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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.

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