Since the release of its documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, on October 1, the BBC has dominated news and commentaries in the country’s mainstream as well as social media. So far, most commentators, Rwandans and foreigners alike, have accused the media outlet of revisionism and attempting to rewrite the history of the Genocide against the Tutsi.

Even the nation’s leaders have weighed in. Speaking after the swearing-in of Senate president Bernard Makuza on October 14, President Paul Kagame accused the the broadcaster of cynicism and trying to cleanse genocidaires while turning victims into killers.

And it’s not difficult to understand why the British broadcaster’s documentary should alarm many. I have watched the documentary — not once, but twice. And no matter how I try hard to be objective and to rationalise, I can’t help but wonder what the motive of the usually respectable media outlet was or what was on the mind of its journalists who made it and the executives who approved it.

I locate my problem with the documentary at three levels: The methodological, or who was interviewed; the factual; and the philosophical.

On the methods level, most of the key informants BBC chose to interview are either individuals who used to be in leadership positions in Kigali and have since fallen out of favour and therefore have a bone to pick with President Kagame or those who are well known for being critical to the RPF leadership.

One would expect that, as a professional media outlet, the BBC would know better than take whatever such people say at face value. Any journalist, right from journalism school to the newsroom, is taught to always be sceptical of sources, question their motive, crosscheck the facts and present all sides to an issue or event.

That the BBC decided to selectively interview only individuals known to oppose the RPF-led government and take their claims as biblical truth is mind-boggling. And that it didn’t find it good journalism to interview survivors isn’t a quality one would have associated with the broadcaster.

On the factual level, citing two less known American researchers, the documentary claims that if one million people were killed during the genocide, only 200,000 were Tutsi and the remainder Hutus.

In arriving at this figure, the BBC not only relied on individuals who are less knowledgeable about Rwanda and subject at hand but also ignored respected authorities who have been researching the country for years and whose writings on the subject of the genocide and the question of “how many were killed” was painstakingly arrived at using more reliable statistics, censuses and comparative demographic figures across time and boundaries.

For instance, to ignore estimates of renowned academics such as Alison des Forges (RIP), the author of Leave None to Tell the Story (a book considered an empirical biblical account of what happened during the genocide) or Gérard Prunier, who wrote Rwanda: The History of the Genocide, individuals far more qualified, and rely on individuals who know little about the country and who visited for a few months to estimate how many were killed, is to misunderstand the hierarchy of sources and what sources to trust in telling a story.

Dancing on graves

On the philosophical level, when the interviewer visits Ntarama genocide memorial site and talks to the manager, himself a genocide survivor, she questions why the remains of the dead were being preserved!

A cousin who is a survivor of the genocide told me she thought after watching the documentary that the BBC was “dancing on the graves of our people killed.”

This documentary should have been titled Rwanda’s Critics After the Genocide, essentially because, at the core, there is nothing new in it — except the highly questionable numbers of how many people were killed and reintroducing the question of who was responsible for shooting down then president Habyarimana’s plane, itself a very old story.

The reason many people are outraged by the documentary isn’t its lack of new information about the genocide but because they thought the BBC was far more respectable, ethical and professional to know better. Actually, they are disappointed with the BBC.

Dr Christopher Kayumba, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the School of Journalism, the University of Rwanda, and managing consultant at MGC Consult Ltd.

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