Government’s perspectives on healing through gacaca
In the early years of gacaca, the government generally paid minimal attention to issues of personal healing, undoubtedly reflecting its focus on nationwide issues, principally forms of justice.
Recently, however, the government has increasingly discussed the problem of trauma in the community and the need for healing, although gacaca is often identified as a cause rather than healer of trauma. In 2008, Ndangiza, Executive Secretary of the NURC, said, â€?Trauma healing is a very real issue for us now, especially for women. You have all these women who didn’t disclose rape to their husbands and children, so how are they going to discuss rape at gacaca?'[585] The Ministry of Health is responsible for mental-health issues connected to gacaca, but the government rarely spells out exactly what the Ministry's role entails. At the National Summit on Unity and Reconciliation in October 2002, Cyanzayire, Deputy Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and President of the Gacaca Commission, made a rare, and vague, official reference on this point: â€?The Ministry of Health, which has the responsibility to see to the trauma complications induced by genocide and massacres must step up actions in that regard, since those complications have been cropping up in Gacaca.'[586] Where governÂment officials do discuss the role of healing, and where it relates to procÂesses at gacaca, such statements usually come from officials in the NURC who engage more closely with the population through sensitisation proÂgrammes concerning gacaca's aims and methods. At the Symposium on Gacaca in 2000, Antoine Rutayisire, then a commissioner with the NURC, said,The social and psychological implications will be dealt with when one has finished with the legal aspects of gacaca... [M]ost of the speakers [at this conference have] cited the legal angle.
Now the fundamental quesÂtion is. â€?What are the social, cultural and psychosocial implications?[587]This statement identifies a source of discord within the government itself: some departments, particularly the Ministry of Justice, focus on legal (usually retributive) aspects of gacaca, while other departments, such as the NURC, are concerned primarily with the psychological and emotional outcomes of legal decisions. The personnel in these different parts of the government reflect many of the factional divides discussed in Chapter 2, with the Ministry of Justice incorporating many of the legal and RPF elites who initially opposed gacaca and the NURC comprisÂing predominantly diasporic figures who did not live through the genoÂcide and therefore tend to take a more psychosocial rather than punitive approach to gacaca. It is not obvious that, in managing gacaca, these difÂferent departments operate within the same philosophical and practical framework, nor that they are always coherently coordinated.
Rutinburana, Programme Coordinator for the NURC, argued that, while healing undoubtedly plays an important role in gacaca, its purÂsuit is likely to complicate that of other objectives. Rutinburana stated that a key virtue of gacaca is that it can â€?open then heal wounds', with a view towards facilitating both healing as liberation and healing as belonging.[588] In Rutinburana's interpretation, healing as liberation occurs when survivors discover important details about the past. â€?Releasing people from ignorance' by providing knowledge of personal events durÂing the genocide, Rutinburana argues, â€?is an important healing process at gacaca'.[589] Ndangiza meanwhile discusses a version of healing of libÂeration for genocide suspects who unburden their consciences by conÂfessing to their crimes. â€?The churches have been very effective in the prisons at encouraging the detainees to confess', she said. â€?Politicians are very limited in this area - they are not very good at teaching people's hearts.
But the churches teach people that if they did bad in the past but now they confess, they can have reconciliation with God, with their neighbours, and now they can have heaven.'[590] Rutinburana also describes the importance of opening then healing wounds in terms of healing as belonging: â€?Healing may come to those who share their experiences at gacaca', he argued. â€?The survivors will find others who have had similar experiences and they will be able to talk about these things together.'[591] In this view, survivors' feeling that they are not alone in having suffered trauma and that others empathise with them - which they gain through engagement with others at gacaca - may help them deal with many of the psychological and emotional effects of the genocide.Implicit in Rutinburana's comments regarding the need to first open wounds at gacaca is the recognition that healing will be painful, espeÂcially for survivors. Rutinburana argues that truth processes that aim at healing may result in the â€?re-traumatisation' of participants.[592] Similar to the tension between forms of truth and healing discussed in Chapter 3 in the context of the exhumation of mass graves in Ruhengenge disÂtrict, the disclosure of the truth at gacaca, while sometimes contribÂuting to healing, raises difficult personal and communal issues. It may be extremely painful at first for individuals to share their experiences publicly. Rutinburana argues, however, that remaining silent will only exacerbate people's feelings of pain and loss. Conversely, commuÂnal acknowledgement of experiences that survivors share publicly can increase their sense of belonging in the community. As Kayitana, former spokesperson of the Gacaca Commission, states, â€?[In the government] we believe a pill that is bitter is sometimes the one that heals.'[593] [594]