People’s Court for Genocide

Eight years ago, roving gangs of militia members killed his parents, his wife, their four young children and 19 other close relatives during the genocide of ethnic Tutsis. Now Lin Rusekampunzi is getting ready to pass judgment on the accused.

In the United States, the 43-year-old mechanic would be automatically disqualified from sitting on a jury hearing the case. But this is Rwanda, where Rusekampunzi--who has no legal training--will sit as a judge weighing evidence against the people accused of hacking his relatives to death with machetes and torching their houses.

This Central African country is embarking on an a novel experiment: Accused killers will face genocide survivors in outdoor tribunals where villagers will assemble on hillsides and city streets to hear charges against their neighbors in orderly, but informal, gatherings. Everyone can participate and those charged can either defend themselves or confess and beg forgiveness.

Acting as final arbiters will be 254,000 judges who recently won local elections to 19-member tribunals known as gacaca--which in the Kinyarwanda language means “justice on the grass.”

Most of the judges are peasants. Many are illiterate. Although they will judge people accused of committing some of the gravest crimes against humanity, almost all lack legal experience. And like Rusekampunzi, many will be asked to decide the fate of people who killed their friends and families.

Gacaca (pronounced ga-chacha) will be a mix of courtroom drama, town meeting and group therapy. In the next few months, villagers will begin gathering to hear government prosecutors present cases against 110,000 defendants accused of participating in Rwanda’s genocide--in which more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered over a 100-day period.

Villagers will be encouraged to recount their genocide experiences and testify for or against the defendants. In the end, gacaca judges will decide whether the accused will go free or serve sentences ranging from community service to 25-year prison terms.

International observers worry because defendants will not be allowed to cross-examine their accusers or even to have the right to an attorney. But Rwandan officials say gacaca is not geared toward offering the same legal rights available to defendants in the classic legal system.

Jurists here say such systems take too long and are ill-suited for Rwandan inmates, many of whom have been awaiting trial in overcrowded prisons for the last eight years.

Since 1994, the United Nations war crimes tribunal set up in Arusha, Tanzania, to try the architects of the Rwandan genocide has convicted only eight people. There has been one acquittal.

During the same period--even though nearly all of Rwanda’s judges and lawyers had been slaughtered--the country’s justice system managed to try 5,500 other defendants and found 80% guilty. At that pace, it would take about 200 years to try the remaining defendants.

So the country has returned to gacaca--community courts popular in precolonial Rwanda--with the hope that mass informal trials will expedite justice and heal rifts between Hutus and Tutsis.

The U.N.-sponsored war crimes tribunal and Rwanda’s magistrate courts will continue to try those suspected of directing the genocide. The gacaca tribunals will try the foot soldiers--accused killers and their accomplices, people who assaulted others without intending to kill and those who looted and destroyed property.

In the past, gacaca mainly dealt with civil conflicts such as marriage problems or land disputes.

Traditional gacacas preferred reconciliation to retribution. They were not intended to determine guilt as much as to restore harmony in society and rehabilitate people responsible for the disorder. Many feel that because of the genocide’s magnitude, the country would be better served by a justice focused on healing.

“There is no justice for crimes of mass violence,” Gerald Gahima, Rwanda’s attorney general, said recently. “Where participation in atrocities is widespread, justice can only be symbolic.”

Ethnic Tensions

Exploded in 1994

Rwanda’s ethnic rivalries, which stretch back generations, came to a head in April 1994, when a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, along with the president of neighboring Burundi, was shot down over Kigali, the Rwandan capital, killing everyone aboard. Civil war was raging at the time, as Habyarimana’s Hutu government crumbled and Tutsi rebels advanced to seize control.

Extremists from the majority Hutu government used the attack on the president’s plane as justification to wipe out the minority Tutsis. Hutus answered calls broadcast on the radio to kill the unarmed Tutsi population. For 100 days, soldiers, militia members and ordinary Hutu citizens--wielding guns, machetes and garden implements--slaughtered more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus who sympathized with the Tutsis or refused to kill them.

In the frenzy, neighbors killed neighbors. Hutu husbands killed their Tutsi wives and children. Some priests turned against their parishes, inviting Hutu militia members to use bulldozers and crush the churches where hundreds were hiding.

The slaughter of 8,000 a day left Rwanda awash in blood. Piles of corpses rotted in the African sun. Bodies choked a river that fed the Nile. About 250,000 Rwandan women who were not killed were raped and tortured, and about 70% of them were infected with HIV, which causes AIDS.

On a trip here in 1998, President Clinton acknowledged that “the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred” during the genocide.

The United States, the European Union and prominent international agencies are pumping in several million dollars to help make gacaca work, despite concerns that the tribunals will not provide defendants with basic legal rights.

Even Human Rights Watch, which has been critical of some human rights abuses here, said that despite its flaws, gacaca is the only hope for prisoners detained in inhumane conditions.

“It’s impossible to predict what will happen, said the group’s Rwanda specialist Alison Des Forges, “but gacaca is the only guarantee that the judicial process in Rwanda will move forward.”

The Accused Hope for

Leniency Under Gacaca

Jean Baptiste Ntivuguruzwa, 38, hopes gacaca will be his ticket out of Kigali Central Prison.

For eight years, Ntivuguruzwa said, he lived with the guilt of killing his longtime Tutsi neighbor, a night watchman arrested at one of numerous checkpoints set up by soldiers to snare Tutsis.

Ntivuguruzwa said he obeyed soldiers’ orders to kill the man.

“I didn’t give it much thought,” he said from the prison. “In those days, everyone was killing Tutsis and some important men were telling me to do it. So I gave him a strong blow on the head with a heavy stick.”

Ntivuguruzwa, a father of three, recently confessed his crime to prison authorities.

At the Kigali Central Prison, about 1,200 of the 7,000 inmates have confessed. Under gacaca law, those who confess and identify their partners in crime will have their sentences significantly reduced. Ntivuguruzwa, who faced a 25-year sentence, might serve only a few more years before he is released.

“If all Rwandans would say what happened, the truth will be our savior,” he said.

Another inmate, Ancilla Mukaminega, said she hopes gacaca judges will show mercy.

Authorities say Mukaminega, 43, was among the hundreds of Rwandans who slaughtered their relatives because they had Tutsi blood. Mukaminega, a Hutu, poisoned her five young children because their father was a Tutsi, according to authorities.

Mukaminega said she poured a potent insecticide down her children’s throats after her relatives refused to help hide them from Hutus. She too swallowed the insecticide, but a neighbor saved her life by pouring milk down her throat, she said.

“I think the gacaca people will see that living, knowing what I did to my own flesh and blood, is enough punishment for me,” she said. “My mind is my prison, my torture chamber.”

Town Assembly Offers

Glimpse of Future Trials

Rwandans recently had a glimpse of how gacaca will work when government prosecutors went to Gitarama, a small town about 30 miles south of Kigali, to collect evidence against some detainees who lived in the area.

Prosecutors have little or no evidence against about 20,000 of the detainees, according to Penal Reform International, a London-based group working with the government to improve conditions in local prisons. Prosecutors are only now gathering information and assembling files to present before gacaca tribunals.

In Gitarama, a young prosecutor pointed to a 25-year-old woman named Florence he had brought with him, asking a small crowd if anyone knew her.

“I know her!” one woman shouted out. “She is innocent.”

“How did she behave during the war?” the prosecutor asked.

When no one responded, the prosecutor turned to Florence and asked, “How long have you been in prison?”

“About seven years,” she responded meekly.

“She will soon have spent seven years in prison,” he said to men in the crowd. “She has been lucky because she has been protected from the pandemic, AIDS. Do not hesitate to take her as your bride.”

The prosecutor ordered Florence’s release.

Earlier, the prosecutor had presented a man named Sylvestre. A young woman responded that he had killed her husband during the genocide. Another said he had killed her two brothers, Pascal and Frederic, and Pascal’s six children.

“Are you in agreement with all that they have said?” the prosecutor asked. “Yes, I agree,” Sylvestre said.

“Can you tell us their names?”

“I no longer remember their names, but I agree.”

The prosecutor asked the crowd to support the gacaca process.

“Free yourselves. I have already been freed. You cannot bring the dead back to life,” the prosecutor implored the crowd.

Skeptics, Supporters

Await Outcomes

Many Tutsis say they are skeptical of gacaca.

“I don’t think the real truth will come out,” said Josephine Kalisa, whose husband and four children, ages 2 to 9, were killed in the genocide. “Gacaca will free dangerous people who should be in prison.”

“I cannot believe that a person who has killed and raped should be let out,” said another woman who identified herself as a gang-rape victim. “Do you think I could live or sleep in peace if the men who raped me come back to the village?”

Still, most survivors support gacaca, according to Antoine Mugesera, president of the main survivors group, Ibuka, which means “remember.”

“Gacaca will help us know if we can live together,” said Mugesera, whose father, brother and three sisters were killed in the genocide. “It will tell us who is innocent and who committed the crimes.”

Some Rwandans have concerns about the independence of the judges. Tutsis worry because they say people who committed genocidal crimes have been elected to gacaca courts, while Hutus fear that Tutsis will not give defendants a fair hearing. “How can people judge others when they have vengeance in their hearts?” asked a Hutu man whose three brothers are awaiting trial for killing their neighbors.

Rusekampunzi, the gacaca judge, disagreed.

“In the months or even first few years after the genocide, I wanted revenge,” he said. “But with time, the fire has died down. If the people who killed my family admit that they did wrong, I’ll forgive them.”

By many estimates, up to 20% of the 110,000 prisoners awaiting trial are innocent. Many people were detained only on the accusation of neighbors who coveted their cows, houses and other property.

Experts anticipate that thousands of detainees will be sent back to their small towns and rural villages. So far, the Rwandan government and international donors have no plan to reintegrate them into society or even provide counseling for victims who might relive the horrors of the genocide once testimonies begin.

Supporters and critics of gacaca question whether the government can surmount enormous bureaucratic and logistical problems.

Although gacaca will likely heal some wounds, it also could open new ones. And testimony in gacaca courts could lead to the arrests of thousands more, keeping the tribunals in business for a long time.

Mugesera, the president of the Ibuka survivors group, said people should give gacaca a chance.

“This is all about truth telling,” Mugesera said. “If one-quarter of the truth comes out in gacaca, Rwanda will be better off.”