Rwanda turns to its past for justice

Anastase Nabahire was out of the country in 1994, studying in the Congo, when 1 million Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers were slaughtered in the space of 100 days. After it was over, he returned home to find that his grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, three sisters, and four brothers and their wives and children had perished. Only his youngest sister survived.

"I came home, saw all our Hutu neighbors and friends in the village hanging around as usual, and asked how my family had been killed," he says. "They looked away."

Eight years later, it is finally judgment time for the accused perpetrators, and looking away will be impossible.

Out of the some 135,000 suspects jailed after the genocide, only 5,000 have been tried, and 8 out of 10 found guilty. At this pace, it would take 200 years to try the rest. So Rwanda is looking to its past for help in healing its wounds.

Beginning next month, all but those accused of orchestrating the worst acts of genocide will be tried under a traditional system called gacaca. Pronounced "gachacha," the word means open-air debate in the Kinyarwanda language. It is a system of participatory justice, in which the accused stand trial before a panel of judges they have chosen from their own community.

Gacaca courts were common in precolonial Rwanda, where feuding clans would assemble to discuss problems and resolve differences between them amicably, with village elders standing as judges. Today's gacaca courts will work in much the same way: Victims will be given an opportunity to confront their assailants in public.

In two weeks, training begins for the 260,000 gacaca judges, most of whom lack formal education, and some of whom are even illiterate. The government hopes to give the judges basic training in principles of law; group management; conflict resolution; judicial ethics; and financial management. The trials are expected to last three years.

"The central issue here is truth more than punishment," says Protais Musoni, the local government ministry's top official. "It is a cleansing mechanism. We will move the genocide from our subconscious to the conscious, and hopefully, at the end we will allow bygones to be bygones."

Today, Nabahire is a director of Ibuka (which means "remember" in Kinyarwanda), a survivors group. If he could have his way, he admits, all those implicated in the genocide would be given the death sentence. He knows, however, that this will never be.

"Gacaca is a compromise political solution," Nabahire says, "but at this point, it is all we have to look forward to."

Time is of the essence, he adds, for there are whole villages in which not one victim survived to tell the tale. "We can't have any unity or reconciliation if we don't have truth ... and punishment first," he says. "This must happen before all the witnesses are gone."

Gacaca courts will be set up at four different administrative levels. Relatively minor crimes, such as arson and looting, will be processed at the lowest village level. Cases of wounding with intent to kill will be tried at sector level. Murder will be tried at the higher administrative levels, commune and district.

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