  Almost every transition since World War II displays these tensions. The Nuremberg trials, often viewed as the pinnacle of legalism, were, nevertheless, based on ex post facto charges (see Bass 2002: Ch. 5).  The Spanish transition to democracy was so fragile that it had to commit itself to a “pact of forgetting”—more than three decades of silence about abuses committed during the civil war and under Franco. Historical justice and the need to preserve the peace came into conflict, with the latter receiving precedence until the 2008 Law of Historical Memory reversed the trend (see Tremlett 2006).  In South Africa, de Klerk's National Party threatened civil war if the African National Congress insisted on war crime trials against apartheid officials. The celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with its amnesty-for-truth arrangement, was the resulting political compromise meant to avoid both punishment and impunity. The ANC's demand for retributive justice went unheeded (to the outrage of many, including the family of Stephen Biko, who unsuccessfully sued the Truth Commission in the South African Constitutional Court) because heeding it would have eliminated the chance for a democratic South Africa (for an overview see Meredith 1999).  The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, operating in Tanzania, netted some of the Genocide's ringleaders. But Rwanda was not able to apply rigorous criminal responsibility to all those who participated in the murders. Doing so would have taken several centuries. Thus a system of traditional justice, Gacaca, was devised. These makeshift “Grass Courts” failed to live up to western standards of legalism (the judges were not professionals, rules of evidence were not followed) and it failed to produce satisfying punishments. But it did provide a platform from which at least some of the crimes were admitted and acknowledged, and it did manage to empty the Rwandan jails which contained hundred of thousands of prisoners. In the tension between practical functionality and retributive justice, Rwanda nodded to the latter, but eventually focused on the former. The policy of de-Baathification carried out negligently in the aftermath of the second Gulf War, combined with the thoughtless disbanding of the Iraqi army ended up fueling the anti-American insurgency there, in addition to draining Iraq of many of those who had crucial administrate skills and experience. Here too, the commitment to retribution and the desire to create trust by “cleaning out” those associated with the previous regime actually ended up bringing about the opposite effects by further destabilizing the country and harming its bureaucratic competence at a very sensitive time (see Pfiffner 2010).