Truth Commissions, Human Rights Trials, and the Politics of Memory

In March 2003, in the sweltering heat of Suai, East Timor, top government officials, including President Xanana Gusmão, attended a commemoration mass in honor of the victims of one of the most horrific human rights atrocities of the country's recent past. On 6 September 1999, widespread violence caused hundreds of people to seek refuge in the Ave Maria Church. Indonesian soldiers, police, and allied militia massacred more than one hundred of them in the church complex. The bodies of thirty-one victims were buried after the memorial mass in the new Massacre Setembro Negro Monument. During the service, the officiant, Father Luis, reminded the assembly of the need for justice for this crime. Forgiveness and reconciliation for the Timorese depend on justice. Furthermore, justice itself and its resultant healing requires collective memory of the crimes. Knowing the truth, he asserted, is a first step toward justice.¹

Two institutions have been mandated to uncover the truth concerning human rights atrocities perpetrated during the violence that convulsed East Timor in September 1999. The United Nations Transitional Authority in East Timor (UNTAET) established a hybrid court, the Special Panels to try Serious Crimes of the Dili District Court (SPSC), to try individuals accused of gross human rights abuses, including genocide and crimes against humanity during the violence of 1999.² In addition, the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR), promulgated in July 2001, is charged with "inquiring into human rights violations that have taken place in the context of the political conflicts in East Timor; [and] establishing the truth regarding past human rights violations" that took place from 1974 through October 1999.³ This commission and court have been mandated to accumulate, synthesize, and interpret individual memories so as to offer society as a whole an official interpretation of its shared past. In addressing the past, these institutions are expected to hasten justice, reconciliation, and democratization in East Timor.

The East Timorese are not alone in turning to truth commissions and human rights trials to uncover the truth of a traumatic past and shape collective memory of those events. This essay examines the efforts in East Timor, South Africa, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia to bring justice to individuals and societies that have experienced some of the worst atrocities humans have ever inflicted on one another. Massacres, genocide, forced labor, mass rape, forced removal, systematic torture, amputation, economic exploitation, and arson haunt the personal memories of individuals throughout these five societies. South Africa's outgoing apartheid government and the African National Congress (ANC) negotiated the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to record apartheid's atrocities. The top leadership responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 face trial before the United Nation's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) while Rwandan courts try those accused of lesser crimes. The truth about the crimes committed during Sierra Leone's civil war of the 1990s is being pursued by the UN-supported Special Court for Sierra Leone and the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In June 2003 the United Nations and the government of Cambodia signed an agreement to establish Extraordinary Chambers to try the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge. These commissions and tribunals will profoundly shape collective memory of these countries' most traumatic events.

The magnitude of these tasks draws attention to several challenges in formulating collective memory and establishing justice. By demanding to know "the truth" about past atrocities, do societies risk oversimplifying their pasts? Should remembering the past always be privileged over forgetting? To what degree does collective memory of atrocities contribute to society's healing? To what degree does it maintain wounds? Can calls for justice ever be answered when the crimes are as horrendous as those of the Khmer Rouge, the Hutu genocidaires, apartheid, and the combatants in Sierra...