FRANCE
The Guardian (UK)
Chris McGreal in Gisors, Normandy
It’s hard to find anyone in Gisors with a bad word to say about Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka.
Other priests at the small French town’s imposing medieval Catholic church, an hour’s drive north-west of Paris into the rich Normandy countryside, speak with admiration of his popularity with congregants. It’s his ability to engage with people, they say. Worshippers love his sermons, feel his sincerity. He brings something from Africa.
Even those rarely found in Gisors’ church know of Father Wenceslas and insist he is a good man. A bartender at a café next to the church says he’s seen the priest about and that he is well respected.
No one believes what’s said, he adds. It’s just too unbelievable that a priest would do such a thing. …
In 2005, the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), then in the process of convicting many of the political and military leaders who oversaw the genocide, issued charges against Father Wenceslas. The indictment was a catalogue of horror. The priest, it said, conspired with leaders of the extremist Hutu militia spearheading the killing of Tutsis. It alleges that he helped draw up lists of men to die, stood by as Tutsis were taken away and killed, allowed the militia to roam his church hunting for victims, and that he raped young women.
The same year as the ICTR indictment, a military court in Rwanda convicted the priest in absentia and sentenced him to life in prison for genocide.
The protestors – some of them genocide survivors, others French people married to Rwandans – called on the Roman Catholic church to distance itself from Father Wenceslas by stripping him of his position.
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