RELIGION AND VIOLENCE
By Helena Cobban,
Global affairs
columnist, The Christian Science Monitor
(Paper presented to
the American Academy
of Religion conference, “Contesting Religion and Religions Contested: The Study
of Religion in a Global Context”,
Atlanta,
Georgia, November 2003;
and
published by Oxford University Press in the
December 2005 edition
of the Journal of the American Academy of
Religion)
I’m
honored to be here with such a distinguished gathering at this conference, and I’m
looking forward to engaging with all of you on issues of common concern. What I’d like to do now is to start to pull
together some personal reflections concerning the many connecting points
between, on the one hand, religion and violence, and on the other, religion and
social healing—and to do this with reference not just to the Middle East, an
area where I have done much of my professional work over the past three
decades, but also to some parts of Africa, where I have been doing some very
productive research on issues of post-violence healing in recent years.
Since
none of us is neutral on any of these issues—we all live in this world and have
fundamental ontological views of our place in it-- I want to state my own
position on some of these questions upfront: to situate myself for you, and
then to get all this autobiographical cumber out of the way.
I
grew up in England,
as an Anglican, which was really a sort of religious “default option” there. My first professional work as a journalist I
carried out as a foreign correspondent in Lebanon,
mainly in the 1970s. In April 1975, eight
months after I got there, the civil war started. (It was very good for my career, by the
way. I had my byline on the front page
of the London Sunday Times several times when I was still just 23 years
old.) The seven years I spent in Lebanon—most
of them in a situation of active warfare-- were transformative for me. Partly this was because I experienced the war
not just in the fly-by-night way that most “foreign” correspondents experienced
it, but because I experienced it at ground-level-- as someone who married into
the local community; as an Arabic-language speaker; as a woman; and as someone
who struggled to run a household and then raise my two young kids there under
all the privations of prolonged warfare.
(By the way, this made for a very different from the view of war from that
accessible from the comfortable luxury hotel where most of the “foreign”
correspondents stayed.) But partly, too,
the experience was transformative because I saw at first hand the way that
intense fear and hatred took hold of one community in Lebanon,
in particular—but also, at other times of other communities in Lebanon’s
complicated social mosaic.
The
community that was most evidently held in the grip of intense fear and hatred at
the time I was there was the country’s ancient Maronite Christian
community. As a reporter, I would travel
around the parts of Beirut that the
extremist Maronite militias controlled and see stenciled on walls throughout that
zone the simple, genocidal slogan “It is the duty of every Lebanese to kill a
Palestinian.” I talked with a
16-year-old girl from a well-off Maronite family who excitedly told me that
every day, the girls on the bus to the exclusive Christian day-school that she
attended would persuade the bus-driver to stop at a certain ravine so they
could look at the new crop of mangled corpses of Palestinians that were thrown
into it every night. These behaviors, I
could see, were clearly tolerated by all the powers-that-be in that
community. When Bashir Gemayyel, the
leader of the Maronites’ Falangist militia, led a tour of press people around
Tel al-Za’tar, a Palestinian refugee camp that his forces had over-run the day
before, he told us beforehand that we would see some very gruesome sights
there—“And I am proud of what you will see.”
And when I visited the chief monastery run by the Order of Maronite
Monks to interview the head of the Order, Father Boulos Na’man, I arrived a
little early and greeted him as he was carrying heavy boxes of ammunition
across the campus with one of his monks.
Those
were strange and terrifying days. I
found it hard to see militiamen in the battle-zones with stickers of the Virgin
Mary plastered on the stocks of their M-16s…
On the other side, too, there were religious zealots, Muslims whose
battle call was “La ullah illa ullah wa Muhammad
rusoul ullah”. But I left Lebanon
in 1981, and while I was there the Muslim-dominated side of Beirut
was still much more tolerant and diverse than the Maronite-dominated side. In the Muslim-dominated side of the city,
some one-third of the residents were Christians. They held church services, had their own
political parties, and contributed to the nationalist politics there
side-by-side with the Muslims. There
were, as in any war, some atrocities in that zone, too. But they were never publicly glorified in the
way that the atrocities on the Falangist side were glorified—an important
difference. And there was never anything
in Muslim-dominated West Beirut like the systematic, religiously-based “ethnic
cleansing” that wiped whole areas of East Beirut—Shiyyah, Maslakh, Karantina,
others—quite empty of Lebanese Muslims.
The
seven years I spent in Lebanon
were enough to put me off organized religion forever-- I thought! But a decade after I left Lebanon, once I had
moved here to the States and started a new life, I started a tentative move
back toward seeing the need for a spiritual community, and I moved through
Unitarianism to become a universalist Quaker, which is where I am now and see
myself staying. Perhaps I should also
note that though I’ve worked for The
Christian Science Monitor in one way or another since 1976, I have never
been a Christian Scientist. However, my
close collegial relations with many people who are “Scientists” have given me
tremendous respect for those people, for the way they live their lives, and
their fidelity to their beliefs in environments—including here in the USA--
that are often very hostile to their worldview.
Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s I was also wrestling intellectually with issues of war and violence,
especially the age-old question of “Is war ever justified?” This question has been given extra poignancy
by my engagement on human-rights issues.
I note that a number of US human-rights organizations actually supported
the war in Kosovo and the most recent one in Iraq. I, however, have found that precisely
because of the depth of my own experience as a person living in a deeply war-afflicted
society, I cannot support the use of war for any end. War itself is, in my clear and certain
knowledge, a massive assault on the most basic human rights of the civilians
who live in—and often far beyond—the war zones.
And in the present day and age, human ingenuity can surely find ways
other than warfare to deal with differences among human groups, including very
extreme differences on human-rights questions.
God gave us reason and the power to communicate, I figure, so should we
not use those faculties in every way possible, while holding up the value of
every single human life, rather than using force and violence to impose our own
particular views onto others?
Well,
Lebanon is of course far from the only country in the Middle East, or indeed
the world, where religion is—in my view, quite illegitimately—used as a
mobilizing tool by cynical political leaders in their quest for earthly power
or aggrandizement. But religion is also,
I should note, used in the midst and the aftermath of war in some very
different ways, too. At their very
best, religious ideals and precepts can, when confronted with the chaos and the
bottomless tragedy and perversion of the natural order that are induced by war,
be used in ways that provide succor to the afflicted and healing at all levels
of society from the individual person through the group to the nation.
Quite
possibly, since I am here amidst so many fine scholars who have made the study
of religion their lifelong calling, I am not telling any of you anything
particularly new. But I can speak to my
experiences: my experience in Lebanon, in Israel and Palestine, in Syria, Iraq,
and many other Middle Eastern societies that bear deep scars from the effects
of war; and also my experience in more recent years in some war-scarred countries
in Central and Southern Africa—three in particular: Rwanda, Mozambique, and
South Africa.
What
I started out studying in these three latter countries was on the face of it a
political question. In the period
1992-1994, the peoples of each of these countries exited from a period of
atrocious internal violence and entered what they all hoped would be a new era
of national peace and wellbeing. The
peoples of all three of those countries still, at the time they entered into
those new orders, bore extremely deep scars from the preceding violence; and in
each of these countries the national leadership chose a very distinct set of
policies in order to deal with—and hopefully transcend—those painful legacies
from the past. The aim of my research
project has been, some 8-12 years after those policies were first chosen, to
assess the effectiveness of those different approaches. Did those policy choices that were made in
the 1992-1994 period actually help to contribute to a sustained reconciliation
among the previously battling parties, or did they either fail to do this, or
even actively hinder the process of national reconciliation? Might these results have implications for the
kinds of approaches to post-violence issues that UN, international aid donors,
and the rest of the international community were urging?
I
knew from the outset that the project would be difficult. The three countries are all very different,
and so was the nature of the atrocious violence from which each of them was
recovering.
In Rwanda, in the fall of 1994, the
whole society was reeling from the paroxysm of genocidal violence which, in
just 13 weeks earlier in the year, had killed around one million citizens—the
vast majority of them Tutsis. That was 80 percent of the Tutsis who were resident
in the country at the beginning of the year; and of the 20 percent who survived
the genocide, many did so only barely, and bore terrible physical and psychic
wounds from everything they had gone through.
Of the country’s surviving seven million people, nearly all of them
Hutus, possibly more than half had participated in some way in the killing. We can know this, because the genocide there,
unlike the genocides the Nazis committed against the Jews and Roma in Europe,
was not industrialized and not “hidden” behind the walls of large
encampments. They were carried out in
the open, on the streets, on the collines,
often by large groups of people who wielded machetes and nail-studded clubs
against their own neighbors. (I also
need to note that numerous courageous Hutus stood aside from the orgies of
killing; some of them even intervened to help protect their Tutsi neighbors by
hiding them or helping them escape; and around 200,000 Hutus accused of
refusing to join in the genocide were killed by the extremeists from their own
community.)
In
summer 1994, while many organs of the Hutu-dominated government and security
forces were directing much energy into sustaining the genocide, the
Tutsi-dominated exile army was able to take over power in the capital and most
of the country. As we know, the génocidaires retreated into Congo
and took two million terrified Hutus with them.
In many ways, the lethal conflict between the two groups was transferred
from Rwanda
into eastern Congo,
in whose dark forests literally millions of people have perished over the years
since then.
Inside
Rwanda,
meanwhile, the returning Tutsi exile force that controlled the country did put
an end to the genocide. We need to
understand and appreciate that fact, and appreciate the depth of shame of the
international community that not only did nothing to end it themselves, but
also took active steps to pull out of the country the tiny UN force that was
there and that had saved thousands of Tutsi lives already.
On
coming into power, Rwanda’s
new government adopted a policy toward the génocidaires
that accorded with their own desires and those of leading actors in the UN: it
was a policy that relied centrally on criminal prosecutions. The idea was that the UN’s new international
tribunal for Rwanda
would deal with the “big fish” among the perpetrators, and the Government of
Rwanda would deal with all other suspects.
By 1997-98, however, the Rwandan government found it had more than
130,000 genocide suspects detained in stinking, overcrowded lockups—and no
means at all to try them… We’re talking
about 130,000 people mainly of breadwinning age, each with say 6 or 7
dependants, all of them Hutus; and this, out of a total of around 7-8 million
national population. You can see the
crippling economic effects of the policy, as well as the crippling effect it
had on inter-group reconciliation. So
starting in 1998, the government decided to move most of these cases out of the
regular system and send them to a revitalized form of a traditional
community-based hearing mechanism called gacaca. (I’ve written a lot more about these affairs
in an article in the April-May 2002 issue of Boston Review.)
In South Africa, in the period 1990-94,
the country’s 25 million or so people were struggling to find a way to emerge
from the horrors of 40-plus years of apartheid and the preceding four centuries
of brutal colonial rule, and to build a genuine, one-person-one-vote democracy
in their extremely multicultural country.
The negotiations took a long time, and one of the most contentious
issues throughout them was the question of what to do about the individuals who
had planned and perpetrated the horrors of apartheid—and perhaps, how to deal
with apartheid’s beneficiaries, too.
Back
in 1973, remember, the UN General Assembly had passed a solemn resolution
determining that the system of entrenched and brutal racial segregation known
as apartheid constituted nothing less than a “crime against humanity”. (This is a very serious type
of atrocious crime that was first designated and defined in the Nuremberg Trial
of 1945-46.) In the early 1990s
there were, quite understandably, considerable forces in the international
community—as well as within South Africa itself—that called for the
perpetrators of the crime of apartheid to be tried and punished à la Nuremberg. In the course of the intense, intra-South
African negotiations of 1990-94, however—or rather, let me say, at the very end
of them—the parties agreed that “in the interests of national reconciliation”
some form of amnesty would be available to the perpetrators of all “politically
motivated” crimes that had been committed in the apartheid era. At one level, this was an astonishingly
generous and visionary offer from the Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the
leadership of the anti-apartheid movement.
At another, it was a choice that was forced on them, since South
Africa’s powerful military and security
bosses had told the ANC that they would not provide security for the crucial
elections of April 1994 unless some credible form of amnesty from
prosecution would be available for them under the new order.
As
we all know, the form that that amnesty finally took was an offer of
conditional, individual amnesty to all former perpetrators of politically motivated
violence who were able to satisfy a committee of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission that they had told the entire truth about all the
rights-abusing actions they’d been part of during the apartheid era. The deal was amnesty for truth-telling. In the end, 7,116 individuals applied for
amnesties. Of those, 1,167 received full
amnesty, 145 received partial amnesty, and the rest of the applications were
either withdrawn or turned down. (Many were
turned down as having related to acts that were not political in nature.)
The
telling, and high-level public acknowledging, of the “truth” about what had
happened to the victims of the apartheid-era atrocities was seen, probably
rightly, as a constructive act that could contribute to national reconciliation
in a number of ways:
·
by restoring the humanity and dignity of those
who had been horribly tortured;
·
by providing concrete details about the location
of the bodies of murdered victims that had been buried or dumped in secret
places, but whose retrieval and tradition-ordained reburial could help put
their still wandering and tortured spirits finally to rest; and
·
thirdly, by
establishing an incontestable historical record of just how the perversions of
thought (including religious thought) had allowed those God-fearing folk the
Afrikaaners –and alongside them, I must say, the less pious British—to visit
such a lengthy and brutal train of suffering on their fellow-men.
In Mozambqiue, the third of the
countries I’ve been studying, the nature of the violence and the means adopted
in 1992 to exit from it were once again different. The violence we are talking about there was a
prolonged (17-year) period of civil war that was for many years fueled by
intensive, escalatory trouble-making from the apartheid government in
neighboring South Africa. By 1992, Mozambique’s
16 million people had been ground down into deep-set pauperization,
de-development, and human want by those long years of fighting. (There, too, the war came after a punishing,
centuries-long process of colonial encroachment and repression.) The civil war between the Frelimo-led
government and the “Renamo” insurgents left one million Mozambicans dead, many
millions displaced inside or outside their country, and further millions on the
brink of starvation.
The
war was brought to an end in October 1992 when the leaders of the two warring
parties met in Rome, at the successful climax of a negotiation that had been
shepherded for four difficult years by the Catholic lay organization Sant’
Egidio. As those negotiations had drawn
toward their close, the parties and their Sant’ Egidio support team drew into
the process of planning for peace both the Italian government and the UN. The UN, the EU, and other outside powers were
thus all poised to help make this important peace agreement stick, once it had
been concluded.
It
is important to remember just how atrocious the Mozambique
civil war had been. It was marked not
just by killings, but by mutilations, sexual assaults, and the use of sexual
enslavement, the impressment of children and youth, and forced starvation as
deliberate strategies of war. In a
report issued shortly before the conclusion of the 1992 peace accord, Amnesty
International stressed that all who had committed such war crimes should be
tried and punished. For their part,
however, the parties to the Mozambique
civil war based their peace agreement on the provision of a blanket amnesty for all actions committed
prior to the peace agreement, regardless of the severity of those actions. One of the first acts of the Mozambique
parliament after the leaders had signed the peace agreement was to pass the
amnesty law. And it was on the basis of
this law that Renamo transformed itself into a peaceful political party; large
numbers of fighters from the forces of both sides were demobilized (and were
given some help toward social rehabilitation through various UN programs); and
Renamo’s remaining fighters were integrated into the national security forces.
The
timing on all this was important. The
Mozambicans reached their peace accord four crucial months before the UN
established the first of the war crimes tribunals of the modern era, the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia,
which was established in February 1993.
(ICTY was
an important fore-runner for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
established by the UN in November 1994.)
But in October 1992, the UN had still not been caught up in “tribunal
fever”. The UN saw its role
overwhelmingly as support role, in supporting the peace process that had been
decided upon by the Mozambicans themselves.
Thus, instead of seeking to ostracize or even indict perpetrators of
civil-war-era atrocities in Mozambique,
the UN (like the Mozambican government) worked with them as valued colleagues
in the process of national reconstruction.
Many of the former fighters who received subsistence grants and
social-rehabilitation from the UN as part of the process of demobilization
were, without a doubt, the very same people who had committed the atrocities
listed in many years of human-rights reports. But nearly all the Mozambicans insisted, and
have continued to insist, that using the approach of social rehabilitation
toward these people, rather than seeking to judge and punish them, was the
right thing to do.
So
the “policy analysis” part of my research project has been aimed at assessing
which—in these three very different situations—of the three different
approaches seems to have worked best from the point of view of providing the
country concerned with an effective basis from which to escape from iterations
of the former violence and move on toward meeting the vital goals of human
wellbeing, social reconstruction, and national reconciliation.
It’s
no secret to reveal that my preliminary results on this score have been that
amnesty seems to be a really important tool in preventing iterations of earlier
conflict and violence, and it is certainly not one that either individual
countries or the international community should give up easily.
However,
along the way of doing this research, the role of religion in the two processes
of sustaining human groups who are living atrocious times, and of helping them
to heal in the aftermath of atrocity, started to become increasingly evident to
me. Again, perhaps I’m not telling most
of you folks anything you don’t know already; but here is some of what I saw
and what I learned.
The
South African case is perhaps the
one that is most familiar in western discourse. Most of us can remember the news
pictures of the TRC chairman Desmond Tutu, who was also an Anglican Archbishop,
opening the sessions of the TRC with a prayer, and with the lighting of
candles; or the times when, at particularly emotional moments in the TRC’s
hearings he would lead those present in a solemn or joyous hymn. At that performative level—and at the level
of Archbishop Tutu’s many extremely eloquent explanations of how he saw the
value of the TRC’s process-- the role that his version of religion played in
the work of the TRC was evident. I note,
by the way, that though Tutu always stayed faithful to his role as a prelate of
my own birth-church, he also considerably enriched and broadened the “theological”
underpinnings of the TRC’s work by making frequent reference to the indigenously
African concept of ubuntu—a concept
that as far as I know is found in many different forms throughout the continent
and which Tutu defines as the idea that “a person is human inasmuch as he or
she recognizes the humanity of others”.
The
role of religion in both the enactment and the planning of the TRC’s work has been much remarked upon, and I need not add to that
comment here. I want merely to report on
one conversation I had a couple of years ago with a Black South African woman,
a long-time pro-ANC activist who is now a government minister. Her name is Rejoyce Mubadhafasi. During many of the toughest years of the
anti-apartheid she was a semi-clandestine organizer for the pro-ANC United
Democratic Front—in fact, the leading UDF organizer in the Northern
Province. In
the course of our conversation two years ago, Ms. Mubadhafasi told me of many
of the terrible acts of retribution that the apartheid authorities tried to
visit on her and her family in those years.
Close friends were killed. A bomb
was thrown into the small house where she and her children were sleeping. Dogs were set upon her. She was jailed repeatedly. Finally I asked her, “How do you feel about
the fact that the people who did all these things to you and your family are
now walking free?” She told me, in
effect, “That’s okay—God will see to them.”
She also made two other significant points in this regard. Firstly, she and her comrades-in-arms from
the days of struggle were just too plain busy, these days, trying to build up
the conditions of life of their people throughout the country, to be able to
spend too much times worrying about settling old scores with their former
tormentors. And secondly, she stressed
strongly that she did not aspire to be the kind of person who would visit upon
others the same kind of treatment that had been heaped on her. So in that context, leaving the whole
question of “punishing” up to the Almighty seemed far the best thing to do. How handy, therefore, to have a view of the
Almighty that was such that this work could safely be left to him.
In
South Africa,
it was not only in helping to ease the emotional rawness of the years after
the demise of the apartheid system that religion played a part. (Here, I should specify that this includes
all of the many religions now found in South Africa, which along with
Christianity include Islam, Hinduism, numerous traditional and neotraditional
religions, and a number of apparent hybrids among some of these, since many
South Africans seem to be extremely religious, and religiously creative
people.) But during the long, difficult
years of colonial rule and apartheid as well, religious thought and religious
institutions had also played a significant role in sustaining the spirits of
people being ground under terrible forms of oppression. We should not forget that Mahatma Gandhi did
his first, spiritually-motivated nonviolent mass organizing in South
Africa.
Nor should we forget the role that so many churches, mosques, and
temples played in helping to sustain the anti-apartheid movement. The ones that I know most about, however, are
the churches. Ms. Mubadhafasi herself is
a Lutheran, and received significant support in some of her organizing work
from Lutheran organizations in Europe. I remember when I was growing up the
inspiring leadership of Tutu’s Anglican predecessor, Bishop Trevor
Huddleston. The South African Council of
Churches became a bastion of support for the anti-apartheid movement. Of course, Christianity had a lot to make up for
in South Africa,
since both the earlier colonial ventures--whether Dutch or English--and the
later form of rule known as apartheid claimed to receive their inspiration in
good part at least from the teachings of the Christian Bible. (The same was true, of course, of much of the
institution of slavery, here in the USA.) So it was an important contribution to the
anti-apartheid struggle that Christians of conscience like Huddleston or
numerous others could contest with the authors and upholders of apartheid from
within the terms of the very Biblical discourse that they claimed as their own. But during the apartheid era, the role of many
of the churches in South Africa
was much broader than at the level only of ideology. Many of them also took real risks to engage
in the hard, Christian task of aiding the poor and oppressed.
I
want to turn next to the constructive role that many religions and many
religious institutions have played in Mozambique,
since you will have guessed from what I referred to already—even if you did not
know it before, which you probably did—that the religious beliefs of the good
people of Sant’ Egidio certainly informed the approach they took as they helped
the Mozambican negotiators work their way toward the 1992 peace agreement. This was undoubtedly true, and the record of Sant’
Egidio’s work with the Mozambicans remains as a true inspiration to all of
us. You can read a short reflection on
it written by Sant’ Egidio’s representative to the UN at the time, Andrea
Bartoli, an essay called “Providing space for change in Mozambique”,
published in 1998. However, in using their essentially
forward-looking, healing-focused approach to negotiations, the Sant’ Egidio
folks were also connecting with a very rich matrix of such attitudes that already
existed in Mozambican society thanks primarily to the indigenous cultural
resources—including, centrally, indigenous religious resources-- that had long
existed within the country, but also to the externally-born religions that
throughout the 20th century had gained something of a small foothold in the
country.
I
have to confess that I find Mozambique
a really exciting and interesting place to be.
The Portuguese who ran the colonial system were—from a colonial
administrator’s point of view—generally fairly unsuccessful at their job, there
as elsewhere. They did not push their
influence very far inland. They did not
push huge populations of Portuguese or Portuguese-dependent settlers onto the
land there. They did extremely little to
try to “Lusitize” the native populations by forcing them into Lusophone
schools, court systems, churches, etc.
By and large—though with many notable exceptions—for most of their time
in Mozambique
they more or less left the indigenous people alone. With the result that in Mozambqiue—as in Angola,
but unlike most parts of British- or French-ruled Africa—you
had the survival of many, many very significant indigenous cultural resources,
including indigenous religions.
Now,
Mozambique is a
fairly large country with something like 16 or 17 language groups, with each of
these cultural groupings having its own set of approaches to the ontological and cosmological
questions that have confounded humankind throughout the ages. But by and large, members of most of these
groups or nations seem to have subscribed—and largely, still to subscribe—to
some version the basic idea of ubuntu,
which is not surprising considering how close and culturally continuous
Mozambique is with South Africa. To be a
little more precise, what I have learned from studying various pieces of
research on Mozambique including centrally the works of anthropologists Alcinda
Honwana and Carolyn Nordstrom, is that the basic worldview of most Mozambicans
is one in which the concept that westerners think of as the “self” is
intimately bound up in the web of relationships that that self has with the
extended family, with the homestead, with the ancestors who are buried there,
and with the spirit world in which these ancestors belong.
So
here’s what I found really exciting and important: by having kept so much of
their society intact through the centuries of Portuguese rule, when the
Mozambicans did get into their independence war in the 1960s, and then their
terrible post-independence civil war from 1975 on, they still had many robust
indigenous cultural resources on which they were able to draw, that played a
crucial role in helping them withstand the rigors and privations of those
wars. The traditional healers—the curandeiros and curandeiras—had many practices, spells, rituals, medicines, and
other interventions that they used with the constant aim of trying to heal both
individual spirits that had been wounded by war and on occasion the social
rifts that had been caused by the war.
(Of course, in the traditional Mozambican worldview there is no
“disciplinary” divide between the practice of
religion, the practice of healing, the practice of divining the rightful order
of things, and the practice of conflict resolution. And let’s face it, many of these disciplinary
divides in our own era, in our own societies in the west, are pretty artificial
and fragile sometimes, too.)
As
Nordstrom has written so movingly in her book A Different Kind of War Story,
throughout the civil war, and despite the terrible mass dislocations and other
privations that it imposed on Mozambique’s
people, the curandeiros and curandeiras continued practicing their
religion-based arts of individual and social healing. I can’t go into many details here. But she and Honwana give many different
examples of the kinds of rituals with which former child soldiers—some of whom
had been forced by their military commanders to commit atrocities against their
own home villages, precisely with the aim of making sure they would not have
any safe refuge to flee to—would later be taken back into the village
communities and speedily have their community membership reinstated there after
going through the necessary rituals that aimed at spiritual cleansing of the
individual and effecting his reconnection with the ancestors and the rest of
his rightful world. Or, the rituals used
to purify women who had been taken as sex slaves—rituals that once again
allowed them resume their rightful place back in the village community.
Building
on the base provided by these traditions—traditions which are still deeply held
by most of the population to this day, I should add—was the influence of
exogenous religious organizations, whether Muslim, western-Christian, or the
special blend of protestant evangelism and native rituals embodied in the
“Apostolic” or “Zionist” churches whose adherents first encountered those
religious syntheses while working as migrant laborers South Africa’s
mines. I want to stress that all
of these religions played a role in helping to enact at the popular level the
same kind of “forgive and forget” policy that was embodied in the
national-level amnesty. Traveling around
Southern Mozambique as I was able to do a little this
spring, I found very, very few individuals who expressed any desire at all to
investigate—far less, to prosecute—any of the atrocities of the war era. “That was the era of war, and in a war
everyone does terrible things,” I was told over and over again. “Now we are in a time of peace. So our main aim is to make sure there is no
resumption of the war. Investigations? Tribunals? Why would
we ever have wanted to do that? What for?”
I
want to mention just a few other experiences I had in Mozambique. I had two deeply inspiring interviews with
church leaders there: Cardinal Alexander Dos Santos, an elderly prince of the
Catholic church who played a big role in helping to broker the 1992 peace deal,
and Bishop Dinis Sengulane, an Anglican Bishop who also played a big role, and
whose little book about his peacemaking has a wonderful title that captures the
Mozambican spirit of peacemaking beautifully.
It is called Vitória sem Vencidos (Victory without losers). I had a number of interesting discussions
with traditional healers, in which they explained that according to their worldview,
“violence” is an anti-humane force that can sometimes hold people in its grip,
and from which the person or persons have to be rescued if they are to be
restored to their full status of humanity.
But most interestingly of all, perhaps, were the many things I learned through
my encounters with my research associate there, Salomao Mungoi. Mungoi is a former Captain in the government
(Frelimo) army. But for some years now
he has been in the leadership of an organization of ex-combatants from both
sides of the civil war front-line: their organization provides
conflict-resolution and organizational-development services around the
country. Typically, the teams they work
in contain members of both Frelimo and Renamo.
In both his own organization, ProPaz, and in other organizations, I saw
Mungoi and numerous other former Frelimo fighters interacting in an extremely
friendly way with former Renamo officers and fighters. Sometimes—and this I found interesting,
too—when Mungoi was talking about someone he was working with, he would say he
honestly could not remember which side that individual had fought on in
the civil war.
From
my long experience in Lebanon,
I have to say I found the apparent depth of national and social reconciliation
that I witnessed in Mozambique,
11 years after 1992, quite remarkable.
And religion, I note again, had been important in achieving this at many
different levels.
And so, finally, to Rwanda. What many
westerners know about the role of religion and religious institutions in that
sad country is probably the shameful facts about the involvement of many
leaders of religious institutions in the genocide itself.
What we learned from the criminal
prosecutions that followed the war—if we did not know it before—was that many
Christian priests and nuns had been actively involved in aiding the génocidaires. These included an Anglican bishop and a high-ranking
Seventh Day Adventist priest who were both indicted by the ICTR. (The bishop died in detention before his case
was heard.) But the religious
institution that was most deeply morally compromised by its involvement with
the genocide was undoubtedly the Catholic church, which
up until then had been the religious institution most closely associated with
the power centers in the country.
Rwanda’s colonial rulers, the Belgians, had done a far more thorough job
of pushing their social institutions onto the indigenes in Rwanda than the
Portuguese had in Mozambique—and Rwanda is anyway a far smaller country in
which to achieve this. The Belgian “Pères
Blancs” were oftentimes an essential part of the colonial venture.
All
this meant that in the tortured, multiply traumatized aftermath of the
genocide, a high proportion of Rwandans felt that they had no stable
institutions that could help them to recover—either physically, or
spiritually. They desperately needed a
framework within which they could restore meaning to lives shattered by the
whole experience of 1994. And here I’m
referring not only to that tiny minority of Tutsi residents of the country (and
their “moderate” Hutu friends and neighbors) who actually survived the
genocide, but also to the returning Tutsi exiles who found their home
neighborhoods, family homesteads, and entire extended families quite
destroyed. And I am referring, too, to
those millions of Rwandans who had participated in the genocide,
too. The experience of participating was
itself a deeply dehumanizing, traumatizing experience; and once the frenzy of
genocide had been halted, these “participant-survivors” of it had to come to
terms, somehow, with the fact of their own participation or complicity in
it. In addition, as the Tutsi-dominated
RPF armies seized control of nearly the whole country in the summer of 1994,
the leaders of the genocide venture gathered up two million of their fellow
Hutus and led these people into a terrifying and terrorized exile in
neighboring countries. Plus, in the
“heat of battle”, as the phrase goes, some members of the RPF also committed
atrocities against Hutus in some parts of the country.
In
the west, we like to make simplistic, though judgment-laden, distinctions
between “victims or survivors” of violent acts, and “perpetrators”. We tend to ignore the traumatization that
perpetrators suffer; we ignore, also, the fact that many “victims/survivors”
are not themselves pure innocents: indeed, frequently people who have
themselves survived the torment of others go on to become enactors of torment
in their turn. We like to put people in
strict, dyadical boxes and we expect them to stay there. Real-life instances of atrocious violence are
seldom like that, however, a fact that Primo Levi has explored possibly better
than anyone else.
What
I am saying though is that once the genocide had ended in Rwanda,
the entire population of the country was left in a web of complex,
multi-layered trauma. Nearly all the
institutions that had given meaning to peoples’ lives had either been taken
from them by the genocide, or had palpably failed them in their time of need:
families; home communities; economic networks; the state apparatus; the
Catholic church.
Of course, western aid organizations flooded into the country, some
offering services that were vital, appropriate, and much appreciated, and some
offering services that lacked these qualities.
I
have visited Rwanda
only once. I went for nearly two weeks
in the summer of 2002. By then, the
situation had settled down a lot from how it must have been in the mid-1990s. The government was slowly trying to move the
scores of thousands of genocide-related cases into the gacaca system, and it was that process that I was primarily
studying. But I had some intriguing and
very inspiring other kinds of experiences there—and primarily through the
serendipitous fact that I’d been unable to secure the research funding that I’d
thought I needed for the trip. I went ahead and made the trip anyway; and to
save on costs I stayed in a protestant mission in a shanty-town area of the
capital, Kigali. This place was amazing. It was run by Michel Kayetaba, an evangelical
Anglican with unbelievable gifts as a spiritual leader and social
organizer. One of the main things that his
organization, Moucecore, does is to provide faith-based training to grassroots
community leaders throughout the country in a number of sorely-needed social
leadership skills. When I was there, he
had 40 trainees there from around the country, taking a two-week course on
faith-based community development. It looked
very well organized—people of all ages and many different backgrounds were
taking part. Not all were Anglicans;
they came from a variety of different evangelically-oriented groups. They included both Hutus and Tutsis,
worshiping and working together. I
encountered similar, apparently stress-free social mixing between Hutus and
Tutsis with the evangelical Quaker community whom I worshiped and visited with
on one of my Sundays there.
This
would be as if, after the Holocaust in Europe, the
remnants of Germany’s
former Jewish community had re-gathered back in Germany
and had lived in close contact and amity with the Aryan Germans there just a
few years after 1945. (Matters are a
little more complex in Rwanda,
since there it is the minority community, the community that includes the
genocide survivors, that effectively controls the reins of government
power. The minority nature of political
rule there is undoubtedly a major problem that still needs addressing.) But still, at the human level, the ability of
many, many Rwandan Tutsis and Hutus to transcend the terrible cleavage of the
past is a remarkable achievement, and one that needs much more study—as does
the role of religion in this still-continuing work of inter-group
reconciliation. I know that the Muslim
institutions that are well-rooted in parts of the country have played a role in
this drama of reconciliation; but once again, the institutions that I am most
familiar with are the Christian ones, and in this case, specifically the
evangelical Christian ones.
Evangelicism
has experienced a massive growth in adherents in Rwanda
since the genocide. One survey I saw
estimated that by the end of the 1990s some 43% of Rwandan were
identifying themselves as Protestants, up from less than 10% in 1994. I talked to a number of Rwandans who had
converted from Catholicism to an evangelical form of Protestantism, in most
cases because they had found Catholicism too compromised by its role in the
genocide and far too hierarchically organized for their taste. It’s important to stress, too, that the new wave
of evangelicism did not merely “come in from outside” with the evangelical aid
groups that flocked to the country after 1994.
It was well-rooted, already, in the lives, experiences, examples, and
organizing skill shown by indigenous Protestant leaders like Michel Kayetaba or
Antoine Rutayasire. These people and a
few other religious leaders had played an exemplary role during the genocide,
and though people of Christian affiliation should be quite aware of the
shameful role played by some “Christian” leaders during the genocide, they/we should
also learn much more about the courageous acts of leadership that Kayitaba,
Rutayasire, the Catholic pastor André Sibomana, and other church leaders
undertook during the genocide.
Certainly, the writings of these people should be much more widely
distributed and studied around the world.
* *
*
So
what can I say, in conclusion of these remarks?
The title of a recent book by Chris Hedges argues that “War is a force
that gives us meaning”. But many of us
here would probably argue, along with the anthropologists, that one of the main
things that gives “meaning” to the lives of people who
are living through traumatic times is not “war”, but religion. In my own experience, I have certainly seen
how in times filled with fear, uncertainty, traumatization, and suffering,
various different forms of religion can help to restore meaning and dignity to
human lives from which those attributes have previously been stripped, or from
which they were absent.
But
it seems to me—and I’m generalizing pretty grossly here—that “religions” come
in two main different flavors (though sometimes these flavors come mixed together
in the same institutional package.) The
first of these flavors, or trends, in religions is the trend toward judging and punishing others,
a focus that many, many religions seem to have.
The other trend is quite different: it is the trend in those religions
that seek to heal other people and ourselves. In the situations of often atrocious
inter-communal conflict that I have witnessed or studied intensively—whether in
Lebanon, in Israel/Palestine, in Rwanda, South Africa, Mozambique, or
elsewhere—I have seen both trends at work.
And I think I know, both intellectually and from my own experience,
which of these kinds of religion seems
to be more spirit-led and to be best for me and, I venture to suggest, for the
rest of the world.