FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The genocide of 1994 scarred the Central African nation of Rwanda, dividing its people into survivors and perpetrators. In response, the government has organized gacacas, local courts that aim to uncover the truth of who killed whom and to sentence the killers to prison, but a University of Arkansas professor says that trust in the gacacas is scarce among some of the people who seek justice for the murder of family and friends.

When Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar, visited Rwanda early in 2006, he spoke to a wide array of individuals in the government, military, press and higher education about the effectiveness of the gacaca. While every official touted the gacaca as the way to reconciliation between Tutsis and Hutus, many young people, survivors themselves, were skeptical.

“Quite frankly, it sounded too good to be true,” Totten said. “I decided to return to Rwanda, go into the villages and conduct a series of randomized interviews to learn exactly what the educated and uneducated thought of the gacaca.”

People of integrity leading a gacaca hearing outside Kigali, Rwanda.

Ntarama Church, Rwanda, site of the genocide of 5,000 people.

Memorial site at Ntarama Church, Rwanda, where 5,000 people were killed.

The pink shirt of the man with his family indicates that he was a convict. After 10 years in prison, he was found innocent and released at a gacaca hearing outside Kigali, Rwanda.

Recently discovered skeletons outside Butare, Rwanda. Bodies of 63 people were discovered in a pit behind a home.

Totten worked with Rafiki Ubaldo, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who gave feedback on the survey instrument and served as interpreter during the interviews, translating from French and Kinyarwanda, the common languages of Rwanda, into English. Together they interviewed 25 Rwandans. Ubaldo went on to interview another 18 individuals on his own, and another Rwandan conducted 17 additional interviews. Totten is analyzing the results for future publication.

Totten explained that the gacaca process was adapted from a traditional justice system to handle the overwhelming numbers of people imprisoned since 1994 and still awaiting trial.

“Historically, gacacas were used in villages when there was a conflict either within a family or amongst neighbors. It was pretty informal. The head of the village would call together the parties in dispute, and they would tell their stories. Then the community would try to reconcile the two parties and come up with a just determination.

“In the late 1990s, Rwanda was trying to figure out how to handle all the genocide cases — they had 120,000 people in prisons, and the prisons were not only severely crowded but rife with disease. There was a good possibility that many were not guilty, while others were murderers. Some surmised that it would take at least a hundred years to conduct the trials if they used the national courts, and as a result innocent people would die in prison and tens of thousands of others would not be brought to trial.”

The Rwandan government made the traditional gacacas into a more formal process that takes place in every town and village in the country. For each local gacaca, nine “people of integrity” are selected. The intention is for people of integrity to be individuals who are known to be honest, who didn’t take part in the genocide and who are respected members of the community. As a team, the people of integrity conducted information collecting and analysis over a period of two years and have now started the trials. Totten observed four gacacas while in Rwanda.

“People are very serious about the gacaca,” Totten said. “I attended one with well over 200 people in a small village. Witnesses come forth and speak about what happened. If a person pleads guilty and asks for forgiveness, and the people of integrity and the community ascertain that the plea is genuine, the person has his or her sentence cut in half.

“When we got into the villages, it was a totally different story from what I had been told by officials,” Totten said. “There are some people who said the gacaca process is going to work, and when we asked them why, they said 'because the government says it’s going to work.’ Those who were more educated — and I’m talking about high school or first or second year of college — as well as those who had lost vast numbers of relatives were generally more skeptical. Occasionally someone who had lost immediate family members or scores of family members would ask me, 'How would you feel if you had 20 members of your family — your mother, your father and your sisters and your brothers — killed, and you now lived among those who killed them, and you know that they killed them because they confessed in order to get out of prison?’”

Nevertheless, Totten learned that for many survivors the process was important because they wanted to know where their family members were buried and who among them was a killer. But for some survivors, Totten found, “Nothing about the gacaca is good.”

Survivors who were critical of the gacaca process told Totten that not only were the same government officials in place in their village as in 1994, but they also identified people of integrity they knew to be killers. In addition, they believed that some of the pleas for forgiveness were false.

Some witnesses reported that they had been attacked after testifying. They described a lot of tension in the village, with witnesses being shunned or verbally attacked. In one case, a witness’s house was pelted with stones all night long. Another witness was stabbed in her home and the house was burned.

When Totten interviewed Rwandans about the genocide and the gacacas, he started with relatively easy topics before he asked tough questions: Did you know Tutsis who were murdered? How many? Did you have family members killed during the genocide? How many?

“And then they would tell us,” Totten said. “Initially it was very difficult to ask because you feel like you are going to a very private place, and you just hate asking. It was very difficult when the people started crying. I’d stop for awhile and let them collect themselves. If the person was really struggling, I’d ask if they wanted to terminate the interview, because it’s too easy for somebody like me to keep on to get the data and then to leave them there. Amazingly, once they started, they all insisted on going on. If they didn’t want to talk they told me from the very beginning, and that was that.

“One woman — she was the sweetest lady — and she refused to talk about it. She didn’t want to be interviewed, but she basically told me she lost every single family member. She said, 'If you want to see where they were murdered, go up the hill where there were houses where we lived. They were all burned down, and that’s where we grow our bananas now.’”

Totten also interviewed perpetrators, including a Hutu man who lived in an area where every Tutsi had been killed. He explained to Totten why he felt those killings were different than the conventional crime of murder: “During the genocide, everybody was doing it. We were caught up in it. We were afraid the Rwandan Patriotic Front was going to come in from Uganda, and we were being told that we had to save our country.”

While interviewing survivors, Totten met many young people whose education had been cut short by the genocide. In response, he has founded the Post-Genocide Education Fund for such individuals in Rwanda and other countries. He is planning to solicit support from the International Organization of Genocide Scholars, as well as individual funding sources in the United States.

Totten is a professor of curriculum and instruction in the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions. He has written extensively about genocide with an emphasis on prevention and intervention of genocides. As a member of the Darfur Atrocities Documentation Project in 2004, he conducted part of a randomized survey of refugees from Darfur in Chad. His most recent books are Genocide at the Millennium, Century of Genocide and Genocide in Darfur: Investigating Atrocities in the Sudan.

Totten’s colleague Ubaldo, a 30-year-old man who is just resuming his education, is an undergraduate in a Swedish university. He had been studying to be a priest when the genocide broke out, but when he saw priests collaborating with the killers, he dropped out of the seminary.

1)               Community members at a gacaca hearing outside Kigali, Rwanda.

2)                 People of integrity leading a gacaca hearing outside Kigali, Rwanda.

3)                  Ntarama Church, Rwanda, site of the genocide of 5,000 people.

4)                 Memorial site at Ntarama Church, Rwanda, where 5,000 people were killed.

5)                  The pink shirt of the man with his family indicates that he was a convict. After 10 years in prison, he was found innocent and released at a gacaca hearing outside Kigali, Rwanda.

6)                  Recently discovered skeletons outside Butare, Rwanda. Bodies of 63 people were discovered in a pit behind a home. (March 2006)