Citation
The grainy video captured on 18 April by Nick Hughes, who was positioned on the top floor of the French School, is truly the exception that proves the rule. Hughes looked first through the scope of a rocket launcher, borrowed from a Belgian soldier stationed in the school. Then he trained his camera on what he saw taking place in the road below. Hughes would recount later that he had to stop shooting at several points for fear that his lone remaining battery pack would expire and, as a result, there are 'jump cuts' in the video at points when he briefly turned off his camera. Because he was shooting from such a distance, the sound on the audio track is the background noise in the school and, occasionally, the voice of Hughes and an associate. 'She's praying over the person that has just been killed,' he comments at one point. 'They're going to kill her, you can see that,' he says later. p3
Nick Hughes, the British cameraman and later film producer, describes the important footage he captured in Rwanda, one of the only known instances of a killing during the genocide recorded by the media. Mike Dottridge, who was a desk officer with Amnesty International at the time of the genocide, takes a step back from the issue of media coverage to explore the fact that so little attention was paid to events in Rwanda before the genocide, particularly in the late 1980s and between 1990 and 1994, despite abundant evidence of unrest. His paper situates the three and a half years of inaction, as RTLM broadcast its messages of hate, in a broader context in which journalists and others based outside Rwanda share responsibility for this inaction.
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1. A copy of the raw footage shot by journalist Nick Hughes has been deposited in the Media and Genocide Archive at Carleton University. The footage was also entered as Exhibit 467 at the trial of Georges Rutaganda before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.
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