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Suggesting reconciliation at the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) took place under unique circumstances and in a very particular historical context. This article will explore how such a specific kind of reality gave rise to a specific kind of discourse, a so-called ‘reconciliation discourse’. On the one hand, this discourse offered the apartheid victims a lot of opportunities regarding linguistic expression. On the other hand, though, this discourse was also regimented and limited to a certain extent. By means of fragments from the TRC victim testimonies, this article will deal with one aspect of this linguistic manipulation, namely the introduction of the concept of reconciliation. In the first part of the article, I will explain which linguistic methods were used during the TRC hearings in order to emphasize the notion of reconciliation in the narratives of the testifying victims. In doing so, a lot of attention will be paid to the concrete interaction between the testifiers and the TRC commissioners. In a second part, I will try to investigate why the construction of this specific reconciliation discourse was necessary in the South African context. We will see that, amongst others, also political considerations played a role in the control exercised over the discourse of the TRC victims. In this way, we will understand that the reconciliation discourse of the Commission was a reflection of a very ambiguous social attitude: this discourse had to reveal as much as possible about the apartheid past – and this in a manner as spontaneous, as transparent and as open as possible -, but it also had to be adapted to certain socio-political needs. This will tell us that also a quasi-judicial institution such as the TRC involves an inevitable interplay between language on the one hand and ideology and society on the other.
moment ago about how radical the concept of necro-being really is. In terms of the concept of reparations, you said that there can be no reparations. I wonder then, how do you understand reconciliation? This concept that has been bandied about so much. Is it for you a non-possibility or is it a
the period immediately after the end of the civil conflict that followed the closely contested presidential and parliamentary elections of December 2007. Using a framework derived from political psychology and political communication can assist in identifying the process of reconciliation
Created and maintained by the Library of Congress, African and Middle East Division , and part of the LC’s ‘Portals to the World’, this guide provides a selected sampling of online information resources dealing with reconciliation processes in African nations. The ‘Portals to the World’ Web project
critical to the review, but I thought might help serve to support additional translations of this sort. BOOK REVIEWS Robert G. Sutter, China-Watch: Toward Sino-American Reconciliation. The Johns Hop- kins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1978, 155 pp. $10.95. The central thesis of this book is that
engineers, medical teams and logisticians in earlier operations, such as the UN’s Advance Mission in Cambodia between October 1991 and March 1992. China’s presence followed its participation in the Paris Peace Accords for Cambodia and diplomatic support for a peaceful transition and reconciliation
and reconciliation. Greenstein (2018: 13) concurs that the policy focus during Mandela’s presidency was more on reconciliation and national building than on building a democratic South African developmental state. In 1996 Mandela introduced the Growth, Employment and Redistribution ( GEAR ) as a non