Truth and Consequences

Jonathan D. Tepperman

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2002

Article preview: first 500 of 6,231 words total.

Summary:  Truth commissions have become a favorite way for new democracies to exorcise the demons in their past. As their popularity has spread, however, so has the controversy. Are these commissions truly the best way to achieve justice in transitional societies -- or just a dodge that dictators use to escape accountability?

Jonathan D. Tepperman is Senior Editor at Foreign Affairs.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TRUTH

Since September 11, most talk about international justice has focused on what to do with Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists, if and when they are caught. The debate over military tribunals, international trials, and similar concerns arising from the Afghanistan campaign, however, has obscured what is perhaps the greatest recent innovation in post-transition justice: the rise of truth commissions. Few have yet started clamoring for such a panel to catalog the Taliban's various offenses; Afghanistan is still far too chaotic and violent, its government far too tentative. But this lack of a truth commission in Afghanistan bucks the trend. Elsewhere, such commissions seem to be springing up with amazing regularity.

On taking office in October 2000, for example, one of the first things Vojislav Kostunica, Yugoslavia's first freely elected president, did was announce the creation of a truth commission to investigate the crimes committed during the wars of Yugoslav succession. Nine months later and half a world away, Alejandro Toledo made a similar pledge the day he was elected to replace the autocratic Alberto Fujimori as Peru's head of state. Unthinkable just a short time ago, such gestures now accompany practically every transition from civil war or authoritarian rule. Announcing the creation of a truth commission has become a popular way for newly minted leaders to show their democratic bona fides and curry favor with the international community. In the months between Kostunica's and Toledo's announcements, for example, ten other commissions were started, in countries ranging from Bosnia to East Timor and Panama to Sierra Leone.

The truth business, in short, is booming. A new academic discipline has sprung up to study the commissions, with courses on the topic now offered at New York University, Harvard, Michigan, and Columbia law schools. Numerous books and articles on the subject appear each year. And last March, the world's first truth commission consulting firm -- the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) -- set up shop in a Wall Street office suite.

Despite their swelling popularity, however, almost everything about the truth commissions -- including their missions, compositions, and outcomes -- is now the subject of intense debate. And much of the criticism has come from the most unlikely of sources: the mainstream human rights community, which not long ago enthusiastically supported such projects around the world.

TRIAL AND ERROR

More than 21 truth commissions have run their course since 1974. Not surprisingly, their objectives and structures have varied dramatically, as have their results. Still, a few generalizations can be made. Developed primarily in Latin America during the 1980s, truth commissions are tools that traumatized countries use to set the historical record straight. The commissions allow newly democratic nations to investigate the crimes of the past, overturning the lies told by previous regimes to cover up their abuses. Most importantly -- and this helps explain both their popularity and controversy -- truth commissions do all of this without holding trials.

This lack of trials ...

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