MODUS OPERANDI OF GACACA: POPULAR PARTICIPATION
The central role that gacaca affords the population in the daily running and shaping of the institution is one of its most striking and controversial features. Many critics of gacaca have questioned the wisdom of allowing a traumatised and still heavily ethnically divided population to drive the country's main transitional process through its electing judges, instiÂgating cases, providing evidence, determining the guilt or innocence of suspects and engaging in open, wide-ranging dialogue during hearÂings.
Most transitional justice institutions around the world, whether war-crimes tribunals, truth commissions or variations of these bodies, seek, consciously or otherwise, to limit the population's involvement. The rationale for this exclusion is a belief that people emerging from mass conflict will have personally inflicted or suffered extreme trauma or grief and therefore will be too driven by their own experiences, desires and prejudices to help reconstruct the nation.1 Consequently, the arguÂment goes, outside parties - whether elites within the conflict society itself who may not have been caught up so directly in the violence or forÂeign bodies such as the UN - should be commissioned to plan and manÂage transitional processes. External facilitators are assumed to be more impartial in their attempts to formulate fair and effective long-term remÂedies to conflict.At gacaca, the general population plays a very different role than in most transitional institutions. As I argued in Chapter 3, the underlying [304] philosophy of modern gacaca draws on the ethos of the traditional verÂsion by recognising the importance of the community’s ownership over, and direct involvement in, the process. Broadly speaking, most particiÂpants in gacaca interpret popular participation as the means by which gacaca pursues other objectives such as truth, justice and reconciliation. Few non-Rwandan commentators, most of whom express a version of the dominant discourse on gacaca, explicitly discuss popular participation and, where they do, they are normally highly critical of it. As already suggested, these commentators’ emphasis on gacaca as a set of legal statÂutes to be analysed rather than as a social practice to be observed and assessed does not require an in-depth consideration of popular particiÂpation. Where proponents of the dominant discourse on gacaca do conÂsider this theme, it is generally to critique the level of public involvement in, and the removal of external actors such as lawyers from, gacaca. This chapter argues that such criticisms of popular participation in gacaca are misguided.