Churches in the thick of Rwandan violence

Christian Century, Nov 8, 1995

When Hutu militia swept through Rwanda last year, killing an estimated 500,000 Tutsi civilians, churches were a particular target for the violence, charged African Rights, a Londonbased human rights group. Not only that, Hutu churchpeople--including clerics and nuns--sometimes actively participated in the killing of Tutsis, according to the report.

More Rwandans died in Catholic and Protestant church and parish buildings than anywhere else during the killing frenzy, which began in early April 1994 and lasted through june of that year, the report said. "Mass graves, rotting corpses, latrines with dead bodies, blood-stained altars, bullet-ridden doors and shattered windows bear testimony to the killers' determination to kill--and to kill the belief of the Rwandese people that the church can protect the innocent."

The 1,200-page African Rights report, "Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance," is an exhaustive examination of the Rwandan slaughter. It is based on research, including eyewitness accounts and interviews with survivors and accused killers, begun while the killings were going on. Its 19 chapters chronicle the grisly details o the massacre, torture and rape of men, women and children--most of them Tutsis--by Rwanda's Hutu majority.

Some of the report's most devastating accounts are in a 68-page chapter on the churches. "The killers did not merely kill people in churches," the report said. "They killed churchpeople--priests, nuns, seminarians and lay staff of the church. Many of Rwanda's finest priests and nuns died. In addition, the killers deliberately desecrated the churches, attacking the moral and spiritual fabric of the community. The aim was annihilation."

Even as the report spotlighted the victims, it also underscored what it called "the moral failure" of Catholic and Anglican church leaders, most of whom were Hutus. It also singled out the moral courage of priests, pastors and nuns who stood against the genocide. "They [church leaders] have failed to condemn what has happened, and they have neglected to offer solace and support to the victims," the report asserted. "On the contrary, many of the most senior churchmen, including the archbishops of both the Catholic and the Anglican churches, went out o their way to support the architects of genocide."

Church leaders could have played a role in preventing the genocide, the report maintained. "But they stayed silent. Such surrender in the face of evil was nothing less than an abandonment o pastoral duties and moral obligations in favor of the rewards of an intimate relationship with a [Hutu] government responsible for genocide." The churches in Rwanda "must answer for the active complicity of some of its priests, pastors and nuns in the genocide," the report insisted. It named many of those accused of participating in the killing, including four nuns.

Some of the accused have been ailed, while others remain suspect "Where was only a deafening silence from the bishops, followed by a plaintive defense of the [Hutul government position, those priests who were doing the work of killing were bolstered in their confidence by the knowledge that there would not be an outcry from their leaders," the report said. It also found, however, that some priests, pastors and nuns "redeemed the church" by hiding the hunted and vulnerable, tending the wounded, feeding the hungry and confronting the authorities.

"Above all, it has been the Rwandese priests and nuns who have been in the front line, their courage all the more remarkable in the face of the moral and physical cowardice of the most senior figures in the hierarchy of their churches," the report declared.