I have to understand what I have done, accept, repent, if I'm the perpetrator, so that I can be healed. I will receive eventual amnesty from God and that will bring me to a point where I can be healed and my brother or sister can accept me, but if he is also ready to forgive. Forgiveness is a religious experience, an ethical and moral act. We believe that the TRC should not be a kind of commission to inflict punishment on people alleged to have been engaged in human rights abuses. We should encourage the perpetrators, as well as the victims, to explain themselves and not to threaten them with punitive measures or else we would be either wittingly or unwittingly postponing something which we are trying to avert.
Reconciliation underpins the essence of the commission itself.
We should try by all means to desist from using the word 'vengeance'. Like somebody was mentioning about the January invasion after it was repulsed and the restoration of the democratically elected government in 1998, we found ourselves in a vicious cycle of violence. It is well documented that a lot of atrocities were committed even in Freetown here. We are all victims, perpetrators as well as ordinary victims. So we should look at the problem from a holistic point of view, instead of creating problems that in fact will revert us to the root of the crisis itself.