forums are naturally Rwandan. Challenging the benign cultural framing of harmony legal models in Rwanda is vital, especially given the growing acknowledgment that the Rwandan government is increasingly authoritarian, manipulates identity politics, and uses law and “lawfare, the effort to conquer and control … by the coercive use of legal means” (Comaroff 2001:306) selectively as another strategy to consolidate the ruling elites’ power and suppress dissent (e.g., Chakravarty 2015; Hintjens 2008; Longman 2010b; Morrill 2006; Reyntjens 2005; Straus and Waldorf 2011).
Indeed, while the postgenocide Rwandan government claimed to promote a unified national identity that superseded ethnic divisions and officially banned ethnicity, its official history erased reference to deep structures of political economic exclusion and exploitation, and actually reinscribed division by defining citizenship categories in relation to the genocide: Hutu were génocidaires, Tutsi were victims (see Chapter 1).25 Other hierarchies of power and inequality existed across dimensions of gender, class, age, or region. Further, national unity was promoted alongside the implementation of increasingly repressive laws that proscribed ethnic labels and criminalized “divisionism,” “revisionism,” or “genocide ideology,” anything seen as “marginalizing … degrading … [or] stirring up ill feelings” (Law N.18/2008 of 23/07/2008, Article 3). These laws served to reduce political dissent, especially when coupled with ongoing detentions, and state-backed violence at home and in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (Thomson 2011c:442; Waldorf 2011:49).
I suggest that the cultural justification for harmony was an effort to insulate against international critique of, and interference in, Rwandan governance. For Rwandan leaders to claim they could rebuild Rwanda based on their own rather than foreign cultural principles served to protect against persistent allegations that domestic legal forums did not meet international legal and human rights standards (e.g., Amnesty International 2002; Penal Reform International 2004). This echoes how cultural justification for customary law was used in many contexts in Africa both to insulate institutions from colonial interference and to support nationalism at Independence (Chanock 1985:24; Colson 1974:77–78). It parallels Nader’s argument (1990a) that harmony can be a counter-hegemonic strategy, though in Rwanda the move appears directed not at colonial leaders or state law but at the hegemony of international regimes of law and human rights.
What was particularly problematic, I suggest, was the cultural justification for unity itself. Given that mediation was presented as a practice natural to all Rwandans, to reject overtures to “be mediated” or “reconciled” was to reject the unity of all Rwandans, and even to reject shared citizenship and the legitimacy of the state. By a decade after the genocide, many scholars argued that Rwandans “rehearsed consensus” (Ingelaere 2010a:53) or “pretended peace” (Buckley-Zistel 2009), which papered over much deeper divisions (Thomson 2013). This is consistent with Nader’s caution that harmony ideology “may be used to suppress people’s resistance, by socializing them towards conformity by means of consensus-building mechanisms, by valorizing consensus, cooperation, passivity, and docility, and by silencing people who speak out angrily” (Mattei and Nader 2008:77).26 Recent research underscores how most Hutu who had been in Rwanda during the genocide felt that strident resistance to gacaca risked conveying criminally divisive intentions.27 Many Hutu men and women described to me confessing and requesting forgiveness under duress, fearing that not to do so would invite arbitrary accusations, false convictions, and heavy sentences, as well as other social sanctions. For example, as Alphonse returned home from prison after his gacaca trial and took on the role of model reformed perpetrator, he furtively told me that he remained cautious in what he said and did, under watchful eyes. Similarly, victims often described feeling pressured—by defendants, by inyangamugayo, by pastors, by neighbors—to forgive perpetrators or to accept less than they were due in property cases, for the benefit of community and country. The coercive potential of harmony in gacaca was particularly strong, perhaps inescapable, because of how tightly it linked unity principles to state punishment. People were essentially told to forgive and reconcile with a thinly veiled “or else”: risk state-backed punishment as someone who did not value unity, and who therefore probably embraced divisionism as a propagator of genocide ideology and an enemy of other Rwandans and the state.
A growing anthropology of transitional justice has similarly shown how coercion and silencing are core elements of many truth and reconciliation commissions, in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Wilson has argued that the South African TRC’s invocation of ubuntu could “coerce individuals into compliant positions that they would not adopt of their own volition” (2003:189), and Ross (2003) has shown how despite its purported attempts to give voice to victims, the TRC silenced and depoliticized women in particular through its narrow institutionalized definitions of violence. Shaw (2005) and Kelsall (2005) similarly showed how Sierra Leone’s TRC, while ostensibly more attuned to people’s needs than the United Nations–backed Special Court of Sierra Leone, overwrote cultural practices of forgetting through the Judeo-Christian valorization of talk, which rendered the TRC at worst coercive, at best irrelevant. Abramowitz has argued that the Liberian TRC “served to close doors for personal expressions of grief and memory” (Abramowitz 2014:209). Theidon has similarly illustrated how the “victim-centered” approach of the Peruvian truth commission inadvertently created “resentful silences” (Theidon 2010:110) and “systematic distortions” (Theidon 2012:28) that flatten and depoliticize people’s stories. Ethnographic work in other contexts in sub-Saharan Africa has shown how local practices to cope with the past and reintegrate ex-combatants get overlooked, distorted, or erased by a focus on the standard transitional justice toolkit, as in Angola and Mozambique (Honwana 2005; Irega and Dias-Lambranca 2008), Uganda (Allen 2008; Finnstrom 2010), and Burundi (Nee and Uvin 2010).
Overall, Rwanda’s harmony legal models located the solution to the genocide in interpersonal relations, not in structural and political or economic changes.28 In the aggregate, gacaca courts, comite y’abunzi, and the legal aid clinic excluded most Rwandans from having access to Western-style courts, lawyers, and professional judges. Though the harmony legal models were framed as beneficial to reduce unnecessary conflict and promote unity, they meant that in practice governing authorities attempted to impose resocialization through harmony principles on mostly rural, typically poor, and less educated Hutu and Tutsi survivors, thus reinforcing a divide between elites and nonelites, urban and rural. With less economic, social, and cultural capital to negotiate postgenocide Rwanda’s multifaceted and shifting legal terrain, these people typically had little option other than to comply with mediated solutions. Women often had even fewer options, or felt the brunt of mandatory unity principles more strongly, as I illustrate across the later chapters. These effects are consistent with how Nader has extensively argued that the focus of harmony models on relationships over root causes ignores political economy and deflects cases away from the courts that threaten to challenge the status quo, thus serving as an antilegal movement restricting certain people’s access to justice (Mattei and Nader 2008:18; Nader 1988:280, 1999b:107, 2002a:53) and serving as a tool of “pacification and control” (Nader 1999a:305, 2002b:37, 42).
My analysis here is consistent with Juan Obarrio’s recent book describing similar exclusionary dimensions of the “spirit of the laws” in postwar Mozambique, though with an important distinction: by illustrating how these dynamics are not isolated to legal forums framed as customary law (such as gacaca courts and comite y’abunzi) but are also found within a legal aid clinic rooted in Western-style law, I suggest we identify it as mediation-based citizenship rather than “customary citizenship” (Obarrio 2014:109). Obarrio argued that in Mozambique, “While a small minority of the population had access to the mechanisms of the urban official judiciary, the vast majority of the population in rural and periurban areas was both included and excluded from national citizenship, through the enactment of localized forms of rights, which blended official state and customary norms” (Obarrio 2014:174–175). He names this effect “customary citizenship,” which “articulate[es] elements of official law, custom, and kinship” where “acquiescence to official law is filtered through ‘traditional’ norms and the subjection to the authority of customary chieftaincy” (2014:109).
