Peru Truth Commission Seeks National Reconciliation Recently, Free Lance Journalist Ronald J. Morgan interviewed Solomon Lerner, head of Peru's Truth Commission. The president-appointed group is charged with reviewing human rights abuses during the past twenty years. Peru's civil war, ran hot from 1980 to 1995, took 30,000 lives, left more than 5,000 disappeared and caused 600,000 to be displaced. Some 4,000 are jailed on terrorism charges stemming from the conflict. Isolated insurgent actions still occur from time to time. How will the Peruvian Truth Commission Work? There have been a series of complaints, with names of disappeared, of victims, of assassinated, rapes, tortured. We are going to review them. This is going to form a data base. There are four main networks that have been working on this matter in a serious manner. Perhaps there are more. There's the Coordinator of Human Rights, The Defender of the Nation, the Catholic Episcopal Comission for Social Action, Evangelical Council for Conciliation. All of this information has been offered to us. With this we will add the new charges which are occurring at this time. As you know there are people who have remained silent for some time and now are just beginning to say what happened. Also we will take into consideration the work of the Program for Resettlement (known in Spanish as PAR). With all this data we have a starting point. Of course in addition to this we will have to analyse, we have to consult, in order to have truthful and legitimate information. We are going to contract people to go to different parts of the country making use of the different offices in the Andean Sierra and the South which are run by the Defender's Office and the Catholic Church. There will be public hearings and the commission members will travel to different parts of country and listen to what they have to say. We are also going to investigate the (cases) of victims that occurred among the military and police members because there have been victims on both sides of course. Surely we are not going to be able to cover everything but we are going to go as far as we can in the time that we have and with the resources that are available. What are we going to do with this besides trying to establish the truth of the matter? We are going to open the way for justice to operate. The justice which we understand shoud be achieved in two ways: in one sense the justice to sanction those responsible. We will not judge them because we don't have the power to do this. We are fundamentally a moral and ethical commission. But we are going to provide in this report sufficient data so the judicial power, the prosecutors office of the country, can initiate the corresponding actions. But another dimension of the justice is the repairing of damage and there we can go further because the presidency has said this commission's recommendations will have a binding character. In that sense what we recommend will be carried out. Obvioulsy this is not just about material compensation because there is not enough government money to compensate all the victims.We will have to, I suppose, look for various ways through which we return to the victims their dignity and respect which was trampled. We will have to resort to, I feel, the collective sense of the communities that have suffered violence and the compensation will be designed in a collective manner. This will be done through symbols of rememberance, and social development works that respond to the basic needs of the population. One important aspect of this making whole will have to be the psycological repair of the communities because there have been many people who have been traumatized by these events. The young people who were children when this happened need a lot of support so they don't have their life disrupted. Before we finish the work of the commission and present the findings we will try to have something under way. Will the Truth Commission Identify The Guilty? The experience of the other truth commissions is that in some cases there are these type of recommendations. In other cases there has been simply a telling of the facts. You can understand that its very difficult not being a jurisdiction with power to gather official evidence of the crimes to indicate guilty persons. We are going to do so when we have the full moral conviction of it. But in areas where there are some doubts we are going to recommend that there be further investigation. It's a very difficult matter that of guilt . What is going to be done with the numerous clandestine grave sites which are coming to light? These graves will have to be opened with the presence of the Public Ministry. A serious problem that we could face is that of people taking the remains away from the grave sites without the presence of forensic anthropologists. Because all the evidence of the crime will be erased. We have to have patience and confront this in a scientific manner. There have been grave sites that were discovered earlier, but now we are having many more things come to light that have a great number of victims. Why haven't we known about these things before? Because there's been a certain fear to talk. Now that there's what is understood as a more democratic regime where there have not been reprisals against people who have said the truth. And now that there is this commission which in some sense is providing security to the people they have begun to talk. More... |