Half-way to Healing
Fireside, Harvey
at them. Remember who they are? They had a nightmare they called apartheid. It has ended. Your nightmare will end too. They had a problem which people said was intractable. They are solving it. So,...
...That isn't surprising because it reveals the ghastliness...
...Since the peace settlement, international teams of anthropologists and medical personnel have documented nearly 500 mass graves in the country, most of them constructed by the Guatemalan military to bury slaughtered villagers...
...A driver knocks somebody down, and it causes a riot...
...The animators speak the local languages and have taken a vow of confidentiality...
...Afrikaners had women killed in their concentration camps...
...They're always carrying that...
...It isn't surprising that the incident seems to be so insignificant...
...We don't want to be prescriptive...
...They have a warm relationship, but it is not really warm under the surface...
...While a genuine sense of domestic tranquillity has yet to be established in Guatemala, he noted, Guatemalans "have been given a political space, which they can use to recover their dignity...
...So there may be some things that could be applicable...
...While there is no guarantee that any Guatemalan human-rights violators will be brought to justice, Gutierrez believes the REMHI testimony will help Guatemalans "to heal and have something to live for...
...Still, according to Edgar Gutierrez, REMHI's director, the project has created a means for Guatemalans to come to terms with their past...
...Human-rights activists prevailed on the Catholic church to establish a commission to uncover and record what had transpired during the war...
...Commonweal 1 8 September 12, 1997...
...The interesting thing to note is who are the people most opposed to the commission...
...First we have to overcome the community's fear of speaking out," Gutierrez told a gathering at American University in Washington, D.C., last June...
...But all was not lost...
...And most important, "a new generation will then be able to learn from them and to say, 'Never again?'" I IAHVFY FIRFSIDE I larvey Fireside is a visiting fellow at the hrstifute for European Studies, Cornell University...
...According to Gutierrez, they have "succeeded in making people who give their testimony feel as if they were undergoing a kind of resurrection...
...Over the ohjections of many indigenous Guatemalans and international human-rights groups, such as Amnesty International, who wanted a full investigation of all war crimes, the peace accord created a weak process for uncovering and adjudicating the past...
...But there are crucial differences: REMHI is not a governmental entity and does not interface with the country's judicial system...
...For example, the settlement let stand a 1984 government amnesty that exempted its security forces from responsibility for acts committed in the war, and extended the life of the Commission to Clarify the Violation of Human Rights, a weak committee established in 1994 to investigate human-rights violations with no authority to charge individuals accused of violations...
...You see this in South Africa...
...A report detailing REMHI's findings will be released this fall...
...Now again, you get these eruptions...
...Named the Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (and known by its Spanish acronym, REMHI), it is modeled in a limited sense on the South African Truth commission...
...Unlike South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (so' above), the Guatemalan accord called for an ambiguous means to deal with atrocities committed during the war...
...As the people recount their suffering, they have a chance to recuperate and to realize they have certain basic human rights...
...I couldn't go but someone else did...
...What I'm saying is, yes, until you find a way of dealing with the legacy of the past, you're going to constantly be shocked by the eruptions of racism...
...We were invited to the Rwanda delegation to help them as well...
...O F In Guatemala, half-way to healing ollowing thirty-six years of bloody civil war to (;uatemala-during which 1 million Gua temalans were displaced domestically, 2 t I,I )1 U Fled abroad, 100,000 were killed, and 40,000 still remain unaccounted for-a UN-brokered peace was finally signed in December 1996 between the government of President Alvaro Arzu and rebel forces known as the Unidad Rcvolucionaria Nac ional Guatcmalteca...
...What we have built up is a chain based on trust...
...So, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Rwanda, wherever, your nightmare, your intractable problem will end...
...I was invited to go to Australia where they are talking about reconciliation with the Aboriginies...
...It doesn't just disappear...
...There's an end pain that I think might be felt...
...The testimonies have been translated and transcribed at fourteen regional offices...
...You didn't hear what the legacy is of this, what are the aches and pains, what did we do to each other...
...We are being asked already to intervene...
...it goes into the fabric of your nation...
...The Afrikaner is always believing that unless he's got power, he's going to suffer the same thing he suffered as a result of their losing the Boer War...
...But we're not omniscient...
...Mainly, it's not the victims...
...It's there each time the Afrikaner and English meet...
...We're just saying God seems to have blessed us in finding a way, which is not acceptable to everybody...
...REMHI, working through local parishes, has carefully chosen 600 "animators" who have been trained to take the tape-recorded testimony of victims or their families...
...After the end of the Boer War, the English and the Afrikaners didn't deal with it...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 15
