When David, a 19-year-old Rwandan, is
asked about his parents, he prefers to conceal being one of thousands of
children born from a rape during the 1994 genocide.
"I say I don't have a father," he explained.
It
is impossible to say exactly how many women were raped during the
genocide -- the majority of them were subsequently killed and many
survivors prefer not to talk about it.
It
is equally difficult to estimate the number of children born of rape
since 20 years after the genocide -- in which an estimated 800,000
people, essentially Tutsis, died -- the subject is still very much
taboo.
"Rape was the rule and its
absence the exception," said a UN Human Rights Commission report in
1996. "Unfortunately, there are no statistics... rape was systematic and
was used as a weapon by the perpetrators of the massacres."
After
his initial "surprise" and "anger", David said he "had no choice but to
accept" that he was born from a rape and would like to know more.
"My mother is very light-skinned and I am darker. I'd like to know what he looks like," he said of his father.
"He
doesn't know all the details and he has stopped asking questions,"
explained Ester, his mother. "My son doesn't talk a lot. It's difficult
to know what he is really thinking."
Ester,
a Tutsi, fled Kigali when the genocide carried out by majority Hutus
began on April 7, 1994. She was raped by a militia fighter in the border
town of Cyangugu as she tried to cross into Democratic Republic of
Congo with a group of other women.
"A
woman proposed to hide us in a house but she tricked us and called the
local militia chief," she recounted. "We spent a hellish night in that
house."
NO FURTHER QUESTIONS
When she realised she was pregnant the only person she dared confide in was her younger sister.
"After
my son was born I told myself I had no choice but to love him," she
explained. It was only after learning that her rapist infected her with
HIV that she told her son the truth.
"Rape
is still a taboo subject... but people are starting to talk about it.
Things are changing even if there is still a long way to go," said
Samuel Munderere of the NGO Survivor Fund (SURF), which helps rape
victims and their families.
"A lot of children don't know about their past as their mothers refuse to talk about it," he said.
Nineteen-year-old
Nyiramwiza "decided not to ask any more questions" about her father
when she saw how distressed her mother became.
"The
first time I asked about him eight years ago, my mother said nothing
and started crying," she recalled, sitting in a small mud-brick house on
the outskirts of Kigali, an impenetrable look in her eyes.
The following year when she repeated the question, her mother said that he had been killed during the genocide.
"I
haven't told her the whole story because I don't want to upset her,"
said her mother, 42-year-old Augustine, almond-shaped eyes in an
emaciated face.
Nyiramwiza was born
shortly before the genocide started. Her father is a Hutu shopkeeper and
former militiaman who kept her mother, a Tutsi, as a sex slave for a
year in 1993.
Augustine was raped a
second time during the genocide "by many men over a period of many
days". She gave birth to a second child, a boy.
"After the genocide I hated everyone and I hated myself," said Augustine, who lost her whole family in the killings.
"I
didn't love my children because they were a constant reminder of what I
had been through," she said, wiping away silent tears.
She
later discovered she had HIV. She knows her daughter is not
HIV-positive but her son has refused to get tested. He had difficulties
in school, and "used to run away from time to time and be very
aggressive," Augustine said.
NO STATE SUPPORT
Emilienne
Kambibi, a trauma counsellor with SURF, which helps rape victims and
their families, said Augustine's two children are "refusing to accept
reality".
"The child is always ashamed to be the child of a militiaman and tends to reject his identity," Kambibi said.
Children
born of rape during the genocide are reminded of their past every day,
be it through seeing the mother's trauma or through rejection by the
community in a country due to mark 20 years since the massacres this
month.
It is difficult to know
exactly how many children are affected because "a lot of them don't know
about their past as their mothers refuse to talk about it," explained
Samuel Munderere of SURF.
Keeping the
past hidden has become harder since the time of the gacaca, the grass
roots tribunals that between 2001 and 2012 tried some two million
alleged perpetrators. In the process, the tribunals exposed some
incidents kept secret by survivors.
"Such
children are often rejected both by the mother's family and by the
father's," explained Jean-Pierre Dusingizemungu, the head of the
survivors' association Ibuka.
Children born of rape are not considered survivors because they were for the most part born after December 31, 1994.
They
are therefore not eligible for government assistance with their studies
from the National Assistance Fund for the Needy Survivors of Genocide
(FARG).
"FARG should help them. Their story is directly linked to the genocide. They are our children," Dusingizemungu added.
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