c. 1996 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY (RNS)-The Rev. Modeste Mungwarareba says that when confronted with issues of justice in Rwanda, the Roman Catholic Church prefers darkness to light.

Notwithstanding Pope John Paul II’s recent admonition that priests and nuns who collaborated in the 1994 genocide should admit their sins and face legal accountability, Mungwarareba, a Catholic Tutsi from the southern village of Butare, says the church in Rwanda and the Vatican show no signs of forcing clergy to be judged at the altar of the legal system.”Some clergy were responsible for killing people, and it is known and proven that some were aware of what was happening,”said the 44-year-old priest, who hid for nine days from Hutu troops in a Butare church when the fighting erupted in April 1994. He survived on eucharistic wafers and water from the sacristy, then found refuge in a convent for two months.”A lot of gestures and words showed that some priests had no compassion for the ones who were killed,”said Mungwarareba, who was in Rome for a meeting on missionary work.”For me, justice is light. It is better to shine light on the situation.” But in Africa’s most Catholic country, neither the church in Rwanda nor the Vatican has taken concrete measures to identify suspects or conduct an international investigation of its members’ behavior in an attempt to clear the air.

Monsignor Ivan Marin-Lopez, who recently visited Rwanda on behalf of the Vatican, said flatly,”That is not our task but that of the international community.” The pope has stated that only individuals, not the church, can be held responsible for the sins that were committed.

But with the U.N. international war crimes tribunal set to begin trials in July of the first 10 indicted Rwandans, none of them clergy, the church’s role in Rwanda is coming under increasing criticism on several fronts.

It is accused of seeking the release of several priests in custody for alleged crimes, defending clergy suspected of crimes and having helped priests flee the war without attention to questions of culpability.

While questions have been raised about the church’s handling of legal affairs, no one has disputed reports that it and its flock were a principal target of the violence, in which 500,000 to 1 million people, mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were killed.

Hundreds of priests and nuns were murdered for trying to hide thousands of innocent people. Hutu and Tutsi forces frequently attacked churches, which were easily vanquished in the campaign of mass slaughter.

What’s more, the number of priests and nuns suspected of complicity is but a tiny fraction of the thousands of Hutu army troops and Tutsi rebels who engaged in civil warfare.”Churches were a convenient target,”said Rakiya Omaar, co-director of African Rights, a London-based human rights group that has published several reports on the war.”The killers knew where to find people. A lot of priests and others were murdered.” But Omaar is one of the church’s leading critics for its refusal to identify priests or nuns suspected of having collaborated in the genocide. African Rights says it has witnesses who can identify 28 priests and four nuns who collaborated in the atrocities.

(BEGIN FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)”The very fact that many of the letters from the Catholic bishops have called on the (Rwanda) government to release five or six priests or nuns who have been arrested on evidence seems to me a coverup,”she said.

Some observers have accused the church of negligence for not seeking to determine whether certain priests had played a role in the genocide before helping those clergy to flee Rwanda.

They cite the case of the Rev. Wenceslas Munyeshyaka of Kigali, among others, who was evacuated to France in September 1994 and arrested 10 months later on charges of complicity and torture. While the church helped Munyeshyaka escape to France before he was accused of crimes, many French priests and several bishops have actively worked on his behalf since the accusations were made, calling them baseless.”When he arrived in France no inquiry had been done,”said William Bourdon, a French lawyer representing victims of the genocide.”There was no report against him at the time. I think at best the church was careless because if you know someone who fled Rwanda during the genocide you should have been cautious, especially with priests.” A French appeals court recently dismissed an inquiry into charges against Munyeshyaka, saying the courts were not capable of investigating crimes that occurred in Rwanda.

But Bourdon said he will seek criminal charges against the priest based on a new law Parliament is expected to approve that broadens the legal pursuit against suspected war criminals.

(END FIRST OPTIONAL TRIM)

The Catholic Church is not the only denomination under suspicion in connection with the atrocities. A number of Anglican church officials, including Anglican Archbishop Augustin Nshamihigo, have also been accused of involvement in the massacres. Nshamihigo is currently in exile in Nairobi, Kenya.

But the Catholic Church is by far the leading religious power in Rwanda, where 62 percent of the population is Catholic.

Aside from issues of judicial accountability, the Vatican has refused to acknowledge what many Rwandans say is obvious-that the church failed to ease strains among Hutu and Tutsi clergy who openly identified with the warring parties and that these divisions may have fueled the war.

In fact, since Catholicism arrived in Rwanda more than a century ago, the church has nearly always been divided between the Hutu and Tutsi camps. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Tutsis dominated church affairs. In the 1970s the power center shifted to the Hutus, and the church became closely aligned with President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu whose assassination in 1994 touched off the fighting.

The church was so close to the government that at one point the relationship caused visible consternation in Rome. As the pope was preparing to visit Rwanda in 1990, the Vatican ordered the archbishop of Rwanda, Monsignor Vincent Nsengiyumva, to quit his post in the governing National Revolutionary Movement for Development.”The ideology of the church was divided. Some of the church leaders walked with the politicians, so they became associated with power,”Mungwarareba said.”What is true is that most of the religious people were divided, and this is still true,”said the Rev. Guy Theunis, a Belgian priest who lived in Rwanda for 25 years and escaped to Brussels during the fighting.”In a country such as ours, there can be no unity in the country unless the church is unified.”(STORY CAN END HERE. BEGIN SECOND OPTIONAL TRIM TO END)

Marin-Lopez acknowledged that the church had been stained by the close ties between clergy and politicians, but he clearly preferred discussing a future filled with bright possibilities to the bleak past.”For me today the church is beginning to be trusted,”he said.”I saw great appreciation for the church, which is helping the poor by providing food and housing.” Asked whether any priests were guilty of criminal conduct, he said,”this is a very difficult question.”Echoing the pope’s comments that priests who committed crimes should step forward, he said,”we must ask that justice be done.” Carina Tertsakian, who has investigated the Rwanda massacre for the human rights group Amnesty International, said the church would improve its image in the affair if it were more open.”It’s very likely some clergy were involved but obviously not all,”she said.”There tends to be a campaign of vilification against the church. That’s why the tribunal has to get going, and governments and the church should cooperate.”

LJB END HEILBRONNER