AFRICANEWS
RwandaMother, son face genocide chargesGenocideby Hassan Galana
In what legal experts have referred as the first case of its nature, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) based in Arusha, Tanzania, has charged a woman with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Former Cabinet Minister Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 53, appeared before the Tribunal on August 17, charged together with her son Arsene Shalom Ntahobali, 29, on charges of rape, genocide and crimes against humanity. The two, who were arrested in Kenya in July 1997 before being transferred to the Tribunal's detention facility in Arusha, were not required to plead to the charges. It is the first time in history that a woman has been charged with rape or genocide before an international tribunal and also one that a son has been indicted with his mother on the same charges. The mother faces 11 counts while her son faces 10. The two will be tried by a three-judge bench presided by the Tribunal's first woman President, Judge Navanathen Pillay of South Africa. Nyiramasuhuko held the post of Minister of Family and Women Affairs in both the government of President Juvenal Habyarimana that collapsed after Habyarimana's death in April 6, 1994 and the interim one that succeeded it. It is the latter regime that has been credited with overseeing the horrendous massacres whose groundwork had been done by Habyarimana's team. Once the killings started, Ntahobali, a university drop-out became the local leader of the dreaded Interahamwe militia. It is this militia that has been credited with some of the most brutal killings. In his submissions during the indictment, the Tribunal's Deputy Prosecutor Bernard Muna said: "Between April and July 1994 a roadblock was set up near the residence of Minister Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Shalom Ntahobali in Butare town. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Shalom Ntahobali manned this roadblock. During this entire period Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Shalom Ntahobali made use of this roadblock with the assistance of soldiers and other unknown persons to identify abduct and kill members of the Tutsi population." Muna went on: "Between 19 April and late June 1994, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and Shalom Ntahobali, accompanied by Interahamwe militiamen and soldiers, on several occasions went to the provincial offices (of Butare) to abduct refugees. Those who attempted to resist were assaulted and sometimes killed. The survivors were taken to various locations in the province to be executed, notably in the woods next to the Evangelical School of Rwanda. When abducting their victims, Pauline and Shalom often forced them to undress completely before forcing them into vehicles and taking them to their deaths." In one incident, the Tribunal was told how Nyiramasuhuko in the company of the then interim President Theodore Sindikubwabo, reportedly asked the Prefect of Butare Prefecture, Sylvain Nsabimana, "what those people were doing at the provincial offices and why they had not been killed." She was referring to a group of Tutsi who had crowded in the Prefecture's headquarters seeking protection as massacres ravaged the area. That was also the same time her son in the company of soldiers and militia stormed the Butare University Hospital with the sole aim of 'selecting, kidnapping and killing Tutsis who had sought refuge or treatment there.' What however, is shocking is the detailed cases of mass rape and other sexual offences that Nyiramasuhuko is accused of having participated in or planned. The indictment says: "During the events referred to in this indictment, rapes, sexual assaults and other crimes of a sexual nature were widely and notoriously committed throughout Rwanda. These crimes were committed by, among others, soldiers, militiamen and gendarmes against the Tutsi population, in particular Tutsi women and girls. Military officers, members of the interim government and local authorities such as Pauline Nyarimasuhuko and Shalom Ntahobali aided and abetted their subordinates and others in carrying out massacres of the Tutsi population." This is not the first time that the issue of rape and other grotesque sexual offences committed during the genocide have arisen during the trials. What is however new is that these sexual offences are now being recognised as acts of genocide. Sexual violence offences were among the charges that the former Mayor of Taba, Jean-Paul Akayesu, was convicted of last year in May. While sentencing Akayesu to life imprisonment, the Tribunal ruled that rape is an act of genocide if it targets a specific ethnic or religious group. It is against that background that the two were accused of rape. The indictment of Nyiramasuhuko and Ntahobali comes three months after the publication of a detailed study of the killings in Rwanda. The report by the New York based Human Rights Watch (HRW) group entitled Leave None To Tell The Story, has devoted a lot of pages detailing the massacres in Butare, long regarded as Rwanda's intellectual capital. According to the report, Butare, is also a town where the national chairman of the Interahamwe Robert Kajunga and his top lieutenants spent a great deal of time drinking as they planned and co-ordinated the killings. These were mostly carried out by the Presidential Guard, the national police and Interahamwe. Once the slaughter began, the report says, Ntahobali became a big man in Butare. "He swaggered around town with grenades hanging from his belt, often armed with a gun, which he once aimed in insolent jest at a local burgomaster(mayor)," it says. "He controlled his own barrier in front of the family house near the university campus where he bullied his militia, subordinates as well as passers-by. " In addition he recruited and organised militia in Mbazi, a commune just outside the town that was home to his father's family. His father, Maurice Ntahobari, was then the Rector of the National University in Butare. Either due to his privileged background or the political influence his parents had especially his mother Ntahobali, the report observed seemed not unanswerable to anybody in particular. It says: " Although Shalom and his group sometimes operated together with the military, he appears to have enjoyed considerable autonomy and status, probably because of his mother's influence." His mother, the report observed reportedly abetted all his crimes. It adds:" She supported his murders, to the extent of accompanying him when he went to abduct those to be executed." Nyiramasuhuko, the report says, at one time she stood next to her son as a young woman who had resisted being forced into a vehicle was killed on the spot. But Nyiramasuhuko's activities were not in isolation. Instead they were in line with a military programme that the genocidal government had set up in the course of the war. Labelled the 'civilian defence programme', in theory it was supposed to arm civilians to fight rebels allied to the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF). However, in practice this was not the case. When it became apparent that the RPF-dominated by the minority Tutsi- would take power, government functionaries turned to this defence programme in an attempt to exterminate all the Tutsi. According to HRW, Nyiramasuhuko worked tirelessly throughout the Prefecture and used to insist on generous contributions from the urban and intellectual elite of Butare to finance this self-defence effort. She had even established a special fund for it. And it from such activities that she and other genocidaires like her son are now facing justice in Arusha.
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