Truth, Silence And Violence In Emerging States: Histories Of The Unspoken 0815351615, 9780815351610, 1351141104, 9781351141109

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Series Page......Page 3
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
List of figures......Page 8
List of contributors......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 11
1. Introduction: Regimes of silence......Page 12
2. Testimony: Silence as the cornerstone of impunity in Guatemala......Page 37
3. Constructing silence, terror, and dread: Operation Condor and state terror in Latin America......Page 55
4. Euphemism, censorship, and the vocabularies of silence in Burundi......Page 74
5. “What made the elephant rise up from the shade?” Relationships in transition and negotiating silence in Mozambique......Page 99
6. “A deafening silence” and “A piece of speech”: Regimes of silence in an African Counter-Insurgency......Page 122
7. Petitioning Saddam: Voices from the Iraqi archives......Page 138
8. The world was silent? Global communities of resistance to the 1965 repression in the Cold War era......Page 158
9. A selective silence: Leonid Brezhnev’s compromise over the memory of Stalin’s crimes......Page 180
10. Censorship, indifference, oblivion: The Armenian genocide and its denial......Page 199
Index......Page 226

Citation preview

Routledge Studies in Human Rights

TRUTH, SILENCE, AND VIOLENCE IN EMERGING STATES HISTORIES OF THE UNSPOKEN Edited by Aidan Russell

Truth, Silence, and Violence in Emerging States

Around the world in the twentieth century, political violence in emerging states gave rise to different kinds of silence within their societies. This book explores the histories of these silences, how they were made, maintained, evaded, and transformed. This book gives a comprehensive view of the ongoing evolutions and multiple faces of silence as a common strand in the struggles of state-building. It begins with chapters that examine the construction of “regimes of silence” as an act of power, and it continues through explorations of the ambiguous limits of speech within communities marked by this violence. It highlights national and transnational attempts to combat state silences, before concluding with a series of considerations of how these regimes of silence continue to be extrapolated in the gaps of records and written history. This volume explores histories of the composed silences of political violence across the emerging states of the late twentieth century, not solely as a present concern of aftermath or retrospection but as a diachronic social and political dimension of violence itself. This book makes a major original contribution to international history, as well as to the study of political terror, human rights violations, social recovery, and historical memory. Aidan Russell is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph is entitled Politics and Violence in Burundi: The Language of Truth at the End of Empire.

Routledge Studies in Human Rights

The Routledge Studies in Human Rights series publishes high quality and cross-disciplinary scholarship on topics of key importance in human rights today. In a world where human rights are both celebrated and contested, this series is committed to create stronger links between disciplines and explore new methodological and theoretical approaches in human rights research. Aimed towards both scholars and human rights professionals, the series strives to provide both critical analysis and policy-oriented research in an accessible form. The series welcomes work on specific human rights issues as well as on cross-cutting themes and institutional perspectives. Series Editors: Mark Gibney, UNC Asheville, USA, Thomas GammeltoftHansen, Raoul Wallenberg Institute, Sweden, and Bonny Ibhawoh, McMaster University, Canada. Sovereignty, State Failure and Human Rights Petty Despots and Exemplary Villains Neil Englehart Understanding Statelessness Edited by Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole Human Rights in Democracies Peter Haschke Extraordinary Rendition Addressing the Challenges of Accountability Edited by Elspeth Guild, Didier Bigo and Mark Gibney Truth, Silence and Violence in Emerging States Histories of the Unspoken Edited by Aidan Russell For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Human-Rights/book-series/RSIHR

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-FM.indd 2

24/10/18 4:43 PM

Truth, Silence, and Violence in Emerging States Histories of the Unspoken

Edited by Aidan Russell

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Aidan Russell; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Aidan Russell to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Names: Russell, Aidan, 1985- editor. Title: Truth, silence and violence in emerging states : histories of the unspoken / edited by Aidan Russell. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018032413| ISBN 9780815351610 (hbk) | ISBN 9781351141116 (web pdf) | ISBN 9781351141109 (epub) | ISBN 9781351141093 (mobipocket/kindle) | ISBN 9781351141123 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Political violence--Developing countries-History--20th century. | State-sponsored terrorism--Developing countries--HIstory--20th century. | Collective memory--Social aspects-Developing countries. Classification: LCC HN981.V5 T78 2019 | DDC 303.609172/4--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032413 ISBN: 978-0-8153-5161-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-14112-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times NR MT Pro by Cenveo® Publisher Services

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Regimes of silence

vii viii x 1

AIDAN RUSSELL

2 Testimony: Silence as the cornerstone of impunity in Guatemala

26

RAÚL MOLINA MEJÍA

3 Constructing silence, terror, and dread: Operation Condor and state terror in Latin America

44

J. PATRICE MCSHERRY

4 Euphemism, censorship, and the vocabularies of silence in Burundi

63

AIDAN RUSSELL

5 “What made the elephant rise up from the shade?” Relationships in transition and negotiating silence in Mozambique

88

VICTOR IGREJA

6 “A deafening silence” and “A piece of speech”: Regimes of silence in an African Counter-Insurgency LUISE WHITE

111

vi  Contents 7 Petitioning Saddam: Voices from the Iraqi archives

127

ALISSA WALTER

8 The world was silent? Global communities of resistance to the 1965 repression in the Cold War era

147

KATHARINE MCGREGOR

9 A selective silence: Leonid Brezhnev’s compromise over the memory of Stalin’s crimes

169

BARBARA MARTIN

10 Censorship, indifference, oblivion: The Armenian genocide and its denial

188

VICKEN CHETERIAN

Index

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-FM.indd 6

215

24/10/18 4:43 PM

List of figures

7.1 Hierarchy of authority in Ba‘thist Iraq for the state and party officials responsible for processing petitions 7.2 Petition decision makers

136 140

List of contributors

Vicken Cheterian is a Lecturer in History and International Relations at the University of Geneva, and a Lecturer in International Relations at Webster University, Geneva. His latest book is Open Wounds: Armenians, Turks, and a Century of Genocide, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. Victor Igreja is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia. He teaches international relations, anthropology, and conflict and peace studies. He is a member of the research group Felix Culpa: Toward a Theory of Productive Guilt (Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld University) and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and he is a Research Fellow at the School of Social Science, University of Queensland. Barbara Martin received her PhD in International History in 2016 from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. Her research focused on Soviet dissident historians in the post-Stalin era. Since January 2017, she is a postdoctoral fellow of the Swiss National Foundation for Science at the Moscow Higher School of Economics (Russia) and the Research Centre for East European Studies at Bremen University (Germany). Katharine McGregor is an Associate Professor of Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include Indonesian historiography, memories of violence, the Indonesian military, Islam and identity in Indonesia, and historical international links between Indonesia and the world. She recently held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship on the project Confronting Historical Injustice in Indonesia: Memory and Transnational Human Rights Activism. She is the author of History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past (NUS Press, 2007), co-editor (with Douglas Kammen) of The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965– 68, (NUS Press, 2012), and co-editor (with Jess Melvin and Annie Pohlman) of The Indonesian Genocide: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (Palgrave McMillan, 2018).

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-FM.indd 8

24/10/18 4:43 PM

List of contributors ix J. Patrice McSherry, PhD (Political Science),  is a professor, author, and researcher currently associated with the Instituto de Estudios Avanzados (Institute for Advanced Studies, IDEA) of the University of Santiago, Chile, and Long Island University, New York. A three-time Fulbright recipient, she has won various academic honors and grants for her teaching and for her books. Her latest book, Chilean New Song: The Political Power of Music, 1960s–1973 (Temple University Press, 2015), was awarded the Cecil B. Currey Award for Best Book of 2015. McSherry is a recognized authority on Operation Condor and has published numerous works on the subject, including Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005), named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2006. Raúl Molina Mejía  is Professor of the History of Latin America at the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago de Chile. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Guatemala Peace and Development Network (GPDN/RPDG). He is a co-founder and director of the program of Model United Nations for Latin America and the Caribbean (MONULAC). Aidan Russell  is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph is entitled Politics and Violence in Burundi: The Language of Truth at the End of Empire. Alissa Walter is an Assistant Professor of History at Seattle Pacific University. She earned her PhD from Georgetown University in 2018. Her dissertation, “The Ba’th Party in Baghdad: State-Society Relations through Wars, Sanctions, and Authoritarian Rule, 1950–2003,” was supported by grants from the American Association of University Women, the United States Institute of Peace, the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund, and the Academic Research Institute in Iraq. Luise White is Professor of History at the University of Florida. Her most recent book is Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-FM.indd 9

24/10/18 4:43 PM

Acknowledgements

This volume emerged from the 2016 Pierre du Bois Annual Conference for Contemporary History, held at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. We are particularly grateful to Irina du Bois, Lola Wilhelm, Mariana Sandoval de Oliveira, and the Fondation Pierre du Bois for supporting such a stimulating and successful event, and especially to our colleagues David Anderson, Carolyn Biltoft, Nicole Bourbonnais, Sebastián Carassai, Michelle Caswell, Ponciano del Pino, Yvan Droz, Pierre Hazan, Dhana Hughes, Davide Rodogno, Joseph Sassoon, Heike Schmidt, Patricia Spyer, Riina Turtio, and Kirsten Weld for the excellent contributions, challenging debates, and provocative insights that shaped this collection.

1

Introduction Regimes of silence Aidan Russell

Across the world in the twentieth century, as states, communities and nations struggled to emerge from one order of power and give rise to the next, the violence that structured such transformations depended upon and created profound silences in individual and collective experiences. Liberation from colonial control, the forceful rule of oppressive regimes, and the social rupture of communal conflict entailed dramatically different forms of violence, tools that were shaped by history and context in each case. In the problems of silence, however, there is a point of connection. Most simply, silence is an absence in an individual’s speech, a suspension of words or the things she does not say. The concept of silence, on the other hand, also evokes collective omissions, the things no one will say. It may be a matter of etiquette and polite sensitivity, or of discomfort or determination to avoid problematic words, or of grief, terror or pain that is inexpressible in any other way. It may be a literal absence of any words at all, or it may be the elision of one matter or one voice or one story amid endless talk of other things. It may be an active verb—the silencing of other people or the silencing of a particular truth, opinion, observation or experience. It may be an act of denial or an act of protection, finding refuge in words left unspoken. It may be a scar, the outward sign of an open wound, or it may be the only possible space of healing. It can be an act of power, whether imposed on others or adopted for oneself, a tool of domination or an art of resistance, or a far more ambiguous space of engagement and detachment in between. The contributors to this volume examine the form of silence, of truths known but not spoken, to facilitate a dialogue across great diversity. In the ways that acts of political violence have gone unspoken we find a global forum in which the experiences of Cold War Latin America and South Asia may come together with those of decolonizing Africa, of autocratic regimes in the Middle East and of ambiguous transitions within the former Soviet world. Transnational silences span the globe in mutual entanglement, national taboos define the nature of emerging state powers, while communal silences mark the breaks and coherences of social life. “The form of silence is always the same,” suggested Keith Basso in his ethnographic reflections on Western Apache sociality. However, “the function of a specific act of silence—that is,

2  Aidan Russell its interpretation by and effect upon other people—will vary according to the social context in which it occurs.”1 Taking the form of silence as a point of departure encourages the distinction of its function, meaning and consequence from one experience to the next.

Acts and entanglements Emerging states may be defined by their liminality. The unspoken dimensions of violence come to prominence in times of transition, especially as the orthodoxies of contemporary transitional justice have made the end of silence the defining threshold of the emerging state, emerging from political oppression to liberal democracy.2 New states break from their predecessors by encouraging (some of) their subjects to speak about (some of) their experiences of preceding violence. In doing so, they ascribe a temporal profile to silence that confines it to the past and thereby distinguishes this past from the present and future. Communities are expected to be healed by talk of trauma, and states are empowered by managing this talk.3 Neither the transition to liberal democracy, nor the singular end of silence, nor the cathartic effect of speaking, however, are universal or even representative characteristics of such change.4 Transition brings attention to silence, but its orthodoxies risk distorting the debate. “Breaking the silence” is a relatively recent archetype of transition. After the proclaimed watersheds of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals, neither transitional justice nor the redemptive power of speech took an immediate hold in global politics.5 For much of the Cold War, truth-telling was a matter of activism and protest against ongoing violence rather than a ritual of redemption, as the report of Bertrand Russell’s 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, “Against the Crime of Silence”, most notably exemplified.6 Indeed, for some states that emerged from conflict and dictatorship as the Cold War reached its peak, silence itself was the choice of change. In Spain’s “Pact of Forgetting” after Franco, or Nigeria’s “No Victims No Vanquished” edict after Biafra, suspending talk of recent violence was meant to buy time to rebuild.7 Silence seemed necessary to permit a transition from the past, even if, for some, the same absence of public speech binds them painfully to this past half a century later.8 As Hayner observes, the collective choice of silence depends on a degree of consensus that is exceptionally rare, and it is never absolute.9 Its possible appeal, however, for communities of memory as much as for emerging state powers, ought not to be occluded by the international paradigm of transitional justice today.10 When this dominant framework emerged and took root towards the end of the Cold War, on the other hand, the various processes that gave rise to it exhibited strikingly different conceptions of what silence meant and what it meant to break it. The pioneering Latin American commissions of the 1980s pursued the silence of the disappeared, taking the forensic truth of their abduction and torture as a path towards the “larger historical meaning of

Introduction: Regimes of silence 3 collective political repression”11—even if such commissions were also subject to rigorous silencing constrictions of their own (see Molina below, Chapter 2). While pursuing some individual criminal trials, post-Communist states in Eastern Europe largely prioritised historical inquiry and access to secret information over individual truth-telling; seeking redress from a systemic devotion to “the task of silencing truth”, they seemed to require a systemic response.12 The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, certainly the most influential of all such institutions, placed forensic truths and historical revelations alongside personal narratives and social dialogues, turning the end of silence towards the Commission’s paramount good of social reconciliation.13 The subsequent blossoming of various forms of truth commission across the world have similarly sought different truths in different silences, to mark different forms of transition to different ends.14 Yet problems of timing, politics, public performance or the perennially difficult relationship of truth with justice make silence in transition less a moment of rupture, and more a four-dimensional, endlessly shifting space of complexity, contradiction, continuity and change. Meeting silence in transition alone therefore fails to grasp its full dimensions, its diversity and temporality. It is never confined to matters of memory, nor is it ended by the institutions put to the purpose. Silences met in the present provoke the sensation of solidity, how resilient they may be to the pressure to speak, how difficult or necessary it is to “break” them. From a historical perspective, however, we see silences rise and fall, shift in prominence, meaning and utility, or expand until they become impossible to hear at all. Taking silence seriously means moving beyond memory and the moment of transition, looking within and across national boundaries, and seeing scales from the intimate to the global moving in interaction and disjunction. In the middle of the twentieth century, for example, Britain and France fought their decolonization wars in Kenya and Algeria while attempting to restrict metropolitan public speech about their extensive use of torture.15 Subsequently, both former colonial powers perpetuated and even extrapolated this silence in their own emergence into a new postcolonial condition. For several decades France sustained a generalised public “amnesia” over its traumatic break in Algeria,16 while Britain actively silenced the historical record through the retention and concealment of 8,800 boxes of archival material from its former colonies.17 As in contemporaneous transitional justice processes, these silences have recently been addressed by the truth-speaking of personal memories, the work of historical researchers, and prominent judicial test-cases.18 In an archetypical illustration of the ubiquity and sprouting forms of silencing processes, however, the silences of these departing colonial powers were mirrored in their former colonies. Inverting France’s amnesia, Algeria’s hegemonic patriotic history blotted out the experience of others in its decolonization war, from Islamists and rival nationalists to those who

4  Aidan Russell fought for France,19 while Kenya’s political complex sustained the British ban on its Mau Mau organizations and perpetuated the same strategic silence to cover wars and abuses of its own.20 The judicial and historical work that has tackled the absences of colonial memory in Europe has been a joint work of deconstruction and revision between European and African researchers in both cases, and public controversies in France and Britain are matched by simultaneous contestation and transformation in Algeria and Kenya. Apparent divergences of history are bridged by parallel and entangled stories of silence. The critical issue, whether in such national stories or more personal experiences, is that the “life history”21 of silence is a matter of continual regeneration, management, enforcement and change. Just as silences persist beyond the moment of transition, so they evolve and splinter through the long processes of degradation and transformation. The silences of emerging states tell us not only about memory and contestation at the self-conscious point of transition, but about life through the long years and explosive moments that came before.

Three images: The rock, the fence and the edifice We may be rightly uncomfortable in collapsing a great diversity of phenomena under the single label of silence, however. Between multiple disciplinary, linguistic and cultural approaches to the same common word, there seems little to define in unified terms. Linguists and linguistic anthropologists cite silence as a necessary, if endlessly nuanced, element of language itself, a part of communication rather than simply an obstruction to it.22 The psychiatric heritage of trauma theory, in turn, hangs over much of the discourse surrounding the connection of silence and violence, while it is largely through the work of literary scholars that the term has taken central position as the inability of the scarred psyche of the individual to represent traumatic experience.23 Alternatively, many have seen strategies of silence, centring on power rather than psychology. Studies of totalitarianism and state terror have understood silence and its secrets as a technique both to acquire and to reproduce power—even to define it24 —and political science and sociology have explored further silencing strategies in censorship, propaganda and doublespeak.25 Subaltern perspectives have, by contrast, proposed silence as a tactic adopted in response to domination or as a cover that exposes the weaknesses of power.26 In memory studies, silence remains perhaps most casually invoked as a synonym of forgetting or denial,27 but it also shows its face as a necessary suspension of speech in the processes of remembrance, mourning, and “living together again”.28 The “silences of history”, finally, seem to both justify the discipline and stand as a critique of its failings. Speaking of silence is undoubtedly awkward, tacking close to oxymoron, and the scope seems endless to find different meanings in the word.

Introduction: Regimes of silence 5 But perhaps a single definition is unnecessary, or even counterproductive. Silence is as much a metaphor as an empirical element of communication, applied to absences and omissions of all forms, and it is in metaphors for silence that we may begin to grasp what we are dealing with. It is not for nothing that English clichés speak of “eloquent” or “deafening” silences, placing meaning in the aural absence rather than treating it as a void. But if we set aside cliché, it often seems easier to approach in other sensory metaphors than hearing alone. It is through three such contradictions, therefore, that we may begin to feel out the dimensions of an elusive subject. Speaking of memories and memorials of war, Jay Winter approaches silence by stepping inside Augé’s landscape of forgetting.29 Where the latter described memory as a shoreline, gradually eroded by the sea of oblivion, the former sees silence in the rocks and shoals hidden beneath the waterline; fallen from the headland, they nevertheless are not lost but lie just below the surface, concealed and exposed by the tides.30 While distinguishing “liturgical” silences (dwelling on the “eternal themes of loss, mourning, sacrifice and redemption”31) from “political” silences (seeking to suspend conflict over the meaning of memory) and “essentialist” silences (claiming the right to speak as the privilege of certain groups and denying it to others), this image of the shoreline remains the coordinating key. One who knows the coast knows where the shoals lie. Intimate knowledge is similarly key for Veena Das, when she considers silences in memories of violence in India. Yet the imagery of concealment, however inconstant, seems inapplicable to some of her renditions. She sees instead “fences” erected around memories that are very much present on the surface of social life but cut off from the voice of narration and experience.32 She views the goal of the ethnographer as pursuing the moment when one can say, “My spade is turned,”33 but silence is not something to be excavated but observed, because it is already exposed. Here silence forms part of the path towards an ordinary life, not towards the transcendence that other “liturgical” silences might suggest. It is a hard splinter, entangled yet tangible in her otherwise pliant imagery of the weave of life. For Michel-Rolph Trouillot, speaking of the silences of history means speaking less of an absence of sound but of the presence of texts.34 A certain textuality of history structures Trouillot’s view of the creation of silences, in words not written, records not kept, and stories that never end up on the paper that authorises them. The power dynamics he stresses in the production of academic history-writing place the textuality of the narrative to the fore, as one set of silences within a history “buries” another,35 one consensus “masks” another conflict.36 Silence is something partly created by paper and texts, an experience or historical moment not only obscured but, perhaps, destroyed by this weight of words. Yet Trouillot’s ultimate image is of a monumental edifice, a resolutely material sense of history embodied in graves and walls and cement. This is not a barrier between a narrative and a silence—rather the solid mass of these artefacts and immensities exudes

6  Aidan Russell both. “We suspect that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences,” he suggests.37 The silence is found within the material mass, not at all distinct from it. Each of these images hinges on silences of the past, of memorialization, memory and history. In the imagery variously preferred by Winter, Das and Trouillot, however, even the particular silences of memory are given a shape and ambiguous temporality. Whether between individuals, in the public space of memorial or in the narratives of history, silence is a formidable presence, at least for those who perceive it or know what it withholds. It may grow or recede, be made and broken, suddenly vanish or reappear, or stand stubbornly resistant to any attempt to penetrate it. It may have a teleological point of completion in oblivion—the rocks finally washed away and the silences of history lost from recall—or it may rest as a fact of life that displaces communication to other forms of expression and underpins the emerging social world itself. The diverse interpretations of silence defined by different academic disciplines, held in common understandings or emerging in divergent contexts, share a fascination and a power. We may recognise the hidden rock, the rigid fence or the impenetrable and evocative mass of the edifice as much in the silences of an individual as in the collective gaps in historical narrative, in the power of omission and elision in present discourse as much as the heavy silences of memorialization. The unspoken memories of a traumatised individual may be different on a quite fundamental level from the secret actions of a state. The propensity to read “a silence” in each diverse form, however, need not entirely be rejected. The question of something known but not expressed in words binds these disparate forms together, regardless of their origin, dynamic or consequence, and provides the opportunity for dialogue across them.

One proposition: Regimes of silence How then are we to approach such a solid yet shifting phenomenon? We cannot simply “listen to silence”, as the most oxymoronic call would have it. It is true that silence may not only conceal. Silence is indeed a part of communication, and must be treated as such. If silence does not entirely conceal, however, then it also cannot be said to reveal the truth that it does not speak. At best, it may point the way to it. Das describes the “stillness” of women mourning their dead following the anti-Sikh riots of 1984; unable to express traditional mourning laments, as she reads this stillness, they sat silent amid dirt and squalor to embody “pollution”, “the loss, the death, and the destruction”.38 Their silence pointed the way to a truth, but it did not in itself speak; the communicative aspect of silence may only be grasped by correlation with other dimensions of speech and sociality, performance, power and politics, and therefore by coordination with larger scales of contextual knowledge.

Introduction: Regimes of silence 7 Here, therefore, we propose to consider silences not in their abstract presence but in their dimensions of creation, enforcement and transformation. It is in regimes of silence, rather than in gaps of speech, that we may find a means to comprehend both the power and the life cycle of silence. Thinking about how pressures and structures constitute a political regime of constraint, or arise from social expectations, sensitivities, conventions or divisions, immediately attunes us to the variability of significance and consequence any silence might hold. Regimes of silence push us to see mechanisms and structures, sources and edges, the social dynamics of communication and interpersonal power relations. In acts, words, institutions and imaginaries, the creation and maintenance of silence help us triangulate its source and significance in a social context and political moment. The categorization of memory silences in the liturgical, political and essentialist forms adopted by Winter and colleagues, while not necessarily to be translated literally outside of the field of memory, is a good place to start. Pivoting on both social and political constraints and purposes, such a delineation suggests how the meaning and function of a silence may be intimated by the pressures that create it and lend it power. In this manner, we might be well served by a misappropriation of Foucault’s regimes of truth. Silence, like the truth that it may conceal, is a “thing of this world … produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint,” something that “induces regular effects of power.”39 Rather than generalising the meaning of silence or prescribing to it a mirrored trajectory in all circumstances, we are better served by testing these ideologies, the mechanisms and instances that distinguish speech from silence, the techniques and procedures that might accomplish or dismantle silence, the status of those whose silence is recognised or passes unheard, the words and representations that overwrite others or that speak around the gaps in discourse. As with the regime of truth, so silence is “linked in a circular relation with systems of power that produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it,”40 whether it is the powerless or the powerful who refrain from speaking. This alignment of “regimes” is merely another metaphor, not an insistence on Foucault’s rendition of truth nor on a strictly Foucauldian approach to silence. Neither is it simply a frivolous appropriation. Silence is entangled with truth, because in silence we assume the silencing of a truth, a true voice, a true experience or a true opinion kept from open expression. Conversely, we may oppose silence to truth, by no means diminishing their entanglement; the imposition of a truth demands the silencing of other claims to which it is opposed. The mechanisms and constraints that create a silence may not be so distinct from those that regulate what counts as true, in either case. A social regime of silence might designate as true that which is unspoken, its truth confirmed by the inability to express it, as in an authorising discourse of trauma;41 a political regime might designate as true that which is spoken, enforcing silence on other truths to denote their deception

8  Aidan Russell or their error. Ultimately, a regime is constituted by dynamics of power as much as it shapes them; it is constituted by words and actions, values and convictions, created in an act and reconstituted, “ratified”42 by new objects, processes and legitimising institutions later in the course of its existence. No universal designation of such regimes is possible or desirable, changeable as they are between moments and places, languages and contexts, cultures and modes of power. The regime of silence is something with which to think, not a law or model to be recognised in defined sets of configurations. It simply asks from where a silence comes, how it is maintained and expressed, to what it is applied or how it is recognised, where its edges might be found and, if there is purpose, to what purpose silence is turned. It asks what relationship there is between a silence and a truth and, therefore, what position this silence takes with regards to power. Whether the metaphor of the regime is imagined more in the flooding of the tide or the fixing of the fence post, the verbal erasure of a written or unwritten text, the imposing presence of the edifice or any other imagery or sensory evocation that best describes the problem at hand, it points the way to the question of what creates, maintains and changes the truth and power of the unspoken. The contributions in this volume thus are not to be categorised according to a set array of regimes or isolated dynamics. Most touch on several aspects of the problem, from the scale to the purpose or the nature of silence, how it frames or occludes speech, or how it is found behind many spoken words. Some look to the inverse, to words where we have assumed there was only silence (Walter in Chapter 7 and McGregor in Chapter 8 especially). The unifying thread of discussion is in the constraints on speech, however conceived, and the effects of power that these constraints produce. The recognition each of us have seen in the circumstances explored in other parts of the world encourages the collective treatment. The variety of place and context, of culture and circumstance, permits a rich glimpse of an impossible topic. This is not least because regional circumstances and areas of scholarly focus within those regions have pushed debates around silence in different directions. The primacy of the disappeared as a symbol of modern Latin American history focuses attention on both the act of disappearance itself and the truth-telling processes intended to redeem its experience (Molina in Chapter 2, McSherry in Chapter 3). The disciplinary background of African history, in turn, has long promoted discussion of language and orality, the pursuit of “words” and “voices” in rich and problematic ways,43 and so the search for silence within such words seems a necessary step to take (Russell in Chapter 4, Igreja in Chapter 5 and White in Chapter 6). Meanwhile, distortions of history and the means of speaking to domineering power are revealed by the possibilities of particular archives in the Middle East and the Soviet world (Walter in Chapter 7, Martin in Chapter 9 and Cheterian in Chapter 10), or in transnational networks and repositories that disrupt the geographical premise of the state that imposes its silence (McGregor in Chapter 8).

Introduction: Regimes of silence 9 These are issues of emphasis, not contrast. Departing from different points of origin, with our own regional concerns and preoccupations, we may give shape to a broader conversation over the dimensions and significance of a common, if protean, experience of life and violence in the emerging states of the twentieth century. Instead of models, therefore, or too strong a geographical categorization, let us consider three broad fields in which these excursions cross paths: the alignments of silence with power, with speech and with history.

Silence and power Attention to its structuring regime discourages the singular interpretation of silence as either strategy or response. It may indeed be among the “arts of resistance” in some circumstances, but, as Susan Gal notes, a studied silence can equally be “as much a strategy of power as of weakness, depending on the ideological understandings and contexts within which it is used.”44 The explicit dynamic of power forces a confrontation with silence as a matter of action and creation, constrained within its context, from which any strategic or contingent effect may arise. Acts of state terrorism and counter-insurgency push us to see the unspoken as there “from the start”, as the Argentinian journalist Jacobo Timerman wrote, and not solely a matter of memory and transition.45 “The silence begins with a strong odor”, he recounted, preferring another sensory metaphor to the visual. “People sniff the suicides, but it eludes them.”46 Disappearance, as Greg Grandin remarks, was the “signature act of Cold War violence”,47 a singular term for a mess of processes; whatever form of violence the victim suffered in arrest, abduction, torture or execution was subsumed into a greater cloud of uncertainty, the deficit of knowledge. Contained within the fact of disappearance was an unknown temporal scope of violence, extrapolated into an indefinite ignorance. Disappearance was a silent act that reproduced and proliferated silences. Silence binds together the acts of violence suffered, the nature of the power behind them, and the attempt to change in the wake of this power. This final apparent rupture in transition, however, also creates traps. Guatemala most emphatically took the “memory of silence” to heart as the symbol of its emergence from violence.48 Writing in a partially testimonial mode, Molina (Chapter 2) reflects on how silences have persisted throughout his country’s recent history, across multiple “transitions” of varying forms and degrees. Speaking of the memory of silence, and thus breaking one particular field of political taboo, may mark a transition, but it does not in itself achieve the emergence of a new political order. In a sideways shift, elements of an older regime of silence may persist under emerging regimes of political power, and talk of today’s abuses is no more liberated by the ability to speak of yesterday’s violence, especially when the latter remains constrained by “mandatory silence” on particular names and responsibilities.

10  Aidan Russell The Latin American context, however, also presses the extent to which the dynamics of power behind individual and transnational silences are scarcely to be separated. As McSherry explores through hemispheric counter-insurgency strategies in Chapter 3, the silence imposed on individuals in many countries during the Cold War was a necessary corollary to the coordination of terror and dread, fundamental to the purpose of political control that ensnared a continent. In such times, silence is power, and a regime of silence is inextricable from the power of the political regime responsible for it, one that may far exceed that of a single state. Whether the silence of a person disappeared, the silence of witnesses and survivors refraining from speaking about what they have seen, or the most prosaic silencing of a dissenting political opinion, the acts that create absences of speech describe the nature of the power held over them. Through such a regime of silence and its intentional, strategic construction, we can see the dynamics of control within and beyond the nation. Of course, the dynamics of power in the construction and transformation of silence are not a matter of state actions alone. A regime of silence is a matter of social reality as well as a political creation, and its power is coordinated between these intersecting fields. For Timerman, the silence of terror in Argentina was not only a matter of subjugation but of implication, the “veil of silence” imposed on his own muzzled media49 giving breath to “that silence which can transform any nation into an accomplice”.50 The social sustenance of a silence created in acts of state violence substantiate the power of that state. Sebastián Carassai has described the general silence of an Argentinian middle class as essential to the regime in which they lived;51 jumping contexts, this element of social collaboration is equally critical for Cheterian here in his analysis of the oblivion over the Armenian genocide (Chapter 10). The silence of political terror may be the acute edge of domination, but there is also a more ambiguous social regime of implication. Even underpinned by violence, political power may be marked by the “domestication” of rulers and ruled, the “mutual zombification” that Achille Mbembe describes for the (African) postcolony, to be sought in the things all agree not to speak of.52 However, this raises many problems of its own. Where do the parameters of political power around a silence end and social pressures begin? When is a “public secret” constrained by authoritarian censorship and when by social taboo? Considering the sprouting silences of euphemism, denial and social restraint emerging from Burundi’s history of violence, Chapter 4 explores a “singular” absence that has changed dramatically over the years. State denials of genocide and a common vocabulary of euphemism constituted the substance of authoritarian rule. Silences over the same experience, however, when framed by a context of mourning in a moment of possible change, could turn that silence to protest. Today, while some pursue truth-telling as the precondition of reconciliation, for others social values, pains and sensitivities make a continued absence of talk positively desired, even as they

Introduction: Regimes of silence 11 reject the power that once enforced the absence. The variation in regimes of silence shadows the shifting dynamics of power in perhaps surprising ways. Yet the power dynamics of silence must be sought on intimate scales as much as on the scale of states, nations and continents. Igreja, in Chapter 5, turns to the sudden ruptures of silence in Mozambique that may come unexpectedly, long after an experience of violence or the achievement of an apparent transition from a state of conflict. Social regimes of silence provided a means to live together, in his context, but only for a time. Igreja demonstrates the power in idioms of silence particular both to a language and a political community, tied to a complex of spiritual and cosmological understandings. Silence, as he observes it in Gorongosa, is pierced first not by words but by “embodied accountability”, as the ability to break a silence over an intimate crime of violence belongs to the spirit of the one who was killed. Provoking severe bodily discomforts as an old conflict resurfaces, spirit possession then permits the expression of accusation, and the provocation of truth, not through the voice of the living but through the voice of the dead. The relationship of power and silence far exceeds the stark terms of political domination, resistance or even reconciliation, but opens up uncertain spaces of alternation, inversion and change. The question of who speaks, who stays silent, and whose voice is heard at any one moment forces us to consider the effects of power that derive from the words spoken or passed over, and how these change over time.

Silence and speech Words, indeed, must take a particular prominence when we begin with silence. Bakhtin suggested a distinction between quietude, in which “nothing makes a sound”, and silence, in which “nobody speaks.”53 In most treatments of the latter in the context of violence, this special relationship with speech is a latent assumption. It is the lack of words, whether a total muteness or a selective omission over certain truths, that seems to constitute a silence. It may therefore be a wound to be redeemed by speech, or it may be the necessary displacement of representation to other forms beyond words, from images to objects, landscapes and memorials.54 Thinking in terms of regimes of silence, however, produces a certain slippage that seems to drive our discussions of the unspoken away from Bakhtin’s suggested opposition. Words too can serve as part of such a regime. A memory “ghost-written” in a language uncomfortably foreign to normal speech,55 an experience drowned in an excess of others’ words, and a history denied and destroyed by the telling of another, all suggest a silence somewhat distinct from a simple absence of words. The matter of which people speak, the voice they use and the distinction between truths known and words spoken, create absences in discourse that evoke the same sense of absent presence, the rock hidden by the tide or the fence around words on the tip of the tongue. Whatever else silence is, it is not necessarily

12  Aidan Russell a total absence of words, but instead may be found in a matter “obscured by words” themselves.56 Approaching a regime of silence through the words spoken around it reveals its full dimensions. Where and when is it possible to speak of an act of violence, and who is able to speak it? Igreja’s focus on voice brings this critically to the fore (Chapter 5), while the euphemisms of power and the ambiguities in which people speak of their memories make a permanent problem out of the same question (Chapter 4). In Chapter 6, White confronts the relationship of speech and silence directly, in the most probing problematization of the parameters one might conceive as a regime of silence. She sees the repetition of a “piece of speech” in Rhodesian counter-insurgency discourse as creating the “effect” of silence around the event it purportedly described. The truth of the event became impossible to discuss, not because it was never mentioned or was ever denied, but because a set of words around it was subject to endless repetition. Such repetition constitutes the “recursive” loop of iconization by which words become symbols,57 while exerting the effects of silence on the truth of the event. Routine words create silences of discourse, undermining the possibilities of communication in a stultifying noise of words. White’s ultimate flirtation with the problem of wordless noise may take us one tentative step further. The noise of aeroplanes, bombing raids, crackling radios and cackling baboons, as she describes in one moment of war, scarcely constitute Bakhtin’s quietude. Is there also a silence created by such noise, where speech in its empty repetition simply adds to the cacophony, and both words and their sense are lost? If the diverse forms of silence we consider are tethered loosely together by the concealment of truth, the effect of noise to obscure any expression of truth seems to fall, paradoxically, into the same scope. The principle of the regime of silence pushes us beyond a binary of speech and silence, to find the effects of power in the boundaries not only between what can and cannot be said, but between what is and is not heard, even and especially when words and sounds overflow. Speaking of words, on the other hand, helps keep in view the silences within our own work. Familiar as we are with talk of violence ignored or forgotten by the wider world, of dictatorships ruling through fear and imposing silence on their subjects, we easily let these silences grow; the absence becomes blinding. If words mark the edges of silence, means of speaking around the absences of discourse are as significant as the matters not spoken, not least because the words force us to look away from the simplest assumptions of repression. While many things remain unsayable in and to a violent state, this silence is rarely complete. As Walter explores in the content and form of Iraqi petitions under Ba‘athist rule in Chapter 7, there may be great potential for manoeuvre and claim when one knows the words that can be spoken, and studiously, loyally avoids those that cannot. Ways of speaking encompass ways of keeping silent; when we follow words

Introduction: Regimes of silence 13 we trace the shape of silences while turning them inside out. Yet, for Walter as for White, the questions of formula and repetition are key; as Iraqi petitions shifted towards more heavily constrained, formulaic structures, routine robbed speech of its communicative function, of its ability to express a truth other than that which was defined by the routine. Chasing words, finally, allows McGregor in Chapter 8 to trace the shape of silences that were simultaneously national, transnational and global at the height of the Cold War, and so defy the assumptions of their totality. She sees how attempts to speak around and against the silences over the 1960s massacres of the Indonesian Left constituted small-scale yet widely distributed “communities of resistance”. From exile alliances to women’s organizations, the words of these communities both defied a general absence of talk about what had happened and exposed the limitations of self-censorship and marginalization. The regime of silence confronted by such transnational words was not only a matter of state strategy. It also encompassed global priorities, conveniences and sensitivities that are as depersonalised as they are matters of agency.

Silence and history As McGregor shows, taking Trouillot’s words to heart, the silences of history are our own silences, as much as they are facts of past experience. They emerge from our own assumptions and limitations, some of which at least we can work to overcome. Both the practice and effect of history-writing are intimately bound to the regimes of silence we study. History is motivated by the silences of our sources, informants and predecessors. Attention to the regime that frames the truth we believe to be hidden, therefore, is as much a disciplinary precaution as it is a target of analysis. Historians look for gaps in what has been written before, and seek to fill them. Oral history, most notably, has attention to silence at its core. Its methods were developed in part to answer silences of other forms of record, to hear the voices left out of the archival orders of power, to seek the past of “peoples without history”, of women silenced by social and political power disparities, and many other critical fields of human experience (see White in Chapter 6).58 As a method rooted in a social exchange, oral historians are routinely faced with gaps, elisions and absences in their interviews, and thus are drawn to such problems as subjects in their own right.59 Yet a similar concern emerges in the study of archives. A formal structure of power, subject to systems of selection, ordering and fragmentation,60 the archive forms part of a regime of silence when we view it through Trouillot’s moment of “fact assembly”,61 when things get left out from the possibility of record. Reading the regime in place of the silence it creates thus echoes Stoler’s famous encouragement to read along the grain of the archive, as much as against it;62 the choices, priorities and logics of ordering are as informative as the things left out.

14  Aidan Russell If the context of our work encourages attention to silence, however, Trouillot’s primary warning is of the contribution that history-writing itself makes to regimes of silence. History may trace out a silence by its omissions (arising from the absences of sources, the ways that we chain our stories together, or the ways we value certain stories differently), or conform to the kind of repetition and routine that deadens official narratives (compare Chapters 4, 6, 7, 9 and 10). History-writing, and indeed rewriting, must be considered within the same space as the acts written. Barbara Martin makes this most explicit in Chapter 9, when she considers the place of historians and debates over what kind of history to tell in the political knot of transition between a Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR. Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of 1956 both opened and closed the possibilities of speaking about the silences of past violence, and struggles over historical writing took center stage in political change. Writing about silence forms part of the life history of that silence; it may enforce one silence in the place of another, or alter its shape without necessarily dismantling it. Our work is entangled with its object, and good history requires an acute awareness of this fact. After all, given its intimate relationship with silence and its role in the creation of silences, history may have a certain responsibility in the field. As Cheterian asks (Chapter 10), what is the point of history if it cannot speak of some of the greatest crimes of human experience, or worse, becomes complicit in their denial? The danger is that the terminus of the life cycle of a silence, especially one concealed by other narratives of history, may be in the realization of oblivion. If silence is the rocks and shoals partially hidden by the tide, as Winter proposed, it is still Augé’s image that prevails, the tide eroding even these hidden truths to nothing. Substantively distinct from the silences that precede it, oblivion does not conceal truth, but reflects its loss, the totality of its elision. Augé considers the necessity of the act of forgetting, of welcoming oblivion as the release that permits life.63 Where silences have rather obstructed the work of memory that might bring this relief, however, oblivion comes as the completion of the act of violence that began the process. Cheterian’s discussion of the doubled political and historical silences after the Armenian genocide (Chapter 10) provides the critical example of this trajectory. Denial is not necessarily the final act of genocide, because denial remains engaged (albeit destructively) with a claim of truth, and therefore remains open to many possible futures. Oblivion is the end of such futures, the consignment of truth to the past and its loss from the present. The fact that genocide denial, in the Armenian case, has become a source of great “controversy” in the last two decades is, if anything, a sign of progress—oblivion has failed if silence is followed by denial. Where history-writing refrains from engaging with such a silence, by contrast, or actively overwrites it with other stories that block it from sight, such writing forms part of the regime that propels silence towards completion.

Introduction: Regimes of silence 15 The encouragement to pay attention to the silences that surround us and those that we serve to create, however, must be accompanied by a final note of caution. History, like other academic disciplines, has commonly addressed itself to silence in modes of discovery and revelation. The temptation to cast ourselves as archaeologists or magicians is seductive; we “delve” beneath an absence to find a substance, we “excavate” a memory repressed or concealed within an emptiness, we “reveal” the truth hidden behind nothing. Yet this can also lead to the fallacies of the historian as hero, risking the same distortions as any uncritical assumption of the redemptive power of speech in the archetypal truth commission. Worse, our determination to listen to silences can seem to authorise us to fill them with words of our own, triangulated and hypothesised from other sources as best and as responsibly as we can, yet too easily masquerading as the voice of the silenced themselves. We can even become to suspect silences where they do not exist. Experience with oral informants and time spent with archives encourages suspicion, the idea that there are secrets that are being withheld from our scrutinising eyes. This may well be the case; the British removal of its “migrated” archives at the end of empire is only one of the more visible demonstrations of the truth that inspires such suspicions, the secrecy of records flowing directly from the acts of violence that preceded.64 Declassification, punctuated by persistent redactions, similarly forms part of a continuous arc that emerges from original acts of repression, both revelation and continued retention of information shaping the long half-life of particular forms of violence (see McSherry in Chapter 3). Being aware of such secrets, we expect (more even than we suspect) intent behind the gaps we find, and we view them as secrets in the power that they evoke.65 Caswell and Gilliland point to the power of “imaginary documents” in the hopes of survivor communities, the unspoken account of a perpetrator who dies before giving testimony in a court of law. “Such imaginary documents are bound by their impossibility,” they suggest; “they are always out of grasp, falsely promising to make sense of the non-sensical, always emerging on an intangible horizon.”66 In their absence they intimate the possibility of meaning behind the act of violence, even if this meaning will never be found or expressed. Such observations serve to underline the fact that secrecy and permanent loss in the record of violence, whether real or imagined, are functions of that violence itself. Once again, we ought to see histories of silence and of violence as part of the ongoing life history of each, and be alert to how we contribute both to silence and to the repercussions of violence wherever we seek to address them. In the engagement of history with silence, therefore, we must consider our position with great caution. The accounts in this volume encourage us to reflect on what we are doing with the silences we hear. As a motivating goal, breaking the silence must be problematised for historians as for practitioners of political transition and any who engage the violent experiences

16  Aidan Russell of others.67 On an ethical level, we too must respect the potential value of silence for those who keep it. Historians certainly have no greater right to the truth than courts of law or truth commissions, when that truth is something so deeply personal, painful or dangerous as to be kept silent by those who experienced its violent beginning. This, at least, is a premise with which all researchers ought at least to be familiar, though it will always deserve repetition. Some acts of violence may defy representation, and assigning words to them from without is not to break the silence but to overwrite it, to contain and elide the “anomie” of its experience but not to express it.68 “Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation which does justice to it,” wrote Walter Benjamin.69 Telling histories of the mechanisms and constraints that create a silence or transform it, and the effects of power it produces, perhaps offers us a path ahead, while encouraging us to bear in mind our own role in this process. This is not the “burning up of the husk” that Benjamin saw in the revelation of truth; the husk remains, its formation under study. It may not allow us or authorise us to hear unspoken words or to break their hold, but it keeps them in view and helps us see their power in the world, whatever we may imagine that they contain. From power to words to history, the authors in this volume do not necessarily break the silences they study, but set their shapes, trajectories and forms under the microscope for us to explore.

Notes

1. Keith H. Basso, “‘To Give Up on Words’: Silence in Western Apache Culture,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26, no. 3 (1970), 215. 2. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2011); Paul Gready, The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 3. Lars Buur, “The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Technique of Nation-State Formation,” in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 4. e.g. Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Truth Commissions and Transitional Societies: The Impact on Human Rights and Democracy (London: Routledge, 2010); Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou and Timothy D. Sisk, eds. Democratisation in the 21st Century: Reviving Transitology (London: Routledge, 2017); Erin Daly, “Truth Skepticism: An Inquiry Into the Value of Truth in Times of Transition,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 1 (2008); J. Obradovic-Wochnik, “The ‘Silent Dilemma’ of Transitional Justice: Silencing and Coming to Terms With the Past in Serbia,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 2 (2013). 5. Ruti G Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003). 6. John Duffett, ed. Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the International War Crimes Tribunal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970); Marcos Zunino,

Introduction: Regimes of silence 17

















“Subversive Justice: The Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal and Transitional Justice,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 10, no. 2 (2016). 7. Omar G. Encarnacion, Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Murray Last, “Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria,” in Violence and Subjectivity, ed. Veena Das, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 8. Mary Vincent, “Breaking the Silence? Memory and Oblivion Since the Spanish Civil War,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); V. Druliolle, “Recovering Historical Memory: A Struggle Against Silence and Forgetting? The Politics of Victimhood in Spain,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 2 (2015); Ifi Amadiume and Abdullahi An-Na’im, eds. The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice (London: Zed Books, 2000). 9. Hayner, Unspeakable, 207. c.f. Victor Igreja, “Memories as Weapons: The Politics of Peace and Silence in Post-Civil War Mozambique,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 3 (2008). 10. Obradovic-Wochnik, “The ‘Silent Dilemma’”; M. Eastmond and J. M. Selimovic, “Silence as Possibility in Postwar Everyday Life,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012); C. Lawther, “Denial, Silence and the Politics of the Past: Unpicking the Opposition to Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 1 (2013); Ponciano del Pino, En nombre del gobierno. El Péru y Uchuraccay: un siglo de política campesina (Lima: La Siniestra Ensayos, 2017); Daly, “Truth Skepticism”; Carol A. Kidron, “Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (2009); Peter Uvin, Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2008), 145–70. 11. Greg Grandin, “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005), 47; Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 12. Claus Offe and Ulrike Poppe, “Transitional Justice in the German Democratic Republic and in Unified Germany,” in Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 246; Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy”; Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2010). 13. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Final Report, Vol. 1 (Pretoria, 1998); Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness: A Personal Overview of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (London: Rider & Co, 1999); Deborah Posel and Graeme Simpson, eds. Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Witwatersrand University Press, 2002). 14. e.g. Gready, The Era; Hayner, Unspeakable. 15. Raphaëlle Branche, La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); David M. Anderson, “British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-Insurgency, 1952–1960,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 4-5 (2012). 16. Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, eds. La guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004: La fin de l’amnésie. (Paris: R. Laffont, 2004).

18  Aidan Russell 17. David M Anderson, “Mau Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011); Anthony Badger, “Historians, a Legacy of Suspicion and the ‘Migrated Archives’,” Small Wars Insurgencies Small Wars and Insurgencies 23 (2012); David M Anderson, “Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated Archive’,” History Workshop Journal 80, no. 1 (2015). 18. Harbi and Stora, La guerre; Raphaëlle Branche, “The State, the Historians and the Algerian War in French Memory, 1991–2004,” in Contemporary History on Trial: Europe Since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian, ed. Harriet Jones, Kjell Östberg and Nico Randeraad (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Raphaëlle Branche and Jim House, “Silences on State Violence During the Algerian War of Independence: France and Algeria, 1962–2007,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Caroline Elkins, “Alchemy of Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011); Anderson, “Mau Mau”; Huw Bennett, “Soldiers in the Court Room: The British Army’s Part in the Kenya Emergency Under the Legal Spotlight,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011). 19. Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Raphaëlle Branche, “The Martyr’s Torch: Memory and Power in Algeria,” The Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 3 (2011). 20. Daniel Branch, “Violence, Decolonization and the Cold War in Kenya’s North-Eastern Province, 1963–1978,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014); David M. Anderson, “Remembering Wagalla: State Violence in Northern Kenya, 1962–1991,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014). 21. Jay Winter, “Thinking About Silence,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. 22. Basso, “‘To Give Up’”; Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike, eds. Perspectives on Silence (Norwood: Ablex, 1985); Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender,” IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 3, no. 1 (1989); Jack Bilmes, “Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning,” Semiotica 98, no. 1–2 (1994). 23. Pamela Ballinger, “The Culture of Survivors: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Memory,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (1998); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). See also Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a dissenting perspective on the silence of the traumatised, see C. Fred Alford, Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 24. Alexandre Koyré, “The Political Function of the Modern Lie,” Contemporary Jewish Record 8 (1945), 297-99; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 351–354, 419–437; Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jeffrey A. Sluka, Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 25. Terence P. Moran, “Public Doublespeak: On Communication and Pseudocommunication,” College English 36, no. 1 (1974); Adam Jaworski, Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997); Adam Jawor-

Introduction: Regimes of silence 19









ski and Dariusz Galasiński, “Strategies of Silence: Omission and Ambiguity in the Black Book of Polish Censorship,” Semiotica 131, no. 1–2 (2000). 26. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Kalpana Ram, “The Silences in Dominant Discourses,” Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (2015). 27. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Marc Augé, Les formes de l’oubli (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1998); Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); Eviatar Zerubavel, The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 28. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter, eds. Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See above, n. 10. 29. Winter, “Thinking”; Augé, Les formes, 4. 30. Winter, “Thinking,” 3. 31. ibid., 4. 32. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 11. 33. ibid., 93. 34. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 35. ibid., 27. 36. ibid., 28. 37. ibid., 29–30. 38. Das, Violence, 216. 39. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 2002), 131. 40. ibid., 132. 41. Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire. 42. Steve J. Stern, Reckoning With Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 265. 43. David William Cohen, Stephen F. Miescher and Luise White, “Introduction: Voices, Words, and African History,” in African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, ed. Luise White, Stephen F. Miescher and David William Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 44. Susan Gal, “Language and the ‘Arts of Resistance’,” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (1995), 419. c.f. Gal, “Between Silence.” 45. Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), 51. 46. ibid., 52. 47. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 74. 48. Daniel Rothenberg, ed. Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Grandin, “The Instruction.” 49. Jerry W. Knudson, “Veil of Silence: The Argentine Press and the Dirty War, 1976–1983,” Peace Research Abstracts 37, no. 3 (2000). 50. Timerman, Prisoner, 52. 51. Sebastián Carassai, The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 52. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 104.

20  Aidan Russell 53. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 133. Emphasis in original. 54. e.g Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2014); Winter, Sites of Memory; Sabine Marschall, “Memory and Identity in South Africa: Contradictions and Ambiguities in the Process of Post-Apartheid Memorialization,” Visual Anthropology 25, no. 3 (2012); Jens Andermann, “Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2012); Stern, Reckoning, 266–67. 55. Das, Violence, 93. 56. Bilmes, “Constituting,” 82. 57. c.f. Susan Gal, “Multiplicity and Contention Among Language Ideologies,” in Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, ed. Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard and Paul V. Kroskrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 328. 58. Joan Sangster, “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History,” Women’s History Review 3, no. 1 (1994); Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Susan N. G. Geiger, “Women’s Life Histories: Method and Content,” Signs 11, no. 2 (1986); Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher and David William Cohen, eds. African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 59. e.g. Luise White, “Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History,” History and Theory 39 (2000). 60. Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,” Archival Science 1, no. 2 (1987). 61. Trouillot, Silencing, 26. 62. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 63. Augé, Les formes. 64. Badger, “Historians.” 65. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 307–78; Taussig, Defacement; White, “Telling More.” 66. Michelle Caswell and Anne Gilliland, “False Promise and New Hope: Dead Perpetrators, Imagined Documents and Emergent Archival Evidence,” The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 5 (2015), 625. 67. cf. Das, Violence, 57. 68. Veena Das and Ashis Nandy, “Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence,” in The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record, ed. Veena Das (New Delhi: Sage, 1986), 194. 69. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998), 31.

Bibliography Alford, C. Fred. Trauma and Forgiveness: Consequences and Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Amadiume, Ifi, and Abdullahi An-Na’im, eds. The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice. London: Zed Books, 2000. Andermann, Jens. “Expanded Fields: Postdictatorship and the Landscape.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21, no. 2 (2012): 165–87. Anderson, David M. “Mau in the High Court and the ‘Lost’ British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 699–716.

Introduction: Regimes of silence 21 ———. “British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-Insurgency, 1952–1960.” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23, no. 4–5 (2012): 700–19. ———. “Guilty Secrets: Deceit, Denial, and the Discovery of Kenya’s ‘Migrated Archive’.” History Workshop Journal 80, no. 1 (2015): 142–60. ———. “Remembering Wagalla: State Violence in Northern Kenya, 1962–1991.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014): 658–76. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Augé, Marc. Les formes de l’oubli. Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1998. Badger, Anthony. “Historians, a Legacy of Suspicion and the ‘Migrated Archives’.” Small Wars Insurgencies Small Wars and Insurgencies 23 (2012): 799–807. Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Ballinger, Pamela. “The Culture of Survivors: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Memory.” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (1998): 99–132. Basso, Keith H.“‘To Give Up on Words’: Silence in Western Apache Culture.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26, no. 3 (1970): 213–30. Ben-Ze’ev, Efrat, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, eds. Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso, 1998. Bennett, Huw. “Soldiers in the Court Room: The British Army’s Part in the Kenya Emergency Under the Legal Spotlight.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 717–30. Bilmes, Jack. “Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning.” Semiotica 98, no. 1–2 (1994): 73–88. Branch, Daniel. “Violence, Decolonization and the Cold War in Kenya’s NorthEastern Province, 1963–1978.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, no. 4 (2014): 642–57. Branche, Raphaëlle. La torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. “The Martyr’s Torch: Memory and Power in Algeria.” The Journal of North African Studies 16, no. 3 (2011): 431–43. ———. “The State, the Historians and the Algerian War in French Memory, 1991– 2004.” In Contemporary History on Trial: Europe Since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian, edited by Harriet Jones, Kjell Östberg, and Nico Randeraad, 159–73. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Branche, Raphaëlle, and Jim House. “Silences on State Violence During the Algerian War of Independence: France and Algeria, 1962–2007.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 115–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Buur, Lars. “The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: A Technique of Nation-State Formation.” In States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, edited by Thomas Blom Hansen, and Finn Stepputat, 149–81. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Carassai, Sebastián. The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Caswell, Michelle. Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

22  Aidan Russell Caswell, Michelle, and Anne Gilliland. “False Promise and New Hope: Dead Perpetrators, Imagined Documents and Emergent Archival Evidence.” The International Journal of Human Rights 19, no. 5 (2015): 615–27. Cohen, David William, Stephen F. Miescher, and Luise White. “Introduction: Voices, Words, and African History.” In African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, edited by Luise White, Stephen F. Miescher, and David William Cohen, 1–30. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Daly, Erin. “Truth Skepticism: An Inquiry Into the Value of Truth in Times of Transition.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 2, no. 1 (2008): 23–41. Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent Into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Das, Veena, and Ashis Nandy. “Violence, Victimhood, and the Language of Silence.” In The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record, edited by Veena Das, 177–96. New Delhi: Sage, 1986. Del Pino, Ponciano. En nombre del gobierno. El Péru y Uchuraccay: un siglo de política campesina. Lima: La Siniestra Ensayos, 2017. Druliolle, V. “Recovering Historical Memory: A Struggle Against Silence and Forgetting? The Politics of Victimhood in Spain.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 2 (2015): 316–35. Duffett, John, ed. Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the International War Crimes Tribunal. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Eastmond, M., and J. M. Selimovic. “Silence as Possibility in Postwar Everyday Life.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6, no. 3 (2012): 502–24. Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. 2005. ———. “Alchemy of Evidence: Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 5 (2011): 731–48. Encarnacion, Omar G. Democracy Without Justice in Spain: The Politics of Forgetting. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Evans, Martin, and John Phillips. Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Fassin, Didier, and Richard Rechtman. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry Into the Condition of Victimhood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” In The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984, edited by Paul Rabinow, 111–33. London: Penguin, 2002. Gal, Susan. “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender.” IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 3, no. 1 (1989). ———. “Language and the ‘Arts of Resistance’.” Cultural Anthropology 10, no. 3 (1995): 407–24. ———. “Multiplicity and Contention Among Language Ideologies.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 317–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Geiger, Susan N. G. “Women’s Life Histories: Method and Content.” Signs 11, no. 2 (1986): 334–51. Grandin, Greg. “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, National History, and State Formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala.” The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005): 46–67.

Introduction: Regimes of silence 23 ———. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Gready, Paul. The Era of Transitional Justice: The Aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa and Beyond. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Harbi, Mohammed, and Benjamin Stora, eds. La guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004: La fin de l’amnésie. Paris: R. Laffont, 2004. Hayner, Priscilla B. Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge, 2011. Igreja, Victor. “Memories as Weapons: The Politics of Peace and Silence in Post-Civil War Mozambique.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 3 (2008): 539–56. Jaworski, Adam. Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997. Jaworski, Adam, and Dariusz Galasiński. “Strategies of Silence: Omission and Ambiguity in the Black Book of Polish Censorship.” Semiotica 131, no. 1–2 (2000): 185–200. Jelin, Elizabeth. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Ketelaar, Eric. “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives.” Archival Science 1, no. 2 (1987): 131–41. Kidron, Carol A. “Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel.” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (2009): 5–27. Knudson, Jerry W. “Veil of Silence: The Argentine Press and the Dirty War, 1976–1983.” Peace Research Abstracts 37, no. 3 (2000): 93–112. Koyré, Alexandre. “The Political Function of the Modern Lie.” Contemporary Jewish Record 8 (1945): 290–300. Last, Murray. “Reconciliation and Memory in Postwar Nigeria.” In Violence and Subjectivity, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 315–32. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Lawther, C. “Denial, Silence and the Politics of the Past: Unpicking the Opposition to Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 1 (2013): 157–77. Marschall, Sabine. “Memory and Identity in South Africa: Contradictions and Ambiguities in the Process of Post-Apartheid Memorialization.” Visual Anthropology 25, no. 3 (2012): 189–204. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Moran, Terence P. “Public Doublespeak: On Communication and Pseudocommunication.” College English 36, no. 1 (1974): 112–18. Obradovic-Wochnik, J. “The ‘Silent Dilemma’ of Transitional Justice: Silencing and Coming to Terms With the Past in Serbia.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 2 (2013): 328–47. Offe, Claus, and Ulrike Poppe. “Transitional Justice in the German Democratic Republic and in Unified Germany.” In Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy, edited by Jon Elster, 239–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Ould Mohamedou, Mohammad-Mahmoud, and Timothy D. Sisk, eds. Democratisation in the 21st Century: Reviving Transitology. London: Routledge, 2017.

24  Aidan Russell Passerini, Luisa. Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Posel, Deborah, and Graeme Simpson, eds. Commissioning the Past: Understanding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Witwatersrand University Press, 2002. Ram, Kalpana. “The Silences in Dominant Discourses.” Journal of South Asian Studies 38, no. 1 (2015): 119–30. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Rosenberg, Tina. The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2010. Rothenberg, Daniel, ed. Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Sangster, Joan. “Telling Our Stories: Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral History.” Women’s History Review 3, no. 1 (1994): 5–28. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. Sluka, Jeffrey A. Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Stern, Steve J. Reckoning With Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Tannen, Deborah, and Muriel Saville-Troike, eds. Perspectives on Silence. Norwood: Ablex, 1985. Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Teitel, Ruti G. “Transitional Justice Genealogy.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69–94. Timerman, Jacobo. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Final Report, Vol. 1. Pretoria, 1998. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness: A Personal Overview of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. London: Rider & Co, 1999. Uvin, Peter. Life After Violence: A People’s Story of Burundi. London: Zed Books Ltd, 2008. Vincent, Mary. “Breaking the Silence? Memory and Oblivion Since the Spanish Civil War.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 47–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. White, Luise. “Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History.” History and Theory 39 (2000): 11–22. White, Luise, Stephan F Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds. African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Introduction: Regimes of silence 25 Wiebelhaus-Brahm, Eric. Truth Commissions and Transitional Societies: The Impact on Human Rights and Democracy. London: Routledge, 2010. Winter, Jay. “Thinking About Silence.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 3–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Zerubavel, Eviatar. The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zunino, Marcos. “Subversive Justice: The Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal and Transitional Justice.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 10, no. 2 (2016): 211–29.

2

Testimony Silence as the cornerstone of impunity in Guatemala Raúl Molina Mejía

In the Prologue of the report titled Guatemala: Memory of Silence, presented by the UN-supported Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) in 1999, the three members of the Commission1 finished with a sober statement: With sadness and pain we have fulfilled the mission entrusted to us. We place the CEH’s report, this Memory of Silence, into the hands of every Guatemalan, the men and women of yesterday and today, so that future generations may be aware of the enormous calamity and tragedy suffered by their people. . . .2 This chapter analyses events in Guatemala from 1954, when President Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown by decisions and actions of the US administration at the dawn of the Cold War3 (including the organization of a proxy army—Movimiento de Liberación Nacional—to invade Guatemala) to today. From 1954 to 1996, a triangle of political power existed: Guatemala’s private sector, the US government and its embassy, and the armed forces. In that period, the country became a militarized state, with the political system under military control. This document aims to demonstrate that impunity, for which silence has been the cornerstone, is essential for the powerful sectors in Guatemala to maintain their domination and control. The article is written in the first person, and it is therefore partly a testimony, although one supported by history and documents. Constant silence has hidden the calamities and tragedies in Guatemala during the US-mandated counterrevolution (1954–1962), the internal armed conflict (1962–1996), and even the post-signature period of the Peace Accords (1996–2018). The country today is immersed in corruption and impunity.

A Democratic Spring from 1944 to 1954 After the Revolution of October 20, 1944, in Guatemala, the country was indeed an “emerging state.” The Revolution overthrew a fourteen-yearold dictatorship—a new constitution was rapidly drafted, and elections took place for president and congress. The period that followed, known as

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 27 “Guatemala’s Democratic Spring” from 1944 to 1954,4 saw the emergence of a sovereign, democratic and progressive state. The October Revolution in Guatemala, which happened at the end of World War II, brought about significant changes, namely a transition from a semi-feudal situation to modern capitalism. Guatemala benefitted from the first post-WWII years, with the winds of freedom and human rights generated by the creation of the United Nations and the norms of justice established by the Nuremberg trials against Nazi leaders. The first government of the October Revolution was headed by Juan José Arévalo, who had lived in exile in Argentina. He introduced as his political doctrine what he called “spiritual socialism.” With full support of political forces and the population at large, Arévalo widely promoted education, health programs, the Guatemalan Institute for Social Security, the Labor Code, and a first, modest agrarian reform using state land. Unfortunately, the shadows of the early Cold War were projected over this social and political experiment, and the most conservative forces, inside and outside the country, moved to undermine Arévalo’s tenure. Many military coup attempts were launched against him, and most of them counted on some degree of support from the United States, foreign enterprises and Guatemala’s oligarchy.5 In 1950, elections for the second government of the October Revolution took place. Conservative forces strongly campaigned against Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, suggesting that he represented the danger of “communism” in the country, and even for the entire American continent. Despite this opposition, Árbenz won significant support and, with overwhelming votes in his favor, he became president in 1951. Two government officials in the United States, the “Dulles brothers” (closely related to the United Fruit Company, a US-based banana monopoly in Guatemala), intensely opposed Árbenz’s projects, notably a road to link the shore and ports on the Atlantic Ocean with the rest of the country, a hydroelectric power plant, and eventually land reform. The CIA, headed by Alan Dulles, secretly started to undermine the Árbenz government from the very first day. John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State, undertook international overt and covert actions to isolate and ostracize Guatemala’s “Democratic Spring”. In silence and covert manoeuvres, a key component for counterrevolutionary actions against Guatemala was secrecy.6

Towards the US intervention in 1954 After months of secret destabilization campaigns, Washington moved to openly criticize Guatemala’s policies and isolate its government. President Eisenhower authorized the CIA Operation “P.B. Success” to overthrow Árbenz and “cleanse Guatemala of communism”.7 The rest of the story has been significantly documented, with details of all the actions undertaken by the US government to expel Árbenz, including a CIA-directed military

28  Raúl Molina Mejía invasion by mercenaries in June 1954. On June 27, Árbenz resigned, after he was promised by US representatives that the social conquests of the October Revolution would be left untouched. In early July, President Eisenhower and Vice-President Nixon praised the counterrevolution in Guatemala, claiming that it had been achieved by Guatemalans themselves. They asserted that the country would become “a window for democracy,” but a curtain of silence was imposed. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas became the head of state in Guatemala, and soon after his inauguration bodies were exhumed in many parts of the country, mainly of campesinos and workers. The new government blamed Árbenz’s security forces for these extrajudicial executions. In fact, those bodies were the first victims of the counterrevolution, while the gains of the October Revolution, particularly land reform, were dismantled. Silence was crucial for the regime, both in carrying out repression and in hiding resistance. Despite open persecution by the state (many supporters of the previous government were killed or jailed, and many others went into exile), Castillo Armas faced outbursts of opposition in Guatemala. On August 2, 1954, young cadets of the Military Academy (Escuela Politécnica) rebelled and forced the government to dismantle the anti-Árbenz “Liberation” army, composed of mercenaries and some campesinos (peasant farmers) recruited in the eastern part of the country.8 The student movement at San Carlos National University expressed its opposition to the regime and often demonstrated on the streets; it suffered a violent attack in downtown Guatemala City on June 25, 1956, that caused the death of five students.9 Despite an atmosphere of fear, students, workers and campesinos maintained their opposition. On July 26, 1957, Castillo Armas was killed in the National Palace in a “palace coup” led by high-ranking officers, and by 1958 Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, a former general from the Ubico dictatorship, became president. The new president allowed the training of Cubans opposed to Fidel Castro in Guatemala, and he soon developed a reputation as a corrupt ruler. Both trends, conspiracy against another country and deep corruption, depended on silence and disinformation from the media, which was obtained with money or threats. On November 13, 1960, however, young army officers rebelled against Ydígoras. The coup failed, and rebel officers with some troops fled to the Sierra de las Minas in Eastern Guatemala. They were under constant attack and persecution in operations not covered by the media, because silence continued to be the norm. The population at large knew nothing about these military events; the training of Cubans in Guatemala before the “Bay of Pigs” episode in Cuba was a well-kept secret.

Resilience of the revolutionary forces Events accelerated in Guatemala in 1962 in the wake of the forthcoming presidential elections, for which pro-democracy sectors were considering the candidacy of former President Arévalo. Half-term congressional elections

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 29 were rigged by the regime, and a student protest erupted in March to reject the fraudulent results. It soon became a popular uprising, with students, workers and middle-class sectors confronting the police and other security forces on the streets. The rebellion was later named “Jornadas de Marzo y Abril de 1962”, and it came to the point of demanding Ydígoras’ resignation.10 The president called the army to quell the protests, and university premises were militarily attacked. Several students were shot to death, and hundreds of protesters, mostly university students, were jailed and added to already existing “blacklists”. These events did not filter to the international media, despite the support of local radio and TV stations for the popular mobilizations. A number of people who participated in the rebellion, mainly from the Juentud Patriótica del Trabajo (JPT) communist youth,11 made the decision to join the rebel military officers in the mountains and formed the first guerrilla organization. These actions and the counteractions by the army were not known to the public; there were many rumors but no reliable information. Silence became more rigorous in March 1963, when the army overthrew Ydígoras and imposed a military government headed by Colonel Peralta Azurdia. All constitutional guarantees were suspended, including freedom of association (all political parties were prohibited) and freedom of the press. Institutional silence was deepened; for the three years of this military government, only previously censored information was permitted to be provided both nationally and internationally. Once again Guatemala became a secret US pilot project,12 this time centred on counterinsurgency operations. Some of the first forced disappearances in the continent took place in Guatemala City in March 1966, when twenty-eight people, most of them from PGT’s executive committee, were captured and killed, and their bodies disappeared.13 Guatemala was used again as a pilot plan in 1966, in the transition from the military government to a civilian government based on a new 1965 constitution, headed by a progressive lawyer, Julio César Méndez Montenegro. Before his inauguration, however, Méndez Montenegro was forced to sign a pact with the Army’s High Command accepting the military as the real power over fundamental issues, particularly the internal war against guerrilla organizations.14 During his tenure, with US advisors in the field, military actions increased their level of brutality, particularly in eastern Guatemala and later in some cities. Again, although the effects of this counterinsurgency campaign were clear, information and political analyses were censored, and political actions by the left were not tolerated. The experiment with a civilian government failed, and a new strategy was applied by the army. Essentially, former military ministers of defence became the “elected” presidents during the next three electoral periods: General Arana Osorio (1970–1974), General Kjell Laugerud (1974–1978), and General Romeo Lucas (1978–1982). Control by the military was complete, and massive repression became its main tool in the full application of US-designed National Security Doctrine.

30  Raúl Molina Mejía Society managed to reorganize itself at the beginning of the 1970s, and Social Democrats and Christian Democrats put together an important political force. A window in the wall of silence was opened with the earthquake of February 4, 1976, when more than 20,000 people died. The high death toll was due mainly to the country’s abject poverty. International solidarity came to the aid of Guatemala, and thousands of foreigners who provided aid and humanitarian efforts brought home stories about the terrible political conditions in the country. Guerrilla organizations were able to recover, regroup and reinvigorate themselves, once again showing their resilience. By the late 1970s, Guatemala was no longer the only revolutionary situation in Central America: the Sandinistas were in military action against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, and civil–military conflict was high in El Salvador.

Secrecy of the Left The Left in Guatemala also contributed to the culture of silence. It was a means of survival. The Communist Party (PGT) only existed as such between 1948, when it officially registered, and 1954, when it was banned by the government of Castillo Armas. After that, many of the leaders went into exile, and the party as such was immersed in clandestine work, organizing people mainly in labour unions, student associations and campesino groups. PGT members were persecuted constantly. They contributed to the Jornadas de Marzo y Abril de 1962 and to the creation of guerrilla organizations. After the military coup in 1963, as mentioned before, the PGT leadership was the target of the first forced disappearances. Their critical work was always carried out in hiding. When the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR), the first armed revolutionary organization,15 was forced out of the Sierra de las Minas in eastern Guatemala and moved to urban guerrilla warfare, a key component of its strategy was clandestine organizing and action. They were called by the population “los muchachos” (the kids); very few names of leaders and members were known, and the operation of “cell groups”, based on secrecy, was fundamental to their strategy and tactics.

Behind the wall of silence, the military breaks all possible barriers By 1978 all of the revolutionary organizations and the political and social Left were clear about the intentions of the state to increase repression. The state feared the electoral popular support for a coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Guatemala, as well as the potential for revolutionary change by Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Left in El Salvador. Guatemalans failed, however, to predict, let alone to confront, the massive repression that was unleashed by mid-year. On May 29, 1978,

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 31 campesinos who had been struggling in the defence of their lands in the Polochic River’s valley in Izabal were called to the municipality in Panzós. They were received with open fire, and more than one hundred people, including their leader, Mamá Maquín, were killed. This time there was outrage in the media, but it did not last more than a couple of days. The national university, San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC), and organizations of the popular movement organized a fact-finding commission to illuminate the truth about the event. Full responsibility was attributed to the army, but no official investigation was ever done.16 Dominant sectors in Guatemala—the military, US economic and political interests, and most of the oligarchy and the political class—gave General Romeo Lucas the mandate in July 1978 to behead the social movement, destroy the political opposition and annihilate the revolutionary organizations. In a country where repression had been a constant since 1954, acts of brutality visibly intensified in quantity and in harshness. In early October. General Lucas affirmed in an act at a military base that “the national university was a centre of subversion”, a serious threat against that institution. On October 20, 1978, at the end of a demonstration commemorating the October Revolution, a military-led operation in the central plaza of Guatemala City extrajudicially executed Oliverio Castañeda de León, the president and most important leader of the Association of University Students (AEU). Days later, on November 6, Antonio Ciani, AEU’s VicePresident, was abducted by a “death squad”, never to be seen again. In early 1979, the government stepped up repression by targeting the leaders of opposition political parties. On January 25, in front of the Military School, a military death squad killed Alberto Fuentes Mohr, leader of the PSD (Partido Socialista Democrático). Two months later, on March 22, Manuel Colom Argueta, former Mayor of Guatemala City and the leader of FUR (Frente Unido de la Revolución, also a social democratic party), was set up by army officers. After a chase on the streets, Colom Argueta and some of his bodyguards were killed by a commando squad. Soon after, many other social democratic leaders and some Christian Democrats were also persecuted; some of them were killed, and others went into hiding or exile. The political opposition was crushed. Because of this particular repression against legal political forces, a window of public denunciation opened in the permanent wall of silence. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights started to discuss the situation of human rights in Guatemala and issued resolutions of concern. Army operations were launched in the western part of Guatemala, particularly against indigenous peoples who were accused of being members of guerrilla organizations or sympathizers. Extrajudicial executions and torture in army barracks occurred, along with raids against organizations, communities and villages. By then four revolutionary organizations—the PGT, FAR, EGP and ORPA—were well consolidated, and others were attempting to struggle against the state. USAC, the national university,

32  Raúl Molina Mejía continued to come under constant attack, with dozens of students, professors, authorities and workers killed or disappeared during 1979. Events turned for the worse at the beginning of 1980. Campesinos from El Quiché travelled to Guatemala City to denounce atrocities being perpetrated by the army in their villages. They spoke of raids, torture, extrajudicial executions and massacres, and, accompanied by students and workers, they visited Congress and other institutions, including USAC. On January 31, they entered the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City to denounce internationally the harsh repression in El Quiché and break the silence. The group occupied the embassy, and soon police and other security agents surrounded its premises and put the place under siege. What followed is now known as the Massacre of the Spanish Embassy, one of the worst diplomatic incidents in world history. Under strict orders, the police attacked and fired at the building, despite the firm opposition clearly expressed by the Spanish Ambassador. The premises were set on fire by agents of the secret police, and thirty-seven people burned to death. Things got worse for USAC after the authorities of the university attended the massive burial of the victims of the Spanish Embassy. At the beginning of the funeral march, two student leaders were killed, and threats were a constant during the march and the burial. After three failed attempts against the life of USAC’s Rector in the following days, he was convinced to leave the country and travel to Costa Rica. A replacement was to be named by the University Superior Council. On July 14, 1980, as the Dean of the School of Engineering, I was appointed acting Rector for the rest of my term. That very same day, security forces entered the premises of USAC and started to fire on every person in sight. Eight students were killed, and we were forced to shut down the university for three days and look for society’s support everywhere, approaching the Catholic Church, other universities and Congress.

Massacres and genocide in the countryside After violent repression in the cities, which decimated the social and political movements with death squads and security forces acting in tandem, the armed forces spread to the countryside to what they called “areas of conflict,” destroying village after village. The CEH report produced in 1999 documented 626 massacres perpetrated by the army and its paramilitary forces. The same Commission, in its report titled Guatemala: Memory of Silence, clearly stated: “In consequence, the CEH concludes that agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people which lived in the four regions analysed.”17 However, the CEH was prevented by the Peace Accords from giving the names of those army officers and civilians responsible for genocide and other war crimes and crimes against humanity, and its findings were forbidden to be used in trials. These two clear limitations to this extraordinary report can be

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 33 called “mandatory silence.” Genocide started under Romeo Lucas, but it reached its peak under Ríos Montt. Although Ríos Montt was ousted in 1983, he never faced the consequences of his acts. He served as President of Congress from 2000 to 2003 and was a candidate for the presidency in 2004. Only twenty years later, Ríos Montt, the head of state accused of this crime against humanity in the CEH report, has been undergoing a trial, which has been systematically obstructed and delayed by the Right (Ríos Montt died in Guatemala on April 1, 2018, while under house arrest).

The revolutionary movement and the political opposition organize themselves and coalesce in 1982 Life for people in the revolutionary movement and many other progressive organizations became extremely difficult in the urban centres, as many combatants, militants and leftists were killed or disappeared. In the countryside, a constant military conflict existed between the government’s armed forces and guerrilla forces. The Sandinistas had triumphed in Nicaragua in July 1979, and the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN), an alliance of revolutionary organizations, had taken control of a significant portion of El Salvador in early 1980, leaning toward a revolutionary outcome. In January 1982, the URNG (Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca) was formed as an umbrella group for the four main revolutionary organizations. A month later, a broad coalition of opposition personalities in exile, Comité Guatemalteco de Unidad Patriótica (CGUP) was formed, and international unified work began. One of the main areas of the work was the denunciation of human rights violations, particularly within the bodies of the United Nations. The international curtain of silence had to be lifted. At the session of the United Nations General Assembly from September to December 1982, a small team of Guatemalans presented the situation of human rights to state delegates attending the General Assembly’s Third Committee, asking for the adoption of a resolution on Guatemala. The team, later known as RUOG (Representación Unitaria de la Oposición Guatemalteca),18 acted to break the silence regarding Guatemala. RUOG was forced to overcome manoeuvres by the US delegation to defend the Guatemalan government, by then headed by Ríos Montt. This experience illustrated that the curtain of silence was actively aided and abetted by the United States, especially under Ronald Reagan, who personally defended Guatemala’s dictator. Massacres were being reported in various areas of the country, but they were obscured or totally ignored by the international media. RUOG was informed that a massacre was to take place in the department of Chimaltenango, less than one hundred kilometres away from the capital city, and it approached delegates from European nations to ask them to express their concern. They did so, and the massacre did not take place, but those delegates were not totally convinced about the denunciation that had been made.

34  Raúl Molina Mejía When the United Nations Commission on Human Rights met in Geneva, in February of 1983, RUOG attended the session to ask for a specific resolution condemning gross violations of human rights. The US delegation strongly opposed that request. RUOG was informed again that Ríos Montt’s government was going to execute six people accused of belonging to insurgent organizations and condemned to death by “secret tribunals”. RUOG informed European delegates of the situation, but this time they were not as receptive. They had been assured by the Guatemalan Ambassador that such an event would never occur. There was no action by the Commission to prevent the execution, and a few days later, on March 3, the six persons were shot. Only then, with the full support of European and other delegations, was a strong resolution adopted by the Commission, appointing a Special Rapporteur for Guatemala and opening a period of fifteen years during which the situation of human rights would be critically addressed.

Ríos Montt’s tenure was a key element of US strategy for Guatemala A group of officers, both senior and junior, overthrew President Lucas García on March 23, 1982, and nullified the recently finished electoral process in which General Aníbal Guevara, the previous minister of defence, had obtained more votes. Ríos Montt was asked to be a member of a three-member military junta in late March. Soon after, he became head of state and was recognized as such by Ronald Reagan. The strategy was to give a new face to the government, with the appearance of popular support, while at the same time all military operations and repression against civilians increased. Again, Guatemala was a pilot plan for counter-insurgency operations and strategies based on the profound racism and conservatism in traditional ruling elites and sectors of the middle class. All political parties were once again suspended, and the 1965 constitution was overruled. Military decrees replaced congressional laws, secret tribunals were established to condemn those suspected of “subversion” and anonymous judges sentenced persons to death in unfair trials, and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns based on massacres of indigenous peoples in the countryside reached the level of genocide. At the same time, Ríos Montt was presented by Guatemalan propaganda as a born-again Christian, and the US government showed full support for him and his armed forces, both in the country and in international fora. News about his brutal methods reached the international community, however, and the work of the Guatemalan Opposition intensified within UN bodies and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The URNG suffered setbacks during this offensive and was forced to dedicate efforts to aiding peasants who were expelled from their communities by the military campaigns (one million displaced people), many of whom were seeking refuge in neighboring countries, particularly in Mexico (200,000 refugees), or fleeing to the mountains and other towns. Resembling

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 35 the tactics that were used by the United States in Vietnam, “model villages” were established by the armed forces to control and “re-educate” captured displaced people. A nation-wide system of so-called “self-defence civilian patrols” (patrullas de autodefensa civil, PACs) was put in place, with one million males, 14 to 61 years old, forced to serve under the army as paramilitary forces. Most of them were people in charge of controlling and surveilling their territories and populations, but some participated, voluntarily or forcibly, in massacres and other acts of repression by the army. Thanks to disinformation campaigns supported by the United States, most of these actions were presented as self-defence and protective measures, while the goal of halting the revolutionary movement was achieved based on attacking the civilian population, with genocide, scorched-earth campaigns and widespread violations of human rights.

Another component of the Strategy: A Civilian Government in 1986 The strategy applied at all levels by the armed forces included (in addition to its military components) total control of the population—e.g. “model villages” and PACs—and total control of all resources, particularly food, in vast areas of the country, as well as control of the future political system. This was an application of the US-sponsored National Security Doctrine designed for the western hemisphere. Ríos Montt was ousted by a military coup planned on a US battleship and carried out days later by his Minister of Defence, General Mejía Víctores, in August 1983. Once control over the country reached a high level of domination by armed and security forces, the United States favored what was called a “transition to democracy” and a new political system. A new electoral law allowed the formation of political parties, a new constitution was adopted in 1985, and elections took place with civilian candidates for the presidency. Vinicio Cerezo, a Christian Democrat, won the Guatemalan elections and became president (1986–1990). Although he obtained the presidency with significant support from the electorate, Cerezo recognized and accepted that political power remained in military hands. The army continued its military operations against the URNG, as well as its repression of civilians suspected of having links to the revolutionary movement.

The peace-seeking negotiations process and the signature of the Peace Accords By 1986 Central America was on the verge of becoming a “new Vietnam.” The US army had militarized Honduras, and the “Contra” war had been unleashed against the government and people of Nicaragua. US military aid to the Salvadoran armed forces had reached the highest levels to date, and through machinations of all sorts the FMLN was being portrayed as a

36  Raúl Molina Mejía branch of the Sandinista Revolution. At this point, Guatemalan President Cerezo convened two important meetings: Esquipulas I in 1986, and Esquipulas II in 1987. The Esquipulas II Accords of January 1987 were signed by the five presidents of Central America. The Accords deactivated generalized war, abetted by the Reagan Administration, and opened the door for negotiations to end the internal armed conflicts. Armed forces in Guatemala supported the role played by President Cerezo but forbade him from entering any peace-seeking negotiations process with the URNG. Only in 1990 was the National Reconciliation Commission of Guatemala, headed by Archbishop Quezada Toruño and Bishop Juan Gerardi, able to mediate talks between significant sectors of Guatemalan society and the URNG. In 1991 Jorge Serrano took office as a newly elected civilian, and a peace-seeking negotiations process was accepted by the dominant sectors in Guatemala. The internal armed conflict reached a stalemate in which neither side could win. With the end of the Cold War, a new international situation emerged. In parallel to the ongoing negotiations process in El Salvador, the United Nations was asked to moderate the negotiations between the government of Guatemala and the URNG. There were ups and downs in this process. Serrano entered the negotiations with the idea of providing “an honourable way out” to the URNG. He failed in his attempt to defeat the URNG politically and was ousted in 1993 after his self-coup to try to establish a dictatorship. Citizen resistance to the coup was supported by international actors, including the Clinton Administration, and Serrano was exiled to Panama. Ramiro de Leon Carpio, then the national human rights ombudsman was called upon to replace Serrano, and during his short tenure he advanced the peace process to an irreversible stage. However, it was Álvaro Arzú, elected president in 1995, who committed himself to end the process in his first year in government. The Firm and Lasting Peace Accord was signed on December 29, 1996.

Silence and impunity Both in El Salvador (1992) and Guatemala (1996), the Peace Accords included a very important component for the defence, protection and promotion of human rights: Truth Commissions. In El Salvador, the Truth Commission was mandated to establish the truth about the most notorious violations perpetrated by the state as well as by the FMLN, mostly focused on the violence exerted by armed and security forces, which included the assassination of Bishop Óscar Romero, the killing of four US nuns, the assassination of Jesuit priests and their assistants, and massacres such as “El Mozote.” A special arrangement was set up to clearly identify officers of the army to be separated from the institution because of their involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity; a list of more than one hundred officers was provided to the Salvadoran government.

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 37 When the political actors in the Guatemala process discussed the question of a Truth Commission, there were three significant conditions imposed by the army. First, the name could not mention “truth” at all, so as to avoid comparison with El Salvador’s commission and commissions already established in some South American countries. It was called instead the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH). Second, no individual names of persons responsible for violations of human rights were to be revealed; the detailed findings of the Commission were to be kept guarded by the United Nations without public knowledge for fifty years. The army preferred to shield its members from individual legal consequences even if it was to be blamed as an institution. Third, any information obtained from the Commission’s report could not be used in judicial trials. The URNG was criticized by human rights defenders for having accepted these two last constraints. However, it should be mentioned that the URNG rejected any blanket penal amnesty for army officers, as had occurred in El Salvador, and sustained that no impunity should be granted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Because of the two limitations on the CEH, the Catholic Church, through its Historical Memory Project, started its own investigations of violations of human rights during the internal armed conflict before the specific UN-supported Peace Accord was set in motion in 1997. Its results were published in a report called Nunca Más (Never Again), which was made public on April 24, 1998. Two days later, Bishop Gerardi, the coordinator of this project, was brutally murdered in his home on the premises of the San Sebastián church, shocking the population and the world and intimidating relatives of victims. The investigation of this murder by governmental officials, which eventually led to trials for complicity against army members, was obscured and affected by all sorts of obstacles, including a disinformation campaign orchestrated with some foreign “experts”.19 Finally three people involved with the crime were sentenced to serve long prison terms, but they have never revealed who the intellectual and material assassins were. In 1999, the devastating report Guatemala: Memory of Silence was finally presented to all Guatemalans, clearly upsetting President Arzú and the army’s High Command. A set of recommendations contained in the volume of “Conclusions and Recommendations” provided a path to continue searching for truth, establishing national historical memory and seeking justice and reparation, as the only viable path for reconciliation and peace. Needless to say, those recommendations have been ignored by the successive governments of Álvaro Arzú, Alfonso Portillo, Óscar Berger, Álvaro Colom, Otto Pérez and Jimmy Morales.

Impunity leads to criminal violence and widespread corruption The army’s main goal has been, during and after the conflict, to guarantee impunity for its crimes. As long as officers and other personnel were not held accountable for their crimes, they could perpetrate all sorts of gross

38  Raúl Molina Mejía violations of human rights, including crimes against humanity and war crimes, such as genocide, massacres, torture and forced disappearances. A study on impunity in Guatemala20 showed that powerful sectors have used legal and extralegal actions to make the country a paradise for criminals (99% of assassinations have never reached a sentence). Genocide, with more than 626 massacres, was based on the two pillars of racism 21 and impunity.22 The justifications for this behaviour were the same as those used before in South America: members of the army were defending the Fatherland, they were following orders, and “some excesses” always take place in situations of war. The army counted on the silence and support of armed and security forces all over the country. The High Command and military intelligence had established a policy of brutal involvement for every single officer of the army and for many members of civilian patrols, as well as death threats against any single person willing to provide information. Contrary to situations in other countries, no high-ranking officer in Guatemala has dared to inform about any of the acts of state terrorism.23 All army archives were “officially disappeared” even before the CEH asked to be able to consult them. To guarantee total impunity, acts of terror have continued to take place, such as the assassination of Bishop Gerardi and lynchings and attacks against foreigners and indigenous communities. The judicial system was infiltrated at all levels, beginning with the Attorney General’s Office, which is in charge of investigations, and courts and tribunals. Even the five-member Constitutional Court has served to secure impunity, ruling to prevent extraditions or allowing people accused of serious war-related crimes to remain free. Many officers of the army made the transition to civilian operations. With their pensions after retiring, they were able to establish agencies to provide protection and security services. Many established links during the internal armed conflict with drug cartels and CIA narcotics operations to support the Contras secretly in Nicaragua and Honduras; every airfield and radar station was under the army’s control, as well as strategic border points. Officers were trained in clandestine operations, and soon they provided their skills to organized crime. Not only has drug-trafficking expanded, becoming one of the scourges in Central America and the Caribbean, but other crimes, such as human-trafficking, extortion and assassinations, have also multiplied. Barons of organized crime demanded impunity, and with it they acquired unlimited power and silent obedience. Sectors of society came to the conclusion that such impunity was the result of exercising the power of violence. Significant numbers of the youth of Central America, with no access to study or jobs, have found that by joining gangs they also may make a living and gain power. Thus, organized crime and delinquency today have created the conditions for the remilitarization of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Impunity has led to another phenomenon, which is causing deeper levels of poverty as well as thousands of related deaths: corruption. Corruption

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 39 was a trademark of the transition to civilian government in 1986. Vinicio Cerezo saw his presidential power limited by the armed forces, but he and his governmental officials nevertheless enjoyed abundant privileges. His vice-president was blamed for expanding drug-trafficking in the country, an accusation that blocked his own presidential aspirations. Jorge Serrano, overthrown and exiled in Panama in 1993, has been subject to an unsuccessful extradition process for taking more than USD 100 million with him. Suspicions about Álvaro Arzú are being investigated, but his period as president and several periods as Mayor of Guatemala City have seen many of his close friends greatly enrich themselves. Alfonso Portillo, president from 2003 to 2007, served a sentence in a US jail for drug-related crimes, and he has been accused of stealing millions of dollars from the National Treasury. Although no accusations exist directly against Óscar Berger (2008–2011), there were signs of widespread corruption during his term as well, and less and less money for the poor. Álvaro Colom established programs for the poor, but his wife at the time, Sandra Torres, was accused of using many of those resources for her unsuccessful run for the presidency. Other members of their party, Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza, were deeply involved in cases of corruption, but in-depth investigations are just beginning. The worst case of corruption was the government led by Otto Pérez and Roxana Baldetti, with the full support of dozens of officials from their party, Partido Patriota, as well as current and former army officers. Hundreds of millions of dollars were extracted from state funds, causing the collapse of the health and education systems and allowing Guatemala’s poverty to increase 10% from ten years before. Citizens reacted in April 2015, when, in addition to evident acts of corruption, Vice-President Baldetti’s arrogant and disrespectful behaviour outraged her critics. Mass mobilizations in the Central Plaza and many other parts of the country demanded her resignation, which came in early May, and The International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), supported by the US President Obama’s administration and other international actors and finally tolerated by the private sector, strongly supported the Attorney General’s Office’s investigation of what the US State Department called “widespread corruption” in its 2015 report on Guatemala. It took constant mobilization over the course of twenty consecutive weeks to force the private sector and the United States to withdraw their support for Otto Pérez. Just a few days before elections were supposed to take place, Pérez resigned in early September. Although significant sectors of the movement for dignity asked for the postponement of the elections to amend the electoral law, both the private sector and the US Embassy, with the support of some local institutions, maintained the original date. The electoral process continued and ended with the election of current-president Jimmy Morales, who took office in January 2016, and a “new Congress” with more than half of its members re-elected from the previous discredited legislature.

40  Raúl Molina Mejía

A necessary epilogue and some conclusions Guatemala’s political class has lost its legitimacy and credibility, and all institutions face strong criticisms for allowing rampant abuse, fraud and robbery, with the exception of the Attorney General’s Office, which, with the full support of CICIG, continues its investigations of corruption and other crimes. Week after week since 2015, their joint findings report more and more corruption, both public and private. President Morales was originally given the benefit of the doubt after he had claimed to be committed to ending corruption. However, his image was soon tarnished by accepting representatives in his official party (FCN-Nación) who had been elected for other parties and migrated, and for accusations against his son and his brother of having committed fraud in a transaction that took place after his election. At the end of his first year, Morales was being questioned by different sectors of society, while his party used corrupt practices to dominate Congress and control the executive power. Taking advantage of the new government in the United States under Donald Trump, corrupt politicians in Morales’ environment have moved to try to block anti-corruption and anti-impunity efforts. Morales himself drove an unsuccessful effort to end the mandate of Ivan Velásquez, Head of CICIG, which led to a political crisis in April 2017. The crisis is still present in 2018, and the short-term future is unpredictable. It is evident that a struggle goes on between an “alliance of corrupt officials” on one side and sectors demanding a cleansing of the political system and transformation of the state on the other side. However, no one knows which coalition of forces will prevail. As in the past six decades, secrecy, undercover actions, lies and disinformation are the characteristics of the current regime, and, once again, the US government and its agencies provide a blanket of impunity for those people in power. What conclusions can we reach after this analysis of events? First, secrecy has been a fundamental tool for obtaining impunity for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Twenty years after the signature of the Peace Accords, the army has not provided its files, pretending that they do not exist, although some important documents have been leaked to human rights defenders. Those who have enjoyed impunity remain in positions of political, economic, social and military power. There has been a wall of silence regarding state terrorism that occurred from 1954 to 1996. Some holes in this wall of silence were opened by human rights defenders, particularly by the work of RUOG and other organizations at the United Nations fora and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights from 1979 to 1996. This effort was essential in building solidarity from peoples and nations around the world, as well as in obtaining support for the UN-mediated peace-seeking process that led to the signature of the Firm and Lasting Peace Accord. A significant event was the Nobel Peace Award given to Rigoberta Menchú Tum in 1992, as well as other international prizes for peace and human rights granted to other leaders

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 41 of the Guatemalan opposition. The international community should again pay attention to events in Guatemala. The United Nations could translate Guatemala: Memory of Silence into its other four official languages, and all its bodies and associated agencies should include genocide in Guatemala in all its documents about genocide. After the signature of the Firm and Lasting Peace Accord on December 29, 1996, two reports broke the silence related to the terror lived by the people of Guatemala during the internal armed conflict: the report Nunca Más by the Historical Memory Project of the Catholic Church in 1998, and the standard-setting report Guatemala: Memory of Silence in 1999. In addition to the presentation of facts, analysis and conclusions, this report produced a set of recommendations to continue the struggle to establish truth, memory, justice, and moral and material reparation for the victims of the conflict. Unfortunately, each of the administrations since the signature of the Peace Accords—Álvaro Arzú, Alfonso Portillo, Óscar Berger, Álvaro Colom, Otto Pérez, and Jimmy Morales—have ignored these recommendations and have failed to implement the measures the country badly needs. In general, the Firm and Lasting Peace Accord, which generated national and international expectations, was not fulfilled, and the CEH Recommendations, which were one of the Accord’s key components, were never implemented. In this sense, a new blanket of silence has been drawn over new generations who did not live through the tragic decades of conflict, generating an environment of impunity and immunity. The dominant sectors act to “turn the page of history” and forget, while those in the resistance struggle to carry on an ethical revolution. Only this ethical revolution can restore the values of truth, memory, justice and reparation, a goal still distant for the Guatemalan people.

Notes 1. The three official members of the Commission included two Guatemalans, Otilia Lux de Cotí and Alfredo Balsells Tojo, and Christian Tomuschat, from Germany, as its Coordinator (https://archive.org/details/357870-guatemalamemory-of-silence-the-commission-for). Accessed 3 February 2018. 2. The Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) was created based on the Firm and Lasting Peace Accord of 1996. It named its report “Memory of Silence.” 3. Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). 4. The term was introduced by the Guatemalan writer Luis Cardoza y Aragón, who was exiled in Mexico after 1954. 5. Documented in Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit, The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York: Garden City, 1982). 6. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala. 7. Kinzer and Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit. 8. Carlos Enrique Wer, En Guatemala los héroes tienen 15 años, (Guatemala: Armar Editores, 2009).

42  Raúl Molina Mejía 9. María de los Angeles Aguilar Velásquez, paper for the University of Texas at Austin, May 2009, “From Saboteurs to Communists: University Student Movement and Police Repression in Guatemala” 10. An account of events was published by the National University fifty years later: Méndez, Factor, Comp. 50 años Jornadas Patrióticas de Marzo y Abril de 1962, Guatemala, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Sede Guatemala, Dirección General de Extensión Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 2012. 11. The JPT was the organized youth of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT), Guatemala’s Communist party. 12. Susanne Jonas Bodenheimer, Guatemala: plan piloto para el continente, San José: Educa, 1981. 13. National Security Archive reports (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ NSAEBB11/docs/). Accessed 17 April 2017: “March 1966, Central Intelligence Agency, Secret cable. The CIA Station in Guatemala City reports the secret execution of several Guatemalan “communists and terrorists” by Guatemalan authorities on the night of March 6, 1966. The victims—the leader of the Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajadores (PGT), Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, among them— are several of the more than two dozen PGT members and associates abducted, tortured and killed by Guatemalan security forces in March of 1966. The incident became famous as the first case of forced mass ‘disappearance’ in Guatemala’s history.” This information was never provided to the Guatemalan population. 14. Clemente Marroquín Rojas, Méndez’s Vice-President, published the details of the Pact many years later. 15. FAR started in 1962. Years later, other guerrilla organizations were formed. In 1982, FAR, PGT, Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) and Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA) formed the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG). 16. As a member of the fact-finding commission, I can testify that several of its members were later murdered or disappeared by security forces. 17. CEH, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, (Guatemala, 1999), par. 122. (https://archive.org/stream/357870-guatemala-memory-of-silence-thecommission-for#page/n35/mode/2up). Accessed 3 February 2018. 18. Members of RUOG were Rigoberta Menchú Tum, before she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, Rolando Castillo Montalvo, former Dean of the School of Medicine, Frank La Rue and Marta Gloria Torres, both labour lawyers, and myself, Raúl Molina Mejía, former Dean of the School of Engineering and acting Rector of USAC. The work started in 1982 and ended in 1998, two years after the signature of the Peace Accords. 19. Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? (London: Atlantic Books Ltd, 2010). 20. J. Patrice McSherry and Raúl Molina Mejía, “Confronting the Question of Justice in Guatemala,” Social Justice 26, no. 4 (1992): 1–12. 21. CEH report: “33. Through its investigation, the CEH also concludes that the undeniable existence of racism expressed repeatedly by the State as a doctrine of superiority, is a basic explanatory factor for the indiscriminate nature and particular brutality with which military operations were carried out against hundreds of Mayan communities in the west and north-west of the country, especially between 1981 and 1983 when more than half the massacres and scorched earth operations occurred.” 22. CEH report: “56. The justice system, nonexistent in large areas of the country before the armed confrontation, was further weakened when the judicial branch submitted to the requirements of the dominant national security model. The CEH concludes that, by tolerating or participating directly in

Silence as the cornerstone of impunity 43 impunity, which concealed the most fundamental violations of human rights, the judiciary became functionally inoperative with respect to its role of protecting the individual from the State and lost all credibility as guarantor of an effective legal system. This allowed impunity to become one of the most important mechanisms for generating and maintaining a climate of terror.” CEH, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, (Guatemala, 1999), par. 122. (https://archive. org/stream/357870-guatemala-memory-of-silence-the-commission-for#page/ n35/mode/2up) Accessed 02/03/18. 23. Only recently, in 2017, a former army officer published a book in which he admits the army was responsible of “violations of human rights.” See Edgar Rubio Castañeda, Desde el Cuartel: Otra visión de Guatemala (Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2017). The army has attempted to take him to a martial court for treason.

Bibliography Aguilar Velásquez, María de los Ángeles. “From Saboteurs to Communists: University Student Movement and Police Repression in Guatemala.” Paper for the University of Texas at Austin, May 2009. Goldman, Francisco. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? London: Atlantic Books Ltd, 2010. Historical Clarification Commission (CEH). Guatemala: Memory of Silence. Guatemala, 1999 (https://archive.org/stream/357870-guatemala-memory-of-­silencethe-commission-for#page/n35/mode/2up). Accessed 3 February 2018. Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Jonas Bodenheimer, Susanne. Guatemala: plan piloto para el continente. San José: Educa, 1981. Kinzer, Stephen, and Schlesinger, Stephen. Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. New York: Garden City, 1982. McSherry, J. Patrice, and Raúl Molina Mejía. “Confronting the Question of Justice in Guatemala,” Social Justice (1992): 1–12. Méndez, Factor, Comp. 50 Años Jornadas Patrióticas de Marzo y Abril de 1962. Guatemala: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Sede Guatemala, Dirección General de Extensión Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 2012. Rubio Castañeda, Edgar. Desde el Cuartel: Otra visión de Guatemala. Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2017. Wer, Carlos Enrique. En Guatemala los héroes tienen 15 años. Guatemala: Armar Editores, 2009.

3

Constructing silence, terror, and dread Operation Condor and state terror in Latin America J. Patrice McSherry

You must watch their eyes. No one will talk. You must try and see what they may be trying to tell you with their eyes . . . . If you go [to the countryside] . . . the thing that will most move you is the silence. They will not talk to you because talk would mean risking their very lives, and the people are already terrorized and prefer not to talk. — Statement by a priest in Guatemala to Amnesty International, 19851 During the years of state terror in Latin America, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s, the creation of silence, fear, and dread in politically active communities and in whole societies was a key strategy of the Latin American military regimes, an integral component of the violence and repression itself. Fear and silence were fostered to dominate rebellious social classes (i.e. internal enemies), extinguish their hopes and dreams for social justice, and impose social and political control. Under Operation Condor, a covert system among six South American military regimes in the 1970s, the dirty war campaigns were extended across borders, targeting exiles around the world to silence them. The use of fear and terror was a central element of counter-insurgency doctrine. Psychological warfare (PSYWAR or PSYOPS) involves operations to disorient, disrupt, terrorize and disarticulate target populations.2 In this chapter I briefly review the doctrine and practice of counter-­ insurgency as a crucial context within which to understand the creation of silences and terror. I analyse the fomenting of silence and dread in South American societies as a counter-insurgency strategy aimed at securing political, military and economic interests and social control by quashing all manner of social and political opposition “from below”. To achieve this, the Latin American national security states set up and used what I have termed “the parallel state”, a clandestine parastatal system of structures and organizations to carry out both massive and selective violence while preserving “plausible deniability” and the appearance of legitimacy for the state. I present my concept of the parallel state as a means of understanding the centrality of silences as an objective of state terror, touching upon some specific South American cases and Operation Condor. Finally, I draw some

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 45 conclusions about the long-term repercussions of silence, terror and dread in Latin American societies, and I briefly address the role of impunity for human rights crimes as a key manifestation and extension of the silence imposed by regimes of state terror.

Historical context After World War II, Latin American elites and militaries in many countries were faced with rising popular and radical movements demanding social equality and justice, land reform, decent housing, social rights, education reform, political inclusion, an end to police brutality and repression, control of resources and national development, among other claims. The Guatemalan experiment with land reform under nationalist President Jacobo Árbenz (1951–1954)3 and then the Cuban revolution of 1959 awakened strong reactions in the region, the most unequal in the world in terms of distribution of wealth. The Cuban victory over a US-backed dictator was seen by many as a popular triumph in a David vs. Goliath struggle, inspiring politicized workers, peasants, students and intellectuals in the region. At the same time, it prompted fears of a deadly threat among powerful social classes and armed forces. The US government, which had deepened its political and economic influence throughout Latin American and the world after World War II, likewise saw the Cuban revolution and most nationalist, populist and revolutionary movements as signs of communist subversion managed by Moscow, and as threats to its interests. Imbued by fierce Cold War anti-Communism,4 the United States undertook destabilization operations and regime change throughout the Americas and the world in the 1950s and beyond, usually carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A number of national security policies were implemented after the Cuban revolution, including, among others, National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) no. 114 of November 22, 1961 (“Training for Friendly Police and Armed Forces in Counter-Insurgency, Counter-Subversion, Riot Control and Related Matters”); NSAM no. 132 of February 19, 1962 (“Support of Local Police Forces for Internal Security and Counter-Insurgency Purposes);” and NSAM no. 146 of April 20, 1962 (“Improvement of Police Training and Equipment in Newly Emerging Countries”).5 Even earlier, beginning in the 1940s, the United States and Allied commands had created and financed secret paramilitary armies in Europe, and later in Asia and Latin America, to advance the anti-Communist cause.6 A series of coups or attempted coups took place in Latin America beginning in the 1950s, including the overthrow of Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, the attempt at counterrevolution in Cuba in 1961 (the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles, directed by the CIA), the coup against nationalist President João Goulart in Brazil in 1964, among many others, supported overtly or covertly by the US government. The national security doctrine of

46  J. Patrice McSherry the period, disseminated in inter-American security structures such as the US Army School of the Americas in Panama, espoused that Latin America was under threat from “internal enemies” and subversives, and that brutal, extralegal means to crush them were necessary and legitimate. After coups in Bolivia (1971), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976), most of South America was ruled by repressive national security states. They targeted popular movements, peasant and labour leaders, unionists, priests and nuns, students and teachers—anyone who seemed sympathetic to the social movements or critical of the militaries or of traditional social hierarchies. The result was a wave of massive human rights atrocities across the continent. Operation Condor was a cross-border system of repression that allowed South American regimes to expand their campaigns of terror beyond their own territories. This transnational apparatus was created in the early 1970s by military intelligence commanders in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay (soon joined by Brazil and later, in less central roles, Ecuador and Peru). The top-secret system was institutionalized and code-named Operation Condor in 1975, but the unnamed prototype began operating earlier, probably in 1973 and certainly in 1974, disappearing, torturing and murdering persons exiled in neighboring countries, Europe and the United States. Operation Condor specifically targeted exiles: activists and opposition leaders who had fled their own countries after military coups. Through this system, combined multinational teams of military and police personnel (and sometimes civilian agents), operating covertly, pursued exiles or refugees who had escaped their own dictatorships in order to disappear, torture, illegally transfer them across borders (later known as “rendition”) and extrajudicially execute them. Condor also had an assassination capability (“Phase III”), and operatives murdered a number of high-profile leaders in Latin America, Europe and the United States. The aim was to silence leaders who had the potential to rally world opinion and organize opposition to the dictatorships. One such Condor operation resulted in the assassinations of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier and his US aide, Ronni Moffitt, in a car bombing in Washington DC in 1976. Agents of the Chilean Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) coordinated with right-wing Cubans in the United States to carry out this crime. Another Condor operation, targeting Chilean Christian Democrat leader and former minister Bernardo Leighton and his wife Anita Fresno in Rome in 1975, did not succeed in murdering them, but both were gravely wounded in a shooting carried out by Italian fascists “contracted” by DINA agents. Leighton suffered brain damage and his wife became a paraplegic. They withdrew from active opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship. The aim of Operation Condor, to silence its political enemies and create terror and dread, had been achieved. Declassified documents have shown that the US government was not only well aware of Operation Condor but also helped establish, and secretly provided intelligence, organizational, and financial sustenance to

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 47 its central organizations, such as La Dirección Nacional de Asuntos Técnicos (La Técnica) in Paraguay, Dirección Nacional de Información e Inteligencia (DNII) in Uruguay and DINA in Chile—among others—all set up with CIA assistance.7 Although much still remains hidden, accumulated evidence suggests that top US leaders and national security officials considered Condor to be an effective weapon in the hemispheric anti-Communist crusade. Components of the US executive branch of government, i.e. the State Department, the Defense Department and the CIA, were not only closely informed of Condor operations but also actively collaborated with some of Condor’s hunts for exiled political activists. Moreover, the US government put its powerful telecommunications channel at its Panama base—its secure system for inter-American military and intelligence interchanges—at the disposal of Operation Condor to coordinate its covert operations. This is the most concrete evidence thus far of the United States’ secret role in Operation Condor.8

Counter-insurgency warfare The national security states and Operation Condor emerged in the context of a new form of warfare in world history: counter-insurgency. I have argued that this new form of warfare transformed the nature of state and society, just as conventional “industrial” warfare had done in the early twentieth century. Omer Bartov defines industrial killing, which first emerged in World War I, as “the mechanized, impersonal, and sustained mass destruction of human beings, organized and sustained by states”.9 Modern industrial warfare, he asserts, resulted in the expansion of the state and its penetration of society.10 Counter-insurgency war, which is conducted in the shadows using paramilitary forces and secret armies operating outside lawful state action, greatly deepened this penetration and control of society through its explicit targeting of the civilian population rather than an opposing army. Counterinsurgency warfare restructured state and society in profound ways. People were subjected to state surveillance, intimidation and forced incorporation into pro-government groups. Loyalty to the state was compulsory, no matter how repressive that state was; to remain neutral was considered an incipient sign of subversion. Intrinsically linked to the counter-insurgents’ reshaping of the polity was their creation and mobilization of a parallel or shadow state apparatus, engineered to implement and augment the state’s repressive power over society. This parallel apparatus was created to carry out covert or secret policies, to avoid legal constraints and to circumvent any form of accountability. Operation Condor as a transnational state terror system was a product of counter-insurgency doctrine and training, a cross-border component of the parallel state created by the military regimes. The emphasis on counter-insurgent political action represented a major change in US military doctrine and mission, and it had profound effects

48  J. Patrice McSherry in Latin America. Counter-insurgency doctrine advocated (1) the organization and use of closely controlled indigenous paramilitary and irregular forces, networks of informants, and other civilian auxiliaries as “force multipliers” and intelligence gatherers; (2) the expansion of state intelligence organizations to monitor and control society; (3) the use of political and ideological criteria to determine friendly and hostile sectors of society; (4) the use of terror (later called “counter-terror”) to control society and eliminate opposition leaders; and (5) the use of psychological warfare (PSYWAR) to manipulate the political climate and prepare a population for violence through black propaganda and the use of fear. The reorganization of the state to implement these objectives profoundly altered government’s relationship with its citizens and deeply transformed both society and the state itself. Rather than serving its citizens, as in the modern Western model, government became a predatory force that instilled fear, confusion, and disorientation among them. Moreover, covert action and the use of paramilitary groups, both of which are central to counter-insurgency warfare, constituted what Human Rights Watch once called “a strategy of impunity.” Militaries carried out dirty wars and terrorist acts, while officials— often with the complicity of the US government—were able to deny them. Counter-insurgency warfare in its modern form is often identified with the French military, which developed new methods to fight anticolonial insurgencies and independence movements in Indochina and Algeria in the 1940s and 1950s. Military strategists defined counter-insurgency warfare as “low-intensity warfare”, below the threshold of conventional war and employing specially trained commando units. The aim of counter-insurgency forces was to defeat guerrilla insurgencies and their supporters who were seeking to change the political system, and to deter social unrest through political, ideological, economic, social, psychological as well as military means. The French emphasized that insurgency was political and ideological, not just military, in nature. As French expert Bernard Fall put it, “Revolutionary warfare equals guerrilla warfare plus political action”,11 and to defeat guerrilla movements, counter-insurgent militaries needed to confront them in the political and ideological realms. The counter-­ insurgents aimed to forcibly assert government control over the population, using irregular or paramilitary forces in conjunction with military units. Moreover, counter-insurgency war was dirty war. French theorist David Galula argued, “If the counter-insurgent wishes to bring a quicker end to the war, he must discard some of the legal concepts that would be applicable to ordinary conditions”.12 In Latin America, counter-insurgency warfare spawned death squads in a number of countries where none had existed before, and they were linked to US police-training programs in the region. Research done by the North American Congress on Latin America in 1974 showed that “the countries with the most active para-police assassination squads—Brazil, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay—[were] also the recipients of the

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 49 largest US police-training grants in the region”.13 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman showed that in Latin America, all ten states in which death squads had appeared in the 1970s were tightly linked to US military aid and training programs. In addition, 74% of the other states in the world that used torture on a regular basis were clients of the US government.14 A 1981 report by political scientist Lars Schoultz demonstrated that, during the 1970s, US aid tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments that tortured their citizens. Three of the six most repressive states, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay—all Condor members—received 69% of the total military aid to Latin America in 1975. Schoultz’s quantitative survey showed that five of the six Condor countries were the most repressive in the region, and they were among the top recipients of US military and economic aid in 1975–1976. Schoultz concluded that US aid was distributed disproportionately to countries with repressive governments, and that this represented not just a few isolated cases but a clear pattern.15 The impact of state terror upon individuals and societies cannot be overstated. One author, who explores the case of Chile via “drama therapy,” explains: “Political terror and political violence constitute a purposeful effort to annihilate and destroy the most fundamental foundations of self-structure and self-experience. The shattering effects of political violence on the self refers to a process of disintegration or dismemberment where the ability to construct meaning, to maintain selfhood and maintain a connection with others, is lost . . . . [Dorfman’s character seeks] to break the silence of the trauma . . .”.16 Another author and artist, the daughter of a Chilean who was detained, tortured and exiled during the Pinochet dictatorship, writes that social silence on torture and its aftermath creates a damaging sense of isolation, shame and stigmatization among torture victims, who are thus re-traumatized. Persons who were political and social activists struggling for a more egalitarian society are erased; by not finding a place in the official historical memory, these people become a marginalized subculture.17 That is, the aim of torture and state terror is to silence its victims, destroy their identities and their connections to social movements, and render them politically paralyzed. In his classic study, E. V. Walter analysed why states turn to terrorist methods when faced with perceived threats. He argued that state elites manipulate fear as a means of controlling society and maintaining power.18 Terror is used to engineer compliant behaviour not only among victims, but also among larger target populations. While victims suffer direct consequences, broad sectors of society are the principal target. The underlying goal of state terrorism, Walter suggests, is to eliminate potential power contenders and to impose silence and political paralysis, thereby consolidating existing power relations. The proximate end is to instil terror in society; the ultimate end is control. Drawing on Walter’s analysis, one can see that the use of death squads and torture was aimed not only to neutralize specific victims, but also to instil fear and dread in entire societies. The objectives were to

50  J. Patrice McSherry create political passivity in the population, to force people to choose sides between the government and the opposition, to silence the voices of opposition and to “teach a lesson” about challenging the status quo, demanding change, supporting insurgencies or criticizing governments—that is, to solidify the power of dominant elites.

The parallel state To secure at least a minimal acceptance of their legitimacy, the national security states needed to mask the involvement of the state in the atrocities being carried out. Thus, the military rulers created shadow systems to undertake illegal acts that were, on the one hand, visible—part of the strategy of terror—but on the other, deniable. The parallel state allowed the militaries to claim that the waves of torture, disappearance and assassination that engulfed their countries were the work of “out-of-control death squads” or “internecine conflicts within the left.” At times, these regimes were able to achieve a partial legitimacy, especially vis-à-vis elite groups, based on regime policies that favored elite economic interests and eliminated the “leftist threat.” My concept of the parallel state (or parastatal system) allows us to describe and analyse secret forces and infrastructure developed as a hidden part of the state to carry out covert counter-insurgency or counter-terror wars. Parastatal forces and structures were an invisible architecture created by the state, directed by state officials and commanders but with plausible deniability—the ability to camouflage their links to the state. Parallel forces consisted of secret task forces or death squads, made up of military and police officers and civilians, acting “unofficially” and anonymously in civilian clothes, who carried out bombings, disappearances and political murders. The vast parallel infrastructures included secret detention centres, fleets of unregistered vehicles (e.g. cars, helicopters and planes), communications equipment, computer systems and so on. Networks of such detention and torture facilities and clandestine cemeteries were set up in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and other countries (e.g. in Central America); vehicles, communications, computer systems19 and the like (often provided by the United States) allowed a sophisticated level of operation. Agents of repression had unrestricted access to buildings, roads and properties, with guarantees that no authority, whether civilian or military, would interfere with their actions. The parallel state was the hidden part of the visible military regimes, which generally sought to maintain good relations with other countries and to conceal the depth of repression. In Latin America, the parallel state augmented the lethal capabilities of the military dictatorships, allowed them to avoid international law and human rights guarantees, and prevented public scrutiny. The parallel state expanded the powers of the state over society and gave the militaries free rein to utilize extreme and lawless methods

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 51 against “subversion.” This clandestine killing machinery enabled the military states to use untraceable disappearances, torture and assassinations. It was a system designed to guarantee silence and impunity. The military states were well served by the deniability and enhanced repressive power provided by the parallel state. Operation Condor was an offensive weapon of the parallel state and a component of it. Under Operation Condor, military intelligence organizations created special clandestine detention centres for foreign prisoners outside of the normal prison system, hidden in military bases or abandoned buildings. Torture and execution were rife in such centres. Exiles and refugees who were legally arrested could be passed into the covert Condor system, at which point all information available to the outside world about the person ceased. Detainees were transferred across borders without passports, on unregistered flights, and, like the other disappeared, their detention and imprisonment were denied by the state. To avoid detection, Condor operatives disposed of victims by burning their bodies, burying them in anonymous graves, or throwing them into the sea. The pervading sense of ambiguity, unreality, and dread created by the parallel state was a key element of the terror used by the militaries to consolidate power over society.

A few cases of Condor operations One illustrative example of Operation Condor and the parallel state was the secret torture and detention center set up specifically for foreign detainees (Condor victims) in Buenos Aires in an abandoned garage called Orletti Motors, code-named OT-18 or “El Jardín” by military intelligence operatives. The site was equipped with torture devices and staffed mainly by Uruguayan and Argentine military officers and by former torturers of the Triple A (death squads sponsored by the previous Peronist government). Hundreds of Uruguayans, Bolivians, and Chileans were held at Orletti Motors, and Orletti survivors said that combined operations were conducted by military personnel of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay.20 Right-wing gangster (and former Triple A operative) Aníbal Gordon ran Orletti Motors in 1976, under the command of General Otto Paladino, the head of state intelligence agency Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado (SIDE). Uruguayan army major José Gavazzo, a key figure in the Uruguayan Condor apparatus, headed a Uruguayan death squad in Argentina that was based at Orletti Motors. The names of the members of the squad are infamous in Uruguay today (Gavazzo, Hugo Campos Hermida, Manuel Cordero, Ernesto Ramas, Enrique Martínez, Jorge Silveira, Luis Alfredo Maurente, Juan Rodríguez Buratti,21 Pedro Mato [sometimes spelled Mattos] and José Arab). Four of these men had been trained in intelligence and counter-­insurgency at the US Army School of the Americas (Ramas, Silveira, Mato and Maurente), and Gavazzo participated in anti-insurrection courses in the United States.22 These Condor

52  J. Patrice McSherry agents carried out numerous abductions, tortures, and extrajudicial transfers of Uruguayans in Argentina and were identified by numerous survivors. Gavazzo seemed to enjoy showing his face to prisoners, signalling his utter impunity. Argentine judge Néstor Blondi, in a 1986 extradition request for Gavazzo, Cordero, Campos Hermida and Silveira, identified them as “personnel assimilated into the Argentine army”.23 All of these men lived freely after the transition to democracy in 1985, protected by Uruguay’s “impunity law”, the Ley de Caducidad of 1986.24 Gavazzo, like the others, always denied that Condor had even existed. In August 2006, for the first time, he admitted in court that he had indeed functioned from Orletti Motors and in transnational Condor operations.25 In 1976, several Condor assassinations took place within a few months, and there were several waves of disappearances of Uruguayans and Chileans living in Argentina. The exiled Uruguayan legislators Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz were two of those assassinated in Buenos Aires. They were abducted separately on the same day by sizeable groups of armed men in the early morning hours. Both were found murdered, with signs of torture, several days later. The week before they had organized a meeting in Buenos Aires of notable civilian and military Uruguayans to discuss the launching of a campaign to press for elections and the return to democracy in Uruguay. Michelini’s son-in-law, Raúl Altuna, said that Michelini had recently had told him and Margarita Michelini, his wife (Michelini’s daughter) that army officer José Gavazzo was in Buenos Aires and that a group of Uruguayan military men had him (Michelini) under surveillance.26 These assassinations caused political shockwaves in the region. Several days later, during which time no official comment had been made by the Argentine junta, several top Argentine officials finally expressed their condolences. Argentine junta leader Jorge Rafael Videla ordered a police investigation of the crimes, but his act was an exercise in public disinformation (PSYWAR). SIDE documents, recovered in Argentina and declassified by President Néstor Kirchner in 2004, provided evidence that the two regimes had coordinated efforts to monitor and seize Michelini. The abductions-assassinations were covert Condor operations involving both Argentine and Uruguayan forces, with carte blanche from the Argentine junta. The Argentine state disassociated itself from the parallel forces that carried out the assassinations to preserve the covert nature and the deniability of the repression and its involvement in Operation Condor. Shortly after these assassinations, another Condor operation took place in Buenos Aires, where thousands of exiles had fled after earlier coups in neighboring countries. Twenty-four Uruguayan and Chilean exiles who were in Argentina under United Nations protection were seized from their hotel by forty armed men. They were subjected to torture and interrogation and were warned to leave the country before being released. Some of the refugees recognized their kidnappers as security officers from Uruguay and Chile. The CIA knew that these were clandestine Condor units operating

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 53 in Argentina. According to several secret CIA reports on this incident, Argentine, Chilean and Uruguayan “security services are already coordinating operations against targets in Argentina”.27 Shadowy attacks such as these sparked a spreading sense of panic, dread and terror throughout exile communities in Argentina. The traditional protections of asylum and exile, respected throughout Latin America for generations, were being systematically subverted via Operation Condor. A secret US document from 1977, declassified by the Obama Administration in December 2016, reported that Operation Condor planned to murder not only “terrorists” or “Communists” but also members of Amnesty International and opposition politicians, such as former centrist Uruguayan senator Wilson Ferreira.28 This document also confirmed earlier information indicating that the origins of Condor dated from an early 1974 meeting— long before the “official” foundational meeting in November 1975—in which regional collaboration in surveillance and abduction operations was established. The CIA document blandly stated that the meeting’s purpose was “to facilitate the movement of security officers on government business from one country to another”. Another revelatory newly released “Roger Channel” (top-secret) document was from Secretary of State Cyrus Vance to US ambassadors in six Condor countries, dated March 24, 1977.29 The document was based on a CIA summary and characterized Condor as “a cooperative effort by security services”. It noted, “If unspecified actions against a particular extremist were desired, the Condor Service would ask a security service of the country where the extremist resides to carry out these actions”. This is the first use of the term “Condor Service”—indicating the quasi-official, if covert, nature of the Condor system—that I have encountered in my review of thousands of declassified documents. Clearly, the Letelier and Leighton attacks, among many others, fit this profile, although the Cuban and Italian perpetrators were parallel forces rather than official state intelligence services. As a transnational arm of the parallel state, the secret Condor system concealed the policy of the allied militaries to carry out coordinated abduction, torture and assassination operations across borders. Some persons targeted by Condor were under UN protection as refugees, and others were prominent pro-democracy leaders. The Condor system thus enabled the military states to camouflage international acts of terror. As part of the parallel state, Condor exercised unchecked power. Like other parastatal structures, it had a dual character: it was both invisible and visible—but deniable—at the same time. Condor served several functions: (1) it allowed the military states to eliminate political opponents who had escaped national jurisdiction, disregarding due process, while maintaining a quasi-legal face to domestic constituents and the international community; (2) it camouflaged the use of criminal methods, which might estrange actual and potential national and international allies or disrupt economic relations; (3) by operating in the shadows and attributing Condor atrocities to out-of-control groups, the military rulers made it difficult for survivors, human rights monitors, and critics to protest the Condor

54  J. Patrice McSherry system, place responsibility on the military states or take definitive action to stop them; and (4) Condor and the other elements of the state terror apparatus instilled terror, silence and disorientation throughout the region.30

The US government and Operation Condor Condor operatives received specialized instruction in intelligence planning and training, operations and communications in Buenos Aires and elsewhere. Clandestine detention and torture centers were established explicitly for Condor’s foreign prisoners, such as Orletti Motors, as we have seen. The evidence also demonstrates that the US government, driven by ferocious anti-Communism during the Cold War, provided covert backing for the Condor system. The language of declassified US reports and cables indicated that the United States considered Condor a useful and legitimate counter-insurgency network, despite its methods. One representative document, a top-secret CIA National Intelligence Daily (no. 168) of June 23, 1976, read: “In early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia met in Buenos Aires to prepare coordinated actions against subversive targets”.31 The benign language obscured the fact that these “coordinated actions” were the extralegal seizure and torture of exiles. Another 1977 document from CIA headquarters called Condor “a cooperative arrangement among security services of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil to counter terrorism and subversion”.32 Those reports and others demonstrated intimate CIA knowledge and acceptance of Condor’s extralegal action plans. The coordinated operations of the continent’s militaries and intelligence agencies, backed by US security and intelligence assets, made Condor lethally effective. As cited previously, the United States placed at the service of Condor officers its hemispheric communications center in the Panama Canal base, an example of significant covert logistical support and high-level executive approval. A declassified 1978 Roger Channel (top-secret) cable from Robert White, then Ambassador to Paraguay, to the Secretary of State, revealed this connection between Operation Condor and the US military headquarters in the Panama Canal Zone. In the cable, White reported on a meeting with Paraguayan armed forces chief General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos, who identified the Canal Zone base of the US military as the site of a secure transnational communications center for Condor. Another recently released document (still with redactions) pursuant to an order from the Obama Administration in 2016, is a 1979 classified Senate report, which confirmed information unearthed earlier by researchers about the workings of Operation Condor. Referring to the Gestapo-like DINA, the report noted: The Chilean intelligence service is a member of a consortium of South American intelligence services “Operation Condor,” which has, in the

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 55 past, plotted assassinations in foreign countries and maintained files on anti-regime activists. This service maintains close liaison with the German Nazi colony of La Dignidad [Colonia Dignidad] in Southern Chile, which makes its substantial resources available to it . . . . Chilean intelligence has maintained officers in Chilean embassies in all member countries. Argentine and Chilean intelligence officers have agreed through Condor that if any Chilean is known to be involved in an Argentine terrorist group, Argentine authorities may kill him upon capture . . . . DINA has maintained a detention center inside the Colony, and there are allegations that torture has taken place there. Allegations also have been made that German personnel, who are described as ex-Gestapo or ex-SS officers, have given instruction in torture techniques and have actually taken part in the application of those techniques.33 The report demonstrated that the Senate had received information (if partial) from the US intelligence services indicating that Condor was not only linked to Nazi groups but also carried out torture and gave other member countries carte blanche to murder national dissidents in their own territories. Another significant nugget of information was confirmed in this recently released Senate report. DINA and the counter-insurgency Condor network (which still had no code-name) had wanted to open a base in Miami in 1974. The Senate report noted: The above-mentioned plot [1974 assassination attempts in Europe and the Middle East] is relevant insofar as it provides evidence of Condor’s capabilities as well as its possible intentions in planning to open a station in Miami shortly afterwards. [CENSORED] unable to determine Condor’s specific purpose in doing so, but [CENSORED] did discover the plan and informed the Department of State. The Department considered issuing a formal demarche to the governments involved, but Secretary Kissinger objected. Instead, it was decided that [CENSORED] would inform Condor [ONE LINE BLACKED OUT] . . . the Miami Condor station was never opened.34 As I noted in my 2005 book on Operation Condor, the Miami episode was reported in the Washington Post in August 1979. This official government document confirms it. The document, like others, also suggests that Henry Kissinger played a key role vis-à-vis Condor, but scholars still have not uncovered the entirety of US relations with Condor during this period.

By way of conclusion This chapter has presented the argument that the creation of silence and fear in society was an explicit objective of the regimes of state terror in Latin America. It was an integral part of the violence of the national security state and part of a counter-insurgency strategy aimed at imposing social

56  J. Patrice McSherry and political control in the present and embedding impunity for the future. Sharing a national security doctrine that justified all manner of atrocity in the “countersubversive war”, military regimes set up and used parallel state structures and organizations to carry out “industrial repression” and created a climate of anxiety, dread and confusion. The use of torture and PSYWAR tactics within counter-insurgency operations directly targeted civilian populations. Terror and torture were methods used to silence society, especially actual or potential political opposition, and to remove society’s capacity to counter the national security state and the elites who supported it. The national security doctrine of the era justified any means, however atrocious, to defeat “subversion” and destroy the “enemy within”, that is, political and social movements fighting for progressive social change. The terror and trauma visited upon Latin American societies persisted long after the transitions to civilian government, in large part due to the impunity enjoyed by well-known commanders and functionaries of the previous military regimes. Clearly, imposing silence and fear was a means to erase historical memory, create a fearful, quiescent civil society, entrench political and economic inequalities and quash political participation and opposition movements. In other words, the state terror of the Cold War era was aimed not only at subversion or Communism, but against entire societies and their demands for social justice, democracy and the rights and freedoms integral to democratic practice. The terror and the silences instilled by mass disappearances, extrajudicial executions, and torture—and their absolute denial by the state—left a lasting legacy of fear and dread in Latin American societies. The fear and silence implanted by state terror continued to be a deterrent to full political participation and a sense of citizenship in many Latin American countries. In 1999—nine years after a civilian government took office—Chilean writer Isabel Allende compared her country to “an abused child that is always expecting the next blow”.35 Impunity, or the failure to hold accountable the perpetrators of past crimes, solidified silences, denial and the invisibility of brutal repression. As Ariel Dorfman wrote, also in 1999: “Pinochet has perversely determined our national agenda, restricted our democracy, and, what is worse, limited how much we dared to remember as a nation, what we dared to think out loud . . . . Chile must find the moral strength, once and for all, to truly complete its transition to democracy . . . . The time has come to take back the country he stole from us, the country we allowed him to steal.”36 Counter-insurgency operations and the creation of the parallel state were designed to induce political paralysis through violence, silencing political and social movements and individuals struggling for social change. The power of the state was wielded to preserve elite interests and to prevent transitions to more egalitarian societies, where excluded social sectors stood to gain a greater share of political and economic power. During the regimes of state terror, military forces created an apparatus of repression in the shadows to engender ambiguity and dread and to confuse and silence

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 57 the truth. Death squads formed by governments were labelled “out of control gangs” of the left, or sometimes of the right, to obscure the role of the state. Individuals were “disappeared” rather than arrested according to due process of law. The machinery of mass repression built during these years – from the 1960s through the 1980s – was largely kept in the shadows to protect the visible heads of the military regimes. The Cold War anti-Communist crusade was not restricted to “subversives” or “communists”. State terror targeted prodemocracy political leaders, including Christian Democrats and constitutionalist military officers, as well as innumerable social activists at the grassroots level. Of course, all were entitled to due process; no context can justify the use of aberrant and extrajudicial methods such as disappearance, torture, and assassination. The objective of silencing dissident opposition movements and preventing the transformation of ossified political and socioeconomic structures in Latin America resulted in the loss of at least one generation of progressive and socially conscious leaders. Moreover, state terror forced social and political reversals that set back the social gains of decades. Finally, the creation of silences through violence was an attempt to erase the history and the memory of movements that fought for—and achieved to some degree— important social, economic and political rights for excluded and oppressed majorities. As Walter observed, the ultimate end of such methods was to preserve and strengthen powerful interests and social control and to prevent progressive social change in the interest of the majority.37

Notes

1. From Jean Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988): 87. Indeed, the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission’s 1999 report was entitled Memory of Silence. Parts of this chapter draw on my book Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005). 2. For a useful overview of PSYWAR as including “symbolic acts of violence and terror designed to intimidate or to persuade an adversary to adjust his behavior”, see Psychological Warfare in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968) at http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Psychological_­ warfare.aspx. PSYWAR, including false radio reports and bombings, was used by the CIA in Guatemala in 1954 to create the illusion that a large antigovernment force was closing in on the capital. See Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982). PSYWAR was used extensively in Vietnam. See also Alfred McCoy for a history of CIA mind-control experiments: A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, reprint ed. (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006). 3. There is a large literature on the US role in ousting Árbenz. See, for example, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, rev. ed. (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2005); Roberto Ferreira, Operaciones en contra: La CIA y el exilio de Jacobo Árbenz (Guatemala: Flacso, 2013).

58  J. Patrice McSherry 4. See, for example, the top-secret NSC-68 of 1950, an alarmist US policy document that portrayed the Cold War as a global struggle between the United States and a menacing enemy “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seek[ing] to impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world.” See https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68.htm. 5. Kermit D. Johnson, Ethics and Counterrevolution; American Involvement in Internal Wars (Lanham: University Press of America, 1998), 67. 6. See McSherry, Predatory States, Chapter 2; and Daniel Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 2004). 7. For more detail, see McSherry, Predatory States and my other works on Condor. For more on Chile, see “Pinochet ordenó que la CIA instruyera a la Dina,” El Mercurio (Chile), September 21, 2000. For more on Uruguay, see Edy Kaufman, Uruguay in Transition: From Civilian to Military Rule (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1979): 10–11; McSherry, “Death Squads as Parallel Forces: Uruguay, Operation Condor, and the United States,” Journal of Third World Studies 24, no. 1 (2007). For more on Paraguay, see Marcial Antonio Riquelme, “Técnicos norteamericanos asesoraron creación de La Técnica,” ABC Color (Paraguay), May 16, 2004. 8. In the course of research in 2001, I examined thousands of State Department files and discovered a declassified 1978 US cable from US Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White to the Secretary of State. It reported on Condor operatives’ access to and use of a US facility in the Canal Zone for secret communications and intelligence coordination. See Predatory States for an analysis of this covert US link to Condor; see also Robert White cable, October 13, 1978 (www.foia.state.gov/documents/StateChile3/000058FD.pdf). 9. Omer Bartov, “Industrial Killing: World War I, The Holocaust, and Representation,” presentation at Rutgers University, March 1997 (http://muweb. millersville.edu/~holo-con/bartov.html). See also Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 10. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11. Bernard B. Fall, “The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency,” Naval War College Review (April 1965): 1 (www.nwc.navy.mil/press/ Review/1998/winter/art5-w98.htm). See also David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1964); Bernard Fall, “Counterinsurgency: The French Experience,” presentation to students at the US Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Publication No. L63-109 (for official use), January 18, 1963. 12. Galula, Counterinsurgency, 126. 13. Michael Klare and Nancy Stein, “Police Terrorism in Latin America: Secret US Bomb School Exposed,” NACLA Latin America and Empire Report 8, no. 1 (1974): 21. 14. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights, vols. 1 and 2 (Boston: South End Press, 1979), quoted by Jeffrey A. Sluka, ed., in Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 8. While death squads existed in other world regions (Africa and India, for example), in Latin America US policy was linked to their formation and sustenance. See also McCoy, A Question of Torture, especially Chapter 3. 15. Lars Schoultz, “US Foreign Policy and Human Rights Violations in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 13 (1981): 149–70.

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 59 16. Jean-François Jacques, “A Relational Approach to Trauma, Memory, Mourning and Recognition through Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman,” in Lene Auestad, ed., Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning (London: Karnac Books, 2017): 141. See also Neve Gordon, “Torture Is Not to Make People Talk, But to Make Them Remain Silent,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (1997): 23. 17. Marisa Cornejo Gatica, “La huella del sueño: A(n anti) memorial practice to map the experience of exile,” 2013–14. Research-Based Master Programme CCC, HGeneva University of Art and Design. 18. E. V. Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 19. For a military view of the importance of computerized databases for counter-­ insurgency, see Lt.-Colonel Lester W. Grau, “Something Old, Something New: Guerrillas, Terrorists, and Intelligence Analysis,” Military Review (2004): 42–9, especially 45. 20. “El juicio público a los dictadores,” Dignidad (Argentina), June 25, 1985, reproduces the testimony of a Uruguayan survivor of Orletti, Enrique Rodríguez Larreta. See also “Operación Cóndor: Pinochet tenía ‘conocimiento cabal,’” La Nación (Chile), July 7, 2004. 21. In a historic judgment in September 2006, a Uruguayan judge indicted Rodríguez Buratti and other Condor operatives for the first time for their activities in the 1970s. When police came to arrest him on September 10, Rodríguez Buratti committed suicide, according to Uruguayan press accounts. The commanders of the Uruguayan military attended Rodríguez Buratti’s funeral several days later, transforming his death into a protest against the legal judgment and the new human rights policies of Uruguay’s social-democratic government. 22. Roger Rodríguez and Jorge Esteves, “La fiscal Guianze pidió el procesamiento de 10 miembros de la banda de OCOA,” La República (Uruguay), August 30, 2006; SOA Watch, “Notorious Graduates from Uruguay” (http:// www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=247). For Gavazzo, see Trial International (https://trialinternational.org/latest-post/jose-gavazzo/). 23. Samuel Blixen, “Cordero torturaba en Argentina,” Brecha, no. 827 (2001). In 2016, in the landmark Condor trial in Argentina, Cordero was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years. Debora Rey and Luis Andres Henao, “Argentina-Operation Condor,” Associated Press, May 28, 2016 (http://bigstor y.ap.org /article/7dd39e6ad03a42d893d6458cd2b25289/ argentine-court-sentences-ex-dictator-operation-condor). 24. The law was enacted after the transition to democracy in 1985. As military commanders issued ominous threats about upcoming court cases, President ­Sanguinetti pushed the law through Parliament on December 22, 1986, preempting summonses for police and military officers charged with torture, extrajudicial execution, abduction and “disappearance.” A grassroots campaign to overturn the law via a referendum ensued; against all odds, the measure gained thousands of signatures and was put to a vote, at which point it narrowly failed. 25. In 2009 Gavazzo was convicted in Uruguay of the aggravated homicide of twenty-eight Uruguayans held in Argentina. For a summary, see Trial International (https://trialinternational.org/latest-post/jose-gavazzo/). The landmark trial in Argentina on Operation Condor that concluded in May 2016 considered 106 cases of Condor victims: forty-five Uruguayans, twenty-two Chileans, fifteen Paraguayans, thirteen Bolivians, and ten Argentines, the majority of whom were “disappeared” in Argentina, although some abductions occurred in Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Fifteen former military officials from various countries received prison sentences of eight to twenty-five years for criminal

60  J. Patrice McSherry association, kidnapping, and torture. For background, see Francesca Lessa, “Justice Beyond Borders: The Operation Condor Trial and Accountability for Transnational Crimes in South America,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 3 (2015). In January 2017, an Italian court ruled in a large Condor case that had been in progress for some seventeen years, involving forty-two victims of Condor: thirty-three Italian-Uruguayans, five Italian-Argentines, and four Italian-Chileans. Sentenced to life in prison were former military dictator Francisco Morales Bermudez and former prime minister Pedro Richter Prada of Peru; former dictator Luis Garcia Meza and minister of interior Luis Arce Gomez of Bolivia; former Uruguayan Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Blanco; and two Chilean officers, Hernán Jerónimo Ramírez and Rafael Ahumada Valderrama. However, notorious Uruguayan Condor officers José Gavazzo, Jose Arab, Jorge Silveira and Jorge Tróccoli, among others, were absolved, to the anguish of Uruguayan human rights activists. 26. Karina Petroff, “‘No pensé que me iban a tirar al agua, pero sí que me podían matar en cualquier momento,’” Últimas Noticias (Uruguay), August 18, 2005. 27. CIA Weekly Summary, no. 1387 (Secret), July 2, 1976; see also McSherry, Predatory States, 112–3. This and other examples demonstrated deep CIA awareness and knowledge of Condor operations. 28. CIA Report, “Counterterrorism in the Southern Cone,” (Secret) May 9, 1977. 29. Department of State, “Subject: Operation Condor,” March 24, 1977 (Roger Channel), sent to the US ambassadors posted in Asunción, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, La Paz, Montevideo, and Santiago. Tranche of documents released April 2017. 30. This conceptualization draws from Steven Metz, “A Flame Kept Burning: Counterinsurgency Support after the Cold War,” Parameters, (1995): 31–41. 31. CIA, National Intelligence Daily, June 23, 1976. 32. CIA document on Condor with title redacted, April 8, 1977 (https://www.cia. gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000345186.pdf). 33. Staff Report concerning Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies in the United States, submitted to The Subcommittee on International Operations, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, January 18, 1979. 34. Staff Report concerning Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies in the United States, 12–13. See also David Minsky, “Chilean Secret Police Wanted Miami Base for Brutal ‘70s Repression Campaign, New Docs Show,” Miami New Times, January 26, 2017 (http://www.miaminewtimes.com/ content/printView/9039181). 35. Isabel Allende, “Pinochet Without Hatred.” New York Times Magazine (January 17, 1999): 27. 36. Ariel Dorfman, “Hostage.” LASA Forum 29, no. 4 (1999): 9. 37. Walter, Terror and Resistance.

Bibliography Allende, Isabel. “Pinochet Without Hatred,” New York Times Magazine (January 17, 1999): 27. Bartov, Omer. Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. “Industrial Killing: World War I, The Holocaust, and Representation,” presentation at Rutgers University, March 1997. ———. Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Constructing silence: Operation Condor 61 Blixen, Samuel. “Cordero torturaba en Argentina,” Brecha (Uruguay), no. 827 (2001). Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). National Intelligence Daily, June 23, 1976. ———. CIA Weekly Summary, no. 1387 (Secret), July 2, 1976. ———. CIA document on Condor with title redacted, April 8, 1977. ———. CIA Report, “Counterterrorism in the Southern Cone,” (Secret) May 9, 1977. Cornejo Gatica, Marisa. “La huella del sueño: A(n anti) memorial practice to map the experience of exile,” 2013–14. Research-Based Master Programme CCC, Geneva University of Art and Design. Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. The Political Economy of Human Rights, vols. 1 and 2. Boston: South End Press, 1979. Dorfman, Ariel. “Hostage.” LASA Forum 29, no. 4 (1999): 9. “El juicio público a los dictadores,” Dignidad (Argentina), June 25, 1985. Fall, Bernard B. “The Theory and Practice of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency,” Naval War College Review (1965). ———. “Counterinsurgency: The French Experience,” presentation to students at the US Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Publication No. L63-109 (for official use), January 18, 1963. Ferreira, Roberto. Operaciones en contra: La CIA y el exilio de Jacobo Árbenz. Guatemala: Flacso, 2013. Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. New York: Praeger, 1964. Ganser, Daniel. NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe. London: Routledge, 2004. Gordon, Neve. “Torture Is Not to Make People Talk, But to Make Them Remain Silent,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (1997): 23. Grau, Lt.-Colonel Lester W. “Something Old, Something New: Guerrillas, Terrorists, and Intelligence Analysis,” Military Review (2004): 42–49. Immerman, Richard H. The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Jacques, Jean-François. “A Relational Approach to Trauma, Memory, Mourning and Recognition through Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman.” In Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning, ed. Lene Auestad, 137–53. London: Karnac Books, 2017. Johnson, Kermit D. Ethics and Counterrevolution; American Involvement in Internal Wars. Lanham: University Press of America, 1998: 67. Kaufman, Edy. Uruguay in Transition: From Civilian to Military Rule. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1979. Klare, Michael, and Nancy Stein. “Police Terrorism in Latin America: Secret US Bomb School Exposed,” NACLA Latin America and Empire Report 8, no. 1 (1974): 21. Lessa, Francesca. “Justice beyond Borders: The Operation Condor Trial and Accountability for Transnational Crimes in South America,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 3 (2015): 494–506. McCoy, Alfred. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. New York: Holt Paperbacks, reprint ed., 2006. McSherry, J. Patrice. Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. ———. “Death Squads as Parallel Forces: Uruguay, Operation Condor, and the United States,” Journal of Third World Studies 24, no. 1 (2007): 13–52. Metz, Steven. “A Flame Kept Burning: Counterinsurgency Support after the Cold War,” Parameters (Autumn 1995): 31–41.

62  J. Patrice McSherry Minsky, David. “Chilean Secret Police Wanted Miami Base for Brutal ‘70s Repression Campaign, New Docs Show,” Miami New Times, January 26, 2017 (http://www. miaminewtimes.com/content/printView/9039181). Accessed August 4, 2018. “Operación Cóndor: Pinochet tenía ‘conocimiento cabal,’” La Nación (Chile), July 7, 2004. Petroff, Karina. “‘No pensé que me iban a tirar al agua, pero sí que me podían matar en cualquier momento,’” Últimas Noticias (Uruguay), August 18, 2005. “Pinochet ordenó que la CIA instruyera a la Dina,” El Mercurio (Chile), September 21, 2000. “Psychological Warfare,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968) (http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Psychological_warfare.aspx). Accessed August 4, 2018. Rey, Debora, and Luis Andres Henao, “Argentina-Operation Condor,” Associated Press, May 28, 2016 (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/7dd39e6ad03a42d893d6458cd2b25289/ argentine-court-sentences-ex-dictator-operation-condor). Accessed August 4, 2018. Riquelme, Marcial Antonio. “Técnicos norteamericanos asesoraron creación de La Técnica,” ABC Color (Paraguay), May 16, 2004. Rodríguez, Roger, and Jorge Esteves, “La fiscal Guianze pidió el procesamiento de 10 miembros de la banda de OCOA,” La República (Uruguay), August 30, 2006. Schlesinger, Stephen, and Stephen Kinzer. Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, rev. ed., 2005. Schoultz, Lars. “US Foreign Policy and Human Rights Violations in Latin America,” Comparative Politics 13 (1981): 149–70. Simon, Jean Marie. Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988. Sluka, Jeffrey A., ed. Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. SOA Watch, “Notorious Graduates from Uruguay” (http://www.soaw.org/new/article. php?id=247). Accessed August 4, 2018. Trial International, “Jose Gavazzo” (https://trialinternational.org/latest-post/josegavazzo/). Accessed August 4, 2018. U.S. Department of State, “Subject: Operation Condor,” March 24, 1977 (Roger Channel). U.S. Senate, Staff Report concerning Activities of Certain Foreign Intelligence Agencies in the United States, submitted to The Subcommittee on International Operations, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, January 18, 1979. Walter, E. V. Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

4

Euphemism, censorship, and the vocabularies of silence in Burundi Aidan Russell

“Ce que l’on désignera pudiquement …” Burundi’s postcolonial history is often recounted through the dates of great événements, the “events”, isolated flashes of political violence that seem to trace out a sequential chain across the decades: 1965, 1969, 1972, 1988, 1991, 1993, and others stand as the pillars of an implied narrative around which, at times, little more needs to be said. The scale of violence indexed by the événements varies greatly, encompassing everything from individual political assassination to state massacres and genocide. Several different crimes, tragedies and lingering grievances can all be suggested by mention of the same year. It is possible to tell divergent stories through these isolated dates, choosing which to mention and which to pass over. It is a history implied more than told, a string of silences that may express a very specific account of the past or avoid any specificity whatsoever. To a greater or lesser extent, such a “bundle of silences”1 is a universal fact of historical narratives, especially those warped by experiences of violence. Things are left out, by choice or chance or process, from the stories we narrate. Yet in particular terms, Burundi’s history of silences also reflects the society in which it is told. Shades of silence are a common element of everyday sociality and a recurring motif in the imagination and mediation of power. They are part of the art of life, responding to and imposing coercive power dynamics while engendering deep social value. Silence, as both foreign and domestic commentators have noted among the Barundi,2 may be the strategic act of a dependent expressing obedience or loyalty to a superior, or the expression of that superior’s innate superiority, or the sensitivity and caution of relative equals avoiding topics of pain, trouble or embarrassment.3 In Burundi, perhaps even more than elsewhere, power seems to function on the operation and perception of secrecy,4 while living with power means adopting the words and silences that power permits in public speech. Burundi and the Barundi are therefore often silent, both as part of their experience of violence and apart from it. The meaning, form and effect of a silence derive from the particular institutions and culture in which the silence is performed, as Susan Gal observes,5 and no single effect of power can be imputed to such a broad and varied phenomenon.

64  Aidan Russell Built from both quotidian social and political imaginings, and from the particular exigencies of violent crisis and authoritarian rule, the date-list of Burundi’s history constitutes the bones of a particular regime of silence around its experience. More than an absolute absence of speech, these are silences “obscured by words”,6 euphemisms and signs of censorship that leave a shadow behind them. Over the decades, the same words have marked the same absences around experiences of violence, used to deny the act even as it was committed, to extend the effects of violence in its wake, even to contest the power that imposes silence. Euphemisms that express denial can also imply recognition in another time and in another context of power. In place of a history told in silences, then, can a history of such silences be told? This chapter considers the possibility of a history of silence by following the euphemisms and absences around the most critical and devastating of Burundi’s symbolic dates: 1972. Denoting a cataclysmic turning point in the emergence of the postcolonial state, the year saw localised and brutal ethnic violence committed by majority Hutu rebels, followed by a genocidal response from a minority Tutsi-dominated state. Across two subsequent decades of military rule, the 1972 “repression” has been commonly rendered as Burundi’s primordial “public secret”, a “secret that for all its secretness is not really a secret”;7 both the act of violence and the severe control over the memory of state persecution against Hutu underpinned the public order for two decades to come. Denial, censorship and imposed speech defined what could and could not be spoken, what should and should not be understood, in references to the inescapable “events”. These “événements”, among all the others that preceded or followed, acquired their own particular and equally ambivalent name in the national language of Kirundi: “that which we will coyly [pudiquement] call ‘ikiza’, the calamity,” as the journalist Antoine Kaburahe wrote.8 “But we did not speak of it,” he added, reflecting on his childhood in the aftermath. The history of the silences around this calamity, the words used to deny or keep certain aspects of its experience out of public talk, trace the path of Burundi’s emergence as a postcolonial state. They continue to mark the disjunctions and uncertainties in its people’s desires for speech or silence today.

Silence in the act In the wake of a crime, “later cover-ups and excuses are more plausible when deception is built into the initial warning, planning and execution,” notes Stanley Cohen, whether by “euphemism, ambiguity, secrecy, double-track or coded orders, blurring the chain of command.”9 The silences that prevailed after Burundi’s catastrophes in 1972 were framed by the strategies and nature of state violence undertaken in that year. The country had reached a nadir a decade after achieving independence in 1962. Much like in neighboring Rwanda, Belgian colonial anthropology and governmental policy had defined a racialised “ethnic” model of society:

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 65 a minority Tutsi aristocracy ruling over a majority Hutu peasantry and a small, shunned Twa population. In contrast to Rwanda, which fought a civil conflict in the last colonial years resulting in a Hutu-dominated republic, this caricature of social complexity did not become the basis of political identity for most Barundi before independence, and the kingdom remained comparatively united.10 In 1961, however, his political enemies assassinated Burundi’s beloved prime minister-elect, Prince Louis Rwagasore, in the months before the Belgians departed. Under fear of and influence from Rwanda, across the first independent decade Burundi’s elite fell more and more into the same ethnic antagonisms and secretive suspicions. In this time, the first of the symbolic dates became fixed in public discourse. 1965 saw the first Hutu prime minister killed by a Tutsi refugee from Rwanda, a failed coup attempt by Hutu military officers, Hutu politicians condemned to death by a secret court, and localised violence by rural Hutu against neighboring Tutsi that was crushed by military force.11 Some of the factions of the army that led this repression then deposed the king in a bloodless coup in 1966, with the southern Tutsi officer Michel Micombero seizing power. Over the next few years there were recurrent rumors among the political elite of an impending “repeat of ‘65”, variously intended to mean a Hutu coup or a Tutsi purge. In 1969, the rumors seemed to be made true; accusations of another Hutu-led coup plot, supposedly a “coup d’état– génocide” that would be accompanied by a slaughter of Tutsi, triggered another purge of Hutu elites.12 1972, however, was unparalleled in the intensity and devastation of its violence. On April 29, a rebellion broke out in the south of the country, led by local Hutu and with a strong presence of Zairean mercenaries.13 The rebels attacked Tutsi officials before swiftly moving on to civilians, massacring them with their families and killing many Hutu who refused to join them. In response, Micombero’s army moved rapidly into the effected territory, crushing the rebels and firing indiscriminately on the rest of the population. Summons and arrests swept Bujumbura as Tutsi-supremacists around the president accused remaining prominent Hutu (along with a number of their own Tutsi rivals) of treason. Finally, the “repression” moved out into the rest of the country. The army, local authorities and co-opted agents of the ruling party youth league assembled lists of supposed “traitors” in local communities. Primarily targeting educated Hutu, and thus externally characterised as a “selective genocide”,14 the violence persisted well into 1973. Through this catastrophic moment, silence was entirely part of the process of state violence. First, as soon as the rebels struck, the state immediately shut down all independent news sources (notably encompassing ecclesiastical radio stations), instituted a nationwide curfew and banned all movement across the country.15 Missionaries reported that they could remember “no other time when news has been so slow to move in the country”.16 This facilitated the second aspect of silence in the act: a sense of awful realisation as the limits and distortions of state information only gradually became clear.17

66  Aidan Russell Official control of information permitted and weaponised a “denial of knowledge”18, opening up a space of real or projected ignorance by which individuals came to collaborate with the violence. As news of the rebellion came through official channels, many people of all ethnicities followed state orders to man barricades and protect their local community against the marauders. Away from the limited areas of rebel action, however, the barricades seemed to be more effective at stopping refugees who fled from state persecution, and soon they were used for sorting through the local population. It took days and in some cases weeks for the realisation to spread among those who saw themselves defending their communities. This revelation only came from within the process of violence, as a product of it and therefore subject to it; once one realised what was going on, one could not speak this knowledge without being immediately subjected to arrest and disappearance oneself. The primary tool of the emerging regime of silence was therefore violence itself, an immediate and absolute sanction on unwanted speech. Yet after state censorship of public media and the self-censorship of an implicated and terrorised population, the third aspect of silence in the act cast an equally long shadow over the years to come: if one must avoid the wrong words, one must also know the right words to speak, and these words constructed the silences between them. The president, army officers and state media spoke furiously about violence throughout the months of highest bloodshed,19 but this state speech constructed an “interpretive denial”, in Cohen’s terms, a narrative that “acknowledges that something happened but refuses to accept the category of acts to which it is assigned.”20 In the rapidly normalizing discourse of the region, both accusation and denial hinged on the attribution of genocide. “No, there was no genocide of which the Hutu were victims; only those guilty of the genocide of Tutsi were punished,” President Micombero told the sympathetic Zairean press, the interview reproduced in Burundi’s state newspaper Ubumwe (“Unity”).21 Such reversals constituted an archetypal denial of the victim;22 the attribution of prior guilt to the victims of state violence negated their victimhood. During the repression, this attribution had already taken on the narrative form invoked by the date-list; recalling language used to speak of the messy crises of 1965 and 1969, the state in 1972 referred to rebel action as another attempted coup d’état–génocide,23 acts of genocide to be associated only with those who attempted to seize power in recurrent crises, and never with those who held it. “Interpretive denials are not fully-fledged lies,” Cohen observes. “They create an opaque moat between rhetoric and reality.”24 The rebel murders of Tutsi were indeed horrific, but this was a truth turned to foment opacity around the crimes of the state. The most striking demonstration of the occluding nature of state speech came from President Micombero in June, when he acknowledged to a Belgian reporter that perhaps 100,000 people had been killed in the previous six weeks.25 The figure of the dead corresponds with some of the lowest retrospective estimates of the victims of the state alone,26 but Micombero suggested that this was a global figure

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 67 of everyone killed during the whole period of complex violence. He spoke of the atrocities of the rebels and the legitimacy of the state’s response and claimed that more Hutu had been killed by the former than by the latter. The vague numbers of anonymous dead revealed the peculiarity of permissible speech: one could speak of violence in 1972 on its true, incomparable scale. The terms used to express this truth, however, required the occlusion of other truths, of the far greater responsibility of the state for the numbers of dead, and of the predominantly ethnic logic by which the state identified its victims. State denials reflected and framed a discourse of evasion among the population at large. “In 1972, death itself was the object of a durable negation,” note Chrétien and Dupaquier. “One did not speak of killing. One said ‘bamushwabuye’, a word with a double sense that means ‘to gather’, ‘to take away.’ In the context of the period, one could translate it as ‘he has disappeared’”.27 The victims of state violence had been arrested en masse and in public, by agents of the state and by members of the community, driven away from schools and homes by the lorry-load over the course of a handful of months. Yet despite this public stage of mass violence, Burundi became a country of the disappeared as much as any of its Latin American cousins. Importantly, this was not solely a silence that lay between a Tutsi state and a persecuted Hutu population; through the process of information control and the order of violence, many Hutu who might otherwise have been identified with the target population, or Tutsi who otherwise shared nothing of the ideology that permitted such extraordinary extermination, were involved in the arrest and disappearance of their neighbors. The roots of a dissonant silence lay in the process of violence, the uncertainties of a broken community, and the words used to speak of, and avoid, the truth of what had happened.

Naming the event After 1972, the act of state violence maintained its presence in society through the continuation of the regime of silence that had achieved it. “A veritable iron curtain suppressed all true expression of this incredible collective trauma,” as Chrétien and Dupaquier argue.28 Yet this was indeed an obfuscation of all true expression, not an absence of speech. The state did not entirely refrain from talk of what had happened, but the terms by which it would speak kept the experience of hundreds of thousands of its subjects firmly excluded from public talk. The familiar French term of “événements” took a central role in structuring the limits of speech. It was no novelty—previous crises were already glossed as similar “events”, and there is nothing inherently remarkable or devious in this quotidian word. In repetition, however, it took on a particular significance, becoming the primary reference point in which the specificity of the act could be diluted and avoided. State representatives routinely spoke of “the sad events of April–May 1972”,29 “the events of 1965 and more

68  Aidan Russell recent again in 1972,”30 “the latest events”,31 “the unfortunate events of 1972”,32 “the sad events of 1965–1969–1972”33 or “the events of 1972–1973.”34 In place of anger and defiance, the terminology was regretful, vague, and ambiguous. The “language rules”35 of a state in denial matched precisely the codes of a nation wishing to speak of, and avoid speech of, the same violence today. As the language of the state, however, such techniques conformed well to the strategies of political censorship. As Jaworski and Galasiński note, censorship may constitute a mechanism of silence in two ways: “silencing by omission” and “silencing by relegating censored material to the ambiguous, anomalous or liminal zones of reality”.36 The latter technique of ambiguity and induced epistemic anxiety constitutes one of the most critical elements of an authoritarian discursive strategy of rule. Euphemistic language can serve “to darken the message with the effect of creating ambiguity and of undercutting all possible reasonable discussion and consequently opposition. If the receiver gets only an incomplete, limited or uninterpretable sign,” Goldschläger suggests, “he will be in no position to argue.”37 The euphemistic reference to past violence held the possibility of argument in suspense. The événements, lacking any agent, action or victim, could cast the state in a “state of absence”38 when cited alone or specified only by date; the speaker observed the nameless catastrophe and condemned it, a spectator to the agentless events. There was no need for overt denial that the violence had taken place, nor that the state was responsible for it, only regret that violence had occurred. There was no word with which to argue here, and no necessity for confrontation between individuals who were attempting to navigate an uncertain and fearful world. There was, however, another face to this evasion. One did not hear a state representative speaking of the “sad events” in isolation. One heard these words as another iteration of the ongoing discourse that began with the ferocious denial of genocide and the legitimisation of righteous “repression”. Correlation with the precursor “événements” of 1965 had triangulated the recurrent image of the coup d’état–génocide in order to obscure state violence even as it took place. Speaking now of generic “events”, identified only by their connected years of 1965, 1969 and 1972, not only expressed the abiding danger of cyclical violence but intimated the meaning of that violence as an attack on the state, at least when it was the voice of the state that used the universal euphemism. Voice coordinated the latent meaning of the words and the content of their implicit silences because voice carried echoes of other words spoken at other times. This would become most apparent when, once in a while, the state announced an emphatic, explicit interpretation of these events, and so laid bare the absolute meaning of the vacillating euphemism. In 1974, for example, Micombero attempted a political reset to proclaim the consolidation of his revolution, holding elections in which he was the only candidate. In an article celebrating eight years of revolution, the state newspaper Ubumwe

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 69 turned to the military to discuss the “events” of the past.39 “The last events that so plunged Burundi into mourning” were proof of the army’s patriotic duty to defend the nation, Ubumwe declared. Here the euphemism of “events” permitted no ambiguity; in speaking of them as the object of the army’s “patriotic duty”, one was speaking of the crime of rebel violence alone, and distinguishing it from the legitimate response of the state. In reference to President Micombero, furthermore, talk of violence turned emphatically to heroism. In the front-page story of the same special issue, Ubumwe noted that Micombero was “renowned above all for his intervention in 1965 and 1972 when imperialism and its valets40 attempted to sow confusion and hatred, when they even went so far as to try to exterminate a part of the population.”41 In a parallel story entitled “Who is Micombero?”, the paper revelled in his “brilliant” military and political career, his “great simplicity”, “great sense of realism”, “remarkable intelligence”, and his heroic acts that repeatedly “saved Burundi from the catastrophe”.42 The name of Micombero thus rendered state violence speakable, albeit solely in heroic terms.43 The president himself became the means by which the meaning of euphemism became fixed, even if curious ambiguities remained. Ubumwe celebrated the president’s action for national development “by the sword and by the plough, as Marshal Bugeaud once said”.44 Allusion illustrates, but it also complicates; Bugeaud was the French governor who waged the ferocious razzia in nineteenth-century Algeria, and in this citation the “sword” specifically designated violent colonial conquest.45 It was a strange choice for a text that otherwise presented the president as a tireless combatant against imperialism, but it conformed well to the artful values of skilful speech in Burundi. “Like the rhetorical technique of strict silence,” noted the anthropologist Ethel Albert, commenting on the voracious observation of hidden meanings behind public speech in Burundi, “the rhetorical technique of not quite telling all has a positive information content of great significance.”46 Micombero could be associated with terrible violence, but spoken only in positive terms. Without his name attached, the same violence could become vague, ambivalent, and regrettable, as required. State violence itself was therefore not entirely silenced. It hung over its absent victims and current subjects as a latent threat, coordinating what was to be heard in more ambivalent words. Between quotidian euphemism and occasional narratives of violent heroism, state speech navigated the ambivalence of “dis-ambiguation”, at once blurring the identity of “people, facts and events in such a way that any meaningful discussion with or about them [was] undesirable or impossible”, and producing a “version of reality” that was clear, simple and absolute.47 The certainty of the latter formed the center of gravity to which the ambiguity of the former was drawn. Ultimately, the words of the state and its francophone organs framed the language of the everyday. State silences transposed to quotidian public discourse even for the great majority who spoke only Kirundi. Both the journalist Antoine Kaburahe and the politician Sylvestre Ntibantunganya

70  Aidan Russell (who later became president in the 1990s) write in their memoirs of the penetration of state words into social life in the form of daily formalities. The standard greeting or opening to a speech, Tugire amahoro (broadly “peace be with us”), would now be followed by political acclamation: na Micombero yayaduhaye, “And Micombero who gave it to us”.48 Whether this was an expression of obedience or (as Ntibantunganya suggests was mostly the case for peasants) of mockery, the president’s “peace” displaced other speech. Micombero was hailed as “Maza Meza”, the benefactor, and praise of the president precluded talk of the violence over which he had presided. “The authoritarian ideological discourse of the ruling power imposes silence,” writes Goldschläger, “by filling up linguistic space with a meaningless, vacuous and undebatable word.”49 In francophone state speech, “événements” might be undebatable through their ambivalence alone, but in daily speech both “peace” and the president himself became the definition of Goldschläger’s vacuous word, devoid of sense beyond an expression of power. “Power is based on silence, not on dialogue,”50 and, ultimately, the words that structured this silence found their total realisation in noise. Ntibantunganya recalls that the population was expected to refer to the president by his military grade, “le lieutenant-général Micombero”, despite the immense phonetic difficulty this presented for those who spoke no French.51 Kirundi does not distinguish “l” from “r”, vowel sounds are fewer and purer than in French, and words typically do not end in consonants. As Ntibantunganya describes, this could leave a hapless kirundophone garbling the president’s title of “lieutenant-général” as “tenetene jerari Micombero”, a meaningless string that might be heard as French “tenez, tenez [an idiomatic expression that might loosely be translated as ‘well, well’; literally ‘hold’], Gerard Micombero.”52 Those who thus rendered the honorific of the president as insulting gibberish, apparently even replacing his Christian name “Michel” with “Gerard”, risked imprisonment for the suggestion of ridicule. The words, names and absences by which the state could speak of violence tended towards a total social silence in daily life. The name of Micombero, and the “peace” he brought, percussively enforced the power of the state through this alternation of words and noise.

Declaring reconciliation In 1976, a palace coup by alienated army officers put an end to the First Republic. It seemed like a moment of opportunity, as the new regime under President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza spoke of the need to “recognize the existence of an ethnic fact in our country in order to engage a firm struggle against this scourge.”53 The First and Second Republics differed substantially in attitude and intent. Bagaza’s regime pursued grand ideological projects of development and never acceded to the extraordinary violence of its predecessor, yet the social identity of the state changed little. Power remained an almost exclusively Tutsi reserve, even held largely within the

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 71 same social circles from the south of the country that had dominated the First Republic. The “ethnic fact” that was incarnated by the “événements” of 1972, and which remained embedded in the discriminatory structure of the state, was a sensitive and dangerous subject for all. A change in discourse, however, lent substance to this uncertain transition. “Recognizing the ethnic fact” was a striking shift, directly speaking of a matter which the previous regime had avoided in all its talk of the heroic state. To an extent, this was a reflection of a broader transnational mood at the time; Bagaza’s coup was exemplary of a trend noted by Staffan Wiking across Africa, in which half of all illegal seizures of power justified themselves on “ethical” grounds.54 Talking about the truth of the past and the ethical need for social change legitimated the transfer of power, casting a new president as the leader of a new age. As Loveman and Lira describe for Chile, “truth and reconciliation” are by no means solely a contemporary novelty in Burundi, but constitute recurrent historical themes of transition.55 Nevertheless, no institutional or social reality would follow these words. With heavy irony and a salutary warning, both “truth” and “reconciliation” became new structuring elements in the changing regime of silence over the experiences they were meant to address. The pervasive euphemism of the date-list retained its validity in this discourse. “The sombre years of 1965, 1969 and particularly that of 1972 engaged our country on the path of hatred and implacable suspicion,” as the Second Republic’s declaration of its “fundamental objectives” acknowledged.56 This constituted a new calibration of the meaning behind the dates; the ambivalence of euphemism was now correlated by intimations of mutual hatred and suspicion, not solely a designation of anti-state or anti-Tutsi violence. However, the contrast was far from absolute. Like the First Republic’s alternation of open ambiguity and acute specificity, the implication that ethnic hatred went in more than one direction was no call to speak of what had happened. “Recognizing the ethnic fact” still did not mean specifying agents, victims or disparities of experience, distinguishing or exploring what it meant to remember both the rebel murders of Tutsi and the state eliminations of Hutu. It meant citing the term “ethnicity” to pre-empt such specificity and leaving this acknowledgement of truth as a barrier to further debate. Explicit limiting discourses exposed the implicit meaning of recognition at moments of heightened political tension. When rumors spread abroad that the Second Republic was committing a renewed spate of violence against Hutu, state representatives turned to the “truth of the past” to deny these rumors and mark out the clearest boundaries of what they permitted the “ethnic fact” to mean. They insisted on a historical narrative of national unity, disrupted by a frustrated colonial power at the point of independence and restored by the accession of the Second Republic; the “ethnic fact” was therefore a recent phenomenon, an alien deception and a solved problem. As such its violence was still a matter instigated by rebels, never by states. The “elements” who “set fire to an entire region in 1965” were “in the pay

72  Aidan Russell of foreigners”, explained the Chargé d’affaires at the Nairobi embassy to the Kenyan press. “It was these same elements who returned in 1972 to massacre an innocent population.”57 The state newspaper acknowledged that “[c]ertain people remember with anguish the events of 1972, which plunged numerous families into mourning,” finding recourse as ever to ambiguity of actor and action even when speaking of specific violence.58 This ambivalent recognition was as far as the state would go: “What must now be sought is reconciliation.” When it comes to censorship, “what is silenced can only be gleaned from the inferential processes of creating (ir)relevance in what is actually said,” note Jaworski and Galasiński.59 Even as it seemed to speak of what had been kept silent, such talk of truth and reconciliation functioned as censorship by making Hutu identity irrelevant to the particular meaning of 1972 as a moment of unparalleled state persecution. Intimations of mutuality in the official narrative of the past did not extend to acknowledgements of state responsibility. 1972 was a symbol of a social problem, not a political one, and a symbol of equal suffering across society, not a set of violent acts that formed the basis of continuing discrimination against Hutu in particular. Remarkably, this language of reconciliation was the blossoming of a minority discourse that had existed under the First Republic. Already in 1973, Micombero’s regime had permitted an open letter by Burundi’s Catholic bishops to be published in the state newspaper, in which they called for international support for Burundi’s “reconciliation”.60 The bishops boldly recognised the “infernal mechanism” of ethnic divisionism present in both “the movements of rebellion and of repression which continue to plunge our country into mourning.”61 Yet in the interest of pursuing reconciliation, the shape of the argument served to equalise the nature of each collective experience of rebellion and repression. The bishops’ call therefore reproduced the ambiguities of the state. “Certain extremists” pursued the exclusion of “one ethnicity”; “an ideological and operational cadre of racial struggle has been created”, but the passive form permitted no detail of agency or identity. Indeed, talk of ethnicity at all was only a functional step towards denying it. “We refuse the alternative: either the Hutu or the Tutsi,” the bishops declared. “We do not defend one against the other,” because talk of ethnicity at all constituted a “decline of civilisation: from the nation, we fall back to the age of the tribe.” The language of reconciliation, even under Micombero, did not necessarily disrupt or break the absences of the state’s selective speech. It served the state’s claim to be the author of peace, and rendered reconciliation as an implicit, partial recognition on which the state could build an explicit silence. In this precedent, reconciliation was an insistently spiritual and international discourse. The bishops’ 1973 letter, notionally addressed to foreign “artisans of peace” and “Christians of the entire world”, anticipated the forthcoming Catholic jubilee, the “Year of Reconciliation” in 1975.62 For the Second Republic, however, reconciliation was a condition innate to its own

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 73 establishment. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs argued in 1979, “The policy of reconciliation and national unity inaugurated by the Second Republic under the direction of President Bagaza will be pursued with even more rigour. It is manifested concretely by rigorous management of public affairs, social justice in every domain, equality of opportunity for all citizens without distinction.”63 Reconciliation was simply good governance; it demanded no talk of what had happened. The language of reconciliation resembled propagandistic “pseudocommunication”, the exclusion of dialogue and exchange in the guise of a conversation.64 Talk of reconciliation was not an invitation to talk but a word of command not to talk. The state, absent in any form from the narrative of past violence, now incarnated reconciliation, an ambition achieved rather than a goal towards which to strive. This was a wholesale secularisation of the language of reconciliation. The bishops had taken it as a spiritual concept that precluded politics and appealed to international solidarity; the state nationalised it, claimed its apolitical message for itself and at once excluded both the foreign “artisans of peace” and the Church that birthed the ideal. This appropriation was the prelude to an intense anticlerical struggle in the Second Republic, as the state sought to exclude all who could compete with itself in communication with the public.65 It banned the ecclesiastical newspaper Ndongozi, the sole Kirundi-language organ outside of the state’s control that reached a large public, while expelling missionaries and suppressing ecclesiastical social organizations.66 The language of reconciliation constituted a transitional step in a sprouting regime of silence, one that not only maintained an absence around the victims of the previous regime but grew to encompass all who spoke outside of the new state’s reach. “The first characteristic of ideological authoritarian discourse is that it is definitive and all-encompassing and, in that way, reveals its autoreferentiality,” suggests Goldschläger.67 Through the premise of reconciliation, the Second Republic weaved an authoritarian discourse of speech and silence, making itself the sole point of reference and excluding all others from the political realm. Truth and reconciliation, in the end, became the premise for the most explicit act of censorship that would define the Second Republic in many later accounts.68 If reconciliation was achieved by the existence of the state, discussion of the “ethnic fact” was not only no longer necessary, it was actively harmful; the state therefore banned ethnic labels themselves from public use. The year that saw the apogee of the state’s talk of “reconciliation”—1979— also saw the declaration of a new “political project: to destroy the concepts and labels of ethnicities and of regions, to replace them by new values born from the scientific analysis of social structures in a fashion to create a solidarity of natural, durable and dynamic alliances.”69 This became part of constitutional law. Where the previous constitution under Micombero specified that “all the Barundi are equal in rights and duties, without distinction of sex, origin, race, religion or opinion,”70 Bagaza’s 1981 constitution

74  Aidan Russell dropped “race” and replaced it with “color”.71 Ethnicity in Burundi had been not uncommonly discussed in “racial” terms, derived from colonial myths of separate origins for Hutu and Tutsi,72 but “color” could scarcely encompass the same distinctions. Rather than a reversal from Bagaza’s initial recognition of the “ethnic fact”, the abolition of labels was a culmination of this language as a silencing discourse, one that seemed to acknowledge, but in fact censored. For a Tutsi minority government, that which René Lemarchand called “ethnic amnesia”73 seemed the only logical path to maintain power. If the state was not to rule through endless violence, then it would rule through silence, in which neither the violence of the past nor the names of division in the present could be spoken.

Observing the absence There is a geography to silence, or at least to the regime that shapes it. While 1972 swiftly became a “forgotten genocide” in the world at large,74 this forgetting arose from an absence of speech quite different from that which remained framed within the evolving state injunctions and euphemisms. During the “event” itself, there was already little talk of Burundi’s state violence abroad. Partly, this was a function of the forms of violence—the state’s control over information—but for the most part the absence of speech on the world stage seemed to be primarily a function of disinterest.75 Some Belgian media denounced state-led “genocide” to little effect, and a handful of American activists critiqued their own government’s silence, which was largely representative of the rest of the world.76 Transnational Barundi, by contrast, exemplified the geographic shape of the state regime of silence by their overflow of speech, making 1972 foundational to individual and collective identities in exile.77 Their audience was largely constrained to other exiles and a handful of academics, however, and thus made little difference to an indifferent world. Silence within Burundi was largely left to evolve on its own terms, its shape and meaning changing with the political tenor of the moment. Silence is not oblivion in itself; the form of it may permit the eventual loss of knowledge that constitutes such forgetting,78 or it may charge that knowledge with the electric potentiality of the secret.79 While silence tended towards oblivion in the rest of the world, therefore, the prohibitions and slanted euphemisms of the First and Second Republics rather formed this secret around the implicit silence of public speech. Within families, some could find ways to share their knowledge and keep it private, “unofficial”.80 Nevertheless, even in public, at the right times of heightened tension, memories of violence and knowledge of the ethnic logic of power enunciated themselves in rumors of repetition. Just as elite discourse prior to 1972 had dwelt on fears of a “repeat of ‘65”, popular rumors spread routinely afterwards that the state was planning a “repeat of ‘72”. Military coups especially provoked the expression of this fear; Bagaza’s coup in 1976, like any other, was heralded by secretive military manoeuvrings, sudden breaks in

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 75 radio broadcasts and an abrupt moment of official silence until the coup was announced as complete. “Crazy rumors burst out everywhere,” remembers Ntibantunganya.81 “Many Hutu thought that the South of the country was burning once again. The spectre of 1972 remained in the memory of the people.” Narratives of 1972 lived in the “twilight between knowing and not-knowing,”82 speaking and not-speaking, manifesting the profound division between a public stage controlled by the state and the peripheral stage of more surreptitious communication. Like the breaking of a secret, therefore, at the end of the 1980s political change was driven by the revelation that people still remembered. A silence that had reigned for two decades did not prevent protest; rather, the preceding silence lent power to protest in the act of revelation. First, another palace coup by another Tutsi officer, Pierre Buyoya, instituted the Third Republic in 1987. Buyoya declared that the reasons for his action could be found, “almost word for word”, in the terms used to overthrow Micombero a decade earlier, which Bagaza had singularly failed to realise; no repetition of Bagaza’s initial recognition of the “ethnic fact” was forthcoming in his successor’s discourse, however, and both ethnicity and the experience of state violence remained entirely absent from public speech. A year later, violence broke out again in the northern communes of Ntega and Marangara, on the border with Rwanda. While anchored in local and even personal resentments, the conflict immediately took on a large-scale ethnic dimension, precisely through expression of the memory of 1972. “In 1972, they took people away, no one said anything,” explained a Hutu peasant shortly after the new “events” of 1988.83 “It was as if they separated the goats from the sheep.” When a local authority used an ambiguous proverb referring to the stubborn indestructability of weeds, as several witnesses noted, “Those who had lost people before [in 1972] were sickened, saying to themselves, ‘They are going to strike us again!’”84 Unspoken memory was the base condition of the community on the eve of the 1988 violence, of its relationship with itself and with power. The datelist, when invoked to interpret the present, did not so much narrate the past as describe the feared, imminent future, when the current year would be added to the others. The terror of repetition brought these memories into public expression as the trigger to riot. Fearing a coming genocide, Hutu across the two communes attacked Tutsi. Sudden talk about 1972 was like the “pounce” of the secret described by Canetti,85 the moment of power when the secret knowledge that has been kept in silence is suddenly revealed. This sudden violence against local Tutsi was in turn swiftly drowned by yet more bloodshed, as the army once again swept into the affected areas and killed many thousands of Hutu civilians in “repression”. The first large-scale violence since 1972 splintered the possibilities of speech. President Buyoya largely refrained from talk of history, reproducing elements of his predecessors’ vocabularies of concealment in reference to the latest événements. He acknowledged the “global” numbers of the dead in the

76  Aidan Russell “sad events” as an estimated 5,000, without specifying who they were or who killed them.86 Buyoya permitted the vague possibility that innocents might have been accidentally harmed by the army, but argued that all those who bore wounds from military armaments must be exiled “rebels”.87 Once again, suffering state violence became proof of rebel guilt, while victims of the state were elided by talk of rebel crimes. Where the past was mentioned at all, it was a simple repetition of the date-list as anti-state atrocities: “Why must it be today, as in 1972, as in 1969, as in 1965,” asked the ruling party women’s union, “that there are massacres based on conflicts of an ethnic character? These repeated killings are nothing but the work of a small fraction of extremist Hutu who commit themselves wholeheartedly to the techniques of division.”88 Amid this familiar regime of interpretive denial, ambiguous narrations and unequivocal designations, however, other voices demonstrated the weakening hegemony of the state vocabularies of silence. Buyoya, under pressure, proved himself willing to allow a certain opening of the political stage. A surprising range of publications and open letters thus appeared in the months after the 1988 violence to address the “latest events”. Some took a stance similar to the state’s position, seeing rebel violence and legitimate repression in each symbolic moment of the date-list. Others spoke rather of silence itself, read by Lemarchand as the ultimate revelation of a Hutu “hidden transcript”.89 “We will linger here to raise the contradictions that official information masks,” announced a dramatic open letter of protest, pointing directly to 1972 as a genocide of Hutu and accusing the state of planning another.90 In response, Buyoya’s Third Republic sought to silence its critics with competing speech rather than with censorship alone. The president formed a “National Commission for the Study of the Question of National Unity” to put meat on the bones of the “ethnic fact” that the last regime had chosen to forget. While it seemed to speak with more candour (and certainly more detail) than ever before, the Commission’s report reproduced many of the same omissions it claimed to unveil. “That which we coyly [pudiquement] name ‘événements’ in everyday language constitute in effect only a series of tragedies, some more murderous than others,” it stated—to no greater clarity.91 The report read in many ways as a long-form exposition of the implicit narratives of the Second and Third Republics. It lamented the “events of 1972” along with the rest of the date-list but attributed fault only to anonymous “divisionists”. The report made some of the most explicit statements of recognition ever heard from an officially sanctioned voice, treating the “reprisals” against the rebels as the “second moment of the tragedy of 1972”, representing “another form of extremism,” a true moment of “horror”. Yet these horrors were merely a “degeneration” from a legitimate defence, one driven by “collective hysteria” and framed by an “absence of authority”, not by the institutions of the state, nor did the report acknowledge the scale of a particularly Hutu experience of violence. Lemarchand read this report as a cypher for the “official Tutsi position” on a history of Hutu rebellion, noting that “the language is at times so

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 77 deliberately euphemistic … as to raise serious questions about its ultimate purpose.”92 This suspicion may be well-founded, but it may equally understate the suppleness of euphemism. Widening the possibilities of what the old euphemisms could now mean, the report was a gesture, weakening the terms of euphemism to leave space for other meanings to be heard, allowing the implication that Hutu might hear their grievances acknowledged so long as they did not overtly speak these grievances. Simply hearing an ambiguous possible meaning was not enough for exiled Hutu militants, however. Benefiting from their transnational freedom from the permissible terms of the regime, exiled campaigners focused ever more on silence as the damnatory symbol of an illegitimate state. One exile in Geneva wrote of Burundi as the land of le non-dit, “the unspoken”, framing his own struggle as a “refusal to die in silence”.93 The banned exile movement Palipehutu (Parti pour la libération du peuple hutu) in turn made its strongest protest by denouncing the “lacunae” of the state’s Charte nationale, the charter that was meant to define the terms of national unity for those within the country. These lacunae might be found behind the Charte’s words, in “the anonymity of the language used to refer to criminals, designating in an impersonal manner those responsible for crimes committed by the Tutsi regimes”, in “an expressly false presentation of the history of socio-cultural relations between the ethnicities”, and, most especially, in the absence of the army in the narrative of the date list. Citing the army’s “behaviour in 1965, in 1966, in 1972, in 1973, in 1976, in 1987 and in 1988”, Palipehutu deftly added bloodless military coups to the list of bloody acts of repression, inverting these dates from the state’s narrative of Hutu rebellion to point towards the army as the “stumbling block” that “makes and unmakes regimes”, that “plans and executes all the massacres”.94 As Bilmes notes, silence is not only a matter of omission or exclusion, but something that can be created by “arguing plausibly that something is missing”.95 Observing silence, as much as breaking it or filling it with words, constituted an act of protest. It was in this context that perhaps the most remarkable shift in the meanings and forms of silence took place, not among these transnational writers but in domestic action. “All revolutions . . . . are based upon paradoxes where accepted words and values are inverted and rejected,” argues Goldschläger.96 Within Burundi, it was as if silence itself was paradoxically inverted, its substance maintained while its framing, and therefore its meaning, was transformed. Lemarchand described a silent protest in 1991 that took the form of a mourning ritual, with hundreds of people shaving their heads and marching towards Bujumbura;97 held on the anniversary of the beginning of the 1972 massacres, it constituted a “liturgical” silence,98 observing and countering the political regime of silence by performing the rites of grief around its omissions. This was not a matter of “breaking the silence”, at least not literally; the power of the protest itself consisted of silence. It did, however, break the regime of silence, moving the implied absences into the

78  Aidan Russell foreground, turning them to a different purpose, and making protest out of the things that remained unspoken. “People become silent when they fear transformation,” argued Canetti. “Silence prevents them responding to occasions for transformation. All men’s movements are played out in speech; silence is motionless.”99 Such protests, however, defied this proposition. Silence could be the force of change, and the site of contestation. Under internal and international pressure, Buyoya opened the country to multiparty elections and to new speech, interspersed with new forms of silence. Indeed, for the leading opposition party Frodebu (Front pour la démocratie au Burundi), the power and ambivalence of silence was both unity and defiance. Party leaders held minutes of silence during their campaign meetings “for all these victims of state horror or of their social position”.100 The formal liturgical silence indicted the state and brought its omissions into public view, but it also permitted supporters to find their own meaning, and their own memories, in this act of protest. Whether they remembered a Hutu genocide, decades of ethnic oppression, or the persecution of individuals from any ethnic background, people could share in the silence as a rejection of criminal state power. Even still, Kaburahe describes how, at the same time, opponents of Frodebu could lodge their dissent during the minute of silence simply by refusing to stand in respect of it.101 A war of silence, alongside and within the war of words that defined the electoral campaign, took place over the meaning and significance of things not spoken. In these contestations, the singular silence of 1972 as a euphemism of state censorship, bound by the geography of state power, was broken. It was not that the “events” of the past could be discussed freely in Buyoya’s democratizing moment, without fear or constraint. Rather, the state’s regime of silence became only one among many silences exerting pressure on public words, or coordinating the implied meaning of their euphemisms and expressive lacunae. Silence persisted, in many voices and structured by many different orders of power, but it was no longer simply a silence, defined by state words. This, as much as any of the political transformations of the moment, heralded a new stage in Burundi’s postcolonial history.

An open end A history of silence must be open-ended. In the gap between today and the disintegration of the singular state regime of silence in the early 1990s, there have been many new forms of, constraints around and uses for the same absences. In 1993, the electoral campaign culminated in a sensational Frodebu victory and the election of Burundi’s first Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye; he announced a general amnesty, a need to “wipe the slate clean” in the face of “the dramatic events our people have known”, preferring legal silence to enforced speech.102 Yet he was assassinated by elements within the army only a few weeks later, the crime sparking mass violence against

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 79 Tutsi that may constitute Burundi’s second genocide. Civil war followed, with President Buyoya seizing power again in 1996, and silences sprouted, either observed or maintained; splintering Hutu-dominated rebel groups presented their claims around invocations of 1972,103 the crimes of a “falsified history”,104 or the guilty silence that in itself constituted evidence of state criminality.105 Yet between these citations of 1972, many such protests also omitted or minimised the événements of a possible genocide against Tutsi in 1993, and different silences came into conflict. At the same time, surveys of civilians even in the early stages of the war uncovered a strong sentiment of refusal when it came to speaking of earlier dates of violence.106 Talk of violence can be part of violence, and silence can seem preferable if it is conceived as being chosen or shaped by social imperative, instead of being enforced by political imposition. This is the contradiction that lies at the heart of such silences. Different forces place restraints around the same object of knowledge, and the power that creates silence may be more resented than the silence itself. The euphemisms that constituted state censorship are also the euphemisms of social sensitivity, the daily arts of careful communication, and so “one” silence can shift between different regimes and mean different things at each moment. Today, nearly fifteen years after the end of the civil war, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is finally in operation, mandated to find the truths of violence back to 1962.107 Yet the Commission’s president sees its task not only as breaking silence, but as changing the substance of speech. “The Barundi look to talk [dialoguer],” Monseigneur Jean-Louis Nahimana has remarked, “while occluding the truth, passing to one side of the real facts”.108 He may be entirely correct, as the euphemisms once encoded as state censorship remain the preferable language of daily life. Without the regime of power that forced these silences, they may indeed be the preferred means of living with knowledge of the past. “We talk about the past when we get together, when we drink,” remarked one man in an earlier survey on the prospect of transitional justice; “We do not talk about why it started but of the sorrows we suffered. If possible, we must be silent.”109 Perhaps breaking the state regime of silence is sufficient; other regimes, born from a plethora of social pressures, sensitivities, personal grief and polysemic political interests may prevail, allowing different meanings to be found in the unspoken. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission tests and contributes to this ongoing complex; it does not resolve it. Burundi’s vocabularies of silence trace the paradoxes of the phenomenon. Silences are not opposed by speech, but are formed by words and given meaning by unseen dimensions of power. Viewed not from the substance of what is missing but from the regimes of power and forms of speech that constrain it, a constant silence can denote a path of change. “Silence becomes more prohibitive the longer it lasts,” suggests Zerubavel,110 yet the course of public speech in Burundi seems at once to demonstrate and

80  Aidan Russell deny this proposition. Across the First and Second Republics there was a sine wave to the shape of the unspoken; censorship and disambiguated euphemism increasingly robbed public speech of the possibilities of expression as time went on, but loosened in the moments of political transition, before tightening once again as the new power established itself. The transformations in political context since the late 1980s have exposed the multivocality of silence, at once broken and sustained, reinterpreted and repurposed. The terms and euphemisms that denoted oppression in the past may be used to live in something approaching peace in the present, where those euphemisms are shaped by social values and intimate power relations rather than violence and percussive propaganda. Euphemisms and evasive speech remain dangerous, yet these are the tools that are available to read such a history, the change in words and structures of power that underpin the meaning of a silence. While they suggest that a history of silence can indeed be told, it is not necessarily one defined by the arc of a singular absence, moving from constraint to revelation. The words that mark the silence change, in form or implication, and the force and signification of that silence changes with them. Multivocal silences, giving different meanings to the same unspoken object, contest the form of constraint and the power behind it, while the transformation of that power may give new life to the old silence and its constraining words. Such a history does not prescribe a future, either a need for speech or the value of evasion. Nor does it fill the silence, or entirely reveal the truths that are hidden by it. It only turns the attention to what is done with silence, from domination to liberation, and the ambivalent negotiations or messy matters of daily life in between.

Notes 1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 27. 2. “Barundi” is used here as the collective noun for people from Burundi, sg. “Murundi”. 3. See, for example, André Makarakiza, La dialectique des Barundi (Brussels: Académie royale des sciences coloniales, 1959); Ethel Albert, “‘Rhetoric,’ ‘Logic,’ and ‘Poetics’ in Burundi: Culture Patterning of Speech Behavior,” American Anthropologist 66, no. 1 (1964). 4. Simon Turner, “‘The Tutsi Are Afraid We Will Discover Their Secrets’: On Secrecy and Sovereign Power in Burundi,” Social Identities 11, no. 1 (2005). 5. Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender,” IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 3, no. 1 (1989). 6. Jack Bilmes, “Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning,” Semiotica 98, no. 1–2 (1994), 82. 7. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50. For some considered applications of Taussig’s ideas to contemporary Burundi, see Turner, “Tutsi”; Andrea Purdeková, “Displacements of Memory: Struggles Against the Erosion and Dislocation of the Material Record of Violence in Burundi,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 11 (2017).”

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 81 8. Antoine Kaburahe, Burundi: La mémoire blessée (Paris: La Longue Vue, 2002), 26. c.f. Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-François Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, au bord des génocides (Paris: Karthala, 2007), 9. 9. Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 80. 10. René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970); Christine Deslaurier, “Un monde politique en mutation: le Burundi à la veille de l’indépendance (circa 1956-1961),” (PhD diss., Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2002); Aidan Russell, Politics and Violence in Burundi: The Language of Truth at the End of Empire (Forthcoming). 11. Lemarchand, Rwanda; Augustin Mariro, Burundi 1965: la 1ère crise ethnique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005). 12. René Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 85–87. 13. For extended discussions of 1972, see ibid.; Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 75–80; René Lemarchand, “Burundi 1972: Genocide Denied, Revised, and Remembered,” in Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial and Memory, ed. René Lemarchand (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Aidan Russell, “Obedience and Selective Genocide in Burundi,” Africa 85, no. 03 (2015); Aidan Russell, “Rebel and Rule in Burundi, 1972,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (2015); Augustin Nsanze, Le Burundi contemporain: L’état-nation en question (1956–2002) (Paris: Harmattan, 2003). 14. Initially by US diplomatic cables leaked to the New York Times, then popularised by René Lemarchand and David Martin, Selective Genocide in Burundi (London: Minority Rights Group, 1974). See also Russell, “Obedience.” 15. ibid. 16. United Kingdom National Archives, London (UKNA), FCO 31/1099, Thomas Melady, “Telegram from Bujumbura,” May 13, 1972. 17. Russell, “Obedience.” 18. Cohen, States, 78. 19. Russell, “Rebel.” 20. Cohen, States, 77. 21. “‘La République a utilisé les moyens propres à défendre son indépendance et son intégrité’ déclare le Président de la République à l’envoyé de l’Agence Zaïroise de Presse.” Ubumwe, June 16, 1972. 22. Cohen, States, 96. 23. Archives nationales du Burundi (ANB), BI 6.146, Albin Nyamoya, letter to Governors, July 31, 1972. 24. Cohen, States, 108. 25. “Interview que le Président Micombero a accordé à journaliste de la ‘Libre Belgique’.” Flash-infor, June 9, 1972. 26. Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 280. 27. ibid., 466. 28. ibid. 29. UNHCR Archives, 1.BDI.GEN[1], Embassy of the Republic of Burundi (Dar es Salaam), “Explication du Gouvernement Burundais sur l’incident à sa frontière avec la Tanzanie,” April 4, 1973. 30. UNHCR, 1.BDI.GEN[2], “Déclaration du Bureau politique,” June 9, 1973. 31. ANB, BH 6.44, “Le séminaire des cadres provinciaux du Parti Uprona,” February 5, 1974. 32. ibid. 33. ibid. 34. ibid.

82  Aidan Russell 35. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 84–85. 36. Adam Jaworski and Dariusz Galasiński, “Strategies of Silence: Omission and Ambiguity in the Black Book of Polish Censorship,” Semiotica 131, no. 1–2 (2000), 186. 37. Alain Goldschläger, “Towards a Semiotics of Authoritarian Discourse,” Poetics Today 3, no. 1 (1982), 12. 38. Cohen, States, 100. 39. “Où en sommes-nous? Une révolution matérialisée.” Ubumwe, October 19, 1974. 40. One of the state’s narratives about the rebels was that they were counterrevolutionaries supporting a restoration of the monarchy, while any ethnic “divisionism” was representative of the legacies of Belgian imperialism. 41. “Micombero élu.” Ubumwe, October 19, 1974. 42. “Qui est Micombero?” Ubumwe, October 19, 1974. 43. This public discourse within Burundi may be contrasted with the widespread belief, common among political exiles especially, in a premeditated, genocidal “Plan Simbananiye”, naming the violence after Micombero’s sometime minister of justice, Arthémon Simbananiye, rather than Micombero himself. See Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 321–42; Lemarchand, Burundi, 26–28. 44. “Micombero élu.” Ubumwe, October 19, 1974. 45. Thomas Robert Bugeaud, Par l’épée et par la charrue: écrits et discours (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948); Charles-Robert Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History From 1830 to the Present (London: Hurst, 1991). 46. Albert, ““Rhetoric”,” 50. 47. Jaworski and Galasiński, “Strategies,” 189. 48. Sylvestre Ntibantunganya, Une démocratie pour tous les Burundais: De l’autonomie à Ndadaye (1956–1993) (Paris: Harmattan, 1999), 128; Kaburahe, Burundi, 26. 49. Goldschläger, “Towards,” 19. 50. ibid., 12. 51. Ntibantunganya, Démocratie, 129. 52. ibid. 53. “Déclaration sur les objectifs fondamentaux du mouvement du 1er Novembre 1976.” Flash-Infor Special Issue, November 1976. It may be no more than coincidence, but the word for “scourge”, fléau, used in this French declaration is the most common direct translation of the Kirundi word used to refer to the violence of 1972, ikiza. 54. Staffan Wiking, Military Coups in Sub-Saharan Africa: How to Justify Illegal Assumptions of Power (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1983), 129. 55. Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, “Truth, Justice, Reconciliation, and Impunity as Historical Themes: Chile, 1814–2006,” Radical History Review, no. 97 (2007), 43–76. 56. “Déclaration sur les objectifs fondamentaux du mouvement du 1er novembre 1976.” Flash-Infor Special Issue, November 1976. 57. “Le Burundi dans la presse Kenyane.” Le Renouveau du Burundi, June 11, 1979. 58. “Est-il possible de cacher une guerre civile?” Le Renouveau du Burundi, May 28, 1979. 59. Jaworski and Galasiński, “Strategies,” 186. Emphasis in original. 60. André Makarakiza, et al., “Appel de l’Episcopat du Burundi aux chrétiens du monde entier.” Ubumwe, June 29, 1973.

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 83 61. ibid. 62. “Message of His Holiness Pope Paul VI for the Celebration of the Day of Peace,” January 1, 1975. 63. “Mise au point du ministre des Affaires étrangères et de la Coopération.” Le Renouveau du Burundi, May 28, 1979. 64. Terence P. Moran, “Propaganda as Pseudocommunication,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 36, no. 2 (1979), 184. 65. The Church had used the 1975 “Year of Reconciliation’ as the basis for an extensive system of local community organizations, directly competing with the later party hegemony of the Second Republic. See Raphaël Ntibazonkiza, Au royaume des seigneurs de la lance: de l’indépendance à nos jours (1962–1992) (Brussels: Droits de l’homme, 1993), 218. 66. Filip Reyntjens, Burundi 1972–1988: continuité et changement (Brussels: CEDAF, 1989), 25–31. 67. Goldschläger, “Towards,” 13. 68. e.g. Lemarchand, Burundi, 30–33. 69. Reyntjens, Burundi, 18. 70. “Constitution de la République du Burundi,” Bulletin officiel du Burundi 8, no. 74 (1974). 71. République du Burundi, Constitution de la République du Burundi (1981). 72. Jean-Pierre Chrétien, “‘Vrais’ et ‘faux’ Nègres. L’idéologie hamitique,” in Burundi, l’histoire rétrouvée: 25 ans de métier d’historien en Afrique (Paris: Karthala, 1993). 73. Lemarchand, Burundi, 30. 74. Lemarchand, “Burundi 1972.” 75. ibid., 38-39; Chrétien and Dupaquier, Burundi 1972, 363–464. 76. Michael Bowen, Gary Freeman and Kay Miller, Passing By: The United States and Genocide in Burundi, 1972 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1973). 77. Liisa H Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 78. Marc Augé, Les formes de l’oubli (Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1998). 79. c.f. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950), 345–51. 80. Purdeková, “Displacements,” 343. 81. Ntibantunganya, Démocratie, 137. 82. Cohen, States, 80. 83. André Guichaoua, Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Gabriel Le Jeune, eds. La crise d’août 1988 au Burundi. (Paris: AFERA, 1989), 120. 84. ibid. 85. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Continuum, 1981), 290. 86. “Après les événements de Ntega et Marangara, le Chef de l’Etat rencontre la Presse Nationale et Internationale.” Le Renouveau du Burundi, August 27, 1988. 87. ibid. 88. “Suite aux événements survenus en communes Ntega et Marangara, déclaration du comité central de l’UFB.” Le Renouveau du Burundi, August 29, 1988. 89. Lemarchand, Burundi, 133; c.f. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 90. Déo Hakizimana, Burundi: le non-dit (Vernier: Ed. Remesha, 1993), 85. 91. République du Burundi, Rapport de la Commission Nationale (1989), 87. 92. Lemarchand, Burundi, 135. See also Reyntjens, Burundi, 65–71. 93. Hakizimana, Burundi.

84  Aidan Russell 94. Palipehutu, “Pieds de singe dans les urnes du référendum de la Charte de l’Unité au Burundi,” March 25, 1991. 95. Bilmes, “Constituting,” 85. 96. Goldschläger, “Towards,” 13. 97. Lemarchand, Burundi, 150. 98. Jay Winter, “Thinking About Silence,” in Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4. 99. Canetti, Crowds, 294. 100. Kaburahe, Burundi, 34. 101. ibid. 102. “Discours de Son Excellence Monsieur Melchior Ndadaye, Président de la République du Burundi à la 48ème Session de l’Assemblée Générale des Nations-Unies”, New York: October 4, 1993. 103. Jean-Bosco Sindayigaya, “Mise au point du Palipehutu sur la crise socio-politique du Burundi,” Bujumbura: January 1, 1996. 104. CNDD, “Les dix principes du Conseil National pour la Défense de la Démocratie au Burundi (CNDD),” Burundi: January 1998. 105. Frodebu, “Un apartheid qui ne dit pas son nom,” Bujumbura: August 1997. 106. Barnabé Ndarishikanye, “La conscience historique des jeunes Burundais,” Cahiers d’études africaines 38, no. 149 (1998). 107. The TRC was originally agreed as part of the peace negotiations during the civil war. It was planned to operate with hard-coded silences of its own, prevented from classifying genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. In its current, functional form, by contrast, it is constrained by the pressures of a new political crisis. See Stef Vandeginste, “Transitional Justice for Burundi: A Long and Winding Road,” In Building a Future on Peace and Justice: Transitional Justice, Peace and Development, ed. K. Ambos, et al. (Berlin: Springer, 2009); Méthode Ndikumasabo, “Quel avenir pour la commission vérité et réconciliation du Burundi?,” L’Afrique des Grands Lacs 20 (2016). 108. Rénovat Ndabashinze, “Mgr Jean-Louis Nahimana: ‘L’administration ne va pas piloter notre travail’.” Iwacu, April 10, 2017. 109. Ann Nee and Peter Uvin, “Silence and Dialogue: Burundians’ Alternatives to Transitional Justice,” in Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities After Mass Violence, ed. Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 170. 110. Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Social Sound of Silence: Toward a Sociology of Denial,” Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, ed. Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 39.

Bibliography Ageron, Charles-Robert. Modern Algeria: A History From 1830 to the Present. London: Hurst, 1991. Albert, Ethel. “‘Rhetoric,’ ‘Logic,’ and ‘Poetics’ in Burundi: Culture Patterning of Speech Behavior.” American Anthropologist 66, no. 1 (1964): 35–54. “Après les événements de Ntega et Marangara, le Chef de l’Etat rencontre la Presse Nationale et Internationale.” Le Renouveau du Burundi (Bujumbura), August 27, 1988. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 85 Augé, Marc. Les formes de l’oubli. Paris: Payot et Rivages, 1998. Bilmes, Jack. “Constituting Silence: Life in the World of Total Meaning.” Semiotica 98, no. 1–2 (1994): 73–88. Bowen, Michael, Gary Freeman, and Kay Miller. Passing By: The United States and Genocide in Burundi, 1972. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1973. Bugeaud, Thomas Robert. Par l’épée et par la charrue: écrits et discours. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948. Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. New York: Continuum, 1981. Chrétien, Jean-Pierre. “‘Vrais’ et ‘faux’ Nègres. L’idéologie hamitique.” In Burundi, l’histoire rétrouvée: 25 ans de métier d’historien en Afrique, 335–42. Paris: Karthala, 1993. Chrétien, Jean-Pierre, and Jean-François Dupaquier. Burundi 1972, au bord des génocides. Paris: Karthala, 2007. CNDD. “Les dix principes du Conseil National pour la Défense de la Démocratie au Burundi (CNDD).” Burundi: January 1998. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. “Constitution de la République du Burundi.” Bulletin officiel du Burundi 8, no. 74 (1974). “Déclaration sur les objectifs fondamentaux du mouvement du 1er Novembre 1976.” Flash-Infor Special Issue (Bujumbura), November 1976. “Discours de Son Excellence Monsieur Melchior Ndadaye, Président de la République du Burundi à la 48ème Session de l’Assemblée Générale des Nations-Unies.” New York: October 4, 1993. Deslaurier, Christine. “Un monde politique en mutation: le Burundi à la veille de l’indépendance (circa 1956–1961),” PhD diss., Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2002. “Est-il possible de cacher une guerre civile?” Le Renouveau du Burundi (Bujumbura), May 28, 1979. Frodebu. “Un apartheid qui ne dit pas son nom.” Bujumbura: August 1997. Gal, Susan. “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender.” IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 3, no. 1 (1989). Goldschläger, Alain. “Towards a Semiotics of Authoritarian Discourse.” Poetics Today 3, no. 1 (1982): 11–20. Guichaoua, André, Jean-Pierre Chrétien, and Gabriel Le Jeune, eds. La crise d’août 1988 au Burundi. Paris: Afera, 1989. Hakizimana, Déo. Burundi: le non-dit. Vernier: Ed. Remesha, 1993. “Interview que le Président Micombero a accordé à journaliste de la ‘Libre Belgique’.” Flash-infor (Bujumbura), June 9, 1972. Jaworski, Adam, and Dariusz Galasiński. “Strategies of Silence: Omission and Ambiguity in the Black Book of Polish Censorship.” Semiotica 131, no. 1–2 (2000): 185–200. Kaburahe, Antoine. Burundi: La mémoire blessée. Paris: La Longue Vue, 2002. “‘La République a utilisé les moyens propres à défendre son indépendance et son intégrité’ déclare le Président de la République à l’envoyé de l’Agence Zaïroise de Presse.” Ubumwe (Bujumbura), June 16, 1972. “Le Burundi dans la presse Kenyane.” Le Renouveau du Burundi (Bujumbura), June 11, 1979. Lemarchand, René. Rwanda and Burundi. London: Pall Mall Press, 1970.

86  Aidan Russell ———. Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Burundi 1972: Genocide Denied, Revised, and Remembered.” In Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial and Memory, edited by René Lemarchand, 37–50. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Lemarchand, René, and David Martin. Selective Genocide in Burundi. London: Minority Rights Group, 1974. Loveman, Brian, and Elizabeth Lira. “Truth, Justice, Reconciliation, and Impunity as Historical Themes: Chile, 1814–2006.” Radical History Review (2007): 43–76. Makarakiza, André. La dialectique des Barundi. Brussels: Académie royale des sciences coloniales, 1959. Makarakiza, André et al. “Appel de l’Episcopat du Burundi aux chrétiens du monde entier.” Ubumwe (Bujumbura), June 29, 1973. Malkki, Liisa H. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Mariro, Augustin. Burundi 1965: la 1ère crise ethnique. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. “Message of His Holiness Pope Paul VI for the Celebration of the Day of Peace.” The Holy See: January 1, 1975. “Micombero élu.” Ubumwe (Bujumbura), October 19, 1974. “Mise au point du ministre des Affaires étrangères et de la Coopération.” Le Renouveau du Burundi (Bujumbura), May 28, 1979. Moran, Terence P. “Propaganda as Pseudocommunication.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 36, no. 2 (1979): 181–97. Ndabashinze, Rénovat. “Mgr Jean-Louis Nahimana: ‘L’administration ne va pas piloter notre travail’” Iwacu (Bujumbura), April 10, 2017. Ndarishikanye, Barnabé. “La conscience historique des jeunes Burundais.” Cahiers d’études africaines 38, no. 149 (1998): 135–71. Ndikumasabo, Méthode. “Quel avenir pour la commission vérité et réconciliation du Burundi?” L’Afrique des Grands Lacs 20 (2016): 93–117. Nee, Ann, and Peter Uvin. “Silence and Dialogue: Burundians’ Alternatives to Transitional Justice.” In Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities After Mass Violence, edited by Rosalind Shaw, and Lars Waldorf, 157–82. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Nsanze, Augustin. Le Burundi contemporain: L’état-nation en question (1956–2002). Paris: Harmattan, 2003. Ntibantunganya, Sylvestre. Une démocratie pour tous les Burundais: De l’autonomie à Ndadaye (1956–1993). Paris: Harmattan, 1999. Ntibazonkiza, Raphaël. Au royaume des seigneurs de la lance: de l’indépendance à nos jours (1962–1992). Brussels: Droits de l’homme, 1993. “Où en sommes-nous? Une révolution matérialisée.” Ubumwe (Bujumbura), October 19, 1974. Palipehutu. “Pieds de singe dans les urnes du référendum de la Charte de l’Unité au Burundi.” Bujumbura: March 25, 1991. Purdeková, Andrea. “Displacements of Memory: Struggles Against the Erosion and Dislocation of the Material Record of Violence in Burundi.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 11 (2017): 339–58. “Qui est Micombero?” Ubumwe (Bujumbura), October 19, 1974. République du Burundi. Constitution de la République du Burundi. Bujumbura: 1981. ———. Rapport de la Commission Nationale. Bujumbura: 1989.

Vocabularies of silence in Burundi 87 Reyntjens, Filip. Burundi 1972–1988: continuité et changement. Brussels: CEDAF, 1989. Russell, Aidan. “Obedience and Selective Genocide in Burundi.” Africa 85, no. 03 (2015): 437–56. ———. Politics and Violence in Burundi: The Language of Truth at the End of Empire. Forthcoming. ———. “Rebel and Rule in Burundi, 1972.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 48, no. 1 (2015): 73–97. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990. Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. Sindayigaya, Jean-Bosco. “Mise au point du Palipehutu sur la crise socio-politique du Burundi.” Bujumbura: January 5, 1996. “Suite aux événements survenus en communes Ntega et Marangara, déclaration du comité central de l’UFB.” Le Renouveau du Burundi (Bujumbura), August 29, 1988. Taussig, Michael. Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Turner, Simon. “‘The Tutsi Are Afraid We Will Discover Their Secrets’: On Secrecy and Sovereign Power in Burundi.” Social Identities 11, no. 1 (2005): 37–54. Vandeginste, Stef. “Transitional Justice for Burundi: A Long and Winding Road.” In Building a Future on Peace and Justice: Transitional Justice, Peace and Development, edited by K. Ambos, et al., 323–422. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Wiking, Staffan. Military Coups in Sub-Saharan Africa: How to Justify Illegal Assumptions of Power. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1983. Winter, Jay. “Thinking About Silence.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 3–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Zerubavel, Eviatar. “The Social Sound of Silence: Toward a Sociology of Denial.” In Shadows of War: A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century, edited by Efrat Ben-Ze’ev, Ruth Ginio, and Jay Winter, 32–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

5

“What made the elephant rise up from the shade?” Relationships in transition and negotiating silence in Mozambique Victor Igreja

The customary focus of studies of major political transitions from wars and dictatorships to peace and democratization, particularly in the field of transitional justice, has been on confrontational approaches whereby truth commissions and trials are set up to investigate and determine the culprits of serious human rights violations.1 As a corollary of these approaches, sentences are issued, reparation programs are set for victims, and new official histories are written, in attempts to foster processes of coming to terms with past serious human rights violations and crimes.2 These approaches, however, do not exhaust the ways in which people in specific locations deal with the legacies of violent pasts. This chapter analyses the ways in which relationships in everyday life are managed by juggling silence, secrecy, and partial disclosures in the Gorongosa region of Mozambique.3 It explores how the alternation of silence with other types of bodily expressions and speech can be instrumental to ignite embodied accountability and spearhead full disclosures of alleged serious violations perpetrated during the country’s civil war (1976–1992) and severe famine. This type of transition posits primacy on relationships rather than a hasty search for truth, accountability and guilt for the serious violations perpetrated during the civil war and famine in Mozambique. Yet, this does not mean that people have no sense of accountability and justice. Instead, the form and dynamic that accountability takes locally is grasped through the ways in which, decades after violent events, people can surprise audiences by raising accusations about past serious violations, breaking long silences and apparent amnesia. Unexpectedly, people offer disclosures as if the violations had been recently perpetrated. In this context, some silences exist as commodities to bargain through verbal and bodily actions in specific circumstances. These dynamics invite analysis of social regimes of silence, the meaning of relationships shaped by silence, and the specificities of embodied accountability (or a body that prompts responses in others) to foster community actions to address complex experiences of serious violations. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges to study embodied accountability actions because the evolving actions are not bounded by strict timeframes, and thus it is not possible to determine the timing that such bodily

Transition and silence in Mozambique 89 actions might be unleashed in ways that might prompt a response in others.4 Thus, to comprehensively grasp the post-war meanings of silence and disclosure, and the implications for relationships in transition and embodied accountability, it is necessary to develop long-term research into the dynamics of social recovery in former war-zones. It is necessary to maintain a consistent engagement with diverse types of survivors and their offspring. When people eventually break the silence through embodied accountability actions, the testimonies, arguments and counter-arguments, rhetorical and proverbial language, dream-telling, and drummed and lyric music all constitute important sources for gathering and organizing evidence about serious past violations. This chapter therefore begins with a discussion of silence as a socially produced phenomenon in communities beset by violence and protracted conflicts. It contrasts global projects of political and legal accountability with the specific notion of “embodied accountability” that emerges around silence in Gorongosa and involves the spirits of the dead, bodies of the living, and local social relationships. Following an overview of Mozambique’s history of violence, this chapter presents the significance of the spirits of the dead in the aftermath of civil war, setting the scene for an ethnographic exploration of the relationship between silence, sudden speech, and embodied accountability. A case study of a woman’s navigation of the post-war legal and social regimes around silence and memories of past violations within her family and community paves the way for the overall analysis and discussion.

Violence, silence, and embodied accountability: “A conflict does not rot” Various anthropologists and other social scientists have acknowledged that silence is a polysemic phenomenon.5 Susan Gal asserts that “silence, like any linguistic form, gains different meanings and has different material effects within specific institutional and cultural contexts.”6 Silence can be a form of collective action that allows those involved to organize social relations in ways that showcases public order while maintaining disturbing actions in intimate spaces.7 This dynamic of cultural intimacy allows the community involved to shun revelations of behaviors and practices that are collectively “considered a source of external embarrassment.”8 In contexts beset by political repression and violence, silence can imply the absence of political and socio-cultural conditions for people to narrate contested memories of violent past experiences.9 It has also been acknowledged that one cannot hastily interpret silence as a symptom of malaise or fear.10 Nonetheless, in specific political contexts and situations, responses of malaise or fear can sometimes be present.11 While silence implies various types of absences, “not all silences are equal.”12 There is a pattern in how certain silences are dealt with when individuals dare to break them. Breaking silence can be a powerful political statement,

90  Victor Igreja yet one that can attract the intensification of violent persecution, and, ultimately, death, as exemplified by the case of Anna Politkovskaya (2003) in Russia and many other silence-breakers.13 The late Steve Biko was uncompromising on this point and put it very bluntly in his book, I Write What I Like, even as the agents of the apartheid system in South Africa intensified their violence in the 1960s and attempted to silence anti-apartheid voices.14 Elsewhere and in another time, the journalist Carlos Cardoso, who would later be murdered in the streets of Maputo, declared, “It is forbidden to put handcuffs on the words.”15 The meaningfulness of silence and how it is broken are functions of the stakes, the players, and the prevailing politics of reception16 and political and socio-cultural practices of conflict resolution. In the aftermath of mass political violence, struggles to enforce or interrupt silence do not take place only between rival political elites.17 Such struggles are also ignited by a multiplicity of civil society actors, ranging from ordinary citizens who were victimized by violence to intellectuals and writers, and in some non-Western societies, diverse specialists of healing.18 In Mozambique, contested and divisive memories of past violations have existed in complex ways at the levels of community and state institutions.19 At the state level, the relationships between the former war foes, Frelimo (Portuguese acronym for the Mozambique Liberation Front) and Renamo (Portuguese acronym for the Mozambican National Resistance), were shaped by the use of memories as weapons to score political points, a matter that is explored further below.20 At the community level, relationships have ranged from purposeful silence to the unplanned voicing of disturbing memories, and sometimes to exhaustive disclosures in community courts. Rather than treating these variations as solely a matter of a political, state-derived regime of silence, the tensions between silence, partial disclosure, and full disclosure are better understood as part of the emerging context of potential litigation involving kin members. In Gorongosa, silence regarding serious past violations could be interpreted as part of Paul Ricoeur’s idea of “backup forgetting, a sort of forgetting kept in reserve (oubli de reserve).”21 It suggests a socio-cultural dynamic of transition that differs from other instances of reinforcement of silence attributed to “mistrust” of outsiders, or silence “as effects of repression” because of colonial occupation and violence.22 It also differs from post-conflict contexts in which survivors have used specific linguistic strategies to enforce silence,23 or in other contexts where survivors and political elites colluded to enforce amnesia as a strategy for local coexistence.24 There is, rather, a local belief in Gorongosa that serious violations leading to death have detrimental impacts on the health and social relations of those involved who survive. Such a recognition of the existence of undying pasts is central to the analysis and interpretation of protracted conflicts.25 In everyday life, people allude to this recognition by stating in the Gorongosa language, “micero ai vundi,” a conflict does not rot, because the impacts of deadly disputes do not fade away unless there is a proper resolution through

Transition and silence in Mozambique 91 locally legitimate processes centered on the body, the spirits of the dead, and other culturally meaningful mechanisms.

Bodies, spirits, and social relations To appreciate the nature of these struggles around relationships in transition, there is a need to move beyond Eurocentric secularized notions of the body. The focus should be on the plurality of cultural meanings of notions of the body, life and death, serious violations, accountability, and family relations. Eurocentric secularized notions conceive the body as a physical entity that is stripped of agency after death. In contrast, in numerous non-Western societies, the body is regarded as a physical channel of meaning;26 it is at once a secular, a political, and a religious entity.27 In this manner, bodies are “constant live bridges” not only between the external and internal worlds, but also between past, present, and future.28 In these types of conception, the body can retain power beyond death and dismemberment.29 In this context, the destruction of corporeal life opens up spaces for the politicization of death.30 Politics or disputes following corporeal life in Gorongosa are possible because the spirits of the dead are regarded as social actors that can intrude in bodily and community functioning by taking possession and disturbing the bodies of the living.31 Like language, which according to Jacques Lacan aims to “evoke a response in others,” the presence of the spirit induces a response in others.32 In Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, the spirits of those believed to have died innocent deaths have the power to return and disturb the social lives of the living, possessing them to speak even after long silence over the violations of the past.33 The possessed may undergo bodily torments in retaliation for past misdeeds, but through possession, the living also expect the spirits to disclose the etiology of misfortunes and provide healing interventions through the work of healers. In Gorongosa, spirits can possess both men and women, though more often the latter.34 The belief in and interaction with spirits is encouraged by all sectors of the society, except by the Christian religious groups (at least publicly), whereas government officials tend to be ambivalent towards these cultural phenomena.35 In cases of major social and health crisis, however, Christians tend to negotiate their public positions and privately deal with the tormenting spirits through existing cultural mechanisms.36 The social world of the Gorongosas is permeated by a plethora of spirits: madzoca ancestral spirits, n’ fukua spirits of nineteenth-century warriors, and, importantly, gamba spirits of male soldiers who died in the civil war, as well as many other less active spirits.37 The practice of possession occurs through the separation of the personalities of the spirits and of their hosts, and the spirits are expected to have an identity, an individual name, and they freely enact aspects of their own personalities. In a state of spirit possession, the possessed body is known as txiquiro (host). In this transient

92  Victor Igreja subject position, the spirit/host alliance (txiquiro) can voice contested memories and make accusations of serious violations in the host’s past, or that of the host’s own family.38 When the spirit leaves the host’s body, the host experiences post facto amnesia, thus the host is not accountable for the revelations and accusations that were made in a possession state. This ambiguous dualism, a mechanism of separation of the body of the host and the spirit, turns spirit possession into a social phenomenon with significant implications for locally embodied accountability actions. Therefore, silence can be a form of social action that gains mobilizing power through bodily signs consisting of persistent and intense afflictions allegedly triggered by spirit possession: persistent bodily pain and headaches, sleeping difficulties, and reproductive health problems are some of the disturbances attributed to the malevolent actions of spirits. While unspoken, these bodily afflictions express the ongoing social conflict that remains unresolved after violence. The types of interpretation given to persistent bodily complaints reaffirms the role of cultural concepts of bodily experiences and practices.39 Similar phenomena have been observed in numerous cultural contexts whereby bodily afflictions gain different meanings when the afflictions are persistent. These are interpreted as expressing the existence of hidden, unresolved violations and the need to identify the culprits through myriad spirit possession rituals.40 To advance this analysis, I use the term “embodied accountability” to refer to persistent and disturbing bodily and social afflictions whose etiology is culturally attributed to alleged serious past violations. This attribution triggers struggles and negotiations to identify publicly the alleged culprits and attain a resolution. In this regard, bodily actions in the context both of life and death are invested with evocative dynamism and unpredictability. Embodied accountability is both stable (for example, in the form of bodily rituals) and continuously emergent. This latter feature creates room for innovation through a variety of unpredictable actions that can maintain or break silences. People’s bodily afflictions and actions, which are interpreted as both crystallizations and expressions of silenced conflicts, triggers further actions in diverse sites such as the landscape, people’s homesteads, the consultation spaces of healers, community courts, and sometimes in local state institutions.41 In turn, actions evolving from these sites can unleash bodily responses that might instigate broader collective engagements with accountability implications. The engagement with accountability ultimately takes place on a social level, reflecting an understanding of how the combination of serious violations, suffering, and silence can constitute and enlarge relationships as inflections of time and history. In Gorongosa, the transition from violence to peace is eventful as well as ongoing, expressed through kinship relations that are subject to processes of shrinking, expansion, and interrogation, brought about by the intersection of silence, embodied accountability, and the voice of spirits.

Transition and silence in Mozambique 93 Despite the specificity of its social and spiritual understanding in Gorongosa, such embodied accountability is not alien to other contemporary practices that are focused on the search for truths about those deemed responsible for serious violations. The difference is that the global accountability project uses a set of bureaucratic and numerical criteria, which mandates that accountability is only ignited when there was a “widespread or systematic attack” directed against civilian populations, and evidence is defined as the existence of material and visible vestiges of death.42 For embodied accountability, the number of victims, the time of their violent death, and the existence of the material vestiges of the victims are not central to an understanding of serious violations and the subsequent pursuit of justice. Embodied accountability is instead shaped by silence over the existence of invisible forces, perpetuating serious afflictions and intractable conflicts, particularly at the level of family and social relatedness. Thus, to grasp the social lives of silence and the invisible forces that animate people’s struggles to address serious violations, it is necessary to focus on the diversity of “lived experience of relatedness in local contexts.”43

Histories of political violence: Independence war, civil war, memory wars Mozambique has gone through almost three decades of war. Following nearly thirty years of effective Portuguese colonization, the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo) was founded in 1962 to wage an armed struggle for independence. While Frelimo represented a united military front, it was plagued by serious internal conflicts, some of which predated colonization. Lack of consensus on the priorities of the armed struggle coupled with internal struggles for control of the leadership resulted in numerous dissentions and assassinations within the Frelimo ranks. Nevertheless, Frelimo successfully led the anticolonial struggle between 1964 and 1974. Particularly in the northern and central regions of Mozambique, Portuguese troops bombarded the region, killing many civilians and causing internal displacement. Both the Portuguese and Frelimo troops used civilians as human shields, and many individuals were tortured and killed by both armies on the grounds of collaboration with their enemies. The armed struggle for independence ended with the signature of the Lusaka Accords on September 7, 1974. This accord marked the beginning of attempts to build a new political order in Mozambique under the leadership of Frelimo and Samora Machel, the first president of the country. The euphoric celebration of independence did not, however, resolve the conflicts that were unleashed in the context of colonial occupation. In June 1975, in the aftermath of independence, the country was engulfed in “fear and suspicion,” and “coercion became an ever more important component of mobilisation and discipline.”44 Over time, the mechanisms adopted to deal with the legacies of colonialism and the liberation struggle contributed to

94  Victor Igreja widespread internal dissatisfaction with Frelimo; alleged reactionaries within and outside the party, traditional authorities, Christian religious leaders, and numerous other Mozambicans accused of past collaboration with Portuguese colonialism were persecuted, arrested, and sent to re-education camps.45 The persecution of the alleged collaborators of the Portuguese colonialism had the unintended effect of motivating an unspecified number of Mozambicans to join the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) rebel movement, and the failure of the independence process to foster the post-colonial reconciliation in the country over time degenerated into a full-blown civil war.46 Explanations over the origins of the civil war remain a matter of serious dispute between the Frelimo and the Renamo, as among various intellectuals.47 Conventionally the war opposed two internal belligerents, but it involved foreign troops from former Communist Bloc countries and from the former regimes of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa. The civil war affected every part of the country. In Gorongosa, there were some areas controlled by the government army (largely communal villages) and others by the Renamo rebel forces (largely old residences or houses in the bush known as madembe). Nevertheless, the control of these areas continuously shifted from one army to the other, and the civilians living under each of the opposing military regions were generally labeled capricornio, which means traitor. For both government and Renamo forces, being called capricornio was a death sentence. As a result, many civilians were made direct targets of the violence, whether through the destruction of villages, aerial bombardments, forced conscription to fight in the war, torture, and indiscriminate killings of civilians suspected of collaborating with “enemy forces,” kidnapping, rape, or compulsory marriage of young girls and adult women, as well as widespread maiming and indiscriminate killing through the use of landmines.48 The civil war was intercalated by periods of severe drought, which triggered extreme famine and created mass exodus and numerous deaths among war-affected populations. Amid the war and famine, civilians living in the epicenter of the war in central Mozambique attempted to maintain some form of a social life.49 Between uncertain routines and being closely watched by militias (Frelimo) and mujibas (Renamo policemen), civilians celebrated marriages, practiced small farming, hunted animals, and traveled inside the war-zones to do small business to survive. Yet social life was shaped by a permanent peril in which the soldiers, militias, and mujibas instigated deep divisions among the people. Neighbors and family members became suspicious of one another; they formed dangerous alliances and spied on each other; they practiced torture to rule among themselves and committed acts of betrayal that culminated in the murder of family and community members. These grisly events and experiences created profound divisions locally, despite a tendency in postwar ethnographies to neglect the analysis of the involvement of civilians in serious violations during the war.50

Transition and silence in Mozambique 95 At the end of the 1980s, the impossibility of a military resolution swayed the belligerents to accept mediated political negotiations. The Frelimo government made politico-legal reforms to boost the peace prospects by adopting a multiparty constitution in 1990. Over a two-year period (1990–1992), national and international mediators brokered peace negotiations in Rome, Italy. During the negotiations, participants viewed accountability as part of a transitional justice process as divisive and precluded it from the eventual peace settlement signed on October 4, 1992, as the Acordo Geral de Paz (AGP, General Peace Agreement).51 Ten days after the signing of the AGP, the Frelimo government alone debated and passed an Amnesty Law for crimes committed between 1979 and 1992.52 Elections followed in 1994, won by Frelimo but confirming Renamo as the official opposition. The centerpiece of the transition was not truth and accountability, but the fostering of political relations. It was expected that these relations could facilitate the formulation of new laws in a democratic context and advance the institutional development and the broader democratization and decentralization process. Yet the challenge is that relationships in transition feature unpredictability, which makes it difficult to know when and how silence will be broken. Thus, despite the appeals made by the party leaders and other influential members in Mozambican society for national unity and reconciliation, highly antagonistic and confrontational relationships animated the interactions between Frelimo and Renamo in the post-war dispensation. Both parties used memories as weapons, consisting of mutual accusations of the perpetration of serious human rights violations and crimes, which aimed to deny one another ideological and political legitimacy.53 These “memory wars” entailed a struggle to control the historical narrative. Frelimo adamantly refused the notion that the civil war was the by-product of internal dissatisfaction in its own ranks and in society more broadly; for Frelimo cadres and many pro-Frelimo academics, Renamo forces were rather the by-product of the Cold War and the machinations of the Rhodesian and South African regimes to destabilize and prevent the development of the socialist revolution in Mozambique.54 In turn, Renamo refused Frelimo’s accusations on the grounds that they distorted their identity as a movement and subsequently as a political party. They defended a nationalist position, arguing that they took up arms to fight against Frelimo’s repressive socialist policies. These ideological conflicts and struggles for recognition, coupled with the manipulation of the electoral system, derailed the democratic process and sparked a new cycle of armed political violence in 2012.55 In September 2014, the country’s president and Renamo leader, Afonso Dhlakama, signed a new peace deal, which nevertheless did not bring peace and stability to the country. The violent military hostilities and instability continued, including the participation of alleged death squads that assassinated many political opposition members, while Renamo suffered a major blow with the death of Dhlakama in May 2018, their long-term military and political leader.

96  Victor Igreja

Cultural dynamics of transition: Gamba spirit possession At the level of national politics, therefore, memories were used as weapons without triggering any formal process to deal with the unresolved memories of past conflicts, even passing the 1992 Amnesty Law to prevent possible prosecutions. At the community level, on the other hand, post-war relationships juggled silence, secrecy, and revelation, with the goal of dealing with past disputes in appropriate forums. This turned attention to the role of cultural beliefs and practices in the forms that embodied accountability can take in Gorongosa. In the social context of life following the peace agreement, possession by gamba spirits took on a special role. Extending the original meaning from the spirits of those killed in the civil war, gamba also refers to healers whose power comes from these spirits as well as to the bodily afflictions caused by possession, the rhythms the healers play on their drums, and the songs and dances that accompany the resolution rituals of past conflicts connected to the spirit.56 The cultural identity of the people in Gorongosa is centered on the value of the collective; therefore, issues of responsibility and guilt, particularly in relation to serious violations, are also collective. Gamba spirits target the bodies of survivors allegedly responsible for a past violation, or those of their offspring; once gamba spirits strike, the extant bodily affliction and family unrest triggers myriad unpredictable actions for righting wrongs. This ethics of reciprocity also establishes that impunity, and disregard of time flow, unpredictably disturbs the life of the living in profound ways. Possession by gamba is a trauma of a twofold derivation. First, the host and their patrilineal kin were exposed to warfare that led to vulnerability; then, to address that war-related vulnerability, the host’s patrilineal kin perpetrated serious wrongdoings. When the war ended, the alleged perpetrators and war survivors more broadly wished to forget the past horrors by remaining in silence.57 The gamba spirits, however, intrusively take possession of the bodies of the living, paving the way for breaking the silence. The interruption of the silence is regarded as a trace of these alleged serious violations in wartime. To change the predicament of serious affliction, the host’s relatives must negotiate with the spirit and acknowledge past wrongdoing. When a consensus is reached over the acknowledgement of culpability, through a verbal narrative, the gamba spirit establishes the modalities of reparation. It can follow two paths. The gamba spirit may decide that his host/patient becomes his wife, and he uses his or her body to work as a gamba healer.58 In this type of resolution, the gamba spirit fosters a closure that revolves around the setting of amical and kin relationships between the spirits, hosts and the host’s family. The kinship of the host is expanded to accommodate the new member, who has a virtual existence that is continuously actualized through embodiment. In the other type of resolution, the spirit demands reparation, which may be in the form of money and

Transition and silence in Mozambique 97 other objects to be delivered in a specific closing ceremony in the homestead or landscape. Gamba spirits initially possessed people because of violent events that specifically took place during the civil war.59 Over time, however, the configuration of the gamba spirits has changed to adopt multiple temporalities, denoting any past event and individual presumed to have died an unjust death.60

Spirit’s voice: Greed, betrayal, and death In December 2014, Azesta reported her case to the community court, complaining that she was suffering immensely with illnesses. The community courts, recognized by the government in 1992, are open forums where everyone can participate; they combine local cultural practices and a loose application of state laws.61 Azesta related to the court that she had lost two babies with illnesses and her husband had abandoned her because of these enduring social and health problems. Prior to reporting her case in the community court, Azesta consulted various healers who informed her that there was a spirit wreaking havoc in her family because of violent deeds during the civil war involving her paternal family members. Although the spirit did not manifest itself to the public through the common phenomenon of spirit possession and verbal accusations, when Azesta confronted her paternal relatives regarding their wartime actions, they refused wrongdoing and indicated that Azesta should deal with the problems afflicting her on her own. While the Amnesty Law of 1992 blocked the possibility of any court in the country adjudicating on charges of wartime violations, cases of spirit possession sway the judges of community courts to engage in what Robert Cover referred to as “justifiable disobedience” of the amnesty law and “radical reinterpretation” of such cases.62 The community court therefore sought to ask Azesta’s father to seek the truth behind her embodied complaints of past misdeeds in her family, but it was revealed that her dad had died during the civil war. The court then summoned the person in Azesta’s family who was expected to assume the responsibility (ku himirira) of monitoring the resolution of family problems. In her case, it was her paternal uncle, Loquia, who testified in the community court saying to the judges that he knew nothing about violent events involving his family. Given that the community judges were unable to reach a verdict, the case was transferred to a gamba healer. A common procedure in these types of cases involving spirits of the dead, this continues the resolution process in another mode.63 The relatives of Azesta (including her mother, Loquia, Loquia’s wife Vale, and their elder son) and a community judge participated in the examination of the problem in the gamba healer’s forum. The healer played the drums, and the audience accompanied with songs evoking memories of violence and suffering of the civil war. As observed in another context, “music can provide the framework and expression in which social

98  Victor Igreja organization, beliefs, group identity, and historical memory can be formalised or confirmed.”64 In Gorongosa, the gamba song calls for the spirit to manifest itself to the audience by taking possession of the bodies of the living and to break the silence by telling what wrong (ku nhangara) happened in the past that needs to be resolved. In the case of the session for Azesta, the lyric claimed, “The spirit is not like a domesticated pig that can be cheated with bran, the spirit is like a pig from the bush.” This song meant that such a clever person as the spirit cannot be easily deceived and silenced (ku matama). In this way, the song attempted to sway the spirit to talk, showing that the audience, including the community judge, wanted to hear what went wrong in the past. These appeals turn the songs into meaningful practices of “resistance and contestation”65 through social and political participation and expressions of historical consciousness.66 After a few songs, the spirit manifested itself through the body of Azesta. The spirit revealed his name as Tuomba. The spirit alleged that during the civil war, Loquia had conspired with the government soldiers in the Gorongosa village (former Vila Paiva de Andrade), which led to his torture and death. The gamba healer asked Loquia about his response to this revelation. Loquia alleged that one day during the war, he met several government soldiers, who accordingly “asked me if I knew a person named Tuomba.” Loquia admitted that he said he did know Tuomba, and he added that “the matropa [government soldiers] asked me to show Tuomba’s house. I showed them the way to Tuomba’s house. Yet I did not know that these soldiers wanted to hurt Tuomba.” The gamba healer confronted Loquia by saying, “Even in times of peace, when a stranger arrives in the valley and asks us for the residence of a neighbor, we never show it because we don’t want to have problems. What about soldiers during the war searching for a person in the mountains? Why didn’t you say that you did not know?” Several participants in the session got agitated and started accusing Loquia of being a capricornio, using the name for alleged traitors during the civil war. A man watching the session said, “Many people disappeared and were killed during the war because of capricornios like you. It is dangerous to reveal your neighbor’s house to soldiers or anyone else that you don’t know.” The gamba healer asked everyone to keep calm and to allow Loquia to answer the questions. “I only showed Tuomba’s house to the soldiers because I knew that he used to fetch wood for them,” said Loquia. “I thought that he was on good terms with them.” At this point, the spirit of Tuomba intervened. “But didn’t the soldiers promise you something in return for showing my house?” Loquia answered, “They did not promise me anything. I was just surprised when, few days after I met them, they gave me a package of cigarettes.” The gamba healer interrogated him. “At the time were you a smoker?” Loquia answered positively and added, “Until today I smoke.” The spirit intervened once again, but this time in a more assertive way. “You are lying (ku nhepa). You betrayed me because you wanted to grab my field. One day when you

Transition and silence in Mozambique 99 were drunk, you told Cabultcha that you had done something very wrong against someone during the war, and that sometimes you have nightmares about it. Didn’t you say that?” The gamba healer asked the audience who Cabultcha was and his whereabouts. They said that Cabultcha was an old neighbor of Loquia’s, but that he had changed houses to a distant village. The healer adjourned the session and requested that Cabultcha be brought to the session to reveal if the allegations involving his name were true or false. Yet this adjournment and the decision to hear the testimony of Cabultcha was not based on the belief that the healer and the audience could obtain complete disclosures around the serious allegations that had been made. Instead, the healer wanted to probe the extent to which the spirit could have been engaged in tainting Loquia’s position through defamation, which is a serious local breach. As the audience disbanded from the scene, the healer loudly raised a rhetorical question, “Don’t the spirits lie?” He then concluded, “The heart of a person is a forest.” This proverb is sometimes used to suggest that people can know one another from the exterior without knowing their intentions. A week later, Azesta, her paternal uncle Loquia, his wife, Vale, and other relatives returned to the gamba healer’s house in the company of Cabultcha. The gamba healer once again played the drums and songs of gamba, and the spirit of Tuomba manifested to the audience through Azesta’s body. The healer requested the spirit to repeat the revelation that he had made on the previous session. The healer asked Cabultcha what he knew about Loquia’s activities during the war. First Cabultcha asserted that he had not been with Loquia during the war, saying, “I can only tell you what he told me with his own mouth and what I heard with my own ears.” Then he explained, “Once Loquia told me that he did something very bad during the war … but the first time that Loquia told me this, I immediately cut him off and I told him that I did not want to hear because I had enough of the war.” The dialogue continued: HEALER:  “We are not accusing you of anything. We just want to know what

Loquia told you about his actions during the war.” I understand. It was on the second time when Loquia mentioned his actions during the war that I decided to listen to him.” HEALER:  “What did he tell you?” CABULTCHA:  “He told me that he collaborated with the matropa [government troops] in order to increase the size of his field.” HEALER:  “When you heard him saying these things, what did you tell him?” CABULTCHA:  “I told him what our ancestors used to tell us: ‘The trap placed to hunt the rat, tomorrow might hunt the trap’s owner.’” HEALER:  “This means what?” CABULTCHA:  “This means that if someone does a great wrong today, tomorrow the person might suffer because of the same wrong.” CABULTCHA:  “Yes,

100  Victor Igreja At this point the spirit of Tuomba also intervened, proclaiming, “That which has horns cannot be wrapped in a bag.” This is a popular proverb that some people use to mean “There is nothing that can be done secretly without being unveiled.” Following the proverb, the gamba healer pleaded with the witness. “Tell us all that Loquia told you about his actions during the war.” Finally, Cabultcha concluded, “Loquia did not disclose all his actions to me at once. It was in another occasion that he told that he had betrayed someone during the war, and the person was killed by matropa, but he did not tell me who the person was—bassi [that’s it].” Upon completing his testimony, the focus turned to Loquia. The healer warned Loquia that in case he continued to hide (ku fissa) the truth, the problem would escalate and “you will all have miserable lives for a long time.” In response, Loquia said, “It was war. Many bad things happened because of the war and famine. When the war arrived, we all went crazy, and the famine made life even more ruthless.” The mother of Azesta, who had been quiet until then, now intervened. “We all suffered a lot with war and famine,” she declared, “but not all of us committed violations against others.” The community judge who was following the case in the audience also weighed in. “I lost three children because of the famine during the war, but I never killed anyone to cope with the famine,” she said, then added in proverbial language, “You made the hive fall.” She promptly explained the meaning: “Someone does something wrong, but when the person realizes that there is danger, the person tries to push responsibility onto others.” The gamba healer agreed. “Indeed, there is no point to say that ‘it was war, it was famine,’” he remarked. “It was you who plotted with matropa, and consequently someone was murdered.” Following several hours of deliberations, Loquia decided to disclose his role in the death of Tuomba. “The soldiers promised me and many other people living in the communal village that if we identified Renamo collaborators inside the communal village we should denounce, and the government would pay us well. I told them that I was not interested in money, I wanted to grab the land of my neighbor.” At this point, the healer interrupted and asked, “Who was your neighbor at that time?” Loquia replied, “There were many, but Tuomba was one of them.” The healer asked how he knew that Tuomba was a Renamo collaborator. “I did not know. I just knew that before coming to live in the communal village, he used to live in the madembe under Renamo control,” Loquia declared. The healer followed up, giving the impression that Loquia’s answer was not satisfactory. “The majority of people who moved into communal villages were living in the madembe before,” observed the healer. “But this did not mean that they were Renamo collaborators. What is it that made you betray him?” Finally, Loquia admitted, “I just saw that he had a lot of food at home. I suspected that he was receiving food from the Renamo-controlled area in exchange for collaboration.” The long silence that had followed Loquia’s actions during the war was a point of some discussion, beyond the actions themselves. “When you sold

Transition and silence in Mozambique 101 him out,” asked the healer, “you did not know that his n’ fukua [spirit]67 could return to haunt and destroy you and your family?” Loquia answered, “Who cared about n’ fukua during the suffering (ndondo)? We only did what we thought would save us. At that moment, I just wanted his field to increase my nourishment.” The community judge pressed the point, saying, “Since the end of the war, we have resolved your problems a number of times in the court, but neither you nor your kin have ever revealed that you had this serious war debt.” Loquia’s wife, Vale, remarked, “We often say in Gorongosa, ‘You cannot smash a rat that is in a clay plate, otherwise the plate breaks.’ It is the same in this case: you cannot reveal to outsiders the evil that your relative did until the evil returns to haunt you.” Once the central aspects of the truth of the serious violation and the truth of the long silence were revealed, resolution remained. The gamba healer asked Loquia if “the field of greed” was still in his possession. He answered positively. When the admission of responsibility was established, the gamba healer asked the spirit of Tuomba, still lodged in the body of Azesta, to demand reparation. The spirit stated that “a field of greed does not enrich anyone,” indicating that he no longer wanted the field. Instead, the spirit declared, “From now on, we are kin, I want to use this txiquiro [host, body of Azesta] to work as a healer.” In this case, it was necessary to consult Azesta if she agreed with the settlement. For that, the spirit had to be dislodged from the body of Azesta so that she could assert her own volition with her own voice. She, however, asserted that she did not accept that decision. “I cannot pay for someone else’s violation,” she said. “Loquia is still alive and he has daughters. He must offer his own daughter for the spirit.” At this, the affair was concluded; the spirit agreed to take one of Loquia’s daughters in place of Azesta, and the new host would work as a gamba healer. One year later, in December 2015 when I visited the region again, I met the daughter who had been offered to the spirit. She had started working as a gamba healer, and she was gradually gaining reputation in her village of being an eximious healer, judging by the number of clients who solicited her services. I also met Azesta. She related that she was no longer ill, but she could not confirm that she was fully recovered, given that she still did not have a husband. When she married again, became pregnant, and gave birth to a baby that would survive its first five years, then she could assert that the resolution of the conflict had led to her full recovery.

Economies of silence and negotiations over embodied accountability In the aftermath of the civil war in Mozambique, many war survivors wished to forget and move on to rebuilding their lives. While relationships among survivors were always shaped by clouds of suspicion about their wartime deeds, they remained silent while pretending that they were ready to move on without looking back. The resolution of Azesta’s case in the

102  Victor Igreja gamba healer’s forum revealed this dynamic of disguised public appearance and silence when the community judge appeared surprised to hear, for the first time, of Loquia’s harmful actions during the civil war; even though he had already been involved in the resolution of several of his cases, never before had these revelations publicly transpired. In the context of my other research activities in the region, my interlocutors often reported about personal and family experiences of victimization, whereas grisly experiences involving personal and family acts of violence were kept in silence.68 In some regions in Sri Lanka, Alex Argenti-Pillen found that silence took a particular form whereby survivors often quoted one another, referring to people and events in circumspect and ambiguous ways, avoiding using the names of persons and preferring euphemisms.69 Accordingly, this dynamic of silence played a role in the reconstruction of a peaceful local community.70 In Gorongosa, however, the dynamic of silence and revelation has an added meaning. Memories of personal and family involvement in serious violations are kept aside71 because there is often the expectation that the troubling memories, which are expressed using the voice of spirits, might one day be raised for accountability purposes in the local institutions of resolution. The breaking of silence in the case of Azesta was triggered by the unending experiences of suffering, namely Azesta’s bodily afflictions, the death of her offspring, and the disruption of marital relations with her former husband. In this economy of silence and revelation, the persistence of bodily suffering raises suspicions that the root causes must be related to serious violations that unfolded in the past. Gamba healers and spirits have dominated this economy by linking the alleged violations to the temporalities and events of the civil war and famine. Although, as stated above, over time other temporalities were included in the scope of local analysis—for example, violations perpetrated during the pre-colonial occupation, the Portuguese colonial period, and after the civil war72—the majority of cases that I observed for more than a decade culminated in breaking a silence related to the civil war. The social and health problems of Azesta created the circumstances and context for the negotiation of the truth about the violent past, where one of the suspects was Azesta’s paternal uncle. It is likely that in the intimate spaces of Azesta’s family, innuendos and rumors circulated about family involvement in violent actions during the civil war. Yet these rumors were kept in the family until the right moment to be presented in a public forum. The fact that Loquia had verbally shared the knowledge of his hurtful actions with a friend contributed to increase the legitimacy of the resolution, because someone outside the family was aware of some of the past evil deeds and collaborated as a witness by testifying in the gamba forum. Consequently, Cabultcha’s testimony reduced the possibilities for Loquia to continue to live in denial. Loquia’s public admission of lethal wartime collaboration paved the way for the resolution of the dispute. Yet the resolution followed a cultural understanding of closure. In this context, closure did not mean a putative

Transition and silence in Mozambique 103 erasure of the traces of the problem. Instead, closure created new spheres of relationships whereby the afflicting spirit expanded the kinship relations of the confessed perpetrator. Both the spirit and the living must share responsibilities in the present and future. The conception of spirits in Gorongosa evokes a certain dualism, that “spirits are persons”73 whereas persons are not spirits. While the dualism of persons and spirits is present in the local conceptions of social life, it is suspended during the resolution of problems of life and death. The spirit assumes the role of a healing force while the living have the responsibility to ensure that the spirit’s host is treated with respect. The dualism of person and spirit is malleable, even circumstantial, because once the spirit has been officially incorporated into kinship relations, there is a fusion whereby spirits and persons mutually influence one another, even potentially triggering new conflicts in the future.74 The spirit may speak again of the past violation, and the people might ask rhetorically: “What made the elephant rise up from the shade?” The expression implies that a certain problem had been resolved but it has emerged again. This expression is not used in a negative sense. Instead it merely acknowledges the impossibility of ever reaching a clear-cut solution, particularly to problems of life and death. The host’s spirit becomes a living and mobile legacy of the family involvement in the perpetration of serious violations, and they have the responsibility of holding commemorative ceremonies upon the request of the virtual family member. This outcome suggests relationships in transitions, shifting between memories of war and tragedy to the potential of converting the silence of suffering into healing and the widening of family networks.

Notes

1. Victor Igreja, “Mozambique,” in Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice. Vol. II, ed. Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths (New York: Routledge, 2001); Hugo Van der Merwe, Victoria Baxter and Audrey Chapman, eds. Assessing the Impact of Transitional Justice (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009); Olivera Simic, ed. An Introduction to Transitional Justice (London: Routledge, 2017). 3. Gorongosa is a district of Sofala province in the center of Mozambique. Gorongosa society is founded on patrilineal kinship, polygyny, and an agricultural system of production. Although colonial Portuguese officials attempted for more than a century to classify the ethnicity of the Gorongosas, the local people identify themselves with a place rather than an ethnicity. They call themselves Ma-Gorongosianos, referring to the constellation of the Gorongosa Mountains, which are said to possess mystical powers. The family is the basic unit of society. 4. Victor Igreja, “Multiple Temporalities in Indigenous Justice and Healing Practices in Mozambique,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6 (2012). 5. Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

104  Victor Igreja





6. Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence.” In The Anthropology of Politics, ed. Joan Vincent (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 214. 7. Victor Igreja, “Silence and Visual Representations of Anti-Violence Campaigns in Cosmopolitan Brisbane,” Anthropology in Action 25 (2018), 16. 8. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3. 9. Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds. Contested Pasts (London and New York: Routledge, 2003); Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” History and Theory 41 (2002), 179–97. 10. Carol Kidron, “Toward an Ethnography of Silence,” Current Anthropology 50 (2009), 5–27. 11. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 12. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 27. 13. Anna Politkovskaya. A Small Corner of Hell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 14. Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 15. Paul Fauvet and Marcelo Mosse, É Proibido pôr Algemas nas Palabras: Uma Biografia de Carlos Cardoso (Lisbon: Caminho, 2004). 16. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning.” 17. Victor Igreja, “Frelimo’s Political Ruling through Violence and Memory in Postcolonial Mozambique,” Journal of Southern African Studies 36 (2010), 781–91. 18. Heike Behrend and Ute Luig, eds. Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa, (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Hodgkin and Radstone, Contested Pasts; Hugo van der Merwe, “The Role of the Church in Promoting Reconciliation in Post-TRC South Africa,” In Religion and Reconciliation in South Africa, ed. Audrey Chapman and Bernard Spong (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2003). 19. Victor Igreja et al. “Testimony Method to Ameliorate Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms,” British Journal of Psychiatry 184 (2004), 251–57; Victor Igreja, “Testimonies of Suffering and Recasting the Meanings of Memories of Violence in Postwar Mozambique,” In Mediations of Violence in Africa, ed. Lidwien Kapteijns and Annemiek Richters (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 20. Victor Igreja, “Memories as Weapons,” Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (2008), 539–56. 21. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 214. 22. Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, 15, 17. 23. Alex Argenti-Pillen, Masking Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 24. Susanne Buckley-Zistel, “Remembering to Forget,” Africa 76, no. 2 (2006), 131–50. 25. Alcinda Honwana, “Undying Past,” in Magic and Modernity, ed. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (California: Stanford University Press, 2003). 26. Mary Douglas, “Do Dogs Laugh? A Cross-Cultural Approach to Body Symbolism,” in Implicit Meanings, ed. Mary Douglas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 85. 27. Thomas Csordas, ed. Embodiment and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4. 28. Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 44.

Transition and silence in Mozambique 105 29. Florence Bernault, “Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History 47 (2006): 213. 30. Kamari Clarke, Fictions of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 28. 31. Michael Lambek, Human Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 32. Riley, Impersonal Passion, 64. 33. Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Lambek, Human Spirits; Adeline Masquelier, Prayer Has Spoiled Everything (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Sasanka Perera, “Spirit Possessions and Avenging Ghosts,” in Remaking a World, ed. Veena Das et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 34. In an exception to the general rule, a particular kind of healer known as paza is always a man and specializes in unveiling facts in cases shrouded in secrecy. 35. Victor Igreja, “Post-hybridity Bargaining and Embodied Accountability in Communities in Conflict, Mozambique,” in Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development, ed. Joanne Wallis et al. (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2018). 36. Victor Igreja and Beatrice Lambranca, “Christian Religious Transformation and Gender Relations in Postwar Gorongosa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 39, no. 3 (2009). 37. Victor Igreja, “The Politics of Peace, Justice and Healing in Post-war Mozambique,” in Peace versus Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa, ed. Chandra Sriram and Suren Pillay (Kwa-Zulu Natal: University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2009). 38. Victor Igreja, “Justice and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of the Civil War in Gorongosa, Mozambique Central,” in Building a Future on Peace and Justice, ed. Kai Ambos, Judith Large, and Marieke Wierda (Berlin: Springer, 2009). 39. Andrew Strathern and Michael Lambek, “Introduction,” in Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, ed. Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7. 40. Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); for China, see Erik Mueggler, The Age of Wild Ghosts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For Sri Lanka, see Perera, “Spirit Possessions.” 41. Victor Igreja, “Memories of Violence, Cultural Transformations of Cannibals and Indigenous Statebuilding in Postconflict Mozambique,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (2014). 42. ICC, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002), 4–10. 43. Janet Carsten, “Introduction,” in Cultures of Relatedness, ed. Janet Carsten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1. 44. Jocelyn Alexander, “The Local State in Post-War Mozambique,” Africa 67, no. 1 (1997): 4. 45. Christian Geffray, La Cause des armes au Mozambique (Paris: Karthala, 1990); Margaret Hall and Tom Young, Confronting Leviathan (London: Hurst Co., 1997); João Cabrita, Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Michel Cahen, Os Outros (Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 2004); Barnabé Ncomo, Uria Simango (Maputo: Edições Novafrica, 2003); Igreja and Lambranca, “Christian Religious Transformation.” 46. Igreja, “Frelimo’s Political Ruling.” 47. Cahen, Os Outros; Geffray, La Cause; Hall and Young, Confronting Leviathan; Joseph Hanlon, Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire (London: Zed Books, 1984).

106  Victor Igreja 48. Victor Igreja, “Media and Legacies of War,” Current Anthropology 56 (2015), 678–700. 49. Stephen Lubkemann, “Migratory Coping in Wartime Mozambique,” Journal of Peace Research 42 (2005), 493–508. 50. Ibid. 51. Victor Igreja and Elin Skaar, “A Conflict Does Not Rot,” Nordic Journal of Human Rights 31 (2013), 149–175. 52. Victor Igreja, “Amnesty Law, Political Struggles for Legitimacy and Violence in Mozambique,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9 (2015), 239–258; Victor Igreja, “Os Recursos da Violência e as Lutas pelo Poder Politico Moçambique,” in Desafios para Moçambique 2015, ed. Luis de Brito et al. (Maputo: Instituto de Estudos Sociais Económicos, 2015). 53. Igreja, “Memories as Weapons.” 54. Hanlon, Mozambique; John Saul, ed. The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985). 55. Igreja and Skaar, “A Conflict”; Igreja, “Amnesty Law.” 56. Victor Igreja, “The Effects of Traumatic Experiences on the Infant-Mother Relationship in the Former War-Zones of Central Mozambique,” Infant Mental Health Journal 24 (2003), 469–94. 57. Victor Igreja et al., “The Epidemiology of Spirit Possession in the Aftermath of Mass Political Violence in Mozambique,” Social Science and Medicine 71 (2010), 592–99. 58. Igreja, “Justice and Reconciliation.” 59. Victor Igreja, Beatrice Dias-Lambranca and Annemiek Richters, “Gamba Spirits, Gender Relations, and Healing in Post-Civil War Gorongosa, Mozambique,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008), 350–67; Robert Marlin, “Possessing the Past” (PhD diss., State University of New Jersey, 2001). 60. Victor Igreja, “Negotiating Temporalities of Accountability in Communities in Conflict in Africa,” in Time and Temporality in Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies, ed. Natascha Mueller-Hirth and Sandra Rios Oyola (London: Routledge, 2018). 61. Igreja, “Frelimo’s Political Ruling”; Helen Kyed and Lars Buur, “Recognition of Traditional Authority and Group Based Citizenship in Mozambique,” Journal of Southern African Studies 32, no. 3 (2006), 563–81. 62. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan and Austin Sarat, eds., Narrative, Violence and the Law (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 147. 63. Victor Igreja, “Traditional Courts and the Struggle against State Impunity for Civil Wartime Offences in Mozambique,” Journal of African Law 54 (2010), 51–73. 64. Aidan Russell, “Home, Music and Memory for the Congolese in Kampala,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 5 (2011): 303. 65. Gage Averill, A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 9. 66. Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern, eds. Expressive Genres and Historical Change (England: Ashgate, 2005); Leroy Vail and Landeg White, “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique,” The American Historical Review 88, no. 4 (1983), 883–919. 67. In contexts of heated deliberations, people can use n’ fukua and gamba interchangeably. In such cases, the speaker is alluding the idea of innocently killing someone, which triggers vengeful spirits. For further analysis of the n’ fukua phenomenon, see Honwana, “Undying Past”; Victor Igreja, “Why Are There So Many Drums Playing Until Dawn?” Transcultural Psychiatry 40 (2003), 459–87.

Transition and silence in Mozambique 107

68. Igreja, “The Politics of Peace.” 69. Argenti-Pillen, Masking Terror. 70. c.f. Buckley-Zistel, “Remembering to Forget.” 71. c.f. Ricoeur, Memory, 214. 72. Igreja, “Multiple Temporalities”; Victor Igreja, “Legacies of War, Healing, Justice and Social Transformation in Mozambique,” in Peacebuilding from a Psychosocial Perspective, ed. Brandon Hamber and Elizabeth Gallagher (Springer: New York, 2015). 73. Lambek, Human Spirits. 74. Victor Igreja, “Spirit Possession,” in Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Hillary Callan (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2018).

Bibliography Alexander, Jocelyn. “The Local State in Post-War Mozambique.” Africa 67 (1997): 1–26. Argenti-Pillen, Alex. Masking Terror: How Women Contain Violence in Southern Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Averill, Gage. A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Behrend, Heike, and Ute Luig, eds. Spirit Possession: Modernity and Power in Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 1999. Bernault, Florence. “Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa.” Journal of African History 47 (2006): 207–39. Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Boddy, Janice. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Buckley-Zistel, Susanne. “Remembering to Forget.” Africa 76 (2006): 131–50. Cabrita, João. Mozambique: The Tortuous Road to Democracy. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Cahen, Michel. Os Outros: Um Historiador em Moçambique, 1994. Basel: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 2004. Carsten, Janet. “Introduction.” In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, edited by Janet Carsten, 1–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Clarke, Kamari. Fictions of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Csordas, Thomas, ed. Embodiment and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Douglas, Mary. “Do Dogs Laugh? A Cross-Cultural Approach to Body Symbolism.” In Implicit Meanings, edited by Mary Douglas, 83–89. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Fauvet, Paul, and Mosse, Marcelo. É Proibido pôr Algemas nas Palavras: Uma Biografia de Carlos Cardoso. Lisbon: Caminho, 2004. Gal, Susan. “Between Speech and Silence.” In The Anthropology of Politics, edited by Joan Vincent, 213–21. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Geffray, Christian. La Cause des armes au Mozambique. Paris: Karthala, 1990. Hall, Margaret, and Tom Young. Confronting Leviathan. London: Hurst Co, 1997. Hanlon, Joseph. Mozambique: The Revolution Under Fire. London: Zed Books, 1984.

108  Victor Igreja Hayner, Priscilla. Unspeakable Truths. New York, Routledge, 2001. Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 2005. Hodgkin, Katherine, and Susannah Radstone, eds. Contested Pasts. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Honwana, Alcinda. “Undying Past: Spirit Possession and Memory of War in Southern Mozambique.” In Magic and Modernity, edited by Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels, 60–80. California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Horton, Robin. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Igreja, Victor. “Silence and Visual Representations of Anti-Violence Campaigns in Cosmopolitan Brisbane.” Anthropology in Actions 25 (2018): 15–28. ———. “Amnesty Law, Political Struggles for Legitimacy and Violence in Mozambique.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9 (2015): 239–58. ———. “Frelimo’s Political Ruling through Violence and Memory in Postcolonial Mozambique.” Journal of Southern African Studies 36 (2010): 781–99. ———. “The Effects of Traumatic Experiences on the Infant-Mother Relationship in the Former War-Zones of Central Mozambique.” Infant Mental Health Journal 24 (2003): 469–94. ———. “Mozambique,” In Encyclopedia of Transitional Justice, vol. II, edited by Lavinia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, 305–11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. “Spirit Possession,” in Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Hillary Callan. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2018. ———. “Legacies of War, Healing, Justice and Social Transformation in Mozambique.” In Peacebuilding from a Psychosocial Perspective, edited by Brandon Hamber and Elizabeth Gallagher, 223–54. Springer: New York, 2015. ———. “Media and Legacies of War: Responses to Global Film Violence in Conflict Zones.” Current Anthropology 56 (2015): 678–700. ———. “Memories as Weapons.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34 (2008): 539–56. ———. “Multiple Temporalities in Indigenous Justice and Healing Practices in Mozambique.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 6 (2012): 404–22. ———. “Negotiating Temporalities of Accountability in Communities in Conflict in Africa.” In Time and Temporality in Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies, edited by Natascha Mueller-Hirth and Sandra Rios Oyola, 84–101. London: Routledge, 2018. ———. “Os Recursos da Violência e as Lutas Pelo Poder Politico Moçambique.” In Desafios para Moçambique 2015, edited by Luis de Brito, Carlos Castel-Branco, Sérgio Chichava, Salvador Forquilha, and António Francisco, 29–50. Maputo: Instituto de Estudos Sociais Económicos, 2015. ———. “The Politics of Peace, Justice and Healing in Post-war Mozambique.” In Peace versus Justice? The Dilemmas of Transitional Justice in Africa, edited by Chandra Sriram and Suren Pillay, 277–300. Kwa-Zulu Natal: University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2009. ———. “Post-hybridity Bargaining and Embodied Accountability in Communities in Conflict, Mozambique.” In Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development, edited by Joanne Wallis, Lia Kent, Miranda Forsyth, Sinclair Dinnen and Srinjoy Bose, 163–80. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2018.

Transition and silence in Mozambique 109 ———. “Justice and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of the Civil War in Gorongosa, Mozambique Central.” In Building a Future on Peace and Justice, edited by Kai Ambos, Judith Large, and Marieke Wierda, 423–37. Berlin: Springer, 2009. ———. “Testimonies of Suffering and Recasting the Meanings of Memories of Violence in Postwar Mozambique.” In Mediations of Violence in Africa, edited by Lidwien Kapteijns and Annemiek Richters, 141–72. Leiden: Brill, 2010. ———. “Traditional Courts and the Struggle against State Impunity for Civil Wartime Offences in Mozambique.” Journal of African Law 54 (2010): 51–73. ———. “Why Are There So Many Drums Playing Until Dawn?” Transcultural Psychiatry 40 (2003): 459–87. ———. “Memories of Violence, Cultural Transformations of Cannibals and Indigenous Statebuilding in Postconflict Mozambique,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 56 (2014): 774–802. Igreja, Victor, Beatrice Dias-Lambranca, and Annemiek Richters. “Gamba Spirits, Gender Relations, and Healing in Post-Civil War Gorongosa, Mozambique.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): 350–67. Igreja, Victor, Wim Kleijn, Bas Schreuder, Jan van Dijk, and Margot Verschuur. “Testimony Method to Ameliorate Post-Traumatic Stress Symptoms: CommunityBased Intervention Study with Mozambican Civil War Survivors.” British Journal of Psychiatry 184 (2004): 251–57. Igreja, Victor, Beatrice Lambranca, Douglas Hershey, Limore Racin, Annemiek Richters, and Ria Reis. “The Epidemiology of Spirit Possession in the Aftermath of Mass Political Violence in Mozambique.” Social Science and Medicine 71 (2010): 592–99. Igreja, Victor, and Beatrice Lambranca. “Christian Religious Transformation and Gender Relations in Postwar Gorongosa.” Journal of Religion in Africa 39 (2009): 262–94. Igreja, Victor, and Elin Skaar. “A Conflict Does Not Rot.” Nordic Journal of Human Rights 31 (2013): 149–75. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory.” History and Theory 41 (2002): 179–97. Kidron, Carol. “Toward an Ethnography of Silence.” Current Anthropology 50 (2009): 5–27. Kyed, Helen, and Lars Buur. “Recognition of Traditional Authority and Group Based Citizenship in Mozambique.” Journal of Southern African Studies 32 (2006): 563–81. Lambek, Michael. Human Spirits. Cambridge: University Press, 1981. Lubkemann, Stephen. “Migratory Coping in Wartime Mozambique.” Journal of Peace Research 42 (2005): 493–508. Marlin, Robert. “Possessing the Past: Legacies of Violence and Reproductive Illness in Central Mozambique.” PhD diss., State University of New Jersey, 2001. Masquelier, Adeline. Prayer Has Spoiled Everything. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Minow, Martha, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat, eds. Narrative, Violence and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Mueggler, Erik. The Age of Wild Ghosts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Ncomo, Barnabé. Uria Simango. Maputo: Edições Novafrica, 2003. Nordstrom, Carolyn. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

110  Victor Igreja Perera, Sasanka. “Spirit Possessions and Avenging Ghosts.” In Remaking a World, edited by Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Mamphela Ramphele, and Pamela Reynolds, 157–200. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Politkovskaya, Anna. A Small Corner of Hell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by K. Blamey and D. Pellauer. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Russell, Aidan. “Home, Music and Memory for the Congolese in Kampala.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 5 (2011): 294–312. Saul, John, ed. The Transition to Socialism in Mozambique. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985. Simic, Olivera, ed. An Introduction to Transitional Justice. London: Routledge, 2017. Stewart, Pamela, and Andrew Strathern, ed. Expressive Genres and Historical Change. England: Ashgate, 2005. Strathern, Andrew, and Michael Lambek. “Introduction.” In Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, edited by Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Swedenburg, Ted. Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past. Boston, Beacon Press, 1995. Vail, Leroy, and Landeg White. “Forms of Resistance: Songs and Perceptions of Power in Colonial Mozambique.” The American Historical Review 88 (1983): 883–919. Van der Merwe, Hugo, Victoria Baxter, and Audrey Chapman, eds. Assessing the Impact of Transitional Justice. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2009. Van der Merwe, Hugo. The Role of the Church in Promoting Reconciliation in PostTRC South Africa. In Religion and Reconciliation in South Africa, edited by Audrey Chapman and Bernard Spong, 269–81. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2003.

6

“A deafening silence” and “A piece of speech” Regimes of silence in an African Counter-Insurgency Luise White

I write as a historian of counter-insurgency, particularly Rhodesia’s war against two African nationalist armies in the 1970s, who spent most of her career writing with and about oral history. I am, then and now, troubled by some of the concerns that entered African history through women’s history, especially the insistence that speech and silence were opposites and that silence in and of itself represented nothing less than an exclusion from the historical record. For those reasons I found the idea of regimes of silence— the atrocities everyone knows about but no one talks about—and the depths of unspoken knowledge therein provocative and good to think with. I began to wonder if the term might not be inverted, whether regimes of silence could be enforced by speech. This wouldn’t necessarily be a regime of speech, rather a silence that was imposed by speech (or a speech) about events everyone talked about but were in fact little known precisely because the events were best known through speech. What if the speech that was silence was more than just speech, but a boast, a swaggering but inaccurate description of events? Could talk become an accurate description by its repetition? Can regimes of silence contain what David William Cohen has called “a truth,” statements that contain at least as much that is false as is true, but that take on credibility because they are repeated over and over. Such statements survive interrogation because they are fixed; they do not describe what happened so much as return the conversation to the context in which the event took place.1 Can a truth and its repetition constitute a regime of silence in which speech—or in this case, a speech—is substituted for silence? The idea of a silence constituted through speech may well describe much of my personal intellectual history. The theoretical frameworks that gave scholars speech and silence as opposites were frameworks of inclusion, of wanting subalterns to speak in our texts, of believing that research and writing could recuperate lost pasts and recalibrate our understanding of the present. Combined with the linguistic turn and its powerful attention to which words were used—or not used—by whom, the binary of speech and silence allowed for an interrogation of absences and omissions and the unveiling of the previously invisible, the excavation of the hidden. That binary, however, tended to homogenize silences. As it became

112  Luise White clearer that not all silences were the same, scholars informed by Foucault began to concern themselves with the different ways with which people spoke and did not talk about something.2 What had been a rallying cry for more African voices, or women’s voices, gradually shifted to an interest in strategies of speaking and not speaking—everywhere but in the study of violence. There, victims speak (to heal) and perpetrators confess (to heal). The performance of testimonies was rarely interrogated for accuracy precisely because the act of speaking was enough to make truth and reconciliation two sides of a coin. The challenge of this essay is to ask what happens when I try to use the practices that emerged out of women’s history and oral history to study counter-insurgency. Do I perpetuate the silencing of victims, or do I manage something else, an uncoupling of speaking and knowing that suggests that part of the power of political violence is what is said and not said about it, that speech and silence are located in political contexts and strategies? Thus, this chapter argues that what is said and not said is as much about the audience for words (or their absence) as is the act of brutality.3

Rhodesia at war Rhodesia (until 1964 Southern Rhodesia, briefly Zimbabwe-Rhodesia in 1979, and after 1980 Zimbabwe) had never been a formal British colony; the only time it was under the control of the colonial office was when it was part of the Central African Federation (1954–1963). Nevertheless, confronted with the orderly processes of decolonization and majority rule, Rhodesia declared itself independent from Britain in 1965. Almost at once the two banned African political parties in exile in Tanzania and Zambia began to plan for guerrilla war. These were the Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union (ZAPU) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU, whose army was the Zimbabwe National Liberation Army, or ZANLA). The war was sporadic until the 1970s, when ZAPU gave its army a name of its own, the Zimbabwe Peoples’ Revolutionary Army (abbreviated and spoken as ZIPRA). In the mid-1970s there was pressure, largely from Zambia, to unify the two parties, but attempted coups and successful counter-coups sent ZANU and its army to Mozambique. ZIPRA remained in Zambia, where locals routinely complained that theirs was an occupied country: ZIPRA’s army was larger than that of Zambia. Meanwhile, Rhodesia had locked itself into an unworkable constitution and, after a botched attempt at a settlement with Britain, was pressured into negotiating an end to the war by South Africa and to a lesser extent the United States and the United Kingdom. Nothing came from the negotiations in Geneva in 1976 beyond ZANU and ZAPU forming a Patriotic Front, which remained an uncomfortable alliance until 1979. After Geneva, however, the Rhodesian government began secret negotiations (albeit equally uncomfortable and not really secret) with British and US diplomats, and sometimes with Joshua Nkomo

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 113 of ZAPU, to have some kind of compromise on some kind of African rule. Not all whites in Rhodesia were pleased with the possibility of ZAPU in the Rhodesian government, nor were all ZIPRA.4 On September 3, 1978, a civilian aircraft, the Hunyani, was shot down after leaving the resort of Kariba by ZIPRA using Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles. There were fifteen survivors; five went to find help and returned to discover the rest had been shot by anxious young guerrillas. There were many accusations, in many venues, that the women survivors had been raped, but this does not seem to have been the case: the first Rhodesian police on the scene checked to see if the women had their underwear on.5 Even without sexual violence, this was a horrific attack on civilians. It became known as the Viscount disaster or tragedy, named for the brand of the aircraft and often made plural—as in Viscount disasters—to include a second plane shot down in February 1979. This second crash was a story of discomforting intelligence and pilot error. The Uminiati was shot down after leaving Kariba in February 1979; it crashed killing all on board. By then, however, Rhodesian authorities knew that ZIPRA had surface-to-air missiles and required all civilian aircraft flying out of Kariba to gain altitude over the lake, so as to be above missile range when they flew over Rhodesian soil. The pilot of the Uminiati did not do this. He may have been making up time after a late departure, or he may have been one of many pilots who ignored these instructions, as his co-pilot had complained the week before. However, if many pilots ignored the rules, why was this flight the one that was shot down? At the time, many journalists and later ZAPU insisted that General Peter Walls, commander of the Rhodesian forces, was scheduled to be on that flight.6 ZIPRA intelligence had learned he was traveling to and from Kariba on a civilian aircraft; he was scheduled to address a passing-out parade. ZIPRA operatives had seen him at the airport, ready to depart. According to David Caute, reporting from Rhodesia for the New Statesman and The Observer, two flights were delayed. Walls and a few other passengers were chosen at random to take a slightly later flight, about which he did not protest or pull rank. (“Rhodesia is an egalitarian society,” Caute wrote). Was General Walls, and not the civilians, the target of the attack? Did he know the attack and arrange to be put on a later flight? If so—or if Walls was simply lucky—was the attack a failure of ZAPU’s intelligence or a success of Rhodesia’s?7 The stories and recriminations that must have circulated in official circles—Rhodesian and ZAPU—after the crash meant that memorial for the Uminiati was brief and literally out of sight. Two chaplains were helicoptered into the crash site to conduct a short “but moving” service, without a sermon, as they struggled with the heat, the smells, and the flies.8 Since then the crash of the Uminiati has taken up considerably less discursive space in the literature on the Viscount tragedy than did that of the Hunyani. Indeed, the Hunyani took hold in Rhodesian political and popular culture in a way that very little else did.

114  Luise White

Speech at war On September 4, 1978, Joshua Nkomo told a BBC interviewer that ZIPRA was responsible for bringing down the Hunyani but that his men did not shoot any of the survivors. Nkomo claimed these were not civilians but Rhodesian troops being transported in civilian aircraft. When he was asked how ZIPRA brought the plane down, he “answered that we brought it down by throwing stones.” He later claimed he did not want Zambia to know ZIPRA had Soviet surface-to-air missiles, unlikely as it was that Zambian officials did not know the full inventory of ZIPRA ordnance. He knew his answer was absurd, and as he spoke he “laughed a bit” at his own ridiculous evasion, and not at the deaths of innocent civilians.9 The interview was immediately replayed on Rhodesian radio, however, where Nkomo’s chuckle was heard as “a hateful belly laugh.”10 Nkomo’s laughter was nervous laughter to be sure, but it was not the nervousness of a victim or a perpetrator, but that of a man who might have just confessed to a war crime and who definitely ended any possibility of serving in a coalition government in Rhodesia.11 Nkomo’s laugh was not the only broadcast about the attack. At the memorial service for the dead, the Dean of Salisbury Cathedral spoke of “the deafening silence” of the world’s response to the outrage. Calling out by name the medical doctor David Owen, Britain’s foreign secretary, and US President Jimmy Carter, “from America’s Baptist Bible Belt,” he asked, “Are we deafened by the sounds of protest from the nations that call themselves civilized? We are not.”12 This may have been the most anguished statement of Rhodesia’s self-presentation of being alone in the world; it was easily the most popular. The sermon was published, selling 38,000 copies, and a recording of it sold 25,000 copies, earning the dean a gold disc.13 This paled in comparison to the marketing of the raids in Zambia in October. Rhodesia retaliated. What seems to have been an attack on ZANLA camps already in the works began on September 19. This raid had an unfortunate name (Operation Snoopy, named in contrast to the more successful Operation Dingo the year before) and unfortunate results, so it received little attention.14 In stark and long-lasting contrast, the bombing raids in mid-October became one action, and a thing in and of itself. Rhodesia attacked two ZAPU camps in Zambia, one in Westlands near Lusaka, and another in the more remote Mkushi. These raids killed hundreds of people, many young cadres in training and refugees at Westlands, and mainly women, probably refugees and somewhat fewer female combatants, at Mkushi.15 In Rhodesia and in its post-war imaginary, the raid became “Green Leader” (the call sign for the lead aircraft), known for and by the speech the pilot was tasked to read to Air Traffic Control in Lusaka as he approached Westlands camp. The core of the speech was written down (probably by

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 115 senior staff) for the pilot to give as he approached Lusaka. This version, or a version very close to it, appears in a great number of texts: Lusaka Tower, this is Green Leader. This is a message for the station commander at Mumbwa from the Rhodesian Air Force. We are attacking the terrorist base at Westlands Farm at this time. The attack is against Rhodesian dissidents and not against Zambia. Rhodesia has no quarrel —repeat, no quarrel —with Zambia or her security forces, and we therefore ask you not to interfere. We are orbiting your airfield at this time and are under orders to shoot down any Zambian air force aircraft that does not comply with this request and attempts to take off. Did you copy all that?16 David Caute later called the speech “famously arrogant.” It was famous, and it would have been arrogant had it been given as planned, but in fact the pilot only read the speech announcing the raid after Westlands camp was bombed. We know this because the Rhodesian Air Force had linked the aircraft’s radio system to a tape recorder to make sure the words were available for public relations, but the speech was preceded by a recording of the bombing itself, when the airmen talked about the “gooks” running from the bombs. The words were indeed made available, but heavily edited with poetic license: some versions substitute “kaffir” for “gook” while many omit Green Leader’s exclamation that the bombs were “fucking beautiful”, or his delight at the panic on the ground: “You should see the fuckers running around!”17 A few versions include the words of the pilot frantically searching for the written text: “Where’s that fucking piece of speech?” Some versions add the confusion or the humbling of the air traffic controller in Lusaka, and some versions make much of the fact that he was asked if a Kenya Airways plane (or Swissair in some published versions) could take off; when Green Leader suggested it should wait, it waited.18 What do all these differences mean? Some versions and websites explain the obscenities as the stress of the moment, but why do some versions substitute “kaffir” for “gook”? Both terms are racial epithets: kaffir has a rich etymology as it meandered from Arabic to Afrikaans. Originally meaning unbeliever in Arabic, it came to South Africa, probably through East India Company agents or the slaves they brought there. By the late nineteenth century it was a derogatory term for Africans. Rhodesians did not take kaffir as their own, however, but had their own local racial epithet: “munt”, from muntu, or human. In the 1970s Rhodesians used kaffir with irony and to depict qualities separate from race, as when the right-wing politician expressed relief at the failed settlement with Britain in 1972: “The black kaffirs have saved us from the white kaffirs.” “Gook” seems to have a local wartime meaning in Rhodesia that it had nowhere else. Gook was first used by Americans in the Philippines during the Spanish-American

116  Luise White War; it was a corruption of Tagalog, the language, and it was probably first spoken as “goo-goo.” In its American usage, gook suggested a degree of disorientation and passivity: Japanese captives during World War II were said to have goo-goo eyes, and exhausted American soldiers were said to have “gone Asiatic.” The term was clearly a derogatory word for Vietnamese in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the time it was in widespread use in the Rhodesian army it was a synonym for insurgents. White and African Rhodesian soldiers used the term without much awareness of its history or how specific the Rhodesian usage was.19 Thus, while Rhodesian publicists might not have objected to its pilots using a racial epithet, they may have wanted to substitute a better-known one for versions of the speech published outside the country. The various accounts of the exchange with Lusaka Tower are complete invention. Was the Zambian air traffic controller baffled, embarrassed, or out of his league? Had he been warned of the raid in advance, or had he heard the bombs and figured out what was happening? Whatever the air traffic controller knew was not the issue, however: he was written into the performance of the bombing raids. Whatever the air traffic controller knew or did not know was incidental to a text that allowed Rhodesian audiences to imagine a smug mastery of the region’s airspace. There is nothing in the speech or reports of it that suggest it mattered in Zambia, however. There were widespread rumors that the Zambian government and the ZIPRA high command had been warned of the attack; certainly, there were no ZIPRA generals in Westlands at the time of the morning raid. It also seems fairly obvious that the Zambian air force had been informed about the attack. Had it not been, Zambian pilots would have found Rhodesian fighter planes orbiting their base at Mumbwa cause for alarm. More to the point, the pilots and ground staff and the air traffic controller in Lusaka would have heard the sound and the reverberations of the planes and the bombs, just as everyone in Lusaka did: student residences at the University of Zambia shook.20 Nevertheless, in Rhodesia the speech became an example of Rhodesian efficiency and hard-earned pride. Almost immediately after the raid, the recording was parsed to make it sound as if it preceded the raid; it was reprinted in newspapers and press releases, and it was edited and played and re-played on radio. The core of the speech, quoted above, was reproduced almost at once in fiction and song.21 John Edmond, a white Zambian singer-songwriter who spent much of the 1970s performing for Rhodesian troops, recorded “Green Leader,” which included a voiceover of the core speech as well as the mantra of worldwide censure: “My little country cries for peace/No one will hear her case at least/No one in the world to heed her/Tomorrow the world will know Green Leader.”22 The entire cockpit recording seems to have found its way very quickly to journalists sympathetic to the guerrilla cause. It is not clear how, but as Rhodesia began to unravel, fewer and fewer government apparatchiks

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 117 adhered to regulations. Less than six months after the bombing raids, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe-Rhodesia with an African head of state who, if he was not a figurehead, certainly approved of every cross-border raid requested by the Rhodesian security forces. Less than six months after that, there was a constitutional conference, a ceasefire, and two months of direct British rule and an election that made the country Zimbabwe. David Caute, for example, knew of the entire recording soon after the bombing raid.23 David Martin, who had a distinguished record of critical writing about East Africa, and Phyllis Johnson were journalists close to ZANLA. They published what was a history of the triumph of ZANU, in which they quoted the core speech after summarizing the carnage and the cover-up of the bombing raids.24 Paul Moorcraft was a journalist and sometime university lecturer close to Rhodesian security forces. Publishing after 1980, Moorcraft reproduced most of the recording, with footnotes that served as a glossary: Rhodesian pilots called the Zambezi “the stream” and called white phosphorus, the napalm-like incendiary, “fran,” short for “frantan,” from the label on the domed tanks in which it was stored. Years later, Rhodesian partisans tended to see the raid and its speech as an unqualified success. In 2001, the “definitive” history of the Rhodesian air force gives the history of the raid in segments of the recording, introduced by explaining who is speaking from which aircraft.25 Almost all versions contain the back-and-forth checks on speed and altitude and note the timing of the raid not by tasks but by the make of the plane assigned to the task: “Those [Hawker] Hunters are with us.”26 In 2007, a book of Rhodesian air strike operations based on their logs reprinted the core speech as if it had been given on the way to Westlands Camp, asserting that Green Leader’s radio transmission “avenged” the Viscount Hunyani by “exercising complete control over Zambian air space—and in the process making a complete mockery of Zambia’s ability to react to Rhodesian pursuits.”27 In the last five years, there has been a lengthy Special Branch account of tracking down the gang who shot down the Hunyani (complete with dialogue between the pilot and co-pilot as they took off and were hit). There is a Facebook group called ‘The Real Viscount Down’ devoted to correcting the inaccuracies in the book. There is a new a memorial on the grounds of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, and another book, a thorough study of the Green Leader raid, repeats the core speech.28 What’s important here is not the longevity and sheer number of presentations of this text, if indeed I can use the singular. Mind boggling as that may be, what I think is critical is that the actual text of the recording (a text that admires the trajectory of bombs and cheers the deaths of so many people, and which contains the speech written for the pilot who nevertheless neglected to give it as instructed), has become the history of the raid. I cannot make this point too forcefully: the text of a speech that was given at the wrong time substitutes for the history of the bombing raid it was supposed to announce.

118  Luise White

Are speech and silence opposites? Does any or all of the above make the text speech or silence? Does it reveal or conceal? Does its wide circulation mean that it is the opposite of secret? Is any public announcement of an event—before or after it took place—the opposite of government secrecy? For that matter, is government secrecy a thing in and of itself, or is it an idea that may or may not be enforced but organizes and empowers information as a government sees fit?29 And what do inaccuracies, or half- or quarter-truths, do to the idea of secrecy and knowledge? Here is speech, or a piece thereof, that claims a place in the historical record but is as solid as a brick wall, closed to interrogation and commentary. It is as complete as any silence. What was known from the core speech and the cockpit recording of which it was only a small part? The entire cockpit recording turns exceptional violence into boyish cleverness, the coy condescension that calls the Zambezi a stream and has pet names for napalm, but I suspect any army of young conscripts would do that. What the speech (and the histories that repeat the speech as if it were itself the history) omits were the helicopter gunships that followed the bombers. Devastating as the bombs were, their purpose was to move guerrillas out of buildings and to destroy tree cover so they could be picked off by heavy machine guns mounted in Alouette helicopters. These were known as the G-Cars and the K-Cars. The G-Car was larger and used for troop transport; when the seats were removed a heavy machine gun was mounted in it. The K-Car was armed with two 200-mm cannons, and the “K” was for “control” although most people assumed it stood for killing.30 There were between five and nine Alouettes deployed at Westlands Farm. As Green Leader told his navigator as he left the camp, “They’ve got K-Cars in there. They’ll have a beautiful time. They’re like fucking ants running around there.” I wish I could end this essay here, with the belatedly performed speech that both announces great violence and hides great violence, a staged speaking that demolishes any binary of speech and silence. That would have been all my oral history self could have wished for, but probably even then I would have noticed that this piece of speech said almost nothing. The piece of speech—even if it had been given on the way into Zambia—was a performance, the audience for which was in Rhodesia. Actual descriptions of the extent of the violence lay elsewhere. A week after the raid on Westlands Freedom Camp, the ZAPU newspaper The Peoples’ Voice published a special issue. It was remarkable for its catalogue of planes and bombs deployed.31 It described the damage and listed the various silences with which the rest of the world approved of the raid—essentially the same nations that Rhodesians accused of deafening silence, although The Peoples’ Voice made much of the coincidence of Ian Smith’s unofficial visit to the United States. It detailed the carnage and the deaths. The newspaper described the courage of ZIPRA cadres, as well as

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 119 the strength of ZIPRA’s anti-aircraft that brought down one helicopter and a Dakota transport plane at Westlands.32 There is no Rhodesian account of this Dakota being destroyed, but then, the Rhodesian account of the bombing of Westlands is simply the cockpit recordings. In describing the other raid on Mkushi, however, The Peoples’ Voice demonstrated the unrestrained savagery of Rhodesian forces, if further proof were needed. A “girl” instructor was forced to bring other young women onto parade. Surrounded by “eight or ten white soldiers,” she was commanded to shoot them all. When she refused, the white soldiers shot her and then shot all the assembled girls.33 Years later, Rhodesian intelligence officers described Mkushi with grand suburban paranoia. Special Branch and SAS intelligence had learned of “fairly sophisticated training programmes there.” What if ZAPU were training “1,500 ‘maids’” working in white suburbs to put down their brooms on a given day and “shoot everyone in the house. Imagine the implications of that?” Such a plan would have a “devastating effect” on the white population, so it was necessary to bomb Mkushi.34 Descriptions of the experience of being bombed appeared in those venues that privileged experience: children’s history (well ahead of its time) and women’s history. In 1992 Patricia Hayes published a book about the liberation war based on accounts of the schoolchildren she taught in western Zimbabwe. One girl recalled the attack on Mkushi, “with spotter planes and helicopters, and paratroopers . . . .” The attack took place at lunch time; everyone was crowded in the kitchen. When the first bombs fell there, some girls ran to the Mkushi River. Some tried to swim across it, but the paratroopers shot them: “The water was moving but it changed to blood.” One girl did not try to cross the river but “broke through” and ran to the bush; when she got to a Zambian village, the villagers ran away. Four days later ZIPRA trucks came to find the girls who ran away.35 More than a decade later, Tanya Lyons published a book about women in the liberation war. The women she interviewed who had been at Mkushi in 1978 did not describe themselves as victims of Rhodesian bombs, but as the proud graduates of the first detachment of women trained by ZIPRA. When Mkushi was bombed, however, “some of us fought back, but it was too late, the camp was encircled. And to fight somebody using helicopters, and you using small guns, that is very difficult. And we did not know whether the enemy was going to attack women. That is being coward.” Lyons relied on ZAPU publications – The Peoples’ Voice and Nkomo’s memoir – for analysis: Rhodesians knew Mkushi was a women’s camp; Rhodesian white soldiers shot women but Rhodesian African soldiers held back.36 What does all this mean? Cross-border bombing raids were the major successes of Rhodesia’s late 1970s counter-insurgency: presumably this one got songs and novels because it was retaliation—if not outright vengeance—for horrific attacks on civilians. None of that explains why texts and stories and songs about this raid have lasted so long and have taken so many forms,

120  Luise White nor does it explain the mechanisms by which the speech closed off so many other ways of representing the raid. To return to my first paragraph, regimes of silence may describe those public statements—one of which is little more than list the names of the many culprits who scorned the Rhodesian cause—that essentially change the subject; it makes sure that the events they describe go un-interrogated. But is the piece of speech, the warnings that were given to Zambia too late to have much import there, part of a regime of silence? Is it a specific way of talking that, by warning of an event, hides what actually happened, both at the time and almost forty years later? The historian of counter-insurgency wants to end this essay here, but the oral historian has a nagging feeling that she is falling into binaries of speech and knowledge vs. silence and secrecy. What if I dispense with true and false, with known and not known, and loosen up Cohen’s notion of “a truth”? Can the piece of speech, the false and out-of-time story, tell one history while ZAPU tells another and survivors tell yet another? Is the question of speech and silence one of what reveals and what conceals, or do the many forms of speech and silence represent alternate histories, parallel stories that describe other pasts and other trajectories that never happened: a history in which the Zambian Air Force was pinned down by the might of Rhodesian pilots, and another in which a Rhodesian Dakota was shot down killing thirty troops? Instead of thinking of silence as a constricted space between what is known and what can be said, can we think of silence as an opening, a doorway onto histories in which violence was justified and fair and Rhodesians were heroic and vindicated? This is not listening to silence—perhaps my biggest objection to the oral history of earlier decades—but of understanding a silence to be just that, a kind of not talking that demands there be no response or interrogation. This, of course, is Foucault’s point exactly, but Foucauldian discourse may not be pliable enough for wartime, where speech can serve as a doorway. How far that doorway opens and what it opens onto is determined by the speech, not its audience. This describes Green Leader’s piece of speech, which is not subject to debate or analysis of whether it is a warning or an afterthought: it is a fixed piece of speech that locks out debate or dialogue.

Sounds of war Still, there is a lot of noise here. There is Nkomo’s laugh, the deafening silence, and various recordings of that “piece of speech,” but most of all there are the sounds of airplanes and the bombs they drop. These sounds were well known to insurgents and counter-insurgents. ZANLA had two apes in at least one camp in Mozambique. Called Tarzan and Jane by Rhodesian soldiers, these were baboons or chimpanzees (I’ve heard both) who had been in bombing raids before and therefore went berserk at the first sound of approaching planes: they were ZANLA’s early warning system. There was a story about Zimbabwe’s independence celebration in April 1980: a white Rhodesian Air Force pilot, due to retire the next day, played

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 121 a grim and defiant joke on the crowd. As he flew over Rufaro Stadium, he opened the bomb bays of his Canberra; this caused a “howling sound” familiar to anyone who had experienced bombing raids: the former guerrillas on the platform immediately hit the ground while non-combatants and foreign visitors looked on in confusion.37 Do these sounds add up to a whole, or is each one a fragment of another history, another door into a short-lived political option? Nancy Rose Hunt has argued persuasively that the power of the sensory—be it a nervous laugh or the sound of approaching aircraft—to bring violence to the fore comes from its repetition. These are “acoustic debris,” unfit for everyday use but readily available to anyone scavenging the political landscapes they litter.38 While I am hesitant to make a parallel between the Congo of Leopold or Kabila and Cold War–funded surface-to air-missiles (or the lack thereof, see Rhodesian rhetoric), 1950s bombers, and napalm, I want to suggest that in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe the repetition of sounds and images has made political histories increasingly unstable, that each reiteration or chatroom debate has opened up a space to revisit and rethink the event. In this, noises and sounds can become an example of Cohen’s “a truth,” a version of what happened given authority by repetition. The renewed debates have not made the histories of the Viscount disasters or the bombing raids into Zambia increasingly contested even as the discursive lines have hardened: the open bomb bays of the Canberra were the pilot’s joke and the former guerrillas’ terror.39 If noise follows the fault lines of insurgency and counter-insurgency, what does a “deafening silence” do? It is first and foremost classic Rhodesian rhetoric: the beleaguered nation standing alone, rebuked and bloodied, while guerrillas were lauded by an ignorant world. As such it was nothing new, just more poignant. Combined with the “piece of speech” from the raid on Westlands, however ridiculously it was performed, it became a regime of silence, speeches that effectively sealed a doorway and, then and now, denied access to any enquiry or critique of Rhodesian counter-insurgency.

Notes 1. David William Cohen, “In a Nation of White Cars…One White Car, or ‘A White Car’ Becomes a Truth,” in African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, ed. Luise White, Stephan F. Miesher, and David William Cohen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 2. These influences and inflections do not come to the fore in chronological order, but they have been in place for over a decade. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 26–27; Susan Gal, “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender,” in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Michaela di Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Karin Barber, I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1991); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991);

122  Luise White











David W. Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1992); Isabel Hofmeyr, “‘Wailing for Purity:’ Oral Studies in Southern African Studies,” African Studies 52, no. 4 (1995), 16–31; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); White et al., “Introduction: Voices, Words, and African History,” in African Words; Derek Peterson, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004); Stephan Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa 1968–1977 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); C. Didier Gondola, Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence and Masculinity in Kinshasa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). 3. I am not alone in this argument; see Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (London: Hurst, 1999); Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003); David William Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004); Jonathon Glassman, War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Stephen R. Davis, The ANC’s War Against Apartheid: Umkhonto wa Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 4. Luise White, Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 5. Ian Pringle, Green Leader: Operation Gatling: The Rhodesian Military’s Response to the Viscount Tragedy (Solihull: Helion, 2015), 96–97. 6. Keith Nell, Viscount Down: The Complete Story of the Rhodesian Viscount Disasters as Told by a SAS Operator (Johannesburg: Keith Nell, 2011), 352–61; Pringle, Green Leader, 197–99. The website associated with Nell’s book, www. viscountdown.com, has a link that claims the idea that the plane was shot down because Walls might have been on it is a complete fabrication: the ZIPRA gang had no radio communication with Kariba and could not have known who was and was not on a flight. 7. David Caute, Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 309–11; Andrew Nyathi and John Hoffman, Tomorrow is Built Today: Experiences of War, Colonialism and the Struggle for Collective Co-Operatives in Zimbabwe (Harare: Anvil Press, 1990), 34–45. 8. Bill Dodgen, Reflections of a God Botherer (Pretoria: Sigma, 1991), 56–58. 9. Joshua Nkomo, Nkomo: The Story of My Life (London: Methuen, 1984), 167; author’s field notes, Harare, 3 August 2006. In a fragment of a BBC interview with Nkomo from March or April 1979 on www.viscountdown.com, Nkomo denied shooting down any planes: “If we could shoot down Rhodesian planes, we would do it every day . . . .” 10. Caute, Under the Skin, 275–76; P. J. H. Petter-Bowyer, Winds of Destruction (Victoria: Tafford, 2003), 471. 11. For nervous laughter, see Nancy Rose Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 39–41.

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 123 12. The speech is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DanUAxpnymY 13. Caute, Under the Skin, 277–80. 14. The camps that were Snoopy’s target were ten times bigger than originally thought; the first incendiary bombs created a haze that made further bombing and shooting almost impossible. Rhodesians managed to destroy Soviet troop carriers. See Prop Glendenhuys, Rhodesian Air Force Operations with Airstrike Log (Durban: Just Done Publications, 2007), 161. 15. The bombing of Mkushi represents a glaring error on the part of Rhodesian intelligence. By all accounts, Rhodesians had no idea it was a women’s camp; gender was not something that could be determined by aerial surveillance. Even so, their ignorance about the camp reveals a fundamental cluelessness in the interrogation of captured ZIPRA. 16. This is not the full version, but it is the most accessible: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=-p1NRLFso6Q 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p1NRLFso6Q 18. I assume the full version found its way into the hands of journalists, and once tapes were available, anyone could buy one: Rhodesian souvenirs were sold openly in Zimbabwe until 1982. Years ago, I heard that cassettes of the cockpit recording were on sale on the streets of Bulawayo, next to cassettes of jit jive music; author’s field notes, Harare, 5 August 2004. Cassettes of the entire cockpit recording for sale on various Rhodesian websites. 19. For white kaffirs, see Peter Niesewand, In Camera: Secret Justice in Rhodesia (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973); for gook, see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 162–3; Luise White, “‘Whoever saw a country with four armies?’ The Battle of Bulawayo Revisited,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 33, no. 3 (2007), 619–31; for going Asiatic, see E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 20. Security report from captured ZIPRA terrorist Andrew Ncube, November 29, 1978, Rhodesian Army Association Papers 2001/086/049/175, in now defunct British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol; author’s field notes, London, June 20, 2011. 21. For fiction, see Peter Armstrong, Operation Zambezi: The Raid into Zambia (Salisbury: Welton Press, 1979) and Sylvia Bond Smith, Ginette (Bulawayo: Black Eagle Press, 1980). The song was not a hit, according to Edmond, nor did it earn a gold disc, but it is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=LXDoUYYeUEQ 22. John Edmond, Bushcat: Minstrel of the Wild (Leeupoort: Roan Antelope Enterprises, 1997), 234–36. 23. Caute, Under the Skin, 287. 24. David Martin and Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 296–97; Paul Moorcraft and Peter McLaughlin, Chimurenga! The War in Rhodesia 1965–1980 (Johannesburg: Sygma/Collins, 1982), 182–89, reprinted as The Rhodesian War: A Military History (Barnesly: Pen and Sword, 2008), 135–44. 25. Beryl Salt, A Pride of Eagles: The Definitive History of the Rhodesian Air Force 1920–1980 (Johannesburg: Covos-Day, 2001), 626–37. 26. The details of speed and altitude were important first because a large part of the audience for these books consists of former pilots, and second because the kinds of fragmentation bomb used, which explode just before hitting the ground, had to be dropped from an altitude of 1,000 feet. Any higher and the bomb could not be dropped with any accuracy; any lower the speed of the bomb would not allow the aircraft to escape the effects of the blast. See Pringle, Green Leader, 130. Novels praised the aircraft: “A Hawker Hunter, twice as old as anything

124  Luise White





possessed by the Zambian Air Force, but as deadly as any modern fighter in the right hands” (Armstrong, Operation Zambezi, 147). 27. Glendenhuys, Rhodesian Air Force Operations, 162–64. 28. Nell, Viscount Down; Pringle, Green Leader, 139 for the text of the message for Lusaka tower. 29. Luise White, “Telling More: Secrets, Lies, and History,” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (2000); Joseph Mosco, “‘Sensitive but Unclassified’: Secrecy and the Counterterrorist State,” Public Culture 22, no. 3 (2015). For the trial and deportation of a journalist for publishing “the worst kept secret in Salisbury,” see Niesewand, In Camera. 30. For a short history of the Rhodesian use of helicopters, see J. R. T. Wood, Counter-Strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All-Arms Fireforce in the War in the Bush, 1974–1980 (Johannesburg: 30 Degrees South, 2009), 55–60. 31. Curtis LeMay’s boast about bombing North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age may be wrong. Exposure to prolonged bombing raids seems to increase the technological savvy of those bombed. A Mau Mau insurgent, for example, spoke authoritatively about the weight of the bombs falling around him, see Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (London: Granta Books, 2001), 282. 32. ZIPRA commanders, especially Nikita Mangena, had not wanted anti-aircraft kept in military camps precisely because of the risk of bombing raids. Nyathi, Tomorrow Is Built Today, 33. 33. “Massacre of Defenseless Girls at Mkushi,” Zimbabwe People’s Voice, October 28, 1978, 4–6. I am grateful to Hugh Macmillan for making this issue available to me. 34. Pringle, Green Leader, 184. 35. Patricia Hayes, Children of History (Harare: Academic Books, 1992), 66–67. 36. Tanya Lyons, Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle (Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2004), 123–27. 37. Author’s field notes, Pretoria, July 28–29, 2004; Jim Parker, Assignment Selous Scouts: Inside Story of a Rhodesian Special Branch Officer (Alberton: Galago, 2006), 322. 38. Nancy Rose Hunt, “An Acoustic Register, Tenacious Images, and Congolese Scenes of Rape and Repetition,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008), 220–53. 39. There’s another layer here, in that sometimes sounds recall great violence and sometimes they are pilots’ nostalgia. The Viscount Down website advertises a recording of Viscounts taking off and landing at a cargo terminal in Britain, and I own a compact disc called “Rhodesian Forces: A Tribute in Sound” (Msasa Enterprises, 2003), one track of which contains the sound of Rhodesian Air Force craft. The liner notes ask the listener to imagine the sounds above the base at New Sarum—a Canberra B2 bomber, a Hawker Hunter FGA9 fighter, and an Aloutte II gun ship—and provides the affiliation of squadron to each craft.

Bibliography Armstrong, Peter. Operation Zambezi: The Road into Zambia. Salisbury: Welton Press, 1979. Barber, Karin. I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991. Caute, David. Under the Skin: The Death of White Rhodesia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Cohen, David William, and Atieno Odhiambo. Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1992.

Silence in an African Counter-Insurgency 125 ———. The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. John Robert Ouko. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. Cohen, David William. “In a Nation of Cars … One White Car, or ‘A White Car’ Becomes a Truth.” In African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, edited by Luise White, Stephan Miescher, and David William Cohen, 264–80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001 Davis, Stephen R. The ANC’s War against Apartheid: Umkhonto wa Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. Dodgen, Bill. Reflections of a God Botherer. Pretoria: Sigma, 1991. Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Edmond, John. Bushcat: Minstrel of the Wild. Leeuport: Roan Antelope Enterprises, 1997. Ellis, Stephen. The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War. London: Hurst, 1999. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Gal, Susan. “Between Speech and Silence: The Problematics of Research on Language and Gender.” In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, edited by Michaela di Leonardo, 175–203. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Glendenhuys, Prop. Rhodesian Air Force Operations with Airstrike Logs. Durban: Just Done Publications, 2007. Glassman, Jonathon. War of Words, War of Stones: Racial Thought and Violence in Colonial Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Gondola, C. Didier. Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence and Masculinity in Kinshasa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Hayes, Patricia. Children of History. Harare: Academic Books. 1992. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “‘Wailing for Purity’: Oral Studies in Southern African Studies,” African Studies 52, no. 4 (1995), 16–31. Hunt, Nancy Rose. A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in Africa. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. ———. “An Acoustic Register: Tenacious Images and Congolese Scenes or Rape and Repetition,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008), 250–53. ———. A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies and Reverie in Colonial Congo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Di Leonardo, Micheala, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Lindqvist, Sven. A History of Bombing. London: Granta Books, 2001. Lyons, Tanya. Guns and Guerrilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean Liberation Struggle. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2004. Magaziner, Daniel R. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa 1968–1977. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Martin, David, and Phyllis Johnson. The Struggle for Zimbabwe: The Chimurenga War. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. McGovern, Mike. Making War in Cote d’Ivoire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Miescher, Stephan F. Making Men in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

126  Luise White Moorcraft, Paul, and Peter McLaughlin, Chimurenga! The War in Rhodesia 1965–1980. Johannesburg: Sigma/Collins, 1982. Reprinted as The Rhodesian War: A Military History. Barnesly: Pen and Sword, 2008. Mosco, Joseph.“‘Sensitive but Unclassified’: Secrecy and the Counterterrorism State,” Public Culture 22, no. 3 (2010), 433–63. Nell, Keith. Viscount Down. The Complete Story of the Rhodesian Viscount Disasters as Told by a SAS Operator. Johannesburg: Keith Nell, 2011. Niesewand, Peter. In Camera: Secret Justice in Rhodesia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973. Nkomo, Joshua. Nkomo. The Story of My Life. London: Methuen, 1984. Nyathi, Andrew, and John Hoffman. Tomorrow Is Built Today: Experiences of War, Colonialism and the Struggle for Collective Co-operatives in Zimbabwe. Harare: Anvil Press, 1990. Parker, Jim. Assignment Selous Scouts: Inside Story of a Rhodesian Special Branch Officer. Alberton, South Africa: Galago, 2006. Peterson, Derek. Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2004. Petter-Boyer, P. J. H. Winds of Destruction: The Autobiography of a Rhodesian Born Pilot Covering the Rhodesian Bush War of 1967–1980. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2003. Pringle, Ian. Green Leader: Operation Gatling: The Rhodesian Military’s Response to the Viscount Tragedy. Solihull: Helion, 2015. “Rhodesian Forces: A Tribute in Sound.” CD, Msasa Enterprises, 2003. Salt, Beryl. A Pride of Eagles: The Definitive History of the Rhodesian Air Force, 1920–1980, Johannesburg, Covos-Day, 2001. Sledge, E. B. With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Smith, Sylvia Bond. Ginette. Bulawayo: Black Eagle Press, 1980. Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire. Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Vaughan, Megan. Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. White, Luise, Stephan Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds., African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. White, Luise. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ———. “Telling More: Secrets, Lies, and History,” History and Theory 39, no. 4 (2000), 11–22. ———. The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. “‘Whoever Saw a Country with Four Armies?’: The Battle of Bulawayo Revisited,” Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 3 (2007), 619–31. ———. Unpopular Sovereignty: Rhodesian Independence and African Decolonization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Wood, J. R. T. Counter-Strike from the Sky: The Rhodesian All-Arms Fireforce in the War in the Bush, 1974–1980. Johannesburg: 30 Degrees South, 2009. The Zimbabwe People’s Voice. Lusaka: ZAPU, October 1978.

7

Petitioning Saddam Voices from the Iraqi archives Alissa Walter

Authoritarian governments are often depicted as operating under “regimes of silence” in which the state censors free expression in the public sphere and ruthlessly eliminates dissenting voices.1 Such characterizations are largely true of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq (1979–2003). However, an examination of the Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives2 demonstrates that alternative channels of direct communication did exist, through which ordinary Iraqis3 could speak directly to the regime—and did so with considerable candor. Analyzing citizen petitions from the Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives illustrates the opportunities, limitations, and contrivances of citizen-to-government communication in this particular authoritarian setting.4 Two questions guide this chapter: First, how did citizens and Ba‘thist officials each utilize petitioning to manage state-society relations in Saddam’s Iraq? Next, what factors determined which petitions were ‘heard’ and which were ignored or denied, and why did those factors change over time? To answer these questions, I follow the fates of 117 petitions written by Baghdad residents as they wound their way through the Iraqi bureaucracy. Half of the petitions examined here were submitted between May 1986 and March 2000, while the other half were submitted between June 2000 and October 2002 as part of People’s Day (Yawm al-Sha‘ b), a Ba‘th Party outreach initiative that will be discussed below. Iraqi petitions have not yet been the subject of a thorough study, despite their remarkable ability to shed light on the actual practices of state-society communication under a brutal dictatorship. 5 I focus exclusively on petitions written by residents of Baghdad, Iraq’s ethnically, religiously, and socio-economically diverse capital. This narrow geographic focus allows me to analyze how the regime responded to petitions in the “best” possible scenario—that is, in a location where the regime enjoyed its highest concentration of resources, power, and influence—while still including a diverse set of petitioners from a variety of backgrounds.6

Historical context The last two decades of Ba‘th Party rule were characterized by armed conflicts, economic shocks, and considerable social disruption. This turbulent

128  Alissa Walter period included the Iran–Iraq War from 1980–1988, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and its subsequent defeat by the US-led Gulf War coalition in 1991. From 1990 to 2003, Iraqis lived under debilitating international sanctions imposed in response to the Gulf War. Public sector paychecks fell to an average of $2–3 per month, and unemployment, already high due to the demobilization of millions of soldiers after Iraq’s recent wars, surged in the midst of the economic downturn.7 The medical sector was crippled by a lack of medicine and supplies.8 Malnourishment rates increased steadily in the face of skyrocketing food prices, and many Iraqis came to rely on monthly food rations from the government, introduced in September 1990, for the basis of their caloric intake.9 In the midst of these disruptions, some Iraqis petitioned the government to save them from financial destitution, to provide urgent medical treatment, or to intervene in an employment or legal matter. But while the government was rather successful in maintaining a robust welfare system and responding generously to petitions throughout the 1980s, the imposition of international sanctions in 1990 severely curtailed the regime’s ability to use its largesse to maintain public good will.10 In an environment of restricted resources, the Iraqi regime had to be selective in how it prioritized its spending. Petitions provide one way to assess how ordinary Iraqis tried to access extra government aid and how the Iraqi regime determined which problems and populations it would respond to.

Who petitioned the regime? Petitioners represent a peculiar group within society: they are vulnerable enough to have special needs, yet trusting enough in the regime to willingly identify themselves and reveal their plight. What is striking about this collection of petitions is that we see a broad swath of the population readily approaching the regime with demands, criticism, and requests; petitioning was not an activity that was safe only for regime insiders to carry out. First, Baghdadi petitioners were an economically diverse group of people. While many petitioners referenced their poverty and asked for financial assistance, others were well off, indicating that petitioning was not associated with any particular class. Petitions reflect a range of educational levels: some were nicely typed with sophisticated rhetorical flourishes, while others consisted of handwritten scrawl with rudimentary sentences riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.11 At least five female petitioners appear to have been illiterate owing to their use of a thumbprint instead of a signature, suggesting that someone helped them prepare their letter.12 Slightly more than half of all petitioners were women, and many of them were widows (or, less frequently, divorcées) who were more likely to be financially vulnerable without a male wage earner. In fact, women had some distinct advantages in petitioning. One key criterion the regime used to determine whether a low-income family merited extra financial aid was

Petitioning Saddam  129 based on gender. It was government policy that families could be enrolled for a financial assistance program called the “Social Solidarity Funds” (sanadiq al-takaful al-ijtima‘i) only if they had no male breadwinners in the family. Consequently, many Iraqi women went out of their way to emphasize their vulnerability in gendered terms. One woman wrote: My husband died and left my daughters in my care. [. . .] We are in a difficult situation and we are deprived of even the simplest needs for daily life because of our poor situation and because we are women (emphasis added).13 Similarly, a young woman wrote a letter explaining that she was the only child of two elderly parents. They were struggling to get by because they had no breadwinner (ma‘il). By this, she meant there was no male breadwinner, since the petitioner was of working age.14 Both of these women’s petitions were approved. These two small examples illustrate a larger trend, showing how even marginalized and disadvantaged members of society were often successful in negotiating with the regime. The vast majority of these petitioners were not party members, but were political independents who felt secure enough in their standing with the regime to invite the gaze of the state into their personal affairs. So important was political affiliation that letter writers immediately identified themselves at the beginning of each petition: political independents invariably opened with “I am citizen [name],” while Ba‘thists introduced themselves as “comrade” and indicated their party membership rank. Many political independents nevertheless had credentials that signaled loyalty to the regime: family members who were veterans or martyrs in one of Saddam’s wars, recipients of wartime bravery medals, or members of the special card-carrying caste of “Friends of Saddam,” and so forth.15 Those few party members who wrote petitions through civilian channels often did so because they were in a sensitive situation (such as a party official whose son deserted from the military),16 or because they were in conflict with their immediate supervisors and wanted to appeal to higher authorities (such as a party member who had been kicked out of a local Ba‘thist women’s group for misconduct and wanted to rejoin her cadre).17 Petitions by party members share many of the same attributes as the letters sent by ordinary citizens, including framing their requests as demonstrations of loyalty to the regime and emphasizing their financial neediness.18 Most petitions were authored and submitted by a single person. Out of the total 117 petitions in this sample, only eight were written as collective petitions with multiple signatories. This tendency for individuals to write what were essentially “private” letters to public figures is not unique to Iraq: a similar trend existed for petitions written in the Soviet Union, and the lack of collective petitions is an indication of the political atomization that authoritarian regimes actively inculcate.19 Terrified of any mass movement

130  Alissa Walter or show of opposition, the Ba‘thist regime had long sown mistrust between Iraqi citizens by encouraging neighbors and even family members to inform on one another. No one could be sure who was working as a government spy.20 For this reason, Iraqis judged that it was safer to write private, individual letters to the regime rather than give any appearance of collective mobilization.21 None of the petitions sent to the regime was anonymous, which is a point of contrast to petitioners in many other authoritarian settings who omitted their names when writing anything critical of the state.22 Instead, Iraqi petitioners were people who willingly identified themselves and their families to the government, supplying addresses and personal details that were guaranteed to be recorded and filed away, since omitting identifying information would make it impossible for any request to be fulfilled. The result is the forceful, insistent participation of those very populations most often overlooked by governments and scholars alike—the poor, the ill and disabled, the illiterate, widows, divorcées, mothers, and caretakers—who demanded that the regime acknowledge their plights and respond to their needs. In sum, petitioning was available to all strata of society—so long as they were on neutral or positive terms with the regime. Of course, there were many Iraqis who did not approach the regime in writing, including political opponents and ordinary criminals, and historians must be mindful of the “silences” in the archives. And yet the popularity of petitioning indicates that there was a broad base of general trust in the responsiveness of the regime. As Martin Dimitrov has argued, citizens only send petitions and complaints to the government when “the public trusts the central government to intervene on its behalf”; accordingly, a decrease in citizen petitions and complaints can indicate a crisis of faith in the government.23 Despite the ruthlessness of Saddam’s regime, a large and diverse portion of the public looked to the government to meet their basic needs and provide for them during difficult times.

Limits and possibilities of citizen-government communication Petitions are both a kind of political performance and a literary genre, with stable norms and scripts that petitioners use to remain within the political limits of acceptable discourse.24 Outside these narrow parameters, any exercise of speech in public or even in private was risky, as private conversations and writings alike were routinely reported on by informants and scrutinized by Iraq’s internal security apparatus. In this authoritarian context, the voices preserved in these petitions are not “natural,” but mediated by “prevailing norms, institutions, and power structures.”25 Indeed, the artificial “voices” used in these petitions were the only acceptable registers in which Iraqis could speak when communicating with the regime. The large number of written petitions in the archives demonstrates that the regime accepted a certain range of rhetorical approaches and tones,

Petitioning Saddam  131 including some criticism. Not all petitions relied on the kind of obsequious groveling that might be expected in a dictatorship. Borrowing from Sheila Fitzpatrick’s typology of citizen petitions in the Soviet Union, Iraqi petitioners presented themselves either as a “supplicant” or as a “citizen.”26 Those who positioned themselves as “supplicants” presented themselves as downtrodden by circumstances beyond their control. Their dominant traits were their destitution and their loyalty. They typically asked for aid, be it for monthly financial assistance, help with housing, extra food supplies, or a medical procedure they could not afford. In contrast, “citizens” did not ask for charity; they used the language of rights, entitlements, and laws to make demands on the regime or to complain about wrongful government actions. Both kinds of petitions often included heart-wrenching details, though differently framed: “supplicants” emphasized their misery and helplessness, while “citizens” highlighted the devastating impacts that a wrongfully-­ applied policy had on their family. Two typical examples illustrate the difference. The following exemplifies the “supplicant” approach, which depicts an Iraqi official in nearly divine terms: All my hope is in God, and then my hope is in you, that your generous Excellency will not turn me away empty-handed. [. . .] My husband has abandoned me because my children have an incurable illness. [. . .] Do not forget me, your Excellency vice-president . . . . I ask for sympathy and compassion from God and from your Excellency.27 In contrast, a party member wrote the following petition using a “citizen” approach, rebuking the regime for failing to help him sooner: I am [name], Ba‘th Party member [rank], and I have written to the party more than once to explain my health situation. I suffer from kidney failure, and I need a kidney transplant surgery because my life is in danger. The party will not be stingy [lan yabkhul ‘alayi bi-l-musa‘ida] in helping me because I have given enough to the party throughout my career as a comrade, and I have been in the party ranks for nearly 24 years. [. . .] I request that the party . . . pay for the surgery, at the very least. Though both petitioners faced hardships, the bases of these appeals were entirely different. The woman in the first example asked for charity based on the difficulties of her personal circumstances and included many flattering phrases and honorifics, even nearly equating the regime official with God. The man in the second example made bold demands of the party, attempting to shame them into assisting him. Rather than showing deference, he strongly implied that the party owed him for his years of service. In the end, there is no clear indication that either the “supplicant” or “citizen” strategy was more effective than the other in eliciting a positive response. Rather, analyzing the rhetorical strategies employed by Iraqis

132  Alissa Walter disrupts presumptions about state-society dynamics under Ba‘th party rule. Far from universally exhibiting passive, silent resignation or cowering sycophancy while living in a “republic of fear,”28 many of these Baghdadi petitioners demonstrated boldness and agency when interacting with the regime, making claims to rights and entitlements under the law and entreating the government to do more to provide for poor and vulnerable segments of the population. Even those who presented themselves as “supplicants” engaged in an important political act by pointing out the shortfalls of the medical system, drawing attention to the lack of affordable food during sanctions, or highlighting the inadequacy of government pensions to support a family. But how effective were these petitions in challenging government behavior? The next section addresses both the possibilities and limitations of petitions as a vehicle for political action.

The political functions of petitions Though authoritarian regimes seek to dominate communication in the public sphere and eliminate competing or dissenting voices, there are also important benefits to the regime in allowing some opportunities for citizen-initiated communication with the government. Looking at the practice of petitioning in other authoritarian contexts is instructive. In the case of China, Xi Chen argues that encouraging and receiving petitions is one way that authoritarian regimes increase their strength and resilience, because petitions allow the government to routinize bargaining between state and society, rather than rely solely on costly and unpopular repressive measures to manage social discontent and grievances.29 Responding to petitions bolsters regime credibility, strengthens its populist credentials, and provides the government with a tool to placate grievances.30 It also reinforces the notion that the president is the ultimate authority for dispensing justice and charity.31 As Mustafa Kemal stated during the early years of his rule in Republican Turkey: “One of the easiest ways in which a government and a party can lose power is unresponsiveness to people’s complaints . . . . People’s appeals and complaints must always find a true echo in our state organization.”32 Saddam and other Ba‘th Party leaders understood that an implicit moral contract existed in petitioning: citizens expected some show of response to their queries, while the regime gained considerable benefits from maintaining a steady influx of petitions and the information they contained.33 Another reason petitions are valuable to authoritarian regimes is that they help leaders gather information about public opinion, subversive political movements, and abuse or corruption by lower-ranking officials.34 Saddam himself was explicit about his goal of using petitions to monitor corruption by lower-ranking officials and, in fact, occasionally seemed annoyed that petitions most often dealt with ordinary requests for money or assistance, rather than actionable intelligence. In 1980, officials from the

Petitioning Saddam  133 British Embassy in Baghdad attended a speech of Saddam’s in which he complained to his audience: I want you . . . to talk to those people who do not realize the importance of taking up the Head of State’s time by calling him on the phone or who have nothing better to do than to come and say, “Sir, I want a house or I want pocket money or I am sick or I want to be transferred”—all demands which are not appropriate. [. . .] Demands should be confined to those matters in which some injustice has been perpetrated by an official. I am most upset with the demands of those housewives who have no jobs and are on the telephone 24-hours a day imagining that it is Saddam Hussein’s job to listen to unfair demands. Out of every thousand petitions we receive only two [that] deserve attention.35 In 1993, Saddam repeated this point in a sternly worded warning to the officials and ministries who dealt with written petitions: Ministries and other administrations should deal with the citizens’ problems by studying the issues they present according to what the laws instruct, and to fix the problem according to what is permitted within the purview of their ministry. They should not raise the issue with the Office of the President unless it pertains to a matter that relates to the interests of the presidency or pertains to addressing a lower-ranking official harming a citizen.36 Petitions did occasionally produce the kinds of denunciations Saddam was looking for: one reported that a military officer in the petitioner’s neighborhood was stealing from and beating up other residents, all while wearing his uniform as an intimidation tactic.37 An elderly widow complained that her rations agent regularly stole from her portions and, when she complained, the agent beat her and broke down the door of her house.38 A shopkeeper informed the regime that grocers in his neighborhood were profiteering off of the sanctions by hoarding certain goods in order to drive the prices up.39 Yet if gathering intelligence on officials’ misbehavior was the primary goal of receiving petitions, this strategy produced only limited results for the regime: denunciations of officials constitute a mere 4% of this archival sample. Rather, the regime relied much more heavily on a web of paid and unpaid informants to provide it with a critical supply of intelligence about wrongdoing by both civilians and officials.40 Petitions could also supply this information, but more rarely. At the same time, encouraging citizens to identify and denounce abuses of power had the effect of granting ordinary Iraqis a degree of power in an otherwise constrained political environment. Fitzpatrick argues that the denunciation of a fellow citizen or of an official, “morally repugnant though it may be, is actually one of the quintessential forms of individual agency

134  Alissa Walter and participation in a totalitarian state.”41 I would modify this statement to argue that any form of petitioning, whether to request aid or denounce wrongdoing, is an essential form of participation in an authoritarian regime. As other scholars have suggested, all types of petitioning constitute a form of political activity. Writing about Ottoman petitions, Ben-Bassat states that “common people often used the right of petitioning as a political tool to secure their rights by manipulating the system in their favor.”42 This remains true for twentieth-century authoritarian contexts: individual petitions were one of the few politically acceptable forms of direct state-society communication available to ordinary Iraqis. Even those whose petitions were denied nevertheless succeeded in alerting the regime to broader social or economic problems that affected many of the capital’s residents and forced their leaders to acknowledge their very existence and right to petition. To evaluate further the function of petitions in Saddam’s Iraq and the power of ordinary citizens to use petitions to affect change, we must follow the fate of petitions as they wound through the complex Iraqi bureaucracy. The section below analyzes changes that took place during two different periods: the relatively informal approach to petitioning in place between 1986 and 2000, and the formalized petitioning process introduced by People’s Day between 2000 and 2002.

Influencing the outcome of petitions: 1986–2000 Given the importance of petitions for the Ba‘th Party, it is surprising to see that the Iraqi regime initially did not have protocols guiding how citizens should submit their requests. Nor did Saddam create or designate a single office within the government or party apparatus to be responsible for receiving petitions. This is even more surprising when considering that Ba‘thists were otherwise bureaucrats par excellence, and that Iraq was an outlier in comparison to the systematic approaches taken in other authoritarian regimes. For example, the Soviet Union developed a sophisticated process for tracking petitions: letters were systematically sorted according to a list of fifty categories, such as “housing” or “salary” requests. Each month, a centralized office would compile figures on how many requests had been received on different topics.43 This allowed the Soviet Union to track areas in the country where discontent over housing, food, or prices might simmer over into resentment against the regime. Without such analysis, petitions lose their value as intelligence-gathering tools. The Iraqi regime gathered intelligence on these topics through its network of informants, but it undoubtedly would have been aided by a more systematic approach to coding information received from petitions. To produce accurate statistics about petitions, many regimes create a single office to receive petitions and develop a streamlined bureaucratic process for receiving, coding, and responding to the requests it receives.44 Here, again, Iraq was unusual in its haphazard approach. For example, the

Petitioning Saddam  135 Chinese Communist Party created the xinfang system in 1951 that designated a single office for collecting petitions. This system has remained in place, with a few interruptions, until the present.45 With these streamlined procedures, the Chinese Communist Party pledged to respond to all queries within ninety days or less, despite the difficulty of doing so when the Chinese government receives as many as 12.72 million petitions per year.46 Though Saddam Hussein welcomed citizen petitions, he never established a central office that was responsible for receiving and processing petitions. The end result was bureaucratic inefficiency and confusion that frequently frustrated both regime officials and petitioners alike. The lack of a defined bureaucratic process meant that a wide variety of party officials and government ministries were involved in handling petitions, and, because there was no single designated decision maker, there was considerable jockeying for influence (or dodging of responsibilities) when it came to processing petitions within the Iraqi state-party apparatus. Analyzing which ministries and levels of bureaucratic officials attempted to influence the outcome of petitions reveals insights into internal dynamics within the state-party apparatus and how the wheels of government turned in day-to-day decision-making. Beyond this, it also reveals where small “cracks” or “access points” existed in the Iraqi bureaucracy that ordinary citizens sought to exploit, attempting to influence the outcome of their petition by strategically addressing their requests to the office they believed would be most responsive. Following the fates of individual petitions as they passed from one official or ministry to another illustrates how Iraqi petitioners attempted to “amplify” their voices and give their petitions the best possible chance of success. We also see how sympathetic officials championed or undermined the requests they received based on their own interests. The result was that some petitions “spoke louder” than others, either due to the petitioner’s own savvy manipulation of the system or the intervention of an official into their case. To more easily explain the many actors within this bureaucratic apparatus, Figure 7.1 displays the state and party actors relevant to the processing of petitions.47 The entire Ba‘th Party apparatus was overseen by the Party Secretariat, a central office through which all party correspondence was funneled. Government ministries were thoroughly infiltrated by Ba‘th Party members and were subject to party oversight, though their bureaucratic apparatuses were structurally separate. The government ministries interfaced with the Ba‘th Party hierarchy by way of the Party Secretariat. All correspondence between levels of the Ba‘th Party and government ministries was routed through the Party Secretariat; party organizations and government ministries were not permitted to communicate with one another directly.48 Approximately half of the petitions examined here were addressed to Saddam or another high-ranking leader. This is expected behavior under a regime like Saddam’s in which he styled himself as an approachable ruler, connected to the people, yet who was simultaneously a supreme ruler that

136  Alissa Walter President

Party Secretariat amanat sirr al-qutr

Baghdad was divided into 6 large branches

Party Branch fara‘

Each section represented a single neighborhood

Party Section shu‘ba

Government Ministry

Figure 7.1  Hierarchy of authority in Ba‘thist Iraq for the state and party officials responsible for processing petitions.

could intervene in any matter, no matter how small. Furthermore, petitions were one way ordinary people could “go over the heads” of local officials by appealing to the highest authority.49 It is striking that fully half of the petitions examined here were not addressed to Saddam or a high-ranking official, but to a local representative from the Ba‘th Party in the petitioner’s own neighborhood. This suggests that Iraqi petitioning was not primarily a strategy employed in response to obstructive or punitive actions by low-ranking officials. Rather, there is ample evidence that Iraqis approached local party officials (usually at the fara‘or shu‘ ba level representing their neighborhood or district) as potential advocates for their cases. It also demonstrates Iraqis’ awareness that local party officials often made decisions about distributing favors, punishments, and aid to people living in their own communities. The involvement of neighborhood-level officials had advantages for both the regime and for the petitioners. From the side of the regime, local party representatives were the most acquainted with the particulars of petitioners’ situations. The Party Secretariat often left decisions about petitions up to party branch leaders when it came to requests about food rations or granting financial aid, asking the local party branch to “issue an opinion” (bayan ra’y) on the subject.50 As a result, the local standing of a petitioner with the local Ba‘th party representatives mattered a great deal in determining whether their request would be granted. The empathy that party officials displayed at times for the petitioners reminds us of how thin the lines could be that separated low-ranking party officials from their fellow Iraqis. One memo from Baghdad party branch

Petitioning Saddam  137 officials stated, “We have no objection to restoring rations to the family . . . for humanitarian considerations considering that the family lives in a poor state and has no resources.”51 When a group of families were threatened with eviction from government housing, their local party officials wrote an impassioned plea for leniency: “. . . out of humanitarian and social considerations for these families, the children, and the elderly, we ask . . . that they be allowed to remain in these apartments as long as these conditions on the country continue.”52 Though there were limits to the effectiveness of advocacy by lower party officials, these examples show some of the ways they tried to “take care of their own.” These examples also underscore the fact that petitioners and lower-level party officials were neighbors living in the same jurisdictions who may have shared a number of commonalities in their backgrounds. With the dramatic drop in public-sector salaries, lower-ranking officials and ministry employees sometimes faced similar personal financial difficulties to those writing requests to the regime. Even party members and ministry officials sometimes submitted petitions of their own for extra financial assistance.53 On the other hand, the influence of local authorities was bad news for those who did not enjoy good relations with those officials. One man wrote to complain about abuse from a local party official, claiming that the dispute had escalated to the point where the party official threatened to kill him, threw the petitioner in jail for two days, spread malicious lies about the petitioner’s son deserting from the army, and cut off the family’s rations.54 When confronted with the petitioner’s allegations, the local party section defended the official in question, saying he was a “balanced man” (rajul mutawazin) and downplayed the severity of the conflict.55 The Party Secretariat and government ministries investigated the situation and determined that, at the very least, the petitioner’s son was not a deserter, and they ordered the full restoration of the family’s rations.56 Though the party did not chastise the local party official for abusing his position, the restoration of the petitioner’s rations was an implicit critique of the official’s over-reach of authority. Highlighting the influential role of neighborhood-level officials in shaping the outcome of citizen petitions illustrates a larger truth about Iraqi petitioning under the Ba‘th Party in the period between 1986 and 2000, before People’s Day began: personal connections mattered, to some extent, as did the ability to produce an empathetic response from the official reviewing the petition. Heart-rending details about one’s poverty and desperation were more likely to elicit special exceptions not only from local officials, but also from the office of the president himself. Saddam often personally approved requests to give financial aid to needy petitioners, actions that were very much in line with his other habit of staging highly publicized daily meetings with Iraqi citizens to dole out cash or favors.57 This is not to suggest that the entire petitioning system was based on personal favors; regime policies and the rule of law were still generally the most important factors for determining petitions. Special exceptions could be made, however, and petitioners used personal connections and emotional accounts as two strategies to help their cases.

138  Alissa Walter In sum, this informal approach to petitions allowed the regime a degree of flexibility in responding to requests, though it also created bureaucratic inefficiency and made it difficult to collect data. This flexibility allowed for special exceptions to be made for petitioners with especially heart-breaking stories, or for those who made a good impression on Saddam or their local party officials. Between 1986 and 2000, neighborhood-level Ba‘th Party representatives were highly influential within the petitioning system, acting as decision-makers, advocates, or, alternatively, obstructions for petitioners living in their jurisdictions. Over decades of experience living under Ba‘th Party rule, many ordinary Iraqis learned which rhetorical strategies were most likely to be successful, and who within the vast state-party bureaucratic apparatus might be most inclined to support their cause. Petitioners used this knowledge to try to influence the outcome of their request, hoping their voices would be heard above the din of competing petitions and requests.

People’s Day petitions: 2000–2002 The regime took a few steps toward formalizing petitioning protocols with the introduction of the People’s Day campaign. This had far-reaching consequences for the ability of ordinary Iraqis to affect change through petitions and weakened citizens’ negotiating power overall. People’s Day appears to have begun as a commemoration of November 13, 1997, the day when Saddam ordered United Nations weapons inspectors to leave Iraq.58 People’s Day was first celebrated as a public outreach campaign that included community improvement projects, such as repairing tractors for farmers.59 By 2000, petitioning became the primary focus of People’s Day celebrations, during which time officials from neighborhood-level party sections (shu‘ ba) opened their offices to hear pleas and complaints from residents in their jurisdictions. Internally, party officials referred to People’s Day as “the day of listening to citizens’ complaints and grievances.”60 The formalized procedures of People’s Day lent an even greater theatrical air to the process of petitioning, an act that had already required citizens to perform demonstrations of their loyalty and worthiness for assistance within certain narrow scripts. For example, the officials from the Baghdad al-Jadida section gave each petitioner this standardized form to fill out for People’s Day—a document that is stunning for its codification of sycophancy: To: The Comrade in Arms (al-rafiq al-munadil), Respected Secretary of the Baghdad al-Jadida Section Subject: Interview I am citizen [name] living in [address]. I bring my request to you, along with all of my hope and trust, that you will grant me the opportunity to appear before your generous Excellency

Petitioning Saddam  139 to explain my particular issue. I put my fate, and the fate of my family, in your generous hands. I place my hope in God Almighty and then I place my hope in your Excellency because I am suffering from difficult circumstances, and they are:  I wait for help and aid from your Excellency because I see in you the spirit of values, Islamic principles, and noble humanitarianism.61 In this instance, the party dictated the very script petitioners had to use, forcing them to adopt the posture of a “supplicant.” Likewise, the interviews conducted for People’s Day added to the performative aspects of petitioning. Though the idea of presenting petitions through an interview was not a new initiative—as mentioned above, Saddam regularly met with ordinary Iraqis to hear their requests—it was difficult and rare to be selected to meet with the president. The chance to meet with a local representative was much easier to arrange, and oral petitions had added benefits for citizens with no or low literacy. What was previously usually only a written performance now added new elements of body language, appearance, speech, and rapport, which contain within them all the loaded signals of class, gender, education, and background that petitioners certainly would have tried to manipulate to their advantage to persuade the official. Unfortunately, the archives did not preserve interview notes that would provide us a glimpse into how these encounters unfolded. The irony was that, just as neighborhood-level shu‘ ba leaders were becoming even more accessible to ordinary people, the new protocols of People’s Day steadily diminished the influence of these local officials in deciding the outcome of petitions. During their People’s Day interviews with shu‘ ba party officials, residents filled out a blank form with a summary of their problem before the official interviewed them. Neighborhood-level party officials were responsible only for collecting citizen appeals and forwarding them up the chain of command with a brief, formulaic cover letter. The Party Secretariat would then delegate the task of responding to the petition to whichever government ministry was most relevant to the subject of the request. These new protocols solidified the notion that the local party section was the appropriate place to send a petition or lodge a complaint, rather than submitting it to Saddam or another high-ranking official.62 However, because the local party officials were expected to merely collect and submit requests up the chain of command, they lost most of their ability to influence the outcome of petitions. People’s Day shifted decision-making power toward government ministries instead. As shown in Figure 7.2, ministries took the clear lead as decision makers after the changes introduced by People’s Day. Furthermore, these charts obscure instances when local party officials advocated for a certain outcome

140  Alissa Walter 1986 -2000

32% 43%

Ministry Local Party President or Party Secretariat

25%

2000-2002

12%

Ministry Local Party

21% 67%

President or Party Secretariat

Figure 7.2  Petition decision makers.

of a People’s Day petition, only to be overruled by a ministry. This hierarchy of authority may have existed prior to the year 2000, but it became starkly obvious after People’s Day was introduced. Shifting decision-making from local party officials to government ministries had tangible consequences. Government ministries used noticeably different criteria for determining outcomes of petitions than had been previously used by local party officials or even by the president himself. Rather than making decisions based on humanitarian reasons, ministries evaluated petitions based strictly on their eligibility under law. This suggests that the question of how decisions are made is closely tied to the question of who is making the decisions. This trend is seen clearly in ministries’ rejections of petitions for inclusion in the Social Solidarity Fund. Officials were very strict in applying the rules: virtually every family who received some kind of pension was denied inclusion in the Social Solidarity Fund, no matter how paltry the amount.63 This usually held true even for female-headed households. For example, a widow’s request for financial aid was denied because she received her late

Petitioning Saddam  141 husband’s pension of 5,000 dinars each month, although this amounted to a mere $2.50 USD.64 Similarly strict policies were in place for the many petitions asking for a family member who was killed in a war to be reclassified as a “martyr,” or to receive posthumously an award or higher party status that would grant the family more benefits and resources. The Ministry of Defense invariably denied these requests unless a true oversight had occurred.65 The result of these changing protocols was a steady decline in the percentage of petitions that were approved. Petitions written between 1986 and 2000 had a 45% approval rate. Between 2000 and 2002, approvals fell to 34%. The reason for the decline is clear: government ministries were much stricter than either local party officials or the president in deciding petitions, denying 47% of the requests they considered. People’s Day, then, was a misleading campaign: though it purported to increase the regime’s responsiveness to popular appeals and requests, the new system actually resulted in fewer approvals. Why did the regime decide to formalize the petitioning process through People’s Day, and how did the function of petitioning in Saddam’s Iraq change as a result? The timing of the People’s Day campaign had its roots in both political and economic factors. Politically, it was framed as a commemoration of the 1997 ejection of United Nations weapons inspectors, a pointed reassertion of national sovereignty that, when paired with the new People’s Day campaign, included a promise that the regime would take care of its people. It also coincided with the modest economic recovery that took place after the passage of the Oil-for-Food program in 1996. With the loosening of restrictions on Iraqi oil sales, the state simultaneously increased its illegal smuggling of oil and demands for bribes and kickbacks from international business partners.66 The regime, along with corrupt businessmen closely connected to Saddam, began to enjoy an influx of billions of dollars from licit and illicit earnings. 67 Yet this wealth was not readily distributed to the rest of the population, many of whom continued to suffer devastating financial conditions from a combination of unemployment, high inflation rates, and the increased prices for food, clothing, and housing. People’s Day was one mechanism for the regime to make a symbolic show of distributing wealth and favors to the population, performing gestures of responsiveness to maintain public good will. Yet if People’s Day was supposed to showcase the regime’s largesse and a renewed commitment to social spending, why were more petitions rejected after 2000 than before? This theatrical performance of petitioning through People’s Day gave the regime the best of both worlds: it emphasized the symbolic propaganda of governmental responsiveness while actually minimizing the regime’s financial responsibility for discretionary social spending. The archives indicate that it was a success: the large numbers of citizens who came to present their cases on People’s Day suggests that the public bought in to this new petitioning process, despite the increasing unlikelihood of receiving a positive response.

142  Alissa Walter

Conclusions Analyzing citizen petitions illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of petitions as a form of political action in Saddam’s Iraq. On the one hand, anyone could write directly to Saddam, but the Ba‘thist regime always controlled the outer limits of accepted speech. Political scripts informed both the language and content of these petitions. “Supplicants” embraced the role of submissive subject to reinforce the paternalistic power dynamics by which Saddam preferred to govern, hoping this would lead to a favorable outcome. Even those who petitioned as a “citizen” could not level a real challenge at the authorities, however, and always had to defer to Saddam as the ultimate authority in the country. Any speech that ventured beyond acceptable boundaries of put citizens in grave danger at the hands of the dreaded security apparatus. At the same time, though written in a contrived voice, petitions were not pointless exercises in political theatre. Petitions remained an effective method to push the regime to acknowledge the existence of marginalized members of society and the problems they faced. Though the power of petitions to persuade officials appears to have diminished slightly over time, petitions still had the ability to provoke action until the end of Saddam’s regime in April 2003. Petitioning was one of the few sanctioned forms of political activity that Saddam’s regime allowed Iraqis to undertake and, if approved, petitions could result in tangible and even life-changing benefits for individual petitioners. In the face of stringent international sanctions, the collapse of the national economy, spiraling prices, and a punitive, authoritarian government, many ordinary Iraqis seized petitions as an opportunity to speak up for themselves, and—in many cases—they succeeded in making themselves be heard.

Notes



1. Hank Johnston, “Talking the Walk: Speech Acts and Resistance in Authoritarian Regimes,” in Repression and Mobilization, ed. Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005): 108. The American Association of University Women, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Foundation generously supported different phases of the research and writing of this chapter. This chapter is adapted from the author’s dissertation, “The Ba‘th Party in Baghdad: State-Society Relations through Wars, Sanctions, and Authoritarian Rule, 1950–2003” at Georgetown University. 2. The Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives are housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and first opened to scholars in 2010. They contain eleven million digitized pages of documents from the headquarters of the former ruling Iraqi Ba‘th Party. These petitions came from the boxfiles dataset of the Ba‘th Party Regional Command Correspondence (BRCC), which contains the majority of the archive’s bureaucratic memos.

Petitioning Saddam  143 3. “Ordinary people” refers here to individuals who did not hold positions of authority or belong to the president’s inner circle. Within this broad group, both political independents and low-ranking party members are included, along with low-income, middle, and upper-middle socio-economic classes of all ethnicities and sectarian backgrounds. 4. “Petition” refers here to any written communication sent to a regime representative that included an explicit request. This sample is not systematic; petitions appear intermittently in the Iraqi Ba‘th Party archives, intermixed with ordinary bureaucratic memos about various day-to-day concerns of the state and the party. 5. Dina Khoury and Aaron Faust each discuss a few petitions, which helped alert me to their presence in the archives, though they do not dedicate special attention to them. See Khoury, Iraq in Wartime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 154; Aaron Faust, The Ba‘thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism (Austin: University of Austin Press, 2015), 77, 114–115. 6. The events of the 1991 intifada uprising against the regime dramatically changed Iraq’s political landscape, placing whole regions of the country under suspicion. Analyzing petitions from these ‘problematic’ areas would make it more difficult to determine how and why the regime approved or denied any given request. Because Baghdad never openly rebelled against Saddam, it is a more neutral case study to examine. 7. Abbas Alnasrawi, The Economy of Iraq: Oil, War, Destruction of Development and Prospects, 1950–2010 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 93. 8. Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 32–38. 9. Gordon, Invisible War, 25, 32–38. 10. The weakness of the state did not necessarily mean the weakness of the Ba‘th Party, however, as several scholars have shown. Eager to gain preferential access to food and financial support, party membership increased throughout the sanctions period. See Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 51; Faust, Ba‘thification of Iraq, 82–87. 11. Thanks to my research assistant, Khaled Aounallah, for helping me decipher some petitions with particularly egregious handwriting. 12. See BRCC 01-2535-0000-0521, 01-3616-0002-0156, 01-2170-0001-0774, 01-21700001-0499, and 01-3086-0001-0420. According to the United Nations Development Programme, Iraq’s adult literacy rate in 2000 was 74.1%, although this may have been higher in Baghdad. UNDP Human Development Reports, “Adult Literacy Rate (% ages 15 and older),” http://hdr.undp.org/en/­ indicators/101406, accessed March 24, 2017. 13. BRCC 01-3616-0002-0156. A similar petition from an all-female family can be seen in BRCC 01-3616-0002-0050. 14. BRCC 01-2123-0003-0109. 15. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 208–211. 16. BRCC 027-2-4-0353. 17. BRCC 01-3389-0000-0579, 01-3389-0000-0580. 18. BRCC 01-3086-0001-0698, 01-3014-0002-0270. 19. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 55 (1996): 80. 20. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 127. 21. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Petitions and Denunciations in Russian and Soviet History,” Russian History 24, no. 1/2 (1997): 7.

144  Alissa Walter 22. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens,” 80–81. 23. Dimitrov, Martin. “What the Party Wanted to Know: Citizen Complaints as a ‘Barometer of Public Opinion.’” East European Politics and Societies 28, no. 2 (2014), 276. 24. See, for example, Sarah Davies, “‘Cult’ of the Vozhd”: Representations in Letters, 1934–1941,” Russian History 24 (1997), 136–137; Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens,” 92. 25. J.E. Shaw, “Writing to the Prince: Supplications, Equity, and Absolutism in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany,” Past and Present 215 (2012), 65, cited in Yuval Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Ottoman Palestine, 23. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. 26. Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens,” 78–105. 27. BRCC 01-2535-0000-0594. 28. This phrase borrows from the title of Kanan Makiya’s influential Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), which revealed to a broad audience Saddam Hussein’s violent treatment of his own citizens, such as using chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds. Since then, many scholars have noted that Saddam did not rely solely on repressive levels of violence to govern Iraq, but balanced violent terror with a system of lavish patronage and rewards. Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 8; Faust, Ba‘thification of Iraq, 14–15. 29. Xi Chen, Social Protests and Contentious Authoritarianism in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 5. 30. Lex Heerma van Voss describes similar motivations for early modern rulers to accept petitions: “Introduction,” in Petitions in Social History, ed. Lex Heerma van Voss, 4. New York: International Review of Social History and Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 2001. 31. Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan, 23. 32. Quoted in Yigit Akin, “Reconsidering State, Party, and Society in Early Republican Turkey: Politics of Petitioning.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3 (2007), 441. 33. Ben-Bassat makes a similar observation regarding Ottoman petitions in Petitioning the Sultan, 5–6, 23–24. 34. Martin Dimitrov and Joseph Sassoon, “State Security, Information, and Repression: A Comparison of Communist Bulgaria and Ba‘thist Iraq,” Journal of Cold War Studies 16 (2014), 4-5. 35. UK National Archives, Foreign Commonwealth Office (Hereafter FCO) 8/4126, Memo from British Embassy Baghdad, June 4, 1980. 36. BRCC 01-2214-0000-0259. 37. BRCC 01-2170-0001-0722, 01-2170-0001-0723. 38. BRCC 01-3389-0000-0071. 39. BRCC 01-2208-0000-0454 to -0456. 40. Dimitrov and Sassoon, “State Security, Information, and Repression,” 22–27. 41. Fitzpatrick, “Petitions and Denunciations,” 7. 42. Ben-Bassat, Petitioning the Sultan, 22. 43. Davies, “‘Cult’ of the Vozhd,” 135. 44. Akin, “Politics of Petitioning,” 440–442. 45. Zou, “Granting or Refusing the Right to Petition,” 125–126. 46. Chen, Social Protest and Contentious Authoritarianism in China, 100; Zou, Keyuan. “Granting or Refusing the Right to Petition: The Dilemma of China’s Xinfang System.” In Socialist China, Capitalist China: Social Tension and Political Adaptation under Economic Globalization, ed. Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne, 126. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Petitioning Saddam  145 47. For more information about the Ba‘th Party and Iraqi government structures, see Sassoon’s Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 34–56. 48. ibid. 49. Van Voss, “Introduction,” 3, 6–7. 50. See, for example, BRCC 01-3439-0001-0495. 51. BRCC 041-2-2-0313. 52. BRCC 01-2129-0000-0309. 53. See, for example, BRCC 01-3389-0000-0458, 01-2123-0003-0130, 01-33890000-0300. 54. BRCC 041-2-2-0341. 55. BRCC 041-2-2-0303. 56. BRCC 042-2-2-0295. 57. BRCC 01-3616-0002-0155, 01-3616-0002-0074, 01-3616-0002-0049. Saddam was not unique in this regard: other authoritarian leaders were known to respond sympathetically to petitions, especially in the cases of abuse by low-ranking officials. See, for example, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 129. 58. See the full text of Saddam’s speech given on the anniversary of the Gulf War on January 17, 1998: http://www.dhiqar.net/Merath/MK-Mo24.htm, accessed March 27, 2017. 59. BRCC 01-3866-0000-0430. 60. BRCC 01-2170-0001-0122: “yawm al-sha‘ b wa-l-istima‘li-shakawihum wa tazallumathum.” 61. BRCC 01-2170-0001-0041. 62. BRCC 01-3389-0000-0300 to -0304, 01-3389-0000-0296. 63. BRCC 01-2170-0001-0480, 01-2170-0001-0485. 64. Based on exchange rates in 2001. At the time, 1 Iraqi dinar = $0.00050760 USD. http://www.economywatch.com/exchange-rate/dinar.html; BRCC 01-21700001-0627. 65. There are more examples than are possible to cite here. See BRCC 01-30860001-0505, 01-2150-0000-0381, 01-2077-0001-0227. 66. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, “Did Iraq Cheat the United Nations? Underpricing, Bribes, and the Oil for Food Program,” Working Paper 11202, National Bureau of Economic Research (2005), 23; Katerina Oskarsson, “Economic Sanctions on Authoritarian States: Lessons Learned,” Middle East Policy Council 19 (2012); http://www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy-archives/ economic-sanctions-authoritarian-states-lessons-learned 67. Gordon, Invisible War, 94.

Bibliography Akin, Yigit. “Reconsidering State, Party, and Society in Early Republican Turkey: Politics of Petitioning.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39, no. 3 (2007): 435–457. Alnasrawi, Abbas. The Economy of Iraq: Oil, War, Destruction of Development and Prospects, 1950–2010. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Ben-Bassat, Yuval. Petitioning the Sultan: Protests and Justice in Ottoman Palestine. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Chen, Xi. Social Protests and Contentious Authoritarianism in China. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

146  Alissa Walter Davies, Sarah. “‘Cult’ of the Vozhd”: Representations in Letters, 1934–1941.” Russian History 24, no. 1/2 (1997): 131–147. Dimitrov, Martin. “What the Party Wanted to Know: Citizen Complaints as a ‘Barometer of Public Opinion.’” East European Politics and Societies 28, no. 2 (2014): 271–295. Dimitrov, Martin, and Joseph Sassoon. “State Security, Information, and Repression: A Comparison of Communist Bulgaria and Ba‘thist Iraq.” Journal of Cold War Studies 16, no. 2 (2014): 3–31. Faust, Aaron. The Ba‘thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism. Austin: University of Austin Press, 2015. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “Petitions and Denunciations in Russian and Soviet History.” Russian History 24, no. 1/2 (1997): 1–9. ———. “Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.” Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (1996): 78–105. Gordon, Joy. Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Hsieh, Chang-Tai, and Enrico Moretti. “Did Iraq Cheat the United Nations? Underpricing, Bribes, and the Oil for Food Program.” Working Paper 11202 National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005. Hussein, Saddam. Speech given on the anniversary of the Gulf War, January 17, 1998. http://www.dhiqar.net/Merath/MK-Mo24.htm, accessed March 27, 2017. Johnston, Hank. “Talking the Walk: Speech Acts and Resistance in Authoritarian Regimes.” In Repression and Mobilization, edited by Christian Davenport, Hank Johnston, and Carol Mueller, 108–137. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Khoury, Dina. Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Oskarsson, Katerina. “Economic Sanctions on Authoritarian States: Lessons Learned.” Middle East Policy Council 19 (2012): 88–102. Sassoon, Joseph. Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Shaw, J.E. “Writing to the Prince: Supplications, Equity, and Absolutism in SixteenthCentury Tuscany.” Past and Present 215, no. 1 (2012): 51–83. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Reports. “Adult Literacy Rate (% ages 15 and older).” http://hdr.undp.org/en/indicators/101406, accessed March 24, 2017. van Voss, Lex Heerma. “Introduction.” In Petitions in Social History, edited by Lex Heerma van Voss, 1–10. New York: International Review of Social History and Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 2001. Zou, Keyuan. “Granting or Refusing the Right to Petition: The Dilemma of China’s Xinfang System.” In Socialist China, Capitalist China: Social Tension and Political Adaptation under Economic Globalization, edited by Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne, 124–137. New York: Routledge, 2009.

8

The world was silent? Global communities of resistance to the 1965 repression in the Cold War era Katharine McGregor Silences enter the process of historical production at four critical moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives), and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).1

The historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot made these observations based on his research into the Haitian revolution, which barely rates a mention in archival sources, nor in Western historiography. Trouillot analyzes how power influences every point of the production of history and how this can lead to silences in history. In the case of the 1965 anti-communist violence in Indonesia, different factors have led to “silences” in historical sources, archives, narratives, and histories about this period of history. Most new histories about this violence have necessarily relied heavily on oral history due to a general lack of freely available records from those involved in the violence, including the Indonesian army.2 Yet there were other barriers to retrieving and closely analyzing this past, including disinterest in “communist” victims of Cold War struggles. It was only after the formal end of the Cold War in 1989 that some scholars began to document in earnest the patterns within the violence.3 The greatest stimulus for new research and new narratives was the end of the Suharto regime (1966–1998), which was founded on the basis of this violence. Since 1998, survivors, activists, and sympathetic historians have begun to write new histories of the violence. Some of this work has considered the Cold War context of the repression and how Western governments in particular endorsed, if not assisted, in furthering the repression.4 Yet perhaps because these works are based mostly on diplomatic or national archival sources, they do not capture examples of transnational resistance to the violence that challenge the idea that the world was silent about this repression. Some scholars, including Simpson, Hearman, and myself, have begun to chart international advocacy for this case by focusing on the roles of the United Kingdom–based organization TAPOL (the British Campaign for the Release of Indonesian Political Prisoners), Amnesty International, and individual Quakers who supported political prisoners.5

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-Chp08.indd 147

24/10/18 4:46 PM

148  Katharine McGregor In this chapter I revisit two examples of resistance that derived from political ties between those persecuted and left-wing international organizations to better understand the nature of “silence” regarding this case of mass violence. I use the term “silence” here to refer not just to complete silence, but also to the forces that worked to mute protests. I focus on transnational activism from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s emanating from Indonesian members of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation, which included some Indonesian leftists trapped in exile after the onset of the 1965 violence, and the protests of Dutch socialist women who had strong connections to imprisoned Indonesian women.6 I ask how in each case activists tried to raise the alarm about the violence and the obstacles they encountered in generating sympathy at the height of the Cold War, particularly due to the fracturing effects of the Sino-Soviet split on left-wing international solidarities, but also due to opposition to the Vietnam War around which most activism was centered. This research is based on sources from the archives of the International Institute for Social History (IISH) in the Netherlands, which documents activism that is not always captured in national archives. The sense of solidarity with Indonesians targeted in the repression expressed by AAPSO and WIDF members was, I argue, based on strong political ties. I borrow the term “communities of resistance” from Chandra Mohanty to refer to the diverse alliances across the international Left that underpinned this activism.7 By using this term I hope to capture more of the broader scope of the critiques of the emerging regime based on a shared history of opposition to both economic and military imperialism. In doing so, I hope also to trace the shifting discourses and strategies used by activists to frame this issue. First, however, let us examine the violence and the international complicity within this violence as the background for understanding transnational activism for this case.

The 1965 violence On September 30, 1965, an armed movement calling itself the September 30th Movement kidnapped and killed six military generals and one lieutenant in Indonesia. The army, under the command of Major-General Suharto, quickly suppressed the Movement and blamed the action on the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI). Between 1965 and 1968, the army coordinated mass killings of persons associated with the PKI. The army worked with anti-communist groups in society to carry out a purge of approximately half a million largely unarmed Indonesians.8 The repression targeted members of the PKI and members of all affiliated or closely associated organizations, including women’s organizations, farmer’s organizations, youth organizations, and unions of teachers, scholars and workers. The intention was to bring about the complete destruction of the political left and associated forms of political activism and thinking.9

Global communities of resistance 149 The repression took place at a critical juncture in the Cold War when the Sino-Soviet split was fracturing the international left, and when Afro-Asian solidarity similarly experienced a major blow with the cancellation of the planned second Asia-Africa conference to be hosted by Algeria, following their own military coup.10 The Indonesian violence paved the way for the rise of the military-dominated New Order regime, which lasted until 1998, when President Suharto resigned. One of the most comprehensive surveys of foreign responses to (and indeed involvement in) the repression is Bradley Simpson’s book Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968. Using communiqués between the U.S. embassy in Jakarta and the U.S. State Department, Simpson traces the direct encouragement and covert complicity of the United States government in the violence and its prioritization of U.S. economic interests above the large-scale loss of human life.11 More recently, Bernd Schaefer and Baskara Wardaya have examined in their edited book, 1965 Indonesia and the World, a broader range of cases of international complicity in this violence including the role of the East and West German governments and of the Soviet Union.12 The chapters in the Schaefer and Wardaya book take up the crucial question of how the SinoSoviet split shaped responses to the violence. From around 1963, the PKI increasingly sided with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), engaging in direct critiques of the Soviet Union and increasingly following Maoist thinking. One reason for this choice was the PRC’s support for Indonesia’s Confrontation campaign against the formation of the new nation of Malaysia. At first the Soviets publicly critiqued the 1965 repression. In March 1966, for example, at the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, members condemned what they described as “the anti-communist terror in Indonesia” and called for a stop to the “criminal butchery of Communists.”13 The Soviets also protested the death sentences of PKI leaders Njono, Wirjomartono, and Sudisman, which were passed down at the 1966 Extraordinary Military trials, and the leaders’ subsequent executions.14 Yet at the same time, the Soviets maintained relations with the military regime and continued to supply them with weapons in the particular hope that large debts to the Soviet Union would be repaid. Archive sources from the United States and West Germany suggest that (behind closed doors at least) the Soviets endorsed the destruction of the pro-Peking PKI.15 By 1967 the Soviets began to blame the September 30th Movement on the PKI and “Chinese-inspired adventurism.” Bernd Schaefer has even asked the question: “Would the Indonesian army and its Western supporters have dared to launch such deadly attacks on the PKI had the latter been pro-Soviet and supported by Moscow?”16 The position of the Soviet Union partly explains why there was not stronger international condemnation of the destruction of the largest communist party in the non-communist world. So what sources of support, if any, did the PKI have as the repression unfolded? The first source of resistance I would like to examine is that

150  Katharine McGregor which originated from Indonesians who were outside Indonesia at the time of the September 30th Movement. Many of these exiles were abroad as students or participants in international socialist organizations.17 They were not immune to the reach of the newly emerging Suharto regime. These exiles were forced to report to local embassies to declare their allegiance to either Sukarno or Suharto. Those who refused to declare an allegiance had their passports cancelled and were supplied with one-way tickets back to Indonesia.18 This meant that many Indonesian political exiles were in survival mode following the onset of the repression. Only a few felt able to act. The most senior member of the PKI abroad at this time was Central Committee member Adjitorop, who was in Beijing. He formed a group known as the “Delegation” and advised all PKI members to regroup in China.19 PKI exiles in the Soviet Union formed an alternative PKI government in exile known as the Overseas Committee of the Indonesian Communist Party, which was recognized by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).20 These alternative leaderships became rivals. Despite these splits, which grew worse over time, some exiles were able to use their transnational socialist networks to call for protests at the imprisonment and killings of members of the PKI and affiliated organizations back in Indonesia. From the 1940s onward, Indonesians on the political left had formed new political networks across the world, largely by means of participation in the executives and regular attendance at the international conferences and congresses of transnational socialist organizations such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the Women’s International Federation, the World Federation of Trade Unions, and, later, the AfroAsian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation. Through these connections they participated in political activism centering on issues such as decolonization struggles, opposing what they viewed as ongoing Western imperialism in the form of economic control and military bases, and advocacy for better economic and political rights.21 These global networks were important in post-1965 activism.

Protests by the Afro-Asian Solidarity Movement From the 1950s onward, Indonesians became involved in the AfroAsian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO), inspired largely by the 1955 Bandung Africa-Asia conference.22 The AAPSO originated from non-government conferences held in 1955 in New Delhi and in 1957–1958 in Cairo. AAPSO fostered a strong anti-colonial agenda, monitoring and supporting ongoing decolonization struggles, including the Algerian war, and critiquing the continuing dominance of former colonizers in the post-colonial world. The first-ever AAPSO gathering was held in Cairo, Egypt, in 1957 shortly after Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal as a sign of recognition of what its constituents read as a victory against imperialism.

Global communities of resistance 151 In 1965, plans were underway to expand the Afro-Asian alliance to a tri-continental alliance following the Cuban revolution. By the time of the first Tri-continental Conference (January 3–14, 1966), the violence in Indonesia was in full swing. Ibrahim Isa served on the AAPSO Permanent Secretariat in Cairo from 1960 until 1965 as the Indonesian representative.23 Isa headed a delegation of Indonesian participants who had all been overseas to attend the conference in Havana, Cuba. Other members of the delegation included former Member of Parliament Francisca Fanggidaej, member of the Asia-Africa journalists association Umar Said, and Wiyano, a member of the Asia-Africa jurists association based in Conakry (Guinea).24 A total of 540 delegates from eighty-four countries attended this conference. There were in fact two Indonesian delegations attending, one representing the new army-controlled regime and one representing the Sukarno-era delegates.25 The Tri-continental Conference committee chose to recognize the latter as a snub to the new militarist regime. Using this large gathering, the left-wing Indonesian delegation issued one of the most public condemnations of the repression in the form of a conference resolution just three months into the violent campaign.26 All press reporting coming out of Indonesia continued to be censored by the army.27 Despite limited information, the Indonesian delegation understood the attack as army- and foreign-directed. In the resolution they referred to those repressing the communists as “rightist and reactionary elements within the Indonesian military” working in cooperation with, and at the instigation of, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As noted above, the violence is increasingly understood today as having been army-directed. Simpson has argued that the United States government assisted in the repression through the provision of communications equipment and assistance with anti-PKI propaganda, but he does not go as far as to suggest that the CIA instigated the repression.28 The resolution conveys some of the scale of the violence, positioning it as an attack on “democratic liberties” and an effort to split “the anti-imperialist national united front.”29 At this conference, which centered on how to combat Western imperialism, the Indonesian delegation emphasized it was those most opposed to imperialism in Indonesia who were under attack. They reported: So far tens of thousands of people within the progressive movements in Indonesia have been cruelly murdered or tortured, exposing the fascist nature of the present reactionary forces there in power. More than 100,000 people have been arrested.30 This report was most likely based on very limited information, because even within Indonesia, for example, the government-sponsored Fact-Finding Team investigating the violence had only just reported its findings to President Sukarno at the time of the conference, conservatively concluding

152  Katharine McGregor that approximately 80,000 people had been killed.31 The characterization of the newly emerging regime as fascist resonated with older critiques across the international left of the dangers of militarist fascism exposed in World War Two. The resolution highlighted that among those arrested were workers, peasants, women, members of youth movements, as well as professors, students, and journalists. The Indonesians explained that the army was suppressing “every democrat, no matter then [sic] he is a nationalist, a religious person or a communist.”32 In this statement, perhaps cognizant of the broader constituencies of the conference, they tried to signal that it was not only communists who were being targeted. Indeed, those sympathetic to President Sukarno, including those in the left wing of the Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI) were also attacked. The Indonesian delegates framed the violence as an “anti-democratic action” and called upon fellow members of AAPSO to “step up solidarity actions in the spirit of Afro-Asian Latin American solidarity.” This was, however, only one of many resolutions at the conference.33 The most consuming issue was the Vietnam War. In the outline of the conference objectives, organizers praised the South Vietnamese struggle against the U.S.-backed regime, describing it as inspiring and encouraging to all the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and noting that it therefore should be prioritized by the conference.34 Presumably the escalation of the war from 1965, due to the U.S. bombing campaign targeting North Vietnam and the official introduction of U.S. troops, heightened the sense of urgency for international support for the Vietnamese. The Indonesian repression was thus to some extent overshadowed by concern for developments in Vietnam. After the Havana conference, the Indonesian Organization for AfroAsian People’s Solidarity (Organisasi Internasional Solidaritas RakyatRakyat Asia Afrika, OISRAA) continued to report on the repression in its monthly bulletins, which were published in Peking, China. The reason the bulletins were issued in Peking and not Cairo is most likely due to the forced relocation of the Indonesian AAPSO representative, Ibrahim Isa. During the Havana conference he had heard news that there were plans to hold his family in Cairo hostage, so he had asked friends to help them escape to China.35 Indeed, in Cairo as in many other countries, the Indonesian embassy had begun to screen Indonesian nationals.36 The content of the monthly OISRAA bulletins was incredibly pro-China. The first edition of this bulletin in 1967 opened with a quote from Chairman Mao and an open letter dated October 1, 1966 (the anniversary of both the Chinese revolution and the commencement of the Indonesian repression) to the Chinese Committee for AAPSO entitled “Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Is the Guiding Star for the People of the World to Final Victory.”37 From the fourth issue onward, one article per bulletin was devoted to the theme of “Learning from the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung.” Indeed, at the time these bulletins were being compiled, the Cultural Revolution in China (which

Global communities of resistance 153 fore-fronted Mao’s teachings and obedience to them) was escalating. Most Indonesians in exile in China were required to live apart from local Chinese in a quasi-military compound to study Mao’s thought and engage in self-criticism.38 Furthermore, following the lead of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the bulletins continually critiqued the Soviet Union for its “revisionist line” and for collaborating with the army-led regime in Indonesia, including the ongoing supply of Soviet weapons to the regime.39 The former political prisoner Hersri Setiawan has observed that the politics of Indonesian political exiles was shaped greatly by the politics of the countries where they took refuge. In the cases of exiles settling in both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, he believes that Indonesian exiles were constrained by self-censorship and the need to follow the political lines of the respective powers.40 This is apparent in the content of the OISRAA bulletins. Nevertheless, Indonesians in the PRC were still able to use the limited political space they had to draw attention to the repression. Every issue of the bulletin recorded and monitored international condemnation of the violence. In 1967, the bulletin published an urgent appeal that had been issued in 1966 by the Indonesian AAPSO committee. The appeal was addressed to “fellow liberation fighters, progressives and democrats in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the world over.” The appeal stated: After seizing state power in October 1965, the fascist military regime of General Suharto and Nasution, acting at the instigation and in the interest of U.S. imperialism and the domestic reactionaries, has during the last one year unleashed an unprecedented barbarous, atrocious, and nationwide terror campaign against the people of Indonesia, thereby drowning the country in a bloodbath.41 The appeal framed the violence as part of a broader project of Western imperialism. It referred to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people and the imprisonment of 300,000 people. It recorded the specific places of detention, such as Salembang, Tanggerang, Tjipinang, and Wirogunan prisons, and the appalling conditions of detention, noting that some prisoners were dying from malnutrition, dysentery, beri-beri, a lack of food and medicine, or death by firing squad.42 The content of this appeal suggests that information about prison conditions and the practice of taking batches of prisoners out from prison and shooting them was filtering out to the exiles.43 Drawing on the anti-colonial and anti-imperial focus of AAPSO, the appeal called upon “fellow liberation fighters” to stop further massacres and to “raise their voice of protest.” The Indonesian AAPSO committee noted, however, that it would only accept genuine solidarity, and not solidarity from the Soviet Union or its followers, which they reported had continued to send arms to Indonesia.

154  Katharine McGregor In this and subsequent bulletins, the AAPSO Indonesian committee published responses to this appeal. From December 1966 onward, they had received statements of support from the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau based in Conakry (December 11, 1966); the Mission of the Malayan National Liberation League in the PRC (21 November 1966); the Chinese Committee for Asian-African Solidarity (December 11, 1966); eight African national organizations (the Zimbabwe African National Union, the Mozambique Revolutionary Committee, the Basutoland Congress Party, the Bechuanaland People’s Party, the South West African National Union, the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, the Swaziland Progressive Party, and an Angolan revolutionary organization) (December 21, 1966); The Japanese Committee for Asian-African Solidarity (date not clear); The Laotian Committee for Asian-African Solidarity (date not clear); and the South Vietnamese Committee for Asian-African Solidarity (date not clear).44 These relatively disparate expressions of support provide further evidence of the international isolation of the PKI. This was in part the result of the policies of the PKI, including its condemnation of the Soviet Union and support for the Malaysia campaign, but it was no doubt also partly because of hesitation to be seen to support the Indonesian branch of AAPSO, which was clearly aligned with the PKI in exile in the PRC and openly critical of the Soviet Union. From an initial focus on the violent repression in the bulletins in 1966, the tone shifted in mid-1967 to an emphasis on the PKI’s armed struggle. From June 1967 onward, the bulletin increasingly focused on what it viewed as a revival of the PKI and the beginning of armed campaigns in Indonesia in West Kalimantan, East, Central, and West Java, and in the southern and northern parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi.45 In reality, most of these campaigns—with the exception perhaps of the West Kalimantan case—were poorly resourced efforts to defend the remnants of the party rather than armed struggle.46 Yet the bulletin praised these campaigns because they aligned with Chairman Mao’s strategy of armed revolution.47 The bulletin paid considerable attention to Indonesian attacks on ethnic Chinese Indonesians, following the Chinese government in condemning these attacks. Coppel and Cribb have argued that the ethnic Chinese were not disproportionately represented amongst those who died, although Melvin has more recently offered more evidence of ethnic targeting at least in Aceh.48 OISRAA probably emphasized this link as a strategy to generate more Chinese support for opposing the violence. It is notable that only a few country representatives of AAPSO responded to the Indonesian appeal of 1966. Although AAPSO had a broad membership base, the Sino-Soviet split continued to fracture this organization with further implications for potential support for the PKI. The eighth council session of AAPSO held in Cyprus in February 1967, for example, included seven members from the Soviet AAPSO but no Indonesian or PRC

Global communities of resistance 155 representatives. No resolutions were passed on the Indonesian repression. This is consistent with the Soviet Union’s increasing belief that the PKI had a hand in the September 30th Movement and that it had taken such action with encouragement from the CCP.49 This would explain the lack of statements of condemnation of the Indonesian repression at the meeting. The documentary record demonstrates that Indonesians abroad were able to use the AAPSO, at least initially, to raise the alarm about the mass violence. They framed it first at the Tri-continental Conference in January 1966 as an attack on democrats and anti-imperialists forces in an attempt to solicit solidarity. By November 1966, the Indonesian branch of the AAPSO was reporting on more specific aspects of the repression, such as prison conditions and the scale of the violence, and appealing in particular for solidarity for those imprisoned. Yet due to the increasingly pro-PRC stance of Indonesian exiles in mainland China, protest against the repression was not widespread, even in the socialist world. These examples illustrate the very limited political space that remnants of the party abroad had to generate opposition to the violent repression in Indonesia.

Protests by the Women’s International Democratic Federation and the Dutch Women’s Movement Other groups of Indonesians on the political left had even longer transnational links with people abroad. This included Indonesian women who had formed close connections with other women in the transnational socialist organization, the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). The WIDF was the largest women’s organization in the post-war period.50 Created in 1945 by a coalition of women who opposed fascism during the war, WIDF members were primarily concerned with advocating for women’s economic and political rights and opposing fascism, colonialism, militarism, and imperialism.51 Indonesian women first joined this organization in 1946, following the support of the WIDF for the Indonesian independence struggle.52 The leftist women’s organization Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement) became a member organization of the WIDF from 1950 onward. A handful of Indonesian women were extremely active in the WIDF, serving at its headquarters in East Berlin, on the executive of the WIDF, writing for its magazine, and regularly attending its international congresses. The Sino-Soviet split was also felt within the WIDF, with Indonesian women backing Chinese members in 1963 in their attack against Soviet women prioritizing peace over armed revolution.53 Nevertheless, it was through the auspices of the WIDF that Gerwani in particular had built a strong global activist network. As Saskia Wieringa and Annie Pohlman have documented, the Indonesian army was particularly brutal in its attacks on members of Gerwani due to the potent propaganda against the organization, which alleged that

156  Katharine McGregor Gerwani women sexually tortured the army men killed on September 30, 1965.54 Gerwani was banned, and its members were subjected to torture and sexual violence both within and outside of prison. As in the case of the AAPSO, the most pressing issue for the WIDF in late 1965 and early 1966 was the Vietnam War. The WIDF had similarly set up solidarity campaigns for South Vietnam and condemned the intervention of the United States in the war. However, the WIDF also tried to support women targeted in the Indonesian repression. In this case, it was not Indonesians in exile driving this activism.55 Broader forms of solidarity motivated WIDF women in these actions. The first reaction from the WIDF that I have been able to trace is an appeal issued in June 1966 by the head office of the WIDF in East Berlin, following a WIDF council meeting. The appeal read: Tens of thousands of Indonesian women have been brutally murdered, languishing in prisons and concentration camps, exposed to torture and barbaric abuse. The senior officials and several thousand members of GERWANI, one of the WIDF affiliated organizations, were arrested, and we don’t know where they are and what they must be suffering. In the course of events, while the whole of Indonesia was in the grip of fear and terror, and the country robbed of any democracy, GERWANI as well as other women’s mass organizations were banned. Hundreds and thousands of families have been torn apart and live in grief.56 WIDF members were horrified by what they had learned of the violent attacks. They expressed empathy especially for the families touched by this violence. The appeal reveals the difficulty that organizations outside of Indonesia had in obtaining information about what exactly was going on. For members of Gerwani who were still on the run, it was extremely difficult to survive, let alone communicate with people abroad.57 Presumably all communication from Gerwani to the WIDF was abruptly halted due to these difficulties. Consistent with its politics, the WIDF council viewed this repression as part of a larger global pattern. In their appeal, they explained: The wave of terror unleashed by the Indonesian military reinforces the tensions in Southeast Asia and serves the aggressionist policy of American imperialism in this part of the world.58 Like the AAPSO, the WIDF thus connected this repression to broader global patterns. Yet by using more of a rights-based language than the Indonesian branch of the AAPSO, they focused on the ongoing detention without due process of Gerwani women as a violation of the basic human right to a fair trial.59

Global communities of resistance 157 As a follow-up to this, in 1968 the WIDF reported it had sent a telegram to General Suharto in protest against the repression. By June 1969, they had yet to receive any news on the fate of imprisoned Gerwani members.60 It seemed that the WIDF was still struggling to get information on developments following the arrest or decision to go underground of many of the most prominent Indonesian women with whom they had links. Sudjinah and Sulami, who possibly had the strongest ties with the WIDF, for example, went underground from October 1965 until early 1967, and during that time they managed to print and circulate a bulletin in support of President Sukarno condemning the violence.61 Some of the closest connections that Indonesian women formed with other women in the WIDF seemed to have been with the Dutch member branch of the WIDF, the NVB (Nederlands Vrouwenbeweging, Dutch Women’s Movement). They had formed these close friendships due to reciprocal invitations to national congresses and the NVB’s repeated support for Indonesian women in the context of decolonization efforts. The NVB supported Indonesian women, for example, during the independence struggle and again during the early 1960s to oppose Dutch troops being sent to Indonesia to reclaim Western New Guinea.62 The first WIDF appeal for Gerwani quoted above is a document I discovered in the NVB archives. At the top of this document, which is written in German, is a hand-written note in Dutch suggesting this appeal was in fact a reply to the NVB. This raises the possibility that the NVB first raised the alarm about Gerwani to the WIDF. The NVB continued to oppose the Indonesian repression. In 1968, the NVB collected signatures for a petition entitled “Stop the Killings in Indonesia, Freedom for All Democrats!”63 In January 1968, a branch of the NVB delivered a letter of protest to the Indonesian Embassy in the Netherlands over the detention of the Dutch WIDF member Trees SunitoHeyligers, who was married to an Indonesian.64 Sunito-Heyligers had taken on the extraordinarily brave task of representing the PKI leader Njono as his defense lawyer in the 1966 military tribunals. For her efforts, she was arrested in 1968. The colonial connection and the associated flow of information and people between the two countries might have made it easier to get information about what was happening in Indonesia. It is also possible that, because of the alignment of Dutch communists with the CCP, they had better relations with Indonesian communists than other countries and were thus more willing to defend the PKI once it was under attack.65 Throughout the 1970s, Dutch women in the NVB continued their activism. They held a fundraising drive among NVB members to cover the expenses for one Gerwani member to come to the Netherlands to recover after twelve years of imprisonment.66 The NVB also used the colonial connection between the two countries to draw attention to the violence in Indonesia in the protest organized on March 8, 1978, at the Van Heutsz Monument in Amsterdam.67 Johannes

158  Katharine McGregor van Heutsz was a military officer who served as a governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies. He became famous for ending the Aceh war by means of violent massacres.68 The monument in south Amsterdam became the site of many radical protests in the Netherlands from the mid-1960s onward.69 The Dutch women who gathered at the monument in 1978 spread a white cover with the name Gerwani printed on it over the edifice. They symbolically renamed it as the “Gerwani monument” to, in their words, make it a “symbol of liberation” due to previous work of Gerwani on issues such as women’s rights and economic rights.70 Accompanying documentation of the protest in the archives includes a flyer that was presumably distributed at the protest, entitled “Freedom for Indonesian Political Prisoners: Not a Cent for the Suharto Clique.”71 The text on this flyer argued that this colonial monument did not belong in the capital city of the Netherlands and explained that, by staging this action, the NVB wanted to demonstrate their solidarity with “the tens of thousands of Indonesian men and women who are incarcerated in the crowded prisons and concentration camps.”72 The NVB noted the many achievements of Gerwani in Indonesia and the respect with which these Indonesian women were regarded internationally. They pointed to the continuing detention of particular women who had had significant contact with the WIDF before the 1965 repression: Umi Sardjono, Mudigdo, Sulami, and Maasje Siwi.73 They noted the harsh sentences received by Sulami, Suharti, Sudjinah, and Sri Ambar in their 1975 trial and the continuing imprisonment of other leaders without due process.74 NVB members chose to protest on International Women’s Day for symbolic purposes, but also because of the re-appointment of Suharto as President following the 1977 party elections. They were also protesting the continuing payment of Dutch aid to the Suharto government and therefore Dutch complicity with the regime. The NVB representatives demonstrated together with other women’s organizations at 7:00 pm on the same day at the Amstelveld, a square in the center of Amsterdam. Activists in the NVB focused on protesting during the visits of President Suharto to draw attention to the ongoing detentions in Indonesia. They drew on the colonial, economic, and political ties between the two countries to highlight continuing repression. One noticeable shift from the initial protests of the WIDF and the NVB, perhaps as more information became available, was increasing attention to individual prisoners in continuing detention in Indonesia. This may have followed on from Amnesty International’s strategy of individualizing prisoners so that Cold War politics was de-accentuated alongside the rights of individuals.75

Conclusions The two cases of protests that I have outlined here prove that the world was not completely silent about the 1965 Indonesian repression. There was more resistance than scholars have generally recognized, although on the whole

Global communities of resistance 159 the resistance was small in scale. The nature of these protests and associated constraints also help explain some of the forces that worked to mute the effects of these protests. The protests mounted by activists from the AAPSO and the WIDF placed the Indonesian repression in a larger global context of military fascist repressions. They stemmed from shared political views, such as opposition to imperialism in economic and military form that united quite diverse constituencies or “communities of resistance” across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The reasons these protests have remained obscure in histories of the repression is that finding these historical sources requires a different historical lens that is focused not on national but on transnational anti-imperial activism, which to date has only been documented by a very specific archive, that of the International Institute for Social History. In other archives, such as the Indonesian National Archives, there are no traces of such activism. The sources that document the protests remind us of the strong tenor of anti-imperial activism of the 1960s and 1970s, a period during which decolonization was still underway and the world order was still being contested. Indonesian political exiles representing the Indonesian branch of AAPSO publicly condemned the repression at the Tri-continental Conference in Cuba in 1966, describing it as anti-democratic and a violation of civil liberties. In their publications aimed at friends across the Afro-Asian and Latin American worlds, they highlighted that this attack had targeted both anti-imperialists and revolutionaries. They documented the appalling conditions in prisons and the practice of killing prisoners by firing squads. The decision of the Indonesian branch of the AAPSO to relocate to the PRC after 1965 strongly shaped, and to some extent constrained, broader support for opposing the repression due to the pro-Soviet politics of some groups within the AAPSO. The CCP’s influence meant that the Indonesian branch of AAPSO had to frame the repression through the lens of the CCP as well as the more general principles of AAPSO. They emphasized particular aspects of the repression, including the targeting of ethnic Chinese and what the CCP very optimistically read as the PKI’s turn toward armed struggle, despite the very weak nature of this resistance. These constraints meant that even within AAPSO Indonesian representatives could not rally full support from AAPSO members who were unwilling to be seen as siding with the CCP over the Soviet Union. The longer connections between Indonesian women and the WIDF resulted in non-Indonesian members taking action to protest the Indonesian violence. Dutch WIDF members in particular felt solidarity with Indonesian women based on past shared campaigns against continuing Dutch influence in Indonesia following formal decolonization. Because it was not under the control of the CCP or the Soviet Union, the WIDF seemed less constrained by the Sino-Soviet split than the Indonesian branch of AAPSO. In 1966 the WIDF issued an appeal to all members, drawing attention to

160  Katharine McGregor the brutal repression. The appeal pointed to the violation of “fundamental human rights” and connected the violence to broader regional patterns in U.S. imperialism. In the 1970s, when some Indonesian women were still in prison, the NVB highlighted the profiles of particular women who remained in detention. They used the colonial connections between the Netherlands and Indonesia and the symbolic space of the Van Heutsz monument to criticize the repression of Indonesian women who had contributed to improved economic and political rights of women in their homeland. The broader politics of the WIDF combined with their critiques of militarism, imperialism, and human rights violations thus allowed Dutch women to represent the Indonesian repression through a broader lens than the Indonesian branch of AAPSO. Yet Dutch women’s location in a largely anti-communist, pro-capitalist population presumably made it difficult to rally support to halt the repression of “communists.” Furthermore, for both AAPSO and the WIDF, the Indonesian repression was continually overshadowed by the more pressing issue of the Vietnam War, where foreign powers were perpetuating a devastating war. Returning to Trouillot’s reflections on historical silence, it is clear that new histories are only made with new interpretations of the “retrospective significance” of past actions.76 The Indonesian repression was not considered a significant topic for research until the 1990s, due in large part to the influence of the Cold War and the long reign of the military regime that oversaw the repression. Because the political left was so effectively erased in Indonesia, it is only in very recent years that historians and activists have begun to recover this broader history. To do this they have had to look at new sources and new archives to compile new narratives and histories today that start, in Trouillot’s words, with new interpretations of the “retrospective significance” of past actions. This serves as a critical reminder that the choice of what is studied and retrieved from the past by historians inevitably results in more silences.

Notes 1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 26. This chapter has been written with the support of the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT130100957) for the project Confronting Historical Injustice in Indonesia: Memory and Transnational Human Rights Activism. All translations from Dutch to English and German to English were provided by Faye Chan. All Indonesian to English translations are my own. 2. This includes the following manuscripts and edited collections, all of which rely heavily on oral history. Annie Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings (London and New York: Routledge, 2015); Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor, eds., The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965– 68 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012); John Roosa, Ayu Ratih, and Hilmar Farid, eds., Tahun yang tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami Pengalaman Korban 65, Esai-Esai Sejarah Lisan (Jakarta: Lembaga Studi dan Advokat

Global communities of resistance 161 Masyarakat, 2004). The National Archives of Indonesia (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, ANRI) only very recently opened select military archives related to the violence, but most military archives are inaccessible to researchers. One cache of military sources, which perhaps mistakenly was preserved in the regional archives in Aceh, has formed the basis of Jess Melvin’s research that the army co-ordinated the violence. Jess Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). 3. The most important early work was Robert Cribb, ed., The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali (Melbourne: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990). 4. Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, eds., 1965 Indonesia and the World (Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013). 5. See Bradley R. Simpson, “Human Rights are Like Coca-Cola: Contested Human Rights Discourses in Suharto’s Indonesia, 1968–1980,” in The Breakthrough, ed. Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 186–203; Vannessa Hearman, “Letter-writing and Transnational Activism on Behalf of Indonesian Political Prisoners: Gatot Lestario and his Legacy,” Critical Asian Studies, 48, no. 2 (2016): 145–167; Katharine McGregor, “The Making of a Transnational Activist: The Indonesian Human Rights Campaigner Carmel Budiardjo,” in The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo-World Since the Nineteenth Century, ed. Sean Scalmer and Stefan Edberg (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 6. There were other groups involved in activism that I do not deal with here due to limitations of space, such as the Dutch-based Indonesia Committee, the International Labour Organization, and other church groups. 7. Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonization Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 47. 8. Robert Cribb, “Problems in the Historiography of the Killings in Indonesia,” in The Indonesian Killings: 1965–1966 Studies from Java and Bali, ed. Robert Cribb (Melbourne: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999), 1. 9. Kammen and McGregor, The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965– 68, 1–24. 10. On the Asia-Africa Conference more broadly, see Jamie Mackie, Bandung: Non-alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005). 11. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 171–199. 12. Schaefer and Wardaya eds., 1965 Indonesia and the World. 13. 23rd Congress of the CPSU, 1966 (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Pub House, 1966), 29, as quoted in Bilveer Singh, Bear and Garuda: Soviet Indonesian Relations: From Lenin to Gorbachev (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1994), 230–231. 14. Ragna Boden, “The Gestapu Events of 1965 in Indonesia: New Evidence from Russian and German Archives,” Bidragen tot de taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 163, no. 4 (2007): 514. 15. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 189–190. See Ragna Boden, “Silence in the Slaughterhouse- Moscow and the Indonesian Massacres,” in 1965 Indonesia and the World, ed. Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, 90 (Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama), 2013. 16. Bernd Schaefer, “Introduction: Indonesia and the World,” in 1965 Indonesia and the World, ed. Schaefer and Wardaya, 5.

162  Katharine McGregor 17. The 2010 special edition of RIMA (44, no. 1) ed. David Hill and Anna Dragojlovic, including these articles: David Hill, “Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws,” 21–52; Vannessa Hearman, “The Last Men in Havana: Indonesian Exiles in Cuba,” 83–110; and Ana Dragojlovic, “Sukarno’s Students: Reconfiguring Notions of Exile, Community and Remembering,” 53–82. See also David Hill, “Indonesian Political Exiles in the USSR,” Critical Asian Studies, 46, no. 4 (2014): 621–648. 18. Hill, “Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws,” 31–32; and Hearman, “The Last Men in Havana,” 86. 19. Hill, “Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws,” 32–33. 20. Hill, “Indonesian Political Exiles in the USSR,” 638. 21. For further analysis of this activism, see Katharine McGregor, “The Cold War Indonesian Women and the Global Anti-Imperialist Movement 1946–1965,” in De-Centring Cold War History, ed. Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza (London: Routledge, 2013), 31–51; Vannessa Hearman, “Indonesian Trade Unionists, the World Federation of Trade Unions and Cold War Internationalism, 1947–65,” Labour History 111 (2016): 27–44. 22. See Katharine McGregor and Vannessa Hearman, “Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism: Reassessing Afro-Asian Solidarity and Related Activism in the Decade 1955–1965,” in Bandung, Global History and International Law, ed. Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 161–176. 23. Bonnie Triyana, “Pengantar” (Introduction), in Pikiran Seorang Eksil Indonesia di Luar Negeri: Bui Tanpa Jarak besi by Ibrahim Isa (Jakarta: Klik Books, 2011), xxxi–xxxiv. 24. Triyana, “Pengantar,” xxxiv. For more on Francisca Fanggidaej and Umar Said, see their memoirs. Francisca Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner Francisca Fanggidaej (Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2006); Umar Said, Perjalanan Hidup Saya (Jakarta: Yayasan Pancur Siwah, 2004). 25. Triyana, “Pengantar,” xxxiv. For commentary on this, see also “Circular Letter, Modern Revisionists of the Leading Clique of the C.P.S.U Strengthen Their Cooperation” and “Holy Friendship with the Suharto-Nasution Fascist Military Regime of Indonesia,” OISRAA Bulletin 1, no. 4 (1967): 9. 26. “Resolution on Protests against the Suppression of Democrats in Indonesia,” in Resolutions of the First Conference for Afro-Asia-Latin American People’s Solidarity, January 3–4, 1966, Havana, Cuba, The Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, 85. 27. “News censorship in Jakarta,” Straits Times, October 21, 1965, 1. 28. Simpson, Economists with Guns, 171–194. 29. “Resolution on Protests,” 85. 30. “Resolution on Protests,” 85. 31. Oei Tjoe Tat, Memoar Oei Tjoe Tat: Pembantu Presiden Sukarno (Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1998), 183–192. For a discussion of the number of people killed, see Cribb, “Problems in the Historiography of the Killings in Indonesia,” 7–14. 32. “Resolution on Protests,” 85. 33. These resolutions related to different member countries and to broader issues such as military bases. The political commission of the conference made eighteen general resolutions and seventeen specific resolutions including the Indonesian resolution. In addition, the conference declared eighteen resolutions on so-called “burning issues,” three resolutions on colonialism and neo-colonialism, and three resolutions specifically on Vietnam. For a list of all the resolutions, see Resolutions of the First Conference for Afro-Asia-Latin American People’s Solidarity, 1–3.

Global communities of resistance 163 34. Resolutions of the First Conference for Afro-Asia-Latin American People’s Solidarity, 20. 35. Triyana, “Pengantar,” xxxiv–xxxv. 36. Greg Barton, Abdurrahman Wahid: Muslim Democrat, Indonesian President: A View from the Inside (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 89–90. 37. “Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Is the Guiding Star for the People of the World to Final Victory,” OISRAA Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1967): 3. All bulletins are held in the AAPSO collections of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. 38. Hill, “Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws,” 34–37. 39. See for example, “Urgent Appeal of OISRAA to Save More Than 300,000 Indonesian Patriots, November 10, 1966,” OISRAA Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1967): 6. 40. Hersri Setiawan, “Some Thoughts on Indonesian Exilic Literature,” RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 16. 41. “Urgent Appeal of OISRAA,” 5. 42. “Urgent Appeal of OISRAA,” 5–6. 43. For a discussion of the practice of taking out quotas of prisoners from prisons, see John Roosa, “The State of Knowledge About an Open Secret: Indonesia’s Mass Disappearances of 1965–66,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 2 (2016): 281–297. 44. The record of responses to the appeal can be found in the AAPSO collections at the IISH. 45. Examples of such reporting include the following: “Indonesian Revolutionaries Follow Path of Chinese Revolution, Begin Armed Struggle in 1967,” OISRAA Bulletin 3, no. 1 (1968): 15–16; “Acclaiming the Rebellion of Patriotic Members of the Indonesian Armed Forces in East Java,” OISRAA Bulletin, 2, no. 2 (1968): 1; “Over 300 Indonesian Patriotic Armymen and Policemen Stage Armed Uprising,” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 2 (1968): 3; “Indonesian People Win New Victories in Revolutionary Armed Struggle,” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 2 (1968): 4; “Under the Great Banner of Mao Tse Tung’s Thought, the PKI Is Leading the Indonesian People to March on the Road to a People’s War,” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 3 (1968): 4–7. 46. On the South Blitar case, see Vannessa Hearman, “South Blitar and the PKI Bases: Refuge, Resistance and Repression,” in The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–1968, ed. Kammen and McGregor, 182–207. On the West Kalimantan, see Jamie Davidson and Douglas Kammen, “Indonesia’s Unknown War and the Lineages of Violence in West Kalimantan,” Indonesia 73 (2002): 53–87. 47. The texts of these documents are translated on the following webpage https:// www.marxists.org/history/indonesia/PKIscrit.htm. See also Singh, Bear and Garuda, 236–237; and Hearman, “South Blitar and the PKI Bases: Refuge, Resistance and Repression,” 182–207. 48. Charles Coppel and Robert Cribb, “A Genocide That Never Was: Explaining the Myth of Anti-Chinese Massacres in Indonesia,” Journal of Genocide Research 11, no. 2 (2009): 447–465; Jess Melvin, “Why Not Genocide? Anti-Chinese Violence in Aceh, 1965–1966,” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 32, no. 3 (2013): 63–91. 49. Singh, Bear and Garuda, 236–248. For a recent examination of the CCP’s position on G30S, see Taomo Zhou, “China and the Thirtieth September Movement,” Indonesia 98 (2014): 29–58. 50. Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 547–573.

164  Katharine McGregor 51. For more on the organization, see Francisca de Haan, “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991,” Women and Social Movements Online Archive, ed. Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, 2012. 52. For more on the history of Indonesian women’s interaction with the WIDF, see Katharine McGregor, “The Struggle for Women’s Rights: 1946–1965,” Indonesia and the Malay World 40, no. 117 (2012): 193–208; McGregor, “The Cold War Indonesian Women and the Global Anti-Imperialist Movement 1946–1965,” 31–51. 53. McGregor, “The Cold War Indonesian Women and the Global Anti-Imperialist Movement 1946–1965,” 43–45. 54. Saskia E. Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Pohlman, Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings. 55. I have yet to confirm which members of Gerwani remained abroad after G30S. 56. “Appeal for Solidarity with Gerwani and the Women of Indonesia,” Council Meeting of the WIDF, Berlin, June 2–5, 1966. (Appel fur Solidaritat mir Gerwani unde den Frauen Indonesiens), Box 148, Folder 410, Indonesie 1958–1968–1979, NVB Archives, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 57. For two first-hand accounts of their lives on the run before arrest, see Sudjinah, Terempas Gelombang Pasang: Riwayat Wartawati dalam Penjara Orde Baru (Slammed by a Tidal Wave: The Story of Female Correspondents in the Prisons of the New Order), Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2003; Sulami, Perempuan – Kebenaran – Penjara: Kisah Nyata Wanita Dipenjara 20 Tahun Karena Makar dan Subversi (Woman-Truth-Jail: The True Story of a Woman Who Was Imprisoned for 20 Years on Account of Being Accused of Treason and Subversion), Jakarta: Cipta Karya, 1999. 58. “Appeal for Solidarity with Gerwani and the Women of Indonesia.” 59. “Appeal for Solidarity with Gerwani and the Women of Indonesia.” 60. Madame Cecile Hugel, WIDF Secretary, “Report on the Activities of the WIDF,” Sixth WIDF Congress, Helsinki, June 18, 1969, 8. Available in Women and Social Movements International, database. This report noted that the WIDF included a copy of the telegram sent to President Suharto in the issue 18 of News in Brief in 1968. Telegram not yet cited. 61. Sudjinah, Sudjinah Terempas Gelombang Pasang, 14–17. 62. See McGregor, “The Cold War Indonesian Women and the Global Anti-Imperialist Movement 1946–1965,” 40–41. 63. “Protesteert, Protesteert Stope de Moord in Indonesie! Vrijheid voor Alle Demokraten!!” (Protest, Protest, Stop the Murders in Indonesia! Freedom for all Democrats!!), Box 148, Folder 410, NVB Archives, IISH, Amsterdam. 64. For the release of Mrs. Sunito-Heyligers Protest at the embassy, January 16, 1968, The Hague, NVB Archives, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 65. Bernd Schaefer, “The Two Germanys and Indonesia 1965/66,” in 1965 Indonesia and the World, ed. Schaefer and Wardaya, 101, Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Schaefer notes, for example, that the PKI was so exclusive by 1965 that it only invited to its forty-fifth anniversary celebrations those communist parties that toed the Chinese line in Europe, which included Albania, Romania, and Holland. 66. The woman is not named in the NVB Archives of the IISH. 67. “8 Maart, Internationale Vrouwendag Dag van Internationale Solidariteit” (8 March, International Women’s Day, Day of Solidarity), Box 148, Folder 410, NVB Archives, IISH, Amsterdam. 68. Petra Groen, “Colonial Warfare and Military Ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816–1941,” in Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia, ed. Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses (London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2014), 34–38.

Global communities of resistance 165 69. These protests were organized by the Dutch anarchist, anti-war, anti-military, anti-capitalist, and anti-monarchy political group Provo, which was founded in 1965. They frequently staged events in the city of Amsterdam, including smearing the Van Heutz monument, seen as a symbol of militarism and possibly colonialism, with white paint and slogans. Richard Kempton, Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt (New York: Autonomedia, 2007), 31–39, 51, 82. 70. See Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia, 232–275. On the WIDF’s recognition of Gerwani’s contributions to women’s rights, see McGregor, “The Struggle for Women’s Rights: 1946–1965.” 71. “Vrijheid Voorde Indonesische Politieke Gevangenen Geen Cent Voor de Suharto-Kilek” (Freedom for Indonesian Political Prisoners, Not a Cent for the Suharto Clique), Box 148, Folder 410, NVB Archives, IISH, Amsterdam. 72. “Vrijheid Voorde Indonesische Politieke Gevangenen Geen Cent Voor de Suharto-Kilek.” 73. Umi Sardjono served as Chair of Gerwani, Mudigdo served as Second ViceChair, Sulami was Vice-Secretary General of Gerwani from 1957 to 1965, and Maasje Siwi served as General Secretary and as a Gerwani representative on the WIDF Council. 74. Sri Ambar was head of the women’s bureau of SOBSI (Sentral Organisasi Buruh Seluruh Indonesia Central All Indonesian Workers Union), and Suharti represented the BTI (Barisan Tani Indonesia, Indonesian Peasants Front). “Women on Trial,” TAPOL Bulletin 9 (1975): 1, 3. 75. See Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4–14. 76. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26.

Bibliography “Acclaiming the Rebellion of Patriotic Members of the Indonesian Armed Forces in East Java.” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 2 (1968): 1. Barton, Greg. Abdurrahman Wahid: Muslim Democrat, Indonesian President: A View from the Inside. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002. Boden, Ragna. “The Gestapu Events of 1965 in Indonesia: New Evidence from Russian and German Archives.” Bidragen tot de taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 163, no. 4 (2007): 507–528. ——. “Silence in the Slaughterhouse: Moscow and the Indonesian Massacres.” In 1965 Indonesia and the World, edited by Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, 86–98. Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Clark, Ann Marie. Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. Coppel, Charles, and Robert Cribb. “A Genocide that Never Was: Explaining the Myth of Anti-Chinese Massacres in Indonesia.” Journal of Genocide Research 11, no. 2 (2009): 447–465. Cribb, Robert, ed. The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Melbourne: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999. Cribb, Robert. “Problems in the Historiography of the Killings in Indonesia.” In The Indonesian Killings 1965–1966 Studies from Java and Bali, edited by Robert Cribb, 1–43. Melbourne: Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999. Davidson, Jamie, and Douglas Kammen. “Indonesia’s Unknown War and the Lineages of Violence in West Kalimantan.” Indonesia 73 (2002): 53–87.

166  Katharine McGregor Dragojlovic, Ana. “Sukarno’s Students: Reconfiguring Notions of Exile, Community and Remembering.” RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 53–82. Fanggidaej, Francisca. Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner Francisca Fanggidaej. Yogyakarta: Galang Press, 2006. Groen, Petra. “Colonial Warfare and Military Ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816–1941.” In Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia, edited by Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, 25–44. London: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2014. Haan, Francisca de. “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organizations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF).” Women’s History Review 19, no. 4 (2010): 547–573. ——. “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945–1991.” Women and Social Movements Online Archive, edited by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, 2012. Hearman, Vannessa. “Indonesian Trade Unionists, The World Federation of Trade Unions and Cold War Internationalism, 1947–65.” Labour History 111 (2016): 27–44. ——. “The Last Men in Havana: Indonesian Exiles in Cuba.” RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 83–110. ——. “Letter-writing and Transnational Activism on Behalf of Indonesian Political Prisoners: Gatot Lestario and His Legacy.” Critical Asian Studies 48, no. 2 (2016): 145–167. ——. “South Blitar and the PKI Bases: Refuge, Resistance and Repression.” In The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–1968, edited by Douglas Kammen and Katharine McGregor, 182–207. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Hill, David. “Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws.” RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 21–52. ——. “Indonesian Political Exiles in the USSR.” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 4 (2014): 621–648. Hugel, Cecile. WIDF Secretary, “Report on the Activities of the WIDF.” Sixth WIDF Congress Helsinki, June 18, 1969.” Available in Women and Social Movements, International, database. “Indonesian People Win New Victories in Revolutionary Armed Struggle.” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 2 (1968): 4. “Indonesian Revolutionaries Follow Path of Chinese Revolution, Begin Armed Struggle in 1967.” OISRAA Bulletin 3, no. 1 (1968): 15–16. Isa, Ibrahim. Bui Tanpa Jarak Besi: Pikiran Seorang Eksil Indonesia di Luar Negeri. Jakarta: Klik Books, 2011. Kammen, Douglas, and Katharine McGregor, eds. The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965–68. Singapore: NUS Press, 2012. Kempton, Richard. Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt. New York: Autonomedia, 2007. Mackie, Jamie. Bandung: Non-alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity. Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005. “Mao Tse-tung’s Thought Is the Guiding Star for the People of the World to Final Victory.” OISRAA Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1967): 3. McGregor, Katharine, and Vannessa Hearman. “Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism: Reassessing Afro-Asian Solidarity and Related Activism in the Decade 1955–1965.” In Bandung, Global History and International Law, edited by Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah, 161–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Global communities of resistance 167 McGregor, Katharine. “The Cold War Indonesian Women and the Global AntiImperialist Movement 1946–1965.” In De-Centring Cold War History, edited by Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney and Fabio Lanza, 31–51. London: Routledge, 2013. ——. “The Making of a Transnational Activist: The Indonesian Human Rights Campaigner Carmel Budiardjo.” In The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo-World Since the Nineteenth Century, edited by Sean Scalmer and Stefan Edberg, 165–191. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. ——. “The Struggle for Women’s Rights: 1946–1965.” Indonesia and the Malay World 40, no. 117 (2012): 193–208. Melvin, Jess. The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. ——. “Why Not Genocide? Anti-Chinese Violence in Aceh, 1965–1966.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs 32, no. 3 (2013): 63–91. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. “Over 300 Indonesian Patriotic Armymen and Policemen Stage Armed Uprising.” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 2 (1968): 3. Pohlman, Annie. Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings. London: Routledge 2015. “Resolution on Protests Against the Suppression of Democrats in Indonesia.” Resolutions of the First Conference for Afro-Asia-Latin American People’s Solidarity, January 3–4, 1966, Havana Cuba. The Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, 1966: 85. Roosa, John. “The State of Knowledge About an Open Secret: Indonesia’s Mass Disappearances of 1965–66.” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 2 (2016): 281–297. Roosa, John, Ayu Ratih, and Hilmar Farid, eds. Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir: Memahami Pengalaman Korban 65, Esai-Esai Sejarah Lisan, Jakarta: Lembaga Studi dan Advokat Masyarakat, 2004. Said, Umar. Perjalanan Hidup Saya. Jakarta: Yayasan Pancur Siwah, 2004. Schaefer, Bernd, and Baskara T. Wardaya, eds. 1965 Indonesia and the World. Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Schaefer, Bernd. “Introduction: Indonesia and the World.” In 1965 Indonesia and the World, edited by Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, 1–17. Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. ——. “The Two Germanys and Indonesia 1965/66.” In 1965 Indonesia and the World, edited by Bernd Schaefer and Baskara T. Wardaya, 99–113. Jakarta: Goethe Institut and PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2013. Setiawan, Hersri. “Some Thoughts on Indonesian Exilic Literature.” RIMA 44, no. 1 (2010): 9–20. Simpson, Bradley R. Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and US-Indonesian Relations, 1960–1968. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Simpson, Bradley. “Human Rights Are Like Coca-Cola: Contested Human Rights Discourses in Suharto’s Indonesia, 1968–1980.” In The Breakthrough, edited by Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, 186–203. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Singh, Bilveer. Bear and Garuda: Soviet-Indonesian Relations: From Lenin to Gorbachev. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1994. Sudjinah. Terempas Gelombang Pasang: Riwayat Wartawati dalam Penjara Orde Baru (Slammed by a Tidal Wave: The Story of Female Correspondents in the Prisons of the New Order). Jakarta: Pustaka Utan Kayu, 2003.

168  Katharine McGregor Sulami. Perempuan – Kebenaran – Penjara: Kisah Nyata Wanita Dipenjara 20 Tahun Karena Makar dan Subversi (Woman-Truth-Jail: The True Story of a Woman Who Was Imprisoned for 20 Years on Account of Being Accused of Treason and Subversion). Jakarta: Cipta Karya, 1999. Tat, Oei Tjoe. Memoar Oei Tjoe Tat: Pembantu Presiden Sukarno. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra, 1998. Triyana, Bonnie. “Pengantar” (Introduction) in Bui Tanpa Jarak Besi: Pikiran Seorang Eksil Indonesia di Luar Negeri, by Ibrahim Isa, xxxi–xxxiv. Jakarta: Klik Books, 2011. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. “Under the Great Banner of Mao Tse Tung’s Thought, the PKI Is Leading the Indonesian People to March on the Road to a People’s War.” OISRAA Bulletin 2, no. 3 (1968): 4–7. “Urgent Appeal of OISRAA to Save More Than 300,000 Indonesian Patriots, November 10, 1966.” OISRAA Bulletin 1, no. 1 (1967): 6. Wieringa, Saskia E. Sexual Politics in Indonesia. New York: Palgrave, 2002. “Women on Trial.” TAPOL Bulletin 9 (1975): 1–3. Zhou, Taomo. “China and the Thirtieth September Movement.” Indonesia 98 (2014): 29–58.

9

A selective silence Leonid Brezhnev’s compromise over the memory of Stalin’s crimes Barbara Martin

Late at night on February 25, 1956, the delegates of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union assembled to listen to a fourhour long speech by General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. Few of them expected the radical ideological shift that the Soviet leader held in store for them: three years after Joseph Stalin’s death, the veil of silence concealing three decades of state violence would be lifted. In the 1930s, expurgation of yesterday’s heroes and revolutionaries from the pages of history went along with defamation: turned overnight into “enemies of the people,” their famous deeds were attributed to others or else labeled as crimes. Physical annihilation was accompanied by symbolical erasure from the past. As for mass-scale repression, it was maintained as secret. Only a fraction of the trials was public—most of the condemnations did not take place in front of a tribunal, but before a “troika,” an instrument of extrajudicial punishment constituted of three persons. Nevertheless, the silence surrounding repression did not amount to ignorance. Although few Soviet citizens, even at the top of the leadership, had suspected the colossal scale of Stalin-era political repression, millions had witnessed the arrest of a relative, neighbor, or friend. Accordingly, Khrushchev made history not so much because of what he revealed, but rather for breaking the silence. Ironically, the text of the “secret speech” was no more confidential than repressions had been. Despite remaining unpublished, it was read out to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Party members, activists of the Communist youth, civil servants, and workers throughout the country.1 The text itself soon began to circulate underground, and in three months, it had fallen into the hands of the U.S. State Department and the New York Times had published it.2 However, Khrushchev’s policy of de-Stalinization did not encounter unanimous support, either within the Party or within the population. For a little under a decade, the Soviet leader was able to impose his new course, using the weapon of transparency against his adversaries. At the 22nd Party Congress, in 1961, having sidelined his political opponents, he renewed his attack against Stalin, this time openly. The press was filled with fiery anti-Stalinist speeches pronounced at the Congress and the news of the

170  Barbara Martin removal of Stalin’s body from the Red Square Mausoleum and the renaming of Stalingrad as “Volgograd” made the headlines. Yet Khrushchev’s position remained precarious, and his popularity dwindled. In October 1964, the Soviet leader was removed from power. He stood accused of having destabilized the regime in many fields: economic, agricultural, political, and military. Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin was not the last item on the list of policies that the new Brezhnev leadership wished to discard. For a new balance to be established, a compromise was needed between the proponents and opponents of de-Stalinization, and this compromise would have to be enforced as the sole acceptable narrative of the past, putting an end to the diversity of interpretations that had blossomed under Khrushchev, creating “confusion” in people’s minds. This chapter examines the constitution of a new political compromise on the Stalin question in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s ouster. What were the positions of various groups within Soviet society, and how did the Brezhnev leadership balance between these political camps? How were the boundaries of accepted discourse about the past negotiated? And how solid was the compromise that was reached? While a consensus in favor of ending de-Stalinization emerged rapidly within the new leadership, I argue that the rehabilitation of Stalin’s heritage remained a point of contention. And despite attempts to impose a new unified historical narrative, Soviet society remained characterized by a plurality of voices, unleashed by the revelations of the 20th Party Congress.

Three points of view on the “Stalin question” Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20th Party Congress constituted a radical departure from past practices, the meaning and consequences of which were unclear both to his supporters and to his adversaries. The denunciation of Stalin’s crimes seemed to signal not only a return to “socialist legality,” but also the onset of a new era of transparency. In fact, these hopes were soon dashed, as it became clear that Khrushchev’s new narrative offered a selective indictment of some of Stalin’s crimes, while leaving untouched many of the so-called “blank spots” of Soviet history. Moreover, those who took too earnestly his call for a renovation of the Party along “Leninist lines” soon learned the hard way the limits of this new course, which did not amount to a full democratization of Soviet society.3 But most concerned by this new de-Stalinization course were conservatives and Stalinists, who observed with awe the blow Khrushchev had dealt to the Party’s prestige and authority, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Stalin had established a stable balance, based on terror and repression. A whole generation of communist activists, Party and state cadres, workers in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del, NKVD), and other stakeholders of the system had built careers and climbed the social ladder as they replaced the fallen generation

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 171 of Revolution and Civil War veterans swallowed by the purges. Many Soviet citizens had in one way or another benefitted from the disappearance of a neighbor or relative and had no wish for a return to the status quo ante. By denouncing Stalin’s crimes, Khrushchev had opened a Pandora’s box that threatened to put into question several decades’ worth of ill-earned achievements. In a word, he had destabilized an equilibrium that many had a vested interest in preserving. In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s ouster, these various political forces competed for power and influence within the new Soviet leadership. In an unpublished manuscript entitled “The Stalin Question after the October Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1964–1966),”4 the Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev tried to draw the broad lines of the confrontation opposing various groups within Soviet society over the Stalin question. Medvedev was both a witness of the events, belonging to the liberal intelligentsia, and a fine analyst of the political situation. His position was quite unique because he was in contact with officials working within the Central Committee of the Communist Party and thus had access to inside information. Meanwhile, he was also working on an underground research on the history of Stalinism, which he would publish in the West in 1971,5 when he emerged as a prominent dissident. In his manuscript on the Stalin question, Medvedev examines the debates and evolution of official assessments of Stalin in the years following Khrushchev’s ouster. His analysis starts with a tentative typology of political attitudes toward the Stalin question in the late 1960s, differentiating between three different political lines.6 The first group he identifies as “Stalinists”—or as I call them, “neo-Stalinists.” This group had never accepted Khrushchev’s denunciations and openly called for a return to the celebration of Stalin’s leadership and for the end of de-Stalinization. This group was composed of prominent representatives of the military, of state and Party officials, but also of a number of intellectuals and writers. In the years following Khrushchev’s ouster, they began to push for an official rehabilitation of Stalin. The second group was constituted by the “moderates,” as Medvedev calls them, or “conservatives,” as I describe them. It seems that this label could be applied to a large part of the Brezhnev leadership. They did not favor a return to Stalinism but wished to end what they considered an excessive “blackening of Soviet history,” which they felt had taken place under Khrushchev. This implied silencing the less glorious pages of the Soviet past, and in particular those concerning Stalinist repression. But, as Medvedev noted, “these people generally strove to speak as little as possible about Stalin, whether about his positive or negative role.”7 Despite being generally dominant, this group also had to contend with the two other groups. Finally, the third group, whom Medvedev calls “anti-Stalinists,” favored a furthering of de-Stalinization. However, after Khrushchev’s ouster, they were forced into a defensive position and actively opposed the move for

172  Barbara Martin Stalin’s rehabilitation. This group consisted mainly of liberal intellectuals and former Gulag inmates. They professed progressive, reformist communist views and considered that the denunciation of past crimes was a precondition for a thorough renovation of the Soviet system, which was necessary to reach Communism. Within this group were reformists working within the state and Party apparatus, intellectuals integrated to the system but lobbying for change, but also more marginal groups, some of which progressively stepped into dissidence. Although liberals had been able to dictate their agenda under Khrushchev, they were now marginalized, and their main method of action became lobbying through individual or collective letters of protests to the Soviet leadership. Medvedev concluded this overview by noting that: No open and free discussion between these three currents is led in the press. In our country, there is no institution responsible for the study and evaluation of Stalin’s record, the study and analysis of the crimes committed during the period of the personality cult. Therefore, the struggle between representatives of various points of views takes other forms, it generally proceeds through secret channels, and this complicates the analysis of the directions and perspectives of this struggle.8 I would nuance this typology by pointing out that the lines between conservatives and neo-Stalinists were not as clear-cut as Medvedev implies, for several reasons. First of all, because they had in essence formed a coalition to remove Khrushchev from power, these two groups had some strong common interests. Second, their mutual influence was strong, in particular on the discursive level. While conservative leaders were initially on the expectative concerning the adoption of a new line towards Stalin, they tended to define themselves foremost in opposition to their fallen adversaries, the anti-Stalinists. Meanwhile, the neo-Stalinists, still unsure to what extent they could afford to stray from the official line, clouded their revolutionary views in a carefully balanced language that was similar to that of the conservatives, while time and again pushing forth some more provocative ideas. What can we say of the interactions of these groups? First of all, Khrushchev’s eviction from power, and the lack of opposition to this coup, meant that the new Brezhnev leadership was granted carte blanche to repeal his predecessor’s least popular policies. Here a clear consensus seems to have emerged within the leadership over the course of 1965 between the neo-Stalinist faction and the moderates-conservatives. As a result, publications denouncing Stalin’s crimes progressively vanished from print. However, the extent to which the heritage of the 20th and 22nd Party Congresses should be repealed, and Stalin’s name allowed back into print and official discourse, was a matter still to be negotiated. On the question of Stalin’s rehabilitation, conservatives occupied a position that one may qualify as ambivalent. Although in favor of celebrating

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 173 Stalin-era achievements, they considered that these should be ascribed foremost to the people and Party, Stalin being a figure too divisive to be fully rehabilitated. On this point, they were at odds with the neo-Stalinists. This disagreement allowed for the lobbying of the liberal group to have a certain, if limited, impact on the elaboration of the new course, which I call the Brezhnev compromise.

Defining a new line through compromise The neo-Stalinist offensive The years 1965–1966 were a turning point in official policy regarding Stalin, and although the confrontation between neo-Stalinists and anti-Stalinists continued throughout the decade, I argue that the general lines of this compromise were already drawn by the 23rd Party Congress in February 1966. In April 1965, the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany constituted a crucial testing ground for the determination of the new course. It was preceded by a wave of publications in Soviet press celebrating Stalin’s role in the war. An official report concerning the Soviet victory was prepared at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, a traditionally conservative institution, on the basis of which the Ministry of Defense should have made a speech. However, the speech was apparently canceled due to the openly Stalinist orientation of the document, and the report never appeared in the press.9 On Victory Day, Brezhnev celebrated the crucial role played in the Nazi defeat by “the Soviet people, its glorious heroic army, guided by Lenin’s party of communists.”10 In the four-page speech published by Pravda, Stalin’s name was mentioned only once, in passing, as the head of the State Committee of Defense during the war— yet these words were met with applause. Brezhnev concluded by reaffirming that the Party “consistently implement[s] the general line, expressed in the decisions of the 20th and 22nd Congresses, in the CPSU’s [Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s] program.”11 This apparent return to the status quo ante was followed by a period of silence around Stalin’s name in the press.12 Yet the question was clearly not settled. Arguably a telling example of the perspective of the conservatives on the question could be found in the speeches of Petr Demichev, the head of Central Committee Secretary in charge of Ideology. Along with other Politburo members, he had faithfully applied Khrushchev’s line while the latter was in power, and had even called for the removal of Stalin’s body from the Red Square Mausoleum in 1961.13 However, he was now drifting toward a more conservative position, in line with the new Brezhnev leadership. In August 1965, he thus declared: “We have rightly criticized Stalin’s cult, however, enemies have seized upon the critique of Stalin and are using it to denounce the politics of industrialization, collectivization, and all authorities, etc. They want to throw discredit on socialism, leave the people without revolutionary ideals.”14

174  Barbara Martin Meanwhile, the Stalinist camp within the Soviet leadership was clearly gaining new ground, in particular after the appointment of Sergei Trapeznikov, a neo-Stalinist historian and close friend of Brezhnev’s in Moldavia, as Head of the Department of Science and Higher Education of the Central Committee. His appointment was a bad omen for the supporters of de-Stalinization. Medvedev described him in less than flattering terms: Five years of intense study at the Higher Party School and the Academy of Social Sciences in the mid-1940s could not give the young party worker any serious knowledge either in the field of Marxism or the field of social sciences, either in history, or in philosophy, but they could educate a staunch and smug dogmatist and Stalinist.15 Trapeznikov’s historical works, hastily published after his nomination, provoked only hilarity within the intelligentsia, and in the following years he repeatedly failed to be elected to the Academy of Sciences.16 Yet his political influence at this historical juncture was crucial. In various fora, he repeatedly called for a return to the study of Stalin’s theoretical works. Moreover, he did not hide his design of suppressing publications about Stalin’s crimes, which he called “blackening under the guise of a critique.” Nor would he tolerate any further the “resurrection of the dead,” that is, the mention in print of Soviet leaders repressed by Stalin who had been rehabilitated under Khrushchev.17 As Roy Medvedev noted, Trapeznikov’s declarations did not bring an end to these commemorative articles, but any mention of the rehabilitated revolutionaries’ tragic demise disappeared.18 Trapeznikov’s influence grew stronger in the course of 1965. In June and November, he presided over two series of conferences convened by Demichev and the Ideological Commission of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The purpose of these conferences was to discuss the situation in the social sciences and draft recommendations to solve the “significant problems” uncovered in this field, in particular that of Party history. Although the discussions showed that a diversity of points of views still existed as to the orientation of social sciences, the conclusions Trapeznikov drew from them were clear: a new line had to be imposed and the criticism of Stalin should end. During the November conference, Evgenii Zhukov, Secretary of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences and Head of the ad hoc Commission on the History of the USSR, following Trapeznikov’s clear injunctions, drew the contours of the new course for which the neo-Stalinists would seek to push. He called the attention of historians to their “high responsibility” in dealing with “materials that are often of a great political acuteness.” They had to reach a balance between “truthfully exposing history” while avoiding “straying into objectivistic positions,” for “there cannot be any non-Party relation to history.” Zhukov went on to criticize the “subjectivist influences, foreign to Marxism,” that characterized the

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 175 denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult. As for the term “personality cult” itself, Zhukov judged it “mistaken, non-Marxist.” He further complained that “all possible and impossible sins have been ascribed to Stalin” and that he had been blamed “for all the negative moments […] in the development of [Soviet] society.”19 The responsibility for this state of affairs, in Zhukov’s opinion, also lay with “people who virtually specialized on nit-picking criticism of Stalin’s political and theoretical mistakes, striving to blacken his activity in its entirety.”20 Trapeznikov concurred with Zhukov and severely condemned “the blackening, groundless criticism of whole periods of the life of our Party and people.” The result of “such deviations” were “manifestations of ideological and political indifference, resignation and even admiration for bourgeois ideology.”21 However, the neo-Stalinist position did not elicit a consensus among the participants of the conference and even met with some opposition. Thus, Andrei Kuchkin, a historian and Old Bolshevik who had worked on two successive editions of The History of the CPSU under Khrushchev,22 agreed that the criticism of Stalin had gone too far, but asked Zhukov to clarify his position. “You had to complete your thought and add: but the task of condemning Stalin’s Personality Cult remains [relevant]. Or is it being repealed? If you remain silent about this and only say that we have to end the nit-picking criticism of Stalin […], then it means justifying Stalin’s Personality Cult to a certain extent.”23 January 1966 was a time of anguish for the anti-Stalinist intelligentsia. As the 23rd Party Congress approached, many feared that the first Congress since Khrushchev’s ouster would provide the new leadership with an opportunity to officially repudiate the resolutions of the 20th and 22nd Party Congresses. Roy Medvedev recalled hearing that a working group led by Trapeznikov had been entrusted with the task of preparing the Central Committee’s report to the Congress, and many expected that it would contain a mention of Stalin’s “merits.” Moreover, rumor had it that some prominent military leaders were lobbying the Soviet authorities to obtain Stalin’s rehabilitation. Stalinist statements also appeared in a speech by the Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Dèvi Sturua, published in the Georgian press.24 These fears found a new confirmation when, on January 30, 1966, Pravda, the official press organ of the Communist Party, published an article entitled “The High Responsibility of Historians” and signed by Evgenii Zhukov, V. Trukhanovskii, and V. Shchunkov.25 The article drew heavily on Zhukov’s speech from November 1965 and clearly pointed out the new ideological orientation of historical research and the new boundaries of the permissible. The denunciation by the Party and the people of the Personality Cult— this phenomenon deeply alien to Marxism—had a great positive significance. […] However, unfortunately, in this regard as well subjectivist influences alien to Marxism took their toll and were also reflected in

176  Barbara Martin some works by historians. The mistaken, un-Marxist term “period of the Personality Cult” became common. The use of this term, the exaggeration of the role of one figure led, whether voluntarily or not, to the depreciation of the heroic efforts of the party and people in the struggle for socialism, to an impoverishment of history.26 The anti-Stalinists’ protests This article, which de facto constituted a revisionist statement ahead of the Congress, drew the attention of liberal intellectuals. In February 1966, six historians and philosophers wrote a letter of protest to Mikhail Suslov, Politburo member in charge of Ideology, in reaction to the article of Zhukov.27 The signatories contested, in particular, Zhukov’s attack against the term “period of the Personality Cult,” which had been used in several resolutions of the 22nd Party Congress. Because a congress resolution could only be amended or canceled by a new congress, the characterization of this term as “un-Marxist” was a direct violation of the Party’s rules.28 One of the signatories, Aleksandr Nekrich, was precisely one of these historians accused of blackening Soviet history. He recalled that he and his co-signatories received confirmation that Suslov agreed with their letter and would raise the matter in front of the forthcoming 23rd Party Congress.29 This letter was far from being the only one sent to the Soviet leadership ahead of the 23rd Party Congress concerning the threat of rehabilitation of Stalin. The most famous was a petition addressed to Leonid Brezhnev by twenty-five prominent intellectuals in the fields of science, arts, and literature. They expressed their distress with the frequent interventions in the media “directed, de facto, towards the partial or indirect rehabilitation of Stalin,” and voiced their opposition to a revision of the resolutions of the 20th and 22nd Congresses. Claiming to speak in the name of many, they argued: “Our people will not understand and will not accept a divergence—even partial—from the resolutions on the Personality Cult. No one can erase these resolutions from [our people’s] consciousness and memory.” Not only would such a decision cause “serious divergences within Soviet society,” but it would also be a political blunder, threatening to cause “a new rift within the ranks of the Communist movement, this time between us [the USSR] and the Western Communist parties.”30 A second letter signed by an additional thirteen signatories followed nine days later. The letter circulated broadly in samizdat (the clandestine copying and distribution of uncensored texts), as the KGB noted in March 1966, and soon, all the members of the Presidium had read it.31 According to Roy Medvedev, who took part in the collection of signatures, this collective letter had been, if not planned, then at least encouraged from above by a few opponents of the rehabilitation of Stalin within the Party apparatus. They had done so in reaction to a letter from a number of prominent military leaders lobbying the Congress to obtain such an official rehabilitation.32

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 177 Another factor that may have played a role was the intervention in the debate of foreign communist parties, in particular the more progressive Italian Communist Party. On March 19, 1966, the newspapers l’Unità, official organ of this Party, echoed the distress expressed in the “letter of the 25.” On March 27, just before the opening of the Congress, l’Unità published an article by Giuseppe Boffa entitled “Is the Stalin Issue Still an Open Issue?” The historian and journalist warned that the Italian Communists would not accept a repudiation of the 20th Congress resolutions, and he expected his position to be shared by other Western Communist Parties and People’s Democracies in the Eastern Bloc: “A change in this critique in the opposite political spirit, after ten years, cannot but raise deep incomprehension and resolute opposition.”33 Therefore, struggles of influence were clearly happening behind the stage in the weeks leading up to the 23rd Party Congress. However, against all expectations, the question of Stalin’s rehabilitation was eventually kept off the Congress’s agenda, and neither Lenin nor Stalin were mentioned in the Congress’s main report. It is likely that the combination of liberal protests, added to the lack of a consensus on this question within the Soviet leadership, led to this compromise. It consisted of tacitly ending de-Stalinization, but without any official sanction of this new course—in other words, no reversal of any prior resolutions and no official rehabilitation of Stalin. From then on, the accomplishments of the Stalin era would be celebrated, but whenever possible they would be attributed to the people and Party instead of Stalin, and his mistakes and crimes would be kept silent.

Reinforcing a fragile modus vivendi The anti-Stalinist intelligentsia’s struggle The eviction of the Stalin question from the public space did not happen without a struggle, however. The “Nekrich Affair” was the most prominent manifestation of the anti-Stalinist intelligentsia’s opposition to the new course. In October 1965, Aleksandr Nekrich, senior researcher at the USSR Academy of Sciences, had published a popularization work pointing out Stalin’s failure to prepare the USSR for the German invasion in 1941. Despite being based on commonly acknowledged facts and by and large repeating the content of the “Secret Speech,” the book raised eyebrows within the Soviet leadership. A public discussion was planned at the Section of History of the Great Patriotic War at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism for February 16, 1966, just a few weeks before the 23rd Party Congress. Nekrich believed that “Stalinist-minded historians, with the support of the Soviet army’s central political office, the publications’ committee of the council of ministers, and the science department of the Central Committee, were preparing a broad campaign to destroy [his] book.”34

178  Barbara Martin Although the reality of these fears is not confirmed by the documents we have, the discussion saw the confrontation between staunch anti-Stalinists, called in to “defend” Nekrich’s book, and the organizers of the debate. An unofficial transcript of the discussion, selectively compiled by a participant, soon made its way into samizdat and, subsequently, to the West, where it was published along with Nekrich’s book as a testimony to the campaign to rehabilitate Stalin. As a result, Nekrich was excluded from the Communist Party, partly for publishing a book that had been instrumentalized by the West, partly for refusing to repent.35 This expulsion, in June 1967, and a subsequent attack against Nekrich’s book through a devastating review36 caused an outrage within the anti-Stalinist intelligentsia, triggering a wave of protest letters, mainly from academics. The most widely circulated was a letter-essay by General Petr Grigorenko, a World War II veteran and famous dissident, who went further in his analysis than Nekrich, based on his own wartime experience. The letter soon became a “samizdat bestseller.”37 However, the established compromise remained in place. In October 1967, as the Party celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Revolution, it was decided not to mention Stalin’s name in the official speech, but only those of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.38 A month earlier, forty-three sons and daughters of repressed Communists had called on the Soviet leadership to put an end to the public rehabilitation of Stalin, which they felt was taking place in the media. “It should not happen again. The resurrection of the past deals a blow to the idea of communism, throws discredit upon our system, turns the death of millions of innocents into a pattern.”39 The 90th anniversary of Stalin’s birth: shaking the consensus Indeed, the compromise reached in 1966 remained fragile, and it was never totally accepted by either side. Neo-Stalinist publications, particularly in the literary field, continued throughout the late 1960s, in particular around anniversary commemorations, without eliciting any official rebuff or critique. Yitzhak Brudny has argued that the Brezhnev leadership tolerated these manifestations of Stalinist dissent because it tried to co-opt Russian nationalists to foster support for the regime.40 However by 1969, which marked Stalin’s 90th birthday, these publications and other threatening harbingers had intensified to a point that made many anti-Stalinists believe in a concerted move to officially rehabilitate Stalin. According to Medvedev: It was envisaged, for example, to erect a monument on Stalin’s grave, on which there was until then only a marble plaque. For the opening of the monument on Red Square, a meeting of Moscow workers and war veterans was suggested. At the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, a special academic conference dedicated to Stalin’s 90th birthday was due to be convened in December 1969. It was planned to write a long article in

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 179 Pravda, and soon, a team of writers set to write it. One of the Moscow typographies received an order for the preparation of a large series of portraits of Stalin, and a few artists’ workshops – for the production of busts of Stalin. All this “production” was supposed to be released for sale just after the jubilee. In Georgia, not only was an academic conference planned, but also a grand ceremonial forum of representatives of the Republic’s community.41 It is unclear how seriously and on what level the actions mentioned by Medvedev were envisaged. The lack of archival documents leaves us with mere conjectures. It may well be that neo-Stalinists, both in Moscow and Georgia, sought to take advantage of the lack of a clear direction from the top leadership and take the initiative. Because two of these measures—the bust on Stalin’s grave and the article in Pravda—eventually materialized, however, dismissing them as mere hearsay seems exaggerated. Yet the power of the rumor itself was also a significant element in the confrontation of the two sides. The fears raised by the forthcoming anniversary also seemed confirmed by the publication in February 1969 in the journal Kommunist of an article entitled “For a Leninist Party Spirit in the Treatment of Soviet History,” by V. Golikov, S. Murashov, I. Chkhikvishvili, N. Shatagin and S. Shaumian.42 The authors unveiled a program to redress imperfections of recent Soviet historiography: they expressed the regret that “some of our historians, instead of studying objectively our Party’s experience, the dialectics of its development, concentrate all their attention on mistakes and flaws, stress and exaggerate them” (emphasis in the original).43 One could not ignore that the history of the CPSU was “an unprecedented heroic feat, an inspiring example of revolutionary struggle and construction of a new world by the working class, the broad masses of workers guided by their vanguard, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. […] However, some authors, instead of an authentic party critique of the mistakes and defects linked to the Personality Cult, blacken the heroic history of our state and Lenin’s Party in the period of the construction of socialism, depict these years as a continuous chain of mistakes and failures.” Such a “collection of dubious facts about errors and costs” was an “undignified business, having nothing in common with historical research.”44 Many protest letters were addressed to the journal Kommunist in reaction to this article. Leonid Petrovskii complained bitterly that although “no one seized historians by the throat to preach false socialism (lzhesotsializm),” some continued to attempt to revise “the resolutions of the 20th and 22nd Party Congress and teach how to conceal historical truth.”45 The fact that Golikov et al.’s article had appeared in the official press organ of the Central Committee worried Petr Iakir, who noted, “This way, through the authority of the central organ of the CPSU, the pro-Stalinist campaign that has been lasting for a few years has now reached its climax.”46 Roy Medvedev shared

180  Barbara Martin these concerns and complained in an open letter that “the general line of the journal Kommunist is a line of concerted attack on the whole Party course, which has been declared at the 20th and 22nd party Congress.”47 This was all the more alarming, according to Medvedev, as this article had “already become the basis for the activity of the press committees, publishing houses, editorial committees, censorship organs.” And this although—according to the information Medvedev possessed—the article had not been discussed at the highest echelons of power. He concluded: “We consider that [this publication] cannot be regarded otherwise than as a factionary intervention, inflicting damage on the unity of our Party and the whole Communist movement.”48 By the end of the year, the liberal intelligentsia was scandalized by the publication of an openly Stalinist novel by Vsevolod Kochetov entitled, What Do You Want Then? 49 This work was a pastiche on the West, dissidents, and liberal Italian communists, featuring a hero who took pride in calling himself a Stalinist. He denounced Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization and the “literature of horrors” published after the 22nd Party Congress. This novel raised new protests, including from Italian Communists. These publications and the pending question of the official stance on the Stalin question forced the Politburo to reaffirm its position. Records of discussion over the publication of a commemorative article for Stalin’s 90th birthday in December 1969 show that there was a general uneasiness in dealing with the question. Brezhnev himself was originally against the idea of an article, and a few Politburo members shared his embarrassment. Yet the majority still considered that a small article showing in a balanced way both accomplishments and errors of Stalin would be expected and well-received. As one Politburo member, Petro Shelest, put it: … it seems to me that we should give a small, correct article with positive and negative aspects. And the majority of our people, including the intelligentsia, will understand us correctly; even more so as we have to take into account the fact that in recent years, in our marshals’, generals’ memoirs, a lot has been written on Stalin from various points of view, some of this diverging from the Central Committee’s decisions adopted previously. […] Stalin made mistakes—we should speak about them. There were some positive aspects—no one denies it, obviously. And we have to say how it was in history. We should not embellish and we should not distort history.50 Aleksei Kosygin agreed that many positive mentions of Stalin had appeared in recent publications, and no official statement had appeared in the press. “This article would put everything in its place.”51 Therefore, the article was clearly intended as a way to redirect the debate, remind the people of the compromise line adopted by the Party. Roy Medvedev commented on the article in Pravda in December 1969, saying that the intelligentsia had been

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 181 relieved by this short article, which did not contain any rehabilitation of Stalin and remained the only form of commemoration of this controversial birthday. The article, Medvedev observed, “clearly has a character of compromise.” The authors’ goal was to avoid “offending too much either the neo-Stalinists or the resolute opponents of Stalin’s rehabilitation.” Still, a zone of silence remained around many of Stalin’s crimes, in particular in the early months of the war, during industrialization, or regarding the forced collectivization of agriculture.52 In her biography of Brezhnev, Susanne Schattenberg confirms that Brezhnev favored a policy of “objective balance” in relation to the Stalinist past. The Soviet leader could hardly be suspected of Stalinist sympathies and consistently resisted attempts by his neo-Stalinist colleagues to return to the previous order. Nevertheless, he considered that certain truths should remain hidden to avoid open conflict within the Party.53 Toward a new consensual cult: World War II as a substitute for the Stalin cult In the long run, the compromise reached in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s ouster could only last if it was buttressed by a constructive narrative. The mere silencing of the dark pages of the Stalin era did not in itself represent a positive program, and excessive criticism of Stalin’s actions had left the Party with a thirty-year gap in its short history. A consensual usable past was therefore necessary to instill in the younger generation pride for its country’s history. To this effect, at least part of Stalin’s legacy had to be rehabilitated. Already in November 1966, such ideas were voiced during a Politburo meeting. Brezhnev expressed his concern with the state of historical scholarship and particularly with the fact that “some means of ideological work, such as, for instance, some scholarly works, literary works, art, cinema and the press, are often used, I would say frankly, to disparage the history of our party and our people.” In response, he called for the creation of a new official textbook that would become the people’s “bedside book” and would defend Marxism-Leninism and the Communist Party against its detractors. For such critiques sometimes went as far as to attack Lenin’s own legacy. “We will not let anyone offend Lenin,” warned Brezhnev. It was crucial to create “such a backbone, such a core […] which would really educate all of our people […] in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism.” His words met with unanimous support. Andropov noted that “a wholly unjustifiable gap” had appeared “in history between Lenin’s period and contemporary times,” which could be filled productively by showing all the “constructive work conducted” by the Party and the Soviet people.54 However, beyond the creation of a textbook, the Soviet leaders were in dire need of a new, inspiring historical narrative. The popular success encountered by the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Victory over Nazi Germany, in May 1965, revealed the mobilizing potential of a selective

182  Barbara Martin rehabilitation of Stalin’s heritage. While Stalin the General Secretary of the Communist Party was responsible for the death of millions of innocent Soviet citizens, Stalin the wartime military leader could be acclaimed for his role in the victory. This convenient dissociation allowed the Brezhnev leadership to resort to this usable past without fully denouncing the resolutions of the 20th and 22nd Party Congresses. Nevertheless, this constituted a sharp reversal of Khrushchev’s line, from his caricatural denunciation in the Secret Speech of Stalin’s mistakes in conducting the war to his renaming of Stalingrad as Volgograd.55 In September 1966, to commemorate the twenty-five-year anniversary of the Battle of Moscow, the remains of an unknown soldier were reburied by the Kremlin wall with military honors. On May 8, 1967, the monument, composed of a modest bronze sculpture and six large marble blocks with the name of six Soviet “hero-cities,” was officially inaugurated. This newly created lieu de mémoire received a symbolic consecration through the adjunction of an urn containing soil from the Leningrad Piskarevskoe cemetery, burial ground of the fallen heroes of the Revolution, and an eternal flame carried from the Leningrad Field of Mars. This constituted, according to Nina Turmarkin, the “symbolic incorporation of the Great Patriotic War into the Soviet Union’s foundation saga, a mythic history of the glorious Soviet socialist state, whose prime creator had been the idealized Lenin.”56 In the following years, this cult only grew in importance. In 1970, Stalin’s grave by the Kremlin wall was adorned with a bust of the leader, symbolizing his partial readmission into the memorial landscape.

Conclusion: selective memorialization as a way out of the quagmire In his memoirs, Aleksandr Bovin, who worked in the Central Committee of the Party in the 1960s, described the official stance on the Stalin question as follows: in 1966, the Brezhnev leadership, while “leaving the higher, official, parade levels of ideology” virtually unchanged, made it clear to the lower levels that it was “desirable to moderate the anti-Stalinist moods, to put in their places those who blacken our history.” The anti-Stalinist protesters had overestimated Brezhnev’s “principledness”: the Soviet leader “at best closed his eyes on the Stalinists’ counter-attacks” and on the connivance, if not outright support, of a part of the Central Committee apparatus.57 Bovin’s description of the outcome of this power struggle confirms the Brezhnev leadership’s role of arbitrator between antagonistic groups, while emphasizing its partiality towards the Stalinists. This chapter has examined how Khrushchev’s successors re-established their control over the much debated “Stalin Question” after 1964, following a period of unsettling public revelations about the regime’s past crimes. Silence had been the condition for the perpetration of these crimes, but the new Party leaders considered silence equally necessary for the survival of the regime and for its stability.

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 183 Nevertheless, once open, Pandora’s box could not simply be shut again. The evolution of the Soviet leadership’s stance on this question was a non-linear process, in which several groups defending antagonistic positions competed for influence and lobbied the leadership for change. Therefore, as I argue, the outcome was largely a compromise, which emerged not only as a result of this contradictory lobbying but also largely in reaction to a perceived failure of the previous policy of de-Stalinization. A broad consensus rapidly emerged concerning the necessity of putting an end to the criticism of the Stalin era, which could only cast doubts upon the legitimacy of the Soviet system itself. However, silence was not sufficient to restore the regime’s prestige and to fight the increasing apathy, verging on nihilism, of a part of the younger generation. Therefore, positive elements from the past also had to be rehabilitated, cleansed from the moral opprobrium of Stalinism, and used for propaganda purposes. Most prominently, the Soviet Victory of 1945 constituted a potent symbol with unparalleled mobilizing potential, which could easily be dissociated from the broader Stalin-era context. Despite the affirmation of a new official line and the exclusion from print of anti-Stalinist voices, alternative narratives about the Stalin era continued to thrive in samizdat. Some of these texts crossed the Iron Curtain and were published abroad, testifying to the persistence of the debate on this question. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973) and Roy Medvedev’s study Let History Judge (1971) thus explored, on the basis of oral testimonies, the darkest pages of the Soviet past. Beyond their historical value, these works were political manifestos, calling for the acknowledgment of past crimes and the democratization of Soviet society. However, these voices from the Soviet underground would only be widely heard in the USSR during Perestroika, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost’ would finally put an end to decades of official silencing of the past.

Notes 1. Naumov, “K istorii sekretnogo doklada Khrushcheva na XX s"ezde KPSS,” Novaia i noveishchaia istoriia, no. 4 (1996); Susanne Schattenberg, “‘Democracy or Despotism?’ How the Secret Speech Was Translated into Everyday Life,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London: Routledge, 2009), 65. Robert Hornsby estimates that one in six Soviet citizens must have attended meetings where the Secret Speech was read out, implying that a large proportion of the population would have at least heard about it. See Hornsby, Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 31–32. 2. Naumov, “K istorii sekretnogo doklada Khrushcheva Na XX s"ezde KPSS.” 3. This was particularly the case for youth Marxist revisionist circles, which mushroomed in Soviet universities in the aftermath of the Secret Speech and encountered fierce repression. See Benjamin Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev

184  Barbara Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 147–50; Benjamin Tromly, “Intelligentsia Self-Fashioning in the Postwar Soviet Union: Revol’t Pimenov’s Political Struggle, 1949–57,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 1 (2012): 151–176; Hornsby, Protest, Reform and Repression, 102–107; Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union (1953–1970) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 90–94. 4. This document is conserved at the Central State Archive of Moscow, Department of Conservation of Documents of Personal Collections (OKhDLSM), Fond 333, Finding Aid 9, File 24. 5. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Knopf, 1971). 6. Interestingly, Petr Demichev, a Politburo member, provided a similar categorization in a discussion on the state of historical scholarship in the USSR in November 1966, but he defined the two antithetic groups by the journals around which they gathered (“Novyi Mir” for the liberals, “Oktiabr’” for the neo-Stalinists) and did not characterize the third group, although one can only guess that he meant the supporters of the official Party line. See A. Artizov et al., eds., Reabilitatsiia: Kak èto bylo., vol. II: Fevral’ 1956-nachalo 80-kh godov., Rossiia XX Vek. Dokumenty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Materik,” 2003), 508. 7. OKhDLSM, Fond 333, Finding Aid 9, File 24, 5. 8. ibid., p 6. 9. Roi Medvedev, Lichnost’ I èpokha. Politicheskii portret L.I. Brezhneva. (Moscow: Izd. “Novosti,” 1991), 168. 10. “Velikaia pobeda sovetskogo naroda. Doklad tovarishcha L.I. Brezhneva,” Pravda, May 10, 1965, 1. 11. ibid., 4. 12. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i èpokha. Politicheskii portret L.I. Brezhneva., 169; OKhDLSM, Fond 333, Finding Aid 9, File 24, 12. 13. N.G. Tomilina, ed., Boi s ten’iu Stalina. Prodolzhenie: Dokumenty i materialy ob istorii XXII s˝ezda KPSS I vtorogo ètapa destalinizatsii (Moscow; Saint-Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2015), 178–179. 14. OKhDLSM, Fond 333, Finding Aid 9, File 24, 29. 15. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i èpokha. Politicheskii portret L.I. Brezhneva., 64. 16. He only became “corresponding member” in 1976. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i èpokha. Politicheskii portret L.I. Brezhneva., 143–45. 17. OKhDLSM, Fond 333, Finding Aid 9, File 24, 30–31. 18. ibid., p 36. 19. E.M. Zhukov, Meeting of the Ideological Commission, November 15–18, 1965, Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (RGANI), Fond 5, Finding Aid 35, File 210, 67. 20. ibid. 21. S.P. Trapeznikov, Meeting of the Ideological Commission, November 15–18, 1965; RGANI, Fond 5, Finding Aid 35, File 210, 75. 22. “Kuchkin, Andrei Pavlovich,” Bol’shaia sovetskaia èntsiklopediia, 1969–1978. 23. Andrei Kuchkin, Meeting of the Ideological Commission, November 15–18, 1965. RGANI, Fond 5, Finding Aid 35, File 210, 178–179. 24. OKhDLSM, Fond 333, Finding Aid 9, File 24, 67. 25. E. Zhukov, V. Trukhanovskii, and V. Shchunkov, “Vysokaia otvetstvennost’ istorikov,” Pravda, January 30, 1966. 26. ibid. 27. RGANI, Fond 5, Finding Aid 35, file 223, 53–56. 28. ibid, 54.

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 185 29. Aleksandr Nekrich, Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian (Boston; London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 175. 30. “Letter of twenty-five Soviet figures of science and culture to the General Secretary of the CC L.I. Brezhnev protesting against ‘tendencies directed at the rehabilitation of Stalin’,” AS 273, Sobranie dokumentov samizdata, vol. 4 (Munich: Samizdat Archive Association, 1973). 31. “Zapiska V.E. Semichastnogo v TsK KPSS o rasprostranenii v Moskve pis’ma izvestnykh deiatelei sovetskoi nauki, literatury i iskusstva protiv reabilitatsii I.V. Stalina,” in Reabilitatsiia: Kak èto bylo., vol. II, ed. Artizov et al., 485–87; Roi Medvedev, Politicheskii dnevnik, March 1966, 1 (Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial, Archive of the History of Dissent in the USSR (1956–1987), Fond 128 R. Medvedev). Samizdat means literally “self-published,” and it designates the underground circulation of uncensored texts, reproduced on typewriters by readers themselves. The term “Presidium” then designated the Politburo. 32. Roi Medvedev and Zhores Medvedev, 1925–2010. Iz vospominanii. (Moscow: Izd. “Prava cheloveka,” 2010), 70. 33. Medvedev, Politicheskii dnevnik, March 1966 (Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial, Archive of the History of Dissent in the USSR (1956–1987), Fond 128 R. Medvedev). 34. Nekrich, Forsake Fear, 156. 35. For an English version of the transcript and Nekrich’s book, see Aleksandr Nekrich, “June 22, 1941”: Soviet Historians and the German Invasion, ed. Vladimir Petrov (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 250–61. On the “Nekrich Affair,” see Roger D Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 209–213. 36. G.A. Deborin and B.S. Tel’pukhovskii, “V ideinom plenu u fal’sifikatorov istorii,” Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 9 (September 1967): 127–140. (English version in Nekrich, Soviet Historians and the German Invasion). 37. See Petr Grigor’evich Grigorenko, The Grigorenko Papers: Writings and Documents on His Case (Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 1976), 12–51. 38. Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: Kak èto bylo., II, 821. 39. “Letter of 43 children of communists, unjustifiably repressed by Stalin to the TsK of the CPSU about the dangers of neo-Stalinism,” September 24, 1967, AS no. 134, Sobranie Dokumentov Samizdata, vol. 2 (Munich: Samizdat Archive Association, 1973). 40. Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 41. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i èpokha. Politicheskii portret L.I. Brezhneva., 174. 42. V. Golikov et al., “Za leninskuiu partiinost’ v osveshchenii istorii KPSS,” Kommunist, no. 3 (1969): 67–82. 43. ibid., 70. 44. ibid., 72–73. 45. Petrovskii L.P. “Open Letter to the TsK of the CPSU with a critique of historical publications rehabilitating Stalin,” AS 130, Sobranie dokumentov samizdata, vol. 2. 46. Iakir P.I. “Open letter to the editor of the journal Kommunist in relation to its publications rehabilitating Stalin,” AS 99, Sobranie dokumentov samizdata, vol. 1, 1. 47. Medvedev, R.A. “Is it possible today to rehabilitate Stalin?”, open letter to the journal Kommunist,” April 4, 1969, AS 131, Sobranie dokumentov samizdata, vol. 2. This long letter was published in France the same year as a short book by Medvedev, titled Faut-il réhabiliter Staline?

186  Barbara Martin

48. ibid. 49. Vsevolod Kochetov, “Chego zhe ty khochesh?” Oktiabr’, no. 9–11 (1969). 50. Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: Kak èto bylo., vol. II, 526. 51. ibid., 527. 52. Roi Medvedev, Politicheskii dnevnik, 1964–1970 (Amsterdam: Fond imeni Gertsena, 1972), 586–88. 53. Susanne Schattenberg, Leonid Breschnew: Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie. (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 420–423. 54. Artizov et al., Reabilitatsiia: Kak èto bylo., vol. II, 505–516. 55. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 109. 56. ibid., 128. 57. Aleksandr Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’ (Moscow: Zakharov, 2003), 153.

Bibliography A. Artizov et al., eds., Reabilitatsiia: Kak èto bylo., vol. II: Fevral’ 1956-nachalo 80-kh godov., Rossiia XX Vek. Dokumenty. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Materik,” 2003, 508. Bovin, Aleksandr. XX vek kak zhizn’. Moscow: Zakharov, 2003. Brudny, Yitzhak M. Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Deborin, G.A., and B.S. Tel’pukhovskii, “V ideinom plenu u fal’sifikatorov istorii,” Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 9 (September 1967): 127–140. Golikov, V., S. Murashov, I. Chkhikvishvili, N. Shatagin, and S. Shaumian, “Za leninskuiu partiinost’ v osveshchenii istorii KPSS,” Kommunist, no. 3 (1969): 67–82. Grigorenko, Petr Grigor’evich. The Grigorenko Papers: Writings and Documents on His Case. Boulder: Westview Press, 1976. Hornsby, Robert. Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Jones, Polly. Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union (1953–1970). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Markwick, Roger D. Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Medvedev, Roi. Lichnost’ i èpokha. Politicheskii portret L.I. Brezhneva. Moscow: Izd. “Novosti,” 1991. ———. Politicheskii dnevnik, 1964–1970. Amsterdam: Fond imeni Gertsena, 1972. Medvedev, Roi, and Zhores Medvedev. 1925–2010. Iz vospominanii. Moscow: Izd. “Prava cheloveka,” 2010. Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. New York: Knopf, 1971. Naumov, Viktor. “K istorii sekretnogo doklada Khrushcheva na XX S“ezde KPSS.” Novaia i noveishchaia istoriia, no. 4 (1996). Nekrich, Aleksandr. Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991. ———. “June 22, 1941”: Soviet Historians and the German Invasion, edited by Vladimir Petrov. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. Petrovskii, Leonid Petrovich. “Delo Nekricha.” Vestnik RAN t. 65, no. 6 (1995): 528–539. Schattenberg, Susanne. Leonid Breschnew: Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2017.

Brezhnev’s compromise over Stalin’s crimes 187 ——. “‘Democracy or Despotism?’ How the Secret Speech Was Translated into Everyday Life,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, edited by Polly Jones. London: Routledge, 2009. N.G. Tomilina, ed., Boi s ten’iu Stalina. Prodolzhenie: Dokumenty i materialy ob istorii XXII s˝ezda KPSS I vtorogo ètapa destalinizatsii. Moscow; Saint-Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriia, 2015, 178–179. Tromly, Benjamin. “Intelligentsia Self-Fashioning in the Postwar Soviet Union: Revol’t Pimenov’s Political Struggle, 1949–57.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13, no. 1 (2012): 151–176. ———. Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Tumarkin, Nina. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

10 Censorship, indifference, oblivion The Armenian genocide and its denial Vicken Cheterian

The genocide of the Armenians is one of the major areas of twentieth-century world history that remains understudied. In spite of its importance as the first modern genocide, which altered the demographic composition of the Middle East, put an end to the Ottoman Empire, and constituted precedence to future genocidal projects, its scholarly research started only recently. The explanation of this major omission is a difficult task. It is possible to trace Turkish policies of censoring any debate or reference toward the fate of the Armenians, even the collaboration of certain Turkish and international institutions whether voluntarily or out of material interest in this effort. Yet the silence is broader and more complex: it nearly succeeded in eliminating the genocide and its victims from living memory even in spaces outside the control of the post-Ottoman Turkish rulers. The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the long oblivion to which the history of the Armenians was condemned, and on the silence before the debate on denialism emerged. This silence sheds light on the workings of political institutions, as well as intellectual and academic power centers, and poses existential questions that have long been ignored. The emergence of scholarly research on the extermination of the Ottoman Armenians dates only from the 1980s, when it was initially contested and rejected. It finally intensified in the 2000s and received increasing acceptance within some sectors of academia. The first time a Turkish scholar showed interest in the subject was in 1990—incidentally a year after the Ottoman archives were opened to researchers. For over seven decades, the first modern genocide was considered to be insignificant, not a worthy subject of research in an established university setting. It was not only censored by the criminal state itself, but it was also ignored as unimportant by a large number of scholars, intellectuals, artists, and religious personalities. How is this possible?

The crime The omission of an event of such magnitude cannot be coincidental, nor could it be without consequences. The scholarly debate has largely been

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-Chp10.indd 188

25/10/18 2:02 PM

Armenian genocide and its denial 189 occupied by the question of whether the deportations and the massacres of 1915 constituted genocide. This debate is largely of a legal or political nature, and does not have much to do with historical research. As the deportations and the massacres were taking place, representatives of global powers, diplomats, scholars, and eyewitnesses were also documenting them, and all parties knew that those events were organized by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) with the aim to exterminate Ottoman Armenians, as well as other Christian populations such as the Assyrians and the Greeks. To illustrate: On May 24, 1915, exactly a month after the arrest of the Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul, and as reports of deportations and massacres from Urmia province (Persia) and Van province (Ottoman Empire) had reached various capitals, the Foreign Ministries of France, Russia, and Great Britain sent a note to the Ottoman foreign office, writing: “In view of these new crimes against humanity and civilization, the Allied government announces publicly to the Sublime Ports that they will hold personally responsible these crimes all members of the Ottoman government and those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres.”1 To follow up on their promise to punish the perpetrators, the British Foreign Office documented the crimes (a compilation of eyewitness accounts, diplomatic correspondence, letters, and newspaper reports) and published them in 1916 in book form under the supervision of Viscount Bryce and Arnold Toynbee.2 There are the reports of Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople, who stayed there as the representative of a neutral power until April 1917, reporting a “campaign of race extermination.” He later detailed his encounters with the CUP leaders Talaat and Enver, the architects of the exterminations, in a book published in 1919, often quoted in works on the Armenian genocide.3 In Germany, Johannes Lepsius documented the crime in a detailed report,4 and in 1916 printed 20,000 copies to distribute among German policy makers and intellectuals, only to be censored by the authorities. The latter already knew what was happening because German officers were in command of the Ottoman Army and were well informed about the deportations and their nature. In many instances, German officers participated in the planning of the deportations, and in a few cases such as Urfa, where the Armenian civilians showed resistance and Ottoman soldiers failed to overrun the Armenian neighborhood, German officers took part by calling for artillery support. There are also cases where determined German officers stopped deportations, as in the case of General Liman von Sanders’ intervention to prohibit the deportation of Armenians as well as Greeks from Izmir, where he commanded, showing the ability of German officers to stop the exterminations, if desired.5 The Ottomans themselves knew about the crime that was committed by the CUP leadership. Turkish journalist and historian Murat Bardakçi published a document based on the CUP leader Talaat’s private papers. This was a detailed report concerning Ottoman Armenian demographics before

190  Vicken Cheterian the war and in 1917, which revealed that 1,150,000 Ottoman Armenians perished in the years 1914–1917.6 After the war was lost and CUP leadership escaped to Berlin, Turkish military tribunals sought to bring to trial those responsible for the deportations and the massacres of Greek and Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, as well as for breaking the constitution and taking the Empire to war.7 The survivors themselves made a huge effort of documentation as the catastrophe was developing; there were efforts to document eyewitness accounts in three different geographic locations. In the Syrian desert, Armenian intellectuals who survived the deportation tried their best to document the atrocities, the best example of which is Aram Andonian’s publications.8 In the Russian Caucasus, in cities like Tbilisi and Baku that were receiving refugees escaping the massacres, Armenian political groups like the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF or Tashnagtsutyun) documented eyewitness accounts of surviving refugees, writing down their losses and naming Turkish officials who were responsible of their suffering. Intellectuals such as Zabel Yesaian and Hovannes Tumanyan took part in this effort.9 Following the pattern of Armenian studies, scholarly work on the Ottoman Assyrians is also just emerging today,10 yet we also have ample documentation about the mass violence exerted on the various Oriental rites that belong to the Assyro-Chaldean populations dating from the events themselves. In the past, Ottoman violence against Armenians and Assyrians were seen as part of the same political context and the same political project, whether during the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896) or during the genocide itself. The analytical angle through which those events were narrated by the late nineteenth or early twentieth century was that of Ottoman state violence against its Christian subjects.11 In fact, before the mass deportations of the Armenians began, in January 1915 the earliest massacres targeting Assyrians took place in the Urmia region of Iran, where Ottoman military units had penetrated. While the Turkish nationalist leadership focused its propaganda on Armenians to portray them as a subversive, rebellious element within the country, it is surprising to note that it remained silent regarding the Assyrians despite the mass violence exercised against them. In recent years we have noted a growing interest in the history of the Assyro-Chaldeans in the late Ottoman Empire, although its historicity is largely presented as an individual, national one compared to the mass violence against Ottoman Christians a century earlier. We still have limited accounts concerning the fate of the Ottoman Greeks, a field that remains to be developed in the future.12 We also know that Yazidis were also victimized in the same period—at least Yazidi villages in areas from which Armenians and Assyrians were uprooted—yet we also know that Yazidis in Sinjar and adjacent areas were not deported and helped save Armenian survivors. The fate of the Yazidis during the First World War is yet to be studied.13

Armenian genocide and its denial 191 The aim of the above summary of the documentation published during and immediately after the First World War is to show that all sides of the conflict—the perpetrators, the victims, and the great powers—all knew and documented the unprecedented extermination of civilians during the First World War. Historians who continue to research the subject largely use documentation available from that period. Scholars still discover new documents, showing the direct orders given by CUP leaders to exterminate the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, as Tanner Akçam did of late.14 Yet this is just an addition to the mass of already known historical facts documented during and in the immediate aftermath of the deportations and mass killings. New factual additions will not convince those who continue to deny the genocidal nature of the events to change their opinion. The denial of the genocide is of a political nature, while the historic evidence was available even as the events were developing. The subject of our forgetfulness is not a minor issue. By any account, it concerns the deportations of several million people. While Ottoman and, later, Turkish official statistics minimized the number of the Christian population, for obvious political reasons, and while the number of Armenian victims continues to be a subject of debate, the estimate of Armenians living within the Ottoman Empire in 1914 is put around 2.1 million people.15 In the post-war deliberations, the Ottoman parliament itself has given figures of the number of Armenian civilians massacred that vary between 800,000 and 1.5 million.16 From a total of 500,000–600,000 Assyrian, Chaldeans, and Syriacs in the region in 1914, in both the Ottoman Empire and northwest Iran, the massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks and their allies claimed between 150,000 and 250,000 victims.17 Estimates of Ottoman Greek victims in the same period vary between 300,000 and 750,000, from a pre-war population estimated to be between 1,088,850 and 1,708,125 in Anatolia (excluding eastern Thrace).18 Deportations and massacres were followed by the forced Islamization of several hundred thousand surviving orphans and kidnapped women. The properties of the victims were distributed over those who committed the crime, and the process of confiscations continued over several decades.19 The 1915 genocide is equally important in the context of world history. During the First World War the majority of the victims were young soldiers serving in national armies: 8,500,000 soldiers died from war wounds and diseases, out of a total of between 11 and 13 million deaths.20 In other terms, the majority of those killed were soldiers who died fighting, and only a minority were civilians. In the Ottoman Empire, the casualty figures are reversed: an estimated 4.5 million civilians died, the vast majority of whom were members of Christian nations who died in deportations and in systematic massacres, compared to Ottoman military war losses of 325,000 who died in fighting and another 400,000 who died of diseases.21 But despite the scale and the level of awareness of the crime at the time, it seemed soon lost to oblivion.

192  Vicken Cheterian

Oblivion Tanner Akçam was a Turkish asylum seeker in Germany when he discovered the history of his country in the late 1970s. He was a leftist activist, a former student at Ankara University. There he had been arrested and imprisoned for publishing a student journal called Devrimci Gençlik (Revolutionary Youth) in which he had used such taboo expressions as “class struggle” and even “Kurds,” for which he was condemned to eight years’ imprisonment. In March 1977 he managed to escape from the prison with five others, and after months of living underground he escaped to Germany, where he became a political asylum seeker. It was in Germany, while working in Hamburg on a history of torture in the Ottoman Empire, that Akçam came across the Hamidyan Massacres (1894–1896) and later read about the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. In the words of Akçam: This was the first time I came to the subject of the Armenians, before that I did not know anything about it; it was not a subject for the Turkish left, who considered Armenians and ASALA as suspicious, as instruments of Western imperialism. As I progressed in my readings of Abdul Hamid massacres, I thought to myself: I know the history of the French Revolution, of Russia in 1917, of Chinese Communism, but I do not know Turkish history.22 Taner Akçam was a politically active Turkish citizen, pursuing a university education, yet before moving to Germany and starting to work on a research project on “Violence in the Twentieth Century” in Hamburg he had not heard about a genocide that had taken place in his own country. He was not alone. In the late 1980s, as Akçam was starting to read about dark pages of his own country’s history, the entire Turkish nation had simply forgotten about the first modern genocide that was organized in Turkey. The few Turkish citizens who were confronted with the accusations of genocide were often students or university professors, studying or working abroad and coming into contact with members of the Armenian Diaspora. Tanner Akçam finally decided to dwell on this complex issue and become the first Turkish scholar writing extensively in Turkish on Turkish state responsibility for organizing the extermination of Ottoman Armenians, on continuity from the CUP, and finally on the reasons behind the official Turkish denial.23 Akçam’s story is not an exception. Betul Tanbay is a mathematics professor in Istanbul. She was a high school student in France when her history teacher asked her whether she would like to write an essay on the Armenian massacres. She was shocked and immediately called home for an explanation from her parents. She explained that she came from an influential Turkish family with leftist leanings, growing up in the Beyoglu (Pera) district, which in the past had a majority of Greek, Armenian, and other non-Muslim populations. Yet, she learned for the first time about a genocide

Armenian genocide and its denial 193 that took place in her own country only while studying abroad.24 The case of Fatma Müge Göçek, a professor of sociology in the United States who later became one of the founders of the Workshop on Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS), is similar: She heard about the Armenian massacres first time in the United States, when she had already finished her studies and had become a professor. After giving a public lecture, she was asked by an old Armenian lady: Why did you Turks massacre us? Göçek was shocked and could not answer this question because it was the first time she had heard about the genocide of Ottoman Armenians in the country where she grew up. She too would consecrate much of her professional career to uncovering the unwanted past of Turkey’s predicament.25 The genocide survivors who remained in Turkey had to live a century in silence, often by negating their identity. Armenians continued to play an important role in Turkish intellectual, cultural, and political life, but never publicly as Armenians. Just a few examples: the Turkish national anthem was co-authored by Edgar Manas, an Armenian; the modern Turkish alphabet based on Latin was composed by Hagop Martayan (Agop Dilaçar), another Armenian, who seems to be the person who first called “Atatürk” to Mustafa Kemal. But in Republican Turkey, the only place where Armenians were permitted to survive while preserving their ethnic and religious identity was in Istanbul. In the remaining provinces they had to survive as Muslims—as Kurds or Turks. The fate of several hundred thousand kidnapped women and young girls and boys who were trapped in Turkey after the genocide remained largely a taboo. This silence was broken first by an article written by Hrant Dink and published in the Agos weekly in 2004. It revealed one famous case, that of Sabihe Gökçen—none other than the adoptive daughter of Mustafa Kemal and a Kemalist mythical hero figure. Hrant had to pay with his life for his audacity.26 The other case that marked the debate on Islamized Armenians was a book by Fethiye Çetin about her grandmother, a kidnapped Armenian girl whose identity was kept hidden even from her own children and grandchildren.27 The lack of recognition of the genocide meant psychological suffering for the survivors living in the diaspora, and continuous violence and victimization against those remaining in Turkey. There is an even more surprising example that illustrates the depth of this erasure of memory. Murat Kahraman is originally from Dersim, today officially called Tunceli province, in contemporary eastern Turkey. Like many other young people from Dersim, he joined in his youth a left-leaning revolutionary group, took part in armed operations against the state, and lived in hiding for several years in various parts of Turkey. He was in hiding in Izmir when police arrested him. When he showed his fake identity card, the police officer answered: “We know who you are, we know your name is Murat Kahraman, and you know what, we have a surprise for you: we know you are Armenian.”28 To contextualize the shock and the identity crisis of the concerned, one should underline that Armenian origins were not only a taboo in Turkey, and continue to be so in many cases up to today, but

194  Vicken Cheterian that calling someone “Armenian” is also the worst possible insult. Murad Kahraman had to face two shocking events simultaneously: his arrest and his origins that were long hidden from himself, but not from the Turkish state. In many instances of genocides and crimes against humanity, we have layers over layers of silences. There are many taboos, events that are suppressed, history that is impossible to narrate and to be listened to. Survivors have difficulties narrating traumatic experiences. The criminals, or some of them, continue to exercise leading political functions and force victims to silence. Perpetrators, their successors, or their institutions deny the crime, and therefore acts of past violence are justified as legitimate. The victims continue to be victimized, their suffering persists, continuously unrecognized, denied. In the quotes above we discover something deeper, darker: the entire crime of genocide, and therefore the pre-genocide existence of the victims and their civilization, is erased from living memory. Isn’t this the perfect genocide, where, after killing the people and pillaging their houses, schools, and churches, even the past memory of their existence is destroyed and erased? Oblivion has reached its culmination: even the existence of the victims is silenced, their memory effectively erased.29

Acts and processes How could a crime of genocidal dimensions be forgotten, pushed out of living memory? Let us start with the Turkish state policies. First, it is important to note the continuities between the CUP, its secretive Special Organization (teşkilât-i mahsusa), and the Kemalist-nationalist regime, with their essential role in the founding of modern Republican Turkey. While Kemalism was a clear break with the Ottoman past, it was also the continuation of the 1908 “Young Turk” revolution.30 Mustafa Kemal himself was one of the officers who took part in the revolution and was a member of the CUP. While he himself was not part of the 1915 genocide, he relied largely on CUP networks for his nationalist resistance and for building his new regime. It was the CUP triumvirate—Talaat, Enver, and Kemal—who dragged the Ottoman Empire to war, hoping to rejuvenate a state in decline. Instead, they destroyed the Ottoman political culture by annihilating its intricate balance between religious communities, lost the war, and lost the Empire. The “destruction of the Armenian communities of the Ottoman Empire in 1915” was “a definitive break with the idea of a common civic Ottoman future,” write Kieser, Öktem, and Reinkowski. As they add, “The year 1915 hence was the end of Ottomanity.”31 It was the disaster of the war and its trauma, the dislocation of populations and the radical transformation of their environment that permitted Mustafa Kemal to continue CUP policies and impose a top-down social engineering, transforming Ottoman subjects into Turkish nationals. Kemal also continued CUP policies of censoring and denying the crime, continuing the development of a state-sponsored

Armenian genocide and its denial 195 Turkish national narrative. By doing so, the Turkish Republic continued the same policies of the CUP, notably disbanding the Christian millets (organized communities recognized as such by the Ottoman Sultans), whether through violence or legal pressures of confiscation and over-taxation. On the ashes of the Christian nations a new “Muslim bourgeoisie” was supposed to take shape, and it did. Unlike other totalitarian regimes where victims were tortured, forced to confess, photographed, and exhibited in show trials such as Stalinist USSR or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Ottoman Turks exterminated their victims in secret. They pretended to displace them from warzones for their own safety, and great care was taken to communicate orders of massacres in secretive, coded messages.32 Oblivion begins there, an intrinsic part of the crime itself. Silence and extermination went hand in hand. Kemalist silence was a continuation of this policy founded by the CUP and formed the continuation of the destruction of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. Turkish nationalist forces under Kemal first attacked the Republic of Armenia in 1920, snatching away the province of Kars and forcing the Armenian government to surrender to Bolshevik armies. When Kemalist forces occupied Smyrna (today’s Izmir), the local Greek and Armenian inhabitants were victims of massacres and were thrown into the sea. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne put an end to the idea of an “Armenian national home,” which had been supposed to regroup the survivors in an independent national state under international supervision. Now, Armenian existence was tolerated only in Istanbul, whereas in the provinces the forced conversion of Armenians continued, and their monasteries and schools continued to be destroyed, and geographic names Turkified. But eventually even in Istanbul the Armenian and Greek presence came under constant pressure: the property of churches and other foundations was confiscated, heavy taxes during the Second World War served to transfer property and capital from Christians and Jews to Muslims, and pogroms in 1955 aimed to end the Greek and Armenian presence in Istanbul entirely.33 The Turkish state tried to silence any mention of exterminations, whether in literature—for example, by publicly burning Franz Werfel’s novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh, in Istanbul in 193334 —or by censoring the existence of Armenians out of history books. What is more complex to explain, and largely ignored by scholarly research, is the collaboration of third parties in the Turkish state policies of silencing, as the latter alone were in themselves insufficient to justify their success. There was a broader social collaboration inside Turkey and on the international level that cannot be simply explained by political expediency. Fatma Müge Göçek, looking at anti-Armenian massacres over a longer historic period, reminds us that the absence of memory “persists across time for more than two centuries because it involves the interaction of state and society.” And then she adds: “The bystanders in all cases were Muslims, none of whom demonstrated any reaction other than tacit complicity”

196  Vicken Cheterian during most of this period of silence.35 It should also be noted that while bystanders in Turkey were members of the Muslim majority, international bystanders were also non-Turkish and non-Muslim. Bystanders, as much as the state, permitted the oblivion after the genocide. These bystanders included Turkish intellectuals, political activists, artists, and university professors who did not associate themselves with the ruling nationalist circles. Many among them opposed the state, especially various Communist groups and activists. Yet even these groups, as the earlier quote from Taner Akçam reveals, had internalized the Turkish official nationalist discourse against the Armenians as a dangerous, treacherous group, equated them to the hated “bourgeois” class, or eliminated them from their memory. This was despite the fact that the Armenian presence among Turkish leftist groups was even more pronounced than in general society. Aram Pehlivanian was a member of the Turkish Communist Party (TCP) who later became one of its leaders and a member of its politburo. When he died in East Germany in 1979, the TCP made a press release about “Ahmet Saydan.” His party considered neither his real name nor his Armenian identity worth mentioning.36 When the Turkish Worker’s Party (TWP) was founded in 1968, it attracted many Armenians, including the famous novelist Zaven Biberian, Sarkis Cherkessian, and others. Last but not least, Armenians played a prominent role in the Turkish Maoist movement. Garbis Altunoglu is reputed to have been the first Maoist in Turkey, who “used to take Mao’s Red book in his hand and translate it directly into Turkish.”37 The Turkish left ought to have been informed about history and Armenian people, about this incredible crime and lack of justice. But the only movement to recognize the genocide was the Maoist guerrilla movement Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML). Founded by Ibrahim Kaypakkaya and including many crypto-Armenian members, it was a latecomer to the Turkish radical-left political scene. The position of the larger movements differed little from that of the Turkish state. In 1947, for example, the TCP organized a special debate in Moscow about the position of the Turkish Communists on the Armenian issue. It came to the conclusion that yes, it was indeed a genocide, but it was largely the fault of the Armenians, as they were rebellious. “Turkish leftist ideology was largely based on Ittihadism [referring to the ideology of the CUP], Kemalism, where the idea was that Ottomanism was a backward system, and that Kemalism was the expression of modernism, of ‘national democracy’. At the time, we did not see their racist side.”38 Much of the Turkish Left was derived from the CUP-Kemalist ideology, with its “anti-imperialist” rhetoric, believing in the state as the only instrument for top-down social engineering. Their only difference with Kemalism was that they thought those in power in Turkey represented the “national bourgeoisie” who would eventually compromise with imperialism and fail to fulfil the “national democratic” project. Only a worker’s revolution, led by none other than their own party, would fulfil the historic mission. They largely ascribed to

Armenian genocide and its denial 197 the Kemalist image of the Armenians as the “enemy within,” or the auxiliary of European imperialism. The TWP was no different. Mehmet Ali Aybar, a lawyer and the chairman of the TWP, was also a member of the Russell Tribunal “Against the Crimes of Silence” concerning Vietnam. It was during one of the debates about Vietnam, trying to answer the question of whether the United States had committed genocide against the Vietnamese, that French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre mentioned the 1915 genocide of the Armenians: Immediately, the left-wing Turkish juror Mehmet Ali Aybar lost his temper. According to him, it was the Armenians who committed a genocide against the Turks by allying themselves with the Russians during the First World War. He stuck to his guns against the general furor provoked by his words and threatened to resign if we mentioned the Armenian genocide. Obviously, his resignation would have been very embarrassing for the Tribunal. After a discussion following dinner which lasted for several hours, the Tribunal gave way and the Armenians were not mentioned.39 Aybar would go on to write a book of three volumes to negate the genocide of the Armenians. Silencing the memory of the genocide victims was not limited to leftists of Turkish background, however. In the Soviet Union, including in Soviet Armenia itself, starting from 1926–1927 the memory of the 1915 victims was equally silenced, and commemorations were prohibited by the Stalinist order. Four decades later, in 1965, after thousands of people poured into the streets of Yerevan (the capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic), the central authorities in Moscow permitted the construction of the Dzidzernagapert memorial on a hill overlooking the city.40 Yet, even as thousands of Armenians went there to commemorate the victims on every April 24, Soviet media, including Armenian Republic mass media, hardly mentioned this event.41 What about Turkish independent intellectuals and artists? What about Nazim Hikmet, the bard of the modern Anatolian spirit, “the architect of souls,” the “romantic communist” poet of Turkey and beyond? Hikmet knew Armenians well. He had many as close friends. When he was in exile in Leipzig, working for Bizim Radyo, the Soviet equivalent of Radio Liberty, he was encircled by Armenian comrades. There was Hayk Acikgöz and his wife Anjel, while the radio’s editor-in-chief was the Istanbul-Armenian communist militant Aram Pehlivanian; in Moscow Hikmet was in close contact with another Armenian-Turkish Communist, Vartan Ihmalian, and in Beirut with the Lebanese-Armenian poet Armen Darian (Alphonse Attarian). Yeghishe Tcharents—“the Armenian Mayakovski”—translated some of his poems to Armenian as early as 1929, eight years before Tcharents was assassinated in a Stalinist camp. Hikmet even wrote an introduction to Kevork Emin’s translation of his poems to Armenian, published in Yerevan in 1953.42

198  Vicken Cheterian In the second part of the poem “After Getting Out of Prison,” where the prisoner is walking through his neighborhood accompanied by his pregnant wife, Nazim Hikmet writes: The grocer Karabet’s lights are on. This Armenian citizen won’t forgive His father’s slaughter in the Kurdish mountains. But he likes you . . .43 There is this one single line, followed by a long silence. Hikmet was well informed about the fate of the Armenian members of his political community. Yet the annihilation of a people that the Turkish poet of liberty had witnessed himself did not attract more of his poetic inspiration.

Denial If silence constituted oblivion after the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, from the fiftieth commemoration of the Armenian genocide in 1965 denialism largely took its place. But denialism could be viewed as a step forward. Denial means that the debate exists and is repudiated by one of the parties, as the communist Aybar showed at the Russell Tribunal. Denial itself was breaking the silence on the Armenian past. With denial, at least we have a debate, albeit controversial and deformed—the topic and its subjects do exist. Turkish official denialism, which has attracted much academic attention in the past two decades, was the failure of the policy of suppression of memory in spite of destroying the Armenian cultural heritage left behind, in spite of Turkish official efforts to censor even minor mention of the “Armenian.” Moving from oblivion to denial was the result of two decades of Armenian struggle, first peaceful, then violent. First, starting in 1965, thousands of Armenians demonstrated peacefully in the streets of Beirut, Paris, Los Angeles, and Yerevan in Soviet Armenia, demanding the recognition of the Armenian genocide, the return of occupied Armenian territories (based on the borders defined by U.S. President Wilson), and compensation for the killings and pillage of Armenian property. Peaceful struggle started with demanding justice. A decade later, however, peaceful struggle had yielded no results beyond the radicalization of a part of the Armenian youth—first in the Middle East, then in Europe and North America. They argued that legal and peaceful means had failed, and that it was time for “armed struggle.”44 Starting from the mid-1970’s, two groups emerged. The first was the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), which originated from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). The second was the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), which was inspired by the Palestinian guerrillas; its founder Harutiun Takoushian (known as Hagop

Armenian genocide and its denial 199 Hagopian or mujahed) was a former militant of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The two organizations initially targeted mainly Turkish diplomats, but eventually created many innocent victims, especially in indiscriminate attacks on Ankara Airport (1982) and Paris Orly Airport (1983), and through infighting. Yet they succeeded in attracting media attention to their cause. The Turkish state was forced to come out of its silence. Following these two decades of struggles (the first peaceful and legal, and the second violent and mediatized), Armenian activists opted for yet a third strategy: to lobby the legislative bodies in the countries of their dispersion, pressing them to adopt declarations recognizing the deportations and the massacres of 1915 as an act of genocide. These activities added to the pressure on Ankara, especially when legislative bodies in key countries such as the United States of America and France put the matter on their agendas. The obliteration of memory was so complete within the Turkish Republic that there was no single historian who could counter Armenian accusations. Rather, the official Turkish response was to be articulated not by a professional historian, but by a senior diplomat from the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Kamuran Gürün. The former policy of silencing the “events” outright was abandoned. Unable to impose a dark shroud on the debate, “in time the strategy has changed from one of absolute negation of intentional mass killing to that of rationalization, relativization, and trivialization.”45 The argument was that there might have been deportations, and occasional massacres, but that there was no proof about the “intent” of the Ottoman Turkish state to exterminate the entire Armenian population. Whatever happened to the Armenians, the state argued, there was no way to compare it to the Holocaust. Denial, it has been said, is the final phase of genocide. In this new Turkish strategy, European and American intellectuals, especially key scholars who specialized in Ottoman and Turkish history, would play an exceptionally disgraceful role. They deformed historic facts, casting doubt upon the accounts of survivors, questioning the number of victims, and qualifying them as traitors to the Ottoman state. They provided the arguments and their prestige necessary for a criminal state in denial. Leading scholars of Ottoman history and modern Turkey, such as Stanford Shaw and Bernard Lewis in the United States or Gilles Veinstein in France, argued against considering the destruction of Ottoman Armenians as a premeditated act of genocide. Some argued that the tense political debate made a critical scholarly debate even more difficult and risky to engage in critical research on the 1915 genocide, where one could be accused of presenting a denialist thesis.46 The most extreme case of denialism is that of the Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University, Heath Lowry. He surpassed the role of diffusing denialist arguments in scholarly publications, coming to play the role of strategist in genocide denial by

200  Vicken Cheterian consulting on the matter directly for the Turkish government. Lowry also served as the executive director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, based in Washington, D.C., and financed by the Turkish state to lobby its interests in the U.S. capital. An accidental letter sent to Robert Jay Lifton, a New York-based professor, revealed how the Turkish state paid university professors to use them in its propaganda campaigns. The Turkish ambassador to the United States, Nuzhet Kandemir, had signed the letter criticizing Lifton’s book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, in which Lifton had written a few paragraphs of comparison with the practices of the Ottoman government. Two additional documents were inadvertently sent with the letter. The first was a “memorandum” written by Professor Heath Lowry, describing in detail how Lifton had referred to the Armenians in The Nazi Doctors, citing the secondary sources used, and proposing to the Turkish diplomat a strategy to attack and discredit the sources used in Lifton’s book. The second document was a draft letter, very much like the letter signed by the Turkish ambassador, ghostwritten by Professor Lowry; the letter suggests reading reliable sources instead of Lifton’s work, such as the two enclosed books: the first authored by Justin McCarthy, and the second one by Lowry himself.47 In the 2001 issue of the New York Review of Books (NYRB), Christopher de Bellaigue reviewed three works on the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. The central theme was whether the authority of the founder of the Turkish state is eroding six decades after his death. de Bellaigue began with the tension over how Sultan Abdul Hamid II is being portrayed in modern writing, breaking stereotypes founded by the Kemalist establishment. After a tour de force of Ottoman history, de Bellaigue presents to the reader the official Turkish line on “tolerant” Ottoman rule towards religious minorities, describing the Sultan as the protector of Balkan Orthodox Christians and as having given refuge to Spanish Jews. Then, he goes on to praise the achievements of Atatürk, marking the end of multinational Anatolia: Militarily, politically, and diplomatically, Atatürk’s was a stupendous achievement; he succeeded in killing off the multinational empire, portraying it as based on an obsolete, sentimental conception. By the end of the War of Independence, it had become clear that Anatolia’s religious and ethnic diversity would no longer be tolerated. A Turkish identity had emerged out of the ethnic conflict, particularly the conflict between Turks and Armenians, some half a million of whom died during the deportations and massacres of 1915. Anatolia’s Muslims came to regard Armenian Christians, and Christians generally, as traitors, and the Christians looked on the Muslims as oppressors. It was on this Turkish identity that Atatürk was to build the republic.48 One letter addressed to the NYRB by James R. Russell, Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard, challenged the article and its findings. He

Armenian genocide and its denial 201 challenged the number of the Armenian victims of the massacres that took place under Sultan Abdul Hamid II (“actually 200,000 Armenians (none rioters) were systematically massacred in 1895–1896”), and then he challenged the numbers of the victims of the 1915 genocide. After making a short history of the genocide, Russell makes a harsh criticism of the NYRB: If a reviewer wrote that only a third of the actual number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust had died, or that their deaths came about because they had rioted, or elected to make war against the German government, would you print it? No. But if the Nazis had not been defeated, and had successfully promoted their falsified version of the Holocaust, one might write of the crime against the Jews that way, with a clear conscience. The big lie is easily swallowed. But France has not swallowed it. Armenians and their allies now turn our energies from combating Holocaust denial to pursuing justice. Turkey howls as though its world—an edifice erected on a lie—were coming to an end. Maybe it is.49 The article was written in 2001, and by that time Christopher de Bellaigue had already spent five years in Turkey working as a correspondent. Yet the casual manner in which the destruction of the Ottoman Christians was portrayed in the article, and the fact that a prestigious paper saw no problem in publishing it, is expressive enough. Nor did the career of de Bellaigue suffer from this fiasco, as he continued to contribute to NYRB and other publications. Russell’s letter was not the only one; many others followed to arrive at the desk of NYRB, scandalized that the publication could make the Turkish state propaganda so casually. “Russell repeated the Armenian argument that the Ottoman massacres of Armenians were premeditated,” de Bellaigue claims in a later book. Notice, it is “Armenian arguments,” as if that of an angry community. He then adds, “During my time as a correspondent, I had not written, nor had I been asked to write, a single article about the 1915 massacres or their contemporary relevance.”50 The author was now “appalled,” not just by the aggressive tone of the letters written in protest of his NYRB article, but also by the idea that he had made “serious mistakes.” Nevertheless, de Bellaigue made a mea culpa in an original way, by going to the eastern Turkish town of Varto, near Mush, in search of Armenian ghosts—ruins of a previous conflict and a contemporary struggle between the Turkish military on the one side, and Kurdish and Alevi resistance and revolt on the other.51 Yet the question remains: how is it possible that an educated, Western journalist misses a story as important as that of genocide? More challenging, how did a journal as serious as the NYRB let such a story pass? There are subtler and less visible mechanisms of censorship that have developed since then. Academic institutions do not encourage students and researchers to work on the Armenians and the history of the genocide. Ryan Gingeras writes how his initial dissertation topic was on eastern Anatolia,

202  Vicken Cheterian looking at the fate of Nakhichevan and how it ended up being part of Azerbaijan, or about Kars around the end of the First World War. But he was discouraged. His peers told him that his choice would be like committing “professional suicide,” as he was risking dealing with taboo subjects like Kurds or Armenians, and eventually “killing” his career. Publishing ignorant and denialist articles is no obstacle for a career in academia or to continue publishing in prestigious, intellectual journals; doing research about the mass extermination of a nation is. Gingeras ended up writing (a very successful) dissertation focusing instead on the “southern Marmara.”52 Denial of the Armenian genocide in academia thus has a long history. It is continuing today by taking more sophisticated forms. Armenian “suffering” is relativized in the background of the generalized hardship caused by the First World War; the Armenian population are described as “potential rebels” against the Turkish state and a threat for the survival of Turkey itself; the “events” were the result of conflict between two communities, Muslim and Armenian, a kind of civil war; there is no archival evidence to “prove” that the events amount to a genocide; there are many “perspectives” on the matter, an Armenian narrative versus a Turkish one, and we need more research. What counts is to insert doubt about the veracity of the Armenian genocide, to spread the idea that the subject is “controversial.” The essential point is to deny the organized nature of the mass annihilation and the responsibility of the Turkish state in the crime of genocide.53 Yet the most powerful form of denial continues to be silence, the indifference toward the first modern genocide shown in much of academia.

Return of memory In September 2005, a conference was held in Istanbul entitled “Ottoman Armenians During the Era of Ottoman Decline: Scientific Responsibility and Democratic Problem.” This was the first scholarly meeting organized inside Turkey discussing the uprooting of the Armenians. Turkish scholars organized the conference, and all those who presented their works throughout the four days were Turkish citizens. The event was realized by the efforts of three universities: Bogaziçi, Sabanci, and Bilgi. Organizing such a gathering for the first time inside Turkey was not an easy task. The conference was initially supposed to be held on May 25–26, to coincide with the 90th commemoration of the extermination of Ottoman Armenians. The minister of justice accused the organizers of betraying the nation, and the official Turkish Historical Society accused them of “expressing the views of the Armenian side.”54 The conference organizers, coming under immense pressure, canceled the event. It was thanks to the intervention of the high dignitaries of the ruling party, the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi), and specifically of Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullah Gül, that the conference was held on September 24–25, at Bogaziçi University. For two entire days, some 200 scholars, journalists, and intellectuals attended the

Armenian genocide and its denial 203 discussions, where they even mentioned the taboo G-word. The conference ended on the second day late at night, and the participants stood up and gave a standing ovation. “We were applauding, there was no end to it, as if people did not want to leave. We were so euphoric with our success,” in the words of one of the organizers.55 The 2005 conference was a first. Yet it was not a unique event, but part of a general change of perspective of the Turkish public opinion concerning the Armenian question. It was around the same time, on April 10, 2005, that Erdogan wrote a letter to his counterpart, the Armenian President Robert Kocharyan, sending an “invitation to your country to establish a joint group consisting of historians and other experts from our two countries to study the developments and events of 1915 not only in the archives of Turkey and Armenia but also in the archives of all relevant third countries.”56 The idea of forming a “commission of historians” to study together the “events” of 1915 would be repeated on several occasions since then. What caused this “return of memory”? Why, after ninety years of censorship, silence, and oblivion, was there such a sudden interest in the fate of the Armenians among Turkish intellectuals and political figures? In 1990, Taner Akçam had started working on torture in Ottoman Empire/Turkey and discovered the Hamidyan massacres and the fate of the Armenians from scratch. Why only fifteen years later was there such a broad enthusiasm to discuss the Armenian genocide in leading Istanbul universities? What changed in those fifteen years to make it possible for Turkish intellectuals to become sensitive toward the topic? There are two main shifts that opened up the new possibilities. The first is the end of the polarization of the Cold War, the collapse of Soviet ideology and its statist model, and the consequent undermining of similar state-ideological models such as Kemalist Turkey. It was under the conditions of dominant statist-modernist ideologies that minority groups could have been eliminated, and their extermination—both physically and in the collective memory—be seen by the dominant majority as legitimate and desirable. Genocide and its negation is possible when such ideologies are hegemonic, as was the case in the twentieth century. Moreover, the memory of the victims can be eliminated because their narratives have no place in an environment dominated by the ideological narratives and polarized discourses between “us or them.” In fact, it is the same hegemonic ideological narratives that make both the genocidal destruction possible and its denial acceptable. It was necessary to wait for the collapse of totalitarianism so that the memory of the victims could be heard once again. The second major shift happened within Turkey. The old republican elites, long in power, were discredited. In 2002, a new political formation— the AKP—won the parliamentary elections, and its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became the new prime minister in 2003. AKP was a coalition of different formations overall characterized as “Islamo-conservative,” suggesting “the compatibility of ‘Islam and democracy’” but also “in close

204  Vicken Cheterian ideological proximity to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.”57 While AKP governed, it did not have the real power in Turkey, which remained in the hands of the “deep state” or the “guardian state,” which was composed of a coalition of generals, intelligence officers, and nationalist financiers and intellectuals. Initially, AKP was interested in reforms, in democratization, in the rule of law, and moving closer to the European Union in its own struggle against the “guardian state.” It was under these conditions of dual power (the AKP on the one hand, and the deep state on the other) that breaking past taboos, revising politics and history, became possible. On the occasion of the centennial of the Armenian genocide, Erdogan repeated the same idea he had written a decade previously to his Armenian counterpart: Ankara is “ready to pay for any misdeed” Turkish media reported, if an “impartial board of historians” came to conclude that the events constituted genocide: We are saying, if you are sincere on this matter, then come, let’s leave this to historians, let historians study the issue, let’s open our archives [. . .]. We have opened our archives. We have revealed more than one million documents on this. If Armenia also has an archive, then they should open, too. If third countries have archives, they should do the same. Let them study and then let them present their report to us. Then let’s sit around a table as politicians [. . . .] If the results reveal that we have committed a crime, if we have to pay, then as Turkey we would assess it and take the required steps [. . . .] But let’s be careful here. The 1915 events are out in the open as history. The State of the Republic of Turkey is out in the open. Our archives have been opened and are out in the open, but the archives on the opposite side are not open. They are just saying ‘Turkey is guilty,’ but Turkey is not guilty just by saying so.”58 What is the role of the historian in determining the events of the past? The idea that historians need to assess an event of the magnitude of mass deportations and massacres of genocidal scale, after an entire century, poses existential questions: what is the use of history as a discipline, if after a hundred years historians are unable to distinguish what constitutes genocide and what is not? If there is still need to debate, research, and consult about an event of such significance, then what is the usefulness of the study of the past? Why do we need universities where we spend time and energy in a discipline plagued by self-paralysis? Why were previous historians silent for an entire century? The idea of opening up the archives as a way to silence the debate on the extermination of the Ottoman Christians coincides with efforts of a group of scholars in the United States in defense of Turkey. It dates back to newspaper advertisement published in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, on May 19, 1985, when sixty-nine academics announced the imminent opening up of the Ottoman archives in Turkey, as earlier

Armenian genocide and its denial 205 promised by Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal.59 The archival collections that the Turkish leader offered to “open up” have been purged, cleansed, and emasculated across decades, before they were offered to the community of scholars. A 2004 U.S. diplomatic cable by political officers from Istanbul/ Ankara writes that “Turkish officials do not permit access to over seventy million still-uncatalogued documents,” adding: Perhaps more important than the question of access, however, is whether or not the archives themselves are complete. According to Sabanci University Professor Halil Berktay, there were two serious efforts to “purge” the archives of any incriminating documents on the Armenian question. The first took place in 1918, presumably before the Allied forces occupied Istanbul. Berktay and others point to testimony in the 1919 Turkish Military Tribunals indicating that important documents had been “stolen” from the archives. Berktay believes a second purge was executed in conjunction with Özal’s efforts to open the archives by a group of retired diplomats and generals led by former Ambassador Muharrem Nuri Birgi (Note: Nuri Birgi was previously Ambassador to London and NATO and Secretary General of the MFA). Berktay claims that at the time he was combing the archives, Nuri Birgi met regularly with a mutual friend and at one point, referring to the Armenians, ruefully confessed that “We really slaughtered them.”60

Consequences Armenian activists struggling for the recognition of the Armenian genocide argued that impunity encourages new genocides. They cited Hitler, who, they argued, had said in a speech in front of his army generals before the attack on Poland, “Who remembers the Armenians?” To prevent future genocides, they suggested, it was necessary to end impunity and force the Turkish state to recognize the crime and its responsibility in it. Impunity permitted the Turkish authorities—and the larger public as well—to continue the victimization of stigmatized populations. Survivors and their descendants “could not bury their dead,” could not mourn, and therefore could neither forgive nor forget the painful past. Then there were those who were left behind, on their ancestral lands, now the Turkish Republic. Their suffering was manifold. Their physical victimization, especially those living outside Istanbul, did not stop. As Talin Suciyan writes, “the kidnapping of Armenian girls did not come to an end as a practice in the provinces, but continued to pose such an important threat to Armenian families that it was an actual reason to move to Istanbul in the first decades after 1923. Many Armenian girls were unable to attend local Turkish schools because of the danger of kidnapping.”61 Yet a century after the crime was committed, we have not only a lack of justice, but we still wait for the perpetrator to take responsibility. Let us

206  Vicken Cheterian not fool ourselves—there is no justice in any ordinary sense after a crime as massive as that of genocide; there can be no system that can accommodate the claims of the victims or administer just punishment to those who are guilty. The only justice possible after a genocide is a symbolic one, not for the sake of the victims, but for the sake of saving what remains of civilization amongst us. And if genocide is the impossibility of justice, then genocide denial is the failure of history. The insistent calls of Turkish leaders for “historic commissions” point to this failure and to the long subjugation of history and historians to hegemonic power. Again, what is the use of history in any practical sense if after a century we need yet again to call for committees and commissions to evaluate an “event” as horrendous as that of the destruction of several nations? Silencing and oblivion pushed the historian researching the Armenian genocide into an active struggle to “prove” that the genocide did take place. As a result, the historiography of the genocide is only recently moving away from that debate to explore larger ramifications, the consequences of the genocide on the victimized populations, how it has conditioned Turkish institutions and political culture, continuities between the Armenian genocide and the destruction of European Jews, and especially the German experience in both.62 Finally, scholars once studied the contemporary Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Mountainous Karabakh only within the historical legacy of the Soviet Union. Reflecting on the impact of the genocide and its denial on the genesis of the Karabakh conflict remains in its infancy.63 While Ottoman Studies and Genocide and Holocaust Studies have fully integrated the history of the genocide in the last two decades, this history remains marginalized in other mainstream history departments. In 2014, on the centennial of World War I, few publications among the many that appeared on the occasion successfully integrated the place of genocide in the war, while many succeeded in telling their war stories without mentioning the Ottoman genocide. More dramatically, we have failed to grasp and narrate the contemporary Middle East when books do not show that genocide has taken place. Armenians, Greeks, and Assyro-Chaldeans, three of the oldest native populations of the region, are expelled from the history of the Middle East without asking the question of the impact of their absence on regional history, culture, and economy. We do not even have an integrated study of the genocidal project, looking at the destruction of the Armenians, Greeks, and the Assyro-Chaldeans as a continuum, studying their tragic destruction as “national” histories. Yet if one considers that those events are segments of a larger history, then the national characteristics of the Armenian or Greek or Assyro-Chaldean loses significance, and another dimension becomes evident: in the period 1913–1923, the disintegrating Ottoman Empire exterminated the Christian millets it had dominated since at least its conquest of Constantinople and which made up part

Armenian genocide and its denial 207 of the Ottoman social and political order. “It is strange that both Greek and Armenian historians should have treated the first persecutions of the Greeks in 1913–1914 and the Armenian genocide of 1915 as two separate phenomena,” writes Hassiontis. “Yet, despite the quantitative differences, the Greek persecutions and the Armenian genocide were but two sides of the same coin. The Greek pogroms were the first systematic phase of the unified plan for the elimination of the foreign elements in the Ottoman Empire, and the Armenian genocide in its turn set the pattern for the extermination of the Greeks of the Pontus in 1919–21.”64 While today there is extensive literature on the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, and an emerging literature on the AssyroChaldean sayfo (meaning “sword,” a term used to refer to the massacres and deportations of Assyro-Chaldean-Syriac populations from eastern Ottoman provinces), we still need scholarly work to emerge on the history of the Greeks, especially Pontic Greeks, during the same dark period. The occlusion of memory is at the heart of the genocidal enterprise itself, and third-party indifference is an integral part of genocide denial. Thirdparty indifference reveals the fundamental difference between victim and bystander, between those who suffer and those who watch others suffering. What happens when the horror is there, the crime takes place, and the world pretends it did not happen? What happens to human suffering when no one is there to watch, when the spectator is absent, indifferent, or simply oblivious? Indifference toward, and later denial of, the Armenian genocide has deformed twentieth-century historiography. It was not just a matter of silencing the history of the Armenians and other victims of OttomanTurkish repressions, but a deeper failure to comprehend the history of the century. History was replaced by state-sponsored mythology, self-justification, and censorship. Denial of the first modern genocide is the denial of memory itself and the impossibility of history. Just as the possibility of the crime of genocide raises the question of impossibility of justice, similarly the decades of oblivion and denial raise fundamental questions about universalism, and about the profession of the historian itself.

Notes he author of this chapter would like to thank Webster University Geneva and the T Gulbenkian Foundation for supporting his research. 1. Raymond Kévorkian, Le Génocide des Arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 936. William Schabas notes that this was the first use of the term “crimes against humanity” in the context of international law. See William Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 16–17. 2. Viscount Bryce, ed. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire (New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1916). 3. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1919). 4. Johannes Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes; Bericht über das Schiksal des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei wärend des Weltkrieges (Potsdam: Missionshaldung und Verlag, 1919).

BK-TandF-9780815351610_TEXT_RUSSELL-180704-Chp10.indd 207

24/10/18 4:57 PM

208  Vicken Cheterian













5. Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 1995), 228. 6. See Ara Safarian, ed. Talaat Pasha’s Report on the Armenian Genocide (London: Gomidas Institute, 2011), 6. 7. Vahakn Dadrian, “The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunals, International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no. 4 (November 1991), 549–576; Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgement at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011). 8. Aram Andonian, Medz Vojire, Haygagan Verchin Godoradznere yev Talat Pasha (Armenian: The Great Crime, The Latest Armenian Massacres and Talaat Pasha) (Boston: Bahag Printers, 1921). 9. The testimonies are found at the Armenian National Archives in Yerevan, and a selection of which was published: Amatuni Virabyan, ed. Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey, Testimony of Survivors, Collection of Documents (Yerevan: Zankag Publishing House, 2013). 10. David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in the Eastern Anatolia During World War I (New Jersey: Georgias Press, 2006); Benjamin Trigona-Harany, The Ottoman Süryânî from 1908 to 1914 (New Jersey: Georgias Press, 2013). 11. Bryce, The Treatment of Armenians; Abraham Yohannan, The Death of a Nation; or, The Ever Persecuted Nestorians or Assyrian Christians (New York: Putnam, 1916). Archbishop of Canterbury, The Plight of Armenian and Assyrian Christians (London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne and Co., 1918); Jacques Rhétoré, “Les chrétiens aux bêtes,” Souvenir de la guerre sainte proclamée par les Turcs contre les chrétiens en 1915 (Paris: CERF, 2005). 12. George Shirinian, ed. The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide: Essays on Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace, 1912–1923 (Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Centre, 2012). 13. It needs to be underlined that Yazidis came under heavy pressure, including massacres, conversions, and occupation and conversion of their major religious center in Lalesh, under Abdul Hamid II, and specifically in 1892, i.e., two years before the anti-Armenian and anti-Assyrian mass violence known as “Hamidian massacres” of 1894–1896. See Neldia Fuccaro, The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), 34–35. 14. Tim Arango, ‘Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide’ Uncovers Lost Evidence, New York Times, April 22, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/ world/europe/armenian-genocide-turkey.html?_r=0. 15. According to the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, based on figures of adherents to the Armenian Apostolic Church and excluding Armenian Catholics (who had become a separate millet in 1831) and Protestants, there were 1,914,620 Armenians before the First World War. There were an additional 140,000 Armenian Catholics, and a smaller number of Armenian Protestants. See Kévorkian, Le Génocide des Arméniens, 339–343; Charles A. Frazee, Catholics and Sultans, The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 272. 16. Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans, The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920 (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 387. 17. Joseph Yacoub, Year of the Sword, The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History (London: Hurst, 2016), 13, 18; David Gaunt, “The Complexity of the Assyrian Genocide,” Genocide Studies International 9, no. 1 (2015), 83–103. 18. Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger, The Mass Expulsion that Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 13; Antonis Klapis,

Armenian genocide and its denial 209 “Violent Uprooting and Forced Migration: A Demographic Analysis of the Greek Populations of Asia Minor, Pontus and Eastern Thrace,” Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 4 (2014), 625. 19. Anahit Astoyan, Tari Gaghobude. Hayeri Unezrgume Osmanyan Gaysrutyunum 1914–1923 tt. (The Pillage of the Century: Property Deprivation of Armenians in Ottoman Empire 1914–1923), (Yerevan: Nayri, 2013); Taner Akçam and Umit Kurt, The Spirit of the Laws, The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2015). 20. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “World War I 1014–1918: Killed, wounded, missing”: https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/Killed-wounded-and-missing. Martin Gilbert puts the military casualties at 8.6 million, with 3,500,000 Central Power war losses, while Allied Powers had 5,600,000 military deaths. See Martin Gilbert, The First Wold War: A Complete History (London: Phoenix, 1994), 541. 21. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 186. 22. Author interview with Taner Akçam, Geneva, May 2012. On Akçam and his discovery of the Armenian past, see Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds, Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide (London: Hurst and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 139–146. 23. See Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Taner Akçam: The Young Turk’s Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 24. Author interview, Istanbul, June 20, 2012. 25. See Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 26. Vicken Cheterian, Open Wounds, 24–30. 27. Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother: A Memoir (London: Verso, 2008). 28. Author interview, Murad Kahraman, Geneva, May 29, 2012. 29. Yves Ternon, L’Etat criminel, les Génocides au XXe siècle (Paris: Sueil, 1995), 195. 30. This point was made by Erik J. Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993). 31. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, and Maurus Reinkowski, eds. “Introduction,” in World War I and the End of the Ottomans, From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 9. 32. Aram Andonian, Medz Vojire; see also Vahakn Dadrian, “The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18, no. 3 (August 1986), 311–360. 33. Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations 1918–1974 (Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992), 266–298; Speros Vryonis, “The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul,” New York: Greekworks, 2005. 34. Ayda Erbal and Talin Suciyan, “One Hundred Years of Abandonment,” Armenian Weekly, April 29, 2011: http://armenianweekly.com/2011/04/29/ erbal-and-suciyan-one-hundred-years-of-abandonment/; Talin Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey, Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 257, n. 3.

210  Vicken Cheterian

35. Göçek, Denial of Violence, 4, 21. 36. Author interview with Zakarya Mildanoglu, Istanbul, May 7, 2013. 37. ibid. 38. Author interview with Zakarya Mildanoglu, Istanbul, May 7, 2013. 39. Laurent Schwartz, A Mathematician Grappling with His Century (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001), 410. 40. See below. 41. Tatul Hakobyan, Hayatsk Araraden: Hayer yev Turker, (Armenian: Looking from Ararat: Armenians and Turks), (Antelias, 2012), 276. 42. Khatchatur I. Pilikian, “Nazim Hikmet: A Turkish Poet’s Armenian Connections,” Lecture at Socialist History Society, Marx House, February 11, 2006: http://norkhosq.net/wp-content/uploads/N.Hikmet-a-türkish-Poet1.pdf. 43. Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s Poet (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), 191. 44. See Cheterian, Open Wounds, 123–132. 45. Richard Hovannisian, “Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Comparison with Holocaust Denial,” in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard Hovannisian (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 201. 46. Vincent Duclert, “Les historiens et la destruction des arméniens,” Vingtieme siècle. Revue d’histoire 81, no. 1 (2004), 7. 47. Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995), 1–22; William H. Honan, “Princeton Is Accused of Fronting For the Turkish Government,” New York Times, May 22, 1996. 48. Christopher de Bellaigue, “Turkey’s Hidden Past,” The New York Review of Books, March 8, 2001. 49. James R. Russell, “Massacres of the Armenians,” The New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001. 50. Christopher de Bellaigue, Rebel Lands, Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 6, 7. 51. For a critique of de Bellaigue’s Rebel Lands, see Marc A. Mamigonian, “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufacturing Controversy,” Genocide Studies International 9, no.1 (2015), 73–74. 52. Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores, Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xii. 53. Mamigonian, “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” 61–82. 54. Hakob Chakrian, “Osmanyan Hayere Gaysrutyan Angman Shrchanum. Kidagan Badaskhanadvutyun yev Zhoghvrtavarutyuan Hartser’ Kidazhoghove Grker e Porpokum Turkyayum” (Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy Scientific Workshop Stirs Up Excitement in Turkey), Azg, May 25, 2005: http:// www.azg.am/AM/2005052507. 55. Author interview with Ferhat Kentel, Bilgi University, Istanbul, November 5, 2013. 56. A copy of this letter can be found on the website of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.mfa.gov.tr/data/DISPOLITIKA/text-of-the-letter-ofh_e_-prime-minister-recep-tayyip--addressed-to-h_e_-robert-kocharian.pdf. 57. Kerem Öktem, Angry Nation, Turkey Since 1989 (London: Zed Books, 2011), 122, 127. 58. Hurriyet Daily News, “Erdogan says Turkey is ready to take required step if ‘found guilty’ of Armenian killings,” January 30, 2015: http://www.hurriyetdailynews.

Armenian genocide and its denial 211 com/erdogan-says-turkey-is-ready-to-take-required-steps-if-found-guilty-ofarmenian-killings.aspx?pageID=238&nid=77664. 59. Ara Sarafian, “The Ottoman Archives Debate and the Armenian Genocide,” Armenian Forum 2, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 35–44. 60. Wikileaks, “Armenian ‘Genocide’ and the Ottoman Archives,” Istanbul/ Ankara, July 12, 2004: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/04ISTANBUL1074_­a. html. 61. Suciyan, The Armenians in Modern Turkey, 65. 62. Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). For other comparative studies on the Armenian and Jewish cases, see Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Vahakn Dadrian, “The Historical and Legal Interconnections Between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: From Impunity to Retributive Justice,” Yale Journal of International Law 23, no. 2 (1998), 503–559. 63. See Vicken Cheterian, War and Peace in the Caucasus, Russia’s Troubled Frontier (London: Hurst 2009), 303, 307–308; Vicken Cheterian, “The Last Closed Border of the Cold War: Turkey-Armenia,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 31, no. 1 (2017), 71–90. 64. Ionnis K. Hassiontis, “The Armenian genocide and the Greeks: response and records (1915–1923),” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovanissian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 135–136.

Bibliography Akçam, Taner. A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. ———. The Young Turk’s Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Akçam, Taner, and Umit Kurt. The Spirit of the Laws, The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Alexandris, Alexis. The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations 1918–1974, Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1992. Andonian, Aram. Medz Vojire, Haygagan Verchin Godoradznere yev Talat Pasha (The Great Crime, The Latest Armenian Massacres and Talaat Pasha). Boston: Bahag Printers, 1921. Arango, Tim. “‘Sherlock Holmes of Armenian Genocide’ Uncovers Lost Evidence.” New York Times, April 22, 2017. Archbishop of Canterbury. The Plight of Armenian and Assyrian Christians. London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne and Co., 1918. Astoyan, Anahit. Tari Gaghobude. Hayeri Unezrgume Osmanyan Gaysrutyunum 1914–1923 tt. (The Pillage of the Century: Property Deprivation of Armenians in Ottoman Empire 1914–1923). Yerevan: Nayri, 2013. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey’s Poet. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Bryce, Viscount, ed. The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1916. Chakrian, Hakob, “Osmanyan Hayere Gaysrutyan Angman Shrchanum. Kidagan Badaskhanadvutyun yev Zhoghvrtavarutyuan Hartser’ Kidazhoghove Grker e Porpokum Turkyayum” (Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the Empire

212  Vicken Cheterian Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy’ Scientific Workshop Stirs Up Excitement in Turkey). Azg, May 25, 2005. Cheterian, Vicken. War and Peace in the Caucasus, Russia’s Troubled Frontier. London: Hurst and New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. ———. Open Wounds, Armenians, Turks and a Century of Genocide. London: Hurst and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. ———. “The Last Closed Border of the Cold War: Turkey-Armenia.” Journal of Borderlands Studies 31, no. 1 (2017): 71–90. Çetin, Fethiye. My Grandmother: A Memoir. London: Verso, 2008. Clark, Bruce. Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsion That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Dadrian, Vahakn. “The Naim-Andonian Documents on the World War I Destruction of Ottoman Armenians: The Anatomy of a Genocide.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18, no. 3 (August 1986): 311–360. ———. “The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the Turkish Military Tribunals.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23, no. 4 (November 1991): 549–576. ———. The History of the Armenian Genocide, Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. New York: Berghahn Books, 1995. ———. “The Historical and Legal Interconnections Between the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust: From Impunity to Retributive Justice.” Yale Journal of International Law 23, no. 2 (1998): 503–559. Dadrian, Vahakn, and Taner Akçam. Judgement at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. De Bellaigue, Christopher. “Turkey’s Hidden Past.” The New York Review of Books, March 8, 2001. ———. Rebel Lands: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Duclert, Vincent. “Les historiens et la destruction des arméniens.” Vingtieme siècle. Revue d’histoire 81, no. 1 (2004): 137–153. Erbal, Ayda, and Talin Suciyan. “One Hundred Years of Abandonment.” Armenian Weekly, April 29, 2011. Frazee, Charles A. Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire 1453–1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Fuccaro, Neldia. The Other Kurds: Yazidis in Colonial Iraq. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Gaunt, David. Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in the Eastern Anatolia During World War I. New Jersey: Georgias Press, 2006. ———. “The Complexity of the Assyrian Genocide.” Genocide Studies International 9, no. 1 (2015): 83–103. Göçek, Fatma Müge. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gilbert, Martin. The First Wold War: A Complete History. London: Phoenix, 1994. Gingeras, Ryan. Sorrowful Shores, Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hakobyan, Tatul. Hayatsk Araraden: Hayer yev Turker (Looking from Ararat: Armenians and Turks). Antelias, 2012. Hassiontis, Ionnis K. “The Armenian Genocide and the Greeks: Response and Records (1915–1923).” In The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovanissian, 135–136. London: Macmillan, 1992.

Armenian genocide and its denial 213 Honan, William H. “Princeton Is Accused of Fronting for the Turkish Government.” New York Times, May 22, 1996. Hovanissian, Richard G., ed. The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics. London: Macmillan, 1992. ———. Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Ihrig, Stefan. Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Kévorkian, Raymond. Le Génocide des Arméniens. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006. Klapis, Antonis. “Violent Uprooting and Forced Migration: A Demographic Analysis of the Greek Populations of Asia Minor, Pontus and Eastern Thrace.” Middle Eastern Studies 50, no. 4 (2014): 622–639. Kieser, Hans-Lukas, Kerem Öktem, and Maurus Reinkowski, eds. “Introduction,” in World War I and the End of the Ottomans, From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015. Lepsius, Johannes. Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes; Bericht über das Schiksal des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei wärend des Weltkrieges. Potsdam: Missionshaldung und Verlag, 1919. Mamigonian, Marc A. “Academic Denial of the Armenian Genocide in American Scholarship: Denialism as Manufacturing Controversy.” Genocide Studies International 9, no.1 (2015): 61–82. Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Morgenthau, Henry. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1919. Öktem, Kerem. Angry Nation: Turkey Since 1989. London: Zed Books, 2011. Pilikian, Khatchatur I.“Nazim Hikmet: A Turkish Poet’s Armenian Connections.” Lecture at Socialist History Society, Marx House, February 11, 2006: http:// norkhosq.­net/wp-content/uploads/N.Hikmet-a-türkish-Poet1.pdf Rhétoré, Jacques. “Les chrétiens aux bêtes”, Souvenir de la guerre sainte proclamée par les Turcs contre les chrétiens en 1915. Paris: CERF, 2005. Rogan, Eugene. The Fall of the Ottomans, The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920. London: Allen Lane, 2015. Russell, James R. “Massacres of the Armenians.” The New York Review of Books, August 9, 2001. Sarafian, Ara. “The Ottoman Archives Debate and the Armenian Genocide.” Armenian Forum 2, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 35–44. Safarian, Ara, ed. Talaat Pasha’s Report on the Armenian Genocide. London: Gomidas Institute, 2011. Schabas, William. Genocide in International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schwartz, Laurent. A Mathematician Grappling with His Century. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001. Shirinian, George, ed. The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide: Essays on Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace, 1912–1923. Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Centre, 2012. Smith, Roger, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton. “Professional Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1–22.

214  Vicken Cheterian Suciyan, Talin. The Armenians in Modern Turkey, Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016. Ternon, Yves. L’Etat criminel, les Génocides au XXe siècle. Paris: Sueil, 1995. Trigona-Harany, Benjamin. The Ottoman Süryânî from 1908 to 1914. New Jersey: Georgias Press, 2013. Virabyan, Amatuni, ed. Armenian Genocide by Ottoman Turkey, Testimony of Survivors, Collection of Documents. Yerevan: Zankag Publishing House, 2013. Vryonis, Speros. The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul. New York: Greekworks, 2005. Yacoub, Joseph. Year of the Sword, The Assyrian Christian Genocide: A History. London: Hurst, 2016. Yohannan, Abraham. The Death of a Nation; or, The Ever Persecuted Nestorians or Assyrian Christians. New York: Putnam, 1916. Zürcher, Erik J. The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. ——. Turkey: A Modern History. London: I. B. Tauris, 1993.

Index

Acikgöz, Hayk 197 Acordo Geral de Paz (Mozambique) 95 Adjitorop 150 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO): origin of 150; protests by 150–5, 159–160 Afro-Asian Writers Bureau 154 Akçam, Tanner 191, 192, 196, 203 AKP (Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi), 202–3 Albert, Ethel 69 Algeria 3–4, 48 Altunoglu, Garbis 196 Ambar, Sri 158, 165 n.74 Amnesty International 53, 147 Amnesty Law of 1992 (Mozambique) 96, 97 Andonian, Aram 190 Ankara Airport attack (1982) 199 anti-Stalinists: de-Stalinization and 171–2; protests 176–8 Arbenz, Jacobo 26, 27, 45 Arévalo, Juan José 27, 28 Argentina: military aid to 49; Operation Condor and 46 Argenti-Pillen, Alex 102 Armenian genocide 188–207; consequences of 205–7; denial of 198–202; documentation of 189–191; Hamidian massacres 192; historians’ treatment of 206-7; return of memory 202–5; Soviet Armenia’s silence on 197; statistics 191; survivors 190, 193–4 Treaty of Lausanne and 198; Turkish Communists’ position on 196–7; Turkish intellectuals’ and artists’ silence on 197–8; Turkish state policies on 194–7

Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) 190, 198 Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) 198 Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic 197 Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict 206 Arzú, Álvaro 36, 37, 39 assassinations 46, 52 Association of University Students (AEU). 31 Assyro-Chaldean sayfo 207 Assyro-Chaldeans 190 Atatürk 193, 200 Augé 5, 14 Aybar, Mehmet Ali 197 Bagaza, Jean-Baptiste 70–1, 73–4 Bakhtin, M.M. 11–13 Baldetti, Rosanna 39 Bandung Africa-Asia conference 150 Bardakçi, Murat 189–190 Bartov, Omer 47 Barundi 63, 65 Basso, Keith 1 Basutoland Congress Party 154 Ba’th Party (Iraq) 127, 135 Ba’th Party Regional Command Correspondence (BRCC) 142 n.2 Battle of Moscow 182 Bay of Pigs invasion 28, 45 Bechuanaland People’s Party 154 Ben-Bassat, Yuval 134 Berger, Oscar 37, 39 Berktay, Halil 205 Biafra 2 Biberian, Zaven 196 Biko, Steve 90 Bizim Radyo 197 Blondi, Néstor 52

216  Index Boffa, Giuseppe 177 Bolivia: coups in 46; Operation Condor and 46 Bovin, Aleksandr 182 Brazil: death squads in 48; military aid to 49 “breaking the silence” 2–3 Brezhnev, Leonid 170, 172, 173, 176, 180, 181 Britain, decolonization war in Kenya 3–4 British Foreign Office 189 Brudny, Yitzhak 178 Bryce, Viscount 189 Bugeaud, Marshal 69 Buratti, Rodriguez 59 n.21 Burundi 63–80; absence of speech in 74–8; bundle of silences in 63; cover-ups of state violence in 64–7; emergence as postcolonial state 64; événements 63, 67–70; First Republic 70–1, 72, 74, 80; genocide in 65, 66, 74; Hutu rebels 64, 75; massacres in 65, 66; open-ended history of silence in 78–80; racialised ethnic model of society in 64–65; reconciliation in 70–4; Second Republic 71, 73, 74, 80; state violence 67–9; Third Republic 75–6; Tutsi aristocracy in 65 Buyoya, Pierre 75–6, 78, 79 Cambodia 195 campesinos 30, 32 capricornio 94, 98 Carassai, Sebastián 11 Cardoso, Carlos 90 Cardoza y Aragón, Luis 41 n.4 Carpio, Ramiro de Leon 36 Carter, Jimmy 114 Castañeda de León, Oliverio 31 Castillo Armas, Carlos 28 Castro, Fidel 28 Catholic Church 37 Caute, David 113, 115, 117 Central African Federation 112 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): Bay of Pigs invasion and 45; destabilization operations in Latin America 45; Indonesian military and 151; Operation Condor and 47, 53; Operation “P.B. Success” in Guatemala 27 Cerezo, Vinicio 36

Çetin, Fethiye 193 Cherkessian, Sarkis 196 Cheterian, Vicken 14 Chile: coups in 46; Operation Condor and 46; state terror in 49 China: Cultural Revolution 152–153; petitions in 132; support for Indonesia’s Confrontation campaign 149 Chinese Committee for Asian-African Solidarity 154 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 135, 153 Chkhikvishvili, I. 179 Chomsky, Noam 49 Chrétien, Jean-Pierre 67 Christian Democrats, in Guatemala 30–1 Ciani, Antonio 31 Cohen, Stanley 64, 66 Cold War 2; African counter-insurgency and 121; anti-Communism and 45, 56–7; anti-Communism during 45, 54, 56, 57; Armenian genocide and 203; disappearances as signature act of violence in 9; global communities of resistance in 147–160; Guatemala and 26, 27, 36; Mozambique and 95; Operation Condor and 45, 54, 56; silence during 1, 10 Colom, Alvaro 37, 39 Colom Argueta, Manuel 31 Comité Guatemalteco de Unidad Patriótica (CGUP) 33 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 189–190, 194–5 Communism: Cold War anti-Communism and 45, 54; Soviet system and 172; threat to Guatemala of 27 Communist Party of the Soviet Union 149, 150 Communist Party of Turkey/MarxistLeninist (TKP/ML). 196 counter-insurgency warfare: African 111–121; death squads and 48–49; Latin American 56; Operation Condor 47–50 counter-terrorism 48 Cuba: Bay of Pigs invasion 45; revolution 45 Cultural Revolution 152–3 Darian, Armen 197 Das, Veena 5, 6 Dávalos, Alejandro 54

Index 217 de Bellaigue, Christopher 200–1 death squads 48–49 Demichev, Petr 173, 174, 184 n.6 Democratic Spring (Guatemala) 26–27 de-Stalinization: anti-Stalinists 171–2, 176–8; blank spots of history and 170; de-Stalinization in 169–183; moderates/ conservatives 171; personality cult and 175–6; selective memorialization and 182–3; Stalinists/neo-Stalinists and 171, 173–6; Stalin’s 90th birthday and 178–181; victory over Nazi Germany 173, 181; World War II as substitute for Stalin cult 181–2 Dèvi Sturua 175 Devrimci Gençlik (Revolutionary Youth) 192 Dhlakama, Alfonso 95 Dink, Hrant 193 Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) 46, 54–5 Dirección Nacional de Información e Inteligencia (DNII) 47 disappearances 9 Dmitrov, Martin 130 Dominican Republic, death squads in 48 Dorfman, Ariel 56 drama therapy 49 Dulles, Alan 27 Dulles, John Foster 27 Dupaquier, Jean-François 67 Economists with Guns (Simpson) 149 edifice image of silence 4–6 Edmond, John 116 Egypt 150 Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood 204 Eisenhower, Dwight 28 El Salvador 30, 36 emerging state(s): Guatemala as 26; silences of 2–4 Emin, Kevork 197 Enver, Ismail 189, 194 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip 203 Esquipulas I and II Accords 36 Eurocentric secularized notions 91 Fall, Bernard 48 Fanggidaej, Francisca 151 Faust, Aaron 143 n.5 FCN-Nación 40

fence image of silence 4–6 Ferreira, Wilson 53 Firm and Lasting Peace Accord of 1996 41 n.2 First World War 191 Fitzpatrick, Shiela 131, 133 Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Werfel) 195 Foucault, Michel 7 France, decolonization war in Algeria 3–4 Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) 90, 93, 95 Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional (FMLN) 33, 35 Fresno, Anita 46 Frodebu (Front pour la démocratie au Burundi) 78 Fuentes Mohr, Alberto 31 Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes/ Revolucionarias (FAR) 30 Gal, Susan 9, 63, 89 Galasinski, Dariusz 68, 72 Galula, David 48 gamba spirits 91, 96–7 García, Lucas 34 Gavazzo, José 51–2, 59 n.25 G-Cars 118 General Peace Agreement for Mozambique (1992) 95 genocides: Armenian 188–207; in Burundi 65, 66, 74; forgotten 74; in Guatemala 32–3, 38 Gerardi, Bishop Juan 36 Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement) 155, 158 glasnost 183 Göçek, Fatma Müge 193, 195 Gökçen, Sabihe 193 Goldschläger, Alain 68, 70, 77 Golikov, V. 179 gook 115–116 Gorbachev, Mikhail 183 Gordon, Aníbal 51 Gorongosa region (Mozambique) 88, 103 n.3; control of areas in 94; gamba spirit possession in 96–101; silence in 89; spirits in 91–2 Goulart, João 45 Grandin, Greg 9 Green Leader 114–115 Grigorenko, Petr 178

218  Index Guatemala 9, 26–41; army operations against revolutionary organizations 30–2; civilian government in 1986 36; corruption in 38–9; coups d’état 28; criminal violence in 37–8; death squads in 48; Democratic Spring (1944-1954) 26–7; elections 27; genocides in 32–3; Left’s silence in 30; massacres in 32–3; model villages in 35; October Revolution 26–7; Peace Accords 26, 35–6, 40–1; political opposition 33–34; revolutionary forces in 28–30, 33–4; Ríos Monnt’s tenure 34–5; self-defence civilian patrols in 35; truth commissions 36–7; US intervention in 1954 27–8 Guatemala: Memory of Silence 26, 32, 37, 41 Guatemalan Institute for Social Security 27 Guevara, Aníbal 34 Gül, Abdullah 202 Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn) 183 Gulf War of 1991 128 Gürün, Kamuran 199 Gutiérrez Ruiz, Héctor 52 Hamid II, Sultan Abul 200, 201 Hamidian massacres 190, 192, 208 n.13 Hayes, Patricia 119 Hayner, Priscilla 2 Herman, Edward 49 Hikmet, Nazim 197 Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) 26, 32–3, 37, 41 n.2 history: oral 13–16; silence and 13–16; writing and rewriting of 14 Hitler, Adolf 205 Holocaust 199 Hunyani (aircraft) 113, 114, 117 Hussein, Saddam 127, 133 Hutus 64, 75 I Write What I Like (Biko) 90 Iakir, Petr 179 Igreja, Victor 11 Ihmalian, Vartan 197 imaginary documents 15 impunity: corruption and 37–9; counter-insurgency warfare and 48; criminal violence and 37–9; silence and 36–7 India, memories of violences in 5, 6

Indochina 48 Indonesia 147–160; Confrontation campaign 149; Dutch aid to Suharto 158; protests by Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation 150–5; protests by Dutch Women’s Movement 155–7; protests by Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) 155–7; resistance in 148–150; violence in 1965-1968 148–150 Indonesia Committee 161 n.6 Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) 148–150, 154 Indonesian Nationalist Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI) 152 industrial killing 47 Institute of Marxism-Leninism 173, 177, 178 Inter-American Commission of Human Rights 40 International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) 39, 40 International Institute for Social History (IISH) 148 International Labour Organization 161 n.6 International Women’s Day 158 intifada 143 n.46 Iraq: Ba’th Party rule in 127–8, 136f; citizen-government communication in 130–2; defeat in Gulf War 128; hierarchy of authority in 136f; invasion of Kuwait in 1990 128; Iran-Iraq war, 1980-1988 128; People’s Day 138–9; petitions in 127–142; Social Solidarity Funds 129 Isa, Ibrahim 151, 152 Italian Communist Party 177 Ittihadism 196 Japanese Committee for Asian-African Solidarity 154 Jaworski, Adam 68, 72 Johnson, Phyllis 117 Jornadas de Marzo y Abril de 1962 29, 30 Juentud Patriótica del Trabajo (JPT) 29 Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), 198 Kaburahe, Antoine 69 kaffir 115 Kahraman, Fethiye 193 Kahraman, Murat 193–4

Index 219 Kandemir, Nuzhet 200 Karabakh conflict 206 K-Cars 118 Kemal, Mustafa 132, 193, 194–5 Kenya 3–4 Khoury, Dina 143 n.45 Khruschev, Nikita 153; de-Stalinization policy 169–170; removal from power 170 Kirchner, Néstor 52 Kissinger, Henry 55 Kocharyan, Robert 202 Kochetov, Vsevolod 180 Kommunist 179–180 Kosygin, Aleksei 180 Kruschev, Nikita 14 Kuchkin, Andrei 175 Kuwait 128 La Dirección Nacional de Asuntos Técnicos (La Técnica) 47 Lacan, Jacques 91 Laotian Committee for Asian-African Solidarity 154 Latin America: death squads in 48–9; military aid to 49; parallel state in 50–1 Laugerud, Kjell 29 Leighton, Bernardo 46 Lemarchand, Rene 76–77 Lenin, Vladimir 181 Lepsius, Johannes 189 Let History Judge (Medvedev) 183 Letelier, Orlando 46 Lewis, Bernard 199 Lifton, Robert Jay 200 Lira, Elizabeth 71 Loveman, Brian 71 low-intensity warfare 48 Lowry, Heath 199–200 Lucas, Romeo 29, 31, 33 l’Unita 177 Lusaka Accords 93 Lusaka Tower 114–5, 116 Lux de Cotí, Otilia 41 n.1 lzhesotsializm 179

Mao Tse-Tung 152–3 Maquín, Mamá 31 Martayan, Hagop 193 Martin, Barbara 14 Martin, David 117 massacres: in Armenia 191; in Burundi 65, 66; in Guatemala 32–3, 38; by Ottoman Turks 191 Mbembe, Achille 11 McCarthy, Justin 200 McGregor, Katharine 13 McSherry, J. Patrice 10 Medvedev, Roy 171–2, 174, 175, 176, 178–9, 179–180, 180–1, 183 memory of silence 9 memory wars 95 Méndez Montenegro, Julio César 29 Michelini, Zelmar 52 Micombero, Michel 65, 66, 69, 70, 72 military aid 49 millets 195, 206 Mission of the Malayan National Liberation League 154 Moa 95 model villages 35 Moffitt, Ronni 46 Montt, Ríos 33, 34–35 Moorcraft, Paul 117 Morales, Jimmy 37, 39–40 Morgenthau, Henry 189 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional 26 Mozambique 11, 88–103; Amnesty Law of 1992 96, 97; civil war 88, 94–5; embodied accountability in 89–91, 101–3; gamba spirits 96–101; General Peace Agreement 95; Gorongosa region 88; independence war 93; memory wars 95; political violence in 93–5; silence in 89–91; social relations in 91–3; spirits in 91–2; violence in 89–91 Mozambique Revolutionary Committee 154 Mudigdo 158, 165 n.73 Murashov, S. 179 mutual zombification 11

Machel, Samora 93 madzoca ancestral spirits 91 Makiya, Kanan 144 n.28 Malaysia, formation of 149 Manas, Edgar 193 mandatory silence 9

n’ fukua spirits 91 Nahimana, Jean-Louis 79 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 150 Nasution, A.H. 153 National Reconciliation Commission of Guatemala 36

220  Index National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 45 The Nazi Doctors (Kandemir) 200 Ndadaye, Melchior 78 Nekrich, Aleksandr 176, 177–8 neo-Stalinists 171, 173–6 New York Review of Books (NYRB) 200–201 Nicaragua 30 Nigeria 2 1965 Indonesia and the World (Wardaya) 149 Nixon, Richard 28 Njono 149, 157 Nkomo, Joshua 114 NSC-68 document 58 n.4 Ntibantunganya, Sylvestre 69–70, 70 Nunca Más (Never Again) report 37, 41 Nuri Birgi, Muharrem 205 NVB (Nederlands Vrouwenbeweging, Dutch Women’s Movement) 157–158 Obama, Barack 39, 53 October Revolution (Guatemala) 26–27 Operation Condor 44–57; assassinations 46, 52; counter-insurgency warfare 47–50; historical context of 45–7; operations 51–4; prototype of 46; targets of 46; US government and 46–7, 54–5; as weapon of parallel state 50–1 Operation Dingo (Zimbabwe) 114 Operation Snoopy (Zimbabwe) 114 oral history 13–16 Orletti Motors (OT-18 or El Jardín) 51 Osorio, Arana 29 Ottoman Armenians, extermination of 189–190 Ottoman Assyrians 190 Ottoman Empire: Armenians in 191; casualties 191; massacre of Armenians 191 Owen, David 114 Özal, Turgut 205 Paladino, Otto 51 Palipehutu (Parti pour la libération du peuple hutu) 77 Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania 154 Paraguay, Operation Condor and 46 parallel state 50–51 Paris Orly Airport attack (1983) 199

Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT) 42 n.11, 42 n.13 Partido Patriota 39 patrullas de autodefensa civil (PACs) 35 Pehlivanian, Aram 196 People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennykh Del, NKVD), 170 People’s Day (Yawm al-Sha’b) (Iraq) 127 Peralta Azurdia, Enrique 29 perestroika 183 Pérez, Otto 37, 39 petitions in Saddam’s Iraq 127–142; approval rate 141; citizen approach 131–2; citizen-government communication 130–2; decision-makers 140f; denunciations of officials 133; historical context of 127–8; influencing the outcome of 134–8; neighborhood-level officials and 136–7; non-party members as petitioners 129; party members as petitioners 129; People’s Day 138–141; petitioners 128–130; political functions of 132–4; reasons for 128; single-person 129–130; standardized form to fill out 138–9; supplicant approach 131–2; women petitioners 128–9 Petrovskii, Leonid 179 Philippines 115–116 Pinochet, Augusto 46, 56 Plan Simbananiye 82 n.43 Pohlman, Annie 155 Politkovskaya, Anna 90 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) 199 Portillo, Alfonso 37, 39 power, silence and 9–11 Pravda 173, 175, 179 Provo 165 n.69 psychological warfare 48, 56 Quakers 147 quietude 11 Reagan, Ronald 33, 34 regimes of silence 6–9, 64, 67, 71, 73, 78–9, 90, 111, 120–1, 127; political 7–8; social 7, 88; violence as tool of 66 regimes of truth 7 Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance) 90, 94–95

Index 221 Representación Unitaria de la Oposición Guatemalteca (RUOG) 33–34 Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq (Maikya) 144 n.28 revolutionary warfare 48 Rhodesia 12, 94; guerilla war in 112–113; Lusaka Tower attack 114–117; speech at war 114–117; Westlands Freedom Camp raid 118–119 Ricoeur, Paul 90 rock image of silence 4–6 Roger Channel document 53 Russell Tribunal 2, 197, 198 Russell, Bertrand 2 Russell, James 200 Rwagasore, Louis 65 Rwanda 65 Said, Umar 151 samizdat 178, 183 San Carlos de Guatemala (USAC) 31, 31–2 Sandinistas 30, 33 Sanguinetti, Julio Maria 59 n.24 Sardjono, Umi 158, 165 n.73 Sartre, Jean Paul 197 Schaefer, Bernd 149 Schattenberg, Susanne 181 Schoultz, Lars 49 Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado (SIDE) 51 self-defence civilian patrols 35 September 30th Movement 147, 149–150 Serrano, Jorge 36, 39 Setiawan, Hersri 153 Shatagin, N. 179 Shaumian, S. 179 Shaw, Stanford 199 Shchunkov, V. 175 Shelest, Petro 180 silence: breaking the 2; bundle of 63; concept of 1; as form of social action 92; historical production and 147; history and 13–16; imageries of 4–6; impunity and 36–37; interpretations of 6; life history of 4; mandatory 9; memory of 9; power and 9–11; regimes of 6–9; speech and 11–13, 118–120 Simbananiye, Arthemon 82 n.43 Simpson, Bradley 149 Siwi, Maasje 158, 165 n.73 Social Democrats, in Guatemala 30

Social Solidarity Funds (Iraq) 129 socialism, spiritual 27 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 183 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 3 South Vietnamese Committee for Asian-African Solidarit 154 South West African National Union 154 Southern Rhodesia 112 Soviet Armenia 197 Soviet Union: anti-communist terror in Indonesia and 149; anti-Stalinists 171–2, 176–8; blank spots of history 170; de-Stalinization in 169–183; moderates/conservatives 171; personality cult in 175–6; selective memorialization in 182–3; Stalinists/ neo-Stalinists 171, 173–6; victory over Nazi Germany 173, 181; World War II as substitute for Stalin cult 181–2 Spain 2 Spanish-American War 115–116 speech, silence and 11–13 spiritual socialism 27 Sri Lanka 102 Stalin, Joseph 169, 172–3, 178–181 Stalinists 171, 173–6 state terror 4; impact of 49–50 state violence 67–69 Sturua, Dèvi 175 Suciyan, Talin 205 Sudisman 149 Sudjinah 158 Suharti 158 Suharto 147, 149, 150, 157, 158 Sukarno 150, 152 Sulami 158, 165 n.73 Sunito-Heyligers, Trees 157 Suslov, Mikhail 176 Swaziland Progressive Party 154 Tagalog (language) 116 Takoushian, Harutiun 198 Talaat, Mehmed 189, 194 Tanbay, Betul 192 TAPOL 147 Tashnagtsutyun 190 Tcharents, Yeghishe 197 Timerman, Jacobo 9, 11 Tojo, Alfredo 41 n.1 Tomuschat, Christian 41 n.1 torture 56

222  Index Toruño, Archbishop Quezada 36 totalitarianism 4 Toynbee, Arnold 189 transitional justice 2 transitions 9 transnational silence 1 Trapeznikov, Sergei 174, 175 trauma 4 Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 195, 198 Tri-continental Conference 151 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 5–6, 13, 14, 147 Trukhanovskii, V. 175 Trump, Donald 40 truth, regimes of 7 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 79, 84 n.107 truth commissions 2–3, 36, 79 Tum, Rigoberta Menchú 40 Tumanyan, Hovannes 190 Turkish Republic 195 Turkish Worker’s Party (TWP) 196, 197 Turmarkin, Nina 182 txiquiro (spirit/host alliance) 91–92 Uminiati (aircraft) 113 Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza 39 Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) 33, 36, 37 United Fruit Company 27 United Nations Commission on Human Rights 31 United States: intervention in Guatemala in 1954 27–8; military aid to Latin America 49; Operation Condor and 46–7, 54–5 Urma region (Iran) 190 Urmia province (Persia) 189 Uruguay: coups in 46; death squads in 48; impunity law 52; military aid to 49; Operation Condor and 46 US Army School of the Americas 46, 52 van Heutsz, Johannes 158 Van province (Ottoman Empire) 189 Vance, Cyrus 53 veil of silence 11 Veinstein, Gilles 199 Velásquez, Ivan 40

Videla, Jorge Rafael 52 Vietnam, model villages in 35 Vietnam War 152, 156 von Sanders. Liman 189 Walls, Peter 113 Walter, Alissa 12–13 Walter, E.V. 49–50 Wardaya, Baskara 149 Werfel, Franz 195 Western New Guinea 157 Westlands Freedom Camp 118 What Do You Want Then? (Kochetov) 180 White, Luise 12 White, Robert 54, 58 n.8 Wieringa, Saskia 155 Winter, Jay 5, 7, 14 Wirjomartono 149 Wiyano 151 Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF). 155–7, 159–160 Women’s International Federation 150 Workshop on Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS) 193 World Federation of Democratic Youth 150 World Federation of Trade Unions 150 Xi Chen 132 xinfang system 135 Yazidis 190, 208 n.13 Ydígoras Fuentes, Miguel 28 Yesaian, Zabel 190 Zambezi 117, 118 Zerubavel, Eviatar 79–80 Zhukov, Evgenii 174, 175 Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) 112, 154 Zimbabwe African Peoples’ Union (ZAPU) 112–113, 118 Zimbabwe National Liberation Army (ZANLA) 112, 113, 117 Zimbabwe Peoples’ Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) 112–113, 114, 116, 118–119 Zimbabwe-Rhodesia 112, 117