Truth commission

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Truth commissions were set up by state institutions in some states around the 1990s as a result of armed conflicts or after the end of regimes that violated human rights, or they were founded as a citizens' initiative. Her concern was the investigation or clarification of political criminal matters, the granting of amnesty decisions and reparations .

The main impetus for convening so-called truth commissions came mainly from South American human rights activists. In South America , numerous dictatorial regimes were overthrown in the 1970s and 1980s. The demand to make known the "truth" about the human rights violations under the dictatorships was one of the most important concerns of the South American opponents of the regime. The boom in human rights since the 1970s had given a boost to those dissidents whose resistance consisted not of violent struggle, but of educating the juntas about crimes. In mid-1990, a few months after Chile returned to democracy , President Patricio Aylwin set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Before that, commissions had been set up in Bolivia and Argentina to deal with the crimes of the previous period of dictatorships. What was new about the Chilean Truth Commission, however, was that it not only defined the clarification of the "truth" as the goal of its work to come to terms with it, but also that of "national reconciliation". The idea behind such terms was that with the help of a recognizable truth, the division of society into two camps, each with different interpretations of the past, could be prevented. With the end of the dictatorships in Eastern Europe and apartheid in South Africa at the beginning of the 1990s, the report of the Chilean Truth Commission, despite all the criticism of its limitation to political murders, became an impetus for the establishment of further truth commissions. Experts from various countries met at international conferences to discuss how the transition to democracy can be achieved and what role the confrontation with past crimes should play in this. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission , which was active in South Africa from 1996 to 1998 to deal with the crimes of the apartheid regime, leaned, as its name suggests, directly on the Chilean model. The South African Commission is now regarded as the model for most later truth commissions.

The Canadian government pursued a policy of cultural genocide in the 19th and 20th centuries. The basis for the genocide was a directive that explicitly stated that the indigenous people of Canada should be marginalized and their culture destroyed. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released its final report, based on over 6,750 testimonies from survivors and former Native boarding school staff. It is believed that by the time the TRC report was released, four million indigenous children had died in residential schools and similar institutions; their graves were often veiled to cover up the murders. The subject was processed literarily in a book for older children and young people Speaking Our Truth: A Journey to Reconciliation by Monique Gray Smith. The violent robbery of children from the arms of Indian mothers , armed by Mounties and by Catholic priests and nuns, 2017 Kent Monkmann's The scream has artistically shown impressively .

Examples of truth commissions

In the Northern Irish peace process , from a loyalist and unionist perspective, the willingness of the IRA and its political representatives to clarify the whereabouts of the disappeared and to admit guilt for their deaths was and still is an important milestone. The unwillingness to do so has also been one of the obstacles on the way to a Northern Irish truth commission based on the South African model - called for by Sinn Féin .

literature

  • Priscilla B. Hayner: Unspeakable truths. Facing the challenge of truth commissions. Routledg, New York NY et al. 2002, ISBN 0-415-92477-4 .
  • Wolfgang S. Heinz: Lessons for the “day after”. What functions do truth commissions fulfill? In: International Politics . Vol. 60, 2005, pp. 44-50.
  • Christoph Marx (ed.): Pictures after the storm. Truth commissions and historical identity creation between the state and civil society (= Periplus studies 12). Lit, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-0767-2 .
  • Daniel Stahl: Report of the Chilean Truth Commission , in: Sources for the history of human rights, published by the Working Group on Human Rights in the 20th Century, May 2015, accessed on January 11, 2017.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniel Stahl: Report of the Chilean Truth Commission. In: Sources on the history of human rights. Working Group on Human Rights in the 20th Century, May 2015, accessed on January 11, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada , May 31, 2015, 528 pages; French version: http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/French_Exec_Summary_web_revised.pdf , long version via http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=890 in English, chapter by chapter call, chap. 1 is again the summary.
  3. ↑ Orca Book, Victoria BC 2017. Review in Quill & Quire
  4. ↑ online As a large-format print in the inner front cover including flyleaf in: Thomas King , The inconvenient Indian , only in the illustrated edition from 2017, Doubleday Canada.
  5. ↑ Regina Schleicher: To be continued ... - on dealing with the past in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala . In: Medico International eV (Ed.): The price of reconciliation. South Africa's dispute with the Truth Commission . medico-Report 21, Frankfurt (Main) 1998, pp. 89-93 ISBN 3-923363-27-3
  6. ↑ Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica . Organization's website at www.remhi.org.gt (Spanish)
  7. ↑ a b Cheryl Lawther: Truth, Denial and Transition: Northern Ireland and the Contested Past, Routledge, 2014, pp. 2116 ff.
  8. ^ Lack of NI truth process 'encourages tribal myth-making'. The Irish Times, November 3, 2013, accessed September 26, 2015 .