The Truth of Truth Commissions: Comparative Lessons from Haiti, South Africa, and Guatemala

As the twenty-first century opens, many deeply divided societies are struggling to overcome a heritage of collective violence and severe human rights violations. The twentieth-century may be most remembered for its legacy of gross human rights violations and mass atrocities. Violent conflicts, massacres, and oppression by one group over another have torn apart the social fabric of countries in nearly every region of the world. The killing fields of Cambodia, South Africa's brutal apartheid system, genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia are [End Page 1] but some of the terrible examples. Added to this collective brutality are the state terrorism and repression of the Soviet and Chinese gulags, the gross human rights violations of many authoritarian regimes, and the disappearances and torture inflicted by military-dominated dictatorships on their own populations.