When Rape Becomes Genocide

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September 5, 1998, Section A, Page 10Buy Reprints
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The guilty verdict the war crimes tribunal for Rwanda pronounced on Jean-Paul Akayesu this week marked the first judgment for the crime of genocide under international law. In making rape part of Mr. Akeyesu's genocide conviction, the decision also advances the world's legal treatment of rape and sexual violence.

Mr. Akayesu, who is due to be sentenced later this month, was not accused of carrying out rapes or killings himself. Instead, the court found that as Mayor of the city of Taba in 1994, he ordered Hutu to kill their Tutsi neighbors, including children. He also encouraged and ordered the rape and murder of Tutsi women in a cultural center he controlled.

While Mr. Akayesu's conviction completed the first full trial for genocide, a former Rwandan Prime Minister, Jean Kambanda, pleaded guilty to genocide on May 1. Yesterday he was sentenced to life in prison, the maximum punishment at the tribunal. The greater impact of the court's Akayesu decision will likely be seen in the area of rape and sexual violence. The court declared that rape may constitute genocide if committed with intent to destroy a particular group. In this case, Tutsi women were raped to increase their suffering before being killed. The court also issued the first definition of rape under international law. It called rape ''a physical invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive.'' Coercive circumstances need not include physical force, the court said. Threats and intimidation would qualify. The definition is concise and broad enough to be a good guide, enabling courts to prosecute rape more easily in the future.

When charges were first brought against Mr. Akayesu, rape was not among them. Despite extensive media reports of rapes, the tribunal's investigators, at the time virtually all men, could not find evidence to support an indictment. But during the trial a witness brought up rape in the cultural center. Questioned by Navanethem Pillay, a South African who is the tribunal's only female judge, the witness gave details. Other witnesses followed. Largely due to pressure from women's groups, the investigators went back to ask about rape, and those charges were added. Without female judges and investigators, this cruel aspect of the Rwandan genocide might never have been addressed.