11 - Post-conflict justice and the reconciliatory paradigm: the South African experience

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Every transition to democracy is a morally hazardous undertaking. This is due to the standing risk that the construction of a new society might result in the conscription of the individuals that are to be its members. This danger is particularly acute when, as in South Africa, the transition takes place in a context marked by wide-ranging and long-standing injustices. A variety of factors may make it impossible to address these through the standard mechanisms of corrective justice: criminal prosecutions might not be practically feasible and/or might threaten the possibility of a transition, while compensation and restitution might flounder on the difficulty of proving the causal link between current circumstances and events distant in time and space. Yet, if the victims of such injustices are left without ‘a moral response, one that is more specific than the hope of building a better democracy’, then, as Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson have insisted, ‘the new democracy will be morally flawed from its inception’. For then the victims of the past are turned into victims of the new. They are made to pay the price for a democracy in which others may hope to enjoy freedom from the sufferings they have already experienced. In so far as their specific moral interests remain unaddressed, the victims of historical injustice would be no more than conscripted members of the new democracy.