The Roman Catholic Church is preying on my mind. There are several immediate reasons, some entirely obvious. Pope Benedict XVI embraces an excommunicated bishop whom everyone but he (we are told) knew was a demented Holocaust denier. Pope Benedict pronounces, as he departs for Africa, that condoms actually increase the AIDS problem. HIV and AIDS remains an out-of-control plague across southern Africa and the Pope has again done incalculable damage to AIDS prevention.
But it’s not just Benedict. As I prepare to leave on my own Africa trip — to Rwanda to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the genocide of its Tutsi people — I also think of Benedict’s charismatic predecessor. John Paul II wanted to be known as the great healer who apologized on behalf of the Church for its multiple sins and crimes of the past. Most renowned was his apology for the 2000 years his Church fomented anti-Semitism among Catholics. But he too was a ferocious public foe of condoms, for which he never sought forgiveness. Equally infamous but less well-known was his steadfast failure to apologize for, or indeed to even acknowledge, the notorious role of his Church in setting the stage for, enabling and ultimately participating in the genocide in Rwanda.
Many in rich countries still regard Africa as the dark, backward continent and might be surprised to learn that about 80 per cent of Rwandans are Christian, two thirds of whom are Roman Catholic. This is true of both Hutu and Tutsi. It was Catholic missionaries almost a century before the 1994 genocide who invented the fraudulent and destructive notion of Hutu and Tutsi as two irreconcilable, inflexible races, forever divided. As with Pope Benedict, knowledge was absolutely no criteria for making authoritative and deadly statements.
For most of the 20th century the Church in Rwanda shared power with secular authorities. In the years just before the genocide, the most influential Catholic archbishop was an intimate of both the Hutu dictator and his wife, who ran the country as a corrupt ethnic family dictatorship. The Catholic hierarchy in Rwanda, mostly Hutu by 1994, failed to condemn its Hutu extremist friends who were carrying out this African holocaust. While some priests and nuns distinguished themselves by saving threatened Tutsi, far more actively collaborated with the genocidaires in their murderous exploits or at best stood by, silent.
Had they stood up and denounced the plot, had the Pope flown to Rwanda during the genocide (as he had before it) to demand that his flock stop their killing, the genocide could have been stopped in its track.
Instead, they allowed perhaps a million defenseless, innocent Tutsi to be murdered to satisfy the greed and lust for power of the Hutu elite, their close friends.
In a powerful book published in 2004, Genocide in Rwanda: Complicity of the Churches?, some 20 mostly Catholic writers, including the nun who co-edited the book and several Rwandans, overwhelmingly agreed that the Church was indeed complicit. But one contributor, Jerry Fowler, then at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, wondered what the fuss was about. He pointed to the large number of contemporary situations, from El Salvador to Chile to Argentina to Zaire/Congo, when significant and leading elements of the Church had openly aligned themselves with terrorizing elites who practiced wholesale violence and unspeakable human-rights abuses, or at best remained bystanders. Why did similar behaviour seem so shocking in Rwanda? Instead of being scandalized, we should understand that the Church’s role there was really par for the course.
Yet even I was shaken by the latest outrage out of Brazil. A Catholic girl is raped by her stepfather and will give birth to twins. Instead she gets an abortion. The Vatican excommunicates the family and the doctors. The girl is 9 years old. The Archbishop of Recife, fiercely unapologetic, compares abortion to the Holocaust. A child, whose life is permanently scarred, becomes a Nazi.
The power of the ignorant sometimes seems infinite. In Africa, thanks in part to Church influence, abortions are banned in most countries. As a result, unsafe procedures are a leading cause of the continent’s appallingly high maternal mortality rates. A staggering 30,00 African women die each year from unsafe abortions.
The West has made a meal out of feasting on the murderous excesses of extreme Muslims. Yet in Rwanda in 1994, while Christian Hutu were busily slaughtering Christian Tutsi, most Muslim Hutu refused to join the genocide.
From Israel, we now learn that during the recent Israeli war against Gaza, rabbis assured Israeli soldiers that they were holy warriors with a religious mission to expel non-Jews who were “interfering with the conquest of the Holy Land.”
Let me begin this essay again. Religion is preying on my mind …
Gerald Caplan is the author of The Betrayal of Africa and Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide
One Africa. One Degree. Two Degrees is Suicide. December 19, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Africa, Environment.Tags: 2 degrees, Africa, carbon, carbon emissions, carmon emitters, climate, climate change, copenhagen, elliott verreault, g77, global warming, kyoto, Lumumba Di-Aping, neo-colonialism, roger hollander, thrid world, two degrees
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“$10 billion is not enough to buy us coffins”.
http://elliottverreault.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/one-africa-one-degree-two-degrees-is-suicide/
December 19, 209
Yesterday in Copenhagen, where leaders have come together to discuss the fate of the climate, lead G77 negotiator, Lumumba Di-Aping of Sudan, broke down in tears. To a small group of press and civil society supporters, he divulged that many African negotiators, pressured by developeing countries, and some succumbing to their own self-interest, were ready to sign a weak deal.
What would a weak deal look like? A deal that locks Africa and the rest of the world into a 2 degree, 450ppm scenario — what President Nasheed of the Maldives, and now many African civil society leaders call a “suicide pact.”
He did not start his speech immediately. Instead he sat silently, tears rolling down his face. He put his head in his hands and said “We have been asked to sign a suicide pact.” The room was frozen into silence, shocked by the sight of a powerful negotiator, an African elder if you like, exhibiting such strong emotion. He apologised to the audience, but said that in his part of Sudan it was “better to stand and cry than to walk away.”
Di-Aping first attacked the 2 degrees C warming maximum that most rich countries currently consider acceptable. Referring continuously to science, in particular parts of the latest IPCC report (which he referenced by page and section) he said that 2 degrees C globally meant 3.5 degrees C for much of Africa. He called global warming of 2 degrees C “certain death for Africa”, a type of “climate fascism” imposed on Africa by high carbon emitters. He said Africa was being asked to sign on to an agreement that would allow this warming in exchange for $10 billion, and that Africa was also being asked to “celebrate” this deal.
He explained that, by wanting to subvert the established post-Kyoto process, the industrialised nations were effectively wanting to ignore historical emissions, and by locking in deals that would allow each citizen of those countries to carry on emitting a far greater amount of carbon per year than each citizen in poor countries, would prevent many African countries from lifting their people out of poverty. This was nothing less than a colonisation of the sky, he said. “$10 billion is not enough to buy us coffins”.
Calling the current deal that was being proposed “worse than no deal”, he called on Africans to reject it — “I would rather die with my dignity than sign a deal that will channel my people into a furnace.” Africans had to make clear demands of their leaders not to sign on. He suggested a couple of slogans: “One Africa, one degree” and “Two degrees is suicide”