Can a Tweet Prevent a Massacre?

I’d like to think it would have made a difference to have twitter and blogs around in the run up to and during the Rwandan genocide (and mobile phones/cameras of course). I’m not well-enough read on Bosnia so I won’t comment on whether twitter would have made any difference there.

The Rwandan genocide was poorly reported from the beginning. From my reading and visits to Rwanda, it was clear something was going to happen, yet western media remained either unaware or uninterested. Social media would have allowed those with an interest in Rwanda, perhaps Rwandans living abroad to receive the information in much better detail about the massacres that had been happening in the year or so before the genocide.

That would have not only alerted media outside of Rwanda, it would have possibly interested people enough for them to learn about the history and politics inside Rwanda. I’d like to think the idea that the genocide was ‘a typical tribal war’, might have been prevented and maybe perhaps the genocide too.

Even if not prevented, then the journalists who travelled there would have been better informed and therefore better able to explain to the public what was really going on. If their editors chose to ignore them, so what? Journalists have a far bigger audience that what goes in print via their twitter accounts…

Secondly, social media would have alerted ordinary citizens to take action themselves.

Why didn’t the British government respond in the way any ordinary British citizen would have expected their government to? Apparently, ‘the phone wasn’t ringing constantly’ with demands to do so, from the public.

Via twitter, I have learned about conflicts in various countries, seen the the photographs and videos, taken steps to ensure I understand what I am seeing and literally stamped my feet along the road, along that mile to my representative’s office and demanded he insist my government take appropriate steps to put a stop to it. Without twitter that would never have happened. I’ve no idea how many others have been doing the same, but I’d bet I am not the only one. At least some pressure on the UK government during the genocide would have happened – and that would be far more difficult to deny! We, in the west weren’t quite so accustomed to our political leaders completely ignoring their electorate as we are now and they weren’t quite so used to so blatantly doing so (I don’t think?).

We would have had a far clearer idea of what was going on for all those months, we almost certainly would have had a far better idea of how widespread and systematic it was, how much of the country was affected, and we almost certainly would have seen any footage and photographs of any foreign soldiers who were involved before, during and after the genocide, and involved with what.

We would have seen the grenades being thrown into packed churches, the places where people prayed for safety, we would have seen the circuling Interahawe, we would have had communications with the people hiding in attics. Imgaine how difficult it would have been for governments around the world to avoid the use of the word ‘genocide’ if social media existed then as it does now.

And how difficult would it have been for the global public to be given the impression that those hundreds of thousands of people walking to Goma and Bukavu were not indeed the victims escaping the Interahawe?

Finally, remember, the ‘government’ of Rwanda quite deliberately planned the genocide. Think about the methods used. Who took seriously the purchase of so many machetes? No one. They didn’t buy bullets not just because of cost, but because they wanted to ensure the outside world wasn’t quite so interested. They deliberately ensured the vast majority of Rwandans would participate in the genocide, openly and in broad daylight. Would the ‘government’ have done so, knowing it would be filmed? Would ordinary people have participated with the knowledge there was a possibility there would be film, photographic and written, electronic evidence of their acts? How would the clergy have behaved if they’d thought there was a possibility they would be filmed? I’d suggest many of them would have behaved as, for example, the pope would have expected. That would have been a significant difference.

It might never have stopped the violence entirely, but many more of us would have a far better understanding of Rwanda and the means would have been very different.

That is, of course, if mobile phone operators had wanted to and managed to keep their systems running.

(Linda Mevern is the journalist and professor who has doggedly investigated the Rwanda Genocidde)

Miss Melvern seems to have stopped her research into events in Rwanda back when she first started and has not kept up with the flow of evidence and information coming out of the trials at the ICTR. The Rwandan government did not plan a genocide. Alison Desforges, witness for the prosecution, testified in 2006 that the idea that the Rwandan government planned genocide is absurd because it was a coalition government composed of Hutus and Tutsis and n which Tutsis and opposition parties sympathetic to the RPF, and including the RPF, held important ministries. All 3 prime ministers were RPF sympathisers. The Rwandan armed forces and gendarmerie were mixed forces of Hutus and Tutsis. Many important witnesses testified that it was the RPF that obstructed all peace attempts, sabotaged the Arusha Accords, assassinated “moderates” to blame it on the Hutus, killed scores of thousands of Hutus between 1990 and 1994 and then in April, because they knew they could not win the elections launched their final offensive by murdering the president when they shot down the plane and then attacked on the night of the 6th April (Belgian army witnesses) and commenced the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Hutus. Robert Gersony’s report to the UNHCR of October 1994 which was filed in evidence, states that the RPF engaged in the systematic ad sustained massacre of Hutu civilians commencing in April and continuing to the time of the report.

The witnesses who described the RPF responsibility for the massacres and the war included Colonel Marchal, UN force commander in Kigali, General Dallaire, Belgian Ambassador Swinnen, RPF officiers such as Abdul Ruzibiza and Tutsi intellectuals such as Antoine Nyetera who was in Kigali and testified that it was the RPF that did all the killing not the government forces.

If Twitter had existed in 1994, and the Hutus had been able to get out the reality of the RPF massacres as they happened, perhaps Miss Melvern would not have been so taken in by the RPF propaganda and Rwanda would be a democracy today instead of a military dictatorship.

Thank you, Christopher. I was sighing and wondering if I needed to write something like this myself. It is disheartening to see that a free electronic communications activist like Jillian York, who isn’t likely to have any particular agenda re Rwanda/Congo/Africa, has simply accepted the forced consensus about the truth of the Rwanda Genocide contained in her phrase “if Tutsis had taken to their laptops and uploaded videos of the massacres?”

Twitter is just an experiment with real time group-think. Since it’s just a variation on mob mentality I’d say it is much more likely to cause a massacre than prevent one. Angry mobs tend to be violent, irrational and emotional. Besides that, 90% of the people who use Twitter have attention deficit disorder and 50% are too stupid to be able to use a computer without assistance anyway, and that’s hardly the type of person you’d want to seek assistance from during a crisis anyway, even if they weren’t part of an online angry mob. Right? But that’s not important because any twitter activist knows twitter is for starting trouble, not for resolving it. Even President Obama only uses Twitter to tell his followers to harass Republicans. This whole discussion is just mental masturbation.

Anyway, what I really want to know is: what’s up with the funky dates? Don’t you think you’re taking this “citizen of the world” thing a bit too far?

I can’t speak to Rwanda, but I believe that Twitter and the Internet could have dramatically altered events in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and could have prevented innumerable deaths months, if not years prior to Srebrenica. Had people been able to share with the world the realities of the siege on Sarajevo — that alone could have raised international awareness, demanding a much stronger intervention, much earlier. I think about the reporters and editors at Oslobodjenje in Sarajevo, who were fighting desperately to document the events around them while being under direct attack. If they had direct connections with the outside world (and the electricity/signal to get the message out–that would likely be the greater obstacle, even today), I believe Europe and the US could not have possibly sat out as long as they did, in the way they did. Together with everyday people documenting their realities, it could have changed everything.