Genocide and Forgiveness

My senior year of high school I took a humanities class, and in it we studied the American Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, and the genocides of multiple countries. In this class we read a book entitled, "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch. The first sentence reads: "Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda." In 1994 about 800,000 people died over the course of 100 days in one of the world's worst genocides since the Second World War. Reading this book opened my eyes to this atrocity as well as to the fact that few Americans, including our government, did anything to stop it. In Rwanda, the Hutus systemactically killed the Tutsis. Tutsis took refuge in schools and churches only to be massacred there. The Murambi Technical School is now a genocide museum with 45,000 skulls and corpses in all of its rooms, not because they were moved there, but because they were killed there. It has been six years since I read Gourevitch's book, and have not heard much about the Rwandan genocide in the media since.

One of the websites I frequent is that of Relevant Magazine and it's lead article today is entitled, "Unconditional: In the face of a terrible genocide, two Rwandan men choose forgiveness and hope." This article by Katherine Carelock describes two Rwandan men, Emmanuel and Ernest, whose families were killed and who have found forgiveness in spite of the atrocities they have encountered. The link to the article is below. Please read it, for two reasons. The first is to become a little more knowledgable about this event. And the second is to read about the application of forgiveness in real life and be challenged to forgive the personal atrocities in your own life.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7406