Thinking Historically about Missing

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 1. Introduction & Acknowledgements

Introduction How do societies attempt to address the legacies of a violent past? Whether the conflict took place in a former era, as in the case of Spain, or has formally ended but the effects linger on, as in the case of Guatemala, or has yet to be resolved, as in Cyprus, each society exhibits approaches that are varied and that evolve over time. Because the processes that this question points to are highly complex and say as much about the future as they do about the past, they deserve to be addressed in an inclusive and sensitive manner, in consideration of different perspectives and experiences. This requires that individuals are prepared to engage in a constructive, respectful and responsible dialogue. This set of educational materials seeks to contribute to such a process within Cyprus and in other societies experiencing the legacies of conflict. It focuses on the issue of missing persons, a dimension common to conflicts worldwide, and asks teachers and students to consider the question of how societies should address missing persons. 'Missing persons' are people whose families have no news of them, and those who are reported missing as a result of an armed conflict, on the basis of reliable information. The missing are a symbol of how history continues to be lived every day by societies emerging from experiences of conflict or authoritarian regimes and of the fact that this past remains present. Because the missing continue to live in society through the space created by their absence, they, and we with them, live in both the past and in the present. Because of this, and because of the pain caused to families and societies by disappearance, the issue of missing persons can also help students engage with questions about the ways in which the past continues to be reflected in contemporary societies and about how they define their relationship to the past. These materials ask teachers and students to consider the question of how societies should remember missing persons and address the legacy left by the missing and the conflict which caused their disappearance. They do this through a number of activities. Unit 1 looks at the experiences of countries around the world, and how they have addressed the problem of missing persons. Unit 2 looks at the missing in Cyprus. Unit 3 looks at the different responses over time to the missing in Cyprus, and why they have emerged. Unit 4 explores the connections between history and memory. Finally, Unit 5 asks students to conduct an exercise to think through how missing persons in Cyprus should be remembered. These activities form part of three components that are critical to developing a broad and sophisticated understanding how the issue of missing persons can be taught in an accessible and engaging format: 1) a theoretical overview of history and history education; 2) a comparative focus on missing persons at the global level, with in-depth explorations of experiences in the former Yugoslavia, Spain, Morocco and Guatemala along with Cyprus; 3) a sequence of lesson plans that aim to cultivate greater understanding of the phenomenon of missing persons in Cyprus and around the world and also to develop students’ thinking about historical empathy and about representations of the past. Users of the materials also have the opportunity to go further and deeper in their learning experience, by drawing upon an extensive array of additional resources that are provided at the end of each case study. The aim is to introduce a complex and highly sensitive topic, that of the missing persons, to the classroom in a way that not only provides a firm grounding in the issue in its human, social and political dimensions, but also enables students to develop their understanding of concepts and dispositions related to historical thinking. The first section, which offers a theoretical discussion of history and history education, serves as a key resource to prepare educators to handle this and other sensitive topics in the history classroom, and forms the basis for the lessons and activities that follow. This foundation, of learning to think historically, is fundamentally necessary to cultivating a disciplined and rigorous approach to teaching and learning about the past, an approach that aims to enable learners to grapple with different accounts, to evaluate and assess diverse sources, to construct interpretations through disciplined argument and debate, and in so doing, to apply the methods of multiperspectivity in ways that can promote an enriching process of questioning, exploration and learning. As a result, students will be prepared to handle complex historical issues with greater confidence and sensitivity, and will become better able to recognise and critically respond to the abuse and misuse of history.

2_Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers

This set of educational materials is the outcome of a collaboration between The Elders, the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), who came together as a result of the efforts of The Elders to bring attention to the important work of the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, through their documentary film Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future. The educational materials that have emerged from this collaboration benefit, we hope, from the unique attributes of each organisation: the leadership and vision of The Elders, the insights of ICTJ into addressing the legacies of conflict, and the expertise of AHDR in history education and fostering multiperspectivity within intercultural dialogue and education. The way the materials have been produced is a further reflection of the merging of synergies, ideas and efforts, having been produced through a process of dialogue and collaboration by a dedicated inter-communal project team of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot educators, researchers and other practitioners who worked with the guidance of international history education specialists. The pedagogical approach of the lesson plans and activities has been carefully crafted to create a learning journey where with each step, deeper knowledge about the context within which people go missing is attained through interactive activities that allow students to compare and contrast the different ways in which various societies have responded to the issue of missing persons. The lesson sequence introduces students to different sources, aims to enable them to use these sources to understand the motivations and goals of people in the past and aims to help students prepare their own research agenda in order to draw their own conclusions about how Cyprus can address the issue of missing persons and the questions associated with the legacy of social conflict that this issue brings forward. The materials aim to be a first step forward in contributing to a wider process of grappling with difficult and complicated aspects of the past, and represent one of many different educational approaches. Although the emotional, personal or moral issues raised by the experiences surrounding missing persons can also be taken up in extremely powerful ways within teaching strategies, these educational materials have chosen a distinctly historical approach. They aim to provide a foundation in historical thinking on the basis of which students can enhance their ability to think critically about the past, which is in many ways is a prerequisite to being able to address this issue in constructive ways as an active, well-informed and engaged member of society. Developing historical thinking is clearly beyond the scope of one educational publication, however, by moving through this sequence of lessons, students will be able to reflect more critically on how societies have chosen to represent the past and develop their own ideas about alternative ways in which the past might be approached, preparing them to take on larger and more complex questions both in their learning and eventually in their own actions and decisions as citizens. While directed mainly at educators working at secondary school level for use as supplementary materials in classrooms with students aged 12 to 15 years old, the lessons and activities have also been designed to be used in contexts outside of the classroom. Therefore, individuals and civil society organisations, such as youth groups and those working with relatives of the missing, can also easily adapt the lessons in independently organised workshops or seminars. Moreover, the pack is designed to be used in settings around the world where there is an interest in understanding how to teach and learn about sensitive historical topics, such as the missing persons, through a disciplinary approach. We have made every effort to approach the issue with both sensitivity and respect to the profound experiences and perspectives on missing persons that exist, and to take into account the differing levels of knowledge and preparedness that people may bring to the issue. This is also an effort to tap into the reservoir of goodwill residing within societies who wish to move to a place of greater trust and understanding. This process can only be furthered through a combination of mutually supportive efforts and diverse strategies that together lead to a productive and meaningful dialogue on how to come to terms with the legacies of a violent past.

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers_3

Acknowledgements Many individuals and organisations have helped in the production of this set of educational materials. In particular we would like to express our gratitude to: Dr. Umut Bozkurt, who assisted ICTJ in preparing the case studies and provided valuable insight and guidance throughout the project. AHDR Educational Associates Duygu Üstündağ and Danae Psilla, who assisted with archival research. Stephanie Young also contributed to the research process. Representatives of the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) whose encouragement from the start of this endeavor and ongoing guidance have been invaluable. Representatives of the Bi-communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons, Victims of Massacres and other Victims of 1963-74 Events, especially Sevgül Uludağ, Christos Eftymiou, Spyros Hadjinicolaou, and Veli Beidoğlu, whose efforts to transform the pain of the missing persons into a source of healing and understanding has been an inspiration, and who have given their feedback in the process of preparing the materials. We also benefitted from the insight of people who have been involved with addressing the needs of missing persons, such as Nicos Theodosiou and Nicos Sergides of the Organisation of Relatives of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons, Ertan Ersan of the Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans, Emine Çolak and Öncel Polili of the Turkish Cypriot Human Rights Foundation, and Nikolas Kyriakou of the European University Institute. Nicos Anastasiou and the young people of the Cyprus Friendship Programme have been kind enough to pilot some of the activities, helping to bring to life the materials with their enthusiasm and energy. Colleagues from the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) and the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), especially those who supported the preparation of the materials at various stages throughout the process: Alev Tuğberk, Chara Makriyianni, Antonis Hadjikyriakou, and Virginie Ladisch. Our main partner, The Elders, whose vision and creativity catalysed this project, and whose commitment to building a better future for humanity has also touched Cyprus’s efforts to achieve a peaceful solution. We have especially appreciated the wisdom of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dr. Gro Brundtland, who eagerly participated in a pilot workshop in February 2011; and the support of Katy Cronin, the driving force behind this effort. And finally, our main donors, UNDP-ACT and the European Union, whose support to broadening peaceful dialogue and mutual and understanding and respect throughout the world has paved the way for what we hope will be a new era of cooperation within Cyprus.

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Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 2. Developing Historical Thinking: Theory and Research

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 2. Developing Historical Thinking: Theory and Research

Contents 1.

Introduction

2.

Developing Historical Thinking: Theory and Research

2.1

The place of history in education

p. 4

2.1.1

The aims and purposes of history education

p. 5

2.1.1.1 Why do we teach history?

p. 5

2.1.1.2 History’s contribution to education

p. 8

2.1.2

International debates over history education

p. 10

2.2

Research on students’ historical thinking

p. 12

2.3

Developing historical thinking

p. 14

2.3.1

What happened in the past? Developing students’ substantive knowledge

p. 15

2.3.2

How do we know/ learn about the past? Developing students’ understanding of the discipline of history

p. 20

2.3.3

History and collective memory

p. 24

2.3.4

History textbooks

p. 25

2.3.5

Teaching sensitive and controversial history

p. 27

3.

What Do We Mean by Missing Persons? Experiences and Responses from Around the World

3.1

Experiences and responses around the world

3.1.1

What do we mean by missing persons?

3.1.2

Introducing experiences of missing persons around the world

3.1.3

Why does enforced disappearance take place?

3.1.4

Where are there experiences of missing and disappeared persons?

3.1.5

The effect on families

3.1.6

How did we get to the point where missing persons can be traced?

3.2

The experience of Guatemala

3.3

The experience of the former Yugoslavia

3.4

The experience of Spain

3.5

The experience of Morocco

4.

Missing Persons in Cyprus

2_Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 2. Developing Historical Thinking: Theory and Research

5.

How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale

5.1

Overview

5.2

Rationale

5.2.1

Intended learning aims

5.2.2

The conceptual rationale for this enquiry

Unit 1: Managing difficult pasts. How have countries around the world addressed the problem of missing persons? Unit 2: The missing persons of Cyprus Unit 3: Why have different responses to Cyprus’ missing persons problem emerged over time? Unit 4: History and memory Unit 5: How should the missing persons of Cyprus be remembered?

6.

Resources

6.1

Bibliography

6.2

Resources CD: a) activity sheets to accompany educational activities in Units 1-5; b) discussion guide to accompany Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future, a documentary film by The Elders; c) electronic versions of all chapters of Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers

6.4

Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future, a documentary film by The Elders (DVD with Greek and Turkish subtitles)

6.5

Digging for the Future, a documentary film by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (DVD with Greek and Turkish subtitles)

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 2. Developing Historical Thinking: Theory and Research_3

2.1 The place of history in education In this section School history is the topic of frequent controversy, discussion and debate in countries around the world. What light can international history educational research and practice shed on debates about the content and delivery of school history? In the following sections, overviews of the various theories that have been applied to history education are presented, with a focus on the disciplinary approach, which has been used as the basis for this series of educational materials. Learning history is... a vital and vitalising process: everything has a history and our subject is endlessly intriguing, mind-opening and educative - to be bored with history, is, as it were, to be bored with life. (Chapman, 2009, p.1) Although it is rare to find a politician or curriculum policy maker who will openly state that history is unimportant, school history tends to have a lower status than subjects such as national languages, mathematics or science and to be regarded as less useful than subjects such as information and communication technologies. History’s relative lack of status is often apparent in one or more of the following ways: •

history tends to receive much less teaching time than other subjects;

•

history is often not compulsory across all school years;

•

history is often integrated in social studies or humanities courses rather than taught as a discrete subject; and

•

many of the teachers who teach history do so without substantial initial or continuing education in historical teaching and learning.

Paradoxically, despite this relative neglect, school history is the subject which often gives rise to the most intense public educational debates. When it comes to history, almost every politician, public figure, journalist or academic seems to have a strong opinion about what should be taught and, often, about how it should be taught. Whilst it is rare to attend a social gathering where people propound views on curriculum and pedagogy in mathematics, or science, or languages, it is not uncommon to hear arguments on such occasions about which historical periods or events should be included in history textbooks, about what history education should involve, and about other aspects of historical teaching and learning.1 The implications of this situation for history education are serious: history teachers are, of course, the people upon whose knowledge, creativity, imagination and hard work the integrity and success of historical teaching and learning depend and yet history teachers typically have to go about their work with (a) greater levels of interference and interruption, and, (b) lower levels of resources, in terms of professional training and support and /or in terms of curriculum time, than their colleagues who teach other subjects. The chapters that follow are intended as tools to support history teachers in their practice and their reflection on practice. This chapter provides •

a theoretical discussion of the aims and purposes of history education

•

a discussion of some of the debates which have taken place around the world about history education.

This chapter also aims to provide a rationale for the teaching approach, known as the disciplinary approach, adopted in the educational materials developed by the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research on the missing persons and other subjects.

1. Two recent works that review debates in history education around the world from a number of perspectives and that also provide insights into the state of history education in a range of countries are Naku and Barca (eds.), 2010 and Taylor and Guyver (eds.) 2011.


2.1.1 The aims and purposes of history education 2.1.1.1 Why do we teach history? In this section What is history and why is it important to learn history? A range of approaches to history education exist, and it is important to distinguish between differing interpretations and ways of thinking about history education. This section reviews and summarises the key features of three main schools of thought about history’s contribution to education: •

The collective memory/best story approach;

•

The postmodern approach; and

•

The disciplinary approach.

In order to explore the question of history’s contribution to education, ‘history’ needs to be defined: different definitions lead to different ideas about the contribution of history in education. Defining ‘history’ A common answer to the question ‘What is history?’ is the claim that history is simply knowledge about the past. For some, this knowledge extends in the human past as far as there is written evidence, while others include in their definition of history the whole human past, written or not. A third answer to the question includes not only the human past, but also anything that happened in the past and had an effect on human life. An alternative and disciplinary answer to the question focuses on history as a form of knowledge as well as a body of knowledge. History is considered as a discipline with its own methods and logic and it is in this sense that we can also claim that history is a ‘mode of enquiry that may have different interests in the past from every day practical concepts’ (Lee, 2006). On this account history is not just a collection of knowledge claims about the past but also a way of producing knowledge about the past and learning history means developing knowledge and understanding of how history works, or knowledge and understanding of historical processes of inference and argument, as well as knowledge and understanding of propositions about the past. Finally there is the postmodern definition of history that treats history as a collection of stories about the past rather than as a body or a form of knowledge about the past. According to this approach, we cannot really tell how the past happened but only how people (historians, authors, witnesses etc.) have described it. For postmodernists histories are simply stories or ‘tales’ that people ‘tell’. Postmodernists are particularly keen to focus on the authors of ‘history stories’, on their ideological, social and political ‘positions’ in the present (Jenkins, 1991). Starting from David Lowenthal’s distinction between ‘heritage’ and ‘history’ and also postmodern ideas about history, Peter Seixas (2000) proposes a typology of history education approaches. In this typology he describes three different approaches: •

the collective memory/ best story approach;

•

the disciplinary approach; and

•

the postmodern approach.


If we think history as nothing more than the knowledge of the past, then school history is about handing over this knowledge. Summarising Seixas’ description of the collective memory/best story approach, Perikleous (2010) notes that: This means handing over a single definite best story (the true way that the past happened) which reinforces the sense of belonging somewhere (nation, religion, culture, transnational entities etc.). Furthermore, it promotes values (e.g. peace, democracy, patriotism) and gives a general knowledge of human behaviour in history (p. 315). This approach also aims, according to Seixas (2000), at ‘enhancing collective memory’ and usually seeks to develop a shared moral framework that it believes will encourage students to work for the common good. As Seixas observes, such an approach begs a number of questions, notably the question of who is going to choose the ‘best story’. In fact most of the debates over history education internationally focus on precisely this issue (‘Which is the best story to be taught?’) and the controversies that often arise over school history reflect contending visions of what the ‘best story’ is (Naku and Barca, 2010; Taylor and Guyver, 2011). To focus on story, is, of course, to focus on what is to be taught rather than on how it is to be learned and understood. There is a clear danger here of history becoming meaningless for students, if their role is understood simply in terms of absorbing a given body of knowledge (‘the’ story) which has been defined and ‘fixed’ for them by others (teachers, educational authorities, textbooks etc.). When we think of history as a discipline, school history ceases to be simply about acquiring knowledge about the past and becomes, instead, a matter of learning to think with and think about this knowledge and a way of understanding how this knowledge is produced.This approach emerged in England in the 1970s and gained influence among educators and examination boards mainly through the School Council History 13- 16 Project (later School History Project or SHP). Based on Paul Hirst’s theory that each academic discipline is more than the substantive knowledge it produces, but is also a discrete form of knowledge with its own ways of knowing, the project aimed to develop students’ disciplinary understanding of history and of the ways in which ‘historical thinking’ aims to construct warranted knowledge claims about the past (Wineburg 2001). This new approach in history education: whilst not denying the importance of chronology and historical knowledge, aimed to establish a better balance within history teaching between teaching students about the past and providing them with the means to think historically about it. Consequently, there was a greater emphasis in the history classroom on students learning how to analyse, interpret and synthesise evidence obtained from a variety of primary and secondary sources (Stradling, 2003, pp.9-10). Seixas (2000) points out that the disciplinary approach might, for obvious reasons, raise obstacles to the creation of collective memory (and identity): when learning history becomes a matter of learning to think historically students are empowered to ask questions and to test ‘official’ stories that are presented to them at home and in the media. It is clear, however, that a disciplinary approach to history supports an active role for students as learners: once history becomes a matter of investigation and of argument the range of historical learning activities that students can be engaged with in the classroom is greatly increased. There is also the danger, on the other hand, that students may become sceptical about all knowledge claims and be ‘lost to relativism once we tell them that history is not just the facts’ (Seixas, 2000, p. 25). When students become sceptical about knowledge claims they can also become sceptical about historical knowledge itself and this can lead to the idea that there is no point in learning history at all. Postmodern school history is neither about teaching what happened in the past and nor about learning how to learn about the past: according to postmodernists, school history is about learning how different groups organise the past into stories and how these stories serve present aims (Jenkins, 1991). In this way students become aware of the relativity of historical accounts, of the created and ‘fictional’ nature of historical representations and of the strategies of ideological domination that, according to postmodernists, are served by attempts to ‘represent’ the past.


Seixas (2000) identifies two dangers in this approach. The first one is that the notion of a history that is completely relative leads to the conclusion that all that history can amount to is a power game between different groups. What is there for students to do, on the postmodern account, other than to unmask and compare the ways in which different groups aim to use history to define how we understand the world? The second danger, as in the case of the disciplinary approach, is the risk that history may come to seem worthless to students as merely the product of historians’ biased views. The ‘best story’ approach seems to be ill-suited to the demands of the contemporary world where information can easily be accessed, where multiple perspectives and accounts are presented and where ‘best stories’ are challenged every day. Students who remain ‘loyal’ to these stories are likely to believe them simply because school ‘says so’: they may ‘know that’ an authority has handed them down to be learned but, in the absence of an education in historical thinking, they are unlikely to ‘know how’ these accounts might be justified or developed and they are unlikely to have the tools that they would need to be empowered to argue about the merits or limitations of the ‘best story’ and of the counter-stories that they may come across (Rogers, 1979). Students who decide that the ‘best story’ told in classroom is not the ‘correct’ one, but who also lack an understanding of how historical knowledge claims are produced and can be assessed and defended, may simply see school history as useless since it does not deliver ‘the truth’. Postmodernism seems unable to provide a convincing rationale for school history: the interpretation of biases in historical accounts is not enough to support the necessity of history as a distinctive subject in schools. In addition this approach will possibly lead students to naive equalisations of all historical interpretations in terms of their validity, which simply means that they cannot learn anything substantive about the past. The disciplinary approach seems to be able set the limits to relativism and, at the same time, to provide the freedom to explore different stories and multiple perspectives. Learning to think historically (as the disciplinary approach suggests) is also about: learning that historians and others seeking to reconstruct the past ... will be constrained by the range of sources they can access, will interpret and use the same evidence in different ways and will select and put emphasis on different aspects of the evidence. In other words, that most, if not all, historical phenomena can be interpreted and reconstructed from a variety of perspectives, reflecting the limitations of the evidence, the subjective interests of those who are interpreting and reconstructing it, and the shifting cultural influences which determine to some degree what each new generation regards as significant in the past (Stradling, 2003, p.10). Traditionally, history education around the world has been dominated by the ‘best story’ approach. The ‘disciplinary approach’ that emerged in the 1970s became the main challenger to the ‘best story approach’, albeit only in some educational systems. In many others the teaching of the facts that make up a traditional official narrative remains the dominant approach. The postmodern approach remains mostly a theoretical one and does not have a substantial practical manifestation in educational systems. While the three main approaches depicted in the above typology cannot claim to capture the full extent of all the approaches that could be taken to historical teaching and learning, this typology presents a framework with which to compare and assess a range of modes of learning about the past.


2.1.1.2 History’s contribution to education In this section Following from the discussion in the previous section, this section reviews arguments about the aims and purposes of history education in greater depth. While some theorists claim that history teaching should serve particular personal, social or civic aims, others prioritise the aim of developing a disciplinary understanding of history. It is argued that the latter provides a more authentic way of approaching history. It is also argued that by developing students’ understanding of the logic and methods of the discipline of history we can help them to develop new ways of seeing the world through learning how to study the past and think historically, and that this in turn can enable deeper self-understanding, give greater meaning to the present, and provide the tools with which to view the future. Like any other school subject, history has to justify its presence in the curriculum in terms of its contribution to children’s education and in terms of its value for students. John White (1992) classifies the purposes of school history under two categories: •

The first category consists of ‘personal and social aims to do with the sense of identity, cultural roots and shared inheritances, and an understanding of other countries and cultures in the modern world’ (p. 10).

•

The second category refers to ‘[disciplinary] aims intrinsic to the subject (of history) to do with arousing interest in the past, disciplined enquiry and a grasp of historians’ methodology’ (ibid.).

Prioritising personal and social aims White argues that personal and social aims should have a priority over disciplinary aims. His argument is based on the idea that school subjects should give priority to wider educational aims (personal and social aims) because of their potential to promote ‘...student’s well being as an autonomous person within a liberal-democratic community’ (White, 1992, p. 15). He claims that the disciplinary aims will be met anyway since the subject we teach is history. Although he admits that the development of disciplinary understanding can be useful as a way of opening up life options for those who will pursue a career in the discipline, he argues that this is not enough for these kinds of aims to become a priority. Finally, he denies any special value in history’s aim to transform children’s understanding about the world, since aims like the promotion of democracy and patriotism are also transformative in a similar sense. Keith Barton and Linda Levstik (2004) agree with White about the priority of social aims in history education over the discipline’s intrinsic aims and argue that the focus on disciplinary history ‘seems unlikely to inspire... intellectual and emotional commitment’ (p. 259) and also that ‘history’s place in the curriculum must be justified in terms of its contribution to democratic citizenship - citizenship that is participatory, pluralist, and deliberative - and its practices must be structured to achieve that end’ (p. 40). Prioritising transformative aims On the other hand, Peter Lee (1992) prioritises the disciplinary aims of history over the personal and social ones and claims that this contributes also to a transformative aim. According to Lee, changing students’ views of the world, by teaching them how to study the past and think historically, gives meaning to the present and helps students reflect on the future. Lee argues that learning to think in disciplinary ways can change how pupils understand the world in a number of ways:


Changes, for example, cease to be confined to individual actions and events, and include long run gradual developments too, some of which were intended by no-one. Acceptance of the likelihood of unexpected consequences of action overturns a simplistic picture of political and social behaviour: good intentions do not guarantee happy outcomes, and not everything that causes human misery is the product of wickedness. The beliefs and values of people in the past are understood as not necessarily the same as ours, and even as passing strange, but they are still recognised as intelligible and defensible in their own terms, and as helping make sense of present beliefs and values. (Lee, 2011, p. 145) Lee claims that the transformative aim of history differs from other transformative aims because of its impartiality and universality – it is possible to think historically in these ways whilst also having a very wide range of substantive beliefs. Another of Lee’s (1992) arguments against trying to promote personal and social aims through history concerns the danger that prioritising these aims may result in the manipulation of the past to serve these purposes – when the aims matter more than the history we may feel entitled to change the history if it conflicts with our aims. Finally, he points out that there is no evidence that history can promote a wider educational aim like the ‘the promotion of the student’s well being as an autonomous person within a liberal- democratic community’ (White, 1992, p.15). He argues that although we cannot claim that learning history will make us autonomous in pursuing our life options, we can accept that knowing history may help us to think about these options more effectively. Denis Shemilt (1980) also provides arguments that support the idea that studying history can be transformative. Shemilt argues that history can enable students to analyse their world and to think about their place in it and that it can be a means to make sense of the forces that drive social change and development and a way of understanding the meaning of being human. He claims that history can provide pupils with the tools with which to think about social change, our differences and similarities with people in the past and also our shared humanity with those who lived before us. For Shemilt (2011) ‘social engineering’ approaches which primarily aim for social goals ‘strive to counter beliefs about the past deemed to be socially harmful with the truth, validity or reasonableness thereof being secondary considerations which may, if necessary, be ignored or even compromised in the interests of what is perceived to be the greater good’ (p. 93-94). An approach which prioritises social aims can lead to an ‘unhistorical’ approach to the past. The pursuit of social and personal aims may result in a subject which teaches ideals like democracy, patriotism, social justice and only those aspects of the past that support these ideals. If history is subordinated to these ideals then, arguably, we lose sight of any special contribution that history can make in the curriculum Whilst a disciplinary approach does not guarantee the promotion of particular social values, in many cases, one can argue, it does incorporate them in practice as an intrinsic component of disciplinary learning. An example is the case of democracy. The discipline of history shares common values with democracy since thinking historically involves a commitment to open argument, to the public examination of evidence, and also a commitment to debate. There are, however, potential problems with a disciplinary approach, if it is improperly or only partially implemented, as, for example, when the understanding of the discipline is reduced to merely ‘using sources’ and ‘practicing skills’ without due attention to developing students’ understanding of the discipline’s logic and methods. In conclusion, there are good grounds for claiming that to understand the aim of historical learning in terms of the direct promotion of social and personal aims is to run considerable risks, in terms of historical authenticity.2 There are also good grounds 2. In other words, if social or personal aims have priority over the accuracy and the rigour of the history that is taught then it becomes easy to argue that the history should be ‘adapted’ when it conflicts with the social or personal agendas we aim to promote through history lessons.


for claiming that history can make substantial contributions to the curriculum and that it has the potential to transform how pupils view the world by developing their understanding of the logic and methods of the discipline. As Lee (2011) argues: If our students learn to approach the past historically, they will have available the possibility, not merely of clinging to or abandoning their loyalties, traditions and social or political allegiances, but of seeing them in a different light (p.155).

2.1.2 International debates over history education In this section Most debates about history education tend to be about the kinds of political and social ideas that should be conveyed by history education. Politicians, the media, and other groups across society, by offering their views, contribute to the intensity of these debates, which often surface at times of change or during periods of anxiety connected to political issues. Usually within such debates, discussion about content relates mainly to political ideas and arguments and attention is not given to issues of methodology and teaching practices. Preventing the abuse and distortion of history by competing ideological views of the world is the duty of the educational community, who can contribute to a broader, more sensible and informed discussion about the aims and purposes of history education. As noted in the introduction to Section 2.1, public debates about history education are frequently highly politicised and conducted in terms of content rather than method. Soysal and Schissler (2005) observe, in relation to the history of the school curriculum, historically, ‘subjects were transformed into citisens through the teaching of history, geography, and the language of the nation’ (p. 1). This statement indicates why historical teaching and learning is the subject of so much political and public attention. In most countries, debates about the history curriculum are essentially about the kinds of political and social ideas and values that should be conveyed or supported through history education and these debates are usually initiated (or become intense) during reform processes, periods of perceived crisis and / or when a change of political administration occurs.3 It is not possible to do justice to the manifold complexities of debates in many different countries in a few short paragraphs. Simplifying considerably, we can say: •

debates about the history curriculum around the world are often about conflicts of political values in the present more than about the academic discipline of history;

•

these disputes tend to be connected with wider political issues such as relationships between states or about relationships between different ethnic and religious groups within the same states;

•

these debates are often highly polarised and, for example, often pit understandings of school history as ‘means to instil in the young a sense of unity and patriotism and veneration for nation’s glorious heritage’ (Foster, 1998, p.159) against contrary views that see history as a tool for promoting internationalist ideas and mutual respect between people and / or multiculturalist understandings of the nature of modern states.4

3. See Nakou and Barca (2000) and Taylor and Guyver (2011) and, in addition, Lakshmi (2000), Ogawa and Field (2006), Foster (1998), Dunn (2000), Foster (1998), Philips (1998) and Dunn (2000) on curriculum debates in India, Japan, America and England respectively. Relationships between history curriculum reform and broader changes can be explored, for example, in Dunn (2000) and Taylor (2004). 4. These ideas became more popular in the 20th century due to decolonisation, social movements, the discourse on the universality of human rights, the emergence of trasnational entities (e.g. European Union) and globalisation which changed the way societies were organised and made the idea of societies as purely national collectives difficult to sustain (Soysal and Schissler, 2005).


Usually within such debates, discussion is focused on content and on political arguments and attention is not given to issues of methodology and teaching practices.5 Despite the intensity of these debates and the public attention they attract, they are often characterised by an underlying agreement about history education’s aims and purposes, namely the proposition that history education should be concerned with shaping the ideas and values of future citizens through narrative. The crux of the debate often relates to defining the ‘best story’ to be taught for this purpose and / or to the kinds of belief and value that future citizens should hold.

5. An exception to the above claim is the case of England where the debate was also about methodology. In this case the debate was between the idea that history should reinforce British identity through a chronological narrative (an empirically untested proposition) and the ‘new history’s’ idea that school history should pursue aims that are intrinsic in the discipline of history (Foster, 1998; Philips, 1998; Dunn, 2000). While the first position viewed history as a ‘received’ subject which can form the ideas of students (who are passive subjects in this process), the second position argued in favour of the importance of understanding the discipline of history and its interpretative nature and in favour of giving students’ an active role (Shemilt, 1980).


2.2 Research on students’ historical thinking In this section This section provides an overview of 20th century developments in history education research. Most studies reflect assumptions about history education prevalent at the time that they were conducted and, since history education focused for so long on the development of substantive knowledge, this was the main focus of early research efforts. Recent research focuses on historical thinking and shows that students are able to develop sophisticated ideas about history from a young age, and supports a greater focus on the development of historical thinking in classrooms. From rather limited beginnings in the early 20th century, history education research has grown to become a rich and productive field of enquiry.6 As the field has expanded, the quantity and quality of what is known about how children learn history has grown and the ways in which historical education is understood have themselves undergone dramatic changes. In the early 20th century, history education research was mainly focused on the acquisition and recall of factual knowledge about the past and on testing students’ ability to recite names, dates and facts. Research findings tended to show that children did not know the facts that they were expected to know and often led to criticism of school practices. The emphasis on substantive knowledge was not a phenomenon restricted to education, but it was also present in the ‘prevailing views of knowledge in the discipline of history’ at the time (Wineburg, 2001, p.36). In the 1950s, the influence of Jean Piaget’s theories of cognitive development focused educational psychologists’ interest on students’ thinking processes in history rather than on their acquisition of substantive knowledge.7 The results of studies based on Piagetian tradition showed, however, that students’ thinking in history was developing later than in maths or science and resulted in doubts being expressed about the ability of adolescents to cope with historical thinking (Hallam, 1967; Stones, 1955 cited in Steele, 1976; De Silva, 1972 cited in Steele, 1976). This research adopted methods derived from educational research in maths and science and used these models to explore students’ historical thinking, an approach subsequently considered problematic because of the substantial differences between the logic and methods used in history and in these other disciplines (Wineburg, 2001; Dickinson and Lee, 1978 and Booth, 1987). Approaching students’ historical understanding in terms of reciting substantive knowledge or trying to explore it in terms of forms of thought characteristic of science or mathematics led to pessimistic assumptions regarding students’ ability to think historically and, consequently, sustained conventional teaching practices focused on the transmission of factual knowledge. Both approaches to school history, and the pedagogic pessimism that they resulted in, were subjected to sustained critique in the 1970s. The early 1970s were a turning point in history education in England. The School Council History Project’s evaluation study by Denis Shemilt (1980) is probably (along with CHATA project) the most important study of students’ reasoning in history conducted to date. The main findings from this study were that adolescents can develop a refined understanding of history as a form of knowledge and that this understanding can be taught. Although Shemilt’s work overturned the negative pictures of students’ historical reasoning drawn by studies based on Piagetian tradition, he explicitly acknowledged the usefulness of the Piagetian approach as long as it was adapted in terms of history and not physical sciences. Other studies, notably the CHATA project, showed that understanding of the discipline’s ways of knowing is not confined to secondary education students, and that younger students can also develop sophisticated ideas about history and how we can produce knowledge about the past.8

6. Wineburg (2001), pp. 28-60 reviews the history of history education research and Donovan and Bransford (2005) summarise current research and apply it to classroom practice. 7. Wood (2005), and Harré (2006) provide critical expositions of Piaget’s theories. 8. For information about the outcomes of the research project Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches (CHATA) conducted between 1991 and 1996 see Lee (2006), Lee and Ashby (2001), Lee and Ashby (2000), Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (2001).


Today, research in the area of students’ historical understanding in terms of historical reasoning flourishes around the world.9 In the case of the Cypriot educational systems, though, very little research evidence exists regarding students’ thinking in history.10 As in other cases, this is due to the lack of a research community of experts in history education and the prevailing views of history education on the island. The number of postgraduate researchers in history education is increasing, however, and this will potentially lead to the formation of a stronger research community in Cyprus (Perikleous, 2010) and consequently the exploration of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot students’ historical thinking.11

9. For examples of research in the US and the UK, beyond the work already mentioned, see Barton (2008), Barton and Levstik (2008), VanSledright and Afflerbach (2005), Shemilt (2009), Lee and Howson (2009) and Chapman (2009). For examples of research beyond the U.S. and the UK see Barca (2005), Cercadillo (2001), Hsaio (2005), Kourgiantiakis (2005), Ribeiro (2002 cited in Barca, 2004), Bermudez and Jaramillo (2001), Nakou (2001), Carretero, Lopez Manjon and Jacott (1998), Perikleous (2011). 10. To date, two studies have explored students’ historical thinking in the context of Cyprus. Both have focused on Greek Cypriot primary students, exploring, in one case, students’ knowledge of substantive concepts (e.g. freedom, revolution etc.) as they were prescribed in the curriculum at the time (Skouros, 1999) and, in the second case, primary students’ ideas about the second order concept historical empathy (Perikleous, 2010). 11. As part of the evaluation of these educational packs, the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research is planning to conduct a study which will include an exploration of students’ historical thinking. Currently, the AHDR is the only organisation in Cyprus with the expertise and declared will to conduct this kind of research.


2.3 Developing historical thinking In this section This section draws on fundamental principles for learning in different areas of knowledge, and focuses on their application in history education. Two key dimensions of developing historical knowledge and understanding are: developing students’ knowledge of the past, and, developing students’ knowledge and understanding of history as a disciplined form of thinking about the past and about how we can construct knowledge about the past. These dimensions of historical learning are elaborated upon in subsequent sections. At the heart of teaching there is the idea that ‘[m]uch that each human being knows about the world is acquired informally, but mastery of the accumulated knowledge of generations requires intentional learning, often accomplished in [a] formal educational setting’ (Donovan and Bransford, 2005, p.1). It is crucial for teachers to be able to help their students to develop this collective knowledge. In a synthesis of the findings of over thirty years of educational research, the US National Research Council set out to identify fundamental principles for learning in different areas of knowledge in its publication How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 1999) the following three wellestablished principles are highlighted. Fundamental Principles for Learning 1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. 2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must: (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organise knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application. 3. A metacognitive approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them (Donovan and Bransford, 2005, p. 1). In the context of history, the first principle directs teachers to the importance of understanding the assumptions that students bring to the classroom about what happened in the past and about how we can construct knowledge about the past. The second principle draws attention to the importance of our students developing a strong foundation of knowledge about the past, an understanding of concepts that relate to the content of the history we teach (e.g. government, state, trade, tax) and an understanding of concepts that relate to the discipline of history (e.g. accounts, evidence, cause, change). The third principle highlights the importance, if students are to progress their thinking, of developing students’ ability to think about how they are thinking in history, and thus to self-evaluate, in order to develop as independent learners. In all three cases, developing students’ knowledge of the past and developing students’ knowledge and understanding of history as a disciplined form of thinking are both equally important. In this section, we discuss both of these dimensions of historical knowledge development: •

developing students’ substantive knowledge of the past (factual knowledge of what happened in the past); and

•

developing students’ disciplinary knowledge (understanding of how we learn about the past and the forms and limits of historical knowledge).


2.3.1 What happened in the past? Developing students’ substantive knowledge In this section When developing substantive knowledge, it is important to enable students to orientate themselves in time. Students often come to the classroom with knowledge of the past that is incoherent, fragmented, distorted, or open to misconceptions. Overcoming such challenges requires helping students to develop coherent historical frameworks in which the past can be organised in meaningful ways. This section discusses the development of coherent historical frameworks through teaching and also stresses the importance of engaging with history beyond the traditional focus on political and military national history. When we refer to substantive knowledge we mean the: •

substantive knowledge of the past (past events, names, dates);

•

substantive knowledge of past concepts (e.g. ‘slave’, ‘divine right’, ‘king’ etc as understood in the time in question); and

•

knowledge of substantive concepts derived from a range of areas of knowledge (economics, politics, sociology, etc.) that we use to make sense of the past (e.g. ‘revolution’, ‘war’, ‘unemployment’, ‘social class’ etc.).

Developing students’ substantive knowledge about what happened in the past is central to history education. Knowledge is not valuable for its ‘own sake’, however, and the point of developing students’ knowledge of the past is to help students orientate themselves in time. In other words, to help students develop pictures of the past which they can remember, understand and use to make sense of the world.12 The findings of recent exploratory research in the England (Lee, 2004, 2007; Lee and Howson, 2009) and also a recent report of the Schools Inspectorate (2007 cited in Shemilt, 2011) suggest that students in both primary and secondary education in England do not posses coherent pictures of the past. Their knowledge about the past tends to be fragmented and in most of cases limited to fragmentary knowledge of events, periods and people without an understanding of how these factual fragments might be connected to each other or to the present (Lee, 2004; Shemilt, 2000). In addition, students’ understanding of what they do know tends to be distorted by their misconceptions about the past or how we can come to know about it. Classroom experience in Cyprus, at least, suggests that the above descriptions apply in the case of Cypriot students also and this claim is also supported by anecdotal evidence of teachers’ perceptions: concerns about students’ inability to connect the knowledge of different historical periods and about the tendency to confuse chronology and to ‘misplace’ people and events in time appear frequently in history teachers’ everyday discussions. The traditional and widespread practice in many educational systems of teaching history on a strictly chronological model in which historical periods are taught in sequence without any special attention being given to establishing connections between them does not seem to help students develop the ability to orient themselves in time. As Sam Wineburg (2000) mentions, the claim that students ‘don’t know the facts’ in history has remained unchanged for the last 100 years. Even in educational systems (i.e. the English one) where emphasis is given to the development of students’ historical thinking, the claim that students’ historical knowledge is fragmented remains. Some of the most prominent

12. The idea of orientating in time refers to the ability of students to access the past in ways that make it meaningful and relate it to their present and their future. In other words orientation in time is about being able to use the past to understand the world (in the past, the present and the future). In this sense the past, the present and the future are not considered as separate temporal chunks, but as developmentally connected parts of the same continuum (time). See Howson (2009) for useful visual models of temporal orientation.


figures in this educational tradition argue that although developing disciplinary understanding is necessary if we are to help students develop a coherent understanding of the past, there is nothing to suggest that this is sufficient (Lee, 2004; Shemilt, 2000). To tackle this issue it is essential to find ways of connecting the substantive knowledge that students acquire together so that, eventually, they can develop big pictures of the past. The development of historical frameworks have been proposed by Lee, Shemilt, Howson and Rogers as a strategy for encouraging the development of big picture understandings of the past. Rogers reports classroom research that demonstrated some success in helping students develop understandings of this nature through the use of rapid overviews and scaffolds of questions designed to get students to review what they were learning regularly and to ask questions about connections across periods and between past and future (Rogers, 2008).13 According to Lee (2004) these usable historical frameworks: •

cannot be built up solely through the teaching of the details of history but require the study of long term patterns of change;

•

their building requires the teaching of broad generalisations about how human societies have developed;

•

they must be rapidly taught and often revised so that students can assimilate new knowledge to their developing frameworks and also consolidate the frameworks themselves; and

•

they must be open to change, improvement, modification or even abandoning in favour of a better ones.

In addition, Lee stresses the importance, to the development of big picture understandings, of explicitly focusing teaching and learning around second order concepts such as change.14 Shemilt (2000) also highlights the importance of a disciplinary approach and suggests a number of practical strategies to scaffold framework development including: •

teaching students summaries of history on large scales that are frequently revisited and deepened;

•

the inclusion of long term thematic studies in syllabuses;

•

the frequent use of overviews in class at various degrees of resolution (20, 160, 700 years etc.);

•

the highlighting of key data to be incorporated into developing frameworks in class to clearly distinguish them from other aspects of lesson content; and

•

the frequent revision and summary of key data to be incorporated in developing frameworks.

Building on these ideas, content could be organised pedagogically in a combination of overviews, thematic studies and depth studies linked to key historical themes (e.g. settlement and communication, everyday life and beliefs, movement or power and politics). The following table suggests how these three kinds of studies can assist the development of coherent historical frameworks.

13. Comprehensive explorations of frameworks and big pictures can befound in Lee (2004), Shemilt (2000) and (2009) and Howson (2009). 14. Second order or disciplinary concepts are concepts related to the way we explore the past (e.g. time, cause, change etc.). They are essentially ‘rules and tools used to determine what we are entitled to say about the past, how we construct narratives and explain what occurred’ (Shemilt, 2010). These concepts are discussed further below.


Study

Description

Overviews

Overviews are taught quickly at the beginning of the teaching of a key theme. Teaching an overview is focused on setting chronological starting and finishing points and identifying the key thematic changes which will be studied (e.g. where did people live in Cyprus from 7000 BCE to 2011 CE). Overviews are the initial forms on which the frameworks are to be developed.

Thematic studies

During thematic studies, students study large scale changes (e.g. how did people choose the location of their cities in Cyprus from 7000 BCE to 2011 CE or how did people build their houses in Cyprus from 7000 BCE to 2001 CE). Thematic studies are used to develop the key thematic changes, identified in the overview, and to fill out the framework.

Depth studies

In depth studies, students study events or short periods of time (e.g. an ancient city in Cyprus). Depth studies are used to test and develop the framework and students are encouraged to locate depths studies in the framework as it evolves.

In addition to the above, the development of substantive knowledge can be assisted by comparative studies that go beyond single national contexts. Students will never be able to really understand the world, especially the complex contemporary ‘global village’ where people from distant places have to interact with each other on a daily basis, unless they have the chance to study the past beyond a narrow national focus. On the basis of the arguments above and also on a number of other considerations, we propose a number of principles that should govern thinking about the content of school history: •

During their history education students should have the chance to work with stories of groups (women, children, minorities and religious groups living close to them and the rest of the world) who are usually excluded or neglected by school history. We should not pretend that these stories do not exist since students encounter them outside school and they have a powerful effect on their personal narratives (Wertsch and Rozin, 1998).

•

Students should have the opportunity to study a variety of issues beyond political ones dominated by the deeds of important men. In this sense, the content taught must include aspects of history other than the political and military, such as everyday life and working conditions in rural and urban areas, science, education, social changes, technological development, the history of minorities and religious groups, migration, women, and children. The traditional approach of focusing on political history is problematic, both in terms of neglecting a great part of what happened in the past and also in terms of understanding political history itself: the present has been shaped, as the future will be, not only by political decisions or events, but also by a variety of factors, interrelated in complex ways. It is evident also that we cannot fully understand political history itself without viewing it in relation to other aspects of history.15

•

Finally, the sources of content knowledge that we offer our students should be of various kinds, reflecting the contemporary range of the discipline of history and also the core materials that disciplined historical thinking works on and with. The use of sources has to offer more than merely the stimulation of students’ interest or the creation of a sense of ‘authenticity’.

15. For example, the expansion of empires cannot be understood without reference to developments in technology, transportation, communications and warfare. See Mann (1986) and (1993) for a systematic review of the interrelationships between social, military, political and ideological factors in the development of human history.


The main benefit from using sources is the development of students’ historical thinking. Working with sources provides the opportunity to think about how we can construct knowledge about the past using the traces of the past that exist in the present. Working with historical traces helps students develop understandings of concepts that are central in historical thinking (such as accounts, evidence, and relics).16 Students should be encouraged to work with primary and secondary sources of a variety of kinds which: •

are suitable for their comprehension abilities and age;

•

present multiple perspectives from the local, national and international contexts, so that students become aware of them; and

•

include a full range of sources of knowledge of the past ranging from the relics of material culture through to historical reports in various genres, from official through to oral histories and traditions: a range of materials essential to the development of pupils’ abilities to interpret, evaluate and compare sources and narratives in relation to contrasting accounts.

A very important part of developing students’ substantive knowledge is helping them to understand the substantive concepts that are used when we study the past. These are concepts historians use to describe political, social, economic and cultural phenomena (e.g. trade, democracy, king, slavery, constitution etc.). They are numerous and are referred to various areas of human activity. The selection of which substantive concepts are to be developed in classrooms needs to be based on the relevance to the substantive knowledge to be taught. Students (and of course educators) should be aware of the fact that the meaning of substantive concepts can change over time and space. Gaining the knowledge of a concept in one context cannot always guarantee that this will work in another context. For the example, the concept of monarchy in the Middle Ages had a very different content from the concept of monarchy in the 21st century. As mentioned earlier, students do not come to history classes ‘empty headed’ but bring with them their own ideas about the past and how we know about it, based, often, on their everyday understandings of the present. Children begin to develop understandings of the world from a very young age. Research shows that these initial understandings have a powerful effect on the integration of new concepts and understandings (Bransford et al., 2000). Students’ ideas can be helpful to history teachers but they can also create problems because ideas that work well in the everyday world are not always applicable in the study of history and to the worlds of the past (Lee, 2005, p.31). In the case of substantive concepts this means that when students encounter a new historical concept they will often have existing ideas of it based on their experience of the present to which they are likely to attempt to assimilate the new concept, often with unhelpful consequences for the development of their understanding of the past. Thus, for example, it is probable that when students first encounter the concept of ‘democracy’ in Ancient Athens they will understand in it modern terms and thus misunderstand Ancient Athens by assuming that women had the right to vote. Research evidence from both sides of the Atlantic provides considerable insight into the kinds of substantive preconception that students are likely to bring to their studies.17 Teachers need to be attentive to students’ conceptual learning so that misconceptions that can impede historical learning do not go unchallenged.

16. For research evidence that explores how the use of a variety of sources can contribute substantially to the development of historical understanding see Rogers (1984) and Yeager and Doppen (2001). 17. For examples of studies about students’ ideas about substantive concepts see Furnham (1992), Berti (1994), Delval (1992), Torney- Purta (1992), Berti and Andriolo (2001), Berti and Vanni (2002) all cited in Lee (2005).


Developing a coherent historical framework which extends to our present helps students to realise that the present is essentially the leading edge of the past which moves towards the future.18 In this way the past becomes important for students’ contemporary lives and their thinking about the future. Developing substantive concepts can also make a useful contribution to developing children’s’ understandings of generic features of the world (for example economic processes). Through history, students can come to understand how modern day institutions, processes and practices have developed and acquired their current meanings. In this way, the development of students’ substantive knowledge of the past can contribute to history’s transformative aim of changing the way students see their world.

18. The ‘leading edge’ metaphor is Peter Lee’s. These ideas are developed in systematic and accessible ways in Howson (2009).


2.3.2 How do we know/ learn about the past? Developing students’ understanding of the discipline of history In this section We discuss the importance of developing students’ understanding of disciplinary concepts in history, their understanding of historical enquiry and also the development of dispositions relating to the disciplined exploration of the past. Second order or disciplinary concepts related to the way we explore the past, such as time, cause and consequence, change and continuity, evidence, accounts, significance and historical empathy are defined. The ideas that should be developed in relation to each of these concepts are the result of an on-going process of learning. Teachers should keep in mind that developing historical understanding is a long and painstaking process. Historians produce and articulate knowledge claims about the past through processes of disciplined historical enquiry. Learning to understand history cannot simply mean understanding the product of historical enquiry (knowledge about the past) but must also involve understanding the processes of historical enquiry that generate this knowledge and that give it whatever authority and credibility it has (Megill, 2007; Rogers, 1979). Developing understanding of history as process can also help students appreciate the nature and limits of historical knowledge and also empower them to be able to detect and critique ideological myths masquerading as historical claims. Developing these understandings involves developing our students’ understanding of disciplinary concepts of history, their grasp of historical enquiry and their understanding of the dispositions associated with the disciplined exploration of the past. Second order or disciplinary concepts are, essentially, ‘rules and tools used to determine what we are entitled to say about the past, how we construct narratives and explain what occurred’ (Shemilt, 2010).19 Second order concepts include concepts such as time, cause, change, evidence, accounts, significance and historical empathy. They define the relationship between ‘the known past’ and ‘the real past’ and prioritise historical accounts over the products of myth, folk memory, journalism and fiction (ibid.). Since as mentioned earlier the development of meta-cognitive abilities is one of the basic principles of learning, it is crucial to help our students develop some key second-order concepts which may help them explore the past, understand the present and take control of their own learning even after the end of their school career. Although students might not be aware of it, they already hold complex conceptual assumptions based on their experience of the world inside and outside school before they start thinking about history. These ideas are likely to be misconceptions mainly because historical thinking is in many cases counter-intuitive. For example, when students attempt to explain the behaviour of people in the past (historical empathy), the resources that they rely on to interpret their own experience of the world are likely to be as much a hindrance as a help, since people in the past lived in a very different conceptual worlds and had very different beliefs and values and ideas about the world and how it works. As in the case of substantive concepts, teachers need to be aware of their students’ tacit understandings and conceptual assumptions in order to be able to challenge misconceptions and help them move to more powerful understandings. A great deal is known about students’ preconceptions and research based models of progression have been developed that can assist teachers in moving student thinking from simplistic and flawed understandings to more sophisticated and more powerful ones.20 Research progression models cannot predict a student’s route to mastery of concepts in a Piagetian way, where all students follow the same route and every subsequent level replaces the previous one (Lee and Shemilt, 2003; Lee, 2006). Progression models ‘are like the trails left by sheep on a mountainside, which show us the way most of the sheep happen to go, not the paths they must take’ (Lee, 2006, p. 138). Progression models are useful as a guide to the preconceptions that we are likely to encounter

19. They are also known with other names such as meta-concepts and procedural concepts. 20. For examples see Ashby and Lee (1987); Dickinson and Lee (1978); Dickinson and Lee (1984); Lee and Ashby (2001); Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (2001); Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (1997); Barca (2005); Cercadillo (2001); Chapman (2009); Hsaio (2005); Lee (2006); Lee and Ashby (2000); Shemilt (1984); Perikleous (forthcoming).


in any history class and to what we can expect to achieve by developing our students’ ideas (Lee and Shemilt, 2003; Ashby and Lee, 1987; Lee, 2006).21 The following table presents some of these second order concepts and some key ideas that we should aim to develop through historical teaching and learning. The ideas described below are final points that teaching should aim to move students towards and it is unlikely that students will develop these ideas before the final stages of their school careers. These ideas represent a goal to work towards: when teaching to develop ideas we should always aim for the highest level and not just to move our students from one simplistic idea to another less simplistic one.

Concept

Ideas to be developed

Time

Students should be helped to understand the distinction between what is ‘past’ and what is ‘old’ or ‘outdated’. They should also develop an understanding of periodization (periods in history cannot usually be defined by specific starting and ending points and these can differ according to the theme we study) and the fact that understanding periods in history demands also depth knowledge of the history that the period labels organise and summarise. They should also be aware that in many cases conventional terms which refer to time can have a different meaning in history, for example, when we refer to the music of the 1960s this does not mean everything that was written (or aired) from 1/1/1960 to 31/12/1969 but refers, rather, to music that expresses what we understand ‘the 60s’, as a period concept, to connote. Finally, students should develop a sense of duration when they think about events, changes and so on.

Change and continuity

Students should understand that change can be intentional or unintentional and that it has various directions between and within themes. They should also understand that history is dealing with much longer scales than everyday ones and that, in many cases, change is viewed as a change in states of affairs and themes rather than in terms of single events. The latter is a very important distinction since students can tend to reduce changes to single events which cause others. Students also need to understand that history works with the notion of continuity (the absence of change): in other words, history is also concerned with states of affairs and / or themes that did not change.

Accounts

Students need to understand that accounts (e.g. history books) are not copies of the past but representations of it. There is no one complete and true account of the past since accounts demand selection and since there are no perspective-free accounts. Also students need to understand that differences in accounts are in many cases due to the different questions which their authors are trying to answer. Therefore bias and personal preferences are not the only reason for different accounts.

Evidence

Historians construct claims about the past by interrogating ‘sources’. Students should learn that ‘sources’ only yield ‘evidence’ in the context of questioning and that information about the past only becomes ‘evidence’ when it is used to help establish or to test a claim about the past. Also,

21. Summaries of key research in relation to a number of second order concepts are available in the case of evidence (Lee and Shemilt, 2003), accounts (Lee and Shemilt, 2004), causation (Lee and Shemilt, 2009) and empathy (Lee and Shemilt, 2011). Lee (2005) is a concise and systematic exploration of all the second order concepts.


Concept

Ideas to be developed we are not forced to choose one ‘correct’ account of the past but we can extract our own conclusion combining various and even opposing accounts. They also should be able to make two parallel distinctions between records and relics and between intentional and unintentional evidence.22 Finally, they need also to be aware of the fact that quality is more important than quantity: even where a large number of evidential arguments appear to support one claim about the past, one opposing evidential argument can be enough to disprove it.

Cause and consequence

Students should understand that identifying causes involves thinking in terms of networks of interrelated events, processes and states of affairs that relate to each other in various ways and not just in terms of a linear chain of interlinked events. In this network the relationships (not only the elements) are important. Exploring this network we can identify elements that are essential for the events we explain. These elements can be identified as causes and other aspects of the situation considered as background elements. Causes can also be understood in terms of their role – one factor may enable an outcome, for example, but another factor may be crucial in determining the timing and manner of the outcome.

Historical empathy

Students should understand that in order to explain the actions of people in the past, they need to consider the ideas and beliefs about the world that people in the past held, which were often dramatically different from the ideas and beliefs that the students hold and that they need to understand past actors’ aims, intentions and aspirations if they are to explain what they did and why they did it. Also they should understand that knowledge of the historical context in which people in the past lived is vital to making sense of the different ways in which people in the past viewed their situation and their world in general.

Historical significance

Students should have an understanding that historical significance is ascribed to people in the past by people in the present and that it changes as the present changes. The forms of significance ascribed to a given historical change, event or personality vary also depending on the differing themes and timescales that are used in different representations of the past. The significance ascribed to an event, change or actor also varies depending on how it is contextualised and related to other aspects of the past.

22. Records are sources that were constructed to convey information about past events/processes or states of affairs (e.g. a battlefield combat report). Relics are sources that were not intended to report something (e.g. the remains of a battle). The status of a source depends on how it is interrogated. We can scrutinise reports as reports, for example, by extracting ‘the story’ that they were trying to tell about a past event, or, alternatively, we can interrogate them as relics, for example, in order to understand aspects of communication technology in the past.


Thinking historically is a way of ordering and exploring the past: historians ‘give temporal order to the past, explain why events and processes took place as they did, and write accounts of the past; they base everything they do on the evidence available’ (Lee, 2005, p.41). Students need also to develop abilities relevant to historical enquiry and to be enabled to conduct their own inquires and produce answers to historical questions by gathering, evaluating and interpreting a variety of historical sources. Helping students develop their conceptual and practical grasp of historical enquiry is a key dimension of the history teacher’s role. In addition, students should be able to communicate the results of their inquiries and their knowledge in a variety of ways using the proper historical language and conventions. Also, we should bear in mind that ‘history is an interpersonally constructed form of knowledge and historical knowledge claims are tested and established according to debate, hence discussion and debate are inherent to the subject as a form of knowledge and they should therefore be integral to the development of historical thinking’ (Chapman, 2009). Finally, dispositions are also a fundamental part of the discipline of history. In order to try to interpret and understand the past students need to be respectful towards evidence and be prepared to provide impartial accounts (even if examining the evidence results in stories that they do not want to tell). They should also be able to appreciate well-grounded judgments and strive to make them. A respect for the past, its people and their achievements and an acknowledgment of the distance between the present and the past are all crucial to the study of history. Developing disciplinary understanding is a slow and difficult process. Concepts, abilities and dispositions cannot be developed simply through a few classroom discussions and examples. We must return to these ideas again and again over a number of years in appropriate ways and with suitable materials in order to consolidate and deepen emerging understandings. We should bear in mind that developing historical thinking is not an all-or-nothing endeavour, but a process of the continual development of increasingly sophisticated ideas. This does not mean that students will do it as well as professional historians. History education is not, in any case, in the business of creating ‘mini historians’. History education is, however, about creating historical thinkers and doing this involves the consideration of a range of complex forms of thinking (Megill, 2007; Tosh, 2008).


2.3.3 History and collective memory It is conventional, in academic literature, to distinguish between ‘history’ and ‘collective memory’, or, to say the same thing in a different way, to distinguish between the ways in which the past is approached and constructed through the academic discipline of history and the ways in which the past is approached and constructed in social, cultural and political practices linked to the construction of individual and group identities (Wertsch, 2002). It is difficult to distinguish between these two categories in a final and definitive sense, since, for example, the products of academic history can be used in ‘collective memory’ projects and also, of course, because individual historians themselves operate in contexts and are shaped by them to one degree or another. The difference, however, captures an important distinguishing feature of the disciplinary historical approach to the past, namely, its epistemological intent: as Wineburg notes, although the probative interrogation of sources of evidence about the past is a key component of disciplinary historical thinking, it is not generally welcome at family gatherings, or other social occasions, where the past is recalled (Wineburg, 2007). Although the content of school history has typically been focused around the products of academic history, as mediated by textbooks, rather than on the study of collective memory texts and practices, curriculum models exist that ask pupils to focus on both. For example, under the National Curriculum revision introduced in England in 2007, as well as studying aspects of British, European and world history, pupils are expected to study ‘historical interpretations’ which is described as involving: • Understanding how historians and others form interpretations. • Understanding why historians and others have interpreted events, people and situations in different ways through a range of media. • Evaluating a range of interpretations of the past to assess their validity (QCA, 2007). The ‘others’ referred to here include ‘writers, archaeologists... filmakers’ (QCA, 2007) and the intention is that school history should explore a wide range of forms through which history is constructed and presented in everyday life and contemporary culture. Teachers have interpreted these requirements in a number of ways and have, for example, developed strategies in which pupils: • explore how popular cultural representations of the past are constructed (Banham and Hall, 2003); • explore how the aims and practices of popular history differ from the aims and practices of academic history (Historical Association History Transition Project, 2005); • explore how popular cultural understandings of particular passages of the past have been changed over time (Card, 2004). Focusing historical thinking on the ways in which the past is understood through collective memory and popular culture can have many merits, not least in helping students develop the tools that will help them think about the multiple and often conflicting representations of the past that they come across in everyday life. It is to be hoped, for example, that empowering students to think critically in these ways will enhance their ability to recognise and, where appropriate, to challenge, ideologically motivated misrepresentations of the past. It is also likely that students’ grasp of the discipline of history will be deepened if they are asked to think about the specific differences between disciplined historical representation, whose primary purpose is to produce warranted constructions of the past and whose primary focus is epistemological, and other forms of representing the past in public history and popular culture whose aims are often highly variable and range, for example, from entertainment to attempts at enculturation into particular national or communal identities through narrative (McAleavy, 2000; Chapman, 2010). Thinking in these ways is likely to enhance students’ historical literacy and also their broader cultural literacies. Studying collective memory practices through school history can, arguably, help to develop students as critical historical thinkers (Wineburg, 2007). However, to return to Wineburg’s observation about family gatherings, it can serve another purpose also. Human beings engage with the past for multiple purposes and understanding history involves understanding this: there are times and contexts in which a critical and disciplined orientation to the past is appropriate and necessary (notably, where claims to truth are involved); there are other times, however, when a reasoned and critically focused approach to the past is neither called for nor warranted (for example, there is little to be gained by demonstrating that an episode of The Flintstones is not grounded in warranted historical claims).


2.3.4 History textbooks In this section Textbooks play a central role in many educational systems. The majority of history textbooks share two common features: first, they tend to promote official narratives which endorse and advocate the ideas and beliefs of dominant groups in society; second, these narratives tend to be single and authoritative and tend not to allow space for different perspectives. This section discusses the challenges associated with attempting to present a more ‘objective’ version of history, and offers recommendations about how to re-function the narratives presented in textbooks using a disciplinary teaching approach. The intention of this approach is to engage students with less one-sided approaches to the past and to develop students’ historical understanding. School textbooks play a vital role in everyday educational practice. Although we cannot claim that textbooks are identical to what is taught or learned, their influence is profound (Foster, 2006). Textbooks are the most widely used educational tools: Foster claims that in the 18th and 19th century textbooks were the widest read books apart from the Bible. Although the variety of educational resources has increased dramatically in contemporary classrooms, the role of textbooks remains central in many educational systems. This is partly due to the fact that they offer, at least theoretically, a ‘safe’ guide in teaching as expressions of the curriculum.23 The role of textbooks is even more crucial in the case of history since they are often used as means to endorse the cultural, ideological and political ideas of dominant social groups and to assert cultural homogeneity through the promotion of shared attitudes and the construction of shared historical memories (Foster and Crawford, 2006). International research on history textbooks reveals a great deal about the content of textbooks. The historical text included and the facts and perspectives which are excluded offer us insights into textbooks’ ideologies (Foster and Crawford, 2006). Today, the majority of history textbooks share two common features. First, they tend to promote official narratives which express and advocate the ideas and beliefs of dominant groups (usually the dominant racial / ethnic / social and male group in each case). These official narratives are, in many cases, rather nationalistic.24 Although these features can be less obvious in modern textbooks than they were in the past, they are still present and affect the picture of the past presented to the students (Foster, 2006). The second key feature of textbooks is the fact that textbook narratives tend to be single and authoritative and do not allow any space for different perspectives.25 What can be done to counter the monoperspectival stance on historical learning generated by textbooks? Efforts to counter monoperspectival and ‘official’ features of textbooks and to produce ‘balanced’ textbooks are one possibility but it is unlikely that simply including content about previously marginalised groups, for example, will make a great difference to the overall outcome unless the existing narrative framework is challenged also (Foster, 2006; Sleeter and Grant, 1991).

23. The heavy reliance on textbooks is, at least to a degree, due to teachers’ anxieties relating to having to teach large classes in many different school subjects (Foster, 2006). In many cases textbooks can even ‘become’ the curriculum itself and Foster and Crawford (2006) claim that history textbooks often come to have the same authority as government policy papers. 24. In Cyprus, the textbooks used in both the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot educational systems present a narrative dictated by the respective official curricula which ‘aim primarily to promote national identity and pride... [and]...focus on the moral (and often military in terms of heroism) superiority of ‘our just nation’ over that of immoral ‘others’ (Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, 2008, p. 2). In China the emphasis is on the idea of ‘One China’ which includes the mainland and all the peripheral territories and a narrative in which China is a glorious but peaceful nation which is usually the victim of evil neighbours or western countries (Vickers, 2006; Crawford and Foster, 2007). The simplistic way US history textbooks present the case of 9/11 as an unprovoked terrorist attack has also been interpreted as an example of a ‘narrow and nationalistic perspective’ (Hess, Stoddard and Murto, 2007, p. 28). 25. The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research in Cyprus (2008) claims that ‘the majority of the history textbooks used today [in Cyprus] present a monolithic, monoperspectival and ethnocentric official narrative’ (p. 5), a judgment that could equally be applied to many textbooks around the world.


While it does not seem possible to have an ‘objective’ and agreed narrative which includes all stories, unless a textbook becomes a library, history textbooks can attempt to counter monoperspectivity by including a variety of interpretations and thus to ‘include multiple perspectives’ from a variety of contexts, local, national, regional and international (Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, 2008, p.3). To achieve mutliperspectivity, textbooks might endeavour not to consist solely of narratives constructed by their authors and aim to include a variety of primary and secondary sources. In this way textbooks could become a means of teaching history as an interpretative discipline and not just a means of promoting selected versions of the past. Finally, textbooks should offer the materials for building flexible historical frameworks and aim to provide a scaffold around which developmental narratives of change might be constructed. Textbooks which provide a variety of sources, different perspectives and that aim to facilitate the construction of historical frameworks are not guaranteed to promote historical understanding if they do not offer the opportunities for the students to develop understandings about the discipline of history. In this sense textbooks need to provide ‘carefully designed tasks and activities that aim to develop substantive (factual) knowledge’ and also ‘specific historical concepts, abilities and relevant dispositions’ (Association for Historical Dialogue and Research, 2008, p.5). Textbooks which support tasks of this kind are most likely to help teachers with their everyday practice. In many cases the lack of this kind of support can lead teachers, especially teachers inexperienced in history teaching or those who have to deal with large classes and a variety of subjects, to take less sophisticated approaches. In conclusion history textbooks should not aim to provide just ‘objective’ and / or balanced stories, but should also aim to develop students’ historical understanding. Textbooks that set out to promote this aim should be based firstly on abandoning the single, nationalistic (or any other) authoritative narratives and on presenting the past through multiple perspectives. Combining these principles with a focus on developing the understanding of history as a discipline is likely to help students appreciate history’s interpretative nature and to engage with history not as a story to memorise and pass on, but as a means to develop, test and refine their understanding of the world.


2.3.5 Teaching sensitive and controversial history In this section There is an extensive international research and practice literature exploring the teaching of sensitive and controversial topics in history and other subjects. In this section we signpost this literature and identify some key principles that can inform practice. Like many aspects of the recent or distant past, the missing persons issue on which we focus in this set of educational materials is likely to be a highly sensitive issue and one that may elicit emotional responses from pupils and generate controversy and disagreement. There are many good reasons why this should be so: •

the topic is inherently upsetting, because of the injustice, cruelty and inhumanity that missing persons and their relatives endured and still continue to endure in many cases;

•

the topic may have direct personal resonance for students and teachers, who may have family or other links to missing people;

•

where there are no direct personal links to the topic it is possible that students may feel closely connected to it because of the resonance that the issue has with wider community narratives and identities;

•

the topic is very directly linked to the broader ‘Cyprus question’ and it is not possible to debate it without also making explicit or implicit reference to this wider sensitive and controversial issue.

There are extensive research and practice literatures internationally addressing the teaching of sensitive and controversial topics in the classroom (for example Wiese, 2011) and the topic has been much discussed in the context of history pedagogy and didactics (for example, in Cole (ed.) 2007, HA, 2007(a) and 2007(b)). Strategies for addressing these issues in particular contexts have also been developed.26 Sensitivity and controversy inherently involve questions of value, and, therefore, questions where empirical research can never provide definitive guidance. A number of principles, grounded in research and / or practitioner literature, guide our thinking in what follows and these principles are: •

the principle that it is better to provide opportunities for pupils to address controversy directly, rather than to seek to avoid it, particularly where matters of importance are concerned (Barton and McCully, 2007; Kitson, 2007);

•

the principle that controversial issues are best addressed in a focused manner and in relation to a framework that enables disciplined debate (HA, 2007(a));

•

the principle that controversial issues should be addressed democratically through open dialogue and debate from which it follows that − teachers should aim to provide students with opportunities to openly debate issues rather than seek to prescribe the views that their students should take; − that students must feel able to speak freely and, thus, that a classroom climate of democratic respect for a diversity of views and for open debate must be encouraged through, where necessary, direct teacher intervention and, in general, by teacher modelling (Cole (ed.), 2007; HA, 2007(a); Wiese, 2011);27

26. See, for examples of work addressing these issues in the context of the Northern Ireland conflict, Barton and McCully (2007), Kitson (2007), Kitson and McCully (2005), McCully and Pilgrim (2004), McCully, Pilgrim, Sutherland and McMinn (2002). 27. See, for example, the Nuffield Foundations’ proposals for managing discussions (Nuffield, n.d.).


•

the principle that teachers should enable students to express their emotional reactions to controversial issues rather than seek to avoid emotional issues (Barton and McCully, 2007).

Individual teachers must, of course, make their own decisions about how to approach teaching and learning focused around sensitive and controversial issues in their classrooms.


The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research NICOSIA 2011

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 3. What Do We Mean by Missing Persons? Experiences and Responses Around the World

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 3. What Do We Mean by Missing Persons? Experiences and Responses Around the World

Contents 1.

Introduction

2.


2.1


2.1.1


2.1.1.1 Why do we teach history? 2.1.1.2 History’s contribution to education 2.1.2


2.2


2.3


2.3.1


2.3.2


2.3.3


2.3.4

History textbooks

2.3.5


3.


p. 4

3.1


p. 5

3.1.1


p. 5

3.1.2


p. 6

3.1.3


p. 8

3.1.4


p. 9

3.1.5


p. 10

3.1.6

How did we get to the point where missing people can be traced?

p. 11

3.2


p. 23

3.3


p. 32

3.4


p. 42

3.5


p. 49

4.


2_Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 3. What Do We Mean by Missing Persons? Experiences and Responses Around the World

5.


5.1

Overview

5.2

Rationale

5.2.1


5.2.2



6.

Resources

6.1

Bibliography

6.2


6.4


6.5


Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 3. What Do We Mean by Missing Persons? Experiences and Responses Around the World_3

3. What Do We Mean by Missing Persons? Experiences and Responses Around the World In this section, the reader will be able to learn about: •

What is meant by missing persons in contrast to enforced disappearances;

•

Why enforced disappearance exists, why and how it is used as a tool for political repression;

•

Where there are experiences of missing and disappeared persons and the responses by the international community to this issue;

•

The effect on families;

•

Major developments, including: -

The role of the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg Tribunals;

-

The discovery of the DNA method of identification and its application to human rights;

-

The emergence of truth commissions and the impact of the South African experience;

-

The application of forensic anthropology and forensic archaeology to human rights;

-

The work of civil society;

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The International Day of the Disappeared;

-

The 2006 Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance;

-

The United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances and the Committee on Enforced Disappearances;

-

The responses of humanitarian and human rights law. Often, the disappeared persons are killed immediately, but their spouses, children or parents continue to live for many years in a situation of extreme anguish and stress, torn between hope and despair. They must therefore also be considered as victims of the crime of enforced disappearance (Pourgourides, 2005, paragraph 3).

One of the most terrible effects of conflict is the loss of life that results, and the destruction which it causes to whole communities of people. In many conflicts, within that loss almost always lies a deeper, and sometimes quieter tragedy: questions about the whereabouts of people who went missing and whose fate was never learned. In some cases, as in the Congo, they could be children who were separated from their families. In others like Iraq, Chechnya, or the former Yugoslavia, they could be people who were rounded up, killed, and then buried in mass graves. Or they could be arrested and held incommunicado in secret prisons as was common throughout Latin America. When the fates of these people are unknown, they are considered 'missing'.


3.1 Experiences and responses around the world 3.1.1 What do we mean by missing persons? This pack looks at situations where people have gone missing, and where they have been disappeared. While the end scenario is the same - not knowing the fate of a person's loved one, and agony for families over their whereabouts - there is a difference in law and in politics between the 'missing' and the 'disappeared'. It is helpful to be clear about the difference between these two terms, however, which are briefly explained below. 'Missing persons' are people whose families have no news of them, and those who are reported missing as a result of an armed conflict, on the basis of reliable information. This term is different from and broader in scope than 'enforced or involuntary disappearance' (Scovazzi and Citroni, 2007). Missing people can be: •

People captured during conflict;

•

Combatants ‘missing in action’ (MIAs) who probably died during combat;

•

Victims of mass killings;

•

Victims of abductions;

•

Bodies not properly identified and buried as unidentified people;

•

Displaced people and refugees;

•

Victims of natural catastrophes.

The crime of enforced disappearance, on the other hand, is defined under the 2006 International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance as the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorisation, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law (International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 2006, article 2). The primary difference between a person who has gone missing, and a person who has been disappeared, lies in the intention of the crime. Enforced disappearance is almost always part of a systematic policy of making people disappear. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has also set out a definition on enforced disappearance, which differs from the above primarily because it is broader, and regulates international criminal law.1

1. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. It was adopted on 17 July 1998, and entered into force on 1 July 2002. It broadens this definition of enforced disappearance to include non-state actors, defining enforced disappearance as: the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by or with the authorisation, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organisation, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time (Rome Statute, 1998, article 7 paragraph 2(i)).


3.1.2 Introducing experiences of missing persons around the world This section of the educational pack provides an overview of how the phenomenon of missing persons has been experienced in various contexts around the world. Educators and other users of this pack will gain a better understanding of key definitions and terms, along with the main developments that have occurred on the issue of missing persons at the global level over the past decades. Given the complex and multi-dimensional nature of the subject, the text should be seen as a first step towards introducing the human, political, social, and legal dimensions of the issue. The responses of civil society actors, families’ groups, governments, and international actors and organisations to the issue of missing persons have differed across time and across societies.2 ‘Contrary to what many people think, enforced disappearance is not a practice of the past nor is it limited to a few regions of the world. All the continents have experienced or are experiencing this criminal practice. People are disappearing in many parts of the world’ (International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances, 2010). This educational pack looks specifically at how the phenomenon of enforced disappearance and missing persons has affected five different societies: Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, Spain, Guatemala, and Morocco. Each of the case studies was chosen because of its ability to show us a different perspective on what happens in a society when people go missing, about how people in the country and the international community have responded to the phenomenon, how governments have treated the crime, and how the societies have tried to overcome the legacy of the violence which caused the disappearances. Generally speaking we will refer to situations of enforced disappearance and missing persons together, because we are concentrating on the impact of these situations and on what happens to families and to communities after people are disappeared. •

The former Yugoslavia was chosen because this case study illustrates the progress and the tensions that can arise in conflicts where there are multiple groups involved in violence. The former Yugoslavia also highlights the often tense relationships that emerge between truth seeking efforts in civil society and international legal efforts to prosecute people who perpetrated crimes like disappearance, murder, and ethnic cleansing. It is also an example of the process of regional efforts at truth-seeking.

•

Spain was chosen because the disappearances happened more than a generation ago, and were followed by a very clear societal, legal, and political 'pact of forgetting' which attempted to bury the memories of the past, and the official memory of the people who remained missing. Spain's recent efforts to find the missing, as well as to deal with the legacy of conflict which caused so many deaths and so much fear enables a discussion about the importance of dealing with the past and about what can happen if societies try to bury their past along with their missing.

•

Guatemala is interesting for its approach to reform, and the wider level of community engagement in the process of uncovering and returning the remains of disappeared people. There is also a tension in Guatemala regarding the large gap between what the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission recommended and the reforms and restitution efforts that have been made. Constant pressure from victims’ families using the local Guatemalan courts and Spanish courts, coupled with the discovery of police archives have been significant catalysing factors for prosecuting the authors of the Guatemalan genocide. The Guatemalan case therefore also highlights the use of different pressure points which has led to the prosecution of perpetrators of enforced disappearance.

•

The Moroccan case is a much less clear-cut study of what happens in societies that have suffered from a policy of enforced disappearance. In Morocco, in contrast to the other case studies, there has been very little interaction with international forensic, anthropological, or human rights experts, and it is the Moroccan government which heads the excavations of the missing. Morocco is a case where progress is very slow, domestic and international human rights organisations have a particularly difficult task in pressuring authorities to create progress, and there is very little accountability for the crimes committed, or deep official support for promoting alternative narratives about the past.

2. Civil society can be defined as a collection of voluntary social actors and organisations with shared interests and values that help form the basis of society.


What unites all of those cases is the agony shared by the families who live their lives between worlds, with no answers about what might have happened to their loved ones; simultaneously imagining the worst and hoping for the best. Without the simple right of knowing the fate of their loved ones, people are unable to mourn, tormented both by the possibility that their loved ones may be alive and waiting for help, and by the possibility that they have died and no one has laid them to rest. The right to know the truth about the fate of missing loved ones is a fundamental human right. The 'right to truth' means the right of families to know the fate and the whereabouts of their missing loved ones. Some, including the Inter American Court of Human Rights, also argue that this right does not just belong to the relatives of missing people, but also to society in general. With the right comes a society's collective responsibility to inform, and to be informed. The state has an obligation to inform to the individual about the fate of missing persons, and, by extension, society as a whole. It is not simply the right of any individual victim or his nearest and dearest to know what happened, a right to the truth. The right to know is also a collective right, drawing upon history to prevent violations from recurring in the future. Its corollary is a ‘duty to remember’ on the part of the State: to be forearmed against the perversions of history that go under the names of revisionism or negationism, for the history of its oppression is part of a people’s national heritage and as such must be preserved. These, then, are the main objectives of the right to know as a collective right. (UNCHR, 1997, paragraph 17)


3.1.3 Why does enforced disappearance take place? The phenomenon of forced disappearance... is the worst of all human rights violations. Indeed, it is a challenge to the very concept of such rights, the negation of the right of a human being to exist, to have an identity. Forced disappearance transforms the being into a non-being. It is the ultimate corruption, an abuse of power which allows the authorities to transform law and order into something derisory and to commit infamous crimes.(MacDermot, 1981) To 'disappear' a person is a political act designed to create a very specific kind of terror. The crime of disappearance is designed to silence opposition and criticism on two levels: first, the act of disappearing people silences those who are the targets of the crime, who were in opposition, or who were critics of those committing the crime of disappearance. But disappearing people also creates fear and insecurity in the broader community, silencing those who might oppose. The crime of disappearing people has enduring consequences. It is not just designed to harm the person who has been disappeared, but to cause continuous anxiety and fear to their families, their loved ones, and their communities. Therefore withholding information about what happened is part of the crime; it is a crime designed to harm over a long period and ensure the perpetrators escape justice. It can happen in the context of internal armed conflicts within democratic countries or as part of dictatorships or occupations. In a post-war context, political factors play a significant role in how the issue of the disappeared or the missing is addressed. It can be used to silence opposition to government, telling families and victims’ groups that uncovering and publicising too much truth about the violence of the past can destabilise fragile peace processes or progress towards reconciliation. Oftentimes, transition processes from conflict situations will not result in a complete handover of power, or will entail making a pact with the former power-holders. This has enabled those who were involved in carrying out the atrocities to continue to hold important positions and even be viewed as leaders by powerful elements within societies. If there is political interest in continuing to deny the atrocities, or to tell particular versions of the past, then it might be that only one group of disappeared is prioritised, or that the process is continually stalled. Without the support of political leaders, it is very difficult to initiate a process to recover the remains of the missing, and families and the people involved in exhuming and identifying the disappeared could find themselves facing overt or covert opposition through actions like continual bureaucratic blocks, the refusal of authorities to open archives, a lack of financial support, harassment, and threats. Additionally, in post-conflict contexts where fighting between groups led to atrocities being committed by multiple parties, the issue of disappearance or the missing often runs the risk of being used to reinforce black and white narratives about victimhood and perpetration. 'Our' missing and 'their' murderers can sometimes prevent authorities on all sides from wanting to allow exhumations, because they run the risk of challenging hegemonic narratives about guilt and innocence. Such situations become extremely complex, and often, humanitarian concerns about relieving the suffering of families become subsumed within political and strategic manoeuvring. However, in cases such as these, bringing to light multiple groups of victims of atrocities can be the most powerful means of building empathy between communities that have suffered.


3.1.4 Where are there experiences of missing and disappeared persons? People going missing or being 'disappeared' in conflict or authoritarian regimes is not a new phenomenon. But it is only relatively recently that the international community has been addressing the issue. The reasons for this are explored below. The first time in modern history that the phenomenon of disappearance was made 'official' was in Nazi Germany's Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass (‘Night and Fog decree’) of 7 December 1941. In this decree, people in occupied territories that were considered to be a threat to German security were secretly moved to Germany and disappeared. 'In order to maximise the desired intimidating effect, officials were prohibited to provide any information on their fate' (Pourgourides, 2005). This technique of terror was also used in Latin America some twenty years later. The large number of soldiers who went missing in action during the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and efforts to recover them, brought the issue of missing persons to the attention of the West. International attention to the phenomenon of missing and disappeared people continued to grow, mainly as a result of two major contexts: the struggles against dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and the collapse of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, where more than 20,000 people disappeared. The term 'enforced disappearance' ('desaparicion forzada' in Spanish) was first coined by Latin American civil society groups. In both regions, it was the families of the missing and disappeared that were the driving force behind the development of laws to assert the rights of the disappeared and their loved ones. As Pourgourides observes: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN Commission on Human Rights were the first international human rights bodies to respond to this phenomenon in the 1970s, with regard to cases in Chile after the military putsch of 11 September 1973 (Pourgourides, 2005). Unfortunately, missing persons and enforced disappearance are common features of conflicts all over the world, and the crime continues to occur. People have been abducted and disappeared by states or warring factions in conflicts in more than seventy countries in all regions of the world over the last fifty years, including in the following places: Africa: Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Asia and the Pacific: East Timor, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka. Europe: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, the former Yugoslavia, Republic of Macedonia, Russian Federation, Georgia and Serbia (Kosovo), Spain, and Turkey. The Americas: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti and Peru. More recently, the actions of the United States in ‘renditioning’ individuals within the war on terror is a form of enforced disappearance, recognised as such by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances. Middle East and North Africa: Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria and Morocco.


3.1.5 The effect on families He came up to me, took me by the chest and threw me into the truck. At the same moment, the truck moved. I was lying on the floor of the truck and I don't remember the trip from Potocari to Tisca... For the last ten years I have been trying to learn the fate of my husband and my child. Ten years have gone by and I still know nothing of the fate of my child. I don't know whether I will ever discover a single part of his body. (Sabaheta Fejzic, Srebrenica Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Conference, 2005) The families of the disappeared still want to know the truth, both because they have not lost hope and because they need to end the uncertainty and close the grieving process. (Batallas, 2010) Families of missing and disappeared people are subject to a kind of torture that lasts a lifetime: not being able to know what happened to their loved one, always wondering about their fate, both praying for the best and imagining the worst, and not being able to mourn their loss. It is in the continued silence of the victim, of the perpetrator, and of the society, in the face of so many nightmares that the crime of enforced disappearance becomes truly terrible. While knowing the fate of a loved one who has disappeared is a right under human rights law and international humanitarian law, states have not all adopted and applied laws that will give those answers to relatives of disappeared people. In addition to the trauma of losing your loved one in circumstances of complete uncertainty, the families of missing or disappeared persons often have to endure legal, practical, and emotional hardships. Families are often left in limbo. Legal and administrative procedures such as remarriage, applying for a child's identity document, and difficulties for the children of the missing, as well as for families if it is the primary earner who has been disappeared all become part of the trauma of disappearance. Claiming inheritance or transferring property titles also frequently become impossible. As Carlos Batallas, Head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Guatemala observes: All these formalities would be so much easier if a person could be legally classified as ‘absent due to disappearance.’ In many cases, families record the disappeared person as dead, just so they can carry out these formalities. But this makes the suffering worse; on top of the uncertainty, they feel guilty because they have denied the existence of a loved one. (Batallas, 2010) In addition to the grief and stress faced by relatives, they also often encounter isolation and intimidation. Because disappearance is often institutionalised, victims' families cannot seek the support of the state and of state institutions such as the courts, the police, and hospitals. In addition, families sometimes find themselves marginalised by their communities because of community fear of becoming victims themselves.


3.1.6 How did we get to the point where missing people can be traced? In the last decades, there have been a number of developments at regional and international levels which have led to a great deal of progress in the ways in which missing persons are handled. By far the most important development in enabling the recovery of those who have been disappeared is the application of DNA technology to human rights work. The impact of this has been vast, and has formed the foundation of the field of forensic anthropology, which has allowed a much more effective process of understanding what happened to people, and how. At the same time, the early experiences of countries like Guatemala, Chile, and Argentina has led to significant progress in the field. In addition, developments in the jurisprudence of international humanitarian law have made it more clear to state actors what their responsibilities are to the victims and to society at large. Civil society groups are also helping to build awareness about the experiences of missing persons and their families, and the steps that need to be taken to address their grievances. While progress is not uniform and significant gaps still exist, these developments point towards a greater acceptance of awareness, accountability, and responsibility. The different forms of response to the phenomenon of disappearances include: responses by civil society and family associations, scientific investigations, memorialisation projects, fact-finding commissions, reparations programmes, and legal responses. Because Latin American countries had experienced the devastating effect of systematic enforced disappearance over a sustained period of time, that region was at the forefront of confronting the issue, at the level of families, of civil society, and of legal approaches. Key milestones are highlighted below. • The role of the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg Tribunals in establishing the basis for human rights The brutal experiences of World War II, most notably the Holocaust, led to the growing recognition of human rights and the development of legal instruments to define and enforce those rights (Winter, 2007). In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which embodies the main principles upon which today’s understanding of human rights is based. Between the 1970s and today, the United Nations and a number of regional and international courts have worked towards creating a legal system which protects people from enforced disappearance and other violations of human rights which are described further below. After World War II, the Allies established the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and subsequent trials under the law known as Control Council 10. While some well-known international legal scholars indicate that enforced disappearance is a recent crime in international law, it can be argued that the tribunals established enforced disappearance as a war crime and a crime against humanity, in relation to the Nazi regime's Night and Fog decree (Finucane, 2010).3 The 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War requires parties in an international conflict to ensure there is effective communication between prisoners of war and their families. It also requires the establishment of offices which communicate information about the capture of soldiers to their families (Finucane, 2010). The Geneva Convention applies in times of war and armed conflict to governments who have ratified it.

3. See in particular the cases of the indictment of Wilhelm Keitel before the International Military Tribunal, and the United States v Altstoetter et al. Available at: http://www.adl.org/education/dimensions_19/section3/justice.asp


• The discovery of the DNA method of identification and its application to human rights The application of DNA profiling to human rights, and to the identification of victims of conflict revolutionised the work of people trying to trace the missing and disappeared. DNA profiling was developed by British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys in 1984. It was originally used in forensic science in the 1988 Enderby murders case in the UK. It began to be used in the late 1980s as a means of identifying the remains of unidentified people who had been buried in mass graves, or in unmarked graves without identification. Previous to this, excavations had relied on identification documents or military insignia to identify unknown bodies. However, in the case of enforced disappearance, anything that could identify a person would usually be removed before they were buried in hidden locations. Additionally, documentation about their secret detention or their fate was also extremely difficult for families or human rights protection groups to get hold of. Therefore, families were entirely at the mercy of the authorities that disappeared their loved ones, who had no incentive to share information. The ability to use DNA profiling technology in these cases changed the entire dynamics of the field. The work of people like American anthropologist Clyde Snow, Argentine anthropologist Mercedes Doretti, and their colleagues uncovering mass graves in Argentina in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was of critical importance to developing forensic anthropology (Newman, n.d.). The application of DNA technology in the 1990s and 2000s to discovering missing US servicemen in the Vietnam War was also important for the refinement and acceptance of the use of DNA profiling in human rights work and to find missing people (Mydans, 1999). DNA profiling is also being used to identify unmarked graves from the First World War (BBC News, 2009). • The application of forensic anthropology and forensic archaeology to human rights As the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team explains, 'forensic anthropology uses methods and techniques from physical anthropology and forensic medicine to solve legal cases involving skeletal or almost skeletonised remains' (AFAT, n.d.) It also uses forensic archaeologists, who apply 'traditional archeological methods to legal contexts' (AFAT, n.d.). The process of exhuming and returning remains, collecting evidence and identifying patterns of abuse draws on the resources of ‘a range of disciplines, including forensic pathology, geophysics, odontology, genetics, ballistics, radiology, and computer science, among others’ (AFAT, n.d.). As the Anthropology Archive put it, summarising the applications of forensic archaeology and anthropology in human rights work: Human rights organisations are often involved in the recovery and identification of victims of genocide.4 Their work is divided between careful archaeological fieldwork to excavate clandestine graves and meticulous laboratory work to document trauma and attempt to identify missing individuals. The organisations that investigate these crimes are often composed of international scientists. Some active groups in this field include the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense), Physicians for Human Rights, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (Fundacíon de Antropología Forense de Guatemala), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Commission on Missing Persons (IC-MP), and the International Forensic Centre of Excellence for the Investigation of Genocide (INFORCE).

4. Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.


The work of the human rights groups can be extremely challenging on many levels. Not only are they working in potentially hostile environments, but the job of identification can be especially problematic due to the lack of antemortem, or before death, records in many instances. The work of these groups is of obvious importance to the families of the missing, but it is also critical to the prosecution of those responsible for the atrocities. Forensic anthropologists have worked across the globe, in countries such as Argentina, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Iraq, to name just a few (Anthropology Archive, 2011). Other forensic anthropology teams include: Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team/Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (AFAT/EAAF), whose work is described at: http://www.eaaf.org/ Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation/La Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala whose work is described at: http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/FAFG.html Forensic work has also been conducted in the following locations: •

In the former Yugoslavia thousands of missing people have been recovered and identified through large-scale forensic investigations using novel forensic methods and technology.

•

The Cypriot forensic team, comprising Greek and Turkish Cypriot forensic practitioners, integrates different disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology and genetics. The team works with the families of missing persons and is a model of best practice.

•

In the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon, are making remarkable efforts to provide answers to families who lost relatives as a result of armed conflicts in the region.

•

Investigations continue in several countries of Latin America, such as Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala and Peru.

•

Many countries in Africa including Angola, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Sierra Leone and South Africa have launched forensic initiatives.

•

The search for missing persons in Asia has included forensic investigations in several countries, including East Timor, Nepal, The Philippines and Sri Lanka (ICRC, 2009).

• The emergence of truth commissions and the impact of South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Truth or reconciliation commissions are truth-seeking bodies of enquiry that have as their goal the uncovering of past human rights violations by a government or parties involved in a conflict, making those violations public, and trying, as far as it is possible, to rectify the situation (Hayner, 2001). Truth commissions, or historical enquiry commissions are established by state actors to carry out enquiries or investigations on a particular issue. There is no uniform approach to commissions: each situation is different to the other, and each commission has used different methods (Hayner, 2001). Truth commissions frequently include a number of investigative steps—protecting evidence, compiling archives, interviewing victims and key political actors, opening and publishing state information, and producing reports and recommendations (ICTJ, 2011). In some cases where national governments have not established truth commissions, other official institutions—such as municipalities or ombudspersons—have created more limited official inquiries. There are also many examples of important truth seeking initiatives launched by civil society, faith-based communities and victims’ associations.


There have been a number of commissions focusing exclusively on disappearances. Some of the countries that have had commissions on disappearances are Uganda, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Sri Lanka, and Honduras. Truth commissions have also included disappearance as part of their mandate, including in: Guatemala, Chile, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, and Peru (Hayner, 2001). While the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) was not the first truth commission it has come to be seen as a major milestone in truth-seeking efforts for a number of reasons, especially because it was the first commission to use the tools of public hearings and quasijudicial amnesty hearings to explain and confront in a public way the legacy of a structural violence. Operating from December 1995 to March 2003, its mandate included a range of violations that happened under the apartheid regime, of which disappearance was one. The SATRC heard 22,000 witness statements, and delivered a seven-volume report at its conclusion with a number of recommendations. One of the most important contributions South Africa made to the issue of disappearance is the level of publicity both the commission and the issue received. The SATRC was the first commission to hold public hearings where both victims and perpetrators were heard. The nature of the confessions and of the truth commission spectacle, together with South Africa’s transition to democracy led to an extraordinary level of global attention, which in turn promoted the concept in the broader public consciousness of societies dealing openly and systematically with legacies of violence. In South Africa, amnesty was exchanged for full disclosure of a crime, and only if the crime had been politically motivated. The crime had to be judged as proportional to political motive, and it is important to note that the amnesty process was designed as part of a quasi-judicial process, not as a general amnesty that figures of the Apartheid regime granted themselves. It was considered as an exchange for truth, and therefore a form of moral reparation (Coyne, 2005). The process is often misunderstood. Only around 10% of approximately 7,000 applicants were granted amnesty. There has been a great deal of criticism since the SATRC ended that the national prosecution authorities and the government have done very little to pursue those who were not granted amnesty or who did not apply for amnesty. This was an exceptional situation however, driven by a political compromise. The incoming South African government was forced to accept the idea of conditional amnesty as part of the conditions of the political transition set by the Apartheid regime. The SATRC's truth in exchange for amnesty programme was therefore an attempt on the part of the incoming government to avoid giving blanket amnesty, which was being sought by the Apartheid regime, while also providing accountability. To date, it is the only truth commission to have had such powers (Bozkurt and Yakinthou, 2011). The Kenyan TRC has similar provisions, but may only recommend amnesty. In other cases, some truth commissions have recommended prosecutions, passing information that came out of the commission to prosecutors’ offices once the commission had finished its work. Others did not. In each case, the issue of how to deal with crimes committed has been different, and it is important to note that truth commissions are not prosecuting bodies, and do not serve the same purpose as courts. • The work of civil society Civil society can be defined as a collection of voluntary social actors and organisations with shared interests and values that help form the basis of society. Civil society organisations, including those that are formed by victims themselves, have also been at the forefront of conveying demands to the state, building public awareness about the missing persons issue and paving the way for a number of international legal frameworks to be adopted. There are a multitude of organisations that exist at local and international levels, working with a different focuses and strategies. With the increasing vibrance and strength of the human rights movement over the last decades, their actions have had more of an impact. The focus, especially of organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), is to prevent people going missing in the first place. This means that as soon as a conflict erupts, people are in place to register prisoners and communicate their whereabouts to families who have registered a person missing. National authorities are also reminded of their duty to establish strict lines of command within their armed and security forces to make sure there is effective supervision and discipline.


In Argentina, the civil society group Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) along with other civil society and families’ groups were instrumental in pressuring the government to establish a truth-seeking commission, which had limited success. Their pressure has resulted in increasing numbers of domestic prosecutions in recent years. Their work is described further at: http://www.madres.org/navegar/nav.php In Lebanon, the non-government organisation Umam has established a documentation centre to map the locations of mass graves, and to collect archival documents, oral histories and written testimonies of victims' families and perpetrators. Together with a coalition of families of the disappeared, they continue to form a constant pressure-point for the Lebanese government to address the issue. Their work is described further at: http://www.umam-dr.org/ A number of regional coalitions against enforced disappearance exist, and have contributed to global awareness on the issue. They include, but are not limited to: •

Euro-Mediterranean Federation Against Enforced Disappearances http://federation-euromed.blogspot.com/

•

Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Detained-Disappeared http://www.desaparecidos.org/fedefam/eng.html

•

Collectif Des Familles de Disparu(e)s en Algérie http://www.algerie-disparus.org/cfda/index.php

•

The Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearance http://www.afad-online.org/

• The International Day of the Disappeared One important contribution of the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Detained-Disappeared was the declaration of 30 August as The International Day of the Disappeared.5 The day was created to draw attention to the plight of loved ones of disappeared persons, and to put pressure on governments, international organisations and legal instruments to work harder to resolve past cases and prevent future cases of disappearance. The day is commemorated around the world in many different ways, for example with art exhibitions, book launches, public marches, conferences, lectures and plays.

5. See, for example, ICRC (2011).


• The responses of humanitarian and human rights law States are bound by international law. International law comes from a variety of sources, including customary law and treaties. These instruments have developed principles that intend to protect people who might be vulnerable to being disappeared or to go missing. In respect of international human rights law and international humanitarian law relevant to the question of disappearances, the key principles which signatory states must abide by are: • families have the right to know the fate of their missing relatives; • the parties to a conflict are obligated to search for people reported missing, and to facilitate public and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) enquiries; • lists must be exchanged showing the locations of burial sites and the details of people buried there; • parties to international armed conflicts must provide information on the wounded, sick, shipwrecked, prisoners of war, other protected persons deprived of their freedom and the dead, as quickly as possible and without adverse distinction;6 • captured combatants and civilians under the authority of an adverse party are entitled to respect for their lives, dignity, personal rights and convictions. They must be protected against all acts of violence and reprisals. They have the right to correspond with their families and to receive relief. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has been the most important source of jurisprudence in developing the concept of enforced disappearance as a serious human rights violation. Since 1988, the Inter-American Court has been developing jurisprudence around the idea that disappearing people violates a number of fundamental human rights, including the rights to life, to justice, to be free of torture, and to liberty (Scovazzi and Citroni, 2007). The Inter-American Court also developed the idea that families of missing and disappeared people also had the right to know the truth about the fate of their loved one. The Court has been a global leader arguing that the violation of the right of family members to know the truth about their loved one continues from the moment that the person is abducted, and ends only when they receive full information about their loved one's fate (Dijkstra, 2002). The Court linked that idea to the violation of families' right to be free of torture, arguing that not knowing is a form of psychological torture. This means that the Court also extended the concept of who was a victim to include loved ones of disappeared persons as victims of the original and ongoing crime. The Court also more recently ruled on the obligation of states to inform society about what happened to those people disappeared. That is, the Court has helped families and civil society organisations to turn the idea that society also has the right to know the truth about the fate of the disappeared into a legal right belonging not just to victims directly affected by the disappearance but to society as a whole. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has also recognised the ongoing nature of the violation. Each of the Courts has developed different aspects of reparations for enforced disappearance: the ECtHR has a higher level of states and parties abiding by its rulings, while the IACtHR has helped develop the concept of a society-wide right to truth, exercised through judgements recommending non-monetary reparations like memorialisation projects to educate society about what happened. The IACtHR dealt with enforced disappearance much earlier than the European system, which meant that set much of the tone for how enforced disappearance is perceived, but the European system is now dealing with a much higher volume of disappearance cases. European courts, until the 1990s, saw very few cases of enforced disappearance or missing persons. Disappearances in contexts like Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia only really began to flood the Court in the late 1990s

6. A legal term that means non-discrimination.


and during the 2000s. However, the ECtHR now has 200 judgements in enforced disappearance cases, compared to the 33 judgements of the IACtHR. (Fernanda Perez Solla, 2006) Active between 1996 and 2003, the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina tried very hard to use Inter-American precedents to bring European human rights standards up to the same level as those in the IACtHR. The ECtHR has slowly been making its approach to enforced disappearance and missing persons cases more consistent. The two systems also take a different legal approach: the Inter-American Court has argued that because the nature of disappearance cases means that it is very hard for families to prove that their loved one has been disappeared, the burden of proof should be reversed – the Court stated that the burden of proof would rest on the state to show that it had not disappeared the victim. This made it much easier for families to bring cases to court and have them heard. The European Court has been much slower to recognise this rule, which means that many families have not been able to have their cases heard, because they do not have sufficient proof to show that their loved one has been disappeared (Dijkstra, 2002). • The 2006 Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance The convention is not just a document created by lawyers and politicians. For the last 30 years, families of disappeared and civil society organisations worked together for a Convention on disappearances. The right of families to know the truth has been acknowledged as a result of the generationlong struggle to create a document which protects against enforced disappearance. Thus the Convention represents the culmination of a long struggle. The 2006 Convention is an international treaty, and is designed to prevent enforced disappearance. It was opened for signature in February 2007, and entered into force on 23 December 2010. As of today, there are 30 state parties to the treaty. The Convention represents by itself an achievement of associations of relatives of disappeared people and NGOs from all over the world. Its adoption was first requested by families of victims of disappeared people from Latin America, back in the eighties. It took more than 30 years to the international community to adopt this legal tool, which fills an immense and intolerable gap: the lack of an international treaty to prevent and suppress enforced disappearance. (Bacalso, 2010) The Convention states that the widespread or systematic use of enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity. The first article of the Convention states that: No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance. (2006 Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, article 1) A summary of the many steps that have been taken in order to create such a convention is provided at: http://www.icaed.org/the-convention/history-and-background-of-the-convention/ To see the Convention's key provisions, visit: http://www.icaed.org/the-convention/need-for-the-convention-and-key-provisions/


The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances was established in 1980, for one year, and renewed regularly since then. The Working Group receives and examines reports of disappearances submitted by relatives of disappeared persons or human rights organisations acting on their behalf. After determining whether those reports comply with a number of criteria, the Working Group transmits individual cases to the Governments concerned, requesting them to carry out investigations and to inform the Working Group of the results. (OHCHR, n.d.) The Working Group played a key role in the monitoring of states' progress in implementing the Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances. Through its recommendations and its monitoring processes, the Group has contributed significantly to the protection against enforced disappearance. A Committee on Enforced Disappearances was established to govern the Convention. It consists of ten experts deemed to be of high moral character, elected for four-year terms, serving in their personal capacity and acting impartially. ... Article 30 stipulates that a request, in particular, that a disappeared person be sought and found, may be submitted to the Committee, as a matter of urgency, by relatives of a disappeared person or by any person authorised by them. In the conditions set forth in Article 33, the Committee may also request its members to undertake a visit onsite. If the Committee receives information about a widespread or generalised practice of enforced disappearance in the territory under the jurisdiction of a State Party, it may urgently bring the matter to the attention of the General Assembly of the United Nations, through the SecretaryGeneral of the United Nations (article 34). (France Diplomatie, 2008) In conclusion, developments in science, the attention of the international community, the emergence of legal norms and the vigilance of civil society all point towards growing awareness about, and sensitivity towards, the phenomenon of enforced disappearance and missing persons. Different societies have chosen to respond to missing persons in different ways, but often these responses have been inadequate. The issue of missing persons raises critical questions not only about how states meet their obligations towards people who have suffered human rights violations but also about how societies confront and handle the legacies of violent pasts in ways that seek to build trust and promote stability. It is becoming increasingly clear that states and other responsible parties cannot escape addressing the right to truth. Neither can they escape growing international attention when atrocities are committed or allowed to happen. This pack is designed to help its readers become aware of the global issue of enforced disappearance and missing people and also help in thinking about what creates the conditions which allow such atrocities to be committed repeatedly, creating scars that cut across generations. By becoming more aware about the experiences of different countries, and the developments around missing persons, a more informed and thoughtful discussion about these wider questions can, perhaps, become possible, and we may, perhaps, move one step closer to creating societies which will not fall prey to such horrors.


Selected Resources Anthropology Archive (2011). Human Rights Organisations. [Online.] Available at: http://www.lwcag.org/forensic/human-rights-organizations.html. Last accessed 24 September 2011. Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (AFAT) (n.d.). About Us. [Online.] Available at: http://eaaf.typepad.com/about_us/.Last accessed 24 September 2011. Bacalso, M.A. (2010). 'The International Coalition against Enforced Disappearance (ICAED) Celebrates the Entry into Force of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance', Press Release, ICAED, 23 December 2010. Available at: www.icaed.org/fileadmin/user...into.../ICAEDPressRelease23dicEN.pdf. Last accessed 6 October 2011. Batallas, C. (2010). 'Guatemala: The continuing tragedy of the disappeared', Interview with ICRC, 22 February 2010. Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/interview/guatemala-interview-220210.htm. Last accessed 5 October 2011. BBC News (2009). ‘DNA scheme to identify WWI dead‘, BBC News. April 20, 2009. Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/8008355.stm. Last accessed 24 September 2011. Bozkurt, U. and Yakinthou, C. (2011). 'Legacies of violence and overcoming conflict in Cyprus: the transitional justice landscape,'Oslo Peace Institute Report. Oslo: Oslo Peace Research Institute. Coyne, R.T. (2006). 'Escaping Victor's Justice by the Use of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions', Oklahoma Law Review, 58(11), pp. 11-20. Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (1992). General Assembly Resolution 47/133 of 18 December 1992. U.N. Doc. A/47/49. Dijkstra, P. et. al. (2002). ‘Enforced Disappearances as Continuing Violations’, Report of the Amsterdam International Law Clinic, 7 May 2002. Fernanda Perez Solla, M. (2006). Enforced Disappearances in International Human Rights. London: McFarland and Company Inc. Publishers. Finucane, B. (2010). 'Enforced Disappearance as a Crime Under International Law: A Neglected Origin in the Laws of War ', The Yale Journal of International Law (35), pp.171-195. France Diplomatie (2008). Enforced disappearances. [Online.] Available at: http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/france-priorities_1/human-rights_1101/enforced-disappearances_6493/index.html. Last accessed 24 September 2011. Hayner, P. (2001). Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions. New York: Routledge. International Center for Transitional Justice (2011). 'Truth and Memory.' [Online]. Available at: http://ictj.org/our-work/transitional-justice-issues/truth-and-memory. Last accessed 10 October 2011. International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances (2010). [Online.] http://www.icaed.org/. Last accessed 10 October 2011. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2009). Missing Persons: A major humanitarian concern. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/interview/missing-interview-280908.htm. Last accessed 24 October 2011. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2011). International day of the disappeared 2011. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/event/day-disappeared-event-2011-08-26.htm. Last accessed 24 September 2011.


International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006). [Online.] Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/disappearance-convention.htm. Last accessed 15 August 2011. MacDermot, N. (1981). Le Refus de l'oubli - La politique de disparition forcée de personnes. Colloque de Paris, janvier-février 1981. Paris: Editions Berger-Levrault. Mandate of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. [Online.] Available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/disappear/index.htm. Last accessed 10 June 2008. Mendez, J. (1998). ‘The Right to Truth’, in Christopher Joyner (ed.) Reigning in Impunity for International Crimes and Serious Violations of Fundamental Human Rights: Proceedings of the Syracusa Conference, 17-21 September 1998, pp.255-278. Toulouse: érès. Mydans, S. (1999). ‘Of Soldiers Lost, but Not Forgotten, in Vietnam,’ New York Times, April 19, 1999. [Online.] Available at: http://www.mishalov.com/Vietnam_MIA.html. Last accessed 24 September 2011. Naqvi, Y. (2006). ‘The Right to Truth in International Law: Fact or Fiction?’ International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 88, no. 862, pp.245-273. Newman, C. (n.d.). Dr. Clyde Snow - the bone detective. [Online.] Available at: http://vimeo.com/2358781. Last accessed 24 September 2011. Nowak, M. (2002).‘Civil and Political Rights, Including Questions of: Disappearances and Summary Executions’, Report of Mr. Manfred Nowak, independent expert charged with examining the existing international criminal and human rights framework for the protection of persons from enforced or involuntary disappearances, pursuant to paragraph 11 of Commission resolution 2001/46. UN Document E/CN.4/2002/71. [Online.] Available at: http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/3e140ed64e7c6a83c1256b9700513970?Opendocument. Last accessed 2 October 2011. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) (n.d.).Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. [Online.] Available at: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Disappearances/Pages/DisappearancesIndex.aspx. Last accessed 24 September 2011. Pasqualucci, J.M. (2003). The Practice and Procedure of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pourgourides, C. (2005). ‘Enforced Disappearances’, Report of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Doc. 10679, 19 September 2005.[Online.] Available at: http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc05/EDOC10679.htm.Last accessed 10 October 2011. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002).International Criminal Court.[Online.] Available at: http://untreaty.un.org/cod/icc/index.html. Last accessed 5 October 2011. Scovazzi, T. and Citroni, G. (2007). The Struggle Against Enforced Disappearance and the 2007 United Nations Convention. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Srebrenica Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Conference (2005).Voice of the Victims Session, 11 June 2005. [Online.] Available at: http://www.hlcrdc.org/Outreach/Kazivanje-istine/1404.en.htm. Last accessed 10 September 2011. Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights Through Action to Combat Impunity (2005). UN Document E/CN.4/2005/102/Add.1. [Online.] Available at:http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/alldocs.aspx?doc_id=10800. Last accessed 2 October 2011.


United Nation’s Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) (1997). ‘Question of the impunity of perpetrators of human rights violations’, E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/20, 26 June 1997. UN Document. Winter, J. (2007). Dreams of Peace and Freedom. Yale: Yale University Press.


3.2 The experience of Guatemala Guatemala is a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nation with some 24 different linguistic communities. The country's history is marked by the marginalisation of the indigenous Mayan population, military rule, and a 36-year internal armed conflict – among the longest and most savage in the western hemisphere – that took place between 1960 and 1996. In a 1999 report, the United Nations (UN)-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification estimated that 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during this almost four-decade long conflict.

Roots of the conflict Underlying the Guatemalan civil war was a deeper conflict over unequal access to land and resources. This dates back to the period of independence from Spain after 1821. An export-focused economy based largely on coffee was established, placing power largely into the hands of what became known as the 'agro-elite'. This group became politically influential through their close connections to the authoritarian regimes that ran the country in the period between the 1820s and the 1940s backed by the military. Between 1945 and 1954, a series of agrarian and labour reforms were implemented, focusing on strengthening workers' rights and redistributing land to more than 100,000 peasants. Part of the reforms saw land taken from a US-owned company, and in the context of the Cold War, this was seen as a provocative act which threatened US interests, and as part of Soviet expansion. These tensions led to a CIA-led coup in 1954. The USbacked military regime used its power to violently repress dissent as it repealed all the reforms (Ladisch, 2011). A guerrilla group, which formed and became active in the early 1960s against the military regime, evolved over the next two decades into a number of insurgent groups and became formidable opponents of the government. In 1982 these groups merged into the Revolutionary National Unity of Guatemala (URNG), and the military, under the successive leadership of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García and General José Efraín Ríos Montt, intensified its efforts to squash these insurgents. The military purposefully collapsed the difference between the Mayan communities and the guerrillas, and targeted community leaders, civilians, women, and children in its counter-insurgency strategy. It also targeted urban intellectuals who opposed the government, and it is from that group that the greatest number of the urban disappeared comes (Mejia, 2009). While the military declared victory over the insurgents in 1983, rising poverty and inequality increased social unrest and protests against the state. An orchestrated transition to civilian rule ensued in 1984 in order to quell the discontent, but despite the election of a civilian president, in 1985, the military continued to exercise power. The new government, however, did manage to begin the process of opening the road for peace negotiations with the URNG (Ladisch, 2011). After a lengthy peace process, a UN-brokered peace agreement was signed in 1996 between the government and the URNG. The agreement covered a range of issues - from demobilisation and reintegration of the guerrilla forces, to respect for human rights, resettlement of the displaced population, dissolution of civil defence patrols, steps toward resolving land tenure issues, and the strengthening of the judicial system and civil society. While the peace agreement was extremely ambitious, very few of the wide-ranging reforms or reparations recommendations have been implemented, and corruption and violence continue to be deeply ingrained.

Official treatment of the missing The Guatemalan peace accords also included the creation of a Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) that, operating with a mixed Guatemalan and international staff led by the UN, collected testimonies throughout the country and presented its report in February 1999 (CEH, 1999). The CEH's mandate was threefold: •

To clarify, with due objectivity, equity and impartiality, the human rights violations and acts of violence connected with the armed conflict that had caused the Guatemalan population to suffer.


•

To prepare a report that would contain the findings of the investigations carried out and provide objective information regarding events during the civil war period covering all factors, internal as well as external.

•

To formulate specific recommendations to encourage peace and national harmony in Guatemala. The Commission was tasked to recommend, in particular, measures to preserve the memory of the victims, to foster a culture of mutual respect and observance of human rights and to strengthen the democratic process.

The Commission aimed to document human rights violations linked to the conflict. It registered 42,275 victims of the armed conflict, including men, women, and children. A large number of people who would be considered victims of the conflict did not register their stories with the Commision. Of the violations registered, some 23,000 were victims of arbitrary executions and more than 6,000 were victims of forced disappearance (CEH, 1999). The overwhelming majority of the victims (83 percent of those who were fully identified) were indigenous Mayans, though people from all social and economic stratas of society were victims. Somewhere between 500,000 to 1.5 million people were displaced internally or sought refuge in other countries. More than 669 massacres have been documented (CEH, 1999). Other, broader figures state that in addition to the above, which focused on attacks in the countryside, up to 40,000 people from Guatemala City were also disappeared during the conflict (Mejia, 2009). It is estimated that up to 50,000 people were disappeared in total. The Commission concluded that acts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and other violations of human rights and humanitarian law had occurred. To provide guarantees for non-repetition and respect for human rights, the Commission recommended that those responsible for abuses should be brought to justice by the Guatemalan authorities and that a reparations policy should be promoted to dignify victims. The conclusions of the Commission were strongly contested by the government of the time. As a result, many of the report's recommendations languished along with prosecutions for serious human rights abuses. A series of developments in the early 2000s led to the establishment of a National Reparations Programme in 2003. During the administration of Alfonso Portillo of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), monetary reparations were promised to former civil defense patrols - which at one time numbered some 500,000 - following violent protests by their members. The Historical Clarification Commission found that the patrols were responsible for some 18 percent of human rights violations and acts of violence, and that they often acted in concert with the army, which was found responsible for some 85 percent of the abuses. Following Portillo's commitment to pay reparations to the civil defence units, a lengthy process to provide reparations to victims of human rights abuses finally culminated in an agreement among civil society, victims' groups, and the government to create the National Reparations Programme in May 2003. On 25 February 2009 President Alvaro Colom accepted the CEH report in Guatemala City's Plaza of the Constitution, on the 'Day of Dignity for the Victims of the Internal Armed Conflict'. In accepting the report, he asked for pardon.

The groups involved Truth-seeking in Guatemala has been a community-led and community-involved affair. In the early 1990s, before the signing of the peace agreement, a broad group of civil society organisations and relatives of disappeared persons came together to lobby the Public Ministry about the existence of secret cemeteries in their communities. These organisations collected information about clandestine cemeteries, enforced disappearances, and political executions, in order to discover the locations of their loved ones' remains. They invited an international team of forensic anthropologists made up of members of the Argentine and Chilean Forensic Anthropological Teams, to conduct initial exhumations and to train local anthropologists and students who later formed the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropological Team (EAFG/FAFG).


Since 1994, the FAFG has been trying to find the disappeared. It exhumes mass graves found in the Guatemalan countryside in an attempt to identify massacre victims – and how they died. The anthropologists analyse the unearthed bones for fractures, bullet holes, slash marks and other clues to causes of death. They compare the bones and other materials – such as clothing fragments – found in the graves with descriptions of the missing and the dead in the hope of compiling enough scientific evidence to identify and prosecute the victims' killers. When the work is complete, the researchers turn over the remains to victims' survivors so that they can have closure – and arrange proper burials for their loved ones. (Mejia, 2009) The FAFG is currently focusing on 'the historical reconstruction of forced disappearances in Guatemala and the creation of a methodology for the search for people who went missing during the armed conflict' (FAFG, n.d.). Their work is primarily funded by foreign governments, foundations, and, for part of one year, by the Guatemalan government through the Reparations Commission. As of 2011, 1,242 forensic investigations have been conducted, and 5,656 remains recovered. Of these, 4,156 remains have been returned to the families to be reburied (Suasnavar, 2011).7 Exhumations in Guatemala, in contrast to other contexts, have been an inclusive process that extended beyond the return of remains. Children, neighbours, friends, and community members have been involved in helping, cooking meals, digging for remains, providing psychological support to family members. Exhumations in Guatemalan society have helped to create a broader process of healing among victims and communities (Ladisch, 2011). There has also been a focus on psycho-social reparations in Guatemalan society. An unofficial truth-seeking process sponsored by the Catholic Church, called the Recovery of Historical Memory project (REMHI), issued a report in April 1998 that analysed some 7,000 interviews with victims and attributed responsibility for more than 90 percent of the atrocities documented to the army. Two days after the report was published, REMHI's leader, Bishop Juan Gerardi, was murdered. While this case eventually resulted in a few convictions, legal proceedings continue to this day. The national reparations scheme initiated by the government in 2003 for victims of the conflict provides only financial compensation, is slow and insufficient, and does not address the needs of families to know what happened to their loved ones. There is no national tracing mechanism for families of disappeared people. The continued existence of embedded structural corruption and the continued power of crime syndicates have affected the confidence of the families of victims. Convincing the families of the disappeared to come forward is not always an easy task. The ICRC has reported that only half of all rural families from which a person disappeared have undertaken any investigations. In most cases, this is because they are afraid, are isolated or do not know about the organisations they could call on, or else are too poor to travel, carry out the formalities required or undertake a search. (Batallas, cited in ICRC, 2010(b)) As a result, the fate of many of the disappeared continues to be unknown.8

7. These numbers do not include more recent cases: notably in the Verbena Cemetery in Guatemala and the cemetery in Escuintla - where they are looking for remains of enforced disappearance. 8. The ICRC has also been involved in Guatemala. It has supported civil-society organisations 'in their efforts to trace those who disappeared during the armed conflict and offers legal advice to the government. In 2009, the ICRC succeeded in reuniting separated relatives in 37 cases, facilitated over 150 exhumations and burials, and helped procure 570 legal documents – mainly birth and death certificates' (ICRC, 2010(a)).


Moreover, recognition of the scale, and deep damage caused by the civil war is not country-wide. The elite, generally of Spanish ancestry, have largely denied the causes and consequences of the violence of the past. In the absence of widespread acknowledgement, alternative methods are used to protest and to memorialise the past: Few formal memorials have been built in post-conflict Guatemala to commemorate those who were massacred during the internal armed conflict because the current power dynamics and social hierarchy of the country do not allow rural Maya people to [re]claim and appropriate public spaces. (Steinberg and Taylor, 2003 cited in Memory and Resistance, n.d.) Institutions such as the military and other parts of the political domain deny a need for commemorations that would exhibit the terror they bestowed upon the masses in the past. Because a lack of formal memorials exists, informal media such as graffiti have been used to transform public spaces into places of memory. (Memory and Resistance, n.d.) Graffiti is used as a form of protest and an avenue for exploration of how pain is memorialised: Testimony, testimonio, and various forms of artistic expression are some of the vehicles that have been used by Guatemalans to communicate and denounce the past. (Memory and Resistance, n.d.) Legal action is another strategy that has been pursued, but as domestic prosecutions failed to achieve justice, some began to turn to international forums, including the Spanish courts. Others went directly to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which ruled against the government on a number of cases in recent years. In October 2005 the Spanish Constitutional Court ruled that genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the Guatemalan dictatorship and internal armed conflict could be prosecuted in Spanish courts under universal jurisdiction provisions in Spanish law. Overall, what kept investigations going despite grave risks was the will and effort of local victims, supported at key moments by honest prosecutors.

Legacy of the conflict The Guatemalan case highlights the power of a strong national and victim-led movement as well as evolving international approaches to prosecuting perpetrators of enforced disappearance. Because the Spanish courts ruled that under the principle of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity can be prosecuted in Spanish courts, the charges of genocide, state terrorism, torture and other crimes against humanity have been brought against three Guatemalan former military presidents and five senior army and police officials. People who are considered to be the main architects of the atrocities and lower-level perpetrators of the crimes are only recently beginning to be prosecuted in Spanish, Guatemalan, and international courts (BBC News, 2009(b) and Amnesty International, 2011). However, some cases are still under investigation or pending prosecution in national courts, and victims’ organisations have continued to press for justice. ‘General Efrain Ríos Montt, a former de facto president of Guatemala and army general, who human rights advocates say was responsible for massacres, was nonetheless [re]elected in 2007 to a four-year term in Guatemala's congress, making him virtually immune to prosecution in the Guatemalan court system’ (Mejia, 2009) (he benefited from immunity as a Congress member since first being elected to that position in 1990). Sebastian Elgueta from Amnesty International has argued that a number of former government officials who contributed to the murders continue to hold powerful positions in the private sector (Mejia, 2009). Today, Guatemala is recognised as one of the world's most violent countries (WHO, n.d.), where hundreds of human rights activists are attacked each year (Human Rights First, n.d.), and '[m]any Guatemalans whose family members were killed by the death squads still live in fear themselves' (Mejia, 2009). The majority of the violence today is drug related with impunity stemming from the fact that the state is co-opted at various levels


into a narco-state. This is partly due to the 'continued existence of illegal and clandestine security organisations, which are responsible for a large number of threats and attacks against human rights defenders. These organised crime-like groups allegedly have extensive links with many public institutions in Guatemala. They were supposed to have been dismantled following the Peace Accords, yet they continue to operate' (Human Rights First, n.d.). These organisations operate in a climate of almost complete impunity.


Selected Resources on Guatemala On the conflict •

General background information: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/guatemala/index.htm

•

On the genocide, with an emphasis on the roles of family and victims’ organisations: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/guatemala/genocide/index.htm

•

On the genocide case and the background: http://www.guatemala-times.com/news/guatemala/1301-spanish-judge-tries-guatemalan-genocide-case-operation-sofia.html

•

On the 'Death Squad Dossiers' used by Guatemalan death squads to log and collect information about their victims: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/guatemala/logbook/index.htm

•

On threats to activists after police files were opened: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/threatened-and-attacked-%E2%80%93-dangers-opening-guatemala039s-policefiles-20090327 and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041003530_2.html?sid=ST2009041003614

•

Film footage of victim stories can be found in the documentary film When the Mountains Tremble, made by Skylight Pictures

•

On how Spanish courts were engaged in Guatemala: https://nacla.org/node/6078 While the Spanish courts have not been very successful in their attempts to enforce universal jurisdiction against a number of countries (it began with Latin America, and extended to Israel, China, and the US, but Spanish politicians received significant pressure from the US to curtail the court's work, and so the Spanish parliament passed a law in 2009 limiting the court's mandate in universal jurisdiction cases), the primary value of the Spanish universal jurisdiction efforts has been to add legitimacy and visibility to victims groups and their demands.

Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) REHMI was a church-based initiative that extensively documented the atrocities committed by both sides, and presented them in a comprehensive four-volume report in April 1998, one year before the CEH report (see above). Links: •

The second section of this article contains information about ‘recovering historical memory’: http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/guatemala.html#memory

•

This site includes the 7 questions REMHI asked when gathering information: http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/guatemala/violent-truths.php (see the section called 'recovering memory')

•

http://www.peoplebuildingpeace.org/thestories/print.php?id=95&typ=theme


Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) The FAFG was an important part of the process of finding the disappeared, and was very involved in the exhumations: http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/FAFG.html Article on FAFG work: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7019560 On the ‘Nunca Mas/Never Again’ Report The issue of perpetration and responsibility can also be explored through the lens of the murder of the primary author of 'Guatemala Nunca Mas' (Guatemala Never Again), published by REHMI (see above) - Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera. The report carried statements from thousands of witnesses and victims of the civil war. The bishop was bludgeoned to death by a concrete slab in his garage two days after the report's publication in April 1998. Three officers were convicted of his murder – which was significant because it was the first time military officers were tried in civilian courts. • • • •

Biography of Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Jos%C3%A9_Gerardi_Conedera Blogger reactions to his murder, ten years later (see extracts): http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/05/06/guatemala-remembering-bishop-gerardi-and-his-report-never-again/ Reactions to prosecutions: http://www.trocaire.org/whatwedo/victory-against-impunity-guatemala Blog on trials from expert witness: http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/a-personal-account-of-testifying-at-a-guatemalan-genocide-trial-by-kate-doyle/

On victims/activist group, HIJOS Guatemala •

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/1980--from-memory-to-resistance-children-bear-witness-hijos-celebrates-10years-in-guatemala-

On the trials of perpetrators •

An article on the first prosecution of perpetrator of enforced disappearance: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/09/guatemala-court-convicts-paramilitary.php

•

A different perspective on the same trials: http://www.lab.org.uk/index.php/news/57-focus/401-emerging-out-of-the-fog http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2429-disappeared-but-not-forgotten-a-guatemalan-community-achieves-alandmark-verdict-

•

An account of the trial of killers of one disappeared man, Edgar Fernando García: http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/i-wanted-him-back-alive-%E2%80%9D-an-account-of-edgar-fernando-garcias-case-frominside-tribunals-tower/


On the role of archiving and archivists •

http://blog.witness.org/2010/10/kate-doyle-%E2%80%9Carchivists-can-be-at-the-heart-of-accountability-and-justice%E2%80%9D/

On testimonies from loved ones of victims • •

http://www.para-nunca-olvidar.org/transen.html (text files) http://www.para-nunca-olvidar.org/testen.html (sound files)

On memorials in Guatelama Graffiti is used as a form of protest and an avenue for exploration of how pain is memorialised. •

For images see: http://www.freewebs.com/guategraffiti/disappearancedisplacement.htm

•

For the interaction between formal memorials and graffiti see: http://www.freewebs.com/guategraffiti/memorials.htm

•

This website contains various images of memorials and from the forensic anthropology laboratory: http://web.unbc.ca/~nolin/


Bibliographic sources on Guatemala Amnesty International (2011). 'Guatemala Arrests Former General for Genocide’. 20 June 2011. [Online.] Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/guatemala-arrests-former-general-linked-massacres-2011-06-20. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Archidiocese of Guatemala (1999). Guatemala: Never Again! New York: Orbis Books. BBC News (2009(b)). 'Guatemala sees landmark sentence', BBC News. 1 September 2009. [Online.] Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8231142.stm. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Comision Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (2011). Guatemala. [Online.] Available at: http://cicig.org/index.php?page=guatemala. Last accessed 29th September 2011. Doyle, K. (2007). ‘The Atrocity Files: Deciphering the Archives of Guatemala's Dirty War’, Harper's Magazine, December 2007, pp. 52-64. Gaebler, E. (2011). 'Four Guatemalan Soldiers Guilty of Massacre Sentenced to 6,060 Years in Prison', Impunity Watch. 9 August 2011. [Online.] Available at: http://impunitywatch.com/?p=19360. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Guatemala Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) (1999). Guatemala Memory of Silence: Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification. [Online.] Available at http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/toc.html. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) (n.d.). Forced Disappearences. [Online.] Available at: http://www.fafg.org/Ingles/paginas/ForcedDisappearances.html Guatemalan. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Human Rights First (n.d.). [Online.] Available at http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/our-work/human-rights-defenders/guatemala/. Last accesssed 29 September 2011. International Commitee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2010(a)). ‘Guatemala: ICRC calls for creation of a national search committee’. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/news-release/guatemala-news-220210.htm. Last accessed 29 October 2011. International Commitee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2010(b)). ‘Guatemala: the continuing tragedy of the disappeared’. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/interview/guatemala-interview- 220210.htm. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Ladisch, V. (2011). 'The Challenge of Implementation: Guatemala', in Wolff, S. and Yakinthou, C. (Eds.) Conflict Management in Divided Societies: Theories and Practice. London: Routledge. Memory and Resistance (n.d.). Graffiti in Postconflict Guatemala. [Online.] Available at: http://www.freewebs.com/guategraffiti/graffitiabriefsynopsis.htm. Last accessed 18 August 2011. Mejia, R. (2009). 'Digging Guatemala: Anthropologists Look for Clues to Past Political Killings', Scientific American, 23 March 2009. [Online.] Available at: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=anthropologists-study-political-killings. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Nelson, D. (2009). Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. Durham: Duke University Press.


Nolin Hanlon, C. and Shankar, F. (2000). ‘Gendered Spaces of Terror and Assault: The Testimonies of REMHI and the Commission for Historical Clarification in Guatelmala’, Gender, Place and Culture 7, no. 3, 2000, pp. 265-286. Suasnavar, J. Email correspondence with V. Ladisch. 19 September 2011. Wilkinson, D. (2004). Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala. Durham: Duke University Press. World Health Organization (WHO) (n.d.). Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability: Guatemala. [Online.] Available at: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/national_activities/gtm/en/index.html. Last accessed 29 September 2011.


3.3 The experience of the former Yugoslavia Throughout the 1990s, the states that were part of the former Yugoslavia became battlegrounds that witnessed the worst violence in Europe since the Second World War.

Roots of the conflict The conflict itself did not begin with the end of the Cold War, but had its roots in earlier tensions. The Second World War was marked by 'harsh repression, great hardship and the brutal treatment of minorities. It was a time of prolonged armed conflict, in part the product of civil war, in part a struggle against foreign invasion and subsequent occupation' (ICTY, 1997). Three major Yugoslav factions fought against each other. In the early part of the war, there were widespread massacres of Serbs by the Croatian separatist Ustase group, as well as by Bulgarian and Hungarian occupiers. Later on, Muslims and Croats were also killed, especially at the end of World War Two, when Croatian soldiers were handed over by the Allies to Tito's Partisans and executed en masse (ICTY, 1997). This memory was easily rekindled as Yugoslavia began to break down in the 1990s. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was made up of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia as well as the two separate regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina, which were autonomous provinces within the Republic of Serbia. Yugoslavia had a number of religions and ethnic groups, and these ethnic groups were also mixed within each of the states, though Bosnia and Herzegovina was the most unique in that it did not possess a single ethnic majority (ICTY, 1997). While 'divisive nationalism and open advocacy of national ethnic identity were...severely discouraged' (ICTY, 1997), the ethnic identity of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims remained prominent. The region experienced serious political and economic crisis during the collapse of communism, and this was deepened by political actors who used militant nationalism to fuel mistrust and tension between the ethnic and religious groups (ICTY, n.d.). Croatia and Slovenia accused Serbia of taking the majority of the governmental, military, and financial resources and power and Serbia accused Croatia and Slovenia of separatism (ICTY, n.d.). In 1990, the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo lost their autonomy when (Serbian) Belgrade extended direct rule over them, despite the fact that ethnic Albanians outnumbered ethnic Serbs in Kosovo. Kosovo was a particular area of importance for ethnic Serbs, considered ancestrally Serbian, and therefore its integration into the state of Serbia was a particularly strong signal to the rest of the region (ICTY, 1997). At the same time that Kosovo was annexed by Serbia, the Kosovo Assembly declared Kosovo an independent republic within Yugoslavia. The assembly was subsequently dissolved by the Serbian Assembly. This was followed by widespread repression of Kosovar Albanians. Slovenia's declaration of independence in 1991 marked the start of the bloody unravelling of Yugoslavia. Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) followed suit in 1991 and 1992 through wars that lasted until 1995 . In Croatia, the violence was primarily between the majority Croats and the large ethnic Serb minority and involved, among other factors, battles about territorial separation. Bosnia was made up of approximately 43 percent Bosnian Muslims, 33 percent Bosnian Serbs, 17 percent Bosnian Croats and approximately 7 percent of other nationalities. The broader ethnic tensions were therefore reflected internally. Regional tensions were also reflected, as Serbia and Croatia struggled to hold power in the state. Fighting in Kosovo lasted from 1998 to 1999, and Kosovo was the site of violence between the ethnic Albanian community that sought refuge from Serbia, and Serb forces who used violence to force Kosovar Albanians to flee their homes en masse. In March until June 1999, NATO launched air strikes against Serb forces in Kosovo and Serbia, which led to the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army from Kosovo and the eventual end of the wars. The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia included widespread attacks against civilians, population expulsions, systematic rape and the use of concentration camps (ICTJ, 2010). The conflicts were characterised by extensive war crimes and crimes against humanity. They were driven by breakaway struggles that grew into bitter and bloody ethnic conflict between and within the region's groups.


There are a total of 34,809 people reported missing as a result of the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo (ICRC, 2011(b)). More than a decade later, approximately 13,714 of those people are still missing (ICRC, 2011(b)). It has been calculated that the lives of 200,000 people have been directly affected by the disappearances (ICTJ, 2010). A large number of those missing were buried in mass graves. In the region, of the 22,456 people reported as disappeared during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, 12,908 remain unaccounted for (ICRC, 2011(b)). 1,811 of the 6,016 people reported for Kosovo have not yet been found (ICRC, 2011(b)). From the conflicts in Croatia between 1991 and 1995, some 2,355 of 6,337 reported are still missing (ICRC, 2011(b)). The missing include Croats, Serbs, Bosniacs, Albanians, Montenegrins, Hungarians, and Roma. Exhumations have been slow-going, and progress in the region is not uniform, due to reasons of both political will and logistics. In some places, there are a small number of burial sites which contain a large proportion of the area's missing. Those areas are easier to marshal resources to excavate sites, and exhume the remains. This also often speeds up the identification and return process. In other places, there are a high volume of graves with fewer bodies, which makes identification of sites and their excavation a much more laborious process. In these areas, the return of remains is often a much slower process. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) was established in 1996 to support the Dayton Peace Agreement in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Since the end of 2001, the ICMP has used DNA to identify 'large numbers of persons missing from armed conflict.' The organisation 'developed a database of 88,610 relatives of 29,073 missing people, and more than 33,000 bone samples taken from mortal remains exhumed from clandestine graves in the countries of former Yugoslavia. By matching DNA from blood and bone samples, ICMP has been able to identify 15,955 people who were missing from the conflicts and whose mortal remains were found in hidden graves' (ICMP, 2008). The use of DNA as a method of identifying remains has been critical in enabling the remains of loved ones to be returned to their families for burial, and to the ending of the suffering caused by uncertainty and the ‘effective use of DNA as a means of mass identification has transformed ICMP from a small organisation operating on an essentially political level into the biggest identification program in the world’ (ICMP, 2008). When disappearance is mentioned in conjunction with the former Yugoslavia, the horrors of Srebrenica usually come first to mind. Srebrenica is a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which formed part of a UN-protected ‘safe zone’ during the war between Bosnian and Serbian forces for control over territory. It was supposed to be a demilitarised area, protected by the UN peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR. In July 1995, the Bosnian Serb military began laying siege to the areas surrounding Srebrenica, and as a result, thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled Srebrenica to nearby Potocari, seeking refuge in the UN military compound. In the days leading up to the massacre, some 20,000-25,000 Bosnian Muslims (mostly women, children, and the elderly) gathered in and around the compound, with Bosnian Serb snipers firing on the crowd at random. While some ablebodied men from Srebrenica decided to flee to the woods to escape the encroaching Bosnian Serb army, others were separated from the women and children, when they were being bussed from the UN compound to safe Bosnian Muslim territory, and taken to detention camps (Yakinthou, 2008). Many of those who fled into the woods were either killed or captured and also taken to detention camps (Human Rights Chamber, 2003). Most of those men separated from the women and children on the buses were killed and buried in mass graves: Almost to a man, the thousands of Bosnian Muslim prisoners captured, following the takeover of Srebrenica, were executed… Most...were slaughtered in carefully orchestrated mass executions, commencing on 13 July 1995, in the region just north of Srebrenica. Prisoners not killed on 13 July 1995 were subsequently bussed to execution sites further north of Bratunac, within the zone of responsibility of the Zvornik Brigade. The large-scale executions in the north took place between 14 and 17 July 1995. (ICTY, 2004)


Based on the evidence gathered, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice have declared Srebrenica a genocide.9 The impact of the massacre has been catastrophic on the women who were left behind, who have had to try to re-establish their lives in a context where the fate of their loved ones is still not officially known. As of 2011, approximately two-thirds of the Srebrenica missing have been identified and returned to their families. In March 2010, the Serbian parliament officially apologised for the massacre, though the fact that the parliament stopped short of calling it a genocide was heavily criticised by a number of sectors, including Muslims and Bosniaks in Serbia (BBC News, 2010). The conflict was effectively ended in December 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Agreement by the presidents of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia (in Kosovo however, conflict erupted from 1998 to 1999). Though the agreement was focused on ending the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was also designed to provide the basis for regional balance of power between the conflict states in the former Yugoslavia, both re-modelling the system of government in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and redistributing territory between the conflict parties.

Official treatment of the missing The scale and range of atrocities committed during the war were extensive. There have been some attempts to carry out prosecutions for war crimes, but there has been little coordinated effort to learn the fate of the missing in the region. At the country level, extensive prosecutions have taken place in BiH at the cantonal and district levels, as well as before the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, inaugurated in 2005. Croatia established specialised chambers to deal with war crimes cases in 2003; Serbia set up the War Crimes Chamber in the District Court of Belgrade the same year; and international judges and prosecutors were deployed in Kosovo in 2000. The quality of the prosecutions in these countries varies, however. Witnesses in the Serbian court have felt intimidated into silence when asked to testify against police officers suspected of war crimes. In the court in BiH, the use of plea bargains has often been ill-received by victims’ groups. A working group on missing persons, chaired by the ICRC, was established in 2004 to liaise between the Kosovar and Serbian authorities on the issue of the missing. In 2006, the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government in Kosovo established the Kosovo Commission on Missing Persons. Its mandate was to search for the missing, regardless of ethnicity (ICMP, n.d.). The Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina (MPI) was co-founded by the Bosnia and Herzegovina Council of Ministers and the ICMP in 2005, and began operating in 2008. It centralises all information on the missing and on mass graves, notifies families and issues certificates of disappearance, informs local judicial authorities about the locations of possible grave sites and requests investigation, participates in excavation and exhumations, autopsies and identifications, and provides support to the families of the missing. An important task has been to establish a unified record of people who went missing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is critical because, as has happened in other conflicts, in the absence of a centralised record of the missing and disappeared, a number of organisations keep their own records, which leads to confusion over numbers and information. The MPI grew out of a 1997 initiative by the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in 1997 called the ‘Joint Exhumation Process’. This allowed the conflict parties to exhume their own missing persons in the 'other side's' territory (ICMP, n.d.). Together with the MPI, a group of

9. Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Prosecutor vs Radislav Krstić , Judgement of 10 April 2004, case no. IT-98-33-A. Available at: www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/acjug/en/krs-aj040419e.pdf (1 November 2011); International Court of Justice (ICJ), The Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), Case 91, The Hague, Judgement of 26 February 2007.


families of the missing lobbied to have a Law on Missing Persons created. This law entered into force in November 2004, but has not yet been fully implemented (ICMP, n.d.). The law 'establishes the principles for improving the tracing process, the definition of a missing person, the method of managing the central records, realisation of social and other rights of family members of missing persons, and other issues related to tracing missing persons from/in Bosnia and Herzegovina' (BiH Law on Missing Persons, 2004). The governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo each collaborated with the ICRC to produce a 'Book of Missing Persons' for their country, which lists the names of people still unaccounted for as a result of the conflict (ICRC, n.d.). None of the governments involved have made a comprehensive effort to investigate the causes of the war crimes or document the crimes committed. Initiatives to launch truth-seeking measures have either failed to produce a commission (BiH, 1990s, 2005-2006) or have established commissions that failed to deliver a final report with findings and recommendations (Serbia and Montenegro, 2001). Throughout the former Yugoslavia, authorities have provided material reparations primarily to members of the dominant ethnic group in the area. Similarly, memorials usually pay tribute only to victims of the majority group. Reparation laws also are significantly more favourable to former combatants than to civilian victims. At the regional level, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established in 1993 by the United Nations Security Council, has indicted 161 people, many of them high-ranking political or military leaders including the former Prime Minister of Kosovo, the former President of Serbia, and the former commanders of the Bosnian Serb and Croatian armies. The ICTY has also ruled on cases of genocide, which involves people who remain missing.

The groups involved The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as families' and survivors' groups have been at the forefront of efforts to find the missing. Pressure, as well as financial and structural support by the international community has aided the excavation of burial sites and the identification and return of remains. The ICMP, initially set up to coordinate the various commissions that had been established to search for the missing in the region, also worked closely with civil society groups. Through its work, it provided a space for victims’ groups to meet and it led advocacy efforts for the law on the missing. Since 2006, civil society organisations from the post-Yugoslav countries have actively discussed the need for establishing a regional truth-telling mechanism. The Coalition for RECOM (regional truth commission) approached the governments in the region in the first half of 2011 with a request to establish a regional truth commission to establish the fate of the missing (ICTJ, 2010). The Coalition is made up of 1,500 regional NGO and human rights groups (Balkans Chronicle, 2011).10 Civil society has been heavily involved in pushing for progress on the issue of the missing, and a great deal of controversy exists over unresolved questions, including the exact number of missing people in the region. The numbers of missing in each country have been subject to political manipulation. In an effort to address this gap RECOM has gathered half a million signatures in a regional petition to establish the commission (Balkans Chronicle, 2011). At the same time, however, there is also strong opposition to a regional truth commission by some victims’ groups in Kosovo, Croatia, and Bosnia: these groups fear that the commission will allow Serbia to escape its responsibilities for the crimes it committed by also presenting atrocities committed against ethnic Serbs (Balkans Chronicle, 2011). There is also resistance more widely to thoroughly addressing the issue, for atrocities were committed by all sides. There are a number of civil society organisations that represent survivors and victims of Srebrenica. Women of Srebrenica is a non-governmental organisation whose ‘task is to search for more than 10,000 people missing in Europe’s largest massacre, committed by the Bosnian Serb army, on

10. For more information on RECOM, see their website: http://www.zarekom.org/The-Coalition-for-RECOM.en.html


July 11, 1995, in Srebrenica’ (Women of Srebrenica, n.d.). ‘The Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery is an example of civil society engagement, and was designed in close consultation with survivors, serving as both a civic and sacred space. The ICRC 'supports efforts to determine the fate of people missing in relation to conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and to ensure that their families’ legal, psychological and economic needs are met. This includes assisting the authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Kosovo with amendments to existing legislation and the drafting of new laws to protect the rights of missing persons' families' (ICRC, 2010). The ICRC also chairs the Working Group on Missing Persons, through which dialogue is conducted between the Kosovar and Serbian authorities. The ICRC has worked to gather information which has been held in the archives of military contingents in Kosovo and of international organisations. This has led to exchanges of information between the conflict parties, as well as exhumations and the return of remains to family members in both Serbia and Kosovo. In Sarajevo, the ICRC has helped build the capacity of the BiH Missing Persons Institute, and in Pristina it supports the Government Commission on Missing Persons in Kosovo. The ICRC trains National Society staff in each of the countries to provide psychological support to families of the missing, and works with local Red Cross organisations on the issue of the missing (ICRC, 2010).

Legacy of the conflict Now, prosperous Slovenia is looking forward to EU and NATO membership. Croatia is recovering from war, and its territory is in tact, although most of its Serbs have fled or been driven out. Bosnia is divided into two, a shattered land still struggling to overcome the legacy of the war. Macedonia has been riven by ethnic conflict - but spared all-out war - between ethnic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians returned to Kosovo after the war there, but then 230,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians were forced to flee...Serbia and Montenegro have been impoverished by the wars. (Judah, 2011) There have been significant documentation efforts by NGOs and legal institutes, as well as memorials to the missing built by survivors' groups, civil society, and governments. For example, the Humanitarian Law Center, a non-governmental organisation, has accumulated information about all those who were killed or disappeared in the Kosovo war (about 12,000 people). During the process of documenting all individual cases they conducted interviews with hundreds of family members of the missing. They also collected newspaper articles and testimonies from family members. The prosecution of war crimes and crimes which led to people's disappearance over the course of the conflict has been under-represented in the regional media, or else dealt with selectively within each country so that the media reinforces already-established victim-perpetrator narratives that emphasise separate narratives and that present the community concerned as innocent (Amnesty International, 2010(a)). Amnesty International has also claimed that a lack of political will at the regional level to provide accountability for crimes has contributed to the slow pace of resolution. Currently, the regional coalition to establish a truth commission is the most dynamic aspect of the efforts to recover the remains of the many thousands of missing from the former Yugoslavia, and bring a measure of peace to their families. However, progress is slow, and internal disputes continue to hamper these efforts. In the meantime, the ICMP continues its excavations and identifications in each of the countries, and the families continue to wait for the truth about the fate of their loved ones.


Selected Resources on the former Yugoslavia The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslovia http://www.icty.org/ •

Testimonies provided by victims can be found at this link: http://www.icty.org/sections/Outreach/VoiceoftheVictims

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Testimonies of those providing statements of guilt can be found at this link: http://www.icty.org/sections/Outreach/StatementsofGuilt

The Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina http://www.hrc.ba/ENGLISH/DEFAULT.HTM

The Humanitarian Law Center http://www.hlc-rdc.org/stranice/14.en.html •

From this link, one can access stories from family members of those who were killed in the massacre of Srebrenica: http://www.hlc-rdc.org/Outreach/Kazivanje-istine/1404.en.html

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This link provides two different perspectives on whether Mladic was a war hero or a war criminal: ‘Serbia faces task of admitting its role in wars’, June 13, 2005, Associated Press article posted on CNN: http://www.hlc-rdc.org/Outreach/Kazivanje-istine/1404.en.html (go to Press Clippings, Page 17)

Coalition for a Regional Truth Commission (RECOM) http://www.zarekom.org/The-Coalition-for-RECOM.en.html •

News and other sources on RECOM: http://www.impunitywatch.org/en/publication/75 http://old.balkaninsight.com/en/main/interviews/24056/ http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/12082.html http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Serbia/Serbia-towards-a-regional-truth-on-war-crimes http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/10/26/karadzic.trial.analysis/index.html

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Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113683431991447#!/group.php?gid=113683431991447&v=info

On the missing •

Missing Lives. Authors: Nick Danziger (photographs), Rory MacLean (text), Mark Thomson (design). Copyright: Dewi Lewis publishing and the ICRC. Release year: 2010. This is a photographic book and exhibition with photos of memorials and of memories, as well as stories from 15 family members. See for example: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/missing-lives-060710.htm


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Other sources about the missing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4563551.stm http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/kosovo/Experts_lose_hope_of_finding_Kosovos_missing_.html?cid=29501766 http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=nearly-15000-war-missing-still-haunt-the-former Yugoslavia-2010-08-29 http://www.innovationsreport.com/html/reports/social_sciences/institute_missing_persons_hope_peace_balkans_123345.html http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2007-08-30-844668576_x.htm

On the ICTY trials •

While not focused on missing persons or enforced disappearance, this article describes the confession of a perpetrator who was responsible for war crimes, and how he sees what he did: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2008/0830/p01s01-woeu.html

On efforts to establish commissions in Yugoslavia •

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/yugoslavia-launches-truth-commission-681821.html

On how atrocity is dealt with over time •

This is an article with a video in which the Serbian president apologises during a visit to a Croatian massacre memorial: http://www.rferl.org/content/Serb_President_Visiting_Croat_Atrocity_Site/2210210.html

On disagreements over facts and interpretation, on apology and forgiveness •

http://www.rferl.org/content/The_Dynamics_Of_Apology_And_Forgiveness_In_The_former Yugoslavia/2025889.html

On the Srebrenica Massacre in BiH Srebrenica was the site of what has been characterised as the worst massacre in Europe since WW2. The ICTY labelled it a genocide. Many of the victims of the massacre are also still missing. In July 1995 more than 8,000 men and boys were killed in the town of Srebrenica, and 25-30,000 people were displaced forcefully by the Serbian army as well as by paramilitaries. The town had been considered a 'safe zone' under UN protection. The Dutch forces who were representing the UN at the time did not stop the massacre, closing their compound and pushing people out as others were being murdered in front of the compound. There was a case of victims' families taking the Dutch commanders to the ECJ or the ECHR over the event. •

For the legal case against the Dutch state and the UN see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6721139.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7457239.stm

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Article on massacre: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/675945.stm

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Wikilink explaining massacre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre


On memorials in the former Yugoslavia •

About the contested nature of memorials, whether and why they are important: http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Bosnia-and-Herzegovina/IWPR-Calls-for-War-Memorials-Divide-Bosnia

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About a memorial to those killed or missing in Croatian village of Nadin: http://www.zadarskilist.hr/clanci/20112008/kameni-spomenik-u-nadinu---simbol-ponosa-i-sjecanja There are photos (at the bottom of the page under ‘Galerija slika’) to those who were killed or went missing in the Croatian village called Nadin. The newspaper article says that the monument ‘symbolises a stone which stands still although it is wounded by the enemy's grenade, which is represented by the hole in the middle. The rosary is a symbol of all rosaries which Croatian combatants and civilians wore during the Homeland war’.

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A video of a monument honoring Bosniak victims from the village of Kozarac (near Prijedor, in Republika Srpska - BiH): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2-MSIGpN7g&feature=related At 6:45 is the text (on the monument) in English. A majority among the names of the killed are names of those whose bodies have not been found yet, so they are missing persons. The ‘sticks’ (lamps) on the outer wall symbolise barbed wire (because many Bosniaks from the region were held in 1992 in infamous Serb-run camps, where Bosniaks were routinely tortured and killed).

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On memorials in Bosnia-and-Herzegovina: The Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery was designed in close consultation with survivors, serving as both a civic and sacred space. This site contains a vast array of information and sources about this memorial. http://memoryandjustice.org/site/srebrenica-potochari-memorial-and-cemetery/ Women of Srebrenica is a non-governmental organisation whose ‘task is to search for more than 10,000 people missing in Europe’s largest massacre, committed by the Bosnian Serb army, on July 11, 1995, in Srebrenica’: http://www.srebrenica.ba/index.en.php?link=intro


Bibliographic sources on the Former Yugoslavia Amnesty International (2010(a)). ‘Amnesty International Report 2010’. New York: Amnesty International. Balkan Chronicle (2011). 'Half a million in former Yugoslavia sign a petition for missing persons', The Balkan Chronicle, 2 July. [Online.] Available at: http://www.balkanchronicle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1193:half-a-million-in-former Yugoslavia-sign-apetition-for-missing&catid=83:former Yugoslavia&Itemid=460. Last accessed 29 September 2011. BBC News (2010). Serbian MPs offer apology for srebrenica massacre. [Online.] Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8594625.stm. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Brunborg, H., Lyngstad, T. and Urdal, H. (2003). 'Accounting for Genocide: How Many Were Killed in Srebrenica?', European Journal of Population, 19(3), pp. 229-248. Humanitarian Law Center (2007). Transitional Justice in Post-Yugoslav Countries: 2007 Report. Belgrade: Humanitarian Law Center. International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) (2006-2011). Memory and Justice: Srebrenica Potochari Memorial and Cemetery. [Online.] Available at: http://memoryandjustice.org/site/srebrenica-potochari-memorial-and-cemetery/. Last accessed 29 September 2011. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (1997). The Prosecutor vs Dusko Tadic, IT-94-1-T, Judgement 7 May 1997, The Hague. [Online.] Availabile at:http://icty.org/x/file/Legal%20Library/jud_supplement/supp6-e/tadic.htm. Last accessed 10 October 2011. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (2001). The Prosecutor vs Radislav Krstić, IT-98-33-T, Judgement, 2 August 2001, The Hague. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icty.org/x/file/Legal%20Library/jud_supplement/supp49-e/krstic.htm#1. Last accessed 10 October 2011. Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina (2003). Srebrenica Cases, decision of 7 March 2003. [Online.] Available at: www.hrc.ba/ENGLISH/press_eng/pressEng/march03.pdf. Last accessed 10 August 2011. International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) (2008). About ICMP. [Online.] Available at http://www.ic-mp.org/about-icmp/. Last accessed 29 September 2011. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2010). The ICRC in the Western former Yugoslavia. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/where-we-work/europe-central-asia/serbia/overview-western-former Yugoslavia.htm. Last accessed 29 September 2011. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2011(a)). Annual Report 2010. Geneva: International Committee of the Red Cross. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2011(b)). Email communication with Christalla Yakintou, 4 November 2011. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) (n.d.). The Former Yugoslavia – Conflicts. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icty.org/sid/322. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Judah, T. (2011). 'Yugoslavia: 1918-2003', [Online.] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/yugoslavia_01.shtml. Last accessed 1 November 2011.


(n.a.) (2004). 'Bosnia-and-Herzegovina Law on Missing Persons'. [Online.] English translation available at: www.ic-mp.org/wp-content/.../11/lawmp_en.pdf. Last accessed 1 November 2011. Perrielo, T. and Wierda, M. (2006). Lessons from the Deployment of International Judges and Prosecutors in Kosovo. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. Ivanišević, B. (2007). Against the Current – War Crimes Prosecutions in Serbia. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. MacLean, R. (2010). Missing Lives. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Mégevand-Roggo, B. (2005). Srebrenica - remembering the missing. International Committee for the Red Cross, 5 July 2005. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/misc/srebrenica-editorial-050705.htm. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Wagner, S. (2008). To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Women of Srebrenica (n.d.). Women of Srebrenica. [Online.] Available at http://www.srebrenica.ba/index.en.php?link=intro. Last accessed 29th September 2011. Yakinthou, C. (forthcoming). The Emergence of a ‘Right to Truth’: A Comparison of Inter-American and European Human Rights Approaches.


3.4 The experience of Spain Roots of the conflict Spanish public interest in the legacy of violence from the civil war has been increasing over the last decade, after a generation of disengagement, where debate over the civil war was left primarily to academia (Boyd, 2008). Spain went through a bloody civil war from 1936 to 1939, sparked by a military rebellion led by General Francisco Franco against Spain's democratically elected government of the II Republic. Franco’s dictatorship ended in 1975 with his death, which led to a transition to democracy. By the end of the regime, more than half a million Spaniards had been killed during the civil war and the subsequent dictatorship period (Graham, 2004). Many of those killed in the Spanish Civil War were executed away from the battlefields and left buried in unmarked graves (Kovras, 2008). Recent historical research estimates the number of people executed by Franco’s troops during and after the war as being between 70,000 and 100,000 (Ferrándiz, 2006). Between 1939 and 1947, more than 400,000 Spaniards were kept in concentration camps. Over the next three decades, political executions and persecution were rife. Half a million people fled the country (Anderson, 2009). Among those who were killed during the war, around 114,266 were buried in common graves all over the country and their remains went missing. During the dictatorship, Francoist repression not only aimed to punish Republican sympathisers but it also aimed at eradicating ideas that it saw as ‘anti-Spanish’, such as communism, masonry, liberalism, and athiesm. To spread the regime’s ideology particular attention was paid to teachers to ensure that future generations would be educated in 'national' ideas: between 1936 and 1943, together with other civil servants of the II Republic, around 60,000 primary schoolteachers were investigated and 6,000 fired (Ruiz, 2007). The positions were replaced with supporters of the regime. A standard textbook ‘El Parvulito’ in Spain's preschools, reveals how Franco justified his regime and indoctrinated younger generations.11 This textbook - used until Franco’s death - explained the Civil War to four and five year olds with these words: ‘Some years ago, Spain was very badly governed. Every day there were shots fired in the streets and the churches were burned down. To stop all of this, Franco rose up with the army, and, after three years of war, managed to throw out the enemies of the Fatherland. The Spaniards named Franco their Chief and he has been governing Spain gloriously since 1936.’ (Anderson, 2009) In 1977, two years after Franco's death and as part of a long negotiated process of transition to democracy, between the Francoist elite and the democratic opposition, Spain's first democratically elected parliament passed an amnesty law (Kovras, 2008). The law, envisioned to free the remaining political prisoners of the regime, also guaranteed amnesty for the crimes committed by Francoism. This meant that no one would be called to account judicially. At that moment, there was a strong fear in Spain that opening old wounds would trigger another civil war or a military coup. This fear drove the compromise accepted by democratic reformers, who feared the army and the considerable residual military strength of the civilian extreme right, to leave the past behind (Graham, 2004). Over the course of the 1980s, there were fractured efforts to deal with the past from different sectors. A series of limited reparations laws were passed, however, none of these laws explicitly or officially recognised the victims, which led to complaints among those affected by the war. During this period Spain also witnessed the explosion of detailed empirical works of history that minutely reconstructed Francoist repression on a province-by-province basis. By the end of the 1990s about 60 percent of provinces had been researched to some degree. A new history was constructed which listed the real names of the dead by counting them from municipal registers and cemetery lists (Graham, 2004).

11. For a discussion on other factors which influenced the return to democracy, see Aguilar, P. (2000). Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, Oxford, Berghan Books.


Yet the real breakthrough in terms of coming to terms with the past came in the 2000s. This was the period when Spain saw the emergence, simultaneously, of a number of different factors which made debate about the civil war legacy more possible (Blakeley, 2005). Among those factors was the appearance of a victims' families movement that aimed at the ‘recovery of historical memories’. The recovery process essentially aimed at locating graves and exhuming remains of the victims of the civil war (Kovras, 2008). This was an initiative started by local organisations that sprung up in different regions of the country. The most notable of these organisations was the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) which has petitioned for the exhumation from common graves of the remains of those extra-judicially murdered so they may be identified and reburied by family and friends (Encarnación, 2008). Official treatment of the missing President José María Aznar, from the conservative Partido Popular which was in power from 1996 to 2004 was generally unsympathetic to families' demands for exhumations. The Aznar government rejected requests to finance exhumations of the mass graves throughout Spain containing the remains of those executed during the Civil War, though it almost simuntaneously assumed the cost of exhuming and repatriating the remains of the members of Blue Division that fought during World War II alongside the Nazis in Russia (Kovras, 2008). This position of the government further contributed to the ‘uneven acknowledgement’ of the suffering caused by the civil war (Kovras, 2008). This period witnessed a shift in public attitudes regarding facing the past, and intellectuals and left-wing groups took much stronger public stances on the issue. While the 1977 amnesty had been consistently supported by a significant proportion of Spanish society (Blakeley, 2005), the arrest of Chilean dictator Agusto Pinochet, the deepening societal confidence in Spanish democracy, reduced fear about a return to conflict, and a growing urgency among families of victims began to erode this consensus (Blakeley, 2005). The passage of time and the evolution of a new generation of Spaniards who were less beholden to the early transition period's political compromises made delving into the past seem less threatening. Aznar’s succession by the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero started a new phase in Spain’s newly surfaced interest to reckon with its past. In December 2007, Spain's parliament approved the so-called Law of Historical Memory after a long period of fierce debate.12 The law included a condemnation of Franco’s military uprising as ‘illegitimate’, as well as the judgements carried by Franco´s courts. It also established a number measures to to adjudicate the appropriate reparation to the victims of the war and the dictatorship, including monetary compensation, and the restoration of citizenship to those forced into exile, with extension to their descendents, as well as those who faught in the international brigades. These measures were intended to complement existing reparations laws, passed during the late 1970s and 1980s. Most importantly, the law obliged the government to provide support for the exhumation of the remains of those executed by Franco’s supporters, still buried in unmarked graves throughout the country. However, the fact that the law did not oblige the government to finance the exhumations was criticised by a number of human rights organisations (Tamarit Sumalla, 2011). Lastly, the law called for the removal from public view of ‘shields, plaques and statues and other commemorations to the Spanish Civil War that exalts one of the warring parties and post-civil war Francoist regime’ (Encarnación, 2008). Responding to a series of claims presented by victims’ groups disappointed with the law before the Audiencia Nacional (the National Criminal Court), Judge Baltazar Garzón decided to investigate the cases of executions and disappearance in November 2008. However, the same Audiencia 'ruled that it was not competent to investigate cases of enforced disappearances dating from the Spanish Civil War and early years of the rule of Francisco Franco; it therefore referred the 114,266 suspected cases of enforced disappearance to the 43 local criminal courts in whose jurisdiction the mass graves had been found’ (Amnesty International, 2010). 13 courts subsequently 'classified the cases as ordinary crimes and closed the

12. The complete title of the law is: Law 52/2007 which recognises and expands the rights, and establishes measures in favor of those who suffered persecution or violence during the civil war and the dictatorship. For a direct link to the law, see http://www.boe.es/aeboe/consultas/bases_datos/doc.php?id=BOE-A-200722296. Last accessed 10 October 2011.


investigations on the grounds that the crimes had passed the statute of limitations (which sets a maximum period of time that legal proceedings may be initiated after a specific crime). Only three of the local courts classified the cases as crimes under international law (which have no expiry date) (Amnesty International, 2010). In 2010, Garzón was charged with knowingly exceeding his jurisdiction, and faces being removed from the bench (Ku, 2010).

The groups involved The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) was founded in 2000 by Emilio Silva who was in search for his own grandfather, killed in October 1936 by Francoist vigilantes (Encarnación, 2008). Silva’s grandfather’s roadside grave which also contained the remains of another thirteen victims, became the ARMH's flagship case and was taken to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In November 2002, the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances urged the Spanish government to undertake investigations about the fate of the killings of Republicans following the end of the Spanish Civil War and exhumations of known graves of the remains of the disappeared. While the Working Group recommended the Spanish government investigate only two cases, it increased the pressure on the government to deal with this issue (Blakeley, 2005). Instead of waiting for the government to respond to the UN resolution to start digging the graves, the ARMH started the exhumation process with the aid of private funds. Emilio Silva’s grandfather became the first victim of Spain's civil war to have his identity confirmed by a DNA test. By 2006, the ARMH had exhumed some 40 gravesites containing 520 bodies. What needs to be underlined is that ARMH’s work has depended on volunteers and on the financial contributions of the families of the missing. Although local authorities have sometimes offered aid, during the early period of exhumations there were no central government funds for the work (Graham, 2004). The 1998 arrest in London of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet was one of the factors which contributed to increasing debate about the civil war past in Spain. Pinochet's arrest was ordered by Spanish investigating judge Baltazar Garzón, who asserted competence on the basis of universal jurisdiction (Encarnación, 2008). After assuming power in a CIA-backed coup d’etat on 11 September 1973 that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected socialist government, Pinochet had became president of the republic from 1974 until transferring power to a democratically elected president in 1990. The initial indictment had accused him of the murder of 50 Spanish citizens living in Chile. This charge was later expanded to include the systemic torture, murder, illegal detention, and forced disappearances of hundreds of Chilean citizens between 1973 and 1991 (Encarnación, 2008). Garzón's move attracted the attention of the association of victims’ families, who subsequently submitted their application to his court. However, more critical to the public debate domestically was the combination of pressure from victims’ associations such as AMRH and the political parties from the left which supported them (Izquierda Unida and Catalanish), and who played a significant role in awakening Spanish society’s consciousness. In 2008, Garzón began investigations into the execution and disappearance of 114,266 people killed between 17 July 1936 and December 1951 after receiving cases from the association of families (Beevor, 2006). It is estimated that there are 2,052 burial sites across Spain, of which less than 10 percent have been investigated (Fotheringham, 2010). The Spanish government remains ambivalent in its commitment, progress continues to be slow, often right-wing town councils in towns in which burial sites exist oppose excavations, and urban development means that possible sites are being built over (Fotheringham, 2010). Recently, however, the government has mapped gravesites, and approved a protocol for exhumations.13

13. For information on this, see: http://mapadefosas.mjusticia.es/exovi_externo/CargarInformacion.htm


Legacy of the conflict The legacy of the civil war has only begun to be dealt with in Spain, and there is a great deal of tension across all sectors of society regarding how the past should be addressed. This is especially evident in the treatment of the missing. There is an emerging, but cautious, debate in the media about the importance of finding the graves of the missing. At the same time, the political division across left and right remains pervasive, and families of missing people still sometimes request anonymity in the process of seeking remains. However, families continue to play an important role in continuing pressure to open burial sites and exhume and identify bodies. There is also an increasing engagement among civil society actors and the arts and academic communities in the discussion about the past and in rethinking the way the civil war is understood. In a way the spirit of the 1977 amnesty continued to live on in Zapatero’s Law of Historical Memory, as the 2007 law explicitly states that any adjudication of human rights violations anchored on the new law ‘will omit any reference to the identities of those who took part in the events or legal proceedings that led to sanctions or condemnations.’ This virtually guarantees that no one in Spain will ever be prosecuted on charges of crimes against humanity (Encarnación, 2008). The law also falls short of international standards regarding the right of victims of serious human rights violations and their relatives (Amnesty International, 2010).


Selected Resources on Spain On the Spanish Civil War •

BBC Edited Guide Entry on Spanish Civil War: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A882902

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A short clip summarising the Spanish Civil War: http://www.encyclomedia.com/video-spanish_civil_war.html#moretext

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A clip showing the meeting between Franco and Hitler in 1940: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d32vTvpV7s

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A clip with an excerpt from Franco’s speech after his civil war victory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX_-faiNTVU&feature=related

On the search for the missing persons •

The Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory: http://www.memoriahistorica.org.es/joomla/

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Minister of Justice map of graves: http://mapadefosas.mjusticia.es/exovi_externo/CargarInformacion.htm

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60 years after the war, the relatives of the disappeared search for their relatives: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKOfzMa-NOU

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The painstaking search for Spain’s Franco-era missing, AFP, November 22, 2010: http://www.dawn.com/2010/11/22/the-painstaking-search-for-spain%E2%80%99s-franco-era-missing.html

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Spain begins to confront its past: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0206/p06s01-woam.html

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An interview with a grandson of man killed by Franco whose remains were found in a mass grave: http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/23/recovering_historic_memory_in_spain_grandson

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On the exhumation of mass graves: http://www.archaeology.org/0609/abstracts/franco.html

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An article on the murder of the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca by nationalists in 1936 and recent efforts of his family to find his remains: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5262420.stm


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On Judge Baltazar Garzón: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2211769.stm http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/opinion/09fri2.html?_r=1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/25/baltasar-garzon-spain-franco

On memorials in Spain •

A statue of Franco is removed in Spain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIrqHAjTwHc&feature=related

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‘Spain Examines Future of Fascist Monument, and Franco’s Remains’ by Raphael Minder for the New York Times on 21 June 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/22/world/europe/22ihtspain22.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=franco&st=cse


Bibliographic sources on Spain Amnesty International (2010(c)). Spain – Amnesty International Report 2010. [Online.] Available at: http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/spain/report-2010. Last acccessed 29 September 2011. Anderson, J.L. (2009). ‘Lorca’s Bones Can Spain finally confront its civil-war past?’. The New Yorker Digital Edition. [Online.] Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/22/090622fa_fact_anderson. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Beevor, A. (2006). The Battle for Spain. Phoenix, London Blakeley, G. (2005). 'Digging up Spain's past: consequences of truth and reconciliation', Democratization, 12(1), pp. 44-59. Elkin M. (2006). ‘Opening Franco's Graves’, Archaeology 59(5), pp. 38-43. Encarnación, O. (2007/8). ’Pinochet’s Revenge: Spain Revisits its Civil War’, World Policy Journal, 24(4), pp. 39-50. Encarnación, O. (2008). ‘Reconciliation after Democratization: Coping with the Past in Spain’, Political Science Quarterly 123(3), pp. 435-459. Ferrándiz, F. (2006). ‘The return of Civil War ghosts, The ethnography of exhumations in contemporary Spain’, Anthropology Today, 22(3), pp. 7-12. Ferrandiz, F. (2009). ‘Cries and Whispers: Exhuming and Narrating Defeat in Spain Today’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9(2), pp. 177-192. Fotheringham, A. (2010). 'Scandal of the Spanish Civil War mass graves', The Independent, 14 November 2010. Graham, H. (2004). Coming to Terms with the Past: Spain's Memory Wars’, History Today, 54(5). [Online.] Available at: http://www.historytoday.com/helen-graham/coming-terms-past-spain%E2%80%99s-memory-wars. Last accessed: 29 September 2011. Kovras, I. (2008). ‘Unearthing the Truth: The Politics of Exhumations in Cyprus and Spain’, History and Anthropology, 19(4), pp. 371-390. Ku, J. (2010). 'Garzon Formally Charged for Exceeding Jurisdiction, Could Be Suspended Within Days', OpinioJuris, 8 April 2010. [Online.] Available at: http://opiniojuris.org/2010/04/08/garzon-formally-charged-for-exceeding-jurisdiction-could-be-suspended-within-days/. Last accessed 10 October 2011. (n.a.) (2008). 'Digging up the Franco era: Spanish judge orders 19 mass graves exhumed', Der Spiegel Online, 17 October 2008. [Online.] Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,584822,00.html Last accessed 10 October 2011. Ruiz, J. (2007). ‘Franco and the Spanish Civil War’, History Review, 57(8). Tamarit Sumalla, J. (2011). 'Transition, Historical Memory and Criminal Justice in Spain', Journal of International Criminal Justice, 9(3), pp. 729752


3.5 The experience of Morocco Roots of the conflict Morocco’s gaining of independence from France in 1956 started a dark phase in Moroccan history, defined by systematic human rights violations. For many years Moroccan authorities arbitrarily detained, tortured, ‘disappeared’ and executed approximately 50,000 of its citizens. They also responded brutally to public protests and strikes (ICTJ, 2009). In 1961, King Hassan II succeeded to the throne and ruled the country with a 'firm and arbitrary' hand for 30 years (Howe, 2000). King Hassan II aimed to make Morocco a pro-Western bastion of stability in a volatile area. He also laid the foundations for a modern constitutional monarchy. Yet King Hassan II’s administration was fearful of Arab socialism that was on the rise in the 1960s, and as a result, his security forces carried out waves of repression against anyone seen as posing a threat to the monarchy (Howe, 2000). The authorities targeted intellectuals, trade unionists and members of the left-wing National Union of Popular Forces, as well as farmers and anyone seen to be opposed to the monarchy during the 1960s (Opgenhaffen and Freeman, 2005). Furthermore, the two unsuccessful military coup attempts carried out in the early 1970s led to greater repression, particularly towards Marxists and Islamists. Dissidents were arrested and taken to secret detention centres where they were ‘disappeared’. Some military officers accused of taking part in the coups were executed after summary trials, whereas others were sent to the detention centres, and kept there for many years. 'Survivors of torture have written autobiographical accounts of captivity in dark and cramped cells deep within secret detention facilities' (Opgenhaffen and Freeman, 2005). There was a significant rise in human rights violations after 1975 when war broke out in Western Sahara between Morocco and the Sahrawi Polisario Front.14 Thousands more people were arbitrarily detained and tortured (ICTJ, 2009(a)). In total, approximately 50,000 people were victims of arbitrary detention, torture, disappearance, and extrajudicial execution. Between 1,000 and 2,000 were disappeared (Opgenhaffen and Freeman, 2005).

Official treatment of the missing Morocco started experiencing a period of reform during the 1990s. King Hassan II, in response to growing internal and international criticism was compelled to establish the Advisory Council on Human Rights (CCDH) in 1990 to advise him on ‘all matters concerning human rights.’ A few years later, authorities released several hundred political opponents (ICTJ, 2009(a)). At this stage, King Hassan II produced a new constitution, which stated that the kingdom would ‘abide by universally recognised human rights.’ However, Morocco's main opposition parties opposed the new charter that limited public freedoms and reaffirmed the monarch's overwhelming powers. In response, the monarchy took new steps to win international approval in 1993 with the creation of a Ministry of Human Rights and ratification of the United Nations Convention against Torture (Opgenhaffen and Freeman, 2005). In February 1998 Hasan II named Abderrahmane Youssoufi, a human rights lawyer and leader of the Socialist opposition, as the prime minister (Guillerot et. al., 2009). The Youssoufi government programme promised sweeping reforms in the administration, education, economy, judiciary, human rights and the status of women. On September 28, 1998, the Advisory Council on Human Rights (CCDH) announced that investigations showed the number of disappeared persons to be 112, with 56 of these known to be dead. Human rights groups contested the figures as unrealistically low, but considered the Council's statement an implicit recognition of state responsibility on the issue of disappeared persons (Guillerot et. al., 2009). In the very same year, the CCDH also recommended that the King establish an official body to compensate victims of past human rights abuses. King Hassan II approved the proposal just two weeks before he died (ICTJ, 2009). King Hassan II was succeeded by his son King Mohammad VI, who ascended to the throne on July 30, 1999. The new king wanted to avoid following in his father's footsteps. In one of his first acts, King Mohammed VI, created the Independent Arbitration Commission (IAC) to compensate 14. A Sahrawi rebel national liberation movement working for the independence of Western Sahara from Morocco.


victims of arbitrary detention and forced disappearance. During almost four years of work the IAC decided more than 7,000 cases and awarded about $100 million in reparations (ICTJ, 2009). The Independent Arbitration Commission clarified 742 cases of enforced disappearances in its final report but hundreds remain unaccounted for (ICTJ, 2009). Some victims and their families complained about the Commission’s procedures, however, and sought justice as well as greater disclosure of government wrongdoings (ICTJ, 2009).

The groups involved As a result, Moroccan civil society organisations began to demand the adoption of a comprehensive approach to addressing the past. A group of former political prisoners established the Moroccan Forum for Truth and Justice (Forum Vérité et Justice, or FVJ) in October 1999 to campaign for an independent truth commission and a broader definition of reparation. The Forum at the time was headed by Driss Benzekri, a political prisoner from 1974 to 1991 (ICTJ, 2009(a)). At a national symposium held in 2001, the FVJ, together with two human rights organisations, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights and the Moroccan Organization for Human Rights, agreed on a plan for an independent truth commission and submitted it to the King (ICTJ, 2009). The FVJ campaigns on behalf of the victims of the repression on the basis of a four-point programme: establishing the truth about gross human rights violations, petitioning for official apologies by the state, pressing for victims’ rehabilitation and also for institutional reforms likely to prevent coercive policies and past abuses from happening again (Vairel, 2008). Significantly, the FVJ brings together victims from all the groups that suffered under repression whether they are nationalists, socialists, Marxist–Leninists, Islamists or army officers involved in the two coup attempts (Vairel, 2008). Over the years, FVJ carried out routine demonstrations to keep the issue on the public agenda. Starting in March 2000, and inspired by the contentious practices observed in Latin America, the association routinely demonstrated in front of the former secret detention centres. The leaders of the association initiated a series of sit-ins that gathered human rights activists and victims, carrying candles and roses, brandishing portraits of the disappeared or wearing the portraits around their necks (Vairel, 2008). The FVJ’s role in coming to terms with the past in Morocco is very important because it is primarily through their pressure that a truth and reconciliation model was allowed to develop (Vairel, 2008). In 2003 the Advisory Council on Human Rights (CCDH) formally recommended that King Mohammed establish a truth commission to ‘deepen the democratic transition’. He inaugurated the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER) in January 2004. The CCDH recommended members for the IER whom the King then appointed. Several of them were former political prisoners. The IER’s president became Driss Benzekri, the cofounder of the FVJ. The IER aimed to establish the truth about past violations, provide reparations to victims and families and recommend measures to prevent future violations. The Commission was authorised to investigate human rights violations from independence in 1956 to the establishment of the Independent Arbitration Commission in 1999 and to identify institutional but not individual responsibility for those wrongs. It expanded its mandate from investigations of enforced disappearance and arbitrary detention to include other abuses, including torture, extra-judicial executions, excessive use of force against protesters, sexual violence and forced exile (ICTJ, 2009). Although the IER lacked the authority to carry out searches, public authorities were legally obliged to cooperate. Yet certain security agencies and former officials refused to cooperate. Some human rights organisations also protested against the fact that the IER prevented witnesses and victims from naming perpetrators. Their testimonies were publicised over television and radio, but witnesses had to first sign statements that they would not give names of perpetrators. In response, various NGOs, led by the Moroccan Association of Human Rights, ran parallel hearings where a small number of victims gave full testimony and named perpetrators.


In December 2005, the IER presented its report to King Mohammed, who approved the publication of the report and asked the CCDH to carry out the Commission’s recommendations (ICTJ, 2009). The IER report established the responsibility of state actors and other parties for past abuses. It also outlined extensive individual reparation plans, proposed adoption of a communal reparations programme and recommended that the prime minister issue a public apology for past abuses. The Commission also recommended reforming state institutions to strengthen the rule of law and prevent the recurrence of human rights violations. It advised the Moroccan government to add clear constitutional guarantees of human rights, abolish the death penalty and reform the country’s security and justice systems (ICTJ, 2009(a)). It is difficult to know the exact numbers of disappeared in Morocco, though the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID) received 248 cases over the years. Of these it clarified 185 cases, primarily through the government. Nine remain outstanding with the UNWGEID (ICRC, 2010) and a number more, not submitted to UNWGEID, remain unresolved. This is thought to be only a percentage of the actual missing, for not all families have listed their missing with the UNWGEID.

Legacy of the conflict Morocco’s communal reparations programme represents one of the most advanced experiences in the field of collective reparations. It includes a development dimension that seeks to meet the social and economic needs of the targeted communities and a symbolic dimension that seeks to acknowledge past abuses and preserve the memory of them by converting former detention compounds into social, cultural and economic centres, and memorials. Officials selected 11 communities and regions that suffered from collective punishment or isolation due to the presence of the former secret detention centres to benefit from the programme, including al-Hoceima, Khenifra, Figuig, Zagora and Hay Mohammadi in Casablanca (International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearences, n.d.). Since 2006 the CCDH has made substantial progress in carrying out the IER’s reparations programmes. The distribution of individual compensation to victims is nearly completed, with $85 million distributed to some 9,000 people. The CCDH has signed agreements with ministries and official agencies to provide victims and their families with medical care and vocational training at the state’s expense. A programme was launched in 2008 to manage and fund communal reparations efforts at the regional and community level (ICTJ, 2009). The symbolic dimension of the collective reparations programme 'aims to acknowledge the harm and preserve memory through the organisation of commemorative activities, and the construction of memorials, including the conversion of former secret detention centres into sites of memory' (ICTJ, 2009). The CCDH’s record on clarifying the fate of the disappeared remains mixed. Unlike in many other contexts, not all disappeared in Morocco were killed, but a number languished in prisons for years and sometimes decades. Those who were released were simply freed by the government, without explanation of why they had been held, or why they had been released. As part of the CCDH’s commitment to following the recommendations of the report, exhumations have been undertaken by the Moroccan authorities at the request of victims’ families, but victims’ families have complained that the process is not transparent. Another important criticism brought to the Commission was its limited investigative powers and lack of authority to hold perpetrators of human rights abuses to account. International organisations like the ICRC and Amnesty International have engaged with the issue by maintaining a 'dialogue with the Moroccan authorities and the Polisario Front to try to clarify the fate of people still disappeared from the 1975-1991 Western Sahara conflict' (ICRC, 2010). As of 2011, important work remains to be done. The Moroccan authorities have not yet fully complied with their obligation to grant victims 'the rights to truth, justice, and adequate reparation' (Amnesty International, 2010). A number of disappearance cases remain unresolved. Some relatives of disappeared persons have had no access to their loved ones' remains, and information about the conditions surrounding their capture and death is not uniformly or consistently provided. Significant complaints involved the limited information the Commission released about the


fate of the disappeared and the burial sites of the deceased. Furthermore, communal reparations programmes are still in the implementation phase. The IER’s legal and institutional reform recommendations remain in embryonic form (ICTJ, 2009). It is also important to note that the practice of disappearance continues in Morocco, though it is not as widespread.


Selected Resources on Morocco General background on Morocco •

Human Rights and Freedom from State Tyranny: Country Studies – Morocco: http://www.democracyweb.org/rights/morocco.php

On recent human rights reform in Morocco •

'Morocco's King Mohammed pledges constitutional reform': http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12695092

•

Moroccan government pledges in face of growing protests: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP1plxzyQXE

On recent disappearances •

http://www.euromedrights.org/en/about/4306.html

On the truth commission •

Summary of the Final Report of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission (IER): http://www.ccdh.org.ma/spip.php?article551

•

Report by Human Rights Watch about the Commission and disappearances: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2005/morocco1105/4.htm#_Toc119468371

•

Information about the Commission: http://www.hrw.org/en/node/11523/section/7

•

Statement by Driss Benzekri, President of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, on the conclusion of the Commission's mandate: http://www.ictj.org/static/MENA/Morocco/IER.benzekri.eng.pdf

•

‘Morocco Truth Commission Public Hearings to Begin Tomorrow’, ICTJ Press Release, 20 Dec 2004: http://www.ictj.org/en/news/press/release/282.html

•

'Morocco lifts lid on torture cases, abuse': http://www.ictj.org/en/news/coverage/article/365.html

•

'Royal Gulag' Economist piece on Tazmamart prison camp: http://www.economist.com/node/486729?Story_ID=486729


•

'New king delves into father's gruesome heritage': http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,348023,00.html Contains photographs of victims of Moroccan oppression and torture listening at public hearings designed to expose human rights abuses during the regime of King Hassan II.

•

'Morocco truth panel details abuse': http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4536258.stm

•

’Stirrings in the Desert’ New York Times interactive webpages: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2005/10/01/international/20051001_MOROCCO_FEATURE.html

•

'Morocco's justice and reconciliation Commission': http://www.merip.org/mero/mero040405

On memorials in Morocco •

A call for a memorial of Tazmamart prison: http://www.moroccoboard.com/viewpoint/42-jamal-laoudi/490-tazmamart-the-memorial

•

Plans for re-using torture centres: http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2008/12/02/feature-03

•

Google videos for Tazmamart prison: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1280&bih=576&gbv=2&q=tazmamart%20prison&ie=UTF8&sa=N&tab=iw#q=tazmamart+prison&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1280&bih=576&gbv=2&prmd=ivns&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=ehSJTYrsOtSZhQe6y8i2Dg&ve d=0CEYQqwQ&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=ff3e2739446bc197


Bibliographic sources on Morocco Amnesty International (1991). ‘Morocco: A Pattern of Political Imprisonment, Disappearances and Torture’. London: Amnesty International. Amnesty International (2010(b)). ‘Broken Promises: The Equity and Reconciliation Commission and Its Follow Up’. London: Amnesty International. Guillerot, J. et al. (2009). ‘The Rabat Report: The Concept and Challenges of Collective Reparation’. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. Hazan, P. (2006). 'Morocco: Betting on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission', USIP Special Report, vol.165. Howe, M. (2001). ‘Under a New Regime, Moroccans Search for Truth And Justice’, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 20(7), p. 32. Human Rights Watch (2005). ‘Morocco’s Truth Commission: Honoring Past Victims During an Uncertain Present,’ Human Rights Watch Reports, 17(11). International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) (2009). ‘Truth and Reconciliation in Morocco’. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearences (n.d.). Morocco: Country by Country Ratification Campaign. [Online.] Available at http://www.icaed.org/the-campaign/morocco/. Last accessed 29 September 2011. International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) (2010). The ICRC regional delegation in Tunus. [Online.] Available at: http://www.icrc.org/eng/where-we-work/africa/tunisia/overview-tunis.htm.Last accessed 29 September 2011. Opgenhaffen, V. and Freeman, M. (2005). ‘Transitional Justice in Morocco: A Progress Report’. New York: International Center for Transitional Justice. Slymovics, S. (2003). 'No Buying Off the Past: Moroccan Indemnities and the Opposition', Middle East Report, no. 229. Washington, D.C.: Middle East Research and Information Project, pp. 34.37. Vairel, F. (2008). ‘Morocco: From Mobilizations to Reconciliation?’, Mediterranean Politics, 13(2), pp. 229-241.



Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 4. Missing Persons in Cyprus

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 4. Missing Persons in Cyprus

Contents 1.

Introduction

2.


2.1


2.1.1




2.2


2.3


2.3.1


2.3.2


2.3.3


2.3.4

History textbooks

2.3.5


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3.1


3.1.1


3.1.2


3.1.3


3.1.4


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3.1.6


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2_Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 4. Missing Persons in Cyprus

p. 4

Contents 5.


5.1

Overview

5.2

Rationale

5.2.1


5.2.2



6.

Resources

6.1

Bibliography

6.2


6.4


6.5


Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 4. Missing Persons in Cyprus_3

4. Missing Persons in Cyprus In Cyprus, the people who went missing over the course of the conflict are referred to as missing, rather than disappeared. In this context, 'missing persons' are people whose families have no news of them and those who are reported missing as a result of an armed conflict, on the basis of reliable information.1 Missing persons can be men, women or children, civilians or members of the armed forces. The missing persons issue is one of the most difficult consequences of the Cyprus conflict, but significant efforts have been made in recent years to address the humanitarian aspect of this issue. The positive developments in the missing persons issue in Cyprus demonstrate that, despite the persistence of the conflict, some of the most basic needs of victims can be addressed, institutional cooperation and trust can be established on an inter-communal basis, and the process of coming to terms with the past can begin.

Roots of the conflict Cyprus is a multicultural country, but one which lives with the consequences of violent conflict and division. Due to its location at the crossroads of the Mediterranean, Cyprus has seen groups as diverse as the Romans, Crusaders, Lusignans and Venetians settle and control it at various points in time. Ottoman rule over the island, which started in 1571, ended when Cyprus became part of the British Empire in 1878. A 1946 official census undertaken by the colonial administration showed that Greek Cypriots comprised 80% of the population while Turkish Cypriots comprised 18% (other ethnicities included Armenians and Maronites) (Patrick, 1976). It was the conflicting nationalistic aspirations of the island’s two dominant population groups, the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities that led to increasing friction on the island, particularly from the early 1900s onwards. The anti-colonial struggle was institutionalised through the formation of a Greek Cypriot guerrilla group called EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) in 1955, whose primary aim was to end British rule in Cyprus and to realise enosis, unification of island with Greece. The aspiration, as well as the violent activities undertaken by EOKA, caused a great deal of tension between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriot community. In 1957, as a reaction to EOKA, the Turkish Cypriot guerrilla group TMT (Turkish Resistance Organisation) was formed, whose goals were to defend the Turkish Cypriot community and to seek closer ties with Turkey, through taksim, the division of the island on an ethnic basis. The violence during this period was both inter- and intra-communal, in that EOKA targeted those who were perceived to be an obstacle to their goals in either community. This phase of the Cyprus conflict ended in 1960 with the establishment the Republic of Cyprus based on the 1959 Zurich and London Agreements, which shared governance of Cyprus on a bicommunal basis between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities (Xydis, 1973). However, a dispute over constitutional changes and the persistence of conflicting nationalistic projects again led to inter-communal clashes, which began in December 1963. The violence escalated in 1964 and continued with periodic clashes over the next years, leading to the displacement of 30,000 Turkish Cypriots, nearly 20% of the Turkish Cypriot population (Minority Rights Group International, 2010). During this time, there were a number of deaths and reports of missing persons, leading to the establishment of a United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) on 4 March 1964 and the active involvement of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC). Although there were a number of efforts to resolve the situation through inter-communal talks between the representatives of the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities, the conflict continued. The missing persons issue in this period of the conflict was one faced by both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. A report issued on 10 September 1964 by the UN Secretary General (S/5950) established that there were 232 Turkish Cypriots and 38 Greek Cypriots missing up to that point. Both civilians and those who were members of security forces disappeared in different circumstances: some were travelling from one village to another; going to work; some were forcefully gathered together in groups by armed men; while others went missing in action. In some instances, people were captured and held as hostages, later to be returned or exchanged for prisoners held by the other community. However, many of the people who went missing during the 1960s were never found. The International Committee for the Red Cross and the UN provided assistance to the two communities to collect information about and locate the missing persons, and where possible, arrange for exchanges. 1. Please see section 3.1.1 for a more information about how the term 'missing persons' is defined.


Official bodies were established, such as the Missing Persons Office at the Turkish Cypriot Communal Chamber and the Director General’s Office at the Ministry of Justice to collect lists of individuals reported as missing, take steps to find their whereabouts, and to respond to the needs of the families. However, the international and official efforts were not able to address every case. Media coverage of the missing persons issue during this period can be seen in both Turkish and Greek language newspapers, which document the response of families of missing persons. There are reports that the Association of Families of Missing Turks organised demonstrations and wrote petitions to the UN, while the Union of Relatives of Greek Hostages went on hunger strikes at least two times during 1964. From June to August 1964, Bozkurt newspaper journalists Bilbay Eminoğlu and Ahmet Tolgay published a series in which they interviewed family members of people who had gone missing. What can be seen in the media of the time is that the communities tended to focus on their own missing persons, with minimal reporting or acknowledgement of the cases ın the other community. This is a trend which has continued to the present day, although recent developments outlined below have led to a more common perspective. In 1965, efforts to find information about the missing persons slowed down, leaving the calls of the families of the victims unanswered. The next milestone in the Cyprus conflict was in July 1974, when a coup to topple the government of Cyprus was carried out by the military junta in Greece and was then followed by the intervention of the Turkish military. These events brought about the current division of Cyprus, with far reaching political, economic, and humanitarian consequences for all Cypriots. A 1975 agreement between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders led to 140,000 Greek Cypriots and 60,000 Turkish Cypriots being displaced from their homes, with Greek Cypriots settling in the southern and Turkish Cypriots settling in the northern part of the island (Minority Rights Group International, 2010). Another major consequence of the events of 1974 was a significant increase in the numbers of missing persons from both communities, resulting in a total number, as reported currently by the Committee on Missing Persons, of 1,958 missing persons (1,464 Greek Cypriots and 494 Turkish Cypriots) (CMP, 2011(b)). Of these, 219 Turkish Cypriots and 43 Greek Cypriots are from the 1963-1964 period.2

Official treatment of the missing Inter-communal talks held under the auspices of the United Nations to resolve the conflict continue to this day, but have failed to generate an overall solution to the Cyprus problem. In the interim, the parties to the conflict have employed various methods over the years to address the problems that have emerged as a result of the division of the island. Some of these measures have been undertaken unilaterally, such as the interstate cases launched against Turkey by Cyprus at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). In parallel, collaborative measures have also been adopted as an outcome of inter-communal talks, such as the 1981 agreement to establish the Committee on Missing Persons. Along with the efforts on the official level, there have also been initiatives spearheaded by individuals and by civil society. In 1981 the talks between the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot leaders held under the auspices of the United Nations led to an agreement to set up the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, mandated to ‘establish the fate of missing persons’. The Committee does not attempt to establish the cause of death or attribute responsibility for the death of missing persons (Article 11, CMP Terms of Reference)’ (CMP, 1981). The CMP consists of two members appointed by the leaders of each community, along with a third member appointed by the Secretary-General of the UN. The committee members take decisions on the basis of consensus. Although the CMP was established in 1981, it took many years for it to operate on an effective basis. Until recently, the dynamics of the Cyprus problem were accompanied by a general lack of trust at the level of leadership and society, influencing negatively any initiatives requiring cooperation between the communities. The missing persons issues also became embedded within the context of each community’s official narrative of the conflict, and thus, came to be exploited for political purposes as well. Each community accused the other of using the issue for propaganda purposes; and the missing of the other community were rarely recognised. It is indicative that one ongoing debate for many years was on the

2. Figures provided by the CMP.


number of missing persons, with conflicting information from the two communities about the exact numbers. It was generally reported that the number of Greek Cypriot missing was 1,619 and the Turkish Cypriot missing was 803 (CNN News, 2002 and European Commission, 1999). However, it later came to be revealed that some of the names on the lists provided by the authorities were already known to be dead (a point discussed further below). Where the responsiveness of political bodies failed, civic action and responsibility set in, thus creating new dynamics (more below). Reflecting the increased pressure from various directions that was building up, the UN Secretary-General stepped in again in December 2003 and August 2004, calling on the leaders of the two communities to help the CMP activate its work. He asked that the CMP ‘conclude the remaining investigative work on both sides' and agree to implement the agreement of 31 July 1997 which provides for the exchange of information regarding known burial sites and the return of remains of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot missing persons, in line with the CMP's terms of reference (CMP, 2011(a)). Finally, in 2004, the Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat and Greek Cypriot leader Tasos Papadopoulous agreed to reactivate the CMP. The agreement by the leaders to reactivate the CMP is what has led to concrete progress on the missing persons issue since 2004. On 28 August 2006 the CMP announced the beginning of a programme of exhumations around the whole island, to be carried out by a team of Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot archaeologists and anthropologists under the guidance of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team.

Stages of the CMP’s Work 1. Cypriot archaeologists excavate potential burial sites, looking for remains. 2. Cypriot anthropologists working in the CMP's anthropological laboratory in the UN protected area analyse the exhumed remains and send bone samples to the Laboratory for Forensic Genetics. 3. Cypriot scientists analyse the DNA of the bone samples with the samples provided by family members of missing persons to identify the exhumed remains. 4. Once the person is identified, the family of the missing person is informed by a member of the CMP and the remains are returned formally. The family has the opportunity to come to the CMP's facilities to view their loved one's remains, and to meet the scientists involved in the process. (CMP, 2011(a))

Another important task undertaken by the CMP at this time concerned achieving a clear understanding of the total number of missing persons. It was during this period that files were finally exchanged and thoroughly examined, including as well the 2007 submission of 43 cases by the Greek Cypriot member on Greek Cypriots who went missing in 1964. According to the CMP’s August 2011 statistical progress report, there are 1,958 missing persons (1,464 Greek Cypriots and 494 Turkish Cypriots) (CMP, 2011(b)). Along with setting up the scientific infrastructure, other preparations at this stage included appeals for people to come forward with any relevant information concerning the fate or the remains of people listed as missing, so that burial sites could be located. It is generally understood that such information is treated confidentially, with no threat of investigation or prosecution resulting from the information that is given. CMP members have stated that the ability to provide information without fear of being prosecuted is essential to getting people to share information, which is critical to locating burial sites (Kıbrıs, 2008).


However, there are a number of differing perspectives both within Cyprus and in the international human rights community about issues that touch on the most sensitive aspects of the work of finding missing persons. On the one hand, some people have called into question approaches to issues such as conditional immunity from prosecution and the responsibility of investigatory bodies and governments to provide a fuller truth about the fate of the missing. On the other hand, others emphasise the need to maintain a secure process that enables the burial sites to be identified.

The Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot team of CMP archaeologists, working together at burial sites across Cyprus. Photographs courtesy of the CMP.


Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot members of the CMP visiting the sites. Photographs courtesy of the CMP.

The Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot team of CMP scientists, working together at the CMP lab to identify remains. Photographs courtesy of the CMP.

A family member watches and waits while the CMP team uncovers a site. Photograph courtesy of Sevgül Uludağ.


The groups involved After 1974, it was not only the families of the missing persons but also the international community who voiced demands for the authorities to take responsibility for meeting their obligations to investigate the fate of the missing. Through several Security Council Resolutions, the UN called on the two communities and Turkey to address the issue, and discussions were held between 1974 and 1981 on how this could take place. While talks proceeded at the official level about the process through which the missing persons could be investigated, relatives of the missing persons set up organisations to represent their interests. In 1975 the Turkish Cypriots set up an organisation called the Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans and the Greek Cypriot families set up an organisation named the Organisation of Relatives of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons. Both groups are currently active and have over the years been the main organisations speaking on behalf of the missing persons' families. As in many other conflicts around the world, the anguish of the families was directed towards the authorities in both communities, in the form of demands to know what happened to their loved ones. Through their activities, these organisations seek to honour those who were killed and/or went missing, to maintain a network of and provide support to families, and to build awareness about this aspect of the Cyprus conflict. There is also an organisation that represents the 43 Greek Cypriots who went missing in 1963 and 1964. Each community has chosen to represent and remember the missing persons in very different ways. From 1974 onwards in the Greek Cypriot community, the families of Greek Cypriot missing persons, particularly mothers, wives and sisters, organised many demonstrations, mainly directed to demanding greater accountability from Turkey. An annual ‘Marathon of Love’ was instituted in 1984, and many memorials commemorating Greek Cypriot missing persons were built. In contrast, in the Turkish Cypriot community, the missing persons have been integrated collectively within the overall commemoration of all those who died in the conflict. The Turkish Cypriot administration for many years did not place the same emphasis on the need to find out about the fate of the missing persons, openly stating that they were dead. There are no separate monuments to the missing persons in the Turkish Cypriot community. Each community focused only on its own missing persons. It was only during the 2000s that perceptions began to adjust and alternative viewpoints could be proposed. Because the CMP was not able to fulfil its mandate until 2004, for many years the families of the missing persons continued to live in anguish as they waited to find out about the fate of their loved ones. This led some families to seek legal measures, the first of which was a case launched at the European Court of Human Rights in 1990. In the Varnava and others v. Turkey ruling in 2008, the ECtHR found in that Turkey was in violation of Article 2 (right to life), Article 3 (prohibition of inhumane or degrading treatment) and Article 5 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention of Human Rights. This finding supports a number of other, earlier decisions made on inter-state cases, raised by Cyprus against Turkey: the European Commission of Human Rights in 1976, 1983 and 1999 found that Turkey violated fundamental articles of the European Convention on Human Rights and on 10 May 2001 the ECtHR ruled against Turkey, finding it in violation of Article 2, Article 3 and Article 5. Although the Court’s rulings have been critical to motivating the authorities to take greater action, and thus served as an important form of recourse for the families, they have also left relatives with limited options, as seen by the experience of Turkish Cypriot relatives who in 2002 submitted 4 separate cases to the ECtHR, all of which the Court found inadmissible, stating that the relatives had allowed too much time to pass to submit their cases.3 The same criteria has also led the Court to reject 51 other cases (Kyriakos, 2011). Pressure continued to mount for an effective response to the missing persons issue, both internationally and locally, especially in light of the lack of concrete progress. In 1995 two Greek Cypriot women who believed their husbands had been buried in a Greek Cypriot military cemetery in Lakatamia requested information on the people buried in the communal, anonymous grave. The authorities were not able to respond, and the women broke into the cemetery with the intention of opening the graves themselves. They were arrested by the police and later released.

3. The cases: Karabardak and Others v. Cyprus, no. 76575/01, 22 October 2002; Baybora and Others v. Cyprus, no. 77116/01, 22 October 2002; Şemi and Others v. Cyprus, no. 13212/02; Hüseyin and Göçer v. Cyprus, no. 28280/02, 3 January 2003.


The story of the two women, along with that of other victims, was extensively reported in the Greek Cypriot media by journalist Andreas Paraschos. This process was significant because it highlighted the fact that responsibility for the handling of the missing persons was shared across all parties to the conflict, and could not just be attributed to one factor. The build-up of interest and demands from within civil society and the media prompted the authorities to assume greater responsibility. Exhumations were carried out in the summer of 1999 at Lakatamia and Saint Constantine and Helen military cemeteries by the non-governmental organisation Physicians for Human Rights. In May 2000, officials informed families about the 126 people buried in the Lakatamia cemetery (Sant Cassia, 2005). Families of some of the men who were identified launched civil cases alleging a breach of human rights and negligence by the authorities. The wife of Christofis Passias whose remains were also identified in those exhumations, launched a case in 2002 against the Republic. This case was settled in November 2010, when a court in Cyprus found the government guilty of failure to effectively investigate the missing person's fate, which is a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (Yakinthou, 2008). The advancement of forensic sciences and associated technologies in the late 1990s had a significant impact in the ability to implement exhumation and identification processes. In fact, it was the vast scale of exhumations and DNA identifications that took place in the former Yugoslavia in the early 2000s that allowed for procedures and processes to be refined and developed. However, because the CMP in Cyprus had yet to move forward, there were only a few cases in which the new technologies were applied. In addition to the Lakatamia case described above, there was an exhumation that took place by a US-led investigation into the whereabouts of an American-Cypriot named Andreas Kassapis. The investigation was concluded in 1998, and represents the first identification using the DNA method in Cyprus (Sant Cassia, 2005). In 2001, authorities in the south launched an appeal for families of missing persons across the divide to submit blood samples for use in DNA identification. Although the Turkish Cypriot leader at the time strongly discouraged Turkish Cypriots from doing so, a group of families from the town of Dohni responded to the call. Along with the developments on the scientific level, the trend towards a legal approach to the missing persons also created a new dynamic that shone a spotlight on the responsibility of authorities. The cases launched at the local level and at the ECtHR in the early 2000s as well as the decisions that started to come out of the ECtHR at that time, demonstrated that the efforts to address the missing persons in Cyprus were not sufficient. Another significant breakthrough came when, as a result of the efforts of civil society actors, the missing persons issue started to be reconceptualised as an issue common to all Cypriots. Discussion at the public level was fuelled by the writings of pioneering journalists Andreas Paraschos and Sevgül Uludağ. From 1995 onwards, Paraschos’s coverage of the Lakatamia exhumations led to significant internal debates within the Greek Cypriot community which questioned the responsibilities and actions of their leadership towards missing persons. Author and journalist Makarios Drousiotis published a book in 2000 titled 1619 Guilty Actions which voiced criticism towards the way the issue of the missing persons had been mishandled and used as a political tool by officials, at the expense of addressing the humanitarian needs of the families (Drousiotis, 2000). In 2002, Uludağ began to investigate the issue of the missing persons with the purpose of showing the commonality of pain and suffering that both sides have experienced. Her articles, which became a daily feature of newspapers in both communities, presented personal stories of individuals, Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot, who were involved in the missing persons issue, either as relatives of victims or as witnesses. This process was important in several respects: it gave victims a space to tell their own stories, it presented a different perspective that had been silenced by the official narratives in both communities for so long, and it also highlighted the limitations of the way that history is currently presented and understood in the Cypriot context. A book based on her work, Oysters with the Missing Pearls, was published in 2005 in Turkish, has been translated into Greek and English. She has set up a hotline for people to call in anonymously and give information about the location of burial sites or stories about people who have been declared missing, which she passes on to the CMP. She has also been instrumental in building bridges between Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot victims which has led to the establishment of a bicommunal initiative bringing


together relatives of the missing from both communities (see below). Such efforts have helped to shed light on the human dimension of this issue and also been valuable in supporting the process of identifying possible burial sites. Civic initiatives across the divide accelerated with the opening of checkpoints in April 2003, allowing for the formation of a new organisation called the Bi-communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons, Victims of Massacres and other Victims of 1963-74 Events. It was established in 2005 and is the only organisation in Cyprus representing the families of both Greek and Turkish Cypriot missing persons. The Bicommunal Initiative goes to schools, villages, and meeting groups all over the country talking to people in environments as diverse as academic conferences and local community gatherings in small villages. Its members speak about their shared experiences of pain, and their desire that the atrocities of the past be exposed, spoken about, acknowledged, and learned from. Often, they ask communities to come forward with information regarding particular cases. They always highlight their view that the pain of loss is shared by both communities, and often emphasise the link between exposing stories of violence about the past and increasing general awareness of suppressed narratives and preventing further conflict in the future.

Members of the Bicommunal Initiative come together at a seminar. Photographs courtesy of Sevgül Uludağ.

Another organisation, the Turkish Cypriot Human Rights Foundation (TCHRF), established in 2005, also began to be active on the issue. It directly engaged with relatives of the missing on a number of different levels. First, it provided legal advice to relatives who had been feeling frustrated with the lack of progress and unresponsiveness by authorities in both communities. TCHRF lawyers helped the relatives initiate a legal process in the southern part of Cyprus, claiming that authorities failed to carry out effective investigations. Representatives of the Foundation also organised a number of seminars and meetings to inform relatives about the new stage of the CMP’s work. At the same time, they also emphasised the importance of providing psychological support to the relatives. Beyond addressing the needs of relatives, the efforts of the TCHRF have raised public awareness and sensitivity about the missing persons issue overall. The new environment has also led the two main victims’ organisations, the Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans and the Organisation of Relatives of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons, to initiate contacts and communication with each other. They have jointly attended various conference and events to talk about the plight of the missing. This represents an important step forward in acknowledging the common pain and suffering that both communities have endured.


Legacy of the conflict In July 2007, the CMP began returning the remains of people who had gone missing in the conflict to their families. The first funerals in the Greek Cypriot community occurred on 8 July 2007 and the first funerals in the Turkish Cypriot community occurred only a few days after on 13 July 2007. That process continues, and as of 30 June 2011, 797 people have been exhumed from burial sites all over the country. The CMP has opened 536 burial sites and the remains of almost 286 people have been returned to their families (226 missing Greek Cypriots and 60 missing Turkish Cypriots) (CMP, 2011(b)).

After the CMP identifies and returns the remains, the families conduct a funeral. Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot families bury their loved ones. Photographs courtesy of the CMP.

As the CMP's mandate is limited to finding and identifying the remains of people who went missing, there is no formal capacity for families to learn the circumstances surrounding their loved one's death. The need to know what happened is brought up time and time again by families, and some of them have brought new cases at local and international levels claiming that the current mechanisms in place are unable to fulfil the legal responsibility of the authorities to carry out an effective investigation. The legal route both then and now has functioned as a source of pressure but has yet to produce any consistent or clear impact. Judgements have yet to be fully enforced and the issue of what constitutes an effective investigation and the role of authorities still remain open questions. Once exhumations have taken place, new legal cases become possible, because, under the law, the remains are seen as new evidence, and therefore when families receive the remains from the CMP, they are able to initiate a new case. Therefore, as a result of the return of remains since 2007, a number of new cases have emerged. There are currently 16 such cases opened by Turkish Cypriots and 33 opened by Greek Cypriots at the ECtHR.4 Following the Court’s inquiries, authorities have launched parallel criminal investigations in both communities. Along with the cases at the ECtHR, there are also those that have been introduced locally by both Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot families. One recent ruling, in response to Turkish Cypriot claims regarding victims at Dohni, resulted in a dismissal of the case, stating that missing persons are a facet of the Cyprus problem and thus can only be handled by the President’s office, and therefore cannot be subject to judicial oversight. Decisions on local cases such as this one have not yielded clear or consistent conclusions about the responsibility of the authorities, 4. Interview with Turkish Cypriot officials, 11 August 2011.


and thus still fail to satisfy international legal standards about the role of such bodies. These cases and investigations are still ongoing, and issues relating to meeting the obligation to carry out an effective investigation and to provide information about the circumstances of death, including on the question of what should happen to those responsible for the deaths, are becoming increasingly pressing. While some individuals and groups have put forward the idea of a ‘truth commission’ as a way of dealing with this issue, such calls have not found much traction in society.

Family members who lost their loved ones in the infamous ‘lost bus’ plant a tree at the well where the remains were found. Photograph courtesy of Sevgül Uludağ.

At an event organised by the Bicommunal Initiative, Sevilay Berk, daughter of a missing person, whose remains were found, gives an award to Xenophontos, who showed the burial site of Berk’s mother and father. Xenophontos is still waiting for his missing son to be found. Photograph courtesy of Sevgül Uludağ.

Recently, increased interest in the filmmaking and theatre communities about the missing has also created more awareness and discussion about the events of the past and the plight of victims from a multiperspectival approach. In 2004 Greek and Turkish Cypriot filmmakers Panicos Chrysanthou and Derviş Zaim made the documentary Parallel Trips, gathering stories of massacres and narratives from survivors and family members of missing persons. Also in 2004, Greek Cypriot filmmaker Tony Angastiniotis made a documentary Voices of Blood: Searching for Selden about a massacre of Turkish Cypriots in the villages of Atlılar, Muratağa and Sandallar (Aloa/Maratha/Santalaris). In 2007, a documentary titled The Missing Bus, about Turkish Cypriots who went missing near Larnaca in 1964 was released by Fevzi Tanpınar and Raşit Pertev. The following year, in 2008, a series of documentaries and related programmes were aired on Greek Cypriot television, such as Soultana kai Charita by Demetris Andreou. In 2010, an international foundation, The Elders, made a documentary about the progress of the missing persons issue through the eyes of four young Cypriot students, called Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future (a copy of this film is provided in the Resources section of this pack). That same year, Turkish Cypriot filmmaker Derviş Zaim released a feature film shot in Cyprus called Shadows and Faces about violence in a mixed village in early 1964. My Own Truth was also released by Soula Hadjikyriacou in 2010. Such works have been important in promoting a broader and more shared understanding of contested historical issues. There are still many missing persons who have yet to be found as part of the CMP’s work, and misconceptions about the missing persons continue to be a facet of the public discourse in both communities. However, significant progress has been made in closing a painful chapter for the familes of those victims whose remains have been recovered. Concerns continue to be raised by victims’ groups about the length of time the process has been taking, and claims are made that access has been prevented to possible burial sites in the northern part of the island.5 It is certain though that CMP operates as a successful model of institutionalised cooperation between the two communities, and is making its work 5. Although the rate of identifying remains is one of the fastest in the world according to the CMP, the laborious and painstakingly detailed work done under conditions of uncertainty with restricted funds and resources means that families continue to wait while the process is completed.


known to the public, by engaging with victims’ groups and other civil society efforts and through ongoing media outreach, regular updates to its website, and the production of a documentary film, Digging for the Future in 2010 (a copy of this film is provided in the Resources section of this pack). The progress that has been made by the CMP, the increased public exposure about the issue and the efforts of various organisations, journalists and artists has meant that the issue of the missing persons in Cyprus is being discussed more widely, and is no longer treated with the same level of taboo as had been the case in previous years. There is a greater expectation that authorities must act responsibly, more recognition of the importance of the work of the CMP, wider acknowledgement that both Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots have suffered, and a more nuanced discussion about what this process reveals about the past and about the future choices it presents for the people of Cyprus.


Selected Resources on Cyprus Websites of organisations addressing the missing persons issue in Cyprus •

Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans: http://www.kktc-sehitaileleri.org

•

Bi-communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons and Victims of Massacres and War: Christos Eftymiou, email: [email protected]. Sevgül Uludağ, email: [email protected]

•

Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP): http://www.cmp-cyprus.org

•

Organisation of Relatives of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons: http://www.missing-cy.org.cy/

•

Turkish Cypriot Human Rights Foundation: http://www.ktihv.org

Films and documentaries on missing persons in Cyprus Links have been included for any films that are available online. Copies of Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future and Digging for a Future, both with Turkish and Greek subtitles, are provided in the Resources section of this pack. Copies of all the films are available at the Home for Cooperation library. Please contact the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (www.ahdr.info) for more information at [email protected]. •

Antigone’s Speech/Ο Λόγος της Αντιγόνης A 2011 documentary by Soula Hadjikyriacou.The documentary focuses on the three wives of Greek Cypriot soldiers who were killed in action in 1974 and buried in southern Cyprus, but authorities insisted for decades that they were missing. (In Greek)

•

In this Waiting In this Waiting is a feature-length documentary released in March 2011 and directed by Anna Tsiarta. It is about seven Cypriots, who lost their loved ones in 1963, 1964 and 1974, and the stories they lived during the events and after, leading up to the recent findings of the remains of many Cypriots missing for over thirty years. http://www.inthiswaiting.com

•

Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future A documentary by The Elders launched in February 2011. The film focuses on the efforts of the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP), which has been working to recover and identify the remains of missing persons and return them to their families. In the film, four Cypriot teenagers take part in a journey with three members of The Elders, Lakhdar Brahimi, Jimmy Carter, and Desmond Tutu to learn about this difficult and painful issue. Together, they visit exhumation sites and meet the scientists of the CMP – Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots who together dig deep into the ground to recover the remains of Cypriots who were killed during the conflict. They also visit the CMP laboratory


where bones are carefully analysed, documented, reassembled, DNA-tested and eventually identified by Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot forensic anthropologists. The Elders and the young people also meet two men who both lost their fathers. These two men, Veli Beidoğlu and Spyros Hadjinicolaou, share their stories and discuss how they are using this common experience to promote understanding between their two communities. http://www.theElders.org •

Digging for a Future A documentary produced by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus in 2010. The film presents an overview of the work of the CMP and its members, and includes statements of support from UN and European Union officials as well as interviews with family members of the missing. http://www.cmp-cyprus.org

•

My Own Truth/ Η δική μου αλήθεια A documentary series made by Soula Hadjikyriacou and aired on Greek Cypriot television in 2010. Part 1: The two first interviewees, Petros Souppouris and Giorgos Liassis, were both witnesses and victims of the Palekithro killings in 1974. The second interviewee is Androulla Liasis, Giorgos’ sister, who was seriously injured during the Palekithro killings and was left partly disabled. Part 2: This part of the documentary starts with a description of the rise of nationalism and a description the 1963-64 events. The first interviewee is Panickos Hadjiloizos, an ex-police chief. The documentary briefly looks at the murder of a Turkish Cypriot in Nicosia and at the atrocities at Dohni village. The second interviewee is Kutlay Erk, whose father disappeared after being in hospital and explores this event and rumors that surrounded his disappearance. The third interviewee is Harris Simeonides, the President of the Committee of the Missing Persons 1963-64. Part 3: A judge from Yialousa, Spyros Hadjinikolaou’s father, had gone missing in 1974. Spyros tells the story as he remembers it as a five year old. The second interviewee is Panagiota Solomou from Komi Kepir. Her daughter Christina, the third interviewee, talks about her experience as a teenager who lost her father and brother, and the consequent emotional absence of her mother. Irini Mandoles is the fourth interviewee. Her mother Charita Mandoles, has been a prominent figure in the families’ movement to discover the whereabouts of their missing relatives. Part 4: The documentary takes the viewer to the fields of Mesaoria, going through the villages of Muratağa, Sandallar and Atlılar (Maratha, Sandallaris, and Aloa) where the mass graves of Turkish Cypriots killed by EOKA B during 1974 were found. The first interviewee is Hüseyin Akansoy from Maratha. The second interviewee, Suat Kafadar from Dohni, narrates how Greek Cypriots put men from his village in buses to transfer them to Limassol. Leyla Kıralp’s husband was also in one of the buses that left Zigi and Dohni to go to Limassol. Leyla returns to Zigi and remembers what it was like to say goodbye to her then husband who she never saw again.

•

Soultana and Charita/Σουλτάνα και Χαρίτα Demetris Andreou’s documentary aired on Sigma TV in July 2008 and July 2009. The film looks at the common pain and grief of two women, of Sultana; a Turkish Cypriot, and Charita; a Greek Cypriot. Both women have been waiting for many years to find out what has happened to their missing relatives. Andreou brings the two women together and takes them to the place where they have last seen their missing relatives.

•

The Missing Bus/Kayıp Otobus Released in 2007, this film was directed by Fevzi Tanpınar and written by Raşit Pertev. It follows the story of 11 Turkish Cypriot men who left their Larnaca village on the morning of 13 May 1964 for work at the Dheklia base. They never returned home. In May 2010 DNA tests confirmed their remains were found in the bottom of a well at the village of Voroklini.


•

Massacres in Cyprus A documentary film produced in 2004 by the Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans. It covers in detail a range of violent incidents that occurred in villages and towns across Cyprus from the 1950s until 1974. Within the documentary, there are a few mentions of missing persons cases. The first of these is of religious leader Yusuf Mehmet Hilmi Effendi, who disappeared on 6 July 1958. An incident on 14 August 1975 in the village of Terazi is presented in which Greek soldiers are said to have taken Turkish Cypriot men. Another case occured on 26 December 1963 when a man named Mustafa Zorba disappeared on his way to Nicosia, a fate suffered by two other Turkish Cypriot men on 29 April 1964. The incident in which 32 Turkish Cypriot villagers from the Famagusta area who disappeared following the clashes involving police chief Pantellis are also covered.

•

Voice of Blood I and Voice of Blood II: Searching for Selden Produced in 2004 by Antonis ‘Tony’ Angastiniotis. The documentary portrays the killing of Turkish Cypriot civilians in the villages of Muratağa, Sandallar and Atlılar (Maratha, Sandallaris, and Aloa) in 1974. Eyewitnesses of the events talk to the camera and reveal how they survived. http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=-7695688617775364591#docid=6069441414391519024 Voice of Blood II is a dramatic documentary about a Greek Cypriot journalist, who after a young Turkish Cypriot girl visited him in his dream, crosses the north side of the island and sets out to try and find her. His search brings him outside Famagusta where three Turkish Cypriot villages lie in ruins. There he meets some of the residents who share with him the stories of the villages and how they were attacked. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7695688617775364591#

•

Dead, Presumed Missing? A film on Missing Persons in Cyprus A film produced in 2003 by Paul Sant Cassia and Colette Piault.This film explores the story of two Greek women who attempted a dramatic exhumation on the collective tombs of 'unknown soldiers' in Cyprus in order to claim their husbands back. It traces the different official perceptions of Greek and Turkish Cypriots towards the recovery of their missing persons, and follows the attempts by the UN to resolve the problem. http://www.der.org/films/dead-presumed-missing.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8dWAV1X9E0

•

Missing Presumed Alive: The 1619 Missing Persons (In English + English subtitles) Focuses on the arrest, detention and return of Greek Cypriots during 1974. The documentary also looks at the three cases of missing persons that were taken to the European Court of Human Rights. Part 1/2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HraydcPS_nM Part 2/2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bld4h8TPrH0


Bibliographic sources on Cyprus Angastiniotis, T. (2006). Trapped in the Green Line: the Making of Voice of Blood. Nicosia: Rüstem. Bryant, R. (2004). Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus. London: I.B. Tauris. CNN News (2002). ‘Cyprus ‘missing men’ discussed’. [Online.] Available at http://articles.cnn.com/2002-01-11/world/cyprus.missing_1_turkish-cypriot-leaders-greek-cypriots-rauf-denktash?_s=PM:WORLD. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) (1981). CMP Terms of Reference 1981. [Online.] Available at http://www.cmp-cyprus.org/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=1365&tt=graphic&lang=l1. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) (2011(a)). CMP Fact Sheet August 2011. [Online.] Available at http://www.cmp-cyprus.org/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=1307. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) (2011(b)). CMP Quick Statistics 31 August 2011. [Online.] Available at http://www.cmp-cyprus.org/nqcontent.cfm?a_id=1307. Last accessed 29 September 2011. Δρουσιώτης, Μ. (2000). 1619 Ενοχές. Τα λάθη, τα ψέματα και οι σκοπιμότητες. Λευκωσία: Αρχείο. European Commission (1999). ‘1999 Regular Report from the Commission on Cyprus’ Progress Towards Accession’, 13 October 1999. International Crisis Group (2006). ‘The Cyprus Stalemate: What Next?’ London: International Crisis Group. Kıbrıs Gazetesi (2008). ‘Geçmişle yüzleşme, çok hassas bir konu’, 28 November 2008. [Online.] Available at http://www.kibrisgazetesi.com/index.php/cat/2/news/62528/PageName/Ic_Haberler Last accessed 28 October 2011. Kıbrıs Türk Federe Devleti Enformasyon Dairesi (1983). Kayıplar İçin Kimi Suçlamalı? Lefkoşa: Kıbrıs Türk Federe Devleti Enformasyon Dairesi. Kızılyürek, N. (2002). Millliyetçilik Kıskacında Kıbrıs. Istanbul: Iletişim. KKTC Başbakanlık Tanıtım Dairesi (1995). Kayıplar. Lefkoşa: KKTC Başbakanlık Tanıtım Dairesi. Kyriakos, N. (2011). ‘Enforced disappearences in Cyprus: problems and prospects of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights’. In European Human Rights Law Review, 2011(2), pp. 190-199. Κληρίδης, Γ. (1988). Η Κατάθεση μου [τομος Α]. Λευκωσία: «Αλήθεια». Loizos, P. (1988). ‘Intercommunal Killings in Cyprus’. In Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 23(4), pp. 639-653. Makriyianni, C. and Psaltis, C. (2007). ‘The Teaching of History and Reconciliation’. In The Cyprus Review, 19(1), pp. 43-69. Μαχλουζαρίδη, Σ. Π. (1985). Κύπρος 1940-60: ημερολόγιο των εξελίξεων. Λευκωσία. Minority Rights Group International (2010). Cyprus Overview. [Online.] Available at: http://www.minorityrights.org/1873/cyprus/cyprus-overview.html. Last accessed 29 September 2011.


Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2007). ‘Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruinations and the production of anthropological knowledge’. In Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S) 15, pp. 1-18. Νεοκλέους, Ν. (2008). ‘Αγνοηθέντες 1974’. Λευκωσία: Επιφανίου. Papadakis Y. (2005). Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide. London: I. B. Tauris. Papadakis, Y. (2006). Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History, and an Island in Conflict (New Anthropologies of Europe). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Patrick, A. R. (1976). Political Geography and the Cyprus Conflict. University of Waterloo: Department of Geography. Psaltis, C. (forthcoming, 2012). ‘Intergroup trust and contact in transition: A social representations perspective on the Cyprus conflict’. In Ivana Markova and Alex Gillespie (eds). Trust and Conflict. London and New York: Routledge. Πέτρου, Μ. & Γεωργιάδη, Ε. (1991). ‘Το αδύνατο πένθος των συγγενών των Κυπρίων Αγνοουμένων: ψυχικές και κοινωνικές διαστάσεις’. Ανακοίνωση στον 3ο Πανελλήνιο Συνέδριο Ψυχολογικής Έρευνας Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών. Δημοσιεύτικε ανεπρυγμένο στο Ψυχολογικά Θέματα, Απρίλιος 1996, τομός 7, τεύχος 1, Αθήνα. Ρούσου, Μ. (1993). ‘Η τραγωδία του να είσαι Πηνελόπη: πατριαρχία-πόλεμος- Πολιτικη’. Στο Κοινωνία και Ζωή: λίγο πριν την ανεξαρτησία και μέχρι το 1984. Λευκωσία Εκδ. Δήμου Λευκωσίας. Sant Cassia, P. (2005). Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Sant Cassia, P. (2006). ’Guarding Each Other’s Dead, Mourning One’s Own: The Problem of Missing Persons and Missing Pasts in Cyprus’. In South European Society and Politics, 11(1), pp. 111-128. Saygılı, A. (2006). ‘Kıbrıs’ta Geçmişle Hesaplaşmak Mümkün mü? Bir Olanak(sızlık) Olarak Kayıp Kişiler Komitesi’. In Kıbrıs Yazıları, VOL. 3-4, pp. 28-40. Uludağ, S. (2005). Oysters with the Missing Pearls. Nicosia: IKME and Bilban. Uludağ, S. (2005). Cyprus: the Untold Stories, Bibliopolis. Xydis, S. (1973). Cyprus: Reluctant Republic. The Hague: Mouton. Yakinthou, C. (2008). ‘The Quite Deflation of Den Xehno? Changes in the Greek Cypriot Communal Narrative on the Missing Persons in Cyprus’. In The Cyprus Review, 20(1), pp. 15-23. Zembylas, M. (2009). ‘Making Sense of Traumatic Events: Towards a Politics of Aporetic Mourning in Educational Theory and Pedagogy.’ In Educational Theory 59(1), pp. 85-104.



Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 5. How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 5. How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale

Contents 1.

Introduction

2.


2.1


2.1.1




2.2


2.3


2.3.1


2.3.2


2.3.3


2.3.4

History textbooks

2.3.5


3.


3.1


3.1.1


3.1.2


3.1.3


3.1.4


3.1.5


3.1.6


3.2


3.3


3.4


3.5


4.


2_Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 5. How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale

Contents 5.


p. 4

5.1

Overview

p. 5

5.2

Rationale

p. 7

5.2.1


p. 7

5.2.2


p. 7

Unit 1: Managing difficult pasts. How have societies around the world addressed the problem of missing persons?

p. 10

Unit 2: The missing persons of Cyprus

p. 15

Unit 3: Why have different responses to Cyprus’ missing persons problem emerged over time?

p. 18

Unit 4: History and memory

p. 22

Unit 5: How should the missing persons of Cyprus be remembered?

p. 34

6.

Resources

6.1

Bibliography

6.2


6.4


6.5


Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 5. How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale_3

5. How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale The activities described in this sequence of learning are intended for use with students between 12-15 years of age. We have assumed that these students will have relatively undeveloped ideas of historical empathy and about historical interpretations and accounts. It is intended that the activities will be modified, as appropriate, in response to students’ reading ability, substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge and understanding. Timings for individual units are not given: we assume that teachers will want to pick and choose between the activities offered and / or to adapt them to their pedagogic priorities and circumstances. Teachers will be able to prepare for this lesson sequence by reviewing the discussions in previous sections about the theory and practice of historical thinking in history education and about the experiences of other countries that have dealt with missing persons. In addition, those conducting the activities in this sequence can benefit from a range of resources. Teachers always have the opportunity to exercise their creativity and resourcefulness in seeking out new sources, prompting new questions, and designing their own activities to complement those included here. In this way, the learning journey is always one that is continually stimulating and fresh. Teachers are invited to draw on these readily available resources: 1. In the Resources section of this pack, a CD has been included that offers sample handouts for the classroom activities in all the units. A symbol in the unit plans means that there is a handout for that particular activity on the CD. These are open to modification by teachers, and teachers are free to adjust them depending on factors such as the learning abilities of their students. 2. Teachers may also wish to draw on additional sources when implementing the activities, such as: a. A collection of newspaper articles on missing persons from Greek and Turkish language newspapers from various years spanning the mid1950s to 2009. These are located at the AHDR Library and Archive at the Home for Cooperation. b. A diverse collection of documentary films, books, pamphlets and photographs on the missing persons in Cyprus. These are located at the AHDR Library and Archive at the Home for Cooperation. c. The links to news articles, websites and organisations provided at the end of the case studies for Morocco, Guatemala, Spain, the former Yugoslavia and Cyprus. 3. Along with this, teachers will also find two documentary films, subtitled in Greek and Turkish, included in the pack. Cyprus: Digging the Past in Search of the Future by The Elders and Digging for the Future by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus. Both can be viewed in classrooms, and a special discussion guide has been prepared for The Elders’ documentary which is also included in the Resources CD. Finally, teachers are encouraged to contact the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR). AHDR conducts regular trainings for teachers on history teaching, and will be able to provide specialised training in support of teachers using this pack. AHDR can also assist with facilitating contacts with the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) and organisations representing the families of missing persons for those who wish to have a more direct interaction with this subject. AHDR is based at the Home for Cooperation in the Ledra Palace buffer zone in Nicosia, which also hosts a Library and Archive containing a vast array of materials (books, periodicals, journals, films, etc.) on Cyprus history in several languages and from different perspectives. AHDR’s collection of materials on missing persons is also based here. AHDR can be contacted at [email protected] and on the following phone numbers: +357 22445740 and/or +90 542 850 6681.


5.1 Overview Enquiry question:

How should the missing persons of the Cyprus conflict be remembered?

Enquiry outcome:

Working in small groups, students will produce a number of design briefs for memorialisation projects commemorating the missing persons of the Cyprus conflict and peer assess each other’s briefs.

Historical knowledge and understanding:

As a result of taking part in this sequence of lessons it is intended that students will:

Units

•

Develop knowledge and understanding of aspects of the recent history of Cyprus (19602010) relevant to the missing persons issue.

•

Develop knowledge and understanding of the missing persons issue and how it has been addressed in contexts outside Cyprus.

•

Develop their ability to understand and explain the actions of persons in the past (historical empathy).

•

Develop their understanding of the ways in which the past has been interpreted and represented through monuments and other forms of representation (historical interpretations and accounts).

Title

Summary

1

Managing difficult pasts. How have societies around the world addressed the problem of missing persons?

In order to explore how societies around the world have addressed the problem of missing persons, students explore and compare and contrast the issue in Guatemala, Morocco, the former Yugoslavia and Spain, considering a number of themes including the nature of the conflicts in these four contexts, the groups involved (families, governments, NGOs, international groups, etc.), the official treatment of the issue and the legacy of conflict in the present.

2

The missing persons of Cyprus

This unit contextualises the problem of 'missing persons' by locating it in the history of Cyprus since 1960. Students explore the circumstances under which people went missing in Cyprus during the conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s and a variety of responses to the issue both within and outside Cyprus.


Units

Title

Summary

3

Why have different responses to the missing persons problem emerged in Cyprus over time?

In this unit, students will focus on the different ways in which four different groups have responded to the issue of the missing persons in Cyprus, exploring and comparing their motivations, aims and beliefs.

4

History and memory

The purpose of this unit is to explore some of the ways in which societies represent, remember, forget, celebrate, commemorate or negate the past. The unit looks (a) at monuments in general using case studies from two countries and (b) a case study of three monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

5

How should the missing persons of the Cyprus conflict be remembered?

Drawing on the substantive knowledge and the historical understanding they have developed in the previous units, students work in groups to produce design briefs for memorialisation projects commemorating the missing persons of Cyprus and peer assess each other’s design briefs.


5.2 Rationale 5.2.1 Intended learning aims This lesson sequence aims to engage students in sustained historical reflection and enquiry that will enable them: •

to develop their historical knowledge and understanding about the missing persons issue in the context of the recent history of Cyprus;

•

to develop their understanding of historical empathy and historical interpretations and accounts;

•

to discuss and debate personal, social, ethical and political dimensions of history; and

•

to reflect on how they feel the past should be approached in the light of the needs of both the present and the future.

The lesson sequence will also enable various modes of learning – including small group work and peer assessment and review, exploratory discussion and debate – an approach that is particularly appropriate where complex and sensitive issues are addressed.

5.2.2 The conceptual rationale for this enquiry The sequence of lessons sets out to achieve these aims through an enquiry question and an enquiry outcome that asks students to explore the ways in which the issue of missing persons in Cyprus might be approached in the present and future. The enquiry involves students developing their knowledge and understanding of the ways in which the issue of missing and disappeared persons1 has been addressed in a number of societies around the world (Unit 1) and it also involves students developing their knowledge and understanding of the history of the missing persons issue in Cyprus (Unit 2). Unit 3 will seek to develop students’ abilities to engage with past action and past actors on their own terms, or, in other words, in ways that seek to understand past actors within their own horizons of meaning and understanding. The objective here is to develop students’ capacity for historical empathy or for the rational understanding of the meanings, beliefs, purposes and contexts that have informed action in the past and to develop this by developing understandings of the actions of groups that have sought, in different times and places and for different reasons, to address the question of missing persons in Cyprus. The purpose of engaging with these histories is not simply to develop knowledge and understanding of these important topics. The purpose is also to engage students with questions of ‘public history’ (Tosh, 2008) or to get students to think about how difficult contemporary history is addressed in public historical consciousness and how such histories could and should be addressed in the future (Cole, ed., 2007). These are controversial issues since the ways in which we construct the recent past in the present is bound up with family and group identity and also since the ways in which we construct the past relate to the futures that we wish to bring about (see the discussion of teaching sensitive and controversial issues in Section 2.3.5). The past is represented in the present in a myriad of ways – in cyberspace, in film and on television, in museums, in textbooks, in public architecture, in street names, in memorials and monuments, and so on. Engaging with monuments, as Peter Seixas and Penny Clark have shown, can be a very good way of exploring how children think about and understand history (Seixas and Clark, 2004). It is also a way of engaging with, and seeking to cultivate, a range of forms of historical consciousness, including understandings of disciplinary history and its relationship to other forms of historical understanding (Rüsen, 2005).2 Engaging students in debate and discussion about the representation of the past in 1. 'Missing persons' are people whose families have no news of them, and those who are reported missing as a result of an armed conflict, on the basis of reliable information. Please refer to Section 3.1.1 for a broader discussion about missing persons. 2. For a theoretical discussion of Rüsen and of historical consciousness see Lee (2002) and for discussions that explore the ideas in brief see Chapman and Facey (2004) and Chapman (2010).


the present – and future – is also likely to be a way to help students engage with history as a live issue, or as one that raises important questions about collective self-understanding in time and the forms that it does and might take. Unit 4 encourages students to reflect on memorials and monuments and on the representation of the past in forms of public remembering and forgetting. The first component of Unit 4 asks students to explore a range of representations of the past in a number of countries. These representations have no direct bearing on the missing persons question, although some of the monuments and memorials deal with state terrorism and genocide. The point of exploring these public representations of the past is to get students to debate and think about the range of ways in which the past is represented – to get them to think about the various purposes that are served by public monumentality and also to get them to think about how public monuments and memorials construct meaning. The second component of Unit 4 focuses on three monuments and memorials in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). All three of these representations relate, explicitly or implicitly, to ethnic cleansing and inter-group conflict.3 The purpose of focusing on these cases is to explore how the past is represented in the present but also, more specifically, to focus students on the representation of painful and difficult pasts in a contemporary context. There are a number of issues to consider here. Looking at monuments and memorials involves thinking about the ways in which the past is represented. It also involves thinking about aims that such representation can have and about the role that groups representing the relatives of ‘the missing’, NGOs and agencies such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have had in ensuring that difficult pasts are addressed rather than repressed or ignored. As seen by the cases of Guatemala and Morocco in the previous section, memorials, monuments and other commerative activites have been proposed within some reparations programs as one way to preserve the memory of conflict and abuses which took place during conflict situations and to act as a reminder of the state’s responsibility to address the needs of victims. As is apparent from the comments above, ‘representation’ is a key theme in this sequence of lessons. To engage successfully in the interpretation of monuments and memorials, students need to develop their ability to read and decode messages expressed in a number of media and often through symbolism and metaphor, as well as to develop sensitivity to context. This sequence of lessons aims to develop students as ‘readers’ of texts of various kinds as well as to develop their abilities as historical thinkers or, in other words, to develop symbolic and artistic literacy as well as historical literacy (Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla, 2007; Lee, 2005).4 The final unit in the sequence asks students to debate what might be done in the present and future to represent the missing persons issue in public space, with a starting point that brings to the surface the purpose(s) that commemorating the missing persons would serve. We frame this issue, in the first instance, through a focus on monuments and memorials, although we propose that students should have the opportunity to propose alternative modes of representing the past – the point is to engage students in debate about how this difficult contemporary history could and should be addressed in the public present (and future) and not to close down options. As Liz Dawes Duraisingh and Veronica Boix Mansilla have argued (2007), designing a monument can be a very effective strategy for engaging students with the past in a disciplinary manner and also for helping them to think about the contemporary meanings or relevance that they feel should be ascribed to the past.

3. ‘Ethnic cleansing can be understood as the expulsion of an ‘undesirable’ population from a given territory due to religious or ethnic discrimination, political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of these’ (Bell-Fialkoff, 1993). 4. A number of useful strategies that aim to increase students’ abilities to ‘read’ in these senses have been developed, for example, Banham and Hall (2003).


Commenting on a sequence of learning that aimed to engage students in thinking about difficult aspects of the human past – including the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the Rwandan genocide – and that also asked these students to think about monuments and historical significance in a sustained way, through an interdisciplinary enquiry through which students produced their own monument designs, Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla show how such activities can help students engage with complex historical questions and also with the question of the social meanings of the past in contemporary life. Creating a monument requires more than gathering and posting information about the past. It invites students to identify a leading metaphor or image.... that captures the essential dimension of the period under study... To establish significance, students must deliberate and explain not only what or who is worth remembering, but also the essence of what is to be remembered.... The monuments project... invites students to think about the contemporary relevance of what they are memorialising... Students are asked to consider the likely response of different audiences to their monument. In doing so they are challenged to think about how societies today represent the past and assign significance... Finally, the monuments project gives students an opportunity to think about how monuments per se capture historical significance and perform their function as sites of memory in contemporary society. (Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla, 2007, pp.25-26) Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla are careful to point out that merely making things is not enough: ‘making a monument invites... sophisticated thinking about the past – it does not guarantee it’ (Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla, 2007, p.27). As Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla observe: students in a memorial project face learning challenges that are common to history classrooms more generally, such as overcoming presentism, linear explanations and the illusion of understanding how historical actors ‘really felt’. (Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla, 2007, pp.27-28) Furthermore, students who are asked to design monuments have, as part of the process, to become sensitive to the ways in which representations of the past work in symbolic and rhetorical terms. It is to be hoped that this process will enhance students’ critical awareness and their ability to decode the ways in which the past is used in the present to convey political, social and other agendas and values. As Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla observe: When examining monuments, artworks, films or theatre plays, teachers may invite students to consider the creator’s intent, how the work selects and represents the past, how ‘accurate’ a portrayal of the past it is, how aesthetic tools are employed to produce particular effects in the viewer, and how they experience the work themselves. (Dawes Duraisingh and Boix Mansilla, 2007, p.29) Considering these issues is also likely to provide students with opportunities to broaden their engagement with the past: monument analysis and design also ought to provide students with opportunities to explore, understand and express affective as well as cognitive responses to the past. It is never possible to study the past without, in some sense, reflecting on the present (Hutton, 1993). Engaging with monument design means thinking about how the past should be represented in ways that are simultaneously true to the past and also expressive of attitudes and orientations towards the past that we wish to foster in the present. In other words, it is not possible to address the question of missing persons in Cyprus without thinking about how the past of Cyprus itself should be represented. It is not possible to do this, also, without some governing conception of the kind of future that is desirable and that should be facilitated through action in the present. This enquiry aims to provide an opportunity for students to consider these complex and controversial issues.


Unit 1 Unit 1: Managing difficult pasts. How have societies around the world addressed the problem of missing persons? Aims and objectives •

Second order understanding -

•

Help students to realise that contextual knowledge is imperative if we are to make sense of behaviour of people in the past (historical empathy).

Substantive knowledge -

Develop students’ contextual knowledge of the phenomenon of missing persons in Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Morocco and Spain.

-

Develop students’ knowledge of the ways in which the issue of missing persons was addressed in the above cases.

Unit rationale and summary Developing contextual knowledge is central in history education. In the case of historical empathy, research shows that one of the major features in students’ ideas, when trying to make sense of behaviour in the past, is the lack of use of the historical context in which the actions, institutions and practices are situated. Thus, students tend to focus more the personal preferences and intentions of individuals when trying to explain past action and not on the wider historical context.5 Students who move beyond explanation in terms of individual intentions in many cases use stereotypes6 to explain why people in the past did what they did.7 In addition, familiarity and the ready availability of information on the historical context also seem to affect students’ ability to understand and explain behaviour in the past (Downey, 1995 cited in Yeager and Foster, 2001; Yeager and Doppen, 2001). Ashby and Lee (1987) explicitly point out that students work at higher levels with familiar content. All the above indicate the importance of helping students develop their substantive knowledge in order to work with historical empathy. We should note here, though, that the suggestion is not about increasing students’ factual and situational knowledge in a traditional monoperspectival way where situations and groups in the past are presented in simplistic terms. Instead students should have the opportunity to work with a variety of sources and perspectives, and also be encouraged to search for their own evidence. Finally we should also be cautious not to swamp students with more information than they can handle and make sense of and with. The main aim should be to encourage students to build contextual understanding, having in mind their maturity, reading age and ability (Foster, 2001). The above does not mean that we should focus only on familiar content about which students already poses substantial factual knowledge. Empathy exercises work well in situations which are unfamiliar and even seem puzzling or paradoxical to students (Foster, 2001; Seixas, 1993). Seixas (1993) suggests that it might be easier for students to understand historical distance when they encounter situations that do not seem similar to their own. Also, Wineburg (2001) claims that the unfamiliar past (more distant in thought and social organisation and time) allows us to realise our limitations in understanding it. What is important in every case, regardless of the degree of familiarity of the content, is for students to have access to substantive knowledge in sufficient degree to allow them to reconstruct historical context in order to make sense of people in the past.

5. See Ashby and Lee (1987); Barton (2006); Bermudez and Jaramillo (2001); Dickinson and Lee (1978); Dickinson and Lee (1984); Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (2001); Lee and Ashby (2001); Shemilt (1984); Perikleous (2011). 6. Defined as ‘a fixed idea that people have about what someone or something is like, especially an idea that is wrong’ (Cambridge, 2011). 7. See Ashby and Lee (1987); Barton (2006); Bermudez and Jaramillo (2001); Brophy, VanSledright and Bredin (1992) cited in Barton (2006); Cooper (2007); Dickinson and Lee (1984); Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (2001); Lee and Ashby (2001); Shemilt (1984).


In this unit, students will explore how different societies have addressed the issue of missing persons. The unit aims to develop students’ understanding of the phenomenon both in terms of its content and the ways people in different places responded to it. It also aims to challenge students’ inclination not to take into consideration the context / situation within which behaviour in the past took place. In the first part of the unit, students are asked to explore the content of the term ‘missing person’ and the different situations in which people can go missing. This will help them realise the range of the phenomenon and challenge possible misconceptions (e.g. for some Cypriot students it is likely that a missing person might mean a male soldier who went missing during a specific military situation, for example in 1963-64 or in 1974). The second part of the unit asks students to study specific case studies of the phenomenon in four contexts other than Cyprus and to identify differences and similarities in a variety of aspects of these cases, relating, for example to the nature of the conflicts, the size of the phenomenon, the groups that responded to the phenomenon and the ways in which different groups responded. Students are asked to suggest reasons for these differences and similarities. It is intended that this unit will help students develop an overall picture of the phenomenon internationally, realise its complexity and also realise that Cyprus is not the only place in which people have gone missing due to conflicts.


Unit 1 plan

Phase

Teacher activity

Participant activity

Orientation/ starter activity

Organise the class in four groups.

Respond to the questions suggesting answers.

Pose the question: ‘How can people go missing in cases of conflict?’ With follow up questions help students to identify lack of knowledge about a persons’ fate as the key characteristic of the phenomenon of missing persons.

Main lesson activity 1

Provide each group with a short text which describes the point at which four different countries/areas (Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Morocco, Spain) are now in relation to finding out about the fate of missing persons. Ask each group to suggest reasons for the situation described in the text. When students rely on uninformed assumptions or assimilate these cases to the case of Cyprus, the teacher may wish to challenge them to support their claims with evidence in order to encourage pupils to engage with the specific details of these individual cases (e.g. What makes you think that this is the reason? Are you sure that this was the situation? How can you find out?). Ask students to suggest whether and how each reason they suggested may have helped or hindered the effort to learn about the fate of missing persons based on the information they have collected. Facilitate the discussion between groups.

It is possible that some of the students’ answers will not qualify as cases of missing persons (i.e. include people killed in conflicts or prisoners in their examples). Discuss and suggest reasons for the situation they read about. Write each suggested reason on a card. Each group posts their cards on the board and presents their suggestions to the rest of the class. It is likely that some students will realise that it is difficult to do so without any contextual information. Some other students might just make suggestions based on assumptions (which are likely to be uninformed ones since these are unfamiliar cases) about the context of each case. It is also possible that some students will assimilate the cases in question to the case of missing persons in Cyprus. Categorise their cards under reasons which were helpful and reasons which hindered the effort to find out about missing persons. Post their cards on the board / a classroom wall under the two categories (‘Helpful’ vs ‘Unhelpful’). Present their work to the rest of the class and respond to other groups’ questions.

Transition between activities

Ask students to explain why it was difficult to suggest reasons in the previous activity.

Resources/ materials

Students are likely to respond with reference to the lack of additional information.


Short texts about the current situation in each country. Markers. Cards. Board / classroom walls.

Phase

Teacher activity



Provide each group of students with context cards on the case that they are looking at (the context cards will be different for each student group).

Identify specific aspects of the situation and fill the cards provided.

Ask students to identify and make a note of specific aspects of their context that they feel may have affected responses to the missing persons issue (students should use blank cards to note these aspects on and use a new card for each new aspect that they identify).

Categorise their cards under aspects which were helpful and aspects which hindered the effort to find out about missing persons. Post their cards on their board under the two categories (‘Helpful’ vs ‘Unhelpful’).

Ask students to suggest how each aspect of the situation might have helped or hindered the effort to learn about the fate of missing persons based on the information they collected.


Facilitate the discussion between groups.

Make comparisons between cases (e.g. the temporal distance between the event and today might in some cases might have made finding out what happened to them easier, as the topic may have become less controversial, and, in other cases, it might have hindered the effort to find out due to a lack of evidence).

Ask students to suggest groups or categories of people in the country/ area that they are examining who might have responded to the issue of missing persons.

Students suggest groups that might have responded to the issue.

Ask students to suggest how different groups might have responded. Use follow up questions to challenge students’ assumptions (e.g. Is it possible that a government did a lot to try and find out about missing persons but that it was impossible to find information?).


Present their work to the rest of the class and respond to other groups’ questions.

Provide each group with texts which describe how different groups responded to the issue of missing persons. Ask students to fill in cards which ask them to

Resources/ materials Context cards providing contextual information about the different cases. Blank cards (different colour for each aspect of the situation) for students to record findings on. Markers. Cards. The board / classroom walls.

Students suggest ways in which different groups might have responded. Some of them are likely to realise that they cannot have definite answers while others are likely to make assumptions (e.g. the government of X country did nothing because we do not know yet what happened to the missing persons). Identify the responses of specific groups and fill the cards provided. Categorise their cards under aspects which where helpful and

Text which provides information about the responses of different


Phase

Teacher activity


identify the response of specific groups. Inform students that it is possible to identify more than one response for each group.

aspects which hindered the effort to find out about missing persons.

Ask students to suggest whether and how each group’s actions may have helped or hindered the effort to learn about the fate of missing persons based on the information they have collected. Facilitate the discussion between groups.

Debrief / plenary activity

Ask students to compare their original categorisation in Activity 1, with their final one in Activity 3 and to suggest how the information that they have gathered on historical context and on the groups’ responses has helped them deepen their understanding and develop their ideas.

Post their cards on the board under the two categories. Present their work to the rest of the class and respond to other groups’ questions. Make comparisons between cases (e.g. the government’s response in some cases was helpful and in some others not). Discuss how the activities helped them to develop their knowledge of the issue.


Resources/ materials groups. Cards (different colour for each group which has responded to the issue). Markers. Cards. The board / classroom walls.

Unit 2 Unit 2: The missing persons of Cyprus Aims and objectives •

•


Help students to realise that contextual knowledge is imperative if we are to make sense of the behaviour of people in the past (historical empathy).

-

Encourage students to think about how actions in the past are related to the present (causation).


Develop students’ contextual knowledge of the phenomenon of missing persons in Cyprus.

-

Develop students’ knowledge of the ways in which the issue of missing persons has been addressed in Cyprus.

Unit rationale and summary This unit aims to develop students’ contextual knowledge of the phenomenon of missing persons in the context of conflicts in Cyprus in the period covering the1960s to the present. The importance of developing students’ understanding of the historical context has already been discussed in the previous unit. The unit focuses on the case of Cyprus and students explore the major conflicts which led to the phenomenon of missing persons and the response of a variety of groups to it. It also provides the opportunity for students to think about the importance of historical context when they attempt to make sense of the past and also to think about the ways in which different responses to the issue of the missing persons in the past are related to the ways in which this issue is understood in the present. In the first part of the unit students are asked to explore the situation under which people went missing in Cyprus in different periods in the 1960s and 1970s. In this process some possible misconceptions will be challenged (e.g. the idea that missing persons exist only in one community in Cyprus, the idea that people went missing only in one period, the idea that the missing persons were only male soldiers). The second part asks students to explore the different responses to the issue of the missing persons of Cyprus that emerged within and outside the island in the period since the 1960s. It also encourages students to suggest how different responses have contributed to the present situation.


Unit 2 plan

Phase

Teacher activity



Organise the class in four groups.

Students respond to the questions.

Present students with a short text describing the current situation in Cyprus regarding missing persons. Ask students to suggest answers to the question – Why are there still missing persons in Cyprus today?

It is likely that most of the students will mention only one of the conflicts (e.g. Greek Cypriot students may only refer to 1974 while Turkish Cypriots may only refer to the events during the 1960s).

Resources/ materials Short text describing the current situation in Cyprus regarding missing persons. Cards.

Each student writes a short answer on a card: these cards should be retained for review at the end of the lesson. Main lesson activity 1

Provide each group with newspaper excerpts which refer to people going missing in the 1960s and in 1974 due to the conflicts of those times. Ask students to respond again to the question – Why are there still missing persons in Cyprus today?


Ask students to recall different responses to the issue of missing persons identified in Unit 1. Ask students whether they are aware of specific responses to the missing persons issue that have occurred in Cyprus.

Students use the information from the newspaper excerpts to respond to the question.

Newspaper excerpts.

This will probably challenge the idea that many students may hold that missing persons are only people in their own community who went missing in one specific situation. Students refer to responses to the issue of missing persons from the four case studies they studied in Unit 1.

Cards. Markers.

Students explain any responses to the issue of missing persons they are aware of in Cyprus. Again it is likely that students will refer to responses related to the missing persons of their own community. Students note their responses on cards: these cards should be retained for review at the end of the lesson.


Organise students into groups. Provide each group with sources which describe different responses to the missing persons issue in Cyprus (each group works with different responses).

Student groups read the sources that they have been given and respond to the questions (see left). They record their findings on cards where they include the name of


Sources on group responses.

Phase

Teacher activity


Ask students to read their sources and identify how the group / individual they have been given responded to the missing persons issue and when the group was formed.

the group/ individual and a few words about its response.

Ask the student groups to allocate the group / individual that they have been given information to one or more of a number of categories written on the board (official / unofficial responses, local / international responses, group / individual responses).

Each group presents its findings to the rest of the class. Students categorise responses and discuss their choices and post their group / individual’s name on the board.

Resources/ materials Cards. Markers. The board / class room walls.

Students should come to the front of the class and post their groups’ name in the appropriate section/s of the board. Transition between activities

Ask students how these different responses may have influenced the present situation described at the beginning of the lesson. Are there, for example, responses that may have contributed towards the present situation to a greater degree than others?

Students respond to the question.


Ask each group to sort the different responses identified in the previous activity according to the degree to which they think that they may have influenced the present situation.

Each group discusses and sorts their Response Cards on the board.

The board / classroom walls.

They present their sorting to the whole class and explain their choices.

Cards (from previous activity).

Facilitate the discussion between groups. Introduce the idea that it is possible that the importance of a response might vary according to different aspects of the present situation. Ask each group to say the degree to which their sorting is based on specific evidence or on assumptions that they have made.

Debrief / plenary activity

Ask students to compare what they now know with their cards from the starter activity and the transition activity between Activities 1 and 2 and reflect on how their ideas on (a) the reason for people going missing in Cyprus and (b) the responses of different groups has changed.

Groups compare their answers and discuss differences and similarities Respond to the question. In this way students are encouraged to think about the fact that their decisions are tentative and although logical can be changed in the face of specific evidence. Compare the cards that they have completed in the Main Lesson Activities 2 and 3 with the cards completed earlier in the lesson. Respond to teacher questioning whole class.

Asks students if (and how much) their original ideas have changed and why? Manage whole class discussion on these issues.


Unit 3 Unit 3: Why have different responses to Cyprus’ missing persons problem emerged over time? Aims and objectives •

•


Help students understand that people’s behaviour is based on a variety of motives according to their ideas, aims and feelings.

-

Help students understand that people’s motives for action are influenced by their situation and the historical context.

-

Help students understand that in order to make sense of people’s behaviour we need to reconstruct their ideas, aims and feelings and their situation.


Develop students’ understanding of the different ways in which different groups in Cyprus responded to the issue of missing persons.

-

Develop students’ understanding of the motives and aims of a number of different groups who have responded to the missing persons issue in Cyprus.

Unit rationale and summary Research shows that students tend to interpret action in the past in terms of their own everyday ideas and beliefs. Wineburg (2001) claims that this is the natural way of thinking; a way of thinking which requires little effort. He calls this phenomenon ‘presentism’, which is the idea of a familiar past which is simple and speaks directly to us without the need for translation. This assumption underestimates the historicity of culture and the degree in which cultural matters are historically contingent and variable (Chapman, 2010). The past is viewed as culturally homogenous with the present, only inhabited by people who were less smart/ rational or less moral than people today. The idea of a deficit past is confirmed in almost every research study of students’ thinking about historical empathy.8 The deficit past is also evident in research studies which investigate other aspects of students’ historical thinking (Barton, 1996; Levstik, 2006; Barton, 2006). The idea of a deficit past is the result of a combination of students’ failure to realise that people in the past saw the world differently and the idea that people in the past did not have what we have in terms of technology, knowledge, and so on (Lee and Ashby, 2001; Lee, 2005). According to Lee (2005), students’ tendency to think about the past in terms of deficit can also result from of the ways in which their families introduce them to the differences between the past and the present and of prevailing ideas about progress. School in some cases also reinforces these ideas because curricula, textbooks and teaching practices often favour the idea that the present is superior to the past (Lee and Ashby, 2001). Research studies also suggest that another aspect of presentism in students’ ideas about the past is the assimilation of past actions, institutions and practices to familiar and recognisable modern ones.9 Students often struggle to appreciate the differences between the present and the past in terms of beliefs and social conventions and, hence, often struggle to interpret actions, practices and institutions in any other way than by drawing on what they already know from their own everyday present. The deficit past is not absent here since students usually assume that institutions in the past serve ‘the same functions as our equivalent institutions, only badly’ (Lee and Ashby, 1987, p.69).

8. See Ashby and Lee (1987); Cooper (2007); Dickinson and Lee (1978); Dickinson and Lee (1984); Kourgiantakis (2005); Lee and Ashby (2001); Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (2001); Ribeiro (2002) cited in Barca (2004); Shemilt (1984). 9. See Ashby and Lee (1987); Cooper (2007); Dickinson and Lee (1978); Dickinson and Lee (1984); Lee and Ashby (2001); Lee, Dickinson and Ashby (2001); Ribeiro (2002) cited in Barca (2004); Shemilt (1984).


Finally, students often struggle to depart from their own ideas and situations and thus struggle to distinguish between the historian’s and the historical agent’s point of view and knowledge of the particular situation in which the historical agents were acting (Ashby and Lee, 1987; Dickinson and Lee, 1978; Dulberg, 2001). This is expressed by students’ attempts to explain the behaviour of people in the past by employing personal projections and ignoring the intentions of historical agents’ and their knowledge of their situation. Having in mind the above, this unit aims to help students realise the importance of being aware of the need to actively reconstruct past actors’ beliefs, ideas, intentions and understanding of their situation when we attempt to make sense of their actions. This is to be achieved by exploring the responses of four different groups on the issue of missing persons in Cyprus. More specifically students will explore: •

The formation of the Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans in 1975

•

The formation of the Pancyprian Organisation of Relatives of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons in 1975

•

The formation of the Bi-communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons and Victims of Massacres and War in 2004

•

The production of a documentary on the issue of missing persons in Cyprus by The Elders.

In all cases these groups of people decided to respond to the issue in particular ways. Students will explore these responses and attempt to understand the motives behind them. This unit requires a more in-depth exploration of the issue than was undertaken in Units 1 and 2. In addition, whereas Units 1 and 2 focused on the importance of contextual knowledge in making sense of the actions of past actors, this one focuses on historical agents’ ideas and views of the situation. In the first part of the unit students will attempt to suggest reasons for the responses developed by these four groups. The provision of related sources will allow them to explore different motives behind each group’s response and also help them realise the importance of knowing about each group’s ideas, aims and beliefs. Students will also have the opportunity to make comparisons and categorisations of motives and in this sense think about a variety of issues related to making sense of people’s behaviour. In the second part of the unit students are encouraged to explore how time and the changing historical context affect the role played by an idea, belief and / or aim within the same group of people. In this way students are encouraged to think about the relation between people’s ideas and the historical context in which they are situated (and how they see their situation).


Unit 3 plan

Phase

Teacher activity



Organise the students into four groups.

Respond to the teacher’s request.


Ask students to mention different responses to the issue of missing persons in Cyprus which have been explored in Unit 2. Inform students that today they will focus on four groups and explore the reasons for their response to the issue.


Pose the key question: Why have these different responses to the missing persons issue emerged? Ask each group to suggest answers to the following questions: •

•

Why did some Turkish Cypriots form the Association of Martyrs’ Families and War Veterans in 1975? Why did some Greek Cypriot people form the Organisation of Relatives of Undeclared Prisoners and Missing Persons in 1975?

•

Why did some people from both communities form the Bi-communal Initiative of Relatives of Missing Persons and Victims of Massacres and War in 2004?

•

Why did The Elders produce a documentary on the issue of missing persons in Cyprus in 2011?

Discuss the questions in their groups and suggest motives on cards.

Motive Cards.

Post their Motive Cards on the board / classroom walls.

The board classroom walls.

Markers.

Refer to problems faced during their attempt to suggest reasons/ motives. It is likely that they will refer to lack of information, not being aware of each group’s history, organisation etc..

Ask participants whether they faced any problems trying to suggest reasons/ motives. Transition between activities

Ask students to think about how they can construct an account of why these groups of people responded to the missing persons issue in the way that they did. Explain the task for the lesson: students will be divided into four groups and each group will take the role of one of the four historical groups identified above and research their beliefs, aims and motivations.

Respond to the question posed by the teacher.

Signs with each group’s name

The most likely response is that the groups themselves are the best to answer the question; other possibilities include looking up the answers in history books.

Each group is given a sign with their historical group’s name on it. Main lesson activity 2

Ask the four different groups to use the available sources to investigate the aims, motives and beliefs underlying their historical group’s response to the

Work within their groups suggesting reasons based on the available sources.


Written sources

Phase

Teacher activity


missing persons issue.

Write each reason on a card (of a different colour from the cards of the previous activity) and post it on the groups’ section of the board / classroom walls.

Ask the groups to rank the aims, beliefs and motives of their historical group according to the importance that they have in explaining why their historical group responded in the way that it did. Once students have completed the above analysis, ask each group to present their findings to the class.

Sorting according to the teacher’s instructions using their cards on the boards.

Ask participants to suggest differences and similarities between groups and discuss reasons for these differences and similarities.

Each group will feed back their findings to the whole class.

Ask the groups to sort their findings into two categories – claims that are directly mentioned in the sources and claims that they have inferred from the source materials that they have been given. Once students have completed the above analysis, ask each group to present their findings to the class. Ask participants to suggest differences and similarities between groups and discuss reasons for these differences and similarities. Transition between activities


Ask students two questions: •

Why do the aims, beliefs and motives arise at particular times?

•

Do they think it likely that the aims, beliefs and motives that individual historical groups have are likely to fluctuate over time?

Ask each group to pick two aims, beliefs or motivations that they have identified in the case of the historical group that they are examining and then to map the emergence and fluctuation in importance of these ideas over time on a graph (X axis = timeline of events – Y axis = degree of importance).

Resources/ materials Video clips Timeline of events. Motive Cards. A2 sheets. Markers.

Discuss differences and similarities between groups. Do grouping according to the teacher’s instructions using their cards on the board / classroom walls. Each group will feed back their findings to the whole class. Discuss differences and similarities between groups. Respond to the questions.

Prepare their line graph. Present their line graph to the other groups and explain it.

Graph sheets. Markers.

Ask each group to present their line graph to the whole class and explain their decisions. Debrief / plenary activity

Ask groups to compare how their boards looked at the beginning and now (the different colour of the motive cards allows this) and to discuss why they are different now. How did the activities change their boards? How have the activities changed the way they think about people’s decisions?

Discuss how their ideas changed and why.


Unit 4 Unit 4: History and memory Aims and objectives •

•


To help students to reflect on and compare representations of the past.

-

To help students understand how representations of the past express the aims and purposes of the people who construct them.


To develop students’ understanding of a number of types of monument.

-

To develop students’ understanding of the politics of memory and of the role that particular groups have played in the construction of monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Unit rationale and summary This unit aims to help students think analytically about the ways in which the past is represented in public history through monuments and memorials. The purpose of asking pupils to think in these ways is, firstly and most importantly, to sharpen the critical lenses with which they scrutinise representations of the past and, secondly, to prepare the ground for the decisions that students will be asked to make in the final unit in which they will be asked to develop memorialisation proposals in the Cyprus context. Monuments and memorials, like other forms of historical representation, express, and ask us to accept, particular ways of approaching the past that they seek to evoke or represent. Here, as elsewhere, We can distinguish between approaches to the past: •

that aim to identify the present with the past (or to assert continuity between them) or that aim to differentiate the present from the past (or to assert discontinuity); and

•

that aim to affirm the value of aspects of the past or that seek to negate them.

Thus, for example, traditional orientations towards the past assert continuity of identity between the past and the present and aim to ensure that the future is shaped by adherence to past values or practices through monuments, heroic narratives and so on. By contrast, critical orientations towards the past disrupt continuity, effect a breach between the past and the present and model the past as something to be negated and overcome, for example through iconoclasm and critique.10 (Chapman, 2010, p.100) This unit aims to get students to think about these issues by asking them to compare and contrast monuments and the ways in which monuments represent the past. Two types of monument are examined: (1) monuments with no connection to Cyprus or to the missing persons issue and (2) monuments directly relating to missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

10. Iconoclasm means attacking icons and symbols either literally (for example, by defacing them) or metaphorically (for example, by making fun of them).


Understanding monuments Any monuments could be examined in the first component of this unit, provided that they differ in their approach to the past and their representational strategies. The monuments listed below are chosen simply for illustration. A rationale is provided below for the examples chosen here. 1. The Victoria Memorial, Lancaster (England) This monument was erected shortly after the death of Queen Victoria and is typical of the large number of monuments to the queen’s reign that were constructed at this time. It is a contemporary monument that clearly aims to celebrate the Victorian era as an era of national greatness. Victoria stands with a commanding expression, holding the symbols of power, on the top of a pedestal raised on a plinth that is supported, at the four corners, by idealised representations of women symbolising Wisdom, Truth, Liberty and Justice and that features bas relief panels on each of the four sides of the monument depicting ‘great’ people, overwhelmingly men, who flourished during her reign and who are represented as contributing to its ‘greatness’. The men include judges, poets, generals, scientists, politicians, and so on. http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-383140-queen-victoria-memorial-lancaster http://www.britarch.ac.uk/lahs/tour/dalton.htm 2. The Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project (STAMP) ‘Captured Africans’ Memorial, Lancaster (England) This monument differs profoundly from the Victoria Memorial and is chosen for this reason and also because it is located in the same city (thus dramatising the ways in which multiple pasts are often represented in the same place). Whereas the Victoria Memorial was raised by Victoria’s contemporaries in celebration, the STAMP Memorial was constructed nearly two centuries after the formal abolition of the slave trade, whose victims it memorialises (the trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 and had flourished in the port of Lancaster in the second half of the eighteenth century). Whereas the Victoria Memorial celebrates ‘greatness’ the STAMP Memorial commemorates the victims of exploitation and indicts the trade that exploited them and it is located near to the quay in Lancaster where ships engaged in the ‘Africa trade’ would dock. The plight of ‘Captured Africans’ is represented on the memorial as the 'base' of a structure of trade and commerce that is also represented on the memorial and the city’s role in this trade is recorded in a list of ships sailing from Lancaster in the ‘Africa trade’ on one side of the monument. Whereas the Victoria Memorial expresses a conventional (if now discredited) narrative of ‘national greatness’ created at the height of the British Empire, the STAMP Memorial expresses a counter-history, commemorates a group of people ‘hidden’ in the older ‘official’ narrative and draws attention to the suffering of the victims of ‘empire’. http://www.uclan.ac.uk/schools/journalism_media_communication/literature_culture/abolition/stamp.php 3. Memorials to the victims of Nazism (a) Sachenhausen Memorial (Germany) This memorial was constructed in the early 1960s by the East German communist regime and it is typical of the ways in which the regime represented the victims of Nazism. These victims are presented in political terms (as the website notes, only ‘red triangles’, denoting communist and social democrat prisoners in the camp, are recorded on the monument).11 The statue commemorating these ‘victims’ in front of the monument does not emphasise their suffering but instead, through its title (Liberation) and its design, it celebrates, instead, the role of the Red Army in defeating

11. Inmates of the camp were obliged to wear a triangle on their uniforms. The triangles were of different colours, denoting the category of inmate that individuals forced to wear them represented (see http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005378).


Nazism and ‘rescuing’ camp inmates from Nazi oppression. An idealised Red Army soldier is at the centre of the group and he envelops the two ‘liberated’ prisoners with his hands and cape, taking them under communist ‘protection’. This monument exemplifies the ways in which monuments can be used to create political narratives through partial and distorted representations of the past constructed to support political projects in the present. http://www.stiftung-bg.de/gums/en/index.htm http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/GALLFR/sach12.HTM (b) The Documentation Centre, Nazi Party Congress Hall, Nuremberg (Germany) The Nazi Party Congress Hall symbolises many key features of the Nazi regime: in its design, which echoes the Coliseum in Rome, it expresses imperial ambition and the regime’s propaganda strategies; its state of incompletion points to the consequences of the war that the Nazi’s provoked; its material structure (stone quarried by concentration camp slave labourers) embodies the brutality of the Nazi regime.12 The Documentation Centre that opened at the site in 2001 represents a negative form of monumentality: the construction of the documentation centre shoots an ‘arrow’ of ‘light’, into the building, puncturing the symmetry of the Nazi architecture. Inside the glass and steel arrow is a documentation centre in which the appeal of the Nazis, their crimes and the eventual outcomes of their rule are represented through museum displays.13 A key focus here should be the design: what has been done to this Nazi ‘icon’ by the architects? How does this this addition to a building originally designed to convey one story (the greatness of the Nazi ‘Reich’) turn the building into a memorial and monument that tells a very different story? http://museums.nuremberg.de/documentation-centre (c) Stumbling Stones, Cologne (Germany) In contrast to the previous two modes of representation that monumentalise the past in order to appropriate it in order to support present political projects (3(a)) or in order to criticise the past in the light of the consequences of past actions and present political values (3(b)), the Stumbling Stones (Stolpersteine) aim to draw attention to individual victims of Nazism and to make their memory literally present in the streets and in front of the houses that they were torn away from by the Nazi regime. This is, one might say, a very ‘unmonumental’ form of memorial. The stones are literally in the street (they are part of it) and they simply record the names of individuals and the stark outline of what the Nazis did to them. Unlike 3(a) there is no overt symbolisation, no attempt to interpret the fate of victims and no attempt to draw conclusions from the fact of their victimhood for the present: the bare facts of past atrocity and persecution are simply made present in everyday life literally ‘underfoot’. http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/germany_insideout/rhineland3.shtml http://www.ww2museums.com/article/1367/Stumbling-Stones-Berlin.htm

12. The question ‘What should be done with this symbol of Nazism?’ has arisen persistently since the end of the Second World War. See Der Spiegel (2008) for a recent response to this question. 13. http://museums.nuremberg.de/download/download_dokuzentrum/04_Architecture_2009.pdf


As has been noted, the purpose of examining monuments such as these is to develop students’ ability to ‘read’ monuments. There are at least two issues here: •

developing students’ capacity to interpret and understand the ways in which monuments represent the past;

•

developing students’ capacity to read the ways in which monuments construct a relationship to the past.

Considering the first of these two issues involves thinking about a wide range of issues. On the one hand, for example, is the question ‘What is and what is not represented?’ The contrast between the Sachenhausen Memorial and the Stumbling Stones is instructive here – in the former case, through the ‘red triangles’, communist resistance to fascism is highlighted and the past is constructed in political terms through the memorialisation of one group of victims only in the context of an implicit political narrative; in the latter case, the names and fates of individuals as individuals are memorialised. On the other hand, students will need also to think about symbolism and iconography. The slave trade, for example, could be represented through symbols and iconography foregrounding suffering, foregrounding resistance, and so on: the STAMP Memorial, however, explicitly draws attention to trade – ‘captured Africans’ are represented but the monument is overwhelmingly focused on trade: on the trade in goods that was supported by the buying and selling of people and on the ships that plied this trade. In addition to the questions ‘Who or what is represented?’ and the question ‘How are these things represented?’ there is also the question of where a monument is located. The examples above give students opportunities to reflect on these questions: the Victoria Memorial is in Dalton Square, opposite Lancaster Town Hall, whereas the STAMP Memorial is located by the quay on the riverside – what do these two locations mean? Why was the Victoria Statue erected where it was? The Stumbling Stones raise a related issue and show how the politics and meaning of location is crucial when thinking about monuments and memory: why has the artist who originated this project placed these monuments to the missing in the places they were taken away from (ordinary streets, residential areas, and so on) rather than in places, like Auschwitz, where they were taken to and where many of these people were killed? Students should be encouraged to debate and consider all of these questions. The second issue – the relationship to the past that a memorial aims to construct –seems at first rather abstract. It can be scaffolded and rendered accessible, however, by using ‘graphic organisers’ to help students model conceptual differences and relationships in concrete and visual ways. Students might, for example, be asked to organise images of monuments physically, by placing them on continuum lines or on diagrams that aim to visually represent conceptual differences (for example, Venn diagrams). Students could be asked, for example, to physically move images of the monuments listed up or down a line between two opposite statements (Celebrate the past / Negate the past) and to argue about which of the monuments aim to construct the most positive and which the most negative representation of the past. Thus, for example, whereas both the Victoria and the Sachenhausen monuments ask us to celebrate particular people, albeit for different reasons the Nuremberg Documentation Centre aims to negate the Nazi building by firing and ‘arrow of enlightenment’ into it – literally (in the building’s structure) and through the insertion into this Nazi icon of documents revealing Nazi terror.

Monuments to the missing and to victims of conflict: Bosnia and Herzegovina The intention of the unit on monuments in general is to get pupils to think about types of monument, their function and the relationships to the past that monuments construct. This unit develops these ideas further in the context of monuments that relate to missing persons. Many of the same issues arise – who/what do these monuments memorialise, how do they memorialise, what relationship between the past and the present do they construct? Many monuments could be used to explore these issues (see, for example, the very interesting materials on monuments and the politics of monumentality in Guatemala in Section 3.2. The following suggestions, arising out of the case study materials on Bosnia and Herzegovina in this booklet, are intended to illustrate approaches that could be taken.


Bosnia and Herzegovina Background and contextual material on the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina is provided in this booklet, in Section 3.3. Exploring monuments and memorials in this context is a way of considering questions about monuments and memory in general and also a way of exploring how these matters are addressed in a political context in the present. The atrocities that accompanied the breakup of the former Yugoslavia are still very fresh in the minds of those involved and reflecting on these monuments is a way of thinking about the ways in which societies can address recent and difficult pasts and also about constraints that can arise. Three monuments have been chosen for the purposes of this exercise. 1. Memorial to Bosniak Victims of Atrocity, Kozarac (near Prijedor, in Republika Srpska - BiH14) This monument, erected in July 2010, commemorates the Bosniak victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ carried out by Bosnian Serb forces in Kozarac after they captured the town in May 1992. The monument consists of a stone enclosure dedicated ‘To the Innocent Killed Citizens of Kozarac, 19921995’ and contains an inscription by the Bosniak poet Mehmedalija ‘Mak’ Dizdar (1917-1971): One does not live here in order to live One does not live here in order to die One also dies here in order to live On the inward-facing side of the blocks of stone that make up the enclosure are inscribed the names of the 1,226 Bosniak victims of atrocity in Kozarac. Each block is up-lit at night and each features a small memorial fountain at its base. Electric ‘candles’ that are illuminated at night, whose design mirrors barbs of barbed wire, are embedded in the outward facing sides of the stone blocks, one for each of the victims. The blocks are smooth on their inward faces and rough-hewn on their outward faces (Irwin and Šarić, 2010). Some context for the monument is provided by Irwin and Šarić: The victims’ groups say they are eager to create memorials on the grounds of... camps in what is now the Serbian part of Bosnia, Republika Srpska... but have so far been unsuccessful. In most cases, they say they have been denied access to these places by local Bosnian Serb officials, or have to ask permission even to visit...... Memorial plaques or monuments are sometimes permitted, but in places ‘hidden away from the public eye, in villages where returnees live, or religious memorials at the cemeteries where the victims are’, Hodzic said. One example of a larger Bosniak memorial is in the town of Kozarac, near Prijedor, which was almost entirely Bosniak before it was captured by Bosnian Serb forces on May 24, 1992. After that, non-Serb inhabitants were either killed or expelled, and their houses destroyed. Today, Kozarac is once again mostly Bosniak because of an influx of returnees to the area, and the memorial to the town’s war victims opened in July of this year... The memorial was the result of ‘a lot of lobbying’, explained Mujagic, who grew up in Kozarac. ‘It’s all politics,’ he said. ‘Kozarac was also already a small enclave... 95 percent of the population there is Bosniak, so probably the Serb authorities don’t care so much. In a way, it is a monument for Bosniaks, in ‘their own town’.’ Todorovic believes that the local authorities felt pressured ‘to allow at least one memorial’. 14. ‘The 1995 Dayton peace accord, which ended the Bosnian war, set up two separate entities; a Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska’ (BBC News, 2011).


‘Kozarac, due to the demographic structure, was probably the smallest risk,’ he said. In addition, the Kozarac monument does not include any educational components, which tend to provoke the most opposition. Each side is intent on avoiding anything which might contradict the main narrative of war upon which they rely, observers say. (Irwin and Šarić, 2010). http://iwpr.net/report-news/calls-war-memorials-divide-bosnia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2-MSIGpN7g&feature=related 2. The Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery The Memory and Justice website summarises events at Srebrenica as follows: In July 1995, the worst massacre in Europe since World War II took place in the Bosnian silver-mining community of Srebrenica. The civilian Muslim community at Srebrenica, fearing ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serbs, fled their homes and sought refuge at the nearby UN base of Potočari. But Serbs forces were allowed to enter the refugee camps, where they systematically separated all of the men from the women and children. The women and children were bused away to safety in Tuzla, while the men were divided into groups, forced to dig mass graves, and then massacred. (ICTJ, n.d.(a)) The Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery was inaugurated in 2003 and former US President Bill Clinton officially opened the site. Information about the process that led to the creation of the memorial, and the role in this of relatives of the victims, and of the United Nations, can be found on the Memory and Justice website (ICTJ, n.d.(a)). Whilst it is unlikely that the site would exist without the support and funding of the international community, pressure for its creation arose from the relatives of the victims who, for example, insisted that the memorial be located at the site of the former UN base at Potočari and who were closely consulted in the design of the memorial. The Memory and Justice website summarises the design of the site as follows: The memorial has two parts, divided by a road. On one side of the road is the cemetery, which is shaped like the petals of a flower. On the other side is the Srebrenica Memorial Room, a building that was a battery factory in the 1980s and the headquarters of the Dutch UN battalion in the 1990s.... The... Memorial Room... consists of two black towers: one presenting a film on the massacre, and the other showcasing the stories and personal items of twenty victims. ‘The tops of the towers are closed, evoking a sense of loss, the darkened spaces seeming like voids from which the narratives of July 1995 descend,’ wrote the members of :arch [who designed the memorial]... Each year, additional victims are identified and reburied. The cemetery will not assume its final look until authorities and families are satisfied that all possible victims have been buried. (ICTJ, n.d(a)) A description and architectural plan of the cemetery and memorial produced by the architects who designed it can be accessed at the ArchNet website (http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=16709). ArchNet summarise the cemetery memorial design as follows: The focal point is a semicircular memorial plateau or ‘musale’ where religious ceremonies for up to 1,000 people can be performed. Enclosing the musale, a horseshoe of inclined granite slabs bears the names of the 10,000 victims. The musale also features a covered area, mihrab, minbar, ablution facilities and fountain. The surrounding land is divided into eight petal-shaped parcels, defined by granite footpaths. Here, white tombstones are gradually appearing as the victims are identified. (Archnet, 2010)


The atrocities at Srebrenica differed from those at Kozarac in a number of ways, not least in the direct involvement of the international community in the events leading up to the massacre at Srebrenica (through, for example, the actions and inactions of the UN peacekeepers at the time). The memorials differ also, for example in the involvement of high profile international figures and organisations in sponsoring, funding and supporting the development of the Srebrenica memorial site. Both memorials are still, nevertheless, bound up in contemporary politics: In 2005, two days before the ceremony for the 10th anniversary of the massacre, Bosnian police found and successfully defused two large bombs that had been planted at the memorial. (ICTJ, n.d.(a)) http://memoryandjustice.org/site/srebrenica-potochari-memorial-and-cemetery/ http://www.potocarimc.ba 3. The Bruce Lee Statue in Mostar’s Spanish Square Bruce Lee, a martial arts film star who died of a swelling of the brain in 1973 at the age of 32, was memorialised in 2005 by the erection of a life size 1.68 metre statue depicting the actor in a ‘in a typical defensive fighting position’ (BBC News, 2005) in Spanish Square of Mostar, a scene of bitter ethnic fighting during the Bosnia civil war. The statue was erected by the youth group, Urban Movement Mostar with financial support from the German government. ‘Out of all the ethnic heroes and those who have a material interest in acting as victims, we have chosen Bruce Lee,’ said Veselin Gatalo... For Urban Movement, putting up a statue of Bruce Lee in Bosnia may have been an irreverent gesture, but it wasn’t an absurdist one. The group chose Lee as their subject because watching his films was a truly shared and cherished experience for young Yugoslavs. ‘Now they can rack their brains trying to decide whether he is he Bosniak, Croat, or Serb,’ Gatalo said. (ICTJ, n.d.(b)) Unlike the other two memorials discussed in this section, the Bruce Lee statue bears little apparent relationship to the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Urban Movement Mostar clearly intended a relationship, however: by memorialising Bruce Lee, first, they looked for common ground between divided communities, and, second, by not memorialising an ethnic ‘hero’ they refused to fall back on the conventional political narratives that fuelled the Bosnian conflicts. The relationship between past and present that Urban Movement Mostar sought to create is symbolic rather than literal and explicitly future-oriented as much, and perhaps more than, past-oriented: as a BBC report puts it Mostar remains split with Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs still deeply divided. Lee was chosen by organisers as a symbol of the fight against ethnic divisions. ‘We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats,’ said Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar. ‘But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.’ (BBC News, 2005) Despite these intentions, the Bruce Lee statue is a failed monument: the statue has been removed from Spanish Square. As Memory and Justice report – After repeated acts of vandalism... the statue was put in storage. As of 2007, it had not been displayed again. (ICTJ, n.d.(b))


These three monuments differ in a large number of ways: •

One issue that students can consider is the purpose of the monuments – although all three monuments clearly intend to memorialise – to ensure that people or a person is remembered – there are many differences in how this is done. Whereas both the Kozarac and Srebrenica memorials literally record names in stone and use symbolism to construct meaning, the Mostar monument is apparently iconic rather than symbolic in form. There are clear differences in purpose, however, even where symbolic representation is used: whereas the Srebrenica site contains a ‘Memorial room’ that represents the atrocities that took place at Srebrenica, the atrocities that took place at Kozarac are neither depicted nor described other than allusively through poetry and metaphorically through aspects of the monument design (such as the candle spikes on the outside of the monument).

•

Other very evident differences include the fact that the Srebrenica site is a cemetery as well as a memorial whereas neither of the other two sites have this function.

•

The kinds of memory that are involved in the three sites differ also. Although all three refer to atrocity in some way or other, the reference in the Bruce Lee statue is present metaphorically and Lee is intended to function as a symbolic reminder of common experiences (watching Bruce Lee films) erased by the atrocities of the Bosnian war.

•

The monuments also differ in their institutional history and size and in the degree to which they are sponsored or sustained by local groups or communities or by international organisations. These facts are highly consequential.

The communities who had suffered loss were both central to the setting up of the Kozarac and Srebrenica memorials. In the latter case, however, the international community are described in the sources as playing a much more significant role. The context for the Kozarac monument differs significantly from the Bruce Lee monument also and this may well be a key to the explanation for the fate of the Lee statue: whereas both have community support in their context, the Mostar statue is located at a site of continued division in a still divided community whereas the Kozarac monument is constructed in the middle of a predominantly Bosniak community. The Lee statue was also developed by a relatively low status group, a youth arts group, who were ‘taking on giants’, as it were, by trying to generate a new ‘narrative’ challenging dominant political narratives. The presence at Srebrenica of the memorial room representation of atrocity and the absence of an equivalent at Kozarac may be a function of context and of inter-communal politics, as Irwin and Šarić’s account of its context suggests.


Unit 4 plan Component 4(a) Approaching the past in different ways: monuments and monumentality Phase

Teacher activity




Introduce the issues (briefly) – Why do people represent the past in monuments and how do monuments work?

Listen and respond to questions.

Teacher.

Discuss a monument example in small groups, annotate a picture to draw attention to features of the monument in answer to the questions posed by the teacher.

Photocopies of a monument for students to annotate.

Model this with an example of a monument (e.g. the Victoria Memorial and STAMP Memorial featured in this unit, or other monuments such as the United States Marine Corps Iowa Jima memorial15) and ask students questions like – What is it? What is it for? How is it made? What do you think the people who made it wanted us to think and feel about what it represents?

Listen and take part in class discussion.

Plenary discussion on this activity – What are monuments, what are they for, how do they work? Transition between activities

Brief the class on their tasks: to work in groups on monuments of different kinds from around the world answering the same questions (above) about their monument - What is it? What is it for? How is it made? What did the people who made it want us to think and feel about the people or issue it represents?

Listen and ask questions. Form small groups (3-5 students in each) and receive one task sheet and photograph per group (see the column on the right).

Hand out monument sheets (see column on the right).


Circulate and support students reminding them of the key questions for the task.

Work in small groups as above developing answers to the questions about their monument.

15. http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/american&military_history/THE%20IWO%20JIMA%20MEMORIAL.pdf


A number of different ‘information sheets’ (providing background information) and photographs of monuments of different types (so that different groups of students have different monuments to work with). Include the questions (see Teacher Activity column) on the sheet.

Phase

Teacher activity



Chair a plenary discussion (a) Individual groups report back on their monument (b) Discussion issue – Are these monuments of the same kind? How are they similar and how are they different?

A representative of each group to feed back to the whole class on the activity above.

Introduce a graphic organiser (the choice of type could vary – Venn diagram, quadrant grid, continuum line). The simplest to use is a continuum line with ‘Celebrate the past’ and ‘Negate the past’ as the two opposite ends of the continuum. Each group could be given their own line or a line could be created on a board or on a wall.

Working in groups (or whole class if a whole class approach is adopted) students are to decide where to place pictures of the various monuments examined in the previous activity on a continuum line graphic organiser (organised around the binary ‘negate the past’ / ‘celebrate the past’).


Circulate and support the students engaged on the main task (see the next column). Manage whole class discussion – Where should we place the pictures? Debrief / plenary activity

Revisit the question posed in the introduction. Manage whole class discussion - Why do people represent the past in monuments and how do monuments work? And the question – What different kinds of monument are there?

Contribute to the discussion.

Resources/ materials All members of the class will need to see all the monuments used in the previous activity. Images of these could be projected or a hard copy could be provided to each student group.

Individual groups could have a hard copy of the graphic organiser or a whole class version (on a board or wall) or both could be used.

Contribute to the whole class discussion – Where should the items be placed? Listen and contribute to whole class discussion.

Explain how this relates to the topic for the next lesson: How have missing persons been represented and memorialised in monuments? Case studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina.


Component 4(b) Monuments to the Missing: how have missing persons been represented and memorialised in monuments? Case studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Phase

Teacher activity



Remind the class of the previous unit’s questions – Why do people represent the past in monuments and how do monuments work? – and explain that this lesson will be a case study of how monuments have been used in one context (Bosnia and Herzegovina) that will answer the question ‘How have monuments constructed in Bosnia and Herzegovina approached the issue of missing persons?’

Discuss the three monuments in small groups and come to a judgment on the question (see the left hand column). Contribute to whole class discussion.

Resources/ materials A power point showing images of the three monuments or hard copy images of the three monuments.

Present images of the three monuments (Kozarac, Srebrenica and Mostar) on a rolling power point or in hard copy and ask students to discuss the question: How do these monuments differ? Plenary discussion on this activity – gather student views on the monuments based solely on their visual appearance. Record these views (e.g. on a flip chart or whiteboard) to revisit at the end of the session. Transition between activities

Brief the class on their tasks: the class is to work in groups, taking one monument per group, research their monument and feed back their findings to the class. Ask the students to consider the following questions as they work on their case study:


•

Who / What is memorialised by the monument?

•

Who is doing the memorializing?

•

What can we conclude from the memorial about the intentions of the people who constructed these monuments?

Circulate and support students reminding them of the key questions for the task.

Listen and ask questions. Form small groups (3-5 students in each) and receive one task sheet and photograph/s per group (see the column on the right).

Work in small groups as above developing answers to the questions about their monument.


A number of different ‘information sheets’ (providing background information) and photographs of the monuments at Kozarac, Srebrenica and Mostar.


Phase

Teacher activity



Explain the ‘envoying’ feedback activity. One member from each group is to visit the other groups and inform them about the monument that they have been looking at. Each ‘envoy’ is to have 10 minutes to do this. All groups must be visited by each ‘envoy’ in turn.

Listen and ask questions.

All members of the class will need to see all the monuments used in the previous activity. Images of these could be projected or a hard copy could be provided to each student group.


Circulate and support students during the ‘envoying’ activity – keeping them to time and focused on the questions.

Envoys from each group circulate around the class informing groups about the monuments that they have looked at.

Student envoys may need a hard copy of pictures.

Group members who are not envoys listen to envoys and ask questions. Debrief / plenary activity

Revisit the question posed in the introduction and set up a whole class discussion of the question. Revisit the ideas suggested at the beginning of the lesson. Do any of these ideas need to be revised? What new ideas can we add?

Listen and contribute to whole class discussion.

Flip chart or whiteboard record of students’ ideas from the start of this unit/lesson.

Explain how this lesson relates to the later unit (Unit 5) where students will be asked to debate and design their own commemorative projects.


Unit 5 Unit 5: How should the missing persons of Cyprus be remembered? Aims and objectives •

•


To develop students’ understanding of the ways in which representations and interpretations of the past are constructed.

-

To help students understand how representations of the past express the aims and purposes of the people who construct them.


To develop students’ understanding of the public history of the missing persons issue in Cyprus.

Unit rationale and summary So far in this sequence of learning students have developed their historical knowledge and understanding of the missing persons issue by looking at the issue in the context of a number of other countries around the world (Unit 1) and in the Cyprus context (Unit 2). They have also developed their understanding of the ways in which groups in Cyprus have sought to address the missing persons issue in different ways at different times (Unit 3). Students have also, in Unit 4, engaged with public history and the analysis of monuments and memorials, the purposes that they can be constructed to serve and the relationships to the past that they seek to construct. The purpose of this unit is to build on this knowledge and understanding and to get students thinking about how they feel the missing persons issue might best be addressed through commemoration. Whereas previous units have been primarily focused on historical thinking this unit requires students to think historically about the past and also to think about the present and future: it is, in other words, about the politics of memory as much as it is about disciplinary history. This unit addresses the overall enquiry question ‘How should the missing persons of the Cyprus conflict be remembered?’ directly. In this unit students are asked to: a) Agree, as a class, the purposes that a commemoration proposal should aim to serve and criteria in terms of which a commemoration proposal should be judged; b) Produce design briefs for a commemoration proposal, in small groups, and (1) research, (2) develop and (3) present these proposals to the whole class; c) Peer assess each others’ proposals and agree, as a class, which proposal they feel best meets the criteria agreed at b) above. Some comment on each element of the unit components follows below. a) Purposes and criteria The question ‘How should the missing persons of the Cyprus conflict be remembered?’ presupposes an answer to a prior question ‘What should be the purposes of commemorating the missing persons?’ In this component of the unit students should be engaged with these two issues and, specifically, be encouraged to: •

Debate and agree the purposes that they feel commemoration of missing persons should serve and


•

Define criteria to use when judging how effectively commemoration proposals meet these purposes.

These are open questions. They are also risky questions – it is possible, for example, that some students may argue that the purpose of commemoration should be to promote reconciliation between communities across the existing divide, however, it is equally possible that some students may perceive community divisions as a given and argue that the purpose of commemoration should be to ensure that injustices committed by one community or political group or military agency should not be forgotten. The role of the teachers should be to enable students to share and debate views on these issues and not to pre-empt discussion, however, the teacher should also remind students of their obligations as history students, which include an obligation to be balanced in their consideration of the issues and not to exclude evidence or aspects of the record from consideration on personal or ideological grounds. The nature of the criteria that students propose will relate to how they answer the question about purposes and many different criteria could be developed. Some hypothetical criteria, that presuppose that the purpose of commemoration has been defined as to promote reconciliation, might include the following: •

Diversity: commemorations should aim to include as wide a range of experiences, communities and time periods as possible;

•

Multiperspectivity: commemorations should encourage participants or audiences to consider a number of perspectives on the missing persons question;

•

Openness: commemorations should aim to encourage participants or audiences to form their own meanings and narratives rather than to impose one meaning or story;

•

Accuracy and balance: commemorations should be thoroughly researched and historically accurate in their details and also provide a comprehensive treatment of the issue;

•

Sensitivity: commemorations should demonstrate awareness that the missing persons issue is a sensitive one and ensure that the issue is represented in ways that anticipate and take account of a range of community reactions;

•

Engagement: commemorations should foster a meaningful interaction with members of the public, and thus questions of who to reach and how should be taken into account.

A key issue for students to debate at this point is the question of form: what forms of commemoration do they consider to be most appropriate? There are many possibilities, for example: physical monuments or memorials; documentation or educational materials or displays; commemorative events that bring communities together; memorial or commemorative days and so on. b) Design As a result of the preceding units in this sequence, students will be aware of many sources of evidence and also of many groups of people who are or who have engaged with the missing persons issue and they will be able to draw on this knowledge. Designing a commemoration proposal is about putting this knowledge and understanding to work but it ought also to involve a research component. Students should be asked to consider two questions before they get involved in the process of design, namely: •

What do we know already? What have we learned that can help us with our task? and

•

What more do we need to know and how can we find this out?


The second question can be framed in a number of ways, depending on the time that is available for this task. It may be that students have limited time (e.g. one lesson) in which to conduct further research or it may be that students are given substantial amounts of time, depending on the priorities of individual schools. If there is limited time then research will, of necessity, be limited to ‘desk research’ and to the kinds of sources that can rapidly be consulted in one lesson (e.g. written and internet sources). If more time is available it may be possible for students to visit sites and contact and engage in dialogue with key stakeholders (such as the CMP or the groups identified in Units 2 and 3). Additional questions that students might be encouraged to pursue through research include the following: •

How have missing persons been commemorated in the past? Have memorials to missing persons been constructed in the past, across the existing divide? How far, if at all, do any memorials that have been constructed share common features? What kinds of story, about the Cyprus issue, do these memorials tell? Are there memorials in the locality of the school and what can be learned from these?

•

What can we learn, about missing persons and about what happened to them, from various key groups working on this issue in Cyprus? What can students learn, for example, from groups such as the CMP?

•

What views do organisations representing the relatives of the missing persons have on commemoration? The views of relatives and of organisations that represent them can be accessed directly, by consulting them, or, indirectly, by examining what these organisations say on their websites or in other media.

In this component of the unit it is proposed that individual groups of students research, design and present commemoration designs to the rest of the class. There are many ways in which the design component could be managed and the exemplification in the design component of the plan below is merely one possible strategy. A clear set of requirements that all groups’ design briefs must meet will be required. This cannot be specified in advance since the purpose, criteria and other elements of this exercise are to be student-defined. Nevertheless, in all cases, each group will need to clearly define what they are proposing should be done, how they propose it should be done and why they think these things should be done in this way. c) Peer assessment The peer assessment component of the unit involves student groups applying the criteria agreed in the first phase of the exercise to each other’s design proposals as they are presented at the end of the design phase of the exercise. There are many ways in which a peer assessment component could be managed and the exemplification in the peer assessment component of the plan below is merely one possible strategy.


Unit 5 plan

Phase

Teacher activity



Introduce the task: the class is to work in groups to design commemoration proposals in answer to the question: How should the missing persons of the Cyprus conflict be remembered?

Listen.


Explain that each group will be asked to research and produce their own design proposal and that the class will peer assess each other’s proposals and aim to agree a ‘best’ overall proposal. Explain that before they can get started they have to discuss and answer two key questions:


•

What purpose/s should a commemoration of the missing persons serve?

•

What criteria should be used to decide how effectively a commemoration proposal meets these purposes?

Divide the class into groups. Task the groups to discuss the first key question and to record ideas on a sheet of A3 (one per group). Circulate and support groups. Manage a plenary discussion of the first key question and aim to arrive at agreement about the purposes that the class’ proposals should aim to serve (e.g. by taking a vote).

Discuss the first key question in small groups, noting down possible purposes on an A3 piece of paper. Feedback and discuss ideas whole class.

A3 paper. Pens. Post-its. A camera (to record class decisions made on the board).

Write down the agreed purposes and record them (e.g. with a digital photograph of the board) Task the groups to discuss the second key question and to note down possible criteria on post its (one criterion per post it). Circulate and support groups. Manage a plenary discussion of the second key question. Groups to identify their five key criteria. Each group to come to the front and present one criterion in turn and to stick the relevant post-it on the board. Once all post-its are on the board, manage a discussion – group them together if they are similar and aim to arrive at consensus about the five criteria that the class will use (e.g. by taking a vote). Record the decisions that have been made about criteria (e.g. with a digital photograph of how the class have configured post-its on the board). Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 5. How Should the Missing Persons of the Cyprus Conflict be Remembered? Lesson Plans and Rationale_37

Phase

Teacher activity


Explain that before they can get started on designing proposals in groups, the class need to review their resources and to identify any further research that they need to undertake.


Pose two additional key questions:


•

What do we know already? What have we learned that can help us with our task?

•

What more do we need to know and how can we find this out?

Brainstorm ideas in groups in answer to their question (depending on whether they are an A group or a B group). Agree a list of key points for their scribe to report whole class.

Divide the class groups into two – A groups and B groups. A groups are to take the first question and B groups the second. Give each group a white board marker and task them to (a) discuss the question for five minutes and (b) then to send a scribe to the front of the class to add their ideas to the board (which will be divided in half with one half devoted to each key question).



White board markers / chalk – one per group.

Scribes from each group to put key ideas on the board. Contribute to whole class discussion.

Circulate and support group discussions. Manage whole class discussion on the two issues in order to agree on a research plan – an agreed list of types of research that each group will need to conduct; an agreed list of resources to draw upon. Record these decisions so that they can be shared subsequently (e.g. take a digital photograph of the board). Transition between activities

Task the class to work in the groups that have already been identified to produce commemoration proposals.


Define time scales (how long they have) and review points by which each group will be expected to report on progress to the teacher. Remind the class of the agreed purpose/s and criteria (e.g. by projecting the photographs taken earlier of the board) Agree a reporting format – e.g. each group’s design must include a clear statement of (1) what they propose should be done, of (2) how they propose that it should be done and a rationale stating (3) why they propose these things; each


A record of the purposes and criteria agreed earlier (e.g. photographs of what was agreed on the board to be projected).

Phase

Teacher activity



group will have an agreed amount of time to present their ideas to the whole class. Main lesson activity 3

Task groups to work on the research and design for their proposals (working to the time scales, purposes, criteria and formats identified above). Circulate and support groups. Remind groups of time scales, purposes, criteria (and so on); remind groups of reporting points for progress reports and circulate and advise groups on progress. [THIS COMPONENT OF THE UNIT WILL VARY CONSIDERABLY DEPENDING ON HOW MUCH TIME HAS BEEN ALLOCATED TO THE RESEARCH AND DESIGN ELEMENTS OF THE TASK.]


Explain the peer assessment and presentation arrangements. E.g. each group will have 10 minutes to report their design proposal to the whole class. Groups who are listening (but not presenting) will mark the groups that are presenting against the agreed criteria and provide constructive written feedback against each criterion.

Research resources – e.g. books and print materials and website addresses and hyperlinks relating to existing monuments and memorials, key stakeholder organisations, and so on. [THESE MATERIALS WILL VARY CONSIDERABLY DEPENDING ON HOW MUCH TIME HAS BEEN ALLOCATED TO THE RESEARCH AND DESIGN ELEMENTS OF THE TASK AND THE DECISIONS THAT THE STUDENTS HAVE MADE ABOUT WHAT TO INCLUDE IN THEIR RESEARCH – THE COMMENTS ABOVE ASSUME A SHORT TIME SCALE AND A ‘DESK RESEARCH’ MODEL.] Marking sheets (listing the agreed criteria) for each group of students to fill in whilst they listen to each other’s presentations.


Phase

Teacher activity



Task each group in turn to present their design proposal to the whole class.

Groups present their design proposals and mark each other’s proposals as they are presented.

Manage verbal feedback to each group (provide feedback and also call for feedback from the groups who are marking against criteria). Collate together the marks provided at the end of each presentation so that a running overall total is available. At the end of the presentations and feedback, identify the group who has scored the highest against each criterion (it is likely that a number of groups will have lead on different criteria). Task each group to discuss the feedback that they have received and also to pool their thoughts on what the features of the overall collective class design proposal should be (it could merge two proposals, take ideas from a number of proposals and merge these, and so on).

Provide written feedback on each presentation once it is over (pass this to the teacher) and provide brief verbal feed back to the whole class. Once the presentations are complete discuss the feedback that they have received in their groups and pool their thoughts on what the features of the overall collective class design proposal should be (see left). Participate in whole class discussion.

Manage discussion: what, overall, have the class decided they should propose (see the what, how, and why questions above). Debrief / plenary activity

Manage whole class discussion: What, overall, do groups feel that they have learned about the missing persons issue as a result of studying this topic? What do they think should be done about this issue now and in the future? What actions, if any, do they want to take as a class about this?

Participate in whole class discussion.


Resources/ materials As above.


Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 6. Resources

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers 6. Resources

Contents 1.

Introduction

2.


2.1


2.1.1




2.2


2.3


2.3.1


2.3.2


2.3.3


2.3.4

History textbooks

2.3.5


3.


3.1


3.1.1


3.1.2


3.1.3


3.1.4


3.1.5


3.1.6


3.2


3.3


3.4


3.5


4.


2_Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 6. Bibliography

Contents 5.


5.1

Overview

5.2

Rationale

5.2.1


5.2.2



6.

Resources

6.1

Bibliography

6.2


6.4


6.5


p. 4

Thinking Historically about Missing Persons: A Guide for Teachers – 6. Bibliography_3

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