Truth Without Reconciliation. Abena Ampofoa Asare
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his leadership.61 Others remembered begging Rawlings for clemency when some of his soldiers committed brutalities.62 Others told stories blaming the chairman for the era’s violence.
For all these reasons, the country waited on tenterhooks when Rawlings was called as a witness to the NRC’s investigation of the high-profile kidnapping and murder of three high court judges and an army officer in 1982. Rawlings’s role in this particular crime had already been the subject of speculation within the NRC.63 The former president strode into the Old Parliament House amid clapping, hooting, and raucous cheering. Justice Amua-Sakyi warned the crowd to “comport themselves” appropriately or risk being ejected from the proceedings. This was only the beginning. The commissioners’ encounter with Rawlings was stilted: an awkward dance including timid questions from the NRC about the whereabouts of videotape recordings and the bravado of the former president, who blustered and lectured his way toward admitting that he could neither produce nor locate the tapes in question. Abruptly, the commissioners dismissed Rawlings, saying that their questions were finished and they were satisfied with his responses. Amid cheers and laughter, Rawlings made his way out of the chambers, joined the crowds of supporters thronging around the Old Parliament House, and marched peacefully back to his central Accra residence.64
The limited exchange between Rawlings and the commissioners was anti-climactic, to say the least. As one reporter stated, “It took longer for him to come and go than to answer their questions.”65 The factual truth of his testimony was almost beside the point. In the détente between Rawlings and the NRC, the former president’s determination to control the story represented a sharp public rebuke to all who presumed that a national human-rights review could bend Rawlings to its will. In the words of one US State Department analyst, “The Commission’s focus on carefully structured proceedings may, this day, have missed the mark.”66 Hardly anyone who observed the February 12, 2004, hearings would conclude that the truth of Rawlings’s role in past political violence had been determined. Oral-history methodology, however, urges us to consider that silence, stilted speech, avoidance, and rumor often speak eloquently. There is a richer transcript of the détente between former president Rawlings and the commissioners at the NRC.
First, the palpable silences in this exchange speak volumes. The commissioners’ laser focus on the whereabouts of certain tapes is a determined evasion of the numerous other questions that could have been put to Rawlings about human rights abuse. Indeed, as described above, some NRC petitioners directly accused Rawlings and/or his wife, Nana Agyeman Konadu Rawlings, of culpability for heinous crimes. Numerous other petitions and testimonies insisted that the order created by Rawlings’s rule was toxic, a breeding ground for soldier violence. Despite citizen stories about the role of the Rawlings family, the commission focused exclusively on the whereabouts of tapes recording soldier confessions about a few high-profile acts of violence and rigorously avoided much of the controversy produced by decades of Rawlings’ rule. At moments, it appeared that the only one willing to approach the violence of the past was J. J. Rawlings himself. Sitting before the NRC, he hinted at the limitations of the NRC’s shallow questions.
NRC: Is there any other information at all on these video tapes, being referred to now, that you’d like to give to the Commission?
RAWLINGS: [Pause] Lots of them. But um …
NRC: Please go ahead.
RAWLINGS: No, if you have specific questions, I’ll deal with them.67
Similarly, when the NRC Chairperson, Justice Amua-Sakyi, abruptly dismissed the former president, Rawlings opened his eyes wide in surprise and quipped, “Oh, Sir, why? … Is that all?68 The insinuation was that the commissioners had not yet completed their work, that they had ended the interview too early and had not yet managed to confront Rawlings on anything of substance.
The silence of the commissioners when presented with the opportunity to publicly question Rawlings was deafening. In the NRC final report, the commissioners were bolder, going so far as to blame “the highest Executive authority in the land” for igniting the violence that suffused Ghanaian public life;69 however, at the public hearings, the commissioners deliberately treated Rawlings with kid gloves. Wise or not, this choice wordlessly revealed the ongoing power of Ghana’s former president as a volatile force in national politics.
From the moment he set foot in the Old Parliament House surrounded by jubilating crowds, the NRC’s dilemma was apparent. Ignoring Rawlings completely by never seeking his participation would have undermined the entire initiative; however, delving too deeply into Rawlings’s past was also risky. A rigorous engagement with Rawlings might confirm the skepticism of those who insisted that the NRC was a partisan enterprise or a threat to the country’s equilibrium. If the only purpose of the hearing was to ask a few questions about a tape, presumably, Rawlings could have submitted his responses in writing. However, a decision to never call the former president into hearings would also have damaged the NRC’s reputation. The encounter gave the commission the appearance, if not the substance, of political authority. The image of Rawlings, in his signature dark glasses, sitting before the high table, answering questions about human rights abuse, was visually powerful. Indeed, he had been compelled to appear. Having successfully created this illustration of accountability, the NRC quickly extracted itself from this encounter, careful not to tread on the tail of a tiger.
Indeed, the “truth” revealed by this moment was Rawlings’ enduring power and the limitations of the commission’s desire to pursue rigorous historical accountability. In Ghana, all those watching this exchange would have received the message loud and clear: the violence of the past could not reliably be contained by the present. Digging too deeply was still risky business. Rawlings’s day at the NRC displayed the constraints of historical justice in twenty-first-century Ghana. Indeed, Rawlings himself scolded the commissioners like schoolchildren, insisting that they must take the context of revolution into account when assessing the Ghanaian past. “You’ve got to appreciate the degree of tension that was existing then…. It’s a complex thing … when you’re talking about a revolt, the thing erupts from the bottom, and it takes time to restore command and control. And it can be very devastating. And that’s what we presided upon. This is a different subject. If you people are interested, we can deal with that later, ok? For now, let’s deal with some of your pertinent allegations.”70
Within the NRC archive, victims of violence rejected this solipsism where “revolution” is description, explanation, and justification of the violence that ordinary Ghanaians faced during these years. The stories of Ghanaians illuminate the scores of men, women, and children injured, stunted, and damaged by agendas and policies that they did not choose and which did not benefit them. “Revolution” does not adequately explain the brief life of Seidu Nombre, shot in the head at Kokompe for answering back to soldiers during the December 31 coup, nor does it contain the grief of his father, Salifu, who testified at the NRC.71 Revolution does not assuage the anguish of the family of Yaw Fosu Munufie, whose two-year-old niece died in a ditch when soldiers shot her father for breaking curfew.72 Revolution cannot erase the words of ex-sergeant Abraham Kwaku Botchwey, who suffered torture and begged his captors to fire one bullet and end his life.73 The narratives of citizen suffering challenge this claim that the ends justify the means in Ghanaian politics.
At the intersection of human rights testimony and life history, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith see an opportunity for the creation of insurgent narratives. “Through acts of remembering,” they claim, “individuals and communities narrate alternative or counter-histories coming from the margins, voiced by other kinds of subjects—the tortured, the displaced and overlooked, the silenced and unacknowledged.”74 Ghanaians thrust forward troubling versions of the truth that did not easily align with the government’s hope to use the truth commission as an instrument of closure. Nonetheless, this democratized historiography was delivered in jars of clay. The NRC bureaucracy, which questioned just how much truth telling Ghana could bear and survive, actively contained these insurgent narratives.
Conclusion
The NRC was created in response to Ghana’s polarized