Communication: From confrontation to reconciliation – The challenges

As we look at that world, it is obvious how far we have to go to; how little, despite the set-piece triumphs such as South Africa or Chile, we have actually achieved if we think of all the other centres of long-running conflict and confrontation - the North of Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka. Why has there never been any truth or reconciliation attempted between India and Pakistan? Why no international criminal court in Algeria?

How do we make the present process deeper, wider, more effective? And how far back should we go into history? Slavery? Aboriginal extermination, the theft of their land, the abuse of the 'lost generation'? Colonialism? Indentured labour under British colonial rule in India, for instance, when hundreds of thousands were dragged from their homes and sent thousands of miles to work as labourers in other parts of the British Empire? This is, if you like, the continuing past-present that is still with us.

And then there is the future - or rather the future-present that threatens to invade us with more arenas of conflict and exclusion. Here I am thinking of the growing intolerance in a Europe where we said 'never again': neo-Nazis and fascists in government as well as in the street; the voice of hate all around us. The Gypsies or Roma, Europe's largest minority, persecuted in every country of Europe with no state to represent them and few friends. It has been called by a Jewish research institute in the UK 'the new holocaust'. They do not use that world lightly. What can we do to reconcile the one to the 'other'? Can we really make reconciliation the continuing on-going process we claim it should be? In Britain, for instance, where recent eruptions of Asian communities - in Oldham and Burnley most recently - have shaken our complacency that 'multi-cultural Britain is settling down nicely.

All these are the day-to-day ongoing challenges in the external world that face the practical work of reconciliation. But it is not of these that I want mainly to talk. I am more concerned with the process itself as we see it in operation. Indeed, of the different means and routes we take to reconciliation. Of international criminal courts; of truth commissions; of reparations; of the interlocking operation of all three. And here the troubling questions, for me at least, arise:

∑ why do we use one method in one place in preference to another?
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∑ why are we as selective as it seems in our application of each one?
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∑ how successful have the various roads to reconciliation been?
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∑ can we not find a more even-handed, less discriminatory approach that will bring together the various concepts involved in each process?
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In other words: let's try and reappraise the situation so far - and look a little to the future.

Is reconciliation ever completed? Can we turn the page without closing the book? Satisfying to victims? Is it justice? Do the villains of the piece feel repentance? Tell the truth? Get off too lightly? Pay adequately for the gift of forgiveness? And do those who forgive, who have been wronged, have adequate recompense? Do they not, rather, bear the greatest burden? Is this an equal transaction? How can the words that litter the road to reconciliation - CONFESSION - REPENTANCE - PENANCE - FORGIVENESS; TRUTH - JUSTICE - PENALTY - REPARATION; RESTITUTION; EQUALITY; MEMORY - be brought together without privileging one unduly at the expense of another? How be more even-handed, non-selective in our application?

I feel more than a little inadequate standing here, all questions and no answers. But forgive my ignorance; indulge my questions; enlighten me in the course of this week. And maybe, together, we shall come up with some answers to the challenges that face us in the work that brings us together today.

Because it is CHALLENGES you have asked me to talk about let me start with the title at the head of your conference paper: COMMUNICATION: FROM CONFRONTATION TO RECONCILIATION. On the face of it, clear enough. But it assumes a great many things. Among them:

∑ that communication itself is an active agent in ensuring reconciliation;
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∑ that we have seen successful reconciliation;
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∑ that there is a model for this and that we can apply it generally;
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∑ that all situations of conflict or confrontation are capable of resolution/conciliation;
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∑ that we are through the worst and have only to continue on this line to resolve outstanding confrontation;
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∑ that questions of justice, equality, repentance, punishment and reparation are somehow extraneous to the process.
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And now I shall begin my own sweeping assertions and assumptions.

COMMUNICATION is, indeed, part of the reconciliation process but, like the words it accompanies, it is fraught with ambiguities - not to say contradictions. Each term cuts two ways, itself value-free, no more than a tool in the hand of whoever wields it. Communication is as much the weapon of hate, intolerance, racism and exclusion as it is of peace, love or friendship. It is this we are challenged to confront: not by silencing those voices - better they be out in the open where we can hear and respond to them than that they fester in covert and clandestine warrens

We have seen in places like Rwanda or Former Yugoslavia how the tools of communication - radio, the press and, in the latter, TV - became the instrument of hate and death. Radio Mille Collines in Kigali told Hutu's where the 'cockroaches' could be found and urged them to stamp on them. In former Yugoslavia, the Serbian press and TV fell entirely into government hands and were used to communicate ethnic hatred via a vicious cocktail of misinformation and propaganda.

For those of us who deal with free expression and for whom the word has an almost 'sacred' function, it was a testing time. Not all were able to admit that the media and its journalists, whose interests we defend, were themselves guilty: had become oppressors rather than victims.

That was the first thing, but there was more. Was it right in those particular situations - and they are not the only ones - to continue to uphold the principle of free expression, the right of all without fear or favour to communicate their thoughts, beliefs opinions? And we came to a conclusion, not a sacred and inviolable principle, but a response to particular situations of great and immediate urgency. In the USA, the model, at least constitutionally for all free expression, there are few situations where they admit of any restrictions on speech. Apart from the debatable right of a person to shout 'Fire!' in a crowded cinema, they rest on the doctrine of 'Clear and present danger'. That is to say, if the object of hate speech is present and in clear danger of being physically attacked as a result of the incitement, then that is not allowed. Test cases have established this as almost the only situation where the right to communicate is not lawful.

In both Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, this was clearly the case. And further compounded by one more factor: the lack of any independent, countervailing voice in the media or politics. It was not an equal situation. In a multi-party system, the plurality of voices, however hateful the speech of one side, guarantees both sides are heard. To debate, to reconcile or at least to silence by superior argument or fact the offending party. There is an equality of communication.

In neither Rwanda nor in Serbia was this so. And lest we get carried away by our faith in the power of communication for good, let's remember that for every media icon who brings the truth to our screens or newspapers, there is another who brings the voice of division and exclusion. The treatment of race or immigration in the UK media recently has done little to break down the barriers between people; much to incite and encourage the fear and apprehension that characterise those who feel most threatened.

But there is an even more cynical use of communication in these days of 'mediatisation' and 'spin': public relations. Here's what the Argentine junta did when it began to get a bad press on its campaign of disappearances, torture and murder:

'In 1977, following a joint report from Amnesty and the US State Department's Human Rights Bureau accusing the Argentine security forces of being responsible for hundreds of disappearances, the military hired US public relations firm, Burston-Marsteller [the favourite of many of the world's less savoury autocrats], to plan its response. B-M recommended that the military "use the best professional communication skills to transmit these aspects of Argentine events, showing that the terrorist problem is being handled in a form and just manner, with equal justice for all". A tall order, but not impossible in the communication age. Almost as though they believed in the hackneyed motto that "the pen is mightier than the sword", B-M suggested that the military appeal to "the generation of positive editorial comment" [if this means anything, it is probably a euphony for "buyable"] and to writers of "conservative or moderate persuasion". As a result of their campaign, Ronald Reagan declared in the Miami News of 20 October 1978 that the State Department's HRB was "making a mess of our relations with the planet's seventh largest country, Argentina, a nation with which we should be close friends".'

Alberto Manguel in 'Memory and forgetting', Index on Censorship 5/1996

Over the years, others rose to the PR company's support … culminating in 1995, in an article in the leading Spanish paper El País, in which the prestigious Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, argued among other things that far from the military and their henchmen being the guilty parties, 'responsibility far exceeds the military sphere and implicates a vast spectrum of Argentine society, including a fair number of those who today cry out, condemning retrospectively a violence which they too, in one way or another, contributed to fan'. He concludes, 'those imprudent justice seekers in Argentina take advantage of a debate on the repression in the 70s to seek revenge, to avenge old grievances or continue by other means the demential war they started and then lost'.

Burston-Marsteller could not have claimed any greater success. We shall hear the same words in defence of the South African government, and of the Palestinians: the equivalence of evil between victim and aggressor, even, as Vargas Llosa suggests, the primacy of the latter. 'We were only doing our duty,' say the military everywhere from Northern Ireland to Jerusalem. 'There was a plot/communist plot/ CIA conspiracy/whatever: the country was at risk.'

CONFRONTATION can lead to war or conflict. But the same term takes on a quite different connotation when it is a matter of facing up to evil; taking it on, fighting it: the courage it takes for victims to 'confront' the truth of their experience. And without the other side of truth, that of the perpetrators, there can be no reconciliation. It is a hard and painful business to confront the truth within oneself; hard too, to confront in public the pain, humiliation and indignity inflicted for so many years as those who bore witness in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission were asked to do.

RECONCILIATION also has its ambiguities. If I am asked to reconcile myself to the wrongs and indignities of the past, you ask me to accept them, to submit. If you ask me to be reconciled to the enemy after a process of confession, repentance, punishment, restitution and then, finally, forgiveness, that is a very different situation. It becomes a transaction between equals. Not merely the formal political and legal equality conferred by the new state - I take the equality of humanity before God or their fellow humans as a given - but a sense that they may be given the means to rise to social and economic equality. That they have won something from forgiveness - that it was worth it

This sense of being rewarded for accepting the burden of forgiveness is often absent from the formal processes of reconciliation we have watched. That the confession of a few who are rewarded by amnesty does not equate with the symbolic act of forgiveness of so many. That repentance, too, is absent from this equation, as is justice for the guilty and reparation for those who have suffered. As is the truth on one side compared to some partial proximation on the other. It does not seem a very equal transaction - at least not to some of those involved. Nor does it satisfy.

Listen to one person on the T&CC

'I have long been waiting for justice to come. I did announce this after the inquest [on her husband Steve, founder of the Black Consciousness Movement], that I needed the case reopened so that we could get the actual truth. I don't think there's anyone who can give me that truth except to have those perpetrators taken to a proper court of justice and after questioning, or after the court proceedings, prove that we can get the truth about what happened to my husband.

'If these perpetrators are just let to go to the Commission, definitely they are going to lie there because they want to get an amnesty. And therefore no justice will have been done at all to the families. I'm not talking mainly about my husband's case. There are so many other cases that need to be heard properly. I don't know what the Commission is gong to bring. Nobody has been to me to explain what this Commission is all about, and all I know is that at the end, we will have to forgive these people. But how can you forgive without proper justice having been done? It's very difficult for me to go and listen all over again to the lies I listened to in 1978 during the inquest. What guarantees do I have that the perpetrators will speak the truth now? They will tell whatever lies so that they will get amnesty.

'To me it is an insult [to be asked to go before the Commission] because all that is needed is to take the perpetrators to a proper court of justice. Having gone through the trauma, the suffering _ and the perpetrators are comfortable wherever they are. Some of them got top positions in their jobs and were transferred. Yet here we are, suffering for their deeds.

'I doubt very much whether they can convince me this Truth Commission is going to bring us reconciling; one would think of reconciling after justice, but justice must be done first.

'It can never be easy. To me, really, it is opening the wounds for nothing. Because these people are going to go to the Commission - I suppose they've applied or their names have been taken. But if they do, are they going to tell the truth? Or are they going to lie so that they will get an amnesty?'

Ntsiki Biko

Mrs Biko is not talking about revenge, though she has every reason to ask if not for revenge, then, at least, for retribution. Yet she simply asks that there be truth on both sides, justice in the shape of a law court and, only then, forgiveness. Confession wins amnesty [a sort of secular version of divine forgiveness]; what, not being divine in their infinite mercy, does the forgiveness of their enemy win for the wronged? And where is reparation in this process? In an increasingly secular world, or one where rival religions are still at war where 'reward in heaven' seems inadequate, how do we find a secular base or precedent for what are, in the end, practices so strongly founded on Christian doctrine? Mrs Biko raises important questions: she is not alone in feeling that justice and reparation are absent to the detriment and ultimate value of the process.

There are three main processes by which the modern world seeks some form of reconciliation after domestic or international conflict:

∑ international criminal courts or tribunals;
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∑ truth and reconciliation commissions;
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∑ the granting of reparations.
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Almost the only common factor among them is that they follow some major change: from totalitarian government to some form of democracy; from war to peace. And all are attempts to ease the path of transition. Other than that, we apply each selectively and, by omission, discriminate between suffering. Of course circumstances vary; but the idea that there might be retrospective application still causes problems for otherwise impeccable jurists and moralists alike.

International criminal courts and tribunals

Stemming from the original concept initiated in Nuremberg following WWII, these are distinguished by their international character and by the fact that they are imposed from outside by the major powers. They are also, by their nature, highly politicised, seen as the tools of the victors, imposed rather than chosen and submitted to with reluctance. They aim to bring to justice the leading figures responsible for 'crimes against humanity' and, by individualising the guilt of a few in what are exemplary - or show - trials, to remove the stigma that would otherwise attach to the nation in whose name the acts were carried out. The courts for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia are the current examples of this practise. Unfortunately, both are deeply flawed in that the attitudes of the respective countries seem to be moving to a rejection of their justice: it is too slow; the operation of the courts has become too controversial to carry the moral weight they claim.

The challenge for the tribunals is to prove that international justice can contribute to the creation of lasting peace in the aftermath of social and political breakdown. This is important because there will always be societies in which those who carried out the bulk of the crimes will remain in government or linked with the structures of power. As there will be societies that have suffered such a cataclysm that the normal domestic structures are inoperable. In all likelihood, they will be in those very societies where peace and reconciliation are most elusive.

In both Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, the respective tribunals were the result of retrospective guilt as much as - more than - morality. In Yugoslavia, following the failure of the Dayton Agreement and the prospect of a Balkan imbroglio once again threatening Europe, there was a powerful political motive too. As far as it goes, it seems an attractive option: punishing those who have committed atrocities removes their influence and example from the political scene and makes it easier for voices of moderation and reconciliation easier to be acknowledged. Payam Akhaven, a legal advisor to the Rwandan tribunal, argued that 'the symbolic effect of prosecuting even a limited number of leaders who planned and executed the genocide before an international jurisdiction would have a considerable impact on reconciliation'.

Yet the argument is more ambiguous than may appear. Effective reconciliation depends on the interaction of international trials and the domestic situation. Isolated from a parallel effort to foster justice internally, their contribution to reconciliation will, inevitably, be frustrated.

In Yugoslavia, a war crimes tribunal had the convenient appeal of suggesting action without, for the immediate future, requiring it. In October 1992, therefore, the Security Council called for a commission of experts to study the matter. Moving with uncharacteristic speed, it affirmed the creation of the tribunal in May 1993. For the next seven years it did little except pick up some of the minor Serbian figures deemed responsible for the torture of prisoners in alleged concentration camps. The masterminds of massacres in places like Tuzla or Srebrenica - Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadic - remain free within Nato-controlled areas.

The deportation to The Hague of Slobodan Milosevic last week showed how divisive the arrest of a leading figure could be within society. The Serbian government has split down the middle; a nascent democracy, however partial or fragile, has been set back; the fragmentation of the country, with the Montenegran presidency taking one line and the Serbian another, looks closer than ever. It remains to be seen how the legality of Milosevic's 'purchase' by the western powers in return for billions of dollars in aid will be determined; what effect his appearance in court will have on the dubious stability of the country. Yet Mohamed Sacerbi, former foreign minister of Bosnia, is confident that Milosevic's removal will bring reconciliation for the people of the region. 'While he was still loose, the region was tainted. He manipulated the media and the people with lies; he falsified history and created myths and hatred with his lies. His absence will allow the truth to come out, historical truth as well as the truth about what actually happened.'

In Rwanda, resentment against its tribunal is growing. 'It makes it harder to forgive the ordinary people if we don't have the leaders here to be tried in Rwandan courts before the Rwandan people according to Rwandan law,' said the country's deputy justice minister Gerard Gahima as far back as 1996 when criticising the presence of the court not in Rwanda itself but in neighbouring Arusha. Lack of adequate resources, the slowness of bringing anyone to justice and the anomalies between punishments in or out of Rwanda have all built friction. 'It is an anomaly, at the least, that middle level genocidaires tried in Rwanda will face the death penalty, while those whose seniority and guilt is sufficient to attract the interest of the tribunal will only face life imprisonment,' say Anthony Dworkin writing in Index in 1996.

The Genocide Convention is quite specific on the obligation of the international community to see justice done when crimes on the scale of Rwanda are committed. Unfortunately for the credibility of the same community, we don't recognise such an obligation consistently. Bad enough that the Rwandan tribunal has been given so little money and moves so slowly. Much worse that the behaviour of the outside world during the crisis undercut the ability of international bodies to lay claim to a plausible standard of moral behaviour. Rwandans see the tribunal as another act of the same powers that stood by and watched as the slaughter took place. How different might their attitude to the UN court be if UN troops had shown a similar commitment at the time?

And then there are the omissions that also cast doubt on the whole process. Why not against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia for their mass killings between 1975 and 1979? Why not Saddam Hussein or his lieutenants for the gassing of 5,000 Kurds in Halabja in 1988? There are many more: Ariel Sharon, for instance was found guilty by an Israeli commission of inquiry for supervising the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila camps during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Today he is prime minister of Israel. No international accounting was ever demanded.

Algeria? Sudan? Ireland? The question marks remain.

As they do over the comments of Justice Goldstone when asked if an international court might not be appropriate in S Africa alongside or following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 'I had had some experience,' he starts, 'in the Commission of Inquiry regarding Public Violence and Intimidation in S Africa. Twenty thousand people were killed between 1984 and 1994 in political, violence-related incidents.' Moments later: 'If we have a permanent international criminal court it will be forward looking, not backward looking. _ No country will agree on a treaty knowing that its actions 30-40 years ago are going to be examined.' And on truth commissions as against courts: 'It's really difficult to have a truth commission when serious crimes against humanity have been committed [as in Yugoslavia]. I do not underestimate what happened in S Africa, but we did not have genocide. _ I think the international community has been sensible to leave it [the absence of a criminal court] in the case of S Africa. The S Africans are handling the case in a moral way which is conducive to respect for human rights in the future.'

Without establishing hierarchies of suffering, it is at least arguable that 50-plus years of murder, dehumanising segregation and labour conditions tantamount to slavery could figure in the same league.

As to Goldstone's reservations about 'retrospective justice': shall we ever see the likes of Henry Kissinger or Robert McNamara brought to justice as many of their victims in the Third World demand? Given the USA's limited commitment to a permanent criminal tribunal, and it's global domination, the odds are slight

Truth commissions, amnesties and pardons

'If these are the limits of "truth", where do we go from here?' As Ntsiki Biko says, truth-telling is not an equal or reciprocal exercise. Yet truth commissions operate on the assumption that this is so: that truth-telling from both sides will lead to accountability and forgiveness, followed by amnesty or pardon, the conditions for reconciliation. They are set up internally by consent or treaty between the 'defeated' and the 'victorious' after some great domestic upheaval. They are based on some 'equivalence' between the two parties and initiated by the new power with the limited consent of the losers.

In Archbishop Desmond Tutu's own words, the aim of South Africa's truth commission was 'the promotion of national unity and reconciliation _ the healing of a traumatised, divided, wounded, polarised people'. The laudable aim of every such commission, whether in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay or less successful instances like the Philippines, Haiti or Germany following reunification, based on the assumption that the truth will make people free of their past; but memory does not so easily die and the burden of truth, as of forgiveness, always rests with the victims, who watch their persecutors walk free and are not comforted.

Few who have gone through this process are today satisfied with the results, most notably those who suffered - and by their own account still do. A good deal of the problem is that transitions - I prefer to call them transformations - take a long time to complete. As does the healing process when it is allied neither to a sense of justice nor of reparation, whether this be in tangible form of economic recompense or the knowledge of the fate of a loved one.

In this respect, the record of the truth commissions in Latin America has disillusioned many of those who believed that shared truth was a precondition of social reconciliation. As Michael Ignatieff says: 'the military and police apparatus survived the inquisition with their legitimacy undermined but their power intact. The societies in question used the truth commissions to indulge in the illusion that they had put the past behind them. The commissions allowed exactly the kind of false reconciliation with the past that they had been expressly created to forestall.' ('Articles of faith' in Index 5/1996)

The military, security and police establishments allowed the truth to come out only to a point: to the point of individual cases of disappearances, but not to the point of allowing prosecutions of their own people or accepting responsibility for their crimes. The elected governments in Chile and Argentina which had created the commissions had to chose, says Ignatieff, 'between justice and heir own survival: between prosecuting the military and rising a coup, or letting them go and allowing a democratic succession to consolidate itself'.

The German writer Theodore Adorno makes much the same point about the 'false reconciliation' in Germany following WWII:

'"Coming to terms with the past" does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory. The attitude that it would be proper for everything to be forgiven and forgotten by those who are wronged is expressed by the party that committed the injustice.'

Back to the burden of forgiveness rather than guilt.

The mothers of the Plaza del Mayo in Argentina feel much the same:

'It's our love for our children that keeps us going. Truth we don't have and justice even less so. Truth and justice are what we want - and an end to impunity'

'The real tragedy is that the murderers are still walking the street. If they were in prison we might be able to forgive. We want justice. Right now [1996], justice is only a word, nothing more. The same with democracy - One day victory is going to come, I'm sure of it. We're fighting to make sure the killers are put away. All those who are happily walking the streets. We're going to make them pay - and not just with money.'

At much the same time, Palestinians and Israelis were discussing the possibilities of reconciliation, not at government level but among academics and community leaders of goodwill. The conference came to the conclusion that the Palestine/Israel situation was not one of transition so much as 'decolonisation' of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.

'But even the injustices of the Occupation,' notes Stanley Cohen, professor of criminology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, as well as of sociology at the LSE, 'are far easier to acknowledge than the recent exposures by the revisionist historians of what actually happened in 1948 rather then the Israeli myth of the creation of the State of Israel. That history is the real taboo _ I find it difficult to imagine any future Israeli government setting up a truth commission.'

What then, one might ask, about justice and accountability? Why not an international criminal court for the prosecution of individual perpetrators, disqualification and compensation? Cohen again:

'I find it impossible to imagine the circumstances in which retrospective justice will occur. There will be no political authority to put Shabaq agents on trial for torture.'

Nor is he optimistic about reconciliation, 'a political goal that confronts both sides'. Only one year on from Oslo, he writes:

'This seemed a long way away. On the Israeli side, there was little spirit of reconciliation, whether at the level of official negotiations or the humiliations inflicted by soldiers at road blocks'.

Something, incidentally, that many visitors to South Africa notice still. One went so far as to say that 'nothing has changed; it's a veneer at the top'. And another that 'the level of violence indicates how skin deep reconciliation has been; people don't think they've got anything as a result of the commission, houses, land - and that's going to take a long time, too long. Land occupation as in Zimbabwe could happen any time'.

Does any of this matter, Cohen asks finally? And replies:

'One thesis is that no just resolution is possible without honestly confronting the past, without a full acknowledgement of injustices _ The other thesis is that it doesn't matter what goes on in people's heads, hearts or souls. A structure of political and legal compulsion has to be implemented which gives people no choice but to conform.'

I must agree. On only one thing, compensation - reparations - for the loss of their country and 50 years of exile and suffering by the Palestinians, was Cohen even a little more optimistic: 'However, mass payments to the Palestinian Authority are made more to stabilise Chairman Arafat than out of any sense of redress for past injustices,' he concludes sadly.

Reparations

With one exception, reparations must be fought for and won. Payment is long withheld and less than even handed; the logic of reparations more deeply flawed and hotly contested than any other road to reconciliation. The notable exception, of course, is the reparations paid by the German state to victims of the Holocaust. Even here, there were notable exceptions. While Germany has paid reparations to the State of Israel since its foundation in 1948, only recently has individual compensation been agreed to survivors of the forced labour contingents sent to keep the wheels of Nazi industry turning. The recent award of billions of dollars against leading German corporations like VW, Speigel, Krupps etc, was a long time coming and only achieved after years of legal wrangling. Why now? I really don't know, but that it has 'reconciled' Jews to Germany I much doubt.

What is clearer is that neither in 1945, nor in 2000 have the Gypsies, 1.5 million of whom died alongside the Jews, received equal treatment. Without state or status to make their case, there seems little likelihood that they will ever be recognised or recompensed.

And given the retrospective award by German industry to forced labour, is it not pertinent to ask when the demands of black American for reparations for slavery - forced labour on the plantations that kept the wealth of America flowing - repeated again only a week ago, will be acknowledged? Why Bush, as his predecessors, brushes the claim aside with no evident respect or recognition of its justness? Would reparations ease the tensions and sense of injustice that characterise black-white America? It might, given the explosive nature of these, be worth a try. Apologies come easy: the will to put the money where the heart supposedly is another matter.

And the Australian Aborigines? A ten-year-long process whose purpose was to achieve a much overdue reconciliation between Aborigines and white Australians, has recently ended with the refusal of the Australian prime minister to apologise or offer any form of atonement for the treatment of the Aborigines; no serious offer of reparations or further return of land; and the strong suggestion that it is Aborigines who must 'reconcile' to white society, which has, in any case, done enough already to 'accommodate' to theirs.

These are only the cases where reparations are being demanded and worked for. There are many more cases where the battle has not even begun. For indentured labourers from India, removed by the British government thousands of miles from their homes and subjected to conditions very like slavery? And why not for the victims of other holocausts/genocides? For the Armenians of Turkey, still struggling to have what happened in 1915 even acknowledged as genocide by the international community, let alone Turkey? The Herero of Namibia? Of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians - Jews as well as Christians - massacred under Stalin at Babi Yar and Bykovnya; and of Belarusans slaughtered by the Soviet army at Kurapaty?

We may not be able or willing to respond to this Utopian vision. But we should acknowledge the shortcomings of our methods, if only to watch that we allow all people the possibility of Truth, Justice, Repentance and Reparation together if we are ever to reach the moment of lasting reconciliation.

Judith Vidal-Hall is Editor of Index on Censorship, an award-winning monthly journal that denounces all forms of government and media oppression. Previously she worked on the editorial staff of South magazine, a pioneer in political and development journalism.