One truth among others? Truth commissions’ struggle for truth and memory

Abstract

Most truth commissions combine human rights investigation with a historical narrative explaining the causes and patterns of violence and violations. However, their historiographical function has been generally overlooked in transitional justice scholarship, as well as in history and memory studies. This article presents an analytical framework to situate truth commission narratives in the broader context of struggles for social memory. I argue that the historical context chapters in commissions’ final reports reflect the explanatory schemes and memory tropes circulating in wider society, but they also often transform the terms of the societal debate. Commissions negotiate the tension between their authoritative status over historical truth and the need to persuade those who question their truthfulness and legitimacy. Toward that end, they adopt various narrative strategies (adjudication, avoidance, giving voice, and transformation). Finally, while it should be acknowledged that the strategic interventions and silences of commissions have ruled out many alternative memories (and along with them, visions of future), it is wrong to reduce commission narratives to politically usable reconstructions of the past, as they have often surprised and upset political leaders through their findings, historical explanations, and recommendations.

Keywords

Human rights memory politics nationalism social memory truth commissions

Most truth commissions combine human rights investigation with a historical narrative explaining the causes and patterns of violence and violations. However, their historiographical function has been generally overlooked by transitional justice scholars, as well as historians.¹ It is understandable that temporary panels established primarily for human rights investigation, rather than the publication of professional historiography, fail to draw attention for their engagement with the past. In addition, not all truth commissions complement forensic investigation with a historical narrative. Nonetheless, many truth commissions do take part in academic and non-academic debates concerning the causes, patterns and consequences of political violence. They make a strong claim in favor of remembrance and truth as the precondition of individual and social processes of healing, reconciliation, and peacebuilding.² Furthermore, truth commissions are sponsored by governments, and sometimes by the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations. In other words, their verdict on history carries the promise of official endorsement. Although commissions’ historical narratives do not enjoy the status of professional historiography, their capacity to shape processes of societal contestation over the meaning of the past suggests that their historiographical function should be taken seriously.

This article explores the ways in which truth commissions reconstruct the national past. How do truth commissions combine forensic investigation with a historical narrative about past political violence? What entitles the commissioners and the staff, lacking the credentials of professional historians, to assume the responsibility to write history? In what ways do they participate in the debates over social memory? What are the common narrative strategies that allow truth commissions to interact with existing representations of the past circulating in public discourse?

Truth commissions have emerged in political contexts where societies’ conventional mechanisms for investigating serious crimes and writing unbiased accounts of the past (the judiciary and the media chief among them) had ceased to function. They face the twofold task of discovering forensic facts and forging societal consensus over the meaning of the past through their findings and narratives. On the one hand, political decision-makers grant them, at least ideally, the authority to publicize the truth about the nation’s past, above and beyond political and societal debates. On the other hand, commissions are firmly embedded in the social struggles over memory and history, which makes the reception of their findings and narratives dependent on larger political and societal processes. They produce one truth among others.

Commissions constantly negotiate the boundaries between legal-forensic and narrative-historical notions of truth to validate their claim to truth (an authoritative account of the past) and memory (a shared account of the past). Furthermore, their methodologies, social functions, and forms of public reception force observers to rethink the relationship between history and memory. They take a strong moral, political, and epistemological stance in favor of truth against the possibility of denial and relativization, which leads them to treat (individual and social) memory and history as deeply intertwined procedures. It is through their moral interest in history that truth commissions seek to overcome the positivist separation of the strong truth claim attributed to history and collectively shared meanings attributed to social memory.

Truth commissions are at once socially embedded and transformative. They are embedded in the sense that they draw their factual and discursive sources from the existing field of social memory—reflected in their use of prior human rights documentation and forensic investigation, as well as narratives and memory tropes circulating in the public. Commissions’ transformative potential comes from their self-declared objective to move beyond the confines of existing accounts of political violence by publicizing hitherto unacknowledged violations and providing novel explanations for the causes and consequences of violence.

The tension between the social embeddedness of truth commissions and their claim to move beyond social and political cleavages in the name of truth forces the commissioners and the staff to make strategic choices to interpret the past. I identify four such strategies: they might (1) adjudicate between contending positions by confirming or rejecting certain narratives and explanations that hold sway in public debates, (2) avoid contentious issues, (3) claim to give voice to memories and experiences that are systematically excluded from public debates, and finally, (4) transform the public debate by producing narratives and explanations that unsettle the existing accounts of the past.

A specific truth commission may make use of one, some, or all of these strategies. Furthermore, truth commission narratives are produced as much by the exclusions as the written content. I develop an analysis of the silences of truth commissions to better understand the ways in which they reconstruct the past and provide illustrative examples of various commissions’ narrative strategies and exclusions.

Truth, history, and memory in truth commissions

A major source of disagreement among historians concerns the epistemological status of the relationship between history and collective memory (Assmann, 2006; Klein, 2000; Olick and Robbins, 1998). Historical positivism finds memory’s claim to truth rather weak. It asserts that memory belongs to the domain of fiction and myth, where social, ideological, and aesthetic concerns take precedence over the claim to represent the past truthfully. The relationship between history and memory is one of opposition between fact and fiction, science and myth, and “hard data” and anecdotal evidence. Contrasting this position, other historians rightly point to the interdependent nature of this relationship: memory, whether in the form of oral history or written memory stored in archives, is the raw material of history, which in turn informs, and is at times challenged by, collective remembrance (Fogu and Kansteiner, 2006: 285; Kansteiner, 2002; Le Goff, 1992). The standard of “truth,” let alone establishing the epistemological superiority of history over memory, in fact points to the dependence of the former on the latter for its truth claim: “we have no other resource, concerning our reference to the past, except memory itself” (Ricoeur, 2004: 21).

The self-stated objectives of, and expectations from, truth commissions lead them to blur the distinctions between history and memory at every step of their investigatory and historiographical endeavor. They are expected to uphold a high standard of accuracy and truthfulness, and simultaneously produce a historical narrative to forge agreement over the meaning of the past among most, if not all, citizens—a shared memory. As I explain below, their double claim to truth and memory is riven by tension.

The primary task of truth commissions is to provide the full picture of human rights violations (Freeman, 2006; Hayner, 2011). Commissioners and the staff collect testimonial data from victims, observers, and occasionally, perpetrators (Imbleau, 2004: 168). Although the human rights investigation is not conducted primarily for history-writing purposes, forensic truth, which I define as the totality of corroborated facts about human rights violations, is not wholly separable from historical truth, which incorporates these facts into explanations about conflict onset, patterns of violations, and their consequences (for an illuminating discussion on the South African Commission’s conceptions of truth, see Boraine, 2000). Historical explanation is a crucial step for interpreting the data on violations within a broader context and connecting individual stories of suffering to national tragedy. Furthermore, the claim that confronting past wrongs prevents future conflict, a foundational premise for truth commissions, requires knowledge about the circumstances that made violence and violations possible in the first place (Wiebelhaus-Brahm, 2009a; Zalaquett, 1990). Therefore, truth commissions write context chapters to analyze the proximal causes of conflict onset as well as its deeper roots.

There is considerable variation across truth commissions in terms of how they combine human rights investigation with historical explanation. All truth commissions contribute to the historiography of political violence, at least minimally, by publicizing the facts of human rights violations. Identifying patterns of violations and responsible institutional actors is another historiographical operation that most, if not all, truth commissions undertake. There is greater variation across truth commissions in whether or not they put the atrocities in historical context. Of the 23 truth commissions that produced a publicly available final report as of late 2012, 17 have undertaken the task of writing a historical narrative. Among them, some prioritize rigorous forensic investigation over historical narrative, devoting a short chapter (e.g. Chile) or several paragraphs (e.g. Argentina) to situate political violence in context. Others limit the human rights investigation to a number of illustrative cases and pay closer attention to general patterns of violence (e.g. El Salvador). Some truth commissions highlight the outgoing dictator’s personal disposition for brutality and corruption as the chief cause of national tragedy (e.g. Chad). Others produce several volumes to make sense of conflict and violence from political-institutional, economic, legal, and sociohistorical perspectives (e.g. Guatemala and Peru). Some explicitly reject the challenge of rewriting the nation’s history within the confines of a truth commission (e.g. El Salvador), while others embrace it full-heartedly (e.g. Guatemala). Some commissions declare themselves unfit to pass moral and political judgment on particularly divisive and controversial historical events (e.g. Chile), while others consciously tackle the sources of bitter divisions in social memory (e.g. Peru). In short, there is no common historiographical approach across truth commissions.

Moral and political considerations shape the ways in which truth commissions make strategic decisions about the relative weight and interconnectedness of forensic investigation and historical narrative. Forensic data are costly and difficult to obtain; yet, publicizing the facts of forced disappearance, massacre, torture, sexual violence, and forced recruitment evokes the public’s indignation against perpetrators and makes it difficult for the latter to question the commission’s legitimacy. Focusing on forensic data, therefore, boosts the moral standing and political legitimacy of the truth commission in a way that historical explanation, typically considered a matter of opinion, cannot. However, overreliance on forensic data may have alienating effects for victims, who want the public to understand why they were targeted. The choice of not contextualizing political violence or assigning individual and/or institutional responsibility for violations reduces forensic data to a set of isolated and incomplete truths (Stanley, 2004), devoid of logical connection and meaning. A commission misses the opportunity to convey the message that policies designed to promote civic and political repair should address the root causes of political violence. At the extreme, the failure to address the questions that matter to society about political violence and violations may drive a truth commission to irrelevance. Therefore, most truth commissions, even the most forensically oriented ones, provide (albeit minimal) historical explanation.

The claim to truth carries enormous political and moral weight.³ Deponents (especially surviving victims and victims’ relatives, but sometimes perpetrators and bystanders, as well) want the commissioners and larger society to treat their memories as reflecting the sad truth, the real experience of violence. They do not regard testimony as an idiosyncratic account of episodes straddling fact and fiction. Rather, the testimonial process is an act of witnessing and truth-telling that links individual suffering to political repression and social breakdown. The timing and staging of the truth commission at the moment of political transition and reconstruction accentuate the moral and political character of truth commission narratives.

The demand for truth forces commissioners and the staff to take on the role of historians and social scientists (Cueva, 2004: 62). Nonetheless, truth commission reports are addressed to the general public, rather than to the academic community. The public judges their historical narratives less on the merit of scholarship than on the basis of perceptions of their truthfulness, accuracy, and use for a number of social and political ends. As the social reception of the final report’s findings, narratives, and recommendations involves performative, commemorative, and mediatic aspects, its role in guiding public discussion goes well beyond the text: “The work of truth commissions is memory work, the creation of collective history and national memory” (McClennen and Slaughter, 2009: 14; for the performative and commemorative aspects of memory work, see Connerton, 1989).

The twofold claim to truth and social memory places truth commissions in an ambiguous position. Ideally, societies bestow upon them the authority to tell the truth—even if temporarily. Yet, their social embeddedness means that the same processes of societal contestation over historical memory, which truth commissions purportedly mediate and even suspend in the name of overcoming biases arising from social divisions and political interests, deliver the ultimate judgment on commissions’ authority. Powerful political and military actors may impede truth-finding efforts to protect their personal reputation or uphold political stability founded upon social amnesia. Likewise, many citizens who did not participate in committing violations may nonetheless mistrust human rights defenders, victims, and the commission staff for various reasons. Thus, they may see a truth commission’s narrative as one historical interpretation among others, enjoying no special authority to interpret the nation’s past. The tension between a commission’s authority to produce the truth, beyond and above the social and political circumstances that paralyze other institutions charged with the task of truth-finding (chief among them the judiciary and the media), and its social reception as one claim to truth among others motivates the question: under what conditions do truth commissions overcome, mediate, suspend, initiate, or conclude societal conflicts over the meaning of the past?

Truth commissions are best understood as privileged participants in social struggles over memory or what Eviatar Zerubavel (1996) famously calls “mnemonic battles,” that is to say, processes of social contestation over the veracity and moral–political significance of various reconstructions of the past. Although the commissioners and the staff share with historians, journalists, prosecutors, and social scientists the quest for truth, their authority on truth is somewhat different. Truth commissions’ legitimacy is found in the interstices of procedural authority (i.e. truth is an effect of the procedures that bring it into being) and personal authority (i.e. the truth value of a narrative is shaped by the moral and social standing of the narrator), the latter highlighting the impartiality and moral impeccability of the commissioners.⁴ Often times, truth commissions complement these two notions of authority with a third principle brought into existence through the commissions’ work: the orientation toward witnesses, especially victims, as the sufferers and narrators of personal and national tragedy.

Commissions’ ad hoc authority on (forensic and historical) truth and their embeddedness in social struggles over the meaning of the past result in a constant tension. The struggle for social memory typically precedes the truth commission process. Periods of political violence result from, and reproduce, irreconcilable interests and values, contending social demands, and rival social memories. The presence of alternative memory narratives and “frameworks of memory” (Halbwachs, [1950] 1992) simultaneously enables and constrains a commission’s construction of historical truth. Insofar as the interpretive frameworks, anecdotes, patterns, causal explanations, and memory tropes employed by a truth commission originate in the process of social interaction, the field of social memory enables the commission. However, the social embeddedness of the truth commissions is also a constraint because the commissioners and staff cannot unproblematically step outside the hermeneutics of social interaction to produce a completely independent narrative.

Truth commissions operate in the already existing field of social memory, yet their involvement may alter the field itself. While the social embeddedness of truth commissions creates a strong tendency toward conformity with existing representations of the past in scholarship and social memory narratives, truth commissions’ capacity to transcend taken-for-granted meaning frameworks should be acknowledged. The raison d’être of truth commissions is to uncover facts and provide new perspectives on national history (Johnson, 2006; Verdeja, 2006: 135). Their sponsors (politicians, civil society groups, and international agencies) assume, implicitly or explicitly, that before the intervention of truth commissions, the social contestation around the past had been impaired by incomplete information, the presence of actors too biased to acknowledge the complete truth, and the absence of procedures and institutions to reinstate agreement over the facts as a precondition of public deliberation. Therefore, many truth commissions have incentives to redefine the terms of the debate to challenge the ongoing reconstructions of the past circulating in the public sphere.

As is often witnessed in democratic transitions, the perpetrators and beneficiaries of violations prefer to live on as though nothing serious happened. Likewise, bystanders might choose to turn the page on history in the name of political stability or a narrow notion of social reconciliation (Wilde, 1999). Many victims are no longer alive, and victim-survivors are likely to face forms of social exclusion. Under those circumstances, truth commissions rupture the forced normalization of social and political life by advocating a process of coming to terms with the violent and divisive past as a precondition of recovering a shared, uncoerced public space.

The need to rupture the operation of the existing field of memory requires an external framework of reference, as the existing hegemonic frameworks cannot foster societal agreement without deceit or violence (Winter, 1995). Truth commissions work through past memories only selectively and with great difficulty. They problematize the past in ways that may upset some sectors of the population, especially the presumed perpetrators and a significant portion of uninvolved bystanders, although one important measure of truth commission success is the ability to persuade precisely those potentially hostile sectors. To overcome the forced silencing of alternative memory narratives, commissions endow victim-survivors and victims’ relatives with a historically unprecedented role in making meaning of the past. Yet, their empathetic engagement does not translate into full identification with the victims, as truth commission narratives often diverge from victims’ own explanations of causes and consequences, thereby failing to fully satisfy victims’ expectations.⁵ Thus, commissions risk alienating all concerned actors while trying to satisfy them all.

In other words, the simultaneous processes of working through existing memory narratives and suspending them complicate truth commissions’ social function. The authority associated with their claim to truth is transfigured into the need for legitimation through persuasion and agreement over the meaning of the past. Toward that end, truth commissions make strategic choices to produce historical narratives that sufficiently disrupt existing meaning frameworks without destroying the possibility of mutual understanding altogether, and needless to say, without compromising the claim to truth.

Truth commissions’ narrative strategies

Truth commission narratives make strategic interventions into the struggles for social memory, in dialogue (and contestation) with official statements, media coverage, scholarship in history and the social sciences, and the memory narratives of civil society groups, state security institutions, (sometimes) nonstate armed actors, and political parties. I identify four main narrative strategies through which truth commissions take part in the ongoing social debates: adjudication, avoidance, the claim to giving voice, and transformation. A truth commission’s final report may combine some or all of these positions.

Needless to say, the specific provisions of a commission’s mandate set limits on what it can say. Sometimes the commissioners are discouraged from adjudicating politically contentious memory debates (e.g. El Salvador), whereas in other cases they are either explicitly encouraged by the mandate (e.g. Peru) or the silences of the mandate can be interpreted by the commissioners as a window of opportunity into historical interpretation (e.g. Guatemala). Furthermore, a commission’s forensic investigation is powerfully shaped by the judicial attributes granted (and more often, not granted) by the mandate. While acknowledging the mandate constraints on commissions, however, I hold that commissioners and the staff exercise considerable agency in their choice of narrative strategies. Many commissions have surprised, and even upset, the political decision-makers who established them as limited fact-finding panels through their shocking findings, comprehensive historical narratives, and recommendations—the hostility between the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and African National Congress (Shea, 2000: 3) and the displeasure of Guatemala’s military and civilian leaders upon receiving the Historical Clarification Commission’s final report (Oglesby, 2007: 179) are two cases in point. Therefore, I treat commissions’ narrative strategies as semi-autonomous decisions made by commissioners and the staff under constraining circumstances.

Adjudication

Part of truth commissions’ memory work requires the adjudication of contending social memories. The truthfulness and accuracy of existing historical interpretations are scrutinized, and commissions confirm or disconfirm some or all the elements that make up various reconstructions of the past.

Truth commissions almost always refute the official propaganda circulating under authoritarianism and internal conflict. Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission debunked the state’s claim that the guerillas posed a serious threat to the military (Guatemala: Memory of Silence, 1999: 24). Another example comes from Uruguay’s Commission for Peace (2000–2002), which found that the majority of the victims did not participate in subversive acts, and were killed after the armed insurgency was defeated; therefore, it concluded that the practices of torture and disappearance were not in response to insurgency (Informe Final de la Comisión para la Paz (Uruguay), 2003: 46).

Aside from refuting propaganda, some truth commissions also correct widely held misperceptions. The Peruvian TRC rejected the widespread belief that the Shining Path was a typical Latin American guerilla organization using Guevarist methods to achieve its objectives. The social scientists working for the Commission explained that the inspiration behind the Shining Path movement came from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and that the group adopted a totalitarian version of Maoist doctrine, similar to the Pol Pot doctrine in Cambodia (Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Peru), 2003: Volume II, Chapter 1, 15–16)—an explanation that confirmed earlier studies on the Shining Path (Degregori, 1990; Gorriti, 1999; Starn, 1995).

The adjudication function is not limited to exposing official lies and misperceptions. Truth commissions incorporate or exclude elements from a rich array of social memories. To the extent that they adjudicate between contending memory narratives, their judgment risks political controversy. Argentina’s 1983 National Commission on the Disappeared provides contextual background on the pre-coup violence with a single sentence, written by Ernesto Sábato in the Prologue: “During the 1970s, Argentina was torn by terror from both the extreme right and the far left” (Nunca Más, 1984: Prologue). The sentence has sparked such reaction from the relatives of leftist victims that after decades of controversy, it was deleted from the prologue of the 2006 edition of the final report (Galak, 2006). Chile’s 1990–1991 TRC intervenes in the public debate over the legacy of the democratic socialist Unidad Popular government (1970–1973) experience that ended with the military coup. Drafted by the conservative historian and commission member Gonzalo Vial (Stern, 2010: 82), the commission’s context chapter sides with the right-wing memory camp that sees decline, crisis, and potential for violence in the socialist experiment. The leftist memories of political mobilization and social transformation are entirely absent from the commission’s narrative. Nonetheless, the context chapter refutes the military regime’s characterization of the post-coup period as an internal conflict.

Avoidance

Commissions sometimes make the explicit decision not to take sides. Mandate limitations may force the commissioners to avoid judgment. At times, commissioners themselves prefer not to take a stance: the issue at hand may be considered irrelevant to the commission’s work, the commissioners may declare themselves unfit to assert their points of view, or the commission may find the issue too controversial to take the risk of making a judgment.

Avoidance should not be understood as the absence of historiography. In the formulation of Michael Ignatieff (1996), truth commissions limit the range of permissible lies—and truths for that matter. Accordingly, a truth commission’s decision not to intervene into the debates over social memory defines issue areas in which the commission puts no restrictions on the struggle for social memory. Divergent positions enjoy equal legitimacy and truth value from the commission’s perspective. In other words, if commissions generally set limits on what can be said, then the strategy of avoidance identifies those parts of the past for which there is no limit on what can be said.

For example, El Salvador’s Commission on the Truth (1992–1993), established by the Mexico Peace Accords that ended the conflict between the government and the guerillas, was composed of non-nationals. As a result, the commissioners devoted themselves to documenting abuses, confining historical explanation to several paragraphs. They simply declared the commission uninterested (or unable) to pass judgment on Salvadoran history (From madness to hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: report of the commission on the truth for El Salvador, 1993: “Recommendations”).

Chile’s National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation (1990–1991) decided not to comment on the legitimacy of the military coup of 1973 and the accomplishments or failures of the military regime. The final report declares that Chileans can have “legitimate disagreements” on those issues (Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, vol. I, 1993: 64). Presumably, the polarization of the Chilean society over the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship led the commissioners to take a cautious approach. In fact, the composition of the commission itself reflects the deep divisions over memory: the truth commission was split between centrist and left-leaning human rights advocates, and sympathizers of the Pinochet regime. The commissioners sought to ensure consensus within the panel by refraining “from taking a stand on whether the use of force on September 11, 1973, and immediately thereafter was legitimate” (Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, vol. I, 1993: 31).

Giving voice

One of the key claims of truth commissions is to give voice to those experiences and memories that were forced into silence and oblivion. The appeal of truth commissions as tools of transitional justice and the preservation of historical memory owes partly to the fact that post-conflict societies face serious obstacles to instituting processes of dialogue free of intimidation, exclusion, and manipulation (Crocker, 1999: 18). The systematic exclusion of persons and social groups from struggles for memory threatens the very truthfulness of publicly circulated narratives. Ideally, commissions take into account the relations of political, cultural, and socioeconomic domination that prevent victimized individuals and communities from having access to state institutions, civil society organizations, the media, and the academia. In other words, they seek to transcend the existing field of social memory simply by granting access and visibility to hitherto silenced individuals and social groups.

Therefore, commissions frequently bring into light those voices that otherwise remain excluded from public debates: “[T]hose largely in favour of the [South African] TRC, argue that the TRC will heal the wounds of the past through survivors telling their stories to sympathetic individuals who, for the first time, will acknowledge their real pain” (Hamber, 1996). Almost every final report has chapters devoted to addressing the needs and grievances of victims, and a number of procedures, including confidential testimony-taking sessions and public hearings, are specifically designed to give voice to victim-survivors and victims’ relatives.⁶

Commentators note commissions’ substantial (if limited) success in promoting official recognition of victimhood by incorporating the narratives of affected persons into national memory (Fletcher and Weinstein, 2002). Fiona Ross (2006) notes that “individual experiences of suffering were harnessed to the imaginative work of forging a new public imaginary and sociality” in the work of the South African TRC (p. 326; for a similar account of Chile’s commission, see: Lira, 1997: 229). Based on their observations in Peru, Lisa Laplante and Kimberly Theidon (2007) note that, for many victims, the truth commission was the first (and probably only) platform where “they received recognition from a state entity, and were treated with interest and respect” (p. 238).

Parallel to their orientation for victims, truth commissions offer a platform for perpetrators to come forward to testify. Confessional narratives can be thought of as giving voice in a different way: they bring new voices into the public debate by overcoming self-concealment rather than forced silence and exclusion (Fletcher and Weinstein, 2002). Even under auspicious circumstances, however, a small number of perpetrators testify before truth commissions. Among those who do, some reproduce self-justifying tropes of heroism and sacrifice, while few others add elements of confession, repentance and apology into their narratives, thereby unsettling fixed positions on the struggles for social memory (Payne, 2008; for a critical take on the practice of incentivizing perpetrators to testify, see Moon, 2008, 91–114). Despite the prevalence of the reconciliation discourse that emphasizes mutual respect and acknowledgment between victims, perpetrators and bystanders as a crucial step for forging lasting peace, the majority of individual and institutional actors associated with past abuses have either kept silent or reacted to commissions’ findings and conclusions in angry and dismissive words. As a result, truth commissions remain a predominantly victim-centered transitional justice mechanism.

Transformation

Truth commissions do not merely address existing memory narratives, causal explanations, and justifications. They sometimes transform the public debate by incorporating novel vocabularies, narratives, and explanations. As stated earlier, the transformative potential allows a truth commission to challenge the limitations arising from its social embeddedness.

In what ways do truth commission narratives try to move beyond the constraints intrinsic to the circumstances of their creation? The primary source for the transformative narrative strategy is employing the increasingly transnational language of human rights and transitional justice. The subject and the primary addressee of the truth commission narrative is the nation. Yet, commissions pay close attention to the moral and legal vocabulary of international human rights norms, and occasionally invoke this vocabulary to move beyond the historiographies anchored in national discourse.⁷

For example, Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification has attempted to transform the public debate through its conclusion that the military committed “acts of genocide” against the Mayan population (Guatemala: Memory of Silence, 1999, Conclusion 122). The final report makes direct reference to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to reach this conclusion. It also assigns responsibility to the Guatemalan state for failing to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide. The moral force of the word genocide perhaps accentuates the Commission’s suggestion that Guatemalans rethink the racist, discriminatory, and violent foundations of the political order (Grandin, 2005).

The silences of truth commission narratives

The silences of a text should not be considered the absence of narrative; to the contrary, conscious and unconscious exclusions may be as constitutive of historiography as the written text. In fact, the commissioners and the staff adopt specific case selection and analysis methods to conduct forensic investigation, make sense of the data through particular meaning frameworks and vocabularies, and shape historical narratives with their values, worldviews and interests (see Wilson, 2001: 33–61, for an excellent account of the “technologies of truth” employed by the South African TRC). Therefore, the final reports necessarily exhibit selective and exclusionary features—needless to say, with significant variations across truth commissions.

The decision-makers who establish the truth commission partly account for historiographical exclusions. Most truth commission mandates do not allow the final report to identify perpetrators. Therefore, commissions usually produce something less than the “complete truth,” that is, the identification of the criminal act, the harmed individuals, and the perpetrators (Stanley, 2005). Narrow definitions of human rights violations may also bias the reconstruction of the past. For example, the mandate of South Africa’s TRC (1995–1998) allows the investigation of only those crimes that had been committed with a “political motive.” This definition supports the recognition of political activists in the resistance movement as victims, but not the sufferers of the everyday functioning of apartheid (Mamdani, 2002: 38). Limitations on the remit may likewise create gender bias (Nesiah, 2006): a truth commission asked to investigate cases of death and disappearance exclusively is likely to put emphasis on young, male victims, which in turn means that women’s experiences of suffering and vulnerability (e.g. as widows and orphans facing poverty and social exclusion) are written out of history.

Periodization plays an enormous role in shaping the historical narratives, as well. For example, the truth commissions in Chad, Sri Lanka and Haiti have analyzed only a portion of the acts and patterns of political violence because their mandates imposed firm restrictions on the start date of investigation. Arbitrary cutoff dates inevitably produce truncated histories of violence⁸ and trigger the suspicion of intentional bias. Social and political actors dispute a specific periodization because it has serious implications for which violations are under investigation, which individual and institutional actors are held responsible for the violations, and how the commission will narrativize the past. For example, Nigeria’s Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (1999–2002) was initially asked to investigate violations under the previous military governments between 1984 and 1999, which excluded the dictatorial first term of the president-elect Olusegun Obasanjo. Pressure from the human rights community led the government to extend the periodization (Yusuf, 2007).

Mandate constraints notwithstanding, the commissioners and the staff exercise considerable discretion over the content of the historical narrative, and consequently, its exclusions. Their decision often determines whether or not a truth commission will produce a comprehensive and inclusionary historical narrative. For example, the members of Chile’s 1990 commission decided to write a short context chapter on the immediate causes of the military coup, overlooking the possibility of explaining the socioeconomic, political-institutional and cultural factors underlying political conflict (Grandin, 2005). In contrast, Peru’s TRC (2001–2003) brought together famous social scientists and human rights advocates as commissioners, to produce a comprehensive and methodologically pluralistic social history of the country, interconnected by a central narrative, and spanning nine volumes (Cueva, 2004; Milton, 2007).

Some exclusions happen when commissions fail to give voice despite their best efforts to be all-inclusive and empowering, especially toward the victims. Technical difficulties make it impossible to reach all the affected. For example, the Peruvian commission failed to take testimonies in faraway Andean villages. The social climate of fear and mistrust also prevents victims from testifying in those regions recovering from a prolonged period of violence. The lack of resources forced Chad’s truth commission to set up its offices in a former secret police detention center, where an important number of torture and killings had taken place. As a result, many victims did not come forward to testify.⁹ Furthermore, social relations of domination, whether or not immediate products of violence, block vulnerable persons’ access to a commission, as their social superiors claim the right to speak for them. The Regional Commission in East Timor (2002–2005) could not contact women during the testimonial process because when the commissioners arrived at villages, male heads of household directed them (Stanley, 2005: 590). Complicating the picture is the fact that commissioners sometimes fail to understand the nature of victimization and to devise strategies to reach out for victims. Early commissions’ failure to conceptualize sexual violence as a category of violation distinct from torture is one such example.

Several commentators have criticized truth commissions on the grounds that their historical narratives focus too much on individualized criminal acts at the exclusion of the mundane operation of violations and injustice. Mamdani points out that “from the outset, there was a strong tendency in the [South African] TRC not only to dehistoricize and decontextualize the story of apartheid but also to individualize the wrongs done by apartheid” (Mamdani, 2002: 57; original emphasis). Millions of citizens who had suffered from the regime’s practices of coerced labor, forced removal, and racial discrimination were excluded from the TRC’s broader historical narrative.

Mamdani’s criticism sheds light on a greater phenomenon that seems to have afflicted most truth commissions: overemphasis on forensic investigation excludes from historiographical interpretation those cultural, socioeconomic, ethno-linguistic, racialized, and gendered social hierarchies and relations of domination that produce and perpetuate inequality, discrimination and violence. As Mamdani notes, the apartheid system violated “subsistence rights” as much as “bodily integrity rights”; yet the TRC fails to acknowledge this aspect of repression. Similarly, the Southern Cone dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s committed massive violations of bodily integrity rights in the context of ambitious economic liberalization projects that left significant portions of society under conditions of poverty, unemployment, and vulnerability (Winn, 2004). However, truth commissions in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay have not addressed these social and economic factors either as the underlying cause or consequence of political repression.

Another major source of exclusion for truth commission narratives is their methodological nationalism.¹⁰ The political and symbolic space designated by truth commissions is the nation (and the nation-state). Political violence and human rights violations are defined as a national problem, requiring data collection and historical analysis primarily at the national level, ultimately to promote nationwide self-reflection and reconciliation. Methodological nationalism generates serious exclusions. First and foremost, regional and global political factors are rarely taken into account. Even when the forensic investigation points to a high degree of regional cooperation across repressive regimes (e.g. the Southern Cone in the 1970s) and the responsibility of non-national actors, such as multinational corporations or foreign governments, most commissions do not broaden their factual investigation beyond the national scope. At most, they mention the responsibility of foreign actors in passing.¹¹

This summary of the shortcomings and exclusions of truth commissions takes the discussion of this article back to where it started: truth commissions are established, usually during political transitions, as a mechanism for coming to terms with a violent and divisive past, and as such, they are part of a larger national reconstruction project. As critics of the transitional justice paradigm suggest, the context in which truth commissions produce historical narratives is one of “nation-building and an hegemonic project of state formation” (Wilson, 2001, xvi). One can argue that the potential for political and discursive violence is lurking at this founding moment of national reconstruction (Bartley, 2009). The seemingly radical project of rethinking and criticizing the national past through truth commissions perhaps serves to affirm Pierre Nora’s assertion that the nation and its political institutions frame collective memory under modern conditions—what he calls the mémoire-nation (Nora, 1989, 1996). Various commissions have excluded key events, historical figures and forms of human suffering from their historical accounts, which raises the suspicion that the project of nation-building through remembrance is a contemporary version of Renan’s famous association of willed forgetting and national (re)imagination.

However, it is also crucial to take into account those truth commissions that try to produce the most inclusionary and complex historical narrative possible. Many commissions, even those established for narrow political ends, have surprised and upset their sponsors with their findings, historical explanations and recommendations. Rather than losing faith in truth commissions altogether, explaining variations across commissions helps us to understand better the conditions under which truth commissions assume a transformative role in reinterpreting the nation’s history.

Conclusion

Almost all commissions have dealt with the challenges of understanding and narrativizing violent and potentially divisive pasts, although there are variations across commissions in terms of the political circumstances under which they work and the strategies they employ. Historically truth commissions emerged when the social communication over the meaning of the past failed. Some people did not know about the basic facts of human rights violations, either because facts were concealed or because they chose to ignore them. Even when the facts were known, radical disagreement over their meaning threatened mutual understanding. Life-shattering experiences of a significant portion of the citizenry were considered by their compatriots to be minor events—collateral damage of political conflict. The beneficiaries and sufferers of the past simply did not have venues for dialogue and contestation, not least as a result of the power asymmetries involved.

The politically troubling implications of the breakdown in social communication has led decision-makers, often under civil society pressure, to intervene indirectly by endowing a temporary body, the truth commission, with the moral and procedural authority to discover and publicize the truth about the past. Truth commissions necessarily take their truth claim very seriously, not only as a scholarly but also as a moral and political matter. This moral–political character explains why truth commission narratives activate society-wide processes of contestation in democracies and democratizing regimes. However, those same processes of social contestation threaten the legitimacy of such hegemonic truth-finding institutions as truth commissions. In other words, truth commissions fully expose the ethical and political implications of historiography, but this undertaking paradoxically puts their own basis of legitimacy at stake.

Thus, truth commissions constitute their legitimacy performatively as they narrativize the nation’s past. The realization that larger society does not grant them a priori legitimacy leads them to make efforts to bridge the breach between those political and social actors who establish and advocate them, and those who question their accuracy, usefulness and legitimacy. The authoritative claim to truth goes hand in hand with the need for persuasion as the basis of commissions’ legitimacy, which drives many commissions to develop narrative strategies in the interstices of embeddedness and transcendence with respect to the field of social memory.

Critics have rightly pointed out that some commissions have risked putting the quest for historical truth in the service of the political project of national reconstruction and reconciliation. While it should be acknowledged that the strategic interventions and silences of commissions have ruled out many alternative memories (and along with them, visions of future), it is also wrong to reduce commission narratives to politically usable reconstructions of the past. Even when an incoming government and a truth commission tended to share a narrow and politically expedient notion of reconciliation (e.g. Chile and South Africa) or a government intentionally deprived the commission of resources to curb its authority (e.g. Guatemala and Nigeria), the commissioners and staff surprised and upset governments, as well as other political and military leaders, through their findings, historical explanations and recommendations. It is not their social and political embeddedness, or their deconstructive and transformative potential, but rather the interplay of these forces, that characterizes truth commissions’ struggle for truth and memory.

Footnotes

Notes

Author biography

Onur Bakiner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Seattle University. His research and teaching interests include transitional justice, human rights and judicial politics, particularly in Latin America and the Middle East.

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