Wall Street Journal - April 30, 2004
Yaroslav Trofimov, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

KIGALI, Rwanda - Charles Kabonero, a skinny 23-year-old in a Voice of America T-shirt, is the fourth managing editor in the three-year history of Rwanda's only independent newspaper.

His predecessors all fled into exile after receiving death threats or being arrested because the paper criticized the government.

Mr. Kabonero has already served four stints in jail for his writings. "We keep making news because of what happens to us," he says, holding up a copy of the newspaper, called Umuseso, with a front-page article about its latest brush with the Rwandan government. "To us, it's now ordinary to be arrested."

The newspaper's tribulations aren't a straightforward case of a strict regime muzzling the press. In Rwanda, the press played an instrumental role in a staggering genocide 10 years ago. Now the question is how much repression is justified in the cause of stabilizing the country. The paper's struggle is part of a larger one in Rwanda over how to best heal its wounds -- and ensure one of the greatest horrors of the 20th century doesn't happen again.

For 100 days in 1994, extremists among Rwanda's majority Hutu group rampaged through the central African nation slaughtering Tutsis, a minority, and fellow Hutus who opposed the genocide. Almost a million Rwandans were killed while the world looked on -- but did almost nothing to stop the carnage. The United Nations withdrew most of its peacekeeping contingent after Western nations refused support. The genocide continued until a predominantly Tutsi rebel force led by Paul Kagame, who is now the president, ousted the Hutu-dominated regime.

Rwanda's media helped incite the violence. The radio broadcast addresses of targeted families and the locations of groups trying to hide. Mobs burned Tutsis alive, tossed grenades into packed churches and drowned entire families in public latrines. "When they came for us, they were listening to the radio," recalls Anne Marie Mukamana, a Tutsi genocide survivor, whose husband and 1-year-old daughter were killed in 1994. She was raped and infected with AIDS at the time.

The debate over how much a government should restrain the press in a violent society is being faced elsewhere. It's a balance Western-led administrations are having to strike in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo -- where ethnic tensions have been used to justify shutting down media -- and in Iraq, where the U.S.-led occupation has forcibly closed down some publications.

Mr. Kagame and his Rwanda Patriotic Front are now trying to instill an ideology of national unity that transcends the Tutsi-Hutu divide. That includes an effort to control the media in the name of preventing more bloodshed. Officials argue that freedom of expression should take a back seat to ethnic reconciliation. "There are some things that have to be banned," says Tito Rutaremara, Rwanda's national ombudsman and a French-educated intellectual behind much of RPF's ideology. "The killers are still here, and so are the victims. We have to be vigilant all the time."

Barring "divisionist" speech is vital since so many Rwandans were involved in the killings, he says. "The genocide here has been committed by millions of people," says Mr. Rutaremara. "Here, it is not the same as in Germany, where only the SS or the Gestapo did it."

In recent years, the government's policies have helped Rwanda become one of Africa's safest countries, boosting its economy and attracting desperately needed foreign investment.

But there is a controversial side to Rwanda's unity drive. Mr. Kagame's fellow Tutsis -- who make up about 15% of the nation's 7.8 million inhabitants -- hold the main positions of power in Rwanda, in government, the military and business.

Critics say the charge of "divisionism" is increasingly used to smear Mr. Kagame's opponents, disband Hutu-dominated political parties and harass journalists who criticize the authorities. "As long as they don't like you, you'll be charged with divisionism," says Umuseso's editor, Mr. Kabonero. Some contend the government's actions could actually set the stage for future violence, instead of preventing it.

For centuries, Rwanda's Tutsi minority lorded over Hutus. That was reinforced in the 1930s by Belgian colonial rulers who promoted the Tutsi elite and implemented a system of ethnic identity cards. In 1959, as Rwanda's Tutsis clamored for the country's independence, the Belgian governor switched sides and encouraged Hutus to rise up. A blood-soaked Hutu takeover sent many Tutsis into refugee camps abroad for decades.

Under Hutu rule, Tutsis inside Rwanda routinely suffered discrimination and state-sponsored violence. Tutsi refugees weren't allowed to return. In 1990, a well-armed Tutsi insurgent group led by Mr. Kagame, the current president, invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda.

In this volatile climate, a newspaper called Kangura spurred sales by promoting Hutu supremacist ideology and urging a final solution to the "Tutsi problem." A private radio station, RTLM, wooed listeners with pop music and anti-Tutsi propaganda.

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Rwanda's Hutu president was shot down. The Hutu military and security forces immediately blamed the Tutsi rebels.

Massacres began hours later, with the state bureaucracy used to hunt down Tutsis and the regime's foes. RTLM inflamed the hysteria with broadcasts referring to Tutsis as "cockroaches" and "snakes." The radio station provided machete-wielding mobs with precise on-air directions to hideouts of people slated for extermination.

In the aftermath of the genocide, a tribunal was set up in Tanzania, to determine who was responsible. Last December, the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ruled that Kangura and RTLM journalists were just as responsible for the killings as those who pulled triggers and slashed throats.

The UN court gave its maximum penalty of life in prison to the editor of Kangura, Hassan Ngeze, and a co-founder of RTLM, Ferdinand Nahimana, for causing genocide through the "poisoning of minds." They are in a UN detention facility in Tanzania, pending appeals.

To stabilize the nation, Mr. Kagame's government is teaching a new version of Rwanda's history, to university students, soldiers, released prisoners and others. According to the government, Hutus and Tutsis are no longer ethnically different after generations of intermarriage. Differences between the groups based largely on lifestyle -- Hutus were traditionally farmers, and Tutsis cow herders -- were exacerbated by Belgian authorities for political purposes, the government says. As proof, it cites the absence of organized Hutu-Tutsi violence in Rwanda before 1959.

Last year, Mr. Kagame won a seven-year term as president with 95% of the vote, in an election European Union observers say was marred by fraud and intimidation. Before the election, the government imprisoned critics and political opponents of Mr. Kagame, on charges of fomenting "division."

Mr. Kagame is a regular visitor to Washington and European capitals and his country receives more Western aid per capita than almost any African country. Yet some human-rights groups complain he doesn't get the sort of criticism meted out to other African leaders with similar records of repression. "Burdened by guilt over their inaction during the genocide, many foreign donors have generously supported the Rwandan government -- credited with having ended the genocide -- while ordinarily overlooking its human rights abuses," Human Rights Watch, a New York-based international organization, said in a January report.

The U.S., which has given Rwanda $700 million in aid since the genocide, criticized the nation this year in its State Department human-rights report for "serious abuses" including restriction of political freedoms, arbitrary arrests and harassment of independent media.

Mr. Kagame rejects his Western critics. "They have no moral authority. I wish they would be humble and accept the tremendous progress that we've made in this country," he said in a recent meeting with reporters.

Journalists at Umuseso were detained for stories written about last year's election. "We were the only ones to treat the candidates equally," says Mr. Kabonero, who became editor in January, after his predecessor sought political asylum in Tanzania. "In the government's eyes, if you are independent, you are automatically in opposition."

Umuseso, the nation's largest paper, is produced in an unmarked office consisting of two tiny rooms off a dirty and dark Kigali courtyard. There, Mr. Kabonero and his staff of 13 -- a mix of Tutsis and Hutus -- put the paper together on five aging desktop computers donated by European embassies. A poster on one wall shows Rwandan government members; another promotes tourism to Uganda. The furniture consists of chipped tables and shaky chairs. "As you can see, we are poor," Mr. Kabonero says. "But we make sure the paper is out every week."

Since the nation's only printing press is controlled by the government, the paper must print its run of as many as 20,000 copies in Uganda, then truck them in. At the border, Rwandan police seize the entire shipment and take it to Kigali for inspection. If an article especially offends the government, an entire issue can be impounded.

With Rwanda's state-controlled companies refusing to advertise in Umuseso, the paper survives on circulation revenue and rare advertisements placed by the UN or international-aid organizations. An army of street vendors hawk the colorful paper for about 50 cents -- or more than half a Rwandan's daily average income -- at Kigali's major intersections.

The paper refrains from personal attacks on Mr. Kagame. While a recent edition described government officials' reprisals against the paper, it also featured an editorial titled "Bravo Kagame," which insisted the officials acted against the president's will. "We know there are some things we cannot say," Mr. Kabonero says.

Like the president, Mr. Kabonero is a Tutsi. He was a teenager, living with his exiled family in Uganda, when the genocide occurred. He was among the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi refugees who returned to Rwanda after Mr. Kagame took power. Mr. Kabonero, who combines work with studying journalism at Rwanda's National University, says it's crucial for his paper to stay independent. Rwanda's past problems with the media, he says, were caused by the close link between some outlets and extremists in the government.

Rwanda's free-speech advocates say the government is drawing dangerously wrong lessons from 1994. They argue that stifling political discourse -- especially about ethnic relations -- will breed resentment that could rekindle violence. "Kagame is sitting on a volcano that is dormant but active -- and one day it will blow up again," says Faustin Twagiramungu, who was Rwanda's prime minister in the first post-genocide government.

Mr. Twagiramungu, who ran against Mr. Kagame last year, now lives in exile in Belgium. A moderate Hutu, he barely escaped the Hutu death squads in 1994; his four brothers were killed.

As it seeks to draw readers, Umuseso can be sensationalist, with one recent page-one story headlined: "A Boy Becomes a Girl -- Is That Possible?" But the paper also gets scoops: Umuseso's reports are credited by diplomats with prompting the government to remove several officials implicated in corruption and human-rights abuses, including the deputy chairman of the Supreme Court.

The government, which denies the dismissals resulted from the newspaper's reporting, makes no apologies for the way Umuseso is treated. Mr. Rutaremara, Rwanda's ombudsman, says the arrests of Mr. Kabonero and others happened because Umuseso often prints rumors as fact, slandering government officials. "They have no capacity to make investigations," he says. "They are not serious and it becomes dangerous." In Rwanda, he adds, journalism is for "people who fail to get any other work."

While Rwandan authorities allow Umuseso to survive -- knowing a newspaper's influence is limited in a nation where half the people are illiterate -- they exercise far-stricter controls over the airwaves. It is only this year that Rwanda permitted competition with the state radio monopoly, the main source of news for most Rwandans.

Mr. Kabonero says he once hoped that the new broadcaster, Radio 10, would be another independent voice. But Radio 10 -- Rwanda's first private station since the lethal RTLM -- isn't courting controversy. At a lavish kick-off party last month in Kigali's new Intercontinental Hotel, Radio 10's owner Eugene Nyagahene evoked RTLM's gruesome record to a crowd of dignitaries and then pledged: "Such history will never be repeated."

Instead of politics, pop music is the mainstay at the station, which touts itself as "Daily Pleasure." The staff, made up mostly of former Tutsi refugees who came to Rwanda after the genocide, simply borrows news from government broadcasts. "We won't discuss things such as ethnic relations," says Mr. Nyagahene. "It's too early for that."

Umuseso's Mr. Kabonero -- who says he is thankful that Radio 10 agreed to buy ads in his paper -- understands the broadcaster's caution. "It would be a very big problem for them to be independent," he says. "They've seen what happened to us."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

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