Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of what is surely among the most important genocidal acts of my lifetime: the attempt to eradicate as many members of the Tutsi population in Rwanda (and sympathetic Hutus, it must be remembered). Below is an essay I wrote nearly a decade ago both as a commemoration of the anniversary and as an example of one kind of research essay for my classes. There are
many posts reflecting the acts beginning April 7, 1994, on the internet this week; this one is about the attempt to bring a sense of justice in a particularly Rwandan way.
Abstract:
The Rwandan practice of Gacaca—a process of public confession done
before a town’s residents—is helping to quicken the pace of judicial procedures
instituted in response to the 1994 Rwandan genocidal massacres.
“We will Never Do
It Again!”:
Rwandan Gacaca
On February 19, 2003—just a few
months shy of the ninth anniversary of the April 1994 airplane crash killing
President Juvenal Habyaramana and setting into motion the infamous 100-day
genocidal attack on Rwandan ethnic Tutsis—“Judges at the UN International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda...unanimously pronounced former Seventh day
Adventist pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana and his son[,] medical doctor Gerard
Ntakirutimana[,] guilty of genocide” (Fondation Hirondelle, 2003) for their
roles in specific killings at Mugonero and Busasero. They are sentenced to ten years and
twenty-five years, respectively. The
Ntakirutimanas are the highest-profile defendants of the ICTR trials, and their
unanimous convictions provide testament to the difficult work done by ICTR
prosecutors.
The work has been difficult, but the
eleven-month trial, the speediest of the ten decisions the ICTR has
accomplished since its 1995 inception, and of which there remain another
forty-five, leaves observers optimistic.
After all, the Ntakirutimana’s defense relied primarily on two
easy-to-prove points: that neither
defendant was anywhere in the vicinity during the massacres in which they
supposedly participated; and in any case, neither actually swung a machete, the
preferred method of execution during the massacre.
Neither fact, however,
mattered. Their guilt was moral rather
than physical. Pastor Ntaki (the
familiar patronymic among Rwandans), a Hutu, had received this letter, dated April 15, 1994, from
several Tutsi pastors under his leadership:
How
are you! We wish you to be strong in all
these problems we are facing. We wish to
inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our
families. We therefore request you to
intervene on our behalf and talk with the [mayor]. We believe that, with the help of God who
entrusted you the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed,
your intervention will be highly appreciated…We give honor to you. (Gourevitch, 1998, p. 42)
Pastor Ntaki did indeed intervene
with the mayor. The result is described
by Philip Gourevitch.
In Nyarubuye, when Tutsis asked
the Hutu Power mayor how they might be spared [after the extermination had
begun the previous week in Kigali],
he suggested that they seek sanctuary at the church. They did, and a few days later the mayor came
to kill them. He came at the head of a
pack of soldiers, policemen, militiamen, and villagers; he gave out arms and
orders to complete the job well. No more
was required of the mayor, but he also was said to have killed a few Tutsis
himself.
The killers killed all day…At
night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind
the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking
beer…And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find
beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed
again. Day after day, minute to minute,
Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they
worked like that. “It was a process,”
Sergeant Francis said. (Gourevitch, pp
18-19)
These victims were the neighbors and
friends of their murderers. Something
very strange went on in Rwanda
during those months. And something no
less strange occurs in its aftermath.
One thing that must be understood
about the Rwandan massacres is that they did not happen either in a vacuum or
in secret. The murderers, minority
ethnic Hutus, members of the same tribe with which President Habyaramana,
himself a Hutu, had stocked his government, were well-prepared, armed and
trained for months prior to the genocide, and informed of the attack’s timing
and pressed on by Radio Mille Collines, Rwanda’s nationally-owned radio
station. There were also a lot of
them. The fifty-five current cases
before the ICTR are but a tiny fraction of the 2500 “Category One” killers,
described by Samantha Powers (2003) as genocide planners, “well-known”
murderers, or defendants who killed with “zeal” or “excessive wickedness”. Another 120,000 Rwandans await conviction on
lesser charges. It is estimated there were
800,000 individual murders of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus during that one
hundred days, and there are many, many categories besides Category One.
The ICTR obviously cannot try each
case, nor is it designed to try, a la Nuremburg, a specific class of cases. Eventually, each case is meant to arrive in Rwanda’s
regular court. Helping them get there is
a specifically Rwandan process called gacaca.
Gacaca
(pronounced ga-CHA-CHA and so-named “for
the leaves of grass on which traditional leaders sat while they resolved
community disputes” [Powers, p 48]) is a once-a-week judicial procedure
attended by the rescapés, or Tutsi
and Hutu survivors of the massacres.
Inaugurated in 1999 by Rwandan president Paul Kagame in an attempt to lessen
the strain on the country’s prisons into which suspects had been crammed since
mid-1994, gacaca is “a public
confessional process that recalls both the Salem witch trials and a Mississippi
Christian revival” (Powers, p 48). Powers
describes one such gacaca she
witnessed in Niyikazu, Butare:
One group of prisoners arrived on
foot, dressed like other villagers in worn blue jeans and smudged Nike
T-shirts, African sarongs, and an assortment of flip-flops, loafers, and
bedroom slippers…They were hauling stools and benches, on which their fellow
townspeople sat during the day of exhausting testimony. Although there was hardly any supervision,
none of the prisoners tried to make a dash for the hills. The local prison chief explained, “It is not
in our culture for people to try to escape.”
A second group of prisoners arrived
dressed in pink prison uniforms…Some of the prisoners has starched their shirts
for the big day. All seemed giddy,
enjoying the change of scenery and the first hope in seven years of eventual
release.
…[A] handful of prisoners in the
jail’s musical troupe made their way into the center of the courtyard, which
was by now ringed by more than a thousand onlookers. One prisoner played the bongo drums and four
strummed guitars, several of which had been painted pink to match their prison
uniforms. The musicians…were joined by
prison singers, who danced to a rhythmic song about murder, confession, truth,
liberation, and reconciliation. The beat
was catchy, combining reggae, polka, and gospel singing…When the song reached
its final stanza—“We are assuring you, it will never happen again”—the three
prison dancers twirled around and
swished their hips to the tune, all the while making a throat-slitting motion,
and wagging their fingers to indicate admonition. “We will never do it again!” (p 49)
This seems the stuff of satire, ripe
for mockery, but the truth lies in that phrase delivered by the unnamed prison
chief: “It is not in our culture for
people to try to escape.” These people
had done terrible deeds and it has become in their best interests to confess
them because they have nowhere else to go.
Those who, after the return and victory of the Rwandese Patriotic Front
from Uganda,
decamped to Tanzania
or Congo
or Zaire
to escape vengeance, have, for the most part, returned. The number of former murderers living in
close proximity to their former victims is of course a sore point—Gourevitch
ends his book with the story of Jean Girumuhatse, a returnee from Zaire who had
run a roadblock and who admitted to killing at least six people, and his
request of Laurencie Nyirabeza, a rescapé
whose family he killed and a woman who he himself struck with a machete, for
her “pardon”—however, as President Kagame has said, “We have no
alternative.”
Gourevitch’s tale ends as
Girumuhatse describes the genocide as “like a dream.”
“It
came from the regime like a nightmare.”
Now, it seemed, he had not so much waked up as entered a new dream, in
which his confession and his pat enthusiasm for Rwanda’s reform—“The new regime
is quite good. There are no dead…There
is a new order”—did not require any fundamental change of politics or
heart. He remained a middleman, aspiring
to be a model citizen and to reap the rewards.
When the authorities said kill, he killed, and when the authorities said
confess, he confessed. (Gourevitch, pp
310-11)
This, it would seem, is the
particular advantage of the gacaca: that one who needs to confess will do so, and
be sent further along the chain to ultimate responsibility, while one who has nothing to confess will be
absolved. Of the 8000 prisoners
presented at gacaca, nearly 2000 have
been freed, not on technicalities but on the say-so of their neighbors. Such a system is unlikely to work in the
US—we are more a nation of Pastor Ntakis, who loudly declares, if not his
innocence, then his lack of responsibility for the consequences of his
actions—but gacaca seems a uniquely
effective Rwandan solution to a uniquely Rwandan problem.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works
Cited in this Essay:
Fondation
Hirondelle. (2003, February 19.) Elizaphan Ntakirutimana. Retrieved March
Gourevitch,
Philip. (1998.) We Wish
to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed
With
our Families. New
York: Farrar
Strauss Giroux.
Powers,
Samantha. (2003, January 16.) Rwanda: The Two Faces of Justice. The New
York Review of Books, pp 47-50.
