Post-Genocide Transitional Justice: Grassroots Survivor Perspectives from Rwanda

• In Event: Rethinking Sovereignty, Power and Justice from a Critical Perspective

Abstract

This paper explores how Rwandan genocide survivors conceptualize transitional justice and the ethical values that animate it, the forms of justice they desire and seek - both retributive and reparative - and the gap between their desires and convictions and the realities of both justice and injustice in Rwanda and outside of Rwanda, and specifically at the former International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and now, its Residual Mechanism, both based in Arusha, Tanzania. It seeks to advance a bottom-up, grassroots perspective on transitional justice that is survivor-centered, to serve as a counterpoint to the dominant discourses on and scholarship about transitional justice that feature survivor perspectives only minimally and marginally. It draws upon the published narratives and testimonies of Rwandan genocide survivors to illustrate how they describe and define their hopes for post-genocide justice.
This paper also examines the complex ways in which Rwandan genocide survivors relate forms of ethical dissonance in their lives in relation to their largely unfulfilled desire for post-genocide justice, and the ways in which they respond to them in their efforts to rebuild their lives. The paper will illustrate how survivors pursue repair, rehabilitation, and advancement in their lives – in effect advancing their own reparative justice - despite and through often profoundly traumatic experiences and legacies, the political, policy, legal, and social obstacles they face and the ways in which they surmount some of them, and how this process of rebuilding takes place amongst survivors individually as well as collectively, through communal survivor organizations of self-help. It will further examine how these tasks and experiences of reparative justice that genocide survivors pursue themselves with very limited financial and human resources and typically with little government, NGO, and international support inform their conception of and desire for particular types of transitional justice, especially as they relate to reparation and to providing greater resources for genocide survivors to actualize justice in their lives. It will discuss ways in which survivors describe how they find some degree of psychic peace and what programs of support and resources would enhance their capacity to live with reduced trauma, stress, distress, and suffering and how these can be implemented and supported by governments, NGOs, and civil society.

Author

• Noam Schimmel, Kellogg College, Oxford