Taking 'an eye for an eye' will only compound any injustice

Published on Tuesday 17 January 2006 01:27

IN SOUTH Africa, we are raised on a strict diet of justice as retribution. With violent crimes on a shocking upsurge, with child rape and abuse on the increase, there are frequent calls - backed by public support - to restore capital punishment.

Mercifully, South Africa's Constitutional Court has ruled that the death penalty - which South Africans eliminated at the same time we were liberated from apartheid - is unconstitutional. Sadly, in many places in the world it seems that men and women have not advanced beyond the biblical admonition of "an eye for an eye" in their yearning for retribution. But "an eye for an eye" asks that the culprit should be the sole target and not others, whose only crime was to be related to him.

So the adage was not intended to mean that killing be paid for by another killing. Given the brutality of the apartheid era, that would have never worked in my homeland.

So it was a mercy that our country chose to go the way of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): granting amnesty in exchange for the truth.

At the TRC hearings, we were exposed to gruesome details about atrocities that were committed to uphold or to oppose apartheid. "We gave him drugged coffee and shot him in the head and then we burned his body. As it takes seven to eight hours for a human body to burn, we had a braaivleis on the side, drinking beer and eating meat."

How low men can sink in our inhumanity.

Each time such stories were published, we had to remind ourselves that a monster has no moral responsibility and so cannot be held accountable; but, more seriously, designating someone a monster closes the door to rehabilitation.

We cannot give up on anybody. If it was true that people could not change, once a murderer always a murderer, then the whole TRC process would have been impossible. We believed that even the worst racist had the capacity to change.

An "eye for an eye" can never work when communities are in conflict; reprisal leads to a counter-reprisal in the sort of blood spiral we are seeing in the Middle East.

The type of justice South Africa practised, what I call "restorative justice", is, unlike retribution, not basically concerned with punishment; it is not fundamentally punitive.

It sets high store by healing. It regards the offender as a person, as a subject with a sense of responsibility and a sense of shame, who needs to be reintegrated into the community and not ostracised. The offender and the victim had to be helped to be reconciled.

This does not mean being soft on crime, but there must be hope that the offender can become a useful member of society after paying the price they owe to society. When we act as if we believe that someone can be better, then they will often rise to our expectations.

• Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace