Rwanda media struggle with press curbs

KIGALI, Rwanda - Ten years after this nation's news media egged on Rwandans to kill their neighbors, journalists in this tiny African nation are struggling to rebuild their reputations.

Officially, reporters here work under constraints that Western journalists and even others elsewhere in Africa would find oppressive, as a result of the curbs put in place after a murderous regime of the majority Hutu tribe killed 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi group and their Hutu sympathizers.

But 10 years on, some Rwandan journalists and many international observers say media restrictions look less like a means to avoid a repeat of the events of 1994 and more like a way for politicians to dodge criticism.

'The press was a tool, not a cause of genocide,'' said Casimir Kayumba, managing editor of Ukuri, which means truth in the local language of Kinyarwanda. "It was caused by bad politics.''

In the years up to 1994, many journalists allied themselves with Hutu extremists who planned and carried out the genocide. A magazine called Kangura, or Wake Him Up!, published screeds denigrating Tutsis as a subhuman race that aimed to destroy Rwanda, and urged Hutus to arm themselves. As the genocide got underway on April 6, 1994, the radio station RTLM filled the airwaves with vitriol, even broadcasting the names of individual Tutsis and their hiding places.

Confirming the media's murderous role, the UN war crimes tribunal for Rwanda in December convicted key figures from the magazine and the radio station of incitement to genocide.

For the government of President Paul Kagame, those events make a boisterous media, which delve into sensitive subjects like ethnicity, impossible for Rwanda.

"We do not have to imitate blindly what is done here and there,'' Laurent Nkusi, the minister of information, said at a recent gathering in Kigali. "We have to work for the needs of Rwandans.''

A consensus of independent observers sees Rwanda as having a feeble media where self-censorship makes government repression hardly necessary. The International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, documented the slow strangulation of free media that sprang up after 1994, when Kagame took power.

The case of Umuseso, a Rwandan weekly with a nose for muckraking, suggests that the government is worried more about its own standing. The newspaper scored a scoop in January with an expose of how 2,671 senior government officials had drawn bank loans totaling about $5.1 million but had declined to repay them. As a result of the scandal, Attorney General Gerald Gahima was forced to resign.

"We think citizens are interested in how politicians run their offices,'' said Charles Kabonero, 23, who runs the paper.

Donald Kaberuka, Rwanda's finance minister, said he was delighted by the journalists' sleuthing, since it triggered a crackdown on questionable loans. "They did a very good job,'' Kaberuka said.

Few other Rwandan officials appear to share his admiration. After the banking flap, Umuseso previewed for its readers an expose of the business deals of Colonel Jack Nziza, the head of Rwanda's powerful Directorate of Military Intelligence.

Nziza called in four journalists for questioning, including two from Umuseso. Under pressure from Nziza, according to the Umuseso reporters, they removed the offending story from a pending issue, but replaced it with an account of their interrogation.

A short time later, Nziza, who seldom speaks for the record, lost his job in a reshuffling by Kagame, and a newspaper close to the government attributed the change to his mishandling of the journalists. Few reporters buy this explanation, and most of them believe the change owed more to a power play by Kagame than a deep concern for the media.

"Nothing has changed for the free press in Rwanda,'' said Elly MacDowell Kalisa, one of those arrested. More ominously, Kalisa and another Umuseso reporter faced continued harassment by telephone and feared that the government might resort to violence. By mid-March, the two had fled to neighboring Tanzania.