Former Women & FamilyAffairs Minister Pauline Nyiramasuhuko sentenced re: Rwandan genocide

[the_future_modernes]

TRIGGER WARNING FOR MASS RAPE AND MASS SLAUGHTER


The Trial and Sentence

RIGHTS-AFRICA Rwandan Woman Sentenced to Life for Genocide

ARUSHA, Tanzania, Jun 24, 2011 (IPS) - Rwanda’s former minister of family and women affairs and the only woman to be indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and rape, among other crimes.

The court handed the sentence down on Jun. 24.

Nyiramasuhuko (65); her son, Arsene Shalom Ntahobali; and former mayor, Elie Ndayambaje, were all given life sentences. They were convicted of extermination, rape and persecution as crimes against humanity for Rwanda’s 1994 genocide where over 800,000 people, mainly Tutsis, were murdered.

In a one-hour session, the presiding judge said Nyiramasuhuko was guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide for entering into an agreement with members of Rwanda’s interim government on or after April 9, 1994 to kill Tutsis in the Butare prefecture.

Nyiramahusuko was additionally found guilty of genocide and other offences including having ordered the killing of Tutsis at Butare prefecture, South Rwanda. Her son was found criminally responsible for killing Tutsis and aiding and abetting the commission of the crime.
MORE

What she Did:

TRIGGER. WARNING. for graphic descriptions of mass rape, murder, dehumanizing language, genocide


2002 A Woman's Work

Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting and burning. Roadblocks had been set up to cull fleeing Tutsis. By the third week of April, as the Rwanda genocide was reaching its peak intensity, tens of thousands of corpses were rotting in the streets of Kigali, the country's capital. Butare, a stronghold of Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus that had resisted the government's orders for genocide, was the next target. Its residents could hear gunfire from the hills in the west; at night they watched the firelight of torched nearby villages. Armed Hutus soon gathered on the edges of town, but Butare's panicked citizens defended its borders.

Enraged by Butare's revolt, Rwanda's interim government dispatched Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the national minister of family and women's affairs, from Kigali on a mission. Before becoming one of the most powerful women in Rwanda's government, Pauline -- as everyone, enemy and ally alike, called her -- had grown up on a small farming commune just outside Butare. She was a local success story, known to some as Butare's favorite daughter. Her return would have a persuasive resonance there. MORE

2002 Rwandan Rugali

She is accused of being one of the most zealous organisers of the
1994 genocide. Her trial at the International Tribunal for Rwanda resumes
this month in the Tanzanian city of Arusha.

She had been a minister for two years when the killings started.

Given the charges against her, and the ferocity with which she allegedly
urged the Interahamwe militia to slaughter Tutsi "cockroaches" - old
women and unborn babies included - she stands accused of working to eliminate part of the very section of society she was duty-bound to protect and help.

...

The shooting down of the plane of the late Rwandan President Juvenal
Habyarimana over Kigali on April 6 1994 was the catalyst that caused
the extermination plan [The Rwandan Genocide] to be put into action. But it had been minutely planned ahead of time - militia groups had been trained and armed, lists of priority victims had been drawn up and the infamous Radio Mille Collines had started broadcasting hate propaganda.

In the southern university town of Butare, Hutus and Tutsis were
well integrated and the extremist message took some time to take hold.
The interim government, enraged by the reluctance of the Hutus of
Butare to kill their Tutsi neighbours, sent Nyiramasuhuko to Butare, where she had grown up, to make the people see the "error" of their ways.MORE

I wish I could read this: Mother of Atrocities: Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract:

As Pauline Nyiramasuhuko stood trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the media seemed more focused on her gender than on the significance of her prosecution for crimes against humanity and genocide. As the first woman brought to trial for her role as a high-level organizer of the Rwandan genocide, Pauline was accused of ordering the rapes and murders of countless women and men. The press remarked on her appearance – that of “school teacher” or someone’s “dear great aunt.” Underneath these remarks was an assumption that women are purer, weaker, more subservient than men and therefore less capable of committing the kind of atrocities for which she stands accused.

Those who view Pauline’s actions during the genocide as somehow inexplicable because of her gender ignore history and engage in the stereotypical thinking that perpetuates the special victimization of women. Women are subjected to especially heinous violence during conflict because of their otherness, their difference from the patriarchy that perpetuates conflict. Women and girls are violated to denigrate the men of another racial or ethnic group, to attack their perceived purity or the purity of their ethnic group, or used as a warrior’s reward. Pauline’s case shatters the myth that women, by their very nature, are incapable of being warriors. Perhaps her case can also shatter the myths about women that have left them especially susceptible to the kinds of violence carried out against women in the Rwandan genocide. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1662710##">MORE

 

Comments

[nagasvoice]

Possibly some of the most difficult news reports I've ever pushed myself through reading. Thank you, that can't have been easy to sort out for the best information.