Abstract
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.
Introduction
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are human rights mechanisms for post-conflict reconstruction. They investigate gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law and seek to uncover the truth in the absence of independent judicial systems (Roper & Barria, 2009). They seek restorative justice, which focuses on the rehabilitation of the perpetrators through reconciliation with the victims. TRCs hence offer a platform for victims and perpetrators to share their experiences in an endeavour to understand the nature of the conflict and to repair the social fabric damaged by the conflict (Androff, 2010).
The documentation these TRCs create has the power to continue this truth telling and reconciliation work into the future, but it is often not utilised in this way. Instead, it can be under-catalogued, restricted by access laws or neglected in suboptimal conditions. In this position paper, I will outline the issues and call on the archival community to act.
Before I became a trained researcher, the first article that I wrote was about the documentation of the Sierra Leonean TRC. My work as a Research Administrator for a Post-Conflict Program had exposed me to the challenges of its documentation. The Sierra Leonean TRC documentation (Svärd, 2007) was left packed in boxes in a room at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, with a database stored on a DVD. In such a state, the documentation was left out of reach of the people it had been generated for. From then on, I began researching African TRCs’ documentation processes. Thirteen years have elapsed since my first article on the theme but the challenges that I identified then are still omnipresent.
Last October, during the International Council on Archives (ICA) conference in Adelaide, Australia, I presented a paper on the Liberian TRC documentation that was removed out of the country and sent to the USA for fear of its destruction. After my presentation I met colleagues from the Public Records Office in Gambia, a country that is currently pursuing a commission ambitiously named the “Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission.” They shared with me that my presentation had opened their eyes regarding the documentation challenges that will accrue from the Gambian process but that they did not know where to start, being excluded from the process to date. This lack of a professional archival presence in the Gambian TRC process confirmed that TRCs’ documentation issues continue to be a challenge, with little consideration for the uses people could make of it into the future.
Mnjama (2008) who is Professor at the Department of Library and Information Studies at the University of Botswana argued that to avoid amnesia, the past must be documented and that Africa needed champions to do this. Since 1997, the United Nations Human Rights Commission has taken measures to ensure that records documenting human rights violations are captured and preserved. Measures such as the Joinet/Orentlicher Principles were adopted by the Commission and relate to the protection and promotion of human rights and include the collection, preservation and access to records. Jones and Oliveira (2016) were also of the view that archives that document human rights abuses are part of the broader social and political contexts but that access and use were still problematic. They proposed an alternative conceptualization of the TRC archives as new democratic spaces; participation/ownership and state-society relations. They contended that such an approach would transform TRC archives into spaces of interaction between the society and the state and would facilitate the development of a broader culture of human rights. The TRC documentation should be managed and used in a manner that fosters remembering, an understanding of the conflict and to promote reconciliation. It should also inform policy making to address the socio-economic and political deficits rooted in the abusive regimes of the past. Huge investments have been made in African TRC processes but unfortunately research shows that the management of TRC documentation is never sufficiently planned for and their findings are not effectively disseminated or diffused into post-conflict societies (Svärd 2007, Svärd 2013).
The South African and Liberian TRCs
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) was established by the South African government according to the terms of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34 of 1995. It was based in Cape Town and concluded its work in 1998 with a presentation of its final report. Its mission was to reconcile the people of South Africa and to uncover the truth about the atrocities that were committed during the apartheid era (VanAntwerpen, 2011, Campbell, 2000 and Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, Vol. I., 1998). The TRC was meant to foster forgiveness through the creation of a platform where the victims of apartheid violence testified publicly, and the perpetrators confessed and applied for amnesty. Its mandate however excluded investigations of the impact of the Apartheid system’s racial policies of socio-economic engineering such as; land dispossession and forced removals, restrictions on movement and the denial of the right to vote. The SATRC was under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Henry, 2007, VanAntwerpen, 2011, Campbell, 2000).
Van der Walt et al. (2003) argued that national unity and reconciliation in South Africa was pursued at the expense of economic, social and psychological reparations to the majority of South Africans. VanAntwerpen (2011) also confirmed that the SATRC core narrative has been vigorously and repeatedly criticized because of its approach, which embraced amnesty and forgiveness and theological articulations. He argued that there were two ways of looking at reconciliation; one which connoted a process of transformation of social relations and another as some form of resignation to the existing order of things. The SATRC was critiqued for creating a sophisticated amnesia of the greater structural and historical violence of apartheid by only focusing on human rights violations from 1960 onwards.
The Liberian TRC was established through the signing of the Liberia Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) by all parties involved in the Liberian conflict. Article 23 of the CPA defined the commission’s mandate as providing a forum where both the victims and perpetrators could recount their experiences in an effort to address the problem of those who committed acts of violence with impunity during the war and facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation. The act was passed by the National Transitional Legislative Assembly on 12 May 2005, and on 20 February 2006, it was implemented by president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who was then president of Liberia (James-Allen et al., 2010). The TRC was launched on 22 June 2006 to investigate the root causes of the crises that led to the massive violation of human rights in Liberia. The TRC carried out its work for a period of 3 years and in 2009 finally published a report. The Liberian TRC was widely considered a compromise between the warring parties who wanted to avoid prosecution. When the report came out, it raised a lot of controversy which overshadowed some of the important recommendations such as recommendations to ensure reparations, memorialization and community reconciliation (James-Allen et. al, 2010).
Freedom of information laws and the challenges
Both the South African and Liberian TRCs took place before the enactment of freedom of information laws. In today’s information society where information has become the fuel that drives all human activities and development, governments are expected to be transparent, accountable and inclusive. The right to access government information promotes civil, political and socio-economic rights (Peekhaus, 2014). Many governments have therefore adopted Freedom of Information Access Laws. The TRC documentation should therefore be made available to the electorate according to the legal framework that governs access to government information. South Africa enacted The Promotion of Access to Information Act in 2001 and it applies to the records of both public and private bodies. Berliner (2017) however argued that despite the strong design of PAIA, there were problems of implementation and compliance.
In 2010, Liberia enacted a Freedom of Information Act to promote access to government information. Despite the enactment of the Act, there were barriers to its implementation, including low literacy levels, lack of political will and information infrastructure to promote access. According to a project funded by Omidyar, Sida, UKaid and USAID that uses open source freedom of information platform to facilitate citizens’ access to government information that was conducted 2014–2016, many people in Liberia did not know how to use the Act and the responsiveness of government institutions was poor. Both countries therefore have a legal framework that should facilitate access to the TRC documentation, but largely does not.
The documentation and its use
The SATRC documentation according to the data that I collected in 2016 and a visit I paid to the National Archives was well taken care of and in an archival setting with regulated temperatures. The people that I spoke to shared that the real worry were the electronic records because the national archives had the paper and the audio-visual records, but the electronic records were kept by the Department of Justice (DOJ). The electronic records might no longer be readable because as far as the respondents knew, the last audit was done in 2003 and at that point, several of the files were not readable. Kenosi’s (2008) had also earlier confirmed that the National Archives of South Africa was experiencing major problems with regard to the preservation of audiovisual records. This complicated full access to the documentation. He postulated that the true contribution of these records to accountability can only be achieved through the citizens’ access to them and lamented that lack of access was likely to have long-term repercussions regarding issues such as compensation to the victims.
The SATRC’s vision was for its archives to become an instrument to support continuing reconciliation work. It recommended that its materials should be digitized and used in all kinds of creative ways undergirded by freedom of information. The documentation was not being optimally used at the time of my visit. My informants confirmed that many ordinary people did not know about the TRC process and that the use of the TRC documentation was by the people with resources and prerequisite skills to utilize it. Though the national archives only provided physical access to the TRC records, it was the Department of Justice (DOJ) that determined whether the requested documents could be made available to requesters. This was because technically, the legislation that established the TRC had a clause, which stipulated that its assets had to devolve to the Department of Justice. The assets included the TRC records and the National Archives of South Africa Act only required the transfer of the records after 20 years. It is now 21 years since the TRC ended and it is hoped that the National Archives will get the mandate to regulate access to the records.
I visited Liberia in 2016 during the pursuit of my post-doctoral research and was received by the Governance Commission. I also visited the Human Rights Commission that was established to continue with the work of the Liberian TRC. My conversations with both the Director of the Governance Commission and one of the Commissioners at the Human Rights Commission confirmed that they did not know where the TRC documentation was. I informed them that it had been transferred to St. George Technical College in Atlanta, USA and that there was no copy of the documentation in Liberia. Liberia had made history by becoming the first sovereign state to hand over its entire TRC documentation to a foreign power, the USA. Svärd (2013) had argued that the Liberian TRC took place amidst a couple of challenges such as lack of well-functioning information institutions that could have facilitated the management and use of the its documentation, freedom of information legislation and poor information management skills. The state of the Liberian archives was also described by Osborne (2009) who wrote that after the two decades of civil war, the country faced the challenges of preservation and maintenance of important documents. The archives had been severely compromised during the civil war period. My visit to the National Archives Centre of Liberia in 2016 confirmed Osborne’s observation. These challenges could, together with the lack of political will to embrace the TRC findings, inform our understandings of why the TRC documentation was removed from Liberia and sent to the USA.
The publication of the draft report of the Liberian TRC on 30 June 2009 created confusion and tension. The report was jettisoned instead of being used to open up the public debate on its relevance to post-war reconciliation and access to government information in postwar Liberia. The TRC for example recommended that the incumbent president of Liberia and some of the perpetrators of the conflict who are now in power step down from government office and leave politics (Svärd, 2013). The reaction towards the TRC report made the Chairman of the TRC, Jerome Verdier, to take a quick decision to send the entire documentation to the USA. During my visit of 2016, I had a conversation with one of the Commissioners who confirmed that Ellen Johansson Sirleaf’s government showed no interest in the TRC documentation. The TRC Chairman explained his decision thus:
“As a responsible institution, we had no alternative” than to send the archives to Georgia Tech. As it ended its mandate, the TRC was receiving threats. This was not the only, or indeed main reason why the archives had to be sent elsewhere. The government had no plan for what should happen to these “very, very important” documents and there were financial problems. The lease on the TRC building had run out, the government refused to pay the rent, and it was threatened with eviction. Leaving the archives there could expose them to insecurity and possibly destruction.” (Crawford, 2020 p. 1).
The agreement between the TRC, the government of Liberia and Georgia Tech Library that is currently housing the TRC documentation and dated 1 June 2010 expired last year but the Liberian government has not made any claims yet to repossess the documentation. It is also stated in the agreement that Georgia Tech Library can only release the documentation after establishing that it can securely be shipped back to Liberia. According to the agreement, the documentation was supposed to be digitized and copies sent back to Liberia but this has not been realized yet (Crawford, 2010). Again, the documentation is not available to the people who were to be reconciled by the processes that produced it.
Discussion and conclusion
TRCs are usually established in the absence of adequate judicial systems. The objective of TRCs is to document human rights violations and to give both the victims and perpetrators a platform to recount their experiences. Establishing the truth through the research that TRCs carry out is expected to create an understanding of the nature of the conflict and facilitate the mending of traumatized societies. The resulting documentation should promote democracy if used in policy making to address the social, economic and political inequalities. The documentation, if well used is supposed to keep the electorate informed about the recommendations that are made by the TRCs. That way, the citizens can interrogate governments on their implementation. The documentation is further the basis upon which reparations can be paid. In some instances, the documentation is required for pursuit of justice. Access to the TRCs’ documentation is therefore of crucial importance to post-conflict reconstruction and should be a prioritized issue. Access to the TRC documentation requires an information infrastructure that is robust to promote the use of information that is not classified and to safeguard classified information.
In the South African case, it was only people with the resources and information skills that could access the documentation. Though the documentation was well preserved at the National Archives of South Africa, all South Africans were not optimally using it as the TRC had recommended. There was also a challenge of managing the electronic records that are in the custody of Department of Justice. In Liberia, the Independent Human Rights Commission that was supposed to carry out the follow-up work of the TRC did not know where the documentation was. It was carrying on with its work in the absence of the TRC documentation which is currently at St. Georgia Tech Library.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in post-conflict societies are established with the support of the international community. This is during a time when post-government institutions (like in the case of the Liberian TRC) lack capacity in the form of information institutions that are fully equipped to manage the generated documentation. What needs to be done is to include a budget that can cater for the effective management and archiving of the generated documentation. This requires an information management infrastructure with rules and regulations for access, information systems and human resources. Information is key to reconciliation and post-conflict reconstruction but it is never prioritized. The victims who are documented by the TRCs should be put at the centre of the documentation processes. The documentation should be availed to all citizens for education purposes. It is the citizens that are the true owners of the documentation. The documentation constitutes knowledge that should be diffused into the post-conflict societies to encourage further research into the challenges faced by post-conflict societies.
The current trend of politicizing the TRC documentation has turned TRCs into meaningless tools in the eyes of the victims who contribute to the documentation. TRCs continue to be implemented on the African continent despite the fact that the documentation is kept out of reach of the citizens and the findings are insufficiently diffused into the post-conflict societies. Lack of access to the documentation demonstrates lack of respect for the victims who contributed to it. They emerge as losers especially in the absence of reparations.
TRCs employ different professions in the pursuit of their missions. One profession that is often missing are the archivists or information managers. I believe that the challenges of managing the TRCs documentation could be mitigated through the involvement of the archival community since it would focus on the creation, capture, management and re-use of the documentation. This perspective is often missing. The archival community therefore needs to engage with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions whenever they are sanctioned. This would help post-conflict societies with some of the problems that surround the TRCs’ documentation. I therefore call upon the International Council on Archives and the archival community to prioritize the issue of the African TRCs’ documentation. The archival community’s skills are badly needed if the status quo is to change.