Authority to Tell - ICTR Contributions to Collective Memory of Sexual Violence in the Rwandan Genocide

After conflict and mass atrocity, stories of the past take center stage. Whose voices are heard, whose sufferings forgotten? Increasingly, battles over history are fought in court, where victims seek recognition for past injustice. But how are narratives of the past, or what Maurice Halbwachs coined collective memory shaped, in a world where legal bodies increasingly exert a power ‘to tell’? What role can international legal bodies play as storytellers? In 1994, after one of the most solemn examples of mass atrocity since Holocaust, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda opened a groundbreaking space for victims of sexual violence to tell their stories. How it contributed to make these heard is the focus of this thesis, which tackles the specific struggle of women in the struggle of memory against forgetting. Through empirically assessing ICTR’s rape prosecution as well as on-ground Rwandan lieux de mémoire, the project adds to existing literature on war and memory in several ways: First, it investigates a still fairly unexplored gendered aspect of memory, asking what the ICTR offers remembrance of wartime rape. Second, it unravels information on actors and events behind the Tribunal’s memory construction, exploring historical impetuses affecting its outcomes. Lastly, it considers ICTR contributions from the perspective of Rwandan national memory. Applying an historian’s advantage of comprehensiveness, the thesis approaches its enquiry with interdisciplinary backing, triangulating primary sources – written, oral and iconographic – with interviews and secondary literature. Its findings reveal essential aspects of law’s storytelling potential. ICTR delivered lasting jurisprudence on sexual violence, as well as making space for unforeseen accounts of its occurrence. Yet, its findings also show how international legal memory construction is intrinsically bound by the political context in which it operates, and how stories told, inherently outcomes of a legal method, convey highly selective and fragmented narratives of the past. Finally, this thesis finds that ICTR contributions have little bearing in the Rwandan memory landscape, where they compete against a post-conflict state fixated on its own historical narrative. Not only a potent reminder of Halbwachs’ notion that the past is constructed through the needs of the present, this thesis illustrates how international courts, albeit endowed with a unique authority to tell, has a hard time safeguarding the breakthrough of individual victim groups’ narratives in aftermaths of war