It is not enough to say "sorry"

I found a quite interesting paper from a multicultural journal, where the Australian case is highlighted and showed as an example of “reconciliation” without and an inclusive political community.


Here is a small fragment of this interesting article:

The ‘national reconciliation’ project is a political technique designed to bring about an end to violence thereby promoting peace within fractured national societies. It seeks to overcome a violent past by not repeating it.

More recently, reconciliation and human rights discourse has been applied to international humanitarian intervention in states in crisis and in the ‘new wars’. In both cases the focus on the victims of violence is a therapeutic strategy by the state designed to help recover sovereignty and legitimacy through recognition and care. The therapeutic focus on individual well-being and healing through victim-centred truth politics or conflict prevention through behavioural and attitudinal change however, is no substitute for the reconstruction of an inclusive political community.

This paper also explores the limits of conventional legal understandings of responsibility as a means of dealing with the legacies of colonisation of Australia. It suggests that the overriding focus upon ‘moral agency’ in contemporary legal and historical debates may actually restrict or derail the institution of reconciliation as a tool of justice. The author suggests that the tragic tradition can enrich or extend our understanding of the reconciliation process, firstly by sponsoring a concept of responsibility that does not take its bearings from the purposes or intentions of the agent and, secondly, by establishing a connection between our spectatorship on the events of the past and the education of compassion.


He also sostains that although there are many competing conceptions of reconciliation, its deployment in former colonial societies might best be understood in terms of the process of ‘coming to terms’ or ‘dealing’ with the past. In this context, the concept of ‘dealing’ carries two related, but analytically distinguishable, meanings: that of exposing or recalling the (always painful) truth about the past and that of resolving or repairing the ruptures of the past. While these moments of memory and healing are readily transposed into a psychoanalytic register as aspects of the ‘work of mourning’ (a concept which I will return to later), they are more commonly framed within politico juridical discourse as matters of historical injustice. From this perspective, what is primarily at stake in our ‘dealings’ with the past is the remembrance of forgotten or undisclosed crimes and their expiation by the perpetrating community or their descendants.


Concluding, according to him, this framing of the discourse of reconciliation gives rise to two nests of questions:



In the first place, there are the complex series of issues that are intrinsic to the notion of historical obligation itself: how are these obligations incurred, how far back in time do they stretch, how might they be redeemed?



Secondly, there is the philosophically intricate matter of how reparations for past wrongs, whether in the form of restitution or compensation, might be articulated with other retributive and distributive claims in a more general theory of justice.

Reference:

 

Muldoon, P. (2005). Thinking Responsibility Differently: Reconciliation and the Tragedy of Colonisation. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26(3), 237-254. doi:10.1080/07256860500153518

 

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