Tutsi bishop brings God’s word to Hutus

John Kabango Rucyahana stood facing a crowd of killers in a prison yard at Gitarama, Rwanda. Years earlier, during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Gitarama's Hutu inmates would have hacked or clubbed to death this stout, bespectacled Tutsi preacher and former refugee. Today, they were all ears, for Bishop Rucyahana had come with a simple, powerful, badly needed message: Confess your crimes to God and to your victims, and you will be forgiven.

"I was speaking to prisoners at Gitarama," said Bishop Rucyahana, 62. "And I said to them, 'Close your eyes. Remember yourself hacking people. Remember them lifting up their hands begging for their lives, and you hacking their hands and arms and cutting their necks.'

"In about 10 minutes, everyone was crying, sobbing. I said, 'Open your eyes. That which makes you cry is what God wants you to repent of.' "

Throughout his work as chairman of Prison Fellowship Rwanda -- an affiliate of the Christian prison reform organization Prison Fellowship International -- Bishop Rucyahana has witnessed thousands of searing moments of truth like this one in prisons and communities across Rwanda since 1997. He has ambitious goals: nothing less than a restored, reunified Rwanda at peace with itself.

Bishop Rucyahana was in Washington during inauguration week to receive the 2009 William Wilberforce Award from Prison Fellowship, and he has just begun.

The task seems impossible. How can survivors put away their hate and bitterness and accept as neighbors once again the killers of their families and friends? Can killers be redeemed? It can be done, Bishop Rucyahana said.

But, "We should take responsibility for our self-caused pain and we can't accuse God [of the genocide]. It is hard to say, but it is truth," said Bishop Rucyahana, the Anglican bishop of Rwanda's Shyira diocese.

On the other hand, he said, "God must be a key player in reconciliation and recovery."

In Bishop Rucyahana's view, Rwandans first need a restored relationship with God and second a biblical example of God's forgiveness that they can follow. "Remember Jesus on the cross. The nails were still in His hands. He called out, 'Father, forgive them, they know not what they are doing.' If we are Christians, we don't wait for the pain to go away before we forgive.

"Forgiveness is hard, yet the cost of the cross is not meant to be easy."

It is not possible through God alone, he said, but "it is as urgent as anything being done in Rwanda."

Justice for Bishop Rucyahana has meant something more than trial and punishment. He and his partners in Prison Fellowship Rwanda created the Umuvumu Tree Project to give the killers a forum to confess their crimes to victims, and for survivors to lay down their hate and bitterness and to forgive the perpetrators.

Other programs give Hutus the chance to demonstrate their change of heart by helping to rebuild Tutsi houses destroyed in the genocide, and to form dairy cooperatives with survivors to foster healed relationships by working side by side.

"It is a miracle how God does heal people," Bishop Rucyahana said about the progress of recovery. "This is not something you can manufacture, not something money can buy. It's something only God can do."

But then he paused and said, "Let's not call it a miracle. People think that it is a drama. It is not. It is life. It is not magic. It is a process."

Peacemaking in Rwanda is not just a nice idea for this man on a mission. He has tasted the bitterness of his country's pain personally.

In 1962, he fled his native Rwanda to escape the anti-Tutsi rioting and discrimination stirred up by the so-called Hutu revolution of 1959, ending up in the Kinyara refugee camp in northwestern Uganda by 1964. Sunk in self-pity at his interrupted life and the squalor of his new surroundings, he burned with bitterness and anger.

In the depths of his despair, in 1966, he discovered a new faith in God. "The Lord met me," he said. "He turned my desperation into hope. It came through the witness of other believers in the camp, not through desperation. Desperation can't save you; it can make you worse."

Under the influence of his newfound faith, he felt better. Within two years, he was out of the refugee camp and hard at work preaching in Uganda's villages, planting churches and providing social services to Uganda's poor. He started a family and became a Ugandan citizen. Life in Uganda was good, and he was feeling settled.

The genocide changed everything.

The news footage he saw of his dead countrymen floating down the River Kagera into Lake Victoria on the Rwanda-Uganda border rocked his world upside down. Realizing that the worst had happened, he knew what he had to do: go back to Rwanda.

"The voice from the Lord was very clear. We had to go. We had the choice to rebel or obey. We chose to obey. People said, 'How do you dare commit your family to going to such a place of violence?' But the voice of God was clear as day and night. Someone had to go and preach about Jesus and peace."

The Ruhengeri district in northwestern Rwanda, where he moved in 1997, was dangerous. In his travels through the countryside, he got caught in the middle of shootouts. That same year, his niece Madu was killed.

"They cut the flesh off her arms to the bone, then gang-raped her and cut her neck. I had to repent of anger and bitterness in order to be able to preach forgiveness to prisoners. God doesn't want us to preach what we don't know."

Still, he weighs his difficulties philosophically. "God takes us into troubled situations, so we may be agents of transformation. If we believe God can use us, we can make a difference.

"When God originally called us, people thought we wouldn't last a week. Yet here we are."