I posted late last month of the report that native Iraqi terrorists seem to be looking for an exit strategy from their insurgency (al Qaeda terrorists not so). The insurgents concerned are Baathist holdouts - dead enders,” as Donald Rumsfeld called them - and Saddam loyalists who fought the Americans and other coalition forces. Since the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq they have become increasingly persuaded that Baathism is not ever to return to Iraq and that loyalty to Saddam is a lost cause.

Kim Du Toit asks what should be done with them in the new, democratic Iraq:

I know, the immediate impulse is to say, “Kill the [expletive]!”

But it’s not really that simple. Let’s assume you were a senior Army officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, and you were ordered to commit some atrocity against, say the Shi’ites or Kurds.

Don’t even think that refusal was an option. In a civilized society, refusal to obey an illegal order might mean enforced resignation, but plaudits for your humanity from society as a whole. Under Saddam’s dictatorship, refusal might have meant watching helplessly as your teenage daughter and ten-year-old son were gang-raped right in front of you, and your wife killed by being boiled alive, followed by your own death from having a four-foot spike hammered up your anus.

Kim was born South African and lived there the first three decades of his life before immigrating to the US. He has a different perspective on handling the dead enders because of his native land’s experience in overcoming apartheid.

When the African National Congress came to power, the question then became: what to do with these instruments of Afrikaner oppression?

Commendably, Nelson Mandela suggested that there be what he termed a “Reconcilation”—that these people would be forgiven, provided that they made a public show of penitence, and confessed all that they’d done.

It worked, more or less, although a few of the most egregious offenders found that there was still a prison sentence in their future—but the names were announced ahead of time, so everyone knew exactly where they stood.

As far as I know, the issue was settled at that point.

Now some thoughts. First, one of the things that definitely enabled the South African reconciliation was the active work of the church there. The church was segregated during apartheid (more so than in the antebellum American South, actually) but the teachings of the church and it doctrine formed a common basis of blacks and whites for structuring the nation’s reconciliation.

In many respects, this battle for justice was one that built the legitimacy of the church as a political actor with real power to promote social change. It is therefore not surprising that the task of overcoming social divisions and (re)building relationships in a democratic South Africa is something that is now seen by society and by church leaders as a key part of the church’s role. …

The South Africans established a network of organizations called Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs). As United Methodist Bishop in South Africa Peter Storey wrote,

… By 1990, when then South African President F. W. de Klerk announced negotiations with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC), small groups of South Africans- nongovernmental organizations, religious leaders, and human-rights lawyers-had already begun to address the problem of the nation’s past. They said there could be no new, united South Africa without a commonly acknowledged history and that this required honestly facing and dealing with the brutal oppression of the apartheid years. …

Any successful attempt to address the past would need to both acknowledge the suffering of apartheid’s victims and lead to national reconciliation. It had to steer a delicate course between those who cried “prosecute and punish” and those who demanded “forgive and forget.” Negotiators created a process that evokes biblical reconciliation, a process that proceeds according to this rubric: “It is necessary to both remember and judge-and forgive.”

TRCs were not specifically religious organizations but the scope and nature of their work was significantly influenced by the church. Van der Merwe wrote,

Once the TRC was established, the churches became even more actively involved, particularly within local communities. Many churches provided direct assistance in facilitating the implementation of effective gross human rights violation hearings. The TRC made extensive use of church networks when setting up Human Rights Violations Hearings in local communities. Through the South African Council of Churches and other religious networks, local ministers were drawn into the process of coordinating meetings, arranging publicity, statement taking and other crucial functions to ensure effective community engagement in the hearings. In some cases, churches also assisted in creating a (limited) support structure for victims seeking counselling.

In collaboration with the TRC, church structures also made key inputs into two TRC events: the Religious Sector Hearing and a Children’s Hearing. A wide range of churches participated in the Religious Sector Hearing in East London in November 1997. At these hearings, churches made submission about their role during apartheid. Some used the opportunity to look at the their own history of human rights abuses, and apologised for their role in apartheid. Others used the opportunity to recount their experiences of struggle against apartheid abuses.

This part was critical. While helping to enable reconciliation among different sectors of socieyt (principally between whites and blacks, of course, but there were many other groups also), the churches looked at themselves in the mirror and recognized that they had been both part of the problem as well as of the solution.

There were many other characteristics of TRCs that enabled their success that I won’t delineate here. Bishop Storey’s article explains them well. The question is: can South African TRCs serve as a model for uniting Iraq?

Whether the Muslim clerics in Iraq can serve a role similar to that of the Christian clergy in South Africa is a key question. Forgiveness and reconciliation are central Christian virtues, much more strongly than in Islam.

In December 2003, after Saddam Hussein was captured, I wrote a piece for the United Methodist News Service on what would constitute justice for Saddam, in which I broached the idea of using South African TRCs as an example (not muyoriginal thought with me, I should add).

Most of Saddam’s crimes were committed against Iraqis inside Iraq. “The Iraqis need to see justice being done in front of them,” Iraq’s representative to the United States, Rend al-Rahim, said Dec. 14 on CNN. “This is going to be truly a process of healing. (It will) lead to a national reconciliation, to Iraq being able to move forward and, in a sense, look at its past and say, ‘Never again.’”

Trying Saddam is only one part of justice for Iraq. We should also help the Iraqis achieve restorative justice to engender reparation, restitution and rehabilitation of their nation, and redemptive justice to enable them to break the grip of their oppressed past.

A potential model for this long-term task is how South Africans worked out of apartheid without tearing themselves apart socially. The Iraq Foundation, founded by Iraqi refugees in 1991, and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority have broached the idea of Iraqi truth commissions.

None of this can be done while the insurgency is active, but it seems to me a good idea for the Iraqis to consider in persuading the dead enders to abandon their fight.