Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You
Last week I was reminded of how deeply the horrors of war can affect people. I heard a radio article about Uxenu Ablana, who was a small child when he was taken from his family during the civil war in 1930s Spain. Right-wing nationalists kidnapped him when they took over his village. His mother died – no one knows exactly how – and his father was imprisoned as a suspected leftist. Ablana grew up in orphanages, where he says he was severely abused and indoctrinated with right-wing political propaganda. The article reports that although thousands of children were stolen during Spain's civil war, the subject is still taboo in Spanish culture.
To get a better sense for the currents in contemporary Spanish culture, you might turn to Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past. Author Giles Tremlett examines, among other things, the Spanish people's reluctance to fully acknowledge and redress the wrongs of the dictatorship that ruled the country from the end of the civil war through the 1970s. It's an eloquent history both of present-day Spain, and of the legacies of the civil war and the dictatorship.
Spain is not the only country where children have been wrested from parents who were targeted as radicals by an authoritarian regime. In 1970s Argentina, the military government “disappeared” tens of thousands of trade unionists, students, and people thought to have left-wing political views. Some of them had young children, and some women gave birth while in custody. As many as 500 children and newborns were taken from their families. Many, it is suspected, were given to military families to be raised as their own. Searching for Life, by Rita Arditti, lays out the story of the grandmothers of some of these children, who have labored tirelessly to locate their grandchildren and attempt to reunite with them.
Elsa Osorio's My Name is Light, on the other hand, is a fictional account of a disappeared child, Luz, who is searching for the truth about her own past. It is an incredible, vivid story – Luz's biological mother, who has been imprisoned as a suspected leftist for most of her preganancy, is taken to a clinic for her childbirth by a prison guard who hopes to give her baby to his girlfriend. But just as Luz is born, a general's daughter undergoes a cesarean section that fails to save the life of her baby. The general commandeers the newborn Luz and gives her to his daughter, all the while weaving an elaborate conspiracy to cover the tracks of the adoption, and keep his daughter from ever knowing that her own child died at birth. The real narrative, though, is Luz's journey to find the truth about her biological family, as well as her adopted one.
Posted by Emily-Jane
Children are taught to avoid unnecessary violence. When we're small, we learn that it's bad to hit or bite or kick people, and that we should try to work out our differences without resorting to fighting. We're in for a frustrating surprise when we learn that grown-ups, even those who are in charge of countries or their armies, don't always play by the same rules.
Sad but true, people struggling for political power continue to engage in horrifying atrocities to achieve their ends. When political violence and human rights abuses within a particular nation rise to extreme levels, people and leaders of other nations have to wonder, "Should we intervene?" The United Nations says that when national governments are failing to protect their own people, intervention is necessary. The question was the topic of an episode of the radio program America Abroad this week, and the program left me wondering about human rights atrocities around the world, their history, their scope, and what people have tried to do to redress the suffering and animosity they have caused.
Clea Koff was a student forensic anthropologist studying for her master's degree when she was offered a position with a group of forensic investigators for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal, examining the evidence in mass graves left after the Rwandan genocide. She jumped at the chance to put her skills to practical use, and eventually served four missions for the Tribunal in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo. In each place, Koff and her colleagues worked sixty-hour or longer weeks in awkward, sometimes dangerous conditions with poor supplies and patchy institutional support, coaxing little bits of people's stories from their bones, bodies, clothing, personal possessions, and surroundings. Koff's account of her experiences in The Bone Woman strikes a compelling balance, contrasting her interest in scientific inquiry and the search for truth with the very human consequences of her work for genocide survivors and the families of victims.
The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention offers a more big-picture philosophical approach to some of the same questions. Essays by fourteen academics, journalists, and human rights activists detail the recent history of ethnic violence in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and East Timor; but also they explore questions of responsibility and accountability, such as: What are the consequences of non-intervention? How do guerrilla and military leaders convince individuals to participate in ethnic violence? Do regular people in the West have the power to compel their governments to attempt to stop genocide abroad?
To get a sense for the scope of humanitarian crimes and their history, I recommend Adam Jones's Crimes Against Humanity. This short, accessible text is divided into chapters explaining different types of humanitarian crimes – genocide, "ethnic cleansing," slavery, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, rape and sexual crimes, forced disappearance, and Apartheid. Along the way, Jones also provides information about international human rights law, and the history of grassroots efforts to stop ethnic and political violence.
By now you're probably feeling a little down, even if you find this topic utterly compelling. But, where humans have had to face the most incredible horrors, we often also find inspiring stories of perseverance and resistance. Return of the Maya: Guatemala, A Tale of Survival is a collection of photographs by Thomas Hoepker, recording the landscapes, communities, and people of Guatemala in the last years of its devastating 36 year long civil war, and in the first years of peace. The book includes a chapter on Guatemalans' efforts to locate and identify the bodies of civilian victims, to re-bury the dead with respect, and to hold war criminals accountable. But it is also full of photographs of the landscape, of communities, and of people engaging in all the day-to-day activities of life.
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Update (Monday, March 23): Sometimes when I have a subject on my mind, it seems like I hear about it everywhere, all the time. So I wasn't that surprised when I came home last night, turned on my radio, and heard Speaking of Faith's Krista Tippett interviewing Mercedes Doretti, co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. Doretti and the team have unearthed graves and investigated atrocities in more than 30 countries, always at the request of victims' loved ones. In the hour-long program they talked about the practice of forensic science as a tool for human rights, and discussed the mechanics of reparation, the human need to bury our dead, and many other subjects.
As the program ended I realized I want to read more about Argentina's history of human rights abuses. So in case you're on the same page as me, here is a short list of a few of the books I'm going to read next:
- The Ministry of Special Cases, by Nathan Englander – a novel about a middle-class Jewish Argentinian family whose son is "disappeared," and their struggle with the mechanisms of government bureaucracy to find him and learn the truth of how he was kidnapped.
- An Absence of Shadows: Poems, by Marjorie Agosin – a collection of poems honoring kidnapped people and their families, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Agosin's poetry was featured in the Speaking of Faith episode.
- The Flight: Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, by Horacio Verbitsky – Verbitsky, a respected journalist, interviews Francisco Scilingo, the first military officer to come clean about his participation in the Dirty War.
Posted by Emily-Jane
