KETTY NIVYABANDI
ON 25 APRIL 2020, exactly five years after Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would run for a third term, I attended the virtual screening of a new documentary. The Forgotten of the Great Lakes, directed and produced by Burundian filmmaker Joseph Bitamba, looks at the use of rape as a weapon of war, following survivors in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and then Burundi.
The Burundian survivors interviewed share one thing in common: they all lived in neighborhoods that actively protested against Nkurunziza’s third term in 2015 and were raped by security forces in retaliation. One woman’s testimony will haunt me forever. She does not wipe away her tears and her voice breaks as she describes how policemen and members of ruling party’s youth militia – the notorious Imbonerakure – burst into her home.
They gangraped her, in front of her children, before trying to force
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