Rwanda’s Lesson About Government [Reader Post]

The story of Immaculee Iligabiza is destined to be, I think, one of the defining stories of our time, like that of Anne Frank or Solzhenitsyn. Her story has been featured on “60 Minutes” and PBS; her books “Left To Tell” and “Led By Faith”, as well as her new book on Our Lady of Kibeho in Rwanda have been international bestsellers. I urge you to read them. They will sweep you away; I read each in one day apiece.

Her story is a truly amazing one. She came from a fairly well-to-do, religious Catholic family in a small town in Western Rwanda. Her parents were educators, heavily involved in charities and community-minded. Then the horrible genocide of 1994 began. She got home from college just as the maelstrom of killing began. Her father sent her to the local Protestant pastor in hopes he would hide her from the machete-wielding Hutus bent on wiping out the Tutsis. The pastor did hide her with seven other women in a tiny bathroom (see the picture above) where she spent three months praying and becoming transformed in mind and heart. It is a story replete with miracles and palpable evidence of the Providence of God. Her entire family (save one brother) and most of her friends were wiped out and at several times she really should have met their fate, too. But she feels she was saved for the purpose of warning the world at large about the dangers she saw herself. Her remedy?: Faith, Family, Forgiveness, Fortitude. These are the most powerful forces in the world building a Kingdom that is unshakeable.

After reading her books, one fact struck me pretty hard: this was a GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED genocide. Some blame can be laid at the feet of the Belgians for the adversarial structures they purposefully left. For decades, the dominant Hutu tribe used government social policy and rules to marginalize the smaller Tutsi tribe (also known by some as the ‘Wahtusi’). Immaculee experienced this when she was forced to always show her tribal identification card at school, for instance. [Immaculee finds this quite ironic in that centuries of intermarriage have made the physical distinctions almost useless, much as the ‘Aryan’ ravings of the Nazis had little factual basis.] The government also co-opted media sources, making them into propagandistic hate sites. Tutsis were routinely labeled ‘cockroaches’ or vermin and were increasingly barred from access to knowledge and power. When the Hutu President was killed in 1994, the government officially closed everything so that killing squads, trained for years, could devote all their energy to implementing the ‘final solution’ of killing ALL Tutsis.

It’s amazing how powerful government and media can be. Immaculee’s own friends and neighbors, people she knew and trusted, were among those taunting her in the house where she was hiding as they were searching for her, describing how they would slowly torture and gang rape her. About a million people were killed in ways so heinous it was like hell on earth.

And yet, partly thanks to people like Immaculee, a grass-roots movement (not a government mandate!) of forgiveness and charity has helped make Rwanda a re-born jewel of prosperity and peace. (The Benebikira Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, which takes care of hundreds of orphans, is part of this general effort.)

There is certainly a lesson here for us in this country right now. It’s never a good thing to give any government too much of the power we the people have by right. What are this remarkable story and this remarkable woman trying to teach us?

I invite you to read what Immaculee has to say. And please spread the word. It’s too important to keep it under a bushel basket.