Gacaca: A Flawed Project and the Hope for Transitional Justice

In 2000 an ambitious new process of transitional justice was launched in Rwanda as a way to adjudicate crimes related to the genocide of 1994 at a local level. It took the name gacaca from the traditional village courts on which it was based and between 2006-2010, almost one million cases were heard at gacaca courts throughout the country. Each court was led by a council of elected “people of integrity ” and it considered a range of crimes, from thefts to murder, connected to the genocide; it also required the participation of all residents who, using informal language, voiced accusations, defended themselves, and served as witnesses. Gacaca was ambitious not just in scope, but also in the expectation that an informal process without the mediation of the legal experts could lead to outcomes perceived as legitimate both inside and outside of Rwanda. Now, after the conclusion of gacaca, the evaluations of its success are harsh and focus on the ways it failed to adequately punish perpetrators and became a tool of increasingly authoritarian propaganda about a unified Rwanda. While the critiques are well founded, I suggest that there are promising lessons from gacaca that are being overlooked in the scholarship and can be applied to other institutions of transitional justice. I will argue that in its ideal conception the process of gacaca was a productive response to two of the biggest challenges that face scholars of transitional justice. The first is the question of how to balance the needs of punishment with the challenge of strengthening the various relationships affected by the crime—this is the tension between retributive and restorative justice— and the second is the question of how to provide a direct link between the work done during transitional justice and the possibility for cooperation and new alliances in the period that follows