MEDIA
Hutu Power accounts of 1994 would be credible, since they were undoubtedly‘ there’.
The arguments in Untold Story and Bad News are enticingly presented as“ what they don’ t want you to know”. Unfortunately, the medium of television does not do justice to Corbin’ s controversial arguments. She rehashes, at high speed, some of the conspiracy theories that have been proposed by the government’ s enemies since 1994: that Habyarimana’ s assassination was carried out by President Kagame; the genocide was, in fact, a civil war, and( at the same time) it was deliberately started by Kagame. Although one may meet people who support the theory that Kagame shot down Habyarimana’ s plane, there is precious little hard evidence to back it up in this documentary, and so Untold Story is forced to rely on speculation and dubious allegations of motivation. Various‘ expert witnesses’ are dragged in, but we the audience are none the wiser unless we have degrees in ballistics. When the rhetoric and mood effects of the documentary are stripped away, the question of whether the 1994 genocide happened during a civil war or not, starts to sound like arguments that the Jewish
34- CHIEF EXECUTIVE
Holocaust was less serious because it happened during World War Two.
To his credit, Sundaram does not tangle Bad News up in dodgy revisionism and focuses on the present. We are presented with two main, interconnected ideas: free speech is impossible in Rwanda and, therefore, Rwandan society operates in a fog of ignorance and paranoia. Rather than relying on‘ expert witnesses’, like Untold Story, Sundaram’ s book derives from his first-hand experiences. However, this forces us to rely almost entirely on his word alone, and at times he reveals himself to be a rather unstable narrator.
Their argument can often be reduced to:“ they are hiding something; you would only hide something if it was the worst thing imaginable; therefore they are up to the worst things imaginable.”
In one of the most memorable sequences in Bad News, Sundaram describes a terrifying night, when he thought his house was being broken into by secret police. He hears footsteps clattering on the roof, sees shadowy shapes flitting past his window and becomes convinced that he is about to be taken to the Rwandan equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. The next morning he is shown by his bemused askari that this disturbance was in fact created by flying insects, attracted by the rains and his lights, and a flock of hawks who were devouring them. Similar episodes crop up again and again, creating an air of unrelenting paranoia: his journalist friend finds an olive in his salad and thinks it is poison; people jump up every time someone knocks at the door; phones are tapped, movements monitored to a minute degree and everyone is suspected of working for the government. Undoubtedly he did feel paranoid, but this becomes the default register of the book so that it becomes hard to take his thesis seriously.
This is a shame, as Sundaram’ s central argument would resonate strongly with many people: if Rwanda wants to build a functioning liberal democracy, it needs a media sector that can operate without fear. However, his obsession with free speech comes over as both historically naïve and out of context. He barely mentions the use of media to promote eth-