Digitilisation of Gacaca archives to be completed by June 2018

Work is being fast-tracked to ensure that the ongoing scanning and digitalisation of 63 million copies of Gacaca courts’s archives are completed in June next year. AEGIS Trust Logistics Manager Medy Kimenyi briefs journalists in the main store room of Gacaca documents awaiting digitization. Faustin Niyigena Dr Jean Damascène Bizimana, the Executive Secretary of the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG) said this Tuesday as officials from CNLG and Aegis Trust, the British NGO which campaigns to prevent genocide worldwide, gave journalists a guided tour of the stores where they are kept at the Rwanda National Police headquarters in Kacyiru. CNLG counts 19,000 boxes of finished files documented during Gacaca courts. Faustin Niyigena Digitilisation of Gacaca archives involves gathering all Gacaca court case files and keeping them in soft copies to ensure safe storage in addition to easy access. CNLG Executive Secretary Jean Damascene Bizimana briefs the media yesterday. Faustin Niyigena Bizimana said: “The scanning and or digitalisation process started back in 2015 but we are working untiringly to ensure it is wrapped up by June 2018. It is not easy work but we have our staffers on the project putting in more time and working up to midnight. “We used to have only two scanners for this operation but now they are eight; and they are not just any scanners but the best one can find on the market.” Cloud Architect Thiery Mukiza explains about the server which stores the digitized files. The used space is about 40 terabytes out of 380 terabytes full capacity storage. Faustin Niyigena After a briefing on the ongoing operation, among others, officials showed journalists around the 11 kilometer-long shelves’ zone where the documents are neatly packed. According to Bizimana, 35,433,399 pages of the documents have been scanned. These, he said, are from 27 districts apart from Rubavu, Rutsiro, and Nyabihu districts. 19,000 boxes store 60 million files already documented from books and papers used during Gacaca trials. Faustin Niyigena Once digitalisation of the Gacaca archives is complete, deliberation will then be on which ones can be made easily accessible online. Medy Kimenyi, an Aegis Trust staffer involved in the operation, said documents are stored systematically – according to Sector and District from which they came from – an exercise that takes a lot of work and time. Staff enter data in the system in the scanning room. Faustin Niyigena Shedding light on how the actual work is done, before the scanning process begins, Aline Umugwaneza, an Aegis Trust project coordinator, explained that there are teams with overlapping tasks and everything is double checked and verified at each stage. Files are documented according to province, district, sector, cell and village; and each file and box have a barcode for digitalizing them. Faustin Niyigena She said: “Supervision and quality assurance is a key element in this whole process and whenever something is found lacking it is rectified before scanning. Eight thousand analog tapes, cassettes and compact discs (CDs) are still not documented. Faustin Niyigena In January, while appearing before the senatorial Standing Committee on Political Affairs and Good Governance, which was analysing CNLG’s 2015/16 annual report and action plans for the current Financial Year 2016/17, Bizimana said the Commission had estimated that it required about Rwf5 billion to complete digitalisation. On Tuesday, he told journalists that that amount was revised downwards to around Rwf2.8 billion, after also streamlining the process to cut costs in a manner that does not hinder efficiency. editorial@newtimes.co.rw

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Digitilisation of Gacaca archives to be completed by June 2018