Coached to Forgive: Who Really Benefits From Rwanda’s Forgiveness Parades?

I don’t know about y’all, but a recent story in Umuseke has stayed with me. On November 4, the Pentecostal church ADEPR held an “Imbabazi Celebration Day” in Gatsibo District, where genocide convicts asked survivors for forgiveness.

After church teachings on unity, 35 of 89 inmates agreed to apologize. All 35 are about to walk free anyway, having served their sentences. Then came the hugs, the applause and, bingo, unity and reconciliation.

For readers new to this: in 1994, Rwanda’s government organized the killing of more than one million Tutsi in about 100 days. Since then, the state’s unity commission and grant-hungry nonprofits such as Prison Fellowship Rwanda, led by Bishop John Rucyahana, have made these ceremonies routine. Today, churches increasingly run the show.

Read carefully what survivor Clémentine Murorunkwere told a man implicated in her family’s killing: “Ku bw’iyi Leta dufite ubu ngubu, njye n’umuryango wanjye, twiyemeje kuguha imbabazi twivuye inyuma, nta buryarya, turashaka kubaka igihugu cyacu.” In English: “For the sake of the government we have now, my family and I have decided to forgive you wholeheartedly and sincerely. We want to build our country.” I take her at her word, but I keep coming back to those opening words. Could another survivor in that room have said no as freely as she said yes?

So who really benefits from these scenes of humiliation? Not the survivors. Those who take part are poor, vulnerable people whom the genocide left with nothing, and the convicts are equally poor, low-level killers. I have yet to see a well-off survivor or a big-fish génocidaire on that stage.

The government benefits first. In 2021, it dissolved FARG, the fund for the neediest survivors, and it never passed the compensation law it promised in 2001. Parading survivors with their killers as proof of reconciliation costs far less than reparations.

The churches benefit too. More Tutsi were killed in churches than anywhere else. The UN tribunal gave Catholic priest Athanase Seromba life for his part in bulldozing his Nyange church on about 1,500 Tutsi, and convicted Adventist pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana of aiding and abetting genocide. ADEPR’s own pastor Jean Uwinkindi is serving life for massacres in Bugesera, yet ADEPR only stripped its convicted clergy of their titles this March. The Catholic Church has done even less. Seromba reportedly still says Mass in prison, and Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, convicted of genocide in Rwanda, was finally dismissed for fathering a child. Where do these churches get the moral authority to referee?

Here is the irony. Rwanda’s Muslim leaders urged believers to stay out of the killing, and many mosques became refuges. Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to kill, and about 400 of their 2,500 members were murdered, including Hutu who would not abandon their Tutsi neighbors. Yet I have never seen either community stage these ceremonies, though their records would give them every right to.

Some survivors may find genuine peace in forgiving, and that is their choice. But forgiveness that is coached, staged and offered “for the sake of the government” is humiliation dressed up as reconciliation.

Real reconciliation will begin when the state pays what it owes survivors, and the churches apologize, defrock their convicted clergy and pay reparations. Until then, these ceremonies will serve everyone but the survivors.

More on forgiveness“Have You Forgiven Your Family’s Killers?” An Inadequate Question for a Genocide Survivor (2023), How the Dogmatic Ideology of Forgiveness Can Harm Genocide Survivors (2018) and Living With, But Not Forgiving, Killers (2014).