Parts of the British press have decried Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame as a ‘dictator accused of war crimes’, a huge leap from the days when he was lauded as his country’s saviour. Yes, it’s true, he does wield absolute power in a country that is purported to be a multi-party democracy, but where opposition journalists and politicians are not tolerated; and yes, he has been accused by the UN of war crimes against Hutus in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the 1994 genocide ended. But Rwanda’s story is not black and white.
Its present and future are inexorably shaped by its past, and just as the media failed to understand the complexities of, and to properly report, the atrocities of the genocide, it is once again failing to look beyond a story, opting instead for edited truths that make good headlines. The Daily Mail, whose reputation for scare tactics precedes it, made headlines in March this year with: ‘Forget Gaddafi. Blair's NEW best friend is a despot guilty of even bloodier slaughter’. Alongside the piece, the paper published a horrifying photograph of rows of skulls sitting on a tin shelf, victims of the Rwandan massacre, an irony obviously missed by the Mail, which deemed it irrelevant that the ‘despot’ was the one to stop the genocide, and shoulder the responsibility of preventing it from ever happening again.
While the Rwandan genocide was unfolding, it was not just the politicians who sat on the sidelines dismissing the slaughter of at least 800,000 Tutsi civilians by Hutu militia as a tribal issue, the worldwide press corps also turned its back on a country that desperately needed the international community to intervene. A handful of journalists stayed on the ground, but their reports rarely made it into print. The media wasn’t interested in a country that had been judged by the world to be too small, too black and simply too far away; no headlines there.
Today, 17 years on, the politicians and the media have chosen very different directions in their attitudes toward Rwanda. Britain’s prime ministers, from Labour’s Tony Blair, to the current conservative PM David Cameron, are still hungry to atone for the sins of their predecessors’ omissions, whether it’s via the creation of the social action project, Umubano, or most recently being photographed standing shoulder to shoulder with Kagame, their chosen hero of the peace, of the genocide, as they announced a 57 per cent increase in aid to Rwanda. The media, however, has chosen to depict Kagame as the villain, because in journalism it’s easier to report the good and the bad, and a lot harder to report the grey area in between.
In January this year, the Guardian newspaper referred to the genocide as an event of the past while cautioning Kagame to relinquish his tight grip on power. Even less empathetic was the Daily Mail, which recently branded Kagame a ‘Rwandan dictator’. One of the few pieces of reporting that attempted to seek middle ground came from Richard Grant at the Daily Telegraph, who after interviewing Kagame, concludes : ‘If you hold him up to the light in the right way, you can see both facets glinting at once’, the ‘benevolent dictator’ and the ‘incurable despot’.
To a large degree, Kagame deserves to wear the West’s badge of honour. Leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, he ended the genocide and has made huge progress in rebuilding a broken country, pushing economic reform, investing in infrastructure, education and farming, and has more women in his government than anywhere else in the world, all the while earning the reputation for transparent governance.
For the media, however, 17 years has dulled the rawness of the genocide and the heroic value of Kagame’s role in hauling his country out of the abyss. Objectively, Kagame’s inspired growth and prosperity have come at the price of repression. His flat out dismissal of the UN’s allegations of war crimes as totally untrue, while questioning the motives of the report, smacks of the paranoia that creeps into the mindset of those in absolute power. The media’s judgement on Kagame is akin to a prosecutor’s cross examination of a defendant, where the facts can at times be heavily edited and heard out of context. Statements of fact are not always the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The media has been quick to set aside the genocide, for it is this that surely continues to mould Kagame. The question the media should be asking is how objectively can Kagame be expected to see his country? Hatred and bitterness that motivate such heinous actions during the genocide do not disappear overnight, but rather slide consciously into every conversation, reflex and judgement. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants began sharing power after 30 years of the Troubles, but it will take generations before the ingrained hostility on both sides retreats, before bombs and broken ceasefires are but memories.
And it is only those who have lived through such division who can understand how long it takes for reconciliation and repair. Beneath Rwanda’s flourishing economy and progress, the consequences of the genocide still flow hauntingly close to the surface. For many survivors the genocide is still ongoing, having slipped silently into the next generation through the children born of the mass rapes.
Today these ‘children of the enemy’ are teenagers trying to come to terms with their identity. Some vow to avenge their mothers, some aim to join their Hutu fathers, but the majority of them have grown up rejected by both parents, and both communities, posing an enormous threat for the stability of Rwanda’s future. These offspring are daily reminders for the women of what happened to them. Some were raped daily during the 100 days of atrocities. Unsurprisingly, the rape victims refer to themselves as the ‘living dead’. The British media reacted to the mass rapes with almost total indifference. The US press body produced a handful of articles and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda paid lip service to the rape victims, leaving them to shoulder the shame and stigma of their aggressors’ actions.
With survivors and perpetrators still living alongside each other as neighbours, tensions obviously remain. Seventeen years is but a blink of an eye in term of forgiveness and healing. Is it not natural that Kagame should feel the need to keep a strong grip on power? The British media would be the first to blame him if he didn’t.
Claire Macdonald has worked for news publications in the UK and Hong Kong and recently spent time in Rwanda to work on a module for Hult University in London that focuses on Rwanda's genocidal rape victims. She is from Northern Ireland and holds a MSc in International Relations from Kingston University.
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