If the Rwandan Genocide Happened Today, Would We Get It?
Posted by Mark Kersten
Photo: http://justiceinconflict.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/clothes-belonging-to-victims-of-the-genocide-at-the-murambi-genocide-memorial-center-in-rwanda-photo-by-shawna-nelles-640-x-427jpg.jpg?w=584
Clothes that belonged to victims of the Rwandan Genocide hang in the
Murambi Genocide Memorial Center (Photo: Shawna Nelles)
The story is familiar. When the killing started, everyone who was able
to flee did so. As unprecedented violence erupted in Rwanda,
Westerners boarded planes that whisked them back to safety. A few UN
peacekeepers stayed but, as famously recounted by Canadian General
Romeo Dallaire, they weren't able to stop the violence. The United
Nations famously dithered. Michael Barnett's seminal work suggests
that the UN wasn't ignorant or oblivious to what was happening on the
ground. But in the invigorating post-Cold War era where the UN finally
had the opportunity to assert itself, intervention in Rwanda simply
wasn't considered a 'winning' option.
Three months after the carnage began, some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus
perished. Sadly, concerns remain over the continuity of pre-genocidal
politics in Rwanda and the potential for this small land-locked
country to once again descend into bloody tyranny. "No More Rwandas"
may be a popular slogan for genocide prevention campaigners around the
world. But in a bitter twist of irony, it may also be an appropriate
mantra for Rwanda itself.
These issues have been and will continue to be rehashed and revisited.
This April marked the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide and
observers still struggle to identify the lessons that should be drawn
from those three vicious months in 1994.
An issue that needs continued and critical reflection is how the
Genocide was reported and covered by the international media. As
Bartholomäus Grill, one of the few journalists who covered the
Genocide notes,
It wasn't just the UN, the West and other African nations that failed;
it was also journalists, like me. We ran after the big story in South
Africa, paying little attention to Rwanda or merely spreading clichés
about the country.
News outlets generally did an atrocious job of covering the atrocities
in Rwanda. Many news agencies simply weren't interested in what was
happening on the ground. I was told recently, by one of the small
handful of journalists who were in Rwanda during the Genocide, that
only seven or eight reporters covered the violence from within the
country. And few, if any, stayed for the entire period. They needed to
escape the bloodshed for a few weeks every now and then to decompress.
News agencies were undoubtedly concerned about the magnitude of
violence in Rwanda and putting their staff in danger. Perhaps as a
result, the few journalists and reporters who were sent to cover the
Genocide were generally unexperienced. But outlets were also
distracted and wanted their top people to cover other momentous
events. Most notably, news agencies sent top journalists to cover the
election of Nelson Mandela and his "long walk to freedom". The
developing horror story in Rwanda got the shaft.
Making matters worse, the journalists that did cover the genocide
generally mischaracterized events and leaned heavily on a
black-and-white, 'good' versus 'evil, morality tale. According to one
report from the New York Times, the violence stemmed from age-old
ethnic hatreds:
Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have died in a week of
fighting rooted in the centuries-old feud between Rwanda's majority
Hutu and minority Tutsi ethnic groups. Many have been hacked to death
by gangs with machetes, knives and spears.
The report is emblematic of others from the time. Each saw events in
Rwanda through the prism of the all too irresistible heart of darkness
narrative wherein violence is something quintessentially African,
utterly senseless, undoubtedly backward and, above all, apolitical.
Photo: http://justiceinconflict.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/rwanda-genocide-flame.jpg?w=584
This church, in the village of Nyarubuye, now serves as a memorial
(Photo: Ben Curtis / AP)
This isn't to place undue blame on the journalists that covered the
Rwandan Genocide. They were thrown into a complex political
environment with almost no knowledge of the political history of the
country. Getting it right would have required a miracle.
Some journalists who were in Rwanda still feel guilt for their faulty
coverage. Lindsey Hilsum, who reported from Kigali in the first days
of the Genocide, recalled how difficult it was to cover events in
1994:
We simply didn't think about the idea of war crimes or genocide. That
was something that happened to Jews, and perhaps to a degree in the
Balkans or with Pol Pot...I didin't use the word 'genocide' until the
end of the month, for other journalists it took longer.
I didn't go out because there were roadblocks everywhere with drunk
men with red eyes and machetes. The phone didn't stop ringing. It was
my Tutsi friends calling me to say 'they are at the door' or 'this is
the last time I can talk to you'. I wrote down what they said as my
reports, but I still didn't join the dots to realise this was
genocide.
Grill also recently expressed a sense shame at his reporting of the
Genocide. The violence was not the product of some pre-modern thirst
for bloodshed, "killing sickness" or "insidious virus". As Grill
notes:
Today we know that the genocide was not the work of archaic, chaotic
powers, but of an educated, modern elite that availed itself of all
the tools of a highly organized state: the military and the police,
the intelligence services and militias, the government bureaucracy and
the mass media.
So what have journalists learned? If another Rwanda were to happen
today, how would it be covered?
The answer to these questions are clearly mixed. On the one hand,
social media and citizen journalism make it much harder for atrocity
events to go uncovered. On the other hand, however, we have continued
to see a binary approach to reporting alleged genocide. The preeminent
example of this is in Darfur where complex political violence has
often been diluted into an absurdly over-simplified narrative which
suggests that a genocide has been committed by 'bad' Arabs against
'good' Africans.
But perhaps this type of coverage isn't actually about understanding
violence or getting to the truth. Perhaps, as Mahmood Mamdani has
suggested, it is more about prodding the world into taking action
first - and thinking later.
(Photo: RNW)
And perhaps this type of coverage is the lesson that many observers
and journalists have actually drawn from the Rwandan Genocide. Some,
like Alan J. Kuperman, have suggested that there has been an
over-exaggeration in reports of alleged genocide that is directly
linked to journalistic failures in Rwanda:
Partially in reaction to this reporting failure in Rwanda, Western
media have suffered from exactly the opposite problem ever since. They
now exaggerate the extent of civilian atrocities in ethnic conflict.
Around the world, rebels and human rights groups learned the lesson
from Rwanda that they must declare "genocide" to have any hope of
Western intervention.
At the same time, global audiences are still as - if not more -
captivated by personality-driven story-lines that tend to distract us
from events of mass violence. I don't know the numbers but I would
hazard a guess that there have been more - and far more senior -
journalists consistently covering the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius
than the "seeds of genocide" in the Central African Republic (CAR).
Looking at the headlines of major news sites over the last few weeks
easily confirms that Pistorius' emotional courtroom outbursts far
outweigh coverage of the precarious political future of the CAR.
Reporting genocide and mass atrocities has always been tricky. It is
hard to be accurate when events on the ground shift quickly and when
violence is the result of complex social and political forces. It is
easy to get it wrong, reproduce facile tropes and spin all too
familiar morality tales.
If another Rwanda was taking place today, it wouldn't be ignored. But
it would likely be treated just like the first Rwanda.
http://justiceinconflict.org/2014/04/22/if-the-rwandan-genocide-happened-today-would-we-get-it/
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SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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