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Rwanda: "Peace Cannot Stay in Small Places"
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Dec 21, 2005 (051221)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"Peace cannot stay in small places," said Ndagijimama Abdon, an
elder Gacaca judge in Gisenyi, "it is good when peace reaches
everywhere." The Alternatives to Violence project of the Rwanda
Friends Peace House focuses on workshops for judges in the local
Gacaca process dealing with lower-level genocide perpetrators.
One key issue, as this participant told evaluators, is how such
small-scale projects can have a wider impact.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from an evaluation
report from the project, published on the web site of the African
Great Lakes Initiative, one of the co-sponsors (http://www.aglionline.org).
Another Bulletin sent out today contains a short summary of the
Gift for Life program, which supports rape survivors in Rwanda, and
excerpts from a 2004 report by African Rights based on interviews
with over 200 rape survivors. The report, published on the web site
of the UK-based SURF Survivors Fund (http://www.survivors-fund.org.uk)
also contains background on Rwandan women's organizations working
on this and related issues.
For earlier AfricaFocus Bulletins and links on Rwanda, see
http://www.africafocus.org/country/rwanda.php
Note: Today's two issues of AfricaFocus Bulletin are the last for
2005. My best wishes to readers for the holidays and for our
common work and concerns for Africa as we enter the new year.
Publication will resume in the second half of January.
Thanks to all of you who have supported AfricaFocus Bulletin this
year. Your support will continue to be needed in 2006. To make a
voluntary subscription payment, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/support.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
Peace Can Not Stay in Small Places
Lessons From Alternatives to Violence Workshops with Gacaca Judges
May 2004 - March 2005
By Laura Shipler Chico and Uwimana Marie Paule
A joint report from the Friends Peace House (FPH) and African Great
Lakes Initiative (AGLI)
For further information about FPH, please contact David Bucura at
[email protected] or 250 08 520862
For further information about AGLI, please contact David Zarembka
at [email protected] or (314) 645-0336 Or visit AGLI's website at
http://www.aglionline.org.
[Excerpts only. For full text see
http://www.aglionline.org/PDF/AVP%20Rwanda.pdf]
Executive Summary
"Peace cannot stay in small places," said Ndagijimama Abdon, an
elder Gacaca judge in Gisenyi, "it is good when peace reaches
everywhere." Abdon's message of hope and expectation is
characteristic of what we found as we traveled Rwanda to evaluate
the impact of the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) on
Rwanda's slow recovery from genocide. As we interviewed more and
more people, we began to feel that AVPis gaining momentum here in
Rwanda. Again and again, interviewees issued a clarion-call for AVP
to continue, to reach into every corner of the country, into every
heart. Every person needs AVP, interviewees said again and again.
Blanket our communities, reach every Gacaca judge, every leader,
every genocide survivor. Go into the prisons and work with those
who have been accused of genocide. Take AVP to our neighboring
countries and help our region find peace. Tothe participants in
this evaluation, AVP is not just a series of workshops that stays
confined to small meeting rooms. Though AVP starts as a short
three-day workshop, it inevitably ripples outward reaching small
corners of each life in unexpected ways. Now in Rwanda, 4 years
after the program was introduced here, AVP is beginning to feel
like a movement: a movement of hope, of healing, of slow
reconciliation, of possibility.
With funding from the United States Institute of Peace and support
from the Africa Great Lakes Initiative, the Rwanda Friends Peace
House offered seventy 3- day workshops in Alternatives to Violence
to Gacaca judges throughout Rwanda. To evaluate the success of
these efforts, we interviewed 37 judges, government leaders, AVP
facilitators and community members. The reports from interviews
were, without exception, glowingly positive. This evaluation seeks
to move underneath this praise for AVPto discern why it has been so
well received here, and to identify its major contributions to
Rwanda's healing process in the wake of the 1994 genocide.
Through the course of the interviews, four major themes emerged.
First, AVP's experiential methodology was new for many participants
and they reported that it helped them to internalize the workshop.
As one interviewee observed, "AVP teaches people to have lessons in
the mind, not just in the notebook." At the heart of AVP's efforts
in Rwanda is the hope that the transformative and
community-oriented nature of AVP's methodology can contribute to
the country's difficult journey of healing and reconciliation.
This, then, was the second theme that surfaced during the
interviews: the role that AVP is playing in healing wounds and
rebuilding after genocide. This is a complex theme, with
interlacing questions of truth, forgiveness, and transformation.
Without asking for personal testimonies or demanding that
participants recall past violence, AVPquietly invites participants
to begin to see the possibility of good in themselves and others,
to seek truth even when it contradicts strongly held beliefs, and
to find a deep source of reconciliation and transformation.
The third theme examines how AVP 'culture' and Rwandan culture
interact, compliment and challenge one another. AVPis an imported
program that, over the past several years, has been molded and
shaped to suit Rwandan society. The interviews revealed that AVP
both reinforces existing values within Rwandan culture (such as
humility and respect for one another) and simultaneously challenges
aspects of the culture (such as established hierarchies and
top-down decision-making processes).
Lastly, many interviewees reported that AVP equipped them to
respond to community and family conflict with creativity and
compassion. While most interviewees were Gacaca judges and had been
trained in AVP for the purposes of applying lessons to the Gacaca
process, these same judges gave countless testimonies about how AVP
had helped them in responding to conflict in their personal lives.
It was through these testimonies that we discovered that AVPis not
only a conflict resolution program, but also a quiet and unassuming
advocate for women and children's rights: many interviewees talked
about how AVPhelped to shift communication patterns between
husbands and wives and stem violence in the home.
Introduction
Eleven years ago, the small African nation of Rwanda burst into the
world's consciousness with its 1994 genocide. That genocide has
been called, by historians, the most "efficient" in world history
in which a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in a
period of 100 days. After the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)
overthrew the Hutu Power government, swarms of refugees fled in
fear of revenge killings and the new government imprisoned a
hundred thousand alleged perpetrators of the genocide. Now, most
refugees have been repatriated and Rwanda has turned to the
monumental task of healing and rebuilding a nation after
unimaginable brutality.
In an innovative and controversial effort to bring justice and
reconciliation to both the victims and suspected perpetrators of
the genocide, the Rwandan government has elected to utilize a
modern day version of a traditional form of arbitration known as
Gacaca to settle many of the lower-level cases
...
Gacaca: "Key to Hope for Peace in Rwanda"
The dictionary defines hope as "a desire for something to happen,
combined with the expectation that it will." For the past two
years, Rwanda has embarked in a process designed to seek the truth
of what happened during the genocide, to facilitate reconciliation
within the country, and to expedite the trials of the near 100,000
cases of alleged acts of genocide. At the heart of this process is
the hope that it is possible to live together in peace after
unspeakable acts of betrayal and horror.
After the genocide, the new Rwandan government arrested and
imprisoned over 100,000 people accused of perpetrating acts of
genocide. The numbers overburdened the legal court systems, and
most accused have remained in jail without trial for ten years.
This not only leaves the prisoners without a fair hearing, and the
state bearing the burden of supporting them, but it also leaves
survivors of the genocide in limbo, waiting to hear the truth of
what happened to their families and to see justice done. It has
been estimated that, without Gacaca, the cases would take up to 200
years to process.
Gacaca literally means "on the grass" and it gathers all community
members in each small cell and each sector of Rwanda once a week to
hear lower level cases related to the genocide of 1994. "Lower
level" cases include those who allegedly looted, destroyed
property, and participated in killing but were pressured or coerced
to do so. Planners of the genocide, those who raped women, and
those who killed multiple people remain in the legal court system.
One Gacaca judge explained the system like this:
Gacaca was here in Rwanda even before. Gacaca is not here because
of the genocide. It was the way Rwandan people and culture used to
resolve their problems. Me, I am old and here there are others who
are old. When the people had the problem in Rwanda before, they
resolved in Gacaca because there was no court. The court came with
development, but before it was Gacaca that resolved problems in the
family. When the family had a problem, they resolved it themselves.
If they couldn't then they went outside to Gacaca. What they call
"igisenge" it is when a problem between a husband and wife is
resolved between the two of them with just two other people
members of the family or neighbors, but not many people. When a
problem is not resolved in igisenge, they went to Gacaca, where
they called members of the family, neighbors and friends to help
them to resolve the problem. Now, Gacaca is not a new thing for
Rwandans. Rukamata Dismas, Gacaca Judge
Each Gacaca court is administered by a coordinating team and
tribunal of 9 judges. Each tribunal has a President, two Vice
Presidents and two Secretaries. For the past two years, Gacaca has
been tasked with collecting information and documenting the truth
of what happened during those 100 days in 1994. On March 10, 2004
Gacaca officially began its judgment phase hearing cases and
deciding on restorative penalties, designed to reintegrate released
prisoners back into their communities. Amajor goal of Gacaca is to
seek the truth, and therefore prisoners receive dramatically
reduced penalties for confessing the details of their crimes.
Conflict is an inevitable result of Gacaca. As prisoners return to
their communities, old hatreds and pain are revived and new
conflicts spring up over land, family, children, and more. Fear and
mutual suspicion mount as potential Gacaca witnesses and prisoners
who are willing to testify are intimidated and, in some cases
murdered. Survivors can be re-traumatized by the re-telling of what
happened, and the wives of men who have been imprisoned for
perpetrating acts of genocide may hear for the first time that
their husbands are indeed guilty. Released prisoners may have to
face false accusations and they might hear that others witnessed
acts they thought were hidden.
In order to support the Gacaca process and to contribute to its
ability to promote reconciliation, the Friends Peace House launched
an intensive Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), training the
lead judges in Gacaca tribunals across the country. In a span of 10
months, AVP trained 1,167 Gacaca judges in 11 of Rwanda's 12
provinces.
...
Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP)
The Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) began in 1975, when a
group of inmates near New York City asked a local Quaker group to
provide them with non- violence training. Highly experiential in
nature, the workshop encourages participants to recognize that they
can best find their own answers to the conflicts they encounter.
...
Implementing Organizations
The Alternatives to Violence Project Rwanda (AVP- Rwanda) was
established as a joint project of Rwanda Yearly Meeting of Friends
(RYM) and the Friends Peace Teams'African Great Lakes Initiative
(AGLI). AVP is housed within and administered by RYM's Friends
Peace House, an organization which was founded in 2000 to be a
witness for peace, reconciliation, and conflict resolution after
the genocide and war of 1994. AVP-Rwanda is currently administered
by a nine-member committee and has 58 active facilitators located
throughout the country.
AVP quietly invites participants to begin to see the possibility of
good in themselves and others, to seek truth even when it
contradicts strongly held beliefs, and to find a deep source of
reconciliation and transformation. The Friends Peace House's vision
is a unified Rwandan society that has a vibrant culture of peace,
which respects human rights, and which improves the living
standards of all its members. Its three general goals are: 1) to
build a sustainable and durable peace in Rwanda; 2) to restore the
relationships that were destroyed by the war and genocide to ensure
peaceful co-existence; and 3) to reintegrate the people who were
harmed by the tragic events of this country. The Friends Peace
House works with all sectors of Rwandan society and in all
provinces of Rwanda, regardless of religious affiliation, gender,
or ethnic group, focusing particularly on women, widows, children
and youth, genocide survivors, prisoners, community and religious
leaders, and grassroots and religious associations.
...
B. Healing Wounds: Rebuilding After Genocide
At the heart of AVP's efforts in Rwanda is the hope that the
transformative and community-oriented nature of AVP's methodology
can contribute to the country's difficult journey of healing and
reconciliation. Eleven years later, the reverberations of the 1994
genocide are still felt at all levels of society. The economy and
infrastructure still flounders as Rwanda struggles to establish a
reputation as a stable country and to attract international
investors; only 12% of secondary school- aged children can afford
to go to school; entire families have been obliterated by not only
the killing but also by high levels of mistrust and suspicion. In
this genocide, neighbors killed neighbors, pastors killed church
members, fathers killed wives, grandmothers murdered grandchildren.
Even families and churches that have survived in body have been
ripped apart by betrayal. It is not surprising that people in
Rwanda tend to believe that people are inherently evil, that no one
is to be trusted, and that "forgiveness" is simply an empty gesture
to push the horrors of the past away. Gently, AVP moves into these
festering wounds. Without asking for personal testimonies or
demanding that participants recall past violence, AVP quietly
invites participants to begin to see the possibility of good in
themselves and others, to seek truth even when it contradicts
strongly held beliefs, and to find a deep source of reconciliation
and transformation.
Truth
In Rwanda, truth is a keystone to healing. Many people do not know
what happened to their families and want to find their bodies to be
able to move through their mourning; wives of men imprisoned for
committing acts of genocide live braced for learning the truth of
what their husbands did; witnesses for Gacaca are being intimidated
and sometimes murdered to stop the truth from emerging; people who
participated in the genocide but have not yet been accused are
fleeing the country, afraid that Gacaca will reveal the truth and
they will be punished; prisoners who were falsely accused are
hoping that the truth will liberate them. So essential is the truth
to Rwanda's recovery that the government has chosen to encourage
genocidaires to confess the full extent of their crimes in exchange
for greatly reduced sentences. The country needs these confessions,
and the Gacaca judges who have been trained by AVPhave the enormous
responsibility of discerning truth from empty accusations and
rumors.
The lesson of listening was very important for Gacaca because it
will help people to understand and help people speak the truth. If
judges don't listen well, that is in fact a form of violence, and
they often don't know that they have done violence. - Rugandura
Celeste, Gacaca Judge
In the Basic AVP workshop, facilitators introduce an activity they
call "rumors." In this activity, they ask five volunteers to leave
the room and choose one to stay to listen to a short, detailed
story. Then one by one, the volunteers come in, listen to the story
from the person who came before, and retell it to the person who
follows. Usually participants are practically on the floor
laughing, tears streaming down their faces as they story changes
and changes some more, to the point of becoming unrecognizable.
This activity is cited as one of the most valuable that AVPoffers
Gacaca judges. Many report that after seeing how stories can change
in the retelling, they will no longer believe hearsay or rumors but
will go to the source. When we asked, "Before AVP,do many judges
just believe what someone tells them, even if that person didn't
witness it?" the answer came back again and again Yes.
There are many changes [in the community because of AVP]. When you
look at the judges, there is a difference between those who have
had the workshop and those who haven't had the workshop. We have
found that judges who have not taken AVP don't listen to people or
take the time to understand or see if what they are saying is true
or not true. Instead they just write down what they have in their
own minds. ... There is a secret to knowing the truth and that
secret is in the game, 'Rumors'. It's not good to say that "I
understand" [or I heard]. When people say they understand, it is
good to ask them 'you understand from whom?' and go to see that
person and ask them if what the other person told you is true. For
example, a person can say, 'I understand that Patrick has killed
someone.'Now, it is good to ask who told you that story, and then
go to the source and ask if the story is true. Because sometimes
you can go to the source and you find the story is not true. You
can find that that person says, 'Patrick did not kill. He showed
the killers where that person was hiding, but he did not kill that
person.' The first person said I killed, the second story said I
revealed someone's hiding place. So that is not the same story. -
Kavoma Patric, Community Peacebuilder
Rwandan culture holds a strange paradox: because of the history of
betrayal, people tend to be quite cynical and slow to believe
another's assertions, and, simultaneously perhaps because direct
communication is so expensive and impractical, and the society has
relied on messengers for centuries - people are quick to believe
what they are told. This tendency to believe information without
checking its source, especially when it comes from perceived
authorities, may have played a role in the genocide. It is possible
that people were very quick to accept the pre-genocide Hutu Power
propaganda, and, because they did not question its source, were
more easily convinced of its credibility. AVP then enters into this
paradox, teaching simultaneously that trust may be possible, and
healthy skepticism is essential to rebuilding the country and
preventing further violence. "At home, everything I was told, I
accepted as true," said Mukarwihura Anne Marie, "but now I can be
humble and look for the truth."
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
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with a particular focus on U.S. and international policies.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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