by Otto Penzler
Around the same time, some Interahamwe arrived at the local hospital, where a unit of Doctors Without Borders was in residence. Rose, a young Tutsi woman who had sought refuge at the hospital, watched in terror as soldiers stormed the complex. (Rose, who is now under military protection, requested that her last name not be printed.) “They said that Pauline had given them permission to go after the Tutsi girls, who were too proud of themselves,” Rose told me. “She was the minister, so they said they were free to do it.” Pauline had led the soldiers to see rape as a reward.
Chief among the Interahamwe at the hospital was Pauline’s only son, a 24-year-old student named Arsène Shalom Ntahobali. Shalom, as he was known, was over six feet tall, slightly overweight and clean-shaven. He wore a tracksuit and sneakers; grenades dangled from his waist. Rose said that Shalom, who repeatedly announced that he had “permission” from his mother to rape Tutsis, found her cowering in the maternity ward. He yanked her to her feet and raped her against the wall. Before leaving Rose to chase after some students who had been hiding nearby, he promised that he’d return to kill her. But before Shalom could do so, she fled the hospital and ran home to her family.
A few days later, Rose recalled, a local official knocked on her door. Rose told me that the official informed her that even though all Tutsis would be exterminated, one Tutsi would be left alive— one who could deliver a progress report to God. Rose was to be that witness. And her instruction on her new role began that moment. “Hutu soldiers took my mother outside,” Rose told me, “stripped off her clothes and raped her with a machete.” On that first day, twenty family members were slaughtered before her eyes.
Rose told me that until early July, when the genocide ended, she was led by Interahamwe to witness atrocity after atrocity. She said that even though the Interahamwe’s overarching objective was to kill, the men seemed particularly obsessed by what they did to women’s bodies. “I saw them rape two girls with spears, then burn their pubic hair,” she said. “Then they took me to another spot where a lady was giving birth. The baby was halfway out. They speared it.” All the while, Rose repeatedly heard the soldiers say, “We are doing what was ordered by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko.”
I met Rose in Butare this summer. She is 32 now, a pretty woman with high cheekbones and small features. Speaking in an airless hotel room, Rose pitched slightly forward in a red business suit, her gaze direct. She explained that since the genocide she has suffered from stomach ulcers, and occasionally slips into semicon-sciousness, racked with delirium and pain. “People think I’m possessed,” she said. These fits, she said, frighten her children—her two born before 1994 and the four genocide orphans she adopted afterward. As we spoke, it was clear that Rose was telling her horrific story as carefully as possible, to finally fulfill, in a way much different from intended, her role as witness.
Rose said that during the months the genocide was carried out, she saw Pauline Nyiramasuhuko three times. The minister was an unforgettable sight. She’d exchanged her colorful civilian wraps for brand-new military fatigues and boots. She was seen carrying a machine gun over her shoulder. Other survivors told me they heard the minister for women and family affairs spit invectives at Tutsi women, calling them, “cockroaches” and “dirt.” She advised the men to choose the young women for sex and kill off the old. By one account, women were forced to raise their shirts to separate the mothers from the “virgins.” Sometimes, I was told, Pauline handed soldiers packets of condoms.
Much of the violence took place in the scrubby yard in front of Butare’s local government offices, or prefecture, where at one point hundreds of Tutsis were kept under guard. Witnesses recalled that Pauline showed up at night in a white Toyota pickup truck, often driven by Shalom, and supervised as Interahamwe loaded the truck with women who were driven off and never seen again. Often, when a woman at the prefecture saw Pauline, she appealed to her, as a fellow woman and mother, for mercy. But this, claimed survivors, only enraged Pauline. When one woman wouldn’t stop crying out, a survivor recalled, the minister told the Interahamwe to shut her up. They stabbed the pleading woman and then slit her throat.
There will never be a precise accounting of how many Rwandans were massacred between April and July 1994. Human Rights Watch calculates the number to be at least 500,000, while the United Nations estimates that between 800,000 and one million Rwandans died during that period. Whatever the total, the rate of carnage and the concentration of the killing (Rwanda is roughly the size of New Jersey) give it the distinction of being the most ferocious mass slaughter in recorded history. Three-quarters of the Tutsi population was exterminated. Today, Rwanda’s common greeting, the Kinyarwanda expression mwaramutse—which translates as “did you wake?”—is less an expression of “good morning” than it is of relief that one is breathing at all.
Understandably, the world’s attention subsequently focused on the sheer volume of the Rwandan slaughter. But the prosecutors and judges of the International Crime Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, are now coming to recognize the equally alarming and cynical story of what was left behind. Though most women were killed before they could tell their stories, a U.N. report has concluded that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide. Some were penetrated with spears, gun barrels, bottles or the stamens of banana trees. Sexual organs were multilated with machetes, boiling water, and acid; women’s breasts were cut off. According to one study, Butare province alone has more than 30,000 rape survivors. Many more women were killed after they were raped.
These facts are harrowing. More shocking still is that so many of these crimes were supposedly inspired and orchestrated by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, whose very job was the preservation, education, and empowerment of Rwanda’s women.
In July 1994 Pauline fled Rwanda in a mass exodus of more than one million Hutus fearing retribution by the advancing Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. After finding safety in a refugee camp in Congo, she eventually slipped into Kenya, where she lived as a fugitive for almost three years. On July 18, 1997, however, Pauline was apprehended in Nairobi by Kenyan and international authorities. (Shalom was seized six days later, in a Nairobi grocery store he was running.) After interrogation by investigators, Pauline was transferred with Shalom to Tanzania, where both were delivered to the International Tribunal in Arusha.
At the tribunal, Pauline faces eleven charges, including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. She is the first woman ever to be charged with these crimes in an international court. And she is the first woman ever to be charged with rape as a crime against humanity. (Her son, Shalom, faces ten charges, to which he has pled innocence.)
For the last five years mother and son have spent their days at the U.N. Detention Facility in Arusha in nearby 16-by-19 cells. They have access to a gym and a nurse. Pauline often spends time tending flowers and singing to herself in a common open-air courtyard.
Since June 2001, when their trials began, Pauline and Shalom have spent most of their weekdays in a courtroom inside Arusha’s dilapidated conference center. The U.N. Security Council established the Arusha tribunal in November 1994, eighteen months after establishing a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. With all of Rwanda’s judicial and law enforcement personnel dead or in exile, and the country’s physical infrastructure reduced to rubble, the U.N. chose to house the tribunal in this tourist hub near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Fifty-three Rwandan genocidaires are in custody in Arusha; twenty more have been indicted and are on the lam, most likely in Kenya and Congo.
This summer, I attended sessions of Pauline’s trial. In court, her appearance suggested a schoolteacher. Now 56, she favored plain high-necked dresses that showed off the gleaming gold crucifix she usually wears. According to observers, at the beginning of the trial she shook her head and smirked as charges were read out. But as more and more survivors have come from Butare to testify against her, she has grown subdued. During my visit, Pauline mostly looked blankly around
the courtroom past a pair of scholarly bifocals, taking copious notes on a legal pad and avoiding the gaze of witnesses. Sometimes, I was told, she wears wild hairstyles and headdresses and slumps behind a computer screen that sits in front of her, as if she were trying to disguise herself from witnesses asked to identify her. On one such day eleven months ago, she didn’t show up at all, preferring, her attorneys told the court, to worship in chapel; that morning, when asked to identify the defendant, the witness could point only to Pauline’s chair. The courtroom is typically crowded with three judges, twelve defense attorneys and prosecutors, clerks, interpreters, and other staff. Most days there are only a handful of spectators watching all this in a narrow gallery behind bulletproof glass—and frequently there are none at all.
Pauline and Shalom are being tried together with four other Hutu leaders from Butare who are also accused of genocide. Fourteen witnesses for the prosecution have testified so far, with seventy-three more still to go, most of whom will have something to say against Pauline, who faces life imprisonment. In most cases, she is accused of inciting crimes rather than carrying them out herself. However, according to a document prepared by tribunal investigators in preparation for the trial, one witness, code-named Q.C., saw a Tutsi community leader die “at the hands of Nyiramasuhuko.” (The report does not specify what weapon Pauline used.) Attorneys for each of the six accused will most likely open their defenses in 2004 and will probably call more than a hundred witnesses of their own as the trial creeps along for at least another two years. Justice at the tribunal has moved at a glacial pace, with only eight convictions and one acquittal handed down in seven years.
Pauline has consistently denied the charges against her. In 1995, before she was arrested, she gave an interview to the BBC in a squalid Hutu refugee camp across the Congo border, where she had been leading the camp’s social services; her job duties included the reuniting of separated parents and children. When asked what she did during the war, Pauline replied: “We moved around the region to pacify. We wrote a pacification document saying people shouldn’t kill each other. Saying it’s genocide, that’s not true. It was the Tutsi who massacred the Hutu.” Told that witnesses had accused her of murder, Pauline shot back: “I cannot even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman—a mother-killed, then I’ll confront that person.”
Over lunch during a break in court this summer, one of Pauline’s attorneys, Nicole Bergevin, accused the Tribunal of making her client a scapegoat of the vindictive current government in Rwanda and of an international community guilt-ridden over its failure to stop the bloodletting. “I’m sure there were some rapes,” Bergevin said, “but Pauline never ordered any rapes.” Later she added: “She was never known to be anti-Tutsi. I’m not saying that no one wanted the Tutsis to be exterminated. Probably there were, but it was not a plan. It was never the government’s intention. If it was, Pauline was not aware of it.” Bergevin then told me that Pauline didn’t have any knowledge about the rapes taking place in Rwanda during the genocide.
Pauline has only one concern, Bergevin said, and it is for Shalom, who, like his mother, faces life imprisonment. “She feels helpless,” Bergevin said.
My many requests to see Pauline were denied. The tribunal bars prisoners from contact with anyone other than family and friends (and even these visits are limited). I did, though, reach Pauline’s husband, Maurice Ntahobari, who at the time of the genocide was the rector of National University in Butare. He now lives in Antwerp, Belgium; his Rwandan passport has been taken away. Though he admits to being in Butare during the genocide, Ntahobari insists he didn’t see or hear any killing. As for the charges against Pauline, he reminded me that she had been a social worker: “She was committed to promoting equality between men and women,” he said defiantly. “It is not culturally possible for a Rwanda woman to make her son rape other women. It just couldn’t have taken place.” Pauline’s only error, he insisted, was in belonging to the side that lost.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko was born in 1946 amid lush banana groves and green, misty valleys. Her parents were subsistence farmers in Ndora, a small, neat roadside settlement six miles east of Butare. Her family and friends remember her as more ambitious and disciplined than bright. Her sister, Vineranda Mukandekaze, who is 60, told me that Pauline was “good but not generous. She kept everything to herself.” Juliana Niyirora, an old friend of Pauline’s, said: “From her childhood Pauline had political ambition. She always wanted to achieve high. If she saw someone build a house, she wanted a bigger house. If she saw someone do well, she wanted to do better.”
In high school, Pauline became friends with Agathe Kanziga, the eventual wife of the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana. It was a crucial connection. After graduating, Pauline left Butare for Kigali to join the Ministry for Social Affairs, which was then establishing a network of centers teaching women how to take care of their families, providing instruction on such basics as cooking and supervising children. When Pauline was only 22, Agathe helped her skip up the bureaucratic ladder to become national inspector of the ministry.
In 1968 Pauline married Maurice Ntahobari, who later became president of the Rwanda National Assembly, then minister of higher education and later rector of National University in Butare. By all accounts, however, Pauline was the dominant force in the family. “Maurice was like the woman; he didn’t say anything,” said Jean-Baptist Sebukangaga, a professor of art at National University who has known Pauline since her childhood. “Pauline directed everything. She got Maurice his job as rector at the university.” A friend and neighbor told me that she once saw Pauline screaming at Maurice for not being more committed to the politics of the MRND, the ruling Hutu extremist party.
At 24, nine months pregnant, Pauline, already the mother of a little girl, traveled to Israel on a government mission and gave birth to a son there. (Hence, Shalom.) She returned to Kigali, where in the years that followed she had two more daughters. But Pauline never gave up her job and eventually enrolled in law school, one of the few women in Rwanda to do so. “She had four children, but she still wanted to go back to school,” her friend Niyirora marveled. Already a local MRND party boss, in 1992 she was appointed minister of family and women’s affairs.
Pauline’s brother-in-law, Matthias Ngiwijize, told me that when Pauline became a government minister, she changed. “She stopped coming to her family’s homes,” he said. “She didn’t talk to anybody. She was only close to herself. She resented the poor part of the family. She even stopped visiting her mother.”
A woman eager to prove herself in a party structure built around men and Rwanda’s patriarchal society, Pauline soon found that the road to political success led her back to her birthplace. Butare had become the government’s biggest headache. Home to National University and a scientific research institute—and with the highest concentration of Tutsis in Rwanda—Butare had the most enlightened citizens in the country. The town had been largely immune to Hutu extremism; the MRND never gained a foothold there. But Pauline tried to change all that through a program of intimidation. She would convoy through town with party thugs, setting up barricades in the streets, paralyzing traffic, and disrupting town life. Pauline’s periodic invasions of the town became known as Ghost Days, days when Butare stood still.
Pauline was soon caught up in the anti-Tutsi ideology of her party. “Before 1994 there was no racism in Butare,” said Leoncie Mukamisha, an old schoolmate of Pauline’s who worked under her at the ministry. “Then Pauline came and organized demonstrations in town. The local papers described her as a frenzied madwoman.” Leoncie said that Pauline’s actions won the favor of the president, who recognized her obedience and anti-Tutsi virulence, and assigned to her a number of extremist Hutu ideologues as advisers.
Other friends I spoke with claimed that Pauline’s anti-Tutsi conversion was a purely careerist move meant only to please the higher-ups. It was an echo of the old argument that many Nazis were “just following orders.” Her si
ster told me that even in 1994, just before the genocide, Pauline had many Tutsi friends, and that a number of Tutsis worked peacefully under Pauline at the ministry.
Leoncie portrayed her differently. She said Pauline’s racism was ardent; at the ministry, she said, Pauline was “horrified at having to be in daily contact with Tutsis.” And a former Hutu political figure who met Pauline in 1992 says that in private discussions, her antipathy toward Tutsis was chillingly clear. “When one spoke with her, one became aware that the Tutsi were people to be destroyed,” he said.
It may never be possible to answer what motivated Pauline’s actions. She may have genuinely felt rage toward Tutsis; she may have been a simple opportunist, hungering for power. But certainly by 1994, her anti-Tutsi zealousness was public. During the genocide Pauline delivered admonishing speeches over Radio Rwanda. A witness recalled one speech: “We are all members of the militia,” Pauline said. “We must work together to hunt down members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front.”
In his confession to genocide and crimes against humanity, former Hutu Prime Minister Jean Kambanda identifies the members of his inner sanctum, where the blueprint of the genocide was first drawn up. The confession names only five names. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s is one of them.
During my visit to Butare this summer, two young women, Mary Mukangoga, 24, and Chantal Kantarama, 28, led me into the center of Butare to the prefecture, where they first met and became friends. “I went to the prefecture because other refugees were there,” Mary said in a near whisper. “I preferred to be killed when we were all together.”