Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech (2004)

[struggle4progress]

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

DOCKET: Volume XXI, No 2, Summer 2004
Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech
Susan Benesch

In November 1991, a large drawing of a machete appeared on the cover of Kangura, a Hutu-owned Rwandan tabloid. Along one edge of the machete's curved blade appeared the question: WHAT WEAPONS SHALL WE USE TO CONQUER THE INYENZI ONCE AND FOR ALL?? -Inyenzi,- or cockroach, was a term coined in the 1960s by some of Rwanda's governing Hutus to refer to rebel fighters of Rwanda's minority ethnic group, the Tutsi. In the early 1990s, inyenzi became a slur applied to any Tutsi.

In April 1994, more than two years later, the Rwandan genocide erupted. Over the following three months, in what the United Nations later characterized as 'a tidal wave of political and ethnic killings,' more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by the armed forces, the presidential guard, and the ruling party's youth militia.

By the time the genocide began, after four years of civil war, Hassan Ngeze, the founder, publisher, and editor of Kangura, had printed reams of anti-Tutsi vitriol, but he had not called for mass killing of Tutsi civilians. In fact, he had stopped publishing his paper by the time the genocide began, and no killings were directly linked to what he had printed. So after Ngeze was indicted in 1997 for incitement to genocide, among other crimes, by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (which had been convened in Arusha, Tanzania), three judges had to decide whether he could be held responsible for causing the killings of hundreds of thousands of people - or had been exercising his right to free speech when he published his anti-Tutsi materials. Ngeze was tried together with two other media executives: Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, both founders of a radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), whose anti-Tutsi vitriol was more explicit than that of Kangura. RTLM broadcasters not only read out the names of people to be killed but added their license plate numbers - so they could be hunted down if, after hearing their names on the radio, they tried to escape by car.

At the end of the 'Media' trial, which lasted more than three years, the judges - a South African, a Sri Lankan, and a Norwegian - issued a 361-page ruling that is a landmark in international law.1 They found Ngeze, Nahimana, and Barayagwiza guilty, declaring: 'Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.' As one witness put it, the defendants' crime was to 'spread petrol throughout the country little by little, so that one day would be able to set fire to the whole country.'2 The judges agreed. Their decision was legally daring and, in spite of its length, not fully explained. But it was correct ...

http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=193&paper=2022