How can past sins be absolved?
Michael Ignatieff; Z.C.A. Luyendijk; James Brittain.
Courtesy: World Press Review, Feb 1997 v44 n2 p6(4)
(truth commissions can find out the truth but they cannot change the military apparatus or society; includes related articles; reprinted from Index on Censorship, Sept/Oct 1996; NRC Handelsblad, Sept. 7, 1996)(Healing Nations)(Cover Story)
Abstract: Many nations are wrestling with the problem of reconciliation in the face of horribles atrocities committed amongst their own people. Finding out the truth will not necessarily bring about healing. Truth is relative and depends on the vantage point of the seeker. Even outsiders cannot be impartial.
* From post-Nazi Germany to today's Rwanda, Bosnia, and South Africa, countries trying to deal with past horrors are sadly familiar. But it is open to question whether nations, like individuals, actually suffer trauma, or what mixture of truth and justice will bring healing and reconciliation. Our cover package:
What does it mean for a nation to come to terms with its past? Do nations, like individuals, have psyches? Can a nation's past make a people ill, as we know repressed memories sometimes make individuals ill? Conversely, can a nation or parts of it be reconciled to the past, as an individual can, by replacing myth with facts and lies with truth? Can we speak of nations "working through" a civil war or an atrocity as we speak of individuals working through a traumatic memory or event?
The International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague is collecting evidence about atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. It is doing so not simply because such crimes against humanity must be punished--otherwise, international law means nothing--but also because establishing the truth about such crimes through the judicial process is held to be crucial to the eventual reconciliation of the people of the Balkans. In the African city of Arusha, a similar tribunal is collecting evidence about the genocide in Rwanda, believing likewise that truth, justice, and reconciliation are indissolubly linked in the rebuilding of shattered societies. In both these instances, the rhetoric is noble but the rationale unclear. Justice in itself is not a problematic objective, but whether the attainment of justice always contributes to reconciliation is anything but evident. Truth, too, is a good thing, but as the African proverb reminds us, "truth is not always good to say."
In South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is collecting testimony from the victims and perpetrators of apartheid. In Tutu's own words, the aim is "the promotion of national unity and reconciliation ... the healing of a traumatized, divided, wounded, polarized people." Laudable aims, but are they coherent? Look at the assumptions he makes: that a nation has one psyche, not many; that the truth is certain, not contestable; and that when it is known by all, it has the capacity to heal and reconcile. These are articles of faith about human nature: The truth is one, and if we know it, it will make us free.
Such articles of faith inspired the truth commissions in Chile,Argentina, and Brazil that sought to find out what had happened to the thousands of innocent people killed or tortured by the military juntas during the 1960s and 1970s. In all cases, the results were ambiguous The truth commissions did succeed in establishing the facts about the disappearance, torture, and death of thousands of persons, and this allowed relatives and friends the consolation of knowing. At this individual level, the commissions did a power of good. But they were also told to generate a moral narrative--explaining the genesis of evil regimes and apportioning moral responsibility for their deeds. The military, security, and police establishments were prepared to let the truth come out about individual cases of disappearance. But they fought tenaciously against prosecutions of their own people and against shouldering responsibility for their crimes. The military and police survived the inquisition with their legitimacy undermined but their power intact. The societies in question used the truth commissions to indulge in the illusion that they had put the past behind them. The truth commissions allowed exactly the false reconciliation with the past that they had been created to forestall.
The dangers of this false reconciliation are real enough, but it is possible that disillusion with the truth commissions of Latin America goes too far. It was never in their mandate to transform the military and security apparatus, any more than it is in Archbishop Tutu's power to do the same. Truth is truth; it is not social or institutional reform.
Nor is it realistic to expect that when truth is proclaimed by an official commission it is likely to be accepted by the perpetrators. People, especially people in uniform, do not easily or readily surrender the premises upon which their lives are based. All that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse. In Argentina, for example, it is now impossible to claim that the military did not throw half-dead victims into the sea from helicopters. Truth commissions can and do change public discourse and memory. They cannot be judged a failure because they fail to change behavior and institutions. That is not their function.
Truth commissions have the greatest chance of success in societies that have already created a powerful political consensus behind reconciliation, such as South Africa. In places like Yugoslavia, where the parties have murdered and tortured each other for years, the prospects for truth, reconciliation, and justice are much bleaker.
The idea that reconciliation depends on shared truth presumes that shared truth about the past is possible. But truth is related to identity. What you believe to be true depends, in some measure, on who you believe yourself to be. And that is mostly defined in terms of who you are not. To be a Serb is first and foremost not to be a Croat or a Muslim. If a Serb is someone who believes Croats have a historical tendency toward fascism, and a Croat is someone who believes Serbs have a penchant for genocide, then to discard these myths is to give up a defining element of their own identities. It is impossible to imagine the three sides ever agreeing on how to apportion responsibility and moral blame. The truth that matters to people is not factual or narrative truth, but moral or interpretive truth. And this will always be an object of dispute in the Balkans.
It is also an illusion to suppose that "impartial" or "objective" outsiders would ever succeed in getting their account of the catastrophe accepted by the parties to the conflict. The very fact of being an outsider discredits rather than reinforces legitimacy. The truth, if it is to be believed, must be proclaimed by those who have suffered its consequences.
Atrocity myths about the other side are an important part of the identities in question. Hill-country Serbs in the Foca region of Bosnia told British journalists in the summer of 1992 that their ethnic militias were obliged to cleanse the area of Muslims because it was a well-known fact that Muslims crucified Serbian children and floated their bodies down the river past Serbian settlements. This myth used to be spread about the Jews in medieval times. The myth was not true about the Jews and it is not true about Muslims, but that is not the point. The point is that myth is strangely impervious to facts. What is mythic is that atrocities are held to reveal the essential identity of the peoples in whose name they were committed. All the members of the group are held to have a genocidal propensity, even though atrocity can only be committed by individuals. The fiction at work here is akin to the nationalist delusion that the identities of individuals should be subsumed into their national identities. But nations are not like individuals:They do not have a single identity, conscience, or responsibility.
The most important function of war-crimes trials is to "individualize" guilt, to relocate it from the collectivity to the individuals responsible. Yet trials inevitably fail to apportion all the guilt to all those responsible. Small fry pay the price for the crimes of the big fish, and this reinforces the sense that justice is arbitrary. Nor do such trials break the link between individual and nation. The 1946 war-crimes trials in Nuremberg failed to do this; the rest of the world still holds the Germans responsible collectively, and the Germans themselves still accept this responsibility. The most that can be said is that war-crimes trials do something to unburden a people of the fiction of collective guilt by helping them to transform guilt into shame. This appears to have happened in Germany, but it is not clear that Nuremberg itself accomplished this transformation of attitudes. As Ian Buruma has pointed out in The Wages of Guilt, many Germans dismissed the Nuremberg trials as nothing more than "victor's justice." It was not Nuremberg but the strictly German war-crimes trials of the 1960s that forced Germans to confront their part in the Holocaust. Verdicts reached in a German courtroom benefited from a legitimacy that the Nuremberg process never enjoyed.
It is open to question whether justice or truth actually heals. All societies, including our own, manage to function with only the most precarious purchase on the truth of their own past. Individuals may be made ill by repression of their own past, but it is less clear that what holds true for individuals must also hold true for societies. A society like Serbia, which allows well-established war criminals to hold public office and prevents them from being extradited to face international tribunals, may be a distasteful place to visit, but it is not necessarily a sick society. For such societies will not see themselves as sick but as healthy, refusing the outside world's iniquitous attempt to turn their heroes into criminals. War crimes challenge collective moral identities, and when these identities are threatened, denial is actually a defense of everything one holds dear.
There are many forms of denial, ranging from outright refusal to accept facts to complex strategies of relativization. Here one accepts the facts but argues that the enemy was equally culpable, or that the accusing party is also to blame, or that such "excesses" are regrettable necessities in war.
What seems apparent in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, and in South Africa is that the past continues to torment because it is not really past. Reporters in the Balkan wars often reported that when they were told atrocity stories, they were occasionally uncertain whether these stories had occurred yesterday or in 1941 or 1841 or 1441. For the tellers of the tale, yesterday and today were the same. Crimes can never be safely fixed in the historical past; they remain locked in the present, crying out for vengeance.
This makes the process of coming to terms with the past, and of being reconciled to its painfulness, much more complicated than simply sifting fact from fiction, lies from truth. We know from victims of trauma that the mysterious inner work of the psyche is arduous. At first, the memory of trauma--a car crash, the death of a child or a parent--returns so frequently that it literally drives the present out. The victim lives in the past and suffers its pain over and over again. With time and reflection and talk, trauma takes its place in the past, and the pain becomes only a memory.
It is perilous to extrapolate from traumatized individuals to whole societies. It is simply an extravagant metaphor to think of societies coming awake from nightmare. The only coming awake that makes sense is one by one, individual by individual, in the recesses of their own identities. Nonetheless, individuals can be helped to heal and to reconcile by public rituals of atonement. When Chilean President Patricio Aylwin appeared on television to apologize to the victims of Augusto Pinochet's repression, he created the public climate in which a thousand acts of private repentance and apology became possible. He also symbolically cleansed the Chilean state of its association with these crimes.
The experience of the war in Yugoslavia makes it difficult to conceive of reconciliation in terms of "forgiving and forgetting," "turning the page," "putting the past behind us," and so on. The ferocity and scale of the war show up the hollowness of these cliches for what they are. But reconciliation might eventually be founded on something starker: the democracy of the dead, the equality of all victims, the drastic nullity of all struggles that end in killing, and the demonstrable futility of avenging the past in the present.
--Michael Ignatieff "Index on Censorship" (human-rights bimonthly), London, September/October, 1996.