ANALYSES OF GACACA TO DATE AND OVERLOOKED ISSUES
The literature on gacaca has mushroomed in recent years, especially after gacaca was extended from a pilot phase in select communities to nationwide operation in early 2005. Analyses of gacaca can be divided roughly into three camps, which are discussed in greater detail later in this book: first, the dominant view of gacaca comes from human rights and legal comÂmentators, either observers from international non-governmental organiÂsations (NGOs) such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) or non-Rwandan academic observers.
These commenÂtators interpret gacaca primarily as a judicial institution that can be anaÂlysed through its governing legal documents and are highly critical of the process. They argue that gacaca's primary objective is the punishment of genocide perpetrators, which they generally claim should help deter future criminals.[8] The second group of commentators, which has emerged more recently, comprises a small number of non-Rwandan academics, including Bert Ingelaere and Lars Waldorf, who have conducted extensive fieldwork into gacaca and criticise various aspects of its practice, particularly what they perceive as the Rwandan state's coercion of popular involvement in gacaca and interference during hearings in order to collectivise the guilt of all Hutu.[9] Finally, a third group of commentators includes several Rwandan and non-Rwandan observers (of whom Alice Karekezi, Simon Gasibirege and Mark Drumbl are among the main proponents) who argue that gacaca aims to punish genocidaires but also contributes (to varying degrees) to other post-genocide objectives, particularly reconciliation.[10] These obserÂvers highlight, often implicitly, the need to analyse gacaca both as a set of legal statutes and as a socio-legal practice, in which participants’ involveÂment in, and interpretations of, gacaca are important for understanding and critiquing the institution as a whole.The analysis of gacaca in this book falls in the third category of interÂpretation, focusing on a wide range of legal and non-legal objectives, while employing the detailed fieldwork and observations of gacaca hearÂings that are central to the second category. However, this book seeks to overcome deficiencies in all three groups of analysis. While this book concurs with the second and third groups of commentators that the first view misrepresents gacaca by failing to interpret the institution as an evolving socio-legal practice, the second and third perspectives are also largely inadequate for two main reasons. First, they do not directly counter the deficient analysis of gacaca offered by human rights comÂmentators. In particular, the second and third groups of commentators fail to explain why it is necessary to analyse gacaca on the basis of the population’s views and participation during hearings. In response to this shortcoming, this book offers for the first time a detailed critique of the dominant discourse on gacaca and more clearly justifies the need to anaÂlyse gacaca as a dynamic, lived socio-legal institution. Furthermore, the book seeks to overcome a perceived weakness in the second category of analysis, namely the authors' tendency to overstate the role of the Rwandan government in controlling gacaca to the detriment of a finer- grained analysis of popular participation in, and shaping of, gacaca. This book therefore focuses strongly on the agency of everyday Rwandans, while also recognising the crucial national socio-political context within which gacaca operates.
Second, most commentators who imply that an appropriate analysis of gacaca requires close empirical consideration of how gacaca functions have not yet observed and analysed gacaca in this way. What unites the first and third camps of observers is a lack of first-hand observations of gacaca hearings, which would enable an examination of the practice - and not only the potential - of gacaca.
Because gacaca is a deeply perÂsonal and inter-personal experience for those who participate in it, we require a detailed understanding of people's actions and interactions during hearings and their long-term effects.This book represents one of the first detailed qualitative accounts of how gacaca operates on a day-to-day basis, based on my personal obserÂvations of gacaca hearings, focusing on the population's active involveÂment in the institution and the key external social, cultural, legal and political factors that influence this. Crucially, this book constitutes the first academic analysis of the entirety of the gacaca process, as my desk research commenced in October 2001, several months after the start of pre-gacaca hearings, and my fieldwork spanned the period from January 2003, when the first genocide suspects began returning from prison to their home communities to await gacaca trials, until April 2010, as gacaca was completing its final cases. This book also draws on 459 interÂviews with all relevant categories of actors in gacaca, from the officials who created the institution in the late 1990s to academic and NGO observers to everyday citizens who today participate in it, thus combinÂing â€?high' and â€?low' investigations (including multiple interviews with many of the same individuals over more than seven years) to provide a comprehensive popular and political view on the intentions, modalities and outcomes of gacaca.