Introduction
Our topic tonight is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. But the occasion is to remember and honor the work and contribution made by Neelan Tiruchelvam before he was so cruelly assassinated on July 29. 1999. Terrorism was and remains an ever present threat, not only in Sri Lanka, but in many parts of the world and. as we’ve seen, in the United States of America as well. Violence, whether it originates from the state or from an individual or from groups, is self-defeating and leaves in its wake personal tragedy and intensified conflict. The best and most fitting way to remember Neelan Tiruchelvam and to honor his memory is to reject violence, embrace dialogue, negotiations and peace so that he and others will not have lived or died in vain.
I am reminded of the powerful words spoken by another great human rights activist, Adam Mishnik. He was a former prisoner of the Communist regime in his native Poland, and he speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about transformed attitudes:
The image of the enemy is a moral and political burden because you are negotiating with someone who only yesterday you called an oppressor, a murderer or a terrorist. You promised your followers that this person would be severely punished as a reward for the oppression that they had lived through. Your followers meanwhile are telling you justice requires punishment. They ask, ‘How can you negotiate and talk to a person who is responsible for all the disasters of our people?’
His reply is, ‘I’m negotiating because I’ve chosen the logic of peace and abandoned the logic of war. This means my enemy of yesterday must become my partner and we will live in a common state. He may still be my opponent, but he is an opponent within peace, not within war.’
It is impossible to understand and appreciate the search for truth and reconciliation in South Africa unless we see it in historical context. For decades, the dominant theme in social and political life was the politics of oppression and the politics of resistance. After years of escalating violence, this finally gave way to the politics of negotiation. The logic of war was replaced by the logic of peace. Former enemies sat down at the same table and negotiated a new interim constitution, which would serve as the basis for a national election. The emphasis now was win-win. It involved compromise and consensus. This was followed by four very difficult, turbulent years, but which finally culminated in a new democratically elected government.
The question of what nations should do about a conflictual past did not leave South Africa untouched. After 300 years of colonialism and racism, there were many perpetrators and there were many victims. There is an ever-growing body of literature dealing with society in transition from an authoritarian or dictatorial regime to a new form of democratic government. The most comprehensive is a study edited by Neil Kritz entitled, Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, and this has brought major documentation of and contributions to this field. Many other research projects and international conferences are under way. The topic is related to, but distinct from, human rights and international law.
Countries in transition share a number of similarities. Briefly stated, these are:
• A shift from totalitarianism to a form of democracy.
• A legacy of oppression and serious violations of human rights.
• A fragile government and a precarious unity.
• A commitment to the attainment of a culture of human rights and a respect for the rule of law.
• A determination to make it impossible for past violations to be repeated.
Questions confronting these newly emerging democracies, including South Africa, include at least the following:
• How do emerging democracies deal with past violations of human rights? What measures are desirable and possible in the context of particular transitions?
• How do new democracies deal with leaders and other individuals responsible for disappearances, death squads and psychological and physical torture? Where must the line be drawn between those who gave the orders or those who carried them out or both?
• How do new democracies deal with the fact that some perpetrators may remain part of the new government or security forces or hold important positions in public life? Does this hold the new democracy at risk? Is there an alternative?
The arguments advanced to take a nation’s past seriously are moral, psychological and political. The moral imperative can be summed up from the commandment from the Jewish tradtion: ‘To remember is the secret of redemption.’ The psychological argument has been advanced in particular by a school represented by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. ‘It is as bad for nations as it is for individual people to suppress the memory of evil or mournful experience.’ The political argument is summed up in the famous statement by George Santanyana, ‘Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.’ There is,, however, another side to this, which has been highlighted in particular by Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law School. He has strongly criticized those who ‘squander moral capital in an ineffective effort to right past wrongs, creating martyrs and fostering political alienation rather than contributing to a genuine sense of vindication’. Indeed, he continues, ‘Moral capital is better spent in educating the population in the limits of the law rather than engaging in a quixotic quest after the mirage of corrective justice.’ Timothy Garton Ashe reminds us in his book, The File, that there is a defensible position which calls for moving on into the new future and not allowing the past to destroy or inhibit the new democracy.
For example, there is the profound insight of the historian Ernest Renan who argues that ‘every nation is a community both of shared memory and shared forgetting*. He adds, ‘And 1 would even say historical error is an essential factor in the history of a nation. Historically, the advocates of forgetting are many and impressive. They range from Cicero in 44 BC, demanding only two days after Caesar’s murder that the memory of past discord be consigned to eternal oblivion, to Winston Churchill in his Zurich speech 2000 years later recalling Gladstone’s appeal for a ‘blessed act of oblivion between former enemies.
There were those in leadership in the new South Africa who sided with those who believed that some serious accounting for the past was not only right and moral but also wise in terms of developing a stable and peaceful future. Our argument can be summed up as follows:
To ignore the past is to perpetuate myth and error; it is to build a future on lies and half-truths. By lapsing into amnesia, we risk the danger of leaving people in constant victimhood instead of enabling them to become survivors who move forward in their lives. Victims have the right to know at whose hands they and their loved ones suffered. To delay and/or to suppress the truth makes it difficult, if not impossible, to uphold the rule of law and to develop a culture of human rights. Countries are often haunted by their past. Two examples are Germany in the 1950s and Switzerland much more recently. Finally, a conscious act of memory frees us from being paralyzed by the past.
Favorable Conditions
I want to refer briefly to what I describe as ‘favorable conditions’ which contributed to the establishment of and the work of the TRC.
The public call and support for the Commission was made by the African National Congress, which was the major opposition and which ultimately won the first ever democratic election in South Africa.
The role of Nelson Mandela. He is the embodiment of truth and reconciliation in his own life and person. I am still amazed at the remarkable lack of bitterness that he has consistently displayed. From the day of his release to the present time, he has focused on the need to come to terms with the past, but always with a readiness to forgive and to move on. It is not merely in the words that he uses, powerful as they are, but in his actions of reaching out to the very people who had put him in jail, who had kept him there, who had decimated his own party, who were responsible for torture and deprivation, detention without trial, mass removals, and so on. He stretched out a hand of reconciliation and friendship.
The fact that the President supported the establishment of the Commission, and that he was directly involved in appointing the commissioners and selecting the chairperson and deputy chairperson, gave the Commission his personal stamp, not so much of authority but of compassion and support. Throughout the life of the Commission, he insisted on its independence, but was never slow to defend it when it came under severe attack.
His persona reflected all that was good about the Commission — a deep horror of human rights violations, an anger at the horrific treatment of so many hundreds and thousands of people, and yet a commitment to truth which would simultaneously work towards reconciliation. There are many countries whose representatives came to South Africa and many countries to which I traveled whose people were deeply envious, with good cause, of the fact that we had such a person as Nelson Mandela as the leader of our fledgling democracy, but no one appreciated him more than those of us who were in the cauldron of the Commission. It certainly assisted us enormously to do the work entrusted to us.
A third favourable condition was that the Commission was building on the successful political negotiations which had led to peaceful elections and the appointment of a democratic government. There was a sense that if we could succeed in the almost impossible task of bringing former enemies together at the table to negotiate a new Constitution and a new administration, then we could also try to deal with the past to help to consolidate that new democracy and to build a human rights culture, which until that time had never existed in South Africa.
A fourth feature was the existence of a very strong civil society. The fact that the overwhelming majority of South Africans had for so long been excluded from the parliamentary process and government at local, regional, and national level meant that there had been little point in forming political parties. A great deal of innovation, energy and passion had, therefore, gone into the development of a strong civil society with one of the largest numbers of non-governmental organizations in the world. Some NGOs focused on legal issues, others on education, others on matters of religion; others were committed to caring for the victims of apartheid; they were involved in almost every area of life in the country. This meant that when the decision— was made to have a truth commission in South Africa, there were many who had had long experience working within NGOs who were available to serve on the Commission as senior committee members and staff. It also meant that there was a cradle of support, and many NGOs were directly involved in the numerous drafts of the Bill which finally became law.
A further factor which assisted the Commission was the interest of the international community in its initiative. Not only were many governments, institutions, organizations, and individuals willing to offer advice, but several governments responded to our request for assistance, with direct financial contributions to the President’s Fund, the fund set up to help victims with reparation and rehabilitation. In addition, a number of countries agreed to second staff, mainly policemen and women who could assist our Investigative Unit in their huge task of following up the stories told by victims and perpetrators. They not only provided a far greater degree of impartiality, but accepted responsibility for their airfares, accommodation, and salaries, so that we could have more than sixty investigators from the international community and South Africa working throughout the life of the Commission.
A final factor, which I think assisted the Commission enormously, was the person of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There is no doubt that the commissioners who were appointed had been publicly tested and tried, and each, in his or her own way, had a contribution to make, and made it. However, none of us was indispensable. There were other South Africans who could have served equally well on the Commission. With one exception. I don’t think the Commission could have survived without the presence and person and leadership of Desmond Tutu. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a tireless fighter for justice in South Africa, he was a household name long before he came to the Commission. He had demonstrated in his life and work an enormous compassion for the underdog. His sense of humour, his twinkling eyes, his tiny stature, his presence rather than his performance, meant that he was and is an icon in South Africa. His choice by President Mandela was an inspired one. He assisted the Commission enormously in every possible way to become an instrument for healing, perhaps because he always saw himself and his colleagues on the Commission as wounded healers, not better than anyone else, not wiser than anyone else, but simply people who had been given a job to do and who cared very deeply for victims and perpetrators alike.
There are six unique features which distinguish the South African model from any other truth commission that has taken place anywhere in the world, and I would like to briefly outline some of these.
A distinctive feature was the democratic process that was followed throughout in the establishment of the Commission. We need not go into detail here, except to stress that the role of civil society, the churches, opposition parties, and the government in drawing up the Act ensured maximum participation. The several drafts, which were freely available to any person or organization, the number of workshops and conferences held throughout the country, the public hearings by the parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Justice, and the manner of selecting the commissioners resulted in widespread participation. The fact that it was not a presidential commission, appointed by the President, but a commission established by a democratically elected Parliament, is also unique.
Secondly, the proceedings of the TRC, unlike the Argentinean, Chilean, and Salvadorian commissions, or any others, were not held behind closed doors, but were open to the public. This resulted in maximum transparency as well as remarkable participation by many in South Africa and beyond her borders. We debated for a fairly long time whether or not we should allow cameras into the open hearings. What concerned us was that the cameras might intimidate victims who were already facing the challenging task of telling very personal and horrifying stories. We consulted widely, and in the end made the decision that cameras would be permitted, but that there would be a measure of control to protect victims from abuse. The general view among the NGOs, which we consulted, was that the stories the victims were going to tell were stories that the whole of South Africa needed to hear. I have no doubt that this was the right decision, and we were extremely well served by the media’s coverage of the Commission and its hearings throughout its life. On the whole, the media were very cooperative, and the Commission was able to reach an agreement on guidelines for the presence of cameras at hearings. Overall, 1 think these guidelines met the criteria required for good media coverage, but at the same time ensured dignity and sensitivity.
I think what was appreciated by many, particularly in the rural areas of the country, was the opportunity to participate in four hours of live radio coverage every day, which, of course, included hearing the victims speak in their own language without commentary. Many people in South Africa can neither read nor write and depend on radio for information. Radio penetrates even the most remote areas of the country, which again meant that people who could never get to a public hearing, who knew very little about the finer details of the Commission, could listen and could participate in the hearings. There were regular features on all SABC news bulletins. There was also a regular forty-five minute summary on television each Sunday evening.
A third unique feature of the South African Commission was the powers granted to it by the Act. These included search and seizure as well as subpoena powers. The former was particularly important because we knew that long before the 1994 election, instructions had been given for the destruction of documents. This would have denied us access to a great deal of material, and we were quite sure that certain state departments which were opposed to the new democracy would attempt to destroy even more material or at least confiscate it and spirit it away. We also appreciated that many civil servants would do their best to obstruct the Commission’s work. The powers of search and seizure were therefore extremely useful and were used on a number of occasions, particularly with regard to the former South African Defence Force.
In most instances we started off by inviting people who we thought had information that was necessary for us to fulfill our objectives. In the majority of cases, the people who were invited, particularly from the police and the military, agreed to attend the hearings, and those who initially declined and were warned about the possibility’ of a subpoena very quickly changed their minds.
A fourth unique feature was the extensive mandate which the Commission chose to adopt. Instead of confining itself to hearing individual victims of human rights violations and perpetrators applying for amnesty, the Commission decided to hold special hearings and institutional hearings, because of apartheid’s impact on every area of life. As has already been discussed, the major benefit of following this course of action was that it gave institutions and senior people in those institutions an opportunity to account for the role that they played in the apartheid years, and also to point towards a new dispensation where institutions could be much more accountable in terms of fundamental human rights.
Commenting on the Commission’s five-volume report, Judge Albie Sachs states,
It is not a dry governmental report, but a passionate memorial that resonates with the emotion of the hearings themselves. In addition, it contains a serious reflection on how’ evil behalour is condoned and spreads itself and on what institutional mechanisms and what kind of culture are necessary to prevent its reappearance.
He adds, ‘That was one of the greatest objectives of the Commission, not simply to let the pain come out but to explain the conditions that permitted gross injustice to flourish and so to ensure that these things did not happen again.’ In the recommendation made by the Commission to government, it is hoped that the lessons learnt from sins of omission and commission, not only by individuals, political parties, and state machinery, but also by institutions, will guide all of us into a more decent and just society’.
A fifth point to stress is that after considerable discussion, it was decided that the Commission would make public the names of the alleged perpetrators. This was in strong contrast to the Chilean and Argentinean commissions. Some names were mentioned in the Salvadorian Commission, but those people were immediately granted general amnesty by the President of that country when he received the report. We decided that the naming of perpetrators, while raising the risk of denying due process, was important in terms of accountability and acknowledgement. The main point was that we gave people who were named an opportunity to make their own response. We followed this procedure in the hearings, where we stressed that at the time of the hearing no findings were being made. Before we included names in the final report, we sent notices Informing people of our intention, and invited them to respond in writing if they had any objections to being so named.
The most unique feature of the South African Commission was undoubtedly the inclusion of conditional amnesty. This was a very ambitious, risky and contentious decision. It arose directly from the South African context where the military and security forces remained very powerful and threatened to make a peaceful election impossible. They demanded a general amnesty, and this was rejected; but it was decided that instead a limited form of amnesty would be included in the interim constitution, which had direct bearing on the enabling act of the TRC. The late Judge Marvin Frankel’s comment is instructive:
The call to punish human rights criminals can present complex and agonizing problems that have no single or simple solution. While the debate over the Nuremberg trials still goes on, that episode — trials of war criminals of a defeated nation — was simplicity itself as compared to the subtle and dangerous issues that can divide a country when it undertakes to punish its own violators.
A nation divided during a repressive regime does not emerge suddenly united when the time of repression has passed. The human rights criminals are fellow citizens, living alongside everyone else, and they may be very powerful and dangerous. If the army and the police have been the agencies of terror, the soldiers and’the cops aren’t going to turn overnight into paragons of respect for human rights. Their numbers and their expert management of deadly weapons remain significant facts of life.The soldiers and police may be biding their time, waiting and conspiring to return to power. They may be seeking to keep or win sympathizers in the population at large. If they are treated too harshly or if the net of punishment is cast too widely, there may be a backlash that plays into their hands. But their victims cannot simply forgive and forget.These problems are not abstract generalities. They describe tough realities in more than a dozen countries. If, as we hope, more nations are freed from regimes of terror, similar problems will continue to arise.
Since the situations vary, the nature of the problems varies from place to place. It is important to stress that limited amnesty under stringent conditions is very different from general amnesty, which encourages amnesia and impunity. In South Africa, amnesty was made possible in exchange for truth and there were certain very clear demands. Firstly, amnesty had to be applied for on an individual basis; there was no blanket amnesty. Secondly, applicants for amnesty had to complete a prescribed form published in the Government Gazette, which called for very detailed information relating to the specific human rights violations. Thirdly, applicants had to make a ‘full disclosure* of these violations in order to qualify for amnesty. Fourthly, in most instances, applicants would appear before the Amnesty Committee and these hearings would be open to the public. Fifthly, there was a time limit set in terms of the Act. Most importantly, only those acts which were demonstrably political would qualify. Further, acts committed for personal gain or out of personal malice would not qualify.
There were 8000 perpetrators who applied for amnesty, and it is interesting that of these, a very small percentage actually received amnesty. The most common reason was that the criteria were not met and, in particular, the Amnesty Committee concluded that ‘full disclosure’ had not been made. It has to be added that there were many other South Africans, particularly in the security forces and in political leadership, who ought to have applied for amnesty’ but did not.
In its determination to avoid impunity, the Commission, in its recommendations to the government, emphasized the need for accountability in the following terms:
Where amnesty has not been sought or has been denied, prosecution should be considered where evidence exists that an individual has committed a gross human rights violation. In this regard, the Commission will make available to the appropriate authorities information in its possession concerning serious allegations against individuals (excluding privileged information such as that contained in amnesty applications). Consideration must be given to imposing a time limit on such prosecutions. Attorneys-General must pay rigorous attention to the prosecution of members of the South African Police Service (SAPS) who are found to have assaulted, tortured and/or killed persons in their care. In order to avoid a culture of impunity and to entrench the rule of law. the granting of general amnesty in whatever guise should be resisted.
The Search for Truth
Despite the understandable reservation regarding the search for truth, it is a fact that a commitment to history involves a search for an objective truth. The Commission therefore unapologetically set out to try to reach a public and official acknowledgement of what happened during the apartheid era. If only to counter the distorted and partial recording of history in South Africa, it was necessary that there should be an accurate record of the period under rev iew. Colin Bundy reminds us that ’the establishment of the objective truth is part of the struggle for the control of history. It plays a central role in society’s redefinition of itself’. Bundy argues that the provision of accurate and authentic facts discredits the distorted version of history provided by the previous regime and prevents that version from being perpetuated in school and university textbooks and in people’s memories. The truth that emerged in the stories told by victims and perpetrators challenged the myths, the lies, and the half-truths conveyed and distributed at every level by the former regime.
I am unashamed in my belief that, in the South African context, history has to be rewritten and that the TRC has made a significant contribution to this end. This is not to argue for one group’s truth to be replaced by another, but rather for the enlarging of the boundaries, a testing of different claims, so that a fuller and more precise picture begins to emerge.
In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission distinguishes between four kinds of truth. The first is objective or factual or forensic truth. 1 he Act, which governed the work of the TRC, required it to ‘prepare a comprehensive report which sets out its activities and findings based on tactual and objective information and evidence collected or received by it or placed at its disposal’.
This requirement operated at two levels. Firstly, the Commission was required to make public findings on particular incidents with regard to specific people, concerning what happened to whom, where, when, and how, and who was involved. In order to fulfill this mandate, the Commission adopted an inclusive policy of verification and corroboration to ensure that findings were based on accurate and factual information. The Investigative Unit, which had more than sixty trained investigators at its disposal, did a yeoman task in seeking to corroborate and verify testimonies, whether they were from victims or perpetrators. Secondly, the Commission was responsible for findings on contexts, causes, and patterns of violations of human rights that engaged the Commission at a very broad and deep level.
While the Commission, through its Investigative Unit, its database, and its Research Department, attempted to do all of the above with the highest degree of efficiency possible, there were always limits in the search for truth and even in truth-telling.While I think Michael Ignatieff underestimates the influence and impact of some truth commissions, nevertheless his comments are salutary:
All that a truth commission can achieve is to reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged in public discourse. In Argentina, its work has made it impossible to claim, for example, that the military did not throw half-dead victims in the sea from helicopters. In Chile, it is no longer permissible to assert in public that the Pinochet regime did not dispatch thousands of entirely innocent people.
It follows that in the South African context it is no longer possible for so many people to claim that ‘they did not know’. It has become impossible to deny that the practice of torture by the state security forces was not systematic and widespread, to claim that only a few ‘rotten eggs’ or bad apples’ committed gross violations of human rights. It is also impossible to claim any longer that the accounts of gross human rights violations in ANC camps are merely the consequence of state disinformation.
The second kind of truth is personal or narrative truth. Through the telling of their own stories, both victims and perpetrators have given meaning to their multi-layered experiences of the South African story. Through the media these personal truths have been communicated to the broader public. Oral tradition has been a central feature of the Commission’s process. Explicit in the Act is an affirmation of the healing potential of truth-telling. One of the objectives of the TRC was to ‘restore the human and civil dignity of victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they were the victims’.
It is important to underline that the stories we listened to didn’t come to us as ‘arguments’ or claims as if in a court of law. They were often heart-wrenching, conveying unique insights into the pain of our past. To listen to one man relate how his wife and baby were cruelly murdered is much more powerful and moving than statistics which describe a massacre involving many victims. The conflict of the past is no longer a question of numbers and incidents; the human face has shown itself, and the horror of murder and torture is painfully ^ real.
By facilitating the telling of‘stories’, the TRC not only helped uncover the existing facts about past abuses but assisted in the creation of‘narrative truth’ —the personal story told by a witness. This enabled the Commission to contribute to the process of reconciliation by ensuring that the silence shrouding individual subjective experiences had at last been broken, by ‘restoring memory and humanity’. A great deal of this material has been recorded in the Commission’s report, but together with the report must be seen the transcripts of the hearings, individual statements, a mountain of press clippings, and video material. This material will be an indispensable resource for historians and other academics and researchers for years to come.
The third kind of truth is social or ‘dialogicaf truth. Albie Sachs, even before the Commission began its work, talked about ‘microscopic truth* and ‘dialogical trutlr: ‘The first is factual and verifiable and can be documented and proved. Dialogical truth, on the other hand, is social truth, truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion and debate.
People from all walks of life were involved in the TRC process, including the faith community, the former South African Defence Force, NGOs. the media, the legal and health sectors, and political parties — and obviously the wider South African population through the media and public scrutiny. What I am emphasising here is that almost as important as the process of establishing the truth was the process of acquiring it. The process of dialogue involved transparency, democracy, and participation as the basis of affirming human dignity and integrity.
Finally, the fourth kind of truth is healing and restorative truth. The Act required the TRC to look back to the past and to look to the future. The truth which the Commission was required to establish had to contribute to the reparation of the damage inflicted in the past and to the prevention of it ever happening again in the future. But for healing to be a possibility, knowledge in itself is not enough. Knowledge must be accompanied by acknowledgement, an acceptance of accountability. To acknowledge publicly that thousands of South Africans have paid a very high price for the attainment of democracy affirms the human dignity of the victims and survivors and is an integral part of the healing of the South African society.
In summary, one of the major advantages of a truth commission committed to discovering the truth is that it involves what could be termed inclusive truth-telling. The TRC had a specific and limited mandate, but its attempt to help restore the moral order must be seen in the context of social and economic transformation. These are two sides of a single coin. Truth-telling is a critical part of this transformation, which challenges myths, half-truths, denials, and lies. It was when listening to ordinary people relating their experiences under apartheid that one was able to understand the magnitude and horror of a sy stem that damaged and destroyed so many over so long a period. It also reminded the Commission forcibly of the maldistribution of assets and the legacy of oppression, which makes transformation so difficult. Therefore, the work of the Commission was not a one-off event, a kind of cure-all. The process has only started and has to continue, and the public and private sectors have to accept leadership in this regard. In particular, those who benefited from the long years of discrimination and inequity have a particular responsibility.
This means that dealing creatively and honestly with the past isn’t a question of laying the blame only on the military, the police, the politicians, the liberation movements, but also on the beneficiaries of apartheid, who were largely white. In searching for the truth, political accountability is important, but apartheid could never have survived without being buttressed by those who benefited from it.
Reparation
A central part of the Commission’s work was to establish a policy and set off recommendations for reparation, which the state wanted to implement. The Commission had no budget, so we were not in a position to pay reparations to any of the victims.
Our proposal to the state, which flowed from our careful listening to the views of the victims themselves, included an initial, fairly small grant and a subsequent payment over six years. We also recommended symbolic reparations such as renaming streets or schools, building memorials, peace parks, etc.
Regrettably, the South African government only granted the initial amount and has been stalling and virtually silent on the larger recommendations. They still maintain they will respond, but the damage has been done and victims feel very badly let down.
Conclusion
I have outlined the South African model and, of course, it is impossible to impose this model on any other country. Nevertheless, it may be possible for comparative models, including the South African experience, to be of assistance to those countries which wish to deal with a conflictive past, to build an enduring peace and establish a human rights culture.
To do this requires a comprehensive strategy, a holistic approach which will include accountability, truth, reconciliation, institutional reform and reparation. It’s a difficult and challenging process, but essential, if the logic of war is to be replaced with the logic of peace.
