Truth as genre

Truth commissions contain various different but interlinking strands of truth inquiry, with similarly configured implications for methods, objectives and prioritised interests. Several of these strands are briefly detailed in the first section of this chapter – truth as acknowledgement, truth as justice, naming names, patterns vs individuals, amnesty for truth. Others are dealt with in later chapters (truth and reconciliation in Chapter 5; apology as truth in Chapter 6). The main subject of this chapter, however, is an attempt to go beyond these insights by mapping a new conceptual understanding of truth – truth as genre. Truth as genre provides a means of acknowledging and interrogating truth commission work across diverse methods, objectives and interests. Many of the strengths and weaknesses of official truth commissions can be traced to the fact that they constitute an imperfectly realised hybrid genre, spanning the state inquiry, human rights report and official history. One of the most frequently cited conceptualisations of truth is truth as

acknowledgement. The important distinction between knowledge (factual truth) and acknowledgement, attributed to Thomas Nagel (Aspen Institute 1989), is based on the premise that although certain truths may already be widely known they have often previously been officially denied or rationalised. There is value, therefore, both in establishing factual knowledge and in having knowledge sanctioned as official truth. Such acknowledgement affirms the reality of painful experience. It also reconfigures unequal and unaccountable relations of power as the state owns responsibility for its actions (albeit often under a different government), thereby healing the rift between private and social memory on the one hand and official denial and lies on the other. A distinction can usefully be made between official acknowledgement (by the

government of the day) and public acknowledgement (the formation of a more shared collective or societal memory of the past). To the extent that the TRC helped forge a greater consensus about certain broad truths – apartheid was a crime against humanity; both the apartheid state and its opponents committed abuses – it can be argued that it also helped to create a stronger collective

memory and public acknowledgement of the past (Gibson 2004: 68-116, 156-66). Asking rather more of acknowledgement, Cohen (1995: 39-56) argues that human rights information-work has been more geared to transforming ignorance into knowledge than to thinking about transforming knowledge into acknowledgement. The desired response is surely for knowledge to be publicly acknowledged and acted upon (also see Cohen 2001: 222-77). The TRC was less successful in achieving acknowledgement in this fuller sense. While truth commissions are often understood to sacrifice justice for truth,

there are also a plethora of claims that truth, as acknowledgement or otherwise, constitutes (1) a stepping-stone towards greater justice, and (2) a form of justice (truth as justice). Truth commissions can facilitate justice and help build the rule of law in

various ways. Commissions have forwarded case files to prosecutors or the courts and provided evidence to support court proceedings (notably in the trials of leaders of the former military juntas in Argentina, to establish the identity of perpetrators through investigations in Chile, and at the international level in the charges brought against General Pinochet).1 In 1998, the TRC handed a list of more than 300 names to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), requesting further investigations with a view to prosecution. Commissions have also investigated judicial complicity in abuse, and recommended sanctions against perpetrators (including prosecutions), reparations for victims/survivors and judicial reform (Hayner 2002: 86-106). Public truth-telling in hearings and reports can marshal the naming of perpetrators as a modest form of censure and as the basis of further possible judicial and non-judicial action. Truth in these guises can be construed as countering injustice, if in somewhat hushed tones. A second argument is that truth intersects with justice most powerfully

in transitional contexts by contributing to a public debate about the nature of justice, moving thinking out of the criminal justice/retributive trenches and on to suggestive, new terrain (see Chapters 3 and 4). Phelps writes of the TRC:

the hearings were a public enactment of a radical kind of justice, justice that returns dignity to those who have been victimized; justice that gives back the power to speak in one’s own words and to shape the experience of violence into a coherent story of one’s own, thereby allowing for a renewed (or new) sense of autonomy and sense of control; justice that allows victims, in hearing stories from other victims, to locate their personal stories in a larger cultural story; justice that corrects the erroneous message communicated by the system of apartheid – that these people of color are unworthy – the message corrected not in the official language and setting of the legal system, but in public space that belongs to the people.