Forgiveness, Not Revenge

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

“When you're dealing with the subtleties and complexities of human relationships, law is an extremely blunt instrument,” she explains. “Law can tell people to stop doing something. It can't make people love each other; it can't make people behave differently in a day-to-day way.” While she is aware that a basic respect for law may be one of the few things that people in a multicultural society—let alone the world—have in common, she's not sure that will suffice: “I worry that there's a false hope that law can solve the problem, when, at best, in many circumstances law can create a clearing, a space, where other kinds of difficult work at building human relationships can go forward.”

In Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Minow examines how those relationships can be mended in war-ravaged societies. As she covers the history of war crimes and their aftermath, Minow pays special attention to the ongoing drama in South Africa, where Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others oversaw the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) until the release of its final report last fall.

As a response to a mass violation of human rights, the TRC is a landmark alternative to criminal prosecution, Minow says. The key to the commission's success was a decision to grant amnesty to many perpetrators in return for truthful testimony about what really happened in the past. For the first time ever, a society had looked beyond the narrow satisfaction of punishing individuals to achieve a more critical goal. The hope is that by recovering its repressed history, the country can now move on, toward a democratic future.

“The healing process is incomplete, and certainly there's lots of struggle and unhappiness in South Africa,” Minow says. “But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stands as a remarkable milestone in the creation of an alternative concept of human rights—one that is inclusive, one that's not creating a new cycle of revenge.”

In Minow's view, truth commissions are not better than war-crimes tribunals—a model of prosecuting war criminals that goes back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following World War II. Rather, truth commissions are an alternative that in certain cases can be more suited to the situation. “That's kind of an unusual position to take,” she says, “because generally people hold our war-crimes tribunals or criminal prosecutions as the gold standard, as the measure against which all other efforts to enforce human rights are to be evaluated. I'd argue that it really depends on your goals, and that the vision of human rights could be achieved in an alternative way.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print