The truth will heal suffering, deter future violations and serve as reparation and compensation for victims’. What has been the impact of human rights discourse and institutions in South Africa? When atrocities have been committed with impunity, and are dealt with by forgiveness and restorative justice, do truth commissions become no more than a moral response?
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Nobel prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu was set up to deal with the human rights violations between the apartheid years 1960 to 1994. The commission aimed to reconcile the nation with its past and was acclaimed in international circles. In the first study of its type, carried out over a five-year period by anthropologist Richard Wilson, research was conducted on the impact of the TRC in urban African communities of Johannesburg, which have been ravaged by political violence.
Conclusions and observations drawn regarding the role and achievements of the TRC include:
- The TRC delivered some advantages including bringing the voices of ordinary Africans into the public space and breaking a regime of silence.
- The commission did not deliver on its main promises of providing a global truth of apartheid and ‘reconciling the nation’.
- It was primarily an elite instrument of nation-building and state legitimation and had little impact on popular justice as retribution and practices of revenge.
- Tutu’s religious-redemptive language of reconciliation and forgiveness largely convinced a religious constituency but punitive forms of justice continued to be practiced by armed gangs and local courts in African townships.
The main argument of the book is that for human rights to have more legitimacy in democratizing countries, they must connect up with retributive conceptions of justice.
