In 1998 and 1999 the Rwandan government and the UN recognised around 650,000 people in makeshift camps as internally displaced (IDPs) in the north-western prefectures of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi. More than four years after the issue of internal displacement was taken off the agenda in Rwanda, conditions in the villages inhabited by the resettled IDPs call for renewed attention to the question of whether internal displacement has ended with the implementation of durable solutions, as required by the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.

Ignoring UNHCR pleas for restraint, Burundi and Rwanda pressed ahead Monday with a joint operation to return thousands of Rwandan asylum seekers to their homeland. Authorities denied UNHCR and its NGO partners access to the transit centre from where the return operation was being conducted.

The trial of a former Rwandan minister suspected of playing a key role in the 1994 genocide of some 800,000 people started at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) last Thursday. Prosecutors accuse Andre Rwamakuba of drawing up lists of Tutsi people to be killed and allowing militiamen with him to kill women and disembowel those who were pregnant. The former doctor also allegedly walked around a hospital with an axe hanging from his belt, striking any ethnic Tutsis he found in wards or corridors.

Thousands of Rwandans are converging on an ill-equipped transit centre in northern Burundi after the authorities dismantled several border sites and ordered the closure of another transit centre. Songore transit centre has a capacity for 800 refugees and was already overcrowded with 1,000 residents before the transfers started. An additional 1,500 asylum seekers have already arrived at the site since Saturday, and many more are coming.

Thousands of Rwandans seeking asylum in Burundi, most of them women and children, must not be coerced to return home without having their asylum claims fairly examined, Human Rights Watch has said. Rwandan asylum seekers in Burundi, who began fleeing Rwanda in late March, numbered some 7,000 by early May. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) moved about 2,000 of them to two official sites to afford them better security and access to assistance.

The number of Rwandans returning home from the eastern forest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has risen dramatically since a feared militia said it, too, would repatriate after disarming, the United Nations refugee agency said. In the last week, some 230 Rwandans volunteered to go home from the DRC with assistance from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the wake of an announcement on 31 March from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) that it would disarm and return home peacefully.

Hundreds of Rwandan asylum seekers, who had fled to Burundi in fear of tribunals at home, may have been intimidated to return to Rwanda, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has reported. "UNHCR is not organising these departures and is often not present when the asylum seekers are leaving the sites," Ron Redmond, UNHCR spokesman, was quoted as saying on Friday in Geneva.

UNDP and UNIFEM have begun working together in Rwanda to open up access to ICTs for women and girls, and to empower them through the use of ICTs, to improve their social and economic rights and build a more secure economic
future for themselves and their families. As the first pilot project of the Digital Diaspora initiative, the Rwanda project is using the technical and market knowledge of Africans in the Diaspora to build the capacity of women’s business-oriented organisations to use ICTs to promote business linkages and influence policy-making, in order to situate women’s issues and concerns at the centre of efforts to reduce poverty.

New refugees have been fleeing the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to Rwanda since April causing crowding in Rwandan border centres, according the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which has begun transferring the existing refugees to a camp farther inland. Since last Friday UNHCR has moved 567 of the exiting 7,500 refugees at the border centres in the Rwandan provinces of Gisenyi and Cyangugu. The refugees have been there since fleeing eastern DRC in 2004.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) urged President George W. Bush in his meeting with Rwanda's President Paul Kagame on 15 April to press the Rwandan government to take concrete action to promote peace in the Congo. In a letter addressed to President Bush ICG has recommended three steps to marginalise the hardliners among the Rwandan Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) rebels operating in the eastern Congo and to encourage the return of the 8,000 to 10,000 FDLR combatants still based in the Congo.

Rwanda has condemned Burundi for moving a group of Rwandan Hutus who had crossed their common border, further from the frontier. Rwanda says the Hutus are fugitives from justice, and says the Burundian action amounts to giving them the status of asylum-seekers. Some 2,000 people have fled to Burundi recently, fearing unfair treatment in new village "gacaca" courts.

What exactly was the role of the Catholic Church in the Rwandan genocide? NDAHIRO TOM, a Rwandan human rights commissioner, paints a picture of deep historical and political complicity and calls for the Church to restore its credibility by contributing to the process of justice.

Why do they eat my people as they eat bread? (Psalm 14)

All over Rwandan hills, valleys and mountains, thousands of crosses mark mass graves of genocide victims of 1994. During the genocide, many Tutsis were massacred in or around places of worship, including Catholic churches – paradoxically, in a country which was the most Christianised in Africa, with Christians representing more than 80% of the population. Catholic bishops in Rwanda have sometimes claimed that all Rwandans believe in God. (Kinyamateka, No. 1614, January 2003, pg. 6) There are hundreds of churches and chapels everywhere and almost every day followers repeatedly recite the prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven”, pleading with the Father to deliver them from evil (Matthew 6:13). From where, then, did the malevolence at the root of the genocide come? How and by whom could it have been overcome? Part of the answer to these questions is the Church and its members.

According to Jean-Pierre Karegeye, a Jesuit priest, genocide is morally hideous, an evil expressed in forgetting God, and hence a new form of atheism. Karegeye asks several pertinent questions which merit consideration: “Christians killing other Christians? How could Rwandan Christians who manifested commitment to their faith have acted with such intense cruelty? How did ordinary people come to commit extraordinary evil…? Does the sin of genocide disturb the relationship between God and the perpetrators in official Catholic Church discourse? How can we explain the strange situation of priests involved in the crimes of genocide who are still running parishes in Western countries? Why are they protected by the Vatican against any legal proceedings?” He concludes: “The Church’s attitude towards genocide seems to suggest that the hierarchy of religious values is not usually in proportion to the hierarchy of moral standards.”

Generally, in Rwanda, the leadership of the Christian churches, especially that of the Catholic Church, played a central role in the creation and furtherance of racist ideology. They fostered a system which Europeans introduced and they encouraged. The building blocks of this ideology were numerous, but one can mention a few – first, the racist vision of Rwandan society that the missionaries and colonialists imposed by developing the thesis about which groups came first and last to populate the country (the Hamitic and Bantu myths); second, by rigidly controlling historical and anthropological research; third, by reconfiguring Rwandan society through the manipulation of ethnic identities (from their vague socio-political nature in the pre-colonial period, these identities gradually became racial). From the late 1950s, some concepts became distorted: thus democracy became numerical democracy or demographic.

The philosophy of ‘rubanda nyamwinshi’ a Kinyarwanda expression, which politically came to mean ‘the Hutu majority’, prevailed after the so-called social revolution of 1959 ignored the basic tenets of democracy. In my view, recurrent genocides in Rwanda since 1959 were meant to maintain the ‘Hutu majority’ in power, by killing the Tutsi. Distributive justice became equivalent to regional and ethnic quotas; and revolution came to mean legitimised genocide of the Tutsis.

Church authorities contributed to the spread of racist theories mainly through the schools and seminaries over which they exercised control. The elite who ruled the country after independence trained in these schools. According to Church historian Paul Rutayisire, the stereotypes used by the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government to dehumanise Tutsis, were also spread by some influential clergymen, bishops and priests, before and after the genocide. The Catholic Church and colonial powers worked together in organizing racist political groups like the Party for the Emancipation of the Hutu (Parmehutu).

Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Dévelopment (MRND) was the party which in the mid-1970s had introduced and institutionalised policies of racial discrimination which they termed “équilibre éthnique et régional” (ethnic and regional equilibrium, a quota system). The Church fully supported the quota system, but on 30 April 1990, five Catholic priests from Nyundo diocese broke the silence. In a letter to the Church’s bishops in Rwanda, they called the quota system ‘racist’ and urged that it was high time “the Church of Jesus Christ established in Rwanda proclaimed aloud and tirelessly” to denounce it, since it constituted “an aberration” within their Church. They maintained that the only sure justice in schools and employment was the one which only took account of individual capacities, regardless of people's origins, and that it was on this condition that the country could have citizens capable of leading it with competence and equity.

In conclusion, they said: “The Church should not be the vassal of the secular powers, but it should be free to speak with sincerity and courage when it proves necessary.” The authors of this letter were Fr. Augustin Ntagara, Fr. Callixte Kalisa, Fr. Aloys Nzaramba, Fr. Jean Baptiste Hategeka, and Fr. Fabien Rwakareke. All but the last two were killed during the genocide.

Within the Catholic Church, this discriminatory policy had long been in the seminaries. According to Fr. Jean Ndolimana, the enrolment of Tutsis in the Nyundo diocese was limited to 4%. On the school card, every seminarian had to indicate his father’s ethnic group. Instead of condemning those who were against the racist system, instead of playing an important role in institutionalising injustice by convincing their congregants to accept a morally reprehensible policy, Church leaders should have spoken out against racist discrimination. Regrettably the Church took the side of the political regimes, and thus was unable to exercise its prophetic role. It did not denounce political and social injustices, nor did it condemn the first mass killings, nor those which followed.

It is difficult to describe the position taken by the institutional Church just before and during the genocide. It is appropriate to take note of a declaration made by some “Christians” who met in London in June 1996: “The church is sick. The historical roots of this sickness lie in part with the “mother churches”. She is facing the most serious crisis in her history. The church has failed in her mission, and lost her credibility, particularly since the genocide. She needs to repent before God and Rwandan society, and seek healing from God.” This diagnosis offers a good summary of the situation. The Church lacks a sense of remorse and therefore cannot repent; hence its active involvement, in my view, is the last stage of genocide – denial.

Twenty-nine Rwandan Catholic priests, from Goma, Zaire, wrote a letter to the Pope in August 1994, demanding that the Rwandan government should allow all refugees home and then hold a referendum to determine the country’s political future. The authors of this letter had no good programme for the country. All they wanted was to hold in contempt the Pope’s acknowledgment of the genocide. As early as 15 May 1994, the Pope had declared that the massacres in Rwanda were indeed genocide.

The priests wrote to the Pope: “Everybody knows, except those who do not wish to know or understand it, that the massacres which took place in Rwanda are the result of the provocation of the Rwandese people by the RPF.” These priests, contaminated by the genocidal ideology, placed His Holiness the Pope in the category of “those who did not wish to know,” to cover up their own shortcomings and those of the government they served.

Accepting failure is a virtue. Even so, it is difficult for institutions like the Catholic Church that are known to command respect world wide – above all when such institutions, have been party to policies of racial discrimination and genocide. The Church decided to adopt silence and slander as defence mechanisms. The question is why the Vatican has accepted or tolerated such tendencies.

The call for remorse and repentance still seems unnecessary and problematical for the Catholic Church. In March 1996, Pope John Paul II told the Rwandan people, “The Church... cannot be held responsible for the guilt of its members that have acted against the evangelic law; they will be called to render account of their own actions. All Church members that have sinned during the genocide must have the courage to assume the consequences of their deeds they have done against God and fellow men.”

Had this been accepted and done, it would have helped to end a culture of impunity that has characterised Rwanda for more than thirty-five years. This could have been an established warning to anyone who harboured the archaic racist ideology. It could have acted as a deterrent to foreign mentors, warning that continuation of such politics contravenes the principle of natural justice and is liable to be punished by law. Thirdly, it offers the only premises on which durable reconciliation; rehabilitation and reconstruction could take place or be cemented.

I chose to write about the Catholic Church and the genocide in Rwanda because I would argue it was the only institution involved in all the stages of genocide. As a layperson, it is astounding to hear about the “love, truth and trust” that the Church has achieved in a country where genocide took more than a million lives in just a hundred days, and to see the institutional Church protecting, instead of punishing, or at least denouncing those among its leadership or in its membership who are accused of genocide.

There is no doubt that throughout the history of Rwanda, Church leaders have had ties with political power. The Church was also involved in the policy of ethnic division, which degenerated into ethnic hatred. In order to succeed in its mission of uniting people, the Church in Rwanda and elsewhere must examine its attitudes, practices, and policies that have too often encouraged ethnic divisions.

Church leadership should both be on the side of and be perceived to be on the side of justice and the victims of injustice rather than on the side of genocide perpetrators and deniers. The Church must remember what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his April 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question”.

As he wrote, one way in which Churches could fight political injustices was to question state injustices and call the state to responsibility; another was to help the victims of injustice, whether they were church members or not. To bring an end to the machinery of injustice, he said, the Church was obliged not only to help the victims who had fallen under the wheel, but also to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself.

Since justice is an unavoidable integral element of the process of reconciliation, the Church should be among those asking that the perpetrators of genocide be brought to justice. If the Church contributes to the process of justice, unity can be re-established among Rwandans, in general, and among Christians, in particular. It is the only way that the Church can restore its credibility, and thus be what it is called to be: a witness to faith, hope and love, to truth and justice. Only in this way will the Catholic Church in Rwanda be able to help save the people of Rwanda –all the people - from future suffering and bloodshed.

* Ndahiro Tom is a Commissioner of Human Rights in Rwanda. This article is a shortened version of a longer article sent to us by the author. Please write to [email][email protected] for a copy of the longer version.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

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Lessons from Rwanda:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/11/news/eddallaire.html

The people of Rwanda will mark the 11th anniversary of the 1994 genocide on 7 April with a national day of mourning. The deaths of more than a million people were a loss for Rwanda and for humanity. For genocide survivors this is a traumatic, but extremely important occasion, when they may publicly express the grief they still feel. For other Rwandese, and outsiders, it is an appropriate moment to demonstrate compassion, sorrow and regret. All at African Rights share in the sorrow of the commemoration. Through our work we have all learned of the deaths of countless men, women and children. In memory of the victims, we emphasize, once again, the need to prioritise justice and to offer support to genocide survivors.

The first trials before the gacaca courts of justice finally opened in Rwanda on 10 March. More than three years after their official launch, the courts, made up of locally-elected judges from a district or hill, read out their first verdicts against people suspected of participating in the genocide. The most notable fact was the summoning of several hundred local administrative leaders before the courts, reports the International Justice Tribune, a newsletter on international criminal justice.

The “News For Peace” publication in Rwanda is a result of a partnership between the National University of Rwanda, University For Peace and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Christopher Liundi, former head of UNESCO ’s Kigali Office was the original initiator of the “News For Peace” concept.

The “News For Peace” publication envisages a platform of identifying the positive grassroots initiatives that are improving peoples’ lives, developments within the lowest echelons of the rural setup and initiatives that are supporting the process of peace and reconciliation.

Within the Rwandan community, activities like cultural art and crafts, forms of agriculture and grassroots environmental protection activities, fisheries and initiatives providing support to the needy like street children, the sick and the homeless are going on unnoticed.

The paper consists of articles collected by the students of the School of Journalism and Communication. The same students plan the lay-out and design of the publication with support from The University For Peace.

“News For Peace” requests support in any form and opens its hands to public and private advertisers, individual or communal well-wishers, international organisations and institutions. Your support is needed to make this ambitious project a reality.

We extend sincere appreciation to the rector of the National University of Rwanda, and the Management of the School of Journalism and Communication for their outright support in the production process.

“News For Peace” extends emotional and unending thanks to the University for Peace for all that they have done to make this long-over-due initiative a reality.

Contact Fred Mwasa ([email protected]) for more information.

Reporters Without Borders protested against the disproportionality of the one-year suspended prison sentence imposed by a Kigali appeal court on Charles Kabonero, the editor of Rwanda's main independent weekly Umuseso, for "attacking the dignity of a high authority." The court also imposed a heavy fine which Kabonero will be hard-pressed to pay. "The obstinacy of the plaintiff, parliamentary deputy speaker Denis Polisi, has had derisory results inasmuch as the courts found Umuseso not guilty of libel or sowing division, but a very heavy sentence has been imposed on a charge lacking in substance, to say the least," the press freedom organization said.

With the resumption of the Gacaca trials on March 10 2005, African Rights has released the sixth report in the series on the history of the genocide in the 12 original pilot sectors. This series was formulated with the aim of providing a background against which the results of the trials can be measured and can exist as a shared point of reference for all residents. Already published during the earlier phases of gacaca are the reports on Gishamvu, Nyarugunga, Nkomero, Nyange and Kindama sectors.

This particular report looks at Gahini sector, which at the time of the genocide was in Rukara commune in Kibungo province. With the redrawing of the administrative boundaries, Gahini now lies in Rukara district in Umutara province. As with all other previous reports, this one is based on the collective testimonies of prisoners, survivors and local people who witnessed the unfolding of the genocide.

Among the key perpetrators implicated in this region is Jean-Baptiste Mpambara, at the time bourgmestre of Rukara. He is currently detained in Arusha. French and Kinyarwanda copies of this report will soon be available. Contact [email protected] for more information or a copy of the report.

MTN Rwanda's Tuvugane community payphone initiative, aimed at bringing mobile communication to rural communities, has proved to be even more successful than originally expected. According to the cellular operator, Tuvugane - which means 'we can all talk' - began with the rollout of some 600 payphones, and a year after the launch more than 1 600 mobile payphones are available in the country's rural regions. The Tuvugane initiative is part of MTN's drive to increase teledensity in rural areas throughout its operations and put telecommunications within the reach of even those who cannot afford handsets, says Yvonne Muthien, corporate affairs group executive at MTN.

At a two-day meeting that began on Tuesday, AU officials were considering three options for disarming an estimated 10 000 to 14 000 Rwandan rebels in the DRC. "Short of nothing is being done and there is no other option than to make a forceful disarmament of the" rebels, said AU's Peace and Security Commissioner Said Djinnit. "Africa is ready to provide troops for that forceful disarmament. But we don't want to intervene in isolation of all the existing efforts." Both DRC's President Joseph Kabila and Rwanda's President Paul Kagame have agreed to allow the African Union to coordinate any new operation involving African Union troops.

The International Justice Tribune reports that nearly three years after the official launch of the gacaca, the community courts which were created to prosecute the majority of Rwanda's genocide suspects, the first trials opened on 10 March. Out of the approximately 10,000 local courts, less than 800 have reached the trial stage so far. In January, Domitila Mukantangazwa, executive secretary of the national gacaca service, said that "over a million persons are expected to be tried by the gacaca courts".