Justice, forgiveness both necessary

Truth-telling and justice are not enough to obtain closure for the trauma of genocide, rather reconciliation or coming to terms with what had happened through forgiveness should be the ultimate goal, said a US history professor yesterday.

Prof Sue Gronewold, who also teaches master's programmes on holocaust and genocide studies at Kean University, stressed the importance of reconciliation at a lecture, “Justice for Genocidal Crime”, at Liberation War Museum in the capital's Segunbagicha.

She gave examples of the Cambodian trial where people spoke of their victimisation and suffering before the perpetrators and reached some kind of closure.

However, in reply to questions from Barrister Tureen Afroze, prosecutor of Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, she said there cannot be any reconciliation without justice.

Gronewold also pointed out that death tolls in genocides are always contested and often governments inflate or deflate figures and tell the history through museums and textbooks with a certain political motivation. She gave China's example of how the government is using the Nanjing massacre to gain political control over the sea territories on the east.

Regarding whether the death toll in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombing is the same in American and Japanese textbooks, Gronewold shared the story of a protest when Enola Gay, the plane from which the atomic bomb “Little Boy” was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, was exhibited in the Smithsonian Museum in 1998. She said Americans were not ready to accept the number of victims, trying to justify the bombing by saying that it was needed to stop the World War II. She also said study of genocide was necessary for prevention through proper intervention.