We have to. To make any sense of a United States that can not only tolerate genocide but in fact actively intervene to prevent other states from action, we must examine the media as a vehicle by which the American political will gives the public its cue for response. We may cling to our myth of journalistic objectivity, but Herman and Chomsky identify several filters shaping the news which is ultimately transmitted. Among these is the symbiotic relationship between journalism and bureaucracy: journalists depend on official representatives whose information is considered inherently credible and newsworthy; in return, they must display a good-faith acceptance of the official message to maintain their access to these sources. Government personnel, then, need not rely on heavy-handed tactics of visible censorship. "Newsworkers are predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news personnel participate in upholding a normative order of authorized knowers in the society," asserts Mark Fishman in Manufacturing the News. "In particular, a newsworker will recognize an official’s claim to knowledge not merely as a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge. This amounts to a moral division of labor: officials have and give the facts; reporters merely get them." If this is true, then we can expect news of Rwanda to transmit both the facts relayed to them by government sources and also the context signifiers useful to government sympathies: those associated with atrocities in a ‘good’ regime.

‘good’ regime, allied with the US

‘bad’ regime, ideologically opposed to the US

We can use this elision of the proper name for the genocide to help pinpoint American media coverage along the continuum outlined earlier, from good regime to bad, unworthy victims to worthy, tolerable atrocities to those that outrage. Let's consider the key distinctions:

The choice for those sculpting the news is whether to immerse the reader in specifics which personalize the victim and insist upon the crime's brutality; or to let that reader preserve emotional distance from the victim and intellectualize the event away. We know that the events of Rwanda shock because they unfold without the sanitizing layers of technology which characterize contemporary Western warfare—these are neighbors who stand face to face and raise clubs, hoes, machetes against one another, who are trained to slit the Achilles tendon in massacre situations so that victims cannot escape before it is their turn to die. The violence is visceral and personal and, to a media saturated with sight-bite images evoking primal fears, perfectly picturesque. Yet coverage at the time of the genocide is restrained. Photos featured in the New York Times to illustrate the events portray, in order of appearance: President Habyarimana; refugee families in a Tanzanian camp; Rwandan and Swiss nationals heading for the border; American and European nationals queuing up for Burundi entry visas; RPF rebels firing mortars; French paratroopers at Kigali airport. Finally on April 12, six days after the massacres began, a front page photo shows corpses—several swaddled forms extended by a roadside, above the caption "Havoc in Rwanda: Victims of tribal war were tossed on the side of a road in Kigali, the capital. An estimated 10,000 people have been killed in the city." Though tragic, the picture and its caption provide no details about the lives of the Rwandans depicted, whether they were killed on the roadside, where they were going. Which side of the 'tribal war' they were on. How they met their deaths, what their wounds were like. They are merely 'victims of war', nearly faceless, interchangeably scattered. Compare with the front-page photo of April 14 above the day's Rwanda report: a close-up portrait of an Israeli man killed when his bus was targeted by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The frame does not take in the whole bus, the entire collection of victims, but instead draws iconic power by letting this individual stand apart, showing his wounds in awful detail, introducing him to us so that we may mourn his loss. Not only photos but the paper's copy demonstrates this refusal to personalize the horrors of Rwanda. An April 11 article features the headline 'American Evacuees Describe Horrors Faced by Rwandans'; the jump is headed 'Americans Who Got Out Describe the Anguish Rwandans Face'. Whether you look forward to understanding the ordeal of Rwanda's citizens caught in the bloodbath or you consider such voyeurism ghoulish, you needn't have bothered. The article offers almost nothing in the way of description of Rwandans after all. We learn that an American AID employee was stared down by soldiers with rocket launchers, an American family huddled in their hallway eating canned food and trying to calm their terrified children amidst the violence, an American health official and his family hid in their house behind windows barricaded with mattresses. These last do describe giving shelter to their Tutsi cook, and listening to UN staff pleading for help on the radio until "we just had to turn it off". But the article is no more willing than any of the other coverage to personalize the fate of Rwandans, to evoke an emotional connection with the victims.

As for our earlier test case, the forbidding of the word 'genocide' further solidifes the American position on Rwanda as a friendly regime. 'Genocide' itself is an emotionally charged word—especially in the climate of the Bosnia conflict and the era's cultural fixation on Holocaust remembrance. Its use would sketch in a detail of motive that would intensify the horror of the Rwandan killings. As such, there's no room for it in American propaganda.

TTed Koppel, opening a Nightline broadcast:
"Tonight, Rwanda. Is the world just too tired to help?"
In framing the language of news reports, journalists can make the daily death toll feel so staggeringly high that the public conscience demands action be taken to end the atrocities—or, with the same numbers, create the impression of a daunting, irresistible momentum which stupefies us into resigned passivity. Rwanda is the latter case—a situation where, we're taught, intervention would only sacrifice our money and our personnel before a chaotic crush of senseless, unreasoning violence. Boutros Boutros-Ghali's concession, "Let us recognize that this is a failure... not only of the UN but also of the international community. All of us are responsible for this failure... It is a scandal. I am the first one to say it and I am ready to repeat it" may not sound like very good propaganda; but it does effectively close the case and dispel any possibility of action. Once Rwanda is safely classified as a failure, all that can be done is to move on. Several 'spins' are used to position the news from Rwanda as a conflict unfit for international intervention:

—Interpreting the violence as chaotic, formless, headless and thus unassailable—merely another spontaneous outbreak of chronic and deep-rooted ethnic hatred.
As British paper the Independent explains, "A terrible genocidal madness has taken over Rwanda. It is now completely out of control." Or the Guardian, reporting on "a new wave of tribal killings". Or the New York Times, invoking "rampaging troops and gunmen looking to settle old tribal scores".
But the press was merely following the lead of Western politicians in their public denial of systematic extermination. National Security Advisor Anthony Lake characterizes such situations as "particularly hard to come to grips with and to have an effect on from outside, because basically, of course, their origins are in political turmoil". And if it's hard for America to have an effect on from outside, then we should stay home—and if we stay home, the United Nations should get to stay home too. Hence the Secretary-General's April briefing to the Security Council, full of "anarchy and spontaneous slaughter". In turn, the official Western party line drew directly from the self-serving propaganda of the genocidaires themselves. Defense Cabinet Director Colonel Theoneste Bagasora, in an April 28 phone call from the Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, "characterized the killings as a spontaneous reaction by the population to the RPF offensive". When Sam Kiley of the Times interviews Rwandan defense minister Colonel Augustin Bizimana, the colonel insists that armed forces are working to bring the militias under control, though "it is very difficult to end these hatreds." Jérôme Bicamumpaka, Rwanda’s minister of foreign affairs, appears before the UN Security Council at the height of the genocide to claim that ethnic disturbance "unleashed the animal instincts of a people afraid of being enslaved once again." That this anarchy exists only rhetorically is clear from NGO reports and government documents. In mid-April Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch, writes to the acting President of the Security Council specifically to quash the talk of random and inevitable violence. "We urge your attention to the fact that the Rwanda military authorities are engaged in a systematic campaign to eliminate the Tutsi", he writes. "The organized campaign has become so concerted that we believe it constitutes genocide as defined by Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide"; and he calls for all parties to the convention, including the five permanent members of the Council, to intervene. Roger Winter, director of the US Committee for Refugees, has followed Rwanda's troubled politics for ten years. Desperate to change the perception of the Rwandan violence as spontaneous and random, he writes an article detailing the political nature of the violence, the conspiracy by which a ruling elite exploits ethnic divisions to cling to power in a changing political landscape. Winter's article is rejected by the American press, eventually appearing in the Toronto Globe and Mail on April 14. That day's New York Times edition instead proclaims "Anarchy Rules Rwanda’s Capital And Drunken Soldiers Roam City"— providing exactly the opposite context. Jean-Herve Bradol of Medecins Sans Frontieres refuted the journalistic fiction of lawless anarchy. ‘There was no anarchy, no chaos…In Kigali, there was order.’ Reports demonstrate that the American government was perfectly aware of the falsehood of the public spin it forced onto Rwanda. A memorandum from May 1994 prepared for Secretary of State Christopher acknowledges that "campaigns of ethnic cleansing against Tutsis appear well-planned and systematic." "Multiple sources indicate that the violence by the Presidential Guard and various youth militias was not spontaneous, but was directed by high-level officials within the interim government", concedes a Defense Intelligence Report. "There is an organized, parallel effort of genocide being implemented by the army to destroy the leadership of the Tutsi community." The method behind the madness was scrupulously denied, in order to stultify the American public into acceptance of another endless chapter in an unbreakable cycle of violence.

—The framing of the murders as simply casualties of a civil war.
The international community is no more eager to intervene in a civil war without the welcome of the host country than it was in the days after Somalia. Knowing that the public shares this reluctance, the American press follows the government lead in shuffling the Rwandan dead into wartime casualty statistics. Headlines from the first weeks of the genocide reveal for Alain Destexhe "a clear attempt to present the massacres as part of a civil war: ‘Rwanda on Fire’, ‘Fierce Clashes’, ‘Civil War’, ‘Fall of Kigali Imminent’", to which we can add 'Terror Convulses Rwandan Capital as Tribes Battle', 'A Truce is Reported', 'Deaths in Rwanda Fighting Said to Be 20,000 or More'. For the media audience consuming such explanations, civil war is lamentable but outside the American purview. 'Civil war' encompasses a wide range of conflicts, any of which every country must sort out for itself.

...a prelude to a humanitarian catastrophe prompting risk-free international assistance.

—Publicizing the plight of Rwandan refugees to create a humanitarian crisis displacing international action.
By the time the word genocide appears in press coverage of the massacres, press coverage of the massacres has all but given way to photos and news reports of the flood of refugees into Tanzania and Zaire; so that, indeed, for many at home in America, the ‘genocide’ becomes indelibly linked with images of displaced families, of camps stricken by cholera, of hunger and despair. Three weeks after the onset of the massacres, relief organization Oxfam issues a press release entitled "Oxfam fears genocide is happening in Rwanda". They receive no interest because the sudden flood of thousands of Rwandans into Tanzania—the fastest refugee migration ever recorded—catches the journalistic imagination. John Magrath, Oxfam press officer, observes that "the refugees became the story, not the genocide." It is undeniable that the conclusion of the South African elections frees a glut of 2,500 accredited foreign reporters stationed there to travel north, enabling a greater quantity of coverage as the simultaneous refugee situation develops. But between coverage of the ‘true’ genocide and the refugee crisis exists a difference in the quality of coverage, the strategic end to which readers’ attention is engaged. To quote from Alain Destexhe’s analysis, "‘genocide’ and ‘Holocaust’ were frequently and quite incorrectly applied, even by the most widely respected journalists, in reference to the subsequent cholera epidemic in Goma... There is a great danger in the way the media applied the term ‘Holocaust’ to the devastation wrought by the cholera epidemic on Goma, which has the largest concentration of Rwandan refugees in Zaire. This puts the medical disaster that resulted from the massive influx of refugees as a consequence of the genocide on the same level as the genocide itself, a premeditated mass-crime, systematically planned and executed. This has resulted in a double error with the exaggerated emphasis focused on the cholera victims distracting attention from the real crime already committed." Not for a minute will I suggest that this despair was not genuine or did not merit international relief. But I do argue that the sympathetic, humanizing publicity of the plight of refugees, following the dearth of insightful coverage recognizing the true scope of the genocide, represents a deliberate strategy to recast the Rwandan drama not as a mass murder which America condones by failing to honor its treaty obligations, but instead as a scenario of hope with America in the starring role of ever-caring donor nation. By channeling official prestige and public goodwill to intervention in the refugee crisis across the borders, America effectively stifles the possibility of intervention within the devastation of Rwanda itself. "For Western governments, humanitarian action provided a way of responding to the crisis while continuing to conveniently overlook the fact that a genocide had taken place until the situation had evolved to such a point that it could be forgotten altogether." According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. contributed over $237 million in emergency assistance to Rwanda between April and November 1994; however, the vast majority was earmarked for refugee assistance outside of Rwanda. Dennis McNamara, a director with the UN Division of International Protection, testifies before the US Senate that "unfortunately, what happened was that vast sums of money were spent in the camps, and I frankly state that within Rwanda for the survivors there was barely a trickle. So you got this imbalance of about $2 million—at the height, $2 million a day being spent in the camps and practically a trickle coming through, rather reluctantly, into what I have just described, a totally shattered country."

SSo the suppression of the name ‘genocide’ which we’ve traced from reluctant government to compliant press proves critical in normalizing the Rwandan violence and cultivating an air of resignation. Without the suppression of this one label, efforts to explain the massacres as a spontaneous outbreak of uncontrolled race-hate would be impossible—for there is no possibility of a systematic campaign of extermination without a system, without the coordination and forethought epitomized in the Nazi regime’s vast bureaucratic apparatus. Similarly, free and honest use of the word ‘genocide’ would dispel the myth that the dead of Rwanda were casualties of war. And finally, if the Rwandan atrocities are acknowledged as genocide to the extent of world leaders’ knowledge, the word would lose its potency and fail to electrify the world when magnifying the refugee crisis becomes the West’s PR priority.

As American headlines breaks the news of Rwandan massacres, a duality appears which contrasts the assassinated presidents, stable forces of law and order, against the leaderless lawless forces of violence. Habyarimana’s obituary in the New York Times lauds the self-proclaimed president who "excelled at strengthening ties to the West... at a time when a number of other African leaders were being accused of running corrupt and inefficient governments… In 1990, he sought to make a major break with the past by authorizing the formation of a multiparty political system in what was largely a feudal society. But his efforts to reach a peaceful settlement were not successful." A willful desertion of truth and logic is required to manipulate Habyarimana, under whose auspices thousands of weapons are stockpiled and distributed, into the shape of a man making "efforts to reach a peaceful settlement" which unnamed forces, rather than his own institutionalized violence, tragically undermine. A historical revisionism capable of anointing the slain president a peacemaker, then, can suggest that the ruler represented forces of democracy and modernization without scrupling to mention that only under his single-handed rule had Rwanda remained a 'feudal society' until the last decade of the 20th century. Or that only military pressure had forced his 'major break with the past'—a neat circumvention of the truth that the feudal, single-party past he sought to break from was not historical circumstance but his own creation. At the same time, coverage of the killings emphasizes random nature and individual responsibility. Notable by its absence is the interim government—the only mentions of current political figures are Agathe Uwilingiyimana, whose relevant contribution to the image of official non-involvement is her murder, and a single sentence ending a page 12 in which French officials pledge continued noninvolvement but concede that "about 10 members of the family of the dead Rwandan President… had been flown out of the country aboard French aircraft." (In fact, while Rwandan citizens beg European troops to shoot them rather than leave them to be massacred, the French do airlift First Lady Agathe Habyarimana, center of the Hutu Power akazu clique, three of her children, two grandchildren and a brother to safety. Not mentioned but also benefiting from French transport are Ferdinand Nahimana, the CDR party luminary and founding director of RTLM, and 40 other Hutu Power notables posing as 'caretakers' to Rwandan orphans.)
The distancing of officials from responsibility continues with a report stressing that there is "no authority in the capital" while the killings take place. In accordance with their officially maintained innocence, the Rwandan genocidal government continues to be welcomed in its Embassy in Washington. The Rwandan representative to the UN Security Council takes its seat as debates including those on what to do about the violence in Rwanda, where he finds a platform for his government's propaganda on the events. Interim minister of foreign affairs Jérôme Bicamumpaka reassures the Security Council that "the government took strong measures to stop inter-ethnic violence... Messages calling for peace were broadcast over the radio." When a resolution finally does pass, authorizing 5,500 troops for Rwanda, acting president Charles Keating of the UK writes to his government that "the US has essentially gutted the resolution… In reality the expansion is a fiction." America insists that before the troops can deploy, 150 officers must go and persuade the government to agree to a ceasefire. Czech ambassador Karel Kovanda insists that such hollow diplomatic gestures are "'rather like wanting Hitler to reach a ceasefire with the Jews.' Afterwards, British and American diplomats "quietly told him that on no account was he to use such inflammatory language outside the Council. It was not helpful." (L. R. Melvern) Meanwhile the interim government's foreign minister and the leader of the CDR party are openly feted in France, received by President Mitterand, and scheduled for meetings with the Prime Minister and the minister of foreign affairs. American governmental rhetoric and press coverage clearly draw more of their substance to Bicamumpaka and his genocidal regime's propaganda than to the government's true understanding of the state of affairs in Rwanda. Classified documents from throughout April and May speak candidly of the government's central command over the campaign of extermination. "There is substantial circumstantial evidence implicating senior Rwandan government officials in the widespread, systematic killing of ethnic Tutsis." "Unlike government forces, the RPF does not appear to have committed Geneva Convention defined genocidal atrocities." "Multiple sources indicate that the violence by the Presidential Guard and various youth militias was not spontaneous, but was directed by high-level officials within the interim government". This defense Intelligence Report from May 9 is already using the past tense, considering the atrocities not only an occurrence but a fait accompli; yet it will be a further two months before President Clinton announces his intention to close that regime's embassy and seek its expulsion from the UN. The line to take is articulated in a set of 'talking points' prepared for anUnder-Secretary of Defense for Policy dinner meeting with Henry Kissinger. "We played an important role in brokering the Arusha Accords. As the only "honest broker" left on the field... we could (and should) play a critical diplomatic role in urging the parties to adhere to the Arusha peace agreement." As Rwanda's self-appointed guide through the democratizing process and, later, as a key player at Arusha out to prove the possibilities for harmony in contemporary Africa, the US cannot afford to see the peace process acknowledged as a failure nor the regime devised under its aegis painted as a Fourth Reich. Thus the only answer was to classify the documents, keep the imprudently honest diplomats in line, bestow public blessing on the Rwandans acknowledged as orchestrators of genocide and thank heaven for good press. Like the New York Times editorial of April 9 insisting, "Democracy is staggering. But we can't give up."

And as for the word 'genocide', if it wasn't clear before how desperately American opinion-makers required its suppression, our determination to cleave to the interim government presiding over the massacres must signal the ideological imperative. Bedfellow to genocidal regimes is not a new role for the United States, but the word itself is only allowed visibility when it can be hurled at our enemies. In the words of Herman and Chomsky, "'Genocide’ is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes." Thus Turkey has 'killed' its Kurds, but only Iraq has been guilty of an anti-Kurdish 'genocide'. Thus Rwanda has suffered a bloody civil war; has been devilled by persistent ethnic tensions; has been devastated by a refugee crisis, but as long as possible, as long as politically expedient, will not have had a genocide.