Background

By now much has been written about the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) in South Africa, which were designed to provide a measure of justice to those who had suffered from state-sponsored racial violence. Much of this literature has been critical (Wilson, 2001). One of the most visible apologists for the TRCs, however, was Bishop Desmond Tutu. In some of the bishop’s statements, he distinguished between retributive and restorative justice, emphasizing that the true African (and superior) form of justice was restorative, while the typically Western form was retributive (Tutu, 1999)

Like South Africa, Rwanda witnessed its share of state-sponsored ethnic violence. But in contrast to South Africa, it chose to deal with its many genocide prisoners through uniquely retributive means. In the early years following the 1994 genocide, accused persons were simply thrown in jail, often on the basis of a single and unsubstantiated accusation, to be tried later by Rwanda’s conventional courts. Some prisoners were tried and sentenced by these courts and a small number were executed, but Rwanda’s prison population continued to grow. Rwanda’s conventional justice system was overwhelmed. After considerable debate and eventual rejection of the TRC model by the Government of Rwanda (Uvin, n.d.), the trial method of gacaca was decided upon in 1999, a method that ideally would weld elements of restorative justice to a basically retributive core (Schabas, 2005, p. 3). In procedures similar to those of the TRCs, accused persons would receive anything from full clemency to reduced sentences in exchange for full confessions. And for those who received reduced sentences, the possibility existed to serve all or part of their remaining terms by doing communal work – travaux d’interet general.