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Demanding Justice: Rape and Reconciliation in Rwanda

MADRE Speaks Fall 1997

A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.

—Tsistsistas, Cheyenne

One of the most brutal—and invisible—forms of mass violence is the systematic use rape to serve political ends. Like military violence, rape is a crime in perpetuity against survivors, their families and communities, who endure the repercussions indefinitely. Like warfare, rape requires the dehumanization of the person who is targeted. Both kinds of violence aim to humiliate, degrade and subjugate. But the relationship between rape and war exceeds simple analogy.

Because women are situated at the center of both family and cultural reproduction, they become strategic targets when the aim is to eradicate a people. Indeed, rape has been used in wars throughout history and across the world to trigger a chain reaction of devastation that destroys not only individual women, but entire communities. First, women and girls are brutalized by the rape itself. Then they are shamed and marginalized by their own communities. When rape is committed on a massive scale, the social fabric of family and community unravels exponentially, weakening a people's capacity to resist. It is this ability to destroy community that makes rape such a powerful weapon of war.

When reports of mass rape emerged from the Former Yugoslavia in 1991, women's groups from around the world moved to activate human rights law to meet the crisis. They argued that, contrary to prevailing legal thought, rape is not incidental to warfare; not a "private" crime against honor or decency, but a form of torture and a gross violation of human rights. A consortium of women's groups pressed the Organization of American States to define rapes committed by agents of the Haitian military during the 1991-1994 coup d'etat as torture, which is a violation of international law. Thanks mainly to the work of the International Women's Human Rights Law Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law, the Haiti precedent compelled the UN tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia to reverse an earlier ruling and recognize rape as a war crime and, under certain circumstances, an act of genocide.

These are achievements to be celebrated, but they are not permanent victories. This fact has become painfully clear since the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR) in November 1994. The ICTR was created to investigate and punish war crimes committed during the 1994 genocide, when hundreds of politically moderate Hutu and over half a million Tutsi were slaughtered in just 100 days. Central to both the ideology and execution of the genocide was the mass rape and sexual mutilation of women and girls. Yet the ICTR has not brought even one perpetrator of rape to justice. A closer look at this failure underscores the work that lies ahead in the fight against rape as a weapon of war.

The Failure of Justice

Despite the tens of thousands of rapes committed during the Rwandan genocide, the ICTR has neglected to investigate, much less prosecute, sexual violence. Only in June 1997, after international pressure from a coalition of women's groups, did the ICTR finally amend a single indictment to include charges of rape. During the trial, ICTR staff discovered that two of the witnesses had testified before, but had omitted evidence of rape because no investigator had asked them about sexual violence.

Charges of rape are secondary within the tribunal's mandate, reflecting and reinforcing pervasive ignorance about sexual violence among ICTR staff. Survivors have expressed repeatedly that they are uncomfortable describing their ordeals to men. Yet there are few women investigators or translators at the tribunal. None of the investigators are trained to work with rape survivors. Instead, they rely on the standard human rights model of documenting testimony. Specific, intrusive and repetitive questioning is how one internationally respected human rights organization claims to guarantee the validity of its evidence -- hardly an approach conducive to enabling a rape survivor to speak about her experience.

Even women who might be willing to endure such questioning are excluded from the justice process by the ICTR's method of gathering witnesses. Ignoring criticism from Rwandan women's organizations, teams of foreign, male UN investigators travel from village to village in Rwanda, publicly inquiring if anyone there has been raped. This, despite the fact that anonymity is a necessity for women who, if publicly identified as rape survivors, are likely to be banished by their communities and lose their homes and livelihood.

The tribunal's most treacherous defect is its lack of witness protection. Since its inception, people rumored to be cooperating with the ICTR have been harassed, threatened and, in several cases, assassinated. Over 200 genocide survivors were killed in 1996, in attacks that many Rwandans characterize as attempts to prevent them from testifying. Despite these dangers, the ICTR's witness protection program is largely fictional. There is only one staff person assigned to the entire city of Kigali, and the national unit that has yet to even outline an approach to witness protection.

A corollary to the physical danger is the lack of psychological support for witnesses. Victims' advocates and mental health workers involved in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission emphasize the importance of psychological support for witnesses who relive the horror of brutal assault during testimonies. Rwandan women also tell of renewed nightmares, hallucinations and emotional breakdowns after testifying before the tribunal. Every interview tears open old psychological wounds, yet the ICTR has made no provisions for counseling services of any kind.

The tribunal's miserable record on rape is part of a larger dysfunction rooted in chaotic management, bureaucratic infighting and a lack of qualified staff and resources. There are no computers in the ICTR headquarters in Arusha; no running transcript of hearings; no legal researchers or library. Investigators often fail to follow up on cases even after people have risked their safety to meet with them. And many people report being treated with disrespect and callousness by ICTR staff. A growing number of Rwandans attribute this bungling to a lack of international political will to empower the tribunal. The result -- arbitration without justice -- amounts to another type of violence perpetrated against genocide survivors.

Prioritizing Women's Human Rights

More and more Rwandans characterize the tribunal as recklessly inept, offering genocide survivors no real benefit while putting them at risk of physical assault and emotional trauma. The frustration has led several women's organizations to stop cooperating with the tribunal. These activists reject the claim of the ICTR that the tribunal has been unable to prosecute rape because survivors refuse to come forward. Instead, they say, women would thankfully utilize the system if they only had some indication that the tribunal would actually punish rapists and provide witnesses with a minimum of respect, safety and psychological support.

These conditions could be met by synthesizing international human rights advocacy with the work of community-based women's organizations serving rape survivors. Achieving national reconciliation in the wake of genocide is a historic challenge demanding international mechanisms of justice. But such structures will remain abstract and unaccountable if they are not rooted in the conditions of people's daily lives. In Rwanda, the gap between international law and local needs could be bridged by integrating local women's organizations into the work of the ICTR. So far, most of Rwanda's highly functional and well-organized women's associations have had little or no communication with the ICTR. Pro-Femmes, a Kigali-based umbrella organization of 35 women's groups, has never even been contacted by the tribunal. Yet indigenous organizations like Pro-Femmes have been working with women and their families since the genocide. They understand the reality of women's lives and the problems they face. These groups can provide women who want to testify with the support they need and the respect they deserve.

The ICTR and similar international mechanisms should be guided by community-based organizations like these. A partnership of local knowledge and international political clout might actually yield a framework capable of prosecuting war criminals and identifying the policies and conditions that give rise to mass violence. Approaching human rights work from the experience of embattled communities reveals a critical truth: the horror of war-time rape is rivaled only by the incredible courage of survivors. The leadership of these women is crucial to creating the changes needed for them to rebuild their country in peace and go on with their lives in dignity.