BY Bryan Mullan

The image of a lifeless toddler in a green jumper among a pile of bodies is burned into Allan Thompson’s memory like an image on emulsion paper. He stumbled onto the massacre site at the Mugunga refugee camp in eastern Zaire, two years after the Rwandan genocide, while working for the Toronto Star.

(Photo: Sophie Béraud)

“We were stepping over bodies; it was awful,” Thompson says. “Heads split open, stomachs hacked open and innards exposed.”

As horrific as it was, it struck Thompson that this was only 20 people compared to the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the 1994 genocide.

“It made me realize the magnitude of what happened by getting a small example of it two years later.”

He came across the grisly discovery at the Mugunga camp while covering the mass exodus of 700,000 Rwandan refugees who were returning home. Most of them were Hutus who fled Rwanda in 1994, fearing retaliation for the genocide of almost one million Tutsies by Hutu extremists.

“At some point during the day I had an epiphany: where the hell had I been back in 1994?” Thompson says.

He had written a few stories on the genocide from Ottawa but he wasn’t drawn into it. That soon changed.

More than ten years later and a National Newspaper Award nomination under his belt for his coverage of post-genocide Rwanda, Thompson is on a mission. As an assistant professor at the Carleton School of Journalism and Communication, he has immersed himself in what he calls “the Rwanda initiative.”

The National University of Rwanda (NUR) in Butare. ZOOM IN

Since joining the university in 2003, he has organized two major conferences dealing with Africa: The Media and the Rwanda Genocide in 2004 and Africa Now: Untold Stories in 2005. This January, he started a four week teaching posting at the National University of Rwanda (NUR) in Butare.

“The immediate deficit in Rwanda is teachers,” explains Thompson. “In 1994 a lot of professionals were killed and whole sectors of the economy were wiped out.”

The idea of a teaching exchange came from the 2004 conference. Thompson had invited faculty members from the NUR to participate.

“The initial phase is a teaching collaboration, but I am hoping this will evolve into a full-fledged exchange program between the two universities.”

Thompson’s plan is to attract experienced journalists and journalism educators to teach eight-week courses and media training workshops at the NUR. Confirmed for this winter are Roger Bird, recently retired from the School of Journalism and Communication; Sue Montgomery, Carleton grad and veteran reporter with the Montreal Gazette; and Sylvia Thomson, another Carleton grad and currently with the CBC.

The primary source of funding for the project is the Foreign Affairs Department. Carleton International, the university’s global outreach wing, is also pitching in.

“Two months is enough time to let the teachers know the students, know the faculty and they would even have enough time to see the silverback gorillas in the north.”

Thompson says cultivating a cadre of Canadian journalists who are interested in Africa will eventually lead to more coverage of the continent.

“A country like Rwanda is a story-buffet. Not only is it staggeringly beautiful, but you’re surrounded by these incredible human stories.”

Telling those stories in the post-genocide environment is not always that easy for Rwandan journalists. Reporters Without Borders, an international non-governmental organization, says in its annual report that a free press does not exist in Rwanda because of “a monopoly of radio and TV, insipid print media and systematic harassment of the only independent newspaper.”

Thompson says the present Rwandan regime is still coming to grips with the role of the media in the genocide.

“The radio station RTLM (Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines) was almost like the soundtrack to the Rwanda genocide. Media was perverted and manipulated for the purpose of the genocide. And there is a genuine fear of never lapsing into that kind of situation.”

The hostile media environment is an important reason Thompson feels this exchange is needed. He says that helping to establish international contacts for local Rwandan journalists will make it harder for the government to clamp down on the press.

“There are young journalism students who are very keen and eager to be journalists and I think the media climate won’t always be the way it is.”

For more information or to read Thompson’s blog, visit rwandainitiative.ca.