Remember the Victims – Forget the Evil

The ways to reconciliation, no matter how real they are, can only be like overgrown paths or lines on navigation maps, if they are not followed. Memories could be like the meadows along those paths - of various colors and smells but still wild, uncultivated and unpredictable, if they are not cultivated, which implies that something is grown on them, but something, if not quite uprooted, at least not nourished, something remembered, and something forgotten, because it would only make sense to talk about culture, that is, the cultivation of memory. The meetings themselves in this analogy could even be understood as comfortable highways, which still lead nowhere if people do not meet on them in sincere efforts to make peace..., while active peace initiatives would be like crossroads on those paths and roads, and personal examples would be the only sure signposts to the path, truth and life.

My reflections on bridging the divide began immediately after the demolition of the bridges in those places, especially the Old Bridge in Mostar, when my family was also destroyed, and before I was fully rebuilt. The need for wound healing appeared immediately after something was wounded that had not even been nourished yet. The paths of reconciliation were traced after the route of the war passed through our family, friendly and neighborly meetings, activities, initiatives..., trampling over some of our memories. Therefore, all this is primarily my personal bridging, my medicine, my path, my relationship to memory, my encounter with the past and my peace initiative, so it may or may not be understood as a pattern for everyone, especially not for all victims, because this process should start within the surviving victims themselves, while the stimulus from the outside, in the form of some collective pattern, can very easily be some collective manipulation... Be that as it may, the path to reconciliation and the most active silent initiative, it seemed to me, is that the child of the victims refuses to be the parent of hatred, that the priest of the self-sacrificing God does not accept to offer others on the altar, and that the member of the minority does not try to create something even worse from the possibly hostile majority: foreigners, whose language, although he understands it, he considers foreigners, whose beliefs, although he does not understand them, he considers blasphemous, and whose culture he considers to be torture. Paradoxically, it seemed to me that perhaps these are the best circumstances for the life of a Christian: no persecutions that kill and no privileges that inflate.

Encounters with others are a challenge to self-sufficiency, and sometimes they alone are sufficient for reconciliation, while sometimes they should be preceded by the encounter of a person with himself. When we meet, we unwittingly look for a place for the other, but also for who he is, facing the fact that he, like us, is in the place where God has placed him, and where we and he often search for that God. If these searches are different, it is an opportunity to face them without intermediaries and prejudices, facing our searches anew. Inter-national and inter-confessional relations in all their complexity still come down to interpersonal relations, and like all such relations, they may be insincere, but in this case only sincerity can push the boundaries.

As far as memory is concerned, I am not one of those who see in the memory of evil a special potential to prevent the same evil from being repeated, so at one time I found the catchphrase particularly intriguing in the public discourse of post-Yugoslav realities, and which is still often affirmed today: forgive but not to forget, which, although it replaced an incomparably worse one: never forgive - never forget, did not correspond very well not only with my personal experience, but much more importantly, with the experience of the Church. Both of these experiences could be summed up in the words of the famous ascetic, who teaches: In order to deserve the forgiveness of sins, some dedicated themselves to strenuous feats. But a man who does not remember evils reaches his goal before them... Not remembering evils is a sign of true repentance. (John Climacus - The Ladder, Lesson IX About Bad Memory).

Therefore, I am not one of those who see in the memory of evil and tragedies a special potential to avoid the same evil, that is, not to repeat it. That memory often appears as a bad memory, as an excuse for vindictiveness and as a potential for the victim to turn himself into a criminal, and the criminal into a victim. And so in a circle and endlessly. And then, instead of remembering the past, we live in it. Living in the present, we should remember the victims, but not the evil. Therefore, the culture of memory should be the cultivation of the content of memory, which means that when processing memories we remember something, but also forget something, which implies a certain culture of forgetting. This forgetting is not some pathological suppression of memory, nor traumatic amnesia, but the consequence of not giving importance to something that we should forget, so that it disappears from our life as unimportant. Because what we remember we keep alive. That is why in the Church we constantly mention the names and pray for the eternal memory of the people we care about, so that even after death we would preserve them in our own, but what is even more important, in God's memory, which can then make them immortal. In the church, we also pray for our sins to be forgiven, just as we forgive our debtors, where truly forgiving someone's sin also means forgetting it, not misremembering it. If those persons became victims of someone's and someone else's evil, then we should try to remember the victims, while we forget the evil, which is not easy, but not impossible. By forgiving, we forget evil, which in us can not only cause feelings of hatred, but also the possibility that through revenge and by retaliating evil, we become criminals ourselves.

Therefore, I see as one of the main possible ways of reconciliation in bridging divisions and the healing process: remember the victims - forget the evil!

Deacon Branislav Rajković