Guerrillas in the mist.

• Author: Silverstein, Ken
• Position: Media misrepresentation of Rwanda

With the end of the Cold War, Africa's difficulties are now largely a depressing distraction. That means that barring brutal warfare, a natural disaster, or widespread famine, the continent rarely registers on the American media's radar screen. And even when those kinds of calamities occur, news reports often willfully ignore the human dimensions to focus on whatever impact the disaster might have on a topic that interests Americans.

This was absurdly true in the case of coverage of the fighting and dying in Rwanda over the last few years. Now that the human misery, disease, and death in that country are of an incalculable scale, attention is centered on the Rwandans. But for a long time, the media's coverage of the civil war in that country slighted human beings and focused almost entirely on a cuddlier subject: Dian Fossey's apes.

Warfare broke out in Rwanda in late 1990, when the now triumphant guerrillas of the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded the country from neighboring Uganda. Their goal was to topple Juvenal Habyarimana's repressive Hutu-dominated government, which was installed in a 1973 military coup. American journalists were largely unmoved by the dramatic events taking place in the country. Between January of 1991 and December of 1993, a few months before the recent upsurge in violence, 7he New York Times ran 10 stories on Rwanda, half of them brief wire service dispatches. The Washington Post didn't have a single story on Rwanda during that period, while The Wall Street Journal ran a grand total of four sentences in three one-paragraph filler items.

However, the press has rigorously covered the saga of Rwanda's endangered mountain apes, which were made famous in Gorillas in the Mist, the 1988 movie starring Sigourney Weaver as Fossey, the murdered American researcher. A mid-June Nexis search which cross-referenced Rwanda with "gorillas" vs. "guerrillas" resulted in a rout by the apes, 1, 123 to 138. And 91 of the references to the humans had come since April 6, when the downing of Habyarimana's plane outside Kigali touched off the terrible crisis that has since been in the headlines.

The clearest way to demonstrate the press' ape obsession is to compare events in Rwanda during the 1991 to 1993 period with the coverage of country that was provided by American newspapers.

Events, 1991: George Bush increased U.S. aid to Rwanda to $15 million, up from $9 million previous year. Habyarimana's government received...