South Africa can draw upon a wealth of international experience of truth commissions, writes Eddie Koch
SOUTH Africa is not the only country to scour its past in a cathartic endeavour to uncover details about human rights abuses. There have been at least 15 truth commissions in 13 countries over the last 20 years, and a number of countries are setting up new ones, according to the latest edition of The World Paper.
Countries that have emerged from authoritarian rule face powerful pressures to fill the blank pages of history. “If not addressed directly, this silence past can fester into resentment and that can threaten a new democracy, and can reinforce a system of impunity for the perpetrators,” says human rights researcher Priscilla Hayner.
“If combined with needed political, military or judicial reforms, a truth commission report can perhaps help keep the past from being repeated.” This is the primary reason why many governments around the world — including Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Malawi, Haiti and South Africa — are considering or are in the process of setting up new truth
The first to receive major international attention was set up in Argentina and reported in 1984 on abuses committed by the military during that country’s “dirty war” against internal political opponents between 1977 and 1983.
There have been less publicised “truth commissions” in Uruguay, Bolivia, the Philippines, Germany, Chad, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Uganda (which has had two human rights inquiries). Rwanda has also just instituted a formal probe into genocide committed there.
Vaclav Havel, the poet and hero of Czechoslovakia’s velvet revolution, became famous for insisting the problems of his new government were not about choosing between socialism and capitalism, or poverty and wealth, but “about truth, how to purge a society of past lies and rebuild people’s faith in the autonomous, integral and dignified human.”
Says Hayner: “Such commissions are often referred to as having a ‘cathartic’ effect on society, as fulfilling the important step of formally acknowledging a long-silenced past. But not all truth commissions have been such successes. Some have been significantly limited from a full and fair accounting of the past — limited by mandate, by political constraints, restricted access to information or a basic lack of resources — and have reported only a narrow slice of the ‘truth’.”
Hayner notes a commission of inquiry set up in Uganda by Idi Amin under international pressure in 1974 was simply banished from the country after it issued a 1 000-page report about hundreds of disappearances under three previous periods of Amin’s rule.
In the Philippines, a truth commission was created in 1986 by new president Corazon Aquino without any real budget or staff. The commission ultimately resigned over continued abuses by the new government as Aqino’s initial commitment to human rights waned in the face of continued armed
Despite Havel’s eloquent appeal, most countries in Eastern Europe have chosen not to reopen their history books. “Ex- communists have regained power through fair elections in Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria,” says Silviu Brucan in the same edition of The World Paper.
“The transition to a market economy throughout Eastern Europe has proved much more difficult and painful than we thought and, for the majority of the population, their living conditions are harder than before. Hence, people are now concerned about the present and the future, rather than the past.”
Chile set up a Commission of Truth and Conciliation in the early 1990s. Its brief was heavily circumscribed by General Augusto Pinochet’s continued hold on power and by stipulations that it could only report on people who had been murdered and could not reveal details about the
Now that Pinochet and his allies are losing their power base in Chile, the government of President Eduardo Frei is intensifying the work of the commission and testimony from torture victims is actively being sought. A body of literary work, including Ariel Dorfman’s play, Death and the Maiden, and Luz Arce’s book, Hell, are symptoms of the creative effect that can come with collective catharsis.
But most other countries in Latin America, says Andrew Graham-Yooll of the Buenos Aires Herald, do not have active truth commissions. “In the capitals of Latin America, people with untold stories live in their own private hells and are still waiting for a chance to let in some light.”
Hayner says that where truth commissions have been set up, the most contentious issue they face is whether to name individuals found to be responsible for individual crimes – – especially when these people still occupy high political or military posts: a dilemma that is particularly acute in South Africa, where right-wing groups argue the country could be ripped open rather than old wounds being healed by its commission.
“The whole truth, some argue, required naming individuals shown to be responsible for serious abuses. But others insist this violates a person’s due process rights: a truth commission, after all, is not a court of law.”
The terms of reference of most truth commissions do not explicitly address this controversy, leaving this up to the discretion of the commissioners. But, Hayner notes, an inquiry in El Salvador received extensive accolades for naming high-level military, political and judicial figures as the perpetrators of human rights abuses — and suggests this is the direction in which most truth probes are likely to move.
“Indeed, human rights advocates and others were riled when an agreement was recently reached for a truth commission in Guatemala that explicitly prohibits the commssion from naming names.”
The newspaper notes with concern that some countries have deliberately not chosen to confront the horrors of the past. “In Mozambique and Cambodia, for example, there seems to be no popular desire to institute a truth commission at this time, despite the horrendous abuses suffered.”