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It was the first week of April 1994 and a month after the start of the long rainy season. The slopes of the mountains were of a lush green. The fields were filled with bananas, maize and sorghum.
Mabare, a village in the eastern province of Rwanda, was an oasis of calm, but trouble was coming.
On April 6, at around 8:30 pm, as the inhabitants of this lakeside village were getting ready to go to bed, a surface-to-air missile shot down about 50 km on a plane carrying a plane carrying it at the time was President Juvenal Habyarimana was preparing to land in Kigali, capital of Rwanda.
Habyarimana – a Hutu – was returning with his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, after signing a peace agreement with rebels of the Tutsi ethnic group.
The crash killed everyone on board and sparked one of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century. Over the next 100 days, the majority Hutu forces killed more than 800,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus. Many were brutally murdered with machetes by the Interahamwe militia, the youth branch of the ruling party at the time, the MRND.
Rwanda is celebrating this week the 25th anniversary of the genocide. World leaders are in the country to attend the vigils and pay tribute to the victims.
During the first days of the genocide, Mabare, a predominantly Hutu village, was spared. The inhabitants of the village continued to occupy their farms as usual.
But then, bodies, some peppered with bullets, began to float in the waters of the nearby lake Mugesera. Some were alive but seriously injured by deep wounds caused by machetes. As the campaign of violence began to spread from Kigali throughout the country, it became obvious to the inhabitants of Mabare that it was only a matter of time before they were also attacked. .
Under the guidance of the imam of their only mosque, Rashid Bagabo, locals decided to act.
With the help of his small boat, the imam began to recover the bodies of the lake, while young men from his mosque were erecting barriers on the two unpaved roads that ran through their village, for the purpose to block the attackers' access.
"Our religion teaches us to save lives, not to take lives," said Bagabo, 56, Al Jazeera. "This teaches us that if you save a life, it is as if you are saving all humanity, so it was easy for me to do something."
"There was nowhere to stand"
Slowly, the doors of the mosque were filled – young and old, men and women, Muslims and Christians all took refuge.
"People have been killed everywhere," Bagabo said. "Thousands of people were killed in churches, some church leaders took part in the genocide, there were three churches in our village but people were afraid to go there. safe to come to our mosque. "
Muslims made up less than a quarter of the population of a small village of about 500 inhabitants. But at the height of the genocide, more than 500 people went to the mosque, including residents of neighboring areas in search of safety.
"There was nowhere to stand in. All the spaces, there were people," recalls the Imam.
Abdul Karim Rugwiza was one of the young men at the time charged by the imam with managing the roadblocks.
"Our job was to delay the advance of the Interahamwe to give people time to flee and hide in the bushes," Rugwiza, 59, told Al Jazeera.
It was not only the men of the Muslim community who tried to stop the bloodshed in the village. The women of the mosque decided to provide first aid and basic medical care to the wounded who would be taken to the mosque.
"We were twenty women," said Mwanaidi Kampire.
"We did our best to help the wounded, we were farmers and housewives before the genocide – but that has changed," she added.
"People were brought from everywhere, we could not help everyone because some of them had wounds that we could not cure," she added.
Twenty-five years later, Kampire is still haunted by what she has witnessed.
"We saw elderly people, babies and women machete-cut by their own neighbors, they did not do anything to them, I still do not understand how anyone can do such a thing," she said. .
Barricaded in the mosque
On April 13, a week after the start of the genocide, a group of about 100 heavily armed Interahamwe attacked the village. The young villagers at the checkpoint did their best to stop their progress.
"We had nothing, only stones, sticks and some of us had spears. had guns and grenades. We absolutely could not stop them, "said Rugwiza.
"We threw stones at them and they threw grenades at us, some of my friends were killed while they were trying to stop them, we ran to the mosque and told everyone to run."
Many escaped into the bushes. Others, traumatized physically and psychologically after surviving previous attacks in other villages, decided to barricade themselves in the mosque. Nearly 300 people, mostly women and children, remained on site.
When the militia arrived at the mosque, located at the end of the village near the lake, they were short of bullets.
One by one, they started throwing grenades. Of the nearly 300 people who barricaded themselves in the mosque, only eight survived.
Pierre Ngarambe, a local Christian who had taken refuge in the mosque, was one of the lucky few to have survived the grenade attack.
"I survived, but I lost my wife and seven children in the attack.Our Muslim brothers did everything to ensure our safety.I can not thank them enough. at the last moment, they were trying to shelter us "old said.
The imam also survived the attack, but his relatives, including his nephews, did not do so.
"I was taking elderly people to a safe place.I was about 3 km away." My deputy, Said Ndagira, was killed protecting the inhabitants of the mosque ", he said. said the Imam.
Today, the village has a new mosque a short distance from the place where the old was. Survivors and residents say the horrific events of a quarter of a century ago have unified the community.
"We have become very close," said the new mosque imam of Al Jazeera, Sahinkuye said.
"We are building a wall in the old mosque with the names of the deceased, they are not here with us, but we have not forgotten them or what has happened."
Bagabo, the former imam, was honored as a hero by the government for his role in saving lives in his village during the genocide.
"I was just doing what my religion tells me to do, I do not think I'm a hero, it's the heroes who are not with us today," he said.
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