After atrocities: to seek remembrance or forgetting?

A notable piece by freelancer Vivenne Walt led the WaPo‘s “Outlook section yesterday. In it, Walt made the interesting observation that–despite what many news accounts in the West would have us believe–Iraqis were not all glued to their television sets, eagerly following Saddam’s court hearing on Thursday.
Walt gives us many examples of this–I’ll come back to some of these, later. But her own opinion, expressed fairly well in the piece, is that the seeming reluctance of Iraqis to examine all the details of the atrocities of their recent past is a bad thing. Hence the title of her piece: “Not better forgotten”.
She asks,

What, after all, would German teenagers know these days about the Holocaust, if the gas ovens were not preserved and museums not built?”

I can understand her point. But from all the work that I’ve been doing on how societies can develop effective policies that enable them to escape from iterations of past atrocious violence, I would characterize her view of what “needs” to be done in the immediate aftermath of atrocities as a very “western” point of view.
And even in Germany, remember, it was not in the immediate post-Hitler years that Holocaust “remembrance” movement started, along with the whole series of explorations that Germans undertook regarding their own community and family members’ roles during the Hitler years. All that came much, much later than 1945. At the time, in 1945-46, in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Hitlerism, most of the German people were really not at all in the right “place” to start aggressively exploring their own society’s role in supporting the Nazis.
The Allied occupation forces in Germany did what they could, in their various ways, to “educate” or perhaps “re-educate” the Germans about the ghastliness of the Nazis’ deeds. Civilian work crews from various towns were forcibly taken out to nearby concentration/extermination camps to help in the cleanup, so that they could see firsthand what had been happening there. The Allies tried to disseminate the “latest news” of what was happening at the Nuremberg trials throughout Germany, in German, as speedily and effectively as possible. But by and large, most Germans–with some notable exceptions like Karl Jaspers (see this post from yesterday) really did not want to hear about it.
They had other concerns…

In 1945 and for quite a long time after that German society was still reeling from the effects of the battles that had been waged all over it. Many cities had been firebombed to rubble by the RAF and the USAF. Eight million ethnic German refugees were summarily kicked out of East Europe, and had to be fed, somehow, and cared for.
In addition, examining the Nazis’ deeds was a painful subject. Of course many adult Germans had played an inglorious role during the Nazi era…
It took another whole generation, and the coming of an era of much more prosperity and social stability, before a new generation of younger adults started asking the questions about what had happened during the Nazi years; and some, though not all, of the older generations of Germans started answering those questions. It was at that point that the historical “record” established by the Nuremberg trials became important.
So now, today, in Iraq, what is the situation? Here’s how Walt reported it from Baghdad:

[Saddam’s] morphed visage was none too welcome last week — not because Saddam’s former self was missed, but because many Iraqis did not wish to dwell upon his memory in any form. In a crowded restaurant at lunchtime, where I watched the pictures as they aired, a waiter turned to me and echoed a sentiment I had heard from several people over the past few weeks: “I hope the trial is over quickly. We don’t want to hear about all this.”
His comment reflects something disturbing about Iraq’s public discourse over the past 15 months. Something has been missing here — so lacking that on many days its absence is almost palpable. It is the shared remembrance of Saddam, his atrocities and the scars left inside every Iraqi. Rather than openly air the history of that era, Iraqis seem to have chosen to close the book and move on…
[M]ost Iraqis seem intent on letting go of a rare opportunity: to have Saddam’s misdeeds bind the nation with a defining purpose for the future.

The pursuit of “truth commissions”, or “truth and reconciliation commissions” is often very closely allied to the creation of more concrete (often, literally, concrete) “memorials” to those who were killed by repressive earlier regimes, or more simply, to the fact that that repression occurred.
So, in the case of the Nuremberg Trial, was the work of that tribunal itself. “What,” Walt asks, “would German teenagers know these days about the Holocaust, if the gas ovens were not preserved and museums not built?” (She conveniently ignores the fact that it took most of a generation’s-span of time before Germans really felt ready to start preserving, building, and visiting such memorials.)
She notes that some “modest local efforts” at memorialization have been made in Iraq:

A small memorial was erected by an organization in the southern town of Hillah, near the largest mass grave yet uncovered in the country. Another memorial was built in the city of Halabja in northern Iraq to mark the gassing of 5,000 Kurds there in 1988. But in countless conversations I’ve had with Iraqis, few seem enthused by the idea of more national memorialization. “I don’t think a museum will do anything but demoralize the people and make them feel inferior,” Saad Jawad, a political science professor at Baghdad University, said when I asked how to preserve the memory of Saddam’s rule. “Rather, spend the money on schools and hospitals.”

Of course, one of the things that certainly complicates the ability of many Iraqis to get a healthy and self-confident grip on the own nation’s past is that–in strong contrast to the situation in Hitler’s Germany– in Saddam’s Iraq a high proportion of the people who stayed inside that autocratically run country were both victims of the regime and in some way morally compromised by it.
Iraq’s people–like any other human community forced to live under extremely dictatorial rule– cannot be neatly divided into “victims” and “perpetrators” of the regime’s violence.
Perhaps one person who understood this fact best was the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. In his magisterial 1986 reflection on his years in Auschwitz, “The Drowned and the Saved”, Levi wrote a whole chapter titled “The Gray Zone”, which is well worth re-reading with the situation in Saddam’s Iraq in mind.
Levi wrote that while desire of human beings for simplification ius justified,

the same does not always apply to simplification itself… The greater part of historical and netural phenomena are not simple, or not simple in the way that we would like. Now, the network of human relationships inside the Lagers [concentration/extremination camps] was not simple: it could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors. Anyone who today reads (or writes) the history of the Lager reveals the tendency, indeed the need, to separate evil from good, to be able to take sides, to emulate Christ’s gesture on Judgment Day: here the righteous, over there the reprobates….
Instead, the arrival inthe Lager was indeed a shock because of the surprise it entailed. The world into which we were precipitated was terrible, yes, but also indecipherable: it did not conform to any model; the enemy was all around but also inside, the “we” lost its limits…

Well, I can’t type the whole chapter here. I hope you get the drift. Cannily, Levi noted that, “The Lager, on a smaller scale but with amplified characteristics, reproduced the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian state.” He was quite right, and we would do well to take his lessons regarding “the gray zone” beyond the purview of the Nazi extermination camps and appkly it to a place like Saddam’s Iraq.
Where Levi noted that much of the really brutal (and brutalizing) work inside the Lager was done by Jewish collaborators themselves, we could note that inside Saddam’s Iraq, much of the actual implementation of his foul schemes against the Kurds and the Shi-ites was done by individuals who were themselves Kurdish or Shi-ite. It is nearly always, after all, left to members of politically marginalized populations to do the dirty work of dictatorships: assassinations; mass killings; unjust wars. And then, if those implementers should balk at their work, the regime would think little of snuffing them out.
Here’s something that not many people in the west know: most of the 5,000-plus people who won amnesties through the work of South Africa’s TRC were not white folks who’d been planners or implementers of the apartheid regime’s atrocities: they were black South Africans. Some of those blacks, it is true, were people who’d committed violent acts as part of their work for the ANC or other anti-apartheid movements. But a good number of them were blacks who had performed their violence in the service of the apartheid hit squads.
They had been the askaris the young men of violence whom the regimed had managed to “turn” from their previous anti-apartheid leanings, or had otherwise been able to suborn. Why should we be surprised? The regime had all the carrots and nearly all the sticks in that society. There were hundreds of thousands of out-pf-work youths who could be tempted into a profession that would draw them ever further into its grip.
And so it undoubtedly was in Iraq. Who had the power to subron? And which population groups were vulnerable, marginal, and particularly liable to be suborned? I can understand why many Iraqis don’t feel easy right now with the idea of enthusiastically examining and revisiting the Saddamist past. Partly because so many of them are still bearing the very recent wounds of having been victimized. And partly because a good number bear the wounds of so recently having been victimizers.
Give them a break! Let them heal a bit first, and re-find something that will re-center a previously shattered moral universe. (For many, it is very likely to be religion.) And then–like the Germans of the 1960s–if there comes a time when they want to start going back to explore the Saddamist era, it will be their decision whether, when, and how to do so.
One of the things I’m exploring in this book I’m currently writing is how each of three countries–South Africa, Rwanda, and Mozambique–made decisions in 1992-94 on how to deal with the legacies of recent atrocious violence, and how effective each of those decisions was. In Rwanda, they chose mainly war-crimes trials, which we might (along with most westerners) name simply “justice”. In SA, they plumped for the TRC, which we might label as the “truth” option. In Mozambique, they opted for neither war-crimes trials nor any official truth-seeking exercize. Instead, an almost intentional forgetting of the horrific levels of violence they’d suffered during their 15-year civil war took place… And of all three peace processes undertaken in that period, Mozambique’s looks to be probably the most successful.
This challenges so many western norms! We westerners like to think that our own, highly individualized form of justice is a good thing–and good for everyone in the world, not just ourselves. And the US branch of the western family certainly has a strong belief in the redemptive power of truth-seeking and truth-acknowledgment. (I grew up in the UK branch. We’re more inclined to keep our families’ skeletons hidden firmly in our closets.) People in Mozambique, however, have a fairly strong belief that to talk about the violence of the past can bring it back in a vivid way right into the present once again. They have rituals to mark the transition form war to peace, from violence to coexitsence– but those rituals are determinedly non-verbal rather than verbal. And Mozambicans certainly don’t share westerners’ views that all responsibility for people’s actions can be firmly pinned onto the individuals themselves…
Well, I could write a lot more about all this! (That’s what I’m doing in the book, of course.)
But certainly, I found Vivienne Walt’s piece of reporting very informative and thought-provoking.
Heck, I wanted to write something here about Slobo, too. Do I still have time?