Legal analysis on the crime of rape under ICTR jurisdiction

III.5. Consequences of rape in Rwanda

Although the exact number of women raped will never be known, testimonies from survivors confirm that rape was extremely widespread and that thousands of women were individually raped, gang-raped, raped with objects such as sharpened sticks or gun barrels, held in sexual slavery or sexually mutilated. These crimes were frequently part of a pattern in which Tutsi women were raped after they had witnessed the torture and killings of their relatives and the destruction and looting of their homes.

According to witnesses, many women were killed immediately after being raped. Other women managed to survive, only to be told that they were being allowed to live so that they would "die of sadness." Often women were subjected to sexual slavery and held collectively by a militia group or were singled out by one militia man, at checkpoints or other sites where people were being maimed or slaughtered, and held for personal sexual service. ^110(*)

The militia would force women to submit sexually with threats that they would be killed if they refused. These forced marriage, as this form of sexual slavery is often called in Rwanda, lasted for anywhere from a few days to the duration of the genocide, and in some cases longer. Rapes were sometimes followed by sexual mutilation, including mutilation of the vagina and pelvic area with machetes, knives, sticks, boiling water, and in one case, acid.^111(*) Throughout the world, sexual violence is routinely directed against females during situations of armed conflict. This violence may take gender-specific forms, like sexual mutilation, forced pregnancy, rape or sexual slavery. Being female is a risk factor; women and girls are often targeted for sexual abuse on the basis of their gender, irrespective of their age, ethnicity or political affiliation.^112(*)

Rape in conflict is also used as a weapon to terrorize and degrade a particular community and to achieve a specific political end. In these situations, gender intersects with other aspects of a woman's identity such as ethnicity, religion, social class or political affiliation. The humiliation, pain and terror inflicted by the rapist are meant to degrade not just the individual woman but also to strip the humanity from the larger group of which she is a part.^113(*)

The rape of one person is translated into an assault upon the community through the emphasis placed in every culture on women's sexual virtue: the shame of the rape humiliates the family and all those associated with the survivor. Combatants who rape in war often explicitly link their acts of sexual violence to this broader social degradation.

In the aftermath of such abuse, the harm done to the individual woman is often obscured or even compounded by the perceived harm to the community. During the Rwandan genocide, rape and other forms of violence were directed primarily against Tutsi women because of both their gender and their ethnicity. Regardless of their status- Tutsi, Hutu, displaced, returnees-all women face overwhelming problems because of the upheaval caused by the genocide, including social stigmatization, poor physical and psychological health, and unwanted pregnancy and increasing of poverty^114(*).

In Rwanda, as elsewhere in the world, rape and other gender-based violations carry a severe social stigma. The physical and psychological injuries suffered by Rwandan rape survivors are aggravated by a sense of isolation. Rwandan women who have been raped or who suffered sexual abuse generally do not dare reveal their experiences publicly, fearing that they will be rejected by their family and wider community and that they will never be able to reintegrate or to marry. Others fear retribution from their attacker if they speak out.

Often, rape survivors suffer extreme guilt for having survived and been held for rape, rather than having been executed.

In addition to the social and personal trauma resulting from the injuries suffered from sexual violence, women are also facing terrible economic difficulty. As a result of the genocide, many women lost the male relatives on whom they previously relied on for economic support and are now destitute. Women survivors are struggling to make ends meet, to reclaim their property, to rebuild their destroyed houses, and to raise children: their own and orphans. Some Hutu women, whose husbands were killed or are now in exile or in prison accused of genocide, are dealing with similar issues of poverty as well as with the recrimination directed at them on the basis of their ethnicity or the alleged actions of their relatives.^115(*)

The government has initiated a legal commission to address these issues and to introduce legislation to allow women to inherit equally with men, but the reforms are expected to take a long time. Rwandan survivors of sexual violence are particularly troubled by the lack of accountability for the abuse they suffered. They want the perpetrators of the violence against them to be held responsible.

However, the Rwandan judicial system is facing systemic and profound problems that make the likelihood of justice, for both the genocide perpetrators and their victims, a remote possibility. It is clear that rape victims face specific obstacles, including that police inspectors documenting genocide crimes for prosecution are predominantly male and are not collecting information on rape.

General Conclusion and Suggestions

* ¹¹⁰ N., Binaifer, Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath, New York. November 2003.

* ¹¹¹Ibidem.

* ¹¹² B. Nowrojee, «Your Justice is Too Slow»: Will the ICTR Fail Rwanda's Rape Victims? November 2005

* ¹¹³ Ibidem

* ¹¹⁴ Effange-Mbella, «Reaching Out to Survivors of Sexual Violence, the Legacy of ICTR Gender Justice», p.5, citing Africa Legal Aid (AFLA), Gender Justice: The Legacy of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), p. 12.

* ¹¹⁵ G. Breton, Analysis of Trends in Sexual Violence Prosecutions in Indictments by the ICTR November 2002.