Women and War in Rwanda: Gender, Media and the Representation of Genocide 9780755619016, 9781780763477

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In memory of my grandmother Peggy Holmes

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LIST OF ILLUSTR ATIONS

Fig 1: Rwandan women in high politics: President Paul Kagame walks with aide Rose Kabuye on 7 November 2008 during an emergency summit in Nairobi aimed at restoring stability in the conflict-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. A colonel in the Rwandan Patriotic Front who fought on the front line, Kabuye was appointed City Mayor of Kigali in 1994 before becoming a member of the Rwandan Parliament, serving as Chairperson of the Defence and Security Committee in 1998. In 2003, at the height of the second Congo war, Kabuye became the President’s Chief of State Protocol, advising government officials on matters of national and international protocol. Fig 2: A woman holds a placard during a demonstration on 19 November 2008 in Kigali protesting the arrest of Rwandan presidential aide Rose Kabuye in Germany on 9 November and her subsequent extradition to Paris, France. A French court charged Kabuye with ‘complicity in murder in relation to terrorism’, on suspicion that she was connected to the political assassination of former Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana. At the time, Rwanda pressed for a hasty trial in France. The case was dropped when a key witness retracted his statement.

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Figs 3 and 4: By 1994, there were some 20 Hutu extremist magazines and newspapers in circulation in Rwanda, of which Kangura was the most renowned. Tutsi women were presented as sexualized military operators, working for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Pro-democratic Hutu women who refused to conform to the ideals of a pure Hutu state were also dehumanized. A very public ridiculing of UN peacekeeping (UNAMIR) troops formed part of the strategy of Hutu extremist politicians to derail the peace process and hamper the Rwandan population’s efforts to bring about genuine democracy. Figs 5 and 6: Gendered discourses and narratives about rape and genocide have been central to conflicts in the Great Lakes region since before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In the early 1990s Hutu extremist propaganda magazines such as Kamarampaka were keen to instil fear in Rwandan populations by mediatizing the genocide of Hutu. These narratives were appropriated by political actors in Rwanda and the DRC and by militia groups such as the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and the Congrés National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), throughout the two Congo wars (1997–2010). Fig 7: A campaign flyer distributed in an edition of The Observer in the summer of 2009. At the time, Amnesty International attempted to raise awareness among its British audience that the problem of rape in the east of Congo was not simply a by-product of war, but a military strategy. Fig 8: Spanish photojournalist Cédric Gérbehaye took this image of dissident general Laurent Nkunda at the CNDP headquarters in Masisi hills, North-Kivu in July 2007. At the time, Gérbehaye believed Nkunda was performing in front of the camera, using the international media to heighten his notoriety and position himself as a threat to Congolese president Joseph Kabila.

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ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the advice and help of the following people this book would not have been possible, and I thank them for their support: Neil Lazarus, Terry Lovell, Christine Sylvester, Lindiwe Dovey, Mark Hobart, Deniz Kandiyoti, Zoe Marriage, Jack Spence, Christine Kenyon-Jones, Henry Theriault, Nazneen Ahmed, Aurora Tellenbach, Shirley Randell, Gabi Gabiro, Janne Gundersen, Phil Green, Donald Lickley and Ronnie and John Howard. Special thanks go to the people I interviewed for the time they spent discussing their experiences of (reporting) war and genocide in Rwanda and the east of Congo. Thanks also go to the researchers at the BBC Archive, the British Film Institute and Centre IWACU in Rwanda, Tomasz Hoskins at I.B Tauris, and the anonymous reviewers of this book. I am particularly indebted to Stephen Chan, Linda Melvern, Philip Bohrer and my family. Georgina Holmes, London January 2013

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ABBR EVIATIONS

ABC AFDL AFP ALiR AU AVEGA BBC BBTG CDR CEDAW CEPGL CNDP DFID DRC EAC EU Ex-FAR FAR FARDC FAWE

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Australian Broadcasting Corporation Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaire Agence France-Presse Armée pour la Libération du Rwanda African Union Association des Veuves du Genocide British Broadcasting Corporation Broad-Based Transitional Government Coalition pour la Défense de la République Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries Congrés National pour la Défense du Peuple Department for International Development Democratic Republic of Congo East African Community European Union ex-Forces Armées Rwandaises Forces Armées Rwandaises Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo Forum for African Women Educationalists

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FDLR GDP HAGURUKA

Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda Gross Domestic Product Association for the Defence of Women and Children’s Rights HRW Human Rights Watch ICC International Criminal Court ICCPR International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda IDP Internally Displaced People IMF International Monetary Fund IR International Relations LIPRODHOR Ligue Rwandaise pour la promotion et la défense des droits de l’homme LRA Lord’s Resistance Army MDR Mouvement Démocratique Républicain MIGEPROF Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion MLC Mouvement de Libération du Congo MONUC United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo MONUSCO Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo MRND Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement/Mouvement Républicain National pour la Démocratie et le Développement MSF Médecins Sans Frontières MSM Mouvement Social Muhutu NGO Non-governmental organization NRA National Resistance Army OAU Organization of African Unity ORINFOR Office Rwandais d’Information PARECO Patriotes Resistants Congolais PARMEHUTU Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu PL Parti Libéral PSD Partie Social Démocrate RANU Rwandan Alliance for National Unity

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A BBREVIATIONS

RBA RCC RCD RDF RNC RPA RPF RPR RRWF RTLM RUD/Urunana SGBV SURF TVR UDPS UN UNAMIR UNAR UNESCO UNHCR UNICEF UNIFEM

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Rwanda Broadcasting Agency Rwanda Cinema Centre Rassemblement Congolais pour le Démocratie Rwanda Defence Forces Rwanda National Congress Rwandan Patriotic Army Rwandan Patriotic Front Rassemblement Populaire RwandaisInkeragutabara Rwanda Refugees Welfare Association Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines Rally for Unity and Democracy Sexual and Gender-based violence Rwanda Survivor Fund Télévision Rwanda Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social United Nations United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda Union Nationale Rwandaise United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations Children’s Fund United Nations Development Fund for Women

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Map 1.

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Map 2.

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Map 3.

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INTRODUCTION

On 9 November 2008 Rwanda’s Head of Protocol Rose Kabuye was arrested by the German authorities for her alleged role in shooting down the plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana in Rwanda on 6 April 1994 – said to be the ‘trigger’ of the genocide when some 800,000 people were systematically killed within three months. A European arrest warrant had been issued by France and Kabuye was one of nine senior Rwandan officials indicted two years previously by France’s anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière. According to Bruguière’s report, published in 2006, the Ugandan-based Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had assassinated Habyarimana following a four-year civil war with the then Mouvement Républicain National pour la Democratie et le Développement (MRND) government. A more widely held view circulating internationally put the former Hutu extremists in the frame, although little evidence from the crash site was available publicly: the black box was missing and the wreckage did not appear to provide substantiating clues. The Rwandan government responded to the Bruguière report by establishing its own commission, led by former justice minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo, to investigate the role of France during the genocide. However, amidst rumour and speculation, who truly bears the responsibility for shooting down the plane remains unclear. A subsequent ballistics report published in April 2009 by the Rwandan government, attempting to provide a final narrative on the crash, raised more questions than it answered.1

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While Rwanda immediately protested against Germany’s detention of Kabuye, the retired lieutenant colonel in the Rwandan Army and former mayor of Kigali waived an extradition hearing and requested that she be transferred to Paris. According to the Guardian, Kabuye opted to travel to Europe on the premise that ‘a trial would expose France’s politically motivated attempts to whitewash its own complicity in the mass slaughter’.2 The UK media reported the arrest of Kabuye in the context of the Rwanda-versus-France battle over the truth about who exactly should be held to account for genocide. Rwanda’s government-funded newspaper The New Times concentrated on mediatizing her innocence, publishing online articles which included photographs of women protesting in the streets of Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Rose Kabuye is not the only Rwandan woman manoeuvring on the international stage. The widow of President Habyarimana, Agathe Kanziga, who herself has been accused of perpetrating genocide and whose brothers were part of Réseau Zero (Network Zero), the extremist Hutu Power network operating in Rwanda in the early 1990s, continues to influence the discourse of genocide denial. A refugee in France, Kanziga was interviewed by Alex Duval Smith in February 2007. Portraying herself as a ‘misunderstood victim’, Agathe was ‘driven by despair’ and ‘on the verge of tears’ upon learning that French officials had turned down her appeal for residency 13 years after the French military had rescued her from Rwanda. According to Kanziga, the Bruguière report proved her innocence, while at the same time exposed RPF deceit. Accusations of her role in the genocide – a term she avoided using – were ‘inventions by the RPF’ and ‘long in advance, they [had] spread these lies to cover their own crimes’.3 During the months that genocide was taking place between April and July 1994, Britain – a permanent member of the UN Security Council – failed to define what was happening as genocide and in doing so has been accused of complicity and denial. The state-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was also accused of failing to adequately report genocide, appearing instead to describe events in Rwanda as tribal war and anarchy. Since 1994, documentary films and Newsnight news features have contributed to the development of the BBC’s institutional narrative on the Rwandan genocide, and

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women’s experiences and testimonies have been central in mediatizing the politics of memory. In parallel, political actors have used BBC news and current affairs broadcasts as a platform to sustain or contest political violence in the Great Lakes region. Over the years, the public relations tactics of governments, militias and political parties have become increasingly sophisticated, incorporating websites, films, radio programmes, newspapers, pamphlets and social media. Mediatized political discourse has been produced and sustained by Rwandan, Congolese and international journalists, filmmakers, representatives of governments, social commentators, politicians, academics, ordinary people, informants, and members of diaspora groups operating across the globe. This book investigates the way in which Rwandan and Congolese women are seen to perform in war and genocide within BBC documentary films about Rwanda and the east of Congo broadcast between 1994 and 2010. I contend that women’s performances play a central role in the gendered international politics of revisionism, a process whereby actors manoeuvre to influence media narratives for political gain. I ask a number of questions concerning gendered representations of war and genocide in public discourse and reflect on how gendered narratives promoting or denying genocide are among the most valuable commodities. The book seeks to challenge normative readings about African women in conflict and in doing so resists the tendency to fit Rwandan and Congolese women into a framework of victimology which presents African women as silent, passive and lacking agency, so frequently – albeit often unwittingly – adopted by feminists theorizing international relations (IR). I hope to demonstrate how Rwandan and Congolese women, in their manoeuvrings and performances within documentary film, are political actors, regardless of their position in the macro- and/ or micro-hierarchies of global political power. Calling for an additional dialogue with post-colonial African feminists/womanists, I build on feminist concepts of militarization to offer a new reading of the events that have taken place in the Great Lakes region since 1994. In contributing to the field of African Studies, the book also provides a new perspective on the role of the media during conflict in the eastern

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provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and reveals how gendered narratives are central to the conflict’s mediatized war. Drawing on theories of genocide denial and the use of television broadcasting in public relations, diplomacy and war, the research provides a new perspective on the extent to which the UK media ‘missed the story’. Finally, in assessing why Sexual and Gender-based violence (SGBV) is employed in conflicts in the east of Congo, I ask whether mass rape should be better understood as constituting genocide by attrition, rather than solely being framed as a weapon of war. Finding recent feminist theorizing of war and genocide in the Great Lakes region limiting, I propose an alternative theoretical model through which to interpret genocide by attrition as an integral part of the militarized economies within the region. Historian and anthropologist René Lemarchand has suggested that war and conflict in the Great Lakes region has been dominated by the politics of inclusion and exclusion, where the recurring central pattern: is one in which ethnic polarisation paves the way for political exclusion, exclusion eventually leading to insurrection, insurrection to repression, and repression to massive flows of refugees and internally displaced persons, which in turn become vectors of further instability.4 A key component of this pattern is the production of histories and narratives about political events relating to Rwanda. These narratives play a particular role in the post-genocide era where the politics of remembering (and forgetting) and the development of new political identities contribute to continued politics of inclusion and exclusion. Chapter One describes the key events which are most often referenced in BBC media political discourse. These events include the civil war and genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s; the role of the international community in (not) preventing genocide; the RPF-led massacres at the Kibeho refugee camp in Zaire in April 1995; and the wars in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In order to better understand how political actors manoeuvre within BBC documentary films, the main players and military groups are identified. The chapter then describes the position of Rwanda directly after the genocide – known as ‘ground

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zero’ by the RPF – and the role of women in rebuilding Rwanda in accordance with the new post-genocide political ideology. The chapter also sets out some of the criticisms that the current Rwandan government has received from commentators locally and internationally, most notably with regard to its position on human rights, democracy, justice and the process of memorializing the 1994 genocide. Chapter Two examines two major methodological issues within ‘western’ feminist theorizing of conflict in the Great Lakes region, and in Rwanda and the DRC in particular, which contribute to the denial of African woman’s agency. The first concerns the way in which the gendered nature of war and genocide in Africa are imaged within the international system. The second relates to the ways in which Rwandan and Congolese women are brought into feminist theorizing of wartime rape. The chapter then discusses the concept of the ‘international politics of revisionism’. Using as its case study the plane crash narrative discussed above, the chapter highlights how gendered discourses on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are appropriated by actors locally and internationally either to memorialize genocide or to explain conflict in the east of Congo in order to justify the type of intervention required in the region. Chapter Three describes the political context in Rwanda in the 1990s and charts the gradual militarization of the population as the Hutu extremists prepared for ‘war’. Within the gendered genocide ideology of the early 1990s, Rwandan women were imaged as either citizens, non-citizens or partial citizens. This analysis is important if we are to observe how the genocide ideology has been appropriated by all sides of the conflict over the last two decades. It considers how Rwanda’s women’s movement, which was burgeoning at that time, posed a threat to the weakening dictatorship. The chapter raises questions about how feminists theorizing IR, by not reflecting on the key terms genocide, civil war, ethnic conflict and anarchy, often unwittingly replicate the discourse of genocide ideology. This distinction is required if we are to examine the gendered nature of mediatized conflict in the Great Lakes region over subsequent decades. Chapters Four, Five and Six discuss how the gendered international politics of revisionism are played out in BBC Panorama documentaries

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and Newsnight news features. Under the BBC’s Royal Charter, the news corporation must ‘ensure that [it] observes high standards of openness and transparency’.5 Although the BBC continues to have control over the dominant narratives that feature in its news and current affairs programmes, it is still possible to see how within its media discourse other political actors attempt to influence public discourse. Chapter Four assesses how the BBC current affairs programme Newsnight mediatized the ‘Rwandan genocide’ between 1994 and 1998. The ways in which media discourse is produced by political actors, and the dynamic between news reporting from the field and studio debates controlled by the presenter, reveal a discrepancy between occasions when conflict in Rwanda is framed as genocide, and occasions when it is framed as ethnic violence and civil war. The chapter considers how Rwandan women have been imaged and how these representations have been employed in Newsnight’s own engagement with the international politics of revisionism. The chapter then explores how multiple actors manoeuvred in 1994, adopting narratives about war and genocide to justify their action or inaction when genocide was taking place. Chapter Five explores how BBC documentary films produced and broadcast in the post-genocide era are an important means by which the BBC can consolidate its own institutional narrative on the 1994 genocide. Primarily focusing on Panorama documentary films, the chapter considers how the BBC’s institutional narrative draws on colonial stereotypes in a bid to reconcile the tensions between reporting genocide in Africa – where genocide is conventionally perceived as ‘western’ and a product of civilization – and the role of the West in failing to intervene. In this context, the terms ‘West’ and ‘western’ are understood as artificial (epistemological) constructs often mapped as a geographic division between the so-called advanced capitalist societies of the north, and the Third World countries of the south. Once problematized and understood as artificial, the ‘West’ and ‘western’ can serve as useful tools to analyse how dominant models and configurations of knowledge are produced in all fields, including academic, political and journalistic. Chapter Five contends that a key aspect of the BBC’s revisionist agenda lies in its effort to remember a brutal ‘African’ genocide while simultaneously forgetting or erasing the role

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INTRODUCTION

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of Britain as a permanent member of the UN Security Council in 1994. This chapter also explores how Panorama documentaries shown in Rwanda during the annual memorial month in 2006 have been subsumed into the Rwandan government’s national discourse on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Chapter Six considers how, over the past two decades, an absence of feminist theorizing on the gendered nature of conflict in the east of Congo has meant that discussion on rape and SGBV has been carried out by four groups of actors: NGOs, human rights activists, the United Nations, the international media and media outlets in the Great Lakes region. Together, though for different ends, these actors have instrumentalized the new Congo atrocity narrative, wherein images of mass rape draw on colonial representations of Congolese male and female subjectivities. The chapter uses as its example UK media reporting between October and November 2008, when the Congolese political group Congrés National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), led by Laurent Nkunda, backed out of the peace agreement. It aims to demonstrate how the mediatized war simultaneously contributes to and depends on gendered narratives, as all sides – whether nation states and military operators in the Great Lakes region, or nation states such as the UK – attempt to justify their own involvement (or inaction) while condemning the actions of other actors. The chapter concludes by examining the ways in which documentary film has become a site within which Congolese women survivors, campaigners and activists can mobilize political action internationally.

Methodology In examining how Rwandan and Congolese women are presented in International Relations theory, this research draws on African postcolonial theories of subjectivity, objectivity and agency. The concepts of conscious agency and the passive subjective were first explored in 1970 by Louis Althusser. Through processes of ‘mis-recognition’, bounded by institutions such as the state, family and education, the ‘subject accepts his or her own subjection, while retaining the illusion of coherence and agency’.6 Post-structuralist theorizing of subjectivity has questioned

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essentialist readings of what it means to be a subject, arguing that subjectivity is fragmented and mobile.7 Foucault theorized the subject as a conscious self that has agency and is free to act, but only in relation to the power structures within which the individual exists. However, he has been criticized by feminists for his projection of the subject as being fundamentally passive and controlled, according to Foucault, by ‘disciplinary regimes’.8 Post-structuralists have also considered how the subject is divided into subject and object, or conscious and unconscious, to suggest that there is a fluidity of subjectivity whereby the subject ‘is always in the process of being constituted in and through psychic and discursive systems’. The idea of ‘subject in process’ reminds us that the subject is continually performing and ‘centring itself in order to act at all’.9 The object has also been theorized as the opposite of the subject and ‘someone who is [believed to be] deprived of agency, who is subjected to the agenetic acts of others’.10 This notion of subject/object has been particularly powerful in explaining gendered power structures, where the man is imaged as the subject (the performer), and the woman the passive object (the one who is told how to perform). The concept has also been used to explain other power structures including those constructed around race and ethnicity, wealth/poverty, colonizer/colonized and so on. However, within the diverse perspectives of feminist theory, there is a parallel debate that views fragmentation as positive, since it provides space for multiple subjectivities (and multiple performances) and challenges the notion of a singular, essentialist woman’s subjectivity. An essentialist reading wrongly assumes that all women experience reality in the same way and can empathize with other women simply because they are women.11 Within this book, documentary films and news features are examined using discourse analysis. The corpus was constructed using archival research and texts were obtained from Coventry University Media Library, the British Film Institute (BFI), the private collections of Linda Melvern and my own collection built up over a period of eight years. Transcripts of five Panorama documentaries and lists of Newsnight programmes containing stories on Rwanda from March 1994 to April 2005 were obtained from the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading,

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England. In total, 70 Newsnight news features, 10 one-line stories and eight BBC documentaries broadcast between 6 April 1994 and 30 September 2010 are analysed, in addition to four independent documentary films. The majority of Newsnight programmes and Panorama documentaries were viewed and transcribed at the British Film Institute (BFI) in London in August 2007. The first types of media text analysed are magazine articles and images from Kangura, a Hutu extremist hate propaganda magazine that was published in Rwanda in the four years leading up to the genocide in April 1994. This form of mediatized political discourse, obtained during archival research in Kigali in 2006, was published in Kinyarwanda and translated by Rwandan journalist Sheenah Kaliisa who was based in London. There are obvious problems with this approach, and I have been obliged to interpret the meaning of these texts through the lens of the translator. Two aspects of war propaganda created by regional actors are analysed. The first concerns the publication of independent announcements, press releases and news stories by the Rwandan government, the FDLR and the CNDP. Between 2003 and 2009 both the FDLR and the CNDP were actively communicating to communities in the Great Lakes region and internationally via their websites, www.fdlr.org and www.cndp-congo.org. From 2003 to 2009, the FDLR’s European leadership published over 90 press releases and some 20 statements, declarations and open letters. The Rwandan government-controlled The New Times is also analysed and a keyword search of their website revealed over 20 news stories concerning conflict in the DRC during 2009. The second aspect of this research focuses on the efforts made by leaders of the CNDP and the FDLR to influence international media narratives during interviews with foreign journalists. Here, a series of monthly online searches for news articles, radio broadcasts, documentaries and news and current affairs programmes were conducted between January 2007 and December 2010. While quantitative analysis can help map distortion within mediatized political discourse and help to ascertain which issues appear on a given media agenda, the method emphasizes visibility and representation in ways that often present closed readings of women, providing

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little space to assess how political actors perform, interact with journalists or attempt to influence media narratives. I therefore combine Norman Fairclough’s approach to Critical Discourse Analysis with the framework employed by Anne O’Keeffe in her study of media discourse. Within broadcast settings, political media discourse constitutes ‘political interviews, chat shows, radio phone-ins . . . where two [or more] people are interacting and an audience is listening’.12 This form of analysis is apt for examining Newsnight programmes, which combine short documentary films, known in the industry as news features, with studio debates. Since documentary film is an inherently political genre, interviews and discussions that take place in Panorama programmes are also analysed as mediatized political discourse, wherein interactions occur in front of an imagined audience. Using semiotics, Fairclough calls for a combined approach to analyse texts (spoken and written), media production, dissemination and consumption and the ‘social and cultural practices’ which frame mediatized political discourse.13 A key aspect of Fairclough’s approach is to identify those agents responsible for producing mass media political discourse. These include professional politicians, journalists, experts (academic political scientists, political analysts and pundits), representatives of NGOs and social movements, economic agents and ‘ordinary people’. Both Newsnight and BBC documentary films feature all these political actors. ‘Ordinary people’ are survivors or witnesses of war and genocide, and may include Rwandans, Congolese, European missionaries and embassy staff. Within a given documentary film, each of these agents articulate political discourse, often from different social systems, so that journalistic discourse is mixed with ‘elements of the orders of discourse of the [global] political system’.14 Although the type of programme will determine the amount of airtime which a given group of political actors will have to manoeuvre, the programme itself articulates its own institutional political order of discourse. By combining this approach with an analysis of sound and image, it is possible to ascertain how political actors perform both verbally and through their bodies. A major contention when writing about the politics of revisionism concerns the problem of taking sides, or appearing to take sides. This makes for a challenging time for a feminist theorizing IR who is

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attempting to present a gender-aware reading of media representations of war and genocide in the Great Lakes region of Africa. For this research 34 people were interviewed in order to offset my analysis of documentary films and other media with the personal experiences of those who were involved in producing mediatized political discourse. Those interviewed included editors, producers, journalists and filmmakers from Rwanda, Britain and Canada; members of the Rwandan government; representatives from human rights organizations and NGOs; and Rwandan and Congolese women’s rights activists. However, as political actors, none of the interviewees presented objective perspectives on war and genocide in the region. All research subjects interviewed were performing a particular subjectivity and were aware they were performing within a given frame of discussion. On occasion, it was clear that some responses had been well rehearsed – either because interviewees reiterated statements from previous interviews or because they had discussed the issues at hand with their colleagues. This was most apparent during the interviews with British journalists who had reported in Rwanda in 1994. While conducting research in Rwanda, I was acutely aware that many of the people I was being introduced to were put forward by government officials and that their responses may have been skewed in accordance with party politics. The extent to which motives impact on a given performance, a central discussion of this research, reminds us that it is not just the subjects of documentary film that are influencing the production of knowledge on Rwanda and the east of Congo. However, there were times when it was possible to cross-reference responses and film footage in order to examine various interstices. This approach enabled me to present a more cogent picture of the mediatized conflict over the years. The question of the experience and authority of the researcher has been much discussed within dialogues between feminisms. Caroline Wright asks where exactly one should ‘draw the line in terms of what you have to be in order to know’.15 Is there a requirement with which to experience war and genocide in the Great Lakes region? Do you need to be a Rwandan or Congolese woman to examine the way in which these women manoeuvre in documentary film? Certainly Rwandans and Congolese will be able to add new dimensions to the analysis,

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picking up on cultural nuances which a researcher based in the UK will not necessarily be able to detect. Elshtain’s observation, in one of her many discussions on the absence of gender within IR theory, reminds us not to privilege one perspective over another. She writes: No embodied being, male or female, has access to ‘the whole’ or anything like ‘the totality’. One is free, therefore, to explore differences without presuming the superiority of a gendered narrative that closes out contesting interpretations.16 Instead, Elshtain calls for an approach that is ‘critical, interpretive, theoretically modest, and prepared to keep an appropriate distance between the subject matter of one’s enquiry and one’s own world and identity, open-ended’.17

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CHAPTER 1 CONTEXTUALIZING MEDIA EVENTS: WAR AND GENOCIDE IN RWANDA AND THE EAST OF CONGO

On 6 April 1994 the plane that was carrying President of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana and President of Burundi Cyprien Ntaryamira back from Tanzania was shot down by missiles above Kanombe airport in Kigali just after 8pm. The presidents were returning from Dar es Salaam where they had discussed a peace agreement as part of the Arusha Accords. In the hours after the crash, roadblocks were set up around the capital and there began mass killing on a scale that had not been seen since the Nazi Holocaust. In the first 48 hours Hutu extremists, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, undertook a military coup which saw the deaths of Hutu Power’s political opposition – including the then prime minister and pro-democratic Agathe Uwilingiyimana and the ten UN Belgian soldiers who had been protecting her. According to the UN, from 6 April to the end of July 1994, an estimated 800,000 people were killed, many in the first two weeks after the plane was shot down. The genocide took place four years into a war between the Ugandan-based and predominantly Tutsi-led refugee movement the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the former Mouvement Républicain National pour la Democratie et le Développement (MRND) government. Witnesses speak of neighbours killing neighbours, but there were also a series of militias – Burundian

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Hutu refugees and the Hutu extremist youth-wing the Interahamwe – who travelled from district to district killing and carrying out the most horrific human rights violations. During this time, an estimated 250,000 women, many of them Tutsi or who had family members who were Tutsi, were raped.1 Civilian men and boys also suffered extreme SGBV and were among the first group to be targeted for death. In the years leading up to the genocide, racist ideology was transmitted across the airways by the radio stations Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and Radio Rwanda, published in a number of extremist journals and promulgated in civic meetings and political demonstrations. The hate ideology attempted to divide the population along ethnic lines, ostracizing Rwanda’s Tutsi community and condemning pro-democratic Hutu who chose not to conform to the ideals of a pure Hutu nation state.

Part I: The 1994 genocide in Rwanda The international community On 1 October 1990 the RPF, who were predominantly the children of Rwandans exiled as a result of the massacres and political violence of 1959 and 1972, invaded Rwanda from the north and seized the border town of Kagitumba. The Rwandan government’s Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) led a counter-offensive on 7 October and were victorious with the support of foreign allies, notably France.2 The invasion and a pressure to democratize in a country that had been ruled under Habyarimana’s 21-year dictatorship resulted in international intervention and the eventual signing of the 1993 Arusha Accords. The peace agreement set out power-sharing and a new Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) until democratic elections could be held two years later. Under the Arusha Accords, an international peacekeeping force was to oversee the two-year transition from dictatorship to democracy. Led by Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) held a Chapter VI mandate with some 2,500 personnel – almost half the number of peacekeepers requested by Dallaire.3 Instructed only to oversee the peace agreement, but without the use of force, it soon became apparent

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that the multicultural Ghanaian, Canadian, Belgian and Bangladeshi force did not hold enough political clout among Rwandans in power. Dallaire later spoke in his memoirs of an invisible ‘third force’ operating throughout Rwanda.4 UNAMIR monitored political unrest and violence from the perspective of potential civil war, not genocide – a move which hindered the way in which political violence was interpreted in the months leading up to the genocide. Despite evidence of the militarization of Hutu, disappearances and acts of genocide, the importation of weapons, extreme human insecurity within the country and early warnings from informants and pro-democratic politicians, the UN Security Council failed to adopt the legal term genocide in April 1994. UN member states, including the five permanent members of the Security Council (France, Britain, the USA, the Russian Federation and China) and ten non-permanent members, who were all signatories of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, did not intervene. On 11 April the Belgian peacekeepers began to pull out of Rwanda and, by the end of the first week of genocide and war, the US, France and Belgium had closed their embassies. France, Belgium and Italy sent in troops under a national remit to rescue their citizens but these troops were not under UN command. Throughout April, France cautioned the international community against intervention that would mean appearing to side with the RPF. There was a reluctance to refer to the violence as genocide, with Britain and the USA being among the most vociferous in avoiding the term. On 29 April, Czech ambassador Karel Kovanda, alongside New Zealand’s ambassador, Colin Keating, called for the UN to officially recognize genocide in Rwanda.5 According to Melvern, British representatives, renowned for their ability to frame ‘resolutions with mind-numbing ambiguity’, played a direct role in crafting a statement taken from the 1948 UN Convention, objecting to ‘the killing of members of an ethnic group with the intention of destroying such a group in whole or in part’, arguing that such a crime, although not directly called ‘genocide’ in the statement, would be punishable under international law.6 By the beginning of May, British ambassador to the UN Sir David Hannay

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argued that the Organization of African Unity (OAU), who had put pressure on Habyarimana to secure the peace agreement from 1990 onwards, should ‘play a key role’ in halting the violence.7 It was not until 13 May that Secretary-General Boutros BoutrosGhali suggested to the UN Security Council Dallaire’s proposal to send in an additional 5,500 troops. There followed hours of discussion behind closed doors before a public debate on 17 May, whereupon it was agreed that an additional force was required. Resolution 918 was passed which recognized that UN troops may be required to use force to protect civilians. No troops were made available and although the UK and the US believed there should be a clear mandate for military operations, member states did not put forward the funds or military personnel requested by the UN.8 During this time, Dallaire retained a voluntary force of some 450 men, despite having been called to withdraw the troops early in April. From mid-May onwards, debates in the Security Council focused on the need to extend UNAMIR’s mandate to military intervention. By 17 June, as the MRND government and the extremists were retreating westwards into Zaire, France put forward a proposal to deploy French troops under the humanitarian mission Opération Turquoise. The mission met with criticism in the UK, where it was widely believed that France was trying to retain its Francophone influence in the region. Prunier also notes that ‘the French were keen to recover expensive and sophisticated equipment they had provided to the retreating FAR’.9 The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was executed by a clique of Hutu extremists, of whom many were tried between 1997 and 2011 at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the first international court established to prosecute high-ranking individuals for large-scale human rights abuses in Africa. However, violations against the most vulnerable and exposed men, women and children did not end on 4 July when the RPF took control of the capital Kigali and declared victory over the defeated interim government. In the first two months of genocide, as the RPF took the north-eastern regions of Rwanda, thousands of Hutu refugees, some of them perpetrators, fled into Tanzania. In the final weeks of genocide, as the government escaped westward, up to 2 million Hutu Rwandans

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fled to Goma and Bukavu in Zaire under the instruction of the FAR, Interahamwe militia, their commune leaders and persuasion via radio propaganda. Thousands died of dysentery, cholera, starvation, dehydration and exposure and many women, girls and boys were exposed to SGBV.10 The first period of major mass displacement of populations in the Great Lakes region was not in 1994. Members of the Tutsi community fled Rwanda in the years leading up to the proclamation of independence in 1962. Rwandan Tutsi were again targeted by Grégoire Kayibanda’s Hutu-majority government in the 1970s, some settling in Zaire, others in southern Uganda. Thousands of Burundians, escaping the genocide of 1972 wherein the Burundian Tutsi-led government and army targeted members of the Hutu community, settled in Tanzania and Rwanda.11 The mobilization of ethnicity and class and the fostering of the politics of exclusionism for the purpose of retaining monopoly over political power and economic resources have been the primary causes of human insecurity and the movement of populations in the Great Lakes region over the course of the last 60 years.12 The rise of Hutu Power In the 1950s as Africa pushed towards independence, Rwandan Hutu intellectuals developed a ‘rural manifesto’ that in 1957 was adapted into the Bahutu Manifesto. Appealing to the Hutu majority, the manifesto set out a new Hutu nationalism and introduced race into the socio-political context for the first time.13 It decreed that Tutsi elites oppressed poor rural Hutu – an approach favoured by the Belgian colonizers who believed they could retain influence in Rwanda by transferring power to the Hutu. In 1959 the Tutsi elite formed the Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR), a Rwandan political party that called for immediate independence for Ruanda-Urundi and the reestablishment of leadership under the Tutsi monarchy. At this time, both Hutu nationalist parties and UNAR grew increasingly militarized and operated coercively. The revolution of 1959 grew out of dissatisfaction with Tutsi monarchist/elite rule but was compounded by increased poverty and loss of control over the means of production on

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the part of the Hutu, although many Tutsis who suffered also backed the revolution. The Belgian authorities responded by replacing Tutsi chiefs with Hutu administrators on the assumption that majority rule equated to democracy.14 In 1961 the UN sponsored elections. They were won by Kayibanda’s Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu (PARMEHUTU), the majority Hutu party, and the Tutsi Mwami (or king) fled Rwanda.15 Independence in 1962 was followed by a political uprising of the oppressed Hutu majority which saw thousands more Tutsi massacred. The first president of Rwanda was the Catholic Grégoire Kayibanda, an intellectual, signatory of the 1957 Hutu manifesto and founding member of Mouvement Social Muhutu (MSM), one of the first Hutu political parties in Rwanda.16 An authoritarian who styled himself as the father of the Hutu Republic, Kayibanda was corrupt, ruling through a small group of politicians from Gitarama, his home town, and encouraging politically charged ethnic violence.17 The late 1960s and early 1970s were met again with significant dissatisfaction as the population endured poverty and famine, and there was growing unrest amid Kayibanda’s military ranks. In 1973 Defence Minister Major Juvénal Habyarimana instigated a coup, took power from Kayibanda and founded his own political party, Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND), the following year. At the time, Habyarimana publicly promoted a policy of regional and ethnic equilibrium which saw civil service and education sector jobs apportioned equally to discourage regional divisions between northerners and southerners, Tutsi and Hutu.18 While the policy garnered the support of Tutsi who had been persecuted under Kayibanda, in reality northerners dominated the government, the army and the economy and Tutsi were not allotted their designated percentage of state jobs or placements at university.19 Habyarimana’s regime also rested on the ideology that democracy equated to ethnic majority rule but, in 1978, Article 7 of Rwanda’s new constitution decreed single-party rule.20 In the 1990s the threat of RPF invasion, the pressure to democratize from within Rwanda and internationally, as well as land pressures, the collapse of the economy and high unemployment – particularly among young men – led a group of Hutu extremists called Akazu

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(or ‘little house’) to strengthen the Hutu political parties. They developed a campaign of racist hate propaganda against the Tutsi and established the political youth movement Interahamwe (meaning ‘we who work/fight together’). This political movement sought to militarize Hutu men and women, preparing them for both genocide and war, while at the same time promoting democracy and peace. Hutu Power, the ideology propounded by Hutu extremists, did not end in July 1994. As the former government and the ex-Forces Armées Rwandaises (ex-FAR) fled Rwanda, extremists began a campaign of fear among the Hutu population, urging them to seek refuge in the French safe zone, before settling in the east of Congo. This campaign continued in the months following the genocide, and Hutu extremists were accused of using civilian refugees as a human shield; there was criticism internationally that aid money used to run the refugee camps was funding the remobilization of its troops and secure arms. There followed a political campaign organized by supporters of Hutu Power, such as former editor of the Rwandan journal Kangura Hassan Ngeze, who conducted public speeches to rally civilian refugees, including Burundian refugees, into fighting for their cause. Once new troops had been recruited and armed, the ex-FAR renamed itself the Armée pour la Libération du Rwanda (ALiR), who later formed the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in 2000 when they merged with the Kinshasa-based Hutu resistance movement. Although some 50 key architects of the genocide have been tried at the ICTR and a senior official in the former Ministry of Defence, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity on 18 December 2008, many of the former members of the extremist movement are still in operation and have a clear political agenda. Human rights group African Rights described the structure of the Hutu extremist movement in 2008 as one movement divided into two arms. The FDLR is the Hutu extremist military unit, which is predominantly operating in the eastern provinces of Congo. The second arm, the FDLR’s political wing, includes the splinter group Rally for Unity and Democracy (RUD-Urunana) who are affiliated with the Rassemblement Populaire Rwandais-Inkeragutabara (RPR). There are also a number of smaller breakaway groups such as the Rasta or Soki

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based in the east of Congo but with less political affiliation.21 There are some 19 cells operating across Europe, North America and Africa. The USA and Canada, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and France are reportedly the most important countries for both the FDLR and RUD-Urunana, although there are cells in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK. In Africa, the FDLR is present in Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique and has representatives in Kenya and Tanzania.22 None of the leaders of these two groups – based in Germany and the USA – were in Rwanda in 1994 and therefore cannot be accused of complicity in genocide. At the time of writing their report, African Rights claimed that out of the 67 people in leadership they cite, only two were women – one based in South Kivu, the other in the political wing of the FDLR in North Kivu. According to African Rights, the stated goals of the FDLR and RUD-Urunana are to ‘liberate Rwanda, plead in favour of the oppressed and excluded, open a new era of peace, and bring back into the hands of citizens the planning and management of their lives’.23 Recruitment of Hutu from the north-western region of Rwanda, a Hutu stronghold, continues today with many families keen to ensure their men receive military training. Others have favoured the FDLR because for many years they were regarded as the only true ‘political opposition’ to the RPF government, in addition to being able to offer their men employment in areas of the east of Congo where the FDLR control informal mines. At the time of writing, the headquarters of the FDLR were based in the Walikale region of the DRC, located 100 km east of Goma. Outside of the Great Lakes region, the FDLR and RUD-Urunana enlist support and funding to fuel their military ambitions, lobby politicians and diplomats and ensure good relations with NGOs and various churches. While attracting media attention, these groups are involved in genocide denial, subverting or challenging history and narratives about the 1994 Rwandan genocide to counter Rwandan government narratives. Along with the current Rwandan government, numerous academics, politicians and social commentators, the FDLR and their supporters continue to be significant players in the ongoing international politics of revisionism and accompanying Great Lakes mediatized war.

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The rise of the Rwandan Patriotic Front During one of the first massacres in 1959 – the so-called ‘practice’ genocide – President of Rwanda Paul Kagame fled as a young boy with his family to Uganda.24 From 1982 Rwandan refugees became increasingly persecuted by Ugandan President Milton Obote whereupon an estimated 80,000 Rwandans were killed.25 Prunier observes that the refugees’ shock in discovering that ‘people among whom they had lived for 30 years were treating them as hated and despised foreigners’ encouraged many of them to join Obote’s guerrilla opponent, Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA).26 By the mid-1980s, 3,000 of the NRA’s 14,000 soldiers were Rwandan refugees who went on to support Museveni in toppling Obote in Kampala on 26 January 1986. Kagame and his childhood friend Fred Rwigyema were considered the most prominent Rwandans under Museveni’s direction and from the 1970s onwards Rwigyema quickly rose in the ranks of the NRA.27 Museveni’s reliance on Rwandans subsided when in 1989 his Ugandan negotiating partners became increasingly hostile to their presence in the regime’s national army. There was resentment among Ugandans that Rwandan refugees had too much power in the country’s economy, that Major-General Rwigyema had been promoted to army commander-in-chief and minister of defence and that Rwandans had played a role in the atrocities inflicted on civilians committed by the NRA during campaigns against Obote.28 Recognizing that Banyarwanda (people from Rwanda) were a political liability, Museveni began to sever ties.29 Rwandan refugees had been politically active in Uganda since the late 1970s when the community’s Rwanda Refugees Welfare Association (RRWF) became the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU). RANU is said to have opposed the divisive politics of Habyarimana’s Hutu nationalism. Operating in exile from Nairobi between 1981 and 1986, RANU changed its name to the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1987. The return of refugees to Rwanda was its central goal, although it was also a political group.30 Denying that the group was Tutsi-dominated, the RPF formed an executive membership committee incorporating 15 Hutu and 11 Tutsi, and received

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some support from those who opposed Habyarimana’s regime.31 In spite of this, the motives of the RPF were under significant scrutiny by both Rwandan and international observers and there was criticism that the movement was not doing enough to unite along common grounds with Habyarimana’s growing political opposition in Rwanda. From the late 1980s onwards, members of the RPF such as Aloysia Inyumba, who was appointed as the RPF finance commissioner, forged connections with the Tutsi diaspora groups in the Great Lakes region, Europe and North America. Zairean Tutsi raised funds for the RPF and many encouraged their young people to join.32 Following Museveni’s reshuffle, Rwigyema joined the RPF and created its military arm – the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA). Rwigyema died in combat days after leading the RPF invasion into Rwanda in October 1990. In interviews with Stephen Kinzer, Paul Kagame has indicated that the RPF’s decision to invade Rwanda was brought forward because of pressure from Museveni. While providing the RPF with military and logistical resources, Museveni played a double game and denied offering them support.33 Publicly, Museveni was growing increasingly impatient with the Rwandan refugee presence in Uganda although he did not believe that the RPF’s plan to invade Rwanda would work due to Habyarimana’s popularity both in Africa and internationally. Indeed, Habyarimana defeated the RPF with support from Zaire, Kenya, the Central African Republic, France and Belgium.34 Critics contend that the RPF invasion in October 1990 triggered the Hutu extremist drive to find a final solution to the Tutsi problem. There is no doubt that the invasion and threat of war contributed to the extremists’ call to develop genocide ideology in Rwanda during the first four years of the 1990s. However, this factor should not be viewed in isolation. The pressure to democratize, a growing civil society movement campaigning against the Habyarimana dictatorship, poverty, a lack of job prospects or social advancement and the collapse of the agricultural economy also led to extreme forms of political exclusionism. In February 1993 the RPF attacked again and came within 25 km of Kigali before being stopped by the FAR, with the support of French artillery. In the offensive, thousands of Rwandans living in the north-east of the country were internally displaced and sought refuge in central camps on the outskirts of the capital.35

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As a socialist-military group, the RPF recruited many women to actively promote its ideology, disseminate leaflets, establish welfare groups for refugees and provide health care for soldiers. Women were also recruited into the RPA to serve as fighters and some – such as then-Lieutenant Rose Kabuye, a former member of Museveni’s NRA – were involved in developing strategy and gathering intelligence. Kibeho From July 1994 onwards NGOs, human rights activists and the RPF voiced concerns that aid resource from the international community was facilitating the military operations of the former Rwandan government, the ex-FAR and the Interahamwe (later ALiR), who were based in the camps for internally displaced people (IDP) around Goma in North Kivu.36 These groups garnered the support of Mobutu’s central government and regional strongmen through which they received additional funding and weapons and launched a series of incursions into Rwanda.37 According to Rick Orth, the RPA army log recorded a total of 65 incursions into Rwanda between January and August 1995.38 While conducting these incursions, ALiR also launched attacks against the long-settled Banyamulenge Tutsi in South Kivu and recruited from the Hutu Banyamulenge to help carry out offences.39 Within Rwanda, killings and disappearances of both Hutu and Tutsi continued and violence escalated to a level that went unacknowledged by the international community who were focusing instead on national reconciliation and refugee repatriation.40 The international community’s failure to respond to the call of genocide in 1994 had resulted in deep mistrust on the part of the new Rwandan government, as well as frustration at the UN’s continued inertia in dealing with the mobilization of Hutu in the east of Congo. The RPF had called for the shutting down of the two IDP camps that had been established during France’s Opération Turquoise in July 1994 but took the matter into their own hands when, on 22 April 1995, RPA soldiers massacred at close range some 4,500 IDPs, although the official number of casualties, first announced in a press release by Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu, stands at 338.41 The attack drove thousands of Hutu

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exiles (predominantly women and children) back into Rwanda. Others fled into the forests and migrated westward towards Kinshasa. This journey was treacherous and many more died of starvation, disease and exposure. The exact number of those killed by the RPA who died en route or as a result of violence in Rwanda is contested, although Prunier suggests that the number of ‘missing’ IDPs following the massacre hovers at around 20,000.42 The Kibeho massacres strengthened the ex-FAR’s drive to reorganize. They formed two divisions, one based in South Kivu and the other in the Masisi region of North Kivu, where a force of over 10,000 troops made plans to ‘liberate’ Rwanda.43 The Rwandan government’s decision to massacre IDPs marked a turning point in the attitudes of international human rights organizations and some governments since, for the first time, it was clear that the new state was engaged in the kind of retributive violence that seemed to dominate politics in the Great Lakes region and had in part fuelled the Hutu extremists’ political ideology leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Wars in the east of Congo The wars in the eastern provinces of the DRC have been the tragic result of state failure, poor or irresponsible leadership, mass movements of populations, failed peace agreements, burgeoning illegal economies and political turmoil across the Great Lakes region. In the UK in the past two decades, the ‘Eastern Congo’ has become an umbrella term to describe fighting between multiple militias and ethnic groups within an apparently homogenous geographical space. According to the International Rescue Committee, by 2008 an estimated 5.5 million people had died of either direct or indirect consequences attributed to conflict including famine, poverty and diseases, although the exact number of casualties may never be known and continues to be disputed.44 A UNESCO report published in July 2005 suggested that ‘at least four-fifths of rural families in the Kivus have had to leave their homes at one time or another’.45 One myth – that war is solely the result of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda – predominates, giving rise to a yet more destructive myth: that conflict within the east of Congo,

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in the provinces of North and South Kivu, Ituri, Katanga and Orientale, is a continuation of long-standing ethnic war. Violence and insecurity were already present in the east of Congo prior to 1994 and were symptomatic of Mobutu’s declining power. However, the events that took place in the Great Lakes region in the early 1990s (in Burundi and Rwanda in particular) had a tremendous impact on the social fabric of the eastern communities. David Newbury has argued that conflict in the east of Congo stems from four distinct yet interrelated issues and should not be understood as the simple extension of the Rwandan genocide. The first concerns the legacy of the politics of President Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, where he operated through processes of divide and rule and fostered competition between regions. The second relates to Mobutu’s appropriation of ethnicity as a political tool, which led to subsequent redefinitions of ethnic labels. The third issue centres on the long-term disintegration of the Zairian state and over 20 years of popular resistance.46 Prunier marks the year 1990 as the turning point when, for the first time, Mobutu’s opponents structurally threatened his regime.47 The eastern provinces also have a long history of rebellion dating back to the 1960–65 Katanga civil war against the first government and colonial rule.48 Newbury’s fourth issue concerns the humanitarian crisis which began in Goma’s IDP camps in July 1994 following the genocide and the Kibeho massacre. Attacks by ALiR on Rwanda in 1996 led to the Banyamulenge uprising in October 1996 and provided Rwanda with the opportunity to invade the east of Congo in response to very real security threats. Joint Banyamulenge-Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) attacks in South Kivu marked the beginning of the first Congo war and signalled the meteoric rise of Laurent-Désiré Kabila as the new head of state, supported by Kagame and Museveni. At this time, a new rebel political movement formed in Zaire, the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaire (AFDL). Kabila was one of four signatories on the agreement creating the movement and was soon the AFDL spokesman.49 Prunier believes Museveni and Kagame had identified Kabila in their search for ‘suitable Congolese’ to assist them in mid-1996.50

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The AFDL, led by Kabila, began their Ugandan-Rwandan-backed war of liberation in the south-east of the country and methodically advanced, over a seven month period, down the Congo River to the capital Kinshasa, where in May 1997 they overthrew Mobutu. The overthrow was supported by pro-democratic opposition parties, most notably the Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS). As the AFDL advanced towards Kinshasa, anti-Mobutu Congolese who had been fighting against Mobutu for years joined them. In a surprise turn for the pro-democratic movement in Kinshasa and the west of the country, Kabila came to power and renamed Zaire the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The Rwandan and Ugandan-backed war of liberation was part of a strategy to gain control over the mineralrich eastern region.51 At the time, observers believed Kagame and Museveni considered Kabila a stooge who could be employed for political advantage and help secure the extension of an Anglophone eastern bloc. The first war also marked the entry of a number of other foreign actors into the DRC including Zimbabwe, Angola and Sudan, the Central African Republic and South Africa, and helped to strengthen the influence of the USA and the UK in the region. The second war began in 1998 when Kabila, under pressure from Congolese with political influence in Kinshasa, declared he wanted all foreign troops out of the DRC. Rwanda and Uganda turned against Kabila and invaded the DRC through the proxy rebel group Rassemblement Congolais pour le Démocratie (RCD), an anti-government coalition of former Mobutuists and former allies of Kabila. By the end of 1998, the DRC was effectively divided, with the east controlled by the RCD (supported by Rwanda) and the west controlled by Kabila’s government, supported by Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe. In July 1999 the Lusaka Ceasefire agreement was signed in Zambia by all parties, although fighting and crimes against civilians continued. In January 2001 Kabila was assassinated and his son Joseph Kabila took power in an instance of hereditary succession. Foreign intervention in the DRC continues despite claims to back various ceasefires, and members of the international community continue to profit from the Congo’s vast mineral wealth. The controversial UN Security Council Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic

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Republic of Congo, released on 12 December 2008, documented that the main importers of cassiterite and coltan from the east of Congo were Belgium, the UK and United Arab Emirates, which was also purchasing gold via networks in Burundi, Uganda and Kenya.52 In recent years, China has also stepped up its influence and trade in the Great Lakes region, and has established contracts for mining with the DRC government and the production of mobile phones with Rwanda. The conflicts in the eastern provinces of Congo are having an extreme impact on human security. During the Congo wars, first-layer players included Rwanda and Uganda. Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia were second-layer players who, according to Gérard Prunier, lacked interest in the RPF-FDLR conflict but saw Laurent-Désiré Kabila as a puppet. Third-layer actors constituted Libya, Chad and Sudan – Prunier attributes their presence in the DRC to their relationships between themselves, rather than with the core political actors. Fourth-layer actors such as Burundi and Central African Republic were involved because of geographical proximity, while sideliners included Zambia and Tanzania. Prunier lists two other players who were considered to have had powerful roles: Kenya – for allowing members of the Akazu, Rwanda’s former political elite such as Agathe Habyarimana, to reside and operate within its borders, thus perpetuating the organizational ability and propagandizing work of Hutu Power; and the highly influential South Africa – a silent actor seeking economic advantage.53 Following negotiations between the governments of the DRC and Rwanda, the Nairobi Communiqué was agreed on 9 November 2007 and both parties were to ‘take joint measures to dismantle the FDLR’, as well as disarm all military groups in the region. The Congolese government was to embark on ‘military operations against the FDLR’ where necessary as part of the disarmament process. The Nairobi agreement, which was mediated by the UN, the European Union (EU), the United States and the African Union (AU), was to be supported on the ground by the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), which deployed some 17,000 peacekeeping troops. Two months later in January 2008, the Amani conference in Goma followed a failed military offensive against the

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CNDP and led to the signing of an Act of Engagement on 23 January. All parties, with the exception of the FDLR who were excluded, agreed to the negotiations.54 By March 2008, the UN Security Council issued Resolution 1804 which ‘demanded that the FDLR immediately lay down their arms and submit to repatriation to Rwanda’.55 However, Africa Research Bulletin noted that by April 2008, some five months after the peace agreement was signed, it had come to be regarded as ‘no more than words on paper’. The bulletin reported that ‘armed groups were still killing and raping civilians, and fighting between the army and Rwandan rebels who did not sign the ceasefire’ had displaced thousands of refugees.56 Increased fighting from August onwards led to the breakdown of the Amani Peace Agreement by General Lawent Nkunda in late October 2008. Nkunda accused Joseph Kabila’s Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) of working alongside the FDLR and Congolese militia groups who constituted the Patriotes Resistants Congolais (PARECO) and hence failing to demobilize troops as agreed. In January 2009 Rwanda and the DRC renewed their agreement, a move which marked the official end of the wars. Under the UN operations Umoja Wetu and Kimia II, the FARDC and Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) were to jointly work together to dismantle the FDLR which in 2008 was thought to have 6,500 armed militia on the ground. In return, Rwanda would not support armed groups (the CNDP) and would secure the border between Rwanda and the DRC. As part of the agreement, Kagame placed Nkunda under house arrest in Rwanda. On 23 March 2009 former armed groups the CNDP and PARECO were transformed into political parties and the process of integrating their troops with the FARDC began. Some 6,000 CNDP combatants, led by new military Chief of Staff Jean Bosco Ntaganda, were integrated into the FARDC through an ‘accelerated integration’ process. According to former Special Representative of the SecretaryGeneral for the DRC, Alan Doss, the speed of this integration process, in addition to inadequate training, an apparent lack of funds available to pay soldiers and ongoing abuse of power with impunity by some FARDC troops, has led to significant problems.57 FARDC soldiers, with their various new recruits, continue to have direct involvement

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in the trade of supplying minerals to exporting houses located in the east of Congo. By March 2010, MONUC reported that FDLR reprisal attacks against civilians were continuing and a new joint operation called Amani Leo was launched with the aim of ‘consolidating the military gains of operation Kimia II’ and to restore state authority ‘in areas freed from armed groups’.58 Despite some successful military operations against both the FDLR and the Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which primarily operates in the Ituri region, the report noted ‘significant’ challenges remained such as ‘the persistence of serious human rights violations, including sexual and gender-based violence by the FDLR, the LRA and elements of the Congolese Army, including some who have been recently integrated’, in addition to the ‘illegal exploitation of natural resources’ and ‘intercommunal tensions compounded by population movements’ between the DRC (primarily North Kivu) and Rwanda.59 The DRC and Uganda also improved their relations and between 2009 and 2011 worked alongside Sudan to conduct joint regional operations in pursuit of the LRA. In May 2010 MONUC received an expanded mandate from the UN to reinforce the peace process and oversee the November 2011 presidential elections. Its name was changed from MONUC to the Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO). While recognizing the region was embarking on a new phase, political stabilization is believed to be MONUSCO’s main focus.60 The UN mission has been severely criticized by African states, and Congolese human rights activists in particular, for failing to protect citizens living close to its bases. Since the official end of the second Congo war in 2010, violence in the east of Congo continues to be fuelled by the long-term disintegration of the state, the informalization of politics and economy, and the informalization of regional and global trade networks. It comes as no surprise that the fight for land and resources, and for control over the informal mines, coincided with the rise in demand for electronics and mobile phones globally. While previously illegal mining was perceived to be the side show within a politically motivated war, there is now recognition that conflict and extreme human insecurity is a product of

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a brutal militarized regional economy. In this economy, vulnerable and exposed people – women, children and powerless civilian men – are subject to continued violations imposed by members of all key military operators.

Part II: ‘Ground Zero’ Directly after the genocide, those Rwandans who had not fled found themselves plunged into economic and social crisis. Rwanda went from having 60 per cent of the population living below the poverty line prior to the genocide to 80 per cent directly afterwards. Many survivors were orphans and widows, often left with the most horrific injuries and deeply traumatized. While aid from the international community was being pumped into the IDP camps in the east of Congo and Tanzania, Rwanda received comparatively less financial assistance. The lack of financial support was compounded by an error on the part of the RPF who had requested development aid, rather than emergency aid, not realizing the former would take longer to reach them.61 The previous regime, which had used public money and development aid to fund the genocide and purchase weapons, had left the country in substantial debt.62 The institutional structures of the government were in ruins, as were the legal and medical systems. Doctors, lawyers and other professionals were among the first to be targeted during the genocide and others had fled into Tanzania, Kenya or Zaire. Communications were down and much of the remaining population was not aware that the genocide had ended. Former director of Radio Rwanda Dr Willy Rukundo, now director-general of the Rwanda Bureau of Information and Broadcasting, observed in 2006 that while the RPF’s first broadcast occurred two days after taking Kigali on 6 July 1994, many regions did not have coverage because the ex-FAR had cut communications as they retreated westward.63 The major focus in the first months was on the resettlement of refugees from Goma, as well as the earlier caseloads from Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania; and rehoming orphans and reuniting children with families. However, there were reports that RPF soldiers were entering into Kigali and taking over houses, which sparked resentment among the remaining urban population. Prunier

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notes that many of these returnees were not peasants; they sought employment in the city and in the process pushed Rwandans out of urban areas.64 Members of the former RPF and current members of the government argue that Rwanda was left in such disarray and with such limited resources that the reconstruction of the state, its institutions, the economy and the rebuilding of communities led them to refer to the period directly after the genocide as ‘ground zero’. This is reflected in the statements made by those in positions of authority today, such as the aforementioned Dr Willy Rukundo: We inherited a society that had been uprooted – refugees were coming in, there were dead bodies on the streets. It was total confusion – a mess.65 Senator Aloysia Inyumba, who was made the first post-genocide minister of family and women affairs on 19 July 1994, concurred: We worked eight hours a day and were only paid rice and beans and petrol.66 However, the phrase ‘ground zero’ relates to the RPF’s project to rebuild institutions and government functions following war and genocide and should not be used in relation to post-1994 politics in Rwanda, or indeed Rwandan politics in the context of the Great Lakes region and in international relations. Following war and genocide, women and girls represented 70 per cent of the population in Rwanda, in part because a large number of Hutu men remained in the east of Congo. An estimated 36 per cent of women were widows, a 15 per cent increase from 1992; 130,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49 tested positive for HIV/AIDS and an estimated 35,000 babies were born following rape.67 Women and girls were also faced with a range of social problems including the stigma of having been raped, sometimes being ostracized by their communities, and the distress of having to give birth to an unwanted child. With a significant number of minors heading households, girls

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were particularly vulnerable to rape and SGBV and according to one survey, 80 per cent of girl heads of households had been abused or had fended off sexual abuse.68 The vulnerability of women and girls was summed up by Inyumba: Our mandate was to look into women, children and family issues. After the genocide, there was a large number of women who were homeless, internally displaced and had lost their husbands. There were women whose husbands were in Congo and wives of husbands who had been accused . . . they had to look after their husbands in prison. Young girls between the ages of 10 and 18 years were taken as sexual hostages in Congo and Tanzania . . . It was the first time we had young girls on the street – before we had had only street boys. There were young women who had been sexually abused, infected with HIV, wounded and with scars. Young girls who had been made pregnant were a big issue – they had to keep them because it was not legal to organize abortion and a big number of women had terminations. We followed up women in refugee camps and established a network with the returnée women to bring more refugee women back. We also tried to recruit people from the former ministry to give us more information.69 Rebuilding Rwanda In spite of the challenges of dealing with a society wrecked by war, genocide and false calls to democracy, Rwanda is developing at some speed, although this development has been met with its own challenges and extensive criticism. On 19 July 1994 a coalition government, based on the Arusha Accords of August 1993, was inaugurated. The new government of national unity at this time was genuine, in spite of the international community’s demand for it to broaden its political base.70 RPF Hutu Pasteur Bizimungu was the president, liberal Hutu Faustin Twagiramungu was appointed prime minister, Paul Kagame was vice president and minister of defence, while RPF Hutu Seth Sendashonga was appointed minister of the interior. The cabinet was made up of eight members of the RPF, four members of the

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MRND’s main opposition leading up to the genocide, Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), three Liberals, three Parti Social Démocrate (PSD), two independents and one member of the Christian Democratic Party.71 The two extremist Hutu parties, the MRND and the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), were banned and those of its leadership who were not in exile were arrested. At the local level, 145 new bourgmestres were appointed, of which 117 of them were Tutsi. The Rwandan government defined two phases which marked the transition from emergency planning to sustainable development. Phase 1 (1994–99) focused on resettling internally displaced people and returning refugees from previous eras of political violence; establishing the government of national unity; constructing houses in newly established settlements (locally known as imidugudu); establishing emergency programmes; enlisting women into peace building and establishing gender parity in politics at all levels. Phase 2 (1993–2003) saw the establishment of new institutions, policy and legal frameworks for peace, reconciliation and sustained economic growth, among others.72 In July 2000 the government published its overarching strategy ‘Rwanda’s Vision 2020’ which aimed to reflect the ‘aspiration and determination of Rwandans to construct a united, democratic and inclusive Rwandan identity, after so many years of authoritarian and exclusivist dispensation’.73 The vision set out how Rwanda would develop economically and socially over the next 20 years. It called for a reconstruction of the nation through educational and health reforms and the transformation of the agricultural sector. To reduce public debt and raise gross domestic product (GDP), the vision set as a target the development of a competitive market-led economy which meant implementing a dramatic transition from exporting primary goods to tertiary services.74 Another major focus was on building institutional capacity. The government was critical of the former regime’s reliance on foreign technical assistance which failed to build local capacities – a failure that was compounded by the shortage of competent personnel following the genocide and war.75 The vision is driven by President Paul Kagame who has gained as much criticism as admiration for his leadership capabilities. In a speech at the Economic and

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Financial Crimes Commission in Abuja, Nigeria, Kagame called for the reinvention of politics in Africa so that leaders are ‘held accountable and . . . held responsible for those they enlist to support them in the delivery of public services’. Kagame argued that good governance, building institutions and abolishing corruption will provide ‘African people with hope and opportunities for achieving their own goals in life’.76 The reduction in the level of corruption in Rwanda has been of particular note, and was one of the key requirements the government had to meet to ensure that its multilateral debt to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) was written off in 2005. A number of policies and institutional frameworks have been set out in support of Vision 2020. Reconciliation, justice and peace building are the central tenets of the post-genocide policy, with the end goal of engendering what the government terms ‘a culture of unity’. In policy documents concerning gender mainstreaming, the Rwandan government defines the concepts of peace, reconciliation, culture and gender as follows: Peace: ‘There is no single definition of peace. For some, “peace” has been understood as the absence of war, violence and hostilities . . . but also the enjoyment of economic and social justice, equality and the entire range of human rights and fundamental freedoms within society . . . For others, peace is viewed as a condition of tranquillity where there is no disagreement or dispute, where conflicts are banished, and people, individually and collectively, live in calm and serenity. A major shortcoming of this conception is its failure to recognise conflict as a way of life.’ Reconciliation: ‘a process through which a society moves from a divided past to a shared future.’ It is also a complex term and there is little agreement on its definition; it is seen as both a goal – something to achieve – and a long-term process. There is no such thing as a perfect reconciliation model or method. Culture: ‘the way of life of a given community in people . . . Culture, as a common denominator of the nation of Rwanda, contributes to the human and civic education of its citizens and has influence on the attitudes and behaviour of individuals and

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the society. It inculcates, in the citizens, values that are considered positive.’ ‘Positive values of Rwandan culture, which have been gradually and systematically eroded, deserve to be revived, underlined and adapted to the current context.’ Gender: ‘the socially constructed roles and responsibilities of women and men. It includes expectations held about the characteristics, aptitudes and likely behaviours of both women and men (femininity and masculinity). These expectations are learned and changeable over time, and variable within and between cultures. Gender refers to the socially constructed rather than the physical or biological roles ascribed to women and men. Gender roles vary according to socio-economic, political and cultural contexts and are also affected by other factors such as age, race, class and ethnicity.’77 Divisionism: Law no. 47/2001 defines divisionism as ‘the use of any speech, written statement, or action that divides people, that is likely to spark conflicts among people, or that causes an uprising which might degenerate into strife among people based on discrimination’.78 To some extent, many of the aims laid out in Vision 2020 are being realized: the government is working towards developing a knowledge-based economy and has aspirations to be an IT hub for the region. China and South Korea in particular are proving to be major investors. In January 2009 China signed a new trade and economic agreement with Rwanda which has brought Chinese firms into the country.79 Rwanda also became the Commonwealth’s 54th member on 29 November 2009, following two years of assessment and negotiations. Rwanda had made a previous application in 1996 which had been rejected. One source claims discussions recommenced in 2007 following an informal meeting between President Paul Kagame and the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth Don McKinnon at South African President Thabo Mbeki’s second-term inaugural lunch on 27 April 2004 in Pretoria, South Africa.80 According to one member of the Rwandan government, Rwanda’s primary reason for joining the Commonwealth was to promote its

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economic interests. Having recently joined the East African Community (EAC) and eager to better align itself to other trade developments in the region, Rwanda moved out of the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries (CEPGL) which was proving ineffective. The representative also suggested that there was a perception among Rwandans that the Anglophone way of doing things was ‘more progressive’ politically than the Francophone way and identified a number of countries which were believed to be stagnating. The representative suggested that too many African countries maintained a kind of paternal loyalty to their former colonialists and there was a tendency to fund large embassies in these countries rather than nurture new relationships in other countries where opportunities for government funding or private investment were more readily available. As for rejecting French Africa outright, the Rwandan government appears to have a more nuanced view, partly because most Rwandans still speak French and regard themselves as being very much a part of French Africa. According to the representative: The most attractive headline [in the international media] was that joining the Commonwealth was a way of leaving the Francophonie. You see this as leaving the Francophonie . . . but we are members of both – there is no contradiction.81

Part III: Political voice in Rwanda post-1994 Although the new national government of unity was considered to reflect the breadth of political parties that had campaigned against the Habyarimana regime throughout the early 1990s and was inclusive of Rwandans of all ethnicities, whether survivors or returnees, Francophone or Anglophone, the first decade after the genocide was marked by an increasing control over political space by the dominant party, the RPF. In particular, the political fallout following the Kibeho massacres of 1995 greatly altered the trajectory of Rwandan politics when Seth Sendashonga came to blows with Kagame in parliament and was subsequently fired, along with two other members of the cabinet, for questioning the RPA’s behaviour within the IDP camp.82

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The national army was still dominated by RPF soldiers, despite promises to integrate other Rwandan soldiers during what was initially a two-year period of transition. Both Sendashonga and Twagiramungu were placed under house arrest, before escaping into exile towards the end of 1995. In addition to Seth Sendashonga and Faustin Twagiramungu, a number of high-profile former government officials and politicians have gone into exile. Former Speaker of the Rwanda Parliament Joseph Sebarenzi believes his forced resignation and subsequent departure into exile in 1999 stemmed from his unwelcomed support for a new law giving parliament ‘oversight of the executive branch’ as a means to ensure checks and balances on government decision-making. Sebarenzi believes his departure was significant because he was ‘the first prominent Tutsi to flee the so-called Tutsi-dominated government’. His departure, along with that of others such as Kagame’s once trusted aide and former chief of staff Theogene Rudasingwa, who went into exile in 2005 and is now living in the USA, were ‘part of the wider pattern of forced resignations and/or exile of prominent politicians’.83 During the genocide Rudasingwa had been a prolific RPF spokesperson. More recent departures have included Lieutenant-General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who left Rwanda on 26 February 2010 and went into exile in South Africa, and former foreign intelligence chief of staff Colonel Patrick Karegeya. In 2003 Rwanda’s new constitution was adopted by referendum. The constitution decreed that the promotion of reconciliation and unity among all Rwandans was required in order to counter divisionism, in accordance with the 2001 legislation governing divisionism and its interpretation. Discrimination based on race, religion and ethnicity was banned in all areas of Rwandan life and refugees who had been displaced from 1959 onwards also had the right to return. The president, elected on a ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) basis, was given extensive powers under a seven-year renewable mandate, while the presidential government was provided with a strong executive, an elective legislature and judiciary. The prime minister is the head of the government and reports to the president’s office. The government itself is made up of the Upper House (the Senate) and the Lower House (the chamber

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of deputies), which are elected under proportional representation (PR). This system has been criticized for restricting democracy at the local level, since to avoid political violence, candidates can only campaign as independents rather than party representatives, whereas political parties can campaign at the national level. The first post-genocide multi-party presidential elections took place on 26 May 2003 and saw women enter into politics in significant numbers at all levels of society. Kagame won with a landslide victory of 95.1 per cent and, in the September 2003 parliamentary election, the party (as part of the ruling coalition) won 33 out of 53 seats. While the transitional government believed that Rwanda was not ready for a fully fledged democracy, there were reports of coercion, threats and disappearances in the lead-up to the elections. Former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu, who had returned from exile to campaign for ‘unity in diversity’ was accused of promoting divisionism and forced to flee the country. It was also believed that there were no true opposition parties since many of the smaller ones were ‘satellite parties’ of the dominant RPF. One-party dominance was also evident during the 2008 parliamentary elections and 2010 presidential elections. On 9 August 2010 Kagame won the presidential elections with 93 per cent of the vote, although opinions vary about the extent of his popularity within the country. Some observers claim Rwandans want peace and believe the country is progressing; others contend Rwandans voted for the RPF out of fear and coercion. Over the years, the RPF government has been met with criticism that citizens have limited scope to speak out against the current regime’s decision making around sensitive issues such as reconciliation. There is concern that the new constitution focuses more on what is not permitted than what should be encouraged and that the RPF government is using the threat of genocide as a way of retaining political control over the population. A second, related concern centres on the extent to which the current government operates as a military regime, rather than an elected government. Prunier makes an important point when he observes that the RPF military elite have a ‘highly militarised conception of politics’ which dominates their policies both within Rwanda and in the Great Lakes region. In this

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regard, the Rwandan government’s decision to invade the DRC was based more on previous military success and military prowess than on careful consideration of the involved social and political environment which constitutes the Great Lakes region.84 Kagame’s success in the presidential elections prompted a ‘group of prominent Rwandan leaders living in exile around the globe’, which include Rudasingwa and Nyamwasa, to form a new opposition party. Established on 11 and 12 December 2010, the Rwanda National Congress described itself as ‘an umbrella, broad-based organisation for all Rwandans to exert pressure and advocate for democratic change through peaceful means’.85 As observed, within the Great Lakes region, ‘ethnicity’ and identity formation have been politically and militarily mobilized in different ways in a variety of socio-historical contexts. Multiple wars continually trigger, in Lemarchand’s terms, ‘drastic reordering[s] of ethnic loyalties’.86 According to Lemarchand, the politics of exclusionism are defined as: The denial of political rights to specific ethnic or ethno-regional communities, most notably the right to vote, organise political parties, freely contest elections and thus become full participants in the political life of their country.87 Lemarchand lists other forms of exclusion which are used as instruments to ensure political exclusionism. These include economic exclusionism, characterized as the ‘denial of traditional rights to land’, and social exclusionism which ‘goes hand in hand with the erosion of traditional social networks and the collapse of safety nets that once supported the traditional social order’.88 In Rwanda, where a country and population continues to deal with the effects of extremist hate propaganda, there is a requirement to ensure that the rehabilitation of all groups of people is carefully managed. Yet if one group appears to receive greater government support and political voice than another, it is not surprising if the latter feels marginalized and excluded. Limited political space within Rwanda and the widespread circulation of criticisms against the current government provide political currency for

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violent opposition groups, such as the FDLR, who capitalize on other people’s marginalization, thus perpetuating Lemarchand’s model of violence and repression in the Great Lakes region. Rwandan women as promoters of peace and security Under colonial rule, Rwandan women were expected to adopt a reserved and submissive attitude in their role as wives and mothers and this was reflected in their education. In the 1980s Rwandan culture was extremely patriarchal and women were marginalized in the economic and political spheres.89 However, the post-genocide ‘ground zero’ ethos of the government chimed well with the women’s movement in Rwanda which had grown substantially in the early 1990s. According to Inyumba: The post-genocide and post-conflict era was an opportunity to start afresh. We thought through how family laws could be improved and now girl children can inherit. We did a big campaign on legal issues in cooperation with the civil society and [women’s umbrella organization] PROFAMA and the Ministry initiated the law. Part of the reconciliation strategy was to strengthen women’s organizations.90 Many women, particularly those who had returned to Rwanda following the 1994 genocide, or who arrived in Rwanda from Uganda and Kenya, having previously worked in international NGOs, campaigned to make gender a mainstream issue in political institutions. According to Angelina Muganza, who was the minister of state for skills development and labour (2006–08), prior to the genocide men had not demonstrated they were better leaders and in 1999 women initiated a programme called ‘Men can’t do it alone’.91 Gender-based discrimination has been challenged under economic and legal reform and, by law, women must represent at least one-third of parliament; in the parliamentary election of September 2008, 56 per cent of seats were won by women. Following the 2003 elections, a women’s parliamentary group was also set up. In addition to the inclusion of women in highlevel politics, mainstreaming women into decision-making processes

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at village, district and regional levels has been a major focus. In 1994 there were 13 women’s NGOs, but by 2006 their number had grown to 45. When asked about the role of women during the 2003 election process, Muganza summarized: Men had given up. People could see women victims organizing into associations, such as [widow’s organization] AVEGA. In January 1995 they organized a cry together, to console. After crying came talking and they started a programme to support widows and orphans. People could see that women were visible – on television, at annual conferences and electing leadership . . . The Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion (MIGEPROF) provided funds for every district to finance projects that aimed to build political will among women. Political will helps women psychologically – they don’t want to be defeated by death. We do what we can to build confidence. Now women are in parliament, in political parties and in the ranks of the army . . . Women from Nigeria, Chad, Malawi are coming to Rwanda to visit. UNIFEM [United Nations Development Fund for Women] organized women in those countries to visit and hear the good stories and to come and network with us.92 The government’s will to embed gender equality in the Constitution, Vision 2020 and accompanying policies reflects its awareness of the importance of engaging a large percentage of its population in moving beyond a culture that had once promoted genocide. While conceding that some women played an active role during the genocide, a study published in March 2005, which was ordered by the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission and conducted by the director of gender and family affairs, states that ‘the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a prerequisite for sustainable peace and development’.93 It continues: Traditionally women as a social category generally did not go into active service in war nor did they participate in any form of war instead they were the most credible agents of peace, supports and nurturers of life [sic].94

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Within the report, an official government-sanctioned interpretation of the history of Rwandan women describes them as ‘natural promoters of peace’ and this bolsters the government’s reasoning to integrate women into the reconciliation and peace-building process. Recalling the precolonial era, the report cites Queen Nyiratunga who ruled Rwanda for 18 years when her son Gahindiro was a boy, before remarking on the late Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana who ‘took the tough decision of challenging the former MRND-led government policy of segregating Rwandan children based on ethnicity instead of merit’.95 The report then argues that prior to colonialism, Rwandans shared a common language, cultural values and practices which varied slightly from region to region and, during this time, women were reportedly more empowered: Historically, women’s participation in politics and decisionmaking in Rwanda has been insignificant, specifically in high echelons although in the pre-colonial period, women in Rwanda played an important role in the country’s governance through the institution of the queen mother.96 The report also states that ‘some Rwandans believe that in their victimization and endurance, women bear the brunt of the genocide and therefore deserve a significant and official role in the nation’s recovery’.97 In addition to this, it is believed that the war and genocide impacted on women in specific, gendered ways that need to be addressed through their engagement.98 According to the Rwandan government, ‘many Rwandans perceive women to be better at forgiveness, reconciliation and post-conflict peace building than their male counterparts’.99 According to Muganza, the government also believes that the ‘traditional’ traits of Rwandan women enable them to be good leaders: In the context of Rwanda today, the values of listening, the values of dialogue and consultation, finding solutions to problems – we think women have these qualities. Advising, consoling are the type of things that are needed after genocide and women found their niche as leaders.100

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Today, the Rwandan government has established a gender desk in the national police force, the Rwandan army is given gender awareness training, and MIGEPROF is rolling out a country-wide strategic plan to campaign against SGBV. Rwanda’s justice system Following the Hutu extremist sponsored genocide in 1994, in addition to the public execution of 22 génocidaires by a firing squad on 22 April 1998, the RPF rounded up some 120,000 accused of taking part. The international community, acknowledging its role in neglecting the genocide, established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on 8 November 1994, whose remit under Security Council Resolution 955 was to hold to account the key architects of genocide and war crimes during the year 1994 (category one génocidaires). While the ICTR hoped to achieve ‘political justice’, there was also an end goal of establishing a new political order to halt the cycle of violent retribution in the region.101 From the start, Rwanda and the ICTR had a tense relationship. The international community seeking to retain its independence and to avoid Rwanda’s death penalty, decided to establish the Court in Arusha, Tanzania. The RPF were keen to see that the perpetrators were held to account while ensuring their own forces were not prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity – a move that led critics to argue that the ICTR represented a victor’s justice.102 One area of contention lies in the decision to confine the court’s remit to 1994 and not examine evidence of war crimes in the years prior to the genocide. The ICTR moved at a phenomenally slow pace, with individual court cases lasting years, and there was some disparity between the ICTR and gacaca – the legal process put in place to trial ordinary civilians at the community level. Rwanda had faced unprecedented challenges following the genocide, with the number of genocide suspects detained in its prisons costing US$ 20 million each year and some 10,000 of those detained had died since 1994.103 Based on a traditional system, gacaca (meaning ‘on the grass’) was established in 2001 to quickly bring to justice those accused of perpetrating genocide through local community decision-making.

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Gacaca aimed to prosecute ‘every individual genocide suspect regardless of seniority or social standing’, involve ‘the people who experienced the genocide at every stage’ and confer the duty of prosecution on ‘respected individuals elected by the local population’, while excluding professional judges and lawyers from official involvement.104 These local courts began winding down their operations in 2011. Phil Clark, who spent nine years observing the gacaca hearings, notes that from the outset international observers opposed gacaca on the grounds that the courts were ‘ill-equipped to handle complex genocide cases’, criticisms which Clark believes ‘reflect legal rigidity’ and a ‘limited understanding of the aims of gacaca’. International observers have been wary of cases of corruption including ‘bribery of judges and intimidation of witnesses, syndicates of liars who collude to hide evidence, and retraumatized survivors’. However, Clark contends that, while not perfect, the gacaca courts have facilitated openness in community dialogue – between suspects and survivors – and enabled democratic participation at community level, in contrast to the ‘tightly controlled’ national political arena. According to Clark, the government ‘did not fully anticipate the ramifications of allowing the population to shape the day-to-day running of gacaca’, which has ‘produced a sizeable cadre of skilled political practitioners with deep knowledge of the divisions and concerns within their communities’.105 Women in particular, who are ‘often among the most active and voluble participants during the genocide hearings’ have benefited. Despite having been excluded from the ‘traditional version of gacaca which dealt with family disputes and day-to-day infractions’, women have represented 40 per cent of judges, thereby providing them with greater social standing within the local community.106 Remembering the genocide A major project for Kagame’s government concerns remembering the 1994 genocide and with it the creation of a new national history – two highly political processes which are an integral part of their post-genocide ideology, informing both national and individual constructions of identity and citizenship. Johan Pottier has argued that the current

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government has taken advantage of the ground zero ethos to promote a new version of history which claims that in Rwanda all ethnic groups lived together in peace prior to colonialism. Pottier is also critical of the RPF government’s position as Rwanda’s ‘post-genocide spiritual guardian’ and their ‘exceptional skill at converting international feelings of guilt and ineptitude into admissions that the [RPF] deserves to have monopoly on knowledge construction’.107 Lemarchand has examined the extent to which the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has led to the reordering of collective identities, paying particular attention to new Rwandan narratives about reconciliation, justice, nation building and genocide. New identities in Rwanda have centred on the experience of genocide, where people may be defined as perpetrators, killers, bystanders, victims, saviours etc. In this process, histories become obliterated and replaced by official narratives that favour the current regime. For Lemarchand, the problem lies in the way in which war and genocide are remembered according to the ethnic lens through which they are narrated, although there are also widely differing ways in which individual members of a given ethnicity will perceive history depending on their own experiences. If one ignores the disparities between individual experiences, both the extremist Hutu and extremist Tutsi groups manipulate ‘the historical record for political purposes’, drawing on the victimology framework to exonerate themselves of responsibility for political violence – either before or since the genocide in 1994.108 Pottier and Helen Hintjens both assert that RPF-dominated narratives prevent the voices of the Hutu population within Rwanda from being heard. Hintjens argues that there is a selective amnesia at work, through which all Hutu appear to have benefited from the genocide in one way or another and all Tutsi are victims.109 The terms victim and survivor are restricted to those Tutsi and Hutu who were directly targeted during the genocide in 1994. Debating the concept of collective guilt, Nigel Eltringham says some exiled refugees argue that those Hutu killed by the architects of the genocide against the Tutsi have been neglected. In Prunier’s 2009 analysis of genocide and war in the Great Lakes region, he presents a series of examples of different victims to demonstrate the complex social relations in Rwanda in

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the post-war/post-genocide era. These include people who were Tutsi and found their homes taken over by Tutsi immigrants, a Tutsi businessman who funded the RPF during the war but disappeared under suspicious circumstances, a Tutsi RPF soldier who had a relationship with a Hutu woman before she was accused by his family of involvement in the genocide in order to prevent the relationship developing further, and a Hutu man of mixed parentage who, having fled to Zaire, returned to find that local Interahamwe militiamen had accused him of being a génocidaire.110 Eltringham suggests that, in view of the numerous types of victimhood, the segmentation of identities based on experiences during genocide is inadequate. One particular identity – the Hutu moderate – only appears to be used in retrospect (i.e. with reference to Hutus who either died or were saviours during genocide) and not in contemporary Rwanda.111 Critics also contend that the RPF government’s insistence that all Rwandans should identify themselves by their nationality rather than their membership of a particular ethnic group prevents diversity and difference, and this has proved particularly challenging for the minority Twa population, many of whom were victims during the war and genocide and historically are the most persecuted group in Rwanda. Representing just 1 per cent of the population, the Twa’s culture is perceived as threatened by the current government’s postgenocide ideology. Debates about how the Rwandan government is controlling national political identities has been met with criticism by Rwandan Tom Ndahiro, who provides an extensive assessment of the ongoing Hutu extremist engagement in rewriting history, describing their appropriation of historical narratives as ‘genocide-laundering’, enabling perpetrators to profit from impunity.112

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CHAPTER 2 RWANDAN WOMEN AND WAR

There is a broad consensus among feminists theorizing international relations (IR) that the international political order is hierarchical and privileges men. Typically sovereign states, militaries and international institutions are constructed as masculine, and political actors are assumed to be men. Women political actors are either invisible or made visible in specific ways that do not challenge the status quo. Traditionally, women have been denied involvement in inter-state negotiations and the few women who have achieved leadership positions are understood to have adopted ‘masculine’ qualities in order to succeed.1 The end of the Cold War led to the emergence of alternative voices within IR who were critical of the dominant approach’s preoccupation with ‘the four Ss of states, strategy, science and status quo’.2 As part of the ‘third debate’ within IR in the 1980s and 1990s, which included post-modernism, feminism and post-colonialism, feminists challenged the discipline’s positivism and contributed to unpacking the normative interpretation of global politics as a system of interactions between nation states. In the late 1980s Cynthia Enloe declared that ‘the person is international [and] the international is the personal’, demonstrating how women were very much involved in, and integral to, global politics.3 Enloe challenged the monolithic definition of power pervading realist IR theory which pushed to the margins those people who did not appear to fit the image of the (white, male) political actor,

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while at the same time ignoring ‘micro-pyramids of inequality’. Enloe argued instead that the sovereign state and global politics were formed and sustained through a series of relationships and power structures at all levels of society.4 In the process of exposing women, the numerous groups of men who operate in gendered power relations within the international system also came into view. Feminist theorists have since contended that a refusal to recognize gender hierarchies ‘makes IR scholarship less descriptively accurate and predictively powerful for its omission of this major force in global politics’.5 ‘Gender-neutral’ readings of armed conflict often ignore individuals and in doing so marginalize the ‘specific impact on people’s lives’. In privileging analyses of territory, resources and outcomes in relation to gains and losses, there has been a tendency to focus on men’s experiences. Men are perceived to be the central players in war, the ‘combatants, prisoners of war, generals, war planners, fighters, pilots, infantry’ and war criminals.6 In 2000 Enloe explored wider processes of ‘militarism’, which she defines as a patriarchal ideology with ‘distinctively militaristic core beliefs’ that serve to justify war and privilege certain types of masculinity.7 Militarization is ‘a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideals’.8 Whole societies can become militarized, although groups of men and women are often militarized in different ways – for example, as supporters, enemies, women of the enemy, soldiers on the front line, or workers contributing to the war effort at home. However, militarization does not require that all members of a society are militarized, or endorse militarization. In transforming individuals and societies, militarization ‘involves cultural as well as institutional, ideological, and economic transformations’.9 This process is administered through a series of ‘manoeuvres’ – the ‘efforts that military officials and their civilian supporters have made in order to ensure that each of these groups . . . feel special and separate’.10 In Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Enloe considered how (American) patriarchal military policies that inform men’s identities in wartime also inform the identities of women. Whether wives, girlfriends, mothers or prostitutes, women

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are conditioned to support war, privileging masculinity in the process. Women are supporters of war because their sons and husbands fight on the front line or because, as prostitutes and mistresses, they are economically dependent on the military. For Enloe, the military uses its status to define national security and in turn the social order. This ‘circular process’ relies on ‘gender definitions that . . . bolster ideological militarism’ where ‘racism and militarism become mutually supportive in such a national security state’.11 Enloe also defined militarization as a global process, examining the impact of militaries that have a global reach, such as the US and the UN international peacekeeping force, to uncover how women all over the world are affected simultaneously. In times of both peace and war, governments and their military institutions ‘need women to nurture the boundaries’ that separate conflict from non-conflict situations, war from peace and the home front from the front line.12 Within the context of national wars of liberation, government and military policies which militarize women (and men) are sustained through narratives that frame women’s accepted role during war, as well as ideals about femininity and masculinity. Women may be represented as passive victims, void of agency, but they may also be imaged as active citizens and political subjects, depending on the requirement of the ‘policy’.13 From Enloe’s Euro-American perspective, women are used as symbols to help portray an image of world order that depicts war as confined within certain areas (for example, Africa) or states across the world (Iraq, Afghanistan). Since the late 1990s feminists have been developing their own set of war question(s) and are examining how gender roles are changing in contemporary wars. The latest generation of feminist theorists are analysing broader aspects of gender, violence and war that previously had not been considered, including human trafficking, prostitution, asylum seeking, the human security of internally and externally displaced people during conflict and post-conflict humanitarian emergencies, the economic impact of war on both men and women, and the role of women as military and political actors in armed conflict. Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry consider how wider security issues and the role of women perpetrators of proscribed violence who operate outside conventional state-led military institutions are represented in

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public discourse. In Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics, they focus on women who are terrorists, perpetrators of genocide, war criminals and suicide bombers, and in so doing demand that violent women’s agency should be recognized. Women’s participation is very often a political choice, even if prevailing assumptions maintain that women are only violent out of (apolitical) personal choice.14 In this sense, women are both active agents in war and recipients/ sufferers of the impact of war. Conversely, as Sandra Whitworth notes, ‘the positioning of women and men as either combatants (men) or victims (women) has implications for both women and men’ in other ways. For example, women have more space to campaign for peace, whereas men’s campaigns are considered more ‘political’ and therefore potentially volatile, more threatening and more likely to disrupt the global political status quo.15 International recognition that women can be perpetrators of state-sanctioned crimes such as the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina reflects the more inclusive position in which women find themselves in contemporary international politics – although there is a view among feminists that women are only brought into the global political order in specific ways. The fact that women are the most frequently targeted victims of rape and SGBV in conflict, and are often the group which most visibly experiences suffering in conflict, reinforces the assumption that women are vulnerable and need to be ‘protected’ by (masculine) institutions such as the state, the military and the ‘international community’, whereas men do not.16 These feminists also move beyond earlier essentialist readings which assume that all women are victims during conflict, whether they are the enemy target or supporter of the ally (i.e. the wives, daughters and mothers on the home front). More recent trends in feminist theorizing of IR reveal that the power relations between genders are not universal or fixed. Adopting a social constructionist standpoint, feminists are examining how in global politics gender power structures are relational and that ‘hierarchies of power and dominance are constructed through social interaction and transaction between gender, ethnic, religious, political and other identities’.17 Sjoberg and Gentry note the contradictions that have arisen within feminist theory since attention

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has turned towards the study of violent women, who ‘disrupt the status quo of feminist images of liberated women as capable and equal, not prone to men’s mistakes, excesses or violence’.18 Conversely, these studies mitigate the tendency in feminist theory to simplify ‘characterisations of women and the forces that kill them’ and to glorify women as peaceful agents of positive change. Referring to Morrissey’s critique of feminist analyses of women who carry out proscribed violence, Sjoberg and Gentry remind us that we must be cautious not to deny the ‘short-comings in women’s socio-political behaviour’.19 This new generation of feminists are researching war ‘not just on theoretical grounds of agency and inclusion’ but, as Sylvester observes, ‘by taking up ethnographic methods of anthropology, and discourse analytic methods of post-structuralism to find out what women experience in war’.20 Feminists such as Megan MacKenzie, Miranda Alison, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, Annick Kronsell and Swati Parashar are at the forefront in progressing this work.

Part I: Race hierarchies, new wars and genocide in Africa Although the war studies wing of feminist IR is relatively new,21 feminists from the fields of law, anthropology, development studies, post-conflict studies and African studies have been writing about Rwandan women and war since 1995. Feminist studies on women in the Congo wars began in the early 2000s and generally focused on rape as a weapon of war and the problem of gender inequality in relation to post-conflict development, rather than women’s involvement in politics and experience of conflict more broadly.22 In the absence of theoretical frameworks that can adequately describe conflict in the Great Lakes region, many feminist scholars, in addition to development practitioners and human rights organizations, have been strongly influenced by the theoretical models of ‘new wars’. In response to the traditional Clausewitzean concept of war, and as part of the ‘third debate’ within IR, Kalevi J. Holsti and Mary Kaldor criticized traditional realist models of war, contending that they were too restrictive and failed to adequately explain contemporary postcolonial war. (Here, the term ‘post-’ is used in the strictly temporal

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sense since formerly colonized countries often continue to be under certain forms of imperial control or influence and cannot always be seen as being properly ‘post-colonial’). This shift in thinking occurred towards the end of the Cold War, when inter-state wars were said to be over and small-scale conflicts were on the rise. In The State, War and the State of War Holsti argued that, despite the emergence of a supposedly New World Order and the changing nature of conflict, the Euro-American-centric Clausewitzean concept of war continued to inform Euro-American policy makers, the media and the public. This particular image of politics reflected ‘the predominant forms of greatpower warfare within modern (post-1648) European civilisation’.23 State-centric emphasis on the Great Powers and ‘systemic characteristics such as global balances of power’ engendered a hierarchy between supposedly strong and weak states in terms of core (central actors in war making) and periphery. Although Clausewitzean models outline the concept of a war economy, they do so only in relation to state and inter-state systems which do not correspond with contemporary regional and globalized economies. The globalization of war, including the availability of weaponry and the rise of the information society, had shifted loyalties away from the state’s supreme sovereignty. Holsti also observed that knowledge of wars taking place in countries that had previously been colonized was limited. These wars had not been analysed seriously and were often theorized from a Cold War perspective that characterized them as wars of national liberation based on anti-colonial or communist ideology.24 National liberation movements ‘emphasized the oppression and depredations of colonialism rather than the principles on which the state should be based’ – an emphasis that ignored divisions of territory between rival colonialisms practising economic exploitation in the absence of a state-making programme, while at the same time neglecting the role of contemporary local and regional political and economic actors.25 Within this framework, much academic discourse and strategic planning research was conducted solely in the interests of Euro-American foreign policy rather than in a genuine effort to understand and mitigate conflict globally. The overarching assumption seemed to be that ‘Americans should better understand such forms of warfare if they

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wish to intervene effectively to protect their interests, however those be defined’.26 Following the collapse of the ‘balance of power’ there emerged in the early 1990s a post-Cold War pessimism that portrayed post-colonial war as an irrational unleashing of primitivism, despite evidence that hatreds and affinities arose out of specific socio-economic and political contexts. The argument was based on the premise that, regardless of colonialism, globalization and imperialism, conflicts were ‘just a manifestation of a more fundamental process’.27 In response to traditional IR models that reduced post-colonial war to primitive skirmishes existing outside inter-state relations and therefore beyond international intervention, Holsti coined the term ‘wars of a third kind’ or ‘new wars’. Three main criteria distinguished new wars from old: the purpose of war, the role of civilians and the institutions of war.28 For Kaldor, Clausewitzean-inspired models perpetuated a certain hierarchy of war, structuring it to fit the primitive/civilized binary.29 The difference between Clausewitzean war and new wars lay in the reconfiguration of the social relations of warfare, rather than on technology alone. Kaldor placed greater emphasis on the processes of globalization than Holsti, arguing that the biggest thrust towards globalization was the rise of information technology, the impact of government deregulatory policies established in the 1980s and the increasing influence of international actors such as journalists, human rights activists, NGOs, corporations, diaspora groups, terrorist organizations, security companies and independent mercenaries and entrepreneurs. The increased interconnectedness produced counter-connections and enabled a ‘contradictory process involving both integration and fragmentation, homogenization and diversification, globalization and localization’.30 In new wars, the conventional image of war between states, the separation of the home front from the front line and the clear distinction between military and civilian actors collapses into a blurring of the public and private sphere. Organized violence does not just take place in the public sphere, it pervades the private sphere where it is equally as political. Central to Kaldor’s concept of new war is identity, subjectivity and agency. For Kaldor, identity politics concerned ‘movements which

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mobilize around ethnic, racial or religious identity for the purpose of claiming state power’.31 Unlike realist and neo-realist emphases on nationalism as a means to strengthen the state, Kaldor argued that the process of globalization in the context of new wars broke up these ‘vertical organised cultures’. Actors operating separately from the state cede greater power in and through the economies of war.32 Kaldor therefore called for a new kind of identity politics, formed out of what she conceived to be a ‘decline in importance and legitimacy of political elite’, the growth of popular prejudices and the rise of new forms of political mobilization, often resulting from the need of various local and regional political actors to secure their own survival.33 She is clear that these new forms of identity politics should not be understood as degenerate, primitive or the legacy of some primordial nationalism: The new form of identity politics is often treated as a throw-back to the past, a return to pre-modern identities temporarily displaced or suppressed by modernising ideologies. It is of course the case that the new politics draws on memory and history and that certain societies where cultural traditions are more entrenched are more susceptible to the new politics. But, as I have argued, what really matters is the recent past and, in particular, the impact of globalisation on the political survival of states.34 Instead, the role of diaspora groups, improved education, a growing literacy and increased access to media (and social media) contribute to the formation of new identity politics, which are not specifically tied to a nation state. Within the changing nature of conflict, the globalizing factors inherent in intra-state wars, which take place within ‘weak’ states or during state failure, give greater prominence to actors without borders and ‘enemies without states’, even though conflict is itself in part fuelled by ‘globally exacerbated inequality’.35 A second factor concerning the emergence of parallel (global and regional) economies has also impacted on the formation of identities through generating new forms of trade. In times of conflict, the economy can both polarize and unite identities through a ‘mutual dependence on the continued functioning of the war economy’.36 Within these parallel economies,

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people ‘use the language of identity politics to build alliances and to legitimate their activities’. These networks are ‘linked to wars . . . they are transnational, linking up to international circuits of illegal goods sometimes through diaspora connections’.37 Wars in the Great Lakes region of Africa New wars theory has significantly advanced understandings of the complexity of contemporary conflict and has helped to shape the new security and development terrain. Crucially, the new wars thesis has drawn attention to the ‘economic underpinnings of intra-state wars’ and the way in which ‘warring parties – whether “rebels”, “insurgents”, or government forces – have adapted their strategies to a new “globalized” economic environment’.38 The theory has also brought to the fore the environmental and ‘human impact’ of war, including ‘patterns of human victimization and forced human displacement’.39 It emphasizes how, as part of the politics of resource control in ‘failed’ or ‘weak’ states, ‘aid, UN agencies and humanitarian NGOs’ are ‘an integral or “fixed part” of war economies’ since ‘relief aid in “new wars” is often an essential source of income for belligerents’.40 However, the new wars thesis has come under considerable scrutiny for depicting conflicts as ahistorical and for failing to ‘place individual wars in their historical context’, while at the same time not taking ‘proper account of the many insights offered by the history of warfare itself’.41 The new wars literature seeks to establish ‘broad trends’ across a variety of armed conflicts – both inside and outside of the African continent. Mats Berdal notes the importance of extrapolating ‘distinctive features of these wars as a category’, but reminds us that when ‘moving from case to case the historical and cultural specificity of each [conflict] is lost’.42 Similarly, Kaldor’s assertion that new wars are about identity politics, rather than ‘ideas’, ignores the socio-historical and political context of conflict, thereby inferring that new wars are ‘about nothing at all’. Here, the literature’s emphasis on ‘greed’ belies other factors that lead to and sustain war, including grievance43 – an important aspect of conflict in the Great Lakes region, where politics of retribution and the politics of inclusion/exclusion dominate.

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Scholars of African studies, who bring more nuanced understandings of the history of conflict in the Great Lakes region, have also found the new wars thesis problematic. These theorists are keen to avoid separating old wars from new wars, arguing that the two forms often overlap, operate in parallel or are part of an evolving continuum.44 Robert Jackson has contended that internal conflicts in Africa, often termed ‘civil wars, intra-state wars, or “new wars”’ have their ‘origins in domestic rather than systemic factors’ and are often a continuation of ‘old wars’.45 These wars usually contain fighting that ranges in a continuum ‘from large-scale and sustained conventionally-based warfare . . . to lowintensity guerrilla style warfare – such as the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Amy) insurgency in Uganda’ and may include ‘campaigns of genocide or “ethnic cleansing”’ – as in the case of Rwanda in 1994 or ‘the ongoing “slow genocide” in Burundi’. These internal conflicts may also develop into larger international conflicts.46 The different categories of violence presented by Jackson, while they may result in identical or similar outcomes in the way in which men and women experience war, take on new meanings when we consider the history behind their formations. Informed commentators such as David Newbury, Catharine Newbury, René Lemarchand, Johan Pottier and Gérard Prunier are continuously reminding us of the central role that the interpretation of history has played in sustaining conflict within the Great Lakes region. In ‘The Crisis of the Great Powers in the Great Lakes Crisis’, Newbury states: There is a danger that in focusing uniquely on the immediate atrocities, and in interpreting earlier history only through the lens of the current crises, we fail to situate these events in the ongoing social processes within the region, and fail adequately to account for the external factors involved.47 Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja points out that the label ‘Great Lakes region’ has become restricted to a core regional membership (the DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi), despite comprising nine countries including Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique.48 In this newly drawn map of the Great Lakes region, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has come to symbolize the ‘defining moment in the history

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of the region during the last decade of the twentieth century’, even though the disintegration of the Zairean state under President Mobutu Sese Seko should be understood as the first ‘major determinant’ of instability and conflict in the Great Lakes region because: The Congo under a capable and responsible government could have stopped the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, the second major determinant of instability in the region, or at least prevent the genocidal forces from using Congolese territory to launch raids into Rwanda.49 A failure to recognize, as David Newbury terms it, ‘convergent catastrophes’ neglects the role of regional militaries, regional and international actors and other nations in perpetuating the wars in the east of Congo. An understanding of the many different histories in the Great Lakes region therefore enables us to consider how citizens may find themselves caught up in more than one war over the course of their lives. Stephen Chan notes that Kaldor’s new wars thesis, or at least the way in which scholars have interpreted it, treats all conflicts in Africa – whether in the DRC, Liberia or Darfur – as the same. Dominique Jacquin-Berdal also observed that the generalizing tendencies of the new wars thesis has been ‘“deeply unhelpful” when it comes to understanding post-Cold War patterns of violence and conflict in Africa’.50 This era has been neglected by academics who appropriate new wars theory, even though privatized former ‘Cold War security services and intelligence outfits’ have found new employment and opportunities for private enterprises on the African continent, a trend that itself has its roots in colonialism.51 In this respect, the new wars thesis provides ‘a way of dealing with threat to the existing world order’, without ‘problematising the global order’.52 As Patricia Daley observes, an overemphasis on sameness across the Great Lakes region perpetuates ahistorical, tribal narratives which: attribute the interrelatedness of the violence in the region to the prevalence of a common ethnicity across colonially-imposed national boundaries which divided communities of Tutsi, Hima, Hutu, Ha and Lendu.53

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If new wars theory is not challenging the global political status quo, it has the potential to sustain race and gender hierarchies. Since 2000, new wars theory has been the dominant framework used by feminists theorizing conflict in Africa. Feminists have embraced the new wars thesis, with its emphasis on human security, because it has provided an alternative framework to ensure that gender-specific human security issues, including rape as a weapon of war, are incorporated into current debates on the new security terrain. However, without a serious critique of the new wars thesis, feminists theorizing women and war in the Great Lakes region have often neglected the history and politics of the region, the relationship between old and new wars, and the relationship between new wars and other types of war – for example, genocide – all of which characterize security dilemmas in countries such as the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. The generalizing framework offered by new wars theory, with its focus on sameness across conflicts, also images African actors in normative ways that sustain the global political status quo. Race hierarchies Despite the shift in perspective within critical security studies, mainstream IR and the Euro-American policy agendas in the 1990s and 2000s – both of which informed narratives about war in public discourse – continued to perpetuate certain images of politics about war and genocide which sustain race hierarchies. This of course was nothing new: David Long and David Schmidt remind us that the origins of IR theory lie in colonialism. US liberalist J.A. Hobson’s reading of ‘relations between the so-called developed and less-developed world’ demonstrates just how dependent many of the early IR theorists were on the discourse of colonialism. Hobson, who Long argues was ‘trapped in an imperialist and . . . paternalistic mindset’, categorized those who resided in the less-developed world as backward peoples or ‘lower races’ and ‘rendered non-western peoples the defenceless objects of liberal projects’.54 His endorsement of the colonial race hierarchy could not have been achieved without the ‘suspension of liberal principles of mutual recognition in international relations’, and was employed as a

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means to justify relations ‘between industrialised western nations and the African subjects of western imperialism’. Here, states of the more developed countries adopt the role of the parent (father) to support (develop) states of the south (the child). Long also demonstrates how in early IR theory the subjectivity of the people of the south was constructed in ways that feminized them. Long writes: From a feminist perspective, the metaphor of the parent-child relationship is in fact paternalistic in a more specific sense, that is, that the metaphor is of a stylised, masculinized father-child relationship, where a more distant and strictly teacher-pupil relationship is implied. It might indeed be argued that the discourse of paternalism feminizes as well as infantilizes the Other in order to create a domesticated context in which the usual rules of public order and propriety in international relations can be suspended or deferred, and coercive policies justified.55 African post-colonial theorist V.Y Mudimbe helps to explain how race hierarchies produced and sustained within the international system depict African actors in restrictive ways. Historically Africa has been coded as simultaneously exotic yet transparent in colonial discourse. To the colonialist, the African landmass unveiled itself as a space in which ‘disorder, the reign of evil, and the all-powerful force of false gods played themselves out’.56 In contrast to Islam and the Orient, Africa fitted into the Christian schema as the ‘pagan kingdom or field of disorder’.57 Representing melancholy, disease and irrationality but existing within the Christian universe, Africa was not the Other of the ‘West’ (as Edward Said’s Orient). Instead, Africa and its peoples were seen as proof of the evolution of man from primitive to enlightened individual. The division between the colonial and the ‘native’ still exists today in the grids of knowledge that separate the ‘civilized’ West from ‘barbaric’ Africa. The positioning of African political actors within a race hierarchy is particularly evident in the frameworks propounded by Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations and by Robert Kaplan in The Coming Anarchy, both of which were influential throughout the 1990s

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and served to depict African conflict as primitive, backward and tribal, in comparison to more sophisticated, modern conflicts in which America and European states were directly engaged.58 These images of politics implicitly rely on racial stereotypes which reinforce the global political status quo. They separate out those wars which the ‘West’ visibly appears to support (‘our wars’) from those wars that appear to be localized or devoid of ‘western’ state influence (‘other people’s wars’).59 In doing so, ‘western’ nation states are able to maintain the illusion of appearing to be the epitome of civilization and can perpetuate the image of guardian and custodian of humanity. In contrast, African politics – and conflict in Africa – appear to exist in isolation from ‘western’ politics, thereby leaving little space for citizens in countries such as the UK, France and the USA to understand the relationship between their own governments’ domestic policies and foreign policies pertaining to Africa.60 Race hierarchy is also implicit in genocide studies, a sub-field of IR. The legal definition of genocide was first coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to mean the ‘intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.61 Although mass murder is often a part of war, Lemkin believed that genocide was more dangerous than war and set out to coin a term which would be commensurate with the unique crime of annihilation. Lemkin was also concerned with people’s lack of ability to adequately describe the extent of the crimes that they had witnessed. The term ‘genocide’ was meant to describe ‘assaults on all aspects of statehood – physical, biological, political, social, economic and religious’, in addition to other types of destruction which had been used during the Nazi Holocaust. These include mass deportation, segregation of men and women to lower the birth rate, progressive starvation, economic exploitation and ‘the suppression of the intelligentsia who served as national leaders’.62 The UN passed the resolution to accept the crime of genocide in 1946 and today genocide is covered under crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the ICC. Following extreme cases of political violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the early 1990s, a large body of work has emerged which seeks to delineate specific cases, while drawing analogies and comparisons between cases

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with the view to identifying common acts during the genocide process. However, race hierarchy permeates this academic theorizing of genocide in a number of ways. Daley, in examining the application of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to political violence in Africa, observes that the convention is confined to western grids of knowledge. Ratified when many African countries were still colonies, the convention places ‘western’ powers at an advantage because the current definition of genocide excludes the imperial ‘suppression of political dissidents and cultural groups’.63 Much recent literature focuses on the ‘historical complicity of western governments in either sponsoring or through their “silence” sanctioning genocidal regimes in the non-western world’. However, few audiences in the ‘West’ challenge the image of politics which upholds western democracy as the epitome of civilization, placing western countries ‘above genocide’.64 Daley also observes that genocide is a twentieth-century phenomenon of ‘modernity’ and correlates with Westphalian state assumptions that ‘cultural and political homogeneity are desirable goals of the state’.65 The distinction between ‘western’ and ‘African’ genocide is compounded by the dominant position of the Nazi Holocaust within a hierarchy of genocides. Martin Shaw expresses concern for the continued prominence within academic and public debates given to the Nazi Holocaust, which is regarded as ‘a maximal standard that other episodes must reach if they are to be recognised’.66 Helen Fein argues that focus on ideological genocide – the greatest part of which is on the Holocaust – has led to a misuse of genocide comparisons. The Holocaust, because it is ‘regarded as the apotheosis of genocide’ and is the ‘best known in the western world’, becomes ‘the paradigmatic genocide for political manipulation of images and [for] revising the past’.67 Shaw suggests that the term genocide was ‘born in the wake’ of the Holocaust. Distortion occurs because the Holocaust is known both for its uniqueness and comparability, which reinforces the assumption that the Nazi Holocaust is a ‘hyper-genocide’, where other cases may be seen as ‘mere’ genocide.68 In addition, there is the tendency to look at genocides and other humanitarian crises ‘as if they are frozen in time’,

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or to believe that genocide is a crime that is committed quickly and has a clear start and end. Together, these factors lead commentators and observers to agree that genocide seems only to have taken place once a connection to the Nazi Holocaust has been made.69 The reliance on the Holocaust (a crime that is placed firmly in the West’s past) therefore positions the USA and western European powers at an advantage: condemning the crime of genocide and demonstrating that these nation states have ‘overcome’ genocide, these states once more assume the role of custodians of humanity. In doing so, they have some control over the decision making which determines what constitutes genocide and what constitutes war. In their role as custodians of morality, these states condemn crimes against humanity in Africa in such a way that implies that African actors operate in isolation to their western counterparts. The separation of ‘African’ from ‘western’ genocide therefore absolves western nation states from claiming responsibility or accountability in regards to ‘non-western’ (African) regimes. Genocide scholars have argued that the legal definition of genocide is too restrictive, in part because the debate has been confined to the fields of law and history which do not adequately allow examination of the intersection between politics, economy and society. According to William Schabas, the UN Convention has been ‘asked to bear a burden which it never intended, essentially because of the relatively underdeveloped state of international law dealing with accountability for human rights violations’.70 One major restriction of the UN Convention concerns the emphasis on intent, despite the conviction of a number of genocide scholars arguing that ‘a lack of intent need not detract from the reality of genocide’.71 For Shaw, emphasis on intent blocks serious investigation into the complexity of genocide and the interactions of individuals within a society gearing up to commit genocide. Shaw notes that within public and academic debates, there exists the assumption that ‘we should avoid using “genocide” for situations where there is not an attempt to destroy the group in a violent sense’.72 Greg Stanton and Helen Fein have considered how genocide might be better understood as a process rather than an act. Stanton outlines eight stages of genocide – classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, identification, extermination

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and denial.73 While these help to identify the early stages of genocide, there is rarely a time when genocide unfolds in a single process. Indeed, as Leo Kuper observes, genocides unfold in varied ways according to differences in socio-political and geographic conditions.74 Genocide in the context of war The assumption that genocide is a state-sanctioned act (frozen in time and rarely recognizable until it can be reviewed retrospectively) assumes that genocide can only take place under the auspices of a strong state. This again presents a narrow reading of genocide and obscures the way in which genocide may be a protracted process, often perpetrated in the context of war or where more than one war is taking place, and where both state and non-state actors are drawn into or contribute to the genocide process. Genocide itself has become a major aspect of wars where identity, ethnicity and other forms of difference single out an enemy civilian group. A nation state’s intent to commit genocide can occur in parallel with conflicts that are based on identity politics. For example, it is not possible to separate the rise of the Hutu extremist genocide ideology from the very real threat of the RPF invasion from the north of the country from 1990 onwards, but in this context, genocide itself was not solely a part of ‘new war’. The assertion that genocide is a process is further supported by the concept of ‘genocide by attrition’ which occurs ‘after a group is singled out for political and civil discrimination’ and when the right to life is threatened ‘through concentration and forced displacement’ and the ‘systematic deprivation of food, water, and sanitary and medical facilities’ as well as rape.75 Everita Silina takes a slightly broader view to argue that genocide by attrition is a ‘gradually unfolding genocide . . . characterised by a persistent denial of security to a group of people’.76 Genocide by attrition may occur in the denial of the right to freedom from sexual violence, as derived under international law from ‘ICCPR Article 3; ICCPR Article 26, CEDAW; The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC); Convention Against Torture; ICCPR Article 7 and UDHR Article 5’.77 The concept of genocide by attrition helps us to consider how the process of genocide may take place beyond

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the confines of ‘typical, narrower, interpretations of genocide’ and in the context of war. In particular, it provides additional analytical tools including ‘awareness of the unfolding nature of the phenomenon’, ‘the various attributes of genocide by attrition’ which ‘serve as a list of indicators’ of ‘unfolding patterns of discrimination and human rights abuses throughout the world’ and a reminder that the targeted group will ‘suffer long lasting consequences, some of which may not be apparent at the time the crime is committed’ – for example HIV/AIDS. Above all, ‘genocide by attrition brings to attention more gradual, perhaps widespread, and cumulative denial of human rights’.78 Shaw proposes that we move away from focusing on the genocidal actions of individual perpetrators towards ‘understanding the typical social relations of genocide (not just between perpetrators but between perpetrators and victims), and therefore the structure of social conflict that these set up’.79 Actors who commit genocide collectively are involved in military and political struggles led by complex and evolving government policies and violent institutions.80 Shaw views new wars as ‘genocidal wars’ and is critical of Kaldor’s underrepresentation of genocide in her theorizing.81 The crime of genocide was born in the context of war and preparing for war, and genocide, as violence against civilians, was rendered illegal in the context of the conventional Clausewitzean laws of war. However, the crime’s distinctiveness lies in the ‘fundamental nature of its departure from the legitimate conduct of war’.82 It is therefore misleading to define genocide as separate from the context of war because genocide often uses the same framework as war.83 In coining the term ‘degenerative war’ Shaw has argued that categories of violence can be distinguished only partially from one another. A key feature of this framework is the process of militarization and the use of military power in genocide. As in times of war, states preparing for genocide rely on militarizing their civilians in support of the nation’s armed forces.84 For Shaw, genocide is conflict between armed power organizations and civilian groups, where political subjects belonging to the nation state are militarized as enemies. Once defined as such, these groups of people are no longer civilians of the state, but ‘part of an aggressive, combatant enemy’.85 In contrast, Fein’s approach to defining genocide in the context of war focuses more on the role of genocide ideology. She argues

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that ‘despite the increased level of violence of modern warfare; we can still distinguish war crimes from genocide and crimes against humanity if we specify the criteria further’.86 Fein presents a paradigm which emphasizes the biological destruction of the enemy group, over and above physical destruction in times of war. For Fein, genocide is the: sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.87 Distinguishing between the extremity of genocide (in terms of a nation state seeking to annihilate its own populations), Shaw argues that there has been a reluctance among international actors to acknowledge the number of genocides that have taken place globally in the last 50 years. He suggests that the tendency to avoid using the term genocide is marked by a continued confusion of the definition within academia and the trend since the 1990s to provide replacement terms such as ethnic cleansing and ethnic conflict, as well as a series of other ‘-cides’ which have weakened the significance of the term ‘genocide’.88 Ethnic war may include civil war, wars of liberation and may also incorporate ‘ethnic cleansing’ – defined in the 1992 Bassiouni report on Bosnia-Herzegovina as ‘rendering an area ethnically homogenous by issuing force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area’ but not through the annihilation of people (even if their culture is threatened).89 Compounded by an uncritical ‘use of the 1948 Genocide Convention as their benchmark, despite some generally admitted inadequacies in its framework’, Shaw concedes: Officials, journalists and scholars have been quick to reinvent genocide in new terms. The most widely applied – but least coherent or useful is ‘ethnic cleansing’.90 Shaw calls instead for a return to Lemkin’s original interpretation of genocide to remind us that the ‘many new “-cides” are, in fact, the many

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sides of genocide’, stating that ‘terms such as “gendercide”, “politicide” and “classicide” . . . unnecessarily fragment the discussion of anti-group violence; when “genocide” can cover all forms’.91 Nevertheless, in conceptualizing ‘degenerative war’, Shaw risks reproducing certain images of politics such as the coming of anarchy, tribal warfare and ethnic conflict. The term degenerative war implicitly suggests degradation, backwardness and the return to primitive forms of violence and is particularly problematic when applied to wars in Africa. For example, conflict in the east of Congo is often perceived to be localized degenerative war or intra-state armed conflict wherein African countries and (international) politico-military groups such as the FDLR play a role. Whereas, ‘western’ states – America, France, the UK – appear to be peace-brokers, even if these states financially and politically profit from the illegal economies of the DRC. Shaw observes that genocide is an international phenomenon. However, ‘African genocide’, if construed as part of the process of degenerative war or new war, is once again set apart from ‘western’ genocide. The way in which postCold War conflict and genocide has been categorized in IR therefore impacts on the way in which conflict in the Great Lakes region of Africa is theorized. Most notably, African actors appear to operate in isolation to their ‘western’ counterparts, and Congolese, Rwandan and/ or regional political problems are imaged in isolation to the wider international political economy within which strategic military/political actors such as Joseph Kabila, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni or Agathe Habyarimana and Rose Kabuye operate. Victim-agents and perpetrator-victims The reluctance to position African and ‘western’ politics within the same sphere influences the way in which Congolese and Rwandan women are represented in feminist theorizing of conflict in Africa. In the past, gender relations have been largely viewed in simple terms and have focused on relations between black African men and black African women within a given geographical space on the continent, rather than in the context of globalization, which would bring to the fore the role of African diaspora groups in conflict, as well as the

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role of other international actors. An overreliance on theories of new war, degenerative war and ethnic conflict has meant that Rwandan and Congolese women’s experiences have become African case studies in the overarching narrative about women and war. Again, this has led feminists theorizing IR to interpret violence in Rwanda in 1994 and the east of Congo between 1997 and the present day in narrow terms, where the prevailing assumption seems to be that all black African women are victims of black African (barbaric, savage) male war. Meredith Turshen and Clotilde Twagiramariya incorrectly assume that conflict occurred in 1994 because of Rwanda’s ‘weak state’ status (i.e. politically weak and ineffectual governance arrangements) and image women as victims and/or spectators, rather than engaged (political) actors. Turshen and Twagiramariya depict a simple history of the country, focusing on the 1959 revolution, but arguing that the uprising occurred against colonialists rather than elite Tutsi and monarchists before confusing genocide with civil war, rather than seeing the two as distinct yet taking place simultaneously. In doing so, they endorse the coming of anarchy/ethnic conflict framework of analysis. They write: All Rwandans without exception suffered and are still suffering from the atrocities of the civil war that started in October 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded from Uganda . . . A group of extremists in the country turned the power struggle between the government, its opposition and the RPF, which was on the verge of resolution following the signing of the Arusha Accords in 1993, into a vicious and bloody ethnic war.92 In this ‘ethnic war’ (but not a planned extermination of civilians, including politically active Hutu or Hutu who opposed extremism) ‘levels of distrust were very high’, they write, and so the ‘war brought out the worst in people and a sense of neighbourliness was lost’.93 A more informed gendered reading might consider how genocide, as a militarized process and/or existing within the context of war, operates through power relations at all levels of society. This framework aligns with Lemarchand’s concept of the polarization of identities and the

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reliance on the politics of exclusion and inclusion as a primary means of war and genocide in the Great Lakes region, where the two forms of political violence sometimes run in parallel, and where victim-perpetrators and perpetrator-victims often assume more than one subject position. The focus on African women as victims of African male war prevents us from understanding how African women have agency and are free to act, even if they can only act within the confines of a situation that may render them victims. There is a view among some post-colonial feminists that, in spite of claims made by social constructionists who see gender as relational, academics and development or aid practitioners working from within ‘western’ feminist grids of knowledge foreground patriarchy as the universal oppression of all women around the world.94 Theoretical problems arise from inserting African women’s experiences into overarching feminist narratives about women and war. In the African context, the (male) subject is problematic because it assumes white subjectivity. But once we place sub-Saharan African women into their socio-cultural and political context (that is, recognize them as embodied subjects), we are faced with the problem of representing them as, in African post-colonialist Achille Mbembe’s terms, the subject of the Other. Mbembe considers how western preoccupations with body visibility upheld colonial sovereignty. The invention of the native by the colonizer rested on stripping the African Subject of its materiality and placing him/her within the realm of the symbolic, so that ‘he or she is nothing but an appearance’ of the physical body.95 Dissected under the colonial gaze, dismembered body parts of the native were renamed and categorized by the colonizer. The (primitive, dehumananized) colonized subject is reduced to ‘an embodiment’ not because it is ‘void of agency’ but because it is an empty void. The invention of the colonial subject occurs when the colonizer chooses to ignore (i.e. to not gaze at/listen to) certain human attributes in the native.96 In this form of violence, the native’s now symbolically dismembered body parts are reassembled to fit specific categories defined by the colonizer.97 Under Mbembe’s terms, the woman, as the Other of man, is not a Subject. As the Other of the native, the sub-Saharan African woman is also the ‘Object’. Doubly removed from ‘existing’ as a human, the sub-Saharan African woman appears to hold no use value for the colonizer unless

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she is seen to fit western definitions of either ‘woman’ or ‘non-woman’ (non-white). Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely her appearance that is of use to the colonizer. Many ‘western’ feminist scholars writing about Rwanda and the east of Congo, while recognizing and drawing from the diversity of perspectives within the discipline of IR to challenge androcentric discourse, have tended to reproduce race hierarchies in their theorizing of the global political order. Despite their call to move beyond essentialist readings of Woman, woman and women, ‘western’ feminists often perpetuate myths about Africa as the Other through their discourse on African women and war. In doing so, they assume that the image of the western woman is the norm and that all African societies are ‘male-dominated and anti-women’.98 The overemphasis on patriarchy in much feminist writing about Africa has ‘produced gross distortions and misrepresentations in the understandings of gender relations’ – most notably because they erase from view the role of women as political subjects.99 Imposing imperial grids of knowledge, concealed under the banner of sisterhood, these researchers ‘look for examples which fit the model’ and thereby objectify African women in ways that appear similar to those found in colonial scientific ethnography: unable to speak for themselves, lacking the ability to fight their own corner. Infantilized as such, the subjugated voices of African women are ‘silenced . . . along with their history of contestation, resistance and struggle’. Feminists who adopt ‘victimology theories’ often ‘lead to findings in conformity with the victimology model of the society’.100 In the process of ‘othering’ African women by ‘universalising women’s defeat’, many academics who write within western feminist frameworks recycle colonial myths about savagery, hyper-sexuality, prostitution, the beast of burden and barbaric violence to represent African women as existing within the heart of darkness, and in their helplessness constitute the ‘white woman’s burden’.101 Oye˘wu˘mi states: In creating this homogenous, downtrodden mass, differences and distinctions of age, class, rank, kinship affiliation, marital status, and seniority are ignored as if they do not exist . . . The need for white women to engage in this rescue operation is

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certainly made more urgent by this picture of naked and victimised African women.102 Whether unwittingly or not, many western feminist theorists have endorsed the Euro-American idea of man’s evolutionary progress, wherein the African woman is situated at the bottom rung of the evolutionary ladder. Both these factors result in privileging the production of western feminist discourse on Africa above African feminist/ womanist discourse, which in turn reinforces the marginalized position of Africa in the imagined global political order.103 Rape in African conflict A key area of western feminist theorizing where Rwandan and Congolese women have been discussed concerns the question of rape as a weapon of war.104 International recognition that rape and SGBV are war crimes and crimes of genocide has been one of the greatest achievements of recent feminist theorizing and women’s rights campaigning over the last two decades, although this recognition must also be attributed to the widespread and persistent use of rape and SGBV as a strategy in war since the early 1990s – the ‘backdrop against which feminist arguments for the recognition of rape as a weapon of war ultimately gained legal traction’.105 Analysis of the role of rape as a weapon of war during direct violence and armed conflict became the focus of the 1980s when feminists such as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Cockburn and Catherine MacKinnon considered how rape was employed in nationalistic struggles, wars of liberation and militarism as part of patriarchal society generally. Challenging non-feminist assumptions that rape was a ‘natural’ and inevitable by-product of war, this theorizing was further developed in the 1990s. Feminists also considered how rape committed by soldiers is ‘militarized rape’. Enloe contended that systematic rape occurs when the sexual violation of women is sanctioned by the military and employed as a tactic or ‘policy’. Militarized rape is therefore ‘administered rape’, although women can also be perpetrators. In asserting that militarized rape is systematic, feminists have argued that wartime rape should not be understood as simply primitive misogyny. Rather, rape is a political

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act implemented by militarized individuals and their superiors and all perpetrators should be held to account.106 Although there is no single agreed definition of what exactly constitutes ‘rape as a weapon of war’, Doris E. Buss suggests the term refers to ‘sexual violence as having a systematic, pervasive, or officially orchestrated aspect’, and not ‘random acts’.107 Paul Kirby posits that in the overall consensus that rape is a weapon of war, ‘differences in our ways of understanding and explaining it’ have been forgotten.108 Here, the DRC is one case study in his typology of rape. More recently, Baaz and Stern have examined militarized rape from the perspective of soldiers located in the east of Congo. Conducting in-depth interviews with members of the Congolese Government Forces, Baaz and Stern are challenging many of the stereotypes about African men in war and are covering new ground in feminist theorizing of war in Africa, for example, by exposing Congolese men’s responses to the inclusion of women in the armed forces.109 Rape and sexual violence in genocide While feminists began to theorize rape as a weapon of war, a subgroup of feminists considered how rape constituted genocide. Drawing on theories of genocide, these feminists assessed how rape and SGBV were mechanisms to annihilate a target civilian group. Beverly Allen, who conducted ethnographic research with Bosnian-Herzegovinian rape/genocide survivors in the mid-1990s, coined the term ‘genocidal rape’ to distinguish between rape in war and rape in genocide. For Allen, genocidal rape is ‘a military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide’.110 ‘All rape is related in that it derives from a system of dominance and subjugation’, but genocidal rape is set apart by Allen from other forms of rape. She writes of the ‘horrible difference genocidal rape makes’ in the ‘particular suffering it causes’.111 Methods include gang raping and repeat raping with the intent to kill, the insertion of blunt instruments into women with the intent to kill, and forced impregnation as a means to destroy an ethnic group – an act of genocide Allen herself believes ‘makes sense only if you are ignorant about genetics’.112 For Allen, however, genocidal rape more adeptly fits into definitions of biological warfare than current UN convention definitions. This

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is a particularly pertinent point in the case of Rwanda, where rape survivors recount that men raped to inflict women with AIDS – the intent to kill by means of a slow death, and signifying the longerterm destruction of the community – including the death of boys and men.113 The definition employed by the ICTR states that rape is ‘a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on one person under circumstances which are coercive’.114 During the Akayesu case in 1998, the Trial Chamber concluded that rape and sexual violence in Rwanda in 1994 did constitute genocide because there was evidence of the intent to destroy in whole or in part an ethnic group.115 However, it was the ICTR’s recognition that rape need not include ‘penetration or physical contact’ that moved forward international legal understandings of rape, since the act of perpetrating rape is not specifically male-gendered: women can also be militarized perpetrators of sexual violence, even if they do not physically commit rape. A key difference between feminists theorizing gendered genocide and feminists theorizing rape in African war lies in their focus: feminists theorizing war attempt to understand motives in order to explain how rape and SGBV are an integral part of war, although there continues to be a greater emphasis on armed soldiers as perpetrators. Feminists theorizing genocide focus on outcome – i.e. the intent to annihilate in whole or in part a particular group. As a result, feminists theorizing genocide take a much broader view of SGBV because they bring to the fore the role of civilian perpetrators of genocidal violence in the context of militarization, war and genocide. Fein has examined how the ‘conjunction of war, genocide and rape’ in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina has led to ‘modern innovations in instrumentalizing rape’, where the media and propaganda have been appropriated to gear populations into committing rape as part of the process of genocide.116 Genocide scholars have also considered the social, economic, cultural and historical contexts which lead to genocide and in doing so acknowledge how subjectivities and identities come into play in ways that have been neglected in feminist theorizing of women and war. Mahmood Mamdani observes that a key factor in political identity construction is what he terms ‘race branding’, where race is accepted as a transhistorical reality.117 Mamdani reminds us that the race-branding

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process that was so integral to Belgian colonialism in Rwanda continued into the post-colonial period prior to war and genocide in 1994. Body visibility was still central to the polarization of political identities, only this time it was not the colonialist who stripped Rwandan subjects of their material body and placed them in the realm of the symbolic. As part of the genocide ideology, Hutu nationalism claimed that (Hamitic Caucasian) Tutsi power was synonymous to colonial power, and Hutu power synonymous to ‘Black Power’. Since Tutsi were the ‘resident alien minority’, the general assumption among Hutu extremists was that ancient Rwanda had been Hutu and so should independent Rwanda.118 Genocide scholars who take a feminist approach have also examined how symbolism and rituals (often a part of the culture prior to genocide) are appropriated and subverted in order to facilitate annihilation of a group. In these cases, perpetrators and victims are required to ‘enact public performances of rituals of degradation’ as a means to destroy the community.119 Christopher Taylor, who has conducted one of the most comprehensive studies of the gendered nature of genocide in Rwanda to date, contends that academics often ignore or diminish the subject by depicting ‘social actors as mere bearers of their culture rather than its shapers’.120 The raping of women during genocide takes on symbolic meanings specific to Rwandan culture as narratives inscribed on the Rwandan woman move ‘from her body, to the household, to the extended family, to the nation in a seamless series of symbolically logical leaps, for all are posed in terms of bodily and social processes whose movement or obstruction are causes for concern’.121 On the whole, feminist genocide scholars have received a warmer welcome among their non-feminist counterparts than feminists theorizing IR and as a result have been drawn into richer debates that have broadened understandings of gender relations in both genocide and war. Adam Jones is critical of the way in which much feminist theorizing of genocide often equates ‘gender’ with women and in doing so neglects men.122 He calls for a more inclusive approach to gendercide, one that acknowledges that men are the first group to be targeted and therefore the primary victim group. Jones also criticizes the UN’s gender-blind definition of genocide, arguing that a gendered lens can

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help us better understand cultural and societal differences between genocides. For Jones, genocide is: The actualisation of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in whole or in substantial part, any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means.123 Similarly, Shaw expresses concern that feminist theorizing draws attention to violence against women but does not specifically refer to the extreme levels of violence inflicted on all citizens during genocide. He is equally sceptical of Jones’s term gendercide, where a specific gender is targeted, contending that Jones refers more to concepts of gendered victimhood and the ‘tendency of armed forces to target civilian men’, which Shaw regards as ‘one dimension of a broader genocidal process’. For Shaw, an attempt to destroy in whole or in part a ‘group of sexual orientation’ – for example, homosexuals in Nazi Germany – is more likely than targeting men or women in genocide per se. He continues: That genocide is gendered – women and men are targeted in particular ways relating to their gendered social roles, sexuality, age etc. – is an important insight. However, through this violence, the perpetrators usually intend to destroy not gender groups, but ethnic, national and other groups that they have defined as enemies.124 Elisa Von Joedon-Forgey shatters the commonly held assumption, inherent in feminist theorizing of rape as a weapon of war, that SGBV in genocide is primarily about men’s control over women. JoedonForgey suggests that survivor stories often describe genocidal violence as being ‘embedded in the most sacred aspects of their family lives’ and the ‘intimate ways in which génocidaires target their victims’. Finding the frameworks of atrocity and rape inadequate, Joedon-Forgey coins the term ‘life force atrocities’ to explain how the genocidal process is gendered. Genocide is a crime ‘whose perpetrators are uniquely

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preoccupied with wresting power from that mysterious force that accounts for human life’ and with that, its aim is to ‘break the ties that bind men and women’, family and community together in order to destroy the target group.125 By targeting ‘families as reproductive units’, perpetrators assault ‘the bonds of love, trust, and tenderness that tie individuals to one another’.126 ‘Genocidal rituals institutionalise the transgression of mundane social norms’: perpetrators ‘see their victims as part of a larger organic community’ and are ‘deeply preoccupied with generative symbols’. She writes: For perpetrators, these symbols – whether they are people of a specific status (such as marital, parental, or filial bonds) – are points of access to the ultimate threat, which is that power that continues to give birth to the community in the first place.127 In particular, génocidaires target households – the location in which genocidal attacks most frequently take place. Women are targeted because they are symbols of regeneration, but they are targeted in relation to the family unit. On a more practical note, women are more likely to be in the household at a point when civilian men are ‘more likely to leave home before violence reaches their communities to attempt to secure exit visas for family members, to join resistant forces, or to escape persecution’.128 Those civilian men who stay behind, however, may still be subject to the inverted rituals of regeneration performed on them by perpetrators, or may themselves be forced to perform. These include killing children, slashing open pregnant women’s bodies ‘and murdering their babies’, ‘raping people in front of other family members’ and mutilating men and women’s reproductive organs, among other forms of torture.129 In coining the term ‘life force atrocities’, Joedon-Forgey argues that the genocidal process ‘differs from other instances of mass atrocity, most notably war’ because ‘life force atrocities are not generic in nature’ and ‘are not synonymous with “rape” or with “sexual violence”, although they may involve both’.130 The concept of life force atrocities also helps to explain how the genocidal process can take place in the context of war, while at the same time serves as a warning that the genocidal process could evolve into

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a full-blown root-and-branch genocide. The concept also furthers our understanding of how women at all levels of society take part in genocide: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was charged with the crime of rape, among other crimes against humanity, thereby revealing her role in perpetrating life force atrocities and, ultimately, genocide. Within IR, most feminist discussions on war in Rwanda and the east of Congo tend to be based on the concept of new wars, but not genocide. A lack of engagement in the parallel discussions put forward by their feminist colleagues in the field of genocide studies is in part down to the long absence of war studies in feminist theorizing of IR. Sjoberg and Gentry, in their discussion on Pauline Nyiramasuhuko in 2007, made a conscious decision to avoid engaging with theories of genocide on the grounds that the word ‘genocide’ has been used as a ‘rhetorical tool’ to ‘sensationalise a particular conflict (or, in its denial, to encourage ignoring it’). In their view, ‘analysis of gender and genocide is even more underdeveloped and unknown’ and, while ‘important contributions’ have been made, they claim, genocide scholars have ‘thus far not formed a coherent dialogue’ and ‘many of the projects on gender and genocide focus too narrowly on a single aspect of gender and genocide – for example, rape of women or the killing of men – rather than gender and genocide more broadly’.131 Indeed, there has been no feminist debate within IR about the relationship between war and genocide in Africa. This vacuum is reflected in a failure to incorporate within many case studies a comprehensive analysis of the politics and culture of Rwanda and the DRC. Instead, there has been a reaffirmation of ‘western’ understandings of what constitutes ‘war’, ‘civil war’ and ‘anarchy’ in Africa. Despite Enloe being one of the first feminists to call for an investigation into the experiences of Rwandan women in the context of a planned genocide, her discussion on rape and SGBV in Rwanda in Maneuvers brings together a list of different situations where women suffer under a military policy to rape in times of war, but this list omits the specific cultural and historical factors which lead to rape as a form of genocide. Writing within the context of ethnic conflict, she states that ‘increasing numbers of Hutu women . . . became intensely woven into the state’s ethnicised system as mothers and wives of regular soldiers’ and touches

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on RPF refugee mothers’ patriotic responsibilities for ‘keeping alive, among the next generation, thoughts of a far-away “home”’.132 Either way, in both camps, ‘recruiting young men’ required ‘militia organisers to persuade the mothers of potential recruits’, suggesting that women’s primary role is that of the traditional supporter of the war effort.133 Turshen, in her paper ‘The Political Economy of Rape’, depicts mass violence in April–June 1994 as genocide, although no space is afforded to describe the gendered nature of genocide. She proposes that ‘systematic rape and sexual abuse are among the strategies men use to wrest personal assets from women’. If women owned property then militias (imaged only as masculine) would claim them as their wives ‘to legitimate the seizure of land’.134 However, Turshen makes no reference to the role of women in perpetrating and endorsing sexual violence in order to seize property and belongings, despite the reports of women robbing dead women, or condoning bogus marriage.135 Rather, it appears that the word ‘genocide’ can be used interchangeably with ‘ethnic conflict’. There is also an underlying assumption that women form an allegiance with other women because they are women. This reading does not adequately describe the gendered politics embedded in the act of perpetrating war and genocide in Rwanda and later in the east of Congo. In an area where state boundaries are porous, and where ethnicity and identities are highly polarized and politically mobilized, it is not always possible to assume that all women – including women survivors of genocide and war – unite. This notion is akin to the idea that women should ‘naturally’ be associated with peace, rather than war. Leatherman’s recent assessment of sexual violence in armed conflict recognizes the limitations of new war theory, the requirement to re-examine the history of conflict in the region from a gendered lens, and the need to contextualize conflict in the east of Congo in relation to the wider global trade networks which sustain the economic climate that is perpetuating extreme human insecurity, including SGBV. However, a discussion on whether genocide is taking place at the same time as war in the east of Congo would help to further challenge some of the conventional feminist frameworks which emphasize rape and SGBV over and above other forms of human rights abuses.

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Part II: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko: the subversive narrative in global politics On 18 July 1997 the former Rwandan Minister of Women and Family Affairs, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, was arrested in Kenya by the ICTR. At the time of the genocide and war in 1994, Nyiramasuhuko held a powerful position within the MRND government and regularly attended cabinet meetings where directives to incite the Hutu population were discussed. A member of the ‘Butare six’, Nyiramasuhuko was accused of staging a trap at a local stadium in Butare where Tutsi were sheltering under the protection of the International Red Cross. She also instructed militiamen, including her son Shalôm, to rape women and girls. On 24 June 2011 Nyiramasuhuko was convicted of conspiracy to commit genocide, extermination, crimes against humanity, rape and ‘violence to life and outrages upon personal dignity’ in the Butare region of Rwanda.136 Following Nyiramasuhuko’s arrest in Kenya in July 1997, the international media took a particular interest in her case because she was the first woman to be charged with committing the crime of rape during genocide. Carrie Sperling observed in 2006 that the press became ‘fixated’ on Nyiramasuhuko’s gender and asked repeatedly ‘how could a woman, a mother, a female that looks so feminine commit such atrocities?’.137 Citing Peter Landesman, Sperling explains how in 2002, when Nyiramasuhuko went on trial, the American press focused on her appearance, noting that in her ‘plain high-necked dresses that show off a gleaming gold crucifix’ the former minister looked more like ‘a school teacher’ or ‘someone’s dear great aunt’ than ‘a high-level organiser of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide who authorised the rape and murder of countless men and women’.138 Sperling reminds us that many women and girls ‘willingly and enthusiastically played important roles’, before arguing that Nyiramasuhuko is not an anomaly. Rather, public interest in Nyiramasuhuko ‘says more about [the] continued resistance to view women as equals than it says about her uniqueness among female peers’. Nyiramasuhuko challenges the commonly held myth that women are peaceful bystanders in conflict, unless they are forced to take part.139 As the first woman to be charged

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with the crime of rape in genocide, Nyiramasuhuko also shatters the myth that women are incapable of perpetrating sexual violence in conflict – crimes which previously had been understood to be perpetrated solely by men. Sperling suggests that the assumption that women are peaceful and less able to perpetrate proscribed violence reinforces the stereotype that women are ‘less capable than men’ generally and should be ‘confined to the roles of sexual objects of mothers’ and victims of sexual violence in war.140 Feminists have contended that myths about gendered roles are central to sustaining certain images of politics such as ‘the international system’, the ‘international community’, the ‘nation state’ and at a more individual level, the ‘perpetrator’. Conventional gendered narratives in public discourse uphold these myths to sustain an image of the global status quo. Women perpetrators like Nyiramasuhuko challenge these normative frameworks and in doing so destabilize the global political order. To counter their threat, new narratives single out and isolate women who commit violent crimes by presenting them as subversive. In the process, the women are objectified, their agency removed. As Sjoberg and Gentry note, ‘the women implicated in the narratives cease to be women and instead become a mother, monster or a whore, something other than a person’.141 In the case of Nyiramasuhuko, she is nearly always imaged as the perverse ‘mother of all atrocities’, guilty of persuading her 20-year-old son Shalôm to commit rape.142 Monster, mother, whore narratives eliminate ‘rational behaviour, ideological motivation, and culpability from women engaged in political violence’ and in doing so relign the global political status quo.143 Stephanie Woods points out that Nyiramasuhuko is ‘scorned’ for the crime of rape, which historically has been the ‘least condemned war crime’ in history.144 She is joined by other commentators who criticize the international media for promoting Nyiramasuhuko at the cost of rendering absent and silencing the five men who, alongside Nyiramasuhuko, were convicted and tried for committing genocide in the Butare region between April and July 1994.145 Nevertheless, violent women do challenge the status quo, in spite of narrative attempts to contain and categorize them in mainstream public discourse. Interestingly, during the ten-year period in which Nyiramasuhuko

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was on trial, feminists writing in the field of law and criminal justice expressed concern that Nyiramasuhuko’s gender might sway the jury and ‘influence the outcome of the trial’. Both Sperling and Woods were keen to expose how Nyiramasuhuko herself appropriated traditional gendered narratives and symbols, communicating them through her spoken words, actions and her appearance. Sperling and Woods demonstrate that attempts to categorize and confine violent women as subversive do not prevent these women from exhibiting agency. On the contrary, in the case of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, her attempts to influence international media discourse are very apparent. In August 1995, when interviewed by Hilsum in Zaire’s lakeside town Bukavu for a BBC Newsnight news feature on women perpetrators, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko denies genocide and appears more concerned about her own survival, contending that she promoted peace in Rwanda in 1994. Here, Nyiramasuhuko plays on classic ‘western’ and Rwandan ideals of woman as mother, educator and nurturer, and operates in a manner that seems worlds away from the military leader dressed in fatigues a year before: LINDSEY HILSUM: She was working in the social services section, drawing up plans to look after orphans and abandoned children. She said in April and May last year, she’d organized what she called pacification meetings. Her accusers, she says, are targeting all educated Hutu. The former minister only agreed to be interviewed with her back to camera, as she put it for security reasons. I asked her to respond to the allegations that she’d killed. PAULINE NYIRAMASUHUKO (via translator): I’m ready to talk to the person who said I could have killed. It’s not possible. I couldn’t even kill a chicken . . . I don’t know. If there is a person who says a woman, a mother, could have killed I’ll tell you truly, then I am ready to confront that person.146 Arguing that the extremist Hutu ‘pacification’ process was a genuine attempt to counter unlawful uprising among civilians, Nyiramasuhuko partakes in genocide denial – described as the eighth stage of genocide

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by Greg Stanton, but also constituting an inherent part of the genocide process and a central aspect of genocide ideology.147 At the height of the genocide in May 1994, The Times journalist Sam Kiley encountered Nyiramasuhuko at Kabgayi where the interim government had set up a temporary base, having retreated from Kigali. Nyiramasuhuko ‘told Kiley that the Rwandans were a peaceful people but that the militia had been armed in order to weed out “Tutsi extremist infiltrators” sent by the RPF. The Tutsi plan, she said, was to exterminate all the Hutu.’148 This degree of agency, which is revealed in the media narratives that recount the fate of Nyiramasuhuko, is not addressed by scholars who are more focused on exposing how women perpetrators of proscribed violence are stripped of agency in (predominantly ‘western’) public discourse. Drawing comparisons with another high-profile woman génocidaire, former president of Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavšic´, Sjoberg and Gentry argue that while the ‘prevalence of genocide since the end of the Cold War’ and the subsequent ‘horror and embarrassment in international politics’ has meant that male perpetrators, like their female counterparts, are also depicted in ‘monstrous and horrified terms’, women are nearly always depicted in narratives that aim to both sexualize and dehumanize them.149 However, theoretical limitations in their work at times make the very subjects of these feminist arguments disappear into a dominant ‘western’ discourse. This is particularly the case for women like Nyiramasuhuko who come from cultures which are conventionally perceived to be ‘marginalized’, such as Rwanda. Objectified within feminist theorizing, Nyiramasuhuko is reconstructed as Sjoberg and Gentry’s research subject: she has no voice and limited agency, except in her role as a perpetrator of proscribed violence. This pattern can also be found in ‘western’ feminist analyses of the way in which international media representations of conflict in Rwanda and the east of Congo are gendered. Where the victimology framework is appropriated, Rwandan and Congolese women are depicted as silent victims, members of the sexualized, downtrodden mass.150 Similarly Pottier, in his analysis of the RPF’s control over media narratives, does not consider how women as political subjects can often be responsible

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for producing powerful gendered narratives. Here women appear to be excluded from engaging in ‘high politics’ (including state-level politics) because of their gender. His interpretation ignores how power is not just gendered but operates on many levels: some women may find themselves in more privileged positions (and with more voice) than some men. The narrow focus so often present in feminist analyses of gendered narratives about war and genocide in Africa becomes more so when we consider how, in the process of foregrounding gendered hierarchies in global politics, race hierarchy is ignored, even though, within much feminist theorizing, the intersection of race and gender are noted. If we take time to consider how race and gender hierarchies actually intersect, a set of additional questions are raised: what is the position of sub-Saharan black African women within the global political order? What are the wider politics between nation states and non-state actors that lead to the representation of African women in specific ways and how do African women engage in these politics? How can we ensure that African women are seen to be (political) actors with agency, even when they are being subsumed into gendered narratives that posit them as victims? One step towards reconciling some of these tensions might be to stop seeing the process of constructing and representing subjectivity as closed and controlled by one set of political actors, and begin to regard it instead as a series of interrelated performances, incorporating both speech acts and body visibility. For Butler, there is more than one subjectivity: there is the agency of a man or woman, and the performed subject which they project when they engage with the world through both spoken and body language. The performed subject acquires its ‘own social temporality’ because it is defined by the context within which the person performs it, and the context within which the audience watches/hears the performance.151 This temporality and exposure to multiple readings strips the person who performs the subject of any sovereignty, since the subject itself does not exercise control over what it says – or is seen to be saying. Yet at the same time, the agency of the subject who performs cannot be denied. Butler’s emphasis on the performative nature of subjectivity opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between the journalist/producer/editor and the

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women and men interviewed in their footage or films about conflict in Africa. It reminds us that these people are performing according to how they wish to be perceived – a performance which is occurring at the same time as their actions and words are edited to fit alternative narratives. As Bronwyn Davies has observed in her writing on women’s subjectivities: Through taking up as her own the discourses through which femaleness is constituted, each woman thus becomes at the same time a speaking subject and one who is subjected or determined by those discourses.152 This helps us to ask questions about how women regard their own standpoint – either as victim-agents, spectators, bystanders or aggressors during war and genocide – and how this standpoint may influence the way in which they manoeuvre (perform a given subject-position) within public discourse. In other words: how do women, in engaging with the international politics of revisionism – whether to survive, provide evidence, prove their innocence, or to represent organizations and movements – influence mediatized narratives about victims and perpetrators of genocide and war? At the same time, journalists and filmmakers who attempt to image the Rwandan or Congolese woman’s performing subject do not maintain complete control over the process, so that it is still possible to evidence agency even if the original performance has been contorted to fit a new narrative about war and genocide in Rwanda or the east of Congo.

Part III: International politics of revisionism Without adequately addressing the parallel theorizing of genocide, feminists who write about Rwanda solely in the context of (new) war often find themselves ignoring key aspects of the genocide process itself: revisionism and denial. As in many contemporary wars and genocide, revisionism and denial are central aspects of conflict in the Great Lakes region at all levels. According to Stanley Cohen, when a political atrocity takes place, denial – a form of ‘self-delusion’ or ‘self-

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deception’ – is used by individual perpetrators and is present in the ‘official reactions by governments’ in response to ‘allegations about human right violations’.153 Narratives are central to the process of denial before, during and after the atrocity has taken place, and ‘the language used by the state to persuade people to do terrible things or to keep quiet’ often ‘reappears in responses to outside criticism’.154 Denial stories constitute the collective knowledge (the dominant narrative) concerning a given political atrocity, although there are ‘gradations of collective knowing’.155 In denying atrocity through processes of ‘denial of knowledge’ and ‘moral indifference’ (the absence of ‘appeals to conventional morality’), governments and other actors can become ‘collusive bystanders’. Official discourses of denial, which shield the nation state and politicians who had some level of responsibility for either perpetrating or preventing atrocity, are produced in international public discourse. Cohen observes: Governments respond to the global media, diplomatic channels, press conferences, refutations of Amnesty reports, UN special committees or the General Assembly. Their denials are sometimes justified: allegations may be exaggerated, reports unbalanced, details inaccurate, violations may happen without official knowledge. But words take their own, unanchored lives as they flit through the textual loop of report (claims) followed by government reaction (counter-claims), followed by further rounds of exchanges. The discourse grows, becoming increasingly self-referential, slipping on to the agendas of Washington subcommittees and into documents floating around UN offices in Geneva and New York.156 Over time, ‘events are assigned to “history”’ but the importance of historical narratives also comes into play so that ‘further denials become available: it happened too long ago, memory is unreliable, the records have been lost’. Although increased monitoring by human rights organizations and the rise of information technology (instant television footage, the internet, mobile phone footage, social media including Facebook and Twitter) have made ‘literal denial’ of real-time

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events more difficult, these mechanisms and new forms of public discourse actually enable the ongoing processes of denial attributed to the atrocity.157 This leads us on to thinking about how the media, as one major arena within which political discourse is generated and contested, is a site within which denial and revisionism takes place. Simon Cottle suggests that there is not one ‘mainstream mediatised public sphere’, but a ‘media ecology’ – a web of mediatized public spheres. Media institutions such as CNN and the BBC dominate the media ecology by maintaining a monopoly and representing the views of the elites. Marginalized or minority-interest groups and political actors negotiate mainstream media public spheres, but often find they have more voice in alternative media spheres such as the internet and social media, independent film, documentary film and independent radio programmes. These alternative mediatized public spheres provide a space wherein political actors can challenge the normative gendered and racialized narratives produced by elites, often garnering strong public support along the way to force a response from large media institutions.158 As Michael Chanan also states: The public sphere is not a homogenous expanse but a series of overlapping domains with their own particular interests – political parties, professional bodies, quangos, campaigns and pressure groups – which each tolerate different degrees of independent thought, novelty and challenge.159 For Cottle, the ‘new media ecology’ contains ‘more political opportunities for dissenting voices and views than in the past’ which are ‘communicated through complex networks linking alternative and mainstream media and communications flows’ to enable ‘possibilities for new forms of politics and mediatised protest’.160 Cottle also contends that much media theorizing produces ‘flat’ readings of representation which prevent us from fully comprehending the complex terrain of the new media ecology.161 Mediatized conflict is as much about performance as it is about spectacle: the study of mediatized conflict should focus on ‘how and why

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mediatised conflict’ is not only represented but enacted. The media plays a role in defining, elaborating and evaluating conflict as well as visualizing, dramatizing and narrativizing conflict, but it can also be understood as a ‘neutral’ ground within which conflict is ‘mediated’.162 Indeed, the rise of alternative media, the use of the internet and mobile phones by a range of actors – from protestors to terrorists – has changed the way in which the media is perceived. Increasingly, the media is a site within which the struggle for control over the dominant discourse on a given conflict – even by the less powerful – can take place. Thus the media is ‘capable of enacting and performing conflicts as well as reporting and representing them’; the media actively does something ‘over and above disseminating ideas, images and information’.163 Cottle’s framework for analysing mediatized conflict therefore sets out to consider various ‘different possible media roles, representations and arenas for the public display and deliberation of conflicts’ and explores ‘media performance or “media doing”’.164 His emphasis on performance enables us to consider how the media is a site (or mediatized public space) within which multiple political actors perform. By bringing Africa and the ‘West’ into the same analytical frame, we are able to see how political actors compete for control over (gendered) narratives about war and conflict in Rwanda and the east of Congo. For example, Pottier discusses how individual nation states – the USA, Britain, France and Belgium – interpret political events in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region differently, but contends that the Kagameled RPF government has had dominant control over the production of a ‘simple, easy-to-grasp’ narrative that presents an ‘unproblematic representation’ of politics surrounding the genocide, both before and after 1994.165 Since ‘international actors share with local stakeholders a propensity for simplistic visions, for de-contextualised, standardised accounts of what is going on’, both the international media and NGOs are manipulated. ‘We’ (i.e. audiences in the ‘West’) are ‘told to accept a particular version of events’ which are interpreted ‘globally as the African way of seeing and resolving things’. Such grand narratives, he explains, have ‘come to dominate western perceptions of, and attitudes towards, the [Great Lakes] region’ and the RPF government, as the elites in power, silence all other voices in Rwanda.166 Pottier

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writes about the spread of disinformation on the part of the RPF but confuses the ability of the Rwandan government to silence the voices of Rwandan people that reside within its national borders with those that operate elsewhere in the region and the world and who may be more influential if advising other governments at certain points in time. Pottier omits any discussion on the ways in which politico-military groups in the east of Congo and various diaspora groups globally are heavily engaged in counter-politics of revisionism: it simply cannot be the case that the current Rwandan government can silence all other voices. Rather, an analysis of the current Rwandan government’s struggle for control over the dominant discourse on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda should be undertaken in parallel with an analysis of how other actors seek to influence European and American media representations of war and conflict in the Great Lakes region – both before, during and after the genocide. There is therefore a requirement to consider how various politico-military groups and diasporas tap into, or fund the production of alternative media, to examine how these media and communications channels form part of the Great Lakes region’s media ecology, and how this media ecology overlaps and informs an ‘international’ media ecology. In addition, there is a need to consider the way in which Rwandan state-controlled mediatized public spheres (for example, TV Rwanda) have been contested or supported by diaspora and politico-military groups such as the FDLR and the CNDP. Since representation, memory and the revision of history are so central to the genre of documentary film, it is an important site wherein the politics of revisionism are performed. As Chanan observes, ‘politics are in its genes’: documentary film represents and records political events, and the act of creating and watching documentary film is as equally political as speaking within them. For Chanan, the documentary speaks to its audience as citizens, as ‘members of the social collective’167 and participants in the public sphere, and has the explicit aim to ‘mobilise the viewer as a social subject, situated in history’.168 As with the shift in the media ecology away from the absolutist control of those in power, documentary film is a mediatized public sphere – ‘a field of constant skirmishes between different strategies of debate and contestation’ and a ‘battle ground over social and historical truth’.169

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It provides space for marginalized and embodied voices to compete with those of the elites (i.e. governments and powerful institutions). The documentary film genre enables the production of new narratives about war and genocide in Rwanda and conflict in the east of Congo to ‘enter wider circulation, through the form of its advocacy and the articulation of the social actors who participate as subjects’.170 Despite its origins, documentary film is no longer a mediatized colonial sphere solely under the control of the ‘West’. Rather it is a ‘grey area’ – a post-colonial space where fact and speculation are confused, distorted and manipulated by competing political actors or groups of actors. These actors operate within the same grids of knowledge in the attempt to influence mediatized discourse on conflict in the Great Lake region and turn it to their political advantage. Documentary film is perhaps better understood as, to adopt the term coined by post-colonial theorist Mary Louise Pratt, a ‘contact zone’ – a site within which former colonizers and former colonized subjects interact.171 Nevertheless, the role of the filmmaker, the news editor and anchor in framing real-time news documentaries should not be forgotten. Although a media institution has control over the dominant narratives about war and genocide in Rwanda and east of Congo that feature in its news and current-affairs documentaries, it is still possible to see how within its media discourse other actors attempt to influence public discourse. The plane crash narrative On 5 August 2008 the Rwandan Mucyo Commission published a report into the role of the French government during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The commission had been established four years earlier when on 14 April 2004 the Rwandan cabinet ‘adopted a draft law establishing an Independent National Commission’ to collect evidence of the French state’s involvement ‘in all areas – in politics, diplomacy, media, judiciary and the military’.172 In the 337-page document, the commission accused France of financing the Habyarimana government, training the Interahamwe militias, and instructing French soldiers stationed in Rwanda to turn a blind eye when genocide was

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was taking place.173 The commission, chaired by the Rwandan Frenchspeaking former minister for justice Jean De Dieu Mucyo, had spent 18 months gathering information from Rwandan witnesses who had agreed to testify in public. These witnesses were residing in the former provinces of Gikongoro, Cyangugu, Gisenyi, Kibuye and Ruhengeri in late June, July and August 1994 when France established a buffer zone during Opération Turquoise. Of these 166 witnesses, 12 women testified to having been raped by French troops while they were seeking safety in the Cyangugu refugee camp following the genocide. The Mucyo report came as a very public response to the independently commissioned French Bruguière report published in November 2006 and focused on the unanswered question, ‘who shot down President Habyarimana’s plane?’. Acclaimed French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière began investigating the circumstances of Habyarimana’s death in 2000 ‘on behalf of the families of three French crew members who died on board’.174 In March 2004 the report was leaked and an article appeared on the front page of Le Monde, as well as in the international pages of the UK broadsheets.175 President Paul Kagame responded by publicly accusing France of supporting the genocide during the tenth anniversary commemoration held in Kigali, which led France’s Junior Foreign Minister Renaud Muselier to cut short his visit.176 According to Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, further leaks and tip-offs by French journalists and officials occurred around September 2006, two months before the report was formally published.177 Rumours claimed Bruguière had gathered evidence which confirmed that Kagame was responsible for planning the plane crash. The claims could not be taken lightly: Melvern notes that it continues to be ‘widely believed that whoever is eventually found guilty will carry the moral responsibility for starting the genocide’.178 According to Smith, the early release of information from Bruguière’s enquiry appeared to be a smear campaign: ‘It looked like there was going to be a bombshell [when the report would be officially published] . . . but that bombshell never came. If all was true and Kagame did [shoot down the plane], he would look like a serial killer and be implicated in genocide.’179 When Bruguière’s report finally emerged in November 2006, he called for Kagame to

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be tried and issued arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan officials, also said to have been implicated in the plot. However, it soon became clear that Bruguière’s evidence ‘provided few details’.180 As Melvern observed in 2008, ‘Bruguière’s team did not visit the crash site, had carried out no ballistic investigation, and did not interview the air traffic controllers on duty on the night of the attack’.181 Rwanda’s response to the Bruguière report was to sever diplomatic ties with France, expel the French ambassador from Kigali and recall the Rwandan ambassador in Paris.182 The Bruguière report received significant media coverage internationally. In Anglophone circles, it had long been thought that France’s involvement in Rwanda rested on its drive to maintain strong Franco-African relations. Habyarimana and Mobutu were considered to be key allies in France’s quest to prevent a new Anglophone regional bloc which would extend westward from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.183 Prunier has discussed France’s preoccupation with Rwanda, yet the extent to which President François Mitterrand took a personal interest was revealed in archived documents released in 2007 wherein officials privately claimed that he had been ‘obsessed with Rwanda to the point of interrupting cabinet meetings to talk about it’.184 The report therefore generated discussions that helped shape both Anglophone and Francophone discourses on Rwanda. By contrast, Rwanda’s Mucyo report barely received any media coverage internationally and certainly no front page coverage in the UK. It was immediately branded ‘unacceptable’ by France.185 This led researcher and freelance journalist Andrew Wallis to argue for the report’s legitimacy and to question what, in light of this ‘neo-colonial disregard for the lives of Africans’, we should learn from the Mucyo Commission.186 For Wallis, it was ‘disturbing’ that the international community could accept France’s ‘nonchalance’ ‘without any attempt to answer the specific charges’. Instead, Wallis regarded Rwanda’s report as a landmark moment in the post-colonial struggle over ownership of the discourse on Rwanda and the Great Lakes region: a small African country demonstrating it was prepared to accuse ‘a permanent member of the UN Security Council of complicity, and indeed participation, in genocide’.187

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The international struggle over the discourse on the plane crash operates on a number of levels and is one example of how processes of denial are played out in the international media. As Melvern states, ‘each side in the civil war blamed the other for the death of the president, and a vicious battle for the historical truth has been waged ever since’.188 Indeed, the narrative first appeared in Hutu extremist media just hours after the plane went down where ‘blame was laid squarely at the door of the RPF, with the Hutu radio station RTLM announcing that “Tutsi rebels” had assassinated the president’.189 This narrative has since been appropriated at the ICTR by génocidaires such as Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who has denied Hutu Power’s involvement in Habyarimana’s death, and this denial became the key tenet of his defence case.190 Melvern writes: The colonel and his fellow Hutu defendants portray the killing of the Tutsi as a furious and spontaneous Hutu reaction to the murder . . . [and] . . . claim that there is an international conspiracy to prevent any investigation into the crash so as to protect the leadership in Rwanda.191 The plane crash narrative is one of a number of sub-narratives that fall under the discourse on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. However, the narrativization of events reminds us of the role of individual actors and nation states in the struggle over ownership of the discourse on the Rwandan genocide. The representation of history and political events has played a central role for political actors within the Great Lakes region, where both geographical and discursive spaces have been subject to contestation and manipulation. In the context of Rwanda, debates around the correct ‘history’ start with the narrativization of pre-colonial society: Uvin observes that everyone disagrees ‘almost totally on the nature of precolonial social relations’ which has led to a polarization of histories that mirrors corporate Hutu/Tutsi divisions.192 The revision of history by numerous actors – namely politicians and elites – appears high up on the ‘outsider’ expert-anthropologist/historian agenda, in particular when examining the relationship between the politics of

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history and the construction of ethnicity. Academics have engaged extensively in debates on how mass media dissemination of historical narratives has contributed to ethnic polarization and preparing populations to commit genocide. For Catharine Newbury, violence can be ‘traced to intense struggles involving the politicisation of ethnicity and a perverse dynamic of violence and fear’. Conflicts have been ‘based in part on intellectual foundations, on mental maps of history’ which themselves have a long history: even before independence different interpretations of the ‘Revolution’ of 1959 were circulating in public discourse.193 A major contention in the politics of revisionism lies in the appropriation and reappropriation of academic narratives. Citing Uvin, Eltringham notes that while ‘there is no single “academic” version of Rwandan history’, ‘one can argue almost any position . . . and invoke a series of famous and not so famous social scientists to “prove” it’. The work of historians and anthropologists has therefore been subject to ‘reiteration, reinterpretation and refutation’.194 The question, therefore, centres on which narrative we should accept, and how ‘authority’ should be assigned amid ‘competing voices’. Despite differences in the interpretation of history, competing narratives ‘operate within a shared framework’ (i.e. the same grids of knowledge) and therefore ‘share a past’, even if certain political events are omitted or ignored according to the ‘history’ that is being constructed.195 The failure of conventional modes of analysis to understand how competing histories share a past is reflected in the historian’s failure ‘to investigate the relationship between narratives’.196 According to Lemarchand, the production of historical narratives and the relations between them constitutes the ‘revisionist agenda’ and is compounded by a series of obstacles that prevent us from obtaining an objective account of the events leading up to and during the Rwandan genocide.197 First, as Cohen suggests, our knowledge of critical events and contexts remains inadequate. Melvern observes that the lack of access to French government archives substantially hinders understanding of the extent to which France was involved in supporting the génocidaires, and their potential role in downing Habyarimana’s plane. According to Melvern, 2007 was the first year in which there was anything like ‘a substantial release of declassified material from

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the Mitterrand archives’. These documents ‘revealed how prevalent in French government circles was the belief in an “Anglophone plot” against France in Africa’.198 However, the release of some official reports and the retention of others merely add fuel to the revisionist fire, rather than enabling us to ascertain accountability for the murder of an African president. This ad hoc approach to the release of official government information – whether in France, Belgium, the UK, the USA or Rwanda – also troubles French scholar Jean-Pierre Chrétien, a long-standing expert on Rwanda and the PhD supervisor of Hassan Ngeze, an architect of Hutu extremist hate propaganda. Speaking of his concern for the continued revisionism surrounding the Rwandan genocide in France, and the gravity of the consequences attributed to this revisionism, Chrétien contends that the first requirement is to: open up a serious investigation into the archives of François Mitterrand – today officially closed – but, through inquisitiveness or favouritism, have been used since 2005 in a partial manner and without scientific rigour by partisan authorities here and there, or by journalists.199 Melvern is also deeply concerned by the lack of transparency of governments. She writes: The failure to conduct an international inquiry into the assassination [of President Habyarimana] is extraordinary, given the repeated calls at the time – not least from the UN Security Council. Initially, a formal request was made by the Belgian government to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), but while the missile attack on the plane was discussed at a meeting at the end of April 1994, further consideration was suspended until Belgium could provide information. To this day, as far as can be ascertained, neither Belgium nor any other government has supplied any information at all.200 This lack of concrete evidence has produced what Lemarchand terms ‘grey areas’ – sites where fact and speculation can be confused, distorted

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and manipulated depending on the individual biases of a given political actor, or group of actors.201 Referring to Belgian journal the Annual Review, Belgian linguist Didier Goyvaerts argues that ‘factual information’ such as ‘numbers, figures, dates – can easily be obtained elsewhere’ whereas ‘the information which is not strictly factual happens to be highly suspect. It reflects the one-sided sympathies of the editors and hence detracts from the potential value of the entire enterprise.’202 Lemarchand’s ‘revisionist agenda’ might better be understood as ‘the politics of revisionism’ – an ongoing process involving multiple actors locally and internationally, each with their own ‘revisionist agenda’, but often debating, contesting and manipulating the same issues (and narratives) from within the same grids of knowledge. As Eltringham concedes, ‘Each discourse attempts to establish closure and dominance over the other discourses, but is incapable of establishing a closed, stable, and fixed position.’203 The politics of revisionism is exceptionally broad in scope from, in Lemarchand’s words, ‘the outrageous to the plausible’, but it operates through a great range of communications channels including public debates, conferences, television news, radio broadcasts, websites, pamphlets, novels, journals, government policy, developmental and human rights reports, scholarly work and films. The plane crash narrative also highlights how discussions around whether or not the 1994 ‘Rwandan genocide’ was genocide or a continuation of civil war are central to much of the revisionist discourse on Rwanda and the east of Congo. Lemarchand has contended that ‘few events in history are more subject to controversy than the mass killings commonly designated as genocide’.204 The issue concerns a lack of ‘consensus of scholarly opinion about the precise meaning of the term, the different interpretations of the phenomenon offered by social scientists and the enormous emotional charge it carries’.205 The controversy which surrounds the definition of genocide has been a central component of all revisionist discourse on post-1994 Rwanda, with some arguing that there has been a double genocide of both Hutu and Tutsi in cycles of retribution and revenge violence. Lemarchand writes: ‘to this day, some Hutu extremists stubbornly insist that no genocide ever occurred, only a spontaneous outburst of violence in reaction to the threats posed by the RPF’,206 before discussing how the RPF

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have interpreted conflict and genocide. The extent to which the RPF committed war crimes and crimes against humanity both during and after the genocide continues to fuel this side of the revisionist debate, while questions about how the current Rwandan government control the dominant discourse on the Rwandan genocide and ‘manipulate’ international understandings of genocide and war forms the other. This study therefore examines how multiple political actors within the Great Lakes region and internationally appropriate politics of revisionism. Conceptualizing the politics of revisionism as a process helps us to expose multiple revisionist agendas and enables us to map the dynamics between agendas. To date, a number of academics have commented on the politics of revisionism and the themes can be defined as follows: 1. Between local and regional actors, and global diaspora groups: Within the Great Lakes region and among diaspora groups internationally, narratives about the Rwandan genocide are being appropriated by all sides to give credence to their political legitimacy, while at the same time condemn that of their opponents. For Thomas Turner, revisionism ‘often takes the form of fake documents’ to propagate ‘racist ideas’ that help fuel the continued polarization of identities within the Great Lakes, serving to buttress the political exclusion/inclusion dynamic.207 The process of revisionism involves circulating old myths, as well as new myths about conflict, genocide and ethnicity. The revisionist agenda therefore concerns the production of narratives depicting real-time political events, as much as it concerns pre-1994 history. Processes of memorializing and counter-memorializing genocide are an integral aspect of the politics of revisionism. 2. Between governments of the Great Lakes region and the ‘international community’: Kevin Dunn has indicated that Mobutu played a Cold War game between the USA and the Soviet Union and reappropriated colonial narratives to influence relations between Zaire and ‘western’ nation states.208 Pottier has undertaken the most extensive analysis of Kagame’s RPF government’s attempts to manipulate ‘international media’ depiction of events in the region by

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persuasively influencing journalists and other social commentators and/or controlling access to information in order to perpetuate ‘proRPF’ narratives about Rwanda and the east of Congo. Here, Pottier considers how the RPF are themselves perpetrators of human rights abuses, employing Rwanda’s status as ‘victim of genocide’ to influence foreign policy – most notably British and US. The relationship between local ‘perpetrator’ and international/outsider commentators and policy makers has been the most debated, although there is little time to consider how Rwanda, whether rightly or wrongly, is challenging the colonial legacy of ‘western’ ownership on the invention of Africa. The struggle for control over the dominant discourse between France and Rwanda, as played out in the Bruguière and Mucyo reports and the accompanying media coverage, demonstrate just how politically charged is the relationship between the two revisionist agendas. However, thus far, more space is given to discuss the ‘RPF’ struggle for control over the Anglophone/Francophone discourses on the Rwandan genocide, than to how other perpetrators might be involved in manipulating the ‘international media’. Over the years, the Hutu extremists in power during the genocide, the politico-military Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and the Congolese armed political group Congrés National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), all of whom operate in the east of Congo, had access to funding to develop and sustain powerful communications channels. 3. Within individual nation states: The Rwandan government, a post-genocide state, maintains control over Rwandan public discourse on the 1994 genocide. The government’s revisionist agenda has been much criticized by academics in recent years.209 Revisionist agendas are rife within Europe and the USA, with Belgium being particularly exposed. Goyvaerts, for example, notes that ‘today, in Belgium, it is almost impossible to write or talk about [the Great Lakes] region in Central Africa, and particularly about Rwanda, without triggering extreme emotions’. He continues: ‘To write . . . in any serious way is rather difficult, if not outright impossible, because the Hutu-Tutsi divide in Rwanda and Burundi is also seen to divide Belgium where it pervades

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all levels of society.’ According to Goyvaerts, this division is compounded by the ‘antagonism’ in Belgium between ‘Flemings v. Walloons and Catholics v. non-Catholics’.210 4. Between politico-military groups and the ‘international community’: Within the region, the FDLR and CNDP and others ensure, in their handling of the international media, that they are not seen to be held accountable for atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Here, the ‘international community’ includes the United Nations, human rights groups, international aid agencies and governments. These politico-military groups often dispute the public announcements and condemnations of, for example, MONUC/MONUSCO or the ICC. 5. Between academics: A series of ‘academic networks’ have formed that align themselves with various ‘sides’ – appearing to reflect ‘Rwandophone’, ‘Anglophone’ or ‘Francophone’ revisionist agendas, or appearing to endorse a polarized view of either history or current events that mirror the polarization of ethnicities in the region. This particular group of actors are pushed into a complicated arena where they may be accused of taking sides, even when they are attempting to present an impartial view. Overall, debates concerning academic revisionist agendas tend to focus more on ‘outsider’ expert accounts, than on those produced by African academics. 6. Between individual actors and the international community or nation state: As a means of self-preservation – whether for political or human survival – individual political actors manoeuvre to avoid being convicted of war crimes and other crimes against humanity. They may be former or current members of governments, perpetrators of genocide, witnesses, and bystanders, those who have fallen out of favour with a given political party or members of political parties. Both men and women, these actors may reside in Rwanda, the Great Lakes region, or elsewhere in the world and have access to new media including Facebook and Twitter in which to communicate at both the personal and international level. Another set of individual political actors who may be based in, for example, the USA, France and the UK include those who had foreign policy decision-making responsibilities in the early 1990s.

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The divisions and the accompanying emergence of networks and allegiances remind us that academics are not outsider commentators and are themselves highly engaged in the metaconflict. Jan Vansina is clear on the role of historians in this regard. He writes: Historians of the Great Lakes region cannot remain aloof from the momentous crisis in the area, both because the various parties draw them into it and because the foundations for the future historiography of this crisis are now being established.211 Lemarchand’s criticism of the inaccuracies in reporting basic facts about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda within much academic literature is shared by other long-standing academics. For Newbury and Newbury, ‘recent scholarly analyses’ (i.e. from the 1960s onwards) ‘do not seem to have had much impact outside a small circle of Rwanda specialists’.212 Pottier is particularly critical of what he calls naive ‘new academics’ whom he believes are easily sucked into the RPF way of seeing and representing things. Lemarchand, Newbury and Newbury and Pottier are right to caution against blindly privileging one historical narrative over another. However, they are perhaps too quick to dismiss the potential contribution of academics from other disciplines that are ‘new’ to the Great Lakes region. Certainly April 1994 represents the moment when an epistemological shift in scholarly writing occurred, signalling a movement away from inwardly focused discussions on Rwanda’s anthropological history towards debates around international responses to war, genocide, post-conflict situations and international law. Academics from a multitude of disciplines have taken interest, in particular from the fields of genocide studies, international media studies, international relations, conflict and peace studies, development studies, international law, and African postcolonialism. They have much to offer and many of them are keen to ensure they are engaged in the debates around the politics of history and ethnicity. It is this engagement in the politics of revisionism by academics that has meant that these published works continue to ‘exert strong long-term effects because they define what is relevant and thus pre-empt the agenda for future discussion’.213

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The plane crash narrative reveals how a given media ecology is not just a site within which the politics of revisionism are played out at an international level (i.e. between France and Rwanda). Individual actors who may have other loyalties and affiliations outside of the nation state and, indeed, respective politico-military groups, compete for their narratives to be heard. For example, Melvern uncovers the manoeuvrings of a former spy and alleged key witness, identifiable only as XXQ, at the ICTR. Melvern considers what prompted him to talk to either the Mucyo Commission or Melvern herself. ‘He said he was concerned that the “wrong” version of events had gained currency’, Melvern writes, before suggesting that XXQ was eager to ensure his interpretation of the sub-narrative was heard: more importantly, he wanted to exonerate the widow of President Habyarimana, Agathe Kanziga . . . many believed that in order to maintain her own profitable oligarchy, Kanziga had enlisted the help of the northerners in the army to rid the country of her husband.214 Here, it is worth pointing out that XXQ’s performance reveals how, in Enloe’s terms, the ‘micro-pyramids of power’ which inform the politics of revisionism and the production of narratives on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are gendered. Without unpacking the gender dynamics embedded in the politics of revisionism, there is a danger in assuming that all actors are men, and all women are apolitical, passive victims who suffer the consequences of the actions of men. Although some feminists theorizing IR may actively refrain from discussing genocide because the term is too contested, engagement in theories of genocide, genocide denial and denial of atrocities is required if one is able to determine how women like Agathe Habyarimana and Pauline Nyiramasuhuko are actively shaping narratives about war and genocide in the Great Lakes region – whether for their own personal gain or for wider political/ideological gain, or both. Further, we are able to establish how gendered narratives about war and genocide are an integral part of these international politics of revisionism. If, as Enloe suggests, the process of militarization depends on the development of gendered narratives that fix identities and shape the

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way in which gendered subjectivities are represented, the politics of revisionism, wherein narratives about war and genocide are manipulated and contested by military groups and their supporters, plays a crucial role. Enloe’s term ‘manoeuvre’ deftly explains how individual actors sustain militarization, bringing to the fore a range of narratives that have heretofore remained at the margins of academic discussion. These actors include not only those military groups with less power, or less influence in a given mediatized public sphere, but other marginalized interest groups. Non-military operators such as NGOs, social commentators and human rights campaigners may produce gendered narratives that can be reappropriated by military operators for their own military or political gain. These groups of actors all partake in the gendered politics of revisionism, even if their end goal is to prevent war. Since militarization is a conflation of local, regional and global processes and since multiple groups of people can be militarized – and can militarize – we are able to challenge the assumption that militarization is controlled by nation states alone. Militias can also militarize populations even if they do not hold monopoly over the process. The flipside, of course, is that in exposing how individual actors manoeuvre, we are also able to see how mediatized narratives about war and genocide in the Great Lakes region are challenged. The framework used in this study moves beyond Enloe’s focus on the survivalist strategies of disempowered women who manoeuvre during times of conflict, since this would only represent women as victims with agency, thereby ignoring women who play a significant role in supporting war at the level of political strategy as well as more privileged women who profit substantially from war – and profit from the suffering of less fortunate (less powerful) women and men. Rather, ‘manoeuvring’ incorporates women (political) actors who operate within, or negotiate with governments, politico-military groups, diaspora groups and international institutions, including the international media.

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CHAPTER 3 MILITAR IZING WOMEN, PR EPAR ING FOR GENOCIDE: HUTU EXTR EMIST M AGAZINE K ANGUR A 1990 –94

Even if hate speech works to constitute a subject through discursive means, is that constitution necessarily final and effective? Hate speech is an act that recalls prior acts, requiring a future repetition to endure. (Judith Butler, 1997) Between April and July 1994 thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu women were raped, gang raped and mutilated in Rwanda. Witnesses and survivors testified repeatedly to the brutality of these rapes by the government army, militia groups and men and boys from the women’s own communities. Some testimonies report other Rwandan women’s complicity in rape – by telling men where women were hiding, goading men to rape, even disabling victims so that they could not physically escape rape. While rape and SGBV have been among the many forms of life force atrocity perpetrated during the genocide, there is evidence that the threat of rape was mediatized in Hutu extremist propaganda and formed part of a wider process to militarize Rwanda’s population into committing genocide. This chapter focuses specifically on images featured in the propaganda magazine Kangura, a mouthpiece

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for the extremist party Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), the Hutu-extremist political party whose members included some of the most puissant architects of the genocide. Meaning ‘Wake Up!’, Kangura was particularly explicit in its use of sexual politics and was used as evidence at the ICTR’s Media Trial (2000–03) to convict three Rwandan newspaper and radio executives, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze and Ferdinand Nahimana of direct and public incitement to commit genocide and extermination as crimes against humanity. The three were sentenced to life imprisonment.1 In 2007 the Appeals Court acquitted all three of conspiracy to commit genocide, extermination as a crime against humanity and the genocide charges relating to their editorialships of RTLM and Kangura. Barayagwiza’s verdict was reversed. However, Nahimana and Ngeze were still found guilty of direct and public incitement to commit genocide and their sentences were reduced from life imprisonment to 30 years. A number of studies have considered how Rwandan Tutsi women were represented in Kangura and other extremist Hutu media in the early 1990s. However, if we consider how mediatized propaganda supported the Hutu extremist efforts to militarize the Rwandan population to commit genocide, it is possible to observe how efforts to mobilize Hutu women took place in tandem with efforts to single out and alienate Tutsi women. In particular, Kangura’s appropriation of Rwandan sexual politics helped the Hutu extremists to reposition Hutu women who at the time were campaigning for genuine democracy. This analysis is based on archival research conducted at the educational centre Iwacu Kabunsunzu in Kigali, Rwanda in 2006. A total of 37 out of the 54 editions of Kangura published between November 1991 and March 1994 were analysed using discourse analysis. Whilst in Kigali it was difficult to gain access to a complete collection of Kangura, since many issues were destroyed immediately after the genocide by survivors and repatriated Rwandans the editions accessed, which span issue numbers 4–54, give some insight into the militarization of Rwandan women. Within the Great Lakes region, ethnicity and the politics of exclusion/inclusion are in part born out of the appropriation of colonial

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stereotypes. As has been well documented, interpretations of corporate Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities in Rwanda, Burundi and east of Congo are based on the European Hamitic Hypothesis and the Great Change of Being hierarchy developed from British John Hanning Speke’s theories of race evolution. In the case of Rwanda, these theories categorized ethnicity into two groups: the pastoralist Tutsi (who were recorded as being taller, leaner, of superior intellect, with high brows, thinner noses and lips) and the Hutu – classified as shorter and stockier agriculturalists with flatter noses.2 The stereotypes were strongly based on the visibility of Rwandan men and women’s bodies as they were represented within the Belgian colonial sphere. During the 1933–34 official Belgian census, all individuals were classified as either Tutsi or Hutu and were assigned identity cards. Mamdani notes that the most common reading of this division between Hutu and Tutsi was made on the basis of the ‘ten cow rule’, which labelled more wealthy members of the population Tutsi, although Tutsi continued to be defined on the basis of bodily traits.3 In accordance with the Hamitic Hypothesis, Tutsi were believed to be quasi-Caucasian, superior to black Africans (the Bantu) and closer to their white counterparts. Tutsi, who were alleged to have descended from a mythical Egyptian race, were thought to have travelled down from North Africa with their cows to establish a new kingdom.4 The classification of the foreign Hamitic Tutsi was born out of a disbelief that, in the words of Prunier, ‘“totally savage negroes” could have achieved such a degree of political and religious sophistication’.5 The history of Tutsi invasion and conquest was perpetuated during colonial times by Tutsi chiefs to justify their elite position within Rwandan society.6 Yet during the movement towards independence in the 1950s and the switch in Belgian colonial support from the Tutsi elite to the Hutu masses, the story of foreign invasion was reappropriated to justify Tutsi exclusion from politics. As Mamdani observes, the shift meant that ‘Tutsi who existed at the top of local hierarchy in the pre-colonial period . . . found themselves occupying the bottom rung of a hierarchy of alien races’.7 In addition to the categorization of people according to physical appearance and origin of race, there emerged under colonial rule a host of stereotypes

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about personality and behaviour: Tutsi were thought to be arrogant, secretive, cunning and untrustworthy; while Hutu were considered honest and hard-working but intellectually inferior.

Part I: Gendered images of politics in Rwanda Understanding how Rwandan women’s subjectivities are mediatized in the international politics of revisionism requires us to consider how political actors fuse together local images of politics with wider global gendered discourses. In the context of the 1994 genocide, Christopher Taylor stresses the importance of factoring in the ways in which gendered images of politics specific to Rwandan culture were appropriated by the Hutu extremists. Taylor explores how historically Rwandan symbols and rituals concerning fluidity/blockage and fertility based on the woman’s body cemented Rwandan identity and conceptualized both the community and nation. Power was manifested in the ritual of the Mwami’s (the king’s) ability to create flow, but equally to obstruct. State violence becomes personal violence, manifested in the rivers, flows and channels of the body, blood and cleansing. Impalement also symbolized the reconfiguring of bodies through torture ‘in order that they may become the categorical abomination’.8 Taylor’s research indicates that within local communities, disorderly bodily flows including premature birth, haemorrhagic menstruation and reduced lactation are often associated with blockages in national political relations.9 John Mutamba, who in 2006 worked in the Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion (MIGEPROF), has indicated that the Rwandan woman’s traditional role as custodian of morality was imprinted on her sexualized body; it would be claimed that a woman who was pregnant outside of wedlock symbolized immorality and disruption in the community – a problem that was resolved by killing both the woman and the man who made her pregnant.10 Erika Baines examines the way in which the Hutu extremists employed these socially defined roles to control and ‘discipline women’s sexuality and behaviour for the good of the nation’.11 Baines observes that examining the links between the woman’s body and that which in western feminist theory is considered the private sphere helps to explain why the Hutu extremists encouraged

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the raping of women, who in Rwandan nationalist discourses had previously been imaged as ‘sexed’ but not ethnicized.12 Rape and other forms of life force atrocity in particular were used to subvert the former colonial stereotypes that posited Tutsi as superior to Hutu and Twa. Rape in genocide also symbolized the subversion of former Tutsi rule when Tutsi overlords took Hutu women as their concubines.13 Baines suggests that the raping of women in public and forcing women to walk naked in open places symbolized the public humiliation of the Tutsi community.14 Yet the act of raping then killing (raping to annihilate) Tutsi women also symbolized the purging of the Hutu nation state. Extending this process to Hutu women who were married to Tutsi men, or who had both Hutu and Tutsi parentage also served to render pure the Hutu state. Hutu Power and the growth of democracy The early 1990s saw the onset of democracy following internal opposition and pressure from the ‘international community’ and France’s President Mitterrand. Habyarimana introduced multi-party politics and drew up a new constitution in June 1991, although the first transitional government was largely made up of Habyarimana’s MRND members. As was the post-Cold War trend across Africa, and in line with the international community’s shift in priorities for Rwanda, from development to democracy-as-development, Habyarimana renamed his party Mouvement Républicain Nationale pour le Démocratie et le Développement (MRND). That the party retained the same acronym is significant: its new manifesto continued to follow the dictatorial regime’s power by translating the Hutu majority into democratic majority. It preached that all Hutu were automatically members of a ‘naturally’ democratic party. In spite of this ideology, a growing number of opposition parties burgeoned, including the Hutu-majority party of the south, the Parti Libéral (PL) and the Partie Social Démocrate (PSD). This reinforced a long-standing regional divide between the Hutu of the north (Habyarimana’s stronghold) and the Hutu of the south, as well as divisions between Hutu clans. An article published in Africa Confidential in November 1989 indicates the underlying political tensions and the

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weakening position of President Habyarimana leading up to the 1990s. The article also reveals the tensions between two Hutu clans, of which one was the clan of President Habyarimana’s wife Agathe Kanziga: There is an atmosphere of fin de règne in Rwanda. The corridors of power are the scene of a fierce power struggle between on the one hand the Ruhengeri clan, which includes the Foreign Minister Casimir Bizimungu, and on the other hand the clan of presidential wife Agathe Habyarimana, nicknamed Kanjogora, the name of the famous queen in Rwandese history. President Juvénal Habyarimana is seen as being dominated by his wife’s clan and by the army . . . both these factions are competing for influence over the president . . . It is being widely speculated that the president may either be overthrown or obliged to submit to a peace coup which leaves him as the head of state while the real power lies elsewhere.15 According to J. Berchmans Habinshuti, former personal assistant to Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, there was an overall restlessness among the students and the urban population towards Habyarimana’s regime, and people were working together against the ruling party.16 Restlessness was also brought on by mass unemployment – particularly among young men – poverty and poor state support for ordinary people. The RPF invasion in 1990 contributed to the instability, when Hutu from the north-east of the country fled south and settled in refugee camps around Kigali. A second invasion by the RPF in 1993 is thought to have increased Hutu extremism across the country. The early 1990s saw the growth of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Iwacu Centre, a long-standing farmer’s co-operative established in 1978¸ played a particularly important role in promoting democracy and organizing non-violent protests. Iwacu was particularly powerful because it held influence in all communes. The political activism of farmers constituted the mobilization of the majority of the population and therefore became a very real threat to Habyarimana’s dictatorship, not least because from the late 1980s onwards the severe

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economic crisis and drop in value of cash crops had plunged average rural people into extreme poverty. Habyarimana’s requirement to keep farmers on his side is reflected in his speeches across the decades, where he argues that the development of Rwanda lies in agriculture.17 In the late 1980s and 1990s Rwanda was an extremely patriarchal society and women had limited political, economic and social power. In particular, women had no land and inheritance rights, although increasingly they were taking up positions of authority, with some becoming financially self-sufficient.18 Baines notes that this sparked resentment among unemployed young men, the majority of whom were Hutu, observing that while Tutsi men were blamed for their loss of employment, attacks against educated, urban, employed women were on the rise and Tutsi women were believed to use their stereotyped traits of trickery to seduce men into securing them jobs.19 Women’s organizations became increasingly vocal within the burgeoning civil society. From the late 1980s to 1994, 13 women’s groups and NGOs were operating under the umbrella organization PROFAMA, which promoted women’s peace and development. Members would travel the country educating women to better understand their rights. Women’s NGO the Association for the Defence of Women and Children’s Rights (HAGURUKA), established in 1991, was particularly active in encouraging the women’s movement, although at the time it was not linked to a political party. HAGURUKA’s involvement in political demonstrations largely concerned defending the human rights of women and children. In 1992 HAGURUKA, along with other women’s societies, marched from the central prison in Kigali to the stadium to protest against the way women prisoners were treated. At the time, women prisoners were beaten, their hair was cut and they were often raped. Despite this, the organization, under the direction of its founder Zaina Nyiramatama, was accused of supporting the RPF because the NGO was seen to be fighting against the government. The NGO faced many bureaucratic barriers and HAGURUKA’s campaign to secure the human rights of women and children was made more difficult because they could not gain access to reports from the state.20 There were also a small number of women working in high politics, most notably Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and Minister

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of Women and Family Affairs Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, as well as women such as one civil servant called Valencie who worked under Nyiramasuhuko. Pro-democratic Uwilingiyimana was an important role model and was well respected among many women – as demonstrated when on 7 March 1992 Uwilingiyimana was attacked in her home by assailants believed to be members of Réseau Zero. The violent attack on Uwilingiyimana, who had just been made minister of education, resulted in a very public protest by teachers in Kigali. A march followed wherein some 3,000 women took part and this, according to Habinshuti, spurred on more protests from other fronts: The teachers from surrounding schools also organised a manifestation in protest. There was a press release. Many teachers and students at the time got involved. We were taking huge risks in facing up to the ruling party and they were very aggressive towards us.21 Nyiramatama also observed: We protested. We organized a march. We were really insulted and we were not happy. We knew [she was attacked] by the government, trying to threaten her. We were showing that the ruling government was behind it and was not protecting its people.22 It was the united campaigning for democracy within the multi-party system and within civil society that led Habyarimana and his extremists to develop strategies to reunite Hutu with a common purpose and common identity. As Nyiramatama recalled: People were working together against the ruling party so they devised an ethnic problem to weaken the political opposition. Before, everyone was against the ruling party. All political parties began to split into extremist divisions – even the NGOs and HAGURUKA. It was in 1992 that the number of newspapers increased.23

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While the experiences of pro-democratic, economically self-sufficient women reveal that women generally were a threat to Rwanda’s patriarchal society, the political will of the women’s movement and the potential it had to destabilize single-party rule proved far more threatening to the Hutu extremists. So while women were actively pushing to be visible in their own terms, Hutu extremist women manoeuvred to spread rumours and fear among other Hutu women. Publicly, the government appeared to endorse equality for women: in 1992, the first Ministry of Women and Family Affairs was established under the direction of the staunch extremist Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. According to Valencie, it was an attempt by the government to reclaim power from PROFAMA, which up until then had largely taken on the role of the state in supporting women and children. Yet even within the ministry, divisions were beginning to manifest themselves.24 In 1993 the MRND created its own women’s group with the intent to dispel opposition women’s lobbyist groups.25 At this time, the media also promoted fear among women generally. Nyiramatama observed: Five hundred women attended the protest against the maltreatment of women prisoners. We were expecting more but the government radio demobilized our protest by threatening women.26 According to Nyiramatama, ‘Radio Rwanda, although not RTLM at that stage, would demobilize women to join the coalition and try to confuse politics.’ However, the government did not try to take away HAGURUKA’s funds: They expected women’s organizations to be weak, but HAGURUKA stood up and fought. Those incapable of standing up left the organization. We had women who were against HAGURUKA – women talking [on Radio Rwanda] who were used by the ruling party to discourage women to join.27 Women did not just symbolize the fluidity of ethnicity in Rwanda but signalled the end of the Hutu extremist Akazu’s power. As a result,

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women became direct targets and experienced extreme human insecurity across the country. Nyiramatama claims women were organizing themselves in order to campaign for improved personal security for women. When in 1993 ‘a woman was taken off a bus in the north and raped by many men and killed’ HAGURUKA ‘wrote a petition’ for people to sign. This act was in itself bold: At that time, you had to be crazy to challenge the leading party because of the war at the border [between the RPF and the Habyarimana regime]. But there was no way to support the government when they were violating women’s rights. So it was something really important. At that time, we started to distinguish between who was for women’s rights within the government and who was not. We started to see that some women were just there for the politics.28

Part II: Kangura and the militarization of the pure Hutu nation state It is worth reflecting again on the relationship between militarization and genocide before examining the ways in which Rwandan subjectivities were mediatized in Kangura. As observed, the process of inciting a population to commit genocide depended on the militarization of both men and women civilians. Militarization, which is frequently reliant on the dynamics of memory, commercialized sex and hero worship,29 is perpetuated through a number of communications channels including film, media, music, stories and public speeches. It depends on the acceptance of both men and women civilians, but privileges masculinity. In an analysis that unintentionally describes the image promoted by Hutu extremists of a ‘threat of invasion and ethnic war’, Enloe suggests that as a weapon of war, rape occurs ‘in the name of national security’, when a ‘regime is preoccupied with “national security”’, when ‘a majority of civilians believe that security is best understood as a military problem’, when ‘the police and military security apparatuses are male-dominated’, when ‘the definitions of honour, loyalty, and treason are derived from the institutional cultures

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of the police and the military’, when ‘those prevailing institutional cultures are misogynous’ and, finally, when ‘some local women are well enough organised in opposition to regime policies to become publicly visible’.30 In reading the Rwandan genocide through the lens of ‘civil war’, Enloe does not unpack the very militarizing processes she argues should be unpacked, and dismisses key tactics which the Hutu extremists employed to incite systematic rape – the image of a threat of ethnic war, the image of a threat to national security, the image of the loyal, militarized Hutu civilian, the image of the ‘alien’ Tutsi woman. Rather these tactics are confused with the factors that actually enabled Hutu extremists to incite mass rape: a militarized culture, patriarchy and misogyny, and finally, the political mobilization of Rwandan women. While a key aspect of militarization is ensuring that both genders are seen to be political subjects, have agency and are able to make decisions, the development of genocide ideology depends on alienating and othering a target civilian group. The promotion of the Hutu extremist genocide ideology should not be understood to have been channelled through mainstream media alone. It was promulgated during public meetings, political demonstrations and staged events. For example, early in 1994 Hassan Ngeze ‘visited the Bugesera region several times and distributed leaflets warning of infiltration by “inyenzi”’ (or cockroaches) and the Hutu extremists often recruited young men from football grounds.31 Télévision Rwanda (TVR) began on 31 December 1992 and by 1993 was on air for three hours per day, between 6 pm and 10 pm. Most of its early programmes focused on family planning but, in 1994, TVR announced the deaths of the RPF and their Tutsi accomplices.32 In July 1993 the new popularist radio, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was launched. It appealed to the unemployed youths, playing catchy songs and promoting genocide ideology.33 By 1994 there were some 20 Hutu extremist magazines and newspapers in circulation, of which Kangura was the most renowned. Kangura was established in 1990 with the support of the threatened dictatorial regime led by President Habyarimana. It took an interactive approach, encouraging Hutu to write to the magazine with comments and suggestions, devising questionnaires for its readership to complete

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and return, and writing letters to the president. Rather like the UK’s Private Eye, Kangura was a monthly running commentary on party politics, and cartoons were one satirical device among many to lampoon opposition politicians. Jean-Marie Vianney Higiro, who was the director of the Office Rwandais d’Information (ORINFOR) in April 1994, claims that Kangura along with the other pro-MRND media were ‘funded by northern Hutus who viewed the birth of a private press as an assault on the social and economic accomplishments of the Habyarimana regime’. However, Higiro also notes that pro-MRND media outlets were not the only ones to be using political satire to ridicule its opposition. Higiro cites seven pro-Tutsi publications which ‘strived to be the voice of the Tutsi’. According to Higiro: These newspapers denounced the MRND regime and its human rights records. They too contended that President Habyarimana and his party, the MRND, did not want peace. Examples of dehumanisation of ideological opponents were also found in these papers.34 These newspapers also contributed to the militarization of the Rwandan population and demonstrate how tense the mediatized war between the RPF and the MRND was at that time. Higiro claims that in these newspapers ‘MRND and CDR leaders and supporters were depicted as killers’ and in issue 18 of the paper Rwanda Rushya, published on 22 February 1992, cartoons depicted the ‘MRND and the CDR as monsters that thrive on human flesh’.35 In 1991, the RPF also established its own radio station, called Radio Muhabura, which was reported to have been monitored by the BBC. Editor of the BBC Great Lakes Service, Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, who in the early 1990s was the manager of BBC Swahili radio, claims that the RPF would record BBC Swahili reports and broadcast them on Radio Muhabura, prompting RTLM’s Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza to tell Mugenzi he ‘was the voice of the [Tutsi] inyenzi’ (or cockroaches).36 Kangura was published in Kinyarwanda and French and from late 1993 onwards disseminated throughout the Great Lakes region, most notably in Burundi and Kenya. As with pro-RPF media, Kangura’s

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satirical genre was new to Rwandans and appealed to people in rural communities and cities alike. In a country of high illiteracy, particularly among women, cartoons became a vital means of communicating political ideas. In the process of developing the hate propaganda, both men and women Hutu extremists manoeuvred to gain personal political power. Since, as Enloe concedes, ‘[p]olicies about men are always made dependent on policies about women’ and ‘[p]olicies about women are always built on policies about men’, we first turn to look at how militarized masculinities were central to sustaining the pure Hutu nation state before analysing the militarization of Rwandan women in Kangura.37 Militarizing Rwandan men In addition to the RPF presence in Uganda and in the north-east of Rwanda, it was the pressure to democratize, the rise of multi-party politics and the Arusha Peace Accords that led Hutu extremists to develop strategies to unite the Hutu. The obvious solution was to develop the image of ethnic war between civilian Hutu and the ‘alien’ Tutsi.38 Focusing on the threat of an invasion by the Ugandan-based RPF, the MRND sought to provide evidence through extremist propaganda that all Tutsi were enemies of the state, including the Rwandan Tutsi who were portrayed as ‘the enemy within’. The editor of the independent journal Imbago, Gaspard Karamero, observed in 1995 that ‘despite the talk of ethnic politics, the point was to eliminate political opposition from whatever quarter it came’.39 To sustain this public image of ethnic war, these extremists militarized individual Hutu, preparing them for ‘war’ while at the same time upholding the ideal of a free democratic subject. MRND (Interahamwe) rallies were loud celebrations, with dancing, blowing of whistles and singing. Hutu citizens were encouraged to learn songs that confused messages about democracy and freedom with those about war and, more subtly, genocide. At one such demonstration, a large group of MRND men and women were filmed chanting: Nothing scares us, we create terror . . . We are not attacked, we attack. Nothing can crush us, we are the ones who crush.

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Whenever required, we beat all our enemies. On the battlefield, we are the greatest. We are the Interahamwe movement that loves Peace, Unity and Development. We are ready! Our motto! We don’t attack. We liberate.40 With the backing of the president, members of the Interahamwe and the extremist party CDR organized militia groups and the government’s Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) developed training camps to target unemployed Hutu youths.41 As extremist confidence grew so too did the public exhibitionism of guns and weaponry.42 Former Minister of Defence Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who was instrumental in the genocide, demonstrated in his public rallies that the action of civilians carrying and using weapons was ‘ordinary’ and even natural. During one oration, he was filmed by a Rwandan journalist displaying his gun as he addressed a crowd of eager listeners. ‘The gun,’ he stated: no longer belongs only to the soldier. When you see one, do not be afraid. It can not go off by itself. The gun needs to stop only being for the military. Everybody has a right to own one. So that when they come for you, you can shoot back. I always have one with me. Here it is . . . here it is.43 Kangura was quick to play on stereotyped images in its attempt to redefine Hutu consciousness.44 In ‘The Fear of the Bahutu’, written by Ndekezi Bonaparte-Gisuma and published in December 1990, Hutu are described as ‘naturally fearful, maladroit, indecisive, naïve, with a characteristic inferiority complex’.45 In another early article targeting ‘All the Hutu of the World!’, Kangura calls for Hutu to ‘rediscover their ethnicity’ in the face of a Tutsi determination to keep them down. The magazine then makes a distinction between the ‘artificial nation state’ and ‘natural’ ethnicity in an attempt to depopularize the BroadBased Transitional Government (BBTG).46 The modern post-colonial nation state constructed under the Arusha Accords is first interpreted as a Tutsi plot to keep the Hutu in line (through an artificial democracy), then rendered fragile in opposition to a natural pre-colonial Hutu ethnicity. Having fragmented the post-colonial nation state,

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Kangura proceeds to construct in its articles a pure Hutu nation state. This included redefining Hutu consciousness and in December 1990 Kangura published the Ten Commandments which, according to the ICTR, ‘exhorted the Hutu to wake up “now or never” and become aware of a new Hutu ideology, with roots in and in defence of the 1959 revolution’.47

Part III: Citizen versus partial- and non-Citizen Rwandan women in Kangura Christopher Taylor has indicated that Rwandan women’s capacity to transgress ethnic boundaries through marriage and giving birth to ethnically mixed children placed them in a liminal space that contravened pure Hutu culture.48 The situation was made worse in the 1980s when it emerged that the number of intermarriages had increased since independence, and many Rwandan Hutu elite were partnering or marrying Tutsi women.49 To counter their threat, Kangura imaged Rwandan women not just according to their ethnicity, but their citizenship status. It is possible to identify three groups: non-citizen Rwandan women, full-citizen Rwandan women and partial-citizen Rwandan women, each of which was militarized in specific ways. Non-citizen Rwandan women Imaged as stereotyped Tutsi women, ‘non-citizen’ Rwandan women appear to perform as enemies of the state and secret accomplices in ethnic war. In December 1990, Kangura published the Hutu Ten Commandments, four of which concerned Rwandan women. One stated that all Tutsi women worked ‘only for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group’ and all Hutu were ordered to be distrustful not only of Tutsi women, but also of Hutu men who had relations with them. Another called for the FAR to be ‘exclusively Hutu’ following the RPF invasion of 1990.50 Two commandments specifically referred to Hutu women. These commandments led to a direct comparison between Hutu and Tutsi women, first by claiming that Hutu women were more

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loyal and better wives and mothers; then, through manipulating the colonial obsession with stereotyped physical appearances, by crushing the ego of the supposedly less attractive – i.e. less sexually desirable – Hutu woman. Instead, Hutu women are called upon to be ‘vigilant and try to bring [their] husbands, brothers and sons back to reason’ in the face of deceitful, seductive Tutsi women.51 In Kangura, these Tutsi women spies and accomplices are presented as sexualized military operators. In Ngeze’s editorial for Kangura No. 19, published in July 1991, he makes it clear that Tutsi women spies operate at all levels of society: When it comes to spying, the Inkotanyi enlist the help of their worldly sisters and daughters. You find them everywhere in all the institutions, in the Ministries, in the private sector, in legal and illegal drinking-places, as well as in our own houses, which many of them have managed to infiltrate through marriage. Having husbands does not prevent them from being accomplices and extracting secrets from people by using their worldly wiles.52 In issue No. 35 of the magazine, which appeared in May 1992, an article entitled ‘The Dresses of Beauties Smell for the Hutus’ is accompanied by a cartoon wherein a beautiful woman who appears to fit the colonial stereotype of the tall, slender Tutsi woman wears a strapless, floral print mini-dress, large hoop earrings and bangles. She is in an erotic pose, her left hand lifting up the corner of her dress to reveal more thigh to the – stereotypically – shorter, thicker-set Hutu man standing beside her. Loyal to the Hutu Ten Commandments and thus loyal to the pure Hutu state, he covers his nose with one hand, keeping the other in his pocket. Kangura’s intimation that this Tutsi woman smells posits her as a hypersexual prostitute. Yet, thinking out loud, she appears more concerned that her true identity has been uncovered: ‘They have known our plot. I think the war can stop now for our mission has failed.’53 This image operates on many levels. First, it confirms the extremist Hutu theory that Tutsi women ‘work only in the interest of their ethnic group’. Second, it confirms that Rwanda is threatened by a Tutsi-led

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ethnic war. Third, it provides a reason for Hutu women to condemn sexually attractive Tutsi women, who may themselves be angered at the artist’s depiction of the colonial stereotype. At a more intrinsic level, the cartoon aims to show how Tutsi women, in using their beauty and taking advantage of Hutu men’s supposed weakness, infiltrate the Rwandan state. Having represented the Tutsi woman’s sexualized body as a weapon of war, Kangura proceeds to depict the enemy’s plot as a pre-ordained failure, thus raising the morale of Hutu men and women. In February 1994, just before the genocide began, the stereotyped Tutsi woman is again portrayed as a hypersexual prostitute in cahoots with both the RPF and UNAMIR (though this time in a way that makes fun of the United Nation’s own militarization of women). Lieutenant-General Dallaire sits with his arms around two RPF women. Both have their hands on his knee and one is kissing his forehead. Both women are wearing mini-skirts, jewellery and lace bras. The woman to Dallaire’s right has ‘I heart RPF’ tattooed on her arm. A UN peacekeeper stands to the left, his gun poised as he stands guard. The caption reads: ‘Tutsi women: responsible for rallying Whites to the RPF’ (see Figure 3).54 Appropriation of the stereotyped Tutsi woman prostitute during a public ridiculing of the UN Peace Force occurs again in the Hutu extremist journal Power in December 1993. This time a graphic sex scene depicts an orgy between two Tutsi women and three UN peacekeepers. Demilitarizing the UN (i.e. positing the international institution solely within a simulated private sphere), the caption simply states ‘The Force of Sex and the Belgian Paras’ (see Figure 5).55 Here, it should be pointed out that the actions of the Belgian paratroopers did not help to dispel rumours about their liaisons with Rwandan women. In January 1994 they had been spotted ‘running after women and causing fights in local bars and discos’.56 These images also drew on the global pornographic industry as much as they did on Rwandan images of politics. Full-citizen Rwandan women The silent majority in most analyses of extremist propaganda, militarized Hutu women loyal to Hutu Power, were imaged as full citizens.

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In the four years leading up to the genocide, Kangura presented Hutu women who agreed with the ideal of the pure Hutu state as equal, democratic citizens. In an early article published in 1992, there is a portrait photograph of a stereotypically beautiful Hutu woman (i.e. she personifies the physical image of a ‘good’ upper-class Hutu woman). Underneath the image reads a statement by the CDR’s Mukakibibi Zayinabo allegedly made in June 1989: In these times we are in, a Rwandan woman should never be denied her rights. Men must know that there is nothing he has that is better than a woman. All of us, we have equal rights in front of the law and democracy belongs to us all.57 Here, a clear distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is printed onto Rwandan women’s bodies, where the pure, moral and cleansed Hutu woman symbolizes the Hutu woman subject (the full-citizen) in opposition to the impure, immoral Tutsi woman other (the non-citizen). As Baines observes: Policing a different kind of boundary, codes of morality regarding sexual practices were evoked. Single urban women were incarcerated for looking ‘too stylish’ (western) or having European boyfriends, who were considered to be sexually perverse. The Rwandan Catholic Church, closely aligned to the Hutu president, Habyarimana, helped police women’s bodies by banning contraceptives and becoming increasingly vitriolic on morality in this largely Catholic country. By attacking women in this way, extremists reinforced boundaries of the Hutu nation, reproductive and cultural.58 Kangura’s representation of both Hutu and Tutsi women depended on their increased visibility within Rwanda’s political sphere. As discussed above, women represented a large percentage of the population that had recently been politically mobilized with the opening-up to democracy and the growth of the civil society. However, as the extremist network operated to quash these movements, Kangura rendered their

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bodies visible only in specific gendered terms that sustained the patriarchal dictatorship. Hutu women were militarized not just as mothers, wives and daughters, but as political subjects. In Kangura, these women often appear next to men in images of political rallying59 or in local, community-based public protests.60 They are imaged as ordinary (non-militarized) citizens confounded by the antics of the opposition parties and advocators of the Arusha Accords peace process.61 Fullcitizen Rwandan women were also depicted as victims of war. In a cartoon published in October 1991, the founder of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and key architect of the genocide Ferdinand Nahimana stands tall, holding the radio station above his head. Behind him, crowds of men, women and children are grouped together, but appear half the size of Nahimana himself – indicating the strength and importance of Nahimana, as well as RTLM, while intimating that the radio would protect the local community. The caption states that Nahimana founded a radio station in a community where people had been killed.62 Since genocide mobilizes an entire population to annihilate target groups, the war which the extremists tried to depict was not Clausewitzean by convention: there was no front line, no home front and no inter-state battle. Rather, the extremists depicted the threat of the RPF in a manner which reflected many of the images of politics associated with new wars: the RPF appeared to ‘mobilise around ethnic [or] racial identity for the purpose of claiming the state’, the ethnic dimension of the war had both a regional and global element and was not confined to a single nation state and there is a deliberate blurring of the public and private spheres.63 Perhaps one of the most graphic and shockingly violent images to be published appeared in a parallel journal, Zirikiana, in March 1993. Here, the image shows clearly that RPF soldiers are committing life force atrocities, thereby aiming to destroy Hutu communities. In a graphic scene, the RPF are shown dismembering a child and are telling the naked (Hutu) woman who is tied to a tree that she must eat the flesh. The cartoonist then suggests that life under a power-sharing agreement (le partage equitable), brought about by the signing of the Arusha Peace Accords, will be violent for Hutu communities and Hutu women will be forced to partake in sexual liaisons with

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RPF men (see Figure 5). The image of genocide and rape is replicated one month later in a cartoon published in the extremist-funded journal Kamarampaka on 7 April 1993. Its intent to blur the boundaries between the ‘home front’ and the ‘front line’ is clear. In the cartoon, the RPF (identified by their arm bands) have pillaged a village in Ruhengeri, a Hutu stronghold in the north of Rwanda, and a hut is on fire in the distance. A member of the MRND is stripped to his underwear and tied to a tree. Beside him lies the dismembered trunk of a Hutu man. Two naked women are on the ground to the left of the tree. The woman who belongs to the Hutu Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR) is tied up, her hands behind her back, a stake wedged through her chest. The second woman is a member of the extremist Hutu party, the CDR. Her hands are being held up by an RPF soldier while his comrade rapes her. Underneath the caption reads: ‘Blood and sex: the horrors of war attributed to the RPF’ (see Figure 6).64 The simulation of rape, which demonized all Tutsi men, including civilian Tutsi men, is also evident in the extremist-led Government Army’s military strategies as a means to instil fear of rape among the Hutu community. In November 1993 the UN heard that 35 people had been massacred in the Ruhengeri region, in five locations concurrently. UN Major Brent Beardsley, who was dispatched to survey one of the massacre sites, noted that children had been murdered and that all the girls had been raped. Despite inconclusive evidence, the UN believed the massacre had been staged by the FAR. As Beardsley recalls in the 2001 Canadian documentary Rwanda: The Genocide Fax: Very conveniently there was an RPF glove left laying on the ground. The RPF – I never saw them wear any gloves and if they did wear gloves, why would they leave it laying on the ground? In addition, the Government commanders who are waiting for us at the bottom of the hill all wear a red sash cord, a red rope, around their waists tied and they all carry a very large knife with a big hilt on it. And it appeared to me more when I looked at these children’s necks that they . . . it was a cord that had been used to strangle them and commandos went through extensive training on how to kill people silently with them.65

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While Kangura militarized women as civilians and victims of war, in reality many of these politically engaged ‘free and democratic’ women were militarized spectators and supporters of genocide and genocidal rape. In a special report on Rwanda’s women killers, the BBC’s Newsnight interviewed a man who witnessed two women in Kigali – Odette and Mama Eileen – using a stick to rape a woman on the side of the road, in broad daylight.66 Nyiramasuhuko also took advantage of the personal gains afforded to her as a perpetrator of genocide. Zaina Nyiramatama, who was in Rwanda until January 1994, suggests that Nyiramasuhuko was not interested in the welfare of women and, despite her ministerial remit, ‘did not have “gender politics”’, rather a ‘very patriarchal way of thinking . . . she was not fighting to get anything out of the government because she was part of the system’.67 Nyiramasuhuko also used her new role as the minister of women and family affairs to instil fear among Hutu women. According to African Rights, the Hutu extremists played on Catholic pro-life ideology because it appealed to Hutu who were in the majority Catholic: According to a number of Rwandan doctors, the Habyarimana regime also spread rumours about family planning programmes to frighten the Hutu population. Was this a ‘Tutsi plot to control Hutu birth?’.68 A second notorious woman génocidaire in high politics was Rose Karusha who, at 53, was a local government councillor in Kimisagara, Nyarugenge District of Kigali. In one witness statement, Karusha demonstrates the extent to which some women were militarized: Rose Karusha took an extremely active role in the genocide, wearing military uniform throughout. A tall and physically strong woman, she used to beat up the refugees herself before handing them over to her Interahamwe for the final kill. She distributed firearms to the assassins and was seen frequently at the roadblocks . . . She held meetings with the militia . . . Regarded as exceptionally corrupt, she began her threats against Tutsi immediately after the war began in October 1990.69

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Partial-citizen Rwandan women The term ‘partial-citizen’ refers to the Hutu women who were citizens by ethnic rights but could not be fully accepted into the pure Hutu state as a result of their own political actions. These women attempted to exercise their true democratic rights by campaigning for equality and were often active members of the women’s movement.70 Many of these women were also members of the urban elite, who were accused of wearing – and shamed for adopting – ‘western’ dress. Some opposed Hutu extremism and firmly believed that the Arusha Accords would see an end to ethnic divisionism. It goes without saying that these politically moderate Hutu (and Tutsi) women posed a major threat to the dictatorship and no one embodied this threat more than the then-prime minister of the transitional government, Madame Agathe Uwilingiyimana. Since Kangura was primarily a tool to ridicule opposition parties as much as it was a tool to distil hate propaganda, the magazine’s foremost attack on Uwilingiyimana centred on the fact that she was a woman. After she was appointed minister for education by Habyarimana in 1992, Uwilingiyimana fought to end the quota system in schools which had sustained a Hutu majority. She was a founder of Rwanda’s Seruka (‘Show Me’), which aimed to include women in the country’s development, and an active member of the women’s civil society movement across Africa, having played an integral role in the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE). Described in Kinyarwanda as an ingare (rebel), Uwilingiyimana used her political influence and determination to ‘combat ethnic and sexual discrimination’.71 She believed that ‘true democracy’ would include the liberation of women and girls from poverty and forced labour. A Hutu of the south, Uwilingiyimana had ‘decided to go into politics’ once she had turned 40 years old, but the occasion arose when she was 38. Uwilingiyimana believed that ‘politics was the basis of everything’, claiming that ‘you cannot speak for people who suffer’: ‘I want to evolve the ideas of the people,’ she once said, ‘to speak in the name of the people. It is necessary to speak for the bas-peuple [peasants].’72 She frequently spoke out against the president’s policies and often came under fire from Hutu extremist politicians and the Interahamwe. The second woman to become a

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prime minister in Africa, Uwilingiyimana remained defiant and on a number of occasions highlighted the dangers of supplying weapons to the population.73 Uwilingiyimana is said to have spoken out against ethnic business identity cards at one protest march led by women’s organizations in 1993. Nyiramatama recalled Uwilingiyimana saying: ‘We shouldn’t value ourselves according to our ethnic group, but rather what we are able to do to build our country.’74 It is believed that Habyarimana assumed Uwilingiyimana could be easily manipulated, although he soon discovered that this was not the case. She was acutely aware of the political problems, the extreme human insecurity in Rwanda and the impact that political instability in the wider region would have on any future chances of peace in Rwanda. In what was possibly the last interview she gave – with journalist and grandson of the former governor of Congo and Rwanda-Urundi, François Ryckmans, in Kigali on 15 March 1994 – Uwilingiyimana observed the ‘confusion’ the extremists were deliberately creating in playing ‘the ethnic card’ and noted that there were extremist tendencies across all parties.75 She was acutely aware of the ‘delicate’ political situation in Rwanda, arguing that there was ‘bad will and irresponsibility on the behalf of some people’ and that Habyarimana was ‘trying to control the political parties’. However, Uwilingiyimana was deeply committed to the establishment of a new government as the only chance for peace. Her faith in ordinary Rwandan people remained unwavering, perhaps because of the support she had received, and she did not believe that ‘the people of Rwanda’ were ‘ready to give themselves to this extremist philosophy’, contending: ‘We have a party, a party of Coalition for the Defence of the Republic of Rwanda [the CDR], which proclaims through all its anti-Tutsi extremist declarations, this party has not advanced one step.’76 Uwilingiyimana was also critical of other key actors including President Habyarimana, the RPF and the international community. When asked by Ryckmans in whose interests it was that there should be a political stalemate in Rwanda, she named Habyarimana first and foremost: I say the President of the Republic first because, you imagine the situation, he had all the power, territory, bourgmestres, sous-bourgmestres,

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préfets, sous-préfets, all of this world, and the MRND – all the administrators everywhere. And sadly under the Arusha Accords there is article 46 which says that in three months, we would have got rid of his own administrators, either because they were incompetent or because they were implicated in killings during all those years of war. He had to stop this so as not to replace his administrators. His party is thanks to his representatives and so he must stop [the Arusha Accords] so that he is responsible and not replaced, so that his party is everywhere in the country.77 She contended that ‘the RPF [was] a political force as soon as it put down its weapons. It would become a political force that could cooperate with all the other pro-democracies.’78 Her unease over the political stalemate, which continued up until the genocide began on 6 April 1994, was compounded by her concern over the West and Belgium’s threat to withdraw from supporting Rwanda’s peace process and she feared for the security of ordinary Rwandan people. She tells Ryckmans: This is what I don’t accept from the international community. I’ve always said that they have abandoned us. One has a dictatorial regime for 20 years – how do you want the administrators of the regime to give up their power? The international community strongly helped us to arrive finally to make the President understand and bring an end to the war by negotiation. You know, he did not accept that. He said he was going to fight. The international community made him understand that he had to put down his weapons. The international community helped us during all this period, during the negotiations for two years. The international community helped us and under this pressure, the President decided to sign the Arusha Accords. Why is the international community not continuing to make the last step to put in place the Arusha Accords? We have, I think, achieved the maximum pressure that way but we think we must go slowly so as not to put in danger human lives. And that’s where we need the help of the international community . . . If they abandon us,

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the Rwandan people will be left and what will happen then? Now we find that we are with no strength and I don’t think for the international community it’s the moment to say ‘I’m going’. Voilà, that’s my position.79 Uwilingiyimana also had specific ideas about how to deal with regional political problems, calling for ‘a regional plan – a plan for the region because the security problems in Burundi and Rwanda provoke disorder [across] the region’.80 In spite of her drive to better the lives of ordinary Rwandans, and because of her campaigning for genuine democracy, one can trace, through Kangura’s cartoons about her, Agathe Uwilingiyimana’s transgression from full citizen to partial citizen and then to non-citizen – and it is significant that the number of published cartoons depicting Uwilingiyimana picked up pace in the final months before the genocide. Kangura took a male chauvinist and sexist approach to Uwilingiyimana to ‘reveal’ how, in her performance, she used her body to further her political career, and to expose her inappropriate gender politics. She first appeared on the front page in May 1992, naked and perched on a pile of books, a sign that Kangura had little respect for Uwilingiyimana in her role as minister of education. Later, Kangura focused on her sexuality and made claims that she was having an affair with Faustin Twagiramungu, a fellow moderate Hutu politician, president of the MDR and a member of the transitional government. Frequently depicted in bed with Twagiramungu, her political discussion is reduced to domestic post-intercourse chat, suggesting that the transitional government ruled Rwanda from a very private sphere in contrast to Habyarimana’s public, and thus democratic, sphere. In January 1994 Kangura likened Uwilingiyimana to the stereotyped Tutsi prostitutes – the non-citizens. She appeared on the front page of issue 55 naked in bed, wearing earrings and sporting a short haircut reminiscent of the prostitutes in the previous month’s portrayal by Power of UN peacekeepers’ liaisons with women. In a ploy to destabilize the peace process, Kangura depicts Uwilingiyimana as a self-interested woman who cares little for democracy and the needs of the Rwandan people. Sitting on the edge of the bed looking sexually aroused, Twagiramungu

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asks Uwilingiyimana, ‘Baby, why are you crying?’81 Uwilingiyimana responds by reminding Twagiramungu that he must make her ‘the Prime Minister in the Transition Government’. In a second bedroom scene, published in March 1994, Uwilingiyimana and Twagiramungu discuss the need to send her husband abroad on an assignment so that they can spend more time with each other.82 In another move to further derail Uwilingiyimana’s political credibility, Kangura claims she is pregnant with Twagiramungu’s child, which the magazine portends to be against the will of God. In March 1994 a religious figure separates a crying, naked and heavily pregnant Uwilingiyimana from a naked Twagiramungu, while shouting ‘I curse you, sinners!’83 In June 1992 military strategy and media voyeurism converged when Kangura, in response to the public outcry over the violence directed at their prime minister, published a cartoon depicting the moment when Uwilingiyimana was attacked in her home. Minister Uwilingiyimana is lying half-naked on the floor, staring out towards the reader in yet another provocative pose. Five men (journalists) appear to have just burst in through the doors. Uwilingiyimana says: ‘Forgive me; I will give you everything that you need.’ The cartoon is accompanied by an article in which Kangura addresses Uwilingiyimana directly with a series of questions aimed at discrediting her claim to have been attacked. In depicting her as a mother and exposing her supposed ‘lying about her leg’, Kangura bolsters its own media credibility by imaging itself as loyal to the MRND government:84 ‘Because of the respect media journalists have to give politicians, they packed their machines and announced to the country that the Prime Minister was beaten badly by thieves.’ Once more, the focus is on Uwilingiyimana’s gender. When criticizing Uwilingiyimana for standing up to President Habyarimana’s extremist policies, Kangura argues that she is ‘known for abusing and disrespecting the President’, claiming that her ‘stubbornness’ is (as expressed in Kinyarwanda) the trait of a woman who is ‘either crazy or brings a curse’. In this article, she is ‘shaming’ her parents and makes a mockery of her husband, whom Kangura portrays as weak in the face of her strength: Where was your husband when you were having this misfortune? Doesn’t a man have a word in his own home, if it’s really his?85

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Criticizing Uwilingiyimana’s silence on the questions they pose, Kangura demands ‘explanations’ or they will have to rebuild the reputation of the (extremist) ‘national forces’ that they accuse Uwilingiyimana of destroying when she ‘said they refused to come and rescue [her]’.86 Continually imaged in the very private sphere of the home or bedroom, stripped naked (exposed) and likened to the hypersexual Tutsi women and ‘prostitutes’, Uwilingiyimana is militarized by Kangura as the accomplice to the enemy within. Yet men who are regarded as enemies, and their accomplices, are presented by the magazine as highly effeminized, domestic and lacking in military clout. Just as the body of the Tutsi woman is imaged as a weapon of war, so too is Uwilingiyimana’s, only this time for selfish political gain that contravenes Hutu extremist definitions of democracy and gender equality. In the penultimate issue of Kangura, the extent to which Uwilingiyimana is perceived as a ‘non-citizen’ is clear when she is imaged as a rat which is eating money – a Hutu man is depicted as being on the verge of killing her and Twagiramungu (also imaged as a rat) with a club. In the same edition, Uwilingiyimana and Twagiramungu are portrayed as dancing chickens.87 These depictions are reminiscent of Nazi propaganda about Jews and other ethnic minorities. Agathe Uwilingiyimana was one of the first politicians to be assassinated, on 7 April 1994. She was shot in her home by Presidential Guards in the early hours of the morning.88 At the time, her murder was under-reported in the UK press (for example the Guardian and The Times), appearing instead as an appendage to the death of the ten Belgian peacekeepers who died on the same day while protecting the prime minister. In spite of Kangura’s attempts to slander her, Uwilingiyimana’s strength, optimism, courage and defiance in the face of extremist politicians remains something quite remarkable. She believed that the priority was to ‘reconstruct the country economically from a social point of view’ in order to stop ordinary people from suffering, observing that: Almost every day, people are dying, assassinated. The poor peasants, as usual, are not responsible for the political situation. There’s starvation all over the country. People die of hunger

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every day, dysentery and malaria. We haven’t got the institutions capable of negotiating with our funders.89 By moving beyond the tendency in feminist theorizing of IR to present confused readings of Tutsi women as victims of a blurred civil war/genocide – an act that renders other Rwandan women invisible – it is possible to reveal the ways in which extremist magazine Kangura militarized Rwandan women as political subjects. In doing so, we are able to expose the disparity between the images of full citizens (who did not speak out or otherwise oppose the Hutu nation state) and partial citizens – Hutu and Tutsi women who, in fighting for women’s equality, were fighting for democracy. It is hoped that this exposé furthers feminist understandings of the militarized roles women play in genocide. Feminists theorizing international relations should be more cautious of the impact of negating the complex gendered power relations that led to genocide as they embed ‘Rwanda’ in the overarching (international) story of ‘women and war’. By focusing solely on civil war, or using the terms war and genocide interchangeably, these scholars are in danger of unwittingly endorsing the Hutu extremist revisionist agenda. In mapping the Rwandan Hutu extremist gendered politics of revisionism, we will be able to consider how actors have appropriated the extremist gendered narratives internationally, and how these narratives, along with new post-1994 narratives about genocide, continue to gain currency in the Great Lakes mediatized conflict.

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Fig 1: Rwandan women in high politics: President Paul Kagame walks with aide Rose Kabuye on 7 November 2008 during an emergency summit in Nairobi aimed at restoring stability in the conflict-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. A colonel in the Rwandan Patriotic Front who fought on the front line, Kabuye was appointed City Mayor of Kigali in 1994 before becoming a member of the Rwandan Parliament, serving as Chairperson of the Defence and Security Committee in 1998. In 2003, at the height of the second Congo war, Kabuye became the President’s Chief of State Protocol, advising government officials on matters of national and international protocol.

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Fig 2: A woman holds a placard during a demonstration on 19 November 2008 in Kigali protesting the arrest of Rwandan presidential aide Rose Kabuye in Germany on 9 November and her subsequent extradition to Paris, France. A French court charged Kabuye with ‘complicity in murder in relation to terrorism’, on suspicion that she was connected to the political assassination of former Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana. At the time, Rwanda pressed for a hasty trial in France. The case was dropped when a key witness retracted his statement.

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"Kangura, number 56, February 1994"

Power, December 1993

Figs 3 and 4: By 1994, there were some 20 Hutu extremist magazines and newspapers in circulation in Rwanda, of which Kangura was the most renowned. Tutsi women were presented as sexualized military operators, working for the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Pro-democratic Hutu women who refused to conform to the ideals of a pure Hutu state were also dehumanized. A very public ridiculing of UN peacekeeping (UNAMIR) troops formed part of the strategy of Hutu extremist politicians to derail the peace process and hamper the Rwandan population’s efforts to bring about genuine democracy.

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Zirikiana, March 1993

Kamarampaka, April 1993

Figs 5 and 6: Gendered discourses and narratives about rape and genocide have been central to conflicts in the Great Lakes region since before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. In the early 1990s Hutu extremist propaganda magazines such as Kamarampaka were keen to instil fear in Rwandan populations by mediatizing the genocide of Hutu. These narratives were appropriated by political actors in Rwanda and the DRC and by militia groups such as the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) and the Congrés National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), throughout the two Congo wars (1997–2010).

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Fig 7: A campaign flyer distributed in an edition of The Observer in the summer of 2009. At the time, Amnesty International attempted to raise awareness among its British audience that the problem of rape in the east of Congo was not simply a by-product of war, but a military strategy. Credit: Different Kettle/Amnesty International

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Fig 8: Spanish photojournalist Cédric Gérbehaye took this image of dissident general Laurent Nkunda at the CNDP headquarters in Masisi hills, North-Kivu in July 2007. At the time, Gérbehaye believed Nkunda was performing in front of the camera, using the international media to heighten his notoriety and position himself as a threat to Congolese president Joseph Kabila. Credit: Cédric Gérbehaye/ L’Agence VU

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CHAPTER 4

NEWSNIGHT

Language matters, I said. It determines how a problem is framed and defines the range of possible solutions. I referred to Rwanda about which no member of the Security Council had been able to use the word genocide . . . [it] erased the UN’s political responsibility to intervene to stop genocide. (James Orbinski, Médecins Sans Frontières, in a statement to the UN Security Council in 1999) In the years since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the British media has come under considerable scrutiny by academics and observers for failing to distinguish between government and RPF fighting on the front line and the systematic killing that was taking place well behind government lines. By framing the killings as ethnic conflict and tribal civil war, the British media has been accused of contributing to the British government’s disinterest in Rwanda and failing to meet its legal obligation as a signatory of the UN Convention the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). This accusation has been challenged by numerous journalists who seek to ensure that their version of events will go down in history.1 Former Africa editor for The Independent Richard Dowden has contended that Rwanda itself has ‘challenged assumptions and changed perspectives’ about how the media should report on political crises in Africa.2 Dowden was responding to an article published in African Affairs by Linda Melvern

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and Paul Williams, which argued that the British press may also have contributed to ‘a wilful policy of indifference and obstructionism by the British government’.3 There have been several studies detailing press coverage on Rwanda and questioning the extent to which the British media missed the story during the three months of genocide.4 A focus on the UK equivalent of the ‘CNN Effect’, which assumes that media coverage can influence government foreign policy, overrides discussions on the extent to which the British government dictated how the British media should frame events. In both academic and journalistic spheres, discussions have been limited in scope by an almost obsessive focus on broadsheet newspapers, at the cost of omitting television news programmes. Perhaps more surprising is the absence of BBC’s Newsnight from the discussion. Deemed an essential component of British democracy and renowned for its provision of in-depth analyses of political events and for holding to account those people responsible for them,5 Newsnight in 1994 was one of a limited number of media public spheres within which British politicians jostled to appear. Without the internet and multiple television channels, Newsnight provided an opportunity for British politicians to promote themselves, their party politics and their position on British foreign policy. They are joined by a host of experts who together contribute to Newsnight’s political discourse. A cross-examination of news features provided by journalists on the ground in Rwanda, media discourse generated by studio guests, and the debates set by editor Peter Horrocks raises questions about whether Newsnight had deliberately avoided using the word ‘genocide’ and controlled studio debates in order to protect the interests of the British government.

Part I: Genocide or war? Newsnight’s silenced debate First aired on Wednesday 30 January 1980 with presenter Peter Snow, BBC’s Newsnight aimed to provide an informed analysis of the day’s news in a format that brought together the genres of television news and current affairs, which until then had been distinctly separate in British broadcasting. The programme was scheduled each weekday night, but initially the exact timing of the show varied to accommodate the

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nightly schedule and Newsnight could begin at any time from 10.30pm to 11.30pm. At its launch, Newsnight was considered to be a revolution by some in the industry and its main terrestrial rival Channel 4 News was yet to be conceived. For veteran frontline correspondent Charles Wheeler, Newsnight was able to subvert the normative news and current affairs conventions because the show garnered little interest from the BBC’s upper echelons. ‘From the beginning,’ writes Wheeler, ‘we enjoyed a unique degree of editorial independence, choosing what stories to cover and what treatment to give them.’6 Combined with the infancy of the programme, producers and editors could experiment with methods of reporting news – although founding editor George Carey enforced one rule stipulating that Newsnight should not lead on the same story as the BBC’s Nine O’Clock News.7 This enabled a degree of flexibility for the Newsnight team since the programme’s method of reporting did not fit the BBC’s standard institutional framework.8 By its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005, the BBC was heralding Newsnight as a flagship programme in its attempts to explain in detail current political events and hold to account those responsible for them.9 Today, Newsnight has a clear generic structure and has developed its own institutional framework for organizing mediatized political discourse, although an element of flexibility and experimentation remains. The framework for any given Newsnight programme is typically as follows: i. Introduction to the programme: sensationalist single-sentence news story narrated by the presenter (the news anchor) providing, as Allan Bell describes, ‘a lead for the main story but is a micro-story itself’.10 Accompanied by edited images to reflect the micro-story and the dramatic Newsnight theme tune. ii. Headline story (Story 1): short discussion/debate or extended reporting by a journalist in the field, often responding to questions put forward by the Newsnight presenter. iii. Story 2: a second short discussion/debate or extended report by a journalist in the field. iv. Brief lead into Story 3, often with phrases such as ‘in a moment’.

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v. Summary of the day’s news: these are usually single-sentence news stories (around 2–3 minutes of coverage in total); followed by a reading of the financial markets at their close. vi. Story 3. vii. Studio debate led by the presenter: usually focusing on the content of Story 3, often incorporating phone calls and satellite link-ups with one to three ‘experts’ and/or political actors. viii. One minute on ‘what the papers say’: a review of the headline stories on the front pages of the next day’s newspapers (both broadsheet and tabloid). This framework has become socially recognizable to the audience, as well as political actors (subjects/agents) who have a stake in the events being discussed, so that interviewees know what to expect and how to perform.11 The Newsnight presenter employs conventions typical of political interviews and has a specific role to play in setting the agenda of the debate, questioning and challenging politicians, other representatives of the public or lobbyists of governments and international organizations. Peter Snow, Jeremy Paxman, Kirsty Wark and Mark Urban, who all reported between 1994 and 2005, adopt the generic identity of the Newsnight presenter to appropriate specific discourse traits and a tough questioning style.12 Presenters are also encouraged to enact the Newsnight presenter persona in other public sphere activities such as public appearances or as guests on other media programmes. For example, Jeremy Paxman is the host of BBC2’s intellectual quiz show University Challenge where he appropriates the same hard-hitting, short-quipped persona. Both the presenter and interviewees are wellknown, although those questioned tend to be elected or appointed ‘public representatives who hold a degree of political power’.13 In addition to the political debates, each Newsnight programme includes a series of extended news stories, often termed ‘news features’ in the broadcasting industry by documentary filmmakers and distributers.14 Here, news features are understood to be documentary films, because they depend on a number of the genre’s conventions and have influenced or helped shape conventional documentary films depicting political events in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. In addition,

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news features are often produced and distributed by the same people who make and distribute longer documentary films. Newsnight news features, which until now have largely been excluded from the documentary film canon (and are therefore not discussed in much theorizing of the genre), can vary in length from 10–20 minutes. Many of these short documentary films, in merging news and current affairs and in attempting to provide historical background, are often closely aligned to the classic expository mode of representing reality. For film theorist Bill Nichols, this mode of representation is based around commentary directed towards the viewer, where ‘images serve as illustrations or counterpoint’ to emphasize ‘the impression of objectivity and of wellsubstantiated judgement’.15 This mode lends itself to the Newsnight documentary film because, as Nichols notes, it ‘affords an economy of analysis’ since observations ‘can be made succinctly and pointedly in words’.16 In the case of Newsnight news features, the journalist in the field narrates the omnipresent ‘voice of god’ commentary, taking the viewer on a journey to Africa to uncover the political events that have occurred in the last few days. Indeed, the challenges faced in accessing the region and sending footage back to the UK complements one of Newsnight’s aims: to reflect on recent past political events – an aim the presenter frequently refers to throughout each broadcast when uttering phrases such as ‘tonight we talk to . . . ’; ‘tonight, we learn . . .’ As the outsider westerner, the journalist in the field appears above the fray and ‘has the capacity to judge actions in the historical world without being caught up in them’, even though the journalist and the producers of the documentary film partake in the act of writing history, perform in front of the camera and are engaged in gendered politics of revisionism.17 The Newsnight formula and generic presenter persona have led some critics such as the New Statesman’s Michael Leapman to argue that the programme’s style leans too much towards ‘attack journalism’ and on creating rather than reporting, or indeed, analysing news.18 Advocates such as former economics correspondent for Newsnight Will Hutton believe that Newsnight, in enabling mediatized political discourse, provides ‘an essential aid to living in a democracy’ and in 2002 stated that the programme was ‘one of half a dozen . . . components now of actual British

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democracy and British citizenship’.19 Former Director of Television Mark Thompson once described Newsnight as ‘the single most important programme on the BBC’.20 The BBC boasts how, over the years, the programme has ‘broken countless stories, produced ground-breaking and policy-shifting films’ and ‘delivered many memorable interviews’.21 Newsnight, despite having suffered budget cuts in the early 2000s, is able to capitalize on the BBC’s vast global network of correspondents, heralded by Leapman as ‘possibly the best in the world, because most of its competitors are commercial operations that cannot afford the same level of representation’.22 As discussed in Chapter Two, the word ‘genocide’ was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the politically sanctioned annihilation of targeted civilian groups outside of the context of war. Under the 1948 Convention genocide constitutes the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group’.23 The convention was established out of recognition that the newly ratified crimes against humanity and war crimes perceived national sovereignty as sacrosanct. At the time, under international law, states and individual perpetrators who acted within the boundaries of those states could still freely commit genocide unless they did so across national borders.24 The UN stipulates that nation states that have signed the 1948 Convention have a legal responsibility to act to stop genocide and to hold perpetrators to account. Since 1948 it has become apparent that the extent to which those UN member states halt genocide rests more on political will than any acknowledgement of legal responsibility. Here, the UN assumes the ideal of the CNN Effect in its expectation that media institutions influence government policy. It is for this reason that using the word genocide in news stories and political discussion programmes that report on political violence is considered so important, and there is an expectation that media institutions should play a role in monitoring the violence. Accordingly, Newsnight, considered a central component of British democracy, should at most challenge the British government and opposition parties to ensure that the UK, as a signatory of the 1948 Convention, fulfils its role in preventing and halting genocide. However, an analysis of Newsnight programmes broadcast between

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6 April 1994 and 30 September 1994 reveals that these expectations are not met and the British government is not challenged throughout the course of the genocide. In the first days of the genocide, Newsnight’s coverage of political violence in Rwanda is generated within the studio and completely controlled by the editor Peter Horrocks. The first story is provided on the day after President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, Thursday 7 April 1994, when the following is mentioned by presenter Peter Snow in a single-sentence story during the summary of the day’s news: ‘eleven Belgian troops serving with the UN have been killed in fighting in the central African Republic of Rwanda’. The following day, Rwanda is mentioned in the summary news by Kirsty Wark, who announces that the central African state is ‘in a state of anarchy tonight’ and that ‘thousands of people have been killed during two days of ethnic violence in the capital Kigali’. In addition to using the ethnic conflict/coming of anarchy framework of reporting, Wark refers to the history of colonialism by honing in on the actions of the Belgian government which is ‘making plans to fly its nationals out of the country’, although no effort is made to describe the political history, which includes the genocides of 1959, 1963 and 1972. Visual images portray both militarization and humanitarian catastrophe: we see soldiers chanting and raising their guns in the air, followed by pictures of refugee camps and people, mainly women, huddled in makeshift temporary huts. Wark then introduces us to the first western ‘expert’, the Head of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) France in Rwanda and expert logistician Eric Bertin whom she had interviewed earlier by phone. Bertin’s edited words reinforce the ethnic conflict framework which the presenter established the day before. When asked by Wark ‘who’s in control’, Bertin states very clearly that ‘it’s more an anarchic situation’. He continues: It’s very difficult to know exactly what is happening. Well yesterday it was impossible to know. It seems this afternoon that the army is a little bit more in control of the situation. It seems that the gendarmerie, which is the military police force, as well has a little bit more control now, and the situation is a little bit more quiet.

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Bertin’s observation is perplexing. When interviewed by Melvern, Bertin notes that in February 1994 he detailed in a fax to the headquarters of MSF-France that emergency planning in preparation for political crisis was under way.25 Nevertheless, Newsnight’s portrayal at this point is one that assumes that the situation is calming: when Bertin speaks on the phone, we are presented with a library still of Kigali during times of peace and it depicts a road with men walking along in civilian clothing. The massacres in Kikongo and Nyamirambo on Saturday 9 April 1994 were a watershed moment for many aid workers, who recognized that the targeting of civilians was amounting to something greater than war. Bertin realized that ‘Rwanda was now beyond the limits of humanitarian help’ and on Sunday 10 April pulled all his staff out of the country.26 Bertin also notes that, at the time of his departure, the French military appeared to have ‘control over the Rwandan army’ and were ‘driving freely around Kigali’, leading him to question ‘why the French officers did not simply stop the killing’.27 Yet the level of extreme violence against civilians and the role of French troops observed by Bertin do not tally with Newsnight’s report on Monday 11 April. Again confined to summary news, the 20-second one-line story speaks of the exodus of ‘people’ (Rwandans) to neighbouring countries, helped by French and Belgian forces, all of whom are fleeing the ‘battle’ as the rebel forces advance – although we do not know the political affiliation of these forces. The accompanying library pictures of trucks and heavy artillery again reinforce the news anchor’s commentary. According to my research, in the first nine days of war and genocide, Rwanda received a total of 2 minutes and 50 seconds of coverage on Newsnight. Comprehensive reporting on the country does not occur until almost a month after the genocide began when, on 4 May 1994, we are presented with the first news feature. Using the word ‘genocide’ Overall, news features vacillate between describing political violence as ‘civil war’, ‘ethnic war’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ in all its clarity. However, an analysis of Newsnight programmes reveals that the word genocide was only mentioned five times between 6 April 1994

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and 27 July 1994, before the RPF claimed victory and declared a unilateral ceasefire. Newsnight presenters refer to the term just three times and only after the USA and UK recognize the new RPF government at the end of July. Genocide is first mentioned by reporter Tom Carver in a news feature broadcast on 16 May: ‘Every day, evidence of the genocide inside Rwanda washes up at this outpost.’ His statement is not echoed by presenter Sue Cameron who uses the ethnic conflict/ coming of anarchy framework of reporting: ‘As the killings continue in Rwanda’s civil war, most of the dead are members of the minority Tutsi killed by government-supporting Hutus.’ The word genocide is not mentioned again until 20 June by expert Ian Linden from the UK’s Catholic Institute for International Relations in his second appearance on the show since the plane crash. Linden argues that French intervention to create a humanitarian zone in the west of the country and a UN-brokered ceasefire agreement will not stop the killing because it is state-led political violence and a deliberate targeting of a particular civilian group: One of the sides – the Interim Government – has been guilty of genocide. The other side, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, has done more than external agencies to free people and to rescue their kith and kin. To consider a ceasefire at this point would simply be to allow the killings to go on because it is not primarily regular armies that are doing the killing. It’s the Hutu extremist mobs. Ignoring Linden’s reference to genocide, Peter Snow continues the debate on whether France should intervene, in a pre-recorded (and therefore controlled) interview with Secretary-General Dr Theogene Rudasingwa, who refers to the ‘people responsible for genocide’ three times. Rudasingwa talks about the ‘people who definitely have carried out and planned the genocide’ on 4 July, the day when the RPF took control of Kigali and declared it would establish a new government based on the Arusha Accords, but again, this is not picked up on and debated by presenter Sue Cameron. Later, on 15 July, Robin Denselow, in his second news feature for Newsnight since the genocide began,

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reports exclusively on the shooting war, although his introduction makes it clear that genocide is taking place: ‘They’ve captured the capital and now the rebel troops of the RPF are poised for the final battle for Rwanda. It’s been an extraordinary victory, but can they really bring peace to a country divided and wrecked by genocide?’ Denselow is practically ignored by Paxman in the studio, who relies once more on the ethnic conflict/coming of anarchy framework of reporting to emphasize the importance of a ceasefire. It is not until 27 July 1994, when both the USA and UK officially recognize the new RPF government, that the word genocide is mentioned by a presenter, when Kirsty Wark hosts a Newsnight Special debate on Rwanda. Although this is the first time a news anchor utters the word, Wark continues to use the ethnic conflict/coming of anarchy framework of reporting, thus suggesting that the targeting of civilians is degenerative in a backward/so called ‘primitive’ ‘African’ kind of way. One month later on 25 August Kirsty Wark, echoing Martin Shaw’s concept of degenerative war, declares somewhat inaccurately that ‘civil war turned into genocide’. Newsnight only begins to use the word genocide continuously from 22 September 1994 onwards, in sync with the UN. During this September broadcast, Jeremy Paxman introduces the headline story in a manner which criticizes the UN, even though Newsnight (and the BBC) played no role in pressuring the UN into acknowledging that genocide was occurring from April onward. Paxman declares: ‘A United Nations investigation has at last given slaughter in Rwanda the name it so long seemed to merit: it was genocide.’ This statement is qualified by Robin Denselow’s news feature wherein he reports that the ‘UN is under attack in Africa for taking so long in bringing those responsible for genocide to justice’. However, in the first three months of reporting since the plane crash, journalists in the field and guests on the show refer to genocide, while Newsnight presenters avoid using the word. Describing the ‘act of genocide’ Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporter Anne Chaon has argued that journalists are obsessively preoccupied with their failure to adequately

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describe political violence in Rwanda following the shooting down of President Habyarimana’s plane. ‘Most journalists,’ she writes, ‘are not expert in genocide. Many of them, myself included, arrived in Rwanda with very little knowledge of the country.’28 As a consequence, war was described more often than genocide. The problem of describing political violence in Rwanda is expanded upon by BBC correspondent Mark Doyle, who spent a significant amount of time in the first three months after the plane crash filing stories from Rwanda. Doyle claims to have reported two types of conflict: the ‘shooting war’ and the ‘genocide war’, but observes that he did not use the actual word genocide until 29 April in a report which referred to British aid agency Oxfam’s announcement that genocide was taking place.29 Doyle has since admitted that in the first weeks he got the story ‘terribly wrong’, in spite of having been briefed on the political situation in Rwanda by the ambassador of the African Embassy in Kigali in early 1994.30 Like Chaon, journalists who were reporting in Rwanda alongside Tom Carver at the beginning of May have expressed their difficulty in recognizing genocide as something distinguishable from war. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) British journalist James Schofield, who met the BBC Newsnight team outside the gates of the interim government’s temporary headquarters in Gitarama (its members having fled Kigali the month before), felt that his own coverage was flawed. Schofield had missed the start of the genocide, had not been engaged and later found it difficult to gain entry into Rwanda. When he did travel into the interior from Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, Schofield kept hearing stories of widespread massacres but could not see any bodies, in part because the perpetrators had concealed them. Schofield felt that it was challenging for journalists on the ground to comprehend what was taking place, claiming that ‘you do have this blind spot about genocide – it’s jolly difficult to imagine it’.31 Other journalists who reported in Rwanda at the time felt, retrospectively, that the difference between genocide and war was distinct. Geoff Adams Spink was a producer for the BBC Radio 4 Today programme in May 1994. Having some interest in Burundi, Spink approached his editor Roger Mosey to ask for permission to travel to Rwanda from the UK. His editor agreed, provided that he report only

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from the borders of neighbouring countries and did not enter into the interior. Spink notes that his brief was to report on the refugees and the tensions, because similar ethnic tensions were prevalent in Burundi.32 While in Tanzania, Spink was reliant on conversations with NGO workers for information but they were only providing stories about what Spink terms ‘the human migration fall-out’.33 Upon spending four days in Burundi, Spink, broadcaster Andy Kershaw and another journalist secured an accompanied journey into Rwanda with an RPF guide. During Spink’s three-day trip, he indicates that while in Rwanda he saw both war and genocide, but the confusion lay in understanding which of the atrocities were taking place in the war zone and which were taking place behind government lines (i.e. in the areas where genocide was continuing): We saw both . . . front lines are not demarcated nicely with white picket fences . . . they are very fluid places. I think we’d happened upon the front line when even the [RPF] officer who was escorting us believed that we were well behind it. But the distinction to me is that . . . five minutes before the landmines and the ambushes started to happen, we stood on the bridge of the river with a detachment of RPF troops and they pointed down and literally once every 30 seconds – and we timed it – literally once every 30 seconds there was another body floating down the river and it was usually civilian. No. It was exclusively civilian. Usually older people, children, women – hands tied behind their backs, floating with their face down. Now that’s not war, that’s genocide as far as I’m concerned. In the same way that the trashed village had the bodies of all the villagers stuffed down the village well. And again, that’s not war, that’s genocide. It’s the same with what we saw in Nyamata, so that was genocide. And then we happened upon war as well.34 In 1994 Peter Horrocks, currently director of the BBC World Service, had only recently taken on the role of editor of Newsnight, having previously worked on the programme as an assistant producer and producer in the 1980s. At the time of the genocide, Horrocks says,

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he was ‘coming to terms with managing a big programme such as Newsnight’.35 Within the BBC, they ‘had a conversation about the nature of the story’ and ‘weighed up the strengths of the story and the level of access’.36 Horrocks maintains that ‘it took some time for the story to unravel’ and, as a result, the team ‘decided to take it carefully – we could not base it on speculative conjecture’.37 Concerned that Newsnight was too dependent on rehashing the pieces that BBC news was delivering, producer David Belton sought an agreement from Horrocks to report on Rwanda in late April 1994.38 Like Spink, Belton’s brief was to cover the refugee crisis that was building up in Tanzania and he was told to stay outside of Rwanda’s borders. Alongside a sound technician and cameraman, Belton arrived in Kenya on 25 April and travelled by car from Nairobi to Boneo camp in Tanzania with BBC World Service correspondent Tom Carver, who had recently reported from Johannesburg. The Newsnight team shot its first news feature on those borders, where they encountered the RPF at Rusumo Falls before returning to Nairobi to cut the film. Like Spink, Belton knew that they were witnessing genocide but concedes that the first film was not explicit enough: It wasn’t that we didn’t think it was genocide – we couldn’t say with certainty standing on the border. It was a difficult position to be in. It was complex in terms of what we were seeing and what we were hearing. If we had been standing on a live wire to Paxman and were asked were we seeing genocide, we couldn’t say yes. [In that first film] there should have been a line saying this is what people inside the country are saying. We made amends in the second one – no one else had been to or seen Kabgayi.39 In another parallel with Spink, the team rebelled against the instructions of Newsnight management and travelled into Rwanda from Bujumbura. A Croat-Bosnian priest, Vjekoslav ‘Vjeko’ C´uric´ who had lived in Rwanda for ten years, was running an ad hoc aid mission into the country. C´uric´ would not let them ride in his lorry, and agreed instead that they could tailgate him to Kabgayi, located well behind the extremist government lines and known to the International Red

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Cross as a place where systematic killing was taking place. Belton believed that they saw genocide but at the time found it challenging to depict on camera: Yes, I believed we were witnessing genocide. It was complex – you saw it in various ways but not on camera – that was switched off. We knew it was genocide as there were people lying on the side of the street in large numbers. Some were butchered in front of us and we saw the process happen. There was one man with pink identification papers – we saw them. It was very difficult to tell people this or visualize it for people – we didn’t do a good job in conveying what we’d witnessed. The camp was more complex because they [the Tutsi] were alive. Soldiers were walking in and out. There was a Red Cross presence and therefore it was very difficult for the Hutu soldiers to wipe out this particular group of people. The Bishop was high up in the political hierarchy of the country but at the same time he was a bishop. The killing was not something the government wanted to see themselves and at the time they were under heat from the international community. The camp was just off the main road, it was one month after the genocide had begun and they were several leagues behind the front line – it was difficult for the government to call it civil war, which is what they were saying . . . The people in the camp were slowly starving to death and were being pulled out. A lot of young women I think lost their lives. It felt like a death camp in a Bosnian war – only more brutal.40 Journalists in the field and distributors of news features were aware that the story was big. Ron McCullagh, director of the documentary film production company Insight News TV based in London, distributed for journalists Catherine Bond, Nick Hughes and Lindsey Hilsum during the genocide. It was in his company’s interests to rally broadcast news editors into purchasing footage. Insight News TV had hours of rushes provided by Catherine Bond but no polished documentaries. From April to June 1994, Insight News TV distributed

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footage to Germany, Spain and Canada, among others. But there was little interest in the UK. McCullagh recalls: We faxed people around the world and we said this was happening, could you possibly send us your interest and we’ll send you some material. Part of the problem was that the material was unprocessed. Normally this is a company that produces and makes films ourselves and so normally they get a finished piece. In this particular case, we couldn’t do that because Catherine was on the road and filming all the time and what finished pieces she was doing, she was doing directly for Channel 4.41 For McCullagh, there was a sense that the broadcast news editors had already decided not to run the story. Although he admits that his team did not explicitly use the word genocide, Insight News was stressing that the level of violence was extreme and more than a typical African civil war scenario: This company has a reputation for dealing with stories around the world and therefore not the stories that are high up on the agenda, and we are careful about the people we work with in order to protect that reputation. So there is never a question of the veracity of our material. It’s down to whether it’s important enough to get on the news bulletin from where the editor stands . . . We tell them the story, they don’t respond. Then we come back and tell them look, it really is a story. They still don’t respond. Then we go back and say look this is really serious. At which point, they close down. And they think ‘well you’re pestering’. They’ve already made their decision.42 Describing genocide If media institutions are expected to monitor political violence and assess whether genocide is in process, the question might focus on what evidence should be mediatized. Genocide scholar Helen Fein’s paradigm is apt for assessing the extent to which evidence of genocide

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was present in Newsnight news features. Fein identifies five conditions which constitute genocide: evidence of a sustained attack on a selected group; evidence that the perpetrator is part of an organized group, often led by a commander; evidence that victims are targeted because they are members of a certain collectivity as defined by the perpetrators; evidence that victims are defenceless; and, finally, evidence that an intent to kill is sanctioned by the authorities.43 As Belton suggests, within Newsnight news features there is evidence of all of these conditions in Rwanda, most notably in the documentaries shot in early May 1994. For example, in the news feature broadcast on 16 May, Carver interviews Vjeko C´uric´, who reports: ‘The Tutsi I’ve met so far, those left behind, are just waiting to be killed . . . They don’t know how to get out of the situation, and most of them think they will be killed. They are just waiting to die.’ In the same news feature, Carver observes that the authorities are both condoning and instigating the targeting of civilians. Here, it is worth quoting the documentary at length, since it demonstrates a logic of reporting that distinguishes between war and genocide: Most ordinary people are struggling to continue their lives amidst the carnage. But they’re being bombarded by extremist propaganda on the radio, urging them to keep killing their Tutsi neighbours and every so often we would get a glimpse of the horror that lay beneath the surface. Yesterday, as we were waiting at this spot to be led into the Seminary [the camp at Kabgayi], we watched a man being interrogated by soldiers. With his hands tied behind his back, he knelt in the dirt pleading his innocence. Suddenly, the soldiers handed him over to a group of civilians who clearly wanted to kill him. . . All this took place in sight of the Bishop’s palace. This is a country where all moral order seems to have been destroyed. The UN may be trying to stop the war between the government and the rebels but that’s not where most of the atrocities are occurring. They are taking place in remote villages deep inside the government-controlled areas, far away from front lines and foreign eyes.

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The challenge in describing genocide is also evident in their news features. On 10 May Carver states, ‘You cannot explain this as just a tribal conflict. At an ordinary human level, Hutu and Tutsi have lived easily together, so much so that it’s hard to distinguish one from another.’ Instead, the Newsnight team borrows from documentary film representations of the Nazi Holocaust to reproduce visual representations of genocide that would have been familiar to a British audience at the time. Carver uses the language of the Holocaust to describe the death camp – labelled a refugee camp – wherein Tutsi are selected to be taken away and killed by Interahamwe and government soldiers. ‘These people are caught in a terrible dilemma,’ Carver says, ‘it felt as though we’d entered the Jewish ghettos at the height of Nazism.’ Here, camera shots echo the scenes of the Nazi concentration camps, first honing in on people in the background, then focusing on a baby crying and a frail old woman resting her head against the wall, before readjusting the focus of the camera on to the wire fence in the foreground. The documentary then cuts to a hand resting on the wire, before the scene pans out to see more children standing behind the wire. Witnesses provide the most graphic accounts, but it is clear that they are unable to adequately describe in words what they saw. Missionary Rob Wilson, interviewed by Tom Carver for the 10 May news feature, recalls: As a Christian, I can’t understand how a normal person would take up a panga [machete] and er . . . just kill an innocent baby or a child or a mother . . . And so something snapped inside these youths or whoever did the killing . . . that made them do things that were unthinkable. It’s just not normal. I mean, you can understand in a war situation, soldiers shooting each other but innocent people that had no political affiliation – they were just children and so on . . . you just can’t . . . I just can’t imagine . . . something gripped the people who were committing these massacres and it’s difficult to explain it in human terms. It is also clear that members of the Tutsi population are being singled out. On 16 May, Tom Carver interviews Swiss businessman Claude Sonier, who was trapped in Butare with his Rwandan wife and children before

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being rescued by an Italian consort and is now in Burundi. It is quite clear that Sonier is deeply traumatized by what he has seen, and Carver weaves his words into a narrative that sensationalizes the horror of the journey into Rwanda on which they have only just begun to embark: TOM CARVER: He told us that hundreds of people, including his wife’s mother, had been thrown alive into a pit full of burning tires. CLAUDE SONIER: Forty per cent of the population is dead today. Forty per cent! Because you have not so much Tutsi in life today. TOM CARVER: You talked about a big pit. Can you just describe this please? CLAUDE SONIER: No! No, it’s too much [shaking his head] . . . TOM CARVER: As he was leaving he gave a chilling warning of what lay ahead. CLAUDE SONIER: Sa mère, son frère sont capité. Un vieux – coupé en quarters. (His mother, his brother are decapitated. An old man, cut into quarters). While at Kabgayi, unarmed civilian Rwandan Tutsi boys who are interviewed by the Newsnight team also find it difficult to explain the horror they face: TUTSI BOY [translated]: They are attacking us. It’s unbelievable. They come in here and take the old and the young out of the camp and kill them using knives and machetes. It defies imagination and there’s nothing we can do . . . All the people they target are Tutsi. They don’t want us to live in this country any more. Fein indicates that this inability to describe genocide is common among first-hand witnesses and was just as notable during the 1915 Armenian genocide when reports by foreign correspondents, missionaries, travelers and diplomats were sent from Turkey to London and America. Fein

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notes that these observers knew that horrors and crimes were taking place, and ‘words such as “atrocities,” “extinction,” “extermination” and “perished” were reiterated’ but nothing with as much legal weight as the term or concept of genocide.44 In the case of Newsnight reporting, ‘horror’ becomes the most frequently used word by both journalists and witnesses to describe what they saw. If journalists, witnesses and those about to be killed cannot find a word suitable for the crime, we are left wondering who in media institutions is responsible for identifying genocide amid such a stack of media evidence. Studio debates Since Newsnight prides itself on its ability to challenge politicians on behalf of British citizens, one might ask what the political discussion programme’s approach was to engaging representatives of the British government, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, in studio debates when its very own news features provided evidence of genocide in Rwanda. In this regard, how were studio debates framed to allow for taking those in power to task? On 4 May, Rwanda is described in sensationalized terms by presenter Sue Cameron who states that the ‘horror worsens’ before questioning ‘what the UN should do in Rwanda. Can intervention stop the bloodshed?’ As in the UK broadsheets, violence is described as a ‘civil war’, in which ‘an estimated 200,000 people’ have merely ‘died’, caught up in the fighting. Deliberate targeting of civilians is hidden from view and the primary image is of ‘the Government from the majority Hutu tribe’ being ‘under attack from the Rwandan Patriotic Front, backed by the minority Tutsi’. Cue Newsnight correspondent Peter Marshall’s documentary news feature, which is filmed in a studio. Marshall’s story focuses on the history of the UN in Africa wherein Rwanda is used as a case study to break Newsnight’s real story: a leaked UN report produced in February 1994 which was ‘highly critical of the UN conduct in Somalia’ and the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping was kept concealed for some weeks, even by the then Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Despite this, Marshall’s reporting reveals evidence of genocide: ‘Rwanda today and the horror goes on,’ he begins,

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before observing the ‘dozens of bodies – men, women and children – massacred outside a Catholic mission in the north of the country’: After four weeks of fighting, an estimated quarter of a million have been killed . . . Bodies can be seen floating down the Akagera River. The UN stands condemned for pulling out of Rwanda as the fighting started, leaving the country in the hands of killers wielding machetes. Once again, accompanying footage reveals graphic images of bodies of women and children, some with their legs open having been raped, and RPF soldiers covering their faces to avoid the stench, but rape is not reported here. Marshall then interviews Ian Linden, the second ‘expert’ to appear on Newsnight in connection with Rwanda, whose observations completely contradict the opening statement made by Sue Cameron. He contends that ‘the bulk of the slaughter is being done by irregular forces and gangs of Hutu thugs’ who are ‘certainly connected to the provisional government’. Linden makes it clear that there is a difference between the targeting of civilians and the war between the government and the RPF: The question of the conflict between the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Government Forces using heavy artillery – that’s something completely different, but that is not causing the bulk of the killings and I think everybody is now very worried. Linden feeds into Newsnight’s discussion on the failings of the UN by indicating that the UN cut and ran from ‘a few machete-wielding thugs’ in Haiti and that the UN ‘cannot be intimidated by people of this sort’. Newsnight relies on classic traits of the documentary expository mode – Marshall stands in a studio with a map of Africa and the Congo behind him, depicting the history of the UN’s uneasy relationship with the continent. As he narrates, we are presented with archive footage of the UN in the Congo in the 1960s, stating that ‘the history of UN intervention in African civil wars is not a happy one’ and ending on the UN failure in Somalia. Newsnight’s debate on

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the failings of the UN is placed firmly in the international arena. Marshall refers to Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s admission of what he calls ‘the unfortunate withdrawal of UN forces from Rwanda’ before stating that African nations are not interested in supporting the UN. This statement is backed up by another expert, Cameroonian Dr JeanEmmanuel Pondi of the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge University, who agrees that the ‘UN should work in collaboration with the Organization of African Unity’. This first debate sets the scene for many repeat discussions between May and July 1994 about whether or not the UN (but not UN member states) should intervene in Rwanda. Each time, the angle of the story changes slightly but the issue on the agenda remains the same. On 10 May 1994 Newsnight questions the role of US intervention in Rwanda, with presenter Peter Snow describing two situations: civil war and humanitarian crisis (refugees are fleeing), and the West having problems delivering aid to them. Civil war dominates the next debate on 16 May, the same day that the UN votes to send 5,500 troops to Rwanda and Carver’s accompanying news feature portrays images similar to those of the Nazi Holocaust. The following day, concern is expressed for ‘world failure’ in stopping war generally, and the ‘tragedy of Rwanda’ as the ‘most recent’ war becomes the case study with which to frame a discussion led by Jeremy Paxman on the role of the USA in ‘gearing [UN] member states into action’, although member states are not singled out. Six days later on 23 May, Newsnight reports on the UN’s failure to ‘broker a ceasefire’ and asks ‘what should [the then Assistant Secretary-General in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations] Iqbal Riza do next?’, placing the emphasis firmly on UN bureaucracy and the role of international civil servants.45 On 20 June, the issue on the agenda concerns France’s decision to send in its own troops on the humanitarian mission Opération Turquoise, and Newsnight asks: ‘should France go in?’ On 4 July Newsnight reports the victory of the RPF, stating that ‘the victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front find their advances blocked by France’ before questioning: ‘are French motives purely humanitarian and will it come to open battle between French and Rwandans?’ Eight days later, on 15 July, Newsnight continues to report on the civil war, heralding an ‘imminent’ ceasefire

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before discussing the exodus of refugees fleeing into Tanzania. It is not made clear that these refugees are Hutu, some of them perpetrators, fleeing the advances of the RPF. On 18 and 22 July, attention returns to the role of the world in saving refugees from the ‘latest horror’, when again Rwanda serves as a case study for discussing whether the West ‘really know[s] best’ when dealing with humanitarian crises. All of these debates are confined to the realm of international politics and international organizations (in particular the UN), which are imaged as detached from domestic UK politics and the foreign policy of the British government. Newsnight does not discuss the British role in influencing UN decisions around military intervention. Not once throughout the course of reporting on Rwanda does Newsnight refer to the lobbying efforts of the political activists and NGOs that urged the UK government to recognize that genocide was taking place. In late April, when Rwanda was absent from Newsnight’s agenda, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam publicly demanded that the British government take immediate action in the interests of Rwandan civilians.46 On Tuesday 3 May, Director of Oxfam, David Bryer, and British actress Helen Mirren presented a petition and accompanying press release to the then Prime Minister John Major at 10 Downing Street stating that genocide was taking place.47 On the following day, 4 May, Oxfam printed a campaign advert in The Times, labelling the violence in Rwanda genocide – but arguing that genocide was something extreme, greater than war – and the deliberate targeting of civilians. Below the image of piles of skulls the caption reads: After Cambodia the world said: ‘Never again’, yet in Rwanda there is genocide. Oxfam does not use the word genocide lightly, but there is no other way to describe the mass slaughter happening right now. Men, women and children are being systematically hunted down, tortured and killed. The rivers are choked with bodies . . . Half a million people, mainly Tutsis, face imminent death.48 Oxfam appeals directly to the British government: ‘What is happening in Rwanda is a crime. The apathy of the world is criminal.

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We believe Britain must use its seat on the Security Council to call for effective UN intervention in Rwanda, now.’49 This political activism is not included in Newsnight’s analysis of the day’s news. Instead, on the day that Oxfam prints the advert, Newsnight begins its two-monthlong series of debates on the role of the international community, the need for a world leader in gearing nation states into action and criticism over the ineffectiveness of the UN. From the start of the genocide until the end of July when the RPF took control of the country, no British MP from any of the parties and not a single member of the British government is interviewed by Newsnight, in spite of the importance of the programme in 1994, a time when there were less media public spheres and less opportunities for political actors to promote themselves and their parties. Interestingly, the first MP to speak on Newsnight is interviewed on 22 July during Newsnight’s declaration that the USA has ‘seized the initiative . . . to counter the crippling epidemic’ in Goma refugee camps in Zaire. Long-standing Conservative MP Toby Jessel chooses to hone in on the humanitarian refugee crisis to commend both the USA and the UK for funding aid agencies and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): ‘If every country had responded as well as the Americans and the British,’ he states, ‘the problem wouldn’t be as grave as it is.’ Once the RPF declared victory on 22 July and was recognized by the USA as a legitimate government, representatives of the British government began to appear more frequently on Newsnight. However, an analysis of the Newsnight Special broadcast on 29 July 1994 and a close examination of the political discourse generated by numerous actors during the studio debate suggest that Newsnight reporting ensured, above all, that the interests of the British government were protected. In the hour-long extended programme, Kirsty Wark hosts a chat-show style debate to examine the ‘developing crisis in Rwanda’. Baroness Lynda Chalker, then minister of state for overseas development at the British Foreign Office, is the special guest in the studio. She is joined by Rwandan Tutsi Joseph Mutabobo and Rwandan Hutu Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, Rakiya Omaar of African Rights, former British Gulf Commander General Sir Peter de la Billière, former director of War on Want George Galloway, war crimes expert Dr John Pritchard, Stuart

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Wallis of Oxfam, Ali McHumo of the Tanzania High Commission, BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson, Conservative MP Nick Budgen and Great Lakes scholar Filip Reyntjens. US Special Envoy to Rwanda Brian Atwood, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the UN’s Iqbal Riza, the UNHCR’s Sylvanna Foa, Dominique Moisi from the French Institute of Foreign Affairs and RPF representative Dr Theogene Rudasingwa – many of whom had already appeared on Newsnight over the course of April, May and June – appear on the show via satellite link-up. The programme includes a news feature by reporter Robin Denselow in Goma and a ‘personal argument’ by John Simpson. A series of debates construct an overall story of events from, as Kirsty Wark describes in her introduction, ‘the roots of the killings, the international response and its failures, what the UN can deliver and the agendas which govern the West’s dealings with post-colonial Africa’. The role of individual nation states is barely discussed and Britain is imaged as trying to prevent crisis in Rwanda from April onward. Wark does well to avoid challenging Chalker about the role of the UK as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. However, Chalker, introduced as having just returned from Rwanda (and therefore appearing to be heavily involved in the crisis), claims that ‘Britain has been helping in Rwanda since the beginning of April’ before suggesting that the UK is itself powerless because other factors prevent an international response. Chalker states: We’ve already spent over £50 million in this crisis. We have a large number of soldiers, we all know in other places, but we have said we would help in the way that General Dallaire has requested of us and we’ve fitted exactly what he needs. We were notable to do so in May but it was generally agreed in the OAU that African forces would go in. There has been a real difficulty I think in procurement, not only of forces, but equipment, to allow them to be deployed. And that is something that the UN has really got to put right. Wark then turns to Rakiya Omaar and asks whether, as Chalker suggests, the UN’s role has been good enough. Omaar refers directly

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to the UN as having ‘completely betrayed the hopes of the Rwandan people’. Emphasis on the role of a seemingly independent United Nations, existing outside the control or influence of member states, is challenged first by Stuart Wallis from Oxfam, who makes the point that Lieutenant-General Dallaire and his small number of forces ‘have done their best’ but have been let down by the international community who ‘did not do enough to get 5,500 troops in’. Wark turns to Archbishop Desmond Tutu to qualify that it was not just a ‘western failure’ to act, thus detracting from a potential focus on the role of the British government in providing troops. The Archbishop is the first person on the programme to refer to the ‘Rwanda crisis’ as genocide, claiming that ‘governments could have responded much earlier . . . to stop the genocide’. This statement provides a platform for the then Assistant Secretary-General in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Iqbal Riza, to cleverly expose the inaction of the member states, in particular the UK: Well I think Archbishop Tutu has already spoken for us [i.e. for the UN]. Indeed there were troops on the ground, as Baroness Chalker says, but with all due respect to her, those were troops that did not belong to the United Nations and the countries who had contributed them immediately decided to withdraw them. Within a matter of a couple of weeks, we were down from 2,500 to 250 because governments decided to withdraw them and because the Security Council itself decided to reduce the force. There was a certain reason. The governments who had sent those troops had sent them for a certain mandate, which was to help the parties to implement the agreement, which then broke down. They were not willing to leave these troops in the condition when these massacres and the civil war resumed. One has to say that the very fresh experience of Somalia was hovering in the background – the ghost of Somalia, and that I suppose influenced governments. But as Archbishop Tutu has said, the capacity, the potential, was there. It was not simply an African operation. The West is very much a part of the United Nations and it has demonstrated that when the will exists, they can

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deploy. The French deployed in a matter of days. The Americans have deployed in a matter of days. And Baroness Chalker is right. The British have offered a unit just during the last few days, and it will be there in the next few days. In closely analysing the dynamics between Baroness Chalker, Brian Atwood and Iqbal Riza, we can perhaps gain some insight into the tensions between member states and UN bureaucracy. Riza’s comment on the situation is quickly derided by US ambassador Atwood, who himself uses a number of tactics to divert attention away from individual member states. First, Atwood contends that debates around the responsibility of individual governments are ‘not particularly constructive’, since ‘if we blame the United Nations, we’re blaming ourselves’. In seemingly speaking on behalf of the public, Atwood’s use of rhetoric moves the audience away from thinking about the crisis in terms of genocide and towards viewing it as chaotic ethnic war and he cleverly distinguishes between ‘irrational’ African politics and ‘rational’ western politics. At the same time, Atwood argues that we (that is, we in the ‘West’) must distance ourselves from what has already happened so that the entire world can examine the crisis. It seems that Atwood subtly calls for the kind of distance that only the passing of time can bring, thereby arguing that what has happened has happened and there is nothing to be done about it. It is worth quoting his discourse in full: I don’t think this debate is particularly constructive, frankly, I think we have a serious problem in dealing with these kinds of conflagrations. The world itself must examine this situation as a case study. It’s a very emotional situation because so many people have lost their lives. But we should be realistic here. What has happened is that we were faced with the need to place troops in the midst of a hot civil war. It’s very rare that you will find the political will to do that. It seems to me we need to look – not blame – the United Nations. Indeed, it is true we are all part of that. If we blame the United Nations, we’re blaming ourselves. We have to look at our capacity to respond to these

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things. It’s a much more constructive debate it seems to me, if we can examine whether or not there was a way to prevent this crisis from happening in the first place. These irrational forces at play. We’re now looking back with 20/20 hindsight and expecting to come up with rational answers. It’s easy to do in hindsight, as opposed to on the spot. Later, Atwood uses similar tactics to distance the USA from the responsibility of making political decisions about whether to intervene (to stop genocide), announcing that, with the RPF government in place, the USA ‘will be putting 200 people on the ground in Kigali’ as part of a humanitarian mission. ‘Everyone has to play their proper role,’ Atwood concludes: ‘I think that’s the role we define ourselves.’ Newsnight’s denial In addition to its focus on UN bureaucratic failure, Newsnight’s extended debate also appears to whitewash events in order to further dumb down public questioning of British foreign policy. This is most noticeable in the discourse of Conservative MP Nicolas Budgen, who contends that the British government will only act to prevent political violence or war abroad at the behest of the British public. When asked by Wark whether the Organization of African Unity (OAU) needs more help, Budgen appropriates an argument that had previously been used to challenge nation states on their failure to act to prevent genocide and then subverts it by reminding the audience that domestic priorities must come first. In doing so, Budgen taps into both the fears and needs of the average British citizen, or perhaps the average viewer of Newsnight in 1994: The so-called international community doesn’t have a budget and doesn’t have any money . . . it is all about political will. What this boils down to is whether there is a national political will. And in this instance, I don’t find people coming up to me in the streets and saying ‘I’d like my son to go and fight in Rwanda and run the risk of being killed’. Nor if you ask them ‘are you in favour of

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a lot of money being spent there’ are they prepared, for instance, to delay the start of a new hospital so as to aid in Rwanda. As part of the programme, BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson provides a personal commentary which serves to add weight to the debate. According to Horrocks: John reports for Newsnight on an occasional basis – we commissioned him. We consider who are the extra people we can bring in – the extra gravitas. As a BBC editor, he has more ability to give a strong analysis . . . and tends to be more outspoken.50 Filmed in an editing suite, Simpson considers why it was that the international community neglected Rwanda. Simpson appropriates the ‘balance of power’ image of politics to contend that during the Cold War ‘no one hung around waiting for a public reaction’ and states that nations have ‘cut back on long-term development aid’ to focus on short-term relief. Simpson concludes his ‘expert’ analysis by arguing that ‘public opinion’s only aroused once the crisis point has already arisen’. The inclusion of Simpson, as the BBC’s World Affairs editor, masks Newsnight’s own failure to extend its ‘in-depth political analysis’ to challenge UK politicians during the three months of genocide. And it is quite ironic that Newsnight now discusses the need to rouse public interest in order to ensure that governments act, when the programme itself failed to report on the British public’s interest in Rwanda in early May. Fein has argued that denial can take many forms and includes a failure to recognize an event as genocide at the time.51 Policy elites of allied states have a political interest in denying genocide in order to demonstrate loyalty or allegiance to the country or allied countries that are closely connected to the state committing genocide. It has been suggested that Britain’s engagement in politics of revisionism at the time stemmed from a loyalty to France: an early Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the UK Foreign Office in 2005 for information on Britain’s knowledge of genocide at the time was rejected on the grounds that it would compromise Britain’s relationship with

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France.52 Fein indicates that governments and elites often adopt various framing devices to confuse public opinion. My analysis of Newsnight suggests that between April and the end of July 1994 the programme did well to convey a sense of confusion, off-setting media evidence of genocide in the news features with sensationalized statements to the contrary by news presenters and confining debates to the possibility of brokering a UN ceasefire and the bureaucratic failings of the UN. Newsnight’s control over studio discussions and its reluctance to add to its media agenda the obvious debate – is this war or genocide? – between April and July 1994, followed by the sudden appearance of members of the then Conservative government once the RPF had taken control of the country, are both particularly striking. When asked by the author why Newsnight did not report on the British role in the UN, or make reference to Oxfam’s presentation of the petition at 10 Downing Street on 3 May 1994, Horrocks claimed the ‘focus was the international story’, before remarking that Newsnight coverage was limited because of the nature of the discussion programme’s genre: Clearly in studio discussions you can’t do the eyewitness journalism . . . now we’d have more eyewitness material . . . We choose subjects which are amenable to debate and the UN was the story. I may not have been aware what their [i.e. the UK’s] role was – the role of the French and the US was more significant . . . I imagine that had it become a subject for response and an interest in the UK, then inevitably we would have covered it. I suspect we just thought it was an international story.53 Horrocks was also clear that the key issue was ensuring impartial journalism. When asked why presenters do not use the word ‘genocide’, he commented: My guess would be it’s a bit like the word terrorist. If the word still is part of the political debate then the presenters will avoid using the word, unless to raise the debate among others, then they would use it in inverted commas.54

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Horrocks also stated that there was not a ‘deliberate decision’ to refrain from using the word ‘genocide’, before remarking that ‘there may have been a general discussion about the use of the word and the story’ within the BBC.55 In failing to use the legal term genocide and by not making reference to the role of Britain within the UN, the Newsnight team was not obliged to follow the BBC’s own mandate to interrogate British politicians. Rather, the presenters are seen to be aggressively interrogating a host of international politicians who themselves make no reference to Britain’s status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. The tactic of avoiding the question of British influence in international politics is strengthened by an alignment to the frameworks propounded by Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations and Robert Kaplan’s The Coming Anarchy, which assume there is a morally constituted ‘international community’ to police world politics, from which Britain appears to be decidedly absent. The continued ignorance of Britain’s citizens of the decision making of British government representatives such as Lord Hannay and Lynda Chalker during the genocide is endemic where British foreign policy is concerned. Melvern asserts that the UK’s foreign affairs are the ‘most private realm of political affairs in the UK’ and that ‘there is a governance which is unaccountable and does not have parliamentary oversight’.56 Melvern and Paul Williams have contended that there is a need to undertake a thorough assessment of the government under John Major’s leadership in either preventing or suppressing genocide in Rwanda in 1994 or helping to facilitate and prolong it.57 Newsnight’s failure to challenge UK politicians has further hindered a collective understanding of the extent to which the British government practised denial and has prevented the sourcing of additional leads of inquiry which might expose individuals who should be held to account for failing to act on behalf of British citizens. As observed, many academic studies concentrate on the role of the UK media in influencing British foreign policy. Yet my own analysis of Newsnight suggests that one of the most crucial questions remains unanswered: to what extent were politicians influencing the Newsnight agenda? David Belton, who when interviewed appeared to be surprised that Newsnight presenters did not use the word genocide throughout the

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course of reporting between April and July, provides some idea of the logic behind the selection of studio guests: I’m not sure if Newsnight tried to contact [then Minister of Foreign Affairs] Douglas Hurd and he turned them down. In my experience, the only person that matters is a government minister – preferably from the Foreign Office. It is not so important if it is a member of a party making a claim . . . If he could avoid answering questions on Bosnia, think how much easier it is to avoid answering questions on Rwanda – for example ‘deeply regretful, monitoring the situation, doing all we can . . . ’58

Part II: Mediatizing Rwandan women Former editor of Newsnight (1994–97) Sian Kevill remarked during a Behind the Scenes special, broadcast on 21 February 2002: ‘It was very macho, very public school and particularly Oxbridge . . . full of bullshit and . . . sharp shoulders and very competitive’, before contending that the Newsnight of the 2000s is ‘much more diverse than it was ten years ago’.59 Kevill’s statement that Newsnight’s dominant culture in the early 1990s upheld a predominantly white middle-class male view of the world calls for an assessment of the way in which the programme’s engagement in international politics of revisionism are gendered and how this might have evolved over time in accordance with the editor’s perspective. Like colonial films, Newsnight news features on Rwanda are mediatized spheres within which Rwandan women are stripped of their materiality, dissected under the gaze of the cameraman, journalist and producer, and reconstructed in accordance with the image of politics that fits the documentary’s narrative. This part of the chapter considers how certain politics of revisionism inform the mediatization of Rwandan women’s subjectivities and influence the way in which women’s agency is made visible. In Fair and Park’s60 review of the mediatization of the Goma refugee crisis, they contend that limited access to the region and ignorance of political events resulted in an overreliance on stereotypes. An analysis of Newsnight reveals that the war and genocide in Rwanda and

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continued conflicts in the eastern provinces of the DRC have led to the emergence of new stereotypes and new gendered narratives which over time have changed the way in which Rwandan and Congolese women’s subjectivities have been mediatized. During the genocide, Newsnight’s reporting tended to adopt a classically western reading of war wherein militarization is understood as a masculine domain from which women are excluded – in spite of the many references to civilian deaths. As in the UK broadsheets, women and children are the subjects of humanitarian crises, although in the first three months they are more often seen than heard. In these stories, women are filmed cooking, washing clothes, tending to children and collecting firewood in refugee camps and rural areas. They are not seen to be engaged in politics and are never filmed as representatives of government or military operations. Rape and SGBV in particular are decidedly absent, despite evidence of rape in the footage included in Peter Marshall’s news feature on the UN’s shaky relationship with Africa, broadcast on 4 May 1994. Images of wounded Rwandan women are often framed by narratives about civil war which suggest they are caught in the crossfire, but not deliberately targeted. For example, in a news feature broadcast on 20 June 1994, International Red Cross hospital scenes focus on a woman who is having shrapnel removed from her leg. As in the mediatization of the Goma refugee crisis, reporting on the French humanitarian mission Opération Turquoise is highly gendered. Footage of French troops hone in on French masculinity and the helplessness of Hutu women. On 4 July French troops are filmed escorting Rwandan nuns to the newly created humanitarian zone in the west of the country. It may well be that this footage derives from French sources, since France’s military prowess in Rwanda is accompanied by images of patriotism, including the display of cardboard signs exclaiming ‘Vivre la France’ and ‘Liberté au Rwanda’. Interestingly, Newsnight’s reporting on the role of the French in Rwanda is extremely controlled: on 4 July a news feature depicting France’s humanitarian mission is narrated by Peter Snow in the studio. Again adopting the classic expository mode of documentary film, Newsnight continues to report on the civil war/coming of anarchy framework but is critical of France’s motives, suggesting that there may be charges of bias because

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France has an emotional involvement and is too closely connected to the extremist government. Newsnight’s criticism of France and its questioning of the country’s political goals are bolstered by the gendered narrative of 22 July’s news feature wherein Robin Denselow is sceptical of the level of protection France can offer the Hutu civilian population who have fled Rwanda. Here, France’s military prowess is effeminized to present the image of failure: This unit had been told to help a Hutu woman. She said her husband, who had opposed the former government, had been threatened by the militias. She was told her husband was absolutely safe but the French didn’t have time to get her to him. This mission ended in tears. Witnesses to genocide Women’s voices are most often heard in news features that frame them as witnesses to genocide. The process begins in the later months of the genocide, most notably once the RPF take control of Kigali. For example, on 15 July Robin Denselow’s news feature gives one Tutsi woman substantial airtime to explain how orphans were attacked by Hutu extremists. This pattern in reporting feminized genocide becomes more apparent as the months go on and is crystallized by the first anniversary of the plane crash. On 7 July 1995, Newsnight resurrects the story of UN failure in Rwanda, only this time the programme stresses that genocide occurred. Here, Newsnight replaces images of bullet-wounded women victims of civil war with images of women and girls who have machete wounds to their faces and hands. There is a noticeable change in reporting gendered narratives when Sian Kevill takes over as editor from Peter Horrocks in 1998. Under Kevill, there emerge more news features that focus entirely on the gender dynamics in Rwanda, although it should be noted that there is no longer a political requirement to portray conflict within the ethnic war/coming of anarchy framework of reporting. A four-year anniversary news feature by BBC Africa correspondent Jane Stanley focuses on child-headed households in Rwanda, wherein a 14-year-old boy ‘must

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play mother and father to his brothers’, and where a girl whose surname is Mutoni lives in fear every day because ‘households headed by girls are more vulnerable to rape and assault’. Unlike in previous years, the news feature repeatedly confirms that genocide took place and we are told that a church ‘serves as a memorial to those murdered in the fastest and most efficient massacres of modern times’, that ‘genocide and war has ripped the country apart’ and genocide ‘for once is the appropriate [term]’. Despite the emphasis on girls and human security, this news feature draws heavily on colonial stereotypes about African women: they are only filmed in a rural setting, poor, suffering, uneducated, sitting on the floor in a hut. Overall, the news feature presents an extremely bleak picture which, while deserving to appear on the news agenda, would have benefited from a focus on the work and political activism many Rwandan women were involved in at that time: women and girls are imaged as survivors but not political actors. Interestingly, these human interest news stories are not accompanied by studio debates. In relying on colonial stereotypes, they appear as magazine-style news features and reinforce the image of an apolitical, backwards Africa. The sense of moribund hopelessness is compounded by Paxman’s closing statement that ‘we don’t know we’re born’, before quickly moving on to the next story on Newsnight’s agenda. Killers and militarized political actors As observed, between October 1990 and March 1994 the Rwandan media played a key role in both militarizing women and mobilizing them to commit genocide. Hutu women who supported the extremist government were militarized as loyal wives, mothers and equal citizens of a supposedly democratic state. Yet in reality, gender politics were cleverly appropriated to alienate Tutsi women, the alleged enemies of the state, and those Hutu women who challenged Hutu extremist ideology. On 25 August 1995, three years before the Akayesu case which determined that genocidal rape had occurred in Rwanda and eight years before the media trail came to an end, Newsnight broadcast an 18-minute news feature by Lindsey Hilsum which focused exclusively on women perpetrators. In portraying women as active agents

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and political subjects, Hilsum aims to demonstrate that genocide must have occurred because women, traditionally perceived as excluded from war, ‘symbolize the corruption of social and human values in Rwanda’. During this news feature, the term genocide is employed consistently and repeatedly. Presenter John Snow sets the scene with an introduction that denotes both journalistic exclusivity in breaking the story and the abnormality of what is about to be reported. Hilsum begins the special report with a sensationalist opening line that mirrors the language of reporting in 1994: ‘sixteen months after the genocide in the central African state of Rwanda, a new aspect of the horror is emerging – the widespread role that women played in the massacres’. Hilsum then provides a brief historical account of the genocide, suggesting that both Tutsi and Hutu opponents to the extremist government were killed. She then alludes to Rwanda: Not So Innocent – When Women Become Killers, a report that is due to be published the following day by African Rights, and it becomes clear that the documentary film is structured in accordance with the report, with Hilsum playing the role of investigative journalist in search of Rwanda’s women killers. The news feature employs a series of dramatic juxtapositions of sound and image to shock the viewer. We first hear children crying out and witness scenes from a prison wherein women and children are seated on the floor surrounded by lines of washing in overcrowded conditions, before being informed by Hilsum that about 1,000 women are accused of mass murder. We are introduced to Rakiya Omaar of African Rights, who is a regular commentator on Newsnight. The team adopts a classic documentary technique to emphasize Omaar’s intellectual role as the expert – she sits in her office with shelves of books behind her – and this technique positively challenges conventional stereotypes about African women. Omaar informs us that the people who planned the genocide wanted women to participate because they aimed to involve as much of the population as possible. Hilsum then attempts to uncover the complex politics that exist between women within communities that have been torn apart, stating that many women who survived count other women in their area among those responsible. This includes Hutu women whose Tutsi husbands and

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children have been murdered. Mirroring the African Rights report, Hilsum lists a series of women perpetrators from various aspects of social life in Rwanda, including a mother superior who ‘went to get soldiers and returned with them’, aiding militias to trap nuns and other women in a garage before setting it on fire with petrol. In this story, other Hutu women are portrayed as accomplices, ‘stripping the dead of their clothes and possessions’. Hilsum notes the dozens of testimonies that African Rights have gathered, grouped together into categories which distinguish between military leaders and women engaged in high politics, and women civilian killers. Former Minister for Women and Family Affairs Pauline Nyiramasuhuko is singled out as a military operator. One woman witness states: ‘She led the militia. She would first investigate to see if there were any new arrivals. Then she would leave the militia. They had already prepared the graves in the place where they would kill them.’ Hilsum then speaks of the role of the radio station RTLM in gearing the population to commit genocide. Hilsum is keen to emphasize the agency of women killers, their political engagement in society and the extent to which women perpetrators were militarized to commit genocide, including genocidal rape. Hilsum tells the story of local councillor Odette and hairdresser Mama Eileen, two more women cited in the African Rights report. This time, we hear evidence from male witness Bonaventure Niyibizi: BONAVENTURE NIYIBIZI: From this window, we were able to see her house. She would not go out but she was controlling the militia. And from here, there was a roadblock that was just near her house. To me, Odette was one of the planners in the area . . . and Mama Eileen was like a second person to Odette . . . she would go outside and check and so on . . . she was very active. LINDSEY HILSUM: In the street below, a lawyer’s clerk says he saw Mama Eileen hounding a wealthy Tutsi businesswoman, Speçiose Karakaze. He says they threw Speçiose on the ground and one woman pushed open her legs.

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LAWYER’S CLERK (translated): Mama Eileen took a stick like this, only bigger and she did this for 20 minutes (intimates rape with a stick). Then they took a club and hit her on the head. Then she was dead. BONAVENTURE NIYIBIZI: On the radio we would hear the journalists saying so many Tutsi women have been killed here. They were beautiful but . . . we do have Hutu women who are beautiful. And you could hear this in April . . . and it was something which was already in the propaganda. Unlike Jane Stanley’s report, Hilsum obtains the views of women who were members of the government in 1995. She interviews Senator Aloysia Inyumba, the first minister of women and gender under the new regime. Inyumba attempts to speak for all women, observing that the extremist Hutu government took advantage of many Rwandan women’s call for democracy and equality in 1994: Practically everybody here was sensitivized, mobilized and instructed to participate in the genocide. And so the women, being illiterate, having had a difficult relationship with the state, had a coercive relationship with its population. It’s really understandable why the women took a role in killing. Hilsum states that many wealthy women perpetrators with political power had fled the country, before travelling to the DRC in pursuit of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko to obtain her side of the story. The news feature ends with footage of women and children singing songs in a church, accompanied by the beat of a slow drum. Over this singing, we hear the voice of Rwandan woman witness Veneranda Mukankusi, who provides the documentary film’s single overriding answer to why women killed: ‘Rwanda’s Hutu peasant women were traditionally society’s most oppressed. One irony of the genocide is that so many of them ended up not as victims, but as killers.’

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Reporting rape Despite the extremely high levels of SGBV during the genocide, rape is rarely referred to in Newsnight news features and is never discussed in studio debates. While Hilsum’s report highlights the role of women in committing and supporting genocidal rape, and Stanley’s news feature refers to the threat of rape among vulnerable women and girl survivors, rape is not mentioned again on Newsnight until 2001. Presenter Jeremy Vine, speaking in the studio with the image of skulls as a backdrop behind him, confirms that ‘the Tutsi women of Rwanda are only slowly becoming victims of the country’s genocide seven years ago’. Fergal Keane reports in a short news feature, observing that women in Rwanda believe they were deliberately inflicted with HIV/ AIDS. Rehashing old footage taken from Fergal Keane’s documentary Valentina’s Story, Keane remarks that ‘Rwanda is a nation of widows. Tens of thousands of women lost their husbands’ and that ‘for many that was only the beginning of their suffering’. Keane then emphasizes the work of the widow’s organization Association des Veuves du Genocide (AVEGA), a Rwandan charity established to help women victims of genocide, observing that it received funding from the BBC’s Comic Relief. Newsnight’s limited reporting on rape excludes discussion of the vulnerable position that all women, including Hutu women in refugee camps, found themselves in. Men survivors and victims of SGBV and rape are excluded altogether. However, this discussion also leads us to question the relationship between Newsnight news features and BBC documentary films in creating and reproducing gendered narratives about genocide.

Part III: Political manoeuvring Like conventional documentary films, Newsnight may be understood as a mediatized post-colonial contact zone wherein multiple political actors attempt to influence the political programme’s narratives about war and genocide in Rwanda. Anne Chaon has argued that it was difficult for journalists to glean the full picture of what was occurring in Rwanda because they were reliant on the accounts put

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forward by either members of the extremist interim government or the RPF.61 This part of the chapter considers how the RPF and the extremist interim government attempted to influence reporting on political violence in Rwanda during the first year following the plane crash. Extremist government manoeuvring Members of the extremist interim government were aware of the importance of shaping the mediatized conflict, both in their handling of the hate propaganda leading up to and during the genocide, and in their dealings with the international press between April and July 1994. Schofield notes that perpetrators took time to conceal evidence, threatened white journalists and made it impossible for African journalists who might have been more tuned into political events to enter the country: The Interahamwe would kill any black African so the Red Cross only used white drivers. They didn’t want the world to know what was going on – that’s why they concealed the bodies.62 Because of the mental state of many of the youths, civilians and soldiers it was also incredibly dangerous to film at roadblocks. According to Schofield, the risks were extreme and the people, most of them children, were on drugs.63 During the months of genocide, the extremist government continued to promote the same logic that ran throughout Kangura, arguing that war was taking place and that a pure Hutu nation state promoted democracy, equality, peace and development. In the news feature broadcast on 16 May, Belton, Carver and crew travel to Gitarama to interview members of the interim government, which they describe as holed up inside a training centre. Minister for Education Dr Andre Rwamakuba is filmed exclaiming: Tutsi people do not think about peace. No, no . . . ! The Tutsi people are wrong, are wrong, I say. It’s very wrong I say because when we are preparing peace, they prepare war.

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According to Belton, Rwamakuba kept screaming at them and at one point had Belton arrested. ‘He accused me of being a spy – he was pleased by the genocide.’ Unlike many of the Interahamwe and civilian killers at roadblocks, these people are sober. Yet for Schofield, who was with the Newsnight team at the time, these men were not professional, despite wearing suits and ties: ‘It was a put-up job,’ he remarked. ‘They were stooges for Bagosora. Maybe they hoped to hoodwink the world. I don’t think anyone believed them for a moment.’64 Belton also suggests that by May the interim government was beginning to feel out of control of the situation: They were trying to pull whatever strings they could – saying that the Tutsi started it, the RPF invaded us; in a civil war people do crazy things . . . At that stage, I don’t think they thought they were going to lose.65 Carver reports66: Inside, a siege mentality is growing. Senior ministers and civil servants are closely protected by the elite Presidential Guard. The Minister of Defence showed us the frontline of the war [drawn on a map], proof that the rebels had taken half the country in only a month of fighting. Within the news feature, Carver states that the RPF advance had brought about ‘a sense of paranoia and anger within the government ranks which was increasing all the time’. Minister of Defence MajorGeneral Augustin Bizimana then attempts to distance himself from the perpetrators, claiming that ‘some of his forces were beyond control’ and the government was struggling to bring them to book. In his performance as representative of a legitimate government, he remarks that ‘the current security situation makes it impossible to begin an investigation into who started the massacres’. Here, it appears that Bizimana played on the overall image of chaos. When describing how killings were organized, Schofield recalls that the government army had vastly expanded in the months before the genocide and that there

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was a blurring of boundaries between the Interahamwe, government soldiers and civilians: They were totally disorganized – driven by extremist individuals whatever their rank. The government soldier who took us from Gitarama to Kigali and back was terrified – he was terrified of the Interahamwe. He was very, very frightened.67 Belton also indicates that Bizimana’s calm was not shared by other members of the elite, observing that while they argued it was civil war ‘they were very agitated – there was lots of hand-wringing among the educated local councillors but Bizimana thought it was under control’ and that certain members of the army did not agree with the actions of the Interahamwe.68 A year later, it is clear that the ideology promulgated through the Hutu extremist propaganda channels such as Kangura and RTLM continued to be appropriated by perpetrators who had fled Rwanda. On 15 March 1995, US-born correspondent Elizabeth Jones interviews the former editor-in-chief of Kangura, Hassan Ngeze, in eastern Zaire. Ngeze, who is filmed on stage preaching to a large crowd of predominantly youths and children, takes this as an opportunity to influence international mediatized political discourse on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In the acclaimed documentary, Jones reports on the rearming and militarization of Rwandan refugees who refuse to return voluntarily to Rwanda, before describing her encounter with Ngeze, wherein she explains that Ngeze is continuing to produce RCD media propaganda within the camps: With great crowds around him, Ngeze makes fiery speeches in the refugee camps, boosting morale and expectations of war. In a recent issue of his newspaper, he writes, for example: ‘We know our enemy and we know where he lives. Every one of us has to get ready to save our country with any weapons he can lay his hands on. There is no question of waiting . . . saying “When shall we go back?” We have no time to wait . . . We must show the RPF that they made a mistake when they shared out their land.’

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Ngeze refers to another key tenet of the hate ideology – that Hutu live in fear of genocide in a vicious cycle of violence and retribution within the Great Lakes region: ELIZABETH JONES: Everywhere he goes, Ngeze feeds the appetite of war. But he denies that the intention is to exterminate the Tutsi. Rather, they want to defend themselves against extermination. HASSAN NGEZE: I know there are Tutsi who want to wipe out the Hutu. They are very extreme. But I don’t know of any Hutu that are extremists, who want to exterminate the Tutsi. If a Hutu would really want to exterminate the Tutsi, they would take a Tutsi. It would only take ten minutes to exterminate them because there are so many Hutu. During this documentary, we see signs of the militarization of Hutu women who support the renewed war effort and the reclamation of a Hutu-led nation state: WOMAN REFUGEE: People say we have no mission. They try to discourage us. They say we don’t have the means but we do have the means. The people are with us. We can break through any borders and break down any barriers. We will return to our country. We are ready. We are ready – the young, the old, the women, the men, everyone is ready to go home. RPF manoeuvring Belton has indicated that during the filming of their first news feature at Rusumo Falls, part of the Akagera River that borders Tanzania, the RPF were not interested in the Newsnight team and ignored them completely, regarding them as just another news crew that was not reporting the real story. Things were different by the time they got to Bujumbura: The RPF recognized that organizing trips into Rwanda for journalists was a powerful news weapon – they cast themselves as

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the victims – the Tutsi – although they were. They were very savvy about it and the more territory they took, the more they could show.69 Geoff Adams Spink concedes that during the genocide in 1994 the RPF played a slick media game. The Novotel Hotel in Bujumbura, Burundi was a central location for news crews reporting on Rwanda because it was the nearest safe haven from the crisis. Burundian Tutsi and RPF sympathizers often acted as stringers: There was a lot of activity around the bar of the Novotel . . . in terms of people who would come up to you and say ‘I gather you work for the BBC . . . do you want to meet my friend who works for the RPF’ . . . and there were lots of people who worked for the NGOs – people from the World Food Programme, the Red Cross. Everybody was there. Somehow it felt quite conspirational as well. There were lots of rumours.70 Spink asserts there were no Hutu extremists in Bujumbura and that the RPF sympathizers ‘controlled everything’: They introduced us to RPF people who arranged a rendezvous with us – RPF sympathisers arranged for us to have a meeting with real RPF people who said, you go on this day, to this place, to this border crossing, you cross at this point at this time and there’ll be people waiting for you. Spink continues: They took us to a village that had been trashed . . . they took us to a church in Nyamata which has been well documented . . . and then we crossed the river . . . The RPF were very organised and very media savvy. Their role was to show us what their commanding officer thought we should see. Now we were fully aware of that but I have to say, the evidence was pretty much there before your eyes. And we did question them – we interviewed the officers.

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We questioned them quite closely and said ‘Well you could have done this, how do we know that you haven’t done this, how do we know you didn’t set this up’. We didn’t take them at face value . . . Their mission was to help us out . . . to guard us . . . they were there to protect us and show us things . . . We made it clear in the report that we were being shown things. And apart from anything else, it wasn’t safe for us to run around unescorted and unaccompanied.71 During the latter months of the genocide, representatives of the RPF are allocated airtime on Newsnight, which provides the RPF with an opportunity to shape political discourse, perhaps demonstrating a shift by the BBC in favour of the RPF and an acceptance that they should legitimately take power. On 20 June 1994, RPF Secretary-General Dr Rudasingwa is questioned by John Snow on France’s motives. Rudasingwa uses the opportunity to argue that France is biased in favour of the Hutu extremist government and he repeats these sentiments in a second interview when in London on 4 July, the day the RPF took Kigali. During this trip to the UK, Rudasingwa met with Clare Short and was provided with London Metropolitan Police protection.72 These early Newsnight debates and stories set the scene for later BBC reporting on genocide and war in Rwanda and the east of Congo, where gendered narratives help to sustain the image of Africa in chaos within global politics.

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CHAPTER 5 R EMEMBER ING GENOCIDE, FORGETTING POLITICS: THE BBC’S INSTITUTIONAL NAR R ATIVE POST-1994

When is a work of journalism investigative, and when ‘merely’ analytical or even polemical? (Hugo de Burgh, 2008) When the international community finally declared genocide had taken place and recognized its own failure to act, media institutions were quick to change their reporting style. The BBC has been keen to memorialize political violence in Rwanda as genocide and documentary film has been integral to the success of this campaign. In the process of creating a new media framework, the BBC has engaged in politics of denial and revisionism. Referring to the BBC political discussion programmes and documentary films, this chapter considers how an institutional narrative on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has developed over time. Above all, the BBC has been required to reconcile the problem of depicting genocide – conventionally seen as modern ‘western’ political violence – in Africa, while at the same time continuing to uphold a memory of the 1994 genocide which conceals from view British foreign-policy decision making between April and July 1994. In spite of this, the BBC’s documentary films continue to be a site within which the international politics of revisionism are

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played out and it is possible see how other actors attempt to influence the news stories which make up this institutional narrative. The films have also been appropriated by the Rwandan government and form part of the official Rwandan narrative about conflict and genocide in 1994. In this context, the political significance of the films take on a new meaning, thereby demonstrating that the BBC does not have complete control over the media narratives it produces.

Part I: Remembering genocide Individual BBC news and current affairs programmes Newsnight and Panorama have their own mission statement and sub-brand, and the values of the BBC are embedded within each programme’s remit. Above all, the BBC seeks to ‘enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain’; to foster trust among its audiences; to be independent, impartial and honest; and to deliver quality.1 The public service corporation provides an institutional framework which sets out journalistic standards and conventions to which editors, producers, presenters and reporters are expected to adhere.2 Advocates of Panorama argue that, like Newsnight, the programme has rarely received much support or intervention from the upper echelons of the BBC, enabling them to adopt more innovative ways of reporting news and current affairs.3 Individual production teams shape the narrative of a given documentary film but they will do so in dialogue with colleagues elsewhere in the BBC and in the news broadcasting industry.4 The evolution of this narrative on the Rwandan genocide began in BBC news and Newsnight coverage before extending to documentary films, the digitized tenth anniversary memorial on the BBC website, Comic Relief fundraising films, and has culminated in the BBC-funded feature length film Shooting Dogs (2005). Newsnight, Panorama, the BBC website and other mediatized stories about war and genocide in Rwanda in 1994 tend therefore to collectively constitute a single overarching BBC narrative. The evolution of the BBC’s institutional narrative should also be understood in the context of the corporation’s attitude towards reporting on Africa

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generally. Under its educational remit, the BBC’s award-winning nature and science documentaries and numerous travelogues tend to draw on classic ethnographic representations of wildlife and tribes. These reproductions provide a colonial window to the world which in turn endorses the BBC’s British national way of seeing things. In this regard, the BBC is comparable to another long-standing nationalist institution, the US magazine National Geographic. Both have a strong reputation, well-recognized brand and breadth of audience globally, but over the years have each projected a very white middle-class worldview.5 Working from within the same western grids of knowledge, the BBC and National Geographic have contributed to the current invention of Africa. As has been discussed, news and current affairs programmes have a tendency to confine stories either to savage and primitive wars, humanitarian crises and the degradation of the environment or, paradoxically, the beauty of timeless Africa’s nature. Many of these images were employed between April and September 1994. An analysis of Newsnight and Panorama side by side reveals that Newsnight news features broadcast between 1994 and 1996 contain proto-narratives and footage that would later be used in the longer Panorama documentaries. Paxman’s studio debate and Belton and Carver’s news feature on 10 May 1994 demonstrate the division between stories on the role of the international community and the effects of genocide on the Rwandan population. The separation of narratives is also evident in Panorama. Narratives to emerge in Newsnight between 1994 and 1996 include the eyewitness account, the Goma refugee crisis, French intervention, reconciliation and, in later years, the international justice system (1995) and the state of Rwanda’s overflowing prisons (1996). Beyond 1996, the majority of programmes focus on conflict in the east of Congo, leaving the process of memorializing the 1994 Rwandan genocide to Panorama and the BBC website. One news feature broadcast on 15 July 1994, days after the RPF took Kigali and declared victory, reflects the key tenets of the BBC’s interpretation of Rwanda’s history, which permeate Panorama documentaries. In David Belton’s second trip to Rwanda, he is accompanied by long-standing Africa correspondent Robin Denselow. After describing

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the RPF victory, Denselow adopts the ethnicity/history framework to explain why the political violence occurred: There’s been chaos and bloodshed in Rwanda for over three months now, ever since the country’s Hutu president died in a plane crash and Hutu militias, the Interahamwe, began to kill Tutsi, the traditional minority ruling caste from the same tribe. They also turned on fellow Hutu who supported a peace accord with the Tutsi-led rebels. Hutu had driven much of the Tutsi elite from the country after massacres back in ’59 and the early 60s. These exiles now lead the RPF, which has swept through much of the country since April. Now, this rebel army has got to stop the killings and century’s old hostility . . . Now they must create a country where centuries-old hostility is forgotten and that means attempting to unify a country in which neighbour has been killing neighbour . . . Those who huddle for shelter in a church are lucky to be alive. These are Tutsi and moderate Hutu who escaped the massacres in which over half a million people have died, many killed by those they knew. Later in the news feature, Belton and Denselow interview a woman survivor at an orphanage who describes how children have been wounded, before travelling to Nyarubuye near the border of Tanzania. They encounter a church in Nyarubuye and view the remnants of a large massacre: It’s been three months now since the massacre here but unlike other sites, the bodies have not been touched. Six thousand died in the parish before the RPF reached the area, two thousand around this church. The government militia, the Interahamwe, herded villagers in their hundreds into these outhouses, here they were killed with guns, grenades and machetes. The report is accompanied by a series of graphic images of decaying corpses strewn across the courtyard, on the steps of the church, and in the outhouses. On 6 April 1995, one year after the genocide

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began, some of these images are recycled as Denselow describes the plane crash: No one claimed responsibility for the plane crash that killed the Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana but it was assumed to be an assassination, carried out by Hutu extremists opposed to his peace deal with Tutsi rebels. As they advanced, the Tutsi RPF found evidence that the crash had triggered the most appalling concentrated bloodshed Africa had known . . . up to 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu died, systematically slaughtered by the Interahamwe Hutu militias. The outside world failed to stop the genocide. The images are recycled again in 1996 when on 12 November Denselow reports on the extremist organization of refugee camps, before describing the genocide and the problem of reconciliation: [The new government] must consider whether reconciliation is possible after the horrors of [19]94, horrors Rwanda is determined should not be forgotten . . . . 5,000 people died in this church and surrounding outhouses . . . This horrific memorial has been held as a reminder of the genocide two years ago. By 1998, the BBC employ a soundbite that has become the phrase most often used to describe the 1994 genocide in Rwanda: ‘Three quarters of a million Tutsi as well as Hutu moderates were killed in only one hundred days.’ This phrase was used by the BBC continually during the 2004 ten-year memorial period, where it featured in articles on its dedicated Rwandan genocide webpages. Panorama First aired on Wednesday 11 November 1953, Panorama was originally scheduled on BBC1 as a fortnightly magazine show reporting celebrity news and the arts. The following year it was relaunched as a weekly programme presented by the BBC’s first news personality, Richard

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Dimbleby. Adopting a serious tone, the programme’s remit, under the banner of providing a ‘panoramic view’, declared itself ‘television’s window on the world’ – a phrase that was later added to the opening credits, along with a graphic of the globe.6 Like Newsnight, the BBC today considers Panorama a flagship current affairs programme, priding itself on the programme’s ability to report on historic moments, produce in-depth single-subject stories and deliver high-quality investigative journalism. However, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the BBC was met with some criticism when it moved Panorama to Sunday evenings, considered by some as the graveyard slot. For critic Malcolm Clark, the move symbolized the BBC’s ‘shift away from factual programming’ and was evidence of the ‘hallowed status of documentary in British cultural life’.7 The decision to move Panorama came at a time when the British documentary film industry was under fire for dumbing down journalism and failing to present ‘factual’ news pieces. The problem is summed up by former editor of Panorama Clive Edwards who in 1999 observed that: [Panorama] is under pressure to produce some level of rating that helps to justify its place on BBC1, yet at the same time, it is also there to be the centre piece of the BBC’s News and Current Affairs operation so that we have to, and want to, do the world’s major stories . . . the programme helps fulfil the BBC’s ‘mission to explain’ serious issues which are going to affect people’s lives dramatically. You have to work very hard to make some issues entertaining and, no matter how hard you do that, they may well still only get a small audience. This applied to the Scottish elections, to Rwanda, and so on.8 This chapter considers how the evolution of the institutional narrative on the Rwandan genocide coincides with the changing industry environment and political climate within which the BBC operated from 1994 onwards. Since the genocide, Panorama has dedicated seven documentaries to Rwanda, three of which were made in 1994. According to Peter Horrocks, who was the editor of Panorama in 1997 and had been the

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editor of Newsnight in 1994, these documentaries were largely driven by journalists such as Fergal Keane, Stephen Bradshaw and David Belton, as well as producers David Harrison and Mike Robinson who had ‘felt passionately’ about previous media coverage and were keen to ‘investigate aspects about the responsibility people had’, a view which Horrocks also shared.9 Panorama’s first documentaries were very similar in style to Newsnight, providing commentary on, and coverage of, an African crisis. The first one was broadcast on 27 June 1994 under the editorship of Glenwyn Benson. Although Journey into Darkness is filled with evidence of genocide, the term is not used, but reporter Fergal Keane and crew do an impressive job interviewing survivors of the massacre at Nyarubuye, before tracking down former mayor of Rusumo Sylvestre Gacumbitsi who, survivors claim, ordered men to murder. The documentary offers a great range of perspectives and issues surrounding the process and fallout of genocide. However, in keeping with the approach taken on Newsnight, the BBC voiceover which introduces the audience to Panorama’s latest topic speaks from within the ethnic conflict/coming of anarchy framework: ‘Fergal Keane reports from Rwanda, where the civil war has led to killing on a massive scale’.10 The film begins as if reporting civil war – Keane interviews RPF soldiers and there is evidence of battle scenes – but as the film progresses, the story turns to genocide, although Keane makes it clear in his interviews with Gacumbitsi that he is investigating crimes against humanity. This was followed by A Culture of Murder, broadcast on 22 August 1994. Long-standing Panorama correspondent Stephen Bradshaw describes a number of issues Rwandans face in the aftermath of war and genocide. Adopting the classic expository documentary mode in the opening sequence, Bradshaw puts forth the problem statement: can a nation escape its culture of murder? The question ambiguously plays on previous BBC news coverage which largely posited the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as endemic African tribal slaughter, while at the same time leaves the door open for reporting on genocide. As is the tradition with Panorama, Bradshaw’s tone is serious and austere: he is the voice of authority, the western correspondent detached from the situation. The documentary begins in the Goma refugee camps. Bradshaw and

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team are driving with UN representative Panos Moumtzis who explains how the international community is providing food and shelter for the extremists who murdered, before stating: ‘I’m afraid that when we have one million people it’s impossible to stop and ask the question, “Have you killed anybody back home?”’ His dramatic statement suggests that the majority of these people are perpetrators – a statement which is given weight by footage of scores of people standing along the roadside as if in a police line-up. Moumtzis’s edited words also serve to draw the viewer into the story, playing on the image of crime, murder and mystery – a bestseller for a British audience. The documentary covers all the key stories that were included in Newsnight at that time: the humanitarian crisis in Goma; environmental degradation of the national park at Goma; the problem of refugees refusing to return to Rwanda; the untilled, empty fields; Opération Turquoise; the problem of rehoming orphans; and the need for a justice system. Bradshaw is keen to highlight the difference between war and genocide. Whilst in Rwanda, Bradshaw and team visit the Christos Mission in Kigali where a small massacre took place. Bradshaw describes the scene in a way that may remind some in the audience of the Nazi Holocaust. His statement is buttressed by camera shots of photographs on the walls of the house and an abandoned shoe: Eleven Tutsi nuns and priests were separated from their white colleagues, locked inside a room for three hours and then shot to death . . . We’ve just found this handwritten note quite carefully concealed inside the spine of this bible. It’s written in a mixture of the Rwandese language and French and it says in the French ‘Final Greetings and happy to have suffered for Christ’. It seems to be a farewell note written during the priests’ and the sisters’ final hours. Bradshaw then interviews the US ambassador David P. Rawson, who was one of the first diplomats to return to Rwanda. As the white, western male expert and voice of authority, Rawson is provided with

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substantial airtime to argue that what has occurred, in Bradshaw’s words, was not ‘a frenzy of inter-tribal hatred’ but ‘a bitter power struggle between rival political classes’. Rawson states that what occurred was human nature, which could happen anywhere, although he makes no reference to the campaign of extremist hate ideology: It was a society coming into a modern era with many of its traditional institutions undermined and political elites competing for power with a very small resource base and the whole thing – population pressures, land pressures – the whole thing seemed to explode . . . The strategy on the side of the then government was to take such a toll on civilian lives as to make the Patriotic Front give up their offensive, to make them stop on the battlefield. And that, in my view, is very much the logic of Dresden – going after civilian casualties to make the cost of war too high. Although we are presented with statements and images that suggest the mass killing was political violence, we are not provided with sufficient information to explain what exactly ‘a culture of murder’ actually means to Rwandans and, indeed, people of the Great Lakes region, and there is no scope to consider how the wider politics of exclusion and inclusion influence mass movements of refugees. In the final sequence, Bradshaw returns to the documentary’s problem statement and, during an interview with RPF Dr Emile Rwamasirabo, it becomes clear that the phrase ‘a culture of murder’ belongs to him. Yet unlike Rawson, Rwamasirabo is not allocated much airtime and Bradshaw fails to probe further on what he means: RWAMASIRABO: We want this culture of murdering the population, we want it stopped. BRADSHAW: You speak of a culture of murdering people. That is a chilling phrase. RWAMASIRABO: It is a culture . . . So we have paid a lot to this culture. That’s why we reject it and . . . BRADSHAW: Murder.

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RWAMASIRABO: Yes, murder. So this way we are determined to make even more sacrifice but make sure that this culture of murdering stops once and for all. In the end, Rwamasirabo’s words fuse into Panorama’s eerie tale of an African country trapped in a cycle of violence as Bradshaw concludes, just six weeks after the official end of the genocide: ‘Rwanda’s culture of murder remains unbroken.’ In the first months following the genocide, the approach adopted by Panorama is very much on a par with Newsnight – reporting facts, providing evidence and attempting to present an impartial account that outlines the fear of the refugees in Goma as much as it does the immediate crisis occurring in Rwanda. The actual process of memorializing the genocide in Panorama documentaries does not begin until three years later, when the programme is operating in a very different political and economic climate. An African holocaust The emergence of the BBC’s institutional narrative on the Rwandan genocide came at a time when Panorama refashioned its mode of reporting current affairs, dropping its austere tone in favour of dramatizing stories. At the time, the British factual documentary film genre was in a state of crisis: competition from the increasingly popular documentary dramas (docudramas), which enlisted trained actors and special effects to reconstruct events, led critics to question the veracity of those documentaries that claimed to be ‘factual’. Finding itself in competition with multiple channels and under pressure from media fragmentation in the dawn of the digital age, Panorama was accused of favouring audience ratings over quality journalism. From 1997 onwards Panorama moved away from impartial reporting (evident in the early documentaries produced in 1994) towards dramatizing genocide. However, the Panorama teams also faced a number of challenges inherent in attempting to mediatize and memorialize genocide. Panorama had to somehow backtrack on previous BBC reporting of civil war and ethnic conflict. If audience ratings were to improve in order to help secure the programme’s survival, Panorama would have to

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overcome the problem of compassion fatigue from which, it was widely held, many of its audiences suffered.11 Panorama also had to overcome the problem of portraying the unimaginable. In the shift away from reporting tribal war towards historicizing genocide, the BBC has employed images and vocabulary of the Nazi Holocaust. However, direct references only occur when referring to the failure of the international community to prevent and halt genocide. In the opening sequence of The Bloody Tricolour (1995), Panorama’s investigation into France’s support for a genocidal regime, Steven Bradshaw begins where BBC news coverage left off before drawing Europe into the story: A year ago last month the world was shocked by pictures of the million refugees who had fled Rwanda – a country that had already experienced one of the worst bloodbaths in history. To the world outside Rwanda, it seemed the aftermath of tribal frenzy – a holocaust that could not be more remote from ourselves. But tonight . . . we investigate how a European power was deeply – and shamefully – implicated in the tragedy. Later, in When Good Men do Nothing (1995), Bradshaw tells his presumed British/western audience that Panorama’s investigation ‘reveals why our leaders abandoned [Rwandan] people to the men who kill five times faster than the Nazis’. Although memorializing Rwandan political violence in this manner places the 1994 genocide just below the Nazi Holocaust in a presumed hierarchy of genocides worldwide, the comparison also creates a dilemma. Until 1994 the Nazi Holocaust had only really been appropriated by the media to describe white, western political violence where images of shoes, spectacles, piles of clothing and deserted homes symbolized European civilization. The application of these images – as evidenced in Bradshaw’s discovery of a victim’s handwritten letter concealed in a bible – challenges conventional ways of representing Africa. This leads us to question the ways in which an institution such as the BBC demonstrates that genocide is a modern phenomenon that can happen anywhere, while at the same time retaining the status

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quo of presenting African subjects as somehow less sophisticated, less advanced, less intelligent human beings. And how has this contributed to the mediatization of Rwandan men and women? The tensions in representing genocide in Africa are resolved by inventing an ‘African holocaust’. This is achieved in five ways: depicting Rwanda as isolated from the rest of the world; presenting killers as hyper-masculine; feminizing victims; installing a white, western male hero-adventurer; and, finally, mediatizing horror. All these methods draw on British colonial images about the West’s relationship with Africa. Depicting Rwanda as isolated from the world As discussed previously, evidence that genocide was carried out by government officials and military operators was mediatized in Newsnight news features in May 1994. In The Bloody Tricolour, in which the British media aims to expose the role of France, Bradshaw informs us that Rwandan academic Christophe Mfizi had claimed his country was under the control of Réseau Zero (Network Zero) and led by the Akazu. The documentary uncovers how the Rwandan population was being increasingly militarized – with France assisting in the training of peasants enlisted into the army – before exposing ‘acts of genocide’ prior to April 1994. On hearing of a possible mass grave under a burgomaster’s potato crop, human rights worker Jean Carbonare, along with Alison des Forges and team, begin digging. According to des Forges, the local population was aware of what lay below: A crowd gathered very soon. It was not a very friendly crowd. First somewhat curious but then increasingly hostile as we kept at it and kept at it. The Burgomaster at the start was very confident and cocky and laughing and joking and indeed everyone found it very amusing to see these strangers digging in this pit . . . We talked about acts of genocide because we believed there was official government direction of this killing and we believed the intention behind this killing was in fact to eliminate wholly or in part the Tutsi group in Rwanda.

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The emphasis on years of planning following the first RPF invasion in 1990 is mediatized in order to put France in the frame. In this documentary, Rwanda is shown to have a close relationship with France, but its relationship with other sovereign states both in Africa and elsewhere – for example, China and Egypt – are absent. This absence is just as notable in When Good Men do Nothing (1998), the story of the West’s failure to intervene to stop genocide. Here, the division between Rwanda and the ‘West’ is reflected in a reliance on a range of statements made by white (predominantly male) experts: only one African is interviewed for the film – Ghanaian Brigadier Henry Anyidoho who was the deputy commander for UNAMIR, and then it is in his capacity as a first-hand witness to genocide. Documentaries broadcast in 1994 give some indication of the men (but not women) in authority responsible for inciting genocide – Keane somewhat forcefully challenges former mayor of Nyarubuye Sylvestre Gacumbitsi in A Journey Into Darkness and Bradshaw questions the former Minister of Defence Major-General Augustin Bizimana in A Culture of Murder. In post1997 films such as Valentina’s Story and The Killers, the emphasis shifts away from investigating accountability towards describing the emotional and physical experience of surviving genocide. These films are, of course, important. However, as the BBC’s institutional narrative evolves, details on the planning, the purchasing of arms and machetes on the international market, and the role of Hutu extremist and RPF diasporas in the Great Lakes region and globally are seldom referred to, if at all. In Valentina’s Story, we learn very little about the men and women in power in the extremist MRND government, the CDR and the Interahamwe who preached hate in regional and commune-level meetings and infiltrated political parties and NGOs. Rather, the state is depicted as a faceless institution controlled by Hutu (but not extremist Hutu) and the film is packed with a litany of statements by Keane that lump all Hutu into the same category: Nothing could have prepared Valentina for the apocalypse being planned by Rwanda’s Hutu rulers. A mob of Hutu surrounded the church.

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Fleeing the rebel advance was a vast mass of Hutu refugees. These survivors shared desks with Hutu children whose parents were to become killers. Panorama employs the ethnicity/tribal framework to explain the return of the ‘killers’ to Valentina’s village without engaging in how and why camps such as Kibeho were closed. Keane merely informs us somewhat dramatically that ‘Two and a half years after the genocide, the refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania were forcibly closed. The Hutus came home.’ Even where recognition of a dictatorship is mentioned, the history of events is presented along ethnic lines and there is no space to consider the pro-democratic movement in Rwanda in the early 1990s. In The Killers Keane observes: In 1990 the Hutu dictatorship was challenged. Tutsi guerrillas attacked from abroad. The Rwandan Patriotic Front – the RPF – wanted to overthrow the ruling elite. A shaken Hutu state turned on Tutsi civilians. More than 2,000 were killed. The division between stories about the West/accountability/Nazi Holocaust-equivalent and stories that mediatize Rwanda/horror/victim is strengthened by the use of images and language depicting Rwanda as isolated graphically – a hilly and mysterious country covered in mist. By 2007 even the BBC World Service, in promoting their Great Lakes Service, stated that ‘the traditional tension between the Tutsi and the Hutus exploded into genocide after the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi was shot down’.12 Hyper-masculine killers How and when accountability for genocide is mediatized in Panorama’s evolving narrative impacts on the way in which Rwandan subjectivities are represented. Interestingly, mediatization of those who murdered in the earlier Panorama documentaries depicts a spectrum of subjectivities. In Journey into Darkness, Keane interviews two Catholic missionaries who had lived in Rwanda for some 20 years. Speaking in

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French, Brother Otto Mayer remarks that armed forces seized opposition members before exclaiming: ‘Outside the house were hundreds of bodies. Every three days prisoners came and picked them up . . . there was this horrible brutality. Young people even took pleasure in killing.’ He is quickly corrected by his colleague Brother Henri Blanchard who states that: ‘Youngsters alongside the military hesitated before striking people. At the church a soldier had to rouse them by throwing stones to encourage their attack.’ Keane’s investigation into the role of the former mayor Gacumbitsi leads him to interview both men and women who, they tell him, were forced to kill. In a camp near Kabgayi set up by RPF soldiers, Keane interviews two prisoners of war. The first is a woman; the second is a young teenager from the village of Nyarubuye. They both appear distraught to have been involved: UNNAMED WOMAN: The soldiers took us to places where they had shot people. Some were dead, some alive. We beat the ones who were not dead. The other women killed one each. UNNAMED BOY: They were tied and forced to lie down by the soldiers, otherwise I couldn’t have killed them. They gave me a stick and I beat them . . . UNNAMED WOMAN: I beg everyone to understand. We had no choice. I ask for mercy on behalf of my fellow prisoners. We were forced to do it. [Shot of boy crying and looking emotionally distressed] I keep dreaming about it. I never expected to do it. In later Panorama documentaries, all Hutu are mediatized as savage perpetrators of genocide, unless they are representative of a small group who saved Tutsi, and they are nearly always mediatized as adult men. In much the same way that Panorama employs the corporate Hutu/ corporate Tutsi dichotomy to lump together a range of subjectivities, perpetrators are described quite simply as ‘killers’. For example, in Valentina’s Story, the audience is presented with scenes of an extremely long row of men in prison which, as in A Culture of Murder, simulates a line-up. The film is taken in a moving vehicle, the camera showing close-ups of all the men’s faces who stare at the crew as they drive past before Keane declares: ‘These are the killers . . . ’

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Nigel Eltringham has argued that up to 5.8 million Hutu were not involved in genocide and that certain members of the current government have globalized guilt, attaching it to a single homogenous ethnic identity.13 Pottier has contended that the UK media perpetuates pro-RPF narratives which render all Hutu responsible for committing genocide. It is important to note that use of the word ‘killer’ plays a vital role in Panorama’s bid to reconcile the problem of mediatizing genocide as a modern crime requiring a strong, functioning state and strategic-thinking leaders, with conventional representations that posit post-colonial African politicians as intellectually inferior to their ‘western’ colleagues. In appropriating the word killer, Panorama ignores many of the former political elite to focus on the actions of rural Hutu men. Transmitted in the UK on 4 April 2004 for the ten-year anniversary of the genocide, The Killers is the BBC’s first single-subject documentary that tells the story from the perspective of men who are in prison charged with crimes against humanity and genocide. The documentary begins by explaining how the Hutu community were encouraged through propaganda to hate Tutsi. The role of elites in gearing the population to commit genocide is conveyed in a reconstruction of a commune meeting. The story is told through the testimonies of the convicted men. As the men describe how they killed, close-ups of their faces and eyes are made sinister by lighting and contrast, sometimes concealing half a man’s face in darkness. A number of graphic and shocking statements are included, for example: SILAS NGENDAHIMANA: I had thought about the plan overnight. I woke up, washed my face and left. I felt no pain or sorrow. RWAMUHIZI: I went in [to the church at Nyarubuye], and when I met a man, I hit him with a club and he died. You would say why not two, three or four, but I couldn’t kill two or three because those that entered outnumbered those inside. Some people didn’t even find someone to kill because there were more killers than victims. Some men explain how the killings have affected them psychologically, but none of them admit to having been coerced into partaking

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in genocide. One 50-year-old man, Lauren Renzaho, remarks that the worst thing was killing his neighbour. Another man, Evariste Mahirane, describes how he killed a young boy whom they had been hunting down for one week. A reconstruction of the chase through banana groves, with Rwandans re-enacting the scene, accompanies Mahirane’s narration. The chase is fast and includes the sounds of drumming, adding urgency and drama while drawing the audience into the story. The final person to speak in the documentary is Rwamuhizi – a convicted man who explains how the genocide continues to affect him: The picture of their deaths may never leave me. Everything else I can get out of my head, but that picture never leaves. As he speaks, in the room where he sits the sun shining through a window spreads across his face. This footage seems to have been whitened further to make the man appear more pure, in contrast to the evilness conveyed in images of the men’s faces in earlier scenes. According to Rwandan journalist Gabi Gabiro, who has worked extensively with Fergal Keane in the production of BBC documentaries and news features, the BBC had specifically requested to interview the most brutal of murderers. Since like most Panoramas Films, The Killers lacks self-reflexivity, the production team’s selection process is not mentioned, and the British audiences are left unaware of the complexities around what participation in genocide actually means. Gabi Gabiro reflected: In November 2003 I was given a synopsis of what the film was about and was asked to look for ‘celebrity killers’ – the ones who stood out, were confessing to have killed. The celebrity killers were renounced killers in their specific communities. We were looking for particularly bad killers linked to Nyarubuye . . . There was one whose nickname was ‘Attack’ even before the genocide. He had broken a man’s arm and everyone in the village feared him. We interviewed close to ten men and each man for two to three hours – not all of them are included in the documentary. We wanted to get into the minds of the killers.14

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Gabiro also outlined how the process often worked in Rwanda of recruiting killers, witnesses and victims, which highlights how Rwandans who appear in documentary films are sometimes re-enacting earlier performances: Foreign journalists do not know how much liberty they have in Rwanda to speak to people and it sometimes surprises them. It is much more difficult accessing killers in the western world. There are no access policies if you want to interview someone from a Rwandan prison. If journalists decide they want some killers, the guards will sometimes just bring out the same ones – it’s a question of convenience on their part. Sometimes it’s not always best as they have rehearsed their story. I went to the head of the prison and gave him the names of prisoners we wanted to interview.15 In spite of Newsnight’s 20-minute news feature on 25 August 1995 to uncover the extensive role of women during the genocide, the absence in the later Panorama documentaries of women, children and old men who killed is striking. The deliberate decision to focus on fit, strong men who were keen participants in genocide plays on the old colonial stereotype of the hyper-masculine African man: the savage cannibal. In the context of mediatizing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the appropriation of the hyper-masculine stereotype serves to distinguish an African holocaust from a European holocaust. This is perhaps most notable in the use of the word ‘killer’ in When Good Men Do Nothing (1998). In the film, white men are imaged as ‘civilized’ political actors who made a series of mistakes, and Rwandan men involved in the genocide are known only as hyper-masculine, savage ‘killers’ – the word is repeated 14 times. The reassertion of the colonial hierarchy, imaging white men as supreme and black men as somehow closer to nature, is also evident in the use of descriptive metaphors of the weather and land. In Journey into Darkness, Keane’s narrative presents a sinister scene which alludes to primates and violence in the 1988 Hollywood film Gorillas in the Mist: ‘We have camped out in an abandoned house on the heights overlooking the city, below us in the mist the killers are up and about their work.’

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In contrast to the BBC’s evolving institutional narrative, Channel 4’s Men in Pink, broadcast on 25 August 1999 as part of the True Stories series, presents a more complex reading of what it means to be a murderer in 1994. Directed by Clive Gordon, the documentary follows Rwandan prisoners, focusing primarily on four men from Butare, but offsetting their story with trials at the ICTR. There is more of an insight into the justice systems, the attitude of the prosecutors, an exposé of the discrepancies between witness testimonies and prisoner statements, and a sense that the men who killed are not the only performers in this story. None of these tensions are evident in Panorama documentaries. Men in Pink also sheds light on some of the difficulties experienced in social relationships between Rwandans in the post-genocide era. For example, one prisoner meets his old girlfriend outside the court and she tells him she has found someone else. Men in Pink, in spite of the emasculating and somewhat ridiculing title (from a mainstream British perspective), mediatizes Rwandan subjectivities in a way that makes typecasting problematic – when in court, an older man, who is one of the four on trial, shakes uncontrollably as he stands in front of the jury. He then faints and is helped into a chair by his fellow prisoners, continuing to shake. Feminized victims In Journey into Darkness, Keane reports on victims of genocide and crimes against humanity indiscriminately so that the narrative incorporates the experiences of both men and women. Whilst in Kigali, Keane interviews two men from pro-democratic parties who managed to escape. This is perhaps one of the only times Panorama mediatizes the emotions of men who have lost their families: ARRON MAKUBA: I left Kigali on Tuesday and on Wednesday evening the plane of the president had been shot down and the next day they began killing all party opposition and all the families . . . they came to my house and when they saw that I am not at home, they killed my wife and all my children. KEANE: Can I ask what happened to your family?

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GÉRARD NSHOGOZA, PRESIDENT, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMISSION, RWANDA LIBERAL PARTY: My family’s exterminated, my wife, my three children, my father and mother, my three brothers all were . . . all were killed by soldiers from the Presidential Guard. MAKUBA: I know also that they killed my brother and his wife and children, so at the moment I wanted to kill myself, because I thought I am alone and what can I do when I am alone. During the course of Panorama’s narrative evolution, male victims are sidelined in favour of women victims who, as in Newsnight programmes, perform as key witnesses to genocide. The massacre at Nyarubuye’s church and the experiences of Nyarubuye killers and victims is the central story in the BBC’s institutional narrative on the Rwandan genocide. A child called Valentina and a woman called Flora Mukampore – who tells her story in Journey into Darkness and again in The Killers – appear most often. Valentina is first discovered by Keane directly after the genocide in June 1994. As a young girl, Valentina is found in a terrible state. She is emaciated; her hand is badly infected. With wide, staring, vacant eyes, Valentina is filmed being tended to by nurses who treat a wound to the back of her head without antiseptic. These are extremely painful scenes to watch and Keane remarks that it is unlikely that Valentina will survive. In 1997 Keane returns to Rwanda in search of Valentina, who is healthy and living with an aunt. Through Valentina’s Story, Keane recalls the massacre at Nyarubuye, but the documentary’s problem statement centres on whether ‘her country can heal the deeper scars of genocide’. This time, the documentary employs elements of the docudrama genre, an approach that is used increasingly as Panorama moves away from the investigative style of journalism employed when reporting real-time political violence in 1994 towards memorializing genocide. Keane’s words are powerful when he observes that ‘Valentina has seen things no child should ever see’. Drums and the sound of Valentina’s song can be heard, adding to the mood and drawing the audience into a very African, Rwandan story. Valentina’s translated words are interspersed with

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those of a ‘killer’, Denis Bararuka, who was involved in the massacre at Nyarubuye. Panorama recycles the images from Journey into Darkness to explain the horror of the massacre and describes again how hate propaganda was used to gear the Hutu population into committing genocide. In one sequence, the BBC resurrects the famous scenes shot by cameraman Nick Hughes from the rooftops of Kigali – the only footage wherein killing is taking place – and we hear the same words of RTLM which were mediatized in Journey into Darkness. Other footage to be recycled includes the images of Valentina as she was found, and the footage taken from A Culture of Murder (1994) wherein UN representative Panos Moumtzis explains that extremists in Goma are being supported by aid money. As the BBC’s protagonist-survivor, Valentina also appears in When Good Men do Nothing, The Killers and the BBC’s Comic Relief fundraising documentary Rwanda: Hope in Hell, broadcast on 21 September 2001. Here, she is filmed as a teenager with aspirations to become a doctor. Keane observes with pride and admiration that Valentina is now a ‘beautiful young woman who has the courage to stand up in [Nyarubuye] church and read the message from the book of Jeremiah’. Valentina’s story lends a human face to the BBC’s institutional narrative. Her story of death, loss, pain, mutilation and ultimately survival is made more poignant because of her name – derived from the Latin for strength and denoting love. In the BBC institutional narrative, Rwandan women symbolize compassion, humanitarianism, strength and determination. This association also runs throughout Rwanda: Hope in Hell when Fergal Keane and British actor Paul Bradley return to Rwanda following a previous visit for Comic Relief in 1998. They begin the documentary by declaring it a love story: ‘a story about women, about women’s boundless capacity for love of humanity’. Keane tells us that it is a story ‘that demands to be heard and remembered’, but the audience also needs to prepare for ‘a terrible story’. The terrible story concerns ‘the planned campaign to wipe out the Tutsi population’ (but not pro-democratic Hutu) and the role of rape in genocide. We learn that many women are dying of AIDS and are concerned for the future welfare of their children. We also learn that some women, such as Esther Mujawayo, co-founder of the widow’s association AVEGA,

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are a source of strength for many other women. This documentary is remarkable in its representation of African women as strong, proactive and intelligent, and considerable broadcasting time is dedicated to telling the story of Monica who, with the £50 that was given to her by Comic Relief, looks after 23 orphans and runs a bakery. Nevertheless, unlike the Panorama documentaries, Rwanda: Hope in Hell was produced with the purpose of motivating the British public into donating money to Comic Relief. Whereas the Panorama narrative consistently refers to events that took place in 1994 – thus memorializing the genocide while at the same time representing the subjectivities of Rwandan men and women in ways that posit them in the timeless past of an African holocaust – Hope in Hell must, like all fundraising films, mediatize progress. The deliberate focus on women at the exclusion of men serves to buttress the BBC’s institutional narrative wherein men are killers and women are victims. In this story, post-genocide Rwanda is feminized, but the implication is that all the absent men have been slaughtered in genocide, not missing in the DRC or in prison because of the former policy of genocide. Paul Bradley states: ‘This is a country of widows. Tens of thousands like Immaculée and Monica . . . What Rwanda has instead are mass graves.’ Mediatizing genocidal rape Rape is not specifically referred to in Panorama documentaries but is the central theme of Rwanda: Hope in Hell. Keane speaks to then Minister of Social Affairs Odette Nyiramilimo, who is a doctor by profession. Keane states that rape was used to annihilate women members of the target group, but Odette seems to promote the RPF policy on divisionism to imply that many women in Rwanda, regardless of their ethnicity, were raped and that it was a policy of the Hutu extremists. War-related or revenge rapes are not mentioned: KEANE: Rape as a weapon . . . It was definitely a weapon that was used by the militia and the people in charge – did they know what was going on?

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NYIRAMILIMO: I think they all knew what was going on – all the Rwandan women had to be raped, definitely. KEANE: Is there evidence that AIDS was deliberately spread? NYIRAMILIMO: . . . they did it to contaminate [women] and make them suffer. With the assistance of AVEGA, Keane and Bradley listen to the stories of women who experienced sexual and gender-based violence. The interviews are conducted with sensitivity and it is impressive that these women agreed to testify in front of British men. Gabiro has indicated that in Rwanda rape is still a taboo subject and rarely talked about publicly: I was once asked to find two or three women who were raped during the genocide and who were willing to talk. It’s a very difficult task to testify about rape and one’s experience in genocide. These people sacrifice themselves a lot, especially to testify about rape. So it’s not fair to keep going back to these women and asking them to speak to journalists. One woman I interviewed I took to other journalists – one from TV, another from print. She had been gang raped and abducted to Congo. She continued to be raped when the genocide had ended . . . Still, she is not a sad woman at all. She’s very, very strong. It’s a positive story – she feels relieved when she talks about it, so it’s easier for me to go back to her.16 However, within the BBC institutional narrative, there is no space to consider a number of other important stories such as the testimonies of male rape victims, the effect rape has on family dynamics, the position of women in their communities, and the role of some women in promoting, endorsing and sometimes assisting in rape. By the genocide’s tenth anniversary in 2004, women are always mediatized as good, pure and virtuous. They are victims but they are also survivors. Men, on the other hand, become increasingly absent. This absence serves to endorse the stereotype of the hyper-masculine, violent Rwandan (Hutu) man, thus securing the distinction between a European and an African holocaust.

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Male hero-adventurer witnesses In later Panorama films and in Keane’s own memoir Season of Blood, Keane is both a British witness of, and victim of, genocide. In Rwanda: Hope in Hell he reflects: Seven years ago I reported from Rwanda for the BBC on the campaign of murder launched against the Tutsi minority by the Hutu extremists . . . Returning to Rwanda is the strangest feeling. I mean, I’ve been back a few times. But every time I come back, it’s the images of that time that come to me almost immediately. It’s very hard to see Rwanda in the present tense because I’ll always see it as it was in the genocide and that was a place of terror. After Mujawayo has introduced Keane and Bradley to women survivors, Keane takes her to Nyarubuye, where he is filmed describing his experience of encountering bodies along the path and in the outhouses. Once again, footage from Journey into Darkness is resurrected. Like all journalists reporting in Rwanda in 1994, Keane is obviously traumatized by the harrowing experience, and his own emotional journey on returning to Rwanda over the course of a decade is a central theme in both BBC films and the BBC website. However, by mediatizing his emotions, the BBC is able to subtly suggest that the media institution was reporting genocide throughout – a notion that is endorsed by Keane when he states that ‘Comic Relief has stayed with the story [of genocide] and survivors’. Keane and Bradley also serve to convey the experience of an African holocaust to a British audience in what appears to be an attempt to break the apparent compassion fatigue brought on by a saturation of shock images about violence and starvation in Africa, and they are eager to emphasize that genocide in Rwanda was extreme. For example, in Rwanda: Hope in Hell, the camera focuses on row after row of skulls at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Gisozi, and Keane encourages the audience to: ‘Just try and visualize the amount of brutality involved in that.’ Later, Bradley reflects: Hearing [the story of rape] told. It’s a very, very intense experience and I cannot find the words to describe . . . I do not know

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what to say to someone like that who has been through several forms of hell – several hells if you like. Keane and Bradley’s role as a bridge between survivors of African holocaust and the British public is mirrored by that of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire’s wife, Elizabeth Dallaire, who, during the feature documentary Shake Hands with the Devil (2005), accompanies her husband to Rwanda as he retraces his steps during the genocide. When asked about the impact of having Elizabeth Dallaire in the film, the director Peter Raymont felt that it was very important to have her there: She helped a lot I think for viewers . . . She was part of the process of helping to open up this horrible story for ordinary viewers of television who wouldn’t normally tune into something like this.17 Despite the importance of Keane and Bradley’s role in the later films that memorialize the 1994 genocide, the presence of sympathetic, compassionate white British men, reminiscent of the colonial hero-adventurer who explores Africa, and the absence of sympathetic, compassionate Rwandan men, also serves to ‘other’ Rwanda from the ‘West’. Watching horror The final technique the BBC employs in the process of distinguishing between an African and a European holocaust is the inclusion of graphic footage of death and decay. In this regard, John Taylor’s commentary in Body Horror on UK photojournalistic depictions of catastrophe and war is most appropriate and is worth quoting at some length: Death is rarely seen in ragged human remains unless they are foreign. Reports of horrors overseas concentrate on the essential strangeness of victims, whether they invoke revulsion or invite compassion. Even in those stories which spark moral debate, the press uses stereotypes of alien life: they include refugees, corpses and even skeletons in the streets. These pictures contrast with idealised British systems of value, care and order. They imply that outside Britain chaos is the norm, and life is cheap. They

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strengthen prejudices that the ‘nature’ of very different cultures is, at worse, primitive and barbaric.18 As observed, direct analogies to the Nazi Holocaust can become problematic when mediatizing genocide in Africa. In the case of mediatizing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and popularizing the memory of Rwandan survivors for a British audience, many images used in documentaries are extremely graphic – even ten years after the genocide, sequences include images of people dying on the roadside. It is debatable that Panorama’s original footage from Nyarubuye in June 1994 would have been included in real-time reporting had the genocide taken place in Europe. Certainly less graphic imagery pervaded media representations of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It could be argued that the graphic footage provides evidence that genocide took place. What is most striking, however, is that the verbal narratives of white experts and BBC reporters accompanying many of these images more often than not focus on the gore, in a manner that either dehumanizes the bodies of Rwandans, or highlights how ‘western’ troops were exposed to savagery and barbarism. This is particularly noticeable in the documentaries that focus on the role of the West in failing to prevent and halt genocide: Body parts were in different places, heads were dismembered from machete cuts. It was unimaginable.19 The hideously mutilated bodies of the ten men were discovered and taken away by their colleagues. Their deaths would affect the future of the whole mission [sic] the deaths of the Belgians seemed to make the dangers even more bloodily obvious.20 And as the Belgians left, Rwanda’s age-old hostilities were already being bloodily renewed.21 Fergal Keane also spends much of his time describing the gruesomeness of genocide, most often encapsulated in the word ‘horror’. In episodes of Panorama broadcast from 1997 onwards, dramatization and reconstructions heighten the sense of horror. In The Killers, accused

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man Silas Ngendahimana depicts Nyarubuye Church directly after the massacre. Keane narrates: KEANE: As Gitera and Silas and others prepared to leave, some paused to stare at the ground, it had been transformed. NGENDAHIMANA: There was a tap running. The water flowed out mixing with the blood. It was all over the place. We could only step in small places that hadn’t been stained to leave the place. As he speaks, the audience is presented with the scene of a stream of rainwater flowing through mud, but the colourist has tinted the images to make the brown water look red, as if simulating blood. In this sequence, Keane’s observation that the ground has been transformed seems to symbolize the transgression of Rwandan society wherein all moral codes have been broken. Defining the horror of the Rwandan genocide not only mediatizes an African holocaust: it serves to retain the status quo of presenting African subjectivities as inferior to ‘western’ subjectivities. The emphasis on the breakdown of moral order also helps to define the British nation since, as genocide scholar David MacDonald observes, Britain’s national values are defined in the dramatization of what a nation is not.22

Part II: Forgetting politics As discussed, critics have contended that UK reporting on Rwanda and the east of Congo has perpetuated ‘RPF-friendly’ narratives about war and genocide. Pottier is critical of the way in which some British journalists support the RPF in the revision of Rwanda’s history, most notably in the rewriting of pre-colonial history.23 His merging together of all UK mediatized narratives belies the disparities in reporting between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 in the 1990s, and conceals how scope in reporting varies between editors, producers and correspondents – and there are discrepancies even between Newsnight and Panorama. Pottier’s emphasis on the relationship between

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the current Rwandan government and the British government does not allow space to consider how the British government – as well as the BBC – have their own revisionist agendas which are separate from the RPF revisionist agenda. The BBC revisionist agenda At face value, much of Pottier’s contention that the BBC supports RPF-friendly narratives rings true. As the BBC’s institutional narrative evolves, we hear less about the deaths of pro-democratic Hutu and, by the tenth anniversary in 2004, Panorama documentaries suggest that only the Tutsi minority group were targeted. The history of Rwanda is very basic and each film presents a slightly different interpretation. Sometimes Hutu and Tutsi are from the same tribe, at other times Hutu are mediatized as being oppressed by the Tutsi in colonial times. Panorama, Newsnight and the Comic Relief documentaries all narrativize stories and events from within the corporate Hutu/Tutsi framework. There is also evidence of RPF manoeuvring – although this is largely confined to the early documentaries. For example, in Journey into Darkness and A Culture of Murder, RPF representatives speak of their policies around divisionism, unity and reconciliation, but this occurs at a time when the international community considered the transitional government a success. As observed, there was significant space in the early post-genocide Newsnight news features to allow for RPF manoeuvring, demonstrating the BBC’s – and by extension the British government’s – efforts to help legitimize the new Rwandan government in the international arena. According to Pottier, the current Rwandan government is in some ways able to influence BBC narratives. BBC journalists David Belton, Fergel Keane and Geoff Adams Spink were dependent on RPF guides to provide them with protection while in Rwanda during the genocide. Belton and Spink indicated that the RPF were very media savvy and these skills have not gone untapped in the post-genocide era. Stringers such as Rwandan journalist Gabi Gabiro are likely to find themselves in a position where it is only possible to fix up interviews with people who tow the party line. Nevertheless, a review of the political context

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within which Panorama and Newsnight memorialize the 1994 genocide reveals that the BBC is perhaps more concerned with its own reputation than that of the current Rwandan government. While the BBC’s institutional narrative became increasingly dumbed down and sensationalized in an effort to increase audience ratings amid media fragmentation and increased competition, the invention of a barbaric African holocaust vis-á-vis the more civilized European holocaust (if that is at all possible) attempted to resolve tensions that could potentially disrupt the status quo of mediatizing African subjectivities as inferior. The process is not merely the legacy of British cultural imperialism per se. The way in which the genocide is memorialized is inextricably linked to the extent to which Panorama and Newsnight are able to fulfil their claims to provide quality investigative journalism. Here, investigative journalism is understood to provide objectivity in the interests of the British public and plays a role in British society by uncovering issues – including moral issues.24 The analysis of Newsnight revealed a disparity between the quality of investigative reporting in news features by journalists on the ground and the type of questions posed by presenters to guests during studio debates. It was observed that throughout the genocide no British minister appeared on Newsnight, despite the political capital that an MP or party member would ordinarily have accrued by speaking out on the programme. In particular, it was noted, studio debates focused on the role of the UN but not individual member states and there was no discussion of the responsibilities of the UK in its capacity as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Independent producer Ivor Gaber, who has made programmes for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, has contended that a series of shifts in British politics has seen the decline of Panorama’s investigative journalism since the late 1970s. In the Thatcherite years Panorama found itself at the brunt of a series of political and legal controversies because of its stance in programmes such as Maggie’s Militant Tendency, which shook Panorama’s confidence in making investigative journalism.25 Investigative journalism took another turn for the worse in the Blair years. De Burgh argues that after May 1997 the government controlled the British media agenda and ‘bamboozled the media

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where they should have been sceptical’.26 Indeed, the required shift in journalistic reporting under New Labour was noted by then editor of Newsnight Peter Horrocks. According to Nick Cohen, Horrocks: told his staff that the days of digging up facts that might disconcert the powerful had passed. ‘Labour has a huge mandate,’ he wrote. ‘Our job should not be to quarrel with the purpose of policy but question its implementation. Ennui is over for now’. In the unlikely event of his minions mistaking his meaning, Horrocks deployed the English establishment’s most condescending put-down to get them on message. ‘Clever-clever’ questioning of the warm, new consensus was inappropriate. Newsnight’s tradition of sceptical inquiry was mere ‘trickiness and world-weariness’. What the show needed was a ‘lighter feel’. And by God, it quickly got it.27 This view was shared by Horrocks’ predecessor Sian Kevill, who believed that the New Labour PR office’s tight control over its party members prevented her from securing the appearance of ministers on the show.28 The dumbing down of BBC investigative journalism is evident in the type of programmes Panorama produces. Gaber identifies four categories with which to classify Panorama documentaries: i. Substantive investigations – where there is a revolutionary investigation into a major concern of public importance; ii. Populist investigations – where the techniques of investigative journalism are employed to reveal a significant concern for the public ‘but whose subject matter raises no substantive issues of public policy’; iii. News backgrounders – programmes examine a current issue and provide additional information which is not significantly new, but contributes to the British public’s understanding; and iv. Self-referential – ‘the occasional reprise of recent Panorama hits’.29 A survey of Panorama documentaries reporting on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda reveals that two programmes can be classed as substantive

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investigations ( Journey into Darkness, 1994; When Good Men Do Nothing, 1998). Five can be categorized as news backgrounders (A Culture of Murder, 1994; The Bloody Tricolour, 1995; Facing Up to Genocide: Valentina’s Story, 1997; The Killers, 2004) – although Valentina’s Story and The Killers, like Comic Relief’s Rwanda: Hope in Hell (2001), are also self-referential in their celebration of the BBC’s previous reporting on Rwanda during the genocide. Arguably, A Culture of Murder and The Bloody Tricolour could be categorized as populist investigations. However, coverage of both these stories was led by Newsnight, suggesting that they also served as news backgrounders. The shift in trend towards news backgrounders and self-referential documentaries in the later years is clear. It comes as no surprise that the lack of scrutiny of Britain’s role as a permanent member of the UN Security Council in Newsnight programmes continues in Panorama documentaries. As in Newsnight, Panorama tends to focus on the international community’s failure to prevent genocide rather than the role of individual nation states. Even When Good Men do Nothing, one of the first investigative current affairs documentaries on the West’s complicity in genocide (later made into the US feature documentary Frontline: Ghosts of Rwanda in 2005) does not specifically refer to the UK. Rather, the film hones in on the failings of the Clinton administration, Belgium’s call for non-intervention, UN bureaucracy and the challenges UNAMIR faced on the ground. Focus on the role of the USA is heightened by foregrounding the location of the UN headquarters in New York and narrativizing American Professor Michael Barnett’s story as a US representative working in the UN at the time of the genocide. The Czech ambassador to the UN in 1994, Karel Kovanda, is also interviewed as a witness to the UN’s failings and a supporter of intervention. No British ministers, UK representatives working in the UN, or British experts on Rwanda are interviewed. The UK ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, appears just once in the documentary, in a sequence wherein both Britain and the BBC appear to be in support of intervention. It begins with a scene taken from David Belton’s 16 May news feature for Newsnight where two Tutsi boys who are trapped at Kabgayi declare the old and the young are being taken

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out of the camp and killed. A caption appears on screen stating that the footage comes from the Newsnight archive – thus suggesting that the BBC specifically reported on genocide. Bradshaw remarks that in mid-May the UN ‘seemed to offer these people one last chance of survival’ and the Security Council ‘at last agreed to a force of over 5,000 men with a clear mandate to protect civilians’. Sir David Hannay then manoeuvres, calmly stating that: ‘The priority now must be to ensure the early deployment of the troops needed for these tasks’, as if speaking to members of the UN at the time, rather than to a British audience retrospectively. Immediately after Hannay’s comment, Bradshaw resumes his narrative with the dramatic statement: ‘it was to become the ultimate betrayal. The Security Council had not set a timetable for deploying the troops.’ Throughout the entire documentary, discussion on the UK’s political decision making is not addressed. Horrocks maintains that, as with Newsnight’s reports, ‘the main focus of the story’ was international ‘because the British government, the UK, was not the main player in that scene’.30 When asked why Panorama did not investigate into the role of the British government, Horrocks stated that the question was ‘more relevant for Newsnight’ because ‘Panorama is trying to take a broader scope’ and ‘often the BBC is accused of approaching the story through a British angle’.31 According to Horrocks, Panorama makes ‘narrative-driven documentaries’ that ‘go back and look at what happened and the political forces’ and ‘are not based on assumptions’ or ‘our own journalistic review’.32 While Panorama consistently fails to publicly challenge members of the British government, the programme fulfils its investigative role in The Bloody Tricolour. Here, we see evidence of France’s engagement in the international politics of revisionism, even though it is embedded within the BBC’s institutional narrative on the 1994 Rwandan genocide. When interrogated by Bradshaw as to whether the former president François Mitterrand’s son, who was head of the Africa Office in 1994, was aware of Réseau Zéro – the third force operating in Rwanda – JeanChristophe Mitterrand engages in an act of revisionism: Well I know that’s a phrase this person came up with but I don’t really believe there was such an organization. I mean, give me

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some surnames and I’ll agree with you there was corruption and maybe some gangsters. Bradshaw asks him a second awkward question to see if Mitterrand believes that the genocide was planned. Dismissing the Akazu’s political connections with RTLM, Mitterrand manoeuvres in a way that mediatizes genocide denial while at the same time conveys an image of Rwanda (and Africa) as chaotic and a place that can easily ignite into violence: I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it, knowing Africa and Rwanda. There may have been small organizations which grew up of their own accord. But there was no organization directed from the top. There’s that famous radio, okay. But that radio isn’t an organization. It’s as though someone blew on the cinders. But the cinders were already there. The Bloody Tricolour does provide another chance for the BBC to demonstrate Britain’s support for the new Rwandan government, in opposition to France. In explaining France’s motives to support the extremist regime, Bradshaw states that France was paranoid about RPF leader and intelligence expert Paul Kagame’s ‘close ties to America’. Nevertheless, as the years progress, international politics and the manoeuvrings of individual sovereign states become more and more obscured, to be replaced with the seemingly apolitical micro-narratives of individual (female) survivors and (male) killers. At best, Keane and Bradley provide a personal commentary in the BBC’s fundraising film Rwanda: Hope in Hell: KEANE (speaking to Bradley): For me, the overriding feeling that I get walking there is anger, because you still have people . . . politicians, commentators, who tell us that we have no business getting involved in other people’s countries. Well fine they can argue that, as long as they know the consequences . . . America and Britain argued successfully not to get involved. When it comes to political manoeuvring on the international stage, it appears that the BBC has an important role to play in securing a

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clean image for the UK government – at least from the perspective of its British citizens. Yet in its bid to distance the UK from complicity in failing to act, the BBC is keen to demonstrate how its journalists were reporting in Rwanda from the beginning of April 1994. This process, which is evident in the later Panorama documentaries, was picked up on by Linda Melvern in her critique of the BBC-funded feature film Shooting Dogs (2006), directed by Michael Caton-Jones and produced by David Belton. The film was later released in the USA under the title Beyond the Gates. Starring John Hurt and Hugh Dancy, the story of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda focuses on a massacre at the ETO School, just outside Kigali. Some were critical of the blatant British imperialist take on the genocide. Writing for the Guardian, Xan Brooks believed the film was more awkward than its Hollywood counterpart Hotel Rwanda (2004), because it opted to ‘frame its story from a white perspective’ and included a love interest between Dancy and the ‘cute Tutsi student who had a crush on him’.33 The film also follows the story of a BBC news crew – one of whom looks rather like long-term BBC war reporter Kate Adie – as they confront the dangers of reporting in a country where genocide is in process. At one stage in the film, the BBC news crew challenges a UN peacekeeper and asks whether he believes the killings constitute genocide. In Melven’s column in The Observer on 19 March 2006, she cautioned against the claim that Shooting Dogs is based on a true story, arguing that ‘inadequate reporting contributed to indifference and inaction’ and that ‘it was not a glorious moment for BBC news’.34 Keane replied the following Sunday, as the voice of the BBC’s institutional narrative on Rwanda. In his response, Keane scores a point when he observed that BBC journalists were reporting on the horror from April – Hilsum was in Kigali with UNICEF; Mark Doyle arrived on 8 April and spent his time stationed in the capital with UNAMIR; Kenyan-based reporter Roger Hearing and cameraman Bas Solinki travelled into Rwanda by road and arrived on 12 April. Keane disputed Melvern’s assertion that BBC news broadcasts did not ‘tell the world genocide was underway’, contending that there was ‘nothing ambiguous’ about Mark Doyle’s report of 14 April on ‘what appears to have been a deliberate plan by Hutu militias to massacre Tutsi or rebel supporters’.35 The analysis

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of Newsnight revealed that BBC journalists reporting in Rwanda often mediatized evidence of genocide. However, between April and September 1994, the corporate stance appears to have favoured the ethnic conflict/coming of anarchy framework – this is certainly the case within Newsnight and Panorama. The BBC’s efforts to revise history by airbrushing out the subtleties of its own failure to report specifically on genocide, while celebrating its success in reporting on, as Keane puts it, the ‘horror’, has become a centrepiece in the BBC’s own participation in the international politics of revisionism. The mediatized debate between Keane and Melvern is important, but with limited space in the British mainstream media ecology to discuss Rwanda per se, this theme became the priority issue on the media agenda in March 2006. The debate was also mentioned on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week on 20 March 2006, when journalist and commentator Andrew Marr interviewed David Belton about his role as producer for Shooting Dogs. Marr enquired whether there was a failure of journalism. Belton responded somewhat apolitically, contending that while there were ‘very brave people in the BBC’ who were reporting on the ground, there was a ‘tendency [among editors] to see Rwanda as just another conflict that they did not want to cover’.36 In keeping with the trend of the 2000s to conduct investigations into the role of the media rather than the British political system, a focus on whether individual journalists successfully reported genocide smacks of dumbing down serious discussion on, and investigation into, political matters such as the role of the UK, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council in 1994.

Part III: The BBC in Rwanda The BBC and Voice of America (VOA) opened offices in Rwanda soon after the genocide had ended and at a time when Radio Rwanda was the only domestic network.37 In 1998 the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) funded a BBC project to help rebuild public broadcasting. Geoff Adams Spink returned to Kigali as the director of the project, which aimed to train journalists and build capacity for a public broadcasting service that was to promote democracy. The vision saw the development of a Rwandan equivalent

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of the BBC. The project was to last three years, but DFID pulled it after two. As the director, Spink was to work closely with the head of ORINFOR, Joseph Bideri, but he found the experience problematic and the project barely progressed. Spink also observed that the smart journalists he trained were unlikely to stay in Rwanda because of low remuneration.38 Since then, the BBC has had no direct role in the development of the media industry in Rwanda and the production of media, including independent films, is closely monitored by the government. However, the BBC has a presence in the country via its Great Lakes Service, which forms part of the BBC World Service. According to the editor of the BBC Great Lakes Service, Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, a radio service evolved from what was initially a pilot project funded by Oxfam, the International Red Cross, Save the Children UK and the UNHCR to reunite displaced or missing children with their families. Radio broadcasts began on 15 September 1994, initially lasted 15 minutes per day and included three minutes of news followed by 12 minutes of reading out lists of names. At the time, Mugenzi was working for the BBC Swahili section and was based in London, although a budget of £25,000 was made available so that journalists could travel from Tanzania to the refugee camps in the east of Congo to make news reports. As the situation calmed and NGOs began cutting money and their activities in the region, the BBC worked with DFID who ‘saw the importance of the programme’ because ‘it was not based on propaganda’.39 According to Mugenzi, ‘DFID encouraged [the service] because of talks in Burundi – to encourage [Burundians and other actors] to talk about their problems openly’ in a programme called Imvo n’imvono or ‘Heart of the Matter’, where ‘serious issues in the region’ were discussed.40 The programme expanded to 30 minutes per day in 2000. By 2008, there were two transmissions per day from Monday to Friday and a weekend programme on Saturdays. In the early 2000s, the BBC Great Lakes Service website news function also expanded. Today, news articles on Rwanda are published on the BBC World News webpages almost daily, and journalists writing the news come from a range of news desks within the BBC including BBC Swahili, BBC Afrique and the BBC Great Lakes Service. At the time of writing, these three news

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desks were located on the same floor of Bush House in London and each desk had journalists based in East Africa.41 On 25 April 2009 the then Rwandan minister of information, Louise Mushikiwabo, suspended the BBC Kinyarwanda Service, part of the Great Lakes Service, on the grounds that its weekly programme Imvo n’imvono ‘amounted to “blatant denial of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi of Rwanda” and called it “unacceptable speech”’. The suspension led Africa director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), Georgette Gagnon, to speak out against the Rwandan government’s ‘growing crackdown on free speech’, arguing in a HRW press release published on 27 April 2009 that ‘[i]f Rwanda is truly committed to the fundamental right of free expression, it should allow differing viewpoints on genocide issues and related governmental policies’.42 The suspension of the BBC Kinyarwanda Service followed an incident in May 2008 when three ‘leading independent journalists’ – Jean Bosco Gasasira of Umuvugizi, Jean Grober Burusha of Rushyashya and Charles Kabonero of Umuseso – were removed from the World Press Day celebrations held in Kigali and prevented from attending official news conferences.43 In late 2007 the editor of the BBC Great Lakes Service, Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, was also allegedly accused of ‘exacerbating ethnic differences through the Imvo n’imvono program’ which ‘brings together leading – and at times controversial – figures from the Rwandan diaspora’.44 Observing that the 2010 presidential elections were looming, Human Rights Watch continued: Government officials accused the program of giving airtime to ‘genocide fugitives’, referring to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) . . . The government also warned that BBC’s license might not be renewed if the program did not assume a more positive tone.45 When asked about the problem of impartial reporting in a region where mediatized conflict continued, Mugenzi remarked: Now, we are not doing unification. Now, it’s news and current affairs. The service provides objective and trusted information – the only one [i.e. the only media that does in the region] . . . It’s

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difficult. It’s not easy at all when the government is trying to suppress everyone . . . We try to speak the truth. The problem with Rwanda is that you are broadcasting to a country which is divided . . . The BBC is trying to be in the middle.46 Mugenzi gave as an example the treatment of presidential candidate hopeful and member of the Rwandan diaspora Victoire Ingabire, who had returned from the Netherlands in January 2010 as the leader of the new political party Forces Démocratiques Unies-Ingiki after having spent 16 years living in Europe. Ingabire believed, although she had allegedly been warned against it, that ‘she could mount a constructive opposition’.47 Yet on her arrival in the capital Ingabire made a public address at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Gisozi, announcing that ‘the Hutu who killed the Tutsi must understand that they have to be punished. It is the same for the Tutsi who have killed Hutu.’48 She was accused of inciting ethnic divisionism and minimizing the extent of the 1994 genocide and was arrested for terrorism in April 2010. The six terrorist charges against her were based on alleged Rwandan government intelligence that Ingabire had been in direct contact with the FDLR in the DRC. Her American lawyer Peter Erlinder, a defence lawyer at the ICTR in Arusha and a renowned genocide denier, was arrested in Kigali in May 2010 for genocide denial. Mugenzi claims that, had it not been for the BBC, there ‘would have been total blackout’ on reporting the silencing of Victoire Ingabire, who had not been interviewed in Rwanda. He believed there had been ‘a smear campaign by the [state controlled online newspaper] The New Times’ and Television Rwanda had broadcast a debate about Ingabire without inviting her to join: ‘She was watching [the programme] but was not able to speak.’49 As discussed in this book, the problem of appearing to take sides when reporting on the aftermath of war and genocide is particularly pertinent in the case of Rwanda, where Hutu extremists had in the early 1990s used the language of democracy to publicly incite a large percentage of the Rwandan population. A survey of BBC web news reporting on Ingabire’s situation reveals that attempts are made to present both ‘sides’ of the story and both Ingabire and Rwandan

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spokesperson Mushikiwabo have an opportunity to speak. However, there are also moments when the incident is framed in simple terms that reflect the ethnic conflict framework of reporting used in the early Newsnight programmes in 1994. Coverage of this incident begins on 18 January 2010 when BBC news reports that a ‘row has erupted in Rwanda about the genocide memorial not reflecting the plight of Hutus in the 1994 massacres’. The story informs us that ‘[d]uring the 100-day genocide, Hutu militias systematically killed about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus’, before claiming that Ingabire has announced that ‘Hutus were also killed by Tutsis’.50 This phrasing obscures from view the complex struggle between political parties over time and suggests instead a primordial struggle between tribes. Here, it seems the BBC Great Lakes Service also chose to frame Ingabire’s plight not as part of the wider international power struggle between Rwanda’s elites, but as a more simplified story about democracy and freedom of speech. In March 2010 Africa Confidential also ran a story on the Rwandan government’s treatment of the election candidate. According to Africa Confidential, Ingabire herself manoeuvred, having: sought refuge in the British High Commission in Kigali, in a stage-managed operation that embarrassed Whitehall, which remains close to President Paul Kagame’s government, not least through British ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair . . . She complained the regime was harassing her, after the Criminal Investigation Department had summoned her three times in less than two weeks. November’s UN report said that Ingabire was in regular contact with FDLR leaders, some of whom were guilty of genocide.51 When asked by the author why the UN report was not included in BBC reporting, Mugenzi questioned its validity, asking where the report was before stating that ‘the UN [often] gets its source of information from the Rwandan government’.52 Since 2010, there has been a marked change in reporting by the BBC and journalists have shifted away from memorializing genocide towards

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framing news in the context of democracy and freedom of speech. In June and July 2010, as the elections approached, there were three main stories. The first was the shooting of the exiled former Rwandan army chief of staff Lieutenant-General Nyamwasa in Johannesburg on 19 June 2010 which, according to his wife, was ‘an assassination attempt by the Rwandan government’.53 The stamping out of political opposition in Rwanda formed the second. There was the assassination of Kigalibased Rwandan journalist Jean Leonard Rugambage on 25 June and, the following month the assassination of the leader of the Democratic Green Party André Kagwa Rwisereka, whose party was unable to register.54 The third story concerned the problem of freedom of speech among voters. This shift in reporting reflects a changing view within the broadcasting corporation. Director of the BBC World Service Peter Horrocks commented that the BBC was, to his knowledge, far from being ‘pro-RPF’. Horrocks believes that the BBC Great Lakes Service ‘has matured and is playing a different role now by holding politicians to account . . . Clearly Kagame has got plenty of allegations against him in terms of democracy’. For Horrocks, the change in reporting is ‘more to do with awareness that Rwanda is now moving on’: Clearly it is quite successful economically [but] the political standards it’s held are prominent [because] the genocide has receded somewhat – and Kagame is proud of his connections with leaders in the West.55 For Horrocks, it is more a ‘question about appropriate standards [when one is] connected to international leaders and politicians’.56 The notion of opening up political space sits ill at ease with the Rwandan government – not just because, as critics assert, Kagame is intent on holding on to power. In a BBC Newsnight news feature broadcast on 31 March 2010 Louise Mushikiwabo, by this point Rwanda’s minister of foreign affairs and cooperation following the creation of a new unified department incorporating the old Ministry of Information, defended the RPF position: Our government realised early on that we have to do things differently – That it could not be business as usual because

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this country was in a very particular predicament – that the classic ways of government and leadership would never have worked. So in the leadership style of this country, we tried to be unorthodox. This view is also held by former parliamentary speaker Joseph Sebarenzi, who believes that a ‘consensus-based democracy may end violent competition of power between Hutu and Tutsi, but, alone, it would not necessarily achieve peace’.57 Documentary films in Rwanda According to Patrice Mulama from the High Council of Press, the 2002 Media Law and the 2005 Professional Code of Ethics for Journalists set out the duty of journalists to distinguish between fact and opinion, promote democracy and be honest and accountable to their audiences. Directors who wish to make a film must first seek permission from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, submitting the script, calendar for production and budget proposal58 – a set-up which is not dissimilar to the Belgian and British systems in the early twentieth century. There is also a responsibility to adhere to the 2001 legislation governing divisionism and its interpretation and journalists often practise selfcensorship or are subject to subtle, unspoken codes that prevent too much criticism of the government. A media regulatory body which monitors audio, visual and print media ensures journalists adhere to the established ethics and advises the government on performance and quality of media output.59 Since 1994 these restraints impact on the way in which remembering genocide is mediatized in Rwanda. However, amid the criticism, some people claim that total freedom of press in a country that has been transformed by genocide ideology and hate propaganda needs to be carefully managed. One Rwandan journalist who worked in Kigali between 1995 and 1999, and now lives in the UK, believes that the media was more independent in 2009 than it had been ten years previously.60 At the time of conducting this research, there was also greater political will to replace the current state-owned Rwanda Office of Information (ORINFOR) with a public sector broadcaster, the Rwanda Broadcasting Agency (RBA),

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which would be regulated by its own board made up of private sector and civil society. However, the struggle for political control over public information will continue. Genocide scholar David MacDonald has argued that the process of remembering genocide publicly should help to ‘create an open, moral climate where . . . governments will be obliged to recognise and commemorate the crimes of their own pasts, enabling apologies and reparations to groups they have wronged’. Remembering genocide ‘should also engender a public space where victim groups can freely discuss and present their histories of victimisation and abuse’.61 Most criticism of the current government has focused on the way in which the process of memorializing – and providing a space for victims to mourn publicly – is too controlled by the Rwandan government, who are accused of memorializing genocide in corporate Hutu/Tutsi terms. Over the years, remembrance has focused on ‘the genocide of the Tutsi’ which has seen less recognition of the loss and suffering by all Rwandans during the genocide and war. As one woman civil servant who once worked under the extremist government pointed out, April is a month of mourning for her as well as survivors. Catharine Newbury and Hannah Baldwin have argued that public discourse labelling all Hutu génocidaires has made many Hutu women feel insecure under the post-genocide government, adding to the already socially marginalized status of those women who are late returnees from east of Congo or wives of men in prison.62 The memorial month, which takes place in April, provides an opportunity to promote the government’s national discourse on unity and reconciliation. Mediatizing the 1994 genocide has been regarded as vital if the people of Rwanda are to move beyond the ideologies embedded in the former extremist hate propaganda, which itself employed the concept of democracy in order to divide society. The national discourse on the Rwandan genocide is both favoured for its attempts to block extremist counter-narratives that are circulating in the mediatized war of the Great Lakes region and condemned for preventing alternative voices and alternative ways of commemorating genocide. During the genocide memorial week many programmes pick up on a theme of the Rwandan genocide.63 For example, in 2006 one TV Rwanda chat

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show aimed at women and girls, and presented by a woman journalist called Thérese, debated the role of women and their involvement in planning during the genocide. In Rwanda, documentaries and feature films have a substantive role to play in memorializing genocide and, in Kigali, large viewings of films are on occasion held at Amahoro Stadium, organized by the Ministry of Culture and Sports. Since documentaries and films were not used to promote the extremist hate ideology in the early 1990s, the genres are welcomed as a new form of media and entertainment in the post-genocide era. In 2003, Rwandan documentary filmmaker Eric Kabera founded the Rwanda Cinema Centre (RCC) which aims to promote the country’s film industry and provide support for young filmmakers through the Youth by Youth programme and the Film for Change outreach project. RCC has also set up a skills training unit which has seen more than 100 young people through its doors since its inception. The RCC is well known for organizing the annual Rwandan Film Festival, established in 2005. In March 2008 the festival was showcasing some 60 Rwandan, African and international films. Although the festival is held in Kigali, the RCC team tour the country with a large inflatable cinema screen to ensure Rwandans who live in rural areas can view the films. Dubbed ‘Hillywood’ – a take on Rwanda’s accolade ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’ – the festival and the RCC have garnered much support from filmmakers around the world. Kabera was first introduced to filmmaking as a stringer to foreign news correspondents in the mid-1990s and later worked with Kenyan-based British cameraman Nick Hughes to produce the first feature film on the genocide. 100 Days (2000), which was also the first film made in Rwanda in the post-genocide era and had a cast made up of Rwandan survivors. Kabera’s Keepers of Memory (2004) is probably the most celebrated Rwandan documentary to be exported internationally. The film traces the lives of Rwandan men and women who are responsible for looking after the memorial sites. In the opening sequence the audience is introduced to a small, unofficial memorial where a woman publicly remembers all her family who were killed. Many of the testimonies reveal more about the individual experiences of these people than BBC

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Panorama documentaries: the film does not include any dramatization, reconstruction, colouring of footage or a star reporter providing a narrative, which in some ways proffers a more realistic portrayal of these people and their suffering. Daddy Yousouf, who was the executive secretary of the RCC in 2006, believes that Rwandans produce more informed films about the experiences of survivors: Rwandan documentary filmmakers understand the topic much more than foreigners. They speak the same language [Kinyarwanda] and understand the context. They know how to talk to the characters in the film – as Rwandans – and it is therefore easier to communicate. Three white faces talking to a guy who has never seen a camera – it makes him feel intimidated. When it is just Rwandese with a small camera they are more communicative.64 Kabera has produced a number of other independent films in Kinyarwanda, English and French – such as Through My Eyes (2005), which explores the experience of genocide from the perspective of children and young people and the award-winning Iseta – The Story Behind The Roadblock (2008) which tells the story of a foreign correspondent attempting to film in Rwanda during the genocide and is based on the experiences of Nick Hughes. In 2011 Kinyarwanda, which depicts the story of Muslim Rwandans during the genocide, was released. Documentaries are also considered vital in the promotion and dissemination of the official political discourse generally. Convents notes that after Kagame was elected in 2003, dozens of documentaries detailing his life were broadcast on the television channel TVR.65 Although the radio continues to be the principal media in Rwanda, televisions are readily accessible to most Rwandans, particularly for those who live in urban areas. As Peter Raymont observed, ‘there’s a television that everyone can go and watch in somebody’s house or in a community building’.66 For one week during the memorial month (7–12 April), TVR only broadcasts news, poems, prayers and documentaries: as with the radio stations, TVR is forbidden from broadcasting entertainment shows and music, and chat shows discuss topics associated with the

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genocide. Most of the airtime on TVR is dedicated to documentary films – some of which are shown in two parts over two days. It should be noted that not all Rwandans want to watch the films because they find them too graphic or do not want to revisit their own memories.67 The Rwandan government has faced criticism over the level of graphic footage in many of the films which are shown in the day, at a time when children may be watching.68 In addition to the independent film industry, TVR journalists produce documentaries memorializing the 1994 genocide. Describing the process of making documentary films, one man who worked for TVR in 2006 said that a small crew tends to travel out to a village and shoot a number of survivor testimonies in half a day. The success of the content was dependent on what footage could be recorded in the given timeframe. Made in Kinyarwanda, these low-budget documentaries focus on what survivors have achieved since the genocide and the gacaca courts. During the first week of the memorial period in 2006, TVR screened eight documentaries in Kinyarwanda (two of which were made by TVR), five in French (of Belgian, German and French origin) and three in English. These included The Bloody Tricolour, When Good Men Do Nothing and Ghosts of Rwanda – all of which were made by the BBC, although Ghosts of Rwanda was made in conjunction with American PSB. In 2006 TVR chose to broadcast an aspect of the BBC’s institutional narrative that focused on the role of France and western failure to act. Indeed, a survey of all documentaries reveals that the major narrative running throughout the memorial period concerns western indifference. Interestingly, the later BBC documentaries – which mediatize the more dramatized, dumbed-down narratives about the Rwandan genocide, include testimonies of killers and appear to endorse RPF-friendly narratives – were not broadcast to the Rwandan audience. The reappropriation of the BBC institutional narrative by the current government to suit the official mediatized memorial demonstrates how the international politics of revisionism work in complex ways. BBC Panorama documentaries mediatize the genocide in a manner that rewrites the history of Britain’s complicity in turning a blind eye. However, Rwanda’s own televisual mediatization of the

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international community’s complicity in genocide appears to favour the UK-friendly narrative produced by the BBC. Yousouf believes that the western documentaries serve to educate Rwandans on the context of how the genocide was planned and provide a more investigative form of documentary than Rwandan ones.69 Gabiro agrees that foreign documentaries fill a gap and are perceived as more entertaining than TVR films, which are considered by many Rwandans as something midway between a documentary and a news story: You won’t find a Rwandan-made documentary that goes through the genocide from planning to execution, and you won’t find anybody who has interviewed people in positions of authority, for example, leaders of the former government. But people like Roméo Dallaire have been here since and we have not had a documentary with him included – and journalists have had access. People in prisons have not been included, nor have footage of the trials and the testimonies of former ministers, and we do not have to pay for access to the footage – the Tribunal distributes it free of charge but there are no [Rwandan] documentaries on this.70 What appears to be a deliberate exclusion of perpetrators and international political actors from Rwandan documentaries – either because journalists did not receive state approval, or because of budget constraints – has led to an overreliance on imported documentaries. With limited scope for Rwandan investigative journalism, these imported documentaries mediatize the role of the international community in a way that may not always make sense to Rwandans. As Gabiro points out: People experienced the genocide but people did not understand what happened – they do not have a picture of how the genocide was organized. Many know little about the history of the country and cannot explain the genocide, except what happened to them. You can’t just get it from news. You can’t get it from the radio. Documentaries are the most important way of showing people. The problem is that the documentaries on the planning of the

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genocide are all meant for a western audience and therefore can’t benefit Rwandans that much.71 In contrast to the BBC’s feminized narratives about women rape survivors in genocide, personal testimonies are often used more discretely in Rwandan documentaries. According to Radio Rwanda journalist Christine Gahamanyi, rape was rarely mentioned in the media until after a coalition of women returned from the fourth annual international woman’s conference – Beijing Platform for Action in 1995. Gahamanyi, along with a colleague, set up an organization called the Association Rwandaise des Femmes des Médias to promote the role of women in the media when many Rwandans in political power were not gender sensitive. At the time, there were 24 women journalists but by 2006 the number had increased to 40. When Gahamanyi began her campaign, she lobbied to have a gender desk at ORINFOR, which was established with the support of the then Minister of Gender and Women’s Affairs Aloysia Inyumba. The gender desk went on to train both men and women journalists to be gender sensitive and to understand the need to advocate women’s rights: The organization also seeks to build solidarity among our women journalists and build up capacity to mobilize Rwandan women to work in our society. Before, Rwandan women found it difficult to work. We have had debates and now have many role models, for example, the ministers. It is important to report on women’s activities – to show women’s importance, to show their problems and how they can be solved. We have had many [media] campaigns such as ‘women and decision making,’ and ‘women and gacaca’. 72 Part of the role of the gender desk is to review media programmes and activities and assess whether programmes are balanced in their representation of women, and a report is submitted to the head of ORINFOR each year. After the 1995 Beijing conference, the media has reported on more sensitive issues such as violence against women. However, the continued stigmatization of people who are raped means

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that care is taken to ensure women are not exposed: ‘We do not put their voices in public or say their names but we tell their story. When women are speaking on television, we cover their faces.’73 According to David Russell from the Rwanda Survivor Fund (SURF), an agreement was made not to show certain films in Rwanda which may expose individuals. Since the BBC tends to mediatize the genocide and war through the narratives of survivors, this censorship may in part explain why the Rwandan government only uses foreign films to tell the story of international neglect.74

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CHAPTER 6 ‘LIVING ON GOLD SHOULD BE A BLESSING, INSTEAD IT IS A CUR SE’: M ASS R APE IN THE CONGO

Feminist theorizing and human rights campaigning have finally put the problem of Sexual and Gender-based violence (SGBV) in the DRC on the political map. Systematic rape was a concern for the US President Barack Obama leading up to the elections on 5 November 2008. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on 10 December 2009, Obama stipulated that those accountable for systematic rape in the east of Congo should not be allowed to continue to violate international law.1 In February 2010 the UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon appointed Margot Wallström of Sweden as the first Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict. Wallström is tasked with raising the profile of the ‘participation of women in peace- and security-related issues, most notably the injustice and violence faced by women during armed conflict’, symbolizing recognition of the importance of gender security and the problem of extreme gender insecurity around the world.2 It was Wallström who famously announced in August 2010 that the DRC was the ‘rape capital of the world’. Governments have also ploughed millions of aid money into the DRC and it has been estimated that in 2010 alone, the international

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donor community invested US$ 40 million into programmes aimed at combating rape in the east of Congo.3 According to the UN, the DRC is one of the most gender-inequitable regions in the world, ranking 131 out of 177 of those countries it reviewed in 2008.4 In 2011 the DRC fell 20 places from 167 to 187 in the Index of Human Development to become the least developed country in the world.5 The DRC has ratified a series of gender-aware policies and conventions including the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Rome Statute of the ICC and, in 2010, the Ministry of Gender, Family and Children drew up a Resolution 1325 national action plan to monitor the DRC’s success in ensuring women and gender are central to the country’s peace and security agenda. Despite guaranteeing women equality with men in the February 2006 Constitution, a gap exists between the laws that are in place to protect and promote women’s rights and the reality of women’s lives, which are also subject to local customary law and local political power. UN Advisor for Gender Nadine Puechguirbal once observed that even before conflict in the eastern provinces, when the laws stated that women had the right to vote and could inherit property, in reality ‘a woman could be ousted out of the house of her deceased husband by her in-laws’.6 UN Humanitarian Affairs Officer Claudia Rodriguez also recorded that in certain areas of South Kivu, women are considered the property of their late husband’s family, or the entire community – a concept of ownership that can sometimes be interpreted as ownership of the woman’s body: Any man in the extended family or in the community can have access to her without the woman being able to refuse. The notion of consent is non-existent and therefore cases are not reported as violations.7 Women’s rights are eroded further by a culture of impunity and the absence of a fair, effective and efficient judiciary service, in spite of the introduction of the 2006 Loi sur les Violence Sexuelles. The poor judiciary system is in part the failure of a weak and corrupt government, as well as corruption at the local level. Following a fact-finding mission

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to east of Congo in June–July 2008, the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region of Africa observed that, in the exceptional cases where men are convicted for rape, ‘courts regularly order the state to give compensation to victims, but to date, not a single dollar has been paid’ and that ‘amicable settlements outside the justice system, which seldom benefit the victim, are common and sometimes facilitated by judges, police or prosecutors’.8 The military justice system is also weak and reform is required if these crimes against women are to be taken seriously.9 Women face a double injustice: at a meeting in the House of Commons in November 2008, British Lord Jonathan Mance observed that a prison in Goma housed 26 inmates, of which 20 were women detained for attempting to abort children conceived of rape. The Congolese government is also not doing enough to curb the antics of an undisciplined army which is contributing to the extreme human insecurity of the region. A report published in April 2012 by the Eastern Congo Initiative stated that ‘[t]here is an absolute lack of political will in the Congolese government for security sector reform’ – and that the government is ‘hindering the process of professionalizing the army’.10 In spite of these deeply entrenched societal inequalities, co-founder of the UK-based campaign It Must Stop, Victoria Dove Dimandja, who fled the east of Congo in 2000, maintains that prior to the invasion of Zaire by Uganda and Rwanda and the onset of the civil war in 1997, rape, gang rapes and extreme SGBV was ‘something we never had in our country. It was happening here and there, and in the city.’11

Part I: Genocide by attrition Many feminist studies of rape in African war are confined to countryspecific civil wars and the impact of military institutions that have a global reach, such as the UN. However, amid regional politics of exclusionism (based on the ‘fixing’ of ethnicities) and over a decade of fighting for natural resources, the east of Congo has become a melting pot within which the wider politics of the Great Lakes region are played out. Across the DRC, rape is so widespread that one Congolese woman journalist and activist called in 2008 for the mapping process – that at the time was being carried out in the east of Congo to ascertain

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the impact of rape – to be extended to the whole of the country.12 Recent human rights reports infer that the majority of rapes are now committed by the Congolese Government Army, thereby highlighting that the problem of rape is not a foreign military problem alone.13 Perhaps more worrying is the extent to which civilian men also partake in rape and SGBV. Rapes by civilian men are on the rise, and there have been instances where local men ‘join the military on rape raids’, in addition to exploiting the conflict to ‘sexually assault women [men and children] without fear of punishment’.14 By interpreting rape as a weapon of war, campaigners and development practitioners often fall into the mistake of imaging the DRC’s entire geographical space as a site of mass rape. A report published in June 2011 by the American Journal of Health and commissioned by the United Nations, determined that some 1,152 women are raped daily, amounting to 48 rapes an hour. Baaz criticized the report for its generalizing tendencies, observing that it would not be possible to glean an accurate picture in a country as vast as the DRC, noting that practitioners in the field and women NGOs ‘admit that some women report rape in order to access free medical treatment [for] which other women with non-sexualised “conflict-related injuries” must pay’. According to Baaz, to make such a scientific claim, there would be a requirement to ‘have data showing that there [have] been changes in attitudes and behaviours in relation to sexual violence also in areas not affected by the conflict’.15 These generalizations endorse the sensationalized image of a ‘rape pandemic’ or ‘rape epidemic’ and lead to inaccuracies in understanding the effects of mass rape on local communities in relation to other forms of human rights abuse including beatings, political abductions and kidnappings. Although the problem of rape is recognized internationally as extreme, mass rape in the east of Congo continues to be understood within the framework of war, but not genocide. For example, despite adopting the vocabulary of genocide to assert that rape is ‘often successful in its intent to destroy and exterminate’ and can cause ‘the near total destruction of women, their families, and their communities’, in 2008 US-based campaign group Enough stated that rape was just a ‘weapon of war’.16 In order to move beyond the framework of depicting rape and SGBV as solely a weapon of war, we must

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recognize that mass rape is part of the process of genocide by attrition. As discussed in Chapter Two, genocide by attrition can occur when a group is singled out for political discrimination, when the right to life of a group is threatened, or when a group experiences the persistent denial of security including, as Silina observes, the ‘denial of the right to freedom from sexual violence’.17 If we agree with Adam Jones’s definition of genocide, life force atrocities in the east of Congo, where all members of the community are targeted, constitutes ‘the actualization of intent . . . to murder in whole or in part’ men, women and children.18 The word ‘actualization’ is particularly important here. According to Fein, genocide can be ‘the sustained, purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly’.19 I suggest, therefore, that within the east of Congo, there is ‘the reality of genocide’, even if collectively, the perpetrators (those in command, their foot soldiers and individual civilian operators) do not deliberately intend to commit genocide. The term ‘genocide by attrition’ to describe the wholesale destruction of African villages also helps us to understand how within the militarized economies of the east of Congo, genocide, as a process, rather than a single ‘act’ is taking place. Lacking basic human security, ‘civilians displaced into camps or surviving precariously in rural areas’ face ‘unprecedented shortfalls in humanitarian assistance, primarily food . . . portable water’ and ‘medical care’.20 In the east of Congo, militarized economies generate extreme human insecurity, which is preventing women from carrying out ‘basic economic and survival activities’ such as ‘going to the market, collecting water, gathering firewood’ and farming.21 Denied of this basic right to survive, the families of women – which include young boys, old or disabled men – suffer. As Enough stated in March 2008: By the end of this and every month, 45,000 more Congolese – half of them children – will die from hunger, preventable disease, and other consequences of violence and displacement. Congolese women and girls in particular bear the brunt of this crisis.22 This is compounded by the prevailing attitude of some perpetrators – in particular Congolese regular army troops – that ‘soldiers cannot be

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held accountable for their actions’, it is ‘the woman’s fault for being raped’ and ‘women should know not to go out in places where there are armed men’.23 In addition to the life force atrocities inflicted on men and boys, women and girls of all ages are raped and many die through lack of access to primary medical care and more specialist care required to repair fistulas. As in Rwanda following the genocide, women are frequently left mutilated, disabled, infected with HIV/ AIDS, infertile or pregnant – physically and psychologically traumatized – resulting in the long-term destruction of local communities. Perpetrators themselves, many of them former members of Congolese communities, are also left infected with AIDS/HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, language used to describe genocide by attrition is evident in the UN’s Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro’s speech at the Fourth Ordinary Summit of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR) in Kampala in December 2011, when she declared that attempts to ‘restore peace and stability in Africa’s Great Lakes region will not come to fruition unless the scourge of sexual violence is completely eradicated and justice systems are strengthened to end impunity’. According to a UN press release, Migiro is quoted saying: Sexual violence not only wreaks havoc in the lives of individual women and girls – it also causes lasting damage to the social fabric and economies of the Great Lakes region . . . We see it in failed harvests, lost productivity, fractured families, protracted insecurity and reduced political participation.24 Framing rape and life force atrocities as an integral part of a regional militarized economy, where the privatization of war and the influx of irregular combatants go hand in hand with the profiting from illegal mining and other shadow economies, is vital if we are to understand how militarized actors from across the Great Lakes region interact with Congolese populations, while still accounting for local political and economic factors that foster a climate wherein the process of genocide by attrition can take place. Here, there is a requirement to turn on its head the conventional image circulating international

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public discourse that illegal mining is a consequence of war, rather than the reason for continued instability. War continues because local and international actors involved in the mining industries profit from militarized economies within the region and because ‘warring factions successfully’ realize ‘local resources under their control’.25 As David Keen states, the ‘“point of war” is less about “winning”’ than it is about providing cover for “actions that in peacetime would be punishable as crimes”’.26 In this process, ‘supposed enemies have tended to form local understandings in order to reap economic or criminal benefits from the state of war’. Local alliances ‘frequently cut across ethnic, communal and other ascriptive ties’ and can often result in ‘politically perverse but economically rational alliances’.27 Unlike state-sanctioned genocides, genocide by attrition in the east of Congo, as part of the process of protracted warring over nearly two decades, militarization and criminal activity, therefore has the potential to lead to the neartotal destruction of targeted local communities or village populations, even if there is no collective strategy to annihilate. It should be noted that this regionalized economy does not easily fit into the framework of ‘new wars’ since conflict and trade alliances continue to be informed by local histories and politics. Berdal reminds us that the DRC, although ‘an extreme case of the economization of war’, has at its core ‘socio-economic grievances, issues of power and identity, political ambitions, and security concerns’.28 Rape and SGBV also take place within a wider political economy of violence which includes intimidation, threats and disappearances. Here, perpetrators may act on behalf of the DRC government, political parties and local militias. The purpose of this kind of gendered violence seems to be to sustain Congo’s status quo – both politically and economically. Human rights campaigners calling for political and social change are one group of people within the Congo that have been targeted persistently and women are no exception. Within this destructive economy, women and sex have become commodities to be seized, bought and bartered. Rape, including the rape and mutilation of men and boys, has become a form of ethnic cleansing, used to terrorize local people, destroy communities and displace populations in areas where armed groups compete for mineral-rich land. Foreign military regimes, individual soldiers and militias

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from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan and Zimbabwe have all, over the years, imported militarized and/or genocidal rape and other forms of life force atrocities. The Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by Joseph Kony and the Rwandan Hutu extremist FDLR have been the most prolific in this regard. In February 2009 Human Rights Watch documented a spate of killings ‘of ghastly proportions’ by the FDLR, noting that the FDLR ‘have a very ugly past’ before describing the violence using the vocabulary of genocide (for example, where traditional symbols of regeneration are inverted): One witness at Kibua saw FDLR combatants kill at least seven people, including a pregnant woman, who was slit open. Another saw an FDLR combatant batter a 10-year-old girl to death against a brick wall.29 In the east of Congo, as in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the appropriation of ethnicity as a tool to politically exclude populations can sometimes ‘justify’ local militarized economies. As Turshen states, in the Great Lakes region where history and memory is manipulated by all parties, ‘soldiers hold civilian populations responsible for the abuses of previous regimes or hold them accountable for the movements and actions of the enemy’.30 Extending beyond this, as part of a wider economy of violence, women are perceived as assets, valued for their productive and reproductive labour. In the east of Congo, this also amounts to stealing food, water, clothing, cash, livestock and farming equipment (even seeds) from women. Militia and soldiers often regard rape as ‘payment’ for their military work and a means to climb the military ranks (particularly in the case of child soldiers). Sexual slavery may be used as a means to obtain finance, whereby militias capture women and demand a ransom from their families.31 Families themselves are reported to have sent girls as young as 13 into mining towns to seek an income through prostitution. Other forms of the ‘commercialization of sex’, include instances wherein men, women and some families try to profit through making false claims, blackmailing and bargaining. In a report published in 2010, Baaz and Stern note that the commercialization of

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rape has emerged precisely because ‘the population is informed that women have the right to not be raped (through posters, radio emissions, banderoles and other means of communication which warn potential perpetrators/viewers/readers of the grave legal consequences)’. Attempts to profiteer range from claiming to be a ‘fake victim’ in order to receive free medical care or other resources provided through development and aid programmes, to making false accusations, for example, where ‘family members accuse other young men, often the boyfriends of their daughters, of raping their daughters/sisters in order to press the men for money’.32 Baaz and Stern believe that this local form of bargaining will continue unless more is done to raise awareness that committing other forms of human rights abuse targeting both genders is also a crime.33 Then there are the survivalist strategies of women and girls, who enter into prostitution, quietly play the part of the military ‘wife’, or exchange sex for food and other resources. Women also work in conditions of slavery in artisanal mines controlled by militia. In late 2010 British photographer Georgina Cranston travelled to the DRC to record the lives of women who work inside disused mines located near the once-thriving mining town Bunia in the eastern province of Ituri. The mines, which were once commercially run, are no longer safe and the men and women who work within them risk their lives daily. Described by Cranston as ‘human mules’, the women carry large sacks of rocks up to the surface before handing them to another group of women who walk long distances, often barefooted across challenging terrain, to workshops where yet more women break the rocks and sift for gold. One 25-year-old woman, widowed at 15 during the war in Ituri, had been working underground in perilous conditions for ten years. She tells Cranston that before the war, ‘rocks used to be carried by carts, now they are carried by us’.34 Many of the Congolese women Cranston interviews own strips of farmland but choose to work in the mines because they regard the pay as the most reliable source of income available to them. Often earning less than a dollar a day, women seek employment because ‘their fields are in forests occupied by rebels and growing food has become too dangerous’.35 These women find themselves in an exploitative industry because they either fear becoming, or have already become victims

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of violence. These examples demonstrate how in the east of Congo traditional economies have been subverted and women are no longer rooted in conventional marriage and/or agricultural economies. Some women profit substantially within local mining economies. In Luhwindja, a chiefdom in the Mwenga terrority of South Kivu, local businesswoman Espérance Barahanyi owns a company that supplies day labourers to the mining corporation Banro: Conamula. In her early fifties, Barahanyi is also a member of parliament (at the provincial level) and active in community development, owning an NGO called Apef which provides assistance to vulnerable women and children and ‘socio-professional training’.36 However, Barahanyi holds an exceptional position within the Bashi region, where men are usually leaders. Following the death of local chief, mwami Naluhwindhja, she was appointed ‘mwamikazi’ or guarantor of local customs in 2005, to rule until her son Justin had come of age. Barahanyi, like many local elites, acts as an intermediary between local citizens and Banro: Conamula.37 As Sara Geenan observes in her study of local politics within the mining economies of South Kivu, many of the population believe Barahanyi should rightfully profit from her customary leadership position, yet there is also some resentment that she enriches herself at their expense. Other businesswomen are very much involved in the militarized economy of the Great Lakes region. A report published by the UN Group of Experts on the DRC in 2008 discusses Madame Aziza Gulamili, a ‘half-Burundo-Congolese, half-Asian businesswoman from Bukavu’ who, as a ‘controller of two comptoirs in Goma’ was a ‘major financial backer of the (Hutu) Front pour la Défense de la Démocratie (FDD) rebels in Burundi’. In November 2000 Gulamili had been one of four business people selected by the RCD to assist in monopolizing the buying and selling of coltan in RCD-occupied territory.38 Some women operate at the highest political level. The UN Group of Experts on the DRC also attests to have collected evidence that Nele Devriendt, the alleged wife of Raphael Soriana, one of the chief financiers of the CNDP, was making bank ‘transfers from her account at ING Bank’ to ‘an account held at Banque Commerciale du Rwanda in the name of Elisabeth Uwasse’, said to be ‘the name used by the wife of General Laurent Nkunda’.39 Militarized economies

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should therefore be understood to be class-based since often the poorest women of society are the most vulnerable to rape by perpetrators who overwhelmingly constitute low-ranking foot soldiers, local militia and citizens – among the most politically and economically disenfranchised men. Conversely, wealthy women who have been raped may sometimes find themselves living in poverty, having been ostracized by their families. By recognizing that rape forms part of genocide by attrition, which is itself a product of and integral to militarized economies within the Great Lakes region, we are able to consider how sexual violence not only targets women, but the whole community. The new Congo atrocity narrative Within international public discourse the raping of Congo’s women has become the dominant atrocity narrative with which to frame conflict in the DRC, although increasingly since the official end of the Congo wars in 2010 links are being drawn between rape and SGBV and the unregulated mining economies. In this narrative, rape is depicted as either a by-product of war or a weapon of war but is not recognized as genocide by attrition. Over the years, discussion on rape and SGBV in the DRC has been carried out almost exclusively by four groups of actors: NGOs and human rights activists, the UN, the international media and media outlets from across the Great Lakes region. The struggle for ownership over the discourse and invention of ‘Congo’ has been ongoing since Leopold’s Free State. This gendered project defines the orderly, civilized West in relation to the chaotic Other (Africa), and the enemy (savage Congolese militias and African politicians) in relation to virtuous (‘western’) warriors (the UN peacekeeping mission MONUC/MONUSCO, governments outside of Africa and NGOs). One important narrative which has influenced British and American media depictions of the DRC stems from the human rights campaigning against Leopold’s violent rule (1885–1908), which saw the emergence of the ‘Congo atrocity narrative’. Since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the emergence of NGO reporting on the gendered nature of conflict in Africa, former colonial stereotypes about Congolese men and women have been refashioned to fit the new Congo atrocity narrative.

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As a genre, NGO reporting has its roots in human rights campaigning dating back to the early nineteenth century, where the theme of brutalization and the ‘image of the black body in distress’ drew on classic colonial stereotypes about mastery and debasement. The narrative revealed the extreme brutality of capitalist production which saw thousands of men and women die from maltreatment at the hands of the colonial army, the Force Publique. Black Force Publique soldiers represented African savagery, cannibalism and madness.40 The Congo atrocity narrative was reinforced by a series of photographs that borrowed from images and techniques found in colonial ethnographic science. According to John Peffer, the advent of photographic evidence of Leopold’s barbarism saw the invention of a new type of ethnographic subject: the victim of colonial violence.41 This new subject was gendered male: Nancy Rose Hunt observes that the standard atrocity narrative, which honed in on the ‘mute row of male atrocity victims with mere stumps for arms’,42 was gender-blind and over time rendered invisible women’s experience of pain and suffering – including their experiences of rape and other life force atrocities. Throughout the 2000s, NGOs such as Human Rights Watch (HRW), WomenforWomen International, Amnesty International and Enough were at the forefront of feminizing the standard atrocity narrative to raise the profile of the problem of rape in the east of Congo. The first substantial report to map the extent of rape and SGBV in the east of Congo was Human Rights Watch’s War within a War. Published in 2002, the report provided evidence through a series of catalogued testimonies by women rape-survivors, and traced their experiences from the moment they were attacked to the psychological impact following the incident. Other reports and briefings shared this format, including HRW’s (2005) Seeking Justice – The Prosecution of Sexual Violence in the Congo War and Amnesty International’s (2008) No End to War on Women and Children. Since 2008, a number of reports have emerged attempting to address the complexity around preventing mass rape – such as improving the military justice system (HRW 2009) and the role of the international community in seeking a cessation of SGBV (SCIAF 2008). Reports that catalogue women’s testimonies play an important role in challenging institutional assumptions about SGBV. They break down the division

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between the public (masculine) and private (feminine) spheres, where rape is perceived as either a by-product of war or domestic violence. The reports are also part of a long-standing western feminist campaign which views the state and other institutions as patriarchal systems that privilege masculinity.43 The method of reciting women’s personal atrocity narratives is similar to the method applied by survivor organizations such as Rwanda Survivor Fund (SURF) who seek to raise the profile of women in post-genocide Rwanda. As in the BBC documentaries and the BBC Comic Relief campaign film, women’s personal atrocity narratives are a powerful public relations tool for many NGOs, who often incorporate them into their press releases, web stories and online videos. This ‘western’ feminist legacy has most notably contributed to the feminization of the standard atrocity narrative in its assertion that within the east of Congo women are victims and all men are perpetrators, thereby ignoring how men and boys are also victims of violence, including rape and SGBV.44 In particular, Congolese men are imaged as savage, primitive, hyper-masculine, hyper-sexual and irrational. As Baaz and Stern state, the ‘acts of rape that have occurred in the DRC are often understood as a result of the supposed animal-like bestiality of the rapists’.45 Imaging all Congolese men as hyper-sexual (and by extension all African men located in the east of Congo) and Congolese women as a homogenous, downtrodden, sexually abused mass prevents us from viewing these women as political actors who manoeuvre and operate within the numerous micro-hierarchies of power in order to survive. It also obscures from view the ways in which women partake in – and profit from – genocide and war in the region. These reports do not often distinguish between those women who have become commodities (objects) to be bought, sold and taken, and those business women who capitalize on regional violence and insecurity. The reliance on the ‘woman victim of male barbarism’ stereotype is akin to the BBC’s mediatized stereotype of the raped woman genocide survivor. In addition, the powerful and important role of Congolese human rights activists based in the DRC or in diaspora groups around the world is hidden from view. Many of these men and women work in partnership with Congolese citizens within the DRC to campaign for women and their communities’ basic right to human security.

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The more recent focus on the problem of SGBV takes place in the decade in which the United Nations and its member states have finally begun to recognize the integral need to include women in peace and security initiatives. The adoption by the UN Security Council of Resolution 1325, and its related resolutions (SCR 1820 (2008); SCR 1888 (2009); SCR 1889 (2009); SCR 1960 (2010)) are important tools for furthering the women, peace and security agenda. Aisling Swaine observes that Resolution 1325 has successfully ‘moved international discourse and debate on women’s role in international security forward’, ‘redefining the position of women in the context of conflict’ – mainly by making visible women’s agency and political activism, ‘and by expanding acceptance of the various roles women play in conflict’.46 Calling for security sector reform, SCR 1325 places emphasis on ‘the need to integrate gendered and inclusive approaches into sustainable peace and development’.47 However, SCR 1325’s related resolutions have come under fire for dumbing down the agency of women by suggesting that the UN and nation states are ‘protectors’ of women victims. The main tenet of this new international discourse on women, peace and security is on women’s victimization. International focus on Congolese women victims has also restricted collective understandings of what ‘gender’ means in defence reform initiatives, where ‘gender’ has become ‘almost synonymous with combating sexual violence’.48 To date, there have been very few NGO or media reports that raise awareness of the position of men and boys – either as victims of rape and sexual violence, as traumatized husbands and family members, or as perpetrators. Rarely do we hear stories about child soldiers who are trained to rape, or the extent to which perpetrators are high on drugs and alcohol – cheap payment for their labour. The absence of men’s voices, particularly those of military (and civilian) perpetrators, unwittingly reproduces colonial stereotypes about African men, who rape to fulfil a primal misogynistic desire: like the former colonial Force Publique soldiers, today’s male perpetrators are imaged as savage, backward and emotionless. This in itself belies the local and regional contexts within which human rights abuses are being carried out. The extent to which this stereotype is manipulated in today’s gendered Congo atrocity narrative is epitomized in an Amnesty International

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campaign flyer distributed in an edition of The Observer in the summer of 2009. On the front cover in large black letters reads ‘RAPE’, then underneath in shocking pink ‘Weapon of war’. This statement is accompanied by a graphic image of a sharp knife and two round hand grenades, carefully positioned to symbolize an erect phallus. At the time Amnesty International appropriated this image to inform their targeted British audience that rape was not a by-product of war, but a military strategy. However, by disembodying the African man from the politics and history of the region and focusing only on male sexual organs, Amnesty International reinforces stereotypes that posit African men as barbaric, uncontrollable and hypersexual (see Figure 7). WomenforWomen International has been more forthcoming in recognizing the need to bring men on board, both politically and socially, in order to put an end to SGBV.49 WomenforWomen International also provided assistance to American independent documentary filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson while she was in the DRC in May 2007 filming The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Eastern Congo – a campaign film which aimed to bring the lost (‘silenced’) voices of Congolese women to the world. The Greatest Silence challenges both NGO and media representations to provide a more sensitive and informed reading of the position of women in the DRC. As with NGO reports, Jackson sustains a ‘western’ feminist campaign to show how Congolese women are invisible, ashamed and stigmatized, often ostracized by their husbands, families and communities. Jackson moves beyond the simple framework of cataloguing successive testimonies of women victims (survivors) in order to unravel the wider social issues that arise from SGBV. She focuses on the experiences of these women as survivors as they rebuild their self-esteem and learn how to live in a society which ultimately rejects them. Jackson adopts a similar victim role to that of the BBC’s Fergal Keane by likening herself to the subjects in her film, explaining to both the audience outside of the east of Congo and those she interviews that she shares their horror of having been gang raped. She speaks to a range of Congolese women activists: Faida Mwamgila, the minister of women’s affairs; the then UN Peacekeeper Chief of Staff Colonel Roddy Winser; Dr Denis Mukwege, the medical director of Panzi Hospital in Bukavu; and Major Honorine Munyole, the police officer

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in charge of what was at the time a ‘one-woman sexual violence unit’ in Bukavu. Interviewing Congolese women – from nurses and nuns who assist rape survivors, to women who collect witness statements in the attempt to convict perpetrators, and rape survivors who argue that women must help each other – Jackson ensures that women are not imaged as victims, but as political subjects, performing in their own way. This remarkable documentary therefore exposes the everyday struggle of women – as political subjects – working in opposition to the wider gendered politics of exclusionism in the DRC. The film reveals how, unlike many NGO reports, these women consider it both a country and regional-specific institutional problem, and not solely the result of war. According to Congolese woman activist Annie Atibu Faray, ‘the rapists of yesterday have become the authorities and they encourage sexual violence because for them it has become a way of life. That’s why the violence will not end.’ Somewhat paradoxically, the film has been tremendously influential in affirming the feminized atrocity narrative. This is largely because Jackson chooses to adopt a feminist standpoint that focuses on man’s universal violence against women, telling one group of Congolese that, contrary to their assumptions, when she had been raped ‘there had been no war back then in Washington, DC and that any woman could become a victim at any time’. In Jackson’s narrative the men who were killed by militias and Congolese soldiers during village raids feature as a backdrop to the women’s experiences of being raped. However, if we consider how in the east of Congo rape constitutes one type of life force atrocity, it is possible to hear evidence of genocide by attrition in the testimonies of the women survivors. The story of woman survivor Marie-Jeanne is remarkably similar to those who experienced genocide in Rwanda, where the traditional symbols of regeneration are subverted. She says: My husband tried to give them the [US]$15 that he had. They said they didn’t want the money of a poor man. They started to beat him and killed him. They cut him into three parts: the head, the chest and the bottom part. They took the head, the chest and his sex and gave me the bottom part, which were his legs. Then they turned to me and said ‘Let’s kill the wife too’. They beat me on my head with a machete and broke five of

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my teeth. And then they raped me and abandoned me there. I passed out next to my husband’s legs. In another scene filmed in Bukavu, Jackson records the work of MONUC as they hand out parcels to approximately 100 women who had been kidnapped by ‘rebel militia’ and held as sex slaves. One woman stands up, a crowd of women behind her, and describes what happened to them. In this context, their husband or family’s refusal to take them back forms part of the process of destroying the community: We were raped by 20 men at the same time. Our bodies are suffering. They have taken guns and put them inside us. They kill our children and they tell us to eat those children. If a woman is pregnant, they make your children stand on your belly so that you will abort. Then they take the blood from your womb and put it in a bowl and tell you to drink it. When we were living in the forest, it wasn’t just one man. Every soldier can have sex with you. We got pregnant there. We gave birth there in the forest like animals, without food or medicine. But by the grace of God we had the courage to escape to the village. We are all alone – our husbands have been killed, or they have denied us. There is also evidence of how the fear of rape leads to women’s lack of access to food, which under Eric Reeves and Helen Fein’s terms constitutes genocide by attrition. In one village outside of Bukavu, Jackson encounters a family of seven women of varying ages, and all of them have been raped. The camera focuses on one woman, the primary carer for the older members of her family, as she prepares a meagre meal. She is clearly emaciated and remarks: ‘It’s all we have to eat. We can’t go far to find more because we might meet a rapist.’ Similarly, an 11-year-old called Safi tells a story that betrays the signs of genocide by attrition, wherein the threat of rape is used as a means to steal money and other resources: We were preparing to go to bed and then they appeared. They took everything we had. They took goods, chickens, clothes and

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they asked my parents for dollars to leave me alone. They said if my parents didn’t give them money, they would rape me. It was a boy who raped me. Evidence of genocide by attrition and life force atrocities is also present in the documentaries of Fiona Lloyd-Davies, who visited the DRC in 2010 to film the BBC3 current affairs documentary The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women and an independent film Field of Hope. One Congolese woman called Masika Katsuva, who appears in both films, describes her experience of having been raped when militiamen attacked her whole family, killing and torturing her husband first: They started to cut him up bit by bit with a machete. They chopped off his limbs, removed his intestines and he was still pleading until they cut out his heart. It was then that he fell down and died. They threatened me with knives and they forced me to chew and swallow my husband’s penis. While I was lying on top of my husband’s body they started raping me. I managed to count about 12 men. The inability of witnesses to adequately describe what they see or hear is remarkably similar to the way in which witnesses struggled to find words in Rwanda in 1994. In The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women, Lloyd-Davies takes a young British-Congolese woman named Judith Wanga back to the DRC for the first time since she left her birthplace at the age of three. Reflecting on her experience, where she encountered a three-year-old girl who had been raped, Wanga remarks: You know that rape happens and you know that it can be very violent but . . . there’s something different about how it’s done here. And this is coming from a much darker place, it’s more sinister and . . . these aren’t men who’ve got an urge and they are just fulfilling it. They are just systematically raping and brutalizing . . . in some cases mutilating these women to destroy them.

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Dr Denis Mukwege, who by 2010 had seen more than 60,000 women receive treatment for SGBV and other forms of violence at Panzi Hospital, also struggles to find words that adequately describe the extreme brutality taking place and instead falls back on the notion of ‘war against women’. This once more neglects the way in which the whole family unit are often targeted. He comments: To say rape, I think that in this region the word rape is not enough. The situation is really worse. Before, it was only rape and kill. Now it is rape, kill and burn. This kind of torture is a war against women to destroy women. And we know that to destroy a woman is to destroy also all of the community. In 1994 media coverage of Rwanda contained evidence of genocide, yet governments and the member states of the UN Security Council refused to use the word ‘genocide’, widely believed to be out of concern that under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide they would be required to intervene. Some form of global denial is taking place today. There seems to be a blind spot when we think about SGBV in the Congo. By separating out the problem of mass rape from other life force atrocities and refashioning rape into a narrative about ‘war on Congolese women’, we fail to see that the violence perpetrated – whether by militias, Congolese soldiers, foreign armed groups or civilians – collectively constitutes genocide. Although the mass raping of women in the east of Congo has been recognized at the highest levels of global political power, one might question to what extent the prevailing feminized atrocity narrative trivializes the desperate situation in which Congolese communities find themselves. There is something of an irony in Jackson’s film when we witness the UN distribute aid parcels to a camp for women survivors of rape: the UN is in the DRC to maintain political stability, to help disarm, demilitarize and reintegrate militiamen in a supposed ‘post-conflict’ environment and to provide protection to humanitarian programmes. It is not in the DRC with a mandate to halt the process of genocide by attrition. This emphasis reflects a

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shift away from humanitarian intervention towards liberal peace policies that focus on conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction where, as part of the new security framework, ‘the modalities of underdevelopment have become dangerous’.50 As Mark Duffield indicates, these liberal peace strategies: denote a susceptibility within global liberal governance to normalise violence and accept high levels of instability as an enduring, if unfortunate characteristic of certain regions.51

Part II: British and American Congo atrocity narratives Media institutions in the UK and USA borrow from NGO reports – first because NGOs rely on the media to promote their work, rouse public support and secure funding; and second because journalists out in the field tend to regard NGO staff as the most reliable and/or accessible sources of information, and often use staff as stringers to fix up interviews with women rape-survivors. In doing so, mainstream media in the UK and USA have adopted the NGO method of cataloguing personalized atrocity narratives. Yet journalists and editors have also relied on classic colonial stereotypes about Congolese men and women which depict the Congo as madness, fever and chaos. In colonial ethnographic science, photographs and written accounts were meant to catalogue bodily variations in the African woman’s ‘breed’ and there was a particular fascination with African women’s sexual parts. Women were depicted as either hyper-sexual (as evinced by the seemingly ‘grotesquely’ disproportionate breasts, buttocks and labia of the Hottentot), or asexual and/or lacking sexuality.52 Some colonial scientists went further to dissect African women’s reproductive parts in the name of progressive science and theories of race evolution. Hunt has revealed that British doctor Albert Cook unearthed the skeletons of Ugandan women to ascertain why obstructed labour in African women was a more frequent occurrence.53 Cook’s cataloguing of the pelvises of dead Ugandan women, which had been unearthed from the Kampala Hospital graveyard, was reported in the East African Medical

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Journal, wherein images taken of these women’s skeletons ‘featured as a photographic frontispiece’.54 Both Belgian and British colonialism interpreted the hyper-sexual African woman’s body as the epitome of Africa as the diseased Other of the West, where the black African woman’s body became the icon of deviant sexuality.55 Unhygienic Congolese women therefore represented the backward/savage ‘Congo’. Belgian colonialists also developed racist images about Congolese women’s ‘subfertility and sterility’ which, according to Hunt, ‘spoke of degeneration, race suicide, extinction’ and ‘a customary world unable to reproduce itself’.56 The themes of colonial ethnographic science and the focus on African women’s reproductive parts are prevalent today in western scientific studies, as well as international media accounts. As the fight for land and resources in the east of Congo continues, the association of Congolese women with disease, sickness, hyper-sexuality and death remains a key field of western scientific research and discovery: there is a growing body of scientific literature on sexual violence in the east of Congo which documents HIV infection rates and HIV mother-to-child transmission rates, as well as genital mutilation, despite the presumed lack of access to the region to conduct research into the political status of women. Interestingly, scientists have accessed isolated Congolese communities which few journalists have dared to venture near. Within the USA and UK, mediatized subjectivities are shaped by the metaphor of the ‘Congolese woman’s raped body’ which is born out of these themes of health, reproduction and a focus on mutilated sexual parts. There are obvious reasons for this focus: SGBV creates grave health problems for women – including fistulas, infection, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, infertility and the births of unwanted children. In addition, many journalists on the ground visit Panzi Hospital and interview the most renowned Congolese gynaecologist, Dr Denis Mukwege, who works tirelessly to treat women who have walked for miles to seek treatment for the violence they have endured. However, as in the mainstream media representations of the Rwandan genocide, the extremity of rape presents (primitive/regressive) horror designed to shock a western audience more often than it

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seeks to call governments to account and bring perpetrators to justice, thereby reinforcing the global political order wherein the DRC and Africa are positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy. Writing in 2004 for the Times Online, Jonathan Clayton visits a hospital treating ‘the victims of anarchic sexual violence’ and observes that the majority of women ‘have been attacked, raped by many men, mutilated, [and] abused in acts of savagery’.57 Within media reporting, men’s presumed hyper-masculinity and extreme brutality also alludes to the colonial stereotype of the Congolese cannibal. In Gettleman’s article ‘Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War’ in the New York Times, published on 7 October 2007, he describes the Rastas as ‘a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest . . . and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody that gets in their way’.58 By comparison, a Guardian article on UN peacekeepers perpetuating child abuse in Liberia, Haiti and the DRC adopts more sophisticated language. Rape, prostitution, pornography and ‘trading food for sex’ are not described as acts of out-of-control savagery but ‘exploitation’, a ‘grotesque abuse of authority’, a ‘flagrant violation of children’s rights’ and ‘sexual misconduct’.59 The contrast is striking, suggesting that NGO employees and UN peacekeepers are more civilized, even though they themselves contribute to the militarized economies within the region, wherein women and sex are commodities to be bought, bartered, stolen or seized. UK media coverage October–November 2008 The BBC’s institutional narrative on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide drew on feminized, apolitical stories about women victims and offset them with stories about hyper-masculine killers. This narrative has mediatized violence within the borders of Rwanda, and in doing so enabled the BBC to avoid reporting on Rwanda’s role in the conflicts in east of Congo. Panorama’s efforts to contain the genocide within state borders and a continual repetition of the same narrative, mediatizes Rwandan subjectivities in such a way that they appear trapped in 1994, and as a nation and a people they seem to be unable to progress.

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In memorializing the genocide, Panorama therefore leaves discussion on post-genocide politics within the Great Lakes region to Newsnight – a move which calls for a survey of the extent to which the BBC’s institutional narrative on the Rwanda genocide informs the institution’s way of seeing and representing conflict in the Great Lakes region. A year after the genocide on 22 August 1995 Kirsty Wark introduced a report on the forced return by Zairian troops of Rwandan refugees who were residing in the Goma IDP camps with the question: ‘So which disaster will it be: a humanitarian nightmare or a bloodbath?’ Since then, Newsnight has imaged conflict as a continuation of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, focusing specifically on the FDLR, but providing little space to discuss the complex geopolitics and regional factors contributing to destabilization. In 2001 Andrew Harding reported on the Rwandan Army’s attempts to capture former Interahamwe in the east of Congo, unravelling the drama through metaphors more befitting a BBC nature programme than Newsnight: In the jungles of Africa, a long war is taking a new turn . . . They’re busy hunting a rebel group. Suddenly the Rwandans spot their quarry – perhaps half a mile down the valley. The chase begins. It’s become a daily, deadly game of cat and mouse. We race along behind them as the army moves in for the kill. By April 2006, almost eight years after the Goma refugee crisis, the new stereotype of sickness, death, disease and sterility which had pervaded colonial discourse on Congo, now symbolized by the refugee camp under a smouldering volcano, is cemented. On 25 April, Martin Bell began his reports with the statement: ‘Sometimes it seems that all the ills of the earth have befallen this country at one time.’ Bell accompanied UNICEF to reveal how child soldiers had been brought into the conflict and it becomes clear this is an opportunity to promote UNICEF’s work. Bell’s approach appears to be more akin to that of a campaign journalist. Ditching the framework of war, which has dominated Newsnight news features on the east of Congo up until this point, Bell appropriates the humanitarian framework to focus more on the impact the war is having on women and children. This is the first

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time that mass rape is mentioned in a Newsnight news feature, and a Congolese woman manoeuvres to explain how women in her village are under threat from extreme SGBV. Bell visits a hospital in Goma where all the patients are victims of rape, but there is also evidence of increased attacks on women by civilian men, and an 11-year-old who was raped by a taxi driver is filmed with her two premature babies. Operating within the militarized economy, we are told that after the rape, the taxi driver ‘offered [the girl] ten dollars but she refused to take it’. In August and September 2008, as relations between Nkunda, the FDLR and FARDC intensified, news and current affairs television programmes and the press in the UK barely covered the multiple conflicts that were occurring in the eastern provinces. On 24 September BBC Online ignored the extremity of the renewed fighting in North Kivu but used it as a case study to demonstrate how ‘progress towards the Millennium Development Goals is not only stalling, it is going backwards’.60 Indeed, media institutions only took notice in late October 2008, when Nkunda launched a major offensive against the FARDC and advanced to within 20 km of Goma, the provincial capital on the edge of Lake Kivu on 26 October. Nkunda alleged that the Congolese government had not upheld its part of the peace agreement to demobilize and reintegrate the FDLR into Rwanda, and had failed to protect Congolese ethnic Tutsi from the FDLR. At the time, the Congolese government refused to talk to Nkunda, whom the government regarded as a terrorist supported by Rwanda. Overall, UK media reporting concentrated on two themes: the failure of the Peace Agreement and the urgent need for aid agencies to access displaced refugees in Goma. During this time, new reports reproduced an apolitical narrative about displaced refugees. However, the UK media interpreted this latest conflict in North Kivu as a continuation of ethnic war between Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi. It was clear that both the British government and the UK media were keen to cover themselves in the event that mass ethnic cleansing or genocide might arise. On 1 November 2008 Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared that: ‘We must not allow Congo to become another Rwanda’.61 Media outlets rushed to ensure that they were seen to be covering the events, with many newspapers and programmes – such as BBC Radio

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2’s Today programme, developing dedicated web pages on the east of Congo. The theme of rape did not surface until two weeks later and was mediatized as the fallout from the fighting. At the time, discussions around whether to reinforce MONUC or send an EU peacekeeping force into the region were ongoing. Borrowing from the Rwandan genocide media framework, the UK media presented to its audience the familiar images of 1994’s Goma refugee camps (the point of entry into the Great Lakes region for British audiences), but merged it with the newer feminized Congo atrocity narrative. On 15 November, The Times brought together the 1994 apocalyptic image of Goma’s smouldering volcano with the trope of the ‘black woman’s body in distress’. The headline read ‘Over 250,000 displaced as sexual violence erupts in DRC’. We hear the personalized atrocity narrative of 42-year-old Ngiraganga and that ‘Goma is awash with thousands more similar stories’. As with Newsnight, the politics that have led to the high prevalence of rape and other life force atrocities within the east of Congo are confined to the familiar Hutu/Tutsi ethnic conflict media framework, rather than wider struggles for power and access to natural resources: ‘As so often in Central Africa’, Rob Crilly writes, ‘the roots of misery can be traced to someone else’s war: the Rwandan Genocide of 1994’.62 Interestingly, on 31 October 2008 the Guardian referred to the familiar images of natural disaster to echo the flight of Rwandan Hutu to Goma in 1994. Michelle Faul states that following the fighting ‘thousands of residents, refugees and government soldiers fled in a chaotic torrent ahead of advancing rebels’.63 Gettleman’s ‘Chaos in Congo as rebels draw near’ begins with the statement: ‘Goma, Congo: The exodus has begun’.64 By early December 2008 stories about rape and SGBV became once again the theme of choice for many UK broadsheets. Published on Friday 5 December, Chris McGreal’s article ‘Inside the villages where every woman is victim of hidden war’ drew heavily on the feminized atrocity narrative. Rape is described only in the context of war, where it is ‘used to terrorise and punish communities or as a tool for ethnic cleansing’. All men are savage and primitive perpetrators, described in familiar colonial language that reinforces the race hierarchy, where

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African men are closer to animals than their white counterparts. ‘They came out of the forest. Men with guns appearing barely human,’ he writes, before quoting a woman: ‘They didn’t look like men. Their skins were covered in cuts. Their clothes were completely torn. They became someone else, not humans.’65 On the surface these articles rehash NGO stories and media clichés to produce seemingly apolitical shock-media. Yet a closer examination reveals that the trope of the ‘raped Congolese woman’s body in distress’ is used by the UK media to justify the British government’s stance on the question of United Nations intervention in the region. An analysis of when exactly in the last months of 2008 rape and SGBV is discussed reveals that the majority of articles were published once the UK announced its support for the UN’s decision to increase MONUC’s forces within the region. Indeed, there is a pattern in this approach: amid the years and months of silence on the position of women in the east of Congo and the DRC, the UK media resurrects the feminized atrocity narrative at key political decision-making moments: November 2007 (the beginnings of peace negotiations); January 2008 (the signing of the Amani Peace Agreement); April 2008 (renewed resistance led by the FDLR); and October–December 2008. The only other time when rape and SGBV was reported in any great length in the UK media was in May 2008 during the promotion of Jackson’s documentary film The Greatest Silence. This pattern suggests that the UK media is not advocating ending rape and SGBV per se, but using it as a political tool to first define the UK’s involvement in the Great Lakes region (as an advocator of humanitarian intervention) while at the same time to conceal other forms of political and economic intervention. Endless acts of out-of-control savagery will continue unless the ‘West’ (MONUC) steps in to ‘civilize’ Congo – but only on the terms of certain dominant political actors. It is not the first time this message has been used by the UK media: it was central to the twentieth-century atrocity narrative’s bid to demonstrate the brutality of King Leopold, and justify America and the UK’s intervention in the DRC’s mineral-rich territory. Today, the feminized atrocity narrative – together with the horror images of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and Goma – continue this justification.

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Zoe Marriage notes that since DFID’s inception in 1997 it has promoted two policy streams within the Great Lakes region: the first concerned eliminating poverty, the second focused on rightsbased humanitarianism or ‘new-humanitarianism’. The New Labour government tended to confine conflict within imagined national borders which disregarded ‘the ways in which war, power and ammunition’ flowed across borders. According to Marriage, between 1997 and 2001 DFID: Continually dismissed Rwanda’s role as aggressor and, by linking the fighting on Congo to the insurgency in northwestern Rwanda, it also neglected to mention the profits that Rwanda was making.66 DFID also denied any ability to influence Rwanda’s political decision making and placed most blame over the current crisis in the region on the FDLR, at the cost of sidelining other actors – notably Rwanda. The BBC’s approach, where reporting on the east of Congo is confined to Newsnight, leaving the memorialization of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to Panorama, accords well with the institution’s support for the British government’s policy in the region. In refusing to acknowledge the role of the Rwandan government in plundering the DRC’s mineral wealth and backing Nkunda, BBC reporting does not question whether DFID is morally right to fund Rwanda’s development projects. On 19 November 2009, BBC Radio 4’s Crossing Continents programme investigated the way in which the FDLR operates as an ‘international corporation’. Reporter Peter Greste begins his story at the Heal Africa compound near Goma, where some 120 women and their children live behind barbed wire and high fences. All of them have suffered extreme abuse and gender-based violence. Greste interviews one woman who tells her story of being raped and held captive by FDLR soldiers. Greste then explains that the UN is working to demobilize and reintegrate the FDLR back into Rwanda, before speaking with an FDLR commander on the ground and interviewing Callixte Mbarushimana in Paris. Once more, this BBC report falls in line with the remit of the United Nations, which had stepped up its

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investigations into the international network of the FDLR in 2009. In tune with this focus and following Nkunda’s arrest, the UK media lost interest in him: he seemed to disappear and the Rwandan government, at least in relation to the DRC, appeared to do no wrong.

Part III: Mediatized conflict in the Great Lakes region Narratives produced by NGOs and media institutions, and the international community’s vocabulary on gender parity and democracy, have been employed in the east of Congo’s mediatized war, where they are appropriated by political actors within the Great Lakes region and internationally to justify their own manoeuvrings within the militarized regional economy. In particular, the vocabulary of the Rwandan genocide and the virtualization of rape have been manipulated by all sides to give credence to their political legitimacy, while at the same time condemn that of their opponents. These gendered discourses on rape, SGBV and human rights abuses have also been used to justify or to deny violence, suggesting that regional politicians and military operators are not ignorant of the problem of human rights abuses in the east of Congo and do not lack awareness of the importance of gender equality within the Great Lakes region. FDLR As discussed, the Hutu extremist radio stations RTLM, Radio Rwanda and propaganda news magazines such as Kangura used gendered narratives to promote the threat of war to instil fear into the Hutu population, while at the same time prepare them for genocide. When the ex-FAR and the Interahamwe regrouped and rearmed in the refugee camps around Goma in 1994–45, they continued to administer genocidal rape and it became a tactic to terrorize Rwandan communities during incursions into the west and north of the country, as well as local Tutsi Banyamulenge populations around Goma. At the time, the mass raping of Congolese women was not discouraged by Mobutu: David Newbury notes that Mobutu, in supporting his old allies, allowed the Interahamwe to ‘continue to rape and pillage

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his own population – thus leading to the confrontation of the state with the Banyamulenge that triggered the larger war’.67 The FDLR’s practice of ethnically targeted genocidal rape has over the years been employed by the Mayi-Mayi and the FARDC. Here, ethnicity becomes one of many reasons to rape, even if annihilation of a particular ethnic group is not the military’s primary goal. In 2008–09 the FDLR website contained a series of press releases that bore a striking resemblance to Hutu extremist propaganda and articles published in the Rwandan political satire magazines such as Kangura. Above all, the FDLR was keen to show how the international community was attempting to discredit their movement. In one press release, published on 22 May 2008, they accuse the ‘Kigali regime’, the UN and Human Rights Watch of spreading lies and ‘the demonisation of the FDLR’. Another press release issued in May 2008 claimed they were a ‘plural organisation bringing together women and men of all Rwandan ethnic groups who share a common ideal’.68 In August 2008 the FDLR used the language of the new women, peace and security discourse (promoted by human rights organizations and the media since the rise in interest since the adoption by the UN of Resolution 1325) in order to give political legitimacy to their cause: The FDLR reaffirm their full readiness to dialogue with all women and all men of goodwill, wishing to explore together ways and means to peacefully resolve the crisis in the African Great Lakes region in general and the political problem of Rwanda in particular.69 However, in other documents women are targeted because of their ethnicity. In ‘The truth behind the Rwanda tragedy’, the FDLR claim that Tutsi refugee women in Uganda worked for the Obote government as ‘spies in bars, hotels and restaurants’.70 Despite the evidence of what was happening on the ground in Congo, the FDLR attempted to absolve itself of military rape. In May 2007 the FDLR stated that it ‘strongly condemn[ed] acts of kidnapping . . . women and girls by criminal groups [called] “Rastas” operating in South and North Kivu’.71 The FDLR’s European leadership instead used rape as a political tool to justify its opposition to the current Rwandan government. In the

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May 2007 press release, they contend that rapes and kidnapping by ‘Rasta’ criminal groups are part of the ‘cynic[al] strategy of the criminal regime of Kigali’ which is ‘putting those crimes on the back of the FDLR using media relays supporting its cause in order to tarnish their image’.72 In August 2007 they ‘condemn once again the acts of kidnapping of women and young girls by criminal groups’, and are pleased to ‘inform the public that they have recently liberated three women that had been kidnapped’.73 This narrative was still being appropriated in April 2009, at the time when the Congolese and Rwandan governments had stepped up their operation to disband the FDLR. In a press release published on 9 April 2009, the FDLR distanced itself from any involvement in human rights abuses in the Great Lakes region, but called on the UN Security Council to work ‘in collaboration with the European Union and the African Union’ to ‘establish an international and independent commission to shed light on all these violations so that their authors are identified and brought to justice’. Declaring that the FDLR ‘condemn once again the gross violations of human rights suffered by the Congolese people and the Rwandan refugees in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’, spokesman Callixte Mbarushimana criticizes Human Rights Watch: The FDLR categorically deny the false information published by American organization Human Rights Watch on 9 April 2009 that the FDLR troops would be responsible for rapes, killings and reprisals against civilians in the Congolese region of Kivu. These accusations by Human Rights Watch are unjust, false and unfounded and are only intended to tarnish the good image of the FDLR in the media, the public and within the International Community.74 Mbarushimana then goes on to state that the FDLR are ‘very disciplined and have and continue to maintain good relations with the civilian populations that they have always protected since the creation of our organization in May 2001’, before claiming that Human Rights Watch continues in ‘its unwavering support for the Rwandan Patriotic Front’.75 When challenged by BBC reporter Peter Greste that the FDLR were not fighting the Rwandan government but Congolese people,

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one commander on the ground repeats the FDLR script to argue that they are ‘fighting against the international plot against the FDLR, and against the Hutu people’. The commander then suggests that various people are ‘manipulating the news [and] manipulating things against the FDLR’. Crossing Continents accesses phone records that have logged calls between field operations and Europe, exposing how most of the calls from Europe were made by Murwanashyaka and Mbarushimana. Although Ignace Murwanashyaka was arrested for war crimes by the German authorities on 17 November 2009, Greste manages to interview Mbarushimana in Paris. Greste attempts to reveal the disparity between the poor conditions of FDLR soldiers on the ground and their political leaders, thus exposing how the FDLR, operating as an international corporation, provides wealth for the few in power: he describes Mbarushimana as ‘sharply dressed in a suit and cashmere overcoat . . . and neatly trimmed beard’. This revelation leads us to question the extent to which the ideology of the FDLR is being used to bring in and retain Hutu workers in the Great Lakes regional war economy. Mbarushimana uses the opportunity to mediatize the FDLR’s policy against crimes against humanity, recycling the language of the international community to suit his own revisionist agenda: We do condemn all those human rights abuses which are against civilians, against innocent people. Our troops do not do crimes in that area. We condemn those abuses . . . We have always called for an international investigation and . . . bring those people to justice. That’s our policy. Kabila’s regime During the lead-up to the 2006 elections Kabila, who is considered to be politically weak in the western provinces of the DRC, used the threat of military rape as a political tool to garner support. According to anthropologist Nancy Hunt, in December 2003 former soldiers of Kabila’s opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba’s rebel movement, ‘who had not been paid though recently mixed into the national Congolese army, turned on some 200 girls and women in a village named Nsongo Mboyo in a storm of angry mass rape’.76

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In an unprecedented act, Kabila’s government convicted and tried 26 soldiers of rape in 2006 – ‘just three months before the presidential elections whose results kept him in power’.77 Although Bemba’s troops had integrated into the FARDC, Kabila was able to profit politically by intimating that only he was capable of delivering peace and security. It comes as no surprise that the elections symbolized hope for many women across the DRC who, as one Congolese woman put it, ‘thought they were voting for peace’.78 However, since 2006 SGBV and gender-specific human security threats have been on the rise, leaving many Congolese women disillusioned. Over the years, Kabila’s state has operated coercively to ensure, under the banner of ‘national security’, his own political survival and women who have engaged in political mobilization – whether for women’s rights, democracy or to contest oppression – have encountered militarized state violence. A Human Rights Watch report published in November 2008 observed that two years after the elections, the current government was ‘brutally restricting democratic space’ and in doing so, was taking an active role in silencing women who support Kabila’s opposition.79 HRW cited three women who at the time worked for Kabila’s political opponent, Bemba’s Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) party, and were ‘arrested at a restaurant in Kinshasa on October 21, 2006’ before being taken to ‘Kin-Mazière, where they were repeatedly tortured with electric batons’ and ‘one woman was gang raped by five police officers’.80 Prior to agreeing to a Resolution 1325 national action plan in January 2010, the Kabila government repeatedly maintained that rape and SGBV was only perpetrated by foreign armies, not the FARDC or state police. Evidence of the manoeuvring of Kabila’s government can be found in Lisa Jackson’s documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. Only one government official, the Minister of Women’s Affairs Faida Mwamgila, is interviewed in the film and it is clear she follows the government line, arguing that key perpetrators of rape are Ugandan, Burundian and Rwandan rebels, while carefully omitting the role of both the FARDC and Mayi-Mayi militias. Despite Mwamgila’s assertion that militarized rape is a foreign import, there are numerous clues within the mediatized narratives of women activists

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throughout the documentary. Almost all of the women rape survivors interviewed talk of being raped by Congolese military men and we witness a scene where FARDC soldiers take food from the villagers they are meant to be protecting. The contention among Congolese that militarized rape is a foreign import is further endorsed by a Congolese aid worker who, in one of Jeffrey Gettleman’s articles for the newspaper International Herald Tribune, claims that mass rape is ‘not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society’.81 This assertion ignores Kabila’s political economy of rape and demonstrates how the feminized atrocity narrative is integrated into wider nationalist and ethnic discourses. Laurent Nkunda The CNDP’s relationship with the media in 2008–09 was remarkably similar to that of the RPF’s in the months leading up to and during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. According to the CNDP’s website, www. cndp-congo.org, their vision around the time of Nkunda’s arrest was to ‘restore Congolese and Congo’s dignity’, although there was no specific reference to protecting Banyamulenge Tutsi.82 Their seven-point programme, or mission statement, adopted many of the aims of the reintegration process led by MONUC. Like the FDLR, the CNDP is keen to demonstrate through its media a willingness to ‘exercise good governance, gender [and] human rights and public liberties promotion’. Over the years, the CNDP has repeatedly emphasized its discipline and control – suggesting that its soldiers do not drink or take drugs. This clean-cut image, together with the continual rumours and accusations about which side has committed various atrocities, has made it harder to pinpoint the extent to which individual members of the CNDP are committing rape and SGBV. The image was nurtured by Nkunda who, during his time as leader of the CNDP, appeared to be extremely media-savvy. BBC journalist Fergal Keane, who interviewed Nkunda for a Newsnight news feature broadcast on 23 May 2007, remarked that ‘Nkunda understands the power of television’. In the news feature, evidence of Nkunda’s

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manoeuvring demonstrates how at the time, like the FDLR and Hutu Power in 1994, the CNDP defined themselves as a movement promoting development and democracy, and fighting against genocide: I am not a warlord, I am a commander . . . I’m not here for the war, I’m here for liberation – for Tutsi who are targeted. Keane then observes that Nkunda arranged for his soldiers to dance in front of the cameras in a manner which ‘looked suspiciously like a war dance – a message to the international community’. Nkunda also played the gender card to demonstrate his humanitarian side when in June 2008 he was filmed preaching to women in a maternity hospital near the CNDP base camp. When interviewed by American NBC journalist Ann Curry in 2008, he speaks of being a husband and proud father of six children.83 Other sources have suggested that Nkunda was more interested in using the international media as a tool to threaten Kabila. In 2007 Nkunda agreed to be photographed by award-winning photojournalist Cédric Gérbehaye. After spending three days with the CNDP, Gérbehaye produced striking images that were printed in newspapers around the world. One famous image later won Gérbehaye the World Press Photographer of the Year award. Nkunda is pictured sitting at a table, wearing a cowboy hat, his head cocked to one side, his hands interlaced, resting on his lap. He looks relaxed and is staring directly at the camera. On the table are two mobile phones and his sunglasses. Behind him, on either side, stand two CNDP soldiers carrying guns, who appear to be his guards. The symmetry of the composition suggests control, discipline and order. The use of sepia and the black-and-white contrast present a dramatic image, likening Nkunda to the type of hero one might expect to find in an old American western (see Figure 8). Asked if, as the photographer, he was being used by Nkunda, Gérbehaye reflected on how wars in the east of Congo are mediatized: He did use me – but I used him. When it was published, it put him at a certain level with Kabila. At the time the photo was taken, Kabila was saying to him you have to disarm. When he was

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posing – I think he was actually looking at Kabila – as if saying come to my hills and take me out. It was a provocation.84 Nkunda was also able to take advantage of the international media’s framing of rape in the east of Congo as a weapon of war. When challenged by Ann Curry in 2008, at the peak of his notoriety, Nkunda argued that rape was not a CNDP military policy, but the classic by-product of war. ‘Let’s assume,’ he said ‘that it’s difficult to have control of 10,000 men.’ In late 2008, things took a turn for the worse for Nkunda when he was arrested by the Rwandan government. Cut down to size, it quickly became apparent that Nkunda was a smaller pawn in a bigger game between Kabila and Kagame. Nkunda’s recognition on the international stage, and the mediatization of his perceived threat to Kabila, is likely to have been used as a bargaining tool by Rwanda and the USA to gain Kabila’s buy-in into the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) process. Rwandan government The Rwandan government, which has the monopoly over the 1994 Rwandan genocide narrative within the Great Lakes region has, over the years, portrayed rape in the east of Congo as chaos, in spite of Rwanda’s own role in the region. Its government-owned national daily newspaper The New Times describes conflict in the region only in relation to the FDLR. The New Times website features a range of news stories by Rwandan journalists, as well as articles adapted from largely US and British newspapers and commentaries – some of which are written by international observers or people with authority in the international political arena. An analysis of web news between October 2008 and January 2009 reveals that rape and SGBV are discussed in three narratives. The first forms part of a national campaign to raise awareness of the work the Rwandan government is doing to prevent rape and SGBV in Rwanda. On 23 November 2009 the then Minister of Gender and Family Promotion, Dr Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya called for SGBV to be ‘wiped out completely’, arguing that the first step is ‘breaking the silence’ and speaking

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out about rape.85 In tune with this ethos, the newspaper published stories that exposed men who defiled or engaged in domestic rape, although care was taken not to expose the identity of those that had been raped. On 11 December an article depicted how child survivors of rape suffer trauma. A mother tells how her daughter, who was raped by her father, ‘lives in constant fear’ which has ‘affected her performance at school’.86 Two more narratives depicting SGBV describe the military actions of the FDLR. The first narrative tells of the FDLR’s responsibility for destabilizing the region: ‘the rebel group . . . has raped, killed, looted and brought unimaginable suffering to the people of the African Great Lakes region’.87 The second employs rape to demonstrate the threat of the FDLR to Rwanda, described as ‘spearheading the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi’ in reigniting Hutu extremism, where rape is understood to have been exported, along with the former extremist MRND government’s genocide ideology. An article published on 30 December 2009 reminds Rwandans that the story of the genocide is ongoing: ‘After the Genocide, the FDLR fled into neighbouring DRC where they have continued killing, raping and pillaging people’s property for the last 15 years.’88 In contrast, the CNDP and the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) are mediatized as bystanders, appearing to play no role in perpetrating rape and SGBV. On 30 October 2008 when Nkunda had broken the Amani Peace Agreement and was closing in on the town of Goma, and before Rwanda had signed a deal with the Congolese government, which included detaining Nkunda in Rwanda under house arrest, The New Times appeared to show allegiance to the CNDP. One rather long commentary by journalist Felix Muheto attempts to reveal how regional government ministers are militarizing civilians by exposing the threat of the CNDP as a means to instil fear in the population. Muheto argues that Goma has ‘fallen victim to [an] unfortunate Kinshasa’ ‘war mongering policy’ and that government officials are deliberately ‘painting’ the CNDP as ‘composed solely as Tutsi’.89 Muheto informs the Rwandan population that the Congolese government, in their collaboration with ‘the FDLR/ex-FAR/Interahamwe génocidaires’, are fuelling genocide based on ethnic exclusion: To ferment genocide in the Kivus, they undertook to stir internal differences between the Congolese Hutus and the Tutsi while

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enrolling the former in PARECO. This group is a militia created only for that purpose with an outward goal of fighting against the CNDP.90 Muheto then mixes images of a sexual relationship between the Congolese government and the FDLR with images of terror that single out their engagement in illegal economies (in spite of both the CNDP’s and Rwanda’s own engagement in informal economies across the region) and violence inflicted on women. The FARDC is: an army that has been proven beyond any doubt to be dining and in bed with a renowned genocidal force which, apart from the 1994 Tutsi genocide, is reputed for terrorising the Congolese population (maiming, raping of Congolese women. . .), recruitment of child soldiers, illicit mining and trade.91 On 29 March 2009 when the Congolese, Rwandans and Burundians are engaged in military cooperation in the region, The New Times features an article wherein General Charles Kayonga declares that the RDF ‘regards women in war-torn regions as family’. This is another opportunity for The New Times to single out the FDLR as the main destabilizing military group in the region and highlight how the FDLR continues to promote genocide ideology: He said rape and mutilation were used as a weapon during the Genocide, adding that elements that afflicted gender-based violence crimes on Rwandan women during that period continue to do the same to Congolese women.92 While human rights organizations such as Enough have contended that in 2009 the FDLR and PARECO were among the most prolific perpetrators of rape, there exists some contradiction in The New Times’ portrayal of political violence in the region. In emphasizing the ‘high moral standards’ of the RDF, The New Times establishes a distinction between the savagery of the Congo and the orderly nature of the Rwandan nation state – a notion which is reflected in articles that focus on the steps the government is taking to reduce SGBV within the

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borders of Rwanda, despite its own role in perpetuating human insecurity within the eastern provinces of the DRC at that time. Later, in August 2009, The New Times published an article on male rape in the DRC originally written by Jeffrey Gettleman for the New York Times on 17 October 2007. The New Times exposé of male rape is a remarkable step in challenging traditional assumptions about SGBV in war and genocide. However, it comes as no surprise that discussion about the raping of men within the borders of Rwanda remains under wraps. The border between chaotic Congo and orderly, policed Rwanda is reinforced in other ways. An article published on 30 December 2009 describes the assimilation process of former members of the FDLR on returning to Rwanda. This is the first time that we hear about the emotions of these military men who expose the futility of war and violence. Symbolically these men appear to step out of the realm of savagery and into the realm of civilization. Former FDLR fighter, now ‘trainee’, Jean Mari Karuta, speaks out: ‘Now we are like born again,’ he remarks, ‘and regret the time we spent in the DRC jungles doing nothing, actually we have gained nothing from there other than suffering.’93

Part IV: Congolese women speak out While governments and military actors appropriate the feminized atrocity narrative and the international community’s vocabulary on gender parity and democracy to maintain positions of power, Congolese women are working hard to ensure that their voices are heard within the international media. Filmmakers such as Lisa Jackson and Fiona Lloyd-Davies are at the forefront in creating campaign documentaries that provide space for Congolese women to manoeuvre. In these films Congolese women perform, bringing to the world’s attention the extent to which the stream of violence inflicted on them is destroying their communities. These films do not merely record the experiences of women in the DRC, they expose how Congolese women, many of whom have lost everything, are fighting back. Jackson illustrates this point when she makes it clear at the beginning of her film that, in signing consent forms under the guidance of an interpreter, the women she interviews choose to take part in the

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documentary. The women who feature in Jackson’s The Greatest Silence and Lloyd-Davies’s two documentaries The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women and Field of Hope range from educated political activists and community leaders to voluntary carers and members of small rural villages and are of all ages. Among the political activists Jackson interviews is Christine Schuler Deschryver who in 1998 had witnessed the murder of her best friend. Deschryver claims that ‘massive rapes’ started in 1999. She speaks out again in The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women when Judith (Jude) Wanga meets her on the construction site of a village complex designed specifically for women. Called ‘City of Joy’ (Cité de la Joie), the complex is the brainchild of US feminist campaigner Eve Ensler and Deschryver, who is the director of the project. The complex is meant to provide ‘a safe-haven for women’ – a city, ‘built by women for women’. According to Deschryver, there is a need ‘to create a woman leadership’ and ‘the revolution of women in Africa will start here in [the] Cité de la Joie’. It is Deschryver’s belief that Congolese women need to be educated to ‘know their rights’ in order to ‘fight against ignorance’ and ‘to change the destinies of these women’. Deschryver tells Wanga about Masika Katsuva, claiming that she is already a leader in her own community. Refusing to marry her brotherin-law, Katsuva resolved to help other women after she and her two daughters were ostracized from her murdered husband’s family. Her husband had been a wealthy businessman who had often commuted to Dubai. Her daughters were educated and one had had aspirations of becoming a lawyer: dreams that had been taken away from her when she gave birth to a son born of rape. Katsuva is also the protagonist of Field of Hope, which describes the community she leads and the centre she established to help fellow ostracized women. Katsuva had decided to help other women because of the way women had cared for her after her first rape, when she was hospitalized for some time due to the severity of her physical injuries. She was also devastated by the murder of her husband and the trauma of the attack on her and her family. In her leadership capacity, Katsuva counsels women, takes them to hospital for treatment and cares for the children who are either orphans or have been rejected by women who have been raped. Katsuva rents

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a field which the women cultivate. She explains the significance of the field, while at the same time challenging the stereotype of the Congolese woman-victim as diseased, sick and helpless. In doing so, she highlights how rape and other life force atrocities are plunging women into poverty: Most [women], when they come here, have never worked in a field before. But given what they’ve been through, being stigmatized and neglected, the field provides hope for a better life . . . If they had the choice of living here or as they lived before, they wouldn’t be digging here . . . Some had husbands who were businessmen. Others had office workers. Others have been forced out by their husbands. That’s why we came together, using this field so we can all benefit. Katsuva demonstrates how taking on a leadership role makes her a target for attack because she presents a threat to Congolese patriarchal society. She remarks: ‘Since I’ve been doing this work, I’ve been raped three times. I’ve been beaten, tortured and left to die.’ The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women is perhaps most successful in shattering stereotypes that reinforce the new feminized atrocity narrative. The film also demonstrates how Congolese women from the diaspora work in partnership with Congolese women in the DRC. Like Elizabeth Dallaire, British-Congolese Wanga helps to introduce a very difficult subject matter to an audience that is largely unaware of events taking place in the east of Congo. Wanga performs as both witness and political activist, often reflecting on her experiences, while with great eloquence powerfully critiquing many of the political failures both within the DRC and internationally that are helping to sustain Congo’s terrible political and social status quo. In the film, Wanga encounters several women who are from her age group, including women combatants who have played a role in inflicting violence on other women, and male prisoners charged with rape and SGBV. Following a meeting with Deschryver, Wanga resolves to raise awareness on the position of Congolese women, and on her return to London is invited to speak

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at an event at the Royal Albert Hall. Her actions are not unexpected. In an article published in The Observer, Wanga tells how she became involved in the project, explaining that she ‘was unemployed, trying to kick-start a career in political journalism, when [she] received a call from a BBC producer making a documentary about the Democratic Republic of Congo’. She continues: My uncle works in the Congolese community in north London, translating, teaching English, offering advice; the documentary makers had come to him looking for a young woman, living in Britain but born in DRC, who had not been back for a long while. I fitted the bill.94 Wanga is not the only woman her age in the film campaigning to end violence. Whilst in Bukavu, she encounters 24-year-old Ridelphine (Delphine) Katabesha, a final-year law student and radio journalist who is ‘trying to bring a vital record of what’s happening here to the wider world’. Working for a local charity, Katabesha travels to remote villages to interview women rape survivors, whose stories are then broadcast via a local radio station. Delphine speaks to a woman called Mapendu who had recently been attacked by Congolese soldiers, but does not hesitate to tell her story when two soldiers appear behind them and listen in. Afterwards, Wanga is amazed at her courage, noting that she is ‘so full of awe and admiration at just the sheer strength that she showed in telling the story and going about her dayto-day life’. Wanga’s interest in politics is significant. Lloyd-Davies, on hearing that the film had already been commissioned, approached BBC Three and ‘asked to do the story in a compelling way’.95 Subsequently, the concept of the BBC documentary became more politically driven by Lloyd-Davies who on joining the BBC Three team took Wanga ‘back to her birth place to discover for herself what was going on’.96 Lloyd-Davies had been filming in the Congo for ten years but had found it difficult to secure funding because editors were not interested in commissioning stories about conflict in the DRC. In a blog

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published online at the same time as the release of the documentary, Lloyd-Davies describes the challenges she had faced: I had first gone to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in October 2001, post 9/11. I had been banned from Pakistan after making a film there about Honour Killing . . . So I looked for another story and found a virtually unknown but ongoing horror in eastern DRC. Since then I’d gone back to DRC on and off over half a dozen times to write articles and make short films. But I’d never been able to secure a commission to make a whole film about what was happening to these women. It was as though they had been forgotten by the world. The women had totally captured my heart. I felt I couldn’t let them down.97 When asked by the author, Lloyd-Davies observed the ‘interesting conundrum of how or why a film gets commissioned’, remarking that ‘you show [films] to people and they find them compelling because of the character, whereas the editor does not want to know’. According to Lloyd-Davies, editors will commission pieces based on ‘what they think people will watch and what they think is watchable’. Reflecting on why editors are not interested in the DRC, Lloyd-Davies drew comparisons with Bosnia-Herzegovina, again demonstrating the limitations of framing conflict in Africa within the framework of (primitive, irrational) new war: On paper [Bosnia] was a very, very complicated war. There was always this caveat – ‘well, something’s changed’ and ‘Croats are now fighting Serbs’. In the Congo, it’s much more complicated, much further away and it’s Africa – although now things have changed and Britain is one of [the DRC’s] biggest bi-lateral aid donors. You can argue to editors that British tax money is invested but it’s not directly related to the [UK] economy and Congo is very, very violent. They say it is too far, people won’t watch. There is also an inherent racism – it’s very difficult to get a programme . . . I find that people do want to know about [the DRC] – it’s about finding the myth or the character, like Masika, that makes the story compelling.98

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In spite of the indifference of editors over the years, it is clear that the BBC has become more interested in the DRC since the late 2000s, when political lobbying in the UK had begun to raise awareness of the problem of SGBV in the Congo, and when the plight of Congolese women was finally on the radar of President Obama and some UN member states. The idea that Congolese women who are stigmatized and ostracized are willing to speak out in public about their experiences may to the outsider seem surprising. Yet in both Jackson’s and Lloyd-Davies’s films, there are many scenes where women undertake public performances and each one is a political act. Congolese women acknowledge the need to speak out – in part to help them heal and in recognition that they are not alone in their experience; but also in order to help the community move forward. Lloyd-Davies agrees that her films are about giving a voice to women: It’s really quite impressive [in the DRC]. In other countries, women have not wanted to be identified. In the Congo, the cultural stigma is just as great but the difference is so many people have been raped, it’s almost expected. In some villages, women don’t want to speak out. Masika’s centre or Panzi Hospital [provide space for] extraordinary women’s societies and community groups that support women and women survivors of rape. Within the context of support, women do speak out.99 Towards the end of The Greatest Silence, Jackson attends a meeting for women survivors who meet each Sunday. Every week, women volunteer to stand up and describe what they have experienced and how they feel; yet with Jackson in the room, there is a sense that the women choose to perform in front of a more influential audience in the hope of instigating real change. One woman declares: They talk about parity between men and women but this [is] a dream for us. Impossible. We are considered half human beings. However, with the presence of this woman, Lisa, and God willing, our complaints will be heard at a higher level in Bukavu and we will get some help.

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While this book aims to demonstrate how Rwandan and Congolese women are political actors manoeuvring to influence media narratives about war and genocide in the Great Lakes region, it would be remiss not to mention the many men who work hard to help repair and build their communities. In The World’s Most Dangerous Place for Women Wanga and Katabesha interview a local head nurse called Gishlain who treats women and produces monthly statistics on the level of SGBV in his community. Gishlain talks about the wider social implications of the children born of rape who have no father. Many of these, particularly the boys, will not inherit land and will therefore have few prospects in a rural economy. Finally, there is Bernard Kalume, a Congolese UN employee, guide and translator who, according to Lloyd-Davies, ‘does difficult and dangerous research’. Kalume appears in all three films, and in Frank Piasecki Poulsen’s 2011 film Blood in the Mobile. As LloydDavies remarks, ‘Kalume is a compelling speaker, which is why we’ve all put him in our films’.100 Kalume tells both Jackson and Wanga that his first wife, a Rwandan Tutsi, had been murdered in the 1994 genocide. He fled Rwanda with his two children, but the memories of his ordeal continue to follow him. Kalume’s narrative challenges other BBC narratives that categorize events in the Great Lakes region in accordance with state borders. By the time Jackson worked with him in 2007, Kalume had remarried, was the father of two more children and had clear views on what was happening in the east of Congo. He tells Jackson: When a society can’t protect women and kids, what kind of a society is that? Because, I think, the first responsibility of men is to protect women and kids. And if men themselves start to torture, to kill, to kidnap, to rape women and teenagers – really, how can you say this is a normal society of human beings? Jackson leaves us with an image of Kalume and his happy family, reminding us of how abnormal the levels of violence in the eastern provinces of the DRC are for most Congolese people, while at the same time exposing the fragile and insecure world within which this family, as with so many others, must live.

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CONCLUSION

This book began with the story of Rose Kabuye’s arrest for her alleged role in shooting down the plane carrying President Habyarimana and President Ntaryamira. Days later, the Bruguière case was severely weakened when key witness Abdul Ruzibiza retracted his statement, claiming he had never mentioned Rose Kabuye. The charges against Kabuye were dropped in March 2009. The debate over who was responsible for Habyarimana’s death took another turn on 12 January 2012, when French judges Marc Trévidic and Nathalie Poux announced in a report for a second (independent) French enquiry that the missiles used to down the plane had been fired from the Kanombe military camp, the base of the Hutu extremists and the elite Presidential Guards. Eight experts including two air accident experts, two missile specialists, a pilot, a sound expert and two surveyors, visited the crash site to undertake a forensic analysis and scientifically prove the position from where the missiles were fired. As with the Bruguière and Mucyo reports, this latest inquiry, although it offers scientific evidence, provides new material which can be inserted easily into any of the current revisionist narratives to buttress or dismiss a given theory. Kabuye, an RPF soldier and informant in Uganda in the early 1990s, was appointed the city mayor of Kigali in 1994 before becoming a member of the Rwandan parliament, serving as chairperson of the Defence and Security Committee in 1998. In 2003, at the height of the second Congo war, Kabuye became the president’s chief of state protocol, advising government officials on matters of national and international protocol. Having fought on the front line, helped to rebuild a city infrastructure wrecked by genocide and war, and with

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extensive experience operating in the corridors of high politics at both national and international level, Kabuye reveals the many ways in which one woman alone can manoeuvre and perform in war. The story of Kabuye’s arrest and questions around her role in the RPF have in recent years become one of the most visible gendered narratives to circulate the media internationally. This book has considered how in the context of war and genocide in Rwanda and the east of Congo, where rewriting history is integral to the ongoing mediatized war, news and current affairs programmes, including documentary films have become sites within which the politics of revisionism are played out. The dialogue between multiple revisionist agendas, which constitute the international politics of revisionism, is understood as a militarized process and actors engaged in these dialogues manoeuvre to influence or challenge mediatized narratives. Chapter One established some of the key events that have been central to revisionist agendas since the early 1990s and have most often been mediatized in BBC documentary films and Newsnight news features. The chapter also highlighted how the politics of memory are manipulated and employed by various African actors, which in turn influence their relations with nation states outside the Great Lakes region, and with the diaspora groups, in the continuing mediatized conflict. A new generation of feminists are challenging normative readings of women and war which present all women as victims of conflict perpetrated by men. This research is helping to expose the myriad and complex ways in which women perform in and experience war. Chapter Two considered how in spite of this shift, many accounts of Rwandan and Congolese women in war – whether produced by NGOs, the UN and the international media – often continue to use older feminist IR frameworks which present Rwandan and Congolese women as victims. Rwandan women are case studies in an overarching narrative about women and war; while the east of Congo, as the melting pot of many conflicts within the region, does not easily fit into the conventional feminist (state-centic) frameworks used to describe war in Africa. This is partly due to an overreliance on the theories of new wars and ethnic conflict, combined with limited area expertise in the region’s history and politics and a research focus that concentrates on conflict

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within state borders, such as the DRC and Rwanda. These conventional feminist readings often unwittingly sustain racist stereotypes that help to reinforce Africa’s position in the imagined global hierarchy of political power and in turn separate ‘Africa’ from the ‘West’, to image African conflicts as existing at the margins of international relations. Finding the available feminist frameworks restrictive, I surveyed feminist theorizing of rape and SGBV in war in parallel with feminist theorizing taking place in the field of genocide studies and argued that the extreme violence women experience in the east of Congo might be better understood as genocide by attrition. Within the Great Lakes region’s militarized economies, which have networks extending out across the globe, genocide by attrition has become part of the way of life for people living in the east of Congo. In this environment, the lines between victim and perpetrator have become blurred so that in some cases it becomes difficult to determine who the victim-agents are and who the perpetrators are. Congolese Bernard Kalume, recounting the death of his wife in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and his experiences witnessing mass atrocities against men and women in the DRC, reveals how citizens caught up in the Great Lakes regional conflicts are required to assume many subject-positions. As Baaz and Sterns’s controversial research into why Congolese men rape suggests, some women and some men assume the subject-positions of perpetrator and victim simultaneously. Indeed, Rwandan and Congolese women do not just experience war as victims, they are political actors who perform in the war context – operating, manoeuvring and negotiating to survive, to fight, to earn a living, to campaign against violence or to facilitate positive social change. Some of these women no longer live in the war zone, but of the women I interviewed, many are driven by their memories and experiences of war and continue to be affected by war on a daily basis.

Revisionism and denial Chapter Two also considered the way in which Rwandan women perpetrators have been used by feminists as case studies to explain how

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gendered narratives about violent women sustain the global political status quo. Often discussed outside of their (national and/or regional) socio-political context, these women are stripped of their agency and voice and are subsumed into another overarching ‘western’ feminist narrative about women in international relations, to once again reinforce the position of Africa as existing at the margins of international politics. While feminists theorizing IR have come a long way to explain the gendered dynamics of war, they should not shy away from discussing theories of genocide on the grounds that the field is wrought with contesting narratives about whether a particular conflict constitutes genocide or war. Rather, genocide denial is a central part of the process of conflict in the Great Lakes region and gendered narratives – whether appropriated by male or female actors – have a central part to play. Within this context, four types of dynamic between actors have been identified: between local and regional actors and global diaspora groups; between governments of the Great Lakes region and the international community; between academics; and between individual actors and the individual community and/or nation state. Examining how political actors manoeuvre within documentary film reveals how individual actors engage in the politics of revisionism to preserve their own reputations – whether it be Hutu extremists of the former MRND government, such as the former Minister of Women and Family Affairs Pauline Nyiramasuhuko; members of the current RPF government who refuse to be tried for war crimes; or British journalists such as Nick Hughes, David Belton and Lindsey Hilsum who feel responsible for failing to report genocide. The following three chapters analysed how gendered narratives have been employed in the international politics of revisionism – first by Hutu Power in the years leading up to the 1994 genocide. Using as an example the extremist magazine Kangura, Chapter Three contended that Hutu women who appeared loyal to the idea of a pure Hutu state were imaged as political subjects and full citizens, while Hutu women who campaigned for democracy or were actively involved in the women’s movement were perceived as a threat to the regime and subsequently imaged as partial-citizens. Non-citizens were those Hutu or Tutsi women who were regarded as enemies of the state and imaged as

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sub-human, existing outside of the realms of Hutu society. However, feminists theorizing IR should be wary of inadvertently negating the 1994 genocide in Rwanda by exclusively calling it ‘civil war’ and framing conflict in the context of new war. Without unpacking debates around genocide and war, these feminists are in danger of endorsing the Hutu extremist revisionist agenda, and appear unaware of how their own gendered narratives can be modified by other actors in the region. How the BBC current affairs programmes Newsnight and Panorama mediatized the 1994 genocide in Rwanda between 1994 and 2010 were the focus of Chapters Four and Five. Building on one of the most prolific debates circulating internationally, Chapter Four considered whether or not BBC Newsnight ‘missed the story’. It drew on Stanley Cohen’s concept of states of denial to present a more nuanced reading and proposed that reporters in Rwanda, and the political actors that manoeuvred within their films, often mediatized narratives that were at odds with the narratives promoted by the presenters based in the studio. How and when the word genocide was employed is particularly significant politically, as was the way in which studio presenters framed their reportage as ethnic violence/civil war even when journalists out in the field were describing genocide. The analysis offered an insight into how African politicians engaged in conflict operate within western grids of knowledge to influence and challenge ’western’ media reporting. Chapter Five assessed how the BBC’s institutional narrative on the Rwandan genocide has evolved since 1994. Cementing feminized, apolitical stories about women victims and offsetting them with narratives about hyper-masculine killers, the BBC attempts to resolve the tensions in reporting genocide – understood as a typically ‘modern’ form of ‘western’ warfare – in Africa. It appears that this approach is also a diversion tactic used by the BBC to avoid discussing the Rwandan government’s role in sustaining violence in the Great Lakes region over the last decade. Yet by securing Rwanda’s state borders and concentrating predominantly on survivor testimonies, the BBC neglects many of the complex relationships in Rwanda today and the complex dynamics between Rwanda’s populations, members of the diaspora residing in the east of Congo and elsewhere globally.

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Militarized economies in the Great Lakes region This book also proposed an alternative theoretical framework for understanding the problem of extreme rape and SGBV in the east of Congo. The framework further developed the theory of genocide by attrition as a militarized process and considered how genocide is taking place in the context of war and the fight for natural resources. Within militarized regional economies, militiamen and proxy armies, businessmen and foreign traders have relied on the chaos created by war and human insecurity to retain control over – and access to – Congo’s illegal mining industry. Rape and SGBV, while integral to sustaining a given militarized economy, should not be seen to be taking place outside the context of other human rights abuses including torture, kidnapping and mutilation. Rather, as Elisa Von Joedon-Forgey contends, rape and SGBV are life force atrocities, committed by perpetrators who, through performances of extreme brutality and violence, subvert community rituals and symbols of regeneration to break familial bonds and ultimately the bonds of the wider community. In the east of Congo, where there are multiple perpetrators, these abuses constitute genocide by attrition, even if genocide is not a collective end goal. As with the testimonies of the witnesses and survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda who performed in BBC Newsnight news features, many of the women speaking in Lisa Jackson and Fiona Lloyd-Davies’s documentary films often describe genocide, rather than simply rape, or rape as a weapon of war. Chapter Six suggested that the mediatization of rape and SGBV is employed as a political tool to justify various forms of (regional and international) intervention and claims for political power in the east of Congo. Today in the UK, the trope of the violently raped, diseased ‘black African woman’s body in distress’ is the most powerful image used to explain international military and diplomatic intervention. This image has replaced the trope of the starving African woman with saggy breasts holding a malnourished child as the symbol in the 1980s and 1990s of African backwardness and dependency. The challenge now is to understand how within a regional militarized economy, individual cultural and social perceptions about women and rape influence the way in which SGBV is

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employed by different groups of men from the many societies and communities within Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC. Indeed, more research would need to be undertaken to ascertain these issues as part of the process of de-militarizing men. Although women’s experiences of war – and images of their experiences in war – can be used for political means by many different actors engaged in the international politics of revisionism, this book has focused on women’s performance in war to consider how women themselves shape stories, challenging conventional narratives while creating new narratives. As Jackson and Lloyd-Davies’s films demonstrate, Congolese and Rwandan women, as with all women in the Great Lakes region, are not silent victims, they are political actors. Increasingly Congolese women are developing their own human rights campaigns, often working in conjunction with other women across the Great Lakes region, with diaspora groups and with international NGOs. The extent of Congolese women’s opposition to the institutionalized problems they face is most apparent in their political rallying: on 24 November 2008, 500 women marched through the streets of Bukavu in protest against violence against women and children, chanting their mantra that aims to remind us of the central role of women in Congolese society: ‘Violer une femme, c’est tuer toute une nation’ – ‘to rape a woman, it is to kill a whole nation’.1 This protest was one of many that Congolese women have organized in recent years. Congolese campaigners Victoria Dove Dimandja and José Musau Kalanda are frustrated with the UK government’s disinterest in identifying and holding to account strategic-level operators within the mining industry who by extension are perpetrators of human rights abuses, including SGBV. They contend that spending aid money promoting women’s rights amounts to ‘pouring money onto the symptoms without treating the cause’. They want the UK to lobby the UN and EU and put pressure on multinationals. ‘Let us come together to fight for a responsible government, securing the borders and legalising the mining industry,’ said Dimandja, ‘then allow women to reorganize themselves.’ These women are encouraged to join parliamentary meetings because ‘it’s been seen as a positive thing for Congolese women to speak for themselves’, but often find they are not being listened to.

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Part of the problem, they say, is the refusal of potential influencers such as NGOs to seriously discuss the regional and international politics which are sustaining Congo’s status quo. Many of these NGOs, who receive UK government aid money to deliver DFID programmes in the absence of an effective Congolese government, prefer to remain apolitical. Oxfam maintains that it must ‘balance its work on the ground in very difficult and challenging environments with the political statements it makes’ to ensure staff and the lives of the people they work with are protected.2 Oxfam’s most recent campaigns have focused on the strong voices of Congolese women, and other women and men across the world who are campaigning for change in the DRC.3 This reminds us that women are not just victims of rape: those who seek employment in the mines or adopt survivalist sex strategies are choosing the best of the options available to them in the east of Congo’s militarized economies. Since the official end of the Congo wars, another epistemological shift has occurred, whereby SGBV is defined in the context of development and the Millennium Goals, rather than war. This emphasis focuses on the role of governments in providing donor money to facilitate more gender parity programmes. In a letter of response from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to Victoria Dove Dimandja and colleague José Musau Kalanda dated 10 January 2011, the UK government concedes that ‘the situation for women is not improving’. The letter states that the UK is ‘actively supporting Congolese women by assisting efforts to publicly challenge sexual and gender based violence and to increase the number, influence, and capacity of Congolese women in public life’. The letter also notes the UK government’s call to urgently ‘enhance [MONUSCO’s] efforts to protect and defend civilians’ and that, ultimately, ‘the primary responsibility for protection of civilians lies with the DRC authorities’.4 This ignores the complexity of the militarized economies of the Great Lakes region and isolates the DRC from the rest of the world. The separation of DRC politics from international politics in turn enables governments such as the UK and the USA to present themselves first and foremost as providers of humanitarian aid. DFID’s new DRC operational plan 2011–15, published in May 2011, sets out to address the problems women in the

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DRC face, while recognizing the need to align the UK aid programme with wider UK government conflict and security policy goals for the region. This approach, along with the steadily growing momentum to regulate the mining industry and the US-led 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is a step in the right direction, but by itself is not enough. Meanwhile, in March 2012 the ICC convicted Congolese Thomas Lubanga of war crimes and crimes against humanity. During his time as leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), which was active in Ituri between 1999 and 2003, Lubanga recruited and enlisted children into his ethnic Hema rebel militia for use in combat. The ICC’s comparatively modest success, in view of the number of strategic perpetrators operating in the DRC, also brings us one step closer to addressing the Great Lakes region’s complex security dilemma.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Linda Melvern, 2009b, interview with the author McGreal, 2008 Kanziga in Duval Smith, 2007 Lemarchand, 2001, p2 BBC Charter, 2006, p9 Andermahr et. al., 2000, p266 See Rose, 1986; Zahavi, 2008 Andermahr et. al., 2000, p267 Andermahr et. al., 2000, p268 Davies, 1992, p63 See Davies, 1992; Ferguson, 1993 O’Keeffe, 2006, p1 Fairclough, 1998, p144 Fairclough, 1998, p148 Wright, 1997, p84 Wright, 1997, p344 Elshtain, 1995b, p344

Chapter 1 Contextualizing media events: war and genocide in Rwanda and the east of Congo 1. 2. 3. 4.

Amnesty International, 2004, p3 McGreal, 2008a Melvern, 2009, p99 Dallaire, 2003

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NOTES 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Melvern, 2009, p202 Melvern, 2009, p203 Melvern, 2009, p214 Melvern, 2009, p219 Prunier, 1997, p213 Umutesi, 2004 Malkki, 1995 Lemarchand, 2001 Prunier, 1997, p45 Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002, p221 Taylor, 1999, p44 Melvern, 2000, p15 Melvern, 2000, p20 Taylor, 1999, p45 Taylor, 1999, p45 African Rights, 1996, p8 African Rights, 2008, p8 African Rights, 2008, p24 African Rights, 2008, p54 Kinzer, 2008 Taylor, 1999, p47 Prunier, 1995 Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002, p221 Prunier, 1997, pp. 71–2; Melvern, 2009, p33 Prunier, 1997, p72 Melvern, 2000, p26 Melvern, 2000, p26 Nzongola-Ntalaja, 1999, p6 Kinzer, 2008 Melvern, 2000, p30 Taylor, 1999, p49 Uvin, 1999 Dunn, 2003 Orth, 2006, p86 Dunn, 2003, p3 Prunier, 2009, p37 Prunier, 2009, pp41–44 Prunier, 2009, p41 Orth, 2001, p87 International Rescue Committee, 2008 UNESCO, 2005

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276 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

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Newbury, 1996, p574 Prunier, 2009, p77 Prunier, 2009, p49 Prunier, 2009, pp113–114 Prunier, 2009, pp115–116 Lemarchand, 2001, p5 UN, 2008, pp22–23 Prunier, 2009, pp198–201 Amnesty International, 2008, p3 Amnesty International, 2008, p4 Africa Research Bulletin, 2008 Doss, 2009 United Nations, 2010, p1 United Nations, 2010, p6 Enough, 2010 Rwandan government official, 2005, interview with the author See Uvin, 1999 Rukundo, 2006, interview with the author Prunier, 2009, p5 Willy Rukundo, Radio Rwanda, 2006, interview with the author Aloysia Inyumba, 2006, interview with the author Amnesty International, 2004 Amnesty International, 2004 Aloysia Inyumba, 2006, interview with the author Prunier, 2009, p7 Prunier, 2009, p7 Mutamba, 2005 Rwandan Ministry of Finance and Planning, 2009 Republic of Rwanda, 2000 Republic of Rwanda, 2000, p7 Kagame, 2006, p12 Mutamba, 2005, pp19–22 UNHCR, 2007 Hitimana, 2009 Anonymous source, 2011 Rwandan government representative, 2011, interview with the author Prunier, 2009, p46 Sebarenzi, 2011, p346 Prunier, 2009, p75 Rwanda National Congress, 2010 Lemarchand, 2001, p5

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NOTES 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

277

Lemarchand, 2001, p7 Lemarchand, 2001, p8 See Jefremovas, 2002 Aloysia Inyumba, 2006, interview with the author Angelina Muganza, 2006, interview with the author Angelina Muganza, 2006, interview with the author Mutamba, 2005, p9 John Mutamba, 2006, interview with the author Mutamba, 2005, pp22–23 Mutamba, 2005, p26 Mutamba, 2005, p13 Mutamba, 2005, p14 Mutamba, 2005, p22 Angelina Muganza, 2006, interview with the author Moghalu, 2005, p2 Moghalu, 2005, p3 Clark, 2012, p3 Clark, 2012, pp3–4 Clark, 2012, pp8–9 Clark, 2012, p10 Pottier, 2002, p202 Lemarchand, 2009b, p68 Hintjens, 2009, pp86–87 Prunier, 2009, p2 Eltringham, 2004, p75 Ndahiro, 2009, p103

Chapter 2 Rwandan women and war 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

See Enloe, 1989; Squires, 1999; Tickner, 2001 Williams, 2008, p3 Sylvester, 2002, p29 Enloe, 2004, p23 Sjoberg, 2010, p4 Whitworth, 2008, p108 Enloe, 2004, p204 Enloe, 2004, p204 Enloe, 2000, p1 Enloe, 2000, pxiii Enloe, 2000, p46 Enloe, 2004, pxiii

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278 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

WOMEN

AND

WAR

IN

RWANDA

Enloe, 2000, p3 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p14 Whitworth, 2004, p27 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p4 Buss, 2009, p215 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p1 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p18 Sylvester, 2012 Sylvester, 2012 See Young, 2003; Puechguirbal, 2003a Holsti, 1996, p14 Holsti, 1996, p5 Holsti, 1996, p62 Holsti, 1996, p15 Holsti, 1996, p126 Holsti, 1996, p21 Kaldor, 2001, p35 Kaldor, 2001, p3 Kaldor, 2001, p76 Kaldor, 2001, p71 Kaldor, 2001, p77 Kaldor, 2001, p85 Cottle, 2006, p91 Kaldor, 2001, p84 Kaldor, 2001, p8 Berdal, 2011, p118 Newman, 2004, p174 Berdal, 2011, p124 Berdal, 2011, p111 Berdal, 2011, p111 Alao and Olonisakin, 2000, p27 Cottle, 2006, p91 Jackson, 2002, p29 Jackson, 2002, p29 Newbury, 1999, p674 Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002, p215 Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002, pp14–15 Jacquin-Berdal in Berdal, 2011, p111 Berdal, 2011, p112 Chan, 2011, p95 Daley, 2008, p15

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NOTES 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

279

Long, 2005, pp71–72 Long, 2005, p73 Mudimbe, 1994, p10 Mudimbe, 1994, p12 Mount, 2000; also see Kaplan, 1992; Huntington, 1996 Carruthers, 2000 Daley, 2008, p23 UN, 1948 Power, 2003, p40 Daley, 2008, p22 Daley, 2008, pp22–23 Daley, 2008, p24 Shaw, 2007, p37 Fein, 1991, p55 Shaw, 2007, p38 Silina, 2008, p4 Schabas in Shaw, 2007, p8 MacDonald, 2008 Shaw, 2007, p65 Stanton, 1996 Kuper in Silina, 2008, p11 Fein, 2002 Silina, 2008, p19 Silina, 2008, p25 Silina, 2008, pp14–17 Shaw, 2007, pp92–93 Shaw, 2007, p82 Shaw, 2000, p178 Shaw, 2007, p26 Shaw, 2007, p32 Shaw, 2007, p111 Shaw, 2007, p111 Fein, 1991, p24 Fein, 1991, p24 Shaw, 2007, p37 Bassiouni report, 1994, para 5 Shaw, 2007, p47 Shaw, 2007, p65 Turshen and Twagiramariya, 1998, p103 Turshen and Twagiramariya, 1998, pp103–105 See Hudson-Weems, 1998; Mbilinyi, 1992; Nnaemeka, 1998; Oye˘wu˘mi, 2003

Holmes_Notes.indd Sec1:279

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280 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

WOMEN

AND

WAR

IN

RWANDA

Mbembe, 2001, pp186–187 Mbembe, 2001, p187 Mbembe, 2001, p27 Oye˘wu˘mi, 2003, p27 Oye˘wu˘mi, 2003, p33 Mbilinyi, 1992, p33 Oye˘wu˘mi 2003, p25 Oye˘wu˘mi, 2003, p35 Oye˘wu˘mi, 2003, p29 See Enloe, 2004; Goldstein, 2001; Kirby, 2011; MacKenzie, 2011; Baaz and Stern, 2009, 2010, 2011; Leatherman, 2011 Buss, 2009, 147 Enloe, 2000, p124 Buss, 2009, p149; see also Niarchos, 1995 Kirby, 2011, p2 Baaz and Stern, 2009 Allen, 1996, p1 Allen, 1996, p39 Allen, 1996, p87 Human Rights Watch, 1996 United Nations, 1998, p7, para 2–5 United Nations, 1998, p7, para 2–5 Fein, 1999, p44 Mamdani, 2001, p42 Mamdani, 2001, pp117–126 Fein, 1999, p49 Taylor, 1999, p99 Taylor, 1999, p119 Jones, 2002a, p87 Jones, 2004, p20 Shaw, 2003, p68 Joedon-Forgey, 2010, p3 Joedon-Forgey, 2010, p12 Joedon-Forgey, 2010, p6 Joedon-Forgey, 2010, p10 Joedon-Forgey, 2010, p11 Joedon-Forgey, 2010, p2 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p143 Enloe, 1995, p26 Enloe, 1995, p27 Turshen, 2000, p63

Holmes_Notes.indd Sec1:280

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NOTES 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

281

See Human Rights Watch, 1996; African Rights, 1995 ICTR, 2011 Sperling, 2006, p637 Landesman in Sperling, 2006, p637 Sperling, 2006, p639 Sperling, 2006, pp638–639 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p141 Sperling, 2006 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p13 Woods, 2004 Landsberg, 2002; Woods, 2004 Newsnight, 1995 Stanton, 1996 Kiley in Melvern, 2009, p216 Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007, p141 See Karnik, 1998; Fair and Parks, 2001 Butler, 1997, p40 Davies, 1992, p58 Cohen, 2001, p76 Cohen, 2001, p76 Cohen, 2001, p79 Cohen, 2001, p102 Cohen, 2001, p105 Cottle, 2006, pp51–52 Chanan, 2007, p38 Cottle, 2006, pp51–52 Cottle, 2006, p4 Cottle, 2006, pp7–9 Cottle, 2006, p9 Cottle, 2006, p9 Pottier, 2002, p45 Pottier, 2002, p3 Chanan, 2007, p38 Chanan, 2007, p6 Chanan, 2007, p22 Chanan, 2007, p7 Pratt, 2008 Melvern, 2009, p264 Wallis, 2008 Melvern, 2009, p261 Melvern, 2009, p261

Holmes_Notes.indd Sec1:281

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282 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190.

191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214.

WOMEN

AND

WAR

IN

RWANDA

Bremner, 2004 Smith, 2007 Melvern, 2008, p38 Smith, 2007 Melvern, 2008, p39 Melvern, 2008, p38 Melvern, 2009, p262 See Chafer, 2002; Huliaras, 1998; Melvern, 2008; Melvern, 2009; Prunier, 2009 Melvern, 2009, p265 Wallis, 2008 Wallis, 2008 Wallis, 2008 Melvern, 2008, p38 Melvern, 2008, p38 On 18 December 2008 Bagosora was convicted of masterminding the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and sentenced to life in prison on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity Melvern, 2008, p39 Uvin, 1999, p254 Newbury, 1998, p7 Eltringham, 2004, pp147–151 Eltringham, 2004, p161 Eltringham, 2004, p162 Lemarchand 2007, p1 Melvern, 2007, p42; see also Prunier, 1997 Chrétien, 2009, p137, translated by author Melvern, 2009, p42 Lemarchand, 2001, p3 Goyvaerts, 2000, p256 Eltringham, 2004, p57 Lemarchand 2007, p1 Lemarchand 2007, p1 Lemarchand, 2007, p11 Turner, 2007, p56 See Dunn, 2003 See Straus and Waldorf, 2011 Goyvaerts, 2000, p252 Vansina, 1998, p37 Newbury and Newbury, 1995, p313 Vansina, 1998, p41 Melvern, 2008, p39

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NOTES

283

Chapter 3 Militarizing women, preparing for genocide: Hutu extremist magazine Kangura 1990–1994 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

ICTR, 2003 See Taylor, 1999; Mamdani, 2001 Mamdani, 2001, p99 Taylor, 1999, p58 Prunier, 1997, p10 Taylor, 1999, p88 Mamdani, 2001, p102 Mamdani, 2001, p141 Taylor, 1999, pp118–119 Mutamba, 2006 Baines, 2003, p482 Baines, 2003, p479 Hintjens, 1999, p250 Baines, 2003, p488 Africa Confidential, 1989 J. Berchmans Habinshuti, 2006, interview with the author See Verwimp, 2000 Taylor, 1999, p31 Baines, 2003, p484 Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006, interview with the author Habinshuti, 2006 Nyiramatama, 2006 Nyiramatama, 2006 Valencie, 2006, interview with the author Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006 Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006 Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006 Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006 Enloe, 2000, p3 Enloe, 2000, p124 Eltringham, 2004, p82 Convents, 2008, pp399–400 Melvern, 2009, p81 Higiro, 2007, p75 35. Higiro, 2007, p76 36. Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, 2011, interview with the author 37. Enloe, 2000, p216 38. See Mamdani, 2001

Holmes_Notes.indd Sec1:283

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284 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

WOMEN

AND

WAR

IN

RWANDA

African Rights, 1995, p30 Kabera, 2004 United Nations, 1995, p5 Melvern, 2006a, p81 Bagosora in Kabera, 2004 See Mamdani, 2001 Kangura, 1991, no. 5, p1 Kangura, 1990, no. 4, p19 ICTR, 2003, p4 Taylor, 1999, pp154–155 Hintjens 1999, p250 Kangura in Human Rights Watch, 1996, p11 Kangura in Human Rights Watch, 1996, p11 Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al., supra note 1, para. 177 Kangura, 1992, no. 5, p9 Kangura, 1994, no. 56, p15 Power in Chrétien, 1995 Dallaire, 2003, 163 Kangura, 1994, no. 35, back cover Baines, 2003, p484 Kangura, 1993, no. 44, p73 Kangura, 1992, p35 and 1993, no. 44, p17 Kangura, 1993, no. 49, p15 Kangura, 1991, no. 23, p14 Kaldor, 2001, p76 Kamarampaka in Chrétien, 1995, p364 See Clark, 2001 Newsnight, 25 August 1995 Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006, interview with the author African Rights, 1995, p43 African Rights, 1995, p43 See Enloe, 2004, p138. Enloe observes that a ‘successful democracy incorporates sexual equality’. FAWE, 2000, p4 Uwilingiyimana, 1994 Melvern, 2000, p104 Zaina Nyiramatama, 2006 This interview was first published in Linda Melvern (2000) A People Betrayed Uwilingiyimana, 1994 Uwilingiyimana, 1994

Holmes_Notes.indd Sec1:284

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NOTES 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

285

Uwilingiyimana, 1994 Uwilingiyimana, 1994 Uwilingiyimana, 1994 Kangura, 1994, no. 55, p4 Kangura, 1994, no. 57, p5 Kangura, 1994, no. 59, p12 See Chrétien, 1995 – a photo taken of Agathe at the time shows that one of her legs had been wounded in the attack. Kangura, 1993, no. 56, p4 Kangura, 1993, no. 56, p4 Kangura, 1994, no. 56, pp3–6 Melvern, 2006a, pp162–163 Uwilingiyimana, 1994

Chapter 4 Newsnight 1. See Schofield, 1996; Dowden, 2004; Giles, 2004; Doyle, 2007; Hughes, 2007 2. Dowden, 2004, p283 3. Melvern and Williams, 2004, p3 4. See Philo et. al., 1998; Melvern 2001a, Melvern, 2001b; Melvern, 2009; Chaon, 2007 5. Leapman, 2005 6. Wheeler, 2005 7. Carey, 2005 8. O’Keeffe, 2006, p20 9. BBC, 2009a 10. Bell, 1998, p63 11. O’Keeffe, 2006, p63 12. O’Keeffe, 2006, p63 13. O’Keeffe, 2006, p31 14. White, 2006 15. Nichols, 1991, pp34–35 16. Nichols, 2001, p109 17. Nichols, 2001, p107 18. Leapman, 2005 19. Hutton on Newsnight, 21 February 2002 20. Thompson in Ankomah, 2000 21. BBC, 2009c 22. Leapman, 2005

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286 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

WOMEN

AND

WAR

IN

RWANDA

United Nations, 1948 Power, 2002, p49 Melvern, 2009, p120 Melvern, 2009, p162 Melvern, 2009, p162 Chaon, 2007, p162 Doyle, 2007, p145 Doyle, 2007, p146 Schofield, 2009, interview with the author Geoff Adams Spink, 2007, interview with the author Geoff Adams Spink, 2007 Geoff Adams Spink, 2007 Peter Horrocks, 2011, interview with the author Peter Horrocks, 2011 Peter Horrocks, 2011 David Belton, 2009, interview with the author David Belton, 2009 David Belton, 2009 Ron McCullagh, 2005, interview with the author Ron McCullagh, 2005 Fein, 2001 Fein, 2001, p2 Newsnight, May 23 1994 Melvern, 2009, p274 Melvern, 2009, p274 Oxfam in The Times, 1994 Oxfam in The Times, 1994 Peter Horrocks, 2011, interview with the author Fein, 2001, p2 Hazel Cameron, 2005, discussion with the author Peter Horrocks, 2011, interview with the author Peter Horrocks, 2011 Peter Horrocks, 2011 Linda Melvern, 2009b, interview with the author Melvern and Williams, 2004, p32 David Belton, 2009, interview with the author Kevill, 2002 Fair and Parks, 2001 Chaon, 2007, p162 James Schofield, 2007, interview with the author James Schofield, 2007

Holmes_Notes.indd Sec1:286

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NOTES 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

287

James Schofield, 2007 David Belton, 2009 Carver in Newsnight, 16 May 1994 James Schofield, 2007 David Belton, 2009 David Belton, 2009 Geoff Adams Spink 2007 Geoff Adams Spink, 2007 Raymond Ntalindwa, 2009, interview with the author

Chapter 5 Remembering genocide, forgetting politics: the BBC’s institutional narrative post-1994 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

BBC, 2009a Nichols, 2001, p23 See also Lindley, 2002 Nichols, 2001, p26 For a discussion on the institutional gaze of National Geographic see Lutz and Collins, 1993. BBC, 2008a Clark, 2000, p41 Clive Edwards in de Burgh, 2008b, p65 Peter Horrocks, 2011, interview with the author BBC, 1999 See Moeller, 1999 BBC, 2007 Eltringham, 2004, p69 Gabi Gabiro, 2006, interview with the author Gabi Gabiro, 2006 Gabi Gabiro, 2006 Peter Raymont, 2005, interview with the author Taylor, 1998 American Professor Michael Barnett in Panorama: When Good Men Do Nothing, 7 December 1998

20. Reporter Stephen Bradshaw describing the deaths of the Belgian soldiers which led to UN calls to pull UNAMIR out of Rwanda in Panorama: When Good Men Do Nothing, 7 December 1998 21. 22. 23. 24.

Stephen Bradshaw, Panorama: The Bloody Tricolour, 20 August 1995 MacDonald, 2008, p3 Pottier, 2002, pp65–66 De Burgh, 2008b, p88

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288 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

WOMEN

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WAR

IN

RWANDA

Gaber, 2008, p244 De Burgh, 2008b, p71 Cohen in De Burgh 2008b, p63 Cohen, 2000, p123 Gaber, 2008, p244 Peter Horrocks, 2011, interview with the author Peter Horrocks, 2011 Peter Horrocks, 2011 Xan Brooks, 2006 Melvern, 2006b Keane, 2006 David Belton in Start the Week, 2006 Longman, 2011, p37 Geoff Adams Spink, 2007, interview with the author Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, 2011, interview with the author Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, 2011 Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, 2011 Gagnon in Human Rights Watch, 2009a Human Rights Watch, 2009a Human Rights Watch, 2009a Human Rights Watch, 2009a Mugenzi, 2011 Sebarenzi, 2011, p347 Sebarenzi, 2011, p348 Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, 2011 BBC, 2010a Africa Confidential, 2010 Ally Yusuf Mugenzi, 2011 BBC, 2010c BBC, 2010d Peter Horrocks, 2011 Peter Horrocks, 2011 Sebarenzi, 2011, p348 Daddy Yousouf, 2006, interview with the author Patrice Mulama, 2006, interview with the author Rwandan journalist, 2009, interview with the author MacDonald, 2008, p4 Newbury and Baldwin, 2000, p4 Thérese, 2006, interview with the author Daddy Yousouf, 2006 Convents, 2008, p412

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NOTES 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

289

Peter Raymont, 2005, interview with the author Gabi Gabiro, 2006, interview with the author Convents, 2008, p413 Daddy Yousouf, 2006 Gabi Gabiro, 2006 Gabi Gabiro, 2006 Aloysia Inyumba, 2006 Christine Gahamanyi, 2006, interview with the author David Russell, 2009, interview with the author

Chapter 6 ‘Living on gold should be a blessing, instead it is a curse’: mass rape in the Congo 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Obama, 2009 United Nations, 2010 Smits and Cruz, 2011 Tinsley, 2008 Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2011 Puechguirbal, 2003a, pp1272–1273 Rodriguez, 2006, pp45–46 All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region, 2008, p4 Human Rights Watch, 2009b Gordts, 2012 Victoria Dove Dimandja, 2011, interview with the author UK All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region of Africa discussion at the House of Commons, 27 November 2008 Amnesty International, 2010 Peterman et.al., 2011, p1065 BBC, 2011 Feeley, Emma and Thomas-Jensen, Colin, 2008, p2 Silina, 2008, p19 Jones, 2002a, p87 In MacDonald, 2008, p62 Reeves, 2008 Freely and Thomas-Jensen, 2008, pp4–5 Feeley, Emma and Thomas-Jensen, Colin, 2008 Freely and Thomas-Jensen, 2008, pp5–6 UN, 2011 Berdal, 2011, p119 Keen in Berdal, 2011, p125 Berdal, 2011, p125

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290 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

WOMEN

AND

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IN

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Berdal, 2011, p122 Human Rights Watch, 2009c Turshen, 2000, p806 Oxfam, 2010, p21 Baaz and Stern, 2010 Baaz and Stern, 2010, pp52–53 Cranston, 2010 Taylor, 2011 Geenan, 2012 Geenan, 2013 Jackson, 2002, p526 United Nations, 2008, pp22–23 Peffer, 2008, p57 Peffer, 2008, pp61–62 Hunt, 2008, p224 Youngs, 2003, p1210 Pottier, 2003 Baaz and Stern, 2009, p496 Aisling, 2009, p405 Swaine, 2009, p405 Baaz and Stern, 2009, p563 WomenforWomen International, 2007 Duffield, 2008, p16 Duffield, 2008, p17 Willis and Williams, 2002, p2 Hunt, 1999, p1 Hunt, 1999, p1 Gilman, 1985, pp79–83 Hunt, 2008, p228 Clayton, 2004 Gettleman, 2007b Rice, Xan and Sturcke, 2008 BBC, 2008b Daily Mail Online, 2 November 2008 McGreal, 2008b McGreal, 2008b International Herald Tribune, 2008a McGreal, 2008b Marriage, 2006, p485 Newbury, 1996, p575 Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2008a

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NOTES 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

291

Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2008b Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda 2005, p5 Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2007 Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2007 Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2007 Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2009 Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda, 2009 Hunt, 2008, p220 Hunt, 2008, p220 Anonymous, 2007 Human Rights Watch, 2008, p2 Human Rights Watch, 2008, p42 Gettleman, 2007a CNDP, 2009 Curry, 2008 Cédric Gérbehaye, 2008 Nambi, 2009 Ngabonziza, 2009 Kalisa, 2010 Karuhanga, 2009 Muheto, 2008 Muheto, 2008 Muheto, 2008 Mutesi and Nkurunziza, 2008 Niyonshuti and Buhigiro, 2009 Judith Wanga, 2010 Fiona Lloyd-Davies, 2012, interview with the author Fiona Lloyd-Davies, 2010a Fiona Lloyd-Davies, 2010a Fiona Lloyd-Davies, 2012 Fiona Lloyd-Davies, 2012 Fiona Lloyd-Davies, 2012

Conclusion 1. Radio Okapi, 2008 2. Oxfam, 2011b 3. See Oxfam’s film Walk in My Shoes, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Y6yRflXnjEc. 4. Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2011

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BIBLIOGR APHY

Interviews Adams Spink, Geoff (2007), BBC correspondent, London 17 April. Belton, David (2009), Former Newsnight producer, via telephone, New York 2 November. Bideri, Joseph (2006), Head of ORINFOR, Kigali 6 April. Cameron, Hazel (2005), Academic, London 31 August. Dove Dimandja, Victoria (2011), Congolese human rights campaigner, London, 30 August. Gabiro, Gabi (2006), Rwandan journalist, Kigali 13 April. Gahamanyi, Christine (2006), Radio Rwanda journalist, Kigali 19 April. Gérbehaye, Cédric (2008) Discussion at Amnesty International Event, London, 27 November 2008. Habinshuti, J. Berchmans (2006), Former Personal Assistant to Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, Kigali 21 April. Horrocks, Peter (2011), Director of BBC World Service, former Newsnight producer and Deputy Editor for Panorama, London 26 April. Ingabire, Immaculée (2006), Rwandan journalist, Kigali 10 April. Inyumba, Aloysia (2006), Senator in the Rwandan government, Kigali 19 April. Kalanda, José Musau (2011), Human rights campaigner, London 30 August. Lloyd-Davies, Fiona (2012), Documentary filmmaker, London 16 March. McCullagh, Ron (2005), Head of Insight News TV, London 12 December. Melvern, Linda (2006), Investigative journalist, London 31 March. ——— (2009a), Investigative journalist, London 8 February. ——— (2009b), Investigative journalist, London 4 October. ——— (2009c), Investigative journalist, London 15 December. Muganza, Angelina (2006), Minister of Justice, Kigali 11 April. Mugenzi, Ali Yusufu (2011), Editor of BBC Great Lakes Service, London 31 May. Mulama, Patrice (2006), High Council of Press in Rwanda, Rwanda 14 April.

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Tickner, J. Ann (2001), Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the PostCold War Era, New York: Columbia University Press. Tickner, J. Ann (2006), ‘Feminism meets International Relations: Some Methodological Issues’ in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations edited by Maria Stern, Brooke A. Ackerly and Jacqui True, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tinsley, Rebecca (2008) All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes, House of Commons, London, 21 November. Trial Watch (2010), ‘Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’, http://www.trial-ch.org/en/ trial-watch/profile/db/facts/pauline_nyiramasuhuko_201.html, accessed 23 March 2010. Tripp, Aili Mari (2005), ‘Empowering women in the Great Lakes Region: Violence, peace and the women’s leadership’, SHS Papers in Women’s Studies, Research No 3, UNESCO, http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/files/8301/113 13741841Background_Paper.pdf/Background%2BPaper.pdf, accessed 23 September 2009. Tull, Denis M. (2003), ‘A reconfiguration of political order? The state of the state in North Kivu (D Congo)’, African Affairs, 102:408, pp429–446. Turner, Thomas (2007), The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth & Reality, London: Zed Books. Turshen, Meredith (2000), ‘The political economy of violence against women during armed conflict in Uganda’, Social Research, 67:3, pp803–824. Turshen, Meredith (2001), ‘The Political Economy of Rape: An Analysis of Systematic Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women During Armed Conflict in Africa’, in Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence edited by Caroline O.N Moser and Fiona C. Clark, London and New York: Zed Books. Turshen, Meredith and Twagiramariya, Clotilde (1998) (eds.), What Women Do In Wartime: Gender and Conflict in Africa, London: Zed Books. Umutesi, Marie Béatrice (2004), Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Woman in Zaire, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. United Nations (1948), ‘Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, 9 December’, 78 U.N.T.S. 277, http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/text.htm, accessed 16 May 2011. United Nations (1998), UN Chronicle 7 United Nations http://www.un.org/Pubs/ chronicle, accessed 28 June 2009. United Nations (1998), UN Chronicle 35(3) http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/ index.html, accessed 28 June 2009. United Nations (1999), ‘Verdicts on the Crime of Genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Amended Indictment: Hassan Ngeze’, http://www.un.org/law/rwanda, accessed 24 April 2006. United Nations (2008), ‘Final Report of the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo’, United Nations, www.un.org, accessed 2 January 2009. United Nations (2009), ‘Thirtieth report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’,

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INDEX

Adams Spink, Geoff 139–141, 171, 200, 207–8 Africa, in global political order 69–70, 79, 82, 242 African Rights organization 19–20, 121, 151, 163–4 agency 3, 5, 49, 68, 79, 81,100,111, 268; in war 53; theorizing women’s agency 5–8, 50–51, 68–70; 80–83 aid, provision of 19, 23, 30, 55, 151, 156, 193, 221, 229, 262, 271–2; aid practitioners 68, 97 Akayesu, Jean-Paul 72, 162 Akazu 18, 27, 109, 184, 205 Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaire (AFDL) 25–6 Amnesty International 150, 232, 234–5 Angola 26–7 Anyidoho, Brigadier General Henry Kwami 185 Armée pour la Libération du Rwanda (ALiR) 19, 23, 25 Arusha Accords 13–4, 32, 67, 113–4, 124, 137; advocators of 119, 122 Association Rwandaise des Femmes des Médias 219

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Association for the Defence of Women and Children’s Rights (HAGURUKA) 107–10 Atwood, Brian 152, 154–5 Association des Veuves du Genocide (AVEGA) 41, 166, 193, 195 Bagosora, Colonel Théoneste 13, 19, 91, 114, 168 Banyamulenge 23, 25, 248–9, 253 Beardsley, Major Brent 120 Belgian troops 13, 15, 117, 136; killing of 15, 127, 135, 198 Belgium 15, 27, 86, 93, 96–7, 124, 203; support for Habyarimana 22; see also colonialism Belton, David 179, 200, 203, 206–7, 268; reporting in 1994 141–2, 144, 158, 167–70, 175–6 Bertin, Eric 135–6 Bideri, Joseph 208 Bizimana, Major-General Augustin 168–9, 185 Bizimungu, Casimir 106 Bizimugu, Pasteur 23, 32 Blair, Tony, 201, 211 Bond, Catherine 142

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INDEX Bosnia-Herzegovina 50, 60, 65, 71–2, 142, 262 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros 16, 147, 149 Bradshaw, Stephen 179–85, 204–5 Britain 11, 86, 156, 197, 199, 217, 261–2; member of the UN Security Council 2, 7, 15, 151–2, 158, 203; support for Rwandan government 205 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 85, 112, 135, 138, 171–7, 183, 205–7; Afrique 208; Comic Relief 166, 193, 233; Royal Charter 6; Swahili 112, 208; World Service 140, 186, 208, 121; Great Lakes Service 208–12; BBC Radio 4 139, 207, 247, 269; BBC2 245; BBC3 238, 261; see also Panorama; Newsnight Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) 14, 114 Bruguière, Jean-Louis 1–2, 89–90, 96, 265 Bryer, David 150 Budgen, Nicolas 152, 155 Bujumbura 139, 141, 170–1 Bukavu 17, 80, 235–7, 261, 263, 271 Burundi 25, 58, 96, 103, 112, 139–140, 146; insecurity in 27, 56, 125; militia 13, 208; massacres in 17; regional trade networks 27, 230; see also Bujumbura Butare 78–9, 146, 191 Canada 11, 20, 143 Carbonare, Jean 184 Central African Republic 22, 26–7, 135 Chalker, Lynda 151–4, 158 Chaon, Anne 138–9, 166 children, suffering of 16, 24, 30, 75, 120, 148, 164; soldiers 167; reuniting 32, 208 China 15, 27, 35, 185 Chrétien, Jean-Pierre 93

Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:317

317

Clausewitzean war 51–3, 64, 119 Clinton, Bill: Clinton administration 203 CNN effect 130, 134 Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR) 33, 102, 112, 118–20, 123, 185 Cold War 105, 154; end of 47, 52–3 colonialism 42, 45, 52–3, 57–8; Belgian 73, 241; British 241; History of 135 Cohen, Stanley 83–4, 92, 269 Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 63, 222 Congo atrocity narrative 231–2, 234, 245 Congrés National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP) 27–8, 87, 96–7, 230, 253–7 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 15, 61–3, 65, 71, 129, 134, 239 C´uric´, Vjeko 141, 144 Dallaire, Brigadier-General Romeo A. 15–6, 117, 152–3 Dallaire, Elizabeth 197, 260 degenerative war 64, 66–7, 138 Democratic Republic of Congo: 2006 constitution 222 denial 156, 158, 269; genocide denial 4, 62–3, 83, 99, 205, 210, 239, 268; narratives of 83–5; politics of 173 see also revisionism Department for International Development (DFID), UK 207–8, 247, 272 Deschryver, Christine Schuler 259–60 discrimination 35, 37, 40, 63–4, 225; sexual 122, 222 documentary film 8–11, 85, 174; site of representation 87–88, 132, 145, 266 Dowden, Richard 129 Dove Dimandja, Victoria 223, 271–2 Doyle, Mark 139, 206

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318

WOMEN

AND

WAR

Enloe, Cynthia 47–9, 70, 76, 99–100, 110–11 ethnic cleansing 56, 227, 244–5; use of the phrase 65, 136 ethnicity, determining of 17, 25, 35, 92, 103 European Union 27, 250, 271; peacekeeping force 245 Ex-Forces Armées Rwandaises (ex-FAR) 19, 23–4, 30, 248, 256; see also Forces Armées Rwandaises Fein, Helen 61–2, 64–5, 72, 143–4, 146, 156–7 feminism 11, 47; African 3, 70; constructivist 50, 68; postcolonial 50, 88; see also gender; International Relations theory Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) 28, 225, 249, 252–3, 257 Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) 14, 16–7, 22; see also Ex-Forces Armées Rwandaises Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) 19–20, 27–9, 39, 96–7, 209–11, 228; press releases 243–4, 246–7 Force Publique 232, 234 Foreign Office (UK) 151, 156, 159 des Forges, Alison 184 Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) 122 France 1–2, 14–6, 20, 22, 60, 66, 89–90; complicity of 183, 185; intervention 149, 160–1; relations with African countries 93; revisionism 90, 92, 97, 99, 204; support for Habyarimana 183, 185; see also Opération Turquoise Gabiro, Gabi 189–90, 195, 200, 218 Gacaca courts 43–4, 217, 219 Gahamanyi, Christine 219

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IN

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gender 35; awareness 248, 258; hierarchies 58, 82; in international relations 12, 48, 50, 68; insecurity 221; politics 77, 121, 162, 166; power relations 8, 48, 50, 66, 69, 74, 128 gendercide 66, 73–4 gender equality 41, 51, 127, 248, 258, 272 gender mainstreaming 34 gendered narratives 7, 79–82, 86, 99–100, 172, 266, 268–9 genocide: accountability 15–6, 23, 39, 90, 134, 186, 203; addressed by UN 60; definition 60, 62, 94, 143–4; gendered 72–4, 76–7; genocide denial see denial; ideology 5, 22, 24, 41, 44, 63–4, 73, 81, 111, 113, 257; in Africa 6, 61, 66, 76, 82; memorializing 4, 211, 213, 182–3, 192; prevention 4, 134–5; theorizing of 63–6, 83, 86, 99, 268; use of word 130, 134, 136–7, 143, 158, 269 genocide by attrition 63–4, 225–7, 231, 236–9, 267, 270 Genocide Convention see Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Goma 17, 152, 223, 230, 244–5, 247–8; internally displaced people in 23–5, 151, 180, 182, 193, 243, 245; refugee crisis 159, 160, 175, 180, 245 Greste, Peter 247, 250–1 Ground Zero 31, ethos of 40, 45 Habinshuti, J. Berchmans 106, 108 Habyarimana, Agathe 2, 27, 66, 99, 106 Habyarimana, Major Juvenal 14, 16, 18, 22, 265; death of 1, 13, 89, 91; as politician 90, 99, 103, 106, 108, 123, 125–6; regime 18, 36, 88, 105–6

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INDEX Hannay, David 15, 158, 203–4 Hilsum, Lyndsey 80, 142, 162–5, 206, 268 HIV/AIDS 31, 64, 166, 266 holocaust 183; in Africa 184, 190, 194–7, 201; Nazi Holocaust 13, 60–2, 149, 180, 183, 198 Horrocks, Peter 130, 135, 140–1, 156–8, 161, 178–9 Hotel Rwanda 206 Hughes, Nick 142, 193, 215–6, 268 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 150, 209, 228, 232, 249–50, 252 humanitarian intervention 240, 246 Hurd, Douglas 159 Hutu manifesto 17–8 Hutu Power 13, 19, 27, 73, 91, 105, 117, 268 Hutu Ten Commandments 115–6 Independent, The, newspaper 129 Impunity 28, 46, 226; culture of 222 Ingabire, Victoire 210–1 Inkotanyi 116 Interahamwe 23, 46, 58, 167–9, 243, 248, 256; militiamen 17; political rallying 113–4; youth movement 14, 19 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) 63 International Criminal Court (ICC) 60, 97, 222, 273 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 78, 142, 160, 167, 171, 208 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 16, 19, 43, 78, 102, 191, 210 International Herald Tribune, newspaper 253 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 34 International Relations theory 3, 7, 47, 98, 128; feminist theorizing of 47–50, 66–7, 70–6, 82, 99

Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:319

319

investigative journalism 178, 201, 218; in crisis 201–2 Inyenzi 111–2 Inyumba, Aloysia 31–2, 40, 165, 219 Iwacu Centre 102, 106 Jackson, Lisa F. 235–7, 239, 252, 258–9, 263–4, 270–1 Joedon-Forgey, Elisa von 74–5, 270 Jones, Adam 73–4, 225 Kabera, Eric 215–6 Kabgayi 81, 141, 144, 146, 187, 203 Kabuye, Rose 1–2, 23, 66, 265–6 Kagame, Major-General Paul 21–2, 25–6, 32–9, 89–90, 211–2, 255 Kalanda, Jose Musau 271–2 Kalume, Bernard 264, 267 Kamarampaka, newspaper 120 Kangura, newspaper 9, 19, 102, 110–3, 169, 248–9 Kanombe camp 13, 265 Kanziga, Agathe see Agathe Habyarimana Kaplan, Robert 59, 158 Karusha, Rose 121 Katanga 25 Katsuva, Masika 238, 259–60 Kayibanda, Gregoire 17–8 Kayumba, Lieutenant Cyprien 37 Keane, Fergal 166, 185–7, 189–200, 205–7, 253–4 Keating, Colin 15 Kenya 20, 22, 27, 30, 40, 56, 112, 114 Kevill, Sian 159, 161, 202 Kibeho 4, 23–25, 36, 186 Kigali 13, 89–90, 102, 107–8, 135–7, 206–7; battle for 22, 81; refugee camps 106; taken by RPF 30, 161, 172, 175 Kikongo, killings in 136 Kiley, Sam 81 Kovanda, Karel 15, 203

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320

WOMEN

AND

WAR

New Labour Party (UK) 202, 247 Leopold II, King of Belgium 232, 246; Leopold’s free state 231 Le Monde 89 Lemarchand, René 4, 39–40, 45, 56, 67, 92–4, 98 Lemkin, Raphael 60, 65, 134 life force atrocities 74–6, 119, 225–6, 238–9, 260 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) 29, 56, 228 Lloyd-Davies, Fiona 238, 258–9, 261–4, 270–1 Major, John 151 Mbembe, Achille 68 McCullagh, Ron 142–3 media narratives 3, 9–10, 81, 174, 264 mediatized conflict 4, 7, 88, 214, 248, 266 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) France 135–6 Mfizi, Christophe 184 Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion (MIGEPROF) 41, 43, 140 Mirren, Helen 150 Mitterrand, Francois 90, 92–3, 105 Mitterrand, Jean-Christophe 204–5 Mobutu, Sese Seko 23, 25–6, 57, 90, 95, 248 Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) 252 Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR) 33, 120, 125 Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) 18, 105 Mouvement Républicain National pour la Democratie et le Développement (MRND) 1, 13, 16, 18, 33, 42, 78, 256; women’s group, creation of 109; imaged in extremist propaganda 120, 124, 126; inciting genocide 112–3 Mouvement Social Muhutu (MSM) 18

Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:320

IN

RWANDA

Mucyo, Jean de Dieu 1, 88–90, 96, 99, 265 Muganza, Angelina 40–2 Mugenzi, Ali Yusufu 112, 151, 208–11 Mulama, Patrice 213 Mukwege, Denis 235, 239, 241 Museveni, Yoweri 21–6 Mushikiwabo, Louise 209, 211–2 Mutamba, John 104 Nahimana, Ferdinand 102, 119 National Resistance Army (Uganda) 21 Network Zero, see Le Réseau Zéro and Akazu new wars theory 21, 51, 53–8, 64, 266 New York Times, newspaper 167, 198 New Zealand 15 Newbury, Catharine 56, 92, 98, 214 Newbury, David 25, 56–7, 98, 248 Newsnight: production of 80, 121, 130–4, 138–9 Ngeze, Hassan 19, 93, 102, 111, 116, 169–70 North Kivu 20, 23, 24, 29, 244, 249 Ntaryamira, Cyprien 15, 265 Nyamirambo, killings in 136 Nyamwasa, Lieutenant-General Faustin Kayumba 37, 39, 212 Nyiramasuhuko, Pauline 76, 78–81, 108–9, 164–5, 268 Nyiramatama, Zaina 107–10, 121, 123 Obote, Milton 21, 249 Office Rwandais d’Information (ORINFOR) 112, 208, 213, 219 Opération Turquoise 16, 23, 89, 149, 160, 180 Orbinski, James 129 Organization of African Unity (OAU) 16, 152, 155 Oxfam 139, 150–3, 157, 208, 272 Pakistan 262 Panorama 174–5; origins 177–8; audience ratings 181–2

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INDEX Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu (PARMEHUTU) 18 Parti Libéral (PL) 105 Partie Social Démocrate (PSD) 33, 105 Patriotes Resistants Congolais (PARECO) 28, 257 performance 3, 8, 11, 73, 82–3, 271; in the media 85–6, 99, 125, 263, 270; see also subject; subjectivity post-colonial: theory 7, 47, 52, 59, 68; war 52–3; struggle over ownership of discourse 90, 166 Pottier, Johan 44–5, 56, 81, 86–7, 95–6, 98, 188, 199–200 Poux, Nathalie 265 poverty: in Rwanda 17–8, 22, 24, 30, 106–7, 122; in eastern DRC 231, 247, 260 Power, newspaper 117 presidential elections: Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006 251–2; Democratic Republic of Congo in 2011 29; Rwanda in 2003 38, 40; Rwanda 2010 38–9, 209, 212 Presidential Guard 127, 168, 192, 265 private media, proliferation of 111 Profama 40, 107, 109 Prunier, Gérard 16, 21, 24–5, 31, 45, 56, 103 race hierarchy: in feminist theorizing 82; in international relations 59–61; in Rwanda 58 Radio Muhabura 112 Radio Rwanda 14, 109, 207, 219, 248 Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) 91, 102, 109–12, 119, 164, 169, 193 rape 32, 50, 63, 223, 232; as a crime 78–9, 223; in genocide 71–6, 225–8; virtualization of 248; weapon of war 51, 58, 70–1, 224

Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:321

321

Rassemblement Congolais pour le Démocratie (RCD) 26, 230 Rassemblement Populaire Rwandais-Inkeragutabara (RPR) 19 Rawson, David 180–1 Raymont, Peter 197, 216 refugees 4, 19; from Burundi 13–4, 19, 140; in the Democratic Republic of Congo 28, 30, 182, 250; from Rwanda 21, 23, 31, 169, 243–5; in Tanzania 16, 150; from Uganda 33, 37 Le Réseau Zéro 2, 108, 184, 204 revisionism 85, 93, 173, 204; politics of 3, 5–6, 10, 83, 92, 94–100, 104, 128 Reyntjens, Filip 152 Riza, Iqbal 149, 152–4 roadblocks 13, 121, 167, 168 Ruanda-Urundi 17 Rudasingwa, Theogene 37, 39, 137, 152, 172 Ruhengeri 89, 106, 120 Rukundo, Willy 30–1 Russian Federation 15 Rwanda: 1991 constitution 105; invasion of 63, 67, 106, 115 Rwanda Cinema Centre (RCC) 215 Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) 28, 256–7 Rwanda National Congress (RNC) 39 Rwanda Survivor Fund (SURF) 220, 233 Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU) 21 Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) 22–5, 36 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) 1–5, 13–5, 21–3, 30, 37–8; government 20, 38, 45–6, 56, 95, 137–8, 155, 268; see also Rwanda, invasion of Rwigyema, Fred 21–2 Ryckmans, François 123–4

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322

WOMEN

AND

WAR

Schabas, William 62 Schofield, James 139, 167–8 Sendashonga, Seth 32, 36–7 sexual violence, see sexual and genderbased violence sexual and gender-based violence 4, 7; in the Democratic Republic of Congo 221–4, 227, 231–5, 239; in Rwanda 14, 17, 32, 43, 50; feminist theorizing of 70–2, 74, 76–7 Shaw, Martin 61–2, 64–6, 74, 138 Short, Clare 172 Simpson, John 152, 156 Smith, Patrick 89 Sjoberg, Laura 49–51, 76, 79, 81 South Africa 26–7, 35, 37 South Kivu 20, 23–5, 202, 230 Speke, John Hanning 103 Stanton, Greg 62, 81 Subject, the 7–8, 49; in documentary film 87–8, 267; mediatization of 104, 110, 159–60, 201, 241; performance of 8, 11, 68–9, 82–3 subjectivity 7–8, 11; feminist theorizing of 87–9; in international relations theory 53, 59, 64, 68, 72–3, 82, 100 Sudan 26–7, 29, 228 Switzerland 20 Sylvester, Christine 51 Tanzania 13, 16–7, 20, 27, 30, 32, 43, 140–1 Télévision Rwanda (TVR) 111, 216–8 The New Times, newspaper 2, 9, 210, 255–7 The Times, newspaper 81, 127, 150, 242, 245 Trévidic, Marc 265 Tutu, Archbishop Desmond 152–3 Twa 46, 105 Twagiramungu, Faustin 32, 37–8, 125–7

Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:322

IN

RWANDA

Uganda 17, 21–2, 26–7, 29–30, 40 Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR) 17 United Kingdom (UK), see Britain; Department for International Development United Nations (UN) 7, 97, 138, 153–4, 224, 234, 247, see also UN peacekeeping UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) 14–6, 117, 185, 203, 206 UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 206, 243 UN Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of Congo 26, 230 UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 24 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 151–2, 208 UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) 27, 29, 231, 237, 245–6, 253 UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) 29, 97, 231, 272 UN peacekeeping 147; international peacekeeping force 14, 27, 49; Chapter VI mandate 14 UN Security Council 2, 7, 15–6, 28, 43, 90–93, 147, 151–3; discussion of in the media 201, 203–4, 207; Resolution 1325 222, 234, 249, 252 Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR) 17 Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS) 26 United States (US) 15–6, 20, 26–7, 137–8, 149, 272–3

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INDEX Urunana Rally for Unity and Democracy (RUD) 19–20 Uwilingiyimana, Agathe 42, 106–8, 122–3, 125–7; killing of 13

323

Wark, Kirsty 132, 135, 138, 151–3, 155, 243 women’s movement: in Rwanda 5, 40, 107, 109, 122, 268 World Bank 34

Voice of America 207 Yousouf, Daddy 216, 218 Walikale 20 Wallis, Andrew 90 Wallis, Stuart 152–3

Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:323

Zaire 4, 16–7, 25–6, 30, 95, 151, 186 Zirikiana, newspaper 119

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Holmes_Index.indd Sec1:324

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