After the genocide, redemption

Radio 10 sits at the top of a red Kigali hill. Hastily assembled in January when the station's broadcast license came through suddenly, the studio has the look of a college NPR affiliate tacked together in an era friendlier to electric-blue carpeting.

The staff is young, hip, and articulate. In their first few weeks of broadcasting, they've broken all the rules of old-school Rwandan radio. Programs have included listener call-ins, a chatty morning show, modern pop music, and a children's trivia contest whose winners got to talk on-air.

Ten years ago, Rwandan radio broke the rules too - but to horrific ends. Fierce, beguiling, and radical, "the voice of genocide" - Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (1,000 Hills Free Radio, or RTLM) - drew uncounted Rwandans into its hateful embrace. "The graves are not yet full," a host famously warned. "Who will help us to fill them?"

Rwanda was listening. Radio proved the ideal tool to mobilize up to a quarter of the country's population - armed with machetes, clubs, and a few guns - to undertake the work of butchering nearly a million of their Tutsi and moderate Hutu countrymen, friends, and neighbors in the space of 100 days.

Wednesday the country commemorates the anniversary of the start of the killing with pomp and circumstance: 10 international heads of state and some 500 reporters will gather here in the capital. But recently Rwanda marked a decade of relative peace in a quieter way, when Radio 10 became its first private broadcaster since the venomous RTLM was silenced in July 1994. Now, Radio 10 and four other stations starting up have a chance to redeem Rwandan radio's deadly legacy. What they make of that chance - whether as a truly independent voice or simply as part of what some observers see as Rwanda's Potemkin village of democracy - will, in the months and years ahead, say much about the state of this small nation.

It's a bare-bones affair: four rooms, empty but for their modern computer and broadcasting equipment. Marie Noël Mugema, one of Radio 10's young hosts, cues up tracks for a country-music show. American hip-hop fills the control room. "Doesn't sound very country, does it?" she worries.

Some call the station's programming trivial. Willy Rukundo, station manager of the venerable government news outlet Radio Rwanda, confesses that he and his colleagues tune into Radio 10 to see what they are up to. "But what I'm hearing is, 'Oh, how are you? What did you have for breakfast?' " he says from behind a ponderous pile of books. "I am not concerned with breakfast."

Marie Chantal Zingiro, Radio 10's communications director, says the station aims - in French, English, and the local Kinyarwanda - to provide Rwandans with the practical information they need "to understand how to live properly after 1994." While the cost of rice might not seem hard-hitting, she says, "We're going to be very careful, of course, with the words we are using; we're not going to criticize any particular party. We don't want to be closed for saying stupid things on the radio. But we can't hide. Life is political."

Page: 1 | 2 | 3