Friday, November 1, 2013

How Far Does Forgiveness Extend?

Spiegel Online has a story that raises one of the greatest moral dilemmas a person--a victim--could face.  It is the story of one of the former warlords in Liberia, Joshua Milton Blahyi (aka, "General Butt Naked"), who believes that he was responsible for at least 20,000 deaths and countless other atrocities. In a just society, he would have been executed as a mass murderer and war criminal. Yet, today, he is a Christian priest who tries to find his victims and seek their forgiveness.

Blahyi had a reputation for being more brutal than other military leaders. Everyone knows his nom de guerre, which he says he will never lose: General Butt Naked. He was a cannibal who preferred to sacrifice babies, because he believed that their death promised the greatest amount of protection. He went into battle naked, wearing only sneakers and carrying a machete, because he believed that it made him invulnerable -- and he was in fact never hit by a bullet. His soldiers would make bets on whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl, and then they would slit open her belly to see who was right.

... There are only a few people in the world accused of a similar number of murders as Blahyi. But no one responded to the accusations against him in the same way he did. Kaing Guek Eav, the head of the Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia, where about 15,000 people were tortured and murdered, referred to himself as an ordinary secretary who had obeyed orders, like everyone else in the machinery. Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, accused of acts of genocide that led to the deaths of 8,000 people in Srebrenica and 11,000 in Sarajevo, called the accusations "monstrous words" that he had never heard before. And General Augustin Bizimungu, who helped write the death lists in Rwanda, said nothing at all.

Blahyi answered each question conscientiously, even when he was asked about the taste of human flesh. The record of the hearing, in which he is confronted with his earlier statements, is kept on file in Liberia's national archive.

... Blahyi was never punished for his crimes. The Truth Commission's only mandate was to investigate the crimes. The International Criminal Court in The Hague only has jurisdiction over crimes committed since it was founded in 2002. A special tribunal with the power of prosecuting earlier crimes, like the ones for Rwanda, Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, was never established for Liberia.

... Nevertheless, Blahyi is convinced that there will eventually be a special tribunal for Liberia.

"Would you be prepared to spend the rest of your life in prison?"



"I would accept it willingly, as well as the death penalty. Even if I could run away, I would not run away. My Lord Jesus says: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's."

"How do you atone for your sins?"

"I visit the people I have hurt, the victims of my crimes. I try to help them."

"You ask for forgiveness?"

"Yes. That's the most difficult moment. I couldn't feel anything in the past. Now I feel their pain."

"What are you afraid of?"

"That I will meet the Lord tomorrow, and he will say: 'You have wasted the opportunity that I have given you.'"
While still a murderous warlord, Blahyi was approached Bishop John Kun Kun of the Soul Winning Church in Monrovia, and told him: "All I wanted to tell you is that Jesus loves you, and that he has a better plan for your life." Blahyi killed the bodyguard that let the Bishop in to see him, but met with the Bishop again to pray.

This raises the question of whether their can be forgiveness for such a monster. I believe that there must be the possibility of forgiveness from God (although Blahyi may need to answer to an Earthly tribunal--I don't think his conversion, even if true, should excuse him from the consequences of the law), or else what was Christ's sacrifice for? However, I also believe that Blahyi must now act with a goodness commensurate in magnitude to his former evil, never failing, in order to be worthy of God's mercy and grace.

It is certainly a story to make you think.

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