Political Transition

Contents

1 Introduction 1Paul Gready

PART I The Politics of Memory

2 Remembering and Forgetting ‘Zimbabwe’: Towards a Third Transition 29Christine Sylvester

3 Contested Memories of Repression in the Southern Cone: Commemorations in a Comparative Perspective 53Elizabeth Jelin

4 ‘What is Written in Our Hearts’: Memory, Justice and the Healing of Fragmented Communities 70Victoria Sanford

5 Memory and Forgetting: The Roma Holocaust 90István Pogány

PART II Identities

6 Continuity and Discontinuity of East German IdentityFollowing the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Case Study 107Molly Andrews

7 Mobilising Memories: Protestant and Unionist Victims’ Groups and the Politics of Victimhood in the Irish Peace Process 127Graham Dawson

8 ‘In the Name of the Victims’: The Politics of Compensation in the Work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 148Lars Buur

9 The Construction of Voice and Identity in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 165Fiona C. Ross

vi Political Transition

PART III Re-making Space

10 Remembering Ordinary Agency Under East German State Socialism: Revelations of the Rostock District Record, 1978–89 183Joan Hackeling

11 Insinuating Spaces: Memories of a Madrid Neighbourhood During the Spanish Transition 198Steven Marsh

12 Public Bad, Public Good(s) and Private Realities 212Carolyn Nordstrom

PART IV Testimony and Voices

13 The Politics of Memory and International Trials for Wartime Rape 227Julie Mertus

14 Networks of Memory: Chileans Debate Democracy and the Pinochet Legacy Over an Internet Forum 246Eliza Tanner Hawkins

15 Reconciling Reconciliation: A Personal and Public Journey of Testifying Before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 262Yazir Henri

16 Empire Dies for Irish Freedom: Silence and Amnesia in Anglo-Irish Talks 276Ella O’Dwyer

Notes on Contributors 290Index 295

1 IntroductionPaul Gready

Memory, identity, space/place and voice are central to the vocabu-laries, politics and cultures of political transition. These keywordsare mutually informing. Policy decisions in relation to justice, truthand reconciliation imply as well as create a value system for theseterms. Similarities and divergences in the way the quartet areunderstood can reflect converging or fundamentally different under-standings of the lived-through past and the desired future. Theyprovide some of the crucial fault lines of transition and primary moraland political sites of nation-building.

The post-Cold War rhetorical mainstreaming of human rights hasentrenched a legal/quasi-legal orthodoxy as the preferred way tocome to terms with the past. Official mechanisms such as truthcommissions and war crimes tribunals are, nonetheless, only everpart of the story of the post-oppression or post-conflict era and alsothemselves structure and restructure memory, identity andspace/place and privilege certain voices while suppressing others.Ross and Mertus, for example, detail in this volume how such insti-tutions have misrepresented the lives and concerns of women.Mertus (2000) has argued elsewhere that war crimes tribunals aremost likely to address the interests of the international communityand least likely to satisfy survivors, while Mamdani (2000) has per-suasively claimed that institutions such as truth commissions re-makeconflicts in a single image (of individual victims and perpetrators,of civil and political rights violations).

Officially sanctioned memories, identities, spaces/places and voicesare challenged and resisted from within civil society by the margin-alised, disenfranchised and disenchanted, by minorities, politicalopponents and past perpetrators. Other agents from civil society – themedia, human rights groups, academics – have also helped to definethe profile of who gets to be heard, where and what is remembered,in ways that can reinforce or undermine official agendas.Furthermore, a number of countries have chosen the path offorgetting or of non-legal and non-institutional responses to atraumatic past, and in all transitions local civil society and non-

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2 Political Transition

governmental responses co-exist with any state- or internationally-sponsored initiatives. These different approaches to the past impactupon the content and form of memory, identity, space/place andvoice, and therefore on the cultures and politics of transition.

Transition, as it is understood here, implies a change in politicalregime and culture towards greater democratisation, post-repression,post-colonialism, post-war. Institutional mechanisms define anddelimit transition in a particular way: in largely political and legalterms, as temporally and spatially delimited (in part by the institu-tions themselves), as a historical stage or way-station in a narrativeof progress. Transition as it emerges in this volume is somewhatdifferent. It is a contested and intrinsically incomplete process, shotthrough with considerations of politics and power, mobilised as ademand and a promise, and characterised by continuity as well asmulti-faceted, if often uneven, change. Patterns from the past areoften reconfigured rather than radically altered in the present.Resistance, for example, does not end where transition begins – asBuur notes in this collection, transition creates its own victims.

Ignatieff (1996) writes of societies characterised by a simultaneityof the past and/in the present which means that the past is ‘not pastat all’ (121). While acknowledging an inevitable and desirabletemporal simultaneity, there is a need to liberate the present andfuture from the burden of the past that threatens to overwhelm them.To come to terms with the past means superimposing serial time onsimultaneous time; it means reactivating the movement of time.Transition involves moving on while claiming ownership of the fulltemporal range, forgetting as well as remembering.

There is a geographical as well as a temporal dimension totransition. Transition is spatialised, it re-maps geographical relation-ships, public and symbolic places – as such it re-makes geographiesas well as histories, discourses of transition unravelling unevenlyacross time and space. Furthermore, as Mertus (2000) illustrates,tensions between global, national and local priorities are played outin transitional societies. This book attempts to capture something ofthe dialectic between the global and the local, top down and bottomup, official and unofficial.

In short, transition is understood in this collection of essays to bea rhetorical device or political strategy as well as a layered and oftenfractured political and cultural reality. More specifically, it is a politicsand culture built on the foundations of memory, identity, space/place

Introduction 3

and voice, and it is here that critical and comparative perspectives aresought in this collection.

The regions of Europe, Latin America and Southern Africa havebeen chosen for comparative analysis in this volume because theyhave been central to the macro discourses about justice and truth,influencing policies in an increasingly global exchange and, it issuggested here, will perform a similar role in relation to the debatesabout memory, identity, space/place and voice. The collection,therefore, juxtaposes different country and regional experiences andhistorical eras or phases of transition. It is also multidisciplinary, withindividual contributions often drawing on a range of disciplinaryapproaches.

The sub-divisions of the book – ‘The Politics of Memory’,‘Identities’, ‘Re-making Space’ and ‘Testimony and Voices’ – are by nomeans watertight, so debates can be traced within and between thesections. The approach taken in the collection to these four concernsis introduced below.

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

This is an over-used and under-theorised term in the literature onpolitical transition. For example, in one study that carries the termas its title, it is a rather thinly conceptualised and partially appliedcloak for a discussion primarily focusing on mainstream transitionaljustice and accountability measures.

It can be said that the politics of memory is two things. Narrowlyconceived, it consists of policies of truth and justice in transition(official or public memory); more widely conceived, it is about howa society interprets and appropriates its past, in an ongoing attemptto mould its future (social memory). (de Brito et al. (eds) 2001:37)

Other similarly titled books fail to define their key term at all(Amadiume and An-Na’im (eds) 2000). This collection begins todevelop a more comprehensive definition, stretching beyond theconfines of transitional justice initiatives.

Some components of the definition are overtly political: the useof memory in electoral politics (Sylvester); the nature of official, insti-tutionalised memory, such as that enshrined in truth commissions,war crimes tribunals and other criminal prosecutions, strictly cir-cumscribed by politics and power (Sanford, Buur, Ross, Mertus); the


nationalisation and ‘ownership’ of memory by the state or party(Sylvester) or, conversely, its privatisation, which can democratisememory and/or constitute an abdication of state/party responsibil-ity (Jelin); selective, partial memories and the struggle betweenopposing memories of the past (Sylvester, Jelin, Pogány); memory’sreach and its mobilisation within the politics of the present (Sylvester,Jelin, Sanford, Pogány): ‘memory on-call, an all-purpose memory, amemory for all seasons’ (Zertal 2000:120). Struggles over the meaningof the past are also struggles over power in the present – Jelin, forexample, in her chapter in this collection notes the possibility thatthe original reason for commemoration becomes a ‘pre-text’ forpresent struggles. The politics of memory is interwoven with therepetition and recasting of past divisions and conflicts, as the pastcontinues to influence, sometimes literally exploding into, ongoingsocietal disputation (Sylvester, Jelin, Sanford, Dawson, Buur,Hackeling, Tanner Hawkins).

The politics of memory must also address broader issues andstruggles, such as whether to remember (Pogány), what to rememberand control of memory (Sylvester, Jelin, Sanford, Pogány, TannerHawkins), when to remember (O’Dwyer), and the history of memoryitself (Jelin). Crucial to the politics being outlined here are disputedlines of inclusion and exclusion, solidarity and fracture, memory andforgetting. Examples of these contests range from controversiesaround the issue of ‘victims’ in Northern Ireland and South Africa(Dawson, Buur, Ross), to disputes over the selection and meaning ofspecific commemorative dates and events (Jelin), attempts to enforceinvisibility, silence and forgetting in the war zones of Angola(Nordstrom), and to the re-working of the profile of debate anddemocracy in new forms of technology such as the internet (TannerHawkins). Another line of tension underpinning many contributionsto this book is the relationship between official memory (state-sponsored efforts at memory creation and dissemination), collectivememory,1 and individual memory:2 what Jelin (1998) calls the ‘layersand levels’ of memory.

Memory carries an almost overwhelming set of political expecta-tions during transitions that frame its form and delivery: anemancipatory potential often ascribed in the idea that even thosewithout and outside history still have memory (although this notionis interestingly countered by Pogány’s suggestion that for the Romamemory is a luxury given ongoing deprivation and persecution); afinal, even ultimate, victory for resistance and liberation; a form of

Introduction 5

deterrence; a leading role in the policy arenas of truth and justice; awalk-on part in reconciliation, democratisation and reconstruction;the raw material of catharsis and healing; the facilitator of continuitywithin new beginnings. Alongside the sophisticated politics ofmemory is an equally sophisticated politics of forgetting (Cohen2001). The ideal for the politics of memory is a move from privatememory to public acknowledgement, accountability, debate and‘ownership’, and a combination of the past- and future-orientedfunctions of memory.

IDENTITIES

This book looks at transitional identity in a way that complementsthe dominant discourse in this field (nationalism), by highlightingvarious trajectories of identity: the politics of victimhood, the linkbetween identity and recognition/resources (Dawson, Buur, Ross),between identity, recovery and action (Marsh, Sanford); interrela-tionships and divisions between individual, group and nation/state(Dawson, Buur, Marsh); identity as a reaction to another time andanother place (Andrews); lines of continuity as well as change, grandnarratives alongside the everyday (Andrews, Buur, Ross). Theseprovide the contours of a politics of identity, inextricably linked tothe politics of memory.

Just as memory during transition is plural, so there is a diversityof identity possibilities within a transitional context. As Ignatieff(1996) writes: ‘nations … do not have a single identity … Nationalidentity is a site of conflict and argument, not a silent shrine forcollective worship’ (116). Transition typically involves a search fornew identities, the challenge of dealing with curtailed, fixed (Ross)and proliferating identities (Andrews) – crucially informed by‘rhetorical frames’ and ‘imaginable possibilities’ (Cruz 2000). It iswith such frames and possibilities that this book is concerned.

Memory and forgetting are implicated in identity formation at alllayers/levels, and vice versa. ‘The core meaning of any individual orgroup identity, namely, a sense of sameness over time and space, issustained by remembering; and what is remembered is defined bythe assumed identity’ (Gillis 1994:3). A further important componentof the memory–identity linkage is that both are relational, funda-mentally forged in, defined by and in turn defining, relationshipsand social interaction. Both can be collective. Novick (2001), echoingGillis, talks of ‘a circular relationship between collective identity and


collective memory. We choose to center certain memories becausethey seem to us to express what is central to our collective identity.Those memories, once brought to the fore, reinforce that form ofidentity’ (7).

The danger arises when identity is run through with essentialistdiscourses (a ‘chosen people’) and ‘other’, memories of atrocity andthe desire for revenge, and narratives ascribing guilt and innocence,infamy and glory. Ethnic nationalism is hard to explain withoutaddressing the mutually enforcing relationship between collectivememory and collective identity. Stripped of the fossilising force ofCold War politics, nationalism has become central to politicaltransitions, as both a means and an end. ‘A collective memory thatdenies full humanity to the out-group allows for various shades of“getting rid of”’ (Cohen 2001:97). Memory of atrocity becomes self-duplicating. But it is important to note that democratically forgedcollective memory can be an agent of inclusion and reconciliation(Tanner Hawkins). Further, this is only one identity strand withintransition – collectivism battles pluralism and identities collapseinwards and expand outwards – and one way in which identitybears memory into the future in terms of rhetorical frames andimagined possibilities.

One key, and related, rhetorical frame relates to the identity statusof victimhood. As part of wider trends often associated with a post-modern identity politics, and politically loaded identity-namingduring transition (victims, survivors, perpetrator-victims, bystanders,beneficiaries, etc.), the politics of victimhood takes a particular formin transitional states. It can be a means of self-help, seeking redress,reclaiming voice and critiquing new forms of marginalisation,forgetting and power. It can also take on a more sinister guise.Although the different faces of victim politics are not always easy todistinguish, the process of identity formation is more likely to bedangerous if it produces a group, national or diaspora identity-politics dominated by the embrace of exclusive and intolerant victimclaims. Such identities can be competitive and fragmentary,dominated by grievance, history, a sense of injustice, and the pursuitof recognition and resources. Sometimes such identities are basedon ethnicity or religion.

Chapters in this book examine the politics of victimhood inNorthern Ireland and South Africa as it affects a range of issues:‘hierarchies of victimhood’ as they inform an uneven rememberingof the past and access to resources and recognition in the present;

Introduction 7

the way in which such identity categories are claimed, constructed,assigned, contested, essentialised, rejected; the danger of fragmentary,mutually hostile claims; and victimhood as a site of political mobil-isation, a form of oppositional politics, a re-working of politicalframeworks from the past and the generator of new conflicts.

In the context of a victim culture it is possible to talk of too muchmemory, and too much identity, but also of too little: victimhoodalone makes a person/group stand out, it alone stakes a claim toattention and resources. Perhaps the most damaging reason for thisis that societies lose the capacity to generate multiple, alternativeidentifications and faith dies in ‘transformative politics’, ‘a futureorientation’, in a broader collective, national project (Maier 1993).Whether this results in claims for a new nation-state based on raceor religion, or not, a dream has died. This is a profoundly negativeimplication of transitional victim politics.

A final (already mentioned) identity theme is the coexistence ofcontinuity and change. In the arena of identity, legacies from thepast include persistent rhetorical frames – such as the (Berlin) Wallin the East German psyche (Andrews) – and the frustration ofimagined possibilities, the re-working and renewing of oppositionand the continuities of daily life and human experience. In short,identity is additive rather than substitutive and influenced but notexclusively determined by transitional political change (Andrews,Dawson). Identity formation can replace one grand narrative withanother (nationalism, nation-building) and/or retreat to, uncover,rediscover the intimacy of subjectivities of the ordinary and everyday.

RE-MAKING SPACE

If transition is a spatial as well as a temporal phenomenon, then itsspaces are real and symbolic (social, ideological, economic,narrative). In part the story told here is about people as geograph-ical agents attempting to secure for themselves an element offlexibility and freedom in their daily lives under oppression(Hackeling), about contesting official, transitional narratives of spacefrom the local (street names) to the national (the new national,democratic space (Marsh)), and about the invisible, linked spaces oflocal wars and global economics and politics, creating peoplewithout memory, identity and voice (Nordstrom). Transition takesplace in, over, through and across particular spaces, appropriatesand re-makes spaces that include the very local, the national and


the global – this is the politics of space, clearly linked to the politicsof memory and identity.

One of the most important geographies of transition relates tosites of commemoration, which serve as key locations of struggle forthe keywords of this volume (Jelin, Henri). For example, in theirplanning and reception such sites concentrate and bring to the foredebates about memory.

All over the world, commemorations of atrocities have turned intomemory wars, the forces of denial and acknowledgement literallybattling it out over territory. With each political oscillation, statuesare pulled down, street names changed, and public holidaysabolished. (Cohen 2001:234)

Such sites speak to the need for externalisation, or what Jelin (1998)calls the ‘materialization’ (27), of memory, identity and voice.Memory needs to be ‘deposited’ somewhere, thereby turningindividual memory into public and collective memory (28). Henrimakes similar remarks in his chapter in this book about the need toexternalise experience, ‘[i]t is almost as if one places this memory ina respectful place outside of oneself. In doing that, this memory findsa place inside oneself that is not only destructive.’ This placingoutside can be done in both time and space, resulting in a concen-tration of meaning and the balm of distance. Dawsons’ caution, thatcommemoration is double-edged with the potential to fuel conflictor its resolution, is also worth noting.

In a not dissimilar vein, many of the contributors also allude to anarrative space of memory, identity and voice. Both physical andnarrative spaces are moved between, transformed, occupied,reclaimed, named, linked; and central to both is a transgressivemovement from the private to the public and the personal to thepolitical. Michael Taussig (1992) writes about ‘the violent silencingenacted by State terror’ in Latin America, in relation to ‘disappear-ances’, that the aim is not to destroy memory: ‘Far from it. What isaimed at is the relocation and refunctioning of collective memory’ (48).The aim is to keep the memory of resistance and its destruction alive,but fragmented and in retreat within the private sphere where it feedsan incapacitating fear. Organisations such as the Mothers of theDisappeared are so important because they re-engage with, re-occupy,the public sphere and recuperate collective memory.

Introduction 9

Chapters in this collection also stress the significance ofcommunity reclamation of public spaces that are thereby re-made,turned into sites of popular memory (Marsh, Sanford). Sanford refersto the need for community spaces in which to transform what VeenaDas describes as ‘poisonous knowledge’; issues and actions are notsilenced by violence but held in suspension until communities canreconstruct memory in a public place. Turning repression intoresistance, O’Dwyer suggests that the silencing of voice and memoryhas become a counter-strategy in Ireland used against the Britishstate, the safe space is within as voice and memory await theirappointment with history. The spaces to be liberated are inside aswell as out. While, obviously, spaces of exclusion and silencingremain – Nordstrom refers to globalisation’s foot-soldiers in Angola’swar economy – processes linking narrative, physical and politicalspace contest their geographies of control.

If official, institutional spaces are of great significance to memory,identity and voice, equally vital are ‘civil times and civil spaces’ (Gillis1994:20). Jelin’s chapter in this volume suggests that commemora-tions, whether official or ‘societal’, provide ‘public occasions, openspaces’ for various voices and divergent memories to be articulated.Characterised by alternating hegemonies, disagreement, dialogue orits absence, such moments and spaces unmask the construction ofcollective and official memories. Powerful contemporary officialspaces also include trials (Osiel 2000) and truth commissions. A spaceof public debate can be reclaimed, defined and extended by suchevents and the media coverage they engender. Boraine (2000) hasdescribed the victims’ hearings of the South African Truth andReconciliation Commission as a ‘liberated zone’ (99). Both individualvoice and public debate were liberated.

Unfortunately, the liberated zone was surrounded by a zone thatwas in some ways decidedly unliberated. Outside the confines of thehearing, for example, Henri’s testimony ceased to be his own. It wasappropriated, edited, interpreted, re-interpreted, re-told, sold in away that impacted profoundly on his life. This is one example of amore general concern. One of the problems facing the Video Archivefor Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, according to Hartman(2000), is that the ‘testimonial alliance’, community and mutualtrust that characterised the interview could potentially beundermined by ‘postproduction procedures’: ‘the impersonal, marketforces of electronic recall and dissemination’, the conversion of‘archives of conscience’ into ‘megabytes of information, electronic


warehouses of knowledge’, and the transgression of the line between‘diffusion’ and ‘commodification’ serving to ‘banalize … a new rep-resentational genre (the video testimony), or Holocaust memoryitself’. The issue here is how to link liberated zones or safe places –which as Henri notes are essentially ‘artificial’ – with the state andsociety, how to expand their reach and range, beyond victims, whilestill respecting victims.

Civil society spaces, at a local level and operating longer term, areneeded, unofficial, inventive, alternative, subversive spaces.Hackeling writes instructively of the various spaces of negotiationand dissent in East Germany. Sanford, Dawson, Mertus and Henriidentify the need for safe, supportive spaces of reflection, articula-tion, engagement, and healing. The imperative, ultimately, as Borainealludes (2000:420), is to create ‘liberation zones’ that transcendsocietal divisions, and it is just such spaces that Tanner Hawkins (inher chapter about the Pinochet arrest and the internet as a narrativespace of memory) and Henri (outlining the work of the Direct ActionCentre for Peace and Memory and Western Cape Action Tour Project(WECAT)) describe.

There is an irrepressible dynamic being outlined in this volume:as Sanford argues, one voice creates space for other voices, individualtestimony represents an expansion of agency, a chorus of voicescreates community space for political action. So the issue of space,its manufacture and transgression, is closely linked to the fusion oftestimony and agency.

TESTIMONY AND VOICES

Transition, at both an individual and collective/national level, isabout being able to tell one’s story and/or having a new story to tell.It is a testimonial moment. It announces an end to the era of silence,whether imposed or ‘chosen’, ended by a multifaceted process ofnegotiation and articulation. This volume identifies various platformsfor voice (exhumations, public spaces, people’s tribunals, theinternet) as well as itself providing such a platform through thefrequent use of testimony and interviews.

Werbner (1998) talks of a ‘right of recountability’ (1). But as theexperience of Henri and others suggest this is not enough: ‘The rightto narration is not merely the right to tell one’s story, it is the rightto control representation’ (Slaughter 1997:430). Serious questionsare raised by Henri about the ethics and politics of public testimony

Introduction 11

and its dissemination, about the ‘ownership’ and uses of life stories.For Henri, writing has become an important way to reclaim voiceand agency, to take back his right to comment on and explain hisown testimony: ‘the right to claim memory with honour, to live withit in dignity on one’s own terms’. The underlying questions here –apart from how testimony, one’s own past and story, can be truly‘owned’ – are: how can the individual story be respectfully placedwithin the broader context of societal and official narratives, andwhat is the most desirable relationship between voice, interpretationand representation, the oral and the written, word and image?

Sylvester, Sanford, Marsh, Mertus, Henri and O’Dwyer all suggestquestions relating to power and narrative layering in their chapters.Can the local appropriate national/global discourses? Can thesubaltern insinuate him-/herself within dominant discourses andspaces? Can personal narrative subvert the legal anti-narrative? Is tospeak from within another’s discourse to speak in an occupied voice?Is there a need, as Henri suggests, to theorise the relationship betweenlayers of voices, listeners/readers, mediations, and disseminations?Who ultimately is appropriating whom?

Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, these complexities, sitesand spaces of voice need to be ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, local/national, asoutlined in the section on ‘Re-making Space’ above, and interna-tional – there are many ways to transcend divisions, to expand thereach and range of liberated zones. International human rights law,for example, which is often of increasing relevance for transitionalstates, is cast in this light by Slaughter (1997). Having characterisedhuman rights abuse as an infringement on a subject’s ability tonarrate his or her story, he states:

If human rights abuses exist on a continuum of narratability …human rights instruments and norms can be evaluated andpromoted for their effectiveness in addressing that continuum andproviding a public, international space that empowers all humanbeings to speak. (ibid: 413)

International human rights law becomes

a commitment to the voice … the tool to guarantee recourse toindividual narration. Human rights law implicitly, although oftenexplicitly as well, commits contemporary states to an ideological


understanding of human subjectivity that privileges the power ofspeaking oneself. (429)

And yet here too caution is needed. Mertus argues in this collectionthat women’s court testimony regarding rape at the InternationalCriminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia re-violated women bynot allowing them to tell the stories they wanted to tell.

It is important to deny neither the complex ethics and politics northe extraordinary power of voice. Voice is central, again at manydifferent levels, to identity and memory, as a vehicle of subjectivityand remembering. It is also a form of agency/action, traversingpublic/private and personal/political divisions.

Testimony and/as agency as portrayed in this collection resonateswith the literature on the genre of testimonio. This genre typicallycaptures the voice of the marginalised, details a context of politicalurgency, seeks to effect societal change, demands justice, challengesofficial discourse, blurs clear lines between the individual and thecollective. Thus, in this volume, voice and testimony are political,words and narratives inform action, demand action, create the spacefor action, are action. But their meaning also needs to be dissectedin a more nuanced and context-specific ways. They are, in addition,profoundly unsettling, inverting and challenging expectations(Pogány, Andrews); airing awkward perspectives (Dawson); owningvictimhood (Dawson, Buur); struggling with the difficulties anddangers of ‘naming harm’ (Ross); speaking, if at all, in a stuttering,repetitious, occupied voice, forcibly detained and secured in a safehouse awaiting their transitional moment (O’Dwyer).

The contents of the four sections of this book are outlined in moredetail in the chapter summaries below.

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY

These chapters speak most directly to the theme of the politics ofmemory outlined above.

Chapter 2 by Christine Sylvester, ‘Remembering and Forgetting“Zimbabwe”: Towards a Third Transition’, plots the contested andfragmented chronology of post-colonial memory in Zimbabwe. Theauthor identifies elections as having punctuated three eras oftransition, signalling contests over memory and airing contendingmythologies about the ‘true’ post-colonial Zimbabwe. The rulingZANU(PF) has enacted a politics of memory and mythology in which

Introduction 13

the party is Zimbabwe – it is the source of liberation and patronage,the saviour from colonialism and oppression, the custodian ofnational identity and memory. Increasingly, memory of the past hasbeen marshalled in order to forget the hardships and failures of thepresent.

Sylvester argues that ZANU(PF) has engaged in colonial mimicryby resorting to an invented ideal time of itself and to colonial-styleviolence, to the dream of development and the reality of repression.As a further dimension of mimicry, in a deferred politics of thepresent, the ‘now’ is subsumed by a permanent and variouslymanifested transitional ‘not yet’ or ‘will be’, by the past and future,with ZANU(PF) insisting that it is the sole custodian of this circular,back-to-the-future, post-colonial journey. However, the return to theissues (the rural peasantry, land, war, colonialism) and methods of thepast and attempts to appropriate and manage alternative memorieshave not gone uncontested. The Movement for Democratic Change(MDC), launched as a party in September 1999, epitomises the riseof alternative memory claims and the return to a different past, thehope-filled early independence era. Memory and forgetting are thusbeing contested, notably between political parties, urban and ruralareas, and between historical eras of transition. Sylvester concludesby stating that the MDC must not in turn mimic ZANU(PF), butrather proliferate the ‘inappropriate’ (for example, through gendersensitivity and inclusivity and a more diverse and open-endedremembering and imagining of Zimbabwe).

Chapter 2 outlines the continuities as well as discontinuitiesbetween colonial and post-colonial memory, the tensions thatdevelop over time within the post-colonial era over which past tolay claim to and be judged by, and the extent to which, in Zimbabweat least, politics has been conducted through the differential mobil-isation of memory and forgetting, or put another way, ‘ownership’of memory has become a crucial political issue.

Chapter 3 by Elizabeth Jelin, ‘Contested Memories of Repressionin the Southern Cone: Commemorations in a ComparativePerspective’, is also about the contested politics of memory over time,the disputed role of the past in an evolving present, but taking com-memorative practice as its starting point. It deals with public strugglesabout the meaning of the past – the memories of the repressive dic-tatorships established in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in the SouthernCone of South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and


Uruguay). These are countries with ‘a long history of a transnationalsocial life’, including processes of oppression, resistance and withintransition. The chapter takes the study of the disputes about theselection and meaning of specific dates and commemorative practicesas an ‘entry point to approach the elusive core of memory andoblivion’. Such memory markers in public time and space exemplifythe way in which public memories are produced, contested andappropriated in increasingly vocal transitions.

The commemorative practices during the past decades in the fivecountries are presented briefly. Contrasts and commonalities areanalysed in terms of the relative strength of various social andpolitical actors, and in terms of the interpretive frameworks andmeanings of the past that these actors bring to the public arena. Jelin,for example, shows that the same date may have different meaningsfor the various actors and forces that frame their current strugglesand identities in relation to these dates. The chapter concludes withsome reflections on the relationship between past and present. Howto secure the inter-generational transmission of memories; whether,as the meanings of dates of commemoration change over time, thepast can become simply a ‘pre-text’ for struggles of the present; and,given the dominance of social actors in the region as the mainchallengers to military narratives and the limited role of politicalparties and the state in public commemorations, whether the post-dictatorship state can be brought back into the public sphere toengage with the interrelated issues of legitimacy, responsibility anddemands for justice?

Chapter 4 by Victoria Sanford, ‘“What is Written in Our Hearts”:Memory, Justice and the Healing of Fragmented Communities’,provides an ethnographic study of local mobilisations for truth,healing and justice, following massacres of Maya in Guatemala,which are driven by processes of exhumation and reburial. The bodyand its artifacts take on multiple meanings: the body in need of aproper burial; as a means of identification; as a source of truth andrestored belief in justice; as a deterrent; as a means of resurrectingcultural practices and place as a social, living space.

Public processes such as exhumations, burials and trials act as anavenue of empowerment, a form of agency, a sign that fear andforgetting have been overcome, and link truth to power. In thiscontext, collective recovery of community memory can begin tocreate new public spaces for community mobilisation. Safecommunity spaces for people to speak and be heard facilitate recu-

Introduction 15

peration and the redefinition of collective identity in a context wherecollective identity is crucial to recovery. Although profoundchallenges remain – a history of forced civilian, mostly Maya, parti-cipation in civil patrols and therefore counter-insurgency violence,cultures of vertical and local impunity, with forensic anthropolo-gists, who are potentially expert witnesses in forthcoming trials,under 24-hour protection against intimidation and death threats –the chapter documents the way in which public processes and places(a municipal plaza, a church, a clandestine cemetery) have been re-taken and re-made into sites of popular memory and action, seekingjustice but also breaking onto an ever-widening range of issues.

As the chapters in this section illustrate, in part the contest overmemory is one over whether there should be memory at all, the desir-ability of memory or at least certain kinds of highly politicisedmemory, and whose memory should prevail. Chapter 5 by IstvanPogány, ‘Memory and Forgetting: The Roma Holocaust’, focuses onthe Roma Holocaust or Porajmos, ‘devouring’ in Romani. He asks whysuch a disparity exists in the attention received by parallel crimes,the Jewish and Roma Holocausts. Interestingly, in the context ofdebates about the exceptionality of the Jewish Holocaust, Pogányanalyses Nazi policies towards the Jews and the Roma for differencesand similarities, wrestling with the question of how one finds a moralvocabulary for such a comparison. The author concludes that despitelocal variations, ‘at its worst, the persecution of the Roma was indis-tinguishable from that of the Jews’, and that in many parts of Europe‘in all probability’ it would satisfy ‘the definition of genocide or ofcomplicity in genocide’. So he returns to the question: why has suchsuffering remained, on the whole, unacknowledged?

In attempting to understand why the Roma Holocaust remainedlargely forgotten until recently, the author concentrates on theattitudes of the Roma themselves. The chapter argues that the Romaare preoccupied with the immediate concerns, needs and injusticesof the present, lack an interest in or desire to assert their often tragicpast, and have no tradition of commemoration. Socioeconomic andpolitical factors have also contributed to a lack of voice (poverty,illiteracy, social and cultural marginalisation, suspicion of authority,political impotence and the absence of a powerful state or diaspora).While silence may represent a conscious decision to put the pastbehind them, the voicing of a reluctant memory also takes on aparticular inflection. The Roma, it is claimed, see themselves as lucky,shaping memory as a somewhat undemanding narrative of survival


and good fortune. Such considerations sketch out areas of differencebetween the Roma and Jews in the aftermath of genocide. Thesethemes are illustrated using interview material, which consistentlyupsets expectations. Pogány concludes by noting an increasinglyvocal Roma public voice, demanding recognition of and compensa-tion for the Porajmos, contesting the collective memory of the past,and, more worryingly, claiming an equivalence of victimisationalongside the Jews during the Holocaust.

IDENTITIES

The section on ‘Identities’ examines the sites and strategies of identityconstruction during political transition.

In Chapter 6 ‘Continuity and Discontinuity of East GermanIdentity Following the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Case Study’, MollyAndrews raises a series of important questions about what happensto national identity during political transition. A past ambivalencetowards an ‘official’ East German identity was replaced by a prolif-eration of other forms of East German identification as new spacesopened up for people to experience their common past and present.On the basis of interviews conducted in 1992 with leaders in thecitizens’ movements that led the 1989 revolution, Andrews plots ‘arevolution of memory and identity’.

As one example of identity continuity and discontinuity, thedestruction of the Berlin Wall coincided with a strengthening of aninner, mental wall, as differences between the two Germanies becameincreasingly recognised and even entrenched. A self-confident EastGerman identity was embraced after the decline of East Germany,between the coming-down of the wall and unification: a nationproved its right of historical existence by freeing, and in effecteliminating, itself. There has also been an ambivalence towards, andrejection of, an East German identity and past alongside a reactionagainst the forced appropriation into a new identity epitomised byrapid unification (which occasioned a new identity crisis) and aperceived erasure or discrediting of the East German past, culture,and identity. An East German identity has been forged at the inter-section of shared commonalities (history, experiences, culture), therediscovery of difference and reassertion of self-respect. Sometimesstill reactive, always relational, the post-communist East Germanidentity is perhaps most importantly a revitalising of oppositionalculture and identity. Identity and meaning, therefore, are much more

Introduction 17

complex and layered than a simplistic sourcing in a lost (or new)nation would suggest – in important ways they are additive ratherthan substitutive, and draw on universal human experiences andqualities. Andrews calls for researchers of identity to capture thiscomplexity.

Several chapters in the book examine the construction and con-testation of victim identities and victimhood. Chapter 7 by GrahamDawson, ‘Mobilising Memories: Protestant and Unionist Victims’Groups and the Politics of Victimhood in the Irish Peace Process’, isabout the politics of Protestant/Unionist victimhood in NorthernIreland. Dawson argues that the Labour government’s attempt, ‘fromabove’, to integrate the issue of victims within the framework of aninclusive peace process, thereby attempting to establish for itself aleadership and neutral arbiter role, was followed by a flowering ‘frombelow’ of victims’ groups seeking to give victims a voice and presenttheir interests. Among the results of this twinned, contested processwere a variety of new political developments: for example, aframework for representation and recognition of victims, possibili-ties for reparation and redress, efforts to organise a new kind of publicvoice, and a contested politics of victimhood involving competingclaims and hierarchies, as constituencies have found ways of ‘fightingthe war by other means’.

The bulk of the chapter draws on fieldwork with loyalist groupswhich experienced violence mainly at the hands of nationalist para-militaries. These groups have mobilised memory work towards a rangeof objectives such as telling their side of the story (linking memoryand identity, for example, in claims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and‘genocide’), and seeking release, support, redress, recognition andacknowledgement in both private and public arenas. The authorhighlights the paradoxical impacts of such work for any possiblefuture peace. For example, memory informs a new politics ofperceived betrayal and injustice within the peace process and a‘hierarchy of victims’ which effectively appropriates the categorywhile rejecting any moral equivalence for Republican victims.Dawson concludes by arguing that victim groups are importantbecause they constitute a new kind of public voice in Northern Irelandthat both reproduces and challenges its politics of identity andbecause of their intrinsic value to the communities and individualswith which they work. The challenge is how to mobilise the energiesreleased by such groups both for the psychological/emotional workof reparation and healing and for the political work of building peace.


Lars Buur, in Chapter 8, ‘“In the Name of the Victims”: The Politicsof Compensation in the Work of the South African Truth andReconciliation Commission’, looks at the emergence of ‘victim’ as acategory and identity in the context of the South African Truth andReconciliation Commission (TRC), where people from being victimsof apartheid have become victims of the TRC in various ways, andthereby of transition itself. However, as Buur argues, people havealso used the identity of victimhood to mobilise as political actors,within a sometimes fractious victim politics. He argues that crucialto the emergence of victims as a contested category was a complexinteraction between various ‘vectors’: ‘objectification’ based on arational/statistical system of knowledge-creation, identification andselection; an evolving and institutionally inconsistent ‘taxonomy’of gross human-rights abuses; and the possibility of ‘release’, notablyin the eventual use of the promise of reparations as an inducementto increase statement numbers.

These processes created tensions between victim expectations,TRC promises/recommendations and ANC policy commitments.Buur argues that the TRC and the ANC have clashed over thequestion of representivity, the complex relationship between repres-entative group identities and entitlements. The ANC has marshalledvarious arguments – that South Africa is a nation of victims, thatthe struggle was not about money – to question the TRC’s construc-tion of the identity of victim and avoid/delay making reparationpayments. Symbolic reparation for all is possible through the TRC’srepresentative sample of victims, but in relation to material com-pensation to privilege the needs of a representative sample appearunjust. In this way the TRC, which was supposed to lay thefoundation for peace and justice, in fact re-cast the conflict of thepast and generated new conflicts that open onto a series of broadercontemporary issues: how are limited resources to be allocated andto whom? How can the tensions be reconciled between a new dis-pensation that suggests the possibility of formal equality and thereality of deprivation and growing inequality? Buur concludes thatwhat is at stake is nothing less that the legitimacy not only of theTRC, but of the new South Africa.

Fiona Ross, in Chapter 9, ‘The Construction of Voice and Identityin the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’,examines the construction of women’s voice and identity, specifi-cally women as victims, in the TRC’s work. The TRC equated voice,being able to tell one’s story, with the restoration of human and civil

Introduction 19

dignity, personal and national healing and with the creation of post-apartheid identities. But, the author asks, what happens if ‘speakingpain’ is not straightforward and simple? At the TRC’s victim hearingsa pattern became apparent in which women bore witness to theexperience of others, generally husbands and sons, rather thantalking about themselves. The operational definitions of the TRCseemed to preclude an analysis of the full range of apartheid’s effectsand their gendered nature. Gross violations of human rights focusedon ‘bodily integrity rights’ which, the author argues, privileged theexperiences of men, and more generally the ‘spectacular’ dimensionsof apartheid rather than its more widespread impacts on experienceand subjectivities. Furthermore, it was difficult personally, sociallyand culturally for women to testify about their experiences, especiallyabout violations of a sexual nature, while others objected to the TRC’sgoverning rationale and ethos.

Although there were attempts to remedy these shortcomings –explicit encouragement to women to talk about their own experience,the holding of a series of women’s hearings, a separate chapterdedicated to women in the final report – the author argues that theemergence of ‘women’ as a category in the Commission’s workcarried with it assumptions about the nature and severity of particularharms, notably privileging sexual violence while silencing other kindsof experience. Ross discusses the validity of identifying ‘women’ asa category needing particular attention, as a ‘supplementary interven-tion’, arguing that ‘women’ became a category of essential differencewhile at the same time variance within the category washomogenised. The TRC, it is argued, generated and fixed a range ofidentities, simplifying complex subjectivities and social relationships.This narrow focus may serve to sanitise apartheid, reinscribe genderdifferences, and downplay agency and resistance.

RE-MAKING SPACE

The chapters in this section illustrate that oppression and resistance,authoritarianism and political transition, war and peace, have a spatialas well as a temporal dynamic. Further, transitions involve intersec-tions between a variety of real and symbolic spaces (physical, social,ideological, economic, narrative – the local, national and global).

Joan Hackeling in Chapter 10, ‘Remembering Ordinary AgencyUnder East German State Socialism: Revelations of the RostockDistrict Record, 1978–89’, outlines a particular geography of life


under oppression. It addresses local conflicts and ordinary agency inthe Rostock District of the former East Germany between 1978 and1989. The author contests the picture of ordinary life undercommunism as uniform and conformist or deeply fragmented andprivate, and argues from an examination of city and district recordsthat conflicts and negotiations between residents and the authoritiesoften took a geographical form. For example, residents demandedresource equality between different places and sought to manipulateprivate/public, personal/political and local/national differences anddivisions for their own ends.

The chapter explores in greater detail the less discursive forms ofgeographical negotiation. For example, people moved controversialactivities or indeed moved themselves, thereby exploiting differencesbetween places in relation to levels of scrutiny and rule enforcement,bypassed local bureaucracies to petition more distant or higher stateofficials directly and negotiated the terms of their public attendanceand participation (at work, school, in elections and state-sanctionedleisure and social activities). Both state control and the negotiationof differences with the authorities were, in part, place-based.Hackeling’s argument is that ordinary residents acted on ordinaryconflicts as geographical agents, in an attempt to create someflexibility in their lives. While such ‘unheroic’ practices shouldneither be romanticised nor exaggerated, they do provide a legacyof life in East Germany, a crucial prehistory to the events of 1989and bequeath to East Germans a familiar precedent for activeengagement in the public life of post-unification Germany.

Chapter 11 by Steven Marsh, ‘Insinuating Spaces: Memories of aMadrid Neighbourhood During the Spanish Transition’, alsoresonates with themes of geographical agency. In post-Franco Spain,he argues that the discourse of democracy and the device of transitionhave been used to construct and bind the population to a newnational project, a new ‘time’ and social ‘space’ called ‘democratic’Spain. Drawing on the work of de Certeau, the author insists on theagency of the subaltern and local to transgress, re-make the dominantofficial/national narratives of time and space, to tactically ‘insinuate’themselves and their agendas within the ideological and physicalspace of dominant groups.

To illustrate this thesis, the chapter draws on oral testimony fromVallecas, a working-class part of Madrid, the most deprived areas ofwhich were at the forefront of resistance to Franco in the late 1960sand 1970s. Residents’ associations provided a training ground for a

Introduction 21

generation of future democratic political leaders. Furthermore, bothduring and post-Franco, they tactically used whatever resources wereavailable – the church, the political left, the monarchy – to securebasic needs and human rights and then to gain political control overthe contested ‘space’ of the district (to (re-)construct their homesand neighbourhoods, engage in a battle for the streets around theissue of naming, expose cuts in public spending and contest therelocation of the new Madrid regional parliament from the centreof the city to the margins). In the struggle over the re-making of thearea, within the broader discourses of democracy and transition, theauthor argues that the city has been turned ‘inside out’.

Carolyn Nordstrom in Chapter 12, ‘Public Bad, Public Good(s) andPrivate Realities’, addresses the layered spaces and politics of invisi-bility that characterise Angola’s permanent war/transition. Herepeople inhabit private realities that are publicly erased and politicallydenied – invisible people and places, outside time, space, history,without memory, identity and voice. These invisibilities and erasures,the author argues, are crucial to the processes of global economicsand politics. The chapter follows a journey that identifies linkedlayers of invisibility, parallel economic and political spaces, ascendingfrom the no-man’s-lands between the warring factions of the MPLAgovernment and UNITA to global arenas of profit and power. Localnetworks of exchange, war and survival are set within globalnetworks of exchange that loot the country and fuel the war.

In the resource-rich war zone, the MPLA and UNITA respectivelycontrol the urban areas/consumer goods and rural/food-producingregions. No-man’s-lands are zones of obscene extremes, traversed bythe invisible – such as women-traders whose children are held ransomfor their return – oiling the system for government officials, assortedsoldiers and traders, profiteers, racketeers and mafias. The moreclosed-off the borders and spaces, the more there is a need to tradeand the more political trade becomes. Linking the local and theglobal are basic foodstuffs, minerals, weapons and the most unlikelyluxury items; survival and death, misery and money/power, war andeconomics, periphery and centre are interwoven. Similarly, theinformal (black-market, smuggling), illegal, extra-state shadoweconomy dwarfs, becomes more reliable than, and is inextricablylinked to, the formal, legal and state; and in both war and peacemoney buys power. Nordstrom states that next to nothing is knownabout these eclipsed lives and economies and that this in itself is avery political act.


TESTIMONY AND VOICES

Huge expectations are placed on testimony/voice during politicaltransition, as they both transcend divisions between, and knittogether, the personal/private and public/political. Chapters in thissection identify various sites or spaces of testimony and voice and plotlinkages between voice and agency. All engage with the ethics, politicsand power of voice. None more so that the last two chapters whichcontain first-person testimonies from South Africa and Ireland.

Julie Mertus, in Chapter 13, ‘The Politics of Memory andInternational Trials for Wartime Rape’, examines what prospectsadversarial tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal forthe Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) hold for women who see themselvesas active agents of change seeking to use international advocacy asa personal and political tool. Mertus contends that war crimes trialsalone cannot serve the various needs and interests of victims of sexualviolence. She explores the limits of such tribunals for wartime rapethrough an analysis of the Foca case, decided by the ICTY in February2001. The case resulted in the sentencing of three ethnic Serbs toimprisonment for their abuse of women at a ‘rape camp’ near Foca,a Bosnian town south-east of Sarajevo. Was this a landmark victoryfor the international women’s human rights movement and/or asource of disappointment and re-traumatisation for the survivors?

Trials are never designed to tell the stories victims want to tell.Narratives are re-worked into what Mertus calls the legal ‘anti-narrative’ of segments, linearity, consistency, narrow legal definitions,sterile language and euphemism. Courts mistrust the natural voiceof the survivor. The narrative is perpetrator-driven. The prosecutionreduces the witness to the role of victim, relevant not as an agentbut only insofar as her actions demonstrate something about theperpetrator. Survivors are not asked about their experiences ofthemselves and their survival. Defence lawyers seek to cast blameand discredit survivors. Rape survivors asserted their agency, but ina mute and distorted form, against the grain of legal process. Mertusconcludes that survivors need space and opportunity to choose theirnarrative voice and form, which requires alternative and comple-mentary witness/survivor-focused processes to international warcrimes tribunals.

Eliza Tanner Hawkins, in Chapter 14, ‘Networks of Memory:Chileans Debate Democracy and the Pinochet Legacy over anInternet Forum’, discusses the online forum created by the Chilean

Introduction 23

Newspaper La Tercera in the aftermath of the arrest of GeneralPinochet in London in October 1998. She argues that this event laidbare the unresolved tensions and divisions within Chilean society.In this context, the online forum created a public sphere or space, acommunications network for debate for Chileans all over the worldabout the meaning and legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship. Thechapter is based on a study of 1670 letters sent to La Tercera’s onlineforum between October 1998 and January 1999.

Tanner Hawkins outlines the distinctive characteristics of theonline public space as including accessibility (related to wealth andclass but unrestricted in other important ways, for example,geography), a new freedom to communicate, the way peoplecommunicate (exchanges of views, standards of civility), and thecontent of discussions. Specifically highlighted in the chapter aredebates about the definition and quality of Chilean democracy. Theinternet provided a platform for a multitude of voices and a crashcourse in a culture of democracy. The consequences of such a spaceare identified as the formation of public opinion and of collectivememories. Participants tried to understand the past in order to makesense of the present, specifically events surrounding the arrest ofPinochet. Supporters of Pinochet recalled problems during theAllende years casting Pinochet as the saviour of Chile, while hisopponents stressed the human rights abuses of his tenure, called forjustice and viewed the sharing of experiences and judicial actions asa form of vindication of their experiences and memories. Thisdiscussion is part of the process of re-writing (official) history, of theforging of a still contested, but perhaps increasingly consensual,collective identity and memory.

Yazir Henri is a former combatant and torture survivor whose lifebecame caught up in the traumatic ‘choiceless choice[s]’ (Langer citedin Langer 1991:26) of political struggle. He states in Chapter 15,‘Reconciling Reconciliation: A Personal and Public Journey ofTestifying Before the South African Truth and ReconciliationCommission’, that the opportunity to testify before the TRC provideda (previously lacking) space to speak out in his own voice, to confronthis past and reclaim his dignity. Outside the safe space of the TRC,however, was an unprotected public space in which Henri’s storytook on a life of its own as it was variously appropriated by others (themedia, individual commentators, the TRC report).


Since testifying … I have been called many names, placed withinseveral stories, given several histories and the most harmful ofnarratives … have now become a part of my public face … theagonised confessor … the betrayer.

Henri’s attempt to reclaim himself was undermined as his story/selfwas dismembered, re-told into the very narrative he went to the TRCto question, re-told into the lives/deaths, in the voice and narrative,of others. Henri delivers various other criticisms of the TRC, butperhaps his central question concerns the ethics and politics of voice.

Today Cape Town is a deeply divided city, characterised by thelegacy of apartheid: violence, socioeconomic deprivation andsegregation, white privilege. Henri argues that there remains a needfor supportive spaces where South Africans can explore their mutualhumanity. One such supportive space is provided by the DirectAction Centre for Peace and Memory and the Western Cape ActionTour Project (WECAT). It started as a self-help network motivated bythe need to break the cycle of victimhood in the context of demo-bilisation, post-traumatic stress disorder and unemployment. Henridescribes WECAT’s ‘heritage tours’, designed to facilitate encounterswith the historical and present-day life of marginalised andtraumatised communities. Encounters occur around places that havewitnessed immense pain; place transforms and is transformed,situating recognition, commemoration and acknowledgement. Henritalks of creating a ‘memorial marker [that] is human, alive anddialogic’. Reconciliation for this author is crucially about suchencounters, about responsibility and resurrecting hope.

Ella O’Dwyer testifies to a story that is both personal and political,private and public. Imprisoned in England as an Irish Republicanprisoner, O’Dwyer describes herself as having studied the processesof institutionalisation and control through literature, informed bythe work of Foucault, from within the confines of prison and Empire.In Chapter 16, ‘Empire Dies for Irish Freedom: Silence and Amnesiain Anglo-Irish Talks’, she unpacks the strategic deployment oflanguage and discourse as weapons in the context of incarcerationand the Irish conflict: the war of words encompassing silence,statement, amnesia (say and sign nothing); slogan and repetition;creative annihilation and compulsive control; agreement and treaty.Within the frame of prison, colony and Empire, the subalternstruggles to speak at all, has her voice interned, embargoed, stammersa disjointed, disjunctive discourse, is only able to speak from within

Introduction 25

another’s discourse in an occupied voice. O’Dwyer finds an analogyin Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, moving 16 stones around his person sothat he can suck each one on a perfectly consecutive basis. This, sheargues, can be seen to bear a striking resemblance to the Irishinterface with Empire as Molloy personifies both inadequateexpression and the compulsion to control.

O’Dwyer states that a history of treaties and agreements cannotindefinitely intern contradictions, disagreement, fear and resistancewithin the national voice or narrative. The colonist comes to fearboth the known and the unknown, agreement and silence. Sheconcludes with the suggestive proposition that silence and amnesiaare agents of vision, in that they have protected voice and memoryin secure places. They await their opportunity to make history, bothas the story of the past but also as the strategic architect of the future.In the words of Barbara Harlow (1996), the dilemma now is a classicof the transitional move from interrogation to negotiation: when totalk and when not to talk.

NOTES

1. Collective (or social) memory, as stories and practices about the past toldand enacted by society or groups within society, to themselves and others,can be said to incorporate but transcend, be shaped by and in turn shape,individual experiences and official narratives through various kinds ofcommunicative sharing and contestation (of experience, knowledge,emotion, reaction). It reworks memories through collaboration, corrob-oration and dispute, providing an evolving template for comparison,identification, evaluation and debate.

2. Individual memory combines psychological processes of recall, learningand forgetting with an insistence that even the most personal and privatememories are socially, culturally and politically informed. There is acontext to each act of remembrance. Individual memory in various waysspans the private and public domains, the psychological, experiential andthe social/interactive.

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Achebe, C., 285Adams, G., 132Agamben, G., 78Agger, I. and S. Jensen, 173Ahmed, A., 132Albrecht, W., 185Alvarez, J., 242Alves, G. and B. Cipollone, 220Amadiume, I. and A. An-Na’im, 3American Association for the

Advancement of Science(AAAS), 87n2, 151

amnesty/impunity, 54, 61, 63, 65,154–5, 166, 259

lateral/vertical impunity, 84–5An Crann/The Tree, 128Anderson, B., 120Anderson, K. and D. Jack, 232, 242Angola, 262, 269

Angolan war/peace, 213–15see also war economies

Arendt, H., 87Argentina, 57–9

Mothers of the Disappeared, 8, 58Arias, A., 71Askin, K., 229Asmal, K., L. Asmal and R. S.

Roberts, 179Ayers, E., 220

Ball, P., 151, 161n2, 162n5Barnes, T. and E. Win, 31Barton, C., 140Bayart, J-F., 30, 219Bayart, J-F., S. Ellis and B. Hibou,

219Beckett, Samuel, 277–8, 282–5Beetham, D., 228Berdahl, D., 118, 121, 123–4n10Berdal, M. and D. Malone, 216, 219Bernáth, G., 101, 102n10Bhabha, H., 31, 46–8, 280, 286Black, M., 129, 141

Bohley, B., 116–19, 121–2Bolton, D., 128Booth, K., 228Boraine, A., 9–10, 160–1Bourdieu, P., 184Braham, R., 98Braun, G., 185Brazil, 61–3Brearley, M., 91Brie, A., 116Britain, V., 213Bryden, D. and S. Lengnick, 229Buur, L., 152, 157, 160, 167, 169

Calhoun, C., 249Carmack, R., 71Cesarani, D., 94Chakaodza, A., 36Chakrabarty, D., 31–2, 49n13Chandler, D., 228Chesterman, S., 229Chile, 55–7

Allende, 56, 67n2, 246, 254–5,259

democracy, 56, 251–3La Tercera, 246, 248–50Pinochet, 56–7, 86, 246–9

Chingono, M., 216, 218, 220Chinkin, C., 242Cilliers, J. and C. Dietrich, 214, 216Cohen, S., 5, 6, 8Cold War/post-Cold War, 1, 6, 36,

213Collier, R., 46commemoration, 4, 8–9, 55–66, 79,

97, 142, 199, 204, 272–3; see also identity and memory

compensation see reparations Corradi, J. E., P. Weiss Fagen and M.

A. Garreton, 253Crowe, D., 93–4Cruz, C., 5Culler, J., 287

Index

295


Daniel, E. V. and J. Knudsen, 236Darnolf, S., 37Das, V., 73, 78, 86David, P., 236Davies, N., 91Dawidowicz, L., 91–2Dawson, G., 127, 140de Bréadún, D., 139de Brito, A., C. Gonzaléz-Enríquez

and P. Aguilar, 3de Certeau, M., 184, 199, 200–6Dennis, M., 109Developments in the Law, 229, 243Dewar, M., J. Brown and S. Long,

132Drake, P. and I. Jaksic, 56Dumas, A., 70

Eagleton, T., 280ethnic cleansing, 131–5, 137, 140exhumations, 70–5, 77–9, 81, 86–7

Falk, R., 242Falla, R., 71Fanon, F., 283Fay, M-T., M. Morrissey and M.

Smyth, 131Fings, K., 95Fings, K., H. Heuss and F. Sparing,

90Finlay, L., 134, 140–1, 143n3Fischer, W., 119, 123n7Fonseca, I., 97Foster, A., 133–4, 143n3Foucault, M., 78, 87, 283–4Friedrich, M., 244Fraser, A., 94–5Frazer, W., 140–2, 143n3

Gazmuri, C., 258genocide, 9–10, 71–2, 84, 85, 86,

90–1, 96, 132, 247Germany/East Germany

Berlin Wall, 111–13Brandt, Willy, 107Kohl, Helmut, 107Stasi, 110, 119–20, 188, 194n9unification, 107, 109–10, 115–20,

185, 193–4

Gilbert, M., 92, 95Gilliar, B., 107Gillis, J., 5, 9Global Witness, 214, 218Goldblatt, B. and S. Meintjes, 170,

175Golz, H., 190, 197González-Balado, J. L., 202Gorbachev, M., 185Gorman, D., 140Greece, 198Greif, A., 220Guatemala

1996 Peace Accords, 71civil patrols 79–85Commission for Historical

Clarification (CEH), 71–2, 74,79, 83–4

Gerardi, Bishop Juan, 70, 82Guatemalan Forensic

Anthropology Foundation(FAFG), 70, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81,86

Montt, General, E. R., 85Panzós massacre, 71–3Plan de Sánchez massacre, 70–1,

73–9, 81–2Río Negro trial, 71, 79–84

Gwarinda, T., 45

Habermas, J., 248–9Hacking, I., 150–1Halbwachs, M., 254Hare, P., 213Harlow, B., 25Harnden, T., 132Hartman, G., 9Hayner, P., 242Herman, J., 73, 236Herzberg, U., 119Herzberg, W., 110Hilberg, R., 91Hirsch, M., 142Hodges, T., 214, 216, 219, 223Höffer, V., 193Hogwood, P., 118, 120human rights

debating human rights, 246, 252,254, 256–60

Index 297

defining gross violations, 148–54,157–60, 166–7, 170, 174–6,274

global/local, 1–2, 73, 79, 227–30human rights abuses, 8, 34, 40,

43–4, 53–66, 71–2, 83–4, 90,97, 128, 131, 136–7, 165–6,169–73, 217, 221

human rights activists/organisa-tions, 8, 39, 44, 53, 58–9, 65,68n10, 86–7, 111, 159–60, 170,172, 175, 228–30, 263, 270–4

international human rights law,11–12

in transitions, 1, 141, 159–61,206

see also ethnic cleansing,genocide and rape

Human Rights Watch, 213–14, 218Hutton, P., 254, 257–8

identity, 1–7collective identity, 5–7, 78–9,

101, 109, 118–21, 128, 132–3,137

contested/complex identities, 64,108–11, 117–22, 133, 138

continuity and change, 109–11,115, 116–22

defining victim, and victimhood,129, 139, 148–54, 157–60,166–7, 170, 174–6, 265, 270–1,274

individual identity, 113, 120–2and the internet, 249national identity, 5, 48, 107–10,

113–21, 176, 259, 286–8politics of victimhood, 10,

123n8, 127–42, 148–61, 166–7,169, 177n10

rape victim/survivor, 228–9,231–2, 236, 242–3

see also commemorationIgnatieff, M., 2, 5, 177n3, 229internet, the, 9–10, 101, 246–58; see

also voiceIreland/Northern Ireland

Arms Trial, 281Bloomfield Commission 128–9

Bloody Sunday and inquiry, 131,139–40

Collins, M., 278–9Emmet, R., 288European Union’s Special

Support Programme for Peaceand Reconciliation, 128–9

INLA, 127, 136, 139IRA, 127, 131–3, 136–9, 141, 281Molyneux, Sir James, 132the peace process, 127–30, 133,

137–9, 141, 280–2, 284the Troubles, 128, 130–6Ulster Defence Regiment, 131,

134–5, 137, 140–1Victim’s Liaison Unit, Northern

Ireland Office, 129, 139

Jahnke, K., 185Janet, P., 73Japanese military sexual

slavery/comfort women, 228,242

people’s tribunal, 242Jarman, N., 132Jarausch, K., 110Jarausch, K., H. Seeba and D.

Conradt, 107, 108, 109Jay, M., 184Jelin, E., 4, 8, 55Jelin, E. and S. Kaufman, 254Jessen, R., 184justice, 1, 3, 5, 54, 56, 58, 63, 65–6,

68n10, 71, 73, 75, 78–87, 134,138–9, 141, 158–9, 168, 221,228–30, 242, 246–8, 252–3,256–7, 259–60, 289

Karsai, L., 90, 93Keck, M. and K. Sikkink, 53Kelso, M., 94–5Kenrick, D., 90Kenrick, D., and G. Puxon, 90–2, 94Klier, F., 121Klingermann, H-D. and R.

Hofferbert, 112Knabe, F., 110Kocka, J., 110–11, 184Kolinsky, E., 109, 110


Koppe, I., 122Kriger, N., 31, 34Krog, A., 148, 266Kuzwayo, E., 168

Langer, L., 23Levi, P., 84

grey zone, 83–5Levy, A., 229Lewy, G., 90–5, 103n15Lindenberger, T., 184Lusby, K., 230Lynch, H., 133–4, 138–9, 141,

143n3

Macanany, P., 75Maier, C., 7Maier, K., 213Makonde, J., 43Makumbe, J., 34, 37–8Mama, A., 176Mamdani, M., 1, 158Mann, S., 158Manz, B., 71Masamvu, S., 43Matoesian, G., 229Mbembe, A., 168McCabe, E., 139McClintock, A., 176McClure, J., 135McFalls, L., 107, 120McInnes, C., 138McKay, S., 141McKittrick, D., S. Kelters, B. Feeney

and C. Thornton, 128, 131–2,136

Memoryand agency, 73, 79, 86anti-/post-colonial memory,

29–32, 34, 37, 39, 40–3, 45–8collective memory, 4, 5–9, 55,

65–6, 71, 73, 79, 84, 86, 101–2,120–1, 128, 131–5, 137, 140–2,247, 249, 253–60

contested/conflicting memory,1–3, 41, 54–66, 101–2, 111,132–4, 137, 140, 142, 199–200,246–7, 254–60

cultural memory, 131–4, 140

forgetting/silence/invisibility, 1,5, 6, 48, 54–6, 65–6, 73,96–102, 116–17, 127–8, 131,133–5, 137, 141, 165–6, 170,173–6, 199, 212–13, 215–17,220–23, 242–3, 246, 254,259–60, 269–70, 271, 276–7,281, 286–7

individual memory, 4, 71, 84,133–5, 140

interned/freed memory, 276,286–8

irruptions of memory, 248miscarried memory, 287myth and memory, 32, 35, 39,

47–8, 48–9n4national memory/nationalism,

5–7 29, 34, 35–7, 39, 42–3,45–8, 54, 286

official memory, 4, 9, 66ownership of memory, 270, 272politics of memory, 3–5, 31, 37,

39, 40, 41, 46–8, 54–5, 66, 127public memory, 73, 79, 86, 228,

243reluctant memory, 15reparative memory, 140–2see also commemoration

Mertus, J., 1–2, 228Minkenberg, M., 107Minkley, G. and M. Legassick, 184Minow, M., 228Minter, W., 213Moyo, S., 39Munyanyi, P., 44Mushonga, A., 42Mutsakani, A., 42

Naimark, N., 117Nairac, R., 137Necas, C., 94Ni Aolain, F., 230Nietzsche, F., 107Nordstrom, C., 214, 216, 218Novick, P., 5–6Nussbaum, M., 79

Offe, C., 108–9O’Malley, E., 281

Index 299

Osiel, M., 9, 235Overy, R., 92Owens, I., 170

Page, M., 138Paraguay, 63–4

Stroessner, A., 63–4, 67n2Passauer, M., 115Peake, S., 128Pennebaker, J. and B. Banasik, 254people’s tribunal, 242–3Pflugbeil, S., 114–15, 119Pickel, A., 108–9Pogány, I., 90Poland, 185Portugal, 198Pratt, K. and L. Fletcher, 229

Raftopoulos, B., 47Raftopoulos, B. and T. Yoshikuni, 31Ranger, T., 31rape, 43, 80, 85, 98, 165–6, 171–2,

227–43Ray, A., 230reconciliation, 1, 5, 6, 34–5, 41, 45,

48, 54, 67n6, 85, 128–9, 136,142, 168, 198, 242, 246–8, 250,253, 259–60, 271–3

redress see reparationsReich, J., 112, 114–15Reinecke, R., 113–14, 121Reno, W., 219reparations/redress/compensation,

29, 33–4, 38–40, 42–5, 96, 100,101, 129–30, 134–7, 140–2,148–50, 153–61, 166, 242

Reynolds, P. and F. Ross, 176Roma,

Gatlif, T., 100Nazi policies towards, 90–3neglect of, silence about Roma

Holocaust, 90–1, 96–102numbers killed in World War II,

91persecution, 91, 93–6, 98–9, 101Porajmos, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100,

101socio-economic situation, 96–7,

100–1

RomaniaCeausescu government, 32

Ross, F., 169, 170, 172, 173Roßteutscher, S., 109, 119Rotberg, R. and D. Thompson, 242Ryder, C. and V. Kearney, 138

Said, E., 283Schiphorst, F., 39Schmidt, E., 31Schneider, P., 112Scott, James, 37Scott, Joan, 174Sen, A., 228Shaller, H., 116Shanker, F., 242Sithole, M., 38–9, 40, 41Slaughter, J., 10–12Smyth, M., 138–9Smyth, M., and M-T. Fay, 128Snow, C., 74, 87n2South Africa,

ANC, 148–9, 155–61, 171–2, 262,265–6

Cape Town, 263, 271–2, 273–4KwaZulu-Natal, 157, 171Mbeki, T., 157, 265Mthintso, T., 174Ndungane, N., 158Nqumse, A., 172Promotion of National Unity and

Reconcil-iation Act, 151,152–3, 155, 166–9. 264

Ramashala, M., 165Reparation and Rehabil-itation

Committee, TRC, 155–7TRC Report, 152, 154, 155, 157,

165–6, 167, 168–9, 170, 172–3,175, 177n7, 266–7

TRC Women’s Hearings, 171–2,173–4, 175

Tutu, D., 148, 156–7, 158, 168,268, 270

Villa-Vicencio, C., 154Zingxondo, Z., 172–3

Southern Cone, South America,53–4, 64–6

Operativo Cóndor, 53see also individual country entries


Soyinka, W., 32space/place, 1–3, 7–10, 19

civil spaces, 1–2, 9–10, 60, 62–3,73, 75, 78–9, 86–7, 109, 142,183, 242–3, 246–53, 258,272–5

cultural spaces, 221–2erased spaces, 212–13, 215, 217,

221–3narrative spaces, 8–10, 109, 128,

140, 242–3, 263–6, 272–5, 276,278

national space, 198–200official spaces, 9, 171psychological space, 120public spaces, 8–10, 55–60, 62–4,

66, 73, 75, 78–9, 86–7, 109,128, 134, 171, 242–3, 246–53,258, 266

space/place and agency, 183–5,187–94, 200–1, 202–8, 271–3

SpainAlonso, Hilaria, 202, 203, 204,

205–7, 208Alonso, Jenara, 202, 204–7Catholic church, 202–3, 210n11De Borbón, King Juan Carlos,

198–9, 207–8Communist Party, 202–3, 207,

210n12ETA/Basque separatism, 200, 203,

207, 208n2Franco/civil war, 198–9, 201–3,

210n12Prego, V., 199, 209n3, n8transition 198–201, 205–7Vallecas, Madrid, 200–8

Spenser, E., 289Staadt, J., 190, 193Staunton, I., 31, 43Steininger, R., 107Stewart, M., 97, 101Sunkel, O., 248Sylvester, C., 31, 33, 34, 37, 48

Taslitz, A., 229Taussig, M., 8Taylor, R., 278–80, 282, 287Templin, W., 111–12

testimony see voiceThompson, L., 32transition,

definition, 2–3politics and cultures, 1–3, 6, 30,

32, 33–48, 56, 184, 198–201,205–7, 212, 247–8, 258

and time (past, present, future),2, 4, 7–8, 29–32, 46–8, 54–6,64–6, 79, 96–8, 121–2,123–4n10, 198–9, 201, 251,253–4, 258–60, 271–3, 278–80,283–4, 287, 289

trials see justicetruth, 1, 3, 5, 71, 72–5, 77–8, 86–7,

98–100, 101–2, 141, 149–53,157–60, 168–9, 170, 172, 174,228, 237–40, 242–3, 258–9,262, 264–5, 269–70, 280,281–2, 289; see also voice

truth commissions, 1–2, 3, 9, 34,61, 154, 168, 177n3, 208n2,242

Tuan, Yi-Fu, 185

Ullmann, W., 112, 123n4Uruguay, 59–61

van Beek, M., 150Villa-Vicencio, C. and W. Verwoerd,

148voice, 1–3, 8–12, 22

and agency, 86–7, 227–30, 240–3

collective/national voice, 109,117, 276, 283–4, 287–8

different/contested voices, 62,159–60, 199–200, 242–3, 251,258, 274–5, 276

and healing, 65–6, 73, 86, 128,133–37, 140–2, 148, 155,160–1, 167–9, 173–5, 263–70,272–5

interned/occupied voice, 281,283–9

lacking/struggle for voice,96–102, 127, 130–6, 138,140–1, 199–200, 250, 263–5,269–70, 272, 281, 283–9

Index 301

and the legal anti-narrative,227–43

ownership of voice, 266–70public voices, 75, 78, 127, 134, 148women’s voices, 165–6, 169–75,

227–43see also internet, truth

Voigt, P., 185

Wald, P., 228–9War Crimes Tribunals, 1–2, 3, 12,

227–30Foca case, 230–43

war economies, 212–23Ward, C., 229Warren, K., 71Weber, M., 184Weiß, K., 110, 123n4Weißhuhn, R., 111, 113Werbner, R., 10, 31Wiesenthal, H., 118Wilde, A., 248Wilson, R., 148, 154, 160–1Wolf, C., 119

Yeld, J., 267–8Yoder, J., 117–18, 120

Zertal, I., 4Zimbabwe

and Britain, 30, 39, 41–3constitution, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41–2,

45Fifth Brigade/Gukurahundi, 34

38–9MDC, 29, 41, 43, 44–7Moyo, J., 29, 35, 36, 41Mugabe, Robert, 29, 31, 34, 35–6,

40, 41, 42–5, 47Mukapira, R., 42Shamuyarira, N., 34structural adjustment (IMF,

World Bank), 30, 36–7, 40, 45Tsvangirai, M., 39, 43, 49n11war veterans, 38–40, 42–4ZANU (PF), 29–48ZAPU, 34–5, 46ZCTU, 36, 38–9, 41, 43Zvobgo, E., 37

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