The Rwandan genocide continues to trigger controversy. While the academic tide has turned against President Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front, Clark's book is a welcome nuanced contribution to Rwandan and transitional justice scholarship. Rejecting both the unconditional embrace of the RPF and the criticism of Kagame's doctrinal detractors, he examines the findings of years of interviews with participants in the grassroots trials that deal with alleged crimes of all but the most senior politico-military officials responsible for the 1994 tragedy.
The most important argument put forward is undoubtedly that gacaca is a dynamic, living institution, neither fully indigenous justice, nor a simplistic top-down indoctrination campaign by the Rwandan state. Gacaca should be understood as an endogenous attempt to reconcile different, not always compatible goals; in its formal set-up and in its daily practice, gacaca is a compromise, the outcome of different interests and interpretations of post-genocide justice advocated by victims, perpetrators, the government and the international community. Clark's analysis of the arduous negotiations that led to the establishment of gacaca illustrates this well, with several RPF factions losing out and Kagame himself grudgingly agreeing with those who counselled against classical trials and executions of perpetrators. Gacaca is deeply political, but not necessarily in straightforward ways. The case study of its establishment as a hybrid form of justice shows the deeply fragmented nature of the RPF and the uneasy mix of emotional, political and economic considerations that ultimately led to the unprecedented suggestion that community courts deal with 120,000 genocide suspects.
Gacaca pursued six profound objectives – truth, peace, justice, healing, forgiveness and reconciliation – and three pragmatic goals – processing the backlog of genocide cases, reducing overpopulation in Rwanda's prisons and stimulating development. This was a hugely ambitious agenda – far more challenging than those set by South Africa's TRC or processes for addressing the crimes committed by Latin American juntas – especially for a state as traumatized as Rwanda. It should come as no surprise that although Rwanda by 2010 has made some progress, many Rwandans and outside observers remain dissatisfied. It is important to underline that the entire process of peace building and reconciliation, spearheaded by gacaca, occurred in a context rendered deeply uncertain by the real threat of a comeback of the FAR/Interahamwe in the 1990s, diaspora influences and the returnees from refugee camps, the wars in Congo, and power struggles within the RPF. Clark takes issue with the legalistic approach of the likes of Human Rights Watch and its narrow, deterrent-oriented take on what post-genocide justice should constitute, virtually ignoring the political context of the transition process. He acknowledges the ‘cacophony of events’ inside and outside the country that have shaped gacaca, for better or for worse.
The book argues for a balanced appraisal of the community courts. It opposes the romanticized Blair-Clinton view of Rwanda as a healed nation, becoming the Singapore of East Africa. Many victims feel that the perpetrators maintain their lies before gacaca and do not regret the atrocities committed. Many suspects complain about the years spent in overcrowded jails, only to be acquitted by gacaca, while numerous judges had to be removed because they themselves were implicated in crimes. Yet gacaca is not a total failure either. Despite the absence of lawyers, it has not turned out to be mob justice, or a pseudo-traditionalist tool to impute collective guilt to the Hutu – the further away the hearings are from Kigali, the less control the RPF seems able to exert. High levels of public deliberation, despite the economic cost for individuals in the Rwandan countryside, are not the product of coercion, but of a genuine (if sometimes unfulfilled) desire for truth and healing. Gacaca is done in very different ways in eastern, southern and central Rwanda – local communities have experimented with their own strategies to meet the objectives. For many people, remembering the murders and rapes is traumatizing, but also a prerequisite for deeper forms of engagement and confrontation, enabling parties to tackle their problems head-on through collective discussions. There are limits to healing and forgiveness, but gacaca has made a profound contribution to negative peace (the absence of further violence) and, in some cases, also to positive peace (more long-term reconfigurations of social relations).
Positive and negative peace ultimately depends on wider questions of impunity, democracy and development in Rwanda. It is encouraging that Clark highlights increased discussion in community hearings of war crimes committed by RPF fighters, another indication that gacaca is not just a Tutsi instrument of control (most judges are actually Hutu, elected by the population). Whereas it is probably too ambitious to hope that gacaca could act as a catalyst for real democracy in Rwanda, its hybridity, contradictions and social experiments are hopeful signs. They represent progress, for both individual victims and perpetrators who engage in substantial truth-telling and healing, but also for the process of bridging the complex political and ethnic cleavages that have torn society apart.
