Who Can Forgive?

Abstract

The practice of truth and reconciliation promised to throw a bridge between the état de droit and its rule of law, and a socio-political solution for dealing with crimes against humanity but it had a number of problems. The intermediate stage between truth and reconciliation had been identified as forgiveness. Reconciliation is the result of forgiveness. But the nature of forgiveness, what exactly it involves, whether there are different sorts of forgiveness depending on the offence, had not been thought through by the protagonists of the new policy. Nor had its relationship with justice been considered sufficiently. The three examples discussed in the preceding chapter suggest that for victims, forgiveness comes only after justice has been done. The intellectual slide made by the proponents of truth and reconciliation, from the notion that telling the truth automatically produces catharsis to an almost ipso facto forgiveness, neither was nor is borne out in fact. As a result of their failure to consider carefully what forgiveness is, they had also made the fundamental mistake of thinking that forgiveness could be decreed from on high, either as the highest virtue or as necessary if societies in transition are to have a harmonious future. But the myriad victims of crimes against humanity need more than a cultural hegemonic programme with forgiveness as its key, to placate them.