Speaking for Myself (49 page)
An idiosyncratic rendition of the national anthem greeted our arrival at Kigali airport, and as the red carpet was unrolled, I realized we were in for a full state visit, with Janet Kagame, the President of Rwanda’s wife, there to greet me with her welcoming delegation. As for the British delegation, it consisted of myself, Sue, and Ken McKenzie, our protection officer. Twenty minutes later the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the First Lady’s plane whispered to a halt. The door opened, and out poured fifty people, with Laura and Jenna bringing up the rear. Among the welcoming party was the British Ambassador, and all four of us squashed into his Range Rover, while helicopters patrolled overhead. Anything that moved had been commandeered by the American Secret Service, including fire engines. As for the ceremonial exit from the airport, we had no alternative but to sneak into the slipstream of the American convoy.
Our first stop was the Gisozi Genocide Memorial, where we laid a wreath before going into the museum itself. Set up with the help of the UK-based Aegis Trust, it presented the background and history of the civil war that had devastated the country and shamed the rest of the world. More than 800,000 Tutsis had been murdered and a lesser number of Hutus. In most conflicts children are absolved of responsibility and are treated with compassion, but in Rwanda that had not been the case. As with rape, infanticide had become a weapon of war. Tutsis were like cockroaches, the propaganda went, and to eradicate them, babies and toddlers had been held by their legs and their heads cracked against walls. It is hard to imagine a more hideous example of a crime against humanity, and Laura and I stood in this room and wept. Later we met some survivors — mothers and rape victims — who even ten years on found it hard to talk about the genocide.
When Laura left, I stayed an extra day, wearing my legal hat. The leaders of the genocide were facing trial at the International Criminal Court for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, but the cases handled there were only the tip of the iceberg. Back in Rwanda there was a huge backlog of cases waiting to be dealt with by the internal courts, but the system could not cope. Based on numbers alone, it would take two hundred years to process all of the cases currently before the courts. While those awaiting trial in Arusha were, rightly, receiving proper medical treatment for illnesses such as HIV/AIDS, their victims, mainly women who had been repeatedly and brutally raped, were dying before they could give evidence, unable to get similar treatment.
While the tribunal deals with the major perpetrators, Rwanda itself is pioneering a system for the “lesser players” known as Gacaca courts, based partly on traditional tribal methods of solving disputes and partly on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. I went to see one of these courts in operation, accompanied by Janet Kagame, a tall, imposing mother of four in her forties.
We watched as men accused of individual crimes of violence and theft were brought before a village gathering of what appeared to be many hundreds of people. My abiding impression was one of color: the dresses of the women, the forest of umbrellas used as sunshades, and the accused, who were dressed entirely in pink. Witnesses were called, the accused answered questions, and an appointed group of nine elders from the locality gave judgment. It all takes place within the course of a day. There is no capital punishment, but individuals who are found guilty can be sentenced to more then twenty years in prison. Rough justice indeed.
The idea behind the Gacaca courts is that the harm caused by the genocide was done to the community as a whole, and so the community as a whole should judge what happens to the perpetrators. For lawyers brought up on the common-law view of due process, there is some disquiet. Issues of bias and the rights of the accused come to mind. But what is the alternative? How do you heal a country after a civil war of such magnitude and horror? I’m not saying the Rwandans have the answer, but it was both instructive and fascinating to talk about what works and what doesn’t. One thing is clear to me: on such a grand scale, in a country as poor as this, the idea of trial by jury, or even trial by a tribunal of three judges, is not really a practical possibility. Yet to throw up your hands and not deal with these crimes at all is no answer either. Not to acknowledge them would leave festering resentment. At least giving these victims the opportunity to tell their stories is an acknowledgment of what they went through.
I can’t pretend that I know the answer, but part of the solution must be to go along with the grain of the society concerned, to go along with a system that is already embedded in its culture, rather than imposing one from the outside. This is not an uncontroversial view, however. Following my visit I addressed an international law college in Geneva, and it was clear from the response that not all the professors and students were willing to see this as a way forward. For some due process was all.
On my next visit to Rwanda, in March 2007, I opened a survivors’ center, provided by the British government and run by a foundation that provides not only practical advice but training for trauma counselors. Now that the country’s immediate needs for shelter and food are beginning to be met, there is a real need for psychological counseling.
The focus of that second visit was a seminar of women parliamentarians from across the world, but particularly from Africa. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the President of Liberia, is a shining example, a true role model. To take up the reins of a country so devastated by war, with no infrastructure to speak of, is a huge task at any age, let alone at sixty-eight. I had been invited to speak on violence against women, and listening to other delegates, I realized how far we had traveled in the UK. In the Sudan, for example, there isn’t even a word for rape.
As a result of the war, women outnumber men six to four in Rwanda. One positive consequence is that 49 percent of the MPs are now women, which inevitably changes the government’s priorities. In stark contrast, the Kenyan delegate was one of only six women MPs in Kenya’s parliament. She explained how she had been trying to get through a law on wife beating and rape for years, but the attitude in the Kenyan parliament, she explained, was no different from that of the male population as a whole. She quoted a male MP as saying, “It is well known that when an African woman says no, she means yes.”
The night of the official dinner was one of the most extraordinary of my life. Toward the end of the evening, the charismatic and legendary “Princess of Africa,” Yvonne Chaka Chaka, began to sing. Little encouragement was needed for the delegates to take to the floor, and soon even the two Presidents were dancing, while I was handed the microphone to join in with “No Woman No Cry.” And so, in spite of the difficulties that women in Africa face, this was a joyous celebration of life, a spontaneous display of warmhearted exuberance.
The retreat by the Cabinet office over that first visit to Rwanda in the summer of 2005 marked a turning point, not only in my relationship with Downing Street but also, to some extent, in my relationship with the press. From then on, I felt I was being heard on issues I was highlighting, issues that increasingly related to women.
Every year Breast Cancer Care focuses on a particular area of concern, and in October 2005 it produced a report showing that the organization was still not getting its message across in minority and ethnic communities. Within the Muslim community, in particular, the taboo against discussing women’s bodies made it hard to achieve the breast awareness that is so necessary for early diagnosis. With this in mind, Breast Cancer Care invited the Pakistani High Commissioner to share the findings. The problem was even greater in Pakistan, she said, and as a result, she invited me to visit her country early the following year, with the aim of highlighting the breast-awareness message. Breast Cancer Care paid my travel expenses, and the government agreed to pay Sue’s expenses so the charity didn’t lose money. The Foreign Office also agreed that I could continue on to Afghanistan. I had maintained contact with the Minister for Women there, and she was very keen for me to see for myself what was being achieved in the wake of years of Taliban rule.
As all women with a growing family can attest, the crunch comes when your children start to leave home — and let no one underestimate how hard that is. Just as they have to learn to live without you, so you have to learn to live without them. Painful though it is, there are advantages. When I had four children at home, I rarely went away for more than three days at a time, but I was now able to take longer trips. By the time of my visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Euan and Nicky were away at university. For me it was never a case of “out of sight, out of mind,” though, and I would speak to Leo and Kathryn daily, timing the calls so that they could tell me about their days. Even in the ten years since we’d arrived at Number 10, communications had totally changed. Now the kids knew that wherever I was in the world, I was always reachable by cell phone. There was something both surreal and grounding about finding myself in a truck negotiating a mountain pass or smearing antimosquito cream on my arms in equatorial Africa, and having Leo on the line asking where I’d put his goggles, or Kathryn asking if she could borrow a pair of my shoes and did I think black or brown mascara was better.
The two destinations of that trip in early 2006 couldn’t have been more different. Among the Pakistani middle class, gender is no barrier to high achievement, and the women I met included a general, three newly qualified fighter pilots, and the governor of the central bank. They lived in an entirely different world, however, from those who packed the refugee camps set up in the wake of the 2005 earthquake and those who lived in Kashmir, where the women I met were completely covered, so conservative is their culture.
Pakistan has the highest rate of breast cancer in Asia, due partly to environmental conditions but also because they don’t examine their breasts. In the developed world 80 percent of women going to the doctor with a nonbenign breast lump have a stage 1 or 2 tumor, for which there are many good treatments leading to a positive prognosis. In Pakistan, by contrast, 80 percent of the women presenting with a lump already have a grade 3 or 4 tumor. As a result, the prognosis is not good, and many can be offered only palliative care.
I talked to one woman sharing a bed with another woman, lying top to tail. She was crying. When I asked about her condition, she pulled aside her hospital gown and showed me a suppurating tumor on her left breast. She was forty-two with young children. She had only come to the hospital, the British doctor told me, once she could no longer ignore the pain. There was very little they could do for her. In the UK, he said, doctors would rarely see a tumor like this, as it would be unlikely to get that far without treatment.
I had been due to meet Madame Chirac in Kabul; however, Sue and I turned up at the airport to find that our flight had been canceled. Luckily a UN flight was going there early the following morning, and we were allowed to hitch a lift.
We drove in from the airport through a capital laid waste by war. The Minister for Women had arranged for me to visit the largest girls’ school in the city, where the age range went from five to twenty-one. There were eight thousand pupils, and in order to accommodate them all, the school functioned on a shift system. Many classrooms were filled with rubble, and there was no glass in the windows, yet classes continued, as they needed to make up for lost time. The school was desperately in need of a science lab, the head told me, as well as sports equipment. As for books, I saw girls reading dog-eared copies of low-grade Pakistani magazines and the Koran, and that was it. Accompanying us on the trip was a
Times
journalist, and on our return to England, enough money was raised to provide six new classrooms and a science lab. A Swiss charity called Smiling Children has since taken up the school’s cause and is providing training for the teachers.
I knew there was an issue in Afghanistan concerning the appointment of women judges to the Afghan supreme court. Chief Justice Shinwari was an old-fashioned conservative who was claiming that women did not possess the necessary qualifications in Sharia law. Taking the bull by the horns, I raised the issue with President Karzai. He wasn’t surprised, and later that afternoon a group of women MPs told me they’d been bending his ear about this very subject for some time. Afghanistan’s new constitution stipulates that one-third of MPs should be women, and they were already beginning to show their muscle. The men had wanted segregation in the debating chamber, but the women had simply refused, and all the MPs now sit alphabetically. Sitting literally beside the women MPs, the men were obliged to notice their existence. The women told me that they were determined to challenge the idea that no women were qualified to sit on the supreme court, and they did. I later learned that they had organized a campaign in the Afghan parliament, and when President Karzai renominated Shinwari for Chief Justice in 2006, the parliament refused to accept him, and a more liberal Chief Justice was appointed.
There is no doubt that President Karzai is under enormous pressure from the conservative elements within his government. One example of the concessions he is having to make on women’s issues is his own wife. Before the Taliban came to power, she had worked as a doctor, but now she is no longer allowed to work.
I was granted the rare privilege of meeting Mrs. Karzai. I knew from the President that she longed for a baby — an admission that astonished me at the time — and that he feared that she wasn’t able to have one. When I met her, I sensed a real aura of sadness. When I discussed the implications of living in a city so inherently dangerous, she told me that it didn’t affect her because she never went beyond the palace. She hadn’t even been permitted to join Madame Chirac at that morning’s opening of a children’s hospital. “It’s not safe,” she explained.
“But surely if it’s safe for the French President’s wife, it must be safe for you?”
