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NEWS STORY
April 6, 2001 Margaritte Salome Uwamaliya lives in a newly built village for widows on the outskirts of the Rwandan capital, Kigali - neat, square earthen houses with concrete floors and iron roofs. In her living room there are wooden chairs and a sofa, a radio and crocheted covers on the sideboard which hint at her former life as the wife of a civil servant. Her husband and two of her six children were killed in the genocide seven years ago, as were her siblings and every other relation except two of her brother's children who now live with her. From behind her house she looks up the hill to Kigali's biggest prison, Kimironko, where prisoners in their pink pyjama uniform come and go. "We see these people, we are forced to forgive them, but they don't recognise what they've done... they ignore us, even if we offer them a drink of water," she says. "Foreigners can never understand the void we widows live in, we have lost the whole of our large families, our husband's families, everyone is gone." Margaritte says the pain of poverty is with her every day; when her children want something for school they lament the lack of a father to provide it for them. Rwanda, in a unique experiment in local justice, is starting to try many of its 120,000 prisoners in informal people's courts in an attempt to foster national reconciliation. Survivors such as Margaritte now face the challenge of confronting the killers of her family. She speaks for many survivors when she says, "It will not be easy to live with them again, it will be very, very hard to welcome them." The survivors know who killed their families, though many would be too afraid to testify against them in public. The gacaca system of justice - once a traditional community court used for banal village disputes - will try prisoners before open meetings in towns and villages in which their former neighbours and friends will detail exactly what each of the accused did during the genocide. Rape, which was extremely prevalent during the genocide, will not be tried by gacaca , the memories too painful for the victims to recall in open court. "We are asked why we didn't take the South African approach of amnesty," says Gerald Gahima, the government's chief prosecutor. "Ours is a different case and you can only do what is politically possible in your own society. Of course, we cannot kill all those who deserve to die, it would not stabilise our society. But in the aftermath of genocide there was an over whelming feeling that there must be accountability, people must be punished so it will not happen again." Gacaca promises that those found not guilty by the community in which they lived, or those who have confessed to a minor part in the killings, will go free. "Establishing the truth is as important as justice, and if everyone participates it will create the environment for reconciliation," says Mr Gahima. The justice minister, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, says: "There can be no reconciliation here without justice. We have to break a system of impunity which stretches back to the 1960s when people were told that the more they joined in the killings, the less they would be punished." But gacaca is a risk, a judicial experiment that needs enormous resources to equip 10,000 courts, and elect and train 280,000 lay judges. No one can be sure that the instinct to protect friends and relatives will not weigh heavier than the truth. Many survivors oppose gacaca which they know will inevitably return killers to communities where the survivors, often widows and children, are desperately poor, marginalised and fearful. As one government official put it, "For most of us the genocide ended in 1994, but in the villages survivors feel threatened every day of their lives. If you visit villages and speak to them they are immediately afraid they will be noticed, that they will be killed." Judges murdered However, Mr Gahima and other justice officials say there is absolutely no alternative, given the overwhelming numbers involved in the three months of killing in 1994, when about 800,000 people were butchered. "The bottom line is that the courts cannot do this job - gacaca is the only chance," Mr Gahima says. The justice system itself was decimated in the genocide with many officials and judges murdered. But since 1994 it has been rebuilt, staffed with 800 judges trained with help, in particular, from Canada, the US, and Germany. In the last five years 5,000 people have been tried. Tens of thousands of the old, the sick, and those against whom the evidence was too flimsy, have been released. But 120,000 remain in prison, and, even with the International Committee of the Red Cross paying half the prison food bill, the prison system still takes 4% of the national budget (5% of the budget is set aside for a survivors' fund). Philip Munyurwo is an early beneficiary of a gacaca trial. He spent four years in prison in the south-east of the country and wrote three times to the authorities pleading his innocence. "When they started gacaca in the prison they asked those who had confessed to the killings whether I had been with them... and they said 'no'. Then they asked the people of my village and no one accused me, so I went free," Mr Munyurwo says. Mr Munyurwo is an anxious-looking man; responsible for his own family and the children of his brother who was killed in the genocide. While in prison he worried about how hard things were for his family. He shakes his head, remembering those four long years. But at the sudden sight of a large group of prisoners in pink pyjamas being escorted up the road he breaks into a broad smile and waves to his former companions. Ready to confess As talk of gacaca started in many jails, spontaneous groups sprang up and divided those ready to confess from those who maintained their innocence. "We started gacaca in the prisons, taking a truckload at a time back to the village they all came from. People came out in their thousands and were very clear who did what, who should go free and who deserved prison," said the justice minister. He believes that once gacaca has started in earnest, Rwanda can return to normal in about three to five years, without its massive prison population distorting the family life of everyone in society. < story url
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