Current state of Rwanda’s media “presents a grave danger”
Author says President Paul Kagame’s repression of Rwandan journalists has broken the link between Rwanda and the international media
While the role of the media before and during the Rwanda genocide was discussed at great length during the Media and Mass Atrocity roundtable, a select number of panellists focused their attention on the current state of the media in the country.
During the panel “Rwanda — After the genocide,” acclaimed journalist Anjan Sundaram said there was a substantial problem with Rwanda’s media. He said that he’d tracked more than 60 journalists who have been “removed from their function to hold power accountable” since the end of the 1994 genocide.
According to Sundaram, those journalists were “killed, disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, or forced to flee the country.”
“We have a situation in which the media is unwilling to criticize power,” he said. “This presents a grave danger to Rwanda’s future.”
Sundaram, who has worked extensively in different countries in Africa and has written books from his experiences, said President Paul Kagame’s grip on the media has tightened since 1994.
Mark Frohardt of Internews echoed some of Sundaram’s concerns, explaining that mass atrocities like the Rwanda genocide do not emerge from nowhere, and that a “cultural shift” is necessary to move beyond the event. He stressed that it takes more than media institutions to foster the type of mindset that would lead to a mass atrocity.
“It takes time, it goes deep,” Frohardt said. “It is really important to look at all elements, critical dimensions, of how people get their information.”
Internews works with local news agencies to help create sustainable coverage locally. Frohardt recalled a story where most townspeople did not trust the local radio station, and instead got their information from the priest. When they asked the priest where he received his information, he said from the local radio station — he simply knew how to properly curate and relate the information to his fellows, Frohardt said.
In the years following 1994, Frohardt said there was a lot of frustration and doubt amongst the Rwandan people regarding details of the genocide. He said the slow pace and lack of a death penalty in the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was construed by some Rwandans as proof that the genocide had never actually taken place.
Preservation Work
But work is currently being done in Rwanda to document, catalogue, and digitize information from the genocide to make it more accessible, both nationally and internationally.
Paul Rukesha, a digital content team leader at the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, said during the panel that work was being done to preserve more than 600 hours of testimony from the genocide, and more than 2,000 hours of other films, documentaries, and interviews.
And that doesn’t include what Rukesha called “11 kilometres” of shelves of documents turned over from the Dutch.
“There are many challenges in digitizing (materials),” Rukesha said. “It’s costly, and another problem is the translation.”
The current plan, he said, is to start digitizing documents from the Gacaca courts in early 2018, and continue work on making a digital database for educational purposes.
