Reconciliation means different things to different people. Its significance varies from culture to culture, and changes with the passage of time. To understand the concept this paper poses four basic questions namely: what is Reconciliation; who is involved; how; and when, in what order and how fast?
Key findings:
- Ideally reconciliation prevents, once and for all, the use of the past as the seed of renewed conflict. It consolidates peace, breaks the cycle of violence and strengthens newly established or reintroduced democratic institutions. In practice such all-encompassing reconciliation is not easy to realize. It is not an isolated act, but a constant readiness to leave the tyranny of violence and fear behind. It is also not an event but a process, and as such usually a difficult, long and unpredictable one, involving various steps and stages. The reconciliation process is not a linear one. At each stage a relapse back into more violent means of dealing with conflicts is always a real possibility and the stages do not always follow logically after each other in any set order. The three stages for reconciliation are: replacing fear by non-violent coexistence; building confidence and trust; and developing empathy.
- Coexistence, trust and empathy develop between individuals who are connected as victims, beneficiaries and perpetrators. This is reconciliation at the interpersonal level. Many initiatives in the area of healing (counselling victims and offenders together) and restorative justice (mediation) take this route towards reconciliation. All the steps in the process also entail the reconciling of groups and communities as a whole. Each perspective, the interpersonal and the collective, has its own chemistry but they are equally important in the process of reconciliation.
- Burying the past in a reconciliatory way requires the mobilization of a variety of techniques. Most of them have to be activated in the short run: healing the wounds of the survivors; some form of retributive or restorative justice; historical accounting via truth-telling; and reparation of the material and psychological damage inflicted on the victims. There are close links between these four mechanisms. Without reparation there can be no healing. Restorative justice, if adequately organized, can heal the wounds of both victim and perpetrator.
- Given the volatility of an immediate post-conflict context, time management in processing reconciliation is an extremely important but difficult dimension in the search for a shared future. Policies must not come too soon or too late. The end of a violent conflict creates a complex agenda- rebuilding the political machinery and the civil service, holding free elections, prosecuting human rights abusers and so on. More often than not it will be impossible to tackle all tasks simultaneously. As reconciliation is only one of the many challenges, short-term political or economic interests may lead to reconciliation measures being postponed. However, reconciliation efforts cannot be put off indefinitely. Healing, truth-telling and reparation deliver important short-term benefits but generally they will not eliminate altogether the underlying causes of the past violence. Long-term tools are also required, three such tools are: education, memory and retrospective apologies.
