On October 7, Hirondelle news service had a despatch out of Kigali saying that the country's leaders now expect "over 700,000 people-- almost one-tenth of the population-- to be brought before genocide courts." Just a few weeks ago, the caseload at the country's semi-traditional gacaca courts that have been dealing with most of the genocide-related cases stood at 120,000. The 580,000 "new" accusations have apparently arisen out of the gacaca courts' practice of encouraging full confessions from suspects, who are also asked to name all their accomplices.
Back in the late 1990s, when the RPF leadership started planning the gacaca court system, it was thought of as a way to clear the already huge genocide-era case-load (then around 140,000) in something like a reasonable time. Some 10,000-20,000 of the most serious cases were kept in the regular, civil-law court system; all the rest were sent over to the new, specially established gacaca courts, which use a variant of the traditional "gacaca" conflict-resolution mechanism integrated into the national justice system. (For more details of this move, and of how traditional gacacas worked, see this 2002 article.)
The more serious cases still kept in the regular court system were those that fell into a class called "Category One." It was thought they would be few enough that the regular courts could process them all within just a few years. Now, however, that Hirondelle report says,
“Regular courts would never handle such a volume”, says Innocent Musafiri, spokesperson of the National Service for Gacaca Jurisdictions (NSGJ), the organ in charge of Gacaca courts. “It is simply impossible”, he adds...
Regular courts have taken eight years to complete 8,000 genocide trials. At this rate, it would be about half a century before all 50,000 Category Ones appear in court.
As it is, ever since the gacaca courts started their "full-scale" operation back in June (2005), they have been obstructed by considerable popular apathy. (See Hirondelle 9/29/05.) For a system that relies for its effectiveness both on popular participation and-- more broadly-- on popular "buy-in" to the results of the hearings, this has been a significant problem. Indeed, it is just about impossible to see how Rwanda or any other country with a population of around eight million could even start to plan a process of hearing 700,000 individual cases, at all.
The challenging nature of the whole exercise was also further revealed when the NSGJ revealed that some 14,000 of the 200,000 people elected as "judges" in the gacaca courts were themselves charged with genocide (Hirondelle, 9/15/05.)
This very long-drawn-out attempt to fully establish the exact "accountability" of all accused individuals for their participation in the events of spring 1994 seems like a continuing and burdensome tragedy for the country. And in the ICTR things are not looking great, either. On October 7 Hirondelle had a story from the court's seat in Arusha reporting that the court's spokesman, Roland Amoussouga from Togo, has been removed from his post after an internal probe found that he may have given out confidential information to a job-seeker. This news is just the latest in a series of administrative scandals that have plagued the court.
And mean-time, its costs continue inexorably to rise... (For my description of ICTR's work, and of some of the reasons for its huge operating costs, read this late 2003 article of mine.)
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