From

http://www.transcend.org/

The "chapter": After violence: 3 “R”

TRANSCEND:

A Peace and Development Organisation for
Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means

 
 
 
AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION, RESOLUTION
Coping With Visible and Invisible Effects of War and Violence
 
By Johan Galtung, dr hc mult, Professor of Peace Studies 
American, Granada, Ritsumeikan, Troms” and Witten Universities 
Director, TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development Network
 
1. An Overview, and a Summary. 2
 
2. On Conflict/Violence/Peace Images  8
 
3. Mapping the Violence Formation 15
 
 Nature 17
 Humans 17
 Society 19
 World 23
 Time 24
 Culture 25
 
4. Violence, War, Trauma, Guilt - and the Search for Closure 27
 
5. Auschwitz, Gulag, Hiroshima, Nanking: Who/What is Guilty? 35
 
6. Truth&Reconciliation in South Africa: A New Jurisprudence? 40
 
7. Reconstruction After Violence: An Overview 53
 
 Rehabilitation: the collective sorrow approach 54
 Rebuilding: the development approach 56
 Restructuration: the peace structure approach 58
 Reculturation: the peace culture approach 61
 
8. Reconciliation After Violence: An Overview 64
 
 Introduction 64
[1] The exculpatory nature-structure-culture approach 65
[2] The reparation/restitution approach 67
[3] The apology/forgiveness approach 69
[4] The theological/penitence approach 71
[5] The juridical/punishment approach 73
[6] The codependent origination/karma approach 75
[7] The historical/truth commission approach 77
[8] The theatrical/reliving approach 79
[9] The joint sorrow/healing approach 81
[10] The joint reconstruction approach 83
[11] The joint conflict resolution approach 85
[12] The ho'o ponopono approach 87
 Conclusion 89
 
9. Resolution After Violence: An Overview 92
 
 The democracy, parliamentarian approach 96
 The nonviolence, extra-parliamentarian approach 98
 
10. Reconstruction/Reconciliation/Resolution: The Interface 100
 
 Diachrony versus synchrony 101
 Building conflict transformation capacity 103
 
 2
 
1. An Overview, and a Summary.
 
Violence has occurred, in the collective form of a war, with one
 
or more governments participating, or in the family, or in the
 
streets. Material and somatic, visible damage is accumulating,
 
deplored by parties and outsiders. But then the violence is
 
abating: the parties may have run out of material and nonmaterial
 
resources; the parties converge in their predictions of the final
 
outcome and more violence is seen as wanton, wasted; and/or
 
outside parties intervene to stop the violence, keep the peace,
 
for whatever reason, like preventing the victory of the party they
 
disfavor. A truce, cease-fire (armistice, Waffenstillstand, cese
 
al fuego) is initiated, an agreement is drawn up, signed. There is
 
a sigh of relief. And bewilderment.
 
 The word "peace" is used both by the naive who confuse
 
absence of direct violence with peace and do not understand that
 
the work to make and build peace is now just about to start, and
 
by the less naive who know this and do not want that work to get
 
started. Thus the word "peace" becomes a very effective peace-
 
blocker. Our purpose is to contribute to the worldwide effort to
 
unblock that process toward a peace beyond cease-fire so that
 
"after violence" does not so easily become "before violence"./1/
 
 The scene is appalling. The killed, the wounded, the raped,
 
the traumatized, the bereaved. The refugees, the displaced. The
 
new populations of widows, orphans, the wounded and war-struck,
 
the demobilized soldiers. The material damage, ruins; PTT,
 
electricity and water not working, road, rail, bridges, broken.
 
The institutional breakdown, the absence of law and order, the
 
lack of governance. The land mines and unexploded ordnance (UXO)
 
everywhere. People scavenging in the ruins.
 
 3
 
 And yet this is only what meets the naked eye. In another
 
context what to do before violence has been explored/2/. In that
 
connection a little triangle was found useful, the ABC-triangle
 
where A stand for attitudes/assumptions, B for behaviour and C for
 
the contradiction underlying the conflict, the clash of goals held
 
by the parties; the issues. C is the root conflict. But as the
 
conflict runs its course A and B start taking ugly shapes:
 
anything from hatred eating at their heart to depression for A,
 
the inner state of the parties; anything from the most rabid
 
physical and verbal violence to withdrawal, apathy for B.
 
A and B, particularly B, constitute the meta-conflict, the
 
conflict that comes out of, or after, the root conflict, the over-
 
layer.  Only B, the overt violent behaviour, is visible.
 
 The focus in Conflict Transformation By Peaceful Means was on
 
how to transform the root conflict so that the parties can handle
 
it, the thesis being that "it is the failure to transform conflict
 
that leads to violence". But then there was also another thesis,
 
that conflict mobilizes a reservoir of energy that can be used for
 
constructive, not only destructive purposes. In other words,
 
violence in general, and war in particular is not only a monument
 
over the failure to transform the conflict so as to avoid
 
violence, but also the failure to use the conflict energy for more
 
constructive purposes.
 
 Before violence the emotions were more pent-up. It made
 
sense to approach the root conflict as an intellectual problem
 
demanding high levels of creativity. After violence all of that
 
has changed. Pent-up emotions have been released in a frenzy of
 
collective human madness. There is massive destruction of all
 
kinds. And under the ruins the root conflict is still there!
 
 4
 
 The first task dealing with the root conflict is to map the
 
conflict formation, the parties, the goals, the clashes/issues.
 
The corresponding task after violence is to map the violence
 
formation, to understand better how the meta-conflict has run its
 
diabolic course, wreaking havoc within and between humans, groups,
 
societies, producing war-torn people, war-torn societies, a war-
 
torn world./3/ War is man-made disaster.
 
 To start this mapping of violence another triangle, related
 
to the ABC-triangle, may be useful:
 
 
 
VISIBLE Direct Violence
 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
 
INVISIBLE Cultural Violence Structural Violence
 
 
 
The direct violence, physical and/or verbal, is visible as
 
behavior. But human action does not come out of nowhere; there
 
are roots. Two roots are indicated: a culture of violence
 
(heroic, patriotic, patriarchic, etc.), and a structure that
 
itself is violent by being too repressive, exploitative or
 
alienating; too tight or too loose for the comfort of people.
 
 The popular misunderstanding that "violence is in human
 
nature" is rejected. The potential for violence, like love, is in
 
human nature; but circumstances condition the realization of that
 
potential. Violence is not like eating or sexing, found all over
 
the world with slight variations. The big variations in violence
 
are easily explained in terms of culture and structure: cultural
 
and structural violence cause direct violence, using violent
 
actors who revolt against the structures and using the culture to
 
legitimize their use of violence as instruments.
 
 5
 
 The ABC-triangle is at the human level of human attitudes and
 
assumptions, cognitions and emotions, human violent behavior
 
physical or verbal, human perceptions of goals as incompatible,
 
clashing. The violence triangle is a social reflection of this.
 
The cultural violence is the sum total of all the myths, of glory
 
and trauma, and so on that serve to justify direct violence. The
 
structural violence is the sum total of all the clashes built into
 
the social and world structures and cemented, solidified so that
 
unjust, inequitable outcomes are almost unchangeable. The direct
 
violence described above grows out of this, of some elements, or
 
out of the total syndrome.
 
 Obviously peace must also be built in the culture and in the
 
structure, not only in the "human mind". For the violence triangle
 
has built-in vicious cycles. The visible effects of direct
 
violence are as described above: the killed, the wounded, the
 
displaced, the material damage, all increasingly hitting the
 
civilians. But the invisible effects may be even more vicious:
 
direct violence reinforces structural and cultural violence, in
 
ways to be described below. And this, in turn, may lead to even
 
more direct violence. Most important is hatred and the addiction
 
to revenge for the trauma suffered among the losers, and to more
 
victories, glory among the winners. Power also accrues to the men
 
of violence. People feel this, are skeptical about "military
 
solutions", start searching for "political solutions". They tend
 
to be structural, like drawing geographical borders. Left out is
 
the cultural aspect, including the possibility that drawing
 
borders in geography may reinforce borders in the mind, which in
 
turn may legitimize direct violence in the future. An intra-state
 
war today may become an inter-state war tomorrow.
 
  6
 
 Geographical fragmentation may substitute the horizontal
 
structural violence of "too distant" for the vertical structural
 
violence of repressing, exploiting and alienating minorities
 
within a nation-state. We are now in a phase of internal wars of
 
secession and revolution. But distance may also lead to a new
 
phase of external wars between newly created states.
 
 In addition, with a cease-fire the motivation for serious
 
action often suffers a dramatic decline. The obvious thesis would
 
be: if violent cultures and structures produce direct violence,
 
then such cultures and structures also reproduce direct violence. 
 
The cease-fire, then, becomes nothing but a between-wars period;
 
an illusion perpetrated on people with too much faith in their
 
leaders. A feeling of hopelessness follows as people start
 
realizing the vicious circle: violent structures can only be
 
changed by violence; but that violence will lead to new violent
 
structures, and also reinforce a culture of warfare.
 
 The way out lies in denying the first horn of the dilemma,
 
the thesis that "the (oppressive, exploitative) structure can only
 
be changed by violence", itself a part of a culture of violence. 
 
If the contradiction is not too sharp, then the politics of
 
democracy is an answer. If the contradiction is very sharp--
 
meaning that the vested interests in the status quo are
 
considerable for some, and so is the suffering in terms of the
 
basic needs of survival, well-being, freedom and identity for the
 
majority or the minority (in the latter case majoritarian
 
democracy may legitimize the status quo)--then the politics of
 
nonviolence, following the lead of Gandhi, may be the answer./4/
 
 A major problem is that (parliamentary) democracy and (extra-
 
parliamentary) nonviolence are parts of the political culture in
 
 7
 
only some parts of the world, and democracy (which may be violent
 
in its consequences) more so than nonviolence. But both are
 
spreading rapidly, and do not exclude each other.
 
 In this complex of vicious cycles we can now identify three
 
problems that can only be solved by turning the vicious cycles
 
into virtuous cycles (notice the "re": again, again, and again):
 
[1] The problem of reconstruction after the direct violence:
 
[2] The problem of reconciliation of the conflict parties
 
[3] The problem of resolution of the underlying, root conflict;
 
  If you do only one of these three without the other two you
 
will not even get that one. Hegel was arguing reconciliation
 
between Herr and Knecht without resolution; Marx resolution
 
without any reconciliation. Reconstruction without removing the
 
causes of violence will lead to its reproduction. Badly needed is
 
theory and practice combining all three.
 
 But what does "combined" mean? Assuming violence has already
 
happened, it means synchronic rather than diachronic, linear, one-
 
after-the-other. That opens for two models: three separate tracks
 
for each task; one track for all three tasks.
 
 The first model refers reconstruction to "developers",
 
reconciliation to theologians-psychologists, and resolution to
 
jurists-diplomats-politicians; all approaches to be discussed.
 
 The second model would fuse the tasks into one, based on a
 
fundamental hypothesis: reconciliation can best take place when
 
the parties cooperate in resolution and reconstruction.
 
 And this may also be where the road to peace is located, if
 
peace is defined as the capacity to handle conflicts with empathy,
 
nonviolence and creativity./5/ Capacity to handle conflict is a
 
major casualty of war. So let us look into that.
 
  8
 
2. On Conflict/Violence/Peace Images
 
Violence must be seen in a context, and the context chosen is
 
"conflict". There are many misunderstandings and unfortunate
 
conceptions of conflict, that great Creator and great Destroyer. 
 
A common discourse about conflict, in the media, among researchers
 
and people in general, conceives of conflict as an organism with
 
birth, growth to a turning point, and then a decline, till in the
 
end the conflict dies out. That discourse has quantitative time,
 
khronos, on the horizontal axis and on the vertical axis the level
 
of direct violence, from the first sign of "trouble" to "cease-
 
fire", the kairos points of time, in the qualitative sense. The
 
conflict may have "burnt out", the parties may coincide in their
 
prognosis about the outcome and find it useless to continue
 
destroying each other, or a third party has intervened, forcing
 
them to stop, or making them agree to stop. The end is then often
 
called "peace"/6/, a khronos flow.
 
 A list of major shortcomings of this discourse includes:
 
[1] The impression is given that violence/war arises out of
nothing, ex nihilo; compatible with the idea of evil at work.
 
[2] The impression is given that violence/war has its origin at
precise space and time points, and with the first violent act.
 
[3] The impression is given that violence/war ends with no after-
effects, compatible with ideas of "conflict termination".
 
[4] The impression is given of a single-peak conflict life-cycle,
and not of long periods of latency, multiple peaks etc.
 
[5] A point not to be underestimated: violence/war is seen as a
variable; peace only as a point, as zero violence/war.
 
 Thus, violence/war is seen as an eruption with a beginning
 
and an end and no other consequences than those that are visible
 
at the end of the violence: the killed, the wounded, the damage;
 
the kind of military communique we have lamented above.
 
 
  9
 
 Of course, nobody is quite that naive; a considerable
 
literature exists about "causes of war" and the "aftermath". But
 
this image counteracts both prevention and aftermath care.
 
 Before an alternative image is developed, let us compare
 
violence to disease, for instance to tuberculosis, TBC. A
 
fruitful way of conceiving of any human pathology is in terms of
 
interplay between exposure and resistance; in casu between micro-
 
organisms operating under the right conditions (for them) of
 
temperature and humidity, and the level of immunity of the body,
 
which in turn has to do with the immune system, nutrition and
 
living standard, mind and spirit. This all plays together
 
holistically and synergistically. Of course some generalities can
 
be identified, but they will never completely cover any individual
 
case, leaving room for empathy with the individual patient and
 
his/her total environment and history, combining the generalizing
 
and the individualizing.
 
 More particularly, studies show how TBC rates decreased more
 
because of improved living standards (nutrition, housing,
 
clothing) than because of artificial strengthening of immune
 
systems through inoculation, and early diagnosis (X-ray)./7/
 
 A disease cannot be detached from patient/8/ and context as
 
an abstract entity with a life-cycle of its own, calling for
 
generalized prevention, therapy and rehabilitation. Key aspects
 
of exposure and resistance may be in the context in a broad sense,
 
not in the disease-patient interface. Causal cycles pass body-
 
mind-spirit, not only the body. And key causes may be far away
 
from the symptoms. Include the full context, and the cycles may
 
even be global (AIDS), and macro-historical (flu).
 
With increasing globalization this becomes even more true.
 
 10
 
 Nor can violence be detached from its space/time context.
 
 The context in space is the conflict formation, including all
 
parties involved, proximate and distant, with all goals relevant
 
for the conflict, consciously held values as well as positional
 
interests. A first mistake in conflict practice is to include
 
only parties in a limited violence area; confusing symptoms with
 
causes, like a physician referring to a swollen ankle as an "ankle
 
disease", not as a possible heart disorder symptom. Or to hunger
 
as "insufficient food intake", not as a social problem. Remote,
 
back-stage, parties may be crucial.
 
 The context in time is the conflict history, including the
 
history of the future. A second mistake made in conflict practice
 
is to equip conflict history with beginning and end, coinciding
 
with a limited violence interval, from the first eruption of
 
violence till the cease-fire confused with peace.
 
 A violence area-interval is then detached from formation and
 
history and reified as in the "Manchurian Incident", the "Gulf
 
War", the "Yugoslav debacle", "Rwanda", and tabulated in research
 
long on data and short on understanding. One reason for this is
 
no doubt epistemological, rooted in empiricism and beyond that in
 
behaviorism: violence is behavior and can be observed; conflict is
 
more abstract. Another is political: violence may escalate not
 
only inside but also "out of area-interval" and become dangerous
 
to others by contagion, like an epidemic disease. Hence the focus
 
on proven carriers of the germs of disease and violence,
 
"terrorists", to be eradicated, like germs. Causal cycles outside
 
area-interval might include very powerful actors who prefer to
 
remain unnamed/unmentioned. Mainstream media tend to fall into all
 
these traps.
 
  11
 
 What kind of discourse would we recommend to accommodate
 
these considerations, focusing not only on the etiology of a given
 
outbreak of violence/war and on meaningful intervention, but also
 
on the aftermath? Here is one tentative answer:
 
 [1] Direct (overt) violence is seen as having a pre-, side-,
 
and after-history, in unbounded areas and intervals.
 
 [2] These histories can be traced in six spaces:
 
Nature: as ecological deterioration/ecological improvement
 
Human, body, mind, spirit: as traumas-hatred, as glory-love
 
Social: as deepening of conflict/as healing of conflict
 
World(space): as deepening of conflict/as healing of conflict
 
Time: as the kairos of trauma/glory, as the khronos of peace
 
Culture: as deposits of trauma/glory, as deposits of peace
 
 [3] These six spaces can be summarized into three:
 
Direct violence/peace: to nature and human body-mind-spirit
 
Structural violence/peace: in social and world spaces, as
 
- vertical structural violence: repression and exploitation,
 
- horizontal structural violence: parties too close/too remote
 
- structural peace: freedom and equity, adequate distance
 
Cultural violence/peace: legitimizing/delegitimizing violence
 
 [4] Time enters as a medium in which this all unfolds. But
 
whereas direct violence is usually seen as a process with kairos
 
points, structural and cultural violence, and peace, are more like
 
step functions at those kairos points. There is an event that
 
brings about a lower or higher level, after which the level is
 
more permanent. As the permanent is difficult to see (there is no
 
contrast), and the event is difficult to catch (it is too sudden),
 
both phenomena easily pass unregistered. Violence is more easy to
 
understand and conveniently confused with conflict.
 
 12
 
 How would we now depict a conflict process? There is no
 
denial that the violent aspect of conflict is a function of time
 
like an organism with birth, maturity and death, even if multi-
 
peaked rather than single-peaked violence processes may be more
 
realistic (as for diseases). But there are three problems:
 
 This represents violence as a variable and the absence of
 
violence as a point, as zero violence, as "cease-fire". But peace
 
should also be seen as a variable, in terms of more peace or less
 
peace, reflected among other places in the level of positive,
 
cooperative interaction and the level of friendship.
 
 Only one type of violence is included: direct violence; not
 
the underlying structural and cultural violence.
 
 Third, and this is more psychological than logical: up and
 
down have evaluative connotations, so why not have peace on the
 
positive side of the Y-axis, and violence on the negative? With
 
three types of violence/peace this means three Y-axes.
 
 Thus, a more adequate conflict analysis would start with a
 
social formation, and then assess the levels of structural and
 
cultural violence/peace. If positive and high, don't worry. But
 
if both are low we have an early, very early, warning. Both have
 
considerable inertia, being permanent for long intervals of time,
 
like the level of repression/exploitation of indigenous people
 
combined with Western/Christian contempt for primitives-pagans,
 
and machismo interpreting direct violence as catharsis.
 
 Structural, like direct, violence is relational, not only
 
relative. Not only "Y was killed by a bullet, X was not", but "Y
 
was killed by a bullet fired by X". Not only inequality, but
 
inequity: not "Y is low on well-being and human rights" and "X is
 
high on both", but "X is high on both, because Y is low"./9/
 
 13
 
 Structural and cultural peace correspond not only to immunity
 
in disease analysis, but to level of health in general. This
 
resistance may not only be disturbingly low but negative, meaning
 
there is structural and cultural violence operating; a basis for
 
early action instead of waiting for the exposure.
 
 The exposure, like the shot in Sarajevo,/10/ is often seen as
 
an event although the famous drop that leads to an overflow may be
 
a better image. A final provocation, an additional act, with
 
repression, misery/hunger and alienation at an intolerable level.
 
The violence may be expressive of despair and frustration rather
 
than a calculated, instrumental act for basic change. But it will
 
probably provoke a counter-violence, and the process unfolds,
 
downward in this image, until the curve turns upward, less
 
violence, passing zero=cease-fire, and then into peace.
 
 But then comes the basic point: after the cease-fire the
 
situation may be worse than before the violence erupted, for the
 
reasons explored in the preceding chapters. The direct violence
 
may be the lesser evil, at least in the longer term, than the
 
structural and cultural damage wrought. It is like the way being
 
hospitalized is seen in some societies: like a market. The
 
patient offers one disease and gets two or three iatrogenic
 
diseases in return, one surgical error, one infection; and then
 
"hospitalitis" if only in the form of long-lasting back-sores.
 
 Direct violence may have come to a celebrated end. The
 
direct suffering is over, but the structural and cultural violence
 
have increased in the process. Violence therapy has to learn from
 
disease therapy: include prevention--build cultural and structural
 
peace--and include rehabilitation, meaning build cultural and
 
structural peace again. And again. And again.
 
 14
 
 To repeat: conflict is over incompatible goals, violence is
 
to do harm. One source of violence is to harm the parties that
 
stand in the way if the culture justifies such violence/11/. Hence
 
the division of conflict life cycles into three phases, simple but
 
meaningful: before violence, violence, after violence.
 
 Before violence,try to unblock the incompatibility, and to
 
prevent violence in general. This is so much more easy if the
 
level of structural and cultural peace is high: there is a high
 
level of participation, a rich, blooming civil society with
 
bridges across conflict divides, elites who see conflict as raw
 
material to be processed into higher levels of peacefulness, and
 
by peaceful means. Violence is not in the culture; peace is.
 
  Negate all of this and we get conflicts monopolized by elites
 
who use violence to "settle" the conflict and to secure their own
 
position, and people standing by, watching, waiting, accepting the
 
monopoly of national elites and of the world elites in the
 
"international community". Violence is in the culture, because
 
"it is in human nature; such is life."
 
 So Phase I slides into Phase II, violence occurs, with all,
 
most or many of the effects to be pointed out in Table 3.1. There
 
is a cease-fire, and Phase II becomes Phase III. What do we do? 
 
Learn from people: they do the same as ants when their hive is
 
destroyed: they start reconstruction (chapter 7 below). But of
 
human beings we should expect more. Whether the war was
 
"internal" or "external" there is the necessity of some kind of
 
reconciliation (chapter 8 below). People cannot live apart and in
 
agony forever. And: there is the need to do in Phase III what was
 
not done in Phase I, resolution (chapter 9 below). If not, Phase
 
III becomes the new Phase I, reproducing the tragedy.
 
 15
 
3. Mapping the Violence Formation
 
Our first point of departure was an impressionistic listing of the
violence aftermath. The second point of departure was the vicious
cycle in a violence triangle of direct, structural and cultural
violence. In a third effort we shall now bring this together in a
more complete map, covering six "spaces", and both
material/visible and nonmaterial/invisible effects:
 
Table 3.1: Visible and invisible effects of direct violence
 
---------------------------------------------------------
SPACE Material, Nonmaterial, 
 visible effects invisible effects 
---------------------------------------------------------
NATURE depletion less respect for 
 and pollution; non-human nature, 
 damage to diversity reinforcing "man 
 and symbiosis  over nature". 
---------------------------------------------------------
HUMANS somatic effects: spiritual effects:
 numbers killed number bereaved 
 numbers wounded number traumatized
 numbers raped general hatred 
 numbers displaced general depression
 number in misery general apathy 
 widows, orphans revenge addiction 
 soldiers unemployed victory addiction 
---------------------------------------------------------
SOCIETY the material damage the damage to 
 to buildings; social structure: 
 the material damage to institutions, 
 to infra-structure: to governance; 
 road, rail, mail, the damage to 
 telecommunication, social culture: 
 electricity, water, to law and order, 
  health, education to human rights 
---------------------------------------------------------
WORLD the material damage the damage to 
 to infra-structure: world structure; 
 breakdown of trade, the damage to 
 international exchange world culture 
---------------------------------------------------------
TIME delayed violence: structure transfer
 land-mines, un to next generation
 exploded ordnance; culture transfer 
 transmitted violence: to next generation
 genetic damage to kairos points of 
 offspring trauma and glory 
---------------------------------------------------------
CULTURE irreversible damage to violence culture 
 human cultural of trauma, glory; 
 heritage, to sacred deterioration of 
 points in space conflict-resolving
 capacity
---------------------------------------------------------
 
 
 16
 
 It is telling evidence of the materialism of our culture that
 
the first column is taken so much more seriously than the second. 
 
The case is reminiscent of mainstream economic analysis with its
 
focus on material factors only (nature/land, labor and capital)
 
and their effect in producing concrete goods and services, adding
 
up to net and gross national products; leaving out the enormous
 
costs of "modernization" on nature, the human spirit, social and
 
world structure and culture in general./12/
 
 We are up against a general cultural syndrome which makes
 
struggles to have invisible effects taken seriously even more
 
problematic. The syndrome serves a rather obvious function: when
 
only visible effects of violence are considered costs are high,
 
but manageable. The more complete the accounting, the more
 
hesitation there should be before a war is launched, under
 
assumptions of rationality. The same goes for unfettered economic
 
growth, sometimes similar to warfare, but the costs are the
 
effects of structural violence built into the economic and
 
political structure, rather than the effects of direct violence.
 
 Thus, it also makes sense to talk about growth-torn people,
 
growth-torn societies,/13/ and growth-torn worlds. A quick glance
 
at Table 3.1 tells us something about similarities, and about the
 
dissimilarities. The similarities are obvious. And for the
 
dissimilarities there are simple translation rules:
 
- for "killed, wounded, soldiers unemployed", substitute
 
"mortality, morbidity, workers unemployed";
 
- for "material damage" substitute "opportunity costs";
 
- the delayed violence works by polluting nature and humans;
 
- for "revenge, victory, trauma, glory" substitute "revolution,
 
violent if needed", "revolution failed" and "utopia."
 
 17
 
 The left hand column has an air of the obvious except for one
 
more recent entry in the callous "number killed, number wounded,
 
material damage" reports about wars: the number of women raped.
 
The use of women's bodies as battlefields between gangs of men is
 
probably as old as war; the frequent mention in reports these
 
years is also due to the recent rise of feminism.
 
 The right hand column is, however, far from trivial.
 
 Nature: one thing is damage to the eco-system and eco-
 
deterioration; another is reinforcement of the general cultural
 
code of Herrschaft over nature, also a part of the rape syndrome. 
 
Countless millions watch on TV not only people killed and wounded
 
but also nature destroyed, poisoned, going up in flames. The war
 
is legitimated. The damage may be deplored, not the legitimation. 
 
Most damaging is the use of ABC-weapons, capable of also wreaking
 
genetic havoc. But old-fashioned kinetic and incendiary military
 
insults to nature, when done on a large scale (including peacetime
 
maneuvers) can make civilian insults look innocent./14/ Like
 
mega-violence to humans, e.g., Auschwitz and Hiroshima-Nagasaki,
 
mega-violence to nature makes lower, "conventional", levels of
 
violence look almost innocent.
 
 Human: The number of people bereaved through warfare is
 
unknown. A modern 2,3-generation family means the order of 101;
 
counting other primary groups (friends, neighbors, colleagues) we
 
come closer to the order of 102. We can safely multiply the
 
number killed during a war by 10, as a low estimate. Added to
 
that comes second order bereavement, knowing somebody bereaved:
 
the condolences, the sharing in the sorrow, bringing us to 103. 
 
Then comes the tertiary order, general national bereavement, as in
 
general when catastrophe strikes, natural or social.
 
 16
 
 As Erasmus Rotterdamus said long time ago: S�ss scheint der
 
Krieg nur dem Unerfahrenen,/15/ an important point against the
 
naive, self-exculpatory German der Krieg ist ein Naturgesetz./16/ 
 
Because war, like slavery, colonialism and patriarchy, is a social
 
institution, unknown to a number of societies, war is avoidable. 
 
If social = structural + cultural then we have already two handles
 
to limit war, also by seeing to it that they are not reinforced by
 
a war - a point to be developed later.
 
  Of course, a war culture includes ways of making the
 
bereaved, individual and collective, accept their losses:
 
- the sacrifice was for a just, even holy, cause usually meaning
 
for God (as instrument for his will, Deus volt/17/), for History
 
(as instrument for the course of History/18/), or for the Nation,
 
as a collectivity defined culturally by the sharing of (kairos)
 
points of glory and trauma, in time and space/19/;
 
- war is justified by Law as defensive war against aggression;/20/
 
- victory proves that God/History/Law is on our Nation's side;
 
- defeat shows that the Nation has betrayed God/History/Law so the
 
sacrifice is only meaningful if the Nation wins next time;
 
- war is in human nature anyhow, expressing a law of nature;
 
 With rationalizations such as these (Law is basically silent
 
about structural and cultural violence) no wonder that major
 
causes and effects of wars are kept in the dark. They would erode
 
the commitment to God, History, Law and Nation.
 
 Thus, there is something subversive about Table 3.1. Anybody
 
capable of internalizing all effects becomes like a chain smoker
 
who for the first time understands that the warning from the
 
Surgeon General of something being dangerous to your health means
 
your health. But we are not there, yet, for wars.
 
 19
 
 Society: At the social level of the human condition we find
 
as mentioned, structure and culture. What does war do to them?
 
  Nobody will dispute that wars bring about cohesion both on
 
the military and the civilian sides because of the single-minded
 
devotion to one cause: winning, or--failing that--to bring the war
 
to an honorable end. How long-lasting is another matter.
 
  The war may be used by societies threatened by general
 
atomie, atomization, fragmentation; today perhaps particularly
 
pronounced in advanced democracies with eroded traditional sources
 
of cohesion. Outgroup aggression, ingroup cohesion.
 
 Nor is there any question that wars bring out such positive
 
traits as dedication, sacrifice, solidarity, discipline, team-
 
work, good administration. Those who prove themselves along such
 
lines will demand, and often get, high social positions after the
 
war. But these virtues are embedded in a casing of violence and
 
contempt for life that also may carry over to civilian life. War
 
provides mobility for the downtrodden, a reason why soldiers are
 
often from the underclass of society (including the unemployed and
 
the unemployable). But the result may be a lasting over-employment
 
of the under-qualified.
 
 Culturally, war may also cure society of anomie, the absence
 
of compelling norms, substituting war-time norms about
 
God/History/Law/Nation. And that leads to the same question: does
 
this mean that post-war society is organized like an army,
 
responding to military culture? If we assume military culture to
 
be to culture what military music is to music, does that not mean
 
a belligerent Weltanschauung, filled with friend-foe ideas? If so,
 
society never demobilizes but remains militarized, war-prone, in
 
the sense of easily accepting war as an alternative.
 
  20
 
 There is a special aspect of the damage violent conflict does
 
to social structure and culture worth highlighting.
 
 As a conflict gradually leaves the "before violence", and
 
enters the "violence" phase, five processes with deep implications
 
for structure and culture take place:/21/
 
- articulation: a complete conflict triangle takes shape, with
 
emotions/cognitions, violence and contradiction;
 
- conscientization: not only does the triangle take shape, but the
 
two invisibles, the attitudes and the contradiction, A and C,
 
become conscious in the minds of the parties;
 
- simplification: the conflict formation is seen as contracting,
 
to ever fewer actors and goals;
 
- polarization: the contraction ends up as reductionism to only
 
two parties, the (good) Self and the (evil) Other, over only one
 
issue, the issue where Self can most clearly be seen as right;
 
- escalation: all of this is then both a cause and an effect of
 
increasing violence, B, between Self and Other.
 
 There is a simple relation between these five processes:
 
articulation and conscientization go together, so do escalation
 
and polarization, and simplification stimulates both of them. The
 
processes in Self and Other also tend to mirror each other; like
 
Self, like Other, with the media chiming in. As a result conflict
 
work becomes very difficult. People's minds are set.
 
 Structurally the implication is separation in two social
 
camps, and as almost no conflicts today are really "internal" but
 
has outside parties intervening one way or the other, social
 
polarization is accompanied by world polarization. Wedges are
 
driven between regions/civilizations, countries, classes, groups,
 
within families, between persons, breaking up marriages.
 
 21
 
 The result is double structural violence of the horizontal
 
variety: people who actually like each other find themselves
 
ending up in different camps, and in those camps they find strange
 
bed-fellows with whom they have little else in common.
 
 Once polarized structures have been crystallized, they are
 
not easily dismantled, among other reasons because they solve a
 
problem when direct violence enters the scene. Like other forms
 
of communication, direct violence also has sender and receiver,
 
from Self to Other. Better make sure Self is not hit by friendly
 
fire. Moreover, the impact area expands from micro hand-weapons
 
via meso artillery and bombs to macro ABC-weapons. Better make
 
sure there has been adequate territorial sorting in advance by
 
escalating not-too-quickly from micro via meso to macro.
 
 Culturally, the implication is immature conflict philosophy
 
with only two parties and one issue. Such is reality, be ready:
 
Cold War between East and West, clash of civilizations between the
 
West and the Rest. Structure and culture hand in hand, inner
 
mental, and outer social, polarization confirming each other.
 
 There is a tradition in conflict studies/22/ to see these as
 
identity creating mechanisms. No doubt they provide answers to
 
such classical questions as "who am I" (a part of that larger
 
Self) and "where am I heading" (for victory in the struggle with
 
Other".) No doubt not only emotions but also volitions are
 
mobilized by such cognitions (and vice versa). But this is also a
 
twisted, thwarted identity, potentially at the expense of the
 
livelihood, even life of others; nothing to celebrate, nothing to
 
be proud of. Translated into nationalisms this is hard
 
nationalism eloquent on the good of Self and evil of Other,
 
eloquently silent on the other two combinations.
 
  22
 
 A major and real danger is that this deformation of the
 
conflict formation settles, sediments, solidifies in mental,
 
social and world structures, is reified, and provides a ready-made
 
bed for any new conflict that might appear. The genesis of this
 
deformed structure, and deformed culture, is then forgotten long
 
time ago. They are both taken for granted, like in the Christian
 
perception of Muslims, if not created by the Crusades at least
 
solidified by them. The grotesque reductionism is nourished by
 
two solid groundswells: "one day they may come back and complete
 
the job" and "one day they may come back and do to us what we did
 
to them" (by victims and victors, respectively).
 
 This is the material out of which prejudices are made, not
 
only what the Germans call Feindbilder, the images of the enemy,
 
but the equally important Freundbilder, the images of the friend
 
("we fought together against the Nazis/imperialists/communists;
 
they cannot be that bad, now is the time to repay that debt ".) 
 
And thus structural and cultural deformations are transferred
 
through history, being communicated to the next generations.
 
 How detrimental this damage is can be seen by remembering
 
what conflict transformation in the "before violence" phase is
 
about: to think the conflict, and the whole conflict formation
 
anew, to disembed the conflict from where it is located and then
 
locate it, embed it, somewhere else. And then develop a
 
perspective tat may serve as a way out, becoming unblocked and
 
unstuck, using the perspective as an anchor, as a possible
 
reference point for more work on the conflict.
 
 To summarize the damage done: reductionism, operating
 
unopposed, embeds the conflict so solidly that disembedding it
 
becomes an almost herculean task./23/
 
 23
 
 World: If we now define the world as a community of nations
 
in addition to a community of states, in other words as an inter-
 
nation system in addition to an inter-state system, then the
 
effect of wars becomes even more clear. At the superficial level
 
nations share religion and language. At the deeper level they
 
share Chosenness, Glory and Trauma; the CGT-complex. Wars are
 
help define these kairos points. Contiguity around sacred places,
 
and continuity to pay homage to sacred dates, project the nation
 
into geography and history, as clearly seen by watching the names
 
of metro stations and squares in a country referring to itself as
 
la grande nation. Studies of national holidays and anthems, old
 
conflict symbols, also bring out this clearly. For the rest see
 
above for social polarization:
 
 After the guns have become silent the war in the minds is
 
still there: the Dichotomy of nations into two camps, the
 
Manichean view of the camps as good-evil, friend-foe, as the
 
struggle between God and Satan on earth, the Armageddon battle as
 
the defining event; for short, the DMA-complex.
 
 The pattern becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The DMA-
 
complex in the minds survives the end of the war. Any sign that
 
the enemy is still alive will trigger ready-made responses; in the
 
absence of such signs other enemies will be found to complete the
 
Gestalt formed by this type of cultural violence. The end of the
 
Cold War is by now a classical case: the evaporation of the "East"
 
as a conflict partner was unexpected; new enemies of the Nation
 
(or super-Nation) are being excavated from History, with the help
 
of God and Law (Muslims, Serbs)./24/
 
 Wars wreak havoc with structures and cultures. And the more
 
wars we have had, the more do we see the result as normal.
 
 24
 
 Time: As mentioned, a war serves to equip time with the
 
glory and trauma points that in turn serve to define nations. But
 
in addition to that structure and culture also possess a certain
 
inertia. They both drift through vast stretches of time, like in
 
a placid river, largely unchanged at the level of deep structure
 
and deep culture, below surface ripples and eddies. There are
 
waterfalls, "revolutions" for structures and "change of ethos" for
 
cultures; But they are far between. And further down the river
 
the water tends to be about the same.
 
 We live in an inter-intra/state-nation system, to a large
 
extent shaped by well-defined wars, with poorly defined peace as
 
between-wars periods. Each new war reinforces the image of war as
 
normal and natural, as a layer sedimented on top of the other in
 
the national archeology. The nations are vehicles for the
 
transmission of structure and culture, including the pattern of
 
war; much like violent behavior is transmitted in the family./25/ 
 
Major vehicles for transmission are the national language and
 
religion, the myths expressed in popular art and the monuments/26/
 
dedicated to the sacred points in time and space./27/ All this is
 
transmitted through family and school. A national army, and arms
 
including nuclear weapons, is telling evidence of the readiness to
 
translate the myths, those public dreams of the collective
 
subconscious, and the well-embedded conflict, into action.
 
 The basic point about time is the inertia of structure and
 
culture. Unless something deliberate is done to counteract them,
 
they will continue, unabated. A kairos of war may have to be
 
confronted with a kairos of peace. Better still is a long,
 
patient khronos of work for peace till the vicious cycle is broken
 
by a transition from quantity to quality. But how?
 
 25
 
 Culture: Through each war humanity dies a little. But we are
 
a sturdy species, otherwise we would have extinguished long time
 
ago. There is more to us than the sad story told by focusing on
 
war and violence only. If conflict, in the sense of
 
incompatibility of goals, is ubiquitous, at all levels of human
 
organization, from the intra-personal to the inter-regional,
 
intra-global, inter-stellar for that matter, then we evidently
 
also have some great conflict-transforming capacity./28/
 
 More precisely, humanity must have great reservoirs of the
 
three major components of a peace culture, or cultural peace as
 
opposed to cultural violence: nonviolence, creativity, empathy. 
 
Wars and violence are travesties on these virtues.
 
 That wars are not nonviolent is more than a tautology. There
 
may be self-imposed restraints in wars, operating on one or more
 
sides, both ad bellum and in bello./29/ But the point about
 
nonviolence is to respond to violence and destruction with
 
something constructive. Wars rule out that response as treason,
 
and substitutes a culture of secrets/deceits, lies/propaganda./30/
 
 There is no denial that wars may be highly creative in their
 
destructiveness. But the bottom line remains destruction, of life
 
and property. Creativity in life-enhancement, in promoting Other,
 
even "them", is also ruled out as treason.
 
 And the same applies to the third virtue: empathy, the
 
capacity to understand Other from the inside; high treason. In
 
doing so Other's behavior becomes a consequence of his history. 
 
External causes become good reasons. The will to kill "them" may
 
be subverted. Non-war, even peace may be around the corner. The
 
fact that we are around testifies to a lot of resolution capacity. 
 
And reconstruction. And reconciliation. How come?
 
  26
 
 This will be taken up later. At this point, let us only
 
conclude by asking a very naive question. Given all these
 
negative effects of violence in general, and war in particular,
 
how do we explain that human beings in their right mind
 
nevertheless engage in so much violence?
 
 First, if by "right mind" we mean a "cost-benefit" mind, then
 
we have left out the possible, expected, both in the sense of
 
predicted and in the sense of hoped for, benefits to Self. They go
 
far beyond booty, into reinforcing world power pyramids.
 
 Second, if by "cost-benefit mind" we mean egoistic cost-
 
benefit, then Self has to wage war in such a way that benefits
 
come to Self and costs to Other. Kill any number of enemy
 
soldiers and civilians as long as your own are unscathed. To do
 
this, maneuver so that the choice of time and place is yours.
 
 Third, who said human beings are necessarily in "their right
 
mind", if by that we mean having the costs, including to Other,
 
weigh more than benefits, including to Self? Something else may
 
be running their minds, in addition to the cognitions of utilities
 
and probabilities, their products and the sum thereof. That
 
something is usually referred to as emotions.
 
 Those emotions may be highly inspired by a social or world
 
structure found unjust or at least in need of basic remedy, and be
 
nourished and soothed by a culture informing them that he who
 
takes up the sword and puts others to it will be justified. The
 
cognition/emotion distinction is not so sharp that emotions cannot
 
be analyzed cognitively, including by those driven by them. True,
 
they may be blinded by a rage that also may have its physiological
 
basis. But in general we fall back on culture and structure. To
 
which we now turn, in a fourth effort.
 
 27
 
4. Violence, War, Trauma, Guilt - and the Search for Closure
 
In the beginning was the act, not the word; physical movements
 
were followed by verbal acts. Some acts are beneficial, they
 
enhance others. Other acts are harmful: a punch with an arm, or
 
the extension of an arm, arms, armies; a word that hurts, or the
 
extension of bad-mouthing, propaganda. There are also neutral
 
acts. But when tension and emotions are high, no act is neutral. 
 
The act is a transaction, between the two, sender and receiver, or
 
perpetrator and victim/31/ if the act is violent, harmful. If the
 
act is beneficial the bond may be friendship, even love. In
 
either case reciprocity is the norm, not only the same quality in
 
the sense of good for good, and evil for evil, but the same
 
quantity ("an eye for an eye -") in this negative market for bads
 
and disservices rather than goods and services.
 
 In Buddhist discourse beneficial acts carry merits to the
 
author, the actor; and harmful acts carry demerits. Both have
 
major consequences for the quality of the rebirth. In Christian
 
discourses good deeds may lead to salvation and evil deeds to
 
damnation; with major implications for the afterlife, and with no
 
appeal. The relation is not only Self-Other, but Self-Self.
 
 Both discourses agree on one point: a harmful act implies not
 
only trauma suffered by the victim, but also guilt suffered by the
 
perpetrator./32/ The norm of reciprocity demands that the harm is
 
equalized; trauma for trauma (you suffer my suffering), and guilt
 
for guilt (we are equally bad you and I). X has done horrible
 
violence to Y, the guilt is unbearable. If Y also does something
 
horrible to X the two become equally guilty as when Germans
 
equalized Auschwitz with Dresden-Hamburg after the Second World
 
War. Revenge, retaliation balance both accounts.
 
 28
 
 According to this logic there are two ways of getting equal
 
in a violent exchange: when the perpetrator suffers a trauma of
 
(about) the same magnitude, and when the victim suffers a guilt of
 
(about) the same magnitude. In the act of retaliation the two
 
approaches blend into one, both traumatized, both guilty, no doubt
 
a reason why revenge is so frequent. "You are guilty of hurting
 
me, I am guilty of hurting you, we are equal you and I". By this
 
logic the traumatized party has an asset: the right to have a
 
trauma inflicted on the perpetrator. And the guilty party has a
 
deficit: "One day he may come back and do to me what I did to
 
him". The former may lead to trauma-chains through history,
 
vendettas; the latter to a politics of paranoia./33/
 
 Both trauma and guilt may be deposited in the world trauma
 
and guilt banks. The traumatized has a violence credit, and the
 
guilty a violence debit. Both carry interest over time, at the
 
risk of inflation gnawing at the capital. Amortization is long
 
term. This, in turn opens for two new, well-known scenarios:
 
 Traumatization done to somebody else. Y may find it too
 
risky to inflict a trauma on X; X may simply be too powerful. How
 
about Z, lower down on the pecking order,/34/ and a chain of
 
violence winding downwards through social space, time and space?
 
 Traumatization done by somebody else. If X has to be
 
traumatized, there is also the possibility that W, still more
 
powerful, can do so, opening for the possibility of a chain of
 
violence winding upwards in social space, and through time and
 
space. A special case is known as "punishment", W is the
 
"authority" entitled to inflict pain, trauma, not thereby
 
releasing own guilt since the authority is guilt-free. Others, V
 
and U, may doubt this and do the same unto W. And so on./35/
 
 29
 
  What is the purpose of symmetry and balance? Closure, not to
 
the conflict, that requires resolution, but to the violence. Not
 
love, not hatred either. The war is over. Punctum finale.
 
 Even if violence carries its benefits, including the
 
exhilarating risk of being killed as the price one has to pay for
 
the right to kill others (who are willing to pay the same price
 
for the same right), there are limits to violence. Duels among
 
nobles may eliminate a whole social class. Vendettas between two
 
families may eliminate both. The incredibly high level of
 
violence in Colombia no doubt has deprived the country of much
 
potential leadership. The same goes for many other Latin American
 
countries where the victims were small trade union and cooperative
 
leaders. Nihil violentum durabile, no violence is for ever, they
 
say. Evidently some people were/are afraid that this is not the
 
case, substituted the verbal duel of litigation and adjudication
 
for physical duels and outlawed vendettas, and tried to substitute
 
international law/courts for wars.
 
 The problem is whether the approaches above does the closure
 
job, so let us try to look more closely into the matter.
 
 Scenario 1: X hurts Y, X is the perpetrator, Y the victim.
 
 This is the primordial, elemental act. Is it obvious that
 
there has to be a follow-up in order for closure to take place? 
 
The answer depends on X, Y and a lot of Zs.
 
 Imagine that for X this was a sudden burst of passion, an act
 
that only made sense once. Imagine that Y sees it the same way. 
 
Y may not attribute it to X's "nature" but to X's nature under
 
extreme circumstances (drugs, illness, passion) and add structure
 
(suddenly unemployed) and culture (macho). Violence is seen by
 
both X and Y as catharsis. Z accepts, or knows nothing.
 
 30
 
 This type of thinking places us squarely in a dilemma with no
 
clear exit. The extenuating circumstances, let us call them the
 
NSC-complex for Nature, Structure, Culture, gets X off the hook
 
but at the (considerable) cost of dehumanizing X, seeing him (it
 
is usually a he) as the helpless and hapless victim of NSC, like a
 
leaf caught between three heavy storms.
 
 Then restore his humanity, make X an actor with a free will
 
which he, the administrator of that will, handled badly by
 
releasing the violent act. The violence was willed, it was really
 
an act, not only some behavior conditioned by the NSC
 
circumstances. X now has the dignity of being an actor, but at
 
the (considerable) price of being on, not off, the hook; and the
 
hook may even be the gallows. Moreover, Y and Z are also on the
 
hook because they have to do something, they cannot just let it
 
pass by. So, what do they do?
 
 Scenario 2: Guilt for trauma, hoping that will do.
 
Y is suffering a trauma, meaning something with an identifiable
 
cause that did hurt and still does hurt, even to the point of PTSD
 
(post-traumatic stress disorder). X shows signs of guilt, with
 
identifiable cause in his own violence. The guilt hurt, still
 
hurts and will continue hurting, "as long as I live".
 
 The hypothesis would be that through this mechanism symmetry
 
and possibly balance have been obtained. There is no need to
 
drizzle salt and pepper in the wound, to turn the knife around, or
 
any other metaphor. X has enough problems with his own
 
conscience, made credible if he adheres to a faith where the bad
 
deed (assuming hurting Y is one) carries heavy demerit, or reduces
 
the chances of salvation down toward zero, meaning that there is
 
enough trauma in storage for him in the afterlife.
 
  31
 
 Scenario 3: Y the victim hurts X the perpetrator: revenge
 
The hypothesis is that trauma for trauma, and, implicitly, guilt
 
for guilt, sticking to the moderate version--an eye for an eye, a
 
tooth for a tooth, with no interest--may do the job. We assume
 
that X and Y agree on what constitutes equal amounts of violence
 
the tit for tat, the quid pro quo, and agree that equalization
 
means closure. They are both equipped with internal violence
 
book-keeping machinery, both draw satisfaction from a balanced
 
bottom line. The problem is whether Z agrees to any settlement
 
between X and Y, Z being God or Caesar, the state or the public,
 
only two of them, or all in one.
 
 Scenario 4: Z hurts both X and Y for their violent acts
 
Z refuses to see violence/revenge as a private (negative) deal,
 
and punishes both for "taking the matter in their own hands". 
 
 Scenario 5: X and Y together hurt Z for hurting them
 
Z has then managed to unite, possibly even reconcile, X and Y.
 
 Scenario 6: Z hurts X: punishment/justice.
 
Z can then be God, Caesar, the state or the public depending on
 
epoch and circumstances. The basic assumption is the same as in
 
scenario 3: the sum of two violent acts is zero, one cancels the
 
other, closure. But the question remains the same: what is the
 
basis for assuming that X will draw the conclusion (individual
 
prevention) never to be violent again, that Y will be satisfied
 
knowing that X suffers the violence from above known as justice to
 
abstain from engaging in the violence known as revenge, and that
 
Z=the public will learn neither to be violent (general
 
prevention), nor to engage in the violence known as lynching.
 
  Scenario 7: X, Y and Z all feel guilt due to the violence
 
 Schematically the scenarios fill a matrix of shared trauma:
 
 32
 
Table 4.1 Scenarios for X-perpetrator, Y-victim and Z-authority
 
-------------------------------------------------------------
 X as receiver Y as receiver Z as receiver 
-------------------------------------------------------------
X as sender Scenario 2,7 Scenario 1 Scenario 5 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Y as sender Scenario 3 Scenario 3,7 Scenario 5 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Z as sender Scenario 4,6 Scenario 4 Scenario 7 
-------------------------------------------------------------
 
 
Together they constitute a community of violence; maybe not so
 
dissimilar from what we today (1998) have in the Gulf region and
 
in Yugoslavia, with some disagreement as to who is X and who is Y,
 
but not about who is Z: the international community. There is
 
some feeling of guilt, there are mutual accusations, no total
 
satisfaction no total dissatisfaction, no total closure, nor the
 
opposite. A situation of general ambiguity which we may blame on
 
the complexity, on our own shortcomings, or both.
 
 Let us now introduce two more dimensions of violence:
 
intention and irreversibility. Was the harm, with all its
 
consequences, fully intended? Was the harm irreversible, or can
 
it be undone? The harm is in the eyes (and many other senses) of
 
the beholder, the victim; some harm being unavoidable in normal
 
social interaction. But two traffic rules in social, or world
 
(between states/nations) interaction may be useful:
 
 - Never intend to do any harm to others!
 
 - Never do to others what cannot be undone!
 
The latter may be modified to apply to harmful action only; the
 
problem is difficulty in knowing in advance whether action is
 
harmful or not. There may be unknown consequences, and, more
 
importantly, the rule "do no do to others what you do not want
 
others to do to you" is problematic: tastes may be different./36/
 
 
 33
 
 As a rule of thumb let us now assume that the guilt/37/ is a
 
function/38/ of the harm, the intent and the irreversibility:
 
 Guilt = f(Harm, Intent, Irreversibility)
 
This is what makes lethal violence to persons stand out: it is
 
irreversible./39/ We can create, but not recreate, life, a reason
 
why the killer of a child in some cultures had to give his own
 
child in return (or have it killed). Nonlethal violence also has
 
elements of irreversibility: wounds rarely heal completely, and
 
wounds to the spirit never, as psycho-analysis informs us.
 
 Sexualized violence may leave no wound on the body, but
 
irreversible trauma on the spirit. The same applies to all forms
 
of violence to the body as any violence is violation, invasion of
 
the sanctum, the privacy of the body; sexualized violence doubly
 
so. To some extent this also applies to property as body
 
extension, and to burglary as invasion of the family sanctum.
 
 The formula above opens for two additional approaches to
 
guilt release: denial of any evil intent, and reversibility
 
through restitution. Western jurisprudence seems to have
 
developed more in the former direction, with pleas of ignorance,
 
chronic and acute insanity in the moment of action, etc.
 
 And this in spite of the fact that even if harm wrought by
 
crimes of violence and sexualized violence may be irreversible,
 
the harm wrought by property crimes is not. Money can be earned
 
and paid back, the house can be restored. There is the trauma of
 
having had the property violated, but to this the nihil violentum
 
durabile might apply. And destroyed cultural monuments might not
 
be restorable at all because damage is symbolic, not only
 
material. Is it because Christian repent your intent is that much
 
stronger than the capitalist produce-and-consume?
 
 34
 
 How does all of this change the moment X and Y are not
 
individuals but collectivities, at war? Actually, everything
 
mentioned above remains valid, with some terminology differences
 
as when "restitution" is referred to as "reparation" after wars.
 
 But one difference is significant: a collectivity may be
 
divided over the violent acts, as when both German and French
 
troops mutinied against their generals at the end of World War I. 
 
Orchestrated violence, as exercised by armies, requires
 
unconditional obedience, with a very asymmetric chain of command
 
(as opposed to a guerilla movement). On the other hand there is a
 
difference in risk-taking, higher for the soldier in the combat
 
zone than for the ranking officer in the bunker, not to mention
 
the politicians back home setting the parameters for the war. This
 
was one reason why the soldiers revolted; another that neither
 
side was winning. It was a drawn-out stalemate on French soil with
 
the blockade wrecking the German economy at home.
 
 At stake for the military commands on either side was not
 
only victory vs defeat but the legitimacy of warfare, challenged
 
by the soldiers. Only by bringing the World War to an end could
 
warfare be saved. The Germans certainly did both jobs. N�rnberg
 
and Tokyo did not change that: they are in bello, not ad bellum.
 
 We make this point in order to indicate that even if some
 
violence survives in one form or the other, warfare is not only a
 
social institution, but a vulnerable one. Knowledge of visible and
 
invisible effects, including the opportunity costs to social
 
development, may hasten its demise. But in the meantime we still
 
have to deal with the problem of closure. In the next chapters we
 
shall take up two examples, first how not do it, the Nanking
 
genocide, then a possible way out: South Africa.
 
  35
 
5. Auschwitz, Gulag, Hiroshima, Nanking: Who/What is Guilty?
 
 We are now talking about genocide, mega-violence, the
 
intended, massive, extermination of categories of people, defined
 
by nation, class, or otherwise, beyond strategic military
 
consideration, in this horrible 20th century we are about to leave
 
chronologically. To the four cases mentioned more could be added,
 
like the mass killing of Armenians, the allied carpet bombing in
 
Germany, violence during the Chinese cultural revolution, and
 
others (not Italy, interestingly)/40/. The basic theme is this:
 
imagine we want to allocate a certain amount of guilt, given the
 
horrors of genocide. Shall we allocate it to actors ("who") or to
 
culture/structure ("what")?
 
 Nanking is less known, so let us focus on that one. 
 
According to Shi Young & James Yin/41/, the Imperial Japanese Army
 
killed more than 360,000 civilians (369,366 according to burial
 
records and census data (before the population was between 500 and
 
600,000, after only 170,000) in a frenzy of rape and bestial
 
killing, 14 December 1937 to March 1938; "soldiers and units freed
 
by their superiors to murder at will for what they believed was
 
the greater glory of Japan and the Emperor".
 
 In his foreword Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu, chairperson of
 
the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission, admonishes
 
people not to sweep facts under a carpet, like the politician
 
Ishihara tried to do in an interview in Playboy/42/: "People say
 
that the Japanese made a Holocaust there (in Nanking) but that is
 
not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese." And Tutu adds
 
"I am pleased to be associated with this book - as I believe it to
 
be an instrument of reconciliation", with Truth as an
 
indispensable condition.
 
 36
 
 But the Japanese Ministry of Education tried to evade the
 
issue in school textbooks, so it had to be brought to light by a
 
Japanese historian Kenji Ono who visited hundreds of aging
 
soldiers in the prefecture where the 65th regiment of the 13th
 
division came from, and got 20 volumes of diaries, documented in
 
The Nanking Massacre in the Imperial Army Soldiers' Diaries./43/
 
 Actor-oriented guilt-attribution was focused on Lt General
 
Iwame Matsui, commander in central China. He was in Nanking only
 
3 days, found guilty by the Tokyo Tribunal and hanged, on Prince
 
Asaka, Emperor Hirohito's uncle, and by implication on the Emperor
 
himself. Much evidence pointed in that direction, but the
 
Imperial family was given immunity by the US Occupation forces in
 
exchange for the data from the infamous Unit 731 for biological
 
and chemical warfare, examining the impact of B&C agents by
 
vivisection (autopsy on live humans, their bodies being known as
 
marutas, preserved as evidence of how, for instance, anthrax
 
worked). The head was General Shiro Ishii, directly responsible
 
to the Emperor. The Dutch judge on the Tokyo Tribunal, Bert V A
 
R”ling, declared that the US should be ashamed of itself for
 
having entered such a deal.
 
 Young and Yin give voice to three analysts in an effort to
 
understand the motivation behind the massacre:
 
 H. J. Timberley, Manchester Guardian correspondent in 1938:
 
"to strike terror into the heart of the Chinese people in the hope
 
that thereby the latter would be cowed into submission".
 
 David Bergamini, historian: /but they had/ "no longer any
 
hope of it unseating Chiang Kai-Shek".
 
 Edward Behr, historian: "a war of punishment".
 
Rational hypotheses, verifiable through memoirs, letters, etc.
 
  37
 
 But to this actor-oriented approach should be added a focus
 
on structure and culture. Emperor Meiji declared once that the
 
soldiers were the limbs and "we" (the Emperor) the head, making
 
the division of labor very clear. The officer sword was a source
 
of pride; like for the Spanish conquistadores the sharpness to be
 
tested on human bodies, beheading them with one stroke. The blind
 
obedience in the structure, not only of the Imperial army but
 
Imperial Japan has been pointed to as a culprit. This focus
 
extends responsibility to those lower down who obeyed orders.
 
 In consultation with the Japanese peace researcher Kinhide
 
Mushakoji a historical/cultural approach has been developed. One
 
point of origin is the attempt by Emperor Hideyoshi (end of 16th
 
century) to establish an East Asian empire through the conquest of
 
Korea and China, with capital in Beijing. Hideyoshi was clearly
 
aware of Western colonial ambitions at the time, and thought they
 
could best be countered from China by bringing the Japanese
 
Emperor there. Hideyoshi failed after having committed atrocities
 
(the mound of Korean skulls in Kyoto is one example). And Emperor
 
Ieyasu abandoned the project and took Japan into the Tokugawa
 
isolation from 1600 to the 1868 Meiji Restoration.
 
 After the reentry of Japan in the world Hideyoshi's project
 
may have been the model of foreign policy and was continued, but
 
this time with Tokyo as capital. Japan was certainly catching up
 
on the capitalist world project. Late Ching China was weak,
 
unlike late Minh China, as proven by the Sino-Japanese war 1894-
 
95. So was late Yi Korea, as proven by the Korean war 1910-11. 
 
Having conquered Taiwan and Korea, the logical next step was to
 
invade China proper (1937), possibly via Manchuria (1931), with
 
the dai-to-a/44/ as the ultimate East Asian Empire.
 
 38
 
 But why the massacre in Nanking, why not just conquer China
 
and establish dai-to-a? Because Japan had to prove itself as the
 
new China. Being the cultural offspring of China, but having left
 
China behind economically, a pattern of rank discordance/45/ would
 
predict aggression. If Japan were to substitute for China as the
 
East Asian power capable of defending East Asian/Chinese culture
 
against the West, there should be no doubt not only that Japan was
 
strong but that China was weak, not even able to defend herself. 
 
The "rape of Nanking" is a very correct term: rape is about power,
 
not only about sex. In addition rape is about impregnating women
 
with the genetic code of the rapist; the ultimate power,
 
controlling not only her but the offspring. Japanization followed
 
the massacre, implanting the Japan code.
 
 This kind of thinking filled the Japanese collective
 
subconscious, and not only at the top level of society, but all
 
over, through school textbooks, etc. The failure to reject this
 
culture today and be frank about Nanking is a negative indicator
 
rightly taken seriously by Korea and China. There is no closure.
 
 Of course it is problematic to attribute guilt to a culture
 
legitimizing a massacre: that culture is a source of identity.
 
Wherever actors are found guilty others are by definition found
 
innocent: the Tribunal, the rest of society, future generations. 
 
In the Occident other actors are exculpated by such mechanisms. 
 
In Buddhism that does not work, hence a shared bad karma as
 
alternative theory. But the culture is in us, internalized, and
 
we are in the structure. Any guilt-attribution to structure and
 
culture, particularly the latter, is a self-accusation; and an
 
other-accusation of similar structures/cultures. Guilt-
 
attribution to actors is limited, to them, in space and time./46/
 
 39
 
 Let us try to summarize. Who/what was/is guilty of Nanking?
 
Nobody would deny a classical actor guilt, possibly more for those
 
higher up than those lower down, and among the former more for the
 
Imperial center than the person who was executed. We can accept
 
both the N�rnberg Tribunal position, that those lower down cannot
 
get off their guilt claiming that they only followed orders,/47/
 
and the Tokyo Tribunal position that those higher up cannot get
 
off their guilt claiming ignorance of what the lower ranks were
 
doing. We could also accept limited rationality under influence of
 
such intoxicants as alcohol, sex and war frenzy.
 
 But these are fine distinctions within an actor-oriented
 
perspective. Given 100% guilt one possible distribution would be
 
50% to the culture, 40% to the structure and 10% to actors; with
 
those 10% distributed 10% to the rank and file, 40% to the
 
officers and 50% to the imperial military/political center; to
 
indicate a point of view. The legal position is very onesided
 
epistemologically and one could add: anti-military, with some
 
nuances as to where the point of guilt gravity is located. The
 
two tribunals strip the military of some exculpatory arguments,
 
restores them as responsible human beings. But all others and
 
everything else escapes with impunity, scot free, leaving the next
 
generation with nothing to do except reading some history. The
 
searchlight will not be on the victors and their justice, nor on
 
the countless helpers of the military, nor on posterity.
 
 True, to sentence a people to change their structure and
 
culture could also endanger human rights. But to challenge, and
 
change, structural and cultural violence is a task for us all; up-
 
hill, never-ending, indispensable. In that we are all co-
 
responsible; starting with democracy and human rights.
 
 40
 
6. Truth & Reconciliation in South Africa: A New Jurisprudence?
 
Permit me to start on a personal note, reflecting on the fact that
 
I once did six months in prison, in my own home town Oslo, Norway,
 
in connection with objection to military service for refusing to
 
be kill. An unforgettable experience was meeting murderers
 
telling me how they related to their killing:
 
[1] I wish I could do something good for that family, squaring
the wrong I did to them, giving them whatever I might earn - -
 
[2] There is nothing I am so afraid of as meeting that family. I
am so happy these prison walls keep them out, and me in.
 
These two statements could very well come from the same person. 
 
At the same time as they are both very meaningful, they are also
 
contradictory in the sense that it is difficult to enact both. 
 
Contradictions abound in criminal violence and its aftermath. Or
 
just in crime. Or just in violence. Or just in law.
 
 The statements may be read many ways. One reading points to
 
a basic problem of the legal system: the focus is on the relation
 
between the Perpetrator (P) and the Law, represented by the State
 
(S); not on the relation between P and the Victim (V).
 
Adjudication takes place in the P-S relation, ending with
 
acquittal or conviction. In the latter case S administers pain to
 
P with the double intention of deterring P from doing it again
 
(individual prevention, and of deterring others (general).
 
 V is placed on a side-track, irrelevant except for launching
 
the process through an act of accusation, and as a witness. What
 
V suffers is important in deciding the sentence, but is for V and
 
V's nearest kin and friends to bear; like some kind of natural
 
accident. The only recourse might be a civil case against P./48/ 
 
When justice has been administered V, like P, supposedly have
 
obtained closure; the case is concluded.
 
 41
 
 The underlying transaction model between the parties to this
 
drama has justice (revenge from above) as a main theme./49/ Here a
 
fourth party enters, the people/public; but we subsume it under
 
the state as the ultimate sovereign legitimizing the state and/or
 
as the ultimate offended party ("the case of P vs the people of --
 
-). Here are two presentations, as matrix and graph:
 
Table 6.1: Transaction Model I: The Justice Model, Matrix form
--------------------------------------------------------
gives to PERPETRATOR VICTIM STATE/PUBLIC 
--------------------------------------------------------
PERPETRATOR  Trauma as Submission 
 Violence Truth 
 Closure 
--------------------------------------------------------
VICTIM Closure Closure  
--------------------------------------------------------
STATE/PUBLIC Trauma as Voice&Ear Deterrence 
 Justice Justice Closure 
 Closure Closure 
--------------------------------------------------------
 
Figure 6.1. Transaction Model I: The Justice Model, Graph form
 
 STATE/PUBLIC
 
 Submission Punishment Voice&Ear Closure
 Truth Justice  Justice 
 Closure Closure Closure
 
 Trauma, Violence
 Closure
 PERPETRATOR VICTIM
 Closure
 
P does harm to V. The relation is then transformed into a P-S
 
relation where P gives S submission and truth (confession), and S
 
gives V voice&ear. S then does harm to P, punishment, and this
 
second harm is called justice, done unto P, and given to V. As a
 
result closure (the case is closed) is supposed to flow in all
 
directions: S to P ("clean slate"), S to V ("P is suffering, not
 
only you", P to S and V ("I'll not do it again") and V to P and S
 
("this has given me satisfaction, I'll not seek revenge"). And,
 
the general public is also given closure, being deterred.
 
 42
 
 The problem, as with any theory, is whether it works.
 
 The major critique is the failure to deter individually or
 
generally. Given high recidivism for a broad spectrum of crimes,
 
and high and increasing level of criminality in general, it would
 
be difficult to argue that deterrence is effective, given that
 
this transaction model has been around for a long time. But there
 
are at least two important contra-arguments:
 
- "without this the situation would have been still worse", and
 
- "show me a better model".
 
 Then there is another critique: no doubt the victim is short-
 
shrifted. After all the victim is the harmed, offended party. 
 
All the victim is given is a public hearing (the court) that
 
transforms the suffering from private to public. This may invite
 
sympathy and solidarity, but may also work negatively like in
 
cases of sexualized violence against women. After that the victim
 
is treated to justice, "let them eat justice"; and supposed to
 
offer the State closure in return. No revenge, no pressure for
 
restitution. A very meager basis for healing. And yet some of
 
this seems to work: there are few cases of victims taking the
 
justice in their own hands, intercepting the process in front of
 
the court house on the day of the trial, adding to the process at
 
the prison gate on the day of release./50/
 
 Lynching, the obvious exception, in a sense proves the point. 
 
The white lynchers, victimized or not, blinded by "white
 
supremacy", easily saw themselves as "God come State", in a
 
vertical relationship to the presumed perpetrator, imitating the
 
justice model. Internationally "punishment expeditions" was an
 
integral part of the colonial system. The colonial powers saw
 
themselves as the source of justice, in no need of courts.
 
 43
 
 But the basic problem is the distortion of the perpetrator-
 
victim relation by introducing the state (as God's successor). The
 
justice model does not extinguish the harm-trauma in the victim
 
and the guilt-trauma in the criminal for having caused the harm-
 
trauma in the victim. If the violence/harm has been done in the
 
perpetrator-victim relation, then it is in the perpetrator-victim
 
relation the violence/harm has to be undone. That does not
 
contradict the justice model, but could lead to another and
 
additional model. The Truth & Reconciliation model in South
 
Africa/51/ is a new way of dealing with the political crimes
 
committed during apartheid. Here are two presentations:
 
Table 6.2:Transaction Model II: The Truth & Reconciliation Model
------------------------------------------------------------
gives to PERPETRATOR VICTIM STATE/PUBLIC 
------------------------------------------------------------
PERPETRATOR Trauma as Submission 
  Violence; Confession 
 Apology & Truth 
 Restitution Closure 
 Closure 
------------------------------------------------------------
VICTIM Forgiveness Closure 
 Closure 
------------------------------------------------------------
STATE/PUBLIC Amnesty Voice&Ear Reconciliation 
 Closure Restitution Closure 
 Closure 
------------------------------------------------------------
 
Figure 6.2.Transaction Model II:The Truth & Reconciliation Model
 
 STATE/PUBLIC
 
 Submission
 Confession Voice&Ear Closure
 Truth Amnesty Restitution 
 Closure Closure Closure
 
 
  Trauma, Violence
 Apology, Restitution
 Closure
 PERPETRATOR VICTIM
 Forgiveness
 Closure
 
 
  44
 
 The Truth & Reconciliation model is based on three pillars:
 
[1] Victim-Perpetrator: Forgiveness for Apology/Restitution 
 
[2] Perpetrator-State: Truth in return for Amnesty
 
[3] State-Victim: Restitution in return for Closure
 
 These three exchange relations are related. The basic
 
relation is between victim and perpetrator; that relation is the
 
centerpiece of the whole construction. There is an image of the
 
happy ending: Victim and perpetrator together undo the harm done,
 
partly materially (restitution), partly spiritually (forgiveness
 
in return for apology). Final outcome: closure.
 
 If V and P can manage this alone, fine. This is probably the
 
most frequently found model in human affairs. As an example, take
 
an average family. There is love. But there may also be harm in
 
some or all relations: sexual, psychological, spiritual, economic
 
and social infidelity; lack of care and concern for children;
 
physically and verbally violent puberty reactions. In a mature
 
family this is handled according to pillar [1], with acts of love
 
as restitution, healing the wounded love relation. The State does
 
not enter, but possibly some other third party.
 
 But we cannot assume that V and P can handle a relation of
 
massive, even collective, political crimes alone. Pillars [2] and
 
[3], both vertical, are needed. The State offers amnesty for
 
truth, with threat of punishment if truth does not come forward.
 
The hypothesis is that perpetrators fearing punishment will come
 
up with minimum truth, concealing and lying, and perpetrators
 
hoping for amnesty would offer maximum truth, including overdoing
 
it, hoping that more truth will translate into more amnesty. The
 
truth hurts, but liberates, cleanses the festering wound, prepares
 
for [1]. [2] is necessary, but not sufficient.
 
 45
 
 Pillar [3] comes as the crowning achievement, closing the
 
loop. The state adds to any restitution forthcoming from the
 
perpetrator (one does not exclude the other); and the victim, the
 
only one who can do so, closes the case with forgiveness. General
 
reconciliation, and they live happily ever after. Yes?
 
 The net result of letting the truth prevail is supposed to be
 
reconciliation; a concept too complex to be accommodated in a
 
single bilateral relation. Here is one possible definition:
 
[4]Reconciliation=Closure in [1]+Closure in [2]+Closure in [3]/52/
 
But that means that all three "deals" have to come out right; a
 
difficult balancing act. The old justice deal is much simpler.
 
 A woman, white, in connection with the TRC hearings:/53/
 
- I want the truth. I want to know who high up ordered these
atrocities! There cannot be any reconciliation without truth.
 
 Another woman, black/54/, in connection with the hearings:
 
- No government can forgive. No commission can forgive.
 Only I can forgive. And I am not ready to forgive.
 
 We are dealing with horrendous crimes to the individual and
 
collective, human body, mind and spirit. And yet this new model is
 
basically P-V oriented; what matters is what happens in that
 
relation. As the quotes indicate it is not easy. V may feel that
 
P, including those high up, have been lees than frank, that truth
 
is not forthcoming, and sell forgiveness at a higher price in
 
terms of truth currency. S may feel that truth is not
 
forthcoming and hold back on amnesty. On the other hand, P (this
 
is an hypothesis) may also feel that "the more truth the more
 
amnesty", and exaggerate, adding crimes not committed, in the hope
 
of getting off quickly. But by and large the model is clear: S, P
 
and V meet in the same room, for a TRC hearing, with the
 
possibility of arriving at closure together. If they so want.
 
 46
 
 And, the same problem: if the theory works.
 
 First, even if, or indeed if, all truth is forthcoming it may
 
be so horrendous, revealing evil intention behind the often
 
irreversible harm that victim forgiveness is not forthcoming.
 
 Second, where is the steering of the hardened perpetrator?
 
True, to have one's name revealed and associated with heinous
 
crimes may lead to heavy social punishment, like ostracism. But
 
the hardened perpetrator may not be deterred by that; social
 
respect may not be what he is pursuing. To utter some truths and
 
apologies may be a small price for amnesty, getting off scot free. 
 
What is there to prevent him from repeating the crime?
 
 Third, where is the justice? An economy is based on a market
 
for the exchange of goods (including services), and a deal can be
 
closed when the (positive) values are (about) equal. Is justice
 
also based on a market for the exchange of bads/harms (including
 
disservices), where closure can only be obtained when the
 
(negative) values are about equal? As indicated in Chapter 3, is
 
there an underlying, universal, quest for balance, for tit for
 
tat, quid pro quo, harm for harm, as there is for positive goods,
 
that has to be met to obtain closure, also for violence?
 
 The English language uses the word "closure" in both cases. 
 
Closure can come through V doing equal harm to P as revenge and
 
then stopping ("quits", like the Arab sulcha), or through S
 
administering equal harm, "justice" to P. Contrary to the US
 
saying "two wrongs do not make one right", two acts of equal
 
suffering may cancel each other, whereas imbalance may invite
 
violence compensation. Forgiveness in exchange for apology makes
 
sense. But so does punishment in exchange for crime. One does
 
not exclude the other; opening for an eclectic Model III.
 
  47
 
 After all, the court process is about the same, adding
 
priests and psychologists to jurists. But there are also some
 
dissimilarities, leading to both-and rather than either-or:
 
  [1] Victim-Perpetrator. The Justice model is unrealistic,
 
based on the idea that the direct trauma will be healed, even to
 
the point of closure, by the satisfaction derived from indirect
 
administration of punishment by the state. There may be some
 
minor truth to this. But the major truth lies with the direct
 
relation in the T&R model, exchanging apology for forgiveness,
 
adding to that concrete, direct restitution. If direct relations
 
are impossible, the trauma being too deep, go-betweens might be
 
needed, with special training (religious/psychological). A
 
typical example would be sexualized violence, such as rape.
 
 [2] Perpetrator-State: In both models the perpetrator has to
 
tell the truth, and is confronted with evidence uncovered by the
 
investigators. But how can the State both punish and give
 
amnesty? By being lenient, soft with prison and fines, but hard
 
on the need to relate to the victim. Half-amnesty, in short.
 
 [3] State-Victim: In both models the state gives the victim
 
a voice and offers a sympathetic ear. But under the T&R model
 
there is more focus on restitution to the victim, seeing the
 
trauma as a social responsibility, and less on retribution.
 
 Nothing of this seems impossible. Starting with the justice
 
model, more and more elements of the reconciliation model could be
 
introduced, gradually. Basically what would be needed would be
 
personnel able to handle reconciliation, and judges able to
 
accommodate both kinds of knowledge and skills. And the public
 
will have to learn to reconcile and not ostracize if there is
 
progress in the perpetrator-victim relation.
 
 48
 
 Imagine we now superimpose Models I and II on each other, as
 
matrix and as graph. The presentation becomes somewhat messy, but
 
more important is how a sentence might read:
 
 You P have committed crimes against the laws of ----, and you
have violated the general moral bonds tying humans together by
your heinous acts of violence against V. For breaking the law I
hereby, in the name of justice, sentence you to----.
 In addition to serving this sentence you are obliged, after
mature reflection, to extend your deep apology to V and/or V's
family and try your best, directly and/or indirectly, to repair
the human relations you violated. In addition to this you are
obliged to repair the damage done through direct restitution to V
and/or V's family, in kind and/or money, over time.
 Your case is closed when you have served your sentence and
justice has been done, and you have extended your apologies, done
your restitution, and reconciliation has been done. 
 
 The exact amount could then be negotiated in the Court-V-P
 
triad. P has a say, but no veto. And the relative weight of the
 
two models would be the crucial variable that could catch the
 
"circumstances" surrounding the case, such as cultural and
 
structural specificities./55/ Thus, South Africa today seems to
 
have a much higher capacity for Model II than unforgiving West
 
Germans in their Model I orientation toward the leaders of former
 
DDR./56/ Model I also seems to dominate the Latin American legal
 
culture. There are certainly also structural factors like whether
 
the norms are operating at the level of the family or other
 
primary groups, or at the social level as municipal law, or at the
 
world level as international law.
 
 The "lower" the level the more Model II orientation and vice
 
versa? No, some parents are extremely punishment-oriented
 
relative to their children, and there are strong Model II aspects
 
of contemporary international customary law. The basic point is
 
that the level in-between, municipal law, as exported from the
 
West, is very poor in Model II approaches, probably precisely
 
because Model I is so well institutionalized.
 
 49
 
 No doubt this opens for new perspectives in jurisprudence.
 
More particularly, an interesting hypothesis, returning to the
 
opening quotes, would be that having to reconcile, paying the
 
enormous mental and spiritual costs this entails, will have more
 
of a deterrent effect than conventional punishment. Postmodern
 
society, short on social fabric and compelling norms, may even
 
make the tightness of prison society look attractive. The benefits
 
of punishment for society may turn out to be as illusory as the
 
costs to the criminal. New ground is being broken right now,
 
particularly in South Africa, maybe less in other countries where
 
the justice model is more entrenched.
 
 And that leads to an interesting question: why are we talking
 
about such processes in Latin America, and above all in Southern
 
Africa when we include Mozambique, and why right now, in the
 
1990s? Why was the settlement after years of violence not limited
 
to the Justice model, even imitating the Western powers in
 
implementing victor's justice?
 
 Simple answer: impossible, because most defendants would have
 
been from, and in, those very same Western powers. We are talking
 
about residual colonialism and neo-colonialism, run by a local
 
elite, supported by the West (with some opposition), and resisted,
 
violently or not, by people marginalized by the mighty structures
 
they tried to change. In the process atrocities were committed,
 
particularly to protect status quo. The struggle for liberation
 
was typically directed against infra-structure, like power supply,
 
communication/transportation, and the struggle to preserve the
 
status quo aimed at the "terrorists", particularly leaders, having
 
them "disappear". And then they "won", or there was a stalemate;
 
in Latin America, in Southern Africa.
 
  50
 
 So why did patterns of reconciliation emerge in these cases? 
 
Like a plea bargain. The Reconciliation model could serve as a
 
substitute for the Justice model, saving elites from punishment. 
 
Being stronger and less vulnerable they demanded this in return
 
for "accepting" a truce, "granting" independence, "accepting"
 
democracy. The brighter among them, having seen the hand-writing
 
on the wall, knew very well that at best violence could win them a
 
stalemate against the forces of history, and at worst a position
 
in the darker chambers of the graveyard of history. Rather make
 
giving in look like accepting democracy.
 
 When that same layer in the world won or could arraign their
 
enemies into court, they did not miss any chance to "bring them to
 
justice," unless they could make a shady and secret deal with
 
them. This was done against the Germans and Japanese after the
 
Second world war, against East Germans after the Cold War, and
 
against "terrorists" all the time. There is little or no talk of
 
Model II, in any form. Had the losers won, they would probably
 
not have made use of Model II either. 
 
 Nor was the Reconciliation model originally envisaged in
 
South Africa. It seems to have emerged as a compromise between
 
the original ANC position--adjudication, treating political crimes
 
like private crimes--and the regime position---amnesty for all
 
political crimes. Given the limited capacity of the South African
 
courts adjudication would last far into next century, and be
 
counter-productive to reconciliation. A flat amnesty would bury
 
the truth and give no healing to victims. Amnesty in return for
 
truth; and forgiveness in return for apology/restitution, the
 
apology from the perpetrators and the restitution mainly from the
 
State. When it works.
 
 51
 
 And it is far beyond the present author's competence, and
 
also much too early, to asses to what extent it works. The TRC
 
tribunals, with the cooperation of the media (on TV from 6-7 pm
 
every Sunday), have roughly speaking these functions:
 
- to give the victims a full hearing so they can communicate and
share their suffering with the whole society;
 
- to investigate what really happened, using traditional methods
with special investigative teams, witnesses etc.;
 
- expose the violators with full names etc., if the case has been
proved by traditional court standards;
 
- announcing amnesty on the condition of full confession;
 
- trying reconciliation perpetrator-victim, in the same room,
religiously with a priest, psychologically with a psychologist;
 
- organizing restitution, also from perpetrator, when possible.
 
 The experience seems to be that the ANC confess violence, but
 
as it is mainly against things, they have less to confess. The top
 
people of the apartheid regime are silent, or plead ignorance. 
 
Lower ranks come forward and confess. Victims who want to know
 
who higher up gave the order meet massive silence. But be that as
 
it may. Sooner or later the conspiracy of silence will break. 
 
South Africa has broken new paths in the practice of
 
jurisprudence, in seeing a crime both as a relation perpetrator-
 
victim, and a relation perpetrator-God/State/public.
 
 And that leads us to an afterthought. War is a breach of the
 
UN Charter Article 2(4); and postmodern warfare is mainly directed
 
against civilians. When do we get the tribunals after any war
 
when the victims meet their torturers, not only the small foot
 
soldiers but top military and civilian commanders, not only in
 
small countries, but also in the big? And when will presidents,
 
prime ministers and generals apologize? If the South African
 
miracle could happen, so will this, some day.
 
 52
 
 In conclusion, why did all of this work out so much better in
 
South Africa than in some countries in Latin America (Guatemala,
 
El Salvador, Chile, Argentina); or at least so it seems? The
 
Truth Commission model was used in all of them, but Reconciliation
 
only in South Africa. Too early to say, but here are some
 
reflections for whatever they are worth.
 
 The place to look for an explanation is probably in the
 
culture, and not only religion. The Latin American countries are
 
Christian; South Africa is mixed. Christianity of all kinds would
 
emphasize the free will of human beings, see crime as the
 
successor to sin, confession as confession, State/judge as the
 
successor to God/priest and punishment as the successor to
 
penitence. As a result there is a clean slate. But forgiveness?
 
 Many Christians, when asked, say that only the Lord can
 
forgive. But how do we interpret the formulation in the Lord's
 
Prayer (Our Father) "Forgive us our debt as we forgive our
 
debtors" (Wyclif/Douay versions) or "Forgive us our trespasses
 
etc.". Does it mean "He who forgives others will himself be
 
forgiven by the Lord", "Lord, forgive us so we get the strength to
 
forgive others", both (or neither)? A simple reading would be
 
that the Lord forgives, we forgive, and the two are related. At
 
any rate, forgiveness is not beyond human beings.
 
 All this becomes less problematic if one sees the evil act
 
less as rooted in an evil actor, and wars more as something that
 
happens, like an earthquake, drought, flood. It comes and goes.
 
To punish the actors of a war makes as little sense as to punish
 
an earthquake. Better understand why/how it happened (Truth),
 
reconcile oneself to the circumstances (Reconciliation), and be
 
better prepared next time. It makes a lot of sense.
 
 53
 
7. Reconstruction After Violence: An Overview
 
We repeat: humankind at its worst, intra-species war. There are
 
victims, killed and wounded, the bereaved, the deprived, the
 
traumatized, the material damage, the damage to nature. There is
 
no limit to work under the heading of reconstruction, such as
 
rehabilitation, the healing of traumatized humans, bereaved as
 
well as wounded (posttraumatic stress disorder counseling), and
 
rebuilding, repairing the material damage, constructing new
 
habitats, including helping nature renew itself./57/
 
 But a look at Table 3.1 informs us that there is much
 
more work to do. To limit reconstruction to rehabilitation and
 
rebuilding is to commit the fallacy of (badly) "misplaced
 
concreteness", as they used to say in sociology. It means being
 
mesmerized by visible (ruins, people in pain, people crying) at
 
the expense of invisible effects, like military bulletins.
 
 The other items in Table 3.1 can by and large be summarized
 
under two headings: damage to structure and damage to culture. 
 
Structures have to be woven together, but not too tight, not too
 
dominant; cultures have to become peace cultures. More below.
 
 How about damage to nature? We then have to go beyond
 
cleaning up a forest used as a battlefield, using detoxification
 
and planting new trees. We have to try to build mature eco-
 
systems with a structure of diversity and symbiosis, and we have
 
to try to inculcate in those who did the damage a culture of peace
 
which of course would include respect for nature.
 
 Two remarks about the particle "re". Like for research it
 
means again. And again. No end. And it does not mean the
 
restoration of status quo ante except if that is good enough. 
 
And then let us be more specific about reconstruction.
 
 54
 
 Rehabilitation: the collective sorrow approach. Post-
 
traumatic stress disorder is problematic because of the high level
 
of irreversibility. Only one approach will be explored here:
 
collective sorrow, also as an antidote to triumphalism.
 
 Horror has struck. The normal reaction is sorrow, among the
 
bereaved and those who know the bereaved. The sorrow is expressed
 
as a condolence, a period is set aside for the sorrow; women used
 
to dress in black and men had a black ribbon around the arm. At
 
the end, to mark the ending and to mark that life goes on, there
 
is a celebration. The memory of those who passed on is invoked;
 
the challenge to carry on is another basic theme.
 
 So far, so good. All of this can be organized by victor and
 
vanquished alike, after the horror. The basic problem is the
 
theme, the reason for sorrow. Because we are missing the dead,
 
and commiserate with the bereaved and the wounded? That can and
 
should be done, at the family and the community levels. The past-
 
war sorrow, however, should carry another message.
 
 For the victor to deplore collectively the sacrifice that was
 
necessary to win, and for the vanquished to deplore collectively
 
the sacrifice that was insufficient, are parts of the culture of
 
war. A culture of peace would deplore the war as such, any war,
 
as a sign of human failure and folly. War should never be
 
justified; given human potential resources.
 
 War is a scandal; any war is a crime against humanity, to be
 
deplored as such. Around that theme sorrow can crystallize;
 
deploring not only the effects, but war as such. For that to
 
happen not only violent actors, but also violent structures and
 
cultures have to be deplored, as pointed out so often above.
 
Rehabilitation is built around a new cause: abolition of war.
 
 55
 
 But that is a long term goal, like abolition of slavery and
 
colonialism when the abolitionists started (and by and large
 
succeeded). In the short term we are talking about healing, as a
 
very important part of rehabilitation. The wound should no longer
 
hurt, or worse, fester.
 
 But doesn't time heal all wounds? Beyond a certain age we
 
are all bereaved, having lost family members or friends. But we
 
adjust, with small wounds, mixed with bitter-sweet memories.
 
 Unfortunately, that argument misses the point. Traumas divide
 
into acceptable and unacceptable; those caused by war, or violence
 
in general, are often unacceptable. Moreover, traumas divide into
 
individual (or primary group level) and collective; those caused
 
by violence may be individual, but those caused by war are
 
collective. Collective, unacceptable traumas would be the most
 
difficult to heal. Even collective sorrow may not do the job,
 
including turning against the common foe, war itself.
 
 What is left for the conflict/peace worker would be to let
 
the negative argument enter the dialogue: " what will happen if
 
those traumas do not heal? The answer also depends on whether
 
you, individually or collectively, are on top of the traumas, not
 
rather than the traumas on top of you. On top they will not only
 
eat out your heart but be in command, running yours or the
 
nation's life, leading you into endless cycles of revenge. There
 
may be short-term healing to gain from that. But there is a party
 
on the other side with the same problem. Somebody has to break
 
that vicious cycle. This is the task of the strongest, like it is
 
the strongest who shouts least in an argument. That stronger one
 
is you. Do the superhuman, put the wound behind you, find your
 
guidance in the future, not the past."
 
 56
 
 Rebuilding: the development approach. Of course, after
 
destruction comes construction, and with construction come new
 
opportunities. There is the good thing in the bad thing, the New
 
Beginning. The people who have seen this most clearly are the
 
entrepreneurs, from State or Capital, who descend upon a war-torn
 
society very willing to profit from disaster (they may sometimes
 
even be suspected of having organized some of the destruction). 
 
There is space for the private sector, for their capability, if
 
not always for their motivation. Leaving it all to them could be
 
to substitute economic for military invasion and structural
 
violence for direct violence.
 
 What is needed is a national dialogue with general citizen
 
participation. Nobody has monopoly on defining the goal of
 
development; and everybody is entitled to participate in the
 
process. To paraphrase Gandhi: there is no road to development,
 
development is the road. That includes the human development