COMPLICITY IN SILENCE
East African, Kenya
Oct 2 2007
Alan Thomson, a journalism professor from Canada, has gathered 34
impeccable voices to illustrate that even as thousands were massacred
in 1994, the world media deliberately focussed its attention elsewhere.
Genocide crimes, which discredit entire histories and futures,
retroactively casting the perpetrator’s heritage in bad light while
psychologically crippling coming generations, are so abhorrent that
for decades, the struggle to come to terms with the act continues.
It is 13 years since the Rwanda genocide and, in comparison with the
Nazi Holocaust 50 years earlier, or the Armenian genocide nearly a
century earlier, it is still "early days."
It is unlikely that revelations about who shot down former Rwanda
president Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane, exactly how many people were
killed or why those who could stop it looked away, will be coming
out any time soon.
As a measure of the power of what went on, we still read and
watch the piles of books, articles, films and documentaries that
contain predictable themes: The UN’s spectacular impotence; the US
government’s linguistic quibbling over the word "genocide;" and a
disaffected France, watching yet another area of influence overrun by
"Anglo-Saxons."
There are also the divisions between Tutsis and Hutus, how Belgium
set the country dangerously on the skids to self-destruction; and
Ugandan and Zairean support for opposing sides.
But however many the facts, figures and events that are thrown at us,
we remain too puzzled by what we saw to shake off the dread.
Accordingly, The Media and the Rwanda Genocide is not the first book
to examine the role that the mass media played in fanning the flames
of hatred and murder. But what it says is authoritative.
As an editorial project by Alan Thompson, journalism professor at
Carlton University Ottawa, Canada, it gathers 34 impeccable voices
from diplomats, including Kofi Annan and genocide-era commander
of UNAMIR, Romeo Dallaire and several journalists, scholars and
humanitarian workers.
Dallaire, the UN man on the spot, who wrote his account in the book,
Handshake With the Devil, makes the charge that international media
"initially influenced events by their absence."
Nick Hughes, a British filmmaker, who captured live footage of some
killings, recollects, "What I have just filmed is not a normal event?
I knew that whenever there was hostility in Rwanda, civilians got
killed, but the events we were witnessing in April 1994 made us begin
to realise there was something more this time – there was the magnitude
of the killing. I know now that what I saw was human evil in majesty."
Despite this insight in April 1994, it was clear the media would not
go down to Kigali.
This book argues that Rwanda was a victim of media structure and focus
and provides insight into media events that obscured the genocide.
1994 was barely five years since the end of the Cold War.
International affairs and government policy as news focus seemed
passe. Marital problems in the British royal family, star troubles
in America and crime were more attractive in this period.
Foremost of these was the live coverage of the OJ Simpson murder trial,
which gripped the world. A certain US figure skater, Tonya Harding,
garnered more television airtime for allegedly damaging the kneecap of
her competitor than the 800,000 people being killed in Central Africa.
April 1994 also saw centuries of white rule come to an end in South
Africa. Senior reporters from the world’s media were trooping down
south to witness the election and inauguration of Nelson Mandela as
the first black leader of South Africa.
In the US itself, attention focused on the beaches of Florida as
boatfuls of Haitian refugees arrived. Trouble was brewing up in the
Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan.
In all, an estimated 28 million people around the world were said to
be at risk in 12 countries.
Rwanda was just one trouble spot, harder to point out on the map.
"Rwanda, that’s in Africa, right?" asked Dallaire before he was posted
there. A million desperate people could not compete for attention
against OJ Simpson.
This is how airtime was divided in major US media in the second quarter
of 1994: In April, as the first batch of people in Rwanda were killed,
South Africa and Bosnia received nearly 60 and 45 nightly minutes
respectively, or US television channels, ABC, NBC and CBS.
Rwanda got less than 20 minutes.
During the crucial first 30 days of the massacres, Dallaire argues, a
mere 5,000 international troops might have scared off the perpetrators.
As May got underway, focus on South Africa and Bosnia declined. It
might have been expected that Rwanda would go up the agenda, and
indeed, coverage did rise to 30 minutes.
But in mid-June, the OJ Simpson trial began. At the time, both Rwanda
and OJ received less than 10 nightly minutes. But the divergence
began to sharpen.
Some 50 days into the genocide, the Simpson trial’s live coverage
clocked 70 minutes on the three influential channels. Rwanda averaged
only 10 minutes.
By this time, the murderers had become emboldened. Belgian, French
and Italian military transport planes were evacuating Europeans out of
Rwanda. Accounts by BBC reporter Mark Doyle of how European soldiers
drove past people crying for help, plucked up a lone European and then
drove back as those who cried for help minutes before now lay dead,
are heart-rending.
The New York Times devoted a mere 6.9 per cent of articles on world
crises to Rwanda in 1994; The Washington Post, 5.9 per cent.
Respectively, the two papers gave 44 and 46 per cent to Bosnia
respectively.
A dazed Dallaire was informed by a Western diplomat in Kigali,
"This country is of no strategic value? 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."
The diplomat went on: "In fact what there’s too much of here is
people. Well, we’re not going to come because of people."
The media, it seems, was out for ratings, not people. But soon they had
the horror and the drama of hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming
through Goma. It was a magnet for television. So, by mid-July of 1994,
three weeks after the killings had stopped, news about the crisis
shot to over 60 minutes a night on US TV.
CNN emerged as champion of post-genocide news. In April, when
its famous reporters might have made some difference, it carried
zero-stories. With the pictures looking good for TV, it carried 100
in July.
Now, Western governments responded with humanitarian assistance to
crowds who included killers.
In reverse, the local Rwandan media was too close to the action. In
even worse reversal, radio, long praised as the liberator of African
peoples, was transformed into a deadly weapon, which combined with the
machete-wielding genocidaires, took on a haunting, bionic presence. The
image of the genocidaires receiving the impulse to kill via the ear
into the other hand is hard to shake off.
The radio sets were undoubtedly tuned to Radio-Television des Libre
Milles Collins (RTLM), where presenters passed on messages like
"The graves are still empty, who will help us fill them?" talked
of a coming "Fight without pity," encouraged listeners to practice
"Hatred without mercy," urging them to search "drains and ditches"
to ensure "cockroaches" were not hiding there.
It was the regional media, particularly Kenya’s Daily Nation that
stuck to the crisis right from the beginning, but like in Darfur,
African governments could do nothing.
This is an indictment against the media, but we know enough now from
Darfur – an over-covered crisis – to suspect that media attention
might not have translated into timely intervention. We also know
from Iraq that the collapse of weak nations can be engineered to
shore up the power of strong nations, no matter how many people die
in the process. But we do not know enough to settle doubts about why
in this case, no one lifted a finger to stop the killings.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
