Isabel Hilton in Kigali
In her school dress, 10-year-old Rosine looks like any other Rwandan schoolgirl. But her mother, Monique, says Rosine has nightmares: she dreams men are chasing her with knives and she can’t run away.
Rosine’s bad dreams are not the product of her imagination. Five years ago, after her father, four brothers and 57 other family members were murdered by men with machetes, Rosine and her then pregnant mother were repeatedly raped.
Almost a million people died in the Rwandan genocide of 1994: 100 days of slaughter that began when the extremist Hutu interim government unleashed the Hutu militia on the minority ethnic group, the Tutsis. Not all the Tutsis died – some escaped and some women were spared, only to be brutally raped.
Monique and Rosine, then aged four, had been separated in the mayhem when the militia arrived. Monique hid in a tree while her family was massacred. When she came down, she discovered that Rosine had survived.
Mother and daughter tried to escape, but they were caught at a roadblock. Three soldiers took turns at raping them.
Monique and Rosine are just two of Rwanda’s thousands of traumatised rape survivors, for whom there has been almost no counselling, no justice and little medical help.
The mass rape of Tutsi women was an integral part of what was a planned genocide. The propaganda that poured from government radio stations in the months leading up to the genocide taunted Hutus with the mythology of Tutsi women: they were taller, more beautiful and arrogant. They had to be tasted and humiliated before they were killed.
More than 50% of the rape survivors are now HIV-positive. Some say their rapists boasted of infecting Tutsi women with the Aids virus. They would be left to live, they were told, so they could pass on the virus to returning Tutsi fighters.
Odette Nyiramilimo runs a clinic in Kigali. More than five years after the genocide, she still sees women who have never consulted a doctor or spoken about their rape. “There’s a shame among the survivors. Those who were not in Rwanda during the genocide look at those who were and they sometimes ask: ‘How did you survive?'” she says. “It’s as though we have done something shameful to have survived.”
In Kigali prison, 7 000 prisoners are crammed into a space built to accommodate perhaps a 10th of that number. Most of the men in this prison are accused of genocide, and many of those who committed genocide also committed rape.
Few of the men in Kigali prison have been charged with rape, however, because most of the victims were killed and those who did survive were often too ashamed to bring charges.
In the ruins of Rwanda after the genocide, little thought was given to the victims of rape. The Ministry of Justice had scarcely a door left on its hinges when the minister of the new Tutsi-dominated government took over. Given that, at the present rate of progress, to bring to trial the prisoners currently accused of genocide will take nearly 200 years, perhaps it was not surprising that the mass rape of Tutsi women should be neglected.
But the result is that the women have received neither attention nor justice. This, however, is slowly beginning to change. Last year the former mayor of Taba, Jean Paul Akayesu, was sentenced to death in the International Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide in Arusha, Tanzania.
In 1994, Akayesu kept 300 women prisoner in the Cultural Centre of Taba for several weeks. They were raped repeatedly before being killed. In a historic judgment, the court ruled that rape and sexual violence “also constitute genocide in the same way as any other act, as long as they were committed with intent to destroy a particular group targeted as such”.
The court concluded that the rape of the Tutsi women was systematic, was perpetrated against all Tutsi women and had constituted an integral part of the Rwandan genocide.
This week, a judgment is expected in the first case to be brought in Rwanda, the trial of 36 men for rape and murder in Bicumbi commune, two hours’ drive from Kigali. If the men are found guilty, it will be a victory for the women of Bicumbi and for thousands like them who have been left destitute, alone and all but forgotten.