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The Rwanda Tragedy and the Churches

By Hugh McCullum

It’s now the five years since the mind-shattering tragedy of Rwanda when the world awoke one morning to witness on its tv screens one of the worst massacres in human history. No one, as yet knows the exact number of the dead, but the estimated figure is given as one million people. This was due to ethnic fighting between the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s. Only now, some five years later, are the real causes being clarified.

In his carefully researched book, The Angels Have Left Us, Hugh McCullum, who was a journalist in Rwanda, tries to uncover the causes and what he has discovered is not very pleasant.

*There are the arms dealers who sold weapons to all and sundry not caring how they were use. Then there is France. She comes in for lots of criticism

Already before 1990 the Rwandese military began stockpiling expensive light and heavy weapons purchased discreetly from Egypt and South Africa and paid for, equally discreetly, by the French, ever concerned to maintain their influence in franchophone Africa

*The United Nations also comes in for criticism. Some feel they would have intervened.  It is said that they would have intervened if the population had been European but that Africans were dispensable.

*Then there were the churches – Protestant and Catholic – (but especially the Catholic which is the largest Church in Rwanda). They come in for severe criticism because they received favors from the government and were not prepared to criticize the very government policies which led to the Rwanda massacre. Apart from that quite a number of religious actually joined in the massacres.

Most Rwandese Christians would agree that the extremely close ties of important church leaders to the Habyarimana regime, compromised their prophetic voice and undermined completely their moral authority.

But individual devout people come in for praise. They refused to join in the massacres and they themselves were massacred.

It cannot be underlined too strongly that there were many countless acts o heroism, even among some religious leaders, once they got over the shock of the murderous attacks on their once-sacred compounds. They hid and protected many thousands of people who might have been massacred, often at the price of their own lives, and of their families.

The revelations of this book forces us missionaries to ask difficult questions:

1. Does receiving privilege and status from the Government not tie our hands when it comes to speaking out on injustice by that same government?

2. Did our catechesis contain strong enough teaching on racism and tribalism?

3. Does it now tackle this problem effectively?

4. What should we do about this in the future?

McCullun concludes: if the Church of the Future can move beyond mere survival to its basic mission of preaching justice, peace and reconciliation – there is hope. I hope someone is listening.

The book, The Angels Have Left Us, is published by the World Council of Churches, WCC Publications and is available from the World Council of Churches, 150 route de Ferney, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland. (No. 66 in the Risk Book Series.)

“More than two- thirds of Rwanda’s Catholic priests were either dead or in exile. At the end of 1994, only two of the nine bishops were in the country. Three had been killed, two were ill and two in exile. The figures for protestant leaders are similar.”