Seeing the Other through the purity of our window

by Shanie

"How can you say to your neighbour, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye, while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye."

(August 15, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) All of us are at the receiving end of forwarded emails, many of them finding their due place in the bin but a few of them offering some home truths. One such in circulation now refers to a young couple who move into a new neighbourhood. Through her apartment window, the young woman sees the washing hung up on the balcony of the apartment opposite hers. She tells her husband how awful it was that the clothes were still dirty even after the wash. She repeats the comments every time she sees the washing put out to dry in the apartment opposite. One day about a month later, she exclaims that the woman in the opposite apartment seemed to have learnt to wash properly. The clothes now looked clean. To this, the husband replies: ‘Well, I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows!’ And the email presenter has the comment: So it is in life. We often see the other through the kind of window that we look. Before criticism of the other, it is good to check the purity of the window through which we see the other. Our judgments are often coloured by our own state of mind.

The quotation above is from Jesus’ teachings found in the Christian scriptures. We are asked to engage in self-scrutiny before we criticize or judge the other. Unless we take out the logs in our own eyes, we cannot see clearly to take out the specks in the eyes of the other. Only self-scrutiny leads us to acknowledge our shortcomings and learn from the mistakes we have made. The downfall of the LTTE and Prabhakaran was because they were unwilling to accept criticism and thought that only they right and everyone else wrong. Those dissenters who dared to criticize were either eliminated or driven underground while the rest were effectively silenced. The leadership heard only the voices of the hurrah boys – the loudest among whom were the Tamil diaspora. It seems that history is repeating itself. There is an unwillingness within the political establishment now to accept dissenters and their criticisms. The leadership wants to hear only the voices of the hurrah boys and girls – the loudest among whom are the Sinhala diaspora. Are we being led on the same slippery slope to self-destruction as the LTTE?

The political leadership must show greater maturity, willing to identify and accept what is in the long-term national interest and avoid what is clearly short-term party or personal gain. Why is it that we are unable to co-operate with the UN panel set up to inquire into possible human rights violations by both parties in the final stages of the war. Concerns on this have been voiced by the survivors of the war and by human rights groups here and abroad. We need to deal with these concerns if we are to move forward as a nation towards national unity, peace and reconciliation. As Lakdhar Brahimi, the former Algerian Foreign Minister, whom this column quoted last week, stated: "Speaking out is neither unfriendly to the people of Sri Lanka nor an interference in the internal affairs of its government. Quite the opposite: it is a strong manifestation of support for justice, peace and progress for all the people of Sri Lanka."

Accountability and Healing

Those who have listened to the credible stories of the survivors of the war accept that many civilians died in the final months of the war. We can also accept that the security forces did not deliberately target civilians; though it is debatable if bombing of some selected targets should have been avoided when it was known that the LTTE cadres were mingling with and using the civilians as shields. Rohan Gunaratne thinks the number of civilians who died was only 1400, though other reports suggest that number was in tens of thousands. But in whose interest do some keep repeating the fiction that there were no civilian deaths? Anyway, a realistic approximate number can only be known if there is an independent investigation. Such an investigation is certainly outside the terms of reference of the current Commission on Lessons Learned and Reconciliation.

But such an investigation on the lines of the broad terms of reference of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission will certainly help in the healing of memories and in the process of reconciliation. During the apartheid years, Michael Lapsley was an Australian who went to South Africa and worked in solidarity with human rights groups to check abuses. He naturally fell foul of the security forces and was forced into exile in neighbouring Zimbabwe. There, he was the victim of a letter bomb sent from South Africa and lost both his hands and an eye. But that has no dettered him from peace work. As a member of the Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence, he assisted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Today he heads the Institute for the Healing of Memories which set up and has done much creative work to bring about dignity and healing to victims of violence and torture, which has not ended in South Africa with apartheid.

There are similar stories from other countries which have been or in the midst of violence and conflict. In Northern Ireland, many would know the names of Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan who were witnesses to the death of three children, children of Corrigan’s sister. The children were killed when a car driven by an IRA militant went out of control after he was fatally hit by British Army fire. Within days, they had galvanized tens of thousands of women, Catholic and Protestant, to march in the streets for peace. They were later to found The Peace People and were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1976. In her acceptance speech, Williams was to say: "As far as we are concerned, every single death in the last eight years, and every death in every war that was ever fought represents life needlessly wasted, a mother’s labour spurned."

In Israel, a woman doctor, Nurit Peled-Elhanan lost her only thirteen year old daughter to a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in 1997. She was the daughter of an Israeli Army General. The death of her daughter did not embitter her and she turned peace activist founding the Bereaved Families for Peace. On her daughter’s death, she was to comment: ""My little girl was murdered because she was an Israeli by a young man who was humiliated, oppressed and desperate to the point of suicide and murder and inhumanity, just because he was a Palestinian.".

In 2001, Peled Elhanan was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and Freedom of Speech by the European Parliament. The same year, in a speech in the USA she stated: "For me the struggle is not between Palestinians and Israelis, nor between Jews and Arabs. The fight is between those who seek peace and those who seek war. My people are those who seek peace. My sisters are the bereaved mothers, Israeli and Palestinian, who live in Israel and in Gaza and in the refugee camps. My brothers are the fathers who try to defend their children from the cruel occupation, and are, as I was, unsuccessful in doing so. Although we were born into a different history and speak different tongues there is more that unites us than that which divides us….Today, when there is almost no opposition to the atrocities of the Israeli government, when the Israeli peace camp has evaporated into thin air, a cry must rise, a cry that is as ancient as man and woman, a cry that is beyond all differences of race or religion or language, The cry of motherhood: Save our children."

These three stories in three different countries are about men and women who were able to cross boundaries and reach out to the other in the cause of peace and reconciliation. This is what our country also needs so desperate today. We need men and women who will be willing to cross boundaries, willing to reach out to the other and willing to think differently and put themselves in the shoes of the other. The challenge before the Commission on Lessons Learned and Reconciliation is to interpret their mandate in the broadest possible way and produce a report that avoids political expediency by merely blaming one side or the other but instead look positively to a future of national unity, peace and reconciliation. The members of the Commission are all eminent persons who undoubtedly can be expected to effectively meet this challenge.