c. 1996 Religion News Service
GOMA, Zaire _ After a few minutes of coaxing, the battered old Land Rover’s engine came to life, coughing and shaking like a terminally ill patient until it warmed and settled into a healthy rhythm.
The Rev. Victor Bourdeau drifted over to the rattling green hulk, ran his palm across the hood, then gently patted it.”If it would not have started that morning,”Bourdeau said with a sad smile,”we would have died along with the rest of them.” A few weeks before this June morning, Bourdeau, along with five fellow Trappists monks, a nun and seven small children, fled an attack on their monastery in a place called Mokoto north of Goma in eastern Zaire.
The perpetrators were thousands of armed civilians from the Hutu ethnic group. Their main target that day was not the Trappists _ although their lives were no doubt in danger _ but roughly 1,000 civilians from the rival Tutsi ethnic group who had sought refuge inside and around the monastery.
The slaughter that ensued after the monks fled _ several hundred Tutsi dead _ was small on the scale of ethnic killings in this region, still numb from the genocide of Rwanda, where at least 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus died between April and July 1994. But the killings in Goma nonetheless show the murderous power of ethnic cleansing and how it has spread to this part of eastern Zaire.
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World attention has strayed from Goma since the end of the Rwandan civil war in mid-1994. Images of frenzied killings and hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring across the Rwandan border into Zaire have been replaced by other bad news around the African continent. Today attention is on neighboring Burundi, which is predicted to explode in ethnic violence on the scale of Rwanda at any moment.
But the remains of the Rwandan conflict are still very much evident around this town, which sits on the shore of Lake Kivu. Most telling, of course, are the estimated 850,000 mostly Hutu refugees living in camps scattered around Goma. The Zairian government does not want them, and most do not feel comfortable returning to Rwanda, where they feel in danger of being killed or jailed by the now Tutsi-dominated government.
But the real madness and confusion lie just north of Goma in the district of Masisi where Mokoto is located. A conflict among half a dozen ethnic, political, military and paramilitary groups has killed thousands and displaced tens of thousands.
There are many victims in this confusion but if one group is more at a disadvantage than others it is the Tutsis.
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The Tutsis are not Bantu people like the other groups in the region, but are thought to come from north Africa, perhaps Ethiopia. They are primarily herdsmen and tend to be wealthier than the Hutus in the Goma area.
They are also far fewer in number than other groups in the conflict. Most of the Tutsi men of military age left for Rwanda in the past few years to fight for the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which succeeded in overthrowing the Hutu dominated government.
Thus the Tutsis, for the most part, are old men, women and children, according to church and relief officials. Such was the makeup of the group that took refuge on the grounds of the Mokoto monastery grounds in early 1996.”There were just a few young Tutsis, the rest were old men, women and many children,”said the Rev. Leopold Karanie, himself a Tutsi who had left the monastery for Goma a week before the attack took place.”There were very few among them who could fight back.” The Trappists say trouble began looming in January when small groups of Tutsis started camping on the grounds of the monastery. The monks had tried to arrange for an evacuation of the Tutsis but had only been able to make an agreement with a Goma businessman who insisted on each person paying $15 for a trip out of the area.
Most of the Tutsis did not have the money to leave. When, in early March, Hutus attacked and killed several Tutsis, the group moved closer to the monastery. The Hutus attacked again May 8, killing five Tutsis.
Earlier, the monks had asked for protection from the Zaire army, and Bourdeau said he was surprised when a detachment of about 15 soldiers arrived. But the soldiers, seeing the danger, filtered away over a few days, Bourdeau said.
The event that precipitated the attack on the monastery was caused by a bizarre group of Hunde extremists called the Maimai. The Maimai (it means both”water”and”nothing”in Kinyarwanda, a language spoken in Rwanda and eastern Zaire) call themselves a spiritual army, and their warriors are said to be”inoculated”from bullets and thus immune to death. Their stated goal is to push the Hutus and Tutsis back to Rwanda. But they also engage in thievery.
On the morning of May 12, the Maimai had their sights set on 300 or so cows the Tutsis were tending on the grounds of the monastery. After 500 Maimai made a pre-dawn raid and stole the entire herd, the Hutus _ who for months had been preparing an attack of their own on the monastery _ became enraged at losing the herd. They turned their anger on the Tutsis.”We were saying morning prayers and I didn’t really see what happened initially, but I could hear shooting and screaming,”said Bourdeau.”Then everyone came into the monastery, they were trying to hide, people were everywhere. The Hutus started pushing on the doors and the people inside were trying to hold it shut, but then they started shooting through the doors.” The Rev. Jacques Nkota, a Zairian monk, meanwhile was inside the monastery trying to get the people to leave. He hit the Tutsis with a stick, trying to goad them to run for the trees. Nkota knew they would die if they stayed in the building.
Panic ensued, and the monks said they could do no more. Bourdeau made for the Land Rover and found most of the other monks already inside. His sister, Bernadette, a nun, was cramming as many small children into the vehicle as could possibly fit.”What could we do at that point?”asked Bourdeau, a Frenchman, his eyes staring into the soot-black volcanic soil of the grounds of a temporary monastery in Goma, where the monks are staying until it is safe to return to their permanent home.”We were weeping, they were weeping and begging us to stay. It was so hard to leave those people behind.” The group managed to get away before the killing escalated to wholesale slaughter. As Bourdeau sped from the monastery, he passed a machete-wielding Hutu who waved at the group with a severed hand, presumably of a Tutsi victim.
It took Bourdeau nearly five hours on the nearly impassable roads to reach Goma. He went straight to the Zairian military and asked that soldiers be sent to the monastery. The commander refused, saying the situation was too dangerous. A number of international organizations also said they could do nothing.
A few days later an elderly Tutsi man found the monks in Goma. He had survived the attack by slipping off into the woods. Returning to the monastery after the Hutus left, the man told the monks he had found”hundreds”of bodies.”He told us of mounds of women scattered around the inside of the monastery,”said the Rev. James Balwanyi, a Kenyan who was in Goma during the attack.”He told us there were small children tugging on the bodies of their mothers.” In an odd twist of events, according to the old man, many of the Tutsis were saved by Maimai troops who saw what was happening from their camp on the far side of a small lake beside the monastery. “This old man told us the Maimai sent many boats across the lake and carried the people to safety. We don’t know how many managed to get away but some obviously did,”said Balwanyi.”We have been told that these people have been sent to Rwanda.
One mother with a day-old child lay in a small room just off the main entrance to the monastery. The old man told the monks she stayed very still during the attack and the baby slept through the ordeal. Mother and child were spirited across the lake by the Maimai.
Standing in the warm morning sunshine in Goma, the Trappists try hard to shake the events at Mokoto. They brighten for a moment for photos, standing around the old Land Rover, kicking the tires and slapping the hood. But soon they fall back into gloom as they drift back into the monastery.”Those people trusted us so,”said Balwanyi, twisting his hands, and gazing off into the distance.”They came to us for protection. They came to us like a child comes to its parents.”
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