|
December 9, 2003
In a landmark verdict, the war crimes tribunal for Rwanda has convicted three media executives of genocide for inciting people to take part in the wave of killing that swept across Rwanda in 1994. The defendants were found guilty for their use of a popular radio station and a newspaper to inflame hatred against the country’s Tutsi minority and to direct and encourage the campaign of slaughter. The court’s decision, announced on December 3, marks the first time since the Nuremberg trials after World War II that anyone has been convicted of responsibility for mass murder through control of the media. Even more perhaps than the conviction of Nazi publisher Julius Streicher in 1946, this verdict is likely to stand as a decisive precedent in determining that media organizations can be held accountable for the crimes that they direct their listeners and readers to carry out. The three defendants before the Rwanda tribunal, which is based in Arusha, Tanzania, were Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, co-founders of the radio station RTLM (Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines), and Hassan Ngeze, editor of the newspaper Kangura. Nahimana and Ngeze were sentenced to life imprisonment, while Barayagwiza was given a sentence of thirty-five years, reduced from life imprisonment because his rights had been violated in the early stages of his detention. Announcing the judgement, the presiding judge Navanethem Pillay told the defendants, “The power of the media to create and destroy fundamental human values comes with great responsibility. Those who control such media are accountable for its consequences.” “Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon,” the judge told Nahimana, “you caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.” Around 800,000 people – primarily Tutsis, along with some moderate Hutus who defended them – were killed during a few months in Rwanda in 1994. During the genocide, RTLM frequently broadcast statements inciting people to kill Tutsis – at one point telling its listeners, “We must finish with them, exterminate them, sweep them from the whole country…” The station also alerted its listeners about locations where Tutsis were taking refuge, and incited them to pursue named individuals. In the words of Philip Gourevitch, author of the book “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” the station’s message “was unambiguous and was acted on.” The bi-weekly newspaper Kangura (or “Wake Up!”) was used by Ngeze, its editor-proprietor, to prepare the ground for the massacres. “Let whatever is smoldering erupt," Ngeze wrote in the newspaper in the days preceding the genocide. A front page asked the question, “What weapons shall we use to conquer the Inyenzi [cockroaches, a recognized code-word for the Tutsis] once and for all?” next to a picture of a machete. Alison DesForges, a scholar who produced an extensive study of the genocide for Human Rights Watch, told the Washington Post that the tribunal’s verdict was “an extraordinarily important decision,because it does recognize that media can be used to kill.” John Floyd, an American lawyer who defended Ngeze, said it was “a terrible, terrible decision,” and suggested that the case “would have been laughed out of an American court.” The verdict showed that the prosecution had proved to the judges’ satisfaction that the broadcasts and publications of the accused clearly crossed the dividing line separating distasteful but protected speech, from actual incitement to kill. From the book: Genocide Related Links: International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
|