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Rwanda: The preventable genocide

Walter Unger

How could genocide be possible in the most Christianized country in Africa – 65% Catholic, 15% Protestant? When the war in Rwanda ended in July 1994 with a Tutsi-led force capturing the Rwandan capital, Kigali, three-quarters of the registered Tutsi population had been killed – in only 110 days. In an original total population of seven-and-a-half million, the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. This was the most efficient mass killing (albeit low-tech, done largely by machete) since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The latest and possibly most controversial report on the Rwandan genocide (Globe & Mail, July 8) states that as many as 800,000 people were killed in that awful bloodbath. The Organization of African Unity report also says that the slaughter could have been prevented had France, the United States, the United Nations and Christian church leaders not ignored the warning signs.

How does the world community (particularly France, the US and the UN) justify the fact that it did nothing to stop the killing of April, May, June and early July 1994? This was a planned, systematic move by the majority Hutus to exterminate the minority Tutsis. Can any reasonable explanation be given for the world’s later failure to stop continued genocidal acts by the group called Hutu Power after the Hutu retreat from Rwanda? Operating out of refugee camp bases in Zaire (now Congo), where the UN and 100 humanitarian agencies were feeding and caring for them along with other Rwandan refugees, Hutu killers made countless incursions into Rwanda to continue the slaughter.

How do the Roman Catholic, Anglican and other Rwandan church leaders face their complicity in mass murder?

These are some of the harrowing issues Philip Gourevitch deals with in his award-winning book on the Rwandan genocide. The 355-page tome by Gourevitch (a staff writer at the New Yorker) is clumsily entitled We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).

The book is anything but clumsily written. It looks at the genocide and its aftermath through the eyes of survivors. It tells the numbing story of unmitigated passion for power and maniacal bloodlust, and argues that most of the killings could have been prevented through timely international intervention and a prophetic stance by the church.

“God no longer wants you”

The title of Gourevitch’s book is an excerpt from a letter written by seven Adventist Tutsi pastors who were among the 2000 Tutsis slaughtered by Hutus on April 16, 1994 in the Mugonero Adventist church and hospital complex. The Tutsis had gathered in the church complex for protection but were told that death was imminent. The letter was sent to the Adventist head pastor and church president, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, on April 15 pleading for help. Ntakirutimana’s response, according to one of the survivors of the massacre, was, “You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.”

Three months after the massacre at Mugonero, Pastor Ntakirutimana fled with his wife to Zaire, then to Zambia, and from there to Laredo, Texas. It took until fall 1997 for the FBI to arrest the pastor; the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda had issued an indictment against him, charging him with three counts of genocide and three counts of crimes against humanity.

Many priests and church leaders repudiated the violence and gave their lives to protect their flocks. But for far too many, fear overwhelmed Christian love, and they, too, resorted to violence.

Gourevitch gives several other examples of priests aiding and abetting the Hutu violence. Some of these clerics have been arrested and charged with crimes of genocide. For example, Father Wenceslas stood charged, among other things, with providing killers with lists of Tutsi refugees at his church, flushing refugees out of hiding to be killed, and attending massacres without interfering.

The Bishop of Misage, although not as blatantly implicated as Wenceslas, was often described as a Hutu Power sympathizer. He had been publicly accused of barring Tutsis from places of refuge, criticizing fellow members of the clergy who helped “cockroaches”, and asking a Vatican emissary who visited Rwanda in June 1994 to tell the Pope “to find a place for Tutsi priests because the Rwandan people do not want them anymore”. An official at the Ministry of Justice in Kigale affirmed that a strong case could be made for arresting Misago, but added that “the Vatican is too strong, and too unapologetic for us to go taking on bishops. Haven’t you heard of infallibility?”

Myths and misconceptions

The Hamitic myth that, according to Genesis 9, Ham was the original black man is alive and well in Rwanda. The myth is one of the essential ideas by which Hutus and Tutsis understand who they are in this world.

To this myth has been added the theory that Tutsis originally came from Ethiopia and are really Caucasian, descendants of King David, and therefore far superior to the Negroid Hutus. And, although a minority in Rwanda, Tutsis have traditionally received preferential treatment in education and job placement and have held the reigns of power over the Hutus.

In November 1992, Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera delivered a famous speech, calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia. In April 1994, the Nyabarongo River, winding through Rwanda on its way to Ethiopia, was choked with dead Tutsis; tens of thousands of bodies washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria.

Gourevitch makes it crystal clear that what took place in Rwanda cannot be dismissed as simply another flare-up of historic tribal hostilities. This misconception, perpetuated by Hutus, was used to play down what was really happening. This was systematic, planned genocide – a deliberate policy of extermination fed by ethnic hatred and lust for power. It was even referred to by the Hutu Power leaders as “the final solution”. National radio was used to urge the slaughter of Tutsis, with the categorical message: “Kill or be killed.” Nevertheless, hawkish French diplomats and others around the world accepted the official position that the killing of Tutsis was the result of mass popular outrage following President Habyarimana’s assassination, blamed entirely on Tutsis. What the international community did not know was that since 1990 Hutu militiamen were being trained in the skillful use of machetes to mutilate and butcher people so that by 1994, at the proper, engineered moment, hundreds of thousands of Hutus could work as killers in regular shifts slaughtering Tutsis.

Looking truth in the face

After reading the July 2000 Organization of African Unity report, a French Foreign Ministry official stated, “We agree to look truth in the face and to draw lessons from this genocide.”

After years of investigation and research, the evidence clearly indicates that Rwanda was deserted by the United Nations and this can be credited almost entirely to the United States. Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN peacekeeping force, pled for 5000 well-supplied soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu Power – with this, he believed he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt. The US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, opposed the addition of troops and even opposed leaving a skeleton crew of 270 in Rwanda.

Gourevitch does recount some of the efforts made to acknowledge past wrongdoing. In December 1997, Albright apologized that the international community was not more active in the early stages of the atrocities in 1994 and called them for what they were – genocide. She also condemned the use of humanitarian aid “to sustain and support killers”.

On March 25, 1998, President Clinton became the first Western head of state to visit Rwanda since the genocide. He reiterated Albright’s apologies. He pointed out that we cannot change the past, but we can and must do everything in our power to help build the future.

Gourevitch observes that it is ironic that during the time of the Albright and Clinton visits, 350 Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus. Clinton’s pledge to “work as partners with Rwanda to end this violence” sounded deliberately vague. Gourevitch quotes a Rwandan government official who states that Rwanda could not really count on the international community, observing, “We don’t have oil, so it doesn’t matter that we have blood, or that we are human beings.”

The Anglican Church has issued an apology for its failure to stop the killing. Neither the Vatican nor France, complicit in the Hutu atrocities, has made a similar apology.

Is there hope?

As I ponder Gourevitch’s gut-wrenching report, I ask myself the question: What hope for reconciliation and rebuilding a moral society in Rwanda do I see? I believe hope lies beyond apologies for past inaction. It lies beyond the rhetoric of the 1948 UN declaration on the crime of genocide and how it ought to be prevented and/or punished. It lies beyond trust in the humanitarian impulse of the international community. Self-interest runs too deeply in individuals and corporate bodies.

It is clear that the roots of the Judeo-Christian worldview have been cut. Those roots promote the sacredness of life, the equality of all people and the duty to love and care for one another. The fruits of this view are respect for life and liberty and the pursuit of a just society based on moral law – qualities quickly receding in today’s world.

Hope lies in returning to these roots. And the people of God must be renewed as exemplars of righteousness, demonstrating how peace, justice and respect for human dignity are fleshed out.

Walter Unger is president of Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, B.C.

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Last modified September 18, 2000.

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