The Road from Palestine to Rwanda

Opposition to Israeli expansionism and the roots of the Rwandan genocide

It may be best to say straight away that anyone looking for a trenchant or partisan conclusion here, concerning Israel, Palestine or Rwanda, is going to be disappointed.

Anyone who wants to find sources to dig deeper into the story will also be frustrated. I have taken the sources out in what is probably a misguided attempt to make the account more readable. But anyone who wants the sources, most of which are in French, is welcome to get in touch.

The story concerns the life of the Belgian Catholic Leon Naveau, who was born in 1923. He was aged 25 when, in June and July 1948, he made a pilgrimage to Nazareth, which at the time was encircled by a hostile Israeli army and cut off from the rest of the world.

The population of Nazareth, which was part of the Palestinian Arab state under the 1947 United Nations Partition plan, was swollen by refugees and famine was an increasing threat.

Naveau claimed that Arab charities and the Red Cross hadn't responded to appeals for help, and demanded that the cause of Nazareth be taken up by the Catholic church.

He lobbied public figures including Geoffrey d'Aspremont, the Belgian plenipotentiary minister in Beirut, as well as the Alcide Marina, the Apostolic Nuncio in Lebanon. This led to support for his campaign from the Belgian foreign ministry.

In mid-July 1948, Naveau returned to Belgium where he launched a campaign to raise funds for Nazareth. The count Paul de Launoit donated a million Belgian francs which allowed Naveau to return with supplies. Belgian politicians saw the potential for their country to make a distinctive international statement and threw their weight behind the initiative.

The status of Belgium and the Catholic church rose across the Arab world. The list of supporters for Naveau’s campaign, which he called Pro Palestina, was a roll-call of leaders in Belgium's aristocracy, industry and clergy.

In Belgium, Naveau had served as chaplain of Banneux, where Catholics believed the Virgin Mary had appeared to a young girl, Mariette Beco, in 1933.

Banneux was the centre of a Catholic narrative of the church as the primary defender of the poor. This narrative was championed by Naveau's mentor, the Bishop of Liège, Louis-Joseph Kerkhofs.

God and the Church were seen by Kerkhofs as committed to social justice. God had sent his son to rescue the poor and to humiliate and punish the rich.

Naveau was ordained as a priest in Liège in 1950 and travelled in Rwanda, which was then a Belgian colony, in 1953. He made it clear from the outset that he wanted to devote himself to the poorest and weakest in Rwandan society. Naveau devoted himself unrelentingly to the cause of Hutu advancement. The Hutus, who made up the bulk of Rwanda’s population, were clearly subordinate to the ruling Tutsi elite. Naveau, by now an experienced political lobbyist and publicist, conflated their position with slavery.

The dichotomy between rich Tutsis and poor Hutus, however, was not clear cut. There were poor Tutsis, as well as people who considered themselves to be both Hutu and Tutsi, and people who had no idea, or interest in, whether they were part of these groups.

Naveau helped to set up a missionary school called Christ-Roi at Nyakibanda in Rwanda in 1956. The school moved to Nyanza, near the Rwandan royal court, the following year. Those who wanted to petition the Mwami, or the king, would travel to Nyanza to present their grievances. The Mwami, who in the 1950s was called Rudahigwa, had discretion over how long he would make petitioners wait, which was a barometer or how sympathetic he was to their complaints.

Historians argue about whether the ruling Tutsi elite was willing or able to progressively accept Hutu advancement, or whether the elite was sealed. What’s clear is that 1958 was the year when the Tutsi-Hutu relationship in Rwanda broke down, never to be repaired.

In the first half of 1958, a group of Hutu leaders secured agreement from the Mwami Rudahigwa to attend the Tutsi-dominated Conseil Supérieur du Pays (CSP). Belgium had created the CSP in 1952 in a bid to reduce the influence of Mwami’s circle of advisers.

The existence of a missionary school in proximity to the court disrupted the old politics of royal reception. As they sought to attend the CSP, Rudahigwa kept the Hutu representatives waiting for a full week. The Hutus found lodging at Naveau’s Christ-Roi college. The Catholic missionaries relayed claims from the school’s students that democratically minded Hutus were being tortured. Rudahigwa complained that the Christ-Roi school was guilty of political interference. The CSP failed to break the political deadlock between the royal court and the Hutu petitioners.

The following year, 1959, saw the Rwandan “Social Revolution” which ousted the Tutsi royal court and drove many Tutsis into internal and foreign exile. With Belgian military support, the revolution paved the way for the establishment of a Hutu republic.

Naveau was busy helping build the foundations of an army for this republic. The first commander of Kigali school of officers from 1960 to 1963, Léon de Paeuw, recounted that Naveau helped him recruit the second and third intakes of students to the officers school in northern Rwanda in the early 1960s. Rwanda became independent under Hutu leadership in 1962.

The revolution, however, seemed in the 1960s to be somehow incomplete. Lack of access to education had been one the main Hutu grievances. Yet in the 1960s the Tutsis, who only made up about 15% of the population, continued to dominate the education system, especially higher education.

It stands to reason, of course, that an education system can’t immediately be emptied of its existing students to reflect new political realities. Unless the idea is to do it by force.

Naveau left Rwanda in the 1960s, but returned in September or October 1972. He told his former students of his surprise of the predominant position in education that Tutsis still enjoyed. He was one of the main movers behind the creation of the French Revolution-inspired “committees of public safety” that were created in 1972 and which were instrumental in the 1973 purge of Tutsis from secondary schools and the university. Naveau helped to mobilize his former students who had, in some cases, become soldiers, civil servants and politicians. With his base at Christ-Roi, Naveau was in constant motion across Rwanda, preaching dangers posed by continued Tutsi presence in the education system.

The violent purging of the education system was used as the pretext for the northern Hutu military coup which brought Juvénal Habyarimana to power 1973, backed by military figures such as Laurent Serubuga and Théoneste Bagosora, who had been recruited into the army a decade earlier by Naveau.

Bagosora was convicted for his role in the 1994 genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and is generally accepted as having been one of the genocide’s prime instigators.

What does all this mean today? The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis in 1994, committed by the Hutu government as it stood on the brink of losing a four-year civil war, was a distant, unimaginable scenario for Naveau in the early 1970s. Naveau was already dead by 1994, having retired to Canada. If he was still alive today, he would probably be an opponent of the Israeli operation in Gaza, as well as the backing of the Rwandan regime for the M23 insurgency in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

There are both perfectly legitimate positions shared by many for genuinely humanitarian reasons. Naveau, however, was an influential activist in both theatres. It seems clear that his world view was formed by accounts of the visions of Mariette Beco of the Virgin Mary in Belgium, and his successful campaign to raise funds for the besieged Nazareth. This world view was then imported into Rwanda with disastrous results.

The conclusion, if there must be one, is that simplified world views will backfire with incalculable consequences. Israelis are not Tutsis. Rwandan Hutus are not Palestinians. Parallels between the two zones of conflict can be drawn, but these are slippery and treacherous ropes on which to stand, whether academically or in terms of advocacy.

Naveau, without seeming to realise it, crossed a line from campaigning for the victims of a hostile Israeli state in Nazareth to advocating violent displacement by a Rwandan government against a section of its own population.