Rwanda's religious reflections
Twenty-year-old Zafran Mukantwari was the only person in her family who survived the genocide.
I meet her sitting outside Kigali's Al-Aqsa mosque.
She is tightly veiled and speaks softly as she tells me what happened 10 years ago.
Her family were Catholic, she says. Those who killed them worshipped at the same church.
At the age of 10, Zafran found herself alone and at first she continued going to church.
She thought she could find support there. But then she began to question her faith.
"When I realised that the people I was praying with killed my parents,
I preferred to become a Muslim because Muslims did not kill."No protectionBefore the genocide more than 60% of Rwandans were Catholic.
And when the killings started, tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to churches for sanctuary. But they found little protection there.
Churches became sites of slaughter, carried out even at the altar.
On the opposite side of Kigali from Al Aqsa mosque, is the church of Sainte Famille. As dawn mass is celebrated, the sound of hymns carries outside and floats across the waking city.
During the genocide, hundreds of Tutsis crammed inside here trying to escape the horrors unfolding outside. But Hutu militias came repeatedly with lists of those to be killed.
The priest in charge of the church, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, is blamed for colluding with the killers.
Discarding his priest's cassock, witnesses say he took to wearing a flack jacket and carrying a pistol.
"Some members of the Church failed in their mission, they contradicted what they stood for," says Father Antoine Kambanda, director of the charity, Caritas, in Kigali.
He acknowledges that while some priests and nuns risked their lives trying to stop the slaughter, others were implicated in the killings...
Turning to IslamThis position that blame lies with individuals, rather the Church as an institution, is still highly controversial, as Rwanda marks the tenth anniversary of the genocide.
The Church hierarchy in Rwanda supported the previous regime of President Juvenal Habyarimana. And they failed to denounce ethnic hatred then being disseminated.
Some survivors like Zafran have since left the Catholic Church, unable to reconcile the Church's teaching with the actions of its most senior members during the genocide.
Sheikh Saleh Habimana, the Mufti of Rwanda, is the representative of the country's Muslims.
He says many turned to Islam because Muslims were seen to have acted differently.
"The roofs of Muslim houses were full of non-Muslims hiding..."http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3561365.stm
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