Unchopping a Tree In The Series Politics, History, and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey Also in this series: Rebecca Jean Emigh, The Undevelopment of Capitalism: Sectors and Markets in Fifteenth- Century Tuscany Aristide R. Zolberg, How Many Exceptionalisms? Explorations in Comparative Macroanalysis Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, translated by Assenka Oksiloff, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age Brian A. Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in the United States Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking Between Israelis and Palestinians Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet to Post- Soviet Rus sia, 1985– 2000 Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, translated by Assenka Oksiloff, The Nazi Census: Identifi cation and Control in the Third Reich Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: Eu ro pe an Refugees from the First World War Through the Cold War ❖Unchopping a Tree Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence Ernesto Verdeja Temple University Press Philadelphia Temple University Press 1601 North Broad Street Philadelphia PA 19122 www .temple .edu/ tempress Copyright © 2009 Temple University All rights reserved Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1992 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Verdeja, Ernesto. Unchopping a tree : reconciliation in the aftermath of po liti cal violence / Ernesto Verdeja. p. cm. — (Politics, history, and social change) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 1- 4399- 0054- 3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Po liti cal violence. 2. Social confl ict. 3. Confl ict management. 4. Reconciliation. I. Title. JC328.6.V47 2009 303.6'9—dc22 2009013156 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 ❖Contents Acknow ledg ments vii 1 Theorizing Reconciliation 1 2 Key Normative Concepts 28 3 Po liti cal Society 66 4 Institutional and Legal Responses: Trials and 92 Truth Commissions 5 Civil Society and Reconciliation 136 6 Interpersonal Reconciliation 160 7 Conclusion 180 Notes 187 References 197 Index 221 ❖Acknowledgments his is a work about po liti cal reconciliation, about the need and challenges of reconciling after severe po litical violence. I be- Tcame interested in this subject while living in South America as a child and seeing fi rsthand the diffi culties of engaging with a fraught past. Many years of thinking about these issues led me to graduate school, culminating in a doctoral dissertation on which this book is loosely based. I would like to thank Nancy Fraser and Courtney Jung, who provided valuable suggestions and direction on the dissertation, and Richard A. Wilson and Andrew Arato, who reminded me of the importance of retaining the connection between normative theory and practical politics in my work. Matthew Goldfeder read the text with care and pressed me on a number of points, making the argument more coherent than it otherwise would have been. His patience with my questions was matched only by the wit and clarity of his suggestions. While at Wesleyan, J. Donald Moon and Nancy Schwartz kindly read the entire manuscript and gave detailed and important feedback on the fundamental arguments. Their intellectual support and friend- ship helped me enormously in this project. At the University of Notre Dame, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Cen- ter for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change provided fi nancial support and a wonderful environment in which to write. viii ▪ Acknowledgments I would especially like to thank Daniel Myers for securing this support and making Notre Dame such a welcoming place. A number of per- sons in Chile and Bosnia and Herzegovina kindly shared their experi- ences with me, and I am enormously grateful to them. Many thanks also go to Temple University Press and Micah Kleit for taking on this project. I dedicate this book to my parents, Martha and Ernesto, who have always encouraged me in everything I have done and showed me the beauty of learning, and to my Bettina, whose love and warmth made this long journey possible and worthwhile. Without her support, this would have been a diffi cult, lonely road. Unchopping a Tree 1❖Theorizing Reconciliation he past one hundred years witnessed the highest number of po- liti cal deaths of any century (Rummel 1997). Two major wars, Tnumerous civil confl icts and wars of in de pen dence, and sys- tematic state- sponsored atrocities have left behind a battered po liti cal landscape. The genocide of Jews, Roma, Armenians, Ibos, Tutsi, Hutu in Burundi, Bengalis, Khmer, the Aché (Paraguay), Guatemalans, Timorese, Bosnian Muslims, southern Sudanese, and Herero and repression, mass terror, and murder in places as disparate as Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Romania, Uganda, China, and Iran illustrate the heteroge- neous nature of politi cal violence of the past century but do not by any means exhaust its range and depth. Certainly, a century characterized by massacre and torture is not unique in human history, and there is little reason to believe that the twenty- fi rst will be much different. Al- though the instruments of violence today may be more sophisticated and the ideologies behind them different from before (and even this is not always the case), horrifi c violence has long been with us (Kiernan 2007). Nevertheless, what is remarkable are the numerous recent ef- forts at publicly engaging past atrocities, often through new legal mechanisms but also through a multiplicity of other po liti cal and social strategies, with the aim of reconciling former enemies while simulta- neously addressing accountability, truth telling, and the concerns of 2 ▪ Chapter 1 victims. As Martha Minow has eloquently written, these legal and quasi- legal attempts to identify perpetrators and cata logue crimes have “illuminated the hopes and commitments of individuals and societies seeking, above all, some rejoinder to the unspeakable destruction and degradation of human beings” (1998, 1). Po liti cal violence does not end with the last death, however. A common feature of mass murder has been the attempt at destroying any memory of victims, with the aim of eliminating them from history. In the Holocaust, the Aghed (genocide of the Armenians), the Cambo- dian genocide, the Rape of Nanking, the Rwandan genocide, the Gulag and the Laogai, the tortures and murders of leftists in the Southern Cone, and the rule of apartheid, among many others, perpetrators sought not only to eliminate violently a perceived threat but also to eradicate any possibility of alternate, competing social and national histories. Surprisingly, in some countries complex and diffi cult engagements with the past have resulted in remarkable transformations of society. South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and a united Germany are all signifi - cantly more democratic and open than before. In other places, such as Cambodia and Rwanda, peace and stability are the most that can be hoped for, at least in the near term. However, all of these societies have had to confront a complicated tangle of questions: How should perpe- trators, victims, and bystanders be faced? What is the proper balance between punishment and forgiveness? How much memory is too much, and when is it too little? What does it mean to be reconciled with the past and with each other, and how should this be achieved? What, in other words, are the stakes in reconciling? These and similar concerns occupy a central place in societies emerging from massive violence. This book seeks to contribute to these debates by sketching a norma- tive theory of reconciliation that differs from prevailing approaches. The diffi culty in articulating such a theory fi nds an echo in Max Weber’s essay “Politics as a Vocation” (1958). There, Weber distin- guished between two different ethical systems in the po liti cal world: the ethic of ultimate ends, which is committed to the attainment of certain ideals regardless of consequences, and the ethic of responsibil- ity, which recognizes that one’s conduct must be guided by what is possible in the real world, with all of the limitations that this entails. In the end, Weber was distraught about these alternatives, concluding Theorizing Reconciliation ▪ 3 that the former ran the risk of degenerating into the belief that the ends justify the means— giving us Auschwitz and revolutionary fi ring squads— and the latter could always be tempted into one more com- promise, ultimately condemning action to a series of half steps evacu- ated of any meaningful content. Something similar haunts any attempt at formulating a model of reconciliation. On one hand, one risks pro- moting a pure ideal that is unattainable without signifi cantly more violence being done in its wake; take, for example, calls for swift and severe retribution for all human rights violators and their accomplices. Though accountability is desirable as a moral goal— there is, after all, great satisfaction in seeing perpetrators held responsible for gross violations— seeking absolute justice can quickly turn into its own ter- ror. And yet a model that too easily seeks compromise in po liti cally delicate situations can serve as a mere apology for