Whither the Truth Commission?

Apr 05, 2013 Editorial

Even though all three Parliamentary parties unanimously expressed their strong opinion that Guyana needs a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, there have been no demands for allocations in the present budget to establish such an entity. This can only mean that the politicians were only mouthing words they felt the populace wanted to hear.
But those words express a sentiment that goes to the heart of the dilemma our country faces in our search for a road to even higher levels of sustainable growth that would enable the full potential of our people to flower. Such growth demands that all our people see the country as a joint venture and work together to develop it.
Our dilemma is that we have never truly moved away from the effects of the violent conflicts of our recent and not so recent past. In our case, we can appreciate William Faulkner’s aphorism that ‘our past isn’t even past.” Consequently, we remain trapped in an infinitely regressive series of accusations as to ‘who did what to whom, and when?” In every single engagement between our politicians, whether it be the set pieces in Parliament, the tentative “Tripartite Talks” or the press conferences and interviews mediated through the media, the past inevitably rears its head, bares its fangs, and ensures that skittish minds become even more paranoid.
We can debate all we want about budgets in Parliament, but unless we alleviate the reflexive assumptions that each side is about “to do the other side in”, we will never achieve the double-digit growth rates that are necessary for us to catch up with even the rest of the region within a decade. The question of politicians’ motives loom very large: even though the issue had been well ventilated in the media – witness the Plaisance community’s assumption that the tower being erected for e-governance was not in their interest because they were not consulted.
As we have pointed out several times in the past decade, the experts have delineated four main goals of Truth Commissions (TCs), each of which is very apropos to our predicament. Firstly, TCs seek to contribute to a transitional period of lessened rancour by ‘creating an authoritative record of what happened’. Only this week, for instance, Mayor Hamilton Green and Dr. David Hinds were engaged in a debate as to what exactly did Mr. Eusi Kwayana call for in the sixties: ‘partition’ or ‘shared governance’.
Secondly, TCs provide a forum for victims to tell their stories and obtain some form of redress. As a result of the crime spree that transfixed the country and brought the East Coast of Demerara to its knees, whole villages feel victimised and harbour great resentment that their losses, material and psychic were never repaid. The police, for instance, have recently tried to initiate a structured relationship with the village of Buxton, but unless those villagers and the police have an opportunity to tell their stories without recrimination and sanctions, the suspicions will continue to colour the relationship.
Thirdly, TCs seek to recommend legislative, structural or other changes to avoid a repetition of past excesses and abuses. In the same period of violence alluded to above, we are sure that the residents want to be assured that their experience of arbitrary searches and arrests by elements of the police force are a ‘thing of the past’. The Minister of Home Affairs has recently announced an initiative that purports to address those concerns, but because they were initiated unilaterally – without the villagers’ expression of their fears – there will always remain suspicions as to whether the police have really been ‘reformed’.
Finally, TCs seek to establish responsibility and provide a measure of accountability for the perpetrators of excesses. There are, for instance, numerous victims of the violence of the gunmen in the crime-wave who still harbour tremendous resentment for the attention paid to the violations of the latter’s ‘rights’ while they are ‘taken for granted’. They pressure their political representatives to be less ‘flexible’ and the cycle of distrust continues.
Let us introduce a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in this budget debate.

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