Gacaca: A long way left to go

Emmanuel Munyarukumbuzi
Emmanuel Mungwarakarama

The room is crowded when the inhabitants of Buye meet for Gacaca on Wednesday afternoons.
Their task is not easy: to find out who did what to whom in their block of houses during the genocide.

"People are not enthusiastic with saying the truth", says Yves Twagira.
He is one of the participants in the Gacaca in Buye but he is hesitant about the outcome of it.
"If it continues this way, there will never be light on the genocide and the process of reconciliation will be put at risk", he says.
He thinks that the people who do not want to testify or lie deliberately to Gacaca should be pushed to do it because otherwise they make accessory to the genocide. According to him, it is up to the government through the local administration to exhort the population to say the truth.
However, the room is too small to contain all the participants. Some stand outside and watch through the windows. We are in Buye, a small community outside Butare, in the south of Rwanda. Here as in the remainder of the province of Butare Wednesday afternoons are devoted to Gacaca. This Wednesday as usual, the local population attended in great number the Gacaca. The participants meet in the classrooms of the secondary school, in different rooms according to what ‘nyumbakumi' or block of houses they belong to.
In Buye work is at the stage of collection of information. It is a matter of collecting as much information as possible on the genocide: its preparation, implementation and its consequences as well as the role of each suspect.
"At the beginning we draw up a list of the inhabitants of the cell from 1990 to 1994", explains Jean Bosco Rushingabigwi, secretary in one of the rooms.
"The goal is to know those who still reside at it, those who left and where, which was the leaders and other suspects of the genocide".
The information collection is a work that requires the participation of each one, especially of those present during the genocide.

Marie Rose Dusabimana, a young survivor of the genocide is almost of the same opinion.
"Some prisoners write to their families and to former neighbours to tell them to keep quiet. Sometimes people do not want to testify against a friend or a close relation, that handicaps Gacaca considerably”, she says.
She wants that the government adopts suitable measures to fight against those who discourage the population to testify and say the truth.
"But also, it is necessary that the witnesses feel protected if not they won’t be able to say anything", she adds.

Faustin Mutwarasibo is a treasurer of the cell and takes part regularly in Gacaca. From time to time, he acts as secretary to advance work. For him, the fact of having many intellectuals, professors of the National University of Rwanda, members of various religious congregations is not without inconvenient for the advance of ‘Gacaca’.
"Some are reticent to testify and those who do it do not say all the truth", he regrets.
"In my native village, the phase of collection of information is almost finished. Here we are very late ", he notes.

Most of the killers are still waiting for their trial

After the genocide nearly 130.000 people accused to have taken part were put in prison. Eleven years later the large majority of them are still waiting for their trial.
The conventional system of justice in Rwanda does not have capacity to deal with all the suspects. The search for an alternative solution led to the ‘Gacaca' jurisdictions, inspired by a traditional mechanism that was used to solve local quarrels.
The principle of Gacaca is to join all the protagonists in the place of the crime: witnesses, criminals and others that are concerned. Together they will discuss what happened in order to establish the truth. They draw up a list of the victims and point out who is guilty.
Non-professional judges, the ‘inyangamugayo’, lead the debates. These judges are elected among the respected members of the community and they pronounce the verdict of the villagers.