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Anthropological Theory
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
Vol 3(3): 367–387
[1463-4996(200309)3:3;367–387;035243]
Anthropological studies
of national reconciliation
processes
Richard Ashby Wilson
University of Connecticut, USA
Abstract
This article examines how social researchers have evaluated the rise of institutions to
create ‘national reconciliation’ in countries emerging from authoritarianism and state
repression. Reconciliation has been counter-posed to retributive justice by new
political and religious elites, who have instead sought to construct a new notion of the
national self and psyche, and in so doing used organic models of state and society and
metaphors of illness and health in the body politic. Intellectuals such as the legal
scholar Minow have applauded these efforts as attempts to transcend the limitations
of law and legal discourse in order to construct a different kind of public space and
collective memory, and to engage in emotional and psychological healing.
Anthropologists have taken a more mixed and critical view. Some such as Buur and
Ross have asserted that truth commissions are not free of the positivism which
characterizes the legal process and which excludes certain types of voice and
subjectivity and creates silences of its own. Others such as Borneman and Wilson have
criticized reconciliation strategies for undermining the rule of law and they have
asserted that democratizing regimes must instead attempt to rebuild accountability,
and thereby state legitimacy, through retributive justice.
Key Words
anthropology of human rights • political violence • reconciliation • retributive justice
• transitional justice • truth commissions
Plato recognizes only one ultimate standard, the interest of the state. Everything that
furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked
and unjust. Actions that serve it are moral; actions that endanger it, immoral. In other
words, Plato’s moral code is strictly utilitarian; it is a code of collectivist or political
utilitarianism. The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing
but political hygiene. (Popper, 1945: 107)
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ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 3(3)
I THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF NATIONAL RECONCILIATION
The idea of ‘national reconciliation’ emerged from a particular set of historical and
political experiences, namely the transitions to liberal democracy that occurred at the
end of the Cold War. These transitions from authoritarianism to civilian elected rule
began with Argentina in 1983 and culminated in the end of apartheid in South Africa
in 1994. In between these dates, a number of elected civilian governments replaced
military dictatorships in Latin America and communist regimes in the former Soviet
Union and countries of eastern Europe. In all of these countries, the same kinds of
questions were raised in peace talks and afterwards. What will happen to perpetrators of
gross human rights violations and how will victims be compensated? How can a new
official version of historical events be created which challenges the distortions and falsifications of repressive regimes? How can the memory of those who suffered from political
violence be included in a new official history?
The depth of these political transformations varied widely, but in most cases accountability for past crimes was heavily constrained by the continued institutional power of
old elites in reformed state institutions. Famously, General Pinochet, who was responsible for the 1973 coup and the torture and murder of up to 4000 political opponents,
continued to command the Chilean armed forces as Defense Minister after the handover
of the executive to a civilian opposition leader, Patricio Aylwin. Apartheid-era President
F.W. de Klerk was Nelson Mandela’s vice president for two years from 1994 to 1996 in
a power-sharing Government of National Unity. Military and political leaders of the
ancién regime took advantage of their sustained institutional power to pass successive
amnesty laws. In Guatemala, there were 12 amnesties between 1982 and 1988 when
approximately 75,000 were killed in a vicious counter-insurgency war.1 Most involved
blanket amnesties, with one or two exceptions such as in South Africa, where individuals
had to prove that they were acting on higher orders and with political intent.
Apart from a few exceptions, amnesties were not directly challenged by incoming
political elites.2 In only a very small number of cases were political leaders ever brought
before a court, for instance in the successful prosecution of East German former head
of state Eric Honecker. In Argentina, President Alfonsín brought successful prosecutions
against high-ranking military leaders, only to have them pardoned by President Menem
a few years into their sentences. The case in South Africa against former apartheid-era
Defense Minister Magnus Malan collapsed in 1996 due to basic failures on the part of
the prosecution and the Attorney General’s office. By and large, the vast majority of
police, military and paramilitary death squad members who committed murder, rape,
torture and kidnapping walked free in the streets of the newly democratic states. A wall
of impunity and silence protected them from judicial redress, and sealed off the past
from legal retribution in the present.
For the anti-authoritarian political opposition, now walking in the corridors of state
power, impunity was seen as a necessary political compromise. It was argued by President Nelson Mandela and Argentina’s President Carlos Menem that pardon was the
‘price of peace’. Some, such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, argued that amnesty
was necessary to avert further bloodshed and this is why South Africa’s transition was
‘peaceful’.3 Others in Latin America, such as Guatemalan civilian President Vinicio
Cerezo, observed that their countries had endured decades of military rule, and the
most important goal was democratic consolidation, however minimal and incremental,
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and even if it did not directly challenge the foundations of military authority and
control.
In the context of widespread impunity, international and national human rights
organizations lobbied successfully for a small measure of accountability. Even if perpetrators could not be brought to court, tried and sentenced, then at least the truth could
be told about state crimes. Transnational human rights organizations such as Amnesty
International and Human Rights Watch argued for domestic prosecutions, but most
settled for thoroughly documenting abuses, in the hope that it might lead to justice in
the future. ‘Truth commissions’ were set up to carry out this official documentation and
history-writing, and roughly 20 such commissions – depending on how you define and
count them – were established between the 1970s and the present day, with the majority
(15) established in the latter years of the Cold War (1974–1994).
Some commissions were sanctioned and operated by the new state, others by the
United Nations and still others by the Catholic church and non-governmental organizations. All of them shared the same task of documenting ‘who did what to whom, when
and where’, but they fulfilled this task in many different ways. A few named perpetrators
(as in South Africa and El Salvador), whereas the majority (e.g. in Chile, Argentina,
Uruguay and Guatemala) did not officially name individuals guilty of politically motivated violent crimes, preferring to assert ‘institutional responsibility’. Truth commission
reports tended to report ‘the bare facts’ about individual abuses, and most did not write
a serious structural or historical account which integrated individual violations into a
wider analysis of the causes and motivations of political violence.4
This truth-writing project was valuable and necessary to overturn the relativist deformations and denials of truth carried out by repressive regimes.5 If political violence and
genocide have taught us anything about epistemology, it is that relativist and tautological
theories of truth do not assist either allocation of responsibility or the breaking of a regime
of denial. Yet new democratizing political elites went a step further than establishing
salient truths about state terror. They overlaid a truth-finding project with a morally thick
project of national reconciliation in order to legitimize tarnished state institutions. The
slogan for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be, therefore,
‘Reconciliation Through Truth’, and the clear aim would be post-apartheid nation
building. The ideological power of truth finding was harnessed to the project of instilling public moral values and constructing a new, shared vision of the nation.
Nation-building strategies appropriated and absorbed truth-finding, and a collectivist
vision of politicized morality took precedence over the liberal humanitarian project
initiated by human rights organizations. In this way, truth commissions became one of
the main ways in which new elites sought to manufacture legitimacy for tarnished state
institutions. And yet, at the heart of these transitions to liberal democracy was an
irresolvable contradiction, between the formalized approbation of individual rights,
constitutional freedoms and the rule of law on the one hand, and the suspension and
abrogation of these rights and freedoms where they concerned the past political conflict
on the other. Individual freedoms and entitlements were proclaimed, but then quickly
subordinated in the area of justice to state morality and elite interests. A culture of
human rights was constructed upon the quicksand of a culture of impunity.
In many cases, as in the amnesty deal struck between the African National Congress
and the National Party in 1994, or between the guerrilla URNG and Guatemalan
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government in 1994, opposition figures were party to the amnesty negotiations themselves. In the new political dispensation, they had to convince their political constituencies of the need for political compromise after so many years of sacrifice and hardened
opposition, and truth commissions and the language of national reconciliation became
the preferred discourse. This, more than any other factor, explains the widespread popularity of truth commissions and other national reconciliation projects. Truth commissions were promoted by political elites as a mechanism to construct a new ideological
hegemony in the area of justice, rights and public morality, a hegemony which diverted
popular legal consciousness away from legal retribution and financial compensation.
Whether in Latin America or South Africa or elsewhere, political and religious elites
used a remarkably similar language of reconciliation, and their discourse was characterized by the following features: the construction of a new notion of the national self and
psyche, the use of organic models of nation, the use of metaphors of illness and health
and the creation of formulations of the common good which exclude retribution and
encourage forgiveness. These discursive forms are not peculiar to truth commissions or
even democratizing regimes, but are features of nationalist discourse. Nationalist
discourse often constructs the ‘national self ’ in opposition to the essentialized practices
or beliefs of other, usually surrounding, countries.
Truth commissions, on the other hand, construct the national self with regard to the
violent nation of the past rather than against other nations in the present, and they assert
a discontinuity with that same past. The new national self is one which is forged in the
suffering and violence of the past, but no element of that political past has entered into
the present. The present political order is presented as purified, decontaminated and
disconnected from the old authoritarian order. Truth commission hearings construct a
new vision of the national self by inscribing the individual into a new national narrative
on personhood. Belinda Bozzoli (1998), a sociologist who has written about the TRC
hearings in Alexandra township in Johannesburg, refers to the ‘sequestration of experience’ when individual narratives were subordinated to community histories and new
national narratives on the experience of apartheid. Idiosyncratic and unique individual
psyches disappear into the melting pot of a new official ‘collective memory’.
Although they may formally appeal to international human rights, national reconcilers deploy an organic model of state, culture and society which again has its origins more
widely in nationalist and statist discourse and, if we look even further back, to Plato’s
Republic. In this view, the body politic is not constituted by morally autonomous individual citizens but by general principles of organicism, holism and collectivism in which
it is the purpose of the individual to maintain social harmony and the unity, stability,
and good health of the state. These views are widely expressed in the media and in literature on the subject, but come to their fullest expression in the writings of Desmond
Tutu. In justifying the amnesty legislation in South Africa, Tutu writes:
Social harmony is for us the summum bonum – the greatest good. Anything that
subverts or undermines this sought-after good is to be avoided like the plague. Anger,
resentment, lust for revenge . . . are corrosive of this good. (1999: 35)
The main metaphor of the organic state is the body politic as a sick body that is in
need of healing. Truth commissions carry out this healing and thus promote national
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reconciliation. The truth commission opens the wounds of the suffering nation and
cleanses them, thus healing the national body politic.6 The morality of the nation-state
becomes a question of Platonic moral and political hygiene. Here, the focus is not as
much on individuals, but on the nation-state, and this brings us much closer to the
actual meaning of ‘national reconciliation’ as defined by political and religious elites.
Reconciliation between individuals in the sense of victim–offender mediation was not
attempted in South Africa, Chile or other countries where truth commissions
consciously pursued national reconciliation. Sub-national social groups such as classes,
races or genders are not to be reconciled with one another either. Instead, reconciliation
works at a much higher level of abstraction. The nation-state is to be reconciled with
itself. Thus defined, ‘national reconciliation’ is almost impossible to quantify or measure
or assess in any meaningful way. This ideological slipperiness makes it suitable for the
two main tasks facing political elites that inherit the battered shell of the authoritarian
state: nation building, and the centralization of power and authority in the context of a
contested monopoly on both adjudication and the means of violence.
Our understanding of ‘national reconciliation’, then, should not commence on the
ideological terrain marked out by proponents of reconciliation, that is, the values, attitudes and dispositions underscoring moral and legal decision-making (i.e. whether or
not it is morally right and good to forgive one’s aggressors). Instead, we should begin in
the opposite direction with the Weberian problematic of the legitimacy of the state and
its institutions in the aftermath of authoritarianism and the attempts of specific interest
holders to forge formal conditions of acceptability that lends legitimacy to their exercise
of regulation through institutional means.
II RECONCILING INTELLECTUALS
Before examining anthropologists’ studies of national reconciliation processes, let us look
briefly at the wider discussions in law and the social sciences. The idea of national reconciliation has received an unexpectedly large amount of intellectual backing, especially
from the quarters of law, political science and moral philosophy. There is widespread
consensus that the truth finding and documentation aspects of the work of truth
commissions can promote a wider political culture of human rights. Breaking a regime
of denial through truth commission reports or public hearings is important, argues
Michael Ignatieff (2001), in order to reduce the range of ‘impermissible lies’ in the public
realm. Authoritarian rulers constantly denied that anyone had been killed or
‘disappeared’ and military rulers in Latin America regularly put out propaganda that the
disappeared had all fled to live in Miami, rather than been brutally murdered. Some
truth commissions (for example the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification) are more effective than courts in establishing an adequate account of an era of
violence, since they go beyond the guilt of a single individual (think of the narrowness
of the Eichmann trial in Israel7) to include a wider social, historical and structural
context in their examination of a conflict.
Some commentators have gone beyond applauding the fact-finding function of truth
commissions to endorse a much wider moral project of creating shared values and
‘healing the nation’. Martha Minow, professor of family law at Harvard Law School, is
one such advocate. In her 1998 book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, she highlights
the therapeutic dimensions of truth commissions, which for her are models of social
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rehabilitation and public healing. Like Priscilla Hayner (2001: 133–4), Minow largely
defines reconciliation as ‘societal healing’.
Minow justifies the institutional healing project of truth commissions by reference to
the drawbacks and limitations of their opposite – the legal process. Minow develops her
arguments against trials by pointing out that investigations and prosecutions are very
expensive and time-consuming. Crucially, trials may be damaging to victims who often
face antagonistic cross-examining from defense counsels. Victims’ psychological needs
are better served by truth commission officials who listen sympathetically, acknowledge
the wrongs committed and restore the dignity of victims. This creates an official break
with the authoritarian justice of the past:
Precisely because it is not a court, the human rights committee [of the South African
TRC] avoids chilling reminders to victimized people of the hostility and insensitivity of courts under apartheid. (Minow, 1998: 57)
Minow largely endorses a collective model of national healing and the version of reconciliation as therapy for a sick society. For her, whole nations can suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. Addressing the national psyche is something that truth
commissions can achieve whereas the courts cannot:
The very vocabularies of healing and restoration are foreign to the legal language
underpinning prosecutions. Emotional and psychological healing did not figure
largely in the initial and international debates in response to the Holocaust. (Minow,
1998: 63)
Minow (1998: 80) is aware of the criticisms that one might make of this model, namely
that nations do not have psyches that can be ‘healed’, that a therapeutic model can
obscure the political dimensions of the conflict, and that reconciliation deprives victims
of the right to justice and treats individuals as means to a societal or collective good
rather than as ends in themselves. Minow did not have access at the time of writing to
more recent studies by psychologists and anthropologists which challenge the assertion
that truth commissions promote healing (eg. Hamber and Wilson, 2002). There is now
compelling evidence from interviews with victims that telling the truth does not necessarily heal, that many victims experience a decline in their mental health after testifying
in public, that the mental health services of truth commissions are woefully inadequate,
and that retribution in the courts may provide symbolic closure for victims as much as
non-legal reconciliation mechanisms.
Minow considers the objections to truth commissions, but ultimately comes down in
favor of them on the grounds that restorative justice has deeper cultural roots in places
like South Africa, unlike the alien retributive justice of state legal systems. This is interesting for anthropologists because Minow’s last line of defense for national reconciliation mechanisms relies upon a cultural and historical argument about legal pluralism,
tradition and uniquely African approaches to justice. Restoring the dignity of victims of
apartheid is reinforced by a much deeper process of recovering of local cultural
traditions of adjudication suppressed by white colonial and apartheid rule. Instead of
drawing on the numerous anthropological studies of law in Africa (e.g. Moore, 1991)
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or legal historians’ critique of the idea of African customary law (Chanock, 1985),
Minow (1998: 81) relies for her information on TRC Chair Desmond Tutu, whom she
quotes thus:
Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative – not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked
askew. The justice that we hope for is restorative of the dignity of the people.8
This culturological approach may explain the growing appeal which peace building,
international conflict mediation and ‘national reconciliation’ have among some cultural
anthropologists. A number of papers at recent panels at American Anthropological
Association meetings on ‘truth and reconciliation’ have for the most part endorsed the
reconciliation project of post-authoritarian regimes. Anthropologists working in conflict
analysis institutes have argued that anthropology more widely needs to pay more attention to truth and reconciliation commissions (Avruch and Vejarano, 2001) and other
peace-building initiatives. An editorial in the June 2002 edition of Anthropology Today
sees a central role for anthropologists in actual conflict resolution as well as in reconciliation processes in countries emerging from violence.
Professor Cynthia Keppley Mahmood of the Kroc Institute of International Peace
Studies at the University of Notre Dame encourages anthropologists to play a greater
role in peace building through promoting dialogue between bellicose parties. Anthropologists can call upon their ‘ethnographic sensitivities’ so as to engage in the ‘cultural
bridging’ that is necessary between western secularist and fundamentalist religious
traditions: ‘Let us use our professional training to explore whether dialogue may be
possible along avenues political leaders have closed off in favor of military options’
(Mahmood, 2002: 2).
The allure of national reconciliation for anthropologists seems to lie in its fusion of
truth commissions and restorative justice, and the idea that mediation is embedded in
culture and social networks rather than state institutions. Anthropologists seem to have
a pre-disposed intellectual affinity to the idea of restorative justice because of the longstanding concern with legal pluralism in the discipline. The general historical focus of
political and legal anthropology has been on non-state morality, on social norms,
Alternative Dispute Resolution and customary law rather than on colonial and postcolonial state law.9 These anthropological studies focus more on social relationships and
their restoration, rather than rational bureaucratic and legal procedures, which are often
presented as far removed from everyday notions of justice.
III ETHNOGRAPHERS OF RECONCILIATION
Due to the history of legal anthropology within the discipline and its focus on public
morality, popular legal consciousness and cultural norms, we might expect that the few
anthropologists who have actually studied national reconciliation commissions in detail
would be sympathetic to the commissions and antagonistic to legal retribution and the
rule of law. This has not usually been the case, which just goes to show that anthropologists can be an unpredictable bunch. In the discussion that follows, I will focus on
two lines of argumentation pursued by anthropologists studying national reconciliation
processes. First I will consider the critique of positivism within human rights
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documentation and official history-writing made by Buur, Wilson and Ross, all of whom
studied the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Then I will turn to
discussions of the relationship between reconciliation and retributive justice in eastern
Europe (John Borneman) and South Africa (Wilson).
Anthropological critiques of positivism
National commissions of investigation have invariably asserted a causal link between
truth and reconciliation, and they have generally relied upon a positivist understanding
of truth. As a brief aside, positivism in law means something slightly different than in
the social sciences. Broadly speaking, legal positivism sees law as a value-free, neutral
activity guided by the strict application of legal principles as codified in constitutions or
legal precedent. Positivism in the social sciences models itself on empiricist science of
the material-object world and eschews metaphysical reflection in favor of knowledge
produced through systematic observation and experimentation. There is, of course, a
link between the two insofar as legal forms of knowledge are generally positivistic and
share the value-free and empiricist approach to visible facts that characterizes sociological
positivism. Both eschew epistemological reflection. Anthropologists have been critical
of the reliance of human rights institutions on positivistic approaches to knowledge and
history, on the usual grounds that it is inappropriate to apply natural science principles
to societies, and that positivism excludes consciousness, meaning and intentionality.
This critique of positivism in human rights documentation, although begun earlier
(Wilson, 1997), has crystallized in the study of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s approach to truth, knowledge and history. On 31 October 1998, the
South AfricanTruth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its final Report, which
documented gross violations committed during a 34-year period between 1960 and 1994.
The Report had taken nearly three years to complete and was a compendious account which
ran to 3500 pages and nearly 1 million words. It provided findings on more cases, nearly
21,000, than any previous truth commission before it, and the sheer weight of these cases
made a damning indictment of a system of institutionalized racism under apartheid.
Three anthropologists, Buur, Wilson and Ross, looked at the methodology which
guided the TRC’s search for truth and about the past, and constituted the means for
creating the knowledge contained in the final Report. They asked questions such as what
different versions of truth did the TRC hold, how did these versions change over the life
of the commission and how did this lead to the shape of the Report? What over-arching
narrative on the past did the commission assert, and what view of the relationship
between truth and morality did this contain?
The TRC’s final Report (1:100) identified and defined four notions of truth which
had guided the Commission:
1
2
3
4
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Factual or forensic truth: is ‘the familiar legal or scientific notion of bringing to light
factual, corroborated evidence’.
Personal or narrative truth: refers to the individual truths of victims and perpetrators,
attaching value to oral tradition and story telling.
Social truth: is established through interaction, discussion and debate.
Healing and restorative truth: repairs the damage done in the past and prevents
further recurrences in the future.
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Yet there were really only two paradigms of truth under which all the other versions
congregated – forensic truth and narrative truth. These two truths were regularly
counter-posed to one another and each was dominant at different stages. Narrative truth
was hegemonic at the beginning of the Commission’s life as public televised hearings
had an unexpectedly dramatic effect, but it was displaced by a more legalistic and
forensic paradigm after the first year. In concrete terms, the forensic model was institutionally established in the Information Management System (Infocomm), a transnational methodology for human rights documentation. Variants of this large-scale
human rights computer database had also been deployed earlier in Haiti, Guatemala and
El Salvador. Infocomm’s positivist model of truth relied upon quantitative statistical
methods in the production of the Report, whereas other types of truth played a secondary role. Infocomm had seven stages from statement taking to making national findings,
and the whole system was driven by each individual act of violence. The whole system
broke down victims’ narratives into quantifiable acts. Complex events and people were
divided up into their constituent components – either 48 distinct acts in the case of
events, or 3 categories in the case of persons – victims, perpetrators or witnesses.
Lars Buur’s (2000) ethnography took place within the offices of the TRC in order to
demonstrate how the Commission’s ‘global truth’ of the apartheid era was created
through internal bureaucratic practices, rather than external political pressures on the
Commission – the usual focus of research by political scientists such as Hayner (1994).
Buur draws upon Ian Hacking’s (1982, 1985, 1999) work on ‘styles of scientific reasoning’ to understand the rationality of Infocomm, and its statistical style of producing
regularities within populations. Buur’s focus is the bureaucratic mentality of the TRC,
and its reliance upon scientific procedures and formal rules. Buur begins with Hacking’s
observation that science operates on the assumption that a truth relation is possible
between the world and representations of the world; that is, a ‘correspondence theory of
truth’. Hacking (1982: 49) asserts no such relation is possible, since ‘nothing’s either
true-or-false but thinking makes it so’, an assertion which unmistakably questions any
independent criteria of truth.
Statistical styles of reasoning are thus self-authenticating and circular, and the role of
the researcher is to describe the conditions under which relations of truth and falsehood
are established. Buur does this well in his critique of a factual and objective approach to
Truth with a capital T. He points out how the TRC conceived of its project as the establishing of provable or verifiable facts, which are, in the positivist language of Infocomm,
‘found’, ‘retrieved’, ‘captured’ and ‘collected’. In Infocomm’s view, the only knowledge
that matters is that which can be counted or measured. Acceptable knowledge must meet
the criteria of being generalizable, which requires that knowledge be detached from local
knowledge which is itself transformed and homogenized.
Buur (2000: 65) states that the Commission’s entire project of documentation of gross
human rights violations could be understood in terms of the ‘tension between a local
ontology of engagement and a global ontology of detachment’. This approach to global
knowledge is continuous with a modern and colonial project ‘because the image of the
globe – the global truth – connotes a surface waiting to be conquered, of people with no
will or direction of their own, waiting to be worked on and through, where local dynamics
are obstacles which have to be bypassed, managed and absorbed in its order’ (2000: 64).
A positivist approach to documenting the apartheid era suffers from two types of
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disjuncture. Firstly, Buur notes a divergence between the information system and the
norms and actions of bureaucratic staff, which are replete with all kinds of inconsistencies and unintended consequences. Secondly, there is a discontinuity between statistical
science and the experiential life-world of those people affected by apartheid-era violence.
Buur captures well the ambiguity and contradictions of trying to fix and codify individual and social memories, which are fluid, fragmented, fleeting, transient. He exemplifies this by examining how the TRC defined and operationalized the category of
‘victim’. The TRC Report listed 22,000 victims but excluded many thousands of individuals. This categorical exclusion resulted from the distinctions embedded within the
methodology of the database. The TRC’s epistemological system utilized an exclusive
form of power/knowledge built upon positivistic methods of establishing the occurrence
of a ‘gross human rights violation’.
Although insightful, Buur’s framework for understanding the TRC’s methodology is
vulnerable to the usual charges against cultural anthropologists – of epistemological and
moral relativism. State violence requires a response from social researchers, and saying
the truth of an era depends on your style of reasoning is a limited and partial response
at best. At worst it is apolitical and lays the past open to historical revisionism. Wittgenstein’s sarcastic aphorism is correct: we cannot squeeze between language and its object.
Yet in a politically-charged context of competing accounts of violence, social researchers
need epistemologies which allow them to say that some accounts are more plausible than
others. For instance, in the recent libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah
Lipstadt (1993), a British court had to verify whether the Nazis had carried out a policy
of systematic mass extermination of Jews and others in death camps such as Auschwitz,
or whether no such policy existed and the buildings at Auschwitz were in fact air-raid
bunkers. In the context of the rise of the European extreme right (Haider in Austria, Le
Pen in France, and the late Pim Fortuyn in Holland), it matters that Holocaust deniers
such as Irving are proved wrong in public settings, and doing so probably requires some
kind of correspondence theory of truth.10 This need not imply an unreflexive positivism
and a reliance purely on forensic methods, but could also be contingent upon criteria of
plausibility which integrate a concern with logic, coherence and evidence with wider
interpretative and historical understandings.11
The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Wilson, 2001) develops a
critique of the positivism of the South African TRC which shares many elements of
Buur’s analysis. The study points out that only forensic truth was granted epistemological value in the process of creating knowledge about the past. Forensic truth was seen
by the TRC as an end in itself, whereas all of the other three truths are means directed
towards other ends, and specifically towards healing or affirming dignity. The three types
of ‘narrative truth’ are not given any epistemological standing – they are there for
emotional ‘catharsis’ and nation building. These types of truth do not contribute to the
history of South Africa, nor to an improved understanding of the past, nor to the
context, patterns and causes of violations. For this reason, individual statements from
victims did not feature in the writing of the Report.
Over the life of the commission, Infocomm became increasingly driven by positivist
concerns and the desire to create legally defensible findings, at the expense of victims’
experience of telling their stories and to the detriment of including fine grained narrative
accounts in the substance of the Report. This could be seen in two areas – the statement
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form and the data coding process. The statement form upon which victims’ stories were
written went through six different versions, each more like the computer database upon
which it was entered. In the beginning, these were open-ended forms with a great deal
of space for personal narrative. By the end of the process, the statement form had been
stripped down to a checklist as the pressure was increased, in the words of one statement
taker, ‘to get the cold facts’.
The data coding process broke each narrative down into a series of 48 categories of
violation, called the ‘controlled vocabulary’, or the ‘Bible’ by data processors. Once it
was fixed, all the information had to be classified according to this grid. As one data
processor told me: ‘in the beginning there was lots of interpretation of the statement but
by the end we were just like robots. You read it and put it in the computer as it is.’ Information did not ‘exist’ unless it conformed to the controlled vocabulary, showing, à la
Buur and Hacking, how conceptual categories selectively define social reality.12 The existential truths replete with the subjectivities of individuals contained within whole narratives were lost in the data processing. The integrity of the narrative at the data processing
stage was destroyed as processors deconstructed the single narrative and ‘captured’
discrete acts and the details of victims, witnesses and perpetrators. The arc of each
personal account and its overall narrative structure were fragmented.
The TRC’s final Report has to be understood as the direct result of the methodology
used. The main limitation noted by many observers is that there is no overarching and
unified historical narrative linking together the various fragments. The truth commission
did not try to write a history of the apartheid era; instead, it was led by the need to make
perpetrator findings. There was a crucial shift in the TRC’s work ‘from a narratively
framed victim-oriented conception of the TRC process to a perpetrator-focused quasilegal approach’ (Du Toit, 1999: 2). Because of this shift it ended up on the terrain of
the courts, not on the terrain of the historians. Instead of putting ‘apartheid on trial’,
the TRC opted for a more narrow legal quest for findings on individual gross human
rights violations. The Report is little more than a chronicle of wrong acts.
However, in one sense there is a master narrative in the Report, but it is not one a historian
or anthropologist would recognize. Instead, it is ‘more a moral narrative about the fact of
moral wrongdoing across the political spectrum, spawned by the overriding evil of the
apartheid system’ (Posel, 1999: 3). The category of evil takes the place of a wider synthesis
and explanation, and is a way of avoiding a historical analysis of concrete social conditions.
The legal-forensic method gelled nicely with an overarching moralizing and nationbuilding project. An understanding of the social conditions (racism, class inequality, gender
hierarchy, poverty) of wrongdoing was removed and ‘evil’ was put in its place to answer the
question: why did people commit gross human rights violations? Because apartheid was
evil.13 End of story. This replacement of history by theology is only intelligible if we accept
that the Report’s overall narrative is a moral one, dedicated to national reconciliation. The
nation-building project relies not upon shared political and historical understanding of an
era of state violence, but upon recognizing moral wrongness. The history of apartheid was
not written by the South African TRC as politics, but as a morality tale.
The critique of positivism developed in Fiona Ross’ (2002) study of women and the
South African TRC shares key elements with Buur and Wilson’s writings, especially in
noting how the Commission’s emphasis on visible acts was at the expense of the silences
in communication, women’s experiences of abuse, and the everyday, mundane aspects
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of oppression under apartheid. Ross carries out a genealogy of the category of ‘women’
in the TRC’s work. In the beginning, the TRC was relatively blind to the specific experiences of women under apartheid, and treated them as ‘secondary witnesses’ who would
testify at public hearings about abuses against their sons, husbands, and brothers,
whereas men testified about harms suffered to themselves. The ways in which women
testified located them as ‘witnesses’ rather than as ‘victims’.
There were key silences in women’s testimony, particularly regarding abuses that took
place against themselves. These silences were cultural – ‘We are not allowed to ask our
husbands about politics in my culture’ (Ross, 2002: 45) – political – silence as a strategy
of resistance against apartheid security police – and categorical, that is to say, as a result
of the framing and definition of ‘human rights violation’ by the TRC itself. Silence was
also a strategy used by women to cope with the effects of violence on their social
networks, and this placed those coping strategies off the radar screen of the TRC’s positivist approach to Truth. As in both Buur and Wilson’s studies, we see how the classifying frameworks of the TRC rendered some histories, narratives, subjectivities and
experiences visible, and others invisible.
After women’s rights campaigners drew the TRC’s attention to the gendered aspects
of its work, the Commission attempted to focus more attentively on women’s particular experiences of abuse. It instituted special hearings for women, thus transforming
women’s experiences of abuse into a category that could be examined and measured.
Yet this attention on the more visible obscured from view the more mundane aspects
of women’s experiences. The Commission emphasized visible sexual forms of abuse to
the detriment of the manifold ways in which apartheid era violence destroyed social
relations. Ross asserts that the Commission’s emphasis on embodied harm had the
effect of naturalizing particular forms and experiences of violence and concealing other
forms. Too close a focus on bodily violation obscured the impairment of, as destruction to, domestic worlds and relationships caused by apartheid. She encourages a more
inclusive approach to women’s testimony (Ross, 2002: 42), that ‘Hidden in the
discourses of domesticity are powerful forms of knowledge and agency that need to be
recognized and sensitively understood . . . These have to do with experiences of family
life, with expectations of time, with silence and secrecy and the location of self in
stories.’
Ross analyses these aspects of pain and suffering which are not amenable to human
rights enquiries in the light of theoretical discussions by Deborah Battaglia (1999),
Veena Das et al. (2001) and Elaine Scarry (1985) who she uses to argue for greater
acknowledgment and recognition. The categories of violation used by national commissions of enquiry need to be expanded beyond the visible in order to consider the effects
of violence upon social relationships and people’s sense of selfhood and identity. In this
way, such Commissions can better document the profound and long-term social costs
of state terror and reinforce the attempts by women to recover the everyday and resume
the task of living.
Accountability, justice and reconciliation
Democratic legitimacy depends above all on a system of political and personal
accountability that is institutionalized in the principles of the rule of law. (Borneman,
1997: 3)
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WILSON National reconciliation processes
As we saw earlier, much of the discussion of national reconciliation processes in other
disciplines has revolved around the apparent opposition between reconciliation and
retributive justice. In the two ethnographies discussed in the following paragraphs, the
anthropologists concerned have both arrived at the conclusion that legality and the rule
of law are of paramount importance. John Borneman’s (1997) book Settling Accounts
was one of the first attempts by an anthropologist to critically examine the process of
dealing with state violence, and his study sees justice and accountability as the most
desirable path to ‘national reconciliation’ – understood not as forgiveness but as the
absence of violence.
Borneman focused upon East Germany, but also included the transitions from
communism in other eastern European countries such as Hungary, the Czech Republic,
Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Russia. He asserted that those countries (such as
East Germany) which had pursued retributive justice and attempted to (re)establish
principles of accountability and the rule of law were less prone to criminality and cycles
of violence and revenge than those countries (such as Romania and the former
Yugoslavia) which did not pursue accountability. Borneman (1997: 110) therefore
contradicts those who argue that democratic consolidation and national reconciliation
require amnesty laws and political compromise: ‘to avoid a cycle of retributive violence,
it may be wise to go through a longer phase of painful historical reckoning with the past
– that is, of retributive justice in the present’. Borneman’s position could be summarized as ‘reconciliation through justice’.
In its impassioned defense of the idea of the rule of law, Borneman’s book endorses
central aspects of liberalism in a way that is perhaps surprising for an anthropologist.
Legal anthropology has often sailed with the tide of the Critical Legal Studies movement
in its criticism of liberal legal institutions on the grounds that they create and maintain
relations of class or racial domination.14 Although liberal in its political implications,
Borneman’s understanding of law is underpinned by a decidedly unliberal, Durkheimian
and structuralist theory of legal institutions, which emphasizes how law, like religion
before it, creates group unity. Borneman draws from Maurice Bloch’s structuralist
formulation of ‘rebounding violence’ to understand the ubiquity of ideas of vengeance.
In asking how to end the closed cycle of rebounding violence, Borneman observes on
the basis of recent eastern European history that the desire for violence and revenge dissipates where courts pursue a small number of those most responsible, and there is some
time of reckoning for past state criminality. This does not suppress vengeance, but
channels it in politically useful ways.
Drawing upon René Girard’s (1977) book Violence and the Sacred, Borneman treats
trials as ritual performances of symbolic sacrifice, and their function is to ritually purify
the center, to engage in a process of internal cleansing. Sacrifice among the Aztecs or the
African Ndembu is a rite of purification where scapegoating is a way of exteriorizing
guilt. This principle is used by post-conflict regimes in order to purify violence.
Rebounding violence is attached to certain perpetrators, and the sacrificial act of holding
them accountable is a type of violence that does not provoke reprisal. Retributive justice
re-establishes the state as a moral agent, and restores the legitimacy of state institutions
tarnished by decades of complicity in authoritarianism. Conversely, the failure to prosecute past injustices undermines the legitimacy of the state. Where there is no rule of
law, there is more criminalization as society remains locked in a cycle of violence and
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counter-violence. Thus there is a causal link between retributive justice and a lack of
rebounding violence.
Borneman carries out an ethnography of the East German Commissions of Vindication/Rehabilitation set up in workplaces from 1989 to 1994 and he sees an important
role not only for state law but also national reconciliation commissions. Like trials,
reconciliation commissions are a secular moral response that addresses problems of social
cohesion. These Commissions are closer to popular ideas of justice since they work at
the boundaries of state law and popular legal consciousness. East German Vindication
Commissions used a broad conception of justice, combining corrective justice (compensating victims for harms) and retributive justice (compensating the victim for moral
injuries).
Wrongdoers were held accountable for a wrong, but the focus was more on the
damage inflicted upon the victim, rather than, as in state law, on the wrongness of the
act itself. The Commission of Vindication for Radio and Television led open inquiries
to investigate moral injuries that did not entail easily quantifiable injuries. For instance,
they heard cases where individuals argued that because they were deemed ‘political
opponents’ of the Stalinist regime, they had a poor career development or were subjected
to orchestrated plans by the secret Stasi police to discredit them through unsubstantiated rumor. In 1993, 100 petitions were heard before the commission; 75 per cent were
upheld in favor of the petitioners, and of those rejected, the majority were due to a failure
to establish evidence and the ‘facts of the case’ using fairly rigid positivist criteria. The
remedies pursued by the Commission generally entailed issuing formal public apologies,
and in some cases recommending improved pensions.
In a more recent article, Borneman shifts his position closer to supporting national
reconciliation efforts. He redefines reconciliation here as a ‘departure from violence’
(2002: 282), and like many writers such as Minow he asserts the centrality of practices
of ‘listening’ to the silenced voices of victims, and witnessing their narrative reenactment. Anthropology is, according to Borneman, uniquely positioned to instruct
those attempting reconciliation in these practices. Listening and witnessing helps to reestablish networks of trust between citizens and between citizens and the state.
Borneman is careful to avoid the ‘harmony ideology’ of collectivist visions of memory
and reconciliation, and he continues to insist upon the centrality of legal and institutional accountability in any departure from cycles of ‘rebounding violence’.
Borneman’s approval for national reconciliation efforts is positioned in a unique
context of prosecutions, liberal show trials, and lustration in eastern Europe. Yet as we
have seen earlier, the experience of many victims in countries in Latin America and Africa
is of reconciliation in the context of amnesty and impunity. Is listening and witnessing
enough to make possible a departure from ‘rebounding violence’ for the majority of these
victims? Wilson’s book on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
shares Borneman’s concern with accountability, retributive justice and the rule of law,
but is more critical about the degree to which truth commissions complement the courts
and create accountability. This is partly due to the differing position of the rule of law
in South Africa and East Germany. In the latter, high-level politicians including former
head of state Eric Honecker were successfully prosecuted. In South Africa, high-level
prosecutions were not attempted (e.g. of former apartheid state presidents P.W. Botha
or F.W. de Klerk), or they collapsed as in the trial of former Defense Minister Magnus
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Malan. The national reconciliation project in South Africa was delinked from the project
of challenging impunity.
The ‘reconciliation’ advocated by South African Truth Commissioners was an
amalgam of transnational human rights values and a Christian ethic of forgiveness and
redemption. It was propagated through dozens of Human Rights Violations (HRV)
hearings where selected ‘victims’ spoke of the violations, which they or relatives had
suffered. The truth commission’s hearings were public rituals, which sought to inculcate
a disposition towards forgiveness and away from acts of revenge. In the collective effervescence of hearings, individuals were made aware of themselves as particular types of
subjects, such as ‘victims’, who were placed within particular types of national narratives, of suffering, oppression, liberation and finally redemption. The creation of new
identities (like victim or perpetrator) engendered new types of attitudes and dispositions
(forgiveness or repentance) that bound individuals to the TRC’s nation-building project
and constructed a version of the nation out of the ashes of failed Afrikaner nationalism.
This all begs further questions – what was the content of this nation-building project
and what impact did it have on individuals and communities affected by political
violence? How did local actors respond to a human rights commission’s invocations to
forgive? My fieldwork over 12 months in 1996 to 1998 took place in the ‘Vaal’ African
townships to the south of Johannesburg which had been severely affected by political
violence over a 34-year period. In these communities, the language of rights and reconciliation had uneven and varied social effects and there were three main types of
responses to the truth commission’s approach to reconciliation: the first response largely
accepted the urgings to forgive and reconcile, the second largely ignored it in favor of
other more private aims and the third was openly hostile to it and instead in favor of
retribution and punishment. I will deal with each of these in turn:
Elective affinities
The TRC’s version of reconciliation certainly exerted a sway over some individuals. In
South Africa there was a close affinity between a religious ethic of reconciliation and a
political ethic of human rights. In the townships, the TRC’s message was reinforced by
the teachings of mainstream anti-apartheid Christian churches. The ritualized nature of
the hearings was one factor, but equally important were the actions of their religious
leaders in pursuing reconciliation, understood as Christian forgiveness, at a local level.
The message of the TRC on how to deal with the past was clearly conveyed to the
intended audience, which was largely the African middle class. This group of black
professionals, many of whom are employed in local and national government, was overwhelmingly sympathetic to the ruling African National Congress.
Procedural pragmatism
Many victims pursued their own agendas through the TRC mechanisms without there
being any necessary loyalty to the dominant ideology of human rights, reconciliation
and nation building. According to official TRC ideology, victims told their stories, the
truth came out, and people shook hands and forgave one another after years of resentment. It was not at all clear that the TRC’s values were conveyed in the manner expected.
Some of those who appeared before the commission had no understanding of the
commission’s view of reconciliation. Others were motivated by other factors such as a
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desire to clear their name or for retribution. These observations have been echoed by
legal anthropologists such as Sally Merry (1990) and Conley and O’Barr (1990) in other
contexts: people become involved in legal processes for a variety of reasons which may
be very distinct from what the law itself is thinking. In the interaction with human rights
institutions, participants make complex readjustments in their thinking about morality
and law, but the end product is not often one where the participants see the law as the
law sees itself. The mere involvement of victims in human rights mechanisms does not
necessarily signify a deep loyalty to a new language of rights. Instead, the ideology of
human rights was primarily a strategy to hold together a fragile political coalition
between incoming and outgoing elites in the first unstable years after white rule. This,
I think, gives us one reason why human rights have been so prevalent in the democratizations of the post Cold War order.
Resistance and opposition
There was a deep chasm between the national version of human rights and ideas of
justice pursued by the local courts and armed gangs that still control many African townships. Members of gangs and local community courts resist key elements of the
dominant post-apartheid value system to such an extent that it might justify the
Comaroffs’ reference to a dual consciousness in South Africa (Comaroff, 1985). Justice
is understood not as reconciliation but as vengeance and punishment. If reconciliation
is a key aspect of the state’s centralizing project, then vengeance guides local institutions
of social regulation. In a number of incidents I document in my book (2001), local
vengeance overwhelmed national attempts at reconciliation. The greater the factionalism within a locale, the more it approximates a Hobbesian moral universe, the greater
the resistance will be to post-conflict human rights talk. In one case, a police informer
was murdered as a consequence of the competition between two armed gangs who
cloaked their criminal protection rackets in political rhetoric. His murder was also about
the failure of the post-apartheid state to address criminality and to build an effective and
legitimate criminal justice system. The widespread ethic of vengeance in South Africa is
a clear indictment of the legal system and the failed project of nation building using
human rights discourse.
What do the ethnographic studies of Borneman and Wilson tell us more generally
about justice and national reconciliation efforts in democratizing countries? They tell us
firstly that the societal consequences of national reconciliation projects, understood as
attempts to build hegemony and manufacture legitimacy by state elites, are ambiguous
and paradoxical. As long as the state is unable to address legal pluralism and criminality,
then vengeance will remain a central component in how many citizens understand and
enact justice. Researchers must give more attention to what social actors and institutions
actually do with rights talk and reconciliation institutions and what legitimacy they may
or may not have. Participants in new human rights institutions often have their own
agendas, which may or may not coincide with the nation-building project of a new elite.
Following on from that, social actors, from individual victims to collectivist
community courts, adopt a variety of strategies of social action which contest the direction of social change in the area of justice, or what Alain Touraine (1995) calls ‘historicity’. Post-authoritarian citizenship is fluid and in motion, and can be understood as a
shifting and diverse set of claims which transform the ongoing context of social action.
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As a result, we have to be more cautious about what human rights talk and reconciliation can achieve in the new global order, and refrain from some of the more vaunted
claims of political elites who promise to ‘reconcile or heal the nation’.15 These are empirically-derived theoretical insights which can contribute to the project of documenting
and understanding the transformations of post-conflict societies, and more widely to
understanding the meaning of national reconciliation in a neo-liberal and post-Cold War
international order.
IV NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH
Imagining departures from violence has not been a major project among anthropologists or other social scientists. But if we are to contribute to reconciliation in the
many communities in which we work, then such imaginings are an essential part of
our work. They are perhaps the major contribution we might make to international
peacekeeping efforts. (Borneman, 2002: 300)
Thus far, anthropologists have primarily focused upon reconciliation projects confined
to individual nation-states, yet more recently there has been a globalization of human
rights and reconciliation discourse though non-governmental organizations such as the
New York based International Center for Transitional Justice, and intergovernmental
institutions such as the United Nations. In the 1990s, as internal conflicts proliferated
so did international peacekeeping operations and, in their wake, internationally organized reconstruction operations. Since 1990, there have been over twice as many humanitarian interventions by the United Nations than in the preceding 45 years. The stated
aims of these interventions are ensuring international human rights standards, facilitating national reconciliation, mediating in conflict and engaging in post-conflict reconstruction. ‘National reconciliation’ (usually defined in the ‘thick’ sense of forgiveness)
became a key component of international post-conflict reconstruction efforts, and a
global reconciliation industry sprang up to formulate and implement policies.16
Anthropologists need to give greater attention to the discursive formations of international multilateral institutions, the unintended consequences of their interventions
and the reception, transformation and rejection of these ideas by ‘locals’ and local human
rights activists who translate between the abstract universalism of the intergovernmental organizations and the local understandings of peace and justice. Anthropological
investigations should not be confined to local responses but also include the people who
inhabit what Ulf Hannerz (1992) calls the ‘third culture’ of UN workers and nongovernmental organization personnel.
National truth and reconciliation commissions (e.g. in Sierra Leone, Bosnia, East
Timor) are being established, funded and run by UN peacekeeping missions, which see
them as the best way of achieving post-conflict nation building and addressing the legitimization crisis of post-conflict states. Unlike truth commissions in the early 1990s, they
are increasingly taking place in the context of prosecutions for human rights offenders,
as in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which provides for a linking up of truth finding
and retributive justice. This research should aim to expand our understanding of the
actual impact of large scale humanitarian relief operations on state sovereignty, state
building and on the actual lives of Africans, Asians, Europeans and Latin Americans.
This would inform wider debates about the globalization of human rights and global
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forms of deterritorialized regulation, and perhaps engender a more realistic assessment
of influential assertions that there is a single, unified world system (e.g. Hardt and Negri,
2000). That ‘system’, to my mind, is pluralistic and fissured with internal conflict and
contradiction and is not adequately explained by sweeping neo-Marxist theories of
global regulation and domination.
Anthropological contributions to globalization theory and international studies are
vital, but our main emphasis should remain on the unintended social consequences often
ignored by policy makers and globalization theorists alike. In the kinds of places that
anthropologists go, and especially in Africa in the last 10 years, ordinary people’s lives
are greatly affected by issues such as failed states, political violence and civil war, and the
interventions of international organizations in post-conflict reconstruction and nation
building. This global context requires that we pay close attention to these matters and
that we attempt to document them in a way that is sensitive to the everyday problems
that people face. We must also try to explain the consequences of humanitarian actions
so that intergovernmental institutions are more informed about the consequences of the
policies on post-conflict reconciliation they adopt.
Notes
1 On amnesties see Roht-Arriaza, 1995; Roht-Arriaza and Gibson, 1998; and Popkin,
1999.
2 Such as President Raul Alfonsín’s prosecutions of Argentinean military junta leaders
in 1983, who were later pardoned by President Menem.
3 ‘Peaceful’ according to Tutu (1999), despite the fact that 14,000 people died in
political violence between 1990 and 1994, more than in the previous 10 years.
4 The Guatemalan CEH Report being one of the obvious exceptions to this criticism.
5 See Cohen (2001).
6 For more examples of Latin Americans and South Africans using body metaphors
for the nation, see Boraine and Levy (1994).
7 See Arendt (1963).
8 The view that African jurisprudence is restorative and not violent and/or vengeful
is also found in the post-apartheid legal system, and perhaps most famously in the
decision of Constitutional Court judges to abolish the death penalty in 1995.
9 With apologies for the usual long list of exceptions such as Merry (1990), Conley
and O’Barr (1990) and others.
10 Perhaps relevant here is the debate between Richard Rorty (1998) and Charles Taylor
(1990), which pivots on the correspondence theory of truth.
11 A Holy Grail for social scientists, I realize, but Jürgen Habermas’ (1971) concept of
the ‘ideal speech situation’ comes closer than most. In opposition to positivist
science, Habermas seeks to maintain the place of subjectivity and interpretation in
the creation of knowledge. Habermas’ subject is social as well as potentially rational.
Subjects are conditioned by historical experience and therefore rationality depends
as much upon subjectivity and intersubjectivity as it does upon logic and reason.
12 Hermeneutic interpretation, of course, does this also, but at least it is more reflexive about the relationship between the historian or ethnographer and his/her subject
matter.
13 Tutu, in his introduction to the Report, uses apartheid and racism indistinguishably
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as a single evil, without attempting to distinguish how racism and apartheid are
historically specific and not quite the same thing. One could say that there has been
racism since 1652, but a grand project of apartheid (in the Verwoerdian sense of
denationalization of black South African citizens) only after 1948.
14 See, for instance, the work of Peter Fitzpatrick (1992).
15 As I write, a number of victims in the Khulumani Support Group in South Africa
are bringing a law suit against Desmond Tutu on the grounds that he promised them
reparations which they never received.
16 With non-governmental organizations such as the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York and Just Associates in Washington DC.
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WILSON National reconciliation processes
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RICHARD ASHBY WILSON is Gladstein Professor of Human Rights at the University of Connecticut and
author of numerous works on human rights, and political violence in Guatemala and South Africa, including
The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. His edited and co-edited books include Human Rights,
Culture and Context, Culture and Rights and Human Rights in Global Perspective. Address: Department of
Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA. [email: [email protected]]
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