Il nous faut reconnaître avec une profonde tristesse que certains de nos membres d’Église se sont retournés contre leur frères et contre leurs voisins. Ray Dabrowski (directeur de la communication au siège mondial de l’Église adventiste)
Notre cher guide, pasteur Elizaphan Ntakirutimana,
Comment allez-vous ?
Nous vous souhaitons d’être fort dans tous ces problèmes que vous affrontez, et avons le plaisir de vous informer que demain nous seront tous tués avec nos familles.
Nous vous demandons donc d’intervenir pour nous auprès du maire. Nous croyons que, avec l’aide de Dieu qui vous a confié la direction de ce troupeau qui va être détruit, votre intervention sera hautement appréciée, de la même manière que les juifs furent sauvés par Esther.
Nous vous rendons honneur.
Signée des pasteurs Ezekiel Semugeshi, Isaka Rucondon, Seth Rwanyabuto, Eliezer Seromba, Seth Sebihe, Jerome Gakwaya, et Ezekias Zigirinshuti. (Lettre de 7 pasteurs toutsis à leur supérieur, le pasteur Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, à la veille de leur extermination)
Suite à nos billets sur le génocide rwandais et sur les Justes de France …
Retour sur l’un des cas les plus particuliers de ce génocide, celui de ces autorités morales qui, au contraire des Justes, lui ont apporté leur caution morale.
Notamment ce pasteur (adventiste) et son fils médecin, retrouvés par le journaliste du New Yorker Philip Gourevitch, qui ont transformé les église et hôpital dont ils avaient la charge en véritable abattoirs!
Et, répondant à la supplique que leur faisaient leurs subordonnés, pasteurs adventistes eux aussi mais toutsis (« Nous avons le plaisir de vous informer que demain nous seront tous tués avec nos familles », phrase qui inspira son titre aux chroniques de Gourevitch), leur feront cette terrible réponse :
« Samedi, seize, à exactement neuf heures du matin, vous serez attaqués. Votre problème a déjà trouvé une solution. Vous devez mourir. »
Rwanda : Le premier pasteur jugé pour génocide par le TPIR sort de prison
Elizaphan Ntakirutimana avait été arrêté en 1996
Le pasteur adventiste, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, premier homme d’église jugé par le Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda (TPIR) pour sa participation au génocide de 1994 et premier condamné de cette juridiction onusienne, est sorti de prison mercredi en fin de matinée. Il était incarcéré au centre de détention du TPIR à Arusha, dans le nord de la Tanzanie.
jeudi 7 décembre 2006, par Panapress
Doyen d’âge des détenus du TPIR, le pasteur adventiste Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, âgé de 82 ans, avait été condamné définitivement à 10 ans de prison après avoir été reconnu coupable de massacres de Tutsis en 1994 dans le complexe adventiste de Mugonero (ouest du Rwanda) dont il était responsable.
Le complexe abritait une église, un hôpital et une école d’infirmières. Sanglé dans un costume kaki, le pasteur a été accueilli à sa sortie de prison par son épouse et un des ses fils. Affaibli par l’âge et la maladie, il a déclaré à la presse qu’il ne savait pas où aller, l’administration du tribunal n’étant pas encore parvenue à lui trouver un pays d’accueil.
Le pasteur clame toujours son innocence
Ntakirutimana qui refuse de retourner au Rwanda va être temporairement logé par le TPIR à Arusha, en attendant qu’un pays d’accueil lui soit trouvé, selon une source au greffe du tribunal. Comme il l’avait clamé lors de son procès en première instance et en appel, le pasteur a déclaré qu’il n’avait jamais tué personne de sa vie. « J’ai été condamné sur la base de fausses accusations », a-t-il réitéré d’une voix à peine audible.
Ntakirutimana avait été arrêté le 29 septembre 1996 aux Etats-Unis et transféré à Arusha le 24 mars 2000, au terme d’une longue bataille juridique contre son extradition. Il laisse à la prison du TPIR son fils, Gérard, un médecin, condamné à 25 ans de prison. Trois autres hommes d’église, les abbés catholiques Athanase Seromba, Emmanuel Rukundo et Hormisdas Nsengimana sont détenus par le TPIR pour leur rôle présumé dans le génocide de 1994 au Rwanda.
Le plus haut responsable religieux jamais arrêté par ce tribunal des Nations unies, l’évêque anglican Samuel Musabyimana, est décédé en détention en 2003 avant même l’ouverture de son procès. Depuis sa création par l’ONU en novembre 1994, le TPIR a prononcé à ce jour 26 condamnations et 5 acquittements.
Voir aussi un extrait de la chronique de Gourevitch:
« The Mean Streets of Laredo »
Philip Gourevitch
The New Yorker
October 7, 1996
Talk story about Elizaphan Ntakirutimana. Twenty-four hours before F.B.I. agents in Laredo, Texas, arrested Elizaphan Ntakirutimana last week on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda, the 73-yr.-old suspect’s son Eliel and Eliel’s wife, Genny, sat in their newly built mansion near the Laredo Country Club, denouncing the accusations that are made against the old man by genocide survivors.
« They see us as rich and well educated, » Eliel said, and Genny said, « The Rwandese don’t like if you are rich or in good health. »… Eliel is a cardiac anesthesiologist and a naturalized American citizen who has lived in this country since 1980 … Ntakirutimana’s voice was full of angry disbelief. « It is all 100% pure lies, » he said. « I did not kill any people. I never told anybody to kill any people… » Ntakirutimana…is a Seventh Day Adventist pastor… He did not know, as he spoke, that an indictment had already been issued against him by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, describing him as an organizer of the program to exterminate the Tutsi minority at 2 locations in Rwanda’s mountainous western province of Kibuye, in 1994. In Mugonero, the village where Ntakirutimana lived, thousands of Tutsis took refuge in the hospital, and survivors say that the pastor made them false promises of projection…and collaborated with local governmental authorities in preparing the attack in which all but a handful of those at the hospital were killed in a single day. According to his indictment… Ntakirutimana then strayed further afield, leading attacks against Tutsis who had taken refuge in the mountains…he insists that he had nothing to do with it and was helpless to stop it… The family’s Laredo lawyer, Lazaro Garza-Gongora, said, « What’s the evidence? Eyewitnesses? Anybody can say they saw anything. » That is true, but from listening to survivor’s accounts, it’s hard to believe that anybody could have seen as little as Ntakirutimana claims to have seen. The Rwanda tribunal is based in Tanzania, and if Ntakirutimana fights his extradition it may be some time before he faces his accusers directly… The court may then have to confront the difficult question of when an authority figure’s failure to resist genocide amounts to participation in the crime.
Journalist Philip Gourevitch was one of the first people to draw the world’s attention to the Rwandan genocide. His book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, brought the genocide into living rooms, classrooms and the popular imagination. The book’s title comes from a story Gourevitch tells that takes place during the early stages of the genocide. The author tells how Tutsi sought refuge in a small hilltop village in the province of Kibuye called Mugonero. Headquarters of the Seventh-Day Adventist mission, Mugonero has a complex of buildings that include a church and hospital.
Gourevitch tells the story of what happened to those Tutsi, and the fate of their spiritual leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana.
Among the Tutsis at the Mugonero church and hospital complex were seven Adventist pastors who quickly assumed their accustomed role as leaders of the flock. When two policemen turned up at the hospital, and announced that their job was to protect the refugees, the Tutsi pastors took up a collection, and raised almost four hundred dollars for the policemen. For several days, all was calm. Then, toward evening on April 15, the policemen said they had to leave because the hospital was to be attacked the next morning. They drove away in in a car with Dr. Gerard [A son of Pastor Ntakirutimana], and the seven pastors in the hospital advised their fellow refugees to expect the end. Then the pastors sat down together and wrote letters to the mayor and to their boss, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, Dr. Gerard’s father, asking them in the name of the Lord to intercede on their behalf.1
[The letter reads as follows:]
Our dear leader, Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana:
How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. We therefore request you to intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you the leadership of the flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same ways as the Jews were saved by Esther.
We give honor to you.
The letter was signed by Pastors Ezekiel Semugeshi, Isaka Rucondon, Seth Rwanyabuto, Eliezer Seromba, Seth Sebihe, Jerome Gakwaya, and Ezekias Zigirinshuti.2
The response to their plea came within hours. Samuel Ndagijimana, a Tutsi orderly at the hospital who was now seeking refuge, recounts the events surrounding the letter:
‘And the response came,’ Samuel said. ‘It was Dr. Gerard who announced it: “Saturday, the sixteenth, at exactly nine o’clock in the morning, you will be attacked.’” But it was Pastor Ntakirutimana’s response that crushed Samuel’s spirit, and he repeated the church president’s words twice over, slowly: ‘”Your problem has already found a solution. You must die.’” One of Samuel’s colleagues, Manase Bimenyimana, remembered Ntakirutimana’s response slightly differently. He told me that the pastor’s words were “‘You must be eliminated. God no longer wants you.’”
Following the genocide, Ntakirutimana and his wife fled from Rwanda to Zaire to Zambia, and ultimately to Laredo, Texas in the United States. It was there that Philip Gourevitch interviewed him on September 25, 1996, and it was there the day after Gourevitch’s interview, that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation would arrest him based on an indictment issued against Ntakirutimana by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The indictment against Ntakirutimana included charges of genocide, complicity to commit genocide, crimes against humanity (murder). In 1997, U.S. Judge Marcel C. Notzon rejected the indictment and issued a decision saying that Ntakirutimana should be immediately freed.
The “Laredo Judgment” was eventually overturned and Ntakirutimana and his son were taken into custody and extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda based in Arusha, Tanzania. Over the course of several months, prosecutors brought witnesses and survivors to Tanzania to testify against Ntakirutimana and to help reconstruct that crucial period in early April, 1994. Among the evidence used against Ntakirutimana and his son was the letter given to Philip Gourevitch, a letter that Gourevitch gave to the International Criminal tribunal. In February 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal handed down the following sentences: 10 years imprisonment for Ntakirutimana, and 25 years imprisonment for his son.
jcdurbant 