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Reconciliation can refer to a condition in which there is a restoration of wholeness—a bringing together of that which has been torn apart. However, the term reconciliation may also be applied to a process: Those that have been divided by destructive conflict and enmity begin to forge new relationships that hold the promise and seeds of a shared future. The first dimension of a reconciliation process addresses the painful trauma of the past; the second focuses on those that have been divided acquiring the hope necessary to anticipate some kind of shared future. In all instances different circumstances will result in different types and degrees of reconciliation.

The bereaved and dispossessed can never recover that which they have lost, but they can learn to live with their sense of personal and collective loss. For the sake of future peace, this is particularly vital for societies emerging from terrible experiences such as genocide.

The relative success of community efforts to deal constructively with the legacy of fear and hatred that divides it appears to depend in the first instance on three factors:

1. Truth: The perpetrators are prepared to acknowledge their guilt and publicly validate the historical experience of the victims' pain and suffering.
2. Security: The degree to which survivors can orientate themselves toward the future is crucially dependent on their sense of security and corresponding freedom from fear of a return of violence and abuse.
3. Justice: Individual and collective culprits must move beyond acknowledging their guilt and show evidence of being prepared to suffer punishment and/or make reparations.

To these three factors three contextual variables should be added:

• Time enables people to learn how to live with the scars that remain from past events.
• A moral culture of the victims-survivors, which emphasises the interdependency linking all together as part of a common humanity, better equips them to become reconciled to their losses and orientated toward some kind of future coexistence.
• Sustainable reconciliation processes require complementary changes in those political, economic, and social institutions that provided the structures within which the crimes of the past were perpetrated.

Reconciliation after Genocide?

A brief review of some of the postgenocide processes of the last century indicates that there is no common pattern to reconciliation efforts.

Armenian Genocide

Armenians throughout the world agree that there can be no reconciliation with Turkey or the Turkish people until they acknowledge their culpability in the campaign of extermination against the Ottoman Empire's Armenian population during World War I. Various states around the world have acknowledged the crime committed against the Armenians, but there has been no indication that the Turkish authorities are prepared to make the gesture necessary to initiate some kind of reconciliation process.

Cambodian Genocide

Since the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 Cambodians have struggled to come to terms with their legacy of autogenocide. The challenge Cambodians face is to become reconciled with each other and their own history. For many the principal response to the horrors of the past has been an attempt to simply forget them; some justify such an approach by referring to the beliefs of Buddhism and the moral imperative to avoid "the spirit of revenge," while others are driven by the fear of a return of violence should efforts be made to bring the main perpetrators to trial. This social amnesia was initially facilitated by agreements and amnesties proffered by the Cambodian political elite to the surviving Khmer Rouge leadership in order to preserve a fragile peace within the country. However, with the passage of time and in the face of internal and external pressure the Cambodian regime eventually reached an agreement with the United Nations in 2003 for the establishment of a tribunal to try the surviving senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Many Cambodians continue to ask, though, "Why did we do this to ourselves?"

Rwandan Genocide

Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994 a range of initiatives has attempted to address its legacy and build a new future. Some of the main organizers of the slaughter have been brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. By 2001, however, there were still some 120,000 people in Rwanda's prisons awaiting trial for genocide-related offenses. In response the new Rwandan regime began to introduce a form of community-based justice by adapting the traditional conflict resolution process of gacaca. The aim was to promote reconciliation. It is too early to pass judgment on this initiative. However, as historian Mahmood Mamdani has so clearly pointed out, Rwanda's key dilemma remains one of building a democracy that can incorporate a guilty majority alongside a bitter and fearful minority in a single political community. At present to be a Hutu is to be a presumed perpetrator to whom the pursuit of justice seems like victors' revenge. According to Mamdani, the prime prerequisite for reconciliation and a common future in Rwanda is a form of political justice whereby Tutsis relinquish their monopolization of political power rather than continue to hold on to it out of fear of the majority.

Germany and the Holocaust

Following the mass murder of European Jewry and the displacement of the majority of those that survived at the outset, little was done to acknowledge the horror of the slaughter or to create the spaces necessary for survivors to tell their stories. Justice was confined to military trials, internal purges of collaborators in formerly occupied countries, and a de-Nazification program in Germany. Monetary reparations were made to Israel, but the dominant concern seemed to be ensuring that such crimes against humanity would never reoccur. In time, however, interest in the Holocaust grew. In Germany and beyond there are museums, national days of remembrance, educational programs, and many other forms of memorializing the Holocaust. The result has been an expansion of the space available for dialogue within and between the communities that were once so divided. Thus, two generations after the genocide the acknowledgment of the historic crime and the suffering of its victims and survivors, along with efforts at restitution, have helped Jewish communities around the world make a distinction between the culpability of past perpetrators and contemporary generations—a perception necessary for the creation of a shared future in postgenocide societies.

SEE ALSO Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and the Armenian Genocide; Cambodia; International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda; Reparations

Andrew Rigby