From the Indiana Democracy Consortium

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Social Context and the Process of National Reconciliation

Conference highlights

Conference
Friday, October 26, 2007, 4-6 p.m.
Indiana Memorial Union Oak Room

On October 26, the Indiana Democracy Consortium organized a small conference exploring efforts at post-conflict national reconciliation. Eschewing the rigidities of disciplinary boundaries, the panel brought together a mixture of sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists in an effort to explore the myriad aspects of how historic violence can color prospects for future political cooperation and the ways that modern states try to deal with this dilemma. The panel produced a remarkable discussion that highlighted not only new ways of considering national reconciliation efforts in terms of their utility for state-building, democracy promotion, and transitional justice, but also in terms of what this emergent area of scholarship says about the limits and opportunities for cross-disciplinary research.

Post-conflict reconciliation is an area of vital concern. The 20th century produced multiple examples of how civil wars, totalitarian states, and political extremism can inflict the most horrible forms of indignity and murder. The slaughter of European Jews in the first half of the century, the terror of the Khmer Rouge in 1970s Cambodia, and the vicious slaughter of Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda and Burundi in the mid 1990s are, sadly, but a sampling of the crimes the human race perpetrated upon one another during the last one hundred years.

Beyond the sheer horror of death and destruction, violence of this magnitude inhibits the ability of humans to produce sustainable institutions for collective governance. Given the ever-expanding emphasis placed on democratization it is clear that societies marred by terrible past atrocities face a considerable burden of inter-societal animosity and lack of trust. Put simply, it is unlikely that any society can manage to successfully govern itself if egregious civil violence is simply ignored. In this regard, lustration and truth and reconciliation efforts can satisfy several important roles in democratic transition. Not least is the ability to confer some degree of trust in political institutions that have historically been associated with torture and murder. Indeed, this is one of the key motives for lustration efforts as noted by Cynthia Horne. In contrast to truth and reconciliation commissions, lustration techniques are intended to remove from public office any individual who engaged in human rights violations in the previous regime. In some respects, lustration is less about ‘healing’ the hurts of former oppressive regimes and more oriented towards removing from political power those whose past actions are deemed incompatible with the democratization project. Examining lustration policies in former communist states of East and Central Europe, Horne suggests three key reasons why perpetrators of crimes in the previous regime might be removed from public office. Consistent with the evidence from states as varied as South Africa, Fiji, and Ghana, she argues that one of the key ways to increase public trust in transitioning institutions is to provide transparency about past crimes with the assumption that the current regime will tolerate public scrutiny of its actions in the future.

Clearly, the need for improving trust in public institutions is important, but citing evidence from various legal tribunals, Horne notes that there is also a general consensus that something inherent in the process of regime change seems to require lustration processes. The specific nature of this compulsion to excoriate the past crimes of the state is examined more closely in this report, but it is perhaps sufficient to note that virtually all states that have pursued truth and reconciliation efforts have done so with a mind to greater accountability of the state and greater respect for informal norms of tolerance. Interestingly, the decidedly non-democratic mechanisms used in truth-reconciliation/lustration processes are intended to generate precisely the sorts of political norms assumed to underlie consolidated democracy.

Horne notes a third potential motivation for lustration and truth commissions; the need to engage in political ‘witch-hunts’ that can disadvantage political competitors. Indeed, she notes that this rationale is often given in contemporary academic accounts of lustration as a means of explaining how competing left-wing parties can remove rival leftist candidates from political consideration by implicating them in past crimes. As she notes, however, the empirical evidence in favor of this position is somewhat suspect. Of the 300,000 people lustrated in the Czech Republic only about 300 were removed from office.

Dimensions of the discussion

Over the course of the two hour panel and subsequent discussions, several dimensions of national reconciliation were discussed. Here are the key points:

1. Reconciliation is not the same as amnesty

   In contemporary academic discourse, we tend to put truth and reconciliation together without much thought. This is due mainly to the South African experience which controversially granted amnesty to perpetrators in exchange for full disclosure of the many crimes of the apartheid era. As each of the panelists noted, however, it is a mistake to conflate reconciliation efforts with blanket amnesty. Indeed, the South African experience is not necessarily a blueprint that other states have followed without question. As Jonathan VanAntwerpen notes, the emphasis on national reconciliation in South Africa assumed a quasi-religious stature owing in no small part to the role played by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Stressing a model of transitional justice, Tutu advocated a mode of restorative truth-telling that saw forgiveness, including the absolution of past crimes, as central to moving the post-apartheid state past the historic crimes that might otherwise result in bloodshed. It is important to note, however, that Tutu’s model owes much to the Chilean Truth Commission enacted several years earlier in an effort to come to terms with the many atrocities committed during the Pinochet regime. In this case, absolution was not given in exchange for testimony. At the same time, widespread prosecution of Pinochet’s supporters is unlikely to occur in part due to the confidential nature of the committee’s final report, thereby removing it from the realm of available evidence in human rights trials. Both of these cases, but most especially the South African example, are highly controversial owing to the question of justice. Indeed, all three panelists conceded that the amnesty-based model preferred by Tutu does not ‘travel well’ to other cases. In the Peruvian case analyzed by Caroline Yezer and in the European examples discussed by Horne there exists the possibility that perpetrators will be punished. In theory, this is important since the absence of punishment calls into question the credibility of the state as a protector of human rights.

2. While justice is difficult to achieve, truth commissions ideally serve other ends in the process of state-building

   A key point pressed by both Cynthia Horne and Caroline Yezer is that the scope of political crime is so extensive in post-conflict situations that few citizens can claim ignorance or innocence. Yezer, for example, notes that a key strategy pursued by both leftist rebels and military forces in the Peruvian conflict of the 1980s and 1990s was to compel rural villagers to participate either by coercing them to sell out neighbors and friends or through indoctrination practices. Similarly, Horne emphasized the extent to which communist governments infiltrated virtually every key social institution in East Europe, making a wide array of citizens complicit in their efforts to monitor the ideological obedience of fellow citizens. Thus, a key dilemma faced by truth commissions is how to differentiate those who were merely complicit by virtue of their marginal participation in past social institutions from those who can truly be said to have committed human rights violations. In this regard, justice is difficult to achieve. At the same time, commissions are critical to ‘clear the air’ in post-authoritarian states since future participatory democracy requires that citizens be capable of trusting that their government can credibly commit to protecting them. In this regard, commissions are less about the pursuit of justice and more closely related to making citizens out of those who might not otherwise have enjoyed the benefits of political membership.

3. Truth commissions only work if their aim and methods instill trust in victims

   Caroline Yezer rightly notes the distinctions drawn between rural and urban residents in Peru and the ways that city-dwellers tend to downplay or ignore the violence perpetrated by the state and rebel groups on villagers in rural areas. It is hardly surprising that rural citizens feel little desire to openly discuss their experiences with urban-based truth commissions that either fail to appreciate the glaring gap between rural and urban violence or patronizingly use villagers’ narratives as fodder for archives. Yezer’s work in Peru underscores the degree to which truth commissions often alienate victims. Some workers with the Peruvian truth commission treated the process as an academic exercise, conducting surveys in villages in a manner that suggested the accumulated narratives would be used more for scholarly work and less as a way for addressing past violations. Villagers preferred to give their own narratives, not to have their narratives given to them. A recent visit to Indiana University by Maulvi Whahab Adam, a chief Ameer of the Ammadhiya community in Ghana and a leading participant in that country’s recent truth commission, tends to reinforce this perspective. According to Maulvi Wahab, participants in truth commissions need to accept that their narratives, often comprised of hauntingly personal and disturbing experiences, will serve a larger good. Specifically, what can truth and reconciliation commissions contribute to the process of democracy-building? Maulvi Wahab argues that truth commissions are perhaps most important in terms of humanizing victims who had no recourse to rule of law under the previous regime. According to this perspective, truth and reconciliation commissions provide victims with the opportunity to reclaim their status as citizens through the public performance of their testimony. Perhaps more critically, commissions serve an important role in the nation-building process by recognizing victims of past abuses as a legitimate part of society. That said, commissions only work if participants can accept, ex ante, that the process is not a mere façade. The Peruvian case is not reflective of a failed effort at national reconciliation. On the contrary, given the deep complexities of wealth distribution, ethnic and cultural makeup of victim and perpetrator, and the changing fortunes of leftist and indigenous political mobilization in Latin America’s democracies, there is much to be commended in terms of the Peruvian model. Indeed, as Yezer notes, beginning within the next year the Peruvian government will begin prosecuting human rights violators based on the evidence accumulated by the commission.

Conclusions

A key conclusion wrought from the day’s discussion was that it is nearly impossible to control how the outputs of truth commissions and other efforts at national reconciliation are used. Ideally, most observers want national reconciliation to purge past violations from the current political environment, or at the very least, to render them inert as a means of mobilizing extremism. Further, as a means of pushing the democratic project ahead, many liberals see national reconciliation as central to empowering previously marginalized citizens. The democratizing element of the South African TRC has been widely discussed, yet it bears repeating that the South African state has exceeded virtually all expectations in terms of its ability to develop tolerant and open democratic institutions following its history of racial oppression. In this regard, the national reconciliation process has ostensibly satisfied the ‘trust building’ objective discussed by Cynthia Horne.

At the same time, each of the panelists were frank about the limits of reconciliation efforts. Notwithstanding Yezer’s account of the ways that truth commissions can sometimes fail to fully incorporate the narratives of victims, other panelists noted that the benefits produced by commissions are almost always accompanied by non-trivial costs. Horne notes that there are legitimate questions about the timing of lustration techniques. It has been over 15 years since authoritarian governments fell in East Europe, yet lustration is still used. She suggested that it is important to ask at what point is lustration no longer a mechanism for trust-building and more of a tool for disadvantaging political opponents. Similarly, reconciliation efforts are often marred by questionable information sources. Can secret police files be trusted? Are victims’ narratives always an accurate account of events? What criteria are used to determine if a person is a ‘collaborator’? Finally, there are serious legal and bureaucratic issues to address. Even when reconciliation efforts incorporate some form of punishment in an effort to achieve justice, many such policies violate retroactivity laws by prosecuting perpetrators for crimes committed many years ago in a political environment marked by different legal structures.

Ultimately, the panel was reflective of the significant academic ground yet to be covered in terms of truth and reconciliation. As is the case with many aspects of comparative political issues, no single academic discipline can claim a monopoly on the myriad aspects associated with post-conflict efforts at nation-building. From the ethical and philosophical dimensions covered by Jonatan VanAntwerpen, to the procedural aspects and democratic implications of lustration examined by Cynthia Horne, to the focus on the complex relationship between victim, perpetrator and state discussed by Caroline Yezer, there is ample evidence to suggest that the study of national reconciliation is in its infancy. That said, it is increasingly clear that such efforts say much about the prospects of state and nation-building in countries and regions where past violence casts a shadow on efforts at political tolerance and transparency.