Coming to Terms with the Past

Abstract

This paper explores one of the major issues before transitional societies, the balance among truth, justice, and/or reconciliation. It focusses on the role of truth commissions, with an emphasis on the experience of South Africa. A central thesis of the paper is that establishing a shared truth that documents the causes, nature, and extent of severe and gross human rights abuses and/or collective violence under antecedent regimes is a prerequisite for achieving accountability, meaningful reconciliation, and a foundation for a common future. It develops and applies an approach to reconciliation based on and extending Donald Shriver's concept of political forgiveness. As we approach the end of a century marked by genocide and collective violence, it has become increasingly important for deeply divided societies to find a way to come to terms with their past. The twentieth century may be most remembered for its legacy of gross human rights violations and mass atrocities. Violent conflicts, massacres, and oppression by one group over another have torn apart the social fabric of countries in nearly every region of the world. The Turkish massacre of Armenians, the Holocaust of World War H, the killing fields of Cambodia, South Africa's apartheid system and the violence and repression used to sustain it, genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia are but some of the terrible examples. Added to this collective brutality are the state terrorism and repression of the Soviet and Chinese gulags, the gross human rights violations of many authoritarian regimes, and the