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I saw one girl. She must have been about eleven. The look of terror in her eyes,
as if she would never be able to trust another human being again.
I have seen many colleagues get killed. Militias committed wholesale massacres
of people based on their ethnicity. I found myself in a refugee camp of a million people
with thousands of people starving to death. We have almost seventeen thousand
disappeared in Lebanon. In Democratic Republic of Congo millions of people have been murdered.
What are we as citizens living during this time doing about that?
Wars have been so total that countries and societies emerge from this conflict
totally destroyed. Imagine that you come out
of a conflict and you say
what do we do now? You have to rebuild
the bridges and the roads
and the schools and the health systems. But you also have
to look at the past. [pause] Transitional justice is about bringing
justice
closer to people and to victims, when justice has been an ideal, a concept, and an institution
that has been very far
away from people. How we do that is, trying to
establish exceptional mechanisms, such as special
criminal prosecutions, such as truth commissions, reparations programs, in order for that
relationship
between state and citizens
to be more normal. Transitional Justice was a very small academic
idea. Then the South African
truth commission had a major impact
on the field. And now it has grown
into a situation where you have about
forty truth and reconciliation commissions
having been run, international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, reparations
programs having been implemented. That has produced
a situation in which all
countries which are coming out of conflict now are aware of this idea of transitional
justice. We're dealing with post-conflict societies all over the world. One of the
key issues is
accountability; those are the
architects of those crimes need to be held accountable Victims need to be at the center
of the process. They've suffered. So truth commissions, are really an important element,
a truth-telling, so that that society can confront the truth
of what happened We need to take steps to make sure this
doesn't happen again. The foot soldiers who marched and torched houses and ***
and killed people will think that
they can do that again and get away with it. But also, the people
who are attacked, if they see that the state has done nothing to bring justice
to them, they're also likely to start arming themselves. We are dealing with groups
that on the ground are pushing for truth, justice, and reconciliation in their respective
countries. And they are the ones who pushing this agenda And our role is to enable
them to do that. Right after the fall of
Ben Ali in Tunisia, we did send
a mission to assess what their needs are and what their vision is for justice and
accountability during the transition there.
What ICTJ brings to the equation is that, we connect
what's going on on the ground to policy makers and capitols in the UN and
the international community. Ultimately, as an organization
we promote justice
on a domestic level
because we believe that,
it's really at that level that you have permanent
solutions to impunity. You can take lots of examples
of where there was a failure
to confront the past, and that failure continues to have long-term consequences.
You end up with peace agreements that are sanctioned by the international community
and power sharing arrangements between perpetrators
of mass atrocities. These countries relapse
into conflict again. The field has to guard against
the sense that sets of double
standards are developing. At ICTJ we ran a project on US accountability looking
at more systematic
policies that the US was
involved in, including
a policy that allowed for
torture of detainees. It's very important,
for an organization such as ICTJ, not to shy away from those problems. If we're
not involved
in situations like that we are in a way then giving
credence to people who say why is it always about us. Transitional justice is all about
facing denial tactics. There is no armed conflict
going on here, there is no repression. This happened in Argentina for a very long
time. It's very clear, flat-out
literal denial. Nothing is happening here. I would like my children
to learn the history of Indonesia in a truthful manner. To learn about the atrocities
that took place, to learn why it happened, so that they can also
be engaged in the process of trying to unravel the impact of conflict.
Even if the possibilities are small and the work we need to do is great, that barking
dog that justice will catch up to you needs to be ever present. And, I think, that
has a
significant affect on
deterring leaders from undertaking the sort of actions
that they've undertaken throughout the history of mankind. It's a danger
not to confront the past. It's a danger
not to address the suffering of victims. It's a danger
not to have accountability. It's a danger not to have the truth.