Journalists in Rwanda sentenced for genocide role

By Emily Wax
The Washington Post

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"This tribunal has set an important precedent that says if the media in this day and age uses their power to attack an ethnic group or racial group, they will have to face justice," lead prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow said in an interview. He said the use of "hate media" helps explain how ordinary Rwandans — even children and grandparents — were influenced to participate in the killings.

At the trial, several emotional witnesses, including employees of the media outlets, compared the role of the media to that of fuel on a fire. Phrases such as "go to work" and "the graves are not yet full" were read by radio disc jockeys during the spring of 1994. A newspaper called on citizens to exterminate the "cockroach Tutsis."

Over 100 days starting in April 1994, Rwanda's Hutu majority killed about 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in an organized slaughter to settle long-simmering ethnic and political tensions.

Rwanda genocide As many as 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus were killed in three months of attacks by Hutus that began in April 1994. Before the genocide, Tutsis made up about 20 percent of Rwanda's population. They now make up about 9 percent.

The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, headquartered in Arusha, Tanzania, sentenced Ferdinand Nahimana, 53, a founding member of Radio Television Libres des Mille Collines, or RTLM, to life in prison along with Hassan Ngeze, 42, owner and editor of the Hutu extremist newspaper Kangura. Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, 53, another executive at RTLM, was given a 35-year sentence, which was reduced to 27 years for time already served.

The three men turned their media into weapons of war, the court said. The outcome drew comparisons to the 1946 Nuremberg trial of Nazi publisher Julius Streicher, who used films and cartoons to incite hatred of Jews. Streicher was executed. Life in prison is the most severe sentence the U.N. tribunal can give.

"Let whatever is smoldering erupt," Ngeze wrote in the newspaper days before the genocide. "It will be necessary then that the masses and their army protect themselves. ... At such a time, a lot of blood will be poured."

Kangura published what it called The Hutu Ten Commandments, telling people to kill.

Nahimana, whose radio station was nicknamed Radio Machete, launched programs that broadcast the names and addresses of members of the Tutsi minority and of Hutus who sympathized with them.

John Floyd, the Washington-based lawyer who defended Ngeze, called the verdict unfair and said it curbed freedom of speech. Floyd said it could be an excuse for politically charged governments to shut down any media outlet they disagreed with.

The court said that freedom came with responsibility.

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