FictionThatMatters.org

The New Justice

When justice rings true, it has the power to silence and to awe. And it can mean a lot of things, from ‘making things right’ by your neighbor to ending a culture of impunity in which lives are destroyed without a thought. Two new films screening at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival explore the pursuit of justice in the 21st century. Justice in today’s world is no longer just about simple retribution but also about the restoration of entire societies.

My Neighbor, My Killer
Directed and produced by Anne Aghion
Gacaca Films, 2009. 101 minutes.

Anne Aghion’s My Neighbor, My Killer is a chilling, elegiac film that documents the struggle of a rural community in Rwanda to overcome the trauma of genocide. Over 100,000 perpetrators remained in prison ten years after 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia in a few months in 1994. The masterminds of the genocide were removed to an international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, but many lower level genocidaires remained in Rwanda. The government decided to conditionally release these prisoners and try them through a community court system called the Gacaca courts. Suddenly, victims of the genocide found themselves living once again next to their killers. And these killers did not come asking for forgiveness:

We were told they would approach us in peace, in their own time. But not one has so far darkened my door! My brother’s murderer lives just near our home. Why hasn’t he come to ask for forgiveness?

My Neighbor, My Killer is the third installment of director Anne Aghion’s Gacaca series. Like the others, there is no onscreen violence. Instead the terror of this film occurs in listening to both victims and perpetrators retell their stories. A farmer recalls when a baby was plucked from her back and dashed against the ground. A militia leader argues that he did not profit from the murders, and never stole any cows after butchering his neighbor. Friends turned against friends, and family against family in a few short days of bloodlust and frenzy.

The burgeoning violence in the film is underscored by the utter tranquility of the pastoral farming community. Here, a cow stomps its foot in the backroom of a house. There, a farmer tills the soil with a hoe. Yet these simple instruments, which are normally used to work the land, were once turned against other human beings. Although parole terms are meant to prevent the perpetrators from murdering again, this is a community without locks on its doors.

The heroine of this installment is surely Felicité Nyirasangwa, an elderly Hutu woman who married a Tutsi. She was forced to watch while her whole family was slaughtered before her eyes. While many of the villagers fear confronting the killers at the Gacaca courts, she identifies them with her photographic memory. And where others might have desired punishment, she also shows clemency, allowing her family’s killer to go free even after he blatantly lied about his actions.

This is a kind of justice that no one would ever desire to experience. The crimes are too horrible to rationalize, and the government has forced the system upon Rwandans because of an inability or unwillingness to try perpetrators of the genocide.

The Gacaca courts represent restorative justice in its most ambitious form — allowing victims to confront perpetrators face to face. But one wonders in this film, whether there are some relationships that have been so severed as to be beyond restoration:

We have steeled our hearts. They are hard as rock. We form one body. That is our reconciliation.

After watching the film, I was reminded that Kinyarwanda and Kirundi (spoken in Burundi) must be the most beautiful languages in the world. I remember how shocked I was while working with survivors of the genocide that it could occur in a country in which beauty drops from every utterance, every song. Aghion’s film captures this beauty with the sensitivity of a dirge.

From the Village to the World

The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court
Directed by Pamela Yates, produced by Paco de Onis, edited by Peter Kinoy
Skylight Pictures, 2009. 95 minutes.

If My Neighbor, My Killer is a work of filmic poetry, The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court is fine prose. This film examines the turbulent origins of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The tone is more educational than entertaining, but presents an air-tight case for the need for a credible international body of criminal justice.

The International Criminal Court experienced birth pangs for nearly fifty years. Elevated by Justice Jackson’s decision to offer Nazi leaders a fair and transparent trial in Nuremberg at the close of World War II, the international community appeared poised to accept a new, universal form of justice. The United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights offered the promise of an international order premised on fairness. But these aspirations were cast aside with the emergence of the Cold War. For forty more years, few developments occurred in international justice.

Voices began clamoring for a new international body in the 1990s, and soon afterwards the Rome Statute provided for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. The statute allows for the International Criminal Court to investigate — and try — perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The court’s jurisdiction is qualified by a principle of complementarity — that the court will only investigate a crime if a member country is unwilling or unable to do so. While many countries eagerly signed on, the hawks of the Bush era sought to do the exact opposite. For several years the U.S. attempted to weaken the court in any way possible, considering jurisdiction over Americans to be a direct threat to its sovereignty.

The Reckoning presents compelling evidence that the world will be a better place with a strong International Criminal Court. It reveals the passionate, zealous advocacy of Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and several of his most accomplished staff. Cases in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Sudan are rigorously presented. The work of these prosecutors is dangerous, but carried out with fairness and professionalism.

The film inspires you to believe that the prosecutors care a hell of a lot, and they are going to get the facts right.

This is a testament to the court’s transparency and to the need for the world to support it. When was the last time you watched such a barefaced film about the workings of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Stumbling down the beach

If I take issue with The Reckoning, it is on the technical side. Compared to the sparsely layered background music of My Neighbor, My Killer, the soundtrack slathered melodrama on top of material that was compelling enough to stand on its own. And while I enjoyed some of the still photographic shots of the key figures, the camera moved from being voyeuristic to downright intrusive. Moreno-Ocampo is a colossal figure of justice, but I had no need to see him strolling down a beach. Nor did I need to observe the chief prosecutor from between her arms as she was typing. These are lawyers, not actors, and it shows. They seemed uncomfortable with the camera and I did too. Isn’t it enough that they shine before the Jury of the World?

A final niggling point that could have used more treatment is that the court’s docket is almost entirely concerned with Africa at this point. The perpetrators in the DRC, Uganda, and the Sudan should certainly be prosecuted. There are hints of a future prosecution in Colombia, but a truly international court would do well by examining other parts of the world as well.

Signing on, Mr. Obama?

The Reckoning also offers irrefutable arguments that the U.S. should join the ICC, and it should join soon. It is too early to determine whether President Obama seriously intends to sign the Rome Statute. But the film makes you very glad the Bush Administration’s revolting idealogue, John Bolton, is no longer our emissary on the issue.

Let’s run with this thought. I see two arguments for Mr. Obama to continue to abstain from joining the ICC: (1) the scale of strategic military decisions required by the leaders of a superpower will inherently require ‘collateral damage’ of civilians, so American leaders will always be in danger of prosecution; and (2) the military and the executive have some bizarre cabalistic agreement that U.S. military leaders are immune from prosecution forever and ever and ever. You can tell that I don’t agree with either of these reasons, especially since the U.S. courts would have primary jurisdiction unless the Security Council voted over its head. The U.S. could then simply veto any resolution. And really, do our leaders want to claim the right to kill civilians? I mean, really? Then they’re not very good leaders, are they?

But this is all speculation. I don’t know what the future holds for the U.S. and the ICC. What I do know is that anyone who is concerned with international criminal justice will do well to watch this film.

I’ll restate my earlier assessment. If My Neighbor, My Killer depicts local justice in poetic form, then The Reckoning feels like an argument in prose form. I like this kind of argument. Because I happen to agree with it.

–Deji Olukotun

Would you like to know more?

Read Norbert Ehrenfreund’s, The Nuremberg Legacy.
This is a simply written book by an American soldier and reporter who covered the Nuremberg trials. He found the proceedings so inspiring that he became a judge.

Check out Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s civilian counterpart, Reed Brody, in The Dictator Hunter, an amazing film about a chief investigator of Human Rights Watch and his battle against dictators around the world.

Watch the film Judgment at Nuremberg, a classic film about the Nazi trials which combines fact with fiction.

For a song that captures the heart of the issues at stake in Anne Aghion’s film, listen to Rwanda, by Cape Town-based rock duo Soulfire.