Page 43 - Archangel

‘Operation Moses’
and Its Martyrs

Amidst what would become one of the worst genocides in recorded
human history, thousands of heroes emerged every week in Rwanda and
neighboring countries among those who were finding, evacuating, hiding,
transporting, and resettling a million human beings running for their lives.
Witnesses of thousands of murders, Keesie Tinyuka, her friend Layla
Marayika, and a small army of rag-tag volunteers had been involved in
no less than 20 Rwandan rescue missions when Jack and Skye met them.
Godmother to Layla’s son Moses, Keezie told her friend “The clock is
ticking on half a million innocents, and Moses has no future if we fail.”
Raised together in the social justice – oriented United Methodist Church,
the lifelong friends and new colleagues sometimes worked solo, other
times in tandem, or as mission leaders of larger teams.
They tried desperately to convince everyone they encountered of the
scope and scale of the international massacre. They prayed for a different
outcome than the Holocaust driven four decades earlier on different
continents, by different Fascists who would be gods. Many Rwandans,
Zaireans and Tanzanians remained skeptical of the breadth and depth too
long for the survival of their families. Jack Lozi, Sean Collins, and Skye
MacIain needed no convincing as both their Goma and Bukavu camp staff
had been treating and torching the remains of thousands of doubters for
many weeks.
Before Jack met Keezie and later her friend Layla, there was already a
bounty on Tinyuka’s head. She had been vilified ‘on air’ via militia radio
stations for “aiding the Tutsi vermin to escape.” Posters bearing Keezie’s
face were nailed up around most villages. Working with her pastor
husband, Tinyuka started a multi-village rescue and health council to aid
the exodus of refugees and internally displaced people.
Keezie and her husband had agreed that even the death of one should
not, and could not, dissuade the other from continuing to serve Christ
in rescuing the innocent. While Keezie had escaped militia manhunts for
over two months, Interanhabwe eventually learned of their location and
actions and captured her husband. They tried him in a village mock-trial
‘for aiding the enemy.’ Reverend Tinyuka was ceremoniously hacked to
death with machetes, one of the murderers a former member of his own

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