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Reviewed by:
  • The Courts of Genocide: Politics and the Rule of Law in Rwanda and Arusha
  • Gerald Caplan, Independent Scholar
Nicholas A. Jones , The Courts of Genocide: Politics and the Rule of Law in Rwanda and Arusha. New York: Routledge, 2010. Pp. 229, cloth. $130.00 US.

Countries emerging from the dark night of conflict and oppression into the light of a new dawn face an almost limitless number of seemingly intractable problems. Think of Cambodia after the Khmer, South Africa after apartheid, Rwanda after the genocide. The economy, unemployment, infrastructure, governance, public service, schooling, health care, reconciliation, justice, trauma—all need to be dealt with, and all simultaneously. Yet over the last two decades, of all these daunting challenges it has been issues related to post-conflict justice and reconciliation that have received most public attention. An entire industry of professionals and institutions who claim to be expert in guiding such societies in transition to new levels of justice and harmonious living has grown up in response to this. In tandem, a related academic discipline of scholars studying these experiments and evaluating them has sprung up.

We need to hope these specialists can deliver on their promises, for issues related to justice are extraordinarily complex, far more than is often assumed. The subject includes its own multitude of sub-concepts, many of them entirely contradictory of and conflicting with others. For some time after South Africa escaped from apartheid, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the best-known example of a dramatic attempt to deal with the issue. The very title implied that the truth about apartheid would lead to reconciliation between white and black South Africans. This reflected the idealistic notion of restorative as opposed to retributive justice, a concept embraced by Bishop Tutu but not the mothers of Africans who discovered how the apartheid intelligence services had tortured and murdered their children. The truth can make you bitter.

In recent years, among those who pursue the elusive goal of transitional justice, South Africa has been replaced as the center of attention by Rwanda. This has reflected both the number of Rwandan institutions involved in the apparent search for post-genocide justice and their inherent fascination—the regular Rwandan justice system, which had been almost entirely destroyed during the genocide; the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set up in Arusha, Tanzania, by a guilt-ridden Security Council; and the gacaca courts, a unique institution developed in Rwanda by Rwandans to deal with the vast number of accused who could not be accommodated at either of the other two judicial levels.

Naturally, scholars have been racing to observe and study this remarkable phenomenon for several years already, and now that gacaca is over and the ICTR is winding down, we can expect the number of books and articles to explode as a result. Some of these contributions have been welcome and enlightening; for example, Timothy Longman's essay in the latest Peace Review and Clark and Kaufman's recent collection of edited essays, After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond. (See my review in Pambazuka [End Page 124] News.) That Longman, Clark, and Kaufman reach substantially different conclusions about the gacaca process merely underlines the complexity of the issues involved and the need for rigorous scholarship at all times.

Nicholas Jones's book, which is the subject of this review, has a daunting title, The Courts of Genocide: Politics and the Rule of Law in Rwanda and Arusha, and is yet another contribution to the subject. But it is not, I fear, up to the standards the subject demands.

There are several problems. First, Jones is a very awkward writer, apparently unaware at times of common syntax, grammar, and word meaning. For example, he writes of "a part of Rwanda history that people do not contend," by which he means that experts don't dispute this aspect of Rwandan history. He states that the "racist underpinnings of the Hutu social revolution became the moniker for the future ethnic divide," although 'moniker' is simply an informal word for 'name'. He quotes another author, making the statement "justice becomes the causality of a political...

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