May 6, 04:53 PM
Witnessing Gacaca
Visiting a Rwandan Gacaca Court for the first time Wednesday afternoon, what struck me most was the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the monumental. Here in an old municipal office building, its concrete walls chipping faded yellow and blue paint, 50 citizens of a sub-disctrict of Kigali sat shoulder-to-shoulder on narrow benches facing a table crowded with seven volunteer judges. In the back of the room, a young woman nursed her baby.
Between the judges and the other citizens sat two men in the pink shorts and shirts that make up a Rwandan prisoner’s uniform. These two were accused of crimes that included killing family members of some of those sitting just a few feet away.
No barrier separated them, and the only guard sat in the corner of the room, holding his assault rifle casually and sometimes looking out the window. Witnesses—anyone in the community who had something to say, and primarily people who had been identified in an earlier investigation phase of the Gacaca process—came forward one at a time to offer testimony.
After each witness had spoken, the accused stood to reply to what had just been said. The judges listened intently, taking notes by hand and often interrupting the witnesses or accused to get the proper spelling of names, clarify points, or resolve discrepancies between written statements and public testimony.
Everything was very orderly. No one—witness, judge, or defendant—raised his voice, and rarely were strong emotions betrayed in facial expressions. In the case of the community members and survivors, I read this stoicism as a quiet dignity in the face of an ongoing nightmare. (I couldn’t begin to imagine what was going through the minds of the accused, and I don’t care to interpret their behavior.)
There were no lawyers and no cross-examinations, and each witness’s testimony and defendant’s response took between two and twenty minutes. In this way, the Gacaca judges—respected community elders chosen for their lack of bias—hear the cases of one defendant in the morning and one in the afternoon. They attempt to determine a verdict and sentence in no more than a handful of such half-day sessions.
Gacaca justice is meant to be swift because there is so much work to do. While the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (which we visited in Arusha, Tanzania) takes a very methodical approach to trying the masterminds of the genocide—finishing less than 30 trials in over a decade—something had to be done with the hundreds of thousands of “ordinary” genocidaires, accused of killing, raping, and robbing on the orders of others and now awaiting trial, many for nearly a decade, in the country’s overcrowded prisons.
So, the Gacaca (pronounced “gah-cha-cha”) process was begun three years ago by the Rwandan Government, loosely basing it on a traditional village court system that had the same name.
Problems, however, have not disappeared. The process is going more slowly than it was hoped, with just 10 percent of the courts around the country in each village or city sub-district now beyond the investigation phase to the trial phase in which the court Jerri and I visited was operating. There was recently a halt to the process as the national Gacaca law was amended and the government attempted to address other irregularities, such as judges’ failure to properly complete paperwork and, more disturbingly, at least one court in which elected judges were themselves alleged to have participated in the genocide.
It’s hard to judge the seriousness of such problems, or the overall effectiveness of Gacaca, not least because there are 9,000 different courts and so little media or scholarly attention being paid to what’s happening in them as they meet once each week in every corner of the country.
I have a hard time as well deciding whether the rather informal nature of the Gacaca system is more liability or benefit. A retired lawyer from Washington, DC, (a friend of a friend who was nice enough to speak with me before Jerri and I left on our trip), took the opinion last October in an excellent Washington Post piece that the potential to swiftly offer some truth and reconciliation was more important than a more careful and slow legal process.
But it’s also true that real judgments are rendered in these courts, and it seems to me that some of Gacaca’s shortcomings mean that both the wronged and the accused could miss their only chance for justice.
Without professional prosecutors or investigators, for example, evidence and important testimony might be missed or mishandled, making a greater potential for the guilty to be found innocent or given an unduly light sentence. Without any real system of witness protection, there have been, according to several Rwandans we spoke to, cases of witness intimidation and murder. Without defense attorneys, there is the potential for violations of the rights of the accused, and among the thousands in jail there must be at least some who are innocent of all or part of the charges against them.
In the the first trial we witnessed, the wife of the accused insisted on her husband’s innocence. This despite the fact that before the trial she’d told several people in the community, including the now outraged brother of a victim, that her husband was guilty. Was she changing her story out of fear of retribution? Was it all part of a plot, as our translator Martin later guessed could be the case, to discourage other potential witnesses, who might think that the wife’s damning evidence would be enough, from making the effort to attend the Gacaca session and testify that day? Given the Gacaca’s limitations in time and resources, locating other witnesses and ferreting out the truth of these matters might not be possible. (The trial was adjourned until next Wednesday, so I’ll probably never know how it turns out.)
In the second trial, a man of about 60 years of age pleaded guilty to most of the charges against him, including genocide itself. To other charges, including looting property and bringing the gasoline used to burn a young woman alive, he pleaded not guilty. His trial went on for a few hours that afternoon, with one witness, a Hutu who said he had sheltered Tutsis during the genocide, offering testimony involving the defendant’s alleged looting and murdering at a mental hospital near to the area. In his response, the defendant stated that this witness, together with other members of his family, was actually among the group who participated in murders.
In the midst of this morass of accusation and counter accusation, around 3:30, the judges announced that they would have to adjourn for the day. At seven members in attendance, they were already two below their full complement, and losing one more who had to leave to take an exam would mean they would not have quorum.
At this point, a middle-aged man rose and asked to address the court. He said he’d been waiting to testify since 9:00 that morning. And he’d been waiting 12 years to face this man, who had just pleaded guilty to killing his entire family. He requested that the court reconsider their decision to adjourn, and at least let him give his testimony and face, as he felt he needed to do, the person who had murdered his loved ones.
The judges said they couldn’t do this. Pointing to Martin and me (Jerri had had to leave for a meeting at WE-ACTx), they asked how it would look to the observers who were there that day if the court was badgered into changing its mind. The man responded that he was sure we wouldn’t mind, but no more was made of this question as he then turned to the defendant and demanded, forcefully but without yelling, that he look him in the eye and tell him what he had done. He said he wanted to hear it from the defendant’s own lips.
The defendant turned around in his chair, looked at the man, and despite his earlier guilty plea, said, as Martin translated it, that he sort of admitted to being a part of the group that had committed those murders. The man said this was not good enough, and he started to say, still in a remarkably calm voice, that he wanted to hear a real admission of guilt.
At that point, however, a judge intervened and said that this was not the way the court was to function. The aggrieved man would have his chance to testify next week.
It was an imperfect conclusion, but it was much better than nothing, and better than many of the other possibities. I guess the same could be said of what Jerri and I witnessed that day and the entire Gacaca process.
Mark and Jerri,
I can barely find words to write. Nothing seems appropriate as a response to what the two of you describe. The Gacaca court and the Murambi Memorial seem unreal, like you were sitting in a dream or walking in a nightmare. Yet you both did find words that moved me deeply! One of the hopeful thoughts that I had is that you will both keep finding words to tell of this horror so that many others HAVE TO HEAR and believe that it happened because you SAW and TOLD.Maybe that can help to stop horror again. I feel for the emotions that you have had to feel. Yet,I believe that you know what to do with that pain in your soul. We have to have hope that, if people become aware, there is more good than bad people and the good will make a difference.
With a heavy heart,
Mom/Beej
— beej/mom May 6, 06:04 PM #