Special Report Transcript Episode 80, Section 7, Time 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 disappearances and for them it was critically important to see that. The extend and the depth of denial in Chile, as in many other countries, was so great that up into the mid to late 1980s which was fifteen years after the military coup, fifteen years after most of the violations had taken place there was still blanket denial from the government. // What we see here, especially from white people, is an attitude of why is it necessary to rake up the past, we don’t want to know about the past, it’s about reconciliation. Let’s take hands and go into the future. // I think that it’s a universal that the people who are least served or somehow threatened by the truth, are not interested in that truth coming out; even if it’s maybe several steps removed.

Notes: Max du Preez; Priscilla Hayner; Chilean graveyard ‘Noala Impunidad’; Exhumation; Max du Preez; Priscilla Hayner

References: there are no references for this transcript