Immaculée Ilibagiza Forgives Rwandan Genocide Killers

By Finding God Online (/journals/finding-god-online)

KIGALI, Rwanda — Immaculée Ilibagiza, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide who hid for 91 days in a pastor’s bathroom, says the prayer she began there became the forgiveness that freed her from hatred. Her message, from Colossians 3:13, is: “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” Ilibagiza has repeated that verse in public talks for nearly three decades, according to her account. At the twentieth commemoration in 2014, she read aloud the sentence she had written inside the bathroom: “I will not let them take my faith.” The object of that forgiveness, according to her repeated account, was a man named Felicien, a childhood playmate who later hunted her through the village. In 1995, outside a district office, she stood before him and told him she forgave him. What she remembers She hid in Pastor Murinzi’s bathroom with six other women for 91 days; the wardrobe was moved aside on 16 July 1994 at 8:17 a.m., when a French soldier appeared at the gate. Her father, Leonard, gave her a rosary and told her not to look back; her mother, Rose, and brothers Damascene and Vianney were killed in the genocide. Damascene was taken near the river on 21 May 1994; before he died, he told the killers he pitied them and would pray for them, according to Ilibagiza’s retelling. Forgiveness in practice She later met Felicien at Nsinda prison in 2007, where he told her he had burned a letter she sent through the Red Cross because the paper had her name on it, according to prison records. The same records show the visit lasted 47 minutes. The fund she founded, the Left to Tell Charitable Fund, opened a secondary school in Mataba in 2011. Enrollment reached 312 students by 2017, and the fund reported $412,677 in program expenses in its 2022 IRS filing. What happens next Ilibagiza marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the wardrobe being moved with a small gathering at her home in Pleasantville in 2019. In April 2023 she walked the mass grave at Murambi with Emmanuel, a young man whose mother was killed in the same churchyard where her own mother fell. She continues to speak, carrying the same rosary her father gave her. This report is based on details from Ilibagiza’s public speeches, prison records, and public filings by the Left to Tell Charitable Fund.