In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I focus on how people maneuvered within the architecture of social repair of gacaca courts, comite y’abunzi, and the legal aid clinic, respectively. In each chapter, I explore how people experienced mediation efforts combined with punishment across these different forums. In Chapter 3, I show how gacaca sessions were deeply contextualized, and thus served as spaces in which people could reconstruct moral orders, debating the meaning of collective belonging and negotiating the micropolitics of reconciliation in relation to genocide citizenship and material loyalty. I suggest that the contentious conversations in gacaca sessions brought to the fore some of the disagreements and divisions lurking behind Rwandans’ superficial public agreements, and illustrated the widespread disagreement with the simplified notions of causality, guilt, and innocence in the master narrative.
In Chapter 4 I shift to an examination of comite y’abunzi as a harmony legal model in which law-backed mediation combined harmony and punishment. I show how, as with gacaca, comite y’abunzi sessions entailed contextualized conversations in which people negotiated the micropolitics of reconciliation, specifically in relation to family and community. Cases before comite y’abunzi were both within families and between families and often centered on land, and thus they were intimately intertwined with the economics of memory and negotiating the meaning of exchange in relation to social networks. These cases in particular show the overlaps between genocide-related disputes and quotidian disputes in the aftermath of genocide, complicating assumptions about among whom and about what “reconciliation” needed to occur in postgenocide Rwanda.
I turn to the legal aid clinic in Chapter 5, examining how harmony and punishment combined in similar and different ways in a legal forum based not on customary law but on universal legal principles. I show how clients at the legal aid clinic were frequently directed to mediation as in the other forums, and consider how the contextualization again allowed for people to use these mediation efforts as spaces to contest the meaning of family, community, and justice. Cases before the legal aid clinic bring to light tensions between legalization and mediation, and they show how mediation was situated within a broader system of dispute resolution. These cases further show the limitations of focusing exclusively on genocide crimes versus ordinary disputes, or on customary-style law as distinct from Western-style law.
In Chapter 6, I focus on the mediators at the heart of these legal forums, showing how they served as intermediaries between professional representatives of government and their neighbors. Lay judges’ deep insider status illustrates the deep contextualization of these harmony models. Attention to lay judges reveals the textured ways the government-through-community approach unfolded. I claim that lay judges showed a side of state power that was improvisational and ambiguous, which is crucial to moving beyond coercion to understand how people experienced variations in state power in Rwanda. In the Conclusion, I briefly offer three cautions for transitional justice and peace-building practice: to relinquish the search for a pure cultural solution; to recognize that while coercion and instrumentality may be increased by legal forums they are not uniquely created by them; and to recognize that reconciliation processes may indeed be inherently violent and fraught.
Chapter 1
Silencing the Past: Producing History and the Politics of Memory
Like many outsiders visiting or living in Rwanda—expatriate aid workers, researchers, tourists—I visited the Murambi genocide memorial early in my time there, in July 2004, as I was conducting several months of fieldwork on the politics of commemoration at the ten-year anniversary of the genocide. Murambi is located three kilometers outside the town of Gikongoro in the southwest of Rwanda. It was the site of a massacre in which tens of thousands of Tutsi men, women, and children were killed while seeking refuge in April 1994 at a technical school that was under construction. Murambi was (and still is) one of the most publicized genocide memorials in Rwanda, in large part because more than eight hundred corpses have been disinterred and remain preserved in chalky white limestone, carefully resting on low tables in room after room of the original school.
What made my visit different from the visits of most others who went to Murambi between 2004 and 2011 is that I was invited to come inside the two-story administrative building, which was added in 1998, to see the exhibit a few weeks before it was due to be formally opened. I had ridden to Murambi that morning with a Rwandan staff member of Aegis Trust, the British NGO that just three months earlier, in April 2004, had successfully opened the national genocide memorial in the Gisozi section of Kigali. Aegis also had a contract to turn Murambi into one of the Ministry of Memory’s seven designated national genocide memorials, and there were plans to have an official opening later that month.1 The day I visited the Murambi site it was buzzing with activity, as dozens of people worked outside and inside, finishing reexcavating a mass grave from which bodies had been disinterred years before, smoothing cement on the collective burial site, erecting a flagpole, laying carpet, adjusting lights, washing windows, painting walls and fences. A landscape architect walked around on his own, surveying the site. My Aegis colleague first accompanied me on a tour, in which the primary guide—an elderly man whom I saw on later visits, with a pronounced divot on his skull where, as he explained, he had narrowly missed being killed by a bullet during the massacre at Murambi—opened doors to room after room filled with ghostly bodies of those killed by the massacre.2 My colleague then suggested I go inside on my own to look at the exhibit, which was almost complete, while he did further consultations.
Inside, after I recovered (as much as one can) from the emotional and sensory assault of the seemingly endless corpses, I saw confirmation that the work on the memorial was indeed nearly complete. I recognized the floor-to-ceiling panels that lined the walls (Figure 1) as very similar to those at the Gisozi genocide memorial in Kigali. They told the story of Rwanda’s history in virtually the same way, with a combination of enlarged photographs and images interspersed with text in three languages (English, French, and Kinyarwanda). The final sections emphasized the history specifically of what had occurred on this site (see the text in the box at the end of this chapter). One wall prominently featured a six-minute video including interviews with survivors and some of the alleged perpetrators of the Murambi massacre. A survivor’s narrative was prominently displayed on another wall. My host later told me that, as the text indicated, officials planned to “scientifically preserve” (cryogenically freeze, another Aegis staff told me) three corpses in the interior room, and to reinter the remaining corpses outside, pursuant to the wishes of many survivors to provide proper burial for victims.
At the close of the day, as we returned to Kigali, my host invited me to return to Murambi to attend the official opening a few weeks later. For the next several months, as I continued to follow up with him, he or his colleagues repeatedly told me that the official opening had been postponed, for this or that simple reason. When I returned to the States, the interior space remained unopened. In later years as I returned to Rwanda and at times visited Murambi, the interior remained closed, except to allow visitors to enter, sign a guest book, and make a donation. I was told by a variety of guides that there was “nothing inside,” or it was “not open yet,” or it would “open sometime soon.” Behind the main building in the original rooms of the technical school, the excavated bodies remained in their places on wooden slats. Meanwhile, changes to the exterior spaces reflected the ongoing professionalization of the site, consistent with a global lexicon of memorialization, including additional signage, and an aesthetically haunting display of victims’ clothes strung on lines in an open-ended school room. Evidence of the unraveling of diplomatic ties between Rwanda and France surfaced, including two new signs marking “Place of French Flag during Operation Turquoise” and “French soldiers were playing volley here” atop