www.rjp.umn.edu The Gacaca Tribunals in Post-Genocide Rwanda

county, slightly smaller than the state of Maryland. It has a population of 8,440,820, of whom 85 % are from the Hutu ethnic group and 15 % are of Tutsi descent. The country has an agrarian economy and is quite lush and green in the wet season (CIA World Factbook, 2005 & Lonely Planet, 2005). “The name Rwanda once evoked images of the amazing mountain gorillas and breathtaking mountain views, until the country was devastated by bloodshed (Lonely Planet, 2005).” Ethnic tensions between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority go back generations. The Belgian colonizers gave military and administrative power to the Tutsis, enraging the Hutu people (CIA World Factbook, 2005, Dallaire, 2005, & Lonely Planet, 2005). In 1959, a mass murder of Hutu leadership was followed by a massacre of as many as 100,000 Tutsis by Hutus (CIA World Factbook, 2005 & Lonely Planet, 2005). The killings continued on both sides, with thousands of Tutsis fleeing to neighboring countries as refugees. The refugees formed their own militia, called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The RPF came to fight for the Tutsi people from bases in neighboring countries where refugees were stationed and fought on behalf of the Tutsis in a Rwandan civil war than began in 1990 (CIA World Factbook, 2005 & Dallaire, 2005). This led to a genocide that occurred between April and July of 1994, when approximately 800,000 to 1 million Rwandans were killed and between 1.7 million and 2 million people in Rwanda wer