The better approach to reconciliation
By Zechariah Manyok Biar
May 16, 2013 – Some of you who might have read my previous articles know that I promised some weeks ago to write separately on the topic of peace and reconciliation that was initiated by Vice President Dr. Riek Machar and taken over by President Salva Kiir Mayardit. As I was delaying, Tongun Lo Loyuong and Ngor Arol Garang respectively published articles that I admire on the topic of peace. Their articles have motivated me to write the article that I promised to write.
As I said some weeks ago, I was disappointed when President Kiir suspended the peace and reconciliation process. I thought there were hidden agenda for suspending it. But I was relieved later when he appointed a committee led by His Grace Daniel Deng Bul and retired Rt. Rev. Paride Taban to continue with the process.
The involvement of the President, the Vice President, and the Church in the initiative is a positive thing. All of them now have stake in either the success or the failure of this peace.
When Dr. Machar initiated the process and the President was not clear about it, the stake of either success or failure of the process was exclusively on Dr. Machar. When the President got involved by first suspending the process to ironically lessen the exclusive responsibility from Dr. Machar, he signed up to the responsibility of either failure or success of the process.
Now, both the President and the Vice President have their names attached to the process. Dr. Machar will go down in history as the initiator of the process of peace in the Republic of South Sudan and President Kiir will go down in history as the one who carried it through to the finishing line.
The third group that has signed up to either the success or failure of the process is the Church. Tongun has eloquently argued in his article that the promotion of peace is the mandate of the Church. I agree with him. It was even the expectation of many people that the Church was going to initiate the reconciliation and healing process in the country. But that did not happen until Dr. Machar took up the challenge. Now that the Church has accepted to get involved, it must be sure that the success or failure of the process will be counted on it.
Having said the above, we would agree that the success or failure of the peace process cannot happen without the role of the people. Regardless of how hard the above leaders could try, the process could fail if the citizens who are to be reconciled undermine the reconciliation process. It, therefore, should be clear that the failure or success of the process will be in the hands of the people.
The approach that will be taken, above all, will determine the success or the failure of the reconciliation. What I hear today is that there is a belief that some communities are criminals and others are victims of these criminals. So, the approach based on this belief would be that the criminal communities should be prepared to kneel down during the process and apologize. Such approach will fail because every community knows how to be defensive. Defensiveness will probably be led by some members of that particular community who were against what the majority of their community members did against another community. May be they were also victimized because of their position. Putting them in one basket with the people they disagreed with, on the one hand, could be unfair. Thinking of isolating them as individuals while still generalizing their community as criminal, on the other hand, is contradictory.
Another approach is that justice will have to be done during the process in which anybody who is known to have committed a criminal act during the war will have to be locked up first before people can reconcile. This approach will fail too because preconditions often do not work in true reconciliations. Tongun correctly puts it this way: “As Christians we are then expected to behave likewise towards our brothers and sisters who have offended us, without any pre-condition of demanding or expecting the offender to issue a public apology, or show remorse and beg for forgiveness” (Article published by both SSN and Gurtong).
The approach that is likely to succeed, I believe, is the one that people affected are taken as individuals and not as communities. The individuals who know who killed their beloved ones should be allowed to request the person they are angry with and talk to them freely. They should express their emotions without any external influence. The person they know to have killed their beloved ones should also be allowed to respond with honesty. They can even cry and be given time to do so. That was what used to happen in South Africa during similar process.
If the person that many people in a particular community are holding responsible is a leader, then he or she should be asked to go in person and hear how people express their grieves. He or she should also be given a chance to express him/herself on how he/she feels about the issue and the logic behind his/her action. Some of these leaders were ordered to act and others gave orders to others to act. They will have different ways of explaining the logic behind their actions.
The aim of this practice, however, is not to lock somebody up but to reconcile with one another after hearing what had been emotionally affecting the other. Locking somebody up is different from this process. If locking up of people who committed crimes during the war was the best choice, it would have been done long time ago when the evidences were still fresh.
The expressing of grieves and sorrows can relieve the affected person and can give the one he or she is angry with a sense of sorrow too. Those who reconciled in this manner can even eat together immediately and decide to open a new page without any external pressure to do so.
In this approach, we will all understand during the process that individuals from every community were affected in one way or another during the war and they know those who caused them problems, either from within or from without their community. This means the reconciliation is not only from one tribe with the other, it also among individuals within one community. It is only through this understanding that spirited sympathy for the individual victims will take place.
People affected have nothing to do with politics when it comes to how they feel about their lost loved ones. What matters to them is to know why one did it. So, political statements must be discouraged during the process. Honesty must be the preferred practice.
Tribalizing every issue even issues of grief must stop. We should respect individual’s feelings as they are. Thinking that there are bad communities against the good ones must stop. We should hold people accountable as individuals. Supporting people who are held accountable because they belong to one’s community must stop. We should let them always explain why they did what they did. This is the honesty that will let us unite as one people. Lining up behind tribes often drown reality of any situation and make affected people angrier towards the defenders of criminals.
Because of the above, therefore, true peace and reconciliation must be divorced from our usual way of doing things, if it is to succeed. The Church must stand as if its father and mother are the truth and honesty only. They should not accept irrational pressure from those who think they can feel good only if they are seen as winners. True peace and reconciliation is based on win-win not lose-win situation.
Zechariah Manyok Biar can be reached at [email protected]