Category: TJF

Jonathan Edelstein has an excellent new post over at Transitional Justice Forum on the (apparently dysfunctional?) effect of the ICC prosecutor’s recent actions on the peace talks for Northern Uganda.

That post follows up on this May 19 one from him, on the same subject. I am so glad Jonathan’s keeping his eye on the northern Uganda issue so closely because it really is one of the important early tests of the infant International Criminal Court.
Also, if you go to TJF, you will find you can now post comments there. Hurrah! My son and tech adviser is in the process of fixing the glitches in comments-posting both there and here. But at JWN, for now, I’m going to keep the comments flow on the parallel comments blog, while we see if we can install a visual comment-verification filter here.
Please, if you have an interest in the issues Jonathan or others are writing about over at TJF– or, if you have any further questions about the subjects covered there– do send in some comments there!
Again, my general apologies for glitches in comment-submission service both here and there. We do what we can. I realise it ain’t perfect.

Jonathan Edelstein and I both have new posts up at the Transitional Justice Forum blog. I put mine up last night. It’s about Serbia. Jonathan put his up today. It’s about Uganda. Amazingly, though, both deal with a number of the same tough issues, including the difficulty of negotiating between the interests of peace and those of justice, and also between the desire to punish one prominent accused perpetrator and the (peacemaking) interests of the broader community…
(The former of those dilemmas is a theme that Jonathan and I have both written quite a lot about.)
Anyway, head on over and join the discussions there.

Yesterday I wrote a post over at Transitional Justice Forum that looked at one of the high-order issues I’ve been examining in my project on post-violence policies in Rwanda, South Africa, and Mozambique.
The post is titled Meta-tasks for societies exiting from mass violence. I also briefly introduce there the idea that the interests of peacemaking and peacebuilding need to be considered in/by such societies, along with the interests of “truth” and “justice” that seem to absorb so many participants in the west-based human rights movements.
If these are topics that interest you, head on over and read the post, and do please consider contributing to the Comments-board discussion there.
Also, if you have friends or colleagues who find these topics interesting, send them the link, too. (I hope, anyway, that you’re telling everyone you know to read JWN… But the readership and definitely the participation in the Comments boards over at TJF could both use a boost… )

Over at the Transitional Justice Forum blog, Joanna Quinn yesterday put up a post about the election-related developments in haiti. She also provides some useful background about the situation there. I’m looking forward to seeing more of her work on Haiti there, too, since she did her doctoral dissertation onthe ‘Politics of Apology in Haiti and Uganda.’

Check out this post on the Saddam trial that I just put up on Transitional Justice Forum. Also, this post from last Saturday, about the recently completed report of the Morrocan truth commisiion.

Transitional Justice Forum, the group blog that I’ve been trying to crank up with help from Jonathan Edelstein and some other friends and colleagues, has gotten off to a slow but generally satisfactory start.
Yesterday, I put a new post up there about Afghanistan where earlier this week the government adopted a new transitional-justice “Action Plan”. It’s an interesting situation. Several of the parliamentarians elected to the country’s two-house “Loya Jirga” (parliament) back in September are people accused of involvement in earlier rounds of atrocitiy. As a result, many human-rights activists there are worried that the parliament– which will have its inaugural session next Monday– might attempt to immediately pass legislation for a blanket amnesty. I guess that President Hamid Karzai pushed for government approval of his new TJ “Action Plan” in attempt to forestall that.
Personally, I’m not as opposed to the adoption of amnesties– even blanket amnesties– at the end of long, punishing civil wars as most of my colleagues in the human-rights movement are. I believe fairly strongly, based on quite a broad amount of evidence, that if what we are concerned about is improving adherence to the rule of law, going forward, and if there has been a clear and universally recognized transition out of the preceding, highly atrocity-laden era, then the granting of amnesties can play a role in both marking and easing that transition.
But anyway, in the TJF post, I just mainly describe what I understand of the situation in Afghanistan.
If you’re interested in this issue, why don’t you go over to TJF and submit a comment?
Other posts there over the past couple of months include:

— Jonathan writing about the still tragically strife-torn situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the attempt of President Joseph Kabila to enact a blanket amnesty there… Another really interesting and humanly challenging situation there…
— me, writing about the recent discovery of huge archives of old police files in Guatemala, and what that might mean for truth-seeking efforts there…
— this short post by Brandon Hamber linking to a story about the recent discovery of mass graves in Namibia…
— Christopher Le Mon, writing about the Saddam trial (also here)…
— me, writing about Uganda and the ICC…
— Jonathan, on Liberia and Aceh…
— me, on the Saddam trial (also here)…
— Joanna Quinn, on Uganda…

… and more.
So as you can see, we have quite a lot of interesting and very thought-provoking “cases” being discussed there, and we’re also probing many of the (sometimes contesting) principles that underlie transitional-justice efforts, as well.
I urge you all to head on over to TJF, read a few of the posts that interest you– and if you can, to leave some comments over there. Even if your comments are only questions, or requests for more information, or for clarification, or whatever. That way, I hope we can make the blog be a bit more lively for everyone.
Ya know, here’s something I find really interesting. The big human-rights organizations have become stunningly successful at ginning up international concern for the ongoing atrocities that they choose to highlightduring any particular period of time… Right now “genocide in Darfur” is on the lips of many, many well-meaning people in the west who this time a year ago probably couldn’t even have found Darfur on a map. A few years ago it was “East Timor” (ditto.)
But once the current round of atrocities dies down some, then the human-rights groups shift everyone’s attention to the next place, and sadly few people– humanitarian aid workers, mainly– are left behind to worry about what actually happens in, say, East Timor, once the place is no longer on the front page of the New York Times…
But if the “landmines of the heart” (as Betty Williams so accurately describes the kind of simmering resentments and desire for revenge that may lie unattended for many years in the aftermath of an atrocity) are not attended to effectively, then they can become ignited once again, very easily, even many years later. And that is the job of Transitional Justice. Transitional Justice mechanisms– whether war-crimes courts, truth commissions, general amnesties, social-reintegration efforts, vetting procedures, or whatever– are those mechanisms used in a post-conflict situation with the goal of ensuring that the inter-group conflict in question and all its attendant atrocities do not recur. They seek to defuse the landmines of the heart. As such, they lie at the heart of any attempt to build a lasting peace where previously there was only conflict, fear, resentment, and war.
That’s why I think that understanding Transitional Justice, and trying to identify which TJ mechanisms can work, and which do not– or, which ones work in which of the many different kinds of post-conflict situation around the world– are really important tasks. That’s why I’ve been working so hard (okay, probably not quite hard enough, but still pretty darn’ hard) with my co-authors there to get this new TJ blog off the ground.
If any of you want to come and help us– whether by posting comments there, or by volunteering to write a main post for us there, or by publicizing the TJF blog in your work and with your colleagues, or whatever– then that would be really great.

We have a terrific new contributor over at our Transitional Justice Forum blog. She’s called Joanna Quinn, and she’s written some really interesting things about transitional justice issues in Uganda and a bunch of other countries. (See here and here, for starters.)
At the second of those links, she and I have started having a pretty interesting discussion. Check it out. Indeed, we’d really love it if some of you could take the plunge over there and contribute a few comments or questions to our Comments boards.
Uganda is really, really interesting right now. Last week, the government claimed that the ICC had issued five or so indictments against members of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), which has maintained a really vicious civil war in the north of the country for several years… But no word from the ICC directly on these indictments. Is the government jumping the gun? How will the ICC’s intervention (whatever it turns out to be… so far, they announced only a “judicial investigation” into the situation there) affect the politics of war and peace?
I want to say thanks to those of you who sent in suggestions re the new blog… I haven’t had time to implement them all yet, but fully intend to. Rome not built in a day, etc.
One thing we need more of over there is contributors and commenters who want to argue a fairly robust pro-prosecutions line… So far their voice is very under-represented at TJF, and we definitely want to have them there. Do any of you folks from here want to do that, or do you have friends you might tell about TJF who might want to do it? (Or, tell me about them and I’ll invite them along.)