the migrant wife

The Rwandan Genocide has been an interesting topic to research. My research relied on court case records from the ICTR, which included victim and perpetrator testimonies, some of which I hesitate to repeat. Each day at the archives was a battle between my empathy and professionalism. Sometimes, my research notebook filled up at certain pages with shaky handwriting. Shaking came from the shock I had experienced, as a sheltered millennial living in the prosperous West, with access to media channels that provide only sanitised stories of faraway tragedies. Like the rest of us, I live in a society that is carefully bubble-wrapped in a narrative which says that history is slowly marching to a glorious future, a satisfactory culmination of all human ambition and will, devoid of pain and suffering, created by sheer human prowess and intellect.

Yet when we peer into history, we realise that this is not the case. Human society said “never again” after the world wars and the trauma of the Holocaust, but when confronted with the insurmountable evil that is systematic murder of people, technological advancement and economic development seem to fall short of its promises of prosperity and security. On the contrary, they made evil efficient – faster killing, quicker mobilisation, deadlier weapons.

During my research, I came across Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands With the Devil. It is an autobiographical account of the events of the Rwanda Genocide 1994, in his position as the force commander of UNAMIR. On the peculiar title of the book, he said, “I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.”

This poses an interesting question. If there really is a God, as Dallaire says, and if that is the Christian God, whom he believes, how does his existence help us understand the problem of unspeakable evil around us? I do not seek to be ambitious – I am not addressing the victims of genocide, nor am I giving advice on worldwide peacekeeping efforts. Rather, I want to show that rather than being a god who is aloof, indifferent, or even one who is complicit in evil, the God of Christianity gives us hope, empathy, and the power to forgive.

From my research, I became aware of the magnitude of pain humans can, or are willing to, inflict upon their neighbours. I remember my history teacher say, if there’s one thing you learn from history, it’s that “humans are horrible.” Considering my recent research on genocide, perhaps I should modify that: humans are far too willing to be horrible to each other.

Evil is present. We ought just to look past the comforts of our prosperous 21st century western society.  We just have to lend an ear to our hurting neighbour, a dejected friend, or the struggling refugee, to learn that people are scarily capable of causing pain and suffering in others’ lives. Whenever we hear of such stories, however, anger wells up from inside. Why is this happening? Does God care?

The thing is, God did not mean for creation to hurt like so. Our gut tells us that it’s not meant to be this way, and it is right. Creation was meant to reflect the glory of the Creator, kind of the same way a piece of artwork is a product of the artist’s imagination, creativity, and artistic prowess.

The Genesis account points us towards the origin of the fallenness we now experience. Creation, according to the book of Genesis, was meant to be perfect. Humans were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27) – the love, righteousness, mercy, kindness, generosity… that characterises the One who Is. We were meant to reflect God to each other, like mirrors slanted at 45-degrees from the ground. And yet, turning the page, in Genesis 4, we read of the first murder, an unspeakable act of taking the life of one’s own brother. Cain murdered Abel because the latter did what was right, and the former got angry (Genesis 4:1-8). And as we know today, that was not the first drop of blood shed in the history of humanity – we only got better at taking others’ lives. Studies like the one I attempted on the Rwandan Genocide only exemplifies our distance from the perfect created order that God had intended for us to enjoy. What happened between the perfection, beauty, and glory of the world, and the cold-blooded murder of one’s own flesh and blood?

Sin came into the world. Sin seems to be this cruel and judgmental word that people cringe at the sound of. However, it is a serious word – it means “missing the mark”. Back in the Genesis account, right in the middle of the perfect state of humans and the brutal murder of another, Adam and Eve sinned (Genesis 3:6). They “missed God’s mark”: in order for humans to thrive, God set parameters for their behaviour; Adam and Eve wanted to be in the place of God, but in doing so rebelled against God’s intended goodness. With their rejection of God’s god-ship, if you may, the entire human race was corrupted with disobedience.

Taking a pause from the Bible, we return to the case of the Rwandan Genocide. The UN Convoy for Africa, Stephen Lewis, disagrees with Dallaire about the forces behind Hutu atrocities. Rather than the Devil, Lewis thought that the evil that “lies in human behaviour” was the reason for the tragedy. He believed that “human behaviour is capable of the most ferocious and irrational activity”. I do not dispute the fact that there is supernatural evil that is present in the cosmic world, but more evident in research (and frankly, more relevant to our present discussion) is the helpless human condition. The “evil” that Lewis refers to, is sin.

I fear I do not need to labour further on the practical consequences of evil – my study only made it too clear. However, the Bible states that it runs way deeper than that. It primarily causes a separation from God, who is perfectly just and righteous. If he were to forget what Adam’s and Eve’s (and subsequently our) selfish actions, he would not be a just God, at all. What of forgiveness then? I must not get ahead of myself; I will deal with that in due course. This broken relationship mars our entire human experience, from physical death to spiritual death (being cut off from the Loving Father), from pain to suffering to everything in between.

Paul the Apostle in the first century wrote in the book of Romans, that the “wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). This sounds dire, and if that was the end of that, then the gospel is everything but good news. No, the latter part of the verse reads, “but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 6:23) “Jesus Christ” is not just something people say when something goes ridiculously wrong: He is the son of God, who came to earth to live the perfect life we could not live. He did not miss the mark in any way. He died a criminal’s death, to pay the price for our sin. God made him who had no sin (Jesus) to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5:1) At the cross, we see God’s perfect justice and perfect love met: in his justice he required the payment for sin, in his love he paid the price for it himself.

Jesus died for the sin of the world (1 John 2:2), rose again on the third day (Luke 24:1-8), and appeared to many eyewitnesses (see various texts in the four Gospels). He conquered death itself. This is not only the kind of truth that one wears as pretty jewellery round one’s neck. Rather, this is the kind of truth that shines light into the darkest corners of human evil.

Jesus promises there will be resurrection and judgement. Judgment Day is a little different from that presented in apocalyptic fiction, to say the least: it is the time when all actions will be brought to light, and judged according to God’s holy righteousness. I had once thought that Judgment Day was gloomy and dark, but reality is far from it: on the far side of Judgment Day will be a world restored to its original created beauty, and in its intimate and longed-for relationship with God.

And yet, evil still pervades through our experience on earth. We are still looking forward to a day when even the presence of sin (and evil) will be banished forever – that is God’s promise to restore the intended beauty, glory, and perfection of His creation. It is then, and perhaps only then, that we will begin to understand the purposes of what we go through here in this life.

Thus, the Christian hope is precisely this: there is unspeakable evil in this world, but there is also indescribable grace – the very God who breathed humans into existence subjected himself to the cruelest of deaths. He did this so that the good intention of creation can be fully recovered: relationship with the Father restored, justice realised, perfection re-established.

At the end of this section, I would like to point us to the words of Henri Blocher, who summed this up better than I ever could. In his book, Evil and the Cross, he says: “At the cross evil is conquered as evil. … Evil is conquered as evil because God turns it back upon itself. He makes the supreme crime, the murder of the only righteous person, the very operation that abolishes sin. The manoeuvre is utterly unprecedented. No more complete victory could be imagined. … God entraps the deceiver in his own wiles. Evil, like a judoist, [tries to] take advantage of the power of the good, which it perverts; the Lord, like a supreme champion, replies by using the very grip of the opponent.”

It is easy to extrapolate trends of evil at a distance, from a small African country about 27 years ago, for example.  What is more difficult to establish, however, is the prevalence of evil in places of secret – the things that we are most reluctant to admit.

In my research, I focused on the actions of the soldiers, how they intentionally (or otherwise) brought about the genocidal behaviour of the Interahamwe and other paramilitary organisations. In the last section of my essay, I cited Luke Fletcher’s work, which mainly indicated how brother turned against brother, and neighbour against neighbour. He called it “turning interahamwe,” but I call it succumbing to evil to avoid evil. Till this day, Rwandan society is still plagued by the social taboos during the genocide, people being ripped apart by guilt, hunted down for vengeance, and isolated for the evil that was done to them.

There is a deeper point than that. I believe that the propensity for violence and inflicting pain, was something that existed prior to their social conditioning, prior even to the intensification of ethnic hatred. I believe it was only made manifest by their physical circumstance. Just imagine this situation: a Hutu who is a quiet man, a loving father, turns against his wife and her family, and commits other acts of genocide among his neighbourhood. Regardless of the amount of political propaganda he was exposed to, one would wonder if he was under a substantial amount of social pressure to be convinced to participate in such cultural and social taboos. Environmental and social factors definitely play a part in a perpetrator’s psychology, as I have demonstrated in my research study. Yet the humanness that underlies it all exists not only in the hearts of those who take up machetes against their brothers, but also in every human being after the first humans made that fateful choice.

I am not trying to pardon the perpetrators of genocide. Not at all. They had the moral capacity to choose not to murder their neighbours and family. Murder is not excusable, regardless of circumstance. Their guilt is currently being dealt with in international courts and national or local **hearings, and will definitely be dealt with in the ultimate reckoning of the world, the last judgment we had mentioned previously. Yet, my focus is on our own hearts. If placed in the same place, who is to say that our own sinful nature will not rear its ugly head? In fact, we, having been predisposed to evil by the very presence of sin, are capable and willing to commit such evil.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn expressed this sentiment far more succinctly when he wrote The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

This ought to lead us to humility, and empathy. Historical empathy is essential in understanding atrocities such as this. I remember reading the victim testimonies and thinking: there is no way at all how salvation and the Christian hope would be offered to those who commit such atrocities. There is no way how this sort of injustice will be dealt with by Christ’s cross, I thought. And yet God’s work is not thwarted by any human activity; Jesus died even for the Rwanda Genocide. Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished,” before he died (John 19:28-30). He plunged the depths of hell, not that we can remain in this world of evil till the end of time, but that we may be rescued from it when the time comes. The same offer is held out to all who believe, and we just need to receive it with open hands.

I would like to illustrate my last point with a personal experience. It is nowhere comparable to the magnitude of suffering of the widows and orphans of the Rwandan Genocide. But it is perhaps an apt demonstration of the forgiveness that comes in Christ.

My family fled from Mainland China to Hong Kong at various points in the last century. Without knowing better, I had always held a grudge against Japan for its actions in China in recent history, blaming them for the massive suffering in my family. I was largely unaware of this, until one day, at Christian Union, I met a Japanese girl. We were walking back home together after the meeting. In an acquired British fashion (compounded by my unconscious biases), I was inclined to walk home myself. But I was very glad we stayed together for the walk, during which I came to realise my own prejudice and bitterness.

She shared with me her experiences as a Japanese coming to Christ. And there I was, a fellow sinner, seeking forgiveness from the same God who loves all of us. Who was I to be bitter against her for something that she didn’t even do? Had I not been entirely forgiven by Christ, that I could not be gracious to others? Does vengeance not belong to God, that I wanted to avenge my enemies in my own foolish, selfish ways?

I went home to seek forgiveness from him who first forgave me. I sought forgiveness from my friend too. Evil begets evil, and the cycle repeats itself, only pausing momentarily to change its façade. And yet, evil stops at the cross.

Forgiveness is the shortest distance from vengeance to healing. It is made possible only through being forgiven oneself. The Cross provides it in abundance.

To close, I believe a quote from the end of Romans 8 would be fitting. This is a promise made to believers in the promise, in the hope outlined above.

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:37-39)

Not even the Rwandan Genocide. This hinges on the Christian hope of a future restoration through Jesus. Though we might not know the why of immense evil such as this Genocide, we can know how to understand it. Most importantly, it reminds us of the brokenness of the world – and we ought to weep for it. But reality is that Jesus’ heart breaks even more for the magnitude of human suffering. He cared so much he went to the cross for it, to give us the free gift of salvation. That is done; it is finished. And now, it is for us to decide what we do with it.

Further Reading

Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (2018)

SOLAS Centre for Public Christianity, https://www.solas-cpc.org/

Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (2013)