ICTJ in the News

November 23, 2001

Helping Countries, and People, to Heal

The New York Times

By Lynda Richardson

PAUL VAN ZYL is incredibly sunny for a guy whose job takes him to some of the world's darkest places, delving into their darkest days. As a program director for the International Center for Transitional Justice, Mr. van Zyl helps devise remedies for emerging democracies to reckon with the human rights abuses that mark their past.

"I think I'm congenitally energetic," says Mr. van Zyl, a tall, 31-year-old South African, from the new center's airy offices near Wall Street. "My program assistant says that to me at least twice a day."

One recent morning, Mr. van Zyl, a lawyer, has just returned from East Timor and is heading soon to Prague, where he is to meet with 20 human rights leaders about ways to deal with the legacy of abuse in the Balkans. The center is also in discussion with United Nations officials about what a justice policy for a post-Taliban Afghanistan might look like.

"The demand is just absolutely ridiculous," he says in his bare-walled office. "We're actually involved in over 15 countries, and an additional 10 countries are asking us to get involved."

Mr. van Zyl, whose Afrikaans surname is pronounced "fun sail," is quick-minded and driven. In a two-hour conversation, you sense a bit of the precocious 9-year-old who faced down a teacher for picking on a classmate.

So why, he is asked, is transitional justice so fashionable these days? The center, incubated by the Ford Foundation and led by Alex Boraine, an architect of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has a five-year projected budget of $30 million.

"People have come to the realization that unless you develop sophisticated strategies to deal with the past, it comes back to haunt you and bedevils the present and leads to future conflict, and that impedes democratization and development, two absolutely crucial aspects of a new nation's life."

This is the deal with Mr. van Zyl. He speaks in full paragraphs, and he sounds like Tony Blair. But listening, you also cannot help being struck by the depth of experience for someone so young.

At 25, he was the executive secretary of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shaping its policy and strategy. At 26, he was the main state witness in a trial against former President P. W. Botha of South Africa, who was found guilty of contempt for refusing to testify before the truth commission about atrocities carried out by the government security forces.

Mr. van Zyl grew up in the suburbs of Johannesburg. He is the son of professors at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he studied law. At 22, he went into hiding for two months because of death threats he received for leading a campaign to enroll blacks in a whites-only school.

He moved to New York in 1998, working as a corporate lawyer, studying at New York University and teaching human rights at Columbia University. Along the way, he has consulted on transitional justice issues, leading him to where he is today.

On a recent morning, Mr. van Zyl gives a peek around the center, all blond wood and glass, with a slightly Asian aesthetic. He proudly notes that it was designed so that none of the 20 staff members are windowless.

Yet, the center's existence gets in the craw of many human rights advocates. So this is the truth commission mafia, they say, sucking up foundation money and likely to stifle other ways of handling state injustice. They point to the association of the center's leadership with South Africa's truth commission, which was the first to hold public hearings in which both victims and perpetrators told their stories of abuses in the apartheid era. The commission's most famous move was issuing amnesty to perpetrators who confessed to crimes, as part of the healing process.

SO let's have it. Is the group promoting truth commissions that could become substitutes for justice? Mr. van Zyl leans forward, responding with an emphatic "No."

"We always say that truth commissions and prosecutions should go side by side, and there should never be a hierarchy between them," he says. "The South African model worked in the South African context, but it's entirely inappropriate in 99 percent of the other contexts in which we work."

Mr. van Zyl says any public reckoning in Afghanistan must give special attention to the repression of women. "There have to be prosecutions and an accounting, a truth process of where people tell their story of systemic abuses."

As he chats on these weighty issues, it would be so easy to think that Mr. van Zyl is one heck of a serious guy. You'd be wrong. He says he's a poker-playing, in-line skating, dancing maniac when he finds the time. At his wedding to Johanna Hamilton, a documentary filmmaker, on the cusp of the millennium in 2000, they were the last to leave the dance floor, turning in around 6:30 a.m.

"I have a wild, hedonistic, bohemian streak," he says. The couple live in the West Village.

He insists he has every reason to be as bubbly about his work as he is about the rest of his life. "Optimism underpins transitional justice because it basically says you can transcend an atrocity," he says. "You can deal with these terrible unspeakable acts in a way that makes you whole."