Gacaca courts, justice and reconciliation
Commending a work which sets a ‘universal standard’ on assessing Rwanda’s gacaca courts – ‘the country’s remarkable experiment in transitional justice’ – Gerald Caplan reviews Phil Clark’s ‘The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers’.
If Phil Clark’s new book can’t be said to be the definitive work on Rwanda’s gacaca, the country’s remarkable experiment in transitional justice, it is only because it is far too soon for such an achievement. It will take years before the impact of the gacaca process can fully be assessed, and we can be confident that even then, consensus – as in all things Rwandan – will be hard to find. Nonetheless, with this new book on gacaca, following his 2008 book of edited essays ‘After Genocide’ (with Zachary Kaufman, , Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp 355 + 33.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.