Doubting the Unconditional Need for Retribution

John Borneman's brilliantly conceptualized essay "Reconciliation after Ethnic Cleansing: Listening, Retribution, Affiliation" (Public Culture 14 [spring 2002]: 281-304) provides an illuminating and coherent approach to the elusive challenge of achieving reconciliation in the aftermath of ethnic cleansing. I find his assessment convincing and perceptive, providing the best available foundation for evaluating past instances and an excellent framework for future praxis. I especially appreciate the significance that his discussion accords to an ethos of listening so as to discern the specificities of each particular case and identify the concrete reality of perpetrator and victim.

Borneman's creative recommendation to bring anthropological skills to bear on international peacekeeping initiatives seems valuable, and it might have enabled the United Nations effort in Kosovo to have been more alert to the dangers facing the Serb minority after the NATO war of 1999. Revenge killings of Serbs in this period, often referred to as "reverse ethnic cleansing," definitely tainted the peacekeeping undertaking at its inception, complicating, if not altogether precluding, future reconciliation within a reconstituted, multiethnic Kosovo. What occurred in Kosovo was a role reversal in which the perpetrating ethnic community became victimized as a result of the banishment of Serb military and police forces from Kosovo. Only such a test of concrete circumstances can validate the Borneman recommendation, but its cogency and analytic depth is such that the proposed approach merits attempted implementation as soon as possible.

If I understand Borneman correctly, then I believe the political dimension of his approach to reconciliation is not sufficiently theorized. By political dimension I mean the play of forces operative in a particular setting that establishes limits on what is feasible. This concern seems to me of particular relevance to Borneman's unqualified endorsement of "retributive justice" as a necessary element in the reconciling process, clarified in relation to the failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to link its emphasis on truth-telling to some further retributive process. To assess this partitioning of truth-telling and retribution, we need to take into account the persistent and possibly dangerous embeddedness of the structure of apartheid in the governing process in post-apartheid South Africa, especially in relation to the security and armed forces. The South African leadership has struggled impressively to break decisively with its racist past without alienating influential remnants of the apartheid era to the point that they might engage in disruptive activities. Often a peaceful transition after ethnic cleansing, or its equivalent, does not result in the complete displacement of the perpetrators and their ethnic allies, as was the case in Kosovo. In such circumstances, the insistence on retribution might prevent transition altogether or trigger a bloody backlash in the midst of the process. Are we to say that reconciliation is not possible in these circumstances? Perhaps, but the issue needs to be discussed in a way that evaluates when the political conditions permit the pursuit of retributive justice and, furthermore, what should be done if those conditions do not exist. A pessimistic assessment would conclude that unless listening and truth-seeking are supplemented by symbolically convincing procedures for retribution, reconciliation will not be achieved and new cycles of ethnic violence will likely recur.

A more optimistic interpretation, however, would argue that contextual factors might facilitate a high degree of reconciliation even if retribution cannot be realized. Other factors, including the modalities of peacekeeping, may obviate some of the pressure to punish and to remove legacies of unjust privilege. For instance, if the wider international community enables reconstruction of the ravaged society in order to give all ethnic sectors a sense of hope and the experience of material betterment, there may be a greater willingness to dissipate the retributive impulse. Or, if the community faces a common external adversary, it may create a sense of cohesion that helps to render even the deepest grievances inert. I was struck during a visit to Vietnam three years ago, for example, by the extent to which Vietnamese worries...