Justice on a Hill: Genocide Trials in Rwanda
Packer, George
0n a ridge in southern Rwanda, a few miles from the Burundi border, lies the town of Butare. The National University is there, and for many years both the town and the province of the same name...
...The picture inside showed an unsmiling young man with a thin mustache...
...Others were warned not to confess because the coming Hutu war of liberation would release them soon...
...A bakery owner in Butare had accused him of joining killers in a church massacre in which the man's son had died...
...Those people drinking in my bar—there are Hutus and Tutsis drinking together...
...Several times during the two hours of our conversation he excused himself, stood up, and turned his back...
...It's too long a story, I can't tell it...
...Lots of people didn't want to see lots of things...
...But we don't have to love each other...
...I was in the middle of town—I heard gunshots...
...We were cold...
...A thirty-two-yearold technical school instructor named Bertin Bagaragaza sat with me in the dim little library of Butare prison, clutching a ruler, his right eye drooped shut...
...I left him and went back into town to find his accusers...
...But I know how to cook...
...The standard of evidence was extremely low—hearsay, one person's word against another's...
...and there were even cases where Tutsis spoke on behalf of prisoners, two of whom were released...
...Politically, it's a brilliant piece of work...
...A proposed law of compensation payments has made gacaca more acceptable among survivors— but the law hasn't been enacted, and there's no money for it anyway...
...He had also looted a washbasin, five packets of Omo detergent, and some bicycle parts...
...The government doesn't want it...
...That's what I can tell you...
...I asked if he discussed what was happening with his wife...
...A widow who sees the guy that killed her husband return to his own house and sleep with his wife...
...I asked...
...The rate of intermarriage between Hutu and Tutsi was higher here than elsewhere, so high that Hutus in the north of Rwanda sometimes said that there were no real Hutus in Butare...
...In early April of 1994, when the rest of Rwanda was consumed with mass murder, Butare held out...
...After listening to Bertin, I left the Butare prison and went into town to meet Laurien Ntezimana, the lay religious leader who fed and protected Tutsis during the genocide...
...So gacaca presents a paradox, or rather, many paradoxes...
...In a rich smooth voice, Camille told me the story of his life...
...Prospects like these have made gacaca a hard sell among genocide survivors...
...I said, `OK, the Mitsubishi wasn't in the country, it was in Burundi, I rented it to Doctors Without Borders.' Then they said it was the SUV that was with the interahamwe...
...Joseph Kanyabashi, the mayor of Butare, spends the first days of the genocide guaranteeing safety to Tutsis displaced from other areas...
...They're going to kill us," a survivor muttered as he walked away after making an accusation...
...There's a prisoner named Camille Nzabonimana...
...Her older sister was there with her husband, who had imagined this DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 67 RWANDA problem long in advance and changed their cards to Hutu...
...The two prisoners who had been set free received the embraces of family and friends...
...Cowardly because I didn't make a decision right away, before the situation got more serious...
...This is why it traumatizes me when people come here asking questions...
...The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which has had a monopoly on political power in Rwanda since it ended the genocide in 1994 by defeating the Hutu Power regime, has always claimed that the DISSENT / Spring 2002 • 59 RWANDA country's devastation, its continued lack of resources, and the enormity of the crime explain the excruciatingly slow turning of the wheels of justice...
...I went to inform the mayor, and then went home...
...So that it was almost impossible to be neutral, stay at home, remain outside it...
...He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow and is working on a book about Americans in Africa...
...That's the work of religious confessors, and they aren't doing it...
...For her to think that they're making love right now, while I'm here alone...
...Ah ah ah—that's false, that's false, that's false," said Jean de Dieu Mucyo, Rwanda's minister of justice...
...Otherwise, they would never have allowed someone as well known as he to hide so many people so close to the roadblock and the house of leading genocidaires . Much later, back in New York, I learned that Camille's name appears on a list of contributors to the war effort against the RPF, in his case more than five hundred dollars— though many were forced to give...
...I don't know...
...From each level an appeal can be made higher up, with provincial tribunals as the final courts of appeal...
...I I EOPOLD, THIRTY-FIVE, the mayor's assistant, had a high furrowed brow, pursed lips, and a blue-capped pen in his prison shirt pocket...
...There will be another chapter not yet written...
...Even if you know killing is wrong—and everyone knows it—you couldn't let on that you were opposed...
...At gacaca I'll tell everything...
...But more than anywhere else, in Rwanda, where tens or hundreds of thousands of ordinary people from one group joined in the attempted elimination of another group, genocide was made up of countless individual choices, deeds, omissions, evasions, rationalizations, compromises...
...Her extended finger had to express all the fury and grief of the years since then...
...Then he began his slide down the slippery slope...
...In Rwanda, authority has always flowed from top to bottom...
...The first time he did this I thought he was weeping, until he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully but loudly blew his nose...
...In June, as the RPF moves toward Butare, Kanyabashi manages to save some of the last surviving Tutsis before fleeing to Zaire...
...But the minutes of the same meeting show that the need to "cut the brush" around town was also discussed, to deny the cockroaches their hiding places...
...They won't say it, but if the government told the Tutsis that they were free to kill the Hutus, they'd do it...
...Others will benefit from doing community work in place of half or more of their remaining term...
...He had dogs and he was pursuing Tuts is ." Rwandans are taught to measure their humanity by the extent of their self-control...
...The more Tutsis were killed, the more Hutus became afraid: of those doing the killing, those ordering it, and those—the soldiers of the RPF who were advancing throughout Rwanda—who might avenge it...
...Then he stops resisting...
...With gacaca, those in power are courting the possibility that the direction could be reversed, with unpredictable consequences...
...Trucks and trucks carrying corpses...
...But with the war that was in the country, I was afraid that the presence of the Tutsis in the country, with the army of the Inkotanyi [an old battlefield term applied to the RPF] could hurt us afterward...
...The Belgian colonizers exploited umuganda to conscript forced laborers in road-building and other public works, a practice continued after independence, especially by Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu dictator whose plane was brought down over Kigali on April 6, 1994 by a missile fired by attackers who remain unknown to this day...
...He lived very close to the roadblock...
...A Category 2 defendant, facing twenty-five years to life, can have his sentence reduced to twelve to twenty-five years if he confesses at trial...
...So we have to hunt them, and we have to punish those who hide them...
...Mucyo said softly, "You had to be here in '94 to know...
...He seemed not to speak French, and Margueritte addressed him at length in Kinyarwanda...
...The gacaca law states that the genocide was "publicly committed before the very eyes of the population, which thus must recount the facts, disclose the truth and participate...
...I didn't know how long the killings would last...
...I want to know what he did...
...A Tutsi neighbor who lost his family ran to us and said, They killed my parents.' I said, OK, you can stay with us...
...But now, even if I know a lot of things, I won't say...
...The genocide had been a collective effort, a national mobilization requiring everyone's involvement...
...With these gaps in identity, violence comes out very strong...
...The next day Camille had his notion to drive out and look for his wife's family in the sorghum fields...
...Eight years after the genocide, there is a great deal of talk about justice and reconciliation in Rwanda...
...The genocide that followed his death—for which his death provided an excuse—was another variation on the theme of collective enterprise, an apocalyptic umuganda, the responsibility of everyone...
...This effort involved a high degree of imagination and restraint on his part, but it is an effort that seems essential for gacaca to succeed...
...there wasn't really even sorrow...
...He added, "And it's political...
...The words I said could have had an influence on the hunt in the hills...
...It was as if we'd become prisoners in the country that now existed...
...And then the idea of confession came to me—with reflection...
...Margueritte answered for him...
...Margueritte Mukabazanira, a secretary at the school superintendent's office, was at home when I came by...
...Camille continued alone to the mayor's house, but Kanyabashi was out...
...The National University is there, and for many years both the town and the province of the same name enjoyed a reputation for tolerance...
...When Camille said this, he scrunched up his forehead and frowned, shaking his head...
...72 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...
...How was it possible...
...He was not hopeful about gacaca bringing Hutu-Tutsi reconciliation in Butare...
...ou CAN understand how a woman in yher position, who's alone, who lost all her children, how she might think that all Hutus killed," Innocent Kayitare told me that night, in the small office next to the bar he owned...
...In fact, the province seems relatively peaceful today...
...But unfortunately it is not the way most people think...
...They work together even when they contradict each other...
...And yet, unmistakably, it was beginning...
...I knew it was bad, and from the twenty-second to the twenty-fifth we stayed inside—my brother-inlaw, his whole family, five people, and my family...
...Others participated, but at different levels...
...But unfortunately, my colleagues hit him without control, and he died...
...A Tutsi woman in a rural area west of Kigali, who seemed to be the only survivor in her village, said, "Before the war, we were fine...
...Really, they're going to kill us...
...62 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 RWANDA He said I should join my neighbors on the road to Rebero...
...People look for ways to evade the state...
...The point of taking the cases out of the courtroom and onto the hills is to create a setting where the fullest possible truth can be told...
...Scattered among the clothes were unsorted bones and personal effects: a rosary, a wallet, a green national identity card...
...Gacaca is for justice...
...He shook his head...
...They just sat there calmly...
...It was a more or less consistent argument...
...His name was Martin Uwariraye, and we tracked him down at his surviving children's school...
...He thought about it...
...Around the twenty-seventh of April I had a notion to go see my mother-in-law in her village...
...There was more: at a town meeting on the night of April 26, he was named a leader of a security patrol in his neighborhood...
...A sergeant in the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) during the war, he rose quickly to the highest level of the regime, where he presides over the genocide trials and is the most public RPF voice on gacaca...
...At the same time, untold numbers of génocidaires remain at large, both inside Rwanda and outside...
...He wanted to keep the genocide from reaching his district, but he was too cowardly or too attached to his job or too used to following authority to put up resistance when it did...
...Under an enormous tree in a village an hour west of Kigali, a thousand people gathered from all over the sector...
...Is it really because they think it's going to amount to nothing...
...I was troubled by their absence, for he and Leopold seemed like decent men...
...he even opened his shop a few times...
...She said, "People who met us told us this was the one who killed my family," and she pointed in the prisoner's face, while he bowed his head...
...With the earlier troubles, you could hide a Tutsi without being killed yourself...
...Soon he is ordering the destruction of Tutsi houses and issuing firearms to civilian "selfdefense" groups...
...I told myself that my hand, my own hand, mustn't kill, mustn't shed blood...
...And they told us that the daughters had gone to hide in the sorghum field—it was the season when it grew high...
...There are no Tutsis here.' The interahamwe had knives and machetes, but the soldiers had guns and threatened to shoot them...
...Is he a génocidaire...
...A lot of people died...
...I thought of the words on a sign outside the Catholic church of Nyamata, south of Kigali, in which ten thousand people were slaughtered, and which has become one of Rwanda's many genocide memorials: "If you knew who I was and who you were, you would not have killed me...
...On the other side of the main street there was a plot of overgrown grass that in 1994 had been the house of the local organizers of the genocide—the minister of gender and social affairs and her son, an extremely violent militia leader, both now on trial at Arusha...
...Alison des Forges, a leading American expert on Rwanda who will testify against Kanyabashi at Arusha, repeated to me what she was told by a Tutsi: "The only people who should be allowed to judge are we the survivors, because we're the ones who know the kind of pressure they were under...
...The districtlevel gacaca courts will hear Category 2 cases, involving killing but not leadership of killers (by some estimates, three-quarters of those in jail fall into this group...
...Martin gave me his hand and a smile...
...Me, that's what I thought...
...It means we don't threaten each other...
...So he and my wife's sister now had Hutu cards, though they were Tutsi...
...The prosecutor-general put out his cigarette...
...And my husband...
...At 9 a.m...
...There is also an unwritten law that keeps people from talking about Hutu and Tutsi in polite company...
...I N RWANDA I spoke with many prisoners who have confessed...
...In fact, the plane had come from Nairobi to evacuate European nuns and United Nations observers...
...I asked...
...The road that winds south and west to Butare from Kigali, Rwanda's capital in the center of the country, passes through a stunning landscape...
...The person hasn't realized what he's done," 64 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 RWANDA Ntezimana said, and his eyes and teeth flashed with a ferocity that seemed incongruous for a white-haired theologian, but made sense in light of his record...
...It took three days, but eventually they all joined the people he was already hiding in his house...
...I asked what he meant...
...low standards of evidence...
...It was true: Camille's old shop, and the house behind it, stood almost directly across from where the most notorious roadblock in Butare had been set up...
...Those words, that thinking, it's what the colonizers brought us...
...They believed that the genocide was a spontaneous expression of popular anger upon the death of the president, rather than the meticulously planned and brilliantly administered conspiracy that it had been...
...She appeared to be in her fifties, with wire-rim glasses, an African print dress and matching head wrap, and a muted air...
...I went to Butare because it seemed as tough a place as one could find to test the meaning of these words...
...After four years in Canada he came home, as he said, "healed," to participate in the monumental task of bringing justice...
...its message was told but not lived, Gasabirege contends...
...So I was saved this way...
...Of course, they all say that," she scoffed...
...For him, the truth is a simple thing...
...Everyone seemed to understand that it is the only possible way out of the trap set by genocide...
...I didn't say whether or not my wife was a Tutsi, just that they were going to kill her...
...He called it "traumatic grief...
...I fell silent and stopped eating, but she insisted that I continue...
...I asked what he would have done if he had been ordered to kill...
...In a sense, gacaca follows in this Rwandan tradition of mass mobilization...
...My guide was Evode Kazasomako, a psychologist who now holds office in the municipal government and oversees the project...
...You had to show you were for it...
...To grieve for one person is easy," the psychiatrist said...
...If you had a longer memory and looked below the surface, he said, mobilization for genocide began in 1959...
...Frankly, I'm guilty of nothing...
...the logic of kill or be killed...
...I tried to find a subject other than Camille, hoping we would return to him...
...No," she said quickly, "they killed them all...
...If it's to speak, there are always meetings on the hills where she can speak...
...Before, they were fine...
...For the justice minister, gacaca will separate the genocide's guilty from the innocent, and the nuances in these categories don't matter...
...Five...
...If you ban these terms," said a Hutu woman named Genevieve Mukandekezi, "they take a different form that's even more exclusive...
...My sin was this," said Bertin, holding the ruler upright like a scepter...
...Part of the house was destroyed and no one was there...
...You had to be here in '94...
...I asked whether the Tutsis in the hills weren't hiding to save their lives...
...The prisoners' goods were sold off and the profits contributed to a survivors' fund that supported women like Margueritte Mukabazanira...
...What convinced me—inside myself, I thought—an idea came to me...
...That was the first episode, for my wife...
...the violence and impunity of Hutu rule...
...There was a rumor that all those who confessed would be trucked to Gitarama prison in the center of the country and killed...
...As Seth-Robert and Leopold described it, their overriding emotion in those days was fear...
...Jean Marie Mbarushimana, a large, self-assured man with a Gallic blue, double-breasted suit jacket and thick sideburns, is himself a survivor of the genocide...
...We ate beef and potatoes while the television blared a French program about seahorses...
...It was so profitable that in 1993 he started to build a hotel near Butare, which remains unfinished...
...He pointed out that gacaca calls into question the idea of the RPF as an authoritarian government in a culture of obedience and fear...
...And vice-versa...
...But he was quite sure that, if it were up to him, the words "Hutu" and "Tutsi" would not appear anywhere in these rooms...
...The population headed home under late-afternoon rain clouds...
...Beginning this year, all but the most serious genocide cases will be tried outside the court system, by tribunals of elected judges in the communities where the crimes took place, with the local population in attendance as audience and potential witnesses for the prosecution or the defense...
...Are they that cynical...
...Suddenly I felt like a confessor priest...
...As long as trials are delayed, they won't see justice...
...At ten in the morning on April 8, a day and a half after the president's plane had gone down, Seth-Robert's neighbor came to his door...
...In Gisovu, a remote prison high in the fogbound tea plantations of western Rwanda above Lake Kivu, one prisoner said he'd heard that all gacaca judges would be Tutsi...
...I'd only been married a year and there was still only tenderness in my heart...
...THERE IS A long history in Rwanda of mass action under state compulsion...
...No one was present at the genocide," said Thomas Kamilindi, a radio journalist who was nearly executed twice...
...A Hutu student in Butare told me that it was possible to avoid participating—he jumped out a back window every time interahamwe knocked on his door—but it took courage, and it helped if, like him, you weren't well-known in town...
...I'd become like a piece of wood, if I can say" Seth-Robert, who is forty-one, was wearing brown loafers and gray socks below his pink prison shorts...
...And yet I found literally no one, Rwandan or foreign, who was willing to oppose gacaca...
...The last time she had seen him, in 1994, she was as hunted as a rabbit, and he possessed the power of life and death...
...It started as the work of ten "fanatics of the president," local members of the interahamwe, the Hutu Power militia...
...In the northern part of the province, the paved road passes through the ancient royal capital of Nyanza, seat of the regional court of appeals...
...The deeper you look into the details of one corner, the more nuances begin to disturb the law's clarity...
...As the afternoon wore on, there were cases where Hutus and Tutsis argued about the guilt of a prisoner...
...His father-inlaw's example convinced him to stay out of politics, and he never joined any party...
...Indeed, survivors often spoke in such terms...
...The confessed—most of them low-level participants— were receiving threats from influential prisoners and asked to be segregated...
...I said to myself: It's as if Rwanda is dying...
...The government wanted to incriminate the whole population," he said, "to cover up the genocide...
...Gacaca works in the heart of a family, on a hill, among people who have an interest in living together...
...Camille alone ventured out to the market for rice and potatoes...
...Margueritte's face and voice remained dull...
...The booklet was too badly damaged to make out the entry...
...Normally, they hid to save their lives," he agreed...
...GENOCIDE is an absolute...
...It's a deduction from the questions they asked me that I know what's in the file...
...At first only a few solitary Tutsis came forward to give testimony: a man in a khaki fishing hat...
...Leopold Rurangwa dealt with the mail and personnel files in the office of the mayor of one of Greater Kigali's districts...
...The lieutenant went with another soldier and dispersed the group at my house, saying, 'What are you doing...
...Leopold said that he delivered blows with the flat of his machete, intending only to extract information...
...The genocide was organized to incriminate everyone it didn't eliminate...
...the purpose of this "pregacaca" presentation was to gather evidence for the trials to come...
...This is where it's necessary to go past religion into spirituality...
...A Hutu girl protects a neighboring Tutsi family, and only the father of the family is killed...
...The population, which was overwhelmingly Hutu and largely female, said little...
...Christianity replaced traditional values but never penetrated far or took root...
...He took me through concrete and tile rooms where display cases will contain bones, machetes, and other relics of the killings, and then upstairs where a library will inform visitors about what happened in 1994...
...You couldn't say: Wait, I'll think about it and get back to you in a week...
...When the genocide was over, 75 percent of the province's Tutsis, more than a hundred thousand people, had been eliminated...
...I felt guilty...
...Letters written by the Tutsis he'd saved had no effect...
...Everyone was obliged to go...
...At the next level up, that of the sector, tribunals will hear Category 3 cases, involving crimes that resulted in injury...
...After all, there was nothing ambiguous about the mass graves at Gisozi, a hillside overlooking the main ridge across which Kigali spreads out...
...This was Joseph Kanyabashi, who three days earlier had publicly committed himself to the genocidal regime...
...I arrived several weeks later, so I had to rely on Rwandans' accounts of how, for example, one man whose name was put forward by neighbors was rejected when someone else pointed out that he drank too much, or how a Tutsi recused himself because he admitted to harboring anti-Hutu bias...
...When you criticize, they repress...
...One is in the same circle: authority doesn't accept criticism of its faults," said Thomas Kamilindi, the radio journalist...
...Interahamwe shouting...
...He comes from Butare...
...When it was time for them to go back inside the walls, I asked Seth-Robert if he felt any guilt...
...It offers something to all the groups—prisoners, survivors—it offers them all hope, and a reason to participate...
...I was cowardly in those first days of the massacres, and that's why I decided to plead guilty...
...In 1994, the proportion of Tutsis in Butare was far greater than anywhere else in Rwanda— there were 140,000 throughout the province— and in town Tutsis made up a full quarter of the population...
...When it's ten or twenty and you don't have any social support, then it's horrible...
...She goes on living with the family, but nothing can be the same again...
...speculated a woman who happened to be Hutu...
...So for the survivors, it seems as if their neighbors changed overnight...
...A new memorial is being built on a site where bones collected around the city were buried in 2000...
...he was trying to leave...
...These were prisoners without files...
...If someone needed water or firewood, we shared...
...Everyone knows only his corner of it...
...I put down my fork...
...Simon Gasabirege, a social psychologist at the National University in Butare, believes that Rwandans suffer from a weak and disorganized personality de base...
...Is there a Hutu who isn't guilty...
...The prisoners also have a right to their life, though they're in prison...
...she asked...
...The gacaca law allows for substantial reductions in sentences if the accused confesses...
...Rwanda's prisons and lock-ups house close to 112,000 genocide suspects and another 5,000 convicts...
...Goodness alone might not have been enough...
...Over the years new accusations were made by other people whom the bakery owner put up to it, Camille said, while old ones were withdrawn, though he couldn't be sure of the details, for he wasn't permitted to see his own file...
...He studied physics at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow in the seventies, and in 1983 he received training in alternative energy in Florida...
...I held onto his hand...
...It doesn't admit of moral degrees...
...He doesn't mix in what doesn't concern him...
...His satisfaction at this exceeded any pleasure he seemed to feel DISSENT / Spring 2002 6 3 RWANDA at the rescue of Tutsis by other Hutus that he sometimes mentioned—for he himself rescued no one, though a Tutsi hid in his yard without his knowledge...
...The possibilities of evasion put an added burden of guilt on those who wouldn't make use of them...
...There were more threats...
...Synergy" is how Laurien Ntezimana described it: "The two parties in conflict work together to bring light to the matter...
...We descended a flight of stairs down the hill to an iron-roofed shelter...
...On the way to his door I asked if there was a case in the Butare prison that I might find especially interesting in light of our con60 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 RWANDA versation...
...But the chapter being written now has no precedent in history, anywhere, and no one in Rwanda knows how gacaca will turn out...
...Laurien Ntezimana, a Hutu theologian who distinguished himself in Butare in 1994 by working to feed and save Tutsis, told me, "Butare is the most dangerous place in Rwanda...
...Nonetheless, she invited me to stay for lunch...
...Whether they mistrusted the authorities or were reluctant to testify against Hutus, here was Rwanda's culture of conformity and fear in plain view...
...Thus far, the rate of confessions in the prisons is very low—in Butare, less than 10 percent—though the authorities believe that once gacaca begins and some prisoners go free after trial, the number will rise dramatically...
...We've explained many times that these cases should go to court...
...I wanted to find the ambiguous cases...
...Your vehicle participated in massacres.' `Which vehicle do you mean...
...But it always had to be drawn out of them with persistent prompting, and it always stopped well short of horror...
...So it went...
...They knew that not all their Tutsi neighbors could be RPF infiltrators, yet as the genocide proceeded apace and the propaganda machinery played on and the bodies piled up, they began to believe it...
...Because the orders came down—the orders—to be at the roadblock, to join the night patrols, and you had to take your stick and show you were part of it...
...Mucyo, the justice minister, told me, "I want us all to say, 'I'm Rwandan, - which is also the RPF's line...
...The luxury SUV or the Mitsubishi?' In the file it said the Mitsubishi...
...But if, as Laurien Ntezimana said, gacaca only works "with people who have an interest in living together," then it will have to present the full context of each prisoner's response to the madness swirling around him...
...Look into his case...
...It's brilliant...
...68 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 RWANDA There was something mechanical about the expression, and for the first time I had a doubt about him...
...On the wall above his desk was a picture of his murdered five-year-old son...
...Martin was a heavyset man who laughed nervously when I mentioned Camille...
...But one of the militiamen insisted that his wife, Jeanne Chantal, was a Tutsi...
...On the wall was a photograph of Fred Rwigyema, the first leader of the RPF, and a wedding picture of Margueritte and her husband...
...He sat before me in prison pink, still smiling but with a trace of irony...
...Given all the damage the terms have done, the taboo against "Hutu" and "Tutsi" is an understandable effort to break out of the vicious cycle of Rwandan history...
...what we had more trouble understanding, and perhaps did not want to understand, was how it happened in this or that corner of Rwanda...
...A neighbor said my mother-in-law had been killed the day before, a brother-in-law the day I arrived...
...The Hutu population seemed uninterested in guilt...
...0 NE HEARS VARIOUS theories about why so many Rwandans didn't know who they were: A culture of obedience...
...This is what makes the traditional idea revolutionary...
...It was something that happened to them, not something they did...
...Seth-Robert's involvement in the genocide, he said, amounted to joining groups of killers in his neighborhood between April 8 and April 12, when he and his family fled Kigali...
...I'd heard that thirty-two members of his family were killed during the genocide...
...Jeanne Chantal, who had lost many family members in the genocide, fell into a deep depression and left Rwanda with the children for France...
...Yes, it's a nice country except that they kill so many people here...
...As for Camille, Innocent was certain of his guilt...
...It was true: Kagame and others in the RPF have often argued that the genocide was a crime of the state, while the RPA killings were individual excesses...
...I said that most foreigners only understood it as a whole...
...On my last day in Butare, I stood a hundred feet up the main road from Camille's shop and saw for the first time how close to the killers he and those hidden with him had been...
...I asked...
...Those at the cell level—a jurisdiction of about four hundred people—will collect accounts of crimes of genocide committed in their area, divide the suspects into four categories of severity (those in the first category, organizers and zealots of the genocide, as well as rapists, will not receive the benefit of gacaca), and go on to judge the Category 4 offenses, those against property...
...I keep returning to the situation that was there before the war...
...There is no such thing as one truth," said a Westerner involved in preparing for gacaca...
...Lunch was over...
...They seemed to regard their own fear and peril as equal to the Tutsis...
...We bring these people here so you the population can say what you know...
...It's a fairly hard-line voice, though with me Mucyo spoke so softly that at times he was barely audible, and he sat quite still, as if— this, too, was a recurring quality of those in authority—the effort of self-restraint was very nearly immobilizing...
...I imagine it DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 61 RWANDA could lead to killings, maybe by machete, maybe by poison...
...How did he become convinced that he had been wrong...
...that she might look at a Tutsi widow at gacaca and feel there was a double standard of justice...
...We sat at a table outside the Hotel Ibis, where interahamwe leaders had installed themselves when the genocide started here...
...But soon they had recruited a large crowd, including Seth-Robert, who left his house with a bread knife and an unsharpened spear...
...Two months after the RPF takeover, soldiers came to his house one night and brought him in for questioning...
...No ideas came to mind...
...He said they were killing Tutsis since Tutsis were complicit in the death of the president...
...Of what happened in life—that I'd done badly...
...Rwandans are wicked," a prisoner standing behind me said...
...That's why gacaca—what chance does it have with all that...
...You see how in business people are jealous...
...At the meeting I said this: As long as there are still Tutsis in families, and there are Hutus who hide them, we can't easily fight the war...
...Somehow Rwanda's five thousand policemen are going to have to keep order at more than a hundred thousand trials where in many cases Tutsi survivors and Hutu defendants will look at each other for the first time since the spring of 1994...
...Several years go by, and finally she can't stand it any more and confesses to them that she betrayed the father to his killers...
...Hutus judging Hutus—it doesn't square with a government that needs to control everything...
...land pressure in Africa's most densely populated country...
...I asked the neighbors what happened...
...To me, this extremely public exercise in character analysis spoke of a degree of consensus and sheer nosiness that few American neighborhoods could achieve...
...the Presidential Guards had already arrived by bus the same day...
...Inside, a great mound of clothes lay heaped on the ground, stiff with dried blood and sewage, awaiting display...
...In June 1994, as the RPF advanced on Butare, Bertin had attended a meeting at which the mayor, a zealous administrator of the genocide in his district, discussed how to parcel out the goods left behind by the Tutsis who had been exterminated...
...He knows nothing," she said...
...He used to sell solar-heating panels...
...Although the young woman was standing close enough to strike the prisoner, she did not lose her composure...
...He married and had three children with the daughter of a man who had held a rare political place as a Tutsi member of the Hutu political party that assumed power at independence...
...The mayor said there was nothing to do, he had to be buried...
...During the genocide, reactions varied...
...He is later arrested in Belgium and this spring will go on trial at the 66 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 RWANDA international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania...
...They were young and violent, and they entered by force, demanding to see identity cards...
...Kanyabashi was neither the best nor the worst of the men in his position...
...He had no doubt about gacaca's ultimate success...
...Some Rwandans assume that gacaca will liberate tens of thousands of killers...
...the only question is whether the people have the courage to speak it...
...Placing a leading businessman on a patrol would have given the administration of genocide in Camille's corner of it more legitimacy...
...The preamble to the gacaca law, passed on January 21, 2001 and disseminated in the name of President Paul Kagame, gives a strong whiff of command justice, declaring that the "duty to testify is a moral obligation, nobody having the right to get out of it for whatever reason it may be...
...Gisozi will be Rwanda's Yad Vashem...
...During the time of the mwami, the precolonial Tutsi king, it took the form of regular communal work called umuganda...
...Mucyo is so youthful and his smile so shy that when I was shown into his office at the ministry, where he was working on a Saturday morning (the RPF is nothing if not purposeful), I glanced beyond him for an instant to find the minister...
...We want to erase that, we want to put it in the past," Kazasomako said as we walked out into the sunlight...
...What were they...
...The first line read "Ethnicity: Hutu, Tutsi, Twa, Natural70 n DISSENT / Spring 2002 RWANDA ized...
...Each man was, in the words of Seth-Robert, "a good functionary," and as I listened to their stories on a bench outside Kigali Central prison, it didn't seem to make much difference that one was religious and the other civil...
...He was describing what it was like to be a Hutu in Rwanda in the spring of 1994...
...the origin myths, the dehumanizing propaganda—Tutsis were called inyenzi, cockroaches...
...Why else should she agree to participate...
...far likelier is a prisoner exchange, with some going free, others newly arrested after denunciations during gacaca, and the majority staying where they are to finish their sentences in prisons that will remain intolerably crowded...
...He added, "Living toDISSENT / Spring 2002 n 69 RWANDA gether doesn't mean we have to love Hutus...
...You have to make the person understand who he was at the time and ask him if he's still that person, and whether he wants to follow another path...
...HOW ONE SEES gacaca depends in part on how one sees the genocide...
...We want Rwandans who are young now not to know what the words mean when they grow up...
...It was as if life had stopped...
...He looked at me with his left eye...
...The personality that everyone shares, the infrastructure of the community that holds it together, more or less strong, more or less weak—when you have a situation like this where you had such disorganization, then you have terrible damage...
...There are many things wrapped up in that one thing gacaca," said Peter Uvin, a scholar at Tufts University's Fletcher School who wrote a report on the subject for the Belgian government...
...Ask him why are there people who protected and didn't kill...
...They don't want us to throw ourselves into it—while we don't want the government to be involved...
...0 NE BY ONE, the prosecutor called each prisoner forward and asked if anyone knew anything about him...
...Life had stopped...
...The cottages nestled in the hills have terra-cotta tile roofs and little mullioned windows...
...How many did you have...
...the historical inequality between Tutsi and Hutu that was fatally manipulated by the Belgians...
...But now he had a problem, for there were seven Tutsis hidden in his house, including his wife (by the rules of Rwandan identity politics, his children were Hutus like him...
...I was not interested in ideologues or sadists, though Rwanda has produced its share of both...
...The Tutsi survivors seemed utterly isolated...
...I heard this again and again from prisoners...
...That's the first sin I committed...
...At several meetings in mid-April, he urges collective resistance against attacks...
...That's what I feared...
...BEFORE THE genocide, Seth-Robert Nzeyimana was a community development worker in the Methodist church— first in Kibuye, by Lake Kivu, where he was born, and then in a neighborhood of Kigali, where he was transferred in 1993...
...So casually...
...Make up your mind and let me know...
...A Rwandan psychiatrist once told me that a long-term disorder not found in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual had appeared among genocide survivors...
...We want this to be talked about as something in the past, as history," Kazasomako said...
...As I drove, the hills and the cottages looked like the landscape of a fairy tale on which there had been laid a curse...
...They didn't try to flee—that's what I didn't really understand...
...Only after April 19, when the president of the interim government and other leading Hutu Power figures came to Butare and told its Hutu citizens to quit shirking their national duty, did the killings begin in earnest there...
...They had pleaded guilty to genocide, but they didn't tremble at the word...
...By his own account, he had joined a mob that killed a man suspected of spying for the RPF...
...On my way to Butare I made a stop at the court, a two-story colonial building on a hilltop, because I wanted to talk to the prosecutorgeneral about gacaca...
...Even if someone came to ask me to hide him, it would be useless, they'd come search the house and find him...
...Camille's case didn't move...
...No one had a better idea...
...Can you imagine the kind of shumble rumble fucked-up panicky situation you would be living in this country, and then six or seven years later pile up testimonies about what happened...
...In October 2001, 90 percent of the population turned out in their local areas to choose the gacaca judges, known as "people of integrity...
...We sat opposite each other at a table outside the prison director's office, Camille with his hands folded together, a wedding ring on one finger, smiling in polite expectation, as if to put me at ease...
...Only the brown discoloring of his upper teeth suggested that he had spent the past seven years in prison...
...But Rwandans seemed to accept the process as natural, and most people pronounced the elections a success...
...But man can change in a moment...
...They seem exhaustively examined and at the same time fundamentally unknowable...
...I'd advise him to pass through the bush and either try to join the RPF or else leave the country...
...But he knew me well and respected me a lot...
...Faced with criticism abroad and a strain on resources and social relations at home, the RPF has launched a daring experiment in participatory justice based on the tradition of gacaca...
...I pressed a bit: in effect, the gacaca law only covers crimes committed in the name of Hutu Power...
...Everything is on a miniature scale, hidden away, intensely settled, too much human imagination concentrated in too small a space ("the human head has many ideas," a genocide suspect in Kigali Central prison said...
...A teenage boy who was twelve during the genocide said, "I only knew I was a Tutsi because they killed my parents...
...Intelligent thinking, a major political risk, and they take it...
...There, that's cowardice...
...I can't talk about it...
...People had ways of avoiding the order—it was the same with road building...
...It's very nice except for that...
...Human rights groups point out the obvious procedural deficiencies: no defense counsel...
...And I remain here until today...
...When I went, I saw people taking Tutsis out of their houses and killing them with machetes, in plain view...
...Maybe I could have wounded someone...
...For personal reasons...
...Most of the prisoners at Gisovu, with little solid information and an ingrained suspicion of the Tutsi-dominated state, regarded gacaca as an opportunity that probably concealed a trick...
...And we're that way again...
...And the killings started...
...Those who died in '94 loved their lives, they were Rwandans, they had a right to their life...
...Thinking ever faster for her life, Camille said, "No, it's not possible," and he gave two reasons: her sister's card said "Hutu," and her father had been a big man with the Hutu party of independence...
...Across the country, 260,000 people of integrity were selected by their neighbors to make up the gacaca tribunals at all administrative levels...
...I couldn't go home, they'd demand the card...
...When I mentioned Camille, she exchanged a smile with the two teenage girls in the living room with her...
...Instead, in 1987 he left his research job at the National University and opened a shop selling solar panels, mostly for the rural villas of wealthy Rwandans...
...In most cases, confession seemed more a matter of sentence reduction than tormented conscience...
...She wondered how I liked the country...
...In the end, most of the survivors I talked to supported gacaca for their own well-being...
...Psychologists warn of the potential for "retraumatization" as stories of killing and rape and torture are told in the most public possible forum...
...They concluded that I was always guarded, so they didn't come back...
...It is premised on there being a community whose existence is open to serious doubt...
...Mucyo brushed it aside...
...They visited once a month because they too had lost everyone and they had taken Margueritte as their mother...
...Rwandans, who seemed to become different people overnight on April 6, 1994, had been prepared to kill for years...
...On the way, Camille and the militiamen became separated in the confusion of the town...
...Between Hutu and Tutsi there was this suspicion," Leopold said...
...It was carried on at home, at school, in public life...
...You want to free Camille...
...on the twenty-second, while Camille was still in his pajamas, interahamwe wearing the red and yellow headbands of Hutu Power beat on his door...
...When his sister-in-law asks him to rescue her and her children from a besieged church, he sends word that he can do nothing...
...prosecution, judge, and jury one and the same...
...But for every Rwandan involved— and there was hardly a Rwandan who was not, in one way or another—the genocide meant the particulars of his or her own experience...
...We said good-bye before I could bring myself to ask whether the love of material things was worse than the death of Tutsis...
...Fifteen prisoners arrived in the back of a pick-up truck clapping and singing: "Save me, because I have a human body...
...I had a very quick reaction, knowing my wife had a Tutsi card...
...The old categories remain in place, more firmly than ever, in the way people construct their own and others' identities...
...a young woman clutching an umbrella...
...He had shown courage, but he wanted to be honest about the extent of it: if he had known more, he might have shown less...
...Seth-Robert sounded happy only once during the conversation—when he recounted how, after he'd made it across Rwanda's killing fields back to Kibuye, he managed to save the Methodist mission's hospital equipment and musical instruments from looters...
...but when young thugs use them for plunder and indiscriminate killing he tries to toughen the regulations...
...After the genocide, the family adopts her...
...The others were loaded into the truck and driven singing back to prison, where they will await gacaca with Camille Nzabonimana and a hundred thousand others...
...There had been none in his telling...
...He seemed undaunted as he smoked a cigarette by a large window that opened onto an airy secondfloor porch where a pair of birds fluttered and swooped...
...My companion, a young human rights worker, was describing how a group of prominent survivors in Butare, including Martin Uwariraye, used their connections with the local prosecutor and the justice minister to keep wealthy Hutus like Camille in prison...
...Yet later that afternoon, he reportedly tells a crowded meeting at a sector office not to give in to the killings, although he cannot say how this can be done...
...Innocent had the slightly incredulous manner of a man who was still trying to get his bearings, a man who's had his peace permanently disturbed and doesn't want to be caught off guard again...
...What Ntezimana meant was that its history of interconnection, together with the scale of its slaughter, have left a pool of bitterness that is deep and toxic even by Rwandan standards...
...It depends on grassroots participation mandated by the state...
...I didn't know the scale...
...The two girls were also survivors, from Gikongoro...
...There is evidence, though, that manipulation by the RPF has delayed some trials, altered others, led to false arrests, and kept thousands of prisoners from even reading their files and knowing the charges against them...
...Justice and reconciliation after genocide...
...Of course," I said, gesturing to the two girls, "you're the mother of children...
...At night he returned home and tried to sleep a few hours...
...Two nights later, taking advantage of a heavy rain that had cleared the militias from the roadblocks that were now up all over Butare, Camille drove with the lieutenant friend in a military vehicle and found ten people hiding in the field— "boys, girls, some from Kigali, distant relatives, even Tutsis from the area who had no relation to us...
...It falls back on Rwandan traditions to resolve their terrible legacy—and yet nothing is more traditional in Rwanda than the idea that survival means figuring out what the authorities want...
...Here were only fifteen prisoners—I was exhausted contemplating the task ahead...
...He paused...
...They didn't kill themselves—others did it...
...Once they start, who knows when they'll stop talking...
...I heard he saved a lot of people...
...Looking through my notes from our interview, I realized that his narrative jumped from the twenty-fifth to the twenty-seventh...
...Then there is the larger truth of circumstances and motives—those cases where the facts are clear and the witnesses prepared to give accounts, but the actions of the guilty demand a deeper understanding...
...Perhaps it will all come out when he, and the Tutsis he saved, and Margueritte Mukabazanira and Martin Uwariraye, and others, face one another at gacaca . IT TROUBLED ME to think too much about the dilemmas of Hutus like Camille...
...Seth-Robert smiled and nodded slightly, as if he'd been preparing for this question...
...When the killings started in Kigali, his wife's relatives fled to Butare, which was still calm, and Camille hid them in his house behind the shop...
...ample room for manipulation and corruption...
...Gacaca would untie the knot in the same way...
...If we look back at how we lived together before the war, there was no reason to hunt them...
...Priests cut short the process, saying directly, You're damned, you're pardoned...
...He remains in DISSENT / Spring 2002 • 71 RWANDA prison as I write...
...No one ever comes to ask how we live, only to ask questions about these interahamwe...
...He saved a lot of Tutsis, but he's accused of leading killers...
...I raised the question of ambiguous cases— a prisoner, for example, who had protected some Tutsis and killed others, perhaps even killed in order to be able to protect—and how gacaca would deal with them...
...Nonetheless, she was willing to help me find the bakery owner...
...I had to look like the others...
...Maybe I would have—I couldn't know...
...Gacaca will make everyone who survived the genocide a defendant, a witness, or a judge...
...They felt, or allowed themselves to feel, different degrees of remorse...
...It's even more the case with genocide and especially this genocide, where the persons who committed the genocide are members of the same population as the victims of the genocide...
...I told Ntezimana that the confessed prisoners did not seem to grasp what had been done in 1994...
...Twice the interahamwe came back to his house, and both times the lieutenant's vehicle was parked outside...
...Jean Marie Mbarushimana told me that he wanted to make a film about the genocide to show Rwandans how it happened everywhere in the country...
...Do you think Camille is innocent...
...It's too important to put in their hands...
...Finally he offered to go for a replacement card with two militiamen to the mayor...
...and if the confession comes before gacaca begins, the sentence drops down to seven to twelve years, which means that some killers who were arrested just after the genocide will be freed based on time already served...
...Margueritte had given me his name as a possible witness against Camille, but Innocent had spent the whole genocide in a friend's ceiling—where he lost seventy pounds, while his protector went out every day to kill— and he had witnessed nothing...
...We can never know how...
...I had forgotten where Camille's story was leading...
...GEORGE PACKER is the author of two novels and two works of nonfiction, including Blood of the Liberals, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award...
...And Hutus insisted even more vehemently on the friendly relations they'd always enjoyed with their Tutsi neighbors...
...The prosecutor-general of the Nyanza appeals court is responsible for preparing gacaca in his jurisdiction by arraigning prisoners whose files are empty—some of them have been locked up seven years without a court appearance— before the local populations...
...They keep quiet even when they know me...
...There is something in gacaca for everyone to dislike...
...It's possible I'd have done it, I was so afraid of dying and my family dying...
...On April 20, at 4 p.m., they heard the noise of a large plane—a C-130— and assumed it was the Presidential Guards...
...Perhaps you would have done as I would have done, which is to spend as much time as possible in my fucking house...
...Is Camille guilty, Monsieur Martin...
...I got a friend in town to call a lieutenant, a friend of mine, and I explained very rapidly...
...When I asked how the history of the genocide would be presented, he seemed not to have given it much thought...
...That I'd behaved badly...
...The topic is an explosive one in Kigali, but Mucyo kept his cool...
...But it's also an extension of that history, another silence imposed from above, and I didn't see how it could be squared with the other purpose of gacaca besides justice, which is reconciliation...
...The love of material things made me wait...
...Then the Hutu Power authorities descend on Butare on April 19 to demand cooperation, and Kanyabashi, who has a Tutsi wife and has been criticized for his friendships with Tutsis, stands before the assembly and pledges his support to the regime...
...He had never before seen someone die, but now he watched forty or fifty Tutsis being killed every day, and it struck him how many of them did not resist...
...What happened in 1994 everyone knows," a prosecutor from Jean Marie Mbarushimana's office told the crowd...
...My companion stared down the road, as if he was seeing April 1994 again...
...We were frozen...
...The survivors saw it at night or when their protectors were marching them from one place to another...
...His answer was brief...
...Save us, because there's war...
...Each tribunal has nineteen judges...
...But once the genocide reached Butare, it accelerated at a frenzied pace, and by the end of April tens of thousands of Tutsis were dead...
...They took me directly to this prison...
...So that's my sin...
...It was a courage that impressed me...
...No, there's a maid...
...After much reflection, I've told myself this: apropos of what happened, I felt myself guilty of cowardice...
...The number is so great, and the condition of Rwanda's judiciary so poor, that it's often said it would take at least a century to try all the cases...
...I remained in a psychosis of fear, the whole time until July...
...And you did nothing...
...At forty-eight, he was balding, with a small beard and a mole under his left eye...
...There was a genocide, everyone knew it, and the memorial would tell the story...
...If it wasn't one vehicle it was the other...
...Des Forges challenged the notion of a terminally compliant population...
...Members of the RPA are thought to have killed thousands of civilians during and after the war, but these crimes won't go to gacaca, which at the very DISSENT / Spring 2002 n 65 RWANDA least raises questions about the government's own willingness to be held accountable...
...He must have had some relations with the roadblock," he said, avoiding the terms innocence and guilt...
...I could, for example, the day after the plane went down, I could have fled with my family without bringing any belongings...
...Few cried, even the women...
...The capacity to reach down to every individual doesn't mean there is blind obedience on the part of every individual...
...CAMILLE NZABONIMANA received me inside the walls of Butare prison as if I had come to interview him in his living room...
...I told Mucyo that I accepted this distinction, but for a Hutu widow on a hill it might not matter...
...I didn't know the scale of the killings...
...Broadly speaking this is true—but both genocide and gacaca are composed of thousands of separate pieces that have to be assembled into a whole, like the film the Nyanza appeals court prosecutor wants to make to show Rwandans the extent of what happened...
...A simple peasant doesn't prepare hatred for another, or participate with the military...
...I offered that the landscape was lovely...
...The wife of an episcopal bishop in Butare said, "At the moment of the genocide there was a brusque change, people became animals and killed, but before there was no wickedness...
...He told his story in a soft, calm voice, the voice of a good functionary of the church, with a long, mournful face, and at the hardest questions he smiled in a gentle sort of pain and paused a moment with his head tilted at a reflective angle before answering...
...There is now a law in Rwanda that makes ethnic sectarianism a criminal offense...
...that, for gacaca to work, the Hutu widow would need to be able at least to speak of her own loss...
...The word (pronounced ga-CHA-cha) literally refers to the flattened grass where, in Rwandan tradition, elders sit under a tree and render judgments on property disputes and cattle theft...
...Prisoners and their families have their own suspicions...
...At this distance we think about the Rwandan genocide as a singular horror, a truth reducible to two unbelievable figures: one hundred days, eight hundred thousand deaths...
...I told my wife, 'Hide your card, say you've lost it,' and she threw it under the bed...
...A great bit of luck...
...I wanted to talk to Hutus whose conduct during the genocide would force you or me to ask what we might have done in their place...
...That's why the government regards it jealously," said Laurien Ntezimana, who was imprisoned in Butare this past January after his small organization's newsletter printed a word meaning "rebirth of energy" that was also used by a banned political party...
...It seemed to me that no one will be reconciled if Rwandans can't speak openly about the crimes of the past and the suspicions of the present— certainly not through gacaca, which insists that Rwandans address one another in the most public setting about the most difficult things...
...Camille eventually reached the mayor by phone, and within three days Kanyabashi, now fully involved in rounding up Tutsis, issued a Hutu identity card for Jeanne Chantal...
...Behind every green hill there's another hill, with eucalyptus groves and banana trees and terraced fields of sweet potato and manioc and corn...
...Rwandans ask each other, Ni uwacu?— Is he one of us...
...I picked it up...
...On one of my last days in Rwanda, I had an early view of what gacaca might be like...
...It makes the assignment of individual responsibility for the genocide a collective business...
...Rwanda is now adapting this old and local form of trial to seek justice for the clearest case of genocide since the Holocaust...
...If a Hutu met a Tutsi, he thought he'd be killed...
...They're in prison, but a lot of them are innocent...
...Did you cook the lunch yourself...
...Before, we were well together...
...Is he guilty...
...Viceversa was how it always seemed to turn out, yet in Seth-Robert's and Léopold's telling, they had been swept up in a fearsome catastrophe no less than their Tutsi neighbors...
...Camille had to have paid the militia, or given beer, or loaned his vehicle...
...By this time Camille had more than fifteen Tutsis with him...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
