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| Old-fashioned forgiveness: John Caulker wants tradition to heal war wounds. Sara Terry/polaris |
Sierra Leoneans look for peace through full truth about war crime
Human rights activist John Caulker looks beyond the high-profile and costly prosecutions to village-level reconciliation.
By Jina Moore | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the July 8, 2008 edition
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Reporter Jina Moore discusses opposing views on trying war criminals in Sierra Leone.
Bomaru, Sierra Leone - Little but its history distinguishes Bomaru from other villages scattered across Sierra Leone's countryside. A quiet place with mud houses the same color as the dust kicked up by the occasional passing vehicle, it would seem, on an ordinary day, impoverished and washed out.
But today, women dress in freshly laundered wrappers ablaze in color; men wear regal Muslim gowns or their best T-shirts. An anonymous few sweat beneath layers of straw and fabric, in costumes like something from Sesame Street: They are – or are dressed as, depending upon your belief system – the village's local devils, whose appearance signals celebration; their rapid footwork leads a dancing procession to the village center.
Nearly 800 people from Bomaru and nearby villages have gathered for Fambul Tok, a grass-roots reconciliation initiative John Caulker wants to bring to every Sierra Leonean village. The phrase is Krio (English-based creole) for "family talk," the old way of resolving disputes through conversations around bonfires.
Mr. Caulker, whose human rights organization, Forum of Conscience, developed Fambul Tok over the past three years in villages across Sierra Leone, wants the bonfire to be a space for confession and forgiveness for war crimes. Bomaru is the first test of whether the idea works – or whether anyone even cares.
Dozens of people have come to Bomaru 17 years to the day after the war began here in March 1991. They're here to recount crimes they committed after their abductions and forced conscriptions in the 1990s into the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel group from neighboring Liberia infamous for chopping limbs off civilians. But by the time the bonfire is lit and the crowd settles in for storytelling, they've changed their minds.
Maybe it's coming face to face with the moment, maybe it's the half-dozen white people here to document it, but something has spooked the former war criminals.
"They are afraid that if they talk, they will be prosecuted," Caulker explains.
It's a legal impossibility; Sierra Leone negotiated its peace in part by offering fighters blanket amnesty. But here, legal promises can feel like borders – slippery when interests shift.
Caulker sends a film crew, print reporter, and intern – all white – away from the assembly briefly. He talks with the town chief and convinces them to proceed; the chief, a former RUF rebel, promises to offer the first testimony.
And so, the perpetrators talk one after another, until 2 in the morning. Mostly men speak, confessing atrocities they committed as unwilling soldiers forced to choose: kill, maim, rape, or be killed.
If any of the victims in these stories are present, they don't speak. Which is not what Caulker, whose career in human rights began with dangerous undercover research for Amnesty International during the war, had imagined. He'd thought he'd see perpetrators apologizing to victims, and victims reaching out in forgiving embrace.
"I don't want to make the mistake that this is reconciliation," he says. "This is not reconciliation. This is the beginning of the process."
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These days, reconciliation is not revolutionary territory. It's on what Caulker calls the West's "post-conflict checklist," which promotes reconciliation through institutions like truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs). More than 40 countries around the world have turned to TRCs for what, in other circumstances, might be the work of courts or civil society groups: exposing crimes, on the one hand, and promoting social cohesion on the other.
Until South Africa pioneered TRCs in 1995, the past was made public in courts, by definition sites of retributive justice that, experts say, can be at odds with community healing.
"Very often the adversarial process [of criminal justice] has ... effects that can interfere with or delay social reconstruction," says Martha Minow, a professor of law at Harvard University and author of "Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence."
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