On 3 December 2003, in a crowded courtroom within the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania, the three-person panel of judges overseeing The Prosecutor v. Nahimana et al., or the “Media Trial” as it became known, publicly delivered their final verdict.Footnote 1 Procedurally, the case dated back to the tribunal’s arrest and indictment of professor-turned-radio executive Ferdinand Nahimana in March 1996; by mid-2000, it had been joined with the prosecutor’s charges against Hassan Ngeze and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, two other high-level agents involved in Rwanda’s “hate media” sector in the early 1990s.Footnote 2 All told, the trial stretched on for 248 days over the span of three years, amounting to a marathon of human activity that had left a dizzying amount of documentation and speculative commentary in its wake. At last, on that December morning, presiding judge Navanethem Pillay, along with her colleagues Erik Møse and Asoka de Zoysa Gunawardana, shared the decision they had reached on the fate of the three Rwandan media bosses who sat before them (Barayagwiza only figuratively; he had boycotted most of the trial in protest).Footnote 3
The ruling was unequivocal, if not altogether surprising: all three defendants were found guilty on almost every single count of genocide crimes and crimes against humanity with which they had been charged.Footnote 4 Individually, Nahimana and Ngeze were each sentenced to life in prison, while Barayagwiza was sentenced to 35 years.Footnote 5 More broadly, the Trial Chamber’s judgment confirmed their agreement with the prosecution’s principal argument in the case—that both RTLM radio station and Kangura magazine, under the effective control of the three accused, had played a direct and criminal role in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi (hereafter, genocide).Footnote 6 Like many of the court’s other decisions handed down throughout its twenty-one-year lifespan, it was as much forward-looking as it was retrospective. In a press conference following the delivery of the verdict, then-ICTR Prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow stated that the tribunal, in its role as transnational moral arbiter, had sent a clear and resounding message around the world: “Those who use the mass media to target a racial or ethnic group for destruction will face justice.”Footnote 7
To be sure, the ICTR’s ruling constituted a landmark judicial decision. The Media Trial was only the second time in history that journalists had been tried before an international court for their role in creating and/or disseminating extremist propaganda (the first being the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg following the Second World War), and the very first time that a group of judges would be interpreting the crime of direct and public incitement since the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention.Footnote 8 As such, analysis of this case and its 2007 appeal has been prolific, with scholars examining the larger stakes of the trial, the judges’ reasoning in relation to specific crimes, and its precedents regarding, in particular, the regulation of hate speech.Footnote 9
Most observers have approached the trial as a case against three media representatives—whether they have celebrated the Trial Chamber’s decision or raised concerns about its potential chilling effects on press freedom and the freedom of expression. But the Media Trial also held a wider significance. In relation to the accused Ferdinand Nahimana, it represented a key moment in which the practice of Rwandan history—as embodied in one of the field’s most accomplished specialists—was likewise put on the stand and deemed complicit in the state-sponsored campaign to eliminate Rwanda’s Tutsi population. In Pillay’s direct address to Nahimana during his sentencing, she did not mince words; although he was officially being convicted for his role as a founder-director of RTLM radio station, he was equally being held to account for his perceived transgressions as an intellectual, for manipulating Rwandan history into a virulent brand of ethnic ideology. Reading from the Trial Chamber’s judgment, she stated:
Ferdinand Nahimana, you were a renowned academic, Professor of History at the National University of Rwanda.… You were fully aware of the power of words, and you used the radio—the medium of communication with the widest public reach—to disseminate hatred and violence. You may have been motivated by your sense of patriotism and the need you perceived for equity for the Hutu population in Rwanda. But instead of following legitimate avenues of recourse, you chose a path of genocide. In doing so, you betrayed the trust placed in you as an intellectual and a leader. Without a firearm, machete or any physical weapon, you caused the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.Footnote 10
Nahimana’s position as a historian featured conspicuously throughout the Media Trial, and not only rhetorically to underscore his failure or betrayal as a public intellectual. It was also invoked in substantive ways to support one of the prosecution’s guiding theories: that Nahimana was the “principal ideologist of RTLM” or, as senior trial attorney Bernard Muna so colorfully phrased it in his opening remarks, the “intellectual High Priest of Hutu Supremacy.”Footnote 11 In order to prove such an allegation, Nahimana’s research and scholarship ended up being subjected to considerable scrutiny and debate over the course of the trial’s proceedings.
As Richard Wilson has argued, one of the Media Trial’s most enduring legacies is the “conventional wisdom” it produced regarding the linear, causal relationship between ideology, words, and subsequent violent acts.Footnote 12 Here, I explore a corollary wisdom that emerged from the trial: that academic history and historians were implicated in this chain of causation. Specifically, I will show how and why the court ended up constructing Nahimana as one of the central ideologues of the genocidal project, and to what effect. Although a handful of scholars have referenced this case in relation to its impact on post-genocide historical production in Rwanda, there has not yet been a sustained examination of the ways in which Nahimana’s vocation as an academic featured in the trial, or a contextualization of the court’s interpretations of his scholarship.Footnote 13 In so doing, this article reveals the contingent legal and judicial process through which the “hate radio” media boss became, equally, a “Hutu Power” historian.Footnote 14 In addition to its many other effects, I argue that the Media Trial helped codify the notions that history had become “deadly” in the lead-up to the 1994 genocide, that historians themselves could be bad actors, and that the Rwandan historical field as a whole needed to be rescued from its tainted past. While these perceptions had been circulating domestically in Rwanda since the mid-1990s, the ICTR’s ruling provided additional weight and authority—positioning the Media Trial as a critical turning point within a broader saga of politicized history and historiography in the Great Lakes region, and one with longer-term implications for Rwandan academics.
Evolution of an Indictment
Nahimana was arrested on 27 March 1996, in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where he had been residing with his family since the end of the genocide. Shortly thereafter, he was formally indicted and, on 23 January 1997, transferred to Arusha to await and prepare for his trial.Footnote 15 At this early stage, Nahimana faced four charges: conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, and one count of crimes against humanity. All were in relation to his alleged role as a founder and director of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, known by its acronym RTLM, which had operated in Rwanda from July 1993 to July 1994. As set forth in the indictment, RTLM’s broadcasts not only constituted hate speech; they were “designed to…encourage the population to kill.” As a “senior representative” of both the radio station and its holding company, Nahimana “could have taken reasonable measures to change or prevent [those] broadcasts, but failed to do so.”Footnote 16
Nowhere in the original indictment’s “concise statement of the facts” is there any meaningful discussion of Nahimana’s academic background; everything is framed around his association with RTLM. However, in his initial appearance before the Trial Chamber in February 1997, Nahimana himself—perhaps as a deflection strategy—elected to foreground his role as a historian, presenting it to the court as the primary basis of his professional identity. In response to a question from then-presiding judge Laity Kama regarding his occupation before being arrested, Nahimana offered only the following: “Before my exile…I performed many duties. I was basically History Lecturer at the [National University of Rwanda], from 1977 to the date I left Rwanda, being the 14th of July, 1994.”Footnote 17 Nahimana’s lead defense counsel, Paris-based lawyer Jean-Marie Biju-Duval, took things a step further when attempting to have the indictment thrown out a few months later. He insisted that “no factual link” had been established between RTLM’s broadcasts and his client and that the vagueness of the indictment was making it impossible for Nahimana to prepare his defense (the factual basis of the listed charges amounted to a mere thirty-five lines, most of which were about RTLM and the genocide, not Nahimana).Footnote 18 More fundamentally, Biju-Duval complained that the prosecutor had been presenting his client to the global public as the “ideologist” behind the genocide without including any assertions to this effect in the indictment. “And so where do we get that?” he asked. “[There is no mention of] any personal statements or any personal works written…by Mr. Nahimana which could tender credit to this idea.”Footnote 19 As he continued, Biju-Duval independently opened the door to Nahimana’s publications becoming materially relevant to the case, stating that the defense would submit “all of Ferdinand Nahimana’s writings with his personal signature,” because “here we are not talking about collective responsibility…. We are talking about Nahimana’s individual responsibility.Footnote 20
Over the next two years of pretrial proceedings, the indictment remained a contentious subject of debate; it was revised, fought over, and ordered by the judges to be revised again, then expanded in scope to include additional charges (genocide, as well as two additional counts of crimes against humanity). The prosecutor’s office also reformulated the count of conspiracy, with an eye toward obtaining a joinder of Nahimana’s case with those of Ngeze and Barayagwiza. On 15 November 1999, the Trial Chamber officially accepted a finalized version of the amended indictment, to which Nahimana pleaded “not guilty” ten days later; this is what would become the operative roadmap during the trial.
It was a dramatically different charge sheet, and not only because it was now a dense, twenty-nine-page document and Nahimana’s alleged crimes had nearly doubled. It also, in stark contrast to the original, made specific mention of Nahimana’s professional background as a historian and his scholarship. Unlike Biju-Duval’s assertion in August 1997, however, these aspects of Nahimana’s academic life were now being invoked as material evidence of his guilt. Appearing as a line item within the “concise statement of the facts,” the amended indictment definitively proclaims the following: “Between 1979 and 1994, Ferdinand Nahimana wrote and published articles and books inciting the population against the Tutsis and the moderate Hutus, and espoused the superiority of Hutus from the north.”Footnote 21 Aside from his later activities in Rwanda’s media sector, therefore—as director of the country’s Office of Information (ORINFOR) from 1990–92 and founder and steering committee member of the privately owned RTLM from 1993–94—Nahimana’s longer-term vocation as a historian was now being set up as an explicit foundation in the prosecution’s case against him. Of course, part of the reason for this was Nahimana himself, as well as his defense counsel, both of whom chose to tout Nahimana’s academic credentials from the beginning, insisting that his scholarly record be brought into the case. But it also stemmed, as elaborated below, from the novelty of many of the crimes under consideration, the ambitious institutional goals of the ICTR, and the specific temporal constraints the tribunal faced, all of which facilitated an expansive approach to the concept of intent by both the prosecution and judges.Footnote 22
Building the Case Against Nahimana
Given the complexities of this case, the principal actors in the Media Trial faced several challenges. There were fierce debates, for example, over the translation and interpretation of polysemic Kinyarwanda words and proverbs, as well as uncertainty and divergent views regarding the then-still nascent crime of direct and public incitement. Such issues were further compounded by the tribunal’s temporal jurisdiction, which had been limited to the year 1994.Footnote 23 In principle, this would require the court to approach the genocide in a kind of “historical vacuum,” rendering all pre-1994 evidence inadmissible.Footnote 24
In practice, however, the trial’s agents found multiple avenues for expanding the ICTR’s temporal scope. The Trial Chamber, for one, signaled early on that it would hear virtually anything, reserving for itself the right to determine probative or evidentiary value. As “inchoate” crimes that “[continue] in time until the completion of the acts contemplated,” the counts of conspiracy to commit genocide and direct and public incitement likewise provided ample room for the court to move outside its calendar-year restriction.Footnote 25 Drawing on the reasoning that had been used at Nuremberg in the trial of Der Stürmer editor Julius Streicher, the judges in the media case concluded that RTLM and Kangura had become lethal in the spring of 1994 in large part because of their longer-term dissemination of anti-Tutsi propaganda.Footnote 26
Above all, though, the judges maintained that pre-1994 material would be critical as “relevant background” and as a “basis for understanding the Accused’s alleged conduct.”Footnote 27 Legal scholars refer to this as an intent test; here, it meant that evidence falling outside the ICTR’s temporal jurisdiction could be admitted insofar as it illuminated the accused’s purported intent.Footnote 28 Given the centrality of proving intent in charges of genocide crimes, this expansive approach afforded the prosecution considerable leeway, which it readily exploited.Footnote 29 Beyond arguing that the three accused had sought to “heat up the heads” (gushyushya imitwe) of the population through their radio broadcasts and print media, the prosecution repeatedly tried to demonstrate each defendant’s own personal anti-Tutsi commitments. For Nahimana, this ended up bringing his vocation as a historian center stage. For, in order to prove that his genocidal ambitions in April 1994 were “deep-rooted,” the prosecution needed to establish that he had been a “Hutu Power” ideologue all along.Footnote 30
Of course, the prosecution’s immediate task was to show that Nahimana had played a key role in the founding of RTLM and exercised authority over its programming, for which they brought several witnesses to testify to his managerial responsibilities at the station. Biju-Duval and his co-counsel, by contrast, sought to downplay Nahimana’s administrative role and distance him from the day-to-day activities of RTLM, with Nahimana doing much the same during his own testimony, insisting that he had never served as the station’s formal “director.” Yet, despite these claims, the evidence of his intimate involvement in the planning and operations of RTLM—from its creation in 1993 through 6 April 1994—was impossible to dismiss.
The situation became less straightforward once the genocide started, however. As had been shown by many of the experts called to analyze RTLM’s broadcasts, the station’s tone shifted dramatically after the downing of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane on 6 April, with its journalists unambiguously crossing the line into criminal incitement. Yet, this is precisely the period in which Nahimana’s proximity to the station was at its weakest.Footnote 31 To help offset this, the prosecution ended up leaning into the contention that Nahimana had served as much more than a routine administrator. Several witnesses described him as the “brains” behind RTLM, while others noted that the station had been referred to colloquially as “Radio Gatonde” (his home commune), implying that it had been perceived as an extension of Nahimana himself.Footnote 32 Human rights reporter and trained historian Alison Des Forges pushed this interpretation further still, stating in her testimony that Nahimana had functioned as a “spokesperson” for Habyarimana’s National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND) party, with RTLM serving as his official “mouthpiece.”Footnote 33
Showcasing Nahimana’s intellectual contributions to RTLM was always going to be an important component of the prosecution’s strategy, at least from the moment of the amended indictment. This line of argumentation acquired additional force, however, as efforts to establish Nahimana’s command responsibility, especially during the months when RTLM’s broadcasts could be most clearly linked to genocidal violence, proved more difficult. What is more, it strengthened the rationale for delving deeper into Nahimana’s past. Indeed, the more the prosecution emphasized Nahimana’s role as an “ideologist” for RTLM, the more his years as an academic historian could be justified to the Trial Chamber as “relevant background” and a “basis for understanding the Accused’s alleged conduct.” As one journalist cogently observed midway through the trial: “The prosecution and its witnesses have argued that Nahimana is not one of those good men that inexplicably turned evil after the April 6th, 1994 shooting down of president Habyarimana’s plane…but rather…a man whose life was dedicated to an anti-Tutsi cause.”Footnote 34
The Making of a Historian
Nahimana was born on 15 June 1950, in Rwanda’s northern prefecture of Ruhengeri, the second eldest of nine children in a modest, Catholic family. His father was a local chief, and Nahimana has also stated that his father’s Abashatsi lineage were abakonde (those who held land rights), as if to underscore his family’s autochthonous, and thus sovereign, connection to Rwanda’s northern hills.Footnote 35 As a child, in part through the influence of his older brother, he started to develop an appreciation for regional history, which would become the hallmark of his future career. With the new educational opportunities afforded to Hutus in President Grégoire Kayibanda’s First Republic, Nahimana was able to attend an elite secondary school near the northeastern town of Byumba, where he excelled in his coursework. He was then offered a full scholarship to attend the National University of Rwanda, located in the southern town of Butare, where he enrolled in October 1971 to study history.Footnote 36
Politically, Rwanda was in the midst of dramatic changes during Nahimana’s university days. Not only were there ongoing ripple effects from the 1959 Hutu social revolution, the 1960s “Inyenzi” attacks by exiled Tutsi rebels, and Kayibanda’s brutal crackdowns on Tutsis at home in response (which included documented massacres); there were also growing regional tensions among the country’s Hutu population, with Hutus from the north feeling alienated by Kayibanda’s preferential treatment toward his fellow southerners, especially those hailing from the Gitarama area. In a desperate maneuver to reestablish his base of support, Kayibanda turned to a well-worn tactic: Tutsi scapegoating. Rwanda’s young undergraduates were not exempt from these larger dynamics and disruptions. In the spring of 1973, the university became the site of a major anti-Tutsi campaign, as a group of Hutu students and other youths from the surrounding Butare town area—calling themselves the Comité de salut public—drew up a list of Tutsi students and proceeded to terrorize the campus for several days in an effort to forcibly remove them.Footnote 37 Nahimana would later be accused of having been an active participant in this campus-level project of ethnic cleansing. While this was never definitively proven at the Media Trial, what is clear is that Nahimana’s intellectual coming-of-age as a university student mapped precisely onto this tumultuous period of Rwandan history, including the transition of power between the First and Second republics, with Habyarimana’s bloodless coup taking place in July 1973; a consequential development that would swing the political center of gravity northward, to Gisenyi and Ruhengeri.
Nahimana received his Bachelor of Arts in History in 1974, after which he obtained a scholarship to pursue his master’s degree at Laval University in Quebec. There, he was encouraged to write a history of the Catholic missions in the Great Lakes region, a process through which Nahimana started to become aware of the problems and limitations of Africa’s colonially produced historiography, and its specific deficiencies vis-à-vis Rwanda.Footnote 38 In the summer of 1977, with his master’s thesis defended, he returned home, taking up a post as an assistant lecturer of history at his alma mater, the National University.Footnote 39
Historiographical and methodological issues emerged as a significant research focus for Nahimana; in particular, he was concerned by the absence of local and regional histories within the study of the formation of the Rwandan state. In 1979, he was invited to participate in the Bujumbura Colloquium, a conference organized by the Center for Burundian Civilization in partnership with UNESCO, which brought together a transnational community of scholars working on Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zaire (now DRC). There, Nahimana asked his colleagues: “why aren’t researchers…very interested in the Hutu Principalities of Rwanda?”Footnote 40 The answer was complex. Although Africanist scholars in the 1970s and ‘80s were deeply committed to decentering state histories and recuperating local and regional perspectives, not many individuals had the requisite “insider” status at that time to build trust in Rwanda’s mountainous northern communes. Taking inspiration from a new wave of contemporary scholarship—especially Jan Vansina’s revisionist work on the Nyiginya kingdom—and with the encouragement of his former professor, Tutsi historian Alexis Kagame, Nahimana thus set about filling this gap through an investigation of his home prefecture of Ruhengeri.Footnote 41
To that end, he trained in the methods of oral history and became the first person to collect oral traditions and testimonies in the northern hills.Footnote 42 Through this fieldwork, Nahimana confirmed what he had suspected for some time; namely, that the history of Rwanda, as passed down orally by the royal abiru (keepers of the esoteric code) and transcribed by European colonists and court historians such as Kagame, did not fully correspond with people’s memories in the north. On the contrary, he discovered that political and social organization in Ruhengeri had not only been distinct in form from that of the Nyiginya kingdom, but that the region’s Hutu principalities had existed both before and after the consolidation of the modern Rwandan state—remaining in place even after the monarchy was expanded and fortified by German and Belgian colonial officials in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet, because these truths did not appear in the courtly archive on which Rwanda’s colonially crafted historiography was based, they had effectively been erased from the historical record.Footnote 43 For Nahimana (and many of his contemporaries), the history of Rwanda had to be reformulated to account for this plurality; it had to be told, as was the parlance of the day, “from below.”Footnote 44
This research topic would become the basis for his doctoral work, which he carried out under the supervision of historians Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Jean-Pierre Chrétien, and sociologist Claudine Vidal, at the Université Paris VII from 1984 to 1986.Footnote 45 Although Chrétien would retrospectively comment that Nahimana had displayed a somewhat “idyllic” view of the northern Hutu political formations under examination in the thesis, he was nonetheless very impressed by the quality of the research and the novelty of the findings—as were other Great Lakes specialists at the time.Footnote 46 For, in addition to demonstrating that “belonging to the same cultural area did not imply development within the same national reality and the same State,” and that Rwanda was not, in fact, a fully unified political territory upon the arrival of Europeans, Nahimana’s work provided a detailed view of the structure and evolution of the Hutu principalities in the north, revealing how they had managed to avoid incorporation into the Nyiginya kingdom for so long (in contrast to other small autonomous polities in the region) and through what processes they eventually were incorporated in the late 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote 47
Becoming the “High Priest of Hutu Supremacy”
At the Media Trial, the prosecution’s portrait of Nahimana as an ideologue long in the making was predicated on being able to reframe, and thus delegitimize, this research on Rwanda’s northern Hutu principalities. On the trial’s opening day, Bernard Muna referred to Nahimana as a “well-known extremist intellectual [who] wrote books and articles on Hutu Supremacy and Hutu Power.”Footnote 48 Moments later, he revealed the crux of the prosecution’s argument: “In the course of this case, it will be shown that such research was destined to justify the extremist views of parties like the MRND and the CDR.”Footnote 49 In other words, Nahimana’s academic career had always been suspect and ideologically driven. His scholarship not only provided a rationale for genocide once it was already underway but had directly inspired the mass killing of Tutsis in the first place.
The Trial Chamber’s intent test for pre-1994 material was indispensable to this line of argumentation and ended up facilitating the deeper excavation of Nahimana’s past. One prosecution witness dated his anti-Tutsi ideology all the way back to the 1960s, claiming that he had formed a northern Hutu supremacist group (the Association for the Defense of Bakiga Students) at his Catholic seminary, an accusation which Nahimana denied.Footnote 50 José Kagabo, a Paris-based Rwandan Tutsi academic, likewise testified to Nahimana’s longstanding ideological tendencies, insisting that he had been an “extremist” since at least his university days. It was Kagabo who claimed that Nahimana had been involved in the notorious 1973 effort to violently “chase away” Tutsi students from the National University, an event that had led to Kagabo’s exile.Footnote 51 Although neither of these allegations were corroborated during the trial, they nonetheless cast a shadow of suspicion on Nahimana’s academic training, as well as his eventual motivations for conducting oral history work in Ruhengeri.Footnote 52
Nahimana’s scholarship fell under particular scrutiny throughout the trial’s proceedings, especially his above-mentioned 1986 doctoral thesis, which was published as a monograph in 1993.Footnote 53 During the cross-examination of journalist Philippe Dahinden, for example, a lengthy discussion ensued over Dahinden’s wording in a Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) report he had presented to the UN Human Rights Commission in May 1994, in which he described Nahimana as “a historian known for having published a thesis asserting Hutu historical supremacy” and as “the main ideologue behind Hutu extremism.”Footnote 54 The defense aggressively grilled Dahinden on whether he had ever read Nahimana’s thesis and asked how he would define “Hutu historical supremacy.” In response, Dahinden admitted that it was only in 1995 that he had managed to look through the published book version of Nahimana’s thesis. What had guided his thinking in the report, therefore, was his knowledge of RTLM, of Radio Rwanda during Nahimana’s tenure at ORINFOR, as well as his general sense that Nahimana was someone considered at the time to be “doctrinaire” in his pro-Hutu stance.Footnote 55 When pressed further about the actual content of Nahimana’s academic works, he stated:
I am not a historian…but I can tell you what I recall from Nahimana’s thesis.… He was saying that contrary to what was taught…there were Hutu kingdoms existing from time immemorial in the north of the country and they were in competition with other kingdoms located in the south…he wanted to restore historical truth [about this].Footnote 56
Biju-Duval countered by stating: “I don’t quite understand how [this] would allow you to…characterise [the] thesis as projecting Hutu historical supremacy?” While Dahinden agreed that perhaps “I did not express myself clearly” in the report, he stood by the spirit of the point he had been trying to make, which is that he believed Nahimana to be ideologically pro-Hutu.Footnote 57 At the same time, however, he ultimately confirmed the defense’s reading of the thesis project (and, by extension, its original historiographical significance): that its primary aim had been to “restore the historical truth” about the existence of independent Hutu political formations in Rwanda up to the early twentieth century.
Alison Des Forges, a prized prosecution witness who had been qualified as an expert in several ICTR cases before the Media Trial, maintained a more critical stance toward Nahimana’s scholarship during her testimony, casting doubts on the intellectual integrity of his entire body of research.Footnote 58 For Des Forges, the arc of Nahimana’s publications displayed an “unnecessary” and therefore troubling emphasis on ethnicity; she went so far as to physically underline for the Trial Chamber the number of times Nahimana had used the word “Hutu” in a 1979 article of his (thirty-three times in the span of three pages).Footnote 59 When Biju-Duval tried to suggest in cross-examination that Des Forges, too, had used ethnic terminology with great frequency in her 1972 doctoral thesis and that she, too, “like other researchers of that time,” had outlined the hostility between Rwanda’s Hutu and Tutsi communities in reified “ethnic terms,” Des Forges responded yes, but that “Mr. Nahimana was operating as a Rwandan historian; I was operating as a foreign historian. Our modes of expression were naturally different.”Footnote 60 In other words, she insinuated, Nahimana could only have been invoking these labels for the purpose of fueling the country’s ethnic divisions. Of course, the issue was not simply the presence of ethnic categories in his historical writing; it was the fact that, by the early 1990s, the ideological context surrounding the use of these terms in Rwanda had changed—becoming shot through with Hutu extremism. Because of this, the line between historiography and propaganda had become more porous, making Nahimana’s earlier works situationally ripe for a new kind of politicization.
Perhaps most damning, however, were the statements made in court by Jean-Pierre Chrétien, who, as mentioned above, had advised Nahimana’s doctoral thesis. Like Des Forges, Chrétien had been accepted as an expert witness in the Media Trial, though not as a historian per se, nor as someone whose principal role would be to evaluate Nahimana as a fellow historian or former student (primarily, he had been called to verify the anti-Tutsi nature of Rwanda’s “hate media” outlets, drawing on a report he had published in 1995).Footnote 61 Yet, given his longer-term vantage of Nahimana’s trajectory, he was, unsurprisingly, prompted to offer his views on the matter. In his words, witnessing Nahimana’s transformation from “promising academic” to political opportunist had been a difficult experience:
I’m very sad to be here in this regard. Mr. Nahimana was a colleague whom I met for the very first time in Bujumbura during a scientific conference…where he appeared to me to be a very serious…and dynamic historian. I then met him…when he came to study at the University of Paris 7…and he was a serious historian.… The next time I met him…was in March 1990…. I was invited to the National University of Rwanda for some weeks by my colleagues, historians who were there, and I asked them where was Ferdinand Nahimana…and they told me he was no longer at the university but, rather, he was at the [National Institute of Scientific Research]. And his colleagues made comments to the effect that Mr. Nahimana was now in the political sphere which was higher than their modest faculty.… But after that, I saw him only on television. That is why I find it quite painful, because when one knew…a serious student at university, and then politics makes such a student deviate from his path and puts him in a place where…he is now, I think that is quite sad.Footnote 62
On the subject of Nahimana’s thesis, Chrétien was nuanced in his assessment, stating that, at the time, he had considered Nahimana’s research to be sound. Recalling his participation on the examination committee, he confirmed that he had given the work high praise: “This was a new current.… All in all, I can say that it was a very good thesis. I don’t want to re-read history now and say [it] was a bad thesis, no.”Footnote 63 After Nahimana’s arrest, however, it appears Chrétien had come to question whether the thesis had been an early indication of extremist thinking. In hindsight, he told the Trial Chamber, he wondered if Nahimana had perhaps had “two languages in his head when he was conducting his research. And here I am referring to the political aspects of his project.”Footnote 64 The 1993 book version, Le Rwanda: émergence d’un État, only reinforced these doubts, he stated. Although Biju-Duval fiercely challenged him on this point, trying to get him to admit that “the book [was] essentially the same material as the thesis,” he refused to back down: “I wouldn’t say exactly similar because he put in a conclusion which changes the whole meaning of the document.”Footnote 65 For Chrétien, the book’s conclusion—which centers on the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) invasion of Rwanda in October 1990 and its civil war with Rwandan government forces in the years leading up to the genocide—was dangerously polemical, transforming the work into a base of support for “the Hutu ideology and tribalist dictatorship.”Footnote 66 Under cross-examination, he emphasized that he had been “shocked” by the book, describing it as “the political exploitation of scientific material.” In other words, Chrétien argued, with its publication in 1993, Nahimana’s thesis had “[become] an ideological weapon…and I know that it was used as such.”Footnote 67
Such an appraisal was incriminating, to say the least. And yet, what emerges from Chrétien’s testimony, alongside other evidence presented to the court, is a rather intricate picture of Nahimana’s ideological evolution—more time-bound and contingent, certainly, than the prosecution’s argumentation in the trial. Nahimana had been a diligent student, a “serious” and respected young historian, and someone whose intellectual contributions had been in keeping with historiographical trends and generally welcomed by scholars of the day. He had received favorable evaluations in his role as a lecturer at the National University and had not been deemed an “extremist” by any of his colleagues over the course of the 1980s. However, with the RPF’s invasion and the onset of civil war (a conflict that would disproportionately affect the north and northwest of the country), Nahimana proceeded to abandon the methodological conventions of his discipline, retreat from credible academic forums, increasingly take up posts outside the university that put him in close proximity to MRND power brokers, and write and circulate overtly political tracts as opposed to carefully researched historical works. In the process, he began to reframe his own scholarship, positioning it—for anyone who was as concerned by the RPF’s presence in Rwanda as he was—as a relevant body of ideas from which to draw. Thus, despite Biju-Duval’s repeated efforts to neatly separate Nahimana-the-historian and his academic publications from the “Hutu Power” extremism taking shape in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994—“Don’t you think that we have to draw the line between the object itself and the use made thereof?” he asked Chrétien at one point, in relation to Nahimana’s thesis—it was a defense that rang increasingly hollow; not because Nahimana’s scholarship was “destined to justify” the mass killing of Tutsis, as the prosecution had proclaimed in its opening arguments, but because in the three years leading up to the genocide in which Habyarimana’s regime was engaged in a war with the RPF, Nahimana’s work on the historical Hutu principalities of the north had acquired a new, provocative, and violent salience (a development he seemingly encouraged).Footnote 68
For their part, some of Nahimana’s faculty colleagues at the National University had also started to grow weary of him in the early 1990s, especially fellow historian Emmanuel Ntezimana.Footnote 69 Part of this had to do with longer-term grievances related to the relocation of a sizable portion of the university, including the Faculty of Arts and Letters, to Ruhengeri in 1981—a move that was interpreted as political, an indication of Habyarimana’s increasingly flagrant regional favoritism, and which entailed a significant promotion for Nahimana in 1983 to the post of assistant secretary-general of the northern campus. But it was even more so a reaction to their colleague’s ever-deeper forays into the world of politics. With his acceptance of the president’s offer to take over the directorship of ORINFOR in 1990, a position that would place Nahimana in charge of the country’s influential national radio service, Radio Rwanda, it appeared as if Nahimana had all but abandoned the academy in favor of ingratiating himself within the MRND political machine.Footnote 70
Human rights advocates in Rwanda likewise started raising concerns about Nahimana’s conduct at this time, especially following the massacre of Tutsi civilians in Bugesera in March 1992, which he was seen to have instigated by allowing an unverified, inflammatory communiqué to be read aloud on Radio Rwanda.Footnote 71 In addition to pushing for an independent investigation into this event (Nahimana had meanwhile been dismissed from ORINFOR), human rights groups circulated an open letter voicing their opposition to Nahimana’s return to the National University, where he was in the process of being reinstated as a full-time lecturer. In the declaration, signed by the Rwandan Associations for the Defense of Human Rights, Nahimana is referred to as an “extremist with genocidal behaviors,” a “perpetual troublemaker,” and an “ethnic regionalist” who should be kept away from Rwandan youth. Referencing the Bugesera killings, but also recalling as a warning sign the comparably explosive anti-Tutsi atmosphere of the university’s campus back in 1973, the declaration’s signatories stated that “it would be irresponsible to provide [Nahimana] with such a fertile field as the University for him to sow both wheat and hate.”Footnote 72 Although Nahimana was ultimately permitted to resume his post, his views on Rwanda’s ethnic turmoil—and his single-minded animosity toward the RPF—would only intensify, especially in the wake of the RPF’s attack on Ruhengeri in February 1993, an event so destructive that the Ruhengeri campus of the National University had to move back to Butare for seven months.Footnote 73
Indeed, it was in direct response to this attack that Nahimana ended up writing his controversial essay, “Rwanda: Current Problems and Solutions,” which became yet another focal point during the Media Trial. While Nahimana’s emphasis in the piece is ostensibly on the dangers of “regionalism, collinisme [hill identification/bias], and ethnicism” and the urgent need to restore national harmony, he lapses frequently into conspiracy theories.Footnote 74 For example, in describing the RPF as the manifestation of a shadowy “Tutsi League,” he attempts to draw a straight line between the “Inyenzi” exile-rebel attacks of the 1960s and the military invasion of the RPF in 1990, depicting the two as motivated by the same desire: to reinstall a Tutsi monarchy.Footnote 75 As Des Forges explained in her expert testimony, “lumping [these two rebel movements] together in that fashion suggests a blurring of historical developments which is not accurate.”Footnote 76 Moreover, by choosing to recirculate this essay in March 1994—just a few weeks before the genocide started—Nahimana was, again, actively politicizing his own intellectual production. In the cover letter that accompanied the paper, he stated that he hoped his ideas might serve as “an inspiration to help Rwanda find a definitive solution to its current problems.”Footnote 77 At the trial, Nahimana would try to claim that “the historian does not create anything,” and that his only objective with the essay had been to “prevent…catastrophe by calling on Rwandans to find a remedy to this cancer which was handicapping [the Rwandan people].”Footnote 78 However, such entreaties did not sway the judges, who concluded: “Nahimana is a man of words, and he manipulates words to suit his circumstances.”Footnote 79
Closing Arguments
The notion that Nahimana’s scholarly work was foundational to his eventual role at RTLM directly informed the Media Trial. Moreover, it was a claim that assumed greater significance over the course of the trial, given the prosecution’s broader motivation to establish Nahimana as the “high priest of Hutu supremacy” (to underscore his genocidal intent) and their tactical desire to compensate for his distance from the station after 6 April 1994.Footnote 80 Emerging as a key component of their theory of the case, the prosecution argued that Nahimana’s background as a historian ultimately presaged his criminal conduct. They brought forward numerous witnesses who sought to discredit Nahimana’s academic credentials and then built on those testimonies to construct an overarching picture of Nahimana as a dyed-in-the-wool génocidaire—someone “whose life [had been] dedicated to an anti-Tutsi cause.” Capitalizing on the power of a trial narrative’s “innermost, illusory mechanism,” in which “you appear to start at the beginning” but in fact “the ‘conclusion’ of the story is the pole of attraction of the whole process,” the Media Trial’s prosecutors insisted that this was not simply a case against a former media executive, but a “Hutu Power” historian whose academic career had served as the building block for mass murder.Footnote 81
A closer, historiographically situated reading of the trial record, as discussed above, offers a more precise and contingent picture of Nahimana’s ideological evolution, as well as a narrower time frame in which it took place. However, as a high-stakes, precedent-setting, future-genocide-preventing symbolic ritual, the ICTR could not, in the end, accommodate such complexity. Despite the Trial Chamber’s careful caveats inserted throughout its final judgment (for example, that it did not consider Nahimana’s 1993 essay, “Rwanda: Current Problems and Solutions,” or its March 1994 recirculation to constitute a “direct call for violence”), as well as its refusal to render any factual or legal findings in relation to Nahimana’s longer-term body of scholarship, the overriding tenor of the verdict ended up validating and amplifying the prosecution’s major claims.Footnote 82 Nahimana was the “principal ideologist of RTLM” and a “renowned academic” who was “fully aware of the power of words.” His status as a historian, rather than being seen as a mitigating circumstance, only served to “underscore [his] betrayal of public trust.” Overall, the court endorsed the metaphorical characterization that senior trial attorney Stephen Rapp had presented during his closing arguments for the prosecution: that “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks” can, however counterintuitively, be perpetrators of “the greatest evil.”Footnote 83 In so doing, the tribunal helped codify a powerful legal truth: if words could kill, it was because they had been ideologically manufactured to do so by a professional historian.
The oversimplifications of this legal truth, on one level, index the fundamental tensions that exist between history and the law, revealing how both empirical and historiographical context can get lost when historians enter the judicial space of a criminal trial.Footnote 84 More broadly, a parallel can be drawn to the collision “between public and academic perceptions of ‘historical truths’” that Gillian Mathys and Sarah Van Beurden have theorized in relation to the Belgian Parliamentary Commission on the Colonial Past. As a public-facing arbiter of Rwanda’s descent into genocidal violence, the ICTR was infused with a significant narrative power which, not unlike the Belgian commission, tried to cater to global society’s “need for straightforward answers” in ways that ultimately “reinforce[d] status quo thinking.”Footnote 85 Because of this, Nahimana’s longer-term trajectory had to be flattened into a neater, and thus more compelling, story of a historian whose research agenda had been ideologically questionable from the very beginning.
What larger conclusions can be drawn from this analysis of the Media Trial as both a mediator and producer of Rwandan historiography? While the ICTR’s conviction rightly marked Nahimana out as exceptional for his criminal activities as an RTLM executive and for his incendiary role as a public intellectual in the early 1990s, the trial generally obscured the many unexceptional aspects of his early scholarship (its regional focus, grounding in oral sources, and reification of ethnic categories), which were broadly consistent with prevailing trends and practices in African history at the time. In addition, by rendering Nahimana exceptional, the trial effectively ignored the extraordinary intensity of the political disputes taking place across the wider Great Lakes academic scene in the 1980s and ‘90s.Footnote 86 Indeed, by the time the Media Trial began, historical writing on this region had become so thoroughly entangled in the politics of ethnicity and the realities of mass violence that Vansina questioned whether historians could proceed at all, caught—as he saw it—between the untenable poles of “utter detachment” and “utter commitment to the cause one favors in the name of [bearing] witness.”Footnote 87 It was a predicament that would only intensify; in the Rwandan context, not only because “debate[s] about the nature of the country’s history [would become] central to the process of political reconstruction” after the genocide, but because of the government’s politicization of Nahimana’s conviction and its increasingly determined efforts in the years since to remake Rwandan history in service of the RPF’s ideological vision.Footnote 88
Of course, for Rwanda’s post-genocide historians, the implications of this longer era of historiographical crisis and contestation—which the Media Trial both punctuated and transformed—have also been deeply felt. Over the past thirty years, they have faced the unenviable task of having to fundamentally rebuild, redeem, and repurpose their discipline—a daunting endeavor rendered all the more fraught by the cautionary-tale legacy of historians like Ferdinand Nahimana.Footnote 89 In the prophetic words of one Rwandan academic: “Those we have been talking about, they were leaders of the university, they were professors, they were intellectuals [of] some influence. ... People will never forget what they have done.”Footnote 90
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