Memory and Justice: www.memoryandjustice.org

Prevention

Never Again: Memorials and Prevention

Over the course of the past fifty years, an increasingly global interest in constructing memorials to genocide and mass atrocity has emerged. This article will explore a primary way in which this interest has produced a new generation of memorials and a paradigm shift in public memorialization, offering a significantly different definition of the meaning and function of collective remembrance than those seen during the first half of the twentieth century. The distinction lies in the concept of prevention and the ways in which remembering the past can affect the future. To a significant extent, memorials made to commemorate mass atrocity today seek not only to remember and mourn victims but also to inspire public commitment to preventing similar atrocities from ever taking place again.

For several centuries, we have seen memorials and monuments constructed as a means of nation-building. The proliferation of Garibaldi statues in Italy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrates a phenomenon that has occurred in numerous different contexts: visual symbols help enshrine political values, inspire collective national-political identities and encourage popular support for a given regime. In the wake of the First World War, although nation-building certainly persisted as an aim of some memorials, a new important memory function emerged: bereavement, reflection, and mourning. As Jay Winter explains in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, total war turned memorials toward the solemn subject of death, as artists and designers adopted increasingly traditional (as opposed to modernist) means of representation to create spaces for civilians and veterans to deal with grief.

Of course, contemporary memorials continue to engage with both nation-building and bereavement. Memorials built to commemorate state violence perpetrated by a recently overthrown regime often seek to strengthen the legitimacy of the new regime by condemning and repudiating past violence. In South Africa, for example, memorials have been used in part to consolidate a new, democratic, post-Apartheid national identity. As Jacob Zuma, then Deputy President, put it during the inauguration ceremony of the Freedom Park Trust: “Today’s event is but one of the many processes that our government has engaged in since 1994, with a view to creating and fostering a new national consciousness among all South Africans of the common legacy that binds us as a nation.” (July 1, 2000). Similarly, a commitment to democracy has featured prominently in commemoration efforts in post-dictatorship Chile and Argentina.

Meanwhile, bereavement and private reflection have also persisted as important functions for public memorialization. That is, memorials still seek to honor and mourn for the dead. One of the primary purposes of the Srebrenica-Potocari Cemetery and Memorial, for example, was to grant the victims of the 1994 genocidal massacre proper burial.

Yet, contemporary memorials have also come to focus on the goal of preventing recurrence. In 1984, the Argentinian Truth Commission (CONADEP) commercially published its report under the title Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas. The words “Never Again” have become a touchstone for many in the field of public memorialization; indeed they feature prominently in contexts as diverse as the Rwandan Genocide Museums and the Paine memorial in Chile. But as the title of a truth commission, the phrase reveals an important point about the role of memory in the field of transitional justice as a whole. On the one hand, the point of a truth commission is to investigate and establish a full public record of past human rights abuse. Yet, as the title indicates, the point is not simply to remember the past; it is also to instill a public commitment to preventing human rights abuse in the future. A truth commission is not simply about preserving history. It is about making memory “work,” about securing a better future by remembering the past. Memorials, which should be seen alongside truth commissions as transitional justice measures, are similarly engaged in forward-looking “memorywork.”

But how exactly do memorials apply themselves to the goal of prevention? Seen as transitional justice measures, memorials can help states officially repudiate past violence and, in the process, create a public discourse which disincentivizes future human rights abuse. Official repudiation takes many forms, and prosecutions immediately come to mind as an important way in which states punish the perpetrators of human rights abuse. But prosecutions are inherently limited. Because of time and cost constraints, in many cases only a relatively small number of high-level perpetrators will be prosecuted. Vetting can help ensure that a larger group of those complicit with human rights abuse will be removed from public service, but it too faces serious limits. “Symbolic reparations,” including memorials, supplement these measures by expanding the scope of repudiation from the level of individual perpetrators to that of entire systems of violence. In doing so, memorials contribute vitally to institutional and cultural shift—to the promotion of new public discourses committed to de-legitimizing state violence and preventing recurrence.

On a more specific level, memorials tend to draw on several pedagogical strategies. First, many memorials seek to educate visitors by creating a very particular kind of experience—one which encourages visitors to empathize with victims as individual human beings rather than as an abstract, generalized, collective victim. This is accomplished through various means. At Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, visitors must confront the photographs of thousands of victims. The District Six Museum in South Africa, meanwhile, drew on personal collections of photographs, audio recordings, and objects to create a massive archive, which celebrates the lives of the displaced as real people—as active, vibrant individuals. By helping viewers see victims as individual human beings—not necessarily unlike themselves—memorials can lead viewers to a more intense appreciation of the horrors of human rights abuse.

This appreciation, based on an empathetic relationship between victim and visitor, plays a potentially vital role in discouraging future bystanders from remaining passive in the face of mass atrocity. Scholarship on bystanders shows that the ability to consider victims as “others” (because of physical distance, political affiliation, or ethnicity) often serves as a justification for inaction. If the victims of human rights abuse can be seen both as human beings and as citizens unlawfully deprived of their rights by state violence, then a potential next generation of bystanders may develop a firm sense of social responsibility with regard to mass atrocity.

A second important aspect of what we might call the architecture of empathy is the ability of visitors to ‘witness’ sites of torture and violence. Of course the concept of the witness, as used here, is figurative rather than literal; site designers do not propose that visitors will fully understand the pain of victims simply by viewing former torture sites. Nevertheless, the idea is that ‘experiential learning’ can have a greater impact than other, more removed and abstract forms of learning (reading, for example). To this end, converting former sites of torture and detention into sites of conscience has become an increasingly prominent strategy in public memorialization. Examples span the globe, from the former Naval Academy (ESMA) detention center in Argentina to the former prison Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, to the Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda. Some of these sites feature graphic displays of violence, in particular human remains, intended to force visitors to grapple directly with the evidence of mass killing. At Choeung Ek in Cambodia, for example, an open memorial tower is filled with human bones and visitors traverse several roughly excavated mass graves. Several genocide memorials in Rwanda (Murambi, Bisesero, Nyamata, Ntarama, and Nyarubuye) feature displays of human skulls and bones, sometimes ordered in rows and sometimes strewn about in piles.

In a related approach, some converted sites of conscience either recreate or preserve the apparatus of torture, inviting visitors to imagine the suffering of victims. At Villa Grimaldi Peace Park on the outskirts of Santiago, Chile, for example, designers rebuilt a “water tower,” a structure used for torture at the site, which had since been destroyed. On the second floor of the tower there is a small rectangular room—18 inches wide by 24 inches long by 6 feet tall—where prisoners had been held two or three at a time, unable to move and without food or a toilet. Today, visitors to the site are invited to stand in this room for several minutes—and experience a glimpse of what the torture was like.

A third characteristic shared by many memorials that seek to advance the cause of prevention in addition to providing a space for private reflection and remembrance is the active use of educational programming. Indeed, many sites see themselves not simply as memorials but rather as sites of learning. At Villa Grimaldi, tours are led by former prisoners—survivors—who lend their unique perspectives in the interest of teaching visitors specifically what happened at the site. In Timor Leste, the CAVR truth commission converted the Comarca Balide Prison into both a memorial and an active human rights center. Meanwhile, in Johanesburg, South Africa, public programming, tours and educational programs for children and adults were prominent features of the redevelopment of the Old Prison Complex into the new home of the Constitutional Court and a museum site for constitutional rights.

Of course, it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of these pedagogical strategies, especially given the long-term time frame in which many memorials intend to impact public discourses regarding human rights abuse. Research about the public reception of memorials and sites of conscience—who sees them and how do they react?—is undoubtedly necessary if we are to properly assess how likely it is that contemporary memorials will fulfill their goal of preventing recurrence.

Still, it is also important to understand, as this article has attempted, how contemporary memorials approach the concept of prevention and how their efforts represent a significant break with memorialization strategies developed in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Crucially, memorial sites that aim to promote the idea of “Never Again” should be seen in the context of other transitional justice measures, which seek to repudiate human rights abuse. If this repudiation impacts not only legal standards but also broader public discourses about history, morality and culture, we will more likely succeed in discouraging and preventing future human rights abuse. In this regard, the sort of memorials and sites of conscience discussed in this article play a potentially vital role.

Related Site

Choeung Ek, Center of Genocide Crimes

Parque de la Memoria

Terror Háza Múzeum (House of Terror Museum)

Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes

References

Louis Bickford, "Memoryworks," in Pablo De Greiff, ed.,

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Nunca Más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (Buenos Aires, 1984).
External Link

Victoria Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).

Design Competitions

Before any memorial to mass atrocity becomes a physical reality, the process that precedes it is often long, difficult, highly political, and mostly invisible to the public. In many cases, the process takes the form of a formal design competition. When done poorly, such competitions can be a kind of backroom deal, and result in memorials designed by committee, pleasing no one. But when done well, design competitions encourage transparency, emphasize consensus decision-making, and produce some of the most innovative and powerful work in the field.

The juries that make the decisions in design competitions can have members that come from a wide range of backgrounds, including politicians, architects, curators, and victims. Regardless of their professions, what’s most important is the spirit they bring to the process. The scholar James Young has served on juries for two of the most prominent memorial projects in the world today: the World Trade Center Memorial in New York City, and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (as jury chairman). A good design competition, he said, requires a jury that is willing to “stand by its decisions and convictions and be able to provide a rationale for whatever choice they made – including the choice not to choose something, if they can’t find anything that they feel would be appropriate.”

Design competitions are often much more fraught and contentious than either jurors or the public expect they will be. Put bluntly, competitions are battlegrounds – but with the right approach, they can be highly productive battlegrounds. “The processes themselves are and always have been conditioned by political, economic, cultural realities,” Young said. “There’s going to be contentiousness. This is the place where you work through what is to be remembered and why, and everybody’s got very different reasons.” During the World Trade Center Memorial process, Young said, “the family members had a huge sway, because they had a lock on meaning, and on grieving, and on direct loss. But what about the residents of the city? What about the national constituency? What about all the other nationals – there were people from ninety countries killed there. They all need to have voice in it. So it does get very noisy, and there’s a lot of jockeying around. The toughest part is to be able to manage it all without walking away.”

In some cases, a memorial is a means of creating a unified narrative for a community and applying a singular memory to a traumatic event. For this reason, the jury process, with all of its arguments, factions, and strong feelings, can feel unseemly to some stakeholders. “It turns the stomach of those who want to see decorum as part of the whole memorial,” Young says. “The process seems tarnished to people who like only that very clean finished product. But there’s never really a clean finished product. It’s like washing dirty laundry. All this stuff comes out, and it’s not pretty. But it’s always interesting. Open it up, let it be messy, let it live in real time, let it die in real time, let it evolve over real time. Let its meanings change over time, as they’re going to. If you fix it, you kill it. Just open the doors, and it will be OK.”

Often, as a design competition is in progress, the local press will treat the debates surrounding the competition as evidence that something is wrong – that the process is “troubled.” “In fact, all processes are troubled,” Young said. “The press’s job is to write about controversies, and sometimes to pour oil on them to get them going. The jury has to be thick-skinned enough to both withstand that kind of scrutiny – because it’s a necessary part of the process – and not feel that it has to be unduly influenced by very specific criticism. A jury is a space where we work it through, and we should be informed by the criticism we hear, and even by the lobbying. There’s a difference between being informed and being pressured to do a particular thing.”

In the end, the public usually only sees a single design – the design that the jury chose as the winner, which is presented as if it could never have been anything else. But losing designs can also be important to the process of memory. The World Trade Center Memorial jury, for example, received 5,201 submissions from around the world. “I asked everyone to keep in mind the hundreds of hours that would have gone into each submission,” Young says. “Multiply 5,201 by another hundred or 200 hours, and we can count the number of human hours already devoted to memorial work, commemorating these events in architecture, concepts, music, water, in all kinds of ways, by professionals and lay people alike.”

“I would love be able to show all of the losing designs, and suggest that the winning design is just the tip of the iceberg, resting in some way on all the unbuilt designs,” Young said. “All of these, too, should be regarded as part of the memorial. If all the debates, the decisions, and the proposals along the way come out, then the memorial itself becomes much more nuanced, textured, and interesting.”

Some design competitions are conducted blind, meaning that the jurors don’t know who submitted the designs until a winner is selected. This can be an excellent way to eliminate the personal and unconscious biases of the jurors, and allow them the focus on the actual merits of each proposal. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, for example, was a blind competition, and it is often said that Maya Lin’s revolutionary design would never have been chosen had the process not been blind. Unfortunately, blind competitions are also more expensive to run, and many juries find they can’t afford them. Blind competitions also reduce the advantage of celebrity, and quiet the influence of the art market. For this reason, though, it can be hard to get certain designers to participate. “Many of the great well established artists refuse to enter blind competitions,” Young says. They say, ‘I can’t spend hundreds of hours competing against amateurs and have a one in one thousand chance of succeeding.’ The really great ones almost won’t do it by definition.”

Whether entries are sought blindly or by invitation, it’s best for any competition to be transparent. A transparent competition, it must be said, is not an efficient way of making a memorial. But in the end, transparency is most likely to produce a memorial that most stakeholders feel invested in. “Make the process educational,” Young recommends. “Have a conference with speakers, or a series of speakers talking about why we want to remember. What is it exactly that we’re commemorating, and why are we doing it, toward what end? It is for us, or for the next generation? Why does our community have an interest in remembering? Those are tough questions sometimes. People can’t always answer them. But if they do, then they’ve tilled the ground, and they’ve created a very fertile space for memory, and then for a memorial, a monument, a museum, an education center, or whatever it is they end up with.”

“Don’t worry about the end result,” Young says. “Just preserve the process, and keep it as transparent as possible. Ask difficult questions, even if there aren’t answers, and let that process be the memorial for the time being. It could result in a thing in the ground; it might not.” The best memorial, Young has said, is the debate surrounding the memorial.

Art & Architecture

Art and Architecture

What is the difference between public memorials and public art? The line between them can be hard to find, but they are not the same thing. While public sculptures and installations are typically the result of an artist’s solitary vision, the best public memorials respond to a broader spectrum of interests. When they make memorials, artists work for victims, communities, society, and future generations. The stakes can be high. If people are unhappy with a piece of public art in their community, they might be annoyed by its presence; if they are unhappy with a public memorial, emotions can run very deep, as in Halabja, Iraq, where villagers burned down a memorial that had been built to honor them.

But artists often hesitate to cede control, not wanting to compromise their visions as a matter of principle; as a result they can at times be highly resistant to consulting with victims. In one sense, the relationship between designer and victim is that of contractor and client – with clients asking the contractor to build them a place to mourn. In many cases, architects are more comfortable with this kind of relationship than artists. One case in point is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by the architect Peter Eisenman and the artist Richard Serra. When German chancellor Helmut Kohl asked for substantial changes to their design, Eisenman obliged, and Serra removed his name from the project.

Is it even necessary for memorials to be created by trained artists and architects? Not all memorials are. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, stitched by amateurs, proves that effective memorials don't necessarily need professional artists. There is a wide spectrum of possible approaches. On one end, there are spontaneous and often ephemeral memorials, created by everyday people in the heat of grief, like the messages, drawings, and makeshift shrines that accumulated in New York’s Union Square in the days after the September 11 attacks. The fact that they were unprofessional, chaotic, and sometimes kitschy only seemed to increase their emotional power. On the other end there are conceptual art projects that seem almost like pranks, such as the Bruce Lee statue in Bosnia and much of Horst Hoheisel’s work. At their best, these memorials are cleverly and incisively designed to shatter old patterns of thought, pushing passersby to consider ideas that are inspiring and new. Other concepts lie somewhere in between. To make the Paine Memorial in Chile, which commemorates victims of state terror, professional artists worked closely with families of victims to design the site, teaching the families the art of mosaic-making over a period of months. The families testified to how much this creative process became a part of their healing process.

The process is, in some ways, more important than the memorial itself. In many post-conflict situations, “people can’t find anything to agree on except that certain things need to be recalled,” memorial scholar James Young said. “So the memorializing process becomes a place where people work through to reunify otherwise very broken communities.”

Today, it’s unlikely that a new memorial will be built in a traditional style – say, a noble soldier on horseback atop a slab of marble with a plaque. How did the modern approach to memorial design develop? One important factor was that, in the first half of the twentieth century, the tremendous destruction and trauma of the two World Wars irrevocably transformed the function of art. As James Young put it, people began to look to art “not as a redeeming, saving grace, but as something now obligated to represent hopelessness, or irredeemable loss.” At the same time, a tendency toward a new aesthetic – what we now might call modernism – was taking hold. These developments had a huge influence on memorial art.

In the decades since, as artists have grappled with how to address mass atrocity in their work, certain recurring themes have formed a kind of aesthetic lexicon for memorials. For example, the Krakow Ghetto and Deportation Monument in Poland, Un Lugar para la Memoria in Chile, and the Oklahoma City Monument in the United States all use empty chairs to suggest absence. In fact, absence itself is one of the most regular themes found in modern memorials. The winning design for the forthcoming World Trade Center Memorial, which emphasizes the empty footprints left by the destroyed towers, is titled “Reflecting Absence.” Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin features five cavernous voids, which, in Liebeskind’s words, represent “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes.” Sometimes memorials themselves are made to disappear, as with a number of German “countermonuments,” including Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s gradually descending Monument against Fascism, Gerz’s secretly installed and hidden Monument against Racism, and Horst Hoheisel’s inverted Aschrottbrunnen Fountain. (In his design submission for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Hoheisel even proposed blowing up Berlin’s iconic Brandenberg Gate – to remember one destruction with another.)

Many other memorials are built around a landscape theme – notably, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the United States, designed by the landscape architect and artist Maya Lin. “She opened a place in the landscape in order to open a place within us for memory,” Young said. “I think no single memorial has had a greater impact on the aesthetics of memorial and monumental architecture. Finally there seemed to be a vernacular for articulating loss and ambivalence about remembering things you might rather forget.” In another use of landscape, to commemorate the destruction of the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, the architect Tadao Undo planted some 50,000 white blooming magnolias, right in the path of destruction. “It’s built on the premise that we need a memorial that we tend and nurture,” Young said. Young, who helped judge the design competition for the World Trade Center Memorial, said that the jury received a number of proposals with this in mind, and ended up choosing a design that included groves of trees. “You have to take care of them, and they provide comforting shade.” Young said. “You remember life with life.”

Thank you for your comment

It will appear on the site momentarily.

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 legacies of past abuses is always painful. It is also hazardous, mostly because the forces interested in impunity and forgetting still wield considerable power and are determined to erect obstacles in the path of truth and justice. At key moments, initiatives designed to preserve memory provide the necessary energy and impetus to overcome those seemingly insurmountable barriers,”  Juan Méndez, ICTJ

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

Recognizing victims publicly, fashioning meaningful programs aimed at simultaneously acknowledging their trauma and helping them recover from it, and providing spaces for them to tell their stories and be listened to by both fellow citizens and respected leaders … is an essential component of tolerance, the foundation of a democratic society.

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.”⁹One 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

¹ 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.
External Link

¹² footnote

¹³ footnote

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.

See ICTJ Colombia program.

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.

See ICTJ Indonesia program.

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.

Continued in part 3.

References

¹ 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.

Tourism

Tourism and Memory Sites

Tourism is typically associated with pleasure and fun, vacation and escape. What happens, then, when a memorial to mass atrocity becomes a tourist site? In Cambodia, for example, two mass atrocity memorial sites – Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng – are among the most popular tourist destinations in the country. Both are visited far more frequently by foreigners than by locals. Are these tourists morbidly attracted to evil? Are they voyeurs? Or is there a wider range of complicated motivations at play? As mass tourism continues its incredible and unprecedented growth worldwide, these questions are increasingly important.

Tourism that involves going to the sites of genocide, crimes against humanity, or "radical evil" is obviously complicated. Commentators have called it "dark tourism," "negative sightseeing," or "thanatourism," which A.V. Seaton defines as "traveling to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death." Why are tourists attracted to these sites? The authors of the book Dark Tourism have one answer: they see the phenomenon as a pathological but logical extension of unfettered capitalism or commercialism. There is a fear that sites of evil can all too easily be transformed into Disney-like theme parks, robbing them entirely of educational or spiritual meaning.

In some cases, criticisms of "dark tourism," whether made by academics or journalists, are snide and indirect, impugning the motives of tourists without ever articulating what is actually so bad about visiting challenging memorials. It's easy to judge tourists, but it's very difficult to sort through their complicated motivations and reactions – even for the tourists themselves. Based on her interviews with visitors to Cambodia's Tuol Sleng museum, Rachel Hughes found that the tourists were "variously supportive, studious, disturbed, self-effacing, sympathetic, ambivalent, uncomfortable, apologetic, cynical, deferential, frustrated, skeptical, derogatory, prescriptive and excited." After all, tourists come to memorials with a wide range of intentions. While some may be drawn by a taste for morbidity, many others are students, historians, or scholars, politicians or passersby, descendants of perpetrators or victims – or some combination of these categories. What is interesting is how these varied interests are addressed by the site itself, and how the space is shared.

While tourism always runs the risk of trivializing, commercializing, inadequately understanding, and poorly representing the objects of its attention, there is no doubt that tourism can also be a positive presence at sites of memory. The best memorial sites seek to educate tourists about past atrocity, drawing lessons from the past in hopes of creating informed, democratic citizens. But what do tourists actually learn at such sites? How do these sites influence their thoughts and actions in the long term?

Another question is how memory tourism affects the countries in which atrocity memorials occur. Some sites are "negative memorials," commemorating events with a sense of regret and self-indictment. It could be a lost war (like the Vietnam War Memorial in the US), a genocide perpetrated by the former regime of a state (like Germany's numerous Holocaust memorials), or other war crimes (like Argentina's memorials to those who were disappeared by the military dictatorship). Such memorials can be an opportunity for a state to redefine its national identity after troubled years. In the eyes of tourists, how is the image of the state altered by these sites of remembrance? How does a state promote a site of tourism that criticizes the state itself? In post-Apartheid South Africa, for example, the state aggressively promotes tourism sites such as Robben Island (where Nelson Mandela was jailed for 30 years), District Six Museum (a neighborhood wiped off the map), and other memorials that remind visitors of the darkest days of South African history. To what purpose, and with what effect?

The inherent complexity of these sites often leaves visitors confused about how they are expected to behave. Cambodia's Tuol Sleng museum has signs admonishing visitors not to smile; at Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, children routinely ignore instructions that the site is not playground. Memorials are many things at once: sites for mourning and reflection, architectural or artistic landmarks, political statements, public spaces for social gatherings, and educational venues, as well as tourism destinations. With all these competing functions, does memory remain the focus?

When memorials become tourist sites, marketing inevitably becomes a question. The advertisement of memorials requires a delicate negotiation between staying true to a site's serious memorial purpose and promoting it as an attractive destination that repairs the image of a country burdened with negative history. What kind of publicity material is tasteful? Do memorials belong in guidebooks? Should memorials be rented as spaces for private activities, such as parties or conventions? What are the limits of what is acceptable – and who decides?

References

Bickford, Louis. "Transforming a Legacy of Genocide: Pedagogy and Tourism at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek." Memory, Memorials, and Museums (MMM) Program, International Center for Transitional Justice, February 2009.

Hughes, Rachel. "Dutiful tourism: Encountering the Cambodian genocide." Asia Pacific Viewpoint 49, no. 3 (December 2008): p318-330.
External Link

Related Resources

Type: Print
MacCannell, Dean The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

One of the first scholarly book on theories of tourism and a very accessible study, which includes “negative sightseeing,” a precursor to “dark tourism.”

permanent link

Type: Print
Seaton, A. V. "Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism." International Journal of Heritage Studies 2, no. 4 (1996): pp. 234-244.

The seminal article on Thanatourism, which attempts to describe it, categorize it and show conctete examples without being judgmental.

permanent link

Type: Web
Guardian Article external link

The Guardian published a short piece about popular ‘dark tourism’ sites.

permanent link

Type: Print
Cole, Tim Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged, and Sold. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Cole offers a critique of the commodification of the Holocaust through tourism, merchandising, and other commercial enterprises.

download file

permanent link

Discussion of Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park

Do multiple narratives enhance or hinder a memorial's meaning?

As is the case with most historical events, episodes of state violence and atrocity can be difficult to explain as single narratives. Causes and outcomes are often complex and contested. And even in cases in which victims and perpetrators are clearly defined separate groups, there can be internal disagreement over the proper means (and content) of memorialization.

With these concerns in mind, how can we assess the usefulness and feasibility of constructing memorials that allow for multiple and possibly competing narratives of the past?

Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park is one example of a memorial that seeks to sustain multiple narratives. The city has given space to a wide range of groups, and their memorials represent a diverse range of aesthetic and social concerns. The gradual growth of the park has also allowed for layers of history-telling; visitors can trace Japan's evolving attitudes toward its past.

However, the competing narratives of the park have not been without their tensions. For example, among the approximately 200,000 people killed by the bomb and its effects were around 35,000 Koreans, many of whom had been brought to Japan by force during World War II and not allowed to return home. In 1993, Yuri Kitaoka argued in this editorial that Peace Memorial Park had snubbed the Korean victims. In 1999, after long delays, the Monument in Memory of the Korean Victims of the Atomic Bomb was finally moved inside the park.

Meanwhile, the United States has criticized the memorial for not adequately addressing the wider context of Japan's military action during the war (particularly in China) and the prospect of continued land war that, in their view, necessitated atomic force. (Of course, this argument is highly contested as well).

Looking ahead, one can easily imagine other difficulties associated with incorporating multiple narratives into memorials. How, for example, can memorials adequately address situations in which violence was inflicted reciprocally or among several state and non-state actors? And how can we prevent memorials from institutionalizing historical narratives which marginalize certain affected groups? These questions force us to return to an important lesson learned from the history of monuments and memorials. These instruments, despite their ability to heal and reconcile, can also serve to incite existing group tensions.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum

References

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, official site
External Link

Design

Design of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum

Peace Memorial Park was designed by Kenzo Tange, who won a design competition sponsored by the city of Hiroshima. Entrants were asked to develop a comprehensive proposal for the entire memorial park and all related facilities.

Tange’s vision for the park was to create a universal and accessible symbol of peace and hope for Hiroshima. The buildings and monuments are low-rise but majestic, built in what Tange referred to as a merging of “human scale and social human scale.” The design is intentionally international and non-specific to Japan, because Tange felt that a symbol of eternal peace needed to be built in an inclusive style with few few formal references to individual nations.

“Peace does not come naturally; instead it has to be sought and obtained,” Tange said in a 1949 interview. “Peace is not what Mother Nature or Divinity bestows upon you but you practice and create it. This Hiroshima peace facility is not only for commemorating restored peace but for creating peace in a constructive way. We thought the facility we were about to work on had to be a factory where peace shall be created.”

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, located at the center of the park, contains a seminar room, library, temporary exhibition area, and victims’ information area. Near the entrance of the museum is a clock frozen at 8:15, the time the bomb went off. One of museum’s most stunning features is The Hall of Remembrance, which contains a 360-degree panorama of the destroyed Hiroshima, recreated using 140,000 tiles – the number of people estimated to have died from the bomb by the end of 1945.

Near the center of the park is the Flame of Peace, which has burned continuously since it was lit on August 1, 1964, and is meant to burn “until the day when all such weapons shall have disappeared from the earth.” The Flame of Peace is located on one side of the narrow Pond of Peace. Standing opposite the flame is the Cenotaph for the A-Bomb Victims, designed by Tange, which resembles an ancient arch-shaped house and is inscribed with the words, “Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil.” Under the arch, a stone chest holds a registry of all the names of people who died as a result of the bombing.

Across the river is the Children’s Peace Monument, where a statue of a girl with outstretched arms and a crane rising above her is dedicated to the memory of the children who died as a result of the bombing. The statue is based on the true story of a young girl who died from radiation. She believed that if she only folded 1,000 paper cranes, she would be cured. In her honor, people from all around the world have folded paper cranes and mailed them to Hiroshima.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum

References

^* Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, official site
External Link

Discussion for Villa Grimaldi

Should a site's original elements be preserved at all costs?

How important is it for memorials to preserve the physical remains of the events they commemorate? Within this question lies another: if it is beneficial to preserve the original elements of a site, should they be preserved as they are, in varying states of decay or ruin, or reconstructed to their original form? Indeed, in the field of historic preservation there has long been debate over the relative merits of preservation and restoration.

Villa Grimaldi, in Chile, serves as a useful example of how these issues apply specifically to memorial sites that commemorate state violence and mass atrocity. By the time it was decided that Villa Grimaldi should be converted into a site of memory, there was little left to preserve; in an effort to erase the evidence of torture, the government had demolished much of the site by the end of 1988. Ultimately, designers at the site chose to reconstruct the central torture site, but as a bare, oren area, omitting the actual tools of torture.

Designers at other sites have faced similar challenges. In Morocco, for instance, the question of reconstruction is currently being discussed, as the state Equity and Reconciliation Commission has recommended that several former torture sites be converted into sites of memory.

There is no single answer to these questions, and differing contexts undoubtedly present different demands. But how should we begin to think about the relationship between preservation and restoration as it applies to public memorialization, especially as former sites of torture are increasingly being converted into sites of memory?

Comment on this article

Related Site

Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace

Discussion of Tuol Sleng

Tuol Sleng has been instrumental in the creation of a master narrative of the past that legitimizes Cambodia’s current ruling party and projects the aura of a unified national identity. But the average, everyday Cambodian was entirely detached from the design of the museum. The involvement of Vietnam––as an invading force and historical adversary––in the creation of Tuol Sleng has instilled a sense of suspicion in many Cambodians, who often view the museum as inauthentic.

As Andreas Huyssen writes, the museum can seem to replicate the dehumanization of the Khmer Rouge, in the sense that the nameless photographs of the victims echo “the violent voiding of identity that was the torturers’ explicit goal and always preceded disappearance.” Paul Williams notes that by exhaustively detailing the Khmer Rouge’s favored torture tactics, Tuol Sleng focuses on remembering the perpetrators, not the victims.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes

References

This essay was adapted in part from this article: Moore, Lisa. “Recovering the Past, Remembering Trauma: The Politics of Commemoration at Sites of Atrocity.” Journal of Public and International Affairs, Princeton: Princeton University, Spring, 2009.

Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Williams, Paul. “The Atrocity Exhibition: Touring Cambodian Genocide Memorials.” In On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, edited by A. Smith and Wevers, 197-214. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004.

Design

Design of Tuol Sleng

After taking control of Cambodia in 1979, the Vietnamese, seeking to legitimize their unpopular occupation, quickly capitalized upon Tuol Sleng’s propaganda potential. They enlisted Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel turned museologist, to archive the contents and transform the site into a memorial within a year’s time. To research his design, Mai Lam visited the Holocaust concentration camps of Europe. The resulting museum deliberately borrowed imagery from the Holocaust museums in an effort to conflate the Khmer Rouge with the Nazis. He highlighted Tuol Sleng’s most gruesome elements, an approach that culminated in a huge map of Cambodia made from the actual skulls of victims, its rivers painted blood red. (The map was dismantled in 2002.) As Judy Ledgerwood writes, the Vietnamese narrative of Tuol Sleng is one of a “glorious revolution stolen and perverted by a handful of sadistic, genocidal traitors who deliberately exterminated three million of their countrymen. The true heirs to the revolutionary movement overthrew this murderous tyranny…just in time to save the Khmer people from genocide.”

Tuol Sleng’s most famous feature is the display, across several rooms, of thousands of anonymous photographs of the victims of S-21. Khmer Rouge photographer Nhem En took these photos as mug shots when the prisoners were admitted. When the museum was finally opened to the general public, relatives of the victims were prohibited from inscribing the photographs with the victims’ names.

Visitors can also view the preserved artifacts of the prison as left by the Khmer Rouge in 1979, including metal beds, crude brick cells, group shackles, and torture instruments. Mai Lam’s original design and signage now coexist with thoughtful new installations presented by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, including essays and photo exhibits.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes

References

Ledgerwood, Judy. “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82-98.

Discussion of Choeung Ek

Some Cambodians have made the objection that the preservation and presentation of skulls in Choeung Ek’s stupa violates Buddhist custom. In an appeal for the cremation of the human remains displayed at Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng, the former King Norodom Sihanouk decried what he perceived to be the political use of human remains, saying that he was “trying to lay to rest not just the souls of the dead, but the deep divisions between the coalition partners in the new royal government – those placed in power by Vietnamese ‘liberators’ and those who fought a war of ‘liberation’ against Vietnamese ‘occupation.’” Other Cambodians argue that the skulls present no conflict with Buddhist teachings, and insist that their presentation is part of an essential historical record.

In the context of this debate, it is important to examine the popularity of Choeung Ek as a tourist site. Why do so many tourists come to Choeung Ek? Are they motivated by a morbid interest in the site’s blunt display of skulls and raw open graves? Are they genuinely interested in confronting and understanding what happened in Cambodia? Or are they drawn by a complicated combination of motivations?

Comment on this article

Related Site

Choeung Ek, Center of Genocide Crimes

References

Design

Design of Choeung Ek

Choeung Ek is a large site, about the size of a soccer field, and is surrounded by farmland. The centerpiece of the site, a 62-meter concrete and plexiglass stupa, displays over 5,000 human skulls. During the day, the lower levels of the stupa are left open to give visitors an unobstructed view of the skulls, many of which have been shattered or smashed. Behind the stupa, visitors can walk freely around a series of partially exhumed mass graves, in which over 8,000 victims were buried. When it rains heavily, shards of human bones and scraps of the clothing worn by the victims sometimes surface in the walkways around the graves.

Under the direction of the Japanese company JC Royal, the current administrators of the site are constructing a new visitors' center where films will be shown. The company also helped construct the first paved road leading from Phnom Penh to Choeung Ek. As of this writing, however, the site itself is largely unchanged, including the original signage created decades ago by the Vietnamese designers. The site also features a gift shop where books and typical Cambodian souvenirs are sold.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Choeung Ek, Center of Genocide Crimes

References

Discussion of Comarca Balide

Is it possible to turn a site of reprehensible crimes into a human rights center? The post-occupation stewards of Comarca Balide did just that, introducing healing and reconciliation into a place of torture and repression. How were the curators able to accomplish such a difficult transformation with sensitivity and without exploiting the painful memories of the site?

Comment on this article

Related Site

Comarca Balide Prison

Design

Design of Comarca Balide

After independence, Timor-Leste’s Association of Ex-Political Prisoners (ASEPPOL) assumed guardianship of Comarca Balide. In April 2002, ASEPPOL agreed to give CAVR use of the building throughout its mandate, and suggested that the building be turned into “a center for the promotion of human rights and reconciliation in East Timor.”

The Japanese government helped fund CAVR’s move into the former prison. A Timorese company, PT Rosario, run by Julio Alfaro, a former political prisoner, managed the reconstruction of the site. On February 17, 2003, former president Xanana Gusmão inaugurated the rehabilitated Comarca Balide. “As you know, this building was formerly a prison for the detention of political prisoners,” Gusmão told the audience of thousands. “It has undergone a transformation to become a human rights center. The work of the CAVR aims also to facilitate a transformation from trauma to peace of heart. The CAVR does not only search for the truth but seeks to facilitate transformation in the society from trauma to peace.”

The designers preserved over sixty-five graffiti markings made by East Timorese prisoners or their Indonesian prison guards, and erected a large traditional meeting space in the prison’s former exercise courtyard. Additionally, a woman who had been detained in the prison with her mother when she was a child planted gardens within the courtyard space. Upon completion of the construction and rebuilding, a traditional cleansing ceremony was conducted to symbolically remove the spirits associated with the site’s history of abuse and violence. Later, during the tenure of the CAVR, the Comarca site was used to host public hearings, healing workshops, and other cathartic activities.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Comarca Balide Prison

References

Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor-Leste (CAVR), official website
External Link

International Center for Transitional Justice: Report on CAVR
External Link

Waddingham, John “Archives in Timor-Leste: Impressions from a Visit to East Timor, May 2003.” The CHART Project.
External Link

USAID-Timor-Leste. “Programs Highlight: Democracy and Governance.”
External Link

Discussion of Halabja

In the wake of mass atrocity, reparations for victims don’t necessarily have to be material in order to be effective. Symbolic reparations––including memorials––can go a long way toward giving victims a sense of recognition and redress. But as Lisa Magarrell has noted, reparations “almost always fall short of victims’ expectations.” If reparations are purely symbolic, they are even more likely to lead to resentment. “A symbolic reparations program,” Magarrell writes, “will not be taken seriously by victims if it is not accompanied by at least some concrete material solutions for harm suffered.”

This, perhaps, helps account for the failure of the Halabja memorial. While the memorial was well-built, it was not accompanied by efforts to address the material needs of residents. The city continued to lack basic infrastructure and has no central square or other civic space to speak of. When memorials are well planned, they can serve as valuable civic space for a community. But when the Halabja community’s frustration with government inaction boiled over, residents directed their anger at the only civic space they had—the memorial itself—and destroyed it.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Halabja Monument to Kurdish victims of gas massacre

References

Magarrell, Lisa. “Reparations in Theory and Practice.” International Center for Transitional Justice, October 2007.
External Link

Design

Design of Halabja

The main building of the Halabja monument is a single-story, modern structure covered in white orbs. Its curved roof culminates in a 100-foot tower consisting of white spires that resemble hands reaching up and grasping at an object. Inside, the names of the dead are inscribed in white on the black marble walls of a circular hall. The museum exhibits are blunt and literal, including giant photographs of the bodies of victims and a detailed, life-size diorama depicting the aftermath of the gas attacks, replete with mannequins in agonized positions and realistic bomb casings.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Halabja Monument to Kurdish victims of gas massacre

References

Rubin, Amy. “Memorial to Gas Attack Victims Spurs Controversy.” PBS: America Rebuilds II: Return to Ground Zero, September 2006.
External Link

Discussion of Terror Háza

The museum has been both wildly popular and highly controversial. High-tech and slickly produced, the museum strikes some visitors as somewhat over-the-top, even campy, in its presentation of dark events. Some Hungarians insist that the museum takes a biased approach to remembering history, intended to defame members of the current Socialist party with communist pasts––a charge fueled by the fact that Victor Orban’s nationalist party commissioned the building’s renovation in the heat of an election year. Whatever the reason, there’s no doubt that the museum’s scrutiny of communist repression is far more detailed and intense than the focus on fascism. The museum’s curators counter that Hungary’s communist era was far longer than its fascist era.

The Hungarian Jewish community has also criticized the museum for claiming that the horrors committed during and after World War II, such as the Holocaust, were the sole responsibility of outside impositions by foreigners, rather than something many Hungarians were complicit in.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Terror Háza Múzeum (House of Terror Museum)

References

Fuller, Thomas. “Memory becomes battleground in Budapest's House of Terror.” International Herald Tribune, August 2, 2002.

Jordan, Michael J. “Budapest Museum Controversial.” The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 26, 2002.
External Link

Design

Design of Terror Háza

The Terror Háza museum was opened on February 24, 2002, after a year-long renovation process. The reconstruction aimed to make the building stand out imposingly on the street, adding granite sidewalks and a giant black awning stenciled with the word “TERROR” and the symbols of Nazi and Communist rule.

Inside, the museum’s exhibits describe and illustrate the building’s past uses, including the basement prison cells and films detailing employed torture methods, as well as memorial walls to the building’s victims and tableaux featuring names and photos of those believed to have been involved in the Communist intelligence services (including some who are still active Socialist party officials). Hungarian architects János Sándor and Kámán Újszászy planned the building’s renovation; architect Attila F. Kovács designed the museum’s façade and interior exhibitions.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Terror Háza Múzeum (House of Terror Museum)

References

Terror Háza Múzeum, official website.
External Link

Fuller, Thomas. “Memory becomes battleground in Budapest's House of Terror.” International Herald Tribune, August 2, 2002.

Discussion for Oradour-sur-Glane

In her study of Oradour-sur-Glane, Martyred Village, Sarah Farmer notes the “inherent impossibility” of freezing memory by attempting to preserve the burned-out ruins, decade after decade. “Over time, rain has washed white the blackened remains of Oradour, and the jagged walls have crumbled under the impact of frost and thaw. Though workmen repair the ruins and cut back ivy and nettles, decay and new growth threaten to change Oradour from a scene of horror into a melancholy, even romantic vista. Just as memory is continually reworked and reorganized, memorial sites never stand still.” Should natural change over time—a gradual healing of ruin— be seen as part of the memorial site? Or should the site's curators strive to preserve the original ruins as much as possible, defying nature in a call for remembrance?

Comment on this article

Related Site

Oradour-sur-Glane

References

Farmer, Sarah Bennett. Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Design

Design of Oradour-sur-Glane

The victims of Oradour-sur-Glane are buried in a cemetery to the north of the village, where a tall column flanked by ossuaries memorializes the dead. Along the rear wall of the cemetery are ten black tablets inscribed with the names of the 642 people who perished. The identifiable victims were buried in family plots. The bones of the unidentified were interred in several areas, including ossuaries on either side of the main column of the memorial. These ossuaries also contain bone fragments from other execution sites in the general area.

The Centre de la Mémoire, a museum and visitors’ center for Oradour-sur-Glane, opened in May 1999. Yves Devraine, working with architects Jean-Louis Marty and Antonio Carrilero, designed and landscaped the Center, which is located near the village. Devraine designed the building to blend in with its surroundings; it was built into the side of a small valley, and a river is reflected in its glass façade. The façade is interrupted by metal blades, which symbolize the violence suffered by the villagers of Oradour.

Visitors can enter the cemetery and walk around the old village, which has been preserved as it was after its destruction in 1944. There are no guides for the village; visitors are invited to wander through the ruins and come to their own conclusions. The site is maintained through a partnership among the Conseil General, the Rector of the Academy of Limoges, and the Centre de la Mémoire.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Oradour-sur-Glane

References

Centre de la mémoire, Oradour-sur-Glane, official site.
External Link

Discussion of Herbert Baum Gedenkstein

When memorials become ideologically problematic, is it better to get rid of them––or to add to them? The original Herbert Baum memorial reflected the ideology of communist East Germany. But rather than destroying the memorial or leaving it as an outdated relic of the GDR’s collective memory of WWII, the Plexiglas plaques, added after Germany reunified, allow the monument and its original inscriptions to stand and represent the moment in history in which they were created. Instead of replacing one version of the past with a current perception, the plaques and the visible inscriptions beneath remind the visitor that interpretations and perceptions of the past are in constant flux as societies themselves transition. Rather than erase the past as perceived by the GDR under communist rule and rhetoric, the Herbert Baum Group Memorial now creatively preserves a version of history that cannot simply be forgotten, while offering a more inclusive and democratic version of the past.

Comment on this article

Related Site

The Herbert Baum Gedenkstein

References

Bickford, Louis. “Monuments and memory.” International Herald Tribune, November 19, 2007.

Design

Design of Herbert Baum Gedenkstein

The Herbert Baum Gedenkstein, as it was designed by Jürgen Raue in its original form, consists of a small stone cube with inscriptions on each of its four sides. “Bound in friendship with the Soviet Union forever,” it reads in large block letters. “Unforgotten the courageous deeds and the steadfastness of the anti-fascist resistance group led by the young Communist Herbert Baum.”

The two Plexiglas plaques, installed in 2001, add a new layer of history. One plaque lists the thirty-four members of the Herbert Baum Group. The other gives more information about the Baum Group in German, English, French, and Russian, stating in part that the memorial “documents the brave act of resistance in 1942, the conception of history in 1981, and our continuous remembrance of resistance to the Nazis.”

Comment on this article

Related Site

The Herbert Baum Gedenkstein

References

Bickford, Louis. “Monuments and memory.” International Herald Tribune, November 19, 2007.

Jordan, Jennifer A. Structures of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2006: 73-75.

Schafft, Gretchen. “Civic Denial and the Memory of War.” Journal of American Academy of Psychoanalysis 26 (1998): 255-272.

Design

Design for Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace

Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace consists of a 10,200-square-meter green space crossed by two intersecting paths that lead to a wall inscribed with the names of victims. Designed by Ana Cristina Torrealba, Jose Luis Gajardo, and Luis Santibóez, the park is meant to evoke spiritual thought and honor the memory of the victims. According to the site’s literature, the park “symbolizes the end and the condemnation of a sinister past, and also the beginning of a new stage in the life and the coexistence between all people of Chile.”

Pedro Matta, a former detainee at Villa Grimaldi who was deeply involved in discussions with other victims on what to do with the site, described their process: “The group was divided in their opinions: part of the group wanted to rebuild the former torture center as it was during the time of its functioning (which proved to be impossible because there was not enough funding to do that); another part wanted to demolish everything that remained there and to build a beautiful park to the memory of those who disappeared or were killed at the site, and finally, another group, in which I counted myself, proposed that all the artifacts and buildings that were not destroyed by the dictatorship should be preserved for the memory of this country and a park should be built around them. This was the proposition that was finally approved.”

Comment on this article

Related Site

Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace

References

Corporación Parque por la Paz Villa Grimaldi.
External Link

Baxter, Victoria. "Civil Society Promotion of Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation in Chile: Villa Grimaldi." Peace & Change 30, no. 1 (January 2005): 120-136.

Discussion for District Six Museum

The District Six Museum is a living space that is “continually shifted, layered, and subverted by its visitors.” It focuses on the past destruction of a neighborhood by celebrating that neighborhood’s current vibrancy and by drawing visitors into the story. The collection itself––street signs, personal objects, small family photographs––is humble, yet beautiful. The museum is also a real actor in Cape Town social life, hosting discussions and forums on issues such as land reform and diversity.

Nothing in this museum is glitzy, fancy, expensive, or electronic, but the result is inspiring. What makes the jumble of ingredients that comprise the District Six Museum successful? How does its collection compare with those of other museums of memory––or, for that matter, with the collections of traditional museums?

Comment on this article

Related Site

District Six Museum

References

Karp, Ivan, Corinne Kratz, et al. Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, 299-300. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Design

Design of District Six Museum

Upon entry to the District Six Museum, a large, interactive map on the floor and a display of old street signs give visitors a palpable sense of what life was like in District Six. The map was created as part of a 1994 exhibit called “Streets: Retracing District Six.” Former residents were invited to mark places they remembered from the neighborhood. “As the exhibition captured the public imagination,” former museum director Valmont Layne wrote, “ex-residents flooded the organizers with memorabilia from the District: family photographs, bottles, toys, even items of furniture and doors. However, we were not ready for this influx of museum objects. Even so, receiving the deposit had to be part of the spirit of accepting the positive community response with grace.”

The first floor of the museum presents the historical background of some of the policies of the Apartheid regime, particularly the Group Areas Act. The second floor guides the visitor through District Six, exploring its daily life activities through recreated workplaces and social scenes. There are also large, translucent portraits of well-known former residents. One highlight of the Museum is the “memory cloth” on which comments, messages, and personal memories by ex-residents of District Six have been written. The cloth is over 300 meters long and still growing as visitors continue to write on it.

At any given time, the museum hosts several different exhibits, but the main, permanent exhibit is entitled “Digging Deeper.” This exhibit is a varied, multi-textured presentation, consisting of lifelike recreations, panels, timelines, pictures, and sound domes broadcasting the voices of the displaced. Meanwhile, the museum houses an impressive archive collection of visual, oral, textual materials, such as photographs, newspapers, paintings, artifacts, interviews with former residents, video footage of forced removals, and musical recordings.

Comment on this article

Related Site

District Six Museum

References

“Streets.” District Six Museum Official Site.
External Link

Layne, Valmont. “The sound archive at the District Six Museum: A work in progress.” S. A. Archives Journal 40 (1998): 22.

Topol, Sarah. “What’s Being Done on Memory Projects?” World Movement for Democracy.
External Link

Discussion of Constitution Hill

Constitution Hill is, in many ways, a model for what a multi-faceted memorial site can be. In supplanting a former political prison with the home base of a famously progressive constitution, the site honors the painful sacrifices of the past while serving as an active symbol of human rights and democracy for the future. In addition, the Constitution Hill project aspires to create jobs, promote tourism, instill civic pride, provide public space, employ environmentally sustainable architecture, and foster urban renewal within a blighted neighborhood.

Precisely because Constitution Hill is such an ambitious and complex site, it presents many special challenges. In a 2003 paper for South Africa’s Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Ereshnee Naidu noted several considerations that should be heeded if Constitution Hill is to succeed as a site of memory and justice. “To ensure that the voices collected represent the experiences of all those that have come in contact with the Fort,” Naidu wrote, “it is necessary that the national drive to collect stories engage with all South Africans. The process should represent the voices of 'ordinary' people who were incarcerated on the site, and not just the famous personalities, such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, who have been known to be imprisoned on the site.” Has Constitution Hill succeeded in telling the stories of ordinary South Africans? Naidu also notes that Constitution Hill has unique potential as a true site of reconciliation, given that such a wide range of people, both black and white, had been imprisoned there over the decades. Has Constitution Hill lived up to that potential?

Comment on this article

Related Site

Constitution Hill

References

Merwe, Clinton David van der, and Zarina Patel. “Understandings of Urban Regeneration, Heritage and Environmental Justice at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg.” Urban Forum 16, no. 2/3 (April-September 2005): 244-258.

Naidu, Ereshnee. “A Case Study of Constitution Hill.” The Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 2003.
External Link

Design

Design of Constitution Hill

After it was decided, in 1995, to move the Constitutional Court to the site of the Old Fort, a major international competition was held in 1998 to determine the design of Constitution Hill. The winner was OMM Design Workshop, in collaboration with Urban Solutions, led by principal architects Janin Maojada, Andrew Makin, and Paul Wygers. In 2004, the Constitutional Court moved into its new home at Constitutional Hill, and in 2006, construction for the entire complex was completed.

As part of the construction project, most of the old cells were restored to look as they had when the site was a functioning prison. The roof of the passageway into Number Four is inscribed with quotes from Nelson Mandela. As visitors enter the communal cells, they hear recordings of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” South Africa’s national anthem. In the section of the museum that was formerly the women’s prison, a shopping bag commemorates the black women who were arrested for buying food in white areas without a pass. In one cell hangs the white wedding dress belonging to Nikiwe Deborah Matshoba, who was arrested on the way to her own wedding.

The prison also contains a response room, where visitors are encouraged to document their reactions and can view videos of former prisoners returning to the site. In addition, a cell in the fort was remade into a children’s room that holds three-hour classroom programs.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Constitution Hill

References

Constitution Hill, official website.
External Link

“Constitution Hill.” Johannesburg Development Agency.
External Link

“Constitution Hill: Essence of SA.” City of Johannesburg.
External Link

“Making the cell walls talk.” The Economist, August 13, 2005.

Discussion for Irish Hunger Memorial

Given the timing of its inauguration, in July 2002, and its location, just blocks from the World Trade Center, the Irish Hunger Memorial was initially viewed by many visitors though the lens of the September 11 attacks. While under construction, the memorial even played a small role in the 9/11 recovery effort: rescue workers at Ground Zero borrowed the memorial’s earth-moving equipment for their work. Writing in The New York Times, Roberta Smith said that the memorial “arrived at a time when Americans, especially young Americans, have a deeper understanding of tragedy and grief, of fate’s capriciousness and of the complexities of power.”

Today, the Irish Hunger Memorial is more likely to be seen in its own context, and what comes across is its clear intention to link past and future. Although it specifically (and beautifully) evokes 19th century Ireland, it is, in the same way that mass atrocity memorials often are, aimed at preventing future atrocities––in this case, famines.

The inscriptions around the base of the memorial, which refer to various and diverse facts about famine and hunger, indicate that the memorial exists not merely to dwell in sadness over a specific event, but to send a forward-looking message and provoke thought about a current and relevant socio-economic problem.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Irish Hunger Memorial

References

Smith, Roberta. “Critic's Notebook; A Memorial Remembers The Hungry.” New York Times, July 16, 2002.

Design

Design of Irish Hunger Memorial

The artist Brian Tolle and the landscape architect Gail Wittwer-Laird designed the Irish Hunger Memorial. It consists of a half-acre of land, with 32 stones from the counties of Ireland and 62 species of Irish flora grown from native seeds. One-quarter of the acre is planted with clover in fallow potato ridges to symbolize the empty potato harvests of the 1840s. The quarter acre refers to the clauses that Sir William Gregory added to the Poor Law of 1847: it stipulated that any person occupying a quarter acre of land was not eligible for government relief.

Approaching the site from the north, visitors enter a tunnel that brings them to a reconstructed cottage. This roofless two-room 1820 house, donated by the Slack family of Attymass, County Mayo, was taken apart stone by stone in Ireland, transported across the Atlantic, and reassembled in New York.

The landscape is supported on a base of polished limestone from Kilkenny, engraved with 110 quotations from legislations, letters, memoirs, parliamentary reports, proverbs, recipes, songs and statistics all oriented around the subject of hunger.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Irish Hunger Memorial

References

“Public Art: Memorials, Irish Hunger Memorial.” Battery Park City Authority.

Thank You

Thank you for your comment or submission.

Privacy Policy

The International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) is committed to protecting the privacy of individuals using our website. The following discloses the ICTJ’s policy regarding our information gathering and dissemination of information through our website. The use of the Site is governed by the Terms of Use (see below), which includes this Privacy Policy.

Personal Information

In connection with your use of this Site, the ICTJ may ask you for information that personally identifies you, including your name, address, telephone number, and email address information ("Personal Information"). For example, the ICTJ may request your Personal Information when you submit a donation or request technical support. Note that it is the ICTJ’s policy not to intentionally collect any information from children under the age of 13.

The ICTJ does not release any of this Personal Information to third parties, including other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The Personal Information that you voluntarily provide may be used to contact you about ICTJ news and technical support, update your Personal Information, make improvements to the Site, or to customize certain parts of the Site for you.

If at any time you wish to change your Personal Information or opt out of receiving news or any other information from the ICTJ, please email us at: info@ictj.org.

Cookies

This Site uses "HTTP cookies," which allow the Site to identify your computer so the ICTJ may customize its resources to better meet your needs. Most browsers automatically accept cookies by default, but you can usually refuse cookies by adjusting the preferences in your browser. We do not use cookies to store personal data, nor do we link non-Personal Information stored in cookies with Personal Information about specific individuals.

Keeping Your Personal Information Secure

Keeping your Personal Information secure is important to the ICTJ. The ICTJ uses various security methods to protect your Personal Information from unauthorized use, access, or disclosure.

Your privacy is very important to us, but due to the existing legal, regulatory, and security environment, the ICTJ cannot fully ensure that your private communications and other Personal Information will not be disclosed to third parties. Under certain circumstances, the government or third parties may lawfully or unlawfully intercept or access transmissions or private communications. Additionally, in the unlikely event that the ICTJ needs to investigate or resolve possible problems or inquiries, the ICTJ may disclose any information about you to private entities, law enforcement, or other governmental officials as the ICTJ, in our sole discretion, believes necessary or appropriate. Though the ICTJ makes every effort to preserve your privacy, the ICTJ may also need to disclose Personal Information when required by law wherein the ICTJ has a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order, or legal process served on this Site.

Links to Third Party Sites

The Site may contain links to websites maintained by third parties. The ICTJ is not responsible for the privacy practices or contents of other websites.

Policy Changes

The ICTJ reserves the right, at our discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions of the Privacy Policy at any time. As we do not typically use Personal Information except as provided for above, we are not in a position to notify each user of material changes in our Privacy Policy. We therefore encourage users to check the Privacy Policy to remain informed of any changes.

Contact Us

Please direct any inquires or complaints about the ICTJ’s Privacy Policy to:

The International Center for Transitional Justice
5 Hanover Square, 24th Floor,
New York, New York 10004
Phone: (917) 637-3800
Email: info@ictj.org

Terms of use for www.ictj.org (the "Site")

YOUR USE OF THIS SITE INDICATES THAT YOU ACCEPT THESE TERMS OF USE (THE "TERMS"). IF YOU DO NOT ACCEPT THESE TERMS, DO NOT USE THIS SITE.

Use of the Site

With this Site, the ICTJ provides you access to a variety of resources including, but not limited to, news and press releases, publications, events, and other general information ("Resources"). The Resources are subject to these Terms. The ICTJ reserves the right to update these Terms at any time without notice to you.

Conditions to Your Use of the Site

As conditions to your use of this Site, you agree that you will not:

1. Modify, copy, distribute, transmit, display, perform, reproduce, publish, broadcast, license, create derivative works from, transfer or sell any information, products, or services obtained from the Site;

2. Use the Site for any unlawful purpose;

3. Use any of the Resources in a manner that could damage, disable, overburden or impair any ICTJ server or the networks connected to any ICTJ server;

4. Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any of the Resources through hacking, password mining, or any other means;

5. Obtain or attempt to obtain any materials or information not intentionally made available through the Resources;

6. Use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor, deep link with, or copy the Site’s web pages or any of the Site’s content; and

7. Upload files, other than as provided by the Resources, that contain viruses, Trojan horses, worms, time bombs, cancelbots, corrupted files or any other similar software or programs that may damage the operation of the Site or another computer.

Privacy Policy

The ICTJ will only use and disclose your information in accordance with the ICTJ Privacy Policy. This Privacy Policy (see above) is part of the Terms.

Submissions

You agree that any information, feedback, questions, comments and the like that you provide to the ICTJ in connection with this Site ("Submissions") will be provided to the ICTJ on a non-confidential and non-proprietary basis. The Submissions will become and remain the property of the ICTJ. The ICTJ shall have no obligations to you of any kind with respect to any Submissions and shall be free to reproduce, use, disclose and/or distribute any Submissions for any purpose whatsoever, without limitation. You also agree that the ICTJ shall be free to use any ideas, concepts, or techniques embodied in the Submissions for any purpose whatsoever.

User Registration, User IDs and Passwords

If any of the Resources require you to register on this Site, you must complete the registration by providing current, complete, and accurate information as prompted by the registration form. You may also receive an ICTJ user ID or password. You are entirely responsible for protecting and maintaining the confidentiality of your user ID and password, as well as all activities that occur under your account. You agree to immediately notify the ICTJ of any unauthorized use of your account. The ICTJ will not be liable for any loss that you may incur as a result of an unauthorized use of your user ID or password. However, you could be held liable for losses incurred by the ICTJ due to an improper use of your user ID or password. You may not use any other person or entity’s user ID or password at any time.

Termination

Notwithstanding any of these Terms, the ICTJ reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your use of this Site and to block or prevent future access to and use of this Site by you.

No Warranty

THIS SITE, THE RESOURCES AND THE MATERIALS IN THIS SITE ARE PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. THE ICTJ DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. THE ICTJ DOES NOT REPRESENT OR WARRANT THAT RESOURCES OR MATERIALS ON THIS SITE, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE ICTJ PROVIDED BY THIRD PARTIES, ARE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, RELIABLE, CURRENT OR ERROR-FREE. THE ICTJ DOES NOT REPRESENT OR WARRANT THAT THIS SITE OR ITS SERVER ARE FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS.

The ICTJ does not guarantee continuous, uninterrupted, or secure access to its Resources, and operation of the Site may be interfered with by numerous factors outside of the control of the ICTJ, including, but not limited to, telecommunications network disruptions.

Limit of Liability

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE ICTJ BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER FROM THE LOSS OF USE OR DATA, WHETHER IN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE, OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION.

Links to Third Party Sites

THE LINKS TO THIRD PARTY WEBSITES ARE PROVIDED FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE AND THE INCLUSION OF ANY LINK DOES NOT IMPLY ENDORSEMENT BY THE ICTJ. THE ICTJ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENTS OF ANY LINKED SITE OR ANY LINK CONTAINED IN A LINKED SITE OR ANY CHANGES OR UPDATES TO SUCH SITES.

Applicable Law

This Site is controlled by the ICTJ from its offices within the State of New York, United States of America. The laws applicable to the interpretation of these Terms shall be the laws of the State of New York, United States of America, and applicable federal law, without regard to any conflict of law provisions. The ICTJ makes no representation that the content of this Site is appropriate for access outside the United States of America. Those who choose to access this Site from outside the United States of America do so on their own initiative and are responsible for compliance with their local laws. You agree to submission of any dispute to the state and federal courts of the State and County of New York, New York, United States of America.

Severability and Nonwaiver

If any provision of these Terms shall be deemed unlawful, void, or for any reason unenforceable, then that provision shall be deemed severable from these Terms and shall not affect the validity and the enforceability of the remaining provisions. The failure of the ICTJ to insist upon or enforce strict performance of any of the provisions of these Terms or to exercise any rights or remedies under these Terms will not be construed as a waiver or relinquishment to any extent of the ICTJ’s right to assert or rely upon any such provisions, rights, or remedies in that or any other instance; rather the same will be and remain in full force and effect.

Trademarks

The ICTJ and/or any other Resources referenced herein are either registered trademarks or trademark of the ICTJ in the United States of America and/or other countries. The names of the companies and products mentioned herein may also be trademarks of their respective owners.

Copyright Notice

Questions and Contact Information

Please direct any inquires or complaints about the Terms to:

The International Center for Transitional Justice
5 Hanover Square, 24th Floor,
New York, New York 10004
Phone: (917) 637-3800
Email: info@ictj.org

Contact Us

The International Center for Transitional Justice
5 Hanover Square, 24th Floor,
New York, New York 10004
Phone: (917) 637-3800
Email: info@ictj.org

Discussion for AIDS Memorial Quilt

The AIDS Memorial Quilt derives much of its power from its ability to integrate individual and collective memory. Importantly, the quilt recognizes victims as individuals. Families, friends and local communities are invited to participate in the project and commemorate lost loved ones as people rather than statistics. At the same time, once assembled in full, the quilt illustrates the tragic scale of the AIDS epidemic and calls for broad public awareness and action. That is, while respecting and celebrating the diverse, private needs of victims and their families, the quilt meets a public need for collective recognition, remembrance and preventative action. In an interview with PBS, the activist Cleve Jones emphasized this multi-functionality. On the individual level, Jones suggested that “It [the Quilt] was therapy. It was something to do with your hands. It was a way to encourage people to talk and share memories.” Then, on the public level, the Quilt “was a tool to use with the media to get the media to focus on it. It was a weapon to shame the politicians for their inaction.”¹

Unfortunately, however, the Quilt has not represented all groups equally. In February 2008, Essence magazine reported that, among the 47,000 panels included as part of the Quilt, fewer than 400 honor Black people.² Responding to this iniquity, the foundation responsible for managing the project has made efforts to create more panels for African-Americans. Indeed it is vitally important that the quilt be as inclusive as possible in representing the victims of AIDS. In order to inspire political action, the memorial must endeavor to unite different groups around common commitments.

Comment on this article

Related Site

AIDS Memorial Quilt

References

¹ Interview with Cleve Jones. Frontline, PBS, May 30, 2006.
External Link

² “Our News.” Essence, February 2008: 123.

Design

Design of Aids Memorial Quilt

The inspiration for the AIDS Memorial Quilt came during a 1985 remembrance march for the former Mayor and City Supervisor of San Francisco, George Moscone and Harvey Milk respectively, both of whom had been assassinated. Cleve Jones, an activist, asked participants in the march to write the names of AIDS victims they had known on pieces of paper, and then taped them to the outside of the San Francisco Federal Building. The resemblance to a quilt inspired Jones, alongside Michael Smith, to begin the AIDS Memorial Quilt project in 1987.

“I was just overwhelmed by the need to find a way to grieve together for our loved ones who had died so horribly, and also to try to find the weapon that would break through the stupidity and the bigotry and all of the cruel indifference that even today hampers our response,” Jones told PBS. “I thought, what a perfect symbol; what a warm, comforting, middle-class, middle-American, traditional-family-values symbol to attach to this disease that’s killing homosexuals and IV drug users and Haitian immigrants, and maybe, just maybe, we could apply those traditional family values to my family.”

Comment on this article

Related Site

AIDS Memorial Quilt

References

Interview with Cleve Jones. Frontline, PBS, May 30, 2006.
External Link

Discussion for Goree Island

Many historians doubt that the Maison des Esclaves presents accurate history. “The whole story is phony,” says historian Philip D. Curtin, who insists that no more than 30,000 slaves were transported through Gorée Island over 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade, not 20 million as Joseph Ndiaye, the site’s curator, often claimed. As for the Maison itself, critics contend that one of the most beautiful homes on the island would not have been used as a warehouse for slaves. They argue that the history of the house is being intentionally distorted in order to attract tourists.

However, for those tourists, including many African-Americans seeking a connection to their ancestry, Gorée Island and the Maison des Esclaves serve as powerful symbols of the Atlantic slave trade. How important is historical accuracy in a site that holds such emotional power?

On the web, UNESCO and the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience both favor the version of history presented by the curator and guides of Maison des Esclaves; The Baltimore Sun and Time offer historians’ dissenting views of that account. H-Net has a spirited discussion among historians, including Philip Curtin, on the Gorée controversy.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Maison des Esclaves (Slave House)

References

“Through The Door of No Return.” Time, June 27, 2004.
External Link

John Murphy, “Powerful Symbol, Weak in Facts,” The Baltimore Sun, June 30, 2004
External Link

Design

Design of Goree Island

Since artifacts are scarce, the Maison des Esclaves tells its story through its architecture. A horseshoe-shaped staircase divides the space between the Europeans’ rooms above and the slave quarters below. According to Joseph Ndiaye, the site’s recently deceased longtime curator, the courtyard between the stairs served as a marketplace where traders and buyers bargained from the balcony while the slaves were being weighed and sorted. After this assessment, Ndiaye said, slaves were sent down a corridor leading to the infamous “Door of No Return,” which opens onto the sea. The Maison des Esclaves was restored in 1990 with the support of UNESCO and the Senegalese government.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Maison des Esclaves (Slave House)

References

UNESCO: Official Site on Gorée Island.
External Link

Discussion of Mostar’s Bruce Lee statue

Is Mostar’s Bruce Lee statue an ironic conceptual art piece, a genuine memorial to mass atrocity, or both?

Is Mostar’s Bruce Lee statue an ironic conceptual art piece, a heartfelt memorial to mass atrocity, or both? Many monuments in the former Yugoslavia amplify existing divisions and fail to provide for multi-ethnic collective remembrance. In Sarajevo, for example, a group of Bosnian Serbs recently attempted to construct a large commemorative cross overlooking the city, an act seen as a provocation by many Bosniaks living on the Eastern side of the city. In a playful yet serious-minded way, the artists who created the Bruce Lee bronze sought to undermine this adversarial dynamic by creating a narrative that could unify all Bosnian national groups. Nino Raspudić, the co-founder of Urban Movement Mostar, praised the use of a popular culture symbol as a deliberate rejection of the “great narrations” that had spurred violence and deeply politicized even the minutia of everyday life in the region.¹ Similarly, the popularity of Bruce Lee as a childhood hero in Bosnia, evidenced by the Mostar statue, indirectly questions traditional concepts of ‘ethnic identity’ in a world of increasingly global cultural references.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Bruce Lee Statue

References

“Outrage at Serb Plan for Church in Sarajevo.” Javno, May 15, 2008.
External Link

¹ Nino Raspudić, "Bruce Lee Monument in Mostar."
External Link

New Site Added: Bruce Lee Memorial

We just added a new site to our collection here at the Memory and Justice Website: The Bruce Lee Statue is a life-size bronze of Bruce Lee in Bosnia-Herzogovina.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Bruce Lee Statue

Participating in the Memory and Justice Website

We welcome your participation. Anyone may comment on a site, and we are happy to receive submissions detailing your experience with one of the memorial sites listed here as well as suggesting a new memorial site to add to our website. We welcome image submissions and other media.

To enhance and ease your experience here as well as receive periodic updates on the site’s progress, we encourage you to sign up for membership at MemoryandJustice.org. We respect your privacy.

Members of the site can save sites, articles and resources to their favorites page, comment without reentering their information and will receive periodic email updates from the MemoryandJustice.org team.

Discussion for the Monument Against Fascism

As the scholar James Young puts it, this monument “flouts any number of cherished memorial conventions.” It was designed “not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passersby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desanctification; not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet.”

The town had mixed feelings about living with this provocation. Some citizens objected to the monument’s unruly scrawl of graffiti, which included swastikas. Some anti-fascist groups opposed the monument because it did not explicitly honor victims of fascism. Others saw the ugly graffiti as the essence of the monument. “The filth brings us closer to the truth than would any list of well-meaning signatures,” a local newspaper wrote. “The inscriptions, a conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity, are like a fingerprint of our city applied to the column.”

In one sense, the invisibility of the Monument against Fascism is a commentary on the invisibility of all monuments. After all, many monuments are ignored by passersby soon after they are unveiled – think of the man on horseback in the park, covered with pigeons. By calling attention to their monument’s disappearance, the Gerzes are pointing out that monuments disappear all the time.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Monument Against Fascism

References

Young, James. “The Countermonument: Memory against itself in Germany.” In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 27-48. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Crownshaw, Richard. “The German Countermonument: Conceptual Indeterminacies and the Retheorisation of the Arts of Vicarious Memory.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no. 2 (2008): 212-227.
External Link

Design

Design of Monument Against Fascism

Countermonuments are meant not only to commemorate, but also to reflect the memorial’s unfitting nature and memory’s inevitable limitations. The Gerzes felt that monuments themselves tend to have fascistic qualities. Therefore, their monument against fascism would have to be a monument against monuments.

“It is much better to have people talk about a work than to simply do a work yourself, because then the work is part of a public discourse,” Jochen Gerz said in an interview. “A classical work tends to put discussion to rest, whereas if you do works like mine––monuments against fascism or racism in countries like Germany where the issues are so tensely felt––what is important is to keep the discussion going.”

As Esther Shalev-Gerz noted, “During the public existence of the column above the surface, history also altered the situation in Germany: the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification and the resurgence of neo-nazis, had an effect on political awareness which transformed people's relationship and responses to the column. As a foreign object, perceived by some as an almost aggressive element, the status of the monument changed, becoming a kind of public forum.”

Comment on this article

Related Site

Monument Against Fascism

References

Young, James. “The Countermonument: Memory against itself in Germany.” In The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, 27-48. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Wright, Stephen. Interview with Jochen Gerz. Third Text 18, no. 6 (2004).
External Link

Shalev-Gerz, Esther. “Reflecting spaces / deflecting spaces.”
External Link

About the Memory and Justice Project

This website is a project of the International Center for Transitional Justice. It was created to provide interested parties with a forum to exchange views and learn about the emerging field of memorialization as a form of accountability for past atrocity. The website features numerous public memorials/memory-works/sites of memory/sites of conscience/museums of memory and similar accountability projects (there are many different terms used), as well as some of the most interesting intellectual debates. The site is meant to be participatory, and we encourage users to engage with the site and to send recommendations, information, and evaluations about new sites.

In 2001, ICTJ was founded in an effort to assist countries pursuing accountability for past crimes against humanity or human rights abuse. The Center works in societies emerging from repressive rule or armed conflict, as well as in other societies where legacies of abuse remain unresolved. The mission of ICTJ is to redress and prevent severe violations of human rights by confronting legacies of mass abuse. ICTJ seeks holistic solutions to promote just and peaceful societies. Public memorials can contribute to accomplishing these goals. In some cases, they can “redress” severe violations by providing victims a public space to be heard, seen, and recognized, and can in this way provide solace. These initiatives can also contribute to the very complex and multi-causal goal of “prevention”. By being visible reminders on the landscape, by developing pedagogical programming aimed at teaching lessons from the past, and in other ways that are discussed on this site, public memorials can help to create the conditions through which repetition of these crimes becomes less likely. That said, these initiatives can also have the opposite effect. In some post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts, public memorials can fan the flames of hatred and resentment. When they are created to celebrate ethnic or racial superiority over other groups or to lionize perpetrators of abuse, they can sabotage the building of rights-respecting societies. When memorials are created to assign “blame” to certain groups, they can create angry or defensive reactions. In short, we must engage with public memorials, recognizing where and when they lead to redress and prevention, and commenting on when they are not doing this. This website is meant to be a forum for that debate.

The list of sites included on this site is not meant to be exhaustive, and indeed it would be impossible to include every relevant site in the world. In fact, the selection of sites is somewhat arbitrary, as they have been chosen based on where ICTJ’s memory program has been most active. That said, the website has made an effort not to include memory sites that contribute to conflict, authoritarianism, hatred, resentment, racism, or have other harmful effects on society. We recognize that there are different readings of memorials, however, and there is not a perfect science to making these determinations. Nonetheless, we reserve the right not to feature any site that we believe—in consultation with close partners—violates the spirit of this website.

Memory and Justice: a Brief and Selected History of a Movement

By Louis Bickford and Debra Schultz

Introduction

The international human rights movement was still very young when it started grappling with the legacies of past atrocity and human rights abuse. As the emerging global movement began to take shape in the early 1960s,¹ its primary concern was to stop ongoing violations of human rights such as torture, unjust imprisonment, extra-judicial execution, and restrictions of freedom and assembly.

In the 1970s, human rights groups and victims’ associations began to confront harsh dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, among other places, and demanded an end to authoritarian rule and the establishment of democracy. Responding to the fall of authoritarian regimes, activists involved in human rights and democratization movements started to develop a new set of strategies that would focus on accountability for periods of violence and repression in the recent past. They developed programs for confronting the complex legacies of human rights abuse that took place under those former regimes.

At least three important concepts inspired this new direction. The first two were justice and truth, the cornerstones of what civil society organizations such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina were demanding. The third was memory, as activists insisted on not forgetting the atrocities committed in their societies. Both drawing on and reinforcing repertoires from similar movements in other parts of the world – such as the slow emergence in the 1980s of a new wave of questioning the Holocaust in Germany – Southern Cone human rights movements articulated direct linkages between past, present, and future. They called for Nunca Más! (never again) and demanded historical accountability for crimes committed by authoritarian regimes.

A Burgeoning Field

Since the 1980s, when only a small number of organizations and individuals were confronting human rights abuse under prior regimes, the number of institutions working on dealing with the past has grown steadily and exponentially.

Consider the following snapshots:

At the end of military dictatorship in Argentina in 1983, family members of the thousands of people who “disappeared” were calling for truth, memory, and justice in the face of the military regime’s obfuscation, lies, and secrecy. In other countries around the world, human rights and democratization movements did little to try to come to terms with past abuse. On the international level, there was arguably only one report, written by human rights activist Juan Méndez in 1987, then at Americas Watch, that argued in favor of truth and justice for past abuses.²

A quarter century later, by 2008, dozens of NGOs, governmental institutions, university programs, and other organizations around the world have placed an emphasis on dealing with the past as the core of their work, complementing the important findings of other organizations that focus on current violations. These organizations include some of the most vibrant and innovative groups to have emerged in recent years, such as Memoria Abierta (Open Memory) in Argentina; Memorial in Russia; the Center for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR) in South Africa; the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) with 10 international offices representing every major world region; and the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience, a network of dozens of memory sites around the world.

Dealing with the Past: Latin American Roots

Initiatives in Latin America and especially in the Southern Cone pioneered numerous approaches to dealing with mass atrocity. The drivers of these processes—NGOs, political activists, and governmental institutions—experimented with new ways of resolving what was a very old problem: how to come to grips with the terrible legacies of past societal trauma. They used novel instruments (such as truth commissions, oral history projects, and new forensic anthropology methods) and they enhanced existing methodologies (such as criminal trials, reparations programs, and constitutional reform) in order to do so. These novel approaches became the early elements of an emergent field of activity designed to answer the incidence of mass atrocity with a cry of “never again”. For example, the Vicariate of Solidarity in Chile documented more than 19,000 individual cases of human rights abuse. This information would become essential in future court cases and in the Chilean truth commission’s work.³

In the meantime, the Argentine human rights group Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), one of the organizations that would help define the human rights movement globally and whose work on dealing with the past in Argentina was vitally important, became interested in dealing with the past. In the mid-1980s, international organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and others worked closely with domestic organizations, such as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, to focus on the ravages of dictatorship. During this period, the Grandmothers and other groups of victims’ family members worked––in some cases in collaboration with the new democratic government, in other cases as outside voices––to confront the legacies of past abuse.

The work in Argentina to confront past atrocity was groundbreaking; it led to the successful prosecution of former military leaders⁴ and the creation of the most significant early truth commission, the Commission on the Disappeared and Politically Executed (known by its initials in Spanish as the CONADEP). In fact, when the CONADEP began to undertake its work, it relied heavily on the human rights documentation that CELS had done. The Argentine transition also included significant reparations programs for the victims, as well as plans for the reform of institutions under democratic rule. Within civil society, law-based NGOs as well as associations of victims’ families consistently demanded truth, justice, and memory. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team identified the remains of individuals whose cases had been documented by the CONADEP.

In Chile, a democratic transition began in the late 1980s. In many ways significantly different from the Argentine transition, the Chilean experience was characterized by negotiations of a broad democratic opposition that won a plebiscite in 1988 and a return to elected government in 1990. In a context in which prosecutions of the former military rulers appeared dauntingly difficult, the new democratic government established an official commission chaired by Raúl Rettig on truth and reconciliation (1990-1991).

The Rettig Commission used a rigorous methodology to determine who had disappeared and who had been executed for political reasons between 1973 and 1990. The commission (as well as a second truth commission in 2003-2004 called the Valech Commission on Political Prisoners and Torture) relied heavily on the documents archived in the NGOs (including the Vicariate of Solidarity) that had been the core of the opposition movements under dictatorship. This information from within the human rights movement proved crucial since, in contrast to Europe and Japan after World War II, state archives on the previous dictatorship had been destroyed or hidden by the armed forces. Commission members stressed the enormous importance of these NGO records and called them fundamental to their work, even affirming that the commissions could not have completed their missions without the records.⁵ Meanwhile, interesting and inspiring developments around the region were both influencing and being influenced by the developments in the Southern Cone. In Guatemala, for example, two different truth commissions emerged to focus on the legacy of mass atrocity and violence committed during more than a decade of conflict. One of these, the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), was a UN-sanctioned official truth commission (1994-1999). The Catholic Church and affiliated organizations largely ran the other (1995-1998), the Recuperation of Historical Memory Project (REMHI). Both drew heavily on and made fresh contributions to the ideas and priorities being articulated in the Southern Cone about the importance of dealing with the past.

Elsewhere in the world, events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, and the dissolution of the USSR (discussed later) were also contributing to global debates about how to deal with the past.

Human Rights Activism at a Crossroads

As dictatorships ended, giving way to electoral systems, developments in Argentina and Chile posed novel challenges and questions for human rights activists and their supporters globally. On the one hand, the crimes committed by past regimes were horrific, and dealing with the legacies of past abuse seemed essential to building sustainable democracies in the region. On the other hand, even though the dictatorships had ended and state agents no longer terrorized citizens, human rights were far from being guaranteed by the fledgling democracies. How would the human rights movements, based in civil society, deal with ongoing abuse under these new regimes? A core challenge of the human rights movement would be “to understand better how the lingering authoritarian characteristics of transitional democracies are related to their pasts, and how they might be overcome.”⁶

Indeed, one of the ways to combat ongoing abuse would be to confront the legacies of the past. This would also present a key component for the future: In order to build strong democracies based on transparency, accountability, and tolerance, it was important to address the painful and complex legacies of dictatorship. As Martín Abregú, puts it, “It has been argued that working on themes related to the dictatorships in the region was somehow looking backwards, while the challenges in the region were more about the future. But we realized that this was a wrong way to put it … It is clear that to focus on recent history has become a central axis in the construction of deep and stable democracies.”⁷

Activists sought to grapple with these questions which formed the core of, for example, “What Now?” a two-day meeting in Lima in July 1999 of some 50 organizations throughout the region organized by the Legal Defense Institute (IDL) and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).⁸

In this context, the Santiago office of the Ford Foundation launched the Historical Memory Initiative, a grant-making and research program that would ultimately involve a combination of grants, foundation-administered projects, and research consultancies focused on making a more in-depth exploration of the relationship between past, present, and future. Its goal was “to facilitate social learning to prevent repetition” of state violence associated with dictatorship and “to draw ongoing lessons useful to creating cultures of human rights.”⁹

In 2003 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), based in Paris, declared that the archives of a number of human rights organizations should be designated as documentary heritage/cultural patrimony within its Memory of the World Program. In designating the Chilean archives, UNESCO said: “The future cannot be built on oblivion, on concealing what has happened. This idea applies to individuals, societies, and humanity. To understand the raison d’être of democracy and respect for human rights, it is necessary to know and remember how the dictatorships functioned.”¹⁰

But these and other documents have had an even more direct impact. When former dictator Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in October 1998, the effect was profound, not only in Chile, but also globally. Pinochet’s detention could not have occurred without the documentary evidence collected by Chilean human rights groups and archives.

One dramatic example of the importance of documents involves the National Security Archive (NSA), an NGO based in Washington, D.C., that specializes in U.S. government documents. The NSA’s research leading up to the 25th anniversary of the coup in Chile had unanticipated important results. The archive’s special anniversary Web posting of formerly top secret CIA, National Security Council, and Defense Intelligence Agency records on Pinochet and his repression, coupled with an article by NSA researcher Peter Kornbluh in a Chilean newspaper on the documents, contributed to massive negative publicity that convinced Pinochet’s daughter that he should grant an interview to The New Yorker while he was seeing doctors in London. The publication of the article helped call attention to his presence in Britain. In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, the archive’s posting of documents became the single most sought-after and used Internet source of documentation on Pinochet’s human rights violations, with information from the declassified records incorporated into dozens of major newspaper articles around the world.

The NSA’s Chile documentation project became the leading advocate and strategist to force the Clinton administration to release thousands of never-before-seen documents on repression during the Pinochet dictatorship. Archive staff personally delivered the most important of those documents in terms of evidentiary value to judicial authorities in Spain where Pinochet was wanted for killing Spanish citizens in Chile, as well as to judges, lawyers, and victims’ families in his homeland.

Similarly, a project to develop an Internet site in the early days of widespread use also became a vital tool during the Pinochet proceedings both in London and after he returned to Chile. This was the Chile Information Project (CHIP),¹¹ a Web site that included pages on “Chronology of Human Rights in Chile,” “Sites of Memory” (which displayed an interactive map of sites of torture and detention throughout Chile), and “Human Rights Today.” The CHIP project allowed global audiences to quickly access a great deal of information about the dictatorship in Chile at a critical moment.

Projects also emerged in Chile that focused on academic institutions and particularly the discipline of history. The Universidad de Santiago de Chile and its partner, an organization called Education/Communication (ECO), for example, developed municipal histories of repression in a neighborhood of Santiago that the dictatorship had targeted and show the community how to tell its own history of the period. Other projects focused on the discipline of history and the ways in which history, memory, and justice are interwoven. For example, the Ethics Center of the Alberto Hurtado University emphasized the ethical dimensions of history research and teaching in a democratic culture of human rights. The project combined “the need for establishing the truth and of developing a historical consciousness of human rights” with a gender perspective, thus focusing on both “how do we research and write about a troubled recent past in Latin America” and “how do we teach history in Latin America so that it is the history of both men and women.”¹² Similarly, a bilingual electronic publication of 34 major studies on political violence was published under the title “Historicizing the Past in Latin America”, by Dr. Anne Perotin. This electronic publication has further contributed to the ways in which the discipline of history engages with the past in Chile.

One important project in the 1990s was an academic training program run by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for PhD students from Latin America on collective memory and repression in the Southern Cone, coordinated mainly by Professor Elizabeth Jelin of the Economic and Social Development Institute (IDES) in Argentina; Eric Hershberg at the SSRC; Professor Paul Drake, head of the SSRC Joint Committee on Latin American Studies as well as a dean and political scientist at the University of California, San Diego; and Professor Carlos Ivan Degregori of the Institute of Peruvian Studies. Sixty young scholars went through this program, linking it with their on-going doctoral programs at various universities, and went on to build the intellectual underpinnings of what later became known as transitional justice or historical memory.

Dr. Jelin now jokes that she did not go out seeking to start a Latin American field of memory studies. “Memory found me…when the actors in the human rights movement began to talk about it.”¹³ Thirteen books were published as a result of the program (these can be found at the SSRC website), and they have had an impact on the way that universities in Latin America confront the legacies of repression. Graduates have played important roles in subsequent truth commissions, educational reform, human rights NGOs, and public education.¹⁴

In Argentina, similar efforts to understand the past were also emerging, perhaps most clearly in the form of Memoria Abierta (a new NGO), which made efforts to record the social memory of human rights violations as well as the unprecedented movement that arose to protect those rights. Their efforts were meant to address impunity, facilitate social learning to prevent repetition of such traumas, and enhance public recognition of the authoritarian past in order to forge a broader consensus that expressed a shared vision of truth and justice.¹⁵

In fact, the methodologies and practices used by Memoria Abierta for dealing with the past in Argentina—from preserving archives, to opening public spaces to learning based on dialogue, to contributing to the creation of a “memory museum” project—have been revolutionary around the globe in terms of the development of memory and transitional justice work. Memoria Abierta has participated in numerous activities and events in Argentina and abroad, playing a key part in articulating what it means to remember past human rights abuse. As one of the founding members of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience (outlined later) the organization has contributed to the development of sites in places such as Bangladesh, the Czech Republic, Russia, Senegal, and the United Kingdom.

Continued in part 2.

References

¹ It is possible to tell the story of the global human rights movement in different ways, including dating it back to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society's creation in 1839 (see William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New York: palgrave Macmillan, 2001), or the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920 (see Samuel walker, In Defense of American Liberties, Second Edition: A History of the ACLU. Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). One reasonable place to begin the story, however, is with the founding of Amnesty International that began with a letter written by the group's founder in 1961 (see Margaret E. Keck, Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. New York: Cornell university Press, 1998).

² The report was "Truth and Partial Justice in Argentina," by Juan Mendez for Americas Watch. Additional contextual information provided by Aryeh Neier in an interview conducted on March 7, 2008, at the Open Society Institute in New York. For more information on this interview, see full transcription on file.

³ See Ford Foundation Report, "Forty Years in the Andean and Southern Cone" 2003, p. 37.

⁴ President Carlos Saul Menem later pardoned the junta leaders. But the fact that they were successfully tried in a court of law was of no small significance. See Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1996.

⁵ Peter Winn's Consultancy Report: "Ford Foundation Historical Memory Programming in the Andean Region and Southern Cone, Sept. 30, 2007, p. 6, quoting, respectively, Elizabeth Lira and Jose Zalaquett.

⁶ See Ford Foundation Grant #980-1010, p. 2. For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.

⁷ E-mail correspondence with Martin Abregu, April 15, 2008.

⁸ Alex Wilde, "Reflections on Building the Human Rights Field in Latin America: a discussion document," Nov. 29-30,1999, p. 2.

⁹ Alex Wilde, "Reflections on Building the Human Rights Field in Latin America: a discussion document," Nov. 29-30,1999, p. 2, fn.

¹⁰

¹¹ See Ford Foundation Grant #990-0297. For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.

¹² Grant proposal materials, available in Ford Foundation archives.

¹³ Interview with Elizabeth Jelin, March 13, 2008, at the International Center for Transitional Justice, New York, p. 4. For further information on this interview, see full transcription on file.

¹⁴ Peter Winn's Consultancy Report: "Ford Foundation Historical Memory programming in the Andean Region and Southern Cone," Sept. 30, 2007, p. 3.

¹⁵ See Ford Foundation Grant #1005-0337, p. 2. For detailed information about this grant, please see grant paperwork on file.

Discussion for the Paine Memorial

Rather than being designed by a single, professional designer, the Paine Memorial was created through a deeply participatory and consultative process. This approach not only aided in the healing process for families of victims, but also imbued the site with great power and beauty.

Access to this memorial is limited by its location on the outskirts of Paine, which is a small and remote city a long way from Chilean urban centers. Who visits this site? Has it succeeded, as the victims’ families hoped it would, in transcending its function as a de facto cemetery?

Comment on this article

Related Site

Paine Memorial

Design

Design for Paine Memorial, Chile

The citizens of Paine not only actively participated in the process of creating the memorial, they helped to design and build it. Over the course of a year, a group of government-financed artists worked with the families of the disappeared or dead to design the site. They chose to replace each missing “tree” with a mosaic, which the artists taught the families themselves how to create; together, they implemented the designs.

“My dad would be very proud of our mosaic: we’re showing the good part of who he was, not the sadness that remains with us,” one family participant said.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Paine Memorial

References

Rodriguez, Carmen. "A memory of Paine." New Internationalist 385 (December 2005): 8.

Discussion of Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery

When is a memorial site a sacred space, and when is it a civic space? At the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery, the distinction is admirably clear. On one side of the road, all signs point to the sacred: there are gravestones, a mosque, and a generally somber atmosphere. On the other side of the road, where the museum is located, the vernacular design implies civic use. In this way, visitors are given cues as to what behavior is appropriate in what space without having to be explicitly instructed.

Thus far, however, the memorial and cemetery are most often visited by grieving relatives or by dignitaries on anniversary commemorations. Since the war, few Muslims live in the area around Srebrenica, and the cemetery seems to mean little to neighboring Serbs.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery

Design

Design of Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery

The memorial has two parts, divided by a road. On one side of the road is the cemetery, which is shaped like the petals of a flower. On the other side is the Srebrenica Memorial Room, a building that was a battery factory in the 1980s and the headquarters of the Dutch UN battalion in the 1990s.

The plan for the memorial and cemetery was developed in close cooperation with the surviving family members and victims’ groups, particularly the Mothers of Srebrenica, a loose knit victims’ association with chapters in Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and Tuzla. The idea for a Memorial Room was first proposed by Lord Ashdown, the fourth High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, after he visited the Holocaust Room of the Imperial War Museum in London. The room was designed by the Sarajevo-based :arch

Architectural Cooperative and consists of two black towers: one presenting a film on the massacre, and the other showcasing the stories and personal items of twenty victims. “The tops of the towers are closed, evoking a sense of loss, the darkened spaces seeming like voids from which the narratives of July 1995 descend,” wrote the members of :arch. Both the cemetery and memorial are incomplete. Each year, additional victims are identified and reburied. The cemetery will not assume its final look until authorities and families are satisfied that all possible victims have been buried.

In November 2008, the Memorial Center at Srebrenica-Potočari announced a design competition for the second phase of construction of the memorial center.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery

References

“Srebrenica finally buries its dead.” BBC News, March 31, 2003.
External Link

The Memorial Center Srebrenica-Potoêari (official site).
External Link

Competition document “for development of conceptual architectural design for the second phase of construction of the Memorial Center in the complex of Battery Factory in Potoêari, Srebrenica.”
External Link

Design

Design Concepts for Parque de la Memoria

On July 21, 1996, the City of Buenos Aires passed Law 46, officially establishing the Parque de la Memoria project and creating the first state-funded monument of its kind. This law included a provision for an international sculpture contest whose winners would form the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism. A commission comprised of city officials, architects, and representatives of human rights organizations solicited submissions, receiving over 660 entries from forty-four countries. A jury selected a total of seventeen entries, and these sculptures are placed at selected sites throughout the park, which was inaugurated on November 7, 2007.

In addition to the sculptures, the park includes the Access Plaza, walls of victims’ names, and landscaped grounds. While many of the Park’s features are on display and open to the public, other parts of the Park are currently under construction.

As Brigitte Sion writes, the park is “a piece of land with paths that can only be appreciated by walking on them. Both the sculptures in the garden and especially the wall of names are meant to be touched, felt through the body. The wish to ‘see and touch’ has been expressed repeatedly by relatives of the Desaparecidos, and these sensory functions gain a symbolic dimension in the case of victims whose bodies have been robbed from the sight and ownership of their dear ones.”

Comment on this article

Related Site

Parque de la Memoria

References

Parque de la Memoria, official site.
External Link

Sion, Brigitte. 2007. “Affective Memory, Ineffective Functionality: Experiencing Buenos Aires’ Parque de la Memoria.” Hemispheric Institute, 2007.
External Link

Design

Design Concepts for the Bruce Lee statue

The Bruce Lee statue, made by the Croatian sculptor Ivan Fijolic, was developed by the NGO Urban Movement Mostar in cooperation with the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art's De/construction of Monument Project. According to the designers, the project attempts to reclaim positive meaning in public spaces while questioning the significance of monuments and symbols, both old and new. It is intended to evoke and affirm the everyday events of people’s lives that have little to do with politics or national identity.

To demonstrate neutrality between Mostar’s Bosniak east and Croat west sides, the Bruce Lee bronze was positioned to face north. The statue, its designers hoped, would show that in an extremely divided city, some things common to all citizens still existed. “The monument is not being built for Bruce Lee the actor or the characters he played,” Urban Movement co-founder Nino Raspudić wrote, “but rather it is being built for the very idea of justice, represented in a plastic and universally acceptable way, that might also have the power to awaken some positive vibrations through the figure of the famous kung-fu hero we loved so much during our childhood.”

Comment on this article

Related Site

Bruce Lee Statue

Discussion of Sarajevo Roses

By maintaining these poignant reminders of the siege, the people of Sarajevo have continued to rebuild their city without forgetting their past. The memorials are an uncontroversial and apolitical demonstration of the havoc of the war and the scars that it leaves on survivors. Unlike many monuments in Bosnia, the Sarajevo Roses do not provide any personal information about the victims––including, most significantly, their national group, whether Serb, Croat, or Muslim. Nor do most of the Roses offer a particular interpretation of the victims’ suffering. Instead, a simple scar delivers a powerful message. Some of the Roses are accompanied by explanatory plaques, but these are arguably less effective, because they tell passersby what to think.

In a multi-national city like Sarajevo, which is trying to recover from one of the most contentious national conflicts of modern times, these transparent testaments to the destruction of war serve to honor those who died while also reconciling them with those who remain.

Comment on this article

Related Site

Sarajevo Roses

Design

Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace Design

Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace consists of a 10,200-square-meter green space crossed by two intersecting paths that lead to a wall inscribed with the names of victims. Designed by Ana Cristina Torrealba, Jose Luis Gajardo, and Luis Santibóez, the park is meant to evoke spiritual thought and honor the memory of the victims of the center. According to the site’s literature, the park “symbolizes the end and the condemnation of a sinister past, and also the beginning of a new stage in the life and the coexistence between all people of Chile.”

About this Article

"Never Again: Memorials and Prevention" was posted October 26, 2009 and last updated July 27, 2010.