Reconciling – the Long Journey
Having Researched, built Relationships, begun a programme of Relieving need with partners suited for whatever the need is, taken a deep breath and, after careful thought, Risked the beginning of meeting, the long journey of Reconciling can now move into the next phase.
It is worth going back to what reconciliation is and is not. Reconciliation is a portfolio word meaning the gathering together of all the processes and skills necessary to transform destructive differences and conflicts into constructive and imaginative acceptance of difference and capacity to disagree well.
Reconciliation is not a series of compromises to reach a weak middle ground on which all stand, equally unhappily and with no basis for action together. That is kicking the can down the road, or into the long grass or wherever. Fuzziness of that sort is the evasion of the challenge of difference. What should be sought is a transparent and clear-eyed blessing and welcome of diversity so that all, without exception, may have an equal opportunity to flourish as individuals and groups. Reconciliation is also, especially, not the signing of a peace agreement or some other kind of accord, and assuming ‘that is that, deal done, problem solved’.
If we compare the last two paragraphs it is easy to see why reconciliation, properly understood, is so difficult and takes so long.
At its heart is the transformation of every part of a person and group.
There will be a need to see some opponents differently, at least the ones who are themselves willing to be involved in the process. Seeing people and groups differently is not necessarily seeing them as good but, at the least, as people with whom to engage if possible.
There will be a need to forgo some aspects of the conflict, especially violence or its threat and other forms of deeply destructive behaviour. The process will have to lead to a change of heart as well as commitment to the journey. Changing hearts takes a very long time even in the simplest of cases. It is difficult and demanding for all involved.
There will need to be a fresh approach to justice, and a realistic search for truth. Myths will be exposed. Long-held assumptions will be progressively changed by continued contact and relationship building. A dispute that has naturally focused on what was objectionable about the other may well begin to change into a more or less friendly partnership looking outwards to the world around and seeking to bless it.
It is an uncertain process. It has moments of failure and despair and success and elation. It is prone to fits and starts, to forgetfulness and to recalling its importance. The further away in time that the destructive confrontations become, the less urgency there is in reconciliation. It may collapse altogether for a while, or look as if it has collapsed.
So once the engagement with the other has started, what are the key elements?
The most important question is about how to approach the demands of conflicted parties for truth and justice. They are also the most controversial parts of reconciliation. That is why handling those issues comes at this point and not earlier. They come later because they are so important that there has to have been a solid establishment of relationships evidenced by taking risks in meeting, the relief of need, and founded in good and continuing research. Otherwise, both truth and justice become weaponized by one side or the other or both.
The very action of introducing these areas will raise the risk level a great deal more, but ignoring them is the kiss of death. There can never be reconciliation unless it is clear that the journey involves addressing injustices and seeking to find a common understanding of events. However, how they are handled is itself very difficult to manage.
Opening Truth – Revealing Myth
The hunt for any sort of knowledge begins with asking the right questions and using the right approach about what is being hunted. You do not look for new stars with a microscope, nor is a telescope of much value in seeking the answers to the makeup of the ocean floor.
Each conflict will have its own myths, and the longer they have gone on, the more embedded they become. ‘Truths’ that were recognized as convenient myths when first put forward end up as articles of dogma in the hands of supporters of one view.
That is very clearly seen in responses to the conflict in the UK and USA over racism, and in the UK especially over the legacies of slavery. It is one of the most necessary issues to face and will need long work, probably over decades. It reveals itself in different views of history, particularly that of the British Empire, and in rapidly accepted statements of so-called truth. For example, the title of the violence within the army of the East India Company (EIC) beginning in 1857 together with many simultaneous conflicts within Princely States is referred to very often in the UK as the Indian Mutiny, but in India it is called by a variety of other names including the First War of Independence, or the Uprising. For many years these later titles were rejected as it was argued that India was too disparate to have a single war of independence at that stage and that the British-ruled area was an oasis of order. However, that view is widely challenged by contemporary evidence of letters gathered by Indian and British historians, and indeed the demonstration that the British were seen as a common menace, a source of economic destruction and far from benevolent, dates back as far as the late eighteenth century.1
That may seem a long time ago. Yet, for any process of building relationships between modern India and the modern UK, the question of a serious search for the truth will be essential. Memories matter and symbols change thinking. Visiting Amritsar in 2019 I was taken to see the site of an infamous massacre of Indians by British troops in 1919, at a place called Jallianwala Bagh. The killings were the result of the troops opening fire on an unarmed crowd at close range when there was nowhere for the crowd to flee. It was a horrifying atrocity. When I came to the memorial to those who had died, I prostrated myself before it. That caused much fuss in the UK, but in India it was seen as a gesture of deep sorrow, owing to the historical significance of prostration.
Another very current example is that of the island of Ireland. During a trip to Dublin, also in 2019, I was astonished by the impact of a state visit there by Queen Elizabeth II in 2011, as a contribution to reconciliation after the Troubles of the late twentieth century in Northern Ireland. Every detail was recalled to me, particularly the recognition by the Queen of the troubled history between England and Ireland, her speaking in Irish at the beginning of a speech, her visiting memorials to Irish Republicans, and other apparently more mundane but for the Irish very significant gestures, including the bright green of her dress.
Her visit had a huge impact at the time. Its perceptive use of symbol reflected a step forward in the discussions of historical truth, and an acknowledgement that the past was much more complicated than it was often allowed to appear.
It is a good example because the truth in Northern Ireland remains highly contentious. In July 2021 there were exchanges in the UK Parliament about the legacy of the troubles and the very difficult issue of accountability for such events as the Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry/Derry (even the name has very significant political connotations arising from history). The history even of the extremely well-documented recent past is contested on nearly every point.
The reality of every dispute is that the truth that is sought will always be affected by the point at which one starts and the lenses one has.
This can easily lead to a sense of despair or of relativism in which the rightful assumption that an absolute and agreed sense of the truth in a dispute is impossible to reach leads to the wrongful conclusion that no search for truth is worth undertaking.
Truth in terms of telling a true story can be progressively uncovered by many small steps. Like the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, continued excavation reveals more and more and enables a clearer picture of the overall pattern of life.
One of the best examples of progressive and helpful truth telling was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Detailed examination of testimony was both politically illuminating and enabled the culture of the Apartheid state to be revealed.2
The nature of conflictual relationships is that there is always a fear that facilitators are falling for the stories told by others. In a marriage dispute, one will often hear that the mediator, the judge, the lawyers, the social workers all believed the other party, for example the husband. Yet all the wife’s friends believed her, and one is told that thus everyone else was fooled. Even in the terrible cases of the abuse of children and vulnerable adults there will be passionate defences of the perpetrator, not just when suspicions first arise, but also after they have been formally accused, and even after legal and police action.
The facilitator’s approach to truth will therefore always be cautious but persistent.
First, in any large-scale dispute the reconciliation process must include truth discovery by people who have no skin in the game. In a community, this may well be the mediator in the dispute, who listens carefully. In a relationship, the relationship counsellor will do it. As the scale becomes larger or more complicated it will become necessary to build up partnerships, with anything from forensic accounting, where large sums of money are at stake, to specialist historians who are known in the relevant field.
Three examples illustrate the point about the difficulties.
In the Ogoni example and in the wider conflicts in the Niger Delta, already described, good progress was made long after I had moved on by the use of environmental programmes to assess the damage caused and to oversee the discussions about reparations. One Commission in Bayelsa State was led by the then Archbishop of York, now Lord Sentamu, with powerful effect. The clarity brought to the different accounts of environmental degradation contributed to the possibility of setting up a fund and commissioning work in the wetlands.
Second, in one area where I worked, historical enquiry indicated that a very serious outbreak of violence, which was initially described as Christian vs Muslim, had significant roots in ethnic rivalries. For some time, there was an improvement, which has now been reversed as a result of more general conflict in the country concerned. This is an example of where truth is strongly contested. For those involved, the issue of Christian against Muslim is easy to understand, mobilizes internal support and generates external sponsorship from overseas observers in one way or another. Religion certainly plays a significant part, but there are also historical rivalries and the introduction of a new factor in terms of climate change driving people movements.
The reaction from those whose external support depended on the religious conflict message was understandably to deny any complexity beyond the Christian/Muslim factors, and allege either persecution by Muslims or persecution by Christians. In any peacebuilding process, participants must be listened to as perception is almost as important as reality. In the first place, perception is the reality they feel that they experience, and, second, no peace will be built unless there is the beginning of a process of movement towards a common story. In other words, start where people are in terms of truth, not where the facilitator feels they ought to be. Recognize that statements of facts are necessary but far from sufficient, and will be challenged, even irrationally. The impact of narrative on brain chemistry, emotions and thus responses is also foundational. Movements to change the narrative affect the whole physiology of individuals and thus groups, especially those in leadership. They respond with flight or flight, and the handling of truth discovery thus must ‘remember the body’.
Incidentally, as so often, in the case just described the mention of factors other than religion earned the facilitator a great deal of abuse from everyone. Other factors were threatening to all sides in that they undermined their self-identity as victims. In a study of the issues of shame and honour in Palestine and Israel a powerful comment was: ‘Without the expectation of vindication, the role of the righteous victim risks losing its face-saving function. It could easily take on qualities of the weakling, the deserving victim or, worse, one who condones wickedness.’3 We cannot forget the intense importance of shame and honour in conflict.
Third, in the UK the issue of racial justice, especially as it affects people of Caribbean and African heritage, is one where truth is hard to pin down. Cover up of the terrible abuses of the Windrush scandal,4 a lack of welcome in churches and other institutions, institutional racism and many other failings obscured the realities of life for Black people in the UK.
After the murder of George Floyd in the USA in the middle of 2020, the challenge of institutional racism and Whiteness or White privilege resurfaced, especially among the Black population and among young people of colour more than in other groups. At the same time there was pushback from White groups and a number of highly confrontational and even violent clashes in London and other places across the country.
Within the Church of England other incidents spiralled to cause a great loss of confidence by not only Black but other ethnic minority members, especially those who are ordained or in the process of training or of discerning a call to ordination. Memories of past experiences were reawakened.
A leading member of the Black Majority churches (mostly Pentecostal in tradition) in the UK organized a series of online conferences with Black church leaders, youth leaders and young people from across the Christian tradition. It was attended by four of the presidents of Churches Together in England, including myself.
The encounters were remarkable and testing. The experience of the young Black leaders was of continually being stopped and searched, of a sense of profound alienation in a White country where Whiteness is the controlling dynamic in most institutions, including churches. I spoke at the same time to a remarkable and exceptional Black priest in the Church of England. They confirmed the impression of racism, which held despite that particular person being in a senior role and being widely recognized for their work. Their perception was of a ‘cultural disorder’ where Whiteness is in everything that is done. They saw change as involving both power and truth. They were utterly demoralized by their experience.
While I was hearing this, I was also talking to senior police officers of different ethnic backgrounds and to politicians in government and opposition. Again, there was no agreement on truth, although they saw the issue as very important and believed strongly in the idea of truth. More than that, they were convinced that their view was true. The police were not, as a number of officers saw it, harassing young Black men; they were seeking to stop knife crime, which had a disproportionate number of Black victims. They were aiming to protect, not persecute.
The argument continues to sway to and fro. That is for further along in this book. The reality of the disagreement among most people cannot be put down to malice but is a question of different perceptions that are related and believed – genuinely, sincerely, deeply and without malice – as being the whole truth; not a part of the truth that their opponents refuse to accept. There may be a minority that seeks confrontation and trouble, but it is not the general rule.
Progress will take time but needs to be made. It cannot wait until, as if by a miracle, everyone wakes up one morning with the same perception. The capacity to own a narrative, or to live with multiple narratives and yet be in relationships, albeit with grave and painful struggles, will be a mark of the transformation of reconciliation. It will be very far from the finished product, but it will help.
Even in reading that last paragraph we each come to it with different eyes. For the minority communities, the struggle to get to the truth is not just painful, it is existential. Many, not all, feel dehumanized, dismissed as a reality in society. It is immensely important to recognize that reconciliation begins with sacrifice, and sacrifice is the responsibility of the stronger, majority, groups, not the obligation of those who are already victims. For many White people, who are themselves ignored and marginalized by economic, educational and social circumstances, to speak of them as privileged is rightly heard as patronizing nonsense. The complexity of the fragile human condition and the myriad characteristics we hold mean that life is not a simple binary or a game of snakes and ladders. While we may not always be vulnerable to marginalization and oppressive conditions by virtue of a particular condition, this does not make us invulnerable in other spheres.
Embracing complexity means precision. Black Lives Matter is not all Black people against all White people. White people are not a single category, any more than those of UK minority (but global majority) ethnic heritage. They are all first and foremost people, human beings, to be treated with equal dignity and not to be patronized, ignored or put in a category. That is a good place to start.
Justice Delayed Can Be Justice Affirmed
It is a great gift to live in a place where the administration of justice is genuinely intended to be neutral and unswayed by political considerations, albeit with very human failings. The corruption of the courts, or their capture by one group, is the first and most necessary step towards ending democracy and freedom of speech.5 In mid-2021 severe riots broke out across South Africa after the imprisoning of the former president, Jacob Zuma, for refusing to pay attention to the courts. Although it was very disruptive, cost many lives and damaged the economy, the ability of the court to prevail was widely seen as a good step for democracy. By contrast, the Chinese Communist Party declares that independent courts are a threat to party rule and thus to the good of the country.
The need for an independent and apolitical judiciary is based deeply in the realities of human beings. The use of power almost always leads to the abuse of power. Those who wish for an outcome to their policies will sooner or later begin to see that outcome as the just result and any other as unjust.
Yet justice is fragile; it flourishes in strong light but wilts in darkness, and is easily killed in times of conflict. Victor’s justice is always a great fear. The winners of a war apportion ‘justice’ against the losers without giving attention to proper representation, and when the ‘justice’ is in the midst of conflict, violent or not, it will be far more likely to have the characteristics of revenge.
Justice must therefore be independent and must wait for the moments when people are confident that it is being done calmly.
Institutions are especially bad at the administration of justice within their own systems. The nature of an institution is to seek to preserve its life. Those who end up leading an institution are likely to see survival of that institution as best guaranteed by their own survival as leaders.6 One might imagine the Bishop of Barchester channelling the future head of General Motors and saying to himself, ‘What is good for me is good for the Diocese of Barchester.’ A state of co-dependency is created that can only be broken by independence in justice, and yet the sense of self-protection is so great a power that almost any reason can be found for preserving internal control.
To be bad at justice within one’s own system will lead to being bad at justice wherever one has power. Add to the human desire for power the stresses and tensions of dispute, let alone violent conflict, and there will be an overwhelming tendency towards injustice.
The slogan (and title of an NGO), ‘No Peace Without Justice’, is thus accurate only with a series of provisos. They include that the justice must be independent of the most powerful, and committed to impartiality, and at the right time, which will almost always be once conditions of the dispute have calmed, as a means of avoiding a new flare-up. Theologically, Christianity claims that sometimes good justice will only be found before God and is beyond human reach. That may be the case where a perpetrator cannot be found, or the truth seems unfathomable. It is not a reason for human effort to end: it is a source of eternal hope.
John’s Gospel, chapter 21, has an aura of peace and of resolution, but that is a surprise. It takes place only a few weeks after the chaos, betrayal and cowardice of the disciples at the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus. The disciples are still coming to terms with the idea that he rose from the dead and has appeared to them. Resurrection life, which he has given them through breathing the Holy Spirit into them, is to be lived in the ordinary. It is not living on a continuous elevated plane slightly disconnected from the world. Food needs buying, families and friends need feeding. Peter tells his friends that he is going fishing in the Sea of Galilee. This is not, as some commentators suggest, an attempt to return to his life before meeting Jesus; it is getting on with things.
Yet, even among the disciples and certainly with Peter, there must have been a lurking cloud. They had not stood by Jesus. Jesus has not mentioned this to date, but it is there, an elephant by the lake, to misuse a cliché. After a fruitless night of fishing without catching, the power of the narrative comes in waves of ever deeper love from Jesus, waves that ever more powerfully commission them for the rest of their lives.
First, a stranger on the shore calls out instructing them where to place their nets. The voice will have been clear in the early morning stillness. The net is filled with fish. All of them will immediately have remembered, as we do as John’s readers, the story of the great catch of fish at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus.7 They have been recommissioned, reconciled after their failure, not in some messy compromise but in the power of the grace of God catching them and reimagining their futures.
Then, when they have all got to the shore, they find breakfast made. Again, this takes them back to the feeding of the five thousand and, through there, to the feeding of the Israelites during the Exodus by God in the wilderness. Jesus’ reconciliation relieves their hunger and assures them that his promise that those who follow him will not hunger – spiritually – is true. The reconciliation has moved on from renewal of relationship in hospitality, the meeting of need and the security of being in God’s hands.
Finally, Peter is taken aside, and in three questions his denial of Jesus at the time of Jesus’ arrest is reversed. Justice is done, truth is revealed. Peter does not have failure swept under the carpet but rather it is clearly exposed, truthfully addressed and justly dealt with, by the perfectly just God who has shown Peter what it is to fail and be restored. Truth and justice are met in love, and the result is healing and a future.
Truth and Justice – Sources of Hope
Truth and justice are central to the character of God in what we see by God being revealed through Jesus. Wisdom in timing, in place and in manner of dealing with sin and failure puts them in a context of safety and security, not a context of uncertainty and revenge. That has to be true of any process of reconciliation, even more so once we take account of the fragilities of human nature, of our proclivity to confuse justice with what we want, and truth with what we perceive.
The facilitator – however large and complicated or small and simple the dispute, whether it has the violence of guns or the savagery of words and hatreds – has to take as a central aim the establishment of a ‘Galilee beach’: a place of peace and security where truth and justice are seen and recognized.
Maintaining the Momentum
All that having been said, the issue of maintaining the momentum and excitement of the journey of peacebuilding will continually come back.
I have been using the metaphor of a journey. In 1977 or so two friends and I walked across Scotland from the Kyle of Lochalsh to Montrose, sea to sea. It was a long and beautiful walk across the Highlands, camping in remote valleys. It was also very enjoyable apart from the midges and blisters. When I look back more than forty years on, there are various moments that stick in my mind, milestones that enable me to see how we kept going (a fourth person did drop out).
The journey of reconciliation is a very long walk indeed. I remember a married couple I knew whose marriage disintegrated. They separated and began the process of divorce. In a series of remarkable events, they got back together, despite one having found a new partner, and cancelled the divorce at the very last moment.
There will be many who would have loved that to have been true for themselves, but I am not holding this couple up as especially virtuous, any more than they claimed to be so. That is not the point of the story. Some years after they got back together, I was chatting to one of them and asked how they were. ‘It takes a lot of working out,’ was the reply. Long journeys take a lot of working out. On our Scottish walk we had Ordnance Survey maps and compasses (no satellite navigation in those days). Milestones were important – they gave a lift – but the dogged hard work was reading the map, getting the direction right and putting one foot in front of another on agonizingly steep hills where it felt as though some nasty person had added several bricks to the backpack.
Much reconciliation and peacebuilding work is patiently sitting in a hot room trying to get the direction right. I want to suggest a number of ways of keeping the momentum in the hard work as well as in the high moments.
Tell the Story Forwards and Backwards
In Part I the two dangers of overspeed and overreach were discussed. One of the methods of containing them is to set realistic and achievable targets while maintaining as a final aim the vision of the sunny uplands that are the ultimate destination.
A way of forming the vision and getting the general direction established uses working together to develop the moral imagination of a world without the conflict, the imagination of a ‘golden age’ and then the development of a backwards history process to look from the future and see how you got there.
At its heart it is an attempt to draw people into a common story and permit the surfacing of what they see as ideals. If a secure enough environment can be created in the discussions, by small groups and lots of preparation and briefing, those involved are asked to look forward perhaps five or maybe ten years, to two imagined scenarios.
One is a dark age when everything has gone wrong. They are asked to describe it and to set out in some detail what it is that makes it so bad.
The other scenario is a golden age when their best hopes are fulfilled. Once again, they are asked to describe it and say why it is so good.
The second linked exercise is to take the future situations they have imagined, and to fill in the intervening time with the actions and omissions that happened to get to those places. This is the history backwards. Stand in the future scenario that has been imagined and tell the story of how it happened, year by year.
These exercises work best in lower-level and informal disputes, in a community or a church setting. At the level of conflict, they may come in useful later, but the expectations of face-to-face negotiation will be very high. It will almost certainly be necessary to mix and match different approaches as the exhaustion of face-to-face talks often leads to a loss of the sense of direction and desire for the future, and participants become intransigent.
To do these exercises properly will take days for a complicated situation and much less for a simple one. It needs to wait until those in the different groups are sufficiently relaxed with each other to be able to risk a level of openness. The exercises should be repeated occasionally to enable participants to see the progress that is being made and to refine their ideas.
Probably there will be little interaction between the different sides at the beginning. It may be necessary to do the first round entirely separately so that they can each discover more about the others. The expectation and experience are that they grow into an ability to work together in their imaginations, as a first step to working together in reality.
These exercises are sensitive and difficult to time, to design and to moderate. There will always be objections to ‘playing games’ and part of the facilitators’ skills are going to be shown in the pace, the layout and design of the process, and how to ensure that its use is communicated and accepted.
Facilitators will also introduce the very serious questions for consideration. The history backwards exercise will need to include the ways in which truth and justice were established and by what mechanisms.
The underlying purpose of the exercises is to make space for the moral imagination. The question for each side is: ‘What would a truly good society look like?’ At the beginning, the answer from every side is very likely to be: ‘One in which we are in total control.’ The introduction of further questions, the mixing in of direct talks and time spent in imagining the future and the ways forward will remind participants of what they are seeking, enable unrealistic goals (e.g. complete victory) to be challenged, and open the way to non-binding discussions of what is good, preparing the way for the decisions emerging from negotiations.
Running on Parallel Lines
The idea of truth and reconciliation commissions almost always appears at some point. Like the exercises just mentioned, they are enormously powerful tools, but seldom of value by themselves. They are the best known of a wide range of approaches, the timing of which is very delicate, and if used either too early or too late will become useless or even destructive.
Imagine a railway line, single track. If there is a blockage everything stops. The blockage can be a broken rail (easily repaired), a landslide (takes time to deal with but not complicated), a bridge down (major problem). There may be traffic coming both ways, meaning one has to give ground (not at all easy). A simple answer is to run more than one track, but with points to connect them. There will still be blockages, but there will be a great deal more flexibility in dealing with them.
A community dispute is likely to involve many people. There will be leaders, supporters, encouragers, opponents, some elected, some informal, some belonging to organizations with community power such as residents’ associations, schools, hospitals and churches. The dispute might be over access to community facilities, or their absence, or new housing, or a bypass, or any number of other questions.
Facilitating such a dispute in one gathering is likely to be very difficult. Blockages will result from groups feeling left out in a big meeting. There will be discrimination against more vulnerable groups that have difficulty in expressing themselves. The strong will dominate. The development of parallel tracks in which blockages that could affect the main line can be dealt with before they become serious is a way both of managing a difficult level of complexity and a wide variety of levels of power and of keeping a sense of momentum. There will always be something happening. In this approach the biggest and highest-level meeting will focus on key issues and should arrive with a good level of participation and many potential tangles already straightened out. Communication of all that is going on will be essential, for the suspicions of a community that is locked into a dispute will always be of deals being done and fixes being fixed behind the back of other people.
The number of tracks will vary very considerably according to the number of groups that have opposing views, and that need to be able to sort a way forward. Each track requires facilitation, and each track will gain expectations of being important. The balance between creating inclusion and adding superfluous complexity is very difficult to manage.
Inclusion matters. Deals done on high without a top-down, middle-out, bottom-up approach will lack approval and thus fail to gain a social licence to operate in practice. Grassroots deals will be subsumed in overall, elite-based conflict. Those who can wield a power of veto and have an interest in the dispute continuing will do so unless there is significant grassroots pressure that overwhelms obstructions.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs)
These have been discussed in principle elsewhere. The questions in practice are simple to ask and very hard to answer. The answer to the first question must be no and to the others must be yes.
• Is a TRC being looked at as a magic wand that will make everything suddenly better?
• Are there the right people to lead it? They must have widespread confidence.
• Does it have very clear terms of reference?
• What will be the outcome of its actions? What are the criteria that will give great advantage to telling the truth, and how will that lead towards reconciliation?
• Will it be tied into other parts of the process?
Summary
• Reconciliation is a very long journey. To accomplish anything the travelling must ensure variety of pace, of activity and of content. There must be a mix of milestones with celebrations and steady travelling.
• The structure of a process should be kept as simple as possible. The complexity of the dispute must always be embraced and respected.
• Keep the other Rs going at the same time. The different Rs are cumulative, not successive.
• Ensure that different tracks are used to keep support for the process at all levels, not just the top.
• Use the partnerships required for the job; for example, skilled mediators are specialists.
• Fit the activities to the people, not the people to the activities. But find ways of keeping vision and necessary direction something they reflect on constantly.
Points to Ponder and a Case Study
• Try telling the story of a dispute or conflict from both sides. Do a history backwards exercise; it can take thirty minutes not a day! If not a real one, use the St Thomas case (see p. 118).
• What are good examples of truth being revealed that you know? Whose truth is it? One side? All sides?
• What are the best examples of justice after conflict? How was it done, and does it now seem fair?
• Look for examples of reconciliation you know. Describe the time, the extent and what transformation was needed. What were the key milestones, the moments where things changed? How did they get from one to another? What has been the outcome?
• If there is time, in the working case of St Thomas, ask yourselves how the different groups would imagine a moral and beneficial outcome. What will need to be looked at?