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Contributions from
the Column
Media
Giving victims a say in reconciliation
Few new insights into human-rights protection
Civil society should engage in policy-making
01/2007 |
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Giving victims a say
in reconciliation
Ernesto Kiza, Corene Rathgeber, Holger-C. Rohne:
Victims of War: An empirical study on war victimisation
and victims’ attitudes towards addressing atrocities.
Hamburger Edition online, Hamburg 2006, 210 p., ISBN 3-936096-73-6
Download from:
http:// www.his-online.de/ Download/
Forschungsberichte/978-3-936096-73-6.pdf
Since the Nürnberg trials after the Second World War, several international tribunals have avenged war crimes in specific contexts, for example, Rwanda or the Balkans. The trend led to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. However, prosecuting war crimes is just one element of coming to terms with the past. It has become obvious that much more needs to be done for reconciliation to succeed. Recently, the term “transitional justice” has been adopted to cover aspects such as truth commissions, reparation payments to survivors and the reform of police and army.
What, however, are the needs of those people who survived genocide, human-rights violations and war crimes? What do they consider necessary to make peaceful coexistence possible? Too often, these questions are not even asked. The analysis of the needs and interests of victim groups is one of the most neglected areas in the field of transitional justice.
This research paper by Kiza, Rathgeber and Rohne contributes to closing the gap. In a comparative empirical study, they looked at victims’ experiences and attitudes in eleven conflict regions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Bosnia, the DR Congo, Sudan as well as Israel/Palestine.
The authors classify various forms of “victimisation” (the term describes the often gruesome way in which a group of people is made to suffer). Their model distinguishes firstly on objective grounds (for example, torture, displacement or severed family ties), secondly according to subjective perceptions, and thirdly according to victim-offender relations. On that base, the authors designed a questionnaire for victims, including on how to deal with offenders. The questions are guided by the transitional-justice notion’s essential elements of punitive (retributive) and integrating (restorative) measures, dealing with various important aspects, such as the rehabilitation of victims and long-term objectives of any action taken.
The empirical results are not very surprising – and that is this publication’s weak point. What victims answered confirms that combining punitive and integrating measures is both necessary and sensible. The majority express themselves in favour of formal, legal processes based on international law. As might be expected, the answers are marked by the cultures and legal traditions prevalent in the different regions. They also reflect the credibility of the state concerned and the legitimacy of international actors.
However, data and analysis should be read with caution. The surveys were not representative as only few victims were interviewed in every single case. Therefore, the data are difficult to compare. This is all the more so as the study does not tell us anything about the victims’ socio-economic or educational background.
Deficits are glaring in the paragraphs on victim-offender relations. What do we learn from
51 % of those interviewed in Bosnia saying they “knew” the offender, when 72 % of those in the Palestinian Territories state the same? These figures do not make sense. After all, Israelis and Palestinians live in segregated settings, whereas ethnic groups closely intermesh in Bosnia. Similarly, why does Macedonia report the highest number of “civilians as victimisers”, even though that is the only former Yugoslav republic where ordinary people did not band together in militias? The study’s strength does not lie in empirical information, but rather in defining a concept of “victimisation” and designing a questionnaire for highly relevant research.
Natascha Zupan
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