‘Can the past make nations ill as repressed memories sometimes make individuals ill? Can a people be reconciled to its past by replacing myth with fact and lies with truth? All societies forge myths of identity that allow them to forget their unhealed wounds. Nations, like individuals, cannot bear too much reality. But if too much truth can be divisive, how much is enough?’

In ‘The Warrior’s Honour’ Michael Ignatieff tells of travels to the world’s war zones. The ease with which former neighbours became enemies puzzled him. But can the process be reversed and erstwhile foes reconciled? His musings are remarkably apposite to Jamaica, and many bear repeating. As Mark Twain wrote ‘When something is well said, don’t waste time rewriting it. Copy the damn thing!’

Dudley Thompson’s apology for his ‘no angels died’ speech has prompted calls for a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Many feel that if politicians confess their sins, the wounds of the past will be healed and a people imprisoned by violence will be set free to create a new political ethos. But some want not only truth but justice. To them anything less than the imprisonment of those responsible for atrocities like Green Bay, Orange Lane, Gold Street, Top Hill, and Eventide would be pointless.

But though truth commissions in South Africa and South America have done fairly well in establishing what happened, they have been much less successful in explaining who did it and why. The South African commission had the power, but not obligation, to grant an amnesty to anyone who willingly testified about past political crimes. Those who refused could be prosecuted, using the evidence gathered by the commission. But politics hindered the process and serious criminals escaped justice. Even some who refused amnesty and were prosecuted got off. A Jamaican equivalent is hardly likely to find things any different.

Truth commissions generally examine the sins of ousted politicians, but in Jamaica most of the alleged sinners are still publicly active. Politicians are always happy to investigate their foes’ actions. Few wish to publicly examine their own. Who has the power to call a truth commission here? Only the very government who might find many of its members discredited by such a commission.

At any rate political trials seldom apportion guilt satisfactorily. Small fry tend to pay the price for crimes of big fish, often reinforcing the sense that justice is arbitrary. But the great virtue of legal proceedings is that rules of evidence establish otherwise contestable facts. Truth commissions cannot be judged failures because they fail to change behaviour and institutions. They often do change the frame of public memory and discourse. The past is an argument not a fact. Truth commissions, like honest historians, purify the debate and narrow the range of permissible lies.

There is a deep human need to know the truth. The relatives of ‘disappeared’ South American victims preferred the facts to the false comfort of ignorance, and did not need to punish the transgressors to put the past behind them. But most peoples prudently calculate that judicial vindictiveness can tear society apart. Even South African blacks realized that attempts to prosecute apartheid's state criminals might have rendered the country ungovernable.

Shared acknowledgement of responsibility is rarely achieved. Truth is related to identity - what you believe depends partly on who you believe yourself to be. Every society functions with only a precarious hold on the truth of its past, for we have substantial psychological investments in our heroes. A nation which discovers its heroes guilty feels tarnished, and people do not easily surrender the premises of their past lives. When collective moral identities are challenged, denial is actually a defense of everything one holds dear.

Myth dissolves when inner needs change, not when outward facts contradict it. Dudley Thompson’s apology was not prompted by external events. Yet if merely admitting a 20 year old statement was wrong can cause such public stirrings of repentance, imagine the sort of catharsis a new public inquiry would bring. There is a deep human need to tell the truth, especially as the grave looms, and like courage, it is often contagious.

Past major incidents of violence have prompted independent inquiries. But the political atmosphere has changed, and in many cases new information has come to light. Had Dudley Thompson repudiated his ‘no angels died’ outburst then, the entire tone of the Green Bay Inquiry might have changed. A necessary first step of any truth commission would be a review of such past public inquiries. Merely refreshing the public’s memory could bring great insights into the country’s present confusions.

Truth commissions are usually empowered by countries making the transition from dictatorship. Jamaica is an established democracy. But it has the world’s third highest murder rate, and can not properly develop until this changes. Politics may not contribute directly to violence today. But who if not politicians created the garrison dons that rule our inner cities by the gun? A truth commission addressing such issues from a national and not partisan viewpoint must in the long run make Jamaica less violent.

Public rituals of atonement also help to heal. National leaders can have enormous impact on the mysterious process by which people come to terms with their societies’ painful past. Leaders give societies permission to say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable, to rise to gestures of reconciliation that individuals cannot imagine.

President Alwyn’s apology to Pinochet’s victims on television symbolically cleansed the Chilean state and created a climate where a thousand acts of repentance became possible. Chancellor Willy Brandt’s cathartic gesture of kneeling at a death camp officially associated the German state with atonement. So why was Mr. Golding’s suggestion that he, Mr. Patterson and Mr. Seaga walk together through the politically divided inner city ridiculed? What harm could it do?

History is tenacious because no questions of national identity can avoid secrets of the past. If a regime persists in telling lies about the past, its legitimacy will inevitably be undermined. Reconciliation built on mutual apology accepts that history is not fate and need not repeat itself. Without recognition of what happened and an apology to those who died, the past continues to torment and cannot become the past.