AFTER VIOLENCE: 3R, RECONSTRUCTION, RECONCILIATION ...

ut not about who is Z: the international community. There is
some feeling of guilt, there are mutual accusations, no total
satisfaction no total dissatisfaction, no total closure, nor the
opposite. A situation of general ambiguity which we may blame on
the complexity, on our own shortcomings, or both.
Let us now introduce two more dimensions of violence:
intention and irreversibility. Was the harm, with all its
consequences, fully intended? Was the harm irreversible, or can
it be undone? The harm is in the eyes (and many other senses) of
the beholder, the victim; some harm being unavoidable in normal
social interaction. But two traffic rules in social, or world
(between states/nations) interaction may be useful:
- Never intend to do any harm to others!
- Never do to others what cannot be undone!
The latter may be modified to apply to harmful action only; the
problem is difficulty in knowing in advance whether action is
harmful or not. There may be unknown consequences, and, more
importantly, the rule "do no do to others what you do not want
others to do to you" is problematic: tastes may be different./36/
As a rule of thumb let us now assume that the guilt/37/ is a
function/38/ of the harm, the intent and the irreversibility:
Guilt = f(Harm, Intent, Irreversibility)
This is what makes lethal violence to persons stand out: it is
irreversible./39/ We can create, but not recreate, life, a reason
why the killer of a child in some cultures had to give his own
child in return (or have it killed). Nonlethal violence also has
elements of irreversibility: wounds rarely heal completely, and
33