Dominic Odipo
20 September 2002
Nairobi — History is being quietly but irrevocably made in the sleepy northern Tanzanian town of Arusha as unsuspecting foreign tourists troop in and out.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a Rwandan woman of Tutsi extraction, has been brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda charged with several crimes never before preferred against a woman anywhere.
Pauline faces, among others, crimes against humanity, genocide and assorted war crimes. She is also the first woman ever to be charged with rape as a crime against humanity.
The story of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko is one of those that truly tear our hearts asunder, leaving us wondering what human nature really is and to what depths it is capable of sinking.
It is the story of unspeakable slaughter, of Hutu death squads armed with pangas and nail-studded clubs that massacred over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
It is the story of thuggish Hutu marauders known as the "Interahamwe" ("those who attack together") who roamed the Rwandan country side raping, maiming and killing in the sort of murderous orgy that the African continent had never known.
It is the story of a woman, a wife and a mother who commanded these panga-wielding death squads to rape her fellow Tutsi women and then bayonet or burn them to death.
In a heart-rending article published this week in The New York Times, Peter Landesman chronicles the story of Pauline, before, during and after the Rwanda genocide, painting a picture of a woman whose instincts were probably darker than any of the Nazi chieftains that served under Hitler's Third Reich.
After weeks of painstaking research in Kigali and Butare, Rwanda's major towns, Landesman quotes numerous men and women who bore witness to the woman's unspeakable atrocities and are now standing up to testify against her in Arusha.
Hell literally broke loose in Rwanda in April, 1994 shortly after the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana. Pauline, then the national minister of family and women's affairs, happened to be the most powerful woman in the Rwandan government.
Sent to "pacify" Butare, her home town and indisputable centre of Tutsi influence in the country, Pauline reportedly embarked on a murderous binge that virtually wiped out the entire Tutsi population of the town.
Shortly after Pauline arrived in Butare, thousands of desperate Tutsis were lured into the local stadium, ostensibly to receive food and shelter.
It was a trap. Instead of food and shelter, the refugees, men and women, were quickly surrounded by menacing Hutu warriors wearing bandoleers and head-dresses made of spiky banana leaves. Supervising from the sidelines was Pauline, then 48, a portly woman of medium height in colourful wrap-ups and spectacles.
Foster Mivumbi, a local farmer who confessed to taking part in the slaughter, says Pauline goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, "Before you kill the women, you need to rape them."
Tutsi women were then selected from the crowd and dragged away to be raped, Mivumbi recalls. Back at the stadium, Pauline waved her arms and then observed in silence as the Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees.
Survivors were finished off with pangas and, after about an hour, bulldozers began piling up bodies for burial in a nearby pit.
Shortly afterwards, Pauline arrived at a compound where a group of Interahamwe was guarding 70 Tutsi women and girls. According to one of the Interahamwe who was there and later spoke to Landesman, Emmanuel Nsabimana, Pauline ordered him and the others to burn the women.
One Interahamwe then complained that they didn't have enough fuel. "Don't worry," Pauline reassured him. "I have jerrycans of fuel in my car."
"I went to the car and took the jerrycans. Then Pauline said 'why don't you rape them before you kill them?' But we had been killing all day, and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning."
According to another eye-witness, a young woman called Rose, until early July, when the genocide ended, she was led by Interahamwe to witness atrocity after atrocity.
The men seemed to be particularly obsessed by what they did to women's bodies. "I saw them rape two girls with spears then burn their pubic hair", she said. "They then took me to another spot where a lady was giving birth. The baby was half way out. They speared it."
Landesman says she met Rose, now 32, in Butare. She said that since the genocide she has suffered from stomach ulcers and occasionally slips into delirium. "People think I am possessed," she said.
Rose said she met Pauline three times during the genocide. She heard her calling Tutsi women "cockroaches" and "dirt". She advised the men to choose the young women for sex and kill off the old. Some women were forced to raise their dresses to separate the mothers from the "virgins".
According to other witnesses, when the local women saw Pauline, they appealed to her, as a fellow woman and mother for mercy. But this, they claimed, only enraged her.
When one woman wouldn't stop crying out, Pauline ordered the Interahamwe to shut her up. They stabbed her and then slit her throat.
Today Pauline stands accused in Arusha awaiting her fate after reportedly helping to perpetrate the most ferocious and concentrated mass slaughter in history.
She says she is not guilty but even her lawyer now believes she may never be acquitted. The tragedy of Rwanda rolls on.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2002 The East African Standard. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
