Genocide of the Tutsis | A massacre far from the cameras

Allan Thompson was not in Rwanda 30 years ago. He could have jumped on a plane and gone to the field to report what was happening on behalf of the Toronto Star, where he worked at the time… But he didn’t do it. And to this day, he bitterly regrets it. Interview.

In your book Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyondpublished in 2019, you say that you will be “eternally ashamed” of not having volunteered to go to Rwanda in 1994. At the time, you were a parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa for the Toronto Star. So these regrets still haunt you?

Absolutely. I could have gone there. Journalists, as individuals, can make a difference. When people come together and unite, we can change history, in a way, because we change the way people understand events.

If I had called the international news editor at Toronto Star in the spring of 1994, and I had suggested going to Rwanda, I would probably have been sent there. Colleagues from CBC and Globe & Mail went there in May 1994 with National Defense. I could have done the same thing. I’ve often tried to understand why I wasn’t interested enough in this story. I was one of those who didn’t really understand what was going on.

It took quite a while before the West realized what was happening in Rwanda. Today, with new technologies and access to social networks, the dissemination of information is much more accessible. Would things have been different if this technology had existed in 1994?

I did a lot of research on the media that were present in Rwanda in April, May and June 1994. At the time, it was very difficult to report in that country. There was no live television link. The main reason we didn’t see footage of the killings was that there were virtually no cameras on site to film them. There is almost no video of the ongoing genocide.

In a chapter of my book, I studied one of the videos of a massacre. The cameraman who took these images had to take incredible measures to get them out of the country. He went to the airport, put the tapes in an envelope, found someone flying to Nairobi, gave them the package and said, “My friend will meet you in Nairobi to pick up this envelope.” . » And finally, the images were able to be broadcast around the world.

I have often tried to imagine a situation where the events of spring 1994 in Rwanda had occurred in a context where everyone had a video camera. What would the news feeds have looked like in a context where thousands of people are killed every day, and where thousands of their neighbors are able to film these murders, sharing the images online, live?

One might think that the massacres would have stopped sooner…

I’m wondering. We already have access to more images. And yet, we do not realize what is happening right now in Sudan… and even in Gaza! It’s a bit of a miracle that the Al Jazeera network can continue to operate in Gaza. I really wonder how these journalists manage to do their job every day. How do they get electricity? How do they feed? How do they stay safe? How do they transmit? Imagine Gaza if we didn’t have these journalists.

So, you doubt that greater dissemination of images of the genocide in 1994 led to more rapid intervention by Westerners?

In fact, it is quite likely that the United States would not have resisted intervening in Rwanda, as it did, if there had been a daily stream of atrocity videos on American television screens. I think something would definitely have changed.

We cannot predict what the outcome would have been, but essentially the Americans refused to intervene throughout the conflict because they did not want to repeat what happened in Somalia, even though the circumstances were completely different. And I think the lack of media coverage made this refusal easier. The United States did not intervene significantly until after the genocide, when thousands began dying in refugee camps.

So I think having more media coverage is a good thing, although we can’t assume that this coverage will change minds and spark political action. When we have time to look at Israel and Gaza, we may find that fairly systematic media coverage of the situation on the ground in Gaza has influenced public opinion in North America and Europe. So, yes, I think she could have changed things in Rwanda.

Note: Comments have been edited for brevity.

Read Allan Thompson’s account of his quest to identify a murdered father and daughter in 1994