Reconciliation, Mission and Ministry in a Changing Social Order. - book reviews

Christian Century, August 11, 1993 by Roy H. May, Jr.

By Robert J. Schreiter. Boston Theological Institute Series Volume 3. Orbis, $10.95 paperback.

The declaration of a general amnesty in El Salvador less than a week after the United Nations' Truth Commission released its report detailing human rights atrocities and other abuses committed in a more-than-decade-long civil war illustrates a central moral and political problem haunting that nation and so many other countries: reconciliation.

The calls for amnesty were immediate. President Alfredo Cristiani urged El Salvador to "forgive and forget because we can no longer continue resisting ourselves, confronting ourselves, denigrating ourselves, or accusing ourselves, but must close that page and continue forward." Said a leader of the ARENA party: "The Salvadoran family needs to come together. We must pardon each other, one side as well as the other." A member of the rightist Authentic Christian Movement party argued, "If Salvadorans are capable of forgiveness, then the reconciliation of our homeland is possible."

But does amnesty define reconciliation? Although it does not mention amnesty, Robert J. Schreiter's book provides resources for understanding reconciliation in a context such as El Salvador. From the beginning Schreiter reminds us of what reconciliation is not. Above all, it is not a "hasty peace" that "tries to deal with a history of violence by suppressing its memory." Reconciliation as hasty peace trivializes and minimizes violence and abuse, and "tries to escape an examination of the causes of suffering." As Schreiter says, "A quick way to identify this kind of false reconciliation is to look at who is calling for reconciliation and what they want forgotten."

In the case of El Salvador, that task is easy: the staunchest proponents of amnesty are those the Truth Commission indicted as guilty of at least 85 percent of the country's human rights crimes--the government and the ruling ARENA party. What they want to prevent is implementation of the commission's recommendation that the perpetrators be banned from Salvadoran political life and suffer other sanctions.

Amnesty in the interest of a hasty peace is not reconciliation. Victimizers cannot forgive themselves, Schreiter explains; only the victims can forgive them. At bottom, Schreiter reminds us, "Reconciliation involves a fundamental repair to human lives." Gregorio Rosa Chavez, Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, though agreeing that everyone wants pardon to prevail, contends that pardon requires justice--"not a vindictive justice, but one that heals wounds."

Is amnesty a political solution? Observes Peter Weiss of Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (Pantheon, 1990), a study of public efforts to "settle accounts" following torture regimes in Brazil and Uruguay: "How stable is a society in which yesterday's torturers and executioners go about their business, including participation in politics, as if they had committed no crimes?" (Human Rights Quarterly, November 1992). What legitimacy and moral credibility can such circumstances offer?

In El Salvador amnesty is an immediate political solution of the basest kind, one that solves nothing over the long run and fails to heal wounds. It does not deal with the country's fundamental political and moral problem. From a larger perspective the issue is, as Weiss frames it, "How shall torture be eliminated from the face of the earth if impunity for torture remains the rule of transition from a repressive to a rights-respecting regime? And how can a regime be said to be respective of rights if it ignores the rights of victims to justice?" How could any such government be capable of enabling justice and community--the very purposes of politics? Politics based on impunity for torturers can never lead to national reconciliation.

Amnesty may finally be a part of reconciliation and political solutions, but only at the end, not at the beginning, of a process.

Indeed, reconciliation is more of a process than an end point to be achieved. It moves over time and involves painful but intentional remembering. Victims and their families have to tell their stories, and they have to be heard and believed. Their remembering must write a new narrative, one that replaces or breaks what Schreiter calls the "narrative of the lie."

Violence and abuse become narratives of the lie because they destroy people's identity and "are intended to negate the truth of a people's own narratives" and preserve the oppressor's narrative as the official one, the one everybody is supposed to believe.

The narrative of the lie must be replaced by a narrative of redemption. Just telling the stories can be redemptive. A Chilean exiled during the horrible Pinochet regime says, "I think that the dead, more than justice, demand the truth. They do not want revenge, nor one death in exchange for another. The dead clamor fearlessly for truth, because that is the only way to reconcile memory to the past while still defying the future" (Marjorie Agosin, "The Generation of Disenchantment," Human Rights Quarterly, February 1992). Narrative becomes redemptive when it sustains defiance of the future. That is why the Truth Commission's report is dangerous and why amnesty had to be declared: the authorities wanted to shelve the report because it contains the beginning of a narrative of redemption.