Post by dustdevil28 on Feb 15, 2010 14:25:41 GMT -8
very interesting read.
..............
A man with a machete attacks and kills your family. Repeat this scene on a genocidal scale. Would you forgive? Could you? Rwandans are, as human instinct and faith intersect in this African nation.
By Amy Sullivan
KIGALI, Rwanda — Rosaria Bankundiye and Saveri Nemeye are neighbors in the tiny village of Mbyo, south of Kigali. On a steamy morning, they sit in the cool living area of the clay house Saveri helped build for Rosaria just a few years ago. Two of his sons roll around on the floor while the adults talk. At one point, Saveri leans over to say something to Rosaria and she starts laughing, her smile wide. They have known each other for a long time.
Nearly 16 years ago, during the genocide that wracked this African country of 10 million people for 100 days in 1994, Saveri murdered Rosaria's sister, along with her nieces and nephews. Genocidaires also attacked Rosaria, her husband and their four children with machetes and left them for dead. Only Rosaria survived. Yet when Saveri came to beg her forgiveness after he was released from prison in 2004, Rosaria considered his request and then granted it. "How can I refuse to forgive when I'm a forgiven sinner, too?" she asks.
Nearly every religion preaches the value of forgiveness. To most of us, however, such an act of mercy after so much pain seems unthinkable — maybe even unnatural. Scientists have long suspected that we are born with an instinct to seek revenge against those who hurt us. When someone like Rosaria overrides that vengeance instinct with an act of radical forgiveness, it can only be a miracle from God.
Now a growing number of researchers in the fields of evolutionary biology and psychology also believe that humans have a built-in inclination to forgive. In Rwanda, where government and church leaders are actively encouraging citizens to forgive each other, Rosaria's remarkable reconciliation with the man who killed her loved ones was not inevitable. But it is surprisingly understandable.
It is intuitively easy to grasp the instinct to enact vengeance. Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, writes in his book Beyond Revenge that revenge serves several key functions for humans and other species: It deters potential aggressors and discourages those who have harmed you from repeating the offense.
But McCullough also argues that reconciliation and forgiveness are equally essential to the development and maintenance of a thriving community. If kinsmen punish a bully by casting him out of the group or by killing him, they lose both his ability to contribute to the community and their own genetic material — an evolutionary no-no. Over time, individuals and species with more conciliatory tendencies are more successful because they promote their own kin.
'Perpetrators' among us
Beyond blood relatives, there is a second group of people we are also likely to forgive: those with whom we have, or could have, what the primatologist Frans de Waal has termed "valuable relationships." This condition of forgiveness has particular relevance in Rwanda. Unlike most other places where internal violence and ethnic division have occurred, killers — or "perpetrators," as Rwandans prefer to call them — and survivors live side-by-side as they did before the genocide. Ethnic groups have not been divided into separate parts of the country, as was the case in Bosnia and Serbia. And unlike Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Rwandan refugees largely came back to their home villages once the violence was over. After the government released approximately 40,000 prisoners from a massively overcrowded prison system, including thousands of genocide suspects, every daily trip to a village well became a potentially fraught outing. Looking to prevent waves of retaliation, some religious leaders stepped forward to facilitate reconciliation.
Antoine Rutayisire is an Anglican pastor and member of Rwanda's National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. He has visited other countries including South Africa and Northern Ireland that have engaged in reconciliation efforts after violent struggles. Too often, he says, they achieve an unstable peace. "So many societies engage in that cheap exercise called peaceful coexistence," explains Rutayisire. "So, I hate you and you hate me, but we live at peace. You just need one madman to take power and then it flares up and the country is burning."
Rutayisire believes that forgiveness can go beyond mere coexistence to actual reconciliation. He cites programs developed by Prison Fellowship Rwanda to help survivors and perpetrators rebuild those "valuable relationships." One initiative donates cows that are then co-owned by a survivor and perpetrator. The two sell the cow's milk to their neighbors and share the profits. Another village building project — like the one Rosaria and Saveri participated in — gives perpetrators a tangible way to express remorse by constructing houses for the surviving family members of people they killed.
Layered onto the array of incentives Rwandans have to forgive is the impact of religion. Despite the failure of many church institutions to speak out against ethnic hatred before the genocide and the involvement of some church leaders in actually carrying out the genocide, most Rwandans are still church-going Christians.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt may have engaged in a bit of hyperbole when she wrote that "the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth." But there's no question that Christianity — particularly in the teachings and parables of Jesus — took the value of forgiveness embraced by other world religions and put it into hyper-drive. Many Rwandan survivors describe praying extensively before choosing to grant forgiveness, and speak of the example of Jesus forgiving his killers as he hung on the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
'It's all the same to me'
There are risks, however, involved in this faith-based approach to reconciliation. For Christians who believe that a failure to forgive will call into question the strength of their faith, there is a danger that they will feel coerced into forgiveness. Or they could undergo a crisis of faith if they find themselves psychologically unable to forgive.
Or maybe Jesus was onto something. In a village about 30 miles west of Rosaria's home lives a woman named Chantale Ukebereyinfura. In 2006, the man who killed her father came to her and begged forgiveness. Chantale, who suffered from severe depression and PTSD, refused. "Forgiving or not forgiving him, it's all the same to me," she told filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson at the time for the documentary As We Forgive. "If I forgive him, I still have no peace. If I don't forgive him, it's the same." It was a perfectly understandable reaction — the rational reaction, some would say, to what she had endured.
Three years later, she sits in her small clay hut, perched on a bench next to John Nzabonimpa, her father's killer. As he talks about what a good thing it is that Chantale has done by eventually forgiving him, John reaches over and takes her hand in his large one. She doesn't flinch. In fact, she smiles with a calm that did not exist just a few years ago. "I am happy to see him," says Chantale. "I am not afraid." It's either a miracle of faith or a miracle of evolution that prepares the human brain to be capable of radical forgiveness. Either way, it's a miracle.
blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/02/column-rwandas-miracle-of-forgiveness-.html
..............
A man with a machete attacks and kills your family. Repeat this scene on a genocidal scale. Would you forgive? Could you? Rwandans are, as human instinct and faith intersect in this African nation.
By Amy Sullivan
KIGALI, Rwanda — Rosaria Bankundiye and Saveri Nemeye are neighbors in the tiny village of Mbyo, south of Kigali. On a steamy morning, they sit in the cool living area of the clay house Saveri helped build for Rosaria just a few years ago. Two of his sons roll around on the floor while the adults talk. At one point, Saveri leans over to say something to Rosaria and she starts laughing, her smile wide. They have known each other for a long time.
Nearly 16 years ago, during the genocide that wracked this African country of 10 million people for 100 days in 1994, Saveri murdered Rosaria's sister, along with her nieces and nephews. Genocidaires also attacked Rosaria, her husband and their four children with machetes and left them for dead. Only Rosaria survived. Yet when Saveri came to beg her forgiveness after he was released from prison in 2004, Rosaria considered his request and then granted it. "How can I refuse to forgive when I'm a forgiven sinner, too?" she asks.
Nearly every religion preaches the value of forgiveness. To most of us, however, such an act of mercy after so much pain seems unthinkable — maybe even unnatural. Scientists have long suspected that we are born with an instinct to seek revenge against those who hurt us. When someone like Rosaria overrides that vengeance instinct with an act of radical forgiveness, it can only be a miracle from God.
Now a growing number of researchers in the fields of evolutionary biology and psychology also believe that humans have a built-in inclination to forgive. In Rwanda, where government and church leaders are actively encouraging citizens to forgive each other, Rosaria's remarkable reconciliation with the man who killed her loved ones was not inevitable. But it is surprisingly understandable.
It is intuitively easy to grasp the instinct to enact vengeance. Michael McCullough, a psychology professor at the University of Miami, writes in his book Beyond Revenge that revenge serves several key functions for humans and other species: It deters potential aggressors and discourages those who have harmed you from repeating the offense.
But McCullough also argues that reconciliation and forgiveness are equally essential to the development and maintenance of a thriving community. If kinsmen punish a bully by casting him out of the group or by killing him, they lose both his ability to contribute to the community and their own genetic material — an evolutionary no-no. Over time, individuals and species with more conciliatory tendencies are more successful because they promote their own kin.
'Perpetrators' among us
Beyond blood relatives, there is a second group of people we are also likely to forgive: those with whom we have, or could have, what the primatologist Frans de Waal has termed "valuable relationships." This condition of forgiveness has particular relevance in Rwanda. Unlike most other places where internal violence and ethnic division have occurred, killers — or "perpetrators," as Rwandans prefer to call them — and survivors live side-by-side as they did before the genocide. Ethnic groups have not been divided into separate parts of the country, as was the case in Bosnia and Serbia. And unlike Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Rwandan refugees largely came back to their home villages once the violence was over. After the government released approximately 40,000 prisoners from a massively overcrowded prison system, including thousands of genocide suspects, every daily trip to a village well became a potentially fraught outing. Looking to prevent waves of retaliation, some religious leaders stepped forward to facilitate reconciliation.
Antoine Rutayisire is an Anglican pastor and member of Rwanda's National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. He has visited other countries including South Africa and Northern Ireland that have engaged in reconciliation efforts after violent struggles. Too often, he says, they achieve an unstable peace. "So many societies engage in that cheap exercise called peaceful coexistence," explains Rutayisire. "So, I hate you and you hate me, but we live at peace. You just need one madman to take power and then it flares up and the country is burning."
Rutayisire believes that forgiveness can go beyond mere coexistence to actual reconciliation. He cites programs developed by Prison Fellowship Rwanda to help survivors and perpetrators rebuild those "valuable relationships." One initiative donates cows that are then co-owned by a survivor and perpetrator. The two sell the cow's milk to their neighbors and share the profits. Another village building project — like the one Rosaria and Saveri participated in — gives perpetrators a tangible way to express remorse by constructing houses for the surviving family members of people they killed.
Layered onto the array of incentives Rwandans have to forgive is the impact of religion. Despite the failure of many church institutions to speak out against ethnic hatred before the genocide and the involvement of some church leaders in actually carrying out the genocide, most Rwandans are still church-going Christians.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt may have engaged in a bit of hyperbole when she wrote that "the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth." But there's no question that Christianity — particularly in the teachings and parables of Jesus — took the value of forgiveness embraced by other world religions and put it into hyper-drive. Many Rwandan survivors describe praying extensively before choosing to grant forgiveness, and speak of the example of Jesus forgiving his killers as he hung on the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
'It's all the same to me'
There are risks, however, involved in this faith-based approach to reconciliation. For Christians who believe that a failure to forgive will call into question the strength of their faith, there is a danger that they will feel coerced into forgiveness. Or they could undergo a crisis of faith if they find themselves psychologically unable to forgive.
Or maybe Jesus was onto something. In a village about 30 miles west of Rosaria's home lives a woman named Chantale Ukebereyinfura. In 2006, the man who killed her father came to her and begged forgiveness. Chantale, who suffered from severe depression and PTSD, refused. "Forgiving or not forgiving him, it's all the same to me," she told filmmaker Laura Waters Hinson at the time for the documentary As We Forgive. "If I forgive him, I still have no peace. If I don't forgive him, it's the same." It was a perfectly understandable reaction — the rational reaction, some would say, to what she had endured.
Three years later, she sits in her small clay hut, perched on a bench next to John Nzabonimpa, her father's killer. As he talks about what a good thing it is that Chantale has done by eventually forgiving him, John reaches over and takes her hand in his large one. She doesn't flinch. In fact, she smiles with a calm that did not exist just a few years ago. "I am happy to see him," says Chantale. "I am not afraid." It's either a miracle of faith or a miracle of evolution that prepares the human brain to be capable of radical forgiveness. Either way, it's a miracle.
blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/02/column-rwandas-miracle-of-forgiveness-.html