We have seen in earlier chapters that the leaders of a genocide are those most clearly guilty of the crime of genocide. But what of those who aid the genocide in various ways? It is estimated that one-third of the population of Rwanda, over one million people, were in some sense complicit in the genocide that occurred there in 1994. A good debate is ensuing about whether all one million of these people should indeed be tried for their varying levels of complicity. In my view, such an outcome might advance the goal of reconciliation, but convictions for all of these people are so unlikely that we should scale back a bit, yet still allow, for many gacaca, what Rwandans call “trials in the grass,” of low-level participants in genocide. In this chapter I wish to investigate the border between legal and moral complicity in such cases of mass atrocity as genocides.

Complicity is a slippery concept – it is widely used in common parlance, and yet there is little agreement about what precisely it means. In Arusha, Tanzania, major trials have been held for Rwandans in governmental, military, religious, and media leadership positions who had some role in the horrific genocide. At least some of the people who have been successfully tried could count as complicit, as accomplices, rather than principal perpetrators, such as the media executives who ran the radio station that conveyed such a drumbeat of hate mongering in the lead-up to the genocidal campaign.