The Role of the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission

- produced by Tara Helfman & Boris Sokurov

Annotated Bibliography

Asmal, Kadar (2000). “International Law and Practice: Dealing With the Past in the South African Experience.” 15 Am. U. Int’l L. Rev. 1211-1229.

The South African Education Minister Kadar Asmal, one of the key architects of the TRC, analyses the subject of truth commissions through the prism of international law, with the emphasis on the South African experience. In Kadar’s view, international legal norms do not adequately reflect the realities of countries such as South Africa that have to deal with their past keeping in mind the objective of future peaceful co-existence of different racial groups, which in the past may have committed numerous atrocities against each other.

Boraine, Alex. A Country Unmasked: Inside South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Oxford University Press (2001).

Truth Commissioner Alex Boraine provides a memoir of his participation in the development of the TRC and his work as a member of the Human Rights Violations Committee. His is a candid insider’s view of the TRC which addresses both the Commission’s successes and failures.

Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation & Khulumani Support Group. (1998). Submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Survivors' Perceptions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Suggestions for the Final Report.

This report is a culmination of eleven workshops that were conducted by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) with a sample of victims/survivors who belong to the Khulumani Victim Support Group. The aim of the workshops was to elicit the views of victims/survivors on the recommendations to be made by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in its final report. The workshops revealed many different perspectives and views on the TRC, with a common criticism of the TRC as providing for “false reconciliation”.

Edelstein, Jayni (1994). Rights, Reparations and Reconciliation: Some comparative notes. Paper presented at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Seminar No. 6, 27 July.

Jayni Edelstein, a former researcher at the Institute for the Study of Public Violence, discusses the experience of truth commissions in Chile, Argentine, and El Salvador, concluding that countries may have different goals and strategies in establishing such commissions, and thus, each country must formulate its own policy with respect to past human rights abuses and reconciliation.

Gibson, James (2001). Does Truth Lead to reconciliation? Testing the Casual Assumptions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process. (Prepared for delivery at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Hilton San Francisco and Towers, August 30 - September 2, 2001.)

James Gibson, Professor of Government at Washington University at Saint Louis, tests the hypothesis that knowledge of the past will lead to acceptance, tolerance, and reconciliation in the future, based on a national survey of more than 3 700 South Africans conducted in 2001. Some of the most important finding of this analysis is that truth does lead to reconciliation in the South African context, but such process is different for different segments of the population, based upon the degree to which such segments accept the phenomena of the “collective memory” produced by the truth and reconciliation process.

Hamber, Brandon, and Hugo van der Merwe (1998). What Is This Thing Called Reconciliation? Paper presented at the Goedgedacht Forum “After the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Goedgedacht Farm, Cape Town, 28 March 1998.

In this short paper, the authors examine five different ideologies of reconciliation, which are all found in the South African experience. The authors also examine the choices of the dominant ideology of reconciliation made by different groups affected by the TRC’s work: the National Party, the ANC, the NGOs, and the victims groups.

J effery, Anthea (1999). “The Truth About the Truth Commission”. Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations.

Anthea Jeffery, a special research consultant at the South African Institute of
Race Relations, questions whether the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report had "contributed more to uncovering the truth about the past than all the court cases in the history of apartheid", as its chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has claimed. She argues that a comparison of the report's findings with earlier judicial rulings "suggests the opposite".

Kimani, Simon (2001). Report of The National Strategy Workshop on Reparations, Parktonian Hotel, Johannesburg, 31 October.

The Transition and Reconciliation Programme of CSVR hosted a national strategy workshop on reparations, which aimed at establishing the status, nature and time-frames set by government for implementation of the final reparations, i nvestigating how the rights of victims should be balanced with the amnesties enjoyed by perpetrators, and lastly, creating a forum for information sharing and strategic planning by civil society on ways of implementing a broad reparations programme in South Africa. The themes for discussion were structured in such a way that sufficient space would be created for critical engagement with the problem of reparations, while at the same time acknowledging civil society's limitations in terms of capacity and ability to initiate and sustain a fully fledged campaign. The report, compiled by Simon Kimani, a former Researcher in the Transition and Reconciliation Programme at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, covers all these aspects in exquisite detail.

Leseka, Mpho (2000). Summary of the TRC Recommendations: Reparations. Johannesburg: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

Mpho Leseka, a former Researcher in the Transition and Reconciliation Unit at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, highlights the work of the least publicized of the TRC’s committees, by discussing the “five-aspect” approach to offering substantial reparations adopted by the TRC.

Posel, Deborah & Simpson, Graeme (2002). Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, July 2002.

Commissioning the Past, written by Deborah Posel, the Director of Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and Professor in Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Graeme Simpson, the Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in South Africa, provides a multifaceted evaluation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It is concerned with national politics, but also takes into account the specific, local implications of the TRC's hearings and findings, as well as the uncensored voices of some of the survivors of human rights abuses, in whose name the whole exercise was undertaken.

The views of three groups with different perspectives are aired: academic scholars; Commissioners and researchers who worked with the TRC; and people who told the commission stories of victimization on behalf of themselves of a family member. The emerging dialogue between 'outsiders' and 'insiders', and between national, local and individual experiences, are a distinguishing feature of the book.

Rombouts, Heidi (2002). The Legal Profession and the TRC: A Study of a Tense Relationship, Research paper written for the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, February 2002.

This research paper, written by Heidy Rombouts, a former Research Intern in the Transition and Reconciliation Programme at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, examines the often unclear role of the legal profession in the context of reconciliation and truth commission, as it is not a legal process nor a judicial body that is given the task of dealing with the past. The paper focuses on three different aspects of the South African experience- the legislative enactment process, the special legal hearings, and the attitude of the legal profession toward the TRC.

Theissen, Gunnar, and Brandon Hamber (1998). “A State of Denial: White South Africans’ Attitudes to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Indicator South Africa 15(#1): 8-12.