Apologies for and Acknowledgements of Historical Violence and Struggles for Justice

Truth-telling, justice-seeking and reparations processes persist as layered responses to ongoing conflicts and gross violations of human rights during the first quarter of the 21st century. As importantly, as reflected in the pages of the IJTJ, the conventional pillars of transitional justice continue to be interrogated and challenged through the centring of initiatives emergent from the global South3 and through critical engagement with the latter towards practical initiatives and theorizing that seek transformative change. 4 This transformative agenda within transitional justice has also been pursued through a growing set of demands for justice-seeking processes that redress legacies from longstanding historic violations (e. g. , slavery, colonialism) while addressing some of the multiple sequelae that persist in the 21st century. Some examples of this are included in this issue (see Robin Hickey and Rachel Killean on the persecution of the Cham in Cambodia; Padraig McAuliffe’s review essay on cultural heritage and its restitution). These continued manifestations of historical injustice are frequently documented through the protagonism of ‘survivors’ or ‘victims’ within the local, regional and transnational praxis of TJ. The latter was evident, for example, in the recent success of 15 Q’eqchi’ Maya survivors of racialized gendered sexual violence who successfully prosecuted two perpetrators of these gross violations of their rights as well as the murder of many of their spouses in a Guatemalan court. 5 Of note are not only the ways in which victims/survivors framed and resignified themselves as protagonists who have persisted over decades in their search for justice but also the particular ways in which they spoke to both historical trauma and historical healing. 6 Working collaboratively with feminists, psychologists and lawyers as well as Mayan interpreters, these women alongside approximately 40 more broke the silence about sexual violence after nearly two decades. They chronicled not only their experiences but the multiple ways in which they situated those embodied violations alongside the violations of their lands and territories, that is, the historic occupation by colonists over 500 years ago through the more recent occupations of oligarchy who control plantations in Sepur Zarco. Despite the importance of these struggles for justice and repair achieved through the coordinated efforts of many NGOs and human rights and feminist activists, some have argued that sexual violence and rape have been hypervisibilized by the international community. 7 Moreover, the colonial dispossession of Indigenous lands remains the primary, foundational and ongoing injustice for the women of Sepur Zarco and for many Indigenous communities throughout Guatemala. Among other community-based grassroots acts of resistance to this continuum of violence is Emily Willard’s article in this issue recounting the Maya Mam’s self-governance projects of resistance and resilience. These diverse projects, among others, reflect Indigenous mobilizations around territorial defence in the face of a continuum of violence, including the rampant, violent extractivism of transnational corporations, violations supported by the Guatemalan state who, alongside the oligarchy, are the beneficiaries of such incursions. 8 As illustrated through critical analyses, these grassroots initiatives, TJ activists, scholars and healers from the global South as well as those from marginalized or minoritized communities in the global North emphasize the central importance of both the historical, often colonial, roots of historical injustice as well as the structural violence that persists with multiple and complex sequelae, often described as ‘historical trauma. ’ Some Indigenous scholars have defined and then problematized the construct of historical trauma, seeking to clarify its potential contributions to redress and healing. Hartman and Gone9 identified ‘Four Cs’ that constitute Indigenous historical trauma, processes that include ‘Colonial injury’ by European settlers through conquest, subjugation and dispossession; ‘Collective experiences of injury’ and subsequent alteration of identity and ideals; ‘Cumulative effects’ including adverse policies and practices by dominant settler societies; and ‘Cross-generational impacts’ from ancestors to descendants. In subsequent work entailing in-depth interviews with Indigenous healers / ‘Medicine men, ’ they clarified complex differences wherein one leader located historical trauma within local communities, focusing on individual- and community-level healing, and the other situated it politically, emphasizing a national discourse that centred on ongoing systemic oppression and the need for structural change. They demonstrate the multiple ways in which HT is understood and mobilized in diverse Indigenous communities as well as the diverse legacies grounded in historic and persistent oppression of these communities. Within this framing, healing is both deeply historical, that is, grounded in the naming and acknowledging of original violations, as well as focused on the structural legacies of this historical trauma that persist in diverse ways in everyday life. As significantly, it unfolds at multiple levels wherein individuals, families and communities are differently impacted and seek to engage in diverse processes that contribute to redress. These debates have also been taken up in global policy forums. The 2019 Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and racial intolerance10 emphasizes the need to analyse and document the historical roots, the structural legacies in contemporary contexts (including racism, xenophobia, discrimination) and the traumatic effects of enslavement, forced displacement and colonial dispossession of lands and territories belonging to Africans, Asians and Original peoples of the Americas. Achiume argues that contemporary structural inequities have deep roots in historical events that descendants of those who benefited through these gross violations refuse to acknowledge. Despite having signed on to conventions and other international agreements to eradicate these forms of oppression and marginalization, many governments and their leaders have shown little inclination to acknowledge their own countries’ legacies in this regard. This reluctance is, at least in part, a consequence of the unwillingness of those who have benefited from these policies and practices to acknowledge the historical record and the benefits that they have accrued as a consequence. Despite recent events within some countries demanding the acknowledgement of and redress for histories of marginalization, oppression and/or racism (see, e. g. , Daniel Posthumus and Kelebogile Zvobgo’s article on local TJ processes in the USA vis-à-vis reparations and redress for slavery), some of these same governments are engaging in proactive strategies for erasing well-documented violence from public history and educational curricula. 11 Alternatively, a range of discursive strategies for acknowledging or apologizing for past harms have emerged in response to growing demands for redress and reparations. President Emmanuel Macron of France travelled to Rwanda and acknowledged ‘the extent of France’s responsibilities’ for collaborating with perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador apologized for Mexico’s 1911 massacre of 303 Chinese civilians by revolutionary soldiers. Germany formally accepted its ‘historical and moral responsibility’ for the genocide committed against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in the early 20th century. While many of these apologies fail to translate into any material redress, others are linked to various forms of development assistance, return of cultural objects and human remains or other attempts to reconstruct and redefine relationships. These measures fall short of an acceptance of a legal responsibility for offences committed or an obligation to provide for redress to victims or their descendants. They also avoid a serious analysis or acknowledgement of the present-day manifestations of these abuses. The fear of acknowledgement being translated into legal obligation also shapes the nature of such apologies. Philip Oltermann points out that: The text of the joint declaration calls the atrocities committed by German troops a ‘genocide’ but omits the words ‘reparations’ or ‘compensation’ – a move borne out of fear that such language could set a legal precedent for similar claims from other nations. 12 Instead, the development aid contained in the agreement reached between Germany and Namibia for €1. 1 billion in aid over 30 years in a bilaterally negotiated agreement did not involve representatives of the groups directly targeted in the genocide. Leaders from these communities have denounced the agreement as illegitimate and insufficient. The meaning of apologies, and the ways they are performed and negotiated, requires careful scrutiny as they contain narratives of past events and attempts to shape the discourse of engagement with this past. Such apologies are grounded in the onto-epistemologies of those who benefited from colonial violence and continue to fail to eradicate racialized inequities and ongoing violations of the rights of minoritized citizens and the legacies of colonialism for the erstwhile colonies. The apologies suggest that words can somehow erase not only the sequelae but the historical roots, even when these are mostly known through the records of the colonial power, not the stories of the oppressed. Moreover, Achiume notes that: where States have pursued reparations for slavery and colonialism, they have often done so in a racially discriminatory fashion … where whites who profited and benefited from chattel slavery received monetary compensation, while non-whites and their nations were partially or wholly left without redress or were forced to make payment to former colonizers or enslavers. 13 For example, the UK and the USA compensated slaveholders when the enslaved were emancipated and the French demanded payment from Haiti in the wake of its liberation. Such failures elide all four Cs identified by American Indians cited above while also forgoing any acknowledgment of the roots of contemporary transnational relationships in these violent pasts. Although not framed as apologies, growing numbers of whites as well as beneficiaries of white supremacy and the legacies of colonization within the global North have turned to land acknowledgements as one way of recognizing the historical trauma of Indigenous and enslaved individuals and communities. By naming the groups on whose lands they are currently located and the ancestors who preceded them in these sites from which they were dispossessed or upon which they were enslaved, they seek to recognize both that contemporary inequities are rooted in historical violations and that they have been or are beneficiaries of those inequities. Notwithstanding the power of words evidenced in the above-mentioned apologies and land acknowledgments, TJ activists and scholars are challenged to recognize the all too frequent reframing of historical meanings and experiences through words that are not grounded in material change, or are even aimed at evading the necessity of material change. Eve Tuck, Unanga|{x}| scholar in the field of Indigenous studies and educational research in Canada, and her colleague K. Wayne Yang, caution that such discursive constructions fail at redress, warning that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ and that redress requires an anti-colonialism positionality and a return of stolen lands. 14 Such cautions alert those who seek to redress past harms through discourse that reckoning with the past must be grounded in materiality, or, in the words of Karen Barad, that ‘matter matters. ’15 Words alone neither redress historical trauma nor render historically just redress. Such acknowledgements or apologies must be accompanied by dialogic relationships with the descendants of those whose lands were dispossessed, processes of ‘mutual accompaniment’16 whereby those from the ‘outside’ engage in processes of redress initiated and structured by survivors. As Achiume argues, this requires both deeply grounded participatory processes wherein survivors and victims are recognized as protagonists, and political and legal strategies whereby states take up the challenges required by their stated commitments to eliminate racism, redress historical trauma and decolonize structures and sociocultural systems that continue to marginalize racialized peoples. As mentioned above, multiple articles within this third issue of Volume 16 of the IJTJ take up some of the challenges articulated herein while others point to other understudied areas within TJ processes. Nicolas Lemay-Hébert and Rosa Freedman discuss the complexities surrounding the UN’s apology for the cholera epidemic in Haiti after years of silence. The fieldwork they conducted in 2017 with grassroots communities explores collective and individual approaches to material assistance. Emily Willard urges TJ to expand its understandings through focusing on Indigenous scholarship and local Maya Mam communities’ narratives of resilience and triumph in building vibrant futures for themselves and their children. Juliana González Villamizar and Pascha Bueno-Hansen report on their ongoing dialogue with five Colombian activists to inform their analysis of the contributions and perils of mainstreaming intersectionality in the TRC and peacebuilding processes in Colombia. They discuss ontological conflicts about truth and justice between state-based assumptions vis-à-vis gendered Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples’ diverse assumptions, emphasizing the contributions of the latter’s shared cosmological reference points. Brigitte Herremans and Tine Destrooper further explore grassroots understandings of TJ through documenting Syrian victims’ efforts to ‘stretch the boundaries of what is imaginable in terms of justice … beyond the judicial realm. ’ The authors draw on the role of ‘justice actors’ practices and narratives’ to expose limitations in dominant TJ discourses and practices. Expanding the reach of meaning making to young people in the Gambia, Amina Ndow explores how they receive, perceive and experience the ongoing transitional justice process in that country. Ndow examines how young people integrate the testimonies at the truth commission with their imaginative re-construction of the Jammeh regime that consisted of overt indoctrination and hidden truths. As mentioned above, Daniel Posthumus and Kelebogile Zvobgo document TJ outside of political transitions, focusing on the USA and the praxis of TJ in an ‘established democracy’ wherein multiple initiatives have been launched at a subnational level to address racial injustice, with an emphasis on anti-Indigenous and anti-Black historical violence and trauma. Both the Robin Hickey and Rachel Killean article and Padraig McAuliffe’s review essay seek to contribute to a ‘thicker understanding of the harm caused by the destruction of cultural heritage and the means through which that harm can be redressed. ’ Hickey and Killean analyse the attacks on property of local significance to the Cham in Cambodia, while McAuliffe reviews three books that address the restitution of plundered treasures from ‘global’ ethnographic museums to their communities of origin. Three additional articles urge us to extend dominant TJ processes in distinct directions. Ciara Laverty and Dieneke de Vos explore the marginalization of reproductive violence in international frameworks on sexual violence and rape, dominant in many recent discussions of gender violence in TJ processes. They centre reproductive rights, autonomy and choice, arguing that such an approach may ‘ultimately contribute to challenging the gendered normalization of control over women’s reproductive functions. ’ In contrast, Annika Björkdahl and Louise Warvsten examine the Colombian peace and justice processes through the lens of friction, exploring what they call ‘frictional encounters between the Colombian judicial system and the International Criminal Court. ’ Through multiple examples they seek to demonstrate how these frictions generate hybrid, intersubjective understandings of justice, suggesting that neither the local nor the international stand alone in these TJ processes. In his contribution, Kevin Hearty critically examines how existing truth recovery processes address the issue of shoot-to-kill in Northern Ireland. Hearty advocates for the adoption of a maximalist conceptualization of truth and responsibility, an approach that would allow truth recovery to advance beyond low-level ‘trigger pullers’ to ensure ‘moral accountability’ for the complicity of other actors within the state apparatus.