HOLISM: CONNECTING GACACA'S PRAGMATIC AND PROFOUND OBJECTIVES
As argued in Chapter 2, the primary purpose of hybrid systems of tranÂsitional justice institutions is to facilitate holism, seeking to respond to the range of physical, psychological and psychosocial needs of individÂuals and groups after conflict.
Gacaca’s internal hybridity, particularly its combination of pragmatic and profound objectives, similarly seeks to respond to the Rwandan population’s broad spectrum of post-genocide needs. The breadth of the objectives analysed in this book, from the practical need to return hundreds of thousands of able-bodied detainees to their communities to healing survivors’ deep psychological wounds, underscores the enormous scope of gacaca, reflecting the ambitions, hopes and desires of its creators and participants. This section assemÂbles the arguments from Chapters 6-10 to highlight gacaca’s complex galaxy of objectives. Evaluating the normative and empirical claims from those chapters shows that gacaca’s simultaneous pursuit of differÂent objectives has rarely been straightforward. In some cases, these aims have been mutually reinforcing; in others, they have caused significant tensions, suggesting that a major challenge for gacaca has been handling overly lofty expectations about what it can achieve in the post-genocide environment.This section does not discuss all of the possible connections among gacaca’s various objectives, only the most important for highlighting the complexity of its hybrid approach to transitional justice. Regarding gacaca’s most compatible aims, several objectives function symbioticÂally in practice, exemplifying gacaca’s quest for holism. In particular, the pursuit of forgiveness is deeply entwined with that of healing. As many suspects and survivors claim, receiving or offering forgiveness is importÂant for healing as liberation; for suspects through their release from guilt and shame by confessing to, and being forgiven for, their crimes; and for survivors through freedom from feelings of anger and resentment which they may experience after forgiving perpetrators.
In turn, individuals who experience healing may feel more disposed to forgive others, parÂticularly if they define healing as liberation in the positive sense, which encourages them to engage more closely with others, including those who have wronged them. Forgiveness and truth also function symbioticÂally, in that most survivors view truth in the form of a complete and sinÂcere confession as a prerequisite for forgiveness. Sensing a more forgiving environment at gacaca, suspects often feel encouraged to tell the truth about their crimes, in the hope that they will gain a favourable reception from their audience.Overall, a series of four objectives in particular is mutually reinforÂcing: reconciliation, peace, forgiveness and healing. First, positive peace, with its emphasis on educating the population to identify the root causes of its conflicts and to discover effective remedies, is crucial for overcomÂing discord and rebuilding relationships, as reconciliation entails. In turn, reconciliation reinforces positive peace by encouraging the ongoing engagement between parties that is necessary for the maintenance of peace in the long term. Second, by its very nature, profound forgiveness holds that parties who participate in forgiveness processes should seek to rebuild their relationships. In this way, profound forgiveness helps faciliÂtate reconciliation by overcoming parties' respective feelings of guilt and resentment, thus helping facilitate renewed relations. Reconciliation then provides the basis of a strengthened relationship from which parties are more likely to seek, and to offer, forgiveness, when conflicts inevÂitably arise in the future. Third, healing as positive liberation, as indiÂviduals feel free to engage with other individuals and their community, helps facilitate reconciliation by unburdening individuals and encourÂaging greater engagement. Reconciliation may in turn encourage healÂing as belonging, as reconciled individuals feel welcomed in their rebuilt relationships and thus may begin overcoming feelings of alienation and loneliness after conflict.
While gacaca's pursuit of some profound objectives is mutually reinforÂcing, the combination of other objectives proves more problematic. In particular, tensions between pursuing truth and healing, and between retributive or deterrent justice and restorative justice or reconciliation, highlight the main tensions in gacaca as a whole. First, we have already seen the problems associated with the simultaneous pursuit of truth and healing in the gacaca hearing at Ruhengenge, described in Chapter 3. While truth-hearing about the past may contribute to healing by proÂviding the necessary facts about the fate of people's loved ones, and truth-telling may facilitate healing by allowing survivors to receive pubÂlic acknowledgement of their anguish, truth-hearing and truth-telling at gacaca can also retraumatise many individuals, thus undermining healÂing. Retraumatised individuals in turn are unlikely to engage meaningÂfully with others, ensuring that a lack of healing also entails a reluctance to seek reconciliation.
Second, as argued earlier, gacaca represents a deliberate attempt to shape the punishment of perpetrators towards more restorative and reconciliatory ends. In particular, gacaca's use of community service and compensation as punishment encourages convicted perpetrators to engage meaningfully with survivors, either by working on labour proÂgrammes that benefit, or may even involve, survivors directly, or by proÂviding personal restitution to survivors. However, neither community service nor compensation is inherently reconciliatory. For example, comÂpensation demanded unfairly or given grudgingly may in fact inflame existing tensions, as Alphonse suggested during the gacaca journey in Chapter 4. The greater problem for reconciliation, however, concerns the reimprisonment of many suspects who are convicted of serious genocide crimes. Reimprisonment as an outcome of retributive or deterrent justice, while a justified response to crimes committed, also damages attempts at restoration or reconciliation.
By removing perpetrators from the comÂmunity, reimprisonment renders impossible any meaningful engagement between perpetrators and survivors. That a percentage of suspects tried at gacaca have returned to prison for lengthy periods raises the question of how effectively retributive or deterrent justice at gacaca can facilitate long-term engagement and in turn reconciliation. It is clear that comÂmunity service and compensation constitute important punitive measÂures that can contribute to rebuilding relationships. Reimprisonment, however - which affects many individuals convicted of Category 1 and 2 crimes - jeopardises the engagement that begins at gacaca but needs to continue in the long-term for reconciliation to occur.The two main tensions explored here - between truth and healing and between forms of justice and reconciliation - affect both the daily running of gacaca and its overall pursuit of society-wide objectives. As argued in Chapter 3, the population expresses confusion over whether, and how, these concurrent objectives should be pursued. As exempliÂfied by the hearing at Ruhengenge, this confusion negatively influences how gacaca functions from day to day. The tension between truth and healing generally derives from popular interpretations of gacaca and its aims, because the population describes healing as an objective of gacaca much more readily than the government. The tension between differÂent forms of justice and reconciliation results largely from the statutes of the Gacaca Law, which enshrine all of these objectives as key aims of gacaca.
Despite these problems, there is no reason to assume that the tensions inherent in gacaca's simultaneous pursuit of pragmatic and profound objectives render these entirely unfeasible objectives of gacaca. Judges often mediate these tensions, for example by explaining to the population that it is possible to pursue both truth and healing, provided healing is seen as a long-term objective that may require initial retraumatisation. As we saw above, several profound objectives are also mutually reinforÂcing, affording gacaca a sense of coherence in its pursuit of different aims. Nonetheless, beyond the practical challenges for gacaca as identified in earlier chapters regarding discrete objectives, this analysis of gacaca's purÂsuit of hybrid, simultaneous objectives shows the difficulties inherent in such a comprehensive attempt at holism.