Reporting on Genocide in Rwanda

By Jenya Goloubeva & Sabine Thier

Driving out to a remote Church in Rwanda’s countryside in July of 1994, Jeune Pritchard knew she was going to one of the thousands of massacre sites. But she was unprepared for what she saw.

The place looked deceivingly idyllic. But within the Church laid the evidence of atrocities that ravaged Rwanda just several weeks before.

"You know, you couldn’t step into it because there were so many bodies—kids and women," says Jeune who was then the Executive Producer for ABC Radio’s’ Background Briefing. Nearly 10 years past, she remains visibly moved by the memory.

Jeune was meeting an Italian doctor at the Church who ran one of Rwanda’s orphanages for survivors of the genocide. These were children who were pulled out from the mounts of dead bodies at sites like this one. Miraculously alive but alone in the world.

"Kids with terrible wounds or missing limbs or terrible machete cuts across the back of their necks where the Hutus tried to sever their heads," says Jeune.

It was her idea to go to Rwanda to produce two 50-minute radio documentaries that provide an analysis beyond the scope of news reports. She had three weeks, a pup tent, a pair of hiking boots and two tape recorders.

"It’s an indulgence and a privilege," she says of her journalistic experience in Rwanda. She witnessed one of the darkest events in human history since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Roughly 75% of the country’s Tutsi population was exterminated by the Hutus in just three months. That means that Tutsis were being murdered at nearly three times the rate of Jewish extermination during the Holocaust.

"What do you do as a little journalist from Australia seeing this? All you can do is go there and report it," says Jeune.

The task for foreign correspondents is to provide the most truthful eyewitness report of events, and place them in context for a home audience.

But what context does one give to genocide? The ideology of decimation is a complicated and open question. "Are there reasons why this happens—this crazed desire to remove one ethnic grouping? How do people do this to other people?" asks Jeune.

Rwanda’s conflict runs deep into history. At the core, it is a power struggle between the dominant Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority. The situation was further complicated by nearly 70 years of German and Belgian colonization.

The colonizers increased the power of the Tutsis by allowing them fuller control over Rwanda’s bureaucracy, military and the Hutu population.

However, in the 1950s Hutus started to demand for better living conditions and greater autonomy. The Tutsis were thrown out of power by the Hutus and Belgians in 1959. Following independence in 1962, the Hutus took over government for the first time in Rwanda’s history. A large number of Tutsis left the country for neighbouring Burundi, among them Tutsi rebels.

The conflict did not end there. In 1963, some 20,00 Tutsis were killed following an incursion by Tutsi rebels from Burundi. In 1973, the Rwandan President Gregoire Kayibanda was overthrown by his army commander Juvenal Habyarimana, a moderate Hutu who managed to keep the Hutu-Tutsi hatred under control for the next 18 years.

But in 1990 the country imploded with the invasion of 5000 Ugandan-based Tutsi rebels called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Within days the Hutu army went on a rampage against the Tutsis killing thousands of people. In the next two years, the RPF repeatedly tried to invade Rwanda—unsuccessfully. In 1993 the Rwandan government and the RPF signed a peace accord, which turned out to be short lived. The worst came in April 1994.
Rwanda’s genocide was seemingly sparked by a plane crash, which killed President Habyarimana. The government pinned the blame on Tutsi rebels. Within days, a systematic killing campaign was unveiled. It was so efficiently directed that nearly a million Tutsis were murdered primarily with machetes.

Jeune says that she felt under-briefed in the chaos from the aftermath of genocide, which officially ended when the RPF headed by now President Paul Kagame took power on July 4, 1994.

Jeune had read as much as she could. But for the task before her, she says, "I had an incredibly general background as to what Rwanda was, the history of Rwanda over the last 500 years, what Burundi was." Amidst the tragedy, Jeune tried to understand why it had happened.

Every Hutu in Rwanda was called upon to kill at least one Tutsi. National radio broadcasts detailed the Tutsi hideouts.

All sectors of the Hutu society became involved in the killings, including the Catholic Church. "There were certainly people from the Catholic Church involved in killing people, directing the killings of them," Jeune says.

The militia forced ordinary Hutus to participate—kill or be killed. Directing this madness was the highly educated Rwandan elite. "These are people who have European educations. These are people who are multilingual," Jeunesays. "It was medieval…It was medieval."
She recalls the piles of bodies discovered across the country when she was there—bodies that were bulldozed in the "clean-up," after the country had been liberated. "They’d find heaps of bodies with limbs sticking out still, people barely covered," she says.

"It’s hard when you’re there," she says. But "you operate in a very pragmatic way. You think ‘I’ve got to report all this.’ And you do," says Jeune. "But it’s fairly devastating."
It is difficult not to feel small before the survivors, who Jeune says had such a remarkable dignity about them. It is hard not to feel helpless before their tragedy, and impossible not to be deeply affected by it.

"There is certainly sympathy towards the Tutsis," Jeune says about her reports. "You can’t help it."

Jeune reported what had happened as accurately as was possible. She did not take a specific angle. "Clearly you know you’re moved," she says. Her reports are "an attempt to try to understand why it happened." But even to her who witnessed it, " it’s kind of hard to believe it has happened.".

One of the challenges of an assignment like this is making the audience at home care. Jeune says: "A small African country like this gets dismissed as being just tribal: ‘It’s Africa. That’s what they do.’"

The media’s dominant news values often preclude stories of small countries with few natural resources like Rwanda that have no place in the global economy. "It’s not Iraq or Afghanistan with pipelines running through it," says Jeune. "The sad thing is nobody really cares."

What happens in a country like Rwanda after the genocide—after the reporters have left for the next trouble spot? A country cannot just forget about hundreds of thousands of people—women and children—who have been killed. "If you don’t address the killings, and if people aren’t held accountable, I think a country doesn’t heal," Jeune says.

Tutsis and Hutus have to reconcile as they return to the villages in which they had lived side by side before April of 1994. Jails are now filled with Hutus who carried out the killings but prosecution of those who masterminded the horror is slow and obstacle riddled. Many are no longer in the country.

But Jeune says that no matter how imperfect the system is, she believes in the value of international criminal tribunals. There has to be some kind of sense of justice, faces that can be held accountable for the atrocities must be seen.

Rwanda continues to struggle in its healing process. Paul Kagame who has just recently been re-elected President has "huge difficulties." He is running the country like a dictatorship.

Jeune found him to be "an impressive man" when she spoke with him during her stay in Rwanda. She says that she would be interested to talk with him and members of his government again, about the past and their vision for the future.

Jeune will be going back to Rwanda and include her research into a PhD thesis on the country’s experience. Ten years later, she still wants to shed some light on how these atrocities could have happened; how people got caught up in this horror. "I am trying to explain how we might interpret it to ourselves."

With her experience in both radio and television current affairs for the ABC and the SBS, Jeune has a variety of choices for PhD research. "But that has a particular attachment," she says. "I still feel moved by it."

She says that she understands how the job of a foreign correspondent can become addictive. It gives the reporter the sensation of constantly being "on the edge of something." "People find out what’s happening through you."

It hardens people. "You see things, it’s your duty to tell it," she says. "It also kills people."
But as for her own experience, Jeune says she was not nervous for her safety in Rwanda. "Because I wasn’t there for the killings. Otherwise it would have been frightening,."

During her stay in the country, organized attacks on Tutsis continued. The United National High Commission for Refugees was reporting that some 12,000 people per week were moving out of Eastern Rwanda into Tanaania. The ex-Hutu militia and some civilians carried on well after July 4.

Refugee camps were filled with Hutus, many of whom had killed their Tutsi neighbours. Jeune visited several in Goma—"very violent places," she says.

So the danger was real. And the conditions in which she worked fell out of the norm of a hotel stay. Jeune pitched her tent on the grounds of an aid organization. Her entire stay was very basic, often with access to just a single bucket of water and one set of clothes.

Her living conditions and emotional well being after witnessing the horrors of the genocide was not what she thought about. Next to what the Rwandans had lived through, she is not interested in even discussing it. "The people who were there, who saw it, who tried to shield their own children…," she begins.

"You never go in objectively," says Jeune.

Nor do you go in prepared for what Jeune found in Rwanda. The professionalism lies in humility, which comes with the recognition that foreign correspondent are privy to a rare glimpse into humanity.

"It is a privileged position," she says.