NEWS FROM
LUTHERAN WORLD RELIEF
April 6, 2004
For more information contact Jonathan Frerichs at (410) 230-2802.
In this news release:
CLICK HERE to sign-up to receive electronic newsletters and press releases through Lutheran World Relief's Action Center.
RWANDA BACK TO LIFE: TEN YEARS AFTER THE GENOCIDE
Baltimore, April 6, 2004 -- A man with deep scars on his face holds a boy younger than the scars, who is smiling. Women left beyond consolation ten years ago find the courage to counsel and support others still traumatized. A quarter million lay judges try the unanswered crimes of genocide in the villages where they occurred.
These are images from "Rwanda Back to Life: Ten Years After the Genocide," a memorial to the 1994 catastrophe prepared by the German National Committee of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The 80-photo exhibition opens this week in Rwanda and Berlin.
Within days of April 7, 1994, when the genocide began, evidence began to reach staff of LWF's program in neighboring Uganda. Local villagers saw bodies floating down the Kagera River from Rwanda. Staff and villagers mounted an operation that retrieved and buried over a thousand corpses as three months of killings raged upstream. When a rebel army ended the violence, Rwandans fled their country at the unprecedented rate of 10,000 people per hour, fearing reprisals. They formed camps of record size in Tanzania and the former Zaire, which LWF helped run for years with support from LWR and other agencies. When repatriation began later in the 1990s, LWF spent years securing land and building houses, water systems and schools and then helped communities in the slowly recovering country with social and economic development, AIDS prevention and care, and projects of grassroots reconciliation.
Today, ten years after the genocide, 85,000 alleged perpetrators are still in Rwanda's jails - so many that it would take 60 years to try them in Western-style courts. Rwanda's solution, however, is for communities themselves to dispense a newly revived traditional form of law that requires the accused, the survivors and the eyewitnesses to work out what happened in 1994 and who was responsible. Since 2002, LWF has helped train some of the 258,208 lay judges elected for the job, and educate the communities as well.
The void left by 100 days of terror -- of massacres at a rate approaching 10,000 people per day -- has finally begun to fill. Ten years after the genocide Rwanda has come a good way back to life.
Churches in Rwanda were shattered by the genocide. LWF, LWR and other church relief agencies working to rescue Rwandans, however came together after the tragedy in a new, international emergency alliance called Action by Churches Together. The current co-moderator of the Geneva-based alliance is LWR president Kathryn Wolford.
Rwanda also put peacemaking higher on the agenda of LWR and other humanitarian agencies - as a focus of the Stand With Africa campaign that LWR co-leads among U.S. Lutherans, for example, and at the core of an innovative bi-national LWR project for peace in Colombia.
LED BY COFFEE, 2003 A BANNER YEAR FOR FAITH-POWERED FAIR TRADE
Baltimore, April 6, 2004 -- Nearly 60 percent more fair trade products were purchased through the Lutheran World Relief Coffee Project in 2003 than in 2002. The 1,891 participants in the project represents a 34 percent growth for the year.
The LWR project and other initiatives inspired by it are "a powerful model of faithful engagement with the world around us," said Erbin Crowell, Interfaith Program Director at Equal Exchange, the fair trade and LWR partner organization that supplies the coffee, tea and cocoa used in the LWR Coffee Project. Equal Exchange reports that its overall sales of fairly traded products through such projects grew by 70 percent in 2003.
Catholic Relief Services and Mennonite Central Committee each launched new parish-based fair trade projects in 2003 as well, modeled after the successful LWR Coffee Project. Equal Exchange now has eight projects with faith-based groups.
Fair trade is a lifeline for coffee farmers battling to survive three years of record low coffee prices. Yet fair trade certified coffee cooperatives only found fair trade buyers for 15 percent of their output last year, Equal Exchange reports. Faith-based projects like the LWR-Equal Exchange venture are playing a key role nationwide in expanding demand.
CORRECTION: In the March 25, 2004, story about a war-ravaged Liberian hospital in need of power and water the first sentence should read "...hopes to have electricity and water supplies again through a grant sought by
Lutheran World Relief from USAID."
