Bishop Misago, the head of the Gikongoro diocese, had been jailed since April 14, 1999, on charges connected with the ethnic massacres of 1994. He had faced the death penalty if convicted. Instead, he was ordered released at the conclusion of a trial that had lasted for ten months.

In a statement published in the evening of June 15, several hours after the verdict was announced, the Vatican indicated that “one can only rejoice that the truth was recognized, and hope that just judicial solutions can also be found for the thousands of people still jailed in Rwanda’s prisons for crimes of genocide.” (An estimated 120,000 people are still awaiting trial on such charges.) The statement added that “in all cases the death penalty should be avoided.”

The Vatican voiced the hope that the court’s decision in the Misago trial might have a positive impact on Church-state relations in Rwanda. The bishop’s trial had been accompanied by charges that the government was seeking to portray the Catholic Church as a scapegoat for the ethnic massacres.

The court found that Bishop Misago had been wrongfully accused by the country’s former leader, President Pasteur Bizimungu. “The court orders Misago freed. Misago has won the trial,” pronounced Judge Jaiere Rutaremara.

Bishop Misago’s body sagged in relief as the verdict was announced.

Bishop Misago had been accused of conspiring with Hutu militia members to plan the massacre of members of the minority Tutsi tribe. But defense lawyers for the bishop had argued that the prosecution was never able to substantiate any such charge. In fact, they argued, the prosecution had been reduced to arguing that the bishop was slow to act in providing help for the Tutsi victims—an argument which they also denied.

Prosecutors were able to demonstrate that the bishop had attended one meeting at which Hutu troops discussed “security” issues; the prosecution claimed that at this meeting, plans for the massacres were discussed. But the defense pointed out that the Hutu soldiers had compelled the bishop, among others, to attend the meeting. “If he had refused to go, he would have been killed himself,” Bishop Misago’s lawyer observed.

The bishop’s defense had charged that the prosecution of Bishop Misago was part of a campaign by the government to discredit the Catholic Church, and thus to deflect international attention from its own culpability for the 1994 massacres. Vatican officials had frequently indicated their support for such complaints, and their confidence in the bishop’s innocence.

“This is the day of justice and peace!” exulted Archbishop Salvatore Pennacchio as he celebrated the court’s decision acquitting Bishop Misago.

Archbishop Pennacchio, the papal nuncio in Rwanda, observed that the court’s decision was “in conformity with the evidence brought forward in court, which demonstrated without the slightest doubt Bishop Misago’s absolute innocence.”

The nuncio also noted that when the verdict was read in court, the crowd reacted with a loud burst of applause. “Everyone was hugging everyone,” he reported. That popular reaction, he said, suggests that the people of Rwanda recognized the bishop’s innocence, and supported the Catholic Church despite government efforts to paint the Church as a scapegoat for the mass killings of 1994.

In Rome, Cardinal Jozef Tomko, the prefect of the Congregation for Evangelization, also expressed pleasure with the verdict. But in an interview with the Fides news service, the cardinal cautioned that the trials of the African Church are not over. “Bishop Misago was not the only one targeted,” he observed. “In central Africa—the Great Lakes Region in particular—there is a move to weaken the Church under various pretexts. . . . In Africa we see a strategy similar to the one used in the 1970s in South America, when to weaken the witness of the Church, they attacked bishops and encouraged the spreading of cults and ideologies.”

Cardinal Tomko charged that many political forces are aligned against the Church, because Catholic leaders defend individuals against ruthless commercial exploitation. But he saw the role of the Church as an important and positive one. “The Church in the region of the Great Lakes is not afraid: she works fearlessly for reconciliation, peace and justice, welcoming even the destiny of martyrdom,” he said.

The report, prepared by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), also criticized the OAU and the UN. Stephen Lewis, a member of the panel that prepared the report, said the group was “dumbfounded by the involvement of France from beginning to end.”

French officials “were closer in every way to the Habyarimana regime than any other government; they could have stopped the genocide before it began. They knew exactly what was happening,” Lewis said. “Worse . . . they facilitated the exodus of a huge number of genocidaires, thereby ushering in the larger Great Lakes catastrophe.” Juvenal Habyarimana was the president of Rwanda for 15 years until he was killed when his plane was shot down on April 6, 1994—the event that sparked the genocide.

Lewis also said the panel was “shocked” by the role of the Catholic Church. He said, “We specifically name the Catholic Church because its involvement with Habyarimana before the genocide, and the involvement of some of its leaders during the genocide, was entirely unforgivable.” While some priests and religious died trying to stop the genocide, “there were also numbers of leaders of the Church who did not speak out strongly and did not take stands,” he said.

The report faulted the Catholic and Anglican church leaders for ignoring human rights abuses and thereby unwittingly encouraging radicals to launch the genocide. “Church leaders failed to use their unique moral position among the overwhelmingly Christian population to denounce ethnic hatred and human rights abuse,” the report said.

However, evidence that the massacre of Tutsis had a significant anti-Christian component to it raises suspicions about this claim. The Hutu violence involved the slaughtering of many thousands of Tutsis within their own churches. Christian missionary Peter Hammond, who has served throughout Africa since the early 1980s notes that “the holocaust in Rwanda has been widely reported; however, the anti-Christian aspect of the Hutu mass murder seems to have been generally ignored. So too has the influence of witchcraft, Marxism, and Islam in fomenting this Hutu hatred against the Tutsi Christians.”

The panel makes a number of recommendations on rebuilding Rwanda and on how the international community can help. The need for reparations is “our major recommendation,” Lewis said. “There has to be some measure of international response to the Rwandan predicament given the responsibility of the international community at the time and maybe this is one of the ways to do it.”

“It is of course true that there would have been no genocide had a small group among the Rwandan governing elite not deliberately incited the country’s Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority,” the report said. “But this terribly conspiracy only succeeded because certain actors external to Rwanda allowed it to go ahead.”

Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide was presented at the UN by Lewis, ambassador from Canada. He quoted from the report saying that since the genocide many parties had apologized but “no apology has yet come from the French government or the Catholic Church.” The report claims that “In the colonial era, under German and then Belgian rule, Roman Catholic missionaries, inspired by the overtly racist theories of 19th century Europe, concocted a destructive ideology of ethnic cleavage and racial ranking that attributed superior qualities to the country’s Tutsi minority,” charges which historians note are spurious since they apply also to the colonization of Canada and its native population. Anti-Catholic sentiment is evident as the report says, in that “since the missionaries ran the colonial-era schools, these pernicious values were systematically transmitted to several generations of Rwandans, along with more conventional Catholic teachings.”