“No justice, no peace!” shout pro-Palestinian marchers moving through cities in Europe and the US. They have chanted those words and carried them aloft on placards at protests since October 7, when Hamas’s vicious attack on southern Israel provoked Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza.
It is not a new slogan but is well-suited to our times. It has a certain rhythm to it, a marching cadence that works as a call and response to help keep a crowd of demonstrators going. I’ve gone on a few marches back in the day where the slogan was chanted and picked it up myself: “No justice, no peace!” Even though it contains the slightest hint of a threat — if we don’t get justice, you don’t get peace — who could object, really?
Justice and peace are good things. Spinoza, the great Enlightenment philosopher, explicitly linked them: “Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.” Martin Luther King did too: “There can be no peace in the world unless there’s justice, and there can be no justice without peace.”
The truth is more complicated. Societies emerging from conflict are more likely to be faced with a choice: you can have peace or you can have justice, but you can hardly ever have both. I am not being cynical. This is a conclusion based on too many conversations I’ve had with people who have had to live without justice for their loved ones, so that their fellow citizens could move past conflict and know peace.
There are important questions that hover over such people. Is peace only possible if your own side wins unconditionally, or is that just victory? Victors set the rules and write post-conflict legal codes. They decide what justice looks like. But the victors’ definition of justice might not be what the vanquished consider it to be, and so the seeds are planted for the next conflict.
Does a truce or ceasefire equal peace? In the decades since the cold war ended, that has been the most common way to end a conflict. The 1995 Dayton agreement ended the Bosnian war, but it froze in place the division of the country with tensions still unresolved. There have been no more massacres, as at Srebrenica, but I’m not sure I would call dysfunctional governance there and enduring sectarian hatred “peace”.
On January 9 1998, just outside Belfast, Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Britain’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, went to the Maze prison to meet prisoners serving time for paramilitary offences. Once again the “peace” process in the restive province was stalling. For nearly five years the negotiations that held out the promise that the Troubles would end had proceeded in fits and starts. Each logjam had seen spasms of violence: ceasefires broken with bombs or executions by paramilitaries of people in their local pub. These were bloody events that put the negotiations back years.
By the start of 1998 there was broad agreement on how the political structures of a post-conflict Northern Ireland could work. The sticking point for the parties that represented the working-class communities doing the fighting was what to do about their paramilitaries serving time.
Over the 30 years the civil war raged in Northern Ireland, the paramilitary groups — or terrorists, if you prefer — in both communities had developed political parties. The leaders of those parties were participants in the negotiations and they were not going to leave their fighters in prison. The other Northern Irish party leaders in the talks were not interested in discussing the fates of these prisoners, but Mowlam understood there could never be an agreement without their assent.
She went to the Maze that day specifically to meet with loyalist paramilitaries on the Protestant side of the conflict. Her civil servants didn’t want her to go. Many of the other party leaders in the negotiations didn’t either. They thought her visit would lend legitimacy to these men. These were not cuddly fellows. She spoke with men like Michael Stone, serving six life sentences for murder, and Johnny Adair, whose nickname was “Mad Dog” for a reason. He’d led a group of paramilitaries suspected of murdering up to 40 Catholics. Adair’s crimes were not in the dim, dark past. They took place in the 1990s and Adair was only a few years into a 16-year sentence for “directing terrorism”.
There was a brief eruption of violence after Mowlam’s visit but her pledges to the paramilitaries that their concerns would be discussed in negotiations was crucial. The visit unblocked the process. Three months later, on Good Friday, an agreement was reached that ended the Troubles. Early release of republican and loyalist prisoners was one of the last details to be hashed out.
Over the next two years more than 400 “men of violence” walked free from the Maze — Protestant and Catholic, small-time and notorious. One was the IRA’s Patrick Magee, who had bombed the Brighton Grand Hotel during the Conservative party conference in 1984 killing five people. Mowlam apologised to the families of the victims of paramilitary violence for the distress she knew her meeting would cause, but added that she had a “duty to the people of Northern Ireland to use all the legitimate means in my power to ensure the peace process is taken forward”.
To gain peace for all, justice would not be done. Crimes would go unpunished. The families of the victims of violence would have to accept that. The overwhelming majority of Northern Irish society wanted peace, even at the price of getting justice. That peace has held, for the most part. A few months after the Good Friday Agreement was ratified by voters in Northern Ireland, a bomb went off in the market town of Omagh as people went about their shopping. Twenty-nine people were killed. Although the perpetrators, members of a dissident group called the Real IRA, were known, no one has ever been brought to justice for those murders. Peace grows from a fragile root and no one wanted an investigation and criminal trial to disturb it bedding down into Ulster’s soil. Only now, a quarter-century later, is the British government convening an inquiry.
All over the world, in the wake of civil wars or brutal dictatorships, there are stories of victims still waiting for justice; of victims of torture in Greece and Chile under military dictatorships who walk down the street once the juntas are overthrown and see the men who abused them sitting in cafés as though nothing had happened. For the society to make a peaceful transition away from dictatorship there could be no justice for these victims.
Sometimes war crimes are so enormous that there can be no justice proportionate to the size of the crime once peace returns. The Holocaust could not have happened without the willing participation of many people. Not just Nazi leaders but rank-and-file SS camp guards, Einsatzgruppen, ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers and many local citizens in the territories Germany conquered. When so many were involved, what justice was possible for the victims of Nazi murderers: Jews, Sinti, gay people and others?
In Getting Away With Murder(s), David Wilkinson documents quite thoroughly the lack of justice after the Holocaust. Among his interviewees is Mary Fulbrook, a professor at University College London. Fulbrook estimates that between 750,000 and a million people took active part in transporting and murdering six million European Jews and nearly 500,000 Sinti and 15,000 homosexuals. Some 99 per cent of the perpetrators never faced justice. Many SS members simply returned to their lives after the war.
In West Germany, in the 15 years after the war, an estimated 50 per cent of Federal Ministry of Justice employees had been members of the Nazi party. A good number had been involved in overseeing legal processes related to the deportations of Jews. Yet many were re-employed in the legal system because peace, or at least stability, was needed so the country could provide a bulwark against Soviet expansionism.
How did survivors and their wider communities feel about this absence of justice? At the commemoration to mark the 50th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, I stood in the small crowd at the ruins of crematorium II and listened to Holocaust survivor and Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel read a prayer he had written for the occasion:
“God of forgiveness, do not forgive the murderers of Jewish children here.” Then he described from memory frightened children being forced down the steps to the changing room and taken into gas chambers. “God, merciful God, do not have mercy on those who had no mercy on Jewish children.” This otherwise reserved and saintly man was calling down a heavenly justice on the perpetrators, because earthly justice had fallen short.
The present crisis in Gaza will ask similar questions of those charged with its resolution. When the conflict ends, and it must, who will define what justice means for crimes that were committed? After the second world war, the victors revived the International Court of Justice as a forum for cases brought by nations, not individuals, to adjudicate among other things “genocide”, a crime that had only just been identified as the scale of the Holocaust was revealed. But the term, and the laws concerning it, are in their infancy. Genocide is difficult to prove and nearly impossible to get recompense for. The recent case brought by the South African government against Israel at the ICJ for the way it is prosecuting its war against Hamas in Gaza demonstrates this.
The court found “plausibility” in South Africa’s accusation but it did not rule that Israel was in breach of the genocide convention. It did not order Israel to end its incursion into Gaza, but “provisionally” asked it to minimise civilian casualties. It asked Israeli politicians to refrain from making genocidal statements, something most Israelis and vast swaths of the Jewish diaspora wish for.
Simple ideals rarely survive their encounter with the legal and political processes necessary to make peace or justice a reality. After the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, marking the beginning of a process that could have led to a two-state solution, Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat spoke of a “peace of the brave”, not a peace of the just. For now, as the “justice” both sides are seeking is not tempered with mercy, there can be neither peace, nor justice, no matter how many miles are marched demanding both.
Michael Goldfarb reported for NPR from Northern Ireland, Iraq and Bosnia. He writes the “First Rough Draft of History” Substack
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