30 Years After the Genocide in Rwanda: Gender, Accountability and Atrocity Prevention - Panel session from HL-senteret, PRIO, and STK seminar
Panel discussions with Savita Pawnday, Honoré Gatera, Jacqui True, and Erik Møse. Moderated by Ellen Stensrud. Photo: Ingeborg Vea/HL-senteret
As 30 years have elapsed since the atrocities perpetrated in the Rwandan genocide directed against the Tutsi, our understanding and consideration of gender in atrocities and their prevention has undoubtedly been affected. But how? What role does gender play in atrocity prevention? What are the challenges we are currently facing and what are their solutions?
On June 6th 2024, the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies (HL-senteret), the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), and the Centre for Gender Research at UiO (STK) came together in a seminar to explore the role gender plays in mass atrocities and how it is understood by policymakers, academics, and civil society. The seminar was introduced with remarks by Norwegian State Secretary Andreas Kravik and a keynote speech by the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten, then delving deeper with a discussion of a panel of experts.
This post explores the many lessons and challenges of atrocity prevention raised during the panel session, composed of Honoré Gatera (Director of Kigali Genocide Memorial), Erik Møse (former President of the ICTR), Jacqui True (Director of CEVAW), and Savita Pawnday (Director of Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect), and moderated by Ellen Stensrud (Head of Research of HL-senteret).
To know what the SRSG discussed in her keynote, you are encouraged to read this separate blogpost: https://www.massatrocityresponses.com/blog/rwanda-seminar-keynote. You may also watch her keynote, followed by the full panel session, here:
Honoré Gatera, Erik Møse, Jacqui True, and Savita Pawnday’s panel, moderated by Ellen Stensrud:
Main takeaways:
Gender, Women, Peace and Security (WPS), women’s issues, and conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) are different from one another, but interrelated.
Atrocity prevention is gendered in every aspect, including laws, indicators, and contexts, and while academia and accountability mechanisms recognize this, policymaking lags behind.
Early warning is necessary, and it should be gender-sensitive and informed by local people’s needs, feelings, and knowledge.
Solid normative frameworks exist and just ought to be acted upon, yet there are still ways to both expand and concretize them further.
The quality of justice must be improved, as prosecutions and criminal courts can be effective but are currently slow, selective, and inefficient.
More nuance is needed to acknowledge how atrocities are intersectionally experienced by different (groups of) people.
Atrocities need preparation and can be recognized through risk factors and warning systems, such as gender inequality and peacetime violence.
Witnesses, survivors, journalists, and those who report abuses must be supported, treated respectfully, and listened to as informed experts.
Main issues:
Gender still receives too little attention, particularly when it comes to atrocity prevention, and yet atrocities are gendered in every aspect. The indicators which allow for early warning and the identification of atrocities to come, the dynamics of atrocities themselves, and the framework guiding their prevention are all influenced by people’s understanding and experience of gender and its consequences.
Secondly, despite a robust framework and decades of research, policy implementation is still inconsistent, and protection is still lacking. Accountability is similarly inefficient, as criminal courts remain slow and ineffective and thus foster impunity.
“Why gender?”:
The usefulness of applying a gender lens to AP is clear: a gender lens can identify warnings and dynamics that would otherwise be ignored, such as gender inequality, cultural or systemic discrimination, and peacetime violence.
Since the context and behaviors manifesting during times of peace inform dynamics in times of conflict or unrest, within societies that respect women and where gender norms are not oppressive there likely will not be high levels of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), which can instead be commonly found in contexts where gendered violence is normalized.
Gender, WPS, women’s issues, and CRSV are also distinct and different from one another, and should thus be distinguished, but they are nonetheless interrelated. Gender broadly encompasses the spectrum of one’s identity associated with cultural differences, as opposed to “biological” sex; WPS stands for Women, Peace and Security, and explores women’s role in peace and conflict, particularly focused on prevention, participation, protection, and relief and recovery; women’s issues encompass all matters of gender-based discrimination, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and gender-based violence; CRSV instead is focused on the acts of sexual violence carried out in situations of conflict. Their conflation causes confusion, as well as ineffective or absent policy implementation, and must be avoided.
Few successes, many challenges:
Throughout the panel multiple successes have been discussed, chief among which are the current structural framework on prevention, also highlighted by the SRSG, and the WPS agenda. The latter in particular is a great example of how centering gender in discussions and approaches to contexts of (in)security can produce positive change and visible results.
International criminal law has similarly made visible progress for gender-based violence and CRSV, despite widespread impunity, with the ICTR being the first court to recognize rape and sexual violence as components of genocide and potential crimes against humanity.
Nevertheless, challenges continue to persist, especially due to the difficulty of translating issues and necessities between civil society, academics, and policymakers, accounting for their different priorities, language, and conceptualizations.
It was further repeated during the panel that nuance is helpful for academics and necessary to ensure comprehensive, intersectional, and widespread support, but that such complexity can weaken implementation efforts, which are instead based on specificity and targeted actions.
The treatment of victims and survivors of atrocities has also been criticized during the seminar, as policymakers, media, and academics alike have often treated them like props, uncaring of their traumatic experiences and their needs. Victims should instead be heard and treated respectfully, recognizing their role as knowledgeable and invested persons whose advice on directing and implementing policy should be held in high regard, especially for early-warning and data collection.
Some solutions:
In order to produce positive results, all participants agreed that early-warning indicators must be prioritized and employed, remarking that they should be gender-sensitive and account for issues such as inequality, discrimination, and peacetime (sexual) violence.
Even more so, a continuous collaboration between academics, policymakers, and activists should be fostered in order to ensure that the needs and feelings of the people affected are understood and respected. This requires that research and early-warning systems make use of unofficial and on-the-ground reports by NGOs and media, especially if locally based.
Educating policymakers and media about the importance and usefulness of gender and a gender lens is crucial to strengthen gender-sensitive policy implementation, so that it is not dismissed as a secondary issue but is instead mainstreamed.
To ensure a nuanced and comprehensive gendered outlook on atrocities and that their prevention can be carried out, it was explained during the panel that we ought not to default to look at atrocities only through women’s SGBV perspectives. Atrocities such as torture, detainment, and gender-based persecution are ignored otherwise, and so are men as well as intersex and queer people, also at risk of SGBV.
This seminar demonstrated that although steps have been taken in the right direction, there are still significant obstacles to overcome to ensure a comprehensive prevention of atrocities. A way to do so, conscious and understanding of the complex dynamics of such atrocities, is by mainstreaming gender in their approaches and discussion.
The gendered aspects of the genocide in Rwanda:
The dynamics of the genocide were unequivocally gendered, both in the mobilization of perpetrators and the targeting and treatment of victims (battle-aged men should die, childbearing-aged women should be impregnated), and much can be learned from these atrocities. In Rwanda, before the genocide, rape was used to test its potential and effectiveness, as well as to test whether a genocide would be denounced internationally.
To discuss the genocide, “gender” is often equated with “women”, ignoring men and queer individuals, yet nuance can be maintained by including women victims (250’000 raped to torture, impregnate, or infect with HIV), women perpetrators (Nyiramasuhuko, Bemeriki, mothers killing children and husbands, women raping men and boys), and women rescuers (hiding friends and neighbors in their home, with or against their husbands).
Many male survivors managed to flee towards displacement camps in other countries, while women were left as heads of households, single mothers, mothers of war babies, and survivors of the nation. Post-genocide Rwanda later made massive improvements in gender equality and limiting violence, for instance by creating an anti-gender-based-violence police unit.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) processed 75 cases, with many processes taking a long time due to the complexity of the crimes and the fact that many different crimes were happening at the same time. Some processes took as little as a month, while others took years. The Akayesu trial showed the need for investigators and prosecutors to know what to look for and to have focus of these crimes (CRSV, genocidal sexual violence), and also defining rape as an act of genocide for the first time, furthering and speeding up future legal processes.
The International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine consciously investigated sexual crimes, reporting on sexual violence committed by Russian authorities and unearthing its patterns. Focus on sexual crimes was present since the beginning, unlike the ICTR, and it showed that men are often targets of sexual violence as part of torture and in detention camps.
More on the event:
The recorded panel session, where the above topics are discussed in more detail, can be watched here: https://youtu.be/tgWGgHJePAI?feature=shared&t=2155
The full seminar, featuring the welcoming remarks, the keynote speech, the panel discussion, and the closing remarks, is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhRCnvOv7oU