On national reconciliation and national healing

By Richard C. Ntiru

I read with interest two feature articles, published on facing pages of the New Vision of  March 5, 2015, one by Dr John Bahana and the other by someone who was identified as a “Ugandan and former UK independent parliamentary candidate”.

The articles sought to assess the value, in terms of effectiveness as a means of national reconciliation, of the practice of repatriation and reburial in Uganda of the remains of leaders even before justice for the families of their regimes’ victims has been obtained.

Reconciliation can only occur when two or more parties to a conflict – both perpetrators and victims - are ready to stop the past from dictating their future; in such a scenario, the perpetrators must be ready to acknowledge their wrongs and to make amends while the victims must be ready to forgive.

I, therefore, concur in the view of both writers that such repatriations and reburials of remains are of doubtful value in promoting national reconciliation because only perpetrators and victims can effect reconciliation. Moreover, one cannot talk of national reconciliation – as if the whole nation or a significant part of it was involved in the particular perpetrator-victim situations in question.

If anything, such reburials provide an opportunity for various parties or players to reap cheap political benefits, while at the same time, as applicable, reopening old wounds and exacerbating latent animosities. The cases of Mwanga II, Mutesa II, A. Milton Obote, and Bazilio Olara Okello should constitute a big enough sample for pundits to provide a useful analysis and assessment.

Whether or not one agrees (and in either case I don’t) with Bahana’s assertion that the relatives of such deceased persons do not need government permission to bring them home for reburial or with the suggestion that a monument, however potentially profitable as a tourist attraction, should be built in Kampala for Idi Amin is neither here nor there.

For me, quite apart from national reconciliation, which both articles take as their theme, of equal interest are a number of pertinent issues that arise from the two articles. These issues include historical truth; justice; the truth-justice-reconciliation-peace continuum; rehabilitation; and national healing.

Consideration of these issues inevitably leads to an examination of the theme of historiography, which is often characterised by an undercurrent of apotheosis and demonisation, with historical amnesia and revisionism often as the preferred methodology. In such a scenario, the government of the day, for various reasons, tends to lose sight of – or deliberately ignore - one vital tool of historiography, namely, independent commissions of inquiry in cases of state-sponsored violence, disappearances of persons and extra-judicial killings.

Fidelity to historical truth precludes - or at least minimises - distortion of historical facts and their interpretation, as well as revisionism. If the elders of Lango were instrumental in fostering Uganda’s pre-Independence nationalist politics that is objectively what happened; if on October 31, 1960 the Buganda Lukiiko passed a resolution for Buganda to secede from Uganda Protectorate, that is objectively what happened. Historians and political analysts can disagree on the reasons and consequences of these events but not on the facts.
 

The issue of justice - both restorative and retributive - in post-revolutionary or post-conflict
 political dispensations is a challenging one – but one that we must grapple with always in
 our country, especially if we have legitimate aspirations to existing and enduring as a
constitutional democracy. The test is whether an effective government, and therefore a social
 contract, was established following the violent change.  Victims and their families have a
right to truth and justice. Natural law enshrines justice; moral law demands it; state interest
prescribes it; the public expects it as a right; posterity will claim it as an inheritance.

But there can be no justice without truth. Just as there can be no justice without truth, so also there can be no true reconciliation without justice. Even in the 1990s South African “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions” and Rwandan “agacaca” courts, in both of which cases the focus was primarily on truth and reconciliation, the justice component was always manifest and reconciliation was predicated on it. The peace-making agenda of the UN, as well as those of religious leaders and movements like Sant’Egidio involved in conflict resolution, is premised on the proposition that durable peace is not possible without reconciliation, and that reconciliation without justice is not achievable.

We must be clear about what the terms ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’ mean or imply. Reconciliation is not a political concept or an outcome that can be presented as a political ‘deliverable’ as a result of ‘political engineering’. It is a process that takes place at the psychological and spiritual levels and, like justice, constitutes an essential premise of peace. The power of reconciliation rests on the ability of agents of reconciliation to change the hearts and minds of victims as well as perpetrators of violent acts.

Such agents include cultural leaders, community elders, religious leaders, and a new breed of professional called ‘conflict resolution experts’. Governments’ proper and important role is that of assisting, supporting and facilitating the efforts of these agents of reconciliation, as well as enacting appropriate legislation and formulating and implementing policies aimed at creating an environment conducive to reconciliation.

Healing is a different matter, however. Parties to conflicts must genuinely desire it and will it – and be prepared to make sacrifices to work for it. They must discern in the well-being of the other a guarantee of their own well-being. Above all, conditions must exist that are conducive to the successful conclusion of the process, not least in the quality of governance and the policies intended to ensure that the citizens do not become slaves to the past by repeating it.

Finally, the question of historiography. I would submit that for a country like Uganda, which has, for over half of its existence as a nation-state, experienced periods of state-sponsored violence, unexplained disappearances of persons and extra-judicial killings, due to several changes of government through violent and unconstitutional means, commissions of inquiry are a reliable tool of historiography and an effective prescription for national healing. It is probably not too late for a permanent independent constitutional commission of inquiry into state-sponsored violence, disappearances of persons and extra-judicial killings in Uganda since Independence. Publication of the report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearances of People in Uganda in the first years of the Amin government from January 25, 1971 until 1974 would be a good start.

Meanwhile, the window of opportunity grows narrower and narrower by the day, as memories of eyewitnesses fade and eyewitnesses age out and die. It has been said that Japan is suffering from undigested lessons of history; we can avoid this malaise by learning and digesting the lessons of our history well. But before that, we must record them better. That can only ensure national health and empower all concerned – the state, the government, the polity, posterity.

The writer is a communications strategist