Paul Hopkins: An eye for an eye, and the nature of forgiveness

Seventeen years ago this month I was on a flight from Durban to Cape Town. I was on an assignment for the Irish Independent to write an overview on the first 10 years of the rainbow nation, it having thrown off the shackles of apartheid.

About 20 minutes before we landed, my attention was drawn to the passenger two rows in front; it was the billowing righthand sleeve of his jacket that aroused my interest.

My instinct was right and for the remainder of the flight, having introduced myself, I was in the company of Albie Sachs.

I mention this, because the legacy of the Troubles is news again, with Boris Johnson's move on criminal immunity and more talk of Truth & Reconciliation forums.

When you ask Albert Louis Sachs how can people forgive and forget, people who have been victims of untold violence or who have had someone snatched from them in the blink of a bomb blast, he considers his answer carefully.

“I don’t use the words either forgive or forget. When I met the man who tried to kill me, it was a very extraordinary encounter. But I don’t feel I forgave him. That was not my wish.’’

Albie Sachs is a white man. He is Jewish. That day of our first encounter he was a judge in the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

But on April 7, 1988 he was a leading member of the outlawed African National Congress (ANC), living in exile in Maputo, capital of neighbouring Mozambique.

“I was in total darkness ... I knew that something terrible had happened to me. I heard a voice saying, 'Albie, this is Eva ... you’re in hospital ... you have to face the future with courage ... your arm is in a lamentable condition. You have lost your eye'.

“And I remember saying. ‘What happened?’ And the woman’s voice answered, ‘It was a car bomb...’ .

“And I fell into a kind of sense of euphoria and joy because I knew I would live. That moment that every (opposing side) anticipates and dreams about every day ... when they come to get me, when they hit back, will I be strong, will I be courageous? Will I survive? And they had come. And I had survived ... ’’.

Albie Sachs is now 86 — an age when you would think it

was time to take things easier. But since retiring, 12 years ago, from his demanding role in South Africa’s Constitutional Court, this quiet-spoken son of immigrant Lithuanian parents, pandemic not withstanding, still crosses continents addressing nations on how to build bridges after political conflict has deeply divided the people of such nations.

Sachs is no stranger to Northern Ireland, having been a regular there since the early 1970s when he was living in exile in Britain and the ANC had frequent contacts with the IRA. He was there for the Good Friday Agreement. And again in 2013 when I interviewed him more fully. The apartheid agent who took Albie Sachs’ right arm and eye from him that day in 1988 went to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission when it opened in 1996. “I met him again after that,’’ Sachs told me in Belfast. “And I told him I couldn’t shake his hand when I had first met him but, having gone to the commission, he had now given something to the future of our country. I did shake his hand this time but it wasn’t an act of forgiveness on my part — it was an act of acknowledgement that he had done something. He’d had the courage to come to me and look me in the eye.

“He’s not my friend. If I sat next to him on a bus I’d be curious to know how he was getting on but I wouldn’t ask him out for a meal though I feel I can live in the same country as him.

“I feel we’ve become in-compatriots.’’

On that flight to Cape Town 17 years ago, I asked Albie Sachs: "Was it worth it?"

“Sure, sometimes I miss my former self, the seriousness of that young lawyer, the sense of strain and endeavour, the hopeful radiance that used to infuriate my middle-class friends, convinced that it invited martyrdom rather than glory ... and then they felt proved right when the car bomb came...

“To this day they look without looking, and ask without asking ... Was it worth it? Yes, for we have achieved so much.”