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ICTJ Mission
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. More
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ICTJ New York Headquarters
5 Hanover Square, Floor 24
New York, NY USA 10004
Tel: +1 917 637 3800
Fax: +1 917 637 3901
info@ictj.org www.ictj.org
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The ICTJ gratefully acknowledges the support of our donors.
Transitions
TJ News and Analysis from around the World
Under the Lens
Mozambique: Social Justice Issues
"Mozambique
decided to prioritize peace and stability as a transitional
policy."
"Who ought we to
have prosecuted? If not the Rhodesians, South Africans and other
international players why RENAMO and FRELIMO [the two main combatants]?"
"We had fought a
terrible civil war that reached into the heart of every family. Some of
the worst offenders were victims in the sense of having been abducted and
forced to kill. Our priority was family and community
healing."
An ICTJ assessment mission to Mozambique
heard many comment like those, during work in collaboration with South Africa's Institute
of Justice and Reconciliation and Mozambique's Promotion of Peace organization, as
part of a wider ICTJ assessment of how countries in southern Africa have
negotiated their transition, and of South Africa's role in the region.
Since 1994 Mozambique's
use of several transitional justice tools has gone largely overlooked by the
international community, in part because they were not part of a "national" program.
Instead, churches and communities launched projects aimed at healing and
reintegration. After a civil war spanning over two decades, peace was the
priority; there was relatively little effort to censure either the government
or the defeated opposition RENAMO forces.
Mozambique
is now enjoying one of the highest economic growth rates in the world and has
replaced Zimbabwe as South Africa's
leading regional trade partner. But social justice issues are becoming more
visible. In February, the inequality between the elite and the large majority living
on less than $1 a day led to food riots in Maputo, the capital-violence the
government dismissed as orchestrated by outsiders.
The ICTJ found that Mozambique's post-colonial
government has often failed to address issues of identity, ethnicity and political domination, as well as significant
gender-based inequalities in the conflict's impact. Mozambique's reluctance to
address those effects of the civil war call into question the depth and
strength of its social, economic and political transformations.
Algeria: Activists Study Past Abuses
A group of Algerian human rights defenders and
representatives of victims' groups took part in May in a workshop organized by
the ICTJ and the Moroccan Center for the Study of Human Rights and Democracy in
Rabat, Morocco, on "Transitional Justice
in Algeria: Challenges and Options."
For four days, nine activists including lawyers, physicians
and members of various organizations representing victims of the Algerian civil
war examined the challenges posed by their government's policies to address
past abuses and reflected on ways to advance victims' rights.
An estimated 150,000 Algerians were killed and nearly 7,000
disappeared, beginning in 1992, during what became known as the "dirty
war" between the army and Islamist armed groups. Neither the Algerian authorities nor Islamic
groups have acknowledged responsibility for the atrocities that took place; a
cloak of denial and impunity shrouds the massacres, disappearances and extra-judicial
executions.
In March 2005, the government-appointed National Consultative Commission on
the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights released partial
results of its 15-month investigation on the fate of the disappeared. Though the
final report was never publicly released, the Commission noted that 6,146 cases
of disappearances were directly attributable to Algerian security forces.
In September 2005, voters in a national referendum approved a
Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, as proposed by President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika. The Charter grants amnesty to armed rebels and exonerates state
security forces, while promising to provide reparations to the victims and
their families. However, it does not provide for any truth-seeking mechanism or
investigation into the widespread human rights abuses.
ICTJ staff and international experts who have worked in Argentina,
Iraq, Morocco, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Spain spoke at the workshop
sessions and shared their experiences with the Algerian participants on issues
such as truth-seeking mechanisms, reparations, unofficial transitional justice
projects, documentation of mass human rights violations and forensic
anthropology.
The ICTJ's involvement in Algeria began in 2004 after requests
from local NGOs, human rights lawyers and victims' groups. Since then, the
Center's work has focused on capacity-building and extensive monitoring of the
government's policies to address the legacy of the "dirty war." The ICTJ has also
been actively pursuing permission to visit the country and meet with officials
and policymakers to discuss with them transitional justice options for
resolving the current impasse.
Research: How Things Work
In addition to designing a monitoring process to analyze its
own interventions, the ICTJ has launched a research project long in the making
entitled "How Things Work." The ICTJ's
Research Unit believes that understanding how transitional justice
interventions work is as important as trying to measure their impact.
While the ICTJ and others are studying the effects of
transitional justice interventions, the task of understanding, precisely, how
the interventions are connected with the particular goals often attributed to
them has not received nearly as much attention.
The literature on transitional justice includes arguments
that seek to justify the use of different transitional justice measures,
including criminal justice, truth-telling, reparations, and institutional reform
initiatives, among others. It is also full of "aspirational claims"--claims about
what effects these measures are supposed to bring about. But there is a striking lack of explanations
linking specific measures with specific effects.
Understanding these
links is important theoretically, but also in practice; improving these
practices depends upon understanding how they work.
This project gathers leading academics and practitioners,
including:
Louis Bickford: Director of the Policymakers and
Civil Society Unit, ICTJ.
Craig Calhoun: President of the Social Science Research Council
and University Professor of the Social Sciences, New York University.
Pablo de Greiff: Director, Research Unit,
ICTJ.
Anthony Duff: Professor
at the Philosophy Department, University of Stirling.
Eduardo Gonzalez: Deputy
Director of the Americas
program, ICTJ.
Brandon Hamber: Senior
Lecturer and Research coordinator of INCORE, a UN Research Centre for the Study
of Conflict, University of Ulster.
Elizabeth Lira: Professor at the Centro de Etica, Universidad
Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile.
Alexander Mayer-Rieckh: Director of the SSR Program, ICTJ.
Geoffrey Nice: Former Principal Trial Attorney in the Office of
the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia.
Claus Offe: Professor of Political Sociology at the Hertie School
of Governance, Berlin.
Debra Satz: Associate
Professor of Philosophy and a research affiliate for the Program on Global
Justice, Stanford University.
Margaret Walker: Professor of Ethics, Justice, and the Public Sphere, School
of Justice & Social Inquiry, Arizona State
University.
Kosovo: Beginnings of TJ Efforts
When it
proclaimed the country's independence in February 2008, the parliament of
Kosovo committed itself to
confronting the painful legacy of the recent past in a spirit of reconciliation
and forgiveness. It also undertook to respect the principles of the plan formulated
by Martti Ahtisaari, which highlighted the need to use the tools of transitional
justice. Kosovo seems therefore at the edge of dealing with its past.
However,
the government's efforts are complicated by the reluctance of the Serb minority
to engage with the newly established Kosovar institutions and by the confusion
surrounding the presence of both the United Nations
Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo and the forthcoming European
Union crisis management operation on rule of law.
Civil
society has a strong role to play in creating a productive debate about the
past. The ICTJ has been working towards that goal, with projects conducted
independently or in cooperation with the OSCE High Commissioner for National
Minorities.
The
ICTJ has focused on rule-of-law issues, notably
by analyzing the lessons to be learned from the deployment of international
judges and prosecutors in Kosovo (see Lessons from the Deployment
of International Judges and
Prosecutors in Kosovo).
And it is examining ways to engage with other issues affecting Kosovo society.
Liberia: Women and TJ
As part of a consortium advising the European Commission's
Initiative for Peacebuilding, the ICTJ is focusing on Liberia in formulating
recommendations to the EU for improving its peacebuilding role.
In 2003, Liberian women played a pivotal role in a
comprehensive peace accord and have continued to make significant contributions
to transitional justice. Women have backed legislation focused on inheritance
and on rape; women also accounted for four of the initial nine commissioners of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
They have worked to ensure women are heard at the TRC's public hearings.
Many Liberian women recognize peacebuilding as a long
process in which much remains to be done. For example, a recruitment billboard
for the new Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) advertises that to join the new AFL
is to uphold family values. But the billboard shows a family with a father in
army fatigues, a domestic mother, and two beguiling children. Such images raise
questions whether Liberia's
new National Security Strategy will indeed demilitarize security, and shift
away from male-dominated physical security.
Public testimony by Liberian women who demand accountability
for human rights violations that occurred during the armed conflict is an
important step towards individual healing. As one victim of sexual violence who
gave public testimony said, "Better I talk it, than for it to be in my heart."
But repairing the relationship between the state and its
citizens is far more difficult. When women are turned away from the TRC,
experience sexual violence by security forces, or are excluded from key
security sector decisions, transitional justice mechanisms fail women. It may
be more valuable for advocates of transitional justice to acknowledge failures
than to hide them, the better to build the trust needed for reconciliation.
Transitional Justice in The News
Belgian police arrested a Congolese warlord and ex-presidential candidate in
Brussels after
he was charged with rape and torture. Jean-Pierre Bemba, who fled to Europe in
2007, was taken into custody at his home in a suburb of the Belgian capital one
day after the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant. Bemba is accused
of war crimes and crimes against humanity that he committed as head of a
militia that allegedly committed atrocities in Central African Republic's conflict
in 2002-2003. It was the first arrest in an investigation opened last year,
following a request by the Central
African Republic in 2004 to the ICC to
investigate mass rape and other crimes in the country.
For
the first time, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is holding formal public
hearings in the United
States. The Liberian TRC and its U.S. partner, the Advocates for Human Rights, began
formal hearings in St. Paul, Minnesota
on June 9 at Hamline
University. An estimated
30,000 Liberians live in Minnesota; tens of
thousands live elsewhere in the US.
The Liberian TRC was created by legislation in 2005 after the signing of a
peace agreement in 2003.
According to Iraqi officials, eight former members of Saddam Hussein's regime were transferred from U.S. to Iraqi control. They included several former Baath Party officials, including Iraq's former director of military intelligence, Sabir Azizi al-Douri-who was sentenced to life in prison in June 2007-and Saddam's former secretary, Abed Hmoud. The US military, which continues to hold dozens of former Iraqi government officials, said it was currently coordinating other transfers.
Violence against foreigners in South Africa has left more than 60 people dead and has displaced more than 100,000 others. Many South Africans blame the growing immigrant population for much of the country's crime. President Thabo Mbeki's government dismissed the xenophobic attacks as the work of criminals. Analysts say the attacks partly reflect rising frustration among locals who have watched foreigners--some of them in the country illegally--take jobs because they are either prepared to accept less pay or are better qualified.
Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to former students of Indian residential
schools, the first formal apology from the government over the federally
financed program. Mr. Harper offered an apology in the House of Commons for
more than a century of abuse of Inuit, Métis and First Nations children, who
were forcibly taken from their families and placed in church- and state-run
institutions that sought to change the children's cultural identity. The
government sought to use the Indian
Residential School
system to "civilize" the country's indigenous population through
forced assimilation.
Uganda has appointed judges to preside over a special war crimes tribunal to try leaders of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The tribunal was agreed upon during peace talks between the government and the rebels, even though the two have failed to sign a final peace agreement. LRA leaders hope the court will help them avoid prosecution by an international court. The International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of LRA head Joseph Kony and several of his commanders in 2005 for crimes committed during a 21-year-old insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced 2 million.
The Khmer Rouge's former social welfare minister has made her first appearance in Cambodia's UN-backed court. Ieng Thirith, 76, is seeking bail on charges of crimes against humanity relating to the regime's brutal four-year rule in the late 1970s. Three of the five former Khmer Rouge leaders held by the court have already had their requests for bail denied. Up to two million people are thought to have died from starvation, overwork or execution under the Khmer Rouge regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979. In June 2003 the UN and the Cambodian government agreed to establish the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) to try Khmer Rouge leaders. The ECCC became operational in 2006.
Serbian authorities arrested Stojan Zupljanin, a former Bosnian Serb police commander charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity on June 11. Mr. Zupljanin's arrest was conducted under the supervision of the War Crimes Prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Mr. Zupljanin in 1999 for his authority over detention camps and police forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Bosnian War and for his alleged role in ethnic-cleansing campaigns against non-Serb civilians. Serbia's failure to fully cooperate with the ICTY by arresting fugitives in its territory has been an ongoing obstacle to progress towards EU membership.
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