JUSTICE AND THE BURDENS OF HISTORY

Joseph V. Montville

Published in: Mohammed Abu Nimer (Ed.) Reconciliation, Coexistence, and Justice in Interethnic Conflict: Theory and Practice. (Lexington Books, 2001).

Introduction

Justice may be one of the most useful concepts in coming to grips with the challenge of peacebuilding.  A good deal of the discussion of justice focuses on retribution, how a social system protects its members from various forms of harm or transgressions by other members.  Here the threat and imposition of punishment against perpetrators is seen as basic to the functioning of a society.  Recently, there has been increasing interest in the concept of restorative justice that goes beyond simple punishment to seeking healing of conflicted relationships as the most reliable way of defending against recurrence of crime. This essay deals with an aspect of restorative justice as it relates psychologically to the dignity and self-esteem of individuals and the design of reconciliation strategies for peacemaking.

          In its most general sense, justice implies order and morality.  That is, justice means predictability in the daily life of a community and its individual members and the observance of basic rules governing right and wrong behavior.   Justice serves the interests of life and the advancement of the human species, because it is perhaps the most fundamental element of peace.  Indeed, it is a truism that there is no peace without justice.  But from both a moral and dynamic perspective, it is very important to define peace and justice not only as the absence of war and the enforcement of laws, but also as progress toward the optimum environment for the fulfillment of human developmental potential.

          Observers of human behavior in society, from Hobbes and Marx to Freud and Durkheim, have worked to construct analytical theories to predict human behavior and the course of politics and history.  More recently, the eclectic community of scholars who have created the discipline of political psychology have illuminated the conceptual landscape by combining the knowledge of human development and motivation with the knowledge of social systems and institutions.  One of political psychology’s most important contributions has been the development of human needs theory to explain the biological and psychosocial imperatives of human existence and how frustration of natural instincts and needs leads to conflict and reactive violence. Human needs theory is essential to understanding the genesis of political conflict in general and of ethnic and sectarian conflict and violence in particular.  It is also critical to the design of effective conflict resolution intervention strategies in the cause of genuine peace and justice.     

Human Needs and the Defense of the Self

          Adapting Abraham Maslow’s (1954) graduated listing of needs genetic to every human being, there are (1) the basic physical survival needs for food, shelter, clothing, reasonable health, and safety from attack.  Then come (2) the relational or social needs for affection and connectedness to nuclear family and wider identity group.  The more psychologically complex needs for self-esteem and the esteem of others—for dignity—which are critical for a basic sense of security follow as (3), and the self-actualization stage, or the opportunity to fulfill one’s developmental potential, is at (4) humankind’s luxury aspiration. 

          In preindustrial societies the possibilities for individuals discovering their gifts for science, the arts, scholarship, athletics, or other life skills are harshly limited by the need to devote most of their waking hours to securing enough food and maintaining shelter to stay alive and physically functional.  In industrial societies there are far more opportunities to discover individual talents because of the division of labor and variety of specialties the marketplace and community require.  Yet even in these cases, sudden loss of a job or serious illness quickly knocks one back down to the level of survival anxiety unless there are family or social safety nets that guarantee basic needs regardless of the individual’s ability to earn.  Thus, as James Chowning Davies (1986) puts it: “Physical needs are well secured only where people are living in the most developed, integrated, prosperous, interdependent, and nonviolent industrialized societies—and only among perhaps 10 to 20 percent of the people living in these advanced, emancipated societies.  It has taken more than four hundred years—from the wars of the Reformation to the second generation after World War II—to secure the good life for what remains a minority in the most orderly and open conditions (p.51).” 

          Davies also notes the sense of powerlessness that accompanies the inability of the vast majority of people to secure their basic physical and esteem needs.  It is clear that this level of analysis raises the broadest issues of social and distributive justice that are beyond the scope of this essay. The focus here is on identity and esteem needs, which are extremely vulnerable to political violence and aggression.  Sadly, for many nations and peoples, traumatic loss dominates their memory of history.  It is these losses, these wounds that constitute the burdens of history and the enduring sense of injustice that make peacebuilding so difficult for traditional diplomats and political leaders.

          The psychology of victimhood is an automatic product of aggression and resultant traumatic loss in individuals and peoples.  The refusal of aggressors to acknowledge the pain of the hurts inflicted on victims, and therefore the absence of remorse by the aggressors, creates an overwhelming sense of injustice in the victims.  A society, a leadership, a world, and, indeed, a universe the victims had heretofore assumed would shield them from harm have all let them down.  Their new psychology would henceforth keep the victimized people highly suspicious and on permanent alert for future acts of aggression and violence.  It would also make them strongly resistant to pressures to make peace before the aggressors acknowledge the victims’ losses and ask forgiveness for their violence.  The victims’ collective sense of security in their identity, their self-concept,  their basic dignity, and a future for their children have been dealt a devastating blow.

          This concept of victimhood psychology is derived from dynamic or depth psychology, especially the subfield called ego psychology or psychology of the self. But it is interesting, and gratifying, to note that some specialists in philosophy and law have come to similar conclusions about the harm to the victim’s self resulting from criminal acts.  Thus, Jeffrie Murphy (1988), dealing with the issues of forgiveness, mercy, and justice, sees the resentment in victims of crime, and their consequent demand for retributive justice, as defense, above all, of the self .  Murphy writes, “In my view, resentment (in its range from righteous anger to righteous hatred) functions primarily in defense, not of all moral values and norms, but rather of certain values of the self….I am…suggesting that the primary value defended by the passion of resentment is self-respect, that proper self-respect is essentially tied to the passion of resentment…”(p. 16). Gregory Rochlin (1978), emeritus professor of psychiatry at the HarvardMedical School, has written from the perspective of a clinician at a community-based psychiatry department at Cambridge Hospital.  In Man’s Aggression: The Defense of the Self, Rochlin reported on his experience in treating patients in addition to his scholarly research.  He found that insults to or aggression against the self-concept produced an automatic reactive aggression in defense of the self.  His thesis is that narcissism, which he defined as love of the self, is a fundamental part of the human being’s psychological security system.  Narcissism is critical to the defense of the self.  Thus when the love of the self is jolted either through threat, insult or, especially, physical assault, there is an automatic, fear-based psychophysiological reaction. Everett Worthington (1998) has described the fear-based stress response system of the victim as elevations in epinephrine, corticosteroids, and other stress hormones.  This stress-response system can be mobilized by the sight of the aggressor, or hearing sounds associated with him or them, or simply through recalling from memory the original threat or attack.

          The initial reaction of the victim is to avoid or withdraw from the offender.  If this is not possible, then anger (narcissistic rage), retaliation, or fighting (in defense of the wounded self) occurs.  And, as Worthington writes, “if such fighting is unwise, self-destructive, or futile, the person might exhibit the human equivalent of a submissive gesture—depression, which declares that the person is weak or helpless and needs succor; depression usually elicits help and inhibits aggression” (p. 113-14).  It should be noted that animals show similar patterns of flight, fight, or surrender as part of an instinctive physical defense system when under attack.

          Thus in victimhood psychology, the individual or group, which by definition has sustained traumatic loss, is overwhelmed with a sense of existential injustice, and yet, in the absence of acknowledgment and remorse from the aggressor, still fears further attacks.  Memory sustains fear, which activates stress-related hormones, which overall mobilize individuals or groups into militance in defense of the self.  In this high state of narcissistic rage, sense of injustice, basic distrust, and continual fear, it is little wonder that ethnic and sectarian conflict has always been and continues to be so resistant to traditional diplomacy and negotiating processes.  As with individual victims of trauma, peoples and nations require complex healing processes to get beyond their psychological and physiological symptoms to become full partners in reconciliation and peacebuilding.

Individual and Group Reaction to Traumatic Loss

          Conflict resolution and reconciliation strategies often must deal with contemporary victims of traumatic violence and loss as well as members of identity groups or nations that have a memory of violent aggression in the past decades or centuries.  This produces a victimhood psychology based on group memory of the violent loss accompanied by an enduring injustice. Sometimes we must deal with both historic and personal loss in the same people.  Thus Jews in Israel might be recent victims of Palestinian terrorist bombings in buses or outdoor markets.  But they also have an internalized memory of Christian oppression in Europethroughout the ages and the nightmare of the Holocaust.  Catholics in Ireland have burned into their memory Cromwell’s genocidal aggression, repression, and degradation in the 17th century, the passive British genocide of the potato famines in the 19th century, and the experience of combat with the British police and army in the twentieth century.  Palestinians share the collective Arab memory of humiliation by European imperialism starting with Napoleon’s landing in Egypt in 1798, and more specifically their own defeat, displacement, and expulsion when the Jewish state was formed in 1948. As China defines its future relationship with the rest of the world, it is haunted by the memory of humiliation by Britain in the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, and the futile Boxer Rebellion of 1899 against victorious Western powers. Japan’s “rape” of Nankingin 1937 only nourished China’s sense of victimhood and its determination under Mao Tse Tung to regain  its self-respect and the respect of other nations by whatever means necessary.

          Psychiatry and clinical psychology continue to be the most important sources of scientific knowledge of the effect of political violence and traumatic loss on individuals and nations.  Another Harvard psychiatrist from the CambridgeHospital has written what may be the most definitive study to date on the effects of traumatic loss. It  is of equal value to individual rape or torture victims as it is to entire groups and nations that have suffered violent defeat.  In Trauma and Recovery (1992), Judith Lewis Herman has distilled a description of the effects of traumatic loss and a prescriptive approach that, as the cases below will attempt to show, is as relevant to ethnic and sectarian conflict resolution processes as it is to individual victims.

          In a chapter entitled “Remembrance and Mourning,” Lewis emphasizes a theme derived from her clinical experience that has been dominant in the work of the leading psychiatric political psychologist, Vamik Volkan (1988, 1997), and this writer (Montville, 1993 1997).  She writes, “Trauma inevitably brings loss.  Even those who are lucky enough to escape physically unscathed still lose the internal psychological structures of a self securely attached to others.  Those who are physically harmed lose in addition their sense of bodily integrity…Traumatic losses rupture the ordinary sequence of generations and defy the ordinary social conventions of bereavement.  The telling of the trauma story thus inevitably plunges the survivor into profound grief….[which] is the most necessary and the most dreaded task…of this stage of recovery” (p. 188).

          From the perspective of psychologically sensitive conflict resolution interventions, the challenge in dealing with victimhood psychology is that of reviving the mourning process, which has been suspended as a result of the traumatic experience, and helping to move it toward completion.  Storytelling is a central part of  the process, not only for the victim reconstructing the story, but also for the persons representing the aggressor group.  This form of telling and listening is best accomplished in the problem-solving workshop, the dominant tool of the conflict resolution practitioner.  But as will be seen below in the matter of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, storytelling can also achieve its purpose in large, public settings.

          For contemporary victims of political trauma, the process of eliciting details of the violence and loss can be difficult.  Not knowing is one way of describing the victim’s strong reluctance to recall the terror and pain associated with the event or events.  For representatives of groups or nations that have suffered traumatic loss in the past, the memory of which is passed from generation to generation, the problem is somewhat easier to overcome.  But even here, it is critically important for the third party in a dialogue to show great sensitivity in assuring the workshop participants of the safety of the dialogue setting and constantly validating their personal dignity and the experience they are relating.          

          Storytelling is also a form of ritual testimony that has healing powers.  As Lewis (1992) writes,  “Testimony has both a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect, which is political and judicial.  The use of the word testimony links both meanings, giving a new and larger dimension to the [victim’s] individual experience” (p. 181).  Lewis cites a therapist working with Southeast Asian refugees who says that in the telling of the story it is no longer an account of shame and humiliation.  Rather it becomes a story about dignity and virtue.  Victims in the process restore and regain their lives so that they can move on.  There are several examples below of individual stories told in small workshops or as public testimony before a truth and reconciliation commission.

          At this point, the author recalls the story of a Croatian Protestant minister who described to a group of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in 1996 how Serb militiamen cut a two-foot gash in his back with a bayonet and raped his daughter in his presence. His listeners were stunned by the brutality of the acts but also deeply moved by his courage and commitment to rebuilding community with the Serbs of eastern Croatia. The minister had regained his dignity and established himself as an exemplar of moral power.  Skeptics may still challenge the contention that the therapeutic treatment of individual victims of trauma can be used to guide the design and implementation of conflict resolution strategies in ethnic and sectarian conflicts. Thus, it is again gratifying to turn to another practitioner of the law for support of this thesis.

Public Acts of Healing

Justice Richard Goldstone of the South African Constitutional Court is a veteran of commissions of inquiry and international criminal tribunals.  In 1991, he organized and led an important commission in South Africa investigating public violence, and he headed the tribunal in The Hague for Bosnia and Rwanda from 1994 to 1996.  In January, 1997, Goldstone gave a speech at the United States HolocaustMuseum entitled “Healing Wounded People.”  In light of the foregoing discussion on the psychology of healing, the following excerpts are quite remarkable.  Goldstone said:

“The most important aspect of justice is healing wounded people.  I make this point because justice is infrequently looked at as a form of healing—a form of therapy for victims who cannot begin their healing process until there is some public acknowledgement of what has befallen them….In South Africa, how do we deal with the past? Should we brush it under the carpet?  Why reopen the sores?  In Rwanda, how can we deal with a country that suffered one million dead in a genocide?  In attempting to answer these questions, the people who should be consulted more than anyone else are the victims.  What do they want and need for themselves and their families?…One thing I have learned in my travels in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and South Africa is that where there have been egregious human rights violations which have gone unaccounted for, where there has been no justice, where the victims have not received any acknowledgement, where they have been forgotten, where there has been national amnesia, the effect is a cancer in the society and is the reason that explains the spiral of violence that the world has seen in former Yugoslavia for centuries and in Rwanda for decades, as obvious examples.”  [Author’s transcription of audio tape.]  

The healing effect of truth and reconciliation commissions varies considerably from one set of victims to another.  The family of the late Steve Biko in South Africa has strongly criticized the provisions of the Truth and Reconciliation law that provides for impunity for military or police political torture or murder if confessed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).  And a recent unpublished memorandum from Wilhelm Verwoerd in South Africa quotes a black South African saying, “What really makes me angry about the TRC and [its chairman, Archbishop Desmond] Tutu is that they are putting pressure on us to forgive….I don’t know if I will ever be ready to forgive.  I carry this ball of anger inside me and I don’t even know where to begin dealing with it.  The oppression was bad, but what is much worse, what makes me even more angry, is that they are trying to dictate my forgiveness.”

            This is a valuable piece of evidence in support of the point Judith Lewis Herman makes in Trauma and Recovery.  In trying to work through the psychological impact of traumatic violence, victims may generate a fantasy of forgiveness—or be urged to forgive by outsiders.  In this situation victims imagine that they can rise above their rage and “erase the impact of the trauma through a willed, defiant act of love.  But,” Herman continues, “it is not possible to exorcise the trauma, either through hatred or love…the fantasy of forgiveness often becomes a cruel torture….True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution” (pp. 189-90).   

            Yet, for all its obvious imperfections, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has made a major contribution to South Africa’s transition to majority rule.  Storytelling has had its impact.  A program on National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. in September, 1997, carried a statement by one of the members of the TRC named Mary Burton, a well-known human rights activist. She says:

”One of the amazing things is the effect that telling their story has on people…I think of three mothers, for example, of young men who were killed, who were really bowed down by not only grief but long grief; long, exhausted grief…They were witnesses when some of the police who were involved in the incident were questioned at a public hearing….I still couldn’t understand exactly why it seemed to have such a transforming effect on them, because on the final day of the hearings they went home singing and smiling and dancing….And one of them said to me: ‘Now everybody knows, my neighbors know, that my son was not a criminal.  He was a freedom fighter.’  For years she had been looked at as the mother of a criminal, and now she could hold up her head in her own circles.  And so for her it was the public acknowledgment that was important.” (Script, 9/15/97, p. 4.)

            Even without expressions of remorse or repentance by perpetrators, a truth and reconciliation commission performs the crucial task of acknowledgment of the victim’s loss. The violation of basic human rights becomes a permanent part of the state’s public record, and the state assumes a protective stewardship for the victim.  This provides an essential assurance to the victims that their future safety is protected.  There is a noteworthy example of a public acknowledgment of the losses of one side in an ethnic conflict that was unilateral and not part of an interactive process.  Yet there is no question that this act, by a chief of state, was an important contribution to an evolving peace process between two war-time enemies.  On January 1, 1978, October, a widely read Egyptian magazine, published a New Year’s interview with President Anwar Sadat.  Far and away the favorite leader of political psychologists, it was Sadat who, in his stunning visit to Jerusalem in November, 1977, had told the Israeli Knesset that 70% of the problem between Israel and the Arabs was psychological.  In the January interview, Sadat again displayed his amazing insight into the victimhood psychology of Israelis, notwithstanding the fact that Israel had defeated Egypt militarily in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.  (Many believe that Egypt nevertheless won a significant psychological victory in 1973, in the surprise Yom Kippur attack across the Suez Canal.  One of the consequences was the fall of the Golda Meir government in Israel.)

             In the interview Sadat tossed several bouquets to his eventual Israeli partners in peacemaking.  Of Menachem Begin, “I have read his writings and concluded that he is a man with whom understanding can be reached.”  On Moshe Dayan and Ezer Weizman, “Dayan is a hawk which is natural after his great victory in 1967 and after what happened to him in the October [1973] war.  However, Dayan was flexible during our talks…. Weizman is a real gentleman and is witty.  [Noting that Weizman’s son had been seriously wounded in fighting along the Suez Canal]  How can a man like this not want peace.  There is a bereaved father and mother in every Israeli home.”

            To the Israeli people as a whole Sadat said:

“All Israelis are under arms until age 55.  They know war and know it is loathsome.  Death is loathsome and destruction harder to bear than death.  Jews are victims of war, politics and hatred.  They have special problems, which we must know so as to understand their positions.  Jews have lived in fear for thousands of years, exposed to many massacres and persecutions.  When they established Israel, imagination became reality and fear a certainty.  They are strangers in a strange land.  They are surrounded by millions of hostile Arabs.”

            It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Sadat’s words on Israeli public opinion, and especially that of the political leadership at the time.  He undertook an act of clear and unambiguous acknowledgment of the pain involved in being Jewish (without so saying explicitly) in a Christian, European environment throughout the centuries.  He not only communicated to the Jewish people that he understood, but he also used his leadership position in Egypt and the Arab world—Cairo being the communications capital of the Arab world—to educate his own people in the psychology of Jewishness.  This act helped Arabs to understand a little better the vigor of Israeli aggressiveness in defense of the collective self and set the stage for the ultimate Camp David accords by providing a rationale for ending the state of war and making some sort of peace.  The robustness of Israeli-Palestinian attacks and counterattacks continued down through the signature of the Oslo agreements in 1993, but the state of (cold) peace between Israel and Egypt endured, even after Sadat’s assassination, despite provocation on other Arab fronts.

Private Acts of Healing

The problem-solving workshop or seminar for representatives of groups in conflict is practically always successful in beginning a healing process if the third party facilitators are psychologically sensitive.  The safe environment within which individuals can present grievances permits each side to gradually educate the other in the dimensions of loss felt by the other.  Quite naturally, one or the other side may become very defensive in the face of broadside accusations, especially if it feels that its losses in the conflict have not been recognized or appreciated, which in the beginning is almost always the case.  This situation can be characterized as a competition of victimhoods.  Indeed the sense that the other side never truly understands one’s fear and pain usually endures long into a reconciliation process.   

          However, there is one tool in the problem-solving workshop that consistently overcomes the defenses of sides that believe they are victims of unfair collective attack.  This is the telling of personal stories of loss.  As Justice Goldstone and other witnesses stated about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, storytelling usually had a cathartic effect on the victim telling the story, which, as has been noted, became part of the official, public record of the state.  But in the private confines of the small, facilitated workshop, storytelling also penetrates the defenses of the other side that has stoutly resisted the broadside accusations. This writer participated in several workshops in which this phenomenon was apparent.

          In a workshop in Austria in 1983, facilitated by an interdisciplinary group from the American Psychiatric Association, Israelis, Egyptians, and Palestinians met and unburdened themselves of broad political and personal complaints and they got along reasonably well as intellectuals, professionals, and former government officials.  But they did not engage at a profound emotional level until a physician from Gaza told the story of his nephew whose eardrum had been broken by an Israeli soldier who had struck him on suspicion of having thrown a stone.  The physician insisted that the boy of twelve years had not participated in the stone throwing.  He had just had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

          The story was painful—and entirely credible—for the Israelis.  The storyteller was their companion in the Austrian workshop. They shared meals with him, went on outings, and sang songs in the evenings after meetings with him.  There was no saving distance between the victim and the victimizers—representatives of the society that sent the military occupiers to Gaza.  The same would have been true if the victim had been an Israeli child harmed by a Palestinian aggressor. 

          In this case, a Likud-associated Israeli in the workshop, who admitted to having made letter-bombs in London to be used against British targets during the mandate period, was clearly affected by the story of the deafened nephew.  He said he had good contacts in the Israeli defense ministry, and he provided a telephone number for the Gazan to call him directly if and when he ever endured another act of violence at the hands of the Israeli occupation force.  Thus a personal Israeli-Palestinian alliance was forged which, if nourished after the meeting, promised to endure.  Even if this alliance were to wither over time from lack of use, the exchange between the occupier and the occupied established a moral symmetry in the workshop that permitted subsequent collaborative engagement by all the parties in serious exploration of next plausible steps in the peace process. 

          In 1992, the writer was part of a third party team assembled by Vamik Volkan, M.D., founder and director of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia, to run a Baltic-Russian workshop in Kaunas, Lithuania. The dynamic in the early stages of the workshop was similar to that in the Austrian meeting of Arabs and Israelis.  The humiliation of Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—was very fresh in Baltic minds.  Indeed, despite the global recognition of the three states’ independence there were still residual Russian military forces in each.  This situation generated enormous resentment. 

          For their part, the Russian participants, some who were residents in the Baltic states, some from Moscow, including government officials and the Russian Ambassador to Estonia, were very defensive. Some complained about the way the Balts used the term Soviet and Russian interchangeably.  They said the Soviets, the oppressors, were by definition multiethnic—Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks.  The Russians, on the other hand, were not only identifiable by their Russianness, but were also the greatest victims of the Soviet system. They were forced to sacrifice their standard of living so that other Soviet nationalities, including the Baltic peoples, could have a better life.

          The broadsides continued to be exchanged, as in the Israeli\Arab workshop in Austria.  Then a Lithuanian-American woman told her story.  She had been a student in the medical faculty.  The day in 1939 that the Red Army entered Kaunas, she had been walking to the apartment building where her best friend, also a medical student, lived with her family.  As she approached the building, she saw a Soviet military truck pull up to its entrance.  Soldiers stepped out and entered the building.  Shortly thereafter, the soldiers reappeared, leading her best friend and her parents, who were put into the truck which sped away.  In the hushed conference room, the Lithuanian-American physician ended her story.  She never saw her best friend again.

          This first-person account of painful loss, which could never be forgotten, did much to bring home to the Russians in the workshop the sense of helplessness and humiliation the Baltic people experienced because of the Soviet occupation.  Again there was no escape from this truth.  The Russians and the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians were taking meals together, and even singing together during evening recreation.  There was no chance to use the traditional psychological devices of avoidance or denial of unpleasant facts.  Thus the level of discourse changed meaningfully in the workshop.  A retired Russian NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) officer spoke as much to herself as to the others:

“Looking back over history it is hard to understand what happened, how and why.  My father was a military man.  His duty was to save the Baltics from fascism.  This seemed normal to us.  We did not know of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.  We were all unfree and victims.  Six people in my family were put in concentration camps.  This was, sadly, routine at the time.

After World War II, we set out to rehabilitate the countries that had suffered under fascism.  We saw the Baltic countries joining in this effort.  I first saw that the Balts were fighting Soviet domination at C.S.C.E. [Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe] meetings.  It was a slow realization for me and painful to understand.  I am ashamed of Russian behavior in Eastern Europeand the Baltic countries. We behaved badly in these countries.”     [Author’s unpublished memorandum]  

            There is much more about the Russian-Baltic Track II diplomacy interactions than can be described here.   Suffice it to say that these unofficial interventions were buttressed by the active role of the High Commissioner on National Minorities of the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe.  The commissioner, former Dutch Foreign Minister Max van der Stoel, succeeded in emotionally defusing and legally moderating the language issues requiring Russian-speakers to learn Estonian or Latvian.  The third party assistance in the aggregate contributed to a relatively smooth transition in the three Baltic states.   Russians found ways to acknowledge and express levels of remorse for the moral debts the Soviet Unionhad accumulated in the Baltic states.  In the process these small states were able to sense that a measure of justice and equity was returning to their relationship with their giant neighbor.  However, they worked to fortify this new feeling of relative security by pushing eagerly for membership in the Council of Europe, the European Union, and even NATO.   

          This chapter concludes with an account of only partial success of reconciliation efforts in an enduring sectarian conflict, that of Northern Ireland.  There has been an impressive, one could say heroic, struggle to negotiate a settlement of the conflict as seen in the Good Friday agreement of 1998.  There have been enormously gratifying referenda in support of the agreement by all the major parties and the Protestant and Catholic voters.  These majorities in both communities have made the rational choice to end the sectarian terrorism, organize their self-government, and get on with their lives in the broader context of the European Union.  And yet, the burdens of history on this conflict have only received perfunctory attention.  There is an enduring sense of unatoned loss on the part of Irish Catholics in their struggle for justice and dignity under the long rule of Britain.  And there is deep-seated fear in the Protestant, unionist community because of the IRA reluctance to decommission its weapons.  Even if and when the disarming process begins, it is likely that the Protestants will continue to suspect the motives of the IRA culture.  And it is also likely that armed republican units will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

          The complexity of the reconciliation process for Northern Ireland—indeed for Britain and Ireland—was revealed in a long dinner conversation between a unionist and a Catholic nationalist, constitutional politician who were participants in a Track II workshop organized by the author in Strasbourg, France in 1993.  The unionist entered the discussion deeply suspicious of what his people called a "pan-nationalist conspiracy" that brought together the Catholics of Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, and the Irish Catholics of the United States to work relentlessly for the reunification of the island of Ireland.  For Protestants, this meant not only losing their identity in a sea of Irish Catholics, it meant also the prospect of Catholic revenge against them for centuries of British depredations. 

          The task for the Catholic politician in this three-hour conversation was to ease the Protestant’s fears by explaining how he had personally suffered at the hands of the IRA.  He described attacks on his home, threats to his family, even the bones that IRA thugs had broken in his body.  The man had paid a big price for his commitment to constitutional government and nonviolence.  In the telling of his story, he convinced the unionist that there was not a pan-nationalist conspiracy.  This was significant because the politician went on to become a strong advocate of the peace process.  Yet he ultimately became identified with the opposition to the Good Friday agreement, reflecting the Protestant community that continues to be suspicious of  the motives of Catholics.. 

          There are few experts on the thinking of the IRA and its splinter groups.  The most seasoned observers were profoundly impressed by the long effort of John Hume, leader of the constitutional Catholic Social Democratic Labor Party, to persuade the IRA, through Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, to declare a cease-fire and join the peace process.  John Hume and David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had earned their Nobel Peace Prize.  Yet there has been little evidence of any of the healing necessary to begin a genuine reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics.  There is instead a deal, supported by majorities and sincerely friendly governments in London, Dublin, and Washington, D.C.

          Yet the requisite acknowledgment of British/Protestant moral responsibility for past wrongs has not been part of the Catholic-Protestant dialogue among politicians in Northern Ireland.  There was the significant exception of initiatives taken by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in acknowledging England’s responsibility in the starvation of Irish men, women, and children in the potato famines in 1846 and 1848.  Blair also supported the building of a monument at Liverpoolcemetery to the memory of the Irish famine victims buried there.  And he also reopened the official inquiry into British police responsibility for the killing of unarmed Catholic demonstrators on “Bloody Sunday,” in Londonderryin 1972.  It is safe to say that Tony Blair played a big part in the success of the pro-peace referenda among Catholic voters in 1998.  But from the psychological point of view, there is so much more to acknowledge.

            There may be a clue in the assessment of Paul Arthur (1997), a highly respected Ulster University professor, and Catholic, who has won the confidence of unionists and worked mightily in Track II diplomacy.  In describing the impact of the Catholic hunger strikers in Belfast in 1980-81, Arthur notes that those who died were in a long tradition of Irish Catholics who offered up their lives in the struggle for dignity and justice against British rule.  The strike was redolent of martyrdom and religious symbolism even though IRA members were for the most part anti-Church and atheistic followers of  Marxist revolutionary ideology. 

            There was great drama in the strikes and deathwatches.  An iconography emerged with barbed wire from prison represented as crowns of thorns and the dying men seen in postures of crucifixion.  The sacrifice of the mass was being enacted.  Images and evocations of the Blessed Virgin as consoler were seen and heard.   The sense of persecution and loss, and almost spiritual and existential feeling of injustice, is the substance of the memory of the hunger strike, but also of the potato famine, and Cromwell’s armies in the 17th century.

            It is well that the 1998 peace agreement was made on Good Friday.  But the Resurrection  for the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland has yet to take place.

Conclusion

The inescapable lesson of this analysis of the burdens of history on ethnic and sectarian conflicts is that even the most brilliant negotiator can at best help make a temporary deal between adversaries unless he or she also advances a genuine process of healing the wounds of history.  It is distressing, even tragic, that diplomats, most politicians, and almost all professors of political science and international relations are ignorant of this relentless reality.  The scientific evidence for the critical importance of healing is available as are methods and processes for carrying it out. Political leaders can acknowledge publicly the moral debts of their nations; senior clergy can do the same for their followers.  Historians can undertake their own truth commissions in reviewing and revising tendentious studies and textbooks the way French and German scholars did after World War II. Television documentaries and public affairs programs can address the burdens of history.  Educational tourism for both sides in an historic conflict can help people to come to terms with the past, or even rediscover some shared past glories with their contemporary enemies.  Poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, and composers can use their media to communicate messages of atonement.  

          There have been brave, if fitful, attempts to integrate healing processes into formal peacemaking.  The important gestures of British Prime Minister Tony Blair toward the Irish cited above are an example.  Another example occurred when the U.S. State Department’s Middle Eastpeace team of Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller tried, unsuccessfully, to arrange for Yasser Arafat to visit the HolocaustMuseum in Washington, D.C. in 1998.  The diplomats thought that Arafat’s symbolic acknowledgement of the burdens of history on the Jewish people might increase Jewish trust in the peace process.  Ironically, while Arafat was ready to make the visit, an official of the HolocaustMuseum, unmoved by the gesture toward healing, blocked it.

            But the struggle to raise public consciousness of the critical importance of actual healing in political relationships must and will continue.  Perhaps the skeptics will be impressed finally by the efforts of the halt and lame Pope John Paul II. In the Jubilee Year 2000, he is exerting every fiber of his body to travel to the appropriate sites to acknowledge the moral debts of Christendom to its victims throughout the centuries: the Orthodox, the Muslim and Christian victims of the Crusaders, those savaged by the Inquisition, but above all to the Jewish people.  Perhaps a new definition of realpolitik will emerge from these efforts that emphasize the essential role of reconciliation in diplomacy and peacemaking.  Perhaps the idea of justice, in its broadest sense, will find its way into the thinking and agendas of diplomats and statesmen.

References

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