The Irish Times August 8, 1994 --- ED O'LOUGHLIN

God is sleeping in the nightmare that is Rwanda

Murders of clergy and a history of the church losing touch with the common people mean that religion is now irrelevant

BEFORE April 6th, Rwanda was supposed to be about 60 per cent Catholic, 20 per cent Protestant, 20 per cent other. Now it is not much of anything.

Following the massacre of somewhere between 500,000 and one million people in a month, God appears to have been withdrawn from Rwanda and will not be reinstated until "normal life" returns. As it happens, Rwanda's god forsaken condition is neatly reflected in the current state of its organised religions. At least 80 Catholic clergy alone were killed in Rwanda's ethnic holocaust, hacked to death by Hutu militia at the Jesuit centre in Kigali, for example, or massacred by the Tutsi dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front, such as the Archbishop of Kigali, whose close contacts with the extremist Hutu government sealed his fate, along with two other bishops and 10 priests.

Once the killing began many of the Tutsi minority sought sanctuary in churches throughout Rwanda, only to be slaughtered there in quasi ritual fashion by their Hutu neighbours, many of them co religionists.

When cholera struck the Hutu refugees in Goma nearly three weeks ago, there were no last rites for the dying, and the dead were flung without ceremony or prayer into the mass grave.

This weekend, an Irish pilgrimage of sorts set out from Bujumbura in Burundi for refugee clinic run by the Medical Missionaries of Mary and Trocaire at Cyanika, near Gikongoro at the edge of the French "security zone". At its head was Dr Donal Murray, Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, whose mission from the Irish Episcopal Conference was to contact whatever was lost of the Catholic Church in Rwanda and offer what support he could.

At the hillside compound of the Bishop of Cyangugu, two men with Belgian assault rifles stood guard, on the lookout, in particular for the looting which has seen much of Cyangugu dismantled and sold across the border in Zaire. While the two bishops discussed the fate of Rwanda inside, together with Father Oliver Crilly of Strabane, Sister Philomena Sheerin of the Medical Missionaries of Mary and Mr Justin Kilcullen of Trocaire Cyanika's pastor cum gopher, Father Tom McDonald, sat in a jeep outside and wondered in a soft Antrim accent whether humanity was losing its humanity.

After two weeks of talking quietly with the refugees of Cynika, he has yet to hear a spontaneous expression of remorse for the atrocities permitted perhaps by these same people in the name of a Hutu Rwanda.

"They are very sad about their own tragedy all right, especially if anyone was belonging to them," he said slowly. "They'd balance what was done by saying that the Tutis killed Hutus, which of course is what they were told.

The bishop of Cyangugu, Monsignor Thadde Npihinyurwa, was more expansive but less reflective.

How has all this horror come about? It was the result of war, he explained at length, between two factions who had opposed each other for 40 years. But this was a political answer. As a bishop and a man of God, how could he account for the hatred the evil which had seen 59 many people massacred in a tiny country in the space of a month, surely a crime without precedent?

Yes, he agreed, it was without precedent. Some said half a million, some said less, some said one million. It would require a census to be sure.

From Cyangugu to Gikongro, the pilgrims were joined by Abbe Ladislaus Habimana, a Hutu priest who had fled from Kigali to avoid the fighting, he said, and not the advancing Rwandan patriotic front.

We drove for an hour and a half through dramatic mountains covered in virgin forest, emerging at last in to the highland village of Kigeme. This was a great Anglican centre in Rwanda, the abbe explained, with a school, a hospital and even a cathedral. The bishop had fled to Zaire, he added mournfully.

There was no armed guard on the Catholic bishop's house at Gikongoro, merely a couple of stately Sisters of Our Lady of Africa. The pilgrims deposited their offerings a box of communion wafers and some tissue paper. On the table in the small courtyard was a publication from an African bishops' conference on ways towards a lasting peace in Rwanda. It was prefaced by a quotation from Corinthians: "Now these three things abide: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love."

The Bishop of Gikongoro, Monsignor Augustin Misago, is one of three Catholic bishops left in Rwanda three others were murdered and three have fled. Of his 18 priests, 12 are dead, four have fled and two are still working in the diocese, but in practice there is little enough for them to do.

The surviving bishops of Rwanda have declared that anybody who participated in any way in the genocide and that ought to be a lot of people is excluded from the sacraments of the church until further notice. It is a kind of mass temporary excommunication, the bishop explained, and some form of lengthy period of general penance will be required.

And how long will it take before this can begin? Well, in practice the situation would have to be more stable, more normal here he shrugged and smiled helplessly and who knew when that would be? And then, of course, there was the terrible shortage of priests . . .

In the past few days, Bishop Misago began a three way dialogue with the French army commander in the area and the RPF commandant, in an effort to ensure a smooth transition when the French pull out in the next few days. Yes, he admits he is afraid of the RPF, but there is nobody else who can speak on behalf of the local people and the refugees, or who has any chance of being listened to by them. There is nobody else left, the people have no authority any more.

A few kilometres of dusty broken trackway away the four sisters of the Medical Missionaries of Mary three Irish nurse/midwives and a French sister/doctor have established a clinic for the 80,900 refugees whose grass huts cling to the steep hillside above and below the road. Here they perform their practical miracles with funding from Trocaire, which also has plans to establish its own development/emergency aid project in the area.

The "MMMs" were the first foreign aid workers to get here "in before the French" as Sister Siobhan Corkery points out and they plan to stay on after the French have left, although God knows what, will happen then.

It will take more than nursing and food to heal this place: there will be no hope for Rwanda if the political reality is not addressed, and if somebody is not brought to justice for what has happened here, according to Trocaire's Mr Justin Kilcullen. It seems atonement and redemption are not abstract concepts in a place like this. As it happens, the only heroic figure to emerge so far from the Rwandan horror is a clergyman, Father Vjeko Curie, a Bosnian Catholic who, has acquired a reputation of being Rwanda's Oscar Schindler. A fluent Rwandan speaker, he continued to operate inside southern Rwanda throughout the massacres and the civil war, bringing food and supplies in and, on more than one occasion, spiriting large numbers of fugitive Tutsis out.

A thin, lively man with a passion for loud shirts and electric gadgets, he likes to take coffee at the Novotel in Bujumbura arranging his bleepers and his mobile phones on a table in front of him. The local aid community teases him about his shirts and his gadgets, but he enjoys the jokes himself.

Vjeko, as everyone calls him, is now a sort of freelance, trouble shooter for the various aid agencies operating from Burundi into southern Rwanda, but he still carries a copy of a report he has written on the Catholic church in Rwanda. He concludes that the church lost touch with its role and its people, dividing on ethnic lines and acquiring too much worldly power.

Nowadays he remembers in particular a conversation he had with his own bishop, Monsignor Thadde Nsengiyumva of Kabgaye, after it all went evidently wrong. "The church has lost a century of Christianity here," the bishop concluded, shortly before RPF soldiers murdered him along with a neighbouring bishop, 10 priests and the Archbishop of Kigali at the beginning of June.