Government’s perspectives on truth through gacaca
The government interprets truth through gacaca primarily as truthÂtelling and truth-hearing, viewing both as essentially legal but also including therapeutic truth as a subordinate component.
More recently, state officials have begun to discuss the importance of truth-shaping after gacaca, which involves teaching the population historical lessons based on the evidence of genocide crimes gathered from public testimony. The government’s overall concern at gacaca is to encourage suspects and witÂnesses to tell the truth about crimes committed during the genocide and for the general assembly and gacaca judges to weigh fairly the evidence presented. Regarding truth-telling, the government emphasises that the population is best situated to tell the truth about crimes committed durÂing the genocide. As quoted earlier, the Gacaca Manual exhorts judges not to â€?forget that it is from the population that the truth will emerge’.[442] Much of the emphasis on the community’s ownership over gacaca stems from an assumption that, because genocide crimes were often committed in full view of the community, as neighbours killed neighbours and even family members killed family members, then the population will know who committed these crimes and how they were perpetrated. The govÂernment argues that the population not only knows better than anyone else what happened during the genocide but gacaca allows more people to tell their truth than is possible in other judicial institutions.As gacaca has developed, many state officials have tempered their optimism regarding the population’s role in truth-telling. In particular, some officials have expressed growing concerns over widespread false testimony during gacaca hearings. â€?We have faced major challenges with truth at gacaca’, Oswald Rutinburana, Project Coordinator at the NURC, said in 2008.
Many people are not willing to tell the truth and as a result there is a long process involved in sieving the information. People are not always straight. They go round and round, and the judges require smart tactics in finding out the truth. Eventually the truth is known but the process becomes very long.[443]
Fatuma Ndangiza, Executive Secretary of the NURC, echoed these views:
Truth-telling has become our biggest challenge. In our original surveys, 90 per cent of people were favourable toward gacaca’s objectives. They said they trusted the inyangamugayo but they had some concerns about whether they would hear the whole truth from the perpetrators... Now many victims doubt that the truth will come out of gacaca. They hear many lies from the perpetrators and suddenly these new returnees [from the diaspora] are attending gacaca and talking about genocide events that they never saw with their own eyes.[444]
Regarding truth-hearing at gacaca, the government again emphasises the population’s central role in recording and weighing evidence conÂcerning genocide crimes. The Gacaca Law outlines various processes of legal truth-hearing, such as the general assembly’s compilation of four key lists of evidence in the early phases of gacaca, naming and categoÂrising suspects in terms of the severity of their crimes, and recording detainees’ confessions and witnesses’ testimony. The general assembly in turn debates the information gathered through such processes in order to determine the guilt or innocence of individual suspects.[445]
To a much lesser extent, official sources claim that truth-telling and truth-hearing at gacaca may comprise deeply personal forms of discourse that do not directly concern legal issues. For example, some state sources interpret the physical setting of gacaca as a forum in which survivors publicly describe what they experienced during and after the genocide. In this regard, survivors engage in therapeutic truth-telling in order to gain public recognition of their experiences.
As the Gacaca Manual states, â€?To help facilitate the emergence of the truth of what happened during the genocide and other massacres; to recognise the victims and the nature of the damages inflicted on them... these are the tasks of the Gacaca Jurisdictions.’[446] In this sense, truth-telling and truth-hearing are intended not solely to solve legal cases but also to help survivors regain some sense of belonging in the community as others listen to accounts of, and publicly recognise, their traumatic experiences. These truth processes may provide a sense of healing, as they help individuals regain a sense of personal worth by allowing them to tell their stories publicly to an empathetic audience.[447]Finally, in recent years, the government has emphasised the importance of truth-shaping through gacaca, particularly the use of evidence gathered from hearings in teaching civic lessons to the population. â€?We have gathered so much evidence over all these years’, said Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, Executive Secretary of the NSGJ, in 2008. â€?Now gacaca is contributing to changing people’s minds about the criminal-justice system. They have seen that gacaca has dealt with all levels of criminals. They have seen others accused, even by their own relatives, and they have learnt what good behaviour is, how they must live together in harmony'.[448] Such views echo earlier government statements regarding the need to educate the population through processes such as ingando and gacaca. For this reason, the governÂment has built a Gacaca Documentation Centre in Kigali, which will house physical and digital archives of gacaca evidence. â€?We will have a meticulous record of everything the population has discussed at gacaca', said Denis Bikesha, Director of Training, Mobilisation and Sensitisation at the NSGJ. â€?People will come from all over to consult these records. They will understand the events that overwhelmed us in 1994 and they will know how to stop such things ever happening here again.'[449]