An Interview of Dr. Seminega
In April of 2021, I had the honor to correspond with Dr. Tharcisse Seminega, a survivor of the Genocide Against the Tutsi, to interview him for this project. In 1994, Dr. Seminega, a Tutsi, was a professor at The National University in Rwanda in Butare. Dr. Seminega was specifically targeted to be killed during the genocide. Miraculously, he survived, along with wife and five children. The survival of their family of seven is a credit, in part, to members of their Jehovah’s Witness community, who were Hutus and repeatedly risked their lives to save them.
Over a period of two and a half months, Dr. Seminega and his family moved over a great distance, to nine different places, through many highly dangerous roadblocks manned by machete wielding killing squads. Dr. Seminega described this as requiring great “teamwork and coordination” between the rescuers and his family. Among other things, his family had to divide up into several groups and they had to walk “barefoot, in the dark, under heavy rain and through rocky and slippery paths despite [their] fragile health and the fact that [they] had been without moving for a month [after hiding] in [a] goat shack.” One of his sons had to be disguised as a girl and another had to pose as the twin of another boy. All seven members of his family contracted malaria while in hiding. Around twenty Jehovah’s Witnesses and their friends assisted in the survival plan, and not one of them revealed the family's whereabouts. Although Dr. Seminega and his immediate family miraculously survived, more than 100 members of their extended family were murdered in the genocide.
Dr. Seminega concluded emphasizing the following:
When human beings come face to face with challenging choices, some will follow the crowd and practice what is wrong, while others will follow their well-trained conscience and care about the welfare of others and make sacrifices to save lives. The lesson here is that challenging situations may show up in forms of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, coronavirus pandemic, or social upheaval. You may ask yourself, how would I react if such a tragedy happened in the U.S.? Then you would probably remember those ordinary Hutu who turned into heroes, refused to compromise or panic and performed lifesaving acts.
Also, it is important to remember that their self-sacrificing spirit and love for their neighbors didn’t come in their minds and hearts overnight, but stemmed from deep-rooted habits and convictions. Therefore, as individuals, young or old, we should make it the goal of our life to develop beautiful qualities, such as love of what is good, hatred for what is bad, compassion, empathy, and [a] self-sacrificing spirit, and embrace good human values such as honesty, faithfulness, obedience, and trust.
Dr. Seminega is the author of the incredible memoir No Greater Love: How My Family Survived the Genocide in Rwanda.
The complete interview with Dr. Tharcisse Seminega is set forth below.
1) In your book, you discuss many of the root causes of the genocide; and your wife profoundly observed that, "[o]ne of the reasons why the genocide took place is that people are not taught to act according to their conscience." Do you think that many people following the orders of governmental authorities rather than acting according to their own conscience was one of the primary causes of the genocide?
I would say that in an event as complex as genocide, Rwandan society and individuals were subject to various root causes with different degrees of intensity.
First of all, there was the war situation which created a climate of intense feeling of fear of death and insecurity both at the national and individual levels. Then came the government hate propaganda which pushed the idea that the common enemy was the one who caused the war, in this case the Tutsi rebels who attacked the country from Uganda. The hate propaganda also advocated the idea that the enemy’s accomplices, namely the Tutsi inside the country were part and parcel of the plan to eliminate the Hutu.
Finally, the hate propaganda proposed a radical solution to the problem which consisted in wiping out the Tutsi in Rwanda, thus weakening the rebels and preventing them from taking the power. It concluded that the right course for every Hutu to take was self-defense, which implied killing all Tutsi without leaving any to tell the story. In a three-year period, almost the whole Hutu population was convinced that their old-time defenseless Tutsi neighbors, friends, colleagues, parents, teachers, priests, fellow believers and pastors with whom they had been living in peace and harmony for decades were their real enemy and had to die.
And it is at this stage of the process that conscience should have played a role. Since conscience is an internal judge which examines our motives and guides our actions, the Hutu individuals who were confronted with a challenging choice should have asked themselves questions like:
Is killing my defenseless neighbors, friends, colleagues, parents, teachers, priests, fellow believers and pastors the right thing to do?
What evidence do I have that they are accomplices of the attackers and are going to kill me?
Does my conscience condemn or support doing what I am preparing to do?
Is what I am going to do in accordance with my human values and my religious beliefs?
What is shocking in the case of Rwanda is that it was a predominantly Catholic (70%) and Christian country (90%). Churches were expected to intervene to prevent genocide, either by dissuading their followers from committing such atrocities or by warning government authorities against unfounded hate propaganda that would lead to mass massacre of an entire defenseless ethnic group. Instead, the churches completely embraced the ruling government's ideology of ethnic discrimination, and even worse, convinced their Hutu followers that God had delivered the Tutsi into their hands to be killed. This discourse was materialized by acts because the most terrible massacres were perpetrated in churches with the blessing or the complicity of the clergy. In stark contrast, a tiny community (about 2,500 members in 1994) known as Jehovah’s witnesses behaved differently, shunning the hate propaganda and encouraging neutrality in political affairs. But most importantly this community as a whole performed courageous self-sacrificing and life-saving acts countrywide. They were able to hide and help many families of Witnesses and non-witnesses survive. They were able to do that because of their Bible-trained conscience, their human values and their religious convictions.
As a conclusion, I would like to give some comments about other root causes of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, namely : (1) The relationship between the Hutu and the Tutsi during the traditional monarchy from 1300 to 1894; (2) The traditional patronage system and its socio-economic impact ; (3) The colonial power and its sociopolitical impact; (4) The role of the Church starting in 1894 through 1994; (5) The Hutu Revolution and its rule from 1959 to 1994; (6) The 1990 Rebel attack and its consequences.
In a figurative way, we may say that each of the above-mentioned elements brought in a building block to make ethnic divide and resentment against the Tutsi power grow into a huge mountain that unfortunately crushed the whole Tutsi population during the 1960s through the 1990s. The challenge is now how to untie the riddle of the responsibility of each of those players in this part of Rwandan history.
It appears to me that most of the above-mentioned events are political, but a few scholars like Mahmood Mamdani feel that there was “an ethnic” or social component to the genocide because of the inequities people experienced, which the [political] authorities exploited and intensified.
As far as the Churches are concerned, we would expect them to help their flocks handle social issues in line with God’s standards and guidance. This was unfortunately not the case in Rwanda, as the traditional churches did not teach their flock to love their neighbor and keep away from taking weapons to kill their fellow believers. Instead, they took sides for one ethnic group against another, to the point of killing their own flock or even their nuns, pastors and priests. This happened because over time, and especially during the transitional period from the monarchical rule to the Hutu power, the clergy worked hand in hand with the political power and trained their flocks to obey political authorities rather than obey God.
Even though the Tutsi monarchical rule had been largely accepted by the majority of the population in Rwanda, the traditional rulers who were mostly Tutsi didn’t realize or didn’t want to realize that the patronage system that was based on the cow as a symbol of wealth and prestige would, in the long run, create frustration and a sentiment of being part of second class for the Hutu majority. The monarchical power worked closely with the colonial power who then walked away to ask for independence.
The German and Belgian colonial powers came to Rwanda in 1894 and 1916 respectively. They both favored the Tutsi and installed a myth of the superiority of the Tutsi over the Hutu and installed a system of ethnic-based identity cards. They gave Tutsi more opportunities for education, rulership and economic wealth. They used Tutsi to impose forced labor on Hutu to advance the economic interests of the colonial powers. The Hutu revolution was a violent response to the long-standing Tutsi hierarchy’s hegemony but misrepresented the Tutsi as a group by putting all Tutsi under the same umbrella as the “Tutsi reigning class” and targeting them as a racial group.
In 1990, the Tutsi in exile who had fled from Rwanda between 1959 and 1973 had become a tiny nation and formed an army, and together with some Hutu opponents to the Hutu regime attacked Rwanda from Uganda. Even though the 1990 attack was touted as legitimate and a means of liberation of Rwandan society and the Tutsi, it ended up enhancing the Hutu resentment against the Tutsi as a group, and it was not able to prevent the genocide, but stopped it when it was virtually completed.
The International community played a passive role in a tragic situation where it had enough information and enough means to react and prevent or stop the genocide, but it chose to withdraw UN troops when they were most needed, thus giving leeway to the killers to commit genocide unhindered.
2) Many genocide survivors have credited their survival to the actions of specific individuals who chose not only to not participate in the violence or be a bystander, but to actively intervene to help people survive. In your particular case, your survival seems to be a powerful testament to the actions of your religious community. It seems that it wasn't just "luck" that particular individuals were moved by their conscience to intervene, but it was a series of heroic actions by several members of your Jehovah's Witness community that played a crucial role in your survival. As your wife stated in your book, "[M]y husband and all five of my children are alive because our Jehovah Witness friends had repeatedly risked their lives to save us. Their faith was like a rock. They lived for peace. No one could force them to use weapons against their neighbors, even those of a different ethnicity." Do you credit your survival not just to the actions of specific individuals who acted according to their conscience to help, but the fact that you were part of a religious community that was committed to working together to help you and your family survive?
To understand how difficult it was for an individual to hide a Tutsi and save his life, we must remember that the Hutu made up 85% of the population and that the Tutsi lived among them. It was therefore difficult to hide what one was doing from one’s neighbor. And neighbors would look for signs showing that a Hutu was hiding a Tutsi: (1) Is my Hutu neighbor buying more food than he used to? (2) Is he cooking more meals than usual? (3) Is he going to draw more water than he usually needs? (4) Does he stay home more often than before.
Therefore, it took much courage and risk for our Hutu Witnesses to help my family of seven survive as they had to face many challenging situations. It also took coordination of the survival project to overcome all these difficult situations.
One of the biggest challenges was hiding a family of seven people. Moving together as a family would mean putting the whole family at risk, but dividing the family in small groups would mean finding several safe hiding places. This involved finding more trustful people who would keep the secret and cooperate to achieve the same goal. That’s where community-based efforts were required to implement the survival plan.
The second challenging situation was moving the family to nine different places through dangerous roadblocks guarded by the killing squads of militiamen armed with machetes and other crude weapons. Teamwork was needed to find out the right paths to follow in order to avoid crossing roadblocks, the right time to move and the right people to take the lead.
The next challenge was the distance (about 4.5 hours walk) between the first hiding places and the underground room which was the family’s final destination or resting place (or grave).
The last challenge was providing food for such a big family for two and a half months in a time of war, and also managing their diseases because five of us had asthma, and we all got malaria while hiding. It was rainy season and mosquitoes were proliferating.
Definitely, evading the killers could not be just a matter of some individuals acting according to their conscience and performing random saving acts. It required teamwork and coordination among our rescuers themselves and between our rescuers and us.
As regards the collaboration of my family with our rescuers, we agreed to dividing the seven members into several groups despite the emotional heartbreak of thinking that we probably wouldn’t see each other again. We further accepted walking barefoot, in the dark, under heavy rain and through rocky and slippery paths despite our fragile health and the fact that we had been without moving for a month in the goat shack.
Teamwork came also into play when the Witnesses invented several tricks to move two of our sons to the underground room. Our son Joel was taught how to dress and walk as a girl and was disguised as a girl to help him join us in the pit. The other son, Benjamin, was dressed as a twin brother of a boy his age and given a bicycle ride to the underground room.
Our asthma was monitored by teaching us how to cough and muffle the sound by putting a blanket on our mouths and cough laying down on our stomach. The sound was also masked by the music from a small radio set that was playing behind the mud goat hut. Medications and food were brought secretly at night by different messengers and our security was monitored through the cooperation of our Hutu fellow believers for 75 days. About 20 Hutu Witnesses and their friends were used, but none of them was caught and none revealed our hideouts. This is obviously the result of teamwork and a miracle.
3) In the aftermath of the Holocaust, the international community pledged that such atrocities would "never again" happen. Despite this promise, however, genocides and other mass killings have continued around the globe. In your book, you stated that despite the warnings of impending violence, the presence of UN peacekeeping forces initially provided a hope that a peaceful solution would be reached between the Tutsi rebel army and the Rwandan government army. Yet, by April 1994, it became clear that that was a "false hope" and it was "abundantly clear that the UN forces were powerless to protect civilians - and even themselves." During the months from April to July 1994 when you and your family were in hiding and trying to survive, did you contemplate why the international community was not doing more to help end the genocide? Or, in the years since, have you reflected on the failures of the international community to intervene to try to stop the genocide?
During the months from April to July 1994 when my family and I were in hiding and trying to survive, I simply was not able to contemplate why the international community was not doing more to help end the genocide. In the tension of my personal situation, focusing on keeping my family safe did not give me any time to contemplate the political situation about which I had no information.
From a layman’s point of view, I couldn’t even imagine a genocide could occur for at least four reasons:
A power-sharing agreement had been signed between the Hutu government and the Tutsi rebels in Tanzania.
The UN peacekeeping forces were still in the country.
The President of the Interim Government who was known as a reasonable and compassionate physician would not allow the killings to spread through the country.
In our region of Butare (now Southern Province) the prefect was a Tutsi and had even ordered public services resumed and markets opened.
As a conclusion, I would say that I described the political situation in my book, but as a Christian would maintain a neutral position on this political issue as I am not able to speculate on what could or should have happened.
4) In your book, you noted that tragically, more than one hundred members of your extended family were murdered in the genocide. You wrote that forgiveness is a Christian requirement and that you "can personally testify to the benefits of resisting bitterness . . ." In your case, it seems that resisting bitterness was an admirable, personal choice (rather than a choice made as a result of government-promoted reconciliation efforts). Do you have any thoughts, though, on the effectiveness of post-genocide reconciliation efforts by the government in Rwanda? Do you think that government promotion of reconciliation played an effective role in helping to heal communities?
The Unity and Reconciliation Commission was created in 1999 and accompanied by a well-structured framework law. In addition, the national unity policy abolished the ethnic mention on the identity card and established a law prohibiting the use of the terms Hutu, Tutsi and Twa in everyday conversations. Everyone is now Rwandan. The government has also put in place counseling centers to help victims of the genocide recover, built cheap homes for survivors, helped orphans go back to schools and widows earn a living. The Commission certainly responded to a real need because after genocide, Rwandans needed to heal their traumatic effects and wounds left by this tragedy. Survivors had lost members of their families; genocidaires were tormented by a feeling of guilt which sometimes wrongly gripped the entire Hutu ethnic group; returnees from exile were terribly frustrated to find almost all the members of their close and extended families decimated.
However, I don't know enough about the situation in Rwanda after I left (20 years ago) to evaluate matters. When I went back to Rwanda in February 2020, I understood that the government, various humanitarian and religious organizations all recognize that reconciliation between people is key. Each may have a different approach. What I know best are the Bible principles, and this is what I feel most comfortable discussing.
For example, in Jehovah’s Witnesses’ community, unity and reconciliation was possible because all try to show forgiveness, empathy and compassion, knowing that all humans are imperfect. They try to immitate God and Jesus who are forgiving and who invite us to imitate them. Good results have been achieved in our congregations where repentant genocide participants embraced God’s principles and became our brothers and sisters.
On the other hand, since 2015, a report by the National Commission for Unity and Reconciliation states that more than 90% of Rwandans have been reconciled. Yet some experts showed that difficulties persist within Rwandan society. Disturbing facts around the genocide memorial period come each year to reveal the real situation that prevails between the survivors and the genocidaires. Indeed, at the time of the commemoration of the genocide, unrepentant genocidaires regularly attack survivors, injuring or even killing some of them, or pulling out crops from their fields, cutting down their banana plantations, killing their animals or setting their houses on fire. These malicious actions which are perpetrated more than 27 years after the genocide show that there is still a long way to go to get there!!
Moreover, young Rwandan generation who did not experience the genocide of 1994 or did not understand what was going on because they were too young, grew up under a mantle of silence about that traumatic period. They don’t know the truth and are not allowed to ask questions. This makes it hard for them to accept that genocide occurred. Some orphans don’t even know if their parents were Hutu or Tutsi.
5) If you were speaking to U.S. students, many of whom may be unfamiliar with the details surrounding the genocide against the Tutsi, is there any message or anything in particular that you would want them to know?
With the racial instability and protests that we see prevailing in the U.S., it could easily trigger an event like what we experienced in Rwanda. I wish and hope nothing like genocide happens in the U.S.. But what students should know is that in Rwanda genocide didn’t happen overnight. There was a long history of ethnic divide and intense hate propaganda that shaped the mentality of the whole population and prepared them to slaughter neighbors, friends, colleagues, in-laws, and inmates only because they looked different. Just imagine you are targeted for slaughter because you are tall, have a long nose, have many cows or simply because someone spread the idea that you are not Rwandan because you came from Ethiopia.
So how would you feel if you were targeted for slaughter just because you are African American, Hispanic, Chinese or White? Therefore, the advice and encouragement for you young ones is that you should do whatever you can to shun any racial ideology. The U.S. is host to people of different skin colors, cultures, languages and origins. So you should ask yourself, how do I view immigrants from different nations? Do I pay too much attention to what makes them different from me or do I view them as human beings like me, with as good of qualities and talents as I have?
Unfortunately, racial hatred and discrimination can find a fertile ground in a country like the U.S. where there is a past of slavery and where racial differences could be linked to social injustice. We as educators and parents must be greatly concerned about how to help younger generations recognize and reject racist thinking. Just remember this, when you look for a good friend, do you care about the color of his skin or his eyes, or do you look for his human qualities, his reasonableness, his kindness, his honesty, and his faithfulness? Do you agree that those qualities may be found in any human being, regardless of their race, culture, language or country of origin? Are you aware that other humans have the same feelings, same likes and dislikes as yours? So do whatever you can to make friends with people from any ethnic group in your country, regardless of where they came from or what they look like.
In fact, you should consider the cultural and racial mosaic in the U.S. as a source of wealth for the country, as each and everyone have something to teach us, maybe in terms of cooking meals, singing songs, dealing with friends or family members, expressing love and compassion. Therefore, as young people, please make it the goal of your life to develop beautiful qualities such as love of what is good, love of all humans, compassion, empathy, and self-sacrificing spirit.
In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that the ethnic ideology paved the path to the genocide in Rwanda by promoting social injustice and discrimination in Rwandan society. As my book indicates, when human beings come face to face with challenging choices, some will follow the crowd and practice what is wrong, while others will follow their well-trained conscience and care about the welfare of others and make sacrifices to save them. The lesson here is that challenging situations may show up in forms of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, coronavirus pandemic or social upheaval. You may ask yourself, how would I react if such a tragedy happened in the U.S.? Then you would probably remember those ordinary Hutu who turned into heroes, refused to compromise or panic and performed lifesaving acts.
Also, it is important to remember that their self-sacrificing spirit and love for their neighbors didn’t come in their minds and hearts overnight, but stemmed from deep-rooted habits and convictions. Therefore, as individuals, young or old, we should make it the goal of our life to develop beautiful qualities such as love of what is good, hatred for what is bad, compassion, empathy, and self-sacrificing spirit, and embrace good human values such as honesty, faithfulness, obedience and trust.
