This Is The Story A UN Court Didn’t Want Three Rape Survivors To Tell
KIGALI, Rwanda — At first glance, Seraphine Mukakinani’s life seems unremarkable. She didn’t finish school, so she sells clothes or fruits or whatever's around at a small market, which doesn’t bring in much. Usually, she wraps herself in kitenge, that brightly colored “African cloth,” and in secondhand T-shirts. A single bulb lights half of her two-room house, on a road that rings Nyamirambo, a busy, crowded neighborhood in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. For water or cooking or the toilet, she goes outside.
Nothing about this is exceptional, so you’d be forgiven for not realizing that Seraphine is one of the most influential women in the world.
“Recently, a police officer came into the house to check for drugs,” she said. The officer was conducting of a routine spot-check, and he took an interest in a small bundle on a shelf in Seraphine’s bedroom. “‘What is that?’” she remembers him saying. “‘Bring that here.’”
“I opened it, and he got surprised,” Seraphine said. “There’s a picture of me and the president!”
Seraphine rocked with laughter when she remembered the look on his face.
“He said, ‘Umukecuru! Where did you meet our mzee?” Old woman! Where did you meet Big Man?
Seraphine had met him at the screening of a film that tells her complicated, painful story: She survived the 1994 genocide, when an estimated 800,000 people of Rwanda's Tutsi minority group were killed by people in the majority Hutu group. The genocide spread from the capital of Kigali across the country in only 100 days, but the killings happened in waves, at different times and for different durations in different places.
In Taba, a village about an hour's drive from Kigali, the killings came quickly, and with them, a kind of crime long considered unspeakable: Hundreds of women there — and possibly hundreds of thousands across the country — were raped by members of the interahamwe, the youth militia of a Hutu political party, which did much of the killing.
The genocide ended in July 1994. Approximately two years later, lawyers for an international court set up to try high-level perpetrators came to Taba and gathered evidence. Seraphine and dozens of other women — including her sister, Victoire Mukambanda, and a young woman called Cecile Mukarugwiza — told them about being raped.
That part of the story didn’t initially interest the court, which was narrowly focused on connecting local and national leaders to the killings. But eventually, Seraphine, Victoire, and Cecile found themselves at the center of what became one of the most important human rights cases in the world: Their stories would help convict a man for rape as a crime against humanity for the first time in history.
“They told us we had strong testimonies, but they didn't really ever tell us why us,” Seraphine said, referring to the five women who testified at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, in 1997. (Two have since died.) “We were five women from Taba commune. We didn't know much about laws; we weren't educated enough. We were only supported by the truth.”
A new documentary called The Uncondemned explores the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Taba. On the strength of testimony from Seraphine and the four other women, Akayesu was convicted of two charges of sexual violence, along with nine other genocide-related charges.
The conviction was groundbreaking. For millennia, sexual violence had been considered unfortunate but not uncommon — a “thing men do” in war. In a ruling that recognized that sexual assault is about power, not about sexual gratification, the ICTR established rape as a crime against humanity and — in possibly its most powerful legacy — as a form of genocide.
But when filmmaker Michele Mitchell delved into the details, she realized that the Akayesu case wasn't a straightforward victory for women's rights. That story took an even more surprising turn earlier this year, when a UN judge tried to block Mitchell’s film, in the name of protecting the witnesses who appeared in it.
Twenty years after one of its biggest victories, the UN court was still fighting about the same thing that nearly derailed the case in the first place: Who gets to decide when women are allowed to tell their own stories?
Victoire near her home on Oct. 14.
Edward Echwalu for BuzzFeed News
None of the witnesses ever imagined, in the months after the genocide, that judges and lawyers at an international court would be interested in what happened to them. None of them could imagine telling the story of being raped — so many times, often in front of their neighbors and families — or finding words to explain it to someone who hadn’t been there.
Actually, in those early days after the genocide, in late 1994 and 1995, the women who would become witnesses couldn’t imagine ever talking again at all.
“I was so destroyed. I couldn't even speak. Every time I tried to speak, it felt like my heart was going to break,” Cecile, now 37, said at her home outside Kigali. “I don't know if I can explain it. It's like everything was damaged in the brain. Your mind is tied up, and your voice is stuck inside.”
Victoire, the oldest of the women to testify, said that after the genocide, she felt broken. She had been raped repeatedly, with her baby next to her; the baby was later killed. So was her husband. When it all ended, she had nothing left — no reason at all, she remembers, to speak.
“I would sit and just break into tears without anyone beating me, no one harming me in any way, just tears. I couldn't cook for myself. I would forget to eat. I would just sit, silent, crying all the time. That thing ruined our hearts, our bodies, even our intelligence, our ability to think,” she said.
The court recognized sexual violence is about power, not about gratification.
Victoire didn't say a word for months. Then she attended a meeting organized by a woman called Godeliève Mukasarasi. Mukasarasi, who’d worked as a social worker before the genocide, set up an organization for survivors in Taba, called Sevota. Its support groups became well-known near the capital, and government officials and other important people would come to visit with the survivors. Sometimes, they'd bring them a chicken or a goat, a small but crucial gesture of support.
It was a goat that brought Victoire her voice back. “If you have a goat, you have something. You can take it outside to eat. You can talk to it. You can shout at it. Even if you're shouting and chasing it [as it's running away], at least you're opening your mouth.”
Not long after the women found their voices again, the court investigators found the women. The ICTR was opened in November 1994, and its job was to try high-level perpetrators — government officials, journalists, members of the military — for the genocide. But many Rwandans — lower-level perpetrators, genocide sympathizers, or others afraid of what punishments might come down on them or their families — didn’t want the court to succeed. It quickly became dangerous for people to collaborate with court investigators. By September 1996, at least 10 witnesses had been killed before they could testify in Arusha, presumably to stop their truth from coming out.
One of those killed was Mukasarasi’s husband, who was murdered in Taba just before Christmas 1996. In January 1997, a Hutu woman from Taba was murdered after she came back from testifying against Akayesu; her husband, her four children, and three other kids who happened to be at her house were also killed.
But Seraphine, Victoire, and Cecile overcame their fear and testified because they believed it was important; they believed God would protect them if they told the truth; and they believed, at that moment in their lives, only two years after the genocide, that they probably weren’t going to live much longer anyway.
“For a long time, I had that sickness of being so hopeless,” said Cecile, who was only 15 during the genocide. “I thought, I might die now, or in a few hours, or maybe tomorrow. At any time, something can go wrong, and I’ll die. That was my life every day.”
Cecile at her home near Kigali on Oct. 14.
Edward Echwalu for BuzzFeed News
Originally, Akayesu wasn't even charged with rape. Not because there wasn’t evidence that mass rape had happened, but because, as Mitchell’s film shows, at the beginning investigators didn’t — wouldn’t — spend time building up that evidence for trial.
“If you look back on it, rape had been very well-documented at that point. There was no lack of information that rape was a very big issue,” Jessica Neuwirth, who worked as a special expert on sexual violence for the ICTR and drafted the Akayesu judgment, told BuzzFeed News. “The fact that it wasn’t in any of those [original] indictments was very problematic.”
Early on, sexual violence wasn’t seen as an issue big enough to win the attention or other resources of a financially strapped, overworked team of investigators, prosecutors, and other court officials. Mitchell’s film tells the story, from the prosecutors’ point of view, of how Akayesu was eventually charged with sexual violence.
Akayesu was the mayor of Taba (today called Kamonyi). Mayors are powerful and revered figures in Rwanda, and when the killings in Taba began, Tutsis ran to Akayesu’s office, called the bureau communal, hoping for safety. But they were chased out of the bureau communal by militias who, after a few days, began raping women and girls.
Cecile was one of those girls. “Imagine, I was only 15 — I didn't even have my period yet — [and] being raped by that many men,” she recalled recently at her home, north of Kigali. “And it's in public, in front of people you know.
“They start maybe two, then maybe tomorrow there's 10. One leaves, and the other is there — it's like they are all the same — and the last one says, ‘Instead of getting my penis dirty, I would rather use a tree,’” she remembered.
“There were kids around who started throwing small rocks … so everyone left,” she said. Ironically, if the rape hadn't been public, Cecile might not have been saved. “I remember one lady, she was raped until she died,” Cecile said.
Cecile’s story is similar to so many others from Taba. In 1996, a landmark Human Rights Watch report documented many stories of sexual violence — and spurred the ICTR to review its own work. The tribunal sent a gender consultant named Lisa Pruitt to investigate whether witness statements could support sexual violence charges against Akayesu.
Lisa Pruitt arriving in Rwanda.
Courtesy The Uncondemned
Pruitt, whose story is a key part of Mitchell’s film, came away convinced that court investigators had largely dismissed the issue, discrediting survivors for spurious reasons and focusing narrowly on genocide, which they thought was the more important crime. “Many of the investigators said, ‘Well, we can’t be concerned about some women who got raped. We can’t divert resources to investigate those crimes. We had a genocide down here,’” Pruitt recalls in the film.
She presented her findings to the Office of the Prosecutor in The Hague, the headquarters for the tribunal, but she was told there was no interest in pursuing rape charges after all. Pruitt’s work was essentially buried.
As the film tells it, as far as the prosecutors preparing the case in Rwanda knew, there was nothing linking Akayesu specifically to the sexual violence generally committed in Taba. “[It] wasn’t enough to say, ‘Women were raped in Taba, therefore Akayesu should be prosecuted.’ It’s not that simple,” Pierre-Richard Prosper, one of the prosecutors, says in the film. “We had to prove Akayesu knew, allowed it to happen, did it himself or whatever it may be, and therefore should be prosecuted.”
But in the middle of the trial, in March 1997, one witness testified about the sexual violence she saw at the compound where Akayesu was in charge — testimony that made it possible to connect the man on trial to the rape crimes everyone knew had happened.
“She said, ‘Then I saw the women being dragged to the back of the bureau communal, and I saw them being raped,’” Prosper recalls in the film. “Whoa, hold on. You saw this? She said, ‘Yes. I saw women being raped.’”
“This was potentially a game changer,” Sara Darehshori, also a prosecutor on the case, recalls in the film. “That was always the missing link: Rapes at the bureau communal would have been something that Akayesu couldn’t have missed.”
Eventually the prosecution team uncovered Pruitt’s memo, and that helped lead them to Cecile, Seraphine, and Victoire — until the film known only to the world by their court pseudonyms as OO, NN, and JJ. In June 1997, prosecutors added sexual violence charges to Akayesu’s indictment and prepared to prove that even though Akayesu hadn’t raped anyone himself, he’d known that the militias were dragging Tutsi women away to assault them — and he’d had the power to stop them.
Mitchell’s film focuses on the prosecutors’ memories, but experts who worked at the tribunal say the court’s lone female judge was also influential.
“If a female judge experienced in women's issues had not been sitting on the bench in this case, there would have been no gender crimes prosecuted, as they weren't included in the original indictment,” said Kelly Askin, co-editor of Women and International Human Rights Law and a former legal adviser to the ICTR. “[She] invited the prosecution to consider amending the indictment to include sex crimes.”
Former ICTR judge Navanethem Pillay in Geneva in 2016.
Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
That judge was Navanethem Pillay, a South African jurist and the first nonwhite woman appointed to South Africa’s High Court. Pillay left the High Court to join the ICTR, where she was the only female judge for four years. Court transcripts from March 1997 show that Pillay zeroed in on a witness’s disclosure about sexual violence to interrogate possible links to Akayesu.
“There’s a key moment in the transcript, [after] that heavy information gets dropped … and nobody says a thing about it until Pillay raised a question,” said Neuwirth, who wrote the verdict. “What you see right there is that the judges picked it up, not the prosecutors ... If [Pillay] hadn't asked those questions, I don’t think anything further would have happened.”
The indictment was amended in June 1997, six months after the trial began, and three charges of sexual violence, including rape, were added to Akayesu’s indictment for genocide. “One thing Judge Pillay always says is that he was most upset about the [rape] charge,” Neuwirth remembered.
On the strength of testimony from Seraphine, Victoire, and Cecile, as well as two other women whose names remain undisclosed, the court found Akayesu guilty of rape as a crime against humanity — the first time that had ever happened. The court also determined that rape itself could be an act of genocide, a finding that had immediate influence in another international court for war crimes in the Balkans.
It would be hard to overstate the meaning — and continued relevance — of the Akayesu verdict. “Before Akayesu, there was debate about whether rape was even a war crime or merely an inevitable consequence or side effect of armed conflict,” said Askin, “After Akayesu, rape and other forms of sexual violence were taken far more seriously.”
The case has had reverberations in courtrooms large and small around the world, Askin said. International war crimes courts for Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, and cases at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, have all cited the Akayesu conviction. “I was in a very remote village in eastern [Democratic Republic of] Congo, at a mobile court trial, when a judge cited Akayesu,” Askin recalled.
But some of the challenges the Rwanda court faced 20 years ago repeat themselves today, in other war crimes investigations. Neuwirth, who has continued to work on sexual violence matters for other international courts, said it’s still common for prosecutors to overlook rape and other forms of gender violence.
“I’ve seen this happen again and again in criminal tribunals, where they have to amend the indictment,” she said. “A very common problem is that the evidence isn’t there. In fairness to prosecutors, if you don’t make this special effort, you won’t get it. It’s hard to talk about it. If you’re insensitive to that, if you’re sending male investigators, if it’s not part of their mission — you’re probably not going to get [the evidence].”
Akayesu, center, during his trial.
Courtesy The Uncondemned