Memory: making peace with a violent past

Contents • The evil that men do… • Building blocks of international justice • Guatemala: ‘We can’t forgive until we have justice’ • South Africa: • Quandaries of compromise • The price of truth • Chile: •Doing a deal with memory •An unwritten page of history • Russia: an unfinished job • Cambodia: a wound that will not hea • Rwanda’s collective amnesia • Bosnia and Herzegovina: an impossible reconciliation? • Can we prevent crimes against humanity?

© J.M.Huron/Editing, Paris As much of the world has its eyes fixed, at the turn of the millennium, on the future, this Focus section, in contrast, looks back at the past. How, it asks, have nations that endured atrocities in the second half of this century come to terms with their ordeal? What obstacles have lain in their path? Between remembrance and forgetting, how can they make peace with the past and build the foundations for a better future? In a scene-setting article, Tzvetan Todorov explains why we ought to remember the past but not endlessly rake over it. Rosalina Tuyuc from Guatemala develops this idea and insists that the first step to reconciliation involves knowing who to forgive. The ways in which societies react to terrible experiences are shaped by their history, the forces that propel them forward or hold them back. Post-apartheid South Africa made a new departure, as Njabulo Ndebele points out, when it brokered a deal offering amnesty in return for truth. But although this may have helped to ease the reconciliation process, some victims protest that freedom should not be bought by confessing to a crime. In Chile, Oscar Godoy notes that amnesty for crimes committed under the dictatorship has smoothed the transition to democracy, but, say Fabiola Letelier and Victor Espinoza, it has not softened grim memories. In Russia, the work of memory is incomplete. In Cambodia it is to a large extent blocked, laments film-maker Rithy Panh, and in Rwanda it is impossible, according to Benjamin Sehene. A similar situation exists in Bosnia. Finally, Canadian jurist Louise Arbour hopes that the increasingly long arm of international law, by establishing irrefutable facts, can at least prevent the past from being mythologized and may even prevent crimes against humanity.