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At the end of last year, I went to eastern Zaire with an international medical charity, just in time to see the last of the great column of refugees reaching Rwanda. An estimated 440,000 refugees returned home in November, whilst many more fled westwards, across the lush pastureland of eastern Zaire and into the Congo forest.
For the next few months I and the other aid workers waited for the remaining refugees to emerge from the forest. We waited to get permission to pass the checkpoints that barred us from getting to where the refugees had fled. We waited while the world got bored of waiting. We waited while stories emerged from a forested wilderness which prevents satellites and aircraft from seeing what happens under its impenetrable tree canopy. Stories of refugees fleeing for months without food or medical care. Of military operations far from the front line. Of earth mounds smelling of rotting flesh.
Stories, no evidence, no eye-witness sightings.
Throughout this time a small stream of refugees trickled out of the forest. Just 20,000 a month, but enough to feed our optimism that this stream might soon become a flood. The months passed, the frontline became ever further, the checkpoints remained. The trickle of refugees continued sporadically. Our unease increased. We started to discuss whether we should speak out against the ongoing atrocities. We lacked hard evidence, and to speak out would have risked our own security. We tried to weigh up whether we should stay to gather more evidence, or whether we should speak out and then have to evacuate. We tried to balance speaking out on behalf of those who were already dead against the need to stay and treat those who might still be alive. Hours and hours of discussions failed to lead to a unanimous decision, so we stayed and the killings went on.
The collective reasoning of our team failed because it was based on humanistic principles. The evil of not speaking out was considered to be less than the good of gathering more and better evidence. The evil of not trying to prevent the massacre of refugees was deemed to be outweighed by the good of treating and helping those who would emerge in the future. Our course of action was thought to be justified because good was considered to outweigh evil. Yet the evil continued unabated, for nothing had been done to combat it.
If the charity I worked for had spoken out against the atrocities earlier, it may have been kicked out of the country, future patients may have died from a lack of medical treatment and the organisation’s workers may even have been killed. But I believe to think on these lines is to miss the point, because it is considering the problem from a human rather than a divine perspective. We were secondary witnesses to what was happening and in a unique position to speak out. What was happening was wrong, so it was our responsibility and our duty to speak out, whatever the consequences.
There is an increasing tendency now to reject the Christian laws upon which our society has been founded. Absolutes of right and wrong are seen to be an old-fashioned concept that is no longer relevant in an ‘educated’ society which prefers to abide by its own perception of what constitutes social and anti- social behaviour. Yet God gave us definitive and eternal laws precisely because human nature mistakenly considers there to be various and fluid degrees of good and evil, whereas in reality good and evil are completely opposed. As Christians, and therefore God’s servants, we must then stand up to and renounce evil (Psalms 97:10; Proverbs 8:13; Isaiah 1:17), as we promise to do in our baptismal vows. We must overcome evil with good (Romans 13:21), and not try to balance evil with good.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005