Rwanda: Genocidal rape conviction

Off Our Backs, Jan 1999

RWANDA--One September 2, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda made history by giving the first conviction for genocide in an international court and the first conviction for sexual violence in a civil war. It also is the first time that an international court has held that rape can be an act of genocide to destroy a group.

The tribunal found former mayor Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of nine counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

"Rape is a serious war crime like any other," said Regan Ralph, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Women's Rights Division.

The Rwanda Tribunal was at first reluctant to indict Akayesu for rape. When Akayesu was first charged in 1996, the counts in his indictment did not include sexual violence, despite the fact that Human Rights Watch and other rights groups had documented widespread rape during the genocide, particularly in his area. A lack of political will among some high-ranking officials accounted for this.

During the Rwandan genocide, thousands of women were targeted by Hutu militia and soldiers of the former Armed Forces of Rwanda in their genocidal campaign. Tutsi women were raped, gang-raped, raped with objects such as sharp sticks and gun barrels, held in sexual slavery or sexually mutilated. These crimes were frequently part of a pattern in which Tutsi women were subjected to sexual violence after they had witnessed the torture and killing of relatives and the destruction of their homes.

Under pressure from Rwandan and international rights groups, the Office of the Prosecutor finally amended the charges against Akayesu to include sexual violence. During his trial, Rwandan women testified that they had been subjected to repeated collective rape by militia in and around his office and in his view. They spoke of witnessing other women being gangraped and murdered while Akayesu stood by. Reportedly, he said to the rapists at one point, "don't complain to me now that you don't know what a Tutsi woman tastes like."

International criminal law has long encompassed crimes of sexual violence: rape can be a violation of the 1949 Geneva Convention, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the 1984 Torture Convention, and a crime against humanity under the Nuremburg Charter. After World War II, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg established rape as a crime against humanity, but did not actually prosecute it. The Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo Tribunal) did convict Japanese officers of rape.

Despite these legal precedents, rape has long been mischaracterized and dismissed by political leaders as a private crime, the ignoble act of the occasional solider. Worst still, it has been accepted precisely because it is so commonplace.

More recently, both the two International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda have brought sexual violence charges. In July, a treaty creating a permanent International Criminal Court expressly named crimes based on sexual violence as part of the court's jurisdiction.

Human Rights Watch is urging the Rwanda Tribunal to indict more suspects for crimes of sexual violence.

--info from Human Rights Watch