Initial Truth Establishment by Transitional Bodies and the Fight Against Denial

Denial of gross human rights violations is usually a disguised form of racism. Deniers argue that apartheid in South Africa was a moderate and justifiable national policy; that there was no such thing as a policy of disappearance and torture in Chile under Pinochet; that the genocide in Rwanda was an exaggerated event, the 1994 death toll actually resulting from a typically trivial African ethnic war; that the Holocaust is a giant hoax, that it never took place, that the only thing gassed at Auschwitz and Treblinka were lice and that the six million Jews supposedly killed were actually alive and wealthy in Israel or in the United States. Deniers also support Milosevic’s version of recent history, i.e., that the Srebrenica massacre that killed 7000 people was prepared by the Muslims themselves. This subtler, but just as efficient form of racism, aims at attacking the historical truth. It does so notably vis-à -vis the first official records of the violations, in most cases those established by transitional bodies such as the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg. The deniers’ intent is to justify the criminal behaviour of regimes condemned by such bodies, to rehabilitate these regimes and to eliminate, in public opinion, the barrier those past events represent for the resurgence of criminal policies.