INTRODUCING GACACA

In a Rwandan village near the Burundi border, a crowd chatters impatiently beneath a tattered blue tarpaulin shielding them from the midday sun. Before them on a long, wooden bench sit nine elders, mostly middle-aged men and women, led by a young man - the president of the panel - who stands and addresses the gathering.

A murmur goes through the gathering as the prisoner walks to the front, standing between the crowd and the line of judges. He mumbles and the president tells him to speak up. The man, with head bowed, explains that he has come to confess that he killed the wife of his neigh­bour in the first week of May 1994. He found the woman hiding in bushes as gangs of killers walked the paths of the village searching for Tutsi. When he found her, she was crying, screaming at him to let her go. He pulled her out of the bushes and threw her to the ground, then slashed his machete once across her neck, then again, and left her to die.

A pause, and then the president asks the assembly if this man's tes­timony is true and complete. The crowd remains silent. Eventually one man at the back stands and says that, yes, it is true that this prisoner killed the woman. But what he has not told the assembly is that the following day he also killed the woman's son with a machete and threw the body in a pit latrine. Another woman stands and says that she too saw the prisoner kill the boy. The president asks the prisoner to respond to these new accusations. The man raises his head slightly and says that it is not true that he killed his neighbour's son; when he received word that the boy was dead he himself was miles away on the road to Kigali, where he had fled in shame after murdering his neighbour's wife. Voices clamour in the crowd: �He's lying - I saw him in the village on the day the boy was killed.' �I saw him too - he spoke to my wife in the courtyard that afternoon'. �And he killed others - more than the woman and the boy.'

The president asks for calm and for each person in the assembly who wishes to speak to do so one at a time. People start to cry. The judges seated on the bench scrawl in the notepads on their laps. In one week they will have to decide what crimes the man committed during the genocide and what punishment he should receive. When this case is decided, there will be more cases, more stories of pain and loss, more claims and counter-claims, more details to verify, more decisions.

This hearing took place in the Bugesera region of Kigali Ngali prov­ince in 2003 and represents a common scene from thousands of towns and villages across Rwanda that since 2002 have been participating in a revolutionary court system known as �gacaca’.^[2] Derived from the Kinyarwanda word meaning �the lawn’ or �the grass’^[3] - in reference to the conducting of hearings in open spaces in full view of the commu­nity - gacaca is a traditional Rwandan method of conflict resolution that has been controversially revived and transformed to meet the perceived needs of the post-genocide environment.^[4] Gacaca gives respected indi­viduals elected by the local population the duty of prosecuting cases and excludes professional judges and lawyers from participating in any official capacity.

In the face of extreme individual and social devastation, gacaca repre­sents an ambitious attempt to involve the entire population in the proc­esses of justice, reconciliation and post-genocide reconstruction. Among transitional justice institutions around the world, gacaca is unique in its mass involvement of the population that experienced mass conflict first­hand. Today, a huge percentage of Rwandan adults have participated in gacaca in some way, including hundreds of thousands who have been judges or testified during hearings. As Peter Uvin, a Belgian specialist on Rwanda, argues, �Politically, [gacaca is] a brilliant piece of work. It offers something to all groups - prisoners, survivors - it offers them all hope, and a reason to participate.’^[7] As we will see later, however, many crit­ics, particularly human-rights observers, argue that gacaca constitutes an illegitimate form of popular justice that will violate individual rights, especially those of genocide suspects.

The purpose of this book is to explore the nature of gacaca as an institution, to identify its objectives and to judge its effectiveness in responding to the legacies of the genocide. Different sources, whether among the Rwandan government, the population or observers, interpret gacaca and its aims in various ways and inevitably differ in their views of gacaca's efficacy. One main aim of this book is to more clearly ana­lyse what gacaca is designed to achieve than most observers - and many participants in gacaca - have done so far. At the time of writing, gacaca was nearing completion, having tried hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects. This book explores gacaca's objectives, which will then allow us to more carefully analyse its practice and long-term impact.