ICTJ in the News

June 1, 2006

Letter to the Editor: Response to Mark Freeman

The New Internationalist

Letter to the Editor: Partial Truths

By Francis Andrews

Mark Freeman is right to ask the question 'Whose truth?' do truth commissions (TCs) claim to provide (Justice after genocide, NI 385). Since their conception, TCs have been a site of contestation, largely over controversial grants of amnesty in exchange for testimony. One glaring omission from TCs that Freeman failed to comment on is the role played by foreign actors in the promotion of internal conflict. Take Latin America. It would be remiss to assume that TCs there are providing victims of conflict with a foundation on which to build a stable democracy. Many of the brutal regimes established in Central and South America in the 1960s and 1970s were sparks from a still fiery Cold War anti-Communist genocide, promoted and sponsored by the US. Look no further than the US-sponsored coups in Guatemala and Chile. How can peace be achieved if the perpetrator of the problem is still at large?

The Pinochets and the Rios Montts are merely pawns in the grand game of US foreign policy, masks to cover America's ugly face.

The newly elected governments in Latin America are still heavily reliant on trade and aid from the US. Truth commissions in the case of Latin America (and beyond) are therefore limited in their ability to tackle the root cause of the problem. They do not allow for the transparency they espouse, and they do not grant victims the arguably cathartic gratification of knowing who originally constructed them as a 'threat' to the state, and why.

The study of genocide is undoubtedly complex. The many layers of interwoven economic, political and cultural threads only serve to cloud the gulf between the victim and the perpetrator. Yet until victims are allowed access to the bigger picture, and until the deeper roots of these violations are unearthed and held to account, truth commissions grant, at best, partial truths.

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