Thesis (MA (History))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) may be described as one of the most important events in the recent South African past. The TRC’s activities included an examination of gross human rights violations between 1960 and 1994, as well as amnesty hearings for those believed to be guilty of human rights violations. In addition, the TRC had to decide on the possibilities for reparations to victims, and had to compile a comprehensive report on the nature of the abovementioned violations. This process was shrouded in controversy. For example, criticism was levelled at the TRC because of the perception that it was intended as a witch-hunt against Afrikaners. The danger of subjectivity was also mentioned often. How was the public kept up to date about the activities of the TRC? The media played an important role in the distribution of information to those who could not readily attend the various hearings of the TRC.

No description available.

Magister Legum - LLM (Criminal Justice and Procedure) / Transitional justice mechanisms have become commonplace as a tool for recovery for societies emerging from conflict and repressive regimes. The extent to which women's rights concerning development and long-term economic advancement in the arena of transitional justice is dealt with is almost negligible. The significance of including development as a means of protecting marginalised groups such as women has been mostly disregarded in the transitional justice context. Currently, the discourse on gender justice has placed civil and political rights as well as sexual crimes against women at the centre stage. Transitional justice mechanisms have failed to give effect to long-term sustainable and substantive change in women's lives following conflict and periods of repressive rule. The core aims of transitional justice are prosecution of offenders, reconciliation and reparations for the victims of gross human rights abuses. Reparations are usually used as a medium through which restitution and compensation for the harm suffered by victims are made possible. Reparations are also deemed as an essential element for the healing and recovery of the individual victim and the society affected by egregious human rights violations.

Par l'étude comparative de différents conflits africains, cette recherche a pour but de démontrer l'importance des pratiques traditionnelles africaines de justice au sein des processus de résolution de conflit. De nombreux exemples tels que la Sierra Leone, la République Centrafricaine, le Rwanda, l'Ouganda, le Darfour, ou encore le Mozambique, démontrent que chaque État possède sa propre expérience de justice transitionnelle. Lorsque les victimes deviennent les bourreaux, et que les bourreaux sont eux-mêmes des victimes, il devient alors impossible de se reposer sur des modèles de justice préconçus. Sur le continent africain, comme ailleurs, la justice transitionnelle nécessite d'être adaptées aux spécificités des contextes politiques, historiques et structurels de chaque conflit. Par ailleurs, les mécanismes qui composent aujourd'hui la justice transitionnelle, que ce soit à l'échelon international, national, ou local, se doivent de travailler de concert au service de la reconstruction d'un pacte social entre les populations. Il faudra donc réussir à créer des liens entre ces mécanismes, afin que la justice post-conflit représente un atout efficace pour la paix et la réconciliation. L'ambition de ce projet est d'adopter une vision plurielle et renouvelée de la Justice au service de la réconciliation en Afrique et répondant davantage aux attentes des populations impliquées, et de formuler des propositions en vue d'une complémentarité plus efficace entre les différents instrument de la justice transitionnelle. / Through a comparative study of different African conflicts, this research aims at underlying the need for complementarity between the different judicial and extra-judicial mechanisms of the transitional justice process. Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Rwanda, Uganda, Darfur, Mozambique, every post-conflict situation has its own experience of Transitional Justice. There is no pre-conceived solution to solve a conflict, where the frontier between victims and perpetrators is constantly shaken, and with mass atrocities committed by both sides. Be it International Justice, National Justice, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, or Local and Traditional Justice, none of these mechanisms of Transitional Justice can be efficient if they aren't any linkage between them and if they are not adapted to each specific contexts. For post-conflict justice to be a catalyst toward Reconciliation and a Sustainable Peace, peacemakers have to look deep into the political, the historical, and structural reasons that led to the commission of international crimes. The purpose of this PhD project is to encourage the adoption of a renewed plural vision of Justice in Africa, which would meet more specifically the needs of the war-torn population for a long-term peaceful society.

This thesis is a response to a lacuna in musicology, namely the near absence of postcolonial and decolonial epistemologies. Employing both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, it provides a historical overview of the institutional positioning of musicology as an academic discipline founded on structures of expectation and exploitation indebted to Western imperialism. This longer historical view is accompanied throughout by an examination of ethics in its institutionalised forms, specifically in the domains of knowledge production and the university. The thesis maintains that while such ostensibly ethical underpinnings may promise redress on the basis of the violence inflicted by an imperialist past, the discourse employed in its application in fact serves to strengthen the ideological hold of Western hegemony and, in so doing, betrays the promise of reparation that ethics is ordinarily understood to encompass. The thesis examines different aesthetic and epistemological manifestations of the postcolonial, considering at length Steve Reich's string quartet, Different Trains (1988), Philip Glass's opera, Waiting for the Barbarians (2005), and Philip Miller's choral work, REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony (2006). Both content and style weave these works together as they engage, by means of a post-minimalist aesthetic, stream-of-violence narratives intimately bound up with the postcolonial condition. Of particular importance in the consideration of these musical texts is the urgent necessity for epistemological transformation, marked in musicology as the lack of post- and decolonial perspectives. Finally, the thesis grapples with the (im)possibility of complicit scholarship that must, through its very expression, wound its subject.

The focus of this study is to establish how victimization through violence has affected the families who are interviewed. The purpose is to describe how the family’s world has changed in different moments during the political strife in South Africa. The different context or moments are those of political inactivity, the struggle years, the period after the struggle when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was constituted and the new world order in which the families continue with their lives. Using a phenomenological approach, the experiences of families subjected to different forms of political violence, such as disappearances of victims, torture in detention and death in detention, are discussed. The literature review on violence in the South African context situates any discourse which occurred within the broader social, historical and political context. Systems Theory, Social Identity Theory and an Integrated Theory of Political Violence are used as theoretical perspectives in understanding the interconnectedness between violence which affected the families in the present study and the whole society. The qualitative research interview method postulated by Kvale (1996) has been used to collect data from the families. This procedure has enabled the researcher to study the data as it emerged thus allowing an understanding of the essential meanings implicit in the participants’ descriptions of their experiences. The data consists of audio taped interviews conducted with twenty-two members from ten families. This resulted in twenty-two protocols which were transcribed and analysed. The analysis of the protocols, though used differently from the situated structure identified by Wertz (1983), brought essential themes common to all participants. The research findings reveal themes which demonstrate that experiences of the families subjected to political violence had an impact on their lives. They remember living routinely before the struggle against the apartheid structures. This is remembered as a very long time. The struggle years brought disintegration of the family unit as people fled their homes into exile. Others disappeared, were detained, tortured and dies in prison. The relationship between the families and their children was that of concern, as parents discouraged their children to participate in the political activities. The effects of violence culminated in hardship for many families as they experienced an absence of a helpful community, alienation from political organizations, and distrust of the State during the time that missing family members could not be traced by the security police. This distrust also existed among the communities who were experiencing suffering through incidents of black on black violence. The introduction of the TRC, as a major these with sub-themes of healing and forgiveness, is perceived positively by these families. At last, they feel that through this process their suffering of loss of their children, husbands and wives is acknowledged. However, there are divergent opinions about this acknowledgement, as research findings point to an incomplete sense of individual healing for these families though they have told their stories of pain and suffering. This is a controversial issue which needs further research to explicate if individual experience off the victim is perceived to be similar to the collective experience of the broader community. The performance of rituals and memories on behalf of their dead fulfils an important healing role for the families. There is ambivalence about forgiveness for many families as they feel that perpetrators who seek amnesty have not made full disclosures about their activities. There is polarization that surfaces between the present government and the families who testified with regard to reparation which was included as a clause in the TRC process. The families in the present study perceive that in order to continue with the new world order, they have to be compensated for their suffering. Further research should investigate if reparations to individuals who testified before the TRC would be healing, before implementing processes that would heal the whole nation. / Thesis (DPhil (Psychotherapy))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Psychology / unrestricted

This study focused on the impact of the revelations at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings on 30 female victims of all races. An explanatory model, the TRC Revelation Aftermath Model was designed to direct the research and to interpret the data. Researcher made use of a non-probability sampling strategy. Five respondents were selected by purposive sampling and 25 were selected by means of the snowball sampling. The sample of this study consisted of three components, namely ten Commissioners of the TRC, ten Coordinators who worked in the TRC offices, as well as 30 female victims of all races. The Commissioners were interviewed to validate the data obtained from the victims while the Coordinators were consulted merely to obtain general information on the criteria which was used to process the applications submitted by the victims in order to receive the reparations. The analysis of the data revealed that the respondents accepted three assumptions, namely, they were invulnerable with regard to trauma such as that caused by the revelations of the TRC. In addition to this they viewed life as meaningful and that they also had a positive attitude towards it before the political conflict of the apartheid era in South Africa impacted on them. These assumptions were interpreted in terms of Janoff-Bulman and Frieze's theory. The research findings indicated that the assumptions were not only affected by the revelations but that they also influenced the way in which these women experienced the TRC process. It was found that the victim respondents, whose family members had disappeared and were never confirmed dead, had suffered exacerbated emotions which were characterised by denial. This was the result of repressed memories associated with the grief. Of importance too, was the finding that a few of the victims were successful in deriving meaning from their suffering, while others, who could not achieve this, could not reconcile with their perpetrators and this was determined by their age. As the former were willing to forgive their perpetrators they had thus found inner peace. During the interviews, the victims mentioned that although the TRC had appeared to be necessary before they made their submissions, however, after it had disappointed them by not granting them reparations, this exacerbated their suffering as they felt that they had been discriminated against in favour of the perpetrators who were granted amnesty irrespective of not having made full disclosures. According to Parsons General Action System all the respondents experienced their trauma as biological entities, and thus suffered symptoms related to psychosomatic illnesses such as, inter alia, headaches, insomnia, and ulcers. These were accompanied by personality characteristics such as anger, aggression, as well as hatred. As the victims could not function in isolation, they also endured ostracisation related to cultural stereotypes and in this way, their suffering was perceived as secondary to that of males. Furthermore, within the social system, the victims who perceived the TRC as biased, believed that it had caused the country embarrassment by bringing up the conflict of the apartheid era. However, others verbalised that the Commission was a good initiative for South Africa so that peace as well as reconciliation could be facilitated for the sake of unity. It is crucial to stress the finding that some of the respondents, although few, who had been granted reparations, were satisfied with the TRC and perceived it as fair and thus could reconcile with their perpetrators. The research report concludes with a number of recommendations for the establishment of support services for the traumatised victims as well as integrative mechanisms, which could encourage co-operation between the citizens of South Africa so that the reconciliation which the TRC facilitated can be sustained. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, amnesty, violence, human rights, reconciliation, apartheid, trauma, grief, bereavement. / Thesis (DPhil (Criminology))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Social Work and Criminology / unrestricted

"This work is arranged into six chapters. Beyond the introduction, chapter two highlights atrocities of the war and evaluates the diplomacy process, which eventually resulted in the creation of the TRC. It briefly examines the Abidjan and Conakry Peace Plan and specifically elaborates on the Lome Peace Accord, which finally culminated in the promulgation of the Truth and Reconciliation Act of 2000. The human rights and humanitarian law dimension of the conflict will also be addressed. Chapter three gives a general description of truth commissions and analyse the TRC with specific refernce to its structure, function, jurisdiction, mandate, proceedings, evidence, and its investigative methods, which is the backbone of the Truth Commission. It will aslo assess whether naming names would be a potent tool for the Commission to bring perpetrators to shame. From a human rights perspective chapter four address issues such as healing and reconciliation, truth, forgiveness, and assesses whether they are effective remedies for human rights violations. The issue of amnesty, especially Article IX of the Lome Peace Accord, will be evaluated. This chapter will also discuss the issue of impunity. Chapter five deliberates on the relationship between tribunals and truth commissions generally and specifically elaborate on the TRC and the Special Court with specific reference to their legal framework, composition, jurisdiction, information sharing, and whether both institutions serve as accountability mechanisms. Chapter six concludes the dissertation by determining whether or not there are any lessons one can learn from the Commission. It closes by making recommendations for the smooth functioning of the Commission and how it can effectively contribute to the needs of traumatised societies." -- Chapter 1. / Prepared under the supervision of Dr. Jean Allain at the Department of Political Sciences, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the American University in Cairo, Egypt / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2003. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/academic_pro/llm1/dissertations.html / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

Time has passed since truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) started to grow in popularity. The general patterns of their effect on the post-conflict societies are still unexplored. The main claim is that establishing a TRC will reduce the likelihood of conflict recurrence compared to other forms of transitional justice as TRCs are especially well equipped to mitigate reasons for conflict recurrence. This paper uses quantitative methods with the PCJ dataset and the UCDP dyadic dataset to analyse the trends of different types of transitional justice between the years 1946-2006. The logistic regression showed a negative relationship between establishment of TRCs and conflict recurrence. The main implication of these findings is that there are general patterns of TRCs having an effect, which need to be further researched.

Based‌ ‌on‌ ‌the‌ ‌idea‌ ‌that‌ ‌public‌ ‌art‌ ‌reflects‌ ‌cultural‌ ‌values‌ ‌and‌ ‌is‌ ‌meant,‌ ‌not‌ ‌as‌ ‌many‌ ‌have‌ ‌argued‌ ‌as‌ ‌a‌ ‌means‌ ‌of‌ ‌teaching‌ ‌history,‌ ‌but‌ ‌rather‌ ‌as‌ ‌a‌ ‌means‌ ‌of‌ ‌promoting‌ ‌cultural‌ ‌ideals,‌ ‌ ‌public‌ ‌art‌ ‌serves‌ ‌a‌ ‌role‌ ‌in‌ ‌lauding‌ ‌people‌ ‌and‌ ‌behaviors‌ ‌and‌ ‌reflects‌ ‌a‌n important facet in the ‌creation‌ ‌of‌ ‌a‌ ‌national‌ ‌identity‌ ‌and‌ ‌ethos. Further,‌ ‌that‌ ‌in‌ ‌this‌ ‌function‌ ‌of‌ ‌promoting‌ ‌societal‌ ‌norms,‌ ‌public‌ ‌art‌ ‌serves‌ ‌as‌ an‌ iconography ‌of‌‌ a “civil ‌religion”‌ ‌which‌ ‌tell‌s ‌a‌ ‌story‌ ‌to‌ ‌the‌ ‌citizenry‌ ‌about‌ ‌what‌ ‌a‌ ‌given‌ ‌country‌ ‌admires,‌ ‌reveres‌ ‌and‌ ‌aspires‌ ‌to‌ ‌and‌ ‌promotes‌ ‌a‌ ‌specific‌ ‌moral‌ ‌narrative‌ ‌regarding‌ ‌a‌ ‌country‌ ‌and‌ ‌its‌ ‌people.‌ ‌Thus,‌ ‌public‌ ‌art‌ ‌forms‌ ‌an‌ ‌iconography‌ ‌reflecting‌ ‌the‌ ‌norms‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌“civil ‌religion”‌ ‌and‌ ‌its‌ ‌related‌ ‌mores,‌ ‌morals‌ ‌and‌ ‌ethical‌ ‌values.‌ ‌