scholarly journals Truth and reconciliation: Should the key notions be revised?: Experiences from South-Africa and Rwanda

Temida ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-44
Author(s):  
Heidy Rombouts
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Precise Meaning ◽  
Fact Finding

Both the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Gacaca tribunals, which started recently in Rwanda, are framed in terms of truth and reconciliation. But what does the truth mean? What does reconciliation mean? It can be argued that searching the truth has a very precise meaning - namely determining the details of what factually happened. And it is in this sense that most people understand the search for the truth. However it can be questioned whether this fact-finding is what the search for truth aims at in a context of transitional justice. .

scholarly journals Truth and reconciliation in South Africa: Hindu experiences and concerns

2004 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
P.G.J. Meiring
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Faith Communities ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Hindu Community ◽  
The Way

The author who served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), focuses on the Hindu experience in South Africa during the apartheid years. At a special TRC Hearing for Faith Communities (East London, 17-19 November 1997) two submissions by local Hindu leaders were tabled. Taking his cues from those submissions, the author discusses four issues: the way the Hindu community suffered during these years, the way in which some members of the Hindu community supported the system of apartheid, the role of Hindus in the struggle against apartheid, and finally the contribution of the Hindu community towards reconciliation in South Africa. In conclusion some notes on how Hindus and Christians may work together in th

Discourses of Order and Their Disruption: The Texts of the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Hook ◽  
Bronwyn Harris
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Political Efficacy ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Special Power ◽  
Social Orders

This paper asserts that selected texts of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission possess a powerful political potential in their ability to challenge and refute historical relations of racialised power in South Africa. The prospective political efficacy of these texts is seen as residing in their critical ability to subvert and challenge the predominant understandings, discourses and representations of Apartheid, or the ‘old’, South Africa. Three overlapping routes of enquiry are explored in this regard. Firstly, the political efficacy of such texts is seen as arising from their role in terms of the recovery of previously repressed histories. This recovery enlarges the archive of South Africa's past and contributes to the constitution of a new body of knowledge, from which credible standpoints of resistance and opposition may be articulated. A second explanation highlights the fact these texts are able to exert a form of discursive critique upon the predominant practices and representations of both former and reigning social orders. This level of critique enables us, in Foucautt's (1981) terms to restore to political discourses their nature as contextual and discontinuous practices of construction as opposed to naturally-occurring, seamlessly-unified, purely significatory instances of language. The last account engages more directly with the radical and transgressive nature of these texts, with their affective and ultimately symptomatic qualities. It is here suggested that these texts have earned their extraordinary visceral charge, their special power and horror, for many South Africans, precisely because they have exposed and stretched to the limit the boundaries of the past discursive order, of what had been known, what was understood and what could be represented in the Apartheid State.

scholarly journals Reconciliation and psychiatry in South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 62-64
Author(s):  
Bernard Janse van Rensburg
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
African Society ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
South African Society ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Form Part

Although psychiatrists did not form part of the structures of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Society of Psychiatrists of South Africa (SPSA) at the time did make a submission. Since then, the local association of psychiatrists has been reconstituted as the South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP). Psychiatry and psychiatrists may have to extend their activities beyond rehabilitation and restoration, to include endeavours to prevent future violations of human rights.

scholarly journals REMORSE AND REPENTANCE STRIPPED OF ITS VALIDITY. AMNESTY GRANTED BY THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION OF SOUTH AFRICA

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Eugene Baron
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Full Disclosure ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Perpetrators And Victims ◽  
Reconciliation Process

During the South African amnesty process perpetrators would get amnesty if they could prove that there was a political motive for committing their actions, their deeds were proportionate, that they happened during and between the years 1960 and 1994, and if they gave full disclosure. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the following: the fact that remorse and repentance were not required in order for perpetrators to get amnesty, left the reconciliation process in a vacuum. The inclusion of remorse and repentance as a requirement for amnesty, would have established a true (not a cheap) forgiveness and a ‘thick’ reconciliation process between perpetrators and victims. Remorse and repentance would have requested an admission and regret of wrongdoing, followed by an act of repentance underwritten by acts of contrition. 

Research into Reconciliation and Forgiveness at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Homi Bhabha’s “Architecture of the New”

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (02) ◽  
pp. 203-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antjie Krog
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Access Route ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
African Worldview ◽  
Central Argument

Abstract The central argument of this article is that within the discourse around the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), many scholars have insufficiently applied the concept of an indigenous African worldview in their analysis of the TRC’s work, leading them at times to describe the process as coerced, contradictory, and politically manipulated. Using the different stages of my research as well as the different texts that “lit up” every phase, I argue that through a focus on language and translation, the pervasiveness of a particular worldview of interconnectedness can be traced that enabled the commission to execute its mandate creatively and without incidences of revenge. The acknowledgement of an indigenous interconnectedness has wide implications for the concept of transitional justice as it rejuvenates the main concepts of healing, amnesty, and reconciliation. As a journalist who reported on the daily activities of the commission, I move in this piece between the different epistemic communities of journalism, writing, and academia in order to understand the way in which language and its underlying epistemology provides an important access route to understanding the workings of the TRC and the testimonies provided by witnesses.

scholarly journals Narrative Pertaining Truth and Reconciliation

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stephanus Klaasen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
And Function

The use of the oral historical form of communication was tantamount to the failures and successes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, narrative or storytelling is the theoretical framework to assess the successes and failures of the work of the South African TRC. A correlation between the Commission’s work and what followed after it had completed its mandate, points to the successes of the Commission in contemporary South Africa. Current limitations to form unity and build a reconciled society can be placed within the structure and function of the truth as relayed through stories and narratives of individuals and groups at hearings of the Commission. There exists a corpus of literature regarding the post-TRC period. This contribution provides a perspective of the work of the TRC from a narrative approach.

Dealing with the past and transitional justice: building peace through accountability

2006 ◽  
Vol 88 (862) ◽  
pp. 311-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Sooka
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
The South ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Sierra Leonean ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commissions ◽  
Guiding Principles

Based on her experience as a member of the South African and the Sierra Leonean truth and reconciliation commissions, the author formulates guiding principles and looks at the circumstances in which a truth and reconciliation commission constitutes an appropriate instrument to deal with transitional justice issues. The author also identifies possible contributions that truth and reconciliation commissions can make during a period of transition.

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