 Good morning and good afternoon. I'm delighted to welcome everyone here today for this event on reconciliation and justice in Rwanda, lessons for creating ways to live together after violence. My name is Susan Stigant, and I lead USIP's programs in East Africa and the Greater Horn of Africa. This event is part of a series highlighting themes from Imagine, Reflections on Peace, a multimedia exhibit from USIP and the Seven Foundation that explores the challenges of building peace through an immersive look at societies that have suffered and survived violent conflict. You are invited to tour the exhibit if you're in Washington, DC Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays through August 1. Free tickets are available online. There is also a virtual tour for those of you who are joining us online at www.usip.org slash imagine. Almost 30 years ago, in the wake of horrific violence, it almost seemed unimaginable that Rwandans could chart a path out of violence and towards a common future. And for 30 years since then, individuals in their communities, governments, universities, and international partners have taken and continue to take steps towards that goal. This has included efforts towards justice and the Gachacha courts. It has included memorialization, reconciliation, trauma healing, and reform of curriculum, laws, and institutions. It has not been straightforward. It has not been without dilemmas or trade-offs. And this is the case in any context after mass violence and genocide. We won't do justice to a conversation about three decades of reconciliation in the time that we have today. But we will do our very best to draw forward reflections from our panelists about practical approaches and steps that will help to spark the imagination of other countries, other peace builders, and partners who are contemplating similar questions. Today, we are delighted to be joined by a really exemplary panel of experts, practitioners, researchers who have studied, written about, and walked these paths of reconciliation and justice in Rwanda. We have several of our colleagues who are joining us online. Dr. Phil Clark, who is a professor of international politics at SOAS University of London. I'm joined in person by Mr. Mike Jobbins, Vice President of Global Affairs and Partnerships at Search for Common Ground. We have Dr. Alice Karakezi, who is a professor at the Center for Conflict Management at the University of Rwanda. And Dr. Felix Nduhinda, who's an honorary associate professor at the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Rwanda. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for joining us. For those of you who are joining online today, we encourage you to follow in social media with the hashtag Rwanda Reconciliation USIP. We will have an opportunity for questions and answers at the end, so please feel free to add your questions and comments as we go along the way. So let's get into the conversation with the time we have today. Each of you has led decades of research and advocacy and support to legal and judicial processes and peacebuilding activities. And I wonder if you can reflect a little bit on what stands out for you as some of the most important lessons and poignant lessons from Rwanda's experience in justice and reconciliation. Alice, I'd like to go to you to start us off, please. Alice, we can't hear you, sorry. Thank you very much, Susan. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for having me and giving an opportunity to reflect on those aspects that we have been embedded in for so long. Perhaps one of the few things I would say on the top of my head now is, first of all, we have witnessed the importance of having something to refer to in our society, to build on, to expand on, and try to have some remedies. With the advantage of having some familiarity with the society that is attempting to heal, the other important thing that we have witnessed is that the importance of community leaders in justice dispensation is as a necessary condition to people's ownership. And another important thing, to my opinion, is the place of justice and reconciliation. Most of the time we are dealing with, of course, a lot of suffering. And in the case of societies as runners, we are dealing with violence that has been rooted in society. It means that, unlike, for example, what you have seen in places like situations like the Shoah, or where you have administrative violence, you have, in the case of Rwanda and other societies, violence between people who know each other intimately sometime. So it is very important that justice come to the place where people live, where people have suffered, and where people are still distressed. Perhaps the last point that I would like to say now is reconciliation requires direct communities dialogue. It's one thing as one important factor. I will not say the only thing, but a dialogue taking place within community at the place of suffering and with deep roots in the society we are seeking justice and reconciliation in some of the key lessons I would say have learned from those near 30 years of seeing and living efforts at justice and reconciliation. Thanks, Alice. I think we betray how complex the situation is with our title. We just put justice and reconciliation together like they're two words that automatically fit on a page. But as you've said, there are some very complicated pieces that go along with that and advancing those two absolutely critical streams. Phil, can I turn to you for your reflections on key lessons learned? Thanks, Susan. And thanks to the US Institute for Peace for the very kind invitation to be here. It's always a delight to be on a panel with my good friends, Alice and Felix in particular. If I was to think of maybe the most poignant lesson that I would take away from the Rwandan experience of justice and reconciliation over the last 30 years, and I've been researching on these themes for 20 of those years, it's that we've seen a marked Rwandan desire to pursue creative and contextual responses to the genocide against the Tutsi, that particularly through Gachacha, but not only Gachacha, as I'm sure we'll talk about here, Rwanda went down a pathway that actually was opposed by many international actors. There was this real sense when Gachacha was being talked about as a community-based form of justice for genocide crimes. It really brought down on the Rwandan government's head a ton of bricks from international human rights groups, international lawyers, who said, you can't do this. You can't possibly use lay judges sitting under trees in their village to prosecute these very complicated genocide crimes, and the response by the Rwandan government was, well, you tell us what else we're supposed to do. We've got hundreds of thousands of suspected perpetrators. We've got a society that's been torn apart. We've got very limited resources and very limited remaining institutions with which to do justice. How else are we supposed to do this? So I think what really characterizes for me the Gachacha process, but the entire Rwandan recovery since 1994 has been this desire to do things in a way that made sense to Rwandans and to the particular context that the country was confronted with, regardless of whether there was international opposition. It should be said that something like Gachacha was also instituted in the face of major opposition from many Rwandan lawyers. This is something that comes up in my own research was in the late 1990s, early 2000s, some of the most vociferous critics of the use of Gachacha for genocide crimes, in fact, were members of the Rwandan legal community who were steeped in a very, I would say, orthodox conventional understanding of the law and how it should be applied. And they were appalled by the idea that this new creative community-based institution, namely Gachacha, would be used for the genocide cases. So that I think is something important to take out of the Rwandan experience. It's a message beyond Rwanda that we shouldn't just think about post atrocity justice in very narrow terms. It's not only about courtrooms. It's not only about prisons, but there are many other possibilities that can be pursued. And I think we live in an era where transitional justice and reconciliation are being conceived of in increasingly narrow terms. We're being told it has to look like this. It has to look like the International Criminal Court. You can't use amnesties any longer. That's prohibited according to much international thinking. The options are becoming fewer by the year. States recovering from atrocity, I think find themselves hemmed into this international orthodoxy about what they're supposed to do. In that regard, I think the Rwandan experience is inspirational. It says, look to your own context, look to your own needs, look to your own challenges, and find the solution that works best for your society, and you should ignore the critics in that pursuit. Thank you. Thanks, Bill. We'll come back to a number of those points. But it strikes me, drawing off of what Alice said, is that in the news, we often hear about the International Criminal Court or International Criminal Tribunes. And many people think about justice in that regard. And it's much harder to understand, I think unless you've lived or accompanied it, that the effects of violence are still being felt by individuals and communities. And that space to debate and discuss what does justice look like for a particular context is incredibly difficult. And I think maybe underestimated in terms of the time, the energy, the courage, and the effort that's actually needed to go there. Felix, let me turn to you. Thank you very much. Difficult, of course, to chip in here after a very eloquent statement by Phil and Alice. Thank you again, like everybody said, for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here and discussing with you. Now, talking about really the current lesson, I guess if I was to put it in one line, really, which very much joins what Phil just said, it would be Rwanda's mobilization of the colonial past in trying to break away with the colonial legacy. Probably that would be, to me, the key line from which I would deal. I mean, Gattata is the most known mechanism, but anyone starting Rwanda today knows that there is now quite a very many other processes, mechanisms, often called homegrown solutions or processes or programs that are reinvented, if you will, to try to deal with specific issues around justice, reconciliation, and even socioeconomic kind of sphere. So we talk about Gattata, but also we talk about Jaboonzee. We talk about Himihigo. We talk about Ubujehe. And I'm sure we'll be coming back to some of those. But really what stands out is, precisely this Rwanda's idea of looking outside the box, outside of the general prescription within the field of transitional justice in looking to responses to a massive, massive destructive legacy that the country had. There are many, of course, ways of looking at all of those in a very much more open and critical way, but that being said, Rwanda's determination to go there, if you will, where there were very few examples to look upon is pretty much striking. And that, to me, also explains, as we probably will be discussing in the next phase, the daily forms of renegotiation of the lives together within, on Rwandan Hills. How personal experience, of course, going on those hills, training Gattata judges in the early 2000s. And I can, many would say that the society is not perfect, but when you look at the society then and now, definitely you look at quite how society evolves over time. Back to you, maybe. I will probably stop there and publish because some of those later. Thanks, Felix. I think this notion of a daily form of negotiating how we live together is something that so many of us have the privilege to take for granted. And in fact, that's coming out of violence, surviving through violence, adds a degree of complexity to that. And let's, we'll come back to that. Mike. And maybe just to pick up on that and to underscore one of the reflections that Professor Alice made. In so many of the places around the world, I work with Search for Common Ground. We have about 60 offices around the world and we've been engaged in Rwanda for about 15 years, so about half of the post-genocide period. And what's been so striking about the process, the processes in Rwanda, has also been the degree to which justice reconciliation, at one level, is a political process. It's about laws, it's about penalties, it's about the apparatus of state and the institutions that come with and surround the apparatus of state. And at the other level, it's a deeply personal process. And the degree to which the Rwandan society, not only the Rwandan state, but the Rwandan society have embraced a top-down and bottom-up approach. Experience of suffering is a legal one. It is one where there's accountability and is one where the state, as all states do, has a particular role of ensuring justice in society. And at the same time in a society as densely populated as Rwanda, and where the experience of violence is so intimate between neighbors, between local leaders and individuals, that process of renegotiating, as Felix said, is vital and also one that requires sacrifices of every individual in terms of how they reengage in social relationships with perpetrators or with perpetrators. And so that top-down and bottom-up approach, I think really marked the relative success that Rwanda has seen up to today. And it's often lacking, as we look at other parts of the world, sometimes we see relatively robust reconciliation processes and yet without the formal commitment to justice or accountability or the backing of the state in a way that helps society move forward. In other places, we see relatively robust justice and accountability mechanisms that are poorly accepted, poorly understood, happen in the courtroom or in a private place of state, and yet are barely known, let alone supported by the vast majority of people who experienced the violence of the crimes being accounted. And so I think that top-down and bottom-up approach is something that really Rwandan, all of society has embraced and reflected is one of the lessons that the process of justice and reconciliation goes everything from sort of the highest levels of state down to the ordinary farmer who needs to renegotiate her relationship with a neighbor accused or who had committed horrendous crimes against her. And that people's reconciliation alongside political reconciliation, people's justice and a political justice is one of the blends. And I think, you know, like Professor Phil said, it's not necessarily one of the successes that Rwanda has known, a relative success Rwanda has known is that it hasn't been a one-size-fits-all, that there was a bucking of sort of the, some of the international norms and conventions that it was something that was crafted at a particular moment of time by Rwandan society, for Rwandan society. And in that sense, it's actually, I think relatively, it's not, it is also not a model that can be cookie cutter copied in the same way as it was copied from nowhere, it can't be copied as a template and we've seen efforts that have tried. But there are a number of key lessons. I think the first and foremost is the linking of the people and the politics, the people and the power in a justice and reconciliation process is a great, great starting place. I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about the Gautama Courts and Phil, Felix, Alex, I know you've been deeply involved in both studying those, attending several of the court sessions and reflecting on them in the context of broader international law, justice and reconciliation and Rwanda's own journey there. And so I'm wondering if you could maybe kick us off, Phil, and share a little bit with people who are less familiar with what are the Gautama Courts. And what do you think stands out from that experience building on your initial remarks? So Gautama really was this revolutionary system of about 12,000 community-based courts that ran between 2002 and 2012. They prosecuted hundreds of thousands of genocide cases in these very open air hearings with judges who were elected by the local community and those judges couldn't have previously been a professional judge or lawyer. So it was very much a process done without lawyers. It was punitive in the sense that these were prosecutions, people were charged with genocide crimes, those cases were then tested, evidence was gathered from the local community and if people were found guilty, in most cases they didn't get sent back to prison, in most cases they did a certain period of community service. So it was a very involving process, local community members would turn up to these hearings at least once a week debating a single genocide case for an entire day and then sometimes come back the next week and continue to do so. It was a very taxing process for local people in that sense but did manage to deal with this enormous case load of genocide charges over that decade that the courts ran in and along with Felix and Alice, I followed the process all the way through, researching in a range of communities around the country, Felix and Alice were even more directly involved with training judges and I would say that they were much more directly participating in the process as opposed to myself who was really only observing it. If I was to pick out one sort of important feature of Gachacha that I really think is important for a Rwandan society but that in my research has resonated far beyond. I also work in places like Uganda, Burundi and Congo and there's an element of Gachacha that I think is resonant in the places that I conduct research there. It's that Gachacha put an emphasis on every single genocide suspect regardless of how supposedly senior or important they were. And this was a real divergence from how criminal justice was typically talked about in most parts of the world. In the aftermath of mass atrocity that typical view is that you'd hold these trials for a handful of elite perpetrators or at least elite suspects, military and political leaders. And then it almost in many places doesn't matter what you do with everybody else. Maybe you give them a formal amnesty but in many parts of the world you don't even do that. You just kind of ignore the so-called low level actors. Now in a context like Rwanda that option wasn't available because at the end of the day the vast majority of genocide perpetrators were going to go home and live next to genocide survivors on the hills. And so if there hadn't been some kind of reckoning with the crimes that those everyday people had been involved in, there was a real danger of a bloodbath. And so Rwanda's decision through Gachacha was to put a spotlight on the role of your lowest level peasant farmer who had been involved in genocide crimes. And that was really revolutionary in international thinking and international practice. But I think that it was essential and I think it's a big part of the reason why Rwanda hasn't gone back to mass violence. Why if you go to the hills today you find perpetrators and survivors continuing to live in incredibly close proximity. And that experience maps on to places like Northern Uganda, Eastern Congo, many parts of Burundi and other parts of the world where you've had mass violence that has been perpetrated by large numbers of everyday citizens. I think the big thing to take out of Gachacha is this idea that there does have to be some kind of acknowledgement of the crimes committed by those lower level actors. If there is an interest in more harmonious relations in the future you can't just ignore those crimes. You can't pretend that they didn't happen. You can argue about what acknowledgement looks like. And I think Mike makes an important point that that is going to look different in different places that this is certainly not an argument that the Gachacha model should be adopted wholesale. It's simply to say that we have underestimated the importance of each individual everyday perpetrator. There needs to be acknowledgement, there needs to be reckoning, but the exact modalities of that are something that need to be debated in each individual context. So there are many other things we could talk about in relation to Gachacha, but for me that's the one that I would like to put a spotlight on, the importance of those that we used to think of as low level suspects. Thanks Phil. I think that's a really interesting and important point. And then it strikes me that as countries and communities debate that question of what is the modality. There are moral and value questions, there are cultural questions, there are practical questions and figuring out how to weight and calibrate all of those different dynamics is really a very difficult conversation to undertake. Alice, I want to turn to you. I know you've written your PhD dissertation on Gachacha courts. You were involved directly. And wonder what you would draw forward for us and those who are joining us today? Alice, you're on mute. Before that, let me just come back to two points made. One of the things that struck me and I'm saying that not only as a random, but I'm saying that as not only also as somebody who has studied Gachacha, but as somebody who has a background in law and who has been taught to respect international law as a response to genocide and related crimes as well as somebody who has been doing some work with the international criminal criminal for Rwanda. I'll come back to that later. But what struck me is what we study, what we know theoretically needs a lot of adjustment when it comes to real cases. It doesn't appear as something obvious, but most of the advocacy and scholarship that has been developed in response to genocide builds a lot on the Shoah, past crimes, mass crimes, state crimes. But what I think most of the betas, practitioners, scholars have been missed out. We were in the face of what some scholars have said popularly perpetrating genocide. So it wasn't just genocide as a state crime and it has clearly aspect of a state crime, but that intimacy called for responses that have never been there. The intensity of popular perpetrated violence called necessarily for imagination and innovation and those trials and errors. So this one I learnt not to assume what will work, when it will work and for whom it will work. Phil alluded to some processes that took place back in the 90s, how even the newly formed Rwanda legal bar opposed the gacha in the beginning. And understandably so, it is only in 1998 that bar association was born in Rwanda. So now we needed something that could give them the ability of working. But then the process that took place that is not very much known then has been also to leave the meeting where discussions about reconstructing gacha at the leadership level was taking place to meet the, including the population and public opinion. I remember always that two Sundays of TV programs, TV and radio programs that took place in 1998 and 1999 about Kubasa Viterapumena. So the population was engaged directly to give an opinion on that. And interestingly so, their opinion and their position vis-a-vis of the gacha compared to the bar association and the majority of lawyers practicing lawyers at the time because I wasn't of that opinion, was different. So the process through which we conceive justice and reconciliation has been of paramount importance because acceptability, although we were speaking about really a reconstructed mechanism. So nobody didn't know how practically it will work. But psychologically the fact that a good part of the population was in favor of a process that they understand and that will take place where they have suffered and continue to live was important. So we can discuss about all we said before but the process through which the mechanism become known and accepted is one thing that I believe has stood out when it comes to gacha. Lastly, and Mr. Jovins alluded to that. Most of the time I read and I hear about processes that tend to emphasize either at the grassroots level or at the top level. What the gacha does and what the gacha is is a marriage between that bottom-up and top-down level. And one without the other would not work in my view. But most importantly there was a sandwich effect because in between there was memory of things people have known and have done. And that's where the homegrown finding in one society what they know and what they have done and built from that. Because as my colleagues say, we don't necessarily believe that those processes are transferable. But some of the parameters like how society and states meet together and base the effort to what society understand, the society that is targeted and understand is something very important. I'll stop here, I think I have questions but I wanted to flag out those two aspects. Thanks, Alice. I think it's easy for us to imagine justice as something that is done by a court or by a law that for many people is something that is quite untangible. And at the same time, we know that if communities have to move beyond violence, that those who are most impacted by violence need to have a voice in determining what that looks like. And I think this it's very difficult to hold two different approaches simultaneously and to harmonize those. And I think we see that sort of wrestling in other countries. Felix, I want to change gears just a little bit because I know you and Phil have been involved in founding the Genocide Research Hub which works to build a knowledge society around genocide prevention and peace building policy and practice in Rwanda. And today we have the benefit of hearing from people who have led the research. But I don't know that in every context we have Rwandan nationals or those who are actually doing the deep work, the practice, the reflection, having the space to step outside and lead the research, the literature and the documentation that I think is so important. So I'm wondering if you could, Felix, talk a little bit about the Genocide Research Hub. Feel free to weave in your thoughts on Gichacha Courts as well. I don't want to cut you off from that. Fantastic. Probably, actually, I will start with a lot and mindful of the time still diving into that since I was framing my thoughts around the Gichacha. And I wanted to do it through some kind of storytelling, again, I'm mindful of the time. I was a law student by the end of the 90s, in 98, the 2000s when the whole debates around Gichacha were being framed. Many of my law professors were international scholars, the Belgians and Canadians, like Shabas and many others. So the teaching of law at the time couldn't have contrasted with what came to Gichacha. So we were being taught very classical laws that were part of Rwandan narrative, of course, the legal system of Belgian, let's say, legacy. And it was very much evolving parallel to whatever discussions were happening with Gichacha. We came to learn about Gichacha only when the law was adopted. And when we, as a finishing law student, we were mobilized to go and train, to be trained, first of all, and then to go and train the very first batch of Gichacha judges in the hills. That was the first time I went in one of the more remotest places in Rwanda. And the experiences we gained there probably were the best training probably that I had more than my law school. And I'm not being romantic here. And that was very important because then looking back, what came to be Gichacha in practice and what came to be this path towards, let's say, reconstruction through justice and more many other processes was very much part of those initial steps that we saw, we couldn't analyze at the time, but we can have the luxury of looking back and feeding through what we do. Now, at the time we were doing those things, there were very few Rwandan scholars who had time to go and write books on these. Generally, when you look at the literature on Rwanda, on Gichacha, on many other things, at least in international platforms, international publishers, international journals, you'll always find quite a lot of familiar names now. Phil, of course, is one of those, but quite many others who will, with names more or less sounding like Phil Clark than, let's say, Alice Karikazi. So there have been, until very recently, very few Rwandan scholars who are very present in what we call Rwanda studies or scholarship on Rwanda. To the extent that much of the debate we end up having in Amsterdam, Brussels, and so on tend to be pretty much dictated by that scholarship in which Rwandans have had quite a very limited set. Now, that was the drive behind establishing within the Aegis Trust through a very wonderful visionary work of Phil Clark, who hadn't joined yet, of establishing a research program which would support Rwanda research, conduct research, produce papers through some kind of mentorship program, and then publish in, ideally, international platforms where they're, to give more visibility to their scholarship. That program started around 2014, 15, and through, and it was very interesting to see how much demand there was for such a program. So in quite a number of applications, we had four rounds, we had more than 400 plus applications of Rwandans who wanted to conduct research on different topics around the broad field of peace building, but looking at all the areas of reconstruction in post-denocide Rwandan. Now, these topics were proposed by Rwandans researchers who were submitting their proposals. We picked those, we found to be quite innovative and speaking to some of the issues, but very importantly, one of the striking thing was that how quite a number of those papers really didn't go necessarily along the line of what are supposed to be the issues around studying Rwanda at the time within international scholarship. So for us, that was a very important point. So through this program, we managed, of course, to really give a centered voice to those researchers, and we didn't dictate whether the research or the topic of the research was really their research, ours was only a job of accompanying them, and the program has been an amazing blend of really both supporting local scholarship, giving them a voice, but also, most importantly, allowing them really to also very much feed onto, but also into local policies and policymaking so that they are able to go and dialogue with relevant institutions where the scholarship is needed. So that was the background to establishing this program. It's still running at different levels and we have built a very strong network of scholars. There's quite a lot of demand for such a program. Sure, probably, so the piece we wrote about the wider was leading in it. I mean, we wrote actually two, one in the conversation, another some time ago in the British Academy platform. And part of, for example, of one of the wonderful achievements we had and probably will leave it to field as well to feed in it was that, at a given time, we were able to bring all of those, a number of scholars who had completed their research project, able to bring them to London, our teams, at the conference where they were the main presenters. And that was the new, at least Rwanda scholarship that I have been private to, where you have Southern researchers coming to the Global North to be the main presenters with Rwanda researchers from abroad being only, let's say, discussants and so on. So that was the background behind the program. That's the work we have been doing and that we pretty much with determination continue to do back here. Thanks, Felix. I can commend to all of those watching today to check out Genocide Research Hub online. The resources and papers there, I think are really exceptional. And I think they draw forward these specific reflections on Rwanda, but also many of the things we're talking about today that can spark imagination in other contexts. Phil, I wonder, did you wanna add anything on this before we move to the next set of conversation? I mean, just one thing, I guess, Susan, which was, I mean, the reason that we set up this program in Kigali in 2014, the reason we've got the Genocide Research Hub really comes out of this real frustration on the part of many Rwandan commentators and Rwandan researchers, that their work simply was not getting the platform that it deserved. And when we looked into this much more closely, we started to see the reasons why. There were real systemic biases in the publishing world, but also in the policymaking world, against local researchers. There was an idea that Rwanda was a too closed political environment to conduct robust research, that researchers would lack the necessary rigor and independence to be able to produce high quality research. And what that meant was their work wasn't getting published in international journals, but they also weren't being commissioned by USAID and by other donors to do all of these very lucrative research consultancies. The local research community was being really frozen out. And I think one of the things that we're hoping to do through the Genocide Research Hub is to showcase just how much amazing research is being done by Rwandan researchers. And hoping that that starts to change both the profile but also the content of international debates about Rwanda and hopefully opening up new opportunities for those local researchers whose voices really have been dampened down for far too long. Thanks, Phil. I think that's something that we're all reflecting on and trying to act upon as we think about justice, diversity, inclusion. I think Genocide Research Hub was ahead of its time in many ways and is a really wonderful example of what is possible and why it matters and how it really contributes to our thinking and practice and policies. We're going to spend a few more minutes in this conversation, but I want to invite those who are following online to submit any questions. We'll bring you into the conversation. For those who are here with us today in the building, welcome. My colleagues have comment question cards and we invite you to write down a question. We'll collect them together and bring it into the conversation with the panelists in the next 10 minutes. But the two topics I want to cover a little bit further, one relates more to the community peace building efforts that have taken place in Rwanda and then I want to shift to talk specifically about the impact of violence on women and how the justice and reconciliation approaches have been shaped around responding to that. So Mike, I wonder if you could, I think for many people, they hear the word reconciliation, they hear the word dialogue, but maybe it's a little bit abstract to understand what that actually looks like and what it would look like to be inspired by what's taken place in Rwanda. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about what you've seen in search for common grounds work at that community level of engagement. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's, when we look at the Katacha process, for example, you know, is in some senses a national program, but also one that enables the particularities of each community and the cases that unfolded in each community to come to the fore. And one of the things that we find in every post-conflict society where we work and there was certainly the case in Rwanda after the genocide, is as much as certainly accountability and reconciliation is about what happened and is about the perpetration of grievous harm, but it's also about giving voice to the victims and when we talk about, you know, both when Professor Alice was highlighting sort of the role of the media in giving voice and discussing and publicizing, but also forging a social consensus around how a society is gonna deal with the effects of a past conflict and in this case, a grievous harm, that social consensus is something that can only begin to some extent at the national level through media discussions, but also at the community level with the people who live in the most intimate relationships, not only between victim and perpetrator, but amongst victims themselves. And I think what stands out about the Rwandan example of blending that sort of reconciliation and justice process of rolling out that reconciliation and justice process is also the scale and the scope of the accountability mechanisms that came up through Gichacha, in particularly in other mechanisms as well. And if we look at other societies we're sitting here in the US, I'm an American. And if you look at analogous sort of intimate experiences of violence and processes led sort of after an armed conflict in the Rwandan case, the Victoria's RPF, but we can look, I think, at an analogous, one of the situations is the American sort of reconstruction of the 1870s after the grievous crime of slavery. And we see the inability, at that particular historic moment, to roll out sort of at scale, both a local accountability as well as reconciliation processes had a long tail throughout our history, even up to today. And if we look at the Rwandan experience, what's really remarkable about that has been the surge, let's say, or the ability to roll out at scale and accountability mechanisms, but also that set up a framework for social relations to the degree to which perpetrators are held to account and that process is dealt with, it lays the foundations for ongoing social relationships. I think when we look to Rwanda, and I think what's really, two things that I think are really interesting in Rwanda today, and I think we're all of us in the wider world and every society as every society navigates deep social divisions, navigates its own history of crime and abuse, whether as serious as genocide or slavery or more modest divisions. I think the two challenges that I think Rwanda is navigating now that all of us can learn from is one is the generational change and the generational transfer from a society where everyone had immediate experiences of the genocide in Rwanda. Now, as young people come of age for whom the genocide is an important part of their family as well as their nation's history, and yet not the defining element of their lives if they're a 15-year-old, maybe the legacy is, but how history gets forged within the schools but how it also gets integrated into the lives and how it gets integrated alongside one among multiple conflict issues that people deal with, land issues, social issues, gender issues, all of the issues that are present in every society, including Rwanda. And so how that transition gets made from sort of one generation to another and from a moment when Rwandan public life was quite, you know, was profoundly marked by the genocide to the post, you know, to a new era where it will remain part of the country's history and yet, you know, there's a new sets of issues and new sets of challenges. And so we've been partnering, for example, with Debounzi on land mediation, on other sets and building mediation structures, dispute resolution structures, in a way that's sort of a next generation, let's say, not in the next generation, but a next set of issues. And maybe the final thing that I just marked from Rwandan's experience has been the investment that Felix alluded to in research and evaluation. The National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda invested a lot in a number of state institutions, as well as the academic institutions, invested a lot in finding out what works. Not only we talk about some of the more successful programs, there are also programs that were not succeeding, that were shut down, or areas where the leadership identified that the gachacha process or other processes weren't achieving the desired results and there was a need to reinforce that. And the degree to which both the state and its leadership, the society, its international partners were able to sort of study, research, learn, adapt over the years, develop new programs, close old programs, I think is also something that should be celebrated and acknowledged for all of the successes, also the degree to which the research process gave a chance to also correct, course correct over the course of the 30 years that I've gone by. Thanks, Mike. It strikes me that sometimes when we talk about justice and reconciliation, we also have in our minds that there's a date that it starts after violence ends or maybe while violence is ongoing. I think that's an important debate. And then there's a date when it ends, when it's finished. And I think what's really clear in our conversation is that these are processes that continue certainly over three decades and carry forward as a thread. And I'm gonna put a question out there, maybe not to be answered right now, but we know that people have so many complex sets of identities from their own experiences and where they situate in their communities and their countries. And we've used the words today perpetrators, we've used the word victims, we've used the word survivor. And I would love to draw out maybe in the question and answer, what are the words that people use today in Rwanda and how does that impact on the sense of living together? Or how has it been shaped by the conversation on justice and reconciliation? Sometimes we're a bit lazy, we use the words that we think we know, but I think these words really matter. I can see people are writing their questions, which is great. I encourage you to pass them to the end of your row and my colleagues will collect them and we'll start to bring them into the conversation. But before we go there, I wanted to talk a bit about the pattern of violence that was experienced in Rwanda in terms of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape as a very deliberate strategy in the genocide and genocide crimes. Rwanda is certainly not unique in this regard. There are similar patterns that were documented in the Balkan Wars and to continue to be documented today by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Independent Human Rights Commissions, advocacy organizations from Ethiopia to South Sudan to Ukraine. Alice, you've been a leading voice in this, both in your profession, in your advocacy work and then carrying into your work with the International Criminal Tribunal. And I'm wondering if you could say a little bit about how you've seen that evolution of understanding of the impact of violence on women and how that shaped justice and reconciliation over the last three decades. Let me have a new session. Yes, thank you very much for that question. And it's very important to look back because this is something that has really, as you say, evolved. I'm going to give an example so that we are very concrete on that one. If you look at the first version of the 1996 genocide globe in Rwanda, the very first version that categorized level of gravity of crimes hold what they call sexual violence in fourth category and at the same level of crimes of property. But if you go and look the version that has been eventually used, that is an amendment of that level, that first version, you realize that what they call sexual torture moves from category four to go to category one, meaning the most serious crime. And that is something that happened in 96 after the law was completed and published. What happened is groups of women's organizations invited MPs at the time to go to visit women who have survived that sexual violence, in a particular place in Taba where Akayesu Jean-Paul, who was the first convict by the International Tribunal for Rwanda in that respect, came from and was a mayor. So they went for hearings at the invitations of women organizations, including women, members of parliament to listen to the ladies, the women, the girls who have been through that experience and make up their minds. As a result, the law changed in 1996. So that was one step in the change. In 1997, at the occasion of the celebration of the International Women's Day, the guest of honor at that event was not exactly an advocate of women's rights and was not taking that seriously those crimes. In 1998, we made sure it was corrected by involving ourselves in the construction of the speech and that became another important moment of that evolution. To take your back, what is not known to the greatest public, including the scholarship, the first case in the context of the genocide against the tutti in Rwanda when it comes to sexual violence has been ruled by Rwandan courts. And the person who has been convicted was also a local leader, a government local leader, Ejid Gatanazi. In 1998, Rwanda was still practicing death penalty and in April 1998, he was executed for gender-based crime. That was many months before the decision in September 1998 of Jean-Paul Akayes. And the momentum has been so important that it became when some leaders, some top leaders voiced men and women, by the way, voiced their support to the promotional women's rights and the visibilization, if I may say, of gender-based violence in the context of genocide. This kicked out more than just addressing gender-based crimes, but also trying to push at the maximum for the promotion of women's rights. For memory for those who don't know, in 1999, happened the revision of the inheritance law for the first time, and that became like a string that led us to 1999 with the first mobilization of women to run for office in local structures. 2001, to mobilize women to become gacha-cha judges by women's organization and so forth. So I'm not going to be so detailed, but I wanted to give practical things, but sometimes we speak about we think things have just happened and also the language of theory and conceptualization sometimes impoverished experiences. I believe that in a place like this one where we want to see how it has happened daily. So I always say that I've had the privilege to advocate for things that have happened, have yielded success while still alive, and I believe it's really a privilege, but it was a push. It was a lot of effort and advocacy. I remember by then I would sleep in my office, you know, to write papers, to go and see people, to, you know, to work with colleagues who operate from different time zones, etc., etc. So I would not want to abuse that at the time because I know people want to have a Q&A, but that has been like a push, an effort of many agencies brought together. Again, women organizations worked with independent people like me, independent advocates, governments to come together to really give it a name because we had to convince the government to make decisions. We have to convince legislators to be on our side. And it was a daily work and the efforts of different actors coming together. Thanks Alice. Listening to you talk, I go back to my previous curiosity about terminology and it strikes me that women who were impacted by violence went maybe from being victims to survivors to champions and leaders. There's a full transformation beyond that and I think that's an amazing story to show what is possible. And I think that's incredibly powerful. It also struck me as you were talking that for some people it's very hard to imagine the impact and the severity of gender-based violence. But I've seen in other circumstances that when those who are survivors take the courageous step to tell the story that people very quickly are convinced about why this is such a serious crime and why it has to be addressed accordingly. And I think that goes back to sparking imagination about not just the future of peace but really the deep personal impacts and community impacts of violence. Thank you for sharing that and I think you've inspired some of our students in the room today about how they may have to stay up in their research. Alice, please come. Yes, please, just quickly. One thing that I believe was a very tremendous importance in the process. I remember at the time when the International Cognite was doing campaign something came out because I was working very closely with organizations and universities in North America including Montreal and New York and California. So there were rumors or whatever they were that this is really an agenda that didn't concern random women as such but was the fruit of the work of international organizations as well as westernized lawyer. That was a particular refer to me. And what I did then had the chance of knowing about the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence what I did I operated the first one in Rwanda in 1997 and up to now again about perspective that mechanism for raising awareness about gender-based violence has been appropriated by the government and every year the Ministry of Gender now operates 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. So this has been and I remember we did among other things a work between within Kigali and after that we went to Taba we worked from Khamuni to Taba. I remember seeing staff of the international criminal for Rwanda by then I could see them in the streets seeing those who have been targeted by this violence coming to march with us and that's even for myself was a very humbling experience when some of them came and they say you know you didn't plan for us to take part in this march but we want to come with you and I start organizing for that including looking for security measures that could spare them for difficult things potentially. So to tell you again about perspective what can have happened from 97 when we had this first edition of 16 Days of Activism and today, even today every year in March now you will have that mechanism working not now from civil society necessarily but from government, thank you. It's really powerful and I hope we can invite you back to have a conversation in more depth about women's leadership in this justice and reconciliation pathway and also the active role in social and political life at the end of the day. We have a number of really excellent questions and we have about 10 minutes that's left so if our panelists will permit what I'd like to do is read out three or four that I think speak to some of the broad themes my apologies if we don't get to your question but I hope we can continue the conversation and then we'll do one round and the panelists to comment on whatever question stands out for them or to comment briefly on each of them. So the first question I think really relates to imagining what does forgiveness look like and the question is how were the communities who were devastated during genocide able to forgive perpetrators? A second question I think starts to look a little bit forward so with a new generations of Rwandans growing further and further away from the specific experienced memory of the genocide do you think that the spirit and the motivation that developed still impacts Rwandans today and how strongly? A third question that I think looks maybe even further forward or another direction is that the panel has outlined what are really excellent discussions about what to do after a genocide Do the panelists have any thoughts on how nations can prevent violence and genocide from happening? These are each in and of themselves their own events so I would ask that you share maybe a nugget of wisdom and thought and we'd be delighted to host a further conversation I'm gonna turn to Felix first to get his thoughts on any of these questions and any concluding remarks Felix that you'd like to add Fantastic, thank you very much for these quite indeed insightful and broad questions that are not very easy to answer in few kind of sound bits Forgiving perpetrators I guess it's a very complicated long process that is never linear and probably is never similar in two persons I have talked to many genocide survivors who recount their journey in that direction they tell of different experiences some do it really from a person of felt need to liberate one self of anger of hate in order to move forward others really do through some kind of religious sense of rebuilding a broken brotherhood in relation if you will or sisterhood and others tend to do it based on the broader shared kind of felt imperatives of rebuilding society based on someone to reflect the various in government program so there are different processes it's really a journey that is never similar in two persons not very much linear and that's why it's also important when reflecting on those experiences of individual survivors and you are talking about terminologies in Rwanda we have really these beautiful words survivor is literally translates something like someone who escaped death by despair but that idea of escaping is quite moving on and so on second the spirit of what drives one that this whole horrendous experience to do one of the pieces I wrote on the 25th commemoration in the spectrum here in the Netherlands was precisely titled living in the shadow of the past if you look you analyze Rwanda, a country system that has a lot of connections both at the governmental level but also at individual Rwandan actors the assistance on Rwandan agency in driving various agendas of the reconstruction process even within a context of dependence on international means if you will especially resources that is striking to me the government but also increasing the society as well insistent on sitting in the driver's agenda we have a break here we hear you we'll get you to wrap up your final remarks so we make sure we have time to bring in Mike and Alice exactly so I'm concluding the government really tries to drive the agenda even if it relied on its national means that is key also in intervention today we talk a lot about decolonizing knowledge, ethical collaboration ethical interventions and so on but increasingly that's where we come back to the importance of centering local agency in this kind of reconstruction process you may well international solidarity is absolutely key in post-conflict societies people need external intervention people need external needs to rebuild their societies at different level in different sectors but any time that local agency is not empowered to take on I guess even the reconstruction which was spelt in the third question about prevention might be futile because when I look for example my studies are on Rwanda and Congo when I look at many intervention in neighbouring Congo for example where international agency tends to take a central stage most of the time I'm very much discouraged and I tend to make always a contrast between Rwanda and Congo in regard I doubt whether you can build lasting peace when international agency remain dissented rather than progressively giving way to the local agency and empowering it to be more impactful back to you Thanks Felix Mike, final thoughts in two minutes Thanks, well first I think on the question of what forgiveness looks like I'd be remiss to plug the seven foundation and the wonderful exhibit you guys are hosting around the world we see war imagery is very easy in the public as well as the political imagination to see what happened to imagine what happens in wars or how things can unfold in conflict and yet so little done to help imagine and demonstrate what peace looks like what forgiveness looks like what recovery looks like and panels like this one but also exhibits like the kind that USIP seven are putting together is a great way to visualize that and bring that home to so many of us who are far from this I think on the question of genocide prevention and atrocities prevention so genocide and related crimes I think I would just highlight the role of the international community and since we're here in Washington the role that the US could be playing and could be doing much more of you always need to build the muscle before you plan to use it and right now we're in a situation where although with the Eli Wisell Act the US has made new and Congress has mandated new capacities for the US government there's more that can be done to invest in the complex crises fund some of the quick funds that can be mobilized for the next genocide to head off the worst in the context of atrocity to train State Department and other officers around the world but especially in one area where we haven't necessarily seen as much investment is cultivating partnerships we talked about and I think it's a completely agree the value of investing in local knowledge and local agency of the societies most affected as well as investing in knowledge and knowledge sharing with the international societies predominantly in the West but as we look at other power centers in Asia in the Middle East the degree to which awareness and the degree to which those other societies are also aware of educated developing their own capacities we're able to positively engage and address atrocities so that for the next time there is a genocide that there are mass atrocities and we actually can look at a couple of places around the world where we could see much more robust international mobilization to avoid the kinds of tragedies that we saw in Rwanda and so that ally building alongside properly resourcing the atrocities prevention architecture here in the US is one step that I think all of us here in the states as well as our elected leaders could take to make sure that we realize the sort of the never again vision. Thanks for that really practical set of thoughts and bringing it back to Washington where we all sit. Alice, last word over to you in the last two minutes of our program today. Thank you I think I adhere to everything my colleagues have said before me. We have to be patient with justice and reconciliation and forgiveness happens like justice and reconciliation at different levels. You have to provide a vision that's still ambition to live together even after mass atrocities which does not rule out justice in different in its different aspects and you have to allow yourself to make errors. You might have setback with forgiveness sometimes but if the vision leads to ambitiously living together again in the best condition and searching for common grounds to paraphrase the organization you'll get there. One day it works, one day it doesn't work and sometimes let's refer to our own feelings when we speak about those things because we're dealing with human beings. Now when it comes it comes to prevention what genocide teaches you the impact of genocide is that it shutters all social fabric, particularly when it is popular perpetrated. Now it means that the effort to reconstruct and prevent have to address those different levels of society these include aspects we've been speaking about but also creating opportunities in a society creating wealth creating a future imagining a future including by improving the ways people live offering and working to create more favorable conditions where you have less scarcity of resources education for all health insurance for all etc. We don't have sufficient time to that but it has to be holistic it has to attend to the structural as well as the immediate aspect of destruction towards reconstruction so as to create an environment where people want not only to live together but have prospects for a better life. Felix Mike, thank you so much for this really wonderful conversation and for covering such a complex issue that has so many different dimensions to it spans across three decades and looks forward to the future. I think what I take away from our conversation is that imagining what justice and reconciliation looks like isn't a luxury it's a necessity that we have to open our minds be courageous to contemplate approaches that may not have been tried in the past and that the difficult conversations around that shouldn't be a surprise but they absolutely are necessary so thank you for this really wonderful conversation. Thank you to those who joined us in the building today. Thank you for everybody who joined us online. I invite you again if you haven't had the opportunity to come and visit the Imagine exhibit at USIP you can find free tickets online for that. There's also a virtual exhibit so there's an opportunity to take a look at the photos and videos about Rwanda's imagination in the other countries. Thank you very much everybody. Have a good day. Thank you.