High_Gravity
Belligerent Drunk
Rwanda genocide trials leave a mixed legacy
Rwanda genocide trials offer a mixed legacy - latimes.com
Reporting from Kigali, Rwanda Issa Munyangaju is willing to tell his story, but he requires a beer. He sips a Primus in a dim concrete bar and talks about the houseboy he shot during the genocide.
They were friends, he says, until they came to a roadblock manned by Hutu militiamen. They gave Munyangaju, also Hutu, a gun. They told him he would be killed if he didn't execute his friend, whose ethnic group, the Tutsis, had been targeted for extermination.
"I followed their orders," Munyangaju, 44, says. He put a bullet in the young man's stomach, and was within earshot when another shot finished him off.
While he was in prison, government officials visited to tout the benefits of confessing at a type of trial known as gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha), a radical experiment in community justice. Gacaca translates from the Kinyarwanda tongue as "justice on the grass," and many such trials played out on fields, atop hills and under trees. There were no lawyers, and instead of professional judges, panels of elders determined guilt or innocence.
Munyangaju says his confession at his gacaca reduced his prison time from 30 years to 10 and helped ease the burden of his guilt. "Now I can go to heaven," he says.
The ethnic massacres claimed more than 800,000 Tutsis and their perceived allies in 1994. When the trials began eight years later, Rwanda's government argued that the gacaca process would not only relieve prisons bursting with genocide suspects, but would accelerate cases that might take decades to unfold in conventional courts hobbled by the slaughter of much of the trained judiciary.
Survivors would learn who killed their loved ones and where to find the bodies. Killers who confessed would receive reduced sentences and the chance to reenter society. Ultimately, it was hoped, there would be reconciliation.
But as the courts hear the last of more than 1 million cases, the trials' legacy is sharply contested. In a recent report titled "Justice Compromised," advocacy group Human Rights Watch contends that the process has been used to settle personal beefs, as well as to silence journalists, activists and outspoken officials.
The report says the courts have ignored widespread killings attributed to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the party that halted the genocide and now runs the country.
The report also cites the lack of "fair trial rights" for the accused, such as access to lawyers, and decries poorly trained volunteer judges, unencumbered by evidentiary rules, who sometimes rely heavily on hearsay.
Munyangaju says that upon his release from prison, he found that his wife had been impregnated by another man, and in revenge he implicated the man in genocide-related attacks. Later, he says, he admitted that he had lied.
Now he sits on a plastic chair by the road and repairs shoes, earning barely enough to support his wife and two children. His house is crumbling. He tried to breed goats, but someone killed them, and now he is suspicious of his neighbors. Maybe someone from a survivor's family did it; he can't be sure.
"I don't know who killed my goats," he says. "That person can come kill me. I think everyone might be the one who killed my goats."
The genocide began in April 1994, when Hutu extremists seized on the killing of Rwanda's president to unleash soldiers, militias and the Hutu people against the minority Tutsis.
Radios blared orders to exterminate Tutsis like cockroaches; an estimated three-fourths of the Tutsi population was massacred. Yet it has been Hutus, the country's majority ethnic group, who often sit in judgment of other Hutus in gacaca court.
Rwanda genocide trials offer a mixed legacy - latimes.com