In April 1994, Butare, now Huye District, saw unfathomable mass murders, rapes, and other atrocities committed against the Tutsi. In one family, however, a woman, her son, and her daughter-in-law had superior responsibility in all of it.
In 1995, the woman, Rwandan genocide convict Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, told the BBC in an interview that she didn’t take part in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. She had fled to Zaire, now DRC, when the RPF took power.
“I couldn’t even kill a chicken. If there is a person who says that a woman, a mother, could have killed, I’ll tell you truly then I am ready to confront that person,” she told the media.
But Nyiramasuhuko was not being accused of merely slaughtering a chicken. She had ordered the then-governor of Butare to help organise the killings, and when he refused, he was sacked and then killed.
Nyiramasuhuko, who was then the Minister of Gender, called for militia from the capital, Kigali, to come to her home region to kill the Tutsi population. She went there herself to make sure the “work”, as the genocidal government called it, was being properly done.
The case Prosecutor v. Nyiramasuhuko et al., also known as ‘The Butare Case’ also had Nyiramasuhuko’s son, Arsène Shalom Ntahobali as a co-accused.
The family was back in the news when Béatrice Munyenyezi, Ntahobali’s wife was extradited by the US in 2021. She faces seven counts of genocide.
Although Nyiramasuhuko’s family was not the only one to simultaneously take part in the Genocide, they are responsible for hundreds of thousands of murders, rapes, and other atrocities altogether. Here is how:
While the Genocide started on April 7, mass killings in Butare didn’t start until April 21st. The then governor Jean-Baptist Habyalimana who was Tutsi himself had resisted inciting massacres of the Tutsi population.
On April 8, 1994, Théodore Sindikubwabo, the then speaker of parliament announced the formation of an interim government, of which extremism against the Tutsi was the sole criterion to make it to the cabinet.
Sindikubwabo had with the support of the ‘Akazu’, an inner circle of anti-Tutsi extremists, assumed the presidency following the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana whose plane was shot down on the evening of April 6.
Sindikubwabo particularly worked closely with Theoneste Bagosora, then a powerful permanent secretary of the ministry of defence to select the cabinet line-up.
Bagosora was the convener of the meeting that established the government, according to available records. The meeting took place at the former Hotel Diplomate, which was where the current Kigali Serena Hotel is built.
This set in motion a genocide machine, where each member of the cabinet would be evaluated on the number of Tutsi killed in one’s particular area of birth than services offered to Rwandans.
In a demonstration that he was leading by example, Sindikubwabo immediately travelled to his birthplace of Butare, currently part of Southern Province, to “launch” the Genocide.
The same day he went to Butare is when governor Habyarimana, who was once a national university lecturer in the area, was dismissed after it was discussed that he could resist inciting the massacres since he was a Tutsi himself.
Habyarimana’s sacking was announced on Radio Rwanda, and he was killed a few days later. His wife and two daughters were also killed in late June.
He was replaced by Sylvain Nsabimana, who was also replaced after two months by a Colonel, Alphonse Nteziryayo. Both former governors were co-accused in the Butare trial.
Nyiramasuhuko
Furious by Butare’s revolt to start massacres on Habyalimana’s tenure as governor, the genocidal interim government dispatched Nyiramasuhuko, the national minister of family and women’s affairs, from Kigali on a mission to start the massacre of the Tutsi population.
She was Butare’s darling after all, known to have come from a poor family to become one of the most powerful women in the country.
When she arrived in Butare, cars with loudspeakers drove around the streets announcing that the Red Cross had set up a camp in a stadium to provide food and shelter to the population.
It turned out it was an Interahamwe trap to bring together thousands of Tutsis so that they can be easily killed.
Nyiramasuhuko personally supervised the killings at the stadium and encouraged the participation of the Interahamwe. She also ordered that women be raped before being killed.
The former minister also went to an encampment where a group of Interahamwe were holding prisoner about 70 Tutsi women and young girls and gave an order to the Interahamwe to rape them before dousing them with petrol and burning them to death.
Several shocking testimonies of women being raped, some penetrated with spears, gun barrels, bottles, machetes, and other objects, or their sexual organs mutilated with machetes, boiling water and acid have been told. Some witnesses say women’s breasts were also cut off.
Some witnesses said that as the militia, gendarmes, and military men did this, they would claim they were putting into action what Nyiramasuhuko had ordered them to do. In some instances, she gave boxes of condoms to the genocidaires.
Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the Genocide, and one study reported that Butare alone had more than 30,000 of rape survivors.
Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi who had fled from Gikongoro, Kigali, and Gitarama and those who resided in Butare were killed during the Genocide.
Arsene Shalom Ntahobali
As Nyiramasuhuko ordered and supervised the atrocities, she was also working closely with her son Arsene Shalom Ntahobali, who had dropped out of the university to become the most important Interahamwe leader in Butare.
Ntahobali was known especially for rapes, and after he was done with a victim, he would offer her up to be gang raped by the Interahamwe, and sometimes killed. Sometimes he would first hit his victims with a machete, a hammer, or other traditional weapons.
Tutsi women and girls mainly saw him in two instances; when he was raping them or other people.
He was also seen on several occasions wearing grenades on his belt, sometimes hammers, and a machete with blood in his hand.
In late May of 1994, some witnesses saw Ntahobali promising a woman who had gone to school with his mother the safety of her and her three children if she accepted that her 12-year-old daughter becomes Ntahobali’s wife.
The woman said that would not happen because her daughter was only a child. The family was a few moments later abducted with other refugees to be killed in a forest after the woman was stripped of a kitenge wrap she was wearing. Many would be stripped before or after being killed.
Ntahobali and Nyiramasuhuko were together on several occasions, driving Tutsi to murder destinations. They ordered murders, and often called for brutality, telling the militia they were not “working” because some refugees were still alive.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found Ntahobali responsible as a principal perpetrator, for ordering genocide through the underlying act of killing, among others.
Ntahobali and Nyiramasuhuko got their life sentences reduced to 47 years on appeal, in the Butare trial that lasted 10 years.
The ICTR convicted each of the accused variously for genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement of genocide, the crimes against humanity of extermination, persecution and rape, and the war crimes of violence to life and outrages upon personal dignity.
Munyenyezi
Just like her husband and mother-in-law, witnesses say Munyenyezi would also wear military fatigue and had a gun. She had a nickname, “commando”.
A witness told the court in 2022 that she saw Nyiramasuhuko ordering the Interahamwe to rape five female university students during the Genocide.
People in Butare testified that Munyenyezi staffed a roadblock near the Hotel Ihuriro, Rwanda, where she personally inspected IDs and decided who would pass and who would be selected for inevitable death. Some victims were assaulted at the roadblock; others were led to a nearby forest where they were killed.
She was Interahamwe herself, and a core member of the then-ruling party National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND).
According to the US Immigration and Customs enforcement, Munyenyezi entered the country in March 1998 after making false statements to obtain status; she adjusted her status to lawful permanent resident on January 19, 2001, and on July 18, 2003, became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
In 2013, Munyenyezi was found guilty of two counts of Unlawful Procurement of Citizenship or Naturalization, based on false statements on her immigration forms about her membership in the MRND and the Interahamwe. She was later sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, and in 2021, she was deported and arrested by Rwandan authorities immediately.
Her father-in-law, Nyiramasuhuko’s husband Marice Ntahobali, who was a minister before being appointed rector of the National University in 1989, was accused of participating in the Genocide. However, in 2018, Rwandan Prosecution dropped all charges against him for insufficient evidence.