Transitional Justice Forum

Does telling (and hearing) the truth always heal?

Posted by Helena Cobban at 21:06 | TrackBack

In the Washington Post of June 18, a British historian called Antony Beevor had an article in which he described the pacto de olvido-- that is, the pact of 'forgetting' about the violent acts committed during Spain's years of civil war and subsequent dictatorship-- that lay at the heart of Spain's successful transformation from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s.

Beevor argued that,

Today, the pact of forgetting must be broken, if only so that all Spaniards -- citizens of the most modern and forward-looking nation in the European Union -- can understand how the tragedy came to pass.

(The article was produced in connection with the recent publication in English of his book The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).)

I have found Spain's record regarding the pacto de olvido extremely thought-provoking; and in my work on the very similar "pact of forgetting" regarding the details of who did what to whom during the atrocity-laden civil war in Mozambique I had cause to reflect on it a number of times. After all, Mozambique's transition out of the civil-war system in which it was gripped for so many years prior to 1992 was just as successful as Spain's earlier transition out of dictatorial rule...

Reading Beevor's article also reminded me of a research report I re-read recently about popular reactions in Sierra Leone to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission there. This report was by Tufts University professor of anthropology Rosalind Shaw, who wrote it for the U.S. Institute of Peace. The report was published in February 2005. Shaw introduced the summary of her report by reporting this about Sierra Leone:

* After an eleven-year civil war that became internationally notorious for mutilation, sexual violence, and the targeting of children, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its public hearings in April 2003. Increasingly, truth commissions are regarded as a standard part of conflict resolution "first aid kits."

* Despite pressure from local NGOs and human rights activists for a TRC, there was little popular support for bringing such a commission to Sierra Leone, since most ordinary people preferred a "forgive and forget" approach.

The whole of Shaw's report there is certainly worth reading. She describes (and argues eloquently for the value of) the essentially ethnographic approach she used in her research, which included doing field research in various parts of Sierra Leone over the four years, 2001-2004.

She reported that,

In Sierra Leone's TRC, truth telling—the recounting of verbally discursive personal memories of violence, abuse, and torture—was promoted as the only path to reconciliation, healing, and peace. Before the hearings began, TRC workshops in Freetown and provincial towns used "sensitization materials" that presented the TRC's message in printed words and pictures. Leaflets included drawings of burning villages, followed by drawings of ex-combatants testifying in front of stern civilians, with the captions "Memba wetin don bi" ("Remember what has been"); "Mek wi tok tru fo joyn an" ("Let's tell the truth and join hands"); and "TRC fo wan Salon" ("TRC for one Sierra Leone"). Posters on the walls in both the workshops and the hearings bore such messages as "Truth hurts, but war hurts more," "Truth today! Peaceful Sierra Leone Tomorrow," and "Blo Maind to TRC en ge Pis" ("Blow mind to the TRC and get peace"). These messages inculcated the model of healing and reconciliation through the memory practice of truth telling, and located the nation's capacity for a peaceful future in this practice.

However, she found that a large number of the Sierra Leoneans disagreed with this view:

Among certain constituencies and groups, the TRC's message of explicit verbal remembering as a means of nation building did, in fact, resonate in powerful ways. These included, in particular, church leaders and congregations, educated youth, and those in local NGOs: it was activists from local NGOs, after all, who sought to bring a TRC to Sierra Leone. Chiefs and local government officials in the provinces, however, had little choice but to give public support to the TRC's internationally backed rhetoric of nation building, although in many cases their absence from the TRC hearings indicated a different disposition. Almost all of those who testified at the TRC's public hearings, moreover, ended their testimony with appeals for economic assistance, suggesting that many of them had testified in the belief that this would give them access to such assistance. In the context of a war-torn country at the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index, and one that has recently undergone a massive process of UN-ization and NGO-ization, the new language and memory practices of the TRC constitutes a dominant form of knowledge whose power is linked to the political economy of international peacemaking and humanitarian assistance.

Most people I asked during my research over four consecutive years, however, were very divided about the TRC and truth telling. Almost without exception, people wanted "to forget," even if such forgetting eluded them, often urging "let's forgive and forget." Some, intriguingly, were able to synthesize the TRC message of remembering with this prevailing understanding of healing and reconciliation as forgetting. But for others—including victims—the TRC was often an obstacle to healing and reconciliation. For some communities, such as a large village in which I worked in 2003 and 2004 that had held church ceremonies to reintegrate ex-combatants, the TRC disrupted their own practices of reconciliation. Sometimes whole communities agreed not to give statements or to give statements that withheld information that they thought might be damaging to the ex-combatant children of their neighbors. People thereby sought to protect their communities and their relationships from the potentially damaging consequences of publicly remembering violence...

In a section on "Accountability vs. Reintegration", Shaw wrote this:

Do local techniques of post-conflict healing, reconciliation, and reintegration resolve the need for justice and accountability? Here, I would argue, a distinction should be drawn between the need to make states and leaders accountable for mass violence on the one hand, and the treatment of rank-and-file perpetrators on the other. If most survivors of the violence want some form of retributive justice against the latter, then a truth commission or TRC is unlikely to be an adequate response. But in Sierra Leone, as in Mozambique, most survivors wanted reintegration and peace. Here, a truth commission—especially one with public hearings—was popularly felt to be a destructive process.

When I asked survivors of the violence in the northern Sierra Leonean communities in which I worked what form of justice they wished to see, some did speak of the need for retributive justice: "We you do bad ting na road, na bad ting den go pay you" ("When you do a bad thing on the road, it's with a bad thing they will pay you"). But an overwhelming majority responded "I have no power; I leave my case to God." If encouraged to think about what they would want if they had power, most then replied "If I had power, I would still leave my case to God, for the sake of peace," deferring to divine justice and viewing punishment and retaliation alike as escalating rather than ending the cycle of violence...

I believe that Shaw raises some very worthwhile questions about the whole, currently dominant view that public truth-revelation efforts in the aftermath of atrocity are always a good and constructive thing. In addition, she has identified an important issue in international power politics when she notes that, "the new language and memory practices of the TRC constitutes a dominant form of knowledge whose power is linked to the political economy of international peacemaking and humanitarian assistance." To me, there is always an important issue of who makes the decisions in such circumstances. Should it always be the UN, backed up by very well-funded international NGOs? Or should the people of the national community concerned be encouraged to exercise more agency in the making of their own decisions on such matters-- as happened in Mozambique, and before that in Spain?

In relation to this question of "who decides?", I find it very notable that in Antony Beevor, in the article he published yesterday, made no attempt whatsoever to adduce the views of any actual Spanish citizens on the question of whether the pacto de olvido should now be broken-- as though the views of Spaniards on the matter are quite irrelevant to his argument! Instead, he seems to base it on the unstated assumption that any citizen of the world, of whatever national affiliation, should be able to have a "vote" on how other countries should proceed in such matters.

I believe that there is now, indeed, something of a small emerging debate inside Spain on just this matter. But I find the idea that outsiders, however well informed and well-meaning, think that they (we) have standing to make such momentous decisions on behalf of other people rather troubling. It has, after all, been many, many decades since Beevor's country (which was my birth country) faced the challenges of dealing with post-civil war sociopolitical recovery...