Perspective.

For as much as I try to put myself in the shoes of survivors of conflict there are many things that I recognise that a person like me will never fully understand without having actually having lived through it.  While we are all humans on this earth, we are humans with very different means and opportunities and outlooks.  Justice comes in many shapes and sizes.  The following is an except from a speech that Pierre Richard Prosper gave at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002.  He was a Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.  His anecdote honestly made me cry; it reinforced the fact to me that legal terms and austere tribunals often poorly capture raw tragedy.

"Just to give you an example of the mindset of some of the victims and survivors, I recall I had a witness, Witness C, as in Charlie.  He came from Taba, never left the essentially 2-mile radius.  We took him out of Taba to Kigali, which is 45-minutes away.  It was his first time ever going to Kigali.


Later that day, we took him at night and put him on our little 10-seat plane and flew him to Arusha, Tanzania.  It was his first time ever being on a plane.  I remember he said as we were taking off -- through his translator, he looked at me and said, boy, too bad it's night, you know.  I was hoping it was daylight so I can see heaven".


Is an international court a place where this fellow will find justice? Legal proceedings are not where a survivor is going to find justice.  Many other alternatives must be offered to heal a society in different ways.  The legal path is too foreign for most.