The Genocide That Keeps on Giving
By Jennifer Garitson
In the spring of 1994, our country, along with every other country in the world, turned a blind eye to what may be the most egregious act of our lifetime. In a small country in the middle of Africa hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in an attempt to eradicate a certain ethnicity. This genocide was allowed to continue despite the pleas from the Rwandan people for help. In just over three months, an estimated one million people were systematically hunted down and murdered (Eyewitness 74).
Rwanda is made up of two ethnic groups; the Hutus and the Tutsis. These two groups have always been pitted against each other. The Tutsi had ruled Rwanda during much of its colonial era, but they were driven into exile in a revolt in 1959. The Hutu had since been ruling Rwanda and spent a great amount of time and propaganda to fuel the hatred between these two groups. By the late 1980’s though, the Hutu president, Habyarimana, was beginning to lose support due to a weak economy and rampant corruption. Habyarimana and his followers began a campaign to eliminate the Tutsi people, believing that this would help rebuild their slipping base of power (Geulke 587). They spent the first few years of the 1990’s putting this plan into place. They used the radio stations as a propaganda machine and began forming militias that were trained to kill. On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana was returning from Tanzania when his plane was shot down. This was the perfect excuse for the Hutu to begin the genocide that they had been preparing so long for (Straus 348).
Thus began the massacre of the Tutsi people. Men, women, and children were hacked to pieces with machetes and left lying in the roads. Most women were repeatedly beaten and raped. The propaganda machine had led the Hutu to believe that the Tutsi women thought themselves too good for Hutu men (Longman 1). So the Hutu took this chance to force themselves on the Tutsi women. Often a woman would be made to watch as her husband and children were killed, and then raped by the men who had just murdered her family. Some women were forced to kill their own children before being raped. The rape was often followed by mutilation of the sexual organs or of features that were deemed to be characteristic to the Tutsi women. The Hutu men also saw this as a way to help eradicate the Tutsi people. Being a patriarchal society, any child born of a Hutu man and a Tutsi woman would be considered Hutu. Oddly enough, this patriarchal society also believed that once married a woman would be protected by her husband’s lineage, yet Tutsi women who were married to Hutu men were not spared. After being raped, beaten, and mutilated, some of the women were allowed to live. This was only because many of the men raping them knew they were infected with AIDS, and wanted the women to live so they would spend the rest of their lives sick and wondering when they would die. These Tutsi women were subjected to a death sentence that was so cruel we could never fathom such a thing. Yet the entire international community stood by and did nothing to help these women (Crossette A4).
Before the genocide, the role of a woman in Rwanda centered mainly on her position as a wife and mother. Women were valued mostly for the number of children that they could produce and the average number of children per woman was 6.2, one of the highest rates in the world (Gerhart 156). This greatly limited the number of opportunities that women had outside of the home. Rwandan women were expected to be silent and reserved. Domestic abuse was not an exception; it was a way of life. One Rwandan proverb says that a woman who is not yet battered is not a real woman. The patriarchal structure of the Rwandan society left no room for women in education, politics, or employment. This problem was further compounded by the high level of poverty in Rwanda. Women had no access to any sort of knowledge that would teach them about their rights or how to enforce them. The Constitution actually guaranteed the rights of all citizens to participate in politics, but most women did not want to break the patriarchal tradition that kept them at home. Therefore, the laws that were passed were not friendly for women. Women could not own land, obtain credit, or engage in employment without the consent of her husband.
As a result of the genocide, many women lost the male relatives on whom they previously relied for economic support. Because of the previous discrimination, most female genocide survivors have little education, lack marketable skills, and are often denied access to their husband’s or father’s property since they are women. Upon the death of a husband, the eldest son becomes the head of the family or the husband’s family claims the inheritance. Women are also not allowed to inherit property from their father or any other family member unless there is no traceable male successor, which almost never happens. Some women survivors continue to live with their relatives or friends because they are not able to get access to the property they occupied before the genocide.
There are also now a large number children that these women are trying to care for. The astronomical amount of rape during the genocide led to the birth of thousands of Rwandan children, not to mention the ones that were orphaned because their parents were murdered. The response to these children has been understandably mixed. As in many societies, the stigma of rape is very negative. Although abortion is illegal in Rwanda, many Rwandan women could not accept a child that was born of rape. This led to some women performing self-induced abortions at a great risk to themselves. The Director of Kigali Central Hospital noted that some of these self-induced abortions had caused uterine infections, rupturing of the uterus, hemorrhaging, and other gynecological problems (Purvis 20). Some had been bleeding for months before they sought medical treatment. Some who could afford it went to a private clinic or neighboring Zaire to have the procedure done. Other women had the babies and abandoned them at the hospital, refusing to give their names when they went in to deliver. Health professionals assume that many women must have given birth to the babies and then committed infanticide. Those who decided to keep the child faced severe repercussions when bringing the child home. Many family members could not accept the child if they bore a resemblance to the rapist, and ostracized the woman for even attempting to care for the child of a rapist.
Because of the genocide, Rwanda has become a country of women. These women have had the difficult task of rebuilding this country thrust upon them, yet they have no education, employment, or legal status with which to stimulate the economy. There has been almost no punishment of the people who carried out the genocide. This is in large part due to the fact that many Tutsi women were too afraid to speak out against their attackers. The women who were raped do not want to publicly expose what happened to them for fear of rejection by their community or retribution if an attacker finds out that the woman spoke out. Many women feel no one will ever marry them again if they know they were raped. They are suffering in these extremely poor conditions because of fear of social rejection rather than speak up and demand justice.
Though the international community stood by shamelessly while the genocide occurred, financial aid began to pour in after the attacks. Unfortunately, most of the aid has gone to refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania, where many of the attackers who participated in the genocide fled to avoid being captured and facing prosecution. Since July of 1994, approximately $2.5 billion dollars has gone to the refugee camps while only $572 million has been devoted to programs in Rwanda itself (Drumbi 1221). This has obviously created considerable resentment that the perpetrators of these attacks are being cared for more than the women and children who were victimized.
There are some programs that are designed to help these women during this crisis. The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) is funding some displaced persons camps in Rwanda. It’s African Women in Crisis program focuses on reproductive health, trauma management, and quality of life improvement. The Women in Transition program provides assistance to widows and those heading households. The priority of this program is dealing with shelter and women obtaining credit, along with women’s rights education and literacy.
While these programs are commendable, not nearly enough is being done to support these women. Many of the survivors are now starting to die of AIDS that they contracted during the rapes. The children are entering their teenage years, many of them with not a day of schooling. These women cannot be denied the same rights as men and expected to be able to bring this country into some sort of civilization. Most of them have never received any sort of medical help for the injuries inflicted upon them, let alone any sort of psychological help to deal with the trauma and the survivor’s guilt that they are living with. Rwanda cannot begin to rebuild until the women are allowed to claim the land that should be rightfully theirs, until they can speak out about what has happened to them, and until they are given more aid than the people who committed these crimes. The fact that this crime was allowed to be planned, carried out, and executed with no intervention is tragic enough. But the fact that thirteen years later we are still overlooking these horrendous circumstances is inexcusable. Seventy percent of the population in Rwanda is female due to the genocide (Friedman 13). The future of Rwanda is largely in the hands of its women. But until their status as second-class citizens is revoked and they are given every right and protection that a man is, there can be no hope for success.
Works Cited
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Friedman, Thomas L. "Where Beauty Stops." New York Times 145.50327 (1996): 13.
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Purvis, Andrew, and Leslie Dickstein. "Welcome to Ground Zero, Rwanda." Time 143.25 (1994): 20.
Straus, Scott. "Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and the International Community." Political Science Quarterly 120.2 (2005): 348-50.