I’m at the analytical place in my book on strategies that three African countries used to address the legacies of recently-past conflicts where I want to try to put the whole, 15-plus-year phenomenon of truth commissions into some kind of comprehensible political context.
My earlier hypothesis was that the whole TC phenomenon grew up in a mainly European-cultured context (European-cultured elites in Latin America; actual Europeans in east and central Europe), and that originally they were deployed mainly in the context of a fairly well infrastructured society making a marked transition from authoritarian rule to democracy… But that then, over time– and especially after the notable prominence of the South African TRC!– lots of people in very different circumstances around the world got it into their heads that hey, this looks like a good mechanism, let’s try it!
Especially since the Ford Foundation and various other massive US-based foundations have put lots of real mega-$$ into various projects around the world that sought to emulate the SA TRC.
I’m not against the deployment of TRCs. (Far better than deploying troops, cruise missiles, or armies of international prosecutors into recent or continuing war zones, don’t you think?) I just want to look at the developments over time in the way this mechanism has been used, and perhaps to start an assessment of what it has achieved and what it hasn’t achieved.
One of the ironies of the whole international “fame” of the SA TRC was that, as far as I can understand it, the whole thing came about as a result of a rushed and rather messy political compromise that was forced onto the ANC right in the middle of the holding of SA’s landmark, four-day-long 1994 elections…
Basically, the security forces went up to the ANC negotiators and said, “H’mm, nice little elections you’ve got going there. Wouldn’t it be a pity if we found we couldn’t hold back the White hotheads from disrupting them for you, huh? Oh, and by the way, we really still do need some amnesty for our people in the event this democratization thing should work out. How about it, huh?”
Later, with huge help from Archbishop Tutu, the whole TRC venture got packaged as– and actually, in many ways, became– this “visionary”, wonderful, spirit-led process that everyone throughout the world worshiped and wanted to emulate. History’s a funny thing, eh?
… So anyway, I thought I should try to compile all the basic info I would need to make a judgment about the political contexts in which TCs have been used in various places around the world, and see if some trends emerg over time. Here’s the chart I made today.
Comments? Suggestions?
Author: Helena
Meanwhile in Palestine and Israel
I went to hear Dennis Ross giving a presentation today. Dennis was the person who was in charge of the Palestinian-Israeli “file” for the first Prez Bush, and then for two terms of President Clinton. He is a fairly hard-headed person who pursues a manipulative and paternalistic approach to peacemaking, but I have to admit that a personal level I like the guy. When I was researching my book on the Syrian-Israeli peace talks of 1991-96, he was very helpful and gave me an intelligent and thoughtful interview for the project.
It was the way he talked about the Iranian nuclear program that provoked me into the thoughts that I blogged about here. But mainly, I’ve been thinking about what he said about the current opportunities in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
He was quite clear in arguing that this time around, unlike in 2003, the US should absolutely not let Abu Mazen down. “We have an enormous stake in having Abu Mazen show that his way ‘works’,” he said at one point. I agree.
Well, there were many parts of what Dennis said that I quite agreed with. But there were other aspects that, in different circumstances I would definitely have challenged. For example, he talked about the need to have some kind of a monitoring mechanism for any hudna (ceasefire) if it is to work– but was talking solely in terms of having a US institution do the monitoring.
Hey, what about the Quartet, Dennis?
Well, he did mention the possibility of the “Multi-National” Force now in Sinai having a role in some of the monitoring. But that force is nearly 100% American at this point.
Also, he said that, “Just about everybody knows what the shape of a workable deal looks like: it looks much like the Clinton Plan of late 2000.”
Well, yes, maybe…. But as he noted, Prez Bush is not on board that approach yet. Plus, even if he were, he would still need to have a clear strategy for how to bring Sharon (or another Israeli leader) around to it as well. Or even, how bring the Israelis to comply with Bush’s own baby, the ‘Road Map’, for starters. Dennis didn’t mention any of those real challenges…
Nuclear disarmament: a reminder
President Bush and Condi Rice have been stepping up their rhetoric against Iran, accusing the regime there of being undemocratic (true) and of harboring ambitions to acquire a nuclear arsenal (unknowable).
I think it’s time to go back and give the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) a good, close reading, and to think a lot harder about what role we want nuclear arsenals to play in our world. The treaty is still, of course, in force.
First then, its text. To be precise, Article 6, to which the US like all other parties to the treaty is subject:
- Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.
What does the wording of this article tell us about the kind of role that people back in 1968, when the treaty was signed, wanted to see nuclear weapons playing in world affairs?
And what role, actually, do we want to see nuclear weapons play today?
Faiza’s view of elections
I’ve been running around so much recently that I hadn’t checked Faiza’s blog for a while. I should have. Last Friday she posted this, about the elections. She’s as wise as usual.
She was writing from Amman, where she’s been for three weeks or so now, doing some business but also taking a break from the uncertainties inside Iraq.
Anyway, without further ado, over to Faiza:
- Good morning
The world is more concerned of the Iraqi elections than the poor Iraqis themselves.
People in Iraq are busy with their lives details and in solving the problems of water and electricity, and dealing with the lack of gas for cars and cooking, in addition to the daily horror of the bombed cars, explosions, death and destruction… and the gangs of thieves and kidnappers.
All of this in Iraq, while the international media stations are trying to find answers to questions like: What’s the ration of voters? Are the elections going to be held or not? Who is for the elections and who is against it? Who are the names in the winning elections lists? How many people are on each list?
Hmmmmmmm….
Question time in Iraq…
(1) Why has Iyad Allawi been acting as though he has already won the election?
(2) Why did George Bush call Allawi to “congratulate” him on the election?
(3) Why did Iraqi journalists covering the election in Baghdad and Amara get beaten up and otherwise harrassed by Iraqi security forces?
(4) Why did some polling stations report they did not get enough–or in some cases, any– ballot sheets in time for the elections, and what can be done about such irregularities?
(5) How do we feel about reports that at least some voters voted only because they thought things were still the same as in Saddam’s day, when people were badly punished for not “voting”?
(6) Why is the counting expected to take “up to ten days”, and will there be a credibly reliable and clearly documented chain of custody for all the ballot papers from the time of voting until then?
(7) Will the announced “losers” of the election have good reason to trust the integrity of the whole process, and therefore to explain to their followers that they should concede power (and patronage, and potential oil mega-$$) gracefully to the “winners”?
(8) Does anyone have any reason to believe that this election will have results much different from the much-lauded (in the US) 1967 poll in Vietnam? (Thanks to NeoDude for that link).
… Just asking.
Iraqi elections and American mirrors
It will probably be some time before it’s possible to get a good, rounded picture of what happened during today’s elections in Iraq. It will likely take the Iraqi Independent Elecoral Commission many days to provide its “count” of the vote, which would include a figure for the turnout.
But even then, given the lack of any independent observing, many questions may well remain about whether people can generally trust what the Commission reports…
I watched ABC News’s World News Sunday tonight. Peter Jennings was there in a safari jacket, reporting from somewhere in Baghdad’s Green Zone, I think. A high proportion of ABC’s reporting had a cheerleading, distinctly editorializing tone to it. On their website they feature this piece by AP writer Sally Buzbee, which starts out:
- Iraqis embraced democracy in large numbers Sunday, standing in long lines to vote in defiance of mortar attacks, suicide bombers and boycott calls…
Look, I don’t want to impugn the courage that many Iraqi voters showed as they went to the polls today. But I’m not sure that “embracing democracy” was the only– or perhaps, even, the main– thing they were doing as they went there. “Responding to an ayatollah’s command” might equally well, or even better, describe the motivations of a high proportion of the voters.
After all, simply casting a vote is not the essence of democracy. (They got to do that numerous times, under Saddam.) The essence of democracy surely lies in acting from a deep commitment to using deliberation and negotiation to resolve differences, rather than violence; and an equally deep commitment to ensuring the rights of all members of society, including (especially) those with whom one disagrees.
Maybe the people who went to the polls today in Iraq will show those characteristics. I sincerely hope so. But they did not necessarily show them today, simply by going to the voting places.
I think quite a lot of US media outlets have used Buzbee’s piece. Some have used an alternative offering from AP that doesn’t have her cheerleading tone but, more soberly, gives a series of snapshots, from six different parts of the country. Most of the snapshots were penned by people with Arab or Kurdish names.
For his part, George W. Bush saw no need to be either judicious or sober in coming out with his expression of jubilation at the “resounding success” that he claimed the election represented.
Back in October, at the time of the Afghan election, I wrote here that:
- I understand that there are many, many people in the international community who desperately want the inauguration of decent electoral demnocracy in Afghanistan and Iraq to be successful. I am myself one of them. But I fear there may be some people who are so deeply invested in the success of these elections–even though, in Afghanistan, they seemed to be held on terms very vulnerable to US manipulation–that they are prepared to overlook what in other circumstances they might clearly recognize as fatal flaws in the system.
The same is even more true today. Let’s wait and see how credible the rest of this current voting process looks, and what results it generates, before we make any judgments about its worth.
Even more to the point, let’s see whether the election leads to the emergence of an Iraqi leadership that is truly prepared to stand up to US power– and how the Bush administration peole will deal with that.
The Bushies have already drawn one key, defiant line in the sand. Brad Graham and Peter Baker reported in the WaPo today that,
- The Bush administration has for now ruled out creating a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq after today’s elections…
UNU conference on Transitional Justice
Time was, there was a nearly wall-to-wall constituency among western human-rights
advocates and other liberals for the viewpoint that any country transitioning
into democracy or out of massiveoy violent conflict should be the subject
of war-crimes trials. That was back in the mid-1990s, after the UN Security
Council had successfully set up the ad-hoc international tribunals for former-Yugoslavia
(early 1993) and Rwanda (late 1994), and people in the international h.r.
movement were well on their way to achieving their goal of establishing a
permanent International Criminal Court.
I was an enthusiastic part of that constituency. (I’ve been an Amnesty
International member for– nearly– ever, and have sat on Human Rights Watch’s
Middle East advisory committee since 1992.) But starting in late 2000, I was
one of the first people in the h.r. movement to start to raise serious questions
about whether this passion for extensive war-crimes prosecutions actually
served the human rights and interests of peole in societies trying to recover from
violent conflict.
For some of my early writings on this topic, see
this
short June 2001 piece in the London-based magazine Prospect, or
this
longer piece on the Rwanda Tribunal and the Nuremberg precedent, that ran
in Boston Review in April/May 2002.
For quite a while there, I felt that my position was extremely lonely. After
all, in the US, when I started to question the wisdom of the pro- war crimes
courts position that put me in the company of folks like the Republican
Party anti-ICC forces and assorted isolationists, “Christian Nation” freaks,
and other Manifest Destiny cheerleaders in general.
And on the “other side”, cheering on the various war crimes courts and shouting
for ever more courts and more prosecutions, were most of the people I most
admire and affiliate myself with in the world. Oh well, I thought through
the issues again and again and again, and set about trying to build and test
the empirical basis for my position by pursuing my research on three conflict-terminating
countries in Africa that all adopted very different approaches to the atrocity-response
challenge.
I was delighted last fall when Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the United
Nations University invited me to take make a presentation at a conference
that the UNU held this past week, in New York, on the theme of “The Rule of
Law and Transitional Justice: the Way Forward?” Also speaking there
were Ralph Zacklin, the Assistant UN Secretary-General for Legal Affairs;
Bill Schabas, a distinguished Canadian legal scholar who has published widely
on the law of genocide and war crimes and has helped set up a number of UN-backed
tribunals in recent years; Gerald Gahima, the former Attorney-General of Rwanda;
and various other luminaries in the field.
Delighted, but also quite a bit trepidatious. I had thought that my view
of the lack of utility–or even, on many occasions, the disutility– of war
crimes prosecutions as a way to help conflict-terminating societies address
the legacies of recently past atrocities would be very much the position of
an “outlier” in a room largely full of people dedicated to pushing forward
the prosecutions policy.
Well, maybe I should spend more time in New York. It turned out that
my views were not so much those of an outlier. The proceedings of the
discussion were generally off the record. But I was really happy to
learn how much some of the reservations that I had been expressing are also
now shared by people whom formerly I would have identified as being much
more strongly in the pro-prosecutions camp. These included both Schabas and
Gahima. At several points, conference participants made comments that
indicated that they really do “get” a number of points I have been making
repeatedly over the past four years, such as that:
- atrocity commission is in many cases very closely associated with
the incidence of bitter political conflict; therefore, an atrocity-suppression
strategy must include finding a sustainable and rights-respecting termination
of those conflicts - in the conflict-termination process it is the politics and diplomacy
of that process that is the key to its success; therefore, any “transitional
justice” or “rule of law” strategies adopted in those circumstances should
be subordinated to, and be a part of, that politics and diplomacy; such strategies
should always be pursued within a clear and pro-peacemaking political context - it is the residents of the conflict-torn territories themselves who
should be considered as the primary “stakeholders” or “constituency” for
any TJ/RL interventions; therefore, the desires and interests of other actors
in the international community should be subordinated to the needs of the
local-level stakeholders
But let me back up a little, and describe a couple of the most interesting
other things I got out of the conference…
Hamas victories, Gaza municipals
Another round of important Middle Eastern elections was held Thursday– the municipal elections in Gaza’s 25 cities, towns, and villages.
The Palestinian population of Gaza is about 1.3 million, with 80% of those people being refugees from inside Israel (or, the descendants of those original refugees from 1948, who also have refugee status and burning but still unaddressed claims against Israel basedon that. They did get to vote on Thursday.)
Hamas won 78 of the 118 seats being contested, according to this story in yesterday’s WaPo, which also spelled out that Hamas won control of seven of the ten “towns” (for which, read “towns or cities”) being contested.
The movement’s victories in Gaza follow the ones they registered in a few West Bank jurisdictions on December 23, as I posted about here.
That WaPo piece, by John Ward Anderson, is worth reading because it gives a broad but fairly well informed assessment of the meaning of the elections. The New York Times did not mention them until today, when their reporter Steven Erlanger did so in a very dismissive and classically “orientalist” way.
First of all, Erlanger only writes about the Strip having “towns and villages”, though Gaza City is very evidently a city. (Okay, Anderson did that, too.) But it’s a sort of typically orientalist/colonialist thing to do to down-grade the designators used for population centers. Many of what the Israelis call “villages” in the occupied territories or Lebanon have far greater populations than what the Israelis call “towns” inside Israel.
But instead of making his own independent assessment of the importance of the vote, or quoting one of the many very well informed Palestinian commentators on it, Erlanger’s first comment on the vote came from– you guessed it,
- a senior Israeli military official [who] said the results were not especially important, given the influence of local clans that supported slates of candidates. The vote had more to do with local issues than national policy, the official said.
And then, Erlanger did nothing to challenge, balance, or even qualify that assessment, leaving it standing as the most authoritative “analysis” he provided. All he did was add a little “local color” in the form of a quote from a Palestinian “housewife”.
Lazy journalism, or bias? Most likely, a bit of both.
The idea that in any analogous conflict, one would present the “analysis” of “a senior military official” of one of the contending powers on the internal politics of the other power to be in any way objective or authorittative would be outrageous. (Oops, it happens all the time in US reporting on Iraq. But in all cases, it’s more significant for what it tells us about the way the quoted official is trying to “spin” the situation than for what is actually happening inside the community being commented on.)
Note the reference to “clans”, which is a way of downgrading and dismissing the importance of the Palestinians’ internal political processes that the Israelis have used non-stop since 1948…
Regardless of all that spin, the internal politics really are interesting. Hamas is emerging more and more as a smart and well organized political force.
I am really glad that I have my big article on Lebanon’s Hizbullah in the works at Boston Review, since one of the reasons I wrote it was to look at Hizbullah’s political strategy as a possible predictor for what either Hamas and the Shiite parties in Iraq might do.
At this point, Hizbullah’s record seems a much better predictor for Hamas than for the Shiite parties.
Alert readers may say, “Yes, Helena, but isn’t Hamas Sunni?” Yes, indeed it is. But the coordination between it and Hizbullah has been notably strong ever since, in December 1992, Yitzhak Rabin unwittingly sent about 400 cadres from Hamas to study at “Hizbullah University” in the bare hills of South Lebanon.
That has to be one of the great ironies of history. Rabin had recently been elected PM, and he was determined– five years into the first intifada– to “teach the Palestinian militants a lesson”. (Have we heard that before?) So what he did, in a midnight raid, was round up more than 400 Palestinian militants, including many Hamas cadres, from their homes and seek to deport them all summarily to Lebanon…
Ghaith’s photo essay for the BBC
The BBC website has a good little photo essay about Iraqis’ views of the election. It’s been compiled by Raed’s friend Ghaith, which gives me a lot of confidence.
Alongside it, they have another burst of the sort of highly mediated, “blog”-like thing they did once before from Iraq. This one has some interesting material. But a disproportionate number of the (invited) “contributors” are expats–whether “contractors”, whatever that means, or at least one US military person. They don’t really seem to know much about Iraq.
So while the “blog” is a little bit interesting, it’s not nearly as interesting as Ghaith’s photo essay.
There’s a place for good journalism. There’s a place for (real) blogs. But fake blogs– h’mmm.
Kennedy gives withdrawal movement new traction
I only just got the chance to read the excellent speech that Senator Kennedy gave last night, on Iraq. It was well argued and well framed.
Much of the press commentary focused on the fact that this was the first time a U.S. Senator called clearly for a US withdrawal from Iraq. But the way he framed his argument was more nuanced, and better grounded, than that:
- The beginning of wisdom in this crisis is to define honest and realistic goals.
First, the goal of our military presence should be to allow the creation of a legitimate, functioning Iraqi government, not to dictate it.
Creating a full-fledged democracy won