The vice-president of the Rwandan bishops' conference has sharply rejected claims that the Church was responsible for the massacres there in 1994.
"They are accusing the Catholic Church, among others, of having fomented an ideology of genocide," Bishop Alexis Habiy Ambere reported in a Vatican Radio interview. "We absolutely do not agree" with that charge, he said.
The Bishop of Nyundo angrily rejected another claim, "that the Catholic Church had intentionally kept the people in poverty." This is a "very grave" charge, Bishop Ambere said. And he observed: "Everyone can see what the Church has done for the people: opening schools, health centers, working for involvement and development."
In January 2004, an investigatory commission set up by the parliament of Rwanda said that there was an "ideology of genocide" in Rwanda, persisting to this day. The commission pointed to the assassination of three people in Gikongoro who had survived the originally bloodbath ten years ago. Bishop Ambere noted that the Rwandan bishops, in their pastoral message to the country's people, had argued against racial hatred. "Unfortunately the people did not listen to us," he said. The Rwandan bishop told Vatican Radio that it is unfortunate that "personal ideas or actions are attributed to an institution, an ethnic group, a region, a religious confession, or an association." That attitude, he suggested, is evidence of the same willingness to vilify others than sparked the genocidal killings. He charged that the parliamentary commission had prepared its report "without any desire to verify" the testimony it received.
In April 1999, Bishop Augustin Misago of Gikongoro was accused of participating in the 1994 killings, and jailed in Kigali; a state prosecutor recommended the death penalty. But the bishop was found not guilty in June 2000; three months later, an assistant to the prosecutor fled Rwanda, saying that the charges against Bishop Misago had been "indefensible."