INTRODUCTION

This chapter clarifies the genesis and modalities of gacaca and situates it within the broader realm of transitional justice. Much confusion currently surrounds how best to define the history and function of gacaca and how to locate it relative to other transitional justice processes around the world. Questions regarding gacaca abound: is it fundamentally a legal institution, a social institution with certain quasi-legal functions or something entirely different? What is it designed to achieve and how should we judge its effectiveness as a response to the needs of the Rwandan population after the genocide? In later chapters, I argue that most critiques, especially those from non-Rwandan legal commentators, mischaracterise what gacaca is and what it is designed to achieve. Therefore, it is not surprising that most commentators provide unconvincing accounts of the effectiveness of gacaca as a post-conflict remedy. In particular, many legal critics mistakenly characterise gacaca as a form of mob justice, in which the rights of individuals are sacrificed for the sake of the cheap and rapid prosecution of genocide suspects, or simply as a means of centralised state control. Many of the Rwandan government's characterisations of gacaca are also problematic, especially its attempt to portray gacaca as an indigenous mechanism with which the population identifies and in which it readily wishes to participate. Later chapters will show that legal critics are misguided in dismissing gacaca as an illegitimate system for punishing genocide perpetrators, while the Rwandan government (and some commentators) wrongly romanticise gacaca as a form of time-honoured justice automatically acceptable to all Rwandans.