Communities and Individuals: Ways of Reconciliation

The box you have in your hands contains fifteen CDs and DVDs that show a reparation modality that the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER) implemented part of community reparation.

Collective production

This process began in September 2004 with a seminar organized by several civil society associations in Agdez, a city where a secret detention center was located, and culminated with a national symposium held a year later by an inter-association steering committee established by the IER, with the participation of more than 250 associations. The recommendations made by this meeting are included in full in the final report of the Truth Commission. Meanwhile, regional seminars were systematically organized on this topic in the cities that hosted the public hearings for former victims. As soon as the IER ended its mission, the implementation process started, at this level as well, with Institutional Structure , described below, ensuring the inclusion of the maximum number of national and international partners, public and private.

Thus, in its genesis and in its implementation, this process has been always participatory and inclusive, which is why probably it resulted in relative success, as evidenced by independent audits established by international experts. Obviously, the community reparation program, reflected in this box, cannot be duplicated as it is. However, it contains some lessons and challenges facing all truth commissions in the world and experienced during the first months of the IER life: What are the conditions to be met to implement as quickly as possible the final recommendations?

Prepare in advance the implementation of recommendations

These conditions are necessary but not sufficient. For me, they are four: a) building the widest possible political alliances; b) developing specific recommendations; c) involving authorities and stakeholders likely to ensure the implementation as early as possible in the very process of the elaboration of recommendations, and finally d) considering very concretely the issue of human and financial resources. It is this philosophy of working that helps carry out actions that may at first glance look like traditional local development actions. However, they take a full political sense when one keeps in mind that what is most important is to restore confidence in the State’s word, to sustain a pluralistic civic deliberation in territories and to open the possibility for those who were deprived of everything, mainly of the right to speak, to act by themselves, and to move from a status of victim to that of citizen.

This political dimension was obviously amplified by public hearings for victims that took place, after a long internal debate, between December 2004 and February 2005 and broadcast on public television and radio channels. Marked by women's testimony, these hearings remain for the majority of the population, even today, the hallmark of the IER work. The package includes a selection of testimonies from women who say, in their own words, the essential part of what should be said and heard.

The hearings were of two types: direct testimonies by former victims invited to say before the Commission’s members and the population of the chosen city, without being interrupted and in the language of their choice, what they had suffered, and thematic roundtables during which intellectuals and social players tried to examine history in a pluralistic manner. Hearings for victims were thus the highlight of an extensive process of citizen deliberation, compassion and free expression, which also included seminars organized by the IER (prison literature, truth concept, political trials, etc.), thousands of articles published during these two years, dozens of books published and many initiatives organized by the civil society, including to challenge the IER work.

This dynamic process to own back history (although to a relative extent), pluralistic discussions and (peaceful) confrontation are part of the essential contributions of transitional justice. The goal is not to reach a consensus, but to learn collectively how to manage peacefully dissent. So, this how I understand reconciliation: taking together this long, painful, delicate and complex path of confrontation with what we did to each other, trying to understand its deep motivations, not forgetting but relativizing it, registering it, in addition to memory, in national history and in the history of our fellow human beings. Visit what the young Moroccan filmmaker Leila Kilani called in a moving film “Nos lieux interdits” (our forbidden places) to recreate a political community.

Driss EL Yazami January 2013

Fait partie de la collection Community Reparation in Morocco