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Cited by 74Memory, violence, and historyWar, Law, and JusticePhilosophy, History, and Historiography

Writing the Past Out of the Present: History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice

Bevernage, B.·2010·History Workshop Journal
DOI 10.1093/hwj/dbq008
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Abstract

One of the most remarkable recent trends in the field of transitional justice is undoubtedly the rise of ‘truth commissions’. With this trend, history moves centre stage in the ethico-political management of the past. However this turn to history is – I argue – by no means a self-evident virtue. The rise of truth commissions in most cases cannot be explained exclusively by their fact-revealing capacities or the desire to conserve the memories of the past. Neither is the methodology or epistemology of academic historiography of great interest to truth commissions. Why then have so many countries recently turned to history in order to attain national unity and reconciliation? The answer must be sought in history's relation to a specific ‘politics of time’. Transitional justice represents an arena for two conflicting ways of remembering which are driven by contrary temporal features. Truth commissions do not appropriate any kind of remembrance, at random, but turn specifically to history, or what I call ‘modern historical discourse’. This discourse tends to conflict with memory, or, more accurately, with a certain kind of memory which, borrowing from Primo Levi, I call ‘memory of offence’. By drawing from modern historical discourse, I argue, truth commissions aim at the restoration or creation of a modern consciousness of time and of the modernist break between past and present, both of which are threatened by ‘memories of offence’ which claim the ‘persistence’ of the past. The focus on the politics of time allows an insight into a performative dimension of history which exceeds its traditional functions of representing the past, of searching for the truth and of generating meaning. While this performativity can help truth commissions reach ‘closure’, it also has negative effects. In order to explain this I borrow some insights of the historian Mark Phillips and the philosopher Preston King. Throughout the article I use illustrations from the cases of South Africa and Sierra Leone.

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  1. For an analysis of the arguments that are generally used in defence of truth commis- sions, see David Dyzenhaus, 'Justifying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission', Journal of Political Philosophy 8: 4, 2000, p. 474; and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, 'The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions', in Truth v. Justice: the Morality of Truth Commissions, ed.
  2. See, for example Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, vol. 1, Cape Town, 1998, p. 116. Hereafter, TRC.
  3. See for example Alex Boraine, A Country Unmasked, Oxford, 2000, p. 260.
  4. This juridical philosophy was pioneered in the Vela´squez Rodrı´guez case in Honduras by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 1988 and was adopted by the UN by the mid 1990s. For a discussion, see Antoon De Baets, 'Waarheidscommissies als protohistorici', VVN- berichten 4, 2002, pp. 3-11. 8 Question of the impunity of perpetrators of human rights violations (civil and political), Final Report by Louis Joinet for UN Commission on Human Rights, Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (pursuant to Sub-Commission deci- sion 1996/119), October 1997. See http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/impu/joinet2.html.
  5. 9 The South African TRC for example itself admitted that its Report contained fewer names than most books on the subject: TRC Report, vol. 5, Cape Town, 1998, p. 206.
  6. This term is taken from Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness, Oxford, 1999, p. 33; Jose Zalaquett, lawyer and member of the Chilean National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, remarks that the revelation of the truth is particularly important in situations where abuses remain concealed or unsolved. In the case of apartheid, he writes, the abuses were often well known, very visible and rationalized by the state rather than denied. In such cases, he claims, acknowledgement is more important than truth. Dealing with the Past: Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, ed.
  7. Charles Villa- Vicencio and Erik Doxtader, Claremont, South Africa, 2003, p. 133. Referring in 1995 to Mandela's discourse the American historian, Eric Foner, warned his South African colleagues that the policy of national reconciliation might prove a major challenge to their profession: Eric Foner, '''We Must Forget the Past'': History in the New South Africa', Yale Review 83: 2, 1995.
  8. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee, Oxford, 1998. 17 Jacques Derrida, 'Archive Fever in South Africa', in Refiguring the Archive, ed.
  9. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid and Razia Saleh, Cape Town, 2002, p. 54. 18 The South African TRC Report for example famously identifies four notions of truth: factual or forensic truth; personal or narrative truth; social or 'dialogue' truth; and healing and restorative truth: TRC Report (vol. 1), pp. 110-14. With the formulation of a social truth, the Commission especially stressed the importance of the process whereby the truth was reached. This idea was directly inspired by the distinction between a 'microscope truth' and a 'dialogue truth' which the constitutional judge and ANC member, Albie Sachs, introduced in the debates preceding the Commission: The Healing of a Nation?, ed.
  10. Paul de Man, 'Literary History and Literary Modernity', in his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Literary Criticism (1971), Minneapolis, 1983, p. 144. 26 de Man, 'Literary History and Literary Modernity', p. 148. 27 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, Cambridge, 1985, p. 14. 28 Ju¨rgen Habermas, 'Modernity's Consciousness of Time', in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, transl.
  11. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge MA, 1987, p. 5. 29 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: on the Semantics of Historical Time (1985), transl.
  12. Nevertheless, Reinhart Koselleck's idea of a 'Sattelzei', or a turning point, from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century -in which the conceptions of time and history radically changed -finds confirmation in the more recent work of some other important thinkers. See for example, Franc¸ois Hartog, Re´gimes d'Historicite´, Paris, 2003; and Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History, Cambridge, MA, 2004.
  13. Tom Conley, New York, 1988. 36 Habermas, 'Modernity's Consciousness of Time', p. 7. 37 John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: on Reparation Politics, Cambridge, MA, 2006, p. 19. 38 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. 39 Gabrielle Spiegel, 'Memory and History', History and Theory 41: 2, 2002.
  14. Lawrence L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, New York and Oxford, 1995.
  15. Ruti G. Teitel, 'Transitional Justice Genealogy', Harvard Human Rights Journal 16, 2003. 49 Republic of South Africa, Interim Constitution, Pretoria, 1993.
  16. The priority of the double goal of social peace and the creation of political community over the reinforcement of the rule of law is clearly illustrated by the fact that civil-society organizations and victim groups had originally lobbied for the establishment of a 'Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission', and were angry when the term 'justice' disappeared from the Commission's official name: Michael O'Flaherty, 'Sierra Leone's Peace Process', Human Rights Quarterly 26, 2004, p. 54. 51 Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, vol. 3 B, Accra, 2004, p. 53. Hereafter SLTRC. 52 Due to the poor work of the editors, however, the Report was full of typing errors and other mistakes, and therefore had to be reprinted before it reached a national and international audience, well into 2005: Priscilla Hayner, Negotiating Peace in Sierra Leone: Confronting the Justice Challenge (Report for the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue), Geneva, 2007, p. 27. 53 Politics and the Past, ed. John Torpey, Lanham MD, 2003, p. 1. 54 Thabo Mbeki for the ANC, 'Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission', 1996. Document available at: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/misc/trcall.html#2.
  17. Boraine, Levy and Scheffer, Dealing with the Past, p. 24. 58 TRC Report, vol. 1, pp. 5-8. 59 TRC Report, vol. 1, p. 22. 60 'Address by Rt. Rev. Joseph Humper', no date. Document available at: http:// www.sierra-leone.org (consulted December 2007). 61 SLTRC Report, vol. 3 B. 62 The following material is taken from Transcripts of TRC Public Hearings, available at: http://www.trcsierraleone.org/drwebsite/publish/index.shtml (consulted April 2008).
  18. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 26. 65 Interestingly, Anderson's description of the close relationship between the politics of time and the project of nation-building in terms of the creation of the notion of a 'meanwhile', has its pendant in Dipesh Chakrabarty's thesis about the relation between a historicist temporal reasoning and the imperialist or colonialist political project of the West. European domination of the world in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarty argues, was supported by a stagist theory of history, or what he calls the 'waiting-room' version of history, which produces the notion of a 'not yet' in order to defend the claim that non-Western people would one day be allowed to participate in 'political modernity', but had to wait until they were becoming more devel- oped: Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, 2008, p. 9. 66 The expression the 'sting' of memory comes from Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness, p. 271. 67 TRC Report, vol. 1, p. 7. 68 Asmal, Asmal, and Suresh Roberts, Reconciliation through Truth, p. 161. 69 Soyinka, Burden of Memory, p. 20. 70 Soyinka, Burden of Memory, p. 20.
  19. Mark S. Phillips, 'Distance and Historical Representation', History Workshop Journal 57: 1, 2004.
  20. Richard A. Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 25-7. Moreover the Belgian scholar Annelies Verdoolaege has shown that at the hearings feelings of resentment, vengeance and hatred were often ignored during the victims' statements and that the commissioners often encouraged outpourings of forgiveness and reconciliation: Annelies Verdoolaege, Reconciliation Discourse: the Case of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Amsterdam, 2008. 74 The term 'allochronism' is borrowed from Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object, New York, 1983. Fabian discusses the concept primarily in the context of anthropology, which, he claims, often constructs its object of research by represent- ing the people it studies as living in another, more primitive time. Anthropologists tend to turn geographical distance into temporal distance. Despite obvious differences, modern historical discourse shares this allochronic capacity with anthropological discourse. 75 See for example, Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness. 76 Asmal, Asmal and Suresh Roberts, Reconciliation through Truth, p. 52. 77
  21. Chana Teeger and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, 'Controlling for Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa', Symbolic Interaction 30: 1, 2007. 84 The jurisdiction of the SLTRC was restricted to the period 1991-9. That of the Special Court, for mainly pragmatic reasons, only started in 1996 and, tellingly, included no ending date. 85 de Certeau, The Writing of History. 86 Paul Ricoeur speaks about the 'negative ontology' of history: Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, transl.
  22. Shamil Jeppie, Lansdowne, South Africa, 2005. 89 The expression 'language of fidelity' is used in James W. Booth, 'The Unforgotten', American Political Science Review 95: 4, 2001. 90 Charters and press releases by the 'Khulumani Support Group' are accessible at http:// www.khulumani.net.

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Authors
Bevernage, B.
Affiliations
Ghent University (BE)
Corresponding author
Bevernage, B.
ORCID
Bevernage, B.
Venue
History Workshop Journal
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2010-03-01
Volume
69
Issue
1
Pages
111-131
ISSN
  • 0309-2984 (ISSN-L)
  • 1363-3554
  • 1477-4569
DOI
10.1093/hwj/dbq008
OpenAlex
W2108806679
Cited by
74
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 2
FWCI
6.24
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • History Workshop Journal (publishedVersion)
  • Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
  • Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Memory, violence, and history
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › War, Law, and Justice
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Philosophy, History, and Historiography
Keywords
transitional justice, truth commissions, politics of time, reconciliation, national unity, past and present, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Primo Levi

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