Can Genocide End in Forgiveness?

WASHINGTON — In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson set up a special commission to investigate the causes of rioting in Harlem, Watts, Newark and Detroit in the mid-1960s. The Kerner Commission warned that the United States risked splitting into two societies, one black and poor, the other white and upwardly mobile. Not everyone was happy with the commission's conclusion, but it marked a necessary step in a continuing effort to end inequality and racism in America.

Something similar may have taken place in Guatemala last month. In the wake of a four-decade-old internal war, the Commission for Historical Clarification issued "Guatemala: Memory of Silence." Even for those who know the country's history well, the report's findings are shocking: More than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the period of armed conflict. In particular, between 1981 and 1983, a deliberate policy of genocide against the Mayan population was carried out by the Guatemalan state. Can such inflammatory material, spread in a deeply divided society, promote the healing that Guatemala so desperately needs?

In accordance with its mandate, set by the U.N.-coordinated peace agreements, the commission assigned institutional responsibility for the massacres and other acts of violence. Most were carried out with the full knowledge, or by order, of the highest state authorities; 93% of all cases were attributed to the armed forces and paramilitary agents; 3% were traced to the left-wing Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. The U.S. government, including the Central Intelligence Agency, was closely allied with national political parties and elite sectors supportive of the repression.

Guatemalan human-rights organizations cheered the commission's findings. Some conservative politicians called the report biased. Although there has been no public reaction to date by the government of Alvaro Arzu or the armed forces, the report has had a palpably unsettling effect on both.

Truth commissions are not designed to make everyone happy. But they have become an invaluable mechanism in parts of the world like South Africa that are emerging from long and bloody struggle. Their aim is to establish, through rigorous inquiry, a historical record of the human-rights violations that took place, to reveal fundamental truths about a painful period. Their purpose is also reparative--to honor the memories of the victims and support their families--and preventive--so that societies never have to endure such ordeals again.