'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Reconciliation, from Africa to the Middle East

Actually, the reason that I received a paper copy of the latest issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal, which I have just written about on JWN here, is that it has a review of my latest book, Amnesty after Atrocity?: Healing Nations after Genocide and War Crimes.  Since the book hasn't actually received many reviews yet-- though it got some great pre-publication blurbs, that are printed on the back cover-- I wanted to write something here on JWN about this one... Okay, I'll admit: Especially, because this is a very favorable review!  The reviewer, Sol Gittleman, seemed to really "get" what I was trying to do with the book, which is always a good experience for any author to have.

Gittleman is a former provost of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and currently holds a University Chair there.  He twinned his review of my book with another, of a book called Bridging the Divide: Peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is co-authored by my old friend Edy Kaufman along with Walid Salem and Juliette Verhoeven..

Gittleman starts his review by writing: "It takes a very special kind of courage to continue pressing toward reconciliation in the face of overwhelming odds... "  Then he writes appreciatively about Kaufman et al's book before he comes to my book.  Which is where he says (okay, here is where I blush):


He gives more details about the topics  the book covers, and my reflections on them there.  Then he concludes the review by writing


So, a big thanks to you for that, Sol Gittleman... And here, by the way, is a nice, easy-to-download JPEG version of the book's cover:

Anyway, I'm really happy this review appeared where it did-- that is, in a journal that is seriously read and referred to by many people in the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking community-- and in the way it did: Namely, alongside consideration of a book on the challenges of peacebuilding in the Israeli-Palestinian context.  When I launched into the research that became this book, I knew I was venturing out into some geographical terrain in sub-Saharan Africa that was almost completely new to me.  But I found the topic of how people emerging from very hard- (and roughly) fought conflict could ever possibly overcome the many wounds from the past to be a riveting one, and it was one that I had often wrestled with during my earlier engagement with various citizen-diplomacy peacemaking efforts in the Middle East.

When the "flavor of the month" (okay, decade) in the international human-rights movement increasingly, throughout the 1990s, became to consider that every conflict that came to an end should be accompanied by-- or even, God help us, preceded by-- some form of war-crimes trials, I was already very skeptical.  How could that ever happen in the context that I knew best, that of the Palestinian-Israeli context?  Goodness, when the Palestinian and Israeli leadership do finally manage to get together and conclude a final peace agreement, as I sincerely hope they do before too many more years have passed, how would one ever start in the context of that, to unravel the many long chains of responsibility for the very many thousands of dead and harmed on either side of the national divide?  And if one ever attempted to launch such a process-- in the accusatory way that criminal prosecutions always, of necessity, assume-- what effects would that have on the prospects of maintaining and building the peace thus with such difficulty won?

I honestly couldn't see it as being helpful.

In 2001, when my friend the Lebanese lawyer Chibli Mallat worked with some survivors of the 1982 massacres in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to bring a prosecution against Israeli PM Ariel Sharon-- and under Belgium's extremely bizarre law allowing for "universal" (i.e. completely extra-territorial) jurisdiction-- a part of me applauded the effort from the sidelines.  But an even larger part of me asked, "How on earth is this going to help bring Sharon to where he needs to be: Namely, sitting down in an authoritative, final-peace negotiation with the Palestinian leaders?"  I mean, really: How will it help the Palestinian and Israeli people to escape from the yoke of war, occupation, pervasive insecurity, death, and destruction if this one man, Ariel Sharon, ends up in the dock as a defendant?

Later, as my research on the Africa book continued, I met and interviewed some people in Mozambique who had committed and organized acts of anti-humane terror that dwarfed many times over any of the bad actions that Israelis have ever committed against Palestinians, or Palestinians against Israelis.  (If you don't believe me, go back and read some of the reports on the kinds of tortures, mutilations, and other terrioble abuses that the fighters from Renamo, in particular, committed during the 15-year civil war there.)  But here's the thing: By the time I met these men, who had been the highest military leaders of Renamo, in Maputo in 2003, they had been completely reintegrated into national society.  Very nearly all Mozambicans had judged at the end of that terrible war that the only way they could move forward as a country was to put all the pain, ugliness, loss, grief, and blame from the war era very firmly behind them...

So yes, I do still think that the big lessons that I learned from my work on the book have huge relevance in the Middle East.  Including, of course, in Iraq, where surely we have all now seen the debacle and the horrendously peace-threatening tensions that resulted from the knee-jerk application of the prosecutorial strategy in the case of the Saddam trial.

Anyway, if you JWN readers have not yet read (and preferably also bought!) my book, I hope you do so... I hope, too, that wherever you live in the world and whatever parts of the world you are concerned about, reading the book might help you to think more deeply about what it really takes to make and build sustainable peace processes in conflict-wracked parts of the world.  (My hint in this regard: Western-based rights activists have not yet found all the answers...)