Tags:
Journalism of Courage
ARUSHA, (Tanzania), October 24: Hutu militiamen gang-raped women and young girls “in front of everybody…above all to humiliate us” during Rwanda’s 1994 civil war, the first woman to testify about alleged sexual crimes told the Rwanda genocide court here on Thursday.
The woman gave evidence about charges of sexual violence that include “forcible sexual penetration of the vagina, the anus, or the oral cavity by a penis, and/or of the vagina and the anus by an object, as well as breach es of sexual integrity, such as forced nudity.”
The sex-crime charges have been added to counts of genocide and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in this northern Tanzanian town at the insistence of Louise Arbour, the Canadian Chief prosecutor here and at the Hague court prosecuting war crimes in ex-Yugoslavia.
She gave her evidence against Jean-Paul Akayesu, the war-time mayor of Taba, in the prefecture of Gitarama, who is also facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
He is accused of encouraging sexual crimes, and of having been present while they were being committed, but not of having taken part in them himself.Because of his alleged responsibility, he is nevertheless facing a new charge of “rape and other inhuman acts”.
She said the rapes took place in Akayesu’s offices.
In one of them, she said, a group of militiamen forced her and some “very young girls” into a room.
“They started to rape us in front of everybody,” she said. “They raped us, but this rape was above all to humiliate us,” she added. But she gave her evidence in the Kinyarwanda language, using roundabout language and metaphors, as is customary when a woman is speaking Kinyarwanda, for such words as “penis”, “anus” and “vagina” among other private parts.That led to objections from Akayesu in the dock, who challenged the interpretation several times despite an explanation of the cultural linguistic context by the prosecutor.y
