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“Forgiveness to the injured doth belong”

By Carlton Samarajiwa
At the three-hour service last Good Friday at the Methodist Church in Mt. Lavinia, Rev. Asiri Perera in his stimulating three-part sermon on the theme of "Forgiveness" first asked his congregation, "Is it fair to forgive?"

When he received no definite response to his abstract question, he couched it in concrete terms, and asked: "Can you forgive Hitler?" (Pause). Can you forgive Idi Amin? (Pause). Can you forgive Prabhakaran? (Long pause). And, can you forgive Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush and Tony Blair? (Pause).

This was food for thought for a mixed congregation that had come prepared to spend three hours to commemorate the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, whose words “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do?” ring loud and clear in Christian ears.
“Forgiveness to the injured doth belong,” wrote poet John Dryden. None in Rev. Asiri's congregation had suffered under Hitler or Idi Amin or under Sadam. Some in the congregation had suffered directly or had relatives and friends who had suffered under Prabhakaran, but none suffer under Bush and Blair -at least, not directly or personally.
Victims on either side

All said and done, all bombed and destroyed in Iraq, it is to the Iraqis that Rev. Asiri's Good Friday question has to be addressed. Ask the innocent children in Iraq who are paying a price for the sins of their fathers.

Ask the 12-year-old boy Ismail Abbas. Abbas was fast asleep when war shattered his life on April 6, 2003. An American 'precision' missile obliterated his home and most of his family, leaving him orphaned, badly burned and both his arms blown off. “It was midnight when the missile fell on us. My father, my mother and my brother died. My mother was five months pregnant,” the traumatized boy told Reuters at Baghdad's Kindi hospital. “Our neighbours pulled me out and brought me here. I was unconscious,” said the hapless victim of the madness of war.

Ask also another boy, Tyler Jordan, the six-year-old son of United States Marine Gunnery Sergeant Philip Jordan who was buried at St. Patrick's cemetery in Enfield, Connecticut on April 2, 2003.

A Reuters photograph shows Tyler walking, his eyes sad, with the Stars and Stripes flag from his father's coffin. This is the flag at whose hoisting Americans sing "God bless America" with their right hands on their hearts. Tyler's father was killed during fighting outside Nasiriyah on March 23 in the early days of the war in Iraq. Tyler at least has his hands to carry the American flag and his widowed mother to care for him. Abbas has no mother, no father, no brother, and no hands to play with, eat with, drink with, write with and draw with. Ask these two boys about forgiving. Anyway, what do a six-year-old and a twelve-year-old know about forgiveness?

These pictures of Ismail and Tyler can be pictures of our own children and grandchildren. This is what grieves us as we live out the sunset years of our lives - this madness of war that takes away the lives of men, women and children. All war is madness. The last sad words of despair we heard at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai filmed in Kitulgala in the fifties were "Madness, madness," words that sum up the utter futility of war. Ask the victims of war about forgiveness.

Etched in memory

Ask Kim Phuc also about forgiveness. Among the heart-rending images of child victims of war, the Pulitzer prize-winning black and white picture taken by American photographer Nick Ut of little Kim Phuc is an enduring reminder of the madness of war. The nine-year-old Vietnamese girl tears off her flaming clothes and just runs naked with other innocent children. They are fleeing from the napalm attack by the American forces on Trang Bong village, which killed both of Kim Phuc's baby brothers.
Kim Phuc is in her early forties now. In November 1997, she told Veteran Day crowds in Washington: "As you know, I am the little girl who was running from the napalm fire. I do not want to talk about the war because I cannot change history. I only want to remember the tragedy of war..." Kim is now married and has a baby boy. Will she, her husband and her son forgive and forget "Vietnam"?

Akihiro Takahasi, now in his seventies, was fourteen-years-old at the time of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He survived the horror. "Will you forgive the United States?" asked our Sunday Times journalist Ameen Izzadeen, who visited Hiroshima in 1996. Akihiro's reply: "Never. How can I?"

Ask also Anne Ranasinghe, now domiciled in Sri Lanka, who survived the Holocaust. More than half a century after the event, Ranasinghe remembers. Her book of prose and poetry At What Dark Point is “in memory of my father and mother, my grandmother, all my aunts and uncles, school mates, teachers and friends who were murdered by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945”. She once wrote a piece in a local newspaper, titled “It is a sin to forget”.

Ask the countless survivors of the acts of ruthless terror in our own country during twenty years of ethnic fighting about forgiving the terror that massacred little children in their sleep, worshippers at mosque and temple, Buddhist priests, policemen who had surrendered, bus and train travellers, Central Bank employees. Ask also those who survived the horror of the Black July of 1983 and the JVP terror of the early seventies and the late eighties about forgiveness. Those brutal acts are hard to forget or forgive.

Never look back?

"Forgetting is something that time alone takes care of but forgiveness is an act of volition, and only the sufferer is qualified to make the decision," wrote Simon Wiesenthal, a prisoner in a forced labour camp. Once during the Nazi terror, Wiesenthal had to work in a hospital where a young SS officer lay wounded and dying. The Nazi asked Wiesenthal to sit and listen as he confessed to the atrocities he had committed such as burning down a houseful of Jews in the Ukraine and shooting those who tried to escape by leaping out of the windows. Tormented by remorse and guilt as his life was ebbing, the SS trooper begged Wiesenthal, as a Jew, to forgive him. Wiesenthal turned and walked away. He survived the labour camps and spent the rest of his life tracking down Nazi war criminals.

Throughout Easter Week Christians the world over were reminded to forgive, to turn the other cheek. These are also virtues held in esteem by Jews. But Judaism teaches that two conditions are necessary for repentance: the wrong-doer must go with contrite heart to the person injured, wronged and sinned against, and also the sinner must compensate the injured, wronged and sinned against ,for his crime. But how can the Nazis compensate Anne Ranasinghe for exterminating her entire family? Some crimes simply cannot be forgiven, and terrorist and war crimes are among them.

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