Ruth Jamieson[1]

Denial, Acknowledgement and Reconciliation

Introduction

Much of the discussion of truth and reconciliation has been framed in terms of the recovery of `the truth' about past events as a means of restoring the trust relationship which have been broken by war and civil conflict. The assumption is that once the truth is retrieved from the various competing narratives about the conflict, then the healing of communal wounds will surely follow. The foundation for building reconciliation, according to this model is for each party to the conflict to tell its story and for the other to acknowledge its truth. I order for this to happen all parties must overcome the tendency for the truth about atrocities to be believed or disbelieved solely on the basis of group loyalty. As George Orwell observed,

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. […] But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The [worse] truth is that they happen.[2]

What necessarily follows from this is the deceptively simple realisation that the aim of any truth and reconciliation process cannot only be about retrieving and acknowledging the truth about the past; it must also be about understanding how such things happened in order to prevent the repetition of atrocities in the future. Acknowledgement of past atrocities is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for bringing about reconciliation.

The aim of my comments today will be to explore the relationship between denial, acknowledgement and reconciliation. I will be drawing extensively on Stanley Cohen's recent work on the psychology of denial and the various ways in which `states of denial' operate in public discourses on atrocities and gross human rights violations.[3] I will start by briefly outlining Cohen's work on denial and then I will go on to suggest some of the ways in which his conceptual framework might help to inform our discussion of what form of reconciliation process might be appropriate for the former Yugoslavia.

My paper is in three parts. Firstly, I will examine Cohen's concept of denial as it applies to the operation of denial at the level of both the individual and whole societies. Secondly, I will outline his conception of the possible forms acknowledgement may take and how these discourses of denial/ acknowledgement play out at the personal, community and political levels. Corollary to this are the questions of whether it is possible to have too much acknowledgement of past suffering and what effects this might have for the prospects of reconciliation. Finally, I will conclude by offering some remarks on what constitutes reconciliation, how over-acknowledgement militates against it, and how one might begin to think about reconciliation in the context of the former Yugoslavia. I must emphasize that my comments are primarily concerned with the ways in which debates and processes of truth and reconciliation are framed in discourse. I am not advancing an argument advocating any particular model or process for the Former Yugoslavia.

Denial

The are two main points that need to be made about denial. The first is that denial operates at two levels - at the level of the individual psyche and at the level of rhetoric in public discourse. At the level of the individual psyche, `denial is an unconscious defence mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety or other disturbing emotions aroused by external reality'. The unconscious mind sets up a barrier that prevents threatening external realities from reaching the conscious mind, for example, the cancer patient who does not accept that she is terminally ill. Denial serves to keep out `unthinkable, unbearable, unacceptable [external] realities' whereas repression is about suppressing disturbing inner emotional states or memories.[4] The second point that Cohen makes is that there are echoes of these states of denial operating at the level of the social group. Here denial serves the group's `need to be free of a troubling recognition' of wrongdoing on its part.[5] Thus at the social level denial refers to ` the maintenance of social worlds in which undesirable situation (event, condition or phenomenon such as domestic violence, racism, homophobia) is unrecognised, ignored or made to seem normal. What binds us to the group is not only a shared cultural repertoire of understandings, but also emotional and moral ties.[6] These work together to allow the group as a whole to block out unwelcome truths about itself. In this way, Cohen argues, the suffering of others can be `normalised, contained and covered up'.[7] He suggests that denial works through four dynamic elements: the cognitive (denying or not acknowledging the facts), the emotional (not feeling), moral (not recognising harm or responsibility) and action dimension (not recognising the need to act or change).[8] In its rhetorical form - as distinct from its working at the level of the individual psyche - denial (e.g., official statements about past atrocities) may take three forms.

Literal denial:

The fact or knowledge of the fact is denied.

"Nothing happened at My Lai. There was no massacre of civilians."

Interpretive denial:

The fact is accepted, but its meaning or conventionalinterpretation is contested.

"What happened at My Lai wasn't what you say it was."

Cohen emphases that, while interpretive denials are not outright lies, their effect nonetheless is to blur the boundary between rhetoric and reality.[9]

Implicatory denial:

The fact is accepted and the conventional interpretation of the facts is accepted, but the psychological or moral significance is disputed.

"Yes, civilians were massacred at My Lai, but they invited it by sheltering Viet Cong forces in the past."

In this last form of denial what is in dispute is not the facts or the truth about the atrocity, but its moral significance, the moral imperative to do something about it, to accept responsibility for it. Blame is deflected to the victims. Members of the enemy group are treated as though they exist outside the moral boundaries of one's own group and thereby excluded from any claims to empathy or moral responsibility. Because they are outside the moral boundaries of the group it is easier both rhetorically and psychologically to dismiss their claims to our sympathy or care. The difference between knowing about the suffering of those close to you and the suffering of distant others, as Cohen points out, is `too primeval to need to be spelt out'. Ties of culture, history and loyalty bind us all and these ties make it harder to acknowledge wrongdoing by our own people.[10] None of these forms of denial - literal, interpretive or implicatory - permit the acknowledgment of the suffering of the victim. As long as there is denial, there cannot be acknowledgement. Without acknowledgement, there can be no reconciliation.

Acknowledgement

Cohen argues that there are different gradations of acknowledgement ranging from a more or less complete acknowledgement of the facts, their meaning and consequences to an only partial acknowledgement of them.

Completeacknowledgement is a form of acknowledgement in which the fact, its meaning and its consequences are all accepted. "Yes it happened. We did do it. It was wrong, harmful, a crime."

Complete acknowledgement is unusual for perpetrator governments (for example, by the American government about its actions in Vietnam). It is usually outside observers who are most willing to make complete acknowledgement of gross human rights violations or war crimes.

Partialacknowledgement is a form of acknowledgement in which the fact, its meaning and its consequences are only partly accepted. Partial acknowledgement is more typical of perpetrator governments (for example, Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians or the British about the treatment of political prisoners in Northern Ireland). There are three main rhetorical devices for making only a partial acknowledgement of atrocities, all of which draw upon shared cultural understandings or explanations of these forms of noxious behaviour. These rhetorical devices are:

Spatial isolation -The systematic, routine, repeated or ongoing nature of the harmful action is denied.

"Yes it happened, but it was only an isolated incident (these things were done by a few rogues who are not really like the rest of us, or done by the big fish, not by us, etc.)."

Temporal isolation -"Yes it used to happen in the past, but it doesn't happen now."

Self-correction -"Yes, we are aware of the problem, and we are trying to deal with it."[11]

Of course, another possible permutation of partial acknowledgement is that two messages can be communicated and received at the same time. One is the message that is contained in official pronouncements (e.g., "Women civilians are entitled to protection from attack by the Geneva Conventions."). The other is the `gut level' message ("It's OK to rape their women.") which is the opposite of the official policy. The Japanese call this level of intuitive communication `haragei' or `stomach talk'. So another potential obstacle to reconciliation is that there may be a `stomach talk' conversation excusing and justifying atrocities going on underneath formal statements of acknowledgement, particularly if the formal statements of acknowledgement come from the top down.

In a recent article about the reluctance of Americans to acknowledge their war crimes in Vietnam (or indeed the recent NATO bombings) Jonathan Schell points out that few things are harder to do than an honest voluntary accounting by a nation of its own crimes.[12] He argues that when others commit the crimes, we seem to look at events through a `moral telescope' which brings far away events nearer and into sharp focus, but when our own people commit the crimes,

… we seem to look through the telescope's other end. The figures are small and indistinct. A kind of mental and emotional fog rolls in. Memories dim. The very acts that before inspired prompt anger now become fascinating philosophical puzzles. The psychological torments of the perpetrators move into the foreground, those of the victims into the background. The man firing the gun becomes more of an object of pity than the child at whom the gun was fired.

It is all too easy to acknowledge our own group's suffering and at the same time deny, dismiss or avoid dealing with the harm we inflicted on our enemies. The more difficult challenge is to apply the same standard of judgement regardless of social or national ties, and to view our own and others' actions through the same moral lens.

Over-acknowledgement

I want to conclude this discussion of acknowledgement with some remarks about the possibility of over-acknowledgement. We tend to think that all acknowledgement must somehow promote a catharsis or healing of past injustices. We also tend to assume that the more acknowledgment there is, the better. However, it is arguable that it is possible to have too much acknowledgment of past victimisation, especially when it becomes a central theme of a chauvinistic narratives of national martyrdom and past victimhood. At the level of the individual, the danger posed by over-acknowledgment is that the traumatised person becomes engulfed in his or her own victimhood. When this happens there is no closure, catharsis or healing of the past, but only a pathological and permanent immersion in it. At the level of the national group, over-acknowledgement of past injustices may provide the justification for self-righteous, pre-emptive vicitimisation of the past perpetrator, thereby perpetuating the vicious cycle of victimisation, fear and terrible [righteous] revenge. Rwanda, Northern Ireland and the Balkans are telling examples of this. The list of such cyclical conflicts is depressingly long. Bauman astutely observes that the problem with claims to righteousness by either victims or victors, whether the claims are made by others, or ourselves is that

Victors, triumphant or frustrated, do not emerge ennobled … but neither do (at least not necessarily) their victims. Victims are not always ethically superior to their oppressors; what makes them look morally better, and makes credible their claim to this effect, is the fact that - being weaker - they have had less opportunity to be cruel.[13]

George Orwell cogently expresses the destructive potential of over-acknowledgement:

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts .… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them…. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, not and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into ever calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.… Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered .… Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events, which is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied.… Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing off of one part of the world from the other, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening.… If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.[14]

Larry Ray who advances an important argument about nationalist narratives and remembrance also takes up this theme. He argues that one of the preconditions for violent and potentially genocidal nationalism may lie in the apparently routine rituals thorough which national pasts are remembered and constructed, particularly when the commemoration is of past defeat or victimisation. It is precisely because of their emotional and sacrificial power that memories of collective injustice or defeat may be more central in the promotion of violent nationalism than the `faked up glories and imagined pasts' of standard nationalist rhetoric.[15] Clearly, what follows from this is that, when we speak of `healing through remembering' as is currently being mooted as a means of reconciliation in Northern Ireland, we need to be aware that the content and emotional salience of what is remembered may be far more important in determining future relations between the previously warring communities than the act of remembering itself. Whatever form the commemoration of the Irish Troubles takes, victimhood must not be thematised along sectarian lines. Leaving it to sectarian or nationalist groups to construct their own pasts and fill their own museums is offering the proverbial hostage to fortune. Remembrance can just as easily enable the evasion of acknowledgment as it can promote the process of healing. Remembrance and acknowledgement are not synonymous.

Cohen suggests that when nationalism revolves around over-acknowledgement of past injuries, it is `not merely narcissistic, but autistic'.[16] He cites Ignatieff's observation that

… the pathology of groups so enclosed in their own circle of self-righteous victimhood, or so locked in their own myths or rituals of violence, [is] that they can't listen, can't hear, can't learn from anybody outside themselves.[17]

Cohen stresses the importance of preventing these more virulent forms of over-acknowledgement becoming the driving force of political cultures because collective memories of injustice can lend a veneer of righteousness to agendas for revenge and hatred.[18] What we learn form this is that acknowledgement of the truth about the past - whether complete, partial or excessive - does not automatically lead to reconciliation. People who have been victims of war quite rightly desire acknowledgement of their suffering and loss, but at the same time, they may find it difficult to acknowledge the victims who suffered at the hands of their own group. It is at the level of group loyalty that the challenge of acknowledgement is greatest. To be restorative, acknowledgement must involve listening `against the grain' of accepted cultural narratives about victimhood and responsibility.[19]

To be restorative, acknowledgement must be reciprocal and dialogic. For acknowledgement of the suffering of the other to occur, you have to be able to find a way of transcending the `frontier of your own suffering'[20] and of including former enemies inside the boundaries of your own moral community. So there are two problems to overcome: the problems of speaking and listening against the grain and the problem of over-acknowledgement.

I want to conclude by suggesting one way of beginning to speak about and listen to people's accounts of their experiences of violence, trauma and loss. Rather than starting with accounts of victimisation and loss which are framed in terms of national or ethnic identity, these war stories could be thematised according to common social identities, for example, how the conflict affected all mothers, wives, refugees, orphans, fathers, sons and daughters across all of the former Yugoslavia (or Ireland, or Rwanda, or any other fratricidal war). This would displace ethnic difference as the most salient element of the stories of victimisation. Then the terrible nature of war for all involved would come into sharpest focus, rather than only the iniquities of the enemy.