Incomprehensible

by

by hilzoy

How does someone end up doing something like this?

“A United Nations war crimes court on Wednesday upheld the war crimes and genocide conviction of a Roman Catholic priest and increased his sentence to life in prison for his part in the killings of 800,000 fellow Rwandans.

In April 1994, when pro-government Hutu militiamen were rounding up ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu for slaughter across Rwanda, 1,500 parishioners of the priest, the Rev. Athanase Seromba, took shelter in his church in the town of Nyange.

Rather than seeking to protect his flock, Father Seromba, an ethnic Hutu, had the church leveled by bulldozers and ordered gunmen to shoot any Tutsis who tried to flee the carnage, according to testimony introduced in court. There were no survivors.”

Somehow, it makes it worse that these were his parishioners — not because he was a priest, but because these were people he knew. I can dimly imagine how a person might kill a lot of strangers, people he didn’t know, who were abstractions to him, or whose humanity he somehow didn’t really believe in. But your parishioners?

28 thoughts on “Incomprehensible”

  2. I’m with you, hilzoy. It reminds me of how it is easier speak ill of someone when I’m not his/her presence, or, for that matter, it’s easier to speak ill of people I don’t know at all.
    this is a incomprehensible horror.
    but I would like to know how you respond (or responded) to the African-solutions-for-African-problems argument.
    I empathized with the North Atlantic nations who didn’t act.

  4. Pretty horrible. But of a piece with Germans who gave up Jewish friends to the Nazis, or Russians who reported on neighbors to the Stalinists, or Cambodians who denounced their own blood relations as antirevolutionaries to the Khmer Rouge. An old story.
    The charitable view is that war and political oppression make people do horrible things out of fear and the instinct for self-preservation. The uncharitable view is that human beings are just, really, truly, inexplicably evil sometimes.

  7. Well, I’d say that what makes it particularly horrible isn’t simply that Seromba knew his victims. It’s that he was in a position in which he was supposed to care for and protect them. (And also a position that gave him authority over them.) He was somebody to whom they were supposed to turn in times of great need.
    Instead of rescuing his flock, he fed them to the wolves.

  8. redwood: as a general matter, I’m in favor of local solutions, or, failing that, solutions from reasonably nearby, over solutions delivered from a great distance (excluding things like: our providing resources for those local solutions.) Local people are likely to have a better sense of what’s going on, and it’s good for them to address local problems where possible.
    But there are obvious exceptions. One is when the potential local helpers are malign (e.g., the government of Sudan has in mind a way of “solving” the Darfur crisis, but I personally wouldn’t want to go along with it. In that case, other Africans are willing to do better, but that will not always be the case.) Another is when they are unwilling or unable to help.
    In the case of Rwanda in particular, it was a case of such crying human need that, to me, refraining from doing something in the hope that an African solution would emerge would be like not rescuing a kid from a burning house on the grounds that it would be better if her parents showed up and did it themselves.
    (Here I am also taking into account the stuff I wrote in comments to my last post on Rwanda: it matters that helping, here, was feasible, and didn’t involve something like: the reconstitution of an entire country from scratch.)

  10. Davebo, as a Catholic it’s disgusting that the bureaucracy of the church would allow a priest like this to hide, but this is also the type of action that prevented a young Polish priest who saved hundreds if not thousands of Jews from being prosecuted by German or Russian authorities, and later he became Pope. If the church set the precedent that priests were under the rule of any state, then they’d have to be under the rule of every state, and for as dumb as it comes to be in this situation, there have been many more instances of that mechanism protecting good people than bad.

  11. The uncharitable view is that human beings are just, really, truly, inexplicably evil sometimes.

    I think we should take that as a given. Not uncharitable; realistic, factually supportable. That this guy was/is a priest, though, is just bent perpendicular to what Christianity is supposed to be about.

  12. Anderson, given the gravity of the topic, don’t you think it’d be better to refrain from political cheap shots?
    Right. We should definitely distinguish between the Roman Catholic Church’s promotion of the deaths of its flock due to AIDS, and the unauthorized promotion of the deaths of its flock by rogue priests. My apologies.
    But I can’t understand the mentality of a priest who tells Catholics that condoms don’t help prevent the spread of HIV, any more than I can understand what the priest in Hilzoy’s post did. The latter is now in prison for life; the man who’s lying to people about how to save their own lives will die between silk sheets.

  13. Sorry Christian but I’m not buying it.

    If the church set the precedent that priests were under the rule of any state, then they’d have to be under the rule of every state

    It’s not up to the church to decide. Priests aren’t immune to the laws of the country in which they serve.

  14. But of a piece with Germans who gave up Jewish friends to the Nazis,
    My sense is that this was not particularly common. In Germany itself, where the Jews were fairly assimilated, it took many years of a Nazi campaign to isolate and stigmatize the Jewish community before German Jews actually started to be rounded up and sent off to the camps. Even then, mixed-blood Jews and Jews married to Christians, i.e., those Jews most likely to have close connections with non-Jews, were generally spared.
    Outside Germany, local collaborators with the Holocaust were largely either a) in countries where the Jewish communities were not at all assimilated, and where Jews could very easily be viewed as “the other” (e.g. the Baltic countries, Romania), or else b) the government tended to try to protect “their” Jews – for instance, Jews who were deported in Vichy France were all recent immigrants. The Vichy government actually protected the long-time Jews of France.
    There was a lot less of this kind of thing in the Holocaust than there seems to have been in Rwanda.

  15. as a Catholic it’s disgusting that the bureaucracy of the church would allow a priest like this to hide, but this is also the type of action that prevented a young Polish priest who saved hundreds if not thousands of Jews from being prosecuted by German or Russian authorities, and later he became Pope.
    You know, saving a mass murderer is not the moral equivalent of saving someone who saved the victims of persecution. If the Catholic church can’t tell the difference, it ought to get out of the morality business.

  16. If the church set the precedent that priests were under the rule of any state, then they’d have to be under the rule of every state, and for as dumb as it comes to be in this situation, there have been many more instances of that mechanism protecting good people than bad.
    I seriously doubt that. We’re talking about people using their membership of a large, powerful organisation to help them escape the law. Now, I grant that some of the time the law they will be escaping will be unjust (your Godwin instance, for example) but most of the time, in most countries, we assume that the law is just and that those trying to escape it – and therefore those helping them do so – are, well, wicked. So I think that, on balance, the Church’s tendency to help its priests escape arrest under secular law is a wicked thing to do.

  17. The key phrase in the blockquote to me is this:
    In April 1994, when pro-government Hutu militiamen were rounding up ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu for slaughter across Rwanda
    I’m guessing “moderate” Hutu meant “Hutu that weren’t in favor of the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis.”
    I’m also guessing that if this priest had stood up for his parishoners, the government would have simply killed him and then killed his parishoners.
    If those guesses are true, his actions weren’t ideal, but they’re not incomprehensible either.

  18. What interests me as much as the verdict against this murderous priest is: what did it take to get to the point that someone was called to account for any of this? That’s not a pretty story either; Ronald Dallaire (the Canadian commander of the UN force that helplessly observed the genocide) makes clear that there were no angels.
    Vengeance doesn’t help, even for perpetrators of genocide, but how does the world set standards that stigmatize/criminalize genocidal and more generally vicious and aggressive conduct? We seem far from knowing good answers to that and we have continuing, numerous opportunities to try to sort it out.

  19. “I’m also guessing that if this priest had stood up for his parishoners, the government would have simply killed him and then killed his parishoners.
    If those guesses are true, his actions weren’t ideal, but they’re not incomprehensible either.”
    Perhaps if Seromba’s actions had simply constituted a failure to help is parishioners escape. However, Seromba himself order their murders. He didn’t just fail to prevent them from being killed, he killed them.

  20. solarjetman: even if someone was too scared of reprisal to resist, it would have been possible to do a sloppy job of killing people. For instance, not ordering people to shoot anyone who tried to escape, or putting the world’s slowest and most inept driver in charge of the bulldozer and letting people escape.
    No one survived. Fear of reprisal doesn’t explain that.

  21. “I can dimly imagine how a person might kill a lot of strangers, people he didn’t know, who were abstractions to him, or whose humanity he somehow didn’t really believe in. But your parishioners?”
    It’s a pattern in civil wars that violence is perpetrated most often by acquaintances rather than strangers, at least according to Kalyvas (if I remember correctly). Same as most murderers knew their victims.

  25. If I remember correctly a Roman Catholic priest has the duty, if need be, to sacrifice his own life in protection of his “herd” or any Catholic* that seeks his protection (provided the persecution is not just, I presume)**. So, “I would have been killed, if I had acted otherwise” would not be a church-approved excuse.
    *not sure about other people
    **but he is not allowed to lie for that purpose

  26. Says a lot about the Church hierarchy, too, eh? You’d think that a transnational network that conspires to enable and hide pedophiles would at least have the sense to take better care of its real-estate holdings (than to have them bulldozed just because there’s a bunch of people you want to massacre inside), but I guess not…

  27. Some additional info I’ve picked up:
    From a Washington Post article when he was first sentenced:
    Thousands of Rwandans have turned away from Catholicism, angered and saddened by the complicity of church officials in the 100-day genocide … Priests, nuns and followers were implicated in the killings, and some churches became sites of notorious massacres.
    Last month, the tribunal sentenced a Catholic nun to 30 years in jail for helping militias kill hundreds of people hiding in a hospital. In 2001, two Catholic nuns were convicted by a Belgian court for aiding and abetting the murders.
    Ndahiro Tom, a Commissioner of Human Rights in Rwanda said of the Catholic Church that it was the only institution involved in all the stages of genocide, particularly because of its role in education.
    I can’t help noticing the contrast to the picture in Philip Jenkins’ Global Christianity and similar, which argued that the Church in the “global South” would be more truly on the side of the oppressed than the Church is in the global North.

  28. Completely comprehensible. It’s only incomprehensible if you believe people are, after all, good.
    {completely off topic, but there are probably benefits (both personally and to society) to believing that. Just because it’s false doesn’t mean it isn’t useful)
    This, however, is the wrong way to go, I think:
    “As a species we need to find and eliminate the bug in our software that makes this possible.”
    Hasn’t worked so far, and the results of the attempts have typically been horrific. People can’t be trusted with the kind of power that would be required to perfect them.

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