6 - The Missionaries of Africa’s response to the genocide

Summary

In the 15 June 1998 issue of La Nouvelle Relève, a quasi-official Rwandan publication, thirty prominent people, including members of Parliament and cabinet ministers, suggested to the general chapter of the Missionaries of Africa, then meeting in Rome, that they should ‘momentarily withdraw from the country’. They might come back later, they added, ‘with staff who would have never been involved in the Rwandan tragedy’. Two weeks later, Privat Rutazibwa, a former Catholic priest from North Kivu who had joined the RPF in 1992 when it was still fighting the Habyarimana regime and who was now heading the Rwandan Information Agency, made the same claim in an article entitled ‘Missionnaires de l’évangile ou apôtres de la haine’ [Missionaries of the gospel or apostles of hatred]. The article took the form of an open letter to the heads of the male and female branches of ASUMA, Jan Lenssen, the regional superior of the Missionaries of Africa, and Frieda Schaubroeck, a Bernardine sister.

Since their return to Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi, the Missionaries of Africa, the congregation that had initiated the evangelisation of Rwanda in 1900 and had been a dominant force in the ecclesial, social and political life of the country ever since, had kept a relatively low profile. Why, then, this attack from people linked to the RPF government?

Two episodes, mentioned in Rutazibwa's article, give the reason. The first was the publication by ASUMA, on 7 April 1998, of a text entitled ‘Situation de notre pays et des communautés’ [Situation of our country and of the communities], which pledged solidarity for the ‘suffering of so many men, women and children victims, for about eight years, of a conflict over which they have no control’. For the signatories of the article in La Nouvelle Relève, this was nothing short of a provocation. On 7 April 1998, Rwanda celebrated the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the genocide which had claimed the lives of close to a million people, mostly of Tutsi origin. Speaking of eight years, as the religious leaders did in their memorandum, meant that all the trouble started in 1990 when the RPF invaded Rwanda to resolve the decade-long problem of Tutsi refugees in camps outside the country.