Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe

Ghosts at the Table of Democracy

Kenneth Christie, Robert Cribb, Kenneth Christie, Robert Cribb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780700715992
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135789688
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The memory of past atrocity lingers like a ghost at the table of democracy. Injustices carried out in the past - from massacres and murder to repression and detention - embitter societies and distort their structures so that the process of establishing and running a democracy carries an extra burden. This volume examines societies at various stages of dealing with the memory of the past, from China, Mongolia, Indonesia and the Baltic States, where bitter memories of death and persecution still intrude, to Finland, where the civil war of 1918 has finally been accepted as a distant national tragedy.

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INTRODUCTION

Remembering, forgetting and historical injustice

Robert Cribb and Kenneth Christie

The twentieth century which has just come to an end was marked by the emergence of a grand narrative in global politics which has come to be called ‘dealing with the past’. The expression itself, ‘dealing with the past’, is unsatisfactorily vague: ‘the past’ is difficult to define and ‘dealing’ with it leaves open a huge range of possibilities, from amnesia to revenge-seeking. Nonetheless, the term has come to refer in particular to a process that puts to rest the social and international antagonisms created by historical wrongs. The process implies that somehow a line is drawn between the past and the present, so that debts of honour, blood and money need not be carried over from one generation to another in a way that distorts relations between social, national or ethnic groups. The aim is that former enemies — and their heirs — should be able to collaborate in building a civil order at every level of the global community, whatever injustices may have been committed in the past.

Before the twentieth century, sustaining the memory of historical injustice often seemed to be prudent rather than problematic. States and peoples which remembered the identity of their traditional enemies were better placed to keep those enemies at a distance. A deep-seated national memory of invasion and occupation by China undoubtedly helped the Vietnamese prepare to resist the continual threat from the north. Stalin’s preparations to resist Nazi Germany were clearly endorsed by historical memories of the Napoleonic and Wilhelmine invasions. Within state borders, too, the memory of past injustices could reinforce acquiescence in the existing power relations. Only in the twentieth century did the idea begin to develop that war and repression might eventually be eliminated from the repertoire of state power, with the consequence, or perhaps the prerequisite, that the attitudes of fear, hatred and resentment which feed warfare could also be eliminated.

Dealing with the past, we argue, has a strongly instrumentalist element — the past is to be mastered so that it will not blight the future — but it also contains a powerful moral tendency. To ‘deal with’ the past is something very different from simply recognizing the historical reality of victory and defeat, conquest and annihilation, supremacy and subordination. It involves an attempt to rectify past injustice, some effort to provide recompense, at least in symbolic, and perhaps also in material, terms to those who have suffered and to their heirs by providing new judgement of the morality of acts in the past.

Although the notion of dealing with the past has deep philosophical roots, its practical application can be dated to the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Tokyo and elsewhere in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Allies’ management of victory was influenced by a widespread perception that the victory over Germany in 1918 had been mishandled: that in demanding savage reparations and imposing difficult economic conditions on Germany, the Treaty of Versailles had in fact contributed significantly to the circumstances which led to the Second World War. The emergence of the Cold War immediately after the Second World War only increased the need for some kind of reconciliation between the Allies on the one hand and Germany and Japan on the other. In some cases, the trials were little more than ‘victor’s justice’, while in their broad aim they were an attempt to lay down the rules of behaviour for states and their leaders, which would make the world a more civil place in the future. A significant element in the construction of the trials, however, was the idea that they would limit the moral culpability of the losing side by targeting for trial and punishment only those specifically responsible for war crimes. In this way, it was hoped, what might otherwise be seen as the general guilt of the Germans and the Japanese would not damage international politics in the way that it had done after the First World War.

Of course the war crimes trials did not fully achieve this aim. First, it was clear that many guilty individuals escaped trial and punishment. An essential element in the logic of the settlement therefore was that these individuals should be pursued wherever and whenever they could be traced. Until the establishment of the international tribunals to try those accused of crimes against humanity in Rwanda and Bosnia, the pursuit of war criminals took place entirely within the framework of national laws, which were sometimes specially extended to claim jurisdiction over events in other countries. The most celebrated case was Israel’s kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 but recently this element has also been reflected in a somewhat frantic pursuit of the last, ageing war criminals. In 1988, Australia amended its 1945 War Crimes Act to allow it to prosecute those suspected of crimes against humanity in Nazi-occupied eastern Europe; Britain passed a similar act in 1991, extending its jurisdiction to deal with crimes committed outside the United Kingdom and has since then taken some action to deal with these problems. In April 1999, Anthony Sawoniuk who had been responsible for many Jewish deaths in Belarus in the 1940s, was finally brought to trial after living in Britain for more than fifty years; he was seventy-eight years old when he was finally brought to justice for his role in Holocaust atrocities.¹

Second, clearing the slate has seemed to demand some kind of act of contrition from collectivities, especially nations as represented by states. Thus Germany’s acknowledgement of at least residual guilt for the Holocaust has been widely regarded mature and constructive. Japan went further than Germany in constitutionally renouncing warfare as a tool of state policy (though this renunciation was imposed by MacArthur, rather than chosen by the Japanese authorities themselves), but Japan’s reluctance to make the same admission of guilt as Germany had done — on the grounds that Japan itself was a victim and that its political agenda during the Second World War was honourable — has been widely seen as an obstacle to reconciliation in East and Southeast Asia.² Still more problematic than this issue in the West is the one over the United States’ involvement in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War, for instance, more than any other American overseas engagement, still raises tangled and bitter issues of guilt and responsibility. The suggestion that an apology by the United States to the Vietnamese people might be in order is anathema to the vast majority of the American population.³

The settling of accounts within political units has emerged as an issue even more recently. In 1945, colonialism provided the most obtrusive set of grievances for a large part of the world but within a decade it was clear that decolonization was taking place on a massive scale. Grievances which had been, in a sense, domestic to the British, French, Dutch or American colonial empires became international ones. There was, moreover, a pervasive confidence in a process called ‘nation-building’, in which modernization in the broad sense was expected to transcend ancient antagonisms. The sense of human progress which was still powerful in the world in the early 1960s gave the hope that the hostilities of the past would be left behind without any special measures being needed to assuage them.

In the event, the latter process fell far short of these hopes. Instead the second half of the twentieth century was marked by growing waves of violence. States faced revolutions, insurrections, riots and guerrilla warfare, and responded brutally, not only against their challengers but typically against helpless citizenries. In armed conflicts since the end of the Second World War, over 90 per cent of the casualties have been civilians, an estimated 22 million people.⁴ These experiences have inflicted deep and abiding scars on ordinary people. Even early in the century, before some of the worst cases of genocide had taken place, one author could argue that ‘the curse or privilege to be the most devastating or most bloody war century belongs to the Twentieth; in one quarter century it imposed upon the population a ‘blood tribute’ far greater than that imposed by any of the whole centuries combined.’⁵

Paradoxically, on the other hand the twentieth century was also one of democratization. In 1900 there were only a handful of democratic states in the world and the democratic credentials of most of these were compromised by limited franchise and other restrictions. By the end of the century, the public could choose their own governments in relatively free elections in most of the countries of Europe, the Americas and Oceania, in large areas of Asia (the major exceptions being China and Pakistan), and in some parts of Africa. Many of these elections left something or much to be desired in terms of the levels of public participation, the integrity of voting procedures, the role of money politics or the degree of real choice available to the electorate, but the contrast with the beginning of the century was striking. At the same time, moreover, states were enmeshed as never before in an architecture of international cooperation and regulation. The freedom of states to manoeuvre was not simply governed, as before, by their relationship to one or more superpowers, but by international prescription and regulation on issues ranging from trade policy and environment to human rights, refugees and gender.

The relationship between violence and democratization is complex. On the one hand, much violence has been caused by elites resisting democratic demands from below. On the other, democratization, at least in its broad sense, nourishes the populism that feeds on chauvinism, prejudice and hatred. Some scholars have argued that regimes founded on violence can nonetheless provide a stable framework for the development of democracy, because the stability they provide entrenches a consensus on the limits of political change and on the rules of the political game.⁶ In addition, the emergence of analytical history and of the social sciences during the twentieth century has led to a growing consensus that violent events in the past may have a disfiguring effect on present democracies. This consensus arose partly by extrapolation from the scientific psychology of the nineteenth century, and its belief that events buried deep in the past could have a concealed but distorting effect on life long after the event. It also rose partly from concern with the dynamics of democracy: analysts of democratic institutions quickly became aware that democracy was difficult to sustain in political units riven by ancient hatreds. Out of these two considerations has arisen a burgeoning academic and practical interest in strategies for dealing with historical injustice. There are two salient problems: First, how can the sense of distrust and moral imbalance which arises from past crimes be set at nought, so that it becomes possible to establish a civil relationship between social groups who are divided by historical grievance? Second, and still more difficult, what special compensation should be offered in a democracy – a system in which numbers have especial significance — to those groups whose numbers have been diminished by past atrocities?

The problem of the missing became acute during the twentieth century because so many people disappeared for unnatural reasons, as one observer has written succinctly:

The twentieth century has been the century of the missing and disappeared. In part inquiries in to the past such as we are dealing with here have the task of seeing the unseeable, revealing the concealed and finding and remembering the vanished. There is also another important reason however for finding the ‘missing’; it is to display a sign that they were once alive and lived.

They have lost their place in the order of things, in the social and historical fabric. There are personal memories of them but no external evidence or sign to embody these memories. Who can show that these people once lived, had values and causes, and thus what their deaths mean?⁷

In the broad historical perspective, we understand remarkably little and can explain even less of the consequences of atrocity. Historians can often enough identify the economic and political consequences of the destruction of cities and the devastation of countryside, and occasionally can identify that the extinction of a political possibility was brought about by an act of inhumanity. But the emotional burden which survivors carry from their experience of political trauma has remained largely unexplored, mainly because documents rarely exist to give us any insight into this terrain; interview work in this field is possible only for relatively recent events, and then it is enormously time-consuming, spiritually troubling and often fraught with political difficulties. Investigating the memory of terrible events is also plagued more than other forms of oral history by worries about reliability. The mind is not a tape-recorder, and the remembering of events can transform memory itself, perhaps distilling its essence, or nudging it towards a different essence.

Historical injustice is a particularly difficult moral and practical issue. First, it implies that some current realities are illegitimate because they are a consequence of atrocities in the past. Second, it implies that the relationship between the heirs of the perpetrators and the heirs of the victims is not governed by general rules of human relations but by specific obligations, such as atonement on one side and forgiveness on the other. The pronouncement that the realities of today are illegitimate because they depend on past crimes is problematic for several reasons. First, it can be difficult to apply the moral standards of today to social and cultural circumstances of the past when they were alien, unknown or even contested. Second, yesterday’s victims were often themselves the perpetrators of atrocity the day before: who owns the Middle East if we consistently apply the doctrine of prior possession? And third, the extent to which the present condition of any group can be credited to or blamed on historical events becomes increasingly uncertain as those events recede into the past.⁸ The proposition that the heirs of perpetrators have a special obligation to the heirs of victims is also problematic. What set of principles can possibly govern such obligations? If the original injustice cannot be reversed, can the obligation ever be exhausted? It is also difficult to identify precisely who constitutes an heir: are the descendants of African slaves in the United States, or the descendants of early twentieth century Asian or European immigrants, heirs in a moral sense to the soldiers and settlers who slaughtered native Americans in earlier centuries?

In historical terms, the answer to injustice has usually been revenge. The troops of Chinggis Khan poured molten silver into the eyes of the governor of Otral in central Asia in revenge for his execution of the members of a Mongol diplomatic mission. English royalists dug up the body of Oliver Cromwell after the monarchy was restored in England in 1660 and hanged it at Tyburn to register their loathing of his execution of Charles I. Germany accepted the French surrender in 1940 in the same railway carriage where German generals had signed their capitulation at the end of the First World War. Revenge, however, was for victors only, and merely stored up a new set of bitter memories to be avenged when the opportunity arose.

The distinctive feature of the world’s attempts to cope with historical injustice since the Second World War has been the search for tools other than revenge as a remedy for historical injustice. Three elements have been prominent in this search. First, there has been an attempt to establish universal principles of human rights, to enshrine them in international law and to impose them by means of international tribunals. As mentioned, the war crimes trials which followed the Second World War were far from perfect, but they attempted to impose universal standards of human behaviour on a set of serious offenders. After a long gap, this effort has been continued with the creation of international tribunals to judge crimes against humanity in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and may eventually reach a new level of activism with the creation of an International Criminal Court. Although there are still enormous difficulties in applying such measures to large states, the trend towards the international imposition of human rights law plays a role comparable to that of domestic criminal laws in taking the punishment of criminals out of the hands of vengeful victims and putting it in the hands of the state. This approach can clearly have a significant effect when the international community move...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Titile
• Copyright
• Contents
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• 1 Introduction: remembering, forgetting and historical injustice
• 2 Victim or victimizer: the reconstruction of the Cultural Revolution through personal stories
• 3 The aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia
• 4 Forgetting what it was to remember the Indonesian killings of 1965–6
• 5 Remembering and forgetting at ‘Lubang Buaya’: the ‘coup’ of 1965 in contemporary Indonesian historical perception and public commemoration
• 6 Causes and consequences of historical amnesia: the annexation of the Baltic states in post–Soviet Russian popular history and political memory
• 7 Coming to terms with the past: memories of displacement and resistance in the Baltic states
• 8 Transmitted experience: individual testimonies and collective memories of the Nanjing Atrocity
• 9 Thirty thousand bullets: remembering political repression in Mongolia
• 10 Coping with the Civil War of 1918 in twenty–first century Finland
• 11 Civil War victims and the ways of mourning in Finland in 1918
• 12 Remembering the Finnish Civil War: confronting a harrowing past
• Index