Just what can the United States do to stop terrorism?

by Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman
 

To act in any area of life, we need to consider our aims, both short-term and long-term.

For restorative justice, the short-term aim is to stop violence, to mend broken relations, to correct whatever conditions or imbalances gave rise to breakdown, and to build community through processes of healing.

The long-term aim is to lay foundations for peace, harmony and happiness.

Punishment, retaliation, vengeance, and revenge serve neither short-term nor long-term aims. Quite the opposite, they feed violence by playing into escalating cycles of violence. Justice as retaliation is only destructive. We need a justice that is constructive, or we condemn our children to suffer future terrorism sown in the refugee camps of today and the coming months.

Keeping Our Core Principles and Values in View

Restorative justice calls us to consider our principles and values as a person and people. Can we, for example, create a lawful international society by using unlawful means? Do ends justify means, or will our ends reflect our means, in which case, they'd better be compatible? Can we secure freedom if we take away freedom to do it?

These questions are stated in the most simple terms, and situations are never so simple. And yet we need to keep our simple, core principles in view to help us select which actions might take us where we want to go long term.

Nazi doctors said they never would have imagined themselves conducting the horrific medical experiments they did, but that they arrived at such actions incrementally, with expeditious excuses, rationalizations and justifications paving the way -- one dark step after another. Emergencies, especially national and international ones, are gaping chasms luring us into using dark means in the name of good. Trying to find means that reflect our principles of lawfulness and freedom is the job of restorative justice. It takes longer and is often more difficult, but the ultimate result more closely reflects what we want of justice.

As to our values, we often find ourselves knocked from our moorings by crises and emergencies. In an unpublished manuscript entitled “Peacemaking Circles: Using Conflict as an Opportunity to Build Community,” Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart, and Mark Wedge summarize the values that participants in conflict resolution often cite as important: respect, honesty, humility, sharing, courage, inclusivity, empathy, trust, forgiveness, and love. With this crisis, we are being challenged as never before to explore how these values can help us deal with the unresolved international conflicts that culminated in such horrific actions.

Advice to President Bush and Other World Leaders

What can the United States and other concerned peoples do to prevent a re-occurrence of the horrible events of September 11? What would be the core elements of an “Operation Restorative Justice”?

Short-term, we would recommend these specific actions, which would be consistent with our best principles and values.

• Collecting information and evidence on terrorism in this country and worldwide. That’s obvious to everyone as the first step.

• Adhering to international law. Certainly, assassinating individuals is contrary to that. However, provable criminals must be arrested and brought to trial. Acts of inhumanity are totally unacceptable, as is planning them.

• Not killing civilians and innocent people, or we behave like the terrorists and violate our deepest political and religious principles: "Thou shalt not kill." In any case, terrorism uses guerilla tactics, and as we learned in Vietnam, bombing does not stop them.

• Creating as broad as possible a coalition of nations to work to uncover terrorists and arrest them. This too is obvious and happening almost spontaneously.

• Maintaining an attitude of restraint, balance, and caution, so that we do no harm beyond what is necessary and unavoidable to stop or prevent future attacks.

• Making security changes with "sunset clauses," so that freedoms, if they absolutely must be modified to stop future terrorists, are not lost indefinitely.

Long-term, we would recommend that America take the high road of admitting our wrongs and acting from our highest humanitarian ideals to heal hurts and promote the health of the global community, of which we are now an inescapable part. This is exactly what restorative justice teaches: conflicts are opportunities to build community, in this case, the world community. America's standing would only be heightened by such a principled, humble, honest, respectful, inclusive, compassionate, and truly courageous response.

Specifically, we would recommend prevention by:

• Seeking to address the causes of terrorism in human pain and misery, especially the unhealed hurts of past wars that involved the United States. The fear, pain, and suffering that people endure in refugee camps lead to desperation, which leads to suicide bombers. An ounce of prevention in humanitarian aid is worth a pound of cure of terrorism full-blown.
Indeed, if we contributed to the destruction, helping innocents rebuild is our responsibility, our duty. Because the devastation of Germany after World War I laid the groundwork for Hitler's rise, fueled by the German people's desperation, the world learned not to end wars that way, and so the United States devised the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II. If we had devised a version of the Marshall Plan to help populations recover and rebuild after every time the United States has either bombed or contributed to the bombing of a county, we doubt that we would have such terrorism today. Such is the tragically forgotten lesson of World War I. Naturally, not bombing in the first place -- finding peaceful means of resolving conflicts -- would be even better.

• Collecting information about why such hatred is directed at America, setting up forums around the world for people to express their grievances toward the United States, its government, its businesses, and perhaps its people, insofar as our actions impact them. These forums would be for the purpose of building mutual understanding and respect as well as for taking appropriate action to right things. Certainly not all the world's troubles can be laid at America’s door, but as a super-power, our impact is immense, and not all positive. Neither can we assume we know what others need or what they are feeling. We must find out. We need an open table for others to come and talk to us, so that their anger, rightly directed or misplaced, does not build to insanity.

• Committing to the world community that we intend to act responsibly to peoples around the world, and if we have not done so, that we are committed to changing our practices and doing what we can to make things right.

• Stopping policies that oppress people, such as the nonmilitary sanctions against Iraq or supporting governments and regimes that tolerate human rights violations for the sake of enhancing American corporate profits.

• Documenting what America and Americans have done for the world community in the past and now, not as self-justification but as self-appreciation, to help us remember our generous, compassionate nature to others at home and abroad, to honor what we have done for decades to bless the world, and, practically speaking, to help us identify what works, what doesn't, and what we might do now to make the world community happier and hence safer in the decades to come.

Many Methods Are Open

The argument that we either take extreme, forceful, military action or we do nothing offers a classic example of the fallacy of false alternatives. Many methods are open to us, and no single method is a panacea. We need short-term cures of the tragedy and short-term prevention of immediate follow-up attacks. We also need long-term cures of the conditions that create terrorists and long-term prevention by making fundamental shifts in our philosophies, institutions, and cultural practices, especially around justice: what it is and how we practice it in our relationships personally, economically, socially, politically, and internationally.

One essential first principle of Native American philosophy is that change is universal and that it occurs in cycles. These cycles are characterized as development and disintegration, coming together and coming apart, and they tend to go on at once. This crisis proves the principle. The terrible coming apart of the tragedy has brought us together in profound dialogue, questioning, soul-searching, sharing, grieving, healing, and undergoing profound transformation.

We have suffered enormous loss, but we are responding in ways that long term will be a gain in the growth of our cultural soul. Today, we do not have final answers-no one does. That's okay. Restorative justice gives us guidelines for helping us find answers -- appropriate means and methods -- as we go, building on our deepest philosophies, principles, and values.
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Denise Breton and Stephen Lehman are co-authors of The Mystic Heart of Justice: Restoring Wholeness in a Broken World (Chrysalis Books, The Swedenborg Foundation, Fall 2001). They recommend that those seeking to imagine the most constructive responses to international conflicts and terrorism also explore the articles at www.restorativejustice.org. In addition, the Conflict Transformation Program of Eastern Mennonite University sends out articles on the crisis from a restorative justice perspective: email them to receive these mailings.

This article can be found online at http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/blank/item_3318.html