OU historians examine track record of "truth" commissions
By Jim Phillips
April 7, 2008
Three Ohio University historians offered more questions than answers during OU’s annual Baker Peace Conference last week, when they sought to draw conclusions about truth and reconciliation commissions.
Such bodies, which have been set up in various countries, work to uncover past abuses by oppressive governments, in the hopes of resolving conflicts left over from the past. They have been used in Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the 2008 peace conference aimed to compare their work.
In the last panel discussion of the conference, three OU professors took different approaches to the issue, but all seemed to agree that the task of reaching closure after a violent and repressive national episode can be immensely difficult and morally “messy.”
PATRICK BARR-MELEJ, an associate professor of history, specializes in modern Latin America. He argued that while Augusto Pinochet’s military regime killed and tortured many Chileans before he was voted out in 1990, the questions of which actions from that era to punish, which to forgive, and who should decide, are still sensitive for that country.
While historians can review the issues from a safe “panoptic perch,” Barr-Melej suggested, they get more complicated up close. “Being in the trenches during these processes is terribly messy,” he said.
It’s clear, he said, that “we’re not done with reconciliation in Chile.” He cited a surprising oration by the dictator’s grandson at his funeral, in which he praised his grandfather as having acted in Chile’s national interests, including “among other things, saving his country from the Marxist menace.”
Though non-Chileans might imagine Pinochet’s right-wing supporters being whisked out of power, Barr-Melej pointed out that they continued to play a role in Chilean politics, and parties of the left and center still have to work with them. He also noted that Pinochet’s support extended beyond fascist militarists, with many Chileans giving him ambivalent backing for the stability he imposed.
After Pinochet lost a 1988 referendum on extending his rule, Barr-Melej said, it was clear “there were many Chileans who were going to miss the dictator,” though they may not have embraced his politics or brutal methods.
As a striking example of the ambivalence still surrounding Pinochet’s legacy, Barr-Melej showed a clip of current President Michelle Bachelet, being interviewed by Barbara Walters on TV.
When asked about her own experience as torture victim, Bachelet soft-pedaled, responding that torture “was something that happened to many Chileans.”
Barr-Melej said this answer is consistent with how Bachelet has treated her torture experience in other public comments. “She treads carefully when it comes to the past,” he noted.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR Nicholas M. Creary specializes in Africa, and has worked with displaced persons in Mozambique and Angola. He questioned whether any truth-and-reconciliation process can be meaningful if it focuses only on a recent episode such as the mass killings in Rwanda, and leaves out the long history of European colonialism that created the conditions for these tragedies.
When people talk about bringing governmental wrongdoers to justice in “courts of universal competence,” he said, there seems always to be an assumption that these courts will be in Western nations. Could a Third-World court, he wondered, indict a First World figure for crimes of colonialism, and be taken seriously?
Creary said that in a class he’s teaching, one writer studied is Aimé Césaire, the leftist poet/politician from Martinique, who argued that the crimes of the Nazis were new mainly in their choice of victim; Western colonial powers had been visiting such brutality on the Third World for decades, Césaire wrote.
“He says that fascism, specifically Hitler, is the logical end of Western civilization,” Creary observed. “Hitler’s big crime is, he takes things that were historically, traditionally done to non-Europeans, and he does them to Europeans.”
In observing the near-genocidal slaughter in some modern African nations, he asked, “is it not possible to say, the West taught them all a little too well the lessons of ‘civilization?’... If we’re going to talk about these crimes against humanity, how far back do we go?”
It’s also worthwhile to remember, Creary suggested, Frantz Fanon’s observation that since colonial structures are built on violence, breaking their hold requires violence as well. And if we punish those who use brutality in such efforts, he asked, what about those who inflicted it in maintaining their colonial regimes?
“Is justice possible for the vast majority of the victims of systematic, institutionalized violence?” he asked.
To end on a hopeful note, Creary offered the notion of seeking reconciliation not through Western notions of punishment versus forgiveness, but through indigenous African concepts of “a sort of shared or collective humanity.”
T. DAVID CURP’S areas of specialization include 20th Century Poland, Soviet diplomacy, 20th Century Catholicism and modern Ukranian national movements. He offered a skeptical assessment of the prospects for justice and closure after long years of violent repression.
Westerners tend to have “a certain impatience with the messiness of political transitions,” he noted, and want to see the bad old ways swept away quickly and neatly, even when this is highly unrealistic.
An example is the current discourse on Iraq, he said. That country’s experience over the last decade – including two U.S. invasions, crippling U.N.-imposed sanctions, and a full-blown civil war, “renders political decision-making a tad more problematic,” he suggested sardonically.
Americans should realize from their own history, Curp said, that while progress can be made, it’s a never-ending struggle. The current presidential election has brought race into the spotlight again as a political issue, he said, with Barack Obama talking about the “original sin” of slavery and the still-aching wounds it inflicted.
“The Civil Rights movement represented an accumulation of real moral capital,” he argued. “It did not make everything right.”
Though this is true even in a country with great political freedom, Curp said, in the case of formerly communist Poland, “we seem incredulous that the process of reconciliation is not working on a very rapid timetable.”
Though the challenge is daunting, Curp added, this does not “give us leave to walk away.” But Americans should understand that the past is not gone in former Soviet satellites – it lives on, for example, in the brutal mindset that forged the Red Army in the crucible of Hitler’s invasion of Russia.
The Red Army’s tradition represents “quite frankly, a demonic force,” he argued, citing propaganda that urged Russian soldiers invading the defeated Nazi Germany to “break the racial spirit of German women” by widespread rape.
In working out reconciliation in the post-Soviet world, he warned, “the compromises do not just encompass a few very bad apples who carried weapons, or who staffed the dungeons.” Soviet psychologists, for example, served as agents of oppression as well, he said, using commitment to mental wards in lieu of jail for dissidents.
Curp also hinted that if a new government wants to take “some basic prudent steps” to protect its fledgling democracy by stamping out reactionary organizations from the past, maybe this is not a bad thing.
He noted drily that he doesn’t consider it a great stumbling block to German democracy to have criminalized allegiance to the SS after WWII.
“It’s not just vindictiveness,” he suggested.
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