When people are asked to rebuild their lives after violence, the word “resilience” can become a rather convenient way of leaving them to it. We admire their capacity to carry on. Meanwhile, the work of carrying on remains theirs: earning a living, caring for children, making decisions in circumstances they did not choose.
There is something worth questioning in that arrangement. Why should the people who have already borne the harm also bear the whole cost of recovery?
UN News reports that independent UN experts have called on Ecopetrol to provide reparations to victims of Colombia’s armed conflict. The information available here does not establish the basis or scope of that call, or the company’s response. A call for reparations is not itself a finding of liability. Those distinctions matter, particularly when serious responsibilities are being assigned.
Yet the wider human problem deserves attention. Recovery requires resources, and those resources have to come from somewhere. If they come entirely from the injured person’s remaining strength, savings and time, then “moving on” may mean accepting a second burden because the first has already happened.
Reparations cannot return a life to the point before it was damaged. That is an important objection to any easy language of repair. Money cannot make an absence disappear, and a formal process may fail to recognise what a particular person actually needs. There must also be evidence, a fair assessment of responsibility and room to challenge claims. Otherwise, the attempt to address injustice risks creating another.
But the impossibility of complete restoration is a poor reason to abandon practical repair. Help with the conditions of living can still matter enormously. Someone may regain choices without recovering everything they lost.
That distinction reaches into ordinary life, too. After causing harm, it is tempting to look for signs that the other person is coping and take those signs as permission to withdraw. Their competence becomes our reassurance.
Perhaps we should be slower to accept that reassurance. A person can be managing remarkably well and still be owed something. Before congratulating them on their strength, we might ask how much of it they are having to spend on work that should never have been left entirely to them.