Bullet holes bring sleepless nights

This article was first published in the BC Catholic newspaper in July, 2009.

After ordination, Vancouver's Father Bellusci jets off to Rwanda to work with the needy

Father David Bellusci, OP, ordained on the sixth of last month in Vancouver, left for Rwanda only days later to work in a Dominican mission. Father Bellusci, who holds a PhD in philosophy and is doing graduate studies in theology at the Dominican University College in Ottawa, is writing two articles about his time there for The B.C. Catholic. This is the first.

I arrived in Kigali International Airport at 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning, remembering my first visit to Rwanda in the summer of 1992. Rwanda was politically very tense in the early '90s. I also remembered hearing the BBC announcement in April 1994, when I was living in Cape Town, that the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi had exploded as it approached Kigali International Airport.

The explosion left two politically and socially fragile countries without their presidents. In the case of Rwanda, the planned genocide of the country's Tutsi minority immediately followed the assassination of their president. Visiting Rwanda 15 years after the genocide led me to ask many questions about human nature.

Rwandans are wonderfully joyful, religious, and family-oriented people. Their values are superb. On the day I arrived I went to the St. Dominic Centre that is operated by Canadian and Rwandan Dominicans. They had festive activities for orphans and homeless children, including some local Rwandan dances performed by the children, followed by a very wholesome dinner.

The Kigali Orphans Project is supported wholly by the Dominican Missions. At this event I learned my first Kinyarwanda word, urukundo, which means love. What a beautiful word to learn on my first day in Kigali! A few days later I was invited to visit a community of Spanish Sisters running a pre-school in Kigali. As I approached the school, the little children noticed me and slowly approached me. Each one embraced me as though I was their best friend. Before I knew it, at least 50 children were running to me to give me hugs and taking my hand as I walked through the school. Their affection seemed like urukundo.

It was hard to believe these children had come from families who had suffered unimaginable violence and cruelty. Their family members were killed by machetes, hacked to death by axes, or machined-gunned in massacres. Women were raped in front of their families; children were not spared being cut up.

The victims were both Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Hutu extremists had orchestrated the genocide with the help of the youth wing, the Interahamwe. Over three months in 1994, from April to June, about 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.

I could not sleep the night after visiting the memorial museum in Kigali. When I closed my eyes, all I could see were the skulls displayed in the museum, which contained visible bullet holes and machete cracks. Everyday T-shirts, dresses, and pants were displayed; the garments the victims had worn before their death. They were ordinary villagers and city-folk who had been branded Tutsi or Tutsi sympathizers.

The tragedy of this genocide was not just the hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, but the betrayals that took place: neighbours denouncing neighbours and friends killing friends simply because of their ethnicity. Are people fundamentally evil with a disposition to do good, or are people fundamentally good with a disposition to do evil? Genocide would make us inclined to believe in the former: people are fundamentally evil. However, I believe that people are fundamentally good. God created us good, in His divine image. Original sin has inclined us towards evil. Only God's grace, the grace we receive at baptism, can correct this inclination. Rwandans are predominantly Catholic, so what happened? At a conference in Montreal, I heard a psychologist say. "In cases of extreme anxiety, a person is capable of doing anything."

One of the crucial aspects of genocide is the use of propaganda. Newspapers and radio stations in Rwanda delivered, daily, the danger of the Tutsi threat. Readers and listeners slowly began to believe that Tutsi "cockroaches" would wipe out the Hutu if the latter group did not act swiftly. When there is poverty and scarcity of land. and when the majority of the population lives in critical conditions, an extreme solution appears the best solution. Rwandans were given such powerful and regular doses of anti- Tutsi propaganda that the killing of Tutsis did not seem evil.

The propaganda produced something like a diabolical hypnotic spell, and then a wild frenzy; thousands of good Rwandans were transformed into butchers and murderers, a human kil1ing machine. To act morally we need to have enlightened consciences, but when we act out of anxiety with fear pumped up by propaganda, and when our instinct of self-preservation takes control, our capacity to reason diminishes and anything is possible.

Responsibility weighs heavily on those outside Rwanda, on those who could still reason and remain objective, thinking with lucidity. The role of the international community needs to be questioned in this regard. Why did so many western countries, which had ties with Rwanda before the genocide, fail to intervene? Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian Lieutenant-General who led the UN peace-keeping mission, had asked for assistance, but it had been flatly refused by the UN.

The memorial museum had a torch burning when I visited the site in June. The months of April, May. and June were the three months of genocide, three months the world watched and did nothing. If you wish to assist homeless children, or land cultivation, two projects can be supported: for homeless children there is Kigali Orphans, Martin Lavoie, OP, Missions dominicaines, 2715 chemin de la Cite Sainte Catherine, Montreal, Que., H3T IB6; for land cultivation there is Kigali Land Cultivation, Umushumba Mwiza, Account: 0010006-02-31, Banque Commerciale du Rwanda.

Father Bellusci has published a novel based on his previous experience in Zimbabwe: Beating the Drums (Mambo Press).