What about the elephant in the room - Romania?

RELIGION – HISTORY – CULTURE – SOCIETY

The influence of religion and ethnical identity on the development of values in culture and society

Interreligious and intercultural dialogue and conference in the region

of historical Scythia Minor

Muzeul De Istorie Natională Şi Arhelogie Constanţa



International Panel : Comparing the international experiences

of Reconciliation and Healing of Memories to experiences

in region with interreligious experiences over centuries



FR MICHAEL LAPSLEY,SSM

What about the elephant in the room?

Thank you very much, Thank you very much in deed. A few preliminary comments. Firstly to say it that it was an enormous privilege and honor for me to be here on my first visit to Romania. I want to appreciate the generosity and kindness from every Romanian that I have met in the time we have been here and also with my colleagues that we traveled with from different parts of the world. It is almost like a love affair that we have had together for these few days and it has been a wonderful love affair that i has been extremely rich and beneficial.

Now we had called this session and comparing International experience and the work of reconciliation and healing of memories. So presumably we are comparing of what we heard from the Romanians in these last couple of days as well as some of us when we were in the Monastery Sămbata the other day.

I have a feeling that we have only had glimpses of the elephant which is in the room. I have a feeling that we have not spoken about the elephant in the room directly. I suppose what I had hoped is that we would hear what are the historical wounds of this nation and how are they being healed. We heard in the first part of our visit from some of the monks historical stories that go back through the centuries and connected to those stories is great pain. But also an enormous depth of feeling.

We went to the Synagogue a couple of days ago and we heard that only in the last three and a half years has a conversation began in Romania about the holocaust. We have only heard about it from Jewish speakers. We haven’t heard it from anybody else. So it seems to me that it must be part of the elephant in the room.

I understand that there was a fundamental ideological change in 1989. The world heard about it and we understood that you lived under a particular ideology that had profound effects for the faith community but there has been no mention of it.

I have the privilege of working all over the world and I listen to the pain of the human family. One of the most significant things for me in every country that I go to is not what is spoken but what can’t be spoken about. So, for me one of the most memorable things I would take from my visit to Romania is what people are not yet ready to speak about. Is it because the wounds are too fresh? Is it because they are too painful?

I was deeply impressed by the depth of scholarship we heard from academics in this country yesterday - learned professors and doctors at the universities and in the seminaries. I have a question for my academic friends. And that is what is your role in healing these historic wounds? What is your role? It seems to me that we have to begin to speak about not just what people think about the past, ancient wounds, recent wounds but how people feel about them.

Martha spoke in the previous session about how in Europe there is growing Xenophobia, growing racism. My brother from Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation Bucharest and Sofia says his kids play together quite happily. The problem is not the kids, the problem is the parents. So what we talking about is how poison is passed from generation to generation. So we have to begin to speak about that poison. We have to begin talk about what the past has done to us.

One of the great lessons of history is that the past doesn’t go away. You can choose to bury and forget it or you can choose to face it and then to begin to heal it.

Now although born in New Zealand, today I am a South African citizen and I want to suggest to you that there is something very particular that South Africa brings to the world community. Something which has captured the imagination of the world. At the end of apartheid we had a couple of choices. Apartheid began legally in 1948 but had a history that stretched back through the centuries. We had a history of war, racism and dispossesion, a history in which the Christian faith played a wonderful and a very terrible role. Because of course it was in our name and in the name of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the crimes against humanity were carried out.

There was another role where Christians stood out and struggled for the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. So in our context the Christian faith was one of the arenas of the struggle. What captured the imagination of the world was this.

(….But the world believed that we were going to have a bloodbath in South Africa when we had our first democratic elections. My learned academic friends had predicted for decades war, war, war - you are just going to kill each other and instead as people we decided to make peace.)

….We decided that we could live together, that we could create a society of sisters and brothers which of course will take us the next hundred years to do. We also realized that we could not create a new society unless we face our past. So South Africa more than any other country in human history looked into the face of what we had done to each other. That was through out Truth and Reconciliation Commission - a commission that was not perfect, a commission that had its own faults and weaknesses. For nearly five years every single day on television on radio in newspapers we gave space to the stories of what we have done to each other. We heard every side of the conflict. We didn’t just say these were the good guys and these were the bad guys. We listen and heard the stories. We cried together as a people. We grieved as people. As South Africans we have challenged the human family because one of the characteristics of our age is that the unfinished business of the past is coming back to haunt us.



If I want to give you a gift, my dear sisters and brothers from Romania it is this, please, please, please face the past. Don’t seek to bury it and forget it. Touch each others wounds, talk about the choices you made that you are proud of, talk about the choices you made of which you are guilty and ashamed. Tell the beautiful stories, tell the horrible stories because only in doing that, can we begin to lay a true basis of truth on which truly reconciliation will happen. It won’t help us if we simply tell the facts but we don’t speak about the pain and the poison connected to the memories.

I am sorry if I have spoken without European subtlety but with a tradition in South Africa of speaking the truth. I offer what I offer with love to this national and deep respect for all you endured, with all you have experienced, and all that in the future, you have to give to the world.



Thank you very much.

Responses to questions

Response from Fr Michael

We went through several years of negotiations after the release of Nelson Mandela and our negotiations reached a crisis because the apartheid generals said unless there was amnesty these negotiations are going nowhere. Now the South African army was the strongest army on the continent of Africa with nuclear capability. That was on one side. On the other side there was the will of the people to be free and a preparedness to die if necessary in our millions. So, our leaders looked at the spectre of an escalating civil war and they said there shall be amnesty.

Now what the apartheid generals expected and wanted was blanket general amnesty in private. What they got was individual amnesty in public. In order to get it they had to say what they had done and they had to prove that what they have done was in a political framework and also that there actions were proportionate. 7700 people asked for amnesty of whom slightly less than 10% got amnesty. Some of the families said our right to justice has been denied. They took the commission to the constitutional court . The constitutional court said yes it is true that if people get amnesty they cannot be civilly or criminally prosecuted. Therefore the right of victims to retributive justice was denied. However, because there would be reparations, there would be a form of restorative justice.

Amnesty is there in many places. I have just been working in the last two weeks in Northern Uganda. Many people there who suffered under the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) say that the head of the LRA, Joseph Kony should be forgiven. Why? Because they see no other way of stopping the war. And that for them is the bottom line.

In Latin Americans it is always an extremely controversial issue.



Now with the coming of the International Criminal Court means that there are some crimes for which there is no local jurisdiction. In fact it is not possible to give amnesty for some offences including crimes against humanity.

Even some of our own amnesties would not be valid in terms of the International Criminal Courts.

Thank you.

Fr Michael responding to questions

Our Institute is based in Cape Town, South Africa and our primary is in South Africa. We are just 11 years old and when we started we said we would work in other parts of the world by invitation. Some time when horrible things happen in societies there is a kind of rush of humanitarian organizations and people get traumatised by those who come to help them. We said we would only work where we were specifically invited. At the moment we are working in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Northern Uganda and the United States. We have also worked in Sri Lanka, Fiji, Burundi, Eritrea and other places.

The only thing that worries me a bit is that people don’t invite me to place where there is complete peace. I am still looking for those invitations.