Mobilizing Victimization

The "Truth and Reconciliation" commission (TRC) was implemented following the first democratic elections in South Africa in order to bring to light the brutality of the apartheid regime, to offer individual amnesty to persons responsible, and to compensate victims. From the outset, an important aspect of its emergent legitimizing discourse concerned the role and the needs of victims of brutality - whether victims of the former authoritarian government or of the liberation movements - within a rhetoric of "national reconciliation". The TRC's definition was to correspond to a notion of criminal justice that excluded any response of direct punishment or compensation: the proposed amnesty would relieve of responsibility all those to whom it applied.This context gave rise to a highly specific discourse concerning victims of "past conflicts", a discourse created within a precise range of nuances that were designed to make the TRC conceptually compatible with its public image, and vice versa. In evidence was the gradual construction of a language that allowed the Commission to be described in positive terms of satisfying needs, of respect for a greater, more honest and more universal ethical basis than that of retribution, of successful national reconciliation, etc. The propagation and effectiveness of this language were indispensable considering the concurrent dominant discourse about criminal justice in general, which maintained a hard line with regard to crime and which resulted in practice in an uncontrolled inflation of the penal population (two blocks away from the Commission's headquarters, parliament considered such solutions as corporal punishment, the establishment of prisons in abandoned mines, etc.) According to the Commission's discourse, victims identified two common fundamental outcomes of their victimization: their need for financial assistance, and their desire to know the truth. This desire for truth was manifested in two forms: first, the need to know the truth concerning the matter itself, for example, the disappearance of loved ones, and secondly, the restoration of individual dignity through an official and public acknowledgment of their victimization. Whether these outcomes in fact corresponded to the reality experienced by victims themselves tends to be a question of secondary importance, since the organization of the Commission's discourse allowed perfect integration of their testimonies, their attitude, and even their actual participation. This integrative power is to a great extent the result of the characteristic form both of testimonies made to the Commission and of statements concerning the participation by and satisfaction of its members: that is, the narrative form. Because of the great capacity of personal biographies to communicate the experience of injustice and of reparation compatible with the daily experiences of the general public, from these narratives may be drawn a normative language almost beyond reproach. Furthermore, each of the narratives, without exception extremely emotionally moving, included the Commission's role in the implicit or explicit denouement of victimization. The Commission's logic is further reinforced thereby, as it appears to be extracted from the actual experience of the persons who participated. In relating their narratives, victims provided the Commission with the necessary material to persuade other victims to participate in the process, to justify itself to the population of South Africa, and to meet its mandate of restoring dignity to victims. Such circularity is a natural element of all discourse, since it contains in its terms of reference the construction of its context, its subjects, its problems and its solutions. The Commission thus met its mission, primarily through a readjustment of its concepts and language but also by a concrete modification of social reality - if such a modification were possible, and possible to observe outside of the language used in its description. From the outset, "dignity" was very apparent not as an objective personal condition but as the outcome of a specific symbolic reality. Whether or not victims felt better following their visit to the Commission, or after the publication of its report, would have no effect on the general availability of a discourse of restored dignity to describe South African reality. On the contrary, the success of this enormous and costly institution, with its mission of rewriting the history of apartheid, could not fail to transform the social representation of its victims.