We will move to the second panel, which is about the role of international actors in shaping the hierarchy off of memories.
We have three wonderful speakers to talk about different case studies from different parts of the world,
both about the role of international actors, as about the dynamics within countries and the influence of external actors.
I will introduce two speakers one by one and before their presentations, and then they will have about 12 minutes.
And at the end of this panel, there will be about 10 minutes for Q&A.
So again, I encourage you to post your questions in the Q&A function.
We will start with Professor Yassin's Aggravators, also who's a professor of international politics and history at Goldsmiths University of London.
She's currently working on transitional justice and processes of memory construction of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.
She mainly focuses on issues regarding coming at the issue of coming to terms with the past from a comparative perspective and
especially Serbian politics of acknowledging the Serbian Genocide public debates about wartime responsibility and denial,
and various attempts to create truth commissions and pursue this region.
She's the author of Saviours of the Nation of Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and Revival of Nationalism from 2002,
and a co-author and co-editor of A State Collapse in Southeastern Europe New Perspective on Yugoslavia Dissolution, which is from 2008.
Her presentation today will be slightly conceptual,
and it will have the title as memory and justice in the aftermath of war and mass crime, contemporary Serbia and the West German model.
I encourage you to have a look at our website, how demonic narratives dot com, where you can also see the abstract,
and you can read a bit more about the author and the presenters yourself over to amongst you, can you?
I'm just going to share your presentation, so just give me a moment when I load this up.
Thanks very much, Jesse. I'll use the time to just say a big thank you to you and Johanna for organising this and for pursuing it,
even when everything else collapsed in the middle of the crisis.
So thanks to both of you, I know this was no mean feat, to put it bluntly, and that you put a lot of work into this.
OK. So I will be very short.
I've been given 12 minutes and I will try and stick to that.
The title of my presentation, as you can see, is memory injustice in the aftermath of war and mass crime,
contemporary Serbia and the West German model. And it is less, I would say,
about the role of international actors in shaping the hierarchy of memories than about international models and hegemonic narratives,
although of course, the two are related. Now, as Jesse said, I work on transitional justice and memory politics and a post-conflict Balkans.
And the thing that has struck me and I would suggest many of us who work on the region over the years has been the extent to which Germany
and specifically West Germany has been a reference point in so many discussions about dealing with the legacy of the wars of the 1990s.
While I think this has been the case throughout the Post Yugoslav region,
I would also venture to say that it had has been most commonly the case in Serbia.
It should be noted, of course, that the references to West Germany's experience are not unique to the region, as many scholars have shown.
The notion of West Germany as the model penitent to use Thomas Berger's term has achieved global iconic status since the 1990s,
acting as a reference point for international policymakers, representatives, donors,
scholars and activists, as well as for local ones in a variety of settings.
As the German sociologist Misha GABAergic notes in the recent volume, which is called Replicating Atonement and There,
which I highly recommend Germany's experience of dealing with its Nazi past has been used both as a yardstick and a foil.
In other words, both as a model to emulate and as a tool to evaluate other countries approaches towards their own difficult pasts,
usually to show, in fact, how they've fallen short.
Mostly, this has been done by applying an ideal typical German model of atonement, stripped of the specificities,
contradictions and nuances of Germany's actual historical experience of dealing with its Nazi past.
It is also clear that the exact ingredients and interpretations of the German model will vary,
according to the country and the actress who referred to it. So how has the German model of atonement manifested itself in contemporary Serbia?
And here, I would argue the understanding of the German model has been focussed on five main tropes.
The first and the earliest of these references to the German case related, of course, to the creation of the ICJ, why does the new Nuremberg,
in other words, as an international tribunal to judge the war crimes and atrocities committed in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s?
There are, of course, significant differences between the two tribunals.
But what is important for our purposes here is that both of these tribunals had in common an important pedagogic element to their mission.
They were meant not only to serve justice,
but also to counter denial of the crimes and to educate publics in order to promote normative change in the countries affected.
And it is this mission that has been the focal point of the interactions between Western interlocutors and Serbian ones,
as well as in the debates within Serbian society itself.
Secondly. There was the trope of to quote one Serbian activist de-Nazification apology and the example of Willy Brandt.
The call for de-Nazification was particularly hotly debated during the cost of a war in 1999,
when some Serbian activists called for the creation of an international protectorate and a mass
purge of Serbian institutions along the lines undertaken by the allies in Germany in the 1940s.
Neglecting, of course, to acknowledge that de-Nazification was soon abandoned and almost completely reversed by the 1950s.
While such calls subsided after the fall of Milosevic in 2000 of longer duration have been demands for an apology
by Serbia to the other post Yugoslav nations for the wars and for the crimes committed by the Serbs in the 1990s.
These have been a constant phenomenon over the last two decades,
and references to Betty Brandt's iconic genuflexion at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial have been ubiquitous.
A third key reference has been Karl Jaspers famous treatise on the question of German guilt.
And this really has resonated within Serbian intellectual circles in particular,
and many Serbian antiwar intellectuals referenced this text as a guide both to defining Serbia's guilt for the wars of the 1990s,
but also as a way of demarcating their own moral stance towards the crimes that were committed.
Fourth, the post Second World War Franco-German reconciliation has also been a recurrent
trope invoked in particular by representatives of European governments,
institutions and NGOs with Serbian counterparts, as well as other regional actors.
It should, however, be said that in this case,
this particular trope has been referenced less by locals who are generally more sceptical about the notion of reconciliation.
And finally, I think it's important to note that references to the German model have also been
invoked over the years by opponents of a reckoning with the recent past with the 1990s.
And this has included both some Western scholars and also some Serbian intellectuals and politicians.
And their argument is that it is simply too early for Serbia to address its own recent past that even in Germany,
it took 20 years for any meaningful confrontation with the Nazi legacy to emerge.
Some of these have argued that Serbia first needs to focus on rebuilding its economy and establishing a democracy,
and that such a reckoning could come later.
Others, in fact, consider this kind of memory work to be futile and believe that rather than focussing on the past,
Serbia, like other countries, should focus on the future.
I think it is important to emphasise in this very short and schematic overview that the
whole nature of a hegemonic model is not that it is simply exported from somewhere,
but actually that it takes root in societies to which it is exported to use the term.
And it is important to note that the various tropes described have been pervasive in internal debates and public discussions in Serbia,
especially within civil society, amongst intellectuals and in the media.
OK. In the very last part of my presentation, I would like to make three final points that will perhaps open up to questions and and comments.
First of all, I think it is important to note the problematic nature of having any ideal type model for dealing with the past,
such as the West German model of atonement for anyone who has studied West Germany's history of memory.
It is clear to what extent this very complex and indeed unfinished history has been misunderstood,
oversimplified and misinterpreted in order to serve various local and international agendas.
It is also unproductive, I think,
to believe that any one societies experience can be replicated or exportable to very different geographic and temporal circumstances.
A more fruitful way forward, in my view, would be to look at West Germany's experience in all its complexity.
The turning points, the causes and stop start nature of various initiatives.
The existence of parallel discourses and the reasons for their variable public resonance.
Over time, the role of domestic and international actors, as well as the political, social and economic context and so on.
If we do so, we might understand why certain initiatives and memory events had less resonance
than hoped or expected while others were more socially or politically impactful.
Which brings me to my second and related point. When considering Germany's history of memory,
I think it is interesting to see that the troops that are most often referenced in the sort of German model that has been exported,
in other words, Nuremberg, de-Nazification, Jaspers, Willy Brandt and so on that these were not necessarily the ones that had the greatest
resonance internally for West Germany's processes of dealing with its past,
at least not at the time in which they took place. On the other hand, when looking at Germany's history of memory, it does seem that there were other,
more potentially impactful memory events, such as, for example, the Holocaust specific trials in the first half of the 1960s.
And here I'm referring, of course, to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem,
but primarily also to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials or mass media events like the screening of the American TV series Holocaust in 1979.
Or certain types of commemorative activities, such as the Crimes of the Bear Market exhibition in the 1990s.
Yet what is interesting is that these have been neglected in both external and internal
references to the German experience and have also been remarkably absent from debates in Serbia.
My third and final point would be and here I'm in agreement with garbage that a more fruitful way of
approaching the West German case would indeed be to see it as a springboard for reflections about other cases,
such as that of Serbia. If we are going to gain from such a comparison, I would argue we also then need to apply the same temporal lens.
And considering that the obvious starting point for Serbia would be the year
2000 following the end of the Kosovo war and the fall of the Milosevic regime,
this implies that any meaningful comparative study would need to examine the equivalent period in Germany from the end of the Second World War,
roughly up until the mid-1960s, analysing both the considerable parallels between these two case studies at the time and also
the very significant differences between them and the implications of this approach in this way.
I believe the West German case could serve as a useful reference for building Serbia's own history of memory since 2000,
and I would venture to conclude it could perhaps also allow us to understand the very different end points of those both countries 20-year post-war
trajectories with West Germany in the middle mid 1960s really perched on the threshold of some pretty significant change and Serbia in 2020,
appearing further away than ever from engaging in any real reckoning with its own legacy of war and mass crime.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Not that was, I think, a brilliant introduction also to the panel on how the different experiences can travel,
and I feel that our second speaker is also very well equipped to build on this.
And I think your two presentations are greatly interlinked. And then obviously, we're going to go to Rachel's presentation.
So I think it's going to be a few themes that are going to be re-emerging.
So let me introduce the second speaker of today, which is Lord Allderdice John Allderdice,
whom I should have actually also introduced as the director of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Harry's Manchester College,
which is just across the road from my department. And Crick is also one of the partners of this conference.
I should have mentioned that in the beginning other days is actually a psychiatrist by profession,
but we probably mainly know him as the leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland,
as he played a very significant role in the talks on Northern Ireland, including the negotiation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
He was the first speaker of the new Northern Ireland Assembly and he's held many international positions,
including as the president of Liberal International. Since 1996, he has sat as a Liberal Democrat life member of the House of Lords and currently,
as I said, he's not only based at Harry's Manchester College,
but he's also the chairman of the Centre for Democracy and Peace Building in Belfast and president of Libérer Liberal International.
[INAUDIBLE] speak with on a presentation with the title of casting some light on the long, dark shadow of the past.
John, the floor is yours and thank you very much for joining us. Okay, well, let's try and see if we can share this screen.
Okay. Well, thank you very much indeed for the kind invitation to come along and talk a little bit for a short time about how we deal with the past,
which is a very difficult problem for all of us individually and also as communities.
Well, the first thing to say is that we all live out our memories.
It's not possible for us as human beings because of the way that we are constructed to simply come to any new experience and take it as a tabula rasa.
Now all of us come with a perspective from the past when you bump into someone, how they look, the type of name that they have,
what assumptions you make about them from your experience of meeting with similar people in
similar circumstances in the past positively or negatively influences how you perceive that.
And so when we come to these things as individuals or communities, it's impossible for us not to be influenced by the past.
Of course, the question is which memories from the past because we have massive amounts of memory, which of them do we choose?
And of course, I don't necessarily mean choose in a conscious way, although we can do that.
But there are all sorts of assumptions that we make, which I will emphasise some memories,
minimise other memories, ignore some, and in the case of others, completely block them out.
We can consciously do that, but often it it seems to happen in an almost automatic fashion.
Well, one important element of memories from the past in terms of the development of our narrative as individuals or as communities,
and I often do draw things across between individuals and communities,
but I'd emphasise that the psychology of communities is not simply a direct read across from the psychology of individuals.
It's not exactly the same thing. But there are certain interesting common factors because we are human beings.
Well, Islamic Volcan has pointed out that there are two important elements which are
relevant to what we are talking about post-conflict elements which are chosen,
which are victories from the past or traumas from the past.
And these have a profound impact, not only on what we believe, how we function intellectually, but how we engage and identify with others,
our whole way of being in the world is enormously influenced by those things which are positive.
Our victories, successes from the past and traumas from the past obviously defeats our traumas, but there are lots of other kinds of traumas as well.
And and these memories are not necessarily precise memories of single experiences, even when they seem to be.
They are a complex collage which include and indeed exclude aspects of our history and how we feel about these things.
So, for example, specific. Stories.
Memories, experiences from the past seem to be particularly striking, and often people will say, well,
I wonder why that particular trauma was picked out over against all the other traumas that
particular death or did that particular success is picked out over against lots of others?
And is it really very accurate? We heard earlier on about how particular stories can be presented in particular ways.
Actually, they always are. If something is important enough to be remembered, it's usually because it exemplifies a whole series of other things.
It is, in that sense, a kind of example of lots of other experiences, and it may not be that it is a precisely historically accurate example,
but it has all sorts of emotional and other components,
and it represents lots and lots of experiences whenever you experience a certain things that I guess.
Always like that's the way they always deal with us. And so and if you try to point out that, well, that's not entirely accurate.
It doesn't matter. Doesn't convince the person that they should give it up.
Now, sometimes people describe these cultural memories or stories as myths and what they usually mean when they're saying how it is,
it's not accurate. That's just a myth.
We heard this said, for example, during the Brexit Remain debate, each side saying what you're talking is just a myth or it's just old history.
Well, that's a misunderstanding. A myth is is not something that never happened historically.
That's not the important thing about it.
The important thing is that it is representing something of the human condition that's actually happening all the time.
Why are we bothered to read Shakespeare or Greek and Roman myths?
These are things from a long time ago, and some people dismissed them as [INAUDIBLE], no nonsense stories.
Well, the reason that they're powerful psychologically for individuals and communities is because
they represent something of what is happening all the time repeatedly in human experience.
In the case of countries, of course, victories or defeats are one can development about particularly related to our subject that of conflict.
So when we look at this, it's it's not a question of us saying, well,
it's really important for me to listen to the myths of this community and how this community interprets its history so that I can correct them.
But that's that's nonsense, first of all, you won't correct them because they will simply not believe what you have to say.
Because they'll say you don't really understand your external. You don't understand my history and my background at all.
Nor can you because you come from another place than me.
If you're coming from an imperial background, you can't understand me because I was colonised.
If you come from a colonising background. It can be the opposite way around.
The person from the imperial background is when you don't actually understand what was happening with us either.
That's not what's important. What's important is that if we listen to the myths that a community tells it,
kind of help us to understand the disturbed historic relationships they have been inhabiting.
And that gives us the potential basis to create new healthy relationships for the future.
If people want it.
And one of the things you learn as a psychiatrist is that you shouldn't assume that everybody wants good relationships with everybody.
Some people are very happy to continue to have bad relationships with some people.
Because it feeds certain stories that they tell about themselves, so we shouldn't assume that everybody wants a good relationship.
But if they do, they're myths can be a way into it, not by believing or not believing them, but by understanding what the purpose of the news.
No. Memories and myths can be described in narrative ways, not very often what we do is as academics, we write papers about things.
We talk about things actually because conveying feelings more than just thoughts.
They can be sometimes much more powerfully conveyed,
something conveyed symbolically important in song in drama and film and music and various kinds of art forms, particularly in folk art.
But I'm not dismissing high art, but folk art can sometimes tell us a great deal.
So I'm going to take just three examples very quickly. One, of course, from home from Northern Ireland.
And I've put up here two murals.
It's very common, especially in Belfast, but also in other parts of the world for people to paint the walls of houses with murals that tell a story.
And here are two murals. One on the left is coming from a loyalist Protestant unionist background and
the other on the right is from a Catholic nationalist Republican background.
And you'll see that both of them are telling a story.
The one on the left, you'll see there are two photographs and then the paramilitary in the centre,
and there are two sets of flags one on the left and one on the right.
The photograph of the man on the left and the flags on the right, on the left are from a loyalist organisation from the eighteen hundreds,
which was protecting the position of Protestant loyalists who felt under threat and about to be betrayed by the British, which of course they were.
The one on the right, choose a more recent paramilitary with his badges and flags just below him.
It's linking the memory of the past with the present and also the reality of the history and situation now and then is different.
What they're wanting to do is show a continuity that they are fulfilling from the past.
Similarly, on the right, you can see on the left hand side of the right bureau,
which is a Republican one, you can see pictures of Republicans, rebels,
the IRA from the early part of the 20th century linked over on the extreme right of the mural
with a picture of a hunger striker and someone with a Molotov cocktail representing the crude.
As it was then when this bureau was painted 10 or 15 years ago by Republicans linking their past memory with how it was in the present and on the top.
I've put in the motif of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and that is because it brings together the two divided sides.
If we look at some pictures from Colombia here we see on the left are a politician
who was trying to bring about a peaceful resolution when he was assassinated.
It moved more to the violence of far right.
And you see a painting of the far right leader who died some years ago and a new kind of picture on the right,
which is done by a young artist who's talking about the victory of peace, a bringing together of the two sides in Peru.
Also, you see the history of the past the Incas at Machu Picchu,
who had fled from the intrusion of the imperial Spaniards and on the right the the coffins of
those who were killed by shining path as they fought against those who were in government.
Now I finish, if I may, with two quick slides.
One is to say that in Northern Ireland, we came to accept the myths and memories of both sides as valid and work to build new relationships.
Whereas in Colombia, the hegemonic myth of the governing minority was given precedence and the peace process is faltering.
And in Peru, the hegemonic myth of the minority of the governing minority is the only one that's heard.
And history has just dismissed as just history. The final comment on public policy implications, we need to understand history.
Because the myths that each side tells a new side tells an absolute truth about anything, it's not possible.
All we can do is describe the condensed evening unthinking and behaving of our side, often conveyed best and more nuanced in art of various kinds.
But if we come in from outside and this is the external question from outside and become partisan to accept one side of the argument,
we are simply becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.
In the final comment. We need to see the Brexit debate, for example, as a conflict of two historic hegemonic narratives.
It's not one side or the other. That's why Britain was so deeply split.
These are hegemonic narratives of profound historic significance, going back to the Reformation and way back beyond that.
And the idea that we tell stories to persuade ourselves and others is absolutely nothing new.
The gospel of Saint John is completely different from the three synoptic gospels because the writer was
trying to get across his story to a Greek Roman audience and not to an old Judeo Palestinian audience.
I leave it there. Thank you for your forbearance. Thank you so much, John.
That was fascinating from Europe and Latin America, we will now move to East Africa.
John, if you could stop sharing, I think our starting group also has a presentation.
So our third speaker, let me introduce Dr. Rachel Brekke,
who is a lecturer in politics and international relations at Goldsmiths College, University of London, as well just as Jasna.
However, her research interests include human rights activism, political violence, humanitarianism and transitional justice,
especially in eastern Africa and in particular in Uganda and also in South Sudan.
She's also a research associate at the Conflict Research Programme at the LSC, and she's widely published in a variety of international journals,
and she's also the author of South Sudan's Injustice System, Law and Activism on the Frontline, which is from last year.
The title of her presentation is We should have learnt from one of the regional
political opportunities and constraints of a hegemonic narrative of genocide,
memory and justice in eastern Africa. We're very much looking forward to the presentation, Rachel.
Thank you for being here and the virtual floor is yours. Thank you, sir.
Step back, OK. Yeah, I want to thank and Jesse and Joanna for involving me in the conference,
which I'm taking really as an opportunity to test out some preliminary thoughts relevant to one of the questions on our agenda.
And this is the question of what constitutes a hegemonic narrative in or after conflict.
And I want to elaborate really on a turn on this kind of discussion in the literature, sort of transcultural turn in the literature,
which explores how hegemonic narratives of atrocity travel and open the way to sort of distinctive
effects with local sensibilities so they have different impacts in different contexts.
And my argument really is that they open the way to contests over memory and justice even before a conflict has ended.
And I want to demonstrate this argument really by looking at the case of South Sudan.
So. And.
First, you already know from the literature that there's a lot of discussion about the way in which memory travels,
it's unbound, it's fluid and flexible, it's globalised.
But at the same time, I think much of this literature shows that it remains contested, contingent and unambiguous in ethical terms.
And I'm particularly interested in an idea that was shared by Lévy and Sneijder.
And some time ago, this idea of this kind of emergence of cosmopolitan memories,
which you know have in some way provided a cultural foundation for human rights and in particular, they talk about the memory of the Holocaust.
And then and this really came into previous work that I did looking at the genocide in Rwanda,
where Holocaust discourses and experts influenced the mobilisation of the genocide.
And at the same time,
the memory of Rwanda's genocide was also itself sort of trans nationalised and taken up in international and regional policy and commemorations.
And in those commemorations, I have previously argued that what we see is both a sort of international politics of regret,
which the politically significant in various ways,
but also the sort of shaping of a dominant official narrative how which has also travelled that has been influenced by national political imperatives.
And so I really want to think about how the narratives of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda have travelled beyond Rwanda and the region.
And what is their relevance for human rights cultures in the region and in particular,
I want to explore the effects in South Sudan during the Civil War between 2013 and 2019.
It's still sort of simmering, and I'm drawing here on research that I've done on justice in South Sudan during the Civil War and
in particular and sort of my involvement in civil society processes aimed at memory and justice.
So I'm not really outside of this is somewhat engaged research.
And firstly, I think a key point to make is that there is this kind of regional memory of of genocide,
which has emerged sort of institutionalised itself in the regional body.
The African Union in particular, has been shaped quite profoundly by the memory of the genocide.
And this is for historical reasons,
in part because at the moment of the birth of the African Union was also just sort of quite in the aftermath of the
genocide in Rwanda and in particular in the aftermath of a of an investigation in which the OAU looked at its own record,
as many international organisations did during the Genocide and its failings.
And these kind of reflections shaped the principles and practises of the African Union and really quite profound ways,
including in what shaping this constitutive act,
which in a way was sort of the first iteration of a kind of idea of a responsibility to
protect giving the African Union the right to intervene in respect of grave circumstances,
including war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
And we've seen further evolution of thinking about responding to atrocities at the regional level,
including in African Union policies and transitional justice, which stood being made from 2009.
And more recently, the policy was published and in annual Genocide Rwanda Genocide Commemorations,
which take place at the African Union in Addis Ababa, where they commemorate the Genocide in Rwanda.
And finally, in an African Union human rights memorial, which you can see pictured in this slide,
which was a project actually that I was also involved in,
and I organised a number of consultations which were bringing together people across
the region to reflect on past atrocities and how they should be memorialised.
And as you can see from this quotation taken from one of the presentations during these consultations from an EU official,
he talked about the fact that the EU memorial had really originated in the resolution taken on the 7th of April 2004,
on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,
and that it was also sort of moving beyond the genocide in Rwanda to think also
about the remembrance of the red terror massacres and also slavery and apartheid.
And I've written about this process in an article in African Affairs with Alex Duvall.
But really, the key point to note is that here we see the institutionalisation many of the memory of the genocide of Rwanda,
but also its extension beyond and in those consultations. We also had, for instance, other Africans including.
South Sudanese and then undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture, shock jock,
who was thinking about how to build a national memory in South Sudan at the time, it was back in 2012.
And really, I think that is one of the reasons that have been prompted to think further about the relations between these
two events and how the memory of the genocide in Rwanda might shape prospects for human rights in South Sudan.
And for anyone who knows anything about South Sudan, you will know that is a war torn state in the most sort of profound way.
We've seen a proliferation of atrocities, from slavery to violent colonial pacification and to civil wars,
and these atrocities have largely been forgotten, and we can talk about a state of oblivion, a vacuum of memory in South Sudan.
Prior to 2005, and this very much relates to this idea.
The Sharon Hutchinson uncovers within the South Sudanese state that the head of
the state was really this notion of a power to kill without accountability.
It was very much kind of an expression of the net net political idea of the state.
And as Zoe Cormack, one of the few scholars to really have looked into memory practises and memorialisation in South Sudan shows those were,
you know, sort of emergence of rare local memorials.
But even in these,
what we note after 2005 is the interpenetration between different regimes of memory and between local and globalised memory practises.
So I want to take it on from there to think about what happened after, well, during the end,
an ongoing civil war and after the first wave of atrocities in 2013, in December in Japan.
And I think very notably, the first thing relevant to the way in which the regional memory has sort of shaped this response.
We see that the African Union was very quick to mount an enquiry.
And in this enquiry, it was very emphatic about the need for truth, justice and reparation,
something which had really not been considered in the 2005 peace agreement at the end of the previous Civil War.
And since then, we've also seen numerous initiatives to kind of learn from Rwanda.
We've seen South Sudanese travelling to Rwanda, including chiefs including young people,
as part of civil society initiatives to really sort of teach Rwandese about the run up to South News
about the Rwandan experience and to think about its relevance to their own prospects for peace.
And I've actually, you know, to somewhat been involved in some of this thinking about transitional justice in South Sudan.
So, you know, but but there's been a number of civil society, and this is really how I've come to understand it.
But there's also been quite sort of strong claims being made that, you know,
they've come away with ideas that if Rwandans can forgive, why not the South Sudanese?
And for instance, you'll see in the Aegis Trust website, they talk about the idea that this memory,
this kind of experience has really sort of contributed to saving lives.
OK. And so. Well, people now.
Oh, yes, and in fact, it's not only chiefs that have been going,
we also see a hint of the regional tensions in the fact that the former chiefs of staff of the escalating South Sudan,
he travelled to Rwanda also and laid wreath at the mass graves there.
But you know, there's a. His argument was we share a common background of armed struggle.
This is someone who is under sanctions, international sanctions for his role in the conflict,
including sort of accusations of war crimes and within South Sudan,
we've also seen sort of concrete ways in which genocide my memory has manifested itself,
including in the 2019 commemoration of the Genocide in Rwanda, in the United Nations Protection of Civilians sites in Juba.
And you can see here the peacekeepers talking about the ways in which South Sudan can learn from
Rwanda's experience and a bishop also talking about Rwanda as an example for the whole world,
including for South Sudan.
And I think there have already been just the very existence of these sites actually demonstrates quite a fundamental learning.
The fact that the United Nations peacekeepers opened their gates and gave shelter to 200000 civilians in their sights,
in contrast to what happened during the genocide in Rwanda is itself quite significant.
And within these sites, you know, so you know, so we see the memory of Rwanda shaping the kind of very existence these sites.
We should see commemorations by U.N. peacekeepers in these sites.
But we also see and you can see in this picture here and commemorations of the atrocities that took place in Juba in December 2013
and later saw the massacres that have taken place during the war in South Sudan are also commemorated in these sites and outside,
actually. And here is a picture from the protection of civilians sites of a commemoration process taking place there.
And I've got some text there from an interview with a lawyer who I work with another research and he was talking.
He organises these events and he talks about the fact that really this is a
determination to ensure that the the 15th of December will never be forgotten.
And so you see this sort of echo of memory practises that I think what fundamentally we can see is that post to 2013,
we have seen really a shift towards ending silence and impunity for atrocities in South in South Sudan and memory practises that.
You know, our unprecedented meeting in this country, including an online memorial and, for instance, popular evidence that at the popular level,
there's a real demand for truth, justice and reconciliation and healing demonstrated by the Law Society survey and within the peace agreement.
Very significantly, Chapter five of the peace agreement includes agreed principles of transitional justice,
of course, a real reluctance to implement those, but nevertheless very significant.
Now one of the problems here is that, of course, the this is a selective narrative of the genocide and memory that it continues
to be contested in Rwanda is obviously not understood as such in South Sudan.
And I mean, there's a whole sort of series of critiques of this selective memory in Rwanda, which I won't go into now.
But it is simply to say that we learn, you know, what reaches South Sudan instead is a much more selective narrative,
the hegemonic narrative that has been institutionalised at the regional level.
However, despite my sort of sense of the troubling exclusions in Rwanda, is set a selective memory.
I want to hold to the view that this commemoration opens up, rather than silencing struggles for memory and justice in South Sudan.
And in particular, I was inspired to think about this and to write about this by an encounter in the Ministry of Interior.
When I was researching my book, which is pictured above the South Sudan Injustice System,
which, as you can imagine, is pretty critical of the law in South Sudan.
And I was rather nervous because the research was sensitive and maybe foolishly
who was reading this book pictured below the laws fragile state by my side.
And I was asked by a uniformed officer to hand him the book and tell him what it was about.
So I passed him my message, but hoping that, you know, I wouldn't be asked to in too much detail about my own research.
And I talked to him a bit about what the contents of the book.
And he simply said, and his response was kind of surprising, and it stuck with me since he simply said, we should have learnt from Rwanda.
And I think this illustrates the way the sort of symbolic power of the memory of the genocide in Rwanda drives
the recognition that the state cannot simply kill with impunity and the ordinary people's lives matter.
And so even if there are problems with this paradigm in terms of how it shapes
transitional justice and that's something I'm thinking a bit more about, know the work at the same time memory,
I think create this memory creates political opportunities and is punished in the
symbolic resource for counter hegemonic struggles in South Sudan and region.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Rachel. We now have a few minutes left for questions.
We've already received some questions.
I feel both of them are free, Jasna, but I think either Rachel or Lauren otherwise might actually have some thoughts on the first one.
So let me pose this to Lord, added Ice you Butera from Oxford is asking Is there a particular timeframe that is
required to allow for questions about the past traumas or victories to be articulated?
Well, there are two aspects to this question, Jesse, the obvious one,
which is how long do you need to leave it before people can start talking about these things?
Not. I remember a painful personal experience. I was on Belfast City Council just immediately after we had the ceasefires.
I proposed that we should have a memorial window or something of the kind for all of those who had died in the Troubles.
And I was attacked ferociously by all sides on the unionist side.
I was attacked because they didn't want their people to be memorialised alongside the IRA.
And on the Republican side, I wasn't sufficiently recognising the misdemeanours of the British security forces.
So one lesson I learnt from that is there certainly is it is I don't think it's a period of time that you can define in terms of
it needs to be a week a month a year or a decade because it depends very much on the circumstances and the context and history.
But is there a need for a tent? Yes. And and there will be some people for whom never is too short.
You know, they will never want to engage in these kinds of things.
One side is how soon can you do it? The other side is, how long does it continue?
Well, the experience in Belfast City Council is that on the 1st of July every year.
Still, no. There is a meeting of the City Council to remember those who died at the Battle of the Somme in the First World War.
Now, you can imagine in the context of a Brexit debate,
what sort of things does that raise up the idea that continuing to remember is always a good thing.
It's not so simple. Of course, what you can do is try to find a way of turning that memory to a different kind of use.
So, for example, the memories of the First World War. Which could have been very negative.
We're turned to some degree of advantage by saying, Oh, but don't forget that was before partition at that time.
Protestants and Catholics fought together. Common food, therefore, there have been histories of us doing things together,
and maybe we can celebrate those from the past more than those periods where we were divided.
So there isn't a simple answer to the question. If you try doing it too often, you'll get in trouble.
But if you keep on doing it in the same way without any reinterpretation, it can help to cause you trouble.
Thank you very much, John.
We've got two questions for you, and I ask, no, I'm just going to ask you one and then maybe ask if you could answer the other one.
In a written form, Marica July from Brighton is asking a question.
Firstly, thank you for an insightful presentation.
How does Serbia's transition from memories created as part of the post World War to Yugoslav past to
the memory works regarding the wars of the 1990s in the context of drawing on Germany's experience?
OK, thanks, Jesse, and thanks for the questions. I've seen them all, so I will try to reach out to people independently.
I think there's a way of linking the first question that Lord Allderdice has just replied to as well, and I'll be very brief.
I think it's and again here, drawing on the German experience,
I think is really interesting in that many historians have by now shown that it
is a mistake to think of the first 20 years in Germany as a period of silence.
I mean, I'm thinking here of the work by historians such as Robert Muller and others who have shown that there were times,
even at the time, to make sense of the recent past and of the Nazi period and throughout this period.
But the narratives that were articulated focussed on certain aspects of that experience rather than others.
So the most important experience for Germans during this time was, of course,
the question of German victimhood, which formed the dominant narrative of those first 20 years.
And again, drawing on then America's question on the continuities and the parallels.
I think we can look at that and we can also see very much the same phenomenon taking place in Serbia in the last 20 years.
I mean, the main trope, of course, has been of Serbian victimhood,
and that is very much across the board in in terms of the political discourses that we have seen.
And and there in terms of continuities with the Second World War.
Now, in relation to Serbia, it is very much the same victims who are being drawn out in both cases.
So the victimhood narratives continue. And and so this, you know,
the idea in the nationalist narrative is very much of the Serbs being the victims of the 1990s as well as in the Second World War.
So that would be a continuity and the linkage, I think, to the experience of Germany in the immediate post-war period.
Thank you so much. And I will endeavour to answer all those questions.
Great. Thank you. Rachel, I was wondering, just did last question to wrap up?
You mentioned the concept or the idea of that. There's a few vacuums of memory.
And I was wondering whether you could elaborate on that a little bit, but they'll start really vacuums or what are these?
This is these are white spots that are made out of fear or intimidation or
who are the ones that could potentially in the future fill in these vacuums.
Are there still survivors that could actually invigorate this memory?
Well, when I was talking about this kind of oblivion in the past,
I'm talking about and previous atrocities in civil wars in Sudan that are not publicly remembered that,
you know, survivors don't even really define or kind of coalesce around that memory.
And I think in contemporary contexts, there are also, you know, I mean, the war is still as it were sort of in a fragile peace.
And so I mean, there are many things that are not known about all the kind of aspects of the conflict has.
It's continuing and it's not really in the past. I mean,
it kind of relates a little bit to this problem of when do you start talking about the past
because this is still very much part of the contemporary present and very recent past.
For instance, the memory of the new genocide that I was talking about being commemorated in the protection of civilians sites.
I mean, this is, you know, a very recent memory and it continues to affect people's lives.
They're still displaced. The conflict is not over and they're being protected by the United Nations peacekeepers.
And so I'm not sure if that answers your question,
but it's something to sort of show that this is a country in which, you know, there are many silences.
Thank you very much, and thank you to the panel. We are now moving to the break.
And I'd like to ask the panellists there's a few questions on the Q&A. So there's one for John and a couple for Jasna.
If you had a bit of time just to answer these questions to our audience, I will also enable the chat function.
So feel free to use the chat function now if you want to exchange more details or more links and so on.
And I really want to thank our first panel and we will meet here. I do apologise.
I have eaten into our coffee break, but we will meet here again in about five minutes for our second panel.
Thank you very much.