Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity by Priscilla Hayner. Routledge, £16.99, pp 340. ISBN 0 415 92477 4. Rating: ★★★★
The programme director of the International Centre for Transitional Justice in New York has produced a scholarly yet compellingly written review of the 21 official truth commissions established around the world since 1974 to document state crimes and to address concepts of reparation, reconciliation, and reform.
Hayner starts with an anecdote. “Do you want to remember, or to forget?” she asked a Rwandan government official who had lost every single member of his family in the 1994 genocide. He replied, “We must remember what happened in order to keep it from happening again. But we must forget the feelings that go with it. It is only by forgetting that we are able to go on.”
Paying particular attention to the truth commissions established in South Africa (the only one to hold public hearings), Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Hayner examines assumptions that giving victims the chance to speak offers a healing catharsis, and that truth leads to reconciliation.
Some cases run the other way. In Mozambique, the accepted, though largely unstated, belief was “the less we dwell on the past, the more likely reconciliation will be.” In a country where one million civilians had been tortured, maimed, or murdered, there were virtually no calls for accountability and punishment, and traditional healing mechanisms (which do not include talking about traumatic experiences) were deployed extensively at the grass roots. In Cambodia, there was a fear of talking about a still contentious period, not least since many prominent people had once been affiliated with the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodian Buddhism teaches that reconciliation does not require retribution and justice.
Trade offs between truth and justice were typical. The Guatemalan minister of defence made the position clear in 1994: “We support a truth commission. Just like in Chile: truth, but no trials.” In El Salvador, the parliament passed a sweeping amnesty into law just five days after the truth commission report was published, bearing out the pessimism of the peasant farmer who much earlier had told Hayner that he wouldn't be giving testimony because “I would lose a day of work and nothing would change.”
Truth commissions inevitably raise expectations that can only partially be met. None the less, their work in Chile and Argentina paved the way for financial reparations for the families of victims, in El Salvador promoted crucial judicial reforms, and in South Africa comprehensively demolished almost any defence of the apartheid era.
This book tackles the questions that will not go away (and in the United Kingdom have been played out in the Bloody Sunday inquiry, which is a kind of truth commission). Arguably the core effect of truth commissions is to create a major narrative within societal memory, but whether this makes a long term difference is another matter. When Hayner queries whether a democratic society can be built on a foundation of a denied or forgotten history, I think of her own nation: the United States arose out of the near genocide of “Indian” civilisation in North America.