The Hamilton Spectator Magazine, Saturday, September 28, 2002, p. M04 A WOMAN'S WORK; MAGAZINE FEATURE STORY Peter Landesman New York Times News Service Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994.

Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had been deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting and burning. Roadblocks had been set up to cull fleeing Tutsis. By the third week of April, as the Rwanda genocide was reaching its peak intensity, tens of thousands of corpses were rotting in the streets of Kigali, the country's capital. Butare, a stronghold of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus that had resisted the government's orders for genocide, was the next target.

Enraged by Butare's revolt, Rwanda's interim government dispatched Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the national minister of family and women's affairs, from Kigali on a mission. Before becoming one of the most powerful women in Rwanda's government, Nyiramasuhuko had grown up on a small farming commune just outside Butare. She was a local success story, known to some as Butare's favourite daughter. Her return would have a persuasive resonance there. Soon after Nyiramasuhuko's arrival in town, cars mounted with loudspeakers crisscrossed Butare's back roads, announcing that the Red Cross had arrived at a nearby stadium to provide food and guarantee sanctuary. By April 25, thousands of desperate Tutsis had gathered at the stadium. It was a trap. Instead of receiving food and shelter, the refugees were surrounded by men wearing bandoleers and headdresses made of spiky banana leaves. These men were Interahamwe, thuggish Hutu marauders whose name means "those who attack together."

According to an eyewitness I spoke with this summer in Butare, supervising from the sidelines was Nyiramasuhuko, then 48, a portly woman of medium height in a colourful African wrap and spectacles. A 30-year-old farmer named Foster Mivumbi, who has confessed to taking part in the slaughter, told me that Nyiramasuhuko goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, "Before you kill the women, you need to rape them." Tutsi women were then selected from the stadium crowd and dragged away to a forested area to be raped, Mivumbi recalled.Back at the stadium, he told me, Nyiramasuhuko waved her arms and then observed in silence as Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees. When questioned about this incident, Nyiramasuhuko's lawyers denied that she took part in atrocities in Butare. Shortly afterward, according to another witness, Nyiramasuhuko arrived at a compound where a group of Interahamwe was guarding 70 Tutsi women and girls. One of the Interahamwe, a young man named Emmanuel Nsabimana, told me through a translator that Nyiramasuhuko ordered him and the others to burn the women. Around the same time, Rose, a young Tutsi woman who had sought refuge at the area hospital and who is now under military protection as a witness against Nyiramasuhuko, watched in terror as soldiers stormed the complex. "They said Nyiramasuhuko had given them permission to go after the Tutsi girls, who were too proud of themselves," said Rose, who requested that her last name not be printed. "She was the minister, so they said they were free to do it."

A few days later, a local official knocked on her door. Rose said the official told her that even though all Tutsis would be exterminated, one Tutsi would be left alive -- one who could be a "witness to God" of the extermination. She was told she was to be that witness, she added. "Hutu soldiers took my mother outside," Rose said, "stripped off her clothes and raped her with a machete." On that first day, 20 family members were slaughtered before her eyes, said Rose, adding that she herself was raped by Nyiramasuhuko's son, Arsene Shalom Ntahobali. After the first week of the genocide, Mary Jukangoga, 24, and Chantal Kantarama, 28, were forced to become 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. Jukangoga and Kantarama remained in the pit for a night and a day before climbing over the jumbled corpses to pull themselves out.

A farmer named Suzanne Bukabangwa said she was also kept by her neighbours, also farmers, as a sex slave during the genocide. She remembered two things most of all: the stamens from the banana trees they used to violate her, leaving her body mutilated; and the single sentence that the men used: "We're going to kill all the Tutsis, and one day Hutu children will have to ask, 'What did a Tutsi child look like?'" 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. Understandably, the world's attention subsequently focused on the sheer volume of the Rwandan slaughter. But the prosecutors and judges of the International Criminal 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 UN 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 mutilated 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 allegedly inspired and orchestrated by Nyiramasuhuko, whose very job, as minister of family and women's affairs, was the preservation, education and empowerment of Rwanda's women. In July 1994, Nyiramasuhuko 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, Nyiramasuhuko was apprehended in Nairobi by Kenyan and international authorities. Her son, Arsene Shalom Ntahobali, a member of the Interahamwe, was seized six days later in a Nairobi grocery store he

was running. After interrogation by investigators, Nyiramasuhuko was transferred with Shalom to Tanzania, where both were delivered to the International Tribunal in Arusha. At the tribunal, Nyiramasuhuko faces 11 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 10 charges, to which he has pled innocence. Fifty-three other Rwandans are in custody in Arusha; 20 more have been indicted and are on the lam, most likely in Kenya and Congo. This summer, I attended sessions of Nyiramasuhuko's trial. In court, her appearance suggested a schoolteacher.Now 56, she favoured 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.Nyiramasuhuko and her son are being tried together with four other Hutu leaders from Butare who are also accused of genocide. Attorneys for each of the six accused will most likely open their defences in 2004 and will probably call more than 100 witnesses of their own as the trial creeps along for at least another two years after that. Justice at the tribunal has moved at a glacial pace, with only eight convictions and one acquittal handed down in seven years. Nyiramasuhuko has consistently denied the charges against her. In 1995, before she was arrested, she gave an interview to the BBC. When asked what she did during the war, Nyiramasuhuko 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." Over lunch during a break in court last month, one of Nyiramasuhuko's attorneys, Nicole Bergevin, accused the tribunal of making her client a scapegoat of the vindictive current government in Rwanda and of an international community guilt-ridden over its failure to stop the bloodletting. "I'm sure there were some rapes," Bergevin said, "but Nyiramasuhuko never ordered any rapes." 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 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.

According to one estimate, 70 per cent of women raped during the Rwanda genocide have HIV; most will die from it. "The intention in Rwanda was an abstraction: to kill without killing," said Silvana Arbia, now the tribunal's chief prosecutor. She described the case of a 45-year-old Rwandan woman who was raped by her 12-year-old son -- with Interahamwe holding a hatchet to his throat -- in front of her husband, while their other five young children were forced to hold open her thighs. "The offence against an individual woman becomes an offence against the family," Arbia said, "which becomes an offence against the country, and so, by deduction, against humanity." On Aug. 10, 1999, Nyiramasuhuko's indictment was amended to include rape as a crime against humanity. According to prosecutors and witnesses, her frequent instructions to Interahamwe to rape before they killed, or to rape women instead of killing them, had triggered a collective sadism in Butare -- one that had even inspired violence in the local peasants. "There is a shared concept across cultures that women don't do this kind of thing," said Carolyn Nordstrom, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. "Society doesn't yet have a way to talk about it, because it violates all our concepts of what women are." Rwanda's lethal racialism never could be as starkly

delineated as, say, Nazi Germany's. Whether Hutus and Tutsis are separate ethnic groups is a subject of debate, but it was only after European colonists arrived in Rwanda that any political distinction was made between them. Intermarriage had long been common, and both groups spoke the same language and practised the same religion. Around the turn of the 20th century, however, German and Belgian colonists used dubious racialist logic -- namely, that Tutsis had a more "Caucasian" appearance -- to designate the minority Tutsi the ruling class, empowering them as their social and governing proxy. In the 1930s, the Belgians, deciding to limit administrative posts and higher education to the Tutsi, needed to decide exactly who was who in Rwanda. The most efficient procedure was simply to register everyone and require them to carry cards identifying them as one or the other.

Eighty-four per cent of the population declared themselves Hutu and 15 per cent Tutsi. Considering the degree of intermarriage in Rwandan history, this accounting was hardly scientific. What's more, Rwandans sometimes switched ethnic identities, the wealthy relabelling themselves as Tutsis and the poor as Hutus. Unlike the Nazis, who were fuelled by myths of Aryan superiority, the Hutus were driven by an accumulated rage over their lower status and by resentment of supposed Tutsi beauty and arrogance. "The propaganda made Tutsi women powerful, desirable -- and therefore something to be destroyed," said Rhonda Copelon, a professor of law at City University of New York. "When you make the woman the threat, you enhance the idea that violence against them is permitted." This pernicious idea, of course, came to full fruition during the genocide. The collective belief of Hutu women that Tutsi women were shamelessly trying to steal their husbands granted Hutu men permission to rape their supposed competitors out of existence. Seen through this warped lens, the men who raped were engaged not only in an act of sexual transgression but also in a purifying ritual. This explanation conformed with my sense of Nyiramasuhuko's view of the Tutsis. Like many of her countrymen, she seemed able to view individual Tutsis as abstractions.

But in my conversations with Nyiramasuhuko's mother, Theresa Nyirakabue, things became even more complicated. She told me about a Tutsi boy Nyiramasuhuko had hidden during the genocide, then told me, matter-of-factly, that Nyiramasuhuko's great-grandfather was a Tutsi. The great-grandfather had been redesignated a Hutu, Theresa explained, because he became poor. tunned, and knowing that in Rwanda kinship is defined patrilineally -- through the blood of fathers -- I asked Theresa if that didn't mean that Nyiramasuhuko was a Tutsi. "Yes, of course," she said eagerly. And would Nyiramasuhuko have known that she came from Tutsi lineage? Theresa pursed her lips and gave a firm, affirmative nod. The philosopher and historian Robert Jay Lifton, who has explored the psychology of genocide, was intrigued by the revelation that Nyiramasuhuko was of Tutsi descent. "Part of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko's fierceness had to do with eliminating the Tutsi in her," he hypothesized. "She was undergoing an individual struggle to destroy that defiled element in herself." The crimes Nyiramasuhuko is accused of are monstrous. If proven guilty, her capacity for pity and compassion and her professional duty to shield the powerless had apparently deserted her or collapsed under the irresistible urge for power. But in seeking a reasonable explanation for Nyiramasuhuko's alleged barbarity, I remembered something that Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch told me. "This behaviour lies just under the surface of any of us," Des Forges said."The simplified accounts of genocide allow distance between us and the perpetrators of genocide.

They are so evil we couldn't ever see ourselves doing the same thing. "But if you consider the terrible pressure under which people were operating, then you automatically reassert their humanity -- and that becomes alarming. You are forced to look at these situations and say, 'What would I have done?' Sometimes the answer is not encouraging." Note(s): A 30-year-old, who confessed to taking part in the slaughter of Tutsis, said that Pauline Nyiramasuhuko told the Hutus, 'Before you kill the women, you need to rape them.' Illustration(s): Photo: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, Rwanda's former minister of family and women's affairs, now faces an international tribunal, charged with 11 genocide-related crimes. Mary Mukangoga, 24, was raped during the genocide and now has AIDS. Rose says that she was raped by Nyiramasuhuko's son and that she was chosen by Hutu marauders to be the lone survivor and 'witness to God' of the genocide.

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