Discovery of Rwandan genocide priest taints Vatican
May 17, 2009
Uwayezu, far left, meets Giuseppe Betori, archbishop of Florence, who
approved the Rwandan’s appointment
London Times | May 17, 2009
By Jon Swain
Source: http://aftermathnews.wordpress.com/category/genocide/
THE Vatican has come under renewed pressure to purge its ranks of
suspected killers after a second Rwandan Catholic priest accused of
involvement in the 1994 genocide was found to be working in Italy under
an assumed name.
An international arrest warrant is being prepared by Rwanda for
Father Emmanuel Uwayezu following the discovery that he is working in a
parish at Empoli, near Florence. It will accuse him of direct complicity
in the massacre of more than 80 students, aged from 12 to 20, at a
Catholic school where he was headmaster.
One of the few survivors lives in Britain. She still has nightmares
and is too afraid to be identified by name. Last week she identified
Uwayezu and described how he brought soldiers to the school at Kibeho
and conspired with them to have the Tutsi students killed.
“He seemed to be happy with what he was doing. He told us to stay in
the classroom. Some people who were working in the kitchen were shot in
front of his eyes but he did not say a word. Others were hacked to
death, raped or buried alive,” she said. “Now Uwayezu is enjoying his
life. Is he really a father [priest]?”
Uwayezu denied taking part in the genocide and said he had tried to
save the students. He said their deaths still haunted him. He is a Hutu
like another notorious Rwandan priest, Athanase Seromba, who joined the
campaign to exterminate Rwanda’s Tutsi minority and who also ended up in
Florence.
After the genocide they both escaped to Italy with the help of
Catholic supporters and began new lives as priests with the approval of
Florence’s archbishop. Seromba, who was found in Italy by The Sunday
Times, is serving a life sentence after being convicted of slaughtering
2,000 of his parishioners by bulldozing his church as they cowered
inside. He was the first priest to be tried by a United Nations war
crimes tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity.
For a long time the Vatican had vigorously proclaimed his innocence.
It also questioned the objectivity of a Belgian court that had given two
Rwandan Benedictine nuns long jail sentences for genocide.
It remains to be seen how it will react in Uwayezu’s case. He has
modified his name slightly and is known to his parishioners as Wayezu.
In Rwanda in 1994, the Catholic church was the most powerful
institution after the government, but some senior members sided openly
with the Hutu extremist government and the church hierarchy failed to
prevent the slaughter. In 100 days of killing, 800,000 members of the
Tutsi minority were massacred. Some priests and nuns sided with the Hutu
militias and joined in the slaughter.
Yesterday Rakiya Omaar, the director of African Rights, a human
rights organisation that has investigated the genocide and which has
issued a comprehensive report on Uwayezu’s activities during the
genocide, called on the Catholic church and the Italian and Rwandan
authorities to conduct their own investigation.
“All concerned will have drawn lessons from the Seromba case,” she
said. “Denials and dismissals by the Catholic church eventually led to
his conviction and imprisonment for the remainder of his life.”
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