Accuser, liberator or reconciler?: Truth through gacaca

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The theme of truth, perhaps more than any other in this book, illuminates gacaca's hybridity, particularly its combination of formal and discursive methods and legal and non-legal objectives. The concept of truth within gacaca proves highly variable and contested, necessitating the dissection of the ideas implicit in sources' interpretations of this theme. Unearthing the tensions between different conceptions of truth, and the practical difficulties that these create, will show that a key debate regarding gacaca is how it should connect legal and non-legal aims and specifically conceptions of punishment and restoration of fractured social relations. Official, popular and critical sources interpret truth through gacaca in various ways. These sources express a wider range of interpretations of truth than of any other potential objective of gacaca. These perspectives often clash and are themselves rarely articulated consistently or systematically. This chapter provides a more thorough interpretation of truth at gacaca, drawing partly on these sources but seeking to go beyond existing interpretations. At the outset, we require a clearer conceptual framework in which to analyse truth through gacaca. Truth comes in many forms during gacaca hearings and participants pursue truth for myriad reasons. For example, at gacaca the overarching term ‘truth’ may refer equally to the testimony of a genocide survivor who describes his or her experiences during the genocide in order to help prove the guilt or innocence of a suspect, and the testimony of a survivor who describes personal experiences to gain official or communal acknowledgement of his or her feelings of anguish and loss.