Population’s perspectives on truth through gacaca

At the same time, many suspects argue that their truth-telling at gacaca, particularly as it incorporates public confession and apology, will lead to their exoneration if they believe that they are innocent of crimes or will allow them to benefit from gacaca's plea-bargaining system if they are guilty. Richard, a detainee in the ingando at Butare, who argued that he had been unjustly accused of complicity in murder during the genocide, said, �?The community will definitely accept what I say at gacaca. I will stand up and tell them everything I saw when these killings occurred and they will agree that I am telling the truth.'^[452] As with several other objectives explored in this book, some detainees describe truth-telling at gacaca as simply fulfilling an obligation to the state. �?I will tell the truth when I stand at gacaca', said Firmin, a detainee in the ingando at Gashora, �?because the Parquet [public prosecutor] tells us to. This is our duty.'^[453] More than half of the approximately 200 individuals interviewed in the broader community between 2003 and 2010, most of whom had relatives who were accused of genocide crimes, described the primary function of gacaca as the potential for truth-telling to exonerate their loved ones, whose innocence they maintained. All of these individuals said that they would testify or had already testified at gacaca in order to clear their loved ones' names.^[454] �?Gacaca is a source of light that brings the truth', said Agathe, a forty-six-year-old widow in Nyamata, whose parents and three siblings were accused of genocide crimes and were still in prison. �?It will allow us to see who is guilty and who is innocent.'^[455]

Second, many popular sources argue that truth-telling at gacaca serves an important therapeutic function.

Gacaca is important for us survivors because it helps us live and work in the community again... All the survivors come together and talk about what has happened. We realise that we are in the same situation, that we have all had family who were killed. We understand each other and we realise that we are not alone.^[456]

Third, much of the population argues that truth-telling at gacaca con­tributes to the restoration of relationships between individuals and to broader reconciliation. In particular, much of the population interprets gacaca as an important dialogical forum in which various individuals and groups discuss issues that the community might otherwise avoid. The most important feature of this space is its integrative nature. Following a gacaca hearing in Butamwa sector of Kigali Ville province, Michel, the president of the judges' panel, described the importance of truth­telling for reconciliation. �?Gacaca is important for reconciliation', he said, �?because what happens here is real justice where we are all together, criminals and the innocent, and people can talk to one another face to face.'^[457]

The hope of many suspects and survivors - but, generally speaking, a desire expressed more readily by suspects whose main concern is their ability to reintegrate into their old communities - is that the capacity to speak openly at gacaca will lead to greater dialogue between participants after gacaca.

It must be noted, however, that while there is widespread enthusi­asm among the population for engaging in truth-telling at gacaca, many Rwandans also express scepticism about the extent to which the discur­sive space created at gacaca will contribute to more meaningful engage­ment between genocide perpetrators and survivors outside of gacaca. Many Rwandans, especially genocide survivors, are wary of truth-telling at gacaca. Some survivors argue that the discursive forum at gacaca may simply become the scene of further acrimony and discord if debates between perpetrators, survivors and others in the general assembly grow heated. Juliette, a survivor in Kigali Ville, whose parents and two broth­ers were killed during the genocide, said, �?I dread going to gacaca. I don't want to see the people who killed my family. It scares me to think what will happen between us when we come face to face there.'^[459] Chantal, the survivor in Alphonse's community quoted during the gacaca journey in Chapter 4, said, �?I go to gacaca but I go very reluctantly. At gacaca, you hear such terrible things, you cannot even imagine. Sometimes the judges come to my house during the week and ask me to come to gacaca because they know I have evidence to give.'^[460] On numerous occasions during the gacaca hearings I observed, lengthy arguments broke out in the general assembly, and judges were often helpless to restore a sense of order.

While many survivors express concerns over the potential for acri­mony during gacaca hearings, many also argue that to create a space in which they can engage with perpetrators, whatever the nature of that dialogue, is better than having no such space. When asked whether any good could come out of gacaca, Juliette replied, �?Yes, because although it scares me to see the prisoners, it will be good to hear them tell the truth.'^[461] Situations such as the one at the hearing in Kacyiru, however, display the potential pitfalls of the open nature of truth-telling at gacaca. As some segments of the population recognise, truth-telling at gacaca is not inherently restorative. Much of the success of truth-telling depends on the nature of truth-hearing; that is, the outcomes of dialogue and the ways in which the community reacts to revelations at gacaca.

Regarding truth-hearing, popular interpretations generally differ from the government's perspective by emphasising its non-legal functions. As we will see concerning healing in Chapter 9, survivors in particular often talk of the potential �?liberating' effects of gacaca, as truth-hearing fulfils their desire to know what happened to their loved ones and thus frees them from the burden of ignorance. Survivors argue that gacaca will afford them a sense of �?finality', especially through the four lists of information when the truth concerning people's personal experiences is recorded, even in a legal form. Joseph, a survivor in Kigali Ville, said, �?[Eventually] the judges will get to the truth and make a record. Then I will feel as if all these things have finished and life will start again.'^[462]

Reflecting the importance of Christian doctrine for many Rwandans, the population's perceptions of the liberating potential of truth-telling and truth-hearing draw largely on the Christian perspective that �?the truth shall set you free.'^[463] In the biblical context, this idea refers to a new believer's recognition of the truth of his or her sinfulness, and therefore of his or her separation from God, and of the liberation from the state of sin and subsequent entry into God's presence that are possible through accepting the gift of salvation. Whether the nature of truth in the con­text of gacaca is the discovery of what occurred in the past (i.e.

The Christian view of the liberating potential of truth-telling also largely explains the population’s emphasis on confession as a key source of truth through gacaca. Confession signifies the perpetrator’s volun­tary recognition of the wrongfulness of his or her crimes. Public confes­sion may aid survivors’ catharsis through increasing their knowledge of exactly what happened in the past and opening the way for apology, rep­aration and even survivors’ forgiveness of perpetrators. Thus, confession constitutes an important mode of truth-telling that may in turn help build trust, and restore relationships, between suspects and survivors. Many Rwandans’ experiences of Christian gacaca have solidified these expressed connections among truth, liberation and restoration. Celeste, a widow in Butare, whose son and brother were still in prison, accused of perpetrating genocide crimes, said in reference to Christian gacaca,

At gacaca, the judges will bring us to the truth, just as the gacaca with the priests shows us how we can find the truth. The priests taught us to talk together. They were very gentle with us, saying God loves peace and truth, so we also must love peace and truth.^[464]

Survivors often live for years in ignorance of exactly what happened to their loved ones during the genocide. While many killings were carried out in full view of the community, many occurred clandestinely at night or far from victims’ homes, and many survivors did not view crimes first­hand because they had fled their communities or were in hiding. Many survivors have never found the bodies of their loved ones. Survivors often describe never having dealt emotionally with the loss of relatives and friends because they could never fully realise nor articulate the precise nature of their loss. The uncertainty of the details of a person’s death can hamper a survivor’s ability to reconstruct that event in his or her mind and to shape it in such a way as to move beyond grief to a less stricken state of being. Stefan, a survivor in Ruhengeri whose parents and two children were killed during the genocide, said,

I want to see how [the suspects’] eyes look after all these years... I want to know if they will tell the truth. The most important thing for me at gacaca is that I can find out who killed my family, their names, what their faces look like. I have wanted to know these things for many years. Can you imagine what it is like to never know these things?^[465] Raoul, a farmer in Kigali Ville who described himself as �?a Hutu who didn't kill anyone', said that his father and two brothers were murdered during the genocide. �?I don't know who killed them', Raoul said, �?and I want to know. Maybe at gacaca I will finally find out who killed them. I'm angry because I don't already know these things.'^[466] As the gacaca journey in Chapter 4 highlighted, some suspects suffer similarly from this uncertainty about the past, for example Alphonse's and his family's frustration that gacaca would not allow them to discover who killed his father and brother because these acts did not constitute genocide crimes. For much of the population, truth-hearing represents a vital means to healing, as people seek freedom from their ignorance of past events.

A telling example of personal trauma stemming from uncertainty over the fate of missing loved ones is found in the autobiography of British novelist, Martin Amis. Amis describes the torment he experienced from never knowing the precise details of the murder of his young cousin, Lucy Partington, by the serial killer, Frederick West. �?All his life', Amis says, �?[West] had been a colossus of mendacity, the enemy and opposite of truth', and his final assault against truth was to commit suicide in prison before he could be tried for murder, taking with him to the grave the truth of the death of Partington and numerous others.^[467] Amis says,

I have before me a recent newspaper clipping which begins: �?The mother [of a missing girl, aged 22] said last night: “I cannot close my eyes for fear of what I might see.”' Her words have a fundamental eloquence. It strikes you as counterintuitive at first, when you come across it in the litera­ture: the fact that the families of those who have been murdered usually do want to know how the victims died. But the reason is transparent. They want to retard or narrow down the swarm of horrors that will pre­sent itself for contemplation. Afterwards, at least, when you close your eyes, you know what you are going to see.^[468]

Implicit in the expressed importance of truth-hearing is a particular con­ception of human identity as largely constructed by the narratives of an individual's life. If important events of a person's life are unknown, then that individual may struggle to make sense of many of his or her expe­riences and may feel that he or she cannot overcome the pain of the past. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues that humans seek to arrange the various experiences and beliefs that constitute their life into an �?ordered unity' that gives meaning to their life as a whole.^[469] According to MacIntyre, all human lives involve the construction of narratives that contribute to this sense of ordered unity. Drawing partly on Aristotle's conception of human identity, MacIntyre argues that all human lives have a particular telos or a direction that defines the meaning of the events of a life, according to the role those events play in the pursuit of the telos. These events then take on a certain order, expressed in the form of a narrative, because they are arranged in relation to a particu­lar direction for that life. A person therefore comes to understand the significance of a moment in life only by seeing how it fits into the rest of the narrative of his or her existence and, more importantly, how it leads to the fulfilment of his or her telos. As Roquentin, the protagon­ist of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel La Nausee, says, �?a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.'^[470] If genocide survivors do not know many of the key details of the events of their lives - in essence, if there are gaps in their personal stories - then they are likely to struggle to make sense of their experiences and may feel that life has lost much of its meaning. For this reason, many survivors state that gacaca plays a crucial role in helping them reconstruct the narratives of their lives by facilitat­ing forms of truth-hearing that detail the events of the genocide.

It must be noted that some survivors express antipathy toward truth­hearing at gacaca and argue that they do not want to know all of the details of the past. Nathan, a Pentecostal pastor in Nyamata whose wife was killed in 1994, said, �?I am not always mentally stable when I think of what happened to my wife. I cannot identify her killers. I have heard news of who these people are but I am not sure and I think it is better not to know.'^[471] Nathan explained that, for him personally, knowing who had killed his wife and how she died would not help him deal with the pain he had suffered and could even increase his trauma. However, he also recognised that gacaca �?sends different messages to different people' and that for many survivors in his congregation discovering the details of the deaths of their loved ones had provided a form of �?medicine'.^[472]

Apart from learning the facts about the past, some survivors argue that the community’s acknowledgement of their experiences, through the community’s truth-hearing, contributes to the reconstruction of personal narratives. As survivors debate and discuss various issues and themes regarding the genocide in the wider community, they may dis­cern a greater meaning in the events to which these themes are attached. Paul, the survivor from Ruhengeri quoted earlier, said, �?We [survivors] realise that we are in the same situation, that we have all had family who were killed. We understand each other and we realise that we are not alone.’^[473] Truth-hearing at gacaca thus has the potential to provide both the historical knowledge of events and the communal setting in which to most effectively and meaningfully interpret the past.

Finally, some gacaca judges, in contrast to the rest of the population, interpret truth-shaping as an important objective of gacaca. Judges rarely discuss truth-shaping explicitly in this context, although their behav­iour during gacaca hearings often suggests that they consider gacaca to be an appropriate forum for this process. Truth-shaping involves com­munity leaders’ attempts to produce narratives of the genocide, based on evidence heard at gacaca, which they believe will bear meaning for the community as a whole. Gacaca judges often attempt to use evidence gleaned from hearings as a foundation for broader pedagogical pursuits, usually regarding notions of moral education. Faustin, a judge in a gacaca jurisdiction in Nyamata district of Kigali Ngali province, said, �?All gacaca judges must help the population learn lessons from the genocide. We are the moral teachers of the people.’^[474] Some judges and community leaders use gacaca as a forum for their own political and social views, regardless of whether these views concern genocide-related matters. During one gacaca hearing I attended in Nyamata, the president of the judges’ panel opened the hearing with a ten-minute speech about the community’s obligation to vote at the upcoming national presidential and parlia­mentary elections. �?If you participate in gacaca’, the president said, �?you must also vote in the elections. This is your duty as citizens of Rwanda.’^[475] Sometimes other community leaders interfere in the running of gacaca. At a hearing in Kanombe district of Kigali Ville, an observer from ASF recorded that the start of the hearing was delayed by nearly an hour and a half when the president of the judges’ panel allowed the vice-mayor of the district to give a lengthy speech about general patterns of health in the community and the upcoming election of local officials.^[476]