Stovel(2006)two Faces Of Reconciliation_sl

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Two faces of reconciliation: The case of post-war Sierra Leone 1 Laura Stovel [email protected]

The 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone was notoriously brutal and left an enormous burden of trauma, loss and culpability in its wake. Yet despite this baggage, Sierra Leoneans have good reasons to reconcile. This was not an ethnic war with easily-sustained factions. It was a political conflict that divided families and communities in a way that could not be sustained in peacetime. After the war most combatants and displaced people needed to return home or integrate into other communities. This provided an excellent opportunity to observe reconciliation in action. This research examined how Sierra Leoneans were reconciling and building trust in their communities a year after the war ended and attempted to draw lessons for post-conflict reconciliation in general. The findings are based on 3 ½ months of field research conducted across Sierra Leone from February to May 2003. The research involved 65 in-depth interviews: 55 with diverse Sierra Leoneans and ten with foreigners working for aid or human rights organizations or for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It also drew from ethnographic observations and observations of TRC hearings. The research found that the reconciliation process in Sierra Leone was at an impasse. While Sierra Leoneans were quick to say they would reconcile with and forgive excombatants, when asked to define reconciliation almost all said it means they will interact with excombatants and not take revenge. Only two Sierra Leoneans interviewed said that reconciliation should come

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I gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

2 from the heart. No respondent said that he or she trusted returning excombatants and few mechanisms existed within communities to build that trust. This paper explains this impasse by examining the range of conciliatory and peacebuilding activities during the transition from mass violence to peace in Sierra Leone. Early peacebuilding activities prioritize security and peaceful coexistence and often involve unjust compromises for the sake of peace. I argue that this undermines later conciliatory needs that require some form of justice. These early activities, then, may prevent deep and sustainable reconciliation from being achieved. I also argue that even when trials for serious crimes are difficult or undesirable, postwar justice is still possible. The philosophy behind restorative justice encourages us to think of justice as more than trials for individual crimes and instead to think of it in terms of just or fair outcomes. Thus justice is a flexible concept that allows us to consider, among other things, what victims need to feel safe and accepted in their communities after a violation has occurred. The Sierra Leone experience shows that war victims are often seriously harmed not only by the acts committed against them but also by society’s response to those crimes. A program of justice must ask, ‘what can be done to restore dignity to the victim and give her real choices in her life given her altered circumstances?’ Just outcomes may involve changing social attitudes through education or ‘sensitization’ programs, amending discriminatory laws or providing targeted medical or economic support for certain groups of victims. Much talk about postwar reconciliation centres around war violations and uniting the major war factions. However, a strategy for promoting postwar reconciliation must go well beyond this. It must consider the tensions that led to the war to avoid reinforcing or reproducing them in the transitional period. It must also consider new divisions that arose from the war and the challenges of integration for combatants and victims in the postwar period. A discussion of reconciliation, therefore, must begin with a brief overview of the war itself.

3 The war In March 1991, a small group of rebels, calling themselves the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), invaded Sierra Leone from Liberia with the support of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor and his forces. Led by a disgruntled former Sierra Leone Army corporal, Foday Sankoh, the RUF sought to overturn the corrupt and unpopular government in the capital, Freetown. In the first year of the war, the RUF gained some sympathy and support. Sankoh was a skilled orator whose populist, anti-elitist rhetoric attracted some people who had grievances against national or local rulers. 2 Nationally, political elites were enormously unpopular. Over the past two decades, top politicians, especially former president Siaka Stevens, had bankrupted the state and its institutions. In its place they created a clientalist system of governance in which they used their control over jobs and state resources to accumulate power and wealth. By 1991 when the war broke out, Sierra Leone was the poorest country in the world and the state was almost irrelevant to the rural population. 3 Abuses of power were also felt at the local level. As in much of Africa, the colonial system of indirect rule concentrated power in the hands of cooperative chiefs who gained enormous authority over their constituents, including a near-monopoly on the interpretation of customary law. Many used this power to accumulate wealth, penalize challengers and reinforce strict hierarchies of age, gender and class. 4 Decades after colonialism, these ‘customary’ ruling relations remain. Young men often bore the brunt of this abuse as powerful older men often saw

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TRC of Sierra Leone. Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Vol. 3a (2004), http://www.trcsierraleone.org. 3 William Reno, Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); UNDP, Human Development Report 2005, Financing Human Development, (1991) http://hdr.undp.org/reports/global/1991/en/. 4 Reno, supra n 3.

4 them as contenders for wives. 5 Denied even the right to speak in their own defence, many fled their villages for towns or diamond fields where they were easy recruits for armed forces. 6 In April 1992, a coup by junior army officers seemed to bring about the change in government that many Sierra Leoneans desired. Young people in particular hoped that this would end the old gerontocratic order. 7 This hope was short-lived as the new regime proved to be as corrupt as its predecessors but it drew potential supporters away from the RUF and into the army. The new government hastily recruited thousands of soldiers and sent them with only cursory training to fight the rebels. 8 Despite the poor training, by late 1993 the army and its allies almost succeeded in eliminating the RUF. But at that point the RUF made the fateful decision to change its tactics to guerrilla warfare. 9 Militarily, the RUF’s new terror tactics were devastatingly effective. They were quickly able to divide, confuse and frighten the poorly-trained soldiers. By stealing soldiers’ uniforms and attacking villages in them, they were also able to discredit the army in the eyes of the civilian population. By 1994, the word ‘sobel’ – soldier turned rebel – had gained popular currency. We cannot know how many soldiers did collude with the RUF, but the widespread belief that soldiers could not be trusted demoralized many loyal soldiers and turned the army into an oppositional force. Ironically the military government perpetuated the belief that soldiers had betrayed the country. It began supporting the creation of civil militias, based on traditional hunting societies, to fight the rebels – and rebel soldiers – and to defend communities. 10 The most famous and feared of these were the Mende Kamajor militias. Politically the RUF’s terror tactics were counterproductive. By seeking to make the country ungovernable and to control the population through fear, they alienated the very people 5

Interview 63. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, supra n 2. 7 Interview 63. 8 Jimmy Kandeh, Coups from Below: Armed Subalterns and State Power in West Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 9 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, supra n 2. 10 Ibid. 6

5 they claimed to be fighting for. In a tragic but familiar story, war became theatre and amputations and terror became the new ways of communicating with the government and forcing it to negotiate a power-sharing deal. As the violence escalated, the rebels had to rely increasingly on abductions, primarily of children, to gain recruits. Many abductees were forced to commit atrocities in their home villages before being taken away and resocialized into becoming young killers. Girls were forced to do double duty as ‘wives’ of commanders. This overview cannot do justice to the complexities of the war and does not touch on such factors as the scramble for diamonds, which many observers see as a driving force of the war. 11 However the history presented here identifies major war and pre-war tensions that are relevant to reconciliation. While RUF forces committed most crimes, all sides – the army, the RUF and civil militias – tortured, raped, murdered captives and civilians and recruited children. 12 When the war officially ended in January 2002, members of all factions needed to reconcile with their communities and with the population at large. Three conciliatory challenges At the end of the civil war, Sierra Leone faced three main conciliatory challenges. Combatants from all factions, many of whom committed serious crimes, needed to (re)integrate into their own or other communities; victims needed to reintegrate into, and feel safe in, their communities; and citizens needed to reconcile with their political leaders, the state and state institutions, especially the army and police. Though tensions between citizens and the army emerged from the war, most tensions between citizens and the state preceded it. 11

John Hirsch, Sierra Leone: Diamonds and the Struggle for Democracy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001; Ian Smillie, Lansana Gberie & Ralph Hazelton, The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security (Ottawa: Partnership Africa Canada, 2000). 12 Of the violations reported to the Sierra Leone TRC, 59% were attributed to the RUF and other 10% were attributed to ‘rebels.’ As the TRC hearings and the report revealed, however, the identity of perpetrators was often unclear. As the report states, “In terms of dress and behaviour, the RUF and AFRC (former soldiers who became an oppositional force) fighters were virtually indistinguishable; both had ready access to SLA (army) uniforms but commonly combined military fatigues with civilian clothing.” (TRC of Sierra Leone. Witness to Truth: Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Appendix 1, (2004), 23, http://www.trcsierraleone.org.)

6 The literature on restorative justice throws light on the first two conciliatory needs. In contrast to legalistic justice which sees victims and offenders as autonomous individuals, restorative justice assumes that humans are relational beings who need to live in community with others. Crimes committed within a single community not only hurt victims, they create rifts between the community and both victims and offenders. When a crime occurs, victims feel less secure in the community. They need to heal from the shock and injury and see justice and concrete change before they feel like full community members again. The offender, for his or her part, has lost the trust of both victims and the community and has to earn that back. 13 Moberly argues that the community too has been injured because its ‘moral tone’ has been lowered by the crime. 14 (See diagram one below). The need for community is central here. Almost all people need a social and economic environment in which they support themselves, enjoy relationships and to which they feel they belong. War creates militarized communities for combatants – social groups that sustain themselves through violence whose members feel loyalty to one another. When the war ends, however, opportunities for economic gain through violence decrease and these groups cease to be sustainable. Most combatants need to integrate into some kind of peacetime community and economy.

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Howard Zehr, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice (Waterloo, ON: Herald Press, 1990). 14 In Gerry Johnstone, Restorative Justice: Ideas, Values, Debates (Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2002), 104.

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Reconciliation needs addressed by restorative justice

Victim

Offender

• Personal healing • Regain trust in community • (Reconcile with offender?)

• Personal healing • Regain trust of community • (Reconcile with victim?)

Community

• Restore moral tone • Reconcile victims and offenders with community

After an intracommunal conflict, the need for community provides the incentive for excombatants to meet and integrate with those who they or their faction harmed. Although this kind of integration is difficult, it forces a kind of confrontation and negotiation, spoken or unspoken, between combatants, victims and their communities. All have an incentive to make the reintegration process work: combatants because they need the community; victims and other community members because they may empathize with, or want the return of, their sons, daughters or neighbours and because they fear a return to war. (This incentive, and consequent negotiation between victims, perpetrators and their supporters does not exist to the same degree in

8 an identity-based war because combatants often reintegrate into civilian communities that regard them as heroes and support their actions). 15 Governments can do a lot to facilitate this negotiation. They can provide excombatants with training and economic alternatives to war, prepare families and communities to receive them, and help set up community structures to handle potential conflicts. This is exactly what the Sierra Leone government did. With donor and UN support, it set up the National Commission for Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (NCDDR). Excombatants were given job training or education, transportation money and small allowances to help them gain skills and integrate into the peacetime economy. NCDDR officials, religious leaders and NGO workers also travelled across the country ‘sensitizing’ Sierra Leoneans about the need to reconcile and forgive for the sake of peace. They used the saying, ‘There is no bad bush to throw away a bad child,’ to convey an ontology of African society as being naturally inclusive and forgiving and of Africans as needing to be with their own people. They also stressed that many combatants, especially children, were forced to join the rebels and committed crimes under duress. This ‘sensitization’ campaign was very successful. While many Sierra Leoneans noted that child combatants committed some of the worst atrocities and often enjoyed their power over adults, people also showed tremendous empathy toward them. All Sierra Leoneans I spoke with were willing to accept most excombatants back and interact with them peacefully, calling this ‘reconciliation’ and ‘forgiveness.’ But many also described this as the ‘bitter pill’ they needed to swallow for the sake of peace. No one said they trusted returnees and my research found that few mechanisms existed within villages to build that trust. Reintegration organizations often discouraged excombatants and the families and villagers who received them from talking about

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There are cases, however, such as the conflicts in the Great Lakes Region, where conflicting groups are so interwoven that they cannot live apart. This was clearly illustrated in Esther Mujawayo and Souâd Belhaddad ‘s La fleur de Stéphanie: Rwanda entre reconciliation et déni (Paris: Flammarion, 2004, but it was also a point that was stressed to me by my students from the region).

9 the past and strong strictures existed within villages that prevented open dialogue about these issues. As a result, when I asked people how they learned to trust returning excombatants the answer was inevitably, “We watch them.” The words of one man in Port Loko were typical, “Well, we are watching them. Some of them are still aggressive. They can’t change totally. They change gradually. So as time goes on they gain our trust. So we are watching them.” 16 Former RUF and RUF captives, who were tainted by association with the rebels, knew that they were being watched and described acting out humility in order to regain people’s trust and respect. 17 Civil militias or civil defence forces (CDFs) were an exception to this experience. These militias were formed by communities, with the help of local chiefs and with the cooperation of families, to protect their villages. As a result, they were usually welcomed back home. Although CDF militiamen did commit serious crimes, these often targeted ‘outsiders’ who were seen as a threat. A number of people I interviewed quietly noted CDF crimes but it was not safe to talk about them openly within communities. By contrast, it was safe to condemn the RUF, the army and the government. Former militiamen I interviewed did not describe experiencing difficulty reintegrating into their communities; instead they described themselves as heroes. 18 Thus villagers who are concerned about CDFs will watch them, as they watch other returning combatants, but CDFs do not feel the need to act out humility to gain trust. This sense of entitlement and lack or reflection about CDF crimes may cause problems in the future. While the need to reintegrate excombatants and reconcile them with their communities was clear, the second conciliatory need – that of reconciling victims with their communities – was 16

Interview 24. The sad situation facing RUF captives when they returned to their communities after the war was captured in an interview with a young former RUF captive who returned home. Nobody asked her what happened and she could not talk with anyone outside her immediate family about her experiences but she knew people were making accusations about her behind her back. She described having to walk and talk humbly in order to regain their confidence. Thus, without the possibility of dialogue she was ‘on trial’ for this forced association. 18 The exception to this was a group of CDF amputees I interviewed in a camp outside Freetown. They were rejected by their families not because they were CDF but because they were amputees. 17

10 less obvious – or more forgettable, as victims did not pose a serious security threat. The Kabbah government created the National Commission for Social Action (NaCSA) to oversee the return of refugees and displaced people to their homes, set priorities for assistance to civilians, and channel donor money to communities for economic projects or infrastructure. NaCSA was sometimes touted as the civilian equivalent of NCDDR but the two programs were not the same. Unlike excombatants, most civilians did not receive individual help through NaCSA and this created a sense of imbalance and grievance. While most Sierra Leoneans knew that excombatants needed to reintegrate and did not begrudge them assistance and training, many resented the fact that they could not afford to send their own children to school or receive training themselves. To some, this implied that excombatants were being rewarded for their crimes. Paradoxically, victims of serious crimes such as rape or amputation often had more difficulty integrating and being accepted than excombatants did. In a society in which survivors of rape are severely stigmatized, a woman can be rejected by her husband or denied chances of marrying for these acts inflicted on her. This has serious implications for her economic security. Most of Sierra Leone is governed by customary law which ties women’s legal status to their roles as mothers and wives. Under most customary laws, women cannot inherit property and they gain access to property through their relations with men – their fathers, husbands or sons. Women who have been rejected or who cannot bear children due to sexual violence against them have little status in society and often suffer extreme poverty. Some amputees were also rejected as unproductive burdens by desperately poor families struggling to survive. But many did benefit from skills training and some housing assistance that raised their status within the family. These examples show that a crime is not just a violation; it must be understood within a social and economic context. Reconciliation and justice for victims requires that they begin to feel safe in their communities. This is unlikely to happen when they face rejection due to acts committed against them.

11 The third conciliatory need – reconciliation between citizens and the state – is the most challenging. While Sierra Leoneans were strikingly willing to accept excombatants, they directed enormous blame and anger toward politicians and government officials who they accused of corruption, greed and mismanagement. Everybody, including President Kabbah, saw corruption as the root of the war but, as one Sierra Leonean observed, blaming corruption says everything and nothing. The finger always points elsewhere. To reconcile with the government, Sierra Leoneans need to see significant changes in governing practices and concrete improvements in basic services and infrastructure to enable the economy to run effectively. They also need to engage in broad-based dialogue about what good governance looks like, both locally and nationally, and what they want for the future. The Sierra Leone TRC began this public dialogue; other avenues need to be found to continue it.

Mind vs. Heart: The two faces of reconciliation But what is reconciliation? If we look at the literature on the subject a variety of definitions emerge. In one sense, reconciliation occurs when former adversaries at both the national and local levels agree to work together toward a common future. Reconciliation in this sense is about coming to agreement, imagining a shared future, coming together, coexisting and interacting peacefully. These were the dominant interpretations of reconciliation in Sierra Leone at the time of my research. In another sense, reconciliation involves healing from, and coming to terms with, the wounds of the past and building trust - between individuals, between individuals and their communities, and between citizens and the state. These forms of reconciliation were not emphasized by most transitional programs, with the exception of the TRC. If we look at these two groups of definitions, three striking differences can be observed with important implications for post-conflict transitions. First, reconciliation in the sense of coming to agreement, coexisting and interacting peacefully reflect processes that can be planned

12 for, measured or observed. We can see when a peace agreement is signed and we can observe when opposing sides are able to work together in a transitional government. We can also tell if people are coexisting or interacting without incidents of violence. I call this group rational or measurable reconciliation and it is the focus of much peacebuilding work. The other group of conciliatory processes are guided not as much by rational debate as by feelings. When we heal emotionally, psychologically and physically after a loss or injury; when we begin to trust those around us again, especially those who hurt us; and when we come to terms emotionally with what happened, we feel this physically. We may say we have reconciled and we may agree to obey the law and not seek revenge, but until we feel reconciliation and forgiveness, that reconciliation is only partial. I call this group sentient reconciliation and this form of reconciliation is very difficult to measure. There is a second important difference between the two groups. Rational forms of reconciliation do not require justice to succeed. Agreements do not have to be just or fair and peace agreements are prime examples of this. They tend to reflect the power positions of the parties involved. All too often peace agreements guarantee amnesty to those responsible for massive crimes. Settlements often entrench war gains – as they did in Bosnia – or contain powersharing deals that jettison warlords to political office. Similarly, processes aimed at reintegrating combatants into peacetime society and achieving peaceful co-existence benefit those who committed abuses while those who suffered from their actions do not receive equivalent help. In Sierra Leone, people accepted this largely because they were powerless to do otherwise. 19

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The Kairos Document (http://www.bethel.edu/~letnie/AfricanChristianity/SAKairos.html), a public statement signed in 1985 by 156 South African Christian theologians opposed to apartheid, highlights this point. The theologians challenged ‘Church Theology’ which promoted reconciliation as key to conflict resolution. This may be fine for private disputes, the authors wrote, but in other conflicts: …one side is right and the other wrong. There are conflicts where one side is a fully armed and violent oppressor while the other side is defenceless and oppressed… To speak of reconciling these two is not only a mistaken application of the Christian idea of reconciliation, it is a total betrayal of all that Christian faith has ever meant… We are supposed to do away with evil, injustice, oppression and sin – not come to terms with it…

13 By contrast, healing and building trust probably do require some form of justice. We can reasonably assume that for sentient reconciliation to occur, victims and community members need to feel that they have been treated fairly and that the circumstances that permitted violence or failed to protect them have changed. Once again restorative justice provides a useful way of looking at justice and the kinds of changes required for justice to be achieved. It recognizes that justice is more than trials and punishment – which may or may not satisfy victims. A just resolution is an open question that is answered through dialogue between victims, offenders and community members and that differs depending on the needs and circumstances of the parties involved. Restorative justice encourages us to ask what victims see as a fair resolution – leaving open a broad range of possibilities – and what they would need to feel secure in their communities. These questions would encourage us to look backward, not just at the crime itself but also at the structural context that drove or enabled it. Part of that context is the war – the recruitment and resocialization of children that led many to commit terrible crimes; the fear and vulnerability that pushed some people to seek the protection of armed groups; the lack of payment of soldiers and irregulars that encouraged looting. 20 But much of that context relates to pre-war power structures that so strained the society that war came to be seen by some as the only route to meaningful change. Abuses of power by national and local leaders, discriminatory laws, rigid hierarchical relations and a culture that discourages the questioning of authority resulted in extreme poverty; the alienation of certain groups, especially young men; and the inability of

In our situation in South Africa today it would be totally unChristian to plead for reconciliation and peace before the present injustices have been removed. 20

These do not excuse crimes but they partly explain them. This was well understood by many of those I interviewed. As one young abductee whose family was murdered by RUF forces said, ‘Because, if it’s a normal situation, nobody would just get up and kill my family.’ (Interview 33).

14 Sierra Leonean society to adapt effectively to changing circumstances. 21 Postwar justice requires meaningful, broad-based dialogue about these structures followed by concrete changes. This can go a long way in making victims – and citizens in general – feel that the war will not resume. A truth commission with a mandate to look at the root causes of the war can be a tremendous forum for such broad-based dialogue, enabling people to speak publicly who have never yet had a voice within their communities. I see this as a truth commission’s greatest potential contribution to justice and reconciliation. In a sense it is a collaborative project that offers a diagnosis of what went wrong and what is needed to change the situation. But a diagnosis is of little value without action to follow up; in other words, justice is not achieved, and in fact can be undermined, unless the truth commission’s recommendations are implemented. Equally importantly, efforts to provide justice also need to look forward at the social structures that inhibit a victim’s healing and reintegration – such as social rejection after rape and the legal and economic ramifications of such rejection. A just resolution in such cases may include creating sensitization programs that seek to change attitudes towards rape victims and eliminating discriminatory laws that prevent women from inheriting or owning property in their own right. The third important difference between rational and sentient reconciliation relates to their timing. Rational forms of reconciliation tend to come early in the peace process and sentient forms follow. When opposing sides begin to conceive of a shared political future, when a genuine peace agreement has been signed, when former enemies begin to work together in a shared political process, and when combatants disarm and reintegrate into peacetime communities and coexist without violence with other community members, these are early, rational forms of reconciliation. They need to be seen as part of the three immediate peacebuilding priorities of transitional states: establishing security; creating a sustainable peacetime economy; and 21

For a good description of these dependency relations and rigidities see Mariane Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

15 (re)building accountable government (including state institutions). (See diagram two below). Only the latter goal requires fairness or justice to succeed.

Diagram 2

The flow of transitional and conciliatory processes

Stage 1. Bring conflicting parties to the negotiating table Stage 2. Peace agreement* Negotiate transitional government St. 3. Transitional government - Shared political process - (Re)establish governing institutions and rule of law

• • • •

Security/reintegration - Disarm, demobilize, & reintegrate combatants - Refugee return - Peaceful coexistence

Economic reconstruction - Change from war economy to peace economy - Rebuild infrastructure

Stage 4. Truth, broad justice and dialogue Truth commission (National narrative reconciliation); War crimes trials and broad justice (reparations, legal reform, etc); Broad-based dialogue regarding governance and social processes; Action based on TRC recommendations and dialogue Stage 5. Sentient reconciliation • Trust: In individuals, community and government • Healing: Physical and psychological • ‘Coming to terms’ emotionally with events and actions

* Forms of reconciliation marked in bold

Only once basic security and the re-establishment of some reasonable level of democratic governance are in place can the institutions and process that may promote healing, trust-building and ‘coming to terms’ with events begin to function. Truth commissions; fair national judicial processes to deal with war-related crimes; counselling, psychiatric and health services; and

16 processes of dialogue and civic education all require social stability to be able to run effectively. 22 Sentient reconciliation, then, only begins once a basic level of economic and physical security has been achieved. Moreover these forms of reconciliation may take decades, even generations, to occur. 23 This helps explain the impasse. Early peacebuilding activities may undermine the healing and trust building that need to follow because they typically involve unjust compromises in their efforts to end to violence. This situation is exacerbated by the real danger that donors and policy makers may see peaceful coexistence as a substitute for deeply felt reconciliation. For those seeking measurable outcomes, peaceful co-existence may seem adequate and all that can be ‘realistically’ expected. Where this view prevails, victims who demand justice and change risk being cast as unpatriotic troublemakers.

Conclusion: Implications for peacebuilding after intra-community violence Security-oriented arguments for rational forms of reconciliation are inadequate to defend human rights and justice or to achieve sustainable peace. An expanded vision of reconciliation is needed to address these concerns. If the framework for understanding reconciliation presented here is persuasive, what policy implications can we draw? First, while compromises are necessary, peacebuilding processes must incorporate criteria of justice from the start to avoid undermining later conciliatory goals. As early as the peace negotiations, standards of human rights, democracy and civilian representation in negotiations should be in place before an agreement receives international recognition. Minimal international standards could be established by an international commission similar to the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty which produced the report, The Responsibility to Protect. If international supporters of negotiations stood by these criteria it

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Judicial processes outside of the country such as the special tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court do not require peace to be able to operate. 23 For an excellent illustration of this, see La fleur de Stéphanie (Mujawayo & Belhaddad, supra n 15.

17 would give extra weight to civilian interests – countering the tendency of peace deals to reflect ‘facts on the ground.’ Also, rather than fully accepting the logic of sacrifice for the sake of peace, as was the case in Sierra Leone, civilians should see a balance between assistance for excombatants and for them. Rich incentives to top commanders should be kept to a very minimum. If top commanders are so dangerous that they continue to threaten the stability of the country then they too should be among those indicted by the Special Court. Second, peacebuilders need to avoid reinforcing the conditions that led to the war in the first place. Where problems with national and local governance are widely seen to be at the root of the war, donors should avoid prematurely reinforcing undemocratic elite structures before citizens have a chance to discuss problems of the past and directions for future governance. The British government, for example, pre-empted possible change in Sierra Leone when they funded the Paramount Chiefs Restoration Program in 2000 despite their own reports that identified power abuses by chiefs as a root cause of the war (International Crisis Group, 2004). 24 Military commanders and pre-war elites may have to be used to facilitate reintegration – and in Sierra Leone, chiefs were very helpful in this role, generally ensuring that returning excombatants were safe and supported. However, the administrative practice of using these elites as gatekeepers who control access to benefits meant for their underlings invites corruption and reinforces relations of dependency. Research by Ferme and Hoffman indicates that pressure from below may be changing this administrative practice. Whereas in the past, goods ‘intended for collectivities … would have been handed over to a senior member of the group for allocation,’ people are now confronting this ‘corporativist logic’ by insisting that resources be distributed individually ‘no matter how time-consuming the process, or how small the amount.’ 25

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International Crisis Group, Liberia and Sierra Leone: Rebuilding Failed States (8 December, 2004) www.crisisweb.org. 25 Mariane Ferme & Danny Hoffman, “Hunter Militias and the International Human Rights Discourse in Sierra Leone and Beyond,” Africa Today, 50, no. 4 (2004): 84.

18 Third, policy makers and donors must recognize that reconciliation only begins once peaceful coexistence has been achieved. Though the end of violence may seem to justify a withdrawal of international support – especially with other global emergencies vying for resources and attention – this is the point at which solid funding is necessary. Once citizens have agreed to live and work together, processes must be put in place to involve a wide cross-section of the public in identifying problems of the past and deciding on directions for the future. This can be seen as a process of public consultation, but also political education and consensus and nation building. Truth commissions provide a prime way of doing this. As a victim-centred, dialogical process, they provide a credible public record of war-related crimes and can identify root causes of the war and obstacles to fair integration. To do this, they must not only ask about gross human rights violations conducted during the war; they must also ask: ‘What social, political and economic tensions contributed to the war and enabled the violence?’ ‘How are people integrating after the war?’ And ‘are these integrative processes recreating unjust pre-war conditions?’ Given a broad enough mandate, truth commissions can produce what I call a conciliatory history of the war: a history that exposes everything that is relevant to reconciliation. But the truth commission is only the beginning. Its focus is on the past and present. Other forums are needed to involve the public in identifying how governing structures need to adapt to be more accountable to the people and what is expected of citizens in a democratic state. Truth commissions have proven that low levels of literacy and geographic isolation need not be obstacles to these consultations. A consultative forum on governance could travel around the country and have a similar oral structure or it could be more informal, guided by civil society organizations. Fourth, identifying problems and recommending solutions are not enough to promote sentient reconciliation. Solid action is needed. Government, donors and civil society must be firmly committed to ensuring that the recommendations of the TRC and other consultative forums

19 are implemented. National and local government leaders are key in this process as their credibility is most at stake. The time of transition is by definition an opportunity for change and a time for political leaders to show their worth – their ability to admit mistakes, listen to the people, and implement necessary changes. Much can be gained by courageous and decisive action on the part of leaders – and much can be lost if they fail to act. Participating in consultative processes requires a leap of faith on the part of citizens; failure to respond to recommendations would not only reinforce existing distrust of government, it would make the public much less willing to engage in constructive peacebuilding efforts in the future. Finally, I must stress that these conclusions are drawn from a situation of intracommunal violence which has built-in incentives for reconciliation that may not exist in most intercommunal conflicts. Perpetrators have reasons to want to integrate and victims and communities have reasons to be generous. With adequate national and international commitment to providing justice, enabling broad and meaningful dialogue about governance and building the accountability and service-providing capacity of government, deep reconciliation has a good chance of being achieved.