In the next few weeks, Rwanda will complete the most comprehensive post-conflict justice programme attempted anywhere in the world. Since 2001, 11,000 community-based gacaca courts, overseen by locally-elected judges and barring any participation by lawyers, have prosecuted around 400,000 suspected perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.

By Phil Clark

Nearly every Rwandan adult has participated in gacaca in some way, either as a witness, defendant or by attending weekly hearings. Under gacaca’s plea-bargaining scheme, the vast majority of those convicted of genocide crimes have had their sentences commuted to community service. If they were among the 120,000 suspects imprisoned directly after the genocide, they have now been reintegrated into the same communities where they committed crimes and live side-by-side with genocide survivors and their families.

The societal impact of gacaca on post-genocide Rwanda has been highly variable. Gacaca’s volatility results from the enormous number of communities involved, which themselves vary greatly in terms of their experiences of the genocide and the nature of inter-ethnic relations today. Over the last nine years, gacaca has recorded two principal successes and confronted two main challenges.

First, gacaca has proven remarkably successful at expediting the post-genocide justice process, delivering accountability for hundreds of thousands of génocidaires. In the process, it has commuted many convicted perpetrators’ sentences to overcome the problem of overcrowded prisons and facilitated the reintegration of most detainees into everyday society. Thus, the Rwandan government will soon have delivered on its promise of comprehensive prosecutions of those responsible for committing genocide crimes but without recreating the problem of overcrowded jails that necessitated gacaca in the first place.

Gacaca has also been critical in individualising the guilt of those responsible for the genocide, pursuing justice for each perpetrator regardless of their political or socio-economic status. Provincial governors, military officials and peasant farmers have been treated equally – a crucial recognition of the different levels of Rwandan society that participated in the genocide.

The Rwandan government has also completed the genocide caseload in the relatively short period of nine years at a cost of only $40 million. Gacaca has therefore proven substantially cheaper to run than more conventional justice institutions, especially when compared to the immense costs involved with the running of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which to date has cost more than US$1 billion. By clearing the backlog of genocide cases, gacaca has also improved living conditions in Rwandan prisons and saved government resources necessary to sustain such a large prison population.

Second, gacaca’s emphasis on popular participation during hearings has yielded significant dividends in terms of truth. In particular, gacaca has been important for recovering truth in the form of legal facts about the genocide and therapeutic truth in terms of allowing individuals to tell and hear personal narratives that allow them to deal emotionally and psychologically with the past. Gacaca’s gathering of testimony from 11,000 communities now provides a rich, diverse reservoir of historical material regarding genocide crimes.

The recently created Gacaca Documentation Centre in Kigali constitutes the largest archive concerning a mass crime anywhere in the world and will provide an invaluable resource for everyday Rwandans, scholars and analysts for generations to come.

Emphasising the psychological aspects of gacaca’s truth process, suspects and survivors often argue that the opportunity to speak openly at gacaca about events and emotions concerning the genocide has contributed to their personal healing.

In interviews, many guilty suspects claim to have gained a sense of release from feelings of shame and social dislocation by confessing to, and apologising for, their crimes in front of their victims and the wider community at gacaca. Many survivors, on the other hand, claim to have overcome feelings of loneliness by publicly describing the personal impact of genocide crimes and receiving communal acknowledgement of their pain.

While gacaca has produced important benefits, it has also generated significant problems with lasting consequences for Rwandan society. Regarding justice through gacaca, many survivors increasingly criticise the lenient sentences handed down to many convicted génocidaires. In particular, many survivors perceive community service as insufficient punishment, given the gravity of crimes committed during the genocide.

Many survivors argue that convicted perpetrators have in the main benefited from the government’s need to rapidly empty the prisons and thus gacaca’s tendency toward moderate sentencing. Meanwhile, there is widespread anger among Hutu that gacaca has addressed only genocide crimes and not revenge killings against Hutu civilians committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel force that ended the genocide in July 1994 and today represents the ruling party in Rwanda.

Second, gacaca has also generated significant truth-related problems. Gacaca’s attempt to clear the massive backlog of genocide cases has involved weekly hearings over nine years in many communities. For many Rwandans, this has meant hearing repeatedly highly emotive testimony concerning brutal crimes. Gacaca has consequently increased levels of trauma among many of its participants.

The retraumatisation of individuals who are still dealing with the emotional and psychological legacies of the genocide is one of the major costs of gacaca’s truth process. Furthermore, the truth component of gacaca itself has suffered from many participants’ instrumental calculations based on the plea-bargaining scheme. In particular, many genocide suspects have had an incentive to confess falsely to crimes much less severe than those they actually committed in order to benefit from gacaca’s pre-determined system of sentencing.

As many international policymakers today view gacaca as a cheaper, faster way of doing justice for mass crimes and potentially as a model for other post-conflict societies, it is crucial that we bear in mind both gacaca’s successes and shortcomings. Nevertheless, as a response to the enormous challenges that confronted Rwanda after the genocide, gacaca highlights the impressive ingenuity and innovation of the Rwandan people.

Dr. Phil Clark is a research fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, and convenor of Oxford Transitional Justice Research. His latest book is The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice without Lawyers (Cambridge University Press, August 2010).