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Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech Susan Benesch

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Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech Susan Benesch D•CKET Susan Benesch is a journalist and lawyer who works for Amnesty International in Washington, D.C. Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech Susan Benesch In November 1991, a large drawing of a published his anti-Tutsi materials. Ngeze machete appeared on the cover of Kangura, a was tried together with two other media ex- Hutu-owned Rwandan tabloid. Along one ecutives: Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean- edge of the machete’s curved blade appeared Bosco Barayagwiza, both founders of a radio the question: WHAT WEAPONS SHALL WE USE station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille TO CONQUER THE INYENZI ONCE AND FOR Collines (RTLM), whose anti-Tutsi vitriol was ALL?? “Inyenzi,” or cockroach, was a term more explicit than that of Kangura. RTLM coined in the 1960s by some of Rwanda’s broadcasters not only read out the names governing Hutus to refer to rebel fighters of of people to be killed but added their li- Rwanda’s minority ethnic group, the Tutsi. cense plate numbers—so they could be In the early 1990s, inyenzi became a slur ap- hunted down if, after hearing their names plied to any Tutsi. on the radio, they tried to escape by car. In April 1994, more than two years At the end of the “Media” trial, which later, the Rwandan genocide erupted. Over lasted more than three years, the judges—a the following three months, in what the South African, a Sri Lankan, and a Norwe- United Nations later characterized as “a gian—issued a 361-page ruling that is a tidal wave of political and ethnic killings,” landmark in international law.1 They found more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Ngeze, Nahimana, and Barayagwiza guilty, Hutus were murdered by the armed forces, declaring: “Without a firearm, machete or the presidential guard, and the ruling par- any physical weapon, you caused the deaths ty’s youth militia. of thousands of innocent civilians.” As one By the time the genocide began, after witness put it, the defendants’ crime was to four years of civil war, Hassan Ngeze, the “spread petrol throughout the country little founder, publisher, and editor of Kangura, by little, so that one day [they] would be had printed reams of anti-Tutsi vitriol, but able to set fire to the whole country.”2 The he had not called for mass killing of Tutsi judges agreed. Their decision was legally civilians. In fact, he had stopped publishing daring and, in spite of its length, not fully his paper by the time the genocide began, explained. But it was correct. and no killings were directly linked to what he had printed. So after Ngeze was indicted Incitement to Genocide in 1997 for incitement to genocide, among The Media case is important for the histori- other crimes, by the International Criminal cal analysis inherent in its verdict, as well Tribunal for Rwanda (which had been con- as the potentially far-reaching law it laid vened in Arusha, Tanzania), three judges down. In trying Ngeze and his two codefen- had to decide whether he could be held re- dants, the international tribunal suggested sponsible for causing the killings of hun- answers to the most important questions dreds of thousands of people—or had been underlying its work: what causes genocide exercising his right to free speech when he and how might it be prevented? 62 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2004 Incitement is a hallmark of genocide, ring to the Holocaust, commented when the and it may be a prerequisite for it. Each Genocide Convention was being debated by modern case of genocide has been preceded the U.N. General Assembly in 1948, “It by a propaganda campaign transmitted via was impossible that hundreds of thousands mass media and directed by a handful of po- of people should commit so many crimes litical leaders. If such campaigns could be unless they had been incited to do so and stopped—or their masterminds deterred— unless the crimes had been premeditated genocide might be averted. and carefully organized.”8 Within a few days of Hitler’s rise to This idea is absent from many popular power in 1933, his chief of propaganda, accounts of genocide, which attribute it to Joseph Goebbels, exulted that “radio and “ancient tribal hatreds.” If “those people” press are at our disposal” and began shut- have been killing each other for hundreds of ting down anti-Nazi newspapers.3 Through- years, such thinking goes, it is a waste of out the rest of the 1930s, the Nazi-con- time to try to stop them. Perhaps not coin- trolled media spewed virulent anti-Semitic cidentally, this primordialist theory gives propaganda. outsiders an excuse not to try to prevent In Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early genocide. 1990s, Serbian forces took over so many To recognize the importance of incite- television transmitters that large areas were ment in causing genocide is not to ignore left with Serb-controlled television only. the role played by longstanding racial and The anti-Croat and anti-Muslim messages ethnic prejudices. Incitement does not nec- transmitted on Serb television were “very essarily induce people to act against their cogent and potent,” according to Ed Vul- own beliefs; when hate speech incites, it liamy, a British journalist who was there. does so because the listener is receptive to “It was a message of urgency, a threat to such speech. Nor does the incitement theory your people, to your nation, a call to arms, argue that people who participate in geno- and yes, a sort of instruction to go to war cide may be absolved of responsibility be- for your people.... It pushed and pushed. It cause they lack the will to behave differ- was rather like a sort of hammer bashing on ently. It is simply to highlight the power of peoples’ heads, I suppose.”4 media-borne messages to influence people, And in Rwanda, RTLM so “heated up especially by engendering fear. To believe heads,” in Rwandan parlance, during the pe- that incitement is a critical causal element riod leading up to the genocide and during in genocide, one need only recognize that the genocide itself that the United States people do not spontaneously rise up to kill considered jamming its signal (but never en masse. did so).5 Prime Minister Jean Kambanda Before genocide can occur, a large num- (who later entered into a plea agreement in ber of people must come to condone killing. which he admitted to inciting genocide as As the genocide scholar Helen Fein notes in well as other crimes) gave a speech over describing this collective psychological RTLM in June 1994, urging the station to process, one group of people must recatego- continue inciting massacres and calling it rize another group of people as outside “the “an indispensable weapon in the fight boundaries of the universe of obligation.”9 against the enemy.”6 The dominant group must come to see its We cannot be certain that Kambanda putative victims as mortal threats (since was in essence correct—that incitement is killing can then be rationalized as self-de- indispensable to genocide—but history and fense) or as subhuman (as insects or ani- the scholarly literature suggest as much.7 As mals), or both. Indeed, Jews, Bosnian Mus- a Soviet delegate, who was apparently refer- lims, and Tutsis were all portrayed as ver- Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech 63 min. Hutu leaders described Tutsis as cock- ought to be unmolested when simply circu- roaches and also as snakes, Slobodan Milose- lated through the press, but [not] when de- vic referred to Bosnian Muslims as “black livered orally to an excited mob assembled crows,” and in Nazi Germany, Julius Strei- before the house of a corn dealer.”12 cher, editor of the Nazi weekly Der Stürmer, The Rwanda tribunal’s first conviction termed the Jew “a germ and a pest, not a for incitement to genocide was in response human being.”10 (Later, at Nuremberg, to just this sort of immediate incitement. Streicher became the first person to be con- Jean-Paul Akayesu, the bourgmestre (mayor) victed for incitement to genocide by an of the township of Taba, was accused of international tribunal, although the crime leading a public meeting on the morning of had not yet been codified as such.) April 19, 1994, at which he urged his lis- In each of these cases incitement was teners to “eliminate accomplices of the RPF planned and directed by a few individuals [Rwandan Patriotic Front], which was un- for whom genocide was a political tactic. derstood by those present to mean Tutsis.”13 As the journalist Philip Gourevitch notes A member of the Interhamwe Hutu youth with biting clarity, “genocide...is an exercise militia had been killed, and Akayesu held in community building.”11 Deterring geno- forth at the place where the body lay. A wit- cide and war crimes—the ultimate goal of ness testified that Akayesu waved papers as international criminal proceedings like the he spoke, saying that they were Tutsi plans tribunal for Rwanda, its sister ad hoc tribu- to exterminate the Hutu, seized from the nal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and home of a Tutsi “accomplice”—a teacher now the International Criminal Court—is who had already been killed.14 Soon after an extremely difficult task. But the courts Akayesu’s speech, according to testimony will have a better chance of succeeding in at his trial, the massacres of Tutsis in Taba this if prosecutors take aim at those who in- began. cite genocide rather than individual perpe- This “immediate” incitement is rela- trators.
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