Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  The genocide in Rwanda began on April 6, 1994, after the plane of President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down. In the hundred days that followed, eight hundred thousand members of the minority Tutsi ethnic group were killed. Unlike the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, where the killings were clinical, systematic, and remote, the Rwandan mass butchery was a hands-on affair. The killings were committed by the Interahamwe—youth militias of the majority Hutu ethnicity—and farmers, mainly with farm implements, and persisted until Tutsi forces regained the capital city of Kigali. Now the Hutus again live under a largely Tutsi regime and feel enslaved by a hated minority, while the Tutsis loathe the Hutus for having murdered their families. In official interviews, Rwandans say, “Plus jamais” (Never again), but in private, most of the people I met said another eruption was only a matter of time.

  A Rwandan proverb says, “A woman who is not yet battered is not a real woman.” The culture’s underlying misogyny was easily stoked by ethnic propaganda. By some estimates, as many as half a million women were raped during the paroxysm of terror, and subsequently they gave birth to as many as five thousand children. One woman recounted having a member of the murderous youth brigades back her up against a wall and then take his knife to her vagina, cutting out the entire lining of it, and hanging the gory tube of flesh from a stick outside her house. Many Hutus perceived Tutsi women—who tend to be tall, slender, and regal—as haughty and were determined to teach them a lesson. They raped not only to humiliate and shame their victims, but also as a way of killing; many of the men were HIV-positive and were encouraged by their leaders to infect as many Tutsi women as possible. About half of the Tutsi women who survived the genocide had been raped, and most of those contracted HIV.

  The children produced through Rwanda’s genocidal rapes are called les enfants de mauvais souvenir, or “the children of bad memories”; one writer called them the “living legacy of a time of death.” Rwandan society blames the women, so these pregnancies were “rejected and concealed, often denied and discovered late,” according to Dr. Catherine Bonnet, who studied the Rwandan rape problem. She observed that these women often self-induced abortion, attempted suicide, or committed infanticide. Some women left rape babies on church steps; the country is peppered with orphanages.

  To understand how children of wartime rape differ from children conceived in less systematic rapes, I traveled to Rwanda in 2004, at the tenth anniversary of the genocide. I could not identify women who had abandoned or killed their children; the women I saw had kept their children. Many had been cast out by their families, who wanted nothing to do with “the child of an Interahamwe,” and most were struggling to feed themselves and their children. The enfants de mauvais souvenir are accepted by neither Hutus nor Tutsis, and some Rwandan hospitals refuse to treat them. Jean Damascene Ndayambaje, head of the Department of Psychology at the National University of Rwanda, explained that it was considered a disgrace for the women to have allowed themselves to be raped rather than killed.

  Espérance Mukamana, who works for AVEGA, the widows’ organization in Rwanda, said that most of these castoff mothers “never find true love for their children. They love them enough to survive, but no more.” Ndayambaje described how one woman had to be physically restrained while doctors performed a cesarean because she had clenched her vaginal muscles tightly in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the birth. When the doctors brought her the baby, she began ranting and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. Some mothers gave their children names such as War or Child of Hate or Little Killer. Mukamana said, “The children know that their mothers don’t love them, but they don’t know why. They speak and their mothers don’t listen to them; they cry and their mothers don’t comfort them. So they develop strange behaviors. They themselves are cold and restless.”

  Unlike most rape survivors, those in Rwanda have the solace and solidarity of a horizontal identity as members of an acknowledged group. Alphonsine Nyirahabimana, who works with wartime rape survivors and their children at AVEGA, said, “No one can forget what happened to them, so they might as well remember together.” Some women who had conceived children in rape gained enough strength from this group identity to compensate for their loss of traditional social position. Professor Célestin Kalimba, head of the history department at the National University, said that a new Rwandan feminism has been among the accidental side effects of the genocide. “So much of the male population is either dead or in jail,” he said, “and women have to step into major roles.” The mothers who endured forced pregnancy emerged from the war as victims, entered a culture that further victimized them, and had to struggle toward a new society—if not for themselves, then for their castigated children.

  • • •

  At thirty-four, Marie Rose Matamura narrated the events of her life in an even monotone, with an air of complete resignation. When the genocide began, she fled to her church, but militias soon arrived and, with her priest’s consent, killed almost all the people gathered there. She escaped, but was seized by a Hutu man who claimed her and her sister as his wives. This was not uncommon; many of the militia would force women into sexual slavery, cynically using the word wife to euphemize a multitude of sins. Marie Rose’s acquiescence to her captor did not obviate her hatred of him. “In the road, hiding, you meet such a man,” she said. “He would just go walking around the neighborhood raping the ladies. At any time this man could force me to accept his friends; I was raped by many others. He told me that he had given me HIV so he didn’t have to waste time killing me.”

  Marie Rose’s captor fled when the Tutsi forces approached; weak and desperate, Marie Rose and her sister remained in his house. After a medical exam, they learned that they both did, in fact, have HIV and were both pregnant. Marie Rose’s sister died on Christmas Day 2001. Marie Rose took on her sister’s son and has brought him up with her own daughter. “I am trying to forget what happened and concentrate on feeding them,” she told me. “I can’t hate my own child or my sister’s child, though I never forget where they came from. The children ask me sometimes, ‘Who is my father?’ and I tell them that they don’t have a father, that they never did.”

  Marie Rose had begun to develop skin lesions and feared that her neighbors recognized them as a symptom of AIDS. “I don’t know who will take care of the children when I go,” she said. “I go from door to door, asking people if they have dirty clothes to be washed; I braid hair for rich Hutu women with husbands. I feel so sad that I will die—not sad for myself, but for the children. Someday, I will have to tell them the truth. I think all the time about how I will do it and make up the speeches. I will tell them how to behave correctly, and what to do if someone tries to rape them. I fear what they will become with me; I fear what they will become after that, without me.”

  • • •

  Rape has been used strategically since ancient times, and recently in at least thirty-six conflicts, including those in Bangladesh, Chechnya, Guatemala, several African nations, East Timor, and the former Yugoslavia. A Human Rights Watch report explained, “These incidents of rape are clearly aimed to subjugate, humiliate, and terrorize the entire community, not just the women and girls raped by the militias.” Western observers reported mass suicides of pregnant Chinese women following the Rape of Nanking during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and many half-Japanese babies were objects of infanticide. After the Bangladeshi conflict, the prime minister called the women who had borne children of rape “national heroines,” but many of them nonetheless left their babies in dustbins, and those who kept them were never accepted back into society. After the Kosovo war, a young man in Pristina told the Observer, “If I were normal, I would keep the kid, accept my wife. But in our culture, death is better than rape. I could not accept my wife. She would be dirty, evil, the castle of the enemy. A lot of women have been very sensible. They have kept quiet, they have given birth at home, and if they are even more sensible, they kill their scum babies.” One of the victims of wartime rape in S
arajevo said, “It was a hard birth. It hurt a lot. But after what the Chetniks did to me, it wasn’t anything.” She never even looked at the baby. “If anyone had tried to show it to me after it was born, I’d have strangled them and the baby, too.”

  The journalist Helena Smith wrote about a woman named Mirveta who gave birth to a child conceived in rape in Kosovo. Mirveta was twenty and illiterate; her husband had abandoned her because of the pregnancy. “He was a healthy little boy and Mirveta had produced him,” Smith writes. “But birth, the fifth in her short lifetime, had not brought joy, only dread. As the young Albanian mother took the child, she prepared to do the deed. She cradled him to her chest, she looked into her boy’s eyes, she stroked his face, and she snapped his neck.” She then handed the infant back to the nurses, in tears. “In her psychiatric detention cell,” Smith noted, “she has been weeping ever since.”

  • • •

  After the Interahamwe killed her husband, Marianne Mukamana went to the militia’s base and offered herself, believing it was the only way to save her five-year-old daughter. She was raped countless times in the ensuing weeks and told that she would eventually be killed; instead, she was freed by the Tutsi forces. When Marianne delivered a second daughter nine months after the genocide, she felt a surge of loathing for the baby. Marianne was HIV-positive; her new daughter tested positive as well. “I wanted to throw her away,” she recalled. “But then another heart came in me.” She resolved that she would teach herself to love her two girls equally. She told me that she felt the same about both daughters, but when I asked whether she would still give the younger one away, she said that she would. The elder daughter is pure Tutsi and looks it; the younger has dark coloring and Hutu features. Neighbors say that they can’t be full sisters, but Marianne tells them not to believe the lies of the street. “On my deathbed they will ask me why I am dying so young, and I will tell them everything.”

  The two girls are competitive for their mother’s love. The tradition in Rwanda is that the youngest child is the most beloved, and for Marianne it has been hard to embody that cultural expectation. “I will die of AIDS, and my older daughter will be left alone,” she said. “The reason is in the rape that made my younger daughter. How to know that without being angry? I try not to think of the past, because I am afraid of it, and I also don’t think of the future, because now I know better than to have dreams.”

  • • •

  Given the burdens associated with keeping such children in conflict zones—the loss of social status, the dimmed prospects of marriage—the number of mothers who do so regardless is astonishing. But though they often keep these children in good faith, they cannot necessarily provide them with adequate support. “I was used like a horse by the Indonesian soldiers who took me in turns and made me bear so many children,” said a rape survivor in East Timor. “Now I no longer have the strength to push my children towards a better future.”

  A recent report noted that children of rape “become the symbol of the trauma the nation as a whole went through, and society prefers not to acknowledge their needs.” Often, these children face legal problems. Nationality is commonly passed down paternally, so without a father, the child may be stateless. Zahra Ismail of the European University Centre for Peace Studies explained, “This creates a problem for ensuring fundamental social benefits for children, as international law on children’s human rights is based on an assumption of state responsibility.” In Vietnam, children of mixed race were called “dust of life” after the war and denied education and medical care because they had not been registered by their fathers; some mutilated themselves in attempts to look more American or more Asian. Children of Bosnian rape victims who sought refuge in Croatia were denied citizenship. Children born to raped Kuwaiti women following the Iraqi occupation of 1990 still have no citizenship. Ismail argues that such children are “also, albeit secondarily, victims of the rape, who are denied their basic rights.” She continues, “Forced pregnancy has so far been treated solely as a women’s issue, not giving children born of war any consideration. This not only led to their marginalization but also contributed to their being overlooked as victims, and later being somehow cast into the perpetrator camp.”

  The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child holds that children should have the right of citizenship. It does not, however, separately address the rights of children born of rape, nor contain any guarantee of equal treatment for children born out of wedlock. Foreigners frequently wish to adopt these children, but embarrassed governments ban or complicate that process for the sake of national identity. Governments in the countries where parents hope to adopt these children often make policy that feeds into such shame. The UK, for example, tried to facilitate the adoption of Balkan rape babies, but would not grant rape victims the chance to immigrate to the UK.

  • • •

  Small, wide-eyed, mousy, and sad, Marcelline Niyonsenga maintains the posture of an importuning child, looking up anxiously as if waiting for someone’s permission to go on living. She was nineteen when the war began, visiting family in Kigali, and their house was attacked. Shortly thereafter, she found another family with whom to hide. The head of that household, an old man, threw out his wife and forced Marcelline to become his sex slave. After two and a half months, he announced that he was tired of her. She was gang-raped and reluctantly found refuge with another rapist, a businessman who took her with him to Congo. When she learned that the war was over, she begged to go home, but she was pregnant, and her husband had decided to keep her and the child. She waited months for a day when he was away on business. She grabbed three thousand Congolese francs (about $5) and persuaded a taxi driver to take her to Rwanda, where the United Nations High Commission for Refugees took her in. Her damaged uterus had to be removed after the birth of her daughter, whom she named Clémence Tuyisenge.

  Since the war, Marcelline keeps house for her brother, a widower who has refused to let Clémence, who has AIDS, into his home. At least her brother did not abandon her, Marcelline said, even though she was raped and had HIV. Clémence stays with Marcelline’s mother, where Marcelline visits her once a week. More worrisome to Marcelline than telling Clémence about her origins was the prospect of explaining to her that neither of them would live long. Clémence’s body had already erupted in blisters her mother called “pimples.” Whenever Clémence became acutely sick, her grandmother would bring her to Marcelline, who took her to the hospital. When they are both healthy, Clémence and Marcelline laugh together. When Marcelline is sick, Clémence curls up next to her to comfort her. Marcelline often ponders whether it would be better for her daughter to predecease her; on balance, she feels it would be preferable. “People pity me because I have this enfant de mauvais souvenir, but she is the light of my life,” she said. “To be slowly dying like this without even the comfort of a child would be a thousand times worse. I am dying, but I am not alone.”

  • • •

  One woman I met outside Gitarama explained that a man killed her family, including her husband and three children, took her in sexual slavery for the duration of the genocide, and then fled. She gave birth to a son, then developed AIDS; the son remained healthy. Knowing she would soon die, she worried that he would have no relatives to care for him. So she tracked down his father in jail—this man who had killed her husband and children—and decided to build a relationship with him. Every day she brought him homemade meals in prison. She could not speak of what she was doing without staring fixedly at the floor.

  • • •

  In discussing wartime rape, Bishop Carlos Belo of East Timor, who shared the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, said, “Up to three thousand died in 1999, untold numbers of women were raped, and five hundred thousand persons displaced—one hundred thousand are yet to return.” Susan Harris Rimmer of the Australian National University has pointed out that while other wartime atrocities are enumerated, the number of women subject to rape and forced pregnancy usually remains a mere impression.
The word untold, in her view, is both literal and metaphoric.

  Since 1869, the Geneva Convention has guaranteed the wounded and sick in battle medical care, and many would argue that abortion for rape victims falls within these parameters. The UN Human Rights Council has indicated that denying a woman an abortion after rape may constitute cruel and inhuman treatment. But the United States continues to enforce the 1973 Helms Amendment, which states, “No foreign assistance funds may be used to pay for the performance of abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortions.” The current interpretation of that language is that any country or organization that receives US aid is prohibited from discussing or providing abortions even to women pregnant owing to wartime rape. “The truth is, almost all women pregnant from wartime rape would choose to abort,” said Janet Benshoof, president of the Global Justice Center. “In Congo, forty percent of the rape victims are children. If you’re thirteen, how can you bear a child? The mortality rates are incredible. The UN estimates that twenty percent of women who are raped in conflict and denied abortions will try to self-abort—which doesn’t include the ones who have killed themselves instead.” The US government pays for so-called cleanup kits to treat women who have botched their self-abortions, Benshoof said, “so we clearly know what’s going on. These rapes are genocidally motivated, and we’re facilitating genocide by making these women bear these children.”

  • • •

  Alphonsine Mukamakuza is tall, dramatic, and expressive, with all the grace and chiseled beauty for which the Tutsi are known. The deadness that afflicted many of the women I interviewed had not touched her; she would be laughing one minute and wracked with sobs the next. She lived in a mud hut on the outskirts of Kigali, furnished incongruously with an airplane seat propped in a corner, and two broken wooden chairs. The only light came through a crack between the roof and the wall. In spite of this poverty, she was impeccably dressed in a long, cotton print dress and matching turban.