LINKING POPULAR PARTICIPATION TO GACACA’S PROFOUND OBJECTIVES: ENGAGEMENT - THE BRIDGE TO RECONCILIATION
A key outcome of the more intimate communal interactions that are possible in gacaca relative to other post-conflict institutions, and a theme that will prove crucial to our understanding of how gacaca is capable of simultaneously pursuing multiple post-genocide objectives, is the engagement that gacaca facilitates.
A useful definition of engagement, which can be applied in the context of gacaca, comes from Norman Porter in his analysis of the potential for reconciliation in Northern Ireland. Porter emphasises the reconciliatory necessity of creating fora for public discourse and debate, in which a vital element is open and fair engagement between previously antagonistic parties. Speaking in terms applicable beyond the Northern Irish context, Porter argues that meaningful engagement entails ?practices involving honest, committed encounters with others, not least those with whom we disagree most'.[389] In these settings, individuals make themselves vulnerable to others and the most important result is that ?through [these practices] others are opened up to us and we to them, others are permitted to be heard in their terms and we in ours'.[390]Engagement is a critical component of gacaca, given the degree to which the entire community is encouraged to participate and interact face to face at all levels of the institution. As I argue in later chapters, there can be no reconciliation (nor several of gacaca's other aims) without genuine engagement between parties previously in conflict. Engagement occurs via different means at gacaca: from the public discussions surrounding the election of judges through the various phases of the hearings themselves; the focus of the latter being the often non-legal and largely undirected dialogue in the general assembly in which judges act as mediators rather than direct participants.
In particular, engagement entails antagonistic parties debating the root causes of their conflicts. It recognises that there will be deep-seated animosity between individuals and between groups after an event as destructive as genocide. One criticism of the ICTR expressed by some participants in gacaca is that, by undergoing trials hundreds of miles away in Arusha, high-level perpetrators avoid direct confrontation with the communities against whom they committed genocide crimes and therefore receive insufficient justice. Fidele, a gacaca judge in Musanze district, said,In Arusha the big fish are there. The victims travel there but in gacaca everyone is already here: survivors, perpetrators, judges. They are all here in the community. That is the difference. If we want prisoners to come, they come, they tell the truth, they apologise and ask for forgiveness. We can see if they are touched, if they are sincere. But in Arusha it isn't possible for survivors to experience this. They can't tell whether the accused are sincere. Those in Arusha haven't asked for forgiveness. Those in Arusha have committed many crimes here, they should face us, the Rwandan family, but they avoid us by being there.[391]
Similar sentiments were expressed during a case in 2009 concerning the Rwandan genocide suspect, Franqois Bazaramba, who had fled to Finland. Members of the Finnish court where Bazaramba was on trial travelled to his former village in southern Rwanda. A Finnish journalist travelling with the court interviewed a local inyangamugayo named Mamasani about the conducting of the trial overseas. The journalist reported, ?[Mamasani] feels that the final truth in [the trial] could be reached only if Bazaramba and the witnesses in the case would come before the local people. “When he is not there, people can say anything they like.” Mamasani feels that a Gacaca court would be the right place to deal with the Bazaramba case.'[392] In such interpretations, justice delivered through the ICTR or foreign courts is perceived as less rigorous for genocide suspects because it foregoes no direct engagement with the general population, save the small number of everyday Rwandans called as witnesses in ICTR cases.[393] Conversely, survivors such as Esther Mujawayo celebrate the fact that gacaca requires suspects to confront their communities directly.
?After 1994', Mujawayo writes, ?a deafening silence descended upon the whole population... No one, absolutely no one could have imagined that one day the killers would speak... With gacaca, the word [about the genocide] has spread.'[394]As the following chapters highlight, implicit in gacaca is the view that reconciliation after the genocide will require difficult dialogue, a genuine confrontation with the sources of conflict, and parties' mutual dedication to rebuilding fractured relationships. Such a confrontation may on occasion prove detrimental to chances of reconciliation if it only produces further acrimony, and such experiences are legion in the lifespan of gacaca. Engagement is not an inherently positive dynamic; when not managed effectively, it is equally capable of fomenting discord. For engagement to produce positive results, it requires the immense dedication of the parties involved, a genuine sense of trust between them and effective forms of mediation to ensure that this sense of trust is maintained. The forms of engagement that gacaca facilitates distinguish it from other transitional institutions such as war-crimes tribunals, which rarely allow open or meaningful interactions between victims and perpetrators and limit discourse to legal matters, to the exclusion of more emotional concerns.
One likely product of engagement at gacaca, which should be foreshadowed at this early stage, is the largely unpredictable outcomes. As I argued in Chapter 3, gacaca is a dynamic enterprise that involves an ever-evolving process of people's interactions and subsequent reshapings of the institution in order to meet newly realised needs and challenges. These interactions may not always be beneficial or even secure; instances of acrimony are unavoidable given the level of engagement that gacaca entails. There is an element of risk in allowing members of fractured communities to engage so closely with one another. Mediators must contain antagonisms at gacaca and direct the population's engagement towards reconciliatory ends.
Despite the undeniable unpredictability of gacaca and the risks involved, engagement is a central concept in gacaca because it acts as the main conduit through which gacaca, with its emphasis on popular participation, simultaneously pursues a range of pragmatic and profound objectives, including reconciliation. Engagement is therefore crucial to our understanding of how gacaca simultaneously pursues pragmatic and profound objectives that at the outset may seem unrelated or even mutually exclusive. As argued later, when mediated effectively, engagement can produce reconciliatory results between parties previously in conflict which institutions that fail to recognise the need for engagement rarely produce.