Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Writing 2003

Rose said that during the months the genocide was carried out, she saw Pauline Nyiramasuhuko three times. The minister was an unforgettable sight. She’d exchanged her colorful civilian wraps for brand-new military fatigues and boots. She was seen carrying a machine gun over her shoulder. Other survivors told me they heard the minister for women and family affairs spit invectives at Tutsi women, calling them, “cockroaches” and “dirt.” She advised the men to choose the young women for sex and kill off the old. By one account, women were forced to raise their shirts to separate the mothers from the “virgins.” Sometimes, I was told, Pauline handed soldiers packets of condoms.

Much of the violence took place in the scrubby yard in front of Butare’s local government offices, or prefecture, where at one point hundreds of Tutsis were kept under guard. Witnesses recalled that Pauline showed up at night in a white Toyota pickup truck, often driven by Shalom, and supervised as Interahamwe loaded the truck with women who were driven off and never seen again. Often, when a woman at the prefecture saw Pauline, she appealed to her, as a fellow woman and mother, for mercy. But this, claimed survivors, only enraged Pauline. When one woman wouldn’t stop crying out, a survivor recalled, the minister told the Interahamwe to shut her up. They stabbed the pleading woman and then slit her throat.

There will never be a precise accounting of how many Rwandans were massacred between April and July 1994. Human Rights Watch calculates the number to be at least 500,000, while the United Nations estimates that between 800,000 and one million Rwandans died during that period. Whatever the total, the rate of carnage and the concentration of the killing (Rwanda is roughly the size of New Jersey) give it the distinction of being the most ferocious mass slaughter in recorded history. Three-quarters of the Tutsi population was exterminated. Today, Rwanda’s common greeting, the Kinyarwanda expression mwaramutse- which translates as “did you wake?”-is less an expression of “good morning” than it is of relief that one is breathing at all.

Understandably, the world’s attention subsequently focused on the sheer volume of the Rwandan slaughter. But the prosecutors and judges of the International Crime Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, are now coming to recognize the equally alarming and cynical story of what was left behind. Though most women were killed before they could tell their stories, a U.N. report has concluded that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide. Some were penetrated with spears, gun barrels, bottles or the stamens of banana trees. Sexual organs were multilated with machetes, boiling water, and acid; women’s breasts were cut off. According to one study, Butare province alone has more than 30,000 rape survivors. Many more women were killed after they were raped.

These facts are harrowing. More shocking still is that so many of these crimes were supposedly inspired and orchestrated by Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, whose very job was the preservation, education, and empowerment of Rwanda’s women.

In July 1994 Pauline fled Rwanda in a mass exodus of more than one million Hutus fearing retribution by the advancing Tutsi rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. After finding safety in a refugee camp in Congo, she eventually slipped into Kenya, where she lived as a fugitive for almost three years. On July 18, 1997, however, Pauline was apprehended in Nairobi by Kenyan and international authorities. (Shalom was seized six days later, in a Nairobi grocery store he was running.) After interrogation by investigators, Pauline was transferred with Shalom to Tanzania, where both were delivered to the International Tribunal in Arusha.

At the tribunal, Pauline faces eleven charges, including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. She is the first woman ever to be charged with these crimes in an international court. And she is the first woman ever to be charged with rape as a crime against humanity. (Her son, Shalom, faces ten charges, to which he has pled innocence.)

For the last five years mother and son have spent their days at the U.N. Detention Facility in Arusha in nearby 16-by-19 cells. They have access to a gym and a nurse. Pauline often spends time tending flowers and singing to herself in a common open-air courtyard.

Since June 2001, when their trials began, Pauline and Shalom have spent most of their weekdays in a courtroom inside Arusha’s dilapidated conference center. The U.N. Security Council established the Arusha tribunal in November 1994, eighteen months after establishing a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague. With all of Rwanda’s judicial and law enforcement personnel dead or in exile, and the country’s physical infrastructure reduced to rubble, the U.N. chose to house the tribunal in this tourist hub near the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Fifty-three Rwandan genocidaires are in custody in Arusha; twenty more have been indicted and are on the lam, most likely in Kenya and Congo.

This summer, I attended sessions of Pauline’s trial. In court, her appearance suggested a schoolteacher. Now 56, she favored plain high-necked dresses that showed off the gleaming gold crucifix she usually wears. According to observers, at the beginning of the trial she shook her head and smirked as charges were read out. But as more and more survivors have come from Butare to testify against her, she has grown subdued. During my visit, Pauline mostly looked blankly around the courtroom past a pair of scholarly bifocals, taking copious notes on a legal pad and avoiding the gaze of witnesses. Sometimes, I was told, she wears wild hairstyles and headdresses and slumps behind a computer screen that sits in front of her, as if she were trying to disguise herself from witnesses asked to identify her. On one such day eleven months ago, she didn’t show up at all, preferring, her attorneys told the court, to worship in chapel; that morning, when asked to identify the defendant, the witness could point only to Pauline’s chair. The courtroom is typically crowded with three judges, twelve defense attorneys and prosecutors, clerks, interpreters, and other staff. Most days there are only a handful of spectators watching all this in a narrow gallery behind bulletproof glass-and frequently there are none at all.

Pauline and Shalom are being tried together with four other Hutu leaders from Butare who are also accused of genocide. Fourteen witnesses for the prosecution have testified so far, with seventy-three more still to go, most of whom will have something to say against Pauline, who faces life imprisonment. In most cases, she is accused of inciting crimes rather than carrying them out herself. However, according to a document prepared by tribunal investigators in preparation for the trial, one witness, code-named Q.C., saw a Tutsi community leader die “at the hands of Nyiramasuhuko.” (The report does not specify what weapon Pauline used.) Attorneys for each of the six accused will most likely open their defenses in 2004 and will probably call more than a hundred witnesses of their own as the trial creeps along for at least another two years. Justice at the tribunal has moved at a glacial pace, with only eight convictions and one acquittal handed down in seven years.

Pauline has consistently denied the charges against her. In 1995, before she was arrested, she gave an interview to the BBC in a squalid Hutu refugee camp across the Congo border, where she had been leading the camp’s social services; her job duties included the reuniting of separated parents and children. When asked what she did during the war, Pauline replied: “We moved around the region to pacify. We wrote a pacification document saying people shouldn’t kill each other. Saying it’s genocide, that’s not true. It was the Tutsi who massacred the Hutu.” Told that witnesses had accused her of murder, Pauline shot back: “I cannot even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman-a mother-killed, then I’ll confront that person.”