When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  While Western diplomats dismissed the new radio station as a joke, its raw Hutu-extremist message struck a chord with many listeners and its programmes were heard by a rapidly growing audience. It appealed particularly to the unemployed, delinquents, and ‘gangs of thugs in the militia’: an underclass of people who were ill educated and illiterate and not able to discover for themselves the facts about what was going on in the country around them.617 It seemed to give ‘a mute population’ a voice.618 By a coincidence, the station had opened at a time when small portable radios had suddenly become cheaply and widely available in the country.

  A month after RTLMC went on air Rwanda’s government and the RPF signed an accord in Arusha to end the civil war. The agreement included power-sharing arrangements and the return of Tutsi refugees to their homes. Two months later, in October 1993, the UN Security Council approved a 2,500-strong peacekeeping force for Rwanda, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Unamir), a title that was eventually to prove grander than either the powers or the resources allotted to it.

  That same month over the border in Burundi there was a coup. Its President, who had been a party to the Arusha talks, was killed. In the violence that followed tens of thousands lost their lives and up to 600,000 fled into neighbouring countries. Meanwhile, RTLMC’s audiences grew and its language became more graphic and violent.

  By all accounts a few brave souls in the Rwandan Ministry of Information did try to persuade RTLMC to rein in its broadcasts. Just after the Burundian coup the government minister responsible for broadcasting wrote to the station asking it to tone down its programmes, but to little effect. He was criticised on air when broadcasters twice read a letter that had been written by a ‘high-level Hutu Power official’, who had written that the minister had evil intentions.619 Misleadingly, the station accused ‘Tutsi dogeaters’ of killing the Burundian President, mutilating his body and burying it secretly. It was untrue, but it had given the radio station an opportunity to reinforce its audience base and play on its fears.620 The ministry’s calls for compliance were ignored.

  So just as Hilsum was preparing to travel to Kigali, the country was in a state of turmoil: there was insurgency in the north, there were large numbers of refugees fleeing the war, there was intercommunity ethnic violence, the Burundian coup on Rwanda’s borders generated yet more refugees; extremism was growing, centred around militias, and the UN had just arrived in the country with a very limited mandate and even more limited resources.

  In the opening months of 1994, and despite the efforts of many, the broad-based transitional government failed to take off. Each side blamed the other for the failure. Unamir’s military commander, a Canadian general, Roméo Dallaire, picked up intelligence about arms shipments, but was forbidden by his UN masters to do anything. He also learned of deliberate attempts to weaken Unamir’s mandate. Worryingly, Dallaire learned that young men in the militias had been told to go home and wait for ‘a call to arms’.621 He warned the UN about these developments, but there was no approval for him to do anything about it.

  Massacre

  It was on 6 April 1994, however, that events were to take their tragic turn and place Hilsum in a unique and difficult position. There were extreme nationalist factions within Habyarimana’s Hutu-dominated party that were violently opposed to the prospect of any peace deal being signed with the RPF. Those sentiments may well also have been shared by the President himself, but realpolitik determined that he would sign a peace accord of some sort. That day, having placed his signature on a document he flew back to Kigali in his luxury private aircraft, a Mystère Falcon 50, in the company of his Burundian counterpart, President Cyprien Ntaryamira, who had been in office for barely eight weeks. But something went wrong. As Habyarimana’s aircraft approached the city’s airport it was blown up, most likely by a surface-to-air missile fired from somewhere in Kigali’s suburbs. There were no survivors.

  There are a number of theories about who fired the missile and a number of suspects, although no conclusive proof has so far emerged.622

  As soon as the aircraft exploded it seemed that all hell broke loose. To some it was as if it had all been planned in advance. The army and the militias started to kill people. Over the next ten days Hilsum travelled around Kigali mostly by car and kept notes about the appalling sights she saw. What follows is a brief sketch taken from some of her newspaper reports.

  Her first story was published in The Guardian on 8 April. She wrote that the capital had ‘descended into chaos’ and that ‘troops, presidential guards and gendarmes swept through the suburbs killing the Prime Minister, United Nations peacekeepers and scores of civilians’.623 The dead UN peacekeepers were ten Belgian soldiers, all members of General Dallaire’s command. They had gone to investigate the missile attack, and had been disarmed and detained by troops of the Rwandan presidential guard. Their bodies were later found in Kigali. ‘They were dead from bullet wounds,’ Hilsum quoted a UN spokesman saying. ‘You can call it an execution.’624 She noted that Unamir, which was monitoring the ceasefire between the RPF and federal forces, was powerless to stop the slaughter.

  She wrote about ‘gangs of soldiers and youths’ who ‘kidnapped opposition politicians and killed members of the minority Tutsi tribe, clubbing them to death with batons, hacking them with machetes and knives, or shooting them’. The pattern was to be repeated countless times over the next three months. In just thirteen weeks up to 800,000 people – Tutsis and ‘moderate’ Hutus – were estimated to have been killed: a hundred days of extreme violence, which according to one author matched or even surpassed the numbers killed in an equivalent period in the Nazi Holocaust.

  The day after Habyarimana’s death the Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, unable to broadcast to Rwanda’s people, had been interviewed by telephone by Radio France Internationale. Hilsum quoted her: ‘There is shooting, people are being terrorised, people are inside their homes lying on the floor. We are suffering the consequences of the death of the head of state.’625 Within hours both she and her husband were dead.

  In the days that followed, taking risks that she later recognised to have been considerable, Hilsum drove around Kigali witnessing the crowds and the death. On 9 April she wrote about thousands of bodies lying in the streets, after a ‘two-day orgy of violence and looting’. She described how ‘soldiers entered a religious centre, locked six priests and nine novice nuns in a room and then killed them’ sparing only two Belgian Jesuits.626 She said that it was not apparent why religious groups were targeted, but priests from both Tutsis and Hutus seemed to be victims. In the confusion that followed she said it was not ‘clear who is a Hutu and who is a Tutsi’. A Rwandan journalist had described to her how ‘youths armed with knives attacked a young couple with a baby, because, although they were Hutus, they looked like Tutsis’.627

  One day she visited a house where she saw a pile of bodies, partially covered by a blanket, ‘all women, and all had been hacked to death with machetes’. She described walking

  through the wreckage of the house, through shards of broken glass and china, torn newspapers and broken furniture. A young man and a woman lay on the bed groaning with pain. Both had serious wounds – the woman had been hit by shrapnel from a grenade that had left a huge and bloody hole in her knee.628

  She wrote that ‘massacres like this have occurred all over the capital, and in some parts of rural Rwanda’. It would take months for the real scale of the killings to emerge.

  A few Westerners were killed while Western governments accelerated their efforts to evacuate their own nationals. On 9 April French paratroopers landed at Kigali airport, temporarily seized control and began evacuating their nationals. Once it had been completed the forces withdrew and abandoned the Rwandans to their fate.

  Unamir was unable to restore law and order because its mandate was restricted only to monitoring the peace agreement and helping government troops maintain peace. There had been no mention of what it should do if the government
itself was the cause of the unrest. Unamir personnel were confined to the national stadium, where eventually thousands of terrified people fled pleading for protection.

  In her reports Hilsum tried to make sense of why the carnage was happening: it was not simply an inter-ethnic issue, because opposition party supporters had also been attacked, regardless of their ethnic classification. Religious communities were also prominent targets.

  A day after her visit to the house Hilsum wrote about ‘one of the most horrific incidents so far’, where ‘thugs from a Hutu extremist movement attacked a religious centre’ near the Zairian border. The extremists had ‘separated out all the Tutsis and killed them in front of the nuns and several expatriate aid workers’.629

  A week after the murder of the Belgian troops the rest of the contingent was withdrawn from the Unamir force, further limiting what the remainder of the force could do. Unamir was in a difficult position because ‘if shot at, they did not have permission to return fire’.630 Hilsum said General Dallaire had asked for a change of mandate so that he could try to control the chaos, but ‘the request was apparently rejected’. She concluded:

  Unamir’s weakness and the UN’s moral failure as it leaves Rwandan staff to the mercy of marauding soldiers have once more battered its image. ‘We have to look at Somalia, at Angola, and now Rwanda,’ a UN official said. ‘We really need to think again about what we are doing.’

  One evening the extreme stress of the events caught up with her: she had not realised how vulnerable she had been when travelling around and living alone in a suburb where many people were killed. She had shown remarkable courage and tenacity in following stories, but probably without realising it until later, had placed her life at considerable risk. She eventually contacted UN staff and moved to safer accommodation – first to a house shared with other Europeans, and then a hotel, before being evacuated to Nairobi. But within days, she was filing reports from Burundi about events following the death of its President. She returned to Rwanda two months later, as the massacres were coming to an end.

  In a comment piece for The Independent she was more forthright about the UN’s refusal to let Unamir intervene: ‘Unamir, the UN peace-keeping force in Rwanda, has done almost nothing to stop the bloodshed in Rwanda. One journalist saw UN troops standing and watching as a band of armed men butchered a woman. Challenged on their inaction, they explained they had no mandate to intervene.’631 She continued, ‘So while thugs and drunken soldiers rampaged through the suburbs hacking babies to death, UN troops retreated to barracks to await orders.’632 But she acknowledged:

  If they had shot their way through the roadblocks to try to stop the slaughter, they could have been accused of becoming party to the conflict, like the US troops in Somalia. But the problem is deeper than that. The UN force in Rwanda had no credibility. No one was scared of it. An adequately trained and equipped force could at least have asserted its authority over disorganised mobs more interested in killing civilians than fighting rebels. But though many more people are losing their lives in massacres than in fighting, the energies of General Dallaire are still spent trying to broker peace between the RPF and the government.633

  She concluded, ‘The practice of assembling multilateral forces with mandates that cannot adapt to changing circumstances must stop. Failure was predictable, but the UN is not learning from experience … UN bureaucrats cannot run military operations in Africa from New York.’ If it couldn’t then the UN could never really protect people. But, of course, it was susceptible to political pressure. American journalist Bill Berkeley wrote in 2001, ‘We know that the US actually blocked the UN from intervening in Rwanda. The Clinton administration, soured by its experience in Somalia, was reluctant to intervene in another African nation in which American interests were not obvious.’634 Berkeley also noted that, like Dallaire’s warnings to the UN, the CIA had warned its own government that a massacre was on the cards. But American policy toward the UN was then that the organisation had to learn when to say no. Months after the Akayesu trial President Bill Clinton acknowledged that the US for one had been too slow to react; some critics considered that to be only half the story.

  To testify, or not?

  It is not without a hint of irony that the UN, which had proved itself so poor at managing peacekeeping operations, should set up criminal tribunals to catch up with the perpetrators of the crimes that its peacekeeping operations had been unable to stop in the first place. The 1990s not only witnessed the Rwandan massacre, but also the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Until then no international and impartial mechanism had existed that could try people accused of war crimes. The Nuremberg process that followed the Second World War was an ad hoc arrangement. But the scale of the crimes witnessed in both those conflicts was such that few states had any liking for the best that was on offer: a form of national judicial retribution. Opponents were likely to see that as the dispensation of victor’s justice; judgments would be open to criticism as tainted by prejudice.

  Recognising the scale of the potential crimes and the issues involved in the former Yugoslavia, the UN established a special international criminal tribunal (ICTY) in 1993 to undertake the job of prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Its lawyers and judges were drawn from many different national legal systems, and it was hoped the very diversity would demonstrate and deliver impartial justice. As the scale of the Rwandan massacre became clear moves were quickly made to set up another tribunal to try those responsible. In November 1994, and using ICTY as the model, the UN set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). The tribunal began working with a dedicated and talented team of international jurists and lawyers and was determined to make an impact.635

  ICTR decided it was essential for the broad factual background to be established, which was why Hilsum’s testimony was considered so important. Like its counterpart, ICTY (see Chapters 1 and 9), the tribunal decided it was necessary to establish broadly agreed facts, a historical context and timeline against which events and individual acts could be assessed. Both tribunals looked to journalists who had covered events on the ground to help establish those historical facts as they could provide first-hand and impartial testimony. However, the responses that the tribunals received were diverse. Most journalists refused to give evidence, citing professional ethics. A few agreed because they either did not see the ethical issues in the same way as their colleagues, or because they felt that they had to take sides when it came to the crunch.

  Lindsey Hilsum recognised that in her case the decision would be difficult. But she was used to hard choices: the horrors in Rwanda had been far worse than this dilemma. So why did she agree to go to that airless courtroom in Arusha? Why, for that matter, was it based in Arusha? The location was a simple logistical solution: Rwanda was still too dangerous. Some witnesses had already met with fatal ‘accidents’. Others had been killed more openly. But it was also not without significance that Arusha was where the RPF peace talks had been held.

  What was the case against Akayesu? Jean-Paul Akayesu, a Hutu, was mayor, or Bourgmestre, of the Taba commune, which was situated to the west of Kigali. In the two weeks after the massacres began he kept his head down and by all accounts did nothing. He may actually have resisted the genocide.636 But then he attended a meeting where everything changed. Leading Interahamwe figures were present; it was chaired by the newly appointed Prime Minister, Jean Kambanda. Whatever happened at it Akayesu came away a changed man. He went on to hold meetings in his commune, often flanked by local Interahamwe leaders, and assumed leadership of the killings. This change of heart witnessed by his constituents encouraged hundreds of them to pick up their machetes and join him. He ordered Tutsis to be beaten or hacked to death. For the victims it was a cruel surprise because until then they had trusted him to protect them and had flocked for safety to his office compound. Many were massacred. But what made Akayesu’s actions more noteworthy was that he incited the crowd of killers to go and co
mmit sexual offences: principally gang rape. This last action was the key because the ICTR prosecutors wanted to establish that premeditated sexual offences on this scale could also be considered acts of genocide.637

  Hilsum is by no means alone in testifying before a tribunal. Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, Martin Bell, formerly of the BBC, Tom Gjelten of the American National Public Radio, Christiane Amanpour of CNN, and Jacky Rowland of the BBC testified in various cases. But many more journalists refused, and the debate continues. What are the arguments? And why is the issue so important?

  Those who refuse argue that if journalists act as witnesses in such tribunals they expose themselves to charges of bias because they cross the line between being observers and participants in a story. Moreover, by doing so they possibly place themselves or their fellow professionals in danger – particularly those trying to cover events where it is possible that war crimes and other human rights violations will at some stage be uncovered. Journalists, they argue, are not official witnesses, nor are they police. They are observers and nothing more. But, as Hilsum rightly notes, reporters ‘will be among the few outside observers to witness the horror’.638 It is a privileged position, but also a highly sensitive and dangerous one to be in when bullets and shrapnel are flying and the knives are out.

  When the American journalist Marie Colvin was killed while on assignment for the Sunday Times in Syria early in 2012 some argued that the journalism of attachment, as advocated by Martin Bell (see Chapter 9), could end up with reporters becoming ‘moral combatants, crusaders against “evil”’. The editor of Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, wrote that by ‘emphasising attachment over neutrality, and emotionalism over objectivity, the new breed of attached reporter’ will be ‘more like an activist, an international campaigner, rather than a dispassionate recorder of fact and truth’.