Genocide In Rwanda 

     The article is from the Journal of Religion in Africa. It explains the role that churches and religious leaders played in the genocide in Rwanda. Church involvement in the genocide can be explained in part because of the historic link between church and state and the acceptance of ethnic discrimination by church officials. Just as political officials chose genocide as a means of reasserting their authority in the face of challenges from a democracy movement and civil war. Struggles over power within Rwanda’s Christian churches led some church leaders to accept the genocide as a means of eliminating challenges to their own authority within the churches.

           

     In 1994, the Christian churches of Rwanda served as the country’s killing fields. Death squads would surround the churches and systematically slaughter the people within, tossing grenades through church windows, and firing into the crowds with rifles. The organizers of the death squads in many local communities included not only prominent lay church leaders, but sometimes priests, pastors, Catholic brothers, catechists, and other church employees.   The fact that death squads attended mass before going out to kill or that killers paused during the massacres to pray at the altar suggests that people felt their work was consistent with church teachings.

           

     National Church leaders had a close, mutually beneficial working relationship with national political officials, just as local pastors and priests often had a close relationship with local authorities. In ultimately supporting the genocide, church personnel understood the attack on Tutsi and their allies as a struggle in part to protect churches from attacks on their structures and an attempt to preserve their power.

           

     A month into the violence, after most of the major massacres were already finished, the Catholic bishops and leaders of Protestant churches did issue a joint call for the restoration of peace and security. The church treated the violence as a mere product of the war, accusing each side equally, without ever using the term genocide or even alluding to the systematic slaughter of Tutsi civilians.