Critique of sources' perspectives on truth through gacaca

Some suspects have a major incentive to confess falsely to crimes in order to benefit from gacaca's plea-bargaining scheme. A case in Bugesera district of Kigali Ngali province amply illustrates this point. At a gacaca hearing by a small banana-frond-encircled lake in June 2006, a suspect came from a nearby prison to confess to his genocide crimes. Standing in front of around 200 people in the general assembly, he admitted to looting some property from a house on the edge of the community, near the main road leading to Nyamata. When the suspect finished speaking, the judges highlighted for the audience's benefit that he had admitted to committing Category 3 crimes involving property and that, if found guilty, he would need to give the same amount of goods or the finan­cial equivalent to the victims of his crimes and perhaps perform some community service. The judges asked if anyone in the general assembly wished to respond to the suspect's confession. After a lengthy silence, an elderly lady stood at the back of the gathering and asked permission to speak. When this was granted, she launched into a searing tirade, saying, �This man is lying and you judges are not doing your job because you should know that he is lying.' The judges were visibly shocked and asked the woman to explain herself.

The woman sat down and the judges conferred. After they had deliberated, they asked several questions of others sitting in the general assembly, then announced that the woman was correct that this case had already been completed at an earlier hearing. After asking sev­eral questions of the suspect, they stated that he had clearly provided a false confession. The suspect initially protested but soon admitted that this was true. It emerged that he was in fact innocent of all geno­cide crimes. After spending many years in prison, however, he had deemed it preferable to fabricate a confession to a low category of geno­cide crime, which would bring a minimal sentence, rather than spend further years in jail, with no immediate prospect of release. On this basis, the gacaca judges found the detainee guilty of perjury and sen­tenced him to two years in jail. In short, the suspect had gambled on gacaca's plea-bargaining system and lost.^[500] Such cases confirm the fears expressed by genocide survivors in Chapter 4 that gacaca's use of plea­bargaining to extract confessions from suspects may lead to a spate of false confessions.

Evidence from gacaca hearings and interviews with participants also highlights that truth-telling is limited in two further key respects. As Alphonse indicated in Chapter 4, because gacaca often forbids the dis­cussion of RPF crimes against Hutu, many Hutu see gacaca as a one-sided truth process.^[501] Alphonse's relatives who tried to raise the issue of his father's and brother's alleged murder by RPF officers were stopped from doing so, causing them to lament the lack of truth about such crimes. Such examples highlight that, in the vast majority of gacaca jurisdictions, truth­telling is limited to the discussion of one important set of crimes, to the exclusion of another.

Gacaca has also experienced major problems regarding truth-telling about Category 1 crimes. The move of sexual violence cases from the national courts back to gacaca - after they were initially shifted from gacaca, due to victims' reluctance to provide public testimony of such crimes and problems of retraumatisation - has proven difficult because the population recalls its initial reluctance to discuss these issues at gacaca.

Second, unrecognised in numerous sources' descriptions of truth­telling through gacaca, is the extent to which, in the case of each of the three functions of truth-telling (legal, therapeutic and restorative), truth-telling alone is an insufficient means to the expressed outcomes. Whether truth-telling is interpreted as legal (public confession as sham­ing), therapeutic (healing through public disclosure) or restorative (engagement and dialogue in a communal forum), it is not so much the telling of the truth but rather the ways in which other parties respond to it, that is important. If, for example, survivors or the general assembly do not condemn the suspect who publicly confesses to his or her crimes, then truth-telling will fail to shame the suspect. Similarly, if the commu­nity does not display empathy towards the survivor who describes his or her traumatic personal experiences, then the individual will not receive the public acknowledgement necessary for healing. This requirement of truth-telling highlights the extent to which gacaca is crucially a commu­nal enterprise that involves the general assembly in personal pursuits, such as individual healing.

Third, the importance of communal responses for the efficacy of truth at gacaca highlights problems in some sources' interpretations of truth­telling and truth-hearing. Together these processes of truth constitute the dynamic of communal dialogue at gacaca that some sources argue is vital for facilitating more meaningful engagement between parties with the eventual aim of restoring relationships. The need for the appropri­ate reception of individuals' truth-telling hints at the difficulties of com­munal dialogue at gacaca. Some detainees and Rwandan commentators suggest that participants in gacaca will engage relatively effortlessly in dialogue and that truth-telling and truth-hearing will lead quickly to reconciliation. Such views ignore the inevitable tensions created by pub­lic discourse at gacaca. As my observations of various gacaca hearings show, public discussions at gacaca are often acrimonious, as parties who have rarely, if ever, debated with one another on crucial issues assemble to seek solutions to the very real conflicts between them. These parties will not easily reach agreement on many of the issues discussed; the truths heard at gacaca will not provide the easy �medicine’ or �mending of the social fabric’ that some sources suggest (such statements are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 9). Instead, participants in gacaca will need to negotiate the truths told and heard at gacaca and will often require the mediation of judges and other community leaders to discover solutions to their problems. Nevertheless, as Timothy Longman argues, based on his fieldwork into gacaca, �Even heated exchanges were sometimes quite posi­tive, because they allowed hidden grievances and resentments to come to the surface, where the community could deal with them. Some of the gacaca sessions I attended included dramatic confrontations between wit­nesses and the people they accused, with people showing extraordinary courage and forthrightness in ways that could only be positive.’^[505] Gacaca facilitates forms of engagement and confrontation that are necessary for parties to tackle their problems head-on but such interactions are highly unpredictable and often produce further divisions, necessitating sobriety regarding the impact of truth-telling and truth-hearing through gacaca.

Moreover, the dialogical space that gacaca creates must expand beyond gacaca into participants’ daily lives, so that communal dialogue continues in the long term. Gacaca constitutes a vital starting point for these collective discussions. Contrary to Ingelaere’s and Waldorf’s arguments, my research indicates a high level of public deliberation and debate during many gacaca hearings and - as highlighted by the inter­views with participants cited above - a strong desire among all groups in Rwandan society (often for different reasons) to engage in truth-telling and truth-hearing through gacaca. The desire for discursiveness res­onates powerfully among many Rwandans, as also highlighted by Dauge- Roth and Longman.

There is a danger that depictions of secrecy and silence in Rwanda essentialise the entire society. The anthropological work of de Lame, which informs much of Ingelaere’s and Waldorf’s analyses, focuses on a single hill in Kibuye province in the 1980s and early 1990s, and de Lame herself is cautious about extrapolating from the �hillside micro-culture' to the country as a whole.^[506] Furthermore, Ingelaere and Waldorf employ de Lame's analysis selectively. While extending de Lame's characterisations regarding secrecy and silence in Kibuye to Rwanda generally, they con­tinue to describe ethnicity as the primary cleavage in Rwandan society, even though de Lame finds from her Kibuye investigations that socio-eco­nomic cleavages were more important than ethnicity in structuring daily lives.^[507] Certainly some Rwandans are reluctant to engage in truth-telling and truth-hearing through gacaca but this stems more from the immediate concerns discussed above, such as the time-consuming nature of gacaca hearings and the impact of regional insecurity, than from any innate Rwandan reluctance to engage in public discourse on divisive issues.

The open, constructive dialogical space is not an immutable feature of gacaca. One issue in this regard that has emerged over time is the growing legalism of trials in many communities. From my observations of gacaca jurisdictions, the tone of many hearings has become increas­ingly formal and people's interactions more stilted, indicating an over­familiarity or fatigue with the gacaca procedure or the legal complexity of many cases, particularly those in Category 1. Many participants have also started bringing copies of the Gacaca Law to hearings and referring to particular sections of it when they speak, which rarely happened in the early years of gacaca.^[508]

An example of this legalism was a Category 1 trial in Nyamirambo district of Kigali Ville in August 2008. The hearing took place in a sector office with only sixteen men and four women present to give testimony in front of five inyangamugayo. One by one, as the participants were called to testify, they stood and gave slow, laborious evidence - almost in the form of dictation - which the secretary of the inyangamugayo recorded in her notebook. The president of the inyangamugayo continually asked the witnesses to slow down to allow the secretary to finish recording their testimony. Unlike gacaca hearings I had attended in Nyamirambo in pre­vious years, there was almost no interaction between the judges and the general assembly or within the general asssembly.^[509] The judges engaged in a vigorous cross-examination of several witnesses, who were testifying regarding a suspect - considered a �notorious killer' in Category 1 - who was alleged to have used an AK-47 and grenades to kill Tutsi during the genocide. The suspect was absent from this trial. The judges asked one witness to clarify whether it was �the RPF or the interahamwe' who were responsible for several shootings in the community on the days being described. The judges were particularly concerned about inconsistencies between the testimony given by one witness and the father of a boy who was shot and killed. At the end of the hearing, the secretary read back the testimony that the witnesses had delivered and altered parts of the record based on their clarifications. The witnesses then filed past the judges' bench to sign that they agreed with the secretary's record, and the gathering dispersed.^[510] The key characteristics of this hearing were the singular focus on discovering the legal facts about the events under consideration, with almost no discussion of their personal, emotional impact on the individuals concerned, and little communal interaction among the participants.

It should be noted that not all Category 1 gacaca hearings display these characteristics. A Category 1 hearing in Musanze district - which began in a field beside the sector office but was moved indoors when rain began to fall - generated a turnout of more than 150 participants from the community and highly engaged discussions throughout.^[511] A key difference in this case was that the trial involved several senior suspects, including officials from the local mayor's office, who were pre­sent throughout the hearing. This energised the general assembly, in contrast to the Nyamirambo hearing, where the suspect was absent.

Two days after the Nyamirambo trial a gacaca judge in Kacyiru district of Kigali Ville named Fantine, who was also a schoolteacher, explained, �All inyangamugayo are under pressure to complete cases more quickly than before. The government wants to finish gacaca, so it is telling us to finish these cases fast. That is why many cases are now just about the facts - we hear testimony, we ask questions so that we know if someone is guilty or not.' ^[512] Over time, many government officials, including President Kagame, have stated a desire to hasten the gacaca process, to enable the country to begin addressing other important post-genocide object­ives, particularly economic development.^[513] This has led to an enforced speeding up of many trials, particularly close to Kigali where - as previ­ously stated - state officials wield greater influence over the operation of gacaca. As a result, much of the truth-telling during hearings has become perfunctory, limiting the communal dialogue possible through gacaca.

Finally, the most problematic interpretations from the sources ana­lysed here concern the process of truth-shaping. Problems in this regard centre on issues of agency and specifically on two questions: who should constitute the primary actors at gacaca and for whose benefit should they participate in gacaca? Again, these questions, although stemming from issues regarding truth, highlight major tensions within gacaca as an entire institution. Two particular problems with interpretations of truth­shaping highlight these broader issues of agency at gacaca: the problem of judges' and other leaders' sometimes heavy-handed interventions dur­ing gacaca hearings; and the problem of viewing �truth' as easily definable once parties external to gacaca have distilled �truths' from the discourse of direct participants.

First, attempts by judges and community leaders, such as clergy, to engage in truth-shaping during gacaca hearings often leads to unjustified interventions. As my own observations of several hearings show, these interventions are often gratuitous, irrelevant in the specific context of gacaca and highly disruptive to the aims of truth-telling and truth­hearing. Truth-shaping during hearings often deflects attention from survivors' discussions of their experiences and focuses instead on the broader lessons that gacaca judges and other community leaders wish to highlight. Leaders should show restraint and, in the main, allow the general assembly to direct discussions, except when these grow violent or verge into irrelevant areas.

Second, problems arise from some sources', particularly some Rwandan authors', interpretations of truth-shaping as the attempt by commentators or community leaders to teach civic virtues, to reinterpret the past and to reconstruct memory, usually on behalf of the population after it has engaged in gacaca. Some commentators assume that external elites will distil broader truths from the community's dis­course at gacaca and that the community will readily accept the lessons that these leaders impart to them. At the outset, such a view ignores the extent to which the so-called �truth' at gacaca is often contested and inevitably communally negotiated. The community reaches legal decisions and interpretations of emotional discourse only after lengthy debates at gacaca. The general assembly may question any statements from judges or other participants - as the elderly lady did in the perjury case described above - and may discuss them at length. Gacaca is vital for shaping people's understandings of the events of the genocide and its aftermath, particularly for survivors for whom public acknowledge­ment of their experiences is a vital component of their participation at gacaca. As we have already seen, there are many truths told and heard at gacaca and many functions of truth, and the community effectively understands the significance of these truths only via discursive means. Therefore, many participants in gacaca treat with immense scepticism attempts by elites to reinterpret these truths on their behalf. Umutoni, a thirty-seven-year-old survivor in Nyarugenge district of Kigali Ville whose parents and sister were killed during the genocide, said, �Some of us are frustrated because these officials come to gacaca and talk so much. They listen to what the suspects say, then they tell us what they think it means. But we know what it all means because we have been coming to gacaca for all these years now.'^[514]

External parties must respect the multiplicity, and the deeply per­sonal nature, of the narratives that constitute the communal dialogue at gacaca. As Charles Meier argues, the production of historical narratives

means listening to, testing, and ultimately making public [different par­ties'] respective subnarratives or partial stories. To resort to a musical analogy: written history must be contrapuntal, not harmonic. That is, it must allow the particular histories of [different] groups to be woven together linearly alongside each other so that the careful listener can fol­low them distinctly but simultaneously, hearing the whole together with the parts.^[515]

In many instances it will be inappropriate to deploy personal narratives in an effort to teach lessons to the community as a whole. When too heavily detached from popular needs and concerns, truth-shaping at gacaca becomes simply another form of elite control or manipulation, using the population's emotional, private experiences of the genocide for official ends.

Moreover, reinterpreting the past or reconstructing memory are highly complex, controversial processes. Karekezi's argument that truth­shaping at gacaca will reconstruct �a memory that is acceptable for all Rwandans' belies the impossibility of such a task. Inevitably, individ­uals and groups disagree about the nature and significance of the past. History and memory are unavoidably contested; there can never be an �official memory' to which all citizens subscribe.^[516] Reconstructing people's memories of events will require substantial debate, within and outside of gacaca, as the infinite range of people's recollections of the genocide, and the various moral and ethical claims they attach to them, will undoubt­edly clash, rendering it impossible to construct a universally accepted account of the past. As Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka argues, �collect­ive memory... is the very warp and weft of the tapestry of history that makes up society. Unravel and jettison a thread from that tapestry and society itself may become undone at the seams.'^[517] People cleave strongly to their individual memories, because their identity is bounded by how they remember and interpret their experiences. Similarly, societies often struggle to re-evaluate their own understandings of history - their sense of collective memory - because so much of communal identity is tied up with recounting and interpreting the community's past.

These issues are central to the case of the government's Gacaca Documentation Centre, which is designed to create a historical record of the genocide and contribute to the deterrence of future crimes. Gacaca certainly provides one of the most extensive records of any mass atro­city in the world, gathering documents based on communal discussions in 11,000 jurisdictions around Rwanda. However, the content and qual­ity of those records will vary greatly across the country, highlighting, among other things, the extent to which the genocide occurred more rapidly and viciously and caused greater trauma in some locations than in others. The gacaca record will show that genocide as a nationwide phenomenon was also an aggregation of thousands of micro-events that involved millions of individuals. A challenge for the government in con­structing the Gacaca Documentation Centre will be to allow those vital national, community-level and personal dynamics to emerge, underscor­ing the variance of genocide events and their local impact across the country, rather than attempting to tell a singular, bounded, official nar­rative of the genocide and its meaning for the population.

In Rwanda the role of politicised ethnicity as a lens for different groups' interpretations of history has led to the creation of highly volatile, antagon­istic group identities that are one of the root causes of violence. The politics of attempting to counter or reconstruct memory in a country riven by eth­nic conflict are extremely fraught. Nevertheless, the process of analysing and interpreting the events and experiences described at gacaca is import­ant, particularly given the limited national discussion that has ensued since 1994 on the key issues of Rwandan ethnicity and the root causes of the genocide. Academic commentators and other elites play a vital role in distilling historical patterns and moral lessons from evidence gathered at gacaca. They must recognise, however, the inevitable limitations of truth­shaping at gacaca, which stem from the population’s reluctance to allow external parties to formulate lessons on their behalf and the inevitably volatile, controversial nature of processes of historical reinterpretation and memory reconstruction. Effective truth-shaping must be consultative and must reflect a wide range of people’s beliefs and memories.