c. 1997 Religion News Service

Two Rwandan Hutus sentenced to death for 1994 genocide

(RNS) Two Rwandan Hutus have received the first death penalties for the 1994 slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people in their country.

Deogratias Bizimana, a former medical assistant, and Egide Gatanazi, a former administrator, were sentenced to death Friday (Jan. 3) for genocide and crimes against humanity, the Reuter news agency reported. They have 15 days to appeal.

The two men were the subject of a four-hour trial on December 27 before a three-judge tribunal in Kibungo, a southeastern town where they were accused of organizing massacres. They pleaded not guilty but did not have defense lawyers.

Bizimana and Gatanazi were the first suspects to go on trial under a genocide law that passed in 1996. Some 90,000 Rwandans accused of taking part in the slaughter are crammed into jails. An estimated 800,000 Hutu moderates and minority Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutu militiamen, troops and mobs.

Gerard Gahima, deputy justice minister, said it is permissible under Rwandan law for people to be tried without lawyers.”If people think you can sweep the genocide of 1 million people under the carpet because there are no lawyers, they can think again,”he said.”These crimes were committed in broad daylight. Either there were eyewitnesses or there were not. There are no complex legal issues involved. It is an issue of fact.” Human rights groups have welcomed the beginning of the trials but consider them to be flawed and superficial because of the lack of defense lawyers.

In addition to the trials in Rwanda, an international tribunal on the Rwandan genocide opened its first trials in 1996 at its headquarters in Arusha, Tanzania. That tribunal cannot impose the death penalty on those found guilty.

The U.N. human rights office in Kigali said more than 2,000 Rwandan Hutus, some of the 460,000 refugees who returned home last month from Tanzania, had been arrested as genocide suspects.

Serbian Orthodox Church harshly criticizes Serbia’s leaders

(RNS) The Serbian Orthodox Church has accused Serbia’s nationalist leaders of”crushing the will of the people”in a strongly worded statement issued Thursday (Jan. 2).

The statement, released by leading bishops who held an emergency meeting of the Holy Synod in Belgrade, coincided with the resumption of opposition protests against President Slobodan Milosevic, who has refused to recognize opposing victories in recent elections. The protests had ceased during a one-day New Year’s break, The Washington Post reported.

The church leaders called on the Serbian government to”respect the results”of the Nov. 17 local elections.”This is the only way of restoring our people’s faith in a peaceful and better future,”they stated.

An international fact-finding mission determined last week that the opposition had been unfairly deprived of victories in Belgrade and 13 other Serbian cities and towns.

The strong church statement is viewed as a boost for the opposition. It stands in contrast to the church’s usually docile and sometimes approving stance toward Milosevic’s leadership in the past and its lack of condemnation of the 3 1/2-year Bosnian war.

Church leaders said they felt it was necessary to speak out because the government had failed to resolve the six-week-long political crisis.

They also accused Milosevic of inciting civil strife to remain in power.”He has already placed us against the whole world and now he wants to set us against each other and trigger bloodshed just to preserve power,”church officials said.

PASSAGES

Lloyd Wicke, architect of United Methodist Church, dies

(RNS) Lloyd C. Wicke, the architect of the 1968 merger that created the United Methodist Church, died Sunday (Dec. 29) in Columbus, Ohio. He was 95.

Wicke was the chairman of the Methodist Church committee that created the proposal leading to the church’s merger with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, The New York Times reported. On the day of the merger, 10 million Methodists and 750,000 members of the Evangelical United Brethren Church formed one denomination. It remains the nation’s second-largest Protestant group, after the Southern Baptist Convention, though its membership has decreased somewhat.

Elected to the episcopacy in 1948, Wicke also served as the Methodist Bishop of Pittsburgh from 1948 to 1960. He then served as bishop of New York from 1960 to 1972, when he retired.

Great Britain grants Scientology religion status

(RNS) The controversial Church of Scientology has been officially recognized as a religion by Great Britain’s Home Office, paving the way for church ministers to enter the country as missionaries.

The Home Office, which regulates immigration into Great Britain, had previously classified Scientology as a”socially harmful”cult and members were prohibited from entering the country to minister or study, London’s Daily Telegraph reported Dec. 28.

Scientology officials hailed the ruling as a victory for religious freedom and pluralism, in contrast to Germany’s recent crackdown on Scientology as largely a money-making scheme that threatens democracy and the nation’s youth. Three Scientologists were recently expelled from German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s ruling Christian Democratic Union.”We are elated about this decision,”said Heber C. Jentzsch, the Los Angeles-based president of the Church of Scientology International.”The British government is showing commendable leadership in bringing religious freedom and pluralism to Europe, which so far has been dominated by a few state churches,”he said in a statement.

Anti-cult activists criticized the Home Office’s decision, The Observer newspaper reported. The activists expressed concern that Great Britain’s Charity Commission will also overturn its earlier rulings and grant Scientology legal status as a religious charity.

In 1996, the Independent Television Commission ruled that Scientology could advertise on British television. The British Armed Forces also recognized Scientology last year.

Scientology claims more than 8 million followers in 113 nations. The church says it has 100,000 members in Great Britain.

Descendants of `false messiah’ followers seek to return

(RNS) Israel’s Jewish religious establishment has rejected a request from the descendants of a 17th-century religious leader considered a”false messiah”that they be allowed to return to mainstream Judaism.

The 33,000-strong Doenmeh are a Turkish community that traces its origins to Shabtai Tzvi, who in 1665 was regarded by millions of Jews as the messiah who would liberate Palestine from Turkish Ottoman rule and restore Jewish sovereignty. When threatened with death by the Turkish sultan, Shabtai Tzvi converted to Islam, as did hundreds of Turkish Jews who maintained a secret allegiance to Judaism. Mainstream Judaism considers Shabtai Tzvi to be an apostate and a false messiah.

While the Doenmeh celebrate many conventional Jewish holidays, they also instituted some of their own, including one that involves spouse-swapping.”It is their belief that, out of one of these adulterous unions, the reincarnation of Shabtai Tzvi will be reborn,”the Jerusalem Report magazine reported in its current edition, dated Jan. 9.

Late last year, Doenmeh representatives approached Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and asked to be reinstated as Jews. They were told they would have to undergo a full conversion to Judaism, which they rejected, according to the Jerusalem Report.

Earlier, Turkish Jewish authorities also refused to recognize the Doenmeh as Jews. Also known as Sabbateans, the Doenmeh community largely consists of businessmen and government workers who generally maintain a low profile.

Rudin to be honored for interfaith work in Poland

(RNS) Rabbi A. James Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s interreligious affairs director and a Religion News Service columnist, will be honored Tuesday (Jan. 7) in Warsaw by the Polish Council of Christians and Jews.

Rudin is being honored for his role in building bridges between Jews and Roman Catholics in Poland. Rudin has been involved in various Jewish-Catholic exchange programs and played a key role in defusing the dispute over the convent opened by Catholic nuns at the site of the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

The Rev. Waldemar Chrostowski, director of the Warsaw-based Institute of Catholic-Jewish Dialogue and co-chair of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, will present Rudin with the”Figure of Reconciliation Award.” Until the Holocaust, predominantly Catholic Poland was home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the world.

Quote of the Day: Rev. Giuseppe Della Puppa of Venice, Italy

(RNS) The Rev. Giuseppe Della Puppa, pastor of the church of St. Silvester in Venice, has placed a sign over its offerings box announcing that he will no longer accept foreign coins from charitable tourists:”Even banks do not want to change these small coins into lire and I can’t keep them as a collector,”he said, according to the Reuter news agency.

MJP END RNS