The Best American Crime Writing (52 page)

During my visit with Mary, I learned that she had been “murdered” in just this way. This young woman has only one relative who lived through the genocide, a younger brother who lives in Kigali. “All of my friends have AIDS,” she told me in June. “But I’ll die of loneliness before I die of AIDS,” she whispered, choking on her tears. “All I wanted was to marry and have a family.” Today, she lies gravely ill in her hut, cared for by Chantal, withering away.

Mass rape has long been a weapon of war. According to legend, ancient Rome was united after Romulus and his soldiers terrorized their rivals, the Sabines, by raping their women. Widespread sexual assault has been documented in conflicts ranging from the Crusades to the Napoleonic Wars.

It was Abraham Lincoln who approved the laws that eventually established the modern understanding of rape as a war crime. In 1863, he commissioned Francis Lieber, an expert jurist, to develop a set of instructions for governing armies during the Civil War. Lieber specifically named rape as a crime serious enough to be subject to the death penalty. “The Lieber code was revolutionary,” said Kelly Askin, director of the International Criminal Justice Institute. “Before, gender crimes had been very much ignored.”

International law was more reticent about the problem. “Rape was considered a kind of collateral damage,” said Rhonda Copelon, a professor of law at the City University of New York. “It was seen as
part of the unpreventable, fundamental culture of war.” After World War II, the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers in Nanking were prosecuted as war crimes by an international tribunal. However, rape was prosecuted only in conjunction with other violent crimes. The same tribunal, moreover, failed to prosecute the most institutionalized form of sexual violence, the enslavement of “comfort women” by the Japanese army. In 1946, rape was named a crime against humanity by an Allied statute governing German war crimes trials, but the law was never implemented. It was not until 1995, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, that rape was prosecuted as a grave crime tantamount to torture.

The defendant in that 1995 case was a Serbian policeman named Dusan Tadic. The tribunal charged him with various crimes, including the rape of a Muslim woman in a Bosnian prison camp. The rape was labeled a crime against humanity. So was another sexual crime, this one perpetrated against men. Tadic tortured two male Muslim prisoners, forcing one man to bite off the testicles of another, who then bled to death. The tribunal’s indictments set an important precedent. Disappointingly, tribunal prosecutors were forced to drop the rape charge after Tadic’s victim refused to testify—she was afraid of reprisal if she did so. The prosecutors were successful, however, with the sexual mutilation charge. Convicted of torture, among other crimes, Tadic was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Individual stories of rape in Rwanda had begun to accumulate as soon as the genocide ended, mostly through interviews collected by groups like Human Rights Watch. But because Rwandan culture discourages women from talking about sexual matters—and also because the idea that rape was merely “collateral damage” remained ingrained in the judicial community—the prosecutors in Arusha did not initially connect the dots between rape and the Hutus’ genocide blueprint. The legal breakthrough came by a willful accident,
during the 1998 trial in Arusha of Jean Paul Akayesu, mayor of Taba, a Rwandan commune.

Initially, Akayesu had been charged only with genocide. Among the survivors who testified against him was a woman code-named H. (The identities of tribunal witnesses are shielded.)

“H. disclosed to me prior to her going on the stand that she was raped out in the bush,” explained Pierre-Richard Prosper, the current U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, who led the tribunal’s prosecution against Akayesu. “She said that the Interahamwe would come in at the end of the day and start raping the women, and that Akayesu was there.” Sensing a window into not just the act of H.’s rape but the intention of her rapists, Prosper dispatched investigators to Rwanda, specifically to find women who were raped in Taba during the third and fourth weeks of April. Of the 500 or so women they knew had been held captive, investigators discovered that almost all had been killed and dumped in a mass grave. Witness H. was one of about a dozen who was able to escape. So was a woman code-named J.J.

Prosper put J.J. on the stand. Her tale was sickeningly familiar: She said she had been dragged away by Interahamwe and raped repeatedly. Then she mentioned that Akayesu watched her being raped from the doorway and goaded the Interahamwe, saying with a laugh, “Never ask me again what a Tutsi woman tastes like.”

The indictment against Akayesu was amended to include the first-ever charge of rape as a crime against humanity. Prosper argued that Akayesu, in making that flip remark as the Interahamwe proceeded with raping J.J., was effectively ordering them to continue raping others.

On September 2, 1998, Akayesu was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, including rape. He was sentenced to three life sentences, plus eighty years imprisonment, and transferred to a U.N.-sponsored prison in Mali, in West Africa.

“The intention in Rwanda was an abstraction: to kill without
killing,” said Arbia, the tribunal prosecutor. She described the case of a 45-year-old Rwandan woman who was raped by her 12-year-old son—with Interahamwe holding a hatchet to his throat—in front of her husband, while their five other young children were forced to hold open her thighs. “The offense against an individual woman becomes an offense against the family,” Arbia said, “which becomes an offense against the country, and so, by deduction, against humanity.”

On August 10, 1999, a year after Akayesu’s conviction, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s indictment was amended to include rape as a crime against humanity. According to prosecutors and witnesses, her frequent instructions to Interahamwe at the prefecture to rape before they killed, or to rape women instead of killing them, had triggered a collective sadism in Butare—one that had even inspired violence in the local peasants.

One Tutsi rape survivor I met in Butare, a farmer named Suzanne Bukabangwa, had never met Pauline, but became her victim by extension all the same. Her neighbors, uneducated farmers, had kept her as a sex slave during the genocide, she said, torturing her nightly. She remembered two things most of all: the stamens from the banana trees they used to violate her, leaving her body mutilated, and the single sentence one of the men used: “We’re going to kill all the Tutsis, and one day Hutu children will have to ask what did a Tutsi child look like.”

In Butare, I spoke to a local peasant, Lucien Simbayobewe, who was caught up in this cycle of humiliation. Now 40, he was being held prisoner in the local prison. (Only leaders of the genocide have been sent to Arusha.) He wore the pink shorts and matching pink shirt of the Rwandan inmate’s uniform. Wringing his hands in his lap, he told me about one woman he killed who still comes to him every night in his dreams. He couldn’t remember this apparition’s name, but he said he’d killed her when Pauline first organized the Butare Interahamwe. Choking on emotion, he said, “She
comes in the night dancing and gesturing with her hands invitingly, like a lover.” My translator gyrated her arms to show me the motion. “The woman smiles, and says, ‘How are you?’ But before I can answer, she says, ‘Goodbye,’ and then she vanishes—and I wake up.” Lucian then told me in detail about killing her. But when I asked Lucien if he’d raped the woman, he fell silent and fought back tears. Every prisoner I spoke with described explicitly whom he killed and how. Not a single one admitted to raping a Tutsi woman.

Perhaps this is because after the war, Rwanda’s legislature declared the rapes committed during the genocide were the highest category of crime; those convicted are sentenced to death. Or maybe these men could somehow justify to themselves having murdered but not raped. In any event, the weight of that level of confession was obviously too much to bear, and if there could be any tangible proof that rape was considered the more shameful crime, it was this.

Some scholars are beginning to share this opinion. “Rape sets in motion continuous suffering and extreme humiliation that affects not just the individual victim but everyone around her,” said the philosopher and historian Robert Jay Lifton, who in books like
The Nazi Doctors
has explored the psychology of genocide. “A woman is seen as a symbol of purity. The family revolves around that symbol. Then here is the brutal attack on that, stigmatizing them all. All this perpetuates the humiliation, reverberating among survivors and their whole families.” He paused. “In this way, rape is worse than death.”

Gerald Gahima, Rwanda’s prosecutor general, agrees. “Rape was the worst experience of victims of the genocide,” he said. “Some people paid to die, to be shot rather than tortured. Their prayers were for a quick and decent death. Victims of rape did not have that privilege.”

The case against Pauline further cements the precedent established
in the Akayesu trial: namely, that inciting mass rape is a crime against humanity. But Pauline’s case transcends jurisprudence. She presents to the world a new kind of criminal. “There is a shared concept across cultures that women don’t do this kind of thing,” said Carolyn Nordstrom, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. “Society doesn’t yet have a way to talk about it, because it violates all our concepts of what women are.”

I found Pauline’s mother, Theresa Nyirakabue, on the same plot of land in Ndora where Pauline was born and reared. Directly across the road is one of the many orderly settlements of sturdy homes the government built for Tutsi survivors of the genocide. Theresa is 86, diminutive, and half-blind, and keeps upright by grasping a tall staff. But her milky eyes are electric, her smile is quick, and she was eager to invite strangers into her home to talk about her daughter.

She hadn’t seen Pauline since the genocide began and was hungry for news of her. I asked her if she knew that Pauline was in detention in Arusha, and she nodded. I asked her if she knew why, and she nodded again. Then I said that I saw Pauline three weeks before in the courtroom and that she looked healthy enough. Smiling broadly, Theresa said: “Pauline wanted to teach at the health center. She liked to teach good health.” She paused, still smiling, and said, “Pauline’s ministership was the joy of my heart.”

I asked her if she thought her daughter was innocent of the charges against her. Theresa sobered instantly. “It is unimaginable that she did these things,” she said. “She wouldn’t order people to rape and kill. After all, Pauline is a mother.” Then Theresa leaned forward, her hands outstretched. “Before the war, Hutu and Tutsi were the same,” she said. She told me that Pauline had many Tutsi friends. Theresa added that during the genocide, she herself had hidden a Tutsi boy in her home.

At first, Theresa’s story took me by surprise. But then, Rwanda’s
lethal racialism could never be as starkly delineated as, say, Nazi Germany’s. Whether Hutus and Tutsis are separate ethnic groups is a subject of debate, but it was only after European colonists arrived in Rwanda that any political distinction was made between them. Intermarriage had long been common, and both groups spoke the same language and practiced the same religion. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, German and Belgian colonists used dubious racialist logic—namely, that Tutsis had a more “Caucasian” appearance—to designate the minority Tutsi the ruling class, empowering them as their social and governing proxy.

In the 1930s, the Belgians, deciding to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, needed to decide exactly who was in Rwanda. The most efficient procedure was simply to register everyone and require them to carry cards identifying them a
s
one or the other. Eighty-four percent of the population declared themselves Hutu and 15 percent Tutsi. Considering the degree of intermarriage in Rwandan history, this accounting was hardly scientific. What’s more, Rwandans sometimes switched ethnic identities, the wealthy relabeling themselves as Tutsis and the poor as Hutus.

“Identity became based on what you could get away with,” said Alison Des Forges, a senior adviser to the African Division of Human Rights Watch who has studied Rwanda for thirty years. “Half of the people are not clearly distinguishable. There was significant intermarriage. Women who fit the Tutsi stereotype—taller, lighter, with more Caucasian-like features—became desirable. But it didn’t necessarily mean that the women were one or the other.”

With desire comes its emotional alter ego, resentment. A revolution in 1959 brought the majority Hutus to power. As tensions increased around 1990, politicians began disseminating propaganda denouncing Tutsi females as temptresses, whores, and sexual deviants. Before the 1994 genocide began, Hutu newspapers ran cartoon after cartoon depicting Tutsi women as lascivious seducers.

Unlike the Nazis, who were fueled by myths of Aryan superiority,
the Hutus were driven by an accumulated rage over their lower status and by resentment of supposed Tutsi beauty and arrogance. “The propaganda made Tutsi women powerful, desirable—and therefore something to be destroyed,” Rhonda Copelon told me. “When you make the women the threat, you enhance the idea that violence against them is permitted.”

This pernicious idea, of course, came to full fruition during the genocide. The collective belief of Hutu women that Tutsi women were shamelessly trying to steal their husbands granted Hutu men permission to rape their supposed competitors out of existence. Seen through this warped lens, the men who raped were engaged not only in an act of sexual transgression but also in a purifying ritual. “Once women are defiled as a group, anything one does to them is done in some kind of higher purpose,” Robert Jay Lifton said. “It become a profound, shared motivation of eliminating evil. Tutsis must be killed down to the last person in order to bring about utopia. They are seen, in a sense, as already dead.”

This explanation conformed with my sense of Pauline’s view of the Tutsis; like many of her countrymen, she seemed able to view individual Tutsis as abstractions. But in my conversations with Pauline’s mother, things became even more complicated. After Theresa told me about the Tutsi boy she had hidden, she paused, looked at me intently, and told me, matter-of-factly, that Pauline’s great-grandfather was a Tutsi. The great-grandfather had been redesignated a Hutu, Theresa explained, because he became poor. Stunned, and knowing that in Rwanda kinship is defined patrilineally—through the blood of fathers—I asked Theresa if that didn’t mean that Pauline was a Tutsi. “Yes, of course,” she said eagerly. And would Pauline have known that she came from Tutsi lineage? Theresa pursed her lips and gave a firm, affirmative nod.