Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda

Women as Rescuers and Perpetrators

Sara E. Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138043534
• eBook ISBN: 9781351699761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the mobilization, role, and trajectory of women rescuers and perpetrators during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

While much has been written about the victimization of women during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, very little has been said about women who rescued targeted victims or perpetrated crimes against humanity. This book explores and analyzes the role played by women who exercised agency as rescuers and as perpetrators during the genocide in Rwanda. As women, they took actions and decisions within the context of a deeply entrenched patriarchal system that limited their choices.

This work examines two diverging paths of women's agency during this period: to rescue from genocide or to perpetrate genocide. It seeks to answer three questions: First, how were certain Rwandan women mobilized to participate in genocide, and by whom? Second, what were the specific actions of women during this period of violence and upheaval? Finally, what were the trajectories of women rescuers and perpetrators after the genocide? Comparing and contrasting how women rescuers and perpetrators were mobilized, the actions they undertook, and their post-genocide trajectories, and concluding with a broader discussion of the long-term impact of ignoring these women, this book develops a more nuanced and holistic view of women's agency and the genocide in Rwanda.

This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, genocide studies, African politics and critical security studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Gender-and-the-Genocide-in-Rwanda-Women-as-Rescuers-and-Perpetrators/Brown/p/book/9780367188092, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Finding the Right Flashlight

Frames of Analysis and Review of Literature

Feminist scholar J. Ann Tickner writes that “too often women’s experiences have been deemed trivial, or important only in so far as they relate to the experiences of men.”¹ Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda offers a new approach to women’s agency during genocide and is rooted in a multi-disciplinary theoretical framework informed by feminist theory, comparative historical analysis, comparative genocide studies, and constructivism and sociology. This interdisciplinary approach builds on feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe’s advice.

I find it helpful to judge the usefulness of any concept in the same way that I judge a flashlight. Someone hands you a flashlight and you say, “I wonder if it is a good flashlight.” So you go into a darkened room, you turn it on, and you judge if corners of the room previously in the shadows now become easier to see than before. If you find that this particular flashlight distorts the shapes in the room or if the beam is too weak and you still trip over objects on the floor, then you return that flashlight with a polite “thank you.”²

Feminist theory opens questions that help us understand women’s agency during genocide and J. Ann Tickner’s body of work in particular elucidates the gendered frame of the genocide in Rwanda. Feminist sociologist Cynthia Cockburn asserts that, “A gender analysis alerts us to an intentionality in differentiation between the sexes. It also makes us hesitate to take at face value other distinctions.…”³ According to Tickner, “there is a hierarchy of masculinities in which gender interacts with class and race”⁴ and, in the Rwandan case, ethnicity. In order to fully examine the role of women during the genocide in Rwanda, I ask questions inspired by Enloe, including “Where are the women?”; “How did they get there?”; “What are they doing?” and “Why?” In order to capture the voices of women, I collect and analyze oral histories; as gender and conflict expert Erin Baines notes, “life stories are a particularly useful method to shed insight into the social positions of oppressed groups within a given institution and historical setting, to comprehend human agency, motivation, and choice.”⁵ Oral histories shed light on human agency, thinking, feeling, and behavior. Using Tickner’s construct and grounding my research in oral histories, Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda lays bare the gendered foundations of the genocide in Rwanda and women’s agency, including limitations and particularities, in order to understand the invisibility of women’s narratives during the genocide in Rwanda.⁶

Feminist theory also helps us grasp how human agency is simultaneously social and individual; international and personal.⁷ Enloe asserts that the personal is international and vice versa, and that the invisibility of women and the silence that surrounds them during conflict stems from the home and expands into the international sphere.⁸ At the same time, the international community perpetuates a masculinized interpretation of conflict that denies women a role in the violence aside from that of victim or bystander. Educational psychologist David Moshman writes about the conceptual lens through which genocide is analyzed and the flaws inherent in subjective conceptual thought.⁹ Redirecting Moshman’s theory to examine gendered narratives of genocide, the conceptual lens through which genocide is researched, reported on, documented, and (ideally) prevented often ignores women’s agency and typecasts women as passive victims or bystanders. These gendered concepts through which scholars examine the genocide in Rwanda are therefore informed by Moshman’s analysis of subjectivity in conceptual structures; gendered concepts and their resulting biases are largely invisible and therefore go unacknowledged. Due to this invisible gendered lens, most scholars, humanitarians, and interested individuals who study the genocide in Rwanda see men as perpetrators or victims and women as victims or bystanders. There is little space to explore women as rescuers or as perpetrators; as noted by Adler et al, “Genocide is more often than not characterized as a male crime, the outcome of contemporary notions of masculinity.”¹⁰

This denial of agency (which extends into the personal realm) prompts me to re-examine the myth of women’s pacifism. With a few notable exceptions, women agents are typically overlooked because of gendered assumptions, often supported by otherwise impressive scholarship, about “inherent pacifism” that are essentialist and flawed.¹¹ If history is any indication, women are capable of acts of belligerence and of heroism. A group of key works address women’s participation in violent social movements. Sociologist Kathleen Blee explores in Women of the Klan the recruitment and involvement of women in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.¹² The constrained and gendered participation of women is also addressed by historian Claudia Koonz’s Mothers in the Fatherland. Her study sheds light on women’s contributions to the Nazi party and their subjugation to the patriarchal foundations of the fascist regime.¹³ The motivations, actions, and fate of women perpetrators during the Holocaust are further scrutinized by historian Wendy Lower in Hitler’s Furies. Her analysis further emphasizes the ordinary nature of women Nazis.¹⁴ These groundbreaking works laid the foundation for the conversation this study endeavors to join. Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda also addresses more broadly the small but growing body of literature that explores women as combatants and armed insurgents.¹⁵

Still, gendered assumptions about the pacifism of women persist in scholarly discourse, muting discussion of women’s agency and capacity for violence in pursuit of rescue or murder. To move research beyond readily available statistics that reinforce gendered generalizations requires methods for “studying silences,” the title of Annica Kronsell’s 2006 article.¹⁶ Kronsell offers techniques for looking beyond gendered practices and overcoming the absence of readily available data. Ackerly et al. also write about studying silences, asserting that doing so “means that the research has to rely on methods of deconstruction.”¹⁷ Due to the gendered invisibility of women during times of violent upheaval, unless given visibility as victims, silence shrouds their motivations, actions, and experiences post-violence. In instances when a spotlight is cast upon women who participate in violence, they are “othered,” denied “both agency and woman-hood,” and cast into gender-specific typecasts such as the “mother, monster, whore” narratives explored by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry.¹⁸ As a result of a combination of these and specific gendered processes particular to Rwandan culture, the full scope of agency exhibited by women rescuers and perpetrators during the genocide in Rwanda remains uncharted, along with how their agency was performed and under what types of socially (and inherently masculine) prescribed constraints.

Women’s constrained agency during the genocide was in part a result of deliberate gendered mobilization that normalized violence against Tutsi women. Research by feminist scholars Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon on the role of pornography in normalizing violence against women helps to frame in broader terms the treatment of women during the genocide in Rwanda.¹⁹ It contextualizes the extremist literature and pornographic cartoons that targeted Tutsi women prior to and during the 1994 genocide as part of a process of hyper-sexualization and dehumanization that catalyzed violence against Tutsi women, sometimes at the hands of Hutu women. This hyper-sexualization of African women has its roots in a colonial combination of sexual repression, exoticism, and racism that existed in white Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.²⁰ Feminist scholar Jan J. Pettman noted how following colonization many of these “racialized gender stereotypes [that] frequently represented colonized women as promiscuous and exotic” were adopted and adapted in Rwanda to include ethnicity as another boundary-marker of the “other”, and catalyzed violence against Tutsi women during the genocide.²¹

If feminist theory serves as the backbone of this study, scholarship on the role of the individual as victim, bystander, perpetrator, or “upstander” during conflict further develops Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda. Research by Ervin Staub and James Waller examine individual and group motivations for horrific crimes, while Victoria Barnett explores the development and importance of bystanders during the Holocaust.²² As there is little scholarship on rescue in Rwanda, and none on women rescuers, Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda relies heavily on research on rescue during the Holocaust. Staub offers an answer to his own quandaries, examining in Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism how to develop a culture of upstander-ship in instances of mass violence. He provides a lens of analysis for those who rescue that is supported by Samuel and Pearl Oliner’s work on altruism, and Nechama Tec’s research on rescuers and resisters during the Holocaust.²³ Gender and the Genocide in Rwanda also reflects the influence of Dr. Marion Pritchard, a rescuer during the Holocaust who candidly described the layers of complexity, struggle, and identity inherent in a single rescuer.

Still, most of the scholarship on the genocide in Rwanda focuses on men-perpetrated crimes. These include, for example, Jean Hatzfeld’s excellent documentation of convicted genocide-perpetrator testimonies and Scott Straus’s groundbreaking empirical analysis of genocide perpetrators. Crimes committed by women are mentioned in passing, relevant only in relation to the crimes of men.²⁴ This gender-exclusive oversight risks erasing women perpetrators from the supra-narrative of the genocide and is consistent with the ideological constraints that have conditioned “Western views of African women’s history” according to historian Christina Saidi.²⁵ The first two conditions address the prioritization of women as wives, with considerably less importance given to the roles of mother and sister, and the imposition of the western version of the nuclear family, which ignores women’s relationship with her own lineage. The third assumption, “the universally subordinate position of women during all historical periods,”²⁶ is particularly salient here. In other instances, women have been mentioned in the literature, but as subordinates and in a subsidiary role. Political scientist Mahmood Mamdani briefly notes women’s participation during the genocide, albeit in an auxiliary role squarely behind men, “like the second line in a street-to-street battle.”²⁷ The majority of the crimes committed during the genocide were indeed perpetrated by men; yet, the silence about women’s agency undermines the value of existing analyses.

Non-governmental and inter-governmental bodies have furthered this gendered stratification, publishing reports that affirm gendered stereotypes of women’s passivity with the occasional, almost offhand, mention of women who participated in the genocide. The United Nations Economic and Social Council’s “Report on the situation of human rights in Rwanda” noted th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: A Study in Contrasts
• 1 Finding the Right Flashlight: Frames of Analysis and Review of Literature
• 2 History of Rwanda
• 3 Mobilization and Militarization
• 4 Rescuers
• 5 Perpetrators
• 6 Post-Genocide Trajectories
• 7 Sharing Salt
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Ethnographic interview questions for community and government stakeholders
• Appendix B: Semi-structured interview questions for individuals who are survivors, witnesses, rescuers, or perpetrators
• Glossary
• Index