Remediation in Rwanda. Kristin Conner Doughty
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sector, before and after the genocide. Its market was vibrant and open daily, and the town had long been home to a hospital, several primary and secondary schools, courts, and offices of national companies like Electrogaz. The main national dairy plant, Nyabisindu Dairy, was located there, as well as a national museum at the home of the former mwami (king). Nyanza had several churches and a mosque. It was easily reached by public minibus, which ensured regular movement of people in and out, and it had several small hotels. Its population was more diverse and well educated than that of Ndora, with people having relocated there from other regions of Rwanda, with livelihoods not exclusively based on agriculture. Gacaca sessions for Busasamana sector were heard across the road from the High Court, up the hill from the newly opened Institute for Legal Policy and Development. In Busasamana sector, by mid-2008, 2,206 gacaca cases had been submitted in Category Two, 2,079 cases had been submitted in Category Three, and 538 cases were appealed.37
During the genocide, the bourgmestre of Nyanza, Jean-Marie Vianney Gisagara, a Hutu, refused to ally himself with the Hutu power movement, and he helped the area resist the genocide in the initial weeks. He repelled attacks against Tutsi from outsiders, and kept order locally, punishing and imprisoning those who attacked Tutsi (Des Forges 1999:469). The military found and killed Mr. Gisagara in late April, at which point the massacres intensified, and victims attempted to flee (Des Forges 1999:497). The patterns of violence in Nyanza were similar to those in Ndora and elsewhere nationwide, in terms of how perpetrators included a mixture of civilians and militias, and how they chased victims out of their homes and rounded up and killed them in central locations like hospitals or schools. Administrators and civilians set up a network of roadblocks to prevent escape, manned by armed civilian militias. Dynamics of violence further intensified as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) gained ground in Rwanda, bringing increased military skirmishes between the RPF and the army around Nyanza beginning in May (Des Forges 1999:585). Gacaca sessions in Busasamana included extensive testimony about events at local hospitals, orphanages, schools, and churches, as well as the actions of individuals at roadblocks.
Gacaca in Busasamana was complicated by the movement of people in and out of Nyanza during the genocide. This meant that victims and killers often had not been, and were not now, residents of the area. Some were only passing through Nyanza in 1994. Many accused perpetrators had to be summoned from where they now lived in Kigali, for example, or others could not be located and were tried in absentia. This challenged the idea, implicit in gacaca, that cases were tried among people who knew one another then and now. The composition of gacaca sessions in Busasamana demonstrated the more fluid, contingent constellations of people who lived together during and after the genocide. Another issue complicating gacaca in Nyanza was the military’s heavy involvement there, meaning many victims’ deaths had no obvious perpetrators to accuse before gacaca. Many cases involved complicated discussions of complicity—for example, how responsible a defendant was for handing over a victim to the soldiers or for cutting down bushes to inhibit Tutsi from seeking shelter, whether by independent initiative or on authorities’ orders.
Property cases were a significant concern in Nyanza, as looting was rampant. More expensive property was taken in towns, and so the resolution and enforcement of these cases was as difficult as in Ndora, if not more so. Overall, alongside the higher education level of participants (though still only a minority had completed secondary school) and the more cosmopolitan nature of economic and social connections, there was more skepticism in Nyanza than in Ndora about the suitability of customary-style law for handling genocide crimes. This skepticism translated to comite y’abunzi as well. People often tried to find ways to circumvent comite y’abunzi and take their complaints, such as a failure of contract in a business transaction, straight to courts. Often these disputants had only a passing acquaintance with one another.
Methods, Analysis, and Ethics
When I began my fieldwork in 2002, there seemed to be no way to avert one’s gaze from or close one’s ears to the discourse about gacaca, or the profound social force of law. New training facilities were established, including faculties of law at the growing number of universities in Rwanda. A Bar Association was created in 1997 for the first time, and it grew from thirty to more than three hundred members by the end of 2007 (Kimenyi 2007). Existing courts and legal structures were refurbished and new ones created, including construction of new buildings. In my specific field sites in 2007–2008, a new Institute for Legal Policy and Development was built and opened in Nyanza, and two new court buildings were constructed in Nyamirambo. The ability of “rule of law” to create order was a visible sign of the law’s presence as a form of social control used to regulate the conduct of citizens (Foucault 1982; Rose 1999). This was particularly clear in Kigali, which residents and visitors described as orderly and safe in comparison with regional cities like Kampala and Nairobi. New laws took many forms, such as banning the use of plastic bags, prohibiting the raising of animals within city limits, and removing beggars and ad hoc venders from the streets. While in 2005 the ubiquitous moto-taxi drivers were bare-headed, by 2007 they and their passengers wore newly mandated helmets, and even the most regally dressed women were required to straddle the bike, prohibited from riding side-saddle. Minibus drivers respected passenger capacity limits, and their money collectors no longer leaned awkwardly over tightly packed passengers but instead took their own seats. Across the country, groups of pink-clad prisoners engaged in work projects, whether constructing buildings or digging drainage ditches, a constant reminder of the state’s power to lawfully incarcerate. Police officers lined the tarmacked roads, ensuring compliance with new traffic regulations, such as speed limits and seat belt requirements. Billboards across the country advertised the impending launch of inkiko gacaca.
This effect was even more pronounced when I came to Rwanda for the extended period of my research, from July 2007 through July 2008, midway through the gacaca process. Thus, even though I did not intend to study legal processes when I first arrived in Rwanda in late 2002, nor when I began preliminary work as a graduate student in 2004, I was quickly drawn in. Of course, it has become an anthropological trope to assert that one “did not go into the field expecting to study xyz” but rather “stumbled upon it,” as a means of performing authenticity and expertise. I revert to this explanation here in part to reflexively illustrate the palpable force of “law” in this period but more centrally to make explicit the temporal framing of this research. The unique temporal dimensions of my research came into even clearer relief when I returned briefly to Rwanda in 2013, several years after the close of the gacaca process, when the rhythm of life was no longer marked by regular interruption of the “state of exception” (Agamben 2005) of gacaca days. This book tells a story tightly linked to a particular time period, even as I make claims that may extend beyond it.
Many scholars have noted particular challenges of conducting research in postgenocide Rwanda, including government interference in research (Burnet 2012:25; Chakravarty 2012; Ingelaere 2010a:42, 50; Pottier 2002; Thomson 2010:22) and people’s subsequent “selective telling” (King 2009:128). They note that “simply asking ordinary Rwandans about their experiences before the gacaca courts is unlikely to produce reliable results” and emphasize that “researchers must be able to recognize the government’s version of events” (Thomson 2011a:375–376) in order to avoid “taking the ‘mise-en-scene,’ or stage-setting for granted” (Ingelaere 2010a:42). As a close Rwandan friend and colleague commented, “People will often just tell you what they think you want to hear.” These challenges are arguably best met by ethnographic methods (Burnet 2012:33), with the focus on long-term engagement, repeated social interactions across diverse social fields, and participant observation as well as interviews.
Focusing on specific sites over an extended time allowed me to contextualize the social interactions in the gacaca courts as part of broader life. I spent several days a week in each field site over a full year, and so I became a familiar presence. In analyzing case sessions, I took note of who was speaking, what and how it was said, and how people spoke across sessions, and I compared and contextualized their comments with other conversations and observations in and outside sessions, and over time. Consistent with ethnographic studies of law, I studied legal forums “in context,” aiming for “thick understandings of law in everyday life” (Nader 2002a:71). This meant, for example, not looking at the courts as autonomous institutions but seeing how people and disputes