CONCLUSION

This chapter has argued that gacaca facilitates three processes of truth - truth-telling, truth-hearing and truth-shaping - each encompassing three functions of truth: legal, therapeutic and restorative.

GacacaвЂ™s simultaneous pursuit of these processes and functions of truth has often proven highly problematic, especially in trying to balance legal and non- legal, and individual and communal, concerns after the genocide. As one of the primary means to achieving retributive justice, healing and reconВciliation, truth highlights many of the tensions inherent in the hybrid pursuit of those ultimate objectives, especially tensions between retribuВtive and restorative outcomes and between the fulfilment of personal and collective needs. The processes by which the community discovers truth at gacaca underscore tensions in the overall methods of gacaca, particuВlarly between maintaining the central ethos of popular ownership over gacaca and managing elite involvement in the institution, while empowВering mediators to intervene when communal discourse undermines gacacaвЂ™s overall objectives. Nevertheless, evidence from a wide range of communities indicates that gacaca provides a vital dialogical space in which Rwandans tell and hear narratives about the events and effects of the genocide. While challenges to truth-telling, truth-hearing and particularly truth-shaping have emerged over time, gacaca has provided a forum for collective discussions that have not occurred elsewhere in Rwandan society. In doing so, gacaca has fulfilled a vital truth function in pursuit of the sorts of ends explored in the following chapters, particuВlarly justice, healing and reconciliation.

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Source: Clark Phil. The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice without Lawyers. Cambridge University Press,2010. вЂ” 400 p.. 2010

CONCLUSION

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