Description

The Rwandan Genocide deserves a special place in history books. Not only because it did happen right under the eyes of a world looking the other way. Neither only because it was ghastly effective, killing at least 800'000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in just about one hundred days, which makes it the fastest recorded genocide in history.
But shocking numbers and unimaginable cruelty have little lasting value, making the Rwandan genocide important rather because atrocity on this scale can teach us important lessons. Lessons about how to prevent such man-made disasters in the future.
Some lessons have already been learned: The policies for international response and intervention, for example, have been influenced by the Responsibility to Protect framework, which explicitly names Rwanda as a reason for its independence.
However, this comes too late for the atrocities ad genocides of the nineties. Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda face the aftermath of the events that shattered their societies. For the latter two one question proved to be of special importance: How to deal with the perpetrators?Especially in Rwanda this turned out to be a challenge, as both participation and victimization by the genocide were close to universal: The grounds for a common future seemed thoroughly poisoned. Reconciliation was not more than a word with the country's Hutu and Tutsi demographics ogling each other with deep distrust. Over time, three different systems to deal with the perpetrators of the genocide came into being: The formal Rwandan legal system, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and as of late the Gacaca system of (semi-)traditional village, district and provincial courts. This article deals with the latter two, as both international criminal justice and traditional courts are seen as chances to achieve reconciliation where other means of justice are either not available or not able to fulfill their function.