UGANDA: SHOULD WE BURY THE PAST OR DIG IT UP, SEEK JUSTICE?
Albert Gomes-Mugumya
The Monitor (Kampala)
August 17, 2006
While travelling in Cambodia a few years ago, I met an elderly
Cambodian man whose entire family had been wiped out by the Khmer
rouge in 1975.
We got talking at a hotel bar in Seam Reap and he described to me how
his entire family had been killed together with other village mates.
He then summoned over a man who had just entered the bar, and said,
" You know who this is? Pointing to another Cambodian man who had
just come in. "This is General Sovichiet, a former commander with the
Khmer Rouge". The general smiled and slipped away to buy some drinks.
I remember thinking what an extraordinary example of historical
reconciliation I had witnessed. Here was a victim and a General whose
forces had wiped out his entire family three decades earlier tacitly
agreeing to overlook the past.
"We just don’t talk about what happened," explained the elderly
Cambodian. It’s better that way. At that time I thought he was right,
today I am far less certain.
After an episode of acute trauma, should societies bury the past,
cauterise history by an effort of international amnesia and move on?
Or should they seek an accounting, punish the guilty and establish
the truth? Is it better to remember or to forget?
Recent events have raised those questions with new insistence. The
Cambodian Khmer Rouge renegade Ta Mok, who was involved in the
slaughter of almost two million of his own people, died more peaceful
than most of his victims and denied justice to those who survived.
This was due to both state and institutional dithering on prosecuting
him and this cheated at the very last moment millions of Cambodians
of the justice they had been demanding for quarter of a century.
Then the current peace talks in Juba with the Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA) that has been responsible for the brutal murder and injury of
thousands in Acholi land.
Joseph Kony, who lacks any clear and negotiable political objective,
has now zeroed on a strategic position that his prospects and those
of his supporters are better served by a deal.
But as the government prepares the ground for sustainable peace and
reconciliation in Northern Uganda, where does it draw the line between
the clash of peace and justice. Should the Acholis therefore forget
about their past and move on, or seek justice for the dark periods
they have been through?
Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter who died some time last year,
excavated and preserved the memory of what had happened to him and
other Jews in the second world war as a scared duty, a moral obligation
incumbent not just on those who lived through the conflict but on
all who came after, forever.
By sharp contrast, the Algerian people last year voted to forget the
grim civil that war that claimed 150,000 lives since 1992. Their new
charter for peace and national reconciliation is a sweeping amnesty
that pardons the few guerrillas still at war who lay down their
arms and by implication the police officers and security agents who
also committed terrible crimes. This was a mass exercise in national
amnesia.
The charter makes no provision for the 10,000 still missing, les
disparues taken from their homes and probably killed. This is a
guarantee of impunity for the police and army for the charter states
" the sovereign Algerian people reject all allegations intended to
hold the state responsible for a policy of disappearances"
No one can blame the Algerian people for wanting to draw a line under
the recent terrible past. It was hard enough to get the world to pay
attention when the slaughter was at its height.
The news seldom got out, for journalist were themselves targeted by the
killers, and even when it did the overlapping stories of terrorist and
state-backed atrocities were almost impossible to tease apart. After
the nightmare of squalid and complex murder, Algeria wants to rest
from remembrance and judgement only to forget.
But history shows that the act of remembering, of digging out the truth
however awful, is the only way to defy the killers. The struggle of man
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Organised
amnesia is only a temporary palliative.
In the aftermath of horror, many nations have caught their breath,
hoping to create the stability to rebuild by setting aside questions
of guilt. But the confrontation with history is thus delayed.
Sustainable peace can only be built in Acholi as elsewhere by coming
to terms with the violent past as Algeria, Chile and South Africa
have shown. The act of forgetting silences the victims, leaving the
wounds to fester.
Turkey’s bid to join the EU may be derailed by its determination to
forget what happened to the Armenians of Eastern Anatolia murdered
in their thousands in 1915 as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated.
During the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, British troops killed and
tortured with impunity. When it was all over, 150,000 people were dead
(just 32 were white) and Kenya’s independence was brought forward.
Leaders on all sides agreed that peace required forgetfulness. Jomo
Kenyatta dismissed the Mau Mau as "a disease which had been
eradicated and must never be remembered". No British official was ever
investigated. The past was buried in a mass grave. Today, many years
later, Kenyans and some white intellectuals are demanding answers.
True- forgiveness is the only way to free oneself from the bitterness
of the past, but that doesn’t mean that one should forget.
Forgiveness and forgetting are two different issues.
The salve for historical pain is not revenge or time-and still less
monetary compensation-but truth, and the justice that comes from
knowing it has been unearthed. The past should never be deliberately
ignored in the quest for peace.
The author is a specialist in Conflict Transformation and Peace
Building.