Muslims move into mainstream in Rwanda

In one hundred days between April and July 1994, Rwanda turned into a slaughterhouse. In the ensuing genocide neighbour killed neighbour, doctors, nurses, priests and family aided and abetted the murder of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in churches, schools, homes and countryside. Of a population of eight million, it is estimated between 800,000 and one million people were killed in those three months as hatred and ethnic tensions were released.

In the lead up to the nightmare, national radio broadcasts incited hatred, using words of demonization and dehumanization. Extremists called for the annihilation of 'inyenzi', the Kinyarwandan (national language) word for cockroaches, an epithet often hurled at Tutsis. In the land of a 1000 hills, Radio Télévision Libre Mille Collines (RTLMC) was known as Hate Radio, its broadcasting acted 'like a drumbeat urging the killers on'.

Tensions had existed for generations in Rwanda but the shooting down of the plane carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the president of Burundi, on its approach to Kigali airport, brought it to a head. The person or groups responsible for this remain in dispute, but the event on April 6^th was used as the pretext by Hutu extremists to commence murdering their fellow countrymen.

Some Rwandans helped saved Tutsis and moderate Hutus, At a time when the Christian Church was complicit in committing atrocities, a less visible group of people also tried to help.

One Friday in April 1994, the Muslim Council of Rwanda came together and decided that based on the tenets of Islam, their community should not participate in the liquidation. Mufti Sheikh Mugwiza Ahmad, the Mufti of Rwanda, the most respected Muslim leader in the country, issued a declaration instructing his community to help anyone who needed assistance.

"I told the people you must protect anyone who comes to your house and you must give them something to eat and drink," says Sheikh Ahmad, "because it is against Islam to kill."

In his film, Kinyarwanda, Forgiveness is Freedom, executive producer Ishmael Ntihabose interweaves six true stories of Rwandan survivors who were helped by the Muslim community. The film won the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance in 2011.

After the Mufti's broadcast people began arriving in the Muslim area of Kigali. "I protected seven people in my own home," says Sheikh Ahmad. At this time the Grand Mosque and the Nyanza madrassa were closed. "Others did the same for the simple reason it was the right thing to do."

His large house in Kigali was on the main street near a bus station. With lots of annexes people could live quite freely. "They only went out in emergencies," says Sheikh Ahmad. According to the Mufti, strong young Tutsi men ringed the area, fiercely protecting it from roaming militia who threatened its inhabitants.

"When the genocide began," says Sheikh Saleh Habimana, Mufti of Rwanda from 2001-2011, "we thought why should we support this government that has done so much to harm us. The government had denied the Muslim community the right to education, and the right to move freely. Our community was ignorant. We felt hopeless," he adds, "we had no dreams. The Muslim community, which was comprised of a collection of intermarriages, helps explain our resistance."

Habimana attributes this defiance to several other factors. "In Rwanda we practise pure Islam. There is no fundamentalism, no terrorism. In the Holy Koran it says if you save one life, it is like saving the universe. If you kill one person, it is like killing everyone. The Holy Koran forbade us to partake," says Habimana.

The day I spoke to Sheikh Ahmad in June 2012, he had just received his right to remain in The Netherlands for five years. For the past two he has been living in a refuge camp. "At some point people started to say I was involved in the killing, but it is not true. I was accused in the gacaca court (the old fashioned, community based method of justice resurrected to enable people to live together) of killing some people and participating in the genocide," says Sheikh Ahmad. "In Holland, they say I didn't participate."

The controversy that surrounds him concerns a time when he was seen talking to the militia, It is not known what the conversation was about nor his motives, but the result means that he is a very controversial figure.

Despite this Ntihabose, himself a survivor, decided to make this film as he had been fascinated by the stories of human compassion, but he limits the narrative to the true stories of the people he met who had been helped by the Muslim community.

Antoine Rutayisire, senior pastor of St Etienne's Anglican Cathedral in Kigali, has lived his life in Rwanda. "I was in Kigali during and after the genocide and I have interacted with the Muslim community on many occasions. I have never heard of any of them or their leaders mentioning that their Mufti had hidden or protected Tutsis during the genocide. The Muslim community did help each other and did help people who were not part of their religious community, but that is common to all groups irrespective of their faiths. If that was the case, the Mufti would be a national hero, but he is not," says Rutayisire.

Ntihabose, then a 13-year old boy, was picked up on the street outside his house where he lived with his parents, and bundled into the back of a vehicle.At the first roadblock, one of the Interahamwe militia asked the driver, "why don't you just kill this boy?" recalls Ntihabose. The driver replied, "I want to kill him, but not just yet, and not on the road."

For two days Ntihabose was imprisoned in the back as they drove across the country. He had no food and no water, but he did have a grisly vantage point from where he could hear and see the massacre going on around him in the lush green undulating hills of Rwanda. Everyday he was threatened with death. At one roadblock an Interahamwe guard, 'a man acting like Rambo', asked the driver, 'why haven't you killed this cockroach?'

He said, 'I forgot, but I am going to,' recalls Ntihabose.

Close to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, it occurred to Ntihabose that he could escape. One night he witnessed a silent column of people walking, and under cover of darkness, slipped out of the car and joined them. With a bribe to the border guard, money given to him as a precaution by his mother coincidentally on the morning he was abducted, he entered the DRC, and headed towards Burundi, where he knew he had family. "God protected me along the way," he says.

For Ntihabose one image lingers above all others. "I cannot get out of my mind the image of a cat eating a man's eyeballs. I can still see the Interahamwe cutting off a man's head. I can still hear the gurgling sound the dismembered head made. Then these people gouged out the dead man's eyes, and flung them on the road. A cat slunk up to the round balls and started licking them. To this day I cannot look at cats or get the sounds from the dead man out of my head."

Ntihabose, who made it back to Kigali to be reunited with his parents, has worked on two of the best films about the genocide, including Sometimes in April, and Shake Hands With The Devil.

Ntihabose found it difficult to get people to talk about their experiences, and many urged him to stop his project. "They were afraid, thinking something bad might happen to them. They worried if war broke out again, it would make their situation even worse."

Today about 400,000 Tutsis survive and make up about 15 percent of the population of this African nation. According to the 2002 census, the Muslim community made up less than two percent of the population. Poor and discriminated against, Muslims have been segregated, oppressed, stigmatized refused equal rights and shunned since Islam was first introduced in the 18th century by Muslim traders from East Africa.

According to Habimana, almost every ten years there is a slaughter. This was true in the 50s, 60s, 70s and early 90s. For Tutsis, says Habimana, referring to the small spike of conversions to Islam in the years following the genocide, "people believed if you were a Muslim you would never die in the genocide (Muslims were not a target of the Interahamwe). Islam acted like protection. In Africa anyone will join any faith for access to education and medicine," said Sheikh Habimana, "and we never had enough schools or hospitals. What you find is that once people convert, they often go back to their own faith."

Muslims did take part in the genocide. Several are on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, including the journalist Ngeze Hassan. "There are also Muslims in prisons inside the country," says Rutayisire, who has worked closely with Habimana on issues of reconciliation on theNational Unity and Reconciliation Commission."If there are fewer Muslims accused of murder and killings, it is not because they were better, it is simply because they were already a small number in the population," continues Rutayisire. 'It is all a matter of proportions."

For Rutayisire, forgiveness is not an option. Forgiveness is an obligation. "We need to forgive if we are going to build a better nation." Some feel they are being forced to forgive what is beyond human comprehension, to make sacrifices for the country where victims and perpetrators live side by side.

Forgiveness is the ability to free oneself from the dependence on another and in this case the perpetrator of the genocide. "If you hate someone, you constantly think about his inhumanity," says Dr Naasson Munyandamutsa, who won the 2011 Prize of Geneva for Human Rights in Psychiatry, and is credited for placing psychiatry at the 'nucleus of public health'. "If you do that, you remain in his grip and cannot escape to shape your life. Neither Muslims nor Christians advocate revenge. Revenge is a trap for resilience. How do individuals give meaning to things again? How do you deal with the unspeakable and reorganise your internal world?"

The genocide ended when current president Paul Kagame entered Rwanda in 1994 with his Tutsi rebel forces, the country in ruins. In 1995 at an Eid el Fitr ceremony, President of Rwanda, Pasteur Bizimungu, thanked the Muslim community. Sheikh Ahmad was present.

On the surface, eighteen years later, Kigali runs like a city on the up. Cafes serve good coffee and fill up with sleek urbanites forging ahead in line with the president's Vision 2020 to make Rwanda a corruption-free, gender equal, private sector-led economy. Except on the anniversary of the beginning of the genocide.

While the memories and memorials of the holocaust are never far away, on April 6th and 7^th, silent screams echo through the streets, and the horror, grief, sadness, is etched on people's faces.

While there are many criticisms about constraints on political expression in Rwanda, Habimana says that since the help of the Muslim community was officially acknowledged, Muslims have been treated like other Rwandans. "When we go for jobs, we get them. We have been able to translate the Holy Koran from Arabic to Kinyarwanda, We no longer call each other bad names."

Public discourse discourages the use of Hutu and Tutsi terminology in the hope that the process of being Rwandan will be ultimately be internalised. In Rwanda they say there is peace, but not yet reconciliation.