South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the main vehicle through which that country sought to reexamine its past. At the first formal meeting, Chairman and Archbishop Desmond Tutu lectured his fellow commissioners: “It is not dealing with the past to say facilely, ‘Let bygones be bygones.’ For then they won’t be bygones.”
Tutu’s assumption is increasingly becoming conventional wisdom. And largely as a result, we have seen, in the last decade and a half, the flowering of a movement for recovered memory. There is a new resolve on the part of many–individuals and nations alike–to excavate painful parts of the past and to fearlessly face the truth. It is fueled by a sense that the future is hostage to the past and to history’s outstanding debts.
That impulse, that need, to look back is a large part of what has fueled renewal of interest in places like Rosewood, Fla., and Tulsa, Okla., places where atrocities were committed by police-sanctioned mobs against black Americans shortly after the dawn of the 20th century. It is what drove people toward yet another reckoning–with Swiss, German and Austrian banks and other institutions–for the sins of the Holocaust. It is what has propelled troubled societies, from Peru to East Timor, from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone, to ask–as they put together truth commissions–whether, if they can come to terms with their history, they can happily embrace a new day.
In " The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," Milan Kundera declared “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And, more and more, people are taking those words to –heart as they raise their voices and solemnly swear “We will never forget!” But as with all things of importance in life, the reality of remembering is complicated; and the unearthing of truth is difficult.
Some years ago, Dumisa Ntsebeza, a South African TRC commissioner and chief of its investigative unit, shared some of his frustrations during dinner in a Cape Town restaurant. “I ask myself,” he said, “is it expected of me to really investigate 34 years of South African history?” After all, he only had 60 investigators, and never all of them at one time.
His point, of course, was that despite all his hard work and good intentions, despite all the investigative successes he did have–and there, in fact, were many–there was simply no way to unearth anything approximating the whole truth. But even had unlimited resources been available, much of the truth would have remained beyond his grasp, if for no other reason than that different people (witnesses, perpetrators, victims) invariably differed on the basic facts. We didn’t beat him to death; he bumped his head. We didn’t rape that woman; we never saw her. We didn’t order that execution; he did it on his own.
But even if truth were not so endlessly elusive, reconciliation and healing require so much more than wringing one’s hands over the past. They require transformation–of individuals and, where countries are concerned, of the very norms of society. Rediscovered history, recovered memories, can no doubt help that process; but they can’t force it to take place. By the same token, the idea that documenting atrocities and memorializing the victims will prevent such things from happening anywhere again is rooted more strongly in faith than in history.
Never again, in other words, is not a plan; it’s a prayer. A prayer that we will see the connections from one atrocity to another, that we will see bigoted demagogues exactly for what they are, that we will turn against those who scapegoat others. It is a plea that we remember not just the Holocaust but also how easily it came about.
But there is little reason to believe people typically carry the lessons of one tragedy or one atrocity to another. Even had the world properly documented and mourned the Armenian genocide, there is no reason to believe that doing so would have stopped the Holocaust from happening. Getting people to focus on wrongs unfolding in darkened corners of the earth is anything but easy to do.
In 2002, a few months after East Timor celebrated its independence, Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who serves as East Timor’s minister of foreign affairs, observed, “The independence of East Timor is a byproduct of the electronic age. In 1975, when we were invaded [by Indonesia], there were far more killings… And where was the world then? [The atrocities] did not make it into the prime-time news of global television. There was no Internet. The world had not been connected.” When violence broke out in East Timor in 1999, he pointed out, “the world had changed. The media were everywhere… That’s what made Timor free.”
As we commemorate the anniversary of the tragedy of Rwanda, we might want to reflect on the quality of our recollections of the events of 10 years ago, and whether those memories have strengthened our resolve to stand up to genocide whenever it may occur–including in those places where cameras are unlikely to roll and where “never again” sounds more like an empty phrase than a serious promise.
