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Sunday, September 24, 2000
By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer with pictures by Martha Rial, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
It's a common sight on the streets of Kigali and along rural roadways elsewhere in Rwanda -- groups of male workers dressed in matching cotton candy-pink shirts and shorts. These are the chain gangs of Rwanda, although no one is actually shackled. They are the most visible symbol of an enormous problem facing this nation, which lost nearly 1 million men, women and children in the 1994 genocide. The problem is what to do with the more than 120,000 people who are imprisoned and awaiting trial for genocide crimes. Even if the traditional legal machinery were humming along, it would take hundreds of years to work through all the cases.
"We know we have some wise persons who can judge, who can counsel other persons," said Straton Nsanzabaganwa, an official in the Ministry of Local Governance and Social Affairs. "We hope these persons are going to be elected by the people [to be] the future judges of their brothers."
The idea would be to keep the most serious cases -- mass killing, rape and ordering others to commit those crimes -- in the regular courts, and to divert less serious charges like looting and simple assault to the gacaca panels.
There are several unanswered questions about the process, though. It isn't clear whether an accused person could refuse a gacaca trial and insist on a conventional court case. There may be no guarantee of defense counsel, even though the gacaca panel would have access to information about the accused compiled by the prosecutor's office and could even seek advice from the prosecution.
Perhaps more important than any procedural safeguards is the question of whether local groups would be able to put aside their ethnic ties and other biases to judge accused prisoners fairly.
If the accused is a Hutu returning to a Tutsi-dominated area, he may be wrongly convicted out of vengeance. If he goes to a neighborhood that is more Hutu, he may be wrongly acquitted out of solidarity.
Class and wealth differences also could play a role. And if a Hutu has a rival, either Hutu or Tutsi, for power in a particular community, he might not be able to muster enough local support to get a fair judgment.
"The fairness of the proceedings will vary enormously, because they will be essentially political rather than judicial proceedings," said Human Rights Watch's Des Forges. "The result in any one community will be determined by the local balance of power."
The challenge, she said, will be to construct a system in which any errors of judgment can at least be minimized. Because changes are still being made in the gacaca proposal, officials say it will be at least next year before it begins.
Even if gacaca ends up being flawed, there is hope that this community-directed process will achieve something more profound than reducing the prison population.
"Our hope is that gacaca will bring people to dialogue," said Mary Balikungeri, director of a Kigali clinic that supports rape victims and widows. "The truth is important. Somehow, justice will have to take its course. Without it, survivors cannot come to terms with what has happened."
The government, led by President Paul Kagame, is also trying to foster reconciliation by making the country more democratic and less centralized.
In the former regime, local leaders were appointed by the central government. That may have contributed to the brutal efficiency of the genocide. Orders came down the pipeline and were quickly carried out, without question.
No more, Kagame said during a recent visit to La Roche College.
He was elected the country's president in April by government ministers and the parliament. In the future, after a national commission writes a constitution, the people are supposed to elect the president.
Last year, representatives for the smallest political jurisdictions were picked by the people, who lined up behind the candidates they supported. Elections of leaders for large districts will be held by year's end, Kagame added.
In parallel, local and national committees for women and youth are being created so that their special concerns are represented accurately in parliament.
"Participation is extremely important," Kagame said. And if an 80 percent voter turnout in the first elections is anything to judge by, Rwandans appreciate the opportunity "to spell out what they think should be done for them and the manner it should be done."
This push for democratic reform is welcomed by policy experts such as Ahmed Shariff, a Philadelphia-based consultant to peace groups in Africa.
"That's a good thing to try to give some power to the people," he said. "If this persists, it could be a good model for a number of countries in the region. These are positive steps, but they need to be checked."
The other challenge is to reduce poverty, because a lack of jobs, food and health care can trigger new upheaval.
That is where the rest of the world needs to step in to help, Shariff said, particularly because many powerful nations simply watched the 1994 massacre unfold despite early warnings of what would transpire.
Four years later, in 1998, President Clinton acknowledged that the United States "did not act quickly enough after the killing began."
And once the murders had occurred, Clinton added, "we should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."
An independent inquiry into the actions of the United Nations Security Council found in April that "the Council had the power to have prevented at least some of the Rwandan tragedy" if it had not withdrawn its peacekeeping forces, but the council lacked the "political will" to stop the killings.
During our month in Rwanda this summer, Martha Rial and I met many survivors of the genocide who have not forgotten the failure of the international community to step in during the crisis. And they wondered how to remind the outside world that their struggles are far from over.
African consultant Shariff said one badly needed reform is for all countries in the U.N. to be treated equally.
"These organizations seem to be there for the big countries, for the important countries, for the rich countries," he said. "People are ready to send their peacekeeping forces into one country and not into the other. They are selective about where they want to intervene. I don't think that is right."
Neither do the people of Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and other war-ravaged countries in central Africa.
In an ideal world, Rwanda's current, fragile stability could foster peace, just as the genocide and its aftermath escalated tensions in the whole region.
But the jury is still out.
As Shariff put it, "We have to be very cautious in saying things are getting better in Rwanda."
In some ways, the best prospect may be the efforts of everyday Rwandans, particularly the nation's women.
Des Forges told how Tutsi widows from southern Rwanda had banded together to mill grain to supplement their income. They later realized that Hutu women whose Tutsi husbands had been killed also were struggling with feeding children and heading households, so they included them in the mill project.
And then they brought in Hutu women who were practically widows because their husbands had been imprisoned for committing genocide crimes.
"The capacity for forgiveness and understanding on the part of ordinary people is remarkable," she said.
In the end, that may be Rwanda's saving grace, and its hope for the future.
The plans call for people to be taken from prison to the communities where they were accused of committing crimes during the genocide. Their cases would be heard by a locally elected panel of lay judges. In essence, former neighbors would decide who was guilty and what punishment, short of life imprisonment or a death sentence, would be meted out.