Dilemmas of Reconciliation
196 pages
English

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196 pages
English

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Description

How can bitter enemies who have inflicted unspeakable acts of cruelty on each other live together in peace?

At a time in history when most organized violence consists of civil wars and when nations resort to genocidal policies, when horrendous numbers of civilians have been murdered, raped, or expelled from their homes, this book explores the possibility of forgiveness.

The contributors to this book draw upon the insights of history, political science, philosophy, and psychology to examine the trauma left in the wake of such actions, using, as examples, numerous case studies from the Holocaust, Russia, Cambodia, Guatemala, South Africa, and even Canada. They consider the fundamental psychological and philosophical issues that have to be confronted, offer insights about measures that can be taken to facilitate healing, and summarize what has been learned from previous struggles.

Dilemmas of Reconciliation is a pioneering effort that explores the extraordinary challenges that must be faced in the aftermath of genocide or barbarous civil wars. How these challenges of reconciliation are faced and resolved will affect not only the victims’ ability to go on with their lives but will impact regional stability and, ultimately, world peace.


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Publié par
Date de parution 30 octobre 2010
Nombre de lectures 1
EAN13 9781554587667
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0092€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Dilemmas of Reconciliation
Cases and Concepts
Dilemmas of Reconciliation
Cases and Concepts

edited by Carol A.L. Prager and Trudy Govier
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Dilemmas of reconciliation : cases and concepts / Carol A.L. Prager, Trudy Govier, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-415-2
1. Reconciliation. 2. International relations-Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Political ethics. I. Prager, Carol A.L. (Anne Leuchs), 1939- II. Govier, Trudy, 1944-
JA79.D44 2003 172 .4 C2003-901846-6
2003 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover design by Leslie Macredie; text design by C. Bonas-Taylor. Cover etching What Is This Hubbub? (c.1810-1813) by Francisco Goya y Lucientes. Photograph: National Gallery of Canada. Permission courtesy of National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1933.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Introduction Carol A.L. Prager
Overview Michael R. Marrus
Perspectives and Approaches
1. Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework David A. Crocker
2. What Is Acknowledgement and Why Is It Important? Trudy Govier
3. Reconciliation for Realists Susan Dwyer
4. Crime as Interpersonal Conflict: Reconciliation between Victim and Offender Marc Forget
5. Mass Rape and the Concept of International Crime Larry May
6. What Can Others Do? Foreign Governments and the Politics of Peacebuilding Tom Keating
7. Aspects of Understanding and Judging Mass Human Rights Abuses Carol A.L. Prager
Case Studies
8. We Are All Treaty People: History, Reconciliation, and the Settler Problem Roger Epp
9. Toward a Response to Criticisms of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Wilhelm Verwoerd
10. Reimagining Guatemala: Reconciliation and the Indigenous Accords Jim Handy
11. Coming to Terms with the Terror and History of Pol Pot s Cambodia (1975-79) David Chandler
12. National Reconciliation in Russia? Janet Keeping
Conclusion
13. What We Have Learned Justice Richard J. Goldstone
Index
Introduction 1 Carol A.L. Prager
The twentieth century s tens of millions of mass human rights abuses (increasingly associated at century s end with international interventions to stop them and to rebuild political communities afterward) have led to an intense focus on reconciliation. (The horrifying civilian toll resulting from the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, although not comparable in all respects to the issues under consideration here, reminds us that in the twenty-first century the more things change, the more they remain the same.) Practical politics and life underscore the necessity to move on, but how is this possible, or even conceivable, when unspeakable cruelty has been inflicted by hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings on millions of others, sometimes, as in ethnic cleansing, with the explicit intent to make future reconciliation impossible? This is a central question that contributors to this volume address.
The study of reconciliation per se is quite recent. 2 The voluminous Holocaust literature 3 has been more concerned with how a horror of such evil and magnitude could have occurred in our time than with how reconciliation could be achieved, although the most thoroughgoing reconciliation measures have been taken by the German government, as the eminent Holocaust historian Michael R. Marrus documents in this volume. Following upon the Second World War s Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, contributor Justice Richard J. Goldstone played a key role in establishing the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where he served as chief prosecutor, and, subsequently the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Rwanda. Meanwhile it became clear that war crime trials, critically important as they were, could complicate reconciliation and were unable to address the societal cleavages left in the wake of massive human rights abuses. It became obvious, moreover, that war crime trials could not (and, perhaps, should not) try all war crimes. Again, Richard Goldstone, through the Goldstone Commission, played a large part in establishing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Other reconciliation commissions and tribunals (such as the Guatemalan and Cambodian ones Jim Handy and David Chandler refer to) appeared or were planned. As the perplexities involved in achieving reconciliation became apparent, scholars increasingly turned their attention to themes of restorative justice, acknowledgement, forgiveness, restitution, and reparations. 4 Most recently, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance raised the issue of reparations for the slavery practised by European powers during the seventeenth century, a practice declared by the conference to be a crime against humanity.
This collection begins with an overview by Michael R. Marrus. He asks whether and in what sense people might be capable of forgiving the past. Marrus describes efforts to deal with the Holocaust under four headings: political, legal, material, and cultural. Politically, there has been explicit acknowledgement by the German state of its collective responsibility for gross wrongdoing. That acknowledgement, Marrus says, is essential for any reconciliation among Germans, Jews, and the other Holocaust victims. There have been trials of prominent perpetrators in one international tribunal and in four different national ones, and they have been significant, although it would be a mistake, argues Marrus, to regard any such trials as lessons in history. No legal proceeding is designed to offer a full and accurate history of events; rather its purpose is to determine the guilt or innocence of particular individuals, under specific procedural rules. As of June 1999, Germany had paid the equivalent of some 60 billion in reparations. Since then the German government has addressed the issue of slave labour, but that of confiscated works of art has yet to be dealt with. Within Jewish communities, efforts to pursue material compensation are controversial, with some individuals claiming that it risks trivializing Holocaust wrongs. Culturally, Marrus notes the body of literature, drama, and scholarship about Holocaust wrongs, and the monuments, that have been established to acknowledge them. Issues arise here too: there is, for example, the danger of a kind of Victim Olympics.
Perspectives and Approaches
Philosopher and policy analyst David Crocker contributes to an understanding of what reconciliation can mean by describing eight goals of a normative framework for reckoning with past wrongs. Crocker argues that for societies seeking something like reconciliation in the wake of serious wrongdoing, the most significant goals are (1) investigating the truth about the relevant past events; (2) providing a public platform for victims to tell their stories about what happened to them; (3) establishing some measure of accountability and appropriate sanctions for the most significant perpetrators of wrongdoing; (4) complying, and showing compliance with, the rule of law; (5) appropriately compensating the victims of wrongdoing; (6) contributing to institutional reform and long-term development; (7) reconciliation of previously opposed groups and individuals; and (8) deepening and strengthening the quality of public deliberation.
Philosopher Trudy Govier, focusing on a crucially important element of reconciliation, notes numerous references to acknowledgement in recent discussions of reconciliation and transitional justice. She cites the Final Report of South Africa s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 1996 Canadian government report on Aboriginal Peoples. These and other sources claim that acknowledgement of past wrongs is fundamentally important for reconciliation, but they do not explain what acknowledgement is or why it might play a central role. Govier s essay begins to answer these questions. First, she explores acknowledgement by contrasting it with various forms of denial, self-deception, and ignoring. She discusses both individual and collective cases, concentrating particularly on the 1996 Canadian report on Aboriginal Peoples. Then she addresses the importance of acknowledgement from the point of view of victims. Using the idea that identities are significantly social, Govier proposes a theory as to why acknowledgement is so fundamentally important to victims.
Philosopher Susan Dwyer focuses on how reconciliation should be understood in political contexts. Some commentators have expressed considerable skepticism about reconciliation as a political goal, fearing that talk about the need for reconciliation implies a condoning of serious injustice. Dwyer comments on the quest for national reconciliation in South Africa, where there has been a tendency to think of reconciliation in terms of Christi

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