How we handle memorialisation often depends further lacerate the wounds inflicted by tragedy and
on who is directing the process, and importantly violence.
what role is assigned to memorials. Differently
from the past that celebrated survival, resistance, Transitional justice experts working in the Balkans,
victories, and heroes, our present is built on Sri Lanka, Rwanda, or Nepal (just to name some)
monuments that primarily commemorate trauma. know this very well. While the global transitional
The purposes of these memorials are multiple: justice fetishizes trials and truth commissions,
as a form of symbolic reparations, justice for the memorialisation is often used in conflicting ways.
victims, acknowledgement, tools for dealing with To both promote and counter the new knowledge —
the past. Memorials are conceived as ethical and or truth if you like — about the past. In the post-
political promises of non-recurrence that clearly genocide Rwanda, the government uses the victims
have a didactic end. They are meant to teach future as a perpetual public testament to the manner of
generations the lessons from the past so that their death. In Murambi (1) - one of six genocide
tragedies of the history cannot repeat again. museums in Rwanda, 848 preserved human
corpses remain on view, years after the genocide
Bizarrely enough - we know little about
memorials as a part of social and personal
recovery.
(see Longman 2017) (1). This macabre testimony
of death is not only offensive for the victims, but
utterly dehumanising – as it uses the human remains
to promote political legitimacy of the current
It is unclear whether memorials indeed help to heal government. More than 20 years after the wars in the
the wounds of antagonism and what is their role Balkans, memorialisation has evolved into an ethno-
in the prevention of future violence. The past, after political instrument for nation-building and virtue
all, has its ways of coming back to life. But what signalling – a conspicuous expression of moral
we know for certain is that memorials don’t always values (2). Arguably, it serves to keep the wounds
act as a unifying force for social groups. Sometimes alive rather than to support reconciliation and the
they can also deepen the lines of division and healing process (Touquet and Milosevic, 2018).
Grassroot memorial after the Bataclan attacks | Ana Milošević
overview
57