Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (44 page)

On the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, I visited the new memorial in Kigali, built by the Aegis Trust, a British company that specializes in genocide commemoratives. Unlike most other buildings in Rwanda, the structure was air-conditioned; its stagey displays felt as though they had been put together by someone previously engaged in dressing shop windows. The wall texts were stirring and the photos horrifying, but the glitzy aesthetic reflected the national urge to dissociate from events of the too-recent past. The exhibits presented the numbers of casualties in keeping with President Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-centric estimates, which differ widely from those of international observers.

The purpose of my trip was to talk to women who had been raped in the genocide. The memorial treated the events of 1994 as coolly historical, but these women were still living them ten years on. It was as though no time had elapsed at all.

T
he Rwandan genocide drew on a long history of ethnic strife in the country. The Tutsi arrived in Rwanda at some disputed date, apparently after the Hutu were settled there, and established themselves as feudal overlords. The colonizing Belgians preferred the tall, slender Tutsi herders to the short, dark, wide-nosed Hutu farmers and declared the Tutsi, who made up only 15 percent of the population,
the natural aristocracy, granting them privileges denied to the Hutu. These policies engendered fierce hatred. Toward the end of the colonial period, the Belgians fell out with the Tutsi monarch and transferred power to the Hutu. After independence in 1962, the Hutu ruled, periodically attacking the Tutsi. Ethnic battles throughout the following quarter century sent many Tutsi into exile in Uganda and Congo. They then asked to return.

When the Hutu government wouldn’t allow them to come home, they organized an army—the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), under the leadership of Paul Kagame—that engaged in border skirmishes. In 1993, the UN brokered a peace accord between the Hutu government and Tutsi rebels; hard-line Hutu, however, did not welcome the idea of power sharing. In late 1993 and early 1994, the visionaries of the Hutu Power movement began organizing the mechanisms for genocide. They assembled mobs of impoverished and disaffected youth, building up a force called the Interahamwe, which means “those who fight together,” and taught the gospel that the Tutsi were an inhuman enemy—“cockroaches” in their parlance. They established Rwanda’s first private radio station, Radio Mille Collines, to preach messages of hatred. They stockpiled arms: some guns, but mostly machetes and knives. They systematically edged moderates out of government.

The genocide in Rwanda began on April 6, 1994, after the plane of President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down. In the one hundred days that followed, eight hundred thousand Tutsi were killed. Unlike the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, where the killings were clinical, systematic, and remote, the Rwandan mass butchery was hands-on. The killings were committed by the Interahamwe and farmers, mainly with farm implements. But killing was hardly the total of that time’s violence. 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; rape was an explicit tool of the
génocidaires
. Tutsi women, according to the announcements on Radio Mille Collines, wanted to seduce the Hutu men away so that they could end the Hutu race. Many Hutu perceived the slender, regal Tutsi women as haughty and were determined to teach them a lesson.

The men 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. They raped to satisfy their own curiosity; they raped to traumatize these women; and they raped because it was a slower and more painful way of killing. They raped out of odium and desire. According to one propaganda slogan, they wanted these women to “die of sadness.” One woman recounted having a foot soldier in 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, saying, “Everyone who comes past here will see how Tutsi look.”

At the end of a hundred days, the genocide stopped when Tutsi RPF insurgents seized Kigali, the capital. Most of the Interahamwe fled to Congo, where they continued to wreak terror in refugee camps. Kagame entered office as the new president with much cant about building bridges. Instead, he installed a largely Tutsi power structure—exactly what the Hutu Power movement had feared—with the tacit approval of the rest of the world. Kagame periodically orders raids into the Congo camps; some twenty thousand people have been killed in reprisals since the war ended. The Hutu again live under a largely Tutsi regime and feel enslaved by a loathed minority, while the Tutsi hate the Hutu for having murdered their families. Rwandans are defined by the traumas they have witnessed, received, or inflicted. 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.

As many as half a million women were raped during the genocide. About half the Tutsi women who survived had been raped; almost all of them were HIV-positive; and they gave birth to as many as five thousand rape-conceived children. These children 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.” Ninety percent of the women in one study said they could not love the child of
someone who had killed their family. A woman who had attempted to drown herself under these circumstances and been saved by a fisherman said, “I could not even die with this baby inside me. It was a curse that kept haunting me.” One woman who had been married off to a rapist, as often happened, said, “To be taken as a wife is a form of death. There’s no death worse than that.” Because Rwandan society blames the women, these pregnancies were “rejected and concealed, often denied, and discovered late,” according to Dr. Catherine Bonnet, who has studied the Rwandan rape problem. Godeliève Mukasarasi, a social worker, expounded, “The women who have had children after being raped are the most marginalized. People say that this is a child of an Interahamwe.”

Abortion is essentially unobtainable in Rwanda, but some women self-induced miscarriage in the postwar chaos. Some—no one knows how many—committed infanticide. Others left their rape babies on church steps; the country is peppered with orphanages. Since the women who abandoned their children could not be identified, the women I saw were the ones who had kept their children. The children for whom they were sacrificing themselves served as reminders of their trauma. To love the child who results from violation is almost divine—especially because for most of these women, that violation was only one in a constellation of traumas: loss of family; loss of social status; loss of the societal structures that had once seemed secure; loss of any feeling of stability or constancy; loss of health to HIV. When I went to meet these women and their children in the spring of 2004, their children were nine, and therefore old enough to resemble their Hutu fathers. I went to see how one learned to love such children or reconciled oneself to caring for them without love.

Rwandan society is hostile to these women and children. Some were castigated by their families and community; some hospitals wouldn’t treat them. As half-castes, the
enfants de mauvais souvenir
are accepted by neither Hutu nor Tutsi. “Some women were forced by their families to give up the child,” explained Espérance Mukamana, whom I met in Kigali, where she works for Avega, the widows’ organization in Rwanda. “In the beginning, it was hard for these
women even to see their children as human beings because they are considered children of evil. Most of these women never find true love for their children. They love them enough to survive, but no more. You have to motivate the mothers, repeating again and again that the child is blameless. It’s hard for them to see the child as innocent; it’s impossible for them to see themselves as innocent.” All had faced financial struggles; deemed unmarriageable, most were struggling to feed themselves and their offspring.

Professor Jean Damascène Ndayambaje, head of the Department of Psychology at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, explained that it was considered a disgrace for a woman to have allowed herself to be raped rather than killed. “Can one say that one of these things is better than the other?” he asked. “Our society does not say so. All the shame goes to the woman.” He described how one woman had to be physically restrained while doctors performed a caesarean 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. “There are whole mental wards full of such women,” Ndayambaje said. Professor Jean-Pierre Gatsinzi, head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the National University, pointed out a major cultural change, in which a strong bond between mother and child was no longer presumed. “It is a new society we live in,” he said, “with different rules. One must recognize that rape and war are both traumas, and that these women experienced both traumas simultaneously. Rape in war is a crime against humanity; it’s a lot worse than ordinary rape.” While any rape can be profoundly traumatic for its immediate victim, wartime rape is an attack on social norms and more profoundly traumatizes the society in which it occurs.

Mukamana explained, “Traumatized mothers are harsh and cold to their children, even abusive. 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. Because they receive so little love at home, they go out on the street and follow strangers.” Many of these children have
been given darkly evocative names: one child was named Inkuba, or War. Another was Little Killer after his father; another, Child of Hate. Alphonsine Nyirahabimana, who also works with this population at Avega, said, “I have always wondered how any of these mothers can love their children. For some, Christianity has played a big role, and they succeed by praying. Others see the bright part of their situation; one said, for example, ‘I was raped and my family was murdered and I have this child who came out of horror, but at least I don’t have HIV.’ But most are without family, desperate, and hopeless. They come to Avega and talk to one another. No one can forget what happened to them, so they might as well remember together.”

Some women form associations and stand up for their rights. Some have 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. Post-genocide, women can inherit property, which was not possible before. Before, men had multiple wives. Now they sign a contract in the church when they marry, swearing that they will be monogamous. The situation for women is better now than it has ever been in Rwanda.” Some mothers who endured forced pregnancy have struggled toward a new society—if not for themselves, then for their castigated children.

Most encounter only disenfranchisement. One woman explained to me that a man came and killed her family, including her husband and three children; took her in sexual slavery and kept her for three months; then fled when the RPF forces came. She gave birth to a son, and though she developed AIDS, her son remained healthy. Rwanda has few social networks outside of family; you need relatives to survive. Knowing she would soon die, she worried that her son would be all by himself, so she tracked down the father of her son in jail and decided to foster a relationship with him—so her son would have someone after she was gone. When we met, she was making the father daily meals and taking them to him in the jail. This man had
raped her and slaughtered her children. She could not speak of what she was doing without lowering her eyes and staring fixedly at the floor. No new Rwandan feminism had touched her life.

In Kigali, I met with Beatrice Mukansanga, who had a face like a Picasso mask, and Marie Rose Matamura, who was young and sweet looking. Mukansanga had no clear memory of what happened to her in 1994; she remembered being repeatedly raped and waking up pregnant in a hospital some weeks later, but she didn’t know how she had spent the war. Sometime during the genocide, her leg was chopped off. Her husband and two children had disappeared in the genocide, “all lost, all gone,” she said. At the end of the atrocities, she was pregnant and HIV-positive, but did not know who her rapists were. She said, “The baby died in me and was removed.” Whether she had induced the miscarriage was unclear. When she went back to her town of Nyanza, she found that everybody she had known was killed, so she came to Kigali. “I have a terrible time at this time of year, around the anniversary of the genocide, at the start of the rainy season,” she said. “I have horrible nightmares. I am living always with the feeling that I will die at any time.” She was angry that government health programs were available only to those with connections; she had developed full-fledged AIDS, but when she tried to obtain medication, the health workers laughed at her. “They help those who are well enough to help themselves,” she said, “and leave the rest of us to die.”

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 and her sister escaped only to be seized by a Hutu man from the Interahamwe who claimed them as his wives. Many militia would force women into sexual slavery, cynically using the word
wife
to euphemize a multitude of sins. There were no marriages, and there was no guarantee of protection. All the term meant was that these women had been taken on as the object of repeated sexual assault and lived in a man’s quarters. Matamura’s acquiescence to her captor did
not obviate her hatred of him. “He would just go walking around the neighborhood raping the ladies,” she said. “At any time he 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.”