Rwanda

After the 1994 Rwandan genocide, efforts to bring the numerous perpetrators to justice overwhelmed the national court and prison system. As a result, the country established the Gacaca tribunals, a traditional community court system, in order to process the thousands awaiting trial. The Gacaca courts operated with the goal of establishing reconciliation between victims and perpetrators who would often have to reintegrate into the same community. In some respects, the modern Gacaca tribunals also reflect the design of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRC), which are common systems to establish peace after political instability or war. While TRCs are temporary and non-judicial in nature, they are overseen by the state as a venue for airing grievances and confronting offending parties (Rimé, Kanyangara, Yzerbyt & Paez, 2011, p. 695). The tribunals created space for testimonies and discourse on reparations, which acted both as a means of justice and peacemaking.

Reconciliation is important because without some sort of mutual, relational, and satisfactory movement between two groups previously engaged in violence, any peace is unstable. Reconciliation can, and must, occur in top-down and bottom-up processes, which can bring about institutional and community change, respectively. Such efforts have also taken the form of interventions, peace education and interactive problem solving (Staub, 2006). Gacaca courts provide one of the clearest examples of grassroots bottom-up approaches to reconciliation. They addressed a particular need for peacemaking by and for each community with a focus on the future.

In this sense, the Gacaca tribunals followed a transformative justice model through emancipatory postconflict peacebuilding, where “rather than the locus of such discussion involving solely elite institutional democratization, it would be concerned with matters identified by the population, from below” (Gready & Robins, 2014, p. 351). Restorative justice is often a large part of solutions implemented within reconciliation efforts, and this is especially true with respect to the Gacaca tribunals. It entails monetary compensation as well as physical work provided by perpetrators to improve the conditions of survivors and to rebuild communities (Staub, 2006, p. 884).

The participation as witnesses in the tribunals, though not always enacted perfectly, gave victims a voice which began a transformation from victimhood to empowerment. Bearing witness allows empathic acknowledgement of suffering from the community, reconfirms the ‘moral order’, and nurtures a sense of safety (Staub, 2006, p. 881). Lisa Laplante points out that the importance of truth-telling is “the change in personal and political status as truth-tellers, and not just the content of this truth” (Gready & Robins, 2014, p. 359). Greedy and Robins continue, “Mobilizations such as this are an indication of the potential for deeper forms of participation and empowerment, as each positions victims and survivors of human rights abuses as agents rather than objects of intervention, and gestures to ongoing processes of inquiry and activism beyond particular interventions.”

The importance of the Gacaca tribunals outside Rwanda is found in its accessible and decolonized approach to universal principles of reconciliation. As Gready and Robins (2014) put it, “Securing popular access to and participation in all aspects of transitional justice processes (design, implementation, evaluation), and encouraging culturally resonant mechanisms that resist global models, can be seen as an opportunity to challenge a range of exclusions and power relations at both the local and the international level” (p. 349). The traditions of Gacaca clearly cannot be transposed onto other situations of violence and discord outside of Rwanda, or possibly even Africa. Each geographic situation calls for a drawing out of healing cultural practices, specific to the region’s history. Rather, the lessons of Gacaca tribunals lie in enabling a space for transformative justice where survivors can empower themselves through truth-telling, perpetrators of violence can enter into community through restorative justice, and groups can collectively acknowledge hurtful histories and initiate cohesive processes in order to rebuild society.