CHAPTER 16
THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN

16.1.Women and children are too often the forgotten victims of war. That is why we made the decision to dedicate a separate chapter to their plight. They were not, after all, forgotten by the killers during the genocide, who specifically targeted Tutsi women as part of their carefully organized programme. They were raped, tortured, mutilated, and killed. Ultimately, their elimination was central to the genocide plan: Tutsi women had to be eradicated to prevent the birth of a new generation of children who would become the RPF of the future Tutsi children and babies had to be wiped out before they grew into subversive adults. It was an item of faith among the genocidaires that they must not repeat the mistake of their predecessors in the massacres of 1959 to1963, who allowed women and children to survive. The genocidaire saw the RPF invasion by the sons of the exiles as a direct consequence of that oversight. They determined that the blunder would not be made again.

16.2.Hutu Power propaganda routinely contrasted trusted Hutu women with treacherous Tutsi women. An earlier chapter described the notorious “Hutu Ten Commandments,” one of the most widely distributed and popular Hutu tracts circulated before the genocide. The first three commandments spoke directly to this caricature of Tutsi women as subversive temptresses who should be avoided at all costs:

1. Each Hutu man must know that the Tutsi woman, no matter whom, works in solidarity with her Tutsi ethnicity. In consequence, every Hutu man is a traitor:
- who marries a Tutsi woman
- who makes a Tutsi woman his concubine
- who makes a Tutsi woman his secretary or protegé

2. Every Hutu man must know that our Hutu girls are more dignified and more conscientious in their roles as woman, wife, and mother. Aren't they pretty, good secretaries, and more honest!

3. Hutu women, be vigilant and bring your husbands, and sons to reason!

16.3.Women, in other words, constituted a secret, sexual weapon that Tutsi leaders used cynically to seduce and weaken Hutu men. The extremist newspaper Kangura, which frequently ran pornographic cartoons featuring Tutsi women, explained: “The inkotanyi [members of the RPF] will not hesitate to transform their sisters, wives, and mothers into pistols to conquer Rwanda.” The conclusion was irresistible: Only when no Tutsi women were left could Hutu men be safe from their wicked wiles.

16.4.The plan to eliminate Tutsi females was implemented with ghoulish zeal and unimaginable cruelty. Books have been filled with the accounts of these horrible deeds. To understand Rwanda after the genocide, it is important to have no illusions about the sadism of the perpetrators on the one hand, and the excruciating suffering of the victims on the other. This included Hutu women as well. Rwanda being a patrilineal society, children took their father’s ethnicity. Hutu women married to Tutsi men were sometimes compelled to murder their Tutsi children to demonstrate their commitment to Hutu Power. The effect on these mothers is also beyond imagining.

16.5.The level of violence and overall trauma to which women and children were exposed in Rwanda was unique in many respects. The long-term effects of this aspect of the genocide are enormous, and finding remedies is essential to the peace-building process. For millions of Tutsi and Hutu alike, the family unit – a fundamental structure in any society – was shattered during the genocide, and the consequences for reconciliation and reconstruction are enormous. In this chapter, we will describe the impact of the genocide on women and children, indicate some of the initiatives that have been taken to meet the situation, and suggest urgent priorities for the future.

WOMEN

16.6.Of the many moving experiences this Panel shared in the course of its work, nothing touched us more than a meeting with three women who had just barely survived the genocide. We have already described this numbing encounter in the Introduction to this report. The following section is particularly inspired by those women, whom none of us will ever forget.

Demographics

16.7.According to a recent source, “Shortly after the genocide it was estimated that 70 per cent of the Rwandan population was female, reflecting the greater number of men killed in the genocide and the large number of Ex-FAR and militiamen who had fled the country. That figure is still sometimes quoted today, although it is quite out of date. Thanks to the return of millions of refugees and those living in the diaspora, the figure today is closer to 54 per cent. If we focus on economically active women (by subtracting the young and old) the telling figure is that more than 57 per cent of the population is female. But even this figure does not tell the complete story, since some 150,000 men are in the army or in jail awaiting trial. This means that the women of Rwanda shoulder a disproportionate burden of the nation’s economic and reconstruction activities.”[i]

16.8.These numbers make women central to the country’s future economic and social development. But the nature of the Rwandan economy enhances that role even more. Because 95 per cent of Rwanda is rural, agriculture is by far the largest economic sector, and women produce up to 70 per cent of the country’s total agricultural production.[ii] As a result, “women are the main agents of reconstruction and change in Rwanda today, and any consideration of Rwanda’s future must take into account both the differential needs of women and their contribution to economic and social reconstruction.”[iii] This reality has direct implications for the policies and programmes of the Rwandan government, as well as for international and national NGOs, bilateral and intergovernmental aid agencies, and international financial institutions.

16.9.Not long after the genocide, half of all remaining households were headed by women. By 1999, 34 per cent of households were still headed by women or minors (usually female), an increase of 50 per cent over the pre-genocide period.[iv] The great majority of those women had been widowed by the war or the genocide. The large number of female-headed households is another of Rwanda’s pressing social and economic problems. In many cases, women and their dependants find themselves in dire economic difficulty because of the loss of the male relatives on whom they had depended for income. Rwanda remains a staggeringly poor homeland for most of its inhabitants, but even within that harsh reality, women-headed households are far more likely to be poor than those headed by males.[v]

16.10.Soon after the genocide ended, more than 250,000 widowed victims registered with the Ministry of Family and Women in Development. Most had lost not only their husbands, but also their property. By 1996, the government was faced with about 400,000 widows who needed help to become self-supporting.[vi] Since the new regulations of post-genocide Rwanda made it impermissible for government operations to ask about ethnic identities, it is not known how many of these women were Tutsi and how many Hutu. In any event, ethnicity was inconsequential to rehabilitation; the poverty and despair were to be dealt with for all.

Inequality

16.11.In the unwritten laws of Rwandan custom and tradition, women have been people of second-class status, leaving poor Rwandan women even worse off, as a group, than poor Rwandan men. Although the Rwandan constitution guarantees women full legal equality, discrimination based on traditional practices have continued to govern many areas, including inheritance. At the time of the genocide, under customary law, a woman could not inherit property unless she was explicitly designated as the estate’s beneficiaries. As a result, many widows or daughters had no legal claim to the homes of their late husbands or fathers, or to their male relatives' land or bank accounts.

16.12.After the genocide, a commission examined the situation and recommended ways to redress it, and the government subsequently introduced an amendment to the civil code that would at last give women the right to own and inherit property. However, the machinery of Parliament moved slowly, and passage of the amendment did not occur until the year 2000. Even now, some fear that the undertaking will be sidelined by a larger government project to revise the entire legal code concerning land ownership. While the overall land issue is admittedly central to efforts to achieve long-term peace and reconciliation, there is no reason why assuring women the right to inherit land and property should not be incorporated in any future land reform bill.[vii]

16.13.The current government has also pledged to adopt a comprehensive action plan for the systematic elimination of other forms of discrimination against women. Examples of such invidious discrimination abound. The penal code, for example, accords women found guilty of adultery one-year prison terms, while men found guilty of the same charge are given from one to six months’ incarceration along with – or instead of – a trivial fine.[viii] The Panel strongly hopes that the initiative to remove such bias is pursued vigorously for, as we have already stated, it is impossible to see how the political and social transformation necessary to rebuild Rwanda can succeed without empowering women, the majority of the population, to rebuild their lives.

16.14.The developments just described reflect the beginnings of a significant transformation of the customary position and status of women in Rwandan society. As in many other places, Rwandan women traditionally have had restricted access to participation in the economy and public life of their country. A woman’s value in society has been related to her status as wife and mother, and women in general have been expected to adopt a submissive attitude toward their husbands.[ix]

16.15.One observer has described how status effects education and employment: “[Consequently,] traditional education for girls did not include formal schooling, but instead preparation for her role as wife and mother. There was no incentive to educate a girl because the economic gains from her labour went to another family as soon as she married....As [one official put it], ‘In Rwandan culture, a girl’s school is in the kitchen’....Adult women in Rwanda face difficulties finding paid employment because they have been denied the chance to pursue education. For the general population, illiteracy rates for women are higher than for men: 50.5 per cent of women are illiterate, versus 43.6 per cent of men. However, for the population over 30, the difference is much larger: 67.4 per cent of women are illiterate compared to only 43.5 per cent of men.… The women and girls under 30 have benefited from cultural and legal changes that have enabled more girls to go to school.” [x]

16.16.Social change is always an evolutionary and often a protracted process, but circumstances help dictate the pace. With women now comprising the large majority of Rwanda’s adult working population, they are taking on new roles and responsibilities out of sheer necessity. Most importantly, as we will show below, there is a concerted effort among women's groups and in the government to address the needs of Rwandan women and to engage them in the all-important processes of reconstruction and reconciliation.

Rape

16.17.The “Hutu Ten Commandments,” which we described at the beginning of this chapter, were followed scrupulously during the genocide, with horrific consequences for women. It is not surprising that, given the difficulties in collecting accurate data, estimations of the total number of women who were raped vary wildly, from thousands to as many as hundreds of thousands. Large numbers of women who were raped were later killed and remain unaccounted for, while others were spared death only to be raped.[xi]

16.18.During the genocide, rape was routinely used as an instrument of war by the genocidaires to destroy women’s psyches, to isolate them from their family or community ties, and to humiliate their families and husbands. Many of the women were abducted and raped by men they knew – their neighbours or, in the case of some schoolgirls, their teachers. This has made it extremely difficult for women to return to their previous communities. Some have tried to take their own lives out of guilt and hopelessness. Even though they were innocent victims, others are filled with shame because they have given birth as a result of being raped or because they are Catholic and have had abortions, contrary to the laws of their church.

16.19.Many women were raped by men who knew they were HIV positive, and were sadistically trying to transmit the virus to Tutsi women and their Tutsi families. Women and girls were raped in their homes, in the bush, in public places, and at roadblocks. Sometimes they were killed soon afterwards. Some assailants held their victims captive for weeks or months for sexual purposes. Attackers often mutilated their victims in the course of a rape or before killing them. They cut off breasts, noses, fingers, and arms and left the women and girls to bleed to death.

16.20.Since rape was widely regarded as shameful for the victim, it was often enveloped in secrecy. As a result, compiling statistical evidence on rape during the genocide is difficult. However, there is no question that it was used as a systematic tool by the Hutu masterminds to wipe out the Tutsi population. According to testimonies given by survivors, we could conclude that practically every female over the age of 12 who survived the genocide was raped. Considering the difficulty of assessing the actual number of rape cases, confirming or denying that conclusion is not possible. However, we can be certain that almost all females who survived the genocide were direct victims of rape or other sexual violence, or were profoundly affected by it. The fact that most survivors reported the belief that rape was the norm for virtually all women during the genocide is significant in itself. It implies that most women have chosen to remain silent about their ordeals, almost a collective decision of the women of Rwanda not to seek justice for that particular violation.

16.21.As is still true everywhere, victims of rape must be asked to make the extraordinary effort of addressing this painful topic publicly if adequate care and justice are to be provided. Despite a more acute public awareness of the issue, the injustice of social stigma attached to rape has not yet disappeared anywhere in the world, and Rwanda certainly is no exception.

16.22.The plight of a rape victim herself is often disregarded, and the focus misdirected to the shame and social degradation thought to be brought upon her family or community. As a result, blame is shifted from rapist to victim, stigma is reinforced and women are victimized in perpetuity, made to feel isolated long after the attack is over. In many communities, rape is equated with adultery, adding to the pressure on women to keep their violation secret.

16.23.In Rwanda, the shame attached to rape was also reinforced by the fact that, among both survivors and returnees, rape victims are often perceived as collaborators with the enemy, women who traded sex for their lives while their families were being murdered. Many have found themselves ostracized by their communities. In many cases, these are women who were forcibly taken as “wives” by members of the militia and the military and treated as sexual slaves, forced to perform sexual acts repeatedly for one or many men. The women who survived these forced “marriages” reveal enormous internal conflict when describing their ordeals. A woman may acknowledge that she had no choice, and she will despise the man she refers to as “husband”; at the same time, she may be struggling with the notion that, had she not been enslaved by this man, she would most probably not have survived.

16.24.Both Hutu and Tutsi women were raped, but there were differences in both the number of assaults and the reasons for them. Tutsi women were specifically targeted because of their ethnicity. There were fewer attacks on Hutu women, who were singled out mainly for their political affiliations or kinship relations with Tutsi. Many other women and young girls were targeted regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation, especially if they were deemed to be beautiful, by rapists who wanted to demonstrate that they could violate any woman with impunity. Many Hutu women who fled the war and genocide also found the refugee camps of Tanzania and Zaire to be nightmare zones controlled by genocidaires. Rape was commonplace, and many of those who eventually returned to Rwanda share many of the same traumas and problems as the women and girls who were raped during the genocide.

16.25.Victims of sexual abuses during the genocide have suffered persistent health problems since, especially from sexually transmitted diseases including syphilis, gonorrhoea, and HIV/AIDS. Many suffer both the physical and psychological torment of mutilation. Because abortion has been illegal in Catholic Rwanda since colonial times, doctors report that many women require treatment for serious complications due to self-induced or clandestine abortions of rape-related pregnancies. Unfortunately, the number of physicians available to provide the enormous amount of treatment required is grossly insufficient.

16.26.A survey of 304 women, taken soon after the genocide by the Ministry of Family and Women in Development in collaboration with UNICEF, recorded that 35 per cent said they had become pregnant after being raped. Another study conducted in February 1995 by the same Ministry found that of 716 rape cases examined, 472 women had become pregnant and over half of them had aborted.[xii] The “pregnancies of the war,” “children of hate,” “enfants non-désirés,” or “enfants du mauvais souvenir” (terms for the children born of rape) are estimated by the National Population Office to number between 2,000 and 5,000[xiii]; obviously, the number of rape-induced pregnancies was considerably higher. Women who have decided to raise a child conceived by rape often encounter resistance from their families and ethnic groups and have been ostracized and isolated. Many of these women refused to register the birth or seek medical treatment, fearing retaliation if the facts were known. In most cases, women who became pregnant after rape aborted the pregnancy, sometimes even as late as the third trimester. Infanticide has also resulted from shame and fear.

16.27.Rape is a crime under Article 360 of the 1977 Rwandan Penal Code, and it is punishable by five to 10 years of imprisonment. The country is also obligated to prosecute rape under two international conventions it has ratified, the Geneva Conventions and their optional protocols and the Genocide Convention. Under the Organic Law passed on August 30, 1996, gender violence is categorized as a crime of the first order.

16.28.Out of the horror of the rapes committed during the genocide has emerged some positive developments in international law. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) at Arusha, Tanzania, which we will discuss in a subsequent chapter, established a Sexual Assault Committee to co-ordinate the investigation of gender-based violence; and it has both prosecuted and convicted for gender-related crimes. This was the first time that an international tribunal had convicted anyone on the charge of rape. The ICTR (and its equivalent for Yugoslavia) are the first two international tribunals to include rape as a crime against humanity and a war crime under their mandates. The significance of the conviction is that it sets a precedent under international law that rape is indeed, while not a genocidal act, at least a crime against humanity. The conviction of one burgomaster, Jean-Paul Akayesu, for the crime of rape as part of a systematic plan; and the pending trial of Cabinet Minister Pauline Nyiramasuhuko for ordering rape to be used during the genocide, are significant steps for Rwanda and international human rights law overall.

16.29.Thanks to the intervention by a group of women’s human rights scholars and NGOs, the indictment against Jean-Paul Akayesu was amended during his 1997 trial by the addition of three counts under the Geneva Conventions and its protocols. These included: first, rape as a crime against humanity; secondly, other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity; and thirdly, outrages upon personal dignity, notably rape, degrading and humiliating treatment, and indecent assault. These three additional counts would prove to be precedent-setting in terms of international law.

16.30.Akayesu was found guilty of crimes against humanity for rape and sexual violence. The ICTR concluded from the evidence that he had ordered and instigated sexual violence but that he had not participated in rape himself. The human rights groups had argued that rape and other forms of sexual violence, including killing pregnant women, constituted genocide, and that in the specific case of Rwanda, rape and sexual violence were an integral part of the genocidal campaign.[xiv] The ICTR, however, did not charge Akayesu with rape in the context of genocide.

16.31.It is also significant that for the first time ever, a woman has been charged by an international tribunal with the crime of rape. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the Minister of Family and Women's Affairs during the genocide, has been charged with rape in the context of command responsibility. In other words, she is responsible if it is proved that she knew that her subordinates were raping Tutsi women and failed either to stop or to punish them.[xv] The tribunal’s judgement is awaited with great interest around the world.

16.32.While these are historic judicial advances, which we strongly applaud, they can provide little immediate comfort or security to the rape victims themselves. Most of the victims have not come forward willingly about their experience. Some women are unaware that their violation is even prosecutable. Others have little confidence in the justice system and fear reprisals. Understandably enough, they feel uncomfortable telling their stories to male prosecutors or translators, and fear that by reporting the crime, they will place themselves in danger not only of reprisals, but also of isolation from their own community. The damage from rape is always severe, complex and long lasting and the genocidal context has merely exacerbated all these usual consequences.
Women perpetrators

16.33.It should be understood that women were not only victims of violence during the genocide. Many became its perpetrators – against men, but also against other women. This phenomenon was sufficiently widespread that African Rights, a human rights organization that was the first to document systematically the horrors of the genocide, published a study in 1995 called Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers that focusses specifically on the participation of women in the genocide. Many women were guilty of committing gender-based violence. Most of these women were poor, some very poor, but others came from all sectors of Rwandan Hutu society: teachers, peasants, young students, nuns, and mothers of households. Some took other women as prisoners and asked that their captives be raped in their presence. At other times, they used sticks and other implements to commit the rape themselves.

16.34.Hutu Power leaders, some of them women, encouraged these atrocities, but ordinary Hutu women also performed the deeds. Once the genocide was finally triggered, unrestrained violence on the part of many average Hutu exploded – the culmination of years of poverty, scarcity and repression, combined with years of ritual dehumanizing of the Tutsi and constant manipulation by their Hutu leaders. What some Hutu women did to some Tutsi women is yet another manifestation of a society that, for 100 long days, completely lost its bearings, and suffered a collective human breakdown. This phenomenon of violence perpetrated against women by women seems not to have been common in other comparable situations, and it requires greater study.

16.35.Some 1,200 women have been imprisoned in Rwanda for alleged participation in the genocide – about three per cent of the total prison population. When this statistic was gathered, 20 per cent of the female inmates were breastfeeding mothers, which raises yet an additional dilemma – the problems faced by the children of these mothers.[xvi]

Women and development

16.36.Regardless of their status – Hutu, Tutsi, displaced, returnee, survivor – it is no exaggeration to say that all women in Rwanda have faced severe problems due to the upheaval caused by the genocide, a situation exacerbated by their generally disadvantaged gender status. However, out of tragedy has come hope. Important and optimistic developments have taken place based on the recognition of women’s central place in any future hopes for reconstruction and reconciliation and the concomitant emergence of a growing number of women’s organizations since established to deal with the broad spectrum of issues facing women. In recent years, it has come to be understood around the world that women are indispensable to successful development, a truth that has special resonance in Rwanda. Because women form the large majority of the working population, they are key to economic development and reconstruction. There is growing realization that, without substantial progress toward equitable economic development, the achievement of sustainable, long-term peace will be even more difficult.

16.37.Since independence, Rwandan women have organized themselves into socio-professional associations, co-operative groups, and development associations. However, women's associations began taking on new importance in the post-conflict society, as they have attempted to address both women's specific post-conflict problems and the lack of social services provided by the state.

16.38.At the local level, women are creating or re-constituting self-help groups or co-operatives to assist survivors, widows or returned refugees, or simply to meet the everyday needs of providing for their families.[xvii] NGOs and donors have recognized the potential benefits of these groups to reconstruction and development, and they have assisted them or helped to form new groups. One such development effort is the Women in Transition (WIT) Programme, established as a partnership between the Ministry of Family, Gender, and Social Affairs (MIGEFASO) and USAID in 1996 in response to the sharp increase in female heads of households. During its first two years, the programme identified genuine women's associations and provided assistance in the form of shelter development, agriculture, livestock, or micro-credit.[xviii]

16.39.Another major development project targeting women, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' Rwandan Women's Initiative, works with numerous women's associations as its implementing partners. According to UNICEF, women's groups have become “authentic and operational relays for development projects at the grassroots level” because they “favour direct and participatory management, facilitate the participation of women in training and income-generating projects, and enable access to inputs supplies. They are also and above all solidarity groups, enabling women in a difficult situation to organize into pressure groups that put women's needs more firmly on the agenda. Finally, they facilitate the integration of returnees, by directly intervening in reinstallation projects....”[xix]

16.40.Women's associations are also active at the national level, engaged in meeting the special needs of women survivors and returnees, empowering women politically and economically and reconstructing Rwandan society. Thirty-five organizations that work in women's rights, development, or peace have organized themselves into a collective called Pro-Femmes Twese Hamwe (Pro-Women All Together). The Pro-Femmes Triennial Action Plan states that the organisation works for “the structural transformation of Rwandan society by putting in place the political, material, juridical, economic, and moral conditions favourable to the rehabilitation of social justice and equal opportunity, to build a real, durable peace.” In addition to their programs for peace and reconstruction, Pro-Femmes also provides its members with support for capacity building and assists them with communication, information, and education.

16.41.Women's participation at the local level is also being increased by the recent creation of Women’s Committees at each of the four levels of government administration. A joint initiative of the MIGEFASO and women's organizations, these grassroots structures consist of 10 women who are chosen in women-only elections to represent women's concerns at each level.

16.42.The importance of such developments should not be minimized. Suzanne Ruboneka of Pro-Femmes, who helped to organize the committees, explained to a foreign researcher why women-only forums were critical for women to become involved in public decision making: “In our culture, there are still barriers for women to express themselves in public. Women still don't dare express themselves publicly, especially when there are men present. Consequently, there are no places for women to think, to look for solutions, to play a real role. Many women are illiterate, and their point of view is never considered. How can we motivate women, give them the chance to get together to express themselves, without fear?”[xx]

16.43.Traditional constraints on women are not the only obstacle they face. It is both surprising and disappointing that considerable international assistance to Rwanda has been slow to recognize the special needs of women. While some programmes are now designed specifically for them, many agencies still lump together the particular difficulties of women with more general issues. Some consider assistance to women to be covered under projects for vulnerable groups, such as those addressing resettlement and housing. Much American assistance to Rwanda, for example, tends to fall in two categories: democracy and governance, and aid to the displaced. Assistance to women usually falls into the latter category, which includes health, food security, family reunification, and aid to orphans.

16.44.As we have seen, however, there are also significant exceptions to the rule, and we can only hope that the exceptions are the path of the future. The Women’s Committees have already been identified by the donor and NGO community as conduits for development assistance. The Rwandan government gave each Committee the responsibility for setting up, contributing to and managing Women Communal Funds (WCF). Still in the nascent stages of development, these funds are intended to help start economic activities at the commune and sector level while allowing grassroots women to participate in funding decisions that affect their lives. This is accomplished in part through micro-credit activities, in which the WCF provide small loans at minimal interest rates to women who might otherwise not be able to secure credit.

16.45.In an important breakthrough, USAID has identified assistance to women as an objective of its work. Working with Ministry officials, it has funded the Women in Transition Programme, which funds the activities of the Women’s Committees at the commune level and offers training and guidance to the WCF Women’s Committees.[xxi]

16.46.At the same time, United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), has funded programmes for women in selected displaced persons camps and returnee women’s groups. Through its African Women in Crisis initiative, UNIFEM has focused on reproductive health, trauma management, and quality of life improvement for women and girls. UNICEF has instituted a programme with the Ministry of Justice for the protection of children in conflict with the law; this also includes programmes for women in detention, such as advocacy and support for pregnant women, and for women in prison with their children, reinforcing the Ministry of Justice’s Inspection Unit for monitoring detention conditions for women and children.

16.47.One major conclusion that follows from this discussion seems to us evident. At the end of this report, we will argue that Rwanda is entitled to massive reparations from a world that betrayed it at its moment of greatest need. Yet we have no illusion that such reparations will come easily or swiftly. In the meantime, there are immediate needs that deserve to be seen as priorities. Given the frightening scarcity of resources available to Rwanda, the bottomless funding needs of reconstruction and development and the government’s dependence on foreign aid for fully 80 per cent of its budget, special attention deserves to be paid to the role of women.[xxii] If NGOs, bilateral foreign aid donors, and international financial institutions choose not to take into consideration the special needs of Rwandan women and their special contributions to reconstruction, they will be ignoring the very people most central to the moral and physical rebuilding of the country. We believe donors must build in a strong gender component in all their programming, paying special attention to the new roles women are playing in Rwandan society, as we have described them, and designing both development projects and reconciliation projects accordingly.

Women, reconciliation, and peace

16.48.Some Rwandan women have decided they have a special role to play in overcoming the bitterness of the past and the many remaining divisions of the present, and we warmly applaud their efforts. A recent study tells us that, “Rose Rwabuhihi, a Rwandan woman working with the UN, asks the following question, which is surely at the heart of the matter: ‘Is there a way such that we can live together?’” Suzanne Ruboneka of Pro-Femmes Twese Hamwe had serious reservations about reconciliation as conceived by certain foreign aid donors and NGOs, believing they have not understood the nuances of Rwandan culture. She has proposed a specific conceptualisation of reconciliation for Rwandan women: “We have to ask ourselves how things arrived here. Each Rwandan must ask herself this question. Each Rwandan must ask, ‘What did I do to stop it?’ Because this small group of Rwandans that killed were our brothers, our husbands, our children. And as women, what did we do, what was our role in the whole thing? Each person must take a position for the future. What must I do so that tomorrow will be better, that there will not be another genocide, that our children can inherit a country of peace? Each person holds a responsibility to be reconciled with herself.”[xxiii]

16.49.What, then, is the special role of women in the process of finding ways to live together in peace – which is, after all, the key to national reconciliation? As Rose Rwabuhihi pointed out to an interviewer, women share common problems in the realms of health, nutrition, water, and caring for children, all of which are now more difficult than ever, given the economic and social crises that have followed the genocide. They also have in common a lack of formal power within the system to influence decisions affecting their lives. “They share these problems; they could maybe look for peace together,” she notes, recognizing that “the crisis is killing me as it is killing her.”

16.50.Suzanne Ruboneka also believes that women's common struggles give them a special role in national efforts at peace building. “It was women and children who were the victims of all these wars – widowhood, rape, pregnancy – are we going to continue to be the victims of future wars? It is men who make war. Women are saying, ‘Stop the war. We want peace.’”

16.51.These spokespeople for Rwandan women do not suggest that women are, by their nature, more peaceful than men and are therefore more natural peacemakers. The evidence of the genocide is only too categorical on this point. What they do suggest, however, is that the women of Rwanda – often without the assistance of men – are now left to rebuild society, and that as they do, they will face many common problems that transcend ethnicity and politics. As an impressive new corps of leaders understands, by tackling these problems together, women may be able to build bridges to the future.

16.52.This is the approach used by Pro-Femmes in its efforts to build peace among Rwandan women. As Suzanne Ruboneka puts it, the strategy is to make women “see the reality of things. We are all here, in the same country, we must live here, all of us, and we must live in peace. We are all women, and as women, that's something that unites us, whether we are survivors or refugees, old or new, professionals or grassroots women, intellectual or illiterates. We have the opportunity to work together, to tell the truth. We have realized that we need to get past all these differences to find the real problems.”

16.53.An academic sums up the initiative in this way: “Pro-Femmes Twese Hamwe's Action Peace Campaign is designed to enable women to recognize the need to live in peace and give them the tools necessary to live together at the local level. They are organizing “dialogue clubs” in as many of the grassroots cellule-level Women’s Committees as possible, in which the elected representatives bring together women from the community to discuss the conflict on a regular basis. The first discussion in each club is about the causes of the genocide. The organizers hope eventually to have a dialogue club in every cellule-level Women’s Committee in Rwanda.”[xxiv] It seems to us that these fine initiatives can only be a positive force for peace and reconciliation in a country that needs them desperately.

CHILDREN

16.54.Children in Rwandan society traditionally occupied a central and key position. The child was seen as the hope and future of the family. According to custom, children were supposed to enjoy love, care, and the protection of the family and the community. The genocide turned these values completely upside down.[xxv]

16.55.UNICEF reports that a very large number of children were killed during the genocide.[xxvi] Maternity clinics, orphanages, children’s homes, and schools were all systematically targeted. An additional 100,000 children were separated from their families.[xxvii] Not all the orphans or separated children were Tutsi, although no exact ethnic breakdown is available. When hundreds of thousands of Hutu fled into Zaire and Tanzania, thousands of children were abandoned along the route, whether lost in the shuffle or deliberately left behind. All over the country, people were put into the position of looking after relatives’ or other peoples’ children, while the camps for the displaced were filled with children living on their own.

16.56.By late 1995, only 12,000 children in Rwanda and 11,700 in eastern Zaire had been reunified with their families.[xxviii] In the same period, over 12,000 children were crowded into 56 centres that had been turned into temporary orphanages, while more than 300,000 children had been taken in by families.[xxix]

16.57.Even now the situation remains grim. Many children still have not been reunified with their families. At the same time, the government wants to help ease the added burdens of the 200,000 families that have adopted children. Most have only the most meagre of resources, which is equally true for the government. It also needs to develop and sustain a programme to look after more than 100,000 children who may not be absorbed into families in the near future.

Psycho-social trauma

16.58.It will hardly come as a surprise for readers to learn that, while the genocide traumatized the entire population in Rwanda, children and women suffered most acutely. In a UNICEF study of 3,030 children, Exposure to War Related Violence Among Rwandan Children and Adolescents, virtually all had witnessed some kind of violence during the genocide. The statistics tell the terrible story. More than two-thirds had actually seen someone being injured or killed, and 79 per cent had experienced death in their immediate families. Twenty per cent witnessed rape and sexual abuse, almost all had seen dead bodies, and more than half had watched people being killed with machetes and beaten with sticks. Children killed other children, forced or encouraged by adults. The UNICEF report indicates that almost half of surviving children witnessed killings by other children.[xxx]

16.59.Almost all of the children interviewed had believed that they themselves would die during the war and 16 per cent reported that they had hidden under dead bodies to survive. Several thousand girls and women had been raped, exposing them to HIV and its physical and social consequences.

16.60.This study also indicated that the majority of the children continue to have intrusive images, thoughts, and feelings despite attempts to remove the events from their memories. They also suffer continuing physical reactions, such as trembling, sweating, or increased heart rates. All of this is compounded by constant anxiety that they may not live to become adults, which in turn brings on depression, fear, and sleep disturbances. The Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflicts estimates that 20 per cent of Rwandan children are traumatized still.[xxxi]

16.61.The National Trauma Recovery Centre, opened in Kigali in 1995, is designed for the psychological healing of children. So far, the centre has given training in trauma identification and healing methods to over 6,000 Rwandan teachers, caregivers in children’s centres, health and social workers, NGO staff, and religious leaders.[xxxii] This reflects the belief that the psychological healing of the children will be most successful if the entire community is involved in the process.

Child-headed households

16.62.Five years after the genocide, somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 households are still headed by children under 18, with some 300,000 children living in such households. According to recent estimates, 90 per cent of these households are headed by girls with no regular source of income.[xxxiii] They are the legacy of the genocide and the subsequent mass migrations of people into neighbouring nations and back again. What is worse, the numbers of child-headed households are now increasing due to HIV/AIDS. The children of these families have experienced immense pain and trauma, problems that have larger societal implications. Today, many children who have returned to Rwanda exist as best they can, gathered under plastic sheets and on matted grass in the wilderness; often, they are not even related but are merely trying to survive together.[xxxiv] Others have gone back to the decrepit and crumbling homes of their deceased parents, where the eldest child functions as parent to his or (more frequently) her siblings.

16.63.There has been precious little help for the children taking on this role. Communities, unable to decide whether to treat them as adults or children, have tended to leave them to fend for themselves.[xxxv] Inevitably, these children become vulnerable to many problems: they are abused sexually and used as slave labourers; their land is stolen by adults; and they often wind up forsaking their education. Most children find it difficult to articulate their circumstances, so their feelings often go unheard and misunderstood. In therapy, many draw pictures of their family members without mouths – voiceless victims, trying to handle their problems alone.[xxxvi] The need for food and basic amenities are not the only issues that need to be addressed. Children in child-headed households are more in need of love and attention than any other group.

16.64.A 1998 World Vision report on child-headed households in Rwanda described their specific needs as education, health, security, recognition, livelihood, and friendship – a daunting litany for any society, let alone one facing Rwanda’s multiplicity of challenges. But the reality is inescapable: The nation’s children obviously need to develop the skills to survive, but in addition they have huge psycho-social needs. We applaud the World Vision report for drawing attention to the key issue: “The haunting question that should provoke us into action is, what sort of adults will they become?”

Unaccompanied children

16.65.The Rwandan government has estimated there were between 400,000 and 500,000 unaccompanied children after the genocide.[xxxvii] By late 1994, 88 centres for such children had been established. The mass return of refugees from Zaire in late 1996 created more separations, adding possibly another 130,000 unaccompanied children to the total. At present, there are 38 centres caring for 6,000 children without homes, most of whose parents died in the genocide or became separated from their children as they fled the killings. Some of these children were found roaming the streets. It surely goes without saying that all have devastating psycho-social problems

16.66.Ideally, children should be able to leave these centres for a more normal family setting relatively quickly, but many obstacles impede this process. Few families can afford to feed an extra mouth. Relatives often refuse to recognize young family members, unable to cope with the responsibility this would imply. Some children are too young to convey any information about their backgrounds, making it extremely difficult to trace their families.

16.67.Placing children in foster families is more complicated than it might appear. While there are some children who are taken in by relatives, friends or neighbours spontaneously, others are placed in new families, an initiative by the government working together with NGOs to take children out of the centres. To date, about 1,150 children have been fostered through this programme.[xxxviii] But there are important cautionary steps that must be followed here. More than a few families have accepted children for their own interests, not those of the children. Children must be protected from families that will use them simply as free labour, abuse them sexually, or prevent them from attending school.

16.68.In 1997, UNICEF reported that 3,000 children were living in the streets of Kigali and that, “Begging, prostitution and delinquent behaviour were becoming more visible.”[xxxix] In April of the same year, a national seminar on street children was held, and a national initiative to protect and stop children from entering the streets was discussed. By January 2000, United Nations Hig Commission on Refugees reported that the number of street children had doubled to 6,000. UNICEF considers that 80 per cent of these children are probably not orphans, but were sent out by their poor families to beg. Little more than 10 per cent of this group are reached by UNICEF or NGOs working with street children, one reason why UNICEF is advocating a National Task Force on Street Children.[xl]

Children in detention

16.69.Sad as it is to say, children, like women, were not just the victims of the genocide; many were participants. They had been transformed into genocidaires. By late 1995, there were over 1,400 children in some form of detention in Rwanda, although not all had been accused of genocide; some were simply accompanying an imprisoned parent.[xli] In 1998, Amnesty International reported that almost 3,000 children under the age of 18 were being detained on charges of genocide.[xlii] UNICEF has worked to provide lawyers, train magistrates and judicial police inspectors, and rehabilitate detention facilities. Children must be over 14 years of age to be imprisoned in Rwanda, but initially younger children were also placed in prison. These children are now in a separate facility and are undergoing “re-education” or are released if found innocent.

16.70.A rehabilitation centre for child detainees was opened at Gitagata in 1995 and holds children between the ages of seven and 14. Over 950 boys have been transferred there from overcrowded Rwandan prisons and communal jails. Education and certain trades or skills are taught, and living conditions have been improved in terms of hygiene, psycho-social support, and protection issues.

16.71.There are still large numbers of children held in prisons, many of whom admit to having participated in the genocide. Some say they were just doing what everyone else was doing. Many were ordered to participate by their parents or respected elders.

16.72.There are often problems with reintegrating children who have been in prison. Their families often reject them because they are considered “known killers” by the communities. Some simply do not know the whereabouts of their families, while others’ parents may also be imprisoned.

Child soldiers

16.73.Many children participated in the genocide – some as soldiers, although they were well below the age of 18. There were a number of reasons for children to become soldiers. Numbers of them had been separated from their families. Several were orphaned, and in order to survive attached themselves to combat units during the war. We emphasized earlier the severe problem of unemployment and landlessness for large numbers of young men in the early 1990s. From their perspective, the army offered an alluring combination of work, food and shelter, camaraderie, thrills, and prestige.

16.74.The problems faced by child soldiers when their wars end are by no means unique to Rwanda, and these have been well documented. The psychological effects on children who have been so immersed in violence are known to be devastating; they invariably have great difficulty reintegrating into society. In Rwanda, the Ministries of Rehabilitation, Education, Social Affairs, and Youth instituted a national demobilization project for boy soldiers with UNICEF support. The project is designed to assist some 4, 820 boys aged 6 to 18 – often called “kadogos” (Swahili for “little ones”), who had been attached to military units (both Hutu and Tutsi factions). Approximately 2,620 minors have been demobilized in the Kadogo School in Butare, and the intention is to extend the project to include an additional 2,200 minors who still live with adult military groups around the country.[xliii]

16.75.But child soldiers are not simply a legacy of the past genocide; their use continues to this day. Although hard, reliable data are difficult to come by, a 1999 report on child soldiers in Africa says that Rwanda is among nine other countries that are deeply affected by this problem.[xliv] The anti-RPF rebels are the main users of child soldiers, but the numbers are hard to estimate, according to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. Several reports give evidence of their existence. When rebels attacked a displaced people’s camp in Gisenyi in 1998, children were seen among the rebels. When they are recruited, children and youth are normally used first used as porters, spies, and cooks; once they are trained, they will actively participate as soldiers. The interahamwe militia have been known to include girls as well as young males.[xlv]

16.76.In 1999, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers charged that children between seven and 14 (both street children in the urban areas and school children in the countryside) were still being forced to join either rebel groups or government troops.[xlvi] Girls between 14 and 16 have allegedly been “recruited” to “service” the military and other clients.[xlvii] Though the government dismisses the figures as “ridiculous,” an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 children are recruited to the armed forces every year. A researcher for the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers claims that over 45,000 children presently go to military schools for non-commissioned officers in Rwanda.[xlviii] In 1999, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, appealed to the Rwandan government not to recruit child soldiers.[xlix]

16.77.In October 1994, soon after the genocide ended, about 5,000 children under 18 were members of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which claimed at the time that they had not been recruited, but sought the army out for protection during the genocide.[l] The government later claimed that all these children had been reunited with relatives and sent to the Kadogo school or to other secondary schools. In 1997, a UNICEF survey documented 2,134 children associated with the army, about one-third of them as regular soldiers and the rest working as servants.[li] In 1999, one researcher estimated that over 20,000 children from Rwanda were still taking part in hostilities.[lii]

Education

16.78.Many schools and education facilities were destroyed during the genocide. Over three-quarters of the nearly 1,800 primary schools and some 100 secondary schools were physically damaged.[liii] In addition, many teachers and school administrators were killed, fled the country or participated in the genocide themselves. Almost all school children, as we have just seen, sustained severe traumas that severely impede learning and create enormous new challenges for under-trained, overburdened teachers. Many school buildings were used either as slaughterhouses or concentration camps. The consequences for the Rwandan education system can hardly be exaggerated.

16.79.The largest and most visible immediate effort to deal with this disaster was the UNICEF-UNESCO Teacher Emergency Packages (TEP), co-designed by UNHCR. This was a “mobile classroom” system designed as a four-to-five- month bridge, both to provide teachers and students with immediate psychological support and to prevent a total breakdown of educational services. UNICEF and UNESCO also helped in terms of basic office equipment, supplies, textbooks, and support for teacher training. A programme called “Education for Peace” was introduced into the primary school system in 1996 with the aim of fostering mutual understanding, tolerance, and conflict resolution.

16.80.Despite such efforts, however, it is not excessive to say the Rwandan education system is in crisis. At home, children face huge obstacles that impede their access to education: poverty, survival, trauma, child-headed households, illiteracy, and lack of support from families or communities. For those fortunate enough to overcome these barriers, the system presents new ones.

16.81.In 1997, the government carried out a comprehensive study of the education system; on the basis of that assessment, it has now drawn up policies and plans for improvement. It should be said that the government is investing a great deal of hope in the education sector, which “is expected to play a key role in three macro policies: poverty eradication, economic growth, and national reconciliation and national unity.” As the government is the first to appreciate, however, these worthy and ambitious goals require major changes to a devastated and demoralized school sector that are bound to cost very substantial amounts of money.[liv]

16.82.As of the year 1997, barely three of five school-age children were enrolled in primary school. On top of that, for those in school, learning did not come easily; 71 per cent of primary school aged children were enrolled in the first grade, but a mere 14 per cent of sixth graders passed the 1996-97 national primary school exam.[lv] This is hardly surprising, given the children’s barriers to learning from on the one hand end and the inadequacies of the schools at the other: “Primary education suffers from overcrowded classrooms, inadequate infrastructure, shortage of teaching materials, low proportion of qualified teachers, and an unfavourable school environment.”

16.83.Of those successful primary graduates, between 15 and 20 per cent were admitted to secondary level. To gain a perspective on the magnitude of the challenge, the government’s objective, if all goes well, is to raise those figures to a very modest 30 per cent by this year and 40 per cent in the year 2005. The quality of that schooling is another issue; barely two-thirds of secondary teachers have completed secondary education themselves. In 1998, in all of Rwanda, only 8,000 students completed secondary school, of whom just 1,800 will be able to go on to post-secondary.[lvi]

16.84.Even these small numbers, however, are overwhelming the capacity of post-secondary institutions – especially the National University of Rwanda (NUR), the only university in the country – to handle the influx. Yet enrolment at NUR stands at just 4,500 students.[lvii] The university also faces a critical shortage of local academics with the required qualifications and can only continue operating by calling on the services of large numbers of visiting lecturers. As a result, the government is consistently looking for scholarships outside the country in certain cheaper universities, such as those in India in fields such as science, technology and management studies.

16.85.Technical and vocational institutions are in the most embryonic stage. Although the need for their skills is enormous, scientific research “seems to have collapsed completely,” and “non-formal education suffers from the lack of clear formulation of its objectives.”

16.86.Besides problems faced by all young people, opportunities are significantly grater for urban than for rural children, while all girls have to cope with still greater constraints. Institutional barriers in education for girls have been legally removed and there is nearly gender-parity in school enrolment, but it is also true that dropout rates are higher for girls than for boys. A 1997 UNICEF report notes that, "This disparity is often the result of survival strategies of poor families, which withdraw their female children first if there is not enough money to pay for the various costs associated with schooling.”[lviii] Because education is not free in Rwanda, entailing substantial other costs such as school uniforms and books, families are often faced with restrictions on the number of children they send to school.

16.87.A 1996 socio-demographic dtudy carried out by the government found that one-quarter of all children from ages10 to 14 were working. The proportion of girls in this group was higher than researchers expected, the majority being employed in the agricultural sector.[lix] While post-genocide statistics on dropout rates are not yet unavailable, it is not unreasonable to suspect that in response to the pervasive economic crisis gripping the country, families faced with educating either a son or a daughter are choosing to educate the boys and engage the girls in subsistence agricultural work at home.

16.88.It is hard to over-emphasize the significance of these data. Rwanda’s need for educated citizens is almost boundless. According to government data, the country has only one physician for every 60,000 people and one engineer for every 300,00 people. Only 2.6 per cent of government civil servants have university degrees, while another 3.8 per cent have no more than two years of post-secondary education. As of 1998, 46 per cent of primary school teachers and 31 per cent of secondary teachers were properly qualified.[lx]

16.89.As we already noted, one of the government’s hopes is that education will play a key role in national reconciliation and national unity. The goals are spelled out as follows: “To produce citizens free from all kinds of ethnic, regional, religious, or gender discrimination; to promote a culture of peace, justice, tolerance, solidarity, unity and democracy. Also respect for human rights.” These are not only worthy goals, but they are critical for the new Rwanda to survive intact. We have no doubt that the world will join us in applauding these objectives. But it should be clear enough that a deeply troubled education system, burdened with the problems and challenges we have just outlined, cannot easily inculcate new values and belief systems. To meet these challenges, a child must be motivated to attend school, and the school must offer a conducive learning atmosphere and trained, equally motivated teachers. None of this can happen without the investment of large sums of money, far beyond the relatively meagre sums the government is now able to allocate to this sector. If the children of Rwanda are to make a positive contribution to the country’s future, applauding is not enough. What Rwanda needs are the means to make this possible.


CHAPTER 24
RECOMMENDATIONS
24.1.The mandate of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events appears in full as Appendix A. A key part of the mandate reads as follows:
The Panel is expected to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the surrounding events in the Great Lakes Region...as part of efforts aimed at averting and preventing further wide-scale conflicts in the… Region. It is therefore expected to establish the facts about how such a grievous crime was conceived, planned and executed, to look at the failure to enforce the [UN] Genocide Convention in Rwanda and in the Great Lakes Region, and to recommend measures aimed at redressing the consequences of the genocide and at preventing any possible recurrence of such a crime.

24.2.The Panel was asked specifically to investigate the 1993 Arusha Peace Agreement, the killing of President Habyarimana, the subsequent genocide, and “the refugee crisis in its various phases, culminating in the overthrow of the Mobutu regime [in Zaire].” It was also directed to investigate the role of the following actors before, during and after the genocide: the United Nations and its agencies, the Organization of African Unity, “internal and external forces,” and non-governmental organizations. The Panel was also mandated to investigate “what African and non-African leaders and governments individually or collectively could have done to avert the genocide.”

24.3.Having set out in this report the events prior to, during and since the genocide, we present our recommendations addressing the final part of our mandate. They are based on the principles enshrined in the Charter and numerous subsequent declarations of the Organization of African Unity. We are confident that respect for these principles, together with the implementation of the recommendations of this report, will not just prevent further similar tragedies but will also create the foundations for peace, justice and equitable development in the future.

24.4.It is with considerable hope, therefore, that we address our recommendations to three distinct audiences: the people of Rwanda themselves, the rest of Africa especially as it pertains to the Great Lakes Region, and finally to the international community,” including the United Nations. The Panel makes the following recommendations:

A. RWANDA