Essay: reconciliation and truth

"I know who ordered the killing of my best friend, Ruth First. I sit across the Cabinet table from him every day. This is the price we pay." Kader Asmal, South African government minister, speaking on the need for national reconciliation, London June 1995.

Marius Schoon, whose wife Jeannette and six-year-old daughter Katryn were blown up in Angola in 1982, and who is laying criminal charges against the South African police for these murders and that of Ruth First, quoted in the Guardian 26.2.95.

<*> Think of someone who you cannot, under any circumstances, forgive. Think of the reason you can't forgive them; think of the hurt they created; think of what they did, and think of how they can never repair it. Think, too, of how badly you hate that they go unpunished.

Almost everyone can think of someone they cannot ever forgive. I can: thinking of one particular person can still make me shake with anger, years and years after the events which set me against them. I cannot, will not ever ever forgive them. I don't want to, don't feel the need to, don't think that my refusal to forgive them makes me a bad person, or that I'd be a better person if I did.

Now, holding that justly, righteously unforgiven person in your mind, think how bad their crime was. Put it in perspective. Think of how much worse it could have been, how very much worse, and imagine how you would feel then. Then multiply your passion by ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million, a nation.

How can nations ever forgive each other after war? How can vast numbers of people oppressed within a nation, by occupiers or by their compatriots, ever again live alongside those who did them such violence, without wreaking righteous vengeance on their oppressors? How, in short, are both justice and peace served?

This is the dilemma faced by many in post-war situations all over the world, including most obviously and recently in Northern Ireland and South Africa. It is also a fifty-year-old dilemma, still unresolved from after the Second World War. It is also a dilemma for the future, for how ex-Yugoslavia and others can ever regain a measure of peace. Just what is necessary, after war, for justice to be done, and restitution offered to the survivors of injustice?

>>> Confounding our expectations

One way to consider the processes of reconciliation and renewal is to look at the reconciliation that has already gone on elsewhere. In the March 1995 Peace News, Roberta Bacic wrote of this process in Chile. Two other examples of national reconciliation can be found in post-Independence Zimbabwe and Namibia, where near-miraculous processes of reconciliation were developed while Southern Africa was barely beginning to emerge from the years of bitter and bloody wars: wars of independence, civil wars, superpower wars-by-proxy, bandit wars, wars of the rich against the poor, which have ravaged it for so long.

Zimbabwe's immediate post-war policies confounded the expectations of the West. Fifteen years on, and bearing in mind the enormous respect with which president Nelson Mandela is now regarded, it is difficult to capture the flavour of the loathing in which president Robert Mugabe was held at the time in the West, and by whites within the then-Rhodesia. Years of propaganda had fuelled white fear of Zimbabwean nationalism, and personified Mugabe as "the anti-Christ incarnate".

British government policy on who should be the first leader of post-independence Zimbabwe, for example, was said to be known as "ABM"--Anyone But Mugabe". White Rhodesia feared what he would do in revenge for the decades of structural brutality and war atrocities against black Zimbabweans, and many expected a repeat of what happened in Portuguese Africa in 1974 -- an exodus of whites and white capital, leaving a bankrupt economy and an administration in disarray.

President Mugabe confounded his critics. His remarkable first post-election boradcast outlined a policy of national reconciliation. This confirmed what he had been saying during the campaign, that whites need not fear retribution, and that all factions should now work together to create peace and stability for the whole country. One of the first tasks of the national reconciliation policy was to begin the integration of the three main armed forces who had fought each other during the war into one national army--a process not necessarily designed to gladden the hearts of pacifists, but something that did nonetheless begin to bring people together where their enmity was at its greatest.

President Mugabe's speech on the eve of Independence Day gives a taste of the reconciliation mood:

"..If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty rights and duties as myself. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you... If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lessons the past has taught us, namely that oppression and racism are inequalities that must never find scope in our political and social system."

>>> He would still be my jailer

Of course, after the initial euphoria of independence wore off, the process was not without its sometimes horrendous difficulties. Ethnic tension plunged Zimbabwe into violence again, but the country, and the spirit of national reconciliation, survived. Alex de Waal, in his book The Politics of Reconciliation (Hurst/Philip 1990) relates the story of Zimbabwean minister Maurice Nyagumbo, who, on being asked if he minded being affectionately greeted by another parliamentarian, a former Rhodesian Minister who had helped jail him for a total of 22 years, said "If I had not forgiven that man, he would still be my jailer."

The same sort of process was repeated in Namibia on independence. After throwing off occupation by apartheid South Africa, president Sam Nujoma announced that there would be no recriminations or war crimes trials for any participant in the war, neither would people be sacked from their jobs in public appointments on the basis of their political affiliations. This was, like Zimbabwe's reconciliation policies, partly pragmatic, in that it prevented white skills and capital abandoning the new country for South Africa, and prevented the continuation of the war by disgruntled groups. But it was also based on a moral desire to channel energies into rebuilding the nation and creating a single, inclusive, equal and democratic Namibia. As in Zimbabwe, a unified army created from the remnants of the two enemy forces, became a symbol of national reconciliation made flesh. In Angola and Mozambique, and now in South Africa, the same process is being developed to fit each country's circumstances, and similar, difficult deliberations of how reconciliation is to accommodate justice have taken place.

>>> Acknowledging the trauma ...

To those outside these processes, like myself, the central question is: where do people who have lived through such wholesale and sustained attacks on themselves, their friends and family, and their entire communities, over many generations, find it within themselves to accept an official policy of reconciliation? For the purposes of this article I will not discuss the drive for forgiveness laid out by New Testament Christianity, which may be a powerful motivation for many, but cannot show the whole picture. One way to begin is to think back to the processes by which we do or do not forgive individuals. While writing this article, I've thought back to my unforgiven one, and what sets them apart from others who have done me wrong -- or indeed from the wrong I've done to others. They never acknowledged that what they did was wrong, or indeed that they did it at all. While the hurt remains unspoken, it also remains unhealed. This passion to see the perpetrator of one's hurt to accept responsibility for what they did is fairly common amongst many who have survived violence, and often is far stronger than any simple desire for revenge.

If this need to have one's trauma acknowledged is as true for nations as it is for many individuals, then one solution for nations has been to establish Truth Commissions. This is where atrocities from war are investigated and recorded, and where people's loss and pain is finally acknowledged as valid. In Chile after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, the new government set up the Rettig Commission, to investigate crimes committed under the dictatorship. South Africa has a Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, and there are groups in Northern Ireland, such as the Relatives for Justice, who believe a Truth Commission is a necessary part of the peace process there.

The need for this is that, while only those who have suffered loss can forgive, this is utterly impossible if they do not know who or what to forgive. Only when those who have suffered know who tortured them, killed their families and friends, dispossessed them--and if the perpetrators have been punished or prosecuted for their deed, and if they feel remorse--can forgiveness begin to be a possibility.

>>> ... and has the injustice stopped?

What happens after the hurt is acknowledged is another thing. The Rettig Commission was secret, and while victims have been given certain reparations, those who had committed atrocities were left largely unpunished. The South African government has been deliberating on how far the proceedings of the Truth Commission will be secret, how far down and up blame is applied, and whether indemnity--freedom from prosecution--will be given to those found guilty of war crimes. These decisions cannot be easy. On the one hand, no one wants to set the stage for years of vengeance. On the other, it is difficult to escape the idea that those who profited from violence by so much and for so long are getting away with it, their ill-gotten gains intact. For example it is difficult, I have many times heard ruefully remarked, to find anybody in the new South Africa who ever supported apartheid.

It is at this point, when the former oppressors are the ones who have so much to gain by secret proceedings, indemnity and forgiveness, that it is easy to become suspicious of reconciliation. When reconciliation is used by the aggressors as a way of glossing over their aggression, then it can quite legitimately be seen as a reactionary process. This is why the impulse for reconciliation must be one for which the victim is as ready as the aggressor. Only those who have suffered injustice can decide when the memory of that injustice may be put aside. A reconciliation based solely on the aggressor's breezy forgetfulness--"let bygones be bygones", or barely-concealed coercion--"forget what I have done, else I will cause yet more trouble"--merely continues the aggression.

This also means, of course, that the injustice done in the past must have ceased. No one can take seriously declarations of regret for the violence they have done, if at the same time that violence continues. This is where, over time, dissatisfactions in Zimbabwe and Namibia have arisen: the initial glaring injustices of democracy denied may have been remedied, but for many, the violence of poverty continues. In Zimbabwe, a serious complaint about reconciliation is that it has helped to maintain white privilege, and whites are still in control of much private wealth, while most black Zimbabweans remain poor. In Namibia, although the policy of national reconciliation is widely perceived to be successful, with even old political enemies praising the SWAPO government's commitment to multi-party democracy, dissatisfaction has also focused on reconciliation having gone too far in preserving the status quo, to the detriment of creating opportunity for real changes in the lives of most Namibians.

>>> The butcher of Lubango

This requirement for past injustice to have ceased also means that the process has to apply to everyone equally. Possibly the greatest public test for the Namibian reconciliation process was the appointment of Solomon Huwala, who had earned the nickname "the Butcher of Lubango" for allegedly imprisoning, torturing and killing hundreds of detainees in SWAPO-run detention camps in Angola during the war, to the post of Army Chief, the third most powerful appointment in the Namibian Armed Forces.

In theory, Huwala's appointment was unremarkable: other members of both forces, including those in the security forces who had taken part in brutal repression, were welcomed into the NDF with no comeback from their previous lives. Yet the appointment became a national issue, and the army became a focus for discussion on the real meaning of reconciliation. Some agencies within Namibia (and solidarity organisations without), including those most supportive of SWAPO, felt that this appointment was sending out the wrong signals about human rights. Nervous whites focussed on Huwala as the proof of all the fears they ever had about SWAPO, while young SWAPO radicals took to the streets in pro-Huwala rallies, seeing him as the test for whether national forgiveness was truly national, and to be extended to those in the struggle as much as those in the establishment.

Only those who face the need for reconciliation can say whether it is possible. The South African advocate Linda Zama has written that reconciliation in South Africa is possible because it is absolutely essential.