Tribal Conflicts: Bloodletting Sweeps Rwanda

Western missionaries have fled the central African country of Rwanda, leaving behind the bloody mayhem meted out by Hutu soldiers and civilians against rival minority Tutsi tribesmen and political opponents in renewed intertribal violence.

Both Catholic and Protestant churches have been caught up in fighting, and many national Christian leaders and their followers have been murdered. Some 50 percent of Rwandans are Catholic, and 30 percent are Protestant. Only 10 percent of Rwanda’s estimated 8 million people are Tutsis.

Ethnic clashes flared after President Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, were killed in a rocket attack on their airplane near the capital, Kigali, on April 6. They were returning from talks in Tanzania on strategies to end ethnic bloodshed that has gripped the neighboring states for decades.

An estimated 100,000 people were killed in tribal warfare during the first two weeks after the assassination of the two heads of state. Hutu-dominated Presidential Guard soldiers were blamed for carrying out much of the carnage in Kigali.

Children killing children

Traumatized missionaries and expatriate church leaders reported horrifying stories of the situation they left behind. “We saw women with small children on their backs killing. We saw children killing children,” said evacuated Danish Seventh-day Adventist missionary Nils Rechter. “It is so difficult to understand how these kind people can suddenly become so evil.”

On April 7, 16 Rwandan Catholic priests were slaughtered in Kigali. According to a Rwandan Jesuit priest who identified himself as Father Emmanuel, the Presidential Guard stormed the Jesuit House in Kigali, rounding up and killing all Tutsis found in the compound. Speaking in Nairobi, a shaken Emmanuel described how one priest was asked three times if he was a Hutu or Tutsi. The priest repeatedly responded that he was a Christian, but even he, “very visibly a Hutu,” was not spared.

More than 1,000 Tutsis were killed while taking refuge at a church compound in the village of Mushu, 25 miles outside the capital. More than half of the 1,000-plus victims of the church-compound massacre at Mushu were children.

Throughout the city of Kigali, “They were killing people from house to house,” said Kenyan missionary Betty Kiru. “They seemed to know where to look for the people they wanted to kill. Some of our neighbors were killed as we watched through the windows.”

A Free Methodist team leaving from Kigali reported counting 70 bodies in one half-mile stretch of road alone as they left the city.

Rechter, business manager of the Adventist University of Central Africa at Ginsenyi, saw people beaten and stoned to death. He said 15 students were among several hundred Tutsis hacked and beaten to death on the university campus in the days immediately following the death of the president.

“When the truck went around campus to pick up the bodies, people were sitting on the back and having fun doing it,” recalled Rechter. Violence also spread to the Cyangugu region in south-west Rwanda near the borders of Zaire and Burundi.

Hasty departures

In the wake of the violence, virtually all foreign missions immediately uprooted expatriate workers, while local staff have been forced to hide, flee, or remain to deal with the situation.

Veteran Free Methodist missionary doctor C. Albert Snyder said he and his wife, Louise, left Cyangugu to join a convoy of 72 cars carrying foreigners to Bujambura, Burundi. There they met up with foreigners from a 151-car convoy that fled Kigali.

The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board evacuated ten adults and four children to Kenya, where they are “regrouping” until a decision is made about a return.

The evacuated missionaries appear to have mixed feelings about returning. “It will take a long time for anybody to want to go back to Rwanda,” said Rechter. Yet other missionaries are hoping to return as soon as possible.

“I think it is very important for [Rwandan] churches to look upon this as a temporary situation and not that they have been abandoned,” said Snyder. Despite the horror, Snyder asserted that the churches of Rwanda already are providing a model for overcoming ethnic barriers. “Obviously, some of that strife enters into any group, but in the true church, they stand for each other,” he said. “Despite the racial group, they will stand and defend and practically die for each other.”

By Richard Nyberg in Gaborone, Botswana, with reporting from Albert Mori in Nairobi, Kenya, and Kim A. Lawton in Washington D.C.; News Network International.

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