Article December 22, 1997 Issue

One man cries peace in a land of massacres

Andrea Useem

The Christian Science Monitor

In an African country where conflict is often resolved with a gun, Moses Bigirimana has chosen an odd career: professional peacemaker teaching the futility of violence.

His message of choosing life over revenge has been especially poignant in his native land of Burundi, where a frenzy of eye-for-an-eye ethnic violence has left some 50,000 dead since 1993. ...

Last summer at an Army checkpoint, a Tutsi soldier told Bigirimana to lie on the ground, a sign that he was about to shoot. But a crowd of Tutsis who used to pray with Bigirimana had gathered. "When they realized I was going to be killed, they started to cry," he says. The soldier, bewildered, told Bigirimana to get up and leave.

In March, he organized another peace seminar with other church leaders. He included one special guest: the Tutsi who tried to kill him in 1993.

Andrea Useem, a freelance journalist Excerpted from The Christian Science Monitor, June 12, 1997

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