Eliminationist rape and other sexual violence constitute excess cruelty directed at women. They differ from eliminationist politics, violence, and cruelty’s other forms, which perpetrators, in principle and usually in practice, inflict against all the victim groups’ available members, men or women, young or old. The perpetrators’ particular and politically purposeful victimization of women in this singular way, especially when sanctioned, creates a daily impetus, indeed libidinal drive, to make the victims suffer, producing excess violence and suffering that are more frequent, systematic, and widespread than the perpetrators’ other cruelties. Lest anyone think the raping, especially when organized and institutionalized, is just boys being boys, or something other than intricately interwoven into eliminationist or exterminationist assaults’ other purposely cruel aspects, everyone should ponder certain indicative rapes from Rwanda.
Discussing the Hutu’s “massive, massive indiscriminate raping of women, old, young, children,” Rwandan Minister of Justice Tharcisse Karugarama in one brilliant answer to the question What motivated the perpetrators to rape? lays out eliminationist rape’s critical elements. First he explains rape’s purpose: “Rape was used as an instrument of genocide. To humiliate the people, to humiliate the victims.” Then he explains its particular source grounded in the perpetrators’ conception of the victims, which produced in the Hutu the desire for vengeance: “Because there was this feeling that these guys [the Tutsi] despise you. Their women think you are not worth their sex. So violate them.” Then Karugarama adduces what can be seen as eliminationist rape’s emblematic and most analytically significant instance: “We have a woman in Arusha who was standing, encouraging her sons to rape, as a sign of victory, as a sign of self-important and self-aggrandizement. As a sign of being raised to another level, of having raped a Tutsi woman.” He continues: “We have instances where women encouraged their husbands to rape, as a sign that these women have now conquered the Tutsi woman. They are now more superior because the Tutsi woman is down and beaten.” This is not boys being boys. It is mothers and wives being boys. Yet mothers and wives were driving their sons and husbands to rape for reasons that had nothing to do with sexual pleasure but for eliminationist ends, for some combination of cruelty’s multiple purposes and satisfactions. Karugarama concludes his analysis: “So you can imagine under normal circumstances their wife would never encourage their husband to do rape.”118 Exactly. Eliminationist circumstances, cruelty’s vengeance and satisfactions, here gave women the spur to become rapists, and to reveal the raping’s real nature.
In another way, Constance’s and Denise’s stories do as well. Constance, along with other Tutsi women, was a rape camp prisoner: “Over time, all the women became weaker and weaker because we had not been given any food. The Interahamwe told us that they would kill us before we died of hunger, but that they wanted to make us suffer more.” The repeated and institutionalized raping was an integral part of the Hutu’s larger eliminationist agenda. The perpetrators starved the women, told them they would kill them, and let them know they intended to keep them alive as long as possible, while starving them, so the women would suffer maximally. This rape camp interlude of this cruelty and torture’s multiple and intertwined forms came immediately after these same perpetrators had slaughtered the women’s husbands and children, and immediately before they fulfilled their promise to kill all the women, whom they eventually marched away and macheted to the last one. Constance too: “I was cut on the head with a machete and left because they thought I was dead. I was put into a mass grave that night and when I regained consciousness, I got out of the grave and ran in the bushes,” only, before eventually fleeing to safety, to be raped again by four young Hutu, one as young as twelve, at a roadblock where older Hutu “watched and encouraged” them.119
When the Hutu attacked Denise’s community, her husband jumped out of their house’s window and fled. Some neighbors were among the six or so Hutu barging into her house with machetes and torches. When Denise refused to reveal her husband’s whereabouts, “they began to beat me on the legs with sticks. Then one of them raped me. He said, ‘you are lucky. Your god is still with you because we don’t want to kill you. Now the Hutu have won. You Tutsi, we are going to exterminate you. You won’t own anything.’” Then after lording it over her that the Hutu were vanquishing and exterminating all the Tutsi except her, he demonstrated his sickening sarcasm in saying that she, unlike all other Tutsi slated for death, was “lucky” in being spared.
When he finished he took me inside and put me on a bed. He held one leg of mine open and another one held the other leg. He called everyone who was outside and said, “you come and see how Tutsikazi are on the inside.” Then he said, “You Tutsikazi, you think you are the only beautiful women in the world.” Then he cut out the inside of my vagina. He took the flesh outside, took a small stick and put what he had cut on the top. He stuck the stick in the ground outside the door and was shouting, “Everyone who comes past her will see how Tutsikazi look.” Then he came back inside and beat me again. 120
Here, and often across Rwanda, the perpetrators’ raping was accompanied by gruesome genital mutilation and torture. The Hutu were exacting sexual revenge against Tutsi women, whom they said, mantra-like, thought themselves better and more beautiful than Hutu. Additionally, perpetrators often performed this sexual revenge for demonstration purposes and, in this instance, to create a singularly grotesque display they fully expected onlooking Hutu to enjoy.
The shamelessness, indeed the moral order’s inversion—public demonstration of cruelty and otherwise unimaginable suffering as righting the world—is eliminationist assaults’ common feature. The gruesome cruelty, so revolting yet so common and so eagerly inflicted, and then publicly consumed and appreciated among Rwanda’s Hutu, and by other eliminationist assaults’ perpetrators and supporting community members, is enormously lurid and disturbing merely as print on the page. I considered not including here even the words of Denise, this last victim, which as mere words do not and cannot convey one one-thousandth of her pain and suffering’s horror. I nevertheless decided to present her testimony because we must behold, as best we can, the perpetrators’ actual, not sanitized, deeds, if we want to understand why they do what they do, which is not to robotically and clinically and dispassionately “execute” their victims (and do nothing else to them), but, among the many other nonrobotic, nonclinical, non-foot-dragging, nonreluctant, noncoerced, and horrifying acts the perpetrators regularly perpetrate, is to do that.
A Human Rights Watch study of Hutu’s raping during the annihilationist onslaught, based on extensive interviews with victims, concludes:Often the rape of women was accompanied or followed by mutilation of the sexual organs or of features held to be characteristic of the Tutsi ethnic group. Sexual mutilations included the pouring of boiling water into the vagina; the opening of the womb to cut out an unborn child before killing the mother; cutting off breasts; slashing the pelvis area; and the mutilation of vaginas. . . . Assailants mutilated features considered “Tutsi,” including thin noses and long fingers. 121
Concessa Kayiraba, part of a community of rape victims, victimized by the Hutu of their own village, including their own neighbors, explains: “They used their sex as a killing weapon. After that they would insert objects in the vagina like sticks and add in chili pepper. So I think their plan was to kill. They were evil.”122 Ngarambe, speaking for the perpetrators, who he says boasted about raping Tutsi women, confirms the Hutu rapists’ eliminationist motivation: “There was nothing else they wanted them [the Tutsi they raped] for, except to humiliate them, to throw away their humanness, and to make them lose their Rwandan image they had before.”123
The annals of eliminationist rape, in Rwanda, in Bosnia and elsewhere, and now, especially with Rwandan exile Hutu militias in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Political Islamists in Darfur, contain legions of such sexual mutilation, which, together with the perpetrators’ boastful statements, show th
at the perpetrators’ pleasure in raping is principally the pleasure of making the hated victims suffer, of displaying the perpetrators’ utter domination, of appropriating the victims’ women, of, in the perpetrators’ minds, multiple layers of irony, mocking and cruelty, enjoyment, physically and symbolically turning the tables on, and permanently marking the victims, done all in the name of what the perpetrators believe the victims deserve.
Alisa Muratčauš, in addition to being president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, to which a thousand women belong, many of whom were raped and held in rape camps, was herself a rape victim and rape camp survivor. She could not be clearer that for the perpetrators rape was a politically motivated eliminationist weapon, emanating from hatred, hatred born of their conception of Muslims as pernicious alien invaders who had to be eradicated. She knows it because the Serbs repeatedly told it to her, to her sister, and the other victims (including five thousand men) for whom she speaks—as she in so many ways conveyed to me during a long interview in Sarajevo:A lot of women, especially Bosniak women and Catholic [Croatian] women, we are brutally raped and suffered the grossest kind of physical and psychological torture at the hands of the enemies. Rape was systemically used as a weapon of biological genocide to separate women from their communities, to separate women from families, to criminally humiliate the family of raped women. Women of different ages were raped. Some were only eleven or twelve years old, and some of these young children often died because of the extreme assault. . . .
Alisa Muratčauš, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 2008
Some soldiers raped my sister. Told [her] “you will have a baby.
You will bring new life. It will be Serbian. Serbian. Just Serbian people. We will destroy you, all of you. We will destroy, definitely. Bosnia is and Herzegovina is a Serbian land, and there will be no Croatian people, Bosnian people, just Serbian people.”
The Serbs explained to her and others the source of their hatred: “They told us, you are Turkish. You are Balia [a derogatory term]. We will kill you. We will rape you, kill you, hard.” Asked whether the Serbs explained why they wanted to kill her, she chuckled as if the question were naïve and absurd, the answer being so obvious: “Yes, [laughing] they just needed to know that we are Bosniak. It’s enough for them. ‘Okay, we will kill you. We will expel you. This is Serbian land, and just Serbian people will live here. Not you.’” The Serbs raped the Bosniak women in anything but a matter-of-fact way, of having a job to do. The rapists lorded their eliminationist deeds over them, “cut[ting them] with their knives,” carving into their breasts an “Orthodox cross.” Why? “They hated us a lot. This is really a special hate.” The Serbs boasted to their victims: “They were yelling at us, ‘ha-ha-ha, you will have Serbian babies, Serbian children,’” and mockingly offered to bring their victims an “Orthodox priest if you want” to hasten their Serbification. Asked whether the Serbs ever showed sympathy toward the victims, Muratčauš was emphatic: “No. Actually, sexually they enjoy it to [make you] suffer, to torture you. . . . They enjoyed to torture you, to show they are . . . very brave. That they are very strong.” Muratčauš told me that the raping was unequivocally “political”: “Definitely, it was, yes. Not sexual expression. Just the expression of the—actually they hated us. Just to cause fear in us. To expel us. To speed up ethnic cleansing. Definitely.”124
Women’s particular vulnerability to this particular cruelty and torture and the predictable and special fear it engenders, when perpetrators practice it widely, render women’s plight under eliminationist politics’ threat, or as its intended victims, in this significant aspect and probably overall, qualitatively different from and often worse than men’s. While analysis of and policy response to eliminationist politics must focus on its core, this sui generis feature requires special attention. This ought to include the fundamental recognition that rape, as excess cruelty and preventive reproduction, is in many eliminationist assaults a principal eliminationist means, complementing and functionally equivalent to mass murder and expulsion. A Masaleit woman from West Darfur, raped by ten soldiers in the presence of her baby and daughter, and left bleeding and unable to walk, explains that the perpetrators themselves, who burnt down her undefended and rebel-free village, portray rape, just as the Serbs in Bosnia did, in this way: “They were saying the government from Khartoum sent [them] and we [were to be] killed and raped and cleaned [from] the land.”125
Just as eliminationist perpetrators target women in particular ways, they do children as well. Obviously, children are innocent of committing any transgression. Yet race, kinship, group membership, or some other perpetrator principle leads most eliminationist perpetrators to think children ought to roughly share their parents and people’s fate. The perpetrators’ conception of their victims as existential enemies, heretics, subhumans, or demons usually, though far from invariably, encompasses the victims’ children as well and, powerfully informing emotions, manages to efface the tenderness and protectiveness many feel, seemingly naturally, for children. Even worse, the brutality eliminationist politics’ perpetrators inflict upon children is often ferocious.
As with excess cruelty, we need to account for the perpetrators’ violence against children, even small children, and then its variations. That perpetrators willfully, even eagerly, slaughter or expel children, and furthermore, often subject them to excess cruelty, is comprehensible, once it is understood that perpetrators willingly target groups and peoples for elimination because they believe them to be (frequently dehumanized or demonized) beings substantially endangering the perpetrators, their families, or their transformative vision. In short, according to perpetrators’ conception of the victim group, the children, if not already noxious, will grow into the putatively hateful and dangerous beings their parents are. They pose an inherent potential future threat, which perpetrators expect will further intensify, as will the children’s desire to revenge themselves on the people behind their parents’ suffering and elimination. So the children, like their parents, must, in one way or another, go. While this line of reasoning’s particulars vary depending on perpetrators’ conception of victims as existential enemies, heretics, subhumans, or demons, its essential easy-to-follow thread helps explain why the perpetrators and their supporters, often parents themselves, shut down the solicitude ordinarily reserved for children, feeling little or no compunction in eliminating them. Once children are caught in eliminationist violence’s maelstrom that, in any case, tends to become indiscriminate at the point of attack, the perpetrators treat them horribly. Because children, especially infants and small children, are especially vulnerable, they suffer and die disproportionately more just by receiving equal treatment.
Nevertheless, children’s fates vary widely during eliminationist onslaughts. When eliminationist assaults are wholly or primarily mass murderous, the perpetrators’ treatment of children takes three basic forms, each deriving mainly from the perpetrators’ conception of the victims and their threat.
In some eliminationist assaults, the perpetrators treat children utterly differently from their parents by choosing not to target them. This was true for communist regimes, which, unlike the Nazis, did not target children. The Soviets, who, in consigning the vast majority of their victims to the gulag, did not include their victims’ children (though when they expelled entire minority groups or kulaks from their homes and regions, the children suffered and died along with their parents). The Soviets knew the children were themselves not a manifest threat and could always be reared, in the ideological school that Soviet society was, as good communists. In other eliminationist programs against heretics, the perpetrators have similarly often spared children, at least when targeting people for real or alleged political beliefs and actions. This appears to have happened frequently during the Indonesians’ slaughter of communists. The perpetrators have not seen heretics’ children as guilty (they are prepolitical) and could therefore safely live with their surviving
relatives (the Indonesian often also spared women) or be raised by others and imbued with the dominant group’s worldview.
Eliminationist perpetrators’ second mode of treating children is to subject them to a less severe eliminationist fate than that of their parents. This occurs frequently when perpetrators employ various means, including but not only annihilation, or when the assault is selective, focusing on weakening the enemy with strategic killing (the number can still be enormous) of part of a targeted people. The Serbs, in their eliminationist onslaughts both against the Bosniaks and the Kosovars, restricted their targeted killing mainly to men and teenage boys. They did not systematically target younger children for death, instead expelling them together with their families’ and communities’ remnants. Perpetrators eliminating many peoples, even when targeting children, often are less consistent in killing them, because, whatever they believe about the victim peoples, the children are, after all, just children and manifestly not threatening. For them perpetrators often choose lesser eliminationist means such as expulsion.
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