[Birds chirping]
[Speaking foreign language]
♪♪
[Clamoring]
♪♪
Jean-Baptiste: My mum's body was maimed.
I couldn't understand how they could kill her.
Then, I was told, by one young man,
that my entire family was killed.
I had eleven brothers.
They were -- No one is alive, besides me.
♪♪
[Gunfire]
[Man shouts]
[Rapid gunfire] [Man shouting]
[Rapid gunfire]
[Shouting]
♪♪
[Explosion]
[Siren wailing] [Sobbing]
The two o'clock news, they said there was a bombing
and my wife said that
someone saw Smadar going down the street.
You start looking for her.
Eventually, you find yourself running in the streets,
going from hospital to hospital.
Later that night, you find yourself in the morgue
and you see this sight which you will never be able to forget
for the rest of your life.
♪♪
[Explosion]
Newsreader: Well, certainly the most devastating attack, so far,
inside the city walls.
There could hardly have been a more pointed prelude
to the other main event of the day --
a huge peace march in the Irish Republic
by contingents from North and South
who've had enough of this kind of violence,
[Glass shattering] and worse.
[Flames crackling]
[Siren wailing] In 1984,
we targeted the Grand Hotel in Brighton,
where the Conservative Party were holding a conference.
Jo: My sister woke me up and said, "Which hotel is -- is dad in?
There's been a bomb in Brighton. It's on the news."
Pat: In that operation, five people were killed.
Over 30 people were injured.
How dareanybody think their need to be heard
is so important that they've killed my father.
♪♪
[Birds chirping]
[Crickets chirping]
[Bird cawing]
♪♪
[Bell tolls]
Denis: People talk about,
"The pen is mightier than the sword."
I think that's true,
but I think that the -- the spoken word
and the spoken story is even more powerful than the pen
because I think it goes further and deeper
into the psyche of human beings.
Sometimes people tell stories
and all they do is tell their own story.
That's not enough.
You have to tell your own story, but you also have to hear
the story of the -- of the enemy.
You have to tell the story of the people
that you have fought with and argued with,
and perhaps killed.
You have to tell those stories.
A short while ago, it was confirmed
that one of the dead is the MP for Enfield Southgate,
Sir Anthony Berry,
who was treasurer of the royal household.
I was caught for that operation and sentenced
to eight life sentences,
with a recommendation that I do fifty years
before being considered for release,
but was released after 14 years,
due to the -- the peace process.
[Camera shutters clicking] Newsreader: Emotional family reunion
for Catholic prisoners,
[Applause] most from the Irish Republican Army.
Among their number,
convicted bombers, snipers, and murderers.
It was just after Patrick Magee had been released from prison
that I actually began to feel the anger and the rage.
Reporter: Patrick Magee, a convicted IRA bomber,
walked free from the Maze Prison in Belfast.
And, suddenly, I was back in the day,
like it was happening,
and it was a very scary experience
because the emotions were -- were of the day, not of 1999,
and part of that was this incredible anger and rage.
You know, how can someone play God? You know.
And -- and now he's free and I'm -- I'm left with it
and, you know, no one's need to be heard
is so great that they should kill.
[Birds chirping]
[Irish music plays]
♪♪
Getting out, I mean, the first thing is
to get your life back in some semblance of order.
Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by Jo Berry.
I wanted to put more attention and energy
to the part of me that must find alternatives to blaming,
you know, because then, I'd stay a victim forever.
I think Jo wanted to meet me to understand
wh-why her father died.
I thought, one meeting,
say what I have to say, which would've been, I suppose,
a defense of what I did, in terms of the politics,
but also, you know, show some sensitivity towards her
[Train whistle blows] and --
perhaps express regret at the loss and that would be it.
We'd -- We'd part and that'd be it.
[Brakes hissing]
I remember sitting in my friend's kitchen
in -- in Dublin and knock at the door
and I knew it was Pat and...
I'd -- I was in such a state of anxiety and kind of,
"Should I be here, even?" You know,
doubting whether it was the right thing to do and --
and he walked in and I got up and shook his hand
and thanked him for coming.
Part of me was thinking, "Maybe he won't turn up."
He said, "No, no, I want to thank you."
He was, very, very polite
and I remember looking at him
and thinking, "You've killed.
You've killed my dad."
The first hour, Pat talked a lot about the struggle
and why he joined the IRA
and defending his use of violence.
Why the IRA bomb the Grand Hotel?
It was because the Conservative Party were --
were holding their annual conference
and were using that hotel.
I mean, so, therefore, people in government
who made the decisions that had directly affected
what was happening in the streets here,
that were in control of the oppression,
you know, were all there together.
I mean, it seemed quite obvious, you know, that this
presented a great target for us.
And I was listening and asking questions
and telling him about my father
and what had happened to me since then and --
and after about an hour, an hour and a half,
he stopped talking and he sort of --
he wiped -- wiped his eye and -- and he said,
I don't know what to say anymore.
I don't know who -- who I am."
[Crying]
[Swallows]
And, in that moment,
I think part of me wanted to run away
'cause I thought -- I realized
that this was the beginning of another journey.
I mean, I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that
somebody who I've hurt, I've killed her father,
is still prepared to come and listen to me
and to talk to me and to respect my point of view.
He'd opened up
and it was no longer just him defending himself,
you know, he'd become vulnerable
and we were starting something together
and I didn't know where it was going to take us.
But I think there was a -- a need felt, from both of us,
to meet again,
as if, you know, we'd left the conversation short.
There was more talk about.
We must've been in similar circumstances some fifty times.
It doesn't get easy.
Teacher training college established --
It's lovely. How old is it?
Well, it's 100 years old.
Then, to the right --
Please welcome Jo Berry and Pat Magee.
[Applause]
Would you class yourself or -- or would've classed,
been classed as a soldier or a terrorist?
I can understand, after all the decades
of misrepresentation,
while it would be difficult for people here,
people in this audience, to think of me as a soldier
and feel, perhaps, comfortable
with the idea that I'm a terrorist,
in a post-9/11 world,
it's meant to explain a lot and explains nothing.
A word that my readers would use is murderer.
You were charged with murder
of several people.
I had a very strong experience
about labels and what they mean
when I was at a -- a workshop in Northern Ireland
and I was sitting round the table
and there was somebody there who'd been a British soldier,
Pat had been the IRA, and somebody who'd been
in the Loyalist paramilitary and the UDA.
I could've been all their sisters.
I could've been their mothers.
I could've been them, you know.
And, at that moment, the labels are gone
and they're just human beings
because of what they've been through.
Did you ever feel hatred and revenge?
Yes, I have felt anger.
When I felt that kind of pain, you know,
just absolute bottom pain,
I think I had a choice to not go for the revenge,
but to end that cycle.
It's a choice to see the enemy as a human being,
rather than as just the -- the enemy.
Does it not seem, to Miss Berry,
that she may be an apologist
for one of the most horrifying crimes
of this century?
I'm true to myself and I trust my inner impulse.
It seems to be great psychotherapy for you,
and it seems to be a great confessional
for Dr. Magee, but I'm not quite sure
what the rest of us are getting out of it.
I think I'm actually
quite a challenging option for Pat.
I actually think he's extremely courageous to sit with me.
He said, many times, that it'd be much easier for him,
if I'd met him with anger and with political debate,
but the fact that I listened to him,
gave him respect, right from the beginning, that was harder.
You can probably gather, from what Pat said,
that, you know, at times, it is hard to face me
and the more he knows me, as a person,
and the more he knows about my father,
the harder it is to know that he's hurt me.
He lives with that contradiction, that difficulty.
You know, we have this tension between us of that all the time.
Well, one thing that hit me after --
I couldn't tell you when, exactly, this happened.
You talked about your father and I got more of a picture.
He was a human being who had shaped you.
In other words, all the things that I admire in you came,
in some measure, from your father.
That meant this was a fine human being
and I killed him.
[Camera shutters clicking]
So, that's heavy, you know.
You --
It gives you a measure of the loss.
[Camera shutters clicking]
And I end up, now, a very conflicted person.
Um --
Conflicted because, while I can look at the past
and have an understanding that we had no other option,
I also know and carry this heavy burden
that I hurt human beings.
Doesn't matter that they wore uniforms
and that we can justify --
I can justify actions in the past.
I hurt human beings
and I carry that, that burden and...
...meeting you
puts your father there, too.
He's a human being to me now.
He wasn't a human being before.
He was a demonized enemy.
He was a, you know, he was a Tory.
The --
But that's, that's what you've given me.
[Camera shutter clicking]
♪♪
I think, when you're young,
when you're in your seventeens and your eighteens,
and you don't have the -- the benefit
of any sort of real maturity,
there's a degree of excitement to it that we all have
and it's -- you look -- you look back at the violence
and it is very difficult to say that it was worth it.
Very difficult. I -- I don't think it was.
I don't think it was worth 3,600 deaths,
in any shape or form.
Forty yearsof killing each other and hurting each other
before we came to a position where we said,
"Well, we better get in a room somewhere
and begin to talk about this."
We started to find agreement about how we would talk.
Very practical. It's, "How many days a week?
You know, where would we meet?
Who would be there? How many people would be there?
What shape would the table be?"
You know all very practical things.
And people got fed up. They said,
"These people aren't serious," you know.
You used to laugh about talks
about talks, about talks, about talks.
But, actually, it was really important.
People often say, "Ooh, they can't talk
'cause there's no trust."
Trust is an outcome
of a context like this,
not a prerequisite for it, and trust comes
because I say to you, "Will we meet at 9:00 tomorrow morning?"
And you say, "Um, could we make it quarter past 9:00?"
I say, "Okay, we'll make it a quarter past 9:00,"
and, tomorrow morning, you come at a quarter past 9:00
and I say, "Okay, I can trust her."
[Tender tune plays]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
♪♪
They said there was a bombing in Ben Yehuda Street.
My wife said that someone saw Smadar going
down the street and she's worried.
Eventually, you find yourself running in the streets,
[Siren wailing] going from hospital to hospital,
from police station to police station.
Later that night, you find yourself in the morgue
and the finger is right between your eyes
and you see this sight which you will never be able to forget
for the rest of your life.
And your whole life is changing completely,
from one minute to another.
She was 14 years old.
She was a very sparkling
and vivid and beautiful young girl.
She was an excellent student.
She was a swimmer. She was a dancer.
We called her the princess.
What else do you want to know about her?
♪♪
She was 14.
♪♪
[Sigh]
[Birds chirping]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
[Sobbing]
I think the -- the natural and immediate response
is anger, and hatred.
You know, most people choose this, this way,
this path of revenge and retaliation
and it's very, very natural and it's very obvious.
But then, after a while, you start asking yourself questions.
"How could it be?
What can cause someone
to be that angry, that mad,
that he's willing to kill himself with little girls?"
[Speaking foreign language]
[Cries]
Nurit: After our tragedy,
a photographer from The Washington Post,
she sent it to us.
We didn't know she took the picture.
This picture right here...
...this is Abir, daughter of Bassam.
She was shot by -She was shot by a rubber --
-a rubber bullet. -rubber-coated metal bullet.
And he just shot her in the head
from a protected Jeep by her schoolyard.
We both lost our daughters.
We both paid the highest price possible.
Our blood is the same color.
Our pain is exactly the same pain
and the tears are just as bitter.
[Sobbing]
[Speaking foreign language]
And I think the most important question that you ask yourself
is what can you do personally, you know,
to prevent this unbearable pain from others?
[Speaking foreign language]
And the turning point was a year later,
when I met
the leader of the Families Forum,
who invited me over to watch a meeting
of this group of crazy people.
I saw people who paid the highest price possible,
who chose the way of dialogue, instead of hatred,
but then, I saw the Palestinian bereaved families coming
down from the buses, coming towards me,
shaking my hand for peace, hugging me, crying with me.
I was completely shocked.
I was -- I'm ashamed to say I was 47 years old at the time.
It was the first time, ever in my life,
that I met Palestinians as human beings,
as people who carry the same burden that I do,
as people who suffer exactly the same way.
I was completely shocked.
I saw people, human beings, not as workers in the streets,
not as tourists, not as news items -- as people.
I discovered people like Bassam Aramin, who is, for me,
more than a brother today
and the old Rami could never have met him.
[Horn honks in distance]
♪♪
[Bird cawing]
♪♪
[Snorts]
♪♪
Finding peace in communities in conflict
is finding ways that individuals,
and, even more importantly, communities,
find ways of repairing and rebuilding
their relationships with each other.
How do you repair
that kind of damage that has been done?
And I think the only way to do it
is through sharing experiences.
Sharing stories, developing empathy and understanding.
So it's very human contact is required.
I think it has to happen on the community level,
face-to-face level.
♪♪
[Singing in foreign language]
♪♪
[Singing in foreign language]
[Man singing]
♪♪
[Wailing]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
[Continues speaking foreign language]
[Chickens clucking]
[Speaking foreign language]
[Singing nearby]
[Children laughing nearby]
[Speaking foreign language]
[Melancholy tune plays]
♪♪
[Goat bleats]
♪♪
There is pain that is never going to be completely resolved.
There are people who have been damaged by these experiences
and they cannot be healed.
And people sometimes think that if something --
psychological damage isn't like physical damage.
Of course, if my leg was cut off,
you can't stick it back on again,
But if it's psychological,
surely, it must be able to be healed.
No.
I think there's a general belief
that forgiveness precludes justice.
And I don't think that's the case at all.
I think justice is very important.
It is part of the healing process.
And to see that someone who has hurt you has paid the price
is a way of moving on.
So that certainly happened in Rwanda.
And people may not stay in jail
as long as some people would want them,
but that is a practical solution sometimes.
Concessions have to be made for the greater good.
Reporter: Crowded together like animals in a stockyard,
they wait for trials to decide their fate,
virtually all accused of genocide.
Opening new detention centers
has only slightly eased overcrowding
and there's increasing pressure on Rwanda's government
to start the long-awaited judicial process
that will decide guilt or innocence
for each of these prisoners.
After long debate, the government has has decided
what kind of justice will apply to these thousands of suspects.
There will be no amnesties,
but there will be a simplified legal process
to speed up the trials.
[Suspenseful music plays]
♪♪
[Man speaking foreign language]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
[Conversing in foreign language]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
♪♪
The problem is, we can sit here
and deconstruct and criticize -- and people do,
from outside the country, often --
but, you know trying to find a better solution
is very difficult. I don 't think there's --
There isn't any good solution in a situation like this.
There was no appetite,
either from the government or survivors,
simply to release everybody without some form of justice.
So, basically, our Gacaca Courts did a tremendous job.
To have the community own the justice,
as they own the pain,
and they were the ones who saw
the people hack each other to death.
They know who killed who.
So, giving them the opportunity
to solve this problem, by judging them,
makes the community healed.
You know, nobody's happy with the situation,
[Chuckling] that's the problem.
So we end up with, you know,
some of the suspects and perpetrators
who complain they've been in prison too long
or that they've been there without trial
or they've not had enough defense.
And then, the survivors are saying, "Well,
what kind of justice is this?
These people, you know,
killed five members of my family and then what do they do?
Get a couple of years in some community sentence
and they're back living next door.
And, by the way, they've got everything.
They've got their whole family around them.
I'm still struggling here
without any form of family support,"
which is very important in a developing country.
People are still having the tears flowing
around their cheeks.
The guilt is still choking the perpetrators.
You can't understand how a person can get a machete
and open the womb of a pregnant woman,
bring out the fetus, and cut it into pieces.
You can't understand that demonic act.
So we are processing something which is greater
than the human grief, the human concept of grief.
It's too early, but the vision to recover has to be now.
We cannot wait until our pain is over,
in order to rebuild our nation.
We have to do it now.
♪♪
[Indistinct conversation]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
[Conversing in foreign language]
♪♪
I don't understand, for example,
how one of the killers of my family,
one of the killers of my dad, is free.
I can't understand.
I asked him, "How are you free?"
I mean, the killer of my dad.
And he said,
"I recognize that I killed people
and I asked for forgiveness, then, they released me."
And I asked "Who did you ask for forgiveness,
if it's not me"?
He said he asked to the government.
He didn't kill the government. He killed my dad
and now he's free.
If someone decides to be a killer,
then, he have to accept the punishment.
And the punishment for a killer, for me,
is to be killed, too.
If you simply hold tight
to the requirement of justice, come hell or high water,
then you probably won't find it possible to move forward.
But if you try to move forward,
without attending to the pain and the hurt
of the injustice and the trauma of the past,
your move forward will probably be illusory
and you will carry some of that difficulties
into the future and into your relationships,
as an individual, or as a community.
There's a school of thought that forgiveness
shouldn't even be on the table, unless someone shows remorse,
is willing to pay back, in some way,
to repair the harm, to accept responsibility.
And there are other people who think, "Actually,
it's got nothing, whatsoever,
to do with the perpetrator, to do with the offender,
to do with the person who's hurt me.
It's all within myself.
And, if I'm waiting
for that person to show remorse --
maybe they're incapable,
maybe they don't have that muscle --
then I'll be waiting forever and I'll be forever linked,
ever tied to the perpetrator and I'll never get beyond it."
[Tender tune plays] [Birds chirping]
[Bell tolling]
♪♪
"Dear Charles, my name is Richard Moore
and I live in Derry, Northern Ireland.
Thirty-three years ago, on the 4th of May 1972,
I think we came across each other for the first time."
Richard: When I was ten years old, I got out of school, as normal.
I had to pass this British Army lookout post.
And, as I ran past the Army post,
a British soldier fired a rubber bullet.
He said that he fired the rubber bullet
in the hope that we would all bugger off home.
Well, I was at the bottom of the playground
and the Army sanger was there
and what would've happened is, you know,
young people would've gathered there at times
and threw bricks [Laughing] at the sanger.
I've done it meself in the past.
So it was just a normal day, about 20 past 3:00,
and, up behind those houses, there was an Army lookout post.
And, as I ran past the sanger,
that's when the soldier fired the rubber bullet.
[Birds chirping]
[Gunshot]
I spent about two weeks in hospital.
Me brother Noel said to me,
"Richard, do you know what damage was done?"
And that's when he told me that I lost me right eye
and I would never be able to see again with me left eye.
[Birds chirping]
It struck me here, on the bridge of the nose.
I lost this eye and was left completely blind in me left eye.
I just accepted it.
I just accepted it, as if
they had just told me that
Derry City they lost the football match
at the weekend or something.
Until that night, really,
and, when I was in bed that night,
on me own, I cried.
And I cried because I realized, for the first time,
that I was never going to see
me mammy or me daddy's faces again.
[Birds chirping]
[Wind whistling]
November 2005.
I found out the soldier's name
and then, I wrote him a letter
and the letter was hand-delivered to him.
"Since I was a young teenager, I have always said
that I would like to meet the soldier who shot me
and now, I can't believe, after all these years,
that you're sitting, reading my letter.
Charles, I hope you will say yes to me.
I'm confident you won't regret it, in any way.
Finally, thanks for reading this letter
and I look forward to your response,
if and when it comes. Richard Moore."
The first day that I found out his name, everything changed.
He wasn't a soldier, then.
He was Charles.
I'd give him a --
You know, he was a human being, in a sense,
and that sort of distance that the term "soldier" creates
was brought a bit closer by saying "Charles."
I tried to reassure him, in the letter,
that I wasn't writing to make him feel guilty.
I wasn't writing to make him accountable to me.
I also wanted to meet him --
and I told him this in the letter --
to let him know
that I have no hatred towards him
and never had any hatred towards him.
♪♪
I arranged to meet him on the 14th of January 2006.
♪♪
There was a bit of small talk, at the start.
But eventually, I said, "Look, Charles,
in your letter, it said you felt justified
and I find that hard to swallow,
that you can justify blinding a 10-year-old boy."
And he said, well, what he meant by that was,
when he decided to fire the rubber bullet,
he felt justified in firing it.
If he had known the damage that it was going to cause,
then he wouldn't have fired it,
and he was not justifying what happened to me.
And Charles said, at that point, "Look, I regret what happened.
I wish I'd never fired the rubber bullet.
And, if I had known the damage that I was going to cause,
I wouldn't have fired it."
[Birds chirping]
Now, you could pick holes in that story, if you wanted.
You could go down all sorts of roads,
in relation to what Charles is saying.
What Charles done that day,
only he knows what was going on in his head.
I'm not saying that what Charles done was right.
I'm not saying it was justified.
What I'm saying is
that I forgive Charles for what happened.
In unusual circumstances, unusual things happen
and there's no question that Derry and Northern Ireland
was an unusual place.
And I think we're all very lucky,
if we get through our life
without doing something we live to regret
for the rest of our lives.
[Birds chirping]
Forgiving Charles wasn't going to change the past.
It wasn't going to give me back me eyesight.
But what it did do is change my future.
I didn't carry all that baggage of hurt and anger.
And I think it would've prevented me from operating
and living me life as a fully functional human being,
in the way that I have.
♪♪
[Bell chiming]
♪♪
I do actually believe that we're all capable,
given the right circumstances,
of doing anything, just about anything.
It's a rare person that wouldn't,
when their family is under threat,
when they are told
and believe that their neighbors are threatening
and they might take their family away.
Who knows what any of us would do?
People actually think that, you know,
the evil monster is out there
and is different to us.
I've never believed that.
I've always believed that any of us
are actually capable of doing anything,
under certain circumstances.
What allows one group of human beings
to annihilate another group
is if they find a way of dehumanizing them.
Now, you do that by taking
aspects of yourself that you hate,
that you feel are bad, despicable,
and you want to disown them,
and you put them into the victim.
Then, the victim is experienced as a disease or a scourge
and can be annihilated.
You also, the same way, extract anything good from them
and attribute that to yourself --
"I'm civilized and you're a savage."
For forgiveness to occur,
the process must be put into reverse, so to speak,
as where the victim has to see the perpetrator
as not all bad or evil,
and this can occur if they see that the perpetrator
shows genuine remorse, guilt, and takes real steps
to repair or rebuild the damage they've done.
One day, you might forgive,
the next day, something triggers it,
and you might hate all over again.
As you move forward again, something comes to your mind
that takes you back to what happened in the past.
But gradually, a little bit further down the line,
you can begin to let go of the pain.
For me, forgiveness is difficult, costly, painful,
however, potentially transformative.
[Birds chirping]
My mum's body was maimed.
She was just in a small ditch with another woman
and they had just covered with a little soil
on the top of her body.
She was still clothed,
but she was hit on the head and the hands were cut.
I was numbed.
I couldn't understand how they could kill her,
when she was feeding almost everybody in the village.
When the genocide was over, '94,
I took about a month to regain some strength,
to come back to see whether somebody survived
at my village level.
When I reached Butare, people were just fleeing me.
They didn't want to be the ones to tell me the bad news.
One of them said, "Please don't go to your home village."
I said, "Why?" He said, "No, please don't."
When I reached there, I was on the main road,
looking at my village.
There was no house.
[Clucking]There were more than ten houses.
All the houses were destroyed.
Even the bricks were destroyed completely,
were turned into -- to dust.
Then I knew that the worst happened.
I had 11 brothers.
They had about 65 kids.
No one is alive, besides me.
Then, I was told, by one young man,
that my entire family was killed.
He was ready to take me where they had put my mum.
Then, I knew that everybody was dead.
I never thought my family
could be swept away in such a short period of time.
[Thunder rumbling]
[Melancholy tune plays]
♪♪
My mum was like the grandmother
of all the children in the village,
so whoever was feeling hungry, she was ever there,
and most of the kids were coming rather to see her.
She was simply loving and generous.
Even the killer of my mum said
she was feeding him alongside her own sons.
I just cried.
♪♪
I buried my mum.
I could find the body of my younger brother.
I buried the body of my younger brother
and then, I returned back to Nairobi.
Yes, I was terribly angry.
Angry against everyone, angry against the leadership,
angry against the church,
angry against the neighbors.
I was angry against anything and everyone.
They told me the killer of my brother
was still in the village.
They said he has taken the clothes from my brother's body.
And they said, "You can come and take the clothes."
I said, "If I go there, I will kill him.
I'll make sure he dies."
I said, "Keep the clothes."
Because I knew, had I gone there,
something wrong could have happened.
♪♪
I couldn't sleep.
I could sleep and have a nightmare of him.
I was carrying him all over.
My mind was full of him.
He was in prison, but I was his prisoner,
because he was tied on me
and I couldn't separate myself from him.
♪♪
Forgiving is the most difficult act to make.
♪♪
It's so painful.
♪♪
It's so hard, especially when it comes to somebody
who took away the life of the person you loved most,
the life of the person who loved you more
than any other person you might know.
♪♪
[Man singing] -[Speaks indistinctly]
♪♪
Before I entered the prison,
I said, "God, give me enough strength
so that I won't faint in front of him."
♪♪
[Creaks]
♪♪
Then, when he entered,
I felt like a huge power
just pushing me from behind.
When I looked at him, I hated him most
and I wondered why I came to see him.
But when I realized that he was shaking
from the toes to the hands,
to the mouth, to the lips,
I had some pity on him.
I said, "This guy might feel what he did."
I asked him how he was --
"Amakuru?" -- "What news?"
Then, I told him,
that I came to know the truth about my family,
so that I can know how to give a decent burial,
to whoever he might know, where he might have been left.
[Speaking foreign language]
Then, he went back, 1994.
He was just saying, without stopping,
everydetail of how my family was killed,
how they fled, who killed in my village -- everything,
which really made me say,
"This guy [Snaps fingers] is not cheating me."
For the whole three hours, I felt he's the only person
who told me the whole truth I was needing.
Because, without him,
I could have neverknown what happened to my family.
My extended family, my immediately family --
every detail.
And I could know how my mother was killed.
No one wanted to tell me that.
Truth is also liberating.
Because my mind was always wondering,
"What happened to my brother?
What happened to my sister?
What happened to my nephew, to my niece?"
And really knowing what happened to my family
and I can carry on in life, which makes me much stronger.
Then, I asked him, in case my mother came back to life
and was sitting on your side, what would you tell her?
I wanted him to say he was sorry.
He told me that he'd tell her
to give him money.
♪♪
I said, "Why?"
He said he was poor.
Then, I asked him, "What would you tell my mother,"
if she gives him the money?
Then he said, "I would ask her to come to visit me."
"What else will you ask my mother?"
I was hoping, for the third time,
at least, he will ask for forgiveness.
He was shaking.
To me, he was recognizing what he did,
but he couldn't express it.
He was too afraid.
♪♪
Then he said, "I would ask for forgiveness."
♪♪
I told him that I came to see him
to give him forgiveness on my own behalf,
on behalf of my family,
and on behalf of my mother.
♪♪
[Thunder rumbling]
♪♪
[Thunder rumbling]
♪♪
Here, in Rwanda,
there are some remarkable examples
of people who have been able to,
somehow, have some form of individual reconciliation
with people that were involved in killing their families.
But they are a minority, and I don't think
they're representative of how the majority of people feel.
Yet, there is a coexistence.
In the experience of my own wife,
she knows the man that killed her mother.
She's met him and doesn't feel hatred, doesn't revenge.
She doesn't interact with him on a daily basis.
I mean, what do we call that?
I wouldn't say that there's forgiveness there,
but it's certainly not hatred and revenge, either.
It's a coexistence that allows society to function
and I think that's the key to the future of Rwanda,
that it's held long enough,
through the political and the community situation,
that it gives a second generation a chance
to live together without that division and hatred
that could lead to another spiral of violence.
♪♪
Two years ago, I was giving a lecture
at the American Embassy and,
there was a Palestinian sitting in the audience
and he kept looking at me
and I knew he wanted to say something
and I asked him, "What's going on?"
And he said, "You know, the day before your son was killed,
I went through that roadblock."
David was killed by a sniper.
And this beautiful young man --
David was very tall --
came to the car and he said,
"Look, I have to look at your papers.
For me, it's like paying income tax --
I'll do it as fast as I can.
It's my duty."
And they started to talk and then, he drove away.
And this Palestinian said to me, "And, you know, Robi,
the next day, when I heard he was killed, I was so sorry."
Because that's the human face of the conflict.
This pain is the pain that everybody experiences.
♪♪
David -- David was a student at Tel Aviv University.
He was 27 and he was doing his master's
in the philosophy of education.
And he was called up to go to reserves,
like most everybody here.
And he came to talk to me and he said to me, "What to do?"
Because he was in such a quandary.
You see, we look at the world with black and white.
Nobody sees the gray.
Nobody understands what this kid,
who belonged to the peace movement and was torn --
what shall he do?
And then he goes and I was filled with dread.
And then, he gets killed by some guy
who had seen his uncle very violently killed
when he was a small child.
So this man, this Palestinian man,
went on a path of revenge and David was in the way,
and nine other people, and he killed them all.
[Siren chiming]
[Horn blares] [Siren chiming]
They asked me if I wanted to go to his trial
and I had no desire to do that at all.
I don't -- It doesn't give me --
There's no punishment.
Will that bring back David,
if I feel good about the fact that he's rotting in jail
and his mother is sitting in Silwad without him?
She's lost a child, also, in a way.
So what joy could that bring me, that he's sitting in jail?
No. I don't even--
I didn't even get involved in that side of it at all.
The memory for me is David sitting down there
and going like this when he drove off.
That's much more important for me.
It's strange because, when the army came to tell me
that David had been killed,
the first -- apparently -- thing I said is,
"You may not kill anybody in the name of my child."
[Birds chirping, cawing]
One of the projects that we did in the Parents Circle --
you know, we are 500 families of Palestinians and Israelis --
we understood that we shared the same pain.
We thought that it would be very important
to share each other's historical narrative
and personal narrative,
in order to understand the other's point of view.
And we decided that we would go to the Holocaust Museum.
We invited 70 Palestinians to first come
and stay overnight in East Jerusalem,
so that they wouldn't have the indignities
of coming through the checkpoint the next day
and that we could meet them at the Holocaust Museum
in a dignified manner.
[Indistinct conversations]
Then, the next day, we went to this village
which existed before 1948.
It's called Ekbeba.
Two of the Palestinian families from our group come from there.
And, when we got there,
there was nothing left of this village.
It was wiped out completely.
And, suddenly, Umm Jamil,
who's the mother from Dheisheh refugee camp,
stood there and she started to cry.
And we looked at her and we said, "What's the matter?"
And she looked down and she said, "You see here?
This is the well that I used
to draw water out of as a child."
And then, we could understand this longing, you know, this,
"Why do people walk around with keys
to doors that are no longer there," you know?
And you could understand,
with empathy, this pain of longing
and, as Jews, we need to understand that, you know?
We came out of Toledo, in Spain,
and walked around with keys around our neck for generations.
For me, reconciliation is to be able --
not to forget your pain.
It's to be able to create kind of a package,
where you put your pain there,
you specific this pain in a specific place,
and you don't allow this pain to control your mind
and your feeling and your daily life
and to bring you to madness.
Three years ago -- or four years.
I'm not good at time --
they caught the sniper who killed David.
His name was Tha'ir.
And I decided that I couldn't do this work,
if I wasn't willing to go on a path
and so I wrote a letter to the family.
And, about two weeks ago, I came home at about 11:00
and I found an email
from a friend of mine in America,
who said that the sniper and --
had written me a letter, but not directly,
and that the letter was printed in Ma'an,
which is the Palestinian news service.
And I discovered a letter filled with...
justification for killing and that my son was a murderer
and that he could have nothing to do with me
and didn't want me anywhere near his family
and would not write me a letter directly.
The next morning, I got up very early and I turned on the BBC
and, suddenly, I heard Jo Berry on the radio,
together with Pat Magee,
discussing their journey to reconciliation.
So I thought, "What you're doing is right,"
and I went away and I wrote another letter.
And I think I would like to read you that letter.
"Tha'ir, how ironic.
The people who most wanted to protect me
from your words in your letter were my Palestinian friends
and other bereaved parents in our group.
You said that David went to the army to kill.
This young man spent most of his time helping
to make a difference, educating towards democracy,
and who anguished about going to serve said,
'If I go, I will treat all with respect
and so will my soldiers.'
I think that these are not words of a violent man.
You claim that you killed ten soldiers and civilians
in order to end the occupation.
Do you think that you made a difference?
I'm well aware, from your family,
and have shared the story all over the world,
of your uncle, who was violently killed
by Israeli soldiers in front of you
when you were a small child,
and of the uncle you lost in the Second Intifada.
I think there was a definite longing for revenge.
I also think that you will find out, with time,
that there is no revenge for a loved one.
The wisest reaction I had to the words of your letter came
from my wonderful son Eran,
who I thought would be terribly angry.
'Well,' he said, 'Listen, Mum,
perhaps this is the beginning of a dialogue.'"
What revenge could I take to bring David back?
You could take anything from me, and everything,
if I could just, once more, see him
and once more talk to him.
[Swallows]
So, I'm very worried
and reluctant to use the word forgiving.
Is it giving up your right to justice?
Does it mean that it's okay, what they did,
or they can do it again?
Or do you forget?
I don't know, you know?
I don't know. I don't know.
I know that the sniper is on the list to be freed,
you know, for Gilad Shalit, for the soldier.
And I know, absolutely, here, I'm being honest,
they must release him, if it will bring back this kid.
Firstly, nohuman life --
the sanctity of human life is much more important
than any small revenge that I might take.
And, you know, when you think about the generations
of children and grandchildren of these prisoners,
who are so angry and want revenge,
then what is more dangerous --
releasing them back into the community
or facing further generations,
two or three generations, of revenge?
So I say -- and I've said it on television, many times --
that you must release the prisoners.
I often say people make the mistake that they think
politics is about agreeing with each other.
It's not. Politics is about how
we disagree with each other without killing each other.
Because these are issues of relationships,
they're only ever going to be solved
by people talking with each other.
In other words, force and violence
is never going to bring a resolution of the problem.
♪♪
This is a place where Israelis and Palestinians
are meeting each other for peace.
You know, you can always cross the wall.
You can go under the wall. You can go behind the wall.
You can go above the wall.
This wall cannot stop two kinds of people --
the one determined suicide bomber
will find a way to go through,
and the one determined peacemaker
will find a way to go through.
But I think the basic reason behind it all is prevention
of any kind of dialogue and knowing each other.
And this is something that, for me, as a peacemaker,
is essential to go to,
even at the price of breaking the law.
♪♪
Am I afraid?
[Laughs]
No, I'm not afraid.
As I said earlier, the worst thing already happened.
♪♪
[Indistinct conversations]
♪♪
Man: It's easy to say, "Forgive and forget."
It's very hard to achieve that.
It is not improbable that one of the Palestinians today
would've been killed by me ten years ago.
Then he wouldn't be with us,
or I wouldn't be here with you today
to do this -- this joint activity.
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
[Whistling] [Clamoring]
[Calling]
[Whistling]
[Calling]
[Whistling]
[Cheering and applause]
[Whistling] [Singing]
[Chanting in foreign language] [Clapping]
[Whistling] [Chanting continues]
[Whistling]
♪♪
Rami: This is a mission.
This is something that I have to do.
This is the reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.
This is the meaning of my life after the death of my daughter.
We can change this endless cycle of violence,
the only way out is the ability
to listen to the pain of the other.
When all the other extremities are passed away,
and you go beyond the story
to where there is nothing left but the two people,
and you feel that what you are meeting is the other person,
then I think reconciliation, forgiveness, bonding
and even love begins to happen.
[Suspenseful-melancholy music plays]
♪♪
[Speaking foreign language]
[Singing]
♪♪