Genocide: Forgetting and Destroying our Being Kapwa
The African continent holds a special place in my heart. When I was 16 years old, I read an article from Misyon Magazine about a Filipino missionary nun's experience in Cameroon. She recounted how she taught the children in the village how to say "I love you, Jesus" in different languages, including our national and local languages in the Philippines. Her story greatly fascinated me. It made me think of doing missionary work someday on the continent. Nine years after, I entered into a religious formation. My two Filipino religious formators were missionaries in Congo and Cameroon. I also encountered and became friends with several postulants and novices from the continent. My spiritual guide, who is in Senegal, is very fond of giving me artworks, postcards, and cloth from Africa. Thus, despite not yet being able to visit any of the African countries, I have a deep affinity for the continent and its people.
I remembered one of my formators telling us how she had to cross rivers and hike mountains with others to escape the violence brought about by the civil war in Congo during those years. It was here that I first heard about the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis. Thus, when the Rwandan genocide was assigned to me to share in one of our GMF learning encounters, the immersion and the thoughts and feelings it brought to me were very personal and painful.
The massacre occurred from April 6 to July 22, 1994. It was a 100-day slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans who were mostly Tutsis. It was a product of years and years of producing and perpetuating hegemonic narratives and relationships of privileging and discriminating between the two major ethnic groups of Rwanda, the Hutus and Tutsis. Pre-colonial times, the two tribes lived harmoniously alongside each other. As indicated in an article by Human Rights Watch, "Hutu and Tutsi shared a common culture and language and occasionally intermarried." The essay continued with how situations changed between the two when the colonizers controlled Rwanda: "During these years of colonial rule the categories of Hutu and Tutsi became increasingly clearly defined and opposed to each other, with the Tutsi elite seeing itself as superior and having the right to rule and the Hutu seeing themselves as an oppressed people...In the mid-twentieth century, as the colonialists were preparing to leave, Hutu overthrew the Tutsi elite and established a Hutu-led republic." I was particularly struck by the mechanism used by the Belgians in segregating these people. By measuring the Rwandan nose size and height and categorizing their eye type, Tutsis were set apart from the Hutus. The identification card indicating their ethnicity was considered the passport to the death of the Tutsis during the genocide.
The role of media was crucial in creating and sustaining the hate narratives against the Tutsis. The Hutu extremists proliferated and inspired hate and violence toward the Tutsis through their radio station Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). During the slaughter, the station encouraged their audience to kill their neighbors who were Tutsis, using their agricultural tools like the machete. In print media, they depicted the Tutsis as cockroaches and snakes. But most horrifying and painful to me was when I learned that the Catholic Church in Rwanda played an active role in the genocide. An essential teaching in Christianity, the Ten Commandments, was weaponized to incite segregation and hatred. “The Hutu Ten Commandments” was a document that was published in the pro-Hutu, anti-Tutsi newspaper Kangura in December 1990, almost four years before the commencement of the genocide in Rwanda. Tutsis seeking refuge in Catholic churches were slaughtered, with babies and children smashed to death against the walls of the church. These killings were even performed by priests and nuns.
Understanding human cruelty is one of the discussions I often have with my students in our Theology classes. We usually look closely into this when we reflect and share insights about the dynamics of sin. Fr. Jon Sobrino, a Jesuit Liberation Theologian, said in one of his articles that one may or may not believe in God but no one can deny the reality of sin. We have empirical evidence, when we look back at our history, in the current conditions of the world, signs of the times, and personal experiences as proofs of the reality of sin.
But what is sin? Moral theologians define sin in many ways. After the convening of the Second Vatican Council, there have been developments in the theology of sin. For Fr. James Keenan, a Jesuit moral theologian, sin is a failure to bother to love. After learning deeply about the Rwandan genocide and coming across the word ubuntu, an African word that means shared humanity, kindness, and the greatness of heart, I would like to define sin as forgetting and destroying our shared humanity. In the Filipino context, I believe kapwa is our word corresponding to ubuntu. Kapwa, according to Virgilio G. Enriquez, is the unity of the self and others, a recognition of shared identity, and an inner self shared with others. To be complicit and even indifferent to such atrocities as genocide is clearly forgetting and destroying our being kapwa to each other.
