The story of the departure ceremony (10): ‘truth and reconciliation’.
On the first Saturday of every month, a little after sunrise, one of our departure ceremonies is held: the pilgrim lauds. This month we read a text from our pilgrim book of hours Seasons of Life by Daan Bronkhorst, in-house writer of Amnesty International’s Netherlands department. The miniature entitled: ‘Mensen die passgaan’, from the Book of Hours is by Marjoke Schulten. Reader: Sytske Zwart, one of the publishers of Seasons of Life.
Below you will find the text as Sytske recorded it.
A middle-aged woman sits on a bench that stands in the large marble hallway. A little further on is a heavy double door, above which hangs the national flag. Men in dark suits and women in black walk back and forth, thick files in their arms. The woman looks tensely ahead. She clutches her large bag on her lap.
The woman, whom I watch for a while, waits for the oak door to open. There she will be received by a commission appointed by the president to shed light on the past. In this country, Chile, some 3,000 people have been murdered or “disappeared” under the military regime. Now that democracy has been restored, the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation is trying to determine what happened on a case-by-case basis.
The woman’s son and her daughter-in-law were picked up at night years ago. They have not been heard from since. She has heard that her pregnant daughter-in-law gave birth to a child in captivity, but she does not know what happened to that child. All she knows is that her son and his wife have been registered as ‘disappeared’. And that she is therefore entitled to compensation, an official apology and the promise that her grandchild will be searched for.
Will this handling of her case lead the woman to reconcile with what happened? Who knows. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote a book about the trial of war criminal Adolf Eichmann, said: “Those who cannot forgive are forced to feel the same senseless revenge over and over again.” The Chilean commission did not ask for forgiveness. She only asked for a willingness to reconcile. Because anyone who asks for an eye for an eye ends up in a society in which everyone is ultimately blind.
More than twenty countries have established a truth and reconciliation commission in recent decades. In South Africa, the hearings of victims and perpetrators were televised. Chile opted for seclusion. Other countries did things differently. Sometimes it was successful, sometimes the committee did a poor job. And quite often, the preparations for a truth commission led to nothing.
Reconciliation is the unification of opposites. Reconciliation must be principled, but also pragmatic. Reconciliation is necessary, for society as a whole, but often almost impossible on a personal level. Reconciliation has its advantages, because it can nip further conflict in the bud, but it also carries great risks if it is only a matter of covering open wounds.
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has said that truth must meet three conditions. The facts must be correct, the standards must be observed, and there must be ‘truthfulness’. The Chilean commission tried to honor that threefold truth. She recorded the facts, observed all legal rules and testified to the sincere attempt to do justice to victims.
I don’t know what happened to this woman. I hope her grandchild has been tracked down. In a number of cases, this was successful: the babies were given for adoption to families of soldiers.
Will she feel reconciled? In any case, the truth has been granted to her by this committee. Living with the truth: perhaps we should expect reconciliation to be no more than that.
