Free Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid by Jessica Alexander Page A

observation that all their children looked the same. They thought that of us, too.

    Sometimes driving through the country, I saw groups of men dressed in flamingo pink uniforms jogging or walking in unison. The first time I saw them, I asked my colleague whether there was a circus act in town.
    “They’re the Hutu prisoners. That’s the prison uniform. Those bastards.”
    By 2004 (after I had left) fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 Hutus imprisoned for allegedly participating in the genocide had been tried. Those detained included men, women, and children. A handful of people thought to have wielded especial power during the genocide were brought to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. The rest were crammed into Rwanda’s prisons. Harsh conditions contributed to the deaths of more than 1,000 inmates during 2000. At the pace localcourts were proceeding, human rights organizations estimated that prosecuting all these people would take more than a century.
    Gacaca
was the traditional communal law enforcement process that handled village or familial disputes—everything from theft to marital issues, land rights, and property damage. The word
gacaca
means “cut grass” in Kinyarwanda, to symbolize the outdoor gathering place where the community would come to deliberate. The government realized that in order for economic recovery to begin, the thousands of men biding their time in jail had to come back to their communities and work. They hoped the
gacaca
courts could speed up the process.
    The day I came to listen to a
gacaca
trial, I recognized the pink uniforms on the men standing on the back of a pickup truck, holding onto the sides for balance as it pulled into the community center. When the truck arrived, wives, children, and friends ran to greet the prisoners. The men embraced their spouses and swooped their children up in the air to cuddle them. They shook hands with neighbors and laughed with their siblings. These were not the monsters I had imagined. Some were quiet and shy. Others seemed charming and friendly. These looked like normal men—men who had lost themselves for three frenzied months, and did the unspeakable.
    But
gacaca
forced these men to speak. In order to get a reduced sentence, the accused had to admit hiscrimes in front of his peers, neighbors, and family. It was the surviving community members who acted as the witnesses, lawyers, and jurors. Nineteen judges, mostly women—appropriately, and inevitably, given that when the country started to rebuild in 1995 an estimated 70 percent of the population was female—determined the credibility of the accused and decided their punishment. I sat with a translator on the edge of the hill, looking down on the fifty or so community members who had gathered on the grass to listen to the prisoners disclose their crimes and implicate those who had participated with them. Those who confessed and whose confessions were deemed truthful were either immediately released or had years shaved off their prison terms.
    That day we heard from a man who was accused of murder.
    “He killed six people. Two of them children,” my translator whispered in my ear.
    Without flinching, the man described how he and his group staked out a strategic place in the bush. They confronted everyone who passed and asked for the identity cards. If the person was a Tutsi or did not have a card, his group killed him on the spot.
    He told the judges about a woman who hid Tutsis in her house. The woman eventually betrayed the Tutsis she was sheltering and told his group where to find them. Although he denied having participated in the murders himself, the man on trial admitted that themen he was with had gone into the woman’s home and killed them all.
    “The leader of their group told them to kill quickly,” my translator whispered, “because in the neighboring town they had finished the job of eliminating Tutsis long ago. It was a competition. His