Unspeakable Truths

Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions

Priscilla B. Hayner

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135245573
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica

In a sweeping review of forty truth commissions, Priscilla Hayner delivers a definitive exploration of the global experience in official truth-seeking after widespread atrocities. When Unspeakable Truths was first published in 2001, it quickly became a classic, helping to define the field of truth commissions and the broader arena of transitional justice. This second edition is fully updated and expanded, covering twenty new commissions formed in the last ten years, analyzing new trends, and offering detailed charts that assess the impact of truth commissions and provide comparative information not previously available.

Placing the increasing number of truth commissions within the broader expansion in transitional justice, Unspeakable Truths surveys key developments and new thinking in reparations, international justice, healing from trauma, and other areas. The book challenges many widely-held assumptions, based on hundreds of interviews and a sweeping review of the literature. This book will help to define how these issues are addressed in the future.

1
Introduction

“Do you want to remember, or to forget?” I asked the Rwandan government official in late 1995, just over a year after the genocide in that country had left over 500,000 dead.

He had lost seventeen members of his immediate family during the three and one-half months of slaughter. By chance, he was out of the country when it started, and was therefore the only member of his family left alive. When he described the events, he had said with a palpable sense of relief, “With each day, we are able to forget more.”

So I asked, “Do you want to remember, or to forget?”

He hesitated. “We must remember what happened in order to keep it from happening again,” he said slowly. “But we must forget the feelings, the emotions, that go with it. It is only by forgetting that we are able to go on.”

I was sitting with the official as we traveled with a group of international visitors to visit a massacre memorial site, where the bones and decaying clothes of thousands lay strewn in a church. As I observed this site and others over the next days, and tried to fully comprehend the horror of what he and others had experienced, I realized that there was no other answer to my question. One must remember, but one must also sometimes very much want to forget.

I had much the same sensation several months later, while speaking with a weathered farm worker in the far reaches of El Salvador. A United Nations truth commission had, three years earlier, investigated the abuses during the country’s twelve-year civil war, and I was visiting his village, in an area known to have been politically active and heavily battered by the war, to ask whether the commission had reached there, and what impact it might have had. When I asked about the war, he described the killings he saw at the hands of the army: how his father’s throat was cut, how a neighbor who was pregnant was brutally killed. Had he spoken with the truth commission? I asked. Had he given his testimony? He hadn’t. “It’s difficult to remember this, it’s painful to remember,” he said, and you could feel it in how he told his stories. “Oh, how they killed the guerrillas,” he said. “I don’t like to remember these things. What good would it do to go to the truth commission? I would lose a day of work, and nothing would change.” He paused. “It’s painful to remember. But it is important to fight for the rule of law.”

Remembering is not easy, but forgetting may be impossible. There are a range of emotional and psychological survival tactics for those who have experienced such brutal atrocities. While some victims, such as this Salvadoran man, pleaded to forget, other victims I spoke with were clear that only by remembering could they even begin to recover. Only by remembering, telling their story, and learning every last detail about what happened and who was responsible were they able to begin to put the past behind them. In South Africa, time and again I heard survivors say they could forgive their perpetrators only if the perpetrators admitted the full truth. Almost incomprehensibly, hearing even the most gruesome details of the torture and murder of loved ones seemed to bring some peace. In South Africa, many survivors were able to hear these stories through the public hearings of those seeking amnesty for their crimes. One condition for receiving a grant of amnesty was full disclosure of all details of the crimes, including answering questions directly from victims or surviving family members.

In a township outside of Port Elizabeth, on the south coast of South Africa and in the center of what was fervent anti-apartheid activity in the 1980s, I spoke with Elizabeth Hashe, an older black woman whose activist husband disappeared thirteen years earlier with two colleagues. In contrast to what happened in much of Latin America and elsewhere, “disappearing” political activists (kidnapping and eventually killing them, and disposing of the body without a trace) was uncommon in South Africa, and thus the fact that these three men were missing had received a great deal of attention. There was an official investigation when they disappeared, and the police vehemently denied knowing their whereabouts. It was only through the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission that their fate was finally uncovered. I spoke to Mrs. Hashe at a tea break in the midst of a grueling two-week public hearing, after listening for four days as former security police testified in great detail about how they kidnapped and killed her husband and the two other men, roasted their bodies over a fire for six hours until they turned to ashes, and dumped the remains into the Fish River. What did she think of the hearing? I asked. What did it mean to her? “At least now I know a bit of the story. It’s better to know, to know how they killed him,” Mrs. Hashe said.

Monica Godolozi, another of the three widows, was less forgiving. Like most of the audience in the boisterous and crowded hearing room, she was sure that the policemen were not telling the full truth, and were in fact covering up torture that likely took place before the men were killed. As the police officers denied any torture or abuse, the audience hissed loudly; many of the hundreds in attendance had probably once been victims of these same policemen. Mrs. Godolozi told me, “I won’t forgive them. There’s nothing they could do to make me forgive them—except, if they told the truth, then yes. Anybody who tells the truth, I can forgive them. But not someone who tells lies.”

Mrs. Hashe disagreed. “Don’t we want peace for South Africa? How are we going to find peace if we don’t forgive? My husband was fighting for peace for all of South Africa. How can you correct a wrong with a wrong?” A year earlier, Mrs. Hashe had looked tormented as she gave testimony to the commission at one of its first public hearings. Learning what happened to her husband —or at least who killed him, where the ashes of his body were discarded, and many of the details of how he died—changed her; but for Mrs. Godolozi, this was not enough.

Despite the efforts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, many South Africans still demanded strict justice and punishment for their perpetrators. Where justice was not possible, the minimal requirement for forgiveness, most insisted, was to be told the full, honest, and unvarnished truth.

These South African widows, the Salvadoran peasant farm worker, and the Rwandan government official reveal the difficulties faced by individual victims and by entire nations after a period of brutal political repression. I had gone to South Africa, El Salvador, and Rwanda, as I was to travel to a number of other countries, to understand how a country and its people might recover from a period of widespread atrocities. Specifically, I was interested in the impact of official truth-seeking, where past horrors are publicly documented and investigated by a special commission, such as was done in El Salvador and South Africa. I heard similar voices everywhere, similar agonizing tales of brutality, pain, struggle, and survival. The details of repression differed widely, as did the range in individual and national response. Yet I soon saw firsthand what anyone might imagine: that such widespread abuses by the state leave behind a powerful legacy. The damage goes far beyond the immediate pain of loss. Where there was torture, there are walking, wounded victims. Where there were killings, or wholesale massacres, there are often witnesses to the carnage, and family members too terrified to grieve fully. Where there were persons disappeared, there are loved ones desperate for information. Where there were years of unspoken pain and enforced silence, there may be a pervasive, debilitating fear and, when the repression ends, a need to slowly learn to trust the government, the police, and armed forces, and to gain confidence in the freedom to speak freely and mourn openly.

The world has been overturned with political change in recent years—and especially reaching back to the end of the Cold War in 1989—as many repressive regimes have been replaced with democratic or semi-democratic governments, and a number of horrific wars have been brought to an end. At these transitional moments, a state and its people stand at a crossroads. What should be done with a recent history full of victims, perpetrators, secretly buried bodies, pervasive fear, and official denial? Should this past be exhumed, preserved, acknowledged, apologized for? How can a nation of enemies be reunited, former opponents reconciled, in the context of such a violent history and often bitter, festering wounds? What should be done with hundreds or thousands of perpetrators still walking free? And how can a new government prevent such atrocities from being repeated in the future? While individual survivors struggle to rebuild shattered lives, to ease the burning memory of torture suffered or massacres witnessed, society as a whole must find a way to move on, to recreate a livable space of national peace, build some form of reconciliation between former enemies, and secure these events in the past.

Some argue that the best way to move forward is to bury the past, that digging up such horrific details and pointing out the guilty will only bring more pain and further divide a country. Yet can a society build a democratic future on a foundation of blind, denied, or forgotten history? In recent years, virtually every country emerging from a dark history has directly confronted this question. In some countries, this has been debated during peace negotiations, where “the past” may be one of the most contentious items on the agenda. The countries addressed in this book have come out of a wide range of repressive regimes or civil wars, and experienced very different types of transitions. Change may come through negotiations, or through the downfall of an undemocratic regime, perhaps as a result of popular revolt and shifting winds of international support. But in each of these and other very different types of political transitions, very similar questions and difficulties arise.

This book explores the difficult underside of these questions. Its aim, ultimately, is to better understand how states and individuals might reckon with horrible abuses of the past, and specifically to understand the role played by truth commissions—the name that has been given to official bodies set up to investigate and report on a pattern of past human rights abuses. In the late 1990s, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission succeeded in bringing this subject to the center of international attention, especially through its public hearings of both victims and perpetrators outlining details of past crimes. But there have been many other truth commissions, before and since, in some ways similar but in some ways very different.

What Does the Truth Bring?

I am often surprised by the way in which notions of truth, and notions of truth commissions, are initially understood and talked about, and the assumptions that are often held about what a process of truth-seeking is and what it might lead to. Many comfortable assumptions have been restated over and again in untested assertions by otherwise astute and careful writers, thinkers, and political leaders. Some of the most oft-repeated statements, and those that we perhaps most wish to be true, are due careful scrutiny. Indeed, they do not always hold up well even with anecdotal evidence.

For example, does truth lead to reconciliation? Or, to state it another way, is it necessary to know the truth in order to achieve reconciliation? It is possible to point to evidence and to quote survivors to show that it is true; sometimes it is, for some people or in some circumstances. Yet it is easy to imagine that the opposite might sometimes also be true, and also that reconciliation, as hazy a concept as that can be, may be more affected by other factors quite apart from knowing or acknowledging the truth about past wrongs.

It is also often suggested that digging into the truth and giving victims a chance to speak offers a healing or “cathartic” experience. Again, this turns out to be a questionable assumption, at least in some cases. Though little scientific evidence is available on this question, it is clear that this notion of healing may be overstated.

But along with any dose of skepticism—or realism, anyway—in what these bodies accomplish must also come an appreciation for the sometimes remarkable but little-known contributions that they have sometimes made. In Argentina, Chile, and Morocco, largely on the basis of the findings of these countries’ truth commissions, the state has paid significant reparations to thousands of victims or families of those killed or disappeared. A number of significant prosecutions have followed from truth commissions. Important judicial reforms were put in place in El Salvador following the truth commission recommendations. In South Africa, very few people will now defend or try to justify the system of apartheid, or question the fact that egregious practices such as widespread torture were used to sustain apartheid. In many countries, the commission’s work and report have received a great amount of attention.

Perhaps most underappreciated is the sheer difficulty of undertaking these endeavors, of fairly documenting and representing a “truth” in the course of a short and intensive period of investigation, when the issues under exploration often remain the most sensitive of the day and when the commission’s task is to reach and fairly represent the stories of thousands upon thousands of victims. It is clear that truth commissions are of a fundamentally different nature from courtroom trials, and function with different goals in mind. It is also clear that many methodological questions that are central to truth commissions cannot be answered by turning to any established legal norms or general principles, nor can they be well addressed by universal guidelines. Instead, these questions require a consideration of the specific needs and context of each country. The questions that come up—how a commission should best collect, organize, and evaluate the many accounts from victims and others; whether to hold public hearings or carry out all investigations confidentially; whether it should name the names of specific perpetrators in its report; and many others—will be answered differently in different countries. The task is made even more difficult by the fact that many of these questions are unique to these kinds of broad truth inquiries and do not usually come up in relation to trials, for example, where standardized procedures have long been established.

Official truth-seeking, it turns out, is a cumbersome and complicated affair. In the course of my many interviews around the world, where I have had the chance to speak in detail with the commissioners and staff of many past commissions, as well as with victims, advocates, and policymakers who have watched or participated in these processes, a few general points have stood out. All of these issues are addressed in much more detail throughout the following pages.

First, the expectations for truth commissions are often much greater than what these bodies can in fact reasonably achieve. Some level of disappointment is not uncommon as a truth commission comes to an end (or as a government accepts but then does not implement a commission’s report). While there is certainly room for improvement, some of these expectations are simply not realistic in circumstances where there were very large numbers of victims, where democratic institutions remain very weak, and where the will of perpetrators to express remorse or participate in reconciliatory exercises is tenuous, at best. However, these grand expectations and the resulting disappointment sometimes prevent people from appreciating the significant contributions that these bodies do sometimes make.

Second, many of the most difficult problems confronted by truth commissions seem to be almost universal to these kinds of inquiries, as each new commission stumbles on many of the same questions and false assumptions. There is no reason to have mistakes repeated, if these lessons can be made available.

Third, these bodies can have significant long-term consequences that may be entirely unexpected at the start. This seems to be particularly true in the realm of criminal justice. The archives and reports of several truth commissions have been relied on, years later, in efforts to prosecute accused perpetrators in international (and sometimes domestic) courts. Suddenly, the usefulness of having a well-documented record of crimes becomes clear, even where domestic trials do not at first seem possible.

At the beginning of 2010, seven truth commissions were in operation (Canada, Ecuador, Kenya, Mauritius, the Solomon Islands, South Korea, and Togo), and another had just concluded (Liberia). Five of these were inaugurated in 2009, the largest number that have begun in any one year to date. Two other countries have agreed in general terms to establish a national truth commission and are currently drafting their terms of reference (Brazil, Nepal), and in half a dozen more countries there is serious discussion or planning toward creating such a body. Over the past decade, the creation of new truth commissions has been fairly steady.

While the number of truth commissions is now fairly significant, we should be sober in our assessment of what this means. The numbers do not tell the greater part of the story. A few of the forty truth commissions that have existed to date have not been successful, by any measure; others have had some but relatively limited impact. The reasons for this differ widely. Even many of the strongest truth commissions have met with frustration from victims and activists, who have sometimes pushed for more robust inquiries. Another problem remains: the weak record of implementation of the often very strong recommendations of truth commissions.

The desire for the truth, however, is powerful, and seemingly almost universal, to judge from the wide range of contexts where these same demands have emerged. While the decision to dig into the details of a difficult past must always be left to a country and its people, there is much that can be learned from those who have taken this step before.

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Confronting Past Crimes

Transitional Justice and the Phenomenon of Truth Commissions

The 1986 publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, a major four-volume work focused on Latin America and Eastern Europe, helped to de...