THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION: “MULTI-FACETED TRUTHS”

discussion paper #3

 

1. I have spoken in the previous discussion of the importance given to the recognition of personal and organizational wrongs in the many submissions made on the draft National Unity and Reconciliation bill. However in general organizational wrongs have not been a priority of the TRC because both victims testimonies and amnesties are individual. At the same time, be it through special hearings about the media or the judiciary for instance, or the institutional submissions made by the ANC or the NP, and indirectly by the accumulation of individual evidence, it is obvious that entire institutions were rotten to the core (and opinion is divided on whether they still are). The interesting point is that several of these institutions and their members have had significant effects on the TRC formation and process, and on the determination of its goals, and principally what it means to be reconciled. We all have our ideas on what reconciliation entails, but if an official institution is to take charge of it, it needs to offer a number of ideals it can integrate in its supporting discourse. Clearly, the way wrongs get defined in turn heavily influence the nature of reconciliation, the potential need for reparations, etc.

In this section I want to explore further some party political implications of the construction of national reconciliation. I have touched before on the personal aspects of reconciliation and a first summary table might look like this:

Table 1: Valued Models of Reconciliation

reconciliation	involvement	intended or expected results and consequences
between victims and perpetrators	direct	for victims: recognition of wrongdoing. for perpetrators: immunity, forgiveness, absolution, etc. according to beliefs and necessity.
"with reality"	indirect	for beneficiaries of apartheid: privileges no longer based on skin color; now wealth/"merit"-based. for ex-defenders of apartheid: racism is no longer an acceptable political ideal. for ex-opponents of apartheid: will need to participate in politics alongside neighbors. Ethical footing to be ignored. for the disenfranchised: socioeconomic change not in cards in short/medium term. Change for now: self worth no longer dependant on skin color (de jure).

Basically, as things stood before the TRC, with or without a truth commission most of the reconciliation "with reality" could have been said to have already happened for those who were indirectly involved. Social anthropologist P. Reynolds notes that there have not been the massive demonstrations or popular violent retribution that one might reasonably expect and in that sense reconciliation has occurred, even if in some aspects it may sound more like resignation.

But national reconciliation is part of a different discourse. Political scientist A. Du Toit for instance speaks of needed reconciliation rather in terms of political reconciliation, meaning between political formations. Consequently, one immediate observation is that the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) negotiations were already about political reconciliation, and so must have been the later Government of National Unity (GNU): political parties came to the conclusion, rightly or not, that they could work together or that working together was better for the country, etc. Recently President Mandela, always true to himself, speaking at Steve Biko s remembrance ceremonies, again appealed to all parties to unite and work together to build the nation. Now this is wrong in many ways, mainly because a strong opposition to government is a key ingredient in a democracy, but it is also right in the sense that at some levels cooperation is absolutely indispensable (for instance all groups have to agree on a democratic dispensation to begin with). However the point here is that this sounds like any political discourse in any country where massive human rights abuses have not taken place (some refer to this as one aspect of the "Mandela project" of nation-building), where there was no organized state criminality, no victims, etc. This voids the need for any commission.

But Du Toit does make a good point in the following sense: if reconciliation implies a recognition of wrongdoing, then it is nowhere near and the TRC is needed, if it can be designed in the proper way. Reconciliation in that sense is more difficult than simply "working together", and actually contrary to it in many ways: besides the expected political costs of accepting blame, the "working together" rhetoric gives legitimacy and implies approval to the groups one wants to work with. I have spoken of the "we were all wrong" point of view illustrated for instance by the Freedom Front leader, presented as being "objective" in the sense of "equal distribution of blame. It was in fact a defense for those who are generally though of as having been indisputably more wrong and in that way nothing if not partial. But now in addition to the "we were all wrong" rhetoric, we also have the "we are all right," "we can all work together" one. It helps that parties also hide, as we have seen in the last memo, under the morally acceptable gloss of "conservatism" in the conventional right-left political spectrum (and one often sees in the press expressions like "conservative in matters of race", i.e. "we are/were not racists, just conservatives"). Let us thus add to our first table:

Table 2: Party Political valued or recommended Reconciliations

reconciliation	involvement	intended or expected results and consequences
between political parties	policy and ethics based (rhetorical)	policy level: "healthy" political process; "democracy", cooperation (not excluding normal democratic opposition). Abandonment of "struggle", violence, etc. ethics level: recognition of some past acts and policies as morally wrong and not "mistaken;" also, not "we were all wrong", but specific admission.

To conclude this section: reconciliation seems to hinge on groups or individuals admitting having done wrong- there must be something to reconcile over. At the same time, dominant groups get to define what kind of wrong they deem having been responsible for, and therefore what kind of reconciliation is "proper" or which they are entitled to ask for - and get through their influence on the TRC process. Table 2 shows concrete reconciliation between political parties essentially as a legal contract to abide by the laws of democracy and be administratively efficient. Actual government operations are in no way dependent on fulfillment of the wish list I sum up in the "ethics" category because the discourse of political reconciliation has managed to successfully separate the two. It also follows that concrete reparations or reforms will remain optional.

2. Actual admissions of wrong will in fact not occur because they have been made unnecessary. This is how I get to my title for this paper, "multifaceted truths". In fact, the discourse of "national reconciliation" has created a space were such admissions have no usefulness, because it works only if each of the reconciled groups have their "own" historical truth where they were well-intentioned, which transforms right and wrong into subjective personal experiences.

The expression itself is taken from the Inkatha Freedom Party written submission on the draft bill in February 95. The IFP is questioning the legitimacy of the proposed TRC as a government-aligned and controlled body created to write a new official history of South Africa, and proposes that decentralized "facilities" be established and financed by the government and that "resources would be used to promote a debate on the years of apartheid and the struggle for liberation by means of expositions, conferences and publications" (written memorandum, p. 2).

One will notice the definitely post-modern flavor. Of course the entire project of the TRC could be seen as an attempt to revise or deconstruct the official apartheid-era history and replace it with a new one. Many have criticized the fact that this history is (and/or cannot help but be) a very specific one and that the new government is, like the old one, also producing and using history in a policy-legitimation framework.

The National Unity and Reconciliation Act states, in that oft-repeated passage (par. 3 (1) (a)), that the Commission is to establish "as complete a picture as possible of the causes, nature and extent of the gross violations of human rights which were committed during the period from 1 March 1960 to the cut-off date" (... finally set on 10 May 1994). Clearly the focal point is human rights violations, and "causes" refer in a strict sense to chains of events that led to them. In general, few will actually question the veracity of testimonies of victims and perpetrators as to factual events; "factual" reality is not really on the discussion table. However, the rest of the paragraph is more ambiguous: "(...) including the antecedents, circumstances, factors and context of such violations, as well as the perspectives of the victims and the motives and perspectives of the persons responsible for the commission of violations (...)" This is where the National Party and IFP protests start. In short, "circumstances" or "context" are just too large and seem designed to tarnish the image of the NP by exposing ("unfairly") every unsavory detail about the "old" NP (which is a "totally different entity," I am repeatedly told, from the new one, since the latter rejects apartheid; but at the same time the image of the old NP is still defended at all costs). The problem is that this constitutes a strange paradox for the NNP (as well, as we have seen, for the security forces or the Freedom Front, etc.) because when human rights violations are discovered, they are the first to insist that there is a very good - but most importantly, non-debatable - explanation and justification for them, hence the multiple "facets" of truth.

Of course one may see a reference to the democratic right to express oneself, or the more philosophical injunction to respect non-dominant discourses or marginalized experiences or what not. I will not attempt an exposé of the status of objectivity in post-modern social sciences and history; I do not think that it matters particularly here. Ultimately, what we are confronted with is primarily an effort (and I do not single out the NP or the IFP) to make sure that one s justifications for acts that might not "look" right prima facie are permanently affixed to the acts in question to make them right in their intentions, even to the point where the actual concrete actions take a removed position compared to the rationales. In this sense, the criticism falls flat because this is precisely what the TRC process tries to avoid: pre-packaged (pre-"spun") information coming from the top. While its success in doing so is highly disputable, the TRC works by compiling individual narratives, not homogenized ones.

But C. Viljoen submits:

So actual acts might turn out to be boring, in the end; better to listen to commanders, who most likely will explain that they do not know details about each and every operation, but that the intentions were good (that is exactly the format of the NP s submission to the TRC). Viljoen s alternative, we have seen, is that the very top echelons of the security establishment should explain to the public what they have done and what their political motives were. In short, the Truth Commission s mission should be to make sure that everyone understands everyone else s good intentions. In this sense, dreaded "ideological conflicts" stem from moral condemnation, not moral competition (since everyone s contradictory reasons are equally good). It is ironic to see a whole culture of stringent religious and political dogmas suddenly accept, indeed embrace, moral relativism so effortlessly. This has the added advantage of sweeping concrete actions under the justificatory carpet of push-button symbols such as "the situation," "the idealistic goals," "this was war and the war is over," "geopolitical necessities" and "multifaceted truths."

I think that in most cases the concern is with the possibility that spectators might not "understand" the relation between the motivations and the (over)exposed concrete acts, because a number of the latter might seem disproportionate to ordinary civilians. There is also another dynamic of excuse here, namely the "we did not know" explanation that a significant portion of the white population will want to adopt. I submit that the argument that the intentions have to be disclosed is particularly appealing to large portions of the public not because they want or need to know, but because it supports the excuse that they did not. Recent hearings on the activities of the media during apartheid have shown the extent to which state propaganda permeated South African "news" and thus the difficulty of indeed knowing what was being done in their name (this is however not a leakproof excuse, just an arguably slightly better one, especially considering the coarseness of the propaganda in question). Unwittingly, Viljoen agrees: according to his logic, agents in the field acted in good faith on the assumption that they were fighting communism; therefore they should be automatically amnestied, while those in charge do have to come up with better explanations.

Members of the NP (in private interviews) appear torn between offering the explanations for NP policies (communism-fighting still a favorite, and is the official party position in the submissions made to the TRC by FW de Klerk) and closing the past to public scrutiny, and especially to the "biased" TRC. There seems to be a fine line between explaining the past and digging political dirt. The only difference I can see right now is that it becomes "digging dirt" when one loses control over the process. While as I have said there may be a point in the lack of clarity in the TRC s goals, this does not seem to be the main difficulty here. One "new" Nat reminded me right away that "truth," in the social sciences (he is a lawyer), does not exist and that reality is rather a mosaic of subjective "versions". This he said as a form of disclaimer before he started his explanations. To the cynical this may sound like "this is my story and I m sticking to it" and since there really is no way to truly probe the intentions of people, a fortiori their past intentions, the investigation appears closed (at any rate I did not know at the time how to challenge that claim without sounding too antagonistic - maybe that is part of the strategy: those who question this claim are expected to follow the rules of polite society, or run the risk of being labeled as biased or militant or ideologically inflexible).

In short, the discourse of national reconciliation has helped to conceptualize administrative action in isolation from normative concepts.