South Sudan should embrace the IGAD’s truth and reconciliation commission
7 min readSouth Sudan should embrace the IGAD-proposed truth, forgiveness and reconciliation commission to achieve long lasting peace
By Lino Lual Lual, Juba, South Sudan
November 30, 2015 (SSB) —- The human being thoughts are learnt by doing that required all their ideologies and cultural believes but to put it in another way, the erupted South Sudan conflict war in 2013 doesn’t fit any side neither any community but challenges them all at same point as Christians more individualistic cultures love the Bible’s emphasis on affirming one another and sharing hurts and problems but hate the idea of lack of accountability and discipline. Christians from more traditional communal cultures love the emphasis on morals and beliefs but often chafe at emphasis on racial reconciliation and being open about one’s personal hurts and financial needs.
The biblical teaching on forgiveness and reconciliation is so radical and shown that there are no cultures or societies that are in accord with it. It may be here most of all that we South Sudanese would have seen the truth of Brotherhood one people, one nation our community with helping one another.
In its most basic and simple form is that our community are to never give up on loving one another and never give up on a relationship. It doesn’t matter who started it (the conflict war)God will always holds all of us responsible to reach out how to repair a tattered relationship if we accepts begin the process of reconciliation regardless of how the distance or the alienation began.
When someone seriously wrongs you, there is an absolutely unavoidable sense that the wrong has incurred an obligation, a liability, hate speech, We could not do that by hurting fighting ourselves like my brothers Jonglei state citizens did during the coming of (SPLM) former political distantness at Juba airport, yelling at them, making them feel bad and embraced in some way, or just waiting and watching wishing that something bad happens to them.
We too in the media are commanded to forgive bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another, we are also required to forgive in a way that honors justice, just as God’s forgiveness does to speak the truth and honor what is right, yet to be endlessly forgiving as we do so and to never give up on the goal of a reconciled, warm relationship. On the other hand said I forgive you does not mean I trust you.
Some of our people may think they haven’t reconciled until they can completely trust the person who did the wrong. That is not the case. Forgiveness means a willingness to try to reestablish trust, but that reestablishment is always a process. The speed and degree of this restoration entail the re-creation of trust and that takes time depending on the nature and severity of the offenses involved.
List whatever you think you have done wrong and ask the other person to add to the list of things you have done wrong or ways you have contributed to the breakdown in the relationship. When two people within the home are in conflict with each other, it can wreak a lot of havoc in the hearts and lives of the people around them who are not immediately involved in the dispute. What should we do?
To know your sinfulness automatically keeps you from being too sure of your position and from speaking too strongly against people on the other side of a conflict. You realize that you may not be seeing things well. What if the injustice seems too great or grievous for you to ignore?
The tension has to do as well with arguments about whether notions of justice and truth are related necessarily or merely contingently. The Problem of Truth As we have mentioned truth in relation to justice and excepting commissions of inquiry noted in its defining place in the titles of most of these commissions should be recognized as one of the key and problematic in a world which it is yet possible for many people in the face of overwhelming evidence of every imaginable sort still to deny the magnitude, intention, or very existence, it is not surprising that the authenticity of more poorly documented human disasters may be made objects of great contention.
With respect to the truth many truth and reconciliation commissions find themselves operating in epistemologically relativistic and rhetorical worlds that would make the most steadfast of post modernist’s blush.
The issue of the complexity and multiplicity of truth is a central one linking the problematic demands of justice and the hopes for reconciliation. It is also the arena in which the parties’ competing versions of history and the politics of memory play themselves out. Particularly in a dirty war all argues sides to have their own version of the truth of what really happened, no one in South Sudan will again be able to say I do not know what really happened.
The granting of amnesty by the Commission has been one of the most controversial aspects of its functioning and shows argued that freedom was exchanged for truth now is raised the ethically impacted problem of whether truth is a commodity that can be traded and if so, for what and at what price?
Peace, implying reconciliation and perhaps forgiveness distinguishing retributive from restorative forms. Moreover, justice reflects a fundamental and venerable African value of healing and nurturing social relationships at the expense of exacting vengeance, of nothing less than a quality of humane sociality. One of the key problems here involves the concept of transfer effects how to move reconciliation and forgiveness, even if affected at the individual level between victim and perpetrator and the South Sudanese case featured a few dramatic instances of this to the societal or national levels.
Proponents of reconciliation do not limit its application to the individual (or psychologically therapeutic) level. However, it is precisely in trying to apply what may be therapeutically effective at the interpersonal level to the collective level that reconciliation often seems to lose clarity and become more ambiguous as an approach to peace building. Can we talk about individual healing in the same breath as national healing? How exactly is the shift from the individual to the societal going to be brought about?
In this way, individual suffering was brought into a public space to be shared by all made sacred in order to construct a new national collective conscience. Healing at the individual level is independent of collective reconciliation. Clearly, the whole area of reconciliation and forgiveness remains a contested one, raising many more questions than the answers.
Is contrition and forgiveness and even reconciliation affected at a collective level adequate for a nation’s coming to terms with its past? Another is to argue that reconciliation so crucial to peace and stability is part of how successfully affect the transition from regimes based upon violent oppression to those operating under the democratic rule of law. This is how their work is identified with transitional justice democracy and the rule of law nothing less than the future of peace and democracy may rest on the success or failure of these commissions.
If past violations of human rights go unpunished, it will undermine the rule of law and the very foundations of the new democratic institutions that are being built. However, there are practical difficulties associated with defining accountability in the fullest legal sense. For one thing, the fragility of transitional governments needs to be emphasized. How to obtain justice given the constraints of amnesty laws and presidential pardons?
In fact, fears of unchecked impunity and politically expedient calls for reconciliation and forgiveness and wish for a more accommodating and humanist approach that opens the door for reconciliation and forgiveness are linked understanding of the notion of community, it was found that although some community groups and politicians had fears about false reconciliation the polar opposite concern was also evident.
The rule of law is not fully observed against most perpetrators that is why violence makers have not been brought before the court despite the fact that cases have been reported every now and then while some of us actively participated in the struggle and we cannot stand up and say we do not belong to the party y or party x. The country has also become highly polarized with those in the opposition often referred to as ‘enemies of the state.
The recently signing of the compromise peace agreement came at an opportune time to end a political stalemate that had resulted in the degeneration of a sense of humanity among people manifesting in the form of violence. People continue to harbor feelings of hurt that need to be addressed through a national structure such as reconciliation and national healing.
The author can be reached via Linolual69@yahoo.com
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