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A scathing attack on the media's complicity in genocide:
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Rwanda: Complicity in Silence
East African (Nairobi)
ANALYSIS
2 October 2007
Posted to the web 2 October 2007
Nairobi
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 Carleton 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 passé. 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.
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