CONTROVERSY AND CONFUSION OVER GACACA

The introduction of gacaca to deal with genocide crimes has worried many observers, especially international lawyers and human-rights monitors concerned principally with due process for genocide sus­pects.

Alongside these international concerns, the modernisation of gacaca has also caused great confusion and disagreement among many Rwandans. Particularly in the early stages of gacaca, many participants equated the post-genocide institution with its traditional precursor. More importantly, many genocide survivors believed that those found guilty of genocide crimes would receive the sorts of relatively lenient punish­ments that had been handed down to perpetrators at traditional gacaca hearings or even an amnesty.^[200]

Meanwhile, the Gacaca Law is itself a complex synthesis of Western law and historical Rwandan practices, incorporating a plea-bargaining system that has some parallels in Western legal contexts and methods of communal dialogue and deliberation drawn from traditional gacaca; a hybrid resulting from the array of international and local actors who were instrumental in reforming gacaca after the genocide.

A concrete example from my observation of a gacaca hearing in Ruhengenge district of Kigali Ville province on 6 April 2003 will help illustrate the sorts of contestations over the aims of gacaca that often emerge during hearings and their crucial practical impact.^[201] Conflicts between participants in gacaca constitute an important reason for more finely interpreting its objectives. Before the start of this gacaca hearing, the president of the judges' bench ordered a group of women to drag two large blue tarpaulins, containing the recently exhumed remains of geno­cide victims in the community, beneath the thatched shelter where the hearing would take place. The week before, two detainees from Kigali Central Prison had confessed in front of this gacaca to the murder of sev­eral children during the genocide and to dumping their bodies in a mass grave on the edge of the cell. On hearing this confession, the president ordered the exhumation of the site that the detainees had described and the storage of the remains discovered there.

The two tarpaulins were opened at the gacaca hearing of 6 April to display a pile of rotten clothes in one and a heap of cracked and decayed bones, evidently those of children, in the other. On seeing the remains, the general assembly showed signs of great distress. Women and children began crying. Several men shouted angrily at the president for allowing such traumatising evidence to be displayed at an already-fraught gacaca hearing, where the general assembly was constructing a list of people who had died in the cell during the genocide. This gacaca hearing occurred in an especially emotional environment in early April, at the start of a month-long national remembrance of the victims of the genocide and the day before 7 April, which marks the official anniversary of the start of the genocide in 1994.

In my interviews in this community over several weeks before this hearing, I discovered that many in the general assembly had devel­oped a view of gacaca as an important means of discovering the truth of what happened to their loved ones in 1994. This discovery had in turn aided many survivors' ability to deal with emotions of anger and loss by providing the necessary facts about the death of their friends and family, thus allowing them to understand precisely what had hap­pened and to speak more clearly and assuredly about their experiences. For these survivors, the distress of the exhumation appeared to undo much of the good associated with the hearing of gacaca testimonies to this point.^[202] The president replied that the exhumation of the chil­dren's remains served a dual purpose: on the one hand, it verified the testimony of the two detainees at the previous gacaca regarding the location of the mass grave and, with later forensic analysis, it would help verify how many children were buried there and how they had been killed. The exhumation was also a way of publicly shaming the detainees who committed these crimes. A third purpose related to the exhumation, which the president did not mention, was that relatives of those whose remains were discovered could now bury their loved ones in an appropriate manner.^[203]

This situation underscores that different interpretations of the pur­poses and aims of gacaca can become confused and produce discord within the communities involved. For many participants in the general assembly at Ruhengenge, the objective of gacaca was to establish the degree of truth necessary to aid survivors’ healing. They argued that the judges should have excluded any investigations that re-traumatised sur­vivors. The president, however, argued that an important aim of gacaca was also to verify the truth of testimonies heard at gacaca - to reach the clearest possible understanding of what occurred during the genocide, even if this increased levels of trauma for participants - and, in turn, to deliver some form of justice to the perpetrators, for example through public shaming.

As the following chapters will show, situations such as the one just described are unavoidable given the degree of current misunderstand­ing and confusion regarding gacaca’s objectives. Such disagreements also highlight the crucial personal, emotional dimensions of gacaca. Given the immense impact of the genocide on individuals and com­munities and of people’s direct involvement in gacaca hearings, partici­pants invest enormous and manifold hopes in gacaca. Many participants in gacaca, as well as the political leaders and commentators who help shape the system, articulate a wide and often inchoate array of interpret­ations. This confusion poses difficulties both for judges and members of the general assembly who participate directly in gacaca and for observers and commentators who monitor how effectively gacaca operates. Major disagreements nevertheless emphasise the importance of individual and communal agency in gacaca and the vital role of the general population in running and shaping the institution, often with highly unpredictable results.