BY CLAUDE RICHLI
On the evening of
April 6, 1994, a mortar rocket took down the plane of Rwandan president Juvénal
Habyarimana
and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira as it descended into Kigali, killing all on board. Immediately following these events, the country was precipitated into a murderous rampage. Throughout the course of 100 days nearly 1
million people
were killed, mostly Tutsis as if they were responsible, in what became known as “the Tutsi genocide.”
Adventist
Review
marketing director Claude Richli recently
visited Rwanda to find out how the country and the church are doing 20
years later. You can read his article in the April issue of
Adventist World. In the days leading up to April 6, Richli will
post additional articles on the
Adventist Review Web site to mark the 20-year anniversary of this dark chapter in our
church’s history.
Rwanda is one of the most thoroughly Christianized countries
in Africa. At the time of the genocide, almost three quarters of the population
claimed to be Catholic. Adventists were already well represented in this
country of almost 8 million inhabitants. According to Ron Vyhmeister, a
Seventh-day Adventist who did consulting work for the government at that time and
who saw the data from the national census that had been conducted in 1990,
there already were close to 2 million Adventists!
1
So, how can it be that in a country that is home to so many
Christians (including Seventh-day Adventists), rape and massacres on an almost
unimaginable scale could be perpetrated with such cruelty?
Rwanda is a former Belgian colony, and the seeds of the
genocide were planted by the colonial masters. Starting in the 1930s, the
Belgians actively favored the Tutsis at the expense of the Hutus, even
though the Tutsis represented only about 10 percent of the population. They introduced
large-scale modernization projects in education, health, public works, and
agricultural supervision, disenfranchising the Hutus and subjecting them to forced
labor. Grazing areas that were traditionally under the control of Hutus were
seized with minimal compensation.
2 The Belgians also introduced a system of identity cards, labeling each
individual a Hutu, Tutsi, Twa, or Naturalized. Tutsis were also given
privileged treatment in the mission schools. Everything contributed to the
development of a spirit of jealousy and animosity between the two tribes.
In 1959, sensing that independence movements among Tutsis
were afoot, the Belgians and the Catholic missionaries reverted their policies
and started favoring Hutus. The archbishop of Kabgayi, a Swiss Catholic
missionary by the name of André Perraudin, wrote a pastoral letter that gave moral
support to the Hutu demands, which was used to justify the first massacres
against the Tutsis in that area in the same year. In 1960, Belgians replaced
most Tutsi chiefs with Hutus. In 1962 came independence, and Rwanda became a
Hutu republic. The Tutsis were purged from the country and sought refuge in the
neighboring countries, where they organized for guerrilla warfare against the
Hutu regime in Rwanda. This kept the whole region unsettled for decades.
Sometime in the early 1990s, radical Hutus decided to pursue the “final
solution” of eliminating all the Tutsis in one final blow. Machetes were
imported by the hundreds of thousands to arm young militias, the Interhamwe. At
about the same time,
Radio Television
Libre des Mille Collines
(the Free
Radio and Television of the Thousand Hills
), a radio station that had created
a populist format made up of Congolese pop music, call-in programs, and racist
jokes, began broadcasting programs actively inciting hatred and retribution. In
the early days of April 1994, the calls went out on FM 106 to “kill all the
cockroaches.” This played a major role in unleashing the violence that had been
carefully nurtured for the better part of the century. All this propaganda
systematically sapped the moral ground on which Christians stood. Their
resentment had been nurtured for decades. On April 6, when the news went out
that the president had been murdered, the country was primed to explode in a
spasm of tribal rage. Most Christians (but not all) forgot they were
Christians. Neighbors turned against neighbors; gentle people turned into “savage
beasts.”
The Adventist Church was not spared. Three thousand people
were brutally murdered on the compound of the Adventist hospital in Mugonero.
The president of the mission, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, and his son Gérard,
medical director for the hospital, had encouraged people to seek refuge at the
hospital. Once they were there, they called Hutu militias to come in and “clean
up the country.” That was on April 16, 1994.
3
sidebar contentBeginning in 1991, the Adventist University of Central Africa
(AUCA) in Mudende began to feel the impact of the rising tension. It was
located in the country’s western region, in a strategic corridor between the
Democratic Republic of the Congo and the center of the country. According to
Abel Sebahashyi, who was on the staff and is now the vice chancellor of the
university, the first massacres around the campus started in 1991. The
university had to close temporarily. It then reopened, had to close again, and
reopened, until the paroxysm of violence came on the night of April 6, 1994, a
few hours after the presidential plane had been shot down, when thousands of
people sought refuge on the campus. Within three days, more than 1,000 unarmed
people were killed with machetes in the science auditorium. The Adventist missionaries
had to flee in tears with a Belgian armed convoy. It was the end of an era for
the church, and a turning point in the country’s history. It was never to be
the same again.
To read the main story in Adventist World, click here.
