Liberia tries to balance justice, mercy

In the last 40 years, more than 70 truth commissions have been established to help restore societies emerging from conflict. Many have offered amnesty to perpetrators of violence if they explain their actions. Yet that pardon often comes with a condition that governments have been reluctant to enforce – a threat to prosecute those who fail to come forward or testify honestly.

The West African country of Liberia now seeks to fix that shortcoming. Two decades after the end of a brutal 14-year period of civil war, the government is working with judges, lawyers, and civil society organizations to establish a special court on economic crimes and human rights violations committed during the conflict.

“For peace and harmony to have a chance to prevail, justice and healing must perfect the groundwork,” President Joseph Boakai said when he signed the order in May creating the new tribunal.

Mr. Boakai’s comment reflects a tension at the core of building peace through reconciliation. Restorative or transitional justice involves weaving individual stories into a larger shared narrative. By bringing perpetrators of violence face-to-face with those who have been harmed, it can tap wells of empathy and forgiveness through deep listening and genuine remorse. It ties justice to individual reformation and redemption.

The hard part is what to do about those who refuse to participate. As the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission noted in its final report, in order “to avoid a culture of impunity and to entrench the rule of law, the granting of general amnesty in whatever guise should be resisted.” In countries where political leaders have been reluctant to follow truth commissions with prosecutions, victims of war crimes feel doubly harmed.

Following through, on the other hand, accelerates the recovery of democratic principles and the institutions that defend them. In Chile and Argentina, prosecutions that followed truth commissions led to reduced violence, renewed judicial independence, and a restoration of military respect for civilian command, a study by the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Norway found.

Liberia has made solid gains in recovering from a conflict that left an estimated 250,000 dead, displaced more than three times that number, and turned children into soldiers. It elected Africa’s first female president and convened a truth and reconciliation commission. Its economy is growing.

For more than a decade, politicians resisted the truth commission’s recommendation to establish a new court on economic and war crimes. It relied on international courts to convict its most infamous warlords. Meanwhile, corruption and mutual suspicion among political rivals persisted.

The decision to set up the new court, observes Aaron Weah, a Liberian postgraduate student at Ulster University’s Transitional Justice Institute, now sets truth and justice in a new direction. “It is not about retributive versus restorative justice,” he told African Arguments. Liberia may be forging a new model for the rule of law that honors individual dignity over self-interest.