Every so often there is the demand for the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC), a transitional justice-type organisation, to help quell the ethnic divisions in Guyana. Transitional justice is an approach for dealing with societies that are attempting to move away from armed conflict and authoritarian rule, come to terms with their history of abuse and create a justice system that will ensure accountability and prevent future atrocities from occurring. TRCs became popular following its use in post-apartheid South Africa and because, while it is a very complicated process, it fits into the universal narrative that we should all be able to sit down, discourse and find solutions to our problems. Of course, if human conflicts were so easily resolved, there would not have been wars and the apartheid system itself.
The establishment of the Nuremberg tribunal after the Second World War is viewed as an earlier example of transitional justice but that which exists today is said to have emerged in response to the growth of democracy that followed the Cold War. It is now lodged in a framework that incorporates the rule of law and state building, e.g. involves community projects, implementing internationally accepted standards of governance, strengthening peace, furthering democracy, human rights and coming to terms with the effects of past wrongs.
Transitional justice is more concerned with the establishment of what, I called last week, positive peace: developing the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful relations that enable the conditions for a society to flourish (negative peace is the absence of actual hot wars and fear of such wars). Improvements in positive peace are said to be associated with many desirable outcomes of society: higher economic growth, better measures of wellbeing, higher levels of resilience and more peaceful societies. More importantly it is said to provide ‘a theory of social change and explains how societies change and evolve’ (https://www.economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/PPR-2019-web.pdf).
Since the establishment of positive peace is the goal of post ‘war’ societies, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) has identified eight major pillars of positive peace to which we need to pay keen attention. First and foremost is the existence of ‘a well-functioning government that delivers high-quality public and civil services, engenders trust and participation, demonstrates political stability and upholds the rule of law.’ The other seven factors are the existence of a sound business environment, equitable distribution of resources, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbours, free flow of information, high levels of human capital and low levels of corruption.
Considering the armed conflicts that took place in Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Colombia, the Ligatum Institute presented what it defined as ‘a clear framework for effective reconciliation, based upon three key features: fostering national unity, rebuilding communities, and healing individual trauma’. Importantly the Institute claims that ‘successful reconciliation requires visionary political leadership that has a unifying quality’ and such ‘leadership must be rooted in a sense of legitimacy, rather than simply authority’ (https://li.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Breaking-the-cycle-of-violence.pdf). It is obvious then that positive peace can only be developed upon the existence of negative peace because the latter can only result from some agreement between the warring national leaderships. That is to say, without negative peace the process of nation building remains extremely problematic for negative peace usually brings with it a key ingredient: a national approach to governance.
Truth and reconciliation bodies are one of the important but subsidiary factors that can help to deliver an inclusive narrative of the conflictual past if they are based on international best practices and are led by commissioners deemed authoritative, credible and free from political interference of any kind. However, the development of such a national narrative is impossible if the conflict is still raging! There are other factors: the inclusive political leadership must make reconciliation a national priority and become models of reconciliation; ensuring that political representation does not actively discriminate against any one party, ethnicity or religion and emphasizing the sense of a unifying, national identity. ‘Without strong national leadership, bottom-up approaches are unlikely to be effective, sustainable, or be able to reach the scale required to succeed’ (Ibid).
It requires no elaboration for one to identify where Guyana stands in relation to the establishment of positive peace. It is close to the negative end of a continuum of all the eight pillars. This is because successive governments have been seeking to establish positive peace in the context where negative peace has not been accomplished to provide the necessary conditions for its development. If the political leadership cannot even begin to devise a sensible narrative of the present conflict, I believe that it is fair to say that it is too sectional and divisive to lead to a national reconciliation of any kind.
Guyanese political leaderships tend to believe that if they, their party and supporters make sufficient noise about wanting and developing national unity, it will occur or at least fool others that an authentic effort is being made. In its time, the coalition government established an entire ministry and plan to induce national unity. It did not last long in government but its demise brought such astonishing ethnic unrest that one can only conclude that the impact of the efforts was negative. Now we are treated to similar orations about a ‘One Guyana Commission’ and ‘Corridor of Unity’. The truth is that the national cohesion plan of the coalition was quite comprehensive but it failed, as the recent PPP/C’s creation will fail, because it was not being driven by a national leadership. Indeed, I argued (Future Notes, SN: 24/05/2017) that the plan did not address the substantial issue raised in one of the texts in its literature review. There, William Easterly et al. in Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth, wrote, ‘Where such common identity is missing opportunistic politicians do exploit differences to build up a power base. It only takes one such opportunistic politician to exacerbate division; because once such ethnic group is politically mobilized along ethnic lines other groups will.
As we have seen above, TRCs are part of the process of building positive peace, which assumes that negative peace and its usual accoutrements have been achieved. Generally, the relevance and value of TRCs are hotly debated but the establishment of this kind of inquiry in Guyana must await the appropriate stage of national reconciliation. I have said it before and say it again ‘If these kinds of inquiries are to be useful in (Guyana), … they must be done in an environment in which all parties – the government, the opposition, organisations and individuals – feel relatively safe in being open and truthful. Anyone who believes that such an environment exists in Guyana must be from some other planet’ ( Future Notes: SN: 16/01/2013)!’
