Unchopping a Tree

Front matter

ERNESTO VERDEJA i i] |

LI :

Unchoppinga Tree

Conclusion

Notes References

Index vii

Acknowledgments his is a work about political reconciliation, about the need and challenges of reconciling after severe political violence. I became interested in this subject while living in South America as a child and seeing firsthand the difficulties of engaging with a fraught past. Many years of thinking about these issues led me to graduate school, culminating in a doctoral dissertation on which this book is loosely based. I would like to thank Nancy Fraser and Courtney Jung, who provided valuable suggestions and direction on the dissertation, and Richard A. Wilson and Andrew Arato, who reminded me of the importance of retaining the connection between normative theory and practical politics in my work. Matthew Goldfeder read the text with care and pressed me on a number of points, making the argument more coherent than it otherwise would have been. His patience with my questions was matched only by the wit and clarity of his suggestions. While at Wesleyan, J. Donald Moon and Nancy Schwartz kindly read the entire manuscript and gave detailed and important feedback on the fundamental arguments. Their intellectual support and friendship helped me enormously in this project. At the University of Notre Dame, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Center for the Study of Social Movements and Social Change provided financial support and a wonderful environment in which to write.

viii = Acknowledgments

I would especially like to thank Daniel Myers for securing this support and making Notre Dame such a welcoming place. A number of persons in Chile and Bosnia and Herzegovina kindly shared their experiences with me, and I am enormously grateful to them. Many thanks also go to Temple University Press and Micah Kleit for taking on this project.

I dedicate this book to my parents, Martha and Ernesto, who have always encouraged me in everything I have done and showed me the beauty of learning, and to my Bettina, whose love and warmth made this long journey possible and worthwhile. Without her support, this would have been a difficult, lonely road.

Unchopping a Tree he past one hundred years witnessed the highest number of po-

litical deaths of any century (Rummel 1997). Two major wars,

numerous civil conflicts and wars of independence, and systematic state-sponsored atrocities have left behind a battered political landscape. The genocide of Jews, Roma, Armenians, Ibos, Tutsi, Hutu in Burundi, Bengalis, Khmer, the Aché (Paraguay), Guatemalans, Timorese, Bosnian Muslims, southern Sudanese, and Herero and repression, mass terror, and murder in places as disparate as Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Romania, Uganda, China, and Iran illustrate the heterogeneous nature of political violence of the past century but do not by any means exhaust its range and depth. Certainly, a century characterized by massacre and torture is not unique in human history, and there is little reason to believe that the twenty-first will be much different. Although the instruments of violence today may be more sophisticated and the ideologies behind them different from before (and even this is not always the case), horrific violence has long been with us (Kiernan 2007). Nevertheless, what is remarkable are the numerous recent efforts at publicly engaging past atrocities, often through new legal mechanisms but also through a multiplicity of other political and social strategies, with the aim of reconciling former enemies while simultaneously addressing accountability, truth telling, and the concerns of victims. As Martha Minow has eloquently written, these legal and quasi-legal attempts to identify perpetrators and catalogue crimes have “illuminated the hopes and commitments of individuals and societies seeking, above all, some rejoinder to the unspeakable destruction and degradation of human beings” (1998, 1).

Political violence does not end with the last death, however. A common feature of mass murder has been the attempt at destroying any memory of victims, with the aim of eliminating them from history. In the Holocaust, the Aghed (genocide of the Armenians), the Cambodian genocide, the Rape of Nanking, the Rwandan genocide, the Gulag and the Laogai, the tortures and murders of leftists in the Southern Cone, and the rule of apartheid, among many others, perpetrators sought not only to eliminate violently a perceived threat but also to eradicate any possibility of alternate, competing social and national histories.

Surprisingly, in some countries complex and difficult engagements with the past have resulted in remarkable transformations of society. South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and a united Germany are all significantly more democratic and open than before. In other places, such as Cambodia and Rwanda, peace and stability are the most that can be hoped for, at least in the near term. However, all of these societies have had to confront a complicated tangle of questions: How should perpetrators, victims, and bystanders be faced? What is the proper balance between punishment and forgiveness? How much memory is too much, and when is it too little? What does it mean to be reconciled with the past and with each other, and how should this be achieved? What, in other words, are the stakes in reconciling? These and similar concerns occupy a central place in societies emerging from massive violence. This book seeks to contribute to these debates by sketching a normative theory of reconciliation that differs from prevailing approaches.

The difficulty in articulating such a theory finds an echo in Max Weber's essay “Politics as a Vocation” (1958). There, Weber distinguished between two different ethical systems in the political world: the ethic of ultimate ends, which is committed to the attainment of certain ideals regardless of consequences, and the ethic of responsibility, which recognizes that one’s conduct must be guided by what is possible in the real world, with all of the limitations that this entails. In the end, Weber was distraught about these alternatives, concluding that the former ran the risk of degenerating into the belief that the ends justify the means—giving us Auschwitz and revolutionary firing squads—and the latter could always be tempted into one more compromise, ultimately condemning action to a series of half steps evacuated of any meaningful content. Something similar haunts any attempt at formulating a model of reconciliation. On one hand, one risks promoting a pure ideal that is unattainable without significantly more violence being done in its wake; take, for example, calls for swift and severe retribution for all human rights violators and their accomplices. Though accountability is desirable as a moral goal—there is, after all, great satisfaction in seeing perpetrators held responsible for gross violations—seeking absolute justice can quickly turn into its own terror. And yet a model that too easily seeks compromise in politically delicate situations can serve as a mere apology for perpetrators, in the process forfeiting any meaningful claim it may make to promoting reconciliation.

This book seeks to navigate this Scylla and Charybdis by recognizing that reconciliation is a complex, multileveled process that is best understood as disjunctured and uneven, with multiple moral claims often in competition with one another. Rather than posit a model, on one hand, equating reconciliation with social harmony between former enemies or, on the other, as a condition of minimal peace with no exploration of past injustices, I outline a conception that emphasizes the importance of shared notions of moral respect and tolerance among erstwhile adversaries as a realistic and morally defensible idea of what we should expect in transitional societies. Reconciliation, I argue, refers to a condition of mutual respect among former enemies, which requires the reciprocal recognition of the moral worth and dignity of others. It is achieved when previous, conflict-era identities no longer operate as the primary cleavages in politics, and thus citizens acquire new identities that cut across those earlier fault lines. This model is normative—it stipulates certain moral criteria that are necessary for a society to be reconciled while also recognizing that the dynamics of reconciliation are manifested in different ways depending on what dimension of society one analyzes. That is to say, the dynamics of reconciliation among political elites are different from those among regular individuals in the private sphere, and the requirements of institutional reform contain certain normative imperatives that differ from the demands and expectations that can be placed on civil society.

These different social levels—political society, civil society, institutional, and individual—draw our attention to the myriad ways in which reconciliatory efforts are manifested and develop.

This book is a work of normative political theory. It seeks to make a contribution to current political theory debates about how best to envision reconciliation while remaining realistic about the very significant practical obstacles such efforts face. A number of important recent works have limited their focus to the institutional or administrative policies of transitional justice (such as the use of trials, truth commissions, or reparations) while eschewing broader theoretical explorations of reconciliation (Drumbl 2007; Elster 2004; Freeman 2006; Torpey 2006). Others have focused on comparative analyses of transitions, highlighting the practical challenges faced by incoming elites Barahona de Brito 2001; McAdams 2001). Many of these texts discuss reconciliation to some extent, but only in the context of broader transitional justice policies without elaborating normative understandings of reconciliation as such. Indeed, there has been a remarkably small amount of sustained theoretical work written on reconciliation, and much of this has been a critique of the concept rather than a positive formulation of its normative foundations.! I hope to contribute to these normative debates by sketching a viable theory. While I draw heavily from cases, I do not pursue a comparative case studies approach per se nor offer policy prescriptions or recommendations. Instead, I identify the moral claims and counterclaims that arise in transitional settings and explore how they may reinforce (and often work against) one another. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that any normative model must remain sensitive to the particularities and contexts of specific transitions—the type of transition, the outlay of different political and social forces, and the likelihood of the resumption of violence—or it will condemn itself to clever but ultimately useless theorizing. I have attempted, then, to outline a model that shows sensitivity to particularity while also considering the normative claims that seem to emerge across cases. Rather than provide a general, transhistorical model of reconciliation, I restrict my project to cases that share certain features, thus excluding other instances of dealing with past violence that face somewhat different challenges. In subsequent sections, I detail the parameters and normative concepts that are at the core of my model, but before doing so, I outline the scope of the model—what kinds of cases it intends to cover and what kinds it does not—in order to clarify its domain of applicability.

Scope of the Theory

The literature on transitional justice and historical memory is vast, and the types of transitions and political contexts are sufficiently varied that one should be hesitant to offer a nomothetic model of reconciliation that would satisfactorily operate in every instance. Indeed, I believe that this is not possible. My model is intended to be useful in certain kinds of cases: those of extreme domestic political violence where the opposing sides are not territorially separate. In this section I demarcate the bounds of the theory and indicate what falls inside and outside its scope.

Under certain circumstances, partition may be a more just solution than forcing enemies to live together. Biafra, East Timor, Western Sahara, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), and Chechnya are all cases where separation is more desirable than forced integration. This is because of, among other things, the form of political identity involved: Where the opponents can be distinguished principally by territory, rather than by non-territorial religious, linguistic, ethnic, or other affiliation, partition may very well be the optimal solution. Of course, non-territorial categorizations are often interwoven with territorial distinctions as well, but the salience of territoriality plays a crucial role in assessing what options are available (Brilmayer 1991; Lehning 1998). In cases where opponents occupy different territories within a larger political community and one group actively oppresses the other, reconciliation following political violence may not be the most desirable solution, particularly if the oppressed overwhelmingly seek independence and have little chance of achieving satisfactory political and economic protections in the status quo. Thus, the attempt at secession by the Ibo during the Biafran War and the successful separation by the Bangladeshis during their war with Pakistan would both appear legitimate (Harneit-Sievers and Emezue 2000; Ikpeze 2000; Kuper 1981), as would the division of East and West Timor (J. Taylor 1999). This is not, of course, to sanction ethnic cleansing, but only to underscore that in situations where the oppressed group is (1) territorially distinct from the oppressor and has little chance of achieving parity and (2) seeks separation, then reconciliation as discussed in this book would require forcing two (or more) groups to remain together that should be permitted to separate. However, in situations where the opponents are not territorially distinct, separation is not an alternative, and some form of reconciling enemies remains the only option. The violence in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s occurred between groups that cannot be separated by territory; leftists and rightists exist throughout the country, and therefore separation makes no sense. A careful reading of the wars in the former Yugoslavia reveals a great deal of pre-conflict ethnic interpenetration and cohabitation as well, and thus separation was achieved only through massive bloodletting; present-day Iraq is also characterized by significant ethnic and religious overlap (Burg and Shoup 2000; Gagnon 2005).

Wherever the politically salient identities are not territorially based, reconciliation is the only viable solution. What exactly is politically salient depends on the particular case: It could be religious, ethnic, class, or something else (indeed, it is almost always a combination of these), and the relevance of any set of distinctions is always open to change over time, giving credence to the social constructivist’s understanding of identity formation (Jung 2000). In any case, the model proposed here is relevant only where politically salient ascriptions do not neatly square with territorially salient distinctions; where they do, an alternative solution such as partition may be more desirable (though some form of reconciliation may be necessary in those cases as well). To paraphrase Hirschman (1970), I assume that “exit” is not an option.

Colonialism

In cases where the colonialist and the colonized are territorially separate, the model presented here is inapplicable. Thus, the Japanese use of Korean sex slaves and the Rape of Nanking are not directly relevant to my framework and the specific debate I engage here. These cases require an additional theoretical analysis of the complex relations between the society that perpetrated atrocities and the one that suffered them.

Where the colonized and colonizer do live in the same political territory, the model here may be relevant. The indigenous-colonialist relationships in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand make interesting candidates for this study, precisely because (the descendants of) the perpetrators and victims must live together. In these situations, there is no “exit.” Nevertheless, these are all historical cases, where the primary means of reconciliation occurs through a reassessment of historical memory, and the political order is not in danger of collapse because of renewed attention to historical grievances. I focus, however, on contemporary instances of mass atrocity and reconciliation where actual perpetrators and victims are still alive, the political order is not well entrenched, and renewed violence remains a possibility. So-called “consolidated democracies” normally do not face the same dangers as societies in transition to democracy, though they certainly have a moral obligation to reflect on past atrocities and their consequences. Regardless, the challenges facing those societies are temporally distinct from the focus of this study, requiring an investigation of the historical legacy of violence and its relation to contemporary life (Barkan 2000; Waldron 1992). This project focuses on reconciliation in societies that have undergone recent large-scale political violence where opposing sides drew their identities along non-territorial fault lines.

Why Not Forget?

Before turning to different theoretical models of reconciliation, I should say something about one contending alternative: societal forgetfulness as a means of “moving on.” The rise in the use of truth commissions gives the impression that engaging the past is necessary after mass violence and that ignoring it is morally wrong. Some scholars cite an “emerging norm of right to the truth” in international law,” and international human rights organizations claim there is an obligation on the state to unearth the past, with no exceptions.’ But these arguments are themselves contentious, and we should first inquire whether forgetfulness may indeed be a legitimate, and possibly better, alternative to the reconciliatory efforts I discuss in this book.

Defenders of forgetting the past argue that to look backward will only re-traumatize a fragile society. Demanding prosecutions and encouraging victims to talk about their experiences will not contribute to reconciliation, but only rekindle the embers of animosity and anger. Reexamining past grievances does little but prolong bitterness and antagonism, preventing a society from moving forward.* As such, whatever cathartic benefits for victims may come from truth commissions, trials, or memorials, the likelihood of renewed violence outweighs them. Bruce Ackerman sees these efforts as wasting “moral capital in an ineffectual effort to right past wrongs—creating martyrs and fostering political alienation, rather than contributing to a genuine sense of vindication.” “Moral capital” should be used to educate the people on the rule of law, rather than pursuing a “quixotic quest after the mirage of corrective justice” (1992, 72). Though not a supporter of forgetfulness, Michael Ignatieff questions the likelihood that “when the truth is known by all, it has a capacity to heal and reconcile. These are not so much epistemological assumptions as articles of faith about human nature: that the truth is one and, if we know it, it will make us free” (1998, 170). Many contemporary scholars remain skeptical of the benefits of revisiting the past. These arguments assume that fragile societies must privilege the practical needs of the present over morality. Peaceful coexistence requires burying the past.

But if forgetting requires burying awful experiences and behaving as if nothing had happened, what kind of reconciliation is this? Who is reconciled? Without some understanding of what happened, it is difficult to see how people could be reconciled with one another—to know whom to reconcile with means knowing who did what and who suffered what. An agreement to forget the past may bring respite from violence and ease a transition, but it is unlikely to remain for too long (Schwan 1998). In many cases where leaders have called for forgetting the past, public demands for the truth eventually resurface (this brings to mind Uruguay, Brazil, and Spain) and some historical reckoning becomes unavoidable.

Of course, for some, forgetting is a welcome response to the past. Perpetrators and their supporters are likely to encourage historical amnesia for self-interested reasons. Forgetting, however, is hardly apolitical or adopted freely; rather, it masks the power that perpetrators continue to enjoy. To expect victims to surrender their claims to moral acknowledgment constitutes a second moral injury against them, where their suffering is effectively excised from public consciousness and their experiences are disparaged as potentially disruptive to social reconstruction. Public forgetting instrumentalizes victims by signaling that their moral value is less important than stability and peace. It is a form of degradation, and “thus it involves a kind of injury that is not merely tangible and sensible. It is a moral injury, and we care about such injuries” (Murphy 1995, 25). The demand that past crimes be forgotten ignores this loss of self-respect. This moral injury results from treating victims as if no wrong had occurred and, consequently, they are not entitled to make claims for moral recognition. Simultaneously, perpetrators feel vindicated, for forgetfulness can in fact serve to confer legitimacy on past policies, at the very least by signaling that past wrongs were not sufficiently awful to demand judgment. The consequences can be devastating. As David Crocker remarks, “Repressed emotions of rage, humiliation, and fear can be expressed in uncontrolled and harmful ways” (1998, 496). A policy of forgetting, of course, is never guaranteed to “succeed,” even by crass instrumentalist terms. Silencing the past may only displace it to future generations, who may take up old grievances and return to violence. The state also loses in this calculus, as unaddressed violations may undermine its future legitimacy in the eyes of victims’ descendants (Warren 1998).

Nevertheless, advocates argue that certain states have chosen a policy of forgetfulness successfully, effectively burying mutual resentments and resisting calls for accountability and painful confrontations with their recent histories. Mozambique and Cambodia are two countries often identified as successful cases. Today, Cambodia has a United Nations—backed hybrid tribunal to prosecute former high-level Khmer Rouge, and it is no longer accurate to speak of it as a case where social forgetting is the norm. Mozambique, however, still stands out for its seemingly socially sanctioned forgetfulness.

Much has been written about how Mozambique has decided to ignore the legacy of its civil war, creating a new moral and political community founded on the willful ignorance of recent history (Alden 2001; England 2002; Manning 2002). After the 1992 peace agreement that ended sixteen years of vicious fighting, leaders from the two combatant groups Renamo and Frelimo turned to the Catholic church to mediate potential conflicts, and the 1994 elections went ahead without any major contestation occurring along wartime fault lines. Boosters of the transition argued that it was achieved peacefully precisely because Mozambicans chose to renounce the past and move on (Alden 2001).

Nevertheless, though there was no explicit public engagement with the nation’s history—certainly not by the political elites who had negotiated the cease-fire and legal amnesty—it was not completely rejected either. Within civil society, villages turned back to a number of autochthonous mechanisms to deal with political conflict. More importantly, these were seen as legitimate by villagers themselves, including the survivors (Bartoli 2001). Curandeiros, or traditional healers, served as authority figures who could mediate communal and personal conflict. Specifically, curandeiros played a crucial role in reintegrating former soldiers who had murdered by “rehumanizing” them, casting off the “bad luck” that came from the victim’s spirit. The process was complex, but the important point here is that it included an implicit acknowledgment of guilt and sense of responsibility by the soldier, for otherwise the soldier would not require rehumanization. These rituals occurred mostly in rural areas where the majority of the fighting took place. Services conducted by curandeiros served as a method of reconstructing badly broken social relations, allowing for the reintegration of erstwhile enemies into the same moral and social community. Through a complex series of ritualized and meaningful actions, former opponents—on occasion from the same town or even family—were invited to live together as equals (Nordstrom 1997). Writes Rama Mani:

The traditional belief is that harm is done not just to the individual involved—victim or perpetrator—but to the entire family or community. Consequently, reconciliation and reintegration require that entire communities participate in the ritual to rid themselves of the harm. With the ceremony, the violator is forgiven and the victim is healed, and each can be reconciled and reintegrated into the community as before. (2002, 118)

Though this does not amount to the notion of reconciliation I delineate, it is far removed from the idea of forgetfulness, since the latter term normally precludes any type of moral engagement with the past or acknowledgment of culpability—in this case the very basis of the soldiers’ rehumanization. After all, if the goal is to forget completely, why engage in rituals of purification and reintegration? Forgetting usually means letting “bygones be bygones,” but here there is at least a recognition that serious wrongs were committed and that there were victims and perpetrators. The fiction that the past does not matter

Theorizing Reconciliation = I| does not hold, since there is such a preoccupation with dealing with it, if only to move away from it. And there is, of course, no guarantee that future calls to revisit the past will not occur, as they have in numerous other countries in similar situations.

The importance of coming to terms with the past may not always be immediately evident, and the force of historical memory may take some time to appear. In spring 2000, Polish historian Jan Gross published Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, an account of how the small town of Jedwabne lost its entire Jewish population in World War II (2001). The Nazis had traditionally been blamed for the murders, though it is now clear that Catholic Poles killed their Jewish neighbors. More disturbingly, it seems that these crimes may have been more common than once believed. The thesis of the book was immensely controversial in Poland, a country that has long thought of itself as the victim nation par excellence. Now Poland is engaged in a full-scale reappraisal of its past, investigating its own history of anti-Semitism and the implications for the nation’s understanding of itself (Gross 2006; Polonsky and Michlic 2004).

In all of these cases, forgetting has not succeeded. Poland is still confronting crimes committed fifty years ago, and Cambodians have recently begun to demand the truth about their nation’s genocide. Even Mozambicans, another people touted as having turned their back on the past, still find it necessary to engage in some form of ritual to reintegrate perpetrators and former combatants into community life. Arguing against social amnesia, Wole Soyinka has written:

Beyond Truth [sic], the very process of its exposition becomes part of the necessity, and, depending on the nature of the past that it addresses, the impact it has made on the lives of the citizens and the toll it has taken on their sense of belonging, it may be regarded as being capable of guaranteeing or founding the future of a nation. Indeed, it may be seen as a therapy against civic alienation. (1999, 12)

Here Soyinka may be overstating the power of truth, and I argue in subsequent chapters that there are other moral claims that require our attention as well. Nevertheless, his point is well-taken; it implies, at the very least, that facing the past is important for societal and communal rebirth and that advocates of social amnesia fail to capture the pull that history can have on a country’s historical understanding of itself.

Paradigms of Reconciliation

Facing the past is a crucial element in reconstructing a shattered society. But what it means to reconcile such a society is not self-evident. Reconciliation, like most normatively complex social phenomena, cannot be measured in any exact manner, and it is precisely this elusive yet very real quality that makes any discussion of its nature and sources difficult. Nevertheless, several broad approaches have emerged, ranging from a “minimalist” legal one predicated on coexistence to a “maximalist” approach based on mutual healing, restoration, and forgiveness. These are not hard-and-fast schools of reconciliation, since there are in fact few such fully developed normative theories; rather, they represent general understandings that have informed the way we think of reconciliation. Nor are they purely in opposition to one another; the call for healing and restoration of social relations accepts the importance of minimal coexistence as a starting point but seeks to deepen it substantially through forgiveness and the development of thick ties of solidarity. Nevertheless, I believe that neither approach is satisfactory.

Minimalist approaches formulate reconciliation as simple coexistence between former enemies, a basic agreement by different groups to accept the law rather than violence to resolve disagreements. Rajeev Bhargava discusses this view in the context of “barbaric” societies moving toward “minimal decency’:

A minimally decent society is governed by minimally moral rules. A complete breakdown of such rules characterizes a barbaric society. In this context, what makes these rules moral is their capacity to prevent excess wrongdoing or evil, not their ability to promote a particular conception of the good life, including a substantive conception of justice. Such moral rules include negative injunctions against killing, or maiming or illtreating others, and also a system of basic procedural due process. (2001, 45)

In this context, procedural justice means accepting basic norms for negotiation, contestation, and decision making while suspending broader issues of redistribution or punishment. Procedural justice is the cornerstone of the minimalist approach. It rejects demands for accountability or transformative policies of material redistribution as unattainable and probably destabilizing while arguing that anything less than basic ground rules for coexistence will result in renewed violence. Reconciliation, therefore, means creating a space where former enemies can become political opponents within the bounds of the rule of law. Writing about Nazism and Stalinism, Stuart Hampshire argues that totalitarianism seeks to create “a bombed and flattened moral landscape” and the destruction of “all notions of fairness and justice from practical politics and, as far as possible, from persons’ minds” (1989, 68). In the face of such thorough moral destruction, the only viable alternative is a political order that reinscribes limits for political and state power and imposes a “bare minimum concept of justice,” amounting to no more than a method of mediating political contestation absent social solidarity or shared background values (1989, 72). Hampshire considers this “basic level of morality, a bare minimum, which is entirely negative,” as the most that can be expected following such extreme political violence. Indeed, procedural justice becomes the only means of achieving a tolerable coexistence between erstwhile enemies “without any substantive reconciliation between them, and without any common ground” (1989, 109).

This argument is certainly compelling, since it reflects a kind of realism and concern about immediately destabilizing conditions, but minimalism leaves a number of normative issues undertheorized, and thus remains problematic as a long-term position on the past. By basing reconciliation on thin proceduralism, minimalists focus on the demands of the present to the near exclusion of engaging the past. We should resist this narrow approach. Victims of atrocity and their descendants have a moral interest in knowing and publicizing the truth about human rights abuses, not in order to pursue a vindictive politics of victimhood, but as a means of achieving legitimate demands for moral recognition. Without some engagement with the past, reconciliation will remain superficial and tenuous at best.