Jan. 26, 2007 – School of Journalism, University of Nairobi

The final event of the African leg of this book tour was a meeting with journalism students at the University of Nairobi. Once I established that I would have to fly through Nairobi at one point or another during the trip to Rwanda, I got back in touch with Prof. Wambui Kiai, director of the journalism school. We had met early last year when I took part in a workshop on hate media with a group of journalists and journalism educators. That event was organized by the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi and I was able to take part because I was in Rwanda at the time, teaching journalism.

with journalism students at University of Nairobi

For today’s event, more than 40 journalism students packed a boardroom at the university for a presentation about the book and more importantly, a discussion and debate about what lessons Rwanda holds for journalists.

Nick Hughes was able to join in for part of the event. I’m sure it all went very well, but to be honest with you, it is a bit of a blur. I have to admit, after an intensive 12 days on the road, exhaustion is starting to kick in. With more help from David McGuffin (who kindly took me home to get fed and watered before departure), I hauled myself out to the airport to catch my overnight flight to London, where I will connect with Air Canada back to Ottawa.

The flight was scheduled to depart just before midnight. After 30 minutes in line, I finally reached the check-in counter. The Kenya Airways representative seemed to spend a long time puzzling over my ticket, tapping on his computer keyboard again and again. Finally he uttered the words that strike fear into the hearts of travelers everywhere: “It seems you have been put on standby,’’ he said. “The flight has been overbooked.’’ By now, I couldn’t even conjure up a rage, so I just slumped over the counter, smiled wanly and asked if there was any way he could check into this because I really had to get back to Canada. He scurried off to a supervisor’s office and returned a few moments later, smiling. “You are on board,” he said triumphantly. “We bumped someone else.’’ I put aside any sense of fairness, said thanks, grabbed my ticket, and headed for the departure gate.

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Jan. 26, 2007 – Meet Nick Hughes

In the clamour to prepare for this book tour, I had actually forgotten that Nick Hughes lives in Nairobi – if I ever knew it at all. Nick is the British journalist who captured searing images of the Rwanda genocide when he took his camera up to the top of a building called the French school in Kigali in mid-April, 1994. Nick’s remarkable footage, virtually the only known image of a killing taking place during the Rwanda genocide, is to my mind an important document, in a sense, the Zapruder film of the Rwanda genocide. I mention the footage in my introduction to The Media and the Rwanda Genocide [link to introductory chapter] and Nick also contributed a chapter to the book, describing how he captured those images [link to Nick’s chapter]

So how could I forget that Nick lives in Nairobi? Well, we had never met before today. I heard about Nick through the grapevine a couple of years ago and finally tracked him down in Lagos, Nigeria, where he was working on project. After his journalism work in Rwanda, Nick turned his attention to the production of the first feature film about the Rwanda genocide, and the first filmed in Rwanda with a Rwandan cast – 100 Days. His partner in the production was Rwandan film and documentary producer Eric Kabera. Given our phone and email communications, I had simply assumed that Nick lived in Nigeria and kept an office in Nairobi. To my delight, I discovered on this trip that he spends most of his time in Nairobi and that I found him in Nigeria at a time when he was there working on an extended project. Nick runs a journalism service company called Vivid Productions which, among other things, provides camera crews and journalistic support to CBC, CNN and other networks for their coverage in east Africa.

Journalist Nick Hughes, who took historic Rwanda genocide footage

So along with David McGuffin, I joined Nick for lunch today on the patio of the venerable Norfolk hotel. I was expecting an older guy, not the youthful 40-something with a red kerchief strung around his neck. One of the reasons I wanted to get together with Nick, apart from the obvious, was to find out more about his footage. Nick confirmed that after he shot the images from the roof of the French school, he arranged to get them back to Nairobi by plane the same day. While he was working in Rwanda as a freelancer, he decided to send the images to the television news service WTN in Britain, in hopes the pictures would be distributed. As far as Nick knows, the images were used at the time and appeared briefly on CNN and other western networks. But then the images dropped like a stone, only to re-emerge later in documentary treatments of the genocide. For reasons that are difficult to understand, those indelible images of two women pleading for their lives, only to be brutally murdered, just didn’t catch on.

What Nick told me next is simply haunting. I have described these images before, the two women who can be seen, kneeling among the bodies. One of the women pleads for her life while the other simply crouches next to her. Nick said that a few years ago, he went back to the street where those images were shot. By knocking on doors, he actually found a woman who witnessed the killing that day. And the witness revealed that the second woman, the one who seems to be crouching in the video, was assuming that posture because she had a baby strapped to her back. Nick said the bystander told him that after the two women were killed, the child remained alive and could be heard screaming for two hours. Finally, the death squads returned and killed the child.

The more I learn about those indelible, invisible images captured by Nick Hughes in Rwanda in 1994, the more troubled I am by them.

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Jan. 26, 2007 – This blog brought to you by the International Development Research Centre - literally

I have been meaning to more fully acknowledge the support for this book and indeed for this promotional tour from an innovative organization called the International Development Research Centre, or IDRC. This Ottawa-based organization, established by an act of Parliament in 1970, is one of Canada’s best-kept secrets. Indeed, many in official circles would have to admit they don’t really know what IDRC does. In a nutshell, this government-funded organization – which operates at arm’s length from government and with an international board of directors – supports research around the world that is designed to create knowledge, to provide a form of development assistance that has sustainability and local solutions at its very core. Different from the sprawling Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the much larger foreign aid organization, IDRC supports development research, not projects per se. It is a difference that it can take a little while to wrap your head around.

I should say that I have had a long association with IDRC. I received a $25,000 fellowship from the organization in 1990 that allowed me to travel to Britain to work at Gemini News Service and to conduct a four-month research trip to North Africa. In a way, that experience sparked my lifelong interest in the nexus between journalism and Africa. For what it’s worth, I should state that my wife works with IDRC, albeit in a division that has had no link to my project. And of direct relevance to The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, it was IDRC that provided the largest share of the funding for Carleton’s 2004 conference on the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide, the event that triggered this book and the Rwanda Initiative project of which I have often written in this space. The program officer who instigated IDRC’s support for Carleton’s Rwanda project was a woman named Pam Scholey who was then working in the peacebuilding division at IDRC. Pam was an exceptional partner at every stage of this project. Bill Carman, who oversees IDRC’s publications branch, took charge of lining up a co-publishing contract for the book, finally settling on a proposal to work together with Pluto Press in London and Fountain Press in Uganda.

More recently, a number of people who work in various communications capacities at IDRC have lent their support to this project, notably by providing funding and important strategic and logistical advice for the book tour. While a number of people at IDRC have been involved, I should mention in particular Pauline Dole, Susan Murray, Jennifer Pepal and again Bill Carman and Pam Scholey.

At lunchtime today, all of that teamwork manifested itself in an excellent event held at IDRC’s regional headquarters for eastern and southern Africa, in Nairobi. (The IDRC team is also working on preparations for launch events in Ottawa and Washington) Vivianne Ngugi, the outreach and communications officer for the Nairobi office, brought together 20 or so IDRC staff members along with representatives of other civil society organizations and the Kenyan Human Rights Commission for the mid-morning seminar. So I just thought it would be appropriate to formally thank IDRC for all of its support for this project.

And please take note that, as a matter of policy, IDRC makes its books available free online. So those who don’t obtain a hard copy of The Media and the Rwanda Genocide can consult the text in its entirety at www.idrc.ca/rwandagenocide

The IDRC event also gave me the chance to re-connect with another of the contributors to the book, human rights expert Binaifer Nowrojee, who now heads the Open Society Initiative for East Africa. Nowrojee, a former lecturer in human rights law at Harvard University, was counsel with Human Rights Watch/Africa and the author of the Human Rights Watch report, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath. She testified as an expert witness before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on sexual violence and in her paper in The Media and the Rwanda Genocide [link to her chapter] she focuses on the direct link between the sexually graphic and offensive depiction of Tutsi women in the pages of Kangura before the genocide and the brutal sexual violence and rape that became a stock in trade of the killers during the genocide. She takes issue with the Rwanda tribunal’s failure to prosecute journalists specifically for inciting sexual violence. I will never forget Binaifer’s presentation at the symposium at Carleton in 2004. [link to Binaifer’s presentation]. Her description of some of the instances of sexual violence against women during the genocide was chilling.

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Jan. 26, 2007 – Nairobi – Visiting Makina Baptist School

I try to squeeze as much as possible into these trips. So even though my agenda included only one business day in Nairobi, I was hell bent to make a visit to the Kibera slum and the Makina Baptist School that is twinned with Devonshire Community Public School, in Ottawa. My son Laith attends Devonshire and along with the other students, has had a glimpse into life in Africa through the partnership with Makina. Indeed, Laith is one of the fortunate Devonshire students who has had a chance to visit Makina in person. He and his Mom joined me on a trip to Rwanda last summer with a stopover in Nairobi and a visit to Makina.

Fortunately for me, my host for this trip is CBC reporter David McGuffin, who is based in Nairobi and kindly offered to let me stay over at his house last night. Not only that, David picked me up at the airport and offered to drive me to Makina first thing in the morning, so that I could fit in a visit before two book launch events. Thank you David.

Students at Makina Baptist School

Makina Baptist is a private school located in the heart of one of the world’s biggest slums, Kibera. You may have seen Kibera’s sprawling mud streets and tin shacks as the backdrop in the hit movie The Constant Gardener. Don’t get the wrong idea when I say private school. Makina is a modest facility, in essence a two-storey tin shack. It follows the government curriculum but because it operates independently, it does not receive government funding. So it charges students a modest attendance fee. And a number of students from single-parent families attend for free. There are more than 400 students crammed into Makina’s dark classrooms, crammed together on wooden benches.

with class pictures from Devonshire school in Ottawa

In addition to sending letters and artwork to their friends at Makina, the students at Devonshire also do small fundraising projects and whenever possible, send some cash along to Makina’s Principal, Mrs. Yavetsi, to make improvements to the school’s infrastructure. On this trip, I was a courier for some of this cash. Mrs. Yavetsi told me she has two projects in mind. She has already begun installing windows in the school’s dark classrooms, to allow light and for ventilation. The ground floor windows are nearly done so now she can turn her attention to the second floor, where the classrooms are like gloomy tin pens. She also has longterm plans to build an extension to the back of the school’s second-storey, making room for four more classrooms. The latest funds from Devonshire could help launch that project.

David and I visited each classroom at Makina, where the children sprang to attention, recited their good mornings then broke into song. In each classroom, I presented the kids with a group picture of their counterpart class at Devonshire. I also gave them a children’s book called The Dot, which is part of an innovative literacy project at Devonshire. Recently, the French version of the book was passed from class to class at Devonshire. All of the students read it, then shared their views in a sort of class review. So the students at Makina will be doing the same and later, will be able to share their views with their friends in Canada.

Kevin and Purity with pictures from Laith

I also had a chance to meet briefly with the students who have been designated as Laith’s penpals, Kevin and Purity. I gave them some snapshots of the pictures they took together with Laith last summer, as well as some pictures showing the highlights of Laith’s year. The visit to Makina was short, but worth the effort and as usual, a reminder of just how fortunate the kids at Devonshire are.

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Jan. 25, 2007 – Well and truly launched in Kampala

I can’t think Fountain Publishers enough for all of their help in launching The Media and the Rwanda Genocide here in Uganda. They booked my hotel, picked me up at the airport and made sure that I was taken care of. Their managing director, James Tumusiime, took me out for dinner last night and today, they organized an excellent book launch and panel discussion in a downtown hotel ballroom. What more could I ask?

The main event today was the book launch organized by Fountain at the Grand Imperial Hotel, just down the street from the Speke Hotel where I am staying. As usual, at the appointed time, 10 a.m., the room was virtually empty. In fact, the posters said we were supposed to start at 9 a.m. The assumption was that we would get going at 10:30 and lo and behold, by 10:30 the ballroom was full.

I shared the rostrum with Fountain chief James Tumusiime along with senior journalists Robert Kabushenga, managing director of The New Vision (widely regarded as the pro-government paper) and Charles Mwanguhya, political editor of The Monitor, (regarded as the opposition paper). John Nagenda, a veteran journalist who is now senior advisor to Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, also spoke, along with Rwanda’s ambassador, Mr. Kamali Karegesa Ignace.

When I was greeted by Robert Kabushenga, from New Vision, he gave me a quizzical look: “ I was expecting to see a grey-haired man in a cardigan, smoking a pipe,’’ he joked.

Fountain’s Tumusiime led off, explaining the longtime interest his publishing house has held for Rwanda. He said he regards his books on the subject as milestones.

I spoke next and to be honest, by this point in the trip, I don’t recall with any great precision what I said. I have long since abandoned notes and now generally introduce myself, explain my transition from journalist to quasi-academic, talk about the evolution of the book from conference, to publication, to operational media capacity-building project on the ground in Rwanda. A central theme of my talks – and something that news media here have picked up on – is the argument that international media organizations bear some responsibility for the Rwanda genocide and in fact, contributed to events by their absence. I always hasten to explain that I make a distinction between the individual journalists who did excellent work in Rwanda in 1994 and the media, writ large, which failed to effectively cover the events of 1994.

Speaking at the book launch in Kampala

Kampala book launch

Rwanda’s ambassador spoke next. He started off by complaining that he had only been informed of this event yesterday. “Typical,’’ someone next to me grumbled. The ambassador went on to reiterate the events of 1994 in detail. Toward the end of his remarks, he referred to me as “one of the good people who have decided to go out and look for information,’’ and thanked me for editing the book.

Kabushenga, the New Vision editor, launched into a defence of African media and took issue with what he saw as my charge that African media, grouped in with ‘international media’ had failed to adequately cover the genocide. He insisted the Ugandan media had paid close attention to events in Rwanda. And he said it was about time Africans started telling their own stories. “Every time I go in a shop there is a new book by a western journalist,’’ he said. And he attacked western news organizations for sending junior reporters to Africa – or no one at all. If these news organizations are serious about news, they shouldn’t send junior reporters to cover the continent, he said. “Here in Africa we have the world’s largest collection of freelancers who came here on holiday,’’ he said.

As for Rwanda’s lessons for Uganda, he said the air waves are filling up in Uganda with FM stations peddling “cynicism and prejudice, a litany of wailing and crying.’’ He said Uganda’s media houses have an obligation to give their journalists better training and to raise professional standards.

Charles Mwanguhya, from the Monitor, took issue with Kabushenga’s suggestion that African media had done a good job covering the genocide. He suggested that they were in fact, just as bad as their western counterparts and continue to fail to tell the story of their own continent. “Some 2 to 3 million people were killed in Congo, how much has the Ugandan media done,” he asked. “Ten years from now we’ll be looking at the role of the media in genocide in eastern Congo.’’

He went on to say that Ugandan journalists, who grew up alongside the Rwandan expatriates who would form the nucleus of the RPF rebels, have no excuse for failing to monitor events in Rwanda more closely. Like Kabushenga, he lamented the current state of professionalism in the Ugandan media and called upon journalists to hold each other to a higher standard. “We have to keep trying to beat each other back into line,’’ he said. “Why not call a journalist to challenge them on their article?”

Next came a round of questions from the floor. Among the questions were the following:

• Why doesn’t the so-called CNN effect result in more coverage of Africa and what can African journalists do?
• What do we make of the proliferation of radio talk shows hosted by people with little media training?
• Did the book examine the record of the RPF radio station during the 1994 genocide?
• Wouldn’t we get better journalists if they were paid more and had better access to resources, rather than falling prey to bribes?
• How can journalists be empowered in society?
• Would the “big wigs” in the Ugandan media houses not benefit from paying their people better?
• What is the current state of the media environment in Rwanda?

In brief, I talked about some research on the so-called CNN effect and the contention that media coverage has more of an impact on decision makers when they haven’t yet made up their minds on a course of action. As for talk radio, I said this is not just an African phenomenon but that North American airwaves were also flooded with obnoxious big mouths and that too many media organizations were resorting to cheap talk radio formats that gobble up space that should be devoted to serious news coverage. No, the book did not have a chapter on the RPF radio station. That would be a good addition. And yes, better pay and access to resources would almost certainly raise journalism standards. As for the current state of the media in Rwanda, I said that journalists told me they operate in a climate of self-censorship and that some subjects are simply taboo.

Kabushenga said Africans need to tell their own stories. On the issue of pay and resources, he recounted an anecdote about a journalist who was covering an event that ended with a buffet and then some popular music. When everyone’s favourite song was played, the journalist forgot himself and began to dance wildly in the middle of the floor. As he was gyrating, two chicken drumsticks wrapped in paper fell out of his jacket pocket. “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys,’’ Kabushenga said.

The Fountain chief joked at this point that it is rare to hold the attention of journalists for several hours without the promise of beer or an envelope of cash at the end of the event.

At the end of the question period, Nagenda, the presidential advisor and former journalist, was called upon to speak and formally launch the book. In some old-fashioned African oratory, the distinguished Nagenda – the silver flecks in his hair matched the pinstripe in his charcoal suit – held forth. He heaped praise on the book, particularly its striking cover. But then he turned to the opening ‘statement’ from Kofi Annan and let loose. The statement coming from a man who headed UN peacekeeping operations during the 1994 genocide was “pathetic,’’ Nagenda said. “Annan should own up,’’ he declared. (Some local media would later take Nagenda’s shot at Annan as a criticism of the book).

Nagenda said the audience had witnessed a westerner ‘flagellating himself,’ for the western media’s responsibility in the genocide. “Why stop at the west?” Nagenda asked. What about the Arabs, Israel, India, China, Russia and others?

He reflected on the fact that Rwandan president Paul Kagame is cynical about his media. “So is my boss, the president of Uganda. And I’m even more cynical than those two,’’ he said. He said unprofessional journalists ‘write something and think about it later.’ And he blasted a racy new tabloid that is now on the streets in Kampala, the Red Pepper. “Those people must be bashed through the courts,’’ he said.

Finally, Nagenda brought his remarks to a close and called the Fountain publisher and myself to come forward for an official launch, the three of us awkwardly standing before the cameras holding books. The Media and the Rwanda Genocide has now been well and truly launched in Uganda. My thanks and congratulations to Fountain Publishers.

Fountain's James Tumusiime, L and John Nagenda, launch the book

Book signing after the launch

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Jan. 25, 2007 – Searching for a Digital Age
in Kampala

On the margins of the book tour, I had another mission in Uganda. Back at Carleton, I am the faculty advisor for the local student chapter of the organization Journalists for Human Rights. More than a year ago, the students raised money to support a community radio station in Rwanda, Radio Izuba in Kibungo. On a previous visit, in the summer of 2005, I went to the radio station to meet the director and check out their operations. I was quite impressed by the station’s reach in the community.

The students raised about $3,000 and decided to buy some computer equipment for the station. I learned after the fact that in their eagerness to help out, they had already wired the money to a computer firm in Kampala that had been recommended by the station. Months passed and the computers never arrived. The students made many phone calls and sent email messages. They got various replies, that the order was being changed, that computers had been damaged in a car accident on the way to the border. The upshot is, the computers never arrived in Rwanda and the students could get no satisfaction with the company in Kampala to whom they had wired their money, Digital Age.

So, I made it my mission to find Digital Age and have a chat with the person who had been the point of contact for the journalism students. I had his name, his mobile phone number, the name of the firm and a detailed street address in Kampala. There was no phone directory listing for the company, but that is not unusual in Uganda. Not everyone puts a listing in the phone book. The mobile phone number the students had been using was now disconnected. And my Ugandan contacts said they didn’t recognize the name of the computer company, or the street address. Margaret Jjuuko, a professor at Makerere University with whom I have come in contact through our Rwanda Initiative project, took a couple of hours to drive me around Kampala looking for Digital Age. Unable to find the address, we went to the registry office which said there was no such address in existence. The Plot and Block number didn’t make sense and the street I had listed did not actually exist. After a few hours, we gave up the chase.

Driving around Kampala looking for Digital Age

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Jan. 24, 2007 – From Kigali to Kampala

The process of leaving Kigali for my next stop, Kampala, Uganda, began with a persistent wake-up call at 4:30 a.m. Of course, I had lots of time to spare at the airport, but that is just the way I like it. My Kenya Airways routing was via Nairobi, with a stop of a few hours to catch up on some email and blogs.

I still get a bit of a pang every time I leave Rwanda, but to be honest, less so than before. I guess it is because I am now almost certain that I will be back again soon. Still, you have to catch your breath, looking at the place from the air.

Rwanda from the air

During the Nairobi stopover I had a chance to catch up on email messages that were trapped in a Carleton account that I had had difficulty accessing in Rwanda. Among them were queries about the plans for the Feb. 6 and Feb. 7 book launch events in Ottawa.

I arrived in Kampala in the mid-afternoon. Actually, I arrived in Entebbe, the airport made famous by the 1976 raid by Israeli commandos. It was nice to see a friendly face at the arrivals area. Jennipher Nalubega, a marketing executive with one of the Fountain Publishing companies, was holding up a hand-drawn sign: Prof. Allan Thompson. Her driver, Peter, navigated through rush-hour traffic for the 30-minute ride into Kampala. I have to say, after nearly a week in Rwanda, the first thing I noticed about Kampala was that the sidewalks and curbs haven’t been scrubbed clean by work crews.

We went directly to the headquarters of Fountain Publishing in the suitably named Fountain House. Along with marketing manager Sara Kahangi and publications officer Ann Nambalirwa we went over plans for tomorrow’s event. At 10 a.m. I will be leading off a panel discussion at the Grand Imperial Hotel with two prominent Ugandan journalists to formally launch the book and then debate the implications for Uganda. (The New Vision newspaper carried a story on page 4 about the book launch under the heading: Professor to unveil Rwanda genocide book. )

On the way to the hotel, Peter drove past an African craft market, near the national theatre, so I would know how to find my way back there tomorrow. I need presents.

I’m staying at the venerable Speke Hotel, named for British explorer, John Hanning Speke. Speke was the first outsider to discover the source of the Nile River. The hotel that bears his name claims to be the oldest in Uganda and was built in the British colonial era, in the 1920s. It has that Hemingway-esque feel of some of my other favourite Africa haunts – the Arusha Hotel in Arusha, Tanzania and the Stanley Hotel, in Nairobi. The Speke has a sweeping wooden staircase, big leather couches and portraits of Speke himself loom over the lobby. Another bonus is the free wireless internet access – something Speke could have while searching for the source of the Nile.

And there is, as usual, an irony here. I arrive from Rwanda to promote a book about the genocide and stay at a hotel named for an explorer who is widely credited with being one of the first to put forward the notion that the cattle-raising people of the region – the Tutsi - were descendants of a conquering tribe from Ethiopia and somehow superior and more closely associated with Europeans than the Hutu. (In 1863 Speke published his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.) Speculation about the Semitic or Hamitic origins of the Tutsi was taken up by missionaries and later the Belgian colonizers.  

Notwithstanding the irony, it is a nice hotel. On nearby Nile Ave., gigantic birds nest just above the street as cars rush past below, belching out exhaust fumes.

By now, I had no clean clothes left. And a rather surly clerk at the front desk told me that it was too late to send out laundry if I wanted it back tomorrow. Another hotel employee overheard the conversation and came back a moment later with a friend who whisked away my clothes and returned them laundered, crisply ironed and folded a few hours later. Anything is possible in Africa.

Finally, I had dinner with the managing director of Fountain Publishers, James Tumusiime, a former journalist with the New Vision newspaper who has built Fountain into one of Africa’s premier academic publishing houses. As we passed through the lobby of the Speke, Tumusiime pointed to the book rack outside the hotel shop.

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Jan. 23, 2007 – Meet the press, Kigali-style

The final event of my visit to Rwanda was held today, a press conference and book launch reception in the capital, Kigali. But first I had some business to attend to in Butare. I made a quick visit to the local bank where the Rwanda Initiative has an account, just to check on our affairs. And I also had to make sure the payroll was up to date with our household staff. I said my farewells to everyone at the house, including visiting lecturers Sue Montgomery, who will be here until early February and Shelley Robinson, who will be holding down the fort in Butare for six months. In two days Shelley has already learned more words in Kinyarwanda than I have managed in a decade of visits.

I made the final drive back up to Kigali with Solange and her boyfriend Nicolas Gatambi, who was also one of my students at the journalism school last year. Nicolas is already an accomplished journalist who has won several international prizes for his work and has had reports broadcast by Radio-Canada. In the car he was working on a report he plans to submit to Radio-Canada International on the book launch.

Before heading to the book launch venue I had two tasks to accomplish. The first was to pass by the Western Union office to pick up some money wired by the co-publisher, Fountain Publishers of Kampala, Uganda, to help offset some of the costs for book launch events in Rwanda. Hospitality is expensive in this country, but it is also a fixture of protocol and a necessary ingredient of a book tour.

(I should note that for the most part, this book tour has been funded by the International Development Research Centre and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The IDRC is the co-publisher of The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, along with Pluto Press of London. I owe a debt of gratitude to the folks at IDRC who have devoted considerable effort – and funding – to making this book tour possible. Like me, they believed that it was vitally important to launch the book in Rwanda and to make other stops in London, Kampala and Nairobi to engage with local journalists, academics and students about the subject before carrying on with launch events in Canada and the U.S.)

My next mission was to visit the Kigali Memorial Centre, the national memorial and museum commemorating the 1994 genocide. The centre includes an interpretive museum and research centre, in the style of Holocaust museums in Washington and Jerusalem. The centre is also a mass grave. The remains of thousands of genocide victims have been interred in stately concrete tombs established next to the centre. I was here on April 7, 2004 when the memorial was formally opened during ceremonies commemorating the 10th anniversary of the genocide.

Today I  had a chance to meet briefly with the centre’s coordinator, Freddy Mutanguha and to present him with some copies of the book. The national memorial was established by the Aegis Trust, a London-based organization which had its origins as a Holocaust memorial foundation and research centre.  Steve Robinson, a development officer with Aegis Rwanda, was also at the centre and was excited to receive a copy of the book. Within minutes, we began to brainstorm about holding a workshop or symposium at the memorial centre on the issue of the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide.

Mr. Freddy Mutanguha, coordinator, Kigali Memorial Centre, with Prof. Allan Thompson, Carleton University

Finally, the main event: the national book launch for The Media and the Rwanda Genocide was held at 5 p.m. in a gigantic conference hall in one of the gleaming new buildings at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology.

Before the event I had an interesting conversation with Jean-Bosco and Solange, who have helped to pull the Rwanda tour together. I was aware of the fact that often in Rwanda, journalists who attend a press conference expect payment. While government agencies pointedly refuse to make such payments – which are in the guise of ‘travel allowances’ for taxi fare – many organizations do make such payments. I was told that journalists will often assume that if there is a sign-up sheet at the press conference, they will be signing up to get their payment at the end – usually between $5 and $10. I contemplated giving out free copies of the book in lieu of such a payment, but I didn’t have that many review copies on hand. But I was determined not to follow the corrosive practice of paying journalists to cover an event. In my remarks, I alluded to this by telling journalists that I would like to show them my hospitality by inviting them to a reception after the press conference.

At 5 p.m., I was the only person in the room. But within about 20 minutes or so, there were nearly a hundred people assembled for the press conference, many of them journalists. Chrysologue Karangwa, the recently-appointed Rector of KIST, took his place in the front row. In 2005, when I came to Rwanda to do the spadework for the Rwanda Initiative, Karangwa was the Rector of the National University. A blunt pragmatist, Karangwa told me at our first meeting that he would like to see a detailed Memorandum of Understanding in a day or so in order to nail down our cooperation agreement. He got what he asked for.

Next to Karangwa in the front row was Mr. Joseph Bideri, Director-General of ORINFOR, the government media agency which controls Radio Rwanda, TV Rwanda and two newspapers as well as other media holdings. Bideri was another of the players I met with in the early days of establishing the Rwanda Initiative and we are now working to expand that program to include a media training component for working journalists in Kigali. Bideri had conveniently arranged for TV Rwanda to cover my press conference.

I distributed a press release and also made available a jpeg of the photo taken Monday during my meeting with President Paul Kagame.

The opening of the press conference did have shades of my recurring Bridget Jones nightmare. Just after I began speaking, someone slipped forward to turn on the microphone. (‘Welcome to the launch of Kafka’s Motorbike,’ I thought to myself).

I talked about my links to Rwanda, the genesis of the book project and the contents of the book itself. But most important, I talked about the media sector in Rwanda. I stressed that as a visitor in this country, I did not see it as my role to be a media watchdog. But I encouraged the dozens of journalists who attended the press conference to continue to push for more “political space” in this country and also to use that space with integrity, by ensuring that their work met the highest possible professional standards.

Kigali book launch press conference

The Rector opened the question and answer session by graciously thanking me for the production of the book and by musing aloud why it took a foreigner to pull together such a collection on the media role in Rwanda’s tragedy. Then there were a number of questions. One gentleman, a lecturer at KIST, asked a pointed question about the current “revisionism” among those who deny there was a Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and contend that the current government in fact perpetrated a ‘double genocide’ through its own massacres of Hutu in 1994 and after. The questioner asked me to comment on how Rwanda can expunge these extremists who still profess an ideology of genocide by denying that genocide took place in 1994.

I tried to choose my words carefully. We have extremist hate media in Canada too, I replied, mostly nut bar Holocaust deniers. But my view is the best way to deal with these extremists is to marginalize them by drowning them out with credible, mainstream media reports. It is easier to add something to the media spectrum than it is to take something away. I also stressed that a distinction should be drawn between extremist revisionism that would deny the Rwanda genocide and the legitimate discourse of those who would criticize the Kagame government and its policies. Journalists should be entitled to engage in constructive criticism of the party in power, I stressed.

Eddie Rwema, a journalist with the private Contact FM radio station and a former managing director of the New Times newspaper, challenged me to back up the criticism of the Kagame government contained in a chapter in the book authored by Lars Waldorf, a former Human Rights Watch field worker in Rwanda. Eddie asked me if as editor of the collection I had been careful to check on the sources used in the Waldorf piece and to ensure its accuracy. I assured Eddie that my primary function as the editor of the collection was to do just that. And I noted that Lars’ piece was replete with strong source material backing up his assertions, including direct citations by reports from the U.S. State department, the European Union and the work of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Another journalist asked when the book would be available in French, or even in Kinyarwanda. I told him that I understood there were plans for a French edition, but could make no promises about a Kinyarwanda version. Another journalist asked when the book will be available in soft copy electronically for those who cannot obtain or indeed, cannot afford the book. I told him that IDRC has plans to post the book in its entirety at www.idrc.ca.

The Rector rejoined the conversation, asking a string of questions about whether the book contained a chapter on the role played during the genocide by the Catholic Church, about what the book had to say on the 1994 experiment with independent media that resulted in hate media and about media coverage of France’s controversial role in the genocide. The Rector also cautioned that if there was to be a Kinyarwanda version, great care would have to be taken to avoid errors in translation.

In my reply, I said the chapter by Canadian expert Gerald Caplan touched on the role of the Catholic church in the genocide. As for the 1994 experience with independent media, I said that while some draw a lesson that the approach to allowing independent media should be cautious, my view was that the best lesson from 1994 was that the government should never be seen to be using the media as a tool. As difficult as it may be to remain at arm’s length and to endure criticism from the media, the government would be best to allow the maximum media independence to ward off any suggestion it was using the media as a tool. I had little comment on the question of media coverage of France’s role except to say that this was a topic that definitely warranted further examination. I pointed out that one of my former students at Carleton, Brett Popplewell, who is now doing a Masters at the London School of Economics, is thinking of focusing his research on French media coverage of Rwanda.

Joseph Bideri, from ORINFOR, asked me to reflect on whether the western media’s failure to properly cover the Rwanda genocide was a result of Eurocentric racism. Echoing Romeo Dallaire, I said there was definitely an element of racism at play, along with plain ignorance, some laziness and some systemic problems with a western journalistic machine that continues to virtually ignore Africa. After a few more questions, I brought the press conference to a close and invited everyone to convene next door for a reception. The free beer and soft drinks went down well with my Rwandan journalistic colleagues, just as they would back home in Canada.

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Jan. 22, 2007 – Butare – The book launch party and a chance to re-connect with my students

The reception held in the university courtyard after the Butare book launch gave me a chance to meet once again with some of the students  I taught last year as part of our visiting lecturer program with the university here. These students, now in their graduating year, are in many ways the future of journalism in this country and as good a target audience as any for The Media and the Rwanda Initiative. Indeed, like virtually every young person in this country, their lives were forever changed by the events of 1994.

Prosper Bitembeka, who towers above his peers at 6 foot 6, is in his mid-30s and before enrolling in the journalism school was chief editor of a military magazine called Ingabo. He is a soldier who joined the Rwandan Patriotic Army in 1994, just after the genocide. Before that, he taught literature, sports and fine arts at a Kigali secondary school. Prosper lost four of his immediate family members in the genocide. Just a few weeks ago, he celebrated the joyous occasion of his marriage to Claire, who works at the university hospital while he finishes his ‘memoire,’ the final project required before graduation.

Egide Kivange, in his mid-20s, goes by the nickname Black Eagle (his father gave each of his children a nickname associated with an animal), and when I met him last January, he was the Rwandan Patriotic Front vice-president for the school of journalism. He has done internships at Radio Maria and Studio Ijambo, both in Burundi. He was also the class clown. When we embraced at the party in Butare, Egidge blurted out: “My God, you have become so fat.”

Leon Nzabandora, was born in Ukraine, where his parents were studying at the time and returned to Rwanda at age 5. He thought of being a lawyer, but friends convinced him to enrol in the journalism program. Leon wants to follow one of his two passions and be either a sports writer or a political reporter.

Edouard Turatsinze, in his mid-30s, says his passion for journalism started when, as a child, he would listen to radio announcers and dream one day of becoming one of them. Edouard lost his parents and four brothers during the genocide, when he joined the RPF and later worked in a number of political posts in the army. At the Butare book launch, Edouard was preoccupied with how a recurrence of the genocide could be prevented. “Have we learned anything?” he asked.

My former student, Edouard Turatsinze, with the book

Solange, who has been working as my fixer during this book tour, has two passions, journalism and dance. After secondary school she worked as a freelancer at Radio Maria, in Bukavu, Congo. She has done internships at Studio Ijambo in Burundi and Rwanda Television and was also part of the university’s contemporary dance troupe. Solange is a whirlwind with a gift for organization and logistics. She simultaneously planned two receptions in Butare – one at the university and the other at the Rwanda Initiative home – catered by a local fixture known as Maman Akiki, who runs Le Pannier.

Sixbert Kanimba, in his late 20s, first worked as a journalist as a little boy when his father, a primary school teacher, would assign him to listen to the radio and then provide summaries of the news. Sixbert joined the Rwandan Patriotic Army in 1994 and was later demobilized as a child soldier. In 1997, after his secondary school education was interrupted by the genocide, he returned to school to obtain his diploma. He lost three brothers and his father in the genocide.

Charles Kanamugire, also in his mid-20s, was orphaned by the 1994 genocide. When he first started university he also had to work fulltime as a receptionist at a local hotel, to fulfill his dream of one day becoming a famous journalist. An article he wrote about the 10th anniversary of the genocide was published by a Swedish newspaper.

Nicolas Gatambi, who comes from Congo, was the smooth talker of his class and hence, probably has the best future in radio. He won a BBC prize last year for one of his reports and has a driving ambition to perfect his English and to make it as a world-class journalist.

Interview with Nicolas Gatambi, who is doing a piece for RCI

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Jan. 22, 2007 – The President, the media
and the book launch

This day began at 5 a.m. after a luxurious four hours of sleep. It takes me about half an hour to get going in the morning and my mission was to leave the house by 5.30 a.m. to get to the bus station. My ticket on the remarkably efficient Volcano bus service from Butare to Kigali was already booked. But if you want to avoid sitting in one of the uncomfortable jump seats that fold down in the middle aisle, it is important to get there early. I arrived at 5:50 and managed to snag the last regular seat left. I have to admit, for all my talk of enjoying the scenery, on this trip I saw mostly the inside of my eyelids as my head bobbed up and down, alternately smacking against the window or drooping onto my chest. The Volcano bus leaves on time – always – every half hour from 6 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. running the main route in the country, between Butare and Kigali. It drops you off in the centre of town, where cabs and motorcycle taxis wait to ferry you around town.

I headed directly to the Presidential Palace, known as the Urugwiro Village. The walled-off compound is actually a converted resort. The press conference was scheduled for 9 a.m. and at 8:30, I was most definitely the first one to arrive. They were still mopping the marble floor and rolling in cameras when I took my seat at the front of the room. Today, I’m not here as a reporter. I’m here to observe the press conference, to be sure. But my primary mission is to wait until the end of the event and then to approach President Paul Kagame to present him with a copy of the book. The arrangement with the president’s director of communications was that I could politely approach Kagame as he was about to leave the room.

As it turned out, the press conference was worth the wait, in more ways than one. Seated next to me in the front row was Joseph Bideri, the director-general of the government’s media office, ORINFOR, and next to him, the Information Minister, Laurent Nkusi. I had been trying to arrange meetings with both men to tell them about the book and to discuss the Rwanda Initiative. So the 30 minutes we spent waiting for the press conference were put to good use.

By about 9:15 the room was packed and President Kagame made his entrance. His press secretary had already set the ground rules – one question each, no exceptions.

I have to admit, Kagame’s presser was a remarkable performance. For one thing, it went on for nearly two hours. For the first hour or so, the press secretary selected the questioners. Near the 90-minute mark she tried to bring things to a close, asking Kagame if he could take two more questions. Ten questions later he was still going and he had taken over picking out the questioners. More than half of this went on in Kinyarwandan, so I could only read the body language. But it was clear to me that despite the very real restrictions placed on the media here – which manifests itself mostly in self-censorship by journalists wary of directly criticizing the President – Kagame was willing to take all comers. He fired questions back at the reporters, pushing them to reformulate what they had to say. Time and again the room rippled with nervous laughter from the media. At the end, Kagame insisted on taking additional questions from journalist Charles Kabanero, editor of the independent Umeseso newspaper and someone who has time and again run into trouble with the government.

When Kagame finally closed down the event, well after 11 a.m., I sprang to my feet on cue and intercepted him near the door. I had barely introduced myself when he took me by the arm and ushered me down a hallway into a meeting room. We spent the next half hour discussing the book, the media in Rwanda and the prospect of expanding the Rwanda Initiative project to bring media professionals to Rwanda from Canada to conduct training sessions with working journalists. Blogosphere notwithstanding, I don’t think it would be appropriate to say much more about a meeting that quickly turned into a working session.  But I was just shameless enough to arrange not only for someone to snap our picture together, but also to grab a picture of Kagame with a copy of the book.

President Paul Kagame with his copy of The Media
and the Rwanda Genocide

With Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda

Mission accomplished, at least for this morning. Now, the sprint back to Butare in time for the 4.30 p.m. book launch at the National University of Rwanda. By the time I left the Presidential Palace – in a downpour – it was well after noon. And my Rwanda Initiative colleague Shelley Robinson was scheduled to arrive at the airport at 12:50 to take up her teaching position at the university in Butare. It made sense to me to share a ride to Butare with Shelley and our fixer, Solange. As often happens, this got more complicated by the minute. Turns out the university vehicle dispatched to pick up Shelley was also supposed to bring two other visiting lecturers from the Kigali to Butare. By the time we established this with the driver, it was nearly 2:45. I took the executive decision to bail out of the car and grab our own taxi to head to Butare. The two-hour drive (compressed to 1 hour and 45 minutes this time) gave me a good chance to give Shelley a briefing on her teaching assignment.

Somehow, we managed to arrive in Butare almost on time, at 4:40. Students and faculty were just assembling in the conference room booked for the launch. I was introduced by Prof. Gatsinzi, the director of the journalism school. By now I have long since given up using notes. In fact, this is becoming a bit like the political campaigns I used to cover for The Star, except with me making the stump speech. After about 20 minutes we threw it open to questions from the floor and they ran the gamut from when the book will be available in French (that one is asked a lot), to why the international media failed to cover the genocide.

At the National University of Rwanda, Prof. Jean-Bosco Rushingabigwi (L) and Prof. Jean-Pierre Gatsinzi, director
of the journalism program (C)

National University of Rwanda book launch

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Jan. 21, 2007 – The Page 3 boy
off on the road to Butare

As you might have gathered, the schedule in Rwanda has been in flux. The original plan was to travel to Butare today for meetings with officials at the National University of Rwanda and to host a dinner party at the Rwanda  Initiative house in Butare for the Rector of the university, Prof. Silas Lwakabamba. As it turned out, the Rector confirmed mid-morning that he had been called away to Kigali and wouldn’t be able to attend dinner. But I already had a lunch date in Butare with the Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs, Prof. Silas Mureramanzi and wanted to meet with Prof. Jean-Pierre Gatsinzi, the director of the journalism school and my longtime partner in the Rwanda Initiative project.

By now of course, I knew that I would have to return to Kigali again at dawn on Monday in order to attend the press conference being held by President Paul Kagame. I am determined to meet with President Kagame on this trip, at a minimum to formally present him with a copy of the book and if possible, to try and engage him in a discussion about the current state of the media in his country. My plan to go back up to Kigali for the Monday morning press conference meant moving the university book launch in Butare until the afternoon. It also meant that the Information Minister, Laurent Nkusi, would no longer be able to participate in the Butare book launch, as he had planned. Nkusi was obliged to return to Kigali as well to attend the President’s press conference.

So, for about the 25th time in my life, I found myself on the highway from Kigali to Butare. There was another reason for the voyage, as if I didn’t have enough already. Our house in Butare had run out of the gas used for the stove and water heater. And believe it or not, the propane can only be purchased in Kigali. So I was also the mule for a tank of gas. This was all arranged by the capable Solange, the journalism student who is assisting me with logistics on this trip.

The drive from Kigali to Butare is stunning, even when you have made the trip two dozen times and you know that you will be doing it again the next day – twice. And I have to admit, Butare is beginning to feel like a bit of a second home. The household staff we employ – amazing gentlemen all – were there to greet me. We employ four people at our house, which is typical for any middle class household in Butare – and I don’t just mean expatriate residents. Most of those who work in professions and live in detached homes on the edge of town employ a cook and housekeeper as well as at least two, if not three men to serve as night watchmen and daytime guardians for the property. In the prosperous neighbourhood on the edge of town, all of the homes are behind high walls. When you get home you honk the horn, and the guardian on duty opens the gate to let the car into the driveway.

Pix with jean the cook

At our house, the cook is an amazing fellow named Jean, probably the only vegan in town and a wonderful cook who loves to experiment with recipes in the cookbooks given to him by friends. Damascene typically works the day shift opening the gate. He also loves to tend to the flowers and shrubbery around the yard. He works from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and is replaced for the night shift by Joseph. Somewhere in that rotation, to allow Joseph and Damascene some time off, Abdul takes a few shifts. After a long absence, I now routinely greet all three in typical Rwandan fashion, hugging and touching the sides of our heads together – a bit like those fake kisses on the cheek people give in Canada – before briefly touching our foreheads together. There is also sort of a secret handshake, once in the centre of the palm, then shifting into a sort of arm-wrestling position, then gripping the palm again before sliding away.

With the guys who work shift as night watchman and groundskeepers, L-R Damascene, Joseph and Abdul

And of course I was greeted by Sue Montgomery, the Montreal Gazette reporter who is now a veteran of the Rwanda Initiative. Sue taught for us last year and is now on her second rotation in Butare. When I called Sue from Kigali to give her an update on my travel plans she was at the hair salon, a place where Rwandan women routinely spend hours of their time on intricate hairdos. Sue was sporting the tightly-braided helmet-hair typical in Rwanda.

Sue Montgomery and her new do

The day ended with a dinner party at our house – menu courtesy of Jean. Sue and I played host to Prof. Jean-Bosco Rushingabigwi, student Solange Nyamulisa and Jean-Pierre Gatsinzi, the director of the journalism school. The evening made me realize we spend too much time working and not enough time socializing with our Rwandan colleages.

Jan. 21 dinner party, Sue Montgomery, Jean-Bosco Rushingabigwi, me, Solange Nyamulisa, Jean-Pierre Gatsinzi

With Jean, our amazing cook and housekeeper

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KIGALI, Rwanda — Jan. 20, 2007 — Meet the bookseller of Kigali

The Media and the Rwanda Genocide is now on the shelf in Rwanda, thanks to Chiel Lijdsman, the man who could best be called the bookseller of Kigali. Lijdsman owns what most people agree is the best book store in Kigali, the Ikirezi Bookshop, which translates from Kinyarwanda loosely as “the beloved bookshop.”

L-R: Me, Chiel Lijdsman

Ikirezi is a burgeoning business in the heart of Kigali where revenues have been doubling year over year as increasingly, parents buy books for their children, joining the schools, expatriates and government officials who have been Ikirezi’s usual clients.

The small bookshop has what is probably the world’s best collection of literature on Rwanda and in particular, the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The best seller by far is still the paperback version of Romeo Dallaire’s memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil.

Lijdsman, a Dutchman with flowing white hair, came to Rwanda in 1987, to work in the supply of pharmaceuticals. He has turned his expertise for systems and inventory to the management of Ikirezi, which opened for business in 1998. He is also the main supplier of books to shops in Kigali’s main hotels.

Lijdsman has already ordered 100 copies of The Media and the Rwanda Genocide.

And news about the book’s arrival in Rwanda was featured in a report issued this afternoon by the Rwanda News Agency.

I spent much of the day in the Intercontinental hotel bar. Don’t get me wrong, this trip isn’t a big booze-up. As it happens, the best place to get wireless internet reception at Kigali’s Intercontinental Hotel is at a table in the corner of the lobby bar. So that is where I set up shop at 9 a.m. this morning and in true Hemingway fashion, that is where I have spent most of the day.

The Intercontinental, as it happens, is also one of the best places to meet people while visiting Rwanda. It is by no means the best place to see the country. Indeed, its five-star elegance is a gross distortion of life in Rwanda, where most people struggle to survive.

But for someone like me, passing through to promote a new book and to maintain contacts with officials in media, government, the diplomatic corps and civil society, the Intercontinental is the place to be, not least because a lot of people take advantage of the wireless access to use the lobby area as their informal office.

The official book launch events for Monday and Tuesday are still a bit of a moving target. I heard this morning by phone from Azzy, one of the local representatives for Fountain Publishers, the local publisher for the book. After some confusion, it seems that copies of the book did arrive in Kigali today and will be available for distribution for next week’s events.

So, we have books. It is the events that are somewhat in flux. There is a book launch and reception scheduled at the university in Butare – where Carleton has its media capacity-building project – for 11 a.m. Information Minister Laurent Nkusi is scheduled to take part, along with the Rector of the University, Silas Lwakabamba.

But it now seems that President Paul Kagame has convened a press conference for Monday morning, in Kigali, a two hour drive from Butare. That press conference may take over the schedule of the information minister and most of the country’s media. In fact, I would like to be there too as someone whose primary role in this country is to assist with efforts to build the capacity of the media sector.

So the event on Monday morning in Butare may be pushed back to later in the afternoon. And since I will be in Kigali Monday, I had might as well go to the airport and pick up the next teacher from Carleton joining the Rwanda Initiative, Shelley Robinson. She is scheduled to arrive at 1 p.m. So if we get out of the airport by 2, we can still be in Butare in time for a book launch event in the late afternoon or early evening. More logistics.

Solange Nyamulisa, who is helping with logistics for the book launches, spent the morning visiting various media houses in Kigali, distributing press releases and reminding journalists of the book launch event in Kigali, at 5 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon. That event is being held at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).

In my corner office here at the Intercontinental, I met with a few friends and contacts today while intermittently checking my email and yes, blogging.

One of the email messages was from my mother, Eleanor Thompson, a retired school teacher and semi-retired farmer. She and my Dad, Ronald, still work the family farm in Glammis, Ontario, not far from Walkerton, the town made famous a few years back by the e-coli water tragedy.

Mom and Dad have been following the blog closely, tracking my journey. Mom, who is the computer user in the household, reports that yesterday she even got Dad to sit down in front of the computer to read one of the blogs. It is good news to know that I am reaching my most important readers.

And I also had a chance to talk with my wife Roula and our son Laith, who have been grappling with the sub-zero temperatures and snow that descended upon Ottawa within minutes of my departure. Seems our ever-reliable Toyota Camry failed to start the other day. What is no fun for Roula has been tons of fun for Laith, who tells me that he needs my help to finish making an igloo in the front yard.

We were speaking with each other through the wonders of skype.com, the free internet telephony service that allows for voice communication from computer to computer, using a high-speed internet connection.

There was no skype when I came to Rwanda first in the autumn of 1996.

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KIGALI, Rwanda — Jan. 19, 2007 — Let’s hope seven is a lucky number

I am back in Rwanda, for the seventh time in a decade. I have now come and gone from this country with more frequency than virtually any other on my travels. There is certainly something familiar about the place, and indeed, the journey here. I now zip through the duty-free stores at Nairobi airport like a trip to the corner market – a bit of this, a bit of that – especially some duty free Scotch for the party we will hold on Monday evening at the Rwanda Initiative house in Butare. My Rwandan friends mix their Scotch with Coke, so I don’t break out the single malt.

From the air, Rwanda looks the same as always, beautiful and green. It always amazes me how a place best known for the tragedy of the 1994 genocide could also be so spectacularly beautiful – the land of a thousand hills.

I arrived in Kigali more or less on time after yet another sleepless night. (I did however manage to watch three movies and quaff a few gin and tonics, generously proffered by Kenya Airways.)

I was greeted on arrival by a familiar face, a former student of mine from the university, Solange Nyamulisa. Solange is an excellent young journalist and I hired her to help with some of the logistics for this visit to Rwanda. We were met later by Jean-Bosco Rushingabigwi, a journalism professor at the university who is also helping with logistics.  

Solange Nyamulisa

Kigali International Airport is about the size of a big bus station and my arrival was fairly effortless, as usual. The first time I landed here, in the autumn of 1996 when The Star sent me to cover the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, most of the windows in the airport terminal were still shattered from the genocide and civil war two years earlier.

On that first trip I lugged along a gigantic satellite telephone. In those days sat phones were a new thing and this one, the size of a heavy VCR, came in a carrying case that my driver lovingly referred “the coffin,” but it was essential for making calls back home.

These days, you don’t need a satellite phone anymore. Rwanda has one of the best mobile phone networks in Africa. So all you need to do is bring along your regular mobile phone, then pay $5 for a SIM card the size of dime that contains a local Rwandan phone number and connects you to the network.

Beside the luggage carousel a brilliant new Welcome to Rwanda sign greets travelers as they arrive at the burgeoning tourist destination, best known for its rare silverback mountain gorillas.

But I’m here to promote my book, The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, and to make the rounds of partners and potential partners for Carleton’s Rwanda Initiative media capacity building project. One of my objectives on this trip is to revamp the journalism student internship program Carleton ran in Rwanda last year. More than a dozen journalism students spent six to eight weeks last summer working at the New Times, Kigali’s main English-language newspaper.

But many students have expressed an interest in working for broadcast outlets in Rwanda, at TV Rwanda, Radio Rwanda or one of the new independent radio stations, such as Contact FM. To that end, I spoke today with senior journalists from all three organizations. I also met with David Kabuye, Managing Director of the New Times newspaper, to talk about repeating our highly-successful internship program.

And yes, I am gearing up for Monday and Tuesday’s launch events for The Media and the Rwanda Genocide. While at the New Times, I dropped in to see another of their senior editors and plugged my jump drive into his computer so that I could download a detailed press release about the book and a cover photo. He seemed quite interested in the book, so hopefully it will get some print media coverage. I also hope to drum up some broadcast media attention for the book.

For the first day or so I’m staying at the Intercontinental Hotel, which I will be the first to admit is too expensive. But they do sometimes give a discount (say no more). The hotel also has the great advantage of free wireless internet access for its guests and a terrific location in the centre of town.

There is also a certain irony to this five-star monument to Rwanda’s post-genocide reconstruction. The Intercontinental is built on the site of the notorious Hotel Diplomates (where I stayed during my first visit in 1996), which served as the de facto headquarters of genocide planners in 1994.

This is where Romeo Dallaire had a famous and nasty encounter with Col. Theoneste Bagosora, now on trial at the Rwanda tribunal as the alleged mastermind of the genocide. Within sight of where I am sitting now, there used to be a staircase in the old Diplomates where Dallaire maintains he confronted Bagosora at the height of the genocide. According to Dallaire, Bagosora told him that if he ever saw his face again, he would kill him. Instead, the next time they met Dallaire was giving evidence at a war crimes tribunal and Bagosora was on trial.

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LONDON — Jan. 18, 2007 — The rush for Africa

By the time I reached Heathrow Airport to catch my overnight flight to Kigali, I felt as if I had walked there. "Mind the Gap" they announce at every stop of the sprawling London subway system affectionately known as "the tube."

Mind the gap alright, the gap between the time you expect it will take you to get somewhere in central London and the time it will actually take to reach your destination. I'm conservative when it comes to travel times. Just ask my wife, who prefers "just-in-time" delivery.

I squeezed in a final appearance in Britain today before departing for Rwanda, a meeting with journalism students at City University, one of Britain's best-known journalism schools and an institution that has a long association with Carleton University. The meeting was set for 2 p.m. and was to last an hour. I figured I needed at least an hour after that to collect my things and get back to the hotel at Paddington, then catch the Heathrow Express train, hopefully by 4:15. That would get me to Heathrow at 4:30 and to the Kenya Airways check-in by 5 p.m. - two hours before my flight.

The meeting with journalism students went well. At first I couldn't get my laptop to work with the digital projector, but by the time the students arrived I had figured out plan B. After pushing every button I could find on the console, I discovered a separate DVD player, and managed to play the DVD that David Kulawick had prepared for me. All systems go.

The students packed the lecture room. I learned later that most had been given an assignment to write something about my talk. That is an incentive to attend. Everyone remained engaged, the talk led into a lively question and answer session and before we knew it, it was 3 p.m., time for them to head off to their next assignment and for me to head to Heathrow.

Alex, from Pluto Press, had come along to sell some books and also to top up my supply. I am taking extra books to Africa just in case there is a problem with delivery in Rwanda. My luggage was back at the hotel, but I still had my laptop bag, my signs and now a heavy box of 20 books to cart the 10-minute walk to the Angel tube station.

The Angel tube, as it happens, is right across the White Lion St., where I worked in 1990-91 while on internship at Gemini News Service. So I had my route planned: Northern line from Angel to King's Cross, then Circle or Metropolitan line to Paddington. Alas, the Northern line heading north was disrupted by some kind of accident. No trains were stopping at King's Cross because of a National Rail disruption. So at the last minute I ran across the platform and took the Northern line south, to Moorgate, where I knew I could catch the Circle or Metropolitan to Paddington.

Got to Moorgate, hopped on the Circle. Then found out this train stopped at Edgeware. Baled out at Baker St. (remember Sherlock Holmes?) and jumped on the Bakerloo line to Paddington. Well, first I had to walk about a mile through the tunnels, lugging my books, computer bag and signage. Caught the Bakerloo at Baker St., in to Paddington at 4 p.m.

It took an hour to get from City University to Paddington.

Good thing the hotel was close. I grabbed my suitcases and was back at Paddington at 4:20, in time for the 4:25 Heathrow Express. It took only 18 minutes to reach Terminal 4. By the time I reached the Kenya Airways counter, it was 5 p.m. No problem checking in, but I was wondering about the signs everywhere announcing only one piece of hand luggage was allowed. I had two - big ones. I got past the check in, but was nabbed on my way to gate. I had to go back to the counter and check in the third bag. By now, my books had been evenly distributed between all three suitcases and my carry on. At least some books will get to Africa, come hell or high water.

The quickest way to file this blog seemed to be through an extortionate internet access counter near the gate which charged about 25 cents per minute (10 pence) for internet access. So my money got me exactly 19 minutes. Good thing I took that typing course back in first year at Carleton.

If all goes well, I will be in Africa in the morning. I change planes in Nairobi but in an ideal world, my luggage will head on without my assistance and join me tomorrow afternoon in Kigali, the next and in some ways the most important stage of this book tour. Kigali, here I come.

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London – Jan. 17, 2007

When you are on a book tour, it is a good thing when they are sitting in the aisles.

At yesterday’s book launch at the London School of Economics, the lecture hall was overflowing and yes, there were people sitting on the floor and a few standing at the back of the room. So much for the suggestion that no one cares about Rwanda and the issue of how the news media cover events like the Rwanda genocide. This crowd was there in numbers and members of the audience asked questions until the time ran out and then lined up to buy books.

Yesterday’s event was organized by the Crisis States Research Centre and Polis – Journalism and Society two specialized research centres at LSE. I first made contact with the Crisis States Research Centre in 2005 when I participated in their annual Berkley lecture.

My hosts, James Putzel (L) and Charlie Beckett (R)

I arrived at LSE yesterday with the usual amount of pre-event trepidation, only to be overwhelmed by the response. And to make things even better, I was joined at the front by three of the London-based contributors to the book, journalist and author Linda Melvern, human rights consultant Mike Dottridge and journalist Richard Dowden. (Two other London-based contributors – BBC journalist Mark Doyle and former Human Rights Watch officer Lars Waldorf – were out of the country and not able to attend).

LSE panel: (L-R) Me, James Putzel (LSE) Mike Dottridge,
Linda Melvern, Richard Dowden

We were introduced by Charlie Beckett, director of Polis and James Putzel, director of the Crisis States Research Centre, chaired the event. I opened with a review of the video montage I have assembled for this trip – a clip of the film Hotel Rwanda, some actual news footage from Rwanda and a clip of the nightly news from the period – to reinforce the degree to which the news media downplayed events in Rwanda.

Richard Dowden, the next speaker, immediately took me to task on what he undoubtedly saw as an attack on the journalists who reported from Rwanda. Richard, who was in Rwanda in 1994 for The Independent newspaper, pointed out – quite rightly – that most of the journalists who were in Rwanda did an exceptional job. He also reminded the audience that most people were pre-occupied at the time with events in South Africa and that given the strain on resources, that took away from coverage of Rwanda. And, in an era of mobile phones, BlackBerry communication and other technology up the ying-yang, we now  forget how difficult – not to mention dangerous – it was to report from Rwanda in 1994. 

(When I had a chance to reply, I echoed Richard’s point and tried to stress the distinction I draw between ‘journalists’ and ‘the media.’ They are different beasts and despite the good work done by many individual journalists, ‘the media’ writ large can still fail to properly cover a story, as it did in Rwanda.)

In a poignant moment, Richard recounted a telephone conversation he had while in Rwanda with a news editor back in Britain. “I just couldn’t find the words,’’ Richard recounted. “I told him, ‘sorry, I can’t tell you what I saw today.’ “ At that point, Richard had to stop for a moment to regain his composure.

Linda Melvern, author of two books on Rwanda – Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide – spoke next. Linda recounted her 13 years of investigative work, piecing together the role of western power brokers in the response – or lack thereof – to the Rwanda genocide. Her latest book reveals details of the genocide conspiracy in Rwanda.

Mike Dottridge, who was the Amnesty International desk officer for central Africa from 1979-87 and then Africa director from 1987-94, recounted the degree to which we all missed the warning signs from Rwanda years before the genocide because we weren’t listening, or made no effort to understand.

The question and answer period in the packed hall had the makings of another book in itself. James Putzel opted to take questions from nearly a dozen members of the audience, all in succession, then turned it over to the panellists to pick and choose which ones they would like to answer, depending on their expertise.

There were questions about:

• French media coverage of Rwanda
• the dearth of coverage for events in Congo and Burundi
• whether or not western guilt over Rwanda has given the government of Pres. Paul Kagame a free ride
• the culpability of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who was the head of UN peacekeeping operations in 1994
• media coverage of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
• what difference it makes when journalists use the word ‘genocide’ to describe events like Rwanda
• whether media coverage can ever shift policy
• the impact of the fact that news organizations are commercial enterprises
• whether or not the book dealt with coverage of Rwanda by African media (and yes it does, in an excellent chapter by Emmanuel Alozie – who compared coverage in the Guardian of Lagos, Nigeria and the Nation newspaper, in Nairobi.)

For the next 30 minutes, the four of us took turns responding. I will try to post a recording of the session as soon as I can figure out how to get it out of my digital recorder and send it back  home to our webmaster, Roger Martin.

This event was made all the better by the fact that there were some familiar faces in the audience. I had a chance to see Derek Ingram, a remarkable British journalist who single-handedly founded and managed Gemini News Service and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Commonwealth. I worked for Derek in 1990-91 when I was at Gemini as an IDRC fellow.

(L-R) Gabi Hesselbein (LSE), Derek Ingram, Me

Daniel Nelson, another former Gemini colleague, was also in attendance. Daniel, most recently an editor with the online service OneWorld UK, has worked on newspapers in Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Nigeria, Uganda and points in between.

Brett Popplewell, a graduate of Carleton’s journalism program and now an MA student at LSE, was also there. Brett is in Britain this year courtesy of a scholarship from the Gordon Sinclair Foundation. Brett also went to Rwanda last year through our Rwanda Initiative media internship program. You can read his blogs online.

Finally, I had a chance to meet up with my dear cousin, Keith Surridge, a noted scholar and co-author of The Boer War, a highly-regarded history of Britain’s military adventure in South Africa. My grandfather on my mother’s side, James Surridge, was a brother of Keith’s grandfather, Frank. The brother’s were separated as children when James and two other siblings were shipped off to Canada by the Barnardo organization as home children. Connecting with my English cousin Keith and his brother Mark, an artist in Cornwall, has been an important part of my life.

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Jan. 16 – Oxford – We have liftoff

I owe my son Laith $34.60. We had a deal you see. Laith insisted that when I sell my first book, he should get the proceeds, being such a good son and all. Forget all that stuff about modest royalties and the reality that academic books rarely cover much more than their production cost.

Laith, I sold my first book today and your “royalty” is in the mail.

The first formal event of this pre-emptive book tour went off very well and yes, I did actually sell a few books, at the special publisher’s discount price of £15 per copy. [www.idrc.ca/rwandagenocide]

I was invited to deliver a seminar at the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP), part of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University.  I first came into contact with the PCMLP a couple of years back when I invited one of their members to attend our symposium at Carleton on the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide. As it turned out, he couldn’t attend, but invited me to take part in a roundtable discussion on hate media some months later in London.

When I learned that I would be passing through Britain on the way to Rwanda, I got back in touch with the programme at Oxford and they were more than happy to invite me to meet with some students and faculty. The new head of the PCMLP, Danilo Leonardi, made all the arrangements.

L-R: Danilo Leonardi, Me

As I mentioned yesterday, Pluto Press wasn’t able to send someone from London to take care of book sales. So like a literary Fuller brush salesman, I loaded books into a carry-on bag and dragged them in the pre-dawn darkness to Paddington Station, where I caught the train to Oxford. (True to anal-retentive form, I arrived at Oxford with hours to spare).

Since it didn’t seem like such a good idea to try and peddle my own book, I made arrangements ahead of time to have someone staff a book table for me outside the seminar room.

Through a friend of a friend, I was put in touch with Allen Middlebro, who is doing his DPhil in modern European history at Oxford. And wouldn’t you know it, Allen is a Carleton grad (honours history, 1996) and the son of Thomas Middlebro, who taught English literature at Carleton for decades. Allen kindly offered to take care of book sales and direct people down the hall to Seminar Room B – all in exchange for a copy of the book. That seemed like more than a fair deal to me.

The seminar was set for 12:30 p.m. My timing is not the best. This was the first week of the new term at Oxford and students were just settling in. At 12:25 there were only two people in the seminar room, both journalists (one from New Zealand, the other from Uganda) who are doing research at Oxford through a Reuters fellowship. But moments later, another 15 people showed up for what had always been planned as an intimate seminar. The room was full and we were off.

Before leaving Ottawa I put together a series of video clips to use as part of these book launch presentations. Or rather, David Kulawick of Instructional Media Services at Carleton University put together a series of clips (thanks David).

The presentation starts with a couple of minutes from the film Hotel Rwanda the scene during which the journalist character played by Joaquin Phoenix rushes in with some horrific footage he has taken of a massacre in the streets of Kigali. Later he and the hotel manager ruminate over whether or not the world will respond to the gruesome images.

“How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?’’ asks the heroic hotel manager, played by Don Cheadle. Of course, the world didn’t respond.

“If people see this footage, they’ll say ‘oh my god that’s horrible,’ and then go on eating their dinners,” the journalist character replies.

After the Hollywood version, the next clip is a remarkable bit of actual footage taken in Rwanda in 1994 by British journalist Nick Hughes (who contributed a chapter to the book and also produced one of the first feature films on Rwanda, 100 Days ). Hughes captured the images on April 18, 1994, a week or more after the genocide began. Shooting from the top of a building in central Kigali, Hughes managed to record the killing of two women. The grainy images are so disturbing that they are difficult to watch. But I have included them in this presentation to underline a central point:

How can it be that nearly a million people were massacred in the space of 100 days – at a rate of 10,000 per day – and we only have one known image of a killing taking place? And how is it that that searing image made no dent in the evening news at the time? It surfaced much later in documentary treatments of the genocide.

The montage ends with a few minutes of the newscast on ABC World News Tonight from the same date – April 18, 1994. The venerable Peter Jennings opens the newscast with six minutes on that day’s events in Bosnia. The extensive report on Gorazde is followed by a 20-second script and clip item from Rwanda. And as it happens, ABC was the only US network to report on Rwanda that night.

How to explain that Rwanda didn’t really sink into our collective consciousness until the story managed to permeate our popular culture a decade later through the Hollywood version of events, Hotel Rwanda?

How can footage like that captured by Hughes in the early days of the genocide not top the evening news?

Why did events in Bosnia – doubtless important, crucial developments in a major story – manage to so completely overshadow the genocide in Rwanda?

These questions are the crux of The Media and the Rwanda Genocide  and made for a lively discussion yesterday with the Oxford students and faculty members who gathered in Seminar Room B and gasped collectively at the horrific images from Rwanda, pictures that no one in the audience had seen before.

One of those in attendance was Carles Llorens Maluquer, a visiting research fellow at Oxford from the Universitat Autonama de Barcelona. I had a great chat with Carles, who asked me if during my time in Rwanda I had ever met a Spanish cameraman by the name of Miguel Gil. I told him that I had fond memories of Miguel, with whom I shared a vehicle for a day or two in Rwanda and eastern Zaire in 1996.

Miguel Gil was killed in Sierra Leone on May 24, 2000.

His family later established a memorial foundation to encourage Miguel’s deeply humanitarian form of journalism.
[http://www.fundacionmiguelgilmoreno.com/menuingles.html]

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Jan. 15 – London

I have a book in my hand, at last. After a sleepless night on Air Canada, I touched down at Heathrow a few minutes before 7 a.m., zipped through Customs, grabbed my luggage and caught the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station. Around the corner from Paddington I checked into one of my London haunts, the cheap and cheerful St. David’s Hotel, known for its friendly service and bounteous English breakfast. I rarely have breakfast at home but when I travel, I eat like a wolverine.

Sausage, bacon and beans later, I made the trek to the office of Pluto Press, my London publisher. The Archway Road home of one of Britain’s most highly-regarded progressive publishers looked an awful lot like the little newsroom where I had my first job at the Kincardine Independent. Ramshackle, but friendly.

The woman who buzzed me in said, with a glimmer of recognition: “You’re looking for Beech.” My appointment was with Anne Beech, Managing  Director of Pluto and someone with whom I had only had an email relationship up to now. “Follow me,’’ the woman said. Down a winding staircase, past rows of books and cardboard boxes, we eventually made our way to a small, book-lined (quel surprise) board room. “Beech,” who looked exactly as I thought she would (a bit like Doris Giller, the former Toronto Star books writer who used to sit nearby in the newsroom), arrived a moment later.

After a few pleasantries about the flight and my tube ride to the office, she suddenly blurted: “Have you seen the book? Aaaahhh,’’ then dashed back up the stairs. She returned with a handful of books —- my book —- vacuum-packed in cellophane. I held the volume in my hand for a few seconds, just staring at it. It finally existed.

“Do open it up,’’ Beech insisted. And I did, like a kid at Christmastime.

We were joined later by Melanie Patrick, Pluto’s marketing manager and Helen Griffiths, who handles publicity. Together we strategized about launch plans, which will stretch on into March.

I head tomorrow to Oxford, where I will give a talk to students and faculty in the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy. (I participated couple of years back in a roundtable on hate media organized by the programme). Pluto didn’t have anyone available to go with me to Oxford to sell books, so I offered to cart some up myself in a suitcase. Offer accepted. I departed Pluto Press with a carry on bag crammed with crisp, vacuum-packed books and then began to turn my thoughts to tomorrow’s event at Oxford.

Have you seen the movie Brigitte Jones's Diary, the scene where Brigitte, a publicist for a publishing house, botches the book launch for something called Kafka’s Motorbike, fumbling with the microphone, losing her train of thought while fixated on the obscene nickname given to one of her colleagues. I have been watching that scene over and over in my head.

Determined to stay awake (that is my anti-jetlag strategy), I filled the rest of the day with meetings that would prove useful not only for book promotion, but also for Carleton’s Rwanda Initiative project with the National University of Rwanda.

I had lunch with  Hratche Koundarjian, from the Aegis Trust, a London-based organization involved in a global campaign of genocide prevention and commemoration. Aegis played a major role in the establishment of genocide memorial sites in Rwanda in advance of the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the genocide, in 2004. Its mandate includes “research, policy, education, remembrance, awareness of genocide issues in the media and humanitarian support for victims of genocide.”

And I ended the afternoon over coffee with Duncan Furey and Tony Borden, of the Institute for war & peace reporting. IWPR is “an international network for media development, with not-for-profit divisions in Europe, the US and Africa supporting training and capacity-building programs for local journalism, with field programs in more than two dozen countries.” IWPR runs innovative media training programs in a number of African countries, such as Zimbabwe, Uganda and so we compared notes on Rwanda.

Then it was back to my room to finalize tomorrow’s talk.

Jan. 14 – Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean

The beginning is usually the best place to start. So before launching into my book tour for The Media and the Rwanda Genocide — an edited collection just published by Pluto Press, Fountain Publishers and the International Development Research Centre [www.idrc.ca/rwandagenocide] — it would be best to step back and explain where this all began.

I’m a career journalist, recently turned teacher here at Carleton. In 1996 I found myself in Rwanda, dispatched by my employer the Toronto Star to cover the situation in eastern Zaire, where a peacekeeping force led by Canada was about to deploy to ease the plight of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees who had been living in squalid camps since fleeing Rwanda at the end of the 1994 genocide. The refugees, who counted among their number many of the organizers of the genocide, were now caught in the crossfire of a rebel revolt in Zaire that soon blossomed into a civil war.

I arrived at the airport in Kigali late at night, clutching the huge case bearing a satellite phone I had hastily rented from a marina before leaving Ottawa. The phone would prove to be a godsend, even though it was impounded by the communications ministry until I could prove my journalistic credentials. The next 30 days were frenetic. All the hotels were packed with media who had returned to Rwanda to cover the refugee story. I filed a thousand words per day for 30 days, dictating many stories word-by-word on my satellite phone and pounding up and down the highway from Kigali to the border town of Gisenyi, next to Goma in Zaire.

The most astonishing day, the day when this story really starts, was Nov. 15, 1996. That’s when 700,000 refugees decided to break ranks with the “genocidaires” who had been using them as virtual human shields and head en masse back to Rwanda, by foot.

Many will remember the news coverage of that day, a human migration of biblical proportions, the highway clogged with humanity.

The lead on my story in The Star the next day was: “The wretched of the earth are finally going home.”

That day remains one of the most remarkable for me in two decades of work as a journalist. After spending hours walking up and down that road, interviewing refugees and filling my notebook with colour, I was flagged down by the spokesman for the UN refugee agency, Ray Wilkinson, who was driving one of the UN trucks. “There’s been a massacre,’’ he said. I hopped in for the drive to the Mugunga refugee camp, where only a day before, hundreds of thousands of refugees had been living in squalor.

The camp was deserted. In the distance, you could see the masses still trudging along the highway, as if being transported back to Rwanda on a conveyor belt. Finally, we came upon the massacre site. There were five of us: Wilkinson, myself, Anne McIlroy from the Globe and Mail and Philip Gourevitch, the New Yorker writer who later published one of the bestselling books on the genocide, 'We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.'

Nearly 20 bodies had been hacked apart and then dumped in a heap. Some had their heads cracked open and brain matter exposed, others their entrails spilling out of body cavities. These were the first human remains I had seen outside of a funeral home and they will always be with me. The most difficult to look at were the children, one a baby in a green woolen jumper, lying on its back, arms splayed to the side.

Those moments in Mugunga, confronted by some of the lost souls of Rwanda, were something of an epiphany. In that deserted refugee camp, two years after the Rwanda genocide, I found myself asking: how did I miss the Rwanda story? Why wasn’t I here in 1994? How could I have been so oblivious to such an important event?

I have been back to Rwanda half a dozen times since, both as a reporter for the Star and more recently, to establish a partnership between Carleton’s journalism school and its counterpart at the National University of Rwanda, in Butare. On March 13, 2004, Carleton hosted a major international symposium on the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide, examining both the hate media in Rwanda and the role of international media coverage of the genocide.

The book that I am now setting out to promote, The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, is a collection of papers on the topic, some of them contributed by experts who attended the Carleton symposium and others commissioned after the fact. It seemed only appropriate to travel to Rwanda to launch the book. My first stop on the way to Rwanda will be London.

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