Religion and Violence

A lot has been said about the involvement of religion in violence over the history of America. Many peole have turned away from religion because of it's practitioner's excesses. The Crusades of the Middle Ages are a ancient example whereas the genocide in Rhwanda is a more recent instance. I've wondered how something practiced by most of the world because of it's ability to help people find peace in this chaotic world, can be used as one of the world's most notorious justification for violence.
In the article, Religion and Violence, Helena Cobban gives us a rule of thumb to work with in understanding this historical paradox.

“religions” come in two main different flavors (though sometimes these flavors come mixed together in the same institutional package.) The first of these flavors, or trends, in religions is the trend toward judging and punishing others, a focus that many, many religions seem to have. The other trend is quite different: it is the trend in those religions that seek to heal other people and ourselves. In the situations of often atrocious inter-communal conflict that I have witnessed or studied intensively—whether in Lebanon, in Israel/Palestine, in Rwanda, South Africa, Mozambique, or elsewhere—I have seen both trends at work. And I think I know, both intellectually and from my own experience, which of these kinds of religion seems to be more spirit-led and to be best for me and, I venture to suggest, for the rest of the world.

When religion moves from a personal philosophy of moral values and a path towards serenity into a societal standard of acceptable behavior enforce by government, it acquires the behavioral excesses of humanity. When man attempts to impose some sort of control on his fellow man, he resorts to punishment to impose his will on others. When this is officially or unofficially sanctioned by government, the scale of impact becomes huge. These are the conditions when genocide become possible.
I can't think of a better argument in favor of separation of church and state.


RELIGION AND VIOLENCE
By Helena Cobban,
Global affairs columnist, The Christian Science Monitor
(Paper presented to the American Academy of Religion conference, “Contesting Religion and Religions Contested: The Study of Religion in a Global Context”,
Atlanta, Georgia, November 2003;
and published by Oxford University Press in the
December 2005 edition of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion)
I’m honored to be here with such a distinguished gathering at this conference, and I’m looking forward to engaging with all of you on issues of common concern. What I’d like to do now is to start to pull together some personal reflections concerning the many connecting points between, on the one hand, religion and violence, and on the other, religion and social healing—and to do this with reference not just to the Middle East, an area where I have done much of my professional work over the past three decades, but also to some parts of Africa, where I have been doing some very productive research on issues of post-violence healing in recent years.
Since none of us is neutral on any of these issues—we all live in this world and have fundamental ontological views of our place in it-- I want to state my own position on some of these questions upfront: to situate myself for you, and then to get all this autobiographical cumber out of the way.
I grew up in England, as an Anglican, which was really a sort of religious “default option” there. My first professional work as a journalist I carried out as a foreign correspondent in Lebanon, mainly in the 1970s. In April 1975, eight months after I got there, the civil war started. (It was very good for my career, by the way. I had my byline on the front page of the London Sunday Times several times when I was still just 23 years old.) The seven years I spent in Lebanon—most of them in a situation of active warfare-- were transformative for me. Partly this was because I experienced the war not just in the fly-by-night way that most “foreign” correspondents experienced it, but because I experienced it at ground-level-- as someone who married into the local community; as an Arabic-language speaker; as a woman; and as someone who struggled to run a household and then raise my two young kids there under all the privations of prolonged warfare. (By the way, this made for a very different from the view of war from that accessible from the comfortable luxury hotel where most of the “foreign” correspondents stayed.) But partly, too, the experience was transformative because I saw at first hand the way that intense fear and hatred took hold of one community in Lebanon, in particular—but also, at other times of other communities in Lebanon’s complicated social mosaic.
The community that was most evidently held in the grip of intense fear and hatred at the time I was there was the country’s ancient Maronite Christian community. As a reporter, I would travel around the parts of Beirut that the extremist Maronite militias controlled and see stenciled on walls throughout that zone the simple, genocidal slogan “It is the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian.” I talked with a 16-year-old girl from a well-off Maronite family who excitedly told me that every day, the girls on the bus to the exclusive Christian day-school that she attended would persuade the bus-driver to stop at a certain ravine so they could look at the new crop of mangled corpses of Palestinians that were thrown into it every night. These behaviors, I could see, were clearly tolerated by all the powers-that-be in that community. When Bashir Gemayyel, the leader of the Maronites’ Falangist militia, led a tour of press people around Tel al-Za’tar, a Palestinian refugee camp that his forces had over-run the day before, he told us beforehand that we would see some very gruesome sights there—“And I am proud of what you will see.” And when I visited the chief monastery run by the Order of Maronite Monks to interview the head of the Order, Father Boulos Na’man, I arrived a little early and greeted him as he was carrying heavy boxes of ammunition across the campus with one of his monks.
Those were strange and terrifying days. I found it hard to see militiamen in the battle-zones with stickers of the Virgin Mary plastered on the stocks of their M-16s… On the other side, too, there were religious zealots, Muslims whose battle call was “La ullah illa ullah wa Muhammad rusoul ullah”. But I left Lebanon in 1981, and while I was there the Muslim-dominated side of Beirut was still much more tolerant and diverse than the Maronite-dominated side. In the Muslim-dominated side of the city, some one-third of the residents were Christians. They held church services, had their own political parties, and contributed to the nationalist politics there side-by-side with the Muslims. There were, as in any war, some atrocities in that zone, too. But they were never publicly glorified in the way that the atrocities on the Falangist side were glorified—an important difference. And there was never anything in Muslim-dominated West Beirut like the systematic, religiously-based “ethnic cleansing” that wiped whole areas of East Beirut—Shiyyah, Maslakh, Karantina, others—quite empty of Lebanese Muslims.
The seven years I spent in Lebanon were enough to put me off organized religion forever-- I thought! But a decade after I left Lebanon, once I had moved here to the States and started a new life, I started a tentative move back toward seeing the need for a spiritual community, and I moved through Unitarianism to become a universalist Quaker, which is where I am now and see myself staying. Perhaps I should also note that though I’ve worked for The Christian Science Monitor in one way or another since 1976, I have never been a Christian Scientist. However, my close collegial relations with many people who are “Scientists” have given me tremendous respect for those people, for the way they live their lives, and their fidelity to their beliefs in environments—including here in the USA-- that are often very hostile to their worldview.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s I was also wrestling intellectually with issues of war and violence, especially the age-old question of “Is war ever justified?” This question has been given extra poignancy by my engagement on human-rights issues. I note that a number of US human-rights organizations actually supported the war in Kosovo and the most recent one in Iraq. I, however, have found that precisely because of the depth of my own experience as a person living in a deeply war-afflicted society, I cannot support the use of war for any end. War itself is, in my clear and certain knowledge, a massive assault on the most basic human rights of the civilians who live in—and often far beyond—the war zones. And in the present day and age, human ingenuity can surely find ways other than warfare to deal with differences among human groups, including very extreme differences on human-rights questions. God gave us reason and the power to communicate, I figure, so should we not use those faculties in every way possible, while holding up the value of every single human life, rather than using force and violence to impose our own particular views onto others?
Well, Lebanon is of course far from the only country in the Middle East, or indeed the world, where religion is—in my view, quite illegitimately—used as a mobilizing tool by cynical political leaders in their quest for earthly power or aggrandizement. But religion is also, I should note, used in the midst and the aftermath of war in some very different ways, too. At their very best, religious ideals and precepts can, when confronted with the chaos and the bottomless tragedy and perversion of the natural order that are induced by war, be used in ways that provide succor to the afflicted and healing at all levels of society from the individual person through the group to the nation.
Quite possibly, since I am here amidst so many fine scholars who have made the study of religion their lifelong calling, I am not telling any of you anything particularly new. But I can speak to my experiences: my experience in Lebanon, in Israel and Palestine, in Syria, Iraq, and many other Middle Eastern societies that bear deep scars from the effects of war; and also my experience in more recent years in some war-scarred countries in Central and Southern Africa—three in particular: Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa.
What I started out studying in these three latter countries was on the face of it a political question. In the period 1992-1994, the peoples of each of these countries exited from a period of atrocious internal violence and entered what they all hoped would be a new era of national peace and wellbeing. The peoples of all three of those countries still, at the time they entered into those new orders, bore extremely deep scars from the preceding violence; and in each of these countries the national leadership chose a very distinct set of policies in order to deal with—and hopefully transcend—those painful legacies from the past. The aim of my research project has been, some 8-12 years after those policies were first chosen, to assess the effectiveness of those different approaches. Did those policy choices that were made in the 1992-1994 period actually help to contribute to a sustained reconciliation among the previously battling parties, or did they either fail to do this, or even actively hinder the process of national reconciliation? Might these results have implications for the kinds of approaches to post-violence issues that UN, international aid donors, and the rest of the international community were urging?
I knew from the outset that the project would be difficult. The three countries are all very different, and so was the nature of the atrocious violence from which each of them was recovering.
In Rwanda, in the fall of 1994, the whole society was reeling from the paroxysm of genocidal violence which, in just 13 weeks earlier in the year, had killed around one million citizens—the vast majority of them Tutsis. That was 80 percent of the Tutsis who were resident in the country at the beginning of the year; and of the 20 percent who survived the genocide, many did so only barely, and bore terrible physical and psychic wounds from everything they had gone through. Of the country’s surviving seven million people, nearly all of them Hutus, possibly more than half had participated in some way in the killing. We can know this, because the genocide there, unlike the genocides the Nazis committed against the Jews and Roma in Europe, was not industrialized and not “hidden” behind the walls of large encampments. They were carried out in the open, on the streets, on the collines, often by large groups of people who wielded machetes and nail-studded clubs against their own neighbors. (I also need to note that numerous courageous Hutus stood aside from the orgies of killing; some of them even intervened to help protect their Tutsi neighbors by hiding them or helping them escape; and around 200,000 Hutus accused of refusing to join in the genocide were killed by the extremeists from their own community.)
In summer 1994, while many organs of the Hutu-dominated government and security forces were directing much energy into sustaining the genocide, the Tutsi-dominated exile army was able to take over power in the capital and most of the country. As we know, the génocidaires retreated into Congo and took two million terrified Hutus with them. In many ways, the lethal conflict between the two groups was transferred from Rwanda into eastern Congo, in whose dark forests literally millions of people have perished over the years since then.
Inside Rwanda, meanwhile, the returning Tutsi exile force that controlled the country did put an end to the genocide. We need to understand and appreciate that fact, and appreciate the depth of shame of the international community that not only did nothing to end it themselves, but also took active steps to pull out of the country the tiny UN force that was there and that had saved thousands of Tutsi lives already.
On coming into power, Rwanda’s new government adopted a policy toward the génocidaires that accorded with their own desires and those of leading actors in the UN: it was a policy that relied centrally on criminal prosecutions. The idea was that the UN’s new international tribunal for Rwanda would deal with the “big fish” among the perpetrators, and the Government of Rwanda would deal with all other suspects. By 1997-98, however, the Rwandan government found it had more than 130,000 genocide suspects detained in stinking, overcrowded lockups—and no means at all to try them… We’re talking about 130,000 people mainly of breadwinning age, each with say 6 or 7 dependants, all of them Hutus; and this, out of a total of around 7-8 million national population. You can see the crippling economic effects of the policy, as well as the crippling effect it had on inter-group reconciliation. So starting in 1998, the government decided to move most of these cases out of the regular system and send them to a revitalized form of a traditional community-based hearing mechanism called gacaca. (I’ve written a lot more about these affairs in an article in the April-May 2002 issue of Boston Review.[1])
In South Africa, in the period 1990-94, the country’s 25 million or so people were struggling to find a way to emerge from the horrors of 40-plus years of apartheid and the preceding four centuries of brutal colonial rule, and to build a genuine, one-person-one-vote democracy in their extremely multicultural country. The negotiations took a long time, and one of the most contentious issues throughout them was the question of what to do about the individuals who had planned and perpetrated the horrors of apartheid—and perhaps, how to deal with apartheid’s beneficiaries, too.
Back in 1973, remember, the UN General Assembly had passed a solemn resolution determining that the system of entrenched and brutal racial segregation known as apartheid constituted nothing less than a “crime against humanity”. (This is a very serious type of atrocious crime that was first designated and defined in the Nuremberg Trial of 1945-46.) In the early 1990s there were, quite understandably, considerable forces in the international community—as well as within South Africa itself—that called for the perpetrators of the crime of apartheid to be tried and punished à la Nuremberg. In the course of the intense, intra-South African negotiations of 1990-94, however—or rather, let me say, at the very end of them—the parties agreed that “in the interests of national reconciliation” some form of amnesty would be available to the perpetrators of all “politically motivated” crimes that had been committed in the apartheid era. At one level, this was an astonishingly generous and visionary offer from the Nelson Mandela and his colleagues in the leadership of the anti-apartheid movement. At another, it was a choice that was forced on them, since South Africa’s powerful military and security bosses had told the ANC that they would not provide security for the crucial elections of April 1994 unless some credible form of amnesty from prosecution would be available for them under the new order.
As we all know, the form that that amnesty finally took was an offer of conditional, individual amnesty to all former perpetrators of politically motivated violence who were able to satisfy a committee of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that they had told the entire truth about all the rights-abusing actions they’d been part of during the apartheid era. The deal was amnesty for truth-telling. In the end, 7,116 individuals applied for amnesties. Of those, 1,167 received full amnesty, 145 received partial amnesty, and the rest of the applications were either withdrawn or turned down. (Many were turned down as having related to acts that were not political in nature.[2])
The telling, and high-level public acknowledging, of the “truth” about what had happened to the victims of the apartheid-era atrocities was seen, probably rightly, as a constructive act that could contribute to national reconciliation in a number of ways:
· by restoring the humanity and dignity of those who had been horribly tortured;
· by providing concrete details about the location of the bodies of murdered victims that had been buried or dumped in secret places, but whose retrieval and tradition-ordained reburial could help put their still wandering and tortured spirits finally to rest; and
· thirdly, by establishing an incontestable historical record of just how the perversions of thought (including religious thought) had allowed those God-fearing folk the Afrikaaners –and alongside them, I must say, the less pious British—to visit such a lengthy and brutal train of suffering on their fellow-men.
In Mozambqiue, the third of the countries I’ve been studying, the nature of the violence and the means adopted in 1992 to exit from it were once again different. The violence we are talking about there was a prolonged (17-year) period of civil war that was for many years fueled by intensive, escalatory trouble-making from the apartheid government in neighboring South Africa. By 1992, Mozambique’s 16 million people had been ground down into deep-set pauperization, de-development, and human want by those long years of fighting. (There, too, the war came after a punishing, centuries-long process of colonial encroachment and repression.) The civil war between the Frelimo-led government and the “Renamo” insurgents left one million Mozambicans dead, many millions displaced inside or outside their country, and further millions on the brink of starvation.
The war was brought to an end in October 1992 when the leaders of the two warring parties met in Rome, at the successful climax of a negotiation that had been shepherded for four difficult years by the Catholic lay organization Sant’ Egidio. As those negotiations had drawn toward their close, the parties and their Sant’ Egidio support team drew into the process of planning for peace both the Italian government and the UN. The UN, the EU, and other outside powers were thus all poised to help make this important peace agreement stick, once it had been concluded.
It is important to remember just how atrocious the Mozambique civil war had been. It was marked not just by killings, but by mutilations, sexual assaults, and the use of sexual enslavement, the impressment of children and youth, and forced starvation as deliberate strategies of war. In a report issued shortly before the conclusion of the 1992 peace accord, Amnesty International stressed that all who had committed such war crimes should be tried and punished. For their part, however, the parties to the Mozambique civil war based their peace agreement on the provision of a blanket amnesty for all actions committed prior to the peace agreement, regardless of the severity of those actions. One of the first acts of the Mozambique parliament after the leaders had signed the peace agreement was to pass the amnesty law. And it was on the basis of this law that Renamo transformed itself into a peaceful political party; large numbers of fighters from the forces of both sides were demobilized (and were given some help toward social rehabilitation through various UN programs); and Renamo’s remaining fighters were integrated into the national security forces.
The timing on all this was important. The Mozambicans reached their peace accord four crucial months before the UN established the first of the war crimes tribunals of the modern era, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, which was established in February 1993. (ICTY was an important fore-runner for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the UN in November 1994.) But in October 1992, the UN had still not been caught up in “tribunal fever”. The UN saw its role overwhelmingly as support role, in supporting the peace process that had been decided upon by the Mozambicans themselves. Thus, instead of seeking to ostracize or even indict perpetrators of civil-war-era atrocities in Mozambique, the UN (like the Mozambican government) worked with them as valued colleagues in the process of national reconstruction. Many of the former fighters who received subsistence grants and social-rehabilitation from the UN as part of the process of demobilization were, without a doubt, the very same people who had committed the atrocities listed in many years of human-rights reports. But nearly all the Mozambicans insisted, and have continued to insist, that using the approach of social rehabilitation toward these people, rather than seeking to judge and punish them, was the right thing to do.
So the “policy analysis” part of my research project has been aimed at assessing which—in these three very different situations—of the three different approaches seems to have worked best from the point of view of providing the country concerned with an effective basis from which to escape from iterations of the former violence and move on toward meeting the vital goals of human wellbeing, social reconstruction, and national reconciliation.
It’s no secret to reveal that my preliminary results on this score have been that amnesty seems to be a really important tool in preventing iterations of earlier conflict and violence, and it is certainly not one that either individual countries or the international community should give up easily.
However, along the way of doing this research, the role of religion in the two processes of sustaining human groups who are living atrocious times, and of helping them to heal in the aftermath of atrocity, started to become increasingly evident to me. Again, perhaps I’m not telling most of you folks anything you don’t know already; but here is some of what I saw and what I learned.
The South African case is perhaps the one that is most familiar in western discourse. Most of us can remember the news pictures of the TRC chairman Desmond Tutu, who was also an Anglican Archbishop, opening the sessions of the TRC with a prayer, and with the lighting of candles; or the times when, at particularly emotional moments in the TRC’s hearings he would lead those present in a solemn or joyous hymn. At that performative level—and at the level of Archbishop Tutu’s many extremely eloquent explanations of how he saw the value of the TRC’s process-- the role that his version of religion played in the work of the TRC was evident. I note, by the way, that though Tutu always stayed faithful to his role as a prelate of my own birth-church, he also considerably enriched and broadened the “theological” underpinnings of the TRC’s work by making frequent reference to the indigenously African concept of ubuntu—a concept that as far as I know is found in many different forms throughout the continent and which Tutu defines as the idea that “a person is human inasmuch as he or she recognizes the humanity of others”.
The role of religion in both the enactment and the planning of the TRC’s work has been much remarked upon, and I need not add to that comment here. I want merely to report on one conversation I had a couple of years ago with a Black South African woman, a long-time pro-ANC activist who is now a government minister. Her name is Rejoyce Mubadhafasi. During many of the toughest years of the anti-apartheid she was a semi-clandestine organizer for the pro-ANC United Democratic Front—in fact, the leading UDF organizer in the Northern Province. In the course of our conversation two years ago, Ms. Mubadhafasi told me of many of the terrible acts of retribution that the apartheid authorities tried to visit on her and her family in those years. Close friends were killed. A bomb was thrown into the small house where she and her children were sleeping. Dogs were set upon her. She was jailed repeatedly. Finally I asked her, “How do you feel about the fact that the people who did all these things to you and your family are now walking free?” She told me, in effect, “That’s okay—God will see to them.” She also made two other significant points in this regard. Firstly, she and her comrades-in-arms from the days of struggle were just too plain busy, these days, trying to build up the conditions of life of their people throughout the country, to be able to spend too much times worrying about settling old scores with their former tormentors. And secondly, she stressed strongly that she did not aspire to be the kind of person who would visit upon others the same kind of treatment that had been heaped on her. So in that context, leaving the whole question of “punishing” up to the Almighty seemed far the best thing to do. How handy, therefore, to have a view of the Almighty that was such that this work could safely be left to him.
In South Africa, it was not only in helping to ease the emotional rawness of the years after the demise of the apartheid system that religion played a part. (Here, I should specify that this includes all of the many religions now found in South Africa, which along with Christianity include Islam, Hinduism, numerous traditional and neotraditional religions, and a number of apparent hybrids among some of these, since many South Africans seem to be extremely religious, and religiously creative people.) But during the long, difficult years of colonial rule and apartheid as well, religious thought and religious institutions had also played a significant role in sustaining the spirits of people being ground under terrible forms of oppression. We should not forget that Mahatma Gandhi did his first, spiritually-motivated nonviolent mass organizing in South Africa. Nor should we forget the role that so many churches, mosques, and temples played in helping to sustain the anti-apartheid movement. The ones that I know most about, however, are the churches. Ms. Mubadhafasi herself is a Lutheran, and received significant support in some of her organizing work from Lutheran organizations in Europe. I remember when I was growing up the inspiring leadership of Tutu’s Anglican predecessor, Bishop Trevor Huddleston. The South African Council of Churches became a bastion of support for the anti-apartheid movement. Of course, Christianity had a lot to make up for in South Africa, since both the earlier colonial ventures--whether Dutch or English--and the later form of rule known as apartheid claimed to receive their inspiration in good part at least from the teachings of the Christian Bible. (The same was true, of course, of much of the institution of slavery, here in the USA.) So it was an important contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle that Christians of conscience like Huddleston or numerous others could contest with the authors and upholders of apartheid from within the terms of the very Biblical discourse that they claimed as their own. But during the apartheid era, the role of many of the churches in South Africa was much broader than at the level only of ideology. Many of them also took real risks to engage in the hard, Christian task of aiding the poor and oppressed.
I want to turn next to the constructive role that many religions and many religious institutions have played in Mozambique, since you will have guessed from what I referred to already—even if you did not know it before, which you probably did—that the religious beliefs of the good people of Sant’ Egidio certainly informed the approach they took as they helped the Mozambican negotiators work their way toward the 1992 peace agreement. This was undoubtedly true, and the record of Sant’ Egidio’s work with the Mozambicans remains as a true inspiration to all of us. You can read a short reflection on it written by Sant’ Egidio’s representative to the UN at the time, Andrea Bartoli, an essay called “Providing space for change in Mozambique”, published in 1998.[3] However, in using their essentially forward-looking, healing-focused approach to negotiations, the Sant’ Egidio folks were also connecting with a very rich matrix of such attitudes that already existed in Mozambican society thanks primarily to the indigenous cultural resources—including, centrally, indigenous religious resources-- that had long existed within the country, but also to the externally-born religions that throughout the 20th century had gained something of a small foothold in the country.
I have to confess that I find Mozambique a really exciting and interesting place to be. The Portuguese who ran the colonial system were—from a colonial administrator’s point of view—generally fairly unsuccessful at their job, there as elsewhere. They did not push their influence very far inland. They did not push huge populations of Portuguese or Portuguese-dependent settlers onto the land there. They did extremely little to try to “Lusitize” the native populations by forcing them into Lusophone schools, court systems, churches, etc. By and large—though with many notable exceptions—for most of their time in Mozambique they more or less left the indigenous people alone. With the result that in Mozambqiue—as in Angola, but unlike most parts of British- or French-ruled Africa—you had the survival of many, many very significant indigenous cultural resources, including indigenous religions.
Now, Mozambique is a fairly large country with something like 16 or 17 language groups, with each of these cultural groupings having its own set of approaches to the ontological and cosmological questions that have confounded humankind throughout the ages. But by and large, members of most of these groups or nations seem to have subscribed—and largely, still to subscribe—to some version the basic idea of ubuntu, which is not surprising considering how close and culturally continuous Mozambique is with South Africa. To be a little more precise, what I have learned from studying various pieces of research on Mozambique including centrally the works of anthropologists Alcinda Honwana and Carolyn Nordstrom, is that the basic worldview of most Mozambicans is one in which the concept that westerners think of as the “self” is intimately bound up in the web of relationships that that self has with the extended family, with the homestead, with the ancestors who are buried there, and with the spirit world in which these ancestors belong.
So here’s what I found really exciting and important: by having kept so much of their society intact through the centuries of Portuguese rule, when the Mozambicans did get into their independence war in the 1960s, and then their terrible post-independence civil war from 1975 on, they still had many robust indigenous cultural resources on which they were able to draw, that played a crucial role in helping them withstand the rigors and privations of those wars. The traditional healers—the curandeiros and curandeiras—had many practices, spells, rituals, medicines, and other interventions that they used with the constant aim of trying to heal both individual spirits that had been wounded by war and on occasion the social rifts that had been caused by the war. (Of course, in the traditional Mozambican worldview there is no “disciplinary” divide between the practice of religion, the practice of healing, the practice of divining the rightful order of things, and the practice of conflict resolution. And let’s face it, many of these disciplinary divides in our own era, in our own societies in the west, are pretty artificial and fragile sometimes, too.)
As Nordstrom has written so movingly in her book A Different Kind of War Story,[4] throughout the civil war, and despite the terrible mass dislocations and other privations that it imposed on Mozambique’s people, the curandeiros and curandeiras continued practicing their religion-based arts of individual and social healing. I can’t go into many details here. But she and Honwana give many different examples of the kinds of rituals with which former child soldiers—some of whom had been forced by their military commanders to commit atrocities against their own home villages, precisely with the aim of making sure they would not have any safe refuge to flee to—would later be taken back into the village communities and speedily have their community membership reinstated there after going through the necessary rituals that aimed at spiritual cleansing of the individual and effecting his reconnection with the ancestors and the rest of his rightful world. Or, the rituals used to purify women who had been taken as sex slaves—rituals that once again allowed them resume their rightful place back in the village community.
Building on the base provided by these traditions—traditions which are still deeply held by most of the population to this day, I should add—was the influence of exogenous religious organizations, whether Muslim, western-Christian, or the special blend of protestant evangelism and native rituals embodied in the “Apostolic” or “Zionist” churches whose adherents first encountered those religious syntheses while working as migrant laborers South Africa’s mines. I want to stress that all of these religions played a role in helping to enact at the popular level the same kind of “forgive and forget” policy that was embodied in the national-level amnesty. Traveling around Southern Mozambique as I was able to do a little this spring, I found very, very few individuals who expressed any desire at all to investigate—far less, to prosecute—any of the atrocities of the war era. “That was the era of war, and in a war everyone does terrible things,” I was told over and over again. “Now we are in a time of peace. So our main aim is to make sure there is no resumption of the war. Investigations? Tribunals? Why would we ever have wanted to do that? What for?”
I want to mention just a few other experiences I had in Mozambique. I had two deeply inspiring interviews with church leaders there: Cardinal Alexander Dos Santos, an elderly prince of the Catholic church who played a big role in helping to broker the 1992 peace deal, and Bishop Dinis Sengulane, an Anglican Bishop who also played a big role, and whose little book about his peacemaking has a wonderful title that captures the Mozambican spirit of peacemaking beautifully. It is called Vitória sem Vencidos (Victory without losers). I had a number of interesting discussions with traditional healers, in which they explained that according to their worldview, “violence” is an anti-humane force that can sometimes hold people in its grip, and from which the person or persons have to be rescued if they are to be restored to their full status of humanity. But most interestingly of all, perhaps, were the many things I learned through my encounters with my research associate there, Salomao Mungoi. Mungoi is a former Captain in the government (Frelimo) army. But for some years now he has been in the leadership of an organization of ex-combatants from both sides of the civil war front-line: their organization provides conflict-resolution and organizational-development services around the country. Typically, the teams they work in contain members of both Frelimo and Renamo. In both his own organization, ProPaz, and in other organizations, I saw Mungoi and numerous other former Frelimo fighters interacting in an extremely friendly way with former Renamo officers and fighters. Sometimes—and this I found interesting, too—when Mungoi was talking about someone he was working with, he would say he honestly could not remember which side that individual had fought on in the civil war.
From my long experience in Lebanon, I have to say I found the apparent depth of national and social reconciliation that I witnessed in Mozambique, 11 years after 1992, quite remarkable. And religion, I note again, had been important in achieving this at many different levels.
And so, finally, to Rwanda. What many westerners know about the role of religion and religious institutions in that sad country is probably the shameful facts about the involvement of many leaders of religious institutions in the genocide itself. What we learned from the criminal prosecutions that followed the war—if we did not know it before—was that many Christian priests and nuns had been actively involved in aiding the génocidaires. These included an Anglican bishop and a high-ranking Seventh Day Adventist priest who were both indicted by the ICTR. (The bishop died in detention before his case was heard.) But the religious institution that was most deeply morally compromised by its involvement with the genocide was undoubtedly the Catholic church, which up until then had been the religious institution most closely associated with the power centers in the country. Rwanda’s colonial rulers, the Belgians, had done a far more thorough job of pushing their social institutions onto the indigenes in Rwanda than the Portuguese had in Mozambique—and Rwanda is anyway a far smaller country in which to achieve this. The Belgian “Pères Blancs” were oftentimes an essential part of the colonial venture.
All this meant that in the tortured, multiply traumatized aftermath of the genocide, a high proportion of Rwandans felt that they had no stable institutions that could help them to recover—either physically, or spiritually. They desperately needed a framework within which they could restore meaning to lives shattered by the whole experience of 1994. And here I’m referring not only to that tiny minority of Tutsi residents of the country (and their “moderate” Hutu friends and neighbors) who actually survived the genocide, but also to the returning Tutsi exiles who found their home neighborhoods, family homesteads, and entire extended families quite destroyed. And I am referring, too, to those millions of Rwandans who had participated in the genocide, too. The experience of participating was itself a deeply dehumanizing, traumatizing experience; and once the frenzy of genocide had been halted, these “participant-survivors” of it had to come to terms, somehow, with the fact of their own participation or complicity in it. In addition, as the Tutsi-dominated RPF armies seized control of nearly the whole country in the summer of 1994, the leaders of the genocide venture gathered up two million of their fellow Hutus and led these people into a terrifying and terrorized exile in neighboring countries. Plus, in the “heat of battle”, as the phrase goes, some members of the RPF also committed atrocities against Hutus in some parts of the country.
In the west, we like to make simplistic, though judgment-laden, distinctions between “victims or survivors” of violent acts, and “perpetrators”. We tend to ignore the traumatization that perpetrators suffer; we ignore, also, the fact that many “victims/survivors” are not themselves pure innocents: indeed, frequently people who have themselves survived the torment of others go on to become enactors of torment in their turn. We like to put people in strict, dyadical boxes and we expect them to stay there. Real-life instances of atrocious violence are seldom like that, however, a fact that Primo Levi has explored possibly better than anyone else.[5]
What I am saying though is that once the genocide had ended in Rwanda, the entire population of the country was left in a web of complex, multi-layered trauma. Nearly all the institutions that had given meaning to peoples’ lives had either been taken from them by the genocide, or had palpably failed them in their time of need: families; home communities; economic networks; the state apparatus; the Catholic church. Of course, western aid organizations flooded into the country, some offering services that were vital, appropriate, and much appreciated, and some offering services that lacked these qualities.
I have visited Rwanda only once. I went for nearly two weeks in the summer of 2002. By then, the situation had settled down a lot from how it must have been in the mid-1990s. The government was slowly trying to move the scores of thousands of genocide-related cases into the gacaca system, and it was that process that I was primarily studying. But I had some intriguing and very inspiring other kinds of experiences there—and primarily through the serendipitous fact that I’d been unable to secure the research funding that I’d thought I needed for the trip. I went ahead and made the trip anyway; and to save on costs I stayed in a protestant mission in a shanty-town area of the capital, Kigali. This place was amazing. It was run by Michel Kayetaba, an evangelical Anglican with unbelievable gifts as a spiritual leader and social organizer. One of the main things that his organization, Moucecore, does is to provide faith-based training to grassroots community leaders throughout the country in a number of sorely-needed social leadership skills. When I was there, he had 40 trainees there from around the country, taking a two-week course on faith-based community development. It looked very well organized—people of all ages and many different backgrounds were taking part. Not all were Anglicans; they came from a variety of different evangelically-oriented groups. They included both Hutus and Tutsis, worshiping and working together. I encountered similar, apparently stress-free social mixing between Hutus and Tutsis with the evangelical Quaker community whom I worshiped and visited with on one of my Sundays there.
This would be as if, after the Holocaust in Europe, the remnants of Germany’s former Jewish community had re-gathered back in Germany and had lived in close contact and amity with the Aryan Germans there just a few years after 1945. (Matters are a little more complex in Rwanda, since there it is the minority community, the community that includes the genocide survivors, that effectively controls the reins of government power. The minority nature of political rule there is undoubtedly a major problem that still needs addressing.) But still, at the human level, the ability of many, many Rwandan Tutsis and Hutus to transcend the terrible cleavage of the past is a remarkable achievement, and one that needs much more study—as does the role of religion in this still-continuing work of inter-group reconciliation. I know that the Muslim institutions that are well-rooted in parts of the country have played a role in this drama of reconciliation; but once again, the institutions that I am most familiar with are the Christian ones, and in this case, specifically the evangelical Christian ones.
Evangelicism has experienced a massive growth in adherents in Rwanda since the genocide. One survey I saw estimated that by the end of the 1990s some 43% of Rwandan were identifying themselves as Protestants, up from less than 10% in 1994. I talked to a number of Rwandans who had converted from Catholicism to an evangelical form of Protestantism, in most cases because they had found Catholicism too compromised by its role in the genocide and far too hierarchically organized for their taste. It’s important to stress, too, that the new wave of evangelicism did not merely “come in from outside” with the evangelical aid groups that flocked to the country after 1994. It was well-rooted, already, in the lives, experiences, examples, and organizing skill shown by indigenous Protestant leaders like Michel Kayetaba or Antoine Rutayasire. These people and a few other religious leaders had played an exemplary role during the genocide, and though people of Christian affiliation should be quite aware of the shameful role played by some “Christian” leaders during the genocide, they/we should also learn much more about the courageous acts of leadership that Kayitaba, Rutayasire, the Catholic pastor André Sibomana, and other church leaders undertook during the genocide. Certainly, the writings of these people should be much more widely distributed and studied around the world.[6]
* * *
So what can I say, in conclusion of these remarks? The title of a recent book by Chris Hedges argues that “War is a force that gives us meaning”. But many of us here would probably argue, along with the anthropologists, that one of the main things that gives “meaning” to the lives of people who are living through traumatic times is not “war”, but religion. In my own experience, I have certainly seen how in times filled with fear, uncertainty, traumatization, and suffering, various different forms of religion can help to restore meaning and dignity to human lives from which those attributes have previously been stripped, or from which they were absent.
But it seems to me—and I’m generalizing pretty grossly here—that “religions” come in two main different flavors (though sometimes these flavors come mixed together in the same institutional package.) The first of these flavors, or trends, in religions is the trend toward judging and punishing others, a focus that many, many religions seem to have. The other trend is quite different: it is the trend in those religions that seek to heal other people and ourselves. In the situations of often atrocious inter-communal conflict that I have witnessed or studied intensively—whether in Lebanon, in Israel/Palestine, in Rwanda, South Africa, Mozambique, or elsewhere—I have seen both trends at work. And I think I know, both intellectually and from my own experience, which of these kinds of religion seems to be more spirit-led and to be best for me and, I venture to suggest, for the rest of the world.
[1] The text of this article is available at .
[2] Martin Coetzee, "An overview of the amnesty process", in Charles Villa-Vicencio and Erik Doxtader, eds., The provocations of amnesty: Memory, justice, and impunity (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), p.193.
[3] Andrea Bartoli, “Making space for change in Mozambique,” in Robert Herr and Judy Zimmerman Herr, eds., Transforming Violence: Linking local and global peacemaking (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1998).
[4] Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
[5] See especially "The gray zone", Chapter II in his The drowned and the saved
[6] Antoine Rutayasire has published a short collection of testimonies by genocide survivors (including himself): Faith under Fire: testimonies of Christian Bravery (London: African Enterprise, 1995). André Sibomana died in 1998. But a posthumous, English-language translation of some lengthy conversations with him was published as André Sibomana, Voice of Hope: Conversations with Laure Guilbert and Hervé Deguine (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, and Dar es-Salaam, Mkuki na Nyota Publishers: 1999).