“Here is proof of the ethnic and political cleansing established in principle by the power of Rwanda. Power monopolized by the Hutu ethnic group, the majority in the country, to the detriment of the Tutsi ethnic group, a minority and destined for genocide. Men, women, children: same fate. »
So begins a France 2 report broadcast on January 28, 1993.
January 28, 1993 was more than a year before April 7, 1994, the official date of the start of the three-month carnage that would leave a million dead. In Mutura, in the northwest of the country, France 2 journalists film the bones of civilians found jumbled together on private land, all under the eyes of an impassive police officer writing a report. “The executioners live here with impunity. They are recruited from the army or the militia of the president’s party. And who knows if they don’t watch with a smile as the mass graves are discovered. »
The report continues. “Further east, in the village of Kinigi, people are digging in the mayor’s own property. The bones rise to the surface, and the Mayor displays a falsely incredulous attitude. It happened at his house; he knows nothing, suspects nothing. Just like the Rwandan president whose portrait colors the walls of the country, and with whom France does not have bad relations, would probably know nothing. »
The France 2 anchor immediately follows up with an interview with Jean Carbonare, president of the Survie association, who was returning from a mission to Rwanda organized by the International Federation for Human Rights. “We feel that, behind all this, there is a mechanism that is getting underway,” explains Jean Carbonare. We spoke of ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity in the pre-report that our commission established, and we place great emphasis on these words. »
That’s already a lot of information to take in, but Mr. Carbonare doesn’t stop there. He adds that all members of the mission are convinced that Rwandan power, up to the highest level, is involved in these crimes. ” Our country [la France], which supports this system militarily and financially, has a responsibility. »
That’s not all yet. “What we discovered is that all the women of the Tutsi minority saw their husbands, their brothers, their fathers killed. They are then, like animals, abandoned, raped, mistreated. […] And I insist a lot: we are responsible,” continues Jean Carbonare. He then describes the suffering in the refugee camps, which already number hundreds of thousands of people.
Overwhelmed by emotion, Mr. Carbonare concluded the interview with a call to action: “We can do something, we must do something. »
There is in these five and a few minutes of television, broadcast, let us remember, more than a year before the “official” start of the genocide of the Tutsis, something completely surreal. When we know the role that France was going to play until the end of the horror, we listen to Jean Carbonare like a modern Cassandra.
It was Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, a Franco-Rwandan author and survivor of the genocide, who reminded me of the existence of this major piece of the history of Western journalism while she was in Canada to promote her most recent works.
The convoy, where she recounts her flight from Rwanda in June 1994, in a transport organized by a Swiss NGO and escorted by a BBC team, is notably a treasure trove of reflections on the complex role of the media in the fate of her people. Let us therefore ask, on this thirtieth anniversary of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, some burning questions of journalistic ethics.
First: the reporters from France 2 and Jean Carbonare were already using the word “genocide” in January 1993. If their voices had been heard and the massacres of spring 1994 had been avoided, there might have been people to judge retrospectively that the use of the word was premature, even if the organized killings of Tutsi civilians were already well underway at the time. How can we prevent genocide, then, if we limit the use of the word “genocide” on the air until it is too late? How can we prevent the worst if journalists and experts are discredited when they name the worst?
Two: in The convoy, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse recalls that Western journalists were rare on the ground in the first weeks of the genocide. Either they were all occupied with the historic election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, or they were assigned to cover the evacuation of their own nationals — and the images they captured of the massacres of local populations were presented almost as secondary information. However, Mme Umubyeyi Mairesse recounts how the mere presence of the BBC team’s cameras in the convoy taking him to the Burundian border would have stopped the weapon of a militiaman ready to kill his mother. The question, therefore, is: today, are we fully aware of the role that journalists play in preventing violence through their simple presence or absence in a given context?
Finally, three: when teams of Western reporters were finally dispatched in larger numbers, they were sent mainly to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), an important ally of France, the United States and Canada. It is mainly through this that the Hutu genocidaires and their families fled Rwanda when their regime was routed. Result: in the summer of 1994, most of the images circulating internationally were in fact images of Hutus on the run, and not of Tutsi survivors. In short, we mix everything up, we speak vaguely of “Rwandan genocide”, and the words of the Tutsis are thus buried. The question here is: what have we learned since then? By geographically and logistically nesting the teams of journalists from the perspective of the “allies” of their country of origin, what stories are we showing? Which ones do we obscure? What illusions of “objectivity” do we create?