Me m o ry : making peace - UNESCOunesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/001182/118279e.pdfDecember 1999 - The UNESCO Courier 3 P E O P L E A N D P L A C E S Under the big top of Italy’s

PLANETForests:a hot dealfor a cooler world

CONNEXIONSInternational radiomakesnew waves

IN T ERV IEWWangari MutaMaathai, Kenya’sgreen militant

PEOPLE AND PLACESCircusflashbacks

Me m o ry :making peacewith a violent pas t

December 1999

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C o n t e n t sDecember 1999

PEOPLE AND PLACES

3 Circus flashbacks Photos by Massimo Siragusa; Text by Tonino Guerra

EDITORIAL

9 Into action Ko ï c h i ro Matsuura

PLANET

10 Forests: a hot deal for a cooler world Sophie Boukhari

13 Toyota makes trees Yoshinori Takahashi

WORLD OF LEARNING

14 Spare the rod, save the child E t h i rajan Anbara s a n

ETHICS

37 Police against racism Asbel López

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

40 The year 2000: whoÕs coming to the part y ? Jasmina Sopova

CONNEXIONS

43 International radio makes new wave s Cynthia Guttman

TALKING TOÉ

46 Wangari Muta Maathai, Ke n y aÕs green militant

1 7 Focus Me m o ry: making peace with a v i o l e n t p as t

The second half of this century has been stained by

crimes against humanity. For the victims, the path of

reconciliation winds between re m e m b rance and

f o rg e t t i n g . The complexities of this process are

i l l u s t rated by stories on South Africa, Chile, Guatemala,

Russia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia.

Detailed table of contents on page 17.

C over: Mi Lay massacre memorial, Da Nang, Viet Nam; © J.M. H u ron/Editing, Pa r i s

http://www.unesco.org/courier

December 1999 - The UNESCO Courier 3

P E O P L E A N D P L A C E S

Under the big top of Italy’s Embell Riva Circus, an equestrian act prepares to go through its paces. The circus, owned by the Bellucci family, tours mainly in southern Italy.

CIRCUSFLASHBACK S◗ Photos by Massimo Siragusa; text by Tonino Guerra

Massimo Siragusa’s circus photos conjures up a world of happy memories for Italian poet Tonino Guerra, the scriptwriter of Federico Fellini’s 1974 film Amarcord (‘I Remember’)

■When autumn began and leave sfrom the chestnut trees covered theroad between the station and the

square, a moment would come when Iwould open the window overlooking ourvegetable garden and see with delight thetent of the little circus which had beenpitched on the village green overnight.

When I opened the same window inspringtime, my surprise came from thecherry tree, bursting with white blossoms.I was a small boy then, full of excitementat discovering the big top which had goneup in front of our house.The evening air

was filled with the sounds of trumpetsand the rumble of drums.

It was usually the same circus thatFederico Fellini had applauded before mein Rimini, the chief town of the AdriaticR i v i e r a , near the village where I wa sb o rn—Santarcangelo di Romagna. Iremember how Fellini and I often talkedabout it during the shooting of Amarcord,the film in which he remembered hisyouth in Rimini.

By then, both of us had been living inRome for many years. On Sunday mor-nings, Fellini would often drive me to

Cinecittà1. He just loved to be there whenit was deserted and quiet. He would askfor the keys to Set no. 5 and we wouldmake our way to that dank, empty place.

Let the show begin!As soon as we arrived, he would say in

a voice charged with emotion: “Let theshow begin!” and would start to switch onthe lights one by one. We watched the

1.The centre of the Italian film industry, founded62 years ago on the Via Tuscolana just outsideRome.

4 The UNESCO Courier - December 1999


This lanky giraffe is one of many performing animals in the Moira Orfei Circus. The Orfeis are a famous Italian circus family.

A lonesome clown looks into a mirror before going into the ring.



The spotlight picks out spinning hoops and silhouettes a high-stepping dancer during a Rome performance of the Togni family’s three-ring American Circus.

A tightrope walker with the Roncalli Circus treads the high wire in Vienna (Austria). The Roncalli is a German circus, but most of its performers are Italian.



Acrobats caught by the camera in mid-air during a performance by Livio Togni’s Circus in Palermo.

An elephant arrayed in a fluorescent costume.Flying trapeze artists of the American Circus.



P OET, S TOR Y-T EL L ER A NDSCRIP TW RI T ER

The Italian poet Tonino Guerra, who was bornin Santarcangelo di Romagna in 1923, gra-

duated in education studies from the Universityof Urbina and is a world-famous scriptw r i t e r. Hehas written over 100 screenplays, which havebeen made into films by directors includingMichelangelo Antonioni (with whom he has justwritten L’ Aq u i l o n e, an illustrated story for thethird millennium, published by Editoriale Delfi,Cassina, Milan), Andrei Tarkovsky, the Ta v i a n ibrothers, Federico Fellini, Francesco Rosi andVittorio de Sica.

Some of his poems and short stories havebeen translated into English, French, German,Dutch and Spanish. Of one poem, H o n e y, thegreat Italian writer Italo Calvino has said: “To n i n oG u e r ra turns everything into fiction and poetry —via the spoken word, writing or film, in Italian orin the Emilio-Romagna dialect. We should alllearn his dialect so we can read these wonderfulstories in their original language.” ■

To contact Tonino Guerra, write by e-mail to<[email protected]>

fuzzy glow from the dusty bulbs dotted allaround the huge drab area, and thesounds and images of shows we had seenas children came flooding back.

On days when the circus was in town,even my mother Penelope joined in thefun. Every morning, she would ask thekeeper of the African animals for thedroppings of the giraffes and the old lion,and would use them to work wonders onthe flowers she grew in old saucepans.

The beautiful photos by MassimoSiragusa which illustrate this scrapbook ofgolden memories take me back to thosechildhood days as well as my long visitswith the prodigious Fellini to Set no. 5(one of 16) at Cinecittà. For him this setwas the real Via Veneto, the Via Veneto ofLa Dolce Vita. Set no. 5 served as the back-drop when the coffin with the great direc-tor’s body was displayed to the public forthe last time on November 1, 1993.

These memories also take me back toRussia, one of the countries I’ve lovedmost, and bring to mind the time when Iworked for the director A n d r e iKhryanovsky. A few years ago, I gave himthe script of a cartoon story called TheGrey-Bearded Lion. A film was recentlymade of it which tells the story of a littlecircus whose main attraction is an unu-sual lion called Amedeo, or Teo to hisfriends. As the years go by and he getsolder, divisions grow among the smallfamily of circus folk.

The great PopovI also remember, like so many colou-

red bubbles, the times when I met thegr e at Russian clow n s , e s p e c i a l l yKarandash, who was so short that whenhe stood behind a table, he seemed to besitting at it.

And Popov, the great Popov who per-formed his finest routine one day when hewas in Amsterdam. He entered the ringand prepared to eat a meal in a smallspotlight which lit up part of the ground.When he finished, he gathered up thelight with his hands, as if it were bread-crumbs, a trick he’d worked out with thelighting technician. Just as he was leavingthe ring, he put the light in a shoppingbag. He received so much applause thathe stopped and threw the bag towards theaudience, which was then flooded withlight.

I can’t forget either the statues thatIlario Fioravanti, an old sculptor fromCesena, shaped with hesitant child-likehands. In Pennabilli (the village in theMarches region of Italy between Pesaroand Urbina where I’ve lived for the past

d e c a d e ) , he assembled all the stat u e swhich reminded him of the circus and cir-cus life.They are still in the rooms of anold palazzo in the heart of the ancient vil-lage, the Bargello. In cells which onceheld prisoners, Fioravanti’s statues nowstand as if waiting for a round of applau-se that might break out at any moment,applause suspended in mid-air.

There’s something irresistible aboutthis world that floods my memory withjoy but also fills me with melancholy—thelast notes of the music we heard in the vil-lage as the circus caravans prepared toleave and then went on their way. Thesounds trailed away in the fog and beca-me a kind of poignant lament that, stan-ding on the tips of our toes, we strained tohear until the very last note.

Afterwards, we would gather on thepatch of ground where the circus ring hadbeen. Sometimes we’d plant candles andcreate a ring of light around us. ■



An elephant of the Embell Riva Circus gives its trainer a ride.

The ringmaster of the Moira Orfei Circus.

E D I T O R I A L


■UNESCO is a factor of hope,because it is the one international organization which,

through all its progr a m m e s , respects and defends what is of unive rsal wo rth and dignity

in the mat e rial and spiritual heritage of all cultures, and thereby, the absolute

dignity of all human beings. . . .

G l o b a l i z ation is accelerating with dramatic speed, presenting a global challenge which

demands a global answe r.Yet the response must be made with all due respect for cultural

d i ve rsity and identity, for that priceless individual component that makes up the true dignity

of our many peoples.

But UNESCO can only go on providing the world with such hope, and such defence,

if it proves itself to be an adequate world instru m e n t . UN E S C O is not an end in itself. UN E S C O

is a world service,a tool which is at once delicate,highly complex, and precious. Huma-

nity may all the better avail itself of such a tool if all the wo r l d ’s states—and peoples—agr e e

once again to make proper use of it, and so contribute to its efficiency and universality.

UNESCO must once more represent the whole world, with no exceptions. I pledge to do

my best,in the course of my stewardship, to persuade those who stand outside to return

or to join.

But criticisms,not all of them unfair,have been leveled against this great instrument:

and failings,where verified,must be made good.The purpose of sound management is,

a g a i n , not an end in itself, but a duty to ensure that our institution fully discharges its gr e at

task as a true world serv i c e , responsible and accountable to the world—and to the wo r l d ’s

taxpayers.

Our resources are therefore not unlimited,nor should we spread ourselves too thin. I

propose that we streamline our activities within the limits of our bu d g e t s , and closely focus

upon those programmes which are our true mandate—not for the sake of fashionable aus-

t e ri t y, but in order to make a real impact where best we may, and where truly we must,p r o-

vide our needed service: in our ongoing war against poverty, through education and the

nurturing of human resources.

I suggest pursuit of our most practically conceived progr a m m e s , in co-operation with

leading institutions, scientists and scholars around the world, in terms of our four great

directives, on behalf of education,science,culture,and communication.

UN E S C O is a challenging paradox . It cannot lapse into a mere club for intellectuals, bu t

it must serve as a forum for international intellectual exchange.It cannot pretend to be

a research institution but must keep abreast of and stimulate research.It is not an opera-

tional agency, yet it must see that global ethics for peace, justice and solidarity, through

international co-operation in education, science, culture and communication, are both

morally observed and tangibly applied. F i n a l l y, UN E S C O is not a funding agency, a l t h o u g h

it must provide catalytic funds to generate further funding: in order to demonstrate that

ideals only take shape through action. . . .

In the whirl of this changing age, let us stand firm and faithful to our enduring pur-

pose: building peace in the minds of men. ■

(Extracts from an address gi ven by Mr Koïchiro Matsuura in Pa ris on 15 Nove m b e r , on the occa-

sion of his investiture as Director-General of UNESCO.)

IN TO ACT ION

Koïchiro Matsuura

Koïchiro Matsuura, who wasborn in Tokyo in 19 37 ,studied law at the Universityof Tokyo and economics atHaverford College( Pennsylvania, U.S.A.). In19 59, he began his career atthe Japanese Ministry ofForeign Affairs, where he hass e rved as Director-G e n e ral ofthe Economic Co-opera t i o nBureau (19 8 8 - 19 9 0 ) ;D i r e c t o r -G e n e ral of theNorth American AffairsBureau (19 9 0 - 1992); DeputyMinister for Foreign Affairs( 19 9 2 - 1994), in which post heoversaw Japan’s hosting ofthe First Tokyo InternationalConference on Africa nDevelopment; and since 19 9 4as Ambassador to Fra n c e ,A n d o r ra and Djibouti. Healso served for one year,until November 1999, aschairperson of UNESCO’ sWorld Heritage Committee.On November 12, UNESCO’ ssupreme ruling body, theG e n e ral Conference grouping188 Member Sta t e s ,c o n firmed the choice madeby the Executive Board on 12November and appointed MrM a t s u u ra to the post ofD i r e c t o r -G e n e ral of UNESCO.


P L A N E T

F ORESTS: A HOT DEAL F OR A COOL ER WORL D◗ Sophie Boukhari

Forests can play a key role in combating the greenhouse effect but current proposals for usingthem raise a thicket of thorny issues

◗ UNESCO Courier journalist

Many reforestation projects are underway in Brazil, but deforestation is still gaining ground. According to Greenpeace, 80 per cent of the felling is illegal.

■Why are industrialists so keen ontrees these days? After the Japanesevehicle-maker Toyota (see page 13)

and others, the French car firm Peugeotlaunched a huge reforestation project inlate 1999. The result will be 10 milliontrees growing on 12,000 deforested hec-tares in the heart of the BrazilianAmazon.

The aim of the $10 million project,says Peugeot chief Jean-Martin Folz, is to“make the idea of a carbon sink a reality.”In other words, to show that reducingconsumption of fossil fuels—gas, oil andcoal—is not the only way to fight globalwarming. By using the ability of vegeta-tion to absorb and store carbon dioxide( C O2) , the main greenhouse gas, t h eamount of CO2 in the atmosphere can bereduced.

Tropical forests:a controversial role

Through the process of photosynthe-sis a growing tree gives off oxygen andabsorbs water, light and CO2, which iswhy expanding forests are what is knownas “carbon sinks”. Full-grown forests onthe other hand cease to be carbon sinksand become carbon reservoirs.They storehuge amounts of carbon above and belowground and play a neutral role in the CO2equation. The carbon dioxide given offwhen old trees decompose can be offsetby that which is absorbed when youngtrees gr ow in their place. And whenforests burn, they give off CO2 and beco-me sources of carbon.That is the theory.In practice, however, very little is knownabout the global carbon cycle and the roleof forests in it.

It is also unclear how forests will reactto global warming. “There are uncertain-ties regarding the implications of increa-sed CO2 concentration in the atmospherefor photosynthesis, forest growth rates

and changes in carbon stocks in forests,”says Indian scientist N.H. Ravindranath,one of the three co-ordinators of a specialr e p o rt on forests produced by theI n t e r g ove rnmental Panel on Climat eChange (IPCC). Today’s carbon sink canbecome a source of CO2 tomorrow.

According to currently available data,the world’s main forest carbon sinks are inthe countries of the North (the UnitedS t at e s , C a n a d a , Europe and Russia).After centuries of deforestation,mainly tocreate farmland, these regions have beengaining trees again in the past 100 yearsor so. As a result of the revolution inintensive agriculture, less land is neededfor farming.

On the other hand, large-scale defo-restation is still taking place in tropicalcountries where land hunger is constantlyincreasing (see box opposite page). Thiscontributes to the increased concentra-tion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphe-re. The role of tropical forests in thiscontext is highly controversial. In theory,

as mature forests they should absorb asmuch CO2 as they give out. But recentstudies suggest they actually absorb moreCO2 than was thought. In fact, says YoubaSokona, deputy director of Enda TiersM o n d e , a non-gove rnmental organiza-tion,“we have no clear idea of the state offorest resources or the way they behave indeveloping countries.” Forest sur veys arevery expensive, and not many have beendone in the countries of the South. Theestimates of the Food and AgricultureO r g a n i z ation of the United Nat i o n s(FAO) have sometimes been questioned.

Carbon credits

Despite all these unknown factors, thenotion of carbon sinks has become highlytopical—for political rather than scientificreasons. It came of age in 1997, when itwas introduced into articles 3.3 and 3.4of the Kyoto Protocol on Climat eChange.

Under the protocol, which was the

Article 3.3 says that “direct human-indu-ced land use change and forestry activi-ties, limited to afforestation, reforestationand deforestation since 1990” can beused by states parties to meet their com-mitments. For example, a company mayfund a reforestation project in its ownc o u n t ry, or else a country like T h eNetherlands,say, could sponsor tree plan-t ations in Po l a n d . In 2008-2012, t h eamount of CO2 these trees have absorbedor “sequestrated” will be calculated and


P L A N E T

Women carry seedlings into a wooded area as part of a forest rehabilitation project in Tanzania.

result of tough negotiations in the wake ofthe 1992 United Nations Framewo r kC o nvention on Climate Change, t h ei n d u s t rialized countries promised to redu-ce their annual net emissions of gr e e n h o u-se gases by an average 5 per cent a ye a runtil 2008-2012, using the 1990 level as ab a s e . To do this, some countri e s , n o t a b l ythe United Stat e s , insisted on the esta-blishment of three “ flexibility mecha-n i s m s ” .

The first involves setting up a marketwhere the rich countries will bargain witheach other to buy and sell emission per-mits. The second is a “joint implementa-tion” (JI) arrangement under which theywill earn carbon credits in exchange forfunding reduction of emissions in former-ly communist eastern Europe through,for example, industrial cleanup projects.The third is a “clean development mecha-nism” (CDM), which is like JI but ope-rates between industrialized and develo-ping countries. Many environmentalistshave sharply criticized this “internationaltrading in hot air” and accuse the coun-tries that are the worst polluters of see-king to shirk their obligation to thorough-ly revamp their own energy consumptionpractices.

Including the carbon sink idea in theKyoto Protocol is another way of makingthe Protocol’s application more “ fle x ible”.

counted as part of such countries’ reduc-tion in their own greenhouse gases.

Article 3.4 adds, without going intospecifics, that other human activities rela-ting to carbon sources and sinks can betaken into account. “These articles arelast-minute compromises,” says MichelRaquet of Greenpeace Europe. “Theywere drafted without much idea of theirimplications or whether everyone agreedon the meaning of the terms used. In fact,they vary from one institute or country to

DEF ORES TAT ION GAT HERS SPEED

Over the last 150 years, says the Wo r l dResources Institute (WRI), deforestation and

changes in land use have been responsible for 30per cent of the increase in greenhouse gas emis-sions into the atmosphere.

At present, according to FAO, CO2 emissionsfrom these sources, especially in the tropics,represent a fifth of the world’s carbon dioxideemissions resulting from human activity. Forestclearance to create farmland or pasture is a bigpart of this. In the 1990s, Brazil emitted 27 timesmore CO2 because of deforestation than fromfossil fuel combustion, according to BiomassUsers Network, a non-governmental organiza-tion.

“Wood is usually burned on the spot becauseit’s not worth keeping it,” says French forestryexpert Arthur Riedacker. “It’s also too expensiveto move. In Congo, it costs $130 a cubic metre tobring timber out of the forest to the coast, whilepine wood or spruce only fetches $50 a cubicmetre in France.”

The WRI says that if nothing is done, deforesta-tion could account for 15 per cent of the CO2 in theatmosphere by 20 50, with the rest mainly due toindustrial pollution. Most of it will come from theAmazon region. After 20 50, deforestation will declineb e cause there will not be many forests left. TheIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ca l c u-lates that 73 per cent of the world’s tropical forests


P L A N E T

Villagers water seedlings at a tree nursery in India.

another.” Future negotiations will sortthis out.

These talks will also try to decide—this will be a far-reaching debate—whe-ther or not to include carbon sinks in theCDM. If they are included, rich countrieswill be able to fund afforestation or anti-deforestation projects in poor countries asa way of obtaining carbon credits, insteadof carrying out often more costly schemesat home to curb emissions from industryor transport.

The Intergove rnmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC), the scientificorgan of the 1992 Convention,thinks thatcarbon sinks can play an important role.As the FAO report notes,“IPCC has esti-mated, with a medium level of confiden-c e , t h at globally, carbon sequestrat i o nfrom reduced deforestation, forest rege-neration and increased development ofp l a n t ations and agr o - f o r e s t ry betwe e n1995 and 2050 could amount to 12 to 15per cent of fossil fuel carbon emissionsover the same period.”

Arthur Riedacker, a French expertinvolved in the IPCC’s work, also pointsout that such schemes produce biomassand timber, so reducing fossil fuelc o n s u m p t i o n . Biomass is a renewa b l eenergy source. Wood can replace plasticor concrete, whose manufacture useshydrocarbons. But Ashley Mattoon of theWorldwatch Institute says the trade-off in

carbon sinks may be “a major loophole[in the Protocol] which admits vast quan-tities of fossil carbon into the skies” and“encourages types of forestry that aren’tvery good for forests.”

Questionablegains

To head off these dangers, everyoneagrees the carbon sink idea should be veryclosely examined and tightly regulated.The IPCC, which will report back in2000, will have to be more precise aboutthe meaning of the terms “afforestation”,“ r e f o r e s t at i o n ” and “ d e f o r e s t at i o n ” i narticle 3.3 so as to prevent abusive prac-tices developing. For example, the textcurrently says a country can chop downan old forest and replace it by one of fast-growing trees, notes Greenpeace expertBill Hare.The felling would not be coun-ted in the country’s emissions but thereforestation would earn carbon credits.So the country involved would gain, butnot the atmosphere or the environment,because an old forest and its soil containmore carbon, which would be released bythe felling, than a managed forest everwill. Biodiversity would also suffer.

Another problem would arise if Japan,say, were to fund a forest protection pro-ject in Malaysia. In return, it would askfor carbon credits equal to the emissionswhich the felling of the forest would have

produced. But how can we be sure thatthe protection project is actually respon-sible for preventing the forest from beingdestroyed? And what is the point of pro-tecting, say, a stretch of African savannahif the local population can simply chopdown trees further away?

For the moment, the world is roughlydivided into three camps about the issueof carbon sinks. One consists of severalrich countries (including the U.S., NewZealand and Australia) that want a broaddefinition and flexible use of carbon cre-d i t s. In some countri e s , like NewZealand, carbon sequestration from treeplantations covers a very high percentageof their greenhouse gas emissions. If theyare unrestrictedly taken into account in2008-2015, they will allow such countriesto meet their commitments withouttaking any steps in areas such as industry,transport and human settlements.

In the U.S., which has pledged to cutits emissions by 7 per cent over the next10 years, the carbon sink mechanism isbeing used to persuade Congress to dropits refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol,says Mattoon. The Clinton administra-tion argues that the sinks “could compri-se a significant portion of the country’stotal required emissions reductions.”

A recent article in New Scientist maga-zine said Washington is even pressing forarticle 3.4 to be amended to include


P L A N E T

TOYOTA MAKES TREES◗ Yoshinori Takahashi

waste from wood products in the defini-tion of a carbon sink. It is certainly betterto bury paper and wood waste in theground than to burn it and release moreCO2 into the atmosphere. But how far isthis going to go? “The spirit of Kyotodemands that we should focus on thingst h at produce fewer greenhouse gases,which means encouraging energy-saving,transport reform and improved industrialprocesses and housing, with improve-ments in forestry practices as an extra,”says Riedacker.

Conflicting interests

A second group includes Europeancountries which take a cautious stand andare waiting for the IPCC report beforemaking up their minds.The third group ismostly made up of poor countries, whichare divided on the issue, s ay sR av i n d r a n at h . “ T h e y ’re interested indevelopment, not so much in carbon,”says ENDA’s Sokona, who is a member ofthe IPCC working party.

E ve ryone has different wishes andconstraints as far as development goes.India, China and the countries of sou-theast A s i a , which have competitiveindustries, seem opposed to introducingforestry projects into the CDM. Theywould prefer the rich countries to investin them via industrial projects, whichwould include more technology transfers.But some Latin American countries,suchas Costa Rica, are basing their develop-ment on eco-tourism, so they have aninterest in improving their forests.

Africa, where half of all greenhousegas emissions are caused by deforestation,is hesitating because in a continent wherefood security is still the top pri o ri t y,people fear farmland will be lost if treesare planted. But Africa’s weak industrialbase means it will probably not benefitmuch from the CDM if forestry projectsare not included in it. So some experts arein favour of it under certain conditions.

“Protected parks don’t interest us,”says Sokona. “They mean moving peopleoff land without giving them anything inreturn. It’s too easy for rich countries tocome and plant trees in our countries,puta fence round them and earn carbon cre-dits. However, I’m in favour of agrofores-try, which meets our needs.”

Few countries have taken a clear standso far. Others are still making their calcu-lations and trying to work out their posi-tion. The real battle over the world’sforests will come after May 2000, whenthe IPCC will make its report. ■

Industrialists can no longer ignore the effects oftheir activity on the environment. In a world

which is more and more polluted and threate-ned by global warming, their reputation andfuture depend on doing something about it.

The Japanese vehicle-maker Toyota hasunderstood this since the end of the 1980s. Itlaunched its “Toyota Forest” programme in1992, the year of the Rio Earth Summit, with thegoal of using biotechnology to turn trees intoanti-pollution agents.

Today Toyota is proud of its experimentalforests, including Foresta Hills, half an hour bycar from the company’s headquarters. The fir mis trying to revive s a t oy a m a, which are ancientprotected hills on the edge of populated areas.They are a source of wood and prized items likem a t s u t a ke mushrooms and u r u s h i, Japanesel a c q u e r.

“In this forest, we’re developing the sameactivities our ancestors did in the 19th century , ”says Yasuhiko Komatsu, the project’s chief. “Wewant to create s a t oy a m a for the 21st century. ”The giant company’s engineers say they aret rying to reduce vehicle emissions but cannot getrid of them completely. So other solutions haveto be found—by using trees.

At Foresta Hills, the effect of different kinds oftrees on the level of carbon dioxide in the air ca nbe measured. In some places it is 10 to 20 timesl ower than in others. The most “effective” treesare those which grow quickly, stand up to diffi-cult surroundings and resist diseases andinsects, so these are the ones biologists want to

learn how to cultivate. Increasing the number ofchromosomes of some trees has boosted theira b i l i ty to absorb toxic gases by a third.

Toyota is also researching into how to speedup the growth of trees in very acidic soil with av i ew to the reforestation of southeast As i a ,which has been devastated by deforestation.Recently, the company began organizing refo-restation activities outside Japan, and in August1998 joined with paper manufacturers to set upthe firm of Australian Afforestation Pty. Over thenext decade, 5,000 fast-growing, drought-resis-tant eucalyptus trees will be planted in Austra l i a ,later to be chopped down and made into paper.

Toyota’s work has drawn criticism how e v e r.Environmentalists are worried about the effectson the environment of genetica l l y - m o d i fied spe-cies. Others argue that the main priority in fig h-ting the greenhouse effect is to reduce emissionsof pollutants and cut back on motor tra f fic .

“The car-makers are planting trees to givethemselves a nice green image while hopingtheir vehicle sales don’t drop,” says MichelRaquet of Greenpeace Europe. “What will theyget in return? Carbon credits, even though thereis no scientific guarantee that their forestry pro-jects will have any effect on the atmosphere.”

“One of these days,” says Ashley Mattoon ofWorldwatch Institute, “we will have to ask our-selves how much more time, energy and moneyshould be spent on tinkering with nature ands a t i s fying our dependence on fossil fuels.” ■

◗ Tokyo-based journalist

Right, a tree seedling whose chromosomes have been doubled. It will grow into a tree with greaterefficiency at absorbing toxic gases than the ordinary specimen, left, of the same species.

encourage violence and revenge as solu-tions to problems,experts say.

M o r e ove r , child rights activists contendthat corporal punishment goes against the1989 United Nations Convention on theRights of the Child, which affirms the chil-d ’s need for care and protection. A rticle 19of the convention, which has been ratifiedby 191 countries including Kenya , s p e c i-fies that states must take appropriate mea-sures to protect children from “all forms ofp hysical or mental violence, i n j u ry or abu s e ,neglect or negligent treat m e n t , m a l t r e at-ment or exploitation.”

The HRW report , based on a fie l dstudy, including scores of interviews withs t u d e n t s , t e a c h e rs , parents and offic i a l s ,says that Kenyan children are often puni-

shed for petty offences like coming late toschool or wearing a torn uniform.

The problem has dire implications forbasic education.A recent study shows thatthe enrolment rate in pri m a ry schools isfast declining and only 42 per cent of thoseenrolled in first grade complete the pri-mary school cycle.The decline is, amongother reasons,due to poverty and a hostilelearning environment,say analysts.

“Some students told us that they drop-ped out of school because of severe beat i n gby their teachers.This is in clear violation ofchildren’s right to education,” says Thon-den.

“So far no teacher has been convictedfor these deat h s ,” s ays Jemimah Mwa k i s h a ,a journalist who has written extensively onthe subject in Kenya’s leading newspaper


W O R L D O F L E A R N I N G

■When Justus Omanga, a fourth gr a d estudent at Mobamba SecondarySchool in Kenya ’s Kisii distri c t ,r e p e a-

tedly denied allegations that he had broughta girl into the school compound one nightlast A u g u s t , his teachers became furi o u s.

Four of the teachers kicked, hit and beatOmanga so hard with a huge stick that theb oy fell unconscious.A month later he diedin hospital as a result of severe damage tohis kidneys and other internal injuri e s ,according to family members.

O m a n g a ’s case is not isolat e d . A c c o r-ding to the Kenyan media corporal punish-ment has led to the deaths of at least sixstudents in the last four ye a rs.While caningis a regular feature in schools, some stu-dents have suffered serious injuries whichinclude “ b ruises and cuts, broken bones,knocked-out teeth and internal bleeding,”s ays a recent report from the New Yo r k -based non-gove rnmental organizat i o nHuman Rights Watch (HRW) titled Sparethe Child: C o rp o ral Punishment in Kenya nSchools.

An incentive to violenceand revenge

K e nya is not the only country in theworld that still practises corporal punish-m e n t .I n d e e d , only 70 countri e s ,b e gi n n i n gwith Sweden in 1979, h ave banned thep r a c t i c e . But experts say Kenya is one ofthe worst offenders when it comes to vio-lence stemming from corporal punishment.“In Kenya corporal punishment againstchildren in schools has reached dange-rously high levels,” says Yodon Thonden, aTibetan-American who led the five-mem-ber research team which prepared theHRW report.

A p a rt from the brutality which is often,in Kenya at least,associated with the prac-t i c e , c o rporal punishment in itself canp r ovoke anger in its victims, leading toresentment and low-self esteem. It can also


SPA RE THE ROD, SAVE THE CHIL D◗ Ethirajan Anbarasan

The widespread use of corporal punishment in Kenyan schools has led to increasing dropoutrates and in a few cases, to death

Daily Nation.Neither are teachers commonly sen-

tenced for inflicting serious injuri e s. V i c-tims often come from rural areas, w h e r epeople don’t have the finances to hire al aw yer and where legal aid is poor. In someinstances where teachers have been taken toc o u rt , they have gone unpunished, as it hasbeen difficult to prove a motive in the killingas required under the criminal law, Mwa-kisha says.

Parents scaredto speak out

E x c e s s i vely harsh corporal punishmenttends to be particularly common in thecountryside.“In rural areas,parents don’tf o rmally object to their children being bea-ten for fear they [the children] might bevictimized further,” says Mwakisha.

In public, K e nyan education ministryo f ficials have strongly denied the HRW alle-g at i o n s ,s t ating that some isolated incidentsin rural schools have been exaggerat e d .H owe ve r , in pri vat e , a senior educat i o nministry official admits that the report was“more or less corr e c t .” He says teachers“ b rutally beat children in many schoolswithout any proper reason.This is a prac-tice that can only be stopped by abolishingcorporal punishment altogether.”

Nevertheless the recent deaths and ther e p o rt have triggered a debate in Kenya onbanning corporal punishment, as otherA f rican countries including Namibia, B u r-kina Faso, South Africa and Ethiopia havedone in recent years.

According to government regulations,c o rporal punishment may be inflicted onlyin cases of continued or gr ave neglect ofwork, lying, bullying and gross insubordi-nation.The beating, with a cane no morethan half an inch thick, can be gi ven only byor in the presence of a head teacher. Regu-lations state that boys should be hit on thebackside and girls on the palm of the hand.Students are not supposed to get more thansix strokes as punishment and a wri t t e n

‘Some students told us thatthey dropped out of schoolb e cause of severe beating bytheir teachers. This is in clearviolation of children’s right toe d u ca t i o n ’

record of all the proceedings should bekept.

“The rules are hardly followe d . Te a-c h e rs use clubs, bamboo canes, s o m e t i m e seven a rubber whip to beat the students,”says Thonden.

For many teachers, a tool to copewith big classes

A strong constituency of Kenyan tea-c h e rs is in favour of retaining corp o r a lp u n i s h m e n t , e ven though they concedemore restrictions are required. A few ye a rsago when the Director of Education tried tomake the practice illegal, the teachers ’u n i o nsaid it would not recognize such a ban.

Many teachers argue that without cor-poral punishment the schools would des-cend into chaos and that children wo u l dbecome even more unruly by the time theyreached high school. In fa c t , they believethat in the long run corporal punishmentmeans less rather than more violence.“ We s t e rn countries gi ve excessive freedomto their children. Look at the violent inci-dents in many schools in the UnitedS t at e s ,” s ays Lawrence Kahindi Majali,Assistant Secretary General of the Kenya

punishment by citing Kenya ’s long tradi-t i o n . “When we were under British ru l e ,those who refused to pay taxes or those whodid not obey the rules were caned in public.The use of the cane was a symbol of autho-rity and the legacy continues,” s ays Majali.

M a ny teachers admit that they oftenc a rry out corporal punishment without thepresence of the headmaster. In violation ofthe rules,the students are sometimes bea-ten all over the body, and often records ofc o rporal punishment are not kept inschools.

Stephen P, a fifth grade student in Moip ri m a ry school in Nairobi, s ays teacherscane him or slap him regularly. His offencesinclude coming late to school and notp aying school fees on time. Elizabeth Z,who is in the fourth standard, s ays teachersslap her and pinch her on the cheeks fornot doing homework.

“My children were not treated well bythe teachers after I complained aboutcaning by their class teacher,” s ays DeborahN,a mother of two living in Nairobi.

Teachers are also afraid.They quote agrowing number of instances in which tea-c h e rs have been attacked by students. I n

National Union of Teachers (KNUT).M a ny Kenyan teachers also contend

that corporal punishment is one of the fewd i s c i p l i n a ry tools available gi ven large classs i z e s. According to a gove rnment reportthere are 5,718,700 students and 192,000t e a c h e rs at pri m a ry school leve l , giving ateacher-pupil ratio of 1:31. In many schoolsclasses of 50-60 students are common.

The burden is heaviest in rural areaswhere retired and transferred teachers ’posts are often left va c a n t . As a result,a u t h o rities frequently combine two or threeschools in a regi o n , putting additional pres-sure on the existing teaching staff.

Te a c h e rs also try to justify corp o r a l

December 1999 -The UNESCO Courier 15


“The best method of teaching mathematics?” A cartoon published in Daily Nation, a leading Kenya newspaper.

‘When we were under Britishrule, those who refused to paytaxes or those who did notobey the rules were caned inpublic. The use of the cane wasa symbol of authority and thel e g a cy continues’



HE AVY HANDED TRE AT MEN T

one extreme case,a class prefect was killedby students in the town of Nye ri , near Nai-r o b i , early this year for being too strict withthem.

The fact that corporal punishmentleads so often to brutality may be sympto-m atic of the pressures facing the whole tea-ching profession. Te a c h e rs ’ s a l a ri e s — r a n-ging from 4,000 Kenyan shillings ($60) toabout 15,000 ($200) a month—are amongthe lowest in the civil serv i c e .Te a c h e rs seemto take their frustrations out on their stu-d e n t s , s ay expert s. “ L ow salaries reduceteacher morale, and many of the lowe s t -paid teachers are forced to find housing inslum areas,” says the HRW report.

Mounting tensionE d u c ation ministry officials say gui-

dance counsellors in secondary schoolsencourage teachers to adopt methods todeal with depressed or problem studentsand thus avoid tensions leading to corp o r a lpunishment.

The counsellor discusses with theconcerned student why he or she commit-

ted an offence and tries to find solutions.But officials admit that there are notenough counsellors in schools due to fin a n-cial constraints and even those who havebeen posted as counsellors undertake otherresponsibilities due to shortage of staff.

Te a c h e rs in favour of reducing corp o r a lpunishment feel that the best place forintroducing altern at i ve disciplinarymethods is the Teacher Training Pro-gr a m m e s. At present teachers say that theyhardly spend more than four to five hourson classroom management during their ini-tial two - year training period for pri m a ryschool.

Realizing the gr avity of the problem,m a ny non-gove rnmental organizat i o n sh ave now joined the campaign to abolish

c o rporal punishment and have started wo r-king with teachers to minimize its use untilthe law is changed.

“Until a legal sanction is obtained, wedecided it would be better to work with theteachers,” says Jacqueline Anam-Mogeni,child rights adviser at the NetherlandsDevelopment Organization (NDO).

The Nairobi-based NDO organizesworkshops and training programmes tohelp teachers to get to grips with their pro-blems and encourage them to use counsel-ling methods and other forms of punish-ment,such as manual work.

Alternativesolutions

NDO selects a group of teachers andvo l u n t e e rs from other non-gove rn m e n t a lo r g a n i z ations from a particular regi o nwhere corporal punishment incidents areh i g h , and organizes workshops exposingthem to human rights and child ri g h t sissues.After a week’s training, the teachersgo back to their schools and return for eva-luation every three months.

“We first ask the participants how theyt r e at their own children at home. Once theyrealize there is a problem they themselvescome up with altern at i ve solutions,” s ay sMogeni.

The first session attracted 24 part i c i-pants from different parts of Kenya.Somet e a c h e rs say their attitude towards childrenhas changed after part i c i p ating in thecourse.

“Before I went for the child rights trai-n i n g, I always viewed the punishment asp a rt of the learning process. N ow I wo r kwith the pupils almost at a level of part-n e rs h i p,” s ays Esther Nyakio Ngugi , a tea-cher at Kiri giti Girls A p p r oved school inK i a m bu .

Teachers who participated in the pro-gramme say they have realized that theywere basically driving away students fromschools due to constant beatings.

“This is only a begi n n i n g . We needmore gove rnment and public support tillwe finally abolish corporal punishment,”says Mogeni. ■

Co r p o ral punishment is legal not only in Ke n y a ,but also in a number of other east Africa n

countries, including Tanzania, Sudan and Somalia.Governments complain that there are not enoughresources and trained personnel to reduce the sizeof big classes, which some teachers find difficult tomanage without corporal punishment.

In Tanzania, a few students have reportedlydied after severe corporal punishment in schools.Many teachers do not like using this form ofpunishment but they “think it is the easiest way tomanage big classes,” says Dale Chandler, ExecutiveDirector of Kuleana, a Centre for Children’s Rightsbased in Tanzania.

Kuleana works with other NGOs in the region toraise awareness among teachers and parents of the negative aspects of corporal punishment. Chandler says the campaign aims to drive home thepoint that if you mistreat children they tend todisobey rules when they become adults.

A legal ban on corporal punishment in schoolshas not improved matters in Ethiopia. “Studentscontinue to be beaten by teachers despite the banenforced in 1988,” says Tibebu Bogaie, progra m m eco-ordinator of “Swedish Save the Children”, anNGO based in Addis Ababa. The organization,which published a report on corporal punishmentin Ethiopia early this year, is campaigning againstthe practice in schools as well as in homes.

In Sudan, teachers say schools run by

missionaries in the south organize guidance andcounselling programmes for students to identify rea-sons for their misbehaviour. But they warn thatever growing classes might force them to switch tocorporal punishment to deal with indiscipline.

However, experts disagree with the view thatindiscipline can be tackled only by corporal punish-ment. Peter Newell, co-ordinator of EP O CH - Wo r l d-wide, an NGO campaigning against corpora lpunishment, says that in countries where the pra c-tice was banned decades ago “schools are not fal-ling apart due to indiscipline. Beating can’t be anexcuse for lack of resources. It is a fundamentalbreach of human rights.” ■

+ É

Useful websiteshttp://www.unicef.orghttp://www.stophitting.comhttp://www.freethechildren.org

For more information on child rights andcorporal punishmentEPOCH-Worldwide77, Holloway Road, London N7 8JZTelephone: 00-44-171-700 0627Fax: 00-44-171-700 1105E-mail: [email protected]

‘Before I went for the childrights training, I always v i ewed the punishment as part of the learning process.Now I work with the pupilsalmost at a level ofp a r t n e r s h i p ’

‘ Low salaries reduce teacher morale, and many of the lowest-paid teachers are forced to find housing in slum areas’

http://www.unicef.org

http://www.stophitting.com

http://www.freethechildren.org


FOCUS

Me m o ry: making p e a c ewith a violent pas t

C o n te n ts

1 8 The evil that men doÉTz vetan To d o rov

2 0 Building blocks of international justice

2 1 Guatemala: ÔWe canÕt forg i ve until we have justiceÕI n t e rview with Rosalina Tuyuc by Maite Rico

2 2 South Africa:¥Quandaries of compro m i s eNjabulo S. Ndebele

2 4 ¥The price of truthMax du Pre e z

2 5 C h i l e :¥Doing a deal with memoryOscar Goday Arc a y a

2 6 ¥An unwritten page of historyFabiola Letelier del Solar and Victor Espinoza Cueva s

28 Russia: an unfinished jobAlexis Bere l ow i t c h

3 0 Cambodia: a wound that will not healRithy Pa n h

3 3 Rw a n d aÕs collective amnesiaBenjamin Sehene

3 5 Bosnia and Herze g ovina: an impossible re c o n c i l i a t i o n ?James Lyo n

3 0 Can we pre vent crimes against humanity?I n t e rview with Louise Arbour by Martine Jacot

As much of the world has its eyes fixed,at the turn of the millennium, on thefuture, this Focus section, in contrast,

looks back at the past. How, it asks, havenations that endured atrocities in thesecond half of this century come to termswith their ordeal? What obstacles have lainin their path? Between remembrance andforgetting, how can they make peace withthe past and build the foundations for abetter future?

In a scene-setting article, TzvetanTodorov explains why we ought toremember the past but not endlessly rakeover it. Rosalina Tuyuc from Guatemaladevelops this idea and insists that the firststep to reconciliation involves knowing whoto forgive.

The ways in which societies react toterrible experiences are shaped by theirhistory, the forces that propel them forwardor hold them back. Post-apartheid SouthAfrica made a new departure, as NjabuloNdebele points out, when it brokered a dealoffering amnesty in return for truth. Butalthough this may have helped to ease thereconciliation process, some victims protestthat freedom should not be bought byconfessing to a crime. In Chile, Oscar Godoynotes that amnesty for crimes committedunder the dictatorship has smoothed thetransition to democracy, but, say FabiolaLetelier and Victor Espinoza, it has notsoftened grim memories.

In Russia, the work of memory isincomplete. In Cambodia it is to a largeextent blocked, laments film-maker RithyPanh, and in Rwanda it is impossible,according to Benjamin Sehene. A similarsituation exists in Bosnia.

Finally, Canadian jurist Louise Arbourhopes that the increasingly long arm ofinternational law, by establishingirrefutable facts, can at least prevent thepast from being mythologized and mayeven prevent crimes against humanity.


The evil that men do. . .◗ Tz vetan To d o rov

The collective memory must be free to come to terms with grief and shape a better future

◗ Mr Todorov, who was born in

Bulgaria and has lived in

France since 1963, is a director

of studies at the French

National Scientific Research

Institute (CNRS). His books

translated into English include

Morals of History (University of

Minnesota Press, 1995), French

Tragedy: Scenes of Civil War,

Summer 1944 (Dartmouth

College Press, 1996) and

Convergences: Inventories of

the Present (Harvard

University Press, 1993).

‘We must draw a veil over all the horr o rsof the past,” said Winston Churchill notlong after the end of the Second Wo r l d

Wa r. Around the same time, the A m e rican philoso-pher George Santayana issued a wa rn i n g, o f t e nr e p e ated since, to the effect that “those who forgetthe past are condemned to repeat it.” For those ofus who have experienced the painful history of the20th century, which of these two injunctions is themost useful? W h at should we do—forget orr e m e m b e r ?

The two operations are contradictory inappearance only. Remembering is always, by defi-nition, an interaction between forgetting (erasu-re) and complete preservation of the past—some-thing that is virtually impossible. The Argentinewriter Jorge Luis Borges creates a character in hiss h o rt story Funes el memori o s o (Funes theMemorious) who remembers every detail of hislife. It is a terrifying experience.

Memory selects from the past what seemsimportant for the individual or for the communi-ty. It organizes this selection and imprints itsvalues on it. Peoples prefer to remember the glo-rious pages of their history rather than shamefulepisodes, and individuals often try unsuccessfullyto free themselves from the memory of a trauma-tic event.

How to live with painful memoriesWhy do we need to remember? Because the

past is the very core of our individual or collecti-ve identity. If we do not have a sense of our ownidentity and the confirmation of our existencethat it provides, we feel threatened and paralyzed.The need for an identity is thus quite legitimate.We have to know who we are and what group webelong to. But people, like groups, live amongother people and other groups. And so it is notenough simply to say that everyone has the rightto exist. We also have to consider how our exerci-se of this right affects the existence of others. Inthe public arena, not all reminders of the past areworthy ones, and those that encourage revengeare always suspect.

The victims of evil may, in their personal lives,be tempted to try to forget the experience com-pletely, blotting out painful or humiliating memo-ri e s. To a woman who has been raped, f o rexample, or a child who has been the victim ofincest, might it not be better to act as if thesetraumatic events never happened? We know frompeople’s reactions that this is unwise, becausesuch a blanket refusal to remember is dangerous.

Repressed memories remain more alive than everand give rise to severe neuroses. It is better toaccept a distressing past than to deny or repressit. The important thing is not to go to the otherextreme and endlessly brood over it, but to gra-dually distance oneself from it and neutralize it—in a sense to tame it.

This is how mourning functions in our lives.First we refuse to accept the loss we have expe-rienced and we suffer terribly from the suddenabsence of a loved one. Later,while never ceasingto love them, we give them a special status—theyare neither absent nor present as they were befo-re. A distancing process develops, and eases thepain.

An act of faith in the futureCommunities are rarely tempted to try to for-

get completely evil events that have befallenthem.Afro-Americans today do not seek to forgetthe trauma of slavery their ancestors suffered.Thedescendants of the people who were shot andburned to death in Oradour-sur-Glane1 in 1944,do not want the crime to be forgotten.In fact theywant to preserve the ruins of the village left by theevent.

Here too, as in the case of individuals, it mightbe hoped that the barren alternatives of totallyerasing the past or endlessly poring over it couldbe avoided.The suffering should be inscribed inthe collective memory, but only so that it canincrease our capacity to face the future. This iswhat pardons and amnesties are for.They are jus-tified when crimes have been publicly admitted,not to make sure they are forgotten but to letbygones be bygones and give the present a newchance. Were Israelis and Palestinians not rightwhen they met in Brussels in March 1998 andnoted that “just to start talking to each other, wehave to leave the past in the past”?

When Churchill called for for a veil to bedrawn over past horrors, he was right in a sense,but his injunction must be qualified by all kindsof conditions. No one should prevent memoryfrom being regained. Before we turn the page,said future Bulgarian president Jeliu Jelev afterthe fall of communism, we should first read it.And forgetting means very different things to evil-doers and to their victims. For the latter, it is anact of generosity and faith in the future; for the

1.A French village where the SS massacred 642 persons asa reprisal for attacks by the Resistance.

It seems unjust toask victims to pro t e c tthose who tormentedthem ye s t e rd a y, andyet this is theresponsibility theymust now shoulder.

B e r n a rd Ko u c h n e r, United Nations Sp e c i a l

Re p re s e n t a t i ve for Ko s ovo

A person or a community may need to appro-priate the memory of a past hero or—more sur-prisingly—a victim as a way of asserting theirright to exist.This serves their interests, but doesnot make them any more virtuous. It can in factblind them to injustices they are responsible for inthe present.

The limits of this kind of remembering, whichemphasizes the roles of the hero and the victim,were illustrated during the ceremonies held in1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the bom-bing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the UnitedStates,people were only interested in recalling theheroic role of the U.S. in defeating Japanese mili-tarism. In Japan, attention focused on the victimsof the atomic bombs.

But there is a lot to be said for rising aboveone’s own suffering and that of one’s relatives andopening up to the suffering of others, and notclaiming an exclusive right to the status of formervictim. By the same token, accepting the wrongswe have done ourselves—even if they were not asserious as the wrongs done to us—can change usfor the better.

The past has no rights of its own. It mustserve the present, just as the duty to remembermust serve the cause of justice. ■


Me m o ry: making p e a c e with a violent pas t

former it results from cowardice and refusal toaccept responsibility.

Yet is remembering the past enough to preve n tit from repeating itself, as Santayana seems to say ?Far from it. In fa c t , the opposite usually happens.To d ay ’s aggressor finds justific ation for his actionsin a past in which he was a victim. Serb nat i o n a l i s t sh ave sought justific ation by looking ve ry fa rback—to their military defeat by the Turks inK o s ovo in the 14th century.

The French justified their belligerence in 1914by referring to the injustice they had suffered in1 8 7 1 . Hitler found reasons in the humiliat i n gTr e aty of Ve rsailles at the end of the First Wo r l dWar to convince Germans to embark on theS e c o n d . And after the Second World Wa r , the fa c tt h at the French had been victims of Nazi bru t a l i t ydid not prevent them—in many cases the samepeople who had joined the army after fighting inthe resistance—from attacking and tort u ring civi-lians in Indochina and A l g e ri a . Those who do notforget the past also run the risk of repeating it byr e ve rsing their role: there is nothing to stop a vic-tim from later becoming an aggr e s s o r.The memo-ry of the genocide which the Jews suffered is vividin Israel, yet the Palestinians have in turn been vic-tims of injustice.

Remember to forg e t !Immanuel Ka n t ,

German philosopher ( 17 2 4 - 1 8 0 4 )

Portraits of people who disappeared under the Pinochet regime look out from a wall in Santiago de ChileÕs Humachuco Renca neighbourhood.


T h e re, at Auschwitz,something happenedthat could notp reviously have beenimagined. T h e repeople touched thep rofound layer ofsolidarity between allthose who have ahuman face, theessence of therelationship betwe e nman and man. . . .A u s c h w i t zt ransformed theconditions ofpermanence inrelations betwe e nhuman beings.

J � rgen Habermas,German sociologist (1929- )

Crimes against humanity

The first definition of these crimes was givenin the Charter of the Intern ational MilitaryTribunal set up by the Allies to prosecute themajor Nazi war criminals (the NurembergTribunal) in 1945. It runs as follows: “murder,e x t e rm i n at i o n , e n s l ave m e n t , d e p o rt at i o n , a n dother inhumane acts committed against any civi-lian population, before or during the war, or per-secutions on political, racial or religious groundsin execution of or in connection with any crimewithin the jurisdiction of the Tribunal,whether ornot in violation of the domestic law of the coun-try where perpetrated.”

The United Nations Convention on the Non-Applicability of Stat u t o ry Limitations to Wa rCrimes and Crimes Against Humanity of 1968added the following provision:“eviction by armedattack or occupation and inhuman acts resultingfrom the policy of apartheid, and the crime ofgenocide.”

GenocideThis term coined by Raphael Lemkin, a

Polish-born American scholar, comes from theGreek word genos (race or tribe) and the Latinsuffix cide (from caedere, to kill).

Regarded as the most serious crime againsth u m a n i t y, it was legally defined by theConvention for the Prevention and Punishmentof the Crime of Genocide, which was unani-mously adopted by the United Nations GeneralAssembly on December 9, 1948, entered intoforce in 1951, and has so far been ratified by 130states. Three major conditions for the identifica-tion of genocide (article 2) are:1) The victims must belong to a national, ethni-cal, racial or religious group, as such. Political,economic or cultural groups (e.g. the victims ofthe Khmer Rouge in Cambodia) are thus excluded.2) The members of this group are killed or perse-cuted because of their membership of the group.3) Genocide is a planned collective crime com-mitted by those who hold state power, on theirbehalf or with their express or tacit consent.

Article 3 defines as punishable acts: genocide;conspiracy to commit genocide;direct and publicincitement to commit genocide; an attempt to

commit genocide; and complicity in genocide.Article 4 stipulates that all persons commit-

ting genocide shall be punished, whether they areconstitutionally responsible rulers, public officialsor private individuals.

The International Criminal Court (ICC)

The notion of an international penal tribunalis mentioned in the 1948 Genocide Convention.But it was not until 1998 that 120 countries (outof 160 participants) meeting in Rome adopted astatute for a permanent International CriminalCourt (ICC) to sit in The Hague (Netherlands).The Court will be created when 60 states haveratified the treaty on its statutes, a process whichshould take two or three years.

The ICC will have (non-retroactive) jurisdic-tion over war crimes, crimes against humanity,and genocide, under certain conditions.Signatories have the opportunity not to recognizeits jurisdiction over war crimes.

Ad hoc War Crimes Tribunals

The War Crimes Tribunal for the formerYugoslavia was set up by a resolution of the UNSecurity Council in May 1993. Based in TheHague, it is empowered to prosecute those char-ged with serious violations of international law onthe territory of the former Yugoslavia, includingwar crimes, crimes against humanity, and genoci-de.

So far 91 persons have been charged (inclu-ding Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic), 31of whom are in custody. Sentences ranging fromseven days to 20 years have been handed down toeight defendants. Four trials are currently beingheld.

The Tribunal for Rwanda, based in Arusha,Tanzania, was set up by the UN Security Councilin November 1994. It has jurisdiction over thesame crimes as the above, committed in Rwandaor neighbouring countries between January andDecember 1994.

So far, 48 persons have been charged, 38 ofwhom are in custody. Five defendants have beensentenced, including three to life imprisonmentfor genocide. Three trials are currently beingheld. ■

B u i l d i n g b l o c k sof international justiceWar crimes presuppose combat between nations. Genocide and crimes against humanity, onthe other hand, may be committed during conflicts within states. An international criminalc o u rt to try these offences is in the works.

ÔWe canÕt forg i ve until we have j u s t i c eÕ I n t e rview with Rosalina Tu y u c



Rosalina Tuyuc has spent the past 17 ye a rs wa i t i n g.One night in June 1982, the Guatemalan armycame and took her father away.“ F rancisco Tuyuc is

d e a d ,”she was later told by the military,who never return e dhis body.Another night,in May 1985,they took away herh u s b a n d ,a peasant leader.

But Rosalina, a 43-year-old Kakchiquel Maya nI n d i a n ,was not deterred and in 1988 she founded theN ational A s s o c i ation of Guatemalan W i d ows (Conav i-g u a ) ,whose 15,000 members are today fighting to ensurethe victims of the country ’s civil war are not fo r go t t e n .I n1 9 9 5 ,Rosalina was elected to parliament as a deputy for thecoalition of left-wing part i e s.

Can time ease the pain for those who have lost

a loved one?

No, you never find peace from that. My childrenstill ask me what’s happened to their father and ifhe’s coming home. We relatives of people who’vedisappeared are looking for our loved ones, andwe don’t find them,either dead or alive.Now thatthe state has admitted that abuses occurred,it hasa moral duty to tell us where our dead are buried.Many of them were executed at military bases. Inthe name of reconciliation, the army must saywhere they are. Most people just want to givetheir spouses or children a Christian burial.

Have the aims of Conavigua changed since the

peace agreement was signed in 1996 and the

Historical Clarification CommissionÕs report

was published in February 1999?

The report confirmed we ’d been right about the extentof the repression.N ow we ’re fighting to get the peaceaccords applied and for Indian rights to be recogni-z e d . But we’ll continue to seek compensation for vic-tims of the wa r , to be told where the mass gr aves areand to bring impunity to an end.

What kind of compensation?

The gove rnment has launched a plan to compen-s ate communities—by introducing electri fic at i o nand building schools, roads and bri d g e s — but it’sforgotten the widow s.We want direct individualc o m p e n s ation for the women themselve s ,i n c l u d i n ga psychological support progr a m m e , s c h o l a rs h i p sfor their children and help in recovering their rela-tives’bodies from unmarked graves.

Can anything more be done to fight impunity?

Keep on trying those responsible. We don’t wantrevenge, we want justice.We’d like to take mattersto an international court because it’s very hard inGuatemala to obtain justice.The trials are costly,they drag on for years and the results are not verycredible. But we’re going to bring to court at leasta few of the 80,000 cases we’ve listed.

How do you balance the demands of the vic-

timsÕfamilies and political reality, which

involves making concessions to safeguard the

transition process?

Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. First we needto know who to forgive. Many families don’tknow who killed their relatives. And if we don’tmanage to establish who was responsible, historymay repeat itself. There’s always the fear of abacklash from certain sectors but we can’t forgiveuntil we have justice.

Do the peace accords take the victims into

account?

The agreements led to a “ r e c o n c i l i ation law ”w h i c hwe regard as an amnesty. It doesn’t apply to acts ofg e n o c i d e , kidnapping and tort u r e .We voted againstthis law and we will oppose any other amnesty.T h ea rmy and the guerrillas share responsibility for thewa r , though in different measure. I t ’s normal thattheir leaders have made peace with one another,but in the villages, families are not even speaking toeach other. T h e r e , r e c o n c i l i ation will take a longt i m e . ■

I n t e rview by Maite Rico, Guatemalan journalist

Ti m e l i n e1 95 4: The CIA ove rt h rows the left-wing government of President Jacobo Arbenz,

ushering in a series of military coups and upheavals.

1962: The first guerrilla groups appear.

1 9 8 1 - 8 3: The height of the civil war. The four rebel groups combine to form the

Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union (URNG).

1986: Election of the first civilian president for 16 years, Vinicio Cerezo.

1991: Start of peace negotiations between the URNG and the government.

1 9 9 6: Signature of peace agreements on “the rights and identity of indigenous

peoples”, in December under UN auspices.

1 9 9 9: The Historical Clarification Commission publishes, in Fe b r u a r y, a re p o rt called

“ Remembering silence”. It estimates that more than 200,000 people disappeared or

were killed between 1962 and 1996, and blames the army for 93% of the 626 mas-

sacres it says took place. ■

Many things a re torn away that I wished to keep for eve r, and the tearing will, I know, bringm i s f o rtune, gre a t e rthan the span of a human life.

Franz Kafka, Cze c hwriter (1883-1924)


South Africa: quandaries of c o m p ro m i s e◗ Njabulo S. Ndebele

South AfricaÕs Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to offer amnesty in exc h a n g efor disclosure of events in the apartheid years. How successful has it been?

◗ Former Vice Chancellor and

Principal of the University of

the North in South Africa and

author of South African

Literature and Culture:

Rediscovery of the Ordinary

and Fools and Other Stories.

In his book Tomorrow is Another Country, SouthAfrican journalist Allister Sparks describes howNelson Mandela’s A f rican National Congr e s s

( A N C ) , and the apartheid gove rnment of SouthA f rica were forced to recognize the need for a nego-t i ated settlement. In a crucial meeting between theANC and the right-wing generals of the South A f ri-can armed forces,Mandela declared:

“ ‘If you want to go to wa r , I must be honestand admit that we cannot stand up to you on thebattlefield.We don’t have the resources. It will be along and bitter struggle, many people will die andthe country may be reduced to ashes.But you mustremember two things.You cannot win because ofour numbers : you cannot kill us all.And you cannotwin because of the international community.Theywill rally to our support and they will stand withus.’ General Viljoen was forced to agree.The twomen looked at each other . . . [and] faced the truthof their mutual dependency.”

This declarat i o n , and its acceptance by eve ryo n eat that meeting, i l l u s t r ates one of the major fa c t o rs thatled to the foundation of the Truth and Reconciliat i o nCommission (TRC) in 1995 (see box ) .The basis ofa ny compromise is that contending parties display awillingness to gi ve up irreconcilable goals, and thenenter into an agreement that yields substantial bene-fits to all part i e s.The apartheid gove rnment of SouthA f rica desired to continue to hold on to the reins ofp owe r , but was willing to allow for increased politicalp a rt i c i p ation by blacks.The liberation move m e n t ,o nthe other hand, desired the complete removal of whitep owe r. Neither of these goals seemed achieva b l ewithout an all-out wa r. It seemed in the best interestof all to avoid such a situat i o n .

One of the demands of the beleaguered apar-theid gove rnment was that in exchange for loss ofp ower there should be a blanket amnesty for all theagents of apart h e i d ,p a rticularly the police and thea rmed forces. But while such an outcome would beb e n e ficial to whites, it would not enjoy the support ofthose who were victims of apart h e i d .They wo u l drightly feel that the benefic i a ries and enforcers ofa p a rtheid were getting away too easily. The wo rs toutcome of such a solution would be that blackSouth A f ri c a n s , victims of apart h e i d , would losec o n fidence in any of their leaders who could acceptsuch a solution.

The flaw in this equation is that it does not offer

a substantial benefit for both sides, and thereforedoes not inspire unive rsal confid e n c e .W h at wa sfinally agreed upon was conditional amnesty.F i rs t l y, the victims of apartheid should have theo p p o rtunity to tell what happened to them, and fortheir sufferings to be publicly acknow l e d g e d .S e c o n d l y, the perp e t r at o rs of political crimes shouldaccount for their deeds by making full and tru t h f u ldisclosure of their actions. L a s t l y, r e p a r at i o n sshould be made to the victims.

An important aspect of the amnesty process is thes t i p u l ation that the life of the TRC be prescri b e d ,on the grounds that a time frame would provide ani n c e n t i ve for perp e t r at o rs wishing to come forwa r da n d , after making full disclosure, to be amnistied.Failure to take advantage of the process within thep r e s c ribed time would open perp e t r at o rs to prose-cution in the ordinary courts of law.

The shame of public exposureD u ring the hearings held by the T R C , h a rr o-

wing stories of suffering and cruelty were heard.Did the process result in reconciliation?

One strong criticism of the amnesty process isthat it frustrates justice and the desire for punish-ment.This does not take into account the fact thatm a ny of the recipients of amnesty experience a kindof punishment they never anticipat e d : the shameof being publicly exposed. The exposure of theirp a rt i c i p ation in despicable acts of cruelty has insome cases resulted in broken families,disorienta-tion and loss of self-esteem—a form of punishmentt h at can arguably be far more deva s t ating than thatexacted by an ordinary jail sentence. Equally, thecontrition leading to a plea for forgiveness,as partof a quest for reacceptance in society, can be fa rmore restorative than the hoped-for rehabilitativeeffects of an ordinary prison term.The cure in themethod of the TRC is located within social practicerather than in the artificiality of punitive isolation.This experience raises legitimate questions abouttraditional methods of retributive justice.

It can be said that as a result of the T R C ,S o u t hA f rica has become a more sensitive and a more com-plex society. South A f ricans have been forced toconfront the complex contradictions of the humanc o n d i t i o n , and the need to devise adequate sociala rrangements to deal with them.The healing thatresults will not be instant. It will come from the

I was chained as yo uwe re chained. I wasf reed, and you havebeen freed. So if I canp a rdon myo p p ressors, you cant o o.

Nelson Mandela,former President

of South Africa (1918- )


Le sida d�ferle: a l e rte z l es jeunes !Me m o ry: making p e a c e with a violent pas t

Ti m e l i n e1 9 4 8 - 1 95 1: The National Pa rty comes to power in 1948 and strengthens segre g a t i o-

nist laws against Blacks (76% of the population) adopted since 1911 and builds apar-

theid (segregation between “Whites, Coloureds and Africans”) into a system.

1 959 - 1 9 6 4: Mounting protest. The regime takes a harder line. African National

Congress (ANC) leaders, including Nelson Mandela, are imprisoned for life in 1964.

1976: Soweto riots: 575 killed, mostly young people.

1989-1993: Prime Minister Frederik de Klerk negotiates with the ANC. Nelson Man-

dela is freed in 1990; the last three apartheid laws are abolished in 1991.

1994: Nelson Mandela is elected president in the first multiracial elections, held in

April.

1995: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) headed by Archbishop Des-

mond Tutu is set up to investigate human rights violations committed between 1960

and 1994 and grant reparation to victims. It has no legal powers except to amnesty

the authors of violations who so wish, on condition of “full disclosure of all re l e va n t

facts relating to acts associated with a political objective”.

1 9 9 8: The T RC ’s final re p o rt lists 21,000 victims, 2,400 of whom have testified in

public hearings. Of some 7,000 requests for amnesty, most are granted, but decisions

on several cases are still pending.

1 9 9 9: Thabo Mbeki (ANC) is elected president in June, succeeding Nelson Mandela. ■

new tendency for South A f ricans to be willing ton e g o t i ate their way through social, i n t e l l e c t u a l ,r e l i-gi o u s , political and cultural dive rs i t y. In sum, it willcome from the progr e s s i ve accumulation of ethicaland moral insights.

C e rt a i n l y, some objectives have been achieve d .No South A f ri c a n ,p a rticularly white South A f ri c a n s ,can ever claim ignorance of how apartheid disru p t e dand destroyed the lives of millions of black people inthe name of the white electorat e .All South A f ri c a n scan now claim to have a common base of know l e d g eabout where they have come from, p a rticularly inthe last 50 ye a rs , and this is an essential foundat i o nfor the emergence of a new national value system.Public acknowledgment of South A f ri c a ’s history ofracism represents a form of reconciliat i o n .

Moving towards social justiceThe TRC has not by any means been a smooth

process. Many whites, particularly among Afrika-ners, felt that the TRC was a punitive witch-hunt,targeting them as a community.This criticism didnot take into account the fact that the TRC alsoaddressed gross human rights violations perpetra-ted by the liberation movements themselves. Theeven-handedness of the TRC in this regard is veryclear in its report,and could itself be regarded as asignificant contribution to reconciliation.

There are people who are not happy with theamnesty mechanism and strongly feel that justice hasbeen compromised (see next page). Fo rt u n at e l y, an e g o t i ated transition ensured there were functioninginstitutions in place for citizens to exercise their ri g h t s.

R e c o n c i l i ation is not a single eve n t . It is a process.The TRC was a mechanism to deal with enorm o u shuman tensions which could have exploded with

d e va s t ating consequences.It enabled South A f ri c a n sto nav i g ate successfully through ve ry rough seas.T h equestion is whether after its second democratic elec-tions South A f rica has the will and resourcefulness totake full advantage of the foundation it has inheri t e d .Continuing disparities in we a l t h ,h o u s i n g,e d u c at i o n ,and health between blacks and whites indicate that theprocess of reconciliation must move to a second stage:the achievement of social justice. In this regard, t h ed e fin i t i ve test of a new democratic society is underway.But the disintegr ation of the South A f rican stat ethrough racial conflict is unlikely in the foreseeablef u t u r e .This outcome is a highly significant measure of

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, chairperson of South AfricaÕs Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at the first hearings of the T RC in Cape Town on April 30, 1996. Some 2,400 victims testified before the Commission over a thre e - year period.

And we forg e tbecause we mustAnd not because wew i l l .

Matthew Arnold,English poet (182 2 - 1 8 8 8 )


The price of t r u t h◗ Max du Pre e z

Amnesty applications have shed light on unsolved murders in South Africa, but for somefamilies knowing the truth is not enough

Why should victims of apartheid accept that theSouth A f rican Truth and Reconciliation Com-mission (TRC) gave amnesty to assassins and

mass killers of the former apartheid regime? This isjust one of the questions asked by critics of the T R Cprocess inside the country.At the heart of all cri t i c i s mis the legal power gi ven to the commission to gr a n ta m n e s t y,under certain conditions to people who com-mitted politically motivated crimes between 1960 and1 9 9 4 . Amnesty means a person can never be cri m i-nally charged with that cri m e , nor can he be sued ina civil court for damages resulting from that act.

More than 7,000 people applied for amnesty,including two former cabinet ministers of Pri m eMinister P. W. B o t h a ’s gove rnment and several ofhis police generals. Most have been granted amnesty,although several cases are still under considerat i o n .

Ve ry often, the families of the victims murderedby former policemen and soldiers , and in a few casesby members of the two liberation arm i e s ,h ave rejectedthe entire notion of amnesty.The most prominentinclude the widow and son of Black Consciousnessleader Steve Biko, who was beaten to death in a cellby policemen, and the family of Gri f fiths Mxe n g e , ablack law yer whose throat was cut by three policemenbecause he represented anti-apartheid activists.

They argue that the provision for amnesty robsthem of any sense of justice. In their view, m u r d e r e rsshould face a criminal trial and be jailed—failing todo so cheapens the lives of their victims.Simply confes-sing to these brutal acts should not be enough to bu y

the perp e t r at o rs complete freedom, they argue.T h e yare also against the provision that no civil claims maybe made against the killers once they receive amnesty,arguing that it cuts out the chance of obtaining com-p e n s ation for the death of a breadwinner to their fa m i-lies as well as for pain and sufferi n g .

The counter-argument, s t ated many times byCommission chairp e rson Desmond Tu t u , is that itwould not be in the interest of national reconciliat i o nto send hundreds of former policemen, s o l d i e rs ande ven politicians to jail. N o n e t h e l e s s ,t wo of the wo rs tk i l l e rs in the apartheid police force,Eugene de Kock(whose request for amnesty is pending) and Ferdi Bar-nard (who did not ask for it), were prosecuted andgi ven life sentences.Wouter Basson, the head of thef o rmer gove rn m e n t ’s Chemical and Biological Wa r-fare progr a m m e , is currently on tri a l .There is no evi-dence to suggest that these cases undermined ther e c o n c i l i ation process in any way.

Another argument often put forward in favour ofamnesty is that much, if not most, of the inform at i o nthe TRC obtained about the evils committed by thea p a rtheid gove rnments was disclosed to them throughthe amnesty applications of perp e t r at o rs of gross humanrights violat i o n s. If it were not for these stat e m e n t s ,t h et ruth about a large number of unexplained events andu n s o l ved murders would not have come out.And forthe nation as a whole, if there had to be a tradeoff, t ru t hwas considered more important than justice.

New heroesThe amnesty applications of Phila Ndwa n d we ’s

m u r d e r e rs is a case in point.The young mother of ababy boy and a unit commander of the A f rican Nat i o-nal Congress army, N d wa n d we was stationed withher unit in neighbouring Swaziland when she crossedthe border one day, n e ver to be seen again. For manyye a rs the ru m o u rs dogged her family that she couldpossibly have been a collaborator of the apart h e i dg ove rn m e n t .Then the story came out in the amnestya p p l i c ation of four policemen.They had lured her ove rthe border with a false message, and then kept her in ad e s o l ate house.There they assaulted and tortured herin an effort to get her to join the apartheid police ortell them her unit’s secrets. According to the police-m e n ’s stat e m e n t s , she told them she would prefer tod i e .They shot her in the head and bu ried her.

Phila Ndwa n d we ’s remains were dug up andr e bu ried at a huge public funeral, where her nine-year-old son received a medal for exceptional bra-very on behalf of his dead mother. Instead of PhilaN d wa n d we being remembered as an apartheid col-laborator,South Africa gained a new hero. ■

What is true ofindividuals is true ofnations. One cannotf o rg i ve too much.The weak can neve rf o rg i ve. Fo rg i ve n e s sis the attribute of thes t ro n g .

Mahatma Ga n d h i ,Indian philosopher andpolitician (1869-1948)

A father and daughter mourn at the graveside of Matthew Goniwe, an anti-apartheid activistwho was murdered in 1985 on the orders of the South African government. The Truth andRehabilitation Commission honoured his memory.

◗ Journalist in Johannesburg

p r e s e rve the history of the repression in the collec-tive memory.

The Commission’s report has neve rtheless hada considerable impact.The truth began to come out,opening up new opportunities for “justice as far aspossible”. Under the current president, EduardoFrei, the courts have handed out prison sentencesto the former head of the DINA, the dictat o rs h i p ’ssecret police,and to other military and police offi-cers involved in the repression.1

But two big issues have been put on the backbu rner—the crimes covered by the amnesty law(committed between 1973 and 1978) and the res-ponsibility of General Augusto Pinochet. M a ny



Chile: doing a deal with m e m o ry◗ Oscar Godoy Arc a y a

Chileans have made a pact to ease the transition to democra c y. But the collective memory has played a more crucial part in pro g ress tow a rds a rule of law

◗ Professor at the Institute

of Political Sciences of the

Catholic University of Chile and

a member of the Academy of

Social, Political and Moral

Sciences of the Institute of

Chile

1 Manuel Contreras, the former head of the DINA, wassentenced in Chile for the murder in Washington ofOrlando Letelier, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Allendegovernment,because Chile’s amnesty law does not covercrimes committed abroad. In July 1999, in a decisiondescribed as “historic”, Chile’s Supreme Court confirmedthe indictment of high-ranking officers on the grounds thatwhen victims’ bodies could not be found, the crimesinvolved were “permanent and not subject to limitation”and therefore not covered by the amnesty law. Editor

The question of human rights violations by stat eo f ficials during the military dictat o rship is nota priority in the current political debate.Chi-

leans have been saying this since 1990 in politicals p e e c h e s , in the media and through public opinionp o l l s.Yet at regular interva l s , this serious issue fla r e sup in the national debate.When it does, politicalfigures feel obliged to make amends, but as a rulethey prefer to let time do its work. Is this passivityor a laissez faire attitude that should be legallycondemned?

“Justice as far as possible,” was the line taken byPat ricio Ay lwin while he was president.The work ofthe Truth and Reconciliation Commission (see boxpage 27) formed part of this approach. Its aim wa sto compile a list of victims of human rights violat i o n sunder the military regime and identify the guilty par-t i e s. The idea was to establish the tru t h , awa r dm at e rial and moral compensation to the victims, a n dlay the foundations of national reconciliation.Butthe Commission’s work has been limited by anamnesty law passed under the military regime. Inother words, its role has been largely symbolic: to

An anti-Pinochet demonstration outside the Chilean embassy in Madrid in October 1998.

D i s re g a rd andcontempt for humanrights have re s u l t e din barbarous actswhich have outra g e dthe conscience ofm a n k i n d .

Preamble to the Universal Declaration

of Human Rights (1948)


Some people have alleged that the crimes of thePinochet dictatorship in Chile should not bepunished because pouring salt into this open

wo u n d , establishing the truth and obtaining justicewould destabilize democracy and endanger so-called social peace.

But all efforts to stifle memory have fa i l e d .T h earrest of Augusto Pinochet in London on October16, 1998 revealed how fragile the Chilean demo-c r atic system is and showed the true face of ac o u n t ry which cannot face up to a period of itsh i s t o ry which continues to divide Chileans intotwo irreconcilable camps.

The systematic cover-up of the dictatorship’sc rimes began on the day of the military coup d’étatagainst President Salvador Allende in 1973. But

Chileans and foreigners wonder why a democraticg ove rnment has not managed to repeal a law whichseems a disgrace and was passed in undemocraticcircumstances.

H ow is it that Pinochet has remained beyond thereach of the law and that his political and criminalresponsibility has not been established? The answe rsto these questions are connected to the specialnature of Chile’s transition to democracy, whichincludes an unspoken agreement to keep theamnesty law on the books and guarantee immunityfor Pinochet.The transition is the result of a pact,whose effects have been strengthened by the exis-tence of a right-wing electorate comprising up to 40per cent of vo t e rs and an electoral system that pre-vents a majority from dominating parliament.A gr e e-ments have been made; there has been neither pas-sivity nor laxity.

Reawakened memoriesThe society’s collective memory is stronger than

this, however.Whenever a debate arises about thepolitical heritage of the military regime or someonetries to amend the constitution,memories are rea-wakened of pri s o n e rs who va n i s h e d , e xe c u t i o n swith or without trial and the torture inflicted onthousands of Chileans. There is no collectiveamnesia: the wickedness of the crimes has left anindelible mark.

For nearly nine ye a rs , there was a tug-of-war bet-ween collective memory and political determ i n at i o nto forget. On the one hand, s e veral legal actions we r es t a rted against Pinochet and members of his regi m e .On the other, one could point to a certain sluggi-

A n unwritten page of history◗ Fabiola Letelier del Solar and Víctor Espinoza Cueva s

Only a few of those responsible for crimes under the dictatorship have so far been tried

◗ Respectively president and

executive secretary of Chile’s

Corporation for the Defence of

the People’s Rights (CODEPU)

from the start of the repression, human rights orga-n i z ations and groups of victims’ families tried to fin dout the tru t h . They all worked together to bu i l dthis collective memory of the past.After a while, t h eaction of a band of mothers who denounced thec rimes committed against their loved ones becamethe mainspring of the struggle to restore demo-c r a cy.The main theme of the campaign was “ n e ve ragain”—only the establishment of a nat i o n w i d eculture of respect for human ri g h t s , a completeaccount of what went on and full rights to justicecould ensure that history would not repeat itself.

We were critical of the National Truth andR e c o n c i l i ation Commission set up at the begi n-ning of the transition process (see box).Why, wea s k e d , did its brief only cover those who disap-

shness in the legal system, a veto by the arm e dforces, and the feeling that drawn-out legal pro-ceedings against Pinochet would not catch up withhim and that he would die a natural death beforecoming to tri a l .This was the situation when he wa sarrested in London.

Pinochet enjoys immunity because he has ad i p l o m atic passport and is a senator for life, a n dthe Chilean gove rnment has accepted this. T h eg ove rnment maintains that it cannot accept foreignjurisdiction over him that it has neither recognizedby treaty nor through ratification of an internatio-nal legal instrument.

I approve of this approach because states aresubject to international law even if it conflicts withmy ideals. I also approve of it because I think thedemocratic transition is our business. I would liketo see,in my lifetime,Chilean courts put Pinocheton trial for what he did and remove him from par-l i a m e n t . I would like to see the armed forces quietlyaccept and respect court decisions and see the pro-Pinochet right accept the requirements of the ruleof law and representat i ve democracy. In sum, Iwould like to see judicial sovereignty in Chile fullydeployed,as part of the rule of law in a strong andestablished democracy.

P i n o c h e t ’s detention has moved the Chileanjustice system forward. Politicians have turned aspotlight on the crimes of the dictat o rs h i p, a n dpublic opinion is starting to accept that globaliza-tion doesn’t only involve trade. This is a processwhich is taking us towards a cosmopolitan societyequipped with supra-national bodies based onfreedom and the defence of human rights. ■

K n owing how tof o rget is more amatter of chancethan an art .

Baltasar Gra c i a n ,Spanish moralist and essayist

( 1 6 0 1 - 1 6 5 8 )



Ti m e l i n e1970: A socialist, Salvador Allende, is elected president.

1 9 73: Allende is ove rt h rown in a military coup led by Gen Augusto Pinochet on

September 11.

1 9 7 8: Gen Pinochet pushes through parliament a law (still in force) granting amnesty

for all crimes except non-political offences committed between September 1973 and

March 1978, the main period of repression.

1988: Gen Pinochet loses a referendum he has organized in a bid to stay in power

until 1997.

1 9 8 9: A Christian Democrat, Patricio Aylwin, is elected president in December in the

first democratic election for 16 years. Gen Pinochet remains commander in chief of

the army.

1 9 9 1: A Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to investigate the re p ression bet-

ween 1973 and 1990 and headed by Sen Raul Rettig produces a figure of 3,197

people killed, including 850 whose bodies are missing.

1993: Eduardo Frei (Christian Democrat) is elected president.

1 9 9 4: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission awards compensation to 2,115

families of the victims.

1996: A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, issues a request for Gen Pinochet’s extra-

dition to stand trial for genocide, tort u re and the disappearance of a number of people,

all of them Spanish citizens in Chile.

1998: Gen Pinochet, now a senator for life, is arrested at a London clinic where he

is having medical treatment.

1 9 9 9: On March 24, the British House of Lo rds refuses to grant Gen Pinochet immu-

nity but limits the extraditable offences to tort u re perpetrated after 1988, when

Britain ratified the international convention against torture. In May, the High Court

in London rejects Pinochet’s appeal. On October 8, magistrate Ronald Bartle rules that

he can be extradited to Spain. If the general loses an appeal against this decision,

the British home secretary will make the final decision on his extradition. ■

peared and leave aside those who were tortured,forced to flee abroad, a r b i t r a rily arrested or sent intointernal exile?

Most of all, we objected to its decision not toname those responsible for the cri m e s , which wo u l dhave at least been symbolic justice. And the truththat the Commission established was only the ver-sion presented by the victims, their families andhuman rights organizat i o n s , since the main cul-p ri t s , the armed forces, refused to have anything todo with it.So it was only half the tru t h . A page of ourhistory is still unwritten.

International solidarityYet through the Commission’s bri e f, the gove rn-

ment recognized that the dictatorship had syste-m atically violated human rights on a massive scale.This organized remembrance of the recent pastwas really an appeal for people to face the future bol-stered by a determination that such crimes mustnever happen again.

Later, fearing the clashes that digging up thetruth and dispensing justice would inevitably pro-vo k e , the nine-year-old gove rnment coalition passedmeasures that removed the issue from the publicarena.The Truth and Reconciliation Commissionand its successor,the Reparations and Reconcilia-tion Commission, were supposed to have settled theproblem once and for all. But far from recognizing

A woman with photos of her father and other missing people takes part in a candlelight vigil organized in Chile in October 1999 by relatives of those whodisappeared during the dictatorship.

the ethical, p o l i t i c a l , judicial and social dimensionsof the problem, they reduced it to a search for theremains of those who disappeared, with the resultthat the nation’s ordeal was revived.

P i n o c h e t ’s arrest means the country cannot avo i dfacing the events whose memory, h owe ver painful itm ay be, we have been fighting to keep alive .I n d e e d ,over 40 complaints have been made against Pinochetbefore a judge which have so far led to the arrest andt rial of a dozen military offic e rs (see note page 25).

The determination of the complainants, alongwith international solidarity, made possible an actof justice none of us had imagined: the imprison-ment of Pinochet in a gilded cage. As the formerhead of stat e , he is the chief perp e t r ator of what weregard as crimes against humanity committed underhis rule inside and outside the country.These cri m e sshould be tried by an international tribunal. Sincesuch a tri bunal is still not functioning, P i n o c h e tought to be tried in his own country.

But Chile has neither adequate institutions nor thepolitical will for that .So far there has been no real moveto repeal the 1978 amnesty law or end the system ofappointed senat o rs.All this means that Chile is a par-tial and hesitant democracy,unable to guarantee a fa i rt rial for Pinochet.A l s o,because he is a senator for life,his parliamentary immunity would have to be liftedbefore he could be tri e d . But since he is still a militaryo f fic e r , an examining magi s t r ate could declare himselfincompetent to handle the case and might send it toa military court , which obviously would not be inde-pendent enough. So Pinochet should be tried inS p a i n .This would be a big step towards ending impu-n i t y, and an exe m p l a ry act against the treachery andt y r a n ny of all dictat o rs h i p s.

Building a collective memory implies know-ledge of the past and all its consequences. As longas it is shrouded in the veil of pardon without jus-tice, we cannot plan a future of peace in a societyreconciled with itself. ■


◗ Sociologist specializing in

contemporary Russian society

and teacher at Paris IV

university

Russia: an unfinished j o b◗ Alexis Bere l ow i t c h

Russians looked back in anger when p e re s t ro i k a re vealed the full scale of Stalinist massacre sand re p ression. But current difficulties have largely halted this re a p p raisal of the past

The body of a dictator is buried and dug ups e veral times in Georgian filmmaker Te n gi zAbuladze’s 1986 movie Repentance. Stalin

had a similar fate: he was symbolically exhumedd u ring the political “ t h aw ” of Nikita Khru s h c h e v ’sr e i g n , hidden away during the Brezhnev ye a rs ,d i s i n t e rred again during p e r e s t r o i k a and is todaymore or less out of sight.

These ups and downs show how hard it is forRussians to perform acts of remembering andm o u rning as a prelude to accepting and copingwith what happened in the dark days of Stalinistterror.

D u ring the thaw ye a rs ,b e t ween 1956 and 1964,Soviet society was confronted with its past for thefirst time when Khrushchev denounced Stalin’sc ri m e s. But the denunciation only went part of theway, and a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Stalinismwas not possible. From the mid-1960s on, all refe-rences to Stalin were censored. D u ring the Brezhnevyears, the dictator was quietly rehabilitated as thearchitect of the victory over Nazi Germany.

But while the Soviet establishment offic i a l l yt ried to play down or make people forget aboutS t a l i n i s m , the most radical wing of the liberali n t e l l i g e n t s i a , the dissidents, continued their scru-t i ny of the Stalinist era. The high point of thiss t ruggle to remember came in 1974 with thep u b l i c ation in the West of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’sThe Gulag A r c h i p e l a go.

In the grip ofa reading frenzy

When p e r e s t r o i k a a l l owed people to speak freely,from 1985 on, the first thing the intelligentsia didwas to turn to the past and try to make sense of it.In 1986 and 1987, h i s t o rical novels which hadbeen written decades earlier and had either beenunpublished in the Soviet Union or published onlyin the West turned the spotlight back onto Stalinism.Nearly 10 million copies were printed of the mostpopular of these nove l s ,A n atoly Rybakov ’s C h i l d r e nof the A r b at. All the key moments and events of theStalinist era were now dealt with—the 1930s,col-l e c t i v i z at i o n , the Second World War and stat e - s p o n-sored anti-semitism.

In 1988, Vassili Grossman’s gr e at novel L i feand Destiny, which had been published in the Westin 1980, appeared in Russia, followed in 1990 byThe Gulag A r c h i p e l a go.The circulation of the maga-zine Novy Mir in which these works appeared rea-ched two million.The whole country was grippedwith a reading frenzy.

When the Soviet people discovered the scaleof the disaster it came as a terrible shock. A sense ofshared responsibility spread throughout the country.People wondered whether the whole society shouldrepent,and there was a call for a Nuremberg-typetrial of Stalinism. It was no longer just a matter ofcontrasting an evil Stalin with good communists andcomrades of Lenin, as had been done during the1987 rehabilitation of the victims of the Stalinistshow trials, but of asking what it was in Russiansociety that had made Stalinism possible. E s s ays anda rticles by historians took over from literat u r e .Most authors belonging to the liberal intelligentsialooked for the causes in Russian history — i nserfdom, the absence of a civil society and demo-c r atic practices, and the huge size of the state sector.E s s ays and articles by historians took over where lite-rature left off.

Waning interestin the past

The duty of remembrance was performed bygroups which painstakingly sought out the names ofthe victims, as the young historian Dimitri Yu r a s ovdid,or looked for mass graves.

This movement led to the founding in 1987-1988 of a Moscow-based human rights associa-tion called Memori a l , with member groups all ove rthe Soviet Union. It drew a map of the labourcamps,set up a museum and compiled lists of vic-tims. In 1989, the Leningrad newspaper Vechernypublished day after day the names of people who hadbeen shot.

At first Memorial was a mass organizat i o nwhich planned to put up a monument to the vic-t i m s. But which victims? The victims of Stalinismor eve ryone who had been persecuted by the Sov i e tr e gime? From 1988 on, c riticism was levelled notonly at the Stalinist period but at the entire socia-list regi m e , and this encouraged the adoption of thesecond defin i t i o n .

But just as the monument project was beingdiscussed,public opinion began to lose interest inthe past. In 1996, the inauguration of a memorialcalled The Mask of Sorrow in the Kolyma region,where the most terrible labour camps had been,passed largely unnoticed.

There seem to have been several reasons forthis public loss of interest. F i rst the economicdisaster and its social consequences are leadingRussians to gi ve pri o rity to the present.They are alsomaking people question the ve ry validity of thed e m o c r atic project. M a ny Russians feel nostalgic for

Concern about thef u t u re cannot bere g a rded aswillingness to forg e t .Fo rgetting shouldn e ver be thought ofas a passport tosocial peace.Memory is part ofcivil peace.

B ronislaw Gere m e k ,Polish historian and politician

( 1 9 32- )

the Soviet era and about a quarter of them hankerafter what they call the most “glorious” era, whenthe USSR was feared and respected, d u ring Stalin’srule.

The sense of national humiliation Russians havefelt in the 1990s has weakened their desire to delveinto the darkest ye a rs. Opinion polls show more andmore people think there is too much talk aboutStalinist crimes. For some Russians,as the Frenchhistorian Maria Ferretti has shown, the desire toforget this period of the past has sprung from arejection of the whole Soviet period as an unfortu-n ate interlude in Russian history and from the glo-ri fic ation of pre-1917 Russia. To d ay ’s Russia iscoming to be seen as the direct heir of T s a ri s tR u s s i a , passing over the black hole of socialist ru l e .

So the Stalinist experience has now been erased.The dictator remains the least popular figure inRussian history—though those with favourable opi-nions of him rose from eight per cent in 1990 to 15per cent in 1997, while his disapproval rating fellfrom 48 per cent to 36 per cent in the same peri o d .The proportion of the population which listed themass repression of the 1930s among the main eve n t sof the 20th century fell from 38 per cent in 1989 tono more than 18 per cent in 1994.

This new situation has not stopped inve s t i g at i o n sinto Stalinism and its cri m e s , but it has gr e at l ychanged their nature.During perestroika, researchwas a joint effort and a central part of daily life, bu tn ow it is confined to professional scholars. M e m o-rial has became mainly a research centre. H i s t o ri a n s



Ti m e l i n e1917: The October Revolution brings the Bolsheviks to power under Lenin’s leader-

ship.

1 9 1 8 - 1 9 2 2: Civil war and famine, confrontation between the Red and White armies,

political executions. Foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

1924: Death of Lenin. Stalin becomes general secretary of the communist party.

1 9 3 0 - 1 9 3 1: The rich peasants (kulaks) are dispossessed of their land and massacre d .

At least two million dead.

1936-1937: Moscow show trials, purges, reign of terror. The number of prisoners in

the gulag rises from 500,000 in 1934 to 2.5 million in the early 1950s.

1953: Death of Stalin. Thousands of prisoners freed.

1 95 6: At the 20th Communist Pa rty Congress, Khruschev denounces St a l i n’s crimes.

The thaw begins.

1964: Khruschev is removed from power; end of thaw; rise of Brezhnev.

1 9 8 5: Mikhail Gorbachev launches p e re s t ro i k a ( restructuring) and g l a s n o s t ( p u b l i c

openness and accountability).

1 9 9 1: Boris Yeltsin is democratically elected president of the Russian Fe d e ration. T h e

USSR is officially dissolved in December. Proclamation of the Commonwealth of Inde-

pendent States. ■

working on the Soviet period are devoting most oftheir efforts to publishing official archive s ,p r ov i d i n gpeople with a less romantic and increasingly accu-rate view of what went on.But the task of remem-bering for society as a whole has again been inter-rupted before Russians have been able, at last, toreconcile themselves with their own history. ■

Files on thousands of prisoners of the Gulag are kept in the archives of Memorial, a Moscow-based association.


◗ Rithy Panh’s films include

Site 2 (1989), Cambodia:

Between War and Peace (1991)

Rice People (1994) and One

Evening after the War (1997).

Ileft Cambodia when I was 15 with a spiritualwound I knew would never heal. I had survi-ved the terrible ordeal of the Khmer Rouge

genocide, which killed a quarter of the country’spopulation. I didn’t understand how such a mas-sacre had been possible. Even now, I hardly do.

As soon as I reached the camp at Mairu t , in T h a i-l a n d , I stopped fearing for my life, but I felt a pro-found sadness, whereas I should have been happy. Ifelt my whole life was already behind me, t h at itbelonged to those ye a rs of struggle for surv i va l .

I wanted to forget. Go somewhere else, whereI’d have no memory and no recollections, wherenobody would know what I’d been through. I’dseen and heard my relatives suffer. Our familyhad been deported from Phnom Penh to Chrey, avillage in the middle of nowhere. One of my sis-ters was brought back to my parents, physicallyand psychologically exhausted after bu i l d i n gdikes and digging canals. Soon afterwards, myfather died. He was a peasant’s son who hadbecome a teacher and then a primary school ins-pector. He decided to stop eating.He chose to dieas an act of rebellion, a last act of freedom.Then,one after another, my mother, my sisters and mynephews died of hunger or exhaustion.

SurvivorÕs guiltI didn’t want to talk about any of that . I had

made it part of my s e l f, and it became almost them a i n s p ring of my surv i va l .When I was living as anexile in France, there was a long period when I refu-sed to speak my nat i ve language and rejected anylink with Cambodia. I had been uprooted and I felts o m e h ow incomplete, t o rn between forgetting andr e m e m b e ri n g, b e t ween past and present, a lways illat ease. I lived with memories of my relat i ve s , w i t hthe anxiety—the cert a i n t y — t h at the same tragi cs t o ry would repeat itself. It was bu rned into myflesh foreve r , as if with a branding iron, t h at this isw h at the world is like: a place where there’s a lot ofindifference and hy p o c risy and little compassion.

When you come out of a wa r ,yo u ’re not sure thatyo u ’ ve left violence behind yo u .You are locked in aculture of surv i va l .And when yo u ’ ve surv i ved geno-c i d e1, you always feel guilty about being a surv i vo r.

Cambodia: a w o u n dthat will not heal◗ Rithy Pa n h

A Cambodian film-maker describes how he came to terms with horro r. His country will neve rre c over its lost identity, he says, unless it puts the past on trial

When the Italian writer Primo Levi came backfrom the Nazi death camps, he said that “you feelothers have died in your place, that we’re alivebecause of a privilege we haven’t deserved,becau-se of an injustice done to the dead. It isn’t wrongto be alive, but we feel it is.”

Long afterwa r d s , I learned to speak again andto accept what had happened to me.Then I redis-c overed my memori e s , my ability to imagi n e , t ol a u g h , to dream, to rebuild my life. In Cambodia,they say people who’ve died a violent death can’tbe reincarn at e d , t h at the souls of dead people whoh ave n ’t had a religious funeral and bu rial wa n d e rthe earth foreve r , haunting the living. There arebones all over the place in the country s i d e . Pe o p l efind them whenever they start bu i l d i n g .

A machine to destroy memoryIf you can’t grieve, the violence continues.The

Cambodian mother of a model family, well inte-grated in France, cut off her child’s head just asthe Khmer Rouge killers had chopped off herfat h e r ’s. Similar cases have occurred inC a m b o d i a . At Preah Sihanouk Hospital inPhnom Penh, the only department that providespsychiatric treatment takes patients from all overthe country. Sometimes there are 250 of themwaiting in the corridor.You only have to see howmany are depressive and destitute to realize thatsomething must be done.There is a massive col-lective wound.

The terrible thing about past wars and aboutthe Cambodian genocide is not only the millionsof dead, the widows, the orphans, the amputeesand the depressed, it’s also our shattered identity,the ruins of our social cohesion.

The first political decisions of the KhmerRouge, after they won power on April 17, 1975,were unutterably violent. They emptied townsand hospitals, closed schools, abolished money,deported people en masse to the countryside,defrocked monks and looted old houses.2

“Absolutely everything belongs to Angkar [thecommunist party],” they said. “If the party tellsyou to do something you must do it! Anyone who

We live in a worldw h e re a man is morelikely to be tried if hekills a single personthan if he kills1 0 0 , 0 0 0 .

Kofi Annan,Ghanaian diplomat, Se c re t a ry

G e n e ral of the UN (1938- )

1. The author use this word in its broader sense; contrastUN’s stricter definition, see page 20.

2. The Khmer Rouge divided the Cambodian people intotwo categories: the “old”people living in rural areas andthe “new”people in the cities who were “tainted” byculture and knowledge.



objects is an enemy, anyone who opposes is acorpse.” People had to dress in black, change theway they spoke, use certain words and excludeothers from their vocabulary. It was forbidden tosing, dance, say prayers and even talk to otherpeople. My father, who had spent all his lifetrying to improve Cambodia’s public educationsystem, was particularly worried about the deci-sion to ban teaching.“The spade is your pen, therice-paddy is your paper,” was the messageAngkar drove home.

All social classes were affected to varyingdegrees by mass deportations to the countryside,forced labour, summary executions and famine.Paradoxically, all these absurd sacrifices weremade in the name of restoring the glory of theAngkor era.All the roots of our culture and iden-tity, the basic social relationships and symboliclinks which attached Cambodians to their worldwere methodically and deliberately attacked anddestroyed.

Most of the detention centres were set up inpagodas, places of prayer and compassion, or ins c h o o l s , places of know l e d g e . A n g k a r was amachine for destroying identity and wiping outmemory.

Before they executed their victims, the killerstortured them and made them write hundreds ofpages of false confessions dictated by KhmerRouge officials. After being forced to denouncetheir families and friends, the prisoners were exe-cuted. “By eliminating you,” Angkar said, “wedon’t lose anything. It’s better to wrongly arrestsomebody than to wrongly let somebody go.”

One of the executioners at Camp S-21, inTuol Sleng—Pol Po t ’s main torture centre—today only expresses his “regrets”; he doesn’t feelguilty. He destroyed non-persons, people theKhmer Rouge had stripped of all humanity.

This genocide was “ s i l e n t ” . The KhmerRouge imposed a reign of terror, and most execu-tions were carried out without witnesses andwithout noise.The world let Cambodians die anddidn’t seem to care. Not many people denouncedthe massacres.

When I arrived in France in 1979, I was ama-zed to find that the Khmer Rouge still occupiedCambodia’s seat at the United Nations. A fewyears later, I took the absence of the word “geno-cide” from the Paris peace accords as a refusal toallow the survivors to remember, as an insult tothe victims’ dignity.

The best memory isthat which forg e t snothing but pard o n sinjuries. Wr i t ekindness in marbleand write injuries ind u s t .

Persian prove r b

Survivors should have the courage to confront their history as Òa debt owed to the dead and an obligation to their childrenÓ.


Ti m e l i n e1953: Cambodia, a French protectorate since 1863, gains independence, becoming

a constitutional monarchy under King Norodom Sihanouk.

1960: Emergence of the Khmer Rouge organization, led by Pol Pot.

1 9 70 : Coup d’état by Prime Minister Lon Nol and proclamation of a republic. Sihanouk

aligns with a faction of the Khmer Rouge. In the ensuing civil war he is supported by

China and North Viet Nam, while the United States and South Viet Nam back Lon Nol.

1975: The Khmer Rouge seize the capital, Phnom Penh, in April and impose a totali-

tarian regime. Over 1.7 million people, or a quarter of the population, are killed.

1978: Viet Nam invades Cambodia in December and a new civil war begins.

1982: Sihanouk forms a government to resist the invasion with two other factions,

including one from the Khmer Rouge, and then moves closer to the pro - Vi e t n a m e s e

Prime Minister, Hun Sen.

1989: Vietnamese troops withdraw.

1 9 9 1 : A ceasefire takes effect in July. The Paris Agreement, on October 23, re c o g n i ze s

the Supreme National Council headed by Sihanouk and places Cambodia under UN

control.

1993: The monarchy is restored under Sihanouk.

1 9 9 7 : The Khmer Rouge breaks up. Pol Pot dies in 1998. Seve ral former Khmer

Rouge leaders join the royal army.

1999: Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has agreed to put the main leaders of the

Khmer Rouge on trial, opposes plans for the future court to be composed mainly

of foreign judges, as the UN wishes. He also opposes setting up a “truth commis-

sion”. At least three major Khmer Rouge leaders are left at large. ■

Film director Rithy Panh in Cambodia in March 1999during the shooting of a documentary film about theinstallation of a trans-Cambodian optic fibre cable.Human bones were discovered when trenches for thecable were dug.

I went back to Cambodia in 1990 after 11 ye a rsin exile. I wanted to find the surv i vo rs of my fa m i l yand recover the remains of the dead and gi ve thema proper bu ri a l , so their souls would stop wa n d e-ring the earth and could be reincarn ated in the cy c l eof life and deat h . I wanted at least to confirm theyhad died,so I could start to mourn properly.

I went to Tuol Sleng camp, which has been tur-ned into a “genocide museum”. I wanted to try tofind a photo of my uncle among the hundreds ofpictures of the dead pinned on the wa l l s. But Icouldn’t bring myself to go in.I went back in 1991to film the few surv i vo rs of the camp (only seven outof some 15,000 people who passed through it). Iwanted to understand the banalization of evil andthe dehumanizing machinery of the Khmer Rouge.

But we ’re afraid of this recent past. C a m b o d i a n swho dare to talk about it are divided. Some think weshould forget and look to the future, t h at there’s nopoint in inflicting another ordeal on ours e l ves by try i n gto bring back memories and pick over old wo u n d s.They fear that if trials are held they will revive seri o u spolitical quarrels which might set off another civil wa r.Or else they generalize about Cambodians and saymost of them are “ fat a l i s t i c ” and accept a history ofwar and genocide as their “ k a rm a ” .

This approach was dismissed by a 30-year-oldpeasant called Torng, who was typical of manypeople I spoke to while I was filming. “TheKhmer Rouge didn’t just kill people,” he said.“They turned our generation into ignoramuses,animals, idiots, who don’t know where they’regoing.We didn’t study. All we know is how to useour physical strength. So we can only get jobs as

peasants or labourers. The Khmer Rouge shouldbe put on trial. If they aren’t, people like me willbe tempted to take revenge.”

I believe ,and so do others ,t h at we should face upto our history, so that our relat i ves and friends didn’tdie in va i n .M o u rning wo n ’t be possible unless moraland political responsibility for the Cambodian geno-cide is established.A trial of the Khmer Rouge, b e f o-re the Cambodian people, is absolutely essential.Weh ave to gi ve meaning to basic ideas of law and justi-ce in this country. In a democratic society, you can’tkill without being punished.

We must gi ve our memory a fair and dignifie dt rial in order to understand the past. I’m not bothe-red about the sentences that would be handed dow n .Only the truth can free us—the whole tru t h ,h owe-ver horri fic.The other point of such a tri a l , which isjust as import a n t , would be to restore our identity.The Khmer Rouge have plunged generations of Cam-bodians into a vicious circle of cultural loss.

Not many Cambodians tell their children aboutthe genocide, which is a fuzzy corner of theirmemory. But we can’t build our future by forget-t i n g .The surv i vo rs must tell their stories and ensuret h at the memory of what happened is handed dow nfrom the past to the present.We owe a debt to thedead and we have an obligation to our children.

We shan’t be able to get rid of this 30-yearculture of violence, cast out the monster that isfear and put behind us the collective guilt we feelas survivors unless we manage to understand ourhistory. ■



Rw a n d aÕs collective a m n e s i a◗ Benjamin Sehene

Christianity tried to destroy the collective memory of Rwandans. After independence, ethnicity became the yardstick of identity and the Tutsis we red e m o n i zed. Then came the horrors of genocide.

In Kigali, they are known as b a f u ye bahaga ze— t h eliving dead.They are the hundreds of thousandsof surv i vo rs of genocide who have psychologi c a l

p r o b l e m s. In September 1994, I met one of them—a little girl called Élise, the only member of herfamily who had survived. She was just under fiveyears old,the same age as the civil war in Rwanda,which went on from 1990 to 1994.

Élise suffered from loss of memory and had a ve ryl ow attention span. She could never remember myfirst name. She had no recollection of anything thathad happened more than 20 minutes before—it wa sas if she was trying to protect hers e l f. One evening Ifound a way of getting her to remember my name.She wore ove rsized pyjamas and I said,“Think of theword ‘ p y j a m a ’e ve ry time you see me—pyjama-Ben-j a m i n .”W h e n e ver she saw me after that , she wo u l dhappily shout:“ H e y, wa i t ,i t ’s pyjama-Benjamin!”

Like that little girl clinging to an image,Rwan-dans should perhaps look for a common symbolwhich could unite them around their lost memory.

For centuri e s ,R wandan civilization rested on apyramidal power structure which was rooted inmy t h s. It shaped the economy and conditionedsocial relations. It built (and still builds) a tyrannybased on hierarchy, but a hierarchy imbued with asense of restraint.In an atmosphere of self-censor-ship and silence, things are left unsaid—betwe e nparents and children, husbands and wive s , s h e bu j a s(bosses) and their b a ga ra g u ( s e rvants) and betwe e nTutsis, with their sense of superiority, and Hutus,who feel inferior.

Severing links with the pastBut the establishment of Chri s t i a n i t y, w h i c h

began with the arri val of missionaries in 1900, d e s-t r oyed Rwa n d a ’s collective memory. In 1931, t h eChurch deposed Musinga, the Tu t s i s ’ last divine-ri g h tm o n a r c h , when he refused to be conve rt e d .C o nve r-sion to Christianity would have undermined his legi-t i m a cy and destroyed the meaning of the magical andr e l i gious functions of the monarchy, the pillar ofR wandan society.All the traditions which made up thec o u n t ry ’s social and spiritual fa b ric were dubbedpagan rites and banned, despite the fact that they fos-tered social cohesion by bri n ging together the threeethnic gr o u p s — H u t u s ,Tutsis and Twa s.

The abolition of the A b i ru s, the royal committeeof wise men that was the official guardian of thes o c i e t y ’s collective memory and its esoteric ri t e s ,marked the end of the only high-level institutionthat acted as a counterweight because it was made

up mostly of Hutus. A proverb in the Kinya r wa n d alanguage was coined to describe this break with theesoteric past:Kerezia ya kuyeho kizira (the Churchhas forbidden the forbidden).

After independence in 1962, the new republic ofR wanda tried to ove rt u rn the traditional pyramid-shaped power stru c t u r e ,d e s t r oyed even more of thetraditional sense of national identity and wiped outthe nat i o n ’s collective memory.The republic defin e dits identity by abolishing the old order,which it regar-ded as being too strongly marked by centuries of Tu t s im o n a r c h s , and by basing its legi t i m a cy on the majo-rity ethnic gr o u p, the Hutus.

E ve rything with a Tutsi connotation was ban-n e d .Thousands of words rooted in Rwa n d a ’s his-

tory and social organization were struck out of thel a n g u a g e .The ethnicization of the stat e ,s u p p o s e d l yto create a “social balance”, led to a quota systemwhich limited the proportion of Tutsis in higher edu-cation and the civil service to nine per cent.It wasbased solely on numbers. Pe o p l e ’s ethnic affil i at i o ncould be checked from their identity documents.The new ru l e rs said they were redressing the socialbalance after centuries of feudal domination.

In the vacuum left by the collapse of the tra-ditional collective memory, ethnicity became theonly point of reference.This eventually led to thedemonization of the Tutsis in order to justify theirexclusion from society. The Tutsis were dehuma-nized and dubbed inyenzi (cockroaches), just asthe Nazis had called German Jews “vermin”.Many terms of abuse were used to indicate theywere unwanted parasites. It is easier to crush acockroach underfoot than to kill a person.

The “social revolution”which gave birth to thenew Rwandan republic began in 1959 with abloody revolt by the Hutus, involving the terriblemassacre of 20,000 Tutsis and the flight of thou-sands of others into Burundi and Uganda.This irr e-parable act was the first step towards the descentinto amnesia.But a past that is forgotten is boundto repeat itself because forgetting invo l ves a refusalto admit wrongdoing. In Rwanda, amnesia led to

◗ Rwandan writer, author of

Le piège ethnique (Dagorno

publishers, Paris, 1999)

The country lived for 35 years in astate of growing amnesia,

dominated by the law of silence,of the unspoken, of memories

c o l l e c t i vely re p re s s e dBringing the truth tolight is already as t a rt, as a victory forjustice and a form ofrelief for the victims.

Ro b e rt Badinter,French lawyer and politician

( 1 9 28- )


Ti m e l i n e1 959 : Hutus carry out a “social re volution”, killing members of Rwanda’s Tutsi mino-

rity and overthrowing the Tutsi monarchy. Many Tutsis flee the country. Formerly

German colonies, Rwanda and Burundi have been administered by Belgium since 1924.

1 9 6 2 : Rwanda gains independence. Massacres of Tutsis increase and an ethnic

Hutu regime is gradually established in Kigali.

1 9 9 0 : The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated organization, launches

an offensive against the regime of General Juvenal Habyarimana, in power since 1973.

In October, intervention by Zaire, Belgium and France. French troops remain in the

country.

1993: An accord signed in August at Arusha (Tanzania) provides for power-sharing

with the RPF. It is stalled by President Habyarimana and his political allies. The UN

sends in an international peace-keeping force, UNAMIR.

1 9 9 4 : President Habyarimana is assassinated, setting off a wave of killings aimed at

Tutsis and moderate Hutus. UNAMIR withdraws. T h ree months later, the Fre n c h

establish a “p rotection zo n e” in the southwest. The RPF forms a government of

national union. In November, the UN creates an International Criminal Tribunal for

Rwanda, which sits at Arusha.

According to the Red Cross, the victims of genocide number more than a million

dead, mostly Tutsis, and over two million refugees.

1999: The RPF government extends its term of office by four years, promising elec-

tions and a new constitution. ■

s u c c e s s i ve pogroms against the Tutsis which beganin the 1960s and ended in the genocide.The coun-try lived for 35 years in a state of growing amnesia,d o m i n ated by the law of silence, of the unspoken, o fm e m o ries collectively repressed. Silence inevitablygave rise to impunity and impunity made amnesiaacceptable.

I had a hard job interviewing Tutsi survivors in1994 because the genocide divided Rwandans intotwo camps—Hutus and Tutsis,the perpetrators ofgenocide and the rest. In Rwanda today, you areforced to be on one side or the other; there is noh a l f way house. Just after the genocide, the Tu t s i swho returned were suspicious of Tutsis who hade s c a p e d , presuming they had collaborated with theenemy to save their skins.

If you were a Hutu, you were automatically guiltyof genocide, just as the Tutsis were from 1959 to 1994considered guilty just because they happened to beTu t s i . The genocide was a crime committed bet-ween neighbours ;k i l l e rs and surv i vo rs of the at r o c i-ties still live side by side today.The exterm i n ation ofa million people in 100 days with crude weapons likem a c h e t e s ,c l u b s ,a xes and hoes,could not have takenplace without the part i c i p ation of a massive numberof people.A third of all Hutus are thought to have par-t i c i p ated in one way or another.

Fear of reprisalsAbout 135,000 people suspected of invo l ve m e n t

in genocide are languishing in ove r c r owded jails, a n dthe legal system, which was destroyed in the pro-v i n c e s , is finding it hard to get the trials underway.T h eI n t e rn ational Criminal Tri bunal for Rwanda (theA rusha Tri bu n a l ) ,which has scant resources, is not get-ting ve ry far either.All this is keeping Rwandans fromthe task of remembering their past, especially sinces t at e - e n d o rsed ethnic attitudes still condition theHutu killers to think they killed their historic neigh-b o u rs to ensure the surv i val of their own ethnic gr o u p.To d ay, the guilty flatly deny there was any genocide.

So in one of A f ri c a ’s most densely populat e dc o u n t ri e s , the surv i vo rs see their torm e n t o rs return i n gto live peacefully on the hillsides because there is notenough evidence to bring charges against them. In thefirst months after the genocide witnesses spoke freely,but they have become tight-lipped since a number ofs u rv i vo rs have been murdered by unknown killers.“ W h at ’s the use of giving evidence?” one victimasked me. “ T h e y ’re not being punished any way.”All Rwandans live in an atmosphere of ethnic mis-t ru s t . Fear of reprisals is still ri f e .

The new Rwandan authorities may want to curbindividual score-settling and encourage nat i o n a lr e c o n c i l i at i o n ,but the ragtag soldiers who carried outthe 1994 massacres are still lurking in the forests ofn e i g h b o u ring Congo and have not gi ven up theirplans to exterm i n ate the Tu t s i s.As long as the threatof a new genocide hangs over Rwa n d a , the presentr e gi m e ’s pri o rity will be to defend national frontiers ,as shown by the on-going war in Congo.

The present is still barring the way to memory.■

A Rwandan boy in a Catholic church which is now a memorial to the genocide. In 1994, thousands of Tutsis were massacred in the churchÕs grounds.


Le sida d�ferle: a l e rte z l es jeunes !Me m o ry: making p e a c e with a violent pas t

Ti m e l i n e1 9 9 1: Slovenia and Croatia, two of the six republics of the Yugoslav federa t i o n ,declare their independence.1992: In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Croat and Muslim communities press for theindependence of their republic. They are opposed by Bosnian Serbs who lay siege toSarajevo and seize 70% of the country. Massive “ethnic cleansing” begins, mostlyconducted by Bosnian Serb forces.1 9 9 3 - 1 9 9 4: After the rejection of a peace plan by the Bosnian Serbs, the UN declare ssix “safe areas”, but ground hostilities persist. Formerly allies, Croats and Muslimsclash before signing an accord in March 1994. The UN Security Council creates anInternational War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia based at The Hague (Nether-lands). NATO goes into action against the Serbs.1995: In July, Bosnian Serbs take over Srebrenica and Zepa “safe areas”. In August,NATO bombs their positions around Sara j e vo. The Dayton (USA) peace agreement inNovember ends hostilities. The republic is divided into two associated entities, theFe d e ration of Bosnia and Herze g ovina (51% of the land area, including Sara j e vo )and the Serb Republic. A NATO force monitors application.

In this conflict some 200,000 people were killed and almost 200,000 were dis-placed. Around 600,000 refugees have returned to their homes. ■

duct of the wa r. R at h e r , they were a tool to achieve itsp ri m a ry aim:ethnic separatism or domination of oneethnic group over another. By the wa r ’s end in early1 9 9 6 , all three sides had retreated into ethnically purea r e a s , controlled by their respective arm i e s.

To d ay, the Croat and Serb politicians insist onremaining separat e . In fa c t , it is those ve ry groups res-ponsible for the wo rst crimes who insist most ve h e-mently on ethnic separat i o n .The lack of consensuson a multiethnic society plays into the hands of Mus-lim extremists, who also practice a more subtle policyof ethnic exclusion.All three groups have formed theirown school curri c u l a , which reinforce ethnic hat r e d ,blame the other gr o u p s , and glorify their own my t h o-l o g y. Each has begun religious instruction in thes c h o o l s , which often takes the most pri m i t i ve form ofethnic indoctri n at i o n . All this only serves to cementthe wa rtime ethnic cleansing.

The sad truth is that four ye a rs after Dayton (seeb ox ) , neither side is any closer to reconciliation thanin late 1995. M a ny Bosnians of all nationalities wills t ate openly that they can stop hat i n g, but that theywill neither forgi ve nor forget what happened duri n gthe wa r.And many add that they wish to be left alonewith their own ethnic gr o u p. After what the othergroups did to them, they no longer wish to live withthem any way. In a political climate that works againstthe emergence of any reliable non-nationalist refe-rence point,m e m b e rs of all communities still fear firs tand foremost for the surv i val of their ethnic identityand place group interests above all else.

R ather than work toward calming nationalist pas-sions and anger, local politicians use these fears to fur-ther their own political agendas.This is seen part i c u-larly in the cases of the Serb and Croat populat i o n s ,both of whom look toward a mother country outsidethe borders of Bosnia and Herzegov i n a , and dream ofe ventually seceding and uniting their region with it.From Belgrade and Zagr e b ,politicians continue to fa nthe flames of nationalist desire.The continued insis-tence of nationalist parties in Bosnia and Herzegov i n a ,urged on by nationalists outside,on creating ethni-callypure terri t o ries stands as the gr e atest obstacle to recon-c i l i at i o n . Until the outside forces live up to their obli-g ations under Dayton and stop pushing for “ gr e at e r ”n ational progr a m m e s , little progress will be made inthe reconciliation of the country ’s pre-war ethnicallyd i ve rse populat i o n .And until that time,its citizens willl i ve in an environment of fear of the other ethnic gr o u p s.

In November 1995,Bosnia and Herzegovina signedthe Dayton Peace A c c o r d s , a document designedto create a new unified state comprised of two multi-

ethnic entities. It would have a functioning centralg ove rn m e n t ,hold democratic elections and adhere toi n t e rn ational human rights standards.Displaced per-sons were to be allowed to return to their homes andindicted war criminals were to be arrested and turn e dover to the Intern ational Tri bunal of The Hague.

To d ay ’s reality is dramatically different.The coun-t ry consists of three de facto mono-ethnic entities, t h r e es e p a r ate arm i e s , three separate police forces, and an ational gove rnment that exists mostly on paper.M o s tindicted war criminals remain at large.N ationalist poli-tical part i e s , including many of the ethnic cleanserswho were responsible for the war in the first place,remain securely in powe r. N ationalist extremists—often backed by the ruling political parties—still bomband torch the homes of returning refugees in cert a i na r e a s.

C o n t r a ry to the pronouncements of local nat i o n a-list politicians or intern ational officials wishing to avo i dtaking responsibility, the Serbs, C r o ats and Muslimsl i ved together relat i vely peacefully in Bosnia and Her-z e g ovina for hundreds of ye a rs.All three groups res-pected each others ’r e l i gious customs and holidays andi n t e rm a rriage was common. But something changedwhen all sides committed gri e vous atrocities duri n gthe wa r.These crimes were not an accidental by-pro-

Bosnia and Herze g ov i n a :an i m p o s s i b l e re c o n c i l i a t i o n ?◗ James Lyo n

A once ethnically diverse population lives in a climate of fear and distrustfuelled by nationalists

◗ Director of the International

Crisis Group (ICG) project in

Bosnia and Herzegovina. This

private, multinational

organization, which aims to

strengthen the capacity of the

international community to

understand and respond to

crises, produces analytical

reports targeted at key

decision-makers.

(http://www.crisisweb.org)

http://www.crisisweb.org)


Can we p re vent c r i m e sagainst humanity?Canadian judge Louise Arbour, former chief prosecutor with theInternational Criminal Tribunals (ICT) for ex- Yugoslavia and Rwanda, b e l i e ves international law is making great strides in violence pre ve n t i o n

How has setting up ICTs helped the groups of

people directly concerned to turn the page on

atrocities they have experienced?

These tri bunals have been a spectacular innovat i o n .For the first time, the intern ational community hasshown its concern not only with the short term—stopping armed confli c t — but also with the longterm. It has noted that in the Balkans and Africa’sGreat Lakes region there was very little hope ofachieving lasting peace based on reconciliation andsocial reconstruction unless the truth about pastevents was established.The recording by interna-tional inve s t i g at o rs of irrefutable evidence of cri m e sprevents history from being falsified and the pastfrom being distorted.

When the truth is told, the need to dispense jus-tice becomes obvious. I t ’s ve ry important to pin cri-minal responsibility for any crimes that have beencommitted not only on those who actually committedthem but also on political and military leaders. In sod o i n g, the law at least recognizes that the victimsh ave a legal status and to some extent restores theird i g n i t y. It also stops them from setting themselves ona course for reve n g e , an agenda which can be handedd own from generation to generat i o n .

Do you feel the ICTfor the former Yugoslavia

has helped victims to come to terms with the

burden of memory, a process which is crucial to

reconciliation? In Bosnia, thereÕs a kind of

ÒapartheidÓ between communities.

The ICT has not yet contributed to reconciliationin Bosnia because it has not been given the neces-sary resources. Justice cannot be fully done part-ly because of the refusal of some governments togather evidence and arrest people who’ve alreadybeen indicted.

The existence of an ICTfor the former

Yugoslavia doesnÕt seem to have prevented the

events in Kosovo.

The ICT did not have an immediate deterr e n teffect because the UN Security Council didn’t useits resources to oblige Serbia (the Federal Republicof Yugoslavia) to carry out the arrest warrants theICT had issued.This encouraged the criminals tofeel that in practical terms they were going to enjoyimpunity and immunity. Throughout the Kosovoconflict, from January to June 1999, I repeatedlyurged the intern ational forces there to arrest people

under indictment. I think this was the right deter-rent message to send to the parties in Kosovo.

It’s clear that those who committed crimes inK o s ovo were more aware of the risk of beingindicted and that this influenced their methods.The common gr aves in Kosovo dug up by ICTinvestigators have provided a lot of evidence, cer-tainly enough to make the authors of these crimesrealize that the law can always find such evidence,whatever lengths the criminals may go to in orderto cover up their crimes.

How has the ICT helped to promote reconcilia-

tion in Rwanda, where people are afraid of the

massacres starting again?

M i l i t a ry leaders , people accused of ve ry seri o u sresponsibilities for the genocide, m i n i s t e rs and eve nthe former prime minister (who has confessed hisguilt) are awaiting trial in prison in A ru s h a , in Ta n-zania.They are no longer in a position to fan theflames of tension, so the risk of violence has been tosome extent reduced. In Rwanda,even more thanin Bosnia, the culture of impunity has existed ford e c a d e s.Violence goes in cy c l e s , but responsibilityfor it has not been proven.The ICT represents achange of direction in this respect but it wo n ’t havean immediate impact.

What can we expect from the proposed

International Criminal Court (ICC), which will

be the first permanent institution of its kind?

Setting up the ICC is a huge and irreversible stepfor the world.When it’s up and running it will beable to respond fairly quickly to events and to indictsuspected criminals before they can commit furt h e rm a s s a c r e s. ICTs were set up after crimes were com-mitted in Bosnia, C r o atia and Rwa n d a . But inK o s ovo, indictments were made at the highest leve lat the beginning of June 1999 for crimes com-mitted between January and May. Such speed waspossible because the ICT and its infrastru c t u r ewere already in place.

So an ICC, if it has the necessary muscle, will beable to act and intervene in real time,which is an enor-mous step forwa r d . If there’s the political will to arr e s tpeople who’ve been indicted, e f f e c t i ve prevention ofc rimes against humanity can be env i s a g e d . ■

Interview by Martine Jacot, UNESCO Courier journalist


E T H I C S

P OL ICE AG A INST RACISM◗ Asbel López

Training schemes in several European countries are getting to grips with the stereotyping andprejudice that all too often influence police behaviour

■In a vast salon in Monceau Castle( B e l gi u m ) , 13 policemen fromCharleroi,a town in the centre of the

country, have been divided into teamsand are absorbed in a boisterous cardgame.The officers, unarmed and wearingcivilian clothes, are all men in their for-ties. Today, in early October, they aretaking part in the fourth session of aworkshop against racism and xenophobiarun by the Centre for Equal Opportunityand the Fight Against Racism, a Brussels-based public institution founded in 1993.

Laughter erupts from the policemenand the Centre’s two instructors when thew i n n e rs of each game go on to the nextround of the contest.This time they will beplaying a game according to rules none ofthem will know.

A game with unknown rulesJean,who has spent half his 42 years in

the police force, s ays this is what happens toi m m i grants when “they arri ve in a countrywithout knowing the rules and when therules they have back home are no usebecause they don’t work in the new society.”

For example,he says, rules for womenin Islamic countries are ve ry different fromthose in the We s t .L ater on, d u ring a reviewof the session, Jean says he has never had thechance to talk about such things or discussthe relationship he has with immigrants inthe course of his work.

The workshop is one of 11 projects thatnine European countries are carrying outunder an international programme calledNGOs and Police Against Prejudice(NAPAP), set up by the European Com-mission in 1997 to fight racism and xeno-phobia through workshops for members ofthe police.

Each country has its own pri o rities andm e t h o d s. As part of the British projectm e m b e rs of minority ethnic groups areinvited to take part in the training courses.


The Catalans hold day courses for theirpolice run by local immigrant gr o u p s.France stresses the social integr ation ofi m m i gr a n t s. In Germ a ny emphasis is laid onmaking police more aware of the problemsthat arise in a multicultural society.

In recent years racism and xenophobiah ave increased in many European coun-t ri e s , especially because of economic cri s i s ,u n e m p l oy m e n t , a rise in the immigr a n tpopulation and anti-foreigner propagandaby extreme right-wing parties who are get-ting more and more vo t e s1. In this situat i o n ,police forces are in a particularly exposedposition.

The Centre, which records and pur-sues cases of racist behaviour, says that inBelgium more complaints about discrimi-n ation based on the ori gin of an individualare laid against the police than against anyother gr o u p2.The situation is also troubling

in other European countries. In Britain, areport by a former High Court judge, SirWilliam Macphers o n , said in early 1999t h at there was “institutionalized racism” i nL o n d o n ’s Metropolitan police force. I nG e rm a ny, an official survey showed thatpolice violence against foreigners was “ n o tjust a matter of isolated cases”. AmnestyI n t e rn at i o n a l ’s 1999 report detailed abu s e sby the police in France, S p a i n , Greece andSwitzerland against immigrants and mem-bers of ethnic minorities.

In a democratic system, such thingsshould not happen and the police shouldrespect the principle of equal rights for allcitizens. To ensure such respect, the firstthing to be done is to see that stereotypingand prejudice do not affect the professionalb e h aviour of the police. This is not easybecause police opinions and attitudes aredeveloped at first hand in the front line ofsocial confli c t , and are usually the result ofan accumulation of personal experiences,frustrations and misunderstandings.

The workshops run by the Belgi a ncentre are special because they feature gr o u pwork drawing on personal experience andincidents the policemen agree to talk about.

Belgian police inspector Nestor Van Villinghen with a young immigrant. This photo and those on thefollowing pages show scenes from a video used in Belgian police training courses.

1.The recent electoral successes of the extremeright in Austria and Switzerland illustrate thisprocess.2. Égaux et reconnus, bilan 1993-1998 et perspectivesde la politique des immigrés et de la lutte contre leracisme, Centre pour l’égalité des chances et lalutte contre le racisme, page 16,Brussels, 1999.

Just speaking freely and openly about theseissues is already a big step, she say s ,b e c a u s e“putting things into words and talking aboutthem allows you to be more objective aboutt h e m , to realize their seriousness and impor-tance and to start thinking about them.”

This was not happening when shes t a rted the Centre’s workshops six ye a rsago. At that time, training focused on theimmigrant, not the police.The aim was to

throw light on the culture of immigrants’countries of origin, how they had come toB e l gi u m ,p o p u l ation statistics and the signi-ficance of religious festivals like Ramadan orpractices like we a ring the chador, the shaw lor veil worn by Muslim women.

But the Centre’s officials soon noticedt h at this kind of inform ation session notonly failed to make the police aware of cul-tural diversity but was even counter-pro-d u c t i ve .The policemen got the impressiont h at by explaining how immigrants live d ,t h ei n s t ru c t o rs were trying to justify behav i o u rthat to them was unacceptable.They feltthey were being made fun of and this gene-r ated gr e at hostility towards the cours eorganizers.

Their comments were bru t a l . “The ins-


E T H I C S

The starting point of the six-day course isnot a lecture on tolerance or study of theU n i ve rsal Declaration of Human Rights, bu tc o n t ri butions from the policemen duri n gactivities including card games, r o l e -p l ay i n g, and looking at photos and fil me x t r a c t s.

M a risa Fe l l a , an instructor at theC e n t r e , s ays these “apparently simple”e xercises encourage serious reflection by thepolicemen about their professional beha-v i o u r. She remembers one occasion whensolving a puzzle opened up the subject ofc o m m u n i c ation and aggressivity and eve n-tually turned into a debate about policeb ru t a l i t y.“They discussed their own violentb e h aviour as policemen, when and whythey had been violent or not violent, a n dh ow they dealt with violence by offic e rsunder their orders.” A “ f o rum for talkingand thinking” was opened and allowe dthem to distance themselves from theirj o b s , something which can be hard to dowhen you are in the thick of things.

A forum for talking and thinkingBit by bit,as confidence is built up, the

participants stop using official jargon andbegin to recognize nuances. For example,when one policeman said he could notaccept the position of women in Islam, t h i swas already a step forwa r d , because he wa sb e ginning to distinguish between whole-sale rejection of Muslims and his disap-proval of one aspect of their culture.

Fella says the most heartening aspect ofher work is to see that “behind the uni-f o rms there are human beings who askt h e m s e l ves questions about their profes-sion and about how they do their jobs.”

t ru c t o rs think we ’re ignorant and thereforer a c i s t . . . .They gi ve us nice little talks abouti m m i gr a n t s , as if they’re all nice andf ri e n d l y, but they’ve never patrolled thestreets like we have.”

These days, such resistance has disap-peared or at least has subsided.The door tochange has opened. But problems still exist.The police say they do not know exactlyh ow to put into practice what they havel e a rned in the workshops about confli c tmanagement, non-verbal communicationand handling aggression when they are backdoing their job, which nearly always invo l ve sspeed, stress and confusion.

Another big problem is the progr a m m e ’slack of resources.The Centre has just fiveinstructors, three of them full-time. Onlyabout 300 of Belgium’s 36,200 police andgendarmes attended workshops like thesebetween 1994 and 1998. A medium-termproposal to overcome this is to have thecurrent instructors train new ones.

Another weak point is that it’s seniorofficers who ask for courses to be held fortheir men, who are not necessarily stat i o n e din places where the incidence of racial dis-c ri m i n ation is high.W h at ’s more, the entirestaff of a police station rarely attends thecourse, and this causes friction when theygo back to work.

But despite everything, those who takep a rt agree that the process of exchange anddiscussion between instru c t o rs and police isencouraging.

Long-term effectsOne instructor tells a group that five

vo l u n t e e rs are needed for a role-play i n ggame in which three policemen will play thepart of young immigrants and two otherswill be the police.The first volunteers arethose who want to play the immigrants.

When the two policemen pass the gr o u pof “ i m m i gr a n t s ” , the policeman playing thep a rt of Fa b i o, an 18-year-old Belgian citizenof Mediterranean ori gi n , calls them “p o u l e t s”(chickens) a French slang word meaning“ c o p s ” . The two policemen immediat e l yt u rn round to arrest the yo u t h s , while theirf riends laugh at a nickname that , as police,they have all been called at one time oranother.

When this episode is discussed after-wa r d s , some of the policemen say theywould have just kept on walking and nota rrested anyone for “such a trivial mat t e r ” .Another notes that a few ye a rs ago, t h eyouths would have had their ears boxed.

The instructor uses the episode to showhow the idea of what constitutes an insultcan change over the ye a rs , pointing out thatthis is not just a subjective matter and that

Sensitive issues are discussed in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere.

‘Behind the uniforms there are human beingswho ask themselvesquestions about theirprofession andabout how they dotheir jobs’


E T H I C S

the students gradually come to see theconnection between what they learn in theclassroom and real-life situations.

Before continuing, one of the instru c t o rsexplains to the police that they were called“ c h i c k e n s ” because Pa ris police headquar-ters is built on the site of an old chickenfa rm .“ R e a l l y ? ”m u rm u rs one of them whohad no idea of this, while his colleagueslaugh.

François Delor, a psychiatrist and ins-t ructor at the Centre, thinks this reaction isi m p o rtant from a methodological stand-p o i n t .“ L a u g h t e r ,” he say s , “is a way of avo i-ding confrontat i o n . Laughing together issharing a kind of intimacy and that makesit possible to work together in a climate oftrust.”

The instructor’s job is to monitor eve-rything that is said and done during thesessions and also to spot certain expres-s i o n s , put them in a broader context and usethat to break down prejudices.

Fred,who has spent 17 of his 40 yearsas a policeman, tells how he was once gi ve nwhat he thought was a “stupid” order toa rrest all the Gypsies in the market in C h a r-l e r o i . But a colleague supported the order,s aying that “regular checks, especially ofG y p s i e s , will curb cri m e .” Fred retort e dt h at “ my job isn’t to arrest Gypsies justbecause they’re Gypsies” and said it wo u l dbe better to deploy plainclothes police

who could catch thieves red-handed, w h e-ther they were foreigners or Belgi a n s.F r e d ’s story about the clearly xe n o p h o b i caspect of an order is more effective inc o m b ating racist attitudes than any speechbecause it does not come from one of thei n s t ru c t o rs but from a fellow policeman.

Amid jokes and friendly chat in a conv i-vial at m o s p h e r e ,s e n s i t i ve and serious sub-jects are raised quite easily. But how can webe sure these policemen will incorp o r at e

into their professional lives some of thethings they have seen and heard in theseworkshops and behave more fairly towa r d simmigrants in general?

Delor is firmly convinced that exchangeslike these have positive effects which maysome day influence the minds of these menand change the way they act. “Words andexchanges which seem unimportant some-times have surp rising effects in the longterm.” He adds that people tend to absorbas a “potential cognitive resource” s c at t e r e d

elements whose utility may not be obviousat the time.

This seems to be confirmed by Chri s t i a nRaes, an assistant police commissioner inB ru s s e l s. In an interview in the Belgi a ndaily newspaper Le Matin in July 1999, hesaid that during the training at the Centre“bonds were forged between members ofthe group and something of that hasremained. I haven’t changed dramatically,but sometimes I look at things in a differentway and also try to spend a bit more time lis-tening to my men.”The Centre’s workshops are undoubtedlyhelping the fight against racism and xe n o-p h o b i a .But changing behaviour pat t e rns thatare deeply rooted in a society is a long-hauljob whch depends,as eve r ,on the enthusiasmand determ i n ation of eve ryo n e . ■

Group work drawing on personal experience is a key feature of the Belgian police training courses against racism and xenophobia.

‘Laughter is a way of avoidingc o n f r o n tation. Laughingtogether is sharing a kind ofi n t i m a cy which makes itpossible to work together in aclimate of trust’

+ ÉCentre pour l’égalité des chances et la lutte contrele racismeRue de la Loi, 155 Résidence Palace1040 Brussels.Tel: (32 2) 233 06 11email: [email protected]://www.antiracisme.beRobin Oakley, Police Training concerningMigrants and Ethnic Relations: Practical Guide-lines, Council of Europe Publishing, 1994.

http://www.antiracisme.be

S I G N S O F T H E T I M E S


■At midnight on December 31, t h eworld will enter the year 2000. Fo rmonths, sometimes years, plans have

been made to celebrate this special NewYe a r ’s Eve , especially in the Chri s t i a nworld.But what,if anything, does the datemean to non-Christians?

“December 31 may herald a new year,a new century and a new millennium, butfor me it’ll just be a normal day,” says anamused P. B a l a s u b r a m a n i a n , the chiefaccountant of a large firm in the Indian cityof Madras.

For a large part of humanity, the arri va lof the year 2000 will pass completely unno-t i c e d . But because globalization means fol-l owing trends or simply because there ismoney to be made, m a ny people have yieldedto the temptation to join the festivities.

Marketing the millennium

In India,a d ve rtising razzmatazz orches-trated by millennium marketeers has rea-ched most of the populat i o n , thanks tosatellite television. New Delhi is staging a“Millennium Night Celebration”.Railways t at i o n m a s t e rs will blow their whistles tosend trains off on prestigious trips aroundthe sub-continent. In most of India’s majortourist centres,from Agra, Khajuraho andJaipur,all the hotels are booked up.Yet form a ny Indians, mostly Hindus, there isreally little to get worked up about.

According to the V i k ram Samvat, t h ecalendar of the Hindus and Sikhs of nor-thern and western India, we are already inthe year 2055, while the Shaka, the coun-t ry ’s most widely used Hindu calendar,only clocks up 1920. As Indian Catholicsmark the end of 1999, Buddhists will bee n j oying the year 2542 and Muslims theyear 1420 of the Hegira.A hundred yearsa g o, according to another ancient Hinduc a l e n d a r , the sixth millennium of theK a l i y u ga era began, supposedly the wo r l-d’s last (see box).

When all’s said and done, only the we a l-thiest and most westernized Indians reallyfeel concerned by the millennium celebra-tions. “It’s a legacy of colonial times and aproduct of marketing,” s ays BhupinderS i n g h , a practising Sikh who has retiredfrom the higher civil service and become abu s i n e s s m a n . But he admits he has gonealong with it all. He is promoting Pa k i s t a n ’smost famous classical singer, S h a f q at A l iK h a n , in India with the slogan “The Star ofthe Millennium”.

Another “ s t a r ” is the island of Kat c h a l l ,one of the Nicobar Islands in the Bay ofB e n g a l , which will be the first place in Indiato see the sunrise on New Ye a r ’s Day 2000.

The ministry of culture is cashing in on theevent (as well as making up for India’s lackof infrastructure) by inviting seven luxuryships from all over the world to anchor offthe Nicobar Islands for the big moment.

Other ships are being encouraged togo to Tonga, in the middle of the Pacificnear the international dateline. To attractthem, Tongan King Taufa’ahau Tupou IVhas decreed a switch to summer daylightsaving time on October 3, thereby gaining14 hours over Greenwich Mean Time(GMT) and making the archipelago thefirst place on earth to enter the “third mil-lennium”. This kind of thing has beendone in the past. When Pope GregoryXIII shortened the year 1582 by 10 daysas part of his reform of the Julian calen-dar, it meant that St Teresa of Avila diedduring the night of the 4th to the . . . 15thof October.

Weddings and marathonsThe U. S . M a rine Observat o ry in T h a i-

land has put forward the controve rsial theoryt h at the sun will rise at 7 a.m. on Ja n u a ry 1a b ove the frontier between Mya n m a r( B u rma) and Thailand and that this will be“the best place in the world to see in the mil-l e n n i u m .” But while the Thais have a fronts e at for the big show, they may be giving it am i s s. Like Laos, C a m b o d i a , M yanmar andS ri Lanka,Thailand is a country where T h e-r avada Buddhism is practised; it celebrat e dits third millennium 543 ye a rs ago. W h at ’sm o r e ,Thailand marks the new year in mid-A p ri l ,d u ring S o n g k ra n, the water festiva l .

All the same, some attempts are beingmade to stir up enthusiasm for the ye a r2000.The Tourism Authority of Thailand( TAT) is organizing events with a “new mil-l e n n i u m ” tag—millennium weddings for2,000 couples, a millennium marathon anda big seaside concert . But in SoutheastAsia, which is struggling to recover from at wo - year economic cri s i s , the “new millen-nium”is on the whole generating little realinterest or extravagant projects. TAT saysthere has been a 30 per cent increase in

T HE YEAR 2000: WHO ’ SCOMING TO THE PA RTY ?◗ Jasmina Sopova

From Osaka to San Francisco, from Beijing to Moscow and Pretoria, millennium fever seems tohave gripped most—but not all—of the planet


CA L ENDA RSF OR ALL:We are in the year:● 11 of the Heisei era, which corresponds to thereign of Japanese Emperor Akihito.● 1420 of the Hegira, the Muslim era, whichbegins on the day when the prophet Muhammadleft Mecca and went to Medina.● 1999 of the Gregorian ca l e n d a r. Used all overthe world, it is named after Pope Gregory XIII ,who reformed the Julian calendar in 1582. TheJulian calendar was itself a reform of the Romancalendar (starting from the date of the foundationof Rome) instituted by Julius Caesar. The Juliancalendar began to be observed by Christians in theyear 532, when the Church fixed the start of theChristian era as the presumed day of Christ’s birth.● 5100 of the Ka l i y u ga e ra, the “age ofc o n flicts”. According to Brahman cosmogony thisis the last cosmic phase of human history. It isconsidered to have begun in 3102 B.C. at theend of the Great War which is the main topic ofthe Mahâbhârata epic. The era is supposed toend in the year 428,999.● 5543 of the Buddhist era, which commemo-rates the death of Buddha.● 5760 of the Jewish calendar, which is basedon the Babylonian calendar, that starts from thesupposed date of the creation of the world. ■



hotel reservations for December comparedwith December 1998, but nearly all of themhave been by foreigners.

Japan has followed the We s t e rn calendarsince 1873, as part of the modern i z at i o nprocess it embarked on during the MeijiEra. Until then, the country had used thelunar-solar Ta i i n t a i yo r e k i calendar dat i n gfrom the Nara Era (645-794), Ja p a n e s ecivilization’s golden age. For nearly a cen-t u ry, t h o u g h , the Ja p a n e s e , especially thoseliving in the countryside, went on celebra-ting the “old”New Year as well as the newo n e .And since tradition demands that timeis measured again from zero whenever anew emperor comes to the throne, the Ja p a-nese followed three different calendars atthe same time.

These days the Ta i i n t a i yo r e k i is onlyo b s e rved by a few sentimental folk andNew Year is celebrated on December 31.But though calendars come and go, tradi-tions remain. And so the Japanese will be

marking the New Year as their ancestorsd i d , with ancient games and decorat i o n s ,f o rmal clothes and special “ l u c k y ” f o o ddishes.

One we l l - k n own restaurateur hasannounced grandly he will make a Tale ofG e n j i m e a l , r e f e rring to a famous 1,000-year-old classic nove l . On the menu will be35 dishes for four gourmets. All for a mere$8,000. More accessible will be the wildlypopular television programme Kohaku UtaG a s s e n, a contest between the ye a r ’s bestmale and female singers,which most Japa-nese watch eve ry December 31—especiallythis year when the Y2K computer bug willencourage people to stay at home.

To the west of the Land of the RisingS u n , the new Gregorian year will be gr e e t e dwith typical panache in China.Beijing citycouncil has gone to great expense, helpedby generous donors in Hong Kong, to bu i l da “Chinese Altar of the Century ” .The bu i l-ding complex, which includes several exhi-

The church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. To mark the year 2000, the Palestinian Authority has launched a major construction and renovation programme in the town.

bition halls,has cost some $24 million andmobilized some 200 architects and art his-t o ri a n s.The rotating altar, 47 metres across,has a huge stage which can accommodatemore than a thousand singers and dancers.You enter it through a 300-metre-long“ Tunnel of T i m e ” , d e c o r ated inside withbronze reliefs showing scenes from thecountry’s 5,000-year history.

But the older generation prefer to waituntil February to celebrate the start of theYear of the Dragon, and remote provinceswill mostly ignore the fuss about the thirdm i l l e n n i u m .Young people howe ver can’twait for New Ye a r ’s Eve , and brush asidethe rebukes of the ardent defenders of theChinese calendar who publicly oppose this“biblical” anniversary, as well as the insis-tence of astronomers, who have taken thematter seriously and are trying to explaint h at the new millennium will not in fa c tarrive until a year later.

I n d e e d , in a calendar beginning with



the year 1, a new century does not strictlyb e gin until the year 101, and so on until2 0 0 1 . The Gregorian calendar in its pre-sent form has only existed for 418 ye a rs ,and it is really 2,044 ye a rs old when seen asa direct descendant of the Julian calendar.W h at ’s more, C h rist was actually born afew years before the official Christian dateof his birth. So perhaps it’s not surprisingt h at young Confucians,B u d d h i s t s ,Ta o i s t s ,M u s l i m s , C h ristians and atheists haveconcluded that the year 2000 just repre-sents a worldwide desire to enter the newmillennium as quickly as possible—cele-b r ating and making money at the sametime—and are keen to take part.

The same enthusiasm can be found inthe Jordan va l l e y. On the Israeli side there is“Nazareth 2000”and on the Palestinian side“Bethlehem 2000”.Luckily the share-out ofthe holy places is fair to the two peoplesw h i c h , despite the small number of Chri s-tians among them, are doing up these sites,which date back to the dawn of Chri s t i a n i t y.

In a region with so many celebrat i o n s ,there are countless welcoming banners.A f t e rc e l e b r ations to mark the 3,000th annive r-s a ry of Je rusalem and 50 ye a rs of Israeli his-t o ry have been played down because of thestalled peace process, I s r a e l ’s Lod intern a-tional airp o rt is building an extension cal-led “Ben Gurion 2000” (after the country ’sfirst prime minister) to welcome the pilgri m s

w h o, b e t ween this Christmas and Easter2 0 0 1 , will climb the Via Dolorosa whichsymbolizes the life of Chri s t .

Will there be six million of them,as theVatican predicts, or three to four million asIsrael has provided for, or the 2.5 millionforeseen by the pessimists,who are prepa-ring for only a 20 per cent increase in tou-rist numbers?

Storm in a wine-glass?For Bethlehem, the year 2000 is an eco-

nomically important one.Experts forecastt h at the influx of tourists will boost theincome of the Palestinian population by$100 per capita during the ye a r.The Wo r l dBank has asked donor countries to beat theThree Wise Men to it in Bethlehem, by pro-viding $85 million to do up the town.Theprivate sector has also come up with fundsto build 6,000 extra hotel rooms.

But the millennium has also producedsome inappropriate tidings. A world awayfrom the rosari e s , the merchants of theTemple have had the ultimate bad taste tooffer a “ Je rusalem 2000” C a b e rnet wine.Its label shows the Dome of the Rock,Islam’s third most holy place (after Meccaand Medina) despite the fact that Islamprohibits consumption of alcohol.A stormin a wine-glass? The matter has been takenup with the Arab League.

In the Arab wo r l d , Egypt has decided

In Shanghai, a young couple watch the Bell of the Century.

to be the champion celebrant of the mil-l e n n i u m , and is avoiding any religious ove r-t o n e s.The occasion coincides with the startof ancient Egypt’s seventh millennium, sothe celebrations will naturally take place atthe foot of the Giza pyramids. More than athousand perform e rs will gather on a20,000-square-metre stage and join Jean-Michel Jarre,a French composer who spe-cializes in mega-events, to present The 12Dreams of the Sun.

The producers are happy, as the $9.5million spent on the project will be recove-red from some 50,000 people expected toattend with tickets ranging from $150 to$400 apiece. Such sums are beyond thereach of most young Egyptians, who willbe able to have a “place in the sun” for amore modest amount.

The concert will begin at dusk on thelast day of 1999 and continue until dawn onthe first day of 2000.When the first ray ofthe sun appears in the Egyptian sky, a nine-metre-high golden pyramid will be placedon the Cheops pyramid to mark the birth ofthe “new millennium”.

Happy New Year! ■

With contributions from Indian journalist Utpal Borpujari

( N ew Delhi), Thai journalist Wanphen Sresthaputra (Bang-

kok), Paris-based Japanese journalist Missawa Kano, Chi-

nese journalists Li Xiguang and Huang Yan (Beijing) and

French journalist Claudine Meyer (Isra e l )


C O N N E X I O N S

■In Budapest (Hungary ) ,B ri t i s h ,F r e n c hand German public radio broadcastersare making a joint bid to open an FM

s t ation in 2000.The venture is emblematic ofthe new world in which intern ational radiosare nav i g at i n g . Almost ove rn i g h t , the fall ofthe Iron Curtain radically called into questionthe traditional mission of these broadcas-t e rs—to send an oxygen balloon of inform a-tion to citizens living in one-party states orunder repressive regi m e s.

Not that this mission has lost its rele-va n c e . Afghanistan and China are amongVoice of A m e ri c a ’s top five markets, and inthe latter jamming is standard practice, ameasure of the broadcaster’s undesirablei n flu e n c e , at least by Chinese gove rn m e n ts t a n d a r d s.In times of crisis such as the recentK o s ovo confli c t , audiences surge.Faced withthe most drastic budget cuts in the history ofG e rman public broadcasting in 1999,Deutsche We l l e ’s director general Dieter We i-rich remained adamant about the mission ofan intern ational serv i c e : “ Two thirds ofhumanity live in countries without freedom ofthe press or inform at i o n .We regard it as ourp a rticular duty to provide them with unin-t e rrupted objective inform ation from credibles o u r c e s.”

A buoy for freedomBut in many parts of the wo r l d , the end of

the Cold War has taken a time-old ideologi c a ledge off the equat i o n , forcing intern at i o n a lb r o a d c a s t e rs to adjust rapidly to a radicallyn e w,more fragmented env i r o n m e n t .No lon-ger can they claim to be the sole altern at i ve tocensored gove rnment broadcasts; no longerare they viewed as a freedom bu oy to some, as u b ve rs i ve force to others. F u rt h e rm o r e , i nnumerous developing countri e s , newly elec-ted gove rnments have yielded control ove r

IN T ERN AT IONAL RA DIO MAKES NEW WAV ES◗ Cynthia Guttman

Once the sole source of outside news for many countries, international public broadcastershave had to adapt to a new competitive environment

◗ UNESCO Courier journalist, with additional reportingfrom Canada by Anne Pelouas

the airwave s ,often opening the way for a plu-rality of opinions to be expressed on new FM( f r e q u e n cy modulation) stat i o n s.

“Because of a different political context,radios whose main goal was to provide infor-m ation to countries that didn’t have accessto any outside news sources have had tochange their tune and develop on trans-mission mediums other than short wave ,”explains Hugues Salord, director of inter-n ational affa i rs at Radio France Intern a-t i o n a l e . In a sense, they have had to learnto “sell themselve s ” on markets with enti-rely different cultures and expectat i o n s ,b eit in Europe, A f ri c a ,Asia or Latin A m e ri c a .In short ,e x t e rnal broadcasters have had tobecome both local and international.

The process of adapting to open marketshas been tantamount to an intensive immer-sion course for external broadcasters. In ad e r e g u l ated audiovisual landscape, the firs tm ove for all broadcasters was to strike up

p a rt n e rships with FM stations around theworld for rebroadcast of their progr a m m e s ,o rto acquire FM transmitters to set up local fre-q u e n c i e s , a more expensive option. As am e d i u m , FM represents a quantum qualityleap over crackly short wave ,a l l owing broad-c a s t e rs to speak faster and insert music intop r o gr a m m e s.

The BBC,according to the World Serv i-c e ’s European news and current affa i rs edi-tor Mark Bray n e , was “streets ahead of almosta nybody else” in building up FM netwo r k s ,s t a rting with Finland in 1987. In 1990, t h eWorld Service was in Romania just after thefall of the Communist regime signing dealswith emerging radio stations and has built upa network of 97 local rebroadcasters.A recentstudy shows that the British broadaster hascaptured 17 per cent of the Romanian radioa u d i e n c e :“ We have become a national broad-caster in a sense.We cover Romanian news inquite some detail but with BBC journ a l i s t i c

In the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (People’s Republic of China) a Mongolian boy listens to the radio in uplands near the border with Kazakhstan.


C O N N E X I O N S

values embedded into a solid analytical fa r eof intern ational news,” s ays Bray n e .

A f ri c a , where broadcast markets deregu-l ated faster than in A s i a , is a particularly cove-ted zone.W h e r e ver an external broadcastercan get onto FM, audiences shoot up.T h eBBC and RFI pull in huge audiences in theirf o rmer A f rican colonies while Ethiopia ranksamong VOA ’s top five markets. RFI has star-ted to open up FM relays outside West A f ri-can capitals, in the second and third largestc i t i e s ,and is introducing locally produced pro-grammes in the Bambara language in Mali.

“RFI is practically perceived as a full-fle d-ged national radio serv i c e , with audiencescores of up to 30 to 40 per cent of theFrench-speaking populat i o n ,” s ays ErlendsC a l a bu i g, director of foreign languages.T h eFrench broadcaster is now trying to makeinroads outside the francophone zone, w i t hthe recent opening of an FM station in Ghanaand one to follow in Lagos.“There is a cleardesire for countries in the region to breakaway from their zone of traditonal culturali n flu e n c e ,” s ays Salord.“I think anglophoneA f rica is taking a gr owing interest in the fran-cophone wo r l d ,not only in a linguistic sense,but also from a political, economic and cul-tural standpoint.”

Demand for accurate informationC l e a r l y, there is a strong demand for

e x t e rnal broadcasters , and not only as pro-v i d e rs of intern ational news. “There is fa rgr e ater competition on a large number ofm a r k e t s , but not always for accurate andi m p a rtial news,” s ays Caroline T h o m s o n ,deputy chief exe c u t i ve of the BBC Wo r l dS e rv i c e . “In many countri e s , a lot of musics t ations have come on the air as a result ofd e r g u l at i o n , but news is quite heavily regu-l ated or of ve ry poor quality and subject toconsiderable local interference.”

Voice of A m e ri c a ’s director Sandy Ungerc o n c u rs that there is a strong demand in emer-ging democracies for balanced and accurat ei n f o rm at i o n .“Where media are not fully deve-l o p e d ,where there are criminal libel laws andall sorts of constraints on free flow of infor-m at i o n , reliable inform ation ve ry often has tocome from the outside,”he affirm s.E v i d e n c eseems to speak for itself. Pointing to VOA ’s400 affil i ate FM stations in Latin A m e ri c a ,he asks: “ W hy are they signing up for this ifthere is no need, if they were confident thati n f o rm ation is being provided in their socie-t i e s ? ”

While all the major broadcasters are pre-sent on local FMs, they each have a missionto uphold.The BBC World Service stands byits reputation for trust and quality,r e p e at e d l ysingled out in its audience surve y s.Voice ofA m e ri c a , which became an independent

federal entity in October, upholds its man-d ate to report on world news and on A m e ri-can politics, society and culture. RFI pri d e sitself on presenting a French reading of thenews that reflects the dive rsity of opinion inthe country. DW ’s director Dieter We i ri c hunderlines the broadcaster’s role in “ f o rm i n gan intern ational awareness about the newm o d e rn Germ a ny.” But how this mission isc a rried out has changed, because FM callsfor a more upbeat ,i n t e r a c t i ve style of pro-gramming than short - wave broadcasting.A n dbecause FM stations are locally based,b r o a d-c a s t e rs have to understand and cultivate theirniche audiences.

“It is really a matter of zooming in,”explains RFI’s Calabu i g .“ We have move daway from reaching an indiscri m i n ate mass ofl i s t e n e rs via one means of transmission span-ning the whole globe to a focus on prox i m i t y,which means cat e ring to the expectations ofl i s t e n e rs.”While intern ational news remainsthe backbone of all the broadcasters ’ p r o-gramming and has been significantly expan-ded over the past few ye a rs to provide round-the-clock cove r a g e ,menus have also becomemore eclectic,mixing music and features adap-ted to different regi o n s. Local production hastaken on a heightened import a n c e .

From 1989 onwa r d s , the BBC start e dr e c ruiting younger people in the former Eas-t e rn bloc who were familiar with the targeta r e a .In Bucharest and Sofia ,R F I ’s subsidiari e sbroadcast a mix of locally produced pro-grammes along with others from Pa ris offe-

ring a more Franco-European angle on eve n t s.There is a strong conv i c t i o n , voiced by allEuropean external broadcasters ,t h at they havea role to play in “ a c c o m p a nying a dialogue bet-ween Central and Eastern European coun-t ri e s , to offer an opening onto Europe,” a sC a l a buig puts in.And there is also a commonresponsibility towards building a unifie dE u r o p e :Radio E,a current events progr a m m e ,is put together with contri butions from seve r a lpublic European broadcasters ,giving listenersa richer reading of regional issues.

Local language broadcastingBroadcasting in local languages is one of

the keys to reaching new audiences. R F I ’se f f o rts to break into anglophone A f rica willbe stalled until the broadcaster can afford tom ove into local languages, namely Swa h i l iand Hausa, as VOA , BBC and DW have alld o n e .The BBC has introduced several lan-guages spoken in the newly independent repu-blics of the former Soviet Union, n o t a b l yU z b e k ,A z e ri , U k r a i n i a n , Kazakh and Ky r-g y z .At the same time, it has shut down otherlanguage services—mostly ve rnacular lan-guages in We s t e rn Europe—which doesn’tn e c e s s a rily mean loss of influ e n c e .

The BBC’s strategy is to target elites,and more often than not this can be done inE n g l i s h . “When we have cut languages, i t ’stended to be because we thought that theywere no longer effective rather than becauseour budget had been slashed,” says Thom-s o n .The BBC’s most recent decision to pullout of German was taken after studies sho-wed that most of the broadcaster’s audiencein the German-speaking world listened toits programmes in English. In the U. S . ,t h eWorld Serv i c e ’s audience has even recor-ded growth in recent years.

Faced with cutbacks, DW is ending itsp r o grammes in Japanese and Spanish,and isin the process of closing several other languages e rv i c e s , including Czech, S l ovak and Hun-g a ri a n ,j u d ging that the countries where theselanguages are spoken are now “ e s t a b l i s h e ddemocracies with a gr e at va riety of media ava i-l a b l e ” . It is howe ver expanding its Russianand English-language progr a m m e s , and aimsto make headway in the Asian market via theA s i a S at 2 sat e l l i t e . Regardless of bu d g e tc o n s t r a i n t s , all the major playe rs have intro-duced broadcasts in Albanian and Macedo-n i a n ,r e flecting the pri o rity they put on beingon air as fast as possible when political cir-cumstances wa rr a n t .

Introducing new languages may be at theh e a rt of broadcasters ’s t r at e gies in emergi n gdemocracies and developing countri e s ,but itcosts money.While all broadcasters underlinetheir editorial independence from gove rn-m e n t , they all rely on them for funding, a n d

IN T ERN AT ION A LBROA DCAS T ING ’ SBIG LEAGUEBBC World Service : 1,120 hours reaching 143

million listeners weekly in 43 languages; budget:

£175 million ($280 million)

VOA (Voice of America): 870 hours reaching 91

million listeners weekly in 53 languages; budget:

$106 million*

D W (Deutsche Welle): 718 hours reaching 28 m i l-

lion listeners weekly in 36 languages; budget:

DM606 million ($336.6 million)

RFI (Radio France Internationale)**: 313 hours

reaching 45 million listeners weekly in 20 lan-

guages; budget: FF754 million ($125.6 million)

*Salaries and reporting costs only. Excludes

transmission costs.

** Including its subsidiary, RMC Moyen Orient.


C O N N E X I O N S

none has been graced with a generous influ xover the past decade.VOA ’s director SandyUnger fears “ d r a m atic cuts” if Congress onlygrants the service a straightline budget for fis-cal 2000,which would mean absorbing a 4.8per cent cost of living increase.The World Ser-v i c e ’s budget has declined in real terms ove rthe past eight ye a rs. R F I ’s has been stable.DW ’s budget for 1999 was reduced by DM30 million ($16.6 million/4.7 per cent), a n dwill be slashed by a further 10 per cent to DM546 million ($302.3 million), up to the ye a r2003—seemingly a turnabout from last ye a r ,when the newly elected gove rnment promi-sed “an improvement in the way the countryrepresents itself to the outside wo r l d ”a c c o r-ding to We i ri c h .Besides six language closures,over 700 jobs are to be cut.

In the early 1990s, Radio Canada Inter-n ationale (RCI), a smaller player on the wo r l ds t a g e , cut seven of its 15 languages ands h runk its staff, and nearly went off the air in1996 when it was was saved at the eleve n t hhour by a federal gove rnment gr a n t .F l o ri a nS a u va g e a u , a professor at Laval Unive rs i t y( C a n a d a ) , argues that the crisis reflected theg ove rn m e n t ’s lack of interest in intern at i o-nal culural relat i o n s. RCI now aims to putf o r ward the country ’s economic strength andcultural dive rs i t y, and is boosting broadcas-ting to China and A f ri c a .

In this belt-tightening env i r o n m e n t ,o n eof the dilemmas is how to be present on allf r o n t s. In politically sensitive zones, e x t e r-nal radios have to maintain a short - wave pre-sence in addition to their FM frequenciesand satellite broadcasting. Then comesi nvestment in new technologi e s.The Inter-net is top pri o rity for all public broadcasters.“ I t ’s the short wave of the future,” a f firm sT h o m s o n .“The trouble with FM is that yo uare ve ry susceptible to local pressures,” s h ec o n t i n u e s , noting that at any one time, t h eWorld Service has a couple of FM stat i o n soff the air because an item has offended thep owe rs in place.“If you are looking at how tomaintain vibrant intern ational broadcastingin 20 ye a rs time, yo u ’ ve got to invest in theI n t e rnet now. I t ’s a much freer medium.”

Digitalizing short waveThanks to the net, Indian and Pa k i s t a n i

communities in Britain can, for example,access programmes in Hindi and Urdu.V i e t-namese can do the same in their own language,whether they are in the U. S . or V i e t n a m .A l lb r o a d c a s t e rs are also keeping a close watch onWorldspace—direct reception via satellite onindividual dishes allowing for an exceptionalquality—and the imminent digi t a l i z ation ofs h o rt wave ,which is likely to gi ve this mediuma new lease on life. D i gitalized short wave will

not only ensure higher listening quality, bu talso reduce production costs, a l l owing for abu rst of new stations to go on air and cater toincreasingly specific audience segments.

M a ny of the countries where deregu-l ation is underway inherited state broad-casting services from their former impe-rial powe rs. N ow, the latter are helpingthe liberalization process along, often byp r oviding training courses and technicala s s i s t a n c e . RFI recalls that its launch ofthe first FM station in Dakar (Senegal) in1991 played a significant role in “ o p e n i n gup and enriching the radio landscape andr e i nv i g o r ating national public radio.” Fo rVOA ’s Unger, in a number of deve l o p i n gc o u n t ri e s ,“ i n t e rn ational broadcasters ares e rving as an example of what can bed e ve l o p e d .”W h i c h e ver technology winsout—and colossal investments are atstake—only contents can gi ve extern a lb r o a d c a s t e rs the cutting edge.Their gr e a-test asset, for Salord, lies in their exper-t i s e , k n ow - h ow and worldwide netwo r kof corr e s p o n d e n t s. “ I n t e rn ational radiob r o a d c a s t e rs have a role to play in decry p-ting the complexity of the world we livei n .This is our job, not to gi ve value judg-ments or lessons but to provide facts andelements that help the listener in form i n ghis or her own opinion.” ■

In Tanzania, Rwandan Hutu refugees stand on a mound to get better radio reception.


T A L K I N G T O …

WA NG A RI MU TA MAAT H A I :K EN YA’S GREEN MIL I TA N TA noted environmental and pro-democracy activist hopes the next millennium will see a newAfrican leadership that puts people first

You once said that the quality of theenvironment cannot be improved unless anduntil the living conditions of ordinary peopleare improved. Could you enlarge on this?

If you want to save the environmentyou should protect the people firs t ,because human beings are part of biologi-cal diversity. And if we can’t protect ourown species, what’s the point of protec-ting tree species?

It sometimes looks as if poor people ared e s t r oying the env i r o n m e n t . But they areso preoccupied with their surv i val that theyare not concerned about the long-termdamage they are doing to the env i r o n m e n tsimply to meet their most basic needs.

So it is ironic that the poor peoplewho depend on the environment are alsop a rtly responsible for its destru c t i o n .That’s why I insist that the living condi-tions of the poor must be improved if wereally want to save our environment.

For example, in certain regions ofKenya, women walk for miles to get fire-wood from the forests, as there are notrees left nearby. When fuel is in shortsupply, women have to walk further andfurther to find it. Hot meals are servedless frequently, nutrition suffers,and hun-ger increases. If these women had enoughresources they would not be depletingvaluable forest.

What is at stake in the forests of Kenya andEast Africa today?

Since the beginning of this century,there has been a clear tendency to cutd own indigenous forests and to replacethem with exotic species for commerciale x p l o i t at i o n . We ’ ve now become moreaware of what this invo l ves and have reali-zed that it was wrong to cut down indige-nous forests, thereby destroying our ri c hb i o l o gical dive rs i t y. But much damage hasalready been done.

When the Green Belt Movement (seebox page 47) started its campaign in 1977to plant trees, Kenya had about 2.9 percent of forest cover. Today the forestedarea has further dwindled to around two

per cent.We are losing more trees than weare planting.

The other important issue is that theEast African environment is very vulne-rable. We are very close to the Saharadesert, and experts have been warningthat the desert could expand southwardslike a flood if we keep on felling treesindiscriminately, since trees prevent soilerosion caused by rain and wind. By clea-ring remaining patches of forests we are inessence creating many micro-Saharadeserts. We can already see evidence ofthis phenomenon.

We hold civic education seminars forrural people, especially farmers, as part ofcampaigns to raise public awa r e n e s sabout environmental issues. If you were toask a hundred farmers how many of themremember a spring or a stream that hasdried up in their lifetime, almost 30 ofthem would raise their hands.

What has your Green Belt Movement (GBM)achieved and in particular to what extent hasit prevented environmental degradation inKenya?

The most notable achievement of theGBM in my view has been in raising envi-ronmental awareness among ordinarycitizens, especially rural people. Differentgroups of people now realize that theenvironment is a concern for everybodyand not simply a concern for the

government. It is partly because of thisawareness that we are now able to reachout to decision-makers in the govern-ment. Ordinary citizens are challengingthem to protect the environment.

Secondly, the GBM introduced theidea of environmental conservat i o nthrough trees because trees meet manybasic needs of rural communities. Westarted out by planting seven trees in asmall park in Nairobi in 1977. At thattime we had no tree nursery, no staff andno funds, only a conviction that ordinarycountry people had a role to play in sol-ving environmental problems.We went onfrom there and now we have planted over20 million trees all over Kenya.

The act of planting trees conveys asimple message. It suggests that at thevery least you can plant a tree and impro-ve your habitat. It increases people’s awa-reness that they can take control of theire nv i r o n m e n t , which is the first steptoward greater participation in society.Since the trees we have planted arevisible, they are the greatest ambassadorsfor our movement.

Despite the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and theKyoto Climate summit in 1997, there has beenno significant progress in environmentalprotection programmes and campaigns at aglobal level. Why?

Unfortunately, for many world leadersdevelopment still means extensive far-ming of cash crops, expensive hydroelec-tric dams,hotels,supermarkets,and luxu-ry items, which plunder human andnatural resources. This is short-sightedand does not meet people’s basic needs—for adequate food, clean water, shelter,local clinics, information and freedom.

As a result of this craze for so-calledd e ve l o p m e n t , e nvironmental protectionhas taken a back seat.The problem is thatthe people who are responsible for muchof the destruction of the environment areprecisely those who should be providingleadership in environmental protectioncampaigns. But they are not doing so.

‘The act of planting treesconveys a simple message. It suggests that at the veryleast you can plant a tree andimprove your habitat. It increases people’s awarenessthat they can ta ke control oftheir environment, which is the first step toward greaterparticipation in society ’



Also, political power now is wieldedby those who have business interests andclose links with multinational corpora-tions (MNCs). The only aim of theseMNCs is to make profit at the expense ofthe environment and people.

We also know that many world politicall e a d e rs are persuaded by MNCs not to payattention to declarations made in intern a-tional environmental conferences. I stron-gly believe that as citizens we should refu-se to be at the mercy of these corp o r at i o n s.C o rp o r ations can be extremely merciless,as they have no human fa c e .

You started your career as an academic. Lateryou became an environmentalist, and now youare called a pro-democra cy activist. How wouldyou describe your evolution in the last 25 years?

Few environmentalists today are wo r-ried about the we l fare of bees, bu t t e r fli e s

A 20 - MIL L ION -T REEGREEN BELT

In a country where women play a marginal rolein political and social affairs, 59-year-old Wa n-

gari Muta Maathai’s achievements stand out as anexception. A biologist, she was the first womanfrom East Africa to receive a doctorate, to becomea professor and chair a department—all at the Uni-versity of Nairobi.

Maathai began to be active in the NationalCouncil of Women of Kenya in 1976 and it wasthrough the Council that she launched a tree-plan-ting project called “Save the Land H a ra m b e e” (aSwahili word meaning let’s all pull together). Theproject was renamed the Green Belt Movement(GBM) in 1977.

The GBM initiated programmes to promoteand protect biodiversity, to protect the soil, tocreate jobs especially in rural areas, to givewomen a positive image in the community and toassert their leadership qualities.

The overall aim of the GBM has been to createpublic awareness of the need to protect the envi-ronment through tree planting and sustainablemanagement. Nearly 80 per cent of the 20 milliontrees planted by the GBM have survived. At pre-sent the GBM has over 3,000 nurseries, giving jobopportunities to about 80,000 people, most ofthem rural women.

In 1986 the GBM established a Pan-AfricanGreen Belt Network and has organized work-shops and training programmes on environ-mental awareness for scores of individuals fromother African countries. This has led to the adop-tion of Green Belt methods in Tanzania, Uganda,Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe.

Maathai, who is a member of the UN Secre-t a ry General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament,has won 14 international awards, including theprestigious Right Livelihood Award. She won theaward, presented by a Swedish foundation andoften referred to as an Alternative Nobel Prize, inrecognition of her “contributions to the well-being of humankind”.

In a country where single-party rule prevailedfor decades, Maathai has been teargassed andseverely beaten by police during demonstra t i o n sto protect Kenya’s forests.

“The government thinks that by threateningme and bashing me they can silence me,” saysMaathai. “But I have an elephant’s skin. Andsomebody must raise their voice.”

Maathai, a mother of three children, is cur-rently involved in a struggle to save the 2,50 0 - a c r eKarura forests, northwest of Nairobi, where thegovernment wants to build housing complexes.

■

and trees alone. They know that it is notpossible to keep the environment pure ifyou have a gove rnment that does notcontrol polluting industries and deforesta-t i o n .

In Kenya , for example, real estate deve-l o p e rs have been allowed to go into themiddle of indigenous forests and bu i l de x p e n s i ve houses. As concerned indivi-duals we should oppose that . When yo us t a rt intervening at that leve l , you fin dyo u rself in direct confrontation with poli-cy - m a k e rs and you start to be called ana c t i v i s t .

I was teaching at the University ofNairobi in the 1970s, when I felt that theacademic rights of women professorswere not being respected because theywere women. I became an activist at theu n i ve rs i t y, insisting that I wanted myrights as an academic.



Meanwhile,I found myself confrontedby other issues that were directly relatedto my work but were not clear to me atthe outset, like human rights.This direct-ly led me to another area, governance. Asa result I was drafted into the pro-demo-cracy campaign.

I realized in the 1970s that in a youngdemocracy like ours it was very easy forleaders to become dictators. As this hap-pened they started using nat i o n a lresources as though they were their per-sonal property. I realized that the consti-tution had given them powers to misuseofficial machinery.

So I became involved in the pro-democracy movement and pressed forconstitutional reforms and political spaceto ensure freedom of thought and expres-sion. We cannot live with a political sys-tem that kills creativity and producescowardly people.

With your academic qualifications you couldhave lived a comfortable life in the U.S. ore l s ewhere in the West. But you decided tocome back and settle down in Kenya. In the

last 25 years, you have been verbally abused,threatened, beaten, put behind bars and onmany occasions forbidden to leave thec o u n t ry. Have you ever regretted returning toKenya and becoming an activist?

I did not deliberately decide to beco-me an activist, but I have never regrettedthe fact that I decided to stay here and tocontribute to the development of thiscountry and my region. I know that I havemade a little difference.

Many people come up to me and tellme that my work has inspired them.Thisgives me great satisfaction because in theearlier days, especially during the dicta-torship, it was difficult to speak.

Until a few years ago, people used tocome up to me in the street and whisper“I am with you and I am praying for you.“They were so scared of being identifiedwith me that they did not want to beheard. I know a lot of people were afraidof talking to me and being seen with mebecause they might be punished.

I have been a greater positive force bystaying here and going through trials andtribulations than if I had gone to othercountries. It would have been very diffe-rent to live in the West and say my coun-try should do this and that. By being hereI encourage many more people.

Do you think you were subjected to virulentattacks and abuses because you questionedmen’s decisions?

Our men think A f rican women shouldbe dependent and submissive , d e fin i t e l ynot better than their husbands.There is nodoubt that at first many people opposedme because I am a woman and resentedthe idea that I had strong opinions.

I know that at times men in positionsof influence, including President DanielArap Moi, ridiculed me. At one timeMembers of Parliament accused me andridiculed me for being a divorced woman.I have felt that deep inside they werehoping that by calling into question mywomanhood I would be subdued. Laterthey realized they were wrong.

In 1989, for example, we had a bigconfrontation with the authorities whenwe were fighting to save Uhuru Park inNairobi. I argued that it would be ridicu-lous to destroy this beautiful park in thecentre of the city and replace it with amulti-storeyed complex.

Uhuru Park was the only place inNairobi where people could spend timewith their families outdoors.The park wasa wonderful place for people to go becau-se it was a place where no one botheredthem.

When I launched the campaign oppo-sing the construction of the “Park-mons-ter“, as the project later came to beknown, I was ridiculed and accused of notu n d e rstanding deve l o p m e n t . I didn’t

‘At one time Members ofParliament accused me andridiculed me for being adivorced woman. I have feltthat deep inside they werehoping that by calling intoquestion my womanhood Iwould be subdued. Later theyrealized they were wrong’

Nairobi

Tanzania

0 100 kmIndianOcean

Uganda

Sudan Ethiopia

K EN YA

Mombasa

Kakamega

Kisumu

Nakuru

NyenEmbu

Garissa

In Madagascar, a woman plants rice in the ashes of a felled area of forest, home to the last survivors of a lemur species.

K EN YA FACT FIL ERepublic of Kenya (Jamhuri ya Kenya)A former British colony, gained independence in1963 and became a republic the following year.Area: 582,646 sq.kmCapital: NairobiPopulation: 28.4 millionLanguages: Kiswahili, EnglishLife expectancy at birth: 52 yearsAdult literacy rate: 79.3 %GDP per capita: $372President: Daniel T. Arap MoiMonetary Unit: Kenya Shilling (74 shillings=$1 US)

Source: UNDP Human Development Report 1999


A member of Kenya’s Green Belt movement.

study development but I do know thatyou need space in a city. Fortunatelyother non-gove rnmental organizat i o n sand thousands of ordinary people joinedour protests and finally the park wassaved.

The government, which wanted todestroy that park, has since declared it anational heritage.That’s wonderful.They

could have done that without fighting andwithout ridiculing me.What made you stand in the presidentialelections in 19 97? Despite your popularity, whydidn’t you win a sizeable number of votes?

I decided to stand for election forseveral reasons. In 1992, when a multi-party system was legalized in Kenya forthe first time, I tried very hard with other

political groups to unite the opposition,but in vain.When there were many oppo-sition candidates running for the presi-dency, I withdrew from the campaign.

As expected, the opposition lost thoseelections and everybody now accepts thatthe campaign we launched for them tounite was right. We wanted to form agovernment of national unity within the

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‘This generation of Africa nleaders will go down in history as a veryirresponsible one that hasbrought Africa to its knees.During the past three deca d e s ,A f r i ca has suffered from a lack of visionary andaltruistic leaders committed to the welfare of their people’

opposition in 1992. This is exactly whatthey are now clamouring for.

In the 1997 general elections,my idea wa sto persuade the opposition to unite and fie l da strong candidate from one ethnic commu-nity against the ruling Kenya A f rican Nat i o-nal Union (KANU).1 But I was called a tri-balist by some opposition groups forproposing that idea.When all my efforts tounite the opposition fa i l e d , I decided to ru nfor president.

But during the campaign I also came torealize that in this country it is ve ry diffic u l tto get elected without money. I didn’t havem o n e y. I realized that it doesn’t matter howgood you are, h ow honest you are and howp r o - d e m o c r atic you are, if you don’t havemoney to gi ve to the voter you wo n ’t getelected.So I lost.

All this gave me a new experience.Now I can speak as an insider. I also rea-lized that people here are not yet ready fordemocracy and we need a lot of civic edu-cation and political consciousness. Peoplehere are still controlled by ethnicity andvote along ethnic lines. The ethnic ques-tion became a ve ry important issueduring the last elections.

Despite having enormous natural resourcesA f r i ca still lags behind other continents in termsof development and growth. Why is this?

Poor leaders h i p, without any doubt.T h i sg e n e r ation of A f rican leaders will go down inhistory as a very irresponsible one that hasbrought A f rica to its knees. D u ring the past

three decades, A f rica has suffered from alack of visionary and altruistic leaders com-mitted to the welfare of their people.

There are historical reasons for this.Just before independence was granted tomany African countries, young Africanswere promoted by colonial rulers to posi-tions until then unoccupied by the localpeople and were trained to take overpower from the colonial administration.

The new black administrat o rs andburgeoning elites enjoyed the same eco-nomic and social life-styles and privilegesthat the imperial administrators enjoyed.The only difference between the two interms of the objectives for the countrywas the colour of their skin.

In the process, the A f rican leaders aban-doned their people, and in order to maintaintheir hold on power they did exactly whatthe colonial system was doing, namely to pitone community against another. T h i sinternal conflict continued for decades inm a ny A f rican countri e s , draining theirscarce resources.

So what we need is to improve our lea-d e rs h i p. If we don’t there is no hope,b e c a u s eh i s t o ry teaches us that if you cannot protectw h at is your own somebody will come andtake it. If our people cannot protect them-s e l ves they will continue to be exploited.T h e i rresources will continue to be exploited.

It is also true that Western powers,especially the former colonial masters ofthis region, have continued to exploitAfrica and have continued to work veryclosely with these dictators and irrespon-sible leaders.That is why we are now deepin debt, which we cannot repay.

A f rica also needs assistance from inter-n ational gove rnments to improve its eco-nomic standing. For example, most foreignaid to A f rica comes in the form of curat i vesocial we l fare programmes such as fa m i n er e l i e f, food aid, p o p u l ation control pro-gr a m m e s , refugee camps, p e a c e - k e e p i n gforces and humanitarian missions.

At the same time, hardly any resourcesare available for sustainable human deve-lopment programmes such as functionale d u c ation and training, d e velopment ofi n f r a s t ru c t u r e , food production and pro-motion of entrepreneurs h i p. There are nofunds for the development of cultural andsocial programmes which would empowe rpeople and release their creat i ve energy.

I am hoping that in the new millenniuma new leadership will emerge in A f ri c a ,a n dI hope this new leadership will show morec o n c e rn for the people and utilize the conti-n e n t ’s resources to help A f ricans get out ofpoverty. ■

Interview by Ethirajan Anbarasan,UNESCO Courier journalist

1.The Kenya African National Union (KANU)was formed in 1960, won the country’s first post-independence election in 1963, and has been inpower ever since.

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Études à l’étranger 2000–20013 1E ÉDITION LIVRE ET CD-ROM (PC/MAC)

Le guide international de l’UNESCO pour tout savoirsur les possibilités d’études supérieures et sur les bourses offertes par les universités, les institutionsspécialisées et les organisations internationales

| Une référence unique depuis 1948

| 2 600 cours dans 124 pays

Toutes les disciplines académiques et professionnelles au niveau supérieur | Adresseset références, y compris adresses électroniques et sites Internet | Conditions d’admission | Datesd’inscription | Frais d’études et coût de la vie dans chaque pays | Bourses et assistance financière| Statistiques sur les universités.

| Informations en anglais, français ou espagnolselon le pays

U N E S C O P u b l i s h i n g

Edic iones U N E S C O

Éditions U N E S C O

Study abroad 2000–200131ST EDITION BOOK AND CD-ROM (PC/MAC)

The UNESCO international guide to higher-educationstudy opportunities and scholarships offered by universi-ties, specialized schools and international organizations

| A reference since 1948

| 2,600 courses in 124 countries

All higher-education academic and professional disci-plines | Addresses and references, including e-mail and websites | Admission requirements |Application deadlines | Scholarships and financial aid| Fees and living expenses in each country | Variousstatistics concerning the institutions.

| Entries in English, French or Spanish according to the country

Estudios en el extranjero2000–200131.A EDICIÓN LIBRO Y CD-ROM (PC/MAC)

La guía internacional de la UNESCO indispensable parainformarse sobre las becas y los cursos universitariosofrecidos por universidades, instituciones especializadasy organismos internacionales

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In the next issue

The UNESCO Courier is available on the Internet:

www.unesco.org/courier

Fo c u s :

International Yearfor the Culture of Peace 2000■ A new arena for individual action

■ The South: people adrift in fragile States

■ Three unsung peace-makers

■ The Community of Sant’Egidio: serving the poor,

working for peace

■ Jubilee 2000: a campaign to cancel Third World debt

■ Indian farmers against GMOs

■ Mali: the culture of peace in power

■ Towards a coalition of alternative movements

Fe a t u res include■ Photo report on Japan’s teenagers

■ The long haul to save the Aral Sea

■ Teachers up against classroom violence

■ The Hermitage comes out of its shell

■ The meaning of mortality: euthanasia and world religions

■ Interview with American philosopher Michael Walzer:

the quest for social justice

Documents

Me m o ry : making peace - UNESCOunesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/001182/118279e.pdfDecember 1999 - The UNESCO Courier 3 P E O P L E A N D P L A C E S Under the big top of Italy’s