the violence abated, victims, perpetrators, bystanders, their families, and the recently returned diaspora population have lived side by side across the country’s tightly packed hillsides.
In the mid-1990s, as bodies lay unburied, and refugees streamed out of Rwanda fleeing retaliatory violence, equal numbers crossed into Rwanda after years in exile. These diaspora people replaced, and eventually exceeded, the dead. Within little more than a decade later, this cosmopolitan mixture of people mingled in markets and manually tilled their adjacent fields, they rode pressed hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder in minibus taxis, and their children sat together in schoolrooms. Reports and documents produced by the Rwandan government and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) commonly diagnosed postgenocide Rwanda as suffering from a “devastated” social fabric among these people, including the “destruction of family bonds” (Biruta 2006:155; Ministry of Finance 2000; Ndangiza 2007).
In an effort to create a break from the past, and consolidate power, the Rwandan government focused on reconciliation as the foundation of its governance strategies to restore peace and rebuild a prosperous nation-state. In 1999 the government established a National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, which worked at the national level in collaboration with ongoing government programs, as well as at the grassroots level educating the population.3 The purported goal was to “bridge the deep rifts in society and heal the wounds inflicted by the genocide,” creating cohesion out of division and exclusion (Ndangiza 2007:1). In that vein, Rwanda’s new 2003 constitution underscored the importance of “eradicat[ing] ethnic, regional and any other form of divisions,” “emphasizing the necessity to strengthen and promote national unity and reconciliation,” and recognizing that “peace and unity of Rwandans constitute the essential basis for national economic development and social progress” (2003: Preamble, Articles 2, 4, 5). National unity was justified on the basis that, as the constitution enumerated, “we enjoy the privilege of having one country, a common language, a common culture, and a long shared history which ought to lead to a common vision of our destiny” (2003: Article 7). The public reconciliation discourse was ubiquitous, from political speeches to NGO conferences to sporting and music events, and was taught in schools (King 2014) and solidarity camps (Thomson 2011b).4 Rwanda’s policy of unity and reconciliation formed what Sharon Abramowitz (2014) has described in Liberia as a “total environment of post-conflict transformation,” and it was emblematic of how peace building and reconciliation emerged as global master narratives of the late twentieth century (Nader 1999a:304, 2002b:38; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004).
Grassroots legal forums in Rwanda were a central site for promoting national unity and restoring the social fabric. Specifically, Rwandan government authorities identified local mediation-based courts as an antidote for the divisive politicized understandings of ethnicity at the heart of the genocide ideology. As the president Pasteur Bizimungu explained in 1999, law was intended not just to punish or to make people “be afraid” of committing a crime but rather to change the “bad ideology” that caused the divisive violence and to rebuild the nation (Bizimungu 1999:6). These forums were designed to create the rules, values, and norms among the participants that would “become the basis of collaboration and unity”5—since, as anthropologist Danielle de Lame wrote in 1996, “the old representations that unified Rwandan culture have become meaningless” in the wake of such catastrophic violence and displacement (2005:491). As one Rwandan legal administrator explained to me in 2008, “It would be better for the country if people could change their mindset to accept solutions built on unity and compromise rather than litigation.” The government justified the principles of unity and compromise at the heart of Rwanda’s mediation-based forums as deriving from the shared historical-cultural Rwandan identity undergirding the policy of national unity and reconciliation.
Using law to bridge divides from the past was perhaps most notable in the creation of the now widely known gacaca courts (inkiko gacaca), community courts in which suspects of the 1994 genocide were tried among their neighbors before locally elected judges. I sat through one such trial with a few hundred people on a rural hillside in southern Rwanda in December 2007. The defendant, a man I call Alphonse who had been incarcerated since 1995, was a fifty-five-year-old widower with six children, educated through primary school, and recently converted to the Seventh Day Adventist Church. During his trial for acts allegedly committed thirteen years earlier, Alphonse had apologized for his role in several murders, confessing in detail by providing names of co-perpetrators and describing how and where several specific victims were killed. The eighteen witnesses and victims who testified claimed to forgive him despite the severity of his crimes, and many even spoke positively about ways he had helped some people.
In the closing moments of his trial, Alphonse knelt before the five judges, his bare knees pressing into the packed dirt. He clasped his hands behind his back and bowed his head toward his chest, choking back tears as he asked forgiveness of the judges, his neighbors, and all Rwandans. As Alphonse stood to take his seat on a low bench at the base of the tree under which his trial had taken place, he drew a tissue from his jacket pocket and wiped his eyes. The prisoners on either side of him shifted uncomfortably, and looked away.
The judges rewarded Alphonse’s rather dramatic performance by, after deliberating, reducing his sentence based on his confession, which allowed him to return home within weeks to live among the people who had attended his trial. Over the next six months, I saw him regularly around town, chatting with former prisoners as well as genocide survivors, listening to the radio or having a beer with other men. In subsequent trials in the following months, the judges repeatedly invoked Alphonse’s name as a model for other defendants to follow. He testified regularly from the general assembly, sometimes confirming defendants’ versions of events, other times refuting them. Five months after his trial, Alphonse described what it was like returning home:
People reacted better than I expected them to. When I was first released, I thought some people would not talk to me, I thought I would have to isolate myself, that there would be places I could not go, people I could not embrace. I came and stayed at my house for two weeks. When my children would talk, I would caution them to keep their voices low. I would even draw the curtains and keep the radio volume low, so no one would know I was home. Then people came to visit, making noise and singing. They asked me why I wasn’t coming out, and told me not to be afraid, to come and join the others. It’s good so far.6
Alphonse’s case stood out as a particularly dramatic example of how gacaca was intended to address the seemingly intractable problem of restoring the social fabric devastated by the violence of the early 1990s. Rwanda’s gacaca courts, created by national law in 2001, were designed, according to government sensitization propaganda, to “allow the population of the same Cell, the same Sector to work together” and therefore for gacaca to “become the basis of collaboration and unity.”7 Ostensibly, the courts were intended to provide a process to facilitate the reintegration of perpetrators into quotidian life, out of prison. Suspects were tried publicly onsite at the location of their alleged crimes, by a panel of locally elected judges called inyangamugayo (Kinyarwanda for “people of integrity”). Mandatory participation and the deliberate avoidance of lawyers or professional jurists were intended, at least in theory, to enable all Rwandans to participate actively as witnesses, prosecutors, and defenders with limited hierarchy. The gacaca process hinged on mediating compromises prioritizing the collective over the individual good: as Alphonse’s case demonstrated, defendants received reduced penalty for confessions, and victims forwent demands for harsher punishment in return for information about their loved ones. At the same time, the gacaca process established criminal accountability for genocide, including fines and prison sentences of up to thirty years. The inyangamugayo, backed by police, armed prison guards, and even soldiers, could issue subpoenas and could bring charges against case participants for refusing to testify, for perjury, or for blackmail (Organic Law N.16/2004, Articles 29, 30).
This emphasis on collaborative, unity-based justice in Rwanda was not limited to genocide crimes. In the days and weeks around Alphonse’s trial, I sat on the same hillside as people brought cases before newly implemented mediation
