Berkley Center

My last post detailed how the Catholic Church was a site of mass killings, and an institution that fueled the tensions that led to the genocide by politicizing ethnicity as a means of accessing educational and economic opportunities. However, as Kera pointed out in her comment, this was an abuse by the institution of religion. In modern Rwanda, the Church and faith play an integral role in the reconciliation process.

After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda was a failed state. Its population had been decimated. Four million had fled as refugees to neighboring states in fear of revenge killings. Greater than 120,000 were detained for genocide crimes in prisons designed to hold 45,000 inmates. Processing these cases proved to be incredibly difficult, given that most institutions, including courts, had been destroyed in the conflict. In 1996, Rwanda began to process these cases using a classical justice system within specialized chambers of civilian and military courts. However, only 6,000 cases were processed within five years, which means that it would have taken over 100 years to process all outstanding cases.

This forced the state to invent a homegrown solution, which led to the creation of gacaca courts in 1998 to reveal the truth of genocide events, speed up genocide trials, eradicate the culture of impunity, and demonstrate Rwanda’s ability to solve its own problems. These community courts can hear 75,000 cases a year. However, the core mission of the 9,000 gacaca courts was to reconcile and strengthen unity among Rwandans.

Gacaca is a type of restorative justice, meaning that parties discuss to establish what should be done to repair harm. Additionally, the emphasis is on empowering individual citizens, on sentencing to make amends in a way that directly benefits the harmed as opposed to stigmatizing and punishing the perpetrator, on victims’ needs, and on strengthening and repairing relationships between people. In order to embrace the restorative principles of encounter, repair, and transformation, the perpetrator must feel remorse and be willing to ask forgiveness, and the victim must feel empathy and be willing to grant forgiveness.

To encourage confessions, perpetrators who confess receive shorter sentences and the opportunity to reengage with their community through an intensive community service program (travaille pour l’interet general – TIG). A confession requires full disclosure of crimes committed, naming of accomplices, and an apology to the victims. However, these apologies would be empty without genuine forgiveness on the part of the victim.

There are three main types of victims in any conflict: primary, secondary, and tertiary victims. Primary victims are directly affected by the crime. Most of the primary victims in Rwanda, however, are dead. Secondary victims are closely related to the primary victim and have been indirectly personally affected, family members and spouses being the most obvious examples. Tertiary victims are groups indirectly affected by the crime, such as fellow community members. Of the secondary victims who I spoke with who had received a confession at gacaca, publicly granted forgiveness, and privately felt that this forgiveness was genuine, all said that their faith was a major motivator and solace in this forgiveness. They saw it as their Christian duty to forgive.

To move forward in peace, Rwanda cannot perpetuate its tradition of politicized ethnic divisions. They must find a way to identify foremost at Rwandans and forgive the crimes and systemic marginalization that has plagued their past. They must continue to seek and grant forgiveness, and it is incredibly encouraging to learn that faith is helping both those who have sinned and those who have suffered seek peace.