Nickel Mines and Forgiveness

Over the past decade I have become increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for peace on this planet.

Lately, I've been letting politicians off a little more lightly, since what leaves me aghast is the spiritual leaders preaching the propaganda of hate.

This week, grieving Amish families in Nickel Mines walked the forgiveness of their talk.

"They buried their anger, even before burying their children."

And what do they want from the world outside?

"Tell the world we are grateful for its prayers but also remember to pray for the gunman's family."

In search of Peace Potions

Here's the first:

Choose one of the things that you strongly believe and think about how you might be wrong.

(Repeat seven times.)

A question for Muslims

(This question is directed at those Muslims who follow Islam as a religion of peace.)

How best can those of other faiths, including those of no faith, express their goodwill towards you?

The Prophet Mohammed on the reward for kindness

Particularly since 7/7, I have been anxious not to behave in such way as to suggest to Muslims that I regarded them as potential suicide bombers. Hassan's plea, recently, for a minute of freedom resonated with me as that was something I have consciously, in spite of a certain "British" reserve, been trying to accord to my fellow passengers on London's public transport. Even though I sometimes wryly reflect that the very ones who are most obviously Muslim, are probably rejecting me, my nod, my greeting, my sitting next to them - because of my short sleeves and uncovered head!

One Sunday, a couple of months ago, I passed, and then turned back to stop at, a table in our town centre's pedestrian mall which is manned by Muslims from the local mosque. After a cautious sort of conversation, I took away with me a book they proffered A brief illustrated guide to understanding Islam. I was looking at it again today, and I have found the Prophet Mohammed's response to the question: "Messenger of God, are we rewarded for kindness towards animals?"

He said, "There is a reward for kindness to every living animal or human".

(The references cited for this were: Saheeh Muslim #2244 and also Saheeh Al-Bukhari #2466)

On the Jill Carroll front, I had the disappointing response from the Monitor that my question (During her capitivity, did she experience any kindness from her captors?) was not one of the questions selected for her to answer.

Don't know that I'm giving up completely on that one yet. Suggestions welcomed.

Revisiting The F Word

I came across The Forgiveness Project recently.

Stories for our times.

U Words for Peace

South Africa, 1994. The Boer War (1899–1902) still rankling. Inkatha versus ANC, AWB versus Everyone Else. Necklacing.

Who would have given Peace a chance?

I can remember Julius Lewin’s valedictory tutorial when, in 1966, about to upsticks and leave our sinking ship, he looked into the future for a small class that included Bram Fischer’s son, Paul. “A revolution is not around the corner.” He gave the Nationalist government 30 years. He was pretty much spot on, in that and in much else. I also remember him commenting at some point that, when the handover happened, South Africa had several advantages over other African countries, namely that, in spite of everything, there was still “a reservoir of goodwill” (i.e. between the factions).

Now Tutu’s Rainbow Nation has become a key player in the conflict resolution industry. (Sorry about the creepy jargon.) Yes, it’s still one of the destinations that carries what amounts to an FCO “health warning” with high levels of crime, abysmal driving standards and the now almost universal risk of indiscriminate terrorist attack. But when it comes to forgiveness, Ubuntu rules and this brings me to my first U word.

U IS FOR UBUNTU.

“Ubuntu” in the Nguni languages (“botho” in the Sotho languages) is a concept that emphasises humanity.

Ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

A person is a person through other people.

Desmond Tutu has explained ubuntu in No Future Without Forgiveness (1999, Doubleday) and in God Has A Dream (2004, Doubleday) as “the essence of being human” as a concept in which “my humanity is inextricably bound up in yours”.

“A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are…”

Read Further Links:
Dr Timothy Muriti in Practical Peacemaking Wisdom from Africa: Reflections on Ubuntu
and Professor George Devenish’s Understanding the True Meaning of Ubuntu in Politics

U IS ALSO FOR UMMAH

I would have thought The Ummah would also be a powerful force for unity. How does it fit in here?

Now I’m on more uncertain ground and I would appreciate helpful comment.

The OED definition includes this reference: “The flexibility of government in Islam goes back—doesn’t it?—to the concept of ‘Umma’ in Islam, the idea that Islam came actually to build up an Umma, a community, rather than to impose a doctrine” (Jnrl.R.Soc.Arts CXXIV 613/1)

Isn’t The Ummah a concept in which there is also a supportive community? Yet the news, and blogs, make gloomy reading. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown refers, in The Independent to Darfur, where “an appalling number of African Muslims are being hounded, raped, killed and dispossessed by Arab militias - brothers-in-arms, fellow Muslims of the Ummah”.

Divisions between sects seem to mean that The Ummah applies only to that community which shares the same approach to the teachings of Islam.

Is this so? If so, why?

Lucky along the line

The heat today took me away from my computer and out into the shade. It could have been a welcome break from news and thoughts of war and slaughter, flight and its aftermath.

But because I am glued to the Middle East blogs, it’s not a case of taking a break, sipping a drink. I am, after all, looking for grace towards enemies. I take outside with me Pity the Nation and Country of My Skull. Two wounded nations.

I flick idly through Country of My Skull, skimming for the names of people I knew until I spot a reference to Joyce Seroke, and several paragraphs further on, to Ellen Kuzwayo too. So it is, hooked by two giants Joyce and Ellen, that I come across the testimony of Deborah Matshoba and read about the man Taljaard.

During Deborah Matshoba's first detention in the Old Fort, she was returned to her cell after harsh, harrowing interrogation over several days, during which she became delirious and collapsed.

She recalled in her testimony to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “The cell was swarming with lice. The blankets were caked and smelt of urine. I didn’t know where I was, I was screaming and shouting and had severe asthma attacks.”

“But,” she added, “I was lucky along the line. Because an Afrikaner came, Taljaard, I’ll never forget his name. He said he thought I was mad. I told him I was a political prisoner. He listened carefully and smuggled an asthma spray and some tablets in and helped me to hide it behind the toilet.”

Incredulity and humility compete as I return to these words:

But I was lucky along the line.

Pity the Lebanon - Again, again

As a friend and wellwisher of the Lebanon, I would like to draw attention to the Open Lebanon Forum as a source of up to date news and comment, particularly during the current crisis.

How does "above all nations" resonate for you?

I have been working up a minor fret about possibly jingoistic connotations of “above all nations”, particularly to someone who googles the phrase.

Let me make it clear.

The title of the Catlin/Brittain/Hodges compilation was inspired by the inscription “Above all nations is humanity”.

I interpret this inscription as something of a counter-balance to any notions of national or religious superiority.

So I googled the entire phrase (i.e. “above all nations is humanity”) earlier this week. US links topped the list, which is hardly surprising, given that the inscription is carved on the Cornell campus.

Here are some interpretations of "above all nations is humanity":

George Ball reflecting, in 1999, on his first sighting of the inscription said: "it took me many decades before I realized what it really meant. It was identifying the greatest threat to the human race, national sovereignty, the idea that the nations of the world are autonomous, that they can do what they like within their own borders, that they are accountable to no one. During World War II, I recall a big sign I saw on the wall in a German school house which read "National Socialism is our people's greatest belief." It does not fit well with "Above all nations is humanity."

Nearly all the great atrocities of the 20th century are the result of the decisions made unilaterally by sovereign nations.

Here is the idea in the fine words of Max Frankel in a recent issue of the New York Times magazine: "Someday in the next century we will acknowledge that there can be no global rights without global laws and no way to write and enforce those laws without a global congress, courts and cops. As the lion in the jungle of nations, the United States is not ready to yield to higher authority. But in time we will realize, like the nations of Western Europe, that sovereignty has become the enemy of safety."

It appears also to be the motto of The Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois which devotes a page to its philosophy, along with translations of the phrase into several languages. (You need to scroll down. And they need to seek out more translations, the obvious ones coming to mind being Arabic, as well as the languages of Africa and South East Asia.)

Then elsewhere there's David Scott along with other residents of the Cosmopolitan Club commenting on their interpretation of its (selfsame) motto: "It's a worthy motto. I wish more people in the world took it to heart. Is the corollary of this, 'Beneath all nationalism lies inhumanity'?"

Flying the flag for Iraq

How about this, then? Now that the flags (of St George), have come down - we could put our flag waving and flag positioning skills to another cause.

How about we replace them with flags of Iraq? Even just for one day?

It does slightly go against the one humanity line, but just imagine the effect, even if there were only a tenth of the number of flags that were flying a week ago.

And we'd all know what the flag of Iraq looked like too.

Postcript: Read what's happening to Iraqi football supporters. (I don't know how to link to this particular post, so you'll need to scroll down to Wednesday May 31.)

Scoring for humanity

I read today yet another powerful post by Rachel of North London. Many times over the past year she has moved me to tears and many times to share her outrage.

Do they read her in Downing Street, I wonder? How can they not be moved by her penetrating coherent arguments, her tenacity, her compassion? She is the child in the crowd who is crying out that the Emperor is naked.

One of the points she made today really resonated with me, because it is the very thought that spurred me to start this blog.

Rachel wrote: “I think is the duty of every man and woman alive to seek justice and healing, to work for peace and reconciliation, to root out and report abuse and extremism, and to challenge and speak out what they find to be cruel and unfair. I do not think it matters what I call God, or whether I call on no God at all but instead look to a common humanity…”

Another thing that struck me quite forcibly was the reminder that "every day in Iraq is 7th July". This thought strikes me every single time I hear of another bombing with reports of scores dead.

Why do we not stop what we are doing, just once, as we have done with our minutes of silence for the victims of the London bombings - why do we not just once all stop what we are doing and step out of our offices and houses and schools on to our pavements in all our cities and stand, just once, for the people of Iraq?

What holds us back? Is it that we think a particular message will go out because of this? Perhaps that by commemorating somewhere else's dead we will be in some way be betraying our own?

I think we do need to make this kind of stand but how could one organise this, without it being taken over by groups with a different agenda? Think what it could mean if we showed the grace to make a grassroots gesture like this here, where we live in relative safety? No one would be marching anywhere, after all so we shouldn't need insurance or Health & Safety approval, or the cancellation of police leave.

Maybe we need a rock singer or a rapper to put a rhythm to this thought...

Above all nations, and above all the cliques of government, and above all extremists...is humanity.

We'll prove it yet.

I'm alright Jack. (Someone else can do it.)

“For evil to triumph it is sufficient for good men to do nothing.”

These words, and innumerable variants of them, are attributed to Edmund Burke. The closest Burke actually comes to these words is thought to be: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." This with the usual Wikipedia caveats...

No matter. I go with the first version, partly for sentimental reasons. Over 20 years ago in Cape Town, a fellow Black Sasher supplied me with dozens of orange stickers on which she had had these words printed. I worked out that lifts were good places to ‘place’ this message, provided I was the sole passenger (I am a coward). The stickers did not peel easily, and occasionally the lift doors opened just as I was placing one. Pretty soon I learnt to unobtrusively start the peel, before I got into the lift. I'm not even sure that the stickers delivered a clear message, as more than one person remarked that the message they sent depended on the reader's interpretation of who was good and what was evil!

I felt rage and despair often, in South Africa, because of the "I'm alright Jack" attitude of people who disapproved of racism yet who, I believed, were doing nothing.

So who are our good men, doing something today?

Here's one. Hassan is a Northerner, who has been writing eloquently about the impact of the London bombings. His latest is a Letter from Leeds, which has been posted by Rachel of North London.

Thank you, Hassan, for speaking out and for not passing the buck.

Six Degrees of Separation

I thought of asking Jill Carroll if any of her captors, or their cronies, had shown her any kindness during her 82 days of captivity. On 8 May, The Christian Science Monitor invited its readers to put questions to Jill. Unfortunately, this invitation seems to have been online for a mere 24 hours — I only came across it a day or so after the deadline.

Yet the link seemed to work still, so I filed my question under “What do you want to ask Jill Carroll?” I’ve had no response and it doesn’t seem as though anything’s been added to the update blog since. In fact, the Monitor has gone very quiet on Ms Carroll.

So who else do we know of who was vulnerable in the presence of enemies? Norman Kember? Surely there aren’t that many links between me and someone who knows him? Norman Kember’s gone very quiet too, though it’s not hard to see why both Jill Carroll and Norman Kember have every reason to seek refuge from further inquisition.

And how do I find an Iraqi who can testify to a humane gesture from an American soldier?

Will the people who constitute the six degrees of separation between me and any of these, please step forward?

An Audience in Beirut

I've remembered an article, written by Robert Fisk, that I read some time ago. It appeared in The Independent, but unfortunately you have to pay to read most, if not all, of Fisk's articles in their archive. This charging to view really does bother me, not least because it goes against the original idea of the Internet as being freely accessible to all. I've managed to find a different link to the article, which I've added to the links under Breaking the Mould - it's to the right of this page.

Fisk was encouraged by the response of "a Muslim audience in Beirut ... most of them in their 20s" to the moment in Kingdom of Heaven when Saladin sent his own doctors to a Christian king.

He wrote, "At this, there came from the Muslim audience a round of spontaneous applause. They admired this act of mercy from their warrior hero; they wanted to see his kindness to a Christian".

Yes, the event they applauded happened centuries ago, but the Lebanon is a nation recently ravaged by war and a country where still today brave men and women are being targeted by assassins.

I salute that audience. This generation inspires hope.

Blog addiction

Last Thursday to Goldsmith's Hall to hear Helena Kennedy deliver a Gresham Lecture, Walking the Line: preserving liberty in times of insecurity. As always, it all seemed eminently logical, sensible and moral - while I was listening. Does a wary hesitation indicate, I wonder, that recent events, rather than piling on of decades, have shifted me from the ideals I once soaked up thirstily from liberal philosphers like Leo Marquard? I couldn't find a transcript of the lecture on the Gresham website but I did get diverted by Vernon Bognador's latest lecture on the Judges and the Constitution, with its references to his Human Rights lecture last year.

Another loop, another detour. And so day by day I get diverted from my search for signs of humanity. Sometimes it's a detour to wrestle with, or clutch to, a liberal argument, but mostly it's the sheer weight of atrocities and dismal news that depresses.

What has made me hit the Create button today is that I've had a couple of really useful prompts/prods/pointers in comments on two posts. As a relatively new blogger, who's not yet ready to share this URL with her friends and colleagues, I am surprised that I get any comments at all. None of my 'frivolous' blogs draws in any comments at all, so I rather imagined this would at first really be just a case of my thinking aloud, communicating with the ether, and maybe using the blog to keep me on track, scanning for sparks of hope.

Of course I want to make ripples, but I thought naively I would have to spread the word about the blog to get any sort of response, and that I imagined would be once I'd written a few posts, gathered some anecdotes and could feel a momentum building.

Yet some posts have raised a comment, and my curiosity about the posters, has taken me to blogs which draw me right in and right away from what should be my spark-seeking priorities. So these detours are a learning experience and that's humbling too.

Also, those comments have been a boost especially as they appear whenever I think this isn't going to work or when I've read something like, yesterday, a review of Left to Tell I tie myself in niggly knots wondering if this "counts" as a spark of humanity shown towards an enemy. This is how ridiculous my side-tracking is: because the man who sheltered the woman was a Hutu priest, "technically" he was their enemy, but as a priest he had his thoughts focused on an altogether different, "spiritual" tribe - ergo, does it count?

How do they find me? Is it a complete chance, i.e. via the random Next Blog button? One early comment was from someone who had apparently read about my site on another website but when I google my own blog, I don't even come across it. So it's puzzling.

I'm starting to think about whether I should try to count "my" hits. Is this natural curiosity? Or just plain vanity?

At what cost to humanity...

Six teachers were assassinated in Iraq in the course of the past week.

The toll, according to Saturday's issue of The Guardian:

Balad Ruz: Gunmen kill 4 primary school teachers. (Monday)

Kerbala: Gunmen on a motorcycle shoot a school teacher dead. (Thursday)

Kirkuk: Gunmen shoot dead a school teacher and a student. (Thursday)

(And in another attack on teachers and learners, a bomb at al-Mustansiriya University killed one and injured eleven...) (last Sunday)

How can the children ever feel safe again?

Where is humanity?

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.

Day after day after day

Day 1 having involved the somewhat impulsive setting up of this weblog, Day 2 started with some serious stalling tactics like trying to make sense of the sidebar's HTML code, followed by searching for a good example of a magnanimous enemy from the 1945 compilation.

Suddenly somehow, the language of the anthology seemed so foreign and stilted that I began to feel myself at such a distance from it, that I began to ask myself: Have I, in my naivete, simply failed to recognise that, like the changes in the way we speak and write, we are all utterly changed since 1945. Am I not in pursuit of something that no longer exists?

I woke to "Nineteen dead in Baghdad" and, heavy-hearted. typed www.baghdad.com instead of www.blogger.com I use Google Earth to look at Baghdad even though I realise that this is just making me even more moved by the plight of those who will walk along those roads today. Right now they may be brushing their teeth, reaching for labneh - only to be slaughtered before noon, while queueing for work.

I also remembered reading, I think in one of the colour supplements, the mention by a Palestinian of a single occasion on which his family had been 'shielded' by an Israeli soldier amongst a search party . I spent part of this morning trying to find some reference to the report online, but without success. I need to enlist help here - collaborators!

"Atrocity-mongering is the rule in every war..."

The rule, yes? Or not?

This post's title comes from the Foreword to Above All Nations. The original book, a slim volume, not even available today on Find in a Library, was published by Victor Gollancz in 1945, as the war drew "to its close in a welter of terror and agony for millions".

I came across a second-hand copy of the book in Fish Hoek, South Africa, last October, at a time when I was transcribing letters that my mother had received from a close friend during the Second World War, and was consequently particularly curious about contemporary feelings and attitudes.

The intention of the compilers, George Catlin, Vera Brittain and Sheila Hodges was to show "that even amidst the illimitable degradation of modern warfare men of all nations [could] be decent and merciful to those who, at the very moment [were] their mortal enemies".

"Hope must come, if it is to come at all" he continued, "from...the faith that in every human being some goodness is latent". Can we feel that hope today? Can we find magnimosity in a bleak landscape?

Today, with this blog, I have taken the first steps towards creating something like a sequel to Above All Nations. I'm planning to use a Google Page to create a web site that will record humane acts towards enemies, whether hostages, civilians or soldiers - even though this record may well be a mere mole-hill beside a noisy mountain of atrocities - anything, anything to counter my heavy sense that, as Auden wrote, suffering is taking place "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along" - or blogging...