Mentions
- Post
"If it is the struggle for power that explains the motivation of those who crafted the genocide, then it is the combined fear of a return to servitude and of reprisals thereafter that energized the foot soldiers of the genocide. The irony is that—whether in the Church, in hospitals, or in human rights groups, as in fields and homes—the perpetrators of the genocide saw themselves as the true victims of an ongoing political drama, victims of yesterday who may yet be victims again. That moral certainty explains the easy transition from yesterday's victims to killers the morning after."
- Post
"The Church was the original ethnographer of Rwanda. It was the original author of the Hamitic hypothesis. The Church provided the lay personnel that permeated every local community and helped distinguish Hutu from Tutsi in every neighborhood: without the Church, there would have been no “racial" census in Rwanda. At the same time, the Church was the womb that nurtured the leadership of the insurgent Hutu movement. It provided the intellectual and organizational backup for this movement, from talent as ghostwriters to funding for the cooperative movement which oiled the tentacles that ran through Rwandan society like so many arteries through a body politic."
- Post
"As places of shelter turned into slaughterhouses, those pledged to heal or nurture life set about extinguishing it methodically and deliberately. That the professions most closely associated with valuing life—doctors and nurses, priests and teachers, human rights activists-got embroiled in taking it is probably the most troubling question of the Rwandan genocide."
- Post
"A Hutu teacher told a French journalist without any seeming compunction: "A lot of people got killed here. I myself killed some of the children. . . We had eighty kids in the first year. There are twenty-five left. All the others, we killed them or they have run away."
- Post
"A huge number of the most qualified and experienced doctors in the country, men as well as women-including surgeons, physicians, paediatricians, gynaecologists, anaesthetists, public health specialists and hospital administrators-participated in the murder of their own Tutsi colleagues, patients, the wounded and terrified refugees who had sought shelter in their hospitals, as well as their neighbours and strangers."
- Post
"In an open letter to His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, Rakiya Omaar, director of African Rights, listed the most shocking instances of clergy organizing massacres, and summed up participation of the Church in the genocide: "Christians who slay other Christians before the alter, bishops who remain silent in the fact of genocide and fail to protect their own clergy, priests who participate in the murder of their parishioners and nuns who hand people over to be killed cannot leave the Church indifferent."'
- Post
"The church was a direct participant in the genocide. Rather than a passive mirror reflecting tensions, the Church was more of an epicenter radiating tensions.
...priests were also divided between those who were targeted in the killings and those who led or facilitated the killings..."Everyone had to participate. To prove that you weren't RPF, you had to walk around with a club. Being a pastor was not an excuse."
In all, 105 priests and 120 nuns, "at least a quarter of the clergy," are believed to have been killed. But priests were not only among those killed, they were also among the killers. Investigators with the UN Center for Human Rights claimed "strong evidence" that "about a dozen priests actually killed." Others were accused of "supervising gangs of young killers."
...the figures were similar for the Protestant churches."
- Post
“Without massacres by machete-wielding civilian mobs, in the hundreds and thousands, there would have been no genocide. Just as the killing in Rwanda was not done by shadowy death squads but by mobs of ordinary people guided by armed militia and trained infantrymen, the killing also did not happen in secluded but in public places. Most often, the killings happened in places of worship.” - When Victims Become Killers, pp 225