By Kay Ebeling
*
*
This AM one thought kept
me awake. Rwanda, what year was Rwanda
genocide, was it before they installed Fox News in USA? At the computer looked it up, boom. Genocide in 1994, Fox News showed up in 1995.
What's plaguing me is in Rwanda “they” got one tribe to pick up weapons and kill the other tribe through
radio. Thanks to my weird job, I worked
on a documentary about the genocide in Rwanda recently where I transcribed a
dozen interviews with persons who lived through the attacks. Now I keep thinking Rwanda was a kind of precursor to what is happening in the USA.
Almost every survivor said
a radio station played a key role in rousing up the people to kill their neighbors. Everywhere a person went in the preceding
weeks, RTLM was playing, a network that had been owned by the government, then the
president made it his private station, then the broadcasts became more “populist”
and hateful at the same time.
In 1994 they repeated a
mesmerizing message that Tutsis were cockroaches,* a particularly demeaning term
in Africa.
They repeated a message
that the Tutsis were going to kill the Hutu, so Hutus need to kill them first, kind
of like, the message that liberals are out to destroy the USA and steal your
guns…
Whoever ran that radio station
took a conflict that was already in place, a civil hostility between Hutus and
Tutsis, and exacerbated it, to where people who had been living with each other
in peace were now at each other’s throats.
A spy tactic for centuries is to find a weakness that is already in a population and exploit it.
A spy tactic for centuries is to find a weakness that is already in a population and exploit it.
Almost every Rwanda
genocide survivor I transcribed said the same thing. they’d hear the radio message, a mesmerizing voice repeating and repeating that the Tutsis should
be killed. Then they'd see their neighbors start to believe it. One I recall said she'd look out the window and see a guy she knew for years, sharpening his machete. He looked at her and said, "You will be dead soon" and there was nowhere she and her family could go, yet she escaped. People survived by hiding above ceilings or in the brush... I should go
over those transcripts, they're all in my email. It was only last Christmas that I worked on the documentary about genocide while my neighbors
were having happy times with their families. So the files may still be in my computer.
I woke up this AM scared because I think the Rwanda genocide was a trial run for what “they” are now doing in the United States.
I woke up this AM scared because I think the Rwanda genocide was a trial run for what “they” are now doing in the United States.
In April 1994, the president of Rwanda
got killed when his plane was shot down. No one knows who was responsible, but RTLM used that opportunity to increase
the intensity of their message to the audience they had primed for
years. Radio RTLM told the Hutus to pick
up machetes and kill their Tutsi neighbors.
And like programmed drones, different Hutu persons did go into the homes
of persons they’d gone to picnics with years earlier and killed everyone in the
family, it happened over and over all over the country. Ordinary people were convinced to pick up
weapons and kill ordinary people who they were now convinced were the enemy.
A message of hatred over
the radio helped make that happen in 1994.
Then Fox News appeared
on U.S. cable TV lineups in 1995.
Here is more information
on the radio station including transcripts of the broadcasts, a little light reading: from:
Rwanda radio transcripts -The Role of Radio
“From October 1993 to late 1994, RTLM was used by Hutu leaders to
advance an extremist Hutu message and anti-Tutsi disinformation, spreading fear
of a Tutsi genocide against Hutu, identifying specific Tutsi targets or areas
where they could be found, and encouraging the progress of the genocide. In
April 1994, Radio Rwanda began to advance a similar message, speaking for the
national authorities, issuing directives on how and where to kill Tutsis, and
congratulating those who had already taken part…. Although there were many
pleas for the international community to jam the broadcasts of RTLM and Radio
Rwanda before and during the genocide, both stations continued to encourage and
direct the killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus until they were forced off the
air by the Rwanda Patriotic Front’s military victories.”
https://www.concordia.ca/research/migs/resources/rwanda-radio-transcripts.html Link to From Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights StudiesUPDATE: Later this night another random shooting, this one in Northern California:
* In Rwanda genocide, Radio Station RTLM kept calling Tutsis "cockroaches" which is a word that evokes unreasonable hatred in some Africans. Just like Fox News and its tentacles refer to many of us as "liberals" evoking an unreasonable hatred in some Americans.
Transcripts of radio broadcasts leading up to the Rwandan Genocide. ... the illiterate masses--Radio Rwanda, and Radio Télévision des Milles Collines (
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was a Rwandan radio station ... Transcriptsfrom the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda archives.
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was a Rwandan radio station ... Transcriptsfrom the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda archives.
by RTL des Mille Collines - 1994
Text Kinyarwanda transcript and French and English translations of a recording from RTLMbroadcast on 1994-03-14 for UNICTR tape 340.
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was a Rwandan radio station ... Kantano Habimana, 12 April 1994 (?) Official UN transcript; ICTR-99-52-T; ...
May 10, 2013 - ... of the transcripts of radio broadcasts translated from Kinyarwanda into ... In other words, the RTLM broadcasts exhibit a phenomenon which ...
Dec 3, 2003 - The BBC's Ally Mugenzi worked as a journalist in Rwanda during the genocide and says there was no doubting the influence of the RTLM.
Missing: transcripts | Must include: transcripts
Apr 28, 2014 - Uploaded by Rabii Kalboussi
Rwandan media played a key role in fomenting ethnic divisions and sowing the seeds of mass slaughter in the ...
by S Straus - Cited by 2 - Related articles
Apr 23, 2010 - commentary on radio media effects in Rwanda, and indeed RTLM .... my knowledge—a complete list of RTLM transcripts (though it would be ...
Apr 2, 2010 - Transcripts: Glenn Beck v. ... of modern American public discourse,” I sought out a website that allowed me to peruse some RTLM transcripts.
-ke
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