Truth *and* Reconciliation?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little bit about spending a few days with Albie Sachs at a conference in Berlin. This was a big deal for me not only because I’m writing a book about why some people act in ways that I call morally heroic, but also because I’ve been working on a series of articles that have transitional justice as their focus.

I’ve been teaching and writing about South Africa for several years now, with my first published article on truth and reconciliation just out in the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. But what I haven’t written about in any great detail in the deep divide between the ideas of truth and reconciliation that is often masked when people talk about truth and reconciliation commissions (from the most famous one in South Africa to the many others that followed from it).

There is some very good writing on the question of whether we might do better to think of these commissions as focusing on truth or reconciliation; the implication is that a commission can do one or the other, but never both, because publicizing the truth after gross violations of human rights necessarily precludes reconciliation between groups. Of course, the example of South Africa suggested that we might hope for the opposite — or at least that was the goal so many observers seemed to hear whenever Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke about the theory behind the TRC.

And this is likely why so many people felt disappointed by the South African case. If one is hoping for a rainbow nation — where the emerging truth frees people from their previously-held racial biases — and then one is told that, really, the absence of a retaliatory bloodbath is a real victory, it seems an awfully narrow victory. I want to argue, of course, that the problem isn’t with the TRC but with our expectations. After all, Tutu is pretty clear that reconciliation is a process that doesn’t unfold overnight; over and over again, he points out that the Commission was tasked with the promotion of reconciliation, not with its achievement.

Before any work toward reconciliation can happen, of course, victims’ needs have to be addressed. And one of those needs is for information: victims want to know why they were targeted and survivors want to know what happened to their loved ones. This is a central focus of the “truth” part of any Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But the emergence of the truth shouldn’t be thought of as antagonistic to reconciliation; on the contrary, without the truth, my sense is that reconciliation is impossible. That isn’t the same thing as saying that the one necessarily follows the other, only that truth allows for reconciliation. Without apology, forgiveness, and a restorative response to the harms that group members committed against one another, the truth can only get former antagonists so far.