Gacaca archives to be kept in special centre

KIGALI - Government is refurbishing a building and is in contact with archiving experts to establish a ‘Gacaca documentation Centre’ where all the documents and information related to the semi-traditional courts will be kept. Gacaca courts are supposed to complete all activities this year.Available information from top management of the courts show that works to refurbish the building that is located in down-town Kigali which will shelter the archives are at 90 percent towards completion. The officials also said that efforts to hire documentation specialists to manage the archives are also underway. “The documentation centre will be launched as part of our final report to complete activities of Gacaca courts this year. We will collect all files after completion of trials and that is when the centre will start working,” an official in charge of documentation with the National Gacaca Board said yesterday (Jan. 18, 2009). The Executive Secretary of Gacaca jurisdiction, Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, had said in an earlier interview that they would have completed works to renovate the building—which was provided to them by the Ministry of Infrastructure before the end of this month. She also confirmed that they would hire experts to help manage the centre. “We will look for experts to help us, that is part of our usual activities,” Mukantaganzwa said while responding to the question whether the institution’s staff were skilled enough to organise the archives. She told journalists in a conference last year that more than 60 percent of cases in the tribunals had been finalized and expressed optimism that the remaining cases would have been covered by the end of the year 2009. Government had set a deadline for Gacaca courts to have completed their activities by the end of this year. All the information related to the courts such as files, documentaries and books will then be stocked into a centre for further consultation by researchers and whoever is interested, officials said. “It will be a national heritage for gacaca,” the source at the documentation service at the gacaca headquarters said, declining to reveal his names. The tradition-based Gacaca courts which were set up to deal with cases of perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi has so far tried over one million cases. An amendment of the organic law establishing the Gacaca courts last year obliged the courts to try cases of suspects in category one which were initially reserved for the conventional courts. Ends