Communicating reconciliation: In pursuit of humanity

Communicating reconciliation, the theme given me by the conference organisers, presupposes some understanding the nature of reconciliation. This having been said, the complexity of the relationship between the communication of reconciliation, epistemological definitions of reconciliation and the realisation of reconciliation, should not be too easily set-aside in our eagerness to grasp the pearl of great price of actually reconciling people.

The relationship between communicating and accomplishing reconciliation may be a lot closer than we often realise. The well-known saying of Mme de Stael, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century French intellectual, is insightful, although too optimistic: ‘To understand all is to forgive all.’2 Given the fact that it is the task of the communicator to enable understanding, we would do well to rephrase modestly Madame’s axiom to read, ‘to communicate all is to open the possibility for reconciliation to happen.’

In the context within which I write, which is the wake of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the communicator has a crucial role to play. It is, inter alia, to endeavour to lay bare the mind of even the worst perpetrators, while sensitively seeking to understand the suffering of victims and/or survivors in as comprehensive a manner as they may allow. This kind of exposure of the victim or survivor to the perpetrator and to the what the TRC called the ‘causes, motives and perspectives’ of the perpetrator, as well as of the perpetrator to his or her victim could go a long way to creating a climate within which reconciliation can occur. Hence the importance of the theme, which I am, required to address.

You are the experts in communication. I continue to struggle with what reconciliation means in different contexts. None of us can claim to be experts in promoting reconciliation. That, I venture to suggest in a conference of this kind, is dependent on the grace of God. And yet the question: How best do we talk of God in a secular world? My colleague Erik Doxtader puts it thus: ‘When distanced from the divine, released from the notion that it is strictly a gift and action of God, the faith of reconciliation appears poetic. Reconciliation promises a beginning, the creation of that which we can neither hold nor control. It is something that goads our imagination and extends our knowledge. We quantify reconciliation at the risk of rendering it banal.’3 Doxtader’s word does not, of course, let the communicator off the hook regarding the obligation to provide lucid content to a poetic concept. Neither does it allow the theologian to escape the challenge presented to the church more than a half a century ago by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison cell, which is to speak theology in secular language.

Differently stated, reconciliation is a notion that reminds us that some concepts transcend the prose of consumer society. To fail to hold to this transcendence is to ignore the important utopian challenge that lies at the root of all history affirming religions. It is to surrender to a view of a closed history, which suggests that only the possible is possible. It loses sight of the eschatological notion of what Karl Barth called the ‘possible impossibility,4 which demands decidedly more than the realism of Franz Kafka, which spoke of hope that is ‘not for us’.

A simple or even complex definition of reconciliation, which defines that hope, does not inherently help the reconciling process. Indeed, a tight definition probably does more to bedevil the process than anything else. To define the hope too tightly, to reject the metaphor, to name the ideal, is to own it. To own is to limit. So, perhaps (but only perhaps) it is better to live with definitional ambiguities – embracing the power of metaphor in pursuit of communication.

With this subjectivity disclosed, I seek to do no more than share a few comments on an initiative that attempts to communicate reconciliation, undertaken by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, of which I am a part, in South Africa.

Three Video Documentaries

The Institute is in the process of producing a series of three 26-minute videos on reconciliation. They seek to communicate a range of different ways in which former adversaries engage one another. The aim is to communicate the issues, themes, and controversies that surround the meaning of reconciliation in South Africa. Above all, they are intended to draw the nation and others – those sceptical about reconciliation and those ready to explore its meaning, into dialogue. At best, they may even facilitate the actual reconciling process in South Africa and elsewhere. The videos address the following themes:

If this be reconciliation – former enemies in business together

This video examines the changing relationship between two men, the one a former commander in a former liberation army, the other a former senior officer in the security police in the apartheid regime. Today these two men are in business together. ‘If this be reconciliation, I suppose we are reconciled,’ noted one of the men. ‘We don’t talk about the past, we joke about it.’ The video will explore the possibilities of simply ‘getting on with life’.

Signals of humanity

In 1985, the police, in mysterious circumstances, killed four community activists from Cradock. These men, later referred to as the Cradock Four, became a symbol of resistance to apartheid for the entire country. One of the widows spoke of an encounter with one of the perpetrators: ‘There is nothing he can give me – all I am looking for is a signal of the man’s humanity. If I encounter that, I am obliged, as another human being, to explore the possibility of reconciliation.’ This video raises the question of what might constitute such a signal and the conditions under which it might appear.

Don’t blame me, I just live here

The Institute is working with a number of young people from different racial backgrounds. Many of them are grappling with the meaning of the past and seeking to make sense of reconciliation. Some argue that they have no responsibility for the past. ‘We never even knew one another, but somehow felt we were supposed to be enemies,’ observed a white youth. ‘It was not my struggle,’ a young black student observed. ‘My struggle is to make money and create a better future for myself.’ ‘I was only born a few years before Mr Mandela was released from prison,’ was the rejoinder of a young white woman. And yet there is the reality of what happened during thirty years of armed conflict, pitting black and white South Africans against one another. The video explores the meaning of corporate memory for young people and the nature of individual responsibility in the process of national reconciliation.

Why these interventions? What do they say about communication and reconciliation? I suggest, inter alia, the following:

∑ Reconciliation interrupts an established pattern of events – portrayed differently in each of the above videos. The common denominator is the possibility of cutting the Gordian knot of revenge that hinders the possibility of new life. It makes ‘time for speech’, sometimes in the midst of violence, without any guarantee as to whether such talk can have any long-term benefit.5 Seen on a continuum extending from temporary suspension of the logic of established patterns of cause and effect to a rupture of such patterns that contain the possibility of new life, the interruption offers no guarantee of enduring success. It happens in different ways, at different levels of intensity. Perhaps the most that can be done to capture the scarcity, the importance and the lure of such moments in time, is to collect stories of reconciliation that suggest the possibility of life transcendent of the logic of reprisal.
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∑ Reconciliation does not necessarily involve forgiveness. The holocaust survivor, Simon Wiesenthal, published his memoir, The Sunflower, twenty-five years after being liberated from impending death. He tells of an occasion when he was sent to work in a makeshift hospital for wounded German soldiers. A nurse escorted him to a mortally wounded soldier, named Karl, who was struggling to die. Karl told Wiesenthal that he needed the forgiveness of a Jew in order to die in peace. He spoke of his years in the Hitler Youth and sorrowfully confessed to having been sucked into the treachery of Nazi slaughter. The dying German soldier asked the embattled Jew for forgiveness. Wiesenthal questioned how he, a beleaguered Jew, should respond to a repentant, dying Nazi soldier. Should he have killed him? Could he forgive or deny forgiveness on behalf of other Jews? Without a word he walked out of the room, leaving the soldier to die alone. Haunted by the experience, when the war ended he went in search of Karl’s mother. She confirmed for him Karl’s story and the apparent sincerity of his confession. For the rest of his life Wiesenthal questioned his actions in having walked out on a repentant, dying, Nazi soldier. Wiesenthal, at the same time, pondered the lack of obvious regret by so many Nazis who were brought to trial and by a German population that wished to forget rather than to make amends. What should he have done? He was not ready to forgive. He was tempted to break or interrupt the continuum between hatred and revenge. He was haunted by the challenge of exploring the possibility of reconciliation.
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∑ Reconciliation is process. This is clear from each of the videos. It is process that begins perhaps with no more than a measure of intrigue, curiosity or perhaps morbid fascination as to what it is that makes the alienated person who he or she is. ‘It started by me wanting to see what the people who killed my daughter looked like,’ observed Ginn Fourie, mother of Lyndi, who was killed in an armed attack on a Cape Town pub. ‘I wanted to know what made them the kind of people they were.’ In her case, the encounter with the killers led to her forgiving them and the beginning of a different kind of relationship with them. In the case of Simon Wiesenthal, it did not go that far. It will be intriguing to explore the long-term outcome of the each on the scenarios sketched in the three videos. Reconciliation takes perseverance. It is not for the feint-hearted or easily defeated. And clearly some have no obvious desire to go in search of reconciliation at all.
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∑ Reconciliation involves understanding. Understanding does not necessarily lead to reconciliation. When the story of a perpetrator is thoughtfully told, heard and deeply understood, it can soften the perception the victim, survivor or observer has of the perpetrator concerned. It opens space for the possibility of a new kind of interaction between adversaries. Many perpetrators are themselves victims of one kind or another – of propaganda, religious indoctrination, fear, disillusionment and a culture of submission. ‘Some of us were more eager than others to please our political bosses, but not a hell of a lot of policemen followed the textbook and blew the whistle on what was happening,’ a senior policeman in the former South African Police told me. Jozef Garlinski, a Polish underground fighter, who survived Auschwitz, tells of the horrendous evil he both witnessed and himself suffered. He ends his account by saying, ‘please remember those young SS officers could have been your sons or mine.’6 In understanding the perpetrator, we begin to understand the forces that make for evil. We discover the power of these forces and we begin to realise that the enemy (the German, the Serb or the Afrikaner) does not have a monopoly on moral insanity. We discover that maybe there is a little perpetrator in each of us. It is this that makes unconditional negative judgement of another a little more complex and opens the possibility of a basis for interaction in the present that could lead to a new kind of future.
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∑ Reconciliation requires acknowledgement. As understanding does not necessarily lead to reconciliation, so truth is not necessarily the conduit to reconciliation. There are, however, few who have suffered deeply who are able to begin to rise above this suffering without having at least a rudimentary knowledge of the cause and circumstances surrounding these events. They want to know who killed their spouse, child or parent. They want to know why. Silence, for the victim or survivor, concerning the past often results in a wall of inertia – an inability to move on. There is a sense of paralysis that entraps the victim in his or her sense of defeat. Ashley Forbes, a torture victim of the notorious torturer, Jeffrey Benzien, was critical of the TRC decision to grant Benzien amnesty, arguing that he failed to make full disclosure. Nevertheless, he observed: ‘I forgive him and feel sorry for him. And now that the TRC has showed what happened, I can get on with the rest of my life.’ Acknowledgement did not mean forgetting the ghastly deed. This is usually not possible and probably not helpful. It does not mean necessarily becoming friends with the person responsible for one’s suffering. It does mean a break with overt enmity, and the beginning a different kind of relationship, signalled in Forbes’ words I ‘feel sorry for him [Benzien].’ Not all survivors of torture accomplish this. Consider the words of Kalu: ‘What really makes me angry about the TRC and Tutu is that they are putting pressure on me to forgive…. I don’t know if I will ever be able to do so. I carry this ball of anger within me and I don’t know where to begin dealing with it. The oppression was bad, but what is much worse, what makes me even angrier, is that they are trying to dictate my forgiveness.’ Her words capture the pathos involved in the long and fragile journey of healing. No one has the right to prevail on Kalu to forgive. Would acknowledgement – the truth about the past help her to deal with the ‘ball of anger’?
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∑ Reconciliation takes time. I visited Rwanda, where I was asked to speak about reconciliation. ‘We are still burying the dead and looking for justice,’ I was told. Reconciliation may come later. It would have been obscene to ask Jews to be reconciled with Germans in 1945. The miraculous thing is that there were some Jews who were able to explore the meaning of reconciliation in the immediate wake of the holocaust. There are some Rwandans who argue that reconciliation, in that modest sense of an interruption to Hutu-Tutsi violence, is the only alternative to genocide. In South Africa there is Nelson Mandela who came out of jail after twenty-seven years seeking reconciliation – and there are others in South Africa who are ready to forgive. Icons of hope are important. But for most people, only a first enquiring venture beyond hatred is possible. The reconciling process takes time.
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What then is Reconciliation?

Engraved into the South African social consciousness, the concept remains beyond either the mental or emotional understanding of many – it is at the same time a concept that refuses to go away. The affirmation of the concept by former President Nelson Mandela and the championing of reconciliation by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his role as chairperson of the TRC has allowed few, if any South Africans, to ignore it. Some embraced it. Others rejected it. Few have been able to ignore it.

What then is reconciliation? We have suggested certain pointers: Interruption, something less than forgiveness, process, understanding, involving truthfulness and taking time. To the extent that a word is what it produces, it has something to do with the engaging people in an attempt to overcome enmity. This could be grounded in self-interest, in curiosity or in intrigue.

Whatever the immediate motivation, at a deeper level it gives credence to the African expression of ubuntu. In Xhosa, the phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is a person through persons), places dialogue and reciprocity at the centre of the struggle to be fully human. It suggests that people are incomplete to the extent that they are alienated from one another. St Augustine seeking, in turn, to develop a way forward amidst the escalation of violence and enmity that led to the fall of Rome in 410, gave expression to an enduring dimension of Western spirituality in his confessional meditation: ‘Thou has’t made us for thyself and our hearts and minds shall know no rest until they find their rest in thee.’7 Grounded in the New Testament imperative, as it is, we are reminded that the biblical ‘Thee’ is inextricably related to a ‘thou’. Love of God and love of neighbour cannot be separated. Suffice it to say, within this kind of spirituality, found at the heart of African and western spirituality (and elsewhere too) there resides within humans and nations a desire for living in peace one with another, which seeks to transcend even the most hostile conflicts. Often neglected at the height of war, rebellion and conflict, this hope drives conflict resolution, peacemaking and the need for coexistence. Or is it an anthropological reality? A philosophy of ubuntu suggests it is the latter. It recognises that the process of seeking to be fully human is itself a communication process that refuses to submit to fate. It involves the creation of the kind of future that enables people to engage one another in the creation of a society that includes all others.

Consumed with anger, faced with the possibility of annihilation and yet neither willing nor able to capitulate, reconciliation becomes the only alternative to the impasse. Trapped within a deadlock of destruction or submission, the quest for a way out of the apocalypse is to find an alternative to what seems like the iron grip of fate.8 It is this kind of impasse that resulted in the South African settlement that led to the political transition of 1994. In the words of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘as two spent swimmers, that do cling together’, black Africans and essentially white Boers, realised that a settlement of one kind or another was imperative. It was the only option to bringing to an end an ever-escalating war that threatened to destroy the very identity, infrastructure and promise of a nation yet to be born. Both sides some how came to believe that new life could still emerge, phoenix-like, out of the strife that characterized the apartheid years.

Reconciliation involves learning to deal with conflicts in a humane manner, at the heart of which is civility and creativity. It suggests that being human involves a process of engagement between strangers and adversaries, however difficult, as a basis for the possibility of a relationship and a space within which to deal creatively with issues (material and subjective) that make us less than human. It involves refusing to heighten the potential for self and mutual destruction.

In South Africa reconciliation involves the perpetrators of gross violations of human rights, as well as beneficiaries and bystanders, but also victims and survivors, dealing with the dehumanisation that has come to characterise their persons. Njabulo Ndebele, powerfully and yet simply, suggests that reconciliation has to do with ‘who we can become’.9 It involves committing ourselves to overcoming the dehumanisation that has shaped our lives as well as our dehumanising attitudes towards others. Wole Soyinka ponders the nature of the ‘slave condition’?10 It is a denial of humanity – ‘a psychological mutilation of the human entity’, which in diverse (subliminal) ways can linger for generations in the psyche of oppressed and subjugated people. He insists it is necessary to ‘seize and alter that destiny’. Steve Biko articulated this better than most in the South African context:

All in all the black man [sic] has become a shell, a shadow of a man, completely defeated, drowning in his own misery … The first step therefore is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign in the county of his birth.11

Reconciliation involves the humanisation of the victims and survivors of slavery, colonialism, racism and apartheid. It involves people who have been treated as less than human and who sometimes internalise that dehumanisation, seizing their humanity and their destiny. Antjie Krog in Country of My Skull speaks of the importance of one who has suffered being able to shift from a pre-linguistic state within which one is overwhelmed by the extent of the suffering, to the point where one can take control of the suffering, at least, to the point of being able speak about it. A ‘particular memory at last captured in words can no longer haunt you, push you around, bewilder you, because you have taken control of it – you can move it wherever you want to.’12 Maybe we should say we can begin to wrestle with the possibility of ‘moving’ it. This, she suggests, is what the TRC was all about. This was, in a sense, what Biko’s words, quoted above, are all about. It’s what Habermas13 is talking about when he speaks of taking a measure of rational control through speech, redeeming the ‘inner foreign territory’ of the perverse unconsciousness by bring it to words – by naming the beast.

It also involves perpetrators, beneficiaries and bystanders dealing with the dehumanisation that has come to characterise their persons. This often involves claims to rightful privilege, arrogance, greed, indifference, ignorance and fear. In the South African context, the transcendence of such dehumanisation might need to involve a ‘white consciousness’ that seeks to strip away the layers of deceit that have come to characterise `white superiority’. This `superiority’ has, in different ways, survived the momentous events that heralded the demise of apartheid in 1994 – in much the same way that the ‘slave condition’ has survived emancipation in the previous century.

An Abiding Divergence

Directly related to a theory of reconciliation grounded in anthropological desire is, of course, the challenge of justice. As a case can be made for a human inclination towards self-fulfilment in relation to others, so there is a penchant within most that seeks material and legal satisfaction for loss suffered. The weight of wrong suffered is at times such that it lends credence and understanding to an ingrained human desire for revenge.

The nature of the relationship between non-codified social rules and legal norms in society is complex and need not be entered into here.14 It is enough to note that it is in relation to this kind of reality that Martha Minow defends organised (state) retribution as an exercise in taming, balancing and recasting the personal animus involved in vengeance.15 By institutionalizing feelings of anger, resentment and even hatred, the state exercises procedural controls over individual and group anarchy. In Susan Jacoby’s words, it is an alternative to the ‘wild justice’ of the vigilante.16 The refrain of critics of the TRC is, ‘I want justice’. But, if justice is no more than ‘an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth’ then, I suggest, there is an entrenched divide between justice and reconciliation that can only have the most disastrous implications for deeply divided societies like South Africa and a host of other countries in political transition. In the sense of breaking with, or interrupting, the logic of revenge, reconciliation is the creation of time and space in which to find new ways of dealing with past grievances.

It is this space that, in South Africa, has given rise to competing notions of justice that at least partially satisfy the human impulse for satisfaction. The development of notions of restorative justice as an alternative to retribution has generated extensive debate in this regard.17 The unresolved debate concerns the extent to which retribution necessarily entails vengeance. The need, not least in a deeply divided society, is to define ‘reconciliation’ and ‘justice’ in non-exclusive ways. Indeed they often feed off on another. The threat of punishment in South Africa has, for example, in several ways contributed to the success of the TRC and the possibility of former perpetrators and their victims finding a basis for coexistence.

The TRC model of justice is not perfect. Howard Zehr suggests that from a restorative justice perspective the South African TRC ‘is flawed, opportunities have been missed, but the importance of this understanding [of justice]– not only in South Africa, but for the world – must not be underestimated. It is a bold step on an uncharted path.’18 The TRC was assigned the important task of instituting corrective moral justice by putting the record straight, in the sense of naming both perpetrators and victims, as well as pronouncing a ‘just cause’ in the conflict under review. It had no power to execute punitive justice, nor did it have the power to execute distributive justice, in the sense of correcting material imbalances. At best it could create time and space within which to redress the material and other imbalances that brought the nation to the brink of collapse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The TRC has made certain recommendations in this regard, which include recommendations of material payments to those who it found to be victims of gross violations of human rights.

The state and the nation as a whole has been regrettably slow to respond to these recommendations, which somewhat ironically, means that the success or failure of the TRC process to resolve the tension between justice and reconciliation, will not and cannot be resolved by the TRC. This is up to the state and the nation as a whole. It is a process which includes material redress – both individual and at the level of social services for all victims of apartheid. It must necessarily also include the healing of memories. It must further enshrine in the national consciousness the memory of past abuse, through the establishment of museums, monuments, memorials and other national symbols. If the national memory is to be powerful enough to check future atrocities, future generations must encounter the memory of past atrocities. This memory must, as in the case of the holocaust, be ingrained in the consciousness of every South African.

To the extent that the nation establishes material redress, national memory and the will to resist those forces that made for apartheid, it will have achieved a level of justice that will not satisfy the thirst for revenge of all, but could have begun to redress the needs of most. It is here that the possibility of a creative encounter between justice and reconciliation resides.

Communication as Reconciliation / Reconciliation as Communication

To communicate reconciliation is to understand reconciliation. Understanding, in turn, generates the will to communicate – maybe even to shout it from the rooftops! The how is your domain rather than mine. I offer only the most modest of comments:

Who? Why? When? Where? The mantra that is presumably drummed into the head of every young reporter.19 Question: Is the dissemination of information on political crises and attempts to resolve these crises a fundamental right? What if this information undermines attempts to broker a move beyond conflict at a particularly sensitive point of political transition? What is the role of the journalist in this situation? To what extent is a journalist simply a reporter of the news? Does the journalist (particularly those who are part of the World Association for Christian Communication) have a responsibility also to be peacekeeper, a mediator, a nurse who heals, a doctor who prescribes the appropriate medicine, or a priest who hears confessions? Are there different types of journalism? Who or what is the role of the ‘alternative’ media?

Crucial to the role of the journalist is truth telling. It is to get the facts straight, rather than to perpetuate rumour or simply ensure that the sensation is maintained in order to sell newspapers and generate a television or radio audience. Style and presentation is obviously important. If there is no audience, even the most accurate of reports becomes a pointless exercise. But is terrier-type / no-holes-barred reporting enough? How does this relate to communicating reconciliation? When does reporting ‘only the facts’ become a non-humanitarian activity designed to serve the journalist, the cameraperson or the news agency involved – rather than the people on the ground struggling to interrupt the cycle of violence in pursuit of reconciliation?

The reconciling process needs honest, blow by blow reporting, which conveys the emotion, the atmosphere and the angst of the moment. It is important not to underestimate the will and the ability of the reader or viewer to make intelligent and informed decisions about what the next step may be in the pursuit of reconciliation. The question with which I find myself left, is whether there is not room for more sensitivity in the media for ‘good news’ stories that keep alive the possibility of reconciliation – that interruption and quest for human wholeness that I have tried to identify in this paper. I end where I began. I suggest that communication is an inherent part of reconciliation. Reconcilers and communicators need to spend more time talking with one another. They can undermine one another’s work. They can also enhance it. In the words of Njabulo Ndebele, they facilitate the process of ‘who we can become’.

Notes

1. Jean-Jacques Badibanga, head of Advocats Sans Frontieres in Rwanda, in conversation with the author at the Nyamata genocide site.

2. John Witte and Johan van der Vyver, J. (eds.), Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective: Religious Perspectives (The Hague, Boston, London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), 33.

3. Erik Doxtader, ‘Is it ‘Reconciliation’ if We Say It Is? Discerning the Rhetorical Problem in the South African Transition.’ An unpublished paper.

4. Joseph Bettis, ‘Theology and Politics: Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr on Social Ethics,’ Religion and Life 48 (1979), pp.53-62.

5. Doxtader, op cit.

6. Jozef Garlinski, Fighting Auschwitz (London: Ortis Books, 1994),139.

7. Saint Augustine, Confessions I.i.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.

8. See Friedrich Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, translated by TM Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), 230.

9. In his address at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation’s award ceremony of the Reconciliation Award given to Tim Modise, 8 March 2000.

10. Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),70.

11. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (Oxford: Heinemann, 1987), 29.

12. Antjie Krog, Counry of My Skull (Johannesburg: Random House, 1998), 42.

13. See Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by JJ Shapiro (Boston: Beacon press, 1973). Also ‘Systematically Distorted Communication,’ Inquiry, 13, 1970.

14. See Richard Wilson, ‘Reconciliation and Revenge in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Rethinking Legal Pluralism and Human Rights.’ Paper delivered at the workshop held by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation / History Department. The TRC: Commissioning the Past. The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 11 - 14 June, 1999.

15. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 12.

16. Susan Jacoby, Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 10.

17. John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice: Assessing an Immodest Theory and a Pessimistic Theory. Australian Institute of Criminology, Australian National University, 1998; Jennifer J Llewellyn and Robert Howse, ‘Restorative Justice: A Conceptual Framework.’ Tony Marshall, ‘Restorative justice – an overview,’ Criminal Justice Quarterly, Issue 5, 1993, 2-3; Charles Villa-Vicencio, ‘Why Perpetrators Should Not Always be Prosecuted,’ Emory Law Journal, Vol. 49, No.1, Winter 2000.

18. Howard Zehr, ‘Restorative Justice: When Justice and Healing Go Together,’ Track Two, Vol.6, Nos. 3 and 4, December 1997, 20.

19. Paul Mylrea, ‘Humanitarian Reporting.’ I am indebted to Paul Mylrea, editor of AlertNet, for raising issues of reporting on humanitarian crises at the International Colloquium on Humanitarian Crises and Reconciliation, Madrid, 28-30 June 2000.

Charles Villa-Vicencio is Executive Director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa. He was the National Research Director of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and prior to that he was Professor of Religion and Society at the University of Cape Town. The Institute for Justice and Reconciliation seeks to bring justice and reconciliation into creative unity and it addresses a range of legal, ethical, psychological, social analytical and theological issues, with communication and media at the centre of its agenda.