I have been listening to the 20 year after reports about the Rwandan Genocide on NPR's morning edition and either I missed something or they, with all their resources and twenty years to get it right did. I have heard no mention of how it was the radio, primarily, but the media in general that caused the genocide in 1994.
Here's what as close a witness to the genocide as possible, Jackie Northam - she had a machete held to her throat by some drunken militiaman - said this morning:
And then there was the Hutu man I talked with several months after the genocide ended. Fat and middle-aged, he was in jail for beating to death more than a dozen of his Tutsi neighbors.
He told me they were people he'd been friends with and regularly shared dinner with. He was a godfather to one of the children he killed. He couldn't explain why; he said didn't know what came over him.
For me, this sums up the Rwanda genocide. It's like a madness took over the country, turning otherwise normal, reasonable, loving people into monsters. It took me a long time afterward to try to make sense of what I had witnessed.
But I finally concluded there was no use trying. I believe mankind, at its base, is good. What happened in Rwanda 20 years ago was an aberration.
In the few parts of our free press who aren't ignoring the anniversary, I have yet to hear or see any mention of the central role that the media played in inciting the "madness" that saw long time friends across ethnic lines, murder the people and families who they had lived next to for years. But there isn't any possible room for doubt about that, the media was what made the murders kill their neighbors.
Anti-Tutsi articles and graphic cartoons began appearing in the Kangura newspaper from around 1990.
In June 1993 a new radio station called Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) began broadcasting in Rwanda…
The station was rowdy and used street language - there were disc jockeys, pop music and phone-ins. Sometimes the announcers were drunk. It was designed to appeal to the unemployed, the delinquents and the gangs of thugs in the militia. “In a largely illiterate population, the radio station soon had a very large audience who found it immensely entertaining.” (Linda Melvern)
Its stated aim was “to create harmonious development in Rwandese society” but nothing could have been further from the truth. It was set up and financed by Hutu extremists to prepare the people of Rwanda for genocide by demonising the Tutsi and encouraging hate and violence.
And its danger was noted by people in Rwanda, even as the murder it was inciting, instructing murderers to slaughter their neighbors and telling them where to find people who were hiding. In one of the most shameful parts of the grotesquely irresponsible inaction by the United States, our ambassador pretended that the instructions to commit genocide were open to interpretation.
Some people - including the Belgian ambassador and staff of several aid agencies - recognised the danger and asked for international help in shutting down the broadcasts, but it was impossible to persuade western diplomats to take it seriously. They dismissed the station as a joke.
David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech.
Many Rwandans, however, knew the threat. ‘I listened to RTLMC’, said a survivor, ‘because if you were mentioned over the airways, you were sure to be carted off a short time later by the interahamwe. You knew you had to change your address at once.”
That there was no ambiguity in what was said is apparent in the transcripts of broadcasts recorded then. And the use of the radio was apparent from the earliest days of the genocide. Here is what General Romeo Dallaire, one of the Westerners with the least to be ashamed of said.
In fact, on the second day of the genocide when the interim government of the extremists was established, they raised that [incident]. They said, "You U.N. guys are supporting the RPF. Look what you did on the 18th [of] November and the botched investigation." It was one of those creeping components that was well used throughout the propaganda exercise by the extremists and their radio station to try to discredit us as we kept moving ahead.
The refusal of the American government to take out the radio towers instructing the murderers in how to kill more people, using freedom of speech or freedom of the press as their excuse for inaction, has to stand along side the refusal to bomb rail lines being used to transport people to the death camps as an unforgivable atrocity by omission.
The gods that the secular society of the United States has made of "speech" and "press," putting it above even the lives of people as they are being threatened with murder and even as they are being murdered is a serious issue that it is forbidden to address. No one needed to invent something like the stupid "Godwin's law" to stifle discussion of it because those who should be talking about it are inhibited by something far more effective, the slogans contained in the tragically poetic, insufficiently nuanced writing of the first several amendments of the Constitution and the idiotic absolutism that was adopted by liberals at the behest of the commercial media and the ideological libertarians who place those idols before the lessons of the past two centuries under that constitution.
The First Amendment pieties that the American government used to avoid doing what was morally imperative in Rwanda twenty years ago this month, are to liberals what the Second Amendment is for the right. And their use of both works better for them than it does for egalitarian democracy and liberal values. The signs of that are all around us, with the arming of the far right in the United States, armed to the teeth, and even as their political arm talks openly of "second amendment remedies" as a legitimate means of overturning civil government, as the gun industry, acting hand in glove with them, whip up the paranoia and belief that their lives and rights are under attack, adding the fatal ingredient of self-righteous, self-protection as an excuse to use the enormous personal arsenal that they sold the paranoids.
A dangerous number of those people have armed themselves with automatic weapons, of the kind that our government could not bring itself to ban even after the slaughter of young children at Sandy Hook and the Sandy Hooks that mount across America every week. I am telling you right up front that they haven't amassed that arsenal without the intention of using it and we are their targets as certainly as the Tutsis were of the owners of the radio stations that urged the murderers on. And it's a lot easier to kill lots of people with automatic rifles. The American right also owns the hate-talk radio that saturates the land of the free and the home of the brave. Only we aren't brave enough to do something about it even with the lessons of Rwanda there to be read.
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