Perspective

Reconciliation--Beyond the Power Paradigm

By Mary Bigley

There are many places in the world engaged in the painful reconstruction and reconciliation of their societies following violent and harrowing experiences of conflict. There are many others who will join them in the coming years, once the cease-fires have been successfully brokered and the peace agreements signed. Reconciliation processes are not a luxury; they are indeed crucial to a sustainable, creative and dynamic peace--that state which seems to elude many troubled places in our world.

In this century, we have witnessed more than one hastily assembled peace agreement and resolution process unravel just as hastily--with devastating costs. In an effort to silence the guns and put an end to the horror of war and repression, we have dashed impatiently to the "solution" while not truly understanding the nature of the problem. Efforts to "fix things" have all too often aggravated conflict situations. This may be partly explained by an unwillingness to engage in a rigorous interrogation of fundamental beliefs about the very nature and place of reconciliation within an overall peace process.

A practitioner who continues to conduct just such an exploration is Jean Paul Lederach, director of the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia. Two decades of experience in international conciliation has led Professor Lederach to undergird his ideas about reconciliation with some important assumptions. Firstly he stresses that the basis of every conflict is a relationship--and that same relationship is the basis of a resolution to the conflict. In other words, it is in creating ways to bring the conflicting parties together and not in keeping them apart that a resolution to the conflict can be pursued. His second working assumption is that conflicts may only be resolved by means of encounter, supported by an environment which facilitates both testimony and acknowledgment between those in conflict.

This may seem obvious, but it is clear that the quest for "peace" in a number of places has been built on foundations which strive to keep the parties in conflict apart, to effectively "freeze" the conflict at a point in time--to disengage the warring parties and minimize contact between them. While this may bring about a cessation or a calming of armed conflict--at least for a period of time--it does absolutely nothing in the medium or long term to address or resolve the conflict. United Nations peacekeeping efforts in both Cyprus and Lebanon are shrines to such a way of thinking. Seeking solutions based on separation of human communities is an extraordinary road to follow throughout the same decade which witnessed the dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Yet we have seen just such an approach adopted in Kosovo and Bosnia.

 

Secret Talks

The most recent peace-building efforts in Northern Ireland really began the moment that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) John Hume, and Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams began meeting in secret to talk. The same small beginnings in the secret talks between Israeli and Palestinian representatives led eventually to the Oslo Accords. There can be no peace without dialogue and there can be no dialogue without contact.

There is a world of a difference between this "freezing" or "holding" of positions in situations of conflict and thoroughgoing reconciliation efforts. I would venture a comparison between some conflicts mentioned above and long-standing family feuds. The actual reasons for the original conflict must be continually retrieved and refreshed in the minds of the subsequent generations, and this process of passing on the grievances of one generation to the next frequently masquerades as "history." One condition essential to the maintenance of a conflict over any long period of time is that there be little or no contact between the conflicting parties. Years of segregated education in Northern Ireland ensured that young Catholics and Protestants could not form their own body of direct experience to combat the perceptions of the "other" which prevailed within their own community.

Ongoing conflicts continue to devastate the lives of refugees around the world.

Professor Lederach has also insisted that in order to exercise creativity and build a foundation on which sustainable reconciliation might be built, we must look outside the traditions, paradigms, modalities and discourse of international politics. Governments have always behaved as though the only relevant actors in a peace-building process are political ones. However, the real work of reconciliation begins once the arms have been silenced and the weapons laid down in the aftermath of an armed conflict or genocide, once the repressive regime has been overthrown and replaced by democratic governance, tentatively making its way through a transitional period.


The Enemy Next Door

The contemporary settings where such dramas play themselves out today--Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa--all have one thing in common: the former enemy lives next door. How one feels about, perceives, reacts to and behaves with that former enemy now becomes the core factor in determining whether the conflict will erupt again in violence. The very intensity of hatred, desire for revenge, prejudice, racism and deep animosity that have fueled the conflict require that its transformation be rooted in those dimensions--social, psychological, spiritual and emotional--normally ignored in favor of "high politics" by those brokering a peace deal.

Professor Lederach also points to a number of paradoxes by which any reconciliation process might be characterized. The first of these is a recognition of the need for the wronged to have their story acknowledged by the wrongdoers while both parties must work on finding a way to live together again. The second is that the truth of the past must be revealed in all its ugliness and then must be let go if there is to be a future. This notion of remembering in order to be able to forget characterizes many therapeutic approaches to healing and was very evident in the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

The third relates to the requirement to address both justice and peace while still holding together the possibility of a common and interdependent future. To ensure that none of these paradoxes creates a permanent impasse requires special skill and creativity. Even in its short life, the peace process in Northern Ireland has locked into impasse on more than one occasion. In fact, many believed the issue of decommissioning weapons would completely topple the whole process. But it must be remembered that the political peace process in which the political representatives in Northern Ireland are engaged is not being accompanied by a conscious reconciliation process.

The process of reconciliation is not for the fainthearted. To revisit indescribable pain, to listen to the stories of those who have suffered relentless losses, to face the shame and guilt of one's own complicity, to publicly admit to responsibility, to see the face and hear the voice of those who tortured, murdered, degraded your loved ones, to try to forgive, to see those who benefited from the pillage of your land and still refuse to take responsibility--those who take on such a process need all the encouragement they can get. Making a genuine effort to grapple with what such a process actually is--what it might cost and what it might entail--is the first step.

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