Many sided truths about Truth and Reconciliation

By Rajpal Abeynayake

(May 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Sri Lanka’s own Truth and Reconciliation Commission is finally in place we are told, courtesy the president.

A welcome step many would say, and it probably definitely is, considering that perceptions matter —- and that there is a perception that the collective sensitivities of the entire Tamil community are at stake, one year after Prabhakaran was found naked and dead near the Nandikadal.

Already however, there are cries of foul and too little too late etc., which begs for a clarification of this so called tricky issue of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC.) (Ours incidentally is styled Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, CTR.)

One of the ghoulish aspects of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I remember, was recalled once in an excellent chapter by author and journalist John Pilger in one of his more recent books. He recalled how a parent of an ANC activist had to ‘forgive’’ her son’s white supremacist state- sponsored killers after a particularly horrifying account was recalled by a witness, at a TRC session, of how her son was abducted tortured and killed. Such forgiveness sessions were all part of the mandate of the TRC in the post apartheid South African state.
Pilger, and I’m quite sure I recall correct, inferred that such ‘forgiveness’ had great benefits for one side - - the erring side —- while it left relatives of victims in the bizarre position of having to “pardon’’ people who perpetrated untold atrocities on their loved ones.

However noble the sentiments behind the rationale for the South African TRC, few would deny that there is a certain travesty of justice, indeed a certain unnecessary traumatization of relatives of victims in this kind of process —- akin perhaps, in terms of analogy, to the agony that a rape victim has to undergo recalling her rape ordeal in Court, for instance, under intense and often rude cross-examination ... a certain kind of re-rape as it were, to be brutally matter-of-fact about these matters....

Victims on both sides

In the current Sri Lankan situation there would have been victims on both sides, but the rough equivalent to the South African situation is that the government and the forces which won the day are equal to the South African (black-dominated) ANC, while the former terrorist fighters of the LTTE, such as those who may still be found and be brought before the TRC here, are the “bad guys’’, the equivalent to the white supremacists in South Africa.

It is not as if I posit this loose analogy as a solid unalterable verity — it is just that many people are bound to see things this way, as the government was seen to be under attack by the LTTE terrorists in our situation, while the ANC was seen to be under attack by the terrorist elements of the white supremacist apartheid government in theirs.

Considering all of this, it is not surprising that the call for a TRC was most shrill from among the Tamil community intellectuals who represent the interests of some of the former LTTE cadres, who could be forgiven and let off in a TRC process, as opposed to being prosecuted and given long sentences.

Truth be told, such a call is understandable, but what’s galling is that the government having agreed to a TRC, there is now much animated cackle and tearing of hair in some quarters, about how the state has been remiss in matters of bringing about justice, and affecting reconciliation judiciously.

It is in this context that I’d like to refer the reader’s mind to events more than two decades back, when according to all estimates, upward of a sixty thousand people were killed in summary executions that resulted from the crackdown on the JVP insurgency of that time.

Simply put, no Truth and Reconciliation whatsoever for those traumatised in that era, and no call that we can remember from the intellectual community for such a mechanism either — which begs the question —- why so, are the Sinhalese who died in large numbers in that brutal crackdown a lesser breed, not meriting any kid of ‘truth’ or reconciliation as part of their own closure for the trauma they underwent...?

Now, all this is not to belittle the idea of the upcoming TRC/CTR, or to argue that it is redundant, but to offer some perspective about how different conflicts involving different ethnicities reach denouement quite differently.

It could be argued that the idea of the TRC was not broached at that time in the late eighties, Reconciliation and Truth being said to have been invented in the glorious context of post South African apartheid.(!)

But obviously what’s striking is not the absence of a TRC but an absence of any kind of breast-beating from among the intellectuals, especially the foreign variety, on behalf of the 60,000 or so that perished in those now largely forgotten times.

The dead were buried — some in fact were not, they burnt to embers on tyre pyres - - and the traumatized were left to be traumatized, and the state moved on with the message being that for those who were unfortunate enough to be victimized, it was much tough luck.

Starkly disingenuous

The purpose of this article is to say that all of the breast-beating among the bleeding hearts with reference to the TRC is quite starkly disingenuous, when they fail to mention the background politics of this exercise.

The call for the TRC here in Sri Lanka this past year was never an effort on behalf of the hapless victimized and the traumatised — it was always an effort — a political effort - - to sanitize LTTE cadres, and incorporate them into society almost with a new identikit, and also to embarrass the government as much as possible, and show that there was much that was done to the Tamils and little that was done to the Sinhalese during the horrible period of tumult that was called the ‘war.’

No matter. A process of pardoning cadres was a must, and a process of closure, perhaps a modern day necessity.

But those who are picking holes in the TRC process and are calling now for what is in effect a complete capitulation on the part of the forces — who are being asked to go down on their knees ‘recant’ to their various omissions - - should consider the above perspectives, be pleased that there is such an apparatus called the TRC now in the first place, and kindly shut-up.