“Forgiving is just not a passive act.” At the discussion of the Peacebuilding seminar, I was not able to fully comprehend this idea. My point was that, when your important people were killed during conflicts, sometimes it is too much for the individuals to carry the burden of the grievances, anger, and the sense of revenge throughout their lives. Therefore, I thought that to give up those emotions after certain period of time and free their minds from the chain of hatred could be considered as one form of forgiveness.

However, I learned that from the Peacebuilding perspective, digesting the rush of agony in personal level does not lead to a true reconciliation. It should be an inter-personal approach participated by both victims and perpetrators. Perpetrators must acknowledge the crime that he committed and show apology to the victims, and the victims should try proactively to understand the standpoint of the perpetrator. This is because, in war, everybody can be considered as victims.

While I was thinking about this, I imagined about the people in Japan who lost their family in tsunami. Is it harder for the victims to not have the target for anger? The hardest part in losing families in natural disasters is that you cannot accuse anyone, and just have to accept that it was their fate. And same as war, natural disasters do not fall in equally to the people either. Maybe it is not appropriate to compare the grievances that people feel in war and natural disasters, however, there is a chance for true reconciliation if the conflict was between human being. And if they can share difficulties in both sides, they can try to talk how to stop the reoccurrence of war, which every post-war country are eager to know.

In Nepal, we saw sense of giving up grievances by the victims everywhere, and I saw this as a core obstacle for true nation building of the country. This Nepal culture undoubtedly accelerated the impunity issues remain unsolved, and consequently left many people still unaccounted for. I felt that peace is not living in a quiet, carefree life, and it only exists in action.