Shortly after Anjan Sundaram begins work with Rwanda’s “last free journalists”, teaching them how to write news stories, his students start to disappear.
He hears one of them, Cato, on the radio, praising the president. He knows that Mr Cato is lost to journalism, but he does not blame his former student for joining the president’s army of flatterers, a group called the Intore: “It was the easiest way to protect himself.”
The country’s main independent paper, Umuseso, is shut down. Moses, another student, is one of the few people in Rwanda willing to speak freely about what is happening to the country, why there are so few journalists left: he died, he says, during the genocide, he should have been massacred when his family was slaughtered. “Now what’s to fear; are they going to kill me a second time?”
But it takes time for Mr Sundaram to understand the extent of this wave of repression, the nature of the silencing that the dictatorship imposes on Rwanda after the genocide. This is because Rwanda’s post-genocide struggles haven’t been reported in the media. You understand why when you read Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, Mr Sundaram’s gritty, brutal and often heartbreaking account of a country in the process of crushing its own people into obedience.
He was one of the very few journalists to witness the rapid contagion of violence in President Paul Kagame’s regime, as history is erased, or reshaped, as citizens become the surveillance they fear, and as fear spreads like a second plague across the land, obliterating freedoms in its wake. In his first book, Stringer, Mr Sundaram had established himself as an interesting voice, reporting in vivid, sometimes amusing, often thoughtful detail from the Congo. In his second, he has set down a classic of journalism, an unforgettable account of the machinery that is necessary to sustain a republic of fear.
Early on in Bad News, one of his students, Gibson, texts Mr Sundaram: “My life is in danger. I think I may die tonight.” Mr Gibson, in his thirties, has been boxed into smaller and smaller spaces; first he stops writing politically incendiary articles for Umuseso, reporting only innocuous things, then he decides to start his own magazine, New Horizons, but though he does not intend it to be political, it is too late.
The last journalists in Rwanda must flee or find themselves caught in the network where individuals, hotels, villages, even friends and family, become extensions of the state, carrying out the state’s surveillance as ably as government officials. “The state, extending through the people, became omnipresent,” writes Mr Sundaram. Mr Gibson cannot hide in Rwanda; the system is so tightly controlled that there is, quite literally, no room for dissidents.
On the night before Mr Gibson leaves, he points out the orange sodium-vapour lights on the roads. The street lights are close together; they are the first things visitors see, and visitors are impressed by the roads, the lights. But, Mr Gibson explains to Mr Sundaram, only four per cent of Rwandans have electricity in their homes. The people live in blackness, and they prefer to walk in the dark, because the lights let the government “see us all the time”. And Mr Sundaram begins to understand what Mr Gibson is trying to tell him: “You need to look differently in a dictatorship, you need to think about how to listen to people who live in fear.”
One way to try to understand repression is to see it as the outcome of the disease vector of violence. When violence becomes acceptable, or when it is allowed to ferment unchecked, it spreads, like a contagion, like a disease, across a society, a culture, a community or a country. That kind of uncontained epidemic fosters three things: repression, surveillance and fear. The fear cuts both ways – the citizen fears the state until s/he becomes an arm of the state, but even the tightest and worst of dictatorships also fears the reverse contagion, the return of freedom and individual thinking.
At one point, with his journalism class crumbling around him as students disappear, fall into silence, or are jailed, Mr Sundaram travels into the heart of the oppression that has fallen over Rwanda after the elections. He and his friend find villages where the huts are roofless, because the government has decided that traditional grass roofs are backward – anything that might take citizens back to the old world is dangerous.
The villagers have taken the roofs off their huts themselves, in obedience to the president’s directives, even though there is no other shelter. Back in the capital, Mr Kagame’s government holds conferences that Mr Sundaram describes as pieces of staged theatre for the benefit of Western donors and foreign diplomats. Through the rest of the country, obedience and fear terrorise Mr Kagame’s citizens into pulling their world down over their heads.
One of the reasons why Bad News is so extraordinary is because Mr Sundaram’s reporting indicts all of the elements that allow an oppressive regime to survive: not just the violence of the state, not just the reluctant or eager complicity of the citizens, but also the successful deployment of lies as the new weapons of mass control. This is an intimate biography of a dictatorship, a close, harsh look at how oppression germinates, thrives and survives, and I cannot begin to guess what the writing of this must have cost
Mr Sundaram.
Source: http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/inside-the-republic-of-fear-116020101247_1.html
