International justice and reconciliation in Namibia: the ICC submission and public memory

bibliographic database
Line

Periodical article

Title:	International justice and reconciliation in Namibia: the ICC submission and public memory
Author:	Höhn, Sabine
Year:	2010
Periodical:	African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society (ISSN 1468-2621)
Volume:	109
Issue:	436
Pages:	471-488
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Namibia
Subjects:	International Criminal Court national liberation struggles SWAPO offences against human rights memory conflict resolution
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/40783712
Abstract:	The article analyses the impact of international justice on the debate about public memory and visions of reconciliation in Namibia. Focusing on a submission by the Namibian National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) to the International Criminal Court in November 2006, it shows how domestic actors used international justice to advance their claims for reconciliation and it thus challenges the common assumption that reconciliation is an entirely domestic process. The article discusses how the ICC submission individualized guilt for past human rights abuses and neglected structures of suspicion and denunciation within the guerrilla movement SWAPO. The submission also challenged once more the government's efforts to reduce the complex history of the country's anticolonial war to a narrative of a unified struggle, and showed that the official policy of active forgetting was still questioned after almost two decades of imposed silence. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]