Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword: What Does Trauma Do?
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction An Anthropology of the Effects of Genocide and Mass Violence
- Part I Private and Public Memory
- Part II Symptom and Syndrome
- Part III Response and Recovery
- 11 The Chaplain Turns to God
- 12 Acehnese Women’s Narratives of Traumatic Experience, Resilience, and Recovery
- 13 Rwanda’s Gacaca Trials
- 14 Pasts Imperfect
- 15 Atrocity and Non-Sense
- 16 Growing Up on the Front Line
- 17 The Role of Traditional Rituals for Reintegration and
- Commentary Wrestling with the Angels of History
- Index
- References
13 - Rwanda’s Gacaca Trials
Toward a New Nationalism or Business as Usual?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Foreword: What Does Trauma Do?
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction An Anthropology of the Effects of Genocide and Mass Violence
- Part I Private and Public Memory
- Part II Symptom and Syndrome
- Part III Response and Recovery
- 11 The Chaplain Turns to God
- 12 Acehnese Women’s Narratives of Traumatic Experience, Resilience, and Recovery
- 13 Rwanda’s Gacaca Trials
- 14 Pasts Imperfect
- 15 Atrocity and Non-Sense
- 16 Growing Up on the Front Line
- 17 The Role of Traditional Rituals for Reintegration and
- Commentary Wrestling with the Angels of History
- Index
- References
Summary
Background
By now much has been written about the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) in South Africa, which were designed to provide a measure of justice to those who had suffered from state-sponsored racial violence. Much of this literature has been critical (Wilson, 2001). One of the most visible apologists for the TRCs, however, was Bishop Desmond Tutu. In some of the bishop’s statements, he distinguished between retributive and restorative justice, emphasizing that the true African (and superior) form of justice was restorative, while the typically Western form was retributive (Tutu, 1999)
Like South Africa, Rwanda witnessed its share of state-sponsored ethnic violence. But in contrast to South Africa, it chose to deal with its many genocide prisoners through uniquely retributive means. In the early years following the 1994 genocide, accused persons were simply thrown in jail, often on the basis of a single and unsubstantiated accusation, to be tried later by Rwanda’s conventional courts. Some prisoners were tried and sentenced by these courts and a small number were executed, but Rwanda’s prison population continued to grow. Rwanda’s conventional justice system was overwhelmed. After considerable debate and eventual rejection of the TRC model by the Government of Rwanda (Uvin, n.d.), the trial method of gacaca was decided upon in 1999, a method that ideally would weld elements of restorative justice to a basically retributive core (Schabas, 2005, p. 3). In procedures similar to those of the TRCs, accused persons would receive anything from full clemency to reduced sentences in exchange for full confessions. And for those who received reduced sentences, the possibility existed to serve all or part of their remaining terms by doing communal work – travaux d’interet general.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Genocide and Mass ViolenceMemory, Symptom, and Recovery, pp. 301 - 320Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014