Forgiveness

My mother has shown me an article by Amelia Thomas, Enemy Soldiers gather - to strive for Peace which appeared in The Christian Science Monitor in April. It's about Combatants for Peace, an alliance of former Palestinian 'freedom fighters' and Israeli ex-soldiers. One of them commented, "It doesn't cease to be hard. But you must listen, and you must forgive, even for the most difficult things."

The issue of forgiveness has been explored recently by bloggers like Rachel from North London in The F Word. This post has links to the efforts of other survivors to respond to a request to write about whether they could forgive the bombers.

People often hold up South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an example of what can be achieved in reconciling former enemies. It certainly provided the opportunity to reveal more of the 'Truth', i.e. in the form of the 'facts' - but real 'Reconciliation'? I suppose it's easier to come to terms with a 'wrong' if you feel that justice has been served, and that there is hope for the future.

In South Africa in the Eighties, when I fretted over police actions, someone, to reassure me, told me that a woman we both knew, prominent in the Anglican Church, was quietly recording who had done what to whom, so that one day, when the struggle was over and we had that justice and a moral government for which we were working, the guilty could be brought to trial.

Instead we got a new government and we got the TRC. So did the victims feel cheated when the truth was out and the culprits walked free? Percy, I think they might have.

Interesting too, that amongst the King's Cross survivors, some of the rage has simply been re-directed from the now unavailable home-grown bombers to home-grown institutions. It's even easier to do this when a government is clearly morally wrong. In South Africa there was a tiny, tiny chance that 'agitators' from other parts of the country, might come across me, a 'Whitey' in the course of their anger and, not knowing me, might necklace me. Pretty melodramatic I know, but I still come across, amongst my box of 'important' papers, a note I left there for my husband, instructing him to make it clear at any trial, that I blamed the government, not the accused. (Even though the risk of 'accidental' necklacing is now rather remote on several accounts, I continue to leave this scribble amongst the papers - Why? As some kind of a souvenir? Perhaps it's time to move on, Percy...)

Antjie Krog calls reconciliation a cycle, rather than a process. However it happens, or whatever brings it in to settle over victims of horrors, it's not the full forgiveness Monty.

I digress. This blog isn't about forgiveness. It's about finding a flickering candle in the pitch-dark stadium of war.