June 19, 2001, 17:15
Peru is going to start finding out just how much next month when an official commission is due to be named to the agonising task of picking over two decades of leftist rebel and state-sponsored violence in a national search for catharsis.
Following in the footsteps of such countries as Argentina, Guatemala and South Africa, Peru is turning a fresh page with a Truth Commission to try to understand the deaths of some 30 000 people and the disappearance of 4 000 more from 1980-2000.
"The Truth Commission is probably one of the biggest challenges of Peru's newly reborn democracy," state human rights monitor, Walter Alban, wrote in El Comercio this month.
Establishing the panel, which will scrutinise alleged human rights abuses committed under the 1980-85 government of Fernando Belaunde, the 1985-90 administration of Alan Garcia and the 1990-2000 term of Alberto Fujimori, has been a key achievement of an interim government which steps down in July.
It took office with a moralising mandate after Fujimori was fired last November while in self-exile in Japan amid a corruption crisis triggered by his fugitive ex-spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, a man accused of robbing the country and running death squads.
Fujimori's downfall tarnished what many considered his greatest legacy as president, stamping out the rebel violence by the Maoist Shining Path and the Marxist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement which held Peru to ransom for 15 years. But his regime gave Peru one of Latin America's worst rights records.
The vast majority of the dead in the rebels' wars on the state were peasants from the remote Andes, where grisly mass graves regularly turn up. Lima rang to the sound of bloody carbombs and residents suffered curfews and power cuts.
Now, with Peru's attorney general calling for Fujimori to be tried for what she said was his responsibility in a "horrendous" 1991 massacre by an army death squad, and with President-elect Alejandro Toledo poised to take office on July 28 after democratic elections, it appears Peru is ready to pry open a past whose unpalatable truths have long been locked away.
"One minute's silence is respect. Twenty years is indifference," ran a television advertisement for the Truth Commission, whose members are due to be named next month. - Reuters
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