A field experiment compared the level of personal and collective guilt in survivors (N = 200) and accused perpetrators (N = 184) of the Rwandan genocide before and after participation in Gacaca community courts and in control groups of survivors (N = 195) and prisoners (N = 179) who did not participate in Gacaca. Participation in Gacaca led to a marked reduction in survivors’ personal and collective guilt and to an increase in prisoners' personal guilt. Prisoners’ collective guilt was unaffected by participation but collective guilt was higher for prisoners participating in Gacaca suggesting an effect of the mere anticipation of participation. Survivors who participated in Gacaca had greater doubts about Gacaca, trusted the prisoners' apologies less, were less inclined to forgive, were more revengeful, and opted more for intragroup contact and less for intergroup contact. In sum, participation in Gacaca failed to have direct effects upon dispositions to reconciliation but it produced important indirect effects in this direction by drastically reducing survivors' guilt feelings, which may have enhanced their empowerment.
After 1994, Rwanda was confronted not only with survivors of a genocide that had claimed nearly one million victims, but also with some 130,000 prisoners accused of participation in the massacres. Making matters even more complicated, survivors and perpetrators often came from the same hamlet. To deal with this challenge and to judge those accused of participation in the genocide, the Rwandan government introduced a modified version of a traditional Rwandan community-based conflict resolution system called
From a psychological viewpoint, a truth commission represents a situation in which past traumatic events are recalled, sufferings are verbalized, and related emotions are expressed for the sake of psychological and social healing. Such a linkage of expression, truth telling, and healing was made central in the post-apartheid South African "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (TRC). President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu initiated this commission in order to "heal" national wounds (
The postgenocide Rwandan Gacaca relied upon the South African TRC experience although each Gacaca was also a court handling out custodial sentences. In two different studies that were conducted in the context of Rwandan Gacaca (
These two predictions were addressed in our two studies. As regards emotional reactivation, our findings fully supported the prediction of the model. Both survivors and prisoners who participated in the Gacaca manifested a considerable increase in negative emotions after their participation. In addition, survivors who participated subsequently reported a sharp increase in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such findings thus run against the healing perspective of the expression of emotion in social context. As regards collective identity, results strongly supported the view that participation in Gacaca enhanced social cohesion. After participation, a reliable improvement of intergroup variables was observed in both survivors and prisoners across three of the four indicators of the study.
The results of our two studies on Gacaca thus provided strong support for the predictions of Durkheim’s model. On the one hand, and in contrast to the healing hypothesis that is often associated with truth commissions, participation increased both negative emotions and distress symptoms among survivors. On the other hand, this participation generally resulted in positive effects on social integration. In both studies, the analyses reported were limited to those variables that allowed us to test Durkheim’s model. However, in the second study, data collection included the measurement of several additional variables addressing the question of dispositions to reconciliation among members of both groups who took part in a Gacaca. The data that resulted from these measures are the focus of the present article.
What could be expected from participation in Gacaca as far as reconciliation is concerned?
The needs-based model thus describes reconciliation as an act of social exchange in which emotions play a central role. Could such a social exchange of emotions occur in a truth commission? Findings from our investigation of effects of participation in Gacaca provided initial support for this possibility (
In the present investigation, we intended to further test the needs-based model in the context of Gacaca by examining the dynamics of guilt feelings of participating survivors and prisoners. Guilt has been defined as an unpleasant emotional state associated with possible objections to one’s actions, inaction, circumstances, or intentions (
Regarding survivors, their social image as people worth of dignity and respect was considerably damaged up to the point that they could experience guilt feelings that have no rational basis, as is often the case among victims (
As for prisoners, they are expected to experience guilt feelings that would be well justified by the crimes they committed as members of their group. However, individuals can avoid the unpleasant experience of guilt in a variety of ways (
When victims and perpetrators are involved in a truth commission such as Gacaca, their respective roles are necessarily emphasized in a most extreme manner. The solemnity of the situation, the mutual exposure of opponents, their testimonies and counter-testimonies contribute to intensify their identification with the group of victims or with the group of perpetrators. Such enhanced identification to a role may well entail important psychosocial consequences. This was particularly well documented by recent studies showing that a higher focus on the role of victim could jeopardize intergroup reconciliation. As a matter of fact, the perception of ingroup victimization was shown to be associated with a reduction in intergroup trust (
The theoretical propositions and empirical findings just reviewed allowed us to formulate a number of hypotheses for our investigation of the effects of participation in Gacaca upon attitudes toward reconciliation. In this investigation, before and after their participation in Gacaca, survivors and prisoners rated scales assessing their beliefs about the effectiveness of Gacaca, as well as their sense of personal and collective guilt. In addition, before and after Gacaca, survivors who took part, but also a control group of survivors who were awaiting participation in Gacaca, answered questionnaires assessing variables indexing attitudes toward reconciliation, that is, their perceptions of the fairness of prisoners’ excuses, their feelings of revenge, their readiness to forgive, and their actual contacts with members of their own group and with members of the other group.
The predicted effects were as follows. First, in Gacaca, survivors’ sufferings were acknowledged and validated in a very formal way, in the presence of the entire community and of the accused prisoners who were expected to confess crimes. This situation should have empowering effects for survivors and we expected these effects to manifest themselves in a significant reduction of their guilt feelings. Second, where prisoners’ acknowledged their crimes and publicly confessed in the presence of their victims and of the entire community, this was expected to heighten their awareness of their crimes and thus to enhance their guilt feelings. Third, despite the two previous predictions, the extreme focus of the truth commission situation on survivors as victims and members of the group of victims together with the limitations of Gacaca in granting redistributive justice (i.e., weak punishments; lack of reparations) and restorative justice (i.e., victims view perpetrators’ confessions and expressions of regrets as insufficient; see
In total, 755 volunteers who were able to read and write Kinyarwanda and were at least 18 years old at the time of the genocide took part in the study. Among them, 395 were survivors (238 females, or 60.25%) and 360 were accused of being perpetrators (162 females, or 45%). The experimental group comprised 384 participants of whom 200 were survivors (
The study was conducted between February and April 2006 in four of the five Rwandese provinces with citizens who had been involved in the 1994 genocide, either as a survivor or as an accused perpetrator now in custody. Survivors and prisoners were matched for their residence in the same neighborhoods during the genocide. They participated either in the experimental or in the control condition. Control participants came from a neighborhood where no Gacaca trial had yet taken place and where no such trial was being planned for another year. Also, control participants had not taken part in any other Gacaca trial outside of their neighborhood. Both experimental and control participants responded twice, once before and once after the Gacaca trial that took place for the experimental participants. The two sets of judgments were collected over a period of 10 weeks. Participants lived in hamlets based on agricultural economy. No relevant differences exist in socioeconomic indexes between regions. No gender differences were found in data analyses.
In order to recruit the survivors, we first selected specific, accessible neighborhoods as April-June is a rainy season in Rwanda and as our data collectors (students) had limited means of transportation. We then contacted the local authorities to ask permission to conduct the study within their district. In the presence of the authorities, the research assistant identified each survivor and explained the purpose of the study. It was stressed that they could refuse to participate or, if they accepted, that they could terminate their participation at any time during the study without any consequence. The selection procedure for the prisoners was identical with the exception that written permission was secured from the Minister of Interior and from the head of the penitentiary in order to meet with the convict in prison.
An initial group of 40 senior students of the clinical division of the psychology department of the National University of Rwanda were familiarized with techniques and rules of survey research. A final team of 24 assistants was retained on the basis of skills and motivation. They were paid 15 Euros per data collection day.
Where scales were available in English they were translated to Kinyarwanda. There was no back translation.
The Trauma-Related Guilt Inventory (TRGI;
The extent to which group-based guilt was accepted by participants was assessed using a five-item measure (e.g., "I feel regret for my group’s harmful past actions toward the other group"; "I feel regret about things my group did to the other group in the past"; "I believe that I should have repaired the damage caused to the other group") adapted from a scale originally developed by
Prior observation suggested that negative expectations about Gacaca were common among survivors and prisoners. We measured these concerns with six items formulated for this purpose: "Gacaca trials will have no positive impact on those who have emotional suffering"; "Gacaca trials will not be helpful in the healing of emotional pain"; "It would be better to forget the past: The trial will only cause more emotional suffering"; "The trial will not help Rwanda people to deal with their emotional suffering"; "The trial will not bring justice for those responsible in the genocide"; "The trial will not bring justice to the survivors of genocide". These items were rated on 6-point scales anchored with 0 = not at all and 5 = very much (Cronbach’s alpha = .66 at test and .68 at retest).
To examine the extent to which the expression of apology by prisoners was perceived as faked or sincere, we adapted the 12-item questionnaire developed by
The Transgression Related Interpersonal Motivations Inventory (TRIM) developed by
We translated and adapted the Transgression Narrative Test of Forgiveness (TNTF) developed by
Intergroup contact was measured by a translation of the questionnaire developed by
As regards the measurement of personal guilt, a 4 (groups) × 2 (before and after Gacaca) mixed ANOVA demonstrated highly significant effects for groups,
For collective guilt a significant effect was again found for groups,
Level of personal guilt (1a) and collective guilt (1b) reported by the respondents of the four groups before and after participation of two of these groups in Gacaca.
On the measure of doubt about the effectiveness of Gacaca, the ANOVA showed a group effect,
The results for the five variables measured only for survivors are displayed in
Survivors/Gacaca ( |
Survivors/Control ( |
Group |
Time |
Group x Time |
||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Time 1 |
Time 2 |
Time 1 |
Time 2 |
|||||||||||
η2 | η2 | η2 | ||||||||||||
Distrust | 2.51 | 0.55 | 3.13 | 0.60 | 2.28 | 0.53 | 2.19 | 0.62 | 111.87*** | .22 | 236.56*** | .38 | 430.98*** | .52 |
Revenge | 2.23 | 0.43 | 2.41 | 0.49 | 3.45 | 0.45 | 3.43 | 0.63 | 831.55*** | .68 | 5.70** | .01 | 9.19** | .02 |
Forgiveness | 2.71 | 0.45 | 2.54 | 0.61 | 1.80 | 0.60 | 1.90 | 0.62 | 187.82*** | .32 | 7.02** | .02 | 96.43*** | .20 |
Contact with perpetrators | 2.32 | 0.72 | 1.47 | 0.60 | 1.92 | 0.76 | 1.88 | 0.71 | <1.0 | - | 1111.22*** | .74 | 916.33*** | .70 |
Contact with survivors | 1.28 | 0.61 | 2.08 | 0.69 | 1.96 | 0.76 | 1.90 | 0.71 | 13.46*** | .03 | 620.48*** | .61 | 809.03*** | .67 |
**
We explored the correlations between the various variables of the study as measured after Gacaca among the survivors who took part to Gacaca. However, the observed coefficients were generally of a small size and did not provide additional information about the data.
Clearly, before their participation in Gacaca, survivors had a lower level of doubt about Gacaca than respondents from the other three groups. This suggests that the anticipation of their upcoming participation sparked positive expectations and feelings of hope. Such an interpretation is supported by the fact that, compared to survivors who were not participating in Gacaca, survivors anticipating their forthcoming court appearance also reported much lower feelings of revenge, a higher level for forgiveness, and a higher level of contact with the outgroup. That such hopeful expectations existed among Rwandan survivors in view of Gacaca does not come as a surprise in light of the widespread assumption that simply giving survivors a chance to tell their stories to an official commission would bring them healing (e.g.,
As far as the prisoners were concerned, participation had the ‘positive’ effect of increasing their personal guilt. This did not happen for collective guilt. However, as was mentioned in the results, it should be noted that the collective guilt of the prisoners who took part in the Gacaca was already significantly higher than that of prisoners who did not take part. This suggests that the mere anticipation of participation in the Gacaca was enough to significantly exacerbate the collective guilt of the accused.
The guilt feelings manifested by survivors possibly reflected survivor guilt, or guilt about surviving the death of loved ones and/or about being better off than others (
However, a truth commission process is a complex and multifaceted psychosocial event. Among others, it involves an accentuation of the respective roles of survivors and perpetrators. Abundant empirical documentation showed that accentuating the role of victim and of membership in the victims’ group may entail damaging consequences for the reconciliation process (
These results should also be integrated with our previous observations according to which participation in Gacaca allowed an improvement in the intergroup relations both among survivors and prisoners (
In principle, such effects should bring members of the two groups closer to one another whereas the results discussed in the previous paragraph point to the opposite direction. The divergence could be usefully examined in the framework of the distinction between macro-level and micro-level perspective justice that was first formulated by Brickman and colleagues (
Thus, dissimilar investigation methods and dissimilar socio-political contexts consistently lead us to conclude that truth commissions positively fulfill macro-level justice purposes, but fail to deliver micro-level benefits. To be sure, the fulfillment of macro-level justice represents an important achievement. It contributes to change group categorization from a "they" to a "we" via the creation of a superordinate category, so that members of different groups come to think of themselves as members of a single overarching group.
That micro-level benefits failed to be met for participants in Gacaca might be due to a variety of factors. First, previous studies largely demonstrated that the evocation of crimes had revived painful emotions among survivors (
Yet, the present results do not allow us to conclude on a totally negative note with regard to the capacity of Gacaca to contribute to the more personal, micro level, dimensions of justice. After their participation, survivors manifested a considerable reduction of their guilt feelings, both at individual and at collective level. In this respect, the level of the effect sizes was particularly high. As noted above, such results clearly suggest that, despite the activation of negative emotions they experienced in the process, the survivors left the Gacaca with a very significant gain in social power. According to
The present research has a number of limitations. The design of the study was quasi-experimental – participants’ assignment to conditions was not random but determined by geographical factors. The measures used suffer the usual limitations of self-reports. They were relatively transparent, thereby favoring the intrusion of experimental (there were no reverse scored items), social, or even political demands. But in our opinion, the major limitation was the lack of follow-up measurements in the long run. Participants completed the study scales in the immediate aftermath of their participation to Gacaca – in a window of a couple of weeks thereafter. It would of course be crucial to assess how far the dynamics and effects initiated by Gacaca would evolve in the longer term.
In spite of these limitations, the study has a number of strengths. It is one of the rare studies approaching psychosocial effects of Truth and Reconciliation procedures and, to our knowledge, it is the first one to assess predictions of the needs-based model of reconciliation in such a context. The study relied on a longitudinal design with a considerable number of respondents, in a part of the world in which an investigation of this kind is exceptional. The time frame that was adopted by the government of Rwanda in its implementation of the Gacaca ritual across the country allowed us to develop a classic quasi-experimental design, with effective control groups. The study was also unique in that both victims and prisoners were taken into consideration.
In conclusion, the present efforts confirm that establishing truth is a challenging exercise and that facing truth can indeed be harmful. However, "establishing who did what and why is essential for acknowledgment, for justice, and for collective memories or group narratives that can move groups toward a shared history" (
Patrick Kanyangara is now coordinator of a project "Peacebuilding, peacekeeping and transitional justice" in the African Great Lakes Region (Burundi, DR Congo, Rwanda and Uganda) and is based in Bujumbura (Burundi).
The authors have no funding to report.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
The authors have no support to report.