Female Genocide & Pauline Nyiramasuhuko

From BBC News:

Judges at the UN-backed court for Rwanda is to hand down a verdict for the only woman to be charged with genocide before an international court.

Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, 65, was a government minister in 1994 in Rwanda when 800,000 people - mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group - were killed.

Along with four former local officials and her own son, she is accused of organising massacres as well as the rape of women and girls.

She denies all the charges.

Mrs Nyiramasuhuko was Rwanda's minister for family and women's development at the time of the genocide.

The prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) accuses her of taking part in the government decision to create militias throughout the country. Their mission was to wipe out the Tutsi population as fast as possible.

Mrs Nyiramasuhuko is accused of ordering and assisting in the massacres in her home district of Butare in southern Rwanda. Along with her son, who was in his early 20s at the time, she is also accused of organising the kidnap and rape of Tutsi women and girls.

Women's Role In Holocaust

From the New York Times:

Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the atrocities perpetrated by a few brutal women have always stood out, like aberrations of nature.

There were notorious camp guards like Ilse Koch and Irma Grese. And lesser known killers like Erna Petri, the wife of an SS officer and a mother who was convicted of shooting to death six Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland; or Johanna Altvater Zelle, a German secretary accused of child murder in the Volodymyr-Volynskyy ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

The Nazi killing machine was undoubtedly a male-dominated affair. But according to new research, the participation of German women in the genocide, as perpetrators, accomplices or passive witnesses, was far greater than previously thought.

The researcher, Wendy Lower, an American historian now living in Munich, has drawn attention to the number of seemingly ordinary German women who willingly went out to the Nazi-occupied eastern territories as part of the war effort, to areas where genocide was openly occurring.

“Thousands would be a conservative estimate,” Ms. Lower said in an interview in Jerusalem last week.

While most did not bloody their own hands, the acts of those who did seemed all the more perverse because they operated outside the concentration camp system, on their own initiative.

Ms. Lower’s findings shed new light on the Holocaust from a gender perspective, according to experts, and have further underlined the importance of the role of the lower echelons in the Nazi killing apparatus.

Rwanda: Women Held Over Genocide

From AllAfrica:

Twenty seven women who were accused of taking part in the 1994 genocide were thrown into prison on Sunday by the Rwandan traditional court, gacaca, in the south-western Rwanda, it was learned from a local source on Thursday.

The women, who appeared before Kagano gacaca court, in Nyamasheke district, received sentences ranging from 19 to 30 years in prison, Hirondelle News Agency was told by a member of Rwandan association for the defence of human rights.

They were found guilty of having stoned to death several Tutsis who had sought refuge in the parish church of Kagano, added the source, who was speaking over the phone from Nyamasheke.

According to the Rwandan newspaper, The New Times, the court concluded that the women also burned Tutsi houses and looted their goods.

After the verdict, they were taken to the central prison of Cyangugu, in the same district, adds the newspaper.

On August 12, another woman, Elisa Mukanyangezi, 70, was sentenced to life in prison by a gacaca court of Huye district (southern Rwanda) after being found guilty of participation in the 1994 genocide.

Inspired by traditional assemblies during which village wise men, while sitting on the grass (gacaca in Kinyarwanda), settled disagreements, the gacaca courts are charged to try the alleged authors of the 1994 genocide, except for the "planners" at the national level.

They are not presided by professional magistrates but by "just" people elected from among the community.

Committed by Hutu extremists, the 1994 genocide resulted, according to the U.N. in nearly 800 000 people killed, primarily Tutsis.