(A) Rwanda Lasting Wounds

March 2003 Vol. 15, No. 6 (A) RWANDA LASTING WOUNDS: Consequences of Genocide and War for Rwanda‘s Children I. Introduction............................................................................................................................................................................1 II. Recommendations.................................................................................................................................................................3 To the Rwandan Government: ..............................................................................................................................................3 To Rwanda‘s International Donors and UNICEF: ................................................................................................................4 III. Background..........................................................................................................................................................................5 IV. Children Attacked ...............................................................................................................................................................8 Children Targeted in the Genocide.......................................................................................................................................8 Children as Victims of Combat............................................................................................................................................12 Children as Tools of Violence..............................................................................................................................................13 V. —Justice Has Left Us“: No Longer Children, Accused of Genocide ..................................................................................18 Legal Responsibility of Children for Genocide...................................................................................................................19 Note on Ages ........................................................................................................................................................................24 Arbitrary Arrests ..................................................................................................................................................................25 Miscarriage of Justice: Detention and Mistreatment of Children below the Age of Criminal Responsibility ...............28 Justice Delayed: Criminal Cases Dragging on for Years ....................................................................................................30 Conditions of Detention ......................................................................................................................................................35 VI. Children without Parents: Victims of Abuse and Exploitation......................................................................................41 Children on Their Own during the Emergency: 1994 - 1997...........................................................................................41 Still Alone: Children Today ................................................................................................................................................44 Domestic Labor Exploitation ...............................................................................................................................................49 Denial of the Right to Education.........................................................................................................................................50 Denial of Property Rights ....................................................................................................................................................55 Rwandan Law and Practice .................................................................................................................................................58 VII. Children on the Streets....................................................................................................................................................62 Life on the Streets.................................................................................................................................................................62 Police Violence.....................................................................................................................................................................64 Sexual Violence against Street Girls....................................................................................................................................73 VIII. The Role of the International Community....................................................................................................................75 IX. International Legal Standards ...........................................................................................................................................77 Juvenile Justice .....................................................................................................................................................................77 Freedom from Abuse and Exploitation ...............................................................................................................................78 Acknowledgments ....................................................................................................................................................................80 I. INTRODUCTION Rwanda‘s children have seen the worst of humanity. Eight years after a group of politicians set in motion a genocide in an attempt to retain power, the devastating consequences for those who were left behind are unmistakable. Traditional protective structures for children including family networks, the judicial system, and the education system have been torn apart. As a result, children–many of whom survived unspeakable atrocities–are still the victims of systematic human rights violations day in and day out. In the face of the daunting challenge of rebuilding a society devastated by both war and poverty, protecting their rights has been sidelined. But this does not do Rwanda‘s children justice. The Rwandan government can and must do more to break the cycle of abuse and exploitation that affects tens of thousands of Rwandan children. Failure to protect their human rights is creating a dangerous legacy for them, and for the future of Rwanda. (Human Rights Watch uses the term —child“ to refer to all persons under the age of eighteen.) Those who planned and executed the genocide of 1994 violated children‘s rights on a massive scale. Not only did they rape, torture, and slaughter children along with adults in massacre after massacre around the country. Carrying their genocidal logic to its absurd conclusion, they even targeted children for killing–to exterminate the —big rats,“ they said, one must also kill the —little rats.“ Countless thousands of children were murdered in the genocide and war. Many of those who managed to escape death had feared for their own lives, surviving rape or torture, witnessing the killing of family members, hiding under corpses, or seeing children killing other children. Some of these children now say they do not care whether they live or die. Some five thousand people were arrested on charges they committed crimes of genocide before they reached the age of eighteen. Although they garner less sympathy, children who took part in the genocide are also victims. Their rights were first violated when adults recruited, manipulated, or incited them to participate in atrocities, and have been violated again by the Rwandan justice system. One boy who confessed and was convicted of genocide said he had been given a choice of killing his sister‘s children or being killed himself. He was sixteen years old at the time. Large numbers of these children were in fact arrested unjustly. Another boy, arrested at age thirteen after the genocide, confessed to having killed in order to escape torture, although he now maintains that his confession was false. He had just witnessed other detainees being tortured at the hands of Rwandan government soldiers. His father, among others, had died as a result of torture the night before. He and a thousand others who were younger than fourteen in 1994, and thus too young to be held criminally responsible under Rwandan law, were freed after being transferred from detention facilities to reeducation camps in 2000 and 2001. The government had been promising to release them since 1995. As many as four thousand children who were between fourteen and eighteen years old during the genocide continue to languish in overcrowded prisons. Their adolescence is gone. Despite repeated, hollow promises to give their cases priority within the over-burdened justice system, they have been subjected to the worst of a bad situation. Juvenile defendants have been tried at an even slower rate than adults. Few have enjoyed the right to adequate legal counsel and other due process protections guaranteed under Rwandan and international law. A few hundred, for whom prosecutors had not conducted investigations or made case files during their years of imprisonment, were provisionally released in 2001 after their neighbors cleared them of wrongdoing in public meetings. Ironically, now that the government has finally made some progress in dealing with the massive failures of the justice system–including organizing

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