"Germany, Congo, Darfur, Rwanda" -- by Dr. Josh Ruxin

April 7, 2008, was the 14th anniversary of the commencement of Rwanda’s genocide. With periodic massacres that date back to 1959, Rwanda’s genocide did not happen overnight. Its climax, however, began April 7, 1994. It was a few days later that 36-year-old Epafrodite Rugengamanzi was murdered. From what his sister, Josepha, has gathered, he was chased into the yard of the house where we now live, brutally killed, and buried. Her brother’s killer confessed to the murder during gacaca — the traditional court process for genocide suspects — and brought her to his burial spot.

The disinterment of Epafrodite Rugengamanzi

Josepha came to our house Wednesday with other family members and dug up her brother’s skeleton. The orchestrated process took several hours. Once they were sure that all of his bones had been collected, they carefully cleaned them. Josepha then asked me and my family to come over and listen to their testimony (and asked us to share it with others). Josepha was smiling and told us how lucky she felt to have found her brother’s bones and to be able to re-bury them shortly at Gisozi, the national genocide museum and burial ground.

Epafrodite Rugengamanzi

Josh Ruxin with Josepha

Epafrodite’s murder was avoidable, since the UN had the power to prevent it. Ultimately it was not an international team of peacekeepers who brought Rwanda’s genocide to a close, but rather, the Rwanda Patriotic Army, a disciplined military force drawn from Rwanda’s diaspora. After years of fighting, the Rwanda Patriotic Army on July 4, 1994, brought stability to the country. Human Rights Watch, a French judge, and a Spanish judge allege, however, that the Rwanda Patriotic Army carried out thousands of reprisal killings and crimes against humanity during and after the genocide. President Kagame publicly bristled this past week over the recent Spanish indictment.

A close look at the complexities of Rwanda’s genocide would remind China’s leader Hu Jintao, President Bush and others of the path history can take, yet does not have to. Darfur is at least beginning to take on some of the dimensions of Rwanda: a gradual genocide in a region still lacking an adequate peacekeeping force and the political commitment to bring it to an end. The carnage there continues and now a new genocide threatens in Southern Sudan. While hope has so far proven elusive for Sudan, it is even harder to imagine that its people will get themselves on Rwanda’s track to peace and prosperity anytime in the next few decades. Rwanda’s resilience and approach are exceptional.

My friend and head of Orphans of Rwanda, Jean Baptiste Ntakirutimana, wrote me the other day about his meeting last week with his mother’s killer: “I inquired first about his life in prison, his family and his state of mind. He said he was expecting that I could kill him, which he thinks was the way of doing justice for having killed my mum. He added that no one dared killing my mum; that she was brought by two militia to her home village and called for people to come and kill her. No one did so besides him who felt he had to kill her. In fact he told us that they were told that no one was allowed to loot from Tutsis before killing all their family members. Since they thought I was already killed from Kigali, where I was residing, the only hindrance to take all the family property was my mum. So she had to be killed. By the time he started explaining how he killed her I partly lost consciousness. I prayed to God to give me His spirit to revive me and give me more strength to continue, as I felt it was His mission I was on. Miraculously I felt warmth from my head to my feet, I felt like a big rock melting from my chest and my head. I felt very refreshed, cleaned up my tears and carried on the conversation tremendously relieved from my whole being. I then told him that I have personally been forgiven all my wrong from God and that it is in the same spirit that I was coming to him offering him pardon myself. Then it was like a huge veil off his face he started smiling with a lot of words of gratitude. He started holding my hands and telling me many other things I couldn’t expect about himself and the reality around the genocide. He agreed to go and see other people for whose family members he killed.”

Fourteen years later, Rwandans are still struggling to reconcile the past. The struggle, however, is proving easier against a backdrop of national stability, economic growth, and a rising national profile. Foreign investment is at a high, there are swank hotels, and tourists are coming by the thousands.

Post-genocide history is mired in enduring civil conflict and instability. Rwandans know firsthand that exports such as peace and stability are far superior to tales of disaster, massacres, and corruption. Rather than provide the object lesson of what can go wrong, Rwanda now embodies quite a different ideal. The nation was one of the first to send peacekeepers to Darfur and today has one of the largest contingents on the ground. Nothing points more clearly to Rwanda’s recovery and resolve.

Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last couple of years living in Rwanda, where he administers the Millennium Villages Project in Mayange. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker. His regular posts (including this one) can be found on the blogroll of Nick Kristof of the New York Times, and he has given his permission to be cross-posted here. Josh and EGR executive director Mike Kinman team-teach a global poverty module for Trinity, Wall Street's Clergy Leadership Project.

"Using the broad stage of the Olympics to promote justice" - by Emily Bloemker

Some of my earliest memories involve watching the Olympics with my mom – in our household, during Olympics weeks, we would spend every evening and weekend watching events coverage. I remember, at age five, seeing Greg Louganis hit his head on a diving board. I remember, more clearly, the Magnificent Seven gymnasts of 1996 – at age thirteen, I cried when Kerri Strug (after spraining her ankle) stuck the landing on her second vault attempt and sealed the U.S. women’s gymnastics victory for that year. In our household, and across the world, Olympics have always meant high drama.

And so it continues, but on a broader stage, with more dire consequences. I recently read a post by Nicholas Kristof, entitled The Genocide Olympics. A latecomer to some human-rights issues, I only became aware a few years ago of China’s poor human rights record via the controversy surrounding “Bodies … the Exhibition” in which many worried about the origin of the displayed bodies, obtained from dubious Chinese sources. In his post, Kristof raises questions about the upcoming Beijing Olympics, especially in light of China’s unapologetic underwriting of the Sudanese genocide. In a later post, Kristof outlines his reasons for opposing a boycott, but gives few suggestions of how the average citizen can proceed.

I believe that the Beijing Olympics, and China’s support of the Sudanese genocide, are issues that Christians cannot ignore. So here are a few ideas:

We must educate ourselves, first thing, if we are not already informed. A good place to start is Amnesty International, which is tracking China’s progress in the leadup to the Olympics.

We must pay attention to see if there is one aspect of this very large injustice which catches us: is it the economic participation in entities that support the Sudanese genocide? Socially responsible investing in general? The location of the Olympics in China in the first place? If you are concerned about socially responsible investing, I would suggest visiting Amy Domini’s website – she received an honorary doctorate from Berkeley Divinity School last year, and is a powerful force for good in the investment world. If you would prefer to target investment that supports genocide in Sudan, I recommend visiting this Sudan divestment page, which gives a map of the United States and various divestment efforts happening in them. Finally, if you are opposed to the location of the Olympics in China in the first place, I encourage you to start up discussions with friends, to raise the question from your pulpits, to write about it on your blogs. I hope to preach about an aspect of this issue during my work as a camp chaplain this summer, and I also plan to raise the question of human rights in every conversation I have about the Olympics (and there will be many, since my love of the Olympic games has not waned since childhood).

What is the best way to use this Olympics to spur just action on behalf of the persecuted people of Sudan? How can we best raise awareness and respond to the needs of our brothers and sisters? Let us see this broad stage of controversy as an opportunity for advocacy and justice, and to not allow the opportunity to pass without our voices being heard.

Emily Bloemker is a middler at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, Emily has traveled in Haiti and Sudan with the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Church.

"A Genocide Foretold" by Nicholas Kristof

A chilling editorial from Nick Kristof of the New York Times.

JUBA, Sudan - The Sudanese government started the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur, and now it seems to be preparing to start the second here among the thatch-roof huts of southern Sudan.

South Sudan is rich in oil, but its people are among the poorest in the world, far poorer than those in Darfur. Only 1 percent of girls here finish elementary school, meaning that a young woman is more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than to become literate. Leprosy and Ebola linger here. South Sudan is the size of Texas, yet it has only 10 miles of paved road and almost no electricity; just about the only running water here is the Nile River.

The poverty is mostly the result of the civil war between North and South Sudan that raged across the southern part of the country for two decades and cost 2 million lives. For many impoverished villagers, their only exposure to modern technology has been to endure bombings by the Sudanese Air Force. The war finally ended, thanks in part to strong American pressure, in 2005 with a landmark peace agreement — but that peace is now fraying.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is backing away from the peace agreement, and prodding Arab militias to revive the war with the South Sudan military forces. Small-scale armed clashes have broken out since late last year, and it looks increasingly likely that Darfur will become simply the prologue to a far bloodier conflict that engulfs all Sudan.

Even my presence here is a sign of the rising tensions and mistrust. The Sudanese government refuses me visas, but the authorities in the south let me enter from Kenya without a visa because they want the word to get out that war is again looming.

The authorities in disputed areas such as the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile State also welcomed me, rather than arresting me, even though those areas technically are on the northern side of the dividing line. Local officials in both areas warned that President Bashir and his radical Arab political party are preparing to revive the war against non-Arab groups in the south and center of the country.

"If things go on as they are now, war will break out," said Sila Musa Kangi, the commissioner of Kormuk in Blue Nile. "And it can break out at any time."

Although people speak of renewed "war," the violence is more likely to resemble what happens in a stockyard. If it is like the last time, government-sponsored Arab militias will slaughter civilians so as to terrorize local populations and drive them far away from oil wells.

Read the entire piece here.