Reconciliation and T&R Commissions: Part 3

1. Reconciliation and T&R Commissions: Part 3 Benefits, Problems, and Limitations

2. Some Benefits of T&R Commissions: For Victims • Facilitate healing • May provide a degree of closure to victims and their friends and relatives • Help to restore the human dignity of victims and break the pride of perpetrators • Give voice and catharsis to those who had been silenced • Provide consensual validation of the pain felt from racism, violence, and colonialism

3. Some Benefits of T&R Commissions: At the Societal Level • Provide an opportunity to deepen our understandings of meanings of pain, suffering, resistance and loss experienced • Correct distorted histories conveyed in official curricula by replacing settler heroics with balancing info, such as brutalities inflicted by settlers • Provide for reintegration of falsely accused informers into the community • Decriminalizes the behaviour of some freedom fighters

4. Some Problems of T&R Commissions • Lack of a shared moral order • Invalid assumptions about reintegrative community shaming • Refusal to self-identify as a victim results in foregoing eligibility for reparations • Reopens psychological wounds • Deniers, Platitude Speakers, and Critics • Australian Case Study: Integrative and Assimilative

5. Some Limitations • Limitations of Memory • Shortcomings of Oral Testimony • Neglect of the structural, systemic violence and racism. • Barriers to Cross-cultural Communication • Oversimplification due to a narrow range of witnesses • Failure to Identify Women as Victims • Pay insufficient attention to actors and institutions on the international scale • Politicization of the apology issue