peace

Where there has been conflict, faith communities have the opportunity to play a healing role.

The most striking recent example is South Africa. Desmond Tutu, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has said, ‘We here in South Africa are a living example of how forgiveness may unite people’.

The example was set by Nelson Mandela. When he was released after twenty-seven years in jail, he declared that his mission was to the victim and the victimiser. ‘Our miracle’ Tutu continues, ‘almost certainly would not have happened without the willingness of people to forgive, exemplified spectacularly in the magnanimity of Nelson Mandela.’ It was recognised that the evils of the apartheid era had to be faced.

A general amnesty, which would have amounted to amnesia was rejected, but also the Nuremberg option of the victors putting the vanquished on trial. The participation of white South Africans in the new nation was essential to its economic development.

A third option - a Truth and Reconciliation Commission - was agreed. This was not like the one in Chile which was behind closed doors and on condition that General Pinochet and other members of the military junta were given amnesty. South Africa’s third way was ‘the granting of amnesty to individuals in exchange for a full disclosure relating to the crime for which amnesty was being sought.’

There are many dimensions to forgiveness and these are increasingly being studied. Forgiveness is essentially a religious concept, although there are important differences of emphasis between religions. Forgiveness may have been possible in part in South Africa because of the strength of the Christian church in that country. When Marcus Braybrooke was in South Africa in 1999, he met with some people who had been dispossessed when District Six, a vibrant multi-racial community in the heart of Cape Town, was bulldozed under the apartheid regime. He asked two of the coloured women what they felt about their oppressors. ‘We must forgive them’ they said, ‘because Jesus forgives’.

Religious teaching and especially the power of forgiveness may be the only way to help people break free. Desmond Tutu said that ‘Without Forgiveness there really is no future'. In his book of the same name he describes a visit to Rwanda a year after the massacre of at least half a million people. He argued that revenge only sowed the seeds of reciprocal revenge in the future. The President of Rwanda said the people were willing to forgive, but even Jesus had declared that the devil could not be forgiven. Tutu, however, held that no atrocity was beyond the possibility of God’s pardon.

Many Jews, with the memory of the Holocaust, and some Christians would not agree with Tutu. He recognises that a papering over the cracks is a cheap peace that is no peace.

True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the pain, the degradation, the truth... People are not being asked to forget... Forgiveness means abandoning your right to pay back the perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss which liberates the victim.

He ends the book by saying, ‘God wants to show that there is life after conflict and repression - that because of forgiveness, there is a future.