Gacaca courts begin operating nationwide

Rwanda's Gacaca courts, a communal judicial system that hopes to aid reconciliation and speed up the trials of some 115,000 detainees accused of participation in the 1994 genocide, began operating nationwide on Monday.

The courts allow victims and witnesses at village level to give evidence against the accused publicly while a panel of 19 elected "judges", or respected members of each community, evaluate the evidence and hand down judgments. If the accused confess to their crimes, their prison sentences are reduced significantly.

Many of the accused who have already served at least seven years in prison for minor crimes, or were falsely accused in the chaos that followed the genocide, will be released immediately after their trial.

"Conditions in prisons are not the best. If you tell the truth you can go free," said John Nkubana, who works for the Rwandan Ministry of Justice to sensitize people to Gacaca law around the capital, Kigali.

Similarly a Gacaca court will sentence others who have escaped prison for the last eight years for the first time.

Meanwhile victims are to receive material compensation for their losses, from both the accused and a government fund that receives 5 percent of the national budget, Nkubana added.

Consolata Mukanyiligira, coordinator with the Association of Genocide Widows, Avega, told IRIN that in the context of Gacaca, Rwandans were mainly concerned with finding who killed their loved-ones and where they were buried, so they could lay them to rest "with dignity". After that, she said, "We are obliged to reconcile, because we are neighbours."

The pilot Gacaca trials that ran from June to October had gone "very well", Deogratias Kayumba, of the National Human Rights Commission, told IRIN but added that there were flaws in the system. These included cases of people being paid to desist from giving evidence, threats against those giving evidence, and politicians in some rural areas advising people to keep quiet. Other complaints had been made about people failing to participate in the courts, and a lack of sensitization beforehand, said Mukanyiligira.

The next seven weeks will see each village-court in Rwanda collecting final lists of vital evidence including those killed, registrations for compensation, and lists of the accused and their crimes, after which Rwanda's overcrowded prisons will release the accused to be judged among their own.

An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed during the 1994 genocide.