Women Accused of Genocide in Rwanda
By Nicole Hogg, in Rwanda
Much has been written about the suffering of women during the Rwandan genocide,
particularly as victims of sexual violence. Yet, despite the recent
conviction of two Rwandan nuns in Belgium for genocide, little
analysis has been undertaken to date of women as participants in the
genocide,
or as non-participants, as the case may be.
Hence, as part of a Master's degree at McGill University, I
travelled to Rwanda, via Arusha, to study, and meet, women charged
with genocide.
In Arusha, at
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the trial of Pauline
Nyiramasuhuko, former Minister of Women's and Family Affairs and
the only woman indicted by the Tribunal, began in June this year. It
will be very interesting to follow this trial and see how gender
comes into play, particularly as one of the allegations against
Nyiramasuhuko is that she incited the rape of Tutsi women, including
by her own son (and co-accused).
According to
official statistics, there are currently 3,105 women in prison in
Rwanda, representing 3.4% of the total prison population.
The vast majority of these women are charged with genocide-related
crimes (as against common crimes), ranging from Category 1 offences
(for being among the primary planners, instigators and most notorious
killers of the genocide),
to murder (either with their own hands, or, more often, as
accomplices, in particular, by exposing the hiding places of Tutsis),
to looting and destroying property. Six women charged with genocide
have received the death penalty, of whom one had her sentence reduced
to life imprisonment on appeal, and one has been executed.
Many female
prisoners in Rwanda, like male prisoners, have been detained for over
six years without trial. Many women who were imprisoned shortly
after the genocide claim to have been severely beaten, both by
survivors of the genocide and by the Rwandan authorities. However,
among the women I met in the prisons, there were no complaints of
such treatment in recent years. Rather, their main grievances are:
overcrowding and a consequent high rate of illness (these problems
appear to be particularly acute in the Kigali Central prison);
inadequate food (prisoners usually receive one meal per day, of peas
or maize), lack of visitors (prisoners are officially permitted
visits of three minutes per week but many receive no visitors at all,
due primarily to poverty, which prevents their families from
traveling to the prisons), and delays in getting their cases to
trial. Another significant concern of female prisoners is the
status of their children, both within, and outside prison.
The confession
rate among female prisoners charged with genocide is very low and
most women I have met claim to be innocent.
(In fact, of the trials to date in the Rwandan Courts, the acquittal
rate for women is 40%, which is substantially higher than the average
overall acquittal rate of 20%. )
From among the women who have confessed, I have heard some
gruelling tales. These include: a woman who maliciously beat an old
woman to death (admissions of such intentional behaviour have,
however, been rare); a woman who poisoned and killed her own children
to prevent them being massacred; a (Hutu) woman, kept as a sex slave
by the head of the local Interahamwe (militia), and several women who
claim to have killed, or to have led people to be killed, in fear for
their life or in order to save others.
Whatever one thinks of women who committed crimes during the
Rwandan genocide, it is unfortunate that few mechanisms currently
exist in Rwanda to enable reconciliation between remorseful offenders
(male or female) and their victims or their victims' families,
when both parties are willing. There is much hope, among women
detainees and the Rwandan population in general, that the
commencement of the ‘gacaca' trials (a traditional justice
system, whereby defendants will be tried by respected persons in
their communities, rather than by the courts) early next year may
provide the first step towards such truth and reconciliation in
Rwanda.
Notes
To my knowledge, African Rights is the only organization that has
studied women participants in the Rwandan genocide. Their book,
Rwanda: Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers, which was
researched and written shortly after the genocide, provides a very
interesting overview of the ways in which women participated in the
genocide, as well as detailed testimony against certain alleged
women offenders.
As Western feminist criminologists have noted, in order to gain a
complete picture of women's criminality, it is just as
important to understand women's non-participation in
crime (particularly violent crime), as it is to understand the types
of crimes that women commit, and their motivations for doing so.
Although one must be careful in employing such analyses with respect
to women's participation in the Rwandan genocide, I have found
that some parallels can be made.
According to statistics provided by the Rwandan Ministry of the
Interior, as at April 2001, there were a total of 92,541 prisoners
in Rwanda, of whom 3,105 were women and girls. In addition,
according to the human rights organization Liprodhor, at least
10,000 people, including women, remain detained in ‘cachots',
(police cells, government offices etc.) that accommodate the
overflow from the prisons. According to the women I interviewed in
prison, conditions are generally worse in the cachots than in the
prisons.
Including
Nyiramasuhuko and the two nuns tried in Belgium, there are 50 women,
of a total of almost 3,000 people, charged with Category 1 offences
in Rwanda (that is, 1.7%).
As with orphan survivors of the genocide, many children who have
either one or both parents in prison are left unsupported. In each
of the prisons that I have visited to date, there are some children,
who may remain with their mothers until the age of two to three
years, after which they must be given up to family members or to
NGOs.
According to the women prisoners I met who have confessed to
genocide, the main reason why more women have not confessed is that
they have not yet seen any benefits flowing to others who have done
so (by way of faster trials or sentence reductions). Another
important reason is that in most cases, women who did not murder
with their own hands do not consider they have committed genocide,
despite the fact that legally, accomplices to genocide can be
treated in the same manner as the person who wielded the machete.
Finally, some women report pressure from other prisoners not to
confess, in the name of prisoner solidarity. African Rights has
also noted that women are more ashamed of admitting to violent
crimes than men, as it breaches gender expectations and may lead to
ostracism from their communities. See African Rights, Confessing
to Genocide (June 2000).
I have not yet concluded whether the relatively high acquittal rate
for women is due to women's greater innocence; the nature of
women's crimes, which makes them more difficult to prove; a
general resistance among judges and witnesses to convict women, or
other reasons altogether. Moreover, even a person officially
‘acquitted' may be ordered to provide restitution for
property looted or destroyed during the genocide. Therefore,
further work must be undertaken to examine how many women who are
‘acquitted', are in fact, ‘convicted' of
property offences.
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