Otto Penzler - The Best American Crime Writing 2003

In silence, Mary and Chantal led me to the ruins of what was once a plastics factory, in a shady grove of trees 200 yards from the prefecture office. They explained that the Interahamwe used to store their ammunition in the factory, and that many evenings they were taken from the prefecture, led there, and raped. “Pauline would come and say, ‘I don’t want this dirt here, get rid of this dirt,’” Chantal recalled.

The two young women became part of a group of five sex slaves who were kept at the prefecture and raped, repeatedly and together, every night for weeks. Then one day, the women were thrown into a nearby pit that was full of corpses. The pit, about 400 feet square, is now half filled in with rubble and weeds. Chantal took me there, stepping to the edge; at that point she turned aside, refusing to look in. “They used machetes to kill the ones who resisted and dumped them into the hole,” she explained. She began to weep. She remained inside the pit for a night and a day, she said; then, on the second night, she climbed the jumbled corpses to pull herself out.

I took Chantal back to her home, a neat mud hut in a bustling, dusty neighborhood of shops and wandering livestock. Chantal is married with two children; she was the only genocidal-rape survivor I met who was married. Her husband knows what happened to her. But for thousands of Rwandan survivors, one of the most insidious legacies of the rapes is the stigma-and the inevitable isolation. In Rwandan society, it is almost impossible for a woman who is known to have been raped to marry. One witness who testified against Pauline in Arusha had been engaged to be married a month later. When her fiancé heard about the testimony, he broke off the engagement.

Then there is the generation of children born of the rapes. As many as 5,000 such children have been documented, and most likely, there are many more than that who haven’t. These children will most likely never know their fathers-in most cases, the mother was raped so many times that the issue of paternity was not only pointless but emotionally perilous: In effect, all of her attackers had fathered that child.

Compounding the dishonor, the mere sight of these children-those who aren’t abandoned-can bring on savage memories to survivors. Two women I met who gave birth to their rapists’ children named the children with words that translate as “Blessing from God” as a way to ease the pain. But others in the community gave them names that put them in the same category as their fathers: “Children of Shame,” “Gifts of the Enemy,” “Little Interahamwe.”

“Did you ever see the look in a woman’s eyes when she sees a child of rape?” asked Sydia Nduna, an adviser at the International Rescue Committee Rwanda who works for a program in Kigali aimed at reducing gender violence. “It’s a depth of sadness you cannot imagine.” The impact of the mass rapes in Rwanda, she said, will be felt for generations. “Mass rape forces the victims to live with the consequences, the damage, the children,” Nduna explained.

Making matters worse, the rapes, most of them committed by many men in succession, were frequently accompanied by other forms of physical torture and often staged as public performances to multiply the terror and degradation. So many women feared them that they often begged to be killed instead. Often the rapes were in fact a prelude to murder. But sometimes the victim was not killed but instead repeatedly violated and then left alive; the humiliation would then affect not only the victim but also those closest to her. Other times, women were used as a different kind of tool: Half dead, or even already a corpse, a woman would be publicly raped as a way for Interahamwe mobs to bond together.

But the exposure-and the destruction-did not stop with the act of rape itself. Many women were purposely left alive to die later, and slowly. Two women I met outside Butare, Francina Mukamazina and Liberata Munganyinka, are dying of AIDS they contracted through rape. “My biggest worry is what will happen to my children when I’m gone,” Francina told me. These children are as fragile as Francina fears: A U.N. survey of Rwandan children of war concluded that 31 percent witnessed a rape or sexual assault, and 70 percent witnessed murder. Francina’s and Liberata’s daughters survived but watched their siblings slaughtered and their mothers violated. They will grow up beside children born of rape, all of them together forced to navigate different but commingling resentments.

During my visit to Chantal’s home, I asked her how she coped with her savage memories. She replied: “I just want to forget. My children are my consolation. Most rape survivors have nothing. We’re poor, but I have my family. It’s all I want.”

I found Mary later that afternoon a few miles of dirt track away. She was sitting alone in her home, a stifling mud hut about twenty feet square with one small window. Mary told me that the rapes were her first and only sexual experience. Then, eyes averted, twisting her hands, she told me that five months ago she discovered she had AIDS. She said that two of the other young women she and Chantal were kept with are already dead. Their fate is not the exception but the rule. According to one estimate, 70 percent of women raped during the Rwanda genocide have HIV; most will eventually die from it.

In an interview at the State House in Kigali, Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, talked about the mass rapes in measured, contemplative sentences, shaking his head, his emotions betraying him. “We knew that the government was bringing AIDS patients out of the hospitals specifically to form battalions of rapists,” he told me. He smiled ruefully, as if still astonished by the plan.

The most cynical purpose of the rapes in Butare was to transmit a slower, more agonizing form of death. “By using a disease, a plague, as an apocalyptic terror, as biological warfare, you’re annihilating the procreators, perpetuating the death unto the generations,” said Charles B. Strozier, a psychoanalyst and professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “The killing continues and endures.”

The use of AIDS as a tool of warfare against Tutsi women helped prosecutors in Arusha focus on rape as a driving force of the genocide. “HIV infection is murder,” said Silvana Arbia, the Rwanda Tribunal’s acting chief of prosecutions. “Sexual aggression is as much an act of genocide as murder is.”

During my visit with Mary, I learned that she had been “murdered” in just this way. This young woman has only one relative who lived through the genocide, a younger brother who lives in Kigali. “All of my friends have AIDS,” she told me in June. “But I’ll die of loneliness before I die of AIDS,” she whispered, choking on her tears. “All I wanted was to marry and have a family.” Today, she lies gravely ill in her hut, cared for by Chantal, withering away.

Mass rape has long been a weapon of war. According to legend, ancient Rome was united after Romulus and his soldiers terrorized their rivals, the Sabines, by raping their women. Widespread sexual assault has been documented in conflicts ranging from the Crusades to the Napoleonic Wars.

It was Abraham Lincoln who approved the laws that eventually established the modern understanding of rape as a war crime. In 1863, he commissioned Francis Lieber, an expert jurist, to develop a set of instructions for governing armies during the Civil War. Lieber specifically named rape as a crime serious enough to be subject to the death penalty. “The Lieber code was revolutionary,” said Kelly Askin, director of the International Criminal Justice Institute. “Before, gender crimes had been very much ignored.”

International law was more reticent about the problem. “Rape was considered a kind of collateral damage,” said Rhonda Copelon, a professor of law at the City University of New York. “It was seen as part of the unpreventable, fundamental culture of war.” After World War II, the rapes of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers in Nanking were prosecuted as war crimes by an international tribunal. However, rape was prosecuted only in conjunction with other violent crimes. The same tribunal, moreover, failed to prosecute the most institutionalized form of sexual violence, the enslavement of “comfort women” by the Japanese army. In 1946, rape was named a crime against humanity by an Allied statute governing German war crimes trials, but the law was never implemented. It was not until 1995, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, that rape was prosecuted as a grave crime tantamount to torture.