Gacaca: Rwanda's Experiment in Community-Based Justice for Genocide Crimes Comes to a Close
DEVELOPMENTS
In the next six months, Rwanda will complete the most comprehensive post-conflict justice program attempted anywhere in the world. Since 2001, 11,000 community-based courts known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha), which are overseen by locally-elected judges and forbid any participation by lawyers, have prosecuted around 400,000 suspected perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. Nearly every Rwandan adult has participated in gacaca in some way, either as a witness, defendant, or by attending weekly hearings. Under gacaca’s plea-bargaining scheme, the vast majority of those convicted of genocide crimes have either had their sentences commuted to community service or, if they were imprisoned, have been reintegrated into the same communities where they committed crimes and now live side-by-side with genocide survivors and their families.
BACKGROUND
Following the genocide, during which approximately 800,000 Tutsi and their perceived Hutu and Twa sympathizers were killed, many by their own neighbors and friends, Rwanda has pursued justice for all genocide perpetrators. Whereas most post-conflict societies limit prosecutions to a handful of ringleaders of mass crimes, Rwanda has used the gacaca courts to hold hundreds of thousands of genocide suspects accountable.
In the months following the genocide, around 120,000 suspects, mostly Hutu, were rounded up and transported to jails around the country built to hold only 45,000 inmates. Most detainees were never formally charged with any crime and were forced to live in hellish conditions: underfed, drinking dirty water, and crammed into room so tiny that they were often forced to sleep in latticework formations. During the genocide, the Rwandan judicial system – which manifested signs of debilitation before 1994 – was nearly destroyed completely, as the infrastructure of the national courts was decimated and many judges and lawyers were killed or fled the country. With the existing judicial system incapable of dealing with massive numbers of suspects, the government sought new mechanisms to hear genocide cases.
In response to the social, political, economic, and legal problems created by the overcrowded prisons, the Rwandan government in 2001 instituted gacaca to hasten the prosecution of lower-level genocide suspects, most of whom had been imprisoned for more than six years. In March 2005, gacaca entered its most crucial phase, as it expanded nationwide and began judging and sentencing the first wave of genocide suspects, some of whom, as a result of their conviction at gacaca, have now been sentenced to new prison terms. Gacaca continues to judge and sentence genocide suspects imprisoned since 1994 and has in recent years identified many new suspects who were not rounded up during the initial incarceration process but who now face justice at gacaca.
ANALYSIS
The societal impact of gacaca on post-genocide Rwanda is highly variable, due largely to the enormous number of communities involved. These communities differ significantly in terms of their experiences of the genocide and the nature of interethnic relations today. Gacaca has produced two principal successes and two long-term challenges that are especially worth highlighting.
First, gacaca has proven remarkably successful at expediting the post-genocide justice process, delivering accountability for hundreds of thousands of génocidaires. It has also commuted many convicted perpetrators’ sentences to overcome the problem of overcrowded prisons and facilitated the reintegration of most detainees into everyday society. Thus, the Rwandan government will soon have delivered on its promise of comprehensive prosecutions of those responsible for committing genocide crimes, but without recreating the problem of overcrowded jails that necessitated gacaca in the first place.
The government will also have completed the genocide caseload in the relatively short period of nine years at a cost of only $40 million. Gacaca has proven substantially cheaper to run than more conventional justice institutions, especially when compared to the immense costs involved with the running of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which to date has cost more than.$1 billion. By clearing the backlog of genocide cases, gacaca has also improved living conditions in Rwandan prisons and saved government resources necessary to sustain such a large prison population.
Second, gacaca’s emphasis on popular participation during hearings has yielded significant dividends in terms of truth. In particular, much of the Rwandan population argues that gacaca has been important for recovering truth in the form of legal facts regarding the genocide. Gacaca has also provided therapeutic truth, allowing individuals to tell and hear personal narratives of the genocide, in turn enabling them to deal emotionally and psychologically with the past. Gacaca’s compilation of testimony from 11,000 communities now provides a rich, diverse reservoir of historical material regarding genocide crimes.
Many suspects and survivors state that the opportunity to speak openly at gacaca about events and emotions concerning the genocide has contributed to their personal healing. Guilty suspects claim to have gained a sense of release from feelings of shame and social dislocation by confessing to, and apologising for, their crimes in front of their victims and the wider community at gacaca. Survivors, on the other hand, claim to have overcome feelings of loneliness by publicly describing the personal impact of genocide crimes and receiving communal acknowledgement of their pain.
While gacaca has produced important benefits, it has also generated significant problems with lasting consequences for Rwandan society. Many survivors increasingly assert that the punishments handed down, such as community service, are too the lenient. Some argue that convicted perpetrators, with their moderate sentences, have benefited from the government’s need to empty the prisons.
Second, gacaca has also generated significant truth-related problems. Gacaca’s attempt to deal with the massive backlog of genocide cases has involved weekly hearings over nine years in many communities. For many Rwandans, this has meant hearing repeatedly highly emotive testimony concerning genocide crimes, with the result that gacaca has increased trauma among some participants. The retraumatization of individuals who are still dealing with the psychological legacies of the genocide is one of the major costs of gacaca’s truth process. Furthermore, the truth component of gacaca itself has suffered from certain participants’ instrumental calculations through plea bargaining. Some genocide suspects face incentives to confess falsely to crimes much less severe than those they actually committed in order to benefit from gacaca’s pre-determined system of sentencing.
As a response to the enormous challenges that confronted Rwanda after the genocide, gacaca highlights the impressive ingenuity and innovation of the Rwandan population. Nevertheless, given that many international policymakers today view gacaca as a cheaper, faster way of doing justice for mass crimes and potentially as a model for other post-conflict societies, it is crucial that we bear in mind both gacaca’s successes and shortcomings.
Dr. Phil Clark is a research fellow at the Center for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, and convenor of Oxford Transitional Justice Research. His latest book is The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice without Lawyers (Cambridge University Press, August 2010).