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HOW TO MURDER A MILLION PEOPLE AND GET AWAY WITH IT
Cyprian Kyamusoke of the New People Feature Service
Source: Missionary News Agency (Misna), 7 NOV 2001
The images of horror of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 went round the world. Ever since, media reports on Rwanda invariably contain a paragraph about the 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu who perished at the hands of the Hutu militias. Yet, the news of similar and maybe worse massacres in the same region, before, during and after that genocide are hardly ever mentioned. Why? Because media manipulation has become a highly sophisticated and effective art.
In 1972, the Tutsi Government of Burundi systematically eliminated an estimated 2/300,000 Hutu over a six-month period: a totally forgotten genocide. From 1990 to date, hundreds of thousands Hutu have been killed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army under the leadership of Alex Kagame, now president of Rwanda. If we put together: the victims of the civil war from 1990 to 1994; the acts of revenge and large scale massacres during and after the genocide; the number of people that disappeared since; and, finally, the mass slaughter of Hutu refugees in the forests of the Congo, an estimate of one million victims should not be held as an exaggeration. Some put it even higher. International organisations recently put the total number of victims of the Congo wars at 5 million who have been murdered, without forgetting the victims of hunger, sickness and displacement.
Although it is impossible to prove the exact figures, there is no doubt that mass killings comparable to the 1994 genocide have taken place in the Region. How can one possibly explain that, in this age of instant information, massacres of such proportions escape the notice of journalists or are largely ignored by news agencies which pride themselves on being present where the action is? Well, it is all a game, and this is how it is played. Manipulation of the media – In modern warfare, media manipulation is as important as military action, and large sums of money are devoted to it.
The Rwandan Government has been extremely effective in keeping out of the media whatever could create a negative image. A well known example are the Kibeho massacres. Not long after the genocide, troops of the Rwandan army encircled one of the largest camps of displaced people in Kibeho, cut off food and water supplies for days, pushed people into a small crowded area, and then opened machine gun fire on them for several hours. When UN-force soldiers arrived on the scene, they counted more than 6,000 corpses, before they were ordered to stop. The following day, a spokesperson of the State Department in Washington stated that these figures were exaggerated, while the Kigali government declared that some 300 people had been killed in a stampede. This last version was all the western media consumers ever heard. Twisting the language – Media manipulation refers to twisting the meaning of words, a practice also known as ‘spin-doctoring’.
Thus, when Hutu kill Tutsi, it is a “planned genocide”, but when Tutsi kill the same number of Hutu, it is a “massacre carried out by soldiers who got out of control”. When thousands of heavily armed Rwandans – then members of the Uganda army – invaded Rwanda in 1990, it was “a war of liberation”; when the Ugandan and Rwandan army marched into Congo in 1996, they were “backing a Congolese rebellion”.
Even when, after their second war in 1998, both armies started fighting over the gold and diamond trade in Kisangani, the press – against all evidence – still maintained the myth of a “war waged by Congolese rebel movements”.
And so it goes that, when other African countries carry out military coups and set up one-party states, they are held as “dictatorships and oppressive regimes”, and are cut off from public funding. When, however, Yoweri Museveni fights his way to power with the gun and through child-soldiers, and calls his one-party administration a ‘movement system’, he is hailed as “the example of a new breed of African leaders”, and is given substantial international support. Also the massively rigged recent Ugandan elections have not changed such perception: even when journalists eventually realised that they had been fooled, they could not admit it without loss of face. No wonder the myths live on. Mastering the art of myth making – All peoples have myths regarding their origins.
According to colonial time anthropologists, the Tutsi had come to Rwanda from the highlands of Ethiopia. But this became an intolerable concept, when the Hutu threw their Tutsi victims into the Kagera River, the most remote headstream of the Nile, saying they that should go back to where they had come from. And so, the historians on duty have conveniently replaced the former myth with a new one, that is: Hutu and Tutsi are from the same stock and they used to live in a paradise of perfect peace till colonialists and missionaries sowed the seeds of division. History is rewritten to suit the myth! The psychological and political benefits of such myths are obvious. If the genocide is the result of outside forces (e.g. colonial powers, missionary influence) and of the UN failure to intervene, then the Rwandans do not have to take responsibility for their deeds. Moreover, if there is no difference between Hutu and Tutsi, then there is no point in talking of power-sharing or of challenging the power monopoly of a minority. Such myths are, then, bought wholesale by well-meaning media people who have little knowledge of the history of the huge areas they have to cover, and simply repeat what governments and big news agencies say.
But the new myth deceives only innocent (or gullible?) outsiders, since, when it comes to promoting persons to positions of power, the ethnic belonging remains the main criterion followed. Keeping the cameras away – Modern media need images. Events without a video, or at least a photo, are of little interest to television. So, if you do not want events to be splashed on the front pages, just keep cameras away. When the Interhamwe militias massacred their victims in 1994, they left the dead lying around everywhere and the images of horror went around the world. When, on the contrary, Kagame’s death-squads kill, they make absolutely sure that there is no journalists anywhere near. Should any reports seep through the curtain of silence, two strategies are used to neutralise the effects of leakage: either you state a categorical denial of the facts, or you issue a statement confirming that “the army has killed a certain number of rebels”. Either will usually do the trick. Why bother to enquire why most of the ‘rebels’ killed are usually women and children?
Eliminating unwanted witnesses – Part of the strategy to keep media in line is to terrorise possible witnesses into silence and get rid of those who talk or write (like Rwandan former Minister of Internal Affairs, Mr Senda-shonga, who was murdered in Nairobi). NGOs are tolerated as long as they keep quiet. The few which dare to speak out, like Médicins sans Frontières, are quickly expelled. Church people, too, have been murdered when they spoke out too clearly. Mgr Muzihirwa, Archbishop of Bukavu, Congo, was the first to be executed by invading Rwandan troops, because he had denounced the attack on the Congo by its neighbours, followed by Mgr Emanuel Kataliko. In 1995, a Canadian missionary was killed during a church service by a former member of the Rwandan Patriotic Army. The witnesses who testified to the enquiry commission sent in by the Canadian Government were later imprisoned. The murderer was arrested, but released a few weeks later. In a country where people have been traumatised by random arrests and daily terror, neither journalists nor international courts are likely to hear what really happened, since too often the price of telling the truth is losing one’s life. Demonising the enemy – The refrain of every news report on Rwanda about Hutu killing 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu is meant to create an image of Hutu as beasts with only one instinct: killing. To keep the image alive, the public is fed, from time to time, with reports of new atrocities. At times, the Hutu militias in the Congo have indeed continued to commit hideous crimes against civil populations. On occasion, however, the butchering is carried out by Rwandan troops in order to blame the enemy, and therefore it is often difficult to know who is really responsible.
Demonising the enemy serves several purposes. It justifies the refusal to dialogue in order to seek a political solution. After all, no one can be expected to talk to the devil, can they? It is also the perfect cover-up for one’s own crimes: anyone accusing the government of its crimes is immediately labelled “a friend of the genocidaires” or a “revisionist”. And so, journalists and judges tend to believe every word Tutsi survivors of the 1994 genocide say, but do not bother to listen to the stories told by Hutu who have survived the extermination campaign in Rwanda and in the forests of the Congo. This technique was used effectively to eliminate the voice of the Catholic Church and of missionaries. They have been constantly accused of being the real culprits of the genocide.
The Church’s role in the history of Rwanda is indeed ambiguous (favouring the Tutsi elite in colonial times and being too close to Hutu governments after independence), and some members of the clergy were, at least indirectly, encouraging the genocide. Yet, the unjustified blanket accusations served mainly to discredit and silence the only institution that was not under complete state control and could speak of atrocities committed, where no journalists could reach. Creating a guilt complex – Another highly successful method has been to make the UN and Western countries feel guilty of doing nothing to prevent the genocide. The Masire Report to the UN has clearly demonstrated that the 1994 genocide could have been avoided. The inability of the UN to intervene forcefully and the interference of the USA to stop any rescue operation, are indeed scandalous. But part of the Rwandan propaganda wants us to think that the UN, the Churches, the Belgians, the French and nearly everybody else were responsible for the genocide – all except the Rwandans themselves. It is handy to convince a guilty world that it owes a debt to the Rwandans in terms of reparations.
The blind support of the USA for Rwanda and Uganda throughout their bloody adventures in the Congo may be understood in terms of its geo-political interests. But if Europe has continued to support a government with such a bad record of massive human rights abuses, as the Rwandan one, guilt feelings may be part of the explanation. Subverting human rights organisations – Governments are keenly aware that human rights organisations have a considerable influence on public opinion, and pose a major threat to their attempts to cover up crimes. So, they make a concerted effort to influence existing organisations, to condemn those who are critical of their praxis, and to create their own organisations to promote favourable versions of events.
Examples are not lacking. The first major publications in English about the 1994 Rwandan genocide systematically excluded any investigations into large scale massacres committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) during the same period. In April 2001, the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva declared that the problem of human rights in Rwanda had been solved and did no longer need the attention of the world, whereas Amnesty International kept saying that there were still plenty of problems, and Human Rights Watch asked the Rwanda government to “resolve recent cases of disappearances and assassinations”.
The International Tribunal in Arusha has still to come up with any indictment of RPF leaders responsible for massacres, of which it has plenty of evidence. Political pressure often prevails over impartiality. Becoming a super power’s ally – In recent years, the USA has developed economic and geo-political interests in the Great Lakes Region to contain the fundamentalist regime of Khartoum and to foster the interest of American companies in the fabulous mineral resources in the region. To pursue its policies, the world super-power needed local allies. Uganda, and later Rwanda, proved perfect partners. These received funds, military training, equipment and access to intelligence information. From Pinochet to Kagame, the USA administration has never bothered much about the human rights records of ‘strategic allies’, and has even actively covered up murders and massacres when this suited its interests. Given the clout Washington exercises everywhere in the world, it is not surprising that so much of what really happened in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo was covered up for so long.
In the end, lie is what suits a superpower’s interests. The fact that commercial media have largely ignored mass murdering in the Great Lakes Region poses serious questions. Many of us still trust rather naively what is printed in the papers and reported on the radio. In this age of information and disinformation, we need to learn to be very critical of the big media and to look for alternative sources of information, if we care to know what is actually happening in the world.
In the case of the Great Lakes, the highly paid professional media moguls have truly missed the point. It was local human rights groups, a few courageous NGOs, some local priests, bishops and missionaries, who told the truth, often at the risk of their lives. Whom should we listen to?
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