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The most recent issues of the Peace Fellowship newsletter can be read here:
Text of the talk given by Revd Roberta Rominger, Moderator of Thames North Synod and one of the Patrons of the United Reformed Church Peace Fellowship, to the Annual Conference on 26th November 2005 at URC House, Tavistock Place, London UK. Thank you for your invitation to speak today. It gives me a chance to say thanks to you good people on behalf of the United Reformed Church for your witness among us and the important work you do in our name. Obviously, peace is a concern of every Christian, but so are lots of other things, and peacemaking takes more commitment and courage than a lot of the rest. We are grateful to you for putting such significant energy and dedication into this work.
I had an interesting time deciding what to talk about today. The kind of peacemaking I know the most about from my own experience is mediation in troubled churches. Fights over what hymnbook to use, pews vs. chairs, whether the minister is a saint or a crook, that sort of thing. It’s amazing that the Nobel Peace Prize has never been awarded to a church leader for service within his/her denomination, really. But the URC is a small family and the danger was that even if I changed the names to protect the innocent, Andrew Jack there would still know who I was talking about, and that wouldn’t be appropriate. I reckoned I needed another idea.
It was at the end of September, just as I was really starting to panic, that I heard a story on the news. Just one of those little items, a brief mention to intrigue you without any of the details to fill in the picture. The story was about Algeria, where they were having a referendum. A referendum on peace, the BBC said. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika had been elected to a second term last year by promising that he would lead the nation in some serious peacemaking. So he and his government were putting forward a “Draft Charter for Peace and Reconciliation” and inviting people to give their consent to a whole set of initiatives. Since 1992 the Islamic insurgency had killed 150,000 people and caused $35B worth of damage. But earlier this year the government had finally tracked down the two principle insurgent groups in their mountain hideaways and defeated them. The fighting is over, give or take. And Pres. Bouteflika’s challenge now is to lay the foundation for a lasting peace.
The provisions of the peace charter go something like this. Any Islamic extremist who lays down his arms and turns himself in or otherwise admits to having supported the insurgency will be forgiven. Amnesty. No judicial proceedings. This does not extend to those who took part in massacres, of which there had been several, or rapes, or bombings in public places, who are still to be held to account as criminals. It does bar the former insurgents from holding public office. It rejects the claim that the government security forces may have had a hand in the thousands of disappearances that have happened. The charter says, “We’re just not going to go there.” It does provide reparations for the families of the disappeared, and likewise, it provides assistance to the families of the Islamic extremists. It rallies the people’s loyalty: from now on we will not disparage Algeria in public. We will not tarnish our country’s image in the eyes of the world.
This referendum took place on 29th September. When the votes were counted, 97% had supported it. There had been an 80% turnout of the voters, twice the usual number who turn out for elections. One area of the country had boycotted: the Berbers are the largest ethnic minority group in Algeria and they have longstanding grievances from a history of discrimination. They are particularly sore that their language was outlawed back in 1998 - it was the last government that did that, not the current one. Things have been pretty explosive with them. But since September the government has been wooing them. The Berber language has just been recognised again and there has been new investment in their area. So just this week a second election was held, a “reconciliation poll”, to give the Berbers a chance to vote. I haven’t heard how it turned out.
I was intrigued by this story and all the questions it raises. Obviously, peace is more than the absence of conflict. You don’t need me to tell you that. When both sides in a civil war lay down their arms, there is still a long way to go. How do you make peace across such a divide, with all the grievances, all the memories of atrocities, all the unresolved religious and tribal passions? How do you weigh up one person’s rightful demand for justice against a murderer with the knowledge that labelling people murderers is going to lead you straight back to the fighting? What does it take to move a society on to the point where it can function, where former enemies can live side by side again within the greater community? How do you do it?
In Algeria, even the overwhelming vote in favour of the charter is only the beginning. How do you translate all those general promises into concrete laws? How do you enforce the one that says that from now on you can only say nice things about the country? Do you criminalise all opposition to the government? Can you really refuse to investigate the claim that it was government forces responsible for 6,000 of the 7,000 disappearances over the last decade? Dealing with the insurgents, how do you determine which were the ordinary foot soldiers who can be given amnesty and which were the bombers and mass murderers and rapists who need to be held accountable? And is it right to legislate forgiveness? What is the response to the critics who say that there was no real debate on this charter and it’s barely worth the paper it’s written on? They allege that it’s all a government trick to consolidate power behind Bouteflika and his party. What if it doesn’t hold? What happens then?
It’s not a million miles away from what our government has been proposing just this week, the amnesty for the IRA. We all heard the Democratic Unionists, practically choked with their distress, begging their fellow MPs to understand that it is impossible to wipe away the accountability for the brutality that has happened. Unthinkable that the perpetrators would be walking the streets absolutely free. And they were outvoted. The bill goes on to a second reading and it looks like it will pass.
Reconciliation cannot just be declared. But at some point, that’s what always seems to happen. You might want to fulfill the demands of justice, but it can’t be done. It just isn’t practical. So the government says, we’re going to draw a line here. This is how we’re going to do it. And then we’re all going to move on. The conflict is over. You can keep going on about your unresolved needs if you want, but understand that you then become part of the problem. We’re moving on. Please come along.
It’s all very thought provoking. So I got me some books and started reading up on other stories, variations on the theme. How do you establish peace within a divided society?
Czechoslovakia 1989. The Velvet Revolution happens so quickly and so peacefully once it finally happens that it kind of throws everybody off balance - communism has given up practically without a fight. The population is euphoric about the victory of freedom. The problem now is how to make sure communism is really eliminated from the national system. Some 200,000 of communism’s victims, political prisoners, were freed within the first few months of the new Czechoslovakia, and it felt great. Two hundred thousand unjustly accused people given back their lives. Jubilation on all sides. But that was the easy part. In Algeria and N Ireland, you have the prospect of killers from opposite sides of the conflict running into each other in the post office. In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, it’s collaborators, secret police operatives, spies.
The secret police were called the Statni Bezpecnost, StB. They spent 20 years recruiting people to report to them and lots of people did. To say no was to say good-bye to any hope of promotion at work or to have your child barred from attending university. Or to have some scandal from your past revealed to the world. There were a hundred ways of falling into their clutches. Everybody knew it was happening.
The StB kept meticulous records of its recruits, of course. And for the most part it’s trustworthy stuff. If they’d known that one day they’d be overthrown and the Czechs would be reading it all, they might have doctored the files with false information to throw them off the track. But the StB never imagined such a day would come. So what’s there is their working system. There is a register of names and then there are files. In your file would be copies of whatever reports you submitted. So after the Velvet Revolution, in one sense, it was easy for the new society to expose the collaborators. There was the list with all their names. In 1990 when it came time to elect a government, the new political parties were invited to scrutinise their candidates to make sure that they weren’t sponsoring anybody whose name was on that list. Most people could see the sense of that, though it was all a bit patchy that first time through. But in 1991 things got serious.
The policy was called lustrace, and by the end of 1991 it had became law. For five years, no one who had worked for the secret police would be allowed to hold public office or any senior position in the military or the courts or the new police or the state-run radio and television stations. They couldn’t be directors in any company that the new government put any money into, or hold tenure in any of the big universities. The law applied to some 40,000 positions of different kinds of leadership.
IIt was discovered that 16 of the newly elected government deputies were on the list. They received a private invitation to resign and six of them did, but ten did not. Some of them believed their names were there in error. Some knew their names were there simply because they’d had a trip abroad and filed a report with the police, which everybody did - it was the price you paid for the privilege of being allowed to travel - and they didn’t reckon that should count. There were other similar extenuating circumstances. But the public needed its clean sweep. The names of the ten were read out on television. Each was allowed to speak in his/her defence. And then they were all dismissed.
Lustrace became increasingly ugly as time went by, a very blunt instrument to achieve a fairly positive political outcome. The problem was that people became literalists when they read that register of names from the StB. If your name was there, you were guilty, end of story. And while the original lustrace legislation said that people would only be banned from public service for five years for having collaborated, the reality was that their reputations were tarnished forever. It was unfair because the list was flawed - many of the people named there had never spied in any significant way. It was doubly unfair because the list was only about men and women out in the big wide world who were seen as helping the StB from their various neighbourhoods and work places - it didn’t contain any of the names of the key StB agents, the people on the payroll, who were mostly at large, unreachable. And it was triply, painfully unfair because some of the dissidents, the good guys, had intentionally flirted with the StB in order to subvert them. It was a dangerous game, but the freedom movement depended on it. If you allowed yourself to be recruited as an informant and then met with your StB supervisor to file a report, you could often pick up some good information to take back to the movement. You could tell whose flat or telephone was bugged, for instance, by what the StB knew about and what questions they were asking. And of course, you would feed them little, irrelevant bits of information in order to cover up the huge picture of subversion that you were actually part of. As a friend of one of these people said, “You know a person told the police something. It looks terrible. But I know that it’s not important. I know what he didn’t say.”
And of course, there is the whole other side to the issue. That at the time people agreed to share information with the secret police, this was seen as the patriotic thing to do. Some of them, especially the young or the naïve, answered questions for the police as their civic duty, the same way you or I would.
When the original lustrace legislation was proposed, the idea was that people would be presumed innocent until proven guilty. It wouldn’t be enough just to have your name on the register - you wouldn’t be expelled from your job unless there was proof that you had actually worked with the StB. Many people were dismayed when this basic protection was removed from the bill. You did still have the right of appeal. By the spring of 1993 70 people had appealed and each one had been cleared. So it all started to get embarrassing - it was making the new republic look bad. Perversely, this didn’t make the public question lustrace. They just got angry at the people who appealed because they were making the Czech Republic a laughing stock in the eyes of the world.
For our purposes today, we add an Eastern European peacemaking dilemma to our picture. In Algeria and N Ireland and other places of civil war, the problem is what to do with past atrocities and their perpetrators. In the former communist countries there is a different kind of peace struggle to be negotiated. On the one hand, you absolutely do not want to have the communists working their way back into control. They have all the advantages - who else had any chance to learn how to run a government or even a political party? You have to create policies to keep them out. But then you find you’ve legislated against freedom and equal rights, the very things you reckoned to be fighting for through all the years of resistance. Over and over again such laws have been passed, and if you question the new governments as to how they could sin like this against freedom, they’ll look you straight back in the eye and tell you that in this matter the ends justify the means. We are the enlightened ones, they’ll say - we know what’s good for the people. The formalities of democracy can be abused, and we mustn’t have that. Maybe some day we can operate a free democracy, but for the time being, that is not possible. And so the victims become victimisers. It’s an old, old story, isn’t it? The purge of lustrace looks for all the world like the communist purges of the generations before.
And you can see how it happens. Those dissidents in places like Czechoslovakia kept the ideals of freedom alive despite every attempt of the communist machine to wipe them out. It meant that they were smart - they were better at the game than the communists themselves. Their radars were finely tuned to any sign of danger. They walked around suspicious of everybody and they themselves operated by absolute secrecy. You don’t survive as a dissident unless you develop a huge degree of paranoia. It’s hardly surprising that you might find it difficult to deal with a free press and free elections and competing ideologies all being allowed the same space in the public arena.
So there are two pictures of governments trying to turn their divided societies into peaceful ones. Let’s add a third, and then I’d like to get you involved in the conversation with your insights about these things.
The Truth & Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, 1996, is held up as a shining light in this business of peacemaking. There’s a model of addressing unresolved conflict in a society. It draws its inspiration from the Christian gospel, so it deserves to be held up alongside the other two for that reason alone as we ponder these things.
I hadn’t realised that there had been 19 similar experiments in other countries before the South African one - did you know that? The difference in South Africa was that the Commission was held publicly. You could attend and listen if you wanted to. The proceedings were broadcast live on television and then the highlights were repeated in digestible portions. It wasn’t about dealing with certain individuals behind closed doors. The other difference was the level of the ambition. It was an attempt at a huge national catharsis, to move everybody on to a new place.
They benefited from having experience in how not to do it. After the Boer War no effort was made at reconciliation, and the tensions between the British and the Afrikaners went on for decades. It was Desmond Tutu who observed that if the English and the Afrikaners had just sat down and told each other about their pain at the end of that war, South African history might have taken a different course. But nothing like that happened. He hoped that the new South Africa could do it better, so that the bitterness running through the length and breadth of that society would not undermine their efforts to establish a better day.
The idea behind the Truth and Reconciliation process was simple. You provide an arena in which the stories can be told. The victims will come out of their need to tell the world what they suffered. The perpetrators will also come because you’ve promised them amnesty in exchange for a full disclosure of the facts. It works for you because the reality is that you would never be able to prosecute those oppressors - the quality of evidence you would require for a responsible trial in a court of law simply could not be obtained. If you insist on any level of justice in your court proceedings, the reality is that most of them are going to walk free.
In the end, 21,000 victims testified, and 7,000 perpetrators. What I hadn’t realised was that hardly any of the perpetrators were given the full amnesty they’d come hoping for. The deal was that they had to demonstrate that they had acted under orders or through political conviction, and they had to tell the whole truth. After hearing their testimony, the feeling was that scarcely any of them had told anything beyond the bare minimum they’d reckoned they could get away with. There are many, many stories still untold.
Nevertheless, this is the example of something that worked as a new government attempted to heal the wounds of a broken society. I’m sure you’ve heard the stories too, of the tears and the forgiveness, victims embracing their torturers and families pardoning the soldiers and prison guards who killed their loved ones. It is moving beyond words. Families who said that with the new information they’d received, they could now go and recover the body of somebody who had disappeared, and that’s all they were asking, the chance to give their loved one a decent burial. It leaves you humble at the magnificence of the human spirit. And humbled too by what can happen when the gospel is given a chance to operate in a public sphere.
Critics abound, needless to say. There was a bad moment when the final report of the commission was ready for publication and the government blocked it. They were unhappy that human rights abuses that had been committed on their side were listed in the book alongside all the sins of apartheid. It was 1% against 99% and if they’d just kept quiet and let it go through, it would have gone unnoticed. As it was, the sins of the ANC became headline news all around the world for a while. Desmond Tutu saved the day on that one, insisting that the new South Africa couldn’t be in the business of substituting new censors for the old ones. They say that the credibility of the report had everything to do with the personal moral stature of Desmond Tutu, the chair of the commission, and his deputy chair Alex Boraine.
Critics say that the commission exacerbated some of the tensions instead of easing them. Many of the stories that came out were simply unknown to the vast majority of people, black as well as white, and the result was national trauma. It was worst for the white population who had believed the lies of the apartheid government and literally had no idea. Maybe you’d say that they needed to have their eyes opened, no matter how painful it was. There is also the accusation that the guilty have been allowed to walk free, to which supporters of the process reply that they will never be free - the stories of their misdeeds will follow them everywhere for the rest of their lives. It satisfies you if you’re a certain kind of person, but it sounds pretty thin if you’re not.
Asked whether reconciliation had been achieved, one person responded like this. “No, in the sense of replacing all the resentment and bitterness with forgiveness and love, obviously. But yes, in the sense that there were striking examples of perpetrators and victims reconciling and even embracing.” Which means that a lot of lives were transformed despite the scars they will always wear. And the new South Africa has managed to move ahead on its difficult journey to real inclusiveness and justice and regeneration.
Three stories. Algeria declaring that reconciliation has been established. Czechoslovakia attempting to purge communism from its system by naming and shaming everyone who had collaborated. And South Africa staging a huge national story-telling event in order to lance the boil of apartheid and enable healing to begin.
There are some common themes in the stories. One is the reality that some of the most brutal perpetrators from the previous time of conflict are allowed to walk free. Justice demands that they be held accountable, but it is all but impossible to do that. Do any of these other solutions ultimately work? And if not, are we doomed as a species to return to conflict again and again, because our need for justice simply cannot be met?
Alongside this are all the Christian questions. Reconciliation is one of our words. So is forgiveness. What does forgiveness look like on a national scale? Is it realistic? Or is forgiveness only ever possible one soul at a time? Algeria looks like a shortcut to me. I find myself doubting that it will work. But South Africa could give you hope. What have we learned?
Then there’s the opposite of forgiveness, which is resentment. It’s an interesting word - it means literally to keep on feeling something again and again. The pain hasn’t been healed and it isn’t going away, so you harbour this resentment against the one you believed has wronged you. What does the Christian gospel have to say to a society trapped in resentment?
And there are all the questions the Czech experience raises. Do the ends sometimes justify the means? Can you create freedom by permitting it to some people and denying it to others? How do you heal the wounds that don’t show, the cancer within?
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