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Death by Radio
by Hugh McCullum ¹

The media's malignancy and neglect in Rwanda

How the international media missed the real story - and local media directed the carnage.

The skulls are still there. They are bleached now and covered in long grass, brilliant red flowers, and scraps of the brightly colored clothes once worn by the women of Ntarama Mission in Rwanda, where about 1,500 people were butchered in 1994 while the world and the media averted their eyes. About one million people were massacred in a low-tech civil war and genocide that lasted a mere 10 weeks.

Almost three years later, visitors to this memorial to the world's swiftest holocaust wonder aloud how it happened and why we hear only snippets of information - if we hear any at all - about the ethnic cleansing that is spreading through Central and East Africa. The ethnic card is politics and economics and is destabilizing several countries in Africa and elsewhere, creating millions of refugees, spreading disease, and increasing arms peddlers profits.

I first came to Ntarama in 1994, just days after the raging Hutu militias had killed women, children, and old men in the church, smashing them with nail-studded clubs and then finishing them off with machetes supplied by British and Chinese farm implement manufacturers. Nobody asked why nearly 100,000 new machetes were imported secretly into Rwanda before the civil war began in April 1994. No gas ovens, furnaces, or hi-tech extermination instruments as in Nazi Germany or the former Yugoslavia; just machetes, clubs, and fragmentation grenades.

It is hard work to kill a person with a club or machete. The killers would have had to "rest" from their "work" as victims lay bleeding at their feet. Most of Rwandas one million victims were killed in this way.

Shattered bones, skulls split like watermelons, mouths drawn back in toothy grimaces, a child's skeleton held in an embrace of death by a mother. They are still there today in Ntarama, mute witnesses to the world's ignorance, neglect, and complicity.

President Juvenal Habyarimana, Rwanda's long-time strongman, died on April 6, 1994, in a fiery plane crash, probably engineered by his own presidential guard and/or agents of foreign powers. There can be little doubt now that his death unleashed a well planned and executed genocide of moderate Hutus and most Tutsis.

It took a while for the international media to catch on. "Just another boring African tragedy" was the attitude, "blacks still killing blacks." Eventually stories of carnage did filter into CNN headquarters in Atlanta, as refugees poured out of Rwanda in unprecedented waves. There were more Rwandans dead or escaped to Zaire or Tanzania than there were alive in the tiny, hilly country. Packs of dogs grew fat on human flesh and the sickeningly sweet stench of death hung over the lush, unharvested fields.

The real story The media, United Nations agencies, and high-earning aid professionals missed the real story. That is why Central Africa is in massive chaos today. Yet we wring our hands or dump tons of tents and potatoes on refugee camps seething with frightened hopeless people, pawns of politicians at home and abroad.

The media missed the genocide, which is why there are 80,000 Rwandese awaiting almost certainly unfair trials, while the UN cannot bring one person to justice at its War Crimes Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania.

The thin, sloppy analysis in the international news media ignored German and Belgian colonial history which played Hutus and Tutsis against each other until they became blood enemies. The genocide of 1994 was the worst, but not the first, of the massacres that have wracked Rwanda, Burundi, and parts of Zaire since independence in the early 1960s.

The media missed the deliberate conditions put in place by the extremist Hutus, aided and abetted by arms sellers from Britain, France, China, and South Africa delivering their goods through surrogates in Uganda, Zaire and Kenya.

Most of the media missed, and continue to miss, France's murky role in supporting extremists so that Rwanda would stay French, and Britain's pretense that its allies in Uganda and Kenya were supporting conflict on opposing sides. Not to mention that South Africa sold weapons to both sides as well as attempting to broker peace.

In its frenzy to show us horror without analyzing the causes, the media left Africa more tattered in the world's eyes than ever before, a basket-case continent where people are always killing each other and begging for food.

Perhaps most significant for those of us who are ourselves media practitioners is that we missed the story of how certain media in Rwanda waged a campaign of incitement to ethnic hatred and violence, which created the social and cultural conditions for genocide, a campaign that is now being repeated in Burundi and eastern Zaire.

Killer airwaves As early as 1992, foreign human rights organizations were criticizing state-owned Radio Rwanda for its scurrilous ethnic attacks on opposition politicians. But it was private-sector commercial radio and television stations that incited mobs to mass ethnic cleansing.

Radio Television Libre Mille Collines (RTLMC) was formed in 1993 by extremists close to Habyarimana's family and became a propaganda success story (although a commercial failure), creating a climate of mass hatred on one side and mass fear on the other. It broadcast a daily stream of anti-Tutsi hate propaganda reminiscent of Goebbels techniques in Nazi Germany and of the anti-Communist vitriol of the McCarthy era in the U.S. Hourly and repetitively, RTLMC referred to the opposition as "traitors who deserved to die" and to Tutsis as "cockroaches and snakes that should be stamped out."

The broadcasts were aimed at convincing an unsophisticated and frustrated audience, poverty-stricken, landless, and unemployed, that their problems were all caused by Tutsis. Individuals identified by name were accused of murdering Hutu babies, and their personal lives and alleged sexual practices were narrated daily.

After the genocide began on April 6, the station regularly broadcast lists of people to be killed.

The power of the radio in village life cannot be overestimated. Highly propagandist broadcasts in French were toned down so as not to offend the diplomatic community. But the broadcasts in peoples common language, Kinyarwanda, were incendiary and direct, calling continuously for the total extermination of Tutsis. The generally illiterate population, a senior UN peacekeeper noted, "listens very attentively to broadcasts in Kinyarwanda; they hold their cheap little radio sets in one hand and their machetes in the other, ready to go into action once the signal is given."

RTLMC was known as "the killer station" for months before the genocide began. According to Journalists without Frontiers, two weeks into the civil war RTLMC proclaimed on air that "by May 5 (1994) the cleansing of the Tutsi from Rwanda must be completed" and that "their grave is only half-full; who will help us fill the rest?" It stayed on air for months after the war, operating from a mobile transmitter, from Zaire and from Burundi, and has a number of extremist successors today.

Perhaps one of RTLMCs least understood roles was that of preparing the mass exodus of refugees into Tanzania and Zaire in June and July of 1994. Its message was that all Hutus would now be massacred in revenge, that retreat was only tactical, and that refugees would be treated well by international aid agencies. The dubious theory of aid as neutral complemented extremist propaganda.

"Press freedom?" Where does press freedom end and incitement to genocide begin? A thorough investigation of the influence of the mass media is required. How did the international community, in the name of press freedom, allow a station like RTLMC to exist? Surely "information dissemination" has its limits - and we in the media have a responsibility to guard them.

1. Hugh McCullum, a Canadian journliast based in Harare and Nairobi, has covered the Great Lakes crisis for several years for various international media.