'SOMETIMES I WISH THEY HAD KILLED ME'

AN 11-YEAR-OLD MASSACRE STILL TAKES ITS TOLL ON RWANDA'S WOMEN

By Don Terry

Published May 22, 2005

Chicago Tribune Magazine

YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR if you pass the Parliament building on the hill, its facade scarred by bullets from a decade ago, and the nightmares from last night.

Turn around, get off the paved highway and take the red-clay side street with no name as you bump and rattle through a neighborhood called Remera near the international airport in Kigali, the capital of the central African nation of Rwanda.

Remember, it is March, the rainy season. Watch out for that crater filled with brown water that looks deep enough to swallow your Toyota. Swerve around that man with a dangling chicken in each hand, their necks just wrung at the market. Pass the picked-over bones of a dead truck; then make a right and drive through the big rusty gates.

Here you find a peaceful place, a courtyard of packed dirt and hope and, on this morning, the petite physician from Chicago the locals call Dr. Mardge.

She is Mardge Hillary Cohen, a trailblazer in treating women with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This is her fourth trip to the haunted hills of Rwanda in less than a year. A killer from out of the past is on the loose.

In the spring of 1994, as most of the world, including the United States, watched, "never again" happened again. More than 800,000 men, women and children in Rwanda were bludgeoned, stabbed, blown up, burned alive, shot, strangled, drowned and hacked to death in 100 days of premeditated madness.

The Hutu majority did its best to wipe from the face of the green hills and mist-shrouded valleys the Tutsi minority and any Hutus who opposed the mass murder. About 10 percent of the nation's 8 million people were killed.

The evil efficiency of the Hutu government and its militias is well-known. What is not as well-known is that tens of thousands of women and girls were raped as part of the horror. Some estimates put the number at 250,000 or more.

Now, 11 years later, many of the women who survived are dying of AIDS. For them, the genocide continues, murder on the installment plan. The 53-year-old Cohen has been going back and forth from Chicago to Kigali to set up an HIV clinic and a research project that will track the disease in women tormented by the restless ghosts of genocide. "We deserted this country once," Cohen says. "We shouldn't do it again."

The courtyard lies behind a high wall topped with homemade concertina wire-broken pieces of green and blue bottles jutting into the air, shiny and sharp like shark's teeth. Inside is a patch of purple flowers, a shed piled high with sacks of food, narrow wooden benches still damp from last night's rain and a roof of white clouds drifting through the African sky.

It is the "waiting room" of the small clinic with the big ambitions. This morning is no different than most: The courtyard fills up fast with the hungry and the sick.

A tall, graceful woman, her Afro cut short and her shoulders cloaked in a green shawl, strides in. She is Francine M., and her story is one of the thousands of reasons Cohen makes the 20-hour journey from Chicago.

At age 36, Francine lives on less than a dollar a day, a typical existence for many Rwandans. Abandoned and alone, she is caring for her two young sons and two teenaged orphan girls. That, too, is typical. It seems everyone in Rwanda, whether they can afford it or not-and most cannot-has taken in children orphaned by genocide or AIDS. As much as 10 percent of the country is infected. Francine's girls were the daughters of neighbors who died in the genocide. Much of Francine's family also perished.

Three months' pregnant at the time, she witnessed the murder of her first husband and two of her sons. Her husband was tortured and forced to dig his own grave. Her little boys were dragged off, pleading with their killers to let them die with Mommy.

Mommy wasn't killed, at least not then. She was taken to a warehouse by Hutu militiamen and, along with dozens of other women, repeatedly raped. She watched her captors get drunk on beer and sometimes come to blows over who would rape the prettiest prisoners first.

The men would come in after a day of "work"-their euphemism for acts of genocide. They'd leave their weapons at the door and pick out a woman. "After killing our husbands," she says, "they came to reward themselves with us. Rape was the last activity of the day."

Francine believes this is when she was infected with HIV, when her death sentence began. Her second husband, who knew about her ordeal, abandoned her when she tested positive for the virus years later. For three years after she was freed, she hardly said a word. "Sometimes," she says, "I wish they had killed me."

IN LATE 2003 the members of Avega, an association of women widowed in the 100 days of mass murder, decided they would not submit quietly to a slow death. They gave the world a second chance to act, to do more than watch people die. They put out an international SOS for doctors, nurses and anyone else with expertise in fighting the AIDS virus to come help the dying women of Rwanda.

Mardge Cohen answered the call. She flew to Africa last year, the 10th anniversary of the genocide, to see what she could do. Along with several other American women doctors and activists, Cohen sat down with the Avega widows and listened to their stories.

They described the poverty and hunger that kills their babies before they can crawl. They told her about overcrowded hospitals and absent husbands. And they talked about their anger and fear over dying without access to medicine, while the men who raped them and killed their loved ones received AIDS treatment in prison.

Continue>  page 2

Chicago Friends of WE-ACTx:

Pooling our resources to support HIV+ women in Rwanda

DR. MARDGE COHEN has started a donor-advised fund at the Crossroads Fund to support HIV+ women in Rwanda.  To contribute to Chicago Friends of WE-ACTx, click here.