Justice and Retribution in Postconflict Settings

John Borneman's essay "Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing" (Public Culture 14 [spring 2002]: 281-304) makes an elegant case for the central role of listening in postconflict situations, rightly highlighting the contribution of anthropology and other interpretative disciplines to fostering greater understanding and intersubjectivity. The transition from authoritarianism requires the breaking of hegemonic silences and the construction of a new public space where ordinary citizens can tell truths about the consequences of state terror. As Michael Ignatieff (2001) has contended, the recognition and acceptance of these formerly repressed truths, as well as their integration into a public narrative about the past, circumscribes the range of impermissible lies. After the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one can no longer maintain, as the National Party once attempted to argue, that apartheid was a benevolent, "good neighbor" policy somehow gone awry.

Further, a greater fusion of horizons promotes better practice in a range of other human rights-related settings. A greater respect for listening and witnessing might transform the procedures of humanitarian organizations as they engage in postwar reconstruction. Human rights reporting might shed its tendencies toward dry legalism in favor of a greater engagement with the subjectivity of the actors involved. Humanitarian organizations might operate differently—and possibly with greater sensitivity—if they were made more aware of the embodiment of suffering.

What is less clear, however, are the consequences of truth-telling for a process of reconciliation. The recounting of experiences and personal truths can have unintended consequences and may interfere with Borneman's progression from the processes of listening, witnessing, and retribution to that of reconciliation. Those actively researching truth commissions and carrying out extensive interviews with survivors describe a more complex scenario in which truth-telling may in fact exacerbate conflict as much as remedy it (Hamber and Wilson 2002).

In order to fully comprehend the concept of reconciliation, we need to complement Borneman's theoretical model of the term with a political history of reconciliation programs in democratizing countries since 1989. More humanitarian interventions have been implemented since the fall of the Berlin Wall than in the preceding forty-five years. This has entailed a much greater role for the intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations in peace negotiations than ever before. In order to understand the role of ideas such as reconciliation in this global political context, we must see these notions as embedded in complex social processes, such as, for example, the shifting class and racial composition of the state.

In democratizing countries of Eastern Europe, southern Africa, and Latin America, elective affinities have been discernible between ideas of reconciliation and the rise of a new political elite. Reconciliation has become a symbol of the pact between old, outgoing elites and the incoming elite, a pact that often preserves an aspect of authoritarian legality—namely impunity—in the present. Here, reconciliation has become the language not of principle and irrevocable individual rights, but of compromises, political hedging, and trade-offs that usually include amnesty for human rights offenders in the ancien régime. The new elites' invocation to reconcile is reinforced by UN missions and international nongovernmental organizations seeking a diplomatic solution to the conflict. In these situations, reconciliation helps to forge a new nation-building ideology that values political expediency over legality and consolidating the rule of law. But this is done at the cost of sacrificing the individual rights of victims and, specifically, the right to justice enshrined in new bills of rights such as the 1996 South African Constitution. As Borneman (1997) contends in an earlier work, the most successful postauthoritarian regimes are those that place accountability and retributive justice at the center of their moral and political project.

For these reasons, reconciliation has been treated with skepticism by international human rights lawyers (Robertson 1999), organizations such as Amnesty International, local human rights activists in democratizing countries, ethnographers of reconciliation processes (Borneman 1997, Wilson 2001), and even some participating in the new institutions...