Dehumanising rhetoric of state TV incites violence, says Zhanna Nemtsova – daughter of opposition leader murdered near the Kremlin in Moscow

Russian propaganda kills. It kills reason and common sense but it also kills human beings.

The tragic death of my father on 27 February was an act of political violence for which Russia’s state TV channels, among others, bear responsibility. For years, they stoked hatred towards him and other opposition figures, casting them as “national traitors”. Propaganda is not a crime, in and of itself: it is part of the furniture of the modern world.

What is a crime is to use propaganda to incite people to break the law, employ violence or wage war. It was for these crimes that, in post-war Germany, the allies convicted propagandists at Nuremberg, and the International Criminal Tribunal condemned the incitement to ethnic massacres in the lead up to the Rwandan genocide.

The founder and director of Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines, Ferdinand Nahimana, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 for stirring up hatred, as was the editor of the magazine Kangura, Hassan Ngeze.

What do Rwanda and Russia have in common? In recent years, our country has witnessed a similar state campaign of widespread brainwashing, pitting one social group against another.

Many of the articles printed by the Kremlin-controlled media ape the divisive rhetoric of Rwanda before the genocide. In the place of the Tutsis are liberals, opposition activists, the west and the “Kiev junta”, while the role of Hutus is occupied by Russia’s so-called patriots.