There is a moving moment in Peter's confident address to the people after he has healed a lame man. He is reminding them about how they handed Jesus over and betrayed him to Pilate and then he says; now I know brothers that neither you nor your leaders had any idea what you were really doing' (ActThese words came to me when I read recently a Sapa report by Jan Raath
about the violence carried out last year when many thousands were
tortured and 200 were killed, and how there are now the slow beginnings
of healing process.
A victim who had to sleep on his stomach for weeks to allow his wounds
to heal (and who) cannot walk much further than a few hundred metres
without enduring excruciating pain' wants justice done but not revenge.
The report tells us that reconciliation between this victim and his
torturer took place earlier this year after the Catholic Church’s
Commission for Justice and Peace took the first steps toward trying to
heal the deep psychological and spiritual trauma inflicted in the
murderous three-month election campaign.' The CCJP gathered 16 victims
to listen, talk and share experiences and then they persuaded seven
perpetrators to attend separate sessions though only two admitted their
involvement. As one of them spoke he was sweating and shaking
uncontrollably as he talked of his brutality, said CCJP coordinator
Joel Nkunsane. "He said what he did was evil, that he caused death, and
people to suffer. He wanted to look in the eyes of his neighbours, to
go back and talk it out."
Nkunsane reported that he and two colleagues had interviewed hundreds
late last year; "It was horrible, horrible," he said. "There were
people so badly beaten they had to have a whole box of cotton wool
stuffed in the hole in their buttocks. Women who had logs forced up
their vaginas. People had their eyes gouged out. I couldn’t take it. We
had to go for counselling. But we saw that we were reopening their
wounds four months after they had (been) brutalised. We heard them, and
then left leaving them in their pain. Victims need not just blankets
and food, they need spiritual healing as well." Perhaps the most
important factor was "the loss of human dignity, and their sense of
worthlessness" after their ordeals, he said.
Can it really be that the perpetrators had no idea what they were
really doing'? When you think of Auschwitz and Rwanda and the many
times when people have acted inhumanly to one another you really
wonder. The sickening numbing violence that is perpetrated on people –
do people really not know what they are doing? And yet in the report
above the few that have agreed to speak about what they have done are
appalled by their own actions. They live in terror. But they have taken
the first steps towards healing. One can already sense the size of the
task ahead. Healing and forgiveness is possible so long as the person
really wants it and is prepared to admit, confess what he or she has
done. One of the last words of Jesus as he hung on the cross was,
Father forgive the; they do not know what they are doing.' (Luke 23:34)