News - Justice Delayed - Anthony Underwood - Catholic World Report

Rwanda_________________________________________________________________________
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Justice Delayed

More than five years after a frightening series of ethnic massacres,
the tensions that tore apart an African nation are still unresolved

More than five years have passed since the day (April 6, 1994) when a suspicious plane crash killed Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana, touching off a shocking bloodbath that left at least 200,000 people dead, and sent two million others into exile. But to this day, there is no clear-cut explanation of how President Habyarimana died, nor of why his death caused such a paroxysm of violence.

In 1994 most Westerners learned—in most cases, for the first time—that for generations Rwanda and neighboring Burundi have been split by rivalry between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. The mass killings of 1994 were motivated by ethnic hatred, and organized along tribal lines. Hutu gangs slaughtered Tutsis, and (to a somewhat lesser extent, since they are a minority) Tutsis slaughtered Hutus. When French troops moved into the country in June 1994, to carry out a UN peacekeeping mandate, they stopped the wholesale slaughters. The West no longer had to read about the stupefying orgies of violence in which scores of people would die at a time: defenseless men, women, and children who were rounded up, then hacked to death with machetes.
It is true that life in Rwanda has returned to something approaching normalcy. Many of the Hutus who fled for their lives in 1994, crowding refugee camps in every country of Africa’s Great Lakes region, have now come back to their old homes. (Tutsis have been slower to return.) But ethnic violence continues to flare up sporadically. The killings come in twos and threes rather than in hundreds at a time, but it would certainly be an exaggeration to say that Rwanda is now a country at peace.

Aided by a UN tribunal, a new government in Rwanda has been painstakingly collecting evidence against the accused perpetrators of the 1994 massacres, and conducting war-crimes trials. According to the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, to date, the country’s courts have convicted over 1900 people, putting 300 to death for human-rights violations. Still, at least 130,000 people remain in prison awaiting trial on genocide charges—many of them having spent months behind bars without any opportunity to establish their innocence.

Meanwhile, the government has been unable to provide a coherent explanation for the whole ugly affair. In fact there is reason to suspect that the government that is supervising the genocide prosecution does not come to this business with clean hands. Rather than probing too deeply into the causes of the massacres, the government has looked for a convenient scapegoat, and found the Catholic Church.

In April 1999, Bishop Augustine Misago of Gikongoro was abruptly arrested and charged with complicity in the 1994 massacres, after President Pasteur Bizimungu delivered a speech in which he accused Church leaders of fomenting ethnic tensions. President Bizimungu followed up on his charges by announcing that, regardless of the outcome of his trial, Bishop Misago would not be allowed to return to his diocese.

The trial of Bishop Misago has proceeded slowly—as all trials do in Rwanda. The prosecution presented its case in the autumn of 1999, in a series of hearings that stretched from September through November. When the prosecution was finished, observers noted that neither the facts nor even the prosecution’s charges were clear. At times prosecutors suggested the Bishop Misago had actually planned a massacre; at other times they charged only that he had been slow to provide aid to the survivors. One Catholic observer summed up the case for the prosecution with a vivid (if mixed) metaphor, saying that it was an “avalanche of lies in a desert of facts.”

Even as the trial of Bishop Misago ground along, prosecutors brought new charges against Father Athanasius Seromba, who had left Rwanda after the massacres to take up new pastoral duties in Italy. At first, the eyewitness testimony against Father Seromba seemed very serious indeed. But soon it was balanced by new charges, brought against the Rwandan government by a political leader who had also been driven into exile.

Christopher Hakizabera was one of the first members of the Rwandan Patriot Front (FPR), a movement which gained power in Kigali after the 1994 massacres. After a dispute with other FPR leaders he fled the country, saying that he feared for his life. In a report to UN authorities, he said that as far back as 1991, FPR leaders had decided to attack the Hutu regime then in power in Kigali “on all fronts: military, political, media,” in order to establish tight new Tutsi control over the nation. Furthermore, Hakizabera continued, the FPR strategy included a propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church:

To be sure, Hakizabera had credibility problems of his own. As a disgruntled political exile, he certainly had an axe to grind. But his explanation of the situation in Rwanda was no more or less plausible than the theories put forward by the war-crimes prosecutors.

A Rwandan Bishop’s View

In September 1999, when the bishops of Rwanda made their ad limina visits to the Vatican, the trial of their brother Bishop Augustine Misago was in recess. But that trial—and the government policies surrounding it—were still at the forefront among the bishops’ priorities.

While he was in Rome, Bishop Frederic Rubwejanga of Kibungo, the vice president of the Rwandan Bishops’ Conference, spoke to the Fides news agency about Bishop Misago’s trial and its political implications.

How is the local Church reacting to the fact that a bishop is on trial?

Bishop Frederic Rubwejanga: The local Church cannot help but take it very seriously. For a bishop to be accused of complicity with the genocide is no small matter. But we are confident that if justice prevails neither the bishop nor the Church will be harmed in any way. Of course the people involved must show caution, courage, and competence. We are encouraging the people to pray for the good outcome of the trial: that the truth will triumph.

Why did it take so long, five years, for the authorities to accuse Bishop Misago?

Rubwejanga: The fact that five years have passed is not strange. On the contrary, it shows that in order to make accusations against someone in authority, such as a bishop, facts must be collected. But what is to be deplored is the sudden and spectacular manner in which Bishop Misago was arrested.

Why should someone accuse the Church of genocide?

Rubwejanga: The reasons are not at all clear; I cannot say that I know them. One reason may be that people tend to confuse the Church as a whole with her individual members. Crimes committed by individual Christians are blamed on the Church as institution. It has often been said that the Catholic Church, to which many Rwandans belong, played a part in the genocide. But this affirmation does not hold under careful examination. In this regard the Pope spoke words which should be heeded. He said that the Church cannot be held responsible for acts committed by some of her members and that these individuals must have the courage to admit their personal responsibility.

What has the Church done to encourage reconciliation in recent years?

Rubwejanga: First, she has always preached reconciliation, which is the heart of the Gospel message. But in recent years—particularly since the genocide—the Church has tried to preach unity to overcome division. The Church in Rwanda has taken advantage of preparations for the Great Jubilee 2000 (which providentially coincides with the centenary of first evangelization in Rwanda) as a time for overall renewal. Each diocese has held its own special synod, with one main objective: to eliminate the deeply rooted ethnocentrism.

What challenges face the Church today?

Rubwejanga: First of all, there is the lingering problem of ethnocentrism, exacerbated by the genocide. But poverty is also a challenge, aggravated by the catastrophe. The Church, too, lost people and structures: many of our pastoral workers, priests, religious, and lay people, were massacred along with the others. There is also the challenge of justice in a country which has shown scorn for human rights.

Anthony Underwood covers African affairs from his home base in South Africa.