Political forgiveness by Russell Day

essay by Maggie Helass

The terrain of political forgiveness is in the early days of exploration-its cartographers will be revising and refining their maps for a long time. So argues Russell Daye, a United Church of Canada minister who is currently lecturing in the Department of Theology and Ethics, Pacific Theological College, Fiji.

The evolution of international human rights has been marked by truth commissions operating in Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia-usually in the period of transition from a less to a more democratic government.

Daye, author of Political Forgiveness-Lessons from South Africa, cites the current strife in the Middle East, the land struggles in Central America, the communal violence in India, the massacres in Afghanistan, and the civil wars in Central Africa as examples of fresh twists and turns in old stories of opposing interests, unequal power relationship, and ghosts of violence past. (In his Afterword, Daye includes post 9/11 developments as another chapter of the same old story.) “Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this point is the seemingly endless series of hostilities in the Balkans. To quote Donald Shriver: ‘The world cringes at a Serb’s willingness to kill a Muslim in revenge for ancestors who fought the Battle of Kosovo in the year 1389’ .”

To which Ken Smith replied:

Several years ago when April 25th fell on a Sunday it was my lot to preach at our church. I’d been wandering around Brisbane looking at the architecture of some of the Cathoilic and Orthodox churches, taking a few photos.

This was just after war had been raging in Kosovo. I started my message by reading part of the heading of a war memorial tablet from the Serbian Orthodox Church in South Brisbane (our church building is too new to have any such memorial). It praised those who gave their lives in the Battle for Kosovo. I then revealed that it wasn’t the recent one, but the 14th century one.

It made people think about just how long memories can be kept, and how the roots of recent events can be traced back to things most of us are completely unaware of.

Salaam

Ken Smith