Read Nigel Eltringham's reply here (Anthropology Matters, 2002).
I am pleased to have been given an opportunity to comment on Nigel Eltringham’s article, "Representing Rwanda: questions and challenges", in the previous issue of Anthropology Matters.
In his article Eltringham mentions my book on the genocide in Rwanda, A People Betrayed, The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide, and that of Philip Gourevitch, "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families". Eltringham claims that both books are the same and that both reflect a ‘just-give-us-the-facts’ approach. I would like to explain why Gourevitch’s book and mine are so different and how they represent two very different schools of journalism.
Gourevitch is a feature writer, not an investigative journalist. His coverage of the genocide mainly concerns a series of stories told by the survivors. His great skill is to tell the history of this tiny and tormented country through the Rwandan people he befriends. He travelled the country gathering the human experiences. There is plenty of material. He met perpetrators who showed no sign of remorse and Hutu who risked their lives for Tutsi. He follows a tradition of powerful reportage, using a style in which the journalist is a part of the narrative. There is a scene, near the opening of the book, in which Gourevitch describes his first visit to a massacre site. "The skeleton is a beautiful thing…" he writes.
But in many ways Gourevitch is uninformed about the most important issues raised by this horrifying event and he leaves a million questions unanswered concerning the exact circumstances of all of this, the shady machinations behind the scenes which helped to facilitate genocide, and the international community’s litany of errors leading finally to catastrophe. Gourevitch admonishes the peacekeepers in UNAMIR (United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda). No detail here about the agonising choices which their force commander had to make, his lack of the most basic equipment, and his own abandonment by the Security Council. Nor does this book explain to readers that 470 peacekeepers stayed on in Rwanda as volunteers and that while politicians were arguing that nothing could be done, this small group saved an estimated 25,000 people. Nor is there any detail about the role of the brave delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the role of this agency in helping the Rwandan people during the genocide. These efforts were a drop of humanity in an ocean of blood but it is not true to say that the whole world abandoned Rwanda.
I am an investigative journalist. I do not agree with Eltringham that facts can be so easily dismissed.
The documents that I used in the writing of my book have been lodged in an archive at the Hugh Owen Library at the University of Wales Aberystwyth to be made available to journalists and researchers. These documents include arms contracts and related correspondence detailing how the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana purchased the weapons and agricultural tools for the genocide. The archive contains an account of what was said at the secret Security Council meetings to discuss Rwanda and other unpublished internal UN documents and letters and documents from G2, the military intelligence offices in Rwanda pre-genocide. The archive has the statute and list of the shareholders of the hate radio. A study of these documents reveals the planning of the genocide. The evidence is indisputable. In Rwanda genocide was planned and executed in a country in which the whole of the international community was intimately involved. And it was planned safe in the knowledge that the world would fail to react.
With the exception of the Financial Times all our newspapers have embraced the celebrity culture. I hope that one day investigative journalism will be as popular and valued as it once was. It has become badly misunderstood and in some quarters it is forgotten altogether.
My own profession bears a great responsibility for the failure over Rwanda. It is the job of journalists to heighten awareness, to galvanise public opinion and try to hold to account those politicians who fail to act in the defence of human values. We failed miserably over Rwanda. The coverage before the genocide was negligible, with predictions that ‘tribal warfare’ would resume. After the genocide began the coverage was misleading. It was quite simply incorrect. The Western media’s failure to adequately report that genocide was taking place, and thereby generate public pressure for something to be done to stop it, contributed to international indifference and inaction and possibly to the crime itself.
Read Nigel Eltringham's reply here (Anthropology Matters, 2002).
Linda Melvern is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Department of International Politics. An investigative journalist, she previously worked on the Sunday Times in London, including as a member of their award-winning Insight Team. Since leaving the paper to write her first book, she has written widely for the British press. Her book on the fifty-year history of the UN was turned into a major television series, UN Blues, for Channel Four television. She writes for British newspapers and magazines and lectures and broadcasts on international issues. She has been researching the circumstances of the genocide in Rwanda for nearly eight years and her account of the genocide, A People Betrayed. The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide was published in September 2000 by Zed Books. It was chosen book of the year in The Observer by Geoffrey Robertson, QC and she was the runner-up in the 2001 Martha Gellhorn journalism award. The book is in its third impression and an updated and revised edition will be published in 2003.