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Did the media fail in Rwanda? Or did individual journalists fail in Rwanda? In his analysis of the world's reaction to the genocide in Rwanda, Alan Kuperman (2000) wrote in an International Press Institute report:

Western media blame the international community for not intervening quickly, but the media must share blame for not immediately recognizing the extent of the carnage and mobilizing world attention to it.

Kuperman says the media must share the blame for the world's failure to stop the genocide. I would like to be the devil's advocate, to explain a bit about how we worked as reporters in Rwanda in 1994.

Before I take issue with Kuperman's point, let me cite a few words written by my friend and colleague Annie Thomas, the first and principal Agence France-Presse (AFP) special correspondent in Rwanda. She was based in Nairobi at the time, but left Kenya immediately after the 6 April 1994 attack on President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane and took the first flight to Bujumbura. Then she drove north into Rwanda and made her way to Kigali through Butare. (Annie is still with the AFP, now based in Dakar.) Here is what she wrote:

You ask me if I think about Rwanda sometimes: much more than sometimes. It has become a kind of obsession.

An obsession because of the event itself: massacres, mutilated children; people I met on both sides: victims and killers. I still have some faces before my eyes. I had nightmares every night for at least two years and, since then, occasionally.

An obsession because of our inability to describe properly those events during the first few days. Being caught in Kigali for a long time, first on the Hutu side, and then on the RPF side, it was simply impossible to say that hundreds of thousands of people were killed. 'Acts of genocide,' or 'genocide' are words, which only came later.

An obsession because of the accusations that arose later against journalists who were there, especially those who were with the 'genocidaires.' As journalists, as an agency, we couldn't avoid listening to them and quoting them. Jean Helene (Radio France International correspondent, killed in Abidjan in the autumn of 2003) suffered a lot because of those accusations and even AFP, afterward, has been described as 'Interahamwe.' (Annie Thomas, AFP, personal communication, February 2004)

Annie spent weeks in Rwanda in 1994, at least three weeks a month for the first three months. She spent most of her time in Kigali or in Gitarama and Butare. She was an eyewitness to a massacre at Kigali hospital on 11 April, when soldiers entered the premises, dragged injured young men from their beds, pushed them toward a pile of corpses in the yard and killed them with bayonets. She reported that scene the very same day on the wire.

Later, she crossed the front line and joined other journalists who had come from Uganda to reach the RPF zone. 'Honestly,' she writes, 'for my intellectual comfort, I would have been much more comfortable on that side than being with militiamen, their machetes still dripping with blood, professing how much they loved France' (Annie Thomas, AFP, personal communication, February 2004).

In the first weeks of the genocide, from April to late June 1994, I was still in Paris, working on the desk at AFP, editing Annie's copy. In late June, I went to Rwanda to report, mainly in the northwest of the country, the heartland of the former President Habyarimana, where militias were acting as the real authority.

It is important to understand what it was like to work as a journalist in Rwanda. There was shelling. There were hundreds of thousands of people on the roads. There were bombs. There was a civil war. There were roadblocks with militias, drunk or stoned, with grenades, machetes, AK-47s.

The militia would come to get Tutsis. They would ask people for their ID cards and check journalists' papers. They were looking for two RFI French journalists, Monique Mass and Jean Hélène, to kill them – just because they were able to understand their broadcasts, which were in French (they may not have heard the BBC broadcasts or read the newspapers). They also described their position very simply: Hutu majority; Tutsi minority. That's what we worked on reporting every day, every hour for radio.

Did the media fail in Rwanda? Yes, definitely. Did journalists fail in Rwanda? No.

Journalists who went to Rwanda were very strongly committed to being there – to report and to testify. Even journalists from France, where the authorities were so involved with the Habyarimana regime, did as much as they could.

During three months of genocide, from 7 April to the beginning of July when the rebels came into Kigali, AFP was one of the rare media outlets to speak out. Sometimes, we were virtually the only international agency on the ground. Mark Doyle from the BBC also stayed most of the time, as did Radio France International (RFI). But very few media were there all the time. Why? Aspiring young journalists should not forget that the media are businesses. Media companies want to be profitable and such reporting costs a lot of money, particularly if it involves the use of satellite phones.

Another factor was the international situation at the time, the global context. In Bosnia, Gorazde was under siege and was bombed for weeks. South Africa was holding its first multiracial elections, celebrating the end of apartheid. In the United States, people were more interested in O.J. Simpson than Rwanda. The French were concerned by the death of Ayrton Seyna, the Brazilian formula 1 driver.

At the international level at that time, people were more interested in Bosnia than Rwanda. The conflict in Bosnia had started in 1992 and in Yugoslavia in 1991. The genocide in Rwanda would have to have lasted for two or three years to garner as much media attention as Bosnia. What we saw in the media in France was similar to that in North America. There was very little coverage of the genocide.

Nonetheless, AFP kept at least two people in Rwanda, usually more. After the expatriates had been evacuated, in mid-April, most of the media pulled their journalists out for safety reasons. They would come back later, especially in June, with the French intervention. But AFP's Annie Thomas stayed, along with representatives from RFI, the BBC and a handful of others. At times, AFP was the only wire service on the ground in Rwanda.

In a 1996 study, Garth Myers and colleagues (1996) compared news coverage of Rwanda and Bosnia in six major American newspapers: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Boston Globe. In April 1994, there were twice as many articles about the conflict in Bosnia as Rwanda.

In all of 1994, the French daily Le Monde published 1,665 articles on Bosnia and only 576 on Rwanda. And the Rwanda tally includes coverage of the evacuation of foreigners and the outbreak in June and July of cholera in the Zaire refugee camps (Rabechault 2000). Among the articles in Le Monde, more than 60 per cent were short pieces, mainly news agency dispatches. In other words, some 220 articles on Rwanda that appeared in Le Monde that year were not bylined pieces by the newspaper's own journalists, nor their own analysis or commentary.

Most journalists are not experts in genocide. Many of them – myself included – arrived in Rwanda with very little knowledge of the country. So, it was tempting, especially at the beginning, to speak of the civil war, of these massacres as a perverse return of a civil war, and to link these massacres to previous massacres since 1959. We failed to understand that the killing was something totally new, that this was not a continuity of what had happened before.

During those first few days in April, special correspondents were much more likely to use words like 'chaos', 'anarchy' and 'furore'. They were reporting on a resumption of the civil war. In the field, it was easy to be confused and view the massacres as a 'side effect' of the fighting.

Then, on 12 April, the main story became the evacuation of foreigners and the closing of embassies. A special correspondent for the French public TV channel recalls that he had very strict orders: cover the evacuation of the French people, then get out. Actually, most of the TV teams came and left with the military planes.

Newspapers generally gave the same amount of space to the evacuation as to the massacres, then reduced their coverage of Rwanda to focus on Bosnia and the elections in South Africa. Photographers arrived quickly, but what they got were pictures of corpses, never photos of massacres at the moment they took place. To my knowledge, there is only one video image of a massacre taking place (the film shot by British camerman, Nick Hughes, in April 1994).

Patrick Robert, from Sygma Corbis Agency, explained that a month after he returned to Paris from Rwanda, he had still sold almost none of his pictures from Rwanda. He was there, but no one wanted to see. Journalists were there: but who would listen to them, or read their stories?

The first time AFP used the term 'genocide' was on 20 April. In the weeks before, AFP referred to 'massacres', 'killings', 'ethnic cleansing'. It was all too easy to link the situation with the past, to recall the waves of killings in Rwanda since 1959 and also in Burundi with massacres that followed the October 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye.

AFP's use of the term 'genocide' was in the context of a report quoting Human Rights Watch, which had warned the United Nations (UN) against reducing the extent of its mission in Rwanda. The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, said in New York that 'Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, could face certain death in what would amount to genocide.'

AFP used the term again on 28 April, this time quoting Médecins Sans Frontières, and again on 3 May, quoting the Council of Europe. On 16 May, the French foreign minister, Alain Juppe, referred to 'genocide' in Rwanda. Finally, 'genocide' came into common media usage when the UN Committee for Human Rights adopted a resolution – on 25 May – acknowledging that genocide was being perpetrated in Rwanda.

We all know now why the international community was so reluctant to qualify the situation so strongly. Using the word genocide would have necessitated action, under the genocide convention (UN 1951). For weeks, AFP and other media used the word only if it was able to quote a source using that term. Thanks to Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières and others, the reality of the genocide finally made its way into the media. As journalists, we probably avoided many errors because of these nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In my view, the NGOs and independent organizations did an excellent job, conducting inquiries and producing reports. But for weeks, the media underestimated what was actually going on in Rwanda.

Is it the reporter's fault? I would say no. Even if they did not have the complete picture of what was going on in the whole country, they described what was happening. Reporting on a daily basis – on an hourly basis for a wire service, if you consider that you're almost always on a deadline for some part of the world – they had to provide an overall picture of the situation: fighting between government troops and the RPF, rebel progress, attempts to reach a ceasefire agreement, political developments, refugees and displaced people and also, of course, killings.

In my view, the media failure came much more from those who were out of the country, in Paris, London, Washington and Ottawa. Given all the material coming in from the field, editors should have the responsibility to qualify the events. But news agencies are very careful about the use of words. At AFP we have a strong policy about the use of words and we have often been too cautious. In 1989, in Timisoara, northern Romania, some reporters described mass graves, with dozens of corpses, including babies. The truth was far from this: the graves actually contained dead from a nearby hospital, the baby was stillborn. After this outrageous mistake, editors at AFP, like others, too often decided that emotional factors were overwhelming a reporter in the field.

Another glaring failure of the media occurred at the very end of the genocide, when the French began 'Operation Turquoise' in southwest Rwanda. Dozens of reporters returned to the country. Although they were able at that time to discover the enormity of the killing campaign in this area – in such places as Kibuye, Cyangugu and Bisesero – they also reported on the humanitarian and military intervention from abroad. The result was that the reality of genocide was, once again, submerged in too much information.

It became worse in mid-July, when a million Hutus crossed the border into Zaire and cholera flared up in the camps. The humanitarian catastrophe overwhelmed the real story of the genocide. Everybody ran to Goma, because the story there was so easy to cover. After months of genocide, the issue of good guys and bad guys disappeared completely. The enemy was cholera, but no political issue surrounded cholera in the camps. It seemed as if journalists were more comfortable covering cholera than genocide.

But there are some other basic facts to remember. There is what one would call in French 'le concept du rapport mort/kilometre' – in essence, the notion that deaths at home or close to home seem to matter more than those at a distance. So five French dead are more important to French readers than ten German dead and more important than one hundred African dead. In this sense, the news media reflect the public's state of mind.

As well, during the spring of 1994, while events were unfolding in Rwanda, those who wanted to know what was going on, knew. The details arrived late, but those who wanted to know, knew. Reporters were there, not all the time, but often. And their testimony was emerging from Rwanda. AFP was almost always there. The BBC was there. Individual reporters in the field showed their determination. They wanted to report, to bear witness to the killing.

To answer Alan Kuperman, I would say, 'Yes we missed the Rwanda genocide.' But Kuperman wrote in 2000, six years after the event. Journalists are neither historians nor sociologists. They do not work in the quiet of their study. Their reports become part of history, but history is knitted day by day, before their eyes. They don't benefit from the distance required to quickly understand the whole scene.

To their credit, individual journalists kept on working in Rwanda in the months and years that followed the genocide. American newspapers were eventually able to tell the truth about the UN and Rwanda, about Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire's famous 11 January fax. French newspapers were able to push for the establishment of an information mission on Rwanda in the national assembly. It was far from a full commission of inquiry, but it was the first time that parliament questioned the presidency and the government about foreign policy. And a clear picture emerged of the ties between Paris and Kigali in the early 1990s and well into the spring of 1994.

A final word: what can the media do when the world doesn't want to listen or to hear?

And what about Africa itself, so silent except for the Organization of African Unity's attempts to convene a summit to achieve a ceasefire? In mid-May 1994, we asked all the AFP offices in Africa to send to Paris press reviews and remarks in the African media on the Rwanda issue. What reactions had they picked up in the press and among intellectuals? What actions, if any, were undertaken? Were there any demonstrations? Any concerts like the Band Aid effort years earlier for Ethiopia?

But our survey of African media coverage found the same troubling apathy that was prevalent in the Western media – with only a few exceptions. In the end, we wrote a synthesis of the African reports under the headline: 'The deepening silence in Africa on the drama in Rwanda' (Anon. 1994).

After the genocide, we all tried to understand how the world missed the Rwanda story. But in the end, I can only conclude that for those of us who thought their work could change something in the world, Rwanda was a cruel disillusionment, a major failure. Reporters were there. Pictures were available. Stories were filed. But if readers, if the people you speak to do not want to listen, you can't force them. They can just turn the dial. And editors can refuse to publish your reports.

A final example: some time ago, in early 2004, Roméo Dallaire gave a terrific interview to TF1, the most popular French TV channel. It was broadcast in prime time. For such a channel, it was a very courageous move to broadcast the interview, but the audience declined. The number of people listening decreased during the programme.

Those who don't want to listen shut their ears. That's what happened for Rwanda. We can say, 'Oh it's the fault of the United States that didn't want to intervene. It's the fault of the government of France.' But the public could have done something.

When I returned from Rwanda in 1994, I went to my little village in eastern France. A fisherman said, 'Oh were you there? Well, don't talk about it any more. We've had enough. We see these terrible pictures at 8 p.m., right when we're eating. But what can we do? We can't do anything.'

For a long time I never spoke to anyone about Rwanda and when I did it was when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda called on me three years later to ask me for details about some of my reporting. In the meantime, I understood that no one else wanted to hear from me about Rwanda. I could not force them to listen, nor did I want to.

REFERENCES

Anonymous. 1994. The Deepening Silence in Africa on the Drama in Rwanda. AFP International, Paris, France, 29 May.

Kuperman, A. 2000. How Media Missed Rwandan Genocide. IPI Report, 6(1).

Myers, G., T. Klak and T. Koehl. 1996. The Inscription of Difference: News Coverage of the Conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia. Political Geography, 15(1): 21–46.

Rabechault, M. 2000. La presse au Rwanda: des massacres à la mission d'information parlementaire: une analyse dans la presse française de la couverture médiatique du conflit rwandais et du rôle que la France y a joué. Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Université de Strasbourg III, Strasbourg, France.

UN (United Nations). 1951. Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. Adopted by Resolution 260 (III) of the UN General Assembly, 9 December 1948. UN Treaty Series no. 1021, vol. 78: 277. Available at <www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm> (accessed 6 September 2005).

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