BETWEEN VENGEANCE AND FORGIVENESS: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence.

• Author: Starr, Alexandra
• Position: Review

BETWEEN VENGEANCE AND FORGIVENESS: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence by Martha Minow Beacon Press, $23

A few years ago, I watched a documentary on concentration camp survivors at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Without exception, the stories were harrowing--one man had been forced to set fire to his relatives after an escape attempt, another had witnessed a young mother inadvertedly suffocate her baby as they hid from the Nazis. But while these men and women had been exposed to unimaginable torture, almost all them relayed their experiences in a composed manner. I found their apparent sanity almost as shocking as the ordeals they were describing. How, I wondered, could these people have come to terms with their past?

In Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, Martha Minow explores the process of rebuilding lives and societies in the aftermath of atrocity. Minow, a professor at Harvard Law School, makes clear from the outset that any response to societal-level violence will be inadequate. "Even to grope for words to describe horrific events is to negate their unspeakable qualities," she writes. But silence is not an acceptable alternative: Victims will never forget what they have been through, and denying them retribution will only build hatred and resentment. The challenge, then, is to negotiate a path between securing justice for victims and attempting to rebuild a society. Minow does not endorse any one method of performing this balancing act--she maintains that different cultures and circumstances will dictate the most appropriate response.

But she obviously favors the approach of truth commissions, particularly the South African model, where individuals who honestly tell of their role in politically motivated violence can trade their testimony for amnesty. And in this compassionate and well-reasoned book, Minow makes a compelling case for truth commissions over traditional judicial prosecutions.

As a practical matter, trials are not really geared to deal with mass violence. No criminal justice system could try every person involved in genocide and systematic rape in wartime--there are simply too many perpetrators. And prosecutions can be a blunt instrument for securing justice. Trials have to answer yes or no, guilt or innocence, all or nothing--and the degrees of culpability are often not so stark. Minow points to the example of Drazen Erdemovic, a Croat married to a Serb who joined the Bosnian Army out of financial...