PO377 ETHNIC CONFLICT AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Week 21: Healing Deeply Divided Societies: Reconciliation and Moving Forward

Lecture Outline

How Should We Deal With Past Atrocities? Reconciliation Truth and Truth Commissions

Amnesty South Africa’s TRC “Truth” in Northern Ireland? “Truth” in Sri Lanka?

Justice and Prosecutions Justice in Rwanda

Discussion Conclusion: what would you want?

How Should We Deal With Past Atrocities?

Four options according to ArchbishopDesmond Tutu:

1. Revenge;

2. prosecution;

3. do nothing;

4. truth and reconciliation.

(At the Nobel Peace Laureates Conference, University of Virginia, 5-6 November 1998: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6tJQRxxGTM)

Reconciliation

Possible conceptualisations (Pankhurst 1999: 240):

1. “to become friendly with (someone) after estrangement or to re-establish friendly relations between (two or more people);

2. to settle (a quarrel); 3. to make (oneself or another) no longer opposed

to something; 4. to cause to acquiesce in something unpleasant;5. to make (two apparently conflicting things)

compatible or consistent with each other”

1. For our purposes: reconstructing/repairing inter-group social relationships.

Reconciliation

“Reconciliation is a process and not an outcome and, in times of transition, a fraught and haphazard process at that” (Hamber 2002: 228).

“Central to policies of reconciliation is usually some sort of truth process” (Pankhurst 1999: 244).

I have mentioned the importance of dealing with the effects of past violence when trying to build a sustainable peace in a deeply divided society. However, there might be very different ways of trying to do this – think about Tutu’s four options.

Truth and Truth Commissions

“[M]ost political players demand truth from those they perceive as the other side or sides, but seem unwilling to offer the truth from their side, or acknowledge and take responsibility for their actions or inactions in the past” (Hamber 2002: 228).

Truth and Truth Commissions

Defining features of truth commissions according to Priscilla Hayner (1996):

a truth commission is focused on the past;

it does not focus on just one event, but on the record of abuses over a period of time;

it is a temporary body, generally concluding with the submission of a report;

it is officially sanctioned by the government (or the opposition) to investigate the past.

Truth versus Justice?

Truth commissions “sacrifice the pursuit of justice as usually understood for the sake of promoting other social purposes, such as historical truth and social reconciliation” (Gutmann and Thompson in Rotberg and Thompson (eds) 2000).

Do you agree?

Truth and Truth Commissions

Amnesty

“Amnesties are official acts that provide an individual with protection from liability – civil, criminal or both – for past acts” (Slye 2000: 171).

Types of amnesty arrangement: blanket amnesty (e.g. Chile) criteria-driven/conditional amnesty (e.g.

South Africa)

Truth and Truth Commissions

Amnesty

“[I]f the allocation of amnesty is mishandled it can lead to a sense of injustice which can be sufficient to threaten peace…. [T]oo much amnesty can seem like impunity, which itself can be a trigger for further conflict” (Pankhurst 1999: 242).

Truth and Truth Commissions

South Africa’s TRC South Africa’s TRC began in 1995 and gave

its report to then President Mandela in 1998. The TRC documented victims’ cases and granted amnesty to perpetrators of violence on all sides (under specific criteria and conditional upon perpetrators disclosing in full). Around 20,000 people told their stories of victimization under apartheid, over 7000 people applied for amnesty and around 800 were granted amnesty (Hamber 2002).

In South Africa the ANC argued the amnesty provisions were vital to ensure stability and prevent further violence. Why?

Truth and Truth Commissions

“Truth” in Northern Ireland?

“[B]ecause power is more evenly weighted [in Northern Ireland than in South Africa] all sides are opting to leave their truths hidden for now” (Hamber 2002: 228).

There is no state-run truth process in Northern Ireland but there are many grassroots NGO organizations attempting local small-scale truth and reconciliation processes, bringing together perpetrators and victims of political violence. Some victims’ groups have argued for a full-scale TRC like South Africa’s but there has never been a public groundswell of support for this.

Truth and Truth Commissions

“Truth” in Northern Ireland?

Organisations like Healing Through Remembering have explored various different ideas about dealing with the legacy of the past, including a Living Memorial Museum, a Day of Reflection, collective storytelling projects and so on (www.healingthroughremembering.org).

At a national level a legalistic approach has been taken to truth, through things like the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

Recently the two Victims’ Commissioners recommended monetary compensation to victims, which has not been uncontroversial.

Truth and Truth Commissions

“Truth” in Sri Lanka? The Sri Lankan government has avoided calls for

war crimes trials, at least when it comes to accusations against agents of the state.

It responded instead with a Commission of Inquiry on Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation, which published its report on events surrounding the end to the war and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation challenges in Nov 2011. Widely denounced as not being properly independent or impartial, white-washing alleged atrocities, failing to address issues of command responsibility and not reaching a conclusion on the authenticity of the Channel 4 footage.

Is this as much truth as we will get in Sri Lanka?

Justice and Prosecutions

“During conflicts it is common for both, or all, parties to conceive of themselves as fighting for justice. The challenge in a peace settlement is often to find a conception of, and structures to ensure, a minimal type of justice which is acceptable to all the key players. Central in this process is usually the establishment of some common truths about the past, and agreement about how crimes of the past should be defined and handled” (Pankhurst 1999: 241).

Is this problematic?

Justice and Prosecutions

“Increasingly, war crimes, serious abuses of human rights and crimes against international humanitarian laws are thought to require some sort of punishment for justice to be seen to be done at the end of a conflict, and in order for peace to hold, whether or not reconciliation of any sort takes place” (Pankhurst 1999: 242).

Justice and Prosecutions

Justice can be defined in many different ways. One crucial distinction is to be made (see Kiss 2000) between:

retributive justice (i.e. criminal justice) and

restorative justice (i.e. “moral justice of enduring societal harmony”) (Rotberg 2000: 9).

Restorative models of justice, then, are crucially interested in goals of reconciliation and moral education; involve restitution as part of the penalty; are deliberative rather than adversarial.

Justice and Prosecutions

Justice in Rwanda

In Rwanda the focus was initially on retributive justice through prosecution: trials from 1996 in both the domestic judicial system and the ICTR.

Gacaca tribunals (experimental from 1999, operational from 2005, ended June 2012): nearly 2 million people tried with about 65% convicted. Excluded most heinous crimes. Administered at local government level and supposedly loosely based on traditional justice system (somewhat debated). Different from national and international judicial systems.

Justice and Prosecutions

Justice in Rwanda

In Rwanda: “criticisms of the way that justice and reconciliation have been handled in the aftermath [of the genocide] are the reverse of those made against South Africa’s TRC; the processes which have been set up are primarily driven by the new government’s objective of bringing to account all those people who took part in the massacres, with far fewer attempts to establish processes which might bring about reconciliation between citizens” (Pankhurst 1999: 252).

However Harrell (2003) argues that gacaca largely fits with a restorative model of justice. What do you think?

Discussion

1) Discuss the contested relationship between truth and justice in terms of the reconciliation process. Are “truth” and “justice” conflicting goals in post-conflict societies? → Are criminal tribunals/prosecutions or truth commissions more likely to achieve sustainable peace – and is this an either-or question? How does this relate to ideas about vengeance and forgiveness as another pair of responses to collective violence (see Minow 1998)?

2) If truth commissions were established right now in our case study countries, what sort of outcomes would you expect them to have? → Consider the relevance of contextual factors such as level of economic development, historical legacies, international relations etc.

Discussion

3) Under which conditions is dealing with past atrocities (either through criminal tribunals or truth commissions) more likely to reinforce or reconstruct ethnic identities? → Consider the relevance of contextual factors and critically assess different ways of dealing with past atrocities.

4) Is an enduring/sustainable “positive peace” (Galtung) possible without reconciliation?

What would you want?

If you lived in a deeply divided society and had been directly affected by political violence, would you want a truth process or prosecution?

Would your choice be different if you were a

victim of political violence, a past perpetrator, or a bystander? What if you were both victim and perpetrator?