Echoes of violence

Considerations on radio and genocide in Rwanda

Bibliographic Data

ID5779995
AuthorsDarryl Li (0000-0002-8041-1285, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume6
Issue1
Pages9-27
Publication date2004-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Genocide Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1462-3528 • E-ISSN: 1469-9494
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1462352042000194683
OpenAlexW2053261164
LanguageEN
Citations received37
References cited9

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Though not without precedent in the region, unfortunately, given large-scale massacres of Hutu in Burundi in the early 1970s and 1990s. It is important to interpret Rwanda's history of violence in non-teleological terms. The 1959 "Hutu revolution" was marked by violence aimed at driving out Tutsi chiefs; after independence, monarchist Tutsi guerrillas attacked the new state from neighbouring countries, providing a pretext for pogroms against Tutsi in the country. Before such violence subsided in 1967, up to 20,000 Tutsi were massacred and 300,000 were forced to flee (Prunier, 1995 Prunier G (1995) The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press) [Google Scholar], p 62), creating one of the first major refugee crises in Africa. In 1973, President Grégoire Kayibanda's largely unsuccessful attempt to incite violence against Tutsi was the last card he played before being overthrown in coup by Juvénal Habyarimana, who remained president until his death in 1994. Although Tutsi were excluded from public life and faced harsh discrimination, there was little ethnic violence directed against them until the 1990 civil war; between 1990 and 1994, tens of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a series of tightly focused and planned massacres. Kirschke argues that "outside Kigali and other urban centres, the station is reported to have attracted people from urban backgrounds ... rather than peasants from rural areas," a claim which is not supported by the fieldwork undertaken for this essay. As one imprisoned Hutu told me, "it's a lie if a farmer says he didn't listen to RTLM" (interview, July 8, 2000). The station began broadcasting in late 1993, with range limited to the Kigali area; from early 1994 onwards, its reach was more or less nationwide. This research is based a number of sources, including interviews and documentation. Interviews were conducted in the summer of 2000 with: approximately 30 inmates in Rwandan prisons who had already pleaded guilty to some form of participation in the genocide; approximately 60 farmers living in rural Rwanda; and conversations with various Rwandan academics, activists, and officials. Interviews in the first two groups were conducted through interpreters speaking French and Kinyarwanda. Other interview transcripts were provided by anonymous sources. The documentation reviewed included several dozen transcripts of RTLM broadcasts translated into English and French, documents of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and relevant writings by Rwandan public figures and academics. In this essay, surnames of interviewees will be omitted. Ages listed are those at time of interview. It is important to point out several empirical and methodological limitations to this enquiry. Empirically, I have been unable to locate extensive documentary evidence (including transcripts) on RTLM's competitors, namely, Radio Rwanda and Radio Muhabura (though the rival stations were often discussed in interviews). Methodologically, my lack of fluency in Kinyarwanda, the short timeframe of field research, and security considerations (regarding the prison) made it impossible for me to achieve the level of trust and familiarity with interviewees ideal for ethnographic work. Indeed, I would be the first to acknowledge the limitations of studying radio in a language one does not understand. In describing on-air radio workers, especially those of RTLM, I have decided to employ the French animateur/animatrice to emphasize the crucial performative and directive aspect of their work. The English equivalents of "journalist," "broadcaster," "disc jockey," and "personality" do not capture this dimension, nor does the Kinyarwanda word "umunyamakuru" (literally, "one of the news" or "newsman"). RTLM's best-known animateurs included Kantano Habimana (allegedly died of AIDS in Congo), Valérie Bemeriki (currently in detention in Rwanda), Noël Hitimana (died in a Rwandan prison), Georges Ruggiu (pleaded guilty to ICTR and given 12 years' imprisonment in 2000), and Ananie Nkurunziza (missing?). Other participants included Editor-in-Chief Gaspard Gahigi (missing?), manager Phocas Habimana (dead?), alleged founder and leading Rwandan historian Ferdinand Nahimana (currently on trial at ICTR). The singer Simon Bikindi, whose music was featured regularly on RTLM, was arrested in the Netherlands in the summer of 2001 and is awaiting trial at ICTR. At the same time, it is crucial to recall the extent to which Rwandans either resisted the genocide or merely sought to avoid it. Numerous Hutu risked their lives to save Tutsi, whether out of altruism or greed, while many avoided work for reasons of disgust, laziness, or conscience. Indeed, it was not uncommon for individuals to have both taken lives and saved them, severely testing the familiar categories of perpetrator, victim, and bystander. Mahmood Mamdani sums up these difficulties well in noting the application of these arguments to hostel violence in apartheid South Africa: "All of these explanations contain a grain of truth, and none can be ignored. The argument of [manipulative elite] forces is compelling, but it cannot by itself explain the violence: conspiracies exist, but that fact on its own cannot explain why some succeed and others fail. Sociological conditions ... do explain why [people] are more disposed towards mobilization, as economic conditions in deprived communities explain the acute desperation that marks the quest to sustain life, but neither explains the ways in which people actually mobilize or act. Although material conditions do explain the constraints under which we make real choices in real life, they cannot by themselves explain the choices we do make within those constraints. The old argument between structure and agency, between sociological and historical constraint and human will, cannot be resolved simply by holding up one end of the pole" (Mamdani, 1996 Mamdani M (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) [Google Scholar], pp 225-226). Rwandan elites, casting themselves in the mould of Jacobins, emphasized progress in nearly all discussions of the past. School textbooks cleanly segment the Rwandan past into the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial stages, each new phase foreclosing any possibility of returning to the previous ones. A book by the son of a prominent Hutu revolutionary charting the anti-monarchist struggle and the subsequent achievements of the post-colonial state (complete with a timeline from 1884 to 1994) is dedicated to those who fought for the "grands principes de Liberté, de Justice, et de Progrès pour nous" (Mbonyumutwa, 1990 Mbonyumutwa S (1990) Rwanda: gouverner autrement (Kigali: Imprimerie Nationale) [Google Scholar], p 5). The Rwandan state dedicated entire years to specific development goals, such as: the augmentation of production (1975), education (1979), and soil conservation (1980). In addition, state-controlled mass media were actively used to sensitize the population to such campaigns (Mfizi, 1983 Mfizi C (1983) Les lignes de faîte du Rwanda indépendant (Kigali: ORINFOR) [Google Scholar], p 57). Indeed, one cannot underestimate radio's importance as the dominant medium of orality and communication in the post-colonial era. In a country without a daily newspaper and few television sets, radio was the dominant mass medium, one whose emergence marginalized earlier forms of orality to reflect a new sense of nationness, making radio a dynamic site for the creation of "imagined communities" in ways beyond the nexus of "print capital" envisioned by Benedict Anderson in his discussion of how newspapers contributed to the rise of nationalism: "The significance of this mass ceremony-Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers-is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?" (Anderson, 1991 Anderson B (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso) [Google Scholar], p. 35). In Rwanda, the answer to Anderson's rhetorical question is radio. As I do not speak Kinyarwanda and my work is based mostly on RTLM transcripts rather than tapes, the analyses of performance here are obviously biased towards forms amenable to textual interpretation and are therefore far from comprehensive. Interviews indicate that the reasons underlying the station's popularity and importance during the genocide stem from other reasons as well. Some of those I spoke to recalled being drawn to RTLM's liveliness, but only when specifically asked about it; more general questions about the sources of the station's popularity almost never received replies such as "because it was funny" or "because the animateurs spoke well." This suggests that RTLM's entertaining style was not necessarily its most important aspect. Interestingly, educated Rwandans, primarily Tutsi, always pointed out RTLM's "street style" as the primary reason for its appeal. It is possible that the reliance of some published accounts on educated, urban informants magnified or reproduced certain presumptions shared by elites. At times, they were even forced to contradict the code of their rhetoric in order to avoid the pervasive influence of euphemism. As news spread that France was preparing to intervene in Rwanda, Valérie Bemeriki instructed Hutu to welcome them with flowers and greetings of "bon jour" and "soyez le bienvenu." Still, after months of whipping up hatred against whites in general and Belgians in particular, and mixing anti-Tutsi invective with superficial reassurances that not all Tutsi were bad, it was only sensible to make the instructions absolutely clear. "If you are told to do something, you are not told to do the opposite," Bemeriki announced to listeners. "If we are saying that we should welcome the French, that does not mean that we should throw stones at them" (RTLM, June 22, 1994). Ruggiu has made some 60 hours' worth of confessions to ICTR prosecutors, during which he presumably discussed in detail how he was hired and the nature of his work at RTLM, as both topics are featured in his plea agreement. The content of these sessions, however, remains confidential. My numerous requests to ICTR for access to the tapes and to Ruggiu himself received no official replies. Ruggiu's case also provides an example of the oversights that can come with an overly textual perspective in understanding radio. In June 2000, Ruggiu was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment by ICTR after pleading guilty to inciting genocide. In the judgement, the tribunal's judges cited Ruggiu's European background and consequent ignorance of the complexities of the situation in Rwanda as mitigating factors in the sentencing. The significance of his European background to his involvement with RTLM was not mentioned. In one incident, the station issued the licence plate number of a red van reported to be "full of accomplices"; the passengers of the vehicle, Hutu dissidents, were stopped at a nearby checkpoint the same day and executed (Kirschke, 1996 Kirschke L (1996) Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda & State-Sponsored Violence in Rwanda 1990-1994 (London: Article 19) [Google Scholar], p 121). Interestingly, Ruggiu also told ICTR prosecutors that at the behest of the Rwandan military, he once relayed a message to have a red Volkswagen stopped, giving registration number and general location, but did not know the result of the broadcast (ICTR-97-32-DP, para 171). Similarly, the ones who needed most to adapt to the rhythms of work crews were the Tutsi who managed to go into hiding. Observing patrol patterns while hiding in the fields during the day, they came out at night to find food, new sanctuaries, or to get news from friends. In exploiting the regularity of schedules, even these Tutsi seem to have developed some sense of mastery over how the system of the genocide worked, even if it was working against them. Resistance, of course, took on multiple and diverse forms, of which only some occurred in the framework of the genocide. In some instances, large groups of Tutsi were able to organize and defend themselves for some time, fending off multiple attacks before succumbing to superior military force (Des Forges et al., 1999 Des Forges A et al. (1999) "Leave None to Tell the Story": Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch) [Google Scholar], pp 216-220

Media Studies and Communication · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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