One grey weekend back in November 2002 a secret meeting took place in New York State; an emotional and sensitive encounter between strangers that even today only a handful of Americans know about. Andrew Rice, whose 31-year-old brother David was killed in the World Trade Centre, was present, along with his younger sister Amy and four others who had lost relatives in the 9/11 attacks.
The families were meeting Aicha al-Wafi, the mother of the alleged 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, who is currently in solitary confinement in northern Virginia facing six conspiracy charges, four of which carry the death penalty. Mrs al-Wafi had asked to meet the relatives in a bid to seek forgiveness and gain support from Americans opposed to the death penalty.
“We were waiting there, all feeling very nervous and not knowing what to expect,” recalls Rice. “Then we were told that Mrs al-Wafi had arrived, so one of the mothers whose son died in the World Trade Centre went out to greet her. The rest of us just sat there waiting. We heard footsteps, then there was silence; then we heard this sobbing. Eventually the two women came into the room with their arms around each other. We were all crying now and for several minutes we just embraced and hugged.”
Also present at the meeting were Renny Cushing and Bud Welch, both members of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, which had been approached by a French human rights organisation to support and set up the unique meeting. Cushing and Welch were experienced in face-to-face meetings of this nature. Renny Cushing’s father had been killed by two shotgun blasts fired by a stranger through the family’s front screen door in 1988 and had since been reconciled with the killer’s family; while Bud Welch, whose 23-year-old daughter was killed in the Oklahoma bombing, had met the father of Timothy McVeigh.
Andrew Rice says: “It was the human contact that changed things for me. Up till then I didn’t know what to think, but Mrs al-Wafi reminded me so much of my own mother who had cried and cried after David was killed. It’s so hard to see your parents cry, and now here were two mothers who had both lost their sons crying and embracing each other.” During the three-hour meeting the relatives spoke of their loss. Andrew Rice spoke about how his brother’s life had been marked by huge turnarounds — hitting rock bottom in his early twenties from alcoholism and drug use and later going to Zimbabwe and South Africa as a Fulbright scholar.
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Mrs al-Wafi, moved by what she heard, began by offering her condolences to the relatives; then she apologised and asked for forgiveness.
Rice and others assured her that she had done nothing wrong. “I told her that even if her son was found guilty in a fair trial I would not support the death penalty. I told her I didn’t see the point of punishing the families of the perpetrators even more.” This seemed to comfort Mrs al-Wafi, who was obviously worried about what the grieving relatives would say to her. She told them how she had moved to France from Morocco when her children were young, worked as a telephone operator and eventually divorced her abusive husband. She produced a picture of Zacarias as a child, describing him as a kind person who had frequently suffered from mental problems.
“Suddenly it all seemed so much more real than the prison photo I’d seen in the press,” says Rice. “As she spoke it wasn’t to do with politics any more, it was just a human tragedy — a family story of a mother who had lost her mentally unstable son to an extremist group in London and who now feared losing him again to capital punishment. It made me realise that it’s not just the victims who lose relatives but also the families of the perpetrators.” As the meeting progressed the atmosphere in the room relaxed and by the end everyone was smiling; saying goodbye was as emotional as saying hello.
After the meeting Rice felt a powerful sense of relief. “I felt I’d turned a small corner in my grieving,” he says. For the bereaved, the quest to understand is both compelling and healing, but that was made particularly difficult for the 9/11 families, thinks Rice. “Our government was talking about an arbitrary and random evil — as if people were dropping out of the sky because they wanted to kill Americans. Their argument was simply ‘We are being killed because of how good we are’. There wasn’t even a hint of ‘They’re killing us because of perceived injustices and grievances’. No one was asking the question ‘why’ because some of the most powerful in this country have argued from Day 1 that to ask why is to support the terrorists.”
Rice knew the meeting with Mrs al-Wafi would be viewed as treachery by both public and government — seen by some as no different to meeting and consoling bin Laden’s own mother — and indeed there has been no reporting of the reconciliation in the American media. Rice is now a member of a group called Peaceful Tomorrows, founded by family members of 9/11 victims seeking effective non-violent responses to terrorism. He took a year off work to travel the United States talking to groups, universities and schools, putting forward an alternative view to the muscular language of revenge.
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Like many of the members of Peaceful Tomorrows he is against the death penalty. “Some people think that if my mother has lost her son, then we should take away another mother’s son. People may say I’ve gone soft and that 9/11 justifies the death penalty, but I say that when you lose someone you love is when you have to decide whether you are going to abandon your beliefs or not.”
Rice says that he has not “gone soft”: “Of course I’m angry, but there’s a spiritual supremacy. I’m protecting my brother’s spirit by putting a barricade around him. I’m refusing to fall in line with what ‘they’ want, which is visceral hatred between two sides. This gives me permission to reconcile.”
Andrew Rice’s story can be seen in The F Word: Images of Forgiveness at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, 78 Bishopsgate, London EC2, June 21-29, 10am-6pm (excluding weekends); www.theforgivenessproject.com