Observation .
C . Transitional Justice for Communities : Fambul Tok in Sierra Leone ( Lesson # 2623 )
Bottom-up community-led grassroots reconciliation initiatives can fill in the gap for ordinary people affected by war whose justice needs are not met by national-level Truth and Reconciliation Commissions . After Sierra Leone ’ s brutal decade-long civil war , the Fambul Tok transitional justice initiative brought communities together to acknowledge harms they experienced from the war , apologize for perpetrating harms , and forgive each other , starting a long path towards community rebuilding .
Discussion .
From 1991-2002 , the country of Sierra Leone in West Africa experienced a civil war characterized by grotesque human rights violations which deeply impacted people across the country . The level of brutality in Sierra Leone ’ s civil war was unprecedented . Over the course of 11 years of war , over 50,000 people died and over one million were displaced . Of those who survived , thousands had amputated limbs due to brutal machete mutilation . An estimated 10,000 child soldiers participated in the violence , and over 200,000 people were raped as a tactic of war .
Sierra Leone ’ s civil war began to end with the Lomé Peace Accord , signed on 27 March 1999 , which provided blanket amnesty for most combatants . The United Nations Mission to Sierra Leone ( UNAMSIL ) was established to enforce the terms of this agreement and to assist with disarmament . In addition , the international community assisted Sierra Leone in establishing two transitional justice mechanisms – 1 ) a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( TRC ) and 2 ) a Special Court to prosecute those most responsible for war crimes . However , the TRC proved inaccessible to most rural people since it primarily operated in Freetown , the capital , and in major district cities ( 2002-2004 ). Since amnesty had already been provided in the peace accords , most perpetrators were not compelled to tell the truth . Furthermore , the Special Court only tried a handful of criminals after spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the construction of a judicial building . As such , the two main mechanisms supported by the international community to establish justice – the TRC and the Special Court – were disconnected from the lives of most Sierra Leoneans .
The net result of these efforts was that the official processes for justice did not meet the needs of millions of ordinary citizens who had been affected by the war . Human rights activist Sierra Leonean John Caulker , national chairman of the TRC Working Group in Sierra Leone and founder of the human rights NGO Forum of Conscience , was disappointed with the results of the TRC . In order to find out what else rural communities needed in order to heal from the war , he traveled around the country from December 2007 to February 2008 , asking communities if they were ready to reconcile and what they would need to do so .
In order to address justice needs of local people , it is important to first understand local conceptions of justice . Most Sierra Leoneans have a very different sense of justice than punitive Western legal norms . In Sierra Leonean conceptions of justice , crime violates not only individual people but also the community . In order to repair this violation , both the victim and perpetrator must be involved in making the community whole again , which would not necessarily be accomplished by sending people out of the community to prison . In fact , according to John Caulker , many Sierra Leoneans see prison as a system to re-victimize victims , since those in poverty must pay taxes to finance prisons . Forcing perpetrators to acknowledge the horror of their own actions is culturally shameful and as such is in itself a form of punishment . A cultural saying in Sierra Leone admonishes that “ you cannot throw a bad child into the bush ,” affirming the importance of dealing with wrong-doing within the larger community .
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