This is by no means a phenomenon confined to Africa. It has happened in every culture on the planet, in every period, and the advancement of civilization has been no protection. The same nation that gave us Goethe and Beethoven also gave us Hitler. There will be others, and perhaps some in unexpected locations, and the only question will be whether uninvolved people have the courage to take a risk to save strangers.
A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.
I am sometimes asked to name the thing that most scares me about Rwanda. My answer is this: It frightens me to death when my countrymen are not talking. If a Rwandan is brooding you never know what he is thinking. When I was a hotel manager I made it one of my number-one priorities to talk with just about everybody who came and stayed with us or drank with us. It was one way I kept myself informed of what was brewing in my country. To stay away from evil people is to never know what is on their minds. And it frightens me that my country today is packed with a lot of angry people not talking to each other. We could be witnessing the roots of a future holocaust.
Europe needed the catharsis of its Nuremberg before it could have the renewal of its Marshall Plan. My country has had neither justice nor effective reconstruction. We are not sitting around a table and talking to each other.
For one thing, the pace of the criminal justice system has been painfully slow. At this writing, more than a decade after the genocide, only about twenty-five top government officials have been tried by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal in Arusha. Those men are locked up in comfort, which is more than can be said for those ordinary laborers of the genocide who pass their days in squalid misery. Jails in Rwanda are wretched places, not much better than the shipping containers in which some prisoners were kept in the days immediately after the genocide. Facilities are drastically overcrowded, with barely enough room for some of the accused to sit up in bed. There is little to eat, so the relatives of some of the prisoners live around the fringes of these hellholes to bring them food. Although it would be easy to escape almost nobody chooses to, for they would live out their days branded as a murderer, whether true or not. Most of these people actually want to be tried. Being thrown in jail for a genocide-related crime in Rwanda does not take much evidence. It sometimes requires merely the accusation of a single person whose motives may not be honest.
Rwanda is attempting to deal with this unique problem in a unique way-by blending traditional notions of justice with a modern court apparatus. The idea is to reconstitute the old village justice system of gacaca-justice on the grass-the court of reconciliation so well known by my father. Genocide suspects would be tried and sentenced by their neighbors in small villages across the nation. Farmers and tavern keepers and housewives would be trained to be apprentice judges and lawyers. There are now nearly ten thousand of these courts operating all over the country. I would call it a noble idea. I would also call it a total failure.
Justice on the grass was never designed to address something as grave as genocide. It was designed to solve cases of missing goats and stolen bananas. Serious felony crimes were always referred to the courts of the king, even in the days of my grandfather’s grandfather. I am a defender of the wisdom of the common man, but it is fantasy to expect a village of laypeople-with their own layers of local intrigue, jealousies, and loyalties-to effectively mete out real justice for something as horrid and earthshaking as mass murder. It would be like taking a rapist to a traffic magistrate. That such a flimsy system has been developed to handle genocide crimes serves only to trivialize the genocide. It insults the dead.
For another thing, the entire point of gacaca was not punishment but reconciliation. You were supposed to apologize to the man you had wronged and share a bowl of banana beer as a sign of renewed friendship. But how in God’s name can a man “reconcile” with people he has raped, tortured, and murdered? How can things ever be put right with the parents of a baby who has been ripped limb from limb? Gacaca is a well-intentioned idea but punishing crimes of genocide requires the authority, stature, and rigor of a state-sponsored court with impartial judges and firm rules of evidence.
The irony is that we could have been a long way down that road if we had had the discipline. After the genocide we still had two hundred state courthouses, known as tribunals, in various locations around Rwanda. Judges were initially hard to find because many had been killed or jailed or fled the country, but the ministry of justice was ready to start trying cases in the spring of 1995. But the Army stopped the first trials and the hearings did not resume for two years, which passed agonizingly slowly for those with nothing to do but look at the patterns of the sun on jailhouse walls. Justice has been a stop-and-start trickle like this ever since. And the waiting goes on for the accused, as does the mounting anger.
This failure of justice is critical, for it leaves our nation still in pieces and in danger of exploding again before long. Breaking the cycle will not be easy. It requires the application of true justice. Without justice there will be more massacres, for widespread injustice never fades away. It ferments and stinks and eventually bursts into bloody flowers.
I am convinced that one of the strongest engines of the Rwandan genocide was the culture of impunity that was allowed to flourish after the revolution against the colonists began in 1959. Rwandans killed their neighbors just to take their houses, people killed people for their banana trees, people leaped over the counters of abandoned general stores and started selling the merchandise as if they were the rightful owners. It was a huge mistake for our government to let this blatant larceny go unanswered. Even today there are people living in houses that don’t belong to them and selling merchandise they never bought. This is what I call impunity. A person’s private property may seem like a small thing when held in balance against their life, but the success of a small crime grants a kind of permission to carry out worse deeds. It is like that famous American parable about a row of windows in an abandoned factory. If they stay intact nobody will throw rocks at them. But if one window is broken and goes unrepaired, the rest will get shattered by vandals in quick succession, because the public gets the idea that nobody cares about the windows. A sense of social disorder creates more chaos. As a nation we did not care about our windows forty-seven years ago, and I am afraid we are not taking good care of them now.