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Rwandans look to Louisville for interfaith model |
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Posted by -Chuck
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Monday, 04 August 2008 |
Peace activists seek reconciliation
By: Peter Smith
Solange Maniraguha survived the horrors of genocide in Rwanda in 1994 -- but her parents, four siblings and about 150 others from her extended family were murdered.
 Today, she works as a trauma counselor and within a Quaker organization called Friends Peace House in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, trying to reconcile victims and perpetrators of the violence.
It's a daunting task, and one that's getting a boost from an unlikely place: Louisville, Ky.
As Maniraguha and other Rwandans attempt to win the trust of people from various religions, they're modeling their agency after Louisville's Center for Interfaith Relations.
"It's really more important to me to know how to work together without looking (at) which religion this person is coming from, but how to rebuild trust, reconciliation and finally durable peace," Maniraguha said in an e-mail to The Courier-Journal.
The unlikely connection between Kentucky and Kigali began when a group of Rwandan Quaker peace activists traveled through Louisville two years ago and learned about the Louisville center -- best known for organizing the annual Festival of Faiths, which brings in outside speakers and aims to foster greater knowledge and cooperation across religious lines.
The Rwandans invited the center's executive director, Jan Arnow, to visit their country, where in May, she conducted workshops and discussions with a group that included various faiths, from Muslims to Catholics to Quakers to Pentecostals.
During that visit, she said, group members told her, "We want to do what your organization does" -- leading to establishment of the center's first branch outside Kentucky.
"They recognized that what they needed to do was create an interfaith organization under the umbrella of which they could do this work," Arnow said, adding the Rwandan group will be run entirely by people in that nation but is using the Louisville branch as a model.
It's not the only case of the Center for Interfaith Relations' global influence.
Visitors from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan visited Louisville last month to consult on how they could conduct their own forum of local faith leaders, similar to one held in Louisville earlier this year.
"I'm very excited … to bring our work somewhere where it can address a social problem (such as) religious terrorism," Arnow said.
Nevertheless, the obstacles are enormous in Rwanda, where ethnic violence in 1994 claimed at least 500,000 lives. The genocide, coming amid a time of economic and environmental stress on the nation, was fomented by the government of the nation's Hutu-led majority and targeted its Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus.
The mass killings -- often by machetes, clubs, stones and other crude instruments -- began almost immediately after the nation's president was killed when his plane was shot down April 6, 1994.
"It's an entire country that's still in mourning," Arnow said. "There isn't one person who wasn't directly affected by the genocide."
The genocide ended once a Tutsi rebel group gained control, but the after-effects have continued, and Rwanda's chaos helped destabilize neighboring countries such as Congo, where conflicts killed or displaced millions.
While international and Rwandan courts are bringing some of the perpetrators to justice, many cases are being heard at so-called "gacacas," or courts on the grass, based on a traditional system in which village elders settle property disputes.
Perpetrators of the genocide -- many of whom were forced or persuaded by its fomenters to participate in the bloodshed -- are granted leniency if they confess and ask for forgiveness.
But reconciliation takes time, said Arnow, who acknowledges that the group organizing a Center for Interfaith Relations is only one small part of the peace-making process.
However, the efforts are spreading already.
Samuel Kamanzi, of Congo, participated in the Kigali workshops and hopes to organize an interfaith organization in his own country. "It is an area which has been torn down by conflicts and war since 15 years," he said in an e-mail to The Courier-Journal.
"Many efforts have been supplied to look for peaceful solution but it didn't succeed until now," he added. "The consequences of this situation is that the war is still going … with all kinds of human rights abuse. … If we could gather all representatives of religious traditions in my province, I think it would be a useful tool in our endeavor toward peace and reconciliation."
Reporter Peter Smith can be reached at (502) 582-4469.
-Original Article-
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