Journalism and Genocide
A landmark case in Rwanda raises the issue: Can words kill? How much press freedom is too much?
To understand why three journalists from Rwanda are on trial for war crimes, one must know that, in rural areas of that country, radio is king. The first thing Africans buy when they get a job is a radio. Even the poorest families haunt their neighbors’ houses to catch snatches of government newscasts. “In Rwanda, the radio has become like the voice of God, telling people what to do,” says Mary Kimani, a Kenyan journalist.
In 1994 the voices coming through the radio urged the killing of the Tutsi minority. “Rwandans didn’t question. They acted,” says Kimani, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis — and moderate Hutu — followed. Now, almost a decade later, some of the men behind those voices are on trial before a United Nations tribunal in Tanzania for their provocative words. With evidence of massacre still visible in a ruined landscape, emotions continue to run high. Yet, for the international media there is another issue: Can words kill? Should media executives be sentenced to life in prison for broadcasts and articles they sponsored, and thereby set a legal precedent that some fear could haunt free speech around the world?
Ferdinand Nahimana, Hassan Ngeze, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza are the first journalists to be accused of crimes against humanity since Julius Streicher, the Nazi editor, was sent to the gallows by judges at Nuremberg in 1946. Nahimana and Barayagwiza founded a talk radio station called Radio Milles Collines that, in the months leading up to and during the 101 days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, became the most popular spot on the radio dial. Hassan Ngeze edited an extremist newspaper called Kangura, or Wake It Up! His anti-Tutsi screeds were a constant refrain on Radio Milles Collines.
Just as Julius Streicher had spent years honing his anti-Semitic message in the Nazi publication Der Sturmer, prosecutors at the tribunal say Radio Milles Collines and Kangura were part of a larger conspiracy to wage war against the Tutsi long before April 1994, when the genocide began. The new station hit the Rwandan airwaves in 1993, and from the start provided a soundtrack for an impending conflict. The lyrics in the music it played called on Hutu to kill Tutsi. Its newscasters told bawdy anti-Tutsi jokes. They broadcast the “Hutu Ten Commandments” — pulled from the pages of Kangura — which, among other things, called on Hutu to show no mercy to the Tutsi minority, which was plotting, they said, to seize power in Rwanda.
Once the killing started, bands of Hutu went from house to house wielding machetes and looking for Tutsi to kill. Radio Milles Collines newscasters helpfully announced where key Tutsis were hiding. The station broadcast license plate numbers of cars carrying Tutsi and their Hutu sympathizers, and urged listeners to hunt them down. The station broadcast death tolls as if they were traffic reports. “The Rwandan government should supply us with tools, guns,” said Kantano Habimana, a popular Milles Collines newscaster, to “kill the Inkotanyi.” Inkotanyi is Kinyarwandan for cockroach, a Hutu nickname for Rwanda’s Tutsi.
More than eight years later, U.N.-appointed prosecutors are trying Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze for sparking such violence. Many defenders of a free press say this trio went beyond the pale. Joel Simon, the deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization devoted to press freedom, says, “To me, this was essentially a form of military communication to coordinate these attacks. It is speech that helped make it possible to carry out the genocide.”
Other free-speech advocates, though, say the Rwanda trial could give ammunition to those who think press freedom has gone too far. “The currently fashionable phrase is ‘American exceptionalism,’” says Fred Schauer, a Harvard law school professor. “Many countries think the U.S. overstates the importance of free speech and free press, and understates the importance of equality.” While it is hard to imagine such a case in the United States, similar incitement questions were at the center of a recent case involving an anti-abortion Web site known as the Nuremberg Files. In May, a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld a 1999 jury verdict that said that the Web site — which published “wanted”-style posters of abortion doctors, listed their names and addresses, and accused them of crimes against humanity — constituted an illegal threat and was not protected by the First Amendment.
Decisions against First Amendment protections are rare in the United States, and it isn’t clear that judges at the U.N. tribunal convened in Arusha, Tanzania, will use a liberal U.S. standard in their decision. They could well decide that Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze are guilty of incitement to genocide not because they directly caused specific deaths but because they obviously intended them.
The current precedent says that to prove incitement, prosecutors have to show a direct link between reports or speeches and murder — something lawyers call causation. Such a direct line between the radio broadcasts, the Kangura articles, and mass murder in Rwanda has been difficult to draw. Stephen Rapp, the American senior prosecutor in the case, has a difficult task. The names of individual genocide victims are not usually included in the evidence gathered by the tribunal. Instead, he has what amounts to circumstantial evidence — broadcast tapes and documents showing that Hutu extremists on staff at Radio Milles Collines and Kangura urged people to kill their Tutsi neighbors.
John Floyd, the Washington, D.C.-based defense attorney for Ngeze, frets that if the three tribunal judges decide that the tenuous connection between broadcast and massacre is enough to prove incitement, the case could set a stunningly broad international standard for prosecuting hate speech. “This is dangerous stuff,” says Floyd. “This isn’t just a question of press freedom. This is an issue of intellectual freedom. This would be like prosecuting the publisher of The Washington Post for an op-ed article. If these three are found guilty, then press freedom around the world is in peril.” The envelope, Floyd notes, may already have been pushed. The tribunal recently indicted Simon Bikindi, one of Rwanda’s most popular singers, for inciting genocide through his lyrics. Floyd compares prosecuting Bikindi to “putting Bob Dylan on trial for protest songs.”
At first glance, the three in the dock look too ordinary to be key players in such a drama. Nahimana is a fifty-one-year-old former history professor from the northwestern city of Ruhengeri who took charge of the Rwandan government’s propaganda machine in the early 1990s. He is known as “the professor” by members of the tribunal, and often speaks up during the proceedings when the translation from Kinyarwanda to English to French is not accurate.
Barayagwiza, also in his early fifties, helped lead a stridently
anti-Tutsi political party before serving as director of political
affairs for the Rwandan Foreign Ministry in 1992. Ngeze was a
bus fare collector before he started Kangura.
While spectators outside Rwanda worry about the case’s press-freedom issues, inside this tiny country, the concerns are more fundamental. The question is whether three men whom many Rwandans see as partially responsible for setting neighbor against neighbor will be held accountable. If they are found not guilty, it will prove for many Rwandans that the culture of impunity which has reigned in Rwanda has emerged from the genocide unscathed.
The Central Prison, near the town of Cyangugu, houses 6,000 inmates, most of whom have been accused but not formally indicted — let alone tried — for genocide-related crimes. They wear pale pink safari shorts and shirts because the former government thought the rosy color was more in keeping with “rehabilitation.” They caterwaul when they see footage of the three defendants on a makeshift movie screen, and seem to derive a certain satisfaction out of seeing once-powerful Rwandans flanked by guards in court. If you ask them, most of the prisoners say that the government ordered them to kill Tutsi. They had no choice. Politicians, military leaders, radio personalities all had the same refrain: Go do your work. And that meant killing Tutsi.
It is not easy for a foreigner to learn firsthand what the majority of the population really thinks about the trial. What is obvious behind the walls of Central Prison, though, is that these inmates — who sleep in shifts because the prison was built to hold a third as many prisoners — are keen to see the leaders of the genocide held responsible. And they think Nahimana, Barayagwiza, and Ngeze are among them.
While the Rwanda tribunal may be called an African Nuremberg, it lacks the drama of the original. When the judges at Nuremberg announced their verdicts on October 1, 1946, they acknowledged that Julius Streicher, the editor of Der Sturmer and the man who called himself the number one Nazi, was less directly involved in the physical commission of crimes against the Jews than the other military and political defendants. Even so, they found him guilty of crimes against humanity (genocide wasn’t on the books yet) because he called for the extermination of the Jews in the pages of his newspaper. Even today, critics of the decision say that the verdict could be twisted to muzzle press freedom. They say that Streicher, while contemptible, should not have been sentenced to death for his ideas. That same concern casts a pall over the Rwanda trial.
Erik Mose, one of the three international judges presiding over the case and vice president of the tribunal, disagrees. He says the question is not whether the U.N. should set precedents such as this one, but why they waited so long to do so. “In my opinion, it is time for the United Nations to make a decision on this sort of thing,” he said from his office inside the Arusha tribunal. “It has been more than fifty years since an international court has attempted to do this and it is about time someone set some limitations again.”
The prosecution closed its arguments on July 12 — the trial’s 163rd day — after an intense, two-week session during which prosecutor Rapp played for the court the thirty most incendiary Radio Milles Collines broadcasts he had on tape. The proceedings are adjourned until September 15, when the defense will begin with the testimony of Ferdinand Nahimana. A verdict is expected early next year.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
