Memory and Justice: a Brief and Selected History of a Movement (Part 3)
The Emergence of New International NGOs
In March of 2001, responding to these demands, the ICTJ was founded by Alex Boraine, Paul van Zyl of the South African TRC, and independent researcher Priscilla Hayner.1 The center would develop cutting-edge research and be a source of best practices worldwide. Responding to requests for technical assistance, the ICTJ would be able to bring both global contacts and top-notch specialist expertise to any situation requiring creative thinking about dealing with the past. And the ICTJ would have a deep commitment to capacity-building. The creation of the ICTJ would help to strengthen, not deplete, the field. In this sense, the ICTJ was seen as a catalytic enterprise, meant to harness existing expertise on dealing with the past through networks, capacity-building, and reciprocal exchange among existing, as well as future, specialists.
The ICTJ focused on one burgeoning area of interest: the formation of public policy on how to deal with the past through approaches such as the creation of official truth commissions, the establishment of reparations policies, and prosecutions of former dictators and warlords in criminal proceedings, in domestic courts when possible, or in international tribunals when necessary. It developed programs in each of these areas and was soon working in more than 15 countries. By 2008, that number had more than doubled. In addition to its initial focus on the legal obligations of states, the ICTJ developed programs that focus on social memory, including its Memory, Memorials, and Museums Program.
At the same time another global organization was forming, also with foundation support, through the Arts and Culture side of its programs. Starting in 1999, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum hosted a meeting of “Sites of Conscience” museums that work to interpret history through their sites, engage in programs to stimulate dialogue, and provide opportunities for public involvement in issues raised at the site.2
Between 1999 and 2004, the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience attracted dozens and dozens of potential members from around the world, including the District Six Museum, the Liberation War Museum (Bangladesh), the Gulag Museum, and the Japanese American National Museum (United States).
By 2008, the coalition had also blossomed in size and complexity, adding more members and organizing numerous events. In June 2007, the ICTJ and the coalition of sites of conscience collaborated with each other and the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO) to organize the first global conference on memorialization and democracy. Held in Santiago, this event brought together scholars and practitioners from throughout the world to debate the relationships between memory, history, public art, memorialization processes, and sites of conscience in terms of building long-lasting and stable democracies.3
The publication from that conference can be found here.
Assessing Impact
Between 1983 and 2008, dealing with the past had gone from an inchoate and ad hoc set of strategies that appeared in a few contexts (most notably Argentina, Uruguay, and then Chile) to a rich, comprehensive and multi-layered set of overlapping fields of activity with a reservoir of experience and comparative knowledge from every world region upon which to draw.
Dealing with the past represents an important new direction in human rights advocacy and in the movement for stable, sustainable, and peaceful democracies around the world. By examining the kinds of activities described above, it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions about the ways in which dedicated activists and flagship organizations involved in this line of work may have helped to strengthen human rights cultures and democratic institutions in many countries.
Ultimately, this article suggests that post-authoritarian democracies have gained strength from dealing with their troubled histories in various ways. These countries have spent more than 20 years engaged in national soul-searching activities that fall under the various titles of “historical memory,” “transitional justice,” “accountability for past human rights abuse,” “memorialization,” “truth-telling,” “reparations for victims,” “sites of conscience,” and “dealing with the past.” These overlapping approaches have been adapted more recently to many other contexts including post-conflict settings (such as Liberia and Sierra Leone) and even to ongoing conflicts (such as in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo).
One way of measuring the impact involves looking at the overall growth of the field and the way it’s been financed. In this regard, it is clear that funding for activities built around dealing with the past has grown enormously over the past decade. Taken alone, increased funding does not reveal much, but linked to the other ways of assessing the impact discussed later, it reinforces the sense that dealing with the past has captured the imagination of global communities as a method of promoting accountability, preventing conflict, consolidating peace, and generating reflection on root causes.
While the Ford Foundation has played a clear leadership role by investing early in these activities, the more recent diversification of funding sources attests to the widespread interest in the linkages between memory and justice. Funding for programs related to historical memory, transitional justice, and dealing with the past has increased dramatically in recent years. By a very conservative estimate, U.S. private foundations alone have invested about $93 million dollars in related fields from 2003-2007.4 Major donors for the combined fields today include government ministries of foreign affairs or aid agencies, such as the governments of Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain; specialized offices such as the Justice and Rule of Law Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK) and the Section for Humanitarian Policy & Conflict Issues of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs; private foundations, such as MacArthur, Charles Stewart Mott, Rockefeller Brothers, Rockefeller, Carnegie Corp, Henry M. Jackson, Oak, Open Society Institute, Samuel Rubin Foundation; corporate foundations, such as Goldman Sachs and Allstate; and other organizations, such as the Henrich Böll Foundation and the US Institute for Peace.5
The roots of this movement in Latin America and especially in Argentina, as discussed earlier, mean that it draws its initial inspiration from the fact that victims and citizens would not let the dictators get away with their bad acts. These movements refused to let authoritarian rulers and military juntas go down in history without recognition of the terrible crimes for which they had been responsible. Using many different approaches, they refused to allow silence, lies, and forgetting to dominate the collective memory of what had happened.
These movements have changed the discourse about the past in their countries and globally; they have re-framed the discussion about the relationship between past and future. Canadian philosopher Michael Ignatieff has said that the goal of truth commissions is “to limit the range of permissible lies,” and these movements also sought, at a minimum, to accomplish that aspiration. In doing so, they helped create the conditions that would allow for the prosecution of perpetrators, significant institutional reforms (such as judicial reform and constitutional reform, as well as reforms of the security sector), the creation of meaningful victim-centered reparations programs, and the establishment of preventative measures so that these crimes would be unlikely to reoccur. They also made it difficult for nostalgia—romantic, fictionalized, partial memories of a law-and-order past under dictatorship—to surface in the future without being undermined by irreconcilable contradictions and undeniable truths about the brutality and hubris of former regimes.
Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute, says that the impact of 25 years of activities that focus on dealing with the past has made an enormous difference. It “is immensely significant,” he explains, because “you can go to certain places and you become quickly aware that addressing the past is very much a part of addressing the future, that it is inseparable. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers argued after World War II that acknowledging moral responsibility and other forms of responsibility is part of the process of constructing what goes forward.” Neier continues, “A crucial part of building a more open society is acknowledging what took place in the past and addressing it in some way.”6
Creating essential linkages between past, present, and future has arguably been the most influential aspect of this movement. By drawing on the experiences of victims and the expertise of civil society organizations and human rights leaders, these movements translated frustration, pain, anger, and disappointment into concrete action for enhancing stable, peaceful democracies in post-authoritarian or post-conflict settings, as well as in other contexts. The movement to deal with past atrocity has always been as much about the future as about the past. It is, at its heart, a progressive movement that seeks to learn from the errors and transgressions of the past in order to build a better future. The following are some, but certainly not all, of the ways that efforts to deal with the past have had an impact since 1983.
By demanding that we learn from the past
The movement to deal with the past is based on the idea that we can learn from it. It has therefore prioritized finding out the truth about what happened in the past through various approaches. These include trials and truth commissions, curricular reform, dissemination of reports from truth commissions, programs about trials and accountability, the conversion of former torture centers into educational sites, and the development of interpretive exhibits to teach citizens about the past and reinforce the idea that these kinds of crimes must never again take place.
By deepening debate about social and political reconciliation
By bringing to the foreground the complex relationships between reconciliation, healing, and accountability, the movement to deal with the past has had to face the challenge that reconciliation, in some cases, might mean forgetting, while in other cases it might mean confronting the past. Nowhere was this clearer than in the case of South Africa, where reconciliation became a widely used, but highly contested and hotly debated, concept. The term increasingly became used in the titles of truth commissions—many of which came to be called truth and reconciliation commissions (such as in Peru, Sierra Leone, and Liberia)—and elicited controversy in many contexts. In any case, the term has been debated in so many contexts and with such sophistication concerning the respective roles of remembering, forgetting, accountability, silence, truth, justice, and reparation, that its very controversy has become a positive contribution.
By addressing the ways that violence is gendered
By looking at historical periods characterized by systematic violence, such as under dictatorship in Uruguay, mass atrocity under Suharto in Indonesia, or apartheid in South Africa, the movement to deal with the past can identify patterns of abuse and violence. One of the clearest types of patterns is the gendered nature of violence: that men and women experience violence differently and in the aftermath have different ways of identifying and reporting on violence. One example is that the iconic “victim” to appear before the South African truth commission was a mother talking about violence committed against a son instead of discussing her own traumatic experience. Another important dimension is the recognition of the continuum of violence in women’s lives in periods of extraordinary societal violence, as well as in pre-conflict and post-conflict contexts.
By giving voice to victims
Throughout history, victims of mass atrocity and their family members have often been silenced. The movement to deal with the past, through initiatives such as truth commissions, trials, oral history projects, documentation and publicity projects, the creation of public memorials and sites of conscience, and other formal and informal truth-telling efforts, has provided those victims with the opportunity to be heard and recognized. As the writer Ariel Dorfman puts it, if the voice of a victim has not been heard, if “her story or his story has not been verified publicly, has not been accepted publicly by the community, this is in some senses a worse punishment than the atrocity itself.”7
By recognizing victims as citizens whose rights have been violated
By recognizing victims publicly, fashioning meaningful programs aimed at simultaneously acknowledging their trauma and helping them recover from it (such as massive reparations programs), and providing spaces (such as truth commissions) for them to tell their stories and be listened to by both fellow citizens and respected leaders, the efforts to deal with the past have endeavored to integrate victims as full citizens who deserve to be seen and heard. This kind of recognition is an essential component of tolerance, the foundation of a democratic society.8 Full inclusion of victims and their experience as important parts of the society as a whole can foster a willingness to accommodate diversity in the future, and to be tolerant of differences. Recognition of victims is thus deeply linked to the constitutive values of modern societies as they deal with problems of discrimination and exclusion.
By raising questions of guilt, culpability, and complicity
Efforts to deal with the past have raised complicated questions about who is guilty. While affirming that individuals must be held accountable for the crimes for which they are directly responsible, the movement has sought to grapple much more deeply with the complexity of guilt and complicity. Moreover, it is clear that it is impossible logistically and financially to prosecute every responsible person, thus it is inevitable that some perpetrators at certain levels will remain untouched by formal justice processes.
By insisting that individual perpetrators must be held accountable for past actions
By sending a clear signal that individuals can be held accountable in courts and in public opinion for human rights violations and mass atrocity, the human rights movement in general (in dealing with the past in particular) has insisted that those most responsible for crimes should be tried in courts, even for crimes committed decades earlier and which many have been forgotten. This insistence on accountability for past abuse may contribute to preventing these crimes from happening in the future.
By insisting that the state is responsible for protecting its citizens
Truth-telling through formal commissions or unofficial forms as well as criminal prosecutions, has pointed to the ways in which the state is “charged with protecting the rights of citizens,” as the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission puts it, and therefore must be held to account for crimes committed by its agents. The Chilean commission continues, “It should always be emphasized that acts of terrorism or other illegitimate actions committed for political reasons cannot be used to justify human rights violations committed by the state, and that the state’s use of its monopoly over public force to violate the rights of persons is a matter of the gravest concern.”
Dealing with the past as a requirement for membership in the world community of states
The movement to deal with the past has helped to make it “shameful to paper over terrible experiences.”9 One of the results of this is that in general countries around the world are expected to deal with their pasts in order to be seen as members of the international community. Comparing Japan and Germany, for example, Neier of the Open Society Institute says, “I think there is a general recognition that Germany transformed itself by coming to terms with the past, and Japan’s refusal to come to terms with the past has produced this continuing resentment in a number of countries of Asia.” While powerful states such as China, Russia, and the United States might routinely ignore this requirement, many less powerful nations, including those that seek membership in the European Community, must increasingly demonstrate that they have sincerely tried to come to terms with violent periods in their recent pasts.
By identifying and reforming abusive institutions from previous regimes
One of the driving principles of the movement to deal with the past has been to develop “guarantees of nonrepetition.” The clearest way to achieve this goal, in addition to deterrence, is by identifying the institutions— such as state security forces, police, the judiciary, the intelligence services, and other key institutions—that were most responsible for the crimes, and to hold those institutions accountable and then transform them into democratic, transparent, and functional institutions. Using vetting techniques, creating civilian oversight bodies, or completely reconstructing institutions are some of the ways to accomplish these goals.
By clarifying international law concerning the obligations of states in the aftermath of violence
The movement to deal with the past has resulted in enhanced jurisprudence by important entities such as the Inter-American Commission and Inter-American Court. This legal interpretation of the obligations of states is at the core of how dealing with past atrocity has been defined. For example, in the Inter-American Court’s 1988 case Velásquez-Rodríguez v. Honduras, the judges were clear: “The State has a legal duty to take reasonable steps to prevent human rights violations and to use the means at its disposal to carry out a serious investigation of violations committed within its jurisdiction, to identify those responsible, to impose the appropriate punishment and to ensure the victim adequate compensation.”10
By changing international norms
There are other ways in which international norms have shifted because of the movements to confront the past. The United Nations Secretary-General’s report on the rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies endorsed the “full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice, and achieve reconciliation. These may include both judicial and non-judicial mechanisms, with differing levels of international involvement (or none at all), and individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals, or a combination thereof.”11
By contributing to the widespread acceptance of criminal prosecution for mass atrocity
Prosecution of those most responsible for human rights violations and atrocity has come a long way since the initial prosecutions of the military junta in Argentina. Today, autocrats as diverse as former heads-of-state Alberto Fujimori (Peru) and Hissène Habré (Chad), as well as hundreds of officials from former dictatorships, are under indictment by domestic courts; this assessment does not even include the work of the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), or the International Criminal Court (ICC), which Jonathan Fanton of the Macarthur Foundation calls “the most important international institution since the United Nations.”12 Although the ICC is not explicitly concerned with dealing with the past, its creation is at least in part attributable to the important strides made by prosecuting the leaders of military regimes in domestic courts in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala, among other places.
By making clear that future political and economic development often depends on dealing with the legacy of atrocity, the movements to confront the past have catalyzed important questions about whether “business as usual” (i.e. not addressing the past) has worked in terms of economic development, peace-building, and post-conflict reconstruction. In many cases, it is clear that ignoring past atrocity can sabotage these goals, as past social trauma simmers and resurfaces as bitter resentment, tension, and flawed institutions. By engaging in constructive and reciprocal dialogues with more established fields—such as Economic Development, Gender , Rule of Law, and Peace-Building—a broad conversation has emerged that links accountability for the past with future national development, thus enriching all of these fields.
The Future of Dealing with the Past
Over the past two decades there has been an increasing movement to deal with past human rights abuse and atrocity. This has resulted in a proliferation of initiatives, activities, new organizations, and new priorities within existing organizations. These efforts have fallen under many different rubrics, but taken together amount to a major new direction in the global human rights, democratization, and peace-building movements.
In spite of the positive results and growth of the field, the efforts to deal with the past that have emerged over the past two decades may have raised as many questions as they’ve answered. Chilean President Michele Bachelet touched on this in 2007 when she visited the memory site Villa Grimaldi, the former torture center, where she herself had been a prisoner after the 1973 coup. “I know that I am going to walk where I walked before…. And I know that the eternal questions will be more than a whisper: How could it happen again? Could we have avoided it? Have we done enough for it to never happen again? Are we now a community based on mutual respect? We can’t stop asking those questions.”13
Achieving the aspiration of Nunca Más concerning human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and genocide is one of the most significant challenges in the world. Efforts to address and learn from the past and, in so doing, to create both democratic institutions and cultures that uphold human rights represents a solid contribution to the achievement of this goal.
However, the movement to deal with past atrocity is still in its infancy, and there is every indication that such efforts and initiatives will continue to expand in the future. The realization that remembering past atrocity and dealing with it may be an important component of building stable long-term democracies has had a profound influence––although local circumstances will always vary. There remain many challenges in all world regions: From Russia, where some blame amnesia or nostalgia for ongoing authoritarian practices, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the damages of a massive war are still being experienced daily; and from countries such as Australia and Canada, where the legacies of the assimilationist policies against native peoples can be seen as cultural genocide, to cases of ongoing conflict in Colombia or Burundi, where dealing with the past may be a part of the attainment of peace. These are just a few of the many examples of places where dealing with the past is or may become important.
Last year in Spain, decades after the end of the civil war and the subsequent period of authoritarian rule under Francisco Franco, parliament passed the Law of Historic Memory, which seeks to engage with that traumatic period. In Cambodia, the transformation of the Tuol Sleng prison museum into a Genocide Museum and Education Center was announced in 2008. The blue-ribbon Moroccan truth commission—the first of its kind in the Arab and Muslim worlds—has recommended that the country grapple with the memory of its past.
The current interest in these strategies suggests that dealing with the past has become a core aspect of building just and fair societies based on transparency, tolerance, and the rule of law. But the relationship between memory and justice is only just beginning to be fully explored, and this topic is likely to continue to remain an important element of the human rights and democratization movements for the long term.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge indispensable editorial and research contributions from Jesica L. Santos. Additionally, they acknowledge the assistance of Alex Wilde, the program staff of the Andean Region and Southern Cone office, James Moske and staff at the Ford Foundation archives in New York, and Peter Winn. Finally, the following researchers made contributions to this report: Cath Collins, Mercedes Crisostomo, Polly Dewhirst, Yanilda Gonzalez, Maria L. Guembe, Veronica Hinestroza, Amy Shaw, and Elisa Taarnala.
References
click reference number to return to the text1 Numerous interviews suggest that Susan Berresford played a key role in this story. Berresford herself explained that when the idea of the ICTJ began to emerge, "what struck me ... was there were these pieces different parts of the Ford program affecting the world and it needed somehow to be more coherent." She decided to throw her support behind the ICTJ and to help it "move confidently, knowing how hard it is to start something, assemble a board, do the work". Berresford worked internally with foundation staff-and "pushed a little harder" to make it work -as well as externally, by calling presidents of other foundations to ask them to support the fledgling organization. Interview with Susan Berresford, March 25, 2008, at New York Community Trust, New York, p. 15. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.
2 Interview with Alison Bernstein, Ford Foundation, New York, March 7, 2008, pp. 12 and 24. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.
3 Sebastian Brett, Louis Bickford, Liz Sevcenko, and Marcela Rios, Memorialization and Democracy: State policy and Civic Action, a report based on the international conference of the same name, held June 20-22, 2007, in Santiago, Chile.
4 Figure derived by adding up grants from private U.S. foundations to programs related to historical memory, transitional justice, oral history, cultural memory, international criminal courts and tribunals, dealing with the past, and reparations between 2003-2006. Because not all grants have been reported for 2007, a total figure is estimated, based on the trends of previous years. Calculated using Foundation Directory Online. Total does not include 2008 grants.
5 E-mail correspondence with Judy Barsalou, March 15-16,2008.
6 Interview with Aryeh Neier.
7 Phone interview with Ariel Dorfman, March 25, 2008. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.
8 E-mail correspondence with Felipe Aguero, April 11, 2008.
9 Interview with Susan Berresford, March 25, 2008, at New York Community Trust, New York. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.
10 I/A Court H.R., Velasquez-Rodriguez v. Honduras. Merits. Judgment of July 29,1988. Series C No.4, par. 174.
11 See United Nations Secretary-General’s report on the rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies, Aug. 23, 2004, p. 4.
http://http://www.un.org/en/ruleoflaw/index.shtml
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