ABSTRACT
On 11 December 2014, Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG) and the British NGO Aegis Trust presented a plan to preserve, describe, digitize and publish the paper documents and audiovisual files from the Gacaca courts. Between 2002 and 2012, over 12,000 of these state-supervised community courts judged the alleged perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against an estimated 800,000 Tutsis by government forces, militia and Hutu civilians. The Gacaca Archive contains the files created before, during and after the reported 1,958,634 cases tried through these courts. Altogether, the Gacaca Archive comprises one of the world’s largest repositories on transitional justice. This chapter presents the Gacaca Archive Project as “community archiving,” which is closely tied to its origins in “community justice.”
Gacaca refers to “a bed of soft green grass” on which local Rwandan communities traditionally gathered to settle disputes between families or community members. This Gacaca juridical system, abandoned in the 1950s by the Belgian administration, and since almost forgotten, was reintroduced but replaced by the modernized, professionalized and centralized Inkiko Gacaca (Gacaca jurisdictions) in the early 2000s, specifically designed to deal with genocide-related cases. It is particularly the Rwandan stakeholders in the international consortium who take ownership of the Gacaca archive project. In this context, classical archival principles and theories related to access, arrangement and description will be challenged.
