Africa's clergy have spoken on global justice, but there is more to say
By B.C.
ACCORDING to an old Church of England joke, some wiseacre hoping to elicit a subtle theological statement asked a bishop what he thought about sin. The reply was succinct: "Sin? I'm against it." Presumably if the same cleric had been asked for an opinion on "justice", he would have said he was in favour. But whose justice, exactly—the human sort or the judgment which all Christians, indeed almost all monotheists, ultimately expect from God? And which agencies of human justice have legitimacy? Those questions cannot be answered so tersely, least of all by a religion like Christianity whose founding event was a flawed earthly trial and execution.
Yet Christian clerics are often under pressure to pronounce on matters of earthly justice, especially the global sort which aspires to punish egregious crimes and therefore deals in huge moral questions. The dilemma can be especially sharp when prominent figures with a big local following are hauled before international courts.
Take one unhappy example: to the dismay of human-rights activists, Serbia’s national church reacted with nativist defensiveness to the post-Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal in The Hague; it has offered moral support to individuals who have been convicted of terrible atrocities. Ratko Mladic, war-time leader of the Bosnian Serbs, has boasted about the church's assistance in hiding him before he was finally sent for trial in the Netherlands in 2011.
In the last two months, international justice has been on people's minds in Africa, especially in Kenya, where President Uhuru Kenyatta (pictured, back) and his deputy William Ruto have been accused by the International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, of fomenting the murderous post-electoral violence which swept the country in 2008. Both men have tried to get the proceedings postponed and to minimise their obligation to make trips to The Hague. And with the backing of fellow leaders in the African Union, the president is trying to get his trial suspended by the UN Security Council.
There have been some powerful statements on the subject from Christian leaders. On October 20th, an Anglican bishop, Mwai Abiero, rebuked the leaders of both Kenya and other African states for trying to escape the ICC’s sights. “Where violence erupted in Africa, it was the common people who became victims of crime perpetrated by the ruling class,” he was quoted as saying.
In September, Kenya’s Catholic bishops deplored a resolution by the country’s parliament in favour of withdrawing from the ICC—a step which has been much discussed but not actually taken. But the most powerful statement came from South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel laureate who is seen as one of the continent’s moral beacons. African leaders wanting to dodge or withdraw from the court were seeking a licence to "kill, maim and oppress their own people" without consequence, he wrote in the New York Times on October 10th.
Although most of the court’s work has been in Africa, and its sole conviction has been of an African (Thomas Lubanga of Congo), the archbishop rejected the idea that the ICC had an anti-African bias. He noted that five of the court’s 18 judges were African, as was the chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda of Gambia. Moreover, “where justice and order are not restored, there can be no healing, leaving violence and hatred ticking like a bomb in the corner.”
All this was a clear iteration of some standard arguments in favour of global justice as a check on criminal leaders and elites. But let’s hope that it isn’t the archbishop’s last word on the subject. In South Africa and beyond, he is best-known as the prime mover of a very different approach to post-conflict healing: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which people were offered amnesty in return for full, penitent disclosures of their misdeeds under apartheid. It’s an approach which the most zealous advocates of earthly justice as a prerequisite to peace generally don’t like.
So in which cases is “justice” the road to peace, and in what circumstances does amnesty and mutual forgiveness have a role to play in uncovering truth and fostering reconciliation? The archbishop won’t be able to answer that question in a single word, nor can there be a single answer; but he should be better qualified than most people to help us wrestle with that dilemma.
