The Epilogue of Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting is entitled ‘Difficult Forgiveness’, indicating that forgiveness is neither easy nor impossible. As the common horizon of memory, history and forgetting, it is always attracting but never reached. Ultimately its two dimensions diverge: below the awareness of guilt, above the gift of forgiveness. There is no conceptual middle ground between them. Neither can we construe a form of reciprocity between the demand of being forgiven and the offer to forgive, nor build on the symmetry between an agent binding herself to an action (as in promising) and releasing her from this bond (as in forgiving). Forgiveness points to a realm beyond established social relationships, a realm where an agent is regarded a priori as a moral subject, i.e., as someone capable of rejecting what she did wrong in the name of the good. Both a negative and a positive consequence follow from that. The negative one reads that there is no public dimension in forgiveness, that ‘the people’ cannot be the agent of forgiving, and that there cannot be political institutions of genuine reconciliation. While individuals can, polities cannot pose as agents summoned by a moral norm. In other words, they are unable to relate the wrongness of their actions to their selfh ood. In the final analysis they can neither bear nor lift moral guilt. What they can do is to engage in ‘a culture of considerateness’, moderation, or clemency, in order to normalise their relationships. Certain public gestures can further this disposition to considerateness on a public scale, but this does not amount to public forgiveness. The positive thesis is that forgiveness can only be thought in a time beyond time, in the optative mode of wish and hope rather than in the indicative mode of description or the imperative mode of prescription. For this anticipation of a memory that will once turn out be unequivocally ‘blessed’, Ricoeur uses the theological term ‘eschatology’, though in a radically philosophical (rather than a theological) sense.

In an equally philosophical vein I propose to ask what is the protology correlate with this eschatology? What is the ‘beginning’ of times, or the ‘time before time’, that is both preparing for and recaptured by ‘the end of times’, or the ‘time beyond time’?

INTRODUCTION

Hannah Arendt's theorizing of forgiveness has become a frequent reference in conflict resolution literature and has rightly prompted many commentaries by theologians and political theorists. The concept itself is controversial, and this chapter reviews some of the critical comments addressed to Arendt. However, the chapter's main purpose is to offer a theoretical complement to the interpretations of Arendt's contribution to theories of peace-making, and a three-fold empirical illustration of this argument. Most discussions of Arendtian forgiveness fail to take into account the other human capacity that palliates the irreversibility and unpredictability of action: promising. The connection between forgiveness and promising is what endows forgiveness with its political character and secures justice. Moreover, although Arendt was wary of the political impact of self-improvement efforts, she theorized reconciliation as the attempt to understand one's place in the world, a kind of pondering that admits of self-reflection, but is quite unlike forgiveness. This rather idiosyncratic form of reconciliation as a process of understanding, which stimulates political judgment, is crucial to empower the public actor. The “gift of the understanding heart,” as Arendt called it poetically, like the connection between forgiving and promising, has provoked few academic commentaries. To make the most of Arendt’ contribution to the theorizing and practices of conflict resolution requires taking into account her analyses of three key political concepts – forgiving, promising and reconciliation as “understanding” – jointly rather than discretely. The first part of the chapter develops this argument by examining Arendt's theorizing and the critiques leveled especially against her discussion of political forgiveness. The second part discusses three real life examples to illustrate why this theoretical argument matters to politics: Arendt's concepts, taken together, can work as analytical categories to decipher and assess empirical processes of conflict resolution. The chapter examines the role of promising and forgiveness in the launching of the 1952 European Coal and Steel Community and the deficit of understanding; in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the deficit of promising; and the deficit of forgiveness and understanding in some of the early Iraqi and US reconciliatory attempts.

INTRODUCTION

Public forgiveness in Northern Ireland, if it has a place at all, still lies in the future. The Northern Ireland Executive's recent policy statement, Strategy for Victims and Survivors, once again kicks the can down the road with regard to deciding on a definition of who was a victim and on a truth recovery process. Strategy for Victims and Survivors lowers expectations for reconciliation and proposes that victims discuss and give input on the character of a future truth process. Is this tantamount to concluding that no process leading to public forgiveness will happen in Northern Ireland? This paper explores this question, highlighting the deeply divided nature of Northern Ireland society, which provoked the conflict in the first place, reduces the likelihood of a truth commission, and hobbles those in leadership from making reconciliatory gestures. Paradoxically, public forgiveness in Northern Ireland will have to come from the grass roots, given the challenges of Northern Ireland's “consensus” politics.

NORTHERN IRELAND AFTER 1998

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 found a formula, through power-sharing, by which two long opposed parties engaged in a zero-sum conflict could work together. It did not, however, represent new found political solidarity. Both parties retain, unaltered, political goals that are antithetical to one another. These political goals are shored up by narratives that draw on a rich history of successive violent events. From both perspectives, victimhood is part of the political narrative. Though nationalists view the 1998 plan more positively than unionists because they see power-sharing as a way-station en route to the eventual unification of Ireland, neither politicized group considers the current constitutional arrangements to be a long term solution to its aspirations.

Tensions got so bad in 2002 that Westminster took back into its own hands the running of Northern Ireland. The Stormont government was restored in 2007, with the Reverend Ian Paisley as First Minister and former IRA operative Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister. Paisley has now given his place to a younger colleague, Peter Robinson.

Despite political tensions, the work of rehabilitating the society after its thirty years’ war continues, by many measures quite effectively. Foreign investment and job creation have helped lift the economy despite persistent high unemployment in certain areas most associated with the conflict.

SPEAKING, TO A QUESTION

What if the question remains? Amidst all the public discussion of forgiveness, there is the question of the inquiry with which it begins, the question that appears in the name of beginning anew – Will you forgive me? Charged if not loaded, the very sound of this question resonates. Asked in time, it strikes us as an opening, a moment of potential given to (re)turning history from fate. Posed in the wake of that which changes everything, however, the inquiry smacks of contrivance, an artifice that recalls if not (re)inflicts a hollowing wound. Between a gesture of redress and an unthinking affront…this variation is telling. Addressed to a subject that has suffered a particular wrong, a transgression whose precise depth may touch the very limit of articulation and defy complete knowledge, the question of forgiveness is never quite the same even if its grammar is altogether familiar. Its inquiry composes a unique imposition, a posing with (dis)respect to an event, a posture that makes reference even as it has neither the comprehension nor the standing needed to refer to that which it addresses. Before a reply, the captivating problem of whether forgiveness is permissible and perhaps even desirable, there is then the matter of hearing the question, of listening to what it renders questionable. Without promise, the question of forgiveness arrives already divided, an inquiry caught between its own expression and its query as to what remains (in)expressible. A speech act that troubles the action of speaking – in public and perhaps for publicity's sake – the question of forgiveness asks after the (im)potentiality of (its) speak-ability and inquires into our experience of (its) language.

In how many ways does the (un)speakable haunt the question of forgiveness? We do not always remember – we may not be able to remember – that the question appears in the aftermath, a moment in which the capacity to ask and the capacity to answer are not given.

INTRODUCTION

What is the function of law, or, more precisely, legal institutions, in response to historic injustice? A period of injustice and violence can be followed by an urge to forget what has happened or indeed specifically to remember it or alternatively to seek reconciliation and forgiveness. Sometimes the legal system takes it upon itself to forget, to remember or to forgive.

This article is based on the assumption that collective processes of forgetting, remembering and forgiving are related to societal efforts of structuring time in response to historic injustice. In the figure of remembering, the past is “relived”, whereas in the figure of forgetting the present is (temporarily) disconnected from its relationship with the past. In the figure of forgiving the relationship with the past is released, while the future is being anticipated.

Although these three collective figures, with their respective strong points and weaknesses, continue to play their roles as markers of historic changes, it will be argued that the specific role of legal institutions is primarily of a mundane, workaday nature. Legal institutions are well-equipped to keep some distance from the collective urges to forget, to forgive or to remember. On the one hand these bodies have to ensure that historical injustice is not ignored, while on the other hand they need to be able to take binding decisions on such injustice that will bring conflicts of the past to legal closure and will be accepted by those involved. By allowing people access to legal action, providing finite answers to injustice, a system of law can help counteract the possibility of historic injustice creating permanent victimhood.

This article is structured as follows. Firstly the relationship between the legal order and the collective duties to forget or to remember the past is discussed in sections 2 to 4. Secondly I examine the relationship between law and the collective duty to forgive in sections 5.1 to 5.4. The conclusion follows in section 6.

THE SOUTH AFRICAN TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was called into existence in July 1995. The Preamble of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No 34 of 1995 (the TRC Act) stated that the objectives of the TRC were to promote national unity and reconciliation, amongst others by establishing as complete a picture as possible of the gross violations of human rights which were committed under apartheid, by facilitating the granting of amnesty to apartheid perpetrators under certain conditions, and by providing recommendations to prevent future violations of human rights. In order to achieve these ambitious tasks, three committees were put into place: the Committee on Human Rights Violations (HRVC), the Amnesty Committee and the Committee on Reparation and Rehabilitation.

The HRV Committee – which is the focus of this article – was in charge of collecting written victim statements and of organising the Human Rights Violations hearings, where a representative sample of victims was allowed to testify in public. The HRVC gathered close to 22,000 statements, covering 37,000 violations; this is more than any other previous truth commission had achieved. These statements were recorded by trained statement takers who conducted interviews with victims of apartheid all over the country. Between April 1996 and June 1997 a little under 2000 of these victims told their stories before the HRV Committee. Over these 15 months 83 hearings took place in public places such as town halls, schools, churches and civic centres. The emphasis of the HRV hearings was on “the validation of the individual subjective experiences of people who had previously been silenced or voiceless”. Supporters of the TRC claimed that to tell their stories of suffering and misery was a healing and cathartic experience for most of the victims. The mere fact that these survivors were allowed to talk about the past meant a lot to them; it showed that their experiences were officially acknowledged and this made them feel respected as human beings.

Because of the impact it had on the victims and also because the media brought this Committee to the attention of the national and international public, the Human Rights Violations Committee has often been considered as one of the most successful components of the TRC.

SYMPATHY AND POLITICAL RECONCILIATION

In a series of recent writings, I have offered an account of political reconciliation as the process combining the resolution of formal questions between adversaries (e.g. who has a right to what) with the inculcation of sympathetic attitudes. I use ‘sympathy’ in its philosophical signification, as the ability to imaginatively switch places with others and view the world from their perspective. This definition is arrived at by way of elimination. There is surely more to reconciliation than the cessation of hostilities. After all, no one would claim that the fighting factions in Iraq have reconciled just because they stopped shooting at each other for a while. There is also more to reconciliation than two or more enemies reaching a fair agreement on how to settle their claims and how to distribute disputed resources. Israel and Egypt reached such an agreement rather quickly in the late 70’s. The Sinai peninsula was returned to the Egyptians, prisoners were exchanged, the war dead exhumed and shipped back home. Since then Israelis and Egyptian have had few claims against each other. They have also wanted nothing to do with each other. Can this state of affairs count as political reconciliation?

Reconciliation, then, involves more than the cessation of hostilities and more than the fair settlement of mutual claims. But what more is needed? Is forgiveness the missing element? I have argued elsewhere that it is not. Since this volume centers on the idea of political or “public” forgiveness, let me reiterate the contours of that argument.

It has become fashionable of late to speak about the importance of forgiveness in politics. The most prevalent argument in favor of political forgiveness concerns its potential to release victims and wrongdoers from the effects of vindictiveness. A desire for revenge, so the argument goes, can generate a never-ending violent cycle, trapping both sides in a dynamic of blow and response, eventually destroying all those involved. As Ghandi famously put it, “an eye for an eye canmake the whole world blind”. The argument is intuitively compelling, but forgiveness is not the only way to quell the desire for revenge.

INTRODUCTION

In 1974, the Irish Republican Army bombing of pubs in Guildford and Woolwich led to the wrongful jailing of eleven Irishmen. The individuals were arrested by the British police based on evidence that was later discredited. In 2005, Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized to the surviving victims and their families. Mr. Blair had been expected to make his statement in the House of Commons, but Members of Parliament did not offer him that opportunity. Instead, he recorded a TV statement immediately afterwards from his office and after that, he spoke in private chambers with the families of the victims without any press present, repeating the statement he just had made.

There had been a “miscarriage of justice”, Mr. Blair said in this statement. “I recognize the trauma that the conviction caused the (…) families and the stigma which wrongly attaches to them to this day. I am very sorry that they were subject to such an ordeal and such an injustice. That's why I am making this apology today. They deserve to be completely and publicly exonerated”.

Gerry Conlon, one of the Irishmen who were wrongly jailed for the bombings, stated to the press afterwards that “[the Prime Minister] went beyond what we thought he would, he took time to listen to everyone. He exceeded our expectations in apologizing, he said it was long overdue.” Conlon added that Blair spoke with sincerity and that “…the good thing is that he has acknowledged it, and he accepts that we are in pain, that we are suffering terrible, terrible nightmares and terrible post-traumatic stress disorder”. Mr. Conlon concluded that he had got all he had wanted from Mr. Blair “and more”.

PUBLIC FORGIVENESS

Can this official apology be seen as an act of public forgiveness? If we understand public forgiveness as (a) a mutual process of transformation: a change of mind and heart on the part of the victim and the wrongdoer to end a cycle of offense and resentment6 that (b) takes place in an open, accessible forum, then the aforementioned apology seems to match the definition. Mr. Blair's statement evoked a positive reaction; Gerry Conlon, one of the victims who personally suffered from the wrongdoing, responded with gratitude to the Prime Minister.

INTRODUCTION

One of the persistent challenges in post-conflict peace-building is negotiating the multiple frameworks out of which actors are working as they try to reconstruct societies together. Sometimes the differences are proper to the people who have been engaged in the conflict; indeed, differences in cognitive frameworks can be one of the causes of conflict itself. But alongside the participants in the conflict are those outside actors who enter the post-conflict zone to help build peace: international peacekeeping forces, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, expatriates, and other international institutions. Finding a way to translate principles and policies from one framework into another is now recognized as a major task that needs to be undertaken if peace-building is to be a successful and sustainable operation.

This chapter focuses on one such zone for translation; namely, the space where secular and religious frameworks meet in the post-conflict peace-building process. On the one hand, it has been widely recognized that such key concepts as forgiveness and reconciliation have – at least for the West – significant religious roots. But on the other hand the principles, policies and actions that flow from these concepts are not entirely congruous or even compatible with one another. There has developed a spectrum of positions regarding how – or even whether – secular and religious approaches to peace-building can work together. Some would argue that in rebuilding after conflict religion is as much the problem as it is the solution, and therefore should be excluded from the process. On this view, religion is seen as intrusive, coercive, and indifferent to certain matters of justice and of human suffering. On the other end of the spectrum, religion is seen as the most important component of peace-building. Attitudes toward Archbishop Desmond Tutu's deliberate use of Christian concepts and symbols in the sessions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission are evidence of the array of opinions on the relation of the secular and the religious in peace-building.

INTRODUCTION

Emphasising the need for a multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary, integrative framework for understanding massive trauma and its Aftermath, this chapter examines victims/survivors’ experiences primarily from the psychological perspective. It describes how victims are affected by mass atrocities, their reactions, concerns and needs. Delineating necessary elements in the recovery processes from the victims’ point of view, the chapter will focus in particular on those elements of healing that are related to justice processes and victims’ experiences of such processes. Reparative justice insists that every step throughout the justice experience – from the first moment of encounter of the Court with a potential witness through the follow-up of witnesses After their return home to the Aftermath of the completion of the case – presents an opportunity for redress and healing, a risk of missing or neglecting the opportunity for healing victims and reintegrating them into their communities and societies, or, worse, causing (re)victimization and (re)traumatization. While restitution, rehabilitation or compensation may only come After the process has concluded, there are still opportunities along the way. Although not sufficient in itself, reparative justice is nonetheless an important, if not necessary, dynamic component among the healing processes. Missed opportunities and negative experiences will be examined as a means to better understand the critical junctures of the trial and victims’ role within the process that can, if conducted optimally, lead to opportunities for healing. In what follows I therefore discuss why it is essential to devote resources to all elements of justice. In line with the focus of this volume, the chapter will cite related experiences in Africa.

CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

It was in the context of studying the phenomenology of hope in the late 1960s that I interviewed survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. To my profound anguish and outrage, all of those interviewed asserted that no one, including mental health professionals, listened to them or believed them when they attempted to share their Holocaust experiences and their continuing suffering. They, and later their children, concluded that people who had not gone through the same experiences could not understand and/or did not care. With bitterness, many thus opted for silence about the Holocaust and its Aftermath in their interactions with nonsurvivors.

Testimonial of Marie Louise Niyobuhungiro:

INTRODUCTION

Over the last decades, with landmark international crimes such as the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, war crimes in Liberia, the former Yugoslavia, Sderot, Israel and Gaza, the Palestinian territories, and crimes against humanity in Darfur (Sudan), Eastern DR-Congo, Uganda and Sierra Leone, there has been increased awareness of victims and victimization in the context of international crime. Unlike the eff ects of conventional criminality, which involves a relatively small number of victims, international crimes result in mass victimization. Furthermore, the scope of its resulting victimization is broader, as international crimes tend to encompass several circles of victims and incorporate aspects of victimization that are not merely additive but multiplicative in their impact.

Whereas the issue of responsibility for international crimes and blameworthiness of individual perpetrators has been the subject of much discussion and scholarly attention, victims of international crimes have for a long time remained invisible and the extent and types of their injuries have not received the same level of consideration. Although the establishment of international criminal tribunals to address the crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the creation of the International Criminal Court, have provided initial opportunities to study victims of international crimes, there are still gaps in our understanding of the variety of victims and extent of victimization in the context of protracted conflict.

In this chapter, we explore the ref ection of victimization in the context of international crime through the lens of writers who experienced or witnessed the crimes. Specifically, we compare how national trauma is narrated by Israeli and Rwandan writers, both of whom have written against a backdrop of genocide and holocaust. We first present the socio-political background of Israel and Rwanda, their similarities and divergence, making the case for the comparative analysis. We then provide a framework for conceptualizing victimization in an international context, extrapolating from conventional to international crimes. We address aspects of victimization related to international crimes that have been ignored in mainstream victimological research and discourse – the ways in which victimization and national trauma of innocent civil society is presented in its literature.

INTRODUCTION

In Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, African Rights (1994) described the horrific cruelties against and killings of Tutsi and moderate Hutu by extremist Hutu over a period of a few months only (see also Ruvebana, this volume). In 1994, the beautiful country of Rwanda – also known as the country of one thousand hills – was engulfed by one of the most eff ective and most public genocides of all time. with in 100 days, from April 7 to July 18, about 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were brutally murdered by extremist Hutu, including their neighbours, friends and acquaintances. In those 100 days, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women and girls, but also men, were raped and experienced other forms of sexual violence. As a 1996 United Nations report observed, “rape was the rule and its absence the exception”. For many survivors, rape and other forms of sexual violence, but also the resulting HIV infection, babies born from rape, and stigmatization and isolation by their family and community members, constitute the ultimate violation of their human rights. In addition, the genocide left hundreds of thousand children orphaned and a similar large number of survivors lost their husband, wife and/or child(ren). Many lost their houses and other possessions. The country's economy, its judicial institutions and social services were completely destroyed. Over 1 million people were involved in the genocide and survivors and perpetrators are now again living side by side. Slowly but withstrong determination, the country is recovering from its horrific past. Programs of reparation and reconciliation, national and local, have been developed, and (tradition-inspired) justice mechanisms put in place.

Many instances of mass atrocities and in many ways similar carnage preceded and followed the period of the Rwandan genocide in different parts of the world.

In the 20th century alone, hundreds of millions fatalities occurred (Rummel 1994), and the scourge of international crimes – genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – remains a reality today. Attempting to do justice under the sceptre of such heinous cruelty and unspeakable suffering is a daunting task, withthe enormity of evil blowing up the limits of normally held trials and convictions.