A Study in Violence: Examining Rape in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide

The UN Security Council Resolution 1820 provides a clear affirmation by the UN that sexual violence against women is a threat to peace and security and should not be tolerated internationally. It also notes, “…rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, or a constitutive act with respect to genocide.”

Another UN article entitled “Sexual Violence: A Tool of War” discusses rape as a direct tool of genocide and uses several compelling quotes to illuminate this distinction. Dr. Denis Mukwege Mukengere, director of Panzi hospital in Bukavu, Eastern DRC is quoted saying, “It is a tool of genocide aimed at destroying the targeted community by ensuring their women can bear no more children.” It goes on to summarize UNIFEM findings that, “Combatants routinely use mass rape, acts of sexual assault, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, and forced pregnancy as instruments of torture, ethnic domination and ethnic cleaning.”

David Scheffer in his article “Rape as Genocide” argues that rape should be included in the definition of genocide. This may find opposition due to the complexity of the terms, but he is adamant that it be included. He writes, “Hanging in the balance is whether the heinous strategy of mass rape in modern warfare will be condemned and prosecuted for what it truly is: genocide.” A key quote in this article cites a victim who affirms this rape as an attempt to wipe out her ethnic group, “’they kill our males and dilute our blood with rape. [They] want to finish us as a people and end our history.’”

Laura Smith-Spark in her article “How did Rape Become a Weapon of War” illuminates the findings of an Amnesty International report entitled “Lives Blown Apart” which focuses on the aforementioned shift from wartime rape from a form of sexual gratification for the troops to a systematic genocidal strategy. Gita Sahgal of Amnesty International is quoted as stating, “Women are seen as the reproducers and carers of the community. Therefore if one group wants to control another they often do it by impregnating women of the other community because they see it as a way of destroying the other community.”

Rape as a systematic tool of genocide proves to be very effective. Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide from the Greek genos meaning group and the Latin –cide which means killing. He was adamant that the term genocide be used for what it represented and included the following acts as genocide. His definition includes:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Qtd. in Power)

Rape clearly fits into each of Lemkin’s requirements for genocide.  Mass rape results in the death of many women either immediately or soon after as a result of HIV/AIDS infection.  It causes both mental and physical harm to the survivors.  Female genital mutilation and gang rapes render victims unable to bear children which stifles the next generation. Rape has the effect of diluting the ethnicity of the victim’s children which serves to damage her community.

Genocidal rape has lasting implications on the community where they take place. Rape itself is a damaging and invasive act that causes severe pain to its victims. “A violent invasion into the interior of one’s body represents the most severe attack imaginable upon the intimate self and the dignity of a human being: by any measure it is a mark of severe torture…It results in physical pain, loss of dignity, an attack on her identity, and a loss of self-determination over her own body (Seifert, 55).”  In addition to this fundamental pain experienced, it is important to understand the cultural value of women and thus the motivation of their attackers during genocidal rape. “…in many cultures a group’s system of meaning is denoted by the female gender, ‘on whose person, body, and life the construction of the community…is created and brought to completion.’ That also means the violence inflicted on women is aimed at the physical and personal integrity of a group. This in turn is particularly significant for the construction of the community. Thus the rape of the women in a community can be regarded as the symbolic rape of the body of this community (Seifert, 64).”

Women play a central role in Rwandan society as mothers and wives. They represent the foundation of new life and regeneration. Attacking them deteriorates the seams of their society in many ways. Women who were raped were shunned by their communities and rejected by their husbands. Often, they were forced to leave their homes and belongings behind because they are considered tainted and promiscuous. Children born of rape are often rejected by their mothers and society because they are of diluted ethnicity which further degrades the social fabric of the next generation. “Many children of rape were abandoned by their mothers or left for adoption. Some mothers named their children “little killers” because they were conceived by the militia who had killed their family members (Mukamana, 383).” It is estimated that approximately 5,000 children were born as a result of rape in Rwanda (Mukamana, 383).

Rwandan women also experienced a loss of identity because marriage and sex are considered a rite of passage between girlhood and womanhood. Coming of age and losing one’s virginity are celebrated with marriage. Thus, women who were raped lost their identity and could not be considered women or girls which damaged their sense of belonging in their communities further. One survivor writes, “With that rape I lost my identity as a girl. When a friend of mine invites me to a party I can’t go. . .I don’t know if when I go I have to be with the girls or with the women. I am not a girl and I am not a woman (Mukamana, 381).”

Survivors of rape in Rwanda suffer from lasting emotional and physical pain. They experience the psychological trauma of being raped as well as the physical trauma inflicted by gang rape and female genital mutilation inflicted by their attackers. Gang rapes are committed systematically, often with no emotion, and according to a social ranking.

Gang rapes are often distinguished by a ritualized procedure, that is, the order of the rape is determined by the status of the men within the group. It has also been proved that rapists tend to depersonalize their victim. They hardly perceive her as a real person, and if they did not know their victim previously, they are almost never able to describe her later (Seifert, 56).