Actually, Rwanda, would rather you said sorry...

Rwandans want an apology from the Roman Catholic Church for the participation of its clergy in the 1994 genocide and for the role of colonial era clerics like the late Monsignor Andre Perraudin in fomenting the politics of tribal extremism in Rwanda.

Francis Nzamwita — whose entire family of 30 people perished during the ‘94 bloodbath, half a dozen of them in the St Famille church in Kigali — does not think the church will ever offer one. “The church’s leadership does not regard us as people,” says Nzamwita. “They even welcome killers and hide them in the Vatican!”

Nzamwita alludes to the fact that the Catholic Church not only shielded genocide suspect priests who found their way to Europe immediately after the RPF’s defeat of the Habyarimana regime and the Nsindikubwabo/Kambanda cliques which planned and executed the genocide; it also found them duties as parish priests in Italy and other European countries.

Nzamwita (and thousands of other Rwandans) is also bitter that the Pope has taken the step of saying sorry — no matter how belatedly — to Irish Catholics for the sexual abuse of young boys by paedophile priests but for Rwandan victims of the genocide the church “has shown only contempt.”

That has been a common refrain of Rwandans and their government whenever the topic is the Roman Catholic Church: This contempt for survivors manifested by its continued silence over the well-documented participation in massacres by senior members of its clergy.

The refrain is back with regularity, voiced mostly by angry callers to FM radio stations, as the Western media continues to unearth details of paedophile priest scandals all over Europe and America.    

Strictly speaking, the Vatican may not have harboured any genocidaire priests within its confines in Rome.

But it appointed suspect genocidaire priests to parishes in Europe — among them at least two notorious killers whom the Vatican gave parishes in Italy, i.e. in close proximity to it.

These were Father Emmanuel Uwayezu to a parish in Empoli and Father Athanase Seromba to one in Florence.

Genocide survivors accuse Uwayezu of direct complicity in the massacre of more than 80 Tutsi students aged 12 to 20 at a Catholic school where he was the head.

Rwanda has prepared and issued an international arrest warrant for this man.

Athanase Seromba in April 1994 lured over 2,000 desperate men, women and children — Tutsis who were trying to find refuge from Interahamwe militias hunting them — to his church.

Once they were inside, Seromba, who had an AK 47 in his robes, ordered a bulldozer to bring the church building down on the terrified refugees.

He personally was shooting anyone who tried to scramble out of the church.

Seromba has since been surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.