ICTJ in the News

December 7, 2005

Paul Van Zyl Calls on Lebanon to Consider the War from the Victims' Perspective

L'Orient Le Jour

Unofficial Translation

By Samer Ghamroun

Whereas justice as we know it functions primarily on an inter-personal or inter-institutional level, transitional justice works on an altogether different dimension, focusing on connections that may be more ambiguous. In essence, it proposes to deal with the relationship between a traumatized society and its specific past and to oversee, as its name indicates, a sound transition towards a better future. From South Africa to Morocco, Argentina to Lebanon, where reality is marked by constant new discoveries of mass graves, people have struggled to overthrow dictators and end their wars only to find themselves crushed under the heavy burden of a history strewn with massacre, torture, and repression. While some wounds may heal quickly, most experiences show that the past in fact becomes the fertile soil for future conflicts and that far from being quietly buried- the past can come back to shape the future in its image, in total denial of the many victims, whose numbers continue to multiply at a dizzying and indefinite rate. The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a human rights organization based in New York City and active in more than twelve countries across the globe, deals precisely with these kinds of societies that are grappling with their pasts.

Facing a Tormented History
"We try to provide assistance and consultation to people seeking to address a legacy of human rights abuses," explained Paul Van Zyl—director of programs at the ICTJ and in Beirut for several days to attend a conference on transitional justice—to L'Orient-Le Jour. Drawing on the histories of several countries that have experienced mass atrocity or repression during conflict, Mr. Van Zyl—himself a former member of the South African Truth and reconciliation Commission of 1993 which helped the country transition away from the horrors of Apartheid—explained the underlying principles that guide the ICTJ's work and how these responses can include both judicial and non-judicial means. "First of all, it's important to note that we do not make decisions on behalf of the people we are trying to assist. Rather, we try to help them find the best possible approaches for their specific context. These measures tend to span the following paths or possibilities: prosecutions, granting reparations to victims, establishing truth-seeking mechanisms to investigate past abuses, initiating reconciliation activities, reforming institutions such as the police force or judiciary, and, finally, vetting those responsible for violations of human rights from positions of power."

Commenting on the initial lack of motivation towards such a long and exhausting process that is often present in societies emerging from a repressive era, and noting that they often face enormous economic obstacles, Van Zyl asserted that, "nonetheless, very few societies can afford to ignore their pasts. Take for example Lebanon today, where you constantly hear about new gravesites being discovered. You cannot expect people to live with dignity, while simultaneously urging them to forget about the past. Forced forgetting will merely bring about more anger and frustration in the future. Lebanon is not immune to this cycle."

Confronting the Past before it Repeats Itself
Mr. Van Zyl then explained one of the fundamental underlying principles of all transitional justice processes: "It has often been proven that a troubled history, with all of its wounds and atrocities, when left alone can easily return to unleash a new era of destruction. Today, Lebanon no longer has the choice of whether or not to deal with its past. The real choice is between two alternatives: would you prefer to let the past resurface on its own, brewing new confrontations with possibly disastrous circumstances, or would you prefer to address the past in the manner that you choose as the most useful or appropriate? This is the question you really have to answer. In fact, Lebanese society is already faced with its past. The parents of the disappeared want to know what happened to their loved ones and the Lebanese public wants to know the truth behind the mass graves they're reading about in the newspapers." While he acknowledged that these questions are fundamentally possible today because of the retreat of Israeli and Syrian forces, he also cautioned against the danger of excessively politicizing these kinds of sensitive questions, which might lead, for example, to sensationalizing the discovery of certain kinds of mass graves, while silencing the discovery of others.

After Taëf: An Artificial Peace
Has Lebanon already decided to "forget everything" since it voted to pass an amnesty law in 1991? "The era of peace and amnesia after the war was artificial and owed much to the oppressive Syrian presence in Lebanon at the time. By the same token, the Taëf accord was one reached between political leaders- now it is time to give the victims a chance to express how they feel about all that has happened. Chile also had an amnesty law after Pinochet, but that did not prevent justice from returning to fulfill its mission there in the long run. It is vital to deal with the past so that the same problems don't keep resurfacing again," Van Zyl explained, while also exploring the fact that, in many contexts, there can be serious initial obstacles to enacting certain aspects of transitional justice, such as seeking accountability for those responsible. Mr. Van Zyl also pointed to the importance of forging bonds between victims from all walks of Lebanese society, suggesting that the diversity of Lebanese history would not necessarily pose a significant obstacle because "there are no people in the world who actually share one unified, identical history anyway." In fact, he cautioned that the real danger lies in two potential attitudes Lebanon might adopt: "To either wholly deny or justify the past." It was in denouncing these two divisive options—which Lebanon has frequently tended towards— that Van Zyl called for examining all that has happened over the past thirty years of Lebanese history from a more humane perspective and one which acknowledges the realities of the victims. "It is when we take away the human element that we begin to accept things like torture and massacres. It is important to talk about the past from the perspectives of the victims, not just those of military or political leaders."

It is apparent that herein lies the condition sine qua non of all the stabilizing processes of the past and hence the present and future as well. It is important to introduce victims into the Lebanese equation—a factor which has long been ignored and sacrificed in the service of other considerations which fail to take the human side of things into account. We have to let the victims write for themselves— unified in their sorrow— the history of fifteen years of civil war and fifteen years of "peace", day by day, night by night, bullet by bullet, massacre by massacre, injustice by injustice, removed from the grandiose considerations of one over another which have never been able to explain or justify the crimes committed.