Women and War in Rwanda by Georgina Holmes

Author:Georgina Holmes [Holmes, Georgina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780755619016
Google: 0kKjzQEACAAJ
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2013-01-15T03:34:24+00:00

Part II: Mediatizing Rwandan women

Former editor of Newsnight (1994–97) Sian Kevill remarked during a Behind the Scenes special, broadcast on 21 February 2002: ‘It was very macho, very public school and particularly Oxbridge . . . full of bullshit and . . . sharp shoulders and very competitive’, before contending that the Newsnight of the 2000s is ‘much more diverse than it was ten years ago’.59 Kevill’s statement that Newsnight’s dominant culture in the early 1990s upheld a predominantly white middle-class male view of the world calls for an assessment of the way in which the programme’s engagement in international politics of revisionism are gendered and how this might have evolved over time in accordance with the editor’s perspective. Like colonial films, Newsnight news features on Rwanda are mediatized spheres within which Rwandan women are stripped of their materiality, dissected under the gaze of the cameraman, journalist and producer, and reconstructed in accordance with the image of politics that fits the documentary’s narrative. This part of the chapter considers how certain politics of revisionism inform the mediatization of Rwandan women’s subjectivities and influence the way in which women’s agency is made visible.

In Fair and Park’s60 review of the mediatization of the Goma refugee crisis, they contend that limited access to the region and ignorance of political events resulted in an overreliance on stereotypes. An analysis of Newsnight reveals that the war and genocide in Rwanda and continued conflicts in the eastern provinces of the DRC have led to the emergence of new stereotypes and new gendered narratives which over time have changed the way in which Rwandan and Congolese women’s subjectivities have been mediatized. During the genocide, Newsnight’s reporting tended to adopt a classically western reading of war wherein militarization is understood as a masculine domain from which women are excluded – in spite of the many references to civilian deaths. As in the UK broadsheets, women and children are the subjects of humanitarian crises, although in the first three months they are more often seen than heard. In these stories, women are filmed cooking, washing clothes, tending to children and collecting firewood in refugee camps and rural areas. They are not seen to be engaged in politics and are never filmed as representatives of government or military operations. Rape and SGBV in particular are decidedly absent, despite evidence of rape in the footage included in Peter Marshall’s news feature on the UN’s shaky relationship with Africa, broadcast on 4 May 1994. Images of wounded Rwandan women are often framed by narratives about civil war which suggest they are caught in the crossfire, but not deliberately targeted. For example, in a news feature broadcast on 20 June 1994, International Red Cross hospital scenes focus on a woman who is having shrapnel removed from her leg.

As in the mediatization of the Goma refugee crisis, reporting on the French humanitarian mission Opération Turquoise is highly gendered. Footage of French troops hone in on French masculinity and the helplessness of Hutu women. On

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