SANDRA KA HON CHU AND ANNE-MARIE DE BROUWER
Globe and Mail
April 7, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT
Fifteen years after she was gang-raped, beaten and left for dead near a river in southern Rwanda, Pascasie Mukasakindi still struggles to put the pieces of her life together.
The militia responsible for the genocide “killed what I would have become,” she told us in Kigali when we met while working on a project documenting sexual violence. She is not able to work and suffers from constant headaches, chest aches, back aches and pains in her vagina.
Pascasie is not an exception, and she is not alone. She is one of thousands of women still trying to overcome the horrific events of 1994 that saw the Hutu majority try to extinguish the Tutsi minority by taking the lives of almost one million people.
The killers also used rape as a tool of the genocide. According to the United Nations, rape was the rule, its absence the exception: An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women in Rwanda were raped. Gang rape, rape with objects such as sticks or weapons, sexual slavery and sexual mutilation were common.
Seventy per cent of women who survived rape during the genocide were – often deliberately – infected with HIV. Many of those women were abandoned by their husbands and isolated by their communities after the genocide. Some women were no longer able to bear children, or no longer wanted to be intimate with a man. Others bore the children of their Hutu rapists or fled the country. Appallingly, survivors of sexual violence have been stigmatized in Rwanda because their sexual violation has rendered them somehow complicit in the genocide. Rape thus proved an effective means to degrade Tutsi women and, ultimately, destroy the Tutsi community.
Notwithstanding the prevalence of rape, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has rendered only eight convictions involving sexual violence since its establishment in 1994. In Rwanda itself, only about 7,000 cases of genocidal rape have been or are being tried. Thousands of women and children are also in need of antiretroviral medication: A 2008 UN report revealed that only half the adults in need of antiretroviral treatment are receiving it.
And not surprisingly, violence continues to be a factor in women’s lives. In 2006, Rwanda’s National Institute of Statistics revealed that 31 per cent of Rwandan women have experienced physical violence, most often from a husband or partner, and 13 per cent have experienced sexual violence.
The Rwandan government bears responsibility for providing reparations to Rwandan women so they have some means to care for themselves, their children and the many children orphaned by the genocide they often care for. While the government has made a public commitment to compensating genocide survivors, a government-administered fund has been largely inadequate in meeting the needs of those who survived sexual violence.
And although the availability of antiretroviral medication has increased enormously over the past years, the stigma attached to HIV-positive status has impeded many Rwandans from accessing the medication at health centres, such as public clinics or hospitals, where their status can be more easily divulged. The Rwandan government should invest greater resources to reduce the stigmatization and isolation experienced by survivors of sexual violence.
To be fair, things are not all dire. A number of positive developments for women have been implemented by the Rwandan government since the genocide. Rape has been legally defined as a serious crime, and widows have been given the right to inherit their deceased husbands’ property. Rwandan women also occupy the highest proportion of parliamentary seats (56 per cent) in the world. Organizations, both within and outside the country, also provide assistance to survivors of sexual violence by distributing food and antiretroviral medication and offering counselling.
But more needs to be done. The international community must provide financial and other assistance to survivors of sexual violence, not only in Rwanda but in other countries where sexual violence is used as a tool of warfare, such as in Congo, Sudan and Uganda. We must also ensure those responsible for such crimes are held accountable.
By failing to intervene during the genocide in Rwanda, the world failed victims of sexual violence when they needed our help the most. We cannot afford to turn our backs on them again. As Pascasie pleaded, “I wish to have a better life. Without people who care about our plight, we will die.”
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