View Video | Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal

Roland Adjovi
speaks on ...

the impact of justice on reconciliation

Transcript0:00
Donald J Horowitz: Well, let’s talk about justice first and then reconciliation, or you can talk about both as you wish.
0:08
Again, this is more my personal . . .
0:13
DJH: Understood.
0:15
. . . understanding. If you do justice, for sure you will reach easily the reconciliation because you have done what is good.
0:29
DJH: Mm-hmm.
0:30
Because I look at justice as something correct, something right. If that’s what the tribunal succeed in doing, I think re-, reconciliation is at the bottom end.
0:44
How can the tribunal do justice? In my view it’s very simple. We have to admit first that a tribunal cannot reach the exact truth – what happened exactly in all the cases. But the tribunal has an obligation to manage to be as close as that, as possible to that reality.
1:09
DJH: Mm-hmm.
1:10
If everyone at the tribunal is doing his work professionally, ethically, I’m sure we will reach result which has not been biased by anyone, and that result in itself is already a kind of justice. And it’s already good for our society.
1:30
It’s only if we work in a way that we achieve other interest than that justice that we will be running far from justice and therefore from reconciliation. But this is – I’m going in abstraction and I don’t know if it’s clear.
1:50
DJH: Well, do you think – (_) we’ve heard obviously we’ve read and you’ve read and we’ve heard criticism of the tribunal particularly, you know, about what the, the involvement of the Rwandans and the effects upon the Rwandans themselves. Do you think that the tribunal has been at all successful in giving a sense of justice to the Rwandans? That’s a generalization, (_).
2:27
I don’t know for Rwandan.
2:29
DJH: Okay.