Memory and Justice: a Brief and Selected History of a Movement (Part 2)
Seeking Truth in Peru
The Peruvian truth commission also made an enormous contribution to the growing field of memory and justice.
Between 1980 and 2000, the period in which the state waged a war against Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”), a Maoist insurgency that terrorized the countryside, numerous human rights groups documented crimes committed by both the state and the guerrilla groups. During the second decade of the period, President Alberto Fujimori brought the insurgencies under control, but at a very high cost, as his government became increasingly authoritarian and resorted to human rights violations of its own. Throughout this period, organizations such as the Pro-Human Rights Association (APRODEH), the Institute for Legal Defense (IDL), and the National Human Rights Coordinator (Coordinadora) sought to document human rights violations and hold perpetrators accountable.
A moment of opportunity for dealing with the past arose during the first half of 2001 in the months between Fujimori’s departure and the beginning of the presidency of Alejandro Toledo, when caretaker President Valentin Paniagua set in motion a truth commission. With the support of key Peruvian NGOs, the truth commission was established after Toledo took office.
The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission started its work in 2002 with the goal of confronting the past in order to build a democratic future. As Peter Winn puts it, “The Peruvian truth commission began with truth telling, but ended with a reshaping of the country’s historical memory—which its members are convinced, in retrospect, was one of the most important aspects of their multi-volume report, which sparked a national discussion on the causes and consequences of Peru’s racial and ethnic divisions.”1
Dealing with the Past in Ongoing Conflict: Colombia
Dealing with the past in the midst of conflict brings up a series of challenges. This may be especially true in Colombia, often referred to as “a country without memory” by Colombians themselves. Throughout a brutal internal armed conflict, both left-wing guerilla forces and right-wing paramilitary groups have accrued a long, horrific record of abuses against civilians. In 2005, Law 975––the Justice and Peace Law––was passed, a controversial package that called for the demobilization of armed groups. The law also laid the groundwork for the creation of the Colombian National Commission on Reparation and Reconciliation (CNRR), an autonomous organization with government representatives, human rights organizations, and victims’ associations.
A new emphasis on confronting the past has entered the popular discourse in Colombia. Anthropologist Maria Victoria Uribe explains, “Memory is a crucial element of peace-building” in Colombia because peace can only “be constructed upon knowledge of the past,” and the concepts of truth, justice, memory, and reparation have increasingly appeared in public debate. There has been considerable national and international interest in displaying experiences from other countries and comparing processes of transitional justice and the achievements of truth commissions. This has made the public, the media, and private universities more sensitive to victims and the issues of truth and historical memory than before.
Moreover, because human rights organizations press for the truth about past human rights violations and those that continue to occur – killings, massacres, and disappearances – they increasingly understand that dealing with the past is part of a larger struggle against impunity. During this decade many human rights organizations have focused on collecting testimonies and oral history projects.
Post-Soviet Memory
In 1989, recognizing impending change in Central/ Eastern Europe, the foundation’s board of trustees approved a new grant-making program for the region, with a focus on strengthening the rule of law and promoting respect for human rights. After the USSR dissolved in 1991, observers wondered whether the human rights sector in Russia would grow and what its emphasis would be.
The International Memorial Society (Memorial) remains the primary institution focused on dealing with the past. Officially founded by Andrei Sakharov in 1992, Memorial continues to enable families to find documents and the graves of family members who were among the millions of victims of Stalinist repression. In 2005, Memorial had a database of 1,300,000 victims.
As early as October 1990, the society, operating as a loosely knit organization, helped erect the Memorial to the Victims of the Gulag at Lubyanka Square, near KGB headquarters in Moscow. In 1991, Memorial promoted the successful passage of the Law on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression. October 30 was declared a Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression.
In 1996, Memorial partnered with the Perm regional administration to create the Gulag Museum, at the site of a former concentration camp. The only remaining prison camp among thousands of such former sites in Russia, the Gulag Museum is a founding member of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience.
Sarah Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) ties knowledge of the past to the future success of the Russian human rights movement. According to CSIS survey data, Russian university students do not understand the impact of Stalinism on their country. Working with Russian partners, CSIS is conducting new research—on historical memory and on gender roles—to promote the use of data assessment and social marketing as a methodology for the next generation of human rights activists.
The South African Transition
South Africa galvanized the world’s attention with its transition from apartheid to the election of Nelson Mandela as president in 1994. The country’s groundbreaking Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-1998) also raised hopes that even legacies as brutal as apartheid could still be addressed in ways that catalyze profound social transformation.
Almost immediately after Mandela’s election, various organizations began to preserve the history of apartheid and antiapartheid struggles, creating multiple opportunities for world communities to reflect on its meaning. The District Six Museum opened in Cape Town in 1994, documenting one of apartheid’s most wrenching episodes. In 1966, the government declared the district a white area and forcibly removed 60,000 residents of color to Cape Flats, a barren outlying area. Then the government bulldozed their houses to the ground, seeking to erase this history. Grounding its programming in community involvement, the District Six Museum educates the public, documents forced removals, and contributes to restorative justice.
Robben Island, a maximum-security prison for political prisoners during apartheid from 1961 to 1991, was declared a World Heritage site in 1999. The Robben Island Museum conducts tours of the physically imposing sites on the island, and created a program to train former political prisoners to serve as docent guiding tours and share their own experiences. Robben Island also became a partner in the University of Wisconsin’s Legacies of Authoritarianism Project—a global research project that sought to understand how societies deal culturally with mass atrocity—and hosted its inaugural meeting in 1999 with scholars and practitioners from a dozen countries.
The Robben Island Museum also supports the Mayibuye Archives in collaboration with the University of the Western Cape. The vast collection contains 100,000 photographs, 10,000 film and video recordings, 5000 artifacts, and 2000 oral history tapes.
No one figure represents the anti-apartheid struggle more powerfully than Nelson Mandela. Yet surprisingly, materials related to his life, work, spirit, and vision are scattered around the world, inhibiting any comprehensive analysis of his legacy. This is changing with the creation of the Nelson Mandela Museum of Memory. Seeking to make accessible materials and information about Mandela, the museum plans to collect and consolidate materials, develop exhibitions, and create Web-based resources and outreach programs in communities that lack access to formal archives.
The Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), convened a meeting in the early 1990s that brought together human rights activists from the Southern Cone and Eastern Europe to meet with South Africans and discuss efforts to deal with the past. These South-South exchanges helped shape the future Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Later IDASA helped publish and disseminate almost a million copies of excerpts from the TRC’s final report.2 Initially launched in January 1989, the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) is one of the primary institutions located in the southern hemisphere that generates knowledge, practice, and policy to address legacies of violence and human rights abuse. CSVR’s monitoring of the proceedings of the TRC, its assessment concerning the implementation of its recommendations, and its analysis of the TRC’s social and political impact made important contributions to national and international debates about how best to remember the past. In 2002, CSVR hosted an international conference on research methods and transitional justice. Its work on the continuum between ordinary and extraordinary violence in societies in transition has helped focus attention on gender and transitional justice. And later it helped launch the new International Journal of Transitional Justice.
The inclusion of gender concerns in justice and memory work represents a major development in the field. One final example serves to demonstrate further evolution. In 2007, the Gay and Lesbian Archive’s (GALA) Memory in Action project launched an exhibition on documenting same-sex experiences in African contexts. The fact that GALA is one among many Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender archives presenting at an international conference to be held this year demonstrates another facet of the political power of memory-work for previously marginalized groups.
The Emergence of a Focus on the Past in Indonesia
Just as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was issuing its five-volume report in 1998, an opportunity emerged for engaging with a violent past in another part of the world. Indonesian dictator Suharto was forced to resign in 1998 after a repressive 32-year presidency. Having blamed the 1965 murder of several senior military officers on the Indonesian Communist Party, Suharto led an anti-communist purge in which an estimated one million people were killed and another million jailed. In 1975 Indonesia annexed the former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste (now East Timor), starting a brutal 24-year occupation in which 100,000 lost their lives.
As Mary Zurbuchen put it, “while the New Order government imposed an official ‘history’ that justified its repressive actions in purging its opponents, people now seek alternative versions of the truth, the uncovering of hidden human rights abuses, and freedom of expression for diverging points of view.”3 They needed frameworks to do so, and some began to talk about transitional justice. Looking to both Latin America and South Africa for ideas, NGOs and local communities wrote revised local histories, started to uncover mass graves, and confronted local corruption. As they became increasingly familiar with transitional justice terminology, Indonesian human rights groups and others initiated discussions about the legacy of 1965 in new books, through newspaper and television coverage, and in public debates about revising the history curriculum. Interviews with former political prisoners were conducted and publicized. Children whose parents had suffered repression have become more vocal in calling for these stories to be heard. Sanata Dharma University launched a new program for the study and promotion of community reconciliation, truth seeking, and human rights.
While discrimination against those affected by the 1965 repression has diminished, there are still lingering effects of that period in Indonesian society.4 Human rights NGOs have therefore become even more immersed in finding out how to deal with the past, and many have sought to learn from global experiences. The leaders of key NGOs working on these themes, for example, have spent time studying transitional justice in Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the ICTJ’s global fellowship program.
While Indonesia has not had a classic truth commission, the Indonesian Women’s Commission has initiated a groundbreaking process to hear testimonies and document human rights violations against women during the 1965 repression. Its report makes comprehensive recommendations to Indonesia’s president and government. These include calls for a presidential apology, symbolic and material reparations for female victims, and ongoing documentation and truth-telling efforts, including the location of mass graves. The commission has linked truth-telling about violations in 1965 to ongoing efforts to eliminate violence against women in Indonesia.
In relation to the Indonesian occupation of what is now East Timor, from 1974 to 1999, the Timorese Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation (2002-2005) concluded that Indonesian security forces committed the great majority of rights violations, which were massive and systemic. Unfortunately, the commission’s report has not been widely distributed, nor its recommendations implemented.5 Nevertheless, its innovations have informed subsequent truth commissions, including the inclusion of gender-sensitive provisions in the enabling legislation for the current Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
South-South Exchange, Global Networks, and International NGOs
South-south exchange has long characterized initiatives to address past atrocity. Chilean human rights lawyer and human rights advocate José Zalaquett explains how the sharing of insights gained from truth commissions has helped these regions:
“There has been an incredible amount of south-south exchange. Chile learned from what they did and didn’t do in Uruguay and Argentina before the time of the Chilean transition. The South Africans learned from Chile and Argentina. Then the Peruvians learned from the South Africans”6
In 1987 and 1988 the newly established Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team focused on finding the remains of the disappeared in Argentina and collaborating with prosecutors to develop evidence, as well as work with family members of the victims to treat the remains respectfully and arrange for proper burials. In the last 20 years, the award-winning team has been invited to work with truth commissions and other truth-telling initiatives internationally. The team has helped inform people about the fate of their loved ones and has also helped develop legal cases for the prosecution of perpetrators.
Transitional Justice
The globalization of methodologies for dealing with the past has generated a set of legal and moral questions related to holding perpetrators accountable in courts. An Aspen Institute conference called “State Crimes: Punishment or Pardon”7 (November 4-6, 1988) helped to launch a path of work that has been extremely influential in holding violators of human rights accountable in courts; according to one analysis, the term “transitional justice” first joined the lexicon at the conference. The meeting “aimed to sort through the moral, political, and legal implications of recent trials, commissions of inquiry, purges, and other measures intended to hold previous regimes to account for systematic human rights abuses, as well as to foster a transition to democracy.”8 “‘Over and over again,’ Lawrence Weschler wrote in The New Yorker, ‘countries as varied as Uganda, Argentina, South Korea, Chile, South Africa, Brazil, the Philippines, Uruguay, Guatemala, and Haiti (all of whom were represented at the Aspen Institute conference) and the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China (which were not) confront the same sorts of questions as they attempt to move from dictatorial to democratic systems of governance—in essence, the question of what to do with the former torturers in their midst.’”9 The period from 1995 to 1998 was particularly important for the globalization of this movement. First, the South African truth commission that started in 1995 sparked a great deal of interest throughout the world with regards to how societies could and should deal with the past.
The way that the TRC was able to create incentives for perpetrators to participate (in exchange for amnesty, in some cases) was unique and inspiring. And the emphasis put on reconciliation gave added significance to this newly salient addition to the global political lexicon. In 1998, former dictator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London, as mentioned earlier, triggering global debates about the practice of universal jurisdiction and whether he should be tried for his crimes in Britain, Spain, or back in Chile. The contribution of the Andean Region and the Southern Cone office has been noted earlier.
By the end of the 1990s, it was becoming apparent that a new paradigm of engagement with the past was emerging. To understand this phenomenon, comparative study—both within regions and between regions—became important. The three-year Legacies of Authoritarianism Project, based at the University of Wisconsin and supported by the foundation’s Crossing Borders program, brought together multi-regional research teams with members from Argentina, South Africa, Peru, the Philippines, Serbia, Thailand, and the United States to discuss the ways in which the realms of art and culture had been used as vehicles for addressing the legacies of past atrocities.10 The movement to deal with past human rights abuse and atrocity was now global. The work done by human rights organizations involved in transitions from authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, among other places, and the efforts made by organizations such as the Historical Memory Initiative in the Andean Region and Southern Cone office, had paved the way. Interest in truth commissions throughout the world had grown dramatically.
That, combined with the interest in the detention of Pinochet, created some excitement about human rights advocacy that focused on confronting past atrocity. The groundwork had been laid for the continued growth of a global field of activity focused on preventing future abuse by engaging with the past.
It was becoming clear that activity concerning past human rights violations—whether it was framed as memory, reparations, or transitional justice—was only going to increase. A narrow slice of a broader set of questions related to dealing with the past, transitional justice addressed the legal obligations that, according to international law states had in the aftermath of atrocity. As such, transitional justice was primarily focused on the role of the state, political institutions, and the formation of public policy. The widely accepted definition suggested that successor states had four types of obligations under international law that needed to be translated into policy. These were (1) the obligation to find and tell the truth about what had happened in the past; (2) the obligation to prosecute and punish perpetrators; (3) the obligation to develop reparations programs for victims; and (4) the obligation to take measures to guarantee the crimes wouldn’t be repeated, mainly by identifying and reforming responsible state institutions.
References
click reference number to return to the text1 Peter Winn's Consultancy Report: "Ford Foundation Historical Memory Programming in the Andean Region and Southern Cone, Sept. 30, 2007, p. 7.
2 William Korey, Taking on the World's Repressive Regimes: The Ford Foundation's International Human Rights Policies and Practices. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007, 262.
3 See Ford Foundation Grant #1000-2048, especially RFG/FAP document from Mary Zurbuchen (Aug. 31, 2008). For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.
4 Interview with Mary Zurbuchen, March 12,2008, at ICTJ, New York. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.
5 Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. New York: Routledge, 2001, Afterword.
6 Quoted in the documentary film "Confronting the Truth: Truth Commis¬sions and Societies in Transition," Steve York and Neil J. Kritz, July 2007.
7 See Ford Foundation Grant fife #885-0148. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.
8 See Paige Arthur's paper "How 'Transitions' Reshaped Human Rights: A conceptual History of Transitional Justice," ICTJ", 2008, p. 1.
9 Paige Arthur, "How 'Transitions' Reshaped Human Rights: A Conceptual History of Transitional Justice," ICTJ", 2008, p. 1.
10 Ksenija Bilbija, Jo Ellen Fair, Cynthia E. Milton, and Leigh Payne, The Art of Truth-Telling About Authoritarian Rule. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.
