(South African War Tribunal picture courtesy of qu301southafrica.com)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa created in 1995 established a new paradigm for reparative justice that contrasted greatly with the Nuremburg trials. In Nuremburg, the victors of WWII historically addressed human right violations as an international community, as survivors of genocide and war atrocities were given a stage to tell their stories, and the suited men who wrote off the war mechanisms that crushed their lives were sentenced to death.
The Truth committees established towards the end of the twentieth century were asked to deliver the same cathartic trial, but for crimes that had been institutionalized in hundreds of years of colonialism. The common demonization of justice, war crimes investigator Richard Goldstone noted in “For Humanity” was what war victims, and even civil warring post-colonial factions, desired most.
But where justice is commonly seen as the death of the murderer, the Truth committees were ultimately created to find “truth” and corresponding facts–the committees were willing to offer amnesty to apartheid leaders like FW de Klerk if they were willing to provide information under that condition.
The committees were instrumental in creating a paradigm tribunal to process through the layers of institutionalized racial law typically rooted back in European colonization, but remain controversial in the affect they have on appropriating justice. The tribunals, war reporter John Richard Pilger criticized, brought to life a new form of multi-cultural capitalism as world politics and larger forces of globalized racism and classism factored into proceedings.
Ariel Dorfman expresses a similar discontent with the efficacy of the truth tribunals in “Death and the Maiden,” set in Chile just turning the page on a dictorial regime. The victimized protagonist, Paulina, who was abducted during the civil strife, comes face to face with the torturer when he toes her husband, Gerardo who gets stranded with flat tire on the road back home.
Gerardo invites Miranda to stay the night, during which Paulina ties him to a chair and digs through his car for evidence to corroborate her accusations. She finds a tape of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” that was played during her torture sessions.
Both men are scared of wrath of the gun-wielding Paulina, and decide that confessing would allow Miranda to escape with his life. The play holds up the raw emotion of the victim, and the complexities of meting out the death sentence on an criminal individual who is not idiosyncratic, but one of many.
Goldstone evokes the play in his text “In Humanity” to exemplify the insurmountable feelings a human rights tribunal brings to the surface. Miranda deserves to be dealt with as a criminal, but the dictatorship that created him cannot be put on trial. As human rights abuses continue to soar in the Middle East and is pronounced in developing countries, a global effort is needed if not to adequately address the human right violations, to listen to them.
As Paulina, Gerardo and Miranda (or his ghost) sit in the music hall as the curtain lifts to mirror, maybe the truth tribunals can have a similar post-modern moment and recognize their own politicized constraints, and count the strings that would them to even consider removing allegations of criminals like Klerk upon his request from their final report, as they did.
International Justice 