Rwandan Reconciliation

Bishop John Rucyahana is an old and dear friend. Our parish has actively supported his work and I had the privilege of visiting in 200o during the sixth anniversary of the genocide. This is a Religion and Ethics interview from earlier in the month.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a moving story today on reconciliation in Rwanda. In 1994, for 100 days while the world looked away, one group slaughtered another at the rate of 10,000 a day. This Spring for another 100 days Rwandans are reliving what happened with public trials and the unearthing of mass graves. There is also repentance, forgiveness, and hope. Lucky Severson reports on Rwanda’s recovery and one of the remarkable men who’s helping lead it.

LUCKY SEVERSON: The dormant volcanoes that loom over the hazy Rwandan countryside can erupt as suddenly and violently as the country itself did 15 years ago. Over a million Rwandans, about an eighth of the population, were massacred in one of the worst cases of genocide in recent history. Then the volcanoes were silent, and it seemed that only the gorillas that live alongside of them were safe from slaughter.

Today Rwanda is a much different place thanks, in part, to this man—Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana

Bishop JOHN RUCYAHANA (Chairman, Prison Fellowship Rwanda): People are smiling because they have the hope, but the wounds and the healing is a process that we’ll continue to engage deliberately to tell people that they just can’t cover it up. We need to be able to unearth it and deal with it head on.

SEVERSON: That’s what the bishop has been preaching from the pulpit of his beautiful church in northern Rwanda since the killing stopped: deal with it head on. And it was personal for him. How could it not be after so many members of his extended family were murdered, including his niece?

Bishop RUCYAHANA: I have forgiven those who killed my niece, and they peeled off the flesh off her arms to the wrist, and they left bare bones, and they gang-raped her, and I forgive them because forgiving is not only benefiting the criminal, it benefits me.

SEVERSON: There are still tens of thousands of people convicted of genocide in Rwandan prisons, but as many as 30,000 have been released back to their communities through a restorative justice program that Bishop John chairs called Prison Fellowship Rwanda. These criminals, shown in a Prison Fellowship video, killed their neighbors and even there friends.

The rest is here-

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/april-17-2009/rwandan-reconciliation/2708/