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

Abstract

The article analyses the impact of international justice on the debate about public memory and visions of reconciliation in Namibia. Focusing on a recent submission to the International Criminal Court, 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 anti-colonial 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.

© Oxford University Press 2010