INTRODUCTION
Exploring how the Rwandan government and population have responded to the genocide, particularly through their creation of and involvement in gacaca, this book investigates concepts that fit broadly into the field of transitional justice.1 Transitional justice encompasses a multitude of discrete, though overlapping, and often conflicting themes that concern how societies address periods of conflict and/or repressive rule.
At the heart of discussions of transitional justice are questions of what reconÂstructive objectives such societies should pursue and how they should pursue them. While much transitional justice literature focuses on quesÂtions surrounding institutions and processes - often advocating temÂplates, toolkits and menus of options based on historical responses to mass atrocity and presupposing the central aims and actors - this book begins with questions of objectives.[71] [72] In the context of gacaca, it is crucial that we understand how participants in the process interpret its aims, what they expect it to achieve or not achieve, and generally on what basis they determine its success. The purpose of this chapter is to provide some theoretical background to the key concepts that the sources anaÂlysed in this book identify as gacaca's objectives.Given the complexity of issues surrounding rebuilding societies after mass violence, immense contestation over what transitional justÂice entails is inevitable. Different transitional societies choose different objectives, and often pursue them in very different ways, usually because of political, social, economic and legal constraints after conflict. The truth commissions of Central and South America in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, sought to establish the truth about crimes commitÂted by political and social elites and, in most instances, offered these individuals amnesty in exchange for the truth.[73] The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) similarly offered amnesty to apartheid leaders in exchange for disclosure about their crimes against the black majority.
The TRC differed from previous truth commisÂsions, however, by enshrining reconciliation as a key objective. This policy represented a turning point in the ideas and practices of transiÂtional justice globally. The TRC in South Africa has since served as a touchstone for other post-conflict institutions, inspiring in many cases (usually implicitly) the expressed pursuit of reconciliation, for example in Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste. Even the Statute of the UN ICTR - an institution designed primarily to prosecute and punish the main orchestrators of the Rwandan genocide - states that â€?prosecuÂtion... would... contribute to the process of national reconciliation and to the restoration and maintenance of peace'.[74]Out of the central question of transitional justice - what reconÂstructive objectives should post-conflict societies pursue? - two specific questions emerge consistently: is it necessary and feasible to punish the perpetrators of mass crimes, and, if so, what is punishment designed to achieve: to fulfil a moral obligation to bring the guilty to account, to deter future perpetrators, or to contribute to wider objectives such as reconciliation? No post-conflict society can avoid addressing these quesÂtions. The creators of the Central and South American truth commisÂsions argued that it was not feasible to punish perpetrators if they were to persuade perpetrators to tell the truth about their crimes.[75] The South African TRC held that punishing apartheid leaders was likely to foment civil conflict, and therefore a political compromise - trading amnesty for the truth about crimes and for national reconciliation - was more approÂpriate.[76] A key sticking point during the Ugandan peace negotiations between 2006 and 2008 was whether rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army would benefit from the national Amnesty Act, which has been in force since 2000, or face prosecution through the International Criminal Court (ICC) or some other punitive mechanism.[77] Meanwhile, the ICTR holds that it is necessary to punish perpetrators, in order not only to fulÂfil a moral obligation to bring them to account, but also to contribute to national peace and reconciliation.
In the South African case, punÂishment and reconciliation were deemed to be contradictory objectives. The ICTR, however, holds that punishment is a prerequisite of peace and reconciliation.What these examples show is that not only do different post-conflict institutions explicitly aim for different political, social or legal outcomes, but even in cases where they claim to pursue the same objectives - as in the South African TRC's and the ICTR's claimed pursuit of reconciliÂation - they often define the same aims, or the methods for achieving them, in very different ways. In the case of the ICTR, the reference to â€?national reconciliation' cited above is the sole occurrence of this term in the Tribunal's statute, with no attempt to more clearly define it or to describe how punishing genocidaires might contribute to it. Serious questions therefore remain over whether the ICTR genuinely views recÂonciliation as a key objective and whether, and how, it actively pursues it. These examples highlight that it is not only vital to isolate the purÂported objectives of particular transitional justice institutions but also to robustly interrogate and interpret their meaning.
This book interprets gacaca's aims and methods on the basis of a range of official, popular and critical sources, focusing on quotidian interpretations of gacaca. This current chapter defines and distinguishes the six key terms that these sources identify as the �profound' aims of gacaca: truth, peace, justice, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation. The aim in employing these terms when interpreting gacaca's aims and methods is not to impose an external theoretical framework on gacaca, drawing on some universal menu of transitional justice options, but rather to analyse these terms in so far as my sources, especially within the Rwandan population, deploy them when discussing gacaca.
The purpose of this current chapter is to introduce the theoretical concepts that my sources define and debate in significantly more detail in later chapters.
The role of theory in this book is fundamentally interÂpretive, employing the conceptual and philosophical literature on the six key themes to better interpret my sources' statements regarding gacaca. Their discussions of these themes are inevitably contextual; how they perceive the meaning of terms such as justice and reconciliation generÂally and how they discern it in gacaca's operation, for example, depend vitally on local values and conditions and the intricacies of the postÂgenocide setting. Local interpretations also often change substantially over time, as people's circumstances evolve. Highlighting the importance of local context for my sources' interpretations of gacaca, its objectives and methods does not amount to an unquestioning relativism regarding their views. Sometimes, as we will see later, my sources offer contradictÂory or purely self-serving accounts of what concepts such as justice and reconciliation may entail, in which case I highlight the problems with such accounts.Later chapters argue that the six themes explored here represent gacaca's profound objectives, which relate to complex issues of rebuildÂing relationships between parties previously in conflict. Alongside these profound aims, this book argues that gacaca feasibly pursues the first and second of three pragmatic objectives, with which my sources assoÂciate it: first, processing the massive backlog of genocide cases; second, improving living conditions in the jails; and third, facilitating ecoÂnomic development. This current chapter is concerned only with traÂcing the contours of gacaca's profound aims, broadly defining each term and, where necessary, distinguishing them from one another. The task of delineating these six objectives is important because, as will become apparent later, numerous sources analysed in this book conflate several of these terms, for example by equating peace or healing with reconciliÂation. As gacaca's three pragmatic objectives do not manifest the same potential for conflation either with each other or with any of the proÂfound objectives, I do not define them in this chapter.
As we will see later, gacaca connects each of the six profound objectÂives, and the groups of profound and pragmatic objectives, in particuÂlar ways. Gacaca's simultaneous pursuit of profound and pragmatic aims represents a holistic approach to transitional justice, aiming to rebuild individual and communal lives and to contribute to reconstruction in both the short and long term. In the context of transitional justice, holÂism refers to the need to rebuild the entire society, responding to the various needs of individuals and groups after conflict. A key question in later chapters will be the extent to which gacaca can effectively combine multiple objectives and thus respond holistically to the legacies of the genocide.
This chapter draws the broad outlines of terms to which my sources' discussions add vital substance and nuance. Consequently, the reader may find that such local interpretations of these key themes aid a more general theory of these concepts; in other words, the lived experience of concepts such as justice and reconciliation in the context of gacaca, how people interpret and practise processes concerning these themes in their daily lives, may highlight tensions within such concepts and therefore aid how we understand them theoretically. While this book focuses on interpreting the ideas behind, and the practices of, gacaca, rather than on theoretical understandings of the themes of transitional justice, the detailed analysis of gacaca's objectives in later chapters may offer insights into the theoretical connections between the concepts analysed here.