By Peter Sullivan
All Things Considered
02 July 2010
JOHANNESBURG - Years ago America's Ambassador to Rwanda asked me to lecture to editors there about freedom of speech and Press freedom in particular.
It was a sobering experience.
In my naïveté, my considered philosophy has always been unfettered freedom of speech. So on the surface the assignment looked simple.
But Rwanda's genocide made me pause: here's a country where about 800 000 people were butchered, literally cut to pieces or burnt alive, partly because a radio station exhorted one tribe to treat another tribe like cockroaches.
Imagine, if you will, Julius Malema on steroids, 24 hours a day.
There is little doubt that the radio station's daily broadcast of poisonous hate fuelled the horror of the genocide, urging people to kill, daily, for 100 days.
So, like a bucket of ice water on a sunbather at the tropical pool of Kigali's thousand hills hotel, my easy speech in tropical Rwanda on freedom of speech was suddenly shocked into harsh reality.
Yes, the radio station should have been closed down. Yes, the disgusting man urging one tribe to kill the other should have been arrested - and quickly, before the damage was done, not after it was all over. To hell with his freedom of speech.
I also spoke to the military there about freedom of speech, but frankly they were uncomprehending and I was a dreadful lecturer, full of my own arrogance and completely unsympathetic.
Each year I lecture at the military college here in South Africa, to very senior officers on a course to become colonels or generals, and I specially adopt an assumed arrogance about media to generate debate. While it works well here, it was an appalling mistake in Rwanda.
There they are continually fighting a war, not going to military school. There are armed rebels in the west, in the hills bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo, and to the north, where there are continual rumblings in Uganda. In the south there is Burundi, where the opposition leader is in hiding.
So Rwanda's generals listened to my talk with mild displeasure, not engaging me at all, simply dismissive of my idealistic ideas.
The journalists and editors of Rwanda on the other hand were wonderful, engaging people, debating the pros and cons of all kinds of freedoms.
Now one of them is dead.
Murdered a week ago, shot four times at close range, as he was about to enter his home, Jean-Leonard Rugambage had complained to colleagues he was being trailed and threatened by Rwandan security agents.
He had written an article online in which he linked the Rwandan government to the attempted assassination of General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in Johannesburg in the middle of last month.
I don't know if Rugambage was assassinated on the orders of Paul Kagame, the Rwandan President. Nor if those who tried to kill Nyamwasa were acting on orders from Kigali.
But not to suspect the government, or its military, would be naïve.
Being allowed to write that, without any fear of recrimination from anyone on South Africa, is an extraordinary thing.
It is extraordinary in Africa and in the world.
While we celebrate getting the World Cup, the state of our economy and a great rugby team, we should also celebrate our freedom of speech. It is a precious treasure.
Anodyne phrases like we must be watchful and ever vigilant of press freedom and freedom of speech don't really resonate with the general public. They sound as if we journalists are simply trying to give ourselves elbow room.
"Ag ja, there they go again. Moaning about freedom of speech and press freedom so they can write anything they like and get away with it."
And it is so easy for readers to switch off when we plead that it is readers' (and non-readers) freedoms we want protected, not our own. Freedom to write and say whatever you want, outside of the kind of hate speech that the Rwandan radio station broadcast during the genocide.
This is a precious treasure South Africans have inherited.
Although the National Party continually harassed journalists and passed more than 100 laws trying to stop us publishing the truth, their politicians had an innate respect for newspapers' right to "tell it like it is".
The Nats were far from perfect; they banned The World and imprisoned some journalists, they threatened us all almost daily and often tried to stop us printing the truth, but by and large the media operated with a great deal of impunity.
Frankly, even under apartheid, our Press was probably the most free in Africa.
While the Nats were furious with the Press, in places like Argentina the editor of La Prensa was murdered by the regime, as he was about to enter his home, a familiar phrase.
Older politicians and activists within the ANC have a huge respect for Press freedom and freedom of speech, having personally experienced the benefits of a free Press exposing the horrors of apartheid to the world.
Younger ANC activists are a different kettle of fish. They don't have much experience of repression, and some feel passionately that newspapers spend all their time strategizing on how to trash both their movement and the country.
"What about the national interest? Where are the positive stories? Let's have a media tribunal to force the Press to tell not just the truth but to give the ANC credit for the good it does!"
These are the cries of the ignorant, of those who believe you can tame a free Press with tribunals, who believe the Press has "an agenda" and who think one party should rule the country until Jesus Christ comes again. Such rot.
Beware these people.
Preserve our precious treasure. Don't take it for granted, it can disappear very quickly. Dictators can very easily get the populace right behind putting restrictions on freedom of speech.
All politicians believe they are badly reported. They want newspapers to print their speeches, to reflect all the good things they do, to use their pictures liberally in the paper and to keep their "minor indiscretions" like corruption in tenders to small paragraphs buried in the back of the paper.
Smart politicians recognise freedom of speech preserves freedom of political choice, but some smart politicians don't really want that - they believe there is only one choice we must all make at the next election.
Every one of us must preserve the precious treasure we have. Nurture it in the ANC's NEC, try to get it understood in the ANC's Youth League, make COPE and the DA and the PAC and the ID underpin it in every policy document.
It is more important than gold, platinum or diamonds. Our precious treasure of freedom of speech and press freedom must be fought for, all the time.
Otherwise the assassinations of Rwanda will haunt us.
Peter Sullivan edited The Star in the turbulent 1990s, was group editor-in-chief of Independent Newspapers in the past decade, and spends leisure time being chairman of BirdLife South Africa. Well connected in business, politics and philanthropy, he has moderated at Davos for a dozen years.
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