Gacaca courts get under way

Thousands of people gathered this week across Rwanda to participate in Gacaca court sessions, which had their official launch on 18 June.

Gacaca is a form of participative popular justice at the village level that will allow Rwandans to bring to trial those accused of participation in the 1994 genocide.

Over 250,000 judges, elected by their own communities on the basis of their "integrity", will hear the cases of the 115,000-prison detainees accused of genocide-related crimes. Each detainee will be brought back to the scene of the alleged crime, and local residents who witnessed the events will be invited to make accusations, or defend the person, in order to reveal "the truth" about what happened.

In Kibuye Prefecture, western Rwanda, more than 1,000 people gathered on Wednesday at a hill in Cyambogo cellule in Nyange District, where a 19-member Gacaca panel of judges sat, Internews reported. The first phase of the process would be to compile a list of those killed during the genocide, and then to listen to confessions of people who committed crimes, but were not in prison, a local judge said. The prisoners would be brought when the lists of victims were complete, she said.

Proceedings opened at one court session with a woman accusing one of the judges of having committed rape during the genocide. The woman stunned the crowd, Internews reported, when she accused the man of having chased away his wife, and then forcing a 17-year-old girl who had sought refuge in his house to marry him. "He raped the girl and then stayed with her by force during the war," she said.

"Every time we are in a bar, my friends always ask you what happened to the clothes full of blood that you were washing at the well," she said.

Another woman said she had heard the rape victim saying the judge cut her thigh with a machete when she had refused to sleep with him. The judge in question told Internews after the proceedings: "I am so optimistic about Gacaca, because people are saying the truth. What they said about me is true, but she agreed to live with me. And the court should look for her in order to get her to testify."

The president of the Cyambogo Gacaca panel, in Kibuye Prefecture, told Internews that Gacaca law stipulated that if a judge was found responsible for a massacre, the rest of the judges had to study the case in isolation and come up with a solution.

Another woman in Kibuye accused a man named Masekurume - now in prison - of being responsible for her husband's disappearance. "He took my husband, I never saw him again," she told the crowd. The accused's wife turned out to be one of the judges on the panel, Internews reported.

In a statement released on 19 June, the advocacy group Amnesty International said the general consensus among Rwandese government leaders and the international community funding the system was that Gacaca was flawed, but that there was no alternative. But the rights group underlined its concerns about the "fairness" of the trials, stating that Gacaca legislation failed to incorporate international standards guaranteeing a fair trial, and that for the most part the Gacaca judges had no legal or human rights background.

"The abbreviated training they have received is grossly inadequate to the task at hand, given the complex nature and context of the crimes committed during the genocide, Amnesty said. "Pre-Gacaca trial sessions observed by Amnesty International delegates in 2001 were marked by intimidation and haranguing by officials of defendants, defence witnesses and local populations."