RE: Rwanda

salam,

there is nothing that humans are not capable of. in europe, mothers and 
fathers would leave their children at home only to put children of "other" 
people in ovens to toast. unfortunately, it takes a human heart to do 
something like that. And, even worse, in 7th century Arabia, fathers burried 
their daughters alive. my sister, we are all capable of horrible things. i 
do believe, however, that it is a choice to say "no," whatever that is based 
on

Afdhere Jama
Editorial Director
HURIYAH Publications
PO BOX 423343
San Francisco, CA 94142
tel: [1] 415.517.0055
e-mail: [email protected]
website: http://www.huriyahmag.com




>From: "Kate Ahmad" <[email protected]>
>Reply-To: Muslim community debate and 
>discussion<[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: RE: [Progressivemuslimsnetwork] Rwanda
>Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 09:57:23 +1000
>
>Salaam Na'eem
>No wonder you were overcome with emotion.  Sometimes things are too 
>horrible to even comprehend; the 'children's memorial' sounds absolutely 
>heartbreaking.
>The article is good though, I have read something similar before.  It is 
>one of the few recent times Muslims have acted admirably, though this is 
>not widely known.
>My interest in these genocide cases is how can humans act like this?  The 
>last line of your article mentions the behaviour that is able to emerge 
>from us all.........but I disagree.  I dont believe there is ANY way in 
>this world I could kill children, probably not even innocent adults.  Then 
>again, I realise that whole groups of people are not inherently evil either 
>- so HOW can these atrocities happen?
>
>Anyway Na'eem, I admire your courage in going to Rwanda.  A patient of 
>mine, an aid worker, recently returned from Rwanda too.  He found the 
>people to be quite sad and hostile; and was overwhelmed by the suffering he 
>could see in them.
>
>
>Wa'salaam
>aisha
>
>>From: "Na'eem Jeenah" <[email protected]>
>>Reply-To: Muslim community debate and 
>>discussion<[email protected]>
>>To: [email protected]
>>Subject: [Progressivemuslimsnetwork] Rwanda
>>Date: Wed, 26 May 2004 17:39:17 +0200
>>
>>salaam
>>
>>a couple of weeks ago - i think - I visited rwanda. I wrote a piece
>>abuot it when I got back. However, I wasn't subscribed to PMN at
>>the time - changed email addies - and so didn't post it here. Since
>>I've been resubscribd now, I thought I'd post it.
>>
>>Please note, there has been a criticism (from 2 of my students, no
>>less) which I completely agree with. However, I dont have the time
>>to amend it now. So let me just say what it is. They argued that I
>>was too kind to Kagame. That his undemocratic practices, etc, give
>>a different impression from what I give in the article. They are right!
>>My only defence is that I wrote this the day after I returned and so
>>was still a tad overcome with emotion. (Not that its a good defence,
>>but I can try.)
>>
>>Below is the article. Ignore the Kagame bits and enjoy
>>
>>
>>
>>     We should all weep and feel ashamed
>>
>>     BLURB: Na'eem Jeenah reflects on a journey through
>>     Rwanda's Kigali Memorial Centre, and calls for us to be
>>     thankful to the people of that traumatised nation
>>
>>     I walked out of the building numbed; looking back now I
>>     am surprised that my legs were even able to carry me. My
>>     eyes were glazed; my arms limp at my sides. I wasn't the
>>     only one. Young, brave men tried desperately to hold
>>     back their tears, and failed miserably. Adult experienced
>>     men broke down and wept; one broke out in a sweat
>>     minutes after we had entered and twitched nervously as it
>>     dripped off his face.
>>
>>     Chief muftis of a number of African countries shook their
>>     heads in mourning and invoked Allah's Mercy. The
>>     former Libyan ambassador to Rwanda, who had
>>     witnessed the 1994 genocide, cried as the memories
>>     flooded back.
>>
>>     We had just walked out of the Kigali Memorial Centre,
>>     established this year, ten years after the holocaust that
>>     had devastated Rwanda, in memory of the 1000000 lives
>>     lost in 100 days of slaughter.
>>
>>     Perhaps it was the last room in the Centre, the Children's
>>     Memorial, that had done it for many of us. Happy
>>     pictures after happy pictures of children that had been
>>     murdered, with five or six line biographies. Fabrice, 15
>>     months old, 'killed in Muhoro Church'. Yves, 3 years old,
>>     'hacked by machete'. Ariane, 4 years old, 'stabbed in the
>>     eyes and head'. Two-year-olds, 'smashed against a wall'.
>>
>>     The Centre is a powerful reminder of what had happened
>>     in this city and in this country; and of what has happened
>>     elsewhere - to Bosnians as victims of Serb supremacism,
>>     to Armenians as victims of Turkish arrogance, to Jews as
>>     victims of Nazi herrenvolkism; to Native Americans as
>>     victims of European colonisation; and of what continues
>>     to happen today - to Kashmiris as victims of Indian
>>     nationalism, to Palestinians as victims of Zionist
>>     fundamentalism.
>>
>>     Set up with the assistance of a British trust, the memorial
>>     is located in the Gisozi district of Kigali, the site chosen
>>     for the mass burial of 250000 victims. It is a
>>     sophisticated and sterile memorial, with multimedia
>>     presentations of the genocide - unlike some memorials in
>>     other towns whose raw power is in their featuring of piles
>>     of skulls and skeletons.
>>
>>     Rwanda is a beautiful land of rolling green hills and
>>     mountains highlighted by forests and lakes, intersected by
>>     rivers and punctuated by earth-coloured buildings.
>>     Despite the red that coloured the landscape in 1994, it
>>     remains mesmerisingly attractive. It is the stuff of artists'
>>     inspirations.
>>
>>     Its people go about their business with diligence, and
>>     even though the poverty is stark, crime is virtually non-
>>     existent - a fact that might be a little difficult to appreciate
>>     when one remembers that not long ago Rwandans killed
>>     more than a million of their own people in three months.
>>
>>     We five South Africans that visited the Memorial were
>>     attending a conference of the Union of Muslim Councils
>>     (UMC), with Muslim community leaders - mostly national
>>     muftis - from 27 African countries.
>>
>>     Having been fed for years on the notion of African tribal
>>     rivalries, we were shocked to discover that there is
>>     actually only one 'tribe' in Rwanda. One tribe, one
>>     language - Kinyarwanda, one history. So what about the
>>     Hutu and Tutsi 'tribes'? There are no such things! The
>>     Hutu-Tutsi identities as they existed in the 20th Century
>>     were creations of Belgian colonial authorities.
>>
>>     The land was colonised by the Germans in 1895 and
>>     handed over to Belgian occupation in 1916, after the First
>>     World War (or the First European Tribal War as Malcolm
>>     X preferred to call it), by the League of Nations.
>>
>>     By the turn of the 20th Century, the terms 'Hutu', 'Tutsi'
>>     and 'Twa' were class classifications which could change
>>     with circumstances. The Belgians converted these into
>>     'racial' categories and reflected these in identity cards they
>>     issued. The arbitrariness of this 'racial' categorisation is
>>     reflected in the policy that anyone with 10 or more cows
>>     in 1932 - and his descendants - was regarded as Tutsi;
>>     anyone with less than 10 was a Hutu. A minority of the
>>     new Tutsis were then favoured by the Belgians with jobs
>>     and status, resulting in a great deal of resentment among
>>     the rest.
>>
>>     From before independence in 1962, there was already a
>>     backlash against Tutsis, with organised massacres taking
>>     place from 1959. Some 700000 Rwandans were forced
>>     into exile - including to South Africa - between 1959 and
>>     1973 because of the Belgian-encouraged ethnic cleansing.
>>     After independence, Hutus dominated politics and
>>     successive post-independence governments - mostly
>>     fascist in a single-party state - entrenched the divisions
>>     and the persecution of Tutsis. With the corporate-
>>     engineered collapse of coffee prices in the 1980s, the
>>     economy deteriorated and Hutus tightened their
>>     economic control.
>>
>>     The Belgians' divide-and-rule strategy didn't manifest only
>>     with the Hutu-Tutsi divide. Muslims were identified as a
>>     separate group - whether Hutu or Tutsi. Swahili Camp in
>>     Kigali bears testimony to this. It was created to intern
>>     Muslims. Camp residents were only allowed out with
>>     written permission and no non-Muslims were allowed in.
>>     It remained a poverty-stricken ghetto until after 1994.
>>
>>     In 1990, President Juvénal Habyarimana formed the
>>     notorious Interahamwe, the Hutu youth militia which,
>>     four years later, was to lead the anti-Tutsi genocide,
>>     together with the extremist media and the church
>>     hierarchy - both Hutu-controlled. Between then and the
>>     1994 genocide, eight major anti-Tutsi massacres took
>>     place.
>>
>>     The Arusha Peace Accords in 1993 between the
>>     government and the liberation movement, the Rwanda
>>     Patriotic Front (RPF), was to lead to a democratically-
>>     elected government. But the government and the Hutu
>>     elite were not interested in peace. Plans were put into
>>     place by the Interahamwe for the final extermination of
>>     Tutsis. Death lists were drawn up in advance; 1000
>>     Tutsis must be killed every 20 minutes.
>>
>>     And all through this, the western world supported the
>>     government with aid - including a huge arms package
>>     from the French in 1993. By 1994, despite numerous
>>     warning signs and appeals from UN forces on the ground,
>>     the UN refused to respond to the genocide waiting to
>>     happen. The US prevented a resolution for UN forces to
>>     be sent in; Kofi Annan instructed that no action be taken.
>>
>>     On 6 April 1994, as South Africa prepared for our first
>>     democratic elections, the Rwandan holocaust began. For
>>     100 days, 10000 people were killed every day, 400 every
>>     hour.
>>
>>     And the world watched, complicit in our silence. We
>>     watched as one million people were massacred. As many
>>     more were raped, tortured, mutilated, orphaned. As
>>     neighbours killed neighbours. As 20000 people were
>>     slaughtered in the Nyarubuye church. As Tutsi women
>>     were systematically raped as a weapon of genocide. As
>>     children were forced to kill their friends and neighbours.
>>     As the country's infrastructure was devastated. As,
>>     suddenly, 85000 children became heads of households.
>>     As the humanity of us all: the victims, the survivors, the
>>     perpetrators and the witnesses from afar, diminished.
>>
>>     But there were many Rwandans who endangered their
>>     lives in order to restore our humanity. People who hid,
>>     protected, saved others at risk, often giving up their own
>>     lives in the process.
>>
>>     And foremost among these were the Muslims of Rwanda.
>>
>>     Today, when Muslims are maligned all over the world as
>>     terrorists, when Muslims fight to save their lives and their
>>     honour, we can take pride in the struggles of the Muslim
>>     community of Rwanda 10 years ago.
>>
>>     Shaikh Hassan, an 'alim that I met in Kigali, told me how
>>     his mother had hidden 10 Tutsi families in her home,
>>     saving their lives.
>>
>>     Yahaya Nsengiyumva saved the lives of over 30 people
>>     by hiding them in his outhouse. One survivor recalls being
>>     chased by Interahamwe, knowing she would die 'any
>>     second', banging on Yahaya's door and being given
>>     sanctuary because, she remembers, he said the Qur'an
>>     says: 'If you save one life, it is like saving the whole
>>     world'.
>>
>>     When, in Nyange, Father Seromba gave the order to
>>     bulldoze his own church on top of his own congregation
>>     of 2000 people, Muslim 'ulama in Rwanda were
>>     encouraging unity and protecting Tutsis, trying to stem
>>     the terrible tide of the genocide.
>>
>>     It is no surprise, then, that entire villages have been, over
>>     the past few years, converting to Islam and leaving the
>>     Catholicism brought by the Belgians, the same Belgians
>>     who divided the Rwandan nation and set the scene for
>>     1994.
>>
>>     And, it is no surprise that the new transitional
>>     government, headed by former RPF guerrilla leader Paul
>>     Kagame, appointed a Muslim woman to head the
>>     country's Unity and Reconciliation Commission.
>>
>>     A tall, gentle man, Kagame has worked tirelessly for the
>>     past decade to create national unity, to create a Rwandan
>>     identity. He, like many other Rwandans, gets particularly
>>     irritated when asked whether he is Hutu or Tutsi and
>>     refuses to answer.
>>
>>     This year, as the world celebrates 10 years of South
>>     African democracy, some attention should also be paid to
>>     10 years of Rwandan reconstruction under Kagame. Ten
>>     years of building homes, trying to develop the economy,
>>     addressing the poverty problem. As we remember 10
>>     years after the Rwanda genocide, we should also
>>     celebrate Rwanda over the past 10 years - something
>>     Africa can be proud of.
>>
>>     When we walked out of the Memorial Centre and Saleh
>>     Habib, Mufti of Rwanda and now chairperson of the
>>     UMC, told me to read a statement to the media, I felt
>>     foolish. What could I say, no matter how well crafted a
>>     statement, that could sincerely express our response to
>>     what we had just witnessed? And so, as I nervously
>>     wiped the sweat from my brow, it was a hollow, dull
>>     reading, an inadequate attempt to articulate to a
>>     brutalised people how deeply their brutalisation had
>>     affected us and how very significant their experiences are
>>     to all of us that call ourselves human.
>>
>>     There were no smiles on the faces of the muftis as we
>>     boarded the buses. Our future journeys would be
>>     profoundly influenced by this mass grave, this memorial
>>     to the worse-than-animal in all our breasts, ready to
>>     emerge if we allow it to.
>>
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