Transition and the Reasons of Memory

Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.

—Jacques Derrida, "On Forgiveness"

All beginnings contain an element of recollection.

—Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember

Of Past as Prologue

What motivates the victims of a universal system of human rights abuses—that is, the once legal South African system of racial apartheid—to forgive their known or unknown abusers? Beyond present material needs and political interests of a state undergoing fundamental democratic transformation to embrace a transitional accounting (instead of a strict discharge) of its duty as guarantor of justice for the citizens, what does it mean for a victim of a crime perpetrated in the name of systems of law such as apartheid's to forgive the past? What does "forgiveness" mean in these contexts, and what kind of morality should govern its offer or refusal to offer; the request for it or the refusal to ask; and the acceptance or refusal to accept? Likewise, is there an ethics that should govern such forgiving relationships in terms of the necessary requirements of justice and the memory of past acts of state-sanctioned, political and judicial, crimes? This essay is a meditation on the range of answers to these questions, answers that could be gleaned easily by any attentive observer from the practices of public memory in South Africa after apartheid. I hope, at the end, to have shed some light on the reasons for forgiveness or forgiveness of judicial crimes in general, and the ethical and political uses of public memories of gross, systemic, state-sanctioned human rights violations in particular.

Often by obtaining knowledge of the crimes suffered and through the processes of public memorialization of this knowledge victims of systemic human rights violations, by themselves or through mediating instruments of state (e.g., negotiated political settlement, constitutional compromise reached between previously warring political parties, truth and amnesty commissions, etc.) resort to the ideology of "forgiveness" or "reconciliation" as a means both to establish facts about the crimes and to promote democratic transformation of the general political culture so that such crimes may not repeat themselves in the future. Hence, David Crocker, in his contribution to Truth v. Justice, argues that this pursuit of "knowledge about the past is important in itself" because "victims and their descendants have a moral right to know the truth about human rights abuses."¹ South Africa's TRC was also explicit on the matter: in justifying the reasons for its offer of amnesty to judicial criminals of the apartheid state, the commission argued that since "secrecy and authoritarianism have concealed the truth" of the crimes "in little crevices of obscurity in our history," and as "records are not easily accessible, witnesses are often unknown, dead, unavailable or unwilling," it was in the interest of truth, and a matter of rights for the victims, to do everything necessary to establish what happened in the particular instances of the crimes, and to make this knowledge public. In a language that thus traded truth for amnesty ambiguously understood as official "forgiveness" of otherwise dire consequences of crime, the commission was ready to say that "truth, which the victims of repression seek so desperately to know," is, "in the circumstances, much more likely to be forthcoming if those responsible for such monstrous misdeeds are encouraged to disclose the whole truth with the incentive that they will not receive the punishment which they undoubtedly deserve if they do."² In fact, even those who raised moral objections against these arguments offered by the commission arrived at their position by considering, on the balance, the value of (public) display of what, it is also pointed out, may not have been as hidden or "secret" as the commission believed.

Finally, critics of "amnesty," "forgiveness," or "reconciliation" have based their opinions on the actual...