I've just been pulling together all the material on Rwanda for my forthcoming book on post-atrocity policies in three African countries. Doing this has underlined for me, yet again, how tough the challenges are that the people and government of Rwanda have been facing as they have struggled to find a way to get beyond the violence of the genocide era (and the eras before and since the genocide), and to find a sustainable political basis on which they can build their country's future.
One of the biggest challenges in this regard stems from the success the organizers of the genocide had in mobilizing very large numbers of people to take part in their heinous project, and from the combination of that truly tragic fact with the insistence of the present Rwandan government-- backed up by nearly the whole of the "international community"-- on continuing to establish the precise degree of individual responsibility that each and every single Rwandan participant in the genocide had for his or her part in the project. Moreover, this pursuit of a stictly individualized "accountability" for acts of violence committed as part of the genocide has been undertaken by a minority (overwhelmingly Tutsi) government that has tried relentlessly to control every part of the public "truth"-seeking process so that only acts of violence committed by Hutus against, overwhelmingly, Tutsis have been included in it, while consideration of the non-trivial number of violent acts committed by the ruling (and Tutsi-dominated) Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has been vigorously excluded.
The result has been an extremely unwieldy, divisive, and in many ways Orwellian process-- and one which throughout the eleven-plus years since the genocide has kept nearly all the people of Rwanda in a state where they have been forced to re-live and re-experience the horrendous, anti-humane violence of the genocide era on a nearly continuous basis.
Unwieldy?
Back in late 2000 when I started studying Rwanda's policy responses to the legacies of the genocide I was extremely concerned that, at that point, the Kigali government had more than 130,000 of its eight million citizens detained in various jails and lockups around the country, on the suspicion that they had participated in the genocide. All were Hutus, most were able-bodied males of bread-winning age, whose detention was depriving half a dozen or more dependent family members of a prime breadwinner... But the country had almost zero capacity to process these cases in their criminal courts, which had also been very badly damaged by the genocide-era violence. At that point, the RPF government was slowly moving to introduce the innovative "Gacaca court" system-- a neotraditional form of community-based justice-- with which it hoped to be able to clear up the backlog of these cases.
In those days, it was estimated that processing all the existing cases through the regular courts would have taken some 160-200 years! Rwandan officials I spoke with said they hoped the Gacaca courts could deal with the backlog in five-to-ten years, instead; and also that through this process the vast majority of the suspects could be returned to their home communities, where perhaps some of them would still have to perform some form of reparative community service. Only the very "worst" suspects, known as "Category 1" suspects would still be kept in the regular court system. In 2001, the Rwandan Ambassador to the US estimated to me that this would be only some 3,000-5,000 cases. Manageable by the courts, perhaps...
Soon thereafter, I started hearing warnings from some of the people monitoring the handful of pilot Gacaca courts that were opened around the country that actually, the truth-seeking activities that formed the core of the gacaca court's work at that point was generating lengthy lists of additional suspects.
Last March, the pilot Gacaca courts moved into their "trial phase", and in late June the Gacaca court process was opened nationwide. In every one of the 9,000-plus "cells" inside the nation, the hearings were started. The effects since then have been startling. In October, as I wrote here, Hirondelle News was reporting that the National Service for Gacaca Jurisdictions (NSGJ) was now expecting to have "over 700,000 people – almost one tenth of its population" on its list of the suspects whose cases the Gacaca courts and the regular courts would have to handle. Moreover, of those 700,000, 50,000 were expected to be "Category 1" suspects.
Meanwhile, the activities of the Gacaca courts have had many other far-reaching political and social consequences. In March and April 2005, some thousands of Hutu Rwandans fled from their home areas in the south of the country, seeking refuge in Burundi from the retribution that they feared the Gacaca courts would visit on them. The NSGJ also reported that 69 Rwandans had committed suicide and 44 had attempted to do so, because they feared appearing before the Gacaca courts...
I just want to bookmark a few other really good online resources for anyone studying post-genocide Rwanda and the Gacaca courts.
This is a webpage that presents the unparalleled research about the Gacaca courts done by the European-based NGO Penal Reform International. If you go down to the bottom of that page you'll find links to various reports they produced on the process between 2001 and 2004, all available in fulltext there, in PDF form. This May 2004 presentation of the second half of a detailed study of pilot gacacas held in Kibuye province is particularly interesting. One sentence that particularly stood out there, for me, was this, reflection on how, exactly, the confessions and apologies encouraged by the gacaca process are supposed to help lead to reconciliation-- and the fact that they only seldom seem to do so. The report's author states that, to have a chance at aiding reconciliation: "The apology... must be accompanied by remorse and an acknowledgement, by the perpetrator of the crime, of the harm that he has committed."(p.19) This fits in with a lot of the work I've been doing recently, on the important role that heartfelt expressions of remorse can play in aiding reconciliation.
This lengthy May 2004 report from PRI gives some vitally needed information about the content of the "re-education" process that detainees and returning (Hutu) refugees have been given in the "solidarity camps" run by the government-backed National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC).
This is the latest (November 2005) of the quarterly situation reports on Rwanda from the Swisspeace FAST political-monitoring system. Its author is the experienced scholar of Rwanda René Lamarchand. He writes, "Alleged participation in the [genocide] bloodbath has become a convenient weapon to clamp down om political opponents and potential critics of the government. The gacaca courts have become the instrument of choice to produce the evidence... "(pp.6-7)
Finally, since I believe that in post-violence, post-atrocity situations, the resources of all social institutions need to be brought to bear, and since I have certainly noticed the excellent reconciliation and rebuilding work done by various religious organizations, here are links to:
* The homepage of the mainly-Quaker African Great Lakes Initiative, which has a lot of good information about what indigenous Quakers (Friends) have done to foster reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda, and this link to the Winter 2005-2006 issue of the AGLI's information-packed newsletter.
I liked your post on Rwanda. I did have the following impressions, though.
Gacaca had the potential to constitute a truly revolutionary approach to accountability for mass violence, but it is not fully actualizing this potential. It could have been a locus for the revitalization of indigenous, local, and restorative mechanisms at multivalent levels of justice that, at the same time, stimulated a deeper level of accountability than has been the case elsewhere with amnesties, public inquiries, and even some truth commissions. However, attempts to diversify the accountability paradigm in Rwanda through popular measures such as gacaca, although partly successful, have fallen short of their restorative, cathartic, and reconciliatory potential. My sense is that this for three reasons: (1) pressures brought by the international community, in particular rights monitors and donors, who have pushed the process to look much more like retributive, adversarial, and individualized criminal trials; (2) pressures by the Rwandan government to centralize and bureaucratize gacaca, thereby removing local autonomy and control, often for political motives; and (3) the reality that the gacaca system was not initially designed to prosecute genocidaires, and the prospect of provisionally releasing, shaming, and rehabilitating murderers is daunting to say the least to victims.
Mark, you make some good points. When I first started studying in the gacaca project, back in 2000-2001, it did seem very visionary and hopeful. On reflection now-- and in light of the project's record to date, I'd say the basic, insuperable problem has been the attempt to establish the conplete accountability of each and every individual, on an individual basis, for the violence that occurred during the genocide. That is really what has caused the ballooning of the caseloads.
At a more epiphenomenal level, the three factors you cite have undoubtedly been important. But regarding your point "2" I'd just note that if it weren't for the central government chivvying the whole process along, in many parts of the country it would never have started at all. The Tutsis are a small minority of the population (14% or so.) There are large parts of the country where there are no or very few Tutsis. So why would an overwhelmingly Hutu community have voluntarily, without the pressure from Kigali, ever have started it? Especially, have started it in the rigid, unidirectional way the Kigali has insisted on proceeding, from the very beginning?
So I think those of us (and I do include myself) who saw this at the beginning as something that was more "authentic" and more "grassroots" than a western-style court proceeding got it a bit wrong. From the beginning it's been imposed by Kigali, and has also been very closely linked to their continuing campaign to "re-educate" the Hutus into fitting into the RPF's favored, "casteless" mold of the "new Rwandan person".
Jonathan and I have a little exchange relevant to that in the comments on the next (Burundi) post.
Posted by: Helena Cobban at February 6, 2006 07:55 PMI cannot resist participating in this discussion as I am in Rwanda at the moment doing research on Gacaca for my PhD dissertation. I have been struck by a number of procedural and normative challenges for Gacaca - particularly after one I observed in Kibuye this week.
The principles and process of Gacaca are most closely aligned with a restorative type of transitional justice. One of its key restorative components is truth-telling, however, this component is not being realized across the country. There are many accused who are refusing to confess and there are extreme regional differences in the success of the plea-bargain strategy for confessions. The only widespread truth-telling is primarily from survivors and bystanders whose testimonies are negotiated and reconciled by judges to come to an official account of events. This account will undoubtedly be beneficial for reconciliation. However, without widespread truth-telling from the accused (who either lie or tell partial truths to get released) the restorative components of Gacaca are in jeopardy.
The second challenging component is compensation. I agree that the practicality of compensation is sensitive and complex. There is currently a survivors’ fund that is a piece-meal attempt at compensation and a draft law (contents unknown) that may propose a more comprehensive strategy. Survivors want compensation from both the accused and from the government. It is ironic that the only compensation to have come out of Gacaca is from the poorest of those accountable – the accused. There are many options for a compensation fund yet the momentum is slow and there is not a strong and independent voice to advocate on behalf of survivors for compensation in any form.
The individual security implications of Gacaca are of most interest to me. What I have found disconcerting in my research so far is the lack of concern and reaction on the part of authorities and donors regarding insecurity. The authorities have designed the Gacaca process and the international community provides the funding. Both of these parties are more concerned with regional security dilemmas than the marked increase in individual security that the Gacaca courts have caused.
The Gacaca courts continue to become more and more complex in terms of their political and social implications for democracy and reconciliation. I look forward to following and contributing to the debate on this timely and insightful blog!
Alana, hi. Thank you so much for contributing your observations here. It is great to think we can have some input from an on-the-ground, trained observer like yourself.
I'd also be really interested to have any insights we could gather from Rwandan people themselves. I realize there might be problems of language as well as of internet accessibility in the way of this. But I'd like to underline to any readers who are Rwandan that-- if you can anyway read our English here-- we'd be happy to accept comments written in French (and I or someone else will then translate them as and when we can.)
So Alana-- if you could help persuade any of your Rwandan colleagues to contribute to the discussion here, that would be great... The rest of us are at present talking "about" gacaca from what is now a pretty huge distance, and I think that's wrong.
Regarding your specific observations, Alana, I'm interested in what you say about regional differences in rates of 'confession', and wonder what explanatory model you might have for this?
Aldso, where you write, Both of these parties are more concerned with regional security dilemmas than the marked increase in individual security that the Gacaca courts have caused I wonder if that second "security" should have been "insecurity"?
Finally, on the broader question of the components of restorative justice, I guess this is a definitional question, but I personally am not convinced that a thorough-going 'truth'-establishment process (as in the TRC) is actually necessary before the previously ruptured relations in society can be constructively restored. I guess my main examples of societies that deliberately eschewed truth-establishment in the interests of building a solid peace are post-Franco Spain and post-civil war Mozambique. I believe that truth-establishment processes have a huge potential to retraumatize individuals and to perpetuate dangerous polarizations in society, and this potential must be borne in mind and broad steps taken to mitigate such effects, as part of the process, if the process is to be successful...
I'd love your thoughts, and those of any other readers, on this point.
Posted by: Helena Cobban at February 23, 2006 03:23 AMThanks for your response Helena. I apologize for the delay in my reply.
a) I'm back in Canada now so my capacity to get Rwandans to participate in this discssion in the blog is limited. I will certainly put the word out whenever I can as I agree that it's very important.
b) The regional variation in confessions seems to depend on the extent to which perpetrators are still living in the community. This is particularly a problem in Butare. Many people I talked to indicated that the former Interahamwe still in Burundi are spreading rumours and threats to dissuade people in Butare from participating in Gacaca. Additionally, many blame the elite presence of the university in Butare for the continuing "silences" in Gacaca (in addition to their leadership role in the genocide). Butare is also the source of refugees supposedly fleeing into Burundi for fear of Gacaca. Although, cause and actual existence of these refugees is debated in Rwanda.
c) Yes, the line should read "marked increase in individual insecurity that the Gacaca courts have caused". Sorry for the typo.
d) I would argue that truth-telling is the most important component of Gacaca. While there is certainly the risk that confessions from the accused and testimonies from witnesses will re-traumatize individuals, there is a significant degree of consensus among Rwandans that the truth is paramount for peace and reconciliation.
The problems with truth-telling in Gacaca (i.e. half truths, lies, false accusations, and lenient plea bargains) are delegitimizing Gacaca according to survivors. The plea-bargain system is meant to be a procedural trade-off between punishment and truth for the practical purpose of relieving pressure on the prison system. However, for survivors it seems that its a personal tradeoff between vengeance and truth. In the end, if there is no truth... what are they left with?
Only the pilot phase courts are moving into the sentencing/judgement phase and the rest are still in the information collection phase. Once more Gacacas move into sentencing/judgement it will be interesting to see how the truth-telling component continues to play out.
Posted by: Alana Tiemessen at March 14, 2006 05:42 PMI am joining this discussion rather late, having only recently discovered this online forum, but hoping to elicit some further discussion on these issues.
I was in Rwanda last year studying gacaca, and came to broadly the same conclusions as Marc Drumbl about three features of the modern reinvention of gacaca to deal with genocide that do not bode well for its success: move to greater retributive rather than restorative focus; centralised bureaucratisation; and the unprecedented application to such a serious crime as genocide. These three aspects contribute to the security concerns that Alana highlights, and suggest that the social support for reconciliation as a result of gacaca trials is not present in most communities. There is local variability, as Alana points out, but the most common responses I observed were fear, mistrust and jealousy of the assistance being provided to the other group.
I wanted to ask Marc, however, for further details about the international community's influence on the increased retributive quality of gacaca. I'm interested to ascertain the extent of influence, how it manifested, etc.
I agree with Alana that Rwandan survivors are supportive of the gacaca if it means they find out what happened to their loved ones, i.e. they want to find out the truth, but in many cases they are being disappointed because the accused have huge incentives not to confess completely and honestly for fear of greater punishment rather than release into the community, and because they could be referred to the classical court system if the crime is classified as Category 1 (i.e. a leaders/planners/organisers, those who exhibited 'zeal or excessive malice' or those accused of rape or sexual torture). It was clear in two of the gacaca trials that I observed that a prisoner was reluctant in one case to admit to being the leader of a group, and in the other case to having committed a sexual crime. Of course, they may have been wrongly accused, but it is difficult to know because of the discincentive for full disclosure.
Back to Helena's concern about the potential harmful effects of truth-telling. I'm afraid I'm not so familiar with Franco's Spain, but I believe that in Mozambique the emphasis on ritual approaches to reintegration meant that social 'forgetting' rather than truth-telling was favoured. I attribute the success of this approach to the use of a traditional method that was widely accepted by Mozambican communities. I don't think it's so much a case of arguing that truth-telling is helpful or harmful, but rather whether it is the best strategy in a particular conflict or cultural context.
My current research is trying to unravel the relationship between such traditional approaches and the more formal Western, introduced approaches to justice, taking into account the complicating influences of colonisation and globalisation, and how this is affecting the success or otherwise of transitional justice in promoting reconciliation and peacebuilding. In addition to Rwanda, I'm looking at Sierra Leone and Mozambique in Africa, and East Timor, Cambodia and Bougainville in Asia/Pacific.
I'd welcome comments from anyone from these countries or working on these particular cases, or on traditional approaches to justice and reconciliation more generally.
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