December 1999

“This is the founders’end-of-the-year statement and a few highlights of our activities this year. It suggests that TFF will promote reconciliation and forgiveness in the year 2000 and beyond. We suggest this theme because it has been singularly missing in the century and the very decade we are now leaving behind. We agree with Desmond Tutu that there can be no future without forgiveness. Hope for change and reconciliation are now the lenses through which the future must be imagined. Why? Because, if we let the present global system of violence – against other humans, other cultures and Nature – continue unabated, it is unlikely that there will be anybody around to celebrate New Year 2100. The wonderful thing about forgiveness, reconciliation and hope is that we have to take the initiative ourselves; they can not be demanded of somebody else. You can’t force another human being to forgive you;...

“We are seeing it for the umteenth time in international conflict-management: when intellectual analysis and politics fall apart, cover it up with military potency and give it all a human face! One would like to believe that the West’s moral, legal and political conflict ‘management’ disaster in the Balkans and in Kosovo 1989-1999 would be debated throughout the West – democracies with freedom of speech. The silence about that failure, however, is roaring. It’s just the locals who won’t understand how well-meaning we were and are! But something else is happening: the disaster is turning into a recipe! Read the statements from leading ministers, top generals, EU, and NATO during the last six months. They invariably state ‘that we have learnt in Kosovo’ that we need more military capacity, more force. NATO’s Secretary- General, Lord Robertson, tells the world that “the time for a peace dividend is over because there...

By Christian P. Scherrer What is the scope of reconciliation? Can we talk about a need of reconciliation as opposed to justice – especially in case of non-war violence? The discussion about the notion of reconciliation needs to be aware of some basic distinctions. The whole notion, which is a very important one, needs to be related to what we have to be reconciled with. There my first remark is that we should not mix warfare with slaughter. Compared to the tremendous increase of intra-state warfare and non-war types of mass violence such as genocide and mass murder the Clausewitzean type of inter-state conflicts was in recent decades a rather exceptional phenomenon. There are two important findings to be considered: Today more people die by slaughter than by war. And, in two third of all contemporary conflicts the ethnic factor (e.g. ethnic nationalism) is a dominant or influential component. The...

Nuclear weapons, which are instruments of genocide, incinerate human beings. The Peace Memorial Museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki display gruesome evidence of the atomic bombings of those cities; one can see walls where human shadows remain after the humans who cast those shadows were incinerated into elemental particles. During World War II the Nazis put their victims into gas chambers and then incinerated them in ovens. While the Nazis took their victims to the incinerators, those who possess and threaten to use nuclear weapons plan to take these weapons, that are really portable incinerators, to the victims. Nuclear weapons eliminate the need for gas chambers. They provide a one-step incineration process — for those fortunate enough to die immediately. The behavior of the Nazis leading up to and during World War II is universally condemned. The German people are often criticized for failing to oppose the atrocities of the Nazi...