Mandela left his jail and threw his energies into the future, whereas you, Fadwa, dragged your life into the past. His humiliations and those of his people made him hate the act of humiliation; your humiliation, on the other hand, turned into a desire to humiliate, a desire that was fed by a relentless, insatiable, morbid energy. Remembering your bitterness, Fadwa, I cling to the example of Nelson Mandela, and I set great store by his decision to pardon and forgive and to turn the ugliest past into a bright new future. The defenders of apartheid will be pardoned for crimes, or so Mandela promised shortly after his election as president of South Africa. And he promised that there would be no dismantling of the symbols and monuments that were dear to the whites, not without intense, patient, serious discussion.
‘Most white police officers and others who killed or tortured in defence of apartheid would be given indemnity for their crimes and would not be publicly named.’4 The government of Nelson Mandela created a Commission for Truth and Reconciliation that had a mandate to create ‘understanding but not vengeance’ for the past, ‘reparation but not retaliation’.
Here the victims are not acting as victims. They are acting as the best of human beings. You, Fadwa, only succeeded in making your husband’s old age miserable and your own life impermeable to fun and tenderness. You were as solid as a rock, for resentment has the texture of heavy metal while forgiving is conceived by a melting of substance. That is why I am afraid when I think of Mandela, and that is why I keep my fingers crossed when I look to South Africa.
Some South Africans say that forgiving and forgetting would be a recipe for disaster. They say that a full amnesty would not help reconciliation, that a failure to deal with the gross abuses of apartheid would only leave the wounds of the past festering. Understanding unacceptable behaviour encourages unacceptable behaviour – so says the futurist Robert Theobald, in another context. But is there one position that we can say is a correct position? This question keeps coming back to us as we confront the endless list of situations in which atrocities are the norm. From the horrors of the Holocaust to the appalling scenes in Rwanda, from the starving prisoners in Serbian concentration camps to the blood-filled stadium where Pinochet kept his prisoners in Chile, and then to the indiscriminate massacres by Muslims and Christians alike in my own country – to all this our answers and solutions never seem to be adequate. And they are certainly never sufficiently preventive. Should harsh punishment – as one might conclude from the futurist’s statement – be the answer? Should we believe that the South African model will succeed, and should we take the example of Chile, where Pinochet and his friends now live a perfectly normal life? Might we agree with President Menem of Argentina that the people who are spreading scandals and promoting Scilingo’s revelations are muckrakers who care nothing for the reconstruction of the country?
It is as tempting to believe in the merits of amnesia as it is to jump to the sad and pessimistic conclusion that what happened to you in the past inevitably determines how you will behave in the future. Howard Jacobson expressed in poignant terms the inevitable ugliness of the victims’ response, in a newspaper article on Baruch Goldstein’s bloody attack on the Palestinians who were praying in the Hebron Mosque, in which dozens of Arabs were killed in a hail of machine-gun fire. He called his article ‘What Baruch did to God’: ‘Out of martyrology grows demonology. Put it how you like: worms turn, ugly ducklings become swans, victims acquire a taste for perpetration, cowards decide it’s time to be heroes.’5
Latifa did not turn into an ugly worm. But who today any longer remembers what she – or Umm Ali – looked like? Her victimizers were happy to see her vanish, and her former comrades had plenty of other martyrs to boast of and had no need to be dealing with her. She was a useless hero who hadn’t been smart enough to leave behind a photograph for her future glorification into martyrdom and further acts of revenge.
Truth. You were pretty strict on this subject, Mme Nomy. In fact, I would say that you were actually a bit rigid. There was another time when I incurred your disapproval for my writing. You had given us a very simple title for a French-language essay. The old chestnut: ‘Describe in three pages how you spent your weekend.’ It never occurred to me that my account was expected to be realistic, so I proceeded to describe the scene in ‘our country cottage’. I wrote about how my father sat peacefully and solemnly in his imposing armchair next to the fireplace, smoking his ebony pipe. I told of the leather-bound book that I placed on his lap, and the sheepdog that sat at his feet. I showed my mother gardening and myself playing on the grass. You thoroughly disapproved of this imagined weekend. You called it a lie: ‘This comes directly from some French novel that you must have been reading,’ you said. ‘It has nothing to do with the truth of your own reality. I wish you had been truthful. Good writing is when writing is sincere. Truth is what I expect from a good student.’
Perhaps, Mme Nomy, your aim was to teach us not to be culturally imperialized. But I cannot agree with your definition of writing. In a creative work one can be sincere and untruthful at the same time. Maybe it was true, perhaps I had read too many books by the Comtesse de Ségur and maybe my imagination had placed me in the cottage of one of her (and my) heroines. Literature has always been obsessed with the puzzle of truth. Tragedy pounds endlessly on with dilemmas of revenge and punishment, love and forgiveness. Tragedy still entertains us with the dilemmas that politics can’t be bothered with.
In the early 1990s, a modern tragedy, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, rose to sudden world acclaim. It was written at a time when the question of amnesty for torturers was being raised in many parts of the world. It was censored in Chile, its country of origin. It was performed for the first time at the ICA in London in 1990. (This was thanks to a woman who died too young – Linda Brandon, an intelligent and lively organizer of talks at the ICA.) Dorfman had written a play about three characters caught in a triangle of torture, revenge and retribution.
Let me tell you about it. I have no idea where you are living now, and whether you will ever see it, but discussing it will help me begin the debate that I never had with you, about truth as an absolute virtue.
Gerardo Escobar is the husband of Paulina Salas. He sits on the commission that has been set up to investigate the crimes of the Chilean dictatorship. He is a lawyer, and he supported the commission’s decision that it would neither name nor judge the perpetrators of these crimes. One day, on his way home, Gerardo has a problem with his car, and a pleasant-mannered man, Dr Roberto Miranda, sees him in trouble and helps him out. Gerardo invites this pleasant Dr Miranda back to his house as a way of thanking him for his help. Paulina is distressed when she sees the visitor. She is sure that he is the doctor who supervised her torture. She wants him punished. When her husband questions her need for revenge, Paulina sequesters Dr Miranda, ties him up, and threatens to kill him unless he confesses. When Gerardo tries to reason with her, his arguments are those of a politician, or a person who believes in forgiveness in order to rebuild. He begs his wife to set the doctor free:
Yes. If he’s guilty, more reason to let him go. Don’t look at me like that. You want to scare these people and provoke them, Paulina, till they come back, make them so insecure that they come back to make sure we don’t harm them … You satisfy your own personal passion, you punish on your own, while the other people in this country with scores of other problems who finally have a chance to solve some of them, those people can go screw themselves – the whole transition to democracy can go screw itself.
Paulina – like the heroine of a revenge tragedy – feels betrayed. She keeps asking, ‘What about me?’ She expresses her burning need for justice. ‘You know what I was thinking of? Doing to them, systematically, minute by minute, instrument by instrument, what they did to me … I was horrified at myself. That I should have such hatred in me, that I should want to do something like that to a defenceless human being, no matter how vile.’
Revenge tragedies are built around
the notion of a person prosecuting a crime in a private capacity, a sort of sublime vigilante. Unlike the figure played by Charles Bronson in the popular movies, they are deeply torn about the only solutions that seem open to them. Heroes of revenge tragedies have to take matters into their own hands because society has failed to establish justice through its normal channels. Paulina is the perfect heroine of a terrible affliction. She is denied even the satisfaction of the recognition of their misdeeds by her torturers and rapists, let alone seeing them punished.
I don’t know Dorfman’s own personal stance on these questions. His strength is that we are alternately convinced by the mutually contradictory arguments of both Paulina and her husband. How can we choose to hide the truth, forget, and hope for a better future, he seems to be asking. At the same time he puts into Gerardo’s mouth words that transcend the political narrowness of the situation and invites us to join Gerardo in begging Paulina to forgive. For her own sake, even we, like Gerardo, want her to forget. ‘Look at you love,’ he tells her tenderly, ‘you’re still a prisoner, locked up with them [her torturers] in that basement …’
Sometimes Dorfman joins Jacobson in his suggestion that the victimizer engulfs the victim into his frame of mind – ‘victims acquire a taste for perpetration’. At other times he joins those who prefer to forgive and think only of the future – of healing instead of the search for justice. For instance, in his afterword to the play he asks: ‘How do we forget without risking its [the atrocities implemented by the dictatorship] repetition in the future? Is it legitimate to sacrifice the truth to ensure peace?’
Is Paulina pushing us to ‘blame the victim’? ‘Imagine what would happen if everyone acted like you did. You satisfy your own personal passion, you punish on your own.’
After having seen some awful reactions from the ‘victims’ in Lebanon’s civil war, I have more problems than I used to with justifications of and allowances for the victim’s reactions. I can understand a victim needing to regain his or her self-esteem. I can understand them calling for retribution. But the savagery inflicted by the Holocaust is no justification for the humiliations imposed by the Israeli state on the Palestinians. Many Jews reacted with the utmost humanity after what they had been through. Many came out saying: ‘Never again should we allow this to happen to any human being.’ Their victimization had turned them not into perpetrators, but into devoted partisans of a better world, a world that abhors torture, racism, and national discrimination. Most Holocaust victims did not turn into perpetrators. And if a few did, ex-victims or not, they are to be blamed. Rarely does a woman who has been raped wish to see her aggressor raped. Equally rare are the women who would take a hammer to destroy the person they see as responsible for the death of a brother. When I saw this happen, I knew it was a terrible exception.
Primo Levi, in The Truce, tells a story that says more than any essay or study about humanity’s dilemma when it faces the choice between pardon and revenge. In this book he tells of what happened to him and his fellow prisoners after the Red Army had freed them from Auschwitz, as they were trying to find their way back home. They wandered for several months in Central Europe, hungry and miserable, thanks to the bureaucratic blunders of the Russian administration. Levi and his fellow inmates ended up in Zhmerinka. All he could say about the place was that it was located some 300 km (190 miles) from the city of Odessa. By then he and his companions had been reduced to begging in order to survive. In Zhmerinka they had an encounter,
which destiny had organized … A dozen German prisoners, like unattended cattle … as far as we could see, they had been forgotten, simply abandoned to their fate … They saw us, and some of them waved towards us with the uncertain steps of automata. They asked for bread; not in their own language, but in Russian. We refused, because our bread was precious. But Daniele did not refuse; Daniele whose strong wife, whose brother, parents and no less than thirty relatives had been killed by the Germans; Daniele, who was the sole survivor of the raid on the Venice ghetto, and who from the day of the liberation had fed on grief, took out a piece of bread, showed it to these phantoms, and placed it on the ground. But he insisted that they come to get it dragging themselves on all fours, which they did docilely.
Levi does not elaborate on the story. He simply tells it. He provides evidence, as the indefatigable testifier. For testifying, in the view of Daniele Sallenave, is ‘the ultimate relationship we can have with the dead; testifying is to be their voice, their messenger, their interpreter. The witness cannot discharge himself from the anguish and the fault of having survived; he can however charge himself with the mission of transmitting. The debt towards the dead is transformed into a duty towards those who are not yet born.’ Primo Levi simply transmits this terrifying little story and leaves the difficult task of drawing conclusions to us. Daniele, the victim who had suffered most among this group of survivors, whom we might have expected to wish the death of the German soldiers, was the only one who gave them food. His generosity is almost unbearable. But he did not just give his bread; he gave a terrible lesson too. A lesson in the nature of humiliation. The soldiers had to be shown what it meant to have to accept dehumanization – to be reduced to the posture of animals – if they wanted to survive. Or was it that Daniele was taking a small revenge by telling them ‘I am better than you … I will help you survive, but first I will have my little revenge and enjoy seeing you humiliated, just as you humiliated me when I was helpless’?
One day the people of ex-Yugoslavia, like those of Lebanon before them, will be able to wake up without the sounds of bullets and go to sleep without needing to shelter from missiles. What will they do about those who killed their loved ones, raped their women, and tortured their prisoners? Would they say in time of peace Borislav Herak will become a ‘normal’ human being again? Like I hope Said had become, even though I do not dare get close enough to find out. Herak was a nice (albeit failed) soldier in Yugoslavia before the war, his brother-in-law was a Bosnian Muslim, and they got along very well. But in the chaotic bloody rage of the war of hatred, he became not only a Bosnian hater, but also a male who would try to use his other weapon, his penis, in order to inflict a humiliation that weapons could not inflict. Did Said rape any women?
Were all these terrible acts committed by people who had simply been ‘pris dans un engrenage’ – ‘caught up in a machine’ – the words used by François Mitterrand to justify the leniency shown to René Bousquet, the Vichy regime’s police chief from April 1942 to December 1943? Bousquet was responsible for the arrest of 13,152 Jews, including 4,115 children.
Bousquet was a high official who was pris dans un engrenage … Bousquet was a prototype of these high officials who were compromised or who allowed themselves to be compromised to a degree.
It would be too easy to explain Mitterrand’s attitude by reference to his political past, and all the discussions about his own WWII career that featured in the press and on TV during his final days in power. His plea – ‘We cannot live all the time on these memories and this rancour’ – was that of a man who knew how it is possible for people to change, and who wanted to be remembered as the president who abolished capital punishment in France. Pompidou once said something similar, commenting many years earlier on France’s recurring scandals and tales of heroism, a legacy from the years of Nazi occupation: ‘I hate all that business,’ he said. ‘I hate medals, I hate decorations of all kinds.’
Simone Veil, the French Gaullist and ex-minister, was herself a victim of the likes of Bousquet. She was deported during the Occupation. Her account of her reaction upon learning that she had been ‘denounced as a Jew’ lacked any sense of vengefulness. She did not try to find out who had given her away, who had betrayed her. To those who commented on her lack of curiosity she replied with beautiful simplicity:
Deep down, I was not interested. I would have been interested to know why and how people had been drawn into this climate of denunciation. Or why responsible politicians or administrato
rs, as well as intellectuals, could be drawn in certain circumstances to accept certain things … because the question could still be raised, even forty years later.6
One day the people of Iraq will be rid of the horrifying oppressor who has so distorted their lives. Saddam Hussein cannot survive forever. One day they will be able to look forward to a freer life, and an end to the punishment that the International Community has inflicted on them (while signally failing to inflict it on their oppressor). What will happen if they decide to look backwards at the same time as looking forward?
Inspired by the Nuremberg Trials, the Iraqi Opposition issued a report entitled Crimes Against Humanity and the Transition from Dictatorship to Democracy (a report commissioned by the Executive Council of the Iraqi National Congress, May 1993) which concludes:
The INC wants to follow that successful precedent [the amnesty announced by the Kurdish organizations on the eve of the Iraqi uprisings of March 1991, which brought over to the rebel side all the Kurdish auxiliary units in the Iraqi army] with a view to isolating those individuals responsible for leading, organizing, instigating or participating in the formulation or execution of grievous abuses of human rights in Iraq since 1979, the date of Saddam Hussein’s ascension to the Presidency of the Republic … The all-encompassing amnesty referred to earlier covers all criminal acts against individual Iraqis committed by any army or civilian personnel up to 1 June 1993, the official date of issuance of this report. It does not cover, however, any civil violations which might be legitimately brought against any Iraqi at a later date.
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