At the centre of the strife in Colombia are various groups: left-wing organisations that were originally established as a liberation force against conservative rule in Colombia; the National Liberation Army, or ELN; the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia; drug cartels; and paramilitary ‘self-defence’ units which were originally created to help the government fight left-wing organisations, but were subsequently outlawed.
On the last day of the conference, the Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe Velez, appeared in a televised dialogue with Tutu, Maduna and Sexwale. Sexwale delivered a pointed message to the guerrilla groups. ‘Those of us who have fought for the freedom of our people,’ he said, ‘not once ever thought of kidnapping as a strategy for liberation. ... We compromise not because we fear war, but because we love peace more.’
The audience roared with applause, and rose to a lengthy ovation. ‘No fighter worth any respect as a fighter will kidnap other people,’ Sexwale declared. Addressing to Velez, he continued: ‘Mr President, it is time for courage… As a citizen of the world, I say, rise from being a president – presidents come and go – to being a statesman.’
Maduna spoke about how he had once been called a ‘cockroach’ by a prison warder when he was a liberation fighter. He asked Velez whether he had ever reflected on the real needs of those fighting the state, and how he was planning to include them in the political negotiations that were being discussed in Colombia. ‘Out there on the mountains are fellow human beings,’ Maduna said. ‘We must draw them out and bring them down into the valleys, if any process of negotiation is going to succeed.’
Colombia is one of the most troubled countries in the world. As always, those affected by the strife there are the most vulnerable members of society: woman, children, peasant farmers and ethnic minorities. The long and painful list of countries currently facing immeasurable strife and genocide shows that the world’s most vulnerable are displaced and voiceless. They are hungry for peace, and long for normalcy in their lives. Countries such as Colombia, and many others on our own continent, highlight what was the moral challenge of the past century, and will be the central moral challenge of this century: as member countries of the United Nations, what should our response be to the destruction of the voiceless?
Well, Tutu, Maduna and Sexwale showed in Colombia how ‘citizens of the world’ can become alternative voices to lead international responses to countries whose citizens are crying out for peace. In response to Velez’s not-so-overt plea for help from the South Africans, the South African threesome issued a joint statement, read by Tutu, making a commitment to approach President Thabo Mbeki in order to facilitate initial talks aimed at encouraging warring factions to join in dialogue with the Colombian government. ‘Come down from the mountain,’ Tutu called out to the fighters through the live TV broadcast; ‘come down to help rebuild your country, Colombia.’
It may be a small gesture from South Africans, but when the people of Colombia responded with a standing ovation, it was as if Tutu’s statement was enough to move mountains.
8. The language of forgiveness
Sunday Times, 17 July 2005
In June 2005, I had the honour of delivering a speech alongside a child survivor of the Holocaust at an event entitled ‘60 Years Later – Children of War Remember’, hosted by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Germany. It brought together both victims of the Holocaust and family members of Nazi perpetrators. The depth and openness of mutual engagement illuminated for me the path that South Africa as a nation has yet to walk.
LAST MONTH I was invited to deliver a speech entitled ‘Forgiveness as an issue of collective memory’ at a public event organised by the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany. The second lecture was entitled ‘Auschwitz, Mengele, me and forgiveness’, and its author, Eva Mozes Kor, was a child survivor of Dr Josef Mengele’s so-called ‘twin experiments’ in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz.
Some may wonder if the language of forgiveness is appropriate in discussions of historical memory in Germany, perhaps because of the word’s erroneous association with forgetting. Far from being driven by a desire to forget, the men and women I met during my recent trip to Germany were fully confronting the past. They are the generation whose parents and relatives were the ‘willing executioners’ – as Daniel Goldhagen refers to Nazi-era German society – in Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’.
At the end of the war, the war generation was in denial, and wanted to forget the past and their role therein. When the post-war generation came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, however, they rebelled against their parents’ denial of responsibility for the Holocaust. They self-righteously attacked their parents’ generation for bringing Hitler to power. At the same time, they continued to enjoy the many privileges of an economically prosperous Germany.
Now in their mature years, having raised their own children, with most of the war generation beyond the grave, many Germans over the age of 50 are beginning to confront memories that they have shared only privately. The post-war generation in Germany is faced with the problem of guilt by association, and wants to deal with it not with the denial and veil of silence that followed the war. They want to confront their shame and guilt, embrace it, and transcend it. Dialogue about forgiveness and/or reconciliation may be the vehicle to reach that transcendence.
Unlike Germans, we South Africans had an opportunity, through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process, for public dialogue about our own past that created victims and perpetrators, beneficiaries and bystanders. In spite of the TRC process of public dialogue, however, and hardly a decade since the TRC concluded its work, we seem to be avoiding any reference to South Africa’s horrific past and its wide-ranging consequences. We have become skilled at attacking one another – black and white – in private and in public. Whites accuse blacks of benefiting from post-apartheid privilege; blacks accuse whites of attitudes that serve to perpetuate the racism of the past. What is starkly missing is dialogue that could help us to understand the forces of the past.
South Africans can learn from the introspection of the generation of Germans who are courageously facing their country’s history 60 years after Nazi atrocities in which they did not participate, and which they did not witness. The past, as the German writer Christa Wolf informs us, is not dead; it has not even passed.
We must talk about our difficult past, and how it continues to define our relationships in subtle ways. Through the dialogue about our past, we must also find a way of celebrating humanity. The heart of forgiveness does not necessarily lie in loving those around us (it definitely does not lie in hating them either). The spirit of forgiveness lies in the search – not for the things that separate us – but for something common among us as fellow human beings, the compassion and empathy that binds our human identity.
9. A wounded nation
Mail & Guardian, 23 December 2009
Listening to the comments of parishioners of St George’s Cathedral in Cape Town on a Reconciliation Day pilgrimage, I was struck by how seldom South Africans have an opportunity to express their frustrations with our adolescent democracy. I wrote this reflection 15 years after the birth of our democracy, yet the need for continued dialogue is even more pronounced today.
ON 16 DECEMBER 2009, Reconciliation Day, while many Capetonians were driving towards the beaches, the dean of St George’s Cathedral, Rowan Smith, was welcoming a group of people who had gathered for a two-hour pilgrimage. As a site of resistance against apartheid, St George’s Cathedral has long been an important symbol of peace and unity. Here, religious leaders of different faith groups joined hands with tens of thousands of South Africans during apartheid to campaign for peace. Thus the pilgrimage included stops at the Great Synagogue near the Cape Town Gardens and the