Abstract:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa was born as a product
of the political campaign wrought during the negotiations that brought apartheid to an
end. The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No: 34 was the cardinal
point which provided legitimate rights to the TRC in 1995. In fact, the motive of this
act was to investigate politically motivated gross human rights violations perpetrated
between 1960 and 1994. The novelty of the TRC was the fact that it was the first truth
commission to grant amnesty to the persons who accepted and repented before the
public about the politically motivated crimes they had committed during the apartheid
government in South Africa. In doing so, the newly elected government of South Africa
adopted the judicial concept of restorative justice instead of the retributive justice
embodied by Nuremberg style trial. The main architect behind this progressive action
was President Nelson Mandela who selected a diverse group of seventeen TRC
commission members under the headship of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The TRC
submitted its five-volume final report to President Mandela in October, 1998. The main
objective of this research is not to assess whether the TRC has comprehensively
achieved its purpose or not; the authors mainly intend to link the South African scenario
with the situation in Sri Lanka after the military victory over Liberation Tamil Tigers
Elam (LTTE) in 2009. One of the main objectives of this research is to compare the
TRC with Sri Lanka's own post-war commission of inquiry in Lessons Learned and
Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), because both commissions emerged from postwar
atmospheres but with completely different features. Apart from that, the authors
intend to portray how the achievements of the TRC could be successfully utilized to the
reconciliation process of post-war Sri Lanka. It is important to acknowledge the fact
that there are many differences between the two systems both ideologically and
technically. This research is based on standard documents relating to both countries and
other literal texts.
