Must one forgive? What good is forgiveness? Does it help reveal the truth? ease the mourning of survivors? encourage the healing reconciliation vital to future generations?
Who can forgive? Can one forgive in the name of someone else, a relative, a friend, particularly if that person has disappeared? Can one forgive someone who does not ask to be forgiven, or who makes no sincere effort to be forgiven, or who refuses forgiveness? Are there several ways to forgive? different degrees or stages of forgiveness? If one feels unable to forgive, can one ask another—God or someone more humane—to forgive in one’s place? What commitment is made by the one seeking forgiveness? by the one granting it? Such questions are as old as humanity.
In Memory, History, Forgetting, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes, “Can one forgive someone who does not admit his guilt? Must the person forgiving the offender have been offended against? Can one forgive oneself? Even if an author comes down on one side or the other of these questions (and how could he not, at least if the philosopher’s job entails more than simply describing dilemmas), there will always be room for objections.”
For half a century, contemporary conflicts that purposefully target civilian populations have posed new questions about forgiveness. Can one grant it to the authors of collective crimes? of state crimes, or crimes against humanity? Can one grant collective pardon to a community that actively participated in or passively
condoned such crimes, to a people united in their support for them, to a state guilty of crimes on a massive scale? to those who seek forgiveness but take no responsibility for their crimes?
Can you forgive, in the aftermath of a genocide, those who tried to exterminate you?
Several years after the events, the Bugesera survivors are almost unanimous in replying no to that last question, although they cannot say whether their position might evolve over time. To understand this refusal, consider the replies of three survivors of the Nyamata marshes who can speak for their companions.
First, Francine, a farm woman and shopkeeper in Kibungo who was a neighbor of the gang members: “Sometimes, when I sit alone in a chair on my veranda, I imagine this possibility: one far-off day, a local man comes slowly up to me and says, ‘Bonjour, Francine. I have come to speak to you. So, I am the one who cut your mama and your little sisters. I want to ask your forgiveness. ’ Well, to that person I cannot reply anything good. A man may ask for forgiveness if he has had one Primus too many and then beats his wife. But if he has worked at killing for a whole month, even on Sundays, whatever can he hope to be forgiven for?
“We must simply go back to living, since life has so decided … We shall return to drawing water together, to exchanging neighborly words, to selling grain to one another. In twenty years, fifty years, there will perhaps be boys and girls who will learn about the genocide in books. For us, though, it is impossible to forgive.”
Now Sylvie, a social worker out on the hills and a baker in the town of Nyamata: “In the deepest part of me, it is a question not of forgiving or forgetting but of reconciling. The white who let the killers work, there is nothing to forgive him for. The Hutu who massacred, there is nothing to forgive him for. Someone
who watched a neighbor open the bellies of girls to kill the babies before their mamas’ eyes, there is nothing to forgive. There’s no point in wasting words talking to him about it. Only justice can pardon … a justice that makes room for truth, so that fear will drain away …
“One day, perhaps, living together or helping one another will come back among the families of those who killed and those who were killed. But for us, it is too late, because from now on there will be a void. We stepped forward into life, we were cut, and we retreated. It is too heartbreaking, for human beings, to find themselves fallen behind where they once were in life.”
Finally, Édith, a school bursar and a Catholic proselyte who goes from church to church in the hills. She is the only one of these three women to envisage the possibility of forgiveness, which she understands, however, as a kind of mystic absolution: “I know that all the Hutus who killed so calmly cannot be sincere when they beg pardon, even of the Lord. But me, I am ready to forgive. It is not a denial of the harm they did, not a betrayal of the Tutsis, not an easy way out. It is so that I will not suffer my whole life long asking myself why they tried to cut me. I do not want to live in remorse and fear from being Tutsi. If I do not forgive them, it is I alone who suffers and frets and cannot sleep … I yearn for peace in my body. I really must find tranquillity. I have to sweep fear far away from me, even if I do not believe their soothing words.”
We can see, then, that the survivors and the killers do not show the same understanding of forgiveness or pardon, and that itself may make forgiveness impossible.
Of all the active and passive protagonists in the Rwandan genocide—survivors, killers, repatriates, witnesses from political, religious, and humanitarian organizations—the survivors are the
least preoccupied with forgiveness. Even though they are distressed by the prospect of reconciliation, they will speak of it only when asked.
The killers, on the contrary, mention forgiveness the most often, but with a disconcerting naïveté, as the following pages will show. The killers’ and survivors’ differing ideas of forgiveness illustrate two distinct visions of the future and of their changed relationship.
Speaking of which, I should note a new and essential distinction between ordinary war criminals and the perpetrators of genocide. The former, while equally guilty of savagery when they destroy, torture, and rape, often prove able, with time, to reflect on the effort and grace demanded by forgiveness—from both their victims and themselves. But the killers of the Kibungo gang, while they speak frequently of forgiveness, and hope to receive it, do not use the questioning language of self-examination. The way they see it, pardon—whether collective or individual, useful or useless, painful or not—comes on its own and is available upon request.
Strangely, the prisoners can imagine what resentment, anger, and distrust mean to a survivor, they can understand the spirit or act of revenge, and they accept the plausibility of these violent responses to their return. But they simply cannot fathom what the act of forgiveness would mean to a survivor. Some prisoners see it as an obligatory first step; for others, it is a mysterious gesture that will depend on the kindness or the personality of the interlocutor. But either way it boils down to a renunciation of revenge.
It can also be a sort of bargain, a trade-off—so many confessions for so much forgiveness—or a formality. Since I have been punished, I have been pardoned, because the hardship of my sentence brings proportionate forgiveness. Or forgiveness vaguely
represents an opportunity: forgiving is forgetting, the best way for everyone to return to the good old days and start over as if nothing had ever happened. The killer seems oblivious to the minimum requirement for those seeking forgiveness: that they tell the truth, with no tactical calculations, in order to help the victims in their work of remembrance and mourning.
The killer has no idea of the ordeal that begins for the victims once they have agreed to forgive, for in so doing they not only reopen old wounds but also lose the possibility of gaining relief through revenge. The killer does not understand that in seeking forgiveness, he is demanding that the victim make an extraordinary effort, and he remains oblivious to the survivor’s dilemma, anguish, and courageous altruism. The killer does not realize that when he asks for forgiveness as though it were a simple formality, his attitude increases the victim’s pain by ignoring it.
The killer does not grasp that truth, sincerity, and forgiveness are bound together. For him, more or less telling the truth is a recommended ploy for more or less diminishing his offense and, thus, his punishment, even his guilt. Asking for pardon is thus a selfish act invested in the future, because it facilitates his reunion with family and friends, promotes his rehabilitation, and helps him renew former relationships.
In the preceding chapter, Élie said, “I wrote short notes of apology to some families of victims I knew and had them delivered by visitors.” The killers make their requests for forgiveness in writing, or from the witness stand, or via common acquaintances. During our visits to Rilima, Innocent is earnestly importuned several times in this way by prisoners hoping he will seek forgiveness in their name from survivors in Kibungo.
Élie and most of the others in the gang do not ask for forgiveness. They offer their apologies in more or less loud voices to survivors who are free to hear, accept, or refuse them—rather like
the way one says “Sorry” to somebody one has just jostled on a sidewalk. Or like that German soldier in the strange parable told by Simon Wiesenthal in The Sunflower, they ask for pardon with the certainty that this request, because it is humiliating and expresses sympathy, deserves in itself a positive response.
These observations bring to mind others the reader has probably made while considering the killers’ comments on their memories and dreams. The killers insist that the dreams reflect mainly their former lives: family, work in the fields, the countryside, cabarets. This is understandable if one recalls how quickly they abandoned that domestic universe, carried away by the madness of the massacres before their headlong flight into exile. The description of their nightmares, however, is more perplexing.
Most of them claim not to have nightmares—unlike their victims, who are tormented at night by haunting, distressing, appalling dreams from which they awaken in an agony of guilt. And when the killers do have their rare nightmares, these are about the horrors of prison or the camps in Congo rather than the killing season in the marshes.
Is this possible? Is it possible that of all categories of war criminals, the perpetrator of genocide winds up the least traumatized? Is it believable that sleep would so thoroughly mask such extraordinary acts and feelings? Are their victims truly so absent from their nightmares? If so, how do they elude the pangs of remorse in their dreams without the protection of lies? To what do they owe the indulgence of their unconscious minds, their bizarre ability to bolt the gates of slumber against their guilt?
And if this is not possible, why do they deny or downplay their nightmares—which they might offer as tangible proof of their repentance and, in a way, some slight repayment of their debt—especially when at the same time, in broad daylight, they
tell us of their crimes in great detail? Do they fear being overwhelmed by their descriptions of these dreams, which might contradict or transform their narrative accounts, discredit them, or make them more heinous? Are they afraid that recounting these nightmares might reveal things they wish to keep hidden? Is their silence a way of anticipating their rehabilitation? or simply a refusal to take a backward look, eyes wide open, for fear of what they might see about themselves?
Is there some connection between this reluctance to discuss their nightmares and their incomprehension of forgiveness? Is this a way to dam up their memories, to avoid any risk of losing control of their confessions? to survive, psychologically, what they did?