Peace versus justice? The dilemma of transitional justice in Africa, edited by Chandra Lekha Sriram and Suren Pillay, Scottsville, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2009, 373 pp., R 244.95, ISBN 9781869141738
Africa has represented one of the principal laboratories of transitional justice since the 1990s. The continent has witnessed the creation of an international criminal tribunal (for Rwanda), several truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) (the best known being the South African TRC), a ‘hybrid’ court made up of domestic and international justice officials (the Special Court for Sierra Leone), and local conflict-resolution and reconciliation mechanisms derived from traditional practices (in Rwanda, Mozambique or Uganda). Finally, African countries also represent the totality of the cases currently before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. For these reasons, Peace versus justice? The dilemma of transitional justice in Africa is a welcome and necessary contribution. Not only does it consider the full range of mechanisms employed in Africa's transitional justice processes, but it also provides a (self-) critical analysis by African scholars and practitioners who were personally involved in them.
The volume is divided into five parts: the first providing a general overview of the challenges of transitional justice in the African context; the second focused on truth and reconciliation processes; the third on war-crimes tribunals; the fourth on indigenous justice; and the fifth on the International Criminal Court. Several themes cut across the various case studies considered. As the book's title highlights, a key issue is the balance between ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ in the African context: the difficult decisions characterising post-conflict situations and the new governments' attempts to address the legacy of human rights abuses, war crimes and genocide — but without jeopardising a fragile peace often ensuing from a negotiated settlement. A second cross-cutting theme is the importance of local ownership of transitional justice processes. This emerges particularly clearly in the chapters on Sierra Leone and Rwanda, where both the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) in various ways disempowered local actors and societies who were meant to be the principal recipients of the justice these courts were providing. A third important theme concerns the ultimate aims of transitional justice, particularly the notion of ‘reconciliation’ through justice and truth-telling mechanisms. Here, local responses – like internationally driven ones – have been found to fall short of the lofty aims they declared as their ultimate justification: bringing about healing, forgiveness, ‘nation-building’ and social consensus about the past. The critiques provided in the volume raise the question of whether greater modesty in proclaiming the aims and more measured expectations of transitional justice are necessary, in Africa as elsewhere.
As recognised by the editors, Peace versus justice? showcases the ‘large footprint’ of the South African TRC as a model for truth commissions in Africa and beyond. Alex Boraine, the former vice-chair of the TRC, examines the impact of the South African case on the establishment of other truth commissions in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and Peru. Other authors focus more specifically on the constraints under which the South African TRC operated and the critiques that have been levelled at it. Other than the issue of the amnesty – which remains contentious both in South Africa and elsewhere, despite the TRC's argument that it was necessary to ensure a peaceful transition and was conditioned on specific criteria, including the full disclosure of the individuals' involvement in human rights abuses – Yasmin Louise Sooka and Charles Villa-Vicencio (both former TRC members) note in their chapters the failure of the TRC to address apartheid's legacies of structural racism and economic injustice. Building on the critiques by Wole Soyinka and Mahmood Mamdani, Villa-Vicencio thus writes that ‘[t]he limitation of the South African TRC was that it had neither the mandate nor the time nor, perhaps, the will to address the underlying problem of racism and privilege that underpinned the gross violations of human rights that it sought to uncover.’ (p. 53) Such critiques of the TRC confirm the claim made by many analysts that, in South Africa, the goal of rectifying injustice was ultimately subordinated to the pursuit of peace and the discourse of national reconciliation.
Justice was, of course, the primary imperative of tribunals set up for Rwanda and Sierra Leone and of the International Criminal Court. Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, a former Special Counsel and Spokesperson for the ICTR, makes a case for trials being the best transitional-justice mechanism for post-conflict societies, despite recognising that in some cases amnesties or truth commissions may represent a necessary first step. However, some of the case-study chapters challenge this view. Wambui Mwangi highlights local ownership as a big problem for the ICTR, particularly in regard to acquittals. John L. Hirsch contrasts the case of Sierra Leone with its ‘hybrid’ Special Court to that of Mozambique, where ‘traditional rituals, local community practices, the churches and civil society replaced Western models of justice’—noting that only in the latter ‘a significant measure of reconciliation was achieved’ (p. 202). His argument that domestic processes are more successful than internationally generated ones is echoed in the other chapters on Sierra Leone, where international involvement in the Special Court overshadowed and sidelined the national judiciary and the country's truth and reconciliation commission, and interfered with regional attempts at negotiating the country's transition. In a similar vein, Chandra Lekha Sriram notes that the International Criminal Court may, in fact, hinder domestic peace-making and reconciliation processes – as, for example, in the Ugandan case when it decided to prosecute Joseph Kony despite a domestically agreed amnesty. The contributors confirm many of the problems with the existing, predominantly international, judicial instruments – without, however, dismissing the need for prosecutions per se or minimising their potential contribution to processes of reckoning with the past.
Although there is some repetition and overlap among the contributions, and some chapters are by now already out of date, all in all Peace versus justice? provides a thoughtful and nuanced account of transitional justice in Africa from an ‘insider’ perspective. It should be useful both to students of the various African case studies covered and to analysts of transitional justice and post-conflict peace building more generally.