9 - Remembering 1994 in Congo-Nil

Summary

The interviews that Christian Terras, Andrea Grieder and I conducted and the minutes of Maindron's gacaca appeal trial open a window into the survivors’ memories of the French priest's role during the genocide. There were different opinions among them of course, though on certain aspects of the narrative only. I did not pick up any substantial variation in the stories of the genocide survivors who were interviewed once or more and who testified at the gacaca appeal court.

According to the survivors, Maindron's attitude changed after the RPF's attack in the north of Rwanda in October 1990. ‘When he arrived,’ Anastase Uwobibabaje, a Tutsi who later became the president of Ibuka for the Rutsiro district, declared during the gacaca trial, ‘he was a priest who helped people. When the political parties started, he wore the hat of the CDR.’ This Hutu extremist party was feared by the Tutsi. Mathias Abimana concurred. Abimana was a Christian believer so committed to reconciliation despite the loss of his wife and two children that he resolved, a few years after the genocide, to forgive Maindron, even though the French priest never expressed remorse for not having publicly denounced the massacres of Tutsi in Congo-Nil, as Stanislas Urbaniak, another expatriate, had done, for example. He and Maindron were very close prior to the genocide:

When he arrived at the parish in 1985, he found me as president of the parish council. I was his right hand. […] He visited me often. He was my confidant. Every month he would give me and my children the sacrament of confession.

Maindron's attitude changed the very month of the attack, when rumours started to spread that Abimana had given money to send a member of the community to the RPF. Maindron asked his parish council chairperson to write a letter to President Habyarimana stating that he dissociated himself publicly, on behalf of all the Tutsi, from the invading army. Mathias responded that he did not have the authority to do so and that he had nothing to do with a war that was happening at the other end of Rwanda.