Global Policy Forum

By Marlise Simons

Every day, it is the mass spilling of blood that dominates the debates in the rambling courthouse of Arusha, a town in Tanzania. Always the questions are grave, but sometimes they weigh more heavily, as they do now.

Five clergymen are to be tried in this East African town on charges that have shaken the trust of many Christians in the region. Their cases have drawn less attention than the turbulence over sexual abuse by priests in the United States and other countries. But the accusations in Arusha are more serious. The five men are accused of genocide.

Three are Roman Catholic priests, one is a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, one an Anglican bishop. Prosecutors at the United Nations war crimes tribunal for Rwanda maintain that the five collaborated with killers in their congregations during the 1994 civil war, when more than 500,000 people were slain.

Each of the accused will be prosecuted separately and the pastor's trial is now under way. Two others are due to start later this year. It is the first time that any member of the clergy has stood accused of genocide before an international tribunal like the court in The Hague that deals with the former Yugoslavia.

The clergymen, all of them Rwandan citizens, will be judged for their individual responsibility. But human rights groups hope that the event will force the churches to re-examine broader issues, like the role of senior members of the clergy in Rwandan politics and the near passivity of the church hierarchy while the killing frenzy was going on.

Soul-searching debates have not come into the open, and rights groups complain that numerous letters to Roman Catholic Church leaders, including Pope John Paul II, have evoked no response. But some remarkable signs of change have quietly appeared. Court officials say the Catholic Church, which until now had been shielding priests and nuns accused of wrongdoing in Rwanda, has begun to cooperate with the tribunal.

"There's been a clear turnabout in the Catholic Church," said a senior official with the prosecutor's office. "In the last few months they have done everything to facilitate our work. It's a major change."

He declined to give details but noted that two indicted priests had recently given themselves up to the tribunal, on orders from their superiors. One is the Rev. Athanase Seromba, accused of helping to kill about 2,000 people who had taken refuge in his church, by ordering bulldozers to crush the building. Later, Father Seromba worked as a priest in Italy under an assumed name and then went into hiding after the tribunal tried to have him extradited. He surrendered in early February after international pressure was put on the Italian government and the Vatican.

The second Catholic priest is the Rev. Hormisdas Nsengimana, who had been living under the protection of a monastery in Cameroon. Prosecutors charge him with playing a prominent role when a group of Hutus attacked and killed refugees in and around the Christ-Roi College, where he was rector. Both men were recently transferred to the United Nations jail in Arusha.

They joined a third priest, the Rev. Emmanuel Rukundo, an army chaplain, who was sent to Arusha after being detained in Geneva last year. It is not known if there are more clergymen among the tribunal's secret indictments.

The role of church workers during the slaughter in Rwanda, where more than 80 percent of the population is Christian, has already been the subject of much scrutiny in the news media.

Critics have pointed to several Catholic and Protestant leaders who sided openly with the Hutu government in the months before it orchestrated the slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Christian Terras, the author of "The Lost Honor of the Church," published in France, said many Hutus in the clergy had been aware of political meetings of extremist Hutus before the wave of killings, or had even attended them. "As many as 100 pastors, priests and nuns played an active role, siding with the Hutu militias," Mr. Terras said.

The killing frenzy lasted three months, and during that time the church hierarchy called for peace. "But at best, leaders sometimes sounded ambiguous and they never used their moral power to condemn or stop the massacres," he said. Reports abound of heroic pastors, priests and nuns who stood up to the killers and saved people. According to estimates, at least 300 clergymen and nuns were slain themselves because they were Tutsi or because they were helping others.

But there is also evidence of refugees seeking protection in churches, only to be trapped and killed after church workers called in armed mobs.

Genocide trials in local courts in Rwanda have already included church workers, and in 1998 two priests were sentenced to death. They remain in Rwandan jails, together with at least half a dozen other clergymen.

In Belgium last year, two Rwandan nuns received long prison sentences after a local jury convicted them of crimes against humanity, finding them guilty of collaborating with murderous militia gangs.

There has been little public reaction from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II wrote a letter in 1996, saying that "the church in itself cannot be held responsible for the misdeeds of its members," but he added that all church members "who have sinned during the genocide must have the courage to bear the consequences."

The Anglican Church went further. The archbishop of Canterbury went to Rwanda himself and apologized. An Anglican bishop, Samuel Musabyimana, is among the church workers waiting to be tried at the tribunal in Arusha.

The first clergyman to go on trial was the Rev. Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, the former leader of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Kibuye region. Arrested in Texas in 1996, he fought extradition but finally became the first person handed over by the United States to an international tribunal.

Pastor Ntakirutimana, 77, is facing a panel of judges from Norway, South Africa and Senegal, and is charged along with his son Gerard, a doctor. The trial of the two men, which began in September, is expected to go on until this summer. Both men have pleaded not guilty to charges that they were linked to the slaughter at the Mugonero Adventist church and hospital complex, headed by the pastor.

According to the prosecution, the pastor and his son, both Hutus, took part in planning the attack on more than 2,000 Tutsi gathered in the complex and the two were in the convoy that led the attack and later tracked down survivors who had fled to the nearby hills.

Ramsey Clark, a former United States attorney general and the pastor's lawyer, said: "The evidence is overwhelming that the pastor was not present during the assault. He and others left at 7 o'clock that morning, hours before the crowd arrived and the violence began."

Mr. Clark said he found the indictments of the pastor and of other religious workers questionable and disturbing. "I'm not religious but I believe in truth and facts," Mr. Clark said. "People who hate the church have insisted on the involvement of priests and nuns." One witness who testified in the small paneled court was "MM," the son of the Rev. Isaka Rucondo, an Adventist pastor who was killed at the complex.

MM, as the court identifies him, said the accused abandoned his pastors and congregation. He described how one night after vespers, his father and five other Tutsi pastors who were caring for refugees wrote a letter to the accused, asking him to appeal to the mayor on their behalf.

The letter, which Pastor Ntakirutimana later showed to Philip Gourevitch, a writer, is now a prosecution exhibit. Addressed to "Our dear leader," the letter says, "We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families." A reply from the pastor came back saying that nothing could be done, the witness said.

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