AIDS a Cruel Echo of ’94 Rwanda Genocide

In her heart, Eugenie Muhayimana didn’t become a mother at the birth of her son. Yearning only for death, she could find no shred of love for the babe born of nearly three months of daily gang rape in 1994 by a band of genocidal killers.

Her first revelation of motherhood came a little later: Janvier Turahirwa, the Hutu militiaman who had enslaved her, looked at the baby boy and said the child did not look Hutu. Kill it, he ordered her.

But maternal pity flooded her heart, and she hugged the child and kept him as her own beloved son.

Muhayimana’s ethnic Tutsi family was killed in the 1994 genocide that began 10 years ago. She survived, only to be kidnapped by Turahirwa, who later took her deep into the jungles of Zaire -- now called Congo -- when Rwanda’s genocidal regime fell that July. Two horrific years later, she escaped and walked back into Rwanda with the boy on her hip and another child of rape waiting to be born.

Coming home, she let her spirits rise a little, suffused with warm feelings of survival and hope. Except that the genocide was not over for her. The killers had left behind the seed of death: In 2000, she found out that she carried the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS.

“Even though I’d been taken hostage and continuously raped, I managed after all to get back to Rwanda with my two children. I felt I found a life and had my family,” she said. “When I found out I had HIV, I felt that all hopes of raising my children were gone. That’s when I felt it was the time of the genocide I’d seen before.”

The genocide left behind many Tutsi widows, thousands of whom are HIV-positive from the mass rapes of that terrible rampage. A 1996 U.N. report estimated that 250,000 to half a million women were raped in the genocide. The scale of the HIV problem among them, a kind of echo of the genocide, is not known because the majority of women are reluctant to be tested, according to Rwandan women’s advocacy groups.

And most of them, like Muhayimana, have yet to receive the antiretroviral medicine that could save them.

Women are dying without seeing justice done or the chance to testify against the Hutu killers who hunted Tutsi families, killing up to 1 million people in 100 days as the world stood by.

Survivors groups decry the lack of antiretroviral drugs for victims of the mass rape and sexual torture of 1994 as another international failing. In a cruel anomaly, HIV-positive prisoners accused of genocide before the Tanzania-based International Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda do get the lifesaving drugs.

“It’s an injustice. It’s ridiculous to see someone who raped and carried out massacres getting antiretroviral drugs first, before the victim herself, who will die and leave orphans,” said Aurea Kayiganwa, head of advocacy, justice and information at Avega, the Rwandan nongovernmental organization representing widows of the genocide.

A recent Amnesty International report said the mass rapes contributed to the spread of HIV in Rwanda but that the international response has been lukewarm.

Avega has arranged for 1,125 women to be tested, more than half of whom are HIV-positive. Only 22 are getting antiretroviral drugs. A big problem is providing the food and support to ensure that patients stay on the treatment.

“It’s very painful given the fact they were tested a long time ago and, up to now, most don’t have access to antiretroviral drugs,” Kayiganwa said. “Many of them have died, and they died without justice.”

The Amnesty International report cited policy advisors in Rwanda as estimating that 100,000 Rwandans now need antiretroviral drugs, with only 2,000 getting the medicine. But not all the recipients are genocide rape victims, because the women are not given special priority in the government AIDS-treatment programs.

Many of the widows are amputees, or have the deep scars from machete wounds on their necks or heads. And many live alone in rural villages, vulnerable and haunted by memories. Some, said Penina Abatoni, coordinator with the Rwandan Women’s Network, have received cruel letters from rapists in prison.

Abatoni said one gang-rape victim received a letter from one of her assailants taunting her about whether she could tell who the father of her child was.

Others have been subjected to pointed community pressure not to testify at genocide hearings against those who raped them or killed their husbands.

“When a woman is living alone, she feels uncomfortable about testifying. They’re always told, ‘What good will it do? It won’t bring back your husband.’ Some have been threatened,” Kayiganwa said.

The flesh clings tightly to the bones on Eugenie Muhayimana’s face, but her eyes are soft and bright.

When the genocide began on April 7, 1994, she was staying with friends, who fled their house and were killed. The friends’ servant, a Hutu, took over the house, joined a Hutu militia and kept her prisoner through the 100 days of the genocide.

She was gang-raped daily by him and his eight colleagues, and then he took her with him as he fled to Zaire.

“He would torture and harass me daily,” said Muhayimana, describing the years in Zaire. “He would say, ‘What should you pay me to let you live since your whole Tutsi family is dead?’ ” Muhayimana said. “He would rape me and go off to fight. He would come back. He would rape me again. I came to hate my whole life. The only thing I could feel each day was death.”

Despite the horror of her story, she conjures up optimism, love and hope, as if borrowing the essence of some passing beam of light. She faces an early death, but says she has found a kind of peace living in the “Village of Hope,” a settlement for the widows in the capital, Kigali, run by the Rwandan Women’s Network.

Asked what hope she has, she gazes at a distant fixed point. A smile dimples her cheeks.

“My first wish is to see my children grow, to see them well-fed, to see them go to school and to university,” she said. “My second wish is to get access to antiretroviral drugs. If I have got two years to live, that might push it out to four. If I have four left, that could push it to eight more years or even to 10, so I could see them as adults. Then I can die. I don’t want to leave them when they’re young.”

Muhayimana has not had her children tested to see whether they have the virus.

The village has a training center and is setting up a clinic that will support 500 women in the area and their families. Many are HIV-positive, but some refuse to talk about it or accept the result of the test.

Passing one such woman in the village, Abatoni, the coordinator, explained the reasoning: “She said to me, ‘I don’t have access to the drugs, so what do I gain by accepting this disease?’ ”

In another corner of Kigali, Anne Marie Bucyana cooks up a gruel each morning to help her digest the antiretroviral medicine that she received for the first time in mid-March.

Soon after the genocide began, her husband was shot dead by Hutu militias. A Hutu fighter tore her baby, Deborah, from her arms and smashed the child against the wall. Then he raped Bucyana, saying, “We don’t need snakes.”

Other Hutus gave her a sword and told her to kill her 2-year-old, Patrick. She refused. Some time later, a Hutu who had been a friend of her husband offered to save her. Instead, he took her to a Hutu militia and told them that he’d be back the next day “when you’ve cleaned up the rubbish” -- meaning that they should kill her and the child.

“It was as if he dumped me in the midst of all the killers,” she said.

The gang of about 16 kept her for six days, repeatedly raping her in front of the child. Then, she said, she was stripped of her sarong, given a hoe and told to dig her own grave.

A commander arrived, demanding to know why it had taken so long to kill her. By pleading in desperate pretense that she was Hutu, she won an overnight reprieve. An elderly woman whom she had sometimes helped in the past managed to rescue her and her child that night and hid them. Two years later, Bucyana found out that she was HIV-positive.

“Whenever I look in the mirror, I see AIDS. Whenever I get the signs of AIDS, I get flashbacks. It’s like a film replaying,” she said, referring to the genocide and rapes.

She hopes that antiretroviral drugs will give her a few more years, long enough to get her son on his feet. If she had even two more years, he’d be 14; otherwise, she’s afraid that he’ll end up on the street.

Her immunity is now extremely low and her hopes for the future so frail that her fondest dream is a fantasy. It centers on her husband, whom she thinks of often: his jokes, his hard work, his inventive ways to make money for the family.

“I remember him every day. Sometimes I tell my son, what if, one day, we saw him coming back? We’d tell him all the problems we have had.”

They have a name in Rwanda for survivors: “those who escaped the sword.”

“Since I discovered I had AIDS, I don’t count myself as a survivor,” Bucyana said. “I feel like the sword is still in me.”