rather than
waiting to be picked off in their homes, people fled there looking
for sanctuary, religious comfort, solidarity with others in danger
and the opportunity to defend themselves in numbers.’71 Several
other churches and a mosque were named on RTLM and soon afterwards
became sites of extensive killing.72 When able to receive its
broadcasts the semi-private Hutu youth gangs and many members of the
presidential guard used RTLM not only for specific information and
directions, but also for inspiration and entertainment. During the
first ten days of the genocide, RTLM were broadcasting twenty-four
hours a day, despite all these conveying these murderous details,
they mostly maintained their informal, relaxed speaking style and
mix of African music.
Reporting
and Interpreting
Up to this
point I have concentrated upon local media work before, during and
after the genocide. From early April 1994, and the beginning of the
Genocide, the interim government developed a practice of feeding the
international media with a regular diet of misinformation. This led
to many global news channels initially portraying the killings as
emerging out of tribal conflict, which had a long tradition in
Rwanda. The interim government appealed for international aid, and
most dangerously, blurred the distinction between the genocide and
the war against the RPF. Both Radio Rwanda and RTLM were used in its
propaganda war of disinformation. Some foreign journalists did not
accept the government line uncritically, ‘however, a disturbingly
large number of foreign correspondents swallowed the “tribal
violence” line either in whole or in part. “Anarchy” and “an orgy of
violence” were favourite terms’. In the foreign media ‘references to
“ethnic bloodbath” and “ancient tribal hatred” persisted into
mid-August’.73 The underlying assumption in many radio, television
and newspaper reports was that Rwanda had fallen into an anarchic
civil war, where Hutu fought Tutsi in a bloody resurgence of an
ancient enmity.74 ‘Everyone was killing everyone else; it was
uncontrollable violence’,75 rather than the reality: Rwanda was held
in the grips of a government-supported genocide. Some newspapers
offered more accurate accounts and by late May UN interviewees were
more explicit in their condemnation. The then Secretary-General of
the UN, Boutros Ghali, admitted: ‘We are all to be held accountable
for this failure, all of us, the great powers, African countries,
the NGOs, the international community. It is a genocide… I have
failed…It is a scandal’.76 With tragic consequences, many radio,
television and newspapers failed to heighten public consciousness
about was happening in Rwanda.
Unfortunately, for many weeks editors were desperately short of
‘good’ pictures, as camera crews and most photojournalists would
only travel with international troops for protection. These UNAMIR
forces were primarily looking after foreign nationals, with the
Rwandese being left to fend for themselves. The result was that many
pictures and reports initially concentrated on Europeans being
evacuated. There was nothing equivalent to the gripping television
pictures of planes going into towers or missiles hitting their
targets to awaken international consciousness. It was not until the
genocide was effectively over that many foreign television crews
ventured to cover the story.
Another
related issue was that there were no international journalists in
the rural areas witnessing the massacres first hand. Most reporters
relied instead on the accounts of non-governmental organisations,
survivors and local media. Many of which were understandably
distorted or initially unable to comprehend the vast scale of the
killings. This was exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of
senior Western and African journalists were not in Rwanda, but in
South Africa, covering Nelson Mandela’s triumph in the historic
election and the related threat of extremist right wing violence.
Many news organisations relied instead on inexperienced stringers or
young journalists with little knowledge this area to cover the
Rwanda story. While it received regular coverage, it was limited in
terms of depth, accuracy and length. Unfortunately, not until it was
too late, was there anything comparable to Michael Buerk’s
unforgettable pictures and reports from Korem on the Ethiopian
famines in 1983.77 Nor was there anything to compare with Bob Geldof’s charismatic leadership of the telegenic BandAid, which
assisted in galvanising public opinion in the West to care about the
starving population of Ethiopia. In comparison to the initial
treatment of the genocide there was far more international
television coverage of the Rwandan refugees struggling to survive in
Goma, Zaire, and the ensuing cholera epidemic in July and August.
The unfolding tragedy during April, May and June in Rwanda
effectively remained a closed book for many international audiences
for several weeks, while the reports of RTLM and Radio Rwanda
continued to incite violence around the country itself.
Judging and
Assessing
RTLM is
instrumental in awakening the majority of the people… today’s
wars are not fought using bullets only, it is also a war of
media, words, newspapers and radio stations’.78
This claim
was made by RTLM’s mastermind and sometime director, Ferdinand
Nahimana, during an interview on Radio Rwanda at the height of the
killing. The popularity of RTLM, the continued use of the radio to
express hatred, and the cry heard at that time on the telephone out
of Rwanda: ‘Stop that Radio’,79 raises several questions connected
to what is the best way to counter hate radio? Is it, as some
suggest, electronically to jam racist stations?80 Or does this set a
precedent that allows authoritarian governments to clamp down on the
expression of free speech? Is it better to wait before embarking on
blocking the airwaves until the station becomes an explicit tool of
the violence, as RTLM did after 6 April 1994? Or if this is a ‘war
of media’ is it most effective to follow in the footsteps of RPF and
actually bomb the offending radio station? Alternatively, is it more
valuable in the long term to use powerful transmitters to broadcast
peaceful messages, as was done in Cambodia by the UN in 1992 to
out-broadcast the Khmer Rouge’s radio propaganda? At first sight for
those intent on stopping ‘that radio’, these instrumental options
appear to offer several possibilities, but simply concentrating on
how physically to halt hate radio fails to address some of the more
foundational issues highlighted by the part played by the media in
the genocide.
It is, of
course, impossible to predict what would have happened if RTLM had
been sanctioned or jammed as some commentators recommended, if Radio
Rwanda had offered alternative perspectives and if there had been
greater diversity of local and global broadcast media in Rwanda. The
genocide would almost certainly still have gone ahead, but with
perhaps a little less efficiency and possibly even less
fear-motivated anger. Some still assert that ‘the fundamental
reality, which cannot be stated too often is that genocide is not
caused by the mass media. At worst they may abet the process, but
inflammatory media coverage is essentially a symptom of a process
resulting from other causes’.81 The roots of evil and what actually
causes the inversion of morality are extremely difficult to
untangle.82 While many claim that the ‘massacres would have taken
place with or without the RTLM broadcasts’,83 one strand to my
argument in this article is that radio may well be more than just a
symptom of listeners’ mistrust and prejudice: RTLM did broadcast
many words and much music which used fear and hatred to incite
violence.
This
conclusion is supported by the observation from the seven hundred
page Human Rights Watch report on the Rwandan genocide: ‘It is
difficult to overstate the importance of the mass media in whipping
up popular sentiment. Most rural people in Rwanda could only obtain
their news from radio broadcasts, and the incessant propaganda, to
exterminate the Tutsi, and the claims that the government was
winning the war, made many ordinary people believe that the future
belonged solely to Hutu extremism’.84 As suggested earlier it is
almost impossible to demonstrate conclusively that the mass media
actually galvanised people to violence; in fact, motivations for
participation in the genocide clearly varied from individual to
individual. ‘Some were moved by virulent hatred, others by real
fear, by ambition, by greed, by a desire to escape injury at the
hands of those who demanded they participate, or by the wish to
avoid fines for non-participation that they could not hope to
pay’.85 Part of the skill of RTLM’s broadcasters was to tap and even
heighten many of these emotions and motives, thereby exacerbating an
already explosive situation. Add to this radio’s dominance in Rwanda
as a means of disseminating information it is reasonable to conclude
that radio played a significant part in contributing or reinforcing
many listeners’ fearful and violent imaginative world as well as
directing the killers to their victims.
Some
scholars have drawn comparisons between RTLM’s broadcasts in Rwanda
in 1993/4 and a radio broadcast in the USA in 1938. War of the
Worlds is perhaps the most famous dramatic adaptation in the
history of radio. The Mercury Theatre Company’s rendition of
H.G. Wells’ story derives its fame from the extreme responses it
provoked from many listeners. Out of an estimated audience of 6
million, some 1 million are believed to have been frightened, with
many taking panic driven action on hearing the broadcast. For
example, in New Jersey ‘in a single block, more than 20 families
rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over
their faces.’ In Birmingham, Alabama, ‘many gathered in churches and
prayed’, with some students in a South Eastern college huddling
round their radios trembling and weeping in each other’s arms.’86
While there are clearly significant differences between the USA in
1938 and Rwanda in 1994, there are according to Kellow and Steeves
several intriguing parallels. First, many in both countries put
‘great faith’ in radio as a reliable and authoritative form of news.
Second, at a time of political and economic turmoil radio played an
important role in providing ‘information and guidance’. Third, Orson
Welles and his company created a believable imaginative soundscape
through the skilful use of ‘on-the-spot reporting’, interviews with
experts and the reference to real places. RTLM’s broadcasts may have
been of a very different style, but they also created a sound
environment which was both enjoyable to listen to and believable.
Kellow and Steeves’ conclusion is that in both cases, in the USA in
the 1930s and Rwanda in the 1990s listeners ‘acted on what they
believed to be true and real.’87
One
important qualification is rooted in the observation that some 5
million people in the USA were not frightened and did not panic.
They resisted believing what they heard for a number of reasons,
including, they realised that the timescale of the drama was
impossible or they checked with other sources and so discovered that
what they were listening to was a play. On the basis of such
critical verification they were able to resist being sucked into the
extreme responses of others around the country.88 Simply hearing a
credible radio programme, and being surrounded by people who are
frightened, does not absolve the listener from individual moral
responsibility in how they themselves respond; nor does the
listener’s moral agency absolve broadcasters from responsibility
towards their audiences.
This was
also part of the conclusion of the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda’s so called ‘Media Trial’.89 On 3 December 1993 the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) judged two of the
founders of RTLM the academic Ferdinand Nahimana and the lawyer
Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, as well as the owner and editor of
Kangura, Hassan Ngeze, guilty of genocide, conspiracy to commit
genocide, public incitement to commit genocide and crimes against
humanity. The tribunal declared that the former history professor
Nahimana acted ‘without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon’,
but ‘caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians,’90
through helping to create ‘a climate of harm’.91 All three wielded
not machetes but words against many of their neighbours. Nahimana
and Ngeze were sentenced to imprisonment for the rest of their lives
and Barayagwiza received a thirty five year sentence. Not since the
Nuremberg trials in 1946, where Julius Streicher the publisher and
editor of the virulently anti-semitic Der St¸rmer (The
Attacker) was sentenced to death by hanging for crimes
against humanity,92 have
media practitioners been found guilty of such wrongdoing. The actual
trial provides valuable additional evidence for helping to assess
accurately the broadcasting practices and audience uses of radio
prior to and during the four months of genocidal violence. Reading
through more than 300 pages of judgement and sentence, based upon
over three years of legal proceedings, it is clear that words of
peace were overwhelmed by expressions of hatred.
The
December 2003 judgment at Arusha is too late, of course, for many of
the victims. Another form of resistance is to understand more
clearly how RTLM was able to operate with such freedom. Alexis and
Mpambara’s report on The Rwandan Media Experience from the
Genocide (2003),93 emphasises how there were no effective
external institutions to counter RTLM’s flagrant transgression of
its original agreement with the government which stated that it
would not ‘broadcast any programs of a nature to incite hatred,
violence or any form of division’, and would ‘refrain from telling
lies or giving out information that may mislead the public’.94 With
powerful supporters and close links in the government RTLM was able
to ignore the Minister of Information’s orders and avoid
sanctions.95 Legislation will not always protect the airwaves,
particularly when powerful vested interests are determined to
protect the channels which are expressing their own extremist views.
It is
sometimes argued that the spread of global media and the
fragmentation of local media is an entirely problematic social and
communicative trend. But given what we know what happened in Rwanda,
surely it is reasonable to suggest that access to more than the
simply government run channels or state-backed local broadcasting
stations will be an advantage to citizens in search of a just peace?
Consider how the recent demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Myanmar
provoked violent repression by the military government against
independent media as well as an even stricter clamp-down on global
networks trying to tell the story of their repression. Similarly,
though in a very different setting, it is hard not to wonder whether
in Rwanda, had there been more diversity of media outlets and
greater access to international media channels whether the slide
towards hatred and ultimately genocide would have at least been
exposed more swiftly and questioned more rigorously both in Rwanda
and around the globe.
Conclusion
I began
this article with a personal prologue: a brief description of one of
my own visits to a genocide memorial in Rwanda earlier this year
(2007), the church at Ntarama. The form of telling is comparatively
understated there, with a guide to show you around, answer questions
and even point out what you might miss. There is now additional
covering to protect the three small church buildings. The intention
is clearly to preserve this as a monument for visitors from all
around the world, who leave their marks in the visitors’ book. There
is also a long memorial wall with many victims’ names. What is
striking here is that there remain extensive blank spaces for the
anonymous victims. In the capital, the Kigali Memorial Centre tells
the story of the Genocide in far greater detail. It is easy to
forget while walking around the displays that the place where the
centre is located, the district of Gisozi, is also the resting place
of about 250,000 victims of the genocide in Kigali. Outside the
centre are eight mass graves, made up of concrete crypts which are
filled from floor to ceiling with coffins containing the remains of
up to fifty victims. Situated by a memorial garden these are usually
silent spaces, apart from the sounds of the city drifting across the
valley. These horizontal presences are less obviously expressive
than the media inside the centre which are employed to tell part of
the Genocide’s story. These varied media include photograph after
photograph of victims when they were still alive, recorded
interviews of survivors, images of the immediate aftermath of the
genocide and neatly ordered skulls and bones. One display shows how
local radio, newspapers and magazines were used as tools for
propaganda to incite hatred. Another wall displays the limited
international press coverage preceding the Genocide from papers such
as The Times or The New York Times. Put side by side
they reveal the sharp contrast between local media and global media
coverage of the Rwandan genocide: a divide which I have highlighted
in previous discussions.
There are
several elements in the exhibition that highlight Rwanda’s religious
history and in particular its connection with the Catholic Church.
For instance one photograph depicts several Western priests dressed
in white standing surrounded by young Rwandans. Such images are used
to illustrate the influence of the Church on education during the
later part of the Belgian rule (1916-1962). The commentary alongside
several other pictures portrays a church that was a divisive
influence, initially favouring Tutsis to be leaders, then supporting
the Hutus after 1959. In the sections on the actual genocide there
are several photos of the ‘killing churches’, such as one image from
Ntarama, Bugesera, showing photos taken soon after the genocide of
bodies carpeting the inside of the church I had visited. The
descriptions are without adornment: ‘People ran to churches for
shelter in large numbers. But churches were not sanctuaries of
safety. The genocidaires moved into the pews and altars and
massacred thousands at a time. Believers ended their lives piled in
the aisles in pools of blood.’96 Next to harrowing photographs of
these events, there are contrasting accounts of the role of local
religious leaders during the genocide. The ambiguity of the role of
the churches and their leaders are highlighted through two
contrasting stories. On the one hand Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka
priest in charge of St Famille, Kigali, a priest who according to
witnesses discarded his priest’s cassock and took to wearing a flak
jacket and carrying a pistol. He not only colluded but also actually
committed acts of violence against Tutsis. And on the other hand,
Father CÈlestin Hakizimana, who at considerable personal risk helped
to turn St Paul’s Pastoral Centre, close to the parish of St Familie,
into a haven for around 2,000 people. The ambiguous role of religion
displayed in the museum was expressed, as we saw earlier, through RTLM by the appropriation of religious language while also
encouraging direct attacks on ‘troublesome priests’.
It is hard
to remain unmoved by what you see or hear at the centre in Kigali
which acts as both a memorial and a museum. Unlike the Jewish Museum
in Berlin, reminiscent of an unravelling Star of David and designed
by Daniel Libeskind, where visitors walk through into disorientating
voids visitors in Kigali walk around a series of displays. Responses
vary. Some visitors are silent, while others more vocal, I saw a
young woman from Europe burst into tears and crumple to the floor
after listening to one story of a survivor, who lost all of their
extended family in the genocide. Alongside this exhibition is a
children’s memorial, dedicated to ‘the memory of the many thousands
of children whose lives were cut short cruelly and intentionally’ in
Rwanda. Part of the power of this mediated memorial space is the way
it leads visitors beyond the bounds of the local to global. The
Rwandan Genocide is not depicted as an isolated phenomenon. Situated
above the memorial museum, which documents some of the causes and
consequences of genocide, is an exhibition entitled ‘Wasted Lives’,
which provides several other examples of twentieth century genocidal
violence in Namibia, Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia and the
Balkans. By locating the Rwandan Genocide in a wider context it
offers visitors a global and historical perspective to reflect on
both the similarities and dissimilarities between what happened in
Rwanda and what has happened elsewhere. This is a form of ‘global
telling’ in a local setting.
In this
article I have shown through an examination of RTLM, Radio Rwanda
and Kangura how ‘telling’ well is globally significant. A
broadcaster may sound innocuous, but easy-going banter and singing
may mask more sinister intentions. Publishing biased news, naming
enemies, directing violence and inciting hatred are examples of
‘telling’ inadequately. Reporting can tell the truth, revealing
hidden violence, but it can also overlook or obscure violence.
Visiting and then walking round the comparatively untidy remains of
a devastated former church may speak more memorably about a genocide
than watching a news report or even traipsing around another
well-ordered gallery which points back to a moment of chaos.
Displaying can keep memories fresh and heighten the desire to make
sure genocide will never happen again, but if too neatly or
gratuitously laid out it can transform viewers into little more than
voyeurs who feel powerless under the weight of violence.
Abstract:
In this
article I investigate some of the ways that audiences both inside
and outside Rwanda were told about what was happening in 1994 during
and after the Genocide. This article is therefore structured around
a discussion of different kinds of telling: radio broadcasting,
subverting and claiming, chatting and singing, publishing and
naming, directing and inciting, reporting and finally displaying. I
particularly focus upon the Rwandan radio station RTLM and
the extremist paper Kangura. With special reference to these
media I demonstrate how religious expressions and themes were drawn
upon, subverted or totally ignored. I also, though more briefly,
consider the subsequent global coverage of the Rwandan Genocide.
Alongside this discussion I describe the attempts in Rwanda both to
keep the memory of the killings alive and to highlight the
Genocide’s global significance through memorials and a museum.
Key Words:
Rwanda, Radio, Religion, Genocide, Media, RTLM, Kangura,
Global.
Notes
1. See, for example,
African Rights (1998). Rwanda: Death Despair and Defiance
(Revised Edition). London: African Rights.
2. LÈon Mugesera,
from a speech delivered on 22 November 1992. Extracts of which were
repeated on RTLM and Radio Rwanda.
3. Estimates range
from half-a-million to one million victims. See Prunier, GÈrard.
(1997). How many were killed? In The Rwanda Crisis: History of a
Genocide. London: Hurst and Company, pp.259-265. Prunier makes a
strong case for there being about 850,000 victims.
4. See Carver,
Richard. (1996). Introduction. In Linda Kirschke, et al.
Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda & State-Sponsored
Violence in Rwanda 1990-1994. London: Article 19, p.3.
5. See Cohen,
Stanley. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and
Suffering. Cambridge: Polity, p.284. And Gourevitch, Philip
(1998). We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed
With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux.
6. Carver, Richard.
(2000). Broadcasting & Political Transition. In Fardon, Richard and
Furniss, Graham (Eds), African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in
Transition. Oxford: James Currey, p.189. Carver cites Ed
Broadbent a journalist writing in The Gazette (Montreal), 3
May 1994.
7. Carver (2000),
‘Broadcasting & Political Transition’, pp. 190-1.
8. See Sennitt, Andy
(Ed.) (2004). Media Network Dossier, Hate Radio. Hilversum:
Radio Netherlands, 2004, available via www.Medianetwork.nl. For an
analysis of hate media in the USA, especially radio, see Hilliard,
Robert L. and Keith, Michael C. (1999). Waves of Rancor: Tuning
In The Radical Right Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharp.
9.
There are several different figures for non-literacy in Rwanda
during the twentieth century, I have based mine upon the UN Human
Development Reports that show how in 1990 the adult (15 years and
above) literacy rate was 53.3%, and in 2001 had risen to 68% of the
population.
10. Gatwa, Tharcisse.
(1998). The Churches and Ethnic Ideology in the Rwandan Crisis
(1900-1994). PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, p.167. See
also a more recent book of the same title by Tharcisse Gatwa (2005).
Milton Keynes: Regnum Books International.
11. MRND [Mouvement
RÈvolutionnaire National pour le DÈveloppement (National
Revolutionary Movement for Development)].
12. Temple-Raston,
Dina. (Sept/Oct 2002). Journalism and Genocide. Columbia
Journalism Review, p.18.
13. Alison Des
Forges, historian and expert witness,
cited in: International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), (3 Dec. 2003). The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco
Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze,
case no. Ictr-99-52-t.
Judgement and Sentence, p.117, paragraph 342.
14. Francois Xavier Nsanzuwera, who was Prosecutor in Kigali in 1994 and expert witness
at ICTR, cited in: The
Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.117, paragraph 343.
15. See, for
example, Broadbent, E. (3 May 1995). Media, even in the West, is
partly to blame for the Rwandan Massacres. In The Gazette
(Montreal). Also cited by Carver in Broadcasting Genocide,
p.2.
16. Cited by Carver
in Broadcasting Genocide, p.5.
17. See, for
example, McLuhan, Marshal (1987). Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man. London: Ark, pp.297-307.
18. See discussion
of the Hamite hypothesis on page … which emphasised the idea that
Tutsi’s came through Ethiopia on their way to Rwanda.
19. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, pp.38-40.Mugesera also employed this
reference to the river Nyabarongo in a RTLM broadcast in Kinyarwanda
between the period of September 1993-March 1994. Also cited in
African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p.79.
20. Des Forges,
Alison and Des Forges, Alison Liebhafsky (1999). Leave None to
Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights
Watch, pp.83-86.
21. Des Forges et
al, Leave None to Tell the Story, p.72.
22. For ‘The Hutu
Ten Commandments’ in full see African Rights, Rwanda: Death,
Despair and Defiance, pp.42-3. See also brief discussion in
Kirschke et al, Broadcasting Genocide, p.68.
23. For a clear
discussion of the Ten Commandments see
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
pp.45-53, paragraphs 138-159
24.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al, p.148, paragraph 438.
25. ITCR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.47, paragraph 140.
26.
ITCR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.47, paragraph 141.
27.
ITCR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.48, paragraph 142.
28. See Des Forges
et al, Leave None to Tell the Story, p.245-6.
29. RTLM, 2 July
1994. Given the timing, the context and the speaker it is not
entirely unreasonable to interpret Inkotayni as being used
synonymously here with the Tutsi people as a whole. Contra ITCR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.137, paragraphs 403-4.
30. Prosecution
Witness GO, a civil servant in the Ministry of Information whose job
it was to monitor RTLM before 6 April 1994,
cited in: ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.117, paragraph 435.
31. Higiro,
Jean-Marie Vianney (1999), ‘Distorsions et Omissions’, p.171 cited
in Des Forges et al, Leave None to Tell the Story, p.70.
32. See Hilsum,
Lindsey (1994, 15 May). The radio station whose call sign is mass
murder. The Observe, p.19. She continues: ‘Over the past five
weeks it [RTML] has played a key part in inciting the massacres…’
33. Chalk, Frank
(1999a). Radio broadcasting in the incitement of interdiction of
gross violations of human rights, including genocide. In R. Smith
(Ed.), Genocide: Essays toward understanding, early-warning, and
prevention. Williamsburg, VA: Association of Genocide Scholars,
1999. pp. 185-203. See also Chalk, Frank (1999b). Hate radio in
Rwanda, in Adelman, Howard and Suhkre, Astri (Eds). The Path of a
genocide: The Rwanda crisis from Uganda to Zaire. New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp.99-107.
34. Kinyarwanda is
the universal Bantu language spoken by all groups in the population.
The language is also known as
Ikinyarwanda, Orunyarwanda, Urunyaruanda,
Ruanda and Rwanda. There are a number of different dialects spoken.
35. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, p.84.
36. Prosecution
Witness BI, cited in: ICTR,
The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.117, paragraph p.342.
37.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.124, paragraphs 364 and 365.
38. See Nzacahayo,
Paul (2000). Shared Life as God’s People: An Exploration of
Exclusion and Koinonia in Social Relations in Rwanda. PhD
thesis, University of Edinburgh University.
39. For further
details on the content of Kangura propaganda see:
Forges et al, Leave None to Tell the Story, pp.70-82, and
African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance,
pp.70-75. For details on the period which began with the
disturbances or muyaga (strong but unpredictable wind) of
1959 to the day Rwanda became formally independent on 1 July
1962, see Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp.41-54.
40. Sebahinzi is a
proper name which literally means the ‘Father of the Cultivators’.
41. Des Forges et
al, Leave None to Tell the Story, p.77.
42. Inditment,
The Prosecutor v. Simon Bikindi, ICTR 2001-72-1, marked
as p.3, paragraph 37.
43. From recording
of RTLM broadcasts, October 17-31, 1993, and also cited in a
slightly different form in Des Forges et al, Leave None to Tell
the Story, p.83.
44. Witness BI and Nsanzuwera, cited in: ICTR,
The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.117, paragraph p.148, paragraph 440.
45. Witness BI
cited in: ICTR, The
Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.117, paragraph p.150, paragraph 443.
46.This phrase was
coined by FranÁois-Xavier
Nsanzuwera, the former Prosecutor of Kigali, who asserted that to be
named by Kungura could lead at the very least to losing your
job or your freedom. ICTR, The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand
Nahimana et al, p.77,
paragraph 237.
47.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
pp.53-58, paragraphs 160-173.
48.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.56, paragraph 168.
49.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al, pp.59-60, paragraph 179.
50. Broadcast on
June 3, and cited by Kirschke et al, Broadcasting Genocide,
p.113. See also, Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p.402. In 1960-3
this was the name given to the Tutsi guerrillas, both as a term of
abuse and because, like cockroaches, they often moved at night. Post
1990 it was used for the RPF fighters who invaded Rwanda, and later
RTML and the interim government would use it to refer to the Tutsi
in general.
51.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.76, paragraph 235.
52.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
pp.39-40, paragraph 122
53. Richard Carver,
‘Broadcasting & Political Transition’, in Richard Fardon and Graham
Furniss (eds), African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition
(Oxford: James Currey, 2000) p. 192.
54.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al, p.316, paragraph 943.
55. Account from witness GO who
monitored RTLM almost every day from day of its creation to the end
of the genocide. See p.147, ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
paragraph 437.
56. ICTR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al., p.150, paragraph 444.
57. ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.150, paragraph 444.
58. Prunier, The
Rwanda Crisis, p.189.
59. ChrÈtien,
Jean-Pierre, (1995). Media and Propaganda in Preparation for and
during the Rwandan Genocide. Reporters sans FrontiËres/ CNRS/
UNESCO, and ChrÈtien, Jean-Pierre, (1995) Rwanda: les medias du
genocide. Paris: Editions Karthala.
60. Carver,
‘Broadcasting & Political Transition’, p. 190.
61. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, p.115.
62. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, p.116 and pp.118-9.
63. African Rights,
Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p.1003.
64. African Rights,
Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p.80.
65. Gulseth, Hege
L¯vdal (2004), The Use of Propaganda in the Rwandan Genocide: A
Study of Radio-TÈlÈvision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), Cand.
Polit. degree thesis, University of Oslo, p.98.
66. Witness GO cited in ICTR, The Prosecutor
v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.147, paragraph 437.
67. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, p.121.
68. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, p.127.
69.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.152, paragraph 449.
70.
ICTR, The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.139, paragraph 410.
71. Physicians for
Human Rights. (1994/5) Rwanda 1994: a report of the genocide.
Dundee, Scotland, p.22.
72. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, pp.130-1. For the role of RTLM on the
attack of the Islamic Cultural Centre see ICTR
The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.152 paragraph 450.
73. African Rights,
Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, pp.250-2. See also
Sunday Times, 8 May, 1994. ‘Hopeless, helpless, horror beyond
belief… There is nothing the west can do, says Annabel Heseltine,
after Witnessing the Rwanda bloodbath.’ Also cites: John Mulaa, 10
April 1994, ‘Decades of hatred and bloodletting,’ Sunday Nation
(Kenya)
74. See, for
example, the leading articles in The Independent, 11 April,
1994 The New York Times, 12 April, 1994. Both are also
briefly cited in African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair and
Defiance, p.253.
75. African Rights,
Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p.252.
76. Le Monde,
27 May 1994. Also cited in Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis,
p.277.
77. See Eldridge,
John (Ed.) (1993). Getting the Message: News, Truth and Power.
London: Routledge.
78. Radio Rwanda,
April 25, 1994, cited in ICTR,
The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand
Nahimana et al.,
p.184, paragraph 539, and discussed on p.321,
paragraph 966.
79. ICTR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al.,
p.164, paragraph 482.
80. Metzl, Jamie
Fredric, (1997). ‘Rwandan Genocide and the International Law of
Radio Jamming’, in The American Journal of International Law,
Volume 91, 628-651.
81. Kirschke et al,
Broadcasting Genocide, p.166.
82. See Staub,
Ervin, (1989). The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and
other group violence Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
p.18. Through the book Staub identifies a number of common roots to
the holocaust, the Armenian and Cambodian genocides, and the
disappearances in Argentina.
83. Carver,
‘Broadcasting & Political Transition’, p. 192.
84. African Rights,
Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, p.85.
85. Forges et al,
Leave None to Tell the Story, p.770.
86. Lowery, Shearon
A. and DeFleur, Melvin L. (1995), Milestones in Mass
Communication Research: Media Effects (3rd Ed.) White
Plains, NY: Longman, pp.45-67.
87. Kellow,
Christine L. and Stevens, H. Leslie (1998, Summer). The role of
radio in the Rwandan genocide. Journal of Communication 48:3,
107-28.
88. See Cantril,
Hadley. (1940). The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology
of Panic. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
89. ICTR, The
Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana et al., p.164, paragraph
482.
90. ICTR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al
p.359, paragraph 1099.
91. ICTR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al
p.351, paragraph 1073.
92. See Bytwerk,
Randal L. (2001) Julius Streicher (2nd ed.) New
York: Cooper Square. See also ICTR,
The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand
Nahimana et al p.335,
paragraph 1007; pp.351-2, paragraphs 1073, 1075.
93. Alexis, Monique
and Mpambara, Ines (2003) IMS Assessment Mission Report: The
Rwanda Media Experience from the Genocide. Copehagen:
International Media Support, March 2003.
94. ICTR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
p.194, paragraph 569.
95. ICTR,
The Prosecutor v.
Ferdinand Nahimana et al,
pp.194-210, paragraphs 571-619.
96. Aegis Trust
(2004), Jenoside, Kigali: Kigali Memorial Centre, p.24.
About the Author Dr Jolyon
Mitchell (Jolyon.Mitchell@ed.ac.uk
) is a Senior Lecturer at New College, the University of
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, EH1 2LX. A former BBC World
Service producer and journalist his most recent publications include
The Religion and Film Reader (Routledge, 2007) and Media
Violence and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press,
2007).
Web
site:
http://www.div.ed.ac.uk/jolyonmitche
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