Rwanda Presses On: Remembering the Genocide Twenty Years Later

Emmanuel Gatera is not the thinnest or shortest man in Rwanda, but he knows how to dance. Get him under a gazebo in a suit and tie with a dozen traditional Rwandan dancers on a spring day—and he gets moving!

People like him do not evoke notions of family or national tragedy, but everybody has a secret or two. Mr. Gatera was not in Rwanda during the genocide, but at least 100 of his relatives perished during the bloodbath. Radical propaganda incited Rwandan genocidaires to go to “work” and kill up to 1 million of their countrymen, whom they called “cockroaches,” from April to July 1994.

Awful Place

“As family, we, too, developed traumas about the genocide due the news we [heard and watched] every day,” shares Mr. Gatera and his daughter Grace. “Lots of Rwandans lost their faith in God after the genocide,” largely because so many church leaders were accomplices in the carnage, he adds. “Many people are fostering internal wounds.”

Specific churches still feel grim—churches with signs, scattered across Rwanda’s green hills and lush valleys. The signs briefly tell of the dark horrors of twenty years ago. One says 10,000 were killed in this church on this date. Some Rwandans were hiding in the churches. Others were lured there by priests and supposed friends.

One such place is Nyamata, Mr. Gatera’s least favorite place in Rwanda. Anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people were eradicated there in a Catholic cathedral. “It is an awful place,” recalls Mr. Gatera. “It was a gruesome desecration of the Lord’s name.”

Total Surrender

On the other hand, continues Mr. Gatera, “Many more found their faith as they realized that God was with them even if they went through their trials and tribulations…The church has [had] a big impact on Rwandans and has played a big role in healing and reconciliation.” His people want to “get over their deep wounds in order to live side by side like they had done before the genocide.”

“A typical Rwandan service is characterized by a total surrender to the Creator, who controls our lives, what we do, and our future,” explains Mr. Gatera. Most people feel “involved in the life of the church” and want to serve and honor God.

Double Standards

Jesse Mugero studied at Uganda Christian University in banana-tree-filled Mukono, Uganda. He is a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and he agrees that Rwanda’s churches are contributing toward reconciliation. But with all the churches that participated in the genocide, he fears that “double standards” remain today. He supports some political policies, but fears the current government is stifling—or even killing—anti-government voices. What stories, he wonders, have not been told: “The media plays a big role in creating awareness and ignorance about conflict.”

For the past ten years, Mark and Abigail Bartels have led the Uganda Studies Program at Uganda Christian University. Students from Christian colleges across America spend a semester together in Uganda, but they also travel to Rwanda for a week or so. Mrs. Bartels has helped lead the trips to Rwanda multiple times, and she echoes Mr. Mugero about Rwanda’s status quo—some of the government’s policies are positive, others are frightful.

Amazing Commitment

Mrs. Bartels senses “an overall vibe and tone to many places that is sort of reserved, mistrusting, scared, hurt, and closed.” But she also finds hope in the church’s work there, especially through a ministry called Christian Action for Reconciliation and Social Assistance, CARSA. The ministry was featured in the award-winning documentary As We Forgive, which tells about two Rwandan women forgiving their families’ murderers after the genocide.

Bartels thinks CARSA’s director Christophe Mbonyingabo is “an amazing man, with an amazing commitment to the long, local process of reconciliation in communities and individuals.” He also tries to reconcile “misperceptions of Westerners about Africans and Africans about Westerners,” and his ministry reaches out to genocide victims and agents, children, and rape victims, and helps churches reconnect with each other and their communities.

Forgiveness

Faustin Mugabe, of the Ugandan Daily Monitor newspaper, interviewed an ex-genocidaire in the beautiful city of Nyamata. Emmanuel Ndaisaba, now 40, is “one of the hundreds of thousands of former perpetrators of genocide released by the traditional Gacaca court,” which required public confessions, public forgiveness, and some relatively light sentencing. He shares the following:

“Altogether, I attacked 18 people—men, women and children. I am haunted most by the 14th person, because she did not die and is still alive. I hacked her all over and thought she had died. When I was leaving, I looked at her, and she was still alive. I left her. Today, Alloys Mururinda is married but she has one arm. The other arm was amputated. She was about to be married when the genocide started. We now live in neighboring villages…I am now one of the members of the Ukuri Kuganze association in Nyamata, which brings together genocide survivors and ex-prisoners who participated in the genocide. I still want to beg for Mururinda’s forgiveness.”

Such forgiveness is both possible and actual in many situations. World Vision, a major Christian aid organization in the United States and elsewhere, recently featured a miraculous and beautiful story of two married couples who used to hate each other because of the genocide. One man had helped killed the family of the other man’s wife. After he was freed from prison a few years ago, they all said God began working on their hearts. Today they all love each other and serve God in close, frequent ministry together.

Dance

The emerald mountains and glassy Lake Kivu surrounding Kibuye, on Rwanda’s western border, is one of the most beautiful sites in East Africa. But even this was no haven of rest in 1994. Two or three survivors told me part of their stories—revealing their machete scars as proof. Yet active churches stood nearby, and as King David danced for the Lord, so many Rwandans dance today.

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(Originally published by Yahoo! Voices.)

Four Books: Great Journeys through the Human Condition

Book One

These are abnormal book reviews. And Thomas a Kempis was an abnormal religious person.

In his 600-year-old best-seller, The Imitation of Christ, a Kempis seeks to show people how they can follow Christ completely and constantly. Anything less, for any amount of time, he explains, is not only wrong, but it also should be out of the question. Jesus lovingly and willingly gave His all for us, and He asks the same in return. This is certainly not a normal human philosophy.

Highlighting books is a two-edged sword. When I highlight, I feel guilty for reading slowly. But when I do not highlight, I feel guilty for not recalling the book better. Life is hard!

Anyway, without regret I underlined a lot in The Imitation. In fact, my only regret, or confession, about this book is that I turned down a chance to give it to an imprisoned Christian brother in the Middle East. I wanted to keep my underlining for my own future reference. He had not asked for it, and I did give him several other good books. But I should have given him this one, too.

But since I did not, I need to share it with everybody else! Of course, a Kempis is not on par with the Bible, but here are some lines I really appreciated:

“A humble peasant who serves God is better than the proud astronomer who knows how to chart the heavens’ stars but lacks all knowledge of himself.”

 “Be willing to suffer a little for Christ…there are many who suffer far worse things to achieve worldly advancement.”

“I am unable to offer You the praise and gratitude I ought, even for the least of Your benefits.”

Book Two

My most recent reading adventure ended with my second bout with the Russian novel Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I first read it in high school and hoped to reread it someday. At 505 pages, it is the shortest of three great Russian novels I have read, including Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Leo Tolstoy’s enormous War and Peace.

I am a slow reader, but worse, I can be lazy. I aged eleven months during Crime and Punishment. The exciting part is that I began it on a short trip to Oman with a friend—reading much in the hot hotel room where I could only sleep for one or two hours the second night—and I ended it in my new home in Montana, just miles from where I grew up in the gorgeous Crazy Mountains.

Perhaps my reading journey mimics that of the book’s protagonist: Raskolnikov. After his crime early in the tale, Raskolnikov starts seeing cracks in his worldview which had led him to murder. Someone whose own wrecked life God was redeeming, Sonia, patiently guided him toward truth and repentance.

In a remarkable passage, Sonia concludes reading part of John’s Gospel to Raskolnikov:

“‘That is all about the raising of Lazarus,’ she whispered severely and abruptly, and turning away she stood motionless, not daring to raise her eyes to him. She still trembled feverishly. The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book.”

Book Three

My eight days in Rwanda were wonderful and terrible. It was a gorgeous country, to be sure! But I visited nine years after the 1994 genocide—which killed 1 million Rwandans in 100 days.

The sight and smell of death do not die as easily or as quickly or as human beings. I visited mass graves and killing sites, including churches. In the worst case, hundreds of butchered corpses lay on tables in room after room for all to see. They were preserved with lime powder.

Much of this could have been prevented had Rwandans resolved their own problems years before the outbreak of war and genocide in April 1994. But the international community also had a fatal hand in the catastrophe. Germany and Belgium exacerbated ethnic divides decades earlier. China and France armed those who carried out the decimation. And America refused to call it genocide (and thus respond forcefully) until it was all over.

In particular, the United Nations had troops on the ground when the killing began. But they were largely forbidden from stopping the violence. Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallaire commanded this ill-fated U.N. force, and he shares his vivid story in Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda.

Book Four

You know a great book when it sways your thinking in specific situations five years after having read it. Charlotte Bronte has led me into, I hope, better living through her classic juxtaposition of honor, heroism, and humanity in Jane Eyre.

The first half of Jane’s life is anything but easy. She suffered abuse as an orphan, lost her groom-to-be under chaotic circumstances, and thereafter lost her job as well. But she overcomes, thanks to her philosophy that morals are worth maintaining—always:

“I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and was not mad, as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation. They are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor. Stringent are they, inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth, so I have always believed. And if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane, quite insane. Physically, I felt at the moment powerless as stubble, exposed to the draft and glow of a furnace. Mentally, I still possessed my soul, and with it, the certainty of ultimate safety.”