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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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�Does the Truth Pass Across the Fire without Burning?� Transitional Justice and its Discontents in Rwanda�s Gacaca Courts.
| Panel |
49. The politics of healing and justice in post-conflict societies: Global discourses and local realities
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| Paper ID | 435 |
| Author(s) |
Ingelaere, Bert
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Over the past decades, it has become clear that societies recovering from gross human rights violations should not simply adopt a strategy of amnesty and amnesia to overcome a violent past and prevent that past from functioning as a seed of continuing or renewed conflict. ‘Transitional justice’ is the full range of mechanisms and processes associated with a society’s attempt to deal with a legacy of large-scale past abuses. The more specific objectives of transitional justice are accountability, truth, reparation and reconciliation. In our paper we focus on the transitional justice efforts in post-genocide Rwanda. Although transitional justice is broad and operates on different levels of society and through various channels, initiatives and mechanisms, the place where the whole process will find its most tangible embodiment for the ordinary Rwandan is during the meetings in the Gacaca tribunals, a modernized and formalized traditional dispute resolution mechanism.
In our paper we present the findings of 11 months of anthropological fieldwork in several rural Rwandan communities. The quest for truth at the local level is the cornerstone of the entire post-genocide transitional justice framework and our avenue to understand the Gacaca process. Other transitional justice objectives to attain at the local level – accountability, reparation and reconciliation – largely hinge upon the truth established and how it was generated in the Gacaca tribunals. Information gathered and narratives disclosed through testimonies, accusations and confessions are the sources to identify (the nature of) guilt or innocence, to conduct trials of accused, to disclose locations to exhume victims, to identify reparation modalities, to facilitate healing and to reconfigure and re-establish social relations.
We analyze the nature of the truth observed and experienced in the Gacaca process analytically distinguishing features complexly entangled in reality. In doing so, we question the popular Rwandan expression that “the truth passes across the fire without burning” indicating that the truth always triumphs. The truth is, in the first place, curtailed by the a priori defining parameters of what the truth can be, both methodologically through the design of the court system and ideologically through the nature of the current overall power structure. The truth is mostly “forensic” and only to a small extent “narrative”, “social” or “restorative” because derived from a criminal procedure. The truth varies since it surfaces through the dynamic of local constellations idiosyncratically subverting and interpreting the truth-generating procedures. The truth has furthermore a high degree of instrumentality as it is sought through confrontation along group-based (mostly ethnic) lines, not deliberation nor dialogue. The truth has a certain degree of arbitrariness resulting from the principle of “confession and denunciation without verification”.
As a result the truth is ‘partial’ in the sense of ‘incomplete’ and ‘deformed’ but also meaning ‘one-sided’ and ‘one-dimensional’ lacking a broadly based contextual anchoring. The question is then what can this type of truth still accomplish in the following stages of the transitional justice process and the post-conflict reconstruction in general? And where does it fail and what are, subsequently, the consequences?
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