BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen
The Reckoning Project is a consortium of journalists, researchers, and lawyers, bridging professional gaps, in order to hold the highest powers to account by investigating war crimes and collecting witness testimony from their survivors.
In Nazi Germany, it was German tabloid Der Stürmer. In Rwanda, it was Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines. While those cultivating hatred may not directly wield the weapons used to commit genocide, they provide the impetus for those that do.
In this episode, guest presented by The Reckoning Project’s co-founder, disinformation expert and author of How to Win an Information War, Peter Pomerantsev, we explore the role of propagandists responsible for inciting hatred and violence, contributing to war crimes and mass atrocities across history and the present day.
Our first guest, Gregory Gordon, was on the ground in Rwanda as a young lawyer, developing the cases against the propagandists involved, and the media outlets, that had “used speech, over either the airwaves or in print to whip up the Hutu population to commit genocide against the Tutsis”
“I was the person who found a sociolinguist who would testify about the terminology that was used, for example, calling Tutsis cockroaches,” he recalled. When the man behind it was finally captured, he struggled to process the subsequent turn of events: Rwandan businessman Félicien Kabuga was deemed unfit to stand trial on the grounds of a dementia diagnosis, nearly two decades after the genocide.
“I can’t believe how frustrating it all turned out to be,” Gordon said. “We need to get more cooperation in the world so that international crimes can be prosecuted efficiently and more quickly, we also need to be more efficient as prosecutors at various accountability mechanisms,” he said.
But Rwanda still marked the first time that journalists have been sentenced to life imprisonment for incitement to murder and violence, and as always with legislation, precedents are set, building on previous cases, helping us contextualise present-day atrocities.
And now, we see Russian propagandists utilising similar language in their campaign against Ukrainians.
“Russia combines deadly attacks on Ukrainian civilians with intensive propaganda operations directed at audiences at home in Russia, in Ukraine’s occupied territories, and also abroad to an international audience: a many-pronged attack,” said Pomerantsev, who notes that former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has also used the term “cockroaches” to refer to Ukrainians.
Ilia Nuzov, from the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) tells The Reckoning Project about their communication addressed to the International Criminal Court (ICC) about Russian propagandists’ usage of hate speech.
We also explore the use of “information alibis” – that is, how Russia uses online tools to spread disinformation prior to the execution of war crimes, “Russian officials and media, accusing the Ukrainians, and the British, of being behind a war crime before committing it themselves,” said Pomerantsev.
“The purpose of an information alibi is not just to mislead people, it’s to create confusion, it’s to reduce outrage, it’s to obstruct the subsequent investigations, and to protect the perpetrators from potential accountability,” said Anastasiia Vorobiova, from law firm Global Rights Compliance.
The Reckoning Project also speaks with Anna Vyshniakova, who examines the impact of this propaganda on Russian soldiers, researching their subsequent willingness to dehumanise Ukrainians. She discusses her pioneering study that directly linked state rhetoric and genuine belief in it to their actions on the ground.
Listen to the Reckoning Project Podcast with Peter Pomerantsev now.
Produced by Aliide Naylor and Charlie Bell in association with the Byline Times Podcast.