Forgiveness in Politics as a Road to Peace
Very often, when you give a
talk about a book you've worked on, you have to take a few
steps back and sort of rewind your mind. It's been three
years since we let go of the manuscript of this book (Forgiveness
in International Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace)
-- Bob Hennemeyer, Drew Christiansen, and I. And since
then, I've wandered into other topics, like Catholic
social teaching and the environment. But in a sense, I
haven't wandered very far. I have found that forgiveness
and peacemaking lurk behind many questions today -- like
the environment. For one thing, we hear that future wars
are more likely to be about water than about oil. If
that's true, then co-existence with other humans has quite
a lot to do with our co-existence with the natural world.
It's about healing our relationships with all of God's
Creation. George Bernard Shaw said, "The secret of forgiving
everything is to understand nothing." At Woodstock, we
took a different tack. We tried to understand a few things
about the inter-group conflicts of today. More to the
point, we brought together diplomats, experts in conflict
resolution, and others, and we invited them to reflect on
their experiences in the trenches. That was before I
entered the picture; that was the work of former Woodstock
director Jim Connor and others. And that's part and parcel
of the whole methodology that continues to drive
Woodstock's reflections on other concerns, such as
economic globalization. We reached a rough consensus -- that there is a
politics of forgiveness. There's a politics of forgiveness
that can contribute to social healing and international
conflict resolution. But I don't think anyone ever lost
sight of the politics in all this. And I heard
faint echoes of John F. Kennedy telling his staff:
"Forgive your enemies, but don't forget their names." I'd like to make a few basic points in these remarks
here. The first is that, admittedly, the whole notion of
forgiveness can seem counter-intuitive in the age of
global terrorism and extreme ethnic conflict. It's an
unlikely topic, but it's real - and that's the second
point. Forgiveness has shown itself to be a political
reality, and we think a strategically useful concept --
useful in helping to repair relationships that have been
long sundered in a number of fractious societies. And, my
third point is that forgiveness in politics is in
politics, which means that it's subject to the
limitations and liabilities of any political project. And
I'll close with some fleeting remarks about why
forgiveness is a fitting framework for dealing with some
of today's most intractable conflicts, entangled as they
are in the intangibles of group identity. My first point: As a theme of international politics,
forgiveness is unlikely, untimely (in some ways), and
usually unheralded when it happens. That much, you don't
need a think tank project to figure out. I was sitting at my computer and working on the
manuscript of this book when I heard something about a
plane crashing at the World Trade Center. At another point
in the drafting, I spoke to our family physician, an
illustrious local doctor named Susan Black, who had just
gotten back from Kosovo, where she spent three months as a
volunteer, helping to set up medical clinics. On one of
the last of those rounds, her translator, whose name was
Faza, and with whom she had been traveling all that time,
pulled out a gun and shot the surgeon, dead. As it turns
out, they had been next-door neighbors. The surgeon, who
was a Serb, had turned in the translator and his family,
who were ethnic Albanians, and probably political
activists. Faza's family went into hiding, and the surgeon
looted their house. That day in the clinic, the surgeon
was wearing one of Faza's shirts. Dr. Black, who has since
retired, told me (referring to the conflicting ethnic
groups), "They will never live together." We used her
account in the book because it so starkly illustrates the
cycles of revenge, the forces of un-forgiveness. Maybe it's all about the "hothead factor." And here I'm
referring to a term used by the clinical psychologist
Everett L. Worthington. In short, the hotheads are the
ones who try to keep people apart by committing violent
and hateful acts. The hotheads shall always be with you,
but so shall the cool heads and the passionate promoters
of peace. The question is: Who prevails -- the hotheads or the
cool heads? And, to give a sense of the obstacles here,
Worthington borrows a page from family psychology and in
particular marital research. Those studies have found that
it takes, on average, five or six "positive events" to
make up for a single negative event in a marriage. I think
we all know what those are. And that's in a normally
healthy marriage. In a troubled marriage, the ratio is
more like 10 to one or even higher. That's the number of
positive events it takes to reverse the tide of the
negative. That throws a little sober light on what it takes to
overcome these forces of unforgiveness, the
memories of offense, the sense of victimization, which
become ideologies and mythologies that propel the cycle of
revenge. The good news is that it happens - forgiveness happens
in the wide, wide world. And that's my second point. The most celebrated example is South Africa. A brutal,
white minority regime fell, and black South Africans rose
to power. Practically everyone assumed that blacks would
do unto whites as whites had done unto them. They didn't,
as a group. Nelson Mandela, the prisoner-turned-president,
appointed a truth commission, instead. And through that
commission, South Africa formally abstained from revenge.
Mandela had also made his white jailer - the guy who kept
the keys during many of his 27 years as a political
prisoner - he made that guy an honored guest at his
presidential inauguration in 1994. In South Korea, at his own president inauguration, Kim
Dae Jung stood beside several ex-autocrats who had once
been more than happy to provide him with free lodging on
death row. Kim is a Catholic who has spoken movingly of
how he experienced Christ's love and forgiveness while
awaiting execution for his human-rights activism. On that
day of triumph in 1988, Kim proclaimed that the "politics
of retaliation" is over. And it was. In Cambodia, Buddhist primate Moha Ghosananda has
struggled to release people from a paralyzing past by
envisioning a future of forgiveness. He calls for
selectively forgiving Khmer Rouge leaders who have
repented and renounced violence after perpetrating that
nation's unspeakable genocide. But Cambodians need more
time. Recently we've seen the politics of forgiveness at work
in East Timor, the most densely Catholic country in Asia,
which is seeking a process of reconciliation with
Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim country. We've seen
the politics of forgiveness at work dramatically in
Northern Ireland, where even the IRA has formally
apologized for some of its past misdeeds, and in the
Balkans, and other places. What you'll often find in these and other examples is a
search for truth, and a desire for public acknowledgment
of wrongdoing. Sometimes all you'll find is a decision to
not to seek retribution, to not settle the
score. That counts. That's all part of the politics of
forgiveness, according to the approach that we took, based
on the seminal work of our friend, the Christian ethicist
Donald W. Shriver, Jr., author of An Ethic for Enemies:
Forgiveness in Politics. Signs and gestures of empathy
- an expression of the commitment to eventually reconcile
- those are also part of forgiveness in politics. Moral
truth, forbearance, empathy, and the will to reconcile --
ultimately, these four elements of forgiveness are all
about self-transcendence, communal self-transcendence,
about transcending group bias, going beyond our
mythological histories and twisted perceptions of reality. Forgiveness is real, and the theme has been working its
way into practical programs of international conflict
resolution. Truth and reconciliation commissions, which
are usually quasi-official entities, are one initiative of
political forgiveness. They represent the idea that
forgiveness, contrary to popular wisdom, is not about
forgetting; it's about remembering in a certain way, as
the South Africans chose to do in setting up their
commission. At one time, people who work in conflict
resolution argued that you shouldn't go there. You
shouldn't bring attention to past atrocities. It'll just
worsen the wounds; you should leave all that in the past.
But at that time, they were not half as wise as William
Faulkner, who once wrote, "The past isn't dead and gone;
it isn't even past." Small-group reconciliation - that's another kind of
initiative. We have case studies from the former
Yugoslavia, where third-party intermediaries have held
ongoing workshops bringing together members of opposing
groups - for example, Serbs and Croats, or Serbs and
ethnic Albanians. These dialogues have usually been
conducted with the help of local religious groups and
interfaith associations. And facilitators have found that
the hardest step is actually not forgiveness per se,
which comes at the end of the dialogue process, and is
often anticlimactic. It's acknowledgment - acknowledging
an atrocity committed by your group against the other. I think one benefit of the Shriver/Woodstock approach
is that it helps you see forgiveness as a process, a
social process, not as an isolated act between two
consenting individuals. And it also helps you see how the
process can break down or stall at the starting gate. In
El Salvador, the Jesuit community called for a process of
forgiving those responsible for assassinating the six
Jesuits, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, at
the University of Central America. But there were
conditions: the perpetrators had to acknowledge their
crimes and repent in some way. That's the element of moral
truth. It didn't happen. The official reconciliation
process there wasn't structured in a way to make it
happen. There are lessons, and we have these lessons because
forgiveness now has a track record in international
politics. Here are a few that we culled from the
experiences of those who have tried to make it work. Another lesson has to do with my third point about
remembering the limits of forgiveness in politics. Not every act of forgiveness will be efficacious. There
will ambiguities, miscalculations, unintended
consequences, as John Langan, S.J., emphasized during our
conversations. For example, you could be so bent on
forgiving that you forget about justice. Some people say
that's what happened in South Africa, which granted
amnesty in exchange for truth. I don't agree. Some people
say that's what's happening now in East Timor, which has
barely begun the prosecutions for human-right atrocities.
And there may be some truth to that. So forgiveness in politics is, as I said earlier, in
politics. I'd say, in but not of
politics. And that's an asset, because politics as usual,
conventional statecraft, realpolitik, whatever you
want to call it - the so-called "realists" have been
swinging and missing quite a lot over the past decade or
so. In a sense, they've been fighting the last diplomatic
war - the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, which was often driven by
material interests, such as power and resources, which
diplomats know well. In the post-Cold War era, what we've
found is that the most intractable conflicts are rooted
not in political ideologies and palpable interests, but in
ethnicity, religion, and other intangibles of communal
identity. We've learned much about this from Douglas
Johnston, who, at 27 years old, was the youngest-ever
commander of a nuclear submarine, and is now a
practitioner of conflict resolution who played an
important part in our investigations. He says these
sources of conflicts, the identity-based conflicts, are
the ones that conventional diplomacy is least suited to
deal with. In other words, something more is needed. Johnston said
during one of the Woodstock dialogues, "Certainly no
diplomatic or military solution will ever break the cycle
of revenge. Unless one can introduce a spiritual component
that gets to the business of forgiveness and
reconciliation, the same drumbeat is likely to repeat
itself for the next few centuries." And so, what we've learned most of all is that in many
places, a durable peace requires more than political
accords and ceasefires. It requires social healing, which
may come only through the introduction of a radical new
factor, such as forgiveness. I think more than any leader, Pope John Paul II
understood the forgiveness factor in the world today. He
dedicated his 2002 World Day of Peace message to the
forgiveness theme, and he wrote, "The pillars of true
peace are justice and that form of love which is
forgiveness." I think the title of that message could
serve as a distinct rallying cry for us today -- "No Peace
without Justice, No Justice without Forgiveness."
On January 9, 2006, Woodstock fellow William Bole gave a talk
titled "Blessed are the Peacemakers: Forgiveness in
Politics as a Road to Peace," as part of the
Year of Prayer lecture
series sponsored by the Maryland Province of the Society
of Jesus and held at St. Ignatius Church in Baltimore.
Bole drew from Woodstock's 2004 book,
Forgiveness in International
Politics: An Alternative Road to Peace (U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops), which he co-authored with
Robert Hennemeyer and Drew Christiansen, S.J. Here is a
text of his remarks.