14 - ‘Blow Your Mind and Cool Your Heart’: Can Tradition-Based Justice Fill the Transitional Justice Gap in Sierra Leone?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Sierra Leone was one of the first post-conflict countries to simultaneously employ amnesty, prosecutions, truth-finding and reconciliation initiatives, and more recently reparations, in the framework of transitional justice. The question is whether there remains a transitional justice gap in Sierra Leone and, if so, whether there is a need to fill it and how tradition-based justice can contribute. Traditional culture still plays an important, though contested, role in rural Sierra Leone, as acknowledged in the mandate and the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This chapter assesses the role of traditionbased justice in ongoing justice and reconciliation initiatives and the challenges to its use.

The chapter situates itself in the ongoing debate on the localisation of transitional justice: moving away from one-size-fits-all solutions and externally imposed models, the current transitional justice landscape presents a variety of mechanisms and tools, which are supposed to complement each other. Along this spectrum, local mechanisms to deal with past crimes have come to the fore in recent years. These may include traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, i.e. ‘non-state justice systems which have existed, although not without change, since pre-colonial times and are generally found in rural areas’. Other mechanisms have shifted further away from traditional practices but are inspired by underlying traditional values, in which case I prefer to call them tradition-based. Both traditional and tradition-based mechanisms are part of the broader group of local justice mechanisms, ranging from informal to formalised, some of which can even be entirely new or modern. In this definition, I suggest, ‘local’ does not necessarily refer to their applicability in a limited geographic area, but rather to the origins of the mechanisms, stemming from a bottom-up approach as opposed to external imposition.

This chapter first assesses whether key goals of transitional justice – accountability, truth-finding, reparations and reconciliation – have been met by the mechanisms enacted in Sierra Leone. To ascertain whether there is a transitional justice gap, the outcomes of the transitional justice mechanisms are compared to the findings of research, including my own, concerning perceptions on the ground of dealing with the past. In this regard the popular saying ‘we forgive and forget’ will be analysed and compared to what is needed to obtain ‘a cool heart’. Examples are given of ongoing initiatives to assess whether traditionbased justice mechanisms can fill the gap.