The notorious Rwanda radio station RTLM began to broadcast racism in 1991, and by 1994 was airing instructions to ”kill and exterminate” the Tutsi minority. In the same year, a national newspaper, Kangura, printed a large cover picture of a machete with the headline ”What weapons shall we use to conquer the Inyenzi once and for all?”
Accusatory fingers were quickly pointed at the media for their role in the ethnic flashpoints of the early 1990s, but the legal response of the international community was flat-footed. While diplomats fumed and fiddled, and the bravest citizens protested against the media, the United Nations was unable to intervene. A coherent international approach to the role of the media in ethnic conflict and genocide is yet to emerge.
Or is it? For the first time since the Nuremberg trials, international criminal justice last week turned to the role of the media. In the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, three journalists were found guilty of direct incitement to cause genocide and now face life sentences.
While such international justice will be welcomed with a shiver of relief by many, it may worry those who aim to protect freedom of expression in developing countries.
According to Helen Darbishire of the United Kingdom-based Open Society Institute: ”We generally fear that advocating application of hate speech regulations will create an impetus to act without ensuring that any steps taken are in conformity with international standards.”
We might expect that sufficient safeguards are in place if it is the UN tribunal that judges on hate speech, but a more general clampdown on hate speech could constitute an unacceptable curtailment of freedom of expression.
”In Rwanda, in 1995, the Ministry of Information, failing to distinguish between criticism and incitement — and perhaps erring on the side of caution — launched an attack on the entire media sector and impounded several papers,” Darbishire said.
Uneasiness about hate speech restrictions apart, given that the Rwandan case was so clear, many ask why justice took so long, and why the killing was allowed to continue. A million people were killed during the genocide, most of them by machete.
Reasons why the international community was unable to act in Rwanda to prevent broadcasts include the lack of systematic evidence gathered, and a failure to engage in diplomatic pressure with a solid foundation in international law.
This is why the judgement will give heart to those attempting to prevent another Rwanda. The international policy community is beginning to develop technologies for preventive detection of hate speech — effectively an alerts system for detecting such instances — and the recent judgements will give them a clear precedent to use as a deterrent when hate speech is detected.
Since 2001, in a move that owes a good deal of its inspiration to the frustrating experience of fiddling as Rwanda burned in 1994, the UK Foreign Office and other government agencies have been working with the BBC’s foreign media monitors to try to detect instances of hate speech in broadcasts around the world.
The Foreign Office has called on figures in the NGO sector, academics and human rights experts to advise on hate speech. BBC Monitoring, the government/BBC-funded body that listens to and summarises foreign broadcasts, is attempting to shake off a reputation for spookery and consolidate a post-Cold War role.
Think-tanks close to United States President George W Bush and international organisations have also launched projects on hate speech this year and clearly in a more transparent, more media-focused world, the monitoring of incitement is more than a passing fad.
”We have high hopes for hate speech monitoring, but it is crucial that at an early stage we isolate the key principles that are really at stake,” said BBC Monitoring director Chris Westcott.
Monitoring of hate speech can surely help to prevent violent conflict but it also presents fundamental dilemmas: just how do we recognise hate speech, and how can we ascertain if it is likely to lead to violence?
If speech that constitutes genuine incitement is detected, what would be the appropriate international legal channels to pursue?
If national authorities are not to be trusted to be fair in separating hate speech from valid criticism, how can international monitoring appear legitimate? And — after the closure of an Iraqi newspaper for criticism of US occupiers — at what point could a legitimate anti-colonial discourse be classified as hate speech?
Fundamentally, where unequal societies cleave politically and economically along ethnic grounds — as was the case in Rwanda — antagonism and debate across ethnic lines is a necessary safety valve. The job of determining what constitutes legitimate political debate and what constitutes incitement is clearly ultimately for the courts. What monitoring can do is provide reliable evidence and engage diplomatic pressure: a role surely strengthened after the decisions last week. — Â