A Brief Evaluation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Some Lessons for Societies in Transition

In a large country with many rural inhabitants, to merely document all the gross violations of human rights that occurred under apartheid and to simply provide the space to thousands of victims to recount the stories of their abuse, all within a time frame of just two years, would require a superhuman effort. It remains possible and is fundamentally important, to critically evaluate the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in terms of some of its own stated objectives – and particularly to scrutinize its operations and assess its processes, through the eyes of victims and survivors themselves.