NationStates Jolt Archive

This is absolutely incredible. I wonder if they need to hire Judge Judy or Wapner?




One million Rwandans to face killing charges in village courts

Andrew Meldrum in Pretoria
Saturday January 15, 2005
The Guardian

One million Rwandans - an eighth of the country's population - are expected to be tried for alleged participation in the 1994 genocide, an official said yesterday.

Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, executive secretary of the National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions, said the trials, which will be conducted in traditional gacaca village courts, could start next month in a few areas but they will not get under way throughout the country until 2006.

"Drawing from the experience and figures accruing from the pilot trials, we estimate a figure slightly above one million people that are supposed to be tried under the gacaca courts," Ms Mukantaganzwa told Reuters in Kigali.

The new estimate of one million indicates the vast scale of the task of bringing to justice those suspected of participating in the killings of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus massacred in Rwanda between April and June 1994.

The traditional courts are preparing to hear accusations against hundreds of thousands of people who are currently living freely, often beside neighbours whose relatives they are suspected of killing.

The gacaca courts are a modernised version of traditional Rwandan justice.

They were launched in 2002 on a trial basis to try to speed up the ponderous pace of the genocide trials in the conventional courts. Nearly 11 years after the killings, there is a huge backlog of suspects awaiting trial in conventional courts.

There are 80,000 people languishing in jail and it is believed many could die before their cases are heard at the current slow pace. It is expected many of these cases will be transferred to the gacaca courts.

Those deemed to be ringleaders of the killings are to be tried by the conventional courts, while those suspected of lesser crimes will be sent to the gacaca courts.

Focusing on confession and apology, the gacaca courts are also intended to ease the way to national reconciliation. Under the gacaca system, those who admit guilt before a set date will receive reduced sentences.

Gacaca means grass and it refers to the rural conflict resolution system used by village communities which would gather on a patch of grass to resolve arguments between two families, employing the heads of each household as judges.

It is hoped the new gacaca will help Rwanda to reduce ethnic tensions. But Amnesty International has warned that the "gacaca may become a vehicle for summary and arbitrary justice that fails defendants and genocide survivors alike".

Over the past two years, the first 751 village courts have questioned thousands of suspects to judge whether they have a case to answer, and trials should start next month.

On Monday the number of courts will be greatly increased to 8,262, and the investigative process will begin.

The gacaca courts will be a world apart from the robed lawyers and air-conditioned hallways of the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda in the northern Tanzanian town of Arusha.

In the 10 years since it was set up to try the masterminds of the genocide, the tribunal has indicted 81 people for genocide-related crimes.

Twenty people have been convicted and three have been acquitted.

Better than just letting everyone go and pretending nothing happened.

I almost want to laugh at the absurdity of trying that many people but then I step back and say "No. On some level it needs to happen."

Damn right it needs to happen. I remember seeing some documentary footage of what was happening over there and it was stomach-wrenching. The audio was pretty much the crew retching and saying "Why are you taping this? Nobody will play it." and someone else (the reporter? - also retching) answering that it had to be documented, no matter how bad it was. That somebody had to bear witness. There was footage of people laying in the street, still alive but only able to twitch. I saw one woman being casually hacked up in front of the camera. When she was left, she was still alive, but one arm, both her breasts and half of her face/scalp were either gone or hanging by flaps of skin. The people doing this did not give a stuff about being caught or the fact that these were people before they'd been chopped up. There were piles of unrecognisable body parts and a church full of dismembered people with a mound of decapitated children in front of the altar. It was (and still is) the most horrifying and disturbing piece of journalism I have experienced.

All of this in about 5 minutes (I kid you not) of news report on SBS. :(

Yeah I am not sure what you are outraged about this time Johnny. Nearly a million people were hacked to death by machetes. Most of the nastiest culprits have already been tried by the UN special war crimes tribunal for Rwanda so I would guess what they are really looking for is mostly for people to apologize. Probably some innocent people will end up in jail, but if thats the worst thing that happens to Rwanda in the next few years they will be lucky.

The problem is that we did not prosecute every soldier that participated in any war previously. Calling it genocide, rather than war, creates the emotional grounds for this kind of action. It does create a precedent for future actions. Will every US soldier who took part in the Iraq intervention be prosecuted for murder? Will we retroactively prosecute just about everyone living in the Balkans. Or any german born before or in 1921. etc.

I am not saying that this form of tribal warfare, with its excessive bloodshed, would or should be acceptable to Western society, but it is traditional and normal in sub saharan africa. It appears that some corruption of their system by ours has occurred for these prosecutions to even take place.

Yeah I am not sure what you are outraged about this time Johnny. Nearly a million people were hacked to death by machetes. Most of the nastiest culprits have already been tried by the UN special war crimes tribunal for Rwanda so I would guess what they are really looking for is mostly for people to apologize. Probably some innocent people will end up in jail, but if thats the worst thing that happens to Rwanda in the next few years they will be lucky.


Not really outraged at all. I could honestly care less if a million Africans' are hacking each other to death. I was just amazed at the amount of people who are going to be on trial. 1/8th of the pop is a huge amount.

Another question is: What the heck are they going to do if they have hundreds of thousands of guilty people?

If you just want the point, and no context, go to the bolded parts. The rest is included for the pun about the womb and the fact that I like the story.

Robin laughed richly. "Dr. Fels was guarding the youn Dr. Pellegrinin against evil influences," he said through his laughter, "and I caught him at it."

"Evil - what are you talking about?" asked Binnie Morrow.

Robing said patiently, "do you remember what Fels said a while back - that the business of psychiatry is to mature its patients? He's right, you know. A Psychiatrist regards emotional balance and maturity as almost the same thing. And a patient who has achieved that kind of balance is one whose inner conflicts are under control. These inner conflicts aren't just born into a person. A clubfoot or a blind eye or a yearning for the a womb with a view produce no conflicts Except in terms of other people; the thing called society. So-" he spread his heavy hands- "what modern psychiatry strives to do is to is to mature its patients, not in ontogenetic terms, not on an individualized psychosomatic basis, but purely and necessarily in terms of society, which is itself illogical, unfunctional, and immature."

"That makes sense," said Corlandt. "Society as a whole gets away with things which are prohibited in any well-run kindergarten, in the violence, greed, injustice, and stupidity departments. We have to wear clothes when the weather's too hot for it; we have to wear the wrong kind of clothes when the weather's too cold. We can be excused of any crime if we do it on a large enough scale. We- but why go on? What was Fels protecting Pellegrini from?"

"Any further consideration of maturity in terms of the individual, completely disregarding society. When we started to consider the end-product, the extrapolated curve on the graph, we were considering an end which negates everything that modern psychiatryis and is trying to do. So Fels called it fantasy and cleared out."


Collected in Thunder and Roses the fourth released volume of a complete anthology of Sturgeon's work.


This million-man trial is part of why the above is true- If enough people are doing something deviant, then you either accept it until you have enough people to actually do something about it, or you're a nutcase who should be cleared away. While what's being done now seems rediculous, there's no doubt that it's the right thing to do.

I forgot the rest of my points because I accidentally started reading from that book again, and it has consumed much concentration. I'll return in about 300 pages.