Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver?

by Audrey R. Chapman, Hugo van der Merwe

Overview

As nations throughout the world emerge from periods of human rights abuses, systematic oppression, and collective violence, truth commissions have become indispensable to political transition. Such commissions are established as temporary bodies to investigate human rights violations and patterns of violence that occurred over a specified period of time. Their goal is to document conflict—to recover the truth—as a first step toward healing.

Of the truth commissions to date, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has most effectively captured public attention throughout the world and provided the model for succeeding bodies. Although other truth commissions had preceded its establishment, the TRC had a far more expansive mandate: to go beyond truth-finding to promote national unity and reconciliation, to facilitate the granting of amnesty to those who made full factual disclosure, to restore the human and civil dignity of victims by providing them an opportunity to tell their own stories, and to make recommendations to the president on measures to prevent future human rights violations.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa provides a comprehensive evaluation of the TRC process and its impact on South African society. Based on a six-year study, the volume draws on an analysis of the victim hearings, amnesty hearings, institutional hearings, public opinion survey data, and extensive interviews with a range of TRC staff, people who worked with the commission, and members of different communities affected by the TRC. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa raises fundamental questions about the TRC, indeed about all truth commissions, their abilities to realize the mandates assigned to them, and particularly to achieve the difficult balance between truth-finding and reconciliation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812240597
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	02/01/2008
Series:	Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Audrey R. Chapman is Joseph M. Healey, Jr. Endowed Chair in Medical Humanities and Ethics and Professor in the Department of Community Medicine and Health Services at the University of Connecticut Health Center. Hugo van der Merwe is Programme Manager of the Transitional Justice Programme at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa.

Table of Contents

Preface   Audrey R. Chapman   Hugo van der Merwe     vii
Introduction: Assessing the South African Transitional Justice Model   Audrey R. Chapman   Hugo van der Merwe     1
The Victim Hearings
What Survivors Say About Justice: An Analysis of the TRC Victim Hearings   Hugo van der Merwe     23
The TRC's Approach to Promoting Reconciliation in the Human Rights Violations Hearings   Audrey R. Chapman     45
Perspectives on the Role of Forgiveness in the Human Rights Violations Hearings   Audrey R. Chapman     66
Amnesty Hearings
An Evaluation of the South African Amnesty Process   Jeremy Sarkin     93
The Impact of the TRC's Amnesty Process on Survivors of Human Rights Violations   Timothy Sizwe Phakathi   Hugo van der Merwe     116
Truth Findings
Levels of Truth: Macro-Truth and the TRC   Audrey R. Chapman   Patrick Ball     143
Truth Recovery Through the TRC's Institutional Hearings Process   Audrey R. Chapman     169
Responses to the TRC
Object of Trust and Hatred: Public Attitudes Toward the TRC   Gunnar Theissen     191
Reaping What You Sow: Political Parties, the TRC, and the Quest for Truth and Reconciliation   Piers Pigou     217
Conclusion
Did theTRC Deliver?   Hugo van der Merwe   Audrey R. Chapman     241
Reflections on the South African Experience   Audrey R. Chapman   Hugo van der Merwe     280
Notes     301
List of Contributors     337
Index     339