According to the Rwanda National Police, reported cases classified as “gender based violence” have gone down from 3,585 in 2011 to 3,444 last year, with defilement (or crimes of a sexual nature committed against children) topping the list as the most reported crime.
Aloisea Inyumba, Rwanda’s Minister of Gender and Family Promotion, has passed away. Inyumba had returned to cabinet last year in the same position she held in the first post-Genocide cabinet. She had also served as a senator, as the executive secretary of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission and as prefet of the then Kigali Ngali prefecture.
In recent years, Rwanda has made global headlines for the significant contributions of Rwandan women to various peacekeeping missions around the world. Official figures from the peacekeeping unit of the Rwanda National Police indicate that of the 490 police personnel on deployment, 150 are female.
“If women discover their role and start discussing gender violence with men, we will put an end to it,” says Illuminee Uwimana, a social affairs officer in Rwanda, while discussing new strategies to address gender-based violence in the country.
Rwanda has scooped the United Nations Public Service Award 2012 for its efforts in fighting Sexual and Gender Based Violence. The award dubbed “Promoting Gender Responsive Delivery” of Public Services is in recognition of the success of the Isange One-Stop Centre, which operates under the Rwanda National Police.
A Quebec judge has sentenced Désiré Munyaneza, the first person charged under Canada’s war crimes legislation, to a life sentence with no possibility of parole for 25 years. Munyaneza “chose to kill, rape and pillage in the name of the supremacy of his ethnic group, reminding us that every time a man claims to belong to a superior race, a chosen people, humanity is in danger,” the judge wrote in a 12-page ruling.
Jean-Baptiste Gatete, a former Director in the Rwandan Ministry of Women and Family Affairs, stood trial at the ICTR in October 2009 for his role in the Rwandan genocide. He is charged with genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to commit genocide and crimes against humanity. He is alleged to have presided over pogroms which took place in the Catholic churches of Kiziguro and Mukarange, where thousands of Tutsis were killed and women and girls were serially raped.
On 22 October 2009, the Hirondelle News Agency in Arusha reported that a Kigali gacaca court confirmed the life sentence for Martin Habimana, a prosperous businessman convicted of rape on his first hearing, June 29. Habimana, in his forties, hails from Nyanza (Southern Rwanda). He was convicted for the rape of a young Tutsi woman he confined on the pretext of protecting her from killers.
Over one million judgments have been rendered by the semi-traditional Gacaca courts in Rwanda. The courts are now focusing on cases involving the planners, organizers, instigators and supervisors of the genocide, and those who committed rape and other forms of sexual violence.
Gerald Caplan, author of The Betrayal of Africa and Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, writes about the Christian Church’s complicity during the Rwandan genocide. In his view, the “Catholic hierarchy in Rwanda, mostly Hutu by 1994, failed to condemn its Hutu extremist friends who were carrying out this African holocaust.”
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