Mr. Hamjatta Kanteh,
thanks for your postings. I find your references very interesting.

I will make a short reply. Due to my poor english maybe my comment on the
reconciliation issue is misunderstood a bit.
I have no intention to suggest that this forgiveness and reconciliation is
the way forward now or later in the Gambia. My comment was a
reflection/reaction on a report from the parliaments debate on the Indemnity
act, published here on the gambia- list. According to the report a
parliament member should have said, that the act should be seen in the
light, that it could lead to or include a forgiveness and reconciliation
process. 
I will let it be up to the people involved. My point is that all I had read
on the topic indicate to me, that it´s the offended part who hold the key to
the reconciliation-process, but there will always be a need that the
offender confess/admit and says so, and that they ask for forgiveness. Your
comment and references seems to support such an opinion.


Regards from Asbjørn Nordam

on 21/04/01 10:18, Hamjatta Kanteh at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> Dear Mr. Nordam,
> The question of the moral imperative of peoples who have traumatically been
> the victims of injustices and their claim to vengeance and the need for
> good-will intervention on the part of outsiders to the conflict, who preach
> forgiveness and reconciliation in order not to shackle future generations to
> a tragic past, is indeed a very vital one to ALL troubled and tragic-infested
> societies and i salute you for raising it.
> 
> Whilst i will grant that your assertion that forgiveness and reconciliation
> is a prerequisite for a post-conflict society to become wholesome again is a
> lucid judgement, yet, it is morally emaciated if applied to the Gambia **as
> things stand** with the perpetrators of the injustices that prevail in that
> society. Your reasoning and call for such a consideration whilst laudable, is
> at best ill-timed and lacks a philosophical understanding of why vengeance in
> the first place and how we draw the line where we can effectively say that
> the time is ripe to reach out to each other, forgive and reconcile.
>

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