Operation "Receiver"

Andrei Babitsky about how thousands of hills in Rwanda called the end of the bloody regime calling for mass murders

In The Hague, the trial of Felicien Kabuga began, who had been hiding from the international wanted list for more than twenty years. He has been charged with a lot of accusations, including murder, but he is famous primarily by the fact that he financed the most bloody media in Rwanda in the history of mankind - Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM, thousands of hills). He was not so much a media manager as an oligarch, a president’s hand, and a power entrepreneur who purchased wholesale parties a machete for mass killings. Since the prosecutors could not prove that Machete was needed for this, the last charge in the court would not be brought to him, but freedom does not shine for him: all his subordinates, caught over the past 25 years, were sentenced to a huge time.

The radio thousands of hills became almost a synonym for the language of hatred, and each time it comes to the responsibility of propagandists, it is given as an example. As if without Kabuga and his media genocide would not have happened. This, of course, is not so, but if the story of RTLM teaches something, then she has a completely different moral.

Genocide troubadours

Employees of the radio station well deserved their reputation. They were indeed trumpeters and instigators of the most “effective” genocide in the history of mankind: for a hundred days , more than half a million people killed in Rwanda. Representatives of the people of Hutu with the help of rifles, sticks and masters destroyed half of their compatriots of Tutsi.

The radio has thousands of hills and coordinated genocide, informing the names and addresses of future victims, and inspired it. The leading radio stations combined the enthusiasm of young Sergei Dorenko with the madness of the late Dmitry Kiselev.

On the live air, they called to kill the “cockroaches” (as they called the Tutsi), reproached too soft militias and complained that, unfortunately, “the graves were not full”. In between, they discussed football and weather. They say that the star of the Khabiman Kantano radio station was so good that even Tutsi laughed at his jokes.

The bloody frankness of the radio thousands of hills made an impression on third -party listeners. A special Rwand tribunal separately considered the affairs of RTLM journalists. All who, unlike Kabuga did not have time to hide, were convicted of a prison time of 30 years.

A few years later, the economist David Yanagizava-Drott tried to evaluate the direct contribution of the radio of a thousand hills to the scope of the murders. He measured the quality of the coating of the radio signal from the two transmitters in the country and compared it with the number of murders in each village. According to his estimates, 10% of murders were explained by the availability of RTLM broadcasts. After this study, in the massive perception of RTLM, it became almost the main culprit of the genocide: as if civilians heard the propaganda of hatred on the radio and went to cut their neighbors.

Infrastructure for mass killings

In fact, the Genocide in Rwanda became the result of a focused government policy and demanded great organizational efforts. By April 1994, the civil war in Rwanda lasted several years, and the political conflict - decades. Since the forces of the rebels were associated with the ethnic minority of Tutsi, and in the government there were representatives of the Khutu nation, the war was accompanied by ethnic purges - the score was already in dozens of pogroms and thousands of killed.

But in the spring of 1994, the plane of President Rwanda was shot down by a rocket, and the government who came to power decided to completely destroy all the Tutsi, and at the same time those huts that did not support him. By this time, the country already had a ready -made infrastructure for mass killings, which included both paramilitarian people's police (Interhamva) and the state governance system itself.

Previously existing state media, primarily the Radio Rwanda, for several years, even before the genocide, they directly called for the murder of Tutsi, and from time to time the attacks were coordinated. Hutu’s intellectuals were noted and retold for each other a book by the French psychologist Roger Mukelly “Psychology of Advertising and Propaganda: Problem and Practical Applications” (1972). From there, they learned and successfully used the principle of mirror prosecution: the enemy must be accused of what you are going to do it yourself. By 1994, more than ten mass murders of Tutsi had occurred in the country.

Thus, after the death of the president, Genocide in Rwanda was an already decision and, given the inaction of the UN peacekeepers and the alignment of forces, would happen in any case.

Maniac instead of intellectuals

The radio thousands of hills, which appeared a few months before the start of the massacre, did not begin genocide, it turned it into a cheerful morning show. The former state media were too boring and traditional for the young - and often illiterate - the country's population. And on RTLM they twisted modern music, joked and accepted the calls of listeners. The presenters told live how they smoked jambs on checkpoints and described in detail the corpses of the murdered Tutsi, who met on trips around the country. Decryption of their gears, easily accessible on the network, affects primarily shamelessness. This was their main media innovation. Here are a few quotes that I translated a few years ago for Esquire magazine.

“These cockroaches are so insidious that even after one of them is burned and he is charged like a firebrand, he still crawls to his gun and shoots in all directions.”

“Last night I saw the child of Tutsi, who was wounded and dropped into a hole with a depth of 15 meters. He managed to get out of the pit, and he was killed by a club. He was interrogated before his death. He said that the Incotanya promised to pay for his studies at the university. Perhaps this could be achieved without risking life and ruin your country. ”

“At all costs, all cockroaches should be exterminated on all corners of the country. Even those who have time to run to the airport or shelter should part with life on the spot. Someone will pretend to be a refugee, someone to portray a patient, someone-a nurse. Look at both, because they know a lot of tricks ... "

These quotes could have been scored by many hundreds, and each of them explains why RTLM employees were put to prison.

But besides, they explain that this was no longer propaganda, designed to manipulate public consciousness. Maniacs have long come to the place of pseudo -intellectuals with abstracts on the psychology of the crowd. It was a bloody dance of death, pure cocaine cargo, necessary primarily in order to maintain his own insanity, performances in the spirit of the trailers Andrei Norkin and telegram-skeleton Anton Krasovsky , dancing on the balcony in the pajamas of the Russian Army to the music of carpet bombing. No one of them left doubts that this music could not last long.

In addition to the target audience of the RTLM broadcast, Tutsi listened to the Patriotic Front, General Kagama, who, after several years of sluggish civil war, captured the country in three months and stopped genocide. They refused to conclude a truce and ignored the shamefully showing peacekeepers, not least because every day they heard what they opposed. The radio has created a great many troubles of thousands of hills, but-if it can serve at least some comfort, it itself brought its end itself.

If the employees of the Russian radio are thousands of hills behind bars, then just because, fortunately, their words are listened not only by the target audience, but the whole world. Felicien Kabuga, who had been hiding in conspiratorial apartments for more than twenty years, understood this. His Russian colleagues have to understand this.