Alphonse

Alphonse was a thirty-six-year-old merchant from Bugesera district in Kigali Ngali province whom I met six times: at the inauguration of the ingando in Gashora (soon after he was released from the nearby Rilima Prison), towards the end of his stay in the Gashora camp, several weeks after his release into his home community and in his house in 2006, 2008 and 2009.

By the second time I met Alphonse, he had become a highly respected member of the ingando community, identified by camp officials as a leader who could encourage other detainees to participate during les­sons. Alphonse said that he had encouraged many detainees who had already confessed to admit to other crimes which they had hidden from prison and camp officials.

When I met Alphonse for the third time, several weeks later in the marketplace south-west of Nyamata where I also interviewed Cypriet, he had been released from the Gashora camp and expressed similar optimism as before. Alphonse claimed to have met many survivors in Nyamata and his current community: �I sought them out, we talked for a very long time and they bought me drinks', he said. The ingando lessons, he argued, had been important for teaching him how to cohabit with survivors and that �if everyone respects the local leaders, then we will live together in peace.' Alphonse said that he felt calm about facing his community at gacaca. �Gacaca has not yet started here', he said,

but I am ready to testify... Gacaca will start after the [Constitutional] referendum. I will tell the truth and the victims will forgive me. There is no question about that. I expect only good things at gacaca, no more punishment, just cohabitation.^[287]

Alphonse said that, since returning to his home community, he had helped local authorities locate the mass grave where his victims were buried. The officials were now busy investigating his crimes. Alphonse repeated that he had been forced to kill and therefore he would not be sent back to prison. �My worry today is not gacaca', he said. �I have already been punished for what I did. My only worry is that I want to start a busi­ness here but I'm still waiting for the capital. My family has to support me and they are very poor.' His father and one older brother, both Hutu, were killed during the genocide - later, when we had developed greater rapport, Alphonse told me who he believed had killed them, as discussed below - meaning that, with Alphonse in prison, the family had lost their three primary breadwinners, plunging them into deep poverty.

I interviewed several survivors who lived near Alphonse’s new house. They admitted to feeling uneasy about his presence in the community. �We knew the people he killed in 1994’, said Chantal, a forty-six-year-old woman whose parents and two cousins had been murdered during the genocide. �He has just come to live in that house. We don’t know why he has moved here but it worries us, as he has done many bad things.’^[289] Zephyr, a thirty-three-year-old man who fled to Tanzania during the genocide and returned to the community in 1999, said,

I knew Alphonse before the genocide - I used to see him often in the marketplace where he worked. But you cannot describe what he did [in 1994]. It is as though it was a different man from the one I knew. I never knew him well but that was a different man, the one who did those things... Now he is back living here and I am not sure what to think about that.^[290]

On a Sunday morning in June 2006, I found Alphonse at a Catholic church several kilometres from where I had met him three years earl­ier. Some children ran ahead into the church to alert him to my pres­ence and he came out to greet me. Alphonse took me to a small adobe building nearby and after the church service five nuns joined us. He said we would soon talk about his experiences since I had last seen him, but first we had to eat. Two other nuns brought pots of rice, beans, okra and stringy pieces of beef and a large calabash of banana beer, which was passed around the table. After the meal, the nuns left Alphonse and me alone. Alphonse said we should visit his home and we walked for fifteen minutes down red dirt paths that wound through banana palms and bright, yellow-flowered acacia trees until we reached a deeply rutted track that sloped upward to his house.^[291]

After greeting Alphonse’s mother, two brothers, his sister-in-law and several nieces and nephews, he and I went inside and sat on low stools in a back room.

and things started to get very hard. There were several marriages in the family and, as you know, marriages cost money. There were times when we didn’t have enough to eat. I contacted friends who couldn’t help us because they also lacked the means. In 2004, our farm began producing again and we had enough to eat, although the drought was bad and many crops died. We survived - the local authorities advised us how to survive... In 2005, I discovered a younger brother whom I hadn’t seen in years and he advised me to start a business, like the one I used to run. But I didn’t have the money to start this, so I’m still farming. I’ve had to look after the children of my brother who died because last year their mother died of AIDS and they have become my responsibility. Slowly, little by little, I’m solving my problems but it is very difficult.⁷⁶

Alphonse explained again that his family had moved house in 2003 to get away from genocide survivors who were threatening him, including harassing him in the market and throwing rocks on his roof during the night. �Many of my friends are survivors’, he said,

but at first even some of them were scared of me [when I came back from jail]. They wondered if the government was trustworthy when it said that the prisoners should come back to the community. Many people died here in 1994 and many people are still scared because of the returned prisoners. The survivors are worried and they don’t believe that things can be peaceful again. Many of them live together now in new houses because the government has built these houses for survivors. Some sur­vivors have been seeking revenge. Some of them have killed our families and we don’t know why those perpetrators haven’t been sent to jail.

Alphonse stood and beckoned me to a window in an adjacent room. â€?You see that house over there?’ he said, pointing through the banana palms to another mud-brick home about 50 metres away. He explained that in the house lived an elderly lady named Muteteli, the mother of two children whom he had killed during the genocide. He said that, in an attempt to get away from the survivors near the marketplace, it was preferable to live even this close to Muteteli because she was too old to threaten him. Alphonse said he rarely spoke to her, even though they tilled the same plot of maize crop. He took me outside and we walked for five minutes down a thin, sloping path with maize and banana plants high on both sides. When we reached Alphonse’s farm, he explained, â€?She starts working in the soil from that end and I start from this end. Because she is older than me, she works quite slowly. When we work, we say very little.’ I asked him whether there was palpable tension between them. He replied, â€?Yes, it’s difficult between us. But what choice do we have? She’s the head of her household and I’m the head of mine. It’s our responsibility to work so we can feed our families... We don’t talk about the past because we have to feed our families.’⁷⁸

Alphonse described crucial instances, however, when he and Muteteli had been forced to talk about the past. He explained that on three occa­sions, after they had worked together all week on their field, they had gone to gacaca on the Sunday morning and Muteteli had stood to testify against him regarding the murder of her children. �It was hard’, he said. �Each time that she tried to speak, she couldn’t. The judges would ask her to speak and she would cry.’ At each of the three hearings, the judges told Alphonse to respond to Muteteli’s testimony; each time he had said that she was speaking the truth.

Alphonse described the overall experience of gacaca in the com­munity as difficult. He said that personally gacaca had been positive so far, owing largely to his good relationship with the gacaca judges in his community. For others, though, gacaca had not been so straightforward. �Many people tell lies at gacaca, the suspects as well as the survivors’, Alphonse said. �I’ve always told the truth since coming back [from prison] and I’ve told others to tell the truth but not everyone does.’ Nevertheless, the dossiers of evidence collected from detainees’ confessions in prison and transferred to the gacaca judges, along with the judges’ deliberations with the general assembly during gacaca hearings, had unearthed most cases of false evidence. Alphonse said,

Many suspects keep saying that they have no reason to confess. They say things like, â€?I was sick during the genocide, I wasn't there.' But eventu­ally the truth comes out because someone will refute them. A lot of new people have been identified [as genocide suspects]. Some of them were even in mass today. Some others have hidden in Kigali and the judges are trying to bring them back.⁸⁰

From his conversations with the inyangamugayo, Alphonse believed that he would not face further punishment for his crimes, given the time he had already spent in jail; at worst, he would have to participate in community service. �I'm hoping my punishment is already over', he said. �All of those crimes were caused by the authorities. They were caused by the bad leaders who forced people to kill... It's true that some people killed by themselves without any force [from the authorities] but most people, like me, were forced to kill.' Alphonse said that the wait for his gacaca sentence was deeply unsettling but he remained positive about the future:

Things will get better soon. The population will tell the truth and the judges will judge people according to the law. The government says that it wants reconciliation but first it must stop the survivors who want revenge. There are many survivors who want to attack those who have come back from prison. It's possible there will be new problems between different groups but I think things will start to improve soon.⁸¹

Alphonse said that one source of major tension at gacaca was the fact that Hutu were unable to seek justice for crimes committed against their loved ones during and after the genocide. It was at this point that Alphonse told me that the RPF had killed his father and brother a month after the genocide ended. �Some friends found their bodies lying on the road, far from our old house', he said. �RPF soldiers had come through the marketplace and were on all the roads. I've seen the same soldiers come back here, even this year. It's like they're mocking us.' Alphonse said that several of his nieces and nephews had raised the issue of his father's and brother's deaths during gacaca hearings but the judges and some members of the general assembly responded angrily that these were irrelevant cases for gacaca because they did not concern genocide crimes against Tutsi.^[292]

I returned to interview Alphonse in his home in September 2008, by which time he had been sentenced by gacaca. As he predicted, he received only six months of community service for the crimes he had confessed but, to his great surprise, he was found guilty of aiding an add­itional murder. �Some survivors invented this story', he said.

You remember I told you before that many survivors have been look­ing for revenge? They were angry that gacaca wouldn’t send me back to prison and they gave false testimony that I had been with others when they killed a man down there in the valley. I thought the judges would just laugh at them. Those judges know me well and they know what I did [during the genocide]. But Ibuka put pressure on them and they decided that I was guilty and should go back to prison for three years... Most of the judges have good experience but others have less and some of them also tell lies. I said I hadn’t received good justice, so I appealed my case.^[293]

Alphonse appealed to the sector-level gacaca and marshalled a group of survivors to testify on his behalf. He also appealed against the cell-level gacaca’s original decision to sentence him to one year’s community ser­vice for his confessed crimes, on grounds of his early confession and the time he had already spent in prison. After his appeal, the sector-level judges quashed the charges against him of aiding murder and reduced his sentence for the remaining crimes to six months’ community ser­vice. �The problem [at the cell level]’, he said, �was that people didn’t know the law. Many people were looking for revenge and the authorities were pressuring them. These people needed the law to guide them. At the appeals hearing, things were better because people knew the law.’ Alphonse said there were two main barriers to discovering the truth at gacaca: members of Ibuka who pressured people in the community to give false testimony and coerced judges to accept this and people who had returned to the community after lengthy periods away - especially Tutsi who had fled the country during the genocide or Tutsi who had never lived in the community before - who Alphonse said gave false evidence at gacaca because they could not have known what happened during the genocide.^[294]

Overall, Alphonse said, people in the community were satisfied with gacaca, believing that it had handed down reasonable sentences, accounting for the lengthy periods that most suspects had already spent in jail. Nevertheless, he said that some individuals had been convicted and sentenced to very long prison terms, including a close friend of his who had been sentenced to thirty years in Muhanga Prison. Alphonse said that some families in the community had written to the Executive Secretary of the NSGJ regarding the harsh sentences being delivered by the local gacaca judges; they were still awaiting a reply. �Gacaca has been good here', Alphonse said,

because most of the detainees are now back with their families. Some have gone back to jail but most are here now and working on their farms again. But there are many people who don't like gacaca. They liked it at the beginning but they have lost faith in the judges... I blame Ibuka. Things were fine at gacaca and we were talking like family until Ibuka became involved. Ibuka has been pushing gacaca not to release detain­ees, even if they are innocent. Ibuka members come to hearings and encourage lies. How would they know anything? Most of those people were hiding in the bushes [during the genocide]. They saw nothing. There's always a change during [the genocide commemorations in] April. Ibuka stirs up trouble, going around saying that this person killed that many Tutsi and should beg the survivors for forgiveness. These problems sometimes last until July.⁸⁵

Alphonse also believed that Ibuka would complicate gacaca's ability to prosecute Category 1 cases after the recent change in the Gacaca Law: �The judges for the Category 1 cases have already been vetted by Ibuka, so it will be their process. In this sector, five of the judges are def­initely chosen by Ibuka, so my conclusion is that gacaca can't work for those cases.'

While many families of genocide suspects were pleased that gacaca had enabled their loved ones to return home, Alphonse said, they still saw gacaca as a one-sided process that ignored crimes committed against Hutu during and after the genocide. �When people heard that the Category 1 cases were coming to gacaca', Alphonse said, �some Hutu women complained of rape during the genocide and the attacks on them but the judges just ignored them. At gacaca, Tutsi women can talk about rape but not Hutu women.'

Alphonse described relations among returned detainees, survivors and their respective families as generally calm:

We live and work together. There is a sense of unity here but it is still lim­ited. People haven't really reconciled... I find dealing with survivors very easy because they know me. They visit me and I visit them. Sometimes people say negative things about me but not very often.^[295]

I interviewed the same survivors in the community as I had in 2003. In the main, they echoed Alphonse’s depiction of local relations. �There is no open conflict here’, said Zephyr, the survivor quoted above,

but everything has changed. It isn’t like before, when we worked closely together, when Hutu and Tutsi intermarried and Hutu children were considered Tutsi children. People are more careful. Many people think the perpetrators should have been punished more. They see them come back from TIG and they say, �Is that the end of justice for them?’^[296]

Chantal, also quoted above, said, �There is no reconciliation here. There is no more violence but there isn’t reconciliation. Even in church, Hutu sit on one side and Tutsi on the other. When we go to gacaca, the Hutu families sit there and the Tutsi families sit here.’ Chantal echoed Zephyr’s concerns regarding the punishments handed down to many convicted perpetrators. �We all know the prisoners can’t go back to jail. The jails are still full, and we need the prisoners here to work on the farms. But if you kill people, if you kill six or seven people, and you spend only six or seven months doing TIG, that isn’t right. The inyangamugayo should have been stricter with the guilty ones.’^[297]

Alphonse stated that the introduction of the abunzi system in his sec­tor had proven useful for the resolution of day-to-day disputes, which would typically remain unresolved because people could not afford to take their cases to the national courts. �The people I know who have used the abunzi have said the process was very effective’, he said. �One time I wrote a submission for the abunzi to use in a family dispute and the abunzi appreciated that.’

Alphonse’s hopes for the future had not diminished, despite his fam­ily’s economic and emotional hardship. He said that he hoped one day to marry, build a house and buy a motorcycle. He had helped create an association of thirty-five local farmers who started a microfinance scheme and were �getting a little money from this'. The association had been disrupted, however, by preparations for the upcoming parliamen­tary elections, which entailed regular rallies that all adult members of the community were required to attend. Alphonse said that, even though he was angry at the RPF for killing his father and brother, he had - for the sake of expediency - decided to become a member of the RPF political wing. �I've become a member like so many others who were sensitised to join en masse', Alphonse said. �The survivors who carry out revenge killings here don't like the RPF. They say the gov­ernment does nothing and they have to take care of things for them­selves... In this sector, if you're not RPF, you're considered against the state and you risk yourself, especially if you belong to the PSD [Social Democratic Party].' Alphonse laughed again and pointed to the corner of the room. �The RPF even gave me that hat and told me to sensitise others. The RPF stopped the genocide and they started gacaca but we still have big problems here. But, as I said, if you don't vote RPF, you risk yourself. People will only vote RPF by force. It's not real democracy here.'^[298]

When I returned to Alphonse's home in April 2009, he was away at his farm and I sat on a wooden bench in the family courtyard waiting for him. His sister-in-law sat on a low stool out the front of the house, sifting beans in a large steel bowl. By the time Alphonse arrived, his sister-in­law was cooking in a small wood-and-chicken-wire enclosure adjoining the house and smoke was billowing into the courtyard. Alphonse took me around the back of the house and showed me the cow that his family had recently acquired. He said on average the cow produced four litres of milk each day and, because the eight members of his household required only two litres per day, neighbours were constantly coming by to ask for a share. �Many things have happened since the last time you were here', Alphonse said. �We have made a little money from the farmers' associ­ation and that is why we have the cow. Our farm has done well, so we now produce more maize, corn and sweet potatoes than we need and there is always a little to sell.' Alphonse said he had become the leader of the farmers' microfinance cooperative, which now boasted seventy-eight members. This, however, was not the biggest development in Alphonse's life: �I am engaged and will be married in August', he said, beaming. �I'm building a new house near this one so that my wife and I will have somewhere to live. Building a house costs a lot of money but this is what a husband must do. It means there is no money for starting a proper busi­ness, like a shop in the market, but a wife and a house come first and maybe there will be a business later.'^[299]

Alphonse recalled our conversations about gacaca and abunzi the year before and said that the trends he had identified then had contin­ued. For him personally, the gacaca journey had ended because he had completed his community service. On a broader scale, though, gacaca was creating problems in the community. Alphonse said that, gener­ally, gacaca had dealt effectively with Category 2 crimes, sending few convicted perpetrators back to prison and using community service to improve local roads and build new communal stalls in the central mar­ket. However, significant difficulties had arisen during Category 1 and 3 cases. �There are big problems with the Category 1 suspects', Alphonse said. �They tell only lies and they never confess to what they did during the genocide. This leaves the rest of us to deal with the consequences. We all had to confess to what we did and now we hear these author­ities at gacaca saying only, “It was the Tutsi who killed the President [Habyarimana]. We did nothing”.' Alphonse said that during the geno­cide he had spent several weeks in Gitarama and he had seen some of the authorities from his sector telling the local people, �You see those houses? Go and kill the Tutsi.'

Alphonse claimed that gacaca's handling of Category 3 cases regard­ing property crimes had proven highly divisive in the community. �The judges have been asking many people to pay compensation for the prop­erty they stole in 1994. But then many survivors start asking for ten times as much property as they had then.' Alphonse picked up a stick from the ground and traced the calculations on his arm.

Some people lost their house during the genocide and now they ask for 2 million francs. Two million! Or they claim they should receive five goats when everyone knows they only had one. The Christians here are more honest but most survivors just tell lies. They demand compensation for almost everything - cows, beans, windows, tables, everything. But people here are very poor. The prisoners come home and their families have nothing, so how can they give compensation?^[300]

As in 2008, Alphonse said that gacaca was suffering from widespread false testimony. He believed he heard more truthful evidence when he was an urumuri during prison gacaca in Rilima in 1998 than in most official gacaca hearings in his community. He said that feelings of anger and revenge were also hampering gacaca, particularly in the climate of the current commemorations of the fifteenth anniversary of the geno­cide. �I could see the change in people's attitudes when I started testify­ing at gacaca', Alphonse said. �I could see the vengeance in the survivors' eyes and they started saying incredible things, inventing stories about me.' Many Hutu in the community believed that their own suffering dur­ing the genocide was being ignored at gacaca hearings and nationwide during the official memorial month. �Everyone commemorates quietly here. They go to the meetings at the sector office. If they disagree with anything, they shut their mouth for fear of going to prison... The Hutu people here say, “I need commemoration for my family during the period of revenge [after the genocide]”. People are asking when their commem­oration will happen.'^[301] Alphonse said that he continued to see military officers walking around the community who had committed crimes against Hutu in the months after the genocide. He said that some offic­ers had moved into the homes of Hutu who had fled as refugees into neighbouring countries after the genocide or had fled from gacaca into Burundi and Tanzania.

Alphonse summarised the community's variable experience of gacaca as follows:

Gacaca has done a good job of connecting many crimes to the people who committed them. In those cases it has helped people reconcile. For many people here, their relations are better. They live and work together and there are no disputes. But not everyone has had this. Gacaca has sometimes made things worse.

As in 2008, Alphonse said that the introduction of abunzi into the community had helped resolve everyday disputes. �People no longer have to go to the higher courts', he said. �The abunzi are good for rec­onciliation and they influence people to do positive things.' However, Alphonse said that many of the continuing antagonisms driven by people's experiences at gacaca penetrated too deeply into their lives for the abunzi to have any lasting impact on relations in the community.^[302]