Beneficiaries are actors too.pdf - Southern Institute of Peace ...

often explicitly told about the danger of non-compliance with the
abunzi process and outcomes, including payment of fines as well
as incarceration. When the state is involved in issuing incentives
and disincentives with regards to one's participation in local legal
forums, the process becomes coercive in essence. People end up
participating in the mediation process not because they are
convinced it works or that they subscribe to its tenets but because
they are obliged to. The combination of state-backed threats and
cultural mysticism and justification for the process makes the
abunzi an institution that is replete with compulsion, hence the
term “voluntary-yet-mandatory control” by Doughty (2011).
Because of these overt and covert threats in the abunzi process,
there is a danger of people sacrificing their individual rights in
order to uphold community rights and collective interests.
Gahamanyi (2003) is skeptical of cultural practices that are often
taunted as being beneficial to the community, and instead
cautions that these can be disempowering to individuals.
Although the threat of punishment by abunzi system is less overt
than the threat in gacaca courts, the imposition of mediation
undermines elements of choice, freedom and individual will to
decide on a course of action to take. In addition, the fact that some
people do not take cases that would have been dealt with by the
abunzi to the primary court might not reflect satisfaction with the
mediation outcome, but might just reflect fatigue or lack of
wherewithal to confront the much clogged formal court system.
In some instances of observing the abunzi institution, there seem
to be problems in distinguishing between the mediation and
arbitration processes both in comprehension and in action.
Depending on the nature of the case, the abunzi can choose to
mediate or arbitrate. In fact, some members of the Rwandan
community refer to the abunzi as arbitrators; for example an RCN
Justice and Democratie report of 2007 referred to abunzi as
'arbitrators” and the same case was found in many other online
reports. In some complex cases, abunzi mediators end up
applying the adversarial process. For example, in instances
where disputing parties cannot be reconciled, the abunzi will
adopt a decision applying the laws of the state. This is a typical
combination of sanctions and incentives in conflict resolution.
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