INTRODUCTION

The theme of truth, perhaps more than any other in this book, illumin­ates gacaca's hybridity, particularly its combination of formal and discur­sive methods and legal and non-legal objectives.

Official, popular and critical sources interpret truth through gacaca in various ways. These sources express a wider range of interpretations of truth than of any other potential objective of gacaca. These perspectives often clash and are themselves rarely articulated consistently or system­atically. This chapter provides a more thorough interpretation of truth at gacaca, drawing partly on these sources but seeking to go beyond exist­ing interpretations.

At the outset, we require a clearer conceptual framework in which to analyse truth through gacaca. Truth comes in many forms during gacaca hearings and participants pursue truth for myriad reasons. For example, at gacaca the overarching term �truth' may refer equally to the testimony of a genocide survivor who describes his or her experiences during the genocide in order to help prove the guilt or innocence of a suspect, and

the testimony of a survivor who describes personal experiences to gain official or communal acknowledgement of his or her feelings of anguish and loss. Sometimes individuals provide both of these forms of testimony in the same speech. It is not always easy to distinguish between �legal truth' and �truth' told for more personal, emotional reasons, or what I term here �therapeutic truth', which is intended to facilitate healing.

Anthony Holiday identifies a similar tension in the pursuits of the TRC in South Africa between what he terms the truth about �forensic' facts and �psychological' facts. �On the one hand', Holiday argues,

there were the forensic facts of politico-legal history, concerning what had been done, by whom and to whom and the political purposes (if any) for which these crimes had been committed. There were, on the other hand, the psychological facts, pertaining to how people now felt about what had been done to them. The former set of facts served the interests of the TRC's truth-gathering task, while the latter set, once bared in pub­lic, would be grist to the mill of national reconciliation.¹

In Holiday's interpretation, forensic facts equate roughly to what I call legal truth, in which evidence is delivered to prove the guilt or inno­cence of a suspect. Holiday's �psychological facts', however, are different from my notion of �therapeutic truth' in that they are intended more for wider, reconciliatory purposes than for personal, emotional ones. Holiday's psychological facts therefore comprise a third function of truth: what I call �restorative truth', which concerns the expression or shaping of truth in order to rebuild relationships after conflict. Where therapeutic truth relates to the individual, restorative truth concerns the communal. These functions of truth often overlap at gacaca because, as argued in greater detail in the section on healing in Chapter 9, there is a symbiotic relationship between restoring individuals' sense of per­sonal and emotional well-being after conflict and restoring relationships between individuals and between groups.

Alongside these three functions of truth, this chapter delineates three processes of truth through gacaca that are discernible from my sources' views. First, gacaca incorporates a notion of truth-telling, as participants describe in an open forum their personal and collective experiences dur­ing and after the genocide. Truth-telling is a specific form of the popular participation in gacaca explored in Chapter 5. Where the earlier discus­sion focused on broad concepts and processes of popular participation, the exploration of truth-telling here is more specific. This analysis cen­tres on the role of truth-telling as a facilitator of retributive, therapeutic or restorative ends. As argued in this chapter, truth-telling constitutes a means to retributive justice, healing and reconciliation. Therefore, where processes of truth-telling serve goals of retributive or restorative justice or healing, as they are discussed elsewhere in this book, it will not be necessary to completely reiterate the nature and effects of these proc­esses here.

Second, gacaca involves elements of truth-hearing, or truth as the reception of truth-telling. Truth-hearing concerns the ways in which participants receive and respond to the content of others' discourse and the effects of these reactions; it is therefore closely linked to the con­cept of acknowledgement discussed in relation to healing in Chapter 9. Truth-telling and truth-hearing constitute halves of an overall process of dialogue at gacaca and key components of the broader pursuit of truth recovery.^[441] Weighing legal evidence is an important example of truth­hearing, as witnesses attempt to prove the guilt or innocence of genocide suspects through their testimony, and judges and the general assembly debate the content of that testimony before passing judgments.

Third, gacaca incorporates a dimension of truth-shaping, or truth as a mediated outcome, which occurs when outside parties interpret and rearticulate the personal testimony of participants at gacaca in order to fulfil a function other than that originally intended by the participants. Where truth-hearing concerns participants' reception of truth-telling within the confines of gacaca, truth-shaping involves external actors and usually (though not always) concerns outcomes of truth-hearing outside of gacaca. For example, truth-shaping occurs when historians debate the significance of evidence heard at gacaca and then publish their find­ings in order to create a historical record of what occurred during the genocide.

Within each of these three processes - truth-telling, truth-hearing and truth-shaping - gacaca embodies the three functions of legal, thera­peutic and restorative truth described above. In exploring the various ways in which official, popular and critical sources interpret truth at gacaca - and in offering my own analysis of this objective - this chapter employs the taxonomy of processes and functions of truth. This chap­ter argues that truth through gacaca manifests in various legal and non- legal forms and that participants often only arrive at what they consider to be the truth after protracted, communal negotiation. Exploring truth through gacaca further highlights the significant tension in the overall processes of gacaca, namely the fine balance required between popular ownership over gacaca and the need, in select instances, for gacaca judges to mediate communal discussions. Despite various tensions highlighted by the pursuit of truth, this chapter contends that gacaca has generally succeeded in facilitating truth-telling and truth-hearing and, to a lesser extent, truth-shaping. Gacaca constitutes a vital forum for Rwandans to describe and to better understand personal and collective narratives of the genocide, with a view to protecting against a reoccurrence of mass conflict.