Guerrillas in the Mist

...The UN Special Rapporteur visited in April and reported that government forces had murdered some 2,300 civilians since the conflict with the RPF erupted in 1990...

...Optimism turned to gloom in mid-year, as spreading warfare was deemed a threat to Rwanda's apes...

...The St...

...The Washington Post didn't have a single story on Rwanda during that period, while The Wall Street Journal ran a grand total of four sentences in three one-paragraph filler items...

...Now that the human misery, disease, and death in that country are of an incalculable scale, attention is centered on the Rwandans...

...and no oil or other resources that would make American intervention worth the cost...

...civil war," said the story's author, who casually noted near the bottom of the article that "the conflict has made more than 350,000 people homeless and ruined the lives of close to one million...

...With a passion unmatched in any journalistic account about the human suffering of Rwanda's war, Rutgers anthropology professor H. Dieter Steklis bitterly charged that protecting the apes was "not high on the world's agenda of problems to solve...

...In a lengthy report on May 28, The Chicago Tribune lauded the victim as "a magnificent, gentle animal with many human characteristics...

...But many argue that the land-locked African nation has no ties to the U.S...

...Verrengia mentioned the war's human toll only in writing that "the hunger and desperation of a million war refugees" had made Rwanda a less "enticing place for visiting scientists to work...

...Nine new political parties formed in anticipation of elections scheduled for 1992...

...This was absurdly true in the case of coverage of the fighting and dying in Rwanda over the last few years...

...The war led to increased human rights violations...

...There were reports of torture and 'disappearances.' Hundreds of extra-judicial executions by members of the security forces and vigilante groups were reported...

...Still, it's hard not to wonder if the Times would have commissioned the article if not for the fact that its author—Alex Shoumatoff, who is married to a Tutsi—-focused on his struggle to save his in-laws from the fighting by bringing them to the United States...

...The rebel army was reportedly responsible for the arbitrary killing of up to 300 civilians during 1993...

...The clearest way to demonstrate the press' ape Ken Silverstein is the editor of Counterpunch, a Washington-based political newsletter...

...The latter's national unity government was shaken in November when Justice Minister Stanislas Mbonampeka resigned his post, citing a lack of cooperation from security forces...

...Mass demonstrations early in the year led Habyarimana to appoint opposition leader Dismas Nsengiyaremye as Prime Minister...

...Events, 1992: Casualties mounted with human rights groups reporting roughly 2,000 civilians killed in the fighting and hundreds of others raped or tortured...

...The most egregious example was reporters' routine portrayal of the conflict in Rwanda as simply an explosion of senseless tribal violence between the Hutu and the Tutsi...

...Their goal was to topple Juvenal Habyarimana's repressive Hutu-dominated government, which was installed in a 1973 military coup...

...The media also largely overlooked the Clinton administration's laissez faire approach to the crisis, most shamefully in its May 16 decision to prevent UN intervention in Rwanda...

...Habyarimana's government received far more important support from France, which deployed combat troops to Rwanda after war with the RPF began...

...In December, rights activist Monique Mujawamariya—who last April barely escaped being murdered by government soldiers—visited Bill Clinton in the White House...

...Press coverage: Anguish reached fever pitch in mid-year, when a male silverback known as Mrithi, Weaver's co-star in Gorillas in the Mist, became the first ape casualty of the war (apparently the accidental victim of an edgy military patrol...

...According to journalist Frank Smyth, the French also rushed in advisers, helicopter parts, mortars, and munitions...

...A mid-June Nexis search which cross-referenced Rwanda with "gorillas" vs...

...And even when those kinds of calamities occur, news reports often willfully ignore the human dimensions to focus on whatever impact the disaster might have on a topic that interests Americans...

...The grave threat to Fossey's camp was also the subject of stories in Newsweek and The Houston Chronicle...

...Warfare broke out in Rwanda in late 1990, when the now triumphant guerrillas of the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded the country from neighboring Uganda...

...The New York Times ran a May 17 op-ed piece—its only such offering on Rwanda between 1991 and 1993—warning that Dian Fossey's former gorilla camp, smack in the center of a combat zone, was badly imperiled...

...The political context of the fighting—a hardline group of Hutu officials seeking to jettison a power-sharing agreement that would have included Tutsi and pro-democracy Hutu parties—was generally ignored...

...A brief January 20 dispatch in the Orlando Sentinel Tribune said conservationists were "heartened by the most recent census of mountain gorillas, the animals slain scientist Dian Fossey tried to protect...

...A May 20 Reuters story echoed this sense of priorities...

...In mid-year, the constitution was amended to replace the existing one-party state with a multi-party system...

...The report led with the news that 36 apes had been reported AWOL from the Virunga mountain region following an RPF offensive...

...That means that barring brutal warfare, a natural disaster, or widespread famine, the continent rarely registers on the American media's radar screen...

...Possibly because editors felt the country's story was hopelessly complicated, neither of these articles mentioned that there was a war taking place in Rwanda...

...The lengthy, angry story in the latter, written by Scripps Howard's Joseph Verren-gia, said that the remote compound had suffered significant damage during recent combat—damage which had left scientists "sputtering with rage" and "moved to tears...

...There is not one gorilla to spare," proclaimed the anthropologist, who suggested that the UN take action "to buffer the gorillas from the dangerous instability of national politics...

...American journalists were largely unmoved by the dramatic events taking place in the country...

...one of Rwanda's leading sources of overseas income...

...Seeking to defuse the crisis, Habyarimana announced a series of political reforms...

...That same type of logic also helps explain why the press, until a few months ago, treated Rwanda as merely the "Home of the Mountain Gorillas...

...The gorillas were also "threatened by land mines planted in the...

...Just as tragically, the war had "ruined the eco-tourism trade that made gorilla sightseeing...

...The Christian Science Monitor ran an 800-word obituary on Mrithi, lamenting that the "needless snuffing of [the ape's] short, noble life leaves a void we will not soon see filled...

...In one particularly bloody incident, 150 Tutsi were killed and many other injured during a March attack by pro-government groups of armed Hutu...

...Guerrillas in the Mist Rwanda's civil war might not have taken us off guard if the American media had spent more time worrying about people—and less about gorillas BY KEN SILVERSTEIN With the end of the Cold War, Africa's difficulties are now largely a depressing distraction...

...But for a long time, the media's coverage of the civil war in that country slighted human beings and focused almost entirely on a cuddlier subject: Dian Fossey's apes...

...guerrillas" resulted in a rout by the apes, 1,123 to 138...

...And 91 of the references to the humans had come since April 6, when the downing of Habyarimana's plane outside Kigali touched off the terrible crisis that has since been in the headlines...

...The cause for optimism was that scientists had reported an increase in the population of mountain gorillas to 306, up from 242 in 1981...

...Western weaponry poured in, mostly from France but including $2.3 million in arms bought from the United States...

...Louis Post-Dispatch reported on the encouraging trend on April 17, when a renowned ape researcher mentioned it during a lecture at a local university...

...Observers fear the gunfire is disrupting [the gorillas'] routine and threatening [their] long-term welfare," cautioned a May 26, 1991, story in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution...

...Events, 1993: It was another bad year for human rights...

...obsession is to compare events in Rwanda during the 1991 to 1993 period with the coverage of the country that was provided by American newspapers...

...Clinton feared that the use of the word might fan public passions and increase pressure on his government to stop the carnage...

...Events, 1991: George Bush increased U.S...

...The year's only major story on the war in Rwanda and the country's complicated political scene was a December 13 New York Times Magazine piece...

...Even when press coverage changed this summer, journalists badly bungled the story...

...In another cynical move, the administration in mid-June instructed officials to abstain from using the word genocide when discussing the killings in Rwanda, though, with up to 400,000 people murdered by that time, almost all Tutsi, that's precisely what was taking place...

...Press coverage: Despite the outbreak of warfare, journalists early in the year emitted hopeful signs about Rwanda's future...

...In the one ray of hope, the newspaper said that while the insurgency had brought an end to tourist activities at Rwanda's Kagera National Park, "gorilla tours still are available where the park enters into Zaire...

...aid to Rwanda to $15 million, up from $9 million the previous year...

...Press coverage: More stories on life in the gorilla zone...

...Between January of 1991 and December of 1993, a few months before the recent upsurge in violence, The New York Times ran 10 stories on Rwanda, half of them brief wire service dispatches...

...A New York Times story the following day also mourned the passing of Mrithi, "the leader of a family of rare mountain apes that Western tourists spend thousands of dollars to view close up...

...Some American officials acknowledge that the administration's posture lacks candor," said The New York Times...

...However, the press has rigorously covered the saga of Rwanda's endangered mountain apes, which were made famous in Gorillas in the Mist, the 1988 movie starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey, the murdered American researcher...

...Dozens of members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, including possible prisoners of conscience, were detained," says Amnesty International's annual report for 1991...