Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence.

• Author: Sieff, Michelle
• Position: Review

Between Vengeance and Forgivenss: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence Martha Minow (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) 192 pp.

As the journey into South Africa's past began in April 1996, the cries of Nomonde Calata pierced the air. She was one of the first to testify to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and as she remembered her husband, she lost her words. For her, the commission was an attempt to find words for her crying, to create meaning from pain.

Martha Minow, in her compelling new book, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence, understands how the dynamic between silence and words marks human existence. Writers such as Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun and Elie Weisel have all testified about the role of imagination, language and story as an escape from the darkest solitude of Auschwitz. Brittle souls become resurrected through the struggle and application of language. Minnow argues that although this century is marked by the relentless repetition of atrocity, what is encouraging is the invention of distinctive legal forms of response to this violence, all of which "are effort[s] to embrace or renew the commitment to replace violence with words and terror with fairness."

The book's purpose is to develop and expand a vocabulary for assessing the goals and limitations of the various responses to mass atrocity, such as prosecutions, truth commissions and reparations. All of these responses seek a path between "too much memory" and "too much forgetting," between vengeance and forgiveness, both of which are harmful to societies torn by conflict. Although she acknowledges that legal responses are insufficient in confronting indescribable pain, she concludes that they are at least necessary for rebuilding brutalized countries.

This work is noteworthy for undertaking the awesome task of comparing varied institutional responses to injustice. The book's promise, however, remains unfulfilled because any serious comparison of these responses requires integrating certain methods of social science with normative legal analysis. None of these institutions can be evaluated in the abstract, they must, as Minow suggests, be observed and analyzed in practice. Minow avoids the tendency to abstraction found in much legal writing, basing her analysis on empirical evidence and showing a remarkable familiarity with a wide range of cases, including Bosnia, South Africa, El Salvador, Chile and Rwanda...