Rwandan Public
Participating
in Gacaca Court Session
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Multimedia
Presentation: "Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation" Photographs from Rwanda by
Stephanie Cheng
GACACA
For 100 days from April to July, approximately 800,000 Rwandans
were massacred with machetes, spears, and small tools. Inundated
with an aura of distrust toward the government and its neighbors,
Hutus and Tutsis, a people who shared the same values, languages
and belief system, stood divided in the aftermath of the genocide.
In an attempt to assuage a culture of impunity and rebuild a war
torn country, the system of Gacaca was proposed in 1999, and officially
carried out across 11,000 jurisdictions in March 2005.
Currently, Gacaca tries category two and category three crimes,
encompassing accomplices and killers, and those who created property
damages in the 1994 genocides, respectively. Category one crimes
prosecute the masterminds of the genocides, which fall under the
jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunals of Rwanda
(ICTR), located in Arusha, Tanzania.
KEEPERS
Rwanda today is forward looking country. The city is vibrant and
so full of life that someone visiting for the first time may not
believe that the 1994 genocides actually took place. Probing a
little deeper, however, is a country filled with survivors and
individuals, each with their own palpable stories and experiences
of what happened during those very frightening 100 days.
The survivors and keepers of the Murambi and Ntarama genocide
sites are just some of the examples of the resilience and strength
of the people who live and cope with the reality of their lost
loved ones everyday.
-Stephanie Cheng
Reports
and Papers: "Gacaca
Courts in Post-Genocide Rwanda" Radha Webley, Researcher
The
word "gacaca" is derived from the Kinyarwanda word for
"lawn" or "grass," its etymology thus betraying
the origins of the gacaca system as a community-based model of
conflict resolution, originally used within local Rwandan communities
as an informal means of resolving disputes around issues such
as land rights, theft, marital issues, and property damage. In
their current form, however, although the gacaca courts still
quite literally take place "on the grass" of communities
across Rwanda, the gacaca system currently being implemented in
this small country is a combination both of this traditional participatory
model and of classical legal precepts...more
Full
Report by Radha Webley PDF (large document containing 164 pages)
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