Politics of Memory and the Critical Analysis of Legal Discourse on Truth and Reconciliation

Restoring transitional justice would refer to a range of approaches to address human rights violations of the past, to repair fractured justice system, to mourn and memorialize historical wounds, and to make legal compensation to the victims. At times of political transition, transitional justice would provide opportunities for the societies to address past human rights abuses, mass atrocities, or other forms of trauma in order to facilitate a smooth transition into more peaceful future. In case of Korean society the list would include i)coercive migration policies, military draft, and comfort women during Japanese occupation, ii)Jeju April 3 Massacre of post colonial period, iii) civilian massacres and rapes including Nogunri Massarcre during Korean War, and iv) fabricated espionage charges, tortures, suspicious deaths, and civil massacres under military dictatorship. In political aspect, memory is the very process of power dispute between the official memory and the suppressed memories, where the suppressed past would fight to be recognized as history by banding together with other oppressed memories to form collective memory. The politics of memory focus at micro-power relations between various political interests that get involved into the making process of collective memory and transitional justice. Critical assertion that this article is trying to make regarding legal discourse of truth and reconciliation is that, such power relations may be perceived not only at the level of suppressing counter memories, but also at the very process of restoring and normalizing those suppressed voices, of adapting them into official history. Thus this article starts with the deconstruction of the notion of restorative justice, through critical analysis on the intentional blurring between absence and loss, which underlies the presumption that we may recover justice of the past and represent existent wounds. Moreover it tries to illustrate how the project of legal compensation leads to normalization, exclusive inclusion, and commodification of counter memories. By doing so, ideological strategy of nation state behind legal discourse of truth and reconciliation may be revealed.