The Best American Crime Writing

by Otto Penzler

  In the first weeks of the genocide, Chantal said, she had been abducted and raped by two Hutu men. She escaped and took refuge at a school near the prefecture. One day, Chantal recalled, she heard Pauline announcing through a microphone: “I have a problem. The cockroaches are now near my house. Tomorrow come and help me. Help me get rid of them.” Chantal fled to the prefecture. The next day, Chantal said, Pauline visited the prefechire with Shalom. Mother and son came with the young men of the Interahamwe and selected girls to rape.

  In silence, Mary and Chantal led me to the ruins of what was once a plastics factory, in a shady grove of trees 200 yards from the prefecture office. They explained that the Interahamwe used to store their ammunition in the factory, and that many evenings they were taken from the prefecture, led there, and raped. “Pauline would come and say, ‘I don’t want this dirt here, get rid of this dirt,’” Chantal recalled.

  The two young women became part of a group of five sex slaves who were kept at the prefecture and raped, repeatedly and together, every night for weeks. Then one day, the women were thrown into a nearby pit that was full of corpses. The pit, about 400 feet square, is now half filled in with rubble and weeds. Chantal took me there, stepping to the edge; at that point she turned aside, refusing to look in. “They used machetes to kill the ones who resisted and dumped them into the hole,” she explained. She began to weep. She remained inside the pit for a night and a day, she said; then, on the second night, she climbed the jumbled corpses to pull herself out.

  I took Chantal back to her home, a neat mud hut in a bustling, dusty neighborhood of shops and wandering livestock. Chantal is married with two children; she was the only genocidal-rape survivor I met who was married. Her husband knows what happened to her. But for thousands of Rwandan survivors, one of the most insidious legacies of the rapes is the stigma—and the inevitable isolation. In Rwandan society, it is almost impossible for a woman who is known to have been raped to marry. One witness who testified against Pauline in Arusha had been engaged to be married a month later. When her fiancé heard about the testimony, he broke off the engagement.

  Then there is the generation of children born of the rapes. As many as 5,000 such children have been documented, and most likely, there are many more than that who haven’t. These children will most likely never know their fathers—in most cases, the mother was raped so many times that the issue of paternity was not only pointless but emotionally perilous: In effect, all of her attackers had fathered that child.

  Compounding the dishonor, the mere sight of these children—those who aren’t abandoned—can bring on savage memories to survivors. Two women I met who gave birth to their rapists’ children named the children with words that translate as “Blessing from God” as a way to ease the pain. But others in the community gave them names that put them in the same category as their fathers: “Children of Shame,” “Gifts of the Enemy,” “Little Interahamwe.”

  “Did you ever see the look in a woman’s eyes when she sees a child of rape?” asked Sydia Nduna, an adviser at the International Rescue Committee Rwanda who works for a program in Kigali aimed at reducing gender violence. “It’s a depth of sadness you cannot imagine.” The impact of the mass rapes in Rwanda, she said, will be felt for generations. “Mass rape forces the victims to live with the consequences, the damage, the children,” Nduna explained.

  Making matters worse, the rapes, most of them committed by many men in succession, were frequently accompanied by other forms of physical torture and often staged as public performances to multiply the terror and degradation. So many women feared them that they often begged to be killed instead. Often the rapes were in fact a prelude to murder. But sometimes the victim was not killed but instead repeatedly violated and then left alive; the humiliation would then affect not only the victim but also those closest to her. Other times, women were used as a different kind of tool: Half dead, or even already a corpse, a woman would be publicly raped as a way for Interahamwe mobs to bond together.

  But the exposure—and the destruction—did not stop with the act of rape itself. Many women were purposely left alive to die later, and slowly. Two women I met outside Butare, Francina Mukamazina and Liberata Munganyinka, are dying of AIDS they contracted through rape. “My biggest worry is what will happen to my children when I’m gone,” Francina told me. These children are as fragile as Francina fears: A U.N. survey of Rwandan children of war concluded that 31 percent witnessed a rape or sexual assault, and 70 percent witnessed murder. Francina’s and Liberata’s daughters survived but watched their siblings slaughtered and their mothers violated. They will grow up beside children born of rape, all of them together forced to navigate different but commingling resentments.

  During my visit to Chantal’s home, I asked her how she coped with her savage memories. She replied: “I just want to forget. My children are my consolation. Most rape survivors have nothing. We’re poor, but I have my family. It’s all I want.”

  I found Mary later that afternoon a few miles of dirt track away. She was sitting alone in her home, a stifling mud hut about twenty feet square with one small window. Mary told me that the rapes were her first and only sexual experience. Then, eyes averted, twisting her hands, she told me that five months ago she discovered she had AIDS. She said that two of the other young women she and Chantal were kept with are already dead. Their fate is not the exception but the rule. According to one estimate, 70 percent of women raped during the Rwanda genocide have HIV; most will eventually die from it.

  In an interview at the State House in Kigali, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, talked about the mass rapes in measured, contemplative sentences, shaking his head, his emotions betraying him. “We knew that the government was bringing AIDS patients out of the hospitals specifically to form battalions of rapists,” he told me. He smiled ruefully, as if still astonished by the plan.

  The most cynical purpose of the rapes in Butare was to transmit a slower, more agonizing form of death. “By using a disease, a plague, as an apocalyptic terror, as biological warfare, you’re annihilating the procreators, perpetuating the death unto the generations,” said Charles B. Strozier, a psychoanalyst and professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “The killing continues and endures.”

  The use of AIDS as a tool of warfare against Tutsi women helped prosecutors in Arusha focus on rape as a driving force of the genocide. “HIV infection is murder,” said Silvana Arbia, the Rwanda Tribunal’s acting chief of prosecutions. “Sexual aggression is as much an act of genocide as murder is.”

  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, fundamen
tal 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 th
e 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.