The world’s double standards on covering Rwanda

One Saturday morning in 2018, 17-year-old Isaac Niwenshuti boarded a local bus bound for a nearby village, to visit his father, whose work had taken him away from home. Isaac never arrived at his destination. His father would never see him again. During Isaac’s journey, his bus was ambushed. A group of armed assailants set the bus on fire, trapping several passengers inside. Isaac was burned alive, murdered alongside five other passengers, including a 13-year-old girl.

In the following days, an armed group took to local radio to publicly claim responsibility for the attack that took Isaac’s life. Later that year, around the time of a second major attack nearby, the group’s founder posted a statement on YouTube, in which he pledged his “unreserved support” for the group, and hailed the launch of its “liberation struggle”.

"The murders of Isaac and at least eight other innocent civilians in 2018 were acts of terror. Had this story played out in Europe or the Americas, those responsible for these murders would have been known to the world as terrorists. Yet, when the members of the National Liberation Front (FLN) responsible for these attacks were successfully brought to justice, international uproar ensued. "The reason?” The FLN’s founder, the man who had so publicly glorified the group’s actions, was Paul Rusesabagina, a minor celebrity in the West.

After his arrest, Rusesabagina was hailed as a “hero” and a “human rights activist”, whose “only real crime was to be critical”. His armed militia, which had openly claimed responsibility for murdering innocent men, women, and children, was dismissed as an activist “political movement”. "Their victims were left anonymous, unmentioned.

For terrorism in the West to be met with this type of reaction would be inconceivable. But this series of events took place in Rwanda – in Africa, where the standards for terrorism are apparently different.

Rather than holding Paul Rusesabagina to account for his role in the murder of 17-year-old Niwenshuti, 13-year-old Ornella Sine Atete, and at least eight other innocent Rwandans, protests of his innocence were immediate and widespread.

Fiction was privileged over reality: a Hollywood script, of the 2004 Film Hotel Rwanda, was sufficient to exonerate him in the court of public opinion. In the real world, however, Rusesabagina’s involvement with terrorism was beyond doubt

During his trial, the prosecution revealed communications and Western Union transfers which established Rusesabagina’s links to the FDLR, an armed group designated as a terrorist group by the United States, and sanctioned by the United Nations for “serious violations of international law”. "These links have been publicly known since at least 2011, when text messages between Rusesabagina and FDLR President Ignace Murwanashyaka were revealed at a Stuttgart trial.

NOTE: The FDLR was designated a terrorist organisation by the United States in 2013. In the same statement, the US State Department added M23, another armed group, to its list of terrorist organization, and said that “there is a credible body of evidence demonstrating support from the Rwandan government to M23, including significant military and logistical support, as well as operational and political guidance”.

Rusesabagina described the foundation of the FLN in an online press conference, as a force made up of ex-soldiers from known terrorist groups, and bragged about their presence in the forests of Burundi on public radio, including on Voice of America.

The rest of the world had seemingly confused Rusesabagina for Don Cheadle, the actor who played Rusesabagina in a fictional 2004 film. Thus, the picture painted by the global media was of heroism, rather than terrorism.

It was not just journalists who fell into this trap. American senators, British MPs, European MEPs, and several NGOs lamented Rusesabagina’s arrest and conviction. To them, there was no point in even considering the notion that the much-lauded “real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda” could put a foot wrong.

Regrettably, these blatant double standards are hardly surprising. Nor are the failures to treat the victims of terror with the respect they deserve.  For centuries, African realities have been flattened, distorted by one-dimensional perspectives, which privilege simplicity and sensationalism over nuance and analysis.

As if to underscore this, Rusesabagina’s 20 co-defendants, also confessed members of the FLN, were swept aside, ignored by Western audiences fixated on headlines alone. Even less column inches were devoted to the FLN’s victims.

Time and again, African realities are fit into pre-conceived frameworks, and thus violent armed movements like the FLN are depicted as “activists”, repressed freedom fighters taking arms against “authoritarian” governments. The Manichean dichotomy – good vs evil – distorts the field of reality. Governments trying to protect the peace and safety of their citizens are demonised as “repressive”.

It is time that the world reassesses how these underlying biases affect the way in which Africa is treated. Governments who are fighting day and night to protect our communities against this violence are not necessarily asking for material support. What we do ask for is solidarity

When terror strikes the Western world, solidarity, thoughts, and prayers pour from every corner. Yet too often, the reaction to similar events in Africa and elsewhere is scorn and suspicion, cynicism rather than sympathy. We cannot, to borrow Teju Cole’s words, accept the deaths of African civilians like Ornella and Isaac as “natural and incontestable”. Each life lost to terrorism is a violation, an assault on humanity.

Source: The Continent