Digitisation of some 60 million copies of archives from Gacaca courts will be completed by the end of 2018 given the current progress of the process, the Executive Secretary of the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG) has projected.

Dr Jean Damascène Bizimana made the revelation, yesterday, while appearing before the senatorial Standing Committee on Political Affairs and Good Governance, which has embarked on analysing CNLG’s 2015/16 annual report and action plans for the current Financial Year 2016/17.

The digitisation of Gacaca archives consists of gathering all Gacaca court case files and other supportive materials and keeping them in soft copies to ensure safe storage and easy access.

The documents, which need to be preserved for documentation purposes on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, have been secured in boxes that are currently stored at the premises of the Rwanda National Police headquarters in Kacyiru.

Of the 60 million copies, Bizimana said 10.4 million have already been digitalised, adding that the number will hit 25 million by the end of 2017.

The remaning 35 million copies will have been digitalised by the end of 2018, he said.

"This is a big project but we have progressed very well so far,” Bizimana told the senators, explaining that initial works on the project were slow but have since taken a good enough shape to enable the remaining tasks to move faster in the future.

The official said that after digitising the documents, another step called indexing will be embarked on, which will consist of organising the archives in a way that will make it easier for researchers to locate them.

The indexing process will be completed by the end of 2019, a time by which CNLG officials also hope that a special documentation centre for the archives will have been availed by the Government.

"Right now the most urgent step is digitisation in order to protect the archives but indexing will also be done so that it’s possible to search the documents by different criteria such as district or any other location,” Bizimana said.

CNLG has estimated that it will require about Rwf5 billion to complete digitalisation of all the 60 million copies of Gacaca archives but the government has been paying the bill in instalments every financial year depending on availability of funds.

Bizimana said that, so far, Rwf840 million from the National Budget has been spent on the project in the last financial year and the first six months of the current financial year, while additional Rwf420 million has been allocated for the work and will have been spent by the end of June.

He said CNLG has been in promising talks with other partners who are likely to contribute to the project by providing some portions of the funds needed to implement it.

Adapted from Rwanda’s traditional mechanism of resolving conflicts in local communities where crimes were committed, Gacaca courts were used to respond to post-­Genocide challenges of providing redress for victims, holding thousands of perpetrators accountable, and restoring harmony among Rwandans.

Gacaca justice system officially closed shop on June 18, 2012, after trying more than 1.9 million suspects in ten years, a huge feat in comparison to how long it would have taken if the trials were to be handled by formal courts.

Editorial@newtimes.co.rw