Restorative Justice: Forgiveness is the Best Punishment

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Restorative justice is concerned with healing victims' wounds, restoring offenders to law-abiding lives, and repairing harm done to interpersonal relationships and the community. It seeks to involve all stakeholders and provide opportunities for those most affected by the crime to be directly involved in the process of responding to the harm caused”. The Rwanda government has suffered a tremendous violent act in the loss of their two major ethnic groups that consisted of the Hutu and Tutsi. The large scale of mass murder caused millions of orphans and un-circumscribable agony to a country that has yet to be restored and healed. After such tragic events of rape, torture and decapitation to innocent people, the widespread of horror still is engraved in the survivors’ memory. For any individual to take any other person life is one scenario and to rape and kill a person while there family watch is another. Imagine the site and anguish given by the victim who is fighting or striving to maintain their life with all their being, while the oppressor ignores his/her cries to resolve the situation. That person is not in their right state of mind and probably does not know the purpose or the aftermath of their action. In 1994 the world witnessed one of the most systematic and vast massacre of our time in Rwanda. By the end of the massacre one million people were dead and hundreds were left with physical and psychological scars. The genocide was fueled by years of hatred between the Hutus and the Tutsis. After the genocide the Rwandan government was left with the task of designing a justice system suitable to prosecute perpetrators of the genocide and the reestablishment of peace within the country. Due to the lack of a competent judicial sys...

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National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (2010). Rwanda Reconciliation Barometer. Retrieved 2ndJanuary 2012, from http://www.nurc.gov.rw/fileadmin/templates/Documents//RWANDA_RECONCILIATION_BAROMETER.pdf
National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (2012). Reconciliation tools. Retrieved 5th February 2012, fromhttp://www.nurc.gov.rw/reconciliation-tools/itorero.html

Kubai, A. (2007). Between justice and reconciliation: The survivors of Rwanda. African
Security Review, 16(1), 53-66.

Richters, A., Dekker, C. de Jonge , k, and Ullrich, J. (2008). The Role of Acceptance and empowerment in promoting Reconciliation from the perspective of the needs- based mode. Social issues and policy reviews, 2(1), 159,186

Saccaggi, B. Grass roots Justice: Rwandas gacaca courts and local concepts of reconciliation. www.consultancyafrica.com .

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