01 Jun 2012

June/July 2012 - Christians & Nation-Building (6): Reconciliation

by Bishop Hwa Yung

One of the major hindrances to nation-building throughout the world is that of ethnic or racial conflict, which is often complicated by religious and cultural factors. The 1990s alone saw violent ethnic conflicts in numerous places such as Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda, Sudan, India, and Myanmar. Elsewhere, in many other places, including in our own country, Malaysia, ethnic tensions continues to lie simmering beneath the surface, always waiting to erupt when sufficient pressure builds up.

The history of the 20th century shows all too clearly that this is not a problem that can be solved purely through modernisation or education or even Christianisation. To illustrate the point, beginning in early April until July in 1994, racial conflict led to the murder of an estimated 800,000 people in Rwanda. From the Christian perspective, the greatest tragedy of Rwanda was that more than 90% of the people were Christians, and the country had been at the centre of the East African Revival in the 1930s. Sadly, even some pastors and priests were implicated in the massacres!

The gospel calls us to ‘strive for peace with everyone’ (Heb 12: 14). More importantly, Paul reminds us that God ‘through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation’ (2 Cor 5: 18, 19). Careful study of the Bible will show that reconciliation lies at the heart of the gospel of salvation. We are first to be reconciled to God. Having been reconciled to God, we are called to live in unity with each other in the church. Following this, the church should then strive more and more to bring reconciliation into our deeply divided world. Christians forget too quickly that one of Christ’s beatitudes in the Sermon of the Mount is, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God’ (Mat 5: 9).

Can the Christians of this nation take the initiative to bring about reconciliation in our country through truth telling, forgiveness and costly love?
We cannot enter here into a detail discussion of how this can be done in practice. But the example of Christians in South Africa has much to teach us. When apartheid ended in 1994, many wondered how old scores would be settled with tens of thousands having been murdered or unjustly killed, and millions of lives economically devastated and socially dislocated. Yet as a Christian, Nelson Mandela knew that without forgiveness and reconciliation, his country would have no future. Thus upon his election as the new President, he invited his jailer to join him on the inauguration platform, as an example to the whole nation! He then set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Over the next two and half years, all those who came forward to confess publicly crimes against those on the opposing side of the political struggle at the Commission’s hearings, and could demonstrate that the acts were politically motivated, received full pardons. Many rightly complained about the injustice of the whole exercise. Countless numbers had suffered terribly and unjustly over many decades. How can the nation just forgive and forget? But Mandela knew that the nation needed grace more than justice, and forgiveness more than revenge. As a result, healing and reconciliation followed, and South Africa has since become of a model of reconciliation for the whole world!

One of the key reasons for the success of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the strong emphasis on truthtelling. Those who sought pardon for their wrong-doings had first to admit them in open court! Without that, there could be no real reconciliation.

It is helpful here to compare the responses of Germany and Japan to the horrible crimes of both nations during the Second World War. The records show that, over the years after the war ended, Germany repeatedly and openly admitted their national wrong-doings during the war. As far as possible, Germany compensated financially all the countries ravaged by their war efforts, with West Germany paying Israel US$60 billion in particular. When the communist regimes finally fell in Eastern Europe, and East Germany was able to elect its first truly democratic Parliament in 1990, its first official act was to issue a public apology to the Jewish people for the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews by Hitler and his fellow Nazis!

In contrast, sadly, Japan has always been foot-dragging whenever confronted with its war crimes during the Second World War. Sure, like Germany, it also paid out billions of dollars in war reparation to other nations. But to this day, there has never been a full and honest investigation into, and admission of guilt by the government for, many of the country’s war crimes, including the Rape of Nanjing, where at least 300,000 people were killed in a mad orgy, and the issue of the ‘comfort women’ all over East Asia. Thus almost 70 years after the end of the war, Japan is still being regularly dogged by unresolved charges of wrong-doing related to the Second World War! The point is this—without truth telling and honest admission of guilt, there can be no genuine reconciliation!

Could this be the biggest problem confronting our own country Malaysia? The issues are so emotive that rarely have we been able to look at them with real openness and honesty. Let cite just two examples. When the then Dr Mahathir (now ‘Tun’) wrote his book, The Malay Dilemma, in the late 1960s, there was a public outcry followed by his subsequent expulsion from UMNO! But as it is, Dr Mahathir was subsequently reinstated into the party and eventually became the Prime Minister. Again, in 2006, when ASLI published a report that bumiputras already own more than 30% of the country’s corporate wealth, it was immediately slammed as being distorted and inaccurate. Among the reasons made by the government for charging the report with inaccuracy was that the report based the bumiputra holdings on market value of the shares, instead of the par value of the shares (i.e. as it was originally valued at when the companies were formed years ago) which is the more accurate measure. Any economist worth his salt will immediately tell you how silly that response is!

It is not my purpose to pursue the logic and the validity of both the above examples. But the point I am simply making is that Malaysians do not seem to be able to deal with these two issues, as well as numerous other related ones, reasonably and truthfully! Instead whenever things of such nature are brought forward, they are immediately labelled sensitive, or even seditious, with police reports against them following quickly in order to gain political mileage for some group or other.

I have no simple answers for this. But I would simply assert that I believe that it is precisely here that the church in our country must seek to take the initiative. What can we do to challenge the nation to take seriously the importance of truth telling? There are hundreds of difficult and painful issues that are regularly swept under the carpet in polite conversation and in public discourse. What can we do to get the country to talk about this openly and rationally, and get our facts right and clear? What can we do to encourage the task of admitting guilt, and forgiveness to another ethnic group for the wrongs they are perceived to have committed against us or others? And to what extent are we willing to listen to the charges that other communities have against us for the selfishness and wrongs of our own ethnic group? Can the Christians of this nation take the initiative to bring about reconciliation in our country through truth telling, forgiveness and costly love?

Allow me to end this essay with a short story, again taken from South Africa. The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is well-known. But less wellknown, but no less critical to South Africa, was the work of some Christians whose efforts made the first democratic elections possible. Space does not allow the whole story to be told, but only its climactic moments at the end. But you can read the details in Michael Cassidy’s book, A Witness For Ever (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995).

After decades of apartheid rule, the country was preparing for free elections for the first time ever. Yet everything was not well, with racial tensions, having built up for centuries, finally ready to explode into a massive civil war! The three main political groups, the National Party, Inkatha Freedom Party and the African National Congress, representing the Afrikaans, the Zulus, and the majority of the blacks in the country respectively, could not agree to a formula for the transitional government. To find a way forward for reconciliation in the nation, two of the world’s most highly respected negotiators were brought in, namely Henry Kissinger and Lord Carrington. But by 14 April, the negotiations had completely collapsed and the international advisors flown off. South Africa was on the verge of imploding, with thousands or even millions of lives at stake!

But some Christian leaders who had been working hard in the reconciliation process refused to give up. Instead, they called on the whole country to prayer. Then three days later the vital breakthrough came. Leaders from all three parties suddenly could agree on a carefully worked out formula, thus ensuring that a new unity government could be formed and a bloody civil war averted. All these happened in the VIP room of the King’s Park Stadium, Durban, where 25,000 Christians were praying at the same time for national reconciliation at a Jesus Peace Rally! When news of the breakthrough was finally flashed throughout the world, the word that summed up headlines everywhere was MIRACLE! The church, through persistent believing prayer, had become God’s instrument of a miraculous healing for a deeply divided nation. Meanwhile, not too far away in another part of Africa, around exactly the same time, a blood bath was taking place in Rwanda!