No one could have anticipated the evolution of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After unpromising beginnings as a second-best alternative to trials, with lukewarm support from politicians and former proponents and scant attendance at its early hearings in Freetown, the TRC began to draw packed houses in former occupied areas. Whereas in early hearings senior RUF officials were cautiously questioned and expressed no remorse for their involvement in the brutal insurgency, just three weeks later TRC chairman Bishop Humper carried out a near crusade, imploring collaborators to confess and apologise for their complicity with the rebels.

In this chapter I will briefly describe the origins, mandate and public perceptions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its sometimes problematic relationship with the Special Court. My main purpose, however, is to describe the evolution of the TRC hearings during the two weeks and a day that I attended them in Freetown, Bo and Kailahun over a period of three and a half weeks. I will also discuss the TRC report, which was publicly released on August 8, 2005, and its potential contribution to reconciliation in the country.

THE ORIGINS

With the collapse of the Abidjan Peace Agreement, the AFRC's eight-month takeover of government in 1997–1998, and the brutal January 6, 1999 attack on Freetown, civilian leaders realized that peace would require renewed negotiations and that amnesty would be part of the final deal. In January 1999, government and civil society leaders, who had fled to Conakry, Guinea, began to discuss the potential of a truth and reconciliation commission to address responsibility for the war (Bennett, 2001).

The first meetings were sponsored by the newly-created Sierra Leone Human Rights Committee, a joint eff ort involving government and civil society leaders in exile, the UN and international organizations. The committee struck up a TRC working group which operated under the National Forum for Human Rights, an umbrella group of human rights NGOs in the country. The government human rights commission, the National Commission for Democracy and Human Rights (NCDHR), also began exploring the prospect of a TRC (HRW, 1999b; interview, NGO head, Freetown, April 10, 2003; Bennett, 2001).