7 - Church and state relations after the genocide

Summary

An important memory actor in post-genocide Rwanda was the Holy See, the government of the Catholic Church in Rome. Catholics like the members of the Commission for the Revival of Pastoral Activities in the diocese of Butare, the priests who met in May and November 1995 in Kigali or local bishops such as Wenceslas Kalibushi in Nyundo and Frédéric Rubwejanga in Kibungo played a significant role in the articulation of genocide memory in Rwanda, not to mention the bishops, pastors and laypeople of the other churches. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference and the papal representatives who, as we shall see, dictated the conduct of the bishops in matters of genocide memory were, however, more influential because of their visibility and their particular position on the political scene. This chapter will focus on the relations between church and state in the post-genocide period and their influence on the politics of memory in the country. In this respect, the Catholic Church, the oldest and most powerful church in Rwanda, was the one that counted most. The Rwandan government had less public interaction with the leadership of the Protestant churches.

The Roman factor

Giuseppe Bertello, the nuncio in office when the president's plane was shot down, had resisted the tendency, common to many Rwandan Catholics, of uncritically aligning himself with the Habyarimana government's ideological positions. As Jean Birara, a former governor of the Bank of Rwanda who fled to Belgium in April 1994, put it in an interview, ‘until 1990 Habyarimana was considered a saint or almost a saint. It was not until a new nuncio was appointed in Kigali that a new understanding of reality started to develop. The church was beginning to move.’ Bertello is credited with having encouraged Thaddée Nsengiyumva, the bishop of Kabgayi, to endorse a pastoral letter supporting the idea of a negotiation between the then-government and the RPF in December 1991 and for having established contacts with the RPF in Mulindi.

The contrast with Henryk Hoser – who arrived in Rwanda on 5 August 1994, less than a month after the end of the genocide, with the title of apostolic visitator – and with Julius Janusz – who took office as nuncio in August 1995 and remained in that position until his appointment as nuncio to Mozambique in September 1998 – could not be bigger.