Truth Commissions

A detailed Summary of Truth Commissions

1) What is the potential of truth commissions in helping people and communities recover from mass, systematic violence? What are the potential problems or limitations of truth commissions with respect to this goal? Address this set of questions by drawing on the work of three of the following authors: Wole Soyinka, Michael Ignatieff, Aryeh Neier, Edwidge Danticat, Primo Levi ("The Memory of the Offense?, Roger Cohen, or Gerald Prunier (in conversation with Fergal Keane). Your answer should include an explanation of what truth commissions are and how they have varied in different places and times.

I decided to cite the works of Aryeh Neier, Primo Levi, and Roger Cohen. Each author revealed different aspects of truth commissions, their potentials and limitations in assisting the victims and communities recover from mass, systematic violences. In Levi's, The Memory of Offense, light is shed on the methodical human memory of the victims and victors themselves when it acts as a buffer against revealing the "truths?of violences bestowed upon them. In the case of Neier's, Rethinking Truth, Justice, and Guilt after Bosnia and Rwanda, truth commissions were severely limited due to their inability to attain documentary evidence to

In Bosnia, one of the most horrific genocides of our time was smeared with government propaganda to disguise it's evil. "That view was presented mainly on Radio-Televisija Beograd, the principal Serbian television station and most effective conduit for vitriol of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic's control of television was critical to his government- and to the stirring up of war ?because the evening news, called the Dnevnik 2, was watched by about 60 percent of the population over ten years of age. As a result, for most Serbs, reality was what Belgrade Television served up to them?In Bosnia, Serbs were "unarmed defenders of centuries-old hearths, fighting for freedom and the right to protect their native soil from the Muslims.?(Cohen,p.154) "Of such estrangement was the decomposition of Bosnia made. Containment, for the outside world, meant preventing the war from spreading or intensifying. Seen from within, however, the policy of containment was about the spread and intensification, over a period of years, of the divisions that destroyed Bosnian society.?(Cohen,p.158) In addition to government propaganda, in a city such as Sarajevo, where Bosnians, Serbs, and the Muslims had been living side by side peacefully for a very long time, it was often an insurmountable task to simply determine who was to blame. "He (Haris) was out on patrol, a month after the war began, looking for Serb snipers. He identified a window in the center of town, near the parliament building, where the fire seemed to originate. When he reached the apartment, he found an old lady

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Approximate Word count = 1067
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English