Echoes of Violence

...Some of Ruggiu's monologues seemed to do little other than leverage his Europeanness for credibility...

...after a cue from RTLM, militia and soldiers butchered some six hundred people inside, while the station gleefully reported the results...

...Across the country, thousands of listeners were relaying, embellishing, and even misrepresenting RTLM's broadcasts...

...According to a report by the press freedom NGO Article 19, one of those threatened was opposition journalist Joseph Mudatsikira...

...Habimana once asked with rhetorical incredulity...

...Providing an example of what to emulate and a warning of what to avoid, Hitimana showed that it was better to denounce than to be denounced and that even personal ties could be subordinated to the imperatives of the genocide...

...We shook hands and made small talk before I introduced myself...

...The raucous, hard-drinking Noel (Noheli) Hitimana was much beloved from his years at Radio Rwanda...

...His mood darkened during the broadcasts, and he would climb down and gather people to tell them what he had heard of the latest Tutsi atrocities...

...Bemeriki acquired a reputation during the genocide for her impassioned, almost frenzied, announcing style...

...A Harmony of the Spheres "You Americans cry a lot when someone dies," Jean d'Amour, my interpreter, told me with surprise one day as we waited for lunch...

...It would continue until 5 p.m...

...Tutsi civilians sheltered in a mosque in Kigali's Nyamirambo neighborhood in the first weeks of the genocide were not so lucky...

...Through radio, the genocide unfolded in thousands of locales, turning ordinary Rwandans into witnesses to the killings and bringing them into the massacres in ways at once both terrifying and mundane...

...Some people were against RTLM, but didn't have the strength to say so DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 81 RWANDA in public," recalled Jamad Nkundintware, a Hutu mason...

...Months later, I looked for an account of the conversation in my journal, but found that it had not even merited a mention...

...So rather than making him into a latter-day Kurtz, Ruggiu's race was at best a gimmick...

...Of course," he replied...

...Rather, the genocide lives on in the grief, pain, and anger that has saturated everything to the extent that one's loss seems to have been reduced to only a single piece of an imponderably vast suffering...

...In the ideological universe of RTLM, one never spoke of killing, but only of "work" or "clearing the brush" (courtesy of "tools," rather than machetes or clubs, of course...

...For the Hutu who risked their lives to shelter others, however, the intimacy of Hitimana's broadcasts made them more than death threats...

...And the elusive goal of Development, promising a vague future of prosperity, justified umuganda, a weekly ritual of communal labor forced on nearly every peasant in the country...

...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 79 RWANDA For many reasons besides radio, hundreds of thousands of people heeded these calls by manning roadblocks, joining search patrols, looting, and steadily killing in their own locales...

...The genocide's continued hold on everyday life seven years later is a reminder of the fact that it involved the direct efforts of htindreds of thousands of ordinary people on a day-today basis, shattering the ties of neighborliness, friendship, and love...

...In fact, there appeared to be no reason to hire him other than the fact that he was white...

...He showed that Radio Rwanda was interested in its listeners," explained confessed genocidaire Elie Ndabamenye, adding that a greeting from Hitimana was something like a small honor, a moment of celebrity and recognition for hard work...

...The same Vedaste Nteziryayo went on to kill many people during the genocide, although another of his Tutsi neighbors insisted that he was a good man who had saved lives as well...

...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 85...

...only intense diplomatic pressure saved them from being massacred...

...What you fought for in '59 is being taken away...

...Centuries of 'civilization" hung in the air like overripe fruit, dangling just out of the reach of the Rwandans listening in rural hilltop homes...

...On the other hand, as news spread that France was sending troops to Rwanda to bring humanitarian aid and cover the withdrawal of the collapsing genocidal regime, Bemeriki told Hutu to welcome the troops warmly...

...Habimana encouraged him to "keep it up" and then advised listeners, "When testing if people like a radio station, you must ask the following question: who are the animateurs of the radio whom you know...

...And in the city's central prison, I found many alleged genocidaires, most of them ordinary farmers, such as Frodouald Ndoliyobijya, who recalled RTLM's antics with a mischievous giggle one minute and in the next humbly told of how he murdered a Tutsi whom his father had tried to save...

...In one wellknown incident, an RTLM reporter covering an attempt by UN peacekeepers to rescue a group of refugees from the Hotel Mille Collines in Kigali relayed the names of all sixtytwo evacuees on the air, including several prominent opponents of the regime...

...Sometimes, RTLM played with its listeners as much as it played to them, using mistrust and fear to build unity...

...During one interview at a roadblock, a man boasted of having helped to kill five inyenzi...

...I asked if this happened every day...

...After all, what is striking about the genocide is not simply that the priest, the schoolteacher, and the radio animateur spoke with one voice of the necessity to "work," but rather that they did so during the weekly sermon, the daily lesson, and the hourly bulletin...

...AFTER SOME TIME in Rwanda, especially the weeks spent working at the Kigali prison, I became habituated to these stories...

...RTLM even had its token white man, a Belgian named Georges Ruggiu...

...They adroitly navigated and manipulated the hierarchies and bonds within audiences, turning the very act of listening into a form of participation in the genocide...

...This article was adapted from a longer study on the role of radio in the Rwandan genocide...

...Hello, good day, have you started to work yet...

...In We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch writes of a prominent Hutu extremist who, taking pity on some Tutsi children at a roadblock, admonishes the militiaman harassing them, "Don't you listen to the radio...

...Noheli Sends His Best We were crouched in the shadow of the mudbrick house, wary of the hot sun and of the listening children peeking through the cracks in the fence...

...Without it, there might have been, during the late evenings in bars after a shift at the roadblock, or in the midst of a nighttime walk home past a banana grove, machete in hand, at least some stillness, a bit of silence, a moment to think alone...

...DARRYL LI works for the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, in the Gaza strip...

...RTLM invoked History, Democracy, and Development to mobilize people rather than to render them docile, using these familiar ideas to mask unthinkable ends...

...You have to start cleaning...

...While handing me a packet of life-saving malaria pills, a doctor once said that he lost ten relatives in the killings...

...I stood up when she entered the room...

...For decades before the genocide, these ideas were the foundation of an authoritarian, single-party state that micromanaged the population and in which Tutsi were marginalized but almost never attacked...

...During the monologue, a neighbor—Vedaste Nteziryayo—looked over in Kizungu's direction and menaced him with a slashing motion across the throat...

...Animateurs relayed personal messages from listeners, while soldiers and militia spontaneously brought suspected RPF collaborators to the station's studios to be interrogated on the air...

...If you do not know them that means that you do not like this radio...

...Or rather, he wanted to do so many things at the same time that he did nothing...

...The "work" of manning roadblocks or searching houses began in the morning, when some locals would report to the authorities...

...In a country with few newspapers or televisions, the medium's portability and many uses enable it to cross boundaries of public and private life and to punctuate daily schedules...

...another time, Habimana announced that all Tutsi who were not against the regime should man the roadblocks alongside Hutu, only to tell people the next day, "Look around, the enemy is among you...

...82 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 In seeking to turn listeners toward a common goal, RTLM treated them as thinking subjects rather than obedient drones...

...The station spread hateful propaganda about the country's Tutsi minority, guided people to where the "enemy" hid, and goaded ordinary people into joining the killings the most famous of its entreaties being the uncharacteristically blatant "The graves are only half full...

...Who are the RTLM animateurs you know...

...Venant Musirikare, an elderly Tutsi, was so terrified by the hardening attitudes of his neighbors that he bought a recording of Bikindi's songs to convince them of his loyalty...

...According to several people I interviewed, educated French speakers, themselves often local organizers of the genocide, regularly translated and explained Ruggiu's broadcasts for others...

...FOR THESE euphemisms to take on such meanings—to make roadblock duty, search patrols, and killing acceptable activities for people to take part in—RTLM appropriated three ideas that had shaped modern Rwanda's understanding of itself: History, Democracy, and Development...

...RTLM's lingering omnipresence had to do with the fact that the Interahamwe were only a small part of a nationwide audience that tuned in for news, entertainment, and the latest instructions...

...During its brief existence as the first licensed private broadcaster in the country, RTLM quickly surpassed the stilted, government-run Radio Rwanda in popularity with a combination of virulence, humor, and style...

...In the summer of 2000, six years after it was knocked off the air in the wake of the collapse of the genocidal regime, reminders of RTLM could be found everywhere...

...The pressure to listen--and to be seen listening—to the station was immense...

...This indirectness, which left nothing unsaid, is apparent even in the title of the Simon Bikindi hit "You Know What I'm Saying...

...Yet the code of the genocide, like all totalitarian languages, sometimes could not be sustained...

...According to one of his former neighbors, a murderer of some notoriety named Hakiri used to spend mornings sitting on the corrugated metal roof of his shop outside Kigali with a radio to his ear, listening to RTLM...

...During one evening program broadcast several weeks before the genocide, Ruggiu read passages from Machiavelli's The Prince on the air, expounding on the necessity of disingenuousness in politics, while classiRWANDA cal European music droned on in the background...

...It seems that Rwandans have been able to continue with life only by accepting the inescapability of death, while mutual suspicion and tension gnaw at the edges of nights and days...

...The UN judges who sentenced Ruggiu to twelve years in prison cited his European background and consequent unfamiliarity with Rwanda as mitigating factors in determining his punishment, but never mentioned that his being European was key to his involvement with RTLM in the first place...

...Bemeriki would say, for example, 'Kill...

...For the people I spoke to who owned radios, listening was often the first thing they did in the morning and the last thing they did at night...

...The semi-private "hate radio" station, linked to an elite circle of Hutu hard-liners, was allegedly the brainchild of Ferdinand Nahimana, a Sorbonne-trained historian currently on trial before a UN-run court in Tanzania for incitement to genocide...

...In what was an almost constant refrain, Kantano Habimana, RTLM's star animateur, warned listeners: "Masses, be vigilant...

...By extension, only the Tutsi could be blamed for their fate—"Will those people truly continue to commit suicide against the majority...

...One Hutu farmer I spoke to recalled several of his neighbors proclaiming, "Kantano [Habimana] said there are no RPF troops here, so we can continue our work...

...I would not object to being called insensitive (or anything worse), but, as Jean d'Amour asked rhetorically, "How can one cry so much for one person when so many have died...

...The Kigali hostel in which I slept was owned by a nearby church, whose priest, Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, allegedly carried a radio tuned to RTLM during the genocide while singling out Tutsi members of his flock for elimination (Munyeshyaka later fled to France...

...I N ITS ANNOUNCEMENTS, advice, and encouragements, RTLM cast participation in the genocide in the mold of umuganda, likening extermination to controlling soil erosion or preventing forest fires, efforts in which everyone had to pitch in...

...It was work...

...Furthermore, only a fraction of the population knew enough French to fully understand him...

...As Mwamini Nyrandegeya, a woman of mixed ethnicity who survived the genocide as a servant to the militiaman who raped her, put it, "RTLM animait dans l'ambiance du moment...

...Hitimana's broadcasts on RTLM exploited a decade's worth of familiarity in order to insinuate the genocide into everyday life, to make its presence felt even in small homes in rural areas at dawn—including the many in which Tutsi were being hidden...

...The word "Tutsi" itself was used far less often than inyenzi (cockroaches) or inkotanyi (the self-given nickname of RPF fighters...

...Short, limping, and slightly rotund, her pink prisoner's uniform reminiscent of an illfitting ballerina's tutu, Bemeriki hardly resembled the voice of genocide...

...Several dozen kilometers away I met Tito Rutaremara, a Tutsi, DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 83 RWANDA who recalled that during breaks in the work day, locals would gather in groups as large as a hundred to listen to RTLM, closely following the information relayed to plan the next day's activities...

...The French said if we don't stop killing children they'll stop arming and helping us...

...Mudatsikira was killed several days later...

...The narrative of History provided a raison d'etre for the postcolonial regime through comparisons with the merciless exploitation of Hutu farmers by Tutsi collaborators during the era of Belgian rule...

...It's still tidy...

...I acknowledged the statement with a nod as I left his office, thinking not of his loss but only of my burning fever...

...Rwandans are not an incredibly stoic people who have simply shrugged off death, nor have they achieved some elusive stage of "closure" and "moved on...

...For just as thousands of Rwandans like Vedaste Nteziryayo chose to kill some Tutsi and to save others, they could also invoke RTLM for their own ends—even, at times, to resist the genocide...

...Although three months of conversations with detainees, survivors, and others made it clear that Rwandans actively debated and critiqued what they heard on competing radio stations— including Radio Rwanda and the RPFcontrolled Radio Muhabura—RTLM somehow captured the national imagination...

...Like the killings, RTLM, too, was omnipresent, routinized, and intimate...

...IN A SENSE, ordinary Rwandans, too, performed RTLM's broadcasts...

...If you are told to do something, you are not told to do the opposite," Bemeriki insisted...

...His monologues featured litanies of places where local residents were warned to remain vigilant or urged to hunt down inyenzi...

...After months of mixing anti-Tutsi invective with superficial assurances that not all Tutsi were bad, it was only sensible for her to make it absolutely clear that these white men were different from the hated Belgians...

...Rwandans obviously resent whites as much as they respect them...

...I see it on television...

...Kantano Habimana captivated audiences with his electrifying announcing style, narrating the results of massacres as if they were victories on the football pitch (he is rumored to have died in a refugee camp in Congo after the genocide...

...It made them betrayals, signals to listeners that underneath all that defined their world, even routines followed in the privacy of the home, lay the possibility of treachery, of being attacked by a Tutsi neighbor or accused of treason by a Hutu friend...

...Similarly, Hitimana converted his habit of sa84 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 luting individuals into a means of denouncing them...

...RADIO' S SUBTLE presence was a key entry point of the state into the lives of its citizens...

...During our interviews, she dismissed RTLM transcripts as forgeries and swept aside uncomfortable questions, instead launching into long, rambling monologues about how massacres of unarmed Tutsi civilians were in fact battles between government troops and rebels...

...Similarly, RTLM's announcements provided practical advice that went into planning day-to-day activities...

...RTLM asked its listeners every morning...

...After a decade on the air at Radio Rwanda, Hitimana was a part of the lives of millions of Rwandans...

...The Genocide, Live A few months before the genocide, Claver Kizungu, a Tutsi farmer living east of Kigali, happened upon a spectacle in the local market...

...By articulating a language of massacre, bringing listeners together as witnesses and performers, and infiltrating everyday routines, it may even have been the key thing that helped transform the genocide from a state-led campaign into a nationwide project...

...For others, catching the latest news was often a major reason for visiting neighbors or swinging by the local bar...

...When we first met, he mentioned that his parents had been killed in the genocide...

...The result was a sort of mutual reinforcement, enhancing the credibility of these elites while at the same time extending the reach and authority of Ruggiu's words...

...RTLM made a fetish of the language of majorities and minorities, styling itself as the voice of the rubanda nyamwinshi ("numerous people...

...not its cruelty, which was unspeakable but not unprecedented, nor even its sheer enormity...

...It was to know what to do...

...Here then is Nicholas [sic] Machiavelli, who speaks through my voice," Ruggiu announced, as if taking on the role of a spirit medium...

...Though he was far from the most popular of RTLM's animateurs, his uniqueness made him memorable, if only as an object of curiosity...

...Yet despite this, and despite the desperate poverty, immense state coercion, and other rationales that can be summoned, something about the genocide remains inexplicable...

...Richard nodded and went about his life...

...Moderates said if there is a white man working [for RTLM], they would be able to destroy any opposition," recalled Protegene Shyaka, a Tutsi shopkeeper...

...we never spoke of it again...

...Another time, an acquaintance of mine told me that after the genocide, he ran into the man who had killed his parents, a family friend named Emmanuel, and did not know what to do...

...But just as radio broadcasts do not travel in the ether, listeners do not exist in a vacuum...

...Although few of the station's listeners had access to a telephone, RTLM found ways of actively involving audiences...

...The uniquely unimaginable thing about the genocide was that rather than the violence becoming normal, normality itself was somehow co-opted in the service of violence...

...Whether in person or on the air, RTLM's animateurs helped listeners experience the genocide as a series of small performances upon which the edifice of larger ideologies could be built...

...RTLM regularly compared the genocide to the 1959 revolution that overthrew Tutsi heRWANDA gemony, collapsing past into present to raise the terrifying specter of a return to the ancien regime...

...I have just been there, and there aren't any bodies in the streets yet...

...The manner of his gaze is unclear, but there is no mistaking the tinny voice blaring from the tiny receiver as anything other than the infamous RadioTelevision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), the station whose broadcasts were a background score to the killings...

...Let me salute you, as you are the same as Noheli [that is, also a journalist...

...They talked off the cuff about a subject they mastered: hatred," a former press liaison with the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) told me...

...No word in English or Kinyarwanda adequately describes the performative role of RTLM's on-air workers...

...The station argued that the numerical superiority of the Hutu meant both that their cause was just and their victory inevitable...

...If we are saying that we should welcome the French, that does not mean that we should throw stones at them...

...SEVEN YEARS after the fact, the most enduring—and perhaps haunting— image of the Rwandan genocide is that of the nameless Hutu peasant standing over a pit of putrid corpses, a machete in one hand and a radio in the other...

...If you die just as everyone else has been speaking about you, it is not like dying like a sheep, without having been spoken of...

...80 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 Despite the outrageousness of some of her claims, Bemeriki had a point...

...Furthermore, she said, she and her colleagues were not demagogues, but responsible journalists who always checked their facts and reported the truth, and if that resulted in their being falsely accused of genocide, so be it...

...Making Sense of it All The first time I saw Valerie Bemeriki, the infamous RTLM animatrice, was through the window of a reception area in Kigali's central prison...

...His fears were not unfounded...

...Ruggiu's case is also interesting because he is the only non-Rwandan to have been indicted by the UN tribunal (he pleaded guilty to incitement to genocide in June 2000) and was the only animateur without journalism or broadcasting experience...

...Let me say Hello, child of my mother," Hitimana said, adopting a tone of playful familiarity...

...It is often said that in times of war or conflict, there is a point where people cease to be shocked or disgusted by the wanton taking of human life and thus find it easier to kill as well...

...Who will help us to fill them...

...Samson Karungura, who killed ten people during the genocide, remembered speculating that Ruggiu's being on RTLM meant either that he couldn't find a job in his own country or that the station had the strength of foreign support...

...Photograph by Antonin KratochviINII thereafter, a group of Interahamwe stopped the UN convoy and singled out several of those named on the radio for abuse...

...Much of the killing in Rwanda in 1994 was marked not by the fury of combat or paroxysms of mob violence, but by a well-ordered sanity that mirrored the rhythms of ordinary collective life...

...Go to Nyamirambo...

...He implied that the gains of the revolution, the postcolonial state, and progress itself were hanging in the balance...

...Hitimana carried on in a similar vein at RTLM...

...Household Names More so than Radio Rwanda or the RPF's Radio Muhabura, RTLM's animateurs developed personas in which listeners invested authority and trust...

...Of RTLM's animateurs, none had a more intuitive grasp of this than Noheli Hitimana...

...The genocide turned these concepts upside down, weaving a coherent ideological tapestry that made euphemisms such as "work" into powerful metaphors for making sense of one's actions, no matter how terrible the implications of those actions may have been...

...It's a lie if a farmer says he didn't like RTLM," said Bernard Rutaremara, who awaits trial in Kigali's central prison for participating in the killings...

...To the outsider's eye, RTLM's transcripts reveal few explicit instructions to murder...

...Kill...

...James Nshogozabahizi, a Hutu farmer, described daily life during the genocide on the hill where he lived, east of Kigali...

...When speaking of democracy to justify the killings, the station urged Hutu to put aside differences and close ranks against the common Tutsi threat...

...If you need anything, any help, just let me know," RWANDA Emmanuel told him sincerely...

...Ironically, the only people who seemed curiously unaware of the significance of Ruggiu's whiteness were those whose duty it was to exact justice upon him...

...Soon Opposite: Mass grave used for victims of massacre in Kbuye, Rwanda...

...When we have spoken about you, you have effectively been spoken of...

...Indeed, many of the tasks of the genocide eerily resembled umuganda, with farmers turning up for their shifts under the same supervisors with the same tools (mostly machetes and hoes), as if it were just another day of clearing fields or planting trees...

...Walking through the crowded streets, I often passed stalls where one could still buy cassettes featuring the extremist songs of Simon Bikindi (arrested by Dutch authorities this summer and sent to the UN tribunal), a staple of the RTLM diet...

...He said that the Tutsi were bad and that they killed many people when they were in power, and that you had to know they are the enemy and get them," Kizungu recalled...

...One Rwandan told interviewers that RTLM "called for all the Tutsi to be exterminated...

...Democracy, meaning little more than the crude arithmetic of ethnic majoritarianism, scapegoated Tutsi to mask the dominance of a narrow clique of northern Hutu under a shared bond of ethnicity...

...The editor-in-chief of RTLM, Gaspard Gahigi, had arrived with a mobile studio and was broadcasting live in front of a crowd of several hundred locals...

...One also could say that the station's animateurs* helped to shape that ambience as well...

...or so, and then people would gather in the local bar to drink, chat, and listen to RTLM before retiring to bed and waking up the next morning...

...For the notorious state-sponsored Interahamwe militia who were the shock troops of the genocide, RTLM's broadcasts were orders, its denunciations death warrants...

...During the early morning shift, widely listened to by farmers rising to tend their fields, he was known for calling out to the farthest mountains in the country, issuing greetings to various regions, and saluting individuals with whom he had shared a drink the night before...

...Almost every personal message, public service announcement, and piece of gossip transmitted found its way by word of mouth beyond those who actually heard them, making each radio a potential spawning ground for new performances...

...But it was for this very reason that, like all totalitarian systems, it could be nothing but imperfect...