The Forgiveness Project
by Marina Cantacuzino
One evening back in 2002, local London TV reported the story of a 3-year-old girl who had died in a London hospital after being mistakenly given the wrong drugs. As the parents, lawyers, and hospital staff emerged from the coroner’s court, the interviewer thrust a microphone under the father’s nose and asked how he felt towards the doctor responsible for his daughter’s death.
I expected to hear bitter words of retaliation and litigation but instead the father said simply that he had crossed the room, hugged the tormented doctor, and told him "I forgive you." It was a particularly moving moment of television, not least because in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq this merciful and compassionate act was so at odds with the bellicose rhetoric of revenge and pay-back that for many months had been grabbing all the headlines. It was at that point I decided that as a journalist I had a voice, and with a friend and colleague who was a photographer, we began to collect stories from those who had experienced violence and atrocity but chose not to further the cycle of violence through retaliation. Over the course of a year I met with parents who had forgiven their children’s killers, victims who had come face-to-face with their offenders, perpetrators who had transformed their aggression into a force for peace.
The 26 stories became an exhibition which I called The F Word and which opened at a small gallery on London’s South Bank in January 2004. I called the exhibition The F Word because, in the course of meeting so many victims and perpetrators of crime and violence, I came to realize that forgiveness cuts public opinion down the middle like a guillotine because people are either inspired or affronted by it. I realized that forgiveness is not an easy concept, nor a soft option, nor the privilege of some superior spiritual wisdom. Rather it is a process, a discovery, an expedient measure, a difficult journey in the course of which one day you might forgive and the next day hate all over again. The stories demonstrated that to go on this journey of forgiveness was difficult, painful and costly, but also (and this was the part that interested me) almost always healing and transformative.
The huge success of this exhibition took me completely by surprise. Six thousand visitors came in less than two weeks; individuals and groups from all over the world wanted to use the stories for their own work in conflict resolution, and visitors left powerful messages in the feedback book asking what next? Many said it was the most important exhibition they had ever seen and one woman wrote, “Now I would like to be photographed next to the man who attacked me.” Even funders wrote offering money – almost unheard of! I was totally taken aback. I had not anticipated that exploring the subject of forgiveness through personal narratives would have such an impact or that being exposed to other people’s stories could stimulate visitors’ own personal inquiry. The exhibition had clearly tapped into a deep and underlying public belief that there were peaceful solutions to violence.
The popularity of the exhibition led to me founding The Forgiveness Project, a UK not-for-profit that sets out to explore how ideas around forgiveness, reconciliation and conflict resolution can be used to impact positively on people’s lives through the personal narratives of both victims and perpetrators of crime and violence. Everything that we now do – our prison program, a website that receives 500 visitors a day, a developing educational resource - contains the real stories of real people at its heart. Personal narrative is our currency.
The stories I’ve collected over the years have shown me that forgiveness is a word that no one can agree on. Everyone has their own definition and most have decided on their particular conditions and limitations. The stories reveal that the act of forgiving allows people to turn a page, make peace with something they cannot change. Forgiveness is not about condoning or excusing but about embracing human frailty and fallibility and taking responsibility for a society we are a part of and may have helped create. It is more than moving on and letting go because it requires a degree of empathy and compassion. As author Stephen Cherry writes in Healing Agony: Reimagining Forgiveness, “Forgiveness is not something that is done but something that is discovered. The relevant discovery is that the offender is ‘human like myself’.”
Several victims of crime or violence have told me about how they feel their life has become inextricably linked to that of the perpetrator, and some like Kemal Pervanic, a victim of the notorious Omarska concentraion camp during the Bosnian War, have become convinced that given the right circumstances we are all capable of hurting others. He says: “People describe these people as monsters, born with a genetically inherent mutant gene. But I don’t believe that. I believe every human being is capable of killing.” Father Michael Lapsley, a priest who during the apartheid era had both hands blown off by a letter bomb sent by the South African security forces, also makes the point that, “All people are capable of being perpetrators or victims - and sometimes both.”
Jo Berry whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was a British politician and a victim of an IRA bomb that killed 5 people at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in 1984, has realized that it is not her place to forgive but her father’s. Rather her journey has been all about not blaming and not judging. “If I get stuck into blaming my life closes down, and I feel I’m part of a problem which keeps wars and terrorism going,” she says. “Sometimes when I’ve met with Pat I’ve had such a clear understanding of his life that there is nothing to forgive.” Jo features in ‘The F Word’ exhibition alongside Pat Magee, the man responsible for planting the bomb.
In October 2009, 25 years after the IRA Brighton bomb, The Forgiveness Project held an event in the UK Houses of Parliament to discuss peaceful responses to oppression. Pat Magee and Jo Berry were to speak. Aware that Magee’s presence in Parliament was likely to offend some people, I wrote in advance to all three leaders of the main political parties, as well as to those who had been most directly affected by the bombing. I wrote as a matter of courtesy, saying that I knew having Magee speak in the House of Commons would bring up difficult feelings, and I explained that The Forgiveness Project was a place of inquiry, that explored rather than propagated forgiveness.
I stressed, in particular to (Lord) Norman Tebbit, who had been badly injured in the blast and whose wife had been permanently paralyzed that his views about repentance being a condition of forgiveness were as valid as the views of any other victim. Repentance as a condition of forgiveness is non-negotiable for someone like Lord Tebbit, and he has publically declared on many occasions open hostility towards Magee for not having been sufficiently repentant or remorseful. I received a fierce letter back from Lord Tebbit, ending with the line: “Your project excuses, rewards, and encourages murder.”
What I would say in response to this and to those who hold the same view, is that certainly The Forgiveness Project humanizes violence but only in so much as it exposes the pain, the hurt and the legacy. We do not “excuse” murder. We seek to understand and explain why people harm other people, but never to justify. For victims there is often a strong need to face the enemy; seeing the human face makes that person seem less of a “monster” and the world therefore a less terrifying place. I’ve always thought Jo Berry put it extremely eloquently when she came to the realization that “if I had lived Pat’s life perhaps I could have made his choices.”
My own position on this is that remorse should be measured by how you live now rather than how sorry you say you are. Almost all the Palestinians I met in 2008 whilst collecting stories from Combatants for Peace (an organization made up of former Israeli military and Palestinian resistant fighters) did not denounce their violent past. They believed they had been fighting a just war, defending their communities at a time – during one or both intifadas – when there was no other viable choice. In the end it was only a weariness born out of witnessing the futility of the cycle of violence that made them lay down their weapons and seek peaceful solutions.
The message of someone like Letlapa Mphahlele is perhaps an easier one for the public to swallow. During the apartheid era Mphahlele, then Director of Operations of APLA, the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, was responsible for many attacks on whites. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, having met Ginn Fourie, the mother of one of his victims, Mphahlele no longer believes violence should have been met by violence. Explaining his old thinking he says, “I believed then that terror had to be answered with terror and I authorized high profile massacres on white civilians in the same way that the whites did on us. At the time it seemed the only valid response.” Now he has come to see it differently and he asks himself, “but where would it have ended? If my enem[ies] had been cannibals, would I have eaten white flesh? If my enem[ies] had raped black women, would I have raped white women?”
One of the key things I’ve learnt from the many people whose stories I have helped to collect and share is an understanding that we are not separate from those who harm us. American born Linda Biehl whose 26-year-old daughter Amy was beaten and stabbed to death in a black township near Cape Town now employs two of those convicted of Amy’s murder and who were later given amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation process. Having visited the townships herself shortly after the murder, Linda had realized that “we all share basic human desires. It’s just the context that is different. I’ve even asked myself if I’d grown up in a township, could I have behaved in that way?”
And Rami Elhanan whose teenage daughter was killed by a suicide bombing in 1997 says, “When this happened to my daughter I had to ask myself whether I’d contributed in any way. The answer was that I had—my people had—for ruling, dominating and oppressing three and half million Palestinians for 35 years. It is a sin and you pay for sins.”
Even Marian Partingon whose sister Lucy was one of the victims of UK serial killers Fred and Rosemary West, says, “My work has been about connecting with Rosemary West’s humanity and refusing to go down the far easier and more predictable path of demonizing her.”
Some years back I stumbled across a quote by Russian author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn which sums up for me the spirit and ethos of The Forgiveness Project. The words are from The Gulag Archipelago (an account of the Soviet prison system under Stalin) in which the Russian writer and dissident gives an explanation of why we prefer not to take responsibility for humanity’s most heinous acts. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Marina Cantacuzino is founder of The Forgiveness Project, a UK-based charity that uses storytelling as an instrument for exploring reconciliation between victims and their perpetrators. Marina also blogs for The Huffington Post on this topic.
by Marina Cantacuzino
One evening back in 2002, local London TV reported the story of a 3-year-old girl who had died in a London hospital after being mistakenly given the wrong drugs. As the parents, lawyers, and hospital staff emerged from the coroner’s court, the interviewer thrust a microphone under the father’s nose and asked how he felt towards the doctor responsible for his daughter’s death.
I expected to hear bitter words of retaliation and litigation but instead the father said simply that he had crossed the room, hugged the tormented doctor, and told him "I forgive you." It was a particularly moving moment of television, not least because in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq this merciful and compassionate act was so at odds with the bellicose rhetoric of revenge and pay-back that for many months had been grabbing all the headlines. It was at that point I decided that as a journalist I had a voice, and with a friend and colleague who was a photographer, we began to collect stories from those who had experienced violence and atrocity but chose not to further the cycle of violence through retaliation. Over the course of a year I met with parents who had forgiven their children’s killers, victims who had come face-to-face with their offenders, perpetrators who had transformed their aggression into a force for peace.
The 26 stories became an exhibition which I called The F Word and which opened at a small gallery on London’s South Bank in January 2004. I called the exhibition The F Word because, in the course of meeting so many victims and perpetrators of crime and violence, I came to realize that forgiveness cuts public opinion down the middle like a guillotine because people are either inspired or affronted by it. I realized that forgiveness is not an easy concept, nor a soft option, nor the privilege of some superior spiritual wisdom. Rather it is a process, a discovery, an expedient measure, a difficult journey in the course of which one day you might forgive and the next day hate all over again. The stories demonstrated that to go on this journey of forgiveness was difficult, painful and costly, but also (and this was the part that interested me) almost always healing and transformative.
The huge success of this exhibition took me completely by surprise. Six thousand visitors came in less than two weeks; individuals and groups from all over the world wanted to use the stories for their own work in conflict resolution, and visitors left powerful messages in the feedback book asking what next? Many said it was the most important exhibition they had ever seen and one woman wrote, “Now I would like to be photographed next to the man who attacked me.” Even funders wrote offering money – almost unheard of! I was totally taken aback. I had not anticipated that exploring the subject of forgiveness through personal narratives would have such an impact or that being exposed to other people’s stories could stimulate visitors’ own personal inquiry. The exhibition had clearly tapped into a deep and underlying public belief that there were peaceful solutions to violence.
The popularity of the exhibition led to me founding The Forgiveness Project, a UK not-for-profit that sets out to explore how ideas around forgiveness, reconciliation and conflict resolution can be used to impact positively on people’s lives through the personal narratives of both victims and perpetrators of crime and violence. Everything that we now do – our prison program, a website that receives 500 visitors a day, a developing educational resource - contains the real stories of real people at its heart. Personal narrative is our currency.
The stories I’ve collected over the years have shown me that forgiveness is a word that no one can agree on. Everyone has their own definition and most have decided on their particular conditions and limitations. The stories reveal that the act of forgiving allows people to turn a page, make peace with something they cannot change. Forgiveness is not about condoning or excusing but about embracing human frailty and fallibility and taking responsibility for a society we are a part of and may have helped create. It is more than moving on and letting go because it requires a degree of empathy and compassion. As author Stephen Cherry writes in Healing Agony: Reimagining Forgiveness, “Forgiveness is not something that is done but something that is discovered. The relevant discovery is that the offender is ‘human like myself’.”
Several victims of crime or violence have told me about how they feel their life has become inextricably linked to that of the perpetrator, and some like Kemal Pervanic, a victim of the notorious Omarska concentraion camp during the Bosnian War, have become convinced that given the right circumstances we are all capable of hurting others. He says: “People describe these people as monsters, born with a genetically inherent mutant gene. But I don’t believe that. I believe every human being is capable of killing.” Father Michael Lapsley, a priest who during the apartheid era had both hands blown off by a letter bomb sent by the South African security forces, also makes the point that, “All people are capable of being perpetrators or victims - and sometimes both.”
Jo Berry whose father, Sir Anthony Berry, was a British politician and a victim of an IRA bomb that killed 5 people at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton in 1984, has realized that it is not her place to forgive but her father’s. Rather her journey has been all about not blaming and not judging. “If I get stuck into blaming my life closes down, and I feel I’m part of a problem which keeps wars and terrorism going,” she says. “Sometimes when I’ve met with Pat I’ve had such a clear understanding of his life that there is nothing to forgive.” Jo features in ‘The F Word’ exhibition alongside Pat Magee, the man responsible for planting the bomb.
In October 2009, 25 years after the IRA Brighton bomb, The Forgiveness Project held an event in the UK Houses of Parliament to discuss peaceful responses to oppression. Pat Magee and Jo Berry were to speak. Aware that Magee’s presence in Parliament was likely to offend some people, I wrote in advance to all three leaders of the main political parties, as well as to those who had been most directly affected by the bombing. I wrote as a matter of courtesy, saying that I knew having Magee speak in the House of Commons would bring up difficult feelings, and I explained that The Forgiveness Project was a place of inquiry, that explored rather than propagated forgiveness.
I stressed, in particular to (Lord) Norman Tebbit, who had been badly injured in the blast and whose wife had been permanently paralyzed that his views about repentance being a condition of forgiveness were as valid as the views of any other victim. Repentance as a condition of forgiveness is non-negotiable for someone like Lord Tebbit, and he has publically declared on many occasions open hostility towards Magee for not having been sufficiently repentant or remorseful. I received a fierce letter back from Lord Tebbit, ending with the line: “Your project excuses, rewards, and encourages murder.”
What I would say in response to this and to those who hold the same view, is that certainly The Forgiveness Project humanizes violence but only in so much as it exposes the pain, the hurt and the legacy. We do not “excuse” murder. We seek to understand and explain why people harm other people, but never to justify. For victims there is often a strong need to face the enemy; seeing the human face makes that person seem less of a “monster” and the world therefore a less terrifying place. I’ve always thought Jo Berry put it extremely eloquently when she came to the realization that “if I had lived Pat’s life perhaps I could have made his choices.”
My own position on this is that remorse should be measured by how you live now rather than how sorry you say you are. Almost all the Palestinians I met in 2008 whilst collecting stories from Combatants for Peace (an organization made up of former Israeli military and Palestinian resistant fighters) did not denounce their violent past. They believed they had been fighting a just war, defending their communities at a time – during one or both intifadas – when there was no other viable choice. In the end it was only a weariness born out of witnessing the futility of the cycle of violence that made them lay down their weapons and seek peaceful solutions.
The message of someone like Letlapa Mphahlele is perhaps an easier one for the public to swallow. During the apartheid era Mphahlele, then Director of Operations of APLA, the military wing of the Pan Africanist Congress, was responsible for many attacks on whites. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, having met Ginn Fourie, the mother of one of his victims, Mphahlele no longer believes violence should have been met by violence. Explaining his old thinking he says, “I believed then that terror had to be answered with terror and I authorized high profile massacres on white civilians in the same way that the whites did on us. At the time it seemed the only valid response.” Now he has come to see it differently and he asks himself, “but where would it have ended? If my enem[ies] had been cannibals, would I have eaten white flesh? If my enem[ies] had raped black women, would I have raped white women?”
One of the key things I’ve learnt from the many people whose stories I have helped to collect and share is an understanding that we are not separate from those who harm us. American born Linda Biehl whose 26-year-old daughter Amy was beaten and stabbed to death in a black township near Cape Town now employs two of those convicted of Amy’s murder and who were later given amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation process. Having visited the townships herself shortly after the murder, Linda had realized that “we all share basic human desires. It’s just the context that is different. I’ve even asked myself if I’d grown up in a township, could I have behaved in that way?”
And Rami Elhanan whose teenage daughter was killed by a suicide bombing in 1997 says, “When this happened to my daughter I had to ask myself whether I’d contributed in any way. The answer was that I had—my people had—for ruling, dominating and oppressing three and half million Palestinians for 35 years. It is a sin and you pay for sins.”
Even Marian Partingon whose sister Lucy was one of the victims of UK serial killers Fred and Rosemary West, says, “My work has been about connecting with Rosemary West’s humanity and refusing to go down the far easier and more predictable path of demonizing her.”
Some years back I stumbled across a quote by Russian author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn which sums up for me the spirit and ethos of The Forgiveness Project. The words are from The Gulag Archipelago (an account of the Soviet prison system under Stalin) in which the Russian writer and dissident gives an explanation of why we prefer not to take responsibility for humanity’s most heinous acts. “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Marina Cantacuzino is founder of The Forgiveness Project, a UK-based charity that uses storytelling as an instrument for exploring reconciliation between victims and their perpetrators. Marina also blogs for The Huffington Post on this topic.