Truth and Freedom in Haiti: An Examination of the 1995 Haitian Truth Commission

This paper reflects on the truth commission experiences of Haiti as a struggle to come to justice in the wake of mass violence and authoritarian oppression in the case of Haiti’s Commission nationale de vérité et de justice (CNVJ), a truth commission first proposed by a Haitian diasporan group in Montréal in 1994, and implemented in the spring of 1995. Modeled after the first deployment of a truth commission institution/genre/performance in Uganda in 1974, the Haitian CNVJ unfolded contemporaneously with the more extensive South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Haitian commission’s mandate was to “globally establish the overall truth of the most serious human rights violations committed between September 29, 1991, and October 14, 1994.” The essay assesses the specific goals and methodology of the commission, its relationship to the judicial system and to the Aristide government in Haiti, and its widely-perceived failure “within an institutional vacuum” as well as in its relation to the U.S. government censorship (redaction) of key sections of the archives on human rights abuses from the period in question. A final and decisive flaw was the “weak publicity and inaccessibility” of the Commission’s work and report. The CNVJ episode is just as pertinent for the explosive problem of impunity and institutional inadequacy in the current post-disaster Haitian environment, and presents a searing example of the obstacles to the institutional life of freedom in the Haitian state. The paper concludes that the strivings for justice in Haiti cannot be delinked from the larger project of freedom.