Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

RWANDAN GENOCIDE, CHURCHES' ROLE
380
Only the eventual return of the refugees from Uganda and elsewhere enabled a reconstituted
Rwandan Tutsi population to be established. Up to 90 percent of the pregenocide
Tutsi population—by some accounts, numbering 1 million, by others, between five hundred
thousand to eight hundred thousand—were slaughtered. The biggest postgenocide
problem has been the issue of justice and reconciliation. The former is of crisis
proportions; too many Hutu were involved in the killings to bring to trial in traditional
or “classical” courts, as they are referred to in Rwanda. Although a symbolic handful of
senior officials have been indicted and convicted at the UN-sponsored International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the vast majority have been facing hearings in the
context of a local village assembly, a form of justice known as gacaca. More senior officials
who are not being tried by the ICTR are being tried in the national courts of Rwanda.
Rwandan Genocide, Churches’ Role. Particularly difficult and problematic has been
assessing the role of the churches—primarily but not exclusively Roman Catholic and
Seventh-Day Adventist—as complicit players in the 1994 Rwandan genocide (specifically,
the participation of priests, ministers, bishops, and nuns in the actual activity of
slaughter). Already in 1959, a “Hutu Manifesto” was published with the support of the
Roman Catholic Church, and in 1957 the “Party of Movement for the Emancipation of
the Hutu” (PARMEHUTU) was established under the guidance of the Church. That said,
it is imperative to appreciate that the Roman Catholic Missionary “White Fathers” from
Belgium came to Rwanda in the late 1880s, developed a theory of the so-called “Hamitic”
origin of the people (i.e., that the Tutsi were literally descendants of the son of Noah,
Ham, in the Hebrew Bible, and were thus of “superior,” “Egyptian” origin, rather than
from sub-Saharan Africa). The Church itself thus played a major role in fomenting identity
division between Hutu and Tutsi, and, in the process, became the dominant religious
voice in Rwanda with a religious leadership closely allied with governmental leadership
and the fostering of a racist divisive ideology. That some in its religious hierarchy were
intimately involved in the actual killings in 1994 and have been brought to trial by the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, including both priests and nuns, and convicted,
is significant in evaluating the role of political allegiance superior to that of religious
commitment. Although the Church itself under Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) did
affirm the Rwandan massacres as a genocide, it argued that those within who participated
did so without either Church support or sanction, and to date (2007) no official statement
comparable to that of “We Remember” with regard to Jews and the Holocaust has been
issued.
Rwandan Genocide, French Response. The French response to Rwanda’s genocide of
April–July 1994 was to a large degree conditioned by the long-standing friendly relationship
that had previously existed between French president François Mitterand
(1916–1996) and Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana (1937–1994). Through a
special, secret consultative body located within the French president’s administrative
domain, the so-called Africa Cell (Cellule Africaine), President Mitterand was able to keep
a close eye on the Francophone countries of Africa, providing economic and military
assistance when they required it and thus helping to ensure the predominance of the
French language (and thereby French influence) in these states. Habyarimana’s Rwanda
had long been one of those with close links to France, notwithstanding the fact that
Rwanda had been a Belgian, not a French, colony prior to independence in 1962. It was
through the Africa Cell, headed up by Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe (b. 1947), that