Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a prominent Rwandan Hutu and former minister of family affairs and women’s advancement, has been sentenced to life in prison by an international tribunal for a variety of heinous crimes, including mass rape, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
According to a 2002 article originally published in the NY Times, Nyiramasuhuko followed a fairly standard feminist routine before become a mass-murderer:
Before becoming Rwanda’s chief official for women’s affairs, Pauline was a social worker, roaming the countryside, offering lectures on female empowerment and instruction on child care and AIDS prevention. Her days as minister were similarly devoted to improving the lives of women and children. But at the stadium, a 30-year-old farmer named Foster Mivumbi told me, Pauline assumed a different responsibility. Mivumbi, who has confessed to taking part in the slaughter, told me that Pauline goaded the Interahamwe, commanding, ”Before you kill the women, you need to rape them.”
But Pauline’s role went beyond mere encouragement:
Tutsi women were then selected from the stadium crowd and dragged away to a forested area to be raped, Mivumbi recalled. Back at the stadium, he told me, Pauline waved her arms and then observed in silence as Interahamwe rained machine-gun fire and hand grenades down upon the remaining refugees. The Hutus finished off survivors with machetes. It took about an hour, ending at noon. Pauline stayed on, Mivumbi told me, until a bulldozer began piling bodies for burial in a nearby pit. (When questioned about this incident, Pauline’s lawyers denied that she took part in atrocities in Butare.)
Shortly afterward, according to another witness, Pauline arrived at a compound where a group of Interahamwe was guarding 70 Tutsi women and girls. One Interahamwe, a young man named Emmanuel Nsabimana, told me through a translator that Pauline ordered him and the others to burn the women. Nsabimana recalled that one Interahamwe complained that they lacked sufficient gasoline. ”Pauline said, ‘Don’t worry, I have jerrycans of gasoline in my car,’ ” Nsabimana recalled. ”She said, ‘Go take that gasoline and kill them.’ I went to the car and took the jerrycans. Then Pauline said, ‘Why don’t you rape them before you kill them?’ But we had been killing all day, and we were tired. We just put the gasoline in bottles and scattered it among the women, then started burning.”
Although Pauline Nyiramasuhuko’s depravity was extreme even for a feminist, it shouldn’t be surprising that the first woman in history to be sentenced to prison for genocide was so keen on the idea of female empowerment before she turned machine guns on innocent people.
In the feminist world, there is a simplistic, black and white narrative of power and victimization. Men are in power, women are victims, and the idea is to turn the tables. Feminists have grown so accustomed to seeing the world in this way that redress of their imagined grievances includes implementing a retributive system whereby former “victims” wield the kind of power they see the patriarchy as having held. Hence human rights abuses against innocent men in the United States are seen as a kind of collective justice by our feminists.
It isn’t much of a stretch for a person who believes in feminist ideology to replace one class of victims/perpetrators with another, in Nyiramasuhuku’s case Hutus/Tutsis. Unfortunately, no matter what form this kind of thinking takes, innocent people are always victimized when it becomes prevalent in society.
On Friday, Rwandans received some measure of justice in the conviction and sentencing of Pauline Nyiramasuhuko; we can only look forward to the day that innocent male victims in the West receive some of the same.
