BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This coming week, the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, will pay a visit to the U.S. April is the official month of mourning in Rwanda, in remembrance of the 1994 genocide that claimed the lives of between 500,000 and one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. President Kagame has been using the tenth anniversary of the genocide to press Western nations to increase assistance to the country they abandoned in its hour of deepest need. Kagame's political party, the democratically elected but autocratic Rwandan Patriotic Front, is known for its political savvy, and it has masterfully exploited international guilt to Rwanda's benefit. But it also has wielded the specter of genocide as a club in the domestic political arena, often against Rwanda's media. OTM's Michael Kavanagh brings us this report.

[GENERAL CROWD NOISE UP & UNDER]

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: The biggest names in Rwandan media and politics and a host of international diplomats mingle together in a conference room in Kigali's brand-new 5-star hotel. It's not exactly the kind of crowd you'd expect at the launching of a new radio station that targets Rwanda's youth with a mixture of American hip-hop, African pop and Bob Marley-style reggae. It's not your average new radio opening. The station, called Radio 10, is not just Rwanda's newest private radio station. For the next month at least, it is Rwanda's only private radio station. Except for state-run Radio Rwanda, there have been no Kinyarwanda language radio stations in the country for ten years.

[CLAPPING, SPEECH BEGINS (IN FRENCH)]

When the president of Radio 10, Eugene Nyagahene, gets up to speak, he reminds everyone why it took so long for private radio to return to this tiny African nation.

[SPEECH CONTINUES (IN FRENCH)]

"Let me assure the people of Rwanda that after the sad events of 1994, with the infamous RTLM, that any risk of losing control will be restricted by the law and the media law. History will never repeat itself." RTLM was the Hutu Power radio station that fomented, encouraged and at times directed the 1994 genocide, to the point of broadcasting the names and addresses of those next in line to die. In December*, the former head of RTLM was given a life sentence for inciting genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. One month later, as if to mark the end of the RTLM era, Rwanda agreed to open up its airwaves to six new private radio stations.

[RADIO IZUBA FADE UP INTO KIBUNGO MIX & UNDER]

Radio Izuba will be the second station to hit the air by the end of this month. In its pilot broadcast, Izuba has been playing mostly music, but eventually Izuba hopes to broadcast the kind of programs that the mostly illiterate population of Rwanda has been starving for: drama and educational programs on civics, health and agriculture.

[FADE IZUBA]

But they will not be broadcasting news. The government's openness to new media extends only so far. During the last year, Rwanda passed a new constitution and a comprehensive new media law. While the laws insist on the freedom of the press, the constitution's preamble goes like this: "We, the people of Rwanda, resolve to combat the ideology of genocide and all its manifestations, and thus eradicate ethnic divisions, regional divisions and all other form of divisions." With a single stroke of a pen, Rwanda buried the machetes of its past. There were no more Tutsis or Hutus. From now on, in public speech, anyway, there were only Rwandans. Laurent Nkusi is Rwanda's Minister of Information, and he defends the government position to effectively bar the discussion of ethnicity.

LAURENT NKUSI: In Rwanda, we have a bad legacy with media. You should never forget that situation.

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: Those who do write or speak about divisions between Hutus and Tutsis are slandered as "divisionist," a charge that can mean jail or worse in today's Rwanda.

LAURENT NKUSI: If a journalist, publicly or not, incites people to hatred, then it's an example of divisionism, so if police has a presumption that some articles would be harmful for the country--

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: But why the police and, and not your office. What does the police have to do with the media?

LAURENT NKUSI: Well, police have a special -- I have asked the same question to them, and they say for us, if there is an issue of internal security, we have to intervene. That's all.

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: As it plays out, "divisionism" has become a convenient excuse for censoring and outlawing any opposition to the Tutsi-dominated government, and journalists have suffered the consequences.

ROBERT SUBUFIRIRA: We, over time, have been regarded as enemies of the state. There are people who even feared to talk to us in public.

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: Until he went into exile a month ago, Robert Subufirira was the managing editor of Umuseso, Rwanda's largest weekly newspaper. Umuseso has a sort of mythic status in Rwanda for its fearlessness in taking on the topics that no one else will touch: corruption, poverty, and, above all, ethnicity. Last year, Umuseso's editors were jailed twice for criticizing government ministers and for publishing a political cartoon in which President Kagame proclaimed that only he, a Tutsi, could lead the government. Eventually, the government pressure became too much to bear.

ROBERT SUBUFIRIRA: So, they decided to openly pick us up, take us to their own offices, pull out guns, put them on the tables, and tell us they are going to kill us.

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: Subufirira is now in Tanzania, awaiting permanent asylum status. He wonders what role the media can play in Rwanda's reconciliation if journalists can't talk about the country's most pressing issues. He remembers well the bloody legacy of the media from a decade ago, but--

ROBERT SUBUFIRIRA: Let us not use it as a reason to suffocate for today because of what happened yesterday. No. If you say today we cannot have an independent media, then when do you think we shall need it?

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: The Minister of Information Laurent Nkusi, whose wife and three children were killed in the genocide, insists that journalists have to respect that Rwanda is still in a critical state of recovery.

LAURENT NKUSI: There is no press without stability. There is no press possible without a, a stable country.

MICHAEL KAVANAGH: But Robert Subufirira's question remains: when will the government decide that the country is stable and that its people can speak freely again? Meanwhile, Rwanda suffers from a kind of national post-traumatic stress. The RPF's heavy hand on the media may be a response to that trauma, but it seems to close off one of the most important ways that victims, regardless of their ethnicity, can come to terms with their past: by talking about it. For On the Media, I'm Michael Kavanagh.

*In the original broadcast version of this piece, it was erroneously stated that the life sentence was issued by the ICT in January.