Forgiveness factor: stories of hope in a world of conflict.

In San Salvador a few months ago, I heard a senior administrator at the University of Central America, where six priests were assassinated during the civil war, reflect on the role of forgiveness in healing his nation. `The timing of an amnesty is crucial,' he said. `Unless atrocities are investigated and perpetrators have a chance to confess, amnesty is meaningless. Only when a person admists a wrong can amnesty convey genuine forgiveness.'

The acknowledgement-contrition-forgiveness experience, can, indeed, be a hard, practical step in moving from violence to peace. Michael Henderson's gripping book recounts dozens of those experiences in vivid detail. They begin with reconciliation between enemies after World War II and come right down to the present. They range from healing the wounds of war to bridging divides between management and labour and the abiding gulf in the US between blacks and whites over the legacy of slavery. In story after story, men and women change conflictual relationships and drop the burden of hatred by forgiving those who have done terrible wrong--not forgetting, but forgiving, impossible as that may seem.

It forgiveness can be documented as catalyzing such historic changes as the Franco-German rapprochement after World War II, why is it not studied and presented as a significant factor in resolving conflict and building peace?

Joseph V Montville of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC writes in one of the book's two forewords, `This book's accounts should be read as additional scientific data for a rigorous "secular" theory and practice of political conflict resolution.'

The deeply embedded traditional concepts which explain conflict and its resolution focus on political institutions and instruments such as governments and on formal mediation or negotiation. Only a few social scientists in the mainstream have found ways to bring the human dimensions of conflict into the study of its resolution. Traditional scholarship focuses on negotiating solutions to technically defined issues--not on changing the relationships that underlie them.

When I said this to a leading social scientist, his thoughtful response was: `Your perspective is absolutely right, but I can't find a way to fit it into a social science research design.'

The challenge of Henderson's book is not just to make minor adjustments in present methods of analysis. In his preface, he quotes Mahatma Gandhi: `When one player's motive is changed [as happened in a British administrator's apology for his arrogance to his Indian co-workers]... the chessboard is upset and everyone can start over.' As Henderson says, `Forgiveness is like that.' The challenge to officials and social scientists is to put on new lenses.

In the book's other foreword, Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi's grandson, raises a profound question: `Why does grief trigger in one the emotion of revenge and pity in another? We wonder about the workings of a heart that decides to forgive.'

The experiences that Henderson recounts revolve mostly around the history of Moral Re-Armament, founder Frank Buchman and Mountain House in Caux, home of countless reconciliations over the past 50 years. That is a remarkable history in its own right which persistently steps to centre stage.

Some will regard that celebratory story as in some way detracting from the documentary evidence of Henderson's `case studies'. That should not be allowed. This book deserves serious study for the point it makes--that changes of heart are key to changing conflictual relationships. That point has earned a place at the centre of the political resolution of conflict.

The reviewer, Director of International Affairs at the Kettering Foundation in the US, was US Assistant Secretary of State during the negotiation of the Camp David accords. He now co-chairs the Inter-Tajikistani Dialogue.