Lesson 6: Rwandan Genocide Impacts/Justice PDF

Unit #4: Peacekeeping and Genocide MYP4 Humanities Lesson #6: Rwandan Genocide Impacts/Justice Objectives: 1. Students will learn about the numerous ways that Rwanda attempted to seek justice and reconciliation following the genocide of 1994. 2. Students will think critically and creatively about...

Unit #4: Peacekeeping and Genocide MYP4 Humanities Lesson #6: Rwandan Genocide Impacts/Justice Objectives: 1. Students will learn about the numerous ways that Rwanda attempted to seek justice and reconciliation following the genocide of 1994. 2. Students will think critically and creatively about the best possible solutions for healing a nation post-genocide. 3. Students will analyze how the current state of Rwanda was shaped by different aspects of its history. Task 1: The Rwandan Genocide is unique because the perpetrators and the families of the vicitms had to coexist after the genocide ended. What types of actions do you think could be taken to heal the nation in the aftermath of this atrocity? ● Task 2: Watch this video about the Gacaca Courts (from 2009). List some potential pros and cons of this method of justice. Pros ● Cons ● Task 3: Open this PBS Frontline Interview transcript (from 2004). It has very interesting information about the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that you may want to read. For this task you can just hit ‘command + f’ and search for “Gacaca.” Read the question and answer about this system. What new things did you learn about the Gacaca courts? Task 4: Read over this BBC Article (from 2012), then answer the following questions: Q A How many people were convicted by the ICTR? How many people passed through the Gacaca courts? What percentage were found guilty? Math time: Based on your last two answers, how many people were found guilty by the Gacaca courts? Task 5a: Read the following article (below, but also linked here). Practice your reading skills by first scanning the article to get an overall idea of what it is about. Then skim the article and highlight parts that seem really interesting and important to you. Finally read it a little more carefully - especially parts that you think help you to answer the questions below (task 3b). Rwanda’s gacaca courts are hailed as a post-genocide success. The reality is more complicated. <br/> Men walking in the Gacaca court’s archives in the Rwandan capital Kigali in 2014 where hundreds of stacked boxes hold the trial case documents of almost 2 million people that have been tried before the traditional Gacaca courts between 2001 and 2012. (Stephanie Aglietti/AFP/Getty Images) Often lauded by international observers, Rwanda’s gacaca courts have long been held up by their proponents as a model for successful, post-conflict reconciliation efforts. Confronted with the nearly impossible challenge of rebuilding a country after genocide, Rwanda needed a mechanism to hold those who committed genocide accountable in an efficient and effective manner. The solution was gacaca: a system of 12,000 community-based courts that sought to try genocide criminals while promoting forgiveness by victims, ownership of guilt by criminals, and reconciliation in communities as a way to move forward. While the organizers and leaders of the genocide were mostly sent for trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, gacaca courts tried more than 1 million ordinary people who served as the foot soldiers of the genocide. Relying on dozens of interviews, quantitative analysis of data on genocide crime prisoners, and firsthand observations of gacaca court proceedings in four regions of Rwanda, Anuradha Chakravarty’s new book suggests that the reality of gacaca is much more complicated. In “Investing in Authoritarian Rule: Punishment and Patronage in Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts for Genocide Crimes,” Chakravarty offers a detailed and nuanced look at the ways that Rwanda’s ruling party used the courts to build its own legitimacy, as well as the ways that participants in the courts viewed their role in punishing the guilty through the gacaca process. Her findings are unsettling and suggest that the gacaca process was far more political and much less conciliatory than the casual observer might want to believe. Chakravarty’s central argument is that Rwanda’s ruling party, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), used gacaca courts as a tool of patronage to build the new, post-genocide government’s legitimacy, which in turn allowed the RPF to entrench its rule into the virtually unchallenged authoritarian system in Rwanda today. Chakravarty convincingly demonstrates that the RPF’s post-genocide consolidation of power in Rwanda evolved based on the cooperation of individual Hutus, who constitute the vast majority of Rwanda’s population and many of whom had committed genocide crimes. While the early RPF consolidation of power “depended on the use of blatant force through killings and arbitrary arrests,” as time passed a system of mutual benefit developed between the RPF and the majority Hutu population it sought to rule. Writes Chakravarty: Task 5b: Answer the following questions: Question Your opinion Were the Gacaca courts a good solution/approach to reconciliation in Rwanda? Explain your position with evidence from the article. What alternatives could there have been? What would you recommend be done differently if a similar genocide ocurred today? Task 6a: Rwanda still has many problems today. Use the following resources to learn information about the current state of Rwanda: Resource Relevant/interesting information http://country.eiu.com/allcountries.aspx ● https://freedomhouse.org/countries/free dom-world/scores ● http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries ● Other ● Sources? ● Task 6b: Given the current state of Rwanda, how well did they recover after the genocide of 1994? Is it a success story or a catastrophe? Reflect on how the history of Rwanda (from Colonial times) up to the present has shaped its current status. Which factors were most significant? Extension: Here are a couple of really interesting articles that you may want to scan over: ❖ https://theconversation.com/rwandas-economic-growth-could-be-derailed-byits-autocratic-regime-114649 ❖ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/world/africa/rwanda-genocide-25years.html