God sleeps in Rwanda : a journey of transformation / Joseph Sebarenzi with Laura Ann Mullane

Includes index.

The drum beat and we were saved -- If we are killed, you will survive -- No one knows how war will end -- A tragedy beyond belief -- It was God's plan -- A life on the signature line -- Clinton's and Annan's healing missions -- A creeping autocracy -- Betrayal -- Escape into exile -- Afterword: Moving toward forgiveness and reconciliation.

A harrowing tale of survival and reconciliation by a Rwandan Tutsi who flees his homeland before the 1994 genocide and later returns to be elected speaker of the Rwandan parliament, only to be forced into exile once again This memoir tells the story of Joseph Sebarenzi, whose parents, seven siblings, and countless other family members were among 800,000 Tutsi brutally murdered over the course of ninety days in 1994 by extremist Rwandan Hutu -- an efficiency that exceeded even that of the Nazi Holocaust. Outbreaks of ethnic violence had been occurring in Rwanda since colonial times when the Belgians ruled the region. As a child, Sebarenzi twice hid with his mother during episodes of killing, narrowly escaping with his life. When he was a teenager, his father sent him away to school in Congo, telling him, "If we are killed, you will survive." Sebarenzi returned to Rwanda after the genocide and was elected speaker of parliament. But he then learned of a plot to assassinate him, leading him to once again flee the country in a daring escape. The poetic title of the book is taken from an old saying, "God spends the day elsewhere, but He sleeps in Rwanda," but this African nation is not alone in having had a shameful history of ethnic violence.