In Zimbabwe, a group of journalists on trial for telling a dreadful lie, are lionised and honoured in western Europe and the United States for their heroic defence of press freedom.

Over in east Africa, another group of journalists are also on trial for telling dreadful lies that may have contributed to a massacre in Rwanda, but their case hardly gets a mention in the western press, although their lawyer said they would not even be charged if they had committed their offence in the United States.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch last week named Geoff Nyarota, one of the Zimbabweans on trial, among the winners of a grant to writers who are targets of political persecution, while there is hardly a mention anywhere of the Rwanda trials. Why the apparent double standards when there are fundamental issues of press freedom in both cases?

Part of the answer is that international news flow is dominated by a few large western firms and much of their news decisions follow the foreign policy interests of the United States and Western Europe.

International human rights and press freedom groups quite rightly see the Zimbabwe case within the context of a pattern of attacks on the opposition, and restrictions and expulsions of journalists by President Robert Mugabe’s government. These actions, along with the forceful takeover of white-owned farms, have attracted economic sanctions and generated media interest.

Rwanda, on the other hand, is an African tragedy that the UN failed to prevent and which everyone would like to forget.

In the Zimbabwe case, Nyarota, the editor of the privately-owned Daily News, and reporter Lloyd Mudiwa face charges of publishing falsehoods and abusing journalistic privilege. Andrew Meldrum, a US citizen and Zimbabwe resident and correspondent for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, was acquitted of similar charges last week but now faces deportation.

The story stemmed from a claim by a man that his wife had been beheaded by supporters of the ruling ZANU-PF party in front of his two daughters. It was reported in the Daily News and the Guardian. But subsequent investigation by the Daily News and the Zimbabwe police determined that the story was false and the man had perpetrated the hoax in the hope of getting a ‘funeral’ grant from the Opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

The story was immediately retracted by the newspaper, which also published a front-page apology to ZANU-PF. But the journalists were arrested under a new Access to Information and Privacy Act introduced just before controversial elections in March that returned Mugabe to power.

So far, 13 Zimbabwean journalists have been charged under the Act, which requires licensing of journalists. The new media laws make it illegal to publish inaccurate information, whether or not a journalist knew it was false and those convicted can be subject to fines and imprisonment for up to two years.

Meldrum won his case because the court said he had not, in fact, published his story in Zimbabwe but the story had only come back to that country via the Internet and so the prosecution would not prove that the story was ‘published’ in Zimbabwe.

Minutes after he was acquitted of the charges, Meldrum was served with a deportation order and is still fighting attempts to expel him from the country. He has been a permanent resident in Zimbabwe since 1981 but Information Minister Jonathan Moyo, the man behind the new media laws, says he must go because he is “an undesirable inhabitant” publishing stories designed “to tarnish the image of the country”.

In the Rwanda case, the defendants are charged under the International Genocide Convention with incitement to genocide and crimes against humanity. The allegation is that their media provided “a drumbeat of persecution” for the Hutu militia which – in the space of just 100 days in 1994 – slaughtered more than one million Tutsis. The slaughter is widely regarded as the worst case of blood-letting since the end of the Second World War.

The case is being heard by an international war crimes tribunal in the Tanzanian city of Arusha. It is the first time since trials against agents of Nazi Germany that propaganda in the service of the state, or any form of extremism, has gone on trial in an international forum.

Two of the defendants, Professor Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, were instrumental in setting up a private radio station, while the third, Hassan Ngeze, a Muslim, edited a newspaper called Kangura (meaning ‘Awakening’).

The radio station and the newspaper are accused of using the most virulent propaganda language to demonise and dehumanise Tutsis and even directing the Hutu militia to places where Tutsis were hiding. Thus, the media and the journalists on trial played an active role in the extermination of the Tutsis.

This virtually ignored trial, in which the defence is yet to take the stand, involves some very important issues. Jon Silverman, the BBC’s legal affairs correspondent, identifies what he regards as the key issue, namely, where and how the line should be drawn between the kind of bellicose propaganda with which governments psych up their populations in a time of conflict, and encouragement to commit genocide which is a clear breach of international law.

Defending the actions of her client, Nahimana’s British lawyer, Diana Ellis, argues that Rwanda had been invaded in 1990 by a Tutsi-dominated force, the RPF [Rwanda Patriotic Front]. “And the government of a country which is at war uses a different kind of language to mobilise a defence against enemies attacking from outside.”

So, in her view the station did not cross the line from propaganda to incitement. As the case develops, it will be interesting to see how and where that line is drawn.

This is particularly relevant in light of US President George W Bush’s war on terror. According to some observers, the language used by the anti-Tutsi propagandists was no more intemperate than that directed against Muslims by some US radio and TV commentators after September 11. But the consequences are very different.

Indeed, Hassan Ngeze’s counsel, John Floyd, who is African-American, says the prosecutions would not have been brought in the US – and should not have been brought in Arusha: “What’s on trial here is free speech and the freedom of the press. In the United States, the First Amendment guarantees these rights, but this case is a dangerous encroachment on these hard-won liberties. We’re talking about a judgment which, potentially, will be used to justify censorship,” he told Silverman.

It will also be interesting to see how the Zimbabwe Courts treat the ‘native’ journalists as against the US-born Meldrum when their case gets to the Supreme Court, especially since Mugabe seems determined to punish journalists who do not practise “ethical behaviour”, whatever that is.

With so many Jamaicans resident in Zimbabwe, there should also be interest in whether Meldrum is deported for being “undesirable” after more than 20 years as a permanent resident. Indeed, there are also parallels with all those Muslim permanent residents in the US who now find that they are less desirable than they were on September 10.