| NAIROBI — Political leaders and representatives of Christian denominations have acknowledged their past inaction and urged strong support for a healing process in Rwanda, that had suffered the trauma of a genocide in which up to one million people were killed over 100 days in 1994.
Churches said in a document entitled, “The Kigali Covenant,” produced at a workshop in the Rwandan capital from April 16-19, they would “stand up and speak against behavior, pronouncements and practices that have the tendency to set one group of people against another.” The covenant was read out at a worship service in the Kigali Stadium to mark the 10th anniversary of the massacres.
Leaders from 20 African countries attended the workshop, convened by the Protestant Council of Rwanda and the Alliance of Evangelical Churches in Rwanda, together with the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC).
Before leaving for Rwanda from Kenya, where he had visited from April 8-15, the Rev. Sam Kobia, general secretary of the WCC, the world’s largest grouping of Christian denominations, said that churches accepted the guilt of inaction.
“The message we are taking to Rwanda is that we as churches know we could have done more to prevent the genocide,” he told Ecumenical News International. “We could have spoken much earlier as churches.”
Separately, the general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), the Rev. Ishmael Noko, appealed for an end to the silence and inaction that permitted genocide and social cleansing to take place in any part of the world.
"The 1994 Rwandan Genocide, the result of escalating violence between Hutu and Tutsi peoples, began in April 1994 and led to the murder of more than 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutu [NOT "Hutu and moderate Tutsi, and the rape of 250,000 Hutu women"] during 100 days of terror.
The LWF general secretary said it was particularly painful to reflect on the role played by religious leaders in fomenting and carrying out the killings. The genocide, he said, “should be a permanent challenge to the complacency of religious leaders in all regions of the world.”
At the Ntarama Memorial (formerly a Roman Catholic chapel) and the Kigali Memorial Center, the church leaders saw human bones and skulls displayed. On April 7, marked as the 10th anniversary of the start of the massacres, survivors of the genocide buried the remains of hundreds of victims recovered from pit latrines and mass graves.
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