Panorama: A Culture of Murder

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Containers:

Box 374, Video-cassette RW037

Extent:

PAL SECAM [TRT 00:38:00] (2 copies

Scope and content:

1. Air Date: 22 Aug. 1994
2. Producer: Mike Robinson
3. Original Language: English
4. "Can a nation put an end to its culture of murder? Stephen Bradshaw opens this documentary with a provocative question and analysis. The documentary focuses first on Rwandan refugees crowding the Goma camp in Zaire where approximately 200 orphans rejected and abandoned had arrived after walking for 70 kilometers. Neither the French (Operation Turquoise) nor UNAMIR came to their rescue. The children, obvious victims of the adults' folly, were found lost in the fields and brought from the bushes where they had been hiding for days. Some adult refugees stricken by hunger returned to scavenge their own abandoned maize and tea fields, but many others fear reprisals from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and so prefer to stay in the squalid conditions of the refugee camps in Zaire. The conditions "defy a journalist's clichès" with no water available and corpses that lay near the camps waiting to be picked up by trucks. 43.000 have died and bodies are taken to the roads for collection. However, the truth is, most of the bodies remain untouched close to campsites being used by the international press.
5. Another major problem is the violent and chaotic situation in which everyone is living. A culture of murder means that the law lies in the hands of young thugs walking around with machetes and maintaining an atmosphere of threatening violence. Knife fights over the food distribution process are quite common. Bradshaw maintains that the village system has moved as a whole into the camps. Everyone obeys the Hutu elders. Food goes to them first. Grain, which is desperately needed, is taken by force then distributed the way the elders see fit. Aid workers are aware of who sets the rules and the United Nations has no illusion about who is really in control. These Hutu elders, many of whom bear responsibility for the massacres back in Rwanda, have brought with them their own system of justice. They send out thugs to control the rest of the refugees. A United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) official acknowledges that among the refugees they are helping there are murderers. The very same people who helped initiate the violence with their propaganda on the radio are now holding the refugees hostage in the camps. "When you have 1 million people in a camp it is impossible to stop and ask them: 'Have you committed a crime?'" Yet many of them are afraid of returning, preferring to risk dying of malaria, cholera, dysentery rather than at the hands of the RPF. When asked about revenge, Paul Kagame denies any desire for summary executions maintaining instead that "There are no reprisals. What the refugees fear most now is to be brought to Justice."

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