At justice, and memory in Rwanda

...perpetrators and anyone associated with them are inclined to forget...

...His recourse was to inform the two NGOs monitoring the trials about the oversight, but there is no formal means in gacaca to lodge an appeal...

...There are far fewer people in the first group than in the second...

...Yet that account of punitive justice, government manipulation, and thousands of wrongfully accused people does not, it seems to me, address some core questions about a postgenocidal society...

...With all these people walking around who have been accused and convicted and now have no rights...

...His views are tempered by a sense of realpolitik in Rwanda and a deep empathy for survivors...

...And the TRC opted for political evenhandedness DISSENT / Spring 2007 13 by investigating crimes committed by the African National Congress as well those of the apartheid government...

...In a society with such pressures, it would be surprising if theft and appropriation weren't motives...

...at best, partial justice offers some room for truths that would otherwise disappear...

...Degrees of Resistance Another complaint is that the Kagame regime creates a black-and-white moral landscape of perpetrators and victims and ignores the actions of the "righteous," those people who at great risk refused to go along with the slaughter and gave comfort and help to the victims...

...Resentment and anger are still present, channeled into grousing about gacaca and grumbling about the government...

...True, there is no showstopping catharsis that West8 DISSENT / Spring 2007 erners envision when they speak of "reconciliation" —killers and victims dissolving in each others' arms in tears—that would be a cruel mockery of the survivors' anguish...

...The Devil could be at work in gacaca, he concluded, along with the Holy Spirit...

...Billboards along the roads urge participation, with a standard photograph of a crowd of seated people eagerly raising their hands to volunteer information to judges...

...Critics of gacaca have settled on a particular account, and it has considerable merit...

...Waldorf is a former attorney for the civil rights division of the Clinton administration's Justice Department, who directed the Kigali office of Human Rights Watch from 2002 to 2004...

...There were many levels of involvement: people were onlookers (cheering, enthusiastic, frightened), finger-pointers (eager, unwilling, under duress), looters and pillagers of the victims' households and stock, killers, and organizers and leaders of the entire operation...

...The chief judge eyed the witness with dry bemusement...

...Only justice can forgive...

...Along the roads, there is an empty house for every eight or ten inhabited ones, and you wonder who lived there and what's happened to their land and household goods...

...They are troubled by the failures of due process, the absence of rights for the accused, and what they see as some victims' manipulation of the process to settle old scores and materially benefit...

...There is no question that there is truth to many of these criticisms...

...Actually, it's the only attempt...

...On the other hand, there were problems...

...Foreign aid poured in...

...Now, a new country must be created on the basis of this majority, along with some 150,000 Tutsi survivors and an infusion of Tutsi returnees from families who fled earlier massacres...

...PRI stresses heroism during 1994, but also the anomalous and often damaged position of the righteous today, caught between Hutu suspicion and Tutsi indifference...

...In Rwanda, the reverse is true: the survivors are vastly outnumbered by the group implicated in their suffering...

...Among Westerners, the analogy with the Jews crept in, never to the victims' advantage —the Jews and the survivors merging with the state of Israel...

...If you view the genocide as largely conducted by government soldiers with interDISSENT / Spring 2007 15 ahamwe in a supporting role, then the government should be trying some thousands, not nearly two hundred thousand, and its "maximalist approach" (Amnesty's phrase) is railroading countless innocents and inflating the wrongdoing of the majority of defendants...

...The number of perpetrators, for instance, is a contested subject...

...Lars Waldorf distances himself from the slurs about survivors' greed, but he thinks that property theft was a factor in the genocide and that restitution is a factor in gacaca as well...

...Indeed, he thinks that restitution is one of the few things that gacaca can reasonably do...

...There is no forgiving and forgetting," reflects Sylvie Umubyeyi in Hatzfeld's book on the survivors...

...Waldorf told me about one episode he'd witnessed when the judges inadvertently miscalculated the sentence at the end of a trial (time already served and community service affect the final sentence...

...Survivors must find a way back to membership in a nation from losses endured "at the mind's limits...

...Category One crimes were automatically transferred to the regular court system or the international tribunal in Arusha...

...He laments gacaca's needless mistakes and failures, but he doesn't object to its existence...

...Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both condemned gacaca as punitive justice...

...The comparative evidence shows that professionals might do the killing, but they count on the locals for help...

...The full truth will never be known, in gacaca or outside of it...

...His views were at first carefully balanced...

...He's writing a book about gacaca, based on meticulous research done over months of observing three courts...

...While the political virtues of a pantheon of the righteous are clear, the subject can seem beside the point in the face of the overwhelming fact of the survivors' anguish and the problems of reintegrating huge numbers of people implicated in mass murder...

...Do the Trials Go Too Far...

...For many people, they maintain, involvement was only a matter of "passing on information to the authorities or to the militia, for example, about where Tutsi were hiding...

...And yet, the trials vary greatly because so much is at stake...

...An impeccably turned-out young woman had come from Kigali to testify and said her piece with clarity and gusto...

...Sibomana, a distinguished human rights activist, let loose in his 1998 interview about those "ungrateful and irresponsible" survivors who refused to acknowledge the help they got, so committed were they, he charged, to their ethnically victimized position...

...By the late nineties, the overcrowding and mistreatment of prisoners made Rwandan jails among the world's worst and provoked an international outcry...

...Impressions and incidents add to the picture...

...To me, understanding no Kinyrwanda but following his cadences and gestures, it was a magnetic oratorical performance, but it occasioned no ripples in the audience, leaving me wondering whether passion and rhetorical skill were nothing out of the ordinary in gacaca...

...The accusation that lurks around gacaca is that the trials victimize innocent Hutu bystanders by unleashing survivors' memories that are repressive, partial, and obsessive...

...People didn't want to tell the truth...

...The commission made a secular version of repentance and contrition into the centerpiece of the proceedings, with the guilty apologizing to and asking forgiveness of the victims or their families...

...The TRC was not a judicial body: it did not try crimes and deliver verdicts, only stories and apologies—a limitation of which many on the South African left were intensely critical...

...How can anyone respect gacaca when there are thousands of people who can't tell their story...

...The demographics make for a contest over the number of memories, the degree of detail, and who gets to remember...

...Yet, Waldorf points out that the government showed no interest when the Danish Center for Human Rights offered to set up and fund training for one hundred roving paralegals...

...The report also points out, interestingly, that a number of the righteous serve as gacaca judges...

...The wife of one of the prisoners was there with a child, during breaks chatting amiably with her neighbors...

...When the cases came to trial, accuser and accused could each call witnesses to buttress their statements...

...The stories that do surface seem slightly misshapen...

...Recently, the widely decried murder of a survivor, a gacaca judge and community leader, was linked to property: Kigali's New Times reported that the killers were known to have looted the man's house in 1994...

...They lied to put their enemies in jail...

...There is also little question that the RPF wantonly killed civilians as they fought their way across the country —some twenty to thirty thousand died by the estimate of Human Rights Watch...

...Des Forges and Longman, "Legal Responses to Genocide in Rwanda," in My Neighbors, My Enemies: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, ed...

...Ironically, just as some Rwandan analysts are minimizing estimates of the numbers of perpetrators and disputing degrees of guilt, historians of the Holocaust—Jan Gross and Omer Bartov, for example—are showing that genocide requires broad-based, neighborly cooperation no matter who wields the murder weapons...

...But fuzzy memories are more common—as in the stories I heard from women who had fled with the enocidaires to Congo, for instance...

...These stories lack sequences of cause and effect and blur into the elliptical allusions to "trauma" that are common in Rwanda...

...That is why a person could claim to have been sick for a hundred days or watching the cows for the duration—evasions that could keep one from calling to mind the blood, the corpses, the ransacked houses, and the excited killers and terrified neighbors at the door...

...The president of Rwanda is Paul Kagame, and former soldiers of the RPF make up a substantial part of the regime's political and military elites...

...You couldn't help but wish for a savvy counselor to urge him to confess—which would have modified his sentence—rather than to walk right into a maximum sentence as he was surely doing...

...Survivors I spoke with scornfully dismissed the very idea of the righteous: no one helped them except the other victims, they insisted, no one...

...In Rwanda, I sometimes caught an undertone of resentment of the survivors and their endless needs...

...Moreover, the never-ending process—with tens of thousands awaiting trial—risks a backlash that could stir up Hutu enmity (euphemistically termed "divisionism" by law, which prohibits ethnic references in the interest of creating a transcendent Rwandan identity...

...and that the Nazis, too, had their own versions of the it-wasn't-me-it-wasthenext-guy alibi...

...But the TRC's relative success made "reconciliation" a touchstone in human rights vocabulary in the nineties, and whatever the specific Rwandan sources, any leadership searching for a means of reintegrating a polity could not fail to be influenced by it...

...The Rwandans had to grapple with genocide, the TRC with crimes against humanity...

...Category Two, those accused of murder or causing injury...

...Historians of the Holocaust now take "property transfer" to be more important in the murder of the Jews than it once appeared...

...And it welded the reconciliation element to a legal procedure...

...Detractors describe them as an alien force, essentially Ugandan, that was bent on taking power, even when it meant provoking a civil war that, in a region afflicted by lethal ethnic rivalries, was bound to result in tragedy...

...Genocide survivors are bitterly disappointed when lack of evidence leads to acquittals of known killers...

...Hutu bystanders are pressured, coerced, and threatened into going along with the proceedings...

...If the defendant that week is someone who killed your children, or if he is your husband and the father of your children, then everything hangs on the outcome...

...He ministers to a devastated population heavily made up of those who returned from Goma...

...The general judgment from human rights workers is that gacaca comes close to being a massive show trial that an authoritarian government has thrown up to legitimate itself to donor nations, at the price of railroading any number of innocents into long prison terms and threatening dissidents with likewise being en14 DISSENT / Spring 2007 snared...

...It was the moment in our conversation when he veered from a standard set of disquisitions to speak of experiences that were raw, less pat...

...Gacaca was the solution the government devised in 2001 to work its way through the backlog...

...One problem is that survivors tend to dismiss stories of the righteous...

...And indeed, some accusations may be blown up or downright false...

...Undoubtedly, the model of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which operated from 1995-1998, shaped the outcome, although the government rejects the comparison and insists that gacaca comes from traditional Rwandan notions of social cohesion...

...Waldorf agrees that a corps of paralegals could make an enormous difference: trained people who understand the process, can listen carefully to the proceedings, and can offer dispassionate advice to defendants...

...Yet she does speak of a justice that "offers room for the truth, which lets fear wash away" This, in Umubyeyi's mind, is the basis for "reconciliation," something achievable in the mundane life of neighbors...

...Killers and bystanders must make their own path back from what they never dreamed themselves capable of...

...An unmistakable animus to survivors crept in...

...This is one area—just about the only 6 DISSENT / Spring 2007 area—where I heard critics welcoming, indeed making, comparisons to the Holocaust...

...It wasn't ordinary people with machetes who killed people, he insisted, it was soldiers with guns, and a few soldiers with guns could kill a lot of people...

...rOR EVERYONE, the process of "beginning after the end"—the poet Eavan Boland's phrase—is as agonizing a labor as has ever been assigned to human beings...

...They discover the bones of their loved ones (disclosure of the location of bodies is required for plea bargaining that substantially reduces prison sentences...

...You don't hear that anymore...

...Anticolonialism is another framework...

...Survivor psychology emerges as problematic, too, in the PRI report, which highlights Tutsi mistrust and defensiveness, but leaves unmentioned the profound emotional problems of Hutus engaged in or witness to boundless, pitiless cruelty...

...Everything is under cultivation, fields pushing up steep hillsides, striated with divisions and subdivisions —with all the green and the one-room dwellings, it reminded me of what I imagine the west of Ireland to have looked like before the Famine...

...Strong memories do float around—"he killed the girls," a woman testified bluntly in gacaca...

...Are witnesses prevaricating or are they telling the truth when they say they saw nothing, or did nothing, or—strikingly--never used the weapons they admit to possessing...

...Gacaca was a form of local justice that elders customarily used to mediate conflicts —mostly property disputes—and dispense judgments...

...The woeful results of lack of counsel were apparent to me at the session I attended...

...Rwanda harbors all the long-standing grudges, land disputes, fights over stock and boundaries, and resentment of the more prosperous that are endemic to rural society, he says...

...The Final Solution was an anonymous technology of death at the endpoint, when the Nazis gassed their victims or mowed them down with bullets or worked them to death in slave labor camps...

...A reminder of international largesse is the weird sight of prison work gangs along the roads, the convicts dressed in immaculately pressed light cotton pink shirts and Bermuda shorts that bear an uncanny resemblance to the "Nantucket red" garb sported by old-line preppies in plummy vacation resorts...

...Ruhengeri was a base of Hutu Power, devastated in the fighting and the aftermath, when tens of thousands of interahamwe and their families stampeded across the border to Goma, a refugee camp where thousands died of malnutrition, cholera, other diseases, internecine fighting, and attacks by government soldiers...

...In the recent break-in, they didn't take money but instead "tore up the documents of gacaca declaration for his property reimbursement...

...What has happened is unsatisfactory in many ways, yet no one has suggested a better course of action...

...Without judging the truth of any particular claim, it's worth saying that the litanies are repeated over and over in Cambodia, too...

...The charge is that gacaca, in maximizing culpability, tends toward assuming guilt until innocence is proven and suppresses the gray areas where panic and terror seized people but did not drive them to culpable acts—looting, say, but not killing in order to loot...

...Everyone, theoretically, has a stake in building the country and coming to terms with the tragedy...

...Generally, they see the use of the Holocaust as the government's way of capitalizing on the victim analogy while ignoring RPF soldiers' role in the violence...

...In Cambodia today, former Khmer Rouge cadre, known to have blood on their hands, still live in uneasy relation to their neighbors, but the killers are the minority, living in a sea of survivors...

...There was a moral imperative to participate in gacaca, and onlookers were obliged by law to contribute any relevant information to the proceedings...

...The situation is extremely complex, as some people committed both righteous actions and killings...

...But in Rwanda itself, estimates are that some two hundred thousand suspects await gacaca, with some fifteen thousand already processed...

...Where the bodies are...

...Demographics of the Aftermath Survivors cannot help but remember...

...After the Holocaust, Jewish survivors overwhelmingly fled...

...How the children died...

...So the nation must proceed on the basis of a composite of remembering and forgetting...

...Indeed, the government department supervising gacaca predicted last year that as many as 760,000 people might ultimately come before gacaca...

...The problem was that there were not enough lawyers or courtrooms to try the prisoners —Amnesty International estimated 112,000 in 2002...

...Yet when confronted with testimony about his role in the killing, he insisted he had done nothing, nothing at all...

...Nonetheless, there are structural elements of organization and rationalization...

...Lars Waldorf is one of the most knowledgeable and persuasive critics scrutinizing gacaca...

...The "war," I sometimes heard the genocide called, as if the dead were civilian casualties...

...It takes a village, so to speak, to kill the neighbors...

...Nadege Degris, a staff member of Penal Reform International (PRI), who watched gacaca closely through 2006, believes that the effects of a large disenfranchised class of middle-aged men, released from prison but denied full citizenship, are going to be catastrophic...

...Excited mobs or scared bystanders lying low...

...The TRC operated on the presumption that the face-toface encounter between guilty parties and those they had harmed could, in some way, bind up South Africa's wounds...

...Given the broad mobilization in 1994, it didn't seem that way to me, but he bridled when I suggested that it would have taken that many people to accomplish mass murder, looting, and pillage on such a large scale...

...Of the perpetrators of the Final Solution, only a few were ever tried—Adolf Eichmann being the most famous...

...The pastor's allusion to vengeance and the profit motive cropped up repeatedly in my visit, the "fact" that survivors were using the trials to settle scores and enrich themselves...

...Hatzfeld goes so far as to suggest that there is something about genocidal killing that lends itself, more than any other form of mass murder, to a process of selective memory or progressive amnesia, which renders the perpetrator innocent in his own eyes...

...The hostility to gacaca among human rights groups is in part a response to the high-handed, authoritarian, and repressive tendencies of this government, which, in the name of reconstruction, has squelched internal debate and political opposition and carried on a bloody war in Congo that has lined the pockets of its loyalists...

...These men and women who risked everything to save their neighbors are denied all rights of recognition," protested the late Andre Sibomana, a Catholic priest and human rights activist in a 1998 interview...

...The difference stems from a singular political history...

...Western observers from nongovernmental organizations are more open...

...PRI reports that survivors believe that "many rescuers acted in their own personal interest and that even if they did rescue some people, they also killed others or abandoned them...

...A man of great spiritual presence, he spoke eloquently of his parishioners' suffering...

...It is an unhappy turn in memory-building for the cause of "reconciliation...

...In Cambodia, if the oft-postponed "Extraordinary Chambers" ever do get up and running (and this looks increasingly unlikely), they will try only a handful of former Khmer Rouge leaders, now old men...

...Rwanda is a land-starved country, its population density the highest in Africa...

...Gromo Alex doesn't share this dire assessment, but he identifies the same demographic as a problem, "a lost generation" scarred by what they did and too old to benefit from the government's investment in education, bound to return to the same places where the genocide was enacted...

...Gacaca did help the work of repentance and reconciliation, he believed...

...The need to remember, the pressure to forget: Rwandans must combine these strains into some plausible representation of the past and some acceptable basis for the present and the future...

...It is at best a facsimile, a mock-up, of a functioning community where people on different "sides"—the relatives of those who were killed and their killers—can cohabit...

...Critics character12 DISSENT / Spring 2007 ize the RPF as marked by a bloody singlemindedness born of living too long in the bush...

...Fear still rippled through the country...

...When the RPF crossed the border in 1990, it triggered the fighting that eventually led to the genocide...

...In explaining Rwandan history, people routinely allude to the Tutsis'—or the "victims," because ethnic talk is forbidden—unfair privileges under the Belgians, their prosperity, their monopoly of the good jobs, their essentially alien status in the country...

...The survivors whom Hatzfeld interviewed remember a familiar landscape occupied by familiar people—acquaintances, friends, workmates, and teammates— who were suddenly, implacably bent on killing them...

...They used gacaca to get money...

...How one sees the trials depends on how one views the government, and this, in turn, shapes how one views the genocide itself...

...Thugs and killers go to jail...

...International law distinguishes between these two, although in the minds of the public they often merge...

...On a Saturday last June, some thirty people from surrounding farms gathered outside a small government building tucked into a space between fields to participate in the trials of three prisoners...

...He'd heard this kind of thing before, evasion so fantastical that it edged into morbid humor...

...But such threats have little effect when the community throws up a wall of obliviousness...

...CHRISTINE STANSELL, Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University, is writing about postcatastrophic societies and is also at work on a book on feminism...

...Claims of being framed are widespread...

...To my knowledge, no one has studied it...

...But it's a critical issue, largely invisible because in Rwanda the "transfer" involved quantities of land and goods in general so small as to escape notice...

...The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, is trying notorious perpetrators and organizers...

...The prisoners sat in front...

...The Arusha tribunal draws flickering attention from the international community, but gacaca is a fixture of daily life in Rwanda and a staple of government propaganda...

...King reflected that "the government did take certain things off the table...

...Just like the Israelis," a journalist scornfully described the government to me—meaning, capitalizing on the historical tragedy while oppressing others...

...But the serenity was belied by the tense silence that hung over the crowd, as everyone waited to begin...

...It can even seem recriminatory...

...I remember seeing dead bodies in that ditch," my research assistant told me as we drove outside the city...

...The judges were to gather facts about crimes and compile dossiers detailing the cases against prisoners from their bailiwicks...

...Here is an explicit conflict of memory...

...The degree to which RPF forces fought to save the Tutsis being slaughtered in Rwanda is a matter of debate...

...The next witness claimed to have been watching her cows from her window when two girls were murdered outside her house...

...Waldorf 's objections are incisive and tough, but they are moderate compared to some extreme judgments I encountered—"oldfashioned Southern lynch law," said one genocide scholar, that had only unloosed a "spiral of accusations...

...The simple structure, a galvanized roof over wooden benches, looked oddly like a picnic pavilion in a quiet American park...

...Rwanda is the one place where, in the aftermath of genocide, the targeted minority took power...

...At the session I attended, attention and concentration were high...

...Yet they exist, and there are many of them...

...Penal Reform International, which has led in advocating for the prisoners, issued a long report last summer that documented stories of the righteous in one district...

...PRI acknowledges the ambiguities...

...A slight, worn man in a shabby suit came forward to declaim against one of the defendants with striking force...

...Lawyers were excluded—a moot point, as there were so few in the country...

...Gacaca can lead to modest gains...

...Yet it's hard to ignore the strain of wishful thinking in the effort to elevate the righteous, the sense of inconvenient facts being whisked away, small numbers being inflated...

...Gacaca Gacaca is the most ambitious attempt any country has made to mete out justice to the masses of "ordinary men" (and women) involved in genocide...

...Low attendance is a problem...

...The Criticisms From afar, gacaca seems an impressive experiment in the rule of law, putting one small impoverished country's slight political muscle behind the world's oft-stated determination to make genocide a crime for which perpetrators are accountable...

...To open up such a path of moral imagination would be an enormous gain in Rwanda's arduous job of imagining itself across the divide of the hunted and the hunters...

...A moral basis must be created to allow people who at one time were divided into hunters and hunted to live together with minimal trust: the trust that one will not be harmed...

...I/he wouldn't have done it if the Tutsis hadn't run away...

...Certainly this is true in Cambodia, where aging KR cadre have turned, in their own eyes, as pure as the driven snow...

...The mantra "never forget" assuages the guilt of the international community—it is the comment of choice in the visitors' books at genocide memorials...

...The lack of rights for the accused—including the right to counsel—tilts the outcome toward conviction...

...The scene was bucolic when I arrived—lush fields, twittering birds, butterflies...

...It also blocked the Arusha tribunal from investigating the RPF's actions, thereby laying itself open to charges of victor's justice and selfexculpation...

...The new Rwandan government, led by former RPF commander Paul Kagame, refused to include war crimes committed by the RPF in gacaca's brief, limiting the scope to genocide...

...Gacaca has been going on so long that it has become a vexatious requirement: think of jury duty that never ends...

...One surly defendant freely admitted that he had walked around the neighborhood for weeks with a machete— the genocide's weapon of choice—in the company of interahamwe (the youth militia who were the shock troops of the genocide...

...Alison Des Forges, the leading American expert on Rwanda, and Timothy Longman in an essay in a state-of-the-art human rights volume question the significance of lower levels of involvement...

...Who raped the girl...

...refusing to help Tutsis, but not killing them...

...Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein (Cambridge, UK, 2004...

...She sees this group as ripe for a revival of Hutu Power...

...How Much Sorrow Is Too Much...

...Rwanda's astonishingly effective slaughter —eight hundred thousand people out of eight million in a hundred days, a rate three to five times that of the Nazis—could not have been accomplished without an extremely broad popular mobilization...

...Who does not want to believe there were people of conscience and humanity who stood in the way...

...Communities would elect judges...

...If the image was ever accurate, it is by now a charming fiction...

...Controversy and hostility surround gacaca, especially outside the country (a recent exchange in these pages between me and Constance Morrill gives a sense of the debate...

...STRONG MEMORIES, fuzzy memories, and serious forgetting exist on a continuum of innocence and guilt, the stuff from which a national polity must emerge...

...A schoolboy in 1994, he fled Kigali with his family on foot and lost his mother in a melee at a road barricade...

...In the annals of genocide, Rwanda's situation is unique, because survivors have not migrated in the aftermath, but continue to live alongside the ethnic majority implicated in the genocide...

...But when most people over the age of twenty-five are somehow entangled in the genocide, this abstract mandate for truth, justice, and reconciliation coexists with an urgent need to protect, deflect, soft pedal, and deny accusations when they touch neighbors, family members, or oneself...

...Category Three, those accused of looting and pillage...

...Demographically speaking, this meant that a Hutu majority and remnant of Tutsis were given responsibility for constituting courts—a huge gamble that paid off insofar as the process did go forward...

...Whatever the RPF's culpability, its leaders, once in power did not call for a vendetta or a reverse genocide, but saw themselves as acting on behalf of the victims of the genocide in the interests of stabilizing the country for all its inhabitants...

...Indictable crimes fell into four categories, soon compressed into three: Category One, defendants accused of planning and/or orchestrating the genocide or committing torture or rape...

...Such is the fragile stability the country has gained...

...John Ndikumana is an immensely impresDISSENT / Spring 2007 17 sive Episcopal priest who works in a region in the north along the Congo border...

...Many Hutus—no one knows how many—also died DISSENT / Spring 2007 11 because they were associated with the victims or because of their political views or family ties...

...In Rwanda, the government tightly controls the press, so there an outsider encounters mostly grumbling and oblique comments about the government's favoritism toward the Tutsis...

...The majority of the country's 1994 inhabitants—Hutus constituted almost 90 percent of the population—stood by or participated in killings that annihilated the Tutsi minority and virtually eliminated the tiny group of Twa, the other ethnic minority...

...Gacaca would sentence perpetrators (although trials involving a death sentence were transferred to the regular judicial system), and it would also provide a space for community education and what one might call collective therapy—all in the interests of building a positive experience of participating in the national community...

...For years after the genocide, former Hutu Power activists and sympathizers muttered about "finishing the job," Caleb King, an American missionary in Rwanda since 2002, recalls...

...No genocide can be reduced to any other...

...There's no question that they badly miscalculated how long it would take them to get to Kigali," says Gregory Gromo Alex, a perceptive observer who headed UN humanitarian assistance in Kigali during the genocide and now lives there...

...they made me/him do it...

...Like a show trial, gacaca is accused of twisting history—herding survivors' accounts along one well-worn story line and suppressing all other stories, especially those of Hutus who were attacked and whose loved ones were murdered by the RPF...

...the other two, in their mid to late twenties, affected aggressive indifference...

...Up against this hard fact, it seems far more likely that gacaca will let the guilty go free than that it will convict the innocent...

...The harshest critics charge that the process serves no one...

...one human rights worker asked me with vehemence...

...The prisoner was too upset to notice, and no one in the crowd seemed to have caught the mistake except Waldorf...

...To me, visiting Rwanda for the first time, with Cambodia on my mind, it seemed that it wasn't calculated remembering but strategic forgetting that was the more powerful problem, a toxic blend of self-protection and the human predisposition to turn away from others' grief...

...Then he read her the riot act: withholding information from gacaca will bring you a year in jail...

...It is there that the future lies...

...But as for the roundups, the ferreting out of hiding places, the chases, the ritual torments, and local murders—those essential activities always required locals who knew where Jews lived, could point them out, and could help track them down...

...Without in-depth knowledge of local conditions, it is virtually impossible for outsiders—and researchers of gacaca are inevitably outsiders— to discern what is going on beneath the surface...

...Forgetting—let's call it serious forgetting, for what's being blanked out is not trivial—is an undercurrent in Rwanda, inside and outside gacaca...

...Gacaca is the one institution in a society otherwise stripped of a civil life where Rwandans can join—albeit in the most attenuated ways—to create that composite...

...As an outsider intensely curious about an innovation in postcatastrophic justice weirdly ignored by the foreign press, I stepped into a field of bitter arguments and strong feelings...

...The emphasis of some authors on popular participation fails to take account of the varieties of participation," they argue...

...I heard the exquisitely mounted exhibits of the Genocide Museum in Kigali dismissed as the work of an expensive team of Israeli designers catering to the government—money, genocide victims, Kagame, and "Zionism" rolled up in one ball of cynicism...

...and it is wrong to conflate the Holocaust with what happened in Rwanda...

...Even sympathizers think the RPF played with fire, although they balance their judgments with an argument about the impossible choices the insurgents faced...

...A prominent human rights specialist told me the numbers of accused beg credulity...

...For me, this kind of talk was resonant with stereotypes of the Jews, but for Rwandans, it was rooted in the African context of antagonism toward a class of supposed compradores...

...But the slogan is largely extraneous to the painful conflicts involved in reconstructing societies after genocides...

...Up close, it is an immensely flawed effort, with at best modest triumphs and many bad consequences...

...some sixty or seventy defendants will be involved...

...The problem with that latter interpretation is that, to hear most people tell it, the genocide happened, but no one really participated...

...Yet in the matter of the righteous, detractors of official memory are eager to cite the European example, evoking a kind of Rwandan Yad Vashem...

...Survivors relate their accounts and recall details...

...The phrase is prohibited—sufficiently shocking and dangerous that an anonymous caller to a talk radio show who used it was tracked down and jailed...

...DISSENT / Spring 2007 19...

...As Phil Clark wrote in Dissent ("When Killers Go Home," Summer 2005), the idea was to blend this 'traditional' form with principles of liberal jurisprudence, judicial impartiality, and democratic participation...

...But there is less fear, I was told repeatedly...

...and in Cambodia, too, large numbers left the country...

...Once the pastor gave up trying to bring me back to the Christian fold and finished lecturing me on the damage wrought by colonialism, he settled down to the question of gacaca and the work that faces the country...

...It's anybody's guess how much theft there was during the genocide and how much the recovery of property plays a role in gacaca...

...Yet Jean Hatzfeld, whose two brilliant books, based on oral histories (one on survivors, one on perpetrators), are the most intimate look we have at the genocide, listened to unending "litanies" of self-exculpation from prisoners and their families: I/he did nothing, it was the others who killed them...

...Those guys are butchers," sneered a foreign journalist who had been in Congo and told me unequivocally that the war put the Kagame regime beyond the pale...

...The remembering that gacaca requires has been one source of this advance...

...Spin this out too far, and you find hints that the Tutsis got what was coming to them—far more than they deserved, of course, but still, a fate that could be explained by their neighbors' legitimate grievances...

...What's going to happen in ten years time...

...The appeal of the idea is evident...

...There were important differences in Rwanda, however...

...She was standing before a man accused of multiple murders, an audience of her neighbors, and a row of judges at a session of gacaca, one of nine thousand local sessions set up by the Rwandan government in 2001 to try tens of thousands charged with participating in the 1994 genocide...

...Was it justice they wanted, or vengeance...

...One, a stooped middle-aged man, was nervous and fidgety...

...There is no forgiving the Hutus who massacred...

...The Rwandan genocide, for example, was not alone in its "varieties of participation...

...The new government set about immediately jailing masses of accused genocidaires...

...Who took the goats...

...The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)—the core of the present government— was an insurgent force based in Uganda made up mainly of exiles and refugees whose families had fled earlier anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda...