INTENDED CONSEQUENCES:
Rwandan Children Born of Rape
by Jonathan Torgovnik
During the 1994 genocide, Rwandan women were subjected to sexual violence on a massive scale, perpetrated by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe. Among the survivors, those who are most isolated are the women who have borne children as a result of being raped. Their families have rejected both them and their children, compounding their already unspeakable emotional distress.
An estimated twenty thousand children were born from rapes committed during the genocide in Rwanda. Many of their mothers contracted HIV from these brutal encounters. These women feel they have lost their dignity, that they are alone and utterly powerless.
In February 2006, I traveled to East Africa on behalf of Newsweek to work on a story about HIV/AIDS, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth year since the disease’s identification. While in Rwanda, I met Margret, a survivor who had been brutally raped during the genocide; she had become pregnant and contracted HIV. Her horrific story led me to return to Rwanda later that year to embark on a personal journey to document and tell the stories of women like Margret. I went back to Rwanda several times over the next three years, uncovering more details of the heinous crimes committed against these women. Many of them are shunned by their communities and their few surviving relatives due to the stigma of rape and of having a child “of a militia.”
Especially now, as history seems to be repeating itself in the Darfur region of Sudan and in the Congo, it is vital that these voices be heard, and that the victims and survivors of the genocide not be forgotten. Many of the women I interviewed have waited more than a decade to start healing themselves by telling their stories. “I cannot really tell you how many men came to rape me. I can’t count them,” says Verena Uwingabira, now thirty-four and HIV-positive. “All I know is that four months later I was pregnant. I felt so bad, I tried committing suicide twice [when] I was pregnant. Now I live with HIV and AIDS.”
Every survivor’s experience is unique, and the collective story they tell is no less important today than it was in 1994. Many of the women I have photographed say they were raped only after being forced to witness the murder of their families. “You alone are being allowed to live,” they were told, “so that you will die of sadness.”
These women have lived through unimaginable suffering, yet the future of Rwanda is largely in their hands. With a population that is 70 percent female, the country is now dependent on the women who survived the genocide to heal and rebuild the country.
Deeply affected by the consequences of the genocide and the challenges that these women and children face daily, I felt the need—for the first time in my career—to do something beyond photography. And so Jules Shell and I co-founded Foundation Rwanda, a non-profit organization established to improve the lives of children born from rapes committed during the genocide. The foundation helps to provide funding for these children’s secondary-school education, links their mothers to psychological and medical services, and raises awareness about the consequences of genocide and sexual violence through photography and other media.
Foundation Rwanda website
Intended Consequences microsite
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Amelie and Inez
I love my first daughter more because I gave birth to her as a result of love. Her father was my husband. The second girl is a result of an unwanted circumstance—I never loved her father. When the younger girl was a baby, I used to leave her crying. I fed the older one more than the younger one, until people in the neighbourhood told me that that was not the right thing to do. My love is divided, but slowly I am beginning to appreciate that this other one is innocent.
They raped me one after the other until I couldn’t move. When I realized I was pregnant, I was in a refugee camp in Congo. I did not want to have a child by a man I did not know, in a place I did not know. So I returned to Rwanda in search of relatives—someone to help me give birth or advise me how to raise a child. When I got to my village, I found that most of my family had been killed. I had difficulty giving birth; my body had been damaged from the rapes. But I gave birth to a good girl.
It was all brutal. I was still a virgin at the time of the genocide. When I realized I was pregnant, I became depressed: I had suffered enough. But when I saw my son for the first time, I felt I had been given another brother. I love him so much. He is a gift; he is my consolation. I look at the people who killed our families not necessarily as enemies, but as people who should be forgiven because they didn’t know what they were doing. But even animals cannot behave like the militias behaved.
I had never had sex until I was raped during the genocide. I never loved that man; I feared him. Even now, I hear people say they enjoy sex—I don’t know what it means to enjoy sex: for me, sex has been a torture. I have hope and faith in God and in the survivor organizations that support us. They encourage us to live positively. I strive to see that my parents’ killers are not going to laugh at me. Instead, they are going to see me making progress every day and staying alive.
I don’t encourage my children to hold onto ethnic ideologies. Don’t look at whether one is Hutu, or one is Tutsi. That’s not what is important. Today, there are hills in Rwanda where you will not find a single surviving Tutsi. My message to the world would be that the Tutsis in Rwanda have really suffered—we have been tortured, we have been discriminated against for a long time, and in 1994 we were almost all killed off. The message I would say is: do not let this happen again.
