Archive · War Reports

Rwanda, 1994

Argyris Dinopoulos covered Rwanda as a correspondent for Antenna (ANT1) in the summer of 1994, in the shadow of the genocide. The two reports that follow are accompanied by a photograph from the assignment.

In the summer of 1994 Argyris Dinopoulos, as Antenna's correspondent, recorded one of the greatest humanitarian crises in the world's post-war history, the outcome of the civil war in Rwanda.

This — at first — humanitarian crisis took on the character of a genocide, with more than half a million dead, and led to convictions before the International Court in The Hague.

Argyris Dinopoulos lived inside the refugee camps at Goma and in other towns, with epidemics — cholera above all — decimating refugees and local people alike, and the dead left unburied for days.

The conditions for reporting were hard: access to Rwanda, from Nairobi, was only by small aircraft flying under limited safety rules, while staying in the camps, in tents or in the open, carried its own risk of infectious disease.

Even so a considerable number of foreign correspondents were in Rwanda, as was an EBU station with satellite equipment, so that transmission of picture and sound was possible, and live links of limited duration could be made.

In the still-early days of Greek private television, assignments such as this one to Rwanda strengthened Antenna's news standing, since the station was present at events of worldwide interest that shook international opinion.