For one and a half year I have now been living in Rwanda, after spending most of the 80s and 90s in other parts of Africa and before that most of the 60s and 70s in Asia. During 36 years of Third world reporting I think I have seen more than enough of wars and human catastrophes, but I have also been able to report about significant progress towards a better world.

It might seem odd but I doubt there is any other African country I have liked to stay in as much as Rwanda. That of course has to do with both the people and the beauty of the landscape.

There is however no way of not noticing the effects of the genocide, even eight years later. I quickly found that the genocide in Rwanda is unique, both as an African catastrophe and as a genocide. There might not be any other case since the Second World War of such a thorough effort of extermination of a so-called ethnic group. And there might not be any other case where to such an extent a people not only were killed, but that also a people killed. Not just as more or less innocent bystanders while hidden killings took place somewhere else behind barbed wire or brick walls, but as active participants, wielding clubs and machetes, searching and finding hidden targets, guarding and holding, watching and listening. This makes the task of reconciliation so much more overwhelming.

The genocide was meticulously planned and it was the goal of the planners to make as many Hutus as possible accomplices in the genocide. They succeeded. So, if you have a situation where a large section of the population have tried to annihilate the minority how do you manage the conflicting aims of achieving justice, truth and reconciliation - how do you try to make sure that these genocidal forces will not be able to try again to create the final solution?

There is in my mind no other way than to start a national dialogue aimed at creating a new Credo, a new truth about what has happened that is as valid for Hutus as for Tutsis as for Twas. This need for a common story, a national narrative, is also what president Kagame emphasised when I, together with Peter Sandberg from Radio Sweden, interviewed him.

Homo sapiens is the only animal able to cooperate with individuals outside our own immediate family. This is not an easy thing to do. We can only manage it through our exceptional language abilities, by using our language to talk to each other in order to establish a common morality, a common system of values that for example tells us that it is right to cooperate, and that it is wrong to kill anyone for the sole reason that he or she is perceived to belong to another ethnic group.

In Rwanda this is a big job ahead after decades of twisted colonial history-lessons and propaganda from the former regime set upon genocide.

This is, as I understand, the main possible historic importance of the coming gacaca-trials. I think one can have doubts as to their short-term effects on justice and reconciliation, although the alternatives – general amnesty or the slow regular legal system – leaves even much more to be desired. But gacaca seems to me to be a genuinely creative and important effort to try to take this general discussion about a new morality to the Rwandan people themselves, directly and without any official or media filters.

I build this assessment on a pre-gacaca I witnessed. This is a kind of test-trial where 50 prisoners for the first time since they were arrested 1994 were taken to their own village Bisesero in the Kibuye province. They were prisoners without any file and any villager was invited to witness for or against them in public.

Let me just give you a small excerpt from our radio-program.

(Excerpt from radio-program (“Genocide in paradise”, Radio Sweden, December 8, 2001) from visit to pre-gacaca in Bisesero, Kibuye.)

I can honestly say this is something of the most touching I have seen in a long life as a jaded journalist. Thousands of villagers absorbed hour after hour in the equatorial sun. Tension so dense that you could slice it with a machete. The crowd crouching under umbrellas listening intently to the prosecutor and the gacaca representative as they explain the background and legalities of the coming real gacaca trials. Introduction of the prisoners one after one. Survivors standing a few feet from the person who butchered their loved ones, telling what they saw and what they know. Some prisoners confessing. Others denying everything. New suspects found among the villagers: “You were also there at that massacre!” And then the big surprise creating a breeze of whispers in the overwhelmingly Hutu crowd, when an old Tutsi man tells the prosecutor that they had got the wrong man for the murder of his wife. The prisoner is immediately released. A Tutsi helping a Hutu!

What strikes me during this whole day is the complete self-control among prisoners, witnesses and on-lookers. No one cries when witnessing, no survivor shouts out his or her anguish; no one attacks the man who killed her husband and raped her daughter.

And this absolute attention to every word that is said. For many in this village it seems, from interviews in the crowd, this is the first time they have listened to a true discussion about the genocide that took place in their midst.

A war crimes tribunal like the one in Arusha, important as it is, delivers justice for sure, but not too much of truth and reconciliation in Rwanda.

A truth commission, like in South Africa, doesn't produce that much of justice, and the effects on reconciliation is debated.

Gacaca is a new way to move ahead. To take justice, truth and possibly reconciliation straight into the villages, to people who can neither read newspapers or have got a radio. It is certainly less costly than the ICTR, which has a donor funded budget 25 times as big as the 2002 gacaca-budget.

The foreseeable problems with gacaca have to do with limited resources in Rwanda. I think I understood something of the magnitude of that problem when I talked to Kibuye Chief Prosecutor Rafaël Ngarumbe, who led the pre-gacaca proceedings in Bisesero. He has got 250 000 (twohundredfifty thousand) murders and 7 000 suspects to investigate. His staff consists of 12 persons and they have got one vehicle, unfortunately without petrol.

On the one hand: 254 000 elected persons, many illiterate, will get a most basic education in legal fundamentals, trauma knowledge, conflict resolution etc. These “integres”, as they are called, will hopefully continue to conduct a more enlightened discussion with their own villagers on the recent history, on the genocide and on the dangers of ethnicity.

On the other hand: many witnesses will not dare to speak out. Legal advice for accused is not a practical possibility, and sentences might be less well argued then one would wish for. Old wounds might open up again. More new suspects might be pinpointed during the trials than those being set free. The prospect of a reduced sentence after confession almost guarantees non-committing lip service. It seems Hutu power is still strong in the prisons. In a situation where only 600 prison employees (1997 figures) have the overwhelming task to take care of more than 100 000 prisoners the latter have naturally had the opportunity to form their own governing structures based on old hierarchies. The leading genocidaires, category 1 prisoners, are reported to harass any true confessors.

And still: gacaca might be Rwanda's only chance to escape from the twin present African curses: traditions of impunity combined with new ethnicity created by genociders, unscrupulous politicians and war-lords.

Nothing could be more important.