*POWER TRUTH POETRY*

RECONCILING WITH CENTURIES OLD oppressors in difficult. Rather, very, very difficult. Impossible?!

Could Bosnians forgive the Serbs? Will there come a day when Kashmiris are able to move on from the violence that has been visited upon them by the Indian state.

Will the Rohingyas living out there lives as refugees ever be able to reconcile with the Burmese that pushed them into the abyss of statelessness?

Have the indigenous people everywhere moved on from the horrors of colonialism?

IMAGINE - JUST IMAGINE  - spending almost 30 years in jail of one of the most  murderous and inhuman political regimes in history and then-

Choosing not vengeance but reconciliation after finally tasting freedom. Nelson Mandela did it, and spent the rest of his life urging black South Africans to forgive white supremacists that had -

Killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of ordinary blacks under the guise of the barbaric system called apartheid.

For Mandela, healing the wounds of white rule would only be possible if black [and other coloured  South Africans could pardon those functionaries of the apartheid regime that had brutalized the black majority.

This meant first and foremost that the truth be uncovered, that the perpetrators acknowledged the crimes they had committed. Only truth could make reconciliation possible.

Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is still burdened by its past.

Black majority rule has been institutionalized but the white minority is still effectively the ruling class while cultural assimilation has been hard to come by.

But truth and reconciliation, as painful as it was, allowed South Africans of all colours and creeds to collectively set into a motion a process of change that was unthinkable when Mandela exited an apartheid jail for the last time in 1990.

Truth and reconciliation would appear an urgent imperative in many parts of the world today.

As Gaza burns yet again, it is tempting to bay for Israeli blood, but as Edward Said recognised many years ago, ultimately the Israelis and the Palestinians will have to learn how to live together.

One day, whenever that maybe the truth of  Israeli crimes against humanity will have to be acknowledged so that reconciliation becomes possible.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational and Research on History, Sufferings and Forgiveness continues. !WOW! thanks, author and researcher Asasim Sajjad Akhtar