Book review: John Nathaniel Clarke,British Media and the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

This book challenges the narrative that the British media failed to alert the international community to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, analysing coverage in the British broadsheets – The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and The Daily Telegraph, in particular – and mapping it out with data on the frequency and nature of the coverage across four phases: (1) pre-crisis, (2) genocide, (3) refugee crisis, and (4) post-crisis. The book examines the relationship between media coverage, parliamentary debate and political decision making in Britain, and the impact the print and broadcast media did or did not have on the British government and its response to the crisis in Rwanda. Conversely, it examines to what extent parliamentary debate was reflected in the media and the important ‘dual movement’ between the two. Dividing coverage into six types – field reporting, political reporting, editorials, analysis, letters to the editor, and other types of story – leads John Clarke to question commonly held perceptions: one is that there was more British reporting on the exodus of mostly Hutu refugees from Rwanda to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) at the tail end of the genocide in July 1994 than there was during the genocide of the Tutsi minority in April, May and June. In a chart, Clarke shows that the amount of field reporting was almost equal in both phases, while it was political reporting and other types of comment on Rwanda that grew during the refugee crisis to create this impression. Similarly, he points out that past criticism that the evacuation of foreigners, especially of Europeans, received disproportionate media attention at the start of the genocide, does not hold up, with only 13 of the 778 stories published in the British press during this phase focusing on the evacuation (less than 2%).

Clarke’s methodology shows us the importance of examining assumptions and the use of quantitative and qualitative analysis in doing so. Other thematic content is analysed and discussed, as well as concepts key to the reporting of the crisis – military intervention, humanitarian intervention and tribalism. Here, another argument is challenged, one held by academic Linda Melvern that, when it came to tribalism, ‘The use of this cliché dominated the early reports on the genocide. The basic inference was that the killing represented uncontrollable tribal savagery about which nothing could be done’ (p. 63).

Clarke shows that, although it was true that tribalism was mentioned frequently during stories on Rwanda when ‘the early use of military force could have saved thousands of lives, if not halted the genocide’, the concept did not dominate coverage throughout the crisis (p. 66). Nonetheless, it is to no-one’s credit that the term appeared at a moment when outside action might have helped, and within that use of terminology lies a lesson for future reporting. Clarke distinguishes between necessary mention of the ethnic dimension that lay behind the mobilization by the majority Hutu against the minority Tutsi and characterizing this as tribal, shifting the blame for British inaction from the characteristics of the field reporting to the tepidity of editorials in the British media:

While the use of the term ‘tribal’ may well have contributed to an environment where intervention was viewed negatively, it was ultimately the absence of editorials challenging the [British] government position against intervention that explains the lack of pressure on the government to change policy (p. 67).

British government policy, articulated in parliament by Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, on 12 April – the day that in retrospect represented a peak in the genocide – was to avoid becoming the world’s ‘policeman’ (or ‘judge’ or ‘universal soldier’) (p. 165).

Central to an appreciation of this book is an evocation of the heady days at the end of the Cold War, when nations in Africa, Rwanda included, were shedding the model of the Soviet-style, one-party state and returning, by popular demand, to multi-party rule. In 1991, I covered the fall of military dictators Mengistu Haile Mariam in Soviet-backed Ethiopia and Siad Barre in US-backed Somalia for The Daily Telegraph and, in the years after that, the rise of democratic movements across Africa. From 1991 to early 1994, calls for democracy bloomed in Rwanda, only to be cut brutally short by the genocide, when civil society activists and political moderates – Hutu and Tutsi – were among the first of an estimated 575,000 to 830,000 Tutsi inside the country to be slain in about 100 days. I had also covered the 1990–1994 civil war that ran concurrent to the brief burst of multipartyism in Rwanda: in 1993, a peace agreement was reached between the Tutsi-led rebel Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and Hutu-led government, paving the way for a transitional government composed of a mosaic of political parties, large and small, holding moderate and extreme views. In Kigali, the Rwandan capital, a volatile atmosphere of division and mistrust prevailed, however. It was the actions of extremist Tutsi in the rebel group and Hutu in the government that broke up this power-sharing agreement, triggering the genocide.

Clarke identifies this period of global history as one where post-Cold War ideas were still evolving amid ‘a conceptual vacuum on the question of where, and when, intervention was justified. In part, the media filled that vacuum and played an increasingly important role in shaping both public opinion and foreign policy’ (p. 5). Our perspectives, as journalists, shifted; after the Clinton administration intervened in Somalia in 1992 and goaded NATO into Bosnia, peacekeeping became a buzzword, military intervention a rallying cry (though not one we always agreed with). The press acquired a new crusading role: it was felt that, with enough public outcry and political pressure, the UN Security Council might authorize Chapter VII (the use of armed force) to deploy foreign armies and/or UN peacekeepers to intervene in nations torn asunder by civil war, where human rights were being abused so horrifically they constituted an affront not just to international peace and security but to humanity itself. Clarke’s book represents an important reminder of this late 20th-century raison d’etre – intervention as moral imperative – and, in doing so, raises the implicit question of where, if anywhere, that argument lies now, a generation later.

I reported for The Times (London) and Channel 4 News (UK) during the genocide in Rwanda and covered its aftermath in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1996–1998) for CNN International, when the UN estimates that as many as 275,000 mostly Hutu civilians were killed by Rwandan and other armed forces chasing them.

The following are answers, lightly edited, to questions I emailed to John Clarke, as well as my answers to his questions.

Catherine Bond (CB): You focus on the role of ideas in shaping the world and how the nature of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda gave birth to the idea that outside military intervention could – and should – be used to prevent mass bloodshed. Where do you think that idea stands now?

John Clarke (JC): That’s a very good question and one that is difficult to answer. The first point that is worth making is that many of the ideas, and indeed the experience of humanitarian intervention, are not new, and history is replete with interventions that were characterized as being of a humanitarian nature. Things which arguably were different in the 1990s were that humanitarian intervention sat at a critical juncture where our ideas about rights and duties within and beyond our borders collided with the gruesome reality of civil conflicts in which people’s human rights were violated in the most brutal manner. Our awareness of those events was driven by a more globalized media that brought distant crises into the living rooms of people elsewhere and onto the policy agendas of states that had the capacity to intervene. That reality had the effect of producing, and perhaps even accelerating, changes in ideas about crises and the pace of decision making and response during a crisis.

At the time of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the question of intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina remained contentious within the British cabinet, making the case of Rwanda an even greater challenge for decision makers. In his memoirs, Foreign Secretary Hurd wrote: ‘It never occurred to us, the Americans or anyone else to send combatant troops to Rwanda to stop the killing. I record this as a bleak fact.’ It is worth noting that, shortly after the genocide in September 1994, in his speech to the UN General Assembly, Lord Hurd outlined a three-part strategy to deal with future crises, introducing early warning, enhanced capacity for preventive diplomacy and, finally, enhanced peacekeeping capacity, all of which became central elements of reforms undertaken in the aftermath of the genocide.

This change in attitude towards actual intervention was felt by politicians from the Labour and Conservative parties in Britain [Hurd was a Conservative]. Interviewed for this book, the former Labour party leader, Prime Minister Tony Blair said, ‘it was an error for us not to intervene in Rwanda, and if it happened again, we certainly should do so.’ Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of Defence [in the Conservative government] at the time of the genocide indicated, ‘attitudes have changed – I think the public sensitivity and public awareness and the willingness to recognize responsibility is different today than it would have been 20 years ago . . . I feel it in myself.’ The main question is what remains of this change of heart, given the changing geo-political reality of the last 25 years or so. In the book, I conclude that:

While the Rwanda crisis was the crucible through which the ideas and practice related to humanitarian intervention were re-cast, it remains an open question as to whether those changes will endure . . . Regrettably, for civilians caught in conflict, the 1990s may ultimately prove to have been a liberal interventionist interregnum bracketed by the Cold War on one side and the ‘War on Terror’ on the other. (p. 250)

CB: Your book also tracks the influence of ideas, conveyed in reporting from Rwanda by the British media, on parliamentary debate in Britain. Which ideas do you think made most impact?

JC: At the time of writing, there were few studies of the media and humanitarian intervention that were systematic, comprehensive and, perhaps most importantly, replicable in a manner that would allow for cross-crisis, cross-state comparison. Moreover, this relationship in the British context was even less examined and, as such, the book sought to fill both these gaps. Its main objective was to provide a better understanding of the media–public policy nexus by looking at media coverage, parliamentary debate, and the influence of each on the other, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis. This meant using a combination of thematic analysis, where each story or parliamentary intervention is categorized according to its main theme (for example, refugees, causes of the conflict, peacekeeping, legal issues), as well as conceptual analysis, where each occurrence of a concept within either a story or intervention is counted (for example, legal concepts, regional impact, human rights, military intervention). The choice of themes of coverage or debate, and the specific concepts used, was central to the analysis. And the value of that approach was in many respects borne out by the significance of the conclusions reached. This resulted in a large data set of over 1,700 news stories and 180 parliamentary interventions, coded with 16 themes and 152 concepts that were subsequently reduced to 49, and then 15 key concepts for analysis. The resulting raw data was then broken down in different ways for analysis by phase of the crisis (pre-genocide, genocide, refugee crisis and post-crisis), ideological orientation of the newspaper, type of story, political party and so on. In terms of conclusions, the first is the challenge posed by the results to the past narrative on the ‘failure’ of international media coverage and the effect that this had in reducing pressure for intervention, an argument frequently provided in an anecdotal manner with little if any evidence to substantiate that claim. I think this is a point that is increasingly appreciated – Mark Doyle, for example, who covered the genocide for the BBC, added the following sentence relatively recently to an article published in Media and Mass Atrocity (2019: 34): ‘Blaming the media is pathetic and just wrong.’

At a minimum my book makes clear, ‘The more strident criticism that the inaccuracy, misrepresentation, and low level of coverage contributed to the malaise of the Western response is therefore not supported by this analysis’ (p. 235). Instead, largely accurate field reporting was not matched by editorials or analyses, which either offered a critical assessment or suggested possible ways to curtail or halt the genocide. Indeed, no newspaper argued forcefully for British military intervention to halt the genocide; by the time editorial pages were evaluating scenarios for military action in early May, the critical window within which intervention might have been effective had passed. This finding was reflected in UNAMIR Force Commander General Romeo Dallaire’s assessment that ‘the failing of the process was in the editing rooms . . . The question is, should I have been involved in that . . . and in retrospect I should have’ (p. 110).

If the conclusions about the nature of coverage is a first point of significant difference between my analysis and those before me, a second relates to what I describe as ‘dual movement’ where media concepts have a clear correlation with parliamentary debate and the amount of parliamentary debate affects the amount of media coverage. In Phase 2 of the crisis (the duration of the genocide from April to June), media references to military intervention prompted 28.6 percent of debate in parliament. In turn, the total amount of parliamentary debate is correlated with the total amount of media coverage two weeks afterwards. The result of this analysis is slightly more nuanced – and presented in the conclusion of the book (pp. 243–235) – but, in short, media concepts affect the amount of debate and the total amount of debate affects the amount of media coverage. Hence the dual movement. In a sense this is comforting for those who hold that this type of interplay between political institutions and the media is fundamental to a healthy democracy.

This statistical finding was confirmed in interviews conducted for the book. Former Prime Minister Blair stated:

Sometimes politicians will react to events that are described by the media, so that the agenda in a way is driven by the media. But at other points the political leadership is itself trying to activate the media’s interest, which is a different role. (p. 243)

This dynamic also applies for key international actors; General Dallaire, for example, invested considerable effort to enable reporters to gain access to stories:

When there was no will to reinforce me, it seemed to me the only way to influence anything was to actually go after the sovereign states, and the tool that I was going to do that with was the media. And so, I became even more deliberate with the well-known international new agencies. (p. 108)

CB: Can you elaborate on the importance of the choice of words used by the media to describe crises such as Rwanda’s in 1994?

JC: We have both dealt with the use of words thought to be particularly evocative, such as the term ‘anarchy’, and what was held to be its effect in making intervention seem more difficult and thereby less appealing to potential intervening countries. Another term that has been evocative is ‘tribalism’, which was similarly viewed as contributing to the sense that events were irrational and therefore unmanageable, making intervention less likely to succeed. On this point, the data does not bear out all-encompassing conclusions that have been previously drawn. It is certainly correct that in the first weeks after 6 April, references to tribalism were frequent, particularly in the centre-right newspapers. Though in some cases such references were offered as part of the explanation of the crisis, the overall effect in some newspapers was indeed to create or re-enforce the perception that the violence was irrational and that meaningful intervention was therefore not possible. However, for the year as a whole, references to tribalism did not dominate coverage in the manner previously suggested, with only 18.9 percent of all stories making reference to that concept. In addition, references were skewed toward the centre-right press, with 26.6 percent of stories making reference to it, compared to only 13.7 percent in the centre-left (pp. 72 and 234–235).

While the term tribal may have provided subtle deterrence against military intervention, it is perhaps more significant that many editorials argued unambiguously against intervention on both moral and practical grounds. It is, of course, possible that the use of terms such as tribalism contributed to an environment in which such overt arguments became more credible. Indeed, no newspaper argued unambiguously for British military intervention to halt the genocide, though in a number of cases, arguments were made that greater action – from the UN and the United States – was necessary.

*****

Clarke first explored the topic of British media coverage and its relationship to parliament and policymaking in a PhD he undertook at Cambridge University from 1996 to 1999, before later developing it into a book. He chose the British press because of the role it had played historically in war reporting and British political debate. In 1994, Britain was one of the few countries in the world with the military and diplomatic capacities to intervene in distant crises, making mentions of intervention in the media more credible and relevant. Added to this, when it came to Rwanda, there were no other outside factors that greatly influenced British decision-making: Britain had no obvious national interest in the country, no historical links to it and no meaningful diplomatic presence on the ground.

JC: In his article in Media and Mass Atrocity (2019), Mark Doyle mentions you called a route you took through the capital of Rwanda during the genocide ‘machete alley’. To me, that description provides a shorthand that draws parallels with other crises, like the first Markale market massacre in Bosnia in February 1994 [when almost 70 people were killed by a mortar], or the image of a young woman who hanged herself [after the Srebenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men in July 1995], which prompted US Senator Diane Feinstein to change her vote to lifting the US arms embargo on Bosnia. What did you mean?

CB: I intended it to mean, ‘this is every bit as bad as Bosnia and should be getting the same level of attention’ – an allusion to Bosnia’s ‘sniper’s alley’ – but I fear that remark may have come off as glib. In retrospect, it may have helped convey the presence of militiamen armed with machetes everywhere along the roads, killing Tutsi families at roadblocks, and our limited ability to move around and report on the killings. At that early stage of the genocide, it was easier to be reporting for print, like myself, or for radio, like Mark, than to work for TV. Though more images on the nightly news bulletins would have made more impact, they were near impossible to get; militiamen threatened all of us, but particularly photographers and cameramen. And when we did get them, the BBC at least often deemed them too graphic to broadcast. It was very frustrating for us: no-one wants to inflict pictures of violence on viewers but, in this case, it was particularly important, necessary really, to convey the speed and scale of the killing. The one image from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda that has endured was shot separately by two British cameramen from upstairs floors of an expatriate school in early April. I was with them when they filmed it; we were waiting for a lift or UN armed escort back to Kigali airport, where we were briefly camped. With their cameras on tripods pointing across the valley, they were able to film a small group of men clubbing several people to death in a pile of bodies on a steep, unpaved street lined with modest, mud-brick houses. One of the women had her arms outstretched, begging.

JC: What do you think your reporting achieved at the beginning of the genocide?

CB: As a journalist who covered the first few weeks of the genocide when, we now know, the vast majority of the people who died during it were killed, I have often thought what it was we could have done better, only to reach, after many years of angst, the simple conclusion that the single thing we could have done better was our jobs as reporters. Our working environment was far from easy but nonetheless I know I could have done a better job of doing more interviews, finding interpreters, taking more notes, taking care of my daily logistics (getting ourselves food and fuel for vehicles were challenges) and keeping a cool head. The situation was so overwhelming that, at times, some of us seemed to lose sight of what it was we could do. Rather than railing at the impotence of the UN (whose communication with us could have been more open and direct), or a month later, at Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels for limiting our access to massacre sites behind their lines (again, it would have helped if they simply told us why), or getting frustrated with our news desks for not sitting up and paying the crisis enough attention (we thought), we should have concentrated on our role, which was to provide as much eyewitness reporting from the ground as possible, with quotes that would have woken up even the sleepiest of opinion writers or politicians in London, Paris, Brussels, or New York. Who there, with the advantage of a bird’s eye view, could have missed the significance of a UN peacekeeper from Poland remarking, ‘genocide? This happened in my hometown.’ Or my own comment to a friend when describing a visit (under heavy armed escort) to a low-income suburb in Kigali, where Hutu militias stood guard at every corner: ‘It was like the Warsaw ghetto. [For Tutsi] there was no way out.’ These were the small things that, in the very early days of the genocide, alerted our subconscious to what was going on. In my own article in Media and Mass Atrocity (2019), I call them ‘the fragments of genocide as they passed before our eyes’.

I am speaking for myself here: there were other British journalists who kept their eye on the ball much better than I did. British reporter Mark Huband did not let logistics, hunger or language get in his way but focused on giving the story the coverage it deserved and had to battle with the preconceptions of the Africa editor at The Guardian to do so. I think now that I too should have concentrated my efforts on being a better reporter – indignant perhaps at world indifference, but polite and calm – and let everyone else get on with their jobs as better peacekeepers, better diplomats, better soldiers, better humanitarians. In an off-the-cuff remark, a friend, Lindsey Hilsum, who covered Day One of the genocide, once said Dallaire ‘should have acted more like a General’, a remark I doubt he would disagree with. Likewise, we could all have been better versions of ourselves and that would have helped raise the standards of our reporting and perhaps its impact. Even so, I am not sure that collectively we would have altered the outcome of the genocide, given that its execution was so breathtakingly swift. But some of the later killings might have been prevented, and that would have made a difference to many thousands of Rwandans. It might also have altered the long-term outcome, which to this day is politically tense.

JC: Do you see ways in which the book falls short of fully explaining the impact of media coverage?

CB: Its necessarily narrow focus on the nexus between the British media, British parliament and British government policy risks conveying the idea that British coverage was the only important coverage there was, eclipsing other media. It was not only the British media that covered the genocide, of course, but media from all over: the first news of it was broadcast and relayed worldwide in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Swahili and Kirundi, to say nothing of far more detailed reporting in Kinyarwanda by Rwandan journalists for Radio Rwanda and the hate radio state station, Radio Milles Collines. The latter reported much of what was going on at roadblocks, albeit in coded terminology, and on officials in the new rump government – their movements around the country and the content of their speeches. The former, which was an organ of the Rwandan state, carried news, as well as greetings between soldiers and their families at home. Belgian’s radio La Une, with its post-colonial contacts (Rwanda had been a Belgian colony), understood the magnitude of the crisis from the start. Journalists from top US newspapers covered the genocide, as did journalists from France and Spain. My reporting for The Times (London) contributed to an understanding of the genocide as well organized because in it I identified the link between the militias and the Rwandan gendarmerie supporting them with shelter and supplies. The documentary I put together, as well as others broadcast in Britain in May, would have also had some impact on some members of the British public and politicians.

JC: Do you see any parallels between Rwanda and crises unfolding now?

CB: This is where I think your book provides an important benchmark. With military powers like the United States and France withdrawing their troops from Afghanistan and the Sahel, your book serves as a reminder of the thorny question of intervention. The fact that this debate was far louder at the end of the Cold War than it is now is disquieting, given the crises of the past decade in which mass and even genocidal atrocities have been reported – in Myanmar, for example, Syria, or Tigray. Debate on military intervention for humanitarian purposes seems to have been largely silent in Britain since parliament voted against backing the idea of US intervention in Syria. Now, with conflict and killings in Ethiopia – one of Africa’s most populous, most militarized nations – are British politicians paying even half as much attention to what the British media is saying than they did during the Rwanda crisis 27 years ago? After Rwanda, Douglas Hurd pioneered the idea of shifting more responsibility for tackling crises to regional powers, and we have seen that unfold since, with equal weight given now to shuttle diplomacy by African elder statesmen. Much of the global clout still lies, however, with members of the UN Security Council. With a belligerent Russia and China’s growing economic power, do Britain, France and the US have more leverage today or less? Or for Ethiopia, today does leverage lie with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates? These days, Al Jazeera’s coverage from Qatar may be more comprehensive and more influential than, say, CNN’s, and Facebook and Twitter may have replaced FM radio as platforms for peddling messages of ethnic hatred. The actors may be different but many of the dynamics are the same or similar. Likewise, as new crises unfold, coverage, politics and any debate on intervention – and whether it would do any good – are worth revisiting for closer examination. Your book captures a phase of military intervention and is a useful guide to mechanisms that lie behind it. In the case of Rwanda, it is also a testament to the long-lasting consequences of inaction.