and pretty much any dam-fool thing that came through my head. Manual labor is good that way, especially when conducted in solitary. (Yes, and I sang Kim Jung-il's big song from Team America: World Police. You're lucky you weren't there.) And of course I thought a lot about Rwanda, and about the nuggets I had meant to write in this space and would have, had the press of physical labor (all those boxes of books to heave up and down stairs, talk about the materiality of the signifier!) not crowded out the minimal-impact sport of keyboarding.
The thing I am most curious and unsettled about is one of the things I am least equipped to discuss. I saw one instance of it, fleetingly, from a car window as I was on the way to the airport. Under the early-afternoon sun, an assembly of about sixty people were sitting on the ground and on low benches, and someone was standing up in the middle of the group, speaking. A pale blue, white and gold Rwandan flag flapped on a pole. “Looks like gacaca!” I said (pronounced: ga-tcha-tcha), and everybody, even our hitchhiker, agreed that that's what it was. Not a big deal for them, but a puzzle and an experiment for me.
The gacaca courts are Rwanda's innovation in the grim business-- increasingly necessary, steadily frustrated-- of truth commissions following the kind of human-rights abuses that involve large numbers of people and potentially whole societies. The idea of a crime against humanity is a new one, invented and selectively applied by the victors of World War II, and since then fitfully inscribed in international law. The prosecution of responsible parties for acts of genocide committed in the former Yugoslavia drags on without many victories to cheer about, but the fact that anyone at all has been delivered up to the Hague reposes on agreement by certain parties (the US and the EU principally) that there should be renditions, trials and convictions. A cynic might say: a NATO trial to justify, post hoc, a NATO war. I’m not particularly cynical in this instance, but the International Court is, alas, a sitting duck for cynicism, whether you ask who gets tried there and how, or who isn't and never will be.
Gacaca courts are open-air village trials for people involved in the genocide of 1994. Naturally, no one is quick to admit that they killed their neighbors, or their neighbors’ relatives. But the killing was done at close quarters, mostly with sharp blades and clubs; the killers were proud of themselves at the time; and acquiring and living on the land of those murdered was one of the outcomes, so it hasn’t been easy for perpetrators to escape discovery unless they were so thorough as to utterly annihilate the potential witnesses. Defendants are summoned to hear the testimony of their neighbors and allowed a chance to confess (which brings a reduced sentence). The big perpetrators seem to have escaped abroad (whence they continue to protest their innocence or ignorance) or to have been captured and dealt with, probably brutally, in the months of war following the spree of killing. Gacacas deal with local machete-wielders—who may have dozens of deaths on their consciences. Given the absence of documentation or any other vestige of public order at the time, the proceedings of gacaca tend to involve personal testimony from victims, even second-hand testimony, which has to be ratified by the audience. The courts are directed by justices of the peace with some legal training (the content and sponsorship of this training being one of the questions I’m most interested to follow up on). Gacaca are not empowered to hand down the death penalty or to deal with persons accused of major crimes against humanity.
Because there were so many suspects and such a limited formal court system, the Rwandans had the choice of letting the accused go free (thus no truth, possibly no reconciliation) or setting up a means for aggrieved parties and suspects to confront each other in public and work out whatever truth and reconciliation might be possible. What I find fascinating (and, in another key, perplexing) about the gacaca system is its detachment from the institutions and norms that our better newspapers term “the international community.” In the case of the former Yugoslavia, a piece of “the international community” deputized itself a posse to go after the criminals. In that of South Africa, the truth and reconciliation commissions invoked the “international community” by implication when they were put under the sponsorship of international icons like Bishop Desmond Tutu. (Although apartheid was mainly a home-grown malady, and therefore no topic for an international court, clearing the good name of South Africa required the participation of people who'd earned the good opinion of mankind.) Elsewhere, the mechanisms vary, but a persistent theme is the recovery from national aberration and a return to a world standard of normality. Truth commissions never satisfy everybody, but they are widely recognized as necessary. They're as much ritual as they are legal process, with subtexts of “speak now or forever hold your peace” and “this is as much reparation as you're ever going to get.”
The Rwandans have as firm a right as anyone to be skeptical of the “international community” and its good opinion of itself. Their wars and massacres were fed by the same outside powers that refrained from intervening when intervention would have been helpful. So as far as the “reconciliation” part of the formula goes, a large-scale show trial might have had the effect of victor’s justice, of mere Tutsi revenge. Trials that happen “on the grass” (the etymology of gacaca), outside the international klieg lights, are apt, I imagine, to have more legitimacy for the internal public.
I’m a China guy—somebody whose ideas of an alternative way of doing things tend to run in channels carved by decades of reading and thinking about Chinese history. And when I think about “informal village courts” headed by judges who’ve had a few days of instruction in the business of judging, with crowds of witnesses pointing many fingers at the accused, it’s hard for me not to superimpose on the quiet Rwandan assembly the mad public denunciations and summary executions of the Chinese revolution, the chase after “rightists,” the Cultural Revolution, and all the strange stuff that went on in explicit rejection of international (bourgeois) judicial norms; or the closed trials of people deemed to have plotted against state security in realms not limited to the Middle Kingdom. “Popular justice” doesn’t get three automatic cheers from me.
Another after-effect of years of being a China guy is great suspicion of anyone who comes back after ten days in a country, having “seen the revolution” and ready to tell the world what it’s all about. I don’t think I was sailing on the good ship Potemkin; I imagine I could have stopped the car, walked across the grass and sat down to hear an hour or two of gacaca myself (for all the good that would have done my ignorant mzungu ears). But allowing for all this ignorance and possible lily-gilding: isn’t there something powerful in the idea that people, however poor and illiterate, can sit on the grass together and determine a suspect’s guilt or innocence without having to apply to London or New York? As our international institutions threaten collapse, this isn’t such a bad thought.
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