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Transitions
TJ News and Analysis from around the World
Under the Lens
The Ghosts of the Past: Obstacles to the Truth in Chile
"...beyond creating a formal record of the truth and pursuing criminal justice, there remains a primary human need to reckon with the bones of the dead..."
By Cristian Correa
A year ago this month, President Michelle Bachelet solemnly established August 30th as the National Day of the Detained and Disappeared. The inaugural ceremony-held at the presidential palace and attended by many organizations of the relatives of the disappeared-was clearly meant to have a strong symbolic impact on the national psyche. In her speech, President Bachelet called on the nation to help her with many goals, including the need to remember the past; learn from human rights violations; vindicate the memory of the victims; and bolster a democracy genuinely premised on respect for human rights.
In honour of that day, the President also announced the creation of a National Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Despite already having several memorials, parks, and monuments meant to honour the memory of the victims of past human rights violations, this particular proposal sparked a vibrant debate around the difficult task of agreeing on whose version of the truth would come to constitute the ‘national memory' of the brutal 1973 to 1990 dictatorship.
The social rift caused by this debate demonstrated just how complex and prolonged a national process of reckoning with mass atrocity can be. Chile has already held two separate truth commissions-the 1990-1991 Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 2003-2005 Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture-along with scores of judicial investigations, that have resulted in the sentencing of more than 100 former military members, with an additional 400 still being prosecuted. Yet, despite what arguably passes as a robust national effort to deal with this dark chapter, the country remains haunted by the ghosts of its past and its own unanswered questions.
One of the primary impediments to a full reckoning lies in the technical difficulties inherent to identifying the remains of the disappeared, few of whom have ever been accounted for. In April 2006, the Chilean Bureau of Forensic Services determined that at least 48 out of 96 disappeared persons whose remains had been found at the General Cemetery of Santiago in the 1990's had been wrongly identified. This declaration had a profound effect on the nation, opening the wounds of the relatives who thought their loved ones had been laid to rest and provoking a lack of confidence on behalf of the relatives of some 400 additional disappeared persons whose bodies had been found and identified before that.
In response, the government appointed a special commission to provide psychological and social support to victims and also enlisted the help of foreign forensic experts to evaluate the process of identifications and give recommendations. A new forensic plan based on this foreign expertise has since been implemented, with some notable progress in identifying remains. However, many of the ghosts of Chile's past continue to inhabit the nation's conscience, slowing its capacity to find peace and showing us all that, beyond creating a formal record of the truth and pursuing criminal justice, there remains a primary human need to reckon with the bones of the dead. For the families of those who were taken and never returned, the painful mysteries of the past remain unsolved and an air of injustice lingers on.
On August 30th-not only in Chile but throughout the world-we pause to remember the missing and the families who have mourned their loss every day since they were forcibly disappeared.
Unearthing the Truth: an Interview with Mercedes Doretti, co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)
"Recovering the remains is not enough to erase the pain of the past, but it is a huge part of healing and a crucial form of reparations."-Mimi Doretti
By Veerle Opgenhaffen
When faced with the question of resolving disappearances, we often think of police investigations, legal inquiries, and truth-seeking measures as the primary methods to determine the fates of victims. Yet the truth can also quite literally be unearthed by analyzing the bones, remains, and other physical forms of evidence left behind. Even when destroyed beyond recognition, incinerated, or buried in mass graves, these remains hold vital clues, not only to the identity of the person killed, but also to the often systemic nature of the crimes that led to their disappearance and death.
The art of riddling truths from fragments of remains constitutes a highly specialized field known as forensic science, considered an "applied" science because it borrows methods and techniques from multiple scientific disciplines and applies them to forensic (legal) cases. Specifically, it combines subfields of both anthropology and archeology, employing tools from genetics, ballistics, radiology, osteology, and other means to assess the identity, age, sex, stature, ancestry, cause of death, trauma, and other characteristics of the deceased.
Since its inception in 1984, the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) has become one of the foremost organizations in the world to apply forensic science to investigating past human rights violations. The team has worked in more than 30 countries-including almost every known location where genocide or mass murder has taken place during the 20th and 21st centuries-and helped train and form similar research teams in many other countries.
The EAAF's work has bolstered the investigations and findings of countless international human rights bodies, including truth commissions and tribunals. Like the ICTJ, its work responds to specific requests from local and international NGO's and victims groups-as well as occasionally government bodies-but is premised, first and foremost, on serving and defending victims and their rights. In pursuit of the truth, they do more than excavate bones and work at gravesites. Often, they perform exhaustive research and interviews, looking deeply into national archives and police records; acquire testimonies from victim's families; and attempt to develop a comprehensive picture of what happened.
In recent years, the EAAF has often worked in places where the Center is active and has at times closely collaborated with us to share information and expertise in the service of truth-seeking and other human rights-related investigations. For example, it recently worked with Morocco's truth commission (IER), the truth commission in East Timor (the CAVR), and even recently returned to South Africa to work on unresolved cases of violent murders committed during the Apartheid era.
I recently had the privilege of speaking with co-founder of the EAAF, Mercedes "Mimi" Doretti by phone at her New York office...
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Photo: Members of EAAF exhuming a mass grave at San Vicente Cemetery in Córdoba, Córdoba Province, Argentina in February 2003. Photo: EAAF.
Transitional Justice in The News
Aug 30: To commemorate the International Day of the Disappeared, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced alarming new statistics indicating that up to 18,000 people still remain unaccounted after the wars that followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The overwhelming majority of victims unaccounted for stem from the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, which the agency claims has left 13,500 cases of disappearance unsolved.
Aug 20: The war crimes trial against ex-Liberian leader Charles Taylor has been postponed until January 7, 2008. Judges presiding over the Hague-based trial say they called for a five-month adjournment in order to give new defense lawyers time to prepare their case. Taylor fired his previous counsel, citing on claims that he would not receive a fair trial. In an interview with Voice of America, the ICTJ's Caitlin Reiger, an expert on prosecutions, shares her perspective on why the case against Taylor is being tried in The Hague, rather than in West Africa.
Aug 26: The ICTJ, in collaboration with the Human Rights Center at UC-Berkeley and the Payson Center for International Development at Tulane University, have produced a preliminary research note to preview findings expected to be released in a more comprehensive, analytical report in the Fall of 2007. The report was made public the same week as a similar research project by the UN human rights agency. Both surveyed Northern Ugandans' views on justice and reconciliation.
Aug 15: National and international human rights groups have renewed an effort to create a truth commission in Mexico to examine that country's "dirty war", an era marked by government-led detentions and abuse of political opponents in the 1960s and 1970s. The NGOs involved in discussions-which include the ICTJ-are debating whether to pursue the effort by creating a justice-focused commission, which would prosecute alleged perpetrators, or to build a truth commission following the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission model, which allowed for conditional amnesties for some ‘repentant' perpetrators.
Aug 8: In partnership with the BBC World Service Trust (WST), the ICTJ launched the first of a series of trainings for African journalists, as part of a joint, two-year "Communicating Justice" project. On August 6, a team of trainers from the Center's Liberia office and the BBC WST convened a group of Liberian journalists in the country's capital to conduct a series of workshops aimed at heightening public knowledge about justice-related issues after periods of conflict. Journalists in four other African countries-Burundi, the DRC, Sierra Leone, and Uganda-will receive similar trainings over the next two years.
Aug 3: In addition to growing criticism from human rights groups, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal has expressed concern about provision of amnesty for perpetrators of gross human rights violations in the Nepalese government's proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) bill. According to the bill, a TRC would examine crimes committed during the 1996-2006 armed conflict; systematize a vetting process for public employees, and; develop a reparations scheme for victims. The proposed legislation was drafted jointly by the Prime Minister's Office, the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, and the National Human Rights Commission.
Aug 16: South Africa's former Law and Order Minister, Adriaan Vlok, appeared in the Pretoria High Court and pleaded guilty as charged for the attempted murder of a prominent anti-apartheid activist in 1989. Vlok and co-defendant Johannes Van der Merwe, the country's former police chief, both received suspended prison sentences. Three other former top security officials were given five-year deferred sentences, which will not go into effect unless they commit crimes within the next five years. Former Truth and Reconciliation Commission Vice-chairperson and ICTJ co-founder, Alex Boraine, shares his views on the proceedings.
Aug 24: The Chilean Supreme Court announced it may rule on former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori's extradition appeal within the next month. In July, a Chilean court barred Fujimori's extradition, saying the evidence presented by Peruvian authorities was insufficient. Fujimori is wanted on charges of human rights crimes committed during his term as president, from 1990 to 2000. He claims he is innocent on charges that he ordered or was aware of illegal abductions, torture, and killings of members of the Shining Path-the Maoist guerrilla movement. Fujimori has been under house arrest since arriving in Chile in late 2005.
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