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Content
A listing of transcripts of the dialogue and narrative of this section.
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Structure
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Special Report
Transcripts for Section 7 of Episode 80
| Time | Summary | | | 48:54 | In the same as South Africans think their problems are unique; they tend to think our Truth Commission is also unique. In fact there have been at least eight Truth Commissions in recent years in places like Uganda, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Chad and Sri Lanka. Still, South Africa’s Truth Commission is the biggest and most far reaching one so far. It has had the effect that many nations who had come through times of repression and turmoil are now looking at establishing Truth Commissions with our Commission as a model. The former Dutch colony in South America, Surinam, is about to launch a Truth Commission. And there’s debate in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda around the same issue. Probably the most prominent expert on Truth Commissions worldwide is a young American academic and researcher, Priscilla Hayner. | Full Transcript | | 49:36 | If you look at some of the more prominent examples of these kinds of Truth Commissions in Latin America for example, you have both examples where commissions were set up through presidential decree, in Chile and Argentina both. And one thing about that model is that because they are set up through a presidential decree and not through national legislation they weren’t able to take on certain powers, such as the power to subpoena, which has become so important to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here. But they only had powers to invite people, either perpetrators or victims, or families of the disappeared to come forward and give testimony. Unfortunately in both Chile and Argentina they primarily took evidence from families of the victims and not from perpetrators. They had almost no collaboration from perpetrators which is strikingly different from South Africa. This is really the only case, because of the amnesty model that has been set up here, where in exchange for the ...more | Full Transcript | | 51:47 | Our Truth Commission here is very different because we have television cameras recording every single moment and radio microphones, and it’s broadcast on a daily basis. Does that in your experience make a big difference? // It’s absolutely remarkable to me to watch the process here. I mean, it’s so much so that I would say that most other commissions are a commission about a product and the commission in South Africa is a commission about a process. And it is the process that will affect the country; that is affecting the country. Presumably the report that’s produced as well will be important, it’s obviously still in process, and we’ll see that. But in other countries people know very little from the outside about what’s happening, nothing’s public. Often, there’s a very strict rule of confidentiality that even the staff can’t speak to the press, no one knows even what cases might be investigated and the journalism sector is usually much more limited, constrained ...more | Full Transcript | | 55:43 | Can a Truth Commission be an effective instrument to extract the truth about the past? // That depends on what powers the commission is given. In some cases there’s great frustration, you can have a commission that’s very effective but in the end it really only has the powers to speak to victims or speak to surviving family members. And I remember speaking with one mother in Chile who had gone to the commission and she’d always been very active in trying to find the remains of her loved one who had gone missing. And in the end when the report came out the report stated, this woman’s husband has disappeared on this date and he has been found to be a victim of human rights violations. But she already knew that. She got no further truth from that case. She already knew exactly what the commission wrote, because essentially they got the information from her and they corroborated that. However the greater society of Chile probably did not fully understand the extent of the ...more | Full Transcript |
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