Dear Heaven Maker:
The frustration and anger at the continuing embedded racism in the United States has exploded with a strength and energy that is both familiar, yet with a strikingly new resolve. We have reached the point of no return. This time change must happen.
How?
Establishing a Truth and Reconciliation process for the United States.
There are many precedents.
The Truth and Reconciliation process in post-apartheid South Africa.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada that was a healing venue for First Nation’s people abused and victimized in residential schools.
There have been over forty different commissions created since the establishment of the Argentinian National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, in 1983.
The commission’s processes are varied but all have the same goal – that healing occurs.
What the commissions have taught us is that stark honesty and time are vital components of healing.
The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) is a group formed to help countries with the process of setting up and running a commission.
For the ICTJ, “Transitional justice refers to the ways countries emerging from periods of conflict and repression address large-scale or systematic human rights violations so numerous and so serious that the normal justice system will not be able to provide an adequate response.”
The ICTJ “assists societies confronting massive human rights abuses to promote accountability, pursue truth, provide reparations, and build trustworthy institutions. Committed to the vindication of victims’ rights and the promotion of gender justice, we provide expert technical advice, policy analysis, and comparative research on transitional justice approaches, including criminal prosecutions, reparations initiatives, truth seeking and memory, and institutional reform.”
Their Vision is profound:
“Societies break the cycle of massive human rights violations and lay the foundations for peace, justice, and inclusion.”
The ICTJ has produced a 21 page manual on how to set up such a process, here.
We can heal. Out of our profound grief let us find profound change.
Martin
PS: These are some of the quotes that moved me this week:
“Justice will not be served
until those who are unaffected
are as outraged as those who are.”
– Benjamin Franklin
“A society whose members seek one another’s welfare is holy, and blessed.”
– Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
“…how sincerely you try to understand another person’s suffering and joy.”
– Bill Bradley
“It is necessary to go beyond rebellious attitudes to a more radically critical and revolutionary position, which is in fact a position not simply of denouncing injustice but of announcing a new utopia. Transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society.”
– Paulo Freire
“…in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”
– Barack Obama
Please share this blog with one or two people.
Martin Rutte
