Transitional Justice and Speaking Truth to Somali History: A Dialogue
- Transitional Justice and Speaking Truth to Somali History: A Dialogue
This dialogue is the product of extensive correspondence between the authors in 2013.
Transitional justice (TJ) is a term used to refer to ways of pursuing of justice in the aftermath of large-scale human rights violations as part of a new political system.1 As this special issue of NEAS suggests, in Somali studies too it has become a lens through which scholars and practitioners examine the current situation in Somalia. What do you think of this focus?
As a historian and the author of the recent book Clan Cleansing in Somalia, I am most interested in the dimension of truth seeking in TJ processes. My research suggests that speaking truth to Somali history is one important dimension of working towards peace-with-justice, or even some peace with some justice. I have written about one particular occurrence of large-scale, clan-based violence against civilians (LSCVAC), as my book’s title indicates, but when we think about TJ broadly construed, [End Page 133] we must include other large-scale human rights violations against civilians. I propose that in this discussion, we focus on large-scale human rights violations against civilians that involved grievous physical violence and were committed in Somalia by and against Somalis. This will help us see how complex the issue of TJ is in the Somali context.
This has indeed been on my mind as well. Three aspects of this complexity are foremost in my mind. First, Somalia is not a postconflict society. Second, from 1978 until today, civil war violence in Somalia has taken many forms and gone through many phases, most of which still remain to be conceptualized. Third, the war in Somalia has been and is, as in the case of Lebanon, both a civil war of and “a war of others,”2 fought on Somali soil by and between foreign powers. Do you agree with that?
Indeed. In 1991‒1992, I distinguish at least three different kinds of violence: (1) large-scale political and clan-based violence against civilians sponsored and perpetrated by the Barre regime; (2) the turn to clan-based communal violence outside of the institutions of the state and the campaign of clan cleansing; and (3) large-scale violence against civilians as normalized practice during the War of the Militias that followed. All that was just in 1991‒1992. Since 1992, all kinds of similar and new kinds of gross violations of human rights have occurred. So I agree with what you imply in your question, that it would be very difficult to determine on which atrocities committed in what period a TJ process in Somalia would focus, and that this should caution us against jumping on the TJ bandwagon too quickly.
This is indeed the complexity any set of TJ processes in Somalia would have to face: the scale and complexity of the kinds of violence relevant to a TJ process; the temporal scope of such a process’s mandate (1978 to the present and beyond), and the fact Somalia is not postconflict. Since TJ processes can consist of legal and semi- or non-legal approaches, which approach do you think might be better suited to the situation in Somalia?
I would not in principle exclude legal processes. Although this may initially widen divisions among Somalis, the fact that people guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity still stand for and hold political [End Page 134] office is evidence of the impunity that prevails in Somalia with regard to civil war violence. However, in this context I have found very helpful an essay by Fletcher and Weinstein on which I also draw in my book.3 Fletcher and Weinstein argue that many processes that aim at bringing about truth and justice give too much emphasis to legal approaches, which almost always focus on the individual. An example of such an approach is the International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 1998, which has brought to trial men who had committed crimes against humanities such as Slobodan Milošević and Charles...
