Genocide in Rwanda. The Role of the Media in Confusing Public Opinion and Encouraging the Killings.

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When, on 7 April, people around the world commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, 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'. It was the French philosopher, Voltaire, who wrote: In the case of the 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 , entitled 'The Media and the Rwanda Genocide.

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 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.

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 , I was a career journalist with the Toronto Star. I was not in Rwanda in I first visited in 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 Reviewing the Toronto Star archives, I found an article of mine published on 9 April I had forgotten ever having written it; perhaps it left my memory because it was such a dreadful piece of journalism. 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 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 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 , 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. 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: 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. 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 in an attempt to counter the destructive messages of hate radio. He is the author of Shake Hands with the Devil: A former film critic before his return to the academy in , his current research concerns the medical aspects of Holocaust survival. Mike Dottridge was a desk officer with Amnesty International during the s, covering Rwanda and other countries in the Great Lakes region. At the time of the genocide and until 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 He is now director of the Royal African Society. He spent much of the period of the genocide in Rwanda and, on several occasions, he was the only foreign reporter in Kigali. 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.

Federal Court, and in Belgian and Swiss courts. 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.

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 , in the trial of George Rutaganda. Hughes later produced the film Days , the first cinematic treatment of the Rwanda genocide. He is also a co-author of Rwanda: 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.

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. 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: Charles Mironko is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on genocide perpetrators. 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 became director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa.

From to , 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. A former journalist, she has trained journalists in Ethiopia and researched township newspapers in Zimbabwe. He joined the faculty at Carleton in 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 Rwanda.

The images are so disturbing they are difficult to watch. Two women kneel amid the bodies of those who have already been slain. They are at the side of a dirt road in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Their final moments are 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.

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. 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 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 , 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. Dallaire and his peacekeepers were only vaguely aware of the mounting tensions in the autumn of , but heard rumblings about a 'third force' — Hutu extremists who opposed the power-sharing arrangement.

Once the president's plane was shot down by unknown assailants, the message from RTLM was unmistakable: The killings began almost immediately in Kigali through the night of 6—7 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. 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. The full text of the judgement summary can be found in 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. 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 , 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. 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, 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 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 , when Habyarimana's plane was shot down: 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. 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. And while they were able at that time to discover the enormity of the killing campaign in this area 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 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 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: 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. 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. Genocide in Rwanda Des Forges , 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. 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: He examines the impact of the private print press on Rwandan politics before the genocide. Charles Mironko uses data from interviews with nearly 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 genocide started because he had sometimes been asked to broadcast news repugnant to him.

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. 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 because policymakers believed their predecessors in the George H.

Bush administration were lured into Somalia by television pictures. Linda Melvern, investigative journalist and author of A People Betrayed: The Rwandan Genocide Melvern , 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 s and between and , 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. 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 , 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 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: 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. 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 rest of the section explores the Media Trial from four key vantage points.

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 , when the attack on the president's plane precipitated the massacres and genocide of April to July , during which he concedes the media did make direct calls for extermination.

Charity Kagwi—Ndungu, 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. Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath Nowrojee 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. 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. Analyses and Case Studies Chalk and Jonassohn , makes blunt recommendations for aggressive intervention in situations where media are being manipulated. Chalk recommends three possible forms of intervention: 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 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 to June , 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.

Remembering the Rwandan Genocide: Reconsidering the Role of Local and Global Media

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. 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 , 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 — 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.

History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. Leave None to Tell the Story: In The Prosecutor v. Zed Books, London, UK. The news media — both domestic and international — played a crucial role in the 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 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.

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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 —94, 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, —94 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 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.

Legacy of Rwanda genocide includes media restrictions, self-censorship

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. 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 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 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. 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.

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. And, oh yes, somewhere in there, a bunch of black tribesmen in Africa were killing each other. 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. 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: 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 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. Simpson and Tonya Harding got a lot more press than , 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, people on the side of that hill over there.

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 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.

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. The early calls for a self-defense force produced no immediate result, probably because partisan and regional rivalries, spurred by the formation of multiple parties in , were still acute. Parties, both those for and those against Habyarimana, had established militia that used violence against each other, in some cases causing death and serious injury as well as extensive property damage in their skirmishes. After March the Interahamwe militia was used not just against other political party supporters but also in the attacks against Tutsi civilians mentioned above.

Bagosora was aware that parties opposed to Habyarimana might well entertain suspicions about the establishment of any new paramilitary group, even if its avowed purpose was to defend against the RPF. Apparently not ready to join in a self-defense effort in early , some leaders of parties opposed to Habyarimana nonetheless began to move towards his side. Shocked by the RPF offensive of February they wondered whether the RPF was set on a total military victory rather than on a negotiated sharing of power.

His assassination by a group of Tutsi military officers outraged many Hutu in Rwanda. The assassination of the Burundian president persuaded several important Hutu political leaders to realign themselves with the forces supporting Habyarimana. Their parties, once solid in opposing Habyarimana, split with the larger number of their members moving to the side of the president and a smaller number still supporting cooperation with the RPF.

The final Arusha Accords, signed in August , called for establishing a new transitional government, including the RPF, to govern until elections could be held, but months passed without the new government being installed. At different times each side was responsible for delays as each sought to take account of the rapidly changing political configurations.

By the end of it was clear that each side was also preparing for renewed combat. The RPF, permitted by terms of the Arusha Accord to install six hundred of its soldiers in the city of Kigali, clandestinely brought in more troops as well as more arms. Recognized as a legitimate party under the terms of the Accords, the RPF also experienced an increase in public support as adherents previously fearful of acknowledging their allegiance openly showed their leanings, and others joined for the first time.

Young people came to RPF headquarters in Kigali or to its base in northern Rwanda for political training. They returned to their homes where they sought to recruit new members for the RPF. In addition other young people were being recruited and trained as soldiers to swell the combatant forces of the movement. The Rwandan army sought to bring in new stocks of arms though in one case U. The preparations of military leaders appear to have focused more on the militia and civilians, however, than on the regular troops.

After the Interahamwe recruited hundreds of new members, soldiers trained them at military camps. Military leaders also provided firearms to civilian authorities and political party leaders who passed them on to militia and carefully selected ordinary civilians. Meanwhile propagandists spewed out increasingly vitriolic attacks against Tutsi, calling for their extermination, and against those Hutu political leaders who refused to rally to Hutu Power.

In addition to preparing the militia as an increasingly effective strike force, political and military leaders affiliated with Habyarimana moved to establish the long-discussed self-defense organization. A week after the Hutu Power rally in late October , a commission of Rwandan army officers met to organize the program. It was neither signed nor dated, but its authenticity was established by Jean Kambanda, prime minister of the interim government during the genocide. In a statement to the ICTR Appeals Chamber, Kambanda identified the document, said it was regarded as highly confidential, and said that it clearly predated April Through analysis of the content and through comparison with other documents and witness interviews, it appears that the document dates to mid-February or at the latest to March It is important to note who is to participate in the planned program, the proposed organizational structure, the weapons called for, and the description of the groups to be targeted by its activities.

The plan, to be implemented under the general chairmanship of the ministers of interior and defense, created a complex hierarchy of organs and committees to coordinate military, administrative, and political actors. It assigned a variety of tasks from the level of the presidency and the military general staff down to the level of the administrative sector, but in a striking omission, it assigned no task to the prime minister.

The prime minister in the months before April , Agathe Uwiliyigiyimana, was not counted among the supporters of Hutu Power and so despite her office, her ethnicity Hutu , and her political credentials, she was not included in the plan. Similarly, of the four burgomasters in the city of Kigali, one was not involved in implementing the plan: In a detailed analysis of requirements by commune, the plan called for supplying participants with 4, firearms and , bullets.

He said that the minister of defense and minister of interior were to be contacted to obtain the necessary firearms for the civilians. The military commander for operations in the city, present at the meeting, indicated that some parts of the city were already organized and awaiting arms and other supplies. It was reported that other civilian self-defense efforts were already underway in areas outside the city and should continue in collaboration with administrative authorities. Given the scarcity of firearms, it was suggested that the burgomasters should instruct people in the use of traditional weapons, including swords, spears, bows and arrows, and machetes.

The commander of operations in the city was asked to quickly prepare lists of members of the armed forces living in residential areas, and the prefect was asked to provide similar information on reservists and reliable civilians as soon as possible. The next day the prefect of the city of Kigali sent the chief of staff a list of several hundred reservists and others presumably civilians chosen for civilian defense. Their names were listed by cell, sector, and commune, the standard administrative units. Genocide in Rwanda New York: Human Rights Watch, , p.

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