Between Getting Even And Getting Human

Harvard Law professor Martha Minow opens her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness by listing the reasons why it had to be written and why it should be read: "The Holocaust and Final Solution, the Rape of Nanking, the...killings of Cambodians, the genocide of Armenians...the killings of the Hutus, the Gulag, the tortures of 'leftists' in Chile, the students in Argentina, the victims of apartheid." She makes a grim list of the genocides, violence, mass tortures and collective horror, nothing how our century is characterized by these and other atrocities and how it may be remembered more for its mass graves than for anything else.

She also expresses in her introduction a tentative hope that along with the rise of institutional destruction and degradation of whole populations have developed the legal tools for peace and recovery. She writes, "Some of the incidents of mass violence are linked...by wondrous, though painful and complex, transformations of the surrounding societies after the events. Less oppressive, and even democratic regimes, [have] emerged." It is those "legal responses" to the horrors that are the focus of her work.

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness looks at the two extremes of response in their legal manifestations: vengeance in the form of justice in trials and forgiveness in the form of amnesty and reconciliation offered by "truth commissions." The Nuremberg Trials of World War II and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa serve as Professor Minow's main examples, and she examines each of their approaches in two rather lengthy chapters. She critiques them on the level of their effects on victims and survivors as well a on a national and societal level. How does each of these approaches help the victims? Does it offer some kind of satisfaction or return something of the dignity that has been taken? What kind of range do these approaches have--how many people are actually affected by them? Does either of these methods work well towards reconstruction and societal reconciliation? Are trials simply the "spoils of war" of the victor, or do they really seek to establish the rule of law? Do the truth commissions allow perpetrators of tortures and rape to go unpunished, or do they invite true repentance and forgiviness?

Professor Minow asks all the right questions, but it is not always easy to unravel her answers. Navigating through her short examples and the sea of names of victims and officials is sometimes difficult, and the first few chapters seem not to lead very clearly from one point to another. There is little sense of progression but rather a sense of increasing complication. There is also a distinct lack of narrative cohesion. We are never really brought close to the trials and the truth commissions--personal reflections or individual experiences are limited especially in the first few chapters, kept very short and giving us very little to latch on to. This brevity makes it difficult at times to keep reading.

But these problems in the book are really a reflection of the problems involved in tackling such a topic as mass violence. There are no real answers, and the deeper you dig, the more complex the issues become. As Professor Minow herself puts it, "There are no tidy endings following mass atrocity." If we are to tell someone's story, whose story shall we tell? Whose perspective should we use when trying to judge the effects of the trials? Which group will be represented--victims, bystanders or perpetrators? The boundaries between these classifications are often blurred. Which individuals should we select to speak? Perhaps the remoteness of her approach is the only means of making an unbiased approach possible.

The later chapters of Between Vengeance and Forgiveness make up for any confusion or difficulties in the earlier ones. The discussion of the Japanese-Americans' search for recognition after the injustice of their internment during World War II is fascinating and a pleasure to read. Professor Minow's chapter on reparations and the final chapter, "Facing History," are well-written and even engaging. They shake out some of the uncertainties in her argument and show us that if we cannot do away with the effects of torture and violence or replace what has been lost after genocide, then at least we can react positively through recognition of the past events and symbolic actions. We can make the past a little easier to bear and make a commitment to a better future. She offers a limited but concrete hope.

Throughout the book, it is apparent that the ultimate goal of its writing is healing. In what I take to be the most moving passage, Professor Minow quotes Cynthia Ngewu, the mother of a murdered victim of the apartheid regime: "This thing called reconciliation...if I am understanding it correctly...if it means this perpetrator, this man who has killed [my son], if it means he becomes human again, this man, so that I, so that all of us, get our humanity back...then I agree, then I support it all." It is this searching for forgiveness, this fumbling for a lost humanity that is enshrined in Professor Minow's book, and it is certainly worth searching for.