When the Gacaca courts closed their doors in 2012, close to two million suspects of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi had passed through its system. The Genocide was not just about physical elimination of the Tutsi, it went far beyond; the killers went as far as trying to eliminate their very existence by destroying their homes and banana plantations and killing their animals. The scars that were left by the Genocide have not gone away. Stark reminders of where once stood a home and its inhabitants are abandoned homesteads with twenty-year old trees sprouting out of what were once bedrooms. Survivors have for the past two decades been busy trying to piece their lives together, and any hope of being compensated for their loss has slowly ebbed away as court orders to that effect have fallen on deaf ears. Some high profile cases of prominent personalities, such as Frodouard Karamira, one of the architects of the Genocide, ended with the court ordering that his victims be compensated from his vast property. The orders remained a dead letter and that was 15 years ago. While it is understandable that the judicial system had other priorities, such as undergoing a complete overhaul, sometimes being rebuilt from scratch, it has now come of age and can tackle the issue of Genocide compensations. As commemorations of the 21st anniversary of the Genocide are just around the corner, survivors should be given a new lease of hope that, finally, their patience was not all in vain.
