Rwanda horror lingers as Anglican Communion Seeks to Address Long-term Needs
Episcopal News Service. May 23, 1996 [96-1479]
(ENS) The meeting room in New York City was thousands of miles from the tortured land of Rwanda where an estimated one million people died two years ago in ethnic genocide, yet the pain in Bishop David Birney's voice brought that horror very close.
"To be in a country where a Christian would take up arms against a brother and sister and bludgeon them to death. . . ," he said, shaking his head. "When day after day for one month you look into the eyes of orphans, the eyes of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of widows -- who's going to take care of them?"
Birney, retired bishop of Idaho who most recently served as assistant bishop of Massachusetts, spent four weeks in February and March in Rwanda as the official representative of the archbishop of Canterbury. In the early 1970s, he served as a missionary to the region, and then was national coordinator of overseas ministries for the Episcopal Church and the presiding bishop's liaison to the Anglican provinces of Africa until 1982.
With Rob Shropshire, Africa officer with the Anglican Church of Canada's Primate's Fund for World Relief, Birey briefed church officials and representatives of the United Nations and other international agencies on the situation in Rwanda, at the Episcopal Church Center, May 7.
As a teacher at Bishop Tucker College in Uganda, "I taught a lot of their clergy who have been murdered," Birney said of the Rwandan church. "It was difficult to wrap my heart and my mind around what happened. I don't have any answers; I don't have many recommendations. The hatred, the anger, the grief there are so great."
The murderous divisions between Hutu and Tutsi tribes that were at the heart of the genocide, he said, were the creation of colonial powers who favored one group over the other. "These are people who share exactly the same language, exactly the same customs, they inter-married," he said. "These are people who belonged to each other -- it's destroyed, it's gone."
While there are no easy answers, he said, "if there is one thing that I believe with all my being must happen, it is that before any effort at reconciliation can be made, there has got to be a means of getting a system of justice in place."
Even more immediate for the Anglican Communion, he said, a tribunal should be established to investigate allegations that church leaders, including Anglican bishops, were involved in the planning and execution of the genocide. Until those charges are either put to rest or proven, the church in Rwanda is essentially unable to function, he said.
"I believe we must, must move ahead to indicate to the government there that the church is serious about getting its house in order," Birney said. "People there need to buy into it and say this is our making, this is our doing," agreed Shropshire. While the charges need to be assessed impartially, it is clear that the Anglican church, like many others, failed to act prophetically when the killing began. "No one bishop opened his mouth when the genocide was starting and being carried out," Birney said. "Not one cried out, 'Stop!'"
Birney has also recommended that the Anglican Communion support trauma teams from around the world who could in turn train local teams to help the population deal with its latent rage.
Visiting Rwanda's capital of Kigali is "quite surreal," said Shropshire. Most of the damage from the fighting has been repaired and fresh paint is much in evidence. "It's a lovely capital. Things look quite good," he said, until "you start scratching under the surface" and discover the wells of "barely concealed grief and animosity."
Shropshire said that the population of "quiet moderates, who at least don't want any more murders," seems to be getting "quieter and quieter" in the face of renewed extremism from both Hutus and Tutsis. "They are afraid to speak up and speak against it," he said.
Birney complained that international attention has moved on to other troubled regions when the needs in Rwanda continue to be great. "The world has just passed them by," he said. With discontent continuing to brew in refugee camps in neighboring Burundi, and similar ethnic tensions affecting that country as well, the danger of another eruption of violence is high. Without concerted and ongoing intervention, he said, "five years down the road, ten years down the road, it's going to blow again."
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