Complaint
This online article explored the position of Tutsis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) against the background of the activities of the M23 rebel group which claims to be defending Tutsis against persecution. A reader complained about a segment of the article which he considered to be historically inaccurate and, by implicitly endorsing a narrative used by Rwanda to justify illegal intervention in DR Congo, biased in a way which reflected a pattern on the BBC’s part of minimising M23 atrocities and omitting Congolese state and victim perspectives. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards of accuracy and impartiality.
Outcome
The relevant segment of the article said “Prior to colonisation, part of the territory that is now DR Congo was subject to the Rwandan monarchy, which is Tutsi. It had long been fighting expansionist wars, extending the kingdom to include more and more of East Africa. Tutsis, Hutus and other ethnic groups lived in the Rwandan kingdom and had done so since at least the 19th Century. But when colonial powers drew up arbitrary borders in Africa, the kingdom was split between present-day DR Congo and Rwanda”. Having considered a number of historical sources (including those cited by the complainant), the ECU accepted that this segment went beyond what the available evidence supports in suggesting that an area of the present-day DR Congo had been an established part of the kingdom of Rwanda. As this point was material to readers’ understanding of the matters dealt with in the article, the ECU upheld this aspect of the complaint in relation to accuracy. In relation to impartiality, however, the ECU noted that the article (like other BBC News Online items on the conflict) included information about the accusations of war crimes and human rights violations against M23 and the experiences of Congolese victims of the violence. In the ECU’s judgement it gave a duly impartial account of the situation.
Partly upheld
