Ivory Coast, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

http://www.rnw.nl/international-justice/article/ivory-coast-truth-or-justice

27 April 2011

How salubrious and healing are Truth and Reconciliation Commissions? This question rears its head again in Ivory Coast. The country’s new president hopes such a commission would restore the calm needed for a future of peace. At the same time, it could offer Ouattara the possibility of not having to appear in court.

By Thijs Bouwknegt, Amsterdam

One of the first statements made by Alassane Ouattara as president, after he had finally crushed his rival, was: ‘a truth and reconciliation commission is going to heal the wounds of the civil war’. Ouattara is facing the emblematic problem of political transition: he has to rebuild the country and settle the past.

Ivory Coast’s much divided population must find a way to live side by side, while the two former presidential rivals must bear responsibility for possible crimes against humanity their troops might have committed. Is it a matter for a TRC, or for judges in a court of law?

Ouattara looks at South Africa, which serves as the classic example of dealing with a brutal past without the interference of judges. Desmond Tutu’s truth commission in the 1990s uncovered the atrocities of Apartheid. Victims were heard in public, while perpetrators were offered amnesty in exchange for confessions. The commission’s purpose was to document past atrocities, reconcile the black and white populations, and reach justice. In South Africa, healing was more important than retribution in court.

Global trend
They became a global trend: official probes into large scale human rights violations, repression or disappearances. Often these commissions dealt with recognising the victims’ suffering, documenting crimes and reconciling former rivals.

Historically, TRCs have been popular in dealing with military juntas in Latin America. Reconciliation initiatives after the war in the former Yugoslavia, however, failed. The US city of Greensboro looked into racial unrest in 1979, while in Canada a commission is currently probing the treatment of its indigenous people.

TRCs were also set up in Asia. Earlier this year, the South Korean commission published an extensive report on human rights violations dating back to the 1950s. Last year, Thailand created a commission which examined the country’s bloody political unrest earlier that year.

Africa
Africa has the highest number of TRCs. Often these proved to be a façade for impunity. The world’s first truth commission was set up by Uganda’s mass murderer Idi Amin. Conclusions from a number of other TRCs remain obscure to this day. Who would still remember Robert Mugabe’s murderous campaigns in Matabeleland in the 1980s? A commission of inquiry examined the matter, but its report remained confidential.

In Liberia, Ivory Coast’s neighbour, the TRC was seen as the only solution for answering the question of justice after a decade of civil war. However, notorious warlords consequently escaped prosecution.
Other TRCs were doomed to fail. Burundi was too divided to discuss its genocidal episodes, while in Eastern Congo the examiners had blood on their hands. In Kenya, where hearings started last week, political wrangling overshadows the content of the subject matter. Chad reached a small victory: documented atrocities formed the basis of a court case against former President Hisséne Habré.

West-Africa
Ouattara does not mention TRCs in the region. Yet West Africa has shown that it has the capacity for self reflection, albeit not as effective as that of Tutu’s South African commission. Neighbouring Guinea announced an investigation in January into the mass killings and rapes at Conakry’s largest stadium two years ago.

The TRC in Sierra Leone published a substantial report on child soldiers and blood diamonds, but reconciliation was hardly present. Potential perpetrators stayed away from the hearings, afraid of prosecution by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown. The report, ‘Witness to Truth’, is gathering dust as the cash-strapped government of Sierra Leone is unable to follow up on the report’s recommendations.

Ouattara could reach out towards the east. In Ghana, efforts towards a TRC led to limited reparations to victims by a succession of corrupt regimes.

ICC
While Ouattara considers his options, the ICC prosecutor is looking over his shoulders. Luis Moreno Ocampo will point out to the new president that recent ethnic killings could not just be dealt with by truth commissions. Judges, preferably in Ivory Coast but otherwise in The Hague, must look into these crimes against humanity, the prosecutor said.

Truth commissions are good sources of material for prosecutors, but impunity is a taboo for Ocampo. His credo is that “one does not cancel out the other.” Both Laurent Gbagbo and Ouattara are well aware of The Hague. Both men – Gbagbo already in 2003 and Ouattara a few weeks ago – have sent a letter to the ICC giving Ocampo the mandate to carry out an investigation.

And now we have to wait to see whether Ouattara could realise his concoction of truth, reconciliation and justice. Ivorians and the international community will closely watch his promises.

More on Israel’s Support for Apartheid

Posted: 17 May 2010 06:14 AM PDT by Kevin Jon Heller As the smear campaign against Richard Goldstone gets ever more desperate, it seems opportune to provide a bit more information about Israel’s support for apartheid, to which Goldstone’s pales in comparison. Here is Sasha Polokow-Suransky again, this time responding to attacks on Goldstone by the Speaker of the Knesset and Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister: Goldstone’s apartheid-era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a blot on his record, but his critics never mention the crucial part he played in shepherding South Africa through its democratic transition and warding off violent threats to a peaceful transfer of power — a role that led Nelson Mandela to embrace him and appoint him to the country’s highest court. More importantly, Ayalon’s and Rivlin’s moralism conveniently ignores Israel’s history of arming the apartheid regime from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s. By serving as South Africa’s primary and most reliable arms supplier during a period of violent internal repression and external aggression, Israel’s government did far more to aid the apartheid regime than Goldstone ever did. The Israel-South Africa alliance began in earnest in April 1975 when then-Defense Minister Shimon Peres signed a secret security pact with his South African counterpart, P.W. Botha. Within months, the two countries were doing a brisk trade, closing arms deals totaling almost $200 million; Peres even offered to sell Pretoria nuclear-capable Jericho missiles. By 1979, South Africa had become the Israeli defense industry’s single largest customer, accounting for 35 percent of military exports and dwarfing other clients such as Argentina, Chile, Singapore, and Zaire. High-level exchanges of military personnel soon followed. South Africans joined the Israeli chief of staff in March 1979 for the top-secret test of a new missile system. During Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israeli army took South African Defense Force chief Constand Viljoen and his colleagues to the front lines, and Viljoen routinely flew visiting Israeli military advisors and embassy attachés to the battlefield in Angola where his troops were battling Angolan and Cuban forces. There was nuclear cooperation, too: South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium while dozens of Israelis came to South Africa in 1984 with code names and cover stories to work on Pretoria’s nuclear missile program at South Africa’s secret Overberg testing range. By this time, South Africa’s alternative sources for arms had largely dried up because the United States and European countries had begun abiding by the U.N. arms embargo; Israel unapologetically continued to violate it. The blatant hypocrisy of the latest attack on Goldstone is nothing new. In November 1986, Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel’s U.N. ambassador, gave a stirring speech to the General Assembly denouncing apartheid and insisting that “Arab oil producers provide the umbilical cord that nourishes the apartheid regime.” (Never mind that Israel remained absent from the 1980 U.N. vote to impose an oil embargo on South Africa in deference to its friends in Pretoria.) Netanyahu was right that Arab and Iranian oil was flowing through middlemen to the apartheid regime, but he categorically denied Israel’s extensive military and trade ties with South Africa, calling charges of lucrative arms sales “flat nonsense” and accusing his critics of trying “to defame Israel.” In fact, Israel was profiting handsomely from selling weapons to Pretoria at the time. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman estimated that the two countries did $400 million to $800 million of business in the arms sector in 1986. According to declassified South African documents, the figure was likely even greater: A single contract for modernization of South African fighter jets in the mid-1980s amounted to “approximately $2 billion,” and arms sales in 1988 — one year after Israel imposed sanctions against the apartheid regime — exceeded $1.5 billion. As the former head of the South African Air Force Jan van Loggerenberg told me bluntly: “Israel was probably our only avenue in the 1980s.” Declassified South African arms-procurement figures (which exclude lucrative cooperative ventures and shared financing arrangements) reveal the full extent of Netanyahu’s lie. The “independent IMF figures” he cited (which excluded diamonds and arms) suggested trade was a minuscule $100 million annually. It was actually between five to 10 times that amount — depending on the year — making the apartheid regime Israel’s second- or third-largest trading partner after the United States. Not all of the weapons Israel sold were used in external wars, and there is no denying that Israeli arms helped prolong the rule of an immoral and racist regime. Who, exactly, deserves to be barred from the US?