06 May 2008: ISS Today: A TRC Process for Zimbabwe?
6 May 2008: A TRC Process for Zimbabwe?
What can Zimbabweans learn from others about accounting for past injustices? The regime of president Robert Mugabe is not yet history, but only pessimists deny some foreseeable future transition. How might Zimbabweans then deal with past systematic and widespread human rights abuses? What forms of justice best secure sustainable peace? To lay sure foundations for a peaceful future, will there be a case for a deliberative formal national process of remembering, dwelling, telling, uncovering, admitting, accusing, apologising? In going forward, to what extent should Zimbabweans be looking back?
Experience in South Africa and in places like Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Cambodia, Timor-Leste and Sierra Leone shows three main ways to address past wrongs: criminal trials, truth-for-amnesty commissions, and a mix of these. These experiences also prompt many difficult interim-phase questions for Zimbabwe: how will negotiations on ‘transitional justice’ persuade the powerful and prosecutable that it is safe to cooperate? How do we balance the need for ‘restorative justice’ with solemn principles pointing to ‘retributive justice’? How does one balance international expectations and prescriptions with fragile local political realities? How far back does ‘the past’ really go? If there is ‘no peace without justice’, whose justice? Who remain neutral? What priority of scarce resources and national attention should a backward-looking process have?
Mere prosecutions, even if politically possible, do not necessarily achieve reconciliation or reduce tension. A truth commission in a new Zimbabwe might be cathartic, lifting the lid on human rights abuses, ending denial, allowing victims to tell their stories and reclaim their dignity - a national healing process. But done poorly a commission could squander resources. It could itself become a focus of renewed conflict, or antagonise those upon whose cooperation national unity depends.
Lessons from elsewhere suggest the following: twe should not recognise any eventual institution that is not independent or credible. The process of commission member selection, their stature and impartiality, are also vital. International tribunals may lack local awareness and legitimacy therefor a hybrid model might work, but an effective Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) should not take its form from an effort to appease international opinion. The institution must be adequately resourced. It must be able to initiate investigations itself as well as to receive complaints. It may have an educational mandate and recommend reforms. Victims must have a central role. It should start work soon after any transition (although a drawn-out design process can increase public awareness and uptake). It could wind up after 2-3 years, or be permanent with a gradually narrowing mandate. Public hearings and broadcast increase public participation and prevent continued denial. Public hearings shift the focus from a mere product (a report), to the process itself. Community-level processes need to also run in parallel - a national conversation about the past, in the language of the future. Finally, a report needs to be publicly digestible, attempting a degree of national ‘closure’.
Any Zimbabwean commission ought to be given an amnesty power. This is often the main incentive for revealing the truth. It should avoid blanket amnesties. Amnesty for international crimes such as torture could not be contemplated. Amnesty provisions could coexist with prosecutions, as in Timor: this facilitates community reintegration of low-level perpetrators (with some act of contrition), while not precluding trials for serious abuses. By contrast in the Solomon Islands the strategy was to strengthen courts and pursue prosecutions. A TRC was thought to send mixed messages about future responsibility for violence. Reconciliation mechanisms were left to church and community processes.
Difficulties specific to Zimbabwe will arise. Should any commission restrict itself to the period after 2000, or ought it deal with Mugabe’s 1980s Gukurahundi campaign in Matabeleland? The results of the official 1985 inquiry was never publicised, although the Catholic Commission’s 1997 Breaking the Silence, Building True Peace report suggests serious matters still raw and unresolved – but will it be safe to approach this existing ethnic fault-line? What is the legal status of numerous official immunities and clemencies given by Mugabe? What about calls for an International Criminal Court (ICC) role? Zimbabwe is not currently a Party to the ICC and the Security Council is unlikely to refer the matter. Provided we do not see mere deals between elites, the world might need to live with any local compromise that works for Zimbabweans.
Sometimes deep wounds must be cleaned and aired, not simply bound up, out of sight is not out of collective mind, one ‘buries the hatchet, not the past.’ Zimbabweans demonstrated national reconciliation in 1980 and might rediscover the balance between forward momentum and adequate pause on past injustice. For many victims no new truth will emerge, but formal acknowledgment of their truth aids the shared healing process. If the cost of remembering is pain, the price of not confronting and institutionalising memories can be distrust and shaky foundations - a future condemned to repeat, and always held ransom to, the unresolved past.
Max du Plessis is a senior Research Associate with the International Crime in Africa Programme at the ISS.
Jo Ford is with the Centre for International Governance & Justice, Australian National University.
This ISS Today piece is adapted from an opinion article appearing in Business Day, 17 April 2008.
