Did the Virgin Mary Warn Rwanda's Holiest Town of the Genocide?
by Nina Strochlic
Apr 20, 2014 5:45 am EDT
Ten years before the brutal genocide, a religious fervor gripped
Kibeho as dozens claimed the Virgin Mary had appeared to them. One of
the chosen recalls her disturbing prophecy.
Before Kibeho, a village spiraling up one of the area's many hills,
became a notorious killing ground during the Rwandan genocide, it was
the country's most celebrated holy spot. For nine years in the 1980s,
it gained worldwide fame after a streak of schoolgirls claimed the
Virgin Mary appeared to them with messages, including one that
foreshadowed the country's devastating genocide.

Photo: Nina Strochlic:
http://cdn.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2014/04/20/did-the-virgin-mary-warn-rwanda-s-holiest-town-of-the-genocide/jcr:content/body/inlineimage.img.1280.1024.jpg/1397954598434.cached.jpg
The road south to Kibeho, paved until it slides into dirt for the last
hour stretch from the capital of Kigali, is peppered with signs
pointing to "Kibeho Holy Place." They lead through the sleepy town,
where pairs of nuns can be spotted walking the streets in
white-and-blue habits, to a stately brick church situated in a back
clearing, crowning the village. The church's brick facade is
purposefully spotted with blue paint to mark the restored sections of
the outside walls where Hutu militias had blasted holes to fire on the
congregants barricaded inside during Rwanda's 1994 genocide. To its
left, a small memorial holds the remains of 28,000 victims of the
subsequent massacres.
On a dreary Friday morning in April, Aloys Ruhinguka is tilling the
garden surrounding the cement-covered mass grave and a greenhouse-like
shed that comprise the memorial. He's a farmer in the area and doesn't
normally work at the site, but the usual gatekeeper found it too hard
to be there during this week.
In the following two days, Kibeho will mark 20 years since the April
13 massacre that resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 people in
the area. The sector's secretary general predicted the planned
commemoration would attract a thousand people from all over the world.
He wasn't far off—the commemoration attracted hundreds of attendees,
including families of those killed.
Ruhinguka unlocks the memorial shed. Inside, cabinets of bones three
rows high are concealed by curtains pinned with ribbons and
handwritten messages. There are neat stacks of femurs and units that
contain whole bodies, still intact and starkly white. Rows of skulls
cover the top of the cabinets.
He grew up not far from the village center, and remembers being 16
years old when he first watched as an 18-year-old girl named Nathalie
Mukamazimpaka sat for hours, staring into the sun and relaying
messages purportedly from the Virgin Mary. "She was saying a bad thing
will happen in this country, and she was facing the sun and giving
messages," he gestures to the sun rising above his head. "She said
many things but what I remember is that bad things will happen in this
country."

The religious pandemonium that engulfed Kibeho began on November 28,
1981, when Alphonsine Mumureke, a 16-year-old student at the local
teacher's training college, claimed the Virgin Mary had come to her in
the school cafeteria. Two months later, fellow student Mukamazimpaka
reported a similar experience. And, again, two months after that,
Marie Claire Mukangango made a similar claim.
Soon the town was flooded with Rwandans and foreigners eager to
observe the supernatural occurrences. The girls would disclose the
arranged time for the Virgin Mary's next appearance, and the media
would set up speakers around the campus center where they would
broadcast the messages relayed by the visionaries to the thousands who
were gathered. Observers hoping for a sprinkle of holiness dragged
jerry cans of water from a small river nearby and brought it to the
girls to be blessed. They'd douse their homes or give it to the sick.
"When she [Mukamazimpaka] finished receiving messages she'd fall down,
and it was Mary saying goodbye," Ruhinguka remembers.
Now 50 years old, Mukamazimpaka is wearing a muted dress and
sunglasses as she makes her way to the church from the village center
on an April afternoon, pausing to reminisce about her visions of
30-odd years ago. She describes the events with a serene demeanor and
soft but rapid speech. "I can't tell why, but she herself decided to
come here and she decided to choose three of us."
The girls relayed her messages to pray, love one another, and seek
redemption to the community. Mukamazimpaka would sit for five hours
staring straight at the sun. She would go 14 days without eating or
drinking. "It's like you get very powerful, become very strong, and
you feel very happy to see her in front of you," she remembers. The
two other girls would do similarly impossible stunts.
But nine months after the Virgin Mary's first apparition, they
received a disturbing visit. On August 15, 1982, Mary appeared with a
foreboding message. "When she came she was crying and says, 'The
world's not very good and killing will happen in this country,'"
Mukamazimpaka remembers. "Twelve years later it happened and we saw
everything." She repeats, "When she came on that day, she was crying."
A few days after this fateful visit, each visionary reported seeing
images of rivers of blood and headless corpses. According to genocide
survivor and author Immaculée Ilibagiza, Alphonsine Mumureke, started
screaming to the gathered crowd of 20,000, "'I see a river of blood!
What does that mean? No, please! Why did you show me so much blood?
Show me a clear stream of water, not this river of blood!" And then,
"Why are those people killing each other? Why do they chop each
other?"
Inside the memorial, Ruhinguka, clad in work boots and a long-sleeve
polo shirt, stands surrounded by bones, twirling the keys in one hand
and gripping a guestbook in the other. He reveals that he was a
survivor of the massacre that took place in the church just a few
yards behind him. "We didn't believe in what she was saying, but when
it happened, we said, 'She was right.'"
When the killing in Rwanda began, people from across the province
streamed to Kibeho because it was the largest church in the region.
"We thought no one could come here because it was a holy place,"
Ruhinguka says.
It's a common thread in the genocide narrative—the persecuted sought
refuge in the country's churches, only to find that the clergy just
stood by or actively participated in their slaughter. During the
national genocide commemoration in early April, President Paul Kagame
charged that Belgian officials and the Catholic Church were complicit
in fostering an environment of animosity that led to the genocide.
In Kibeho, a similar tale played out as the church became a killing
ground. (Bishop Augustin Misago, who oversaw Kibeho's diocese and the
apparitions, was later tried and acquitted of genocidal crimes.) On
April 13, 1994, a group of the Hutu Interahamwe, including police,
soldiers, and civilians, arrived in the town to weed out the Tutsi
population. The church, a school, and the surrounding area were
attacked, and the church was lit on fire.
In a claim fitting for a man from this village, Ruhinguka attributes
his survival to a miracle. After the massacre, he says, the
genocidaires made Kibeho their base from which they carried out
exterminations. The area was part of the French-led Operation
Turquoise, a mission to control and protect the area, but nothing was
done to halt the carnage in Kibeho. The French soldiers arrived to the
village the day after the massacre, Ruhinguka says, and they protected
the killers. "They didn't touch them."

The tragedy was, many thought, just as the visionaries had predicted
more than a decade earlier. "When the killing started, I said, 'This
is the time of killing, and the Mother was announcing this a long time
ago,'" Mukamazimpaka says.
"She said if you don't love each other, if you don't change your mind,
this is what will happen," says Father Norbert Nsengiyumva, a man with
a wide-smile and brightly patterned shirt who serves as one of the
town's priests. "People didn't believe in that, but they realized that
it was true when it happened."
The church massacre wasn't the end of Kibeho's suffering. In 1995,
almost one year later to the day, Rwanda's holy city was once again
the site of bloodshed. After rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front
(RPF) halted the genocide, Hutus, including genocidaires and others
responsible for the carnage, assembled a large refugee camp in the
village, fearing reprisal from the Tutsi liberators. Despite the
presence of Australian and African peacekeepers, an RPF slaughter left
an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 refugees dead, many of them innocent
civilians and children.
Before the visions started in 1981, Kibeho was a normal village,
Father Norbert says, leaning back in his chair in a small room in
front of the priests' quarters. Once word of the apparitions spread,
visitors began to come from all corners of the world. Soon, the
apparitions had become contagious, with more than 30 boys and girls in
Kibeho and the surrounding villages reporting visions of the Virgin
Mary. The flood of holy appearances, including reports of visits from
Jesus, bred suspicion from observers and even religious authorities.
"Human beings can't explain what was going on," Father Norbert says.
So, a few months after the first sighting, two commissions were formed
to investigate the claims and messages of eight of the visionaries
that were deemed the most authentic; one committee was comprised of
doctors and the other of theologians. The medical team literally poked
and prodded the girls while they were in trances, seeing if physical
pain could wake them. The theologians checked the messages against
established church beliefs.
The official inquiries ended in 1989, but their findings weren't
released until 2001, when Bishop Misago announced a "declaration on
the definitive judgment," asserting that, "Yes, the Virgin Mary
appeared at Kibeho on November 28th, 1981 and in the months that
followed." His decision applied only to the three women who reported
the first apparitions and was based on their mental health, the
content of their messages, and "the frightening visions of August
15th, 1982, which proved to be prophetic due to the human dramas in
Rwanda and throughout the country of the Great Lake region in recent
years."
In 2006, to mark the 25th anniversary of the visions, Bishop Misago
said, "Today we can say that the Rwandan tragedy was predicted, but I
remember that on August 15, 1982, on the feast of the Assumption,
instead of seeing a joyful Virgin, the seers witnessed terrible,
frightening visions of corpses bleeding profusely, abandoned on the
hills without burial. Nobody knew what these horrifying images meant."
Marie Claire Mukangango was killed in the church. Alphonsine Mumureke
left in 1994 during the genocide and never came back. But
Mukamazimpaka, on what she says was an order from the Virgin Mary, has
stayed in Kibeho, except for two years during the genocide when she
was ordered to leave by the bishop.
Today, she lives in a small one-story house on the church grounds,
directly across from the dormitory where she received her first
private apparition. The dormitory has since been converted into a
small chapel, filled with polished wooden stools and a statue of Mary
in the corner. In the middle of the courtyard, where the public
apparitions took place, a large shrine is encircled by benches.
After the 2001 commission ruling, Kibeho began to build the church
that the Virgin Mary had requested, finishing the Church of Our Lady
of Sorrows in 2003. But they didn't have the capacity to build to the
dimensions she asked for, Father Norbert laments, so this church will
be knocked down once they raise funds for a bigger one.
The public apparitions stopped in late 1989, when Alphonsine announced
she was told that Mary would no longer appear publicly. Mukamazimpaka
also last reported seeing an apparition in 1989. Father Norbert is not
sure if their efforts will bring Mary back to the community, or if
she'll ever return. "There are many things she asked for that we
didn't do yet, so it'd be better if we do it and then she comes."
But the visitors are still coming. Each year, on August 15, during the
Assumption of the Virgin, which happens to be on the same day the
visionaries predicted the bloodshed of the genocide, and on November
28, the official commemoration of when the apparitions began,
thousands stream back into Kibeho. Last year, more than 20,000
pilgrims visited for the November anniversary.
Kibeho itself has remained devout. Sunday services at each of the two
churches attract some 800 worshippers each, with five priests tending
to the flock. There have been recent reports of apparitions, Father
Norbert says, but shrugs them off, saying "there's no proof."
Thirty-three years after she began seeing visions, Mukamazimpaka
stands framed by the new church the Virgin Mary's messages created.
She speaks with conviction that the predictions she received could
have prevented the bloodshed of the genocide. "If people listened to
the message during that time when they were following what I was
saying nothing would happen. But people were keeping their distance
from the message, this is why it happened...They didn't listen and it
happened," Mukamazimpaka says. "If you get a message to be good and
love each other and you say no, bad things happen."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/20/did-the-virgin-mary-warn-rwanda-s-holiest-town-of-the-genocide.html
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