the Colombian war. There seemed to be some urgency among family members of victims of kidnappings to tell their stories; they wanted to speak to anyone who would hear their tales. Patricia, a young mother of two teenage sons, was among them.
If the wounded can be healers who can bring peace in a land torn by violence, Patricia, whose husband was kidnapped by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, would be one. She was one of many voices calling for peace in Colombia: ‘I do not want these people who kidnapped my husband to go to jail,’ Patricia said through the simultaneous translation. ‘That will only lead to more violence; their children will revolt. All I want is for my husband to return to us, alive. If peace negotiations are not implemented, if this decades-old problem in Colombia is not resolved, I fear my children might become vengeful. I pray that this does not happen.’
Patricia had highlighted a well-known psychological consequence of trauma: how mutable the roles of victim and perpetrator are, and how easily cycles of violence are repeated and passed on intergenerationally, transforming victims into the embodiment of what they hate in the other.
At the end of a workshop I held at the conference on trauma and forgiveness, two women came up from behind and tapped me on my shoulder. One of the participants in the workshop immediately volunteered to act as translator between their Spanish and my English. The first woman wanted to talk about her husband who had been kidnapped three years previously. It was hard for her to mention his name; she hadn’t done so for a long time. The last time she had heard from her husband’s capturers was shortly after he was kidnapped. ‘Having your husband captured is the most unbearable thing that could happen to anyone. But there is nothing worse than not hearing from those who are keeping him captive,’ she said, her voice breaking.
The second woman’s two young sons had been kidnapped. She tried to describe how she had heard about the kidnapping of the younger, who was 10 at the time, but the more she tried, the harder it was for her to tell his story. She began to choke up, and as she tried to continue, she broke down in uncontrollable sobs.
Silence about one’s pain, I thought to myself, is a heavy burden that no one should carry. Earlier at the conference, Sexwale introduced Mpho Hani, who had been widowed when Chris Hani was assassinated by the white right-wingers Janusz Walus and Clive Derby-Lewis. (During his amnesty hearing at the TRC, Derby-Lewis said he couldn’t apologise for an ‘act of war’.) Mpho’s quiet tears as she was introduced were testimony to how silence freezes the pain of trauma and its associated emotions. However, she is also an example of the immeasurable capacity for human goodness even after so much trauma. Talking to her during a lunch break at the conference, I was struck by her commitment to the reconciliation agenda in South Africa.
At the centre of the strife in Colombia are various groups: left-wing organisations that were originally established as a liberation force against conservative rule in Colombia; the National Liberation Army, or ELN; the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; drug cartels; and paramilitary ‘self-defence’ units which were originally created to help the government fight left-wing organisations, but were subsequently outlawed.
On the last day of the conference, the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, appeared in a televised dialogue with Tutu, Maduna and Sexwale. Sexwale delivered a pointed message to the guerrilla groups. ‘Those of us who have fought for the freedom of our people,’ he said, ‘not once ever thought of kidnapping as a strategy for liberation. ... We compromise not because we fear war, but because we love peace more.’
The audience roared with applause, and rose to a lengthy ovation. ‘No fighter worth any respect as a fighter will kidnap other people,’ Sexwale declared. Addressing to Velez, he continued: ‘Mr President, it is time for courage… As a citizen of the world, I say, rise from being a president – presidents come and go – to being a statesman.’
Maduna spoke about how he had once been called a ‘cockroach’ by a prison warder when he was a liberation fighter. He asked Velez whether he had ever reflected on the real needs of those fighting the state, and how he was planning to include them in the political negotiations that were being discussed in Colombia. ‘Out there on the mountains are fellow human beings,’ Maduna said. ‘We must draw them out and bring them down into the valleys, if any process of negotiation is going to succeed.’
Colombia is one of the most troubled countries in the world. As always, those affected by the strife there are the most vulnerable members of society: woman, children, peasant farmers and ethnic minorities. The long and painful list of countries currently facing immeasurable strife and genocide shows that the world’s most vulnerable are displaced and voiceless. They are hungry for peace, and long for normalcy in their lives. Countries such as Colombia, and many others on our own continent, highlight what was the moral challenge of the past century, and will be the central moral challenge of this century: as member countries of the United Nations, what should our response be to the destruction of the voiceless?
Well, Tutu, Maduna and Sexwale showed in Colombia how ‘citizens of the world’ can become alternative voices to lead international responses to countries whose citizens are crying out for peace. In response to Velez’s not-so-overt plea for help from the South Africans, the South African threesome issued a joint statement, read by Tutu, making a commitment to approach President Thabo Mbeki in order to facilitate initial talks aimed at encouraging warring factions to join in dialogue with the Colombian government. ‘Come down from the mountain,’ Tutu called out to the fighters through the live TV broadcast; ‘come down to help rebuild your country, Colombia.’
It may be a small gesture from South Africans, but when the people of Colombia responded with a standing ovation, it was as if Tutu’s statement was enough to move mountains.
8. The language of forgiveness
Sunday Times, 17 July 2005
In June 2005, I had the honour of delivering a speech alongside a child survivor of the Holocaust at an event entitled ‘60 Years Later – Children of War Remember’, hosted by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Germany. It brought together both victims of the Holocaust and family members of Nazi perpetrators. The depth and openness of mutual engagement illuminated for me the path that South Africa as a nation has yet to walk.
LAST MONTH I was invited to deliver a speech entitled ‘Forgiveness as an issue of collective memory’ at a public event organised by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany. The second lecture was entitled ‘Auschwitz, Mengele, me and forgiveness’, and its author, Eva Mozes Kor, was a child survivor of Dr Josef Mengele’s so-called ‘twin experiments’ in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
Some may wonder if the language of forgiveness is appropriate in discussions of historical memory in Germany, perhaps because of the word’s erroneous association with forgetting. Far from being driven by a desire to forget, the men and women I met during my recent trip to Germany were fully confronting the past. They are the generation whose parents and relatives were the ‘willing executioners’ – as Daniel Goldhagen refers to Nazi-era German society – in Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.
At the end of the war, the war generation was in denial, and wanted to forget the past and their role therein. When the post-war generation came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, however, they rebelled against their parents’ denial of responsibility for the Holocaust. They self-righteously attacked their parents’ generation for bringing Hitler to power. At the same time, they continued to enjoy the many privileges of an economically prosperous Germany.
Now in their mature years, having raised their own children, with most of the war generation beyond the grave, many Germans over the age of 50 are beginning to confront memories that they have shared only privately. The post-war generation in Germany is faced with the problem of guilt by association, and wants
