Reconciliation

Reconciliation initiatives can include a vast array of processes.

An educational reform, for example, might have reconciliation as one of its long term goals. There are also initiatives that explicitly address reconciliation. The Institute for the Healing of Memories in South Africa is one example of a reconciliation effort that seeks to bring people together to share their stories so that they can begin to heal individually and as a community. The current government of Rwanda led by President Paul Kagame claims unity and reconciliation as its public theme. The gacaca hearings are mechanisms within this context for truth seeking and reconciliation.
  • Trapped by the Pain of Memory
    (Northern Ireland)

    Tony Gallagher, Professor of Education at Queen's University in Belfast, is a member of the Institute for Conflict Research. Here Gallagher discusses living through a quarter century of political violence, why it is difficult for Northern Ireland to come to terms with loss, and how this reluctance to face history impedes forgiveness and reconciliation.

  • “What People Do When Words Fail Them”: Willy Brandt’s Silent Apology
    (Germany)

    On December 7, 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt traveled to Warsaw, Poland and dropped to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943. Many in Poland and Germany were deeply moved by this famous gesture of repentance and apology. This reading explores some of the issues and questions around what it means to apologize.

  • Who Are You?
    (Northern Ireland)
    A conversation in Northern Ireland can be like a dance: Issues of identity are often avoided as an act of prevention and keeping one’s self safe. A culture of silence emerges, captured in an excerpt from Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Whatever You Say Say Nothing.”
  • Challenging a Culture of Hate
    (Northern Ireland)

    In 1993, Alan McBride's wife, Sharon, was killed by an IRA bomber in Belfast, leaving McBride to raise the couple's young daughter alone. A Unionist all his life, McBride's hatred of the Nationalists and the IRA only intensified. But years later, McBride is challenging the culture that forced him to pick sides and is now acting as an advocate for a workable peace.

  • How Important is an Apology?
    (Northern Ireland)

    In 1974, the Irish Republican Army bombed pubs in London. Eleven people were wrongly accused of the bombings, found guilty, and then spent many years in jail before being released in the late 1980s. They became known as the Guilford Four and the Maguire Seven. In 2005, thirty-one years after the bombings, Prime Minister Tony Blair finally apologized to those people who were wrongly accused and imprisoned.