South Africa

Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Stefaans Coetzee is the face of restorative justice

from the article by Bobby Jordan in The Sunday Times: ....Today is no ordinary day for the 33-year-old who grew up in an orphanage in Winburg in the Free State. Head slightly bowed, he looks up at two imams who have finally been allowed to visit him at Pretoria Central Prison. Their two previous attempts failed. The imams are from Rustenburg, where some of their congregation were nearly blown up by two Wit Wolwe bombs outside their mosque. Now they want to ask Coetzee what it was all about.

A humanist defence and critique of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

from the article by Dan Jakopovich in Peace Studies Journal: In order to build more authentic truth and reconciliation commissions in the future, it is also important to acknowledge the largely inauthentic, instrumentalist political foundations of the TRC project.

Mandela's children

from Alexandra Fuller's feature article in National Geographic Magazine: Coetzee does not talk about his childhood. He speaks about the planning that went into the bombing, how he was chosen for his excellent military skills, the years he has spent in prison. He asks for their questions, and the group responds. How did he learn to hate black people? How did he unlearn this hatred? How does he spend his days now? Is he sorry? And if he is so sorry, what can he give them? Coetzee admits he has nothing material to give the world except the leather belt that holds up his overalls. But, he says, God willing, if he gets out of jail, he can begin to attempt to compensate for what he has done. "There are children now in South Africa," he says, "children without parents. They might be tempted to get into violent gangs, to follow anger instead of love." He says, "I can show them that the first life you have to change is your own."

Amy Biehl, South Africa and restorative justice

 

Forgiveness and the state

 

South Africa's whites and restorative justice

We hear a lot in the news about racial conflict, and a lot less about racial reconciliation. But from South Africa to South Central Los Angeles, there are communities engaging in what experts call “restorative justice" to resolve the wrongs of the past and present.

Kashyap, Rina. Narrative and truth: a feminist critique of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Prior to the establishment of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 'gender was seldom explicitly invoked as a lens into human rights abuse or an organizing principle for the commission's work' (Nesiah et al., 2006, p. 3). In this respect the TRC is a trailblazer, as subsequent truth commissions in other countries have been inspired to incorporate the gender component. The study of the TRC, however, is relatively under-theorized from the feminist perspective. This article argues that the feminist perspective offers a nuanced scrutiny of narrative and truth, two major themes of the TRC. The feminist inquiry helps resurrect 'listening', as a crucial component of narratives. In addition, the value of the feminist perspective lies in its ability to throw light on the experience of both women and men and to create an argument and language for the articulation of the needs of the powerless and dispossessed in society. A feminist critique of truth and reconciliation commissions has the potential to make the transitional justice mechanism more inclusive and democratic. (excerpt)

. Watching a bargain unravel? A panel study of victims' attitudes about transitional justice in Cape Town, South Africa.

Despite the extended nature of many transitional justice processes, collection of relevant longitudinal primary data, especially at an individual level, is rarely observed as a means of assessing the impact of formal measures. This article reports on a panel survey conducted in 2002–2003 and 2008 with 153 victims of apartheid-era violations from Cape Town, South Africa. During the interval between the two waves of the survey, both undertaken after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed its work, government policies concerning reparations, prosecutions and pardons undermined the compromises that were central to the TRC process and integral to the democratic transition. The data analysis shows that approval of the unique conditional amnesty offered by the TRC was at first surprisingly high, with many respondents acknowledging its practical rationale, but it fell dramatically by 2008. This decline in support is associated with an increased sense of the unfairness of amnesty and dissatisfaction with the extent of truth recovery. Knowledge of and attitudes about prosecutions and pardons do not appear to be contributing factors, though the results indicate a greater desire for accountability, even at the risk of instability. The findings emphasize the need for rigorous, ongoing evaluation of transitional justice processes to appreciate properly the complex and dynamic nature of individual attitudes and the influence of emergent events. (author's abstract)

Malan, Jannie. Views and Visions of Coexistence in South Africa.

This project was jointly undertaken by the Durban-based African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) and the New York-based Coexistence Initiative ( ). The main objective was to elicit local understandings and articulations of coexistence in South Africa. The idea was to select a few situations where violent conflict had been replaced by peaceful coexistence, and to learn from what the people could share about their experiences. The project was therefore planned as Coexistence Community Consultations in which receptively listening facilitators would encourage participants to explain and discuss how they had moved from conflict to coexistence and how they established and sustained their mode of coexisting with one another. (excerpt)

Oboe, Ana lisa . The TRC women’s hearings as performance and protest in the new South Africa.

On 28 and 29 July 1997, a special committee of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard the testimonies of women who had been abused and brutalized during the years of apartheid rule by white South Africans. Seizing this unique opportunity to liberate their minds and voices, long suppressed by a heartless patriarchal system, the women told their tales within the traditional frame of oral performances. But the lack of a truly gender-sensitive format forced their testimonies into evasive strategies born partly of an ingrained resentment of male domination and partly of codes of secrecy under which blacks waged a long military struggle against the system. (Author's abstract)

Al-Kassim, Dina. Archiving Resistance: Women's Testimony at the Threshold of the State.

Increasingly today, Fanon's imagination of the postcolonial subject of difference is reconceived in the mode of an international human rights discourse along the lines of reconciliation and reparations. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has become the paradigmatic instance of a state mechanism capable of inducing the change from nationalist to politico-social consciousness; so pervasive is its influence that Moroccan and Algerian commissions refer explicitly to the South African example and openly cite it as a model of reconciling the people. This article examines the ways that women's testimony of political violence is called upon in the nationalist postcolony to signify both a primitive sphere outside the boundaries of national memory and public debate and the progressive character of inclusion at the advent of the new state. This paradox is illustrated in the South African TRC's commitment to symbolic reparation and to providing a space for women's testimony despite the refusal of most women to testify. What conceptions of the human are naturalized in state-mandated projects of healing that depend upon such narratives? What new forms of subjection and resistance await the citizens of the modern postcolonial state? It is with these questions about the power of the symbol to deny `voice' while granting the rights of speech that I turn to Asia Djebar's Blanc de l'Algérie, Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull and Zoe Wicomb's David's Story as a counter to the politics of testimony. (author's abstract)

Pisani, Kobus. After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: challenges facing the historian in a democratic South Africa

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was mandated to establish "the truth" about the causes, nature and extent of gross violations of human rights in the country between 1960 and 1994. This article assesses the significance of the TRC for historians and the writing of history in South Africa. The first section focuses on the task of assessing the TRC evidence and providing guidelines on how this evidence may be used in the quest for historic truth. The strengths and weaknesses of the TRC evidence are pointed out. A discussion of the role of the TRC in narrowing the gap between academic and public history follows in the second section. The third section deals with the significance of the TRC in the reinterpretation of a period in South African history. It is the main objective of the article to reflect upon the tasks of historians after the TRC. (Excerpt from Author)

Valverde, Estela and Humphrey, Michael. Human Rights Politics and Injustice: Transitional Justice in Argentina and South Africa.

Transitional justice is about the recovery of the rule of law and justice after mass violence. In the recent history of Argentina and South Africa, human rights politics have played an important role in the transition from repression to democracy as a discourse of resistance to state repression and as a framework and methodology for the successor state to manage demands for justice and promote reconciliation. Post-transition, they have provided a standard for the accountability of state institutions and evaluation of the democratic government's performance. In this article, we explore the roles of victims, survivors and relatives in the expansion of human rights politics. We argue that victims represent their suffering as embodied injustice and make their victim identity the focus of efforts to recover a moral contract between state and citizens. The expansion of human rights politics to include social and economic rights is an expression of the limits of transitional justice in recovering full citizenship in the context of the neo-liberal democratic project in Argentina and South Africa. (author's abstract)

Mamdani, Mahmood. Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)

"The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa was the fruit of a political compromise. The terms of the compromise both made possible the Commission and set the limits within which it would work. These limits, in turn, defined the space available to the Commission to interpret its terms of reference and define its agenda. This paper takes the compromise legislation that set up the TRC as a historical given and focuses attention on the TRC's interpretation of its terms of reference." (abstract)

O'Brien, Kevin A.. "Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Confronting the Past, Building the Future?"

One of the greatest efforts the ANC-dominated Government of National Unity (GNU) made was that of securing 'national reconciliation' within the country. This was an attempt to confront the past and achieve a sense of justice out of those events which had occurred, without attempting to extract revenge for those acts. By confronting and accepting the acts of the past as having been part of a political and -- at times-- military struggle between a liberation movement and a government entrenched in one view of the world around them, it was hoped that justice would be achieved, and that the country would be able to move forward in building and developing itself. It was for this reason that a process of national reconciliation based on the establishment of the truth surrounding these past activities, which would lead to justice being secured and served for these activities, was chosen over a war crimes, 'Nuremberg-style' confrontation: there was no 'victor' in this conflict, only a realization that fair and equitable representation at the political level had been achieved, and that in order to maintain this representation at the political level had been achieved, and that in order to maintain this representation, the future would lie in cooperation and national reconciliation, rather than in confrontation and revenge. (excerpt)

Gibson, James L.. "The Truth About Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa"

South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process is perhaps the best-known example of an institutionalized attempt to build a more democratic future by confronting human rights atrocities from the past. Yet the South African case is often quite misunderstood, with many misconceptions widely accepted and asserted. This article addresses five facts about the South African experience. Using data from a large national survey of ordinary people, it demonstrates both that the truth and reconciliation process is viewed as effective by most people and that in fact systematic evidence indicates that the process achieved several of its primary goals. From the South African case we learn that, despite their various shortcomings and compromises, truth processes can attain legitimacy among ordinary people in transitional systems and that they can contribute to societal reconciliation.

Garda, Zureida and Bird, Edward. "Reporting the Truth Commission: Analysis of Media Coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa"

This article examines the coverage afforded to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of South Africa by a selection of South African media. It looks at how the media have constructed the past, the way in which the victims and perpetrators have been represented and the extent the which these representations have influenced the question of reconciliation in the country. We have found that in their efforts to reveal the truth and promote reconciliation, the media have, at times, ceased to be critical and interrogative, nonetheless coverage has been extensive and comprehensive. Our analysis will continue until the TRC's work is completed.

Gibson, James L.. "Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile a Divided Nation?"

Throughout the world, truth commissions are being constructed under the hope that discovering the “truth” about a country’s conflictual past will somehow contribute to “reconciliation.” Most such efforts point to South Africa’s process as an exemplar of the powerful influence of truth finding. But has truth actually contributed to reconciliation in South Africa? No rigorous and systematic assessment of the truth and reconciliation process has ever been conducted. This article investigates the hypothesis that truth leads to reconciliation. Based on a survey of thirty-seven hundred South Africans in 2001, the author begins by giving both “truth” and “reconciliation” clear conceptual and operational meaning. The author reports empirical evidence that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s “truth” is fairly widely accepted by South Africans of all races, that some degree of reconciliation characterizes South Africa today, and that the collective memory produced by the process (“truth”) did indeed contribute to reconciliation. The author then considers whether other divided countries might be able to use a similar process to propel themselves toward a more peaceful and democratic future. (author's abstract)

Moon, Claire. "Narrating Political Reconciliation: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa"

This article enquires into the narration of reconciliation in South Africa and its political implications. It scrutinizes the subjects, objects and material practices that flow from the reconciliation story. The investigation turns on two crucial assumptions: (a) that discourse is an ideological system of meaning that constitutes and naturalizes the subjects and objects of political life, and (b) that narrative is a special discursive form, the structural features of which have specific political effects that are not illuminated by a more general discourse analytic approach. A narrative perspective is important because the TRC explicitly undertook the task of telling a story about South Africa’s transition from past violence to future reconciliation, and argued that storytelling was fundamental to catharsis, healing, and reconciliation on an individual and a national level. Narrative theory renders more specifically applicable some of the general claims of political discourse analysis; while the insights of political discourse analysis highlight the political contexts and effects of governing narratives to which most narrative theory, on its own, is blind. The combination of these two theoretical premises furnishes a powerful approach to understanding the story about reconciliation told by the TRC, and its political implications.

Meiring, Piet. "Truth and Reconciliation: The South African Experience"

For five years - ever since the watershed announcement of President F. W. de Klerk in February 1990 that the ANC and other liberation organizations were to be unbanned, that all political prisoners, among them Nelson Mandela, would be freed, and that democratic elections involving the whole South African population were to be held - the issue of the past had been hotly debated. The debate was on the agenda, too, of the multi-party conference (CODESA) which prior to the 1994 elections had to struggle with, on the one hand, the plight of the thousands of victims of the apartheid years, and on the other hand, the urgent needs of the many perpetrators of apartheid who were guilty of gross human rights violations in the past. A blanket amnesty would not work - it would have been a total disregard and dishonouring of the pain and suffering of the victims. At the other end of the scale, Nuremberg-type trials where the victors take the vanquished to court, to be convicted and sentenced, were also not advisable - not if reconciliation was the order of the day. One of the last decisions taken by CODESA was to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.(excerpt)