Barry Laine hands copy of truth and reconciliation document to President Faure |29 July 2017

Barry Laine of the Seychelles Truth Reconciliation and Peace Platform has given to President Danny Faure a copy of his research work entitled ‘Truth and Reconciliation Proposals’.

Accompanied by other members of the civil society of Seychelles, Mr Laine handed over the 165-page document to President Faure at State House yesterday afternoon.

The document contains proposals for a reconciliatory settlement of the coup d’état in Seychelles.

Mr Laine said the Seychelles Truth Reconciliation and Peace Platform (TRPP) researched into 51 countries’ truth process started two years ago and studied how they dealt with their coup d’état.

He noted that they have studied the events leading to the coup d’état and other activities during our coup d’état. While some people have come forward with important information which feature in the document, others are still frightened to do so.

“The document explains how grief can be dealt with, how revenge can be turned into acceptability, once the right actions have been taken. When we meet victims, when we meet perpetrators, how do we lead them to finding acceptability? Some other crimes cannot be explained, but we have to work on acceptance when we can’t explain something,” said Mr Laine who is the author of the document.

Mr Laine added: “We told the president that the civil society has a role to play as it is not a case that the government will create a truth and reconciliation commission. This is because the perpetrator is the current government, compared to other countries which we have studied and which the perpetrator is the outgoing government. The National Assembly has its role to play. So the civil society comes in the middle and says ‘Ok it happened, let’s see now what we can do about it.’ It is not good to say let’s get the tree ready and hang some people. It doesn’t work like that. We need to understand the story and find the truth. This is because there is no truth in a lot of the things that people are telling us because they happened so long ago.”

He said he explained this to the president and gave him the following example. ‘Four years ago four men came to my house and pulled my son away. Twenty years later, eight men could come to the house and pulled my son away.’ The mind has multiplied because the event is there bothering the person.

“This is why it is important that we as civil society get involved in this. We don’t want legal powers because we have got the judiciary. It is also not up to us to decide whether to prosecute someone. If somebody comes up and say this person has killed one of my families we have to ask him/her what does he/she wants to do about it. You want to go through the route of forgiveness or through the route of the court? If you want to go through the court, you must have proof. There are cases of people who have disappeared and when we looked into them they did not disappear because the government took them, but they went fishing and never came back. It was an accident. But because the people who were involved did not like what was going on at State House, they blamed the government for their disappearance. We have to come up with the right information,” stressed Mr Laine.