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III. Background

Sexual Violence during the 1994 Genocide

From April to July 1994, Hutu extremists at the helm of the Rwandan government perpetrated a genocide that cost the lives of at least half a million Tutsi, and moderate Hutu, including men, women, and children.¹ Perpetrators of the genocide sought to exterminate the Tutsi minority, who then represented approximately 10 percent of the Rwandan population. Violence during the genocide assumed gender-specific forms, affecting females differently than males. Members of Hutu militias known as Interahamwe, civilians, and the Rwandan Armed Forces (Forces Armées Rwandaises, FAR) targeted Rwandan women and girls in a genocidal campaign of mass sexual violence.

A 1996 report by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Rwanda estimated that at least 250,000 women were raped during the genocide. The forms of gender-based and sexual violence² were varied and included individual rape; gang-rape; rape with sticks, guns, or other objects; sexual enslavement; forced marriage; forced labor; and sexual mutilation.³ Sexual violence was one of many injuries inflicted upon Rwandan women and girls, who were often abused after having witnessed the torture and murder of their family members and the destruction of their homes. According to many personal accounts of the genocide, perpetrators of sexual violence murdered a large number of their victims directly following the sexual assaults.       

Acts of sexual violence wrought devastating medical and psycho-social consequences on Rwandan women. Women and girls contracted sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV/AIDS; faced unwanted pregnancies⁴ and health complications resulting from botched abortions; and suffered sexual mutilation and other injuries, such as fistulas,⁵ uterine problems, vaginal lesions, and scarring.  Ten years after the events, victims⁶ of sexual violence, particularly those who bore children from the rape or suffered lasting physical injury, such as infection with HIV/AIDS, are still haunted by the abuse and remain traumatized, stigmatized, and isolated.

Mass sexual violence in Rwanda served strategic and political ends. Prior to and during the genocide, extremist propaganda vilified Tutsi women on the basis of both their gender and their ethnicity.⁷ According to the extremist ideology, Tutsi women sought sexually to manipulate Hutu men as a means to achieve Tutsi domination of the Hutu community. Perpetrators of the genocide thus viewed sexual violence against Tutsi women as an effective method to shame and conquer the Tutsi population. Extremists also sexually assaulted Hutu women who held opposing political views, were married to Tutsi men, or sheltered Tutsi during the genocide. The breakdown of law and order during the violence also led to random sexual assaults against both Tutsi and Hutu women and girls.

There is scarce documentation of sexual violence from the period 1994-1998 that was unrelated to the campaign to exterminate Tutsi and moderate Hutu. However, field research has documented rape and forced marriage by advancing soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)—the military arm of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the majority Tutsi rebel group that defeated the genocidal government in 1994 and proceeded to form the new Rwandan government—against Tutsi women whom they had “rescued” from perpetrators of the genocide.⁸ Further, there is evidence that both Hutu extremists and RPA soldiers sexually assaulted Tutsi and Hutu women, respectively, during the protracted conflict between the Rwandan government and militia members who had fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) following the RPF victory.⁹

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), established by the U.N. Security Council in 1994, has jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of international humanitarian law committed in Rwanda and neighboring states in the period from January 1, 1994 to December 31, 1994. The ICTR has tried twenty-three defendants in its ten-year history. In its landmark decision in Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the court recognized that rape can be a constitutive act of genocide under international law,¹⁰ but it has not followed up this decision with vigorous prosecution of rape cases.  

The NGO Coalition on Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations, Rwandan and international NGOs, and others have criticized the court’s relative lack of attention to sexual violence crimes.¹¹ NGOs have noted that prosecutorial staff have not effectively investigated sexual violence and therefore neglected to include sexual violence crimes in some past indictments. The Security Council has set a deadline for the ICTR to complete all investigations by the end of 2004, all trials by 2008, and all appeals by 2010. NGOs have also reported that the tribunal’s sexual violence investigators have not been properly trained to gain the confidence of and elicit information from rape victims.¹² In May 2004, the ICTR initiated a series of training seminars on gender sensitivity and sexual violence investigations.¹³ With respect to witness protection, NGOs have criticized the absence of confidentiality safeguards and security measures upon the witnesses’ return to Rwanda; the failure to provide genocide survivors who serve as witnesses antiretroviral (ARV) therapy and treatment for opportunistic infections of AIDS, which are made available to HIV-positive defendants detained by the tribunal;¹⁴ inappropriate and offensive cross-examination of rape victims; lack of access to trauma counseling for rape victims; and finally, the absence of mechanisms to sanction inappropriate conduct by judges.

Rwandan Women in the Post-Genocide Period

In a country where the majority of the population fall below the national poverty line,¹⁵ Rwandan women and girls, approximately 53.3 percent of the population, are at a particular disadvantage.¹⁶ A large proportion of the male population was killed in the genocide or subsequent combat between the RPA and Hutu militias and ex-FAR. Many female genocide survivors and other women have been deprived of family upon whom they and their children depended for economic survival. In addition to those who were killed, tens of thousands of people were detained on genocide charges from July 1994 onward and the prison population reached a peak of more than 130,000 in late 1998.¹⁷ The many women and girls whose male family members have been imprisoned have the additional burden not only of supporting themselves but also of providing food for their relatives in prison.¹⁸ A 2001 survey by the Rwandan Ministry of Health and the National Population Office found that approximately 36 percent of families were headed by women, as compared to 21 percent in 1992, and that 8 percent of women were widows, as compared to 4 percent in 1992.¹⁹ According to the World Bank, 97 percent of Rwandan women provide for themselves and their families through subsistence agriculture.²⁰

Human Rights Watch interviewed victims of genocide and post-genocide sexual violence who were in desperate economic straits. C.M.,²¹ a young woman who recently gave birth to a child from a rape in late 2003, was evicted by her parents after she revealed that she had been raped. She explained that her economic situation was bleak after she moved to the nearest town: “I didn’t have enough to eat, drink, or take care of the baby.”²² Several women who earned a living from prostitution pleaded for financial assistance so that they could seek other work. They and social workers who assisted them reported that financial need had obliged many young women to turn to prostitution for survival.

Since 1994, the Rwandan government has adopted important measures to improve the status of women and girls. In particular, national initiatives have contributed to an impressive level of participation of women in political life. The 2003 constitution requires the government to ensure that all decision-making bodies are composed of women at a minimum ratio of 30 percent.²³ Women currently make up 48.8 percent of representatives in the national assembly, the highest percentage of parliamentary participation by women in the world.²⁴ Administrative structures called “women’s councils” exist at the cell, district, province, and national levels²⁵ and represent women’s positions on a variety of social issues.²⁶

However, serious discrimination and abuse against Rwandan women and girls persist. Despite the adoption ofinheritance law reform in 1999, women and girls are denied equal rights to land under strongly rooted Rwandan customary law, which privileges the male head of household.²⁷ The inheritance law established three marital property regimes and granted equal inheritance rights to male and female children of civil marriages.²⁸ Significant textual gaps and obstacles to implementation have diminished the positive impact of this legislation.²⁹ In a society in which subsistence agriculture predominates, access to land often determines survival. Both women and girlsare targets of sexual and other forms of gender-basedviolence, including domestic violence, rape, forced marriage, and polygyny.³⁰ According to UNICEF, orphans and “other vulnerable children” number approximately one million in Rwanda, and many of these children are particularly at risk of sexual assault and sexual exploitation, and resort to survival sex.³¹

Our interviews with victims of sexual violence since the genocide, NGOs, and service providers revealed cases of rape of women and girls by relatives, neighbors, teachers, employers, domestic servants, police, and soldiers in the Rwandan Defense Forces (RDF, formerly the Rwandan Patriotic Army, RPA).³²  According to our review of judicial records and research studies by Rwandan NGOs, in every province in 2000-2004, complaints of sexual violence against girls far outnumbered complaints of sexual violence against adult women.³³ In fifteen judgments from the period 2000-2003, the complainant was under the age of sixteen at the time of the rape. Many representatives of human rights and women’s rights organizations and government officials have pointed to a soaring rate of child rape since 1997-1998.³⁴ However, a representative of the Rwanda National Police, a government minister, and an NGO representative noted that the rising numbers most likely reflect greater community awareness of the issue and increased reporting, rather than a surge in sexual violence against children.³⁵  

In the wake of the genocide, numerous NGOs have taken up the cause of women’s and girls’ rights.³⁶ These include survivors’ organizations with general or women’s rights mandates that provide legal assistance and medical and counseling services; development organizations that promote the economic empowerment of rural women and girls; organizations that provide legal assistance to women and girls on such issues as violence, property rights, divorce, and custody; and organizations that seek to improve female educational performance or access to health care.