The Protocol Establishing the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights was adopted by the Organisation of African Unity on 10 June 1998 and came into effect on 15 January 2004. Only 19 States have ratified the treaty although 45 have signed it. More recently, at the AU Assembly in July 2004 a decision was taken to merge the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights with the Court of Justice of the African Union. What are the implications of this merger?

The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights will hold its 37th Ordinary Session from the 27th April to 11th May 2005 in Banjul, The Gambia. During this Session, which will be attended by delegates from State Parties to the African Charter, representatives of National African Human Rights Institutions, as well as representatives of International and Non-Governmental Organisations, the participants will discuss in particular, the general human rights situation in Africa. Despite the improvements registered so far, human rights conditions on the Continent still remain fragile and of major concern and require increased vigilance on the part of the African Commission, the international institutions, of Non-Governmental Organisations and of Civil Society in general.

Child rights advocates have banded together in a bid to cope with ongoing concerns about the welfare of Southern Africa's children. At a recent meeting organised by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Swaziland, delegates from Lesotho, Malawi and South Africa highlighted the need to bolster care programmes targeting children under five years.

The Togolese League for Human Rights (LTDH) has just learnt with indignation and horror the inhumane and degrading treatment the military regime of the pair Faure Gnassinge-Abass Bonfoh is inflicting on former Prime Minister Agbéyome Messan Kodjo who was arrested when he arrived in Togo on 8 April 2005 after three years in exile in France.

La Ligue Togolaise des Droits de l’Homme exige la cessation des traitements inhumains et dégradants infligés à l’ex-premier ministre Agbéyomé Messan Kodjo à la prison de Kara
La Ligue Togolaise des Droits de l’Homme vient d’apprendre avec indignation et horreur les traitements inhumains et dégradants que le régime militaire du tandem Faure Gnassingbe – Abass Bonfoh est en train d’infliger à l’ex-premier ministre Agbéyome Messan Kodjo arrêté à son arrivée au Togo, le 08 avril 2005, après trois années d’exil en France.

For the past two years, the destruction of Darfur has played out before the eyes of the world, and the member countries of the United Nations have remained largely paralyzed. Recent UN votes on sanctions and on a referral to the International Criminal Court are important steps forward on Darfur, but they are not enough. Unless there is a rapid and robust international intervention in Darfur, up to a million people could be dead by the end of this year. As the genocide continues, the need for immediate humanitarian intervention can no longer be disputed, says this Foreign Policy in Focus commentary.

The UN Security Council has widened an international arms embargo to include all rebel and militia groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It will punish violators with a travel ban and freezing of assets. The ban follows a recent push to disarm militias in the volatile east and comes after a pledge from the main Hutu rebel group to disband and go home to Rwanda.

Around 30 million illegal arms are in circulation in sub-Saharan Africa, fuelling conflicts and destroying lives and property across the continent, says a campaigner. Ochieng Adala, director of Africa Peace Forum, which promotes peaceful conflict resolution policies in the Horn and Great Lakes regions of Africa, urged African governments to cut their defence budgets so as to reduce the proliferation of weapons.

The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said on Saturday he could suspend planned prosecutions linked to the war against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in Uganda to enable peace moves to succeed. But Luis Moreno Ocampo ruled out any granting of immunity to war crimes suspects.

The International Crisis Group (ICG) urged President George W. Bush in his meeting with Rwanda's President Paul Kagame on 15 April to press the Rwandan government to take concrete action to promote peace in the Congo. In a letter addressed to President Bush ICG has recommended three steps to marginalise the hardliners among the Rwandan Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) rebels operating in the eastern Congo and to encourage the return of the 8,000 to 10,000 FDLR combatants still based in the Congo.

The chairman of the southern Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), John Garang, appealed on Tuesday to all factions operating in south Sudan to put aside their differences and reconcile. "It is time to heal wounds and work in an atmosphere of fraternity and mutual respect, in order to create a healthy political environment," Garang said in a speech to the South-South Dialogue Conference taking place in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

An exchange of insults between two children of different ethnic groups mushroomed two days later into full-scale fighting between neighbours in this large village in the no-man's land between government and rebel lines in Cote d'Ivoire. Houses were burned, cattle were killed, several people received machete wounds and 1,000 members of the minority Dioula community in Boli last month trekked out to seek shelter in the rebel sector.

Fifty-three people who participated in an unusual soccer tournament last year in Nigeria's main city, Lagos, are now fighting for dear life. State prosecutors say the tournament, held in the name of a secessionist group, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), amounted to treason. They have demanded the death penalty.

Many of the violations experienced by refugees count among those injustices for which it is impossible to truly make amends. Today, permanent resettlement is evaporating as a solution to refugee crisis. For millions of refugees, return is no longer an option but an imperative. This raises some critical questions: What should refugees expect from return? Are they entitled to anything more than a haphazard journey back to ruined or re-occupied homes in communities where livelihoods are uncertain and their welcome luke-warm at best? If so, what are the conditions of just return?

This Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper draws upon insights and experience from researchers, practitioners and war-affected young people themselves in an attempt to better understand the challenges they face during war, and the resulting implications for policy and practice. Unless we involve young people in constructive measures for building a safer society, their energies and initiative will instead be exploited by those who would do them harm.

Rwanda has condemned Burundi for moving a group of Rwandan Hutus who had crossed their common border, further from the frontier. Rwanda says the Hutus are fugitives from justice, and says the Burundian action amounts to giving them the status of asylum-seekers. Some 2,000 people have fled to Burundi recently, fearing unfair treatment in new village "gacaca" courts.

While schools had finally opened a few months back for the younger children, for the many young men and women of Am Nabak camp, education had halted. They do not have the opportunity to enroll in secondary school to further their studies or take part in structured programs targeted specifically for their age group. There is a shortage of skilled teachers who can provide secondary education. According to this group, many of the specialized teachers have either been killed in Sudan or have gone elsewhere.

Several hundred refugees from the civil war in Sudan's western Dafur region have trekked west for 3,000 km, crossing five international borders, to seek asylum in Ghana. They came into the spotlight for the first time last week when a group of 180 refugees from Darfur briefly occupied an unfinished building on the outskirts of the capital Accra. Most of them had arrived in Ghana in small groups since January.

What exactly was the role of the Catholic Church in the Rwandan genocide? NDAHIRO TOM, a Rwandan human rights commissioner, paints a picture of deep historical and political complicity and calls for the Church to restore its credibility by contributing to the process of justice.

Why do they eat my people as they eat bread? (Psalm 14)

All over Rwandan hills, valleys and mountains, thousands of crosses mark mass graves of genocide victims of 1994. During the genocide, many Tutsis were massacred in or around places of worship, including Catholic churches – paradoxically, in a country which was the most Christianised in Africa, with Christians representing more than 80% of the population. Catholic bishops in Rwanda have sometimes claimed that all Rwandans believe in God. (Kinyamateka, No. 1614, January 2003, pg. 6) There are hundreds of churches and chapels everywhere and almost every day followers repeatedly recite the prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven”, pleading with the Father to deliver them from evil (Matthew 6:13). From where, then, did the malevolence at the root of the genocide come? How and by whom could it have been overcome? Part of the answer to these questions is the Church and its members.

According to Jean-Pierre Karegeye, a Jesuit priest, genocide is morally hideous, an evil expressed in forgetting God, and hence a new form of atheism. Karegeye asks several pertinent questions which merit consideration: “Christians killing other Christians? How could Rwandan Christians who manifested commitment to their faith have acted with such intense cruelty? How did ordinary people come to commit extraordinary evil…? Does the sin of genocide disturb the relationship between God and the perpetrators in official Catholic Church discourse? How can we explain the strange situation of priests involved in the crimes of genocide who are still running parishes in Western countries? Why are they protected by the Vatican against any legal proceedings?” He concludes: “The Church’s attitude towards genocide seems to suggest that the hierarchy of religious values is not usually in proportion to the hierarchy of moral standards.”

Generally, in Rwanda, the leadership of the Christian churches, especially that of the Catholic Church, played a central role in the creation and furtherance of racist ideology. They fostered a system which Europeans introduced and they encouraged. The building blocks of this ideology were numerous, but one can mention a few – first, the racist vision of Rwandan society that the missionaries and colonialists imposed by developing the thesis about which groups came first and last to populate the country (the Hamitic and Bantu myths); second, by rigidly controlling historical and anthropological research; third, by reconfiguring Rwandan society through the manipulation of ethnic identities (from their vague socio-political nature in the pre-colonial period, these identities gradually became racial). From the late 1950s, some concepts became distorted: thus democracy became numerical democracy or demographic.

The philosophy of ‘rubanda nyamwinshi’ a Kinyarwanda expression, which politically came to mean ‘the Hutu majority’, prevailed after the so-called social revolution of 1959 ignored the basic tenets of democracy. In my view, recurrent genocides in Rwanda since 1959 were meant to maintain the ‘Hutu majority’ in power, by killing the Tutsi. Distributive justice became equivalent to regional and ethnic quotas; and revolution came to mean legitimised genocide of the Tutsis.

Church authorities contributed to the spread of racist theories mainly through the schools and seminaries over which they exercised control. The elite who ruled the country after independence trained in these schools. According to Church historian Paul Rutayisire, the stereotypes used by the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government to dehumanise Tutsis, were also spread by some influential clergymen, bishops and priests, before and after the genocide. The Catholic Church and colonial powers worked together in organizing racist political groups like the Party for the Emancipation of the Hutu (Parmehutu).

Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Dévelopment (MRND) was the party which in the mid-1970s had introduced and institutionalised policies of racial discrimination which they termed “équilibre éthnique et régional” (ethnic and regional equilibrium, a quota system). The Church fully supported the quota system, but on 30 April 1990, five Catholic priests from Nyundo diocese broke the silence. In a letter to the Church’s bishops in Rwanda, they called the quota system ‘racist’ and urged that it was high time “the Church of Jesus Christ established in Rwanda proclaimed aloud and tirelessly” to denounce it, since it constituted “an aberration” within their Church. They maintained that the only sure justice in schools and employment was the one which only took account of individual capacities, regardless of people's origins, and that it was on this condition that the country could have citizens capable of leading it with competence and equity.

In conclusion, they said: “The Church should not be the vassal of the secular powers, but it should be free to speak with sincerity and courage when it proves necessary.” The authors of this letter were Fr. Augustin Ntagara, Fr. Callixte Kalisa, Fr. Aloys Nzaramba, Fr. Jean Baptiste Hategeka, and Fr. Fabien Rwakareke. All but the last two were killed during the genocide.

Within the Catholic Church, this discriminatory policy had long been in the seminaries. According to Fr. Jean Ndolimana, the enrolment of Tutsis in the Nyundo diocese was limited to 4%. On the school card, every seminarian had to indicate his father’s ethnic group. Instead of condemning those who were against the racist system, instead of playing an important role in institutionalising injustice by convincing their congregants to accept a morally reprehensible policy, Church leaders should have spoken out against racist discrimination. Regrettably the Church took the side of the political regimes, and thus was unable to exercise its prophetic role. It did not denounce political and social injustices, nor did it condemn the first mass killings, nor those which followed.

It is difficult to describe the position taken by the institutional Church just before and during the genocide. It is appropriate to take note of a declaration made by some “Christians” who met in London in June 1996: “The church is sick. The historical roots of this sickness lie in part with the “mother churches”. She is facing the most serious crisis in her history. The church has failed in her mission, and lost her credibility, particularly since the genocide. She needs to repent before God and Rwandan society, and seek healing from God.” This diagnosis offers a good summary of the situation. The Church lacks a sense of remorse and therefore cannot repent; hence its active involvement, in my view, is the last stage of genocide – denial.

Twenty-nine Rwandan Catholic priests, from Goma, Zaire, wrote a letter to the Pope in August 1994, demanding that the Rwandan government should allow all refugees home and then hold a referendum to determine the country’s political future. The authors of this letter had no good programme for the country. All they wanted was to hold in contempt the Pope’s acknowledgment of the genocide. As early as 15 May 1994, the Pope had declared that the massacres in Rwanda were indeed genocide.

The priests wrote to the Pope: “Everybody knows, except those who do not wish to know or understand it, that the massacres which took place in Rwanda are the result of the provocation of the Rwandese people by the RPF.” These priests, contaminated by the genocidal ideology, placed His Holiness the Pope in the category of “those who did not wish to know,” to cover up their own shortcomings and those of the government they served.

Accepting failure is a virtue. Even so, it is difficult for institutions like the Catholic Church that are known to command respect world wide – above all when such institutions, have been party to policies of racial discrimination and genocide. The Church decided to adopt silence and slander as defence mechanisms. The question is why the Vatican has accepted or tolerated such tendencies.

The call for remorse and repentance still seems unnecessary and problematical for the Catholic Church. In March 1996, Pope John Paul II told the Rwandan people, “The Church... cannot be held responsible for the guilt of its members that have acted against the evangelic law; they will be called to render account of their own actions. All Church members that have sinned during the genocide must have the courage to assume the consequences of their deeds they have done against God and fellow men.”

Had this been accepted and done, it would have helped to end a culture of impunity that has characterised Rwanda for more than thirty-five years. This could have been an established warning to anyone who harboured the archaic racist ideology. It could have acted as a deterrent to foreign mentors, warning that continuation of such politics contravenes the principle of natural justice and is liable to be punished by law. Thirdly, it offers the only premises on which durable reconciliation; rehabilitation and reconstruction could take place or be cemented.

I chose to write about the Catholic Church and the genocide in Rwanda because I would argue it was the only institution involved in all the stages of genocide. As a layperson, it is astounding to hear about the “love, truth and trust” that the Church has achieved in a country where genocide took more than a million lives in just a hundred days, and to see the institutional Church protecting, instead of punishing, or at least denouncing those among its leadership or in its membership who are accused of genocide.

There is no doubt that throughout the history of Rwanda, Church leaders have had ties with political power. The Church was also involved in the policy of ethnic division, which degenerated into ethnic hatred. In order to succeed in its mission of uniting people, the Church in Rwanda and elsewhere must examine its attitudes, practices, and policies that have too often encouraged ethnic divisions.

Church leadership should both be on the side of and be perceived to be on the side of justice and the victims of injustice rather than on the side of genocide perpetrators and deniers. The Church must remember what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in his April 1933 essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question”.

As he wrote, one way in which Churches could fight political injustices was to question state injustices and call the state to responsibility; another was to help the victims of injustice, whether they were church members or not. To bring an end to the machinery of injustice, he said, the Church was obliged not only to help the victims who had fallen under the wheel, but also to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself.

Since justice is an unavoidable integral element of the process of reconciliation, the Church should be among those asking that the perpetrators of genocide be brought to justice. If the Church contributes to the process of justice, unity can be re-established among Rwandans, in general, and among Christians, in particular. It is the only way that the Church can restore its credibility, and thus be what it is called to be: a witness to faith, hope and love, to truth and justice. Only in this way will the Catholic Church in Rwanda be able to help save the people of Rwanda –all the people - from future suffering and bloodshed.

* Ndahiro Tom is a Commissioner of Human Rights in Rwanda. This article is a shortened version of a longer article sent to us by the author. Please write to [email][email protected] for a copy of the longer version.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Related Links:

Lessons from Rwanda:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/11/news/eddallaire.html

What are Community Based Organisations (CBOs) and where did they come from? What is their role in the protection and promotion of human rights? What are their strengths and weaknesses? And what are the information, technology and training needs of these organisations? Answers to these questions can be found in new research conducted by Fahamu and the Centre for Adult Education and funded by the Foundation for Human Rights (FHR) and the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA). "This research offers stakeholders a wealth of information to assist CBOs in building human rights capacity both within individual countries and across the region," said Anil Naidoo, Executive Director of Fahamu South Africa. Further, the report contains recommendations on the information and training needs of these organisations and how best to support CBOs in the protection and promotion of human rights.

Having tasted the fruits of freedom resulting from the use of open source software, Brazil has opened its doors to African governments willing to adopt the software for the management of Top Level Domain (TLD) registries. And the governments have seized the moment and taken advantage of the emerging south/south solidarity spearheaded by the South American power house. Kenya was the first to train on how to use the software,Tanzania soon followed suit, while Mozambique and Sudan are lining up for the services.