Truth Recovery and Victimhood in Peace Processes, Study notes of Sociology

Download Truth Recovery and Victimhood in Peace Processes and more Study notes Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! 1 Sociology of peace processes Lecture 11: Truth and victimhood I want today to talk about the problems of ‘truth’ and ‘victimhood’. The lecture will be in three parts. First, I want to give some general background to truth recovery and to link it with victimhood. Secondly, I will outline the case for and against truth recovery in peace processes. Finally, I will outline some ways in which truth and victimhood can be managed as policy issues to make them sociologically functional to peace processes. Why truth and victimhood in the same breath? There are good reasons for linking the two together. Some of the demand for truth commissions and truth recovery processes comes from combatants, in that the search for truth feeds into the issue of amnesty and speeds social reintegration of ex-combatants. The ANC was much in favour of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on these grounds, as were some former members of the South African Police. Security force personnel in Guatemala who have been ‘born again’ in their conversion to conservative evangelicalism, have been keen to reinforce this wiping away of their past also by participation in truth recovery. Governments can desire truth recovery too in order to try to give an official version of events. Most of the demand for truth however, comes from victims. In the transition to post violence there is a desperate need by victims to know the ‘truth’. It is for this reason that truth commissions proliferate, or take different forms as judicial enquiries, recovered memory projects or commemoration projects through the collation of people’s narratives. This wish for the ‘truth’ is widely recognised as docsity.com 2 part of victims’ healing and is a necessary element of reconciliation, such that truth recovery has formed a part of most post violence adjustments. A lot of the demand for truth recovery comes from victims groups who want an opportunity for their suffering to be publicly acknowledged as well as to discover those responsible for their pain and expose the general atrocities of the perpetrators. One might use the common alliteration of the three ‘R’s’ to understand this: victims approach truth recovery procedures from the point of recognition (of their victimhood), responsibility (discovering who’s to blame) and retribution (exposing the perpetrators). Whether or not we add a fourth ‘R’ to the alliteration – reconciliation – depends upon whether the victimhood experience becomes psychologically healing and sociologically functional. I will explain at the end of the lecture what I mean by sociologically functional victimhood. At the moment let’s focus on the three main ‘R’s’. Recognition, responsibility and retribution are motivations that easily resonate with the experience of victimhood. The three ‘R’s’ can dominate even the ambiguous groups and communities that were both victims and perpetrators simultaneously. Republicans in Northern Ireland, for example, are in favour of truth recovery procedures as a way of exposing the role of the British state, even though they run the risk of exposing their own culpability; likewise Loyalists who want to expose the military background of Sinn Fein politicians but try to continue to conceal the role of the security forces. It may well be that their respective support for a Northern Irish Truth and Reconciliation Commission will wane once they realise that they cannot control what truths the process discloses. But their wish to use so-called truth to batter their opponents, illustrates the general problem with truth recovery in all post- violence societies. docsity.com 5 anxieties over the selective use to which truths are put. Let me look briefly at each in turn. What matters for the effectiveness of truth recovery is how the claims to truth are received. They have to be heard as accurate descriptions of events. The South African TRC set up an investigation unit to test the veracity of truth claims, only to discover that most things couldn’t be proved unless the perpetrator claimed responsibility; as most did not. The readiness to hear what is disclosed as somehow ‘true’ is diminished when what is disclosed doesn’t fit with what the victim or relatives expected or wanted. Uncomfortable truths are often explained away as inadequate or, indeed, as untrue, especially if the truth recovery process that disclosed it lacks community legitimacy. Judicial or governmental enquiries as specific truth recovery procedures often lack legitimacy because of poor community involvement. Afrikaners saw the South African TRC as a witchhunt against them and mostly refused to participate. Even where shame apologies are made as part of truth recovery as part of combatants’ acknowledgement of culpability, apologies have to be heard by the former enemy to be meant, the key to which according to the restorative peacemaking paradigm, is hearing the shame-guilt as genuine. Two weeks ago we discussed some of the problems around shame-guilt as emotions, and some of the difficulties in eliciting shame-guilt apologies. The failure of Ulster Protestants to hear what they consider amounts to an apology from Sinn Fein has been used by anti-Agreement Unionists as one of the grounds to suspend the Belfast Agreement. This bears witness to the difficulties some perpetrators have in saying precisely what victims want and to the doubts victims have about accepting what is actually said. docsity.com 6 The partial nature of the truths disclosed is cause and effect of the problems around how truth claims are received, and it is to the partisan nature of truth that I now turn. Some people can simply refuse to participate in the recovery process, as happened in South Africa, ensuring a one-sided or selective recovery of truth. There can be vested interests trying to limit what is disclosed. Sometimes, you see, the truth recovery process has been designed by states, governments or political groups to disguise their own culpability or partisanly expose that of their opponents. Phil Scraton has discussed the way in which ‘truth’ is concealed or the search for ‘truth’ manipulated by the authorities in Britain, whether over deaths in custody, the practices of ‘special hospitals’, or investigations into disasters like Lockerbie or Hillsborough. This is more likely to happen in a post-violence setting where the former regime retains some capacity to dictate the disclosure of its activities and thus in those peace accords where there has not been an outright winner. The terms of reference of the truth recovery process can sometimes be under the control of powerful groups who limit the range of activities to be addressed. The South African TRC focused on ‘gross violations of human rights’ between March 1960-May 1994. This sounds impressive enough but it addressed actual incidents and events in this time frame and thus excluded what we might call the silent oppression of the apartheid regime itself. It has been noted, for example, that since women bore the brunt of that oppression, through forced removals, the pass laws, domestic violence, and broken families, women were not recognised as a special category of victim beyond specific incidents of murder or abuse that involved them. But other truth commissions have been less generous than South Africa’s. The Chilean docsity.com 7 Commission, for example, focused only on the disappearances and not on Chilean human rights abuses, although the El Salvadorean commission had a very broad mandate to address ‘serious acts of violence’. The Northern Irish Victims Commission, not strictly a truth recovery process but which was set up as part of the peace accord, published a Report entitled We Will Remember Them, which completely excluded victims of state violence. One response to control on the truth recovery process from above is to have community-based processes. However, these are mostly localised and focus on truth recovery in a particular neighbourhood or group, and thus tend to be quite deliberately partisan. One notable exception to this was Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification, better known as the Recovery of the Historic Memory Project. This was set up by the grassroots and civil society in Guatemala under the aegis of the Catholic Church as a popular response to the weakness of the state’s own truth commission. The Report was published in 1998 to great controversy – the co-ordinator of the project was assassinated two days after the launch. The project addressed country- wide cases of murder and managed to be popularly acclaimed by local communities, demonstrating the viability of democratic and grass roots approaches to truth recovery, but even so, it took only six months to address 36 years of violence and lacked legal powers to compel participation. Information collected by means of it could not be used in prosecutions. It lacked the resources of more ‘official’ truth recovery procedures. If truth recovery mostly only discloses partial truths, it is hardly surprising that what it discloses can be selectively used. Indeed, people often have pre-determined docsity.com 10 whether the mobilisation is done to undermine or under gird the peace accord. Victim groups that ally themselves with anti-peace groups use their suffering as a brake on the negotiated settlement by accusations that their suffering is being neglected or undervalued. It is hard to respond to such claims. Victim groups that ally themselves with pro-peace parties have an indirectly negative impact because they only encourage the formation and mobilisation of anti-peace victim groups by reinforcing the politicisation of victimhood. Pro-peace parties who have aligned victim groups can in these circumstances hardly complain at the politicisation of victim groups by anti-peace parties. Given the moral relativity of these positions in many post-violence societies, it is perhaps more defensible to discourage all politicisation of victim experiences. Politicisation is difficult to reverse once set in train; some political parties who formerly embraced victim groups as part of their contestation of the peace accord can find victim groups an embarrassment as the party’s political agenda changes. Victimhood can thus remain divisive in peace processes. In Northern Ireland’s case for example, victimhood was experienced differently between Catholics and Protestants and contested notions of culpability for the violence tend to reproduce the old divisions because there is either a reluctance to accept the others’ victimhood or to impose an artificial hierarchy of victimhood in which one’s own ‘side’ suffered the worst. Equality of victimhood is denied, so that victimhood is not a uniting experience amongst people who shared the same emotional and physical suffering. Victim groups in these circumstances thus tend to cohere around the lines of division and docsity.com 11 differentiation involved in the former violence, easily reproducing the old dysfunctional passions. In Northern Ireland’s case for example, there are ex-combatant groups (security forces, Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries), giving recognition to their particular partisan set of experiences and suffering. There are survivor groups (‘survivor’ here includes relatives and family members of the dead) who champion on their own or their loved one’s behalf as people with shared experiences. Sometimes survivor groups are based around a high-profile incident of atrocity in which they or their significant other were involved; sometimes amongst types of survivor, such as those based on neighbourhood, religion or type of suffering, injury and harm. There are also political victim groups, who have either been hijacked by the political parties for broader political ends or are themselves political groupings only masquerading as victim groups. These groups tend not to even talk to each other. Even though victimhood is politicised and manipulated, post-violence societies cannot afford to neglect victims. Victimhood can cause feelings that constitute a psychological disorder or dysfluency for the sufferer from grief upward to known psychiatric conditions. These have to be managed if the person is to become a normal functioning member of the new post-violence society. A pathway to psychological healing for the individual forms part of post-violence adjustments, for victimhood is a psychological state. It is also a sociological process. That is to say, victimhood has ramifications at the level of society rather than just the person. It can distort society by introducing what we earlier called ‘bad civil society’, that is, voluntary and community groups whose practise and effects, unintended or otherwise, destabilises docsity.com 12 the social structure, perpetuates ancient hatreds and reproduces the conflict. Victimhood at the social level keeps vivid the emotional dynamics associated with the former society, requiring policies by which society manages the continued emotional impact of past communal violence. Victimhood provides a ready source of political mobilisation that can impact negatively on the peace accord, made especially difficult since such politicisation is emotion based rather than reasoned thus inhibiting the transformation from emotion/identity politics to democratic/issue politics. A post- violence society thus needs to find pathways to healing for the society as a well as for the individual. I believe that victimhood can be made sociologically functional for peace processes as a result of public policies that address it at the societal level. The following seem relevant policies, although they are hardly comprehensive. • Society needs to find ways in which victimhood can be honoured as an experience in public ways (in acts of remembrance and commemoration, sites of memorial, recovered memory projects, truth recovery projects and the like) • Victim groups need to be recast as ‘healing groups’, in which victims are encouraged to release themselves from the past and look to the future, by which victim groups maintain their positive functions (support structures and resource campaigners) but shed their political ones, a transformation that society reinforces both materially and symbolically. • Society should materially and symbolically discourage burdens of grief for the individual being used by victims and victim groups to prevent the rest of society moving on in terms of the victims’ attitudes toward social and political change. • Forums of public accountability need to be developed in which victims and victim groups are required to take responsibility, along with the rest of society, for the future rather than just commiserate in their suffering. • Financial and material resources should be deployed by the state to manage the practice and functions of victim groups. docsity.com