Transitional justice and information: a key but neglected relationship
Rafiq Hodgig
"We are accustomed to conflict; This habit has created a vicious circle in which many prefer the certainty of war - with its clear norms and predictable risks, the burden of the dead on others, with a routine of hatred and precisely defined enemies - to the uncertainty of peace. The decision is before us, the citizens, demanding unprecedented responsibilities. The most important, perhaps the easiest: to teach ourselves well. So we will have to look -- within a web of anarchy of right demagogy and left populism -- scarce resources of truth, appreciation and forgiveness. For now, I hope that we will be at the best of the moment ".
These words from Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vázquez were recently published in a text addressing the historic opportunity presented to the Colombian people in the referendum on the peace agreement between the Government and FARC rebels. These words capture brilliantly the conflict in societies dealing with the legacy of conflict or violent state repression to mobilize informed citizens to fight for truth and victims rights, to make informed judgments on how to deal with the past, and to separate facts from the sticky network of political discourse, denial and polarized propaganda. This struggle for an informed citizenship depends critically on the direction taken by one of the most important elements of social change - the media.
Transitional justice measures refer to a shift in the values prevailing in society -- from an unsafe environment for anyone belonging to the target group, to sustainable peace and a valuable system that respects the rule of law and citizens trust in the State as guarantors of their rights. There is no magic solution to making this shift happen overnight -- it usually takes years, if not decades, to simplify and extend its roots in highly polarized societies, where heartbreak and mistrust constitute public opinion.
In such circumstances, media reports do not simply present facts, but formulate criteria for interpreting controversial political issues. Coverage in such polarized contexts can facilitate or obscure the essence of transitional justice efforts to determine what happened, identify victims and those responsible for violations. Coverage can stimulate or paralyse the debate on how to compensate victims and ensure that systemic violence does not recur.
This relationship between the media and transitional justice efforts is well defined by two opposing phenomena: coexistence and conflict. There are myriad examples of media projects that have been critical in promoting victims rights, promoting accountability and even stimulating transitional justice processes by uncovering hidden facts about crimes and their perpetrators. In South Africa, the media played a key role in the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions early successes. On the other hand, examples from Peru and the States of the former Yugoslavia, and many other transitional contexts, show that the media has often played a definitively negative role in transmitting information about war crimes trials or truth commissions, often entrenched misconceptions and fueled political polarization in already fractured societies. These negative effects often arise from the politicization of media coverage, the narrative of "us" versus "them", and little knowledge of legal procedures and concepts by some journalists.
However, transitional justice practitioners must bear their share of responsibility for this turbulent relationship. Transitional justice institutions often see the media not as an ally but as a disturbing, if not an adversary, source of misinformation. The philosophy of "Our work speaks for itself" permeates many courtrooms and the offices of those whose decisions can irreversibly shape the ability of societies to deal with their violent past. In some cases, the most they go to ensure the social impact of transitional justice work is to assign private public relations offices under the guise of "communication", while the idea of working with the media to ensure this wider influence is reduced to organizing "educational seminars" for journalists.
These outreach efforts often go beyond "public relations through other means" and achieve little to create a genuine sense of common ownership among the main audiences of transitional justice - victims, civil society, policymakers and the general public. Without the active participation of the media as a factor of social change that is fully aware of its impact, this sense of ownership will remain elusive even with more sophisticated outreach efforts. At the same time, the media must accept that undermining transitional justice processes is incompatible with the stated basic principle of journalism: acting in accordance with the interests of the public.
Moreover, where the media provokes violence and contributes to the dehumanization of the other, changing the direction of the medias dominant narratives offers the key to transforming public dialogue from denial to recognition. Such an act must bring out the victims voices and work on their own forgetfulness again, proving that compassion for the other is not an act of betrayal of the dominant group. Once again, break with the past through transitional justice measures must be communicated through the media if they are to be fully embraced by polarized audiences.
A collective memory of the past is one of the greatest challenges facing a post-conflict society because it involves reaching a degree of consensus in the context of polarization. While truth commissions attempt to provide an objective account of societys oppressive or violent past, they inevitably compete with multiple views and interpretations of this history. In essence, truth commissions and other transitional justice mechanisms must mitigate this conflict to bring society into a common vision of the past, which often involves society as a wholes recognition of the egregious human rights violations that have occurred and the imperative of recognizing victims. However, to generate such acceptance, transitional justice efforts must rely on the media to encourage the making of agreement about the past -- which is a daunting task.
What does this actually mean? If the various transitional justice mechanisms are intended to have a positive impact on peoples lives, the role of the media in sharing information and shaping the debate must be deliberately included from the outset. How it can be done and how it will look, these are still largely unexplored questions both in practice and in the academy.
Drawing on academic work on the subject and the voices of journalists and transitional justice workers, David Tolbert and I tried to chart ways in which the media could influence the success of transitional justice efforts and study some of the factors shaping journalists approach to reporting on these processes. We brought voices from the rich debate on the role of the press in the field of transitional justice to analyse distinct ways of covering the media or interacting with transitional justice processes at different stages and to study some examples of different forms of interdependence between the media and transitional justice processes. Discussion of complementarity between the two is attached to examples of the devastating impact of politicized media coverage that has seriously undermined the work of truth commissions or trials in some countries, reducing any social impact on them. Finally, the paper draws attention to the potential benefits in emerging transitional contexts such as Colombias understanding of the importance of this complex relationship and addressing the need for constructive participation of the media in the transitional justice process from the outset.
In writing this brief, we never aimed to provide healing answers to many of the questions that burden this largely unexplored relationship and that significantly affect transitional justice efforts. Instead, we hope that it will stimulate further debate on the critical role of the media, in an effort to bridge the gap between journalists and transitional justice workers, to minimize mistrust and ultimately to turn flashing instances of coexistence between the media and workers into a constant reality.
Source: ICTJ
