1994 Rwanda Genocide

In 1994, Rwanda lost 1 million people in 100 days. The build up to what resulted in the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda is a long history of deliberate policies starting at colonialism through different successive regimes that were in power at different times. Rwanda had lost 1 million people and by the end of 1994, approximately 2 million people were in prisons as suspects who had taken part in the execution of that genocide. At the time, the public and civil service institutions had all collapsed. Rwanda had only 60 lawyers at the time. The challenge to the government then was how to deliver justice to the dead, the victims who had lost their loved ones and survivors of the genocide, and the suspects in prison. The purpose of this paper therefore,

They tend to forget that traditional justice system is not a source of law, but rather a strategy for making justice available to the majority of the population who cannot access the formal judicial process and hence promote and protect human rights, Human rights cannot be achieved in the absence of proper access to justice. Also letting traditional courts deal with genocide crimes did not imply trivialization of the crime. On the contrary, it serves the very rights. Tradition justice accelerated the process of dealing with backlog cases and stopped

Efforts to promote reconciliation focused on changing attitudes by the people. While writing about reconciliation in Rwanda Ervin Staub says, the essence of reconciliation, is a changed psychological orientation toward the other. This was a long protracted and painful process but in the end it bore fruits. It started with small groups including leaders, the media and churches. (Ervin Staub University of Massachusetts at Amherst). As trials were going on, a lot of details were revealed such as the crude methods used to kill people, how and where they were buried and some of course were never buried at all. These revelations were based on to accord decent burial for relatives. The discovery of the remains of their loved ones was a healing process to build truth and reconciliation between those in prisons and the relatives of the victims. However, reconciliation didn’t mean that the culprit is forgiven to go scout free. Sentences had to be forwarded and were served. The state as the guarantor justice was to execute