Societies Emerging from Conflict : The Aftermath of Atrocity [1 ed.] 9781527510418, 9781443895194

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Societies Emerging from Conflict

Societies Emerging from Conflict: The Aftermath of Atrocity Edited by

Dennis B. Klein

Societies Emerging from Conflict: The Aftermath of Atrocity Edited by Dennis B. Klein This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Dennis B. Klein and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9519-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9519-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 An Ascendant Post-Conflict Framework Dennis B. Klein I. Justice Chapter One ............................................................................................... 10 Bangladesh: Troubling Trends in the Politics of Justice Sue Gronewold Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 24 The Armenian Holocaust and International Law Torkom Movsesiyan II. Narratives Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 34 Contested Narratives of Victimhood: The Tales of Two Former Khmer Rouge Soldiers Eve Monique Zucker Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 53 The Negotiable Society: Transitions from Below Dennis B. Klein Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 74 Changing Narratives of Victims and Perpetrators in Cambodia: The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and Community Responses to Dialogue Interventions Laura McGrew

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III. Reconciliation and Prevention Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 94 In Search of Justice and Reconciliation: Rwanda Mark Ampofo Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 104 Constructing Prevention: An Exploration in Building Memorials that Prevent Atrocity Kerry Whigham IV. Forward? Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 130 Sorry, Not Sorry: An Assessment of the Appropriateness of the 2004 Republika Srpska Apology for the Srebrenica Genocide Ajdin Dautoviü Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 146 The Legacy of Cold War Era Massacres in Cambodia and Indonesia Benny Widyono Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 168 Violence, Armed Conflict, and the Burden of Mental Illness in the Middle East and Beyond Dilshad Jaff and Lewis H. Margolis Bibliography ............................................................................................ 192 Contributors ............................................................................................. 224 Index ........................................................................................................ 228

INTRODUCTION AN ASCENDANT POST-CONFLICT FRAMEWORK DENNIS B. KLEIN

The aftermath of atrocity is an emerging subject of concern, the latest topic competing for scholarly attention with the origins and virulence of atrocities. This volume offers one reason why: stability and parity after atrocity are exceptionally elusive and often perilous. There are many conceptions of successor societies that scholars suggest and analyze critically; some offer hope. But the impediments to negotiating the overburdened past are considerable. It is not even clear if societies emerging from conflict can be characterized as “successor.” Does the proliferation of post-atrocity paradigms over the past quarter century, since the early 1990s—human rights remedies, myriad justice schemes, civil society memorials and counter-memorials, etc.—suggest promising alternatives to conventional criminal retribution? Or does it, in fact, mean that very little so far is working? The trajectories of post-World War II multistate liberation movements, particularly communism, along with decolonization abetted by United Nations conventions, appeared sufficient for articulating common aspirations. As it turned out, they more often than not succumbed to cold war great-power priorities. These priorities materialized in the combative rhetoric of superior Western morality and Soviet ambitions that threatened international security and cooperation. Prerogatives of national sovereignty weakened the promises constituted in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and handicapped the UN Genocide Convention. Errant decolonization movements gave rise to proxy wars, failed states, and internecine destruction. National judicial proceedings invited political caprice and sham justice. 1 The cold war record, observed Samuel Moyn, confirmed that movements seeking to mitigate state power politics are quixotic. Indeed, he argued, their charm masks and deflects “real” political interests.2

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Introduction

With the end of the cold war came a renewed, compensatory commitment to the principle of humanity in adversarial circumstances during and after atrocity. A second phase devoted to the inviolability of individual rights and the benefits of the common good emerged against or in spite of the malfeasance or nonfeasance of the state.3 Non-state actors— particularly NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and other humanitarian organizations, such as the International Organization for Migration, Fortify Rights, or better-known bodies like Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Rescue Committee—came into existence or dramatically expanded their scope of activities to protect and provide for citizens. But the benevolent state remained a player. Nascent transitional justice practices, some explored in this volume, regarded state actors as the centerpiece of reconciliation after atrocity between former adversaries. These include official state apologies, education mandates, lustration, empaneled truth commissions, and exemplary criminal justice prosecution affirming the rule of law. The present verdict after a quarter century is surely mixed. Auspicious strides in post-apartheid South Africa, post-Holocaust Germany, and postDirty War Argentina demand scrutiny for lessons that might be applied elsewhere. Yet large-scale violence is an inescapable fact of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century life, especially in Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Europe, and Southeast Asia. Despite the best of intentions, transitions in Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Indonesia have been seriously compromised. Successor state actors in these cases defied reconciliation, a reprise of great-power dynamics after World War I whose blinding momentum overwhelmed reasoned diplomatic proposals and treaties—the policy of constructive engagement—that sought to avoid the resumption of international conflict. Then and now, the state remains just as likely to create or exacerbate volatility after atrocity as to help achieve stability. In search for a more reliably favorable post-atrocity succession, contemporary scholars are considering the merits of practices that circumvent the state, namely, projects emerging from civil society. This third phase, explored in the chapters that follow, includes public commemorations, citizen activism, historical dialogues, and witness accounts.4 Present circumstances are propitious, though the uneven record of the previous two phases compels caution. Still, we should make note of the scaffolding propping up citizen activism as the engine of transition. Globalization, for example, has had the effect of making room for citizen activism by limiting the predatory hegemony of the state. At the same

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time, however, it has given rise to state (and corporate) voracity and its dire consequences—climate change and mass migration. More persuasive is the anemic performance of discredited state actors in tackling largescale violence and restoring confidence in social stability and security. Into the breach, citizens seize opportunities for independent intervention during periods of transition. This development energizes the mission of NGOs and is evident in the maturity of the transitional justice movement toward organic “co-remembering” practices. 5 The ebbing of hybrid tribunals—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)—signal the rise of transnational activism from below. The articles in the present volume explore the complex and fluid relationships between the state and its citizens in mitigating unstable circumstances after atrocity. With one exception (the article by Dilshad Jaff and Lewis Margolis), they originated at the second international seminar sponsored in 2016 by Kean University’s Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program. Called eponymously “Societies Emerging from Conflict: The Aftermath of Atrocity,” the seminar involved participants with ancestral and family ties to and ethnic roots in Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Canada, Ghana, Indonesia, Iraq, and the United States. Their contributions to this volume are not schematic. While a rough, overall chronology exists to mark successive phases of multistate aspirations, state–citizen alliances, and citizen activism, the behavior of the state varies in all phases and in different world regions. But it helps to note the provenance of post-conflict movements in one phase or another, either in organized multistate activity (UN conventions, liberation movements); in efforts at deploying state power to achieve justice (NGOs, international tribunals); or in transnational civil society. Before previewing the contributions to the present volume, a disclaimer: The usual standards of scholarship prescribe dispassion and analysis; these are epitomized in several impressive articles. Against this conventional grain, other articles are polemical. This is the case because they constitute their authors’ arguments for particular post-atrocity schemes. But it is also true because they exemplify the subjects of their investigations: citizen activism. This volume is divided into four parts: Part I, “Justice,” examines the second phase and its legacies. In her article, “Bangladesh: Troubling Trends in the Politics of Justice,” Sue Gronewold opens the book with a reminder of post-atrocity societies’ vulnerability to recurrent violence and impunity. More than a dozen local leaders who collaborated with the repressive Pakistani military in 1971 are on trial, but the proceedings, she

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Introduction

observes, are exacerbating the rifts in this South Asian country riven by political strife and the vestiges of the 1971 War of Independence. The government has engaged in retaliatory violence against those believed to have left-leaning ideals or goals threatening the status quo. The outlook, she notes, is dispiriting, as restrictions and limits on democracy and fundamental human rights are tightening. In his article, “The Armenian Holocaust and International Law,” Torkom Movsesiyan drives home the argument that “successor” states serve more to impede than to expedite justice after atrocity. He argues that, as long as the Turkish government resists pressure to interrogate the events of 1915 in Eastern Anatolia, popularly known at the Armenian Genocide, formal justice will remain inert. He argues, instead, for an international tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators and explores the role of the International Criminal Court. International law demands not only accountability, he observes, but also the return of land and property confiscated from the Armenians then residing in the Ottoman Empire. Part II, “Narratives,” explores the roles of victims as well as perpetrators in the aftermath of atrocity. These articles observe the emerging salience of citizens in aftermath dynamics. In her article on Cambodia’s aftermath, “Contested Narratives of Victimhood: The Tales of Two Former Khmer Rouge Soldiers,” Eve Zucker draws on her ethnographic research to show that perpetrators—specifically, two former Khmer Rouge soldiers—are more self-reflective than the scholarship (some suggesting remorselessness) suggests. Her findings imply a capacity for their reintegration into society. The act of narrating past behavior itself is, she says, a transitional process and, in the case of survivors, appears to promote the prospects for their recovery. Narration as a transitional process is a phenomenon that I have long been interested in; I return to it in this volume with an article called “The Negotiable Society: Transitions from Below.” By publishing accounts of their ordeal, especially in the 1960s when Germans anticipated statutory support for their inclination to “move on,” Holocaust survivors exhibited a desire to renegotiate relationships with their contemporaries even as they were determined to disquiet them by bearing witness to the Nazi past. What they wrote expressed these twin perspectives: Narratives informed by recrimination make clear that reworking relationships involved a disposition of unrelenting worldly suspicion. On the other hand, counter-narratives, imbued with fellow-feeling, inspired a search for tenable terms for a post-atrocity future. Bringing perpetrators and victims together into direct dialogue has been Laura McGrew’s preoccupation in her work. For her article, “Changing Narratives of Victims and Perpetrators in Cambodia: The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of

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Cambodia (ECCC) and Community Responses to Dialogue Interventions,” she consulted a longitudinal case study of one particular community where an NGO conducted a dialogue project to promote understanding. Noteworthy is her observation of the extra-legal dimensions of the hybrid national-and-international court, which began operating in Cambodia in 2006: The presence of the ECCC, she argues, galvanized public discussion about Cambodia’s troubled past and occasionally about how the past relates to human rights violations in daily life. Even if the conversations expose competing memories—or, especially in the case of perpetrators, an inclination not to remember at all—and therefore elude reconciliation, historical dialogues, she notes, have the effect of promoting a measure of mutual understanding. Part III, “Reconciliation and Prevention,” serves as ballast against the daunting challenges to successful transitions explored so far. The two articles constituting this part revisit the prospects for atrocity mitigation. In “In Search of Justice and Reconciliation: Rwanda,” Mark Ampofo explores the intersections between the state and its citizens. In pursuit of a policy of “unity and reconciliation,” the post-genocide Rwandan government, he writes, adopted a new constitution, created programs to empower women, and fostered economic growth and stability. Most dramatically, however, the government instituted an innovative adaptation of local justice traditions, called gacaca. These community courts were set up in 2001 to speed up the prosecutions of hundreds of thousands of those suspected of having participated in the 1994 genocide and who were being held in overcrowded jails. The government has argued for the courts’ transitional merits but, as Ampofo discusses, it has fallen short of its stated objectives. Kerry Whigham, in the following article titled “Constructing Prevention: An Exploration in Building Memorials that Prevent Atrocity,” writes about the potential of counter-monuments to prevent atrocity’s resumption. Counter-monuments, as they emerge around the world in response to atrocity crimes, are a classic exemplification of phase-three, civil society enterprises. Unlike conventional monuments, which place the state and its surrogates on a pedestal for hero-worship, counter-monuments draw visitors into memory spaces by making the past present and, more importantly, he asserts, by using the past to shape the future. Using a performance-studies lens to analyze these spaces of memory, Whigham argues that these memorials, by asking important questions, can promote the prevention of future atrocities. Given the promise and the impediments, any evaluation of postatrocity frameworks in play since the end of the cold war is preliminary and often self-correcting. The state exhibits the potential for benevolence,

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Introduction

but, as Ampofo argues, under different circumstances and inhabited by actors of varying qualities, it is also prone to malevolence—an inclination that Gronewold and Movsesiyan analyze. The alternative examined here, civil society, is an exciting arena of creative commitment to attenuating occurrences or recurrences of atrocities, as Zucker and Whigham notably laud. McGrew is more cautious about the prospects. On the basis of witnesses’ accounts, I agree with Moyn that even promising transitions are inherently and often fatally burdened by countervailing power politics. The final part, “Forward?”, is an assessment of post-atrocity legacies in three regions of the world. Ajdin Dautoviü, in his article, “Sorry, Not Sorry: An Assessment of the Appropriateness of the 2004 Republika Srpska Apology for the Srebrenica Genocide,” looks at one important transitional scheme—official apologies. Bosnian Serb political elites, he observes, often expressed apologies and acknowledged war crimes against Bosniaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but, by using a standard for evaluating the integrity of apologies, he asserts that these expressions were insufficient for reconciliation. Ever since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995, nationalistic narratives, he asserts, have immobilized BosniaHerzegovina in a state of ethnic segregation. He concludes, however, that those same standards offer possibilities for moving toward reconciliation. Benny Widyono, in “The Legacy of Cold War Era Massacres in Cambodia and Indonesia,” also sees signs of progress. Although the United Nations recognized the Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government in postgenocide Cambodia and the international community tacitly endorsed Indonesia’s official, fifty-year denial of its government’s large-scale reprisals for a botched leftist coup, the two countries started a process of reconciliation with the end of the cold war. An increasingly democratic government in Indonesia is lifting the shroud of silence, and the intervention of the United Nations in supervising Cambodian elections and participating in the Khmer Rouge tribunal is helping to create an open society in that country. In the aftermath of atrocities, however, all transitional frameworks are vulnerable. That is a conclusion we draw from the volume’s final article, “Violence, Armed Conflict, and the Burden of Mental Illness in the Middle East and Beyond” by Dilshad Jaff and Lewis Margolis. They contend that the state and civil society are mute in dealing with a serious legacy of violent conflicts—mental-health traumas. To begin with, most inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa— societies experiencing ongoing violent conflict aggravated by mass migration from the region—are unaware of the acute and chronic longterm consequences of such traumas; few significant steps have been taken to alleviate them. They warn that their neglect will impair the well-being

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of millions of inhabitants and their children and inhibit the two regions’ chances for a stable and secure recovery. Yet their recommendations for epidemiological studies and other remedies is, at the same time, a wake-up call that we hope this volume will help amplify. I am grateful to Kean University for enabling its Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program to convene the international seminar on which the present volume is based. Special thanks go to Brandon Moye, a recent graduate of the program, and Jannette Belen for their help with the project’s development, and to the Jewish Studies program for its assistance in preparing this manuscript for publication.

Notes 1

Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 39–46. 2 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The centrifugal pressures threatening the European Union—a multistate convergence from the 1950s—indicate, among other influences, the potency of the autonomous nation-state. 3 For a succinct discussion of the post-World War II assertions of the individual’s inalienability with the revival of natural rights theories and the ascendance of distributive justice theories, see Jerome J. Shestack, “The Philosophic Foundations of Human Rights,” Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998): 215–24. 4 For an example of citizen-inspired preventive endeavors, see Mary B. Anderson and Marshall Wallace, Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012). See also Iosif Kovras, Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional Justice: The Families of the Disappeared (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 5 See Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000): 235–36. See also Jeffrey Blustein, Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 171–75.

I. JUSTICE

CHAPTER ONE BANGLADESH: TROUBLING TRENDS IN THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE SUE GRONEWOLD

I write today out of concern for events over the past few years in Bangladesh. As a scholar of genocide and human rights in Asia, I traveled to Bangladesh in the fall of 2014 as a State Department Special Lecturer. At the invitation of the newly formed Centre for Genocide Studies at the University of Dhaka, I delivered lectures on comparative genocide, particularly on the European Holocaust and on instances of mass killing in Asian history. For a number of years, I have been impressed by the singular path taken by Bangladesh, particularly its creation, in an Islamic society, of a state devoted to both political and religious tolerance and to social equality and economic opportunity. It has also been committed to coming to terms with the past in a rational, legal fashion. As with the case of Cambodia, I, along with many other international observers, was hopeful that the establishment of an internationally recognized tribunal would put an end to the divisiveness that had plagued both of those countries since the mass killings and upheavals of the 1970s. But I must admit to being increasingly distressed at recent trends that have been unfolding in Bangladesh. There seem to be at least four troubling trends around the politics of justice as carried out there today. In the first place, a culture of violence has developed in today’s Bangladesh. As many have pointed out, the country has been mired in violence since its official birth in 1971; acts of both political and religious violence are, therefore, certainly not new to Bangladesh. But there does seem to have been a recent escalation of very brutal acts of violence. Furthermore, since the founding party, the Awami (People’s) League (AL), returned to power in the election of 2008, hopes were high that much of the extreme violence and disruptions could be reduced and that Bangladesh could develop more solid political and social institutions that

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would serve as bulwarks of democracy throughout the country. However, since the start of 2016, according to Odhikar, a Bangladeshi human rights organization, sixty-four people have disappeared, 185 have died in extrajudicial killings, and 197 have died in political violence. 1 In the month of April 2016 alone, there were four major killings, mostly aimed at a group of well-known, prominent “atheist bloggers,” with a “hit list” of eighty-four intended victims, most of them associated with the freethinking website Mukto Mona (free mind), released by a group calling itself Defenders of Islam.2 Ɣ On April 7, Nazimuddin Samad, age 28, was killed on a busy street near Jagannath University in Dhaka where he was a law student and had posted his views critical of including Islam as the state religion in the Bangladeshi Constitution (it had been removed and then returned in 1988 under a military government and recently upheld in spite of a petition to maintain the secular nature of the government as was the original intention in 1971).3 Ansar al-Islam, the Bangladesh branch of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, claimed responsibility for his death, but the government insisted instead that it was the work of the local, banned Ansarulah Bangla Team (ABT), convicted in another blogger murder last year. Ɣ On April 23, English literature professor Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58, was attacked as he walked from the bus station in the northwestern city of Rajshahi where he taught at the local public university. Much beloved and very involved with his local mosque and its madrasa, and also with music, both Bengali and Western, Siddique was the fourth professor from that university to be killed. Daesch (referred to as ISIS, IS, or ISIL in English) claimed responsibility for the killing, saying it was because he was “inclining to atheism.”4 Ɣ April 26, there was the hacking to death (a standard method notable for its brutality in Bangladesh as it was in the 1995 genocide in Rwanda) of Xulhaz Mannan, age 35, editor of Roopban, Bangladesh’s only LGBT magazine. He had also worked for the U.S. State Department in the USAID development agency and had organized the annual rainbow rally in Dhaka in conjunction with Independence Day on April 14, which was canceled in 2016 due to threats of violence. An associate was killed with him.5 Ɣ These murders followed the killing of a popular publisher, Faisal Arefin Dipan, on October 15, 2015, in broad daylight at the Aziz supermarket in Dhaka.6

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Ɣ These attacks targeted religious and ethnic minorities within Bangladesh; a Buddhist monk was hacked to death in mid-May in southeastern Bangladesh and a Sufi Muslim leader in the north was killed the week before. A Hindu businessman was attacked and killed in his shoe shop in May, as was a seventy-year-old Hindu priest on June 7 while riding his motorcycle. 7 Late October and November, 2016 saw over a 100 Hindu homes burned and seventeen temples vandalized in an eastern section of Bangladesh after reports that a Hindu youth had posted an offensive image on Facebook; four other anti-Hindu incidents were reported in other parts of the country.8 Ɣ Also troubling has been the increase in attacks on foreign visitors to Bangladesh: a European man jogging in the diplomatic quarter was gunned down, a missionary in the far north was attacked and killed, a Japanese man who had been working in Bangladesh on development projects for decades was killed. 9 Then, on July 2, 2016, an attack similar to the IS attack in Paris in the spring of 2016 occurred, breathtakingly brutal and unexpected, in a popular café in Dhaka’s elite Gulshan diplomatic district which left twenty hostages dead, including one American, nine Italians, seven Japanese, and two police. This was the worst attack in many years.10 Ɣ Many others have been brutally attacked and left with wounds. According to the South Asian Terrorism Portal (SATP), in Bangladesh in the past eleven years, militant Muslim attacks have claimed 393 lives, 360 of them civilians, with an astounding 322 of the 393 occurring since 2013.11 Violence has not been confined to sporadic attacks on individuals, but has also included mass actions. While college campuses are (and have historically been) common sites for demonstrations and riots, the presence on college campuses of student wings of political parties is particularly marked in Bangladesh, coordinated with party leaders and joined by outsiders, including Bangladeshis in the diaspora. Mass actions on college campuses in Bangladesh have shown an uptick in recent years, many of them quite violent. This was particularly true in 2013 when outraged groups of students affiliated with the AL and its allies poured into the streets, first in Shahbag Circle in Dhaka (called Shahbag “Square” after the Egyptian gathering place), followed by tens of thousands of people from all walks of life, in Bangladesh and in Bangladeshi communities around the world. Dissatisfied with the International Crimes Tribunal’s

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announcement of life imprisonment for Abdul Quader Mullah for war crimes, they first demanded his execution and then the total ban of Jamaate-Islaami from politics along with a boycott of its followers’ businesses. In protests and counterprotests by Jamaat and its supporters in the month that followed, more than sixty people were killed and scores injured. 12 The same pattern of violent protests, beginning on campuses and then spreading throughout the country, occurred in January 2015 on the anniversary of the AL’s sweep in the 2014 elections, resulting in fifty deaths and hundreds of injuries. 13 Odhikar’s May 2016 Human Rights Monitoring Report argued that political violence during elections had increased since 2014, especially at the lowest level of society which had previously been relatively immune, with forty-five killed and 1,485 injured in internal conflicts in both the AL and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) in May 2016 alone.14 It is not at all clear who the perpetrators of the violent attacks since 2013 have been, and there is much disagreement about this subject both in Bangladesh and abroad. Daesch has claimed responsibility for many attacks since 2015, including the July 1 café massacre, the murder of two foreign nationals, as well as sporadic attacks against minority religious communities and law enforcers. Groups affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) have claimed responsibility for many attacks on those who allegedly hold views or have lifestyles contrary to Islam such as the secular bloggers, LGBT activists, and university professors. Bangladeshi militant groups like Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) and Ansar al-Islam have claimed some as well. The government has consistently denied the presence of outside Islamists in Bangladesh and put the blame solely on local elements, particularly those like Jamaat-eIslaami who are allied with the political opposition, or others who are outlawed like JMB or ABT. Relatively little had been done to respond to the attacks which have become more frequent since 2013, but in late July 2016, police raided an apartment in the Kalyanpur neighborhood of Dhaka, and nine young men, allegedly responsible for the Gulshan café attacks, were killed in the ensuing gunfight. Contrary to all expectations and shocking to all, both inside and outside Bangladesh, not only were these young men from good families and were well educated either abroad or in international schools in Bangladesh, but many of them had ties to the government. Most were fluent in English, with every prospect of doing well in the future. But they nevertheless came under the sway, as recently as the spring of 2016, of charismatic Islamist preachers convincing them to undertake jihad against infidels. Shazad Rouf, for example, was an American citizen whose family

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had returned to Bangladesh from Chicago several years before. He had studied at the American International School as well as at the North South University in Bangladesh, as had several others. His father supplied defense products to security forces in Bangladesh and his grandfather was a former chief of military intelligence. After his mother’s death in 2009, he started praying five times a day and, like the others, went missing in February 2016. In statements recovered from the raided apartment, he also praised Daesch chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as his “Khalifa” and was active in Bangladesh in the student wing of the Jamaat-e-Islaami.15 It is still not clear who perpetrated the other attacks, however, and whether they were home-grown or foreign. In June 2016, the AL government ordered a sweeping arrest of over eleven thousand people, primarily from the opposition parties, but it is not clear if its goal was to stop terrorism or to weaken their political opponents. Also unclear is the evidence on which these arrests were based.16 A second troubling trend in Bangladesh in recent years is the increasing restriction of freedom of speech and the press. Critics— newspaper editors, university professors, internal and foreign human rights organizations, and activists of all stripes—have been criticized and even silenced for calling into question acts and policies of the current AL government under the leadership of Sheikh Hasina, head of the party since 1981. Since the end of the military period and the restoration of democracy in 1990, the AL, with Hasina at the helm, has alternated in power with the current opposition party, the Begum Khaleda Zia-led BNP. Two recent instances stand out as especially troubling. In 2014, a British journalist, David Bergman (who lives in Dhaka, is married to a Bangladeshi, and is respected for his decades-long work informing the world about the atrocities committed during the Bangladesh war for independence) was convicted by the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal #2 for contempt due to three articles he had published on his blog about the tribunal’s procedures; it particularly chastised him for calling into question three million as the number of deaths during the Bangladesh war for independence that had long been touted as irrefutable, alleging that in questioning those high numbers he had “hurt the feelings of the nation.”17 Since 2011, Bergman had monitored the tribunal assiduously, publicizing the most striking lapses in procedure on his blog and in other news sources both inside and outside Bangladesh.18 The latest Bergman case became more complicated when fifty prominent journalists, artists, writers, and activists became alarmed that his treatment signaled a weakening of democratic institutions and signed a petition supporting him amid concern “about the use of the contempt of

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court law to curb freedom of expression.”19 Twenty-three were brought to court on contempt charges—the other twenty-seven apologized for any unintended offense caused by their “crime.” Twenty-two were exonerated, but one was convicted, Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury, a prominent public health physician, respected as a freedom fighter from 1971—and in his eighties. Because of his refusal to bow to the court, and possibly as a warning that no one, not even a venerated freedom fighter, was exempt, he was sentenced to stand an hour in the dock and fined the equivalent of US$64. These actions have been roundly criticized both at home and abroad: PEN/America issued the strongest possible condemnation as did the Bangladeshi human rights organization Odhikar in its May 2016 Human Rights Monitoring Report which also drew attention to new laws drafted but not yet in place, especially the “Distortion of the History of Bangladesh Liberation War Crimes Act 2016” and the “Press Council Act (amendment) 2016” which could be used to silence dissent, close down newspapers, and arrest and fine journalists.20 The U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, in the section on Bangladesh for 2015, found numerous examples in which freedom of the press and speech had been curtailed, and the New York Times printed a strong statement from its editorial board on December 23, 2014 against “Muzzling Speech in Bangladesh” regarding the treatment of Mr. Bergman, joined by Human Rights Watch and the Economist magazine, themselves previous targets of contempt charges. These actions are even more troubling because the founding principles of the AL in 1949 emphasized the will of the people, first in the creation of Pakistan East and West and then increasingly in the struggle for independence against West Pakistan.21 Its first constitution in 1972 stated in its Preamble and then throughout the document the powerful commitment to democracy and democratic institutions. Strongly articulated in its most recent ballot box victories in 2008 and again in 2014 were the four founding principles honed over thirty years which received the strongest popular mandate in the election of 2008: nationalism (since the struggle in 1971 was a nationalist movement for a free East Pakistan/East Bengal/Bangladesh), democracy, socialism, and secularism. Those principles have been both underscored and under siege at various points in its forty-five-year history, which is particularly distressing now, when I would argue that clarity and conviction are most needed. A third troubling trend, related to threats to freedom of expression and of the press, is restrictions on the freedom of religion. Under the AL, religious tolerance has been articulated through the principle of secularism (it is important to remember that the founders of Bangladesh included

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secular progressives for whom a socialist society was the ultimate goal). Also enshrined in the Preamble and body of the 1972 Constitution, freedom of religion has been under assault at various points in the history of Bangladesh. Although 90 percent of the population is Sunni Muslim, the territory that today comprises Bangladesh/East Bengal has long been home to other religions. Hindus comprise approximately 9.5 percent, with the remainder being Theravada Buddhist, Christian (mostly Roman Catholic), Shia Muslim, Bahia, animist, and Ahmadiiyya Muslim. Religious minorities have usually been generally tolerated, and most Bangladeshis are proud of this tradition, which some scholars trace back to the historical importance of a tolerant Sufism. Within Islam, there is general acceptance between Sunnis and Shiites, with neighbors participating in each other’s religious festivals. “Communalism,” or the dividing of the people according to religion (as in India), is strictly outlawed in the constitution. Although the original name of the party was the All Pakistan Awami Muslim League, a conference convened in 1954 dropped the word Muslim and formally committed the party to secularism.22 Since its founding, however, the AL has essentially paid lip service to both principles: toleration of all religions and a commitment to the principle of secularism, all within the context of an adherence to Islam which rises and falls with current events. While article 2A of the first constitution in 1972 identified Islam as the state religion, that article confirmed that “other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony in the Republic.” Moreover, article 41 assured freedom of religion and the party stressed in the document its commitment to secularism. The military regime in power from 1981 to 1990 removed the commitment to secularism and declared once again in 1988 that Islam was the state religion. An attempt in March 2016 to remove Islam as the state religion, reinvigorating a twenty-eight-year-old case that had been on hold, was rejected by the nation’s High Court which argued that the freedom of religion articles in the constitution protected those not Muslim. 23 In the spring of 2017, three other events underscored the fine line the current government is treading: responding especially to Hefazat-e-Islam, a network of conservative (although emphatically nonviolent) madrasa leaders, new textbooks for the nation’s schools were revised with a number of non-Islamic or secular texts removed such as the Hindu Ramayana and Sufi songs of Lalon Shah; madrasa curricula were removed from education ministry oversight with advanced religious instruction made equivalent to a post-graduate degree; and a sari-clad statue of Lady Justice prominently displayed in front of the Old High Court Building in Dhaka was removed (yet quietly reinstalled) as un-Islamic and perhaps

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even Hindu.24 The AL’s attempt to play both sides of the religious identity issue is increasingly difficult in the face of the rise of Islamic militants who insist on the exclusiveness of Islam and regard secularism as heretical. The fourth troubling trend in today’s Bangladesh concerns the declining commitment to a functioning multi-party democracy and the notion that opposing voices are both healthy and necessary in a democracy, principles always proclaimed in Bangladesh, but which have often been absent in practice as the major political parties battle each other, with intrigues, corruption, and assassinations more the order of the day since 1971. There are approximately twenty-five officially recognized political parties in Bangladesh, and the two major parties—in and out of power since the military regime from 1975 to 1990—the AL under Sheikh Hasina (daughter of the assassinated founder of the AL and founding leader of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman) and the BNP under Sheikh Khaleda Zia (widow of the assassinated founder of the BNP and first military ruler, General Ziaur Rahman) are not hegemonic majoritarian parties. They usually depend for their electoral success on their alliances with other smaller political parties, which run the spectrum from strong leftist to militant Islamist. These alliances have always been problematic, and in general the AL is more center-left and in the last election allied itself more with minorities, particularly Hindu, and more secular and liberal groups, in a coalition of fourteen parties, the “Grand Alliance.” The BNP is more center-right and has formed a coalition, the “18 Party Alliance” with more right-wing and Islamist parties, including the now outlawed Jamaat-e-Islaami. A swing group in many elections has been the third largest party, the Jatiya Party (Ershad), representing the military, which at present is included in the AL alliance. While on the surface, the AL and BNP share similar commitments to development and democracy, the two party leaders, derisively called the “battling Begums,”25 are more intent on shoring up their own power and refusing to work with the opposition. During the last election, which the BNP sat out because they believed that proper procedures had not been followed, Zia spent much of the time under house arrest. Election seasons continue to be marked by intrigue and power plays. There seems to be little genuine commitment to the principle of a multi-party system and a legitimate opposition, in spite of the great hope during the 2008 election that this time it would be different. Unfortunately, these four trends: increasing political and religious violence; a decline in religious freedom and tolerance of religious diversity; a decline in the commitment to democracy and democratic

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institutions; and a view of politics as a zero-sum game between the two major dueling parties could not have come at a worse time, for two reasons. Bangladesh is dealing, as is much of the world, with the rise of militant, fundamentalist Islam, and although this intractable problem has not so far presented itself in Bangladesh as elsewhere, the very nature of the Bangladeshi experiment which emphasizes secularism and tolerance in a devout but diverse Muslim society intent on growth with equity for its huge population is anathema to this branch of Islam; the response— domestic terrorist incidents—is, as everywhere, much harder to anticipate and counter. There is much debate about the ostensibly home-grown nature of this Islamic threat, with militant groups such as JMB seemingly behind attacks like the 2004 grenade attack that killed thirty AL leaders. Yet there is also a strong presence of foreign Islamic groups in Bangladesh, particularly in poorer urban and remote rural areas where Saudi-funded madrassas educate poor children, particularly girls, who would never be allowed to attend urban, secular schools.26 And it does not touch only the disenchanted or marginalized. The nine young men responsible for the café massacre in July were as integrated into Bangladeshi society as possible, yet they were drawn not to the AL or the BNP but to militant Islamic groups focused on jihad, pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, leader of Daesch. 27 The ease of traveling anywhere, physically and virtually, and of communicating across borders via social media has completely transformed older patterns of contact, exchange, conversion, and jihad. Bangladesh has until now been able to stave off the greatest threats, but its secular and tolerant traditions are increasingly anathema to newly energized jihadists. Only a forwardlooking, united leadership has a chance of responding in decisive, deliberate ways that are likely to be successful. Finally, the timing is particularly unfortunate for these troubling trends to surface in a Bangladesh which continues its search for identity, centered precisely on these vexing issues of religion, secularism, and democracy.28 It is especially problematic now that the AL has chosen to leverage its wide mandate in the 2008 election to finally reestablish the long-delayed trial to bring to justice those responsible for the bloody excesses in the 1971 war for independence.29 From 1973, when the legal framework was laid down for conducting a tribunal, it was clear that any tribunal would be problematic. In the first place, the Mujib government had granted amnesty to many in order to consolidate the new nation. In addition, it was impossible to try the Pakistani masterminds of the invasion. As a result, no Pakistani leaders are included, and those who have been keeping alive the desire for revenge and restitution (civil society groups such the founders

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and supporters of the internationally recognized Liberation War Museum and those seeking justice for the alleged 200,000 women who suffered grievous sexual assaults 30 ) have been denied their larger objectives. Instead, the court only charged Bangladeshis who opposed independence and sided with Pakistan, collaborating with it in the war and, most egregiously, in the last days identified the best and the brightest leaders for targeted killings in order to seriously cripple the newly independent nation. The preponderance of those charged are top leaders in religiousright groupings who oppose the AL, especially Jamaat-e-Islaami, accused of working closely with violent local militias such as Al-Badr and AlShams, as well as participating directly in violence. Allowed back into politics in 1975 by General Zia’s BNP, which revoked the ban on religious-based parties, many of those unquestionably responsible for war crimes have held high office in coalition governments and today constitute a strong opposition to the AL government. This has meant that there is a wide section of the public—including those involved in the parties’ youth wings—strongly opposed to the trials, and who seek to create disruptions. However, the tribunal enjoys such wide popular support that the government set about quickly—too quickly, according to some observers 31 — resuscitating the original 1973 ICT Act by first amending it in 2009 and then rapidly, by 2010, formulating rules of procedure touted as being up to world standards, establishing tribunal ICT 1 in 2010 with a second, ICT 2, in 2012 to expedite the process. 1,600 individuals were identified as suspect. At the moment, the trials are entering their sixth year, have rendered verdicts on eighteen defendants, with two dying in jail and two executed. Seven have been sentenced to death but are now appealing their verdicts. Five are fugitives, and another thirty-two are under continuing investigation,32 with the court working presently to amend the 1971 law in order to allow the Jamaat party to be tried as a whole. The end is nowhere in sight. There have been many disagreements surrounding all aspects of the tribunal, from the choice between a national or an international tribunal (Cambodia’s is a mixed tribunal)33 to the charges that could be levied (the charge of genocide being one of the most problematic) and punishments (the death sentence in particular draws criticism, especially in the context of doubts as to the fairness of the procedures). A number of personnel have quit or been removed. Criticism is strongly discouraged, with contempt proceedings so liberally handed out that it seems that little dissension is allowed.34 Although tribunals are one of the most respected methods of dealing with the aftermath of political violence, in Bangladesh the actions surrounding the trial have exacerbated tensions between the

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ruling parties and between the parties and their bases, all of which has posed the question: Is this justice or revenge? Instead of closure and reconciliation, attempts at providing overdue justice in this case have only sown more hatred and discord. To truly address unfinished business from 1971, it is important to find a way to make the trial a project of the entire nation, respecting international norms in a process that claims to be universal, in order to prevent lasting damage to Bangladesh. Where are the four trends discussed above leading? It is vitally important that the leaders of the major parties work together to address the myriad challenges facing Bangladesh today. The challenges detailed in this paper—the attacks of militant Islam and the fall-out from a tribunal perceived by a substantial portion of Bangladesh society as not delivering fair trials or unassailable verdicts—are too great, with Bangladesh standing heavily in need of good governance and leadership from the top. The tribunal is only the tip of the iceberg. The court must slow down its work, investigate deliberately and carefully the charges against the remaining defendants rather than handing down swift sentences, it must consider punishments other than execution, and make certain that procedures are fair and based on facts. In general, however, the leadership must devote itself to doing more to shore up its eroding principles: protecting religious and ethnic minorities; and strengthening and enforcing existing laws regarding freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and religion. The leadership must also work with the diverse groups that make up this most diverse nation to tackle the issues that confront their communities. The AL still has broad support. It was founded on the loftiest of principles. It needs to use that support to do what is indeed possible to “set the standard for other nations that have suffered from unspeakable abuses at the hands of their own people,” according to Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch’s Asia Director.35 It must act to bring about what Rabindranath Tagore, Bengal’s leading poet and intellectual, termed “Golden Bangladesh.”36 Only then will Bangladesh fulfill its promise and the live up to the hope that launched it as an independent secular republic in 1971.

Notes 1

Odhikar, Human Rights Monitoring Report, June 1, 2016, http://odhikar.org/statistics/statistics-on-political-violence. 2 Saeed Ahmed, “Yet Another Bangladeshi Blogger Hacked to Death,” CNN, May 13, 2015, http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/12/asia/bangladesh-blogger-killed/

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21

David Bergman, “Bangladesh Court Upholds Islam as Religion of the State” Al Jazeera, March 28, 2016. In May, President Hasina stated that there is indeed freedom of religion in Bangladesh but in the same breath she spoke against speech which spread “filth” against religion, arguing that “this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated to harm us in this way.” 4 Julfikar Ali Manik and Ellen Barry, “Bangladesh Police Suspect Islamist Militants in Professor’s Killing,” New York Times, April 23, 2016; “Islamic State claims responsibility for murder of Bangladeshi professor,” Daily Times. 5 “Bangladesh LGBT editor hacked to death” BBC News Shakhawat Hossain, “Remembering the Two Unsung Heroes Who Fought for LGBT Rights in Bangladesh” The Wire, October 25, 2016. 6 “Bangladeshi secular publisher hacked to death,” BBC News, October 13, 2015. 7 See the section “Human Rights Abuses on Members of Minority Communities” in Odhikar, Report; William Milam, “The Real Source of Terror in Bangladesh,” New York Times, May 19, 2016. 8 Julfikar Ali Manik and Ellen Barry, “Hindu Temples and Homes in Bangladesh are Attacked by Muslim Crowds,” New York Times, November 2, 2016. 9 Alexandra Stark, “Dkaha Attack Part of a Larger Pattern of Terrorism in Bangladesh,” The Diplomat, July 2, 2016. 10 “Dhaka Café Attack ends with 20 hostages among the Dead” The Guardian, July 3, 2016; Bruce Vaughn, “The Islamist Militant Threat in Bangladesh,” CRS Insight, July 21, 2016. 11 Mohammad Jamil Khan “Militant Attacks in Bangladesh Claim 393 Lives in Last 11 Years,” Dhaka Tribune, July 24, 2016. 12 Reporting in February, 2013 in NYT, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, plus Bangladeshi newspapers Daily Star, New Age, The Independent. 13 Jack Detsch, “One Year after Election, Violence Persists in Bangladesh,” The Guardian, Feb. 2015, http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/one-year-after-election-violence-persists-inbangladesh/. 14 Odhikar, Report, 5–6. 15 “Who Are They?” Daily Star, July 4, 2016, http://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/who-are-they-1250065; “Dhaka Raid: Who was militant Shazad?” Daily Star, July 28, 2016; Zayadul Ahsan, “Glimpses into Jihadi Minds” Daily Star, August 2, 2016. 16 “Round Up the Usual Suspects,” The Economist, June 18, 2016 17 Seeada Shankar, “British Journalist David Bergman Convicted in Bangladesh for Questioning 1971 War Death Toll,” International Business Times December 2, 2014. Also see Pen America Center, “PEN Expresses Concern at Conviction in Bangladesh Contempt of Court Case,” https://pen.org/blog/pen-expresses-concernconviction-bangladesh-contempt-court-case. 18 See, for example, Bergman’s comments about the judgment in several cases, “Fair Comment on Judicial Proceedings,” Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal weblog, February 19, 2014,

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http://bangladeshwarcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/01/fair-comment-on-judicialproceedings.html. 19 “Statement of Concern from Scholars, Writers and Activists Regarding Tribunal’s Contempt Judgment,” David Bergman’s website, December 19, 2014, http://ww.sacw.net/article10212.html. 20 Odhikar, Report, 3. 21 The best general history of Bangladesh is William Van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). On the history of the creation of Bangladesh, see especially Richard Sisson and Leo Rose, War and Secession: Pakistan, India, and the Creation of Bangladesh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and Srinath Raghavan, 1971: a Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the issue of democracy, see Ayasha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 22 “A Step Toward Secularization,” in the History section of the Bangladesh Awami League’s website, /index.php/en/party/history/81-a-step-towards-secularization. 23 David Bergman, “Bangladesh court upholds Islam as religion of the state,” Al Jazeera, March 28, 2016. 24 K. Anis Ahmed, “Bangladesh’s Creeping Islamism,” February 3, 2017, New York Times; Shohel Mamun, “Government to Recognize Qawmi dawah-e-hadith,” April 12, 2017, Dhaka Tribune; and Ikhtisad Ahmed, “Three More Signs that Bangladesh’s Ruling Awami League has Tightened Its Embrace of Islamism,” May 29, 2017, Scroll.in. 25 “Bangladesh Elections: the ‘Battling Begums’” Al Jazeera, January 4, 2014. 26 Nusaybah Yusuf, “The Impact of Islamic Schools in Bangladeshi Society: The Case of Madrassa,” Alochonaa (Dialogue), March 27, 2015; Akhilesh Pillalamami, “The Radicalization of South Asian Islam: Saudi Money and the Spread of Wahhabism,” Georgetown Security Studies Review, December 20, 2014. 27 “IS Sent foot soldiers to Bangladesh,” reports that an article in the New York Times, August 3, 2016, cites Dabiq, the IS online magazine, that a Bangladeshi Canadian, Tamim Ahmed Chowdhury, has been appointed IS’s leader of operations in Bangladesh and in 2016 local members carried out 11 operations in Bangladesh, according to an infographic from IS, Daily Star, August 4, 2016, http://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/sent-foot-soldiers-bangladesh-1264252. 28 Salil Tripathi, “Bangladesh and its Search for Identity” History Today, August, 2016. 29 The war exacted a particularly heavy toll. See the special issue of Journal of Genocide Research, December 4, 2011, devoted to East Pakistan, 1971, and Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (New Delhi: Random House, 2013). 30 See Bina D’Costa and Sara Hossain, “Redress for Sexual Violence Before the ICT in Bangladesh: Lessons from History and Hopes for the Future,” Criminal Law Forum 21 (2010): 331–338. For the Liberation War Museum, see Sakib

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Sarker, “The Liberation War Museum: Our Pride and Joy” Dhaka Tribune, March 27, 2016; also see the museum’s website, http://www.liberationwarmuseumbd.org. 31 For a discussion of the inadequacies of the tribunal and its procedures, see Kristine Huskey, “The International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh, Will Justice Prevail?” in Crimes of War blogspot, http://www.crimesofwar.org/commentary/the-international-crimes-tribunal-inbangladesh-will-justice-prevail/. 32 See the graphics in “Five Years, 17 Verdicts” in The Daily Star, March 25, 2015, modified February 20, 2016. 33 “Justice after Decades in Bangladesh: National Trials for International Crimes,” Journal of Genocide Research 13.4 (2011): 503–510. 34 For a thorough and thoughtful discussion of the trial and recent issues surrounding it, see Surabhi Chopra, “The International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh: Silencing Fair Comment,” Journal of Genocide Research 17.2 (2015). 35 Quoted in Morris Davis, “Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal: A Near Justice Experience” on Crimes of War blog, July 2011, http://www.crimesofwar.org/commentary/bangladesh-war-crimes-tribunal-a-nearjustice-experience/. 36 The name of the song he wrote which is now used as the Bangladeshi national anthem. See Tagore, Rabindranath; F. Alam, ed.; R. Chakravarty, ed., The Essential Tagore (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

CHAPTER TWO THE ARMENIAN HOLOCAUST AND INTERNATIONAL LAW TORKOM MOVSESIYAN

The Armenian Holocaust, also known as the Armenian Genocide, which took the lives of one and a half million Armenians between 1915 and 1923 in Anatolia, has become a controversial and political issue for Turkey, a country which has been denying the genocide since it was officially established as a republic in 1923. Today, Turkey faces many obstacles, but the almost century-old denial of the Armenian Holocaust has affected not only Turkey’s democracy and democratization process, but also its bid to join the European Union. However, if the Turkish government were to recognize the Armenian Holocaust, it would face the legal consequences of international law. Therefore, this article argues that one of the main reasons behind the denial of the Armenian Holocaust by the Turkish government is the fear of the repercussions which, under international law, could include compensation and restitution. First, I will look into the historical background of the Armenian Holocaust. Second, I will introduce the denial of the Armenian Holocaust, followed by the trials of the architects of that Holocaust in Turkey. Third, special attention will be given to the history of the term genocide, and the Genocide Convention. Fourth, I will introduce the trajectory of international law and the repercussions that would follow a recognition of genocide. Then, the importance of the International Criminal Court will be examined in cases of compensation and restitution after genocide. Finally, I will examine a case study of the International Criminal Tribunals of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia which examined events that had repercussions similar to those of the Armenian Holocaust. Implications of the future of this phenomenon will be offered as a prescription in the conclusion.

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Historical background The Armenians, a three-thousand-year-old civilization dating back before the Greeks and Romans, created the first Christian state in the world in 301 AD. Equally important, the Armenians inhabited what is known today as Turkey for more than two thousand years. Armenian was the first language that the Bible was translated into. In addition, the Armenians were the largest Christian minority group in the Ottoman Empire, numbering more than three million. The Armenians contributed enormously to the growth of the Ottoman Empire’s economy. However, the Ottoman Empire wiped out more than half of its Armenian population during the Armenian Holocaust in Eastern Anatolia in 1915. The events of 1915 marked the first Holocaust of the twentieth century and it came to be known as the Armenian Genocide. The Armenians were an ancient community integral to the Ottoman Empire that preceded modern Turkey, the same way the Jews were emancipated citizens of Imperial Germany. Along with Jews and Greeks, the Armenians suffered as non-Moslem Ottoman citizens living in the mostly Muslim Anatolia during the Ottoman Empire. They were called dhimmis, the people of the book, and were subjected to discrimination, lack of protection by the Ottoman Empire, and higher taxation than their fellow Moslem citizens. The Ottomans who, according to Peter Balakian, “stereotyped” the Armenians, perpetrated discrimination against them: they “resented” them for being very wealthy, educated, economically stable, and “despised” them for being “Christian infidels.”1 This is one of the many unmistakable similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: the hatred of the Ottoman Empire toward the Armenians was clearly expressed in the same way as the Nazis did toward the Jews. Moreover, in his book, The Burning Tigris, Balakian shows how pan-Turkish ideology referred to the Armenians as “dangerous microbes,” echoing the way the Nazis labeled the Jews as “harmful bacillus.”2 The architect of the Armenian Holocaust, Talaat Pasha, was accompanied by Sultan Abdul Hamid II and the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), also known as the Young Turks, when planning the massive deportation of the Armenians to Aleppo in Syria. According to Taner Akçam, the CUP members also happened to be the “central figures” in the Turkish government in 1922, who admitted without fear that “the republic could only have been established by eliminating the Armenians and removing their demand for self-determination in Anatolia.”3 It is also important to note that the Armenian Holocaust was led by Ottoman Empire nationalists whose primary goal was to kill the Christians

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in order to build a “unified population in the new nation state,” where only a “homogenized national state” with Turkish and Islamic identity could exist.4 Turkey, a country built on the ashes of the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire, denies that the events of 1915 constitute genocide, despite the plethora of evidence available in more than twenty countries that have officially recognized the Armenian Holocaust. It is thus clear that Turkey has a different version of what happened in 1915 in Anatolia, a version that excludes the term genocide. For this reason, the current Turkish government claims that there were no deportations of Armenians, orchestrated by the Ottoman Empire; instead, the Turkish government calls the events of 1915 a civil war. Turkey claims that the Armenians were relocated to Aleppo because they allied with the Russians to scapegoat the Ottomans. However, the planned areas of relocation for the Armenians by the Ottomans had no correlation to the war between the Russians and the Ottomans. 5 What is more, according to an Armenian Genocide expert, Peter Balakian, had the Russians not united with the Armenians, the Ottoman Empire would still have planned to kill the Armenians because the first massacres of more than one hundred Armenians, who suddenly began to disappear, started in the late 1870s and were carried out by the Ottoman Empire’s government.6 According to international law, if any state was to acknowledge a genocide perpetrated by the government, reimbursement of territory and property would be required.7 Apart from compensation for territory, the financial reimbursement, according to international law, would be more serious. A financial reimbursement of properties and land would be devastating to Turkey. Hakk compares these repercussions with Germany’s financial reimbursement to the Jewish Diaspora after the Jewish Holocaust was recognized. As in the case of Germany, Turkey could be asked to pay huge sums of compensation, possibly amounting to the equivalent of billions of U.S. dollars. Moreover, as Ross Vartian, the president of the Armenian Assembly of America has said, Turkey may also be pressured to return some of its northeastern territories that were populated by Armenians before 1915 to Armenia.8

The existence of international law during the Armenian Holocaust Although the current Turkish government, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, does not recognize the Armenian Holocaust, the Allied Powers in

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World War I—Russia, France, and the United Kingdom—held the Ottoman authorities responsible for the Holocaust9 and, as a result, made similar accusations against Germany at the end of the war, which led to the foundation of the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and on the Enforcement of Penalties in 1919. In fact, the purpose of this commission was not only to prosecute the central powers and their allies for crimes against humanity, but also to set up a tribunal that would investigate crimes under international law, as opposed to crimes under domestic law. Turkey signed a peace treaty, known as the Treaty of Sèvres, under which it was obliged to surrender the perpetrators of the Armenian Holocaust. However, the commission’s original agenda failed as the Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified by Turkey.10 The treaty was, in fact, replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne, which gave amnesty to the perpetrators of the Armenian Holocaust. This example shows, not only the willingness of the international community to accept responsibility for punishing the perpetrators of crimes against humanity, but it also serves as a prime example of how international law can operate in practice. In addition, the Istanbul trials of Turkish citizens in 1919 offer clear evidence of the acknowledgment by Ottoman government officials of their responsibility for the massacres of the Armenians. Hence, this evidence shows the involvement of both domestic courts and domestic law, used to hold Turkish citizens accountable as the perpetrators of crimes against humanity before a special military tribunal.11 According to Minassian, on July 16, 1919, the Military Tribunal in Istanbul sentenced to death the Ottoman leaders responsible for the Armenian Holocaust: Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, Jemal Pasha, and Dr. Nazim.12 However, only three out of the fifteen perpetrators of the Holocaust were executed; most escaped, were freed, or became “fugitives from justice.”13 Accordingly, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and the foundation of the Modern Republic of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, many of those previously accused of committing the Armenian Holocaust “did not serve their full sentences.”14 Because the scope of this article is to examine international law and the Armenian Holocaust, if the above instances of special military tribunals in Istanbul are taken into consideration from a legal perspective, it may be concluded that the Turkish government is responsible for the Armenian Holocaust. For this reason, according to international law, it can be argued that Turkey is liable for financial reimbursement, including the return of confiscated land and property that once belonged to the Armenians residing in the Ottoman Empire prior to the Armenian Holocaust. Likewise, the above evidence can also serve as an argument to counteract

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the current Turkish government’s position of denial of the Armenian Holocaust.

Origin of the term genocide and the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide As has been noted, the Armenian Genocide took place in 1915, several decades before the term genocide was invented, and prior to the creation of the Genocide Convention. For these reasons, let us examine the background of the term genocide and its relevance to the Armenian Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist who lost many family members in the Jewish Holocaust, invented the term genocide in 1944. The word genocide has Greek and Latin origins: the Greek word genos means race or tribe, and the Latin word cide means killing. Lemkin came up with the term while doing research on the Armenian Genocide, as described in his memoirs, Axis Control of Occupied Europe. Lemkin was saddened by the fact that one and a half million Armenians had been slaughtered, in what he called the genocide, but that the perpetrators had never been punished; instead, they were let go. What is more, the invention of the term genocide led to a major point in history with the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, designed to punish the perpetrators of any genocide. 15 The Genocide Convention defined genocide as “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: x killing members of the group; x causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; x deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; x imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; x forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”16

Repercussions after genocide in the case of international law Here, repercussions are described in the sense of financial compensation and restitution in the event of genocide. Although the perpetrators of genocide have a moral obligation, there is also the complexity of financial obligations such as compensation and the return of homeland, including

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property, to the victims of genocide. In order to conceptualize restitution and compensation in the case of the Armenian Genocide, it is crucial to clarify from a legal perspective whether financial compensation has to be authorized by a domestic court or an international court. It might be argued that the issue of the Armenian Holocaust should be a matter only for a domestic Turkish court; yet, as mentioned above, after the Armenian Holocaust, nation states like Turkey and its domestic courts refused to address the problem, despite their involvement in the Holocaust. As a result, many of the perpetrators escaped, were let go, or were given amnesty in Germany. This shows the inability and unwillingness of the Turkish government to prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide. For these reasons, there is a necessity for international tribunals to enforce international criminal law in the case of genocide. Some of the first examples of such tribunals were those at Nuremberg after World War II, and later on with the help of the United Nations, the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) were created. Similarly, there was a need for an international institution such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), instead of a domestic court, to prosecute the criminals of crimes like genocide. The ICC was founded on July 1, 2002, as a result of a treaty, known as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Some of the ICC’s features are that it has the authority to order restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation to victims of genocide. The ICC is limited to prosecuting crimes, including genocide, that occurred either on or after July 1, 2002, which excludes the Armenian Holocaust. 17 The ICC differs from the ICTR and ICTY in that, when dealing with claims for compensation or restitution, the ICC “does not require enforcement through a national court,” if national courts are either not willing or not able to proceed with prosecutions or investigations.18 Rule 98 of both the ICTR and ICTY empowers them to award financial compensation to victims of genocide where the victim has the legal right to obtain financial compensation from the perpetrator in a national court.19 So, given that the Turkish government does not recognize the Armenian Holocaust, compensation in the way envisaged through the ICTR and ICTY would not be possible.

Financial compensation and restitution for the victims of the Armenian Holocaust As has been noted, the examples of the ICC, the ICTR, and the ICTY are of little use when assessing compensation and restitution in the aftermath

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of the Armenian Holocaust. Thus, there are several underlying issues to be considered when discussing the complexity of compensation and restitution. First, in international law, before even filing an action against the Turkish State for the assessment of compensation to the genocide victims, the Turkish government needs to recognize the Armenian Holocaust in order to take full responsibility of compensating the victims. This seems unlikely bearing in mind the Turkish State’s political stance of denying the Armenian Holocaust. Second, from a legal perspective there is still no international institution or tribunal specifically set up to deal with the Armenian Holocaust such as that of the ICTR or ICTY. Third, the ICC, the ICTR, and the ICTY would all be unable to prosecute the perpetrators of the Armenian Holocaust because it happened over a century ago and, in addition, none of the architects of the genocide were ever brought to justice. Fourth, if Armenian Holocaust victims claim compensation and restitution, the first question to be raised would probably be which individuals are to be compensated and how. Moreover, in the case of the Armenian Holocaust, there have been several generations of the Armenian Diaspora, scattered to almost every part of the world as a result of the genocide. Because of this, there are countless descendants of those who were driven out of their homeland in the Ottoman Empire during the mass deportations that formed part of the Armenian Holocaust in April 1915.

Conclusion In the final analysis, the repercussions of international law would be such that, if Turkey recognized the Armenian Holocaust, it would find itself under pressured to pay billions of dollars to the genocide victims, to which the current Turkish State responds with denial and ignorance. Therefore, one of the reasons why the Turkish government has refused to come to terms with its dark past is the fear that it will be held liable for financial compensation and restitution as a result of the genocide. Despite the polemics of the underlying issues with regard to the Armenian Holocaust as examined in the previous section of this article, there is a need for an international tribunal to deal with the Armenian Holocaust, and specifically with compensation and restitution under international law. What is more, the absence of such an international legal body does not necessarily mean that the genocide victims are not eligible to claim reparations. To recapitulate, the existence of customary international law prior to the end of the Armenian Holocaust was demonstrated in this article to indicate that the descendants of the genocide are eligible for compensation and restitution. Furthermore, the Armenian

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Holocaust was recognized as a crime by the Great Powers before the signing of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Nuremberg and Istanbul military tribunals, and the Treaty of Sèvres; also, the Armenian Holocaust was recognized as such even prior to the coining of the term genocide by Raphael Lemkin. Likewise, because of Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Holocaust, more collaboration is needed from the international community to pressure the Turkish government to recognize the genocide; in particular, those powerful countries like the United States and the United Kingdom whose NATO relationship with Turkey has been the reason for their reluctance to act thus far. In addition, the United Nations should impose sanctions on Turkey. Finally, although the current state of Armenia can serve as the only legal body able to represent the Armenian Diaspora under the auspices of international law, it would be Turkey’s responsibility to recognize the Armenian Holocaust through its domestic court system.

Notes 1

Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York: Harper Collins, 2003): 140. 2 Ibid., 164. 3 Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006): 10. 4 Jenny Thomsen, The Assyrians/Syriacs of Turkey (Malmö, Sweden: Malmö University Press, 2007): 33. 5 Akçam, A Shameful Act, 10. 6 Balakian, The Burning Tigris, 204. 7 As cited in Akçam, A Shameful Act, 222. 8 M. Hakk, “Turkey and The EU: Past Challenges and Important Issues Lying Ahead,” Turkish Studies 7 (2006): 464. 9 N. Minassian, The Armenian Genocide: International Law and The Road to Recovery (London, UK: LLB of Brunel University, 2008): 23. 10 Ibid., 24. 11 Vahakn Dadrian, “Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and its Contemporary Legal Ramifications,” Yale Journal of International Law 14 (1989): 221. 12 Minassian, The Armenian Genocide, 27. 13 Vahakn Dadrian, “The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7 (1997): 50. 14 Minassian, The Armenian Genocide, 28. 15 H. King, B. Frencz, & W. Harris, “Origins of the Genocide Convention,” Western Reserve Journal of International Law 40 (2007): 14.

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Henry Theriault, “Genocidal Mutation and the Challenge of Definition,” Metaphilosophy 41 (2010): 482. 17 P. Kirsch, “The Role of the International Criminal Court in Enforcing International Criminal Law,” eds. Charlotte Ku and Paul Diehl, International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings (London, UK: Lynne Rienner, 2009): 241. 18 Ibid., 240. 19 K. Kittichaisarre, International Criminal Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009): 324.

II. NARRATIVES

CHAPTER THREE CONTESTED NARRATIVES OF VICTIMHOOD: THE TALES OF TWO FORMER KHMER ROUGE SOLDIERS1 EVE MONIQUE ZUCKER

Introduction In a mountainous and forested region of Southwestern Cambodia, survivors of the Khmer Rouge have found a number of ways to narrate the past, both individually and collectively, as they rebuild their lives and communities in the aftermath of war and genocide. The stories they tell draw dynamically on a variety of cultural, personal, and social experiences and ideas. In this chapter I show how the narrated memories of two former Khmer Rouge soldiers are contested within their own narratives and with regard to the national narrative that is being inscribed by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts Cambodia (ECCC), otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. The narratives reflect their personal histories and positionalities as they seek to articulate their pasts in a manner that meets the needs of their own identity construction set against changing social, cultural, and political environments. The narratives and their variations over time suggest a process that is often tentative, ambivalent, and contradictory. Narratives are central to human experience—the stories people tell reflect and create who they are as individuals and as a collective group. This powerful tool is forged out of experience and imagination, and is chiseled by culture and society. Historical narratives provide individuals with a means to shape themselves and their communities, hence these narratives are subjective and convey meaning. As Alessandro Portelli explains, “Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they think now they did.”2

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There are myriad ways of telling our stories: they may be filtered through different social, political, religious, or personal lenses; framed around a central theme or event; or told in a manner that includes or excludes particular features of the story. These choices of tellings lend a degree of autonomy to the story-telling process. In this way narratives can be in some cases a form of resilience for they offer the potential to manage 3 memories that are painful and difficult, and may continue to haunt. There are also times when narratives are in flux—that is, when competing discourses, new revelations and realities destabilize perceptions of the past and the stories that accompany it. Stories may be framed according to new agendas or made to fit the dominant discourses that inform the present of the past. The narratives of the two soldiers illustrate many of these processes. In this chapter I focus on these two men, framing their stories in a broader discussion of narratives of victims and perpetrators both in Cambodia and beyond.

Background This chapter draws on the ethnographic research I conducted in 2002– 2003 and followed up in 2010. Most of the research took place in the foothills of the Cardamom mountains in Cambodia’s Southwest. The research spanned two adjacent communes (groups of villages). The area is forested where the land has not been cleared for houses, rice fields, or other crops. Villagers in this area are mostly employed as farmers but they also rely heavily on the sale of forest products to subsidize their living. Trading in forest products is the traditional livelihood in this area going back for hundreds if not thousands of years. The residents mostly practice Buddhism along with Brahmanism and Animism. Some in the area have converted to Christianity but they remain a minority up to the time of the research. In the past, the mountainous and forested terrain of my field site, combined with relative proximity to a major road, made it an attractive site for insurgent groups to set up bases and conduct guerilla warfare campaigns in the region. In the late 1940s, this area had become a base for the Khmer Issarak, the independence fighters, who successfully fought for independence and freedom from French colonial rule. The Issarak based themselves in the region and the area became a battlefield just as it would again later the early 1970s during the Khmer Rouge revolution, and again in the 1980s and 1990s when the Khmer Rouge were engaged in civil war with successive governments. While the Khmer Rouge officially ruled the country from 1975 to 1979, they occupied and controlled this area much of

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the time from 1970 to 1999—nearly thirty years. This extensive and enduring experience with the Khmer Rouge makes the experiences of the residents with the Khmer Rouge markedly different than those areas, such as the capital city, Phnom Penh, that fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979. The two communes where I conducted fieldwork had similar but not identical experiences over the thirty-year Khmer Rouge period. The Khmer Rouge entered both communes and established themselves in 1970. However, the area of Commune 1, the commune where I stayed, had become a battlefield at that time with the Lon Nol government, Vietnamese, and Khmer Rouge all fighting one another. To further complicate matters, there was an additional guerilla movement, the Khmer Sar (White Khmer), operating in the area that was not aligned with either the government or the Khmer Rouge. Although many of the residents of Commune 1 were recruited by the Khmer Rouge, others were also recruited by the Lon Nol government or the White Khmer. Both the government and the Khmer Rouge harbored doubt over villagers’ allegiances and it was not long before the executions of “traitors” began. While the government soldiers executed a few individuals for traitorous activity, the vast majority of the executions in the early 1970s were committed by the Khmer Rouge who had the area fully under their control by 1973. The villagers were moved to a cooperative in the center of the commune and then later sent to Commune 2 to work on the large scale agricultural projects that had begun before 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power over the country. During the time the Khmer Rouge ruled the country—1975 to 1979—the experiences of the two communes converged. Residents of Commune 1 were resettled in Commune 2. Those individuals who were old enough to be soldiers and join mobile workforces, were sent to different areas of the country. The Khmer Rouge regime would last until the Vietnamese defeated them in 1979, installing a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). To gain a sense of individual and collective narratives of the past, it is important to understand the social, political, and economic changes that occurred. Prior to the entrance of the Khmer Rouge into the area, the residents of both communes had little exposure to the state compared with other regions in light of the geographical location and relatively sparse population. With the entrance of the Khmer Rouge, a new ideology was introduced that combined first Maoist and then Soviet communism with certain aspects of pre-existing Cambodian structures and beliefs. 4 The radical ideology of the Khmer Rouge destroyed or perverted all previous forms of social and moral structures and beliefs including the family,

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village structure, social and political hierarchies, religious institutions and practices, economic institutions, and other foundational elements of Cambodian society as it had existed up to that point. The vast majority of the vestiges of the old order were targeted for obliteration. The new order imposed a strong nationalism that had a disdain for the individual and all philosophies, practices, ideologies, or ideas that suggested any perspective outside of the Khmer Rouge’s ideological doctrine. After the Khmer Rouge regime fell in 1979, a new era for Cambodia began with the arrival of Vietnamese socialism and the new PRK government. Refugees came back, displaced persons returned to their homes, and humanitarian aid from Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern bloc nations was given to rebuild the infrastructure destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge continued to wage war with the hope of regaining the country. In 1989, Vietnam withdrew and the UN arrived soon after, introducing human rights ideologies and discourses, and a new market economy. A consequence of the country opening up to the wider world was the spread of the AIDS virus. Scores of nongovernmental aid agencies set up shop and began implementing their programs where they could.5 The UN had established the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia (UNTAC), to establish peace, hold elections, and rebuild the country. It is not hard to see that these rapid changes brought with them ideologies, worldviews, and new ideas— opening up whole new vistas in the Khmer imaginary. For the villagers of the two communes where I worked, most of those who were Khmer Rouge gathered near the Thai border to continue the fight for Cambodia after 1979. Some remained with the Khmer Rouge until 1999, whereas others defected and returned home. Meanwhile, villagers who were not Khmer Rouge, or who had later joined the government made several efforts to rebuild their homes but were evacuated a number of times to the main highway, first by the Vietnamese-backed PRK government and then later by UNTAC. Both communes had been resettled in their villages by the time I began fieldwork in 2002. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal had just completed its first trial when I returned in 2010. It is crucial to recognize that survivors who are trying to articulate and narrate their experiences are not only contending with the memory of the rupture wrought by the Khmer Rouge, but they are also trying to interweave these memories into new discourses and realities that they may just be beginning to understand. Hence they are not only articulating and making sense of what happened through cultural frameworks of understanding and earlier ideologies and discourses, but also trying to figure out where they are now in terms of the old and the new realities

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impacting their lives as they contend with the trauma they endured through the wars and the Khmer Rouge regime.

Victim and perpetrator narratives Collective victim narratives provide individuals with a means of framing their experience and establishing a sense of collective identity.6 Integral to these post-violence narratives is a distinction between perpetrators who are destructive and often sinister aberrations of a pre-existing moral order, and victims who are innocent and morally elevated above the perpetrators. For victims, this dichotomy can be beneficial. With others who suffered like themselves they share their victimhood, together with a collective identity—and a morally laden one at that. As Daniel Bar-Tal et al. suggest, “A victim’s position is also often a powerful one because it is viewed as morally superior, entitled to sympathy and consideration and protected from criticism.” 7 It would seem that this establishment of a collective identity in the aftermath of mass violence can be seen as a positive development for victim-survivors of genocide and mass violence. However, the adoption of this collective identity may perhaps ironically oppose the recovery and reconciliation processes. As Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman inquire, “Does the appropriation of victimization as a core moral stance create a paradox in that it becomes a means to revivify the fragments of communities, one that works against reconciliation and rebuilding?”8 In other words, if the goal is for a society to resume peaceful relations between its members, then creating and maintaining polarizing categories surely impedes these processes. 9 And further complicating matters, what about situations where those in the perpetrator camp consider themselves, or at least proclaim that they too are victims? Can everyone be a victim except for the few leaders at the top during a genocide or situation of mass violence? Is blaming the top leadership sufficient to enable healing?10 In the Cambodian context, the last question is perhaps too simplistic given that, as several studies of the recovery processes in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge have shown, healing and recovery take many forms, many of them local beyond the margins of the court. 11 Nonetheless, these issues of accountability, blame, victims, and perpetrators hover over any conversation about the Khmer Rouge past. For many years following the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, the majority of stories being heard by the public were the popular Cambodian survivor memoirs and autobiographies and the stories told by guides, and taxi drivers along the tourism trail in Cambodia. These tales, especially the written ones, were mostly the stories of the urbanites, or new people (as

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they were called during the Khmer Rouge period) and their experiences of the Khmer Rouge regime. These stories fell within the framework that Michael Vickery labeled the Standard Total View (STV). 12 The STV encapsulated a formulaic narrative of the Khmer Rouge period that recounted a series of atrocities that were also prevalent in the refugee accounts of those Cambodians who managed to escape and survive the Khmer Rouge. There is some truth to Vickery’s claim that many of the stories share a common format and features. However, this does not reduce their veracity or their value as he infers. Many of the features of these stories, such as the targeting of the wealthy and intellectual classes, the destruction of institutions, and the emptying of the cities are welldocumented, and the homogeneity of this collective narrative has lent survivors a means of framing and articulating these painful pasts.13 The collective nature of the narratives told in personal memoirs, by refugees, and within the tourist sector link up to wider studies of collective narratives in situations of genocide or mass violence that frame the past. Part of this framing includes the moral and social distinction and opposition between victim and perpetrator as mentioned earlier. Victims on the one hand are good, whereas the perpetrators are bad. Identifying collectively with other victims thus provides victim-survivors with group membership and a sense of moral certitude. The accounts I collected in the course of my fieldwork together also with the work of Laura McGrew,14 Peter Manning,15 Kosal Path,16 and a handful of other scholars and practitioners provide a counter-narrative to those victim-survivors who were able to write their own autobiographical accounts, or had access to powerful resources to have their stories told. The stories of the villagers I worked with are the stories of the “base” people or peasants who came under the authority of the Khmer Rouge early in the revolution. These were voices not previously heard. This rural, poverty-stricken, and often illiterate population had no direct means for sharing their stories. Additionally, their stories were only shared by a small group of scholars and journalists who visited these areas and shared the stories they heard. One of the aims of my initial fieldwork was to hear these other accounts and give voice to them. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal has since provided another source for the collection and recording of voices not previously heard as the trials of the former Khmer Rouge leaders continue and victim and witness testimonies are given and recorded. While these accounts of the past vastly increase the number of narrative accounts of the Khmer Rouge past, adding new voices, they are nonetheless framed by the culture and structure of the court. 17 Beyond the victim testimonies, there are also the witness

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testimonies, and the testimonies of the defendants themselves—which up to now have been limited to the top leadership. While human rights advocates have argued for the prosecutions to reach further down to include the midlevel ranks, such a move has been sharply resisted by the government. Manning suggests the reasons for this resistance lie in the Cambodian government’s interest in buttressing its own power: For the Cambodian government, this was always a story about the wrongdoing of the handful of figures still alive in the KR leadership. In redressing those memories, its own role as ‘saviour’ of the nation could be affirmed, contingent on the containment of memory.18

Thus, the court process to construct a biography of the Khmer Rouge is contested. That is, the debate and the decisions over who is prosecuted directly shape the biography that is written. Moreover, as Manning argues, the memories of perpetrators outside the judicial process, who have essentially been given amnesty (especially low-level leaders), provide another point of memory contestation. In these accounts we find different stories than those emanating from the court.19 Laura McGrew’s,20 Kosal Path’s,21 and my own research show that the victim-perpetrator categories in Cambodia are not always clear and change over time to meet new exigencies and agendas. In earlier work22 I have written about how a lack of coherent categories of victims and perpetrators contributed to the difficulties in reconstituting a moral community in the wake of violent upheaval. This of course is the other side of the paradox mentioned earlier, where clear categories polarize relations further inhibiting reconciliation. Here I wish to show how individual narratives are in flux and subject to internal contestation between competing discourses and ideologies. This occurs as survivors of war and mass violence try to make sense out of their experiences through various discourses and their changing understanding of themselves and their experiences.

Two soldiers, two stories The following section focuses on the narratives of two former Khmer Rouge soldiers as they talk about their pasts. They are approximately the same age and both became soldiers for the Khmer Rouge as teenagers in the early 1970s. At the time I interviewed them, both worked for an NGO in the area and both were active in their communities. They live and were raised in the same region but one resides in Commune 1, the other in Commune 2.

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The format and circumstances of the two interviews were somewhat different from one another. The first interview was with a man I refer as Phat whom I interviewed in 2003. The interview was part of a sixtyhousehold survey of randomly selected participants. This set of interviews which ranged anywhere from an hour to two hours loosely followed a set of specific as well as open-ended questions. During the interview with Phat there were no other people present outside of myself and my research assistant. The interview took place in Commune 2 where he was a resident. The second interview took place in 2010 in Commune 1 and was with a man I call Hom. The interview was conducted very informally as more of a conversation. It was not part of a larger survey or targeted group of interviews and Hom was not randomly selected. We had become acquainted before during my earlier research in the village so we were not strangers even though we did not know each other very well. He had asked that I come to talk to him. Again, I was accompanied by a research assistant, but this time there were one or two of his relatives present during the interview. In both Phat’s and Hom’s interviews, I asked questions about local traditions and history and included opportunities for each of the men to speak about their own histories and their perspectives on the past, present, and future. One significant difference, however, that will be evident in the interviews is that at the time I interviewed Phat in 2003, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal had not yet begun, whereas in 2010 when I interviewed Hom, the tribunal was fully operational and Case 001 had just concluded. In the interview with Phat, the tribunal was never discussed and he expressed no apprehensions about the possibility of one. However, speaking with Hom in 2010, the tribunal was included in the conversation by my asking questions and Hom expressing his apprehensions about the interview. As much as he obviously wanted to speak with me about these matters he was also worried that what he might say could potentially be used in the court and he sought assurances from me that his words would not be used in this manner. He did not want to be accountable for anything that he said to me. In this article and in my research in my field site, all names of individuals have been changed and the location is either not mentioned or given a fictitious name. Despite the differences between the contexts of the two interviews, the two men who are the subjects of this chapter have much in common. They both evince greater sophistication than many of those in their communities, both have had experience working with outside international organizations, both are former Khmer Rouge soldiers, and both are from

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the same general region and thus share similar pasts. I include here only portions of each of their interviews and follow with a brief analysis.

Phat Phat was the Village Development Chief23 of a village in Commune 2 when I interviewed him in 2003. He became a soldier for the Khmer Rouge as a teenager in 1973 and remained with the Khmer Rouge into the 1980s. He begins his narrative in 1970 when the Khmer Rouge entered and established themselves in the area. In 1970, the Khmer Rouge came here... They made this their base. They were friendly with people and they controlled the whole area. They spoke about liberation from the capitalist oppression that was collecting bribes as well as taxes at that time. If we had a bicycle they would collect taxes on it, also for a motorbike. When a child died they would collect a tax, and also when a child was born they would also collect a tax.24 That’s why they struggled against the American imperialism until they won in 1975.

The Khmer Rouge in the quote above are presented as friendly, virtuous and their actions are justified. The language employed, such as the struggle against imperialism is the language of the Khmer Rouge. By this reading it would seem that Phat himself, and by extension the community in which he lived, felt no animosity toward the Khmer Rouge who were seen as benevolent saviors from the evils of American imperialism and government oppression. However later in the interview we are introduced to a different Khmer Rouge: It’s difficult to talk about the Khmer Rouge because there are two kinds of Khmer Rouge. There was the Khmer Rouge in 1970–1979. They led with 25 cruelty…After that Hun Sen allowed Vietnam to enter and chase the Khmer Rouge out. Even me! We had to run to the border and then they established the other Khmer Rouge here. And the other Khmer Rouge were very easy despite that they were the same soldiers as before. Maybe they changed their political program—no cutting and killing. We had enough rice to eat to make us full...It is not like the Khmer Rouge in 1970 to 1979.

Anyone reading this text along with the text above can immediately see a contradiction. The Khmer Rouge of the early days that Phat describes in glowing terms is the same Khmer Rouge that ruled the country until 1979 whom he describes as cruel. Moreover, there is a second contradiction

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which he himself notes, the Khmer Rouge whom he describes as benevolent after 1979 are essentially the same Khmer Rouge as the cruel version that came before. Moreover, he places himself within these descriptions when he says he too ran with them from the Vietnamese. Which Khmer Rouge is he? Both? In this last section of his interview Phat offers an explanation for the upheavals and treachery of the Khmer Rouge. The government and the history and politics that go with it have all been according to what was prophesized by the gods in the Put Tomney (Buddha’s Prediction). Everything about the Three Year Regime26 (Khmer Rouge regime) was foretold such as roads with no one traveling on them, houses with no one living in them, and so forth. However, not many people here know about the Put Tomney so they will have problems with me perhaps if I speak about this. If we know a lot, then we cannot protect ourselves because there are people who will kill us—the powerful people; they could see it as political.

Phat’s explanation of the dystopian world that was life under the Khmer Rouge is interesting in itself and discussed further down. Here I would also like to note the second part of his speech which concerns the dangers of knowledge. Knowledge during the Khmer Rouge was easily a death sentence. Those seen to have knowledge were considered dangerous to the regime. It remains the case that knowing too much can still carry danger in the political realities of present-day Cambodia.

Hom Hom was in his late fifties when I spoke with him in 2010. He is a resident of Commune 1, and a former Khmer Rouge soldier. He works for an NGO but does not hold a high position. Nonetheless, he has taken leadership roles in development initiatives in his community. At the time of our conversation, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal was taking place, and Case 001 had just finished. Although I did not raise the subject of the Tribunal until the end of the interview, its presence was apparent in Hom’s speech throughout as he frequently expressed his concern by saying he was just a simple soldier, that he was against the Khmer Rouge, and that he did not want to be called as a witness. When the war came to his village in 1970, Hom was a monk at the Buddhist temple. He had great aspirations of studying Pali and hoped to become a Buddhist leader. However, with the arrival of war he left the

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temple and joined the Khmer Rouge. His narrative begins in 1970 with the Khmer Rouge calling for people to join them in the forest. There was an announcement telling the people to move to the forest … I joined them and fought the Lon Nol (government) army …and in the end I was victorious… I didn’t have any idea at the time of the communist politics.

He continues: I never was a high-ranking person in the Khmer Rouge army, just a simple soldier… Mostly I was opposed to the Khmer Rouge…I observed some situations happen and whenever I thought something unusual happened I was immediately against it. Those who joined the army during my generation mostly died except for me…During that time I didn’t know that something bad was happening. I was only able to follow the orders and commands of the leader. I expected that after fighting the war I would return home and live again with my family. Unfortunately, my expectations were wrong. I couldn’t return home and in the meantime my parents were killed and some of my relatives were separated and sent to live in other places.

In the first section Hom says that whenever “something unusual” occurred he was opposed to it. Unusual does not simply mean something that is out of the ordinary. There is a moral component. He states that he was opposed to it. Against it. In other words, he judged that the unusual act was wrong and therefore he was against it. He is asserting a degree of innocence and heroism on his part, that is, he maintained his morals and as a low-ranking soldier he played no part in the “unusual” situations that “happened.” But in the next statement he immediately contradicts himself. Here, he claims that he knows what the unusual situations meant, that is, the executions, and/or the accusations and charges that led to the deaths of those around him. But then he says immediately that he did not know anything bad was happening and he reverts back to the low-ranking soldier part of the narrative that he was only following orders. Perhaps realizing that he has said too much or that what he did say may be misconstrued he turns the story to his own losses of home and family. In this latter part he presents himself as a victim. Reflecting back to that time, feeling a need to justify his actions, Hom then proceeds to offer some justification for both joining and supporting the Khmer Rouge. This justification is then extended to the Khmer Rouge,

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followed by a return to a sense of victimhood—this time through global politics and foreign encroachment. I thought that what I was doing was loving my nation and country. The war at that time convinced me that the United States and Vietnamese made Cambodia their military base. If we consider that period, we can see that there are three countries: Russia, US, and China that caused Cambodia to remain at war. It seems like it was a civil war but perhaps it was actually the result of democracy and communism.

I asked Hom for his opinion on what people think about the Khmer Rouge Tribunal to which he replied: Mostly we feel happy to hear about the tribunal because when we think about what we have done, we were only following the policy of the leaders and we didn’t know which party it is. Sometimes when someone sings us a song we feel that the song is beautiful, but at the same time if another person sings us another a different song we also feel that song is beautiful too.

It is interesting that Hom’s opinion about the tribunal concerns his own place within it—or, more accurately, his place outside it. Reflecting on his own role in the Khmer Rouge and the acts he committed, he states again that he was only following orders and this time adds that he was ignorant of who the Khmer Rouge really were as a political movement and perhaps too he is saying that he was ignorant of their political agenda. In the end he suggests that political ideologies are like songs; if it sounds good, follow it. Hom explained to me that until leaving the Khmer Rouge and working for the NGO he has fought many struggles (the Khmer Rouge term for working to achieve revolutionary goals). He tells his children about the killings that occurred under the Khmer Rouge and he also tells them the strength it took for him to survive through the different periods. A lot of the years of my life were spent in wartime. Since the time I was a teenager and became a soldier I slept in a bunker. And after the war, came the time where we needed to build up socialism within Cambodia. I explained to my children that in order to live we had to struggle a lot and we should not care too much about the difficulties...My children know about the killing many people in the Khmer Rouge regime because I told them; many times… I told them about my life when I was a soldier and many other things happened during that time so that they can understand people have to struggle in order to live from one period into the other. Sometimes we had to depend on luck. Some people were killed with no

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Hom’s story is now that of a survivor who struggled and managed to live through harrowing times against all the odds. It is at this point in his stories to his children that he mentions killings during the Khmer Rouge. He is giving them a lesson; you have to struggle to survive. Implicit is the idea of adaptability—a theme I heard a number of times in my research in the context of stories about the unpredictability of the status quo. Regimes change and as another man I interviewed put it, “Society changed and will change again.” But there is another side to his story, one where Hom portrays himself in heroic terms. He expands upon this theme in the following passage. There was a guy that was ordered to be executed but I helped him. He was accused of allowing a cow to graze in a rice field…One day Angkar (the Khmer Rouge Leadership)27 called a meeting to inform the soldiers in the group of the crimes committed by that man. He had allowed the buffalo to graze in the rice field three times. During the meeting I thought the idea was unreasonable so I brought up the concept of materialism. Angkar accepted my argument and pardoned that guy. After all the soldiers left the meeting the guy who was accused got down on his knees thanking me. I think I helped some people during that time but still Angkar never charged me with any wrongdoing. So that’s why I believe in luck or sometimes I think it is the spirits of my parents looking after me. I think it was a really big risk to do what I did to help that man.

The heroism in Hom’s story is discussed in more depth further down. First a few observations.

Contested narratives The accounts of the two former soldiers are reflexive and nuanced. Their narratives are infused with Khmer Rouge discourse such as the use of the word “struggle” to talk about the efforts and hardships undertaken to bring success to the revolutionary movement and to the nation. The narratives are also funneled through discourses reflecting current agendas and influences including concerns over the tribunal, the current political situation, and Buddhist thought. In his narrative Phat invokes the Put Tomney or Buddha’s Prediction, which many Cambodians believe prophesizes the dark period of the Khmer Rouge. This explanation was widely circulated in Cambodia in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge.28 Moreover, the fear he expresses in “knowing too much” by talking about it

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may reflect not only the danger of knowledge that was present in the Khmer Rouge period, but may also be due to the current political climate. Someone who was seen as knowing too much during the Khmer Rouge regime could be easily marked as a traitor. Those identified as traitors were usually tortured to reveal their associates before being executed. It was crucial that those with knowledge and education kept it well hidden to survive. Today, and at the time of the interview, people need not hide their education. However, expressing political views and sharing information that is seen as dangerous by the government can still carry lethal consequences.29 A component of Hom’s agenda is to demonstrate that he played no direct role in the Khmer Rouge atrocities and had little choice but to follow the orders of the leaders. In a sense he is a victim: he lost his family who were killed by the Khmer Rouge, he lost his home, and he was generally subjected to the will of the leaders. Furthermore, the victimhood in his account extends to the state, which he presents as a casualty of cold war politics. Even more significant, in his statement that the war may not have been a civil war but rather “the result of communism and democracy,” he absolves the Khmer Rouge of responsibility for they too were merely victims of cold war politics. Laurence Kirmayer, et al. observed that “…narrative templates provided by cultural authorities and institutions, or implicit in discursive practices, may lead individuals to think about and tell their stories in ways that t the expectations of others.”30 I would add “along with individual concerns, dispositions and agendas.” That is, it is not only external forces that impact the manner in which individuals tell their stories to themselves and others, but there are also internal influences such as fear, desire, doubts, and hope. For Hom, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal raised concerns for his security and he thus felt compelled to emphasize repeatedly that he was simply a soldier and was against the Khmer Rouge. Phat, expressed no fears about a tribunal but it is clear that he still has to work to reconcile his place within the narratives of the benevolent heroic Khmer Rouge with the genocidal Khmer Rouge. His appeal to the Buddha’s Prediction suggests that he is looking in that direction for the answers. The contested nature of these stories occurs not only between the individual and their social realm, but also within the individual themselves. That is, there are contested narratives within the narratives. As individuals struggle with competing discourses, memories and their immediate circumstances—their stories reveal inconsistencies and competing narratives of the events and their understandings of them. Phat stated there were two types of Khmer Rouge—one cruel and one benevolent. He is left to find himself somewhere within that narrative as a former Khmer Rouge

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soldier himself. In Hom’s account he speaks of telling his children about the terrible deeds of the Khmer Rouge and yet also being proud of his tenacity in the struggle. These accounts render a sense of nostalgia and heroism, as in Phat’s telling of the early days of the Khmer Rouge, and Hom’s tenacity throughout the struggles he endured and bravery defending an accused man. There is a hint of pride throughout these stories. Kosal Path in his research in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng notes the pattern of heroics in the narrated memories of former Khmer Rouge cadre. As Path, and Manning too (who also did research in Anlong Veng) point out, these narratives and the memories they convey counter the official memory that is being inscribed by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. In another study, also in Anlong Veng, Dy Khamboly and Christopher Dearing report a sense of nostalgia among the former Khmer Rouge residents living there: “Nostalgia runs deep, despite the counter-narratives of suffering and loss.”31 The loss mentioned here brings us back to victimization. The loss the authors are referring to is the complaint by many former Khmer Rouge cadres that they gave everything for the nation but were left with nothing.32 They were, from their perspective, victims of the Khmer Rouge too. As one former Khmer Rouge tank commander in my field site put it, “I gave them my life for the nation, now my body is covered in scars from shrapnel, and what have I gotten in return?!” The heroism and nostalgia narratives contest the victimhood narrative, offering some level of redemption for the sacrifices made to a cause that turned out so horrifically. As Michael Firsch observes in reading the accounts of survivors of the Great Depression, “By seeing people turn history into biographical memory, general into particular, we see how they tried to retain deeper validation of their life and society…”33 Here too something similar is at work. It is difficult for many former Khmer Rouge to believe that the struggle they endured for what they once believed was a noble cause could have been in vain and, worse, a hideous crime. Thus there is a tension. They at once cling to acts and memories that made their part in the Khmer Rouge movement justifiable but at the same time, recognize they were failed by the regime that promised so much. Moreover, they too suffered the brutality of the regime, losing family members, homes, health, and livelihoods. Hence the appeal to victimhood makes sense, but it also plays well into the current political discourse that favors and empowers victims over perpetrators.

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Conclusion Naomi White who writes about Holocaust survivors’ ways of narrating and managing their memories argues that giving testimony, that is, telling of one’s experiences, is to make knowledge—“knowledge about oneself and the world.” 34 This knowledge, this “becoming aware,” she writes, “entails the interpretation and attribution of meaning to experience.”35 This process allows then the individual a degree of agency, as she suggests further, “In bearing witness about the war, the survivor takes charge of his or her own destiny, personal narrative, and, therefore, identity.”36 Further, this new narrative provides continuity in their lives linking the preHolocaust past to the Holocaust itself and to their lives afterward. 37 In other words, the narrative allows the survivor to grasp what has happened to him or her, and integrate it with their identity through the articulation of these events. By doing this, argues White, the person is able to construct an identity that transcends the rupture of the event by creating a bridge between an individual’s life before the Holocaust and after. Moreover, the identity that is constructed through the narrative and its telling may extend to the collective as well as the individual, thereby fitting the rupture into a larger collective story.38 Although Hom and Phat were not like the victims of the Holocaust that White writes about, they nonetheless must contend with the rupture of war and genocide and find an understanding of this experience that can connect to their present life. They are tentatively and ambiguously constructing life stories that connect the portions of their lives and absorb the Khmer Rouge period in a manner that accommodates their present concerns and interests. In doing so, they not only construct their individual identities but also contribute to the collective memory of the community. For both, we have seen how identity construction is an ongoing process as new agendas, information, and differing contexts lead to an evolution of identity as it is presented to varying audiences and the individual’s own self. Like White, oral historian Alessandro Portelli tells us that the value of oral history is found in the meaning that these accounts convey. 39 The speaker’s subjectivity is central in these individual narratives as they come to understand and present their pasts to themselves and others through changing political and social circumstances. It will be interesting to see how the narratives of their lives will change over time as each individual comes to understand their own experiences differently and continues the ambiguous process of constructing a cohesive biography that makes sense in the worlds they occupy.

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Notes 1 An earlier version of this paper (Narratives of Victimhood and the Other Tales: Perspectives from an Upland Area of Southwest Cambodia) was presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory Network, Columbia University, New York, December 3–5, 2015. 2 Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson. (London: Routledge, 1998): 67. 3 To some degree, the management of the memory may work in some contexts but not others. 4 See Ben Kiernan, “External and Indigenous Sources of Khmer Rouge Ideology,” in Arne Odd Westad and Sophie Quinn-Judge (eds.), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79, 2006, 187–206. Accessed at chrome-extension://gbkeegbaiigmenfmjfclcdgdpimamgkj/views/app.html 12/01/2015. Also, Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: UC Press, 2004). 5 During the 1990s, the Cambodian government was engaged in civil war with the Khmer Rouge who still controlled a substantial part of the countryside. But control in some areas was not always continuous, and a number of NGO projects achieved some footing and success. Some of these projects included the rebuilding of infrastructure, access to clean water, and demining. 6 Laurence J Kirmayer, “Landscapes of Memory: Trauma, Memory and Disassociation” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, (New York: Routledge, 1996), and Jack Kugelmass, “Missions of the Past: Poland in Contemporary Jewish Thought and Deed,” in Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, eds. Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, (New York: Routledge, 1996). 7 Daniel Bar-Tal et al., “A Sense of Self-Perceived Collective Victimhood in Intractable Conflicts,” International Review of the Red Cross, Volume 91 Number 874 June 2009, https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc-874-bartal-cherny akhai-schori-gundar.pdf, accessed October 5, 2016, 237. 8 Veena Das and Arthur Kleinman, Introduction, in Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery (Berkeley: UC Press, 2001): 25. 9 For an in-depth analysis of these issues see Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000). 10 There is the possibility that limiting the accountability to the top leadership might make it possible for the rest of Cambodian society to heal when combined with local approaches to healing the past. A discussion of these possibilities can be found in: Eve Monique Zucker, “Trauma and Its Aftermath: Local Configurations of Reconciliation in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal,” The Journal of Asian Studies 72 (2013): 793–800. 11 See for example, Eve Monique Zucker, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) and Anne Yvonne Guillou and Silvia Vignato, “Introduction,” in Life after Collective Death in South East Asia: Part 1 – The (Re-)Fabrication of Social

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Bonds, eds. Anne Yvonne Guillou and Silvia Vignato, special issue, South East Asia Research 20 (2012): 161–74, 171. 12 Michael Vickery, Cambodia, 1975–1982 (Boston: South End Press, 1984): 36– 63. 13 Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology, American Anthropology Association 21 (1997): 92–93. 14 Laura McGrew, Reconciliation in Cambodia: Victims and Perpetrators Living Together, Apart. A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the University’s requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Coventry University, Centre for the Study of Peace and Reconciliation. Coventry, United Kingdom, April 2011. 15 Peter Manning, “Reconciliation and Perpetrator Memories in Cambodia.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9 (2015): 386–406. doi: 10.1093/ijtj/ijv015 First published online: July 27, 2015. 16 Kosal Path, “Contesting the Public Narrative of the Khmer Rouge: Collective Memory of the former Khmer Rouge Community in Anlong Veng,” in Panel: Contested Narratives of Victimhood: Multidisciplinary, Multi-local and Multivocal Approach. The Politics of Memory: Victimization, Violence and Contested Narratives of the Past, Fifth Annual Conference of the Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory Network. Columbia University, New York, 2015. 17 See also Tallyn Gray, “No Justice Without Narratives – Transition, Justice and the Khmer Rouge Trials,” in Transitional Justice Review, https://www.academia.edu/28270360/No_Justice_without_Narratives_Transition_J ustice_and_the_Khmer_Rouge_Trials, accessed online 10/01/2016. 18 Peter Manning, “Reconciliation and Perpetrator Memories in Cambodia,” 2015. 19 Ibid. Also see McGrew this volume. 20 This volume. 21 Kosal Path. “Contesting the Public Narrative of the Khmer Rouge: Collective Memory of the former Khmer Rouge Community in Anlong Veng,” 2015. 22 Eve Zucker, Forest of Struggle, 2013, Ch.7. 23 The Village Development Chief is not part of the government administration but rather is the village leader for development initiatives by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). 24 It is not clear which period he is referring to regarding taxes. It may likely be the taxation that occurred under Sihanouk and it that may also have been part of the Khmer Rouge propaganda. 25 Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander defected to Vietnam in 1977 and helped the Vietnamese in eventually defeating the Khmer Rouge. He has held power in Cambodia as Prime Minister ever since the Vietnamese removed the Khmer Rouge from government in 1979. 26 The years the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia are commonly referred to as “The Three Year Regime” given that the regime lasted 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days. 27 Angkar, meaning “the Organization,” was the term used to refer to the Khmer Rouge Leadership.

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For analysis on the Put Tomney see Anne Ruth Hansen, “Gaps in the World: Harm and Violence in Khmer Buddhist Narrative,” in Songs at the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler, eds. Anne Ruth Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood, (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2008), 56–62. 29 The recent assassination of Kem Ley, an activist and political commentator critical of the Hun Sen government illustrates this well and follows previous assassinations that were political in nature. See Phnom Penh Post 10 July 2016, http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/longtime-rights-champion-kem-leygunned-down-broad-daylight, accessed 09/28/16. 30 Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, and Mark Barad, “Epilogue: Trauma and the Vicissitudes of Interdisciplinary Integration,” in Understanding Trauma: Biological, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives, eds. Robert Lemelson, et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 483. 31 Dy Khamboly and Christopher Dearing, A History of the Anlong Veng Community: The Final Stronghold of the Khmer Rouge Movement. Documentation Series No. 20, Sleuk Rith Institute/Documentation Center of Cambodia, 2014), 139. 32 Dy Khamboly and Christopher Dearing, A History of the Anlong Veng Community, 138. 33 Michael Firsch, “Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay,” in The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson. (London: Routledge, 1998): 35. 34 Naomi Rosh White, “Marking Absences: Holocaust Testimony and History,” in The Oral History Reader, eds. Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson, (London: Routledge, 1998): 172–182. 35 Naomi Rosh White, “Marking Absences: Holocaust Testimony and History”, 177. 36 Ibid., 179. 37 Ibid. 38 A collective narrative such as the one suggested by White is told in my field site in a manner that connects previous moments of historic rupture to the Khmer Rouge period suggesting cyclic destruction and renewal. See Eve Zucker, Forest of Struggle, Ch.7. 39 Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” 67.

CHAPTER FOUR THE NEGOTIABLE SOCIETY: TRANSITIONS FROM BELOW DENNIS B. KLEIN

Transitions from below The United Nations Genocide Convention, in defining what genocide means, also made clear its scope: to prevent and to punish the crime. But there was no provision for dealing with the aftermath of genocide once it occurred. In its preamble, it plainly presumed that a strong statement, backed by member nations, would “liberate mankind from such an odious scourge.” Clearly, the liberation did not occur, nor has regional conflict since World War II subsided, much less withered, and it appears that it never will. This does not mean that the world has failed to respond. In addition to governmental diplomatic channels, the human rights movement, which involves some 20,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide, exposes and seeks to remedy egregious violations. Fortify Rights, for example, supports investigations into the mistreatment of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya (known by many in Myanmar as illegal Bengali immigrants), exerts pressure to grant them citizenship and free movement, and seeks to open channels of humanitarian aid. The International Organization for Migration, as another example, has helped the government of the Dominican Republic (DR) register and document more than half of the Haitian immigrants residing in the country illegally. The exposure has contributed to an unwillingness to expel Dominicans of Haitian descent, at least in the short term, though police work with street gangs to exert pressure on immigrants in the big cities by threatening to burn down their homes, among other tactics, and bureaucratic and financial hurdles have slowed down the registration process. It is significant that immigrants who flee the DR cross the paradoxically named

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Friendship Bridge into Haiti: As the scene of carnage in 1937 when the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ordered the massacres of more than 10,000 Haitians, it represents an axiom of the human rights movement that conflict is an endemic political condition. It eludes mankind’s efforts to eradicate it. The same conception of conflict cannot be said of the classical transitional justice (TJ) movement. Though it is sometimes criticized for its western, neo-liberal, and legalistic presumptions of justice, it has no peer in aspiring to the summary transformation of successor societies. Recognized most conspicuously for promoting truth commissions in the global south (South Africa’s 1990s Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC] is a prominent example), the TJ movement—like its human rights companion, in full throttle over the past quarter century—notably parts company with the human rights movement’s surgical exposure and mitigation of wrongdoing.1 Transitional justice is an umbrella term for a variety of forward-looking practices with the common purpose of achieving an open society or, at least, a less repressive political order. As it evolved, its grounded mechanisms included state apologies, education mandates, and a range of justice schemes: restorative, as exemplified by truth commissions; corrective or reparatory; compensatory; restitutive; and criminal justice, which, in the context of repair, plays a complementary role and, from the Eichmann trial onward, provided a platform for victims’ perspectives. Successor state actors—government leaders, vetted civil servants, prosecutors, state-mandated truth commissions, restorative justice panels under state guidance, official apologies, and so forth—have dominated the practice of conventional transitional justice in adjudicating differences between parties in or emerging from conflict. But recently, initiatives in civil society have started to make a dramatic difference. These include museums of conscience; public commemorations; the naming of public places, streets, and plazas; citizen activism from the 1990s, such as in UN conferences on the environment, women, social policy, and so forth; and “counter-memorials.” Counter-memorials, like other civil society undertakings, challenge self-serving statist accounts of historical injustice. Noteworthy installations in Germany are Neue Wache, the central memorial to the victims of war and tyranny, with its large interior sculpture, “Mother with her Dead Son,” by Käthe Kollwitz; Bibliothek, an installation commemorating the Nazis’ incineration of books in 1933; the widely celebrated Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; and the Stolpersteine, or brass-topped sidewalk “stumbling” cobblestones, marking residences where Jews lived before their deportation to fatal destinations. 2 Citizen activism in transitional justice enterprises

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seeks to set in place a common foundation for shared memories, or “coremembering.” As Edward Casey observed, “Not only is something communal being honored, but the honoring itself is a communal event, a collective engagement.”3 Surprisingly, however, little attention has been paid to the role witnesses’ accounts can play in articulating transitional prospects for postconflict conditions. 4 One reason, perhaps, is the belief that survivors possess a rarefied, esoteric perspective whose merit as guidance for general observers is limited to inferential, sweeping “values clarification”: the misdeeds of ordinary people, seductive crowd behavior, the differences one person can make in saving a life, early warning signals, and so forth. Another likely reason for inattention is a tendency to devalue emotional and contingent expression at the heart of survivors’ accounts, the subject of our concern. Their reactive attitudes—resentment, forgiveness, and other dispositions—seem existential and “post-traumatic,” dramaturgy that stimulates interest but can seem solipsistic and often invites skepticism, diminishing if not subverting their historical credibility.5 Our contention is that they warrant reconsideration for the significant information they offer about relationships before, during, and after calamity. Jean Améry, a survivor of Auschwitz who wrote thoughtfully about his experiences a generation afterward, elaborated on the historical value of witnesses’ accounts, reflections that suggest their importance for evaluating transitional conditions. He recognized how easily others dismissed survivors as a “traumatized,”6 but, even if he did “go through life like a sick man,”7 he believed witnesses had something exceptional to offer. Experiencing the ordeal, he wrote, was the precondition for exemplifying the “historical reality of my epoch,”8 asserting a relationship between deep, emotional experiences and lucid exposure. 9 What survivors observed and could communicate was the sheer affective power of historical experience that others miss. In documentary analysis, visual or literal references to brutality are objectified and detached—“like a blind man talking about color”10—and fail to touch the “crushing force,” the “entire overwhelming might” of antisemitism.11 Formulations for making amends to redress past wrongdoing weakly approximate post-conflict aspirations, the “craving to assimilate”12 that not only articulates a preoccupation in much of modern Jewish history but also identifies a source of inspiration that fueled an urgent, post-conflict search for recovery. From within history, or from below, their grasp of hostilities’ profound “elemental force”13 and victims’ truculent ensuing worldly distrust explain why transitions to successor polities are difficult to implement and harder to sustain. “Humane pronouncements” cannot offer guidance, 14 he said. Worse, they could

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“again lull” society—not only Jews, but the wider society as well15—into the dangerous “slumber of security”16 and once more to the precipice of catastrophe. 17 Améry believed that survivors were “better equipped” to recognize and affirm the intractability of realities18 and “be more sensitive to injustice of every kind than his fellow man.”19 Having experienced them and knowing them emotionally, they are in a prescient position, we believe, to tell us a great deal about the unsettled and unreconciled ecology of transitional circumstances. Political reconciliation between neighbors emerging from conflict is the paramount ideal articulated in transitional justice theories.20 Responding exhaustively to massive, endemic wrongdoing, the concept represents a sea change in dealing with past conflict by comprehensively revising human rights’ piecemeal mitigation and criminal justice’s limited sanction of exemplary, high-level wrongdoers. Transitional justice eludes a canonical interpretation, but, essentially, it is distinguished from retributive justice by its forward-looking commitment to forming viable relationships for the sake of the public good. Ernesto Verdeja presented a middle-of-the-road, workable formulation: “Reconciliation is, in its final calculus, about reintroducing former antagonists back into the same moral sphere.”21 The goal, as P.E. Digeser observed, is the condition of “peace” where civility and “civic friendship” replace “past wrongs.” 22 This position is sometimes referred to as “democratic reciprocity.”23 David A. Crocker characteristically observed the nature of reconciled relationships: “Former enemies or former perpetrators, victims, and bystanders are reconciled insofar as they respect each other as fellow citizens.”24 This view exists between a basic “minimalist” conception of non-lethal, armslength coexistence and an ambitious, “maximalist” interpretation that promotes social harmony, community solidarity, and mutual compassion. It is a sentiment that is intrinsic to renewed relationships among adversaries, what Stephen Darwall called “recognition respect.” It is a respect for the other as a person without reference to an external, normative standard or authority (which Darwall designated, by contrast, “appraisal respect”). According to Darwall, the nature of the encounter— whether the antagonism is “former” or still coarse—requires a mutual response to appeals for claims or demands, in a word, answerability. In place of what Kant labeled “arrogantia”—a self-indulgent desire to make one’s claims primary—individuals in the reconciled society achieve equal standing “to demand, remonstrate, resist, charge, blame, resent, feel indignant, excuse, forgive, and so on.”25 To these viewpoints Margaret Urban Walker added an element of moral responsibility and accountability in order to regulate reconciled

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relationships and keep them reciprocal. There must be “expectations” and “confidence” that standards are “mutually recognized” as “authoritative” and “shared.” 26 Expectations constitute the presumption that others will play by the rules or will “rise to the reiteration and enforcement of those rules when someone goes out of bounds.” 27 Formulating “reliable and stable expectations,” Colleen Murphy remarked, makes it possible for citizens “to pursue their goals and plans.”28 As Richard Wallace observed, expectations are an important postulate of reconciled relationships, for they tether individuals to normative standards as a requirement (keeping promises) or as a prohibition (not breaking promises). 29 A common commitment to observing normative standards is necessary if citizens of the new order were to reasonably expect a successful transition. Citizens, wrote Pablo de Greiff, “are sufficiently committed to the norms and values that motivate their ruling institutions, sufficiently confident that those who operate those institutions do so also on the basis of those norms and values, and sufficiently secure about their fellow citizens’ commitment to abide by and uphold these basic norms and values.” 30 The state demonstrates its commitment by exercising the rule of law and protecting the inviolability of civil and human rights. The conditions of moral worth, mutual respect, shared standards, and common expectations all presume that negative emotions, such as resentment, threaten the stability of the new order. This is not a simple matter, however, because transitional justice theorists also recognize a role for resentment in the reconciled society. It is, indeed, an appropriate, if not requisite, response to the violations of expectations. But resentment requires restraint. If there is one feature of the reconciled society on which theorists are in agreement, it is the wisdom of managing resentment for the sake of stable relationships and the security of the community. The emotion, were it to linger and hector, would defeat the transition. The foundation of reconciliation that transitional justice postulates, then, is twofold: achieve the conditions of respect for the other’s standing and modulate expressions of resentment to ensure a commitment to, and confidence in, shared normative standards. In what respects do witnesses confirm transitional justice’s foundational tenets? Améry, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and Simon Wiesenthal—three survivors of Nazi-era destruction who published their accounts in the 1960s as part of an emerging cohort committed to communicating their stories openly—serve as commentary. (For brevity, we will refer to them as “survivors,” though there is no presumption that they stand for all survivors.) They started to write openly and boldly about the Nazi past and its legacy in response to an unfriendly climate of German opinion coalescing around the imminent

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lapse of statutory limitations for egregious Nazi-era crimes and a preoccupation with the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which lasted for 20 months (1963–1965). Both events clarified Germany’s impatience with unpleasant historical reminders of and questions about accountability.

The negotiable society Let us compare the differences between two conceptions of successor societies—reconciliation, the transitional justice ideal, and negotiation, an outlook favored by survivors. The reconciled society places a premium on achieving a working equilibrium between former adversaries who could at any time return to the cycle of violence. For minimalists, the requirement is mere coexistence, a civil arrangement to avoid a resumption of conflict. There is little effort at representing the interests of victims, such as retribution or restitution for wrongdoing, or, symbolically, their enfranchisement as citizens with standing. Doing so runs the risk of reigniting offenders’ hostilities and repressive passions as well as victims’ desire for revenge. Hard feelings remain dormant. For some theorists, the bar set by minimalists is too low to merit recognition as reconciliation.31 For maximalists, the requirement is social harmony. In the words of Desmond Tutu, who served as the TRC chair, “You are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’”32 The aim of the TRC was to establish the foundation of interdependent relationships. As consequentialist, it did not always honor victims’ lingering emotions of anger and resentment or the freedom to disagree or protest. The public good was paramount: “He or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole.”33 Charting a different path to succession, democratic reciprocity has managed to augment the victim’s “voice” in the process of mending relationships and achieving reconciliation. In this articulation, transitional justice is distinguished as victim-centered, providing material and moral satisfaction from the 1980s on by means of truth commissions, reparations, official apologies, commemorations and memorials, and education mandates. In the 1990s and 2000s, the United Nations codified a series of reports and principles addressing victims’ rights, including the right to know and the right to justice.34 Unlike maximalists’ presumptions, arguments for reciprocity or mutual respect, which reside at the core of a broadly posited and, in Crocker’s view, a “more demanding” transitional justice reconciliation theory, 35 permit and encourage a recognition of

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victims’ expressions of dissent, outrage, condemnation, and moral protest as intrinsically worthy, so long as they are reasoned and deliberative.36 As Darwall and Walker noted, respect for victims grants them authority, or standing, to make claims, which, moreover, in Walker’s words, “reasonably require consideration of others.”37 Respect for offenders also applies. As Linda Radzik observed, restorative-justice encounters “seem to show respect for offenders’ agency. They are treated as people who are capable of both understanding and being motivated by their moral obligations to others.”38 Darwall described the relationship as “person to other persons,” or “second-personal standing” that require mutual respect for a “community of mutually accountable equals.”39 Mutual respect, however, is a “thin,” if virtuous, conception of reconciled relationships. Hannah Arendt importantly noted that respect “is a kind of ‘friendship’ without intimacy and without closeness. It is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us.”40 If we examine what transitional justice theorists mean by respect, we will note the thinness of reconciled arrangements, a considerable aspiration toward political stability but with little feeling for the limit-experiences of brutal repression and its emotional consequences. Both Crocker and Walker, for example, refer to the reasonableness of reconciled relationships as a means of inhibiting risky expression.41 When Walker outlined the process of achieving reconciliation, the language she used to describe it was clinical: It constitutes “repairs that move relationships in the direction of becoming morally adequate.”42 We get the sense that reconciliation is a matter of triage, as Judy Barsalou and Victoria Baxter observed, “Reconciliation should be aimed conservatively, with the goal of finding ways to peacefully manage rather than to eliminate conflict.” 43 Under hazardous transitional circumstances, achieving a “working moral order,”44 as Walker wrote, is surely fundamental, and might well lay the foundation for a new synthesis. But the foundation transitional justice theorists are committed to constitutes a deficient basis for stable social relationships since it ignores primal, irrepressible emotions. Reconciliation, as Verdeja argued, is a process in which enemies come to respect each other “and eventually form alliances with one another.”45 As Digeser observed, a “durable” reconciliation amounts to putting the past’s volatility to rest so that a “civic friendship” and equal relations can ensue.46 De Greiff homes in on the thinness of these “civic” relationships in discussing the imperatives of trust. “Civic trust” is opposed to the “thick form of trust characteristic of relations between intimates.” 47 It is a “significantly thinner” disposition suitable to reconciliation among “fellow members of the same political community.” 48 In the final analysis, the

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reconciled society is a matrix—a “calculus,” as Verdeja put it—of serviceable relations. Even the term favored by theorists for maneuvering and facilitating shared standards—“mechanisms”—articulates a synchronized, mechanical conception of successor societies. With its emphasis on achieving an equilibrium comprising commitments that are common, respect that is mutual, and norms and values that are shared, reconciliation this thin is, according to de Greiff, quantifiable, amenable to “impact measurement” and “assessment.” As he observed, “The normative model I offer here would lead to the articulation of indices of success.”49 The ideal of democratic reciprocity is a long way from Wiesenthal’s search for a “warm undertone” in the voice of his enemy, Jankélévitch’s dream of “brotherhood,” and Améry’s kind of friendship with enemies that actually felt “intimate.”50 Survivors’ experiences of atrocity cast doubt on transitional justice’s confidence in a common moral sphere, a confidence that survivors themselves once presumed but displaced after the deluge with a yearning for fellowship. As a result, their worldview of post-atrocity humanity—a compound of desire and despair—and that of transitional justice are notably discordant. Transitional justice directly engages adversaries in a process of succession, usually in collaboration with the state. Restorativejustice conferences and truth commissions, which are empaneled or supervised by the state and bring victims and perpetrators together, resorting, or threatening to resort, to the criminal justice system if necessary, are primary examples. Seeking results—a transformation of relationships—the process across the board is consequentialist aspiring to what Tutu called a “greater whole.” Survivors likewise address a difficult audience with ardent concern about relationships, either broken or in a cautionary search of renewal. The act of writing itself established a worldly connection, indeed, a connection with anonymous others, though as their compatriots, not with complete strangers. But they presented their stories unilaterally, maintaining a distance even as they reached out. Améry believed that whatever he wrote he could hardly expect an echo. Nor could they count on the state or the criminal justice system for support or protection, certainly not after the fascist eclipse of political order, and not after observing the failure of postwar West German authorities to demand accountability, including a swift and complete abolition of statutory limitations. More than classical transitional justice mechanisms, with their typical, though not exclusive, official endorsements, their accounts, when not enlisted for depositions in a court of law, are anchored in civil society. 51 From their perch, they were free to interrogate their emotions, indulge reactive attitudes of resentment, dream extravagantly,

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and forgive unconditionally. By being expansive, their accounts give scope to transitions and help keep their procedures honest. Their subjective accounts, and the wide, expressive scope their severe experiences required for them, arrived at observations that significantly diverge from transitional justice theories. Survivors’ emotional expressions, regulated only by expository conventions that channel desultory traumatic memory, make clear that transition is a freighted process colonized irrevocably by the past. Jankélévitch’s insistence that the fraught past is never past for those who experienced it is not only at odds with his contemporaries’ indifference—“Was that past ever a present for them?” he asked—but also with the transitional justice contention, in Digeser’s view, that the past “should no longer reverberate into the future.”52 Misdeeds are ineradicable. Perhaps wrongdoers can change, as Tutu maintained, but for survivors, wrongdoing is the main concern: it is here to stay. As Wiesenthal observed, what happened then could happen again. Having witnessed and experienced the nightmare of human behavior, they had come to know just how combustible relationships are. For them, transitional circumstances did not warrant confidence and hopefulness that, for Walker, were constituent attributes. Myriad acts of ruthless betrayal made sure of that. Jews in prewar Europe, who relied on their neighbors, trusted them, and believed in them not only as equal citizens before the law and the state but, in their hearts, as members of communities bonded together by mutual obligations, recalled the aggression against them as traumatic abandonment. “It is impossible to believe anything in a world that has ceased to regard man as man,” Wiesenthal mourned.53 Walker asserted the importance of hopefulness for “functioning moral relations.” It constituted a “motivating belief that there is a possibility, even if slight, that defensible standards are shared and that individuals are disposed to respond to what the standards require.”54 For survivors, the argument is vacuous. It applied only to their beliefs before the carnage, not to conditions of transition. “Normative” malevolence was the reason for that. For Améry, faith in mutual relationships turned out to be an “emotional fraud.” 55 Reflections like this, manufactured in the crucible of covenantal violations as well as corporeal violence, repudiate the transitional premise of repair. The experience of carnage makes clear that mutual skepticism, not mutual respect, is the appropriate attitude for societies in the process of unsteady and uncertain readjustment. As survivors recalled broken promises and commitments and came to recognize the disingenuous presumption of mutuality and the state’s duty to protect, could it be otherwise? Jankélévitch and other survivors did not relent. Against the wishes of those who wanted to bury the past—the

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“brilliant advocates of statutory limitations”—they held tight to resentment, “our inability to settle the past.” 56 Having first-hand knowledge of what neighbors are capable of, the disposition that would more effectively undergird societies in transition than civic trust is suspicion. De Greiff makes a persuasive point that trust is really trustworthiness—behavior and measures that give citizens reasons to trust. The logic implies that, had Jews ultimately grounded their trust in evidence rather than in expectations of their neighbors’ and the state’s steadfast allegiance to the principle of citizens’ equal standing, there would have been diminishing opportunities for hostilities that were particularly predatory. To inspire trust and confidence in the state, the reconciled society would get it right with measures like assertive, official apologies.57 There would be no need for “vigilance,” for “constant watching to see what one can and cannot get away with.” 58 As Jankélévitch made clear, however, official apologies cannot restore faith or salve resentment. Perhaps “the distress” of the guilty would help, but in the end, German apologies were merely “pretended.” 59 They were, in fact, self-serving: repentance for moral advantage after military defeat, “commercial repentance for business purposes, diplomatic repentance for reasons of state; their contrition is worth nothing.”60 Constant watching is precisely what transition requires for durability. Succession requires negotiation, not reconciliation, and a disposition of unrelenting, panoptic, and probationary suspicion.61 What manages to rescue this conception of transition from stark nihilism are survivors’ forward-looking counter-narratives informed, like backward-looking contempt, by the past. In his essay “Resentments,” Améry referred, briefly, to Max Scheler, the German phenomenologist from the early twentieth century.62 Scheler had written about resentment, disparaging it as a perpetual and self-destructive malice. Améry agreed: It was the “slave morality” of the meek. But Améry manifestly objected, claiming that it was the victim’s entitlement and served to leverage “the overwhelmers.” Even though they both recognized resentment’s futility— in the end, Améry declared his “retroactive rancor”—it is tempting to see here a recessive reference to Scheler that complements his counternarrative aspirations to intimate human relationships. 63 Scheler, whose legacy the Nazis buried and is only recently emerging from the shadows, wrote prodigiously about the capacity of human feelings for others. In a major work, The Nature of Sympathy (Zur Phänomenologie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass, 1913), Scheler argued against Freud and others that sympathetic emotions are other-directed, not selfserving. A vital urge, a craving for satisfaction, draws us to others, he argued, inspiring us to take part in others’ feelings and lives. The logic of

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the heart, including love, is the capacity for knowing others by grasping them as kindred persons behind and beneath observable features: “If the multitude of individual spiritual persons comprising mankind as a whole are to stand revealed, and even their existence brought to light, without culpable or wanton omission of anyone, as capable of being loved as persons, a general love of humanity is requisite, and indeed indispensable.”64 Jankélévitch, too, referred to Scheler, indicating the direction of his thinking and its appeal to survivors. In Forgiveness, Jankélévitch cites a passage from The Nature of Sympathy about Jesus’s generosity. For both observers, forgiveness was unconditional, as Jankélévitch asserted: “But first he forgives.” Scheler’s point concerned love’s purity: We love others “as they are,” while Jankélévitch emphasized true forgiveness: “In order to forgive, forgiveness itself did not set conditions, did not have reservations, required neither promises nor guarantees!” 65 Jankélévitch consulted Scheler as an authority on “the phenomenal aspect of love”66 and fellowfeeling, a measure of what Jankélévitch called a sacred “love for humans.”67 We find evidence of Améry’s swerves to humanity in narrative asides in an essay on resentment where we would not expect it. After expounding on the collective German involvement in Nazi crimes, either by recognizing, approving, or committing them, he shifted course and reflected on those “who, in the Third Reich, broke out of the Third Reich.” Revealingly, the observation, in the spirit of Scheler’s worldview, was anything but thin or distant: He said he would never forget “the few brave people I encountered,” adding intimately, “They are with me.” A Catholic worker in Auschwitz III who “addressed me by my already forgotten first name [Hans] and gave me bread”68 was “my Willy Schneider.”69 There is evidence, too, of Wiesenthal’s wish for human fellowship. Whether or not he believed he could someday regain his “faith in humanity”—a question he left open in his accounts in light of what he wrote just before about how “years of suffering had inflicted deep wounds on my faith that justice existed in the world”70—what he meant by humanity, and what he wanted from it, show a desire for something thicker than adequate and manageable social arrangements under conditions of transition, for he looked for “things which mankind needs in life besides the material.”71 Recognizing the importance of “sympathy” in his relations with the dying SS officer, we can presume that what he yearned for was the kind of relations articulated by Scheler as “a general love for humanity.” In a coda to his story about his encounter with the officer, Wiesenthal wrote about his efforts after liberation to find the officer’s mother in order to learn something more about the officer’s “personality” (Persönlichkeit).72 This is important too. It suggests a desire to grasp “the person” in his enemy—

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no one, said Scheler, should be omitted. The world is hopelessly imperfect, survivors believed, but a connection with the persons who inhabit it remained urgent. That urgency was an existential response to imposed and self-imposed loneliness. It was also an emotion conditioned by the historical circumstances of modern Jewry, an attachment to their neighbors and compatriots, a sense of common fellowship, galvanized by the governing premise and promise of emancipation and by centripetal pressures of the unitary nation-state. These social ties were strong enough to withstand anti-Jewish disruptions for a century and a half. Similarly, resilient dynamics are discernible in other world regions distinguished by conditions of interethnic integration such as the former Yugoslavia and Chile. Even after disruptions in relations, Jewish survivors summoned residual ancestral memories of interethnic comity—real or perceived—and believed they charted a promising course to the future. Like the final calamity that fueled and sustained emotions of resentment and recrimination, memories of the past that predated it lived on. “Brotherhood,” Jankélévitch’s anthem, was modernity’s anthem as well. Its grand appeal energized Améry’s and Wiesenthal’s search for what is good even in adversaries. Here, too, the past was present that also “relates to the future” (Jankélévitch), awakening a longing for a significant—for Jankélévitch, as for Améry, an intimate73—human bond. To suggest, as transitional justice theorists do, that “mutual respect” is sufficient for reconciliation neglects the logic of the heart. There is surely something tragic in survivors’ longing for emotional satisfaction. Two incompatible impulses motivated their decision to join the public debate in the 1960s over statutes of limitations: a refusal and a desire to move forward. Their conviction that malevolence was endemic and required, as a true measure of civic obligation, a resolute suspicion of behavior rather than trust and confidence, aroused little appetite for peace. For some observers it is the way of a chastened world, a point Edna O’Brien poignantly observed in her novel, The Little Red Chairs. Innocent trust in strangers is self-destructive, she observed. The villagers in her story who greeted a stranger promising so much suffered greatly because they were not distrustful enough. Skepticism is the appropriate pose.74 Yet a desire for a connection—which survivors variously called love, fellowship, or sympathy—sought urgent expression. Enlightenment ideals of humanity continued to inspire them, but disruptive experiences of destruction lessened anticipation,75 compelling new terms of engagement at odds with Enlightenment rationalism. Having disclosed the full force of brutality and a contemporary indifference to right or righting relationships,

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the world survivors experienced and inherited exhausted their faith in repair. Even if transitional justice theories assert an ongoing process, “reconciliation,” in aspiring to normative standards that presume shared values and commitments, subordinates emotions, positive and negative, to a reasonable “working order.” But Wiesenthal articulated something unreasonable when he declared, “We cannot obliterate the hell we endured.”76 If there were narrative swerves toward reengagement, survivors did not imagine reconciliation or, in the words of a former executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, “choreographed unity.”77 As Améry noted, “I was a person who could no longer say ‘we.’” The new normative posited instead an “I” representing an alienated reality he became accustomed to even if he did not like it. 78 Along with considering possibilities, survivors came to realize what Primo Levi identified as a new moral code of “selfishness,” an unavoidable reality that eclipsed presumptions of mutuality.79 In the end, survivors’ evaluation of transition was bifocal, based at once on forward-looking inclinations and, simultaneously, on prodigious, backward-looking contempt. For them, succession was post-rational, a working disorder energized by emotional polarities and irreconcilable contradictions. Transitional justice is an exciting work in progress and is still a large tent, but its models are not inclined to inconsistencies. The practical challenges of repair surely demand functional theories. Even when theorists recognize the emotional stakes of transition, they caution restraint. Charles Villa-Vicencio, for example, postulated an “anthropological if not primordial longing for wholeness,”80 a state of existence where, as Tutu asserted, “You are friendly and caring and compassionate.” In VillaVicencio’s words, “The will to be human is often a deeper ingredient” than strategic concerns in the process of reconciliation.81 But even when transitional justice theory gives slack to one side of the transitional spectrum—human longing—it still required setting limits on emotions at the other side—earned resentments—for nothing should threaten the common good, the goal of reconciliation. Survivors’ dissonant proclivities unsettle not only transitional justice models but also canonic, western conceptions of order, of which transitional justice theory is part—from Augustine, who counseled against the private good in favor of living “harmoniously in your house,” 82 to Hegel, who submerged disharmony to harmony; sin, as “something past, as a fragment, as a corpse,” to wholeness and reconciliation.83 As VillaVicencio and others like him ultimately confirm, the human ingredient in the reconciliation process is, in fact, no deeper than living peacefully together in common pursuit of a higher cause.84 Perhaps theorists believe

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that reconciliation, as a process, involves phases of implementation beginning with strategic concerns—the management of resentments and the promotion of basic mutual respect and cooperation—before accommodating greater negative and positive emotions. Reconciliation, they assert, is an ongoing process; settling the past does not necessarily mean that past conflicts are over. Jankélévitch would have agreed: he condemned his contemporaries’ inclinations to forget the past, noting that the mature “infinite ‘forgivability’ of the misdeed does not in the least imply the nonexistence of evil.”85 If that were the case, reconciliation and negotiation, the terms we prefer for permitting emotional expression toward reworking relationships, would be diachronic and perfectly compatible. But transitional justice theorists are no more interested in unsettling the past than Jankélévitch was in settling it. For Jankélévitch, deep human love and the human will to evil—like life and death—are conditions of existence, as ultimate the moment societies emerge from hostilities as they are once matters settle down. The conditions of the past are always present. This is the worldview of disharmony that survivors posit. Paradoxically, minimalist and maximalist theories of transitional justice, in their own ways, acknowledge limit-emotions. Resentment is, on the one hand, intractable, which is why non-lethal coexistence is the most minimalists hope for, while, on the other, an ethos of caring for one another is what maximalists aspire to. While survivors saw it both ways, transitional justice theorists gravitate to the center, proposing an ideal of reciprocity. Survivors, however, have little choice but to live unsettled lives. Améry called himself a “catastrophe Jew,” 86 someone whose “disturbance” precluded “my existential balance.”87 As much as survivors imagined the possibilities of human fellowship, their standpoint occludes a method, a process, for living peacefully after atrocity. Confident expectations of renewal are a pivotal disposition for progress toward reconciliation. For survivors such expectations represent an extravagant, perverse mirage. Citizens’ confidence in a mutual commitment to just norms toward common life was a premise Jews presumed before the war, not afterward. It signified Améry’s atavistic “written and unwritten social contracts,” Wiesenthal’s “eternal and incorrigible” optimism,88 and Jankélévitch’s faith in “mutual” relationships.”89 It did not work out that way for them, however. As survivors, they recognized they had expected support and consideration that their neighbors were not prepared, or were finally unwilling, to deliver. It was “an enormous perception at a later stage” that led Améry to assert “no help can be expected.” 90 It led Wiesenthal to lament that his estimation of

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others, including his opponents, “was kinder than the reality,” 91 and Jankélévitch to conclude that “all men would be brothers” was frankly “naïve.”92 Their experiences with betrayal dramatically altered the axis of relatedness. Instead of what Améry characterized as a “sham undertaking,” survivors—indeed, victims who became survivors in the process—knew that if they were to move forward, as they longed to do, it would have to mean “awaiting no help.”93 If they were to find a way to their world, they would have to negotiate the terms of engagement themselves. To achieve dignity, Améry proclaimed, required a commitment “through my own effort.”94 It was an ethic Wiesel sounded a few years before in a Hebrew edition of Night, which he never published: “This time we are the judges [of God] and he [is] the accused. We are ready.”95 The new world of selfreliance and self-assertion would come at considerable expense, for it would nullify the once-appealing, seductive belief in mutuality. Since “there was no order for me in this world,”96 moving forward would require puzzling out the terms of brotherhood and a common link. As long as human fellowship remained a dream or a narrative digression, the way forward would remain inchoate and undeveloped. Moving forward would involve the high price of unsparing alertness, for they could neither trust their peers nor feel confident in their trustworthiness—in what Murphy termed a “trust-responsiveness.” 97 Indeed, if they expected anything, it was some hostile threat around the next corner. Already, during his first days of exile in Belgium, Améry believed he looked at the world differently: “I was having a beer with a big, coarse-boned, squared-skulled man, who may have been a respectable Flemish citizen, perhaps even a patrician, but could just as well have been a suspicious harbor tough about to punch me in the face and lay hands on my wife.”98 This was a world that demanded negotiation, not reconciliation. It required vigilant navigation between Levi’s moral code of selfishness and an ethic of care that exalts, according to Virginia Held, “the relation itself,” the “self-andother together.” 99 However that relation evolves, it would begin with action in search of negotiation, not with an implicit preordained social contract delineating mutual obligations. Help, in other words, would be possible, even necessary, just not certain. Love, for Jankélévitch, would be an act, not a reaction—“unreciprocal,” “asymmetrical” love.100 By giving rein to emotional extremes, our trio of survivors defied the tenets of Enlightenment rationalism. For Améry, “Enlightenment can properly fulfill its task [but] only if it sets to work with passion.”101 Even more defiant, however, was the irreconcilability of their worldviews, a tragic condition of their uneasy quest for emotional satisfaction. But rather

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than veer toward hopelessness, their bifocal evaluation of transition offers a conception that suggests new terms of post-atrocity engagement. It involved a skeptical glance backward toward behavior that required vigilance and, simultaneously, a wishful glance forward that inspired a worldly engagement. For Jankélévitch, the human will to evil and deep human love, like death and life, is axiomatic. For them, succession was post-rational, a working disorder arising from emotional disparities and a worldview of disharmony. It demanded an orientation that Leo Strauss epitomized as to “live that conflict.” The secret of western civilization’s vitality, he asserted, is rooted in unresolved tensions.102 Territory this uncertain is better left unfinished. It is non-finito, a perpetual present in constant but negotiable flux in search of elusive futures. There is no finality, not because of an unexpected disruption, like an illness or exhaustion; or unwanted interference, like war or death, but because it must be so.103 Combining implacable suspicion with an urgent wish for consummate human fellowship is possible only if the unexpected is anticipated and the combination itself is variously recreated. This is surely a world of “riddles,”104 no longer presumed or seductively secure. But beyond survivors’ physical liberation from captivity, it was one that energized their second liberation with executive responsibilities and with a longing for thick, emotional human connections.

Notes 1

Stephanie Vieille, “Transitional Justice: A Colonizing Field?” Amsterdam Law Forum 4 (2012): 58–68. This chapter is excerpted and revised from my forthcoming book, Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation, published by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. 2 Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Political Violence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009): 22. 3 Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000): 235–36. See Jeffrey Blustein, Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014): 171–75. On “Counter-Memorials,” see James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and Kerry Whigham, “Affective Echoes: Affect, Resonant Violence, and the Processing of Collective Trauma in Post-Genocidal Societies” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2016). 4 Impunity Watch, an NGO, is concerned with “victim communities” and other “local actors and bottom-up processes” toward promoting more effective political intervention. For its 2016 report, authored by Vasuki Nesiah, see http://www.impunitywatch.org/docs/scoping_study_FINAL.pdf.

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P.F. Strawson developed the idea of reactive attitudes in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1968). An attitude frames a response to others’ actions that presumes a moral stance behind their behavior. Responses to inscrutable actions acquire positive or negative inflection based on beliefs in others’ generosity, esteem, or affection on the one hand, or, on the other, indifference, contempt, or broken promises. Since betrayal plays a significant role in survivors’ accounts, we are interested in the reactive attitude of resentment. 6 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980): 99. 7 Ibid., 95. 8 Ibid., 99. See 87. 9 Ibid., 99. 10 Ibid., 93. 11 Ibid., 86. 12 Ibid., 87. 13 Ibid., 87. 14 Ibid., 100. 15 Ibid., 95. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 93. 18 Ibid.,101. 19 Ibid., 100. 20 The term “conflict” might suggest two belligerent parties actively opposing each other. For our purposes, the term describes conditions of distrust and discord between two parties. We are interested in encounters characterized by strife that involved power relationships. “Reconciliation” is one important model of transition but not the only one. Partition is sometimes preferable to reconciliation where adversaries inhabit different territories and, in the aftermath of conflict, sometimes seek political independence. The violence within India between Muslims and Hindus leading, in 1947, to the establishment of independent Pakistan mainly for Muslims and independent India mainly for Hindus, and, some 25 years later, Bangladesh’s war of independence with Pakistan serve as examples. We are interested in circumstances involving distinctive ethnic groups sharing the same physical space, as was the case of Jews in European societies. See Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree, 5–6. Pablo de Greiff regarded reconciliation as a “final aim,” with “a just social order” as the “ultimate aim.” “A Normative Conception of Transitional Justice,” Politorbis 50 (2010): 28. 21 Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree, 25. 22 P.E. Digeser, Political Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001): 65– 71. 23 See Amy Guttman and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot Be Avoided in Politics, and What Should Be Done About It (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

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David A. Crocker, Taking Wrongs Seriously (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006): 61. See Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree, 22. 25 Stephen Darwall, “Respect and the Second-Person Standpoint,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 78 (2004): 54. See Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.) 26 Margaret Urban Walker, “Truth Telling as Reparations,” Metaphilosophy 41 (2010): 532. 27 Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 26. 28 Colleen Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 30. See also Pablo de Greiff, The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008): 125–26. 29 Richard Wallace, Responsibilities and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994): 18–50. 30 de Greiff, “A Normative Conception of Transitional Justice,” 26. 31 See Trudy Govier and Wilhelm Verwoerd, “Trust and the Problem of National Reconciliation,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32 (2002): 178–205; de Greiff, The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, 125. 32 Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999): 31. 33 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 32. 34 For an overview, see Walker, “Truth Telling as Reparations,” 526–27. For an enumeration of official apologies, which reveals a spate of declarations starting modestly in the late 1980s and accelerating from 2000 on, see http://www.humanrightscolumbia.org/ahda/political-apologies. 35 Crocker, Taking Wrongs Seriously, 61; See also Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree, 22 and Kutz, Justice in Reparations, 312: “A central task of Europe’s nascent democracies is establishing the mutual relationships of respect and reciprocity constitutive of common citizenship.” 36 Crocker, Taking Wrongs Seriously, 61. 37 Darwall, “Respect and the Second-Person Standpoint,” 45; Walker, “Truth Telling as Reparations,” 538. See Crocker, Taking Wrongs Seriously, 62. 38 Linda Radzik, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 159. 39 Darwall, “Respect and the Second-Person Standpoint,” 51. 40 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958): 243. 41 Crocker, Taking Wrongs Seriously, 62; Walker, “Truth Telling as Reparations,” 538. 42 Walker, Moral Repair, 209. Emphasis in the original. 43 Judy Barsalou and Victoria Baxter, The Urge to Remember: The Role of Memorials in Social Reconstruction and Transitional Justice (Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2009): 5.

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Walker, Moral Repair, 210. Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree, 23. 46 Digeser, Political Forgiveness, 69–70. 47 de Greiff, “A Normative Conception of Transitional Justice,” 23. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 18n4. 50 Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken Books, 1998): 40; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 161; Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 49. 51 Nils Christie argued that victims and offenders, rather than the state and its civil and criminal justice system, should resolve conflicts. The argument is a classic premise of the restorative justice movement. Nils Christie, “Conflicts of Property,” British Journal of Criminology 17 (1977): 1–26. 52 Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 572; Digeser, Political Forgiveness, 68. 53 Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 9. 54 Walker, “Truth Telling as Reparations,” 532. 55 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 51. 56 Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” 572. 57 de Greiff, “A Normative Conception of Transitional Justice,” 26. 58 Ibid., 23. Quote from Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, ed. Annette C. Baier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994): 133. 59 Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” 567. 60 Ibid., 566. 61 In the United States, healing and reconciliation is the presumed response to conflict; at least, that’s the position of the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), an institution funded by Congress to promote the nation’s potential for managing international conflict without violence. It recognizes the role of grievances in the process but ultimately seeks the resolution of conflict and a “lasting peace.” Had the 2015 forum it sponsored included witnesses to conflicts among its main speakers, who in the end were USIP staff members, it would have more likely acknowledged the persistence of grievances in the aftermath of conflict. See http://www.usip.org/. 62 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 71, 81. 63 Améry referred to Scheler’s 1912 essay on resentment, Vom Umsturz der Werte, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, ed. Maria Scheler, (Bern: Francke, 1955): 33–147. 64 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008): 101. Améry provided a reason for the Nazis’ persecution of intellectuals’ work like Scheler’s: National Socialism “hated the word ‘humanity’ like the pious person hates sin, and that is why it spoke of ‘sentimental humanitarianism.’” Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 31. The observation is self-reflective as well, for his dreams of fellowship placed him ideologically on the other side of Nazism’s tribalism, even as his humanitarianism was anything but sentimental. See Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 60–61. 45

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Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 147; Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, 159. Even though forgiveness, for Jankélévitch, did not require an offender’s promises, and that love, for Scheler, did not “desire a change in the thing loved” (158), they both imagined the possible influence of generosity on inspiring new, moral worldly relationships. But as we have argued, an offender’s change of heart was, for Jankélévitch, essentially wishful. Forgiveness might make moral change possible—the offender “capable of getting back up” (147)—but given his contemporaries’ resistance to self-examination, unconditional forgiveness was, in the end, subjective. 66 Scheler, Vom Umsturz der Werte, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, 161. 67 The similarity of passages in Forgiveness and The Nature of Sympathy suggests Jankélévitch’s intellectual indebtedness to Scheler’s philosophy. Compare the prodigal son passages in Forgiveness, 155 with The Nature of Sympathy, 159. 68 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 73. Améry changed his name from Hans Mayer after leaving his Austrian homeland in 1939. 69 Ibid., 74. 70 Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 83. 71 Ibid., 84. 72 Ibid.; Simon Wiesenthal, Die Sonnenblume: Eine Erzählung von Schuld und Vergebung (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1998): 94. 73 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 36. 74 Edna O’Brien, The Little Red Chairs (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 2016). 75 For an articulation of historical disruption, or discontinuity this stark, where the succession of events are experienced as new temporalities, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Experience, he argued, shatters the “horizon of expectation,” a conception of “disposable” history rivaling classical conceptions that presumed the past as prologue. Survivors’ counter-narratives, of course, flow in the opposite direction by summoning ancestral memories. By incorporating aspects of the past in the present as longing, survivors regard the past as a historia magistra vitae (history as a school of life). The narrative contradiction in the same account—here, as manifest historical discontinuity and counter-narrative historical continuity—is another example of locutionary incongruity that distinguishes the accounts we are investigating. 76 Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 97. 77 Sisonke Msimang, “The End of the Rainbow Nation Myth,” The International New York Times, April 12, 2015 accessed February 1, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/opinion/the-end-of-the-rainbow-nationmyth.html?&_r=0. 78 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 44. 79 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988): 85. 80 Charles Villa-Vicencio, “The Politics of Reconciliation,” in Telling the Truths: Truth-Telling and Peace Building in Post-Conflict Societies, ed. Tristan Anne Borer (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2006): 62.

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Ibid., 61. “The Rule of St. Augustine,” Chapter 1, Rule 2,” accessed June 20, 2015, http://www.op.org/sites/www.op.org/files/public/documents/fichier/rule_augustine _en.pdf. 83 G.W.F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996): 238–39. 84 Villa-Vicencio, “The Politics of Reconciliation,” 60–62. 85 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 158. 86 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 94. 87 Ibid., 100. 88 Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 46. 89 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 141. 90 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 28. 91 Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 96. 92 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 141. 93 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 33. 94 Ibid., 88. 95 Eliezer Wiesel, Unpublished ms., n.d. as reported in Ofer Aderet, “Newly Unearthed Version of Elie Wiesel’s Seminal Work Is a Scathing Indictment of God, Jewish World,” Haaretz, May 1, 2016, accessed June 28, 2016, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/news/.premium-1.717093. 96 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 47. 97 Murphy, A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation, 30. 98 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 46–47. 99 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006): 12. 100 Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 141. 101 Améry, introduction, xi. 102 See Leo Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Strauss observed the tension between intellectual traditions, specifically, “the conflict between the Biblical and the philosophical notions of the good life.” (270) He contended that each person should adhere to one tradition but remain open to the challenge of the other. 103 See, for comparison, Nico van Hout, The Unfinished (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2013). 104 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 47. 82

CHAPTER FIVE CHANGING NARRATIVES OF VICTIMS AND PERPETRATORS IN CAMBODIA: THE EXTRAORDINARY CHAMBERS IN THE COURTS OF CAMBODIA (ECCC) AND COMMUNITY RESPONSES TO DIALOGUE INTERVENTIONS1 LAURA MCGREW

Introduction The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) was created in 2006 to try the “senior leaders most responsible” for crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge (KR) period.2 While there was much hope initially that the ECCC would bring justice, healing, and reconciliation to the Cambodian people, Cambodians have been increasingly frustrated with the slow progress of the trials for senior KR leaders, as the defendants age and die off, and with the reports of corruption and government interference.3 In spite of its shortcomings, the ECCC has created important new space for enhanced public discussion about Cambodia’s troubled past, and new national narratives are being developed. In this space, several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have begun projects incorporating historical dialogue and reconciliation, focusing on relationships between victims and perpetrators, as well as those found in the gray zones in between. In this chapter I introduce a community in which I have done extensive research, that exemplifies the changing narratives in Cambodia and the changing perspectives of victims and perpetrators. I focus on stories from one community of several villages where three individuals have been interviewed repeatedly since 1999, and an additional fourteen individuals

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in 2007, 2008, and 2013. This research is part of a larger study of a nonrandom convenience sample of over 150 interviewees using a semistructured questionnaire in which I examined a variety of research questions related to reconciliation, coexistence, and the ECCC.

History and the ECCC Cambodia has a population of 15 million today, but in 1975 it was approximately 7 million, and in 1979, after the devastation of the KR period, only 5.3 million. 4 It is primarily an agrarian society, with 80 percent of the population living in rural areas, though it is changing with globalization and the increasing presence of factories and large land concessions. More than 50 percent of the population is under 25 years of age.5 Cambodia’s population is primarily Buddhist, and the government is a constitutional monarchy. Although in the 1960s Cambodia under King Norodom Sihanouk had joined the Non-Aligned Movement, war in Vietnam spilled over as the Communist North Vietnamese ran portions of the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail through eastern Cambodia. After Sihanouk was overthrown by the U.S.-backed Lon Nol in 1970, the United States under President Nixon began extensive bombing to disrupt the North Vietnamese supply lines in Cambodia—resulting in thousands of tons of bombs being dropped and hundreds of thousands of casualties. After his overthrow, the KR recruited Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and he called for people to join him—and many rural villagers did so for a variety of reasons: love of the monarchy, economic hardship, or a desire to fight against U.S. bombing. Others were forced to do so by the KR. The civil war between the Lon Nol government troops and the KR rebels continued until April 1975 when the KR troops reached Phnom Penh en masse and took over. By 1975, extensive areas of the country had already been under KR rule, some areas for more than three years. After the takeover on April 17, many people were relieved that the civil war was over. However, as the cities were emptied precipitously, and people were shot by the side of the road, a regime of terror was installed, based upon the Chinese Cultural Revolution, idealizing the rural farmers, and punishing the bourgeois educated classes. Between 1975 and 1979 more than 1.7 million perished from starvation, overwork, lack of medical care, and summary execution. After “3 years, 8 months, and 20 days” of brutal KR rule, the Vietnamese swept into Cambodia in late 1978 and overthrew the KR, who fled across the border into Thailand and to remote areas in various parts of the country. One million Cambodians escaped to the Thai-Cambodian

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border, where camps were set up for the refugees and displaced persons. The civil war between the Western-backed KR and non-communist resistance groups on one side, and the eastern bloc and Vietnamese-backed Peoples’ Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) on the other, continued for more than a decade. The community discussed in this chapter is in one of these frontline areas where the civil war was fought, and where the KR lived close to their former victims. In 1981, the PRK held a show-trial of KR leaders including Ieng Sary and Pol Pot (the “Ieng Sary–Pol Pot Genocidal Clique”) who were convicted in absentia and sentenced to death. All the blame for the KR regime was placed on these leaders, and this national narrative was echoed at all layers of society as testimonies of suffering during the KR period were collected, memorial sites were created, including the Tuol Sleng Museum and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, and teachers and civil servants were encouraged to publicly criticize the KR regime and praise the PRK (and Vietnamese) for saving the country. The collective public narrative inside Cambodia portrayed almost all Cambodians as victims, except for this handful of senior leaders found guilty of genocide. Individuals’ personal experiences—where former neighbors turned into KR cadre who tortured and executed people—were suppressed. The PRK had a national policy of reconciliation, and except in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnamese take-over when some KR leaders were captured by their former victims and killed, or were turned over to the Vietnamese and sent to prison, revenge was discouraged. Throughout the PRK regime, the collective narrative outside Cambodia—for the tens of thousands of refugees who had fled the country after the KR regime (hundreds of thousands of whom remained at the Thai-Cambodian border)—was somewhat different: the KR senior leaders were still blamed for the atrocities of the regime but less vociferously, since, due to cold war politics, the KR had joined the coalition government fighting against the Vietnamese occupiers. Inside Cambodia, no one could confess any links with the KR (except the leaders who had defected and been accepted by the government), and among refugees and displaced persons, mistrust and hatred lingered. The refugee camps in Thailand that housed former KR (FKR) were oppressive, closed places, with little freedom of speech or movement, and a lack of color in dress and life—in spite of the fact that some inhabitants had only arrived there by chance, swept up as the KR were fleeing from the Vietnamese. FKR who had managed to escape to locations in Cambodia where no one knew them, to the United States, or to other countries, or who lived in non-KR camps, all hid their backgrounds, in fear of retaliation. Despite the national narrative

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of reconciliation and acceptance of lower-level KR, there was a miasma of collective guilt hanging over FKR members which continues to this day. Many negotiations were attempted by various governments and politicians in the 1980s and 1990s to end the fighting, and/or to encourage the FKR to defect to the government. Finally, in 1991, a peace accord was signed, and the UN mounted The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), a massive peace operation to bring refugees home and conduct elections. A coalition government, the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC), was created after elections in 1993, made up of the former PRK faction (now as a political party, the Cambodian People’s Party, CPP) and the royalist faction of the non-communist resistance that had been fighting at the border. Starting in the late 1980s, under the PRK and resuming after the politically neutral hiatus during UNTAC, the RGC pursued a two-pronged approach in dealing with their political opponents: while continuing a civil war, they also pursued a policy of national reconciliation, trying to win over the FKR in order to control the entire Cambodian territory. These attempts to encourage the KR to defect to the RGC through their policy of national reconciliation were also known as Prime Minister Hun Sen’s “Win-Win Policy.” As part of the Policy, in 1994, the RGC passed a law which granted amnesty to KR members who defected between July 7, 1994 and January 7, 1995.6 This policy, and the RGC’s efforts to integrate the rank and file into the government, were the cornerstone of the national narrative that continued to blame a small number of senior leaders for all the excesses of the KR regime, and which portrayed the government or party (first the PRK, then the CPP) including its FKR members, as saviors of Cambodia against the destruction of the KR regime. Finally, in 2006 the ECCC, also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (KRT), was established to try “senior leaders most responsible” for those crimes committed by the KR from 1975 to 1979.7 Two trials have been held so far in (Cases 001 and 002). In Case 001, Kang Kech Eav (known as Duch), the former head of Tuol Sleng prison, was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison in 2011. Case 002, against four defendants (Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ieng Thirith, and Khieu Samphan) was split into two parts, and the hearings for the first part (002/01) were finished in 2013 and the second part (002/02) in 2017. While Ieng Sary has passed away and his wife Ieng Thirith has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial, the other two defendants were found guilty in Case 002/02 in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison though appeals are underway. A verdict for Case 002/02 is expected in June 2018, and investigations have been completed for two more cases (003 and 004).

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Reconciliation and coexistence Reconciliation is an ambiguous and contested term, described as both a process and a goal, but the degree and ordering of its possible constituent elements are often debated.8 The definition I have used for this research was developed by a Cambodian think tank, the Cambodian Development Research Institute.9 This definition focuses on the process, rather than the outcome, and focuses on relationships rather than states of being. While reconciliation often implies a full restoration of relationships, apologies and forgiveness, harmony and peace, coexistence is a less ambitious and more practical goal or state. As a result of this larger research project I defined three levels of coexistence found in various communities I visited: surface, shallow, and moderate coexistence—all far from deep reconciliation. While this research focuses on relationships between individuals, families, and communities, rather than on national level reconciliation, national narratives as described above influenced the communities’ perceptions. I concluded that most communities I studied in Cambodia are in some state of coexistence, not yet approaching deep reconciliation. This chapter introduces the three groups of people studied in this research: victims, FKR (many of whom were bystanders), and perpetrators. The categories of victim, bystander, and perpetrator are not mutually exclusive and the lines between them are often blurred. The conflict in Cambodia was Khmer against Khmer, and most people were not separated by race, ethnicity, or religion. 10 Thus it is not easy to determine who was who, and families were often divided by chance or politics. Even so, automatic moral judgments are inherent in the categories assigned to people after violence: victim (associated with innocence and purity) and perpetrator (associated with guilt and evil).11 These automatic judgments often take place in Cambodia; as in the three-tiered society, labels were of utmost importance. The top tier was firstly, the KR leadership or cadre of KR at various levels, most whom can be considered perpetrators who committed crimes. Secondly, “base” people, mainly rural villagers, were the idealized proletariat with extra privileges and who were usually also considered KR, though not necessarily all leaders. Thirdly there were the educated or urban “new” people, who were persecuted and killed. Thus, FKR leaders are perpetrators, FKR base people are either perpetrators or bystanders, and new people are victims. However, anyone associated with the KR was (and still is) often painted with the negative perpetrator brush, although many FKR also suffered hardship and loss of family members.

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The gray areas between the two extremes of victim and perpetrator have led Coloroso to identify a range of roles played by people in genocide. These include: 1) planners, instigators, and perpetrators; 2) henchmen; 3) active supporters; 4) passive supporters; 5) active bystanders; 6) passive bystanders; 7) witnesses; 8) active witnesses, defenders, and resisters; and 9) victims. 12 This framework is helpful in analyzing the complex relationships between group and individuals, though in this research at the community level, we are less concerned with the planners and instigators. At the national level, the common narrative was that reconciliation had been achieved in Cambodia. Prime Minister Hun Sen and other (CPP) members of the Government have often spoken about his “Win-Win Policy” of bringing FKR back into the fold of normal Cambodian life. Successful reconciliation was seen as politically important for the Government of Cambodia but was essentially equated with the overthrow of the KR. In 2001, Foreign Minister Hor Nam Hong concluded that national reconciliation was the primary achievement of the RGC, attributed to the success of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Win-Win Policy in overthrowing the KR. 13 This claim of national reconciliation was again made in a public speech by a government official (Deputy Prime Minister Sok An) in 2006, but this time, although he claimed reconciliation had been achieved, he acknowledged that justice (in the form of the ECCC) had not. 14 Other authors in 2007 and 2009 also concluded that reconciliation had already been achieved in Cambodia.15 However, more recently in the last five years, more observers are acknowledging that reconciliation has not yet been attained. For example, in a survey conducted in 2007 and 2008 in Cambodia of one thousand adults by Phuong Pham et al. at the University of California at Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, 83 percent of respondents still felt hatred toward FKR (who were responsible for crimes), 71 percent wanted to see them suffer, 72 percent said they would like to see those responsible hurt and miserable, and 37 percent said they would like to take revenge. Only 36 percent said they had forgiven the FKR.16 As more people tell their stories about the past, including at the ECCC, a more nuanced interpretation of reconciliation is developing.

Narrative, memory, and identity Historical narratives serve to interpret and judge the past, the present, and the future—of both the self and the community. As people move between different levels or stages of coexistence, a change of narrative occurs: the process of reconciliation requires “a progressive shift of dominant

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narratives, from stories of victimization to stories of evolution and empowerment.”17 Yet narratives do not occur in a vacuum, they exist in social networks and communities, and are influenced at many levels by personal experience, and characteristics of family, community, region, and nation. Narratives are the way in which we understand our world and make up the building blocks of memory: both individual and collective. Memory is socially constructed, dependent upon both the past and the present, the world and the self. Memories are also influenced by violence and trauma—emotions and moral judgments abound. Collective memory is transmitted through a wide variety of social constructs—in Cambodia the government has a firm grip on the national narrative, which it tries to control with an iron fist. The governmentcreated memorials of Tuol Sleng Prison and the Choeung Ek Killing Fields exemplify the official and dominant narrative against the KR senior leaders. Collective memory, as told through collective narrative, is crucial in the creation of identity as well as its survival.18 Narratives, especially dominant narratives are linked to the production and transformation of identity; theorists such as Cobb as well as practitioners (including the NGO in this case study) contend that narrative can be the basis for analysis, intervention, and evaluation of conflict and its transformation.19 In social interactions and relationships, identities of individuals and their identity groups are reproduced as narratives are relayed. The ability of people to change destructive origin myths and dominant narratives that inevitably lead to cycles of violence, is described by Cobb (based on Du Toit) as narrative imagination—in the process of telling the stories, the social context either allows or reduces variation and change, leading toward more or less complexity in social networks.20 The very process of telling and listening to stories can enhance complexity and understanding, and promote community healing.

Community X I now turn to a brief description of Community X, which includes four villages. The relevant history of this community is not confined to the KR period alone; the four villages in Community X can be divided into two sections: one village (A) which in the 1960s was relatively more prosperous, and a cluster of villages (B) that were less so. Prior to the KR regime, some of the inhabitants of the less prosperous villages served as laborers on the more prosperous villagers’ land or in their businesses. When the KR took over (in 1972 in this area—three years earlier than the official KR take-over of the entire country), for the most part, roles were

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reversed and most of those from the less wealthy villages were considered by the KR as the trustworthy proletariat “base” people, while most of the people in Village A were labeled as enemy bourgeois “new” people. Some of the base people were appointed as heads of work groups, or given other tasks of responsibility such as becoming chhlops (spies or militia members). The main character in this chapter, Mr. Pel, is an accused perpetrator who served as a chhlop under the KR.21 As the KR had been active in the community since 1972, many prominent wealthy villagers had disappeared long before 1975 and thousands were killed during the regime. After the KR period, the community experienced another shift, as many villagers had died (especially those new people from Village A), and many people had fled or been displaced (especially the KR cadre from village cluster B who were accused of crimes). Some of the FKR cadre were sent to prison (in Vietnam) but returned after a year or so. Later, some of the displaced villagers returned, while others had disappeared (though some FKR cadre who fled reportedly come back in secret from time to time to visit their relatives). After 1979, the civil war continued through the 1990s with raids in various villages, kidnappings, bombings, and landmine accidents. A Buddhist temple in one of the poorer villages of cluster B served as a prison and execution center during the KR period, and behind this temple a killing field was unearthed after the KR regime. Tens of thousands of people died in this community, especially from Village A. Many were led to their deaths in this killing field by various KR cadre, notably by Mr. Pel. In the 1990s, a monk and some elders arranged for re-burial of the remains in a temple in Village A, and a small memorial was built. In addition to Mr. Pel, there were three accused perpetrators who had been living in the community identified by various interviewees: one had been identified as particularly cruel but had died a few years before; the other two could not be located. There were a handful of FKR soldiers living in the community, one who was available for interview (Mr. Kuy). The collective narrative nationally, and in this community, was of KR as “bad” and perpetrators, and new people as “good” victims. For example, in the aforementioned survey by Pham, being associated with the KR in the past was still seen negatively by many respondents: 69 percent were uncomfortable living in the same community or household as FKR members, and 68 percent were uncomfortable with the thought of their children marrying into an FKR family.22 Mr. Pel and his family, as well as key informant Mr. Kuy, an FKR soldier, felt ostracized and separate from the community.

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The people in Community X Mr. Pel, the well-known accused perpetrator in Community X, was pointed out to me by several other villagers. I did repeated interviews with Mr. Pel, his wife Mrs. Kong, and with several other community members. Mr. Pel and Mrs. Kong were living in the home where Mrs. Kong had been born, into which Mr. Pel had moved after the KR regime. They were married during the KR regime in a group of eleven other couples, in a commonly occurring group (forced) marriage in which the KR cadres chose the couples to marry. During the KR period, Mr. Pel, had been responsible for bringing victims (including neighbors in his village and those in Village A) to the prison to be executed—whether he was involved in the executions or not is not clear. As he remains in this village today, this “intimate” crime leaves particularly deep marks, both individually and collectively, as described by Pouligny et al., weakening the regulatory foundations of society.23 When I first met him in 2007 Mr. Pel was a total social outcast in his village, like the accused perpetrator Eve Zucker mentions in her work on remembrance—she described a former village chief accused of reporting on fellow villagers to the KR, as a “social pariah.”24 When I first heard about Mr. Pel, he would agree to meet, but then not be present when I arrived. Later, when he realized that I was not with a film crew that had also been trying to interview him, he expressed his relief, and was much more willing to talk, though not about his own actions during the KR period. During my visits in 2007 and 2008, Mr. Pel’s hunched shoulders, bowed head, and muted voice, all gave the impression of a downtrodden wasted man. He and his wife had said that he rarely left the house, and he was afraid to go to the Buddhist temple or the market. He spent a lot of time talking about his various illnesses, and he and his wife complained about his mistreatment in prison in 1979 and 1980 which had resulted in health problems. They said that his brother had also been arrested at the same time, and they mentioned the names of several other FKR who had also been in prison. Although he did not discuss it, his wife said he had been a chhlop, and had led people to their deaths at the temple (killing field). Mrs. Kong emphasized that he had only done this for a short time (though other interviewees stated he had performed this role throughout the regime). Mrs. Kong said that if he had not done what the KR told him to do, he would have been killed. During my visits, both Mr. Pel and his wife Mrs. Kong stated that they wanted a trial for the KR leaders (emphasizing the leaders, not the lower-level cadre like Mr. Pel):

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Mr. Pel: I want to have the KRT. I hate the KR so I want to try them. I want to have happy place like nowadays forever. Mrs. Kong: I want to try them because I don’t want that event to happen again. I want peace. Yes, I want the trial. I don’t want it to happen again because I worry they will ill-treat our children.

Although denied by the commune chief (who claimed the incident was a random robbery), both Mrs. Kong, and several villagers told me that Mr. Pel was afraid to leave his house, because his father-in-law had been shot dead in the doorway, but the bullet had been meant for Pel. He was certainly showing a lot of fear during my first visits there in 2007 and 2008. Mr. Kuy was an FKR soldier whom I had met in the early 1990s through another project. I had interviewed him and his wife (Mrs. Lysa) many times over the years, and he was instrumental in making contact with other FKR interviewees in the community. Mr. Kuy had been working with another development NGO in the area, and although he was still treated as a social outcast in the village, his role had changed over time. He was not directly involved in the NGO dialogue intervention.

The dialogue intervention In the last few years, an NGO has been active in the community, conducting a dialogue and memory program, benefiting from the public space opened up by the ECCC. Through this NGO’s intervention, money was collected from the villagers as well as from outside sources, to build a memorial next to the temple that had been used by the KR as an execution center. The NGO started by obtaining approval from local authorities and doing an assessment of the community, carefully investigating possible participants in the project, gathering background information, and then training local facilitators. With permission from all participants, accompanied by counseling from a mental health organization, the videos were then shown to the “other,” then an additional video, or series of videos were shown to the participants. If agreed, face-to-face meetings were arranged. The dialogue started with accused perpetrator Mr. Pel accompanied by his wife Mrs. Kong, and two family members of his direct victims whom he had led to be killed. Later, an evaluation showed that the community was satisfied with the project: victims said they were able to release their anger, pain, and hatred. Mr. Pel was able to rejoin community activities, especially appreciating Buddhist ceremonies to pray for those

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killed during the KR regime, and he and his family experienced less anger from community members. The process was not an easy one, however, as, at first, Mr. Pel had difficulty speaking about the past, and was not able to acknowledge or express regret for what he had done (in front of several witnesses). At first all he said was, “As long as we all get along. I don’t want them to be angry with me,” without admitting any wrongdoing. At seeing this lack of acknowledgment, the initial reaction of the victims was angry and tearful, as they were disappointed with his response. After a series of video exchanges, where each side heard the other’s stories of suffering during and after the KR period, Mr. Pel was finally able to acknowledge the harm he had caused and express regret. In a video showing the process, angry and tear-stained faces gradually changed to happy smiling faces across the course of the project. When Mr. Pel stated he was doing regular Buddhist ceremonies for the people he had harmed, the victims’ families expressed great appreciation for these actions. Mr. Pel even started participating in community events again, which he had not done since before the KR period. However, that is not to say that the process was fully successful in all aspects. In an interview I conducted after the dialogue project, one of the NGO volunteers who was also a deputy village chief, a young man who was himself from a family of base persons, expressed some frustration about other villagers whom he felt still refused to tell the truth. He spoke about the difficulties of undertaking the historical truth-telling project and the challenges of getting the full story. He said that there were still a few villagers who refused to speak, and that it was well known that they had committed crimes during the KR period (he was referring to the FKR accused persons I was unable to locate—no one was willing to share their names or locations during my visits). As discussed earlier, narrative can serve as the basis for conflict transformation. In the NGO dialogue process, the time for reflection, over a long process of discussion in groups, then on video, then finally with victims and perpetrators face to face, allowed new narratives to be developed, as people reflected upon the past and their role and others’ roles in the period of violence.

Changing narratives, changing identities: through stages of coexistence After seeing the meek and downtrodden Mr. Pel in 2007 and 2008, when I visited in 2014, I was astonished by the change of attitude and demeanor.

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Although still poor, he was noticeably more confident—I met him in the midst of the rice harvest and he was playing a key and public role among family and others as their rented rice thresher was furiously spewing an overflowing heap of rice husks. Now, he had a big smile on his face, and essentially strutted as he pulled out chairs for us under his wooden house. He was very happy, he said, with the NGO program. Mr. Pel’s wife, Mrs. Kong also exhibited changing roles over time. In my first contacts with Mr. Pel, Mrs. Kong had acted as gatekeeper, advocate, and apologist, defending the KR and at first denying any wrongdoing by herself or her husband. During later visits, she had melted into the background as Mr. Pel took front and center stage. It is possible that, as his health and status in the community had improved, the couple had reverted to typical gender roles in Cambodia, with the husband speaking out and the wife remaining quiet. Alternatively, she may have been uncomfortable with his new-found notoriety and perhaps preferred to stay out of the limelight. Mrs. Kong’s sister had also played a prominent role in initial visits, as she too had been part of the KR base-people grouping, benefiting from lording it over the new people. The entire family (who lived together in neighboring compounds) was grouped together by other community members, seemingly guilty by their former association with the KR. This collective guilt was often related in terms of the aforementioned incident, as several interviewees mentioned that the death of Mrs. Kong’s father in the doorway of their home was not a robbery, but was in fact an assassination attempt against Mr. Pel. Zucker (in this volume) reviews the development of the collective (and homogenous) narrative of the KR past. As she began her first sets of interviews prior to the tribunal, she concludes that FKR became more apprehensive and cautious about speaking of the past once the ECCC began. A different trajectory occurred in Community X. While FKR interviewees in Community X were reticent to speak at first, after repeated visits, they were happy to the lay the blame for KR excesses on the higherlevel leaders. Mr. Pel stated that he supported the ECCC and bringing the leaders to justice (whom he blamed for making him do things which he had not wanted to do). In other study villages in the FKR areas where I conducted interviews, most interviewees were happy to talk about the past, but only in generalities, to explain the heroic roles they had played in saving Cambodia from the evil Vietnamese. One way to look at the relationships between victims/survivors and accused perpetrators is through the reformulation of trust as a path toward coexistence and possibly, reconciliation. As Mr. Pel slowly emerged from the shelter of his home, and away from his status of social pariah, he also

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came slowly to have more trust in the villagers (or at least trust that their previous desires for revenge had been dampened enough for him to live safely in the village). The victims recognized his fear, and verbalized to him that he no longer needed to fear that they would take revenge, which apparently provided him great relief. The villagers in turn, through a process where he finally shared an apology and acknowledged his wrongdoing, were more willing to accept him back into the fold. The deep conversations, in a controlled environment with the assistance of mental health professionals, initiated by this NGO, assisted community members to discuss the past. As they initially looked at each other’s expressions on videos, then sat face to face, they began to explore their feelings and memories, and move from shallow coexistence to surface coexistence, moderate coexistence, and some even toward reconciliation. Victims and perpetrators moved from separate lives to some degree of cooperation. As described by Cobb above, the narrative imagination was invoked as these villagers told and listened to each other’s stories over time, and more complex social networks were created (or re-created). Reintegration of FKR, especially accused perpetrators, may often involve making merit25 in the community and in the temple which was a finding in my 2007 research. This reintegration through religion was apparent in the actions of Mr. Pel—Buddhism became a mutually reinforcing element in the process of reintegration. Villagers appreciated Mr. Pel’s donations to the temple and the memorial, and the fact that he had started visiting the temple again. In addition, several villagers stated that Mr. Pel had been young, illiterate, and ignorant when the KR recruited him, which allowed them to move toward acceptance of him back into the community, if not forgiveness. As noted earlier, Sluzki observed that, as narratives change from stories of victimization to stories of evolution and empowerment, levels of coexistence may change as well.26 Victims were able to separate Mr. Pel’s narrative of his youth and ignorance, from the collective narrative of evil KR.27 The victims were thus able to feel more power over their pasts, and release some of their anger and frustration. This then moved the community toward increasing levels of coexistence. The NGO dialogue intervention, as well as perhaps the mere passage of time, had allowed changes in individual and community narratives to develop. Sluzki noted that an important role of a facilitator (in this case, the NGO intervenor) is “destabilizing and transforming the story brought forth by the parties in favor of a ‘better’ one and facilitating its consensual adoption by all parties.”28 In addition to this direct action by the NGO, I argue that the very existence of the ECCC has opened a space in society

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for rewriting narratives, both individual and collective, and paving the way for community healing. Another changed narrative through a different NGO facilitator seems to have occurred in a much more indirect way than this dialogue project. Mr. Kuy, the FKR soldier and key informant mentioned above, was involved with several NGO projects. He brought various development activities to the village (such as well-digging) through his involvement with the NGO. He also served as a key informant for some other NGOs and was invited to various forums to discuss reconciliation. He assisted me to set up several interviews and at one of them, a focus group in a temple, one of the interviewees stated half under his breath, “If you have questions about the KR, you should ask that guy in the red shirt who brought you here.” Even in my presence, the resentment toward Mr. Kuy was palpable—and this was an FKR soldier, not a direct perpetrator in the village. None of my interviewees stated that Mr. Kuy had been involved in local atrocities that they were aware of. My previous research indicated that most FKR soldiers were not seen in the same category as cadre and spies during the KR period, as the soldiers were usually sent far away from their home villages, and were seen as fighting for the KR on the front lines—against the much-hated Vietnamese. However, since Community X was close to the front lines of the civil war between the government and the KR in the post-KR years (between 1979 and 1997), the community members must certainly have felt resentful about the attacks on villages during that period, so their resentment may have stemmed from this period. This resentment seemed to persist, despite Mr. Kuy’s statement that he had saved some of the villagers from problems “on the mountain” (a euphemism for the war zones not far from the village). None of the interviewees stated that they had been in contact with, or saved by, Mr. Kuy in the post-KR years. In any case, the story of Mr. Kuy is one of evolution and empowerment—in this case due to his association with outside sources of power gained through his ties with NGOs. As mentioned above, FKR living in communities throughout Cambodia, as well as those overseas, suffered from impressions of the collective guilt of being associated with the KR regime. Those FKR who stayed in their native villages could be ostracized by their neighbors, and in the case of Community X, suffered as outsiders for many years. When asked, Mr. Kuy admitted he suffered discrimination including not being paid the government salary due to him, and being threatened as a traitor. (However, he seemed to be proud of his many efforts to overcome this discrimination by doing development projects in the community.) His wife, Mrs. Lysa, described the great difficulties she had faced in surviving

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after the KR regime when Kuy had been away as a soldier, when she had not been accepted by either neighbors or the government: If there was no [development NGO], I would not have survived, we would not have this house. Not even half of a can of rice was given to us because they [the neighbors] thought that he was the KR. They did not give us anything. [She nearly cries and her face becomes red].

Over time, many of the participants in the KR regime seem to have been reclassifying themselves, imagining new identities. While Mr. Pel had served the regime as a chhlop and led people to their deaths, after his post-KR experience in prison, he began to think of himself more as a victim and other community members also admitted he may have been forced to commit these acts. While we do not know the exact role of all of Mr. Pel’s family, they undoubtedly benefited from his role as a chhlop in the KR structure, so they were certainly more than bystanders and victims and were probably at least passive supporters, and perhaps active supporters. Now, however, the community’s views of the past seem to have changed. Because the roles of various actors in the KR have come out into the open, the entire community seems better able to move beyond the past to focus on the present and the future.

The public space created by the ECCC29 The ECCC has been credited with creating space to enhance public discussion to assist Cambodians to revisit and discuss the past. A recent report by the Open Society Justice Initiative offers much criticism of the ECCC, though the opening of public space was one of the most important positive findings. 30 The previous section focused on an example of a dialogue intervention by an NGO at the community level, which sprouted in the public space created by the ECCC. As communities are affected by the society around them, we now turn to some other effects of this public space at a national level: recognition of ethnic minorities, and of sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) under the KR. Nguyen and Sperfeldt argued that discussion of sensitive topics within the ECCC such as the targeting of ethnic Vietnamese by the KR, has enhanced public discussion and furthered human rights activism. 31 For example, an NGO working on a dialogue intervention around Cambodia’s past, also started a project to conduct research on various aspects of the current situation of the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, and several public research reports were produced. Given the widespread racism of Cambodians toward Vietnamese, this topic was a daring one to deal with,

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and may serve to begin to humanize individual Vietnamese immigrants, many of whom have been in Cambodia for decades if not generations. Another important example of space opened up around the ECCC is related to “Women’s Hearings” for victims of SGBV during the KR regime. Hearings were held in 2011, 2012, and 2013 in Cambodia: the first on sexual violence during the KR, the second expanded testimony about SGBV regionally, and the target group for the third was the post-violence generation in Cambodia. These hearings have been widely praised as breaking the silence about SGBV in Cambodia—during the KR period as well as in society today. Attended by more than a thousand participants, the three hearings have enabled individuals who testified to have their suffering and courage acknowledged, and to express their demands. 32 Through a wide variety of public events, exhibits, movies, and news articles, SGBV, including rape and forced marriage, have now been discussed more openly, and women (and some men) have been able to deal with the harm done to them during the KR regime (and elsewhere, such as at the Thai-Cambodian border).

Conclusion These examples of the expansion of public space around various topics including the past, ethnic minorities, and SGBV have made significant and substantial changes in the national narrative in Cambodia. While free speech is not a human right that is well respected in Cambodia, since 2006 when the ECCC began, there is much more public discussion of the past and of Cambodia’s history (though certain topics, such as the role of FKR leaders who remain in the government, such as Prime Minister Hun Sen, remain forbidden). This public discussion has taken place in many formats, including movies, plays, and art exhibits.33 In addition, the changing nature of victim and perpetrator identities in one community in Cambodia has evolved due to the existence of the ECCC. While victims and perpetrators remember the past differently, and some (especially perpetrators) choose not to remember at all, at least some members of the study community felt more at ease with each other after a dialogue project to discuss the past. Both victim and perpetrator narratives have changed, intertwined, and expanded. National narratives related to the KR past and national reconciliation have also changed over time, at least partly due to the public space created by the ECCC. Although the ideal of full and deep reconciliation remains elusive, after an NGO dialogue intervention the study community has moved further along the continuum from shallow coexistence toward reconciliation.

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Notes 1

An earlier version of this paper (The Politics of Memory: Victimization, Violence and Contested Narratives of the Past) was presented at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory Network, Columbia University, New York, December 3–5, 2015. 2 The word “Khmer” can refer to the ethnic group of Khmer people, or the Khmer or Cambodian language. The term Cambodian can refer to the ethnic group, or national group, as well as the language. Khmer Rouge is a term used to describe the communist Khmer, or “red” Khmer (rouge is red in French). 3 Campbell, “Trials Shocking Failure.” 4 Ciorciari and Chhang, “Documenting Crimes,” 250. 5 CIA, World Factbook. 6 Royal Government of Cambodia, “Law on Outlawing.” 7 See www.eccc.gov.kh/en. 8 See for example: Bloomfield, “Reconciliation” and Lederach, Building Peace. 9 Reconciliation is a long-term process to restore or rebuild relationships between people previously in conflict. It aims for a profound change from enmity, hostility, or complete separation to mutual understanding or harmonious co-operation. In post-conflict societies, true reconciliation has taken place when a society can look to the future and its actions are no longer dictated by the wrongdoing of the past; when that society is inclusive and all members of the society are valued; and trust has been restored. Kar phsah phsaa means the act of healing; the act of getting back together two or more parties previously involved in conflict. In Khmer (the Cambodian language) the healing process emphasizes “a change of heart” and the healing of divisions (Cambodian Centre for Conflict Resolution and Cambodia Development Research Institute, Fact-Finding Mission, 10–11). 10 The KR discriminated against three primary minority groups based on their ethnicity: Chinese-Khmer, Vietnamese, and Muslim Cham. These groups of people were all considered in the category of “new” people and were persecuted. 11 Baines, “Complicating Victims.” 12 Coloroso, Extraordinary Evil. 13 Hor, “Statement.” The relevant excerpts are as follows: . . . I would identify only four categories of success that Cambodia has been able to achieve during the past decade. First and foremost is peace, political stability and national reconciliation . . . did not just come about or transformed overnight. It took this country years of hard work . . . became truly realized only when the Khmer Rouge fully collapsed. The demise of the Khmer Rouge was the hard work of Samdech Hun Sen, Prime Minister of Cambodia, who actively pursued a policy of defection and integration of the Khmer Rouge rank and file. With the complete disintegration of the Khmer Rouge and their integration into the national community, Cambodia for the first time achieved peace, stability and national reconciliation in decades. 14 Sok, “Closing Remarks,” 3. The relevant excerpts are as follows: In Cambodia this emphasis on national reconciliation has not meant that we have forgotten our past, and we have undertaken many efforts to document the record of

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what happened during Democratic Kampuchea. But what is still not yet achieved is rendering justice for the victims of that genocidal regime. . . . Now as we finally have established the ECCC, we keep in our minds firmly that this judicial process must not damage the process of reconciliation that I have described above. In Cambodia we seek justice in order to heal the wounds in our society. 15 See Urs, “Locally Motivated Accountability,” 79–81 and Widonyo, Timing. 16 Pham, et al. Never Forget, 28–29. 17 Sluzki, “Process Toward Reconciliation,” 29. 18 Bar-Tal, “Collective Memory.” 19 Cobb, “Fostering Coexistence.” 20 Cobb, “Fostering Coexistence,” 299. 21 The names of all community members are pseudonyms. 22 Pham, et al. Never Forget, 29–29. Of the respondents in the survey, 23% identified themselves as new people, and 15% as base people, 7% in mobile teams, 8% as being too young, and 31% did not live under the regime. Thus even some self-identified FKR including base people viewed the KR identity as negative. 23 Pouligny, et al., “Introduction.” 24 Zucker, Forest of Struggle, 91. 25 In the Buddhist religion, adherents “make merit” by giving donations of food or money to the temple, or doing good deeds in the community, in order to gain Karma to improve the chances of reincarnation into a better life in the future. 26 Sluzki, “Process Toward Reconciliation,” 29. 27 These observations are echoed in Zucker’s chapter—the reliance of FKR perpetrators on religion as they age, and the attribution of violent acts under the KR to ignorance rather than evil intent. 28 Sluzki, “Process Toward Reconciliation,” 29. 29 This section was used in a chapter on international assistance to transitional justice mechanisms in Cambodia (McGrew, forthcoming). 30 Open Society Justice Initiative, Performance and Perception. 31 Nguyen and Sperfeldt, “Victim Participation,” 97. 32 Ye, “Transitional Justice.” 33 See for example two plays produced in the space created by the ECCC: Prins, “Breaking the Silence” and Wilson, “Production Forced Marriage.”

III. RECONCILIATION AND PREVENTION

CHAPTER SIX IN SEARCH OF JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION: RWANDA MARK AMPOFO

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, “up to one million people perished and as many as 250,000 women were raped, leaving the country’s population traumatized and its infrastructure decimated.” 1 Since then, Rwanda has embarked on an ambitious justice and reconciliation process with the ultimate aim of all Rwandans once again living side by side in peace. Many survivors of the Rwandan genocide lost their entire families—spouses, parents, children, extended families, and friends—and have suffered complex health problems, like HIV/AIDS, as a result of sexual violence during the genocide. Large numbers live in dire poverty. Many have developed long-term psychological problems as a result of their trauma. But survivors have also shown enormous strength by creating groups to help each other, preserving important sites as memorials, and rebuilding their lives—at times alongside the very people who perpetrated the genocide. The post-genocide Rwandan government pursued a policy of “unity and reconciliation,”2 adopting a new constitution, creating programs to empower women, and increasing economic growth and stability. While credited with stabilizing the country, the government continues to face accusations of committing human rights abuses against political opponents inside Rwanda and in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire. With the flight of roughly one million refugees, including perpetrators of the genocide, the epicenter of violence shifted from Rwanda the DRC. “Beginning in 1996, the DRC turned into the battleground for continuing armed conflict between Rwanda’s new government and the perpetrators of the 1994 crimes who fled there,” says Cowan.3 It is estimated that more than five million people died in the ongoing conflict in the DRC in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Why?

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In October 2010, the United Nations released a report4 documenting human rights violations in the DRC in 1996 and 1997, asserting that invading Rwandan troops and their rebel allies had killed tens of thousands of Hutu, including many civilians. Some of those accused are members of the Rwandan government, who have condemned the accusations. Violence in the DRC continues today. Rwanda is about to complete one of the most ambitious transitional justice experiments in history, blending local conflict-resolution traditions with a modern punitive legal system to deliver justice for the country’s 1994 genocide. Rwandan President Paul Kagame described the initiative as an African solution to African problems. In his case, it was indeed a big problem that needed a big solution. Most African leaders seek to blame others for their own problems. “Since 2005, just over 12,000 community-based gacaca courts—deriving their name from the Kinyarwanda word meaning the grass place where communities gather to resolve disputes 5 —have tried approximately 1.2 million cases. They will leave behind a mixed legacy.”

Justice Seven months after the genocide began, the United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha in neighboring Tanzania, to bring to justice those accused of high-level crimes.6 “On September 2, 1998, the ICTR delivered its first conviction for genocide when it ruled that Jean-Paul Akayesu was guilty of inciting and leading acts of violence against Tutsi civilians in the town where he served as mayor.” The Rwanda tribunals also included a landmark case that “prosecuted three journalists for using the media to spread hate speech and directly incite violence during the genocide.” Since the Nuremberg trials following the Jewish Holocaust, no perpetrator had been convicted for that crime. In June 2006, human rights groups urged the tribunal to also address war crimes and crimes against humanity alleged to have been committed by the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army during reprisals following the genocide. The suggestion of any crimes on the part of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) has been vigorously denied by the government of Rwanda, many of whose officials belonged to the RPF, including current President Paul Kagame. As of early 2013, the ICTR had convicted some fifty individuals and acquitted twelve others. Imagine! The court has been criticized for some of these acquittals as well as for light sentences handed down to those

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convicted. It has also come under fire for its high cost and slow pace. The court is winding down its active prosecutions. In addition to the formal ICTR proceedings in Arusha, the government of Rwanda instituted an innovative adaptation of “local justice inspired by a tradition called gacaca.” 7 The courts were set up to speed up the prosecutions of hundreds of thousands of those suspected of having participated in the genocide who were being held in overcrowded jails. After the genocide ended, the country was on the brink of economic collapse. All the farms and the livestock that roamed the country were either burned or destroyed. Since the population had also decreased drastically, there was no manpower to start reconstruction. As of today, Rwanda is still dealing, not just with rebels but also with other countries with whom it is in dispute. It is hard to believe that this is still happening! One of the most important strategies for ending the insurgency that is fueling the war on Congolese soil and heightening divisions within Rwanda would be to adopt a multifaceted approach to lure refugees and combatants back to Rwanda—in the case of those accused of genocide, to face justice. Such a strategy has not yet been clearly articulated but I strongly believe it would require political, judicial, economic, social, and military elements, some of which are already in place, including: Ɣ movement toward more democratic, economic, and political participation; Ɣ due process and a presumption of innocence until proven guilty; Ɣ allowing local populations to decide whether any accusation will be lodged against returnees to Rwanda, thus determining whether the individual will reintegrate or face justice; Ɣ certainty that returnees not accused of genocide can take back their old houses, reintegrate into economic life, and run for local office if they so choose; Ɣ economic support for reintegration and restoring livelihoods; Ɣ social rehabilitation through support for initiatives aimed at coexistence, mutual respect, and reconciliation; Ɣ a major demobilization and reintegration program to provide training and employment to demobilized militia; Ɣ a more effective counter-insurgency strategy with fewer human rights abuses in the Congo; Moreover, “the government also realized it could not deal with the insurgency solely from Kigali, as the insurgents were mostly the sons— and some daughters—of many of the families residing in the northwest,”

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says Anup.8 Consequently, it enlisted Hutu leaders from the northwest to help develop and implement a multifaceted strategy, which included: Ɣ gathering information with the help and participation of local leaders on the location of infiltrating ex-Armed Forces of Rwanda (FAR)/Interahamwe units; Ɣ providing resources to ease the suffering of the residents of the internally displaced camps; Ɣ organizing a political campaign to demonstrate that the government is not exclusively Tutsi by sending out key Hutu ministers to tour the northwest and talk about Rwanda’s future; Ɣ making known the government’s presumption that most insurgents undertake their actions under extreme duress, so only those convicted of participation in the genocide will be punished; Ɣ discouraging reprisals against the thousands of people who abandoned the insurgents beginning in early 1998; Ɣ constructing a public education campaign involving churches, community leaders, and others to isolate those guilty of genocide and separate civilians from militia members; Ɣ providing resources to returnees and internally displaced populations; Ɣ stepping up efforts to reintegrate ex-FAR into the Rwandan army and, once reintegrated, using some of these soldiers and officers to convince other insurgents to return; Ɣ deploying to the northwest, ex-FAR Hutu commanders who have been reintegrated into the Rwandan army; Ɣ creating and training local defense forces, selected by the resident populations, which are partially responsible for the security of their own areas; Ɣ a Constitutional Commission, which will elicit wide input and discussion on the nature of the constitution, the form of elections, and issues related to ensuring Hutu participation and Tutsi security; Ɣ a bottom-up election process, starting with the cell and sector levels, aimed at moving up the chain of political and social organization, culminating eventually in national elections; Ɣ a decentralization process aimed at transferring to the local level, decision-making authority for development and other critical responsibilities, initially through community development committees; Ɣ a series of “Saturday discussions” in which President Bizimungu hosts debates about the central issues facing Rwanda;

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Ɣ a series of meetings between Rwanda’s political parties on the nature of a future political system and their roles in it; and Ɣ a more participatory justice process. Some Rwandans have welcomed the courts’ swift work and the extensive involvement of local communities, stressing that gacaca has helped them better understand what happened in the darkest period of the country’s history and has eased tensions between the country’s two main ethnic groups (the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi). Others are more skeptical: “Some genocide survivors complain that not all perpetrators were arrested or punished adequately for their crimes,” according to a PBS documentary directed by Jonathan Welman. 9 This is similar to the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath. Some of those convicted and sentenced to decades in prison maintain that trials were seriously flawed, that private individuals and government authorities manipulated the course of justice. What a shame! The gacaca became politicized over the years, and ethnic tensions remain high. On both sides, there are doubts, as well as tentative hopes, about the gacaca’s contribution to long-term reconciliation. I acknowledge the enormous challenges the Rwandan government faced in choosing a system that could rapidly process tens of thousands of cases in a way that would be broadly accepted by the population. All this explains “the government’s decision to use gacaca to deal with the extraordinary circumstances it faced after the genocide and describes the government’s attempt to strike a balance between conventional due process and the overwhelming need for swift justice.”10 Actually, the documentary also noted some of gacaca’s main achievements. Using dozens of cases, it illustrated the price paid by ordinary Rwandans for the compromises made in the decision to use gacaca to try genocide-related cases, including apparent miscarriages of justice, the use of gacaca to settle personal and political scores, corruption, and procedural irregularities. As a matter of fact, when the RPF, currently the country’s ruling party, first took power in July 1994 after ending the genocide, it was confronted by the need to deliver justice for the killings of more than three-quarters of the country’s Tutsi population, as well as numerous Hutu who had opposed the killings or tried to protect Tutsi. In total, more than half a million people perished in the span of only thirteen weeks. The challenge would have overwhelmed even the world’s most advanced justice system. In Rwanda, the task was made even more difficult because the genocide had killed a large number of judges and other judicial staff, and had destroyed much of the judicial infrastructure.

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A few months after the end of the genocide, Rwandan prisons were bursting at the seams with genocide suspects. “By 1998, around 130,000 prisoners were crammed into space meant for 12,000, resulting in conditions that were universally acknowledged to be inhumane and that claimed thousands of lives,” says White. 11 Conventional courts began trying genocide cases in December 1996, but had only managed to try 1,292 suspects by 1998. At that rate, genocide trials would have continued for more than a century, leaving many suspects behind bars awaiting trial for years or even decades. The process could have been accelerated if foreign lawyers and judges had been brought in to help, but the Rwandan government rejected such proposals; I believe they did so for the very worst of intentions. Instead, the government proposed setting up community-based courts to try genocide-related crimes using the traditional gacaca model. Aimed at speeding up genocide trials, reducing the prison population, and rapidly rebuilding the nation’s social fabric, the new form of gacaca, like its predecessor, would be run by local judges and would encourage participation by local community members. One of the government’s aims in encouraging community participation was to make ordinary Rwandans the main actors in the process of dispensing justice and fostering reconciliation. A series of gacaca laws would regulate the genocide trials, mixing certain basic fair-trial standards with more informal procedures. Some government officials feared that gacaca might not be the right mechanism for genocide trials, given the gravity and complexity of the crimes. The customary form of gacaca had only been used for minor civil disputes—involving property, inheritance, personal injury, and marital relations—with more serious cases, such as murder, reserved for resolution by village chiefs or the king’s representative. These government officials worried that judges would struggle to apply the law correctly, given that many had no formal education or training. They warned of the risk of bias, stressing that the local setting meant judges would inevitably know the parties in a case which would reduce their objectivity and increase the risk of corruption. Most significantly, these government officials warned that gacaca procedures would fail to comply with Rwanda’s international fair-trial obligations. Nearly ten years after gacaca began, many of these concerns have turned out to be well founded. The concerns were overruled and, “in June 2002, the Rwandan government launched a contemporary form of gacaca to try genocide cases, run by a new institution which later became known as the National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions.”12 Thereafter, for more than two years, gacaca courts in twelve pilot areas used information provided by local

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community members to compile files on what had happened in each of these areas between 1990 and 1994. The courts drew up lists of victims and suspects, and classified the latter into four categories according to the severity of the alleged crimes. “The most serious cases were known as category one, involving mass murderers, rapists, and leaders who had incited killings, being transferred to the conventional courts,” claimed Brummel;13 the rest were to be tried in gacaca. The first gacaca trials started in 2005. They were set to end in late 2007, but the deadline was repeatedly extended over the following three years. In mid-July 2010, the government announced that the last gacaca trials in the country had been completed. However, two months later, it unexpectedly declared that gacaca would continue. This latest extension would allow the National Service of the Gacaca Courts (SNJG) tasked with oversight of the gacaca process to review a number of cases of suspected miscarriages of justice and to allow for revision where appropriate. However, gacaca courts are not expected to handle new cases. Rwanda’s experiment in mass community-based justice has had mixed results. Many Rwandans agree that it has shed light on what happened in their local communities during the hundred days of genocide in 1994, even if not all of the truth was revealed. They say it helped some families find murdered relatives’ bodies which they could finally bury with some dignity. It has also ensured that tens of thousands of perpetrators were brought to justice. Some Rwandans say that it has helped set in motion reconciliation within their communities. Yet there are multiple shortcomings and failures with gacaca: basic violations of the right to a fair trial and limitations on accused persons’ ability to defend themselves effectively; flawed decision-making (often caused by judges’ ties to the parties in a case) or pre-conceived views of what happened during the genocide leading to allegations of miscarriages of justice; cases based on what appeared to be trumped-up charges, linked, in some cases, to the government’s wish to silence critics (journalists, human rights activists, and public officials) or to disputes between neighbors and even relatives; judges’ or officials’ intimidation of defense witnesses; corruption of judges to obtain the desired verdict; and other serious procedural irregularities. Many of these shortcomings can be traced back to the single most significant compromise made in choosing to use gacaca to try genocide cases: the curtailment of the fair-trial rights of the accused. Although these rights are guaranteed by both Rwandan and international law, the gacaca laws failed to put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that all accused

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persons appearing before the gacaca courts would receive a fair trial. The gacaca laws tried to strike a balance by protecting some rights, including the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty; modifying others, such as the right to have adequate time to prepare a defense; and sacrificing others altogether, including the right to a lawyer. Dozens of cases show how these due process shortcomings have directly contributed to flawed gacaca trials. The government in Rwanda also argued that traditional fair-trial rights were unnecessary because local community members who witnessed the events of 1994 and knew what really happened would participate in the trials and would step in to denounce false testimony by other community members or partiality by the judges. Contrary to these expectations, however, Rwandans who witnessed unfair or biased proceedings decided not to speak out because they were afraid of the potential repercussions, ranging from criminal prosecution to social ostracism and instead participated passively in the gacaca process. Without active popular participation, trials were more easily manipulated and did not always reveal the truth about events in local communities. Another significant factor restricting the success of gacaca was the limited training given to gacaca judges, most of whom had little or no formal education and, in the vast majority of cases, no formal legal experience or training. Judges were not bound by evidentiary rules explaining what types of evidence are admissible and the level of proof needed to convict a person, but were expected instead to rely on common sense and general principles of fairness. Courts had to provide reasons for their decisions, but were free to weigh the evidence as they saw fit. This led to contradictory results in different cases based on similar facts, to flawed decisions based, for example, on over-reliance on hearsay, and to convictions based on weak evidence. “The fact that gacaca judges received no state remuneration also made the judges vulnerable to corruption,” says Aghion.14 Originally tried in conventional courts, genocide-related rape cases were transferred to gacaca courts in May 2008. Many rape victims based their initial decision to seek prosecution of the alleged rapist on the fact that conventional courts could enact measures to respect their privacy and could keep a woman’s identity confidential where necessary. The government’s decision to transfer their cases to gacaca courts, by definition involving the local community, took them by surprise and left some feeling betrayed. The (SNJG) justified the decision by claiming that many rape victims were dying of AIDS and that the conventional courts were unable to deal with these cases sufficiently quickly. It emphasized

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that the decision was based on requests by thousands of women who had been raped in 1994. However, it would also enable the Rwandan government to complete all genocide trials as quickly as possible and to end this chapter of its history. Although the law provided for gacaca courts to hear rape cases behind closed doors, victims still feared that the community-based nature of the courts would mean that the local population would know what the closed-door trials were about. On the other hand, some rape victims whose cases were heard by closed-door gacaca courts said that the experience was less traumatic than they had expected. One of the serious shortcomings of the gacaca process, I believe, has been its failure to provide equal justice to all victims of serious crimes committed in 1994. “Between April and August 1994, soldiers of the RPF, which ended the genocide in July 1994 and went on to form the current government, killed tens of thousands of people” (Bromley). They also carried out other killings later in the year, after the RPF had gained full control of the country. Gacaca courts have not prosecuted RPF crimes. Initially, in 2001, gacaca courts had jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and war crimes, in addition to genocide. All killings are crimes of murder. But the following year, as gacaca courts began their work, President Kagame cautioned against confusing crimes committed by RPF soldiers with genocide and “explained that RPF crimes were merely isolated incidents of revenge,” 15 despite evidence to the contrary. Amendments to the gacaca laws in 2004 removed war crimes from the jurisdiction of the courts and a national government campaign followed to make sure that these crimes were not discussed in gacaca. Nearly thirty years after the genocide, Rwandans who suffered or lost relatives at the hands of the RPF are also still waiting for justice. As gacaca draws to a close, the Rwandan government faces another challenge: correcting the grave injustices that have occurred through this process. There have been numerous gacaca cases involving miscarriages of justice or serious procedural irregularities, many of which have not been resolved by existing gacaca appeals procedures. The government’s recognition in late 2010 of the need to correct miscarriages of justice is a positive step. However, the proposal to have such cases reheard in gacaca risks replicating the same problems and may not remedy the situation. A more appropriate mechanism might involve a specialized unit within the conventional court system, staffed with professional judges or other trained legal professionals, to review the cases. Fair and impartial handling of these cases is of paramount importance to the legacy of gacaca and to strengthening the Rwandan justice system in the longer term.

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In conclusion, today, one can say Rwanda is remarkably peaceful. However, at the regional level, the country is not as peaceful as depicted, especially along the border with the DRC. The ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front—the former rebels who toppled the genocidal regime—has worked hard on abolishing ethnic divisions. But peace has come at a price. President Paul Kagame, a Tutsi, rules Rwanda with an iron fist. Critics allege that there is no freedom of press or association. Opposition parties have been outlawed. Such is Rwanda’s irony: just as the genocide was made possible because of the government’s absolute authority over its citizenry, so is peace maintained today.

Notes 1

Anup, Shah. Rwanda- Global Issues. Global Issues. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Rwanda.asp?p=1. 2 Ibid. 3 “Flower in the Gun Barrel” 2009. Directed by Gabriel Cowan. 4 “The Notebook of Memory” 2009. Directed by Anne Aghion. 5 Bromley, Roger. “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Cultural Representations of Reconciliation in Rwanda.” French Cultural Studies 20.2 (2009): 181–197. Academic Search Premier. Web. October, 1 2016. 6 Anup, Shah. Rwanda- Global Issues. Global Issues. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Rwanda.asp?p=1. 7 Anup, Shah. Rwanda-Global Issues. Global Issues. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Rwanda.asp?p=1. 8 Anup, Shah. Rwanda-Global Issues. Global Issues. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Rwanda.asp?p=1. 9 “Triumph of Evil.” PBS Triumph of Evil. 1998. “Frontline” Directed by Jonathan Welman. 10 “Gacaca: Living Together Again in Rwanda”? 20003. Directed by Anne Aghion. http://www.comminit.com/africa/ma2003/sld-172html. 11 White, Dean. “An African Holocaust.” History Today 64.6 (2014): 40–46. Academic Search Premier. Web. October 17, 2015. 12 Des Forges, A. 1999. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from, http://www.grandslacs.net/doc/1317.pdf [Accessed October 3]. 13 “Do Scars Ever Fade?” 2004. Directed by Bill Brummel Production, Inc. 14 “Gacaca: Living Together Again in Rwanda?” 2003. Directed by Anne Aghion. http://www.comminit.com/africa/ma2003/sld-172html. 15 Bromley, Roger. “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Cultural Representations of Reconciliation in Rwanda.” French Cultural Studies 20.2 (2009): 181–197. Academic Search Premier. Web. October 1, 2015. 15 “Rwanda: The Hills Speak” 2004. Directed by Bernard Bellefroid.

CHAPTER SEVEN CONSTRUCTING PREVENTION: AN EXPLORATION IN BUILDING MEMORIALS THAT PREVENT ATROCITY KERRY WHIGHAM

In the early twentieth century, Austrian philosopher Robert Musil famously wrote, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. […] They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention.”1 Monuments honoring important events and people or memorializing those who have died have been around for millennia. Indeed, the triumphal arches of imperial Rome and the pyramids of ancient Egypt are only the most visible in a long line of monuments. These age-old constructions are hardly invisible in the literal sense, but the historical events or people that they were constructed to remember are often not so easily called to mind. In the figurative sense, then, the visibility of these monuments is perhaps more reflective of Musil’s musings than the builders of these constructions would have imagined. Today, the aesthetic language of monuments and memorials has significantly shifted, often eschewing the literal and the monumental for the abstract and the artistic. 2 But monuments themselves are no less pervasive. In fact, they are perhaps even more so. Memory scholar Andreas Huyssen writes, “The past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries.”3 As such, according to Huyssen, contemporary global society is experiencing a “hypertrophy of memory,” through which the past is more present than ever.4 One consequence of this memory explosion is an increasing presence of monuments and memorials across the memoryscape of cities around the globe. And in a world where talk of “collective memory” has become, in some circles, synonymous with memory of large-scale violence and cultural trauma, some of the most pervasive of these memorials are those that reference the

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mass and systematic violation of human rights and other atrocities, including genocide. These spaces of memory take a number of forms: memorials and monuments, both abstract and figurative, that dot the cityscapes of major world capitals; former concentration camps, death camps, or clandestine detention centers that have been converted into sites of memory across Europe and Latin America; other sites of atrocity, like the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Kigali, Rwanda, or the Srebrenica-Potoþari Genocide Memorial in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and memorial museums, like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, or the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) in Santiago, Chile. Whichever form they take or wherever they may be, all of these spaces of memory are attempting to maintain the presence of the past—ideally in order to prevent a repeat of such mass violence in the future. This chapter will examine a number of memory spaces around the world that have been built in response to past atrocity crimes. A significant literature exists examining memory sites, with specific focus on the process by which these memorials come into existence5 and on the way these memorial spaces allow visitors to engage with the past. 6 In this chapter, I will argue for the utility of a performance studies lens to analyze these spaces of memory in order to focus not only on what the memorials are, but on what they do or enact. More specifically, while much of the literature illuminates how memory spaces make the past present, I will emphasize the way these memorials can project that past into the future, specifically through their potential to create spaces that encourage the prevention of future atrocities. I contend that the ability for memory spaces to contribute to the prevention of atrocities is dependent on how those involved in the creation of these spaces answer a series of important questions, which I will outline. The manner in which the builders of memory spaces—what Jennifer Jordan calls memory entrepreneurs 7 — respond to these questions directly relates to the efficacy of these spaces in creating a capacity for prevention in the future.

Spaces of memory and performance studies As a field, performance studies is relatively new. It began to emerge in the latter third of the twentieth century at the nexus of a number of disciplines, including anthropology, theater and dance studies, linguistics, philosophy, and critical theory. It is an interdisciplinary field that uses performance as a lens to study the world, and while some scholars within the field certainly

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study what would more traditionally be referred to as “performance”—e.g. theater, dance, performance art—the field also provides a framework for examining all other aspects of life as a performance, that is, as a phenomenon that enacts or does something through its being.8 As such, the notion of performativity is central to the field. This concept, developed first by linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin, refers to utterances or (in its extended form) embodied practices that enact things through their performance.9 Performance studies, then, is less interested in evaluating whether a performance is a success or failure. Instead, a performance studies analysis asks what a performance succeeds at doing. Moreover, in response to an academic tendency to value the written word above all else, performance studies as a field argues for the equal valuing of embodied practice and ritual as a means of knowledge production and transmission.10 A performance studies approach to studying memorial architecture and spaces of memory can offer a great deal to our analysis and comprehension of how these spaces function. First, it demands that we look at spaces of memory not as static objects of analysis—what Young facetiously describes as “indigenous, even geological outcroppings in a national landscape”11—but as dynamic performances whereby the commissioners and designers of the spaces enact something through creating the space. In other words, they want their spaces of memory to do something, to have an effect that extends beyond their mere construction. Sociologist Félix Reátegui writes about memory as a “deliberate practice,” stating, “The task of memory is […] an act of volition, a concrete decision by specific people to set goals and objectives.”12 As a memory practice, the creation of memory spaces undoubtedly reflects the deliberate nature of memory construction. Of course, the prevention of atrocities is also a deliberate practice, and memory spaces serve as a physical location where these two practices come together. By attending to the deliberateness of these spaces, we can illuminate what exactly their creators intend the spaces to enact, as well as how visitors make use of the space in a way that either coincides or contrasts with the creators’ intentions. This latter point highlights the second utility of a performance studies lens in examining these spaces: it pushes us to see beyond the architectural intricacies or the curatorial designs of these spaces in order to focus on the types of embodied practices that they instigate. Spaces of memory are never meant to be empty and isolated; rather, their creators envision them as surrounded by or filled with visitors who engage with the past through interacting with the memorial space. 13 By using a performance studies approach, we can focus not only on the performative nature of the memorial space itself, but also on the performances of the visitors within

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the site. What sorts of practices does the space encourage and discourage in visitors? What do visitors contribute to the space through their interaction with it? How does the space succeed at being more than a mere container of memory? How can the space transmit memory into the bodies, hearts, and minds of those who visit it? Reátegui writes, “[T]he task of memory is, fundamentally, a display of subjectivity and a weaving of inter-subjectivities.” 14 If the design and construction of the space of memory reflects the subjectivity of the creator, the practices that occur within the space as visitors gather to interact with the space itself and with each other are the “weaving of inter-subjectivities” that Reátegui sees as the natural second element of the deliberate practice of memory. Understanding and decoding these practices requires an array of scholarly tools, and the interdisciplinarity of performance studies provides us with many of them. Political scientist Louis Bickford argues that spaces of memory—what he refers to as memoryworks—have, at heart, a dual purpose: 1) to redress the harms done in the past and 2) to prevent the recurrence of such violations in the future.15 The manner in which memorials accomplish the first of these goals seems somewhat clear. By constructing a space of memory in honor of the people who suffered from some past abuse and, the commissioners of the memorial (most often the state) and those who design it provide some form of symbolic reparation for those harms. Ideally, the memorial serves as a guarantee of non-recurrence, as well. But exactly how successful a space of memory can be in preventing the return of violence is somewhat less clear. I argue that the ability for a space of memory to have a preventive potential is directly related to the ways in which it attracts, involves, and engages the broader public in the life of the memory space. A memorial’s capacity for prevention, then, is dependent upon the ways in which the designers of and visitors to the memory space respond to a series of important questions. In the remainder of the chapter, I will outline these questions, elaborating upon the different ways in which each of these questions can be answered. I will provide examples of specific sites that characterize the vast scope of potential in spaces of memory, based on the differing ways in which these questions are answered. At first glance, these questions seem obvious. Indeed, they often seem so obvious that they are taken for granted. I argue, however, that without a deliberate effort to answer these questions with the goal of both remembering past violence and preventing its resurgence, it is unlikely that a site will succeed at either redressing or preventing atrocity.

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Who or what is the space remembering? Spaces of memory can be places for remembering or honoring victims of atrocity, specific events, the family members of victims, or an entire society. Every space of memory has what I call a sphere of inclusion—the predetermined and specific people or events that the memorial is constructed to evoke, as well as the period of time to which it refers. The sizes of the spheres of inclusion of different memorials can vary greatly, and the specificity and relevance of these selected spheres have a great deal to do with the success or failure of the memorial space. Some memorials have very small spheres of inclusion. For instance, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has a sphere of inclusion of one. The museum that exists within the house where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis and where Anne wrote her famous diary is named for this one iconic figure, and its central purpose is to tell her story. Of course, the fact that the house has such a small sphere of inclusion does not mean that the influence of this memory space is also small. In fact, the mission of the Anne Frank House is to use the story of this one girl to reach over 1.2 million visitors each year,16 encouraging them “to reflect on the dangers of anti-Semitism, racism, and discrimination and the importance of freedom, equal rights, and democracy.” 17 The size of a memorial’s sphere of inclusion, then, is not necessarily reflective of the quality of the site or the scale of its mission and audience. That said, it does seem that the specificity and intentionality of the sphere of inclusion does matter. If a memorial’s sphere of inclusion is too large or too unspecific, the memorial site can cease to be a meaningful space for visitors. A key example of this phenomenon is Germany’s Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, housed in the Neue Wache, or New Guardhouse, in central Berlin. This memorial, though aesthetically beautiful, became a site of great controversy when it was dedicated in 1993, only a few years after German reunification. The memorial was commissioned by the newly reunified German state as the central memorial for honoring the victims of past violence in the twentieth century. Although Chancellor Helmut Kohl intended the space to unify the people of Germany around a shared, public memory, the memorial, in fact, did the opposite, largely because its sphere of inclusion encompasses too much. A plaque outside the entrance to the memorial space articulates exactly who and what the space remembers:

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THE NEUE WACHE IS THE PLACE WHERE WE COMMEMORATE THE VICTIMS OF WAR AND TYRANNY. WE HONOUR THE MEMORY OF THE PEOPLES WHO SUFFERED THROUGH WAR. WE REMEMBER THE CITIZENS WHO WERE PERSECUTED AND WHO LOST THEIR LIVES. WE REMEMBER THOSE KILLED IN ACTION IN THE WORLD WARS. WE REMEMBER THE INNOCENT WHO LOST THEIR LIVES AS A RESULT OF WAR IN THEIR HOMELAND, IN CAPTIVITY AND THROUGH EXPULSION. WE REMEMBER THE MILLIONS OF JEWS WHO WERE MURDERED. WE REMEMBER THE SINTI AND ROMA WHO WERE MURDERED. WE REMEMBER ALL THOSE WHO WERE KILLED BECAUSE OF THEIR ORIGIN, HOMOSEXUALITY, SICKNESS OR INFIRMITY. WE REMEMBER ALL WHO WERE MURDERED WHOSE RIGHT TO LIFE WAS DENIED. WE REMEMBER THE PEOPLE WHO HAD TO DIE BECAUSE OF THEIR RELIGIOUS OR POLITICAL CONVICTIONS. WE REMEMBER ALL THOSE WHO WERE VICTIMS OF TYRANNY AND MET THEIR DEATH, THOUGH INNOCENT. WE REMEMBER THE WOMEN AND MEN WHO SACRIFICED THEIR LIVES IN RESISTANCE TO DESPOTIC RULE. WE HONOUR ALL WHO PREFERRED TO DIE RATHER THAN ACT AGAINST THEIR CONSCIENCE. WE HONOUR THE MEMORY OF THE WOMEN AND MEN WHO WERE PERSECUTED AND MURDERED BECAUSE THEY RESISTED TOTALITARIAN DICTATORSHIP AFTER 1945.

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By the sheer length of this description, it is clear that the sphere of inclusion for this memorial is massive. This single space, which is the first official memorial of the reunified German state to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust, also remembers a number of other victims alongside them: the soldiers killed in both World Wars; all other victims of Nazi persecution, including Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political opponents, and those killed in the Nazi “euthanasia” program; and those who faced persecution under the German Communist regime, among others. The temporal sphere of inclusion is also quite large; the period of time covered by this single space spans almost the entirety of the twentieth century. The fact that the Neue Wache’s sphere of inclusion is so large is not, in itself, the problem. For instance, the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York City also has a large sphere of inclusion. It remembers all of the victims of slavery from the beginning of the transAtlantic slave trade until emancipation. This is a sphere of inclusion that spans centuries and includes tens of millions of victims. The sphere of inclusion of this memorial, however, has not led to huge controversy. The Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, on the other hand, faced mass protests on the day of its dedication because of its sphere of inclusion. The biggest problem, of course, is that this first state memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust memorialized those victims alongside the soldiers of the German army, who were, themselves, involved in perpetrating crimes against the Jews. Furthermore, the central statue of the memorial—a work by Käthe Kollwitz called Mother and Her Dying Son—evoked the Christian iconographic symbol of the pietà, which many also interpreted as a slight against the Jewish victims being remembered. The controversy around this memorial is actually directly related to a number of other memorials that have been built in Berlin as a consequence. The outrage of the Jewish community over the Neue Wache memorial revealed the need for a separate memorial dedicated specifically to the Jewish victims of National Socialism. Hence, the oft-lauded Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman, was constructed and dedicated in 2005. Soon, other victim groups began to lobby for their own memorials, leading to the construction of the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under the National Socialist Regime, and the Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist “Euthanasia” Killings. Each of these memorial spaces has been met with much greater approval, both from the

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victim groups and the wider public. The specificity of these memorial spaces exemplifies that a thoughtfully conceived sphere of inclusion is essential to creating a memorial that both offers appropriate redress to victim groups and resonates with visitors more broadly.

For whom is the space constructed? This question is actually more complicated than it may seem, because successful memory spaces do not have only one audience. Rather, they fulfill the dual purposes outlined by Bickford in their ability to both redress past crimes and prevent future ones. In reality, the audience for each of these purposes is a different one. For a space of memory to redress past crimes, it must be meaningful in the eyes of victims, their surviving family members, or members of a victimized group. As Pablo de Greiff argues, successful efforts at reparations require that: 1) the violations against victims are officially recognized, as is their status as citizens worthy of repair; 2) a sense of faith in the justness of society is restored for the victims; and 3) a sense of social solidarity is generated that unites victimized groups not only with each other, but with the population as a whole.18 If a space of memory is to serve as a component of symbolic reparations for victim groups, then the primary audience must be those groups that were most directly affected by the atrocity crimes. But the audience for spaces of memory most certainly extends beyond these groups as well, especially if they are to succeed at creating the sort of social solidarity that De Greiff refers to above. Spaces of memory also intend to build collective memory19 within the entire population, and, as Bickford argues, this collective memory is intended to have a preventive effect. If spaces of memory are to succeed at not only redressing past crimes, but preventing future ones, the audience for the spaces must extend to encompass as wide a segment of the population as possible. Rarely, if ever, are memorials only for the victim groups or only for the wider population. Rather, they all exist somewhere along a continuum between the two. The Srebrenica-Potoþari Genocide Memorial is a large cemetery in which the remains of the Bosnian Muslims who died in the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica are buried. As Potoþari lies in the Bosnian Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, this memorial is rarely visited by the majority of the local population. Instead, it serves primarily as a place where the family members of those who died can mourn the loss of their loved ones. Each year in July, a new burial ceremony is held so that all of the remains that were discovered over the previous twelve months can be interred in the

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memorial cemetery. The ceremonies are often fraught with controversy, as members of the local Serb population frequently protest the event, and government officials rarely attend. As such, this memorial mostly serves as a space for victims and their families. Although it gives them a place to mourn and contributes to recognizing their losses as legitimate, the lack of government support does not instill a new sense of civic trust, and the controversy around the site exacerbates the lack of social solidarity. If the memorial in Potoþari represents a space of memory whose audience is almost exclusively the victimized groups it remembers, the Cherokee Removal Memorial Park in Birchwood, Tennessee, exemplifies the opposite end of the spectrum. This memory space is dedicated “to those that died and those that cried on the Trail of Tears,” the forced removal of the Cherokee Indians (along with four other tribes) from the American Southeast to the West. The memorial park is an official landmark on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, a network of memory sites recognized by the U.S. National Park Service as existing along the historic route the American Indians took when they were forcibly relocated. Today, the vast majority of the Cherokee population lives either in Oklahoma, where the Cherokees ended their 1,200 mile walk from the Southeast, and North Carolina, where a small population of Cherokee hid in the mountains to avoid relocation. The fact that this memorial park sits in Tennessee indicates that the audience for the memory space is not necessarily the descendants of the victim group, but the wider public. This assertion is supported by the fact that the memorial park is filled with educational material that tells visitors the history of the Trail of Tears—a history that descendants of the victims would presumably not need to learn. This site, then, represents a memory space whose audience is predominantly envisioned as those with little or no direct connection to the event and people being remembered. As it recognizes the crimes committed against the Cherokee, it also aims to generate social solidarity with the Cherokee among the non-Cherokee population by educating them about this past event. As I stated, most memory spaces exist somewhere in the middle of this continuum. For instance, the aforementioned Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is positioned as both a form of symbolic reparation for the victims and a space for visitors who are not members of the victim group to learn about the Nazis’ genocidal project against Jews, with the hope of preventing the recurrence of such atrocities. This memorial and many others were constructed with the support of the state, but spaces of memory can also be created by civil society, and they too exist somewhere along this continuum. For instance, Ciudad Juárez in

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Mexico is one of the most violent places on earth. In recent decades, there has been a particular upswing in the murder of women. The state has done little to recognize or stop this violence, so civil society groups have begun to place pink crosses across the city with the names of victims. These crosses serve a dual purpose: they honor the dead, providing a space for friends and family to mourn their loss, but they also raise awareness of the crimes in an attempt to prompt the state to take action and to stop this gender-based violence. As a result, these memorials are both redressive and preventive. They represent what Jack Santino has called alternately spontaneous shrines or performative commemoratives: public acknowledgments of death, usually created spontaneously by those with ties to the victims and without the encouragement or consent of the state, which at once remember the dead and assert some sort of political stance on a social issue related to the death.20 The pink crosses of Ciudad Juárez and this concept of the performative commemorative demonstrate two important points. First, they highlight the dual temporality of memorials, exhibiting how they can address both the past and the future through a single gesture. Second, they show the essential role that civil society actors can play and have played in using the past to bring about political change in the present and future. The role of civil society in the formation of memory spaces will come up again in several of the remaining questions.

Why is the space being built? Both of the previous questions are inherently connected to a larger one, which is perhaps the preeminent question when it comes to constructing a memory space: What is the space’s intention? What do the creators of the space hope to enact through its construction? In performance studies terms, how is the space performative or what does it enact through its existence? Memory spaces can do a number of things, and most sites have a variety of intentions. Generally speaking, however, each space emphasizes some of these intentions more than others. When those involved in the creation of memory spaces begin the design process, it is incredibly important that they understand what the underlying function of the memory site is intended to be for the visitors to the space. The range of intentionalities that direct the construction of memory spaces is vast, but I focus on a number of these intentions that seem to present themselves more often than others in memory spaces:

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Providing a space for reflection of past violence and its victims Performance studies scholar Joseph Roach writes that one of the defining aspects of modernity is the separation of spaces of death from spaces of the living.21 An entire field of research within tourism studies examines what has come to be known as dark tourism, or the practice of visiting spaces associated with death and destruction. Dark tourism scholars Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone assert that visiting memory spaces related to past atrocities becomes a way for people to reflect upon past death in a safe space that is cordoned off from daily life.22 As such, one of the key intentions of sites of memory is to provide a space where people can reflect upon the horror of past violence and death in a way that does not necessarily prevent them from being able to live in the present. Memorials throughout history have focused on providing a space for reflection over the past. Along with the increased use of abstraction in representing the past, however, contemporary memory spaces are facilitating entirely new embodied engagements with that past. For instance, in designing the non-representational Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Eisenman has said that he intended to create an “affective environment” for the visitors. 23 Eschewing all attempts to represent the violence of the Holocaust literally, Eisenman’s memorial consists of an enormous expanse the size of three football fields and filled with more than 2,000 concrete columns, arranged to form a grid. Visitors can walk through the columns, and as they journey inward, the columns rise far above them, and the ground sinks below them. The width between the columns forces them to experience the memorial independently, as there is not enough space to walk through side-by-side. The uneven ground beneath their feet is intended to create a sense of unease. Eisenman intends the visitors to have an emotional and subjective experience of the past. This memorial is not a space for learning about the Holocaust, but a space for feeling the past or empathizing with the victims in order to create a more intimate link between the visitor and past victims.

Honoring the victims The majority of memory spaces aspire to honor the victims of past violence. In this way, as Bickford states, memory spaces can serve as a form of symbolic reparations to victimized populations and their families. 24 Through the construction of memory sites, the state can recognize past violence and its own role in its perpetration, at the same

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time that it offers a gesture of its own commitment to prevent such violence in the future. There are many examples of memorials whose primary intention may be to honor the victims of past violence. Many of these do so by actually listing the names of known victims within the memorial itself. In the United States, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, is perhaps the most obvious example of a memory space that is primarily intended to honor the victims. The black obsidian walls of this memorial designed by Maya Lin list the names of over 58,000 Americans who fought and died or went missing during the American War in Vietnam. In Lima, Peru, El Ojo que Llora (The Eye that Cries) is a memorial that remembers the thousands of victims of political violence in Peru. The memorial consists of a pre-Columbian statue surrounded by thousands of small stones, each with the name of a victim. The list of victims for the memorial was taken from the national truth commission, the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (Truth and Reconciliation Commission). As such, the memorial is not only a means of honoring those who died, but also a way of disseminating and making public the findings of the truth commission. Finally, the Srebrenica-Potoþari Memorial in Bosnia is a cemetery that contains the remains of over 6,000 victims of the Srebrenica Genocide of 1995. As I stated previously, each July the new remains that have been unearthed over the course of the previous year are buried here in a memorial ceremony, so this memory space continues to grow, honoring more victims and their families as it does so.

Educating visitors about what happened and what can happen An increasingly popular form of memory space is the memorial museum—sites that act at once as a site of memory and an educational space. A memorial museum serves to commemorate past violence, educate visitors about that past, and exemplify how the society is processing that past in the present. While the memory museum may exist to inform visitors about the past, it may not be the only thing that these museums are devoted to illuminating. As sociologist Roger I. Simon states, “Those who think museums are about the past have got it wrong. Public practices of remembrance are always about the future.” 25 Accordingly, memorial museums, in particular, are not only concerned with listing facts and dates about historical violence. Rather, they can also educate visitors about potential future paths for a society. Simon writes, “Our lives are structured through the interactive and mutually informing relation between

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remembrance and an emotionally charged anticipation of future possibilities.” 26 Good memorial museums teach visitors about what did occur, as well as what can occur in the future, based on the visitors’ own choices—their action or inaction. The most well-known memorial museum in the United States is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. This museum, which calls itself “a living memorial to the Holocaust,” has welcomed over forty million visitors since it opened in 1993. Through a comprehensive, interactive, and oft-lauded exhibition, visitors learn about the historical realities of the Holocaust. But the museum also draws connections between the Holocaust and more contemporary genocides in the hope of using the memory of the Holocaust to prevent present and future atrocities. Another example is the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) in Santiago, Chile. This museum, dedicated in 2010, tells the story of the massive human rights violations—including forced disappearances and torture—that occurred during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. The museum also has a number of memorial spaces whose primary mission is not necessarily to educate visitors, but to honor the victims and to forge an emotional connection between the victims and the visitors. According to the museum’s website, the idea of the museum is to inform visitors about the past in order to ensure “that the culture of human rights and democratic values become the shared ethical foundation” of Chilean life.27 Oftentimes, spaces whose primary goal is to educate visitors exist alongside or within spaces that have other goals as well. For instance, beneath Eisenman’s memorial is a so-called “Space of Information”—a small museum exhibition that contextualizes the memorial by providing the historical facts of the Holocaust. In the historic town center of OĞwieçim, Poland, home to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, there also sits another memory space: the Auschwitz Jewish Center. This small museum space, which is housed in a former synagogue that was used by the Nazis as a warehouse, tells the story of Jewish life in OĞwieçim before the Nazis invaded. As such, it serves as a complement to the much more well-known story that visitors hear when visiting the nearby former concentration and death camps. Typically, spaces whose primary goal is to educate visitors take as a guiding principle George Santayana’s precept that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Through teaching the history of past violence to a new generation, curators of these spaces hope this knowledge will contribute to the prevention of such violence in the future.

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Activating or involving participants directly Beginning in the 1980s, a new brand of memorial began to emerge out of Germany. A number of architects and artists commissioned to build memorials to remember the Holocaust started to look back at Hitler’s own architectural propensities for the monumental. They asked why they should be expected to use the same architectural language of monumentality and permanence as the perpetrator of these atrocities in order to remember his victims. As a result, they started building a new kind of memorial, which Young has called the countermonument.28 Young defines countermonuments as “brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being.”29 Whereas traditional monuments convey a sense of permanence through the scale of their construction and the materials typically used to build them, countermonuments are built to disappear or to be ephemeral. The central idea of the countermonument is that the memory does not remain contained in the memorial itself, but in the people who view the memorial while it remains visible. In this way, the primary goal of the countermonument is to activate or involve the visitor directly in its memory project. The preeminent example of a countermonument is Jochen and Esther Gerz’s Monument against Fascism, War, and Violence—and for Peace and Human Rights in Hamburg, Germany. Dedicated in October 1986, this monument consisted of a twelve-meter tall, lead-plated column, which sat in a central square of the neighborhood of Harburg in Hamburg. Viewers were invited to use a metal stylus to write their names into the column. Doing so, according to the artists, was like signing a contract through which the visitors pledged to remember the past and to prevent any repeat of such injustice in the future. As sections of the column filled with names and other drawings, the column was lowered gradually into the ground until the entire column was filled. Today, the column rests underground, invisible to the public. All that remains is a small plaque that explains what once stood in that spot. The inscription concludes, “In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice.”30 Countermonuments like the Monument against Fascism are increasingly popular, especially as public art becomes more and more closely aligned with public memory. Rather than creating spaces that awe visitors with their monumentality, countermonuments and other brands of memorials inspired by this growing tradition intend to transform the visitors themselves into the memorial. In this way, these sites become more than mere containers for our worst memories—cordoned off from life so that

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they have little lasting impact in the day-to-day. Spaces of memory can enlist individuals in the memory project. Memory can be more than stagnant stone and mortar. It can become living flesh and blood.

Changing the way we view our daily lives Relating to the goal of countermonuments to activate the visitor directly, one central intention of memory spaces is that the memory they promote has a lasting impact beyond the space of memory itself. Memorials often seek to change the way visitors experience their daily lives. Some of the best examples of memorials with this intention are not necessarily found at dedicated sites of memory. Rather, they are located on the streets and sidewalks of major cities. One example comes from German artist Gunter Demnig, who created the Stolpersteine project in Germany in 1996. Stolpersteine roughly translates as “stumbling stone,” a term that describes his project literally and figuratively. Demnig places small stones with brass plaques in the sidewalks in front of European homes where victims of the Nazi persecution once lived or worked. Each plaque records the name of a victim, their date and place of birth, and their last known date and whereabouts before being taken away by the Nazis. The majority of the stumbling stones commemorate Jews who died in the Nazi Holocaust, but Demnig’s project also commemorates other victim groups, including Roma people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and victims of the Nazi “euthanasia” killings. There are now many thousands of the stones in countries all over Europe. Demnig created the project as a way of ensuring the memory of those lost, but the stumbling stones do this in a different way than traditional memorial spaces. People encounter these stones as they walk through the streets in their daily lives. The viewers of these stones are not going to a place of memory as a conscious act. Rather, they happen upon the space of memory. Demnig’s project inserts the memory of past atrocity into the quotidian. The idea, according to Demnig, is that it is not the feet that stumble on these stones, but the heart.31 A person sees the stones as she walks by and realizes, in that moment, that one of the millions who died lived in this very place. The violence of the past becomes a bit less of a statistic and a bit more of a reality. And now, every time that person passes that building in the future, the stone will still be there to remind her of this fact. Demnig’s project shows that memory does not always have to be a dedicated act. It can happen in short bursts, interceding in the smallest ways on one’s way to the grocery store or to pick up the kids from school.

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Creating a space for people to come together Visiting a site of memory is not only a way to encounter the past, but also a way to encounter other people. This reality is especially important in post-atrocity societies, because the objective of many authoritarian regimes is to atomize or isolate the population, creating high levels of social fragmentation so that there is little group resistance to the regime.32 Sites of memory can create spaces that bring groups of people back together around the collective project of public memory of past violence.33 One example of a memory space that does this quite successfully is the former ESMA in Buenos Aires, Argentina. During the military dictatorship of 1976–1983, ESMA (Escuela Superior Mecánica de la Armada—Navy School of Mechanics) served as a navy training school and as the largest concentration and torture center in the country. In 2004, Argentinean President Nestor Kirchner opened this space to the public and declared it a national site of memory. This complex includes more than thirty buildings, and only one of these buildings served as the site of imprisonment and torture for some 5,000 of the disappeared. Today, people can visit the site and take tours of this building. Those responsible for converting the complex into a site of memory needed to figure out, however, what to do with the other thirty or so buildings of ESMA that were not themselves sites of atrocity. The choices they made highlight the fact that bringing people together is one of the key intentions of this site of memory. One of the central buildings of the site now houses the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center of Memory. This space hosts theatrical works, concerts, art exhibitions, and academic conferences on any number of issues, as long as they relate somehow to the theme of memory. The cultural center also has a bookstore and a café, where people can gather for an afternoon chat or peruse books relating to similar themes. All of the events hosted at the site are free and open to the public. As a result, this space has truly become a vibrant center of cultural life in the city of Buenos Aires. In other words, this space of death has been transformed into a space of life, in which the people of Buenos Aires can come together in a way that makes the past present. For these reasons, the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center serves as an important example of what sites of memory are able to accomplish.

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Using the past to prevent future violence Ideally, memorials are never only about remembering the past, but also about preventing the recurrence of violence in the future. Some sites of memory make this objective more central than others, however. For an example, one can look again at ESMA. Aside from building the cultural center, the governmental entities that manage the site decided to give the remaining buildings to civil society organizations that work on issues relating to memory and human rights. The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo each have facilities on the site, as does H.I.J.O.S., an organization started by children of the disappeared, and Memoria Abierta, a not-for-profit organization that gathers and archives testimony relating to past violence. ESMA also houses the National Memory Archive, where people can sift through a plethora of documents relating to the period of state terror in Argentina. Many sites of memory focus exclusively on the past in the hope that this focus will indirectly lead to prevention in the future. By allowing ESMA to become not only a site of memory, but a headquarters for multiple organizations actively working for human rights in the present and future, the curators of this memory space are trying to leave less of that possibility to chance. They have ensured that people are coming to the site every day and dedicating their work and lives to preventing the recurrence of such large-scale violations of human rights in the future. As Bickford argues (2014), all memorials are in some way both redressive and preventive. ESMA exemplifies how a space of memory can offer redress for past violence by preventing future violence.

How is civil society involved in the design or construction of the space? The central role of civil society in the creation and daily functioning of ESMA demonstrates the key role that civil society actors can play in sites of memory. Generally speaking, in both societies under the yoke of authoritarian leadership and post-authoritarian societies, civil society activists are the first group of people to demand redress for the crimes perpetrated by the state. Oftentimes, these groups are formed by those most directly affected by the violence: victims or the families of victims. For instance, the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the Mothers of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and COMADRES in El Salvador are all groups comprising women whose children were killed by their respective perpetrator regimes. Because these

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groups were created by people so directly affected by the violence, their interest in seeking redress for their losses is both political and personal. Furthermore, these groups often quickly attain a level of sympathy and credibility from the general public. When they succeed at this, it becomes difficult to conceive of a response from the state that does not consider the desires and needs of these civil society groups. Because civil society groups are generally present long before a state or society opts to build a space for memory, it becomes essential to involve those civil society actors in the process of designing and managing the spaces. When civil society is excluded from this process, the site loses credibility and efficacy with the general public. Still, sites exist all along the continuum that demonstrate differing levels of involvement for civil society actors. The Museo de las Memorias (Museum of Memories) in Asunción, Paraguay, is an example of a site of memory managed completely by civil society. This memorial space is housed in a former government office, which, during the regime of President Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989), was used as a space for detaining and torturing opponents of the authoritarian government. Although the site has now been recognized by both the local government of Asunción and the federal government of Paraguay, it is managed entirely by a civil society organization, the Fundación Celestina Pérez de Almada. Individuals who survived the experience of detention and torture in the space lead tours for visitors. Furthermore, the Fundación manages an array of events at the museum that promote human rights and educate young people about the past violence in Paraguay. The Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación (Center of Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation) in Bogotá, Colombia, is an example of a memorial space that came into being through the joint efforts and collaboration of the city government of Bogotá and a number of Colombian civil society organizations. According to the center’s vision statement, it is “an autonomous, participatory, diverse, and democratic entity, co-managed by the city government, the academy, victim organizations, human rights organizations, and promoters of peace.”34 This space, which was inaugurated in late 2012, hosts events, educational programs, and expositions relating to the memory of past violence in Colombia and the promotion of human rights. Through one project, the center maps other memory spaces and memory practices past and present throughout the city. The openness of the space seeks to create a home for all visitors and organizations, and it has been successful in garnering the active support and participation of numerous civil society organizations

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throughout the country, giving the space a legitimacy that it would not have were it only constructed and managed by state actors. Earlier, I described the German Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, housed in Berlin’s Neue Wache, as an example of a memorial with a sphere of inclusion so large that it has ceased to be meaningful to the wider public. Part of the reason this memorial was so controversial when it opened was that the German government failed to consult with civil society organizations, especially victim groups and surviving families, in the construction of the memorial. Had this consultation occurred, designers and commissioners of the space may have realized the insensitivity of remembering, for instance, Jewish victims of the Holocaust alongside the soldiers of the German army. In fact, the most visible way that civil society organizations participated in this memorial space was through protests at its inauguration, when thousands of individuals gathered to demonstrate against the memorial. These protests against the memorial space delegitimized the site as an adequate means of remembering the past. The level of civil society involvement can vary from site to site, but it is clear that when civil society is excluded completely from the space, it is hard to imagine the site as either rebuilding relationships between citizens and the state or preventing future violence through remembrance of the past.

How does it provide a space for other kinds of memory practice? Finally, perhaps the most important question that any designer or manager of a site of memory must ask is how the space can provide a venue for other forms of memory practice. If a memorial space only serves as a container of memory—a place where an unpleasant past can be cordoned off from daily life—and does not attract visitors, then it has failed as a site of memory. Moreover, if the site only attracts visitors but does not engage them in a way that pushes this memory of the past to stay with them, even after they leave the site of memory, it has also failed, particularly in its potential to prevent the return of violence. If a site of memory is to be preventive, it must activate visitors, initiating not only an engagement with the past, but also a commitment to carry that memory with them into daily life so that each visitor becomes a defender of human rights and an advocate for atrocity prevention. I argue that the most effective way this commitment can be generated is through employing the memory space as a site for an array of other memory practices that more fully activate and engage the visitors.

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The memory practices that take place within sites of memory can take a number of forms, but here I will highlight three in particular: educational programming, civil society engagement, and the arts. Perhaps the most obvious and common of these three is the first. Many sites of memory, especially sites of memory that exist within former sites of atrocity, have some form of educational programming, usually in the form of tours that are offered to the hordes of school children that visit such sites every year. Through guided tours, the directors and educators of memory sites have a unique, though brief, opportunity to convey information and their mission to visitors. These educational programs capitalize on what James Waller refers to as the “power of place,” the unique quality offered by a site of memory that allows for a different level of learning and engagement than a classroom or textbook can provide.35 Often, sites of memory only have a few hours to connect with visitors and transmit their messages, with the help of the power of place. When sites of memory find ways of extending this moment, however, it can lead to particularly fruitful results. One example is the work of the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation (AIPR), a non-governmental organization that brings policymakers and mid-level government officials from UN member states all over the world to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland. The policymakers attend a week-long seminar—the Raphael Lemkin Seminar for Genocide Prevention—where they stay in the town of OĞwieçim, next to the notorious death camp. During the days, they not only tour the sites of atrocity, but also participate in classes and workshops that connect the memory of the Holocaust to the cause of genocide and atrocity prevention today. International experts in prevention supply these policymakers with practical training for creating policy to prevent atrocity. By providing such information within the context of Auschwitz, AIPR communicates exactly what is at stake for these lawmakers, highlighting their responsibility to act, while also giving them the tools to do so. The Raphael Lemkin Seminar is an example not only of an effective educational program at a site of memory, but also of a successful collaboration between a site of memory—the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum—and a civil society organization. When sites of memory create a space for civil society groups to gather and do their own work, this, too, can serve to engage the people who visit the site and ensure that the memory it communicates extends outward from the boundaries of the site itself. This engagement with civil society groups can take shape in a number of ways. As I have mentioned earlier, the Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación in Bogotá has become a home for an array of civil society organizations, and the involvement of these organizations has

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given the center credibility and increased the number of visitors to the space. Similarly, ESMA in Buenos Aires now serves as a home to more than ten civil society organizations working for the preservation of memory and the defense of human rights in Argentina. I have written elsewhere about a range of other forms of memory practice that have emerged within the space of ESMA, including a number of public demonstrations and a full slate of cultural programming at the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti. These spaces can even be productive when they provide an arena to dispute opposing approaches to engaging with the past.36 Practically speaking, the institutions that manage sites of memory have limited budgets and mandates in engaging with the past. Teaming up with civil society organizations can allow these sites to expand those mandates without increasing budgetary needs. Likewise, civil society organizations that work with or within sites of memory can gain a certain level of legitimacy through these partnerships. Consequently, when sites of memory are activated through civil society involvement, both sides can equally benefit from the symbiosis of this relationship. Finally, many sites of memory have successfully utilized the arts as a way of both bringing people into the sites and creating connections between audiences and the past. The arts provide a means for connecting with visitors on a more personal level. Guaranteeing that visitors receive necessary information about the past through the conveyance of facts is certainly an important goal for many sites of memory. For visitors to develop an enduring connection with the events of the past, however, an emotional connection is also required. Visual arts, film, music, theater, and dance are all ways that sites of memory can seek to secure this emotional connection between the visitor and the past. For example, the Ghetto Museum in Terezín, Czech Republic, makes impressive use of the artistic works produced by Jewish prisoners in the ghetto during the Holocaust period. A relatively large number of artists were imprisoned in Terezín, and they did not stop producing art during this period. Much of this artwork has thankfully—and against the odds— been well preserved. Visitors to Terezín can walk through galleries where visual artists have drawn or painted their depictions of daily life in the ghetto. One particularly effective gallery includes the drawings produced by children imprisoned in the ghetto. While some of their drawings depict the horrific realities of life in Terezín, others show beautiful memories of life before the ghetto. With no words at all, these pieces of artwork create an indelible, affective link between the viewer and the artist-victims. Another example comes from Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile. Villa Grimaldi is a former clandestine detention and torture center that is now a

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site of memory. After the end of Augusto Pinochet’s horrific dictatorship, much of Villa Grimaldi was destroyed to eliminate evidence of the crimes committed. Today, the site has been reclaimed by civil society and transformed into a peace park. Villa Grimaldi often hosts theatrical performances relating to memory and the past. One particularly interesting performance has been the two-part play Villa + Discurso by Guillermo Calderón. The first part of this play features three women discussing what should be done with the remains of Villa Grimaldi after the dictatorship. Should it be preserved? Should it be destroyed? Should it be rebuilt? Should it be used to remember the past, or should it be forgotten? By performing this play within the site of atrocity itself, the performance invokes a meta-discourse in the audience about the questions and problems of memory. As audiences watch the discussion of the actors onstage, they are implicated within the performance, especially because they are now sitting within the space that is the result of the debate in which the designers of the space have answered the same sorts of questions being asked by the women on stage. Audience members can wonder whether they would answer those questions differently, but as they do, they become more deeply connected to the space and to the past. Consequently, the potential that this memory of the past will leave with them, as they leave the space, becomes all the more real.

Conclusion This specific example—a play within a site of memory about a group of women asking questions about how the site of memory should be used— seems like a particularly appropriate place to end, given that this entire chapter focuses on the many questions that must be asked in the process of creating a preventive site of memory. When visiting sites of memory, they can often seem so self-evident. The way that they exist in the moment of encounter can feel as though it is the only possible way in which they could exist. But this is never the case. Sites of memory are always the result of a long social and political process through which a group of people answer the series of questions that have been asked in this chapter. They may not answer them deliberately or consciously, but they certainly answer them. And the way that they answer these questions determines the efficacy and impact of that site. This chapter began with Musil’s famous quote: “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.” Too often, Musil is correct. It is so easy to create a space of memory that allows the past to recede into the background, to cease to have an impact on the everyday. But rather than

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reading Musil’s assertion as an inevitable reality, I argue that it is far better to read it as a challenge, both for those creating sites of memory and those visiting them. What does the site remember? For whom does the site exist? What is its intention? These are all important questions, but they are all ultimately components of one bigger, more important question: How can the site ensure that what happened in the past never happens again? Those who answer all of the other questions with this central question in mind can, with great work and dedication, create a space that is far from invisible. They can construct a space and a society that prevents the atrocities that it remembers.

Notes 1

Qtd. in James Edward Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 13. 2 Young, The Texture of Memory; James E. Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorial in History (New York: Prestel, 1994). 3 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003): 1. 4 Ibid., 3. 5 Marcelo Brodsky, ed., Memoria En Construcción: El Debate Sobre La ESMA, trans. David William Foster (Buenos Aires: La Marca Editora, 2005); Edward Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004): 17–44; Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle, eds., The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2011); Peter Eisenman, “The Silence of Excess,” in Holocaust Memorial Berlin, ed. Eisenman Architects (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2005): n.p.; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York, N.Y.: Columbia university press, 2012); Huyssen, Present Pasts; Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanf, 2006); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998); Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); James M. Mayo, “War Memorials as Political Memory,” Geographical Review 78, no. 1 (1988): 62–75; Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Jack Santino, “Introduction,” in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009): 1–3; Jack Santino, “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization

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of Death,” in Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death, ed. Jack Santino (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2006): 5–15. 6 Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time”; Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000); Daniel Libeskind, “Trauma,” in Image and Remembrance: Representations of the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): 43–58; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire,” Representations 26, no. Spring (1989): 7–24; Richard Sharpley and Philip R Stone, The Darker Side of Travel the Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Bristol, UK; Buffalo, NY: Channel View Publications, 2009), http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=449885; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); James Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Kerry Whigham, “Filling the Absence: The Re-Embodiment of Sites of Mass Atrocity and the Practices They Generate,” Museum and Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 88–103; Young, The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorial in History; Young, The Texture of Memory. 7 Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond. 8 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2013). 9 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial, 2nd Edition (London: Routledge, 2007): 187–99; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 10 Richard Schechner, Between Theater & Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985); Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction; Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire. 11 Young, The Texture of Memory, 2. 12 Félix Reátegui, “The Victims Remember: Notes on the Social Practice of Memory,” in Transitional Justice: Handbook for Latin America, ed. Félix Reátegui (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2011): 333. 13 Whigham, Kerry, “Filling the Absence: The Re-Embodiment of Sites of Mass Atrocity and the Practices They Generate,” Museum and Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 88–103. 14 Reátegui, “The Victims Remember,” 333. 15 Louis Bickford, “Memoryworks/Memory Works,” in Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society: Beyond Outreach, ed. Clara Ramírez-Barat (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2014): 491–528. 16 “Anne Frank House Annual Report 2015” (Anne Frank House, 2015),

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http://www.annefrank.org/ImageVaultFiles/id_18056/cf_21/AFS_jaarverslag2015 _EN.PDF. 17 Mission Statement, http://www.annefrank.org/en/Sitewide/Organisation/Organisation. 18 Pablo de Greiff, “Justice and Reparations,” in Transitional Justice: Handbook for Latin America, ed. Félix Reátegui (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 2011): 377–408. 19 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 20 Santino, “Introduction”; Santino, “Performative Commemoratives: Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death.” 21 Joseph R Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 22 Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009). 23 Eisenman, “The Silence of Excess.” 24 Bickford, “Memoryworks/Memory Works.” 25 Roger I. Simon, “Museums, Civic Life, and the Educative Force of Remembrance,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell, 2nd Edition (West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2012): 92. 26 Ibid. 27 See http://ww3.museodelamemoria.cl/sobre-el-museo/; my translation. 28 Young, The Texture of Memory. 29 Ibid., 27. 30 Qtd. in Noam Lupu, “Memory Vanished, Absent, and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s and 1990s Germany,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (2003): 135. 31 Gunter Demnig, Personal Interview, November 29, 2013. 32 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10452798; Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide; Guillermo O’Donnell, Counterpoints: Selected Essays on Authoritarianism and Democratization (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). 33 Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time.” 34 See http://centromemoria.gov.co/centrodememoria/. 35 Waller, Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide. 36 Whigham, “Filling the Absence.”

IV. FORWARD?

CHAPTER EIGHT SORRY, NOT SORRY: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE 2004 REPUBLIKA SRPSKA APOLOGY FOR THE SREBRENICA GENOCIDE AJDIN DAUTOVIû

Introduction In July 1995, in small town of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Army of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska (VRS), under the command of general Ratko Mladiü, killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys. In 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found this massacre to constitute genocide.1 To this day, it is the last genocide on European soil since the end of World War II and the Holocaust. The genocide has fundamentally impacted the societies throughout the newly independent state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2 3 and placed significant obstacles in the way of reconciliation between the different national groups: the Bosniaks, Bosnian-Serbs, and BosnianCroats. To this day,4 there has been no public apology from any BosnianSerb politician for the massacre in Srebrenica or recognition of the genocide which occurred there in 1995. The recognition of the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is marked annually with a funeral service in Potoþari, is deemed fundamental by many Bosniaks within Bosnia. Among those who attend the annual day of mourning, some place conditions on their attendance while others simply do not attend due to their denial of the genocide. The purpose of this article is to explore the ‘appropriateness’ of apologies regarding the Srebrenica Genocide. The article will examine a case study as its principle point of exploration, and showcase, using a methodology provided by Craig Blatz et al., that the apology given by the President of Republika

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Srpska (RS),5 Dragan ýaviü, in 2004 was insufficient and inappropriate to the victims. It will also address other methods for reconciliations within the appropriate literature, and provide policy suggestions for pathways forward. These policy suggestions are important in the localized geopolitical context which has been developed throughout the last twenty years in Bosnia, and thus it must be discussed prior to addressing the various conceptualizations of reconciliation among experts. The geopolitical cementing of these national groups—the Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats—within Bosnia was a creation of a Western-led peace negotiation which sought to solidify the military and geopolitical realities of the war in 1995. These realities mainly dealt with the issues of previous failed peace negotiations, the ongoing liberation of Bosnian territory by the Army of Bosnia (ABiH) and Croatia, the entrenchment of the Serbdominated para-state Republika Srpska, and the Western-led consensus that a future Bosnian state should allow for a fifty-fifty division of land between the Serbs, and Bosniaks and Croats.6 Thus, the fifty-fifty division resulted in two entities: Republika Srpska with a Serb majority; and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a Bosniak majority and a Croat minority. This geopolitical context was highly important and, as James Kennedy noted, the Dayton Accords represented a “pragmatic, realpolitik sanctioning of the ethnically majoritized or homogenized regions that ethnic cleansing had created.”7 This realpolitik approach to Bosnia, in terms of the structure which was created vis-à-vis Dayton, is fundamental to the issue as it left opportunities within the political system for ethnic nationalists—of all constitutive nations—to exploit and make reconciliation extremely difficult. Kennedy goes further in his assertion regarding the thinking of the U.S. elite regarding the construction of the Dayton process by noting that the: US elites sought to create or to affirm homogeneity—though brutally achieved—but that they did so in significant measure based on liberal, Millian assumptions … [which influenced] their thinking in the creation of Dayton’s Internal Boundary Line (IEBL), or the internal border between the Bosniak-Croat Federation and the Republika Srpska. Second, … Dayton’s architects then sought to temper or mitigate homogeneity by designing the possibility of using legal, constitutional escapes from this created or sanctioned homogeneity.8

It is crucial to understand this issue of homogeneity—created through ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia—as it is frames many of the war narratives for Bosnia’s national groups.9 U.S. negotiators realized this and encouraged homogeneous regions and ruled out formal partition.10 Despite

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these imperfections in the crafting of a peace agreement, the ultimate goal was to put an end to the war, and this was accomplished. The goal today, for scholars, experts, activists, and others, is to bring about reconciliation among the different groups in Bosnia so they may live in a more peaceful and reconciled state. To achieve this, one must look at methods for reconciliation and attempt to come to terms with the difficulty of achieving it in post-conflict societies.

Differing viewpoints: methods of reconciliation The pathways toward reconciliation are varied, difficult and can range from personal apologies to official apologies from the state. Furthermore, they can include reparations, or offers to pay damages to victims. According to Ruti G. Teitel, reparative justice has become “the leading response in the contemporary wave of political transformation.”11 This is further institutionalized in accordance with international justice organizations like the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) 12 which see reparative justice’s importance vis-à-vis “seek[ing] to address the harms caused by these violations. They can take the form of compensating for the losses suffered, which helps overcome some of the consequences of abuse.” 13 In her exceptional study of ‘Apology Diplomacy,’ Shannon Jones noted that there were two main typologies of reparative apologies. She described them as material and symbolic.14 Material reparations15 are those that involve concrete forms of compensation and “result in a final settlement between offender and victim and typically consist of specific agreements about compensating the victim.” 16 In contrast, symbolic apologies are different, and mainly attempt to restore the victims’ sense of dignity and moral worth. 17 Likewise, the ways in which symbolic apologies can be given vary. Some examples include official apologies, establishing a national day for commemoration and the construction of memorial sites. 18 In addition to these variations of apologies, other scholars have noted alternative requirements. Apologies are a powerful means by which to deal with the past and the injustices which have occurred. Although they may not all be appropriate—due to the various historical contexts and content of these apologies—it is fundamentally important that they occur. The process in which they occur is also of note for scholars of reconciliation and postconflict studies. Aaron Lazare has found that sometimes ‘pseudoapologies’ can take place. These apologies, he says, can be seen as not genuine, conditional, vague, and they can even minimize the impact of what has occurred.19 In contrast, other scholars like Matt James have noted

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that an ‘authentic apology’ needs to be written, specify the injustices, express regret, not request forgiveness after the apology, and propose ceremonies and reparations. 20 Although expressing regret and issuing apologies are significant steps toward reconciliation, the issue of compensating victims is highly important. Davide Denti, in his study of public apologies in the Western Balkans, rightly points out that “apologies are usually entrusted only a secondary role in restorative justice, as material compensations enjoy primacy.”21 Each theoretical approach has legitimate perspectives and points of consideration. However, for the purposes of this essay, the comprehensiveness of an apology will be determined by a joint study published by Craig W. Blatz, Karina Schumann, and Michael Ross entitled, “Government Apologies for Historical Injustices.” The requirement for operationalizing an apology is indeed an undertaking which the aforementioned scholars have taken note of. However, the comprehensiveness of an apology is significantly elaborated and operationalized by Blatz et al. The scholars outlined a definition for a comprehensive apology or settlement by establishing a set of criteria. The elements of this list include: 1) remorse (“I’m sorry”); 2) acceptance of responsibility (“It’s my fault”); 3) admission of injustice or wrong doing (“What I did was wrong”); 4) acknowledgment of harm and/or victim suffering (“I know you are upset”); 5) forbearance, or promises to behave better in the future (“I will never do it again”); and 6) offers of reparation (“I will pay for the damage”).22 While not every academic or individual would utilize such a list for an apology, they nonetheless assess that a “government apology for a historical injustice is likely to be more comprehensive than a typical interpersonal apology.” 23 This is a key distinction since our context in Bosnia requires this approach to assess the failure of RS to deliver an appropriate apology. Prior to delving into the performance and appropriateness of the apology offered by the RS government, this paper will further expand on the nature of the criteria established and how previous authors utilized them accordingly. While there are six components to an apology which will be utilized, the first element is the most fundamental: remorse. If there is no remorse within an apology, it can be said that it is not genuine, and thus will not allow for significant reconciliation to occur. Furthermore, one must also note that without remorse, the apology can appear to be simply a political act. In their study of various historical apologies, Blatz et al. noticed that up to ninety-six percent of the apologies they examined had the required element of remorse. 24 For example, when President Bill Clinton acknowledged the great injustice which was suffered during the Tuskegee

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Apology he stated, “You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged.” 25 Such apologies display remorse, and are crucial. Likewise, the acceptance of responsibility is an important factor within apologies. Without accepting the responsibility for a historical injustice and acknowledging its truth, it is difficult to foresee a future in which both parties can be reconciled fully or even partially. Historical apologies have included those to do with acts of colonization and their barbarity, massacres, or economic exploitation. In one instance, the Queen of the United Kingdom and the Head of the Commonwealth stated that the Crown had been wrong in the way it had seized indigenous land in New Zealand and acted unjustly.26 Likewise we also have the acceptance of the wrongdoing committed by the Canadian government toward Chinese Canadians by means of the head tax. Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged the “cost of the head tax meant that many family members were left behind in China … [and] our failure to truly acknowledge these historical injustices has prevented many in the community from seeing themselves as fully Canadian.” 27 Additionally, he also recognized past racist actions and committed the government to seek to secure a better life for all Canadians. 28 The reasons for accepting responsibility deal with aspects of being—or at the very least appearing—genuine to the victims or those associated with the victims. Without the acceptance of responsibility for such acts, those affected cannot reconcile the impact of the act with current reality. The current reality for the victims or their decedents is that the historical memory will be vivid long after the apology. Thus, it is crucial for apologies to have promises of forbearance to ensure that such injustices do not occur again and to offer reparation. Forbearance is a key aspect of apologies and regularly features within them. In January 2015, the German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, declared, “Never again can we allow members of the Jewish faith to be endangered in our midst.” 29 , 30 High ranking officials like Steinmeier know the weight which apologies carry and are often ready to issue them if it benefits the state, but they also demonstrate genuine remorse and forbearance. Likewise, as previously noted, Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, also made sure that forbearance and offers of reparation were made to the victims and their relatives. He offered to pay $20,000 31 to twenty surviving head-tax payers and two hundred living spouses of those head-tax payers who were now deceased.32 While such compensation may never truly repair what has been lost, it is nonetheless a gesture which demonstrates goodwill and an attempt to reconcile the past.

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The Apology: The 2004 Republika Srpska statement by Dragan ýaviü In the summer of 2004 a historic apology occurred: Dragan ýaviü, President of the Bosnian entity RS, issued a formal and televised apology to the victims, and their relatives, of the Srebrenica Genocide. This was the first and last apology ever issued by the Serbian majority entity in Bosnia. 33 The current president, Milorad Dodik, has vowed never to recognize the ruling of genocide by the ICTY. 34 Nonetheless, in recognizing a violation of international law and historic injustice, ýaviü’s move represented a significant departure from the political and reconciliatory orthodoxy in the Bosnian-Serb community. His apology read as follows: After all of this, first as a man and a Serb, then as a father, brother and son, and only then as the president of the Serb Republic, I have to say that these nine days of July of the Srebrenica tragedy represent a black page in the history of the Serb people. The participants in this crime cannot justify themselves before anyone one and with anything. If those who did it did it in the name of the nation then they committed a crime against that very nation, if they committed that crime in the name of God and if they are expecting the blessing of God for what they did they committed a crime against God.35

This apology did not occur in a vacuum. It was issued two years after a report had been published called the “Report about Case Srebrenica.” This report was an initiative of the RS government to represent the “truth” regarding the events, and should be seen in the wider context of denialism in Bosnia and Serbia regarding the Srebrenica Genocide.36 The report also garnered strong rebukes from the international community and even from the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Paddy Ashdown.37 What is fundamental here, is that the apology was issued, and that it meets some—but not all—of the criteria for a sufficient apology. Once again, an apology is important, but the substance of it must be interrogated as well. The six elements of the methodology provided by Blatz et al. will be utilized here. The most important aspect of an apology can vary, but generally it can be said that it must involve remorse. Remorse can be expressed in different ways: it can be articulated in a speech; monetary compensation can be offered; or the building of commemorative public spaces or buildings can be undertaken. In our context, the apology deals with the issue of remorse vis-à-vis ýaviü’s acknowledgment that “the participants in this crime cannot justify themselves before anyone and with

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anything.” 38 Furthermore, ýaviü had also noted that the “Srebrenica tragedy represent a black page in the history of the Serb people.”39 This is an important statement, with regard to remorse, as it demonstrates the dark nature of genocide, albeit not recognizing the ultimate gravity of the act. Furthermore, Srebrenica has remained an extremely tense point of reference for Serbs both in Bosnia and Serbia as it represents an extreme split between those who recognize it as genocide, and those who do not. To say the least, even the most progressive Serbian politicians, in Serbia, have not recognized it as genocide let alone in Bosnia where the geopolitical situation is worth more to political actors. Nonetheless, in this midst, ýaviü had chosen to portray Serbs in a negative light despite their attempts to portray the war as defensive and in which they saw themselves as the main victims. For example, Jelena Obradovic-Wochnick has noted the absolute lack of open debate in Serbia on war crimes in Bosnia. She states that this rigidity has made the “field particularly fertile for SRS [Serbian Radical Party] manipulation, who, in conjunction with the SPS [Serbian Socialist Party] and the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), has been active in reorienting the narrative along patriot–traitor lines. Much as during the Milosevic era, the wars are presented as self-defense, with only ‘our’ victims and ‘their’ crimes, and the discourse is heavily dependent on resentment that Serbs should be ‘singled out’ for punishment.”40 Although the author is discussing the political context within Serbia, the same can be said within Bosnia. Thus, the importance of ýaviü’s remorse is emphasized and can, to some extent, be viewed as positive given the difficult scenario which presents a politician (and a human being) in a moral paradox. Likewise, the acceptance of responsibility for the act is important. The acceptance of responsibility for matters of historical injustice are not binary, yes-or-no declarations. Responsibility for a historical injustice can often be conditional, and subject to varying levels of terms and conditions that the apologizer deems appropriate. This is to say that often these political apologies are in tune with the fact that apologies come with financial and political responsibility. With ýaviü acknowledging some level of remorse in his governmental apology on behalf of the RS, he spelled out that the participants of this “crime” cannot “justify themselves before anyone one and with anything.” 41 He laid the blame and responsibility squarely on the participants of the massacre in Srebrenica. He went so far as to say that this act had tarnished the reputation of the Serb people. It is important to note that ýaviü’s apology seems to fail to distinguish clearly the participants in terms of responsibility for the massacre and genocide. On the one hand, he acknowledged that the

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participants could not justify the atrocities, but on the other hand, he spoke of a black page for the Serb people. There should have been a clear articulation on his part. Not all Serbs should feel responsible for such a horrific act, rather only those participants, such as the Army of the Serb Republic, should take responsibility. Such conflation leads to accusations by members of his community of anti-Serb bias as was evident in 2015 when a UN resolution on the Srebrenica Genocide was vetoed by the Russian Federation on such grounds.42 ýaviü was unable to fully accept responsibility for the massacre in its entirety; he did not lay the blame squarely upon himself and, as such, he perpetuates a state of denial which persists in Bosnian society to this day. Bosnian-Serb MPs have denied the Srebrenica Genocide. In fact, Milorad Dodik, suggested that the 2015 UN resolution was directed against Serbs and that it would not help ethnic reconciliation and would “destabilize relations in the country.”43 As such, the limited ability to accept responsibility coincides with the inability to admit the injustice in its entirety. While deconstructing the apology given by the head of the government in RS, one must acknowledge the political and historical nature of it. Out of all the criteria 44 utilized within this framework of assessing the appropriateness of apologies, the admission of injustice is the most fundamental and the most difficult to fulfill given the historical and political nature of the Srebrenica Genocide. Likewise, the genocide is not simply a historical event which occurred, rather it has regional implications with regard to international relations, trade, political discourse and actions, and reconciliation. Given these wide ranging implications, an apology regarding the genocide has an impact on Bosniak-Serb relations in Bosnia, but also in places like Croatia, the Sandžak region in Serbia, and Montenegro. This is further complicated when we consider the instances of violent conflict between Bosniaks and Serbs during the twentieth century such as the Balkan Wars, World Wars I and II, and, most recently, the conflicts of the 1990s. These communities understand themselves within a historical context and have strong senses of identity even if they have not always been as fixed and solid as they are today. Thus, they also understand themselves within a prism as victims of mass violence and injustice. For example, the Serb community in the independent state of Croatia—which consisted mainly of modern day Croatia and Bosnia—was massacred by the fascist and Nazi-collaborating, Ustaša regime of Ante Paveliü during World War II. Paradoxically, Muslims fared slightly better under this regime since they collaborated and were considered ‘Croatian’ according to the warped racial ideology of the Ustaše regime. As such, both communities suffered significantly, and when this is compounded by

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suffering of both communities in the war within Bosnia during the 1990s, it is difficult to reconcile the paradoxes and engage in genuine reconciliation.45 Thus, this historical and political context makes it difficult—if not impossible—for ýaviü to acknowledge the admission of injustice or wrongdoing. In fact, he does not mention the massacre, but rather vaguely refers to the “tragedy.”46 In essence, the most fundamental portion of the apology is empty, although he does display remorse and admits it was a crime of sorts. The acknowledgment of harm is another area in which the apology was lacking. The acknowledgment of harm, along with the admission of injustice are two closely linked criteria. Realizing the harm of a historical injustice is a way for the perpetrator or their representatives to acknowledge the suffering which the victims have endured. Unfortunately, in this apology by ýaviü, the acknowledgment of harm is woefully missing; he emphasizes the shame the incident caused the Serb people rather than the suffering it caused the Bosniak victims. Moreover, rather than descending into a competition as to which side suffered the most, a direct approach in recognizing the victims could have been adopted. Those who represent the group of perpetrators often tend to diminish or underplay the severity of the actions, although ýaviü had delivered a heartfelt apology. But still, it does not emphasize the victims’ suffering or offer the forbearance that is required. Forbearance can allow for trust to be rebuilt between the groups affected and indicates that the government values the victims and is willing to keep them safe.47 In our context, the Bosniak community within Bosnia are still fearful in areas like Srebrenica where the genocide took place.48 Today, relations remain tense due to the denial of the genocide. Likewise, the apology by ýaviü is a microcosm of these tense relations whereby the government of RS sought to deal with the historical past. In his apology he said nothing to reassure Bosniaks that such a “tragedy” could never occur again.49 Indeed, it is unlikely that another such genocide could happen in the future given the reorientation of both Croatia and Serbia toward the European Union, and the lack of ambition for war on all sides within Bosnia. The lack of forbearance should also be understood, as previous scholars have suggested, in the wider political context across the region. The climate of denial has left political elites unable to deal honestly with the genocide. A further factor is their need, as elected representatives, to reflect public opinion. For example, in a survey 97.8 percent of Bosniaks and 96 percent of Croats considered Srebrenica to be a war crime, while only 55.7 percent of Serbs held the same view. 50 Furthermore, 16.2 percent of Serbs did not know how to characterize the

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events of Srebrenica, and 24.2 percent viewed them as “unfortunate consequence of military operations.”51 This helps to explain why officials hesitate to voice ‘controversial’ opinions—there would be no political gain from doing so. In this context, ýaviü is simply reiterating widespread opinions and not engaging in an international, and Western, consensus of the events at Srebrenica. While little was done with regard to forbearance, the issue of compensation and, thus, offers of reparation was missing from the apology. The issue of compensation within apologies can be an indicator of how prepared the apologizer is to address the needs of the victims and, thus, has strong implications for the level of genuineness of the apology. In the case of Srebrenica, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Bosnia had no right to monetary compensation from Serbia.52 However, at the time of this apology, the ICJ verdict had not been delivered, and the situation of reparations for the crime had not been addressed by the RS government. The government of the Netherlands, however, was ordered to pay compensation for the deaths of Bosniaks in the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide, although the Netherlands case only related to the murder of three victims. 53 It should be noted that Serbia’s Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vuþiü, has shown support for Srebrenica’s economy by pledging €5 million to fund infrastructure.54 Coming after the apology by ýaviü, such developments make the nature of the government’s apology insignificant. The apology does not mention compensation in any form, nor does it seek to materially address the needs of the victims and their families. As such, the apology fails to meet this criterion. Overall, the apology can be seen as insufficient and unsatisfactory according to this analysis. The six criteria were used to demonstrate the (in)appropriateness of this apology. Within this apology we saw a presentation of deep remorse from the President of RS. However, we saw the apology failing to accept responsibility, failing to admit the injustice or wrongdoing, failing to acknowledge the suffering of victims, and failing in forbearance and offers of reparation. Thus, only one out of six criteria was met. This means that over 84 percent of the required elements of the apology were missing. While the quantitative approach may seem too rigorous for measuring the appropriateness of an apology, which one could argue is an emotional and discursive act, quantifying the ways in which this apology has failed has been useful. In doing so, it has demonstrated how future apologies could be better formulated. Not only do apologies need to improve, but also policies need to address the lack of material compensation offered to

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victims for their suffering. This will help all sides to come to terms with the past.

Moving forward: suggestions for change The current level of reconciliation within the country with regard to Srebrenica and, more widely, the war of the 1990s is abysmal. Political elites have appropriated war narratives and only entrenched themselves as saviors of the ethnic groups they represent. In 2015, Refik Hodžiü, the director of communications at the International Center for Transitional Justice, wrote an article entitled, “Twenty Years Since Srebrenica: No Reconciliation, We’re Still at War.”55 While the article may sound grim, it is in fact close to reality. Political elites in Bosnia, and abroad, have failed to bring about fundamental reconciliation. There are numerous reasons for this as discussed, but there are still some ways, with regard to policy, in which relations could be improved. There are two approaches to this: 1) a short-term approach focused on the reform of education; and 2) a longterm approach which is focused on dismantling the formation of an ethnocracy vis-à-vis the Dayton Accords (which privileges certain ethnic groups over others) and instead granting each citizen equal rights. The short-term approach has the most realistic chance of success, since many do not want to touch an existential topic such as the Dayton Accords. Those who are familiar with education in Bosnia realize that educational material can be highly susceptible to politicization based on different ethnic backgrounds. Language classes are taught for Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian despite the many linguistic similarities; history classes are taught with different nationalist interpretations; and students are segregated according to their ethnic background. The most infamous example of this is the ‘Two Schools Under One Roof’ system utilized in Mostar, Bosnia. This is the most blatant form of segregation within Bosnia. In fact, there are estimated to be over fifty schools in the CroatMuslim Federation entity in Bosnia.56 Furthermore, a municipal Bosnian court found this policy to be discriminatory and in violation of the country’s Prohibition of Discrimination Law.57 However, this is a problem not only in schools within Bosnia or the Federation entity, but even in schools in RS where genocide denial is rampant. What must be done with regard to reforming education policy on the Srebrenica Genocide is the creation of a commission to investigate ways to implement the teaching of the international consensus regarding the genocide. Ultimately, such a commission could examine how to acknowledge the suffering of all Bosnians in the war, and focus on dismantling the segregated school

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system. Ultimately, such an approach to education reform would require political elites and leaders to look inwards on their intentions for the future of the state of Bosnia. Education is not simply about teaching facts, but is rather part of the territorial socialization which teaches citizens to learn about their state and homeland in a manner that reflects their own nationalist intentions. This is the reason why the long-term policy approach is intertwined with the short-term one. A long-term approach must look toward and open a debate on the nature of the state and how it deals with its citizens. As political scientists can attest, the nature of the state and its relationship with its population are difficult issues. They frame the duties and the contract between the governors and the governed. In Bosnia, the issue is further complicated by the fact that the state is highly decentralized, filled with ethno-nationalist politicians, and a Western-brokered, temporary, peace treaty—the Dayton Accords—has framed the nature of politics and reconciliation in Bosnia for the last twenty-one years. Once again, a discussion regarding the formation of a constitution for all Bosnians—regardless of ethnicity or religion—must be the basis for citizenship and the organization of the state. Political elites have greatly exploited a system which is built on garnering votes from their ethnic populations, and those who have sought to challenge the “other”58 seats in the political arena, have to do so with the clear knowledge that they will never be president, nor will their opposing viewpoints ever challenge the hegemonic political system. If a debate emerges surrounding the constitution and how to reform it, then it must seek to strip power from a system that rewards seats in parliament simply for being a member of an ethnic group.

Conclusion In conclusion, the nature of reconciliation within Bosnia surrounding the Srebrenica Genocide is still shrouded in denial, and is thus not optimal for improving relations between Bosniaks and Serbs. While the mantra that ‘time heals all’ may suffice in some instances, it has not proven to be true in our case study. The apology issued by RS President ýaviü in 2004 was insufficient according to the methodology we have used to analyze it. The apology only satisfied the criteria of remorse, and failed to address the issues of accepting responsibility, admitting wrongdoing, acknowledging victim suffering, forbearance, and offering financial compensation to victims. Likewise, the paper sought to address different interpretations and knowledge bases from scholars regarding issues of reconciliation and

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apologies. It has illuminated the many different perspectives on these topics, and framed the discussion which took place regarding the case study example vis-à-vis RS and ýaviü. Likewise, the paper has also offered policy and intellectual suggestions for future areas of improvement regarding reconciliation and broader political changes, which may be needed if we are to avoid cosmetic reconciliatory apologies. The issues of historical injustices and apologies are certainly difficult discussions to engage in, but those who seek to change the present must deal with past injustices if they are to improve the conditions of today and tomorrow.

Notes 1

“Radislav Krstiü,” International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, http://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/cis/en/cis_krstic_en.pdf. 2 Bosnia-Herzegovina became an independent state as part of the Dayton Accords signed in 1995 under the auspices of the United States, but with roles also played by the European Union (EU) and the Western member states. 3 Hereafter simply referred to as Bosnia. 4 As of December 2016. 5 Hereafter simply referred to as RS. 6 It is fundamental to note here that throughout the war in Bosnia state building projects were undertaken by Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks to ensure territory would be retained. The crucial aspect to note here is that while Serbs and Croats sought to create homogenous states—in the form of Republika Srpska and Herzeg-Bosnia respectively—the Bosniaks, under the leadership of Alija Izetbegoviü, sought to establish a multi-ethnic republic on the basis of equality for each national group. However, as experts like Marko Attila Hoare have noted in his book How Bosnia Armed, the subsequent Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (RBiH) had an overwhelmingly Bosniak composition despite their push to include Serbs and Croats in their military and political ranks. 7 James Kennedy and Liliana Riga, “A Liberal Route from Homogeneity?: US Policymakers and the Liberalization of Ethnic Nationalists in Bosnia’s Dayton Accords,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 19 (2013): 163. 8 Ibid., 164. 9 See Goran Basic, “Definitions of Violence: Narratives of Survivors from the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2016): 1–25. 10 Kennedy and Riga, Liberal route from Homogeneity? 167. 11 Ruti G. Teital, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 127. 12 International Center for Transitional Justice. 13 “Reparations,” International Center for Transitional Justice, https://www.ictj.org/our-work/transitional-justice-issues/reparations. 14 Shannon Jones, “Apology Diplomacy: Justice for ALL?” Clingendael Discussion Papers in Diplomacy 122 (2011): 3.

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Within her study, Jones acknowledges various case studies where material compensation has been offered. She listed countries like Uganda, Nepal, and Cambodia. 16 Charles Barton, “Theories of Restorative Justice” Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 2 (2000): 8. 17 Jones, Apology Diplomacy, 4. 18 “Reparation & Rehabilitation Committee Transcripts, Policies & Articles” Truth and Reconciliation Commission, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/reparations/index.html. 19 Aaron Lazre, On Apology (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 8–9. 20 Matt James “Wrestling with the Past: Apologies, Quasi-Apologies, and NonApologies in Canada.” in The Age of Apology, ed. Mark Gibney, Rhoda E. HowardHassmann, Jean-Marc Coicaud, and Nikalus Steiner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009): 137–153. 21 Davide Denti points to the UN International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on responsibility of States for Internationally Wrong Acts, adopted in 2001. It is fundamental that such an approach be institutionalized in an international capacity to allow for a precedent and example to be set for other reconciliation processes. Davide Denti, “Sorry for Srebrenica? Public Apologies and Genocide in the Western Balkans,” in Disputed Memory: Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. Tea Sindbæk Andersen, and Barbara Tömquist-Plewa (DeGruyter, 2016): 69. 22 Craig W. Blatz, Karina Schumann, and Michael Ross, “Government Apologies for Historical Injustices.” Political Psychology (2008): 221. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 224. 25 Ibid. 26 “NgƗ whakataunga tiriti – Treaty of Waitangi settlement process,” The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/nga-whakataungatiriti-treaty-of-waitangi-settlement-process/print 27 “PM offers apology, ‘symbolic payments’ for Chinese head tax,” The Globe and Mail, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/pm-offers-apology-symbolicpayments-for-chinese-head-tax/article711245/. 28 Ibid. 29 “German Foreign Minister: We Must Never Forget Nazi Atrocities,” Ha’aretz, http://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.638902. 30 The minister’s statement comes from a long tradition of apologies from Germany for the Nazi crimes and genocide committed towards Jews in World War II. However, it nonetheless demonstrates the crucial importance of accepting responsibility and showing forbearance even decades after the Holocaust. 31 Canadian Dollars. 32 However, there were over eighty thousand that paid the Chinese head tax. “PM offers apology, ‘symbolic payments’ for Chinese head tax,” The Globe and Mail,

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/pm-offers-apology-symbolicpayments-for-chinese-head-tax/article711245/. 33 However, it should be noted that in 2008, Milorad Dodik, then Prime Minister of RS, had said in a televised interview with Face TV that he “recognized Srebrenica” as genocide. “Dodik: U Srebrenici je bio genocide! [Dodik: In Srebrenica there was genocide!],” FACETV, http://facetv.ba/novost/10605/dodik-u-srebrenici-je-bio-genocid. 34 “Dodik: Srebrenica je žrtovana, nikad neüu priznati genocide [Dodik: Srebrenica was sacrificed, I will never admit genocide],” Dnevni Avaz, http://www.avaz.ba/clanak/250171/dodik-srebrenica-je-zrtvovana-nikad-necupriznati-genocid?url=clanak/250171/dodik-srebrenica-je-zrtvovana-nikad-necupriznati-genocid. 35 “ýaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [ýaviü recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davic-priznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. 36 An excellent work for further reading is Jelena Obradovic-Wochnick’s journal entitled “Knowledge, Acknowledgment and Denial in Serbia’s Responses to the Srebrenica Massacre”. In this work, the author goes over the institutionalization of the denial of genocide, and how it occured within Serbian society. Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, “Knowledge, Acknowledgment and Denial in Serbia’s Responses to the Srebrenica Massacre,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 17 (2009): 61–74. 37 “International officials Denounce Bosnian Serb Srebrenica Report”, Voice of America, http://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2002–09–04–24-international-67580 632/288499.html. 38 “ýaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [ýaviü recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davic-priznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. 39 “ýaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [ýaviü recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davic-priznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. 40 Obradovic-Wochnik, Knowledge, Acknowledgment and Denial, 68. 41 “ýaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [ýaviü recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davic-priznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. 42 “Russia vetoes Srebrenica genocide Resolution at UN,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/08/russia-vetoes-srebrenicagenocide-resolution-un 43 “Bosnian Serbs MPs reject Srebrenica Genocide resolution,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bosnia-srebrenica-serbsidUSKBN0OQ2IN20150610. 44 The criteria being: 1) remorse; 2) acceptance of responsibility; 3) admission of injustice or wrong doing; 4) acknowledgement of harm and/or victim suffering; 5) forbearance, or promises to behave better in the future; and 6) offers of reparation.

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It should be noted that the figures of the death within Bosnia are controversial due to the fact that graves are still being examined, but often the ethnic make-up of the deaths tend to indicate greater Bosniak loss of life by a significant margin. For example, the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo puts the number of Bosniak casualties for civilians at 33,070 and 30,966 for soldiers. Roland Kostiü, “Transitional Justice and Reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Whose Memories, Whose Justice?” Sociologija 54 (2012): 663. 46 “ýaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [ýaviü recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davic-priznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. 47 Aaron Lazare, On Apology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 48 “Srebrenica tense as Bosnian Serb poised to become mayor,” Al Jazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/10/srebrenica-tense-bosnian-serbpoised-mayor-161013034949226.html. 49 “ýaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [ýaviü recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davic-priznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. 50 Kostiü, Transitional Justice and Reconciliation in Bosnia, 662. 51 Ibid. 52 “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. (Bosnia-Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro),” International Court of Justice, http://www.icjcij.org/docket/?sum=667&code=bhy&p1=3&p2=2&case=91&k=f4&p3=5. 53 “Netherlands to pay compensation over Srebrenica massacre.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/netherlands-compensationsrebrenica-massacre. 54 “A Serbian leader’s public reconciliation with Srebrenica offered a raw moment in a week of political platitudes,” Quartz, https://qz.com/786903/the-prime-minister-of-serbia-was-the-most-candidpolitician-in-a-week-of-boring-speeches/. 55 “Twenty Years Since Srebrenica: No Reconciliation, We’re Still at War,” International Center for Transitional Justice, https://www.ictj.org/news/twentyyears-srebrenica-no-reconciliation-we%E2%80%99re-still-war. 56 “Two Schools Under One Roof; School Segregation in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Columbia Journal of Transitional Law, http://jtl.columbia.edu/twoschools-under-one-roof-school-segregation-in-bosnia-and-herzegovina/. 57 Ibid. 58 The term “other” in reference to political seats refers to the fact that while the three major groups are Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats, and they are allowed to be members of the presidency, if a Bosnian identifies outside of these three options, they may opt for civic parties but not become president if they are not a Bosniak, Serb or Croat.

CHAPTER NINE THE LEGACY OF COLD WAR ERA MASSACRES IN CAMBODIA AND INDONESIA1 BENNY WIDYONO

Victims of the struggle for hegemony in the cold war During the cold war, both Cambodia and Indonesia became victims of the struggle for hegemony in Southeast Asia. After World War II, President Sukarno declared independence for Indonesia on August 17, 1945 while King, later Prince, Sihanouk declared independence for Cambodia on November 9, 1953. In the cold war, both tried to maintain stability by adhering to the principle of neutrality. They maintained power by cleverly balancing a restless right-wing military against a rapidly growing and increasingly militant communist party, the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) in Indonesia and the Khmer Rouge, a budding ultra-communist movement under Pol Pot in Cambodia. At the Asian African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955, Premier Zhou Enlai of China guaranteed neutrality to both Sukarno and Sihanouk. However, President Eisenhower of the United States openly rejected the principle of neutrality in Southeast Asia, fearing that the domino theory would turn both Indonesia and Cambodia to communism. Zhou Enlai, in his own mind, undoubtedly agreed with President Eisenhower that, with a little nudge here and there, neutrality would ultimately result in the triumph of the domino theory. Both Sukarno and Sihanouk veered to the left, but Sukarno was less likely to be bothered by this than Sihanouk. Both leaders were overthrown by right-wing military forces which resulted in two horrible massacres, among the worst in the twentieth century. 2 However, there is a fundamental difference in the outcomes. In Indonesia, in late 1965 and early 1966, the slaughter in a few weeks of hundreds of thousands of real or alleged communists remained, until recently, shrouded in secrecy. By

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contrast, the massacre of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians by the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge is widely known throughout the world. The key difference between the two massacres is that in Cambodia it was perpetrated by ultra-communists condemned by the United States and the world, while in Indonesia, the massacre was committed by a military force receiving aid, training, and encouragement from the U.S. government. .

Three factors contributed to the divergent outcome of the massacres in Cambodia and Indonesia: 1) the attitudes of China and the United States, the main protagonists in the cold war in Southeast Asia; 2) the differing reactions to their overthrow by Sukarno and Sihanouk respectively; 3) the relative strength of the army vis-à-vis the communist party in each country. From the time Indonesia gained independence in 1945 until 1967, President Sukarno was the nation’s only president. With his charismatic personality, eloquence, and passionate patriotism, he remained widely popular despite political turmoil. In 1965 his hold on the presidency was unrivaled. From the late 1950s through the early 1960s, Sukarno increasingly clashed with Western powers—especially the UK and the United States, whom he denounced as neocolonialists. In 1963, Sukarno opposed the formation of an independent Malaysia because he believed that the new nation would remain under British political control and function as a neocolonial force in the region. Sukarno started a policy of armed confrontation with Malaysia which lasted from 1963 to 1966. When Malaysia got a seat on the UN Security Council, in early 1965, Indonesia withdrew from the United Nations in protest and expelled the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. During 1964 and 1965, at loggerheads with the United States and Britain, Sukarno turned more and more to the left, and in particular into the orbit of China. Concurrently, Sukarno developed closer ties with the previously marginalized PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party which was affiliated with China in the Sino-Soviet split. Under the dynamic leadership of D.N. Aidit, the party became the third-largest communist party in the world, behind only those in the Soviet Union and China, claiming 3.5 million members and candidate members in August 1965. When members of the PKI’s affiliated organizations—“fronts” for labor, youth, women and other

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groups—were taken into account and adjusted for duplication of membership, the PKI and its affiliated organizations had a following approaching 20 million. 3 This amounted to 20 percent of Indonesia’s population. Confidently and aggressively the PKI pushed forward plans to gain greater influence through land redistribution which frequently resulted in conflict between dispossessed landowners, party activists, and land occupiers. Sukarno tacitly approved. On May 23, 1965 Sukarno and Aidit stood side by side to address a massive crowd of 120,000 at Jakarta’s main stadium to celebrate the forty-fifth anniversary of the PKI. Sukarno described Aidit as the “bulwark of Indonesia.”4 It was a frightening sign of things to come. With the help of Sukarno, the PKI steadily gained political influence in the government and had begun to infiltrate the armed forces, especially the air force, with whom it shared a distrust of the army. 5 One problem, however, remained for the PKI in the form of the formidable army which was dominated by a majority of right-wing officers. From 1950 to 1965, about 2,800 Indonesian army officers were trained in the United States most of them after 1958.6 The PKI became impatient with the status quo and demanded the arming of workers and peasants to form a “fifth force” to counterbalance the power of the security apparatus, but their efforts failed. In Cambodia, unlike Sukarno, Prince Sihanouk was able to neutralize the country’s embryonic communist movement, which he dubbed the Khmer Rouge, by sending them to the jungle. However, when the United States escalated the Vietnam War in 1964 and 1965, neutrality became impossible for Cambodia to sustain. Sihanouk was unable to stop North Vietnam from building sanctuaries in northeast Cambodia, which the North Vietnamese needed to pass through to get from North to South Vietnam along the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail. This upset the United States, and relations between the two countries continued to deteriorate. Unlike in Indonesia, where in the 1960s talks between the U.S. government and the Indonesian army to remove Sukarno and eliminate the PKI were held in secret, in Cambodia, as early as 1956, when Sihanouk refused to join SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), U.S. President Eisenhower and the CIA were openly determined to support any anti-communist Cambodian they could find.7 Two U.S. actions undertaken by President Nixon indirectly fed the meteoric rise of the Khmer Rouge: First, Nixon authorized massive, initially secret, bombings of Cambodia beginning on March 18, 1969. Recent estimates indicate that more bombs were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped by the Allies during all of World War II. 8 The

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bombardments killed somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 people, most of them civilians.9 This unleashed a huge flow of refugees into the cities, radicalized the youth in the rural areas, and drove many people into the ranks of the Khmer Rouge. On March 18, 1970, Sihanouk was overthrown by right-wing General Lon Nol who was to play the role of Suharto for Cambodia. This included allowing the training of Cambodian military forces by U.S. Green Berets in Bandung, Indonesia after the coup.10 Suharto immediately recognized the Lon Nol government which hurt Sihanouk immensely. However, Sihanouk proved to be more resilient than Sukarno. Enraged by the coup, Sihanouk accused the CIA of orchestrating it.11 He went to Beijing where he embraced the Khmer Rouge leaders and exhorted all Cambodians to fight against U.S. imperialism and Lon Nol.12 Encouraged by this clarion call, thousands of young men and women joined the Khmer Rouge, now aligned with the popular prince. The ties between the prince and the Khmer Rouge also meant that a massive flow of weapons from China went to the Khmer Rouge. As a result, the Khmer Rouge grew from about three thousand guerrillas fighting Sihanouk to around thirty thousand guerrillas allied to him. It was a turning point in Cambodian history. A full-scale civil war erupted and lasted from 1970 to 1975 between the Khmer Rouge and the right-wing Khmer Republic under General Lon Nol. However, the Indonesian model backfired in Cambodia. While the well trained and effective Indonesian army faced defenseless and unarmed members of the PKI who were led to their slaughter like lambs, General Lon Nol’s weak and corrupt troops were no match for the marauding Khmer Rouge troops. The proximity to Vietnam also helped the Khmer Rouge who, in the initial stage of the civil war, were supported by the battle-tested-for-decades North Vietnamese army. In fact, Pol Pot had studied the overnight collapse of the PKI following the abortive coup of September 30, 1965. At the time he was in Beijing, and he concluded, along with the Chinese leaders, that despite the PKI’s emergence as one of the four main political parties during democratic elections in Indonesia in 1955, its strategy of aligning with Sukarno and trying to take over the country through democratic means had been disastrous. Pol Pot resolved that the Khmer Rouge would not come to the same end, and ensured that the Khmer Rouge’s strength would be its army (the PKI did not have one). Pol Pot also decided that the Khmer Rouge should not align itself too closely with Sihanouk, as the PKI’s dependence on Sukarno had not saved it from total annihilation by Suharto.13

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Two cold-war-induced massacres In Indonesia, in the early hours of October 1, 1965, a group of leftist midlevel army officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung of Sukarno’s Palace Guard, kidnapped and executed six right-wing generals and a lieutenant from the military high command. The plotters, calling themselves the 30 September Movement (G-30-S using the Indonesian acronym), claimed that the coup was purely an internal army matter and declared that they had acted to save President Sukarno from a planned seizure of power by a “Council of Generals” (Dewan Jendral) led by anti-communist Generals Nasution, Defense Minister and Chief of Staff of the army and General Yani, Chief of Staff the armed forces who had allegedly planned a coup on Armed Forces Day, October 5, 1965 supported by the CIA. 14 Nasution escaped the killings but Yani was among those murdered. Sukarno was waiting for the outcome of the coup at Halim Airport, headquarters of the G-30-S, which was under the command of the Air Force Commander Omar Dhani who was sympathetic to the coup. He never regained power. The army’s response to the coup was led by Major General Suharto, who headed the Army Strategic Reserve (KOSTRAD in Indonesian). He was for some inexplicable reason not targeted 15 and quickly organized troops to crush the G-30-S conspirators. By the night of October 1, Suharto and the remaining surviving army command were in control of Jakarta. From the very beginning, Suharto maintained that the coup had been plotted and carried out solely by the PKI. 16 The army version depends heavily on the presence of D.N. Aidit and elements of communist youth and women’s groups at Halim Airport. Newspapers were used to disseminate false propaganda about the viciousness of the PKI and claims were made that the generals, before they were murdered, had been tortured and sexually mutilated by members of Gerwani, the women’s organization associated with the PKI.17 The killings of unarmed civilian members of the PKI and affiliated organizations began a few weeks after the coup and swept through Central and East Java and later Bali, with smaller-scale outbreaks in parts of other islands. In most regions, responsibility for the killings was shared between army units and civilian vigilante gangs. In some cases, the army took a direct part in the killings. Often, however, it simply supplied weapons, rudimentary training and strong encouragement to the civilian gangs who carried out the bulk of the killings. Civilians suspected of being communists were killed, raped, tortured, enslaved, or subjected to other crimes against humanity in their own

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homes or in public places. The massacres reached their peak over the remainder of the year before subsiding in the early months of 1966. Estimates of the number of people killed vary widely, but the final judgment of the high profile but non-binding International People’s Tribunal 65 stated that a scholarly consensus has settled on a figure of 400,000–500,000 made by Cribb in 1990.18 Suharto used the coup attempt as a pretext for a step-by-step consolidation of his position, first by neutralizing those who continued to support Sukarno as president, thus easing his own path to the presidency. He did not dare to oust Sukarno straight away as the latter was still the popular leader of Indonesia’s revolution. A power struggle ensued between the two in which Sukarno refused to ban the PKI or to step down, as demanded by ever-larger, daily student demonstrators supported by Suharto. In fact, Wanandi, a prominent leader of the student demonstrations at the time, claimed that it was the students who convinced Suharto to take power and oust Sukarno.19 By March 11, 1966 Suharto had usurped almost all of Sukarno’s authority and established himself as the de facto president. He immediately banned the PKI. Then, on March 12, 1967 the MPRS (the Indonesian legislative body) session stripped Sukarno of his remaining powers and named Suharto acting president. Thus began his thirty-two-year rule. During this creeping coup and afterwards until his death, Sukarno was effectively put under house arrest by Suharto. Once Suharto had decisively sidelined Sukarno, the floodgates of foreign aid opened up. In 1967 an Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI) was established consisting of sixteen donor countries and international organizations which would give lavish aid annually. The economy recovered surprisingly quickly, recording double-digit growth for the first time in 1968. Thereafter, the economy grew at a rate of between 5 and 7 percent annually until 198220 which made it easier for the regime to hide the massacres. In Cambodia, on April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army triumphed. During the Khmer Rouge rule that lasted until January 7, 1979 private property, personal possessions, money, leisure, socializing, marriage (except in cadre-approved cases), religion, and all personal liberties were abolished. The Khmer Rouge turned the country into a totalitarian land of tightly ruled rural communes. The nation’s cities were evacuated, hospitals emptied, schools and factories closed, money and wages abolished, monasteries emptied, and library materials scattered. Freedom of the press, movement, worship, organization, association, and discussion all completely disappeared for nearly four years.

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At first, Sihanouk became the nominal head of the Khmer Rouge regime. However, he was soon abruptly “retired” and placed under virtual house arrest, where he remained for the rest of the Khmer Rouge era. Pol Pot, the secretive real leader of the Khmer Rouge had led the party since the mid-1960s. Thus, both Sukarno and King Sihanouk were placed under house arrest by the perpetrators of the two respective massacres.

Aftermath in the framework of the cold war In Indonesia, the massacre was perpetrated by a military force receiving aid, training, and encouragement from the U.S. government. With the killings occurring at the height of Western fears over the spread of communism during the cold war, for U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, the extermination of the PKI was a momentous victory, shifting the balance of power in Southeast Asia. While the U.S. government and other Western powers were well aware of the massacres, they applauded Suharto for having saved Indonesia from communism and urged the media to downplay the massacres. The Indonesian army barred foreign journalists from entering the country after October 1965, and the few who managed to stay or slip through were confined to Jakarta. Army spokesmen assured the reporters that whatever killings were occurring represented the uncontrollable wrath of the people, not a slaughter organized by the army. For fifty years, the Suharto government and its successors maintained complete silence and inaction about the massacres, as if they had never happened. By promoting the Suharto army and government as exemplars, the United States tacitly endorsed this fifty-year conspiracy of silence and collective amnesia. More recent research findings indicate that the U.S. government, in conjunction with the UK and Australia, is believed to have played an active role in a black propaganda campaign, including clandestine radio broadcasts into the country of Indonesian military propaganda as part of a psychological warfare campaign to discredit the PKI and encourage support for the killings.21 According to the final report of the non-binding International People’s Tribunal (IPT) 1965 in The Hague, these three countries—the UK, the United States, and Australia—continued with this policy even after it had become abundantly clear that killings were taking place on a mass and indiscriminate basis. “On balance, this appears to justify the charge of complicity,” the report says.22 To this day, the U.S. government has never issued any statement condemning the atrocities. Suharto used every method of state propaganda possible to indoctrinate the Indonesian population: textbooks, monuments, street names, films,

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commemorative rituals to remember the killing of the seven officers allegedly by the PKI. During Suharto’s thirty-two years of authoritarian rule, anti-communism became the state’s religion, complete with sacred rites and rituals. As will be seen later, not even the end of the cold war changed their minds.23 Defying the collective international amnesia, two graduate students at Cornell University, Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey presented an alternative theory to Suharto’s anti-communism doctrine. As early as 1966, they wrote an internal essay (eventually published in 1971) widely known as the Cornell Paper.24 They concurred with the coup plotters that the coup was primarily an internal conflict within the army in which younger Javanese officers had acted against an older Jakarta leadership. The authors argued that the PKI, having done very well under Sukarno, had little motive to launch a coup and that its role was incidental. The Cornell Paper was banned in Indonesia. As a reaction to a leaked copy of the Cornell Paper, in 1968, the government published a book reiterating the official line that the PKI, worried about Sukarno’s health and concerned about their position should he die, had acted to seize power and establish a communist state. 25 Indonesian textbooks followed the official government line. In 2004, the textbooks were briefly changed to include other events, but this new curriculum was abandoned in 2006 following protests from the military and Islamic groups. The textbooks which mentioned the mass killings were subsequently burned.26 Suharto turned the site of the murder of the seven army officers in Jakarta on October 1, 1965 at Lubang Buaya (Crocodile Hole) into hallowed ground. In 1969, the regime erected a monument which was named the sacred Pancasila27 monument. It featured seven life-size bronze statutes of the deceased officers standing in postures of pride and defiance.28 During his thirty-two-year rule, Suharto frequently invoked the threat of communism to justify his authoritarian policies and discrimination against the descendants of victims, whom he labeled “children of the PKI” infected by “political uncleanliness.” Likely opponents of the new regime were accused of being communists, and many suffered decades of extortion, stigmatization, and exploitation as forced labor by army officers and their business partners. In all, it is thought that as many as 1.5 million were imprisoned at one stage or another.29 Those PKI members who were not killed or imprisoned went into hiding while others tried to hide their past. Today, former political prisoners from this era still face discrimination and threats. They are forced to live like pariahs and are shunned by society.

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As for China, Suharto accused China, which had close ties with the PKI of being behind the abortive coup. Unruly mobs destroyed the Chinese embassy in Jakarta as well as the offices of BAPERKI, a leftist organization of ethnic Chinese; officials and members of this organization were jailed and/or killed. Relations with China were suspended and wide ranging anti-Chinese laws aimed at the ethnic Chinese were promulgated resulting in thirty-two years of institutional racism against ethnic Chinese including a ban on Chinese schools, religion, and language and strong efforts to persuade ethnic Chinese to change their names to Indonesiansounding names.30 In January 1979, the Vietnamese army, aided by Khmer Rouge defectors, liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge regime. A People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was installed which soon gained control over 90 percent of Cambodia. However, unlike in Indonesia where Suharto was patted on the back and given lavish aid for getting rid of the PKI, the Vietnamese army was widely condemned by the West and China for having invaded Cambodia, no matter how brutal the Khmer Rouge had been. In the eyes of the West and China, the pro-Soviet communist Vietnamese were the wrong liberators. China launched an incursion into Vietnam in retaliation for its action in liberating Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge. In 1979, U.S. President Carter established diplomatic relations with the reform-minded Chinese President Deng Xiao Ping who had replaced Mao Zhe Dong. This was followed by the United Nations playing a very proactive and questionable role in handling the Cambodian tragedy. Spearheaded by the United States and China, the United Nations passed a resolution every year, from 1979 to 1991, continuing to recognize the defeated Khmer Rouge as the legitimate government of Cambodia instead of the de facto government of the PRK. To make this more palatable, in 1982, a Coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) consisting of the Khmer Rouge and two newly created resistance forces, the royalists FUNCINPEC and KPNFL (remnants of the Lon Nol regime), was established which henceforth occupied Cambodia’s seat in New York until 1991. During these years, the Soviet Union, along with its allies, Vietnam and India, voted against the resolution and continued to recognize the de facto government of the PRK. Given the international political divisions during the cold war, it is not surprising that it took more than twelve years to bring the various Cambodian factions to the negotiating table. The non-recognition of the PRK by the United Nations resulted in political ostracism and an economic embargo imposed on Cambodia by

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most Western donor governments, while the refugees in the border camps, the warrior refugees, controlled by the CGDK factions not only received lavish humanitarian aid but also arms and ammunition to fight the PRK military as well as other assistance from China and the West. 31 This collective international amnesia continued until 1991. However, unlike in Indonesia, the entire population suffered: every family had lost at least one relative, and all were affected by having lived in a country that had been turned into one huge concentration camp during the KR regime. In 1980, the PRK government reopened the notorious Tuol Sleng Khmer Rouge prison as a museum to memorialize the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime. It is estimated that between 1975 and 1979 seventeen thousand people had been imprisoned and tortured to death. Only seven survived. The PRK, isolated internationally, had to cope with the daily interaction between culprits and victims throughout the entire country. From the beginning, the PRK decreed that, while the leaders of the Khmer Rouge would be “severely punished,” clemency would be assured for rank-and-file Khmer Rouge who confessed and joined in the efforts to reconstruct the country. The PRK forbade any act of personal revenge. This act of authority was quite efficient and it seems that the toll of victims was low.32 Meanwhile, a People’s Revolutionary Tribunal to try the Pol Pot and Ieng Sary clique for the crime of genocide was convened by the PRK between August 15 and 19, 1979. Both Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were sentenced to death in absentia. The West dismissed the trial as a show by the Hanoi-backed government, but the trial satisfied the need for justice felt by an angry population which wanted to take the law into its own hands. But how did the people, especially the villagers, cope with their anger against the Khmer Rouge? Some villagers relied on Buddhist teaching that condemns the thirst for revenge and the belief in the imminent justice of karma. In addition, several commemoration mechanisms have been established over the years, at various levels. As early as 1979, the district (srok) authorities were urged to gather the human remains scattered in the fields, particularly those around the former Khmer Rouge health centers and killing fields. These remains were placed in memorials hastily built with wood and with roofs made of leaves. Eighty of these small buildings were built all over the country during the 1980s. By doing this, the new government sought to build a collective memory, by organizing collective funeral rituals and gathering material proof of the genocide. The memorials were also used during the state-sponsored ceremonies performed on Liberation Day (January 7) and on the Day of Anger (May 20). The

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Festival of the Dead (Pchhum Ben), falling on the fifteenth day of the tenth month of the Khmer calendar, re-established in the early 1990s, is a far more important funeral ceremony. This annual ceremony is a special time when the “spirits” of the dead come and visit the living.33

In search of justice in the post-cold-war era In the post-cold-war world of the 1990s, Suharto’s regime came under increasing international scrutiny. His luster as a hero who had saved Indonesia from communism faded considerably because of his aggression and the massive human rights abuses in neighboring East Timor, patterned after the 1965 massacre. On December 7, 1975, Suharto invaded and occupied East Timor in the name of anti-colonialism and anti-communism. He accused the main resistance front there, the FRETILIN, 34 of being communist. The occupation of East Timor has never been recognized by the United Nations. However, when Suharto told U.S. President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who were on an official visit to Indonesia at the time, that he was about to order an invasion, the response from Ford was only that “it would be better if it were done after we have left Indonesia” (the invasion began the next day).35 As many as 200,000 East Timorese died during the twenty-five years of Indonesian occupation. On November 12, 1991, there was universal condemnation of a massacre by Suharto’s troops of 250 East Timorese pro-independence civilian demonstrators at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, the capital of East Timor. This became known as the Santa Cruz Massacre.36 Suharto resigned on May 21, 1998, but military terror outlived him in East Timor. On August 30, 1999, in a UN-sponsored referendum, the East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia. Immediately following the referendum, anti-independence Timorese militias—organized and supported by the Indonesian military—in a pattern reminiscent of 1965– 1966, commenced a punitive scorched-earth campaign. The militias killed approximately 1,400 East Timorese and forcibly pushed 300,000 people into Indonesian West Timor as refugees. On September 20, 1999, the UN International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) was deployed to the country and brought the violence to an end. Following a UN-administered transition period, East Timor was internationally recognized as an independent nation on May 20, 2002 under the name Timor Leste. The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR)37 was an independent truth commission established in East Timor in 2001 under the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), a peacekeeping operation similar to the UN Transitional

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Authority on Cambodia (UNTAC). Thus today, citizens of Timor Leste enjoy not only independence but justice through the commission. Meanwhile, their brethren in Indonesia, the descendants and relatives of the 1965–1966 massacres are still waiting for truth and reconciliation, fifty years later. Economic mismanagement and the enormous greed of the Suharto family which amassed a huge fortune, combined with the Asian financial crisis of 1997 in which Indonesia was hit hardest, finally brought Suharto down. At daily student demonstrations demands were made for Suharto’s resignation; during this time four students were killed by security forces. For the next three days, May 13–15, soldiers out of uniform infiltrated the riots and turned the crowds against ethnic Chinese in Jakarta and other cities as the Chinese were seen as the controllers of the economy and were thus blamed for the economic crisis. Businesses and property owned by ethnic Chinese—shops, offices, malls, and residences—were destroyed or burned to the ground, and a number of their owners and family members were burned to death, along with 2,000 mostly urban poor who were caught in the fires while looting the shopping malls.38 An estimated 168 ethnic Chinese women were gang raped and sexually mutilated. 39 The United Nations Rapporteur on violence and sexual assault against females, Ms Radika Coomaraswamy, visited Indonesia and in her report condemned the sexual violence against ethnic Chinese women and women from East Timor and Aceh.40 Since the fall of Suharto on May 21, 1998, many Indonesians have rebelled against the taboo of talking about the mass killings, which they began investigating through journalism, books, and films. These efforts have been aided by the recent declassification of previously secret U.S. records as well as by memorialization activities including the production of some documentary films such as The Act of Killing (2012) and its sequel, The Look of Silence (2014), (both by Joshua Oppenheimer), and others. Secondly, every October 1, Tempo, Indonesia’s leading news magazine, devotes a special issue to some aspect of 1965, including its ground-breaking 2012 issue, “Requiem for a Massacre.” In 2001, despite the efforts of the CIA to prevent it, the United States released Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, a State Department volume that describes how U.S. officials pushed for the annihilation of the PKI, providing covert assistance and urging the Indonesian army to complete the job.41 Meanwhile, the CIA, in a written document in 1968 (declassified in May 2007), acknowledged that in terms of the number killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.42

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On September 16, 2015 more CIA documents, including, for the first time, records of what the CIA was telling President Johnson as the failed coup quickly became a pretext for mass murder. These documents provide the best evidence yet of how hard the United States was pushing for the eradication of the communists and the routing of the pro-Chinese Sukarno.43 The international academic world continued to be intrigued by the lack of unanimity on who was behind the G-30-S Movement. This confusion exists to this day. Although it is generally agreed that only five individuals led the movement and presumably understood all or most of its intricacies—Syam and Pono from the PKI, Lieutenant Colonel Untung, Colonel Latief, and Major Sujono from the army—there was disagreement on who was the leader among the five and, more importantly, who was behind this operational group: the communist party as an institution, D.N. Aidit its leader acting alone, or some ranking officers in the army. Jess Melvin from Australia recently discovered, in government archives in Aceh, Indonesian army documents confirming that the killings were organized by the army as a systematic campaign to annihilate the PKI as an intentional and centralized national campaign.44 This is a very important finding because it debunks Suharto’s official version that the killings were a spontaneous outburst of anger by the population. This position is also implicit in the executive summary that the Indonesian National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) prepared for its official report into the events of 1965–1966.45 The report recommends that the Attorney General conduct further investigations and effect a nonjudicial remedy in the form of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Their recommendations were ignored. John Roosa46 summarized the main theories about the origin of the G30-S, criticizing all of them as being flawed while presenting his own theory: 1) The G-30-S Movement was a plot by the PKI as an institution to seize state power. This is the official version of Suharto’s government.47 2) The G-30-S was an internal army affair to prevent a coup by the Council of Generals. This was the interpretation of the coup leaders supported by Benedict Anderson in the Cornell Paper.48 3) The G-30-S was essentially the work of discontented army officers but the PKI played a large supporting role. This interpretation was advanced by Harold Crouch.49 4) Suharto and other army generals organized the G-30-S through double agents (Syam, etc.). This was the interpretation of W. F

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Wertheim, a prominent Dutch scholar on Indonesia. 50 Wertheim stated that Suharto was friends with two of the main coup leaders, Untung and Latief. He also observed that KOSTRAD headquarters on Merdeka Square were not blockaded by the G-30-S troops allowing Suharto to operate freely from his KOSTRAD headquarters. In 2000, Benedict Anderson51 reexamined his Cornell Paper of 1971 because of new evidence made available by the testimony of Colonel Latief, one of the top coup leaders, who, after eleven years of solitary confinement and torture, was brought before a military tribunal in 1978. In his testimony, Col. Latief stated that on the night of September 30 he had met Suharto in a hospital where he briefed him on the impending coup to take place that same night.52 Anderson quoted Suharto’s admission twice to the American journalist Arnold Brackman and to the German magazine Der Spiegel that he had indeed met Colonel Latief in the hospital but emphasized that the two never spoke. 53 This was absurd: even though we only have Latief’s testimony that he had briefed Suharto at the hospital about the impending coup, Anderson believed that Latif was telling the truth and concluded that Suharto deliberately allowed the G-30-S Movement to start its operations and did not report on it to his superiors. Anderson concluded that “Machiavelli would have applauded.”54 John Roosa, basing his arguments on a previously unknown post mortem of the coup by General Supardjo, who was involved in the coup but not part of its core leadership,55 concluded that Aidit collaborated with Syam, the obscure head of a special bureau of the PKI, to organize the movement but that it did not involve the entire PKI.56 Based on the CIA documents mentioned above, Roosa concluded that the upper echelons of the army were waiting for an opportune moment to attack the PKI and displace Sukarno and they turned the G-30-S into their long-awaited opportunity to do just that. Like Anderson, Roosa also believed that Suharto’s efficient and quick response was the result of his foreknowledge of the movement.57 It is clear that, although a great deal of new material is now available, the G-30-S incident remains a mystery and the many different interpretations of the coup attempt depend greatly on the testimonies of suspected coup leaders, circumstantial evidence, and the various authors’ deductions. The G-30-S mystery will probably never be solved because those who know are dead or continue to refuse to talk. Until today, in Indonesia, there have been no trials, no truth and reconciliation commissions, and no memorials

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to the victims. Instead, today, many perpetrators still hold power throughout the country. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the massacres in Indonesia, between November 11 and 13, 2015, an International People’s Tribunal (IPT) 1965 for crimes against humanity was held in The Hague, the Netherlands. This is a form of hearing held by community groups outside the UN, unlike Rwanda, which is very sophisticated in its proceedings. Following the non-binding verdict reached by the IPT 1965, the then Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal and Security Affairs, Minister Luhut Pandjaitan responded by saying that Indonesia had its own legal system and no external party could dictate the way the nation should solve its problems. Consequently, IPT 65 plans to recommend to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) that the Indonesian government be considered responsible for acts of genocide during the 1965 communist purge in an attempt to press the current government into resolving the issue.58 The monumental decision of President Jokowi to sanction the “National Symposium: Dissecting the 1965 Tragedy, An Historical Approach” in April 2016 marks the first step in fulfilling his campaign promise to make the resolution of past human rights abuses a priority.59 The symposium was opened by Minister Luhut Panjaitan, a close associate of Jokowi, who started by downplaying the number murdered and ruling out an apology, thereby revealing that there is still considerable opposition in the military and in certain Islamic groups to Jokowi’s positive steps to reopen the past. The symposium allowed Indonesians for the first time to hear an alternate account from representatives of millions upon millions of survivors and family members of the victims. After the symposium, Jokowi took a second positive step by ordering the investigation of mass graves of the victims. While this is a laudable gesture, mass graves will never tell the whole story. Many of those killed were just left to rot on the spot or thrown into the rivers. During the massacres, there were harrowing stories that rivers in Java, Sumatra, and Bali were so filled with bodies that the waters turned red. It was therefore puzzling that on July 27, 2016 President Jokowi appointed retired General Wiranto, as his new coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, replacing Luhud Panjaitan. While Panjaitan had never been enthusiastic about opening up the past, the appointment of General Wiranto is considered problematic by many as he was the Commander of the Armed Forces of Indonesia from February 1998 to October 1999, a period which covers the anti-Chinese riots of May

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1998 and the extreme terror accompanying Indonesia’s withdrawal from East Timor in 1999 (see above). Going back to Cambodia, it goes without saying that during the cold war, the West, having legitimized the Khmer Rouge as the representative of Cambodia at the United Nations from 1979 to 1991, was in no hurry to put the Khmer Rouge on trial. Finally, the end of the cold war between 1989 and 1991 enabled the eleven-year stalemate to be broken. Now the Russian Federation, which had replaced the Soviet Union in 1991, cooperated fully in the Security Council’s deliberations on Cambodia resulting in the adoption by the Security Council of a Framework for a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict. This framework became the Paris Peace Agreements adopted at the Paris Peace Conferences on Cambodia in October 1991. In these agreements, a UN body was created, the UNTAC, to take control of the administration of Cambodia until it could conduct elections for a new government. After successful elections organized by UNTAC in 1993, a new government, the Royal Government of Cambodia, was formed, headed by two prime ministers, Prince Rannaridh, son of King Sihanouk and Hun Sen, former prime minister of the PRK (later the State of Cambodia). In 1998 Hun Sen would become the sole prime minister and he holds power to this day.60 The new Royal Government of Cambodia, now recognized by all countries, received massive foreign aid and foreign investment from the West and more recently from China. Like Indonesia, although twenty years later, rapid economic growth catapulted Cambodia into membership of the club of the so-called Asian miracle in East and Southeast Asia. Eventually, in June 1997, the two premiers requested assistance from the United Nations in establishing a trial to prosecute the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge. One month later there was a clash between the two factions in the government which led to Hun Sen becoming the sole prime minister in the 1998 elections. After lengthy negotiations between the government of Cambodia and the United Nations, in 2003 both sides agreed on the details of international participation. This new hybrid court is called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea.61 In 2006, the ECCC with UN assistance and international participation became fully operational, twenty-seven years after the liberation of Cambodia from Khmer Rouge rule. The hearings into the horrifying genocide have seen just five indictments and only one conviction in eight years, at a cost of some US$200 million. Case 001 against Kaing Guek Eav (Comrade Duch) saw the former chief of the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh

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convicted and he is now serving a life sentence. Case 002 originally had four defendants, the top commanders of the Khmer Rouge, but only two remain on trial: Nuon Chea, 87, known as “brother number 2” and Khieu Samphan, 82, who was the former head of state. The former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary, the third accused, died and his wife, Ieng Thirith, another senior regime figure, was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. Cases 003 and 004 have stalled—even the names of those under investigation have not been not officially revealed, although they have been widely circulated. This represents the entirety of the proceedings.

Conclusion Following World War II, the world was immediately torn apart by increasing tensions between the superpowers. The end of the war also witnessed a tidal wave of nationalism sweep the third world which the former colonial powers tried in vain to suppress. In this volatile mix, this rising nationalism brought about a major policy rift between the two superpowers with tragic consequences for third world countries. In the cold war era, truth was a tragically relative term and millions of Indonesians and Cambodians perished in two sets of horrific mass killings, among the worst in the twentieth century, which took place because U.S. officials disagreed with their leaders regarding what each believed was in their national interests. In the aftermath in Indonesia, the United States and its allies hailed the Suharto Regime, perpetrators of the massacres, as the savior of Indonesia from communism. For fifty years, the Suharto government and its successors maintained a complete silence and inaction about the massacres, as if they had never happened. The West tacitly endorsed this conspiracy of silence and Suharto was never asked by the international community to account for his alleged crimes. In Cambodia, although the Khmer Rouge regime, the perpetrators of the massacre, was defeated, the liberators, the Vietnamese army, were condemned by China and the West. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge were rewarded with the right to represent Cambodia at the United Nations, instead of being brought to trial for eleven more years. Only after the cold war ended was it possible in Cambodia to establish the long-delayed Khmer Rouge tribunal. In Indonesia, a glimmer of hope was seen in the monumental decision of President Jokowi to hold a national symposium on the 1965 tragedy in April 2016. However, only time will tell whether President Jokowi will succeed in overcoming the fifty years of opposition to bring a resolution to the massive human rights abuses of the past. Meanwhile, with the cold war over, the United States

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has done a lot to reveal the secrets of its complicity in the fifty-year conspiracy of silence about the massacres. However, opening State Department and CIA documents for scrutiny is not sufficient. The United States must issue a statement condemning the massacre. Finally, whether by design or by default, for both Cambodia and Indonesia, in coming to terms with the two massacres, national reconciliation is likely to be brought about through the demographic change of generational replacement. In 2016, Cambodia had a population of 15.5 million, of which 32.2 percent were below the age of 15, and Indonesia’s population was 260 million of which 27.3 percent were below the age of 15.

Notes 1

This article was revised by the author on April 30, 2017. Article II of the United Nations 1948 Geneva Convention on Genocide defines genocide as pertaining to ‘acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole and in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.’ Thus, the crimes committed against economic and political groups in Cambodia and Indonesia would not be prosecutable under the narrow legal definition of genocide as they fall under the category of crimes against humanity. 3 Rex Mortimer, Indonesian Communism under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959–1965 (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2006, originally 1974): 366 and 367. 4 Guy J. Parker, The Rise and Fall of the Communist Party of Indonesia, Memorandum no. RM-5753-PR prepared for the United States Air Force project, Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 1969, 10 5 Robert Cribb, “Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966.” Journal of Genocide Research 3.2 (2001): 229. Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978): 84. 6 John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006): 183. 7 David Chandler, The Tragedy of Cambodia: History, Politics, War and Revolution since 1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991): 81. 8 Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs over Cambodia,” in The Walrus, (Canada: October 2006): 62–69. 9 Ben Kiernan, “The American bombardments of Cambodia” Vietnam Generation 1 (1989): 32. 10 For a well-documented and detailed account of US involvement in Sihanouk’s ouster see George McTurnan Kahin, South East Asia: a testament (London: Routledge Curson, 2003): 279–99. 11 Norodom Sihanouk, as related to Wilfred Burchett, My War with the CIA (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). 2

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“Message and Solemn Declaration by H. E. Samdech Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodian Head of Nation” Beijing, March 23, 1970. Transcript available at Cornell University’s John Echols collection. 13 Ben Kiernan, How did Pol Pot Come to Power (London: Verso, 1985): 222. 14 Radio Republik Indonesia, “Initial Statement of Lieutenant Colonel Untung” (Text translated into English as broadcast over the Djakarta Radio at approximately 7:15 am on the morning of October 1.) in “Selected Documents Relating to the September 30 Movement and its Epilogue” in Indonesia 1 (1966): 134. 15 The story at the time was that Suharto went fishing with his son all night and escaped being killed. See John Hughes, The Indonesian Upheaval (New York: David McKay, 1967): 59. As will be seen later, in 2000 Ben Anderson debunked this fishy story because of new evidence which showed that Suharto was informed beforehand by Col. Latief, one of the coup leaders who met him in a hospital in Jakarta. See p. ? supra. 16 Pusat Penerangan Angkatan Darat, Fakta-fakta Persoalan Sekitar “Gerakan 30 September” Jakarta, Penerbitan Chusus no.1 October 5, 1965, 15–18. 17 Benedict Anderson, “How Did the Generals Die?” Indonesia 43 April (1987): 109–134. According to Anderson, autopsies on the generals found no evidence of mutilations to support these sensational claims. 18 Robert Cribb, “Introduction: Problems in the Historiography of the Killings in Indonesia.” in The Indonesian Killings of 1965–66: Studies from Java and Bali. ed. Robert Cribb. (Clayton, Victoria: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990). 1–44; International Peoples Tribunal 65, Final Report of the IPT 1965: Findings and Documents of the IPT 1965, The Hague. July 20, 2016. http://www.tribunal1965.org/final-report-of-the-ipt-1965/ [September 17, 2016]. 19 Jusuf Wanandi, Shades of Grey: A Political Memoir of Modern Indonesia 1965– 1998 (Singapore: Equinox: 2012): Chapter 2. Supersemar. 20 Hal Hill, “An Overview of Economic Development”, in Hal Hil ed. Indonesia’s New Order (St Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1994): 61. 21 David Easter, Britain and the Confrontation with Indonesia: 1960–66 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2004): 168–69; also, Marlene Millott, “Australia’s Role in the 1965–66 Communist Massacres in Indonesia,” Australian Institute of International Affairs, 30 September 2015. http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australian_outlook/australias-role-in-the1965–66-communist-massacres-in-indonesia/. [September 10, 2016]. 22 International Peoples Tribunal 65, Final Report of the IPT 1965: Findings and Documents of the IPT 1965, The Hague. July 20, 2016. Accessed September 15, 2016. http://www.tribunal1965.org/final-report-of-the-ipt-1965/ [September 20, 2016]. 23 “Suharto warns that PKI lurks” Jakarta Post, December 18, 1993. 24 Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, “A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia,” originally written as an internal document and published in 1971 in the Interim Reports Series. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1971), also widely known as the Cornell Paper.

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Nugroho Notosusanto and Ismael Saleh, “The Coup attempt of the ‘September 30 Movement’ in Indonesia,” Jakarta: Pembimbing Masa, August 1968. Indonesian: ______, Tragedi Nasional: Percobaan Kup G30S/PKI di Indonesia, Jakarta: Intermassa, 1989. 26 “Indonesia unwilling to tackle legacy of massacres,” Sydney Morning Herald. June 13, 2009. 27 Pancasila, the five principles of Indonesian nationalism was first enunciated by Sukarno in 1945. 28 John Roosa, op. cit., 7–9. 29 Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 159–60. 30 It was in this period that I had to change my name from Oei Hong Lan to Benny Widyono. 31 Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge and the United Nations in Cambodia (Lanham, Rowman Littlefield, 2008): 31. 32 Anne Yvonne Guillou, “Beyond the Khmer Rouge Tribunal: Patterns of Justice and Memory in Cambodia” French Network for Asian Studies (GIS Asia), June 2011. http://www.gis-reseau-asie.org/monthly-articles/khmer-rouge-tribunal-justicememory-cambodia-anne-guillou [September 10, 2016]. 33 Anne Miroux, op. cit. 34 Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Portuguese: Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente or FRETILIN). 35 National Security Archive at Washington University, “Ford and Kissinger Gave Green Light to Indonesia’s Invasion of East Timor, 1975: New Documents Detail Conversations with Suharto” Electronic Briefing Book No. 62 December 6, 2001. http://www.globalresearch.ca/ [September 2, 2016]. 36 Kai Thaler, “Foreshadowing Future Slaughter: From the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966 to the 1974–1999 Genocide in East Timor” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal Volume 7 | 2012 Issue 2 | Article 6. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=gsp; [June 12, 2016] see also Geoff Simons, Indonesia: The Long Oppression (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000): 66. 37 More commonly known by its Portuguese acronym CAVR: Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor Leste. 38 Jemma Purdey, Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996–1999 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2006): Chapter 4. The Climax. 39 Joint Fact Finding Team (Tim Gabungan Pencari Fakta (TGPF) “Final Report of the Joint Fact-finding Team (TGPF)” on the May 13–15, 1998 riots, Jakarta, October 23, 1998. http://semanggipeduli.com/tgpf/bab5.html [September 13, 2016] The TGPF was appointed by President Habibie who succeeded Suharto. 40 Radika Coomaraswamy, Special Rapporteur on violence and sexual assault against females, “The rapes in the series of riots: the climax of an uncivilized act of the Nation’s Life,” Geneva: United Nations, Commissions for Human Rights, Report of Semiannual session, March 1999. Proceedings.

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US State Department, Office of the historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXVI, “Indonesia. Coup and Counter Reaction: October 1965–March 1966,” 142–205. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964–68v26, [August 12, 2016]. 42 Central Intelligence Agency. Indonesia–1965: The Coup That Backfired (Langley, VA: Central Intelligence Agency, 1968): page 71 footnote. 43 Margaret Scott “The Indonesian Massacre: What Did the US Know?” The New York Review of Books, November 2, 2015; CIA; The Presidential Daily Brief, CIA Releases Roughly 2,500 Declassified President’s Daily Briefs, September 16, 2015. The reports are available at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/, [September 28 2016]. 44 Jess Melvin, “Mechanics of Mass Murder:” How the Indonesian Military Initiated and Implemented the Indonesian genocide, The Case of Aceh,” School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne. PhD thesis, 2014. 45 National Human Rights Commission (Komisi Nasional Hak Azasi Manusia or Komnas Ham, “Ringkasan Eksekutif: Hasil Penyelidikan Tim Ad Hoc Penyelidikan Pelanggaran HAM yang Berat Peristiwa 1965–1966” (2012): 196– 197. 46 John Roosa, op. cit. 47 Soeharto, My Thoughts, Words and Deeds: An Autobiography (Jakarta: Citra Lamtoro Gung Persada, 1991); Pusat Penerangan Angkatan Darat, op. cit., 15–18, Notosusanto, op.cit. 48 Benedict Anderson and Ruth McVey, 1971, op. cit. 49 Harold Crouch, op. cit. 50 W. F. Wertheim, “Suharto and the Untung coup –The missing link” Journal of Contemporary Asia I (1970): 50–57. 51 Benedict Anderson, “Petruk dadi Ratu.” In Indonesian, in the Indonesian weekly Tempo. 10–16 April 2000. For the English translation see New Left Review, May– June 2000. https://newleftreview.org/II/3/benedict-anderson-petrus-dadi-ratu, [September 10, 2016]. 52 Kolonel Abdul Latief, Soeharto Terlibat G30S—Pledoi Kol. A. Latief (Suharto was Involved in the September 30 Movement) Defence Speech of Colonel A. Latief Jakarta, Institut Studi Arus Informasi: 2000, 285. 53 Anderson 2000, 9. 54 Anderson, 2000, 8. 55 Brigadier General Supardjo, “Some factors that influenced the Defeat of September 30th Movement as Viewed from a Military Perspective,” Appendix I. John Roosa, op.cit. Roosa lends great credence to this testimony as it was written before Supardjo was arrested. 56 Roosa, op. cit., 203. 57 Roosa, op. cit., 203–234. 58 International Peoples Tribunal 65, Findings and Documents of the IPT 1965, The Hague. July 20, 2016. September 23, 2016. http://www.tribunal1965.org/,[September 30 2016].

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Hermansya, op. cit. Benny Widyono, op. cit., Chapter 2. 61 Democratic Kampuchea is the official name of the Khmer Rouge. The ECCC covers the period April 17, 1975 to January 6, 1979. 60

CHAPTER TEN VIOLENCE, ARMED CONFLICT, AND THE BURDEN OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND BEYOND DILSHAD JAFF AND LEWIS H. MARGOLIS

Introduction Millions have been affected by ongoing violent conflicts and atrocities in the Middle East and North Africa since the end of the cold war in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Currently the region is the most violent in the world with a very high death toll. The region accounts for 40 percent of the estimated global total of battle-related deaths since 1946, and for about 60 percent of all casualties since the turn of the millennium.1 In addition to recognized violent conflict, other types of violence, such as sexual and gender-based violence, affect large parts of the population. 2 In recent years, conflicts in the region, where the warring factions do not reflect conventional armies and nationalities, but rather identities such as religion, ethnicity, and sect, have seen civilians targeted more than ever.3 Deaths and visible wounds are not, however, the only, nor indeed the most prevalent, outcomes of these conflicts. Large numbers of people are experiencing profound and deep mental trauma from which consequences may yet last for generations. Globally, there is a growing interest in addressing the psychological impact of wars and other violent acts on human well-being.4 However, there are still very obvious gaps and hurdles to overcome in this regard, particularly in the Middle East. Although a fair number of articles and publications have addressed and highlighted mental health in the Middle East, the concept of mental health is still relatively new and not widely accepted in this region, despite the overwhelming need. Mental health terms rarely appear in the media, social interactions, academia, or other institutions. Most of the population is not aware of the impacts of mental health traumas. In addition, few significant steps have

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been taken to mitigate the mental health consequences of violence in the region. While primary prevention of violent conflicts in the Middle East should be a top priority, failure to address acute and chronic mental health needs will have consequences for millions of inhabitants and their children. With the health and well-being of people caught up in armed conflicts and wars at stake, more effective and courageous interventions are required. This article addresses critical themes and challenges that face the promotion of mental health and the treatment of mental illness in the violence-torn regions of the Middle East. Specifically, we report estimates of the types and frequency of the mental health consequences of violence and we describe the cultural context for mental health in the region and the challenges of moving ahead to reduce the toll of mental illness. These challenges include inadequate mental health facilities and workforce; the stigma, shame, and discrimination that may be exacerbated by the acknowledgment of mental illness; the lack of safety and security in conflict zones; and the problematic role of experts external to the region. Although the focus of the article is on mental health in the Middle East, we intend for this article to have relevance in any locale where populations are exposed to ongoing violent conflict. Our hope is that by acknowledging the magnitude of the challenges and adopting applicable approaches to mental health problems, local and global key players will be able to identify and confront impediments and design and implement innovative solutions.

Mental health consequences of armed conflicts and wars The World Health Organization (WHO)5 has conceptualized mental health as “a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.” Armed conflicts and wars have a number of well-documented mental health consequences, most often described in military personnel. Deployment to combat zones affects mental health status, most commonly the risk of suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. 6 A century ago, the unprecedented scale and suffering experienced by combatants during World War I resulted in psychiatric casualties suffering from what became known as shell shock, which accounted for a quarter of combat-related hospital admissions.7 The WHO 8 estimated that, in armed conflicts throughout the world, “10 percent of the people who experience traumatic events will have

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serious mental health problems and another 10 percent will develop behaviour that will hinder their ability to function effectively. The most common conditions are depression, anxiety and psychosomatic problems such as insomnia, or back and stomach aches.” With the current armed conflicts in the Middle East, where fighting takes place in homes, streets, schools, other public service facilities, even in holy places, nowhere is safe and the populations of the region are caught up in the midst of brutal, diverse, armed groups, not respecting any of the international laws governing warfare or humanitarian needs. Over 80 percent of the population of the twenty-two countries of the Eastern Mediterranean region of the WHO, either is in a conflict situation or has experienced such a situation in the last quarter century. 9 These extraordinary armed conflicts are having profound negative impacts and mental health consequences in the populations. Symptoms may include sleeplessness, nightmares, fear, flashbacks, nervousness, anger, and aggressiveness. 10 Anxiety, depression, PTSD, substance abuse, suicide, and domestic and sexual violence are among the mental disorders and psychological consequences in the populations associated with armed conflicts. Applying the WHO estimates of 20 percent prevalence of trauma-related diagnoses and assorted symptoms to the populations of Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, for example, means that 7.5 million, 5.5 million, and 1.3 million people, respectively, may face mental health problems produced by armed conflict. Only a small portion of conflict-related literature on mental health addresses long-term outcomes, six or more years after conflicts, and studies of very long-term outcomes, ten to fifteen or more years, are even scarcer. Research conducted with survivors from World War II, 11 the Holocaust, 12 the Kurdish genocide, 13 and the Rwandan genocide 14 has indicated that suffering continues decades after crises have ended. One study in Indonesia found that exposure to renewed violence in people previously exposed to prolonged conflict was associated with a sevenfold increase in PTSD and a threefold increase in severe distress at follow-up compared with baseline.15 A small number of studies on long-term consequences in the Middle East are based on specific populations in the region. In Iraq, for example, there are a few studies on the impact of the previous and current armed conflicts on mental health. In 2000, a study of forty-five Iraqi Kurdish families reported that PTSD was present in 87 percent of children and 60 percent of their caregivers. In another study, Othman16 reports that the rate of suicide among Iraqi youth and women, especially in Iraqi Kurdistan, has increased dramatically since the 1980s. A review of studies on

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adolescents in Lebanon during times of intense armed conflict found a high prevalence of PTSD among the young people associated with various traumas like the destruction of homes, bereavement, and economic hardship.17 A study in Israel found that 76.7 percent of people exposed to war-related trauma had at least one traumatic stress-related symptom, while 9.4 percent met the criteria for acute stress disorder. 18 A similar study by the German Federal Chamber of Psychotherapists in 2015 estimated that half of the Syrian refugees in Germany have mental health problems, with 70 percent having witnessed violence and 50 percent having been victims of violence. 19 These findings suggest that major mental illnesses are prevalent among the populations of this region that has experienced so much mass violence, torture, and trauma due to armed conflicts. Even though they are generally non-combatants, in many aspects women are disproportionately affected, with health conditions exacerbated by past and current traumatic stressors.20 In such circumstances, women face extreme hardship and struggle to attend to all the daily responsibilities for ensuring the survival of their families. 21 Loss and destruction of homes, loss of male heads of households and relatives to death or captivity, displacement and exposure to the threat of sexual abuse and rape leave women, especially mothers, at high risk of depression and mental health problems. Many women take the main responsibility for caregiving in the family, with the destiny of their husbands unknown and new and unfamiliar duties placed on them. Women’s capacity to cope with these new extreme challenges and to attend to their family needs may diminish their ability to consider their own needs, especially if they become widows. Studies have shown higher mental health problems in young women in crises, even if young men are equally or more exposed to trauma.22 At least half of all children exposed to a traumatic event are expected to develop significant neuropsychiatric disorders.23 A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Somalia found high proportions of psychological effects from the prolonged conflict.24 In a study of children in camps for displaced people in southern Darfur, 75 percent of children met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, and 38 percent had depression.25 The Gaza Community Mental Health Programme has reported that among children aged between ten and nineteen, 32.7 percent suffered from PTSD symptoms requiring psychological intervention. 26 In refugee children in high-income countries, high prevalence rates of mental disorders have also been found. In a Canadian study of 203 children, 21 percent of refugees had psychiatric diagnoses compared to 11 percent of locals. 27 Findings

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from an analysis by the International Medical Corps (IMC) showed that 54 percent of the Syrian refugees and displaced persons had severe emotional disorders and 26.6 percent of children faced intellectual and developmental challenges.28 In addition, traumatic experiences in childhood increase the risk of developing one or more of a wide variety of neuropsychiatric symptoms in adolescence and adulthood. Furthermore, there is a risk of transgenerational consequences resulting from PTSD and other mental health disorders associated with armed conflicts. 29 Children of fathers diagnosed with PTSD, particularly in conflict zones, showed significantly greater internalized and externalized behavioral problems, somatic complaints, and higher scores of depression and anxiety compared to children of veterans who did not present with any mental disorder.30, 31, 32, 33

In addition to the consequences of violent conflict on acute and chronic mental illness per se, it is important to note that mental illnesses and disorders may have significant negative impacts on post-conflict reconciliation. Using interviews with fourteen experts on mental health and reconciliation in Lebanon, Königstein (2013)34 has argued that war trauma made reconciliation very challenging. The study hypothesized that “poor mental health decreases the ability of Lebanese society to engage in reconciliation on the community, political and non-governmental organizations (NGO) level by diminishing cognitive skills, trust and shared responsibility.” These diminished capacities impede the promotion of dialogue essential for successful post-conflict reconciliation. Further, people affected by wars and conflicts may be trapped in the victim role, with limited social interaction, and might develop strong feelings of anger and plans for, if not acts of, vengeance. It is evident that the ongoing armed conflicts in the Middle East are affecting the mental well-being of a large portion of the populations in the region, especially vulnerable groups like women and children. As these conflicts sadly continue, the need for attention to the short- and long-term consequences of this trauma will increase.

Cultural forces and the ecology of mental health In order to thoughtfully address challenges to mental health created by armed conflict, it is important to describe, if only briefly, cultural themes that provide a context for approaches to mental health and illness. We acknowledge at the outset that it is unwise to characterize a vast geographic area, inhabited by multiple peoples with multi-faceted histories and customs with broad cultural strokes. That said, understandings of

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mental health and illness, and motivations to prevent and seek treatment occur within cultural contexts and are influenced by cultural forces and themes, so we offer some basic thoughts, before proceeding to the challenges. The social structures of many cultures in the Middle East extend from large to small units: confederations, tribes, clans, and extended families.35 Concepts of honor and shame flow through Middle Eastern culture, where peoples must act honorably to uphold and protect their families and tribes, clans, or geographical regions. These concepts of honor and shame can be traced back to the early Bedouin code of practice, even before the arrival of Islam. The code is still in existence today and it affects not only individual actions, but those of whole nations in the region.36 Cradle to the world’s oldest civilizations, it is important to underscore that the Middle East is a multicultural region, not a homogeneous culture. A wide diversity of religions, beliefs, races, ethnicities, cultures, and political agendas exist in the region. The religions commonly practiced in this region, in addition to the majority Islam, include Christianity, Judaism, and numerous other minority religions like the Bahá’í Faith, Yarsanism, Yazidism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, Druze, and Shabakism. 37 Islam itself has two main branches, Sunni and Shiite. The majority of the Muslim population follows the Sunni tradition of Islam, and approximately 10–15 percent of all Muslims follow the Shiite tradition.38 Sunni Islam has fewer prominent sectarian divisions than Shiite Islam. Shiite sects include Twelver Shiism, Ismaili or Sevener Shiism, Zaydis Alawites, and Druze. Despite these sectarian divisions both Sunni and Shiite share a similar understanding of basic Islamic beliefs. There are multiple, different ethnic groups in the region as well, including Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Assyrians, Circassians, Coptic Christians, Greeks, Maronites, and many other ethnic and ethno-religious groups forming significant minorities.39 All of the derivatives play out in the national boundaries which were created after World War I. Gender roles are generally narrowly defined by cultural and religious custom. Women’s social status is strongly dependent upon marriage and children. The protection of honor is important because the loss of honor can reflect not only on a woman, but also on her extended family and beyond. For all family members, including women, it is expected that individuals will sacrifice their own needs and welfare for the sake of the family unit.40, 41 Women often lack autonomy over their own decisions and they are generally dependent on their husbands, fathers, brothers, and other male relatives.42

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There are urban–rural differences and socio-economic inequalities in the region. According to the World Bank (2013),43 the urban population grew fourfold from 1970 to 2010 and is expected to double again by 2050, from 199 million to nearly 400 million. This urbanization has been driven by several factors like economic development, migration from rural areas, and, more recently, massive population displacements due to armed conflicts and political upheavals. 44 Socio-economic disparities were the main trigger of the Arab Spring in 2011, when people across the Middle East and North Africa took to the streets to protest.45

Defining the challenges to the promotion of mental health and treatment of mental illness Historians have suggested that the first psychiatric hospitals in history were built in the Middle East, in Baghdad in 705 CE, Cairo in 800 CE and Damascus in 1270 CE.46 Yet, in spite of these ancient roots, the region is confronted by serious challenges regarding mental health. There are high levels of skepticism toward mental health, and numerous barriers stand in the way of policies and strategies being implemented on the ground. 47 Regional prevention and awareness campaigns are minimal, with minor initiatives taking place in only a few countries. Lack of awareness, lack of documentation, no computerization of medical records, cultural barriers, interruption of mental health interventions and research into basic needs and the general situation, and other technical difficulties present problems. The unprecedented pattern shift in the nature of armed conflicts in the region has complicated and increased the intensity of these challenges. Even in the absence of armed conflicts, political upheavals in the region have also led to inadequate public health services including those relating to mental health. The Arab Spring, which began in December 2010 and continues to this day in the Middle East, is a case in point. Libya, for example, represents a post-Arab Spring society with enormous health and mental health problems and needs, but with a total lack of mental health care provider power.48 Those concerned with mental health and illness are behooved to recognize and address many challenges facing mental health in the Middle East.

Inadequate mental health facilities and workforce In the Middle East, mental health facilities and workforce are inadequate.49 The mental health needs of the region in the wake of the Arab Spring are profound, but there is an almost total lack of mental health care.50 To put

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the workforce needs in perspective, in the United States there are 1.2 psychiatrists per 10,000 people; no country in the Middle East has more than 0.5. 51 According to Doctors without Borders (Médicins sans Frontières, MSF), there are only four psychiatrists for every one million residents in Iraq, and even fewer professionals are trained in related mental health professions such as psychological counseling.52 In Jordan, there are a total of thirty-one psychiatrists and twenty-four psychologists who are hospital-based and provide mental health care for a population of more than nine million, including refugees from Palestine, Syria, and Iraq.53 In Syria, there were only about seventy psychiatrists for the twenty-three million Syrians before the war and now most have fled. Libya, Morocco, Sudan, and Yemen have fewer than 0.5 psychiatrists per 100,000 persons. The number of psychiatric nurses ranges from 23 per 100,000 population in Bahrain and 22.5 per 100,000 in the Gulf Emirates to 0.09 per 100,000 in Yemen and, reportedly, just 0.03 per 100,000 in Somalia.54 In recent armed conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, health professionals and facilities have frequently come under direct attack by the parties involved, in direct violation of International Humanitarian Law.55 In 1859, Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman, moved by the suffering of thousands of wounded and dying victims, who lay unattended on the Solferino battlefield, made a plea for the victims of war.56 This led to the birth of the International Humanitarian Law and its later additional protocols, which are designed to protect civilians and medical missions during times of armed conflicts.57 The disintegration of the International Humanitarian Law has led to the medical ‘brain drain’ that exacerbates already devastated health services. In Iraq, for example, 70 percent of the country’s fully qualified physicians left the country to seek asylum in other countries due to ongoing conflicts; 2,000 have been murdered, and many more have been kidnapped, threatened, and injured.58 In Syria, in five years of conflict, at least 610 medical personnel have been killed, and according to Physicians for Human Rights (2015), there have been 233 deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on 183 medical facilities. 59 It is important to mention that all these figures are underestimates.

Stigma, shame, and discrimination Stigma, shame, and discrimination because of mental illness are major obstacles to the development of the mental health field. In strong stigma and honor cultures, it is challenging to address mental health effectively. A systematic review of twenty-two psychosocial and mental health studies in the Middle East reported many cultural barriers to treatment and service

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implementation.60 The review noted prominently: limited public awareness of mental illness; stigma; and differences in the beliefs about the causes of mental illness. Popular cultural beliefs in the region have traditionally viewed mental illness as a punishment from God, the result of possession by evil spirits (Jinn), the effects of the “evil eye,” or the effects of evil in objects that are transferred into the individual. Family and reputation in the community are priorities, so there is a tendency to consider mental health problems as private family matters rather than concerns that require intervention. Stigma is the main barrier to seeking out mental health care so people utilizing any available services and their families risk further discrimination. 61 In addition, the shame of expressing mental health problems and seeking care may reflect not only on oneself, but also on the entire family and community. In societies where women are generally not expected to function with much autonomy outside their homes and families, they likely face enormous stresses when these familiar environments are damaged or even destroyed. Women and girls, increasingly at risk of displacement, face many serious problems during and after armed conflicts, resulting in another barrier to mental health stemming from their limited experience in seeking assets in the broader community. Women and children, who make up 80 percent of Jordan’s Syrian refugee population, for example, are vulnerable to sexual, physical, and psychological abuse. 62 In Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, under-reporting of violence against women and girls, inefficient data collection and management, stigmatization of genderbased violence (GBV) survivors, and inadequate service provision for survivors make it impossible to obtain precise information on the prevalence of GBV.63 Gender bias limits women’s ability to seek mental health care, because the stigma associated with it can damage marital prospects, lead to divorce, and diminish their social status. Literature addressing stigma and mental health is rare. According to Swelim et al. (2015), the only evidence-based stigma-reduction program undertaken in the whole Middle East region was implemented in Turkey. This educational program which targeted undergraduate medical students included a two-hour lecture about the causes of schizophrenia, the screening of a film that depicts an individual with the disease, and contact with a person who has the disease. 64 This intervention increased knowledge and positive attitudes about the etiology and management of this disease, as well as lowered social distance scores between the students and individuals with schizophrenia. Nabi65 has suggested that, in addition to the consequences of violent conflict, pre- and post-migration factors are potential sources of a range of

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mental health problems for immigrants in resettlement countries. A wide variety of psychological signs and symptoms, and mental health problems have been documented in populations from the Middle East outside the region, due both to a traumatic past and stress during resettlement. Shame was reported to be the main barrier to seeking mental health care for people from the region living abroad.66 For example, in the United States, a study found that 70 percent of Arab women report that seeking mental health services would be a major source of shame for them. In the United Kingdom, Muslims of South Asian origin reported, more than nonMuslims, that shame prevented them from seeking services. 67 Concerns about confidentiality in seeking mental health care were reported as well.68 In Australia, a study with thirty-five individuals from Arab communities found that stigma and shame were the most significant barriers to accessing mental health services due to the fear of disclosing personal and family issues to outsiders.69

Safety and security in conflict zones Humanitarian crises including armed conflicts can present significant access problems. Barriers include the absence of: physical access to populations or infrastructures; adequate security; time to assess adequately and sensitively the population in life-threatening situations; coherent social structures resulting in displaced populations; and, of course, funding.70, 71 Unfortunately, political and religious authorities may limit the access of willing providers on the bases of religious, ethnic, or national identity. Sadly, the targeting of humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and aid workers is increasing. The bombing of the United Nations/Syrian Arab Red Crescent humanitarian aid convoy in Syria in September 2016, in which many civilians and humanitarians were killed and tons of food and medical supplies destroyed, is just one recent example. 72 These factors obviously prevent professionals from designing, implementing, and monitoring effective mental health interventions, and limit the ability of affected populations to express their needs and receive services. Due to the complex conflicts in the Middle East, many organizations are using remote management of their projects and interventions. In this mode, agencies are delegating the delivery of project activities to existing structures and populations such as local NGOs, local networks, or village committees which act as a bridge between the affected population and the agencies. This remote management poses challenges which include but are not limited to: less nuanced understanding of local changing environments; slower reactions to feedback and complaints from the populations and

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staff; diminished participation and two-way communication throughout implementation; and the risk associated with involving affected populations, where government or local political structures might be hindering access. In Iraq, for example, the situation does not allow field visits to carry out epidemiological mental health needs assessments or interventions as many health workers, as well as journalists and other professionals, have lost their lives in the country. The undermining of humanitarian principles creates serious impediments to access, acceptance, and security for humanitarian operations. Many organizations and aid agencies have not been adhering to the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality in these complex environments.73 According to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), some aid agencies and organizations have acquiesced to the donor governments’ priorities instead of responding to the full extent of the need. Aid organizations may not advocate strongly enough for humanitarian principles when challenged by UN political actors and local authorities. Estimates indicate that half of the forty million internally displaced peoples (IDPs) globally are in the Middle East.74 Most are living within inaccessible conflict zones where it is very challenging to visit and this greatly impedes service professionals from fulfilling their duties and responsibilities. Refugee camps in the region are usually in fragile or unstable countries where their societies are racially/ethnically divided, suffering from economic hardships, going through political crises, have unsafe environments, and are often headed by authoritarian powers. Even refugee camps across borders, however, are not always stable or secure but can sometimes come under attack, another factor interrupting mental health interventions.75

The problematic role of external professionals The role of external professionals is problematic for two reasons. The first relates to the origins and consequent applicability of previously developed models of mental health rescue and relief. The second stems from the complexity of collaboration among international agencies, especially in stressful and chaotic settings such as armed conflicts. The practices of disaster and war relief have largely evolved in Western countries.76 As a consequence, most of the mental health services conducted in conflict settings are designed and executed by investigators and institutions from outside the area of many of the current conflicts and disasters. To date, much of the research into the mental health of waraffected civilians has focused on refugees who have resettled in high-

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income host countries.77 As more global professionals, including foundations and governments, work to support people in need in countries where systems have collapsed and resources are limited, acknowledgment of the origins of these practices is a necessary first step. In 2007, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), a forum for coordination, policy development, and decision-making among the key UN and non-UN humanitarian partners, published standardized guidelines for the provision of mental health services during humanitarian crises.78 Aggarwal (2011) has criticized the guidelines for their lack of a clear distinction between “mental health” on the one hand, and “psychosocial support” on the other. These two concepts denote a range of needs and potential strategies that may not align, especially in the diverse cultures of the Middle East. He further argues that the guidelines lack clarity about translational difficulties in cultures like the Middle East, where there is limited experience with mental health and psychosocial activities to begin with.79 A review by Amawi et al. (2014) shows that the focus on culture and culture-based care in mental health is not well-developed in the published literature in the Middle East. A number of authors have noted the paucity of studies that have used tools and measures culturally validated or developed in the region.80, 81, 82, 83 Additional impediments include Western models often driving hypotheses about mental health services, and beliefs about causality and treatment.84 The systematic review by Gearing et al. (2013) underscored the need for culturally appropriate treatment and services noting the awkwardness stemming from the use of translators, and inadequate cultural understanding by providers of the multiple and varied ways that symptoms may be expressed. Perhaps these methodological limitations explain, at least partially, why there are few large-scale community studies and well-developed intervention studies. 85 The enormous heterogeneity in the region raises yet more additional significant methodological challenges in studying the effects of mass trauma on mental health. 86 Finally, it is worth noting that Western-based psychological interventions, not grounded in an understanding of local mechanisms and customs, are likely to be not only less effective, but also unsustainable.87 The second problem associated with external professionals arises from the diverse landscape of agencies and institutions involved in these settings, because each has their own priorities and implementation models. The IASC guidelines, noted above, emphasize that implementing the tools and materials requires extensive collaboration among various humanitarian actors. Collaboration and coordination among large, complex organizations

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are challenging under the best of circumstances, but are all the more so in the complex, rapidly changing, unsafe settings of armed conflict. These actors may be reluctant to share information and work collectively, as there is neither consistency in relationships nor are there reliable mechanisms to coordinate efforts. The intricate, challenging settings, inadequate understanding of realities on the ground, highly competitive funding environments, and individualized internal bureaucratic systems are additional impediments to effective mental health interventions.

Discussion Mass violence, large numbers of civilian casualties, displacement and destruction of schools, hospitals and other public service facilities, including holy places, are distressingly characteristics of the recent armed conflicts in the Middle East. No setting is protected from today’s brutal conflicts. At the 2005 World Summit to address protection of civilians in mass violence and conflicts, all nations acknowledged their responsibility and accountability, and yet civilians continue to be subjected to acts of horrifying brutality in the Middle East.88 The link between armed conflicts and mental illness has been well described. The primary prevention of mental illness would best be served, of course, by amelioration of the political, social, and religious factors that fuel these conflicts. Until peace comes to the region, however, rescue, relief, and rehabilitation efforts should be cognizant of the impacts of conflict on mental health, even as medical, surgical, and other critically urgent needs are addressed. Unfortunately, even beyond immediate needs, mental health has not been at the epicenter of post-conflict rehabilitation and reconciliation. We have described four challenges to the implementation of strategies to begin to address mental health and illness stemming from widespread conflict. Even prior to the recent upheavals, the mental health workforce in the Middle East has been sparse. The violence has further weakened the capacity to respond, because many professionals have fled and others, tragically, have been slaughtered. A second challenge is that shame and stigma are substantial barriers to seeking and utilizing services, should such services be available. In shocking distortions of the humanitarian rules of war established over 150 years ago, the safety and security of professionals and other aid workers cannot be assured. Consequently, the capacity of governments and aid agencies to get assistance to those in need is severely handicapped. A fourth challenge arises from the fact that most global assistance is guided by professional and cultural practices that are

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defined and developed outside the region. The important role of community and religious leaders, individuals who are very influential in shaping social norms, cannot be overestimated in supporting mental health interventions. The first three challenges contribute to the paucity of interventions that reflect local and regional cultural competence or humility. External professionals, therefore, should be cognizant of how their models do and, especially, do not actually address the needs for mental health care. There have been a number of global initiatives over the last two decades to address mental health. In 2001, for the first time, the WHO published a report focused on mental health.89 Subsequent reports have included: Ɣ WHO Mental Health Policy and Service Guidance Package (2003– 2005) (Patel & Thornicroft, 2009)90 Ɣ WHO Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP) (2008) (Patel & Thornicroft, 2009) Ɣ PLoS Medicine series on Packages of Care for Global Mental Health (Patel & Thornicroft, 2009) Ɣ The Lancet series on Global Mental Health (2007 and 2011) (Chisholm et al., 2007; Patel, Boyce, Collins, Saxena, & Horton, 2011)91, 92 Ɣ The Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health (Collins et al., 2011)93 Mackenzie & Kesner (2016)94 have noted the important step that the UN took in 2015 to include mental health in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Goal 3 states “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”95 but mental health is just one part of a target which calls for the reduction by one third of preventable mortality from noncommunicable diseases through prevention and treatment and the promotion of mental health and well-being. Although the target to promote mental health is praiseworthy, it is just one component of one of many targets, which may diminish the attention it receives and the allocation of the necessary resources. It is noteworthy that the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) has made an effort to address the consequences of war and mass violence in different regions, including the Middle East. In Cairo in 2003, the meeting of fifteen WPA member societies, including the two largest (the American Psychiatric Association and the Royal College of Psychiatrists from the United Kingdom), and two Zonal Representatives from the Middle East

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and North Africa, concluded with many comprehensive recommendations. In 2005, the WPA issued the Cairo Declaration on Mass Violence and Mental Health with a set of recommendations stemming from the 2003 meeting. For example, the declaration underlines that, unless properly addressed, the psychosocial consequences of violence will negatively affect future generations and that psychiatry and behavioral sciences can contribute to the understanding of the complex roots of violence and to the designing of interventions that can prevent violence or alleviate its consequences. Based on the declaration, a WPA taskforce on Violence and Mental Health was established. The main objectives of the taskforce were to raise awareness among psychiatrists globally of the magnitude and distractive effects of violence and armed conflicts on the population, and to implement the recommendations of the Cairo Declaration. Despite these efforts, there is enormous need for more awareness, programs, and research around the issue of mental health for populations experiencing armed conflicts and political upheavals, especially the current complex widespread conflicts in the Middle East. Promoting mental health and preventing mental illness among refugees from the Middle East in high-income countries where they are resettled are urgent. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by the end of 2015, there were 746,800 refugees in the Americas and 4,391,400 in Europe with many of them coming from the Middle East and North Africa region (UNHCR, 2016).96 To address the mental health needs of these refugees who escaped from brutal wars and atrocities, local authorities should promote awareness among primary care providers and identify and support specialists in mental health, not to mention seek resources to provide the services that are needed. Since 2011, US$79.3 million have been made available by the three largest funders of mental health research in low- and middle-income countries (Grand Challenges Canada, the Department for International Development in the UK, and the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States).97 Although these new resources constitute an increase in the attention given to mental health, the extent and severity of the problem of mental illness associated with violent conflict require greater expenditure. Concerned professionals, authorities, and agencies focusing on the Middle East should bear in mind that, with the lack of mental health facilities and workforce, the role of stigma and shame, unsafe and unsecure settings, and the problematic role of external experts, the need for rigorous research on mental health needs is substantial.

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Conclusion Improving mental health should continue to be an important global priority. Calls to action should first realistically acknowledge the challenges to promoting mental health posed by armed conflicts, especially those which increasingly ignore basic humanitarian laws of war. Building on an understanding of these challenges may increase the possibility that needs assessments, the provision of services, and even research can advance the mental and physical well-being of populations affected by armed conflicts in the Middle East and beyond.

Notes 1

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Amra Zalihiü, Dino Zalihiü, and Gordana Piviü. Influence of post-traumatic stress disorder of the fathers on other family members. Bosnian Journal of Basic Medical Sciences 8 (2008): 20–26. 34 Heiko Fabian Königstein. The influence of mental health on reconciliation in post-war Lebanon. An explorative field based study using grounded theory research. Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) 3 (2013): 1–48. 35 Alean AlǦKrenawi. Family therapy with a multiparental/multispousal family. Fam Process 37 (1998): 65–81. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1545–5300.1998.00065.x. 36 Tommy Weir. (2013). Right and wrong or honour and shame in Middle East society? The National. Retrieved from http://www.thenational.ae/business/industry-insights/the-life/right-and-wrong-orhonour-and-shame-in-middle-east-society. 37 Ahmed M Sewilam, Annie MM Watson, Ahmed M Kassem, Sue Clifton, Margaret C McDonald, Rebecca Lipski, Smita Deshpande, Hader Mansour, and Vishwajit L Nimgaonkar. Suggested avenues to reduce the stigma of mental illness in the Middle East. Int J Soc Psychiatry 61 (2015): 111–20. http://doi.org/10.1177/0020764014537234. 38 Christopher Blanchard (2009). Islam: Sunnis and Shiites. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved from http://fas.org/irp/crs/RS21745.pdf. 39 Mordechai Nisan. Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and SelfExpression (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2002). 40 Saida Douki Dedieu, F Nacef, A Belhadj, A Bouasker, and R Ghachem. Violence against women in Arab and Islamic countries. Archives of Women’s Mental Health 6 (2003): 165–71. http://doi.org/10.1007/s00737–003–0170-x. 41 Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia. The incidence of wife abuse and battering and some socioeconomic correlates as revealed by two national surveys in Palestinian society. Journal of Family Violence 15 (2000): 347–74. 42 Lindsay Markle. Women and Economic Development in the Middle East and North Africa. Student Papers in Public Policy 1 (2013): 1–7. Retrieved from http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=sppp. 43 World Bank. (2013). Urban population. World Development. Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL/countries. 44 Mona Serageldin, François Vigier, Maren Larsen, Barbara Summers, and Sheelah Gobar. Urban Migration Trends in the Middle East and North Africa Region and the Challenge of Conflict-Induced Displacement. World Migration Report. International Organization for Migration (IOM), (December), 1–45. Retrieved from https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/our_work/ICP/MPR/WMR-2015Background-Paper-MSerageldin-FVigier-MLarsen.pdf. 45 Jimmy Chang. The Arab Spring Moment. Rockefeller & Co., (June), 1–4. Retrieved from http://www.rockco.com/documents/FG/rockefeller/commentary/546626_June_201 6_Monthly_Market_Review_final_Version_A.pdf.

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Robin E Gearing, Craig S Schwalbe, Michael J MacKenzie, Kathryne B Brewer, Rawan W Ibrahim, Hmoud S Olimat, Sahar S Al-Makhamreh, Irfan Mian, and Alean Al-Krenawi. Adaptation and translation of mental health interventions in Middle Eastern Arab countries: a systematic review of barriers to and strategies for effective treatment implementation. The International Journal of Social Psychiatry 59 (2013): 671–81. http://doi.org/10.1177/0020764012452349. 61 Alean Al-Krenawi, John R. Graham, Yasmin Z. Dean, and Nada Eltaiba. Crossnational study of attitudes towards seeking professional help: Jordan, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Arabs in Israel. The International Journal of Social Psychiatry 50 (2004): 102–14. http://doi.org/10.1177/0020764004040957. 62 United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). Gender-based violence and child protection among Syrian refugees in Jordan, with a focus on early marriage: Inter-agency assessment, (July), 1–92. Retrieved from http://jordan.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2013/ 7/gender-based-violence-and-child-protection-amongsyrian-refugees-injordan#view. 63 United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). (2014). We just keep silent. Gender-based violence amongst Syrian refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, (April), 1–90. Retrieved from http://uniraq.org/images/documents/We%20Just%20Keep%20Silent%20final%20 English.pdf. 64 Abdurrahman Altindag, Medaim Yanik, Alp Ucok, Koksal Alptekin, and Mustafa Ozkan, M. Effects of an antistigma program on medical students’ attitudes towards people with schizophrenia. Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 60 (2006): 283–288. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1440–1819.2006.01503.x. 65 Fatahi Nabi. The Impact of the Migration on Psychosocial Well-Being: A Study of Kurdish Refugees in Resettlement Country. J Community Med Health Educ. 4 (2014): 273. doi:10.4172/2161–0711.1000273. 66 Wahiba Abu-Ras. Barriers to services for Arab immigrant battered women in a Detroit suburb. Journal of Social Work Research and Evaluation 4 (2003): 49–65. Retrieved from http://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/36232075/Barriers_to_Service s_for_Arab_Immigrant.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&E xpires=1476806489&Signature=XATozADhb7u7u4S2EJ1Ji56L2tY%3D&respons e-contentdisposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DBarriers_to_Services_for_Arab_Immigra nt.pdf. 67 Aneela Pilkington, Rachel Maria Msetfi, and Ruth Watson. Factors affecting intention to access psychological services amongst British Muslims of South Asian origin. Mental Health, Religion and Culture 15 (2012): 1–22. doi:10.1080/13674676.2010.545947. 68 Assel Hamid and Adrian Furnham. Factors affecting attitude towards seeking professional help for mental illness: a UK Arab perspective. Mental Health, Religion & Culture 16(2013): 741–58. http://doi.org/10.1080/13674676.2012.718753.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Introduction Anderson, Mary B. and Marshall Wallace. Opting Out of War: Strategies to Prevent Violent Conflict. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2012. Blustein, Jeffrey. Forgiveness and Remembrance: Remembering Wrongdoing in Personal and Public Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Casey, Edward. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Kovras, Iosif. Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional Justice: The Families of the Disappeared. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Shestack, Jerome J. “The Philosophic Foundations of Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998): 215–24. Teitel, Ruti G. Transitional Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Chapter One: Bangladesh: Troubling Trends in the Politics of Justice Ahmed, Saeed. “Yet Another Bangladeshi Blogger Hacked to Death.” CNN. Accessed May 13, 2015. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/12/asia/bangladesh-blogger-killed/. Ahsan, Zayadul. “Glimpses into Jihadi Minds.” Daily Star. August 2, 2016. Bangladesh Awami League’s website. /index.php/en/party/history/81-astep-towards-secularization. “Bangladesh Elections: the ‘Battling Begums.’” Al Jazeera. January 4, 2014. “Bangladesh LGBT editor hacked to death.” BBC News. April, 2016.

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“Bangladeshi Secular Publisher Hacked to Death.” BBC News. October 13, 2015. Bass, Gary. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. New Delhi: Random House, 2013. Bergman, David. “Bangladesh Court Upholds Islam as Religion of the State.” Al Jazeera. March 28, 2016. Bergman, David. “Fair Comment on Judicial Proceedings.” Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal weblog. Accessed February 19, 2014. http://bangladeshwarcrimes.blogspot.com/2014/01/fair-comment-onjudicial-proceedings.html. Bergman, David. “Statement of Concern from Scholars, Writers and Activists Regarding Tribunal’s Contempt Judgment.” Accessed December 19, 2014. http://ww.sacw.net/article10212.html. Chopra, Surabhi. “The International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh: Silencing Fair Comment.” Journal of Genocide Research. February 2, 2015. Davis, Morris. “Bangladesh War Crimes Tribunal: A Near Justice Experience.” Crimes of War blog. Accessed July, 2011. http://www.crimesofwar.org/commentary/bangladesh-war-crimestribunal-a-near-justice-experience/. D’Costa, Bina and Sara Hossain. “Redress for Sexual Violence Before the ICT in Bangladesh: Lessons from History and Hopes for the Future.” Criminal Law Forum 21 (2010): 331–38. Detsch, Jack. “One Year after Election, Violence Persists in Bangladesh.” The Guardian. Accessed February, 2015. http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/one-year-after-election-violencepersists-in-bangladesh/. “Dhaka Café Attack ends with 20 hostages among the Dead.” The Guardian. July 3, 2016. “Dhaka Raid: Who was militant Shazad?” Daily Star. July 28, 2016. “Five Years, 17 Verdicts.” The Daily Star. March 25, 2015, modified February 20, 2016. Hossain, Shakhawat. “Remembering the Two Unsung Heroes Who Fought for LGBT Rights in Bangladesh.” The Wire. October 25, 2016. Huskey, Kristine. “The International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh, Will Justice Prevail?” Crimes of War blogspot. http://www.crimesofwar.org/commentary/the-international-crimestribunal-in-bangladesh-will-justice-prevail/. “IS Sent Foot Soldiers to Bangladesh.” Daily Star. Accessed August 4, 2016. http://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/sent-foot-soldiers-bangladesh1264252.

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Chapter Two: The Armenian Holocaust and International Law Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2006. Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Dadrian, Vahakn. “Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications.” Yale Journal of International Law 14 (1989): 221. Dadrian, Vahakn. “The Turkish Military Tribunal’s Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide: Four Major Court-Martial Series.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7 (1997): 50. Hakk, M. “Turkey and The EU: Past Challenges and Important Issues Lying Ahead.” Turkish Studies 7 (2006): 464. King, H., B. Frencz and W. Harris. “Origins of the Genocide Convention.” Western Reserve Journal of International Law 40 (2007): 14. Kirsch, P. “The Role of the International Criminal Court in Enforcing International Criminal Law.” Edited by Charlotte Ku and Paul Diehl. International Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings. London, UK: Lynne Rienner, 2009. Kittichaisarre, K. International Criminal Law. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009. Minassian, N. The Armenian Genocide: International law and The Road to Recovery. London, UK: LLB of Brunel University, 2008.

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Chapter Three: Contested Narratives of Victimhood: The Tales Of Two Former Khmer Rouge Soldiers Barkan, Elazar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Bar-Tal, Daniel, Lily Chernyak-Hai, Noa Schori and Ayelet Gundar “A Sense of Self-Perceived Collective Victimhood in Intractable Conflicts.” International Review of the Red Cross, Volume 91 (2009). Accessed October 5, 2016, 237. https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc-874-bartal-chernyakhaischori-gundar.pdf. Das, Veena and Arthur Kleinman. ”Introduction” to Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery. Edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Renolds. Berkeley: UC Press, 2001. Firsch, Michael. “Oral History and Hard Times: A Review Essay.” In The Oral History Reader. Edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thompson, London: Routledge, 1998. Gray, Tallyn, “No Justice Without Narratives – Transition, Justice and the Khmer Rouge Trials,” in Transitional Justice Review, Manuscript 1043, Accessed October 1, 2016. https://www.academia.edu/28270360/No_Justice_without_Narratives_ Transition_Justice_and_the_Khmer_Rouge_Trials. Guillou, Anne Yvonne and Silvia Vignato, “Introduction” to Life after Collective Death in South East Asia: Part 1 – The (Re-)Fabrication of Social Bonds. Edited by Anne Yvonne Guillou and Silvia Vignato, 161–74. Special issue, South East Asia Research 20 (2012). Hansen, Anne. “Gaps in the World: Harm and Violence in Khmer Buddhist Narrative.” In Songs at the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of David Chandler. Edited by Anne Ruth Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood, 56–62. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2008. Hinton, Alexander Laban. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: UC Press, 2004. Khamboly, Dy and Christopher Dearing. A History of the Anlong Veng Community: The Final Stronghold of the Khmer Rouge Movement.

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Chapter Four: The Negotiable Society: Transitions from Below “The Rule of St. Augustine, Chapter 1, Rule 2.” Accessed June 20, 2015. http://www.op.org/sites/www.op.org/files/public/documents/fichier/rul e_augustine_en.pdf. United States Institute of Peace. Accessed November 10, 2016. http://www.usip.org/. Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Baier, Annette C. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Edited by. Annette C. Baier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Barsalou, Judy and Victoria Baxter. The Urge to Remember: The Role of Memorials in Social Reconstruction and Transitional Justice. Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace, 2009.

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Chapter Five: Changing Narratives of Victims and Perpetrators in Cambodia: The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and Community Responses to Dialogue Interventions Baines, Erin. “Complicating Victims and Perpetrators in Uganda: On Dominic Ongwen.” Justice and Reconciliation Project Field Note 7, July 2008. Accessed September 30, 2016. http://justiceandreconciliation.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/JRP_ FN7_Dominic-Ongwen.pdf. Bar-Tal, Daniel. “Collective Memory as Social Representations.” Papers on Social Representations 23 (2014): 5.1–5.26. Accessed September 30, 2016.http://psych1.lse.ac.uk/psr/PSR2014/2014_1_5.pdf. Bloomfield, David. “Reconciliation: An Introduction.” In Reconciliation after Violent Conflict: A Handbook, Edited by David Bloomfield, Theresa Barnes, and Luc Huyse, 10–18. Stockholm: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance: 2003. Accessed October 4, 2016. http://www.idea.int/publications/reconciliation/index.cfm. Cambodian Centre for Conflict Resolution and Cambodia Development Resource Institute (2000) CCR/CDRI Fact-Finding Mission to Former Khmer Rouge Zones and Reconciliation Areas: 1–13 November 1999. Phnom Penh: CCCR/CDRI, 2000. Campbell, Charlie. “Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Trials Are a Shocking Failure.” Time Magazine. February 13, 2014. Accessed September 29, 2016. http://time.com/6997/cambodias-khmer-rouge-trials-are-a-shock ing-failure/.

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Chapter Six: In Search Of Justice and Reconciliation: Rwanda Anup, Shah. Rwanda- Global Issues. Global Issues. http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/Rwanda.asp?p=1. Bromley, Roger. “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Cultural Representations Of Reconciliation In Rwanda.” French Cultural Studies 20 (2009): 181-197. Academic Search Premier. Web. October 1, 2016. Do Scars Ever Fade? DVD. 2004. Directed by Paul Freedman. Bill Brummel Productions, Inc. Flower in the Gun Barrel. DVD. Directed by Gabriel Cowan. United States: New Artists Alliance, 2009. Gacaca: Living Together Again in Rwanda? Online. Directed by Anne Aghion. 2003. Rwanda: Dominant 7, Gacaca Productions and Planète. http://www.comminit.com/africa/ma2003/sld-172html Rwanda: The Hills Speak. DVD. 2004. Directed by Bernard Bellefroid. Smith, Gayle. Ten Years After Rwanda- Has Anything Changed? Center for American Progress. April 6, 2004. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/kfiles/b44516.html. The Notebook of Memory. DVD. 2009. Directed by Anne Aghion. Triumph of Evil. PBS. Online. 1998. Directed by Jonathan Welman.

Chapter Seven: Constructing Prevention: An Exploration in Building Memorials that Prevent Atrocity “Anne Frank House Annual Report 2015.” Anne Frank House, 2015 http://www.annefrank.org/ImageVaultFiles/id_18056/cf_21/AFS_jaarv erslag2015_EN.PDF. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10452798. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Bickford, Louis. “Memoryworks/Memory Works.” In Transitional Justice, Culture, and Society: Beyond Outreach, Edited by Clara

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Chapter Eight: Sorry, Not Sorry: An Assessment of the Appropriateness of the 2004 Republika Srpska Apology for the Srebrenica Genocide “A Serbian leader’s public reconciliation with Srebrenica offered a raw moment in a week of political platitudes,” Quartz, https://qz.com/786903/the-prime-minister-of-serbia-was-the-mostcandid-politician-in-a-week-of-boring-speeches/. “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. (Bosnia-Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro),” International Court of Justice, http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/?sum=667&code=bhy&p1=3&p2=2& case=91&k=f4&p3=5. Barton, Charles. “Theories of Restorative Justice” Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics 2, no: 1 (2000). Basic, Goran. “Definitions of Violence: Narratives of Survivors from the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence (2016). Bennion, Tom. “The Tainui Settlement,” The Maori Law Review (1995). Bilder, Richard B. “The Role of Apology in International Law and Diplomacy.” Virginia Journal of International Law 46.3 (2006). Blatz W., Craig, Karina Schumann, and Michael Ross, “Government Apologies for Historical Injustices.” Political Psychology, (2008). “Bosnian Serbs MPs reject Srebrenica Genocide resolution,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bosnia-srebrenica-serbsidUSKBN0OQ2IN20150610. “ûaviü priznao masakr u Srbrenici [Cavic recognized massacre in Srebrenica],” Deustche Welle, http://www.dw.com/bs/%C4%8Davicpriznao-masakr-u-srebrenici/a-2485548. Denti, Davide. “Sorry for Srebrenica? Public Apologies and Genocide in the Western Balkans,” in Disputed Memory: Emotions and Memory Politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, ed. Tea Sindbæk Andersen, and Barbara Tömquist-Plewa (DeGruyter, 2016).

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“Russia vetoes Srebrenica genocide Resolution at UN,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/08/russia-vetoessrebrenica-genocide-resolution-un. “Srebrenica tense as Bosnian Serb poised to become mayor,” Al Jazeera, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/10/srebrenica-tensebosnian-serb-poised-mayor-161013034949226.html. Teitel, Ruti G. Transitional Justice. Oxford University Press, 2000. “Twenty Years Since Srebrenica: No Reconciliation, We’re Still at War,” International Center for Transitional Justice, https://www.ictj.org/news/twenty-years-srebrenicano-reconciliation-we%E2%80%99re-still-war. “Two Schools Under One Roof; School Segregation in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Columbia Journal of Transitional Law, http://jtl.columbia.edu/two-schools-under-one-roof-school-segregationin-bosnia-and-herzegovina/.

Chapter Nine: The Legacy of Cold War Era Massacres in Cambodia and Indonesia Anderson, Benedict and Ruth McVey. A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project: Interim Reports Series, 1971. Also widely known as the Cornell Paper. Anderson, Benedict. “How Did the Generals Die?” Indonesia 43. April (1987). Anderson, Benedict. “Petruk dadi Ratu,” In Indonesian, in the Indonesian weekly Tempo. April 10–16, 2000. For the English translation, New Left Review, May–June 2000. Accessed September 12, 2016. https://newleftreview.org/II/3/benedict-anderson-petrus-dadi-ratu. Burchett, Wilfred. My War with the CIA. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Central Intelligence Agency. Indonesia–1965: The Coup That Backfired. Langley, VA: Central Intelligence Agency, 1968. Central Intelligence Agency. The Presidential Daily Brief, “CIA Releases Roughly 2,500 Declassified President’s Daily Briefs.” September 16, 2015. Accessed September 2, 2016 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/. Chandler, David. The Tragedy of Cambodia: History, Politics, War and Revolution since 1945. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Ampofo is from the village of Wiamoase in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. He is an adjunct instructor at Middlesex County College. Ampofo has a Master of Arts degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a Bachelor of Arts degree in Education and History from Kean University, an Associate degree in Liberal Arts and Education, and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Mampong (Ghana) Technical College of Education. Ajdin Dautoviü is a Master of Arts candidate at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His main interests are geopolitics, political geography, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and human rights violations in regions throughout the world, especially Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. He is currently researching conceptualizations of Bosniak political elites in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sue Gronewold is member and former chair of the History Department at Kean University, where she is coordinator of the World History Program and an interim coordinator of the Asian Studies Program. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History from Columbia University and has taught at Kean since 2001. She is the author of Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China 1860–1936 and has completed her manuscript “Encountering Hope: The Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai and Taipei, 1900–2000.” She has published a number of articles and reviews on subjects related to modern East Asia, particularly women, transnational exchanges, and history and memory. Since 2012, she has been involved with a project out of Amsterdam’s International Institute for Social History that chronicles and compares prostitution in twenty-five cities. The results, Selling Sex in World Cities 1600 to the Present, will soon be published as a book by Brill Press. Active since the establishment of Kean’s Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program, she teaches, writes, and lectures frequently on genocide and human rights in Asia. She also has long been involved in teacher training, particularly through the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute’s Asia for Educators Project. With grants from the Confucius Institute at Rutgers University, she co-

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directed a second international conference on China in the World in 2017. She is a member of the executive boards of the World History Association and the Asia in Latin America section of the Latin American Studies Association. Dilshad Jaff is Research Adviser for conflict prevention and disaster preparedness at the Gillings Global Gateway®, at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Department of Maternal and Child Health. He holds a Master of Public Health degree from the Gillings School of Public Health and has sixteen years’ experience in complex humanitarian crises in conflict zones in the Middle East, largely with the International Committee of the Red Cross. His experience is mainly in designing, implementing, supervising, and monitoring health projects and programs during and after complex humanitarian emergencies, especially for refugees and internally displaced people. Dennis B. Klein is Kean University Professor of History and director of the Jewish Studies Program and the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies program. He is author or editor of five books, including Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto, The Genocidal Mind, and Survivor Transitional Narratives of Nazi-Era Destruction: The Second Liberation (forthcoming). He is founding editor in chief of Dimensions: A Journal of Holocaust Studies and founding director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Braun Center for Holocaust Studies. His current work on post-atrocity testimonies and forgiveness theory is anthologized in Memory, Narrative, and Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journey of the Past and Jean Améry and the Philosophy of Torture. He guest-edited a special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques on witnesses’ accounts of violence and violations, to which he contributed an article on the local theater of the destruction process. Lewis H. Margolis is a pediatrician and epidemiologist in the Department of Maternal and Child Health of the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. His teaching and research focus on leadership and workforce development, evaluative criteria in policy making, and children’s injuries. Recent publications include an analysis of the role of intensive personal leadership education to advance interdisciplinary practice, and a commentary, with Dilshad Jaff and Kavita

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Contributors

Singh, on targeting health care in armed conflicts and emergencies in collaboration. Laura McGrew has a Ph.D. in Peace Studies from Coventry University, and a Master’s in Public Policy from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Her doctoral dissertation was “An Analysis of Reconciliation in Cambodia: Victims and Perpetrators Living Together, Apart.” She is the author of several articles on transitional justice, governance and peace building, primarily related to Cambodia, including “Cambodia” in Transitional Justice, International Assistance, and Civil Society: Missed Connections. She has worked with the United Nations and NGOs in Cambodia, the Thai-Cambodian border, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, West and Central Africa, the Maldives, and the United States on development, gender equity, human rights, rule of law, conflict analysis, peace building, and coexistence. Torkom Movsesiyan holds a Master’s degree in International Affairs and an Honors Bachelor’s degree in International Studies from the City College of New York. He is the founder of Torkomada, a not-for-profit organization which advocates for cultural diplomacy in international affairs. He lectures widely on the Armenian genocide, international law, and Middle Eastern dance, among other interests, including talks at the University of Minnesota and the World Congress on Dance Research. His articles on the aftermath of the Armenian genocide appeared in The Journal of the International Relations and Affairs Group. He is a recipient of the Creative Engagement Grant, the City University of New York Dance Initiative Residency, and the Peter Jay Sharp Scholar Award. Kerry Whigham received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University (NYU). He is the recipient of the Corrigan Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, the Franco Coli Dissertation Award, and NYU’s Global Research Initiative Fellowship in Berlin. He has published articles in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Tourist Studies, Material Culture, Women and Performance, and Museum and Society, and has written a chapter for the edited volume Reconstructing Atrocity Prevention. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, a member of the faculty consortium for Stockton University’s graduate certificate program in genocide prevention, and the academic program officer for online education at the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation.

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Benny Widyono is a Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. From 1994 to 1997, he was the United Nations Secretary General’s Representative in Cambodia. He is Indonesian and has followed and continues to follow the developments occurring there. He is the author of Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, The Khmer Rouge and the United Nations in Cambodia. He has presented his scholarship at the Sleuk Rith Institute (SRI) School of Genocide, Conflict and Human Rights Studies in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and at the Reflections in the Aftermath of War and Genocide symposium of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University. Eve Monique Zucker is an independent scholar and Research Affiliate of the Council for Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on the aftermath of mass violence in Cambodia and beyond, through the lenses of social memory, morality, the imagination, and trust. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE) and her Master of Arts in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has conducted extensive research in Cambodia (2001–2003, 2010) on the topics of memory, morality, and recovery from war and genocide. Her book, Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia tracks the recovery of a village community in Cambodia’s southwest, a site that was a Khmer Rouge base and battleground for nearly thirty years. She is working on projects concerning the role of imagination, empathy, and resilience in the recovery from, and in the prevention of, mass violence. A particular focus for her is the role and impact of the rescuer in healing and in the world views of survivors and others. She has taught at several colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, held visiting scholarships at the University of California San Diego and the LSE, and served as Senior CAORC (Council of American Overseas Research Centers) Fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies in Cambodia and as a researcher for the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University.

INDEX

A Améry, Jean. See narratives, witness accounts, Améry, Jean Argentina, ESMA (Escuela Superior Mecánica), 119–20, 124 armed conflicts, 6, 94, 168–83 civil war, 26, 35, 45, 47, 75–77, 81, 87, 149 current, 170 Armenian Genocide. See Turkey, Armenian Genocide B Bangladesh, 2–3, 10–20 ABT (Ansarullah Bangla Team), 11, 13 Bergman, David, 14 BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party), 13, 17–18 JMB (Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh), 13, 18 C Cambodia, 5, 10, 37–38, 40, 43, 45– 46, 74–81, 85, 87–89, 146– 49, 151, 154, 161–63 CGDK (Coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea), 154 CPP (Cambodian People’s Party), 77, 79 Khmer Rouge (KR), 6, 35–49, 75– 83, 85–89, 146, 148–49, 151– 52, 154–55, 161–62 communes, 36–37, 40–42 ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunal), 3, 5, 34, 74–75, 77, 79, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 161 FKR (former KR), 76–79, 82, 84–87, 89

soldiers, 4, 81, 83, 87 interviews, 41–43, 47, 74, 81– 85, 87, 172 Pol Pot, 76, 146, 149, 152, 155 PRK (People’s Republic of Kampuchea), 36, 76–77, 154– 55, 161 RGC (Royal Government of Cambodia), 77, 79, 161 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 148, 150, 157–58 China, 45, 146–47, 149, 154–55, 162 coexistence, 56, 66, 78, 86, 89 Cold War, 2, 5–6, 47, 76, 146–47, 152–54, 161–62 communism, 45, 47, 146, 152–53, 156, 162 communist, 75–77, 90 D democracy, 4, 11, 14–15, 17–18, 45, 47 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 94–95 E East Timor, 156, 161 F fear, 24, 30, 46, 76, 83, 86, 170, 177 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, 58 G genocide (see also Holocaust; Turkey, Armenian Genocide; Yugoslavia (former), Srebrenica, Srebrenica Genocide), 24, 26, 28–31, 38–

Societies Emerging from Conflict: The Aftermath of Atrocity 39, 53, 79, 94–100, 102–3, 130–31, 135–38, 140, 155, 160 H Holocaust, 24, 27, 29, 31, 49, 110, 122–23 memorials AIPR (Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation), 123 Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 116, 123 Eisenman’s memorial, 114, 116 Neue Wache, 54, 108–10 human rights, 53–54, 56, 88, 95, 116, 121, 160 I identity, 49, 79–80, 84, 88–89, 137, 168 ethnic groups, 140–41, 173 Indonesia, 2–3, 6, 146–57, 159–63 Aidit, D.N., 147–48, 150, 158–59 Cornell Paper, 153, 158–59 IGGI (Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia), 151 PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia), 146–54, 157–59 Suharto, 149–54, 156–59, 162 Sukarno, 146–53 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 139 International Criminal Court (ICC), 4, 24, 29–30 international law. See prevention, international law International People’s Tribunal (IPT), 152, 160 J Jankélévitch, Vladimir. See reconciliation, Jankélévitch, Vladimir (philosopher)

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M memorials, 5, 58, 76, 81, 83, 86, 94, 104–8, 110–25, 132, 155 counter-, 54 monuments, 104–5, 117, 125, 152–53 museum, 54, 108, 115–16, 121, 155 sphere of inclusion, 108, 110, 122 See also Holocaust, memorials mental health, 83, 86, 168–83 anxiety, 170, 172 children, 7, 18, 45–46, 94, 120, 169–73, 176 depression and PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), 169–72 women, 89, 94, 102, 120, 125, 170–73, 176 Middle East, 6, 168–70, 172–83 Iraq, 170, 175, 178 N narratives, 4, 33–35, 39–40, 46–49, 76–81, 87 collective memory, 49, 80, 104, 111, 155 historical injustices, 54, 133–34, 136, 138 sympathy, 38, 62–64, 121 victimization, 38, 48, 80, 86 victims, 74, 76, 78–79, 81–86, 89 victims and perpetrators, 60, 74, 84–87, 89 witness accounts, 39–40, 46–48, 55, 57, 60–61, 69, 148, 160 Améry, Jean, 56–57, 60–62, 64– 67 See also Bangladesh, Bergman, David; Indonesia, Cornell Paper; Cambodia, Khmer Rouge (KR), interviews NGOs (non-governmental organizations), 5, 53, 74, 80, 83–89, 172, 177 International Center for

230 Transitional Justice (ICTJ), 132, 140 OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), 178 Odhikar, 11, 13 WHO (World Health Organization), 169–70, 181 WPA (World Psychiatric Association), 181–82 P prevention, 28, 31, 93, 105–7, 116, 120, 181 civil society, 54, 60, 112–13, 120– 22, 125 human rights, 10, 40, 57, 105, 116–17, 120–22, 124, 175 organizations, 120–24 coexistence, 58, 78–79, 84–86 international law, 24–31, 100, 135, 170 prison, 76–77, 81–82, 88, 98 R reconciliation, 20, 38, 56–60, 62, 64–67, 74–79, 85–86, 89, 121, 130–33, 137, 140–41, 156–57, 172, 180 admission of injustice, 133, 137– 38 anger, 58, 83–84, 86, 155, 158, 170, 172 apologies, 6, 78, 86, 130, 132–39, 141–42, 160 arts, 89, 123–24 bystanders, 56, 78–79, 88 citizen activism, 2–3, 54 compensation, 24, 26, 28–30, 132, 134, 139, 141 courts, 15, 19–20, 38–41, 60, 95– 96, 98, 100–102 See also Cambodia, ECCC (Khmer Rouge Tribunal); International Criminal Court (ICC); International Court of

Index Justice (ICJ) denial, 24, 28, 30, 130, 137–38, 141 descendants, 30, 112, 153, 157 forbearance, 133–34, 138–39, 141 Jankélévitch, Vladimir (philosopher), 57, 61–64, 66– 68 mutual respect, 57–59, 61, 64, 96 national, 79, 89, 163 processes, 38, 65, 79, 91, 94 remorse, 133, 135–36, 139, 141 reparations, 58, 111, 132–34, 139 resentment, 55, 57–58, 62–66, 87, 136 See also Cambodia, FKR (former KR) refugees, 37, 39, 76–77, 94, 149, 155–56, 171, 175, 178, 182 religion, 15–16, 18, 20, 78, 86, 141, 151, 154, 168, 173 Islam, 11, 13, 16–18, 173 secularism, 15–16, 18 Rwanda, 5, 24, 94–99, 101, 103, 105, 160, 170 gacaca, 5, 96, 98–102 ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda), 29–30, 95 RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), 95, 98, 102 S Santino, Jack, 113 Scheler, Max, 62–64 T Transitional Justice, 54, 56–58, 60, 65–66, 132 Turkey, Armenian Genocide, 24–31 V Vietnam(ese), 36–37, 42–43, 45, 75–76, 88, 115, 149, 154 violence gender-based violence (GBV),

Societies Emerging from Conflict: The Aftermath of Atrocity 113, 168, 176 sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), 88–89 violent conflicts, 137, 168–69, 172, 176, 182 massacres, 27, 54, 130, 134, 136–38, 147, 151–52, 156– 57, 160, 162–63 W Wiesenthal, Simon, 61, 63, 65–66 Y Yugoslavia (former) Bosnia-Herzegovina, 105, 115, 120, 130–33, 135–41 Bosnia-Herzegovina, ABiH

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(Army of Bosnia), 131 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia), 3, 29–30, 130, 135 Republika Srpska, 131, 133, 135– 40, 142 Republika Srpska, Dragan ýaviü, 131, 135–39, 142 Serbia, 135–39 Srebrenica, 111, 120, 130, 136, 138–40 Srebrenica, Srebrenica Genocide, 6, 115, 130, 135, 137, 139–41 Srebrenica, Srebrenica-Potoþari Genocide Memorial, 105, 111