If the greater responsibility lies with the system, as Primo Levi says, then why not judge the system and leave the people to deal with their guilt on their own? Tempting as it may be, such a statement really makes no sense. It is obvious that in almost all cases of crime, be they war crimes, private crimes, or crimes against humanity, something has to be done.
The conclusion of the 1989 conference organized by the Aspen Institute on ‘State Crimes, Punishment or Pardon’ was forthright:
Although there were different views as to the extent of the obligation to punish, there was common agreement that the successor government has an obligation to investigate and establish the facts so that the truth be known and be made part of the nation’s history. Even in situations where pardon or clemency might be appropriate, there should be no compromising of the obligation to discover and acknowledge the truth … The identity of the victims and what happened to them, and the identity of the planners and of the perpetrators must be made known … Truth telling, it was agreed, responds to the demand of justice for the victims …
This might be a possible response to situations such as those in Latin America and the rule of military dictatorships. As one of the participants in this conference observed:
Where a society has been fractured by a tyrannical regime and must be reconstructed and repaired, it may be a reasonable assumption, in some cases, that a degree of pacification will achieve more for human rights, in the long run, than insisting on punishment and risking political instability and continued social divisiveness.
Forgiving and Judging
Mario Vargas Llosa expressed a similar idea in an article entitled ‘Playing with Fire’,11 in which he called for forgiveness in Argentina:
Judging and punishing all the extraordinary cruelties perpetrated in Argentina? It would be wonderful, but it is impossible in practical terms … [The Argentinians] should get over their nausea – which is understandable – and their horror, and look towards countries such as Spain and Chile that have found ways of breaking the vicious circle, and have succeeded in burying the past in order to build a future. It is only when democracy has taken root, and a culture of legality and freedom has impregnated the whole society, that a country can be said to have armed itself against bestial violence …
These lines triggered a series of angry responses from writers and lawyers that were printed in Le Monde a week later. Llosa was spared no insult on those pages. Accusations of bad faith, ignorance, and cowardice, and even of advancing arguments that simply rephrased the Junta’s own justifications.
The conference at the Aspen Institute and the debate between Llosa and his critics were not dealing with situations of ethnic cleansing on the scale of the Holocaust or the massacre of the Armenians at the turn of the century. Nor were they dealing with the atrocities committed in Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere. They did not consider the responsibility of the victims when the choice was not between good and evil but ‘between murder and murder’. Their concern was: how can one be just and call for the exercise of justice, not for the sake of avenging the past, but for the sake of less future suffering? This question is not becoming easier in our modern world. On the one hand, ‘Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgements’.12 On the other, according to Shklar, who is trying to achieve the impossible task of demarcating the political from the legal in this domain, it is precisely because of our modernity that the task is becoming less easy:
For a social action to be termed just, however, one must first agree that it is in conformity with one’s system of rules, and since in any conceivable modern society there are always several competing systems of rules, it is not possible to say that any rule as such is just.
Let us take an example: in Lebanon a system of rules based on the rights of the individual coexists side by side with recognition of rules of tribal and blood relations. This fact accounts for the lenient punishments handed out in so-called ‘crimes of honour’.
(I remember, as a teenager, having read the frightening story of a man who had failed in his attempt to kill his daughter, who had been found not to be a virgin before her marriage. During the course of his one-year jail sentence for this attempt, he heard that his son had succeeded in murdering the poor woman. His reaction was complete jubilation. He started dancing and singing in jail. In a similar case of coexistence of differing systems of rules and contradictions, we might look at the judge who freed the Turkish mother and father in Paris, who had killed their daughter in order to preserve the honour of the family, and the angry reactions of feminist and individual human rights organisations. Postmodernism, unsurprisingly, did not produce many texts in the area of legislation!)
But Shklar is aware that political trials are not like ordinary criminal cases in their determination of legality and justice. This is because political interests, actions and circumstances, and people’s attitudes towards them are constantly in flux and are subject to conflicts of opinion. This is why Shklar observes, convincingly, that the main value of the Nurembeng Trials lies in the historical facts that they unearthed about the Nazi government. (One should remember that these trials put Germany’s war criminals and ethnic cleansing policies in the dock, but never thought to try the war crimes for which some Allied commanders had been responsible.)
The Nuremberg Trial of 1945 was not remarkable only because it was something entirely new in the history of international law. It was a great drama in which the most fundamental moral and political values were the real personae. Emotionally and philosophically it confronted every thoughtful individual with the necessity of making some clean decision about his beliefs.
Reconciliation
In Lebanon, in 1994, the victims of a massacre in the Chouf area were invited to participate in a three-day conference on ‘Acknowledgement, Forgiveness and Reconciliation – Alternative approaches to conflict resolution in Lebanon’.13 The village concerned, Maasir al-Chouf, a Christian enclave in a Druze-dominated area, had lived in peace for the major part of the civil war. So much so that a few days before the massacre, a number of French journalists, invited to visit this haven of civil war coexistence between two rival communities, had rushed home to write articles under headlines such as ‘Peace is still possible in Lebanon’, illustrated with big pictures of the local priest and the Druze sheikh shaking hands and smiling. The journalists wrote their articles on 7 March 1977. On 16 March, following the death of Kemal Jumblatt, Druze armed men opened fire on Christian houses in Maasir al-Chouf. They also kidnapped Christians in the village and killed them. When those self-same journalists – who felt betrayed – asked if they could visit the village again, officials of Jumblatt’s PSP (Parti Socialiste Populaire) told them that they could visit Maasir al-Chouf if they first visited Kfar Matta, a village where the Christian militias had massacred Druze inhabitants.
In this conference for reconciliation, designed to encourage the relocation of the Christian refugees in their village of Maasir, the victims of the violence made a statement.
We buried our dead with dignity, we transcended our wounds and we forgave … The State wants time to work towards a solution; time would weaken resentment, and the effect of forgetting would be that the demands for justice would recede. We, the victims, are not asking for the impossible. But we refuse to be ignored, neglected and subjected to a fait accompli. We insist on our right to return to our village and our land. This is why we find it necessary to enter into a process of dialogue based on reflection and compensation, and to create acceptable solutions so that we do not turn the future into a field of experimentation for human brotherhood, which has no guarantee of success … We believe in giving back pride to its owners … at the same time we believe in the logic of coexistence.
There is something tragic in these words. Tragic not only in the rhetorical tone that the victims felt that they had to adopt in the context of a semi-official conference, but also in the genuine inner
struggle of these people – their need for justice, which they are trying to minimize, and their fear for the future if nothing ends up being said about responsibility for the massacres. There is a dignity here, despite the tone of Arabic rhetoric, similar to the dignity with which they had buried their dead.
If the need for vengeance is a fact of life, the meaning of civilized coexistence has long been rightly understood as the intervention by legal or social procedures in order to limit the possibility of this vengeance, and to use legal means and compensations in order to re-establish a possible coexistence between the one who caused the injury and the person injured. But the advanced Western societies are themselves not immune to outbursts of barbarism. I still cannot believe that a Home Secretary of the British government, Michael Howard, could promise in a BBC radio interview that any decision on the length of a sentence of imprisonment would take into account the way the public viewed the possible release of the prisoners. He was addressing the case of the two young boys who had murdered the three-year-old James Bulger. When it appeared after the court hearings that the child murderers might be freed after eight or ten years, the parents of the victim, as well as a large part of the public, were full of grief and anger. In one phrase the Home Secretary threw away one of the pillars of law-based societies: to take the business of punishment out of the hands of the victims and out of the hands of those members of society who may see themselves as possible future victims. As Neal Ascherson commented in an indignant article in The Independent (30 January 1994) entitled ‘When punishment becomes revenge, we’re on the road to barbarism’:
The doctrine of retribution, the infliction of pain to ease pain, is shambling back, a tattered ghost which once seemed to have been laid for good … But what matters is to understand what a leap backwards this [Howard’s declaration] is. As soon as it occurred to our ancestors that government might be about happiness rather than obedience, it was seen that punishment under the law must be designed to achieve something good, rather than balance something evil.
Yes, the ‘civilized countries’ are not immune.
Barbaric ideas need to be exposed, but unfortunately such ideas are often put into practice. Being against the death penalty myself, I cannot agree with the conclusion of Arendt, who after a lucid exposition of these matters is of the opinion that since Eichmann did not want to share this earth with the Jewish people and the people of other nations, ‘we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.’
Arendt is a very political person. I would prefer to leave the last word – not in the sense of a conclusion, but as another question mark – to Bertolt Brecht, to the language of tragicomedy:
The great political criminals must be exposed, and exposed especially to laughter. They are not great political criminals, but people who permitted great political crimes, which is something entirely different … One may say that tragedy deals with the suffering of mankind in a less serious way than comedy.14
1. Calvin Sims, ‘New Horrors from Argentina’s “Dirty War”’, New York Herald Tribune, 14 March 1995.
2. International Herald Tribune, 18 April 1995.
3. Courier International, 16–22 March 1995.
4. International Herald Tribune, 2 May 1994.
5. The Independent, 5 March 1994.
6. Le Monde, 23–4 January 1983.
7. See Flora Lewis, International Herald Tribune, 5 May 1995.
8. Le Monde, 6 April 1995.
9. See the exchange of letters between Günter Grass and Kinzaburo Oe in The Guardian, 6 May 1995.
10. Hannah Arendt, ‘Organised guilt and universal responsibility’ in Smith, R. W., ed. Guilt: Man and Society, Anchor Books, New York, 1971.
11. Le Monde, 18 May 1995.
12. Arendt, ibid, p. 338.
13. The proceedings were later published by University College, Beirut, April 1994.
14. Brecht’s notes for The Irresistible Rise of Arturo Ui, cited by Hannah Arendt in Men in Dark Times.
ISBN: 978 0 86356 676 9
eISBN: 978 0 86356 569 4
First published in 1998 by Saqi, London
This second edition published in 2007
© The estate of Mai Ghoussoub, 2007
Foreword © Maggie Gee, 2007
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