By ANN RICHARDS
If South Africa had any hope of achieving sustainable peace following the dissolution of apartheid, it had to “come clean” and acknowledge what had happened.
“Thousands of South Africans had been jailed, evicted, gone underground or died,” said Alexander L. Boraine, global visiting professor of law at New York University’s School of Law.
“After [Nelson] Mandela was elected, there was great joy. But we had to come down from that mountain very quickly. There were still many unanswered questions. We had to find a way to provide justice for victims, hold those who had committed crimes responsible and reintegrate the perpetrators into society.”
On Sept. 13, the former deputy chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) spoke before a standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty at the University of Michigan-Flint.
His appearance was part of a weeklong series of community events surrounding the South African play, Truth in Translation, which examines the stories of both the victims and perpetrators of apartheid through the experience of translators participating in the TRC. The Flint residency portion of the U.S. tour was funded with a $169,820 grant to the Flint Cultural Center Corporation from the Mott Foundation.
“Our first obligation was to restore dignity to the victim,” Boraine said of the TRC.
“Generally, the perpetrator -- not the victim -- is the focus of justice. We started with the victim, with the voiceless who had been ignored.
“We believed that the quality of justice is limited by reducing it to persecution only. We tried to achieve a justice that was both retributive and restorative.”
The reconciliatory approach of the TRC has been used as a model for other countries grappling with past human rights abuses.
In 2001 Boraine, a former Methodist minister and former member of South Africa’s Parliament, founded the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York City. Today, he travels the world, assisting with peace-building efforts in countries as diverse as Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone.
Through the center, which is working in more than 20 countries, governments, non-governmental organizations and international organizations are attempting to craft a balance between judicial approaches -- such as human rights litigation and war crime tribunals -- and nonjudicial approaches -- such as truth and reconciliation commissions, mediation and peace-building efforts.
Since 2002, Mott has provided more than $2 million in general support and project grants to the center.
“What we sought was a broader definition of justice -- not a watering down but a deepening of that concept,” Boraine said of the center’s work. “The model we used in South Africa was flawed -- we made many mistakes -- but we believe that it was successful in beginning a change process that is still under way.”
Much work remains to be done to restore true equality for all citizens in South Africa, he said.
“The healing in South Africa is partial -- a lot remains to be done. If you are a professional peacemaker, then you believe that the greatest of human rights is life itself -- you want to stop the killing. Then your work has to shift to something else.”