As the international community reflects on the tragedy in Rwanda ten years ago, the question of how societies should attempt to heal the wounds from past virulent conflicts has recently received renewed interest by members of the press, policy, and NGO community around the globe. How effective are truth and reconciliation commissions? Are there lessons learned from the experiences of truth and reconciliation commissions in Sierra Leone and elsewhere that can be used by the international community to deal with the aftermath of other conflicts in different parts of the world?

On April 29, 2004, USIP hosted a presentation by senior fellow Rosalind Shaw on "Rethinking Memory in Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission." An associate professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, Shaw has conducted ethnographic field research in Sierra Leone since 1977, and has published numerous articles on ritual and social memories of violence in Temne-speaking communities. Her major publications include: Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and two co-edited volumes, Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis (Routledge, 1994), and Dreaming, Religion and Society in Africa (E.J. Brill, 1992).

Report Summary

Closing ceremony of the Moyamba District Hearings of Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, June 2003. Photo by Rosalind Shaw

After a decade of civil war in Sierra Leone, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its public hearings in April 2003. Funded through and coordinated by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, and assisted by consultants from the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, TRC staff in Freetown sought to create a commission appropriate to Sierra Leone. Building on findings from her field research on Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), senior fellow Rosalind Shaw analyzed the contentious relationship between remembering, healing, and reconciliation, and the purported therapeutic and conciliatory effects of truth and reconciliation commissions.

Conceptual Challenges of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: "Truth" Telling

Shaw observed that the locus classicus of truth commissions is one of political violence by a repressive state, where such commissions enable victims to challenge the state's official version of the past through personal testimonies of suffering. In the politics of memory that operates in truth commissions following such crimes, personal memories become a site of redemption and of moral accountability.

Outside this locus classicus of covert, state-sponsored violence, for instance in a civil war in which neighbors fight against neighbors, truth telling can provide a "re-balancing"—by, for example, making it clear that atrocities were committed by each side, or alternatively that genocide did, in fact, take place. But the production of an official "truth" by a national commission will not command agreement and "heal" a wounded or divided society. It is deeply problematic to suppose that one either can or should produce a single collective memory: social memory is always a process, and always a contested one.

Remembering and Healing: Challenging Assumptions

Shaw argued that assumptions about the healing and conciliatory power of verbal memories of violence and abuses in truth commissions are very problematic.

First, the language of national healing anthropomorphizes the nation as a feeling and suffering entity. This is basically a nineteenth century, or Durkheimean, idea that society is like an organism that can be healthy or sick. Violence certainly changes social institutions and practices, but it is not valid to conceptualize these changes in terms of a kind of collective psyche that can be healed through a cathartic process of truth telling.

Second, it cannot be assumed that truth telling in a truth commission is cathartic and healing on a personal level either. Some people do feel a great deal of relief and satisfaction when they testify, especially when the reality of the violence and abuses toward them has not been publicly acknowledged before. But others (60 percent of those who testified in South Africa) feel worse after testifying. A truth commission is not therapy.

Third, the conviction that recounting verbal memories of violence and trauma is the means of healing psychological trauma is the product of a dominant culture of memory in North America and Europe. It arose out of specific nineteenth and twentieth century historical processes. In other parts of the world, where different memory practices have developed through different histories of violence, Western psychotherapy might not be the appropriate solution. Words are only one way of externalizing trauma. In her previous research on memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking areas of Sierra Leone, Shaw found that several historical layers of violence—such as the Atlantic slave trade, the nineteenth-century trade wars, and the imposition of a colonial protectorate in 1896—are remembered non-discursively in the landscape, ritual practice, and visionary experience, but rarely in discursive verbal form.

Challenges to the TRC in Sierra Leone

Beside these conceptual issues mentioned above, the TRC in Sierra Leone faced several challenges:

Let's 'forgive and forget'

Shaw observed that most Sierra Leoneans were very divided about the TRC and truth telling. Most people with whom she spoke in her field research since the civil war wanted to forget. It was common to hear people say, "Let's forgive and forget," or "Let's forget about it." Some people were able to integrate the TRC message into this prevailing understanding of healing and reconciliation as forgetting. They created a synthesis. But for many people—including many victims—the TRC was an obstacle to healing and reconciliation. In some places, such as communities that developed their own techniques to reintegrate ex-combatants, the TRC disrupted their practices of reintegration and reconciliation. Sometimes whole communities agreed not to give statements, or to give statements that withheld information that they thought might be damaging to the families of ex-combatants. People wanted to protect their communities and their relationships.

The TRC as a Covert Conduit to the Special Court

The problematic nature of truth telling in the Sierra Leone TRC was compounded by the operation of the Special Court of Sierra Leone—the tribunal created to put on trial those who bore the greatest responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many Sierra Leoneans feared the TRC was a secret conduit for evidence that would be turned over to the Special Court. Because of this, many ex-combatants simply chose not to participate in the TRC process.

Fear of Retaliation and Distrust of the Government

Fears were also exacerbated by the relationship between the TRC and the government, which has (incorrectly) viewed both the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels and the war itself as "northern." There are concerns that the TRC's national commissioners are too close to the government, and that the official memory of war produced in the TRC's final report may reflect this. Some in the north, moreover, fear retaliation by the government once the TRC concludes its work.

Local Practices of Memory, Healing, and Reconciliation

Shaw argued that if the emphasis were shifted from "sensitizing" the population to the practices and goals of truth commissions, and toward sensitizing those within such commissions to grassroots practices of social recovery already in use around them, this diversity of memory practices might be harnessed to transform truth commissions themselves.

She found that although people in Sierra Leone had been talking about the violence when the violence was present, once violence stopped, healing took place through processes of social forgetting. Social forgetting is different from individual forgetting in that people did not simply forget on a personal level. Social forgetting is the refusal to give the violence social reality, to reproduce it through public speech. Over time, Shaw found that this promoted healing, social recovery, and personal forgetting.

Local Rituals and Practices

Grassroots forms of healing and reconciliation in Sierra Leone include Pentecostal healing and rituals to reintegrate child ex-combatants. Shaw observed that war-affected youth in Pentecostal churches used prayer, Bible reading, and spiritual healing in order to exorcize their memories of violence and rebuild their lives. In Temne-speaking communities in the Northern Province, praying over water or kola, asking God and the ancestors to give the child a "cool heart," and rubbing the water on the head, chest, arms, and feet bring about an inner transformation in the child and his/her social relationships. Part of having a cool heart is not talking about the war: the children are remade as new social persons.

These are local, but not "traditional" ceremonies, and entail people drawing upon their knowledge and skills to innovate and adapt forms of reconciliation and social recovery appropriate to the context of the civil war.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Shaw recognized that there is always a need to document abuses through first-hand testimonies, and that truth commissions provide an important frame for debates about past violence. But, she asserted, there is also a need to recognize the significance of grassroots practices of memory, healing, and reconciliation beside those of truth commissions. She warned that if we want a new generation of locally meaningful truth commissions, we have to develop sensitivities to these other practices, and to build on them rather than marginalizing them. If we discount local processes as less important than a disembodied idea of national healing, we may jeopardize any form of social recovery. As TRCs are increasingly considered part of a conflict-resolution "toolkit," we need to create culturally informed commissions if we are to have more locally and regionally effective forms of transitional justice.