A Professor from Queen’s University has said research indicates that many victims of the Troubles are more tolerant towards ex-combatants that non-victims. In a new online blog, Professor John Brewer from the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s says the “real voices of victims are often drowned by the political rhetoric”.
Victims can be moral beacons
Professor John Brewer
Victims/survivors are the ones who have most obviously suffered for whatever gains the peace process has brought to Northern Ireland. While the category ‘victim’ is a morally contested one and politically controversial, the pain of the empty chair at the dinner table, the constraints of the wheelchair or the anguish of every anniversary should not be forgotten or dishonoured in the rush for Northern Ireland to embrace the future. Becoming reconciled to the past is one route into inheriting the future.
Victims, however, can be made into arbiters of the future by those who deem to speak for them. Victims are often voiceless and those who step up to empower victims by speaking up for and on behalf of them need to remember that in one sense everyone is a victim in one way or another and to make only a certain category of victim the arbiter of the future dishonours everyone else who has a stake in progress and change.
But is there any evidence that victims are using the victimhood experience as a brake on progress in the way that many self-selected spokespersons imply? Part of the problem associated with the politicisation of victim issues is that the real voices of victims are often drowned by the political rhetoric of those who choose to place themselves in the position as their spokesperson.
Research undertaken as part of the Compromise after Conflict programme on a randomised, nationally representative sample of the adult population in Northern Ireland, sheds a little light on this. The results are startling.
People were asked about their attitudes towards the release of political prisoners as part of the Good Friday Agreement and given an option to express their support for a series of popularly canvased hard line policies for dealing with ex-combatants voiced by some vociferous victim spokespeople – that political prisoners should be exiled from Northern Ireland; that they should forced to pay compensation to their victims; that they should be forced to say sorry to their victims; and that they should be barred from public and state employment. This was asked of people who had been victims of conflict-related harm themselves, either direct victims or indirect victims or both, as well as people who had experienced no direct or indirect conflict-related harm.
We found that irrespective of the proposed sanction considered, individuals who had experienced victimisation – either directly, indirectly or both – were notably more likely to oppose these measures than those who had not. Moreover, this relationship held even when a range of background characteristics, such as gender, socio-economic status and political identity, were included in the analysis. That is to say, victims are less punitive toward ex-combatants than non-victims and much more tolerant than many of the hard line people who deem to speak on their behalf imply when they give voice to victims’ attitudes.
Part of the explanation lies in the key role played by former paramilitary combatants in conflict transformation within their own communities. Despite earlier expectations of high rates of recidivism, particularly from opponents of prisoner release, in the vast majority of cases not only did former prisoners not return to violence but they became key players in reconciliation and peace-building efforts, particularly at the grassroots level and amongst victimised communities. The willingness of former political prisoners to live in and work for the advancement of their own deprived communities, many of whom have borne the brunt of conflict helps explain the less retributive stance of victims towards former political prisoners.
These results point to the willingness of victims to adopt a less retributive stance towards ex-prisoners in the light of achieving a peaceful settlement than non-victims. The results suggest that victims can be moral beacons pointing us to the future, an idea that many of the people who deem to speak on their behalf would contradict. Spokespeople for victims often wish to make victims arbiters of the future in order to proceed at a snail’s pace; we might progress more speedily if we listened to their real voices not the words put into their mouths.
Compromise after Conflict blog at:
http://blogs.qub.ac.uk/compromiseafterconflict/