Unless someone still has it.
In 1993 and 1994 RTLM was taped by embassies, journalists, researchers, peacekeepers and ordinary listeners, in Rwanda and abroad. Almost everything that survives exists because someone pressed record. 275 of RTLM’s 389 days on air have left nothing at all. If you hold a cassette, a recording or a transcript, check its date: if the day is dark here, yours may be the only copy.
If you have a recording or transcript
Write to us with what you have: the date if you know it, how it was recorded, and where it has been since. Please don’t send files yet. We will arrange a safe copy and tell you exactly what we would do with it; nothing is published without your agreement.
nc@rwandaradioarchive.orgIf you hold an archive
The list of days is open: every date RTLM was on air and whether anything of it survives. Tell us which dates your holdings cover, and we will match them against the tribunal’s transcript record, page by page.
Download the list of daysIf something here is wrong
Every date, placement and figure on this page traces back to a source. If one is wrong, tell us. We will correct it and say what changed. Corrections are how a record like this earns trust.
Report an errorHow new material is checked: a recording joins the timeline only when it matches a surviving transcript, or when where it came from is documented from 1994 to now. Audio is never altered, and voices are never recreated.
Reading the grid
The grid shows when material survives, not when RTLM was on air. Most of what survives was recorded by monitors, and what they chose to record is not a sample of the schedule.
Transcript cover sheets give a date but never a clock time. The hour comes from the broadcasts themselves: announcers gave the studio time constantly, in all three languages. Where a tape's time-checks fall inside its stated duration, it is placed in those blocks. Where a tape has no usable time-check, the day is shaded but no block is claimed.
Where an audio recording can be placed by hour it is marked in its block; otherwise its day is outlined. 93 items are dated only to a month or not at all, and 4 carry dates outside the broadcast period; none of them appear here.
Sources
Transcripts: International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, via the University of Texas Libraries Human Rights Documentation Initiative; francegenocidetutsi.org. Audio: Genocide Archive of Rwanda.
Events: The Prosecutor v. Nahimana, Barayagwiza and Ngeze, ICTR-99-52-T, Judgement, 3 December 2003; Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch, 1999.