Critique of sources' perspectives on peace through gacaca

It is necessary to critically analyse and, in several cases, to reject, the views of the government, population and commentators regarding the three issues concerning peace through gacaca: the nature of the conflict that gacaca's peacebuilding processes are expected to address; the nature of those processes and the actors involved; and the expected outcomes of peacebuilding through gacaca.

Regarding methods of peacebuilding, only commentators on gacaca are consistently convincing, justifiably emphasising the need, and cap­acity, for gacaca to incorporate long-term processes of positive peace. This argument follows from the assumption that low-level conflict is inevitable in any community and that in Rwanda violent conflict has recently been common. Simply avoiding violence - that is, achieving negative peace - for example as some suspects wish, hoping to avoid reprisals from survivors, is insufficient. As the history of Rwanda after 1959 shows, periods of apparently peaceful coexistence between Hutu and Tutsi have tended to give way to mass violence because, despite the supposedly harmonious circumstances, the root causes of conflict were not addressed. At gacaca, it is necessary therefore for participants to con­front face to face the nature, and sources, of their conflicts and to openly and genuinely seek ways of overcoming them. Gacaca provides for this form of confrontation through the processes of engagement as described in Chapter 5, particularly with the emphasis on open, in-depth dialogue and debate on issues of communal importance.

There is no doubting the risk that the level of engagement required at gacaca entails, and suspects and survivors are justified in anticipat­ing painful confrontations at gacaca. Leaders overseeing gacaca must be sensitive to the population’s fears and concerns and to the possibility that gacaca will, at least initially, exacerbate some tensions. At the same time, Rwandan commentators such as Karekezi and Gasibirege (and non-Rwandans such as Longman) are right to argue that not all disputes at gacaca hamper the cause of peace.

Disagreements during gacaca hearings are often healthy, provided they neither concern issues completely irrelevant to post-genocide reconstruction nor escalate into violence. Short-term, low-level con­flict, in the form of the community’s discussions of often-painful and contentious issues, is necessary for long-term peace, as the dialogue of gacaca hearings becomes a training ground for non-violent con­flict resolution outside of gacaca. One example of this comes from the gacaca jurisdiction in Kacyiru district of Kigali Ville discussed in Chapter 5, where in 2003 a recently returned detainee disrupted a hearing, necessitating intervention by the president of the inyangamu- gayo. I returned to the same community in 2006 to observe two gacaca hearings and interview participants.

That was a very difficult time here because the prisoners were coming back. There were always disruptions during gacaca because people were shouting and arguing... If you look at gacaca here now, you will see that things are different. The people are more focused. They speak more calmly. That is because life is more settled. The prisoners have all been back for several years and some of them have been doing TIG in another place and now some will go back to jail... The survivors still live a dif­ficult life because of their memories. You cannot forget the things you have gone through. But things are peaceful here now. There are no big problems.^[545]

Chifura, a sixty-two-year-old woman whose son was awaiting trial for alleged murders committed during the genocide, said,

It is a terrible thing to have to wait like this. My son has been back here for three years and still he doesn't know what will happen to him... I go to gacaca most weeks and the people are calm. They know each other and they talk normally to each other. Mostly in this place, people are liv­ing peacefully, but if you have a loved one who has been accused, then it is not easy. You can't sleep well because you are always worried.^[546]

My observations of gacaca hearings in this community confirmed Donatien's and Chifura's descriptions. Both hearings, which involved several suspects confessing publicly to their crimes and numerous mem­bers of the general assembly standing to provide evidence, were char­acterised by engaged participation and calm mediation by the judges. The atmosphere surrounding these hearings, as Donatien and Chifura described, was significantly less tense than in 2003 because people had become used to the returned detainees living in their midst and to the modalities of gacaca.

A lack of any form of disagreement or conflict during gacaca hearings, on the other hand, usually signifies a lack of meaningful engagement between participants. The Category 1 gacaca hearing in Nyamirambo described in the previous chapter displayed an increased formalism and little of the communal engagement observed in the district in previous years. As we saw in Chapter 4, the detainees who experienced the gacaca journey often avoided confrontation with survivors by moving to the outskirts of their communities. In doing so, however, they forfeited any possibility of engaging with survivors and addressing their antagonisms. Because engagement is so crucial for restoration, gacaca judges require a deep sense of discernment: they must facilitate engagement in order to achieve the aims of gacaca, without interfering unnecessarily in the pro­ceedings, but they must also intervene if the debates at gacaca become unproductive or violent.

Observers such as Corey and Joireman are rightly concerned that acrimony during gacaca hearings may have wider effects on relations in the community. Such possibilities, however, do not completely under­mine the potential for gacaca to embody civic virtues of communal engagement, dialogue and debate that are important for building trust and long-term peace. Furthermore, the mediation of gacaca judges and the presence of government security personnel at all hearings safeguard against destructive altercations or violence. Corey and Joireman there­fore mistakenly conclude that gacaca will inevitably lead to major, short­term insecurity.

While it is undoubtedly important for gacaca to facilitate long-term peacebuilding processes that aim primarily at positive peace, one com­ponent of some officials’ and commentators’ arguments for sustained processes is highly questionable: the importance of punishment of per­petrators at gacaca for deterring future criminals and thus ending impun­ity.

Furthermore, the culture of impunity in Rwanda was only an enabler of the genocide, and it alone does not explain why so many people killed their friends, neighbours and family members. Other cultural and polit­ical factors, particularly fear during the civil-war period, ethnic hatred, material deprivation and incitement and intimidation by state officials, were more direct causes of the genocide.^[549] If a post-conflict institution such as gacaca aims to build peace, then it must respond to the deep- rooted motivations of the population that led it to perpetrate mass vio­lence. Deterrence through punishment may lead individuals to question the consequences of committing crimes but it cannot respond adequately to the complex political and psychosocial causes of crimes such as geno­cide. Even when confronted with the genuine possibility of punishment for their actions, perpetrators who are motivated by extreme fear or eth­nic hatred may not be deterred from committing crimes. It is therefore more appropriate to focus - as some sections of the population and some commentators do - on how gacaca contributes to peacebuilding by pro­viding long-term, sustainable responses to the root causes of mass con­flict, rather than to the factors that allowed conflict. Punishment for perpetrators is still necessary to voice the community’s outrage at crimes committed and perhaps to deter some offenders. Effective deterrent just­ice, however, requires deeper, concurrent peacebuilding processes if it is to genuinely contribute to long-term peace.

Regarding the likely outcomes of peacebuilding through gacaca, the population and commentators overall offer useful insights, while there are significant problems with the government’s perspective. The popu­lation and commentators on gacaca justifiably emphasise the degree to which gacaca causes great concern among many survivors and suspects, particularly as they anticipate the face-to-face engagement and the dis­cussions of often traumatic experiences that gacaca requires. Feelings of trepidation are inevitable before and during gacaca hearings because gacaca constitutes for many Rwandans the first time they have engaged so closely with other members of the community, especially those from different ethnic groups. However, most popular and critical sources ana­lysed here are right to argue that initial periods of foreboding and arduous forms of engagement during gacaca hearings are necessary if individuals and the community as a whole are to reap the rewards of engagement through gacaca.

The government is similarly justified in arguing that the mediated problem-solving of gacaca is critical to cultivating similar methods of peaceful conflict resolution for the future. Several suspects and survivors interviewed stated that gacaca had a discernible impact on modes of dia­logue and conflict resolution in their general community, drawing on principles of mediation and negotiation. As Alphonse stated during the gacaca journey, in his community gacaca (dealing with genocide crimes) and the abunzi (handling daily infractions) operated symbiotically, each reinforcing their respective mediation and resolution processes. As we have seen, however, the government does not consistently empha­sise the role of gacaca in preparing the population to deal with future conflicts. The government often argues instead that gacaca will simply allow the population to achieve negative peace by restoring a lost sense of national unity. Besides the mythical status of the �lost’ unity, the prob­lem with such a view is that maintaining negative peace alone is insuffi­cient for the creation of a functioning, sustainable society. Aiming only at non-violence, as the government argues that gacaca should, fails to foster more meaningful, future relationships between previously antag­onistic individuals and groups. Because there is an absence of violence does not mean that the sources of violence have been eradicated and that they may not again take root in society. Thwarting the potential for future conflict and building a lasting peace entail actively facilitating the creation of stronger bonds between individuals and groups previously in conflict. Gacaca must restore trust and facilitate engagement, not only because these are good in and of themselves but because they contribute to long-term peace by giving people the resources to resolve their con­flicts constructively and independently.

In this sense, peacebuilding at gacaca aims at much more than restor­ing some lost form of communal �unity’; it aims to develop the capacity of the population to resolve inevitable conflicts. Achieving negative peace is a vital first step towards building trust and facilitating engage­ment; a society such as Rwanda must achieve a level of non-violence and stability before seeking to build stronger bonds between its citizens. However, achieving that stability appears to be the aim of processes preceding gacaca, which in turn is concerned more with building trust and facilitating engagement. The view expressed above by the survivor Jean-Baptiste is especially telling: he admitted that the prospect of facing genocide perpetrators at gacaca scared him immensely but nonetheless he believed that gacaca was �good for survivors because we can speak the truth' and that the recognition that gacaca would allow parties to dis­cuss their conflicts constructively convinced him that there would �only be peace from now on'. Certainly not all suspects or survivors share this perspective. The government and gacaca judges must therefore help par­ticipants in gacaca overcome their initial fears and concerns in order to pursue gacaca's profound objectives.

In conclusion, gacaca has led to periods of increased instability, par­ticularly in the early stages of hearings when suspects and survivors meet face to face for the first time and, to some extent, at the beginning of the trial phase when issues of guilt and innocence are at stake, following the lengthy information-gathering phase. That gacaca may create initial tensions, however, does not preclude it from facilitating negative peace, provided these tensions do not lead to violence. Gacaca has often consol­idated a situation of non-violence, which is the requirement of negative peace, by providing an immediate form of mediated conflict resolution. Aided by gacaca's legal statutes that safeguard against violence in the general assembly and the presence of security personnel at all hearings, gacaca judges have helped many parties discuss their conflicts more use­fully, despite the difficulties inherent in assembling antagonistic parties in such close confines.

Gacaca has also proven vital in the construction of positive peace. The same processes of mediated engagement that are important for negative peace in the short term are crucial for positive peace in the long term, particularly if the population learns key virtues of conflict resolution at gacaca that it can transfer into daily life, as some communities appear to have already experienced. Thus, gacaca constitutes a vital realm for educative positive peace. Certainly the prospects for positive peace will be heavily influenced by social and political developments outside of gacaca. However, gacaca currently constitutes a rare forum in which the engagement between previously antagonistic parties necessary for main­taining long-term peace can occur.