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B N W: Biafra Nigeria World News |
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Remembering Rwanda
THE world, this year has been remembering Rwanda. Precisely ten years ago, this tiny nation in the Great Lakes region was plunged into senseless orgy of bloodshed. Like a script straight out of hell's dungeon, the 'civilised' world watched with horror as the two main ethnic groups the Hutus and the Tutsis descended on each other with animal fury, killing, maiming and covering their entire landscape with a blanket of blood, death, pain and sorrow. A tragedy of apocalyptic proportion, official count put the dead at a little less than a million. Yet the madness had lasted a mere hundred days. The conflagration spread to neighbouring Burundi and Zaire, which equally suffered thousands of casualties.
Ten years after this horrendous tragedy, many people believe that it was an avoidable catastrophe. If only the international community was more proactive in responding to the crisis, the scale of destruction would have been minimised. Britain, the United States, France and Belgium and other countries saw the crisis as a peculiar African problem and refused to act. Louis Michael, Foreign Minister of Belgium captured the consequences of this monumental indifference when he said; "it will take eternity for the detestable and guilty indifference of the international community to be forgotten."
Individuals too are confessing their sins of omission, in failing to act when their intervention could have made all the difference. Former US President Bill Clinton has admitted that he failed morally for failing to intervene to halt the Rwandan genocide. Kofi Annan, current Secretary General, who at the time of the genocide was in charge of the UN Peace Keeping Mission, has said time and again that he bore personal responsibility for failing to act to stop the killings.
South African President Thabo Mbeki speaking on April 7 in Kigali, the Rwandan capital during the International Day of Reflection for Rwanda, which was declared by the United Nations, apologised for South Africa's indifference and failure to act to stop the genocide. He apologised over what he called the then apartheid regime inhuman act of asserting the precedence of profit over the lives of the Rwandan people, by supplying weapons of death to the Hutu death squads who masterminded the slaughter.
It is true that the killing of President Habyarimana in an aircraft attack, which so incensed the Hutu majority in power, precipitated the crisis that they began to kill Tutsi citizens. However this singular incident was the accumulation of years of mutual suspicions and rivalry between the two tribes. In fact the colonial power had sown the seeds of tribal discord earlier on in the history of this small nation. Tharcisse Gatwa, a Rwandan writes that racist propaganda was the result of a political policy which was elaborated and applied systematically from the 1920 onwards in the media, political thought and official documents.
Between 1925 and 1935 the colonial administration introduced social and political reforms that grouped the population according to ethnic origin. Discrimination was not excluded by postcolonial governments, but rather they elaborated on it with other techniques such as the so-called 'politique de l'equilibre ethnique et regionale (the policy of ethnic and regional balance) of the Habyarimana regime designed to carry out promotions in schools and employment. The state was thus set for an ethnic eruption at the least provocation.
But the tragedy was all the more compounded because Rwanda is supposed to be one of the few 'Christian nations' in Africa. Majority of the believers are Roman Catholics making up more than 70 per cent of the entire population. Yet in this land where people were immersed in the same waters of baptism and shared the same cup of communion, they so conveniently forgot the Christian injunction of loving one's enemies. How did the tribal blood as one African bishop opined become thicker than the waters of baptism?
Reflecting on the tragedy, Cardinal Bernadin Gantin of the Republic of Benin, says, "the sadness is all the greater if we think that precisely the Great Lakes region has shown the most plentiful fruits of evangelisation: 72 per cent of the population is Catholic, in Africa there had never been such success in such short time. The churches of the Great Lakes have many priests, well trained, with in-depth theology; bishops attentive to their flock, very dedicated sisters ... and now it would seem that the devil has declared war on this bountiful harvest."
It is easy to blame the devil as Cardinal Gantin has done, but some observers believe that the Rwandan tragedy is a result of unsuccessful evangelisation on the part of the church. They believe that an evangelisation that celebrates full churches without the fruits of true conversion is bound to come to naught. Cardinal Gantin himself admits that failure to evangelise tribalism was one of the causes of the Rwandan tragedy. He calls tribalism an African sickness which if let loose, can set fire to the whole of Africa. It is an evil that could break out anywhere in the continent.
In spite of the great advances that have been made in the spread of Christianity in most parts of Africa, tribalism remains a bane. Political leaders are quick to fan the embers of discord by playing the tribal card. Communal clashes in many parts of this country are often between people who share the same religious creed, yet are unable to overcome tribal animosity. Regrettably tribalism rears its ugly head in more ways than one in many Christian denominations in Nigeria. The struggle for leadership positions that goes on in some churches is often a case of insisting that a 'son of the soil' must occupy a particular ecclesiastical position. Is it not a matter of grave concern that top church personnel especially in the orthodox churches cannot be moved, changed or appointed without serious ethnic consideration.
Ethnicity is not a curse. The Catholic bishops of SECAM (Symposium of the Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar) in their 1997 meeting reflecting on the tragedies of the Great Lakes Region affirm that ethnicity indicates a gift of God which makes us different one from the other for our mutual enrichment. What is wrong and what must be rectified without delay, the bishops pointed out, is the perversion of this God-given gift into an instrument of contempt, rejection and exclusion of others.
It has been said often that many church leaders in Rwandan lacked the moral courage to confront the political decay that led to the genocide. This was the result of 'good relations' between the former dictator and most of these church leaders, which dated from before the disintegration and constituted a serious handicap in any of their attempts to mediate. To be able to speak truth to power and play their prophetic role, church leaders must desist from any unholy alliance with holders of political power.
In these climes, churches make it a big media event when top government functionaries worship with them. The Scriptures exhort us to pray for those in authority. But the way of righteousness and the promotion of the common good must also be pointed out to them. To accept donations from top government officials to promote the cause of evangelism is good, but if these monies are stolen funds, then it makes a mockery of the cause of the gospel.
Admittedly Rwanda rewrote its martyrology during the genocide. Though the international media feasted on the stereotypical image of Africa as a continent of woes using the Rwanda event as a benchmark, they failed to do justice to the countless acts of courage known and unknown, men and women, children, priests and religious and whole communities who by stepping over the narrow barriers of tribe bore heroic witness to man's innate goodness, and excellent testimony to the fact that all the Christian seed sown in that country did not fall on rocky ground.
The real heroes of the Rwanda genocide turned to be not the big men and women in the church, some of whom openly aligned with their tribes in the brutal massacre, but rather little children who in their innocence and spontaneity displayed remarkable courage in their witness to brotherly love. On April 29, 1997 twenty-two people, mostly girls, were killed in an attack on a Catholic girl's school in Muramba in the Gisenyi region, near the Zaire border. According to Rwandan radio news reports, a group of armed broke into the school ordering the children to divide up into ethnic groups, Hutus on one side, Tutsis on the other. T
he girls refused and the men opened fire killing 17 girls, wounding 14, and 9 of them very seriously. A Belgian missionary nun, Sister Margarita, Bosmans, aged 62, directress of another school nearby, who tried to stop the assassins, was also killed, and so were four other lay people. Sister Bosmans had been a missionary in Rwanda for 37 years. A similar incident happened in a Catholic minor seminary in Bururi where 38 boys were killed because they refused to separate into Hutus and Tutsis.
Numerous other testimonies of men and women, and clergy who risked their lives to save someone of the other tribe, Tutsis who hid Hutus in their home, people who preferred to die rather than tell where their neighbours were hiding remain the true hope and must count as the labour pains of the birth of a new Africa, a new humanism, a new civilisation of love.
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