“The TRC’s Final Report is unsightly and horrible flawed.”

Jonny Steinberg will have an article in the January 2010 African Affairs on the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  You can wait until then and access it through JSTOR, or purchase it here.

Here are some excerpts to whet you appetite.  This is the best article I’ve read on current affairs in Liberia.

• “The TRC’s Final Report is unsightly and horribly flawed. Aside from making enemies of its natural allies, the Report’s recommendations on prosecution and censure are based on shaky and unreasoned foundations, and are surely incapable of surviving judicial review. Its fate will probably be that of a quashed document embraced by many ordinary people but rejected by much of the political elite and the international community.”
• There’s a fascinating discussion on how it came to be that the 2003 Accra agreement did not include amnesty provisions, even though many thought it did.  ”Indeed, when the TRC recommended that he be prosecuted six years later, former rebel leader and current senator Prince Johnson protested that he and others had been granted amnesty in Accra.”
• “As for the TRC, it appeared unlikely that it would ever grow teeth… The Liberian elite is awfully small. Each Commissioner was acutely aware that within two or three years her work on the Commission would be over and her capacity to find good work in Monrovia would probably depend upon the largesse of more powerful people. The Commissioners hardly seemed the sort to rock the boat.”
• “It seemed that the TRC had not the capacity or the will even to hold warlords accountable to the barest truth. Several former warlords expressed open contempt towards the Commissioners when they came to testify, addressing Commissioners by their first names, or even as ‘pekin’, ‘little boy’ in Liberian English. The message was clear: We may have graced you with our presence, but you will not dare to go after us.”
• Steinberg argues that the TRC report places all the blame on the political elite, and none on ordinary Liberians.   “If the political class rallies against the Final Report, and many ordinary people rally behind it, the popular dimension of the war will remain forever unconfronted.”

Want more?  Read Sizwe’s Test.