AFRICA
Genocide and the role of the Church in
Rwanda
Ndahiro Tom
What exactly was the role of the Catholic Church
in the Rwandan genocide? NDAHIRO TOM, a Rwandan human rights
commissioner, paints a picture of deep historical and political
complicity and calls for the Church to restore its credibility by
contributing to the process of justice.
Why do they eat my people as they eat bread? (Psalm 14)
All over Rwandan hills, valleys and mountains, thousands of crosses
mark mass graves of genocide victims of 1994. During the genocide,
many Tutsis were massacred in or around places of worship, including
Catholic churches – paradoxically, in a country which was the most
Christianised in Africa, with Christians representing more than 80% of
the population. Catholic bishops in Rwanda have sometimes claimed that
all Rwandans believe in God. (Kinyamateka, No. 1614, January 2003, pg.
6) There are hundreds of churches and chapels everywhere and almost
every day followers repeatedly recite the prayer, “Our Father who art
in heaven”, pleading with the Father to deliver them from evil (Matthew
6:13). From where, then, did the malevolence at the root of the
genocide come? How and by whom could it have been overcome? Part of
the answer to these questions is the Church and its members.
According to Jean-Pierre Karegeye, a Jesuit priest, genocide is
morally hideous, an evil expressed in forgetting God, and hence a new
form of atheism. Karegeye asks several pertinent questions which merit
consideration: “Christians killing other Christians? How could Rwandan
Christians who manifested commitment to their faith have acted with
such intense cruelty? How did ordinary people come to commit
extraordinary evil…? Does the sin of genocide disturb the relationship
between God and the perpetrators in official Catholic Church discourse?
How can we explain the strange situation of priests involved in the
crimes of genocide who are still running parishes in Western countries?
Why are they protected by the Vatican against any legal proceedings?”
He concludes: “The Church’s attitude towards genocide seems to suggest
that the hierarchy of religious values is not usually in proportion to
the hierarchy of moral standards.”
Generally, in Rwanda, the leadership of the Christian churches,
especially that of the Catholic Church, played a central role in the
creation and furtherance of racist ideology. They fostered a system
which Europeans introduced and they encouraged. The building blocks of
this ideology were numerous, but one can mention a few – first, the
racist vision of Rwandan society that the missionaries and
colonialists imposed by developing the thesis about which groups came
first and last to populate the country (the Hamitic and Bantu myths);
second, by rigidly controlling historical and anthropological research;
third, by reconfiguring Rwandan society through the manipulation of
ethnic identities (from their vague socio-political nature in the
pre-colonial period, these identities gradually became racial). From
the late 1950s, some concepts became distorted: thus democracy became
numerical democracy or demographic.
The philosophy of ‘rubanda nyamwinshi’ a Kinyarwanda expression, which
politically came to mean ‘the Hutu majority’, prevailed after the
so-called social revolution of 1959 ignored the basic tenets of
democracy. In my view, recurrent genocides in Rwanda since 1959 were
meant to maintain the ‘Hutu majority’ in power, by killing the Tutsi.
Distributive justice became equivalent to regional and ethnic quotas;
and revolution came to mean legitimised genocide of the Tutsis.
Church authorities contributed to the spread of racist theories mainly
through the schools and seminaries over which they exercised control.
The elite who ruled the country after independence trained in these
schools. According to Church historian Paul Rutayisire, the
stereotypes used by the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government to
dehumanise Tutsis, were also spread by some influential clergymen,
bishops and priests, before and after the genocide. The Catholic
Church and colonial powers worked together in organizing racist
political groups like the Party for the Emancipation of the Hutu (Parmehutu).
Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Dévelopment (MRND) was the
party which in the mid-1970s had introduced and institutionalised
policies of racial discrimination which they termed “équilibre
éthnique et régional” (ethnic and regional equilibrium, a quota
system). The Church fully supported the quota system, but on 30 April
1990, five Catholic priests from Nyundo diocese broke the silence. In
a letter to the Church’s bishops in Rwanda, they called the quota
system ‘racist’ and urged that it was high time “the Church of Jesus
Christ established in Rwanda proclaimed aloud and tirelessly” to
denounce it, since it constituted “an aberration” within their Church.
They maintained that the only sure justice in schools and employment
was the one which only took account of individual capacities,
regardless of people's origins, and that it was on this condition that
the country could have citizens capable of leading it with competence
and equity.
In conclusion, they said: “The Church should not be the vassal of the
secular powers, but it should be free to speak with sincerity and
courage when it proves necessary.” The authors of this letter were Fr.
Augustin Ntagara, Fr. Callixte Kalisa, Fr. Aloys Nzaramba, Fr. Jean
Baptiste Hategeka, and Fr. Fabien Rwakareke. All but the last two were
killed during the genocide.
Within the Catholic Church, this discriminatory policy had long been
in the seminaries. According to Fr. Jean Ndolimana, the enrolment of
Tutsis in the Nyundo diocese was limited to 4%. On the school card,
every seminarian had to indicate his father’s ethnic group. Instead of
condemning those who were against the racist system, instead of
playing an important role in institutionalising injustice by
convincing their congregants to accept a morally reprehensible policy,
Church leaders should have spoken out against racist discrimination.
Regrettably the Church took the side of the political regimes, and
thus was unable to exercise its prophetic role. It did not denounce
political and social injustices, nor did it condemn the first mass
killings, nor those which followed.
It is difficult to describe the position taken by the institutional
Church just before and during the genocide. It is appropriate to take
note of a declaration made by some “Christians” who met in London in
June 1996: “The church is sick. The historical roots of this sickness
lie in part with the “mother churches”. She is facing the most serious
crisis in her history. The church has failed in her mission, and lost
her credibility, particularly since the genocide. She needs to repent
before God and Rwandan society, and seek healing from God.” This
diagnosis offers a good summary of the situation. The Church lacks a
sense of remorse and therefore cannot repent; hence its active
involvement, in my view, is the last stage of genocide – denial.
Twenty-nine Rwandan Catholic priests, from Goma, Zaire, wrote a letter
to the Pope in August 1994, demanding that the Rwandan government
should allow all refugees home and then hold a referendum to determine
the country’s political future. The authors of this letter had no good
programme for the country. All they wanted was to hold in contempt the
Pope’s acknowledgment of the genocide. As early as 15 May 1994, the
Pope had declared that the massacres in Rwanda were indeed genocide.
The priests wrote to the Pope: “Everybody knows, except those who do
not wish to know or understand it, that the massacres which took place
in Rwanda are the result of the provocation of the Rwandese people by
the RPF.” These priests, contaminated by the genocidal ideology,
placed His Holiness the Pope in the category of “those who did not
wish to know,” to cover up their own shortcomings and those of the
government they served.
Accepting failure is a virtue. Even so, it is difficult for
institutions like the Catholic Church that are known to command
respect world wide – above all when such institutions, have been party
to policies of racial discrimination and genocide. The Church decided
to adopt silence and slander as defence mechanisms. The question is
why the Vatican has accepted or tolerated such tendencies.
The call for remorse and repentance still seems unnecessary and
problematical for the Catholic Church. In March 1996, Pope John Paul
II told the Rwandan people, “The Church... cannot be held responsible
for the guilt of its members that have acted against the evangelic law;
they will be called to render account of their own actions. All Church
members that have sinned during the genocide must have the courage to
assume the consequences of their deeds they have done against God and
fellow men.”
Had this been accepted and done, it would have helped to end a culture
of impunity that has characterised Rwanda for more than thirty-five
years. This could have been an established warning to anyone who
harboured the archaic racist ideology. It could have acted as a
deterrent to foreign mentors, warning that continuation of such
politics contravenes the principle of natural justice and is liable to
be punished by law. Thirdly, it offers the only premises on which
durable reconciliation; rehabilitation and reconstruction could take
place or be cemented.
I chose to write about the Catholic Church and the genocide in Rwanda
because I would argue it was the only institution involved in all the
stages of genocide. As a layperson, it is astounding to hear about the
“love, truth and trust” that the Church has achieved in a country
where genocide took more than a million lives in just a hundred days,
and to see the institutional Church protecting, instead of punishing,
or at least denouncing those among its leadership or in its membership
who are accused of genocide.
There is no doubt that throughout the history of Rwanda, Church
leaders have had ties with political power. The Church was also
involved in the policy of ethnic division, which degenerated into
ethnic hatred. In order to succeed in its mission of uniting people,
the Church in Rwanda and elsewhere must examine its attitudes,
practices, and policies that have too often encouraged ethnic
divisions.
Church leadership should both be on the side of and be perceived to be
on the side of justice and the victims of injustice rather than on the
side of genocide perpetrators and deniers. The Church must remember
what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his April 1933 essay, “The Church and
the Jewish Question”.
As he wrote, one way in which Churches could fight political
injustices was to question state injustices and call the state to
responsibility; another was to help the victims of injustice, whether
they were church members or not. To bring an end to the machinery of
injustice, he said, the Church was obliged not only to help the
victims who had fallen under the wheel, but also to fall into the
spokes of the wheel itself.
Since justice is an unavoidable integral element of the process of
reconciliation, the Church should be among those asking that the
perpetrators of genocide be brought to justice. If the Church
contributes to the process of justice, unity can be re-established
among Rwandans, in general, and among Christians, in particular. It is
the only way that the Church can restore its credibility, and thus be
what it is called to be: a witness to faith, hope and love, to truth
and justice. Only in this way will the Catholic Church in Rwanda be
able to help save the people of Rwanda –all the people - from future
suffering and bloodshed.
* Ndahiro Tom is a Commissioner of Human Rights in Rwanda. This
article is a shortened version of a longer article sent to us by the
author. Please write to tndahiro@rwanda1.com for a copy of the longer
version.
Rwanda