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Pulling the Plug on Violent Propaganda
By Chiara Magni
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 22, 2010 (IPS) - A review of modern human history finds no shortage of
instances where hate speech has fuelled genocidal rampages
against minority ethnic groups.
One of the most prominent is the case of Radio Télévision
Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a Rwandan radio station
that broadcast from Jul. 8, 1993 to Jul. 31, 1994. It is
regarded as having played a crucial role during the April-
July 1994 Rwandan genocide, spreading racist propaganda
primarily against Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
A November 2009 study by David Yanagizawa of the Institute
for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University
estimated that the RTLM broadcasts explained an increase in
violence amounting to 45,000 Tutsi deaths, about nine
percent of the total.
"Speech alone cannot bring about genocide," explains Susan
Benesch, a human rights legal scholar who has been
commissioned by the U.N. to develop policy guidelines on
potentially dangerous speech, but it is "a catalyst to
spread violence."
Propaganda experts also point to the Armenian genocide –
during and just after World War I – when the low literacy
rate in Turkey meant that most media failed to reach more
than a small number of intellectuals. Historian Vahagan
Dadrian has stressed the importance of the sermons of Muslim
mullahs and the messages of the government spread by town
criers. Code words such as traitors, saboteurs, spies,
conspirators and infidels were common.
Between 600,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians were killed during
the genocide, with propaganda crucially fuelling interracial
hate.
Nearly a century later, the U.N. Office of the Special
Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide has hired Benesch as
part of a groundbreaking 18-month project focused on ways to
limit the effects of inflammatory speech, while at the same
time safeguarding the right to freedom of expression.
Context is important, Benesch told IPS. "There are four main
variables - the speaker, the speech act, the audience, and
the social and historical context in which the speech is
delivered. All four can contribute to dangerousness," she
said.
The project has three specific goals: design a blueprint for
monitoring dangerous speech in countries at risk of genocide
and mass atrocities; develop and test a methodology to gauge
the dangerousness of specific speech; and produce policy
response options.
Christopher Tuckwood, executive director of the Sentinel
Project for Genocide Prevention, told IPS that international
legal norms need to be established in order to determine
when speech is dangerous enough to be justifiably restricted
by a government.
However, he added, "While it is important to guard rights
like free speech, when possible incitement to genocide is
taking place, the threat to people's lives is too high to
allow it to pass by on principle."
It is very important to define genocide properly, as there
is a major difference between genuinely dangerous and
insulting or offensive speech, agrees Francis M. Deng,
Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide.
"U.N. capacity to analyse information on possible genocide
is fundamental. Our task is to gather information,
particularly from within the U.N., and there is a lot of
information that exists within the system," Deng told IPS.
Mark Lattimer, executive director of Minority Rights Group
International, underlined the paradox that international
human rights laws on hate speech are sometimes used against
the very groups they are supposed to protect.
"In Europe, for example, they have been invoked against
black and Muslim activists, and in Iran and Rwanda such
restrictions have been used quite cynically to limit the
freedom of expression of political opponents," Lattimer told
IPS.
Tuckwood agreed. "This is something that constantly comes up
as a legal issue in the U.S., where free speech is
considered sacred but many individuals and groups abuse it
to promote racist, homophobic, and other discriminatory
views," he said.
"At the opposite extreme are governments that use hate
speech themselves. In between are those regimes which may
use the pretence of restricting hate speech to justify
censorship of the opposition," Tuckwood said.
He added that placing restrictions on incitement to genocide
is a very useful measure in preventing genocide itself,
especially since new technology like the internet and social
networking tools makes spreading hate speech and organising
mass violence even easier.
Educating people about manipulative social processes and
discrediting hate speech in the eyes of the public make
inflammatory messages far less persuasive, Benesch said at a
recent U.N. conference.
"People do not wake up one day and decide to start
massacring their neighbours," she noted.
The more information people have access to, the less they
will be influenced by propaganda, which plays a critical
role in fuelling interethnic hate.
"Not only does [potential dangerous speech] cause the
dehumanisation of the target group, but it also motivates
the rank-and-file perpetrators to obediently carry out the
killings," Tuckwood told IPS.
"This is why monitoring hate speech is a particularly strong
warning indicator of the threat of genocide in a situation-
of-concern, to use our own terminology," he said.
Using the prevention strategy designed by Benesch, the U.N.
Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide
is trying to nip in the bud the creation of a social context
that could lead to genocide.
Information from the field is essential to implement this
strategy. The U.N. provides protection to people who could
be endangered by making useful information publicly
available, Deng told IPS.
"More and more we are finding that U.N. agencies are quite
receptive to our requests for information, and we have
daily, weekly and monthly reports based on the information
gathered," he said.
(END)
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