The truth heals.


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Africa » Rwanda
March 13th 2008
Published: April 13th 2009
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The crowd forms early outside the municipal building - a long, spacious, brick auditorium with barred windows and puddles on the slate-colored floor. Husky women in bright patterned dresses fan themselves in the shade; three stout nuns - wide and boxy as fullbacks - nod their crisp white habits with small, agitated flourishes, crucifixes bouncing from their bosoms. It’s half-past eight on a Wednesday morning in Butare; today, as with every Wednesday for the past five years, the town is gathering for the gacaca. Earlier, a girl from my hotel told me it was an obligation to sit in on the weekly hearing. (She was on her way home for a nap; maybe she’d stop by later.) Shops are closed along the main street; more people arrive, climbing from the backs of pick-up trucks, hopping off of motos. A woman with a tall, gnarled walking stick comes dragging her clubfoot down the road: an apocalyptic image with vengeful eyes, come to see justice done, perhaps, or to exact some terrible revenge of her own.

In the aftermath of the genocide, the government took the remarkable step of using the gacaca - the traditional village court - to shoulder the country’s legal burden. It was the only way to sift through a ponderous backlog of cases, with more than 100,000 suspects awaiting trial for genocide crimes. As high-level officials and organizers - the architects of the genocide - waited to stand trial at the International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha, it was in the gacaca that the genocide’s foot soldiers would face the judgment of their peers.

“If we all rise up and support the gacaca process,” said President Kagame in June 2002, “we will have shown our love for our country and our fellow Rwandans.” Posters reading “The truth heals” were plastered in towns and villages across the country, introducing the process to a wary public. Kagame urged patience and understanding from his countrymen.

“Reconciliatory justice will be the basis for unity and the foundation of progress,” he said.

For skeptical Rwandans, it seemed the president was trying to have it both ways. “Reconciliatory justice,” after all, was something of an oxymoron: in the spirit of reconciliation, most low-level offenders would eventually be offered amnesty for their crimes. A man who confessed to the murder of his neighbor could, after six years behind bars, be released to perform community service. Whatever justice was promised by the gacaca courts would be an imperfect justice at best, and even defenders of the system had to admit it wasn’t without its flaws. Were the gacaca judges - respected community leaders, to be fair - qualified to preside over murder trials? Would villagers use false accusations to settle old grudges? And could a program of amnesty for convicted killers really be the best way for Rwanda to begin the difficult process of healing?

On a bright Wednesday morning, milling gregariously outside the court house, everyone is in high spirits. Father Sekamana - tall, broad-shouldered, his forehead showing muscular creases - talks breezily with a crowd of well-dressed men. He’s a spry old guy with thick-framed glasses and a zip-up cardigan the color of cloudless skies; from the laughter around him, he strikes me as something of a charmer. Stocky women and spindly old men approach and squeeze his elbow and offer their well-wishes. This morning, Father Sekamana will be tried for his complicity in murders committed near his parish during the genocide. Outside the auditorium he looks composed, guiltless. People come forward, clasp hands, share a few laughs. The mood is awfully convivial, so that I have to ask a few young guys if this is, in fact, the gacaca, and not a weekly bake sale for the Butare Rotary Club. Slowly we begin to file in, taking our seats on narrow benches and wooden chairs. A grave, self-important man - tri-colored sash draped across his chest - stoops over a megaphone at the front of the room, tugging on a cord. A guard in rumpled khakis slouches against the wall, assault rifle resting between his legs.

Before we’ve even launched into the preliminaries a young guy in a white Che Guevara t-shirt approaches. His sunglasses are dark and opaque, so that I can see my pale reflection in his eyes. The effect is menacing. He leans forward and speaks in low, forceful French. I pick up a few words that sound like “permission” and “papers,” and it’s not hard to see where this is heading. Still, I throw up an admirable bluff, shaking my head, appealing with vigorous hand gestures. He asks me to follow him outside, where we have a brief, comical debate in French (his) and English (mine), before he scurries inside for help from one of the judges.

Soon a wary, middle-aged man in layers of beige steps outside, squinting into the sunlight. He takes my hand cautiously and cocks his head. I plead my case. I explain that I’d been to the permit office in Kigali (lie) and spoken to a few men there (lie) and they assured me I didn’t need written permission to sit in on a gacaca (lie). He urges me on. I tell him I’m a writer (true) working on a book about Africa (true), and that I’m hear to study the question of justice in post-genocide Rwanda (so off the fucking wall, I’m surprised it doesn’t leave a mark on the back of his head). He nods thoughtfully, then asks to see ID. I jog back to my hotel and return with my passport, which I duly present to young Che inside. He brings it to the front of the courtroom, where the beige-clad judge - president of the gacaca, as I’ll later learn - flips through it with a rumpled brow. They hunch together and spend a few minutes studying the pages. I have no idea what they might be looking for, or, worse, what they might find. At the table beside them, the other judges are fussing with their paperwork and rifling through piles of pink folders. More spectators shuffle in from the bright daylight. Father Sekamana sits before the judges, a commanding presence at the front of the room, his dark, imperious eyes moving slowly across the room to take in the crowd that’s gathered. The judge hands my passport back to Che, who comes briskly down the aisle to hand it to me. He smiles a lean, unpleasant smile as he offers an apology. A judge taps on the microphone and clears his throat. The trial is about to begin.

The gacaca is, as I’ll quickly learn, no place for a Perry Mason. The trial is long and, as I’ll later learn, hinges on minor details and technicalities. There seems to be little hope of a serious resolution, never mind courtroom theatrics. Father Sekamana shakes his head, obfuscates, misremembers, contradicts; the judges push a certain line of questioning, give it up, corner the suspect, watch him wriggle free. Many of the spectators quickly lose interest. A couple of young guys behind me whisper, chuckle, bury their faces in their jackets. A squat woman two rows ahead kicks off her sandals and rests her feet on the chair in front of her. She spends some minutes punching SMS messages into her cell phone, sighing exhaustedly, letting her eyes roam around the room. When a woman asks to take the seat occupied by her feet, she seems to suggest with her frank, brutal eyes that it’s already taken. A man in a beaten leather jacket causes a small commotion as he struggles toward a seat in the middle of a row. An exasperated judge makes a few comical entreaties for him to find an aisle seat. A wave of laughter rolls across the room, a bit of comic relief before the first witness is called to the stand.

With no one to translate from Kinyarwanda, it’s here that Jado’s presence is most sorely missed. We’d made plans to meet in front of the courtroom at nine, but an hour later he still hasn’t turned up, and my calls haven’t gone through. I’ve quickly learned that Jado is, if not unreliable, certainly unpredictable - something he shares with most of the young African men I’ve met in the past year. Often it’s a question of finances: if money is tight, it’s better to send an SMS through a friend’s phone than add airtime to your own. (In Uganda, a volunteer friend who was frequently harassed by local men explained how hard it was to keep track of all the numbers used by certain persistent admirers. She saved them all to her phone, so that “Creep 1,” “Creep 2,” “Creep 3,” and so on, would show up on her caller ID.)

And then there are the attendant family dramas, so vast and varied, a catalog of the hardships that can quickly strike in lives that are so precariously balanced to begin with. A sudden illness befalls a cousin or aunt; there are trips to hospitals, to clinics, to burials. Earlier in the week, Jado had to call off our plans at the last minute: a cousin had rushed to the bedside of his sick, aging mother, and with no one to look after the cows, Jado had to spend the afternoon playing cow herd on the family farm.

In the courtroom, the witnesses are offering their sober testimonies, and for the first time all morning, the audience is rapt. A dowdy young woman tells her story in a just-audible whisper; another - a stout, broad-shouldered, church-going lady - speaks plainly, almost pleasantly, appealing to the judges one by one. Neither, I notice, manages to meet Father Sekamana’s imperious gaze. Then a tall, muscular young guy in a leather vest strides to the front of the room with purpose. He sits and leans forward and fixes the priest with his eyes; for the next few minutes, as he offers his testimony in forceful language, he doesn’t once turn from Father Sekamana’s stare. I have no idea what’s being said, but this is clearly a moment of the highest drama. Afterward he returns to his seat just a few rows in front of me, and I can see the smooth rounded knobs of his shoulders heaving with great emotion.

When Jado finally arrives, Father Sekamana is answering questions from the judges. The folds in his forehead rise and fall, the musculature of his great bald dome works expressively. The man is putting on a fine performance. After a brief greeting, Jado leans forward to follow the testimony. The strength of the case against Father Sekamana seems to rest on a body buried outside the compound of his parish near Gikongoro during the early weeks of the genocide. Earlier the witnesses had testified that they heard gunshots during the night; they were sheltering inside his church, huddled, fearful, while the death squads worked outside. In the morning, a beheaded body was found buried outside the compound. (Some claim it was buried inside the compound.) Because of Father Sekamana’s authority over the parish, they argue, the killing couldn’t have taken place without his knowledge - and, by extent, his complicity. The priest’s defense is a simple one: there was no gunshot in the night; he never heard any gunshots; and such gunshots could have only occurred after he, himself, had fled.

There is a long debate on these points, and when the judges chuckle and shake their heads bitterly, you can get a sense of their frustration. The evidence against Father Sekamana isn’t just slight - it’s based on scraps of memory dug up after nearly fourteen years. Even by the gacaca’s standards, there doesn’t seem like much to build a case on. Soon the debate shifts to guns found inside the church compound. Didn’t Father Sekamana know that some of his employees had stockpiled guns? Weren’t they being trained to use them by the militias? Again, a dead end. The priest knew nothing about the guns. He never saw the militias. The judges confer under their breaths. There’s restlessness in the audience.

The last accusation against the priest is the most damning. Isn’t it true, the judges ask, that Father Sekamana operated a roadblock during the genocide? This was a grave allegation. The militia roadblocks were notorious; it was at those checkpoints that the Interhamwe sorted the Tutsis from the Hutus and sent them each to their separate fates. To accuse someone of starting a roadblock is to accuse him of sending hundreds to their deaths. The room is silent. Father Sekamana shakes his head vigorously. Denying the accusations, he makes emphatic chops of the hand to drive home each point. The roadblock near his church, he explains, was used to confuse the militias. Rather than sending Tutsis to their deaths, he was using the roadblock to save them. There’s a restless murmur from the audience. The judges are incredulous. Father Sekamana insists that, given the brutality of the genocidaires, it was only through such acts of cunning that people could be saved.

“No one has taught me to do the evil,” he says. “I did my best to save people.”

Jado makes a short, indignant noise under his breath. Outside, under the pale, hazy sky, he ventures that Father Sekamana will get off easy. The charges brought against him would be impossible to prove; there were even some witnesses who rose to defend him. I remember one the next day, on my way back to Kigali. He was wrinkled, coarse, disheveled; he had a raspy voice, a sort of death-rattle, and threads of silver wound through his hair. The word that came to mind was disreputable, and I wondered if he wasn’t, in fact, like the village drunk who crashes the funeral, jostling the mourners, causing a scene. Often these men were hired to say the things about the deceased no one else had the courage to say. Maybe Father Sekamana had to be defended for the sake of all the others with blood on their hands.



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