Donne senza confini

PAULINE NYRIMASUHUKO: THE WOMEN OF THE SAD RECORD

She doesn't have repentances or remorses Pauline Nyiramasuhuko. She develops her regular life in the cell of the jail of Arusha, in Tanzania, yet she is the first woman tried by the Court of the U.N. with well eleven heads of charge among which genocide, crimes against the humanity and crimes of war in Rwanda.

She is also the first woman to be imputed of rape as crime against the humanity.

Today Pauline is 56 years old, she grown in a country family but her ambition iwas the power and she started with politics thanks to the government friendships, but not only for this. She is a good speaker and one of the few women of Rwanda graduated in law and she entered soon the graces of the President for her position xenophobic extremists towards the ethnic minority "tutsi".
(Pauline)

She was named Minister of the Family and for the Equal Opportunities, but for her social initiatives won't be remembered as never for having sustained in first person the rape of thousand of women "tutse" more than 250.000. This blood-curdling story has recently been brought to the footlight by Peter Landesman, journalist of the New York Times who has completed a report on Rwanda interviewing a lot of people testify of unheard of atrocity: Rose, that today is 32 years old, is one of these. She tells to have been raped by Pauline's son, which repeated to have the consent of her mother to rape women tutse. But the suffering of Rose was not destined to end. A few days later they returned some soldiers to rape her mother, the woman died later few days. She had been definite that she owed to be witness of these atrocities, so she was brought in a place where a woman was giving birth. Rose, with a thread of voice, tells with anguish that moment “ child was almost entirely gone out, to that point he has been pierced through!”. The soldiers repeated “we do what has ordered Pauline Nyiramasuhuko”. This and so many other testimonies will constitute the accusatory plant for the trial against Pauline.

To have used the rape as weapon of war, are putting in knee a country as Rwanda. During the ethnic extermination they were freed sick people of Aids and used for systematic rapes of tutsi. The society ruandese counts a lot of sick of Aids, orphan and women survived to the rapes, excludes from society.. Pauline has had a role as “director” in everything this; she coordinated in first person the exterminations involving /her child, also he arrested together with her mother in Kenya in 1997 while they were trying to escape away.

What the wars are accompanied by the rape it is not certain a novelty in the human history, however to discover that sexual violence has been used in systematic way in a war of our days to work by a woman, it puts our society really to uneasiness.

The trial to Pauline Nyiramasuhuko won't finish before 2004, then we will know only how the history will have judged this sad contemporary reality.

Federico Bastiani