Letter from Rwanda: Gacaca Begins
Scott Strauss, Kigali, June 26, 2002
(University of California, Berkeley; Scott Strauss was resident in Rwanda
2001-2002)
The place where Rwanda would confront its genocide was a dirt patch near the intersection of two unpaved roads. A rudimentary wooden
frame was erected, and white plastic tarps hung over the top. Benches were hauled in and arranged in rows, followed by a table and a megaphone. In an hour, the dirt patch had been transformed into a makeshift meeting hall. Rwandans from the local community soon found seats, as did 19 recently-elected judges, each with a pink notebook and ballpoint pen, ready to write. The judges were dressed for the occasion, the women in colorful African-print dresses and the men in plain blazers. This was the first day of Gacaca, a long-awaited, remodeled community-based justice system designed to accomplish what Rwanda's ordinary justice system could not: trying the country's huge numbers of alleged genocidaires within a reasonable time frame.After five years of trials, only approximately 5,500 Rwandans out of more than 105,000 prisoners have been tried. The trials have often been long, sterile, and vulnerable to corruption. Defendants have had little legal representation; witnesses have been intimidated; and penalties have been arbitrarily assigned.
In short, Rwanda's justice system has proven deeply unsatisfying, to survivors and alleged perpetrators alike. The reasons for the outcome are many: from Rwanda's post-genocide destroyed justice system, to the problems of prosecuting a complex, mass-perpetrated mass crime, to limited resources for and training of police inspectors, judges, and lawyers. Gacaca was designed as a remedy.
Historically, Gacaca has entailed community members meeting to resolve small-scale conflicts, such as land or grazing disputes. The new Gacaca is based on this core idea--that local communities will try and punish the accused (except the worst offenders who will be tried in formal courts) where the crimes were committed. The goals are to induce reconciliation, to establish the truth, and to end a culture of impunity that enabled the genocide--in addition to processing the prisoner backlog. But today's Gacaca is appreciably different from its traditional cousin. The current jurisdictions will handle far more serious crimes and do so on a much larger scale-last year, a quarter of a million "Inyangamugayo" (people with integrity) were elected as judges. But above all, traditional Gacaca was informal and local, but today's is structured by the state from the top down.
In the months before Gacaca, Rwanda witnessed a slow, but steady drumbeat towards its eventuality. Confessions were encouraged in the prisons (prisoners who accept their crimes will be the first to be tried, which is an incentive to confess but risks further delays for the innocent who do not confess). A national competition for the best song promoting Gacaca was held (and won by a prison group from Butare, in southern Rwanda). Teams of Rwandans were dispatched to communities to train the elected judges--training that lasted in total for a month and a half but only for six days for many individual judges. The government passed some final laws, notably concerning community service for those found guilty.
Survivor groups (and individual survivors) raised objections--in some cases, claiming that elected judges themselves were genocidaires-and expressed anger and anxiety that those who committed heinous crimes against them and their families would soon be out of prison. Others worried that the community courts would rekindle old trauma. Human rights groups raised questions about witness intimidation and lack of defendants' rights. Local observers were selected to monitor the trials.
Nonetheless, despite all these preparations, an air of disbelief and skepticism pervaded; few believed Gacaca was imminent-too much was entailed and too much was at stake. So the actual kickoff-albeit as part of a pilot program of one community (a sector) in each of Rwanda's 12 provinces before the process is extended to the entire country-came as something of a surprise. But on June 18, President Paul Kagame inaugurated the jurisdictions in parliament, with a stern speech outlining Gacaca's objectives and warning against including other, incomparable alleged crimes. Those would be handled elsewhere, he said; Gacaca was for the genocide and the related massacres.
The community courts began the following day. The local leader, the Cellule Coordinator, was onsite, organizing the tarp hanging, the bench placement, and the greeting of dignitaries. The mayor arrived, as did politicians from Kigali--this particular location was Kanombe, a 30-minute drive from the city center and near where former President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down in 1994, the event that triggered the genocide. Foreign journalists, researchers, and a handful of diplomats were in attendance, as were dozens of Rwandan observers, police, and community-based militia known as the Local Defence Force: at this particular location, the number of observers seemed greater than the number of Gacaca participants from the local community.
The meeting proceeded through an agenda, listing the objectives--to find the truth, to hasten the court backlog, to reunite Rwandans---and discussed the next step--identifying those in the community before the genocide and those killed in it. The questions were limited, but concrete. When to meet next? Saturday was ruled out because the community was home to many Seventh Day Adventists. Wednesday was chosen. But what if employers did not permit their employees to attend during the workweek? Where would the group meet if it rained? What if a soldier had apprehended a killer, but that soldier had subsequently been deployed elsewhere? How will the killer be identified? A brother had been lost in 1992, would that be part of Gacaca? Yes, answered the head local judge, Gacaca concerned crimes committed between October 1, 1990 and December 31, 1994. The judge in turn implored members of the community to speak the truth; those who did not, he said, could face imprisonment for up to three years.
Gacaca is often called a gigantic social experiment: ordinary, often poor, and poorly-educated Rwandans will judge their neighbors who had turned killers in one of last century's worst mass crimes. What is said less often is that this experiment comes at a time when the genocide is less and less a part of everyday life in Rwanda. To be sure, daily reminders exist: genocide memorial sites are found throughout the country, indicated by a white cross, a sign, or a banner hung over a school or a church--a massacre site--saying "Never Forget". In the provincial capitals, medieval-style brick prisons teem with detainees. Prisoners in standard-issue pink uniforms regularly file out in labor gangs. Fridays are prison visiting days, and streets are filled with family members who travel on foot, sometimes for a day, only to line up for several minutes to deliver food and announce their news across a police-monitored barrier line separating them from the accused. Here and elsewhere, the genocide is publicly present, as it is privately for the thousands who survived or lost family members.
But in contemporary Rwanda, visitors, youth, and others not directly affected by the genocide also can spend days, even weeks, without constantly being reminded of 1994. Life here gives an impression of wanting to move on, of wanting to return to an everyday rhythm one step removed from the violence: women stroll Kigali with banana-filled baskets on their head, tilting this way and that in search of clients; fit young men wheelbarrow goods across town; old men gather around a storefront at a rural trading center, sipping banana beer from straws. These images of daily life in a developing African country are those of contemporary Rwanda as much as the memorial sites are. That said, one need only scratch the surface and out will come Rwanda's particularly harrowing litany of trauma: survivors who lost 20 family members, returning refugees with stories of horror in Congo, husbands arbitrarily arrested, and so forth.
Rwandan politics also appears to be emerging from its post-genocide exceptionalism. The first presidential elections since 1994 are scheduled for next year, and President Kagame of late has been holding large public meetings across the country--a tour widely interpreted here as a vote-getting, or vote-insuring, bid. The government is working out plans to reduce poverty and to decentralize the local administration. These are the stuff of the state-run evening news: a government meeting, a new public works project, a trade fair, a conference on health, and so forth. However, the realm of public speech and the political arena remain severely restricted, and the appearance of normalcy also masks an underside. Journalists from the tiny independent press are routinely detained.
Earlier this year, former President Pasteur Bizimungu was arrested for pursuing opposition politics; the current regime has alienated significant numbers of former supporters who now engage in dissident politics from abroad. Official discourse precludes discussion of ethnicity and regionalism, but grumbling about favoritism--whether "ethnic" or regional (Tutsi returnees from Uganda are generally considered the privileged group)--is never far from the surface.
The capital Kigali is relatively prosperous, but life in rural areas has appreciably declined since the early 1990s--for a complicated mix of demographic reasons stemming from the losses and prison population generated by the genocide, from returning Tutsi exiles settling in urban areas, but also from the low price of coffee and other commodities, among other factors. Though the rump genocidal forces that infiltrated Rwanda in 1997 and 1998 have been largely defeated, rebels are still found in the Nyungwe Forest in the southwest, where military posts are stationed about every mile.
And there is the war in Congo, in which the Rwandan army is heavily involved. In the border towns of Gisenyi and Cyangugu, uniformed soldiers are a constant presence. But the overwhelming impression--at least for a foreign visitor--is one of safety and predictability, of being able to pursue one's work freely as long as one has all proper government authorization and does not depart aggressively from official positions. Email and mobile phones are regular features of expatriate life; Rwandan roasted meat and fish are as tasty as anywhere; and a movie theater showing commercial films even opened in Kigali in March.
Which is a long segue back to Gacaca: the challenges it poses are similar to others in governing post-genocide Rwanda. The Rwandan state historically has been and is today effective at carrying out the tasks it sets for itself, and one temptation will be just to implement Gacaca, to reduce the prison caseload, and move on. But Gacaca also opens a small, but real democratic space that creates the possibility for unforeseen, non-hegemonic discussions, whether on the genocide itself or on currently taboo topics, such as alleged government massacres or Hutu and Tutsi identities.
The question is whether those discussions will be allowed to take their course or whether they will be controlled. If Gacaca's three main goals are reducing the prisoner caseload, promoting reconciliation, and establishing a public record of what happened, certainly the latter two would benefit from open debate. Gacaca's first days indicate the process could go either way.
Throughout, members of communities asked concrete questions that pertained to their lives. But also remarkable was a heavy police and secret service presence, and, apparently, no one pushed the bounds of state-defined acceptable discourse. But this was the beginning, when much local and international attention was focused on the jurisdictions, and the emphasis was on a smooth debut.
The real Gacaca will occur in remote areas when foreign observers are largely absent. Then the hard questions will inevitably be broached, about how to understand, punish, and live with the horror of Rwanda's intimate genocide, but also about how to recognize that 1994 affected most in this small country, that many innocent have been incarcerated, and that many of the really big killers are no longer in the country. Gacaca is a largely local innovation to Rwanda's very particular problems; one hopes that the Rwanda that emerges in it is as diverse and complex as the population it is meant to represent.