Thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees walk along the road in Gisyne after they crossed into Rwanda from Zaire November 17, 1996.
Rwanda on Monday, April 7, 2014, held solemn commemorations to mark the 20th anniversary of the genocide, with many survivors overcome with the emotion of reliving the trauma of the massacres that left nearly a million dead.
Rape during the Rwandan Genocide
During the Rwandan Genocide the violence took a gender specific form, when over the course of 100 days, in an act of genocidal rape[a] up to half a million women were raped, sexually mutilated or murdered. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), also handed down the first conviction for the use of rape as a weapon of war during the civil conflict, and it was the first time that mass rape during wartime was found to be an act of genocide, as the intent of the mass violence against women, was to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular ethnic group.[2][b]
The mass rapes were carried out by the Interahamwe militia, members of the civilian population, with help from female Hutus, the Rwandan military, and the Rwandan Presidential Guard. The sexual violence was directed at the national and local levels by political and military leaders in the furtherance of their goal, the destruction of the Tutsi ethnic group.[3]
There was extensive use of propaganda through both print and radio to incite violence against women, with both mediums being used to portray Tutsi women as untrustworthy, and as acting against the Hutu majority. The conflict resulted in an estimated 2000–10,000 war babies being born as a result of forcible impregnation. The extent of the rapes was quickly picked up by human rights groups, with one report, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath written by Binaifer Nowrojee, becoming one of the most highly cited human rights reports in up to thirty years.[4]
