Why I Want to Hear the Stories of the Perpetrators

“Best-best case scenario, how long do you think it will take for your country to return to normal?” This question was asked over wine and lovely Syrian vegetarian food, by a Brit of a Syrian.

My friend from Syria leaned back in her chair, took another sip, furrowed her eyebrows, and thought a minute before she replied, “Ten years.”

Ten years? That doesn’t sound very optimistic!

She continued, “Even if the fighting ends tomorrow, so much rebuilding is needed. Neighbours who used to be friends have stopped talking, people are emotionally damaged, so many families have lost loved ones. This is going to take a long time.”

How right she was, I realised. In my work in peacebuilding all around the world, it’s a story I’ve heard over and over. It takes a long time, a very long time, to recover from violence. A generation or two, or maybe even three, will suffer the fall-out of the fighting. This is why us peace-studies people insist on remembering Rwanda. Four months of horrible violence reshaped that country’s entire DNA. It’s been nearly two decades since those events and the country is still in recovery mode. Lebanon’s civil war officially ended in 1991, but those of us who have lived there know that peace is still a fair ways off from its splendid shores.

I’m passionate about stories. I love reading stories, telling stories, listening to stories. And I am a firm believer in the power of stories to transform, to build up or tear down, but I most certainly prefer to use stories to build up. So I started thinking about what stories could help speed up progress down the painful road that is ahead for Syria.

And I thought of the perpetrators. More specifically, I thought of the fact that when I lived in Syria just a few short years ago, everyone I met was friendly, hospitable, and gentle. Violence was hardly a part of their vocabulary, or so it seemed. I blink and shake my head every time I realise that the same hands now holding the guns of the Free Syrian Army, pillaging villages and commandeering historical monuments, are hands I shook after agreeing on a purchase in the souq, or are hands that waved down my bus hoping to catch a lift home. Then, I think of the thousands of youth who have been conscripted into military service. Teenagers who played with mobile phones and sat on walls giggling as girls walked by, who knew they’d have to spend their mandatory 2 years in the military at some point and figured they would just get it over with as quickly as possible, are now shooting little children. The atrocities happening today were utterly unthinkable two years ago.

What is their story? What happened to the merchant, the university student, the taxi driver? What events led him from kindness to violence? From chivalry to abuse?

We don’t usually want to hear the bad guys’ stories, but I’m going to find a way to seek them out, to make sure that the stories not only of the victims, but of the perpetrators, are told. And I suspect that we will learn that perpetrators are themselves victims, and perhaps victims are also often perpetrators. Because forgiveness is going to have to happen. It’s a lot easier to forgive someone who has a story, a fellow human being, than it is to forgive a faceless figure, isn’t it?

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