Can you imagine ...?

In Rwanda, the nation's justice system and the International Criminal Tribunal set up to try genocide suspects have been overwhelmed by the number of cases. According to Rwanda’s President, handling all the cases in those courts would take hundreds of years. With that in mind, “gacacas” have been formed to help the process move more quickly.

Thousands of people attend gacaca courts all across Rwanda on any given day. Hearings are held in open fields in neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. There are no lawyers and no judges in robes. A panel of local villagers with no legal experience conducts the proceedings.

While gacacas were originally formed to resolve minor disputes among villagers, they have been reinvented to hand out justice to the perpetrators of Rwanda’s infamous genocide and help fast-track reconciliation efforts in the broken nation. Some analysts say the system has its advantages, reducing congestion in prisons and allowing survivors to hear first-hand what happened to their loved ones. For many, though, it is watching suspects struggle to come to terms with the attacks that brings an unusual form of comfort.

“They (the suspects) will never know peace,” explains a man who lost his family to the violence. “They have to live with the fact that they killed their neighbors for the rest of their lives. While the survivors can move on, they (attackers) probably never will.”