Rwanda and the Devil: Letter to The Walrus

July/August 2009

Beyond Evil
Thank you for Alice Mukarurinda’s story of tragedy and reconciliation in Rwanda (“No Small Mercy,” May). It is perfectly understandable that she should tell her children that “the devil came to Rwanda,” but there is nothing supernatural about what happened fifteen years ago in Central Africa. It was less a story of divine good versus evil than a story of very human manipulation and fear, a descent into momentary madness. The fraction of the Hutu population that took up machetes against their countrymen (estimated at less than 20 percent) were, like Alice’s attacker, terrified by the approaching Rwandan Patriotic Front army of Paul Kagame, an army that would later exact its own UN-documented toll on Hutu civilians. This does not by any means excuse or diminish the horror of the 1994 genocide, but it does make it “our” story, not the devil’s. And it also helps to explain why reconciliation in Rwanda will be an excruciatingly difficult and lengthy process.

Claude Adams
Producer, Out of the Darkness
Surrey, BC

See the full Walrus article

"Word Makers of War"--A Plea for Pacifism

Think about this:

On Page 2 of Nicholson Baker's profoundly counter-intuitive book "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization" we find this, the opening lines of a pacifist play, Jeremiah, by Stefan Zweig:

"I had recognized the foe that I was to fight--fake heroism that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military who, boldly promising victory, prolong the war, and behind them the hired chorus, the 'word makers of war' as Werfel has pilloried them in his beautiful poem."

Word makers of war. I love it, and seek out Franz Werfel and his poem. Werfel, a pacifist charged with treason, published a book of poems in 1919 entitled Der Gerichtag (The Day of Judgement) which contained a poem with this title. (Another possible translation is "Propagandists of War" but I like "word makers" better.) I think of jingoists and sabre-rattlers, and the purveyors of death myths, starting with Homer--"It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country."--and including Rupert Brooke --"There shall be/ In that rich earth a richer dust conceal'd."

Werfel's poem, clumsily translated, contains these lines:

"The fools are babbling and the overambitious are croaking
And they call manliness their old excrements.
Just so that the fat women are yearning for them,
The chest full of medals
Is vaulting into dawn."

Another more powerful poem, called "The War," was written in the first months of WW1:

"On a storm of false words.
The head wreathed by empty thunder,
Sleepless from lies,
Girded with deeds which only do themselves,
Bragging with sacrifices,
Unpleasing, terrible for Heaven--That's the way you are going down,
Time . . . "

And I think of the Christie Blatchfords of the world, filling the heads of infantrymen on the way to Afghanistan with "empty thunder" and praising the generals (and presumably, the politicians behind them) who lead our soldiers to war, and to death, on foreign soil. Word makers of war.

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And here is Chris Hedges, reviewing a new book, The Photographer, in the New York Times Review of Books:

"It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. 'The Photographer' is one . . .

"The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like (author Didier) Lefebvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? . . . How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd?"

Maybe we would have more clarity and honesty about war as "an instrument of virtue" if the word makers, the writers and combat correspondents, embedded themselves with the powerless, rather than with the soldiers. Alas, embedding with the victims isn't sexy, and it exposes one to the real mortal danger of war.

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The virtuous war, the good war, is a pervasive myth. WW 2 was "good." Vietnam was "bad." (All lost wars are bad.) Equally pervasive is the myth that war is necessary.

Here is an excerpt from Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering; Death and the American Civil War". A war, by the way, that left 620,000 men dead on the battlefields, more than the combined dead of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, WW1, WW2 and the Korean War.

"Death created the modern American union--not just by ensuring national survival, but by shaping enduring national structures and commitments . . . Americans had to identify--find, invent, create--the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives--and deaths--at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture.

"The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking."

Note the message behind these sweeping sentences: War creates a sense of nationhood. Is this true? It's an unsettling thought: Nationhood at a cost of half a million lives. And what kind of nation does this blood-flood produce? A nation of graves? A nation, perhaps, that embraces war as a viable instrument of nation-building? Destruction as a means of creation. "To save the village, it was necessary to destroy it." It's the kind of logic one wants to run away from.

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Notes from the breadline . . .

OK, so I'm not on the breadline. Yet. But I wanted to get your attention. I don't stand in line for free bread. I still buy my peasant bread for $12 a loaf from Floran, my Transylvanian baker in Kitsilano. But I ration myself to one slice a day. Things are getting tough. I'm into my sixth month of unemployment. My allotment of UI cheques runs out next month. I'm down to my last 8K in savings. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I bought a lottery ticket. I lost. I wake up every morning at six in a funk. How many days have I got left before the entire superstructure of my life comes crashing down? Okay, that's melodramatic. I'm in a semi-dream state, and in that state, everything is ragged. But the dread of joblessness is beginning to consume me. As Slappy White said: "The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you're on the job."

First, a little bit about myself. I'm 60 and in great health. I'm presentable. I have a resume to die for. Check it out. I have hair, I look okay in a suit, and I know which fork to use at a dinner table. There are a dozen things I can do well, for money (and benefits.) But I'm not doing them. What's that all about? My savings are running out and my credit cards are maxed and that Sour Hour between six and seven in the morning is getting worse. The walls are closing in. I'm getting defensive. (Notice how I emphasized my "great" health after I told you I'm 60.)

Have another look at the picture above. I believe that's Justice in the breadline. Justice is going begging. It's the damned unfairness of it all. I feel myself shrinking. "Unemployment," said Mason Cooley, "diminishes people." I put on my ego in the morning and it doesn't fit anymore. The other day I was helping my son Gabriel mow a neighbor's lawn--he's trying to start a gardening business--and I thought: "Hey, maybe I could do this, for eight bucks an hour." From Visiting Professor to the common vetch (a garden weed) in five years; how the worm has turned.

So I went to Poynter Online, and read Colleen's Help Column. And one of her many pieces of Advice to the Jobless is "Keep a Journal." It's a way of staying in touch with yourself, or reminding yourself that you're moving ahead. Also, it's a way of taking those daily quantum units of job-search frustration, reducing them to a few simple words and then dismissing them as insignificant. To be honest, there's also a bit of petulance at work there: Look, cruel world, what you have reduced me to!

It's also something to do. It's Defoe's Plague Diary. Notes of a Fan. Chronicles of Wasted Time.

So here's my journal. I'll try to keep it simple. No chewing of the furniture, no eruptions of hurt or rage. You'll have to read the sentiment between the lines. And you'll know that when it ends (if it ends?) I'll have found work and my Seldon Crisis will be over. (Seldon Crisis: See Isaac Asimov.)

Thursday, May 21, 2002

Start day by checking email. A woman with information about my proposed documentary (hereafter referred to as PD) has contacted me on Facebook. She wants more detail about my project. I tell her we should communicate by email, because Facebook is "too public." (I've been working on my PD for three months--more about that later.)

I spend five minutes emailing the head of the media department at a local university. Do they have any openings for media trainers, or teachers for that matter? I go through the daily Media Job Search Canada listings. Example: "Senior Network Analyst, CBC Montreal" I do a quick scan of Jeff Gaulin's Jobsite. It's a desert out there. I have breakfast (single slice of peasant bread, buttered) and read about a journalist who wrote a book, made some money, and decided to travel the US with a pool hustler for a year, looking for action.

Yesterday, on the advice of a newspaper buddy, I wrote a short note to a high-profile PR company, telling them a bit about me, and asking about media training jobs. I'll be happy to get so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. You have to understand that I've been doing this daily, for months, and only one in 12 prospective employers even go to the effort of telling you they're received your application. (Here you'll have to read between the lines to sample my emotion.)

Monday, May 25

While bottom-feeding, came across an online men's magazine called JimberJaw that's looking for hip, edgy, sexy articles on such soul-catching subjects as Where to Pick up Girls, Where to Find a Great Cigar, and New Gadgets the New Male Can't Do Without. (JimberJaw is a caveman who's brought to life after being frozen for 50,000 years, and the publication admires his "simple thinking"--all he apparently wants is a Bud, a broad and a gadget) I enquire about such things as payment, kill fee, expenses, etc. The answer comes quickly "$25 per article--300 words. No kill fee. Payment only for articles accepted." I'm surprised they don't offer payment in the form of flints, or a jawbone . . . Gardening is sounding like more of an option every day.

Also inquired about a British-based website that specializes in "wind power and other alternative energy" stories, and is looking for somebody, anywhere, a self-starter, to work for 2 days a week. They promise "competitive" wages. I sent them my CV and my day rate. Haha.

Sunday, June 14

Maybe I should just roll with it. John Patrick Shanley, speaking at a commencement ceremony, says that you just need to tell everybody that you're a poet. Copy Walt Whitman. "Whitman never worked a day in his life." Instead of sweating in the unemployment line, sit under a tree and compose a verse. Presto: You are living gainfully. You are adding to the fluency and harmony of the cosmos. As someone else said, reality is only a matter of how you language it.

Saturday, August 1

Month and a half since the last posting, and little change. No movement on the documentary, no interest in Alkali Lake (unless you count $75 from The Tyee as interest), and little progress in the Sydney Banks retrospective. His "stakeholders" want a budget for a legacy video, but I'm getting silence from Bill. Driving me up the wall. Meanwhile, I wait for the Mary Aikins at Readers Digest to respond to a pitch on three stories: Jade (a pickup from BC Business), Alkali and Banks. But it's like glaciers moving. Nobody responds to anything. My rage is building. Magi thinks I'm falling apart--her theory is I'm looking for "no parking." I have to open up and allow success to come in! Meanwhile, the vault is almost empty. And I've emailed The Chelsea tenants to sound them out on buying the condo . . .

Just another "bad" Indian?

Christopher Pauchay, the Saskatchewan man who left his two young children to freeze to death on a native reserve in 2008, begins a three-year penitentiary term this month. That makes him a “criminal” under Canadian law, subject to all the sanctions that come with this label. But to a small group of people close to him, and to a growing number of Canadians who believe in restorative justice, Pauchay is less a criminal than a victim—a man in need of healing, not hard time.

Prison, they believe, may only criminalize Pauchay further. And a prison term won’t do anything to repair the physical and emotional scars that his homicidal carelessness left on the Yellow Quill First Nation. That healing work will have to wait at least until Pauchay is released. "How,” asked elder Howard Walker, “can we begin a community healing if we are apart from one another – if he's not here with us?"

A select group of two dozen neighbors—in a sense, a jury of Pauchay’s peers—believed in their hearts that they had a a better, more remedial alternative to prison. They were turned away because, some critics say, our justice system is myopic when it comes to aboriginal culture. We are fixated on punishment rather than restoring.

This is not an easy position to advance. What Pauchay did on the weekend of Jan. 27, 2008, was repugnant on so many levels. After an evening of heavy drinking, Pauchay, the only parent at home, carried his two young children—Kaydance, 3, and Santana, 1—outside in freezing winter weather. We still don’t know why. The children were dressed only in shirts and diapers.

Pauchay says he remembers nothing else. He was found incoherent and nearly frozen to death on a neighbor’s doorstep. Early afternoon the next day, from his hospital bed, he asked about his daughters. A few hours later, searchers found Santana’s body in the snow. They found Kaydance 16 hours later, also frozen.

Pauchay is an alcoholic. He has 51 prior criminal convictions. Before sentencing him, Provincial Court Judge Robin Morgan said the accused lacked “insight” into the reasons for his anti-social behavior. He is clearly not a model citizen. And he’s not wise to the ways of the non-aboriginal world. He told the judge that even though he was in a drunken stupor when he lost his children in the -50C degree night, their death was an “accident.” And he compounded the mistake by telling the judge that “jail isn’t the place for me.”

These statements may not be “insightful,” to a judge’s ear, but they are very likely true. Nobody doubted that Pauchay loved his kids and that he had absolutely no intention of harming them. And prison probably won’t cure his addictions. (Addiction programs in prison are voluntary.) But under our justice system, Pauchay’s kind of truth-telling didn’t help his cause. Judges and juries would rather hear remorse and some earnest self-recrimination. We like to believe that even addicts make free choices between right and wrong, for which they must be held accountable. But Pauchay didn't buy into that, and it cost him.

In the end, with everything stacked against him, and facing a malevolent white population, Pauchay considered himself lucky to get three years. He could have gotten seven.

Some say he shouldn’t have gotten a day.

Simon Fraser University Criminologist Liz Elliott told me the three-year sentence was counter-productive and short-sighted, catering to a “macho politics of longer, tougher stiffer sentences.” (Disclosure: Neither Elliott or I attended Pauchay’s trial, or the sentencing.)

In a kinder, more compassionate universe, Pauchay would have been handed over to his neighbors, as they requested. He would have undergone treatment under their care, and been required to work with tribal elders to counsel young natives tempted by drugs and alcohol.

That was the recommendation of a Yellow Quill sentencing circle—a form of restorative justice in which friends, family and tribal elders come together to help “heal” one of their own. After all, Pauchay was a product of a seriously troubled community, riven by unemployment, alcoholism, and a host of other problems.

So the people of Yellow Quill suggested a life sentence of healing and counselling, under their watchful eyes. Pauchay, they said, had already been punished enough. In the words of Yellow Quill Chief Larry Cashene: “The moment Christopher woke up (after his children’s death) was the moment he started his sentence.”

They spoke of forgiveness, rather than punishment. The judge thanked them. And he sent Pauchay to prison anyway.

“It was a slap in the face,” George Peequaquat, one of Christopher’s neighbors, said of the three-year sentence. “They said, we’re going to let you go through the motions, but we’ve already made our decision.”

The Yellow Quill natives, and Pauchay’s lawyer, Ron Piche, have to choose their words carefully. Judges in Canada don’t take kindly to criticism. But the general feeling is that Pauchay was condemned as much by the force of popular feeling among the non-aboriginal community, as by his negligence.

Even before the trial started, Provincial Justice Minister Don Morgan told the Saskatchewan legislature that it would be “highly troubling” if someone with Pauchay’s record received anything less than a prison term.

With that kind of political interjection, it’s hardly surprising that the feeling among Saskatchewan’s non-aboriginal community took on a vigilante tone. The CBC website received more than 800 comments about the story of his sentencing, many of them of the “throw-away-the-key” variety. Some of the comments were borderline lynch-mob.
(http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2009/03/06/sk-pauchay-sentence.html)
Canadians, it seems, are fiercely wedded to their concepts of retributive justice. “No more chances,” was one typical remark. “Protect the rest of us from him.”

But some commentators watching the news from a distance took a different line. In Carcross, Yukon, Harold Gatensby, a long-time proponent of aboriginal justice, labelled the judge’s decision an act of “interference.”

“The struggles going on in the native community that were generated by the Queen’s Law, will not be fixed by it,” he told me. “The community will (fix the struggles.) These are our children, not the government’s.”

In an email, the criminologist Liz Elliott said a prison sentence may provide immediate public gratification. But what happens down the road? “When Christopher Pauchay is released from prison," she said, " with all of the new problems he will have to contend with, it is highly unlikely that anyone from the court will be there to help him and the Yellow Quill community with his reintegration, or with the obvious meaningful changes that need to occur for that community to become healthy.”

She said the annual cost of $80,000 to keep Pauchay behind bars would be much better spent on alleviating the conditions in native communities like Yellow Quill, a hamlet of 120 families who live in conditions that you find in some Third World countries.

THE GET-TOUGH FALLACY

Critics of our existing justice system say that the people demanding longer, harsher sentences are ignoring an important fact: Tough justice doesn’t make for safer communities. Even a two-time Commissioner of Correctional Services, Ole Ingstrup. admitted that the deterrent value of more and longer prison sentences was almost non-existent. Ingstrup retired in 2000, criticized for his “liberal” views regarding incarceration and his embrace of the idea of restorative justice.

Nevertheless, we as a society remain locked in the belief that the answer to reducing crime is to throw more people behind bars for longer periods. In Saskatchewan, natives make up a tenth of the general population, but more than two-thirds of the prison population. That’s a shocking statistic—it says as much about the failure of “white” justice as it does about aboriginal criminality. And more than half of those inmates go back into prison within four years of their release. We are creating an entire criminalized culture.

In his book American Furies, journalist Sasha Abramsky focuses on the US penal system, but some of his most damning conclusions apply equally well to Canada. “Can a country’s democratic institutions survive,” he asks, “when the primary emotion underlying so much of its social policy . . . is revenge?”

Other critics of the justice system say that by advocating tougher sentences, we are worshipping at the “church of payback” with little concern about how the conditions in our institutions affect inmates.

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, said the state needs prisons because it’s the best way “to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.” Prisons are places where the “civil servants of moral orthopedics” can better perform “experiments” on men and women. Their inability to rehabilitate doesn’t matter. The prisons are monuments to the state’s monopoly on power, warehouses of human failure, and even though they don’t “help” inmates, they help us, the grateful voters, to sleep a little easier, at least for a while. Says Liz Elliott: “Punishment is for everybody else.”

THE HISTORY OF CIRCLES

Sentencing circles aren’t that new. In fact, they’ve been a part of Canadian law since 1996. That’s when the government began funding the circles as part of an Aboriginal Justice Strategy. And that’s when the Supreme Court of Canada spoke positively about the “notions of community-based sanction and restorative justice.”

Other voices echoed that sentiment. The Law Commission of Canada, for one, took aboriginal culture into consideration when it acknowledged in 1999 that under the existing Criminal Code “crime is objectified and abstracted from the social context in which it took place.” In other words, crime is of the community, and may be dealt with in and by the community.

Indeed, preferential sentencing is in the Criminal Code. Section 718.2(e) says that "all available sanctions other than imprisonment that are reasonable in the circumstances should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders."

And Judge Barry Stuart, a vocal proponent of aboriginal-sensitive justice who has conducted hundreds of sentencing circles, said that circle sentencing and other community justice processes “do spectacularly better than formal justice agencies.”

So why, then, are native Canadians like Pauchay, so needing of restorative help, still thrown into prison? Because judges still have the final word of punishment, because paternalism is still entrenched in law, as it is in most of the institutions that touch on aboriginal life.

Rupert Ross is an Ontario prosecutor who has made a life study of the aboriginal way of justice. In his highly-regarded book Returning to the Teachings, Ross says we do an injustice to law-breakers, native or otherwise, when he deal with them strictly as “offenders.”

Ross argues from the perspective of 21 years of court duty in the remote First Nations of northwestern Ontario. There he found social traumatization that was so severe, and so pervasive, that he came to believe that the criminal justice system as we know it may actually be an obstacle to community healing. He blames the legacy of the residential schools and other forms of colonization for the alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse in native communities. He won't comment on the Pauchay case, but he believes that the corrosive effect of colonization is transmitted through generations. (Or as Murray Ironchild expressed it: "We didn't commit a sin, but it was passed through us . . . by the priests and the Indian agents.")

“I don’t know how to lock up and torture only the ‘offender-parts’ of people,” Ross writes, “while comforting the hurt parts, teaching the curious parts, nourishing the starved parts, unearthing the hidden parts, emboldening the cautious parts, and inspiring the dreaming parts.

“I worry that whatever I do to the offender-part will make it harder still to touch and encourage all the others, much less restore balances between them.”

Balancing all the parts of Christopher Pauchay, the damaged parts and those still intact, will require a mix of compassion, firmness, continuity, trust and love.

Those are things he won’t find in the nation’s prisons. But he may find them in his community. As a nation, we’ve already taken the first tentative steps towards a system of justice that meets aboriginal needs, a system that’s humane enough to see that Pauchay is a victim, as much as wrong-doer. Why undermine those strategies now?