TO the outside world, it may have seemed incomprehensible that two Catholic nuns were convicted in a Belgian court last week of helping Hutu militiamen to massacre Tutsi during the 1994 killing frenzy in Rwanda. But Catholic clergymen and nuns, as well as pastors of several Protestant churches, were caught up in the ethnic hatred that ripped the country apart, just like everyone else.
"Not that many actually resisted," said Filip Reyntjens, a professor of African law and politics at the University of Antwerp. "The church has been the mirror of the Rwandan society."
It is impossible to talk about the country's modern history without talking about the Catholic Church. That goes for the genocide, too, and not just because, with Hutu hatemongers spewing propaganda depicting the Tutsi as cockroaches and snakes, few religious leaders were willing to stand up and say "Thou shalt not kill."
In the late 19th century, when white colonists began arriving, they found a feudal society in which the cattle-owning Tutsi controlled most wealth, trading milk and meat for the labor of Hutu peasants. The church's white missionaries and the Belgian authorities came to regard the Tutsi as natural aristocrats, and came up with a ludicrous theory that they were more closely related to Europeans than the Hutu, who looked more like the Bantu-speaking tribes of West Africa. Together, the missionaries and administrators established the two- tiered ethnic caste system that eventually exploded in bloodshed.
Most of the nuns and priests the missionaries educated and promoted in the 1920's and 1930's were Tutsi. The same was true in the civil service; the colonial authorities, in essence, trained the Tutsi to govern. The monarch put in power in the early 1930's was Tutsi, and Catholic.
All that changed in the late 1940's and the 1950's. It became apparent to the Belgians and the church that independence was coming, and in the aftermath of World War II, the prevailing thinking among European powers was to favor democratization. The church began championing the rights of the downtrodden Hutu peasants.
The Swiss-born Archbishop of Kigali, Msgr. Andre Perraudin, himself of working class stock, began promoting more Hutu to the priesthood. He supported the violent Hutu revolt against the Tutsi in 1959, which eventually became a political movement aimed at overthrowing the Tutsi monarchy and vesting power in Hutu hands.
Those goals were realized by the time Rwanda became independent in 1962. It is telling that the country's first president, the founder of the main Hutu party, Grégoire Kayibanda, had been educated at a seminary and started his career editing the church's Kinyarwandan newspaper.
Over the next three decades, Hutu priests gained power. The archbishop of Kigali in the late 80's, Msgr. Vincent Nsengiyumva, was a Hutu closely allied with the Hutu ruling party, then led by Major General Juvénal Habyarimana, who had ousted Mr. Kayibanda in a 1973 coup.
Still, Hutu and Tutsi served side by side in parishes, monasteries and dioceses. But when Tutsi rebels in Uganda began a civil war in 1990, political and ethnic divisions emerged among the priests and nuns, just as they did in the rest of the society, historians say, with their politics sometimes bleeding into sermons and pastoral letters.
In April 1994, President Habyarimana's plane went down as he returned from peace talks with the Tutsi rebels. Extremist Hutu politicians seized power and mobilized Hutu militia to kill Tutsi civilians. The rebels restarted their offensive.
At least 500,000 moderate Hutus and Tutsis were killed over the next three months.
Because they were educated, Tutsi priests and pastors were among the first to be killed. More than a hundred died.
MANY of the top Hutu religious leaders remained silent or encouraged the killing, according to African Rights, a human rights organization that has documented the genocide with thousand of interviews. Among those whose silence or vocal support helped the killers, it says, were the archbishops of the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and Adventist churches.
"There was a complete failure at the level of leadership," said Rakiya Omaar, the director of African Rights. "This is a hierarchical society. Obedience is ingrained. The leadership was very, very much — among all the denominations — on the side of the forces of genocide."
For example, an Anglican bishop, a Hutu, awaiting trial in Tanzania, Samuel Musabyimana, is accused of turning 500 Tutsis who had sought refuge at his church over to militiamen. According to the United Nations indictment against him, he said he did not oppose the killing of Tutsis as long as it was not on church grounds.
Farther down the clerical ladder, people went their own ways. The Rev. Wenceslas Munyeshyaka of the Sainte Famille Church in Kigali allowed Hutu militiamen access to his church to kill Tutsi hiding there, witnesses said. He has been accused of raping Tutsi women before they were killed, Ms. Omaar said. He is somewhere in France.
But at a nearby church, the Saint Paul Pastoral Center, another Hutu priest, Father Celestin Hakizimana, bribed the militiamen who tried to break in. He wore his robes to intimidate the crowd. He saved more than 1,500 people.
And in Ginsenyi, a Hutu nun, Felicitee Niyitegeka, tried to hide dozens of Tutsis but was discovered. She chose to die with the Tutsi rather than step aside and let the death squads at them.
But Ms. Omaar's organization has identified at least three dozen Hutu priests and pastors whom she maintains participated in the genocide. The Tutsi-dominated government has accused at least 20 Catholic priests of war crimes. Two have been convicted and sentenced to death in Rwandan courts. Another, Bishop Augustin Misago, was acquitted. He said he had been forced to attend meetings where killings were discussed because he feared for his life.
The nuns convicted in Belgium, Sister Gertrude and Sister Mary Kisito, were Hutu who allowed ethnic hatred to trump religious conviction. Not only did they let Hutu militiamen into their convent to hack hundreds of Tutsi women and children to death, they helped burn more than 500 people alive in a locked garage. The sisters carried the cans of gasoline and fanned the flames, witnesses said.
"This is not something that came out of the blue," Ms. Omaar said. "The church is so deeply implicated in the social and political mindset that led to the genocide."