Rwanda arrests priest over genocide

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=6072848&cKey=1126191928000

KIGALI, Sept 8 - Rwanda has arrested a Belgian priest and accused him of inciting people to participate in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a Rwandan prosecutor said on Thursday.

Rwandan authorities arrested Guy Theunis, a member of the Catholic order of the "White Fathers", in the transit area of the Kigali airport on Tuesday, Belgium's foreign ministry said.

Rwanda's national prosecutor Emmanuel Rukangira told Reuters that Theunis is accused of publishing articles in the Kangura newspaper that incited Rwandan Hutus to commit acts of genocide.

His case will be forwarded to the traditional "gacaca" courts that Rwanda is using to clear a backlog of cases from the genocide, Rukangira said.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

1. Good for Rwanda. n/t

[LostinVA]

2. This is way overdue

There's definitely enough evidence to literally and figuratively hang the guy. The perpetrators of all of the violence in Rwanda should be punished, but it just seems so much more.... chilling and disgusting.... coming from one who purports to follow the teachings of Jesus, himself the ultimate symbol of peace and love.

[uppityperson]

3. Good. Gacaca court is good too. Trial by the people.

[Mairead]

4. I originally thought "oh the poor Tutsis" too...but then I discovered

that the Tutsis are a minority (15%) who aggressively took over the country hundreds of years ago and, along with the later European colonialists, consistently exploited the Hutu majority since then, payback coming only in the mid-20th c. with the uprising and first massacre.

It's not a one-sided thing.

[iverglas]

5. few things in this world are one-sided

The "payback" in question, however, was a carefully orchestrated attempt to eliminate a people, and involved the brutal mass killing of individuals who had nothing to do with any of the old grievances.

Sometimes bad payback is to be expected (terrorism, anyone?) -- but when the victims are individuals who didn't cause the problems ... and the people who are collecting the debt are not the people to whom the debt is owed (as is almost always the case in such situations; the people doing the orchestrating are acting in their own interests, not the interests of the aggrieved people) ... well, it isn't too difficult to draw the line.

[Mairead]

10. Could you expand your allusions a bit?

I get the part about the payback being an attempted genocide, but the 'people collecting', 'people owed', 'people orchestrating', 'aggrieved people' references are a little too fuzzy for me.

[iverglas]

12. it always seems to happen

Groups with legitimate grievances, seemingly inevitably, acquire "leaders" who promise to get redress for those grievances ... and who simply do nothing more than exploit the groups for their own ends.

Bin Laden isn't acting on behalf of any oppressed and exploited peoples. Various liberation movements around the world have become no more than vehicles for power-hungry would-be despots.

I've had to spend some time reading things like the speech by Leon Mugesera that was one of the triggering events of the Rwandan genocide. Nothing in that speech even addressed any legitimate grievances that the people he was speaking to may have had. It was pure hatred, filthy and vicious and nauseating.

When the wreaking of supposed vengeance, fomented by people like that, takes place, it doesn't lead to the institution of an equitable society -- even for the group that comes out on top. It just leads to more exploitation and oppression. Because people like that just don't have anyone's interests but their own at heart, and their only interest in their people's grievances is as a lever for their own ambition, and a vehicle for installing their own corrupt and self-serving tyranny.

Even in Quebec, the sovereignty movement, which arose out of very legitimate grievances, has become little more than a vehicle for a new indigenous economic/political élite to exercise power.

The only way to prevent this happening, it seems, is to address the grievances before they become open sores that no amount of equity is going to heal. If I weren't so tired, I'd blather on some about the role of the international community in strengthening the rule of law and democratic institutions in countries where this kind of problem is endemic ... but right now my prose would just end up being as impenetrable as that earlier effort, I'm afraid. ;)

[LostinVA]

6. Good grief... Hutu Power propaganda here

It's not anywhere near as cut and dried as that. The Tutsi didn't invade and take over the area -- the people are actually v ery much related genetically. The colonial powers CREATED this difference to divide and conquer, akin to the house slave/field slave dynamic. Then, the Hutus committed GENOCIDE, after decades of pogroms and institutionalized discrimination akin to what Nazi Germany did to the Jews. Horrible. And, after the genocide, Hutu Power refugees took over a chunk of Zaire and murdered Tutsi there who had emigrated from Rwanda. I have spoken to survivors of this. I have seen their scars, I have seen their amputated arms, I have heard their stories of gang rape, of being left for dead, of having arms and legs hacked off by machetes.

I agree with you about 99.9% of the time, but I know alot about Rwanda, and what you wrote is literally right from the Hutu Power playbook. Certain Tutsi weren't perfect, but what the Hutu Power, and ordinary Hutus, did was almost beyond comprehension.

And Bill Clinton *sigh* watched it happen...

Sorry, Mairead... got carried away there.

[Mairead]

8. I'm sorry, LiVA, you're right, I should have called out the Hutu

viciousness, too, at least pro forma. The Hutus certainly committed unspeakable atrocities, and if we isolate here-and-now from what's gone before, tribal memories and mythology, etc., then the Hutu acts went far beyond any level that could be construed as payback.

I suppose I didn't call it out because my perception is that Hutu violence has already been fully presented in the west, though in a one-sided way, as though it were an unprovoked, Nazi-style genocide: "the peaceful Tutsis who never did anyone any harm suddenly woke up one day being maimed and killed by the vicious Hutus for no reason at all." kind of thing. That was certainly my perception from news reports in Euro/US media, anyhow, which is why reading other sources came as such a shock to me.

From my understanding of history (admittedly incomplete and very possibly propagandised stiff), Tutsi dominance goes back 500 years or so, well before European colonialism. I.e., the Europeans exploited and worsened it, but didn't create it.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/august96/season_of_blood.html apparently written by an Irishman rather than a Hutu, appears to indict the Tutsi.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ad25 illuminates the Belgian colonialist role in increasing class stratification and setting the stage for the later atrocities (which, the article claims, were unheard of before colonialism).

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-09.htm This HRW account might almost have been written about a totally different country, since it implies that the Tutsi, Huti, and Twa settled the area as equals at about the same time in the prehistoric past and that natural differences among them explain their different social statuses.

It's hard to know how to make sense of it all.

[LostinVA]

9. I guess I spazzed out because

I know sooo many educated people who knew/know nothing about Rwanda, except for maybe what they've seen in "Hotel Rwanda," which confused the hell out of some of them! Americans are so not interested in what happens in Africa, unless it involves Americans being killed.

And, for the record, I don't agree with everything the current Rwanda government has done, trust me. Too much election manipulation!

[goclark]

7. When will the Chimp be arrested?

[WhiteTara]

11. do you think we will ever get a truth commission?

I wonder if in 10 or 20 years we will have a commission like the one is South Africa, Bosnia and now in Rwanda. I wonder if we wille ver be able to tell them how terrible they are and that we all know and want a different world. I want it now! :dispair: