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The Norwegian Trolls have one peculiar point of vulnerability. They are endangered by sunshine. By the first glimmer of sun that might find them, they crack or turn to stone. That is the explanation of the many strange stone-formations you find if you walk in the Norwegian mountains.

The pictures of monsters are difficult to preserve if you come to know them. Ordinary acquaintance might do, or scientific one. When we understand somewhat more of people’s behaviour, particularly when, or if we are able to see ourselves in the other person’s behaviour, then the Monster dissolves.

It is obvious that none of us could have survived with a memory of all we might have remembered. It would result in an overload. We do not register all the writings on those walls we pass. And if we register them, we remember only a fragment. We are highly selective in what we see, in what we store, and in what we re-call. What is abortion to the doctor might be perceived as killing by the priest, to some women it might be a moment of great relief, to others the utmost of sin, hidden behind stone walls in the mind. We perceive selectively, we remember selectively, we recall selectively. We construct. We are human beings.

I was a child in an occupied country during World War II. I did the usual things. Followed the rules: Never fraternise with a German soldier or a Norwegian Nazi-member. There were big signs in streetcars and buses announcing that it was strictly forbidden, and punished by imprisonment, to remain standing in the carrier if there was an empty seat next to a soldier. So, I was a good Norwegian and remained standing. Nevertheless, I can not remember from the time it happened that the Jews were deported, I can not remember one single comment about it in my generally patriotic circles. The Jews were apprehended by the ordinary Norwegian police. Since they were so many, one hundred ordinary taxies were used for the transport to the ship that brought them to Germany. I suppose the drivers soon forgot this episode in their lives. When the few survivors came home from the camps, they came to a country that to some extent had forgotten that they had ever been there. And their property was mostly gone. It was not until 1996 that they – or mostly their children and grandchildren - got some decent compensation.

Silence is one of the answers to atrocities. Silence, because there is nobody around to listen. Isolation of the victim is one of the major features in social systems where illegitimate violence is applied. The mechanism can be observed in cases of battered women. Husbands in such cases tend to isolate wife and children, see to it that they have no close friends or relatives near by. Kids are not allowed to bring friends home. There is nobody to tell. Or maybe nothing to tell. The dinner was not ready when he came home that day or the meat not quite tender. Maybe the husband had reasons for his anger. Her intellectual need for an explanation is directed towards her own deficiencies and silences her protest. To change this, it is essential that she comes out of the isolation and gets access to an audience that will not strengthen her man’s definition of the situation.

So also in concentration camps. Those unable to see themselves as enemies of the oppressors seemed to be worse off than militant opponents supporting a cause. They had nothing to say, except that it all was a terrible misunderstanding. But most prisoners struggled to break the silence, to convey the truth to those outside the camps.

The milk-bucket from the ghetto in Lodz is a moving example. Lodz is the big industrialised city roughly halfway between Krakow and Warsaw. Throughout all the turmoil in the ghetto, a newspaper was printed there every day, in three copies. A few days before the last major transport left in 1944, one copy of all the volumes was hidden in a bucket, buried, regained after the war, and then published in the terrible/wonderful book by Lucjan Dobroszycki: "The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944" (Yale University Press 1984). The victims got a voice here.

There is no end to attempts by oppressors to silence their victims. Nor is there an end to the continuous struggles to break the silence. To me, Mauricio Rosencoff is a prime example. He is from Uruguay. For eleven years he - and ten other men - were kept under complete isolation by the military junta of the country. International attention prevented their killing, but not the torture and the totality of their isolation. For periods of time, they got nearly no water. To survive, they had to drink their own urine. To survive as human beings, nearly all of them engaged in some sort of artistic activity. The one who did not turned insane, just as intended by the junta. Mauricio Rosencoff wrote poetry in his head. At one stage, he got hold of a piece of a pencil and little by little he was able to smuggle out his poems on small bits of paper. When he was released, he found he had become a famous poet in Uruguay. "They treated us as dogs," said Mauricio. "But we did not bark back." Mauricio took part in a seminar on torture in Oslo. So did a man who had acted as a torturer in Uruguay. One day this man was given the task to work on a person from his own street. He saw a man like himself, and fled the country. After the seminar, Mauricio and the former torturer went out for a coffee.

Not far from Krakow is Auschwitz and, next to that, one the major death-camps, Birkenau. Where the railway-tracks ends in Lager Birkenau, a gallows was raised after World War II. Here they hanged the Commander.

I have never been able to understand it. One life against one and a half million! One broken neck against all these suffocated, starved to death, or plainly killed in that camp. To me, the execution became a sort of denigration of the 1.5 million victims. Their worth became, for each of them, 1.5 millionth of the worth of the Commander.

But what else could be done? So asked my Polish colleagues when, a long time ago, I revealed my doubts. And I had no answer, except this: Maybe a trial had to be carried out. Day after day, survivors would have to reveal what happened. All sorts of victims would have to express their despair, rage and wish for vengeance. The Commander would also express his position, his reasons then, and now, in front of the survivors and his judges.

But then, for the judge, if he was a free judge and not only an executioner hired by the rulers, what should he in the end decide?

One possibility, and that would be my preference, would be that he should express as follows to the Camp-Commander: You have clearly done it. You have administered the death of more than a million human beings. You are guilty. Your acts are morally repulsive to an extent beyond what can be imagined. We have heard it. Everyone in the civilized world will get to know about your horrible acts carried out at this horrible place. No more can be said and done. Go away in shame.

But of course, I know that could not happen. I had, in the beginning of the 1960s long talks with professor Batawia in Warsaw. He was professor in forensic psychiatry, and had carried out long conversations with the commander of one of the large concentration camps, I have forgotten which one, it was probably Rudolf Höss. We compared notes. I had worked in the same field, interviewing guards who tortured and killed in Nacht und Nebel (Night- and Fog-) camps in the North of Norway. We found that we had two common experiences. First, neither of us had met any monsters from the camps. Bad news for those hoping to find beasts behind the atrocities; by and large they are not there. Secondly, neither the Polish, nor the Norwegian society was particularly interested in getting aquainted with our results. Batawia was flatly forbidden to publish, my small articles were ignored. It was not until a new generation had grown up that I could publish the whole report in the form of a book. With closeness to the atrocities, it was revenge that was asked for, not analysis.

But nonetheless, they might have been right, those who hung the commander. They did not only hang the commander, but a whole system. His broken neck symbolised a broken idea. It was the nazi-ideology that was hanged in those gallows. Societies need clear and fast answers when their most fundamental values have been under attack such as in the nazi area.

I agree, of course I agree, how could I not. But nonetheless, in a little corner of my sociological conscience lurk some doubts. We kill the commander, yes. We even killed the major initiators after Nuremberg. We exterminate the evil ideas and their major carriers, swiftly, unanimously. We make it crystal-clear that certain acts, -genocide and extermination of unwanted minorities, are crimes so far out that no mercy is possible. My doubts are only: Do we thereby hit the whole target? By hanging the commander and also those bosses in Nüremberg, a good feeling of accomplishment was created; vengeance, often called justice, is carried out but, at the same time, the discussion of related phenomena is effectively cut off.

The commander was guilty and from a legal perspective he certainly deserved his destiny. But nonetheless, at the very same time he also functioned as a scapegoat, as did his chiefs who were hanged in Nüremberg. Behind them were some untamed forces protected by the penal actions against their carriers. Atrocities, when met with individual punishments might prevent the development of a more full understanding of these forces and of the phenomena in general. It was not until 1989 that we got into the deep layers of understanding of the concentration camps with Zygmunt Baumans book on "Modernity and the Holocaust."

By hanging commanders, and while the judges in Nüremberg focused on finding personal guilt for atrocities, other phenomena were left in peace, left to grow. Three themes were not discussed in Nüremberg:

• Dresden

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki

• The GULAGs

Dresden was made into a no-town in less than 24 hours, and with at least 135,000 victims. It has later been difficult to find rational military reasons for their extinction.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were made into churchyards with one atom bomb to each town. The reasons behind these mass-killings of civilians seem unclear. But no one - even if they tried - could have raised the question in Nuremberg or before any other international court. It has been difficult to find rational military reasons for what happened. A better-founded hypothesis seems to be that the dropping of the bombs was intended as a sign of warning to the USSR, a glorious introduction to the cold war.

And then there are the GULAGs. Of course they could not be discussed in Nuremberg with a prominent Russian among the judges. But while they decided on death in Nuremberg, the GULAGs bulged.

But by hanging the individuals most closely related to the atrocities, we re-establish certain standards. We teach everybody a lesson. Mass-killers will end in the gallows. Maybe we are preventing other people from going into the service of evil forces.

These are the conventional arguments for all severe punishments. And I am afraid they have even less validity here than in more ordinary cases. Perpetrators of this type of evil act see themselves as servants of states, most often of national states surrounded by aggressors. Or they are just functionaries, as Adolph Eichman in his office. Or they see themselves as soldiers in an inevitable and also just war, as when secret forces from Israel kill or kidnap persons far outside the border of the Middle East. In my country, we shot the chief-traitor Vidkun Quisling after World War II. It is not reasonable to think that this will influence the next potential traitor. The situation will be another, the cause will be another. And the next person in, he will, while he acts, see himself as an obvious winner. It is the bandits on the other side, who will be brought to court.

The Nuremberg court was clearly a court established by the winners. It was a military court, and international only in the sense that the four judges came from the four major countries that defeated Germany. And it was a court deciding over an enemy that had suffered total defeat.

In more recent attempts to establish international standards, this is to some extent changed. Some courts have gone international. The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague is the most recent example. The International Criminal Court will come into action when 60 countries have ratified. Up to January 2002, 40 have done so. These are or will be civil courts with judges and prosecutors from several different countries. This represents long steps forward, compared to Nuremberg.

And certainly, in contrast to what has happened in Afghanistan, proceedings before an International penal court would have been highly preferable. With an international a court in action, the arguments for sending suspects to The Hague rather than bombs to Afghanistan would have been obviously strengthened. An International Court would have helped towards more civil ways of handling this conflict.

Such a court might also have calmed the wild demands for vengeance that appeared after September 11th. We might have prevented an Afghanistan in even more ruins than before. And we might have evaded the later developments in the creation of military courts, and also prisons as those constructed on the US-base in Cuba, and the degradation ceremonies carried out on the prisoners held there. The danger in further escalation of the conflict is also obvious with Iran, Iraq and Sudan as possible next targets. In Colombia, the ultimate goal for the US-military build-up seems slowly to become converted from a war against drugs to a war against terrorists.

As it all develops, September 11th is step-by-step converted to a war against those resisting the West. Access to an International Penal Court might have helped to prevent this development.

But some basic problems with penal courts remain.

While I was first preparing this essay, in the spring 2001, Yugoslavian authorities were under enormous pressure to send Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Milosevic was at that point in prison in Belgrade, waiting for trial. If the government sent him to The Hague, they would receive money from the West to rebuild the country. If they only brought him to court at home, they would receive nothing. They sent him, and received a promise of money the next day. 11.9 billion dollars against one piece Milosevic. It happened on June 28th, the very same day that Serbs commemorate the catastrophy in a war against the Turks in the 14^th Century. The prosecution raised the claim to get Milosevic to The Hague before the NATO-war against Yugoslavia had come to an end. It seems probable that these claims prolonged the war. After the war, the claims from the prosecutor have created considerable internal instability in the country. The president of the Yugoslavia was strongly against the deportation. The Supreme Court of Yugoslavia had not finished its discussion on the legality of the case. The same turmoil, for the same reasons, takes place in Croatia.

In addition to these concrete problems, three principal problems mar the international courts of the type we find in The Hague:

First: Western legal order emphasises values of being sentenced by equals and according to laws given by elected representatives. Even within the most tranquil among national states, these values are not always adhered to. Or maybe I should rather say; they are never fully realised. Jury-members as well as judges are nearly always older, better educated, and of more prominent class-background than those they are to decide over. Laws are mostly better suited to control the poor than the rich, and to control those without power more than those with power, and they are given by and for the more successful citizens of the population.

With international courts or tribunals, it is even more difficult to play according to the basic rules of the game. It will not be a drama according to national laws, it will not be a trial carried out by national judges, and it will not be trial by an ordinary jury. In my little country, 80,000 collaborators were convicted after World War II. Of course no nazi members served as prosecutors, jury-members or judges. Such people were by definition not worth listening to. The winners decide the aftermath of wars. There was never much talk about Genocide when Europe took hold of Africa and America. It was not until quite recently there appeared claims from Africans and Indians for Truth-Commissions. The break with normal procedure is both inevitable and desirable when a dictator from a terror-regime is brought before the international court. But it becomes a burden to the legitimacy of the international court in cases where the suspect comes from a more ordinary functioning state.

Second: Values of impartiality and fairness are emphasised in Western legal systems. Equality is here an important element. Equal results in equal cases. But equality not only in what comes out of court, but also in what goes in. Again, this is an ideal not always adhered to in national courts; it might sometimes prove less risky to rob a bank than rob a cashier. But international courts have extraordinary problems. Large and powerful states, and small with good connection to the large ones, are better protected against being brought before international courts than small states without power and/or with miserable connections to the great powers. It was the total losers that were hanged in Nuremberg. When the International Criminal Court comes into being, new problems will arise. Turks might be expected there, due to their treatment of Kurds. Some might expect Sharon for both old and new acts, and not only asked for by Belgian courts. Some Russian generals might also be asked to come to answer for their methods in Tsjetsjenia.

The third problem with the international courts is the question of relevance. To create equality, lawyers have strong wishes to eliminate what shall be discussed in courts, to concentrate on certain elements. But international courts are close to international politics. Sharon will claim that his state was in danger, his acts must be seen as an answer to this. Milosevic will – if he decides to defend himself before a court he claims is illegal - probably say that the Kosovo-Albanians were trained and supported by CIA, and that the whole NATO operation was intended to weaken Yugoslavia and give access to territories further East in Europe. But courts are badly suited to handle such statements. They will retreat to questions of relevance and, just as in ordinary court-cases, not allow what the accused persons see as their most important arguments. But thereby they also expose their basic weakness in telling us what happened.

I have no definite answers to the problems here raised. What I can not hide, and will not hide, is ambivalence, bordering to scepticism, regarding international penal law as answers to atrocities. Penal law always creates restrictions on the flow of information, and is therefore not the best instrument to clarify what happened. International penal law is inevitably the law of the winners, and therefore of dubious utility in attempts to create social peace. It is an instrument to describe parts of what happened in the past. But we need systems that look forward. We need instruments that both clarify the past and help the future. Systems for truth and reconciliation might be one answer.

There is nothing mysterious here, only systematic attempts to break silence, combined with trust in the strength of truth. Bishop Tutu was central in creating an arena for exposure in South Africa. People forced into unbelievable degradations in the form of physical and mental pain, were given the opportunity to tell their stories. They could do so eye-to-eye with their oppressors. And what is essential, independent of all the critique that has also hit the commissions: they were given the opportunity to concentrate on what they had seen, what they had experienced, and not on the matter of revenge, particularly not on the task of getting anybody formally sentenced.

Some of these were also essential elements in the situation of the oppressors. Mostly they appeared before the Truth Commission as an alternative to being brought into a penal court. When they talked, they talked under stress. And they had much to defend: self-respect, honour. But they had agreed to break the silence, to participate, to expose what they knew. And they could talk in a frame that was not determined by legal constraints.

Did they tell the truth?

We will never be able to know. But we can compare two systems. We can compare the Truth Commissions to the ordinary penal courts, and ask: what type of information comes out of these two social systems, what sort of answers to atrocities do they produce?

Several elements are clearly different.

First, the goals of the whole operation are basically different. Penal law is oriented towards finding responsibility or guilt. This has consequences for the pattern of thinking within the institution. Penal law is build up on dichotomies, guilty or not guilty. A decision "half guilty" does not count. It is the decision of either-or that counts. Truth Commissions are, in a way, relieved of the dichotomies. They can think in continuums; it was bad what he did, awful, but certain acts were OK , may be even heroic. If the total picture was of a character that made him "guilty," that is not central in the description.

Within penal law it has also to be a personalized guilt. Not a "system-guilt," not a historical development, but the behaviour of one specific person. Once more we see that the Truth Commissions have more to work with, greater possibilities for raising questions closer to a sociologically oriented understanding of the phenomenon.

In addition to decisions on guilt, the essence of the penal process is delivery of pain. In much writing on penal law this is camouflaged; pain and suffering are not elaborated on. The system is filled with euphemisms; prisons are called institutions, cells are in my country called rooms, prisoners are called inmates, guards are called "betjenter" which literally means those who serve other people. Nonetheless, even in countries without torture and capital punishment, we know that delivery of pain is an essential part of the whole operation. But pain makes this a serious matter. Most states develop mechanisms to control it. The emphasis on equality is one such mechanism. Equal pain to equal crimes. But crimes are seldom equal, and offenders are rarely identical twins. Central to penal law is therefore the striving towards ways of handling the differences, particularly by reducing the number of factors to be taken into consideration. This is primarily done through elaborate systems of training or socialization into what sort of information is accepted as "relevant information." Legal training is, to a large extent, training in relevance, or to be more precise, in irrelevance. Many among us have been in situations where we have been told by our lawyers that what we think of as our best arguments in a legal conflict should not be mentioned at all in court. The judge would think we were out of our mind and that the lawyer was a bad one by bringing in what to us was the essence of the case. Again, it is probably necessary in a legal system to have established some sort of agreement on relevance. But this is not necessarily good for exposure of the total story of what happened.

Compared to this, the Truth Commissions stand in a more free position. It is an arena for exposure, for complaints, for emotional displays, - and also for denials. But the central point is to expose what happened, not to decide about later delivery of pain.

For the purpose of preventing errors in the delivery of pain, the penal law arrangements – when they are functioning properly and sometimes they are not - are probably the best that can be invented. But when it comes to a more thorough exposure of what happened, my preliminary conclusion will be that Truth Commissions - if they are functioning properly and, again, sometimes they are not - probably are better instruments than penal courts.

Truth is one important step. But to create peace, more steps must be taken. Most important: there is also a need for reconciliation.

That process has two parts. First, it is the question of compensation to the victims. It is fine that truth is established; it becomes clear what has happened in the past when what often are rich and powerful offenders meet very poor victims. But truth and excuses are not enough. The basic problem of inequalities remains after some common understanding of history has been established. These problems must also be approached but are often ignored in these processes. The affluent offender goes home to his comfortable villa after having told the truth, while the former prisoner goes back to material misery.

The second question has to do with mediation, leading towards peace making. The question can be raised; is peace at all possible after years of oppression, years of killings and rape, maybe also serious attempts of genocide? Of course not completely. Husbands are killed, those raped are left with their scars and maybe also with children intentionally forced on them by the enemy. Or they are, as were travellers in my country, a gypsy-related group, brought into a situation where they are sterilised, or their children are brought to unknown addresses by the authorities. These evil acts can never be undone.

Particularly complicated in Europe during the last years has been the situation in Kosovo; with highly deplorable Serbian acts, with highly deplorable Western interference, and also with highly deplorable Kosovo-Albanian acts. Before the bombing, there were 1,300 international peace-observers in Kosovo. They were withdrawn so that the bombing might commence. Most observers seems to agree that 13,000 international peace-observers would have kept peace in Kosovo, and thus prevented bombs and the flight of 800,000 civilians. Today, there are 45,000 soldiers in the province.

There are two ways to address the Kosovo conflict. There is the usual penal one: kill the killers, or hurt them. Or one could help conflicting parties to meet, create an arena where they can tell their stories, expose their grievances, and then slowly, maybe after many, many attempts, come to some sort of common understanding of what happened and what might be done to alleviate the situation.

The utmost of naiveté?

Not quite. A very strong influence on modern penal policy these days stem from native traditions in New Zealand, Australia, and from native Indian culture, particularly in Canada, but also in the USA. It has become clear how heavily native youngsters are over-represented in modern prisons. Thereby the need for returning to the old ways of coping with conflicts has been exposed. These old ways are based on mediation. In relatively egalitarian societies far away from central authorities, it is close to obvious that punishment might lead to civil war, just as punishments on the international arena without one central power can lead to renew old conflicts and warfare. In such societies, it becomes essential to restore the situations and thereby preserve social systems. Restore is an Old-Norse term. It means, literally, to rise up once more those wooden stocks – staur - that have fallen down, or more relevant here, to rebuild the house. These activities represent a negation of the ideals of penal law. If blame and shame is to be applied, it has to be in the form of re-integrative shaming. If an offender is clearly defined, emphasis is put on how he or she can repair the damage, materially or symbolically, and not on how that person can be brought to suffer. Restorative meetings of this type are in many ways a further development of Truth Commissions.

Not possible in the Balkan region?

I encountered that statement in Tirana, the capital of Albania, some years ago. It was at a huge meeting with hundreds of participants. The theme was how to end the blood-vengeance. "Impossible," said several of the participants. We are proud, so the rules of blood-vengeance have to be obeyed. Then rose a huge, white-haired man. I later learned he had served as a general with the guerrilla forces against the Italian occupants and later in the army. But that had been a long time ago. Now he said: "I have been imprisoned for so many years under Hoxa (the former ruler of Albania). Now it is over. I feel no hatred. Albanians are not that way, they are not a peculiar sort." The discussion immediately came to an end. The project on mediation is by now well established in Albania.

Not possible when monsters are behind the atrocities!

Having worked with crime and punishment most of my life, I have to confess that I never have met a monster. I could not find them among killers in concentration camps, nor have I met one since then. There are people I dislike, but none that are completely impossible to reach, at least for some important moments. My basic supposition is that most people are like most people. We have all been infants and cared for. We have, as Cooley (1902) sees it, had a common experience of being nursed by someone. This common experience is what makes it possible for us to understand the plot in the Greek drama, 2000 years back as well as persons behind recent atrocities.

But when the acts are unbelievable. Genocide?

Many nations are based on genocide, my own included. Norway made an attempt to exterminate the Sami people and culture to the best of our abilities. But in the 1990s the remaining Samis got their own Parliament. It was as compensation for a particularly ugly destruction of one of their major salmon-rivers. Quite recently the University of Oslo, which is my university, also gave back to the Sami a whole assembly of sculls. They had been kept by the physical anthropologists, exhibited for years not far away from my office. Several of them had been executed for sorcery, some for opposition against Norwegian authorities. I admit that these sins are old and small-scale compared to white man’s behaviour in Africa or America. But not small for the Sami population, confronting what they might have seen as Norwegian monsters.

What I am trying to say is that atrocities are common phenomena. It is important for our understanding of them that responses to them not be monopolised as the property of one nation or one category of victims. Atrocities are general features of human history, a part of our destiny. Many nations have been involved, as victims or as perpetrators, most often as both. This makes it important to include atrocities into the normality of abnormality. We must find ways of both preventing and reacting to atrocities where we mobilise the common stock of knowledge on how to handle social conflicts.

But if the acts are fully, completely out of the usual. As the acts we believe are initiated by Osama bin Laden? Am I willing to negotiate with the Devil, in Hell?

I am.

Mediation is the basic approach in restorative justice. Of course we must try to initiate negotiations. Before and preferably instead of violence and at any point later on, attempts must be made to create conditions for dialogue. We ought to meet those we think have done something terribly wrong, we must attempt to understand why they have done it, attempt to convey alternative ways for perceiving the acts, and also look for some common ground. How could we otherwise stop violence, as between Israel and Palestine, if they both dig down in their separate and divided understanding of their situation. Seen from the perspective of preventing violence, the US is probably more protected by conversations than by bombs.

May be nothing will come out of conversations. But it would be good to make an attempt, try to get to know how Osama bin Laden perceived the matter before the bombs were dropped. Maybe, maybe, could it also be possible that he, little by little, came to see that his cause also had much to gain if he said: "I have got some of my message across. I am willing to meet before an international court, yes, even before an ordinary court in the US."

Of course, this is highly improbable. For Osama it would mean suicide. Yet, as is well known, suicide is a type of language not unfamiliar in his world. The US would not necessarily have welcomed such a move and Osama would have known it. It might have encouraged him to do it. Central politicians in the US have clearly stated that they do not want him alive in the US, where they think he would abuse their freedom by giving statements they would rather not have exposed in their country.

September 11th was an extraordinary day. That was my point of departure. But what I have then done in my presentation is to try to show that it was not that extraordinary, after all. Bad, but not the worst. Outside of the ordinary, but not completely. Evil acts, but not by monsters. Difficult to understand, but not impossible. Distant from the ordinary, but not so distant that dialogue is out of question. In short: a case where our ordinary tools from the social sciences in general and criminology and peace-research in particular might be applicable.

My major conclusion from attempts to find answers to atrocities is that there are no easy answers in individual cases, and maybe no good answers in general. This sounds negative, and it is intended so. Pretensions of having answers might be counterproductive. There are many vested interests behind claims of having the right answers. So much is launched as answers to atrocities, which actually increase chances for further atrocities. Penal action might strengthen certain nations, or forces within those nations, but weaken others. It might also carry the seeds for new atrocities. International courts, deviating so much from ordinary ideals for courts, might prevent a deeper understanding of the forces behind mass-scale killings. A conclusion that there are no good answers to atrocities is not a heroic one; it is not one that will initiate strong actions, or immediately create new defences against evil forces. But maybe by admitting to the non-existence of good answers we create a foundation on which to build peace. If the hunt for good answers is a vain one, we are forced back to ordinary ways of handling conflicts. Particularly we have to tap experience from peace-research and civil ways of handling conflicts. We have to live with sorrow and misery in the shadow of atrocities. But – if you forgive me for expressing my own morality – we must at the same time also try out some old-fashioned ways of solving conflict, restore - and forgive - maybe even before the culprits have moved so far as to ask for it. We do not want amnesia. But, after all the information has been brought to the surface, imprinted into all our minds and all human history, we might in the end have no better final solution than forgiveness.

Auschwitz 1985, Warsaw.

Bauman, Zygmunt 1989, Modernity and the Holocaust. Polity Press, Cambridge.

Cooley, Charles H. 1902, Human Nature and the Social Order. N.Y.

Dobroszycki, Lucjan 1984, The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

Loz, Maria and Andrzej Zybertowicz 2000, Privatizing the Police-State. The Case of Poland. Basingstoke, GB.

Miszal, Barbara A. 2001, Legal Attempts to Construct Collective Memory, Polish Sociological Review, 1 (133).

Panuk, Orham, 2001, N.Y.Review of Books, Nov 15

Parmentier, Stephan, 2001, The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Towards Restorative Justice in the Field of Human Rights. Pp. 401-428 in Victim Policies and Criminal Justice on the Road to Restorative Justice. Essays in Honour of Tony Peters. Eds: E. Fattah and S. Parmentier. Leuven.