In the Radio Heza editing office Furaha Hakizimana is listening to an interview about the future of Rwanda she conducted with young people that morning. Outside on the sports ground supporters are cheering two football teams, schoolchildren are playing in the courtyard. The Kimisagara youth centre in Rwanda’s capital Kigali is a noisy place in the afternoon. 23-year-old Hakizimana has been working with Radio Heza for a year. For 30 minutes a week the radio station broadcasts a mixture of news, interviews, music and a soap opera as part of a programme made by young people for young people. Their aim is to contribute to the reconciliation process in Rwanda with their own radio station. “I have a lot of confidence in young people’s potential to create long-lasting peace in Rwanda,” insists Hakizimana.
Fifteen years have passed since the genocide in the East African country. In 1994 Rwanda’s Hutu brutally murdered almost a million Tutsi in just three months. It was the briefest and bloodiest massacre in the continent’s recent history. Since then there has been peace. But it is a difficult peace and demands a great deal of self-denial. Although a government law forbids categorizing people in “Hutu” and “Tutsi” ethnic groups, the people still have great reservations towards each other.
Radio Heza and the newspaper of the same name, with 500 copies being distributed to secondary schools, were launched in a project called “Media for peace, by young people for young people”. The idea was developed by the Forum Civil Peace Service (ZFD) of the German Development Service (DED) in 2005. Since 1999 the DED has been initiating measures to promote peace and resolve conflicts by deploying specialist staff and helping to create organizational structures. In January 2008 the first Heza programme was transmitted in all of Rwanda’s provinces in the country’s main language Kinyarwanda. Meanwhile, according to DED estimates, two million young people listen to Radio Heza each week. The project is being realized by the association Urungano – Jeunesse et Médias and the Jeunes Giramahoro forum, the sponsor of the youth centre, and is transmitted by Voice of America.
Heza means “a nice place”, and the name stands for the vision of a country where everyone feels at home. Hakizimana joined the team a year ago. “I had already taken part in a peace journalism course at the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ). That’s why I was inspired by the idea of talking about peace on the radio,” explains the young journalist. It was a struggle at first, recalls DED/ZFD peace specialist Andreas Wagner, who accompanied Heza from the very start. In Rwanda he was asked: “What’s the aim of your work?” or told “If you want to make radio for young people, get the professionals in.” But Andreas Wagner explains: “Our specific aim was to break the wall of silence among young people. If you want to recognize the sufferings of others, you also have to talk about and acknowledge your own sufferings. In Rwanda openness among young people is rare outside family circles. Depending on personal experiences, every encounter with other young people can spark off feelings of shame or grief, revenge or fear, and mobilize prejudices and grudges.”
People have had enough experience of adults manipulating young people in Rwanda. It was young people who allowed themselves to be incited to violence by the propaganda station Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) and the Kangura newspaper and become the most zealous activists in the genocide. “The propaganda messages reached the young people who had been accustomed to blind obedience from their early childhood and had never had a chance to make their own moral decisions,” says Wagner as he explains the situation at that time. “That’s why it was important for well-trained and competently supervised young people to develop the peace media themselves.”
Nowadays these young people, who grew up after 1994, have only vague memories of the genocide. But there are still retaliation attacks, Hutu rebels still try to disrupt the peace in the country from outside. Perpetrators and victims often live next door to each other, and since the first convicted war criminals have been released, the fear of revenge has grown. In addition to this Wagner has discovered that, despite the law on equality, the different groups still tend to stick together. “‘I didn’t know that’ is something we regularly heard when we started working together.” Evaluating the past was followed by looking to the future. “We chose 15- to 23-year-olds as the target group for our programme. On the one hand, this age group has reached a certain level of reflection in political and social terms, but it is too young to have been involved in the genocide.” Twenty young people received a basic training in journalism. They worked out the radio concept by themselves, chose its name and attended short seminars on “peace journalism” and “methods of conflict resolution”.
Today people listen to Heza even in the border regions of Congo and Rwanda. The team has members from both ethnic groups. “We concentrate on looking ahead, not back,” says Wagner. After all, the aim is to shape the future together. And that’s why the programme focuses not only on serious topics. “It has to be cool as well, because young people happen to like cool things.”
