Justice and Forgiveness

Justice and Forgiveness

was the subject of my last essay in Ethics/Human Rights, Post Grad Class this semester

Since this is on the web, I cannot possibly cut & paste all the content, since part of the content was illustrated by a case study (a mock trial) of the current deep-seated conflict in the Middle East (extremely sensitive, so I am not putting that online), but here is what I can share with you, in more general terms.

When a society tries to reckon with past wrongs, two paths present themselves immediately: Justice or Forgiveness. International Justice is not only about punishment. Oriented towards the future, Justice seeks to establish the Truth of wrong-doings towards the establishment of a common narrative and in order for people to get on with their lives. Forgiveness provides a different imperative for seeking justice: the reintegration of the relationship between victim and perpetrator, built on both sides in honest recognition of mutual responsibilities, based on newly gained recognition and respect for each other’s sufferings.

...

Ethics of ‘order’: at the heart of humanitarian intervention is ‘international order’. There is a post colonialist grievance which is particularly directed towards the rendition of Justice by the liberal democratic states that dominate the contemporary global order. The post colonialist scholar Vivienne Jabri questions the underpinning of International Law. He explains that ‘international liberalism relied on the conception of a modern state’, itself ‘a product of situated struggles, campaigns and acts of resistance, the culmination of some of which came to constitute the norms and value which inform the basis of judgment and responsibility today’. Jabri wants to retain the idea of a cosmopolitan mode of political expression, but ‘one that can meet the postcolonial challenge’ (of not reproducing inequalities) and one that recognizes ‘the possibility of a universal location of politics’ without assuming ‘a juridical remit, nor indeed the emergence of a global political community underwritten by law’. There are therefore strong questions to ask about the validity of the liberal model even if thinkers like Fukuyama assert that a strong state (like United States) that is able to transfer its institutions is central to state building.  ...  The result is that although there is agreement between liberal states, NGOs, international agencies, there isn’t one on the ground, and the question of legitimacy of international Justice Institutions is highly questioned.

Let’s consider other limitations of International Tribunals like the difficulty to establish the truth... In order for reconciliation to happen, there must be some agreement on what happened and why, therefore a need to find out the truth. The problem is that truth may never ‘occur’for lack of recoverable evidences in chaotic settings. The problems further expand as truth is always contested after a conflict, even when the facts are revealed in court of law.

Although, the mock trial highlighted that there are limitations to what international justice can achieve, it is a ‘work in progress’ learning from past mistakes, and this does not mean that it does not have an important role. It can never be enough emphasized that ‘accountability’ should not be dismissed easily....

... Yet, the healing effects of Justice can be both superficial and fragile. They are often symbolic, not all perpetrators can be put in jail; the reality is that they are often needed for the reconstruction work after conflict. A more robust form of forgiving is based on the restoration of common bonds and the transformation of subjective factors that can harm community such as resentment, anger, and desire of vengeance. This form of ‘thicker’ reconciliation, departs from Justice and lean towards notion of deeper Forgiving at grass-root level.

...

Bottom-up approach - What kind of Forgiving can take place when the evidences of wrong doing are shouting at you everyday like the house destroyed in front of you? In the context of deep-seated conflict like Gaza, a realist goal is not to seek total forgiveness; it is to reduce as much as possible disagreements in order to go on with life. For that, one has to look at all levels of society, not only address the structural causes at the top level of institutions, but at every level of what constitute the fabric of a society. In moments of greatest pain, it is difficult to understand that the welfare of the other community is directly related to the welfare of one’s own community. The difficulty is to ‘imagine’ a relationship with the other that transcends the cycles of violence while the other and the cycles of violence are still present. It relies on the capacity ‘to imagine that it is possible to hold multiple realities and world views simultaneously as parts of a greater whole without losing one’s identity and viewpoint and without needing to impose or force one’s view on the other. It pursues complexity as a friend rather than an enemy.’(Lederach 2005).  A critical step in re-humanization is to view the other person as a complex, non idealized individual and a tolerating difference is part of a resilient relationship (Halpern 2004). Because deep-seated conflict is frequently intimate and relational, there is a need to develop population-based programs that help people maintain curiosity and emotional openness towards each other’s perspectives. This fosters the ability to individualize rather than stereotype over time as genuine relationship develop. The reality is that entrenched identities cannot be uprooted overnight; therefore reconciliation is a long term effort.
...
Yet, there may be an unforseen window of opportunity for Forgiveness just after conflict. It has been argued that there is a unique window of opportunity of long term healing that immediately follows traumatic political events, precisely because these very events disrupt existing patterns of identity and community. Immediately after trauma, individual experience of trauma (pain) could be portrayed as a social phenomenon (a commonality) capable of constructing and reconstructing community together rather than immediately try to control panic and injury in ways unknowingly reconstituting the very exclusions and prejudices that initiated the conflict. More space should be made for empathy, compassion and wonder instead of marginalizing these feeling. Instead of trying to forget, it may be preferable to empathise on commonality while it lasts, even commonality of pain. Potentially these universal feelings could become a ‘builder of identity’. A good example can be found in grieving mothers ‘whose only commonality they find in their sons’ death grievance, Marija, a Croat, and Dobrinka, a Serb portrayed by Halpern in Rehumanizing the Other: ‘the two are able to share values, not just wishes’ (2004). All we hear about are warning about how feelings associated with first-hand experiences of trauma can spread and generate collective emotions, thus providing new form of antagonisms, but we tend to dismiss the constructive power of empathy. More broadly speaking, we should recognize the social and political influence that emotions can exert, and move from the Western fear of the irrational towards its embrace and healing power in the case of empathy after trauma, with the potential for identity building and bridging between antagonist communities.

Strategies that foster ‘humane connections’ between victim and perpetrator need to be sought if forgiveness is to become strong enough to overcome deep-seated feelings of anger and revenge. The condition of connexion is to find a commonality. A way to identify with the moral and social outlook if you have to start from scratch may be through the emotions that accompany shared compassion after trauma. Empathy is about experiencing shared emotions and imagining and seeking to understand the perspective of another person. It involves being genuinely curious about another person, therefore it cannot be so easily social-engineered!

In deep seated conflict areas, there is a grounded pessimism that hinders action. John Lederach explains that this kind of ‘pessimism’ is a gift, not a bad attitude. This pessimism represent a ‘grounded realism’ or ‘continuous warning system’, a quest for the deeper reach, the true nature of how change happens, and demands integrity as a condition for surviving manipulation and mendacity (Lederach 2005). For pessimists, the only test should be palpable and seen at grass root level: ‘the test of authenticity of this change, however, will not lie only at the level of words spoken by the leaders, in changes in social structures and institutions ... these structural changes will be tested by concrete actions involving personal processes of change tested at the ground level: ’Ultimately, the authenticity litmus test will ride on how people experience the behaviour of police officers in real-life situations’.

...

We have seen that they are many approaches to grass-root level ethical perspectives to Forgiving at community level, and we have only brushed the subject. More importantly, we have demonstrated the need to complement International Justice with deeper forms of conflict resolution leaning towards Forgiveness.

...

Justice and Forgiving are working in a complimentary manner, sometimes together, sometimes separately depending on the context, but towards the same goal in order for people to live together none violently and respect each other as fellow citizens, avoid lapse back into conflict and start building on areas of common concern. We have seen some limitations of the kind of Justice which can be achieved through International Institutions such as the ICC, which is primarily based on 'liberal society solidarity' and this model has to become more inclusive. In the case of deep seated conflicts, when empathy is both superficial and fragile, we have seen that institutional tools of Justice should be complemented by a more robust form of Forgiving that addresses deeper levels of complexity in a creative (Lederach) or contextual (Feminist 'ethic of care') manner, as part of a long term process. If we accept this proposition, then, there is a need to acknowledge the respective necessities of different modes of approach to deal with past-wrongs and find ways to achieve dialogs and cooperation between these various forms of post-war truth finding mechanisms, instead of relying on one form only.

This is a very beautiful and poignant contemporary poem recited by a Palestianian woman in a London Hall in 2011, that I would like to share with you

Rafeef, Ziadah. 2011. ‘We teach life, sir’, London 12.11.11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKucPh9xHtM  Last accessed 28.05.12

Like wise, many young Israeli today seek to leave their father's dream and start their lives abroad to find the very peace their fathers had endeavoured to create in the once promised land.

The suffering is on both sides.

Below are the words form a young woman who survided to tell war in former Yougoslavia.

It is about the difficulty to be able to confront the truth, not the socially established truth, but the personal truth.

 ‘To whom do my eyes belong? Shall we lower our gaze until justice is done, and all perpetrators are brought to trial? Or should I open my eyes, my thinking and feelings eyes, as wide as possible to see both sides of an historical tragedy while still remaining the part the community that gave me life’... How do we open the kind of safe place to allow a complex, painful, and scary, uncomfortable but extremely important conversation which demands bare honesty to explore the truth?
Is there a future without paying this cost?

Is it how we cross the borders of human division?

Olivera Simic (2009) in What Remains of Srebrenica ? Motherhood, Transitional Justice and Yearning for the Truth, Journal of International Women’s Studies. I only met her as a guest lecturer in my Peace Building class at UQ but this short encounter left an impression on me has endured to this day.