Toronto Globe and Mail - August 1999

 

RAPE AT THE END OF THE WORLD


by Stephanie Nolen

Marie-Louise Niyirora braces her hand on a flimsy wooden table, straightens her shoulders and begins to run through her list.

Let's see: every day, the women have to go out to collect food and firewood alone. And the young men, hardened and aggressive because of the violence they have seen, can not work or go to school. They just sit around all day and drink home-brewed banana beer. It is a perilous situation.

Ms. Niyirora, 29, was a secretary before she left her hometown in Burundi. Now, she works as a sexual violence counselor in Mtabila, the refugee camp in Kigoma, Tanzania, where she lives.

She finishes her tally of the reasons for the ravages of rape and sexual exploitation in the camp, sits back and says: "When you live along in the camp, (men) despise you and you haven't any protection."

Welcome to the end of the world. Mtabila is dusty, backing camp that sprawls along low hills 65 kilometers from Tanzania's border with Burundi. It is home to 86,000 Burundian refugees, who live hunched in tiny mud shelters. This is not Kosovo and you have not seen this people on your television screen. But they have been here living on 15 cents a day, for years.

Civil conflict has simmered in Burundi since 1994, when 300,000 people fled; some were repatriated, but the most recent flare- up of fighting has sent new columns of people over the border into the poor but safe harbour of Tanzania.

These are desperate people. They are filthy. They subsist on 975 calories a day in the form of maize meal and lentils provided by the World Food Program. Their clothes are tattered and their possessions consist of a few bowls or a jerry can that occupies pride of place on their dirt floor. They are dispirited and hard-faced, and they have little to do each day except sit beneath the bleaching sun and think about going home.

Most of the adults are women -their husbands have gone, some as rebels, others as conscripts, hostages or casualties -and to compound their already desperate plight, they are sexual prey for the men who remain.

Suzanne Butoyi was hoeing potatoes when the man crept up and grabbed her from behind. It was early morning and she was working in the little plot where she grows vegetables to supplement rations for her husband and daughter.

"I felt something on my legs," she said, her low flat voice leeching the lilt out of Kirundi. "I collapsed, and he grabbed me at the neck, and I couldn't cry, I couldn't cry, because he was choking me. He had a kind of metal tool and he forced it into my mouth and I was bleeding. And then he raped me.

When he had finished and left her, Mrs. Butoyi. 39, lay in the dirt and yelled for help through the blood that welled in her mouth. No one heard her, and no one came, she said, so she began to crawl back toward her hut. She feared what her husband would say if she told him she had been raped. But covered in blood, she saw no way to hide the truth. Together, they told the zone leader in their block of the camp. He assembled a party to look for the man who raped her, and led her out to try to identify him. Quite soon, she recognized him; he was standing in front of his hut, a fellow refugee. "He saw me with the men, and he looked so frightened," Mrs. Butoyi says. "And I felt so angry, to see him."

The man was taken into custody at the camp police station. But he was released the next morning, because the police said they did not have witnesses and so could not proceed. Mrs. Butoyi believes he bribed them. Now he lives a few hundred metres from her. "I saw him just this morning."

Mrs. Butoyi is a small, slight woman with tiny child's feet and a wide, twisting mouth. Her only clothes are a yellow T-shirt and a stained, turquoise and yellow wrap skirt. She came to the camp 15 months ago. It was her second journey into "refuge"; she spent 1996 here as well. Her mother and father were killed by soldiers last year, and so were two of her children (four more died of disease and malnutrition). This time, she and her husband and her last surviving child fled naked in the night when they heard the guns of the approaching army. They ran for three days and nights from the " village of Giharo into Tanzania.

She knew nothing of rape, she said, until it happened to her. "It's the first time in my life to see something like this, to hear of something like this," she said, leaning forward to rest her head on her arms. "Maybe it's the aftermath of the war and the other things we've seen."

It's enough to make Millicent Obaso weep. An elegantly ferocious Kenyan, Mama Obaso, as she is known, is the reproductive health coordinator for the Red Cross in the region. For 30 years, she has done fairly thankless work from Swaziland to Sudan, trying to give women control over their bodies. In that time, she has seen a revolution in family planning, and the beginning of the turning of the tide in AIDS prevention. But rape? "This you have wherever you have refugees." And refugees, of course, are one of the few reliable exports in Central Africa.

There is a terrible cycle in the camps, says Mama Obaso. "The men want children, they want children to replace their dead relatives. But many men have lost their wives, and they don't have the money to pay the bride price to marry again. Nor do young, single men. So they rape a girl. And the victim's family, anxious to cover the shame, forces her to marry the man who has raped her. They turn it into a positive thing."

Over and over again, in Mtabila and the eight other camps that are home to more than 300,000 Rwandans, Burundians and Congolese in Tanzania, she sees the same thing. "In mass movements and settlements far away from home, there are no regular authorities. Laws and regulations have broken down and no one feels accountable, to their family or community. The people are frustrated in the camps.

"In African society, the man is the powerful person who makes decisions, who has lands, who has means. If he has no money, at least he has cows. He has the final word on everything. Now, men are in the same position as women. The man feels disarmed, and comes out aggressive. And there is anger. A lot of these conflicts are ethnic, and people think about revenge."

Indeed, many refugee women are raped by soldiers and guerrillas during their exodus. Often, they are forced to have sex by men at the makeshift checkpoints, by men who control the boats or carts on which they need to travel, or who offer to "protect" them from other predators. "Their main goal is to get to Tanzania," says Mama Obaso, surveying the throng of women lined up at the water spout. "They will subject themselves to anything that will allow them to come here. With the rape threat comes a death threat, and they look at themselves and they look at their children and they think, 'If I don't comply, I may not be here and then what will happen?'"

Every woman in Mtabila knows this story: Three months ago, as many as 50 refugee women were raped one afternoon about half an hour from the camp. Thirty-seven of them have made formal statements to police. The women, ranging in age from their early teens to their mid-50s, were cutting grass on a hillside to thatch a new roof for a camp church. A party of local Tanzanian men, as many as 100 of them, were in the area, searching for a teacher who had gone missing. The men apparently blamed refugees for his disappearance (he was later found strangled) and, suddenly, set upon the group of women. A schoolgirl was raped by five men; a pregnant woman by 14.

It is difficult to get camp officials to talk, about the incident on the record, because the perpetrators were Tanzanians. Refugee workers fear that, if the Tanzanian government is embarrassed, it might forcibly repatriate refugees in retaliation. But the women of the camp know the story, and so do the sexual assault crisis workers who have been counselling the survivors. So far, seven men are in custody for the attack.

When the afternoon sun begins to sink in Mtabila, the women get ready for their daily trip to the forest. They go to collect firewood to fuel their small cooking pits. They go at night when the 15-kilometre trek is cooler. They go in groups, in the hope it may keep them safer: At least seven women from the camps in this area have been raped while collecting wood in the past three months. Nonetheless, it is the women who go, not their husbands or their brothers. Marianne Ngendahoruri, 25,knows five of the women attacked in the mass rape; she has heard about the other rapes.

So why does she still go to the forest? "Here in Africa, the activities are divided. And collecting firewood is for women."

Mama Obaso takes comfort in a few things: The rape victims have somewhere ~ to go. The United Nations Population Fund, supplies emergency contraception (the ~ "morning-after pill"), and testing and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases (except HIV; the UN High Commissioner for Refugees refuses to administer AIDS testing unless pre- and post-test counselling is available, and since there is no money for that, there are no tests, even though AIDS is endemic in the region.

There are counsellors such as Ms. Niyirora. If the victim is married, her husband is also encouraged to attend counselling, in the hope that he will not blame his wife for the rape and drive her from the home.

Tanzania also recently passed tough new legislation against rape, with a minimum 1 sentence of 30 years in jail and a maximum : of life imprisonment. But Kiza Pondamali, a Congolese refugee working as a women's officer in Lugufu camp, 150 kilometers from Mtabila, reckons that only 15 per cent , of rape survivors take legal action.

"We're not in the habit of announcing such things," she says softly. "It's shame,it's dirty. You were negligent or cheap." Mrs. Pondamali, 38, came home from her nursing job in Baraka one day last August to find her house deserted. "It was a nice day, like this one, and you could hear the sound of guns," she recalls. She found her three daughters along the road; they travelled on together to the jungle on the Congolese side of Lake Tanganyika. With 1,000 other people, they hid in the forest for four months, foraging for food, until they could buy and plead passage in an old boat across the lake to the Tanzanian port of Kbirisi.

The holes in her ears where once she wore earrings, she now keeps open with splinters of wood. She says she knew what to expect when they finally made it to the camp in January, because she lived here from 1995 to 1997, the last time the war flared up in her region of Congo. But this time, she was a woman alone, because her husband had disappeared.

"When a woman has nothing, maybe just the casserole dish on her head, then a man can say to her, 'If I pay for you to pass along this road, or take this boat, then you must lie with me.' And when she gets to the camp, he can say, 'If I build this house for you, you must be as my wife.' The women have no other choice."

As a nurse, she says she knew about disease and would lay with no man to get a house. "I built a little, low hut myself and I said, we will live in this, until I can pay someone to build a better house."

She is not a woman alone any more. While doling out porridge to newly arrived refugees in a Red Cross tent two months ago, she placed a bowl in the hands of an emaciated man she then realized was her husband, Mtambala. He has since built her a better house. And she uses the pittance she earns as a counsellor to pay for firewood.

Like all refugees, she dreams of going home. But there are some things she knows she will not be able to leave behind in the camps. " La viol, c'est de violence," says Mrs. Pondamali. Rape, it comes from violence.

...

Focus reporter Stephanie Nolen travelled to western Tanzania this month with the United Nations Population Fund


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