18 June 2007 - My Birthday

So, I had food poisoning all of last week. Got sick on Sunday and did not go to the doctor until Friday. I missed a couple days of work and had to leave early the other days I was here. I should have just gone to the doctor in the beginning. Oh well, I am feeling much better now.

This past weekend we had a massive BBQ at my house. It began at 1 pm and lasted until about 12:30 am. I still wasn’t feeling 100 percent, so I didn’t last that late. But, it was quite enjoyable. We had amazing goat kebobs. They were delicious, but our whole house now smells like goat. I may never be able to eat goat again.

I missed a bit of work last week and even when I was here I didn’t manage to work on anything substantial as I felt miserable, so there is not much to report. I did however work on a response to a young student in Germany’s email. He wanted some information for a report on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Gacaca Courts. I’ve attached some of it below. It may be able to give some of you a better picture of the Gacaca Courts.

• Gacaca is scheduled to finish the end of this year, 2007. However, there is a possibility that the Gacaca Court’s mandate will be extended.
• There are three main phases to Gacaca
o Collection of information phase
o Categorization
o Trial
• The pilot phase for collection of information phase began 19 June 2002 in one prefecture, which consisted of 12 Cells.
• The second group of the pilot phase, which consisted of 672 Cells, began their collection of information phase 25 November 2007.
• The entire country began the collection of information phase 15 January 2005. There are a total of 9,013 Cells in Rwanda.
• The close of the collection of information stage was 31 December 2005.
• After the information stage the following remained accused
o 77,260 – Category 1
o 432,557 – Category 2
o 308,564 – Category 3
o 818,564 – Total
• It is important to note that the Organic Law has undergone changes and amendments. The criteria between Category One and Two have changed.
o 3,200 – changed category due to the changes in the law
• All trials throughout Rwanda began 10 March 2005 and are scheduled to be completed by December 2007. There are strategies in place in case the cases are not completed.
• These statistics are from 30 April 2007. It is important to note these numbers have greatly increased. The numbers below are for Category 2:
o 76,371 – trials have been completed
o 7,754 – were found innocent
o 18,737 – were forced to serve TIG (community service)
o 17,375 – acquittals
o 7,988 – have appealed
• All Category One prisoners are tried by the Ordinary Courts of Rwanda. They are not tried by the Gacaca Courts. Category 3 consists of crimes against property and those found in this category are not forced to spend time in prison. The main concern of the Gacaca Courts is to complete Category 2 cases.
• As of today, 14 June 2007, approximately 100,000 Category 2 cases have been tried and a little over 300,000 cases remain.
• Not all that remain accused under Category 2 remain in prison. Some have been released and await their trial outside of prison.
• Those that were released under the presidential releases must still stand before Gacaca Courts; they are just no longer in prison. After their release they were sent to rehabilitation camps which dealt with not only the effects of the Genocide, but the future of Rwanda and how to live in harmony with their Rwandan brothers and sister.
• There is community service which is called TIG (Travaux d’intérêt general). The amount of time one spends in TIG depends on the sentence handed down by the courts. TIG is given in place of time spent in prison. It is for those who have confessed.
• Gacaca does not have a problem with the treatment of the prisoners at the ICTR. If Rwanda had the resources, all of the prisoners in Rwanda would be kept under such conditions. The only complaint from the Gacaca Courts is that the trial speed at the ICTR has been extremely slow. The ICTR has many more resources than the National Service of Gacaca Courts and yet the trial rate is much slower than that of the Gacaca Courts.

Oh, by the way, it’s my birthday today. No one at work knows…which is probably a good thing. But, I am going out for Ethiopian food tonight after my French classes. Mmmmm…Ethiopian food. Let’s hope my stomach can handle it.

That’s right. I am taking French lessons 4 days a week now. I even watched ‘The Breakup’ with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn yesterday entirely in French. We had rented it from the ‘video rental store’ here, so of course it was a copy. It was suppose to be in English, but you never can tell with these things. And of course there was no menu to switch the language. I understood about ¼ of it…which is better than nothing at all.