Hi, everyone. Welcome. Happy New Year and happy Hillary through for those of you who are in Oxford.
Today, we are having a cohosted event. G.R. has joined forces with the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
So just introduce this group. ELAC or the Oxfordian sued for ethics.
One Armed Conflict is an interdisciplinary research programme which is based at the Globe Ethnic School of Government.
It seeks to understand and to strengthen law, norms and institutions to restrain, regulate and prevent armed conflict.
It brings together researchers, academics and practitioners in areas such as international law, international relations and philosophy.
EULEX mission is to propose a framework of rules and practises that can drive legal and policy reforms on various aspects of armed conflict.
So, as I mentioned, we have joined forces for a very interesting and a very important discussion.
And we are privileged to welcome Leslie DOMAs, the director and producer of the feature length documentary The Prosecutors,
which, as the three mentioned, all registered participants had the opportunity to watch over the weekend.
Thanks to art works projects, Bernat that we are a visual journalist and filmmaker,
and Nadia Siddiqui, cross disciplinary researcher and co-director at Social Enquiry.
I'll be introducing our speakers as we go through the panel.
So first of all, I will give the floor to Leslie.
And before I do so, let me give a brief introduction of your many professional engagements over the years.
Leslie DOMAs is the founder of Artwork's Projects, an Emmy Award winning our director, architect and mother.
Current projects include directing the prosecutors curating a touring exhibition on ending female genital mutilation for the United Nations,
and co editing a book of photography on the impact of war on children in Syria.
She is in preproduction on a narrative feature on women's rights and in development on a film about the movement for Irish independence.
Her multimedia human rights focussed work has toured the cross five continents in major policy,
academic and cultural settings and been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The MacArthur Foundation. The Open Society Foundation. The International Labour Organisation.
And many other major philanthropic institutions. Leskie is a graduate of Columbia University and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
Leslie, the floor is yours. Thank you so much.
It's really an honour to be here. I must say two things that are framing this conversation.
One is I will be drinking coffee throughout my chat. And as other people are chatting, this is not a sign of disrespect.
I wish we were altogether. And if we were sitting in an auditorium, I would also be drinking coffee onstage, as that can be mentioned.
I think of that kind of Michigan. This list of goulash of the things that I work on.
Also right now, we are in production on a film around the four women peace negotiators sitting down with the Taliban right now in Doha.
But from Afghanistan and it's 10 and a half hours ahead from where I live.
And so day and night have slid into kind of just a week.
Hours. I also wanted to frame my talks today around the fact that in the United States,
for those of you who are American, who have spent time in the United States, it's Martin Luther King Day.
And this is an extraordinarily important day because it gives us a moment to really reflect not just on one very,
very special human being, but on the entire history of non-violent protest.
And as I was thinking about making coffee and thinking about this this conversation today,
I thought to myself, non-violent protest is very much related to the idea of judicial processes.
Because if you think of societies of the forming of societies as the gathering of lots of people who are inherently going to be different.
Right. So there's seven billion plus of us and every single human being is different,
which means that every single human being has different opinions and thoughts and ideas and that we have to come together to live.
Sometimes that's conflicted. Sometimes there's a lot of conflict and it can become very violent and transitional.
Justice is this long arc of life, as I see it, of kind of smoothing all those Escher's edges of bringing us together.
Of of saying what do we need to do to let us live together when our conflicts
have exploded to a point that is not acceptable because we have used violence,
which is fundamentally, at least for me, absolutely not acceptable.
So so on Martin Luther King Day, we're in this interesting position in this country, in America,
where we recently had a group of people who exercised two rights, which are totally acceptable.
They protested, which is something that should be cherished in open societies.
Right. As Karl Popper talked about. Right.
We can have these messy, open, vibrant societies in which we have lots of opinions and we do lots of things.
And we protest and we talk and we argue and then we go to courts.
So the people in the United States who attacked the capital,
who attacked the process that the Congress uses to to verify an election, went to courts and they had every right to do that.
And there is this expectation from the rest of us that the court process will move forward and that we will accept what happens.
And then we have these layers of courts. Right. You go to a court and you don't like what they said.
So you appeal and you go to the next court.
And those are also really wonderful things around how we as a society can effectively and structurally come together.
And those people lost. Right. So they lost the first time. They lost the second time.
They lost the third term. They went to the Supreme Court. They lost.
And then this is where it breaks down because then they attacked the structure of our democracy.
And that's the part where it is unacceptable.
And that's the part where Martin Luther King would have told us, if you don't like the answer that you were getting in court,
there are non-violent ways to say, should we question the laws?
Is our structure correct? Do we need to reimagine it? And in making the prosecutors.
This is something that was so exciting because we looked at three different cases.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the kind of questions that audiences tend to ask about the film.
And the first one is always, why did you pick these three, three cases for those who did watch the film?
We looked at that, the judicial response to complicated sexual violence in Bosnia, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
And we picked those three cases for very specific reasons.
One is that they were at different stages in their conflict resolution.
So the United States is still lurching its way through conflict resolution and transitional justice from its birth,
from the twin evils of genocide of Native Americans or people who lived here before it was called the Americas
by white Europeans and the enslavement and trafficking of an entire group of people from another continent.
So we're still lurching through a transitional justice process of that in the former Yugoslavia.
You have the instance of a court system that moved from the ICC y to the ICC to the suit court ABH and then to the cantonal courts.
And it gave us a wonderful example of what does a judicial process look like 20 plus years out and how can that evolve?
I have great admiration for the the idea that you can if you live in Bosnia, it's not perfect,
but you can go to Bihac and you can go to a war crimes court in your own community with the every
expectation that your case will be heard and that this is not lost and that it is right there near you.
In in Columbia, when we worked with the fiscal year and we documented what they're doing for those who happen to be Americans,
you know, sort of not familiar, it's a little bit like the attorney general's office. They work nationally, but they work out of the booger, as.
Sandra would call it, in in Colombia, in Bogota.
And we're looking at something that was like eight, nine years out of when the agreement had been made with the paramilitaries.
So we got to see how this starts to be implemented and where those expectations are.
Tragically, we still had threatening of witnesses.
We still had a sense that Marco Rubio Perez might escape, which is why he was not present in the courthouse.
He was virtually, as we are today in the courthouse. But the victims, survivors and witnesses move forward with the process.
And in the eight years, there had been this sense that despite ongoing violence, this judicial process was going to be effective.
And it was going to work. And the result was going to be implemented.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we then had something that and Bernadette is here with us today.
And she is much more of an expert as a Congolese citizen and director and journalist.
But we had what Amani Cotnoir and the Dean might say is kind of an evolving, aspirational and ongoing.
Transitional justice period. So we have war crimes being committed while we are still documenting and trying war crimes.
There are those who feel that the military is the wrong place to documents something that may have been perpetrated by the military.
There are others who feel that it is the right place. I will leave that to the lawyers in this conversation to address.
But just to say, it's very exciting to watch a process go on, which is happening such that victims,
survivors and their communities can see it happen even as other events are being perpetrated.
So I think when we talk about whether the judicial system is a deterrent, it is a wonderful example of that.
I would also just like to say something about transparency and the idea of documentation,
which is that sometimes there's this expectation that in the economic north of the global west that we have the most open of societies.
If you watch the film, you might think to yourself that the best footage or the most.
Intimate footage of a trial is not in Bosnia or Colombia.
The two probably wealthier countries in terms of per capita, not what's in the ground.
But but that's another issue around colonialism. But but sort of, you know, per capita income.
And if you look at, you know, basic humanitarian statistics.
But in fact, in Congo, the accessibility and the transparency of the judicial system was breathtaking.
The combination of the judges, local magistrates and and what was afforded and the commitment to community seeing trial,
there is nothing that you would ever see in the United States and certainly not in the other two countries.
I had been thrown out of courtrooms in so many countries and never in Congo.
And I think that, again, if we are committed to a strong transitional justice process, fighting for transparency is a key component of that.
I would like to say that I think that art and documentary film have a lot. An important part of that.
But I. But I am biased. I might close with just one more one more comment, which is I'm often asked why we made a film about.
The judicial process and not specifically documenting the stories of survivors,
which is clearly the core and is my own personal motivation, the actual crime,
I have spent years working with a kind of group of people who who describe
themselves often as legal victims of survivors if they lived end of witnesses,
of experts and advocates. That is all one group of people.
Someone who has had a lived experience of conflict related sexual violence is an expert.
They are very often the best advocate. They are illegal victim.
And they are a witness to what happened in working on this film.
Early we we talked a lot with those advisers, those experts.
And what they said to us is we don't need to tell our stories to an audience.
The world knows this happens. This is not something that we are interested in doing.
What we would like to do is work with you to show what can be done.
What we are doing, what has been done and what needs to be amplified.
So I see this a little bit as a pre-emptive note, because sometimes I'm asked, you know,
didn't you think that you should spend 90 minutes putting a camera in front of somebody so they can tell their story?
And I would just say, when you work with someone who is a survivor,
you might want to find out if they're telling that story for you, but they're telling that story for them.
Now, my timer tells me I've used up my time and I've been a bit rambling, but I hope you'll forgive me.
And I'm excited to give them the rest. Thank you very much, Leslie, and your closing remarks.
Very good link to the next presentation.
Looking more, the question of stories of survival is through the perspective of resilience within the communities.
And I'm delighted to give the floor to that, if you will. And I'll just start with a brief introduction.
She's a visual journalists and filmmaker based in Goma, eastern DRC.
She's an alumnus in social justice photography, decomposing of the colonial gaze led by Yola Africa.
She reports on issues related to human rights, the environment and the exploitation of raw materials,
bearing witness to the resilience and transcendence of the people in this conflict affected region.
She most recently directed the short documentary Letter to My Child from Rape, which brings to the screen the powerful words of the poet.
Advocates dishonours Kaboul as she breaks prejudice to claim a future for the child she bore as a result of sexual violence in Baghdad.
Thank you so much for being with us. The four zorse. OK.
Thank you. I'm very happy to be part of this panel.
Firstly, I apologise because my English is not so good, but I will try to to express what I have to say.
And I'm to be part of this this panel about transitional justice.
It's a big honour for me to to talk about what I'm working on daily and to speak about transitional justice through lands.
It's, um, for me, it's like her to, uh, to to to to give enlight those stories of resilience in DRC.
As everyone know, D.R.C. have been more and more reported based to the image of war of violence.
But there is there are no enough stories based to their resilience,
how people in these days in that situation manage to to improve their their daily life.
And in that angle, I, I directed the film letter to my Child from Rape, which we work with.
Lesley Thomas. And to direct this film.
It was. It was for me, it was an occasion to discover a brave, a brave woman who were behind this village that letters.
And it's, uh, it's like two to two to to him to increase the voice of that those survival.
Of sexual violence and.
So I know that the feeling was not a pro screened in this in this occasion, but to see to see the film, were you people who are following us can.
Can. Can go to visit Depositary, so on.
On our Web site. It's a letter, a letter to my child dot com saw.
I'm here. And if there are some questions.
Open to respond. Thank you. Thank you very much about that at the.
We will leave during the Q&A. A link to the Web site of the film so that people who are in the room can can be directed to it.
And as you have seen, today's panel looks at art and transitional justice through two lenses.
The first one is the depiction of transitional justice through art,
and the second one is the role of art in transitional justice and effectuating this transition.
I'm going to give the floor to Nadia Siddiqui. She's a cross disciplinary researcher and writer interested in the links between cultural practise,
social dynamics and justice as a goal directorate social enquiry.
She leads research exploring identities and belonging and displacements in return.
Measuring social cohesion and understanding wealth, reconciliation, accountability mean to communities.
She? S President previously worked with Oxfam, the Middle East Research Institute, to be Afghanistan endless network.
The Applied Theatre Collective and the International Centre for Transitional Justice, amongst others.
Nadia has also helped produce art design events in New York City that have garnered national and international attention.
She holds a B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan in the Nemitz seen evidence based social intervention from the University of Oxford.
Thank you, Nancy, for being with us. The poisoners. Thank you.
I think I'll just skip showing my slide. Just just go ahead and read.
It's really nice to be here and be able to participate in this discussion.
So I think you, the convenors, for inviting me and actually organising an event on this topic in particular.
So because let's play a bit of that. Have spoken about their work using art to present transitional justice.
As I mentioned, I will talk more about how art and creative practise.
In the absence of or an accompaniment to formal transitional justice processes kind of work and how they serve,
I generally serve as mechanisms for encouraging and supporting positive social change.
I'll first focussed mostly on some of the the writing I've done and the thinking on the ways in which storytelling
and specifically community based and participatory theatre can contribute to transitional justice aims.
Using some examples from Afghanistan, where I've worked with local human rights activists to build an Artspace platform to connect
victims of conflict to each other and sort of mobilise around issues of memory and accountability,
and then also looking at the ways in which such practises and creative practises and art based practises can be of use to
supporting those who actually work within the transitional justice space as people who do transitional justice as well.
So storytelling within the realm of cultural expression in ongoing and post-conflict settings
provides an opportunity for portraying narratives of war and were related experiences.
This also holds true in context where there isn't conflict per say, but the legacies of unaddressed injustice remain and continue.
And I'm thinking here of places like the United States. Such expressions can serve as an important step not only towards individual healing,
but also more broadly towards restoring collective memory and repairing the social fabric in which individuals are embedded.
Reconstructing narratives of past events and telling stories in collective forums can provide a certain sense of normalcy and closure.
And at the same time, and perhaps more importantly for transitional justice aims,
reclaiming truths through sharing of stories can also serve as a means to foster positive change.
They can be a political process. So in the context of particularly in which transitional justice processes are nascent,
theatre can be used as an alternative informal method to push for rights claims and help ensure recourse for survivors.
Artspace forms of storytelling, including participatory theatre, are potentially useful means for addressing the need for self articulated,
personal and shared narratives, opening space for people to collectively share their stories and create meaning about what happened to them.
It would be remiss to put not to point out the formal transitional justice processes like trials.
Truth seeking exercises themselves are performative.
I mean, they are and have amongst their direct aims providing forums for testimony in an effort to bring accountability and uncover truth.
But often because of the constraints of of of these processes,
they usually can only include a select number of people, number of victims as participants.
And they do leaves. They they can potentially leave certain truths sort of uncovered in terms of the scope of what they're focussed on.
Testimonies themselves may also be constrained because of the formal processes and proceedings in a truth commission.
Orna in a trial or a tribunal.
You know, people participants can't speak freely about what's happened to them and sort of set the scene in the context.
They sort of move a little bit more in a linear progression. That's what these things are for.
So participatory theatre and community based theatre.
On the other hand, hand offer participants anaesthetic instrument to analyse their past in the context of the present
and to invent and shape their futures according to their own needs through exercises and games.
That helps them to termin that helped them determine for themselves what those outcomes can be as opposed to having solutions imposed upon them.
So cultural expressions outside of formal proceedings, while not able to capture the complex truth inherent in like in a broader historical narrative,
can inform such processes by capturing national a national record.
Because they're densely packed with meaning.
And this meaning may not be apparent in literary or historical documents or straightforward testimony alone,
but rather found and performed and expressive behaviours. And so we may uncover so much more than we thought we originally looking for in
having these processes first or in accompaniment to more formal proceedings.
And so in a context. Emerging from conflict in conflict, where there's still injustice, reclaiming cultural production and sharing stories.
And keeping them going serves as the bull bull bulwark against erasure and against official narratives that don't include these stories.
Furthermore, it highlights key elements of the initial steps towards justice,
such as acknowledgement, recognition and representation that we we say are important,
but that we often don't fully,
meaningfully engage with at all levels in stages of justice processes or using them as measurable benchmarks towards progress.
So we think of are there new laws? We don't necessarily think of how are people interacting with them?
How are they feeling that they're being responded to? So in Afghanistan,
it was through these games that Afghan activists decided to actually try and use these new mechanisms
to create sort of a broader platform of the disparate and disconnected sort of victims communities.
With US organisations, women's groups to create art that reflected the narratives of conflict across time periods,
geographies, languages, expressions, and also sort of look towards the future.
So they're not stuck in the conflict. But starting from this point. This is what's happened to us.
This is what we can do. And that this diverse group of Afghan participants created these performances based on their own
and others experiences and then shared them back with their peers in the theatre performance,
I think helped put people's experiences back into context and allow them to have at least
some modicum of acknowledgement of what happened to them and what happened to others,
and sort of understanding that across this 40 year long conflict, many things have happened, that there are connexions between between communities.
And this was also true when it was performed. We brought this play to the US for some advocacy work.
But where it resonated the most was with African-American artists themselves who either
left the country when they were very young or their families had fled conflict.
And a lot of them expressed that for the very first time, they're hearing the stories of their families told by other Afghans in native language,
using their own customs, their own cultural traditions, and that that meant something.
This is like a missing piece of their own sort of narrative that's being put back together for them.
So that gets us a way that they can incorporate their own identities into this and in their own families into this broader legacy.
And in that way, I miss the point of sort of having these performances,
is that the interaction, that performer that audiences have with these performances,
help with individual healing and understanding that they may spur collective engage a collective action engagement,
sort of broader thinking around justice. That's the hope of that.
But there's also another sort of part to this,
which is that the act of actually participating in a creative process itself is a form of kind of building collective action and building agency.
So in the process of putting these these these art pieces together, working towards collective understandings of narratives, scenario building,
testing out responses to to problems through the use of theatre, elaborate has been to connect with each other,
have thought, which is something I think we we tend to not we undervalue.
It is important to have fun in these contexts and allow them to express more freely emotion,
deep seated emotions reflect upon themselves and others and then experiment together,
sort of all of these things which are acts of care, healing and learning individually and collectively and in themselves I think are really important.
But it also serves to create what Peacebuilders called a liminal space.
So this in-between set aside context where the rules for acting and interpreting meaning are different
and where there is a possibility to actually sort of expand connexion and in the sort of safe space,
basically to play around and sort of see what there is to to practise in terms of
then moving forward and in real life to sort of pursue actions towards justice.
And so so that's sort of what the process did in Afghanistan to a certain extent.
We had these plays going on. This was in 2010, 2011.
But there is also a broader undercurrent of using it to sort of mobilise people together to sort of work on these issues or think about them,
take them back to their own communities and start problem solving in small ways.
They could, you know, bring justice when better processes were not actually taking place yet.
And so I want to turn to the thought of using this to turn to the second sort of question I have,
which is that we we tend to focus these methods on victims in affected communities, but we sort of assume that people who work on transitional.
Countries. So the prosecutors, teachers. Mediators, investigators.
We don't really. I think that they might need support in some kind of way to sort of also deal with
what with what their what they have gone through there from this these companies,
from these countries that are coming from outside. But what space do they have?
What support do they have to reflect and impacts our experiences and and understand how those things influence what they do like?
These positions are really difficult to be in.
A lot of times people who are part of them are being seen as agents of change or are being told that that's what their role is.
And there's a lot of pressure to deliver or not.
You know, there's also pressure is not delivering and that that can take it a very big physical and emotional toll.
So not only harming the individuals who are working on these processes as they get started.
The activists, civil society members, judges, you know, lawmakers,
but that they may actually affect the processes themselves as burnout as by its takes takes a hold.
So in a sense, being using these creative mechanisms available to connect with peers may make for not only healthy people,
but also better informed processes that also better serve victims committees.
Because there's a sense of, OK, how would how would this work?
How am I feeling about this and what sort of more more innovative ways of approaching these these issues?
Could there be? I mean, for me, it's it's sort of it's it's one of these things that having worked with civil society quite a lot.
And hearing victims stories, it comes to the same same point.
If we are happy,
quote unquote happy or feel it's important for victims to have creative outlets and them to mobilise for justice and we hear their stories,
why shouldn't the same be important for the people who are ultimately responsible for making that change at the highest levels?
We we sort of tend to negate the fact that there might be some need, you know, in the not so.
And this is coming out of work. I think that's the issues of sort of the toll of working and unpacking diocese.
You know, it's been happening in regard to aid workers, with teachers teaching the curriculum around peace, building social workers.
But it might be worth extending to practitioners as well.
I mean, it's not to say that theatre solves everything or art does everything, but that the inclusion of creative experience, all processes might be.
Helpful for those who are working within transitional justice beyond and who may need assistance beyond sort of the technical capacities that exist.
And then this might be another means of art, being able to support transitional justice by supporting the people who are actually working to enact it,