A witness before the Truth commission in Kilifi. Recommendations at such
hearings have been poorly implemented, or left to gather dust on the
shelves. PHOTO | FILE
By Mike Eldon, meldon@symphony.co.ke
In Summary
In May of 2008 I attended a conference that brought
together wise heads in the fraught and complex field of truth and
reconciliation commissions (TRCs).
These people, assembled from all over Africa, offered their
collective experiences in working with perpetrators and victims of
historical abuses.
They were experts in digging out the truth and in
assessing how to both dispense justice and reconcile individuals and
communities, and were in Nairobi to provide input to Kenya’s own
imminent Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission — when the draft
TJRC Bill was on its way to Parliament.
I wrote an article in this column about the
conference and the conclusions it reached, and just before attending the
recent launch of a new book titled Stretching the Truth: The Uncertain Promise of TRCs in Africa’s Transitional Justice
I went back to read what I had written to find that all the worries
that had been expressed at the 2008 conference were more than justified.
“We can only hope,” I wrote then, “that in the rush
to legislation those who will be shepherding it through will pause for
long enough to incorporate what the eminent men and women who spoke at
the conference offered.”
I had already come to appreciate how difficult it
would be to coax serious benefits from what Kenya was about to undergo,
accepting that “the idea is no doubt noble; its ambition could not be
grander; but its effective realisation will be monumentally
challenging”.
Educated by the TRC experts, I worried that we were
asking the commissioners and their staff “to write the definitive
history of Kenya going back to 1963, and also to sort out who had done
what nasty things to whom. We then want them to figure out how to handle
those who have abused (plus those who have authorised abuse) and those
who have been abused,” I wrote, “in a just and practical way. And,
assuming they are not completely exhausted by then, they must reconcile
us so that similar abuses do not recur.”
They would be asked to do this publicly and
accountably, and would be subject to incredible pressure of all kinds, I
confidently predicted. Utopians would demand the whole truth and total
justice.
Others would say we’ve already had enough
commissions and we know enough of the truth, so cut straight to the
justice. And there’d be those who would do anything to keep inconvenient
history buried and, where it couldn’t be so, for amnesty to be granted
to the ignoble.
Then there would be some (fewer!) who’d be as
concerned with reconciling for the future as with either hiding or
squaring the past.
George Wachira and Prisca Kamungi (authors of the
just published book) and others who have studied what has happened in
other African countries found that the world of TRCs is full of
pitfalls. First, experience showed that perpetrators tend to stay very
far away.
After all, what incentive is there to come forward,
when often the threat of prosecution follows? Then, in not a few
instances generous amnesties have been the order of the day, pragmatic
concessions to post-conflict progress.
So TRC hearings have been dominated by victims –
plus rogues posing as such. But even victims (particularly women) have
not rushed to share their tortured stories… except, often, when talk of
compensation was floated.
Experience also shows that even where expectations
of compensation have been raised, rarely have more than symbolic payouts
occurred. And even when they have, it has been after much struggle.
Other recommendations too have been poorly implemented, or not at all.
Kenya was the first country to spell out all three
pillars of a TJRC. South Africa’s was a mere TRC (performing better on
receiving cathartic victim testimonials than on promoting sustainable
reconciliation), while Ghana’s was largely – and pretty unsuccessfully –
limited to reconciliation.
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