As we have seen in chapter 2, one of the main consequences of sexual violence is to “feminize” the victim and “masculinize” the perpetrator. It is a powerfully performative act, which underscores the subjugation of the victim. In Burundi or in the Congo, it is even considered as a way to symbolically turn male victims into “women” and to reinforce the masculinity of the perpetrator. It is an instrument of power that structures or maintains relations between masculinities, and between masculinities and femininities, and that affirms the superiority of the perpetrator’s masculinity (Jones 2006, 459). None of the perpetrators I spoke with seemed to think that their masculinity could be questioned because of their participation in sexual violence against men, quite on the contrary. Even those who had participated in the rape of men reacted strongly to the idea that what they did might be perceived as an homosexual act by the rest of the society—thus suggesting that they understood the perpetration of sexual violence against men as a heterosexual and militaristic performance:
EF: But isn’t that considered as shameful for a man to do that to another man?
Serge: I cannot say that I am proud of what we did, but I am not ashamed, certainly not! I am not ashamed, they [the male victims] are the ones who should be ashamed. We did what we did because it was war. That was how it was done. We did our duty as combatants, that is all. (Serge 2010, interview)
While speaking with men who had either perpetrated or witnessed (without opposing it) sexual violence against men, my questions were often dismissed as a kind of naïveté, as if it was obvious that the conduct of war necessitated the perpetration of that kind of violence. Admittedly, my position as a Western researcher, living in a peaceful country, as well as my gender positioning—being female obviously largely discredited me with regard to military matters—partly explain this dismissal, but the “it is/was war, you know” argument regularly came back, in various forms. Of course, as we will see in a subsequent section, not all of the people I spoke with condoned the use of sexual violence, but many of them saw it as an unavoidable part of the necessary evil entailed by the conflict situation. More precisely, some interviews suggest that sexual torture was employed as part of a more general war strategy destined to extract confessions from prisoners, or to collect information from civilians:
[Talking about events that occurred during the Burundian civil war]
Joseph: Yes, some have beaten male prisoners and sometimes also civilians quite badly. Some have been badly tortured, and used, you know, like women.
EF: Like women?
Joseph: Yes, some of the men were drunk, they were excited and angry, and they had the prisoners pretend they were their wives. As if they were women.
EF: As if they were women…
Joseph: Yes, have them cook for them, clean their clothes, even sleep with them, things like that.
EF: And they were also tortured?
Joseph: Maybe not tortured that much really, but beaten, yes. Some died, others I am not sure, sometimes we had to move on and we could not carry them.
EF: What kind of beatings?
Joseph: First we would threaten them, and then if they did not cooperate or confess we would start punching them, try to hurt them by maybe stabbing them or cutting parts of them…
EF: Parts of them?
Joseph: Fingers sometimes, but more has already happened, like a hand, or private parts. You know this was war, there was no other way. Our security was at stake.
EF: So you have taken part in all this?
Joseph: I took part in some of the beatings, yes, may God forgive me. Sometimes we had no other choice you know, some prisoners did not want to cooperate. But I never participated in… in the other things. (Joseph 2013, interview)
This exchange suggests that sexual violence against men belongs to a broader strategy of brutalization that is not only sexual in nature. It is part of a continuum of violence, and many of the perpetrators I have met did not really differentiate between the perpetration of sexual violence against men, and other methods of torture, especially when applied to prisoners. It might of course be a discursive strategy attempting to diminish the existence and weight of such violence, but some testimonies still suggest that sexual brutalization is often inscribed within a larger project of power assertion. In some interviews, sexual violence was presented as a “last resort” method for punishing prisoners, justified by the war context:
[After hearing about the case of a prisoner who had a bottle inserted in his anus, among other brutalities]
EF: But why do that?
Richard: He had passed on important information about us to the army, so the men wanted to show him what happened to those spying on us. We can’t tolerate that kind of behavior. We had to set up an example. (Richard 2009, interview)
There is a real possibility that some perpetrators did not fully understand these forms of sexual torture as sexual violence. In many accounts, sexual violence against men was described as the most efficient and quickest way to inflict pain, to extract confessions, and so on. Of course, there are good reasons to assume that the fact that the violence was exerted on sexual organs largely explains its “efficiency”, but this never came up clearly during my interviews. Similarly, for some of the people who had witnessed—but said they had not participated in—such episodes of sexual violence against men, sexual torture in particular is part of torture more generally, which itself is part of war. These narratives were particularly present in my interviews with female combatants:
During war everybody is at risk, so it was us or them. If they were a threat because of their activities or because they were passing on information, we had to do something. That was not nice, what was done, but it was necessary. (Béatrice 2011, interview)
I didn’t like it, but we were told to keep our mouths shut. So we obeyed. If they did it, there was surely a good reason for that. (Violette 2011, interview)
A second explanation, given by a small number of interviewees, presents the perpetration of violence (against both men and women) as a kind of necessary evil, especially for “taming” young combatants or people forcefully recruited for auxiliary purposes. It is worth remembering here that forced enrolment is widely used in the Great Lakes region of Africa, and that the integration process of these new combatants or followers is rarely smooth. Déo (2011, interview), for instance, who used to be high in command in the Burundian rebellion, insisted that both men and women who had been kidnapped to be used as auxiliaries or as future combatants had “to be broken, to be tamed”, because they often did not want to perform the tasks they were required to do. The efficiency of such “integration” techniques is, however, doubtful, and is likely to generate more trauma than adherence., for instance, Dionise (2011, interview), a former combatant in the Burundian rebellion, did not openly recognize that he had been sexually abused, but used metaphors to speak about it. He explained, for instance, that when he was abducted and forcefully integrated within the ranks of the combatants, he was first treated with great brutality, beaten, tortured, but that he, as many other men, had to choose between the acceptance of “being treated as a nobody”, of “being used like a female slave”, or being killed. After this traumatizing period, he was apparently allowed to join the ranks of combatants. Dionise recognized that he had subsequently witnessed the perpetration of sexual violence on other men, especially civilians, but adamantly denied his own involvement in these acts. He has stayed two years in the rebellion, and now feels broken, and incapable to “resume a normal life”.