HATE RADIO: A play revealing the dark side of Rwandan media in the 1994 genocide

Hate radio? What do these two words mean? Can radio hate? Can it encompass such a sensitive human emotion? Once one gets a deeper understanding of the context of the two words together is when it all comes out into focus.

For an item that doesn’t and cannot possess human emotional traits, radio did do a lot of harm and spread a lot of hate, in Rwanda and due to its large audience then, it reached many “intarahamwe” fighters or supporters across the country and gave them courage or key data to go on and kill “ Inyenzi” or cockroaches as they then called the Tutsi community.

29 years later, this conversation of the place of the media in the 1994 genocide still is had in various quarters within Rwanda and even back here in Kenya.

The setting in this latest one happens in a box radio set, with glass walls, save for a few wooden parts. The scene opens after a four-person narration, each one a victim of the genocide.

The two gentlemen and two women each have their own recollection of the moments after the April 6th death of President Juvenal Habyarimana. The play is incidentally titled HATE RADIO.

The producer of the 1-and-a-half-hour show, German Jens Dietrich, says that whilst he was just 18 years old when the genocide happened. It was the conversations between his parents and elders that caught his attention.

“I wondered how in such a short time, 1 million people could be murdered in such a manner, and how people could get the ideology to hurt each other,” he says.

The decision to come up with such a play for the Rwandese audience was not an easy one for the producers who had to sieve through transcripts of the RTLM {Radio television mile } broadcast from it opened in March 1993, to the moment that the genocide ended in July of 1994.

Some in the audience at this screening of the play in the southern city of Huye, are the University of Rwanda students, many of who are young enough not to remember the terrible events of 29 years ago, but some who now say that this is a teachable moment of the power of the media in building or breaking a people.

According to a student Jane Muhanzi, “The play has revealed to me the events of the past and how the genocide occurred and I also learned how media was used in a negative light to harm.”

Many who attend the screenings say that by visualizing the recordings of the radio station whose main announcer, Katana, went into exile in eastern Congo and is believed to have died there, say that without an understanding of the gravity of events then, then they may not appreciate being peacebuilders in this present day moment.

The world only took notice of the impact of the hate, being perpetrated inside Rwanda, but did not get to know that the media, that is radio, TV, and print media were used to spread hate and urge the militia to continue with the mission to end the Tutsis from Rwanda and also ensure that they do not have a future generation.

The play switching from Kinyarwanda and French gives one a glimpse of how the radio station operated, then. The three main announcers switched between playing music and picking songs that would resonate with their message to their intended audience and reading out orders and revealing areas where possible targets were.

Producer Jens, says that the use of comic relief and jokes is aimed at making light of a bad situation but also giving context as to how things happened then, and why it’s important to not allow such a powerful medium to lead masses astray.

Lead actor Diogene Ntarindwa tries to become the man that he portrays. His character is that of Kantano Habimana, popularly known as “Kantano”. The most popular animateur in terms of airtime, Kantano called for “those who have guns to immediately go to these cockroaches [and] encircle them and kill them…”

Though he now lives and practices his trade in Europe, he was born in Rwanda and has a good understanding of the local dialect and was once a soldier in the Rwandese army in his younger years.

He says that while he has to become what he terms as a monster, for at least two hours, he still has a fear running down his spine each time he relives that gory piece of Rwandese history.

In much of the show, he shuttles between the main desk, the window in which he communicates with another presenter and the food and drinks table. He dances after announcing that the fighters have rebuffed, a defence of a Tutsi community in Butare in the South, moments later he removes his jacket and reveals a pistol holder, with a pistol in one of the pouches.

The team in the room is all wearing military fatigues except the main man smartly dressed in a suit. A guard stands to ensure they are undisturbed whilst pouring drinks for the other every so often.

The only woman of the bunch, sits facing the crowd’s back, the actor who plays the role of Valérie Bemeriki, a significant figure in the story of how the media was used to mobilise the Hutu community against their brothers.

Bemeriki was known for her calls for machete violence; unlike Kantano, who called for the use of firing squads, Bemeriki told listeners to “not kill those cockroaches with a bullet — cut them to pieces with a machete”.

The lady who once used the microphone to urge death upon others is serving a prison sentence after being found guilty of aiding a massacre. The lady who plays her, says that she did not allow herself to immerse into that character for the role and wouldn’t even visit her in prison to find out from the lady herself who she says managed to do so much harm and leave for her home every night where she put her children to bed.

Geneviève Kalimba, a Rwandese national born and brought up in Brussels, says that it was deliberate for her not to allow her character’s face to be seen much all through the play, for one sole reason, “ I needed to make sure that I could use the power of sound to send a message, it was deliberately set up that way to capture one’s imagination.”

The third villain in the story is Georges Ruggiu, a white man from Belgium of Italian descent who, after moving away from home at age 35[24] to work in Liège, came in contact with a Hutu man from Rwanda.

After meeting President Juvénal Habyarimana, he would visit and eventually move to Rwanda a year before the genocide. At RTLM, Ruggiu preached Hutu Power despite his non-Rwandan origins, urging listeners to kill Tutsis and telling listeners that “graves were waiting to be filled”

The role of the three radio personalities is portrayed in a manner where the audience is woven into a web of events and emotions happening with the phone calls of listeners cheering them on and giving details about where the fighters would find the next target was brought out.

Rwanda has stood firm and tall like its people in the last three decades and according to the Ministry of Peace and Coordination of Unity, the progress of healing and national unification is at 90%.

It is through such works of craft where art imitates life, that the people here hope that future generations can learn from the mistakes of the past and be conscious of their moves and utterances in the future.

Diogene, who plays “Katana,” says that his motivation to spread the gospel of peace is based on such similar rhetoric that went on 29 years ago within the neighbourhood and the remnants of that ideology should be curtailed for the sake of peace.

After the murders had stopped, just about 1 million people had died, Rwanda left to pick up the pieces and much of the world watched as they slowly butchered each other.

The role of the media is documented and prosecuted in a specialized court. After the genocide, The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s (ICTR) action against RTLM began on 23 October 2000 – along with the trial of Hassan Ngeze, director and editor of the Kangura magazine.

On 19 August 2003, at the tribunal in Arusha, life sentences were requested for RTLM leaders Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza. They were charged with genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity, before and during the period of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis.
On 3 December 2003, the court found all three defendants guilty and sentenced Nahimana and Ngeze to life imprisonment and Barayagwiza to imprisonment for 35 years – this was appealed.

The Appeal judgment, issued on 27 November 2007 reduced the sentences of all three – Nahimana getting 30 years, Barayagwiza getting 32 and Ngeze getting 35, with the court overturning convictions on certain counts.

On 14 December 2009, RTLM announcer Valérie Bemeriki was convicted by a Gacaca court in Rwanda and sentenced to life imprisonment for her role in inciting genocidal acts.

As the voices and images of the victims come to the fore, soft music plays in the background before, a radio announcement that the President’s jet has been shot down within Rwandan airspace as he arrived in the country from Tanzania where a peace deal between government and rebels was being discussed and assigned.

That announcement ends with the announcer stating that the situation needed the somberness of bacchant symphony music and that it would play on until further announcements were made.