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RWANDA TEN YEARS ON

SOMETIMES it is because churches are places of such beauty or history that silence is the only appropriate response. Sometimes … but not always!

I asked our guide if it would be appropriate to enter the unremarkable redbrick church. Going through the front door and walking down the aisles I noticed myself doing something very strange. I realised that I was practically tiptoeing – somehow feeling that I was on sacred space. It was also a walk to be made in total silence.

Nyarubue Church is no ordinary place. Not now. Set in a village and high in the hills of eastern Rwanda it was a place that thousands of people fled to in 1994. The reasoning was simple. As a church, surely it would provide a place of sanctuary for people fleeing genocide. In a country and at a time when neighbour was turning against neighbour it seemed to offer one of the few places of safety and security. It was not to be the case.

Over a short space of time the church and its environs became thronged with terrified people. It was at such a time that someone gave the word to the militias. What followed was an attack on the church in which over twenty-five thousand people were murdered. What was meant to be a sanctuary became a mass killing ground. Some of those who ought to have been protectors had in fact been the betrayers.

It is a brutal fact that during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda the machete was most often the weapon of choice. In the space of one hundred days approximately one million people were murdered in this country. Perpetrators did not come from afar. Murder, rape and maiming were committed by fellow citizens. It was quite literally a case of neighbour against neighbour. On occasion it was even family member against family member.

My reason for being in Rwanda was as part of a seven-person team from CMS Ireland.¹ The Anglican Bishop of Kibungo, in eastern Rwanda, had invited us to lead a residential training week for his clergy. Our task was to teach on subjects such as leadership, development and reconciliation. Everywhere we went, and in all the people we met, the scars of genocide were never far from the surface.

What prompts the citizens of a country of approximately eight million people to commit such acts of intense madness? Why was Rwanda propelled from being an obscure country to being a main news item in 1994? Rwanda was colonised during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Colonisers decided to use a well-tried tactic for maintaining power – the tactic of divide and rule. At that time Rwanda was largely made up from three tribes: Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. Encouraging inter-tribal jealousy, suspicion and insecurity was a way of distracting the population from the fact of colonial rule.

During the 1950s and early 1960s Rwanda eventually gained its independence. The success of ‘divide and rule’ as a means of maintaining power was not lost on those who came to political power. The ideology of tribal division became well developed and articulated by those in power. Two disturbing features ensured the success of such a tactic. One was a compliant media that seemed happy to broadcast messages of hate, suspicion and division on behalf of the government. The other was a compliant church. Church had become close to power. In the process, its hierarchy not only failed to criticise such unchristian propaganda but also, in some cases, even supported it.

It is always easier to preach a difficult message of peace and reconciliation to someone else in far away places. On my first Sunday I was guest preacher at a local Anglican Church. My sermon was on the story of the Good Samaritan. Jesus was explicit about what was needed to inherit eternal life – to love God more than anything else, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus was making the point that our neighbour is not only our friend. Our enemy is also our neighbour. By tending to the needs of his Jewish enemy the Good Samaritan was loving his neighbour.

I was nervous about preaching such a message. Here I was in a country that was not my own and I did not want to cause more harm than good. I was also concerned about preaching such a message among people who had suffered far more than I would ever understand.

The congregation warmly received the message. It was later that I discovered that in the church were those orphaned and widowed by the genocide. Also in that congregation were people who, by action or by silence, had committed such terrible acts. Both sides of the conflict were represented in the church. To talk about loving your neighbour as yourself, in the terms of The Good Samaritan, was not lost on these people. They would understand it only too well.

As a visitor I had no right to tell them who their enemy was. But, I could tell them I knew who my enemy was in Northern Ireland – my political opponent, a person I profoundly mistrust, someone from the ‘other’ community. Not only that, it would also include people who were part of organisations that had killed or maimed friends.

We don’t get to choose our ‘neighbour’. Jesus is frighteningly to the point and relevant. I realised afresh that my enemy is my neighbour – the one that Jesus commands me to love. If Christianity in my divided community is to have any integrity this is what must be lived out.

What is truly remarkable in a people to have suffered so much, so recently is their open commitment to peace and reconciliation. The message is preached energetically by both government and church. At the end of our visit I met with the Vice-Chairperson of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, who happens to be a committed Christian. He was unequivocal in saying that the message of reconciliation had to be preached clearly and unmistakably. All this from a man who’s father was murdered in tribal violence in 1963! I reflected on how tempting it is for the Church in Ireland to be so ‘careful’ in its talk about the most fundamental teaching of Jesus – loving our neighbour. So ‘careful’ in fact that the real impact of the teaching gets lost in our fearful diplomacy.

The message I saw the Church in Rwanda preach was also holistic. It was a message of the need for personal salvation. There was also an important emphasis on the need for development. This was a message of particular power and relevance in a country with few natural resources and much poverty. It was clear that the gospel message had to be about lifting up the poor. Running through the very sinews of the Church was also the message of reconciliation. The cost of such a message would not need to be explained in such a country.

It seems as though the Church in Rwanda has managed to weave together the threads of personal salvation, development and reconciliation. It is not a case of ‘either/or’. To preach one of these is not to diminish the importance of the other. This is a lesson for the church in Northern Ireland where the Christian community tends to polarise round one of these threads to the exclusion of the others. In so doing, there is the temptation to look askance at others with different emphases. The power of Christian witness in our own community is where we have a burning heart for people’s souls, for the poor, and for reconciliation in our divided community.

One reflection has taken time to come together in my own mind. In Rwanda there seems to be an agreed narrative about the awfulness of what happened during the genocide. No one tries to justify or excuse what happened. There is no appetite for calling it something other than what it was. This honesty is a vital part of what makes reconciliation possible. This seems to be absent in Northern Ireland. There is an attempt to ‘sanitise’, rewrite and justify the unjustifiable. Maiming and murder does not transform into something else with the passage of time. It may do so in the telling of the story, but not in reality. Airbrushing the story will impede rather than enable reconciliation.

The genocide of 1994 in Rwanda did not just come out of nowhere. It was not created in a vacuum. It was the result of hunger for power, a constant message of division and the absence of a critical voice either in the media or from the church. So why is Rwanda a remarkable place? Is it because of the unspeakable scale of the horror? Does the sheer volume of loss of life mark it out on its own? In one sense, yes. Yet, in another, it does not do justice to this county or these people! What is remarkable is the honesty and mercy with which this population is dealing with the legacy of its past. Their motivation is a desire for the horrors of the past not to be the story of the future.

1 The Church Missionary Society (Church of Ireland).

EARL STOREY is a former Church of Ireland Rector who now works with a Community Development Company. He is also running a peacebuilding project in Derry and Raphoe dioceses. Earl is Chair of Community Relations and Christians – an umbrella organisation for churches of all denominations in Derry/Londonderry.

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