In the second essay, “Perceptions on Truth and Reconciliation, Lessons from Gacaca in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” Régine Uwibereyeho King and Benjamin Maiangwa give us some lessons learned from the gacaca system of Truth and Reconciliation in Rwanda. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, there were over 100,000 individuals suspected of having committed some form of genocide. This number was far too large for Rwanda’s existing western style national court system and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Starting in 2001, in local communities 12000 gacaca courts were set up to try those suspected of being guilty of genocide. The courts were set up in a form resembling a traditional dispute mechanism (gacaca means lawn or grass or grass roots) that was understood by all and “reshaped it into a national program designed to respond to the national wounds of the genocide.” Prior to the genocide, gacaca courts handled low and local level disputes like, inheritance, theft, family disputes, etc. The government added and codified some categories of genocide. Judges were elected locally and had to have “integrity.” Strong social pressure was supposed to be imposed to get a confession from the accused and forgiveness from the victims. They were then to share a drink together. It did not always go smoothly. Given the problems gacaca courts had to deal with, the literature on their success is mixed. “Like other TRCs gacaca struggled with the management of retributive [justice based on punishment] and restorative justice [focused on the rehabilitation of offenders through reconciliation with victims and the community].”
The authors believe gacaca was more of a success than a failure. Their main points are: “Taking into account all the interdisciplinary perspectives and our own experience, both in Rwanda and Canada, we submit that some of the most important lessons are (1) the need to take local community context and experiences of peace building into account, especially Indigenous values and needs; (2) the need to be flexible in implementing the TRC’s Calls to Action—through vigilant monitoring—given that there are divergent perspectives on how people interpret the atrocities committed in their communities; and (3) the need to move beyond Western liberal legalistic justice processes to combine retributive and restorative justice as practiced by communities at the grassroots.”
In the third essay, “Monitoring that Reconciles, Reflecting on the TRC’s Call for a National Council for Reconciliation,” Cody O’Neil, who is a Juris Doctor (JD)/Joris Indigenous Doctor (JID) student, asks us to consider some decolonizing ideas when it comes to measuring performance. This will be important should a National Council for Reconciliation ever be formed since one of its tasks will be to monitor progress in reconciliation. The author begins his essay by calling into mind that measurements and metrics have been used in the services of colonization—but it does not have to be so. It is important for reconciliation to decolonize the measurement of reconciliation or we risk trading in one form of colonization for another. “[S]teadfast in their commitment to domination, colonizers have long sought to measure in order to master. After all, keeping tabs on the forces that threaten colonial rule is required to maintain this rule…. Whether it is surveying Indigenous lands in order to steal them, studying Indigenous knowledges in order to sell them, or counting Indigenous children in order to assimilate them, the ways in which measurement has accelerated Indigenous plunder and advanced settler prosperity are far from a historical aside.” Every colonization project has been measured and we have a lot of precedent-like techniques on how to measure everything in a way that is conducive to maintaining the existing power relations. As evidence consider the wealth and standard of living gap between first nations and settlers. Hence, for true reconciliation we must rethink and reexamine existing tools and categories of measurement. “…it is imperative to contest the colonial ends to which measurement is so often directed.” Additionally, it is also imperative to add “measurement as practiced by Indigenous peoples and nations.”
South Africa’s experience in trying to measure their post-apartheid racial reconciliation can be helpful for Canada’s National Council for Reconciliation. Between 2003 and 2013, South Africa conducted a formal yearly national opinion poll as a tool to measure reconciliation. This “Reconciliation Barometer…. Underwent a substantive conceptual shift in response to changing public perception (partly revealed by the poll itself) that national discourse on reconciliation had become increasingly disconnected from the material reality of ongoing economic inequality.” The national discourse led by Whites focused on the therapeutic aspects of reconciliation while the situation on the ground was of continuing economic inequality. The response was the adoption of “Radical Reconciliation,” a refocusing of the discourse in the direction of economic justice. This meant that regardless of whether you believe in retributive or restorative justice “there can be no reconciliation without restitution.” Apartheid had to be seen as a criminal scheme to funnel wealth and privilege to Whites. The reconciliation barometer also demonstrated a huge lack of understanding between Whites (who felt that no one was really badly off anymore) and the actual living conditions of the majority. The commonly held public perception of the dominant group often easily finds ways to reproduce itself generation to generation – without an intervention. This points to a need to find a common understanding of the economic inequalities. For without this common understanding reconciliation will continue to mean very different things for different people. “Radical reconciliation is thus a call to move beyond a politics of recognition—in the form of apology, multicultural lip service, or otherwise—to a politics of restitution.” Only once a common understanding of what reconciliation means in a given society can useful indicators and metrics be determined. Only once a common understanding based on the reality on the ground is achieved will the likelihood of a real reconciliation improve.
Unfortunate for Canada, our style of reconciliation is best labeled “rhetorical reconciliation” because most settlers speak as if anything can contribute to reconciliation. We speak as if we had this common understanding with indigenous peoples, but we do not. Our entire legal, political, and economic system is designed to exploit indigenous land for the benefit of the non-indigenous. The author believes that reconciliation in the Canadian case is much harder than most other cases where a TRC have been tried. This is because most of the 40 or so TRCs around the world have operated in post-conflict situations. Recognizing the difficulty of the Canadian case is important in order to avoid simplifications and so as to align ourselves to get to a common understanding. “It is questionable whether a transitional justice framework of this sort [South Africa’s TRC] and its language of ‘post-conflict’ retains the same critical purchase in the settler colonial context of Canada, where colonialism is an ongoing process marked by the continued dispossession of Indigenous lands and the suppression of Indigenous sovereignty.” In other words, the Canadian reconciliation case is like seeking forgiveness and acceptance without changing the criminal behaviour. Canada is in a conflict situation right now and there does not appear to be any peace on the horizon let alone reconciliation.
In the final section of the essay offers some suggestions for measuring reconciliation. Two very important ones are first to frame the indicators not as an “Indian problem” that reproduces the colonial system but rather as problematizing the government actions. “one example would be the difference between monitoring health outcomes as opposed to monitoring government failure to address these health outcomes. There is a serious risk (and a long history) of framing socio-economic indicators in such a way that Indigenous peoples are presented as broken, as opposed to the brokenness of the Canadian state or its settler population.”