Government’s perspectives on popular participation in gacaca

The government’s interpretations of popular involvement in gacaca emphasise its importance for facilitating relatively immediate goals, while also conveying a wider ideology concerning the roots of conflict in Rwanda and the need for a stronger sense of national unity.

Part of the government’s discourse concerning the need to draw on Rwandan history to solve current problems emphasises - as we saw in Chapter 4 in the official lessons in the ingando and detainees’ attitudes along the gacaca journey - the need to regain a sense of �national unity’ that colonial regimes and past �manipulative’ governments destroyed. As this and subsequent chapters highlight, the argument concerning the need to regain a lost sense of unity is a key component of the government’s (and many detainees’) views on most of gacaca’s objectives.^[306] Ndangiza argues that gacaca aims �not to administer the classical system of justice, but to re-establish harmony and to bring citizens who were manipulated to commit crimes by the state intel­ligentsia, back to the right path’.^[307] Underlying this perspective is the idea that the Rwandan people embody certain virtues, such as unity and social harmony, that previous leaders undermined.

The government regularly identifies the forms of dialogue and con­sensual decision-making practised at gacaca as means towards fostering more unified interactions in daily life. The theme of popular participa­tion also gives a crucial insight into how the government explains the causes of the genocide to the population and how these sources of div­ision and conflict should be quelled. The government blames �outsiders’ for creating divisions in Rwandan society by �turning [Rwandan] trad­ition... on [its] head’ and propagating what Patrick Mazimpaka, then- presidential envoy to the Great Lakes, calls �anti-values’ in Rwandan society that require �counter-values’.^[308] The government argues that these outsiders are either the colonial administrators who sought to divide the community and to favour particular groups for their own political gain, or past Hutu leaders who actively excluded Tutsi from positions of influ­ence and incited violence against them. Aloisea Inyumba describes the former interpretation of �outsiders’ when she claims, �divisions were sown among Rwandans little by little by white people just as if a farmer sows his seeds'.^[309] The latter view finds expression in the introduction to the Gacaca Law, which states that a major purpose of gacaca is to reconstitute �the Rwandan Society that had been destroyed by bad leaders who incited the population into exterminating part of the Society'.^[310] Ndangiza colourfully describes all Rwandans as needing to �build within themselves a renewed sense of Rwandan nationality, in lieu of the fake identities derived of late from deforming mirrors', in which she considers external forces to be the main deformers of Rwandan identity.^[311] Therefore, in order to overcome the divisions created by outsiders, Rwandans (i.e. �insiders') must look to their own history and culture for solutions.

The government also views communal involvement in gacaca as a rem­edy to the failures of another group of �outsiders': leaders of international institutions such as the ICTR, which are run by the same foreign govern­ments that are perceived to have abandoned Rwanda during the genocide. The government views the ICTR as an expensive, ineffective institution that has little relevance for the population because it is so geographically removed, based in Tanzania, and because little justice has been carried out there, with only forty-five cases of those suspected of orchestrating the genocide heard to date, leading to thirty-eight convictions.^[312] President Kagame argues that the ICTR

has performed very poorly and consumed huge amounts of resources for doing very little... The world is ready to keep wasting resources for doing nothing. The tribunal was not established to deal with the problem we are talking about, of genocide in Rwanda. It's dealing with paying huge salaries to UN workers or other individuals.^[313]

Gacaca, on the other hand, the government argues, provides for the needs of Rwandans, thereby generating a greater sense of popular legitimacy, which is reinforced by the community's direct involvement in gacaca.

Regarding the modalities of gacaca, the government argues that the general assembly constitutes the main participant during hearings. According to former Minister of Justice and Institutional Relations, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, â€?[T]he success of Gacaca largely depends on an active and unconditional participation by the population.'¹¹ Judges are on hand only to encourage what, as already quoted, Hannington Tayebwa from the Ministry of Justice calls â€?facilitated problem-solving.'^{[314] [315] From this stand­point, the general assembly should conduct an open discussion at gacaca hearings, in which judges act as facilitators. The government claims that its officials need to be involved in gacaca, though it rarely outlines what this should entail.}

The Gacaca Law stipulates that the leaders charged with overseeing gacaca must not include lawyers. The primary rationale behind the exclu­sion of lawyers from all direct involvement in gacaca, and of groups such as police officers and clergy from being judges, is a desire to maintain the open, participatory spirit of gacaca. Individuals with specific expertise such as lawyers, the official argument goes, may dominate gacaca hear­ings and intimidate less-qualified participants. These elites should there­fore be excluded from leadership roles in gacaca. �There has been a major problem with elites confusing people', Ndangiza said in 2008, assessing gacaca's performance in terms of discovering the truth about genocide crimes. �Much truth has come out and participation generally speaking has been high but elites participating in the process have been a prob­lem. There has been low participation by elites and when they have par­ticipated, we have seen little truth come from them... There is a danger that they sophisticate everything and people get confused about what is going on.'^[317] Such sentiments echo the concerns about Rwanda's history of elite control over the population, which has led to discord and vio­lence, and the need to invoke the more positive values considered inher­ent in the general population.

The government argues that giving fundamental control over the daily running of gacaca to the population will reinforce the popular understand­ing of traditional gacaca and fulfil the community’s subsequent expec­tations of ownership over the current process. In turn, the population’s ownership over gacaca is justified, the government claims, because the local population knows better than anyone what crimes were committed during the genocide and who is responsible for them.

At gacaca, the truth ultimately comes from the population. We know that people will tell who is responsible because they saw what [the per­petrators] did. They stood there as it happened and they saw everything with their own eyes. There will be no confusion about who is responsible for these things.^[319]

If truth comes primarily from the population, the government argues, then gacaca should be organised to maximise communal participation in the pursuit and articulation of the truth.