Commissioning the truth.

• Author: Orford, Anne
• Position: Transitional justice - Australia

This Article was originally written as an invited contribution to a workshop on Gender and Transitional Justice organized by the International Centre for Transitional Justice. My particular assignment for that workshop was to write a discussion paper which addressed the key category of "truth." The idea of truth has a particularly potent role to play in the world of transitional justice. For many scholars and practitioners in this field, uncovering the truth is understood as a vital task, both at an individual and at a collective level. At the individual level, truth-telling is presented in therapeutic terms, as a means of healing those who have been wounded by the violence of civil war, revolution, or despotism. At the collective level, establishing the truth of a contested history is understood as a necessary basis for moving forward as a nation and creating the conditions for a viable, shared life. The title of this Article indicates a certain distance from this vision of the ends of truth. In particular, the word "commissioning" is there as a reminder. Throughout, this Article makes visible the institutional conditions and productive effects of the commissioning of truth. Testimony or speech becomes part of commissioned truth through institutional mediation--through the institutions of language, of the state, and of liberal internationalism. How should we try to understand what takes place when an international body, a state, or a private organization seeks to write the truth of history? How should we understand the situation of the subject who is called upon to speak her truth in such a context? What does the act of writing a commissioned truth bring into being? What does the commissioning of an official truth mean for the addressees of such performances?

Much critical literature on the current international enthusiasm for the establishment of international criminal courts, war crimes tribunals, and truth commissions in fact does focus on the conditions of production of truth in an institutional context. This literature argues that the juridification of the post-conflict, post-revolutionary, or transitional situation must be understood as part of a broader attempt to create a new world order of liberal democracies in which politics is forever deferred and history comes to an end. Indeed, my initial posture towards the appeal to "truth-telling" in situations of charged international intervention was one of skepticism. My earlier work had explored the arrival of human rights as a justification or alibi for military intervention during the 1990s. (1) In writing on post-conflict reconstruction, I had sought to explore the way in which economic restructuring, exploitation, and management was enabled by humanitarian intervention, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Timor L'Este. I had wanted to understand how it was that the presence of agents of global market integration alongside the militaries of powerful nations and their corporate investors could be interpreted, so straightforwardly, as benevolent and charitable. This research shaped my response to the post-Cold War project of globalizing transitional justice. My first reaction was to read appeals to truth with an assumption that their address to an audience of liberal internationalists might work to mask ways in which states undergoing "transition" were also being produced as reliable subjects of the capitalist democratic order. At the same time, the operation of transitional justice mechanisms would ask the inhabitants of these countries to articulate their needs, desires, losses, hopes, revolutionary ambitions, and so on in the name of a universal humanitarianism. Yet is the arrival of human rights, here in the form of transitional justice institutions, always accompanied by a particular form of restructuring of the subject? Can the process of internationalization be understood as a simple unity with all its operations coordinated to achieve one set of interests?

In order to address these questions, this Article attempts to suspend judgment about the viability and desirability of the project of producing an official truth through the institutions of transitional justice. More particularly, it seeks to escape the choice between universalism (the notion that transitional justice institutions record the truth of the nation's history) and skepticism (the notion that there is no one truth available or that it is not possible to establish an impartial account of the past). In order to do so, the Article explores the telling of truth in this kind of institutional context as a performance. Thus, in what is perhaps a perverse turn at the beginning of an Article about the concept of truth, I want to declare that my interest here will not be in whether the reports produced by institutions of transitional justice (war crimes trials, truth commissions) are true or false. Much of the critical engagement with the texts produced by such institutions treats language as "an instrument for transmitting truth, that is, an instrument of knowledge, a means of knowing reality." (2) Language informs, communicates, or describes. Those who criticize the effects of such institutions along these lines are interested in asking whether this truth commission report, or that war crimes judgment, succeeded or failed to establish the truth of events, or more generally whether it is ever possible for the institutions of transitional justice to establish such a truth effectively. According to this view, "what is at stake in an utterance is its correspondence--or lack of correspondence--to its moral reference, that is, its truth or falsity." (3) This Article takes a different view of language. It engages with the texts of such institutions in terms of their performative effect. To focus on the performative aspect of language is to suggest that language involves "acting on the interlocutor, modifying the situation and the interplay of forces within it." (4) Language acts, does, or accomplishes. In this sense, language cannot be "qualified as true or false, but rather quite specifically as felicitous or infelicitous, successful or unsuccessful." (5) As I will suggest below, much of the literature supporting the work of truth commissions focuses on this question of the success of such commissions at achieving ends such as reconciliation, peace, justice, or a successful transition to democracy. While I also adopt this focus on what the language of truth does or fails to do, my interest here is in exploring the utterances of truth commissions as performances which accomplish the reconstitution of a unified nation and a liberal state.

Finally, in order to avoid an overly generalized assumption about the effects of transitional justice, the Article focuses on one truth commission held in Australia during the 1990s. The choice of an Australian example allows me to write from a position of critical intimacy rather than critical distance--I am better placed to address the effects of truth commissions on political life, collective memory, and national identity when writing about a situation involving my community. Thus, the Article involves the close reading of a report produced by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing them Home. Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. (6) This report, released in 1997, was the outcome of an inquiry into the harms done to the "stolen generation" of children forcibly removed by the Australian state during the twentieth century. According to Bringing them Home, "between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970.... In that time not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal...." (7) Attention to this Australian example of the genre of truth commission reporting unsettles the assumption that massive human rights violations are an exceptional problem confronting states in transition from authoritarianism or dictatorship to democracy. Bringing them Home documents the everydayness and bureaucratization of genocide and of massive human rights violations in the liberal democratic state within which I live.

Part I of the Article offers an overview of the role that "truth" plays in transitional justice literature. As I have suggested so far, much of the literature oscillates between an idea of the truth as something that can be definitively produced or revealed through the institutionalized process of truth commissions or war crimes trials, and a skeptical approach to truth which points to the partial view of history which is inevitably produced when the past is judged and that judgment inscribed in an official report. A third strand in the literature focuses less on the truth or falsity of the history produced through processes of transitional justice, and instead is concerned with these processes as performances. The language of truth is assessed by these commentators, not in terms of whether or not it accurately describes a given event or history, but rather in terms of what it makes possible, brings into being, or does in the world. I suggest that this mode of analysis can be understood in terms of speech act theory--the idea that particular words or utterances accomplish an act. I draw on this approach to think more generally about what it is that the truth of transitional justice brings into being.

Part II develops this approach to analyzing the effects of commissioning the truth through a reading of Bringing them Home. This report can be understood as an attempt to accomplish multiple ends and to make real a series of subjects. In my reading, I trace the ways in which this performance is organized around notions of home, family, debt, inheritance, and faith.

Part III considers the questions of...