How to hate.

A couple of years ago I sat looking out over Cape Town South Africa from a vantage point on Robben Island. I sat there with two members of paramilitary organsisations who are fundamentally opposed to each other. We talked about if we had of been prisoners on the island would we have tried to swim to Cape Town in order to escape. We all answered differently though all laughed at each other's responses before saying good night and retiring for the night.

Both of these men had served time for murder, both of these men had been seen as soldiers, as terrorists and as freedom fighters by different people in different places. And both of these men had been told that the rest of their lives would be spent inside of a prison. Both of these men, now free, see each other on a regular basis, know each other as friends and kid with each other as though they are brothers. Both of them still hold their beliefs close to who they are.

One of these men walked into a house and shot a man point blank in the head as he slept, the other blew up a building killing half a dozen or more people and almost killing the leader of a country. Now both of these men greet each other in peace and humility and openly seek dialogue in order to bring about the end of a conflict which started many centuries ago. Not everyone they know would be or is happy about their friendship or aknowledgement of each other, though I would say that the world is a better place for having these two men free and free to talk with each other.

Both of these men feel that what they have done was necessary and do not back down on what they carried out; what they call "an act of war". Both see that there comes a time when speaking with each other is going to resolve more issues than killing each other.

On Thursday this week I was part of a crew recording an interview with a survivor of Auschwitz. In 1946 at the end of the war he had walked out of the gates of the camp yelling in three languages that he was a free man. Weighing less than 35kg, he was picked up by an American soldier and put into a hospital truck from were his recovery began. Upon recovery he went to Israel and became a part of the Jewish fight for Palestine and the eventual creation of the Israeli state. This small statured and very proud man talked of how he wanted to make sure that the world learnt from the experiences of the Jews in Poland and Germany; that the world and young people of today saw what misconstrued hatred can lead to. As we chatted later after the interview, we talked about hatred; hatred of the Poles, the Germans and then of the Muslims.

"How can you negotiate with a person who is only interested in how he is going to die", he said. This man who had previously talked with us about how he would never be able to hate again, that he had seen enough hatred and wanted to make sure that what happened to the Jews never happened again, had now misconstrued his own hatred. I don't feel that I can take anything from this man who has experienced hell on earth and has come back from it with what seems for the most part to be humility and understanding. However, to watch as hatred rises so easily in this man, makes me feel that humility and understanding is the hardest of lessons and the longest of journeys.

My own country sees attacks on our indigenous people every day of the week covered up as policy and swamped in bureaucracy and everyday I walk past the results of these attacks as drunken men and women abuse each other and bystanders with misdirected anger and hatred. We learn at an ealry age how to hate, it seems that it takes much longer to learn how to forgive and accept each others existance.