1st Global Conference
Session 5b: Forgiveness and Political Violence
Chair: Karl Tomm
(Women) Civilians After Wars: Any Nation State Asking for their Forgiveness?
Trangdai Glassey-Tranguyen
Stanford, UC San Diego, USA
Post-war civilians are often left to deal with war consequences on their own. Creative strategies and peaceful energy emerge amongst the people to help make sense of the war discourses and to build a new life. Yet all of these strides remain mute and moot if the agents of war fail to acknowledge their responsibility for the suffering of the people. Japan has not apologized to the Nanking people for its massacre. The killing fields of Kampuchea remain an unapologetic cruelty of the Khmer Rouge. Further review of world history reveals a clear pattern: only wars, no apologies – hence no impetus for forgiveness from those who have no decision in the wars but are forced into the most ravaging hurts.
Beyond meta-events are the constant death-or-life verge that people endure, the anguish of losing a loved one in battles, the will and search to lead a normal life, the human beings yearning for peace in the midst of wars, and the human hearts longing for life in the face of death. This presentation brings together voices of Vietnamese women in the diasporas from both sides of the 1954 demarcated zones of North and South Vietnams. Currently residing in Sweden, Germany, and the USA, these individuals are struggling to make sense of the violence ravaging through their lives over three decades ago. The time lapse also reveals the reverberating persistence of pain and loss. As these women’s narratives are situated within their social milieu, the stories also unearth the perspectives of their loved ones and other generations. The anguish, the frustration, and the resentment of brutality imposed upon them truncate their psychic being and everyday existence. Their traumas have never been processed, and no one had acknowledged the wrongs in their lives.
Indeed, which nation states will stand up to apologize to the peoples that they have jeopardized with their military projects? Can forgiveness be possible in the face of continued disabling lives, of amputated bodies, of post-war trauma, of deformed newborns, of ongoing psychological and geopolitical displacement, of shattered homes, of aborted dreams? Can a bride ever forgive the army that took her groom away the day after their wedding? Can an old mother ever pardon the premature deaths of all of her sons who were sent to battles? Can a youngster ever fathom the loss of its parents during a raid? Can human beings ever forgive the absence of conscience still prevalent in today’s world? The paper delves into the political economy of personal forgiveness vis-à-vis state crimes, and asks the question of what forgiveness the civilians can forge to move forward in their daily living after the war – despite the states’ apathy and apartheid.
(Primary materials in this presentation are drawn from the Vietnamese Diaspora Studies Project, a component of which was sponsored by a Fulbright full grant.)
Forgiveness and Disclosure Scandals in Romania
Adriana Mica
Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, GSSR, Warsaw, Poland
The present paper makes an inquiry into the way in which different socio-professional categories and organizations reacted to the implementation of disclosure law in Romania and to the flourishing of several legislative proposals on lustration and decommunization in the years following the 1989 anti-Communist revolution. The actors under scrutiny are main political parties and the Romanian Orthodox Church respectively. The inquiry of the paper aims to explore the manner in which several disclosure scandals wielded influence on the attitude of these organizations regarding the disclosure and lustration drives in Romania. It will be thus documented that in reply to the flourishing of disclosure scandals, the organizations under scrutiny played with concepts such as forgiveness, absolution in the one hand, and admonishment and expulsion in the other hand. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the way in which several disclosure scandals brought forward the development or the appeasement of these attitudes.
The political parties reacted differently to the news of one of their members having engaged in collaboration with the State Security services in the past. And in time, the attitude of some parties changed from compliance to stated intolerance at the news that one of its members got caught in the disclosure net. The intolerance vis-a-vis the deviant behavior that was brought forth by disclosure scandals got however appeased subsequent to the flourishing of more and more scandals on the issue. And what is more, the would-be intolerance certain political parties advertised soon turned out to be prejudiced against certain politicians.
In comparison with the political parties, a much less versatile player turned out to be the Romanian Orthodox Church. After the 1989 anti-Communist revolution, the Orthodox Church was several times demanded to face allegations of enjoying comfortable proximity to the former ruling party and political police during Communism. It would be reasonable to argue for example that the priests did not embark on strongly rejecting the anti-delation perceptions against them, nor did they all keep quiet, but on the contrary, the few of them who publicly faced these charges tried to build a defense by operating a small but very important change: in stead of delation they plea guilty of collaboration. And what is more important, none of them admitted to have encroached upon the confessional. By the same token it is argued that the collaboration with the former political police was contextual and instrumental, and it never enroached upon the confessional. It is today to be dealt with by way of confession.
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Trauma and Forgiveness: Comparing Experiences from Turkey and Guatemala
Ayse Betul Celik and Riva Kantowitz
Sabanci University, Turkey
Guatemala and Turkey are both two examples of countries that have experienced violent conflicts in the past two decades. Turkey’s Kurdish Question, which took place primarily between the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan) combatants and the Turkish military, occurred between 1984 and 1999, with a short-lived period of negative peace between 1999 and 2004. In Guatemala, an ethnic conflict between the state and military and the URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca) occurred that resulted in the death of 250,000 people, the height of which was fought between 1982 – 1983, however lasted until the Peace Accords were signed in December of 1996. Although in two different political and cultural settings, these two conflicts produced individuals, who are still suffering from homicides, disappearances and violence, as well as communities that continue to be subsumed in collective trauma resulting from the ongoing effects of violence.
This paper aims to comparatively study traumatized individual and communal understanding of justice, acknowledgment of past mistakes, forgiveness, and understanding of individual and national reconciliation. It addresses the personal conditions and motivations of the victims’ readiness to forgive the perpuatrators as well as the way in which lack of forgiveness and reconciliation affect communities, and the coping mechanisms used by individuals and groups in situations of ethnic conflict such as Turkey and Guatemala. This paper also attempts to theoretically connect individual-level and national-level reconciliation by examining the rhetorics of the truamatized individuals.
The data for the Guatemalan case comes from Riva Kantowitz’s fieldwork in Guatemala from 2003 to 2005, whereas the data for the Turkish case comes from A. Betul Celik’s fieldwork in the southeast Turkey between 2003 and 2005.