Albie Sachs must be smiling somewhere in South Africa, celebrating that Colombians are closer to peace, that we are within reach of achieving that “soft vengeance” against violence, which the title of his 2011 memoir captures so beautifully.
“Don't worry, comrade Albie, we will avenge you,” read the note that his fellow freedom fighters, opponents of Apartheid, sent to his hospital bed. Living in exile in Mozambique, in 1988 Sachs had survived an assassination attempt by South African security agents, but lost the sight of one eye and his right arm to the impact of the bomb planted in his car. Lying in his hospital bed, Sachs asked himself—what it would mean to have revenge, what it would be like to live in a country filled with armless and partly blind people? While his wounds healed, he concluded that his revenge would not be violence, but rather the soft vengeance of achieving the “democracy, freedom, and the rule of law” that his attackers had continued to deny South Africans.
What it would mean to have revenge, what it would be like to live in a country filled with armless and partly blind people? And so, when he served as advisor to the peace negotiations between the ANC and the South African government three years later, he put his faith in the creation of a Truth Commission, which would subject the perpetrators to the punishment of public confession and contrition, rather than the physical punishment of prison. In this way he rejected a more rigid notion of justice that would have made it impossible to reach a peace agreement.
