Reconciliation and T

1
Reconciliation and TR Commissions Part 3

• Benefits, Problems, and Limitations

2
Some Benefits of TR Commissions For Victims

• Facilitate healing
• May provide a degree of closure to victims and
  their friends and relatives
• Help to restore the human dignity of victims and
  break the pride of perpetrators
• Give voice and catharsis to those who had been
  silenced
• Provide consensual validation of the pain felt
  from racism, violence, and colonialism

3
Some Benefits of TR Commissions At the Societal
Level

• Provide an opportunity to deepen our
  understandings of meanings of pain, suffering,
  resistance and loss experienced
• Correct distorted histories conveyed in official
  curricula by replacing settler heroics with
  balancing info, such as brutalities inflicted by
  settlers
• Provide for reintegration of falsely accused
  informers into the community
• Decriminalizes the behaviour of some freedom
  fighters

4
Some Problems of TR Commissions

• Lack of a shared moral order
• Invalid assumptions about reintegrative community
  shaming
• Refusal to self-identify as a victim results in
  foregoing eligibility for reparations
• Reopens psychological wounds
• Deniers, Platitude Speakers, and Critics
• Australian Case Study Integrative and
  Assimilative

5
Some Limitations

• Limitations of Memory
• Shortcomings of Oral Testimony
• Neglect of the structural, systemic violence and
  racism.
• Barriers to Cross-cultural Communication
• Oversimplification due to a narrow range of
  witnesses
• Failure to Identify Women as Victims
• Pay insufficient attention to actors and
  institutions on the international scale
• Politicization of the apology issue