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There are moments in a person's or a human community's life when certain words, usually consigned to everyday banality, suddenly become a source of reflection and personal and community reconstruction.
Such is the case with the words "truth", "justice" and "reconciliation".
In the aftermath of the October 2020 presidential elections, with their warlike political speeches and the violence that accompanied them, these words resonate in a special way in our minds as peace-loving men and women, and invite us to break the infernal circle of violence.
After 30 years of crisis, will there ever be a time for truth, justice and reconciliation in Côte d'Ivoire, with a view to rebuilding social ties and peaceful cohabitation between the sons and daughters of our country?
Those who believe that members of a multi-ethnic, multi-tribal, multi-cultural society, crossed by a deep social fracture, can be reconciled by the sword and the incantations of politicians, must disabuse themselves.
This type of reconciliation requires several things at once, three of which can be mentioned here.
First of all, it requires a deep reflection that leaves the beaten track of political ruse, to ask ourselves "why" have we arrived at this stage of the "dissociation" of individuals who are pitted against each other?
It also requires the method to avoid adding to the complexity of the situation, in order to suggest ways forward.
Finally, it requires a real political will, which consists in not wanting peace and, at the very same, its opposite -- inflammatory and bellicose speeches.
This is the hope that is nourished by this contribution, which will revolve around three main points:
Ivorian reconciliation put to the test of truth
Restorative justice versus vindictive justice
Reconciliation as a social requirement
Reflection on the truth of the Ivorian crises is both necessary and complex.
Its necessity stems from the fact that truth, when it is accepted from an uncompromising analysis of the facts, liberates and opens the way to justice and reconciliation.
It is therefore a prerequisite. Its complexity comes from the fact that each Ivorian has his or her own truth about the Ivorian crises.
More than 20 million Ivorians would therefore have things to say about the crises that shook their country, pitting them against each other, often violently.
But what are the criteria for assessing their own truth? And what are the criteria of assessment for those who listen to them and who validate or not this truth? Is the truth in this case one or many?
Reconciliation, because it works to make the protagonists undertake dialogue and forgiveness, is a path that renews people and societies.
The renewal we are talking about here takes on the meaning of birth, with all that this implies in terms of the pains of childbirth.
This is why the "everyone is wrong, everyone is right" theory that some people sing about with pleasure is in reality a process of concealing the suffering of the innocent people who have been shattered by war, that is, of those who suffered from the war and who still suffer from it, although objectively the situation on the ground is no longer the same.
In a context of rebuilding social ties, truth therefore precedes forgiveness and reconciliation.
We must have the courage to give a voice to all those who have something to say, to the victims as well as to all those whose guilt is known or presumed, to avoid continuing to put the social bond on hold by allowing the executioner to hide and the victim to feed their revenge in silence.
While it is true that in a process of reconciliation truth is a prerequisite, it seems appropriate to me to place it in a bold process of progressive construction which is based on proven facts, where each person is identified in the role and in the position which belongs to them, and that they accept it in this way.
Only in this way does the forgiveness that should follow, as a social necessity expressing the "sublime form of giving" and as the truest imitation of God (for us believers), become in reality an act of resurrection that liberates both the perpetrator and the victim, offering them a new path of assumed peaceful coexistence.
Consequently, in order to produce the fruit of forgiveness, what truth needs first and foremost in our country is a space for dialogue whose relevance and credibility must be guaranteed.
For it is a fact that the truth in question here is what French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin calls "the measure of truth" (2004).
That is to say a truth that does not proceed only from the narrative legitimacy of the one who says it (as victim or executioner), but one that must be confronted with consensual validation criteria.
It is a truth that must be exorcised from its emotions and its various human conditionings in order to make it effective, because there are proofs that are too personal and too isolated (from the victim in particular) that cannot be proven.
With the prerequisite of truth established in the reconciliation process, we next look at the second point. (To be continued)
Francis Barbey, a presbyter of the Diocese of San Pedro in Côte d'Ivoire, is a university professor and specialist in social communications.
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