The 24th anniversary of Rwanda's hundred-day genocide is Friday, April 6. It began when a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down. From April to July, 1994, almost a million ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu friends were slaughtered by marauding gangs of Hutu extremists.
In alternative media, there is a long tradition of using radio for peacebuilding, so many community radio workers were horrified to hear that the airwaves in Rwanda were being used to stoke the furnace of ethnic hatred.
Today we're repodcasting a story by David Kattenburg about how radio in Rwanda is working to promote healing after this sad legacy. It's called "Ghosts of Hate Radio," originally podcast on rabble in 2006, and repeated this week on The Green Planet Monitor.
And the tradition of radio for peace in Rwanda continues. One of the featured radio stations, Radio Izuba, continues to train whole new generations of journalists who are working to make sure this never happens again.
You'll also hear the voices of Willy Rukundo, who was the station manager of state-run Radio Rwanda, and Alan Thompson, who organized and coordinated the Rwanda Initiative, a collaborative project of the National University of Rwanda and Carleton University, in Ottawa. The project ran from 2006 until 2011. It sent more than 75 Carleton journalism students to Rwanda as interns, as well as about 100 professional journalists to teach journalism there.
Thanks to The Green Planet Monitor for permission to repodcast.
Image: Wikipedia – African FM Radio
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