Forgiveness: a way out of the darkness by Marina Cantacuzino
Forgiveness is an inspiring, complex, exasperating subject, which provokes strong feeling in just about everyone. Having spent all last year collecting stories of reconciliation and forgiveness for an exhibition of words and images which I have created with the photographer Brian Moody, I began to see that for many people we met forgiveness is no soft option, but the ultimate revenge. For many it is a liberating route out of victimhood, a choice, a process, the final victory over those who have done you harm. As Mariane Pearl, the wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, said, “The only way to oppose them is by demonstrating the strength that they think they have taken from you.” The exhibition tells some extraordinary stories – stories of victims who have become friends with perpetrators, murderers who have turned their mind to peace building.
As I talked to friends, colleagues and strangers about this exhibition, I began to notice two very different reactions. There are those who see forgiveness as an immensely noble and humbling response to atrocity – and those who simply laugh it out of court. For the first group, forgiveness is a value strong enough to put an end to the tit-for-tat settling of scores that has wreaked havoc over generations. But for the second group, forgiveness is just a copout, a weak gesture, which lets the violator off the hook and encourages only further violence. This is why we called the exhibition The F Word. For some people forgiveness is a very dirty word indeed.
I chose the subject because as a journalist I find I’m far more moved by stories of forgiveness than revenge. In fact, revenge scares me a little. I don’t understand the thinking that advocates the settling of scores, because this just creates an interminable cycle of attrition. On the other hand, the further I have ventured down the forgiveness route, the more I’ve realised that forgiveness is not the other side of the coin to revenge. At one time I thought the title of the exhibition should simple be REVENGE upside down – the seven letters turned on their head.
I chose the subject of forgiveness because gentle people attract me more than resolute ones, vulnerability more than strength, and I believe there are very few truly malevolent people in the world. As Father Michael Lapsley says, “All people are capable of being perpetrators or victims – and sometimes both.” Lapsley runs the Institute for Healing Memories in Cape Town, despite – or probably because – he had both hands blown off in 1990 when he received a letter bomb sent by FW de Klerk’s death squads.
Jon James, who was held hostage in 1997 by Chechnyan rebels with his girlfriend Camilla Carr, said he survived only because he’d learnt from practising martial arts, “That to overcome your opponent you should meet hardness with softness.” Their ordeal lasted 14 months, during which Camilla was repeatedly raped by one of her captors, but they have come through it remarkably intact. For them, like for many others, forgiveness was about seeking to understand the enemy. As Terry Waite wrote to me in his support for the exhibition: “If one can understand why people behave as they do then often the road to forgiveness is opened. Not only is forgiveness essential for the health of Society, it is also vital for our personal well-being. Bitterness is like a cancer that enters the soul. It does more harm to those that hold it than to those whom it is held against.”
When I met Mor Dioum, the human rights lawyer who represents Berthe and Francis Climbié here in England, he asked me with genuine puzzlement, “Why forgiveness, why here in England?” He was referring to the British media’s thirst for retribution. Forgiveness is not a part of our culture, yet recent research by OMD Snapshots found that one in five thought forgiveness should form part of the judicial process here in the UK, and 59 per cent believed forgiveness was an essential part of healing.
In parts of Africa (Rwanda, Sierra Leone and South Africa) where perpetrators of bloody conflicts are being reintegrated into their communities, forgiveness is a much more accepted response to violence, viewed by some as the only way to bring about lasting peace. A Masai woman raped by a member of the British army was quoted recently in The Guardian, saying, “I have not reached forgiveness yet,” as if this was a state of mind she should aspire to.
Emma Thompson wrote to us in her statement of support for The F word: “I have spent time with people in Chile and in Argentina whose families were murdered and tortured during the troubled histories of these countries. I have never heard a single one desire revenge. There is no more important undertaking than forgiveness… It is the most powerful weapon we have against terrorism and atrocity.”
I still find myself defending the notion of forgiveness, though I am not advocating it as the best way forward. Who has the right to ask anyone to forgive? It is an intensely personal choice. As Alistair Little, the former Protestant paramilitary, told me: “Often in a conflict situation there’s a huge pressure on people to forgive. If they don’t, it’s seen as a selfish act, and that I think is reprehensible. To expect them to forgive only victimises them all over again.”
And yet for some rare people forgiveness is the most constructive way forward, one that has immense rewards for victim and perpetrator, as well as society. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said last August after I’d finally got to meet him, “Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what has happened seriously and not minimising it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. In the telling of stories like these there is real healing.”
He told me I should go to Israel and see a pioneering organisation called the Parents Circle – a group of bereaved families supporting reconciliation and peace. The Parents Circle was founded by Yitzhak Frankenthal after his son was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists in 1994. While others around him were bellowing for revenge, this very courageous man decided to go in the other direction. Six weeks ago we went to Tel Aviv to meet Rami Elhanan and Ghazi Briegeith, an Israeli and a Palestinian who have both lost close family members.
Rami, whose daughter was killed in 1997 in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, told me that his work with the Parents Circle has become his sacred mission: “If we – Ghazi and I – can talk and stand together after paying the highest price possible, then anyone can.” Rami believes the suicide bomber to be as much a victim of the occupation as his daughter. Ghazi also sees the soldier who shot his unarmed brother as a victim like his brother – brutalized by a regime that puts guns into the hands of boys. They both believe passionately that somewhere a line must be drawn under the dogma of vengeance. Robi Damelin – another member of the Parents Circle, told me that when the army turned up at her door to tell her that her son had been shot dead while serving in the reserves, the first and totally instinctive words to come out of her mouth were, “Do not take revenge in the name of my son.”
I am in awe of Rami, Robi and Ghazi, just as I am in awe of Linda Biehl, and in a different way of Easy and Ntobeko – two of the men convicted of Linda’s daughter’s murder. Easy and Ntobeko now work for the Amy Biehl Foundation in Cape Town, despite the fact that by doing so they live daily under the shadow of their crime. They were both given amnesty under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), though Easy told me, “I thought the TRC was a sell-out, until I read in the press that Linda and Peter had said ‘it’s not up to us to forgive, it’s up to the people in South Africa to learn to forgive each other. It was then I decided I’d go to tell our story and show remorse. Amnesty wasn’t my motivation. I wanted to say in front of Linda and Peter, face to face, “I am sorry, can you forgive me?”” Forgiveness is not a single magnanimous gesture in response to an isolated offence; it is part of a continuum of human engagements in healing broken relationships.
Tim Newell, former governor of Grendon Underwood prison and author of Forgiving Justice, says, “The main dynamic that stops victims, offenders and their communities of care moving on after the trauma of a crime is the inability to forgive the person responsible for the crime. This identifies forever the person with the deed and can freeze relationships and life stories forever.”
With a reputation for supporting difficult causes, The Forster Company and Anita Roddick are the main sponsors of The F word exhibition. “For me forgiveness is as mysterious as love”, says Anita. “I’ve never understood how people who experience pain through violence can see any light, or any freedom from the obsession of why or how? I’ve never really believed that I would forgive, but then nor have I ever really understood the cage which anger locks you into.”
And that just about sums me up too. I’m not preaching or telling people what to think or how to respond. How can I know how I would behave, especially when I have often suspected that the smaller cruelties of loved ones might be harder to forgive than the greater cruelties of strangers. And yet there seems to be hope in forgiveness, a way out of the darkness. As the late Peter Biehl said when addressing the TRC, speaking in favour of granting his daughter’s killers amnesty: "The most important vehicle of reconciliation is open and honest dialogue… We are here to reconcile a human life which was taken without an opportunity for dialogue.”