Journal

Human Remains and Commemoration

GARIBIAN, Sévane (Guest Ed.)

Reference

GARIBIAN, Sévane (Guest Ed.). Human Remains and Commemoration. Human Remains and Violence, 2015, vol. 1, no. 2

Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:76215

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

1 / 1 Editors’ comment: an exceptional issue for an exceptional year

HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE

Inherently multi-disciplinary in its conception, Human Remains and Violence aims at analysing the fate of corpses and body parts when they appear en masse in contexts marked by violence, whether in post-conflict, mass crime or genocidal situations, or in the aftermath of natural disasters. As such, the journal covers a vast range of topics and fields, from political science, the sociology of religion and diplomatic history to forensic anthropology, disaster studies and international criminal law (this list being purely illustrative and by no means exhaustive). Following the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide on 7 April 2014, the year 2015 contains a series of inescapable commemorations of genocides, to which Human Remains and Violence chose to pay special attention: the year started with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp on 27 January and then the 40th anniversary of the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia on 17 April, followed by the anniversaries of the Armenian and Srebrenica genocides – marking 100 years and 20 years respectively – on 24 April and 11 July. Despite its editorial policy aiming at publishing issues of varia, the Editorial Board of Human Remains and Violence decided, exceptionally, to commission a thematic issue on the topic of human remains and commemoration, with a par- ticular focus on the question of the place given to, and taken by, the various body parts and human remains in post-mass violence memorial procedures. The Board chose Professor Sévane Garibian (Universities of Geneva and Neuchâtel), who has worked extensively on the aftermath of genocide and mass violence including genocide denial and enforced disappearances – notably in Argentina, Spain and Turkey – to act as a guest editor. The Board takes this opportunity to thank her for all her work on this issue.

Élisabeth Anstett, Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Caroline Fournet Editors

Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 1 © Manchester University Press 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.1 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:38 Special issue: human remains and commemoration

HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Editorial

On the occasion of the first international centenary commemorations of a geno- cide, that of the Armenians, the cadavers without graves are reappearing and circulating openly in the written press.1 They populate the lives and imagination of those who bore witness, whose descendants today, wherever possible, transmit their memory and are publicly called to speak in their name one hundred years on.2 The circumstantial media presence of these dead bodies in the construction of accounts, and in the testimonial representation of the horror, add to the more common and recurrent presence of human bones, skulls and skeletons often seen in the photographs typically produced when it comes to commemorating victims of mass crimes. This ‘on paper’ presence of human remains, in all their states, is facilitated by the parallel breadth and visibility of Genocide and Memory Studies, with numerous experts regularly speaking outside of the academic field in light of current affairs. All of this marks a transmission of memories and knowledge, devel- oped more through the images of human remains than through the monuments (when they exist) that commemorate or contain them. However, these remains, both present and represented, are subject to a double paradox. On the one hand, their media circulation affords them a certain immate- riality, meaning that their in situ presence in the scene of the crimes, in sometimes very close territories and often unexpectedly large numbers, tends to be forgot- ten or distanced. Yet the remains of the victims of mass violence have a material presence in space, which varies in its apparentness and in how well it is known and assumed, even long after the events. On the other hand, the expansion of Genocide and Memory Studies does not take into account the long absence of these very remains in the social sciences in general, nor in the flourishing research on commemorative practices and memorial policies in particular. Although human remains are present in images, at the heart of accounts, and in territories (even when they are abandoned, inaccessible, invisible or subject to new political vio- lence)3, they are seldom engaged as a research subject in themselves. This is even the case when they are mobilised in a commemorative context, within a permanent negotiation between individual/collective memories, official/unofficial rites and institutional/societal frameworks.

2 Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 2–4 © Manchester University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.2 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:21:56 Editorial HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Beyond the recent and innovative studies on what human remains can tell us, and how we can make them speak, we are left with one question: when we com- memorate the victims, what do we do with their remains? This enquiry is far from rhetorical. It refers paradigmatically to their diverse public uses and their patrimonialisation, as already pursued by studies on history and memory in which interest is thriving. The function of human remains in commemorative practices is multiple, be it memorial, cognitive, probative or cathartic. However, their political function, with its various aspects and frameworks, is also heavily present in the articles that follow. The question at the heart of this special issue contributes to the image-disappear- ance dialectic explored by Anouche Kunth in relation to the Armenian genocide, to this day denied by the Turkish State: what remains after the political erasing of the criminal act and its victims? How do we show, prove, remember or commemorate, through photography, not only the crime via the cadavers and human remains that it produces en masse, but also its denial and negation? How do we provide a ‘clear representation of destruction’ in the face of the political lie? How do we ‘metabo- lise the void’ into collective landmarks with the aim of tackling ‘the question of afterwards?’ Helen Jarvis also reflects on the iconographic representations of the horror. She questions the controversial commemorative treatments of the remains of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime forty years on. She shows how far these ‘powerful remains’ (in both the material sense of bones and ashes, and the sym- bolic one of artistic representations) are ‘hauntingly ever-present’, ‘well beyond memorial sites and graves’. Zahira Araguete, for her part, takes us to the very heart of collective re-inhumations and local commemorative rites, observing the spontaneous civil practices that arise in answer to the State’s inaction faced with the remains of the victims of Francoism. Thus, a new space of resistance is opened up in response to the Spanish State’s resignation. She visits this space using the example of the Extremadura region, where ‘such novel funerary celebrations and inscriptions’ from the ground acquire a specific function: the social reintegration of the Republicans who died, ‘especially when a DNA match cannot be attained’. Finally, Rémi Korman and Jean-Marc Dreyfus also study the eminently political function of the commemorative treatment of human remains. The former reviews how the place given to these remains has evolved from 1994 to 2014 in the official national ceremonies commemorating the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. He emphasises the change in paradigm, moving from a ‘hyper-materiality’ of mobi- lised bodies (conservation and over-exposure of bones) to a symbolising of the dead (accompanied by a new commemoration of absent or disappeared remains): a change in favour of ‘the euphemisation of memorial practices’ and the politics of reconciliation. Jean-Marc Dreyfus analyses the transfer of ashes from the sites of death in post-Holocaust Europe back to the victims’ native countries and to Israel, from 1945 to 1960. This important but disparate phenomenon of transport- ing ashes for commemorative purposes is little present in the historiography and seems to embody a specific form of ‘politics of the dead’ in response to a particular post-war need. The presence, like the absence, of the remains of victims of mass crime, in all

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:21:56 Editorial HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE forms and all commemorative contexts (centralised or decentralised, solemn or clandestine), involves fundamental stakes that transcend time. These inevitably require us to confront the question of the place and role of human remains in the community of the living in the aftermath of extreme violence. The contributions in this issue invite us to carry out this vital confrontation, which provides many new avenues for reflection.

Sévane Garibian Guest Editor Universities of Geneva and Neuchâtel May 2015

Notes

1 See for example the extracts of accounts published on the Francetv info website on 24 April 2015, the date commemorating the victims of Armenian genocide. URL: http://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/armenie/genocide-armenien/genocide- armenien-son-education-a-consiste-a-jouer-parmi-les-cadavres_871383.html (accessed 8 June 2015). 2 Echoing the above note see URL: http://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/armenie/ genocide-armenien/appel-a-temoignages-si-votre-famille-a-connu-le-genocide- armenien-racontez-nous-son-histoire_866051.html (accessed 8 June 2015). See also URL: https://100lives.com/en/stories (accessed 23 August 2015). 3 One such example is the small collection of remains displayed in the Deir ez-Zor Armenian Memorial in eastern Syria, destroyed by the Islamic State (ISIS) in September 2014. A major pilgrimage site since its inauguration in 1990 (Deir- ez-Zor was the final destination for the plan to exterminate the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire), this complex featured a church, a museum and a monument.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:21:56 Negotiating identity: reburial and commemoration of the civil war dead in southwestern Spain HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Zahira Araguete-Toribio Goldsmiths University London [email protected]

Abstract This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it consid- ers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so doing, the article examines how disparate desires and memories come together in collective reburial of partially individuated human remains.

Key words: DNA typing, reburial, Spanish Civil War, exhumations, local commemoration, collective memory

In the last decade, the unearthing of war and post-war mass graves containing the bodies of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) has reunited the human remains of killed and missing relatives with living families and communities at large. After more than seventy years lying in furtive internments outside of their localities or in graves elsewhere, their recovery has prompted the return of these bodies to the cemeteries of the villages and towns where they once lived, to be reburied and commemorated locally. In some cases, bodies have been successfully identified and given burial in family tombs. In others, they have been buried collectively, especially when the remains of some cannot be identified. In Spain, the reburial and commemoration of these human remains, as in other cases, is acutely entrenched with the predicaments of their forensic identification and analysis.1 Most importantly, however, they are also enmeshed with the political controversies that surround exhumations. On the one hand, the lack of information about the deceased in archives and other ante-mortem records and, especially, the impossibility of finding many living relatives have in many cases made a positive identification through DNA testing highly taxing. On the other, identification and reburial processes have been marked by quandaries around the remembrance of the war’s deceased at national and local levels. The lack of commitment from the central government and judiciary toinvestigate ­

Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 5–20 © Manchester University Press 5 http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.3 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Francoist crimes and to exhume and commemorate these human remains has gen- erated complex relationships between families, activists and the Spanish State over the years. Historical literature on the commemoration of death post-conflict has long examined the connection between dead bodies, their burial and the remem- brance and politics of national identity.2 Some of these studies – which focus on forms of memorialisation, especially after World War One – have shown the way in which states manage the familial and collective commemoration of the war dead in an effort to reassert the nation’s symbolic unity and communal sentiment. Most recently, the advance of new techno-scientific means for the identification and individuation of human remains in the aftermath of war and disaster have prompted a new way of accounting for mass death, shaping, as Sarah Wagner has diversely demonstrated, the meanings of national commemoration.3 A close look at the particular way in which these practices are carried out in different contexts elucidates how human remains and their scientific conception are produced vis-à- vis states’ ethnic, religious and political aspirations.4 In Spain, where civil society groups – formed by members of second, third and fourth generations – have administered the exhumation, identification and reburial of exhumed human remains from the war and post-war periods have seen a ‘decentralisation’ of com- memoration and remembrance practices to the margins of statist action.5 Since the year 2000, the work of families, activists and, on occasions, local town halls and regional institutions have produced new spaces of worship and ritual for these Republican dead. In Extremadura, where I carried out fieldwork between 2011 and 2012, family groups and associations often decided to bury exhumed human remains collec- tively, as the poor conservation of bones or the absence of relatives hampered their positive identification. In these reburials, unidentified remains were individuated, scientifically labelled and placed together inside a mausoleum. During the public act of reburial, the names of the victims were recalled and their personal histories reclaimed. In the process, however, different needs often converged when negoti- ating the fate of the Republican dead and their commemoration. Focusing on the intersections between scientific identification and memorialisation, this article explores the particularities of reburial work in the Spanish context. The article first broadly examines the role of DNA testing in the analysis of human remains from Spanish mass graves. Secondly, through the discussion of a particular case in Extremadura, the article analyses how common burials are subject to particular scientific, familial and political exigencies, becoming, at times, sites of struggle.6 Lastly, it considers how such novel funerary celebrations and inscriptions consti- tute other forms of re-associating and identifying the deceased socially, especially when a DNA match cannot be attained.7

Identification and reburial practices in twenty-first century Spain As in other recent post-conflict scenarios, the act of reburying the bodies found in war and post-war mass graves in Spain is preceded by the archaeological excava- tion of the human remains, the individuation of each corpse, the anthropological

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE study of the bones – of their ante-mortem, perimortem and post-mortem traits – and later their DNA typing. DNA technology has reconvened families with their disappeared relatives and become a political agent in the mediation of complex identification demands in the aftermath of mass atrocity.8 As Sarah Wagner has discussed, the search for genetic identification and return of human remains to families have united scientific practice and social expectations in the restoration of disrupted kinship relations.9 It has also further entangled the lives of survivors with the aspirations of the State. In particular instances such as the Srebrenica genocide, authors such as Wagner have addressed how DNA testing has become a key technology that ‘speaks to the state’s capacities to regulate and respond to the need of its citizens’.10 In her analysis, however, Wagner is critical of how such DNA technologies are used to reassert states’ authority in a landscape of different political claims and to obscure previous forms of governmental inaction or disdain in situations of emergency. Indeed, this ‘technology of repair’, as Wagner calls it, turns sovereign power into an authority that allegedly cares while concealing past negligence, especially in the aftermath of extreme violence – political, ethnic, reli- gious or otherwise.11 In Spain, independent scientific teams have guided the individuation of the corpses found in mass graves from the civil war and the post-war period since the beginning of the exhumation movement at the turn of the twenty-first century. Contrary to the Bosnian case, for instance, the positive identification of these human remains has never been a matter of state priority and, alongside other activ- ities such as exhumations, has been made a responsibility of civil society groups. The progressive endorsement of historical memory-related projects by the State in the years when the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español; PSOE henceforth) governed the country from 2004 until 2011 showed, for some, a level of official engagement. Nonetheless, many still regard the restorative legislation enforced in 2007 – commonly known as the Law of Historical Memory12 – as insufficient, as it legally ‘outsources’ all exhumation, identification and reburial work to families and associations.13 Over the years, many activists in the country have widely critiqued the role of the State as a bystander, which proposed new measures for the legal and moral acknowledgement of the victims, the subsidy of exhumations and identifications or the regulation and standardisation of excava- tion practices, but who never implemented these rulings first-hand. The arrival of the conservative Popular Party (Partido Popular; PP henceforth) government left scientists and civil society groups feeling more helpless. A look at the website of the Spanish Ministry of Justice and its section on ‘Historical Memory’ today suffices one to appreciate the paralysation of most funding connected to exhumations and body identifications since 2011.14 DNA testing has, however, played an important role in the identification of some human remains found in Spanish mass graves, especially since 2006, when the Ministry of the Presidency – in accordance to the Law of Historical Memory – provided financial help for their individuation.15 As Francisco Ferrándiz has argued, this transformed the expectations of many relatives, who then envis- aged the recuperation of ‘concrete cadavers’ – moving away from the consequent

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE ­practices of communal burial that predominated in the first years of the exhuma- tions.16 DNA typing has only been performed, however, in cases where conditions were most favourable. Due to the temporal divide between the killings and the exhumation, forensic scientists working on war and post-war mass graves in Spain have advised that DNA testing cannot be taken in isolation. Instead, they caution, it needs to be ‘targeted’ or related to other types of presumptive and osteological identification attained through the cross-referencing of archival sources, testimonies and the osteological study of bones and dentures.17 Rios et al. have further highlighted that identification processes in Spain depend on numerous factors.18 Elements such as the number of bodies found in the mass grave, their preservation and related belongings, the methods available for their analysis and the ‘quantity and quality’ of ante-mortem data, and ‘the availability of financial support and living relatives’ for DNA analysis are key to securing a positive identification.19 Berta Silva, a member of the excavation team from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid led by biologist Luis Rios, explains that the cases they have dealt with, principally in exhumations in northern Spain, have allowed her team to complete a DNA analysis of human remains regularly since 2006. In fact, as she observed, individual identification through DNA is performed every time it is possible and not only when it is demanded by families because it is ‘part of their working pro- cedure’.20 Indeed, for many living relatives, recovering their ancestors’ remains fulfilled a life-long wish to return them to the solemn ground of the cemetery, where other members of the family rest. As Berta further described, many families claim these remains to inter them in private familial gravesites. Nonetheless, the archaeologist explained that in all cases she had worked a common mausoleum was usually built to accommodate identified, partially identified and unknown human remains – identifications made through presumptive and anthropological examination. Corpses, especially those whose families could not be located, would be buried here in individual coffins with the relevant scientific information on their human traits, ready for future exhumation and identification. For instance, in cases such as the excavation of the Central Prison of Valdenoceda in Burgos where a vast number of bodies were exhumed and analysed, the fami- lies’ association took responsibility for the burial and commemoration of the human remains that could not be returned to their families.21 The identification of some of these corpses was concluded on the basis of clear presumptive and osteo- logical data found in archival sources and in anthropological studies respectively. Volunteers from the association still today continue, however, searching for rela- tives in order to secure the DNA typing of corpses in order to achieve a final posi- tive identification, as the blog dedicated to the exhumation describes.22 Time has dispersed numerous families and made the reencounter with the remains of their relatives arduous. In different instances, time has also complicated the extraction of information from files (sometimes damaged or destroyed) and from the human remains in mass graves (on occasions, deteriorated by the physical environment in which they are kept). These contingencies are also contemplated as a part of the exhumations’ protocol issued on 27 September 2011, which further connects ques-

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE tions about the identification of the civil war and post-war dead to their final fate and resting place. As part E of the last section of the protocol advises:

E) Final Resting Place of Human Remains Once human remains are studied and identified, depending on whether they have been identified or not, their burial will proceed as follows: 1. Identified [human remains]: families will receive them and perform the cer- emony they consider appropriate. 2. Not identified: [human remains] will be inhumed at the cemetery of the loca- tion where the mass grave is located. The most adequate containers will be used, according to the recommendations of conservation and restoration experts. Each body will be buried individually, together with their personal belongings, with an identification that allows their location in future exhumations. This identification should include in all cases their case-study number.

Likewise, authorisation from the Autonomous Community or relevant Local Entity will be required for the transportation of human remains as well as for their re-inhumation or cremation.23 Many experts consider the protocol, issued at the end of the PSOE mandate, a much-delayed set of guidelines, which followed years of practice connected, in some cases, to the ‘heterogeneous and uneven protocols’ produced by regional authorities.24 Indeed, the document’s recommended procedures are shaped by international methods and the experience of Spanish teams over time.25 Its content then reflects some particularities of the Spanish case. As the fragment above sug- gests, aspects connected to the re-inhumation of war and post-war cadavers in the country are, for instance, largely influenced by the precepts of their identification as well as the legal and political context of the place where they are interred.26 Authors such as Wagner have observed that the complexities encountered in some processes of identification – for instance in reference to her study of commingled remains in Bosnian secondary mass graves – have, in fact, generated the creation of innovative burial practices and forms to cater for the dead and its social mourn- ing.27 This was certainly the case in the region of Extremadura, where some exhu- mations exposed human remains which, extremely affected by the acidity of the soil, had effectively turned into dust. Following the trajectory of these corpses from the mass grave to the reburial site revealed, in some cases, how family members coped with the impossibility of a positive identification and, as Wagner observed in Bosnia, how they actively conceived and realised the re-internment of their dead ancestors in the village cemetery.

Identification and collective reburial in Extremadura As in other parts of the country, teams in Extremadura experienced difficulties when trying to accomplish the positive identification of human remains in mass graves. This is not to say that DNA typing has not been done at all or that a posi- tive identification of exhumed remains has never been accomplished in the region.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE

Figure 1 Mausoleum in the cemetery of Puebla de Alcocer where the 42 bodies exhumed rest. The names of those killed at the mass grave are listed on the top and the inscription at bottom reads: ‘Compassion, Peace, Forgiveness’

As Laura Muñoz, the archaeologist and physical anthropologist with whom I worked (part of the Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Extremadura; PREMHEx, in its Spanish acronym) explained to me, some excavations such as the one carried out in the village of Villasbuenas de Gata, north of Extremadura, in 2009 resulted in the successful exhumation, analysis and genetic match of the remains unearthed. The archaeologist – who worked for over eight years in the research project convened by the University of Extremadura, the Culture Regional Ministry and the Councils of the two provinces in the region, Cáceres and Badajoz28 – noted, however, that DNA analysis becomes especially difficult in the case of mass graves containing numerous corpses. In 2012, I participated as part of Laura Muñoz’s team in the exhumation of the bodies of forty-two men buried in two war trenches outside the village of Puebla de Alcocer (southern Extremadura). The excavated human remains presented dispa- rate complications that made positive but also presumptive and osteological identi- fication gruelling. In Puebla, identification work was greatly affected by the limited number of living relatives located – many families had migrated elsewhere after the war – and the few and unreliable records found on extrajudicial executions in the civil registry, where only death certificates with ambiguous descriptions of the men’s deaths remained. According to the testimonies gathered, the corpses of these men, executed by right-wing neighbours with the help of Francoist troops and scattered along six mass graves, remained exposed after their killings. Later on, the

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE widows of some of the deceased managed to secretly reach the site to bury them, covering them lightly with soil. As these stories recounted, and later scientific practice attested, carnivores and vermin soon comingled and displaced their body parts. This made anatomic connection difficult to discern at the time of the exca- vation. In addition to this, the degeneration of some corpses in post-­depositional processes further impeded bone association and the sight of their shattered mate- riality conjured for close kin the futility of their identification. Throughout the exhumation, the archaeologist also made families aware of the difficulty scientists would face when matching human remains with the names of the prisoners alleg- edly executed on the 21 and 25 May 1939 – according to the inscriptions on their death certificates. From the beginning, however, and in the light of other difficulties observed prior to the exhumation campaign, the reburial of the human remains found in Puebla de Alcocer was conceived as a collective act. After liaising with the archaeologist, for instance, José Sánchez-Paniagua, the grandson of one of the men in the grave who promoted the search and exhumation, considered that the challenging effort to locate all families related to the men could turn the analysis and profiling of human remains into an everlasting process. Moreover, he also observed that this difficulty existed when families were found, as some did not ‘want to know anything about the mass graves or their relatives’.29 José spent over six years researching his grandfather’s execution and gathering details about the lives and deaths of all those who perished with him. Having only located half of the families of the forty-two men in the mass grave meant that many corpses would remain unnamed even if a DNA test could be secured. José acknowledged that, in the event of a DNA test, he might obtain the remains of his grandfather and his granduncle – also in the mass grave – but wondered what would happen to the remaining unidentified corpses of the other neighbours from Puebla. Though financial aid from the Ministry of the Presidency covered the exhumation, scant funds for DNA analysis made the indi- viduation of this large number of corpses highly unlikely. Looking for families and funding would mean, in the view of many like José, the delay of a much-desired end: to bury the bodies at the village’s cemetery. The sense of urgency to fulfil this awaited moment, especially as many relatives from older generations were quickly passing away, propelled the decision of a collective reburial. For José a collective burial in a mausoleum, like the one on Figure 1, was a fair option as all the deceased could rest and be commemorated as a group. For many of those I spoke to, burying and mourning all the corpses together made sense since, in José’s words, ‘they died together, [had] been together and [would] remain together in the cemetery, where they should be’.30 For other relatives like Pablo Trenado, whose grandfather and uncle’s bodies were buried in the mass graves, a collective burial meant that they could all be gathered in the same place, especially considering the manner in which some bodies had ‘turned out’ during the excava- tion: fractured and worn away.31 Their collective reburial involved the design of a hollow structure where individual coffins containing the remains of each unnamed corpse would be stored. Each small casket would then be prepared for examina- tion and given the individual’s case number should any relative wish to identify

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE the bones of their dead kin in the future – perhaps, as some acknowledged, in the advent of a more advanced technology of reassociation. Their names – found using the death certificates in the archive and corroborated by testimonies – would be carved on the stone that covered the exterior of the monolith (see Figure 1). For some relatives, however, it was difficult to come to terms with the intricacies of the identification process. An excerpt from a conversation with José Sánchez- Paniagua, his sister Consuelo and Esperanza Muga Blasco (the latter a woman who lost her father, grandfather and uncle in the executions of 1939) elucidates how the idea of these communal internments was negotiated and wrestled with the notion of a positive identification when people imagined the way in which the human remains of their ancestors would be returned after the exhumation:

ZA: What does it mean to you to recover the mortal remains of your relatives? EM: Well, what I don’t know is, how do they know what bones belong to some fami- lies and which ones to another? The bones, I mean, it must be because of the bones. ZA: Yes, after they have been exhumed, it is the archaeologist who studies them and tests them. EM: But bones, I don’t know what evidence must be in bones. CSP: Did my brother not mention to you how it will be done? Did you not tell her José? JSP: Yes, yes I told her but she might not remember now … We will build a common burial site in the cemetery. The bones will come out from the ground where they are. They will take them to Cáceres, where they will be analysed. They will classify them and place them inside small numbered boxes and bring them back to the cemetery. At the cemetery, we will build a mausoleum where they will all be buried together. So you will not receive the mortal remains of your father, grandfather or uncles. They are all going to be together in the mausoleum. You will know your family is there, but for now, you will not know exactly who they are. EM: [to José and Consuelo] And your grandfather, will he be there too? JSP: Yes, our grandfather too. CSP: Your father’s bones will be all together because they will know which bones belong to each body. But you will not know which body is your father’s because in order to know that you need a DNA test and this costs a great deal of money. JSP: and time… CSP: Let’s imagine you say tomorrow ‘I want to know and I am going to pay to iden- tify my father’. Then they will take them out, because each one is classified in a box, and they will find out.32

The difficulties faced in the process of identification altered the expectations of some family members such as Esperanza’s, who, on several occasions before and during the exhumation, manifested her hope to fully identify her three relatives buried at the mass grave. During the exhumation campaign, Esperanza was eager to learn which tests archaeologists would perform on the corpses to reveal her relatives’ identity and had asked about the possibility of a DNA analysis. Even when we spoke about DNA analysis in our visit she seemed familiar with the term,

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE demonstrating the wide reach of this scientific method and its presumed efficacy in many social milieus. DNA analysis was conceived as a successful tool, especially when Consuelo reassured Esperanza how ‘they’ [scientists] might be able to find out in the future. Indeed, this was not the first time someone manifested a clear familiarity with DNA technology. Many had referred to it at the different exhuma- tions in which I participated, associating the sight of the dead body with its forensic meanings and treatment, and many members of the scientific team attributed this local knowledge of some practices such as DNA testing to their regular presence in mass media (for example in television series such as CSI or news reports). Their observations coincided with the view of some authors like Jacque Lynn Foltyn, who point out the role of the corpse and its forensic handling as the centre of recent mass culture products.33 The ascent of the dead body and its scientific meanings as a theme of public interest, Foltyn argues, has also reasserted the authority of DNA evidence and examination more broadly. Explaining the limitations of these identification methods, especially in difficult contexts such as that of Puebla’s mass grave, contested the popular images (involv- ing certitude) generated by these cultural representations of scientific practice. In our last weekend in Puebla, I accompanied Laura Muñoz to visit Esperanza one more time. It was clear by this point that a DNA test was unfeasible considering the extreme deterioration of over half of the skeletons found. Laura explained to Esperanza that an individual identification had to be considered as a ‘remote possi- bility’, given that acquiring additional biographical information about the corpses that were in better condition – and thus targeting a DNA analysis – was extremely complex. Moreover, Laura explained that many of the bones needed for a positive DNA extraction, like dentures or femurs, were missing as they had either decayed or been removed by animals. The archaeologist however added that if indicators that associated a corpse to a specific family emerged during her study of the human remains – for instance, they knew Esperanza’s father had a limp – then a DNA test might be carried out on that concrete set. Esperanza aspired to recuperate her rela- tives’ remains but also recognised the difficulties that the uncertainty over these men’s ante-mortem traits and their executions – as the archaeologist explained – had caused on the identification process. Unresolved identification ultimately determined communal burials, prompt- ing the shared experience of families’ bereavement in Puebla as well as elsewhere. These collective burials of individuated human remains were ensnared with the predicaments of time, place and conservation but also with the social politics around the remembrance of the war in Extremadura. The act of re-inhuming these remains together celebrated the individual identities of the defeated as well as their common Republican histories, prompting the formation of an imagined commu- nity of mourners around their deaths.34 In his seminal study, Benedict Anderson highlights how death is at the core of social forms of collective recognition and entangled with what he terms ‘the mystery of [social] re-generation’.35 Reburials such as that performed in Puebla de Alcocer aimed to place the dead and their stories back into the national collective imagination. In so doing, the act turned these corpses into symbols of a particular identity shared with other historical

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE memory groups. Nonetheless, these sites were also spaces of contestation, where different ideas converged about the type of burial, inscriptions or funeral acts to be performed (such as whether religious, secular, or with political symbols etc.).36 Despite disagreements, they produced localised expressions and funerary vestiges, which fixed these men’s familial, political and social identities in the public realm of the cemetery.

Return to the cemetery Throughout the undertaken fieldwork, most families and activists I met in Extremadura understood the reburial of the human remains in the cemetery as a manner of honouring the defeated. Most activists and family groups involved in the search for the dead often denounced these Republican bodies in mass graves for the loathsome way in which they were buried, emphasising their displaced condition. For many, these ‘dead relatives’ were still today lying on roadsides and outside of cemeteries ‘just like dogs’. José Sánchez-Paniagua, for instance, men- tioned on various occasions that people should be interred inside the cemetery as only ‘animals’ were buried outside. Likewise, other families’ indifference towards the deaths or the refusal to recover a relative’s body from the mass graves was strongly criticised by some as a careless and irresponsible attitude towards the ancestor. Returning these dead to the cemetery constituted a dislocated act in time to restore their privy legitimacy and humanity but also complied with a certain ‘morality of death’ – to evoke Heonik Kwon’s expression37 – based on the belief that these bodies, whether kin, fellow militant or neighbour, had endured a form of ‘undignified’ death and burial for years. As in the case of the familial rituals and commemoration around those killed and buried in mass graves in Vietnam that Kwon discusses38, these internments, including their design and commemorative rituals, aimed to re-signify the negative meanings associated with their violent deaths. Situating these dead bodies inside the realm of the cemetery bestowed the remains a sacred and solemn character. Francisco Ferrándiz has argued that the exhumation, reburial and commemora- tion of the Republican dead have often been enmeshed with the distinct ‘mortuary rituals’ that different historical memory associations entertain.39 At a national level, for instance, important groups such as the national Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, ARMH henceforth) and Foro por la Memoria (Forum for Memory, Foro henceforth) have differed in their views around exhumation processes. For ARMH, the exhumation and reburial of corpses is directly connected to the wishes of relatives and their forms of mourning. For Foro – a group connected to the Communist Party – these acts constitute a way to vindicate, first and foremost, the victims’ political identities and histories. As such, their exhumations and com- memorations are often filled with Republican imagery, political speeches, and left-wing songs and hymns.40 In Puebla, where the socialist town hall facilitated the exhumation and inhumation of the remains, the reburial was perceived – as the socialist town mayor told me in an interview – as an act that ought to be dominated

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE

Figure 2 Families of the dead and neighbours from the village carry the coffins to the mausoleum in Puebla de Alcocer (September 2013). by the wants of the families of those killed and buried in the trenches.41 Indeed, throughout the event, relatives and political representatives celebrated the reburial as a collective act of justice and equality. Nonetheless, one could appreciate how the act also foregrounded conflicting individual and collective intentions and different familial and political desires. In September 2013, relatives, neighbours, local and regional authorities and members of the archaeological team attended the reburial event held in the cemetery of Puebla de Alcocer (Figure 2). The inhumation of the corpses was accompanied by a varied secular liturgy that honoured the deceased and recalled their executions. Before the event, coffins decorated with Republican flags and a red rose were transported by some relatives and the archaeologist from the build- ing in which they had been stored to the autopsy room in the cemetery, ready for their collection during the ceremony. The objects found in the mass grave with the corpses (such as spoons, shoe soles, medals or bullets) were arranged as part of an exhibition at the House of Culture (Casa de la Cultura), where neighbours and families would later gather to learn about the results of the exhumation. The act began with the movement of these coffins from the cemetery’s room to the mausoleum. Relatives and some village neighbours emotionally carried the small wooden coffins, personally transporting the dead to their final resting place. Each coffin was placed next to the monolith built for their burial while a cellist played classical pieces to accompany the act. Once the coffins were piled and arranged by

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE the monument, relatives, local politicians and members of the research project read texts prepared for the occasion. After participants had spoken, a line of men and women, including the archaeologist Laura Muñoz, passed the small coffins to be deposited on the shelves inside the mausoleum’s crypt. The act of Puebla was marked by the voices, eulogies and gestures that emotively recalled intimate connections to the dead and uttered the political sentiments of the living. Familial words and poems celebrated the moment of the reunion between the remains and their living relative, tracing common genealogies. Consuelo, José’s sister, expressed how the reburial concluded years of waiting for her father, who finally saw the commemoration of his death and the burial of his body. For others like Esperanza’s brother, the act enabled him to once again remember his father, grandfather and uncle after years of separation. It meant, as he stated, a new begin- ning in the history of the family and the village community, as the remains returned to a place, in his words, ‘with no ideological distinctions’. Though Republican ico- nography and attire were limited at the cemetery, the presence of local PSOE rep- resentatives and the recollection of fragments from these men’s political histories provided the event with deep left-wing meanings. In their speeches, relatives and political leaders emphasised the victims’ commitment to the fight against Franco’s oppressive regime and for the values of the Second Republic. In a village where the divisions between right- and left-wing neighbours had been profound since the end of the war, the reburial sought, as the PSOE town mayor explained, to ‘repair’ the village’s familial and social fabric. Nevertheless, for many second and, especially, third generations, who had not experienced the war directly, the act was also a platform to express a connection to their ancestors’ struggle, reasserting individual left-wing identities and fuelling present ideological positions. The act of reburial elucidated other contesting views. In How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton analyses the way in which commemorative inscriptions and bodily practices are at the core of social continuity and the transmission of collective memories.42 Indeed, the oral, bodily and material expressions during the act spoke of a collective wish for reparation and remembrance, especially as participants called for reconciliation in their texts and on the engravings of the memorial’s stone (see Figure 1). Nonetheless, the same manifestations that Connerton identi- fies as cohesive mechanisms also prompted the unease of relatives who would have preferred other religious rituals. After the reburial at the cemetery and during the afternoon meeting at the village House of Culture (Casa de la Cultura), Luisa Cabanillas Bayón, a relative of two of the men in the mass grave, asked José and the town mayor why the ceremony had not been officiated by a priest. Luisa explained that she would have liked to bid farewell to her kin’s remains with a religious ceremony – just like in other village ceremonies to the dead. The wishes of Luisa, of Catholic faith, indeed collided with those of other relatives and members of younger generations, for whom a civil ceremony was a more suited way to bury the Republican dead. The experience of the collective reburial of the human remains in Puebla de Alcocer elucidated the heterogeneous character of the communities formed around the exhumation. Time most certainly conditioned the reburial choices of

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE some third generation relatives who sought the rapid inhumation of their ances- tors’ remains before older relatives passed away. The futility of a positive identifica- tion and a DNA match, resulting from the scientific interpretation the mass grave, superseded individual wishes like those of Esperanza to recover and bury her father and uncles’ remains in a family tomb. The state of the bones’ degeneration during the exhumation had impeded their individuation eliciting a reburial that resembled those enacted before DNA testing was carried out on the corpses found in the mass graves from the civil war. In Puebla, the reburial act elicited collective expressions, which assembled familial and political portraits of the dead, reattach- ing these remains to particular stories and providing them with human and social traits. Individual imaginings of the dead retraced the identity of these unnamed bodies revealing intimate experiences of enduring violence across generations as well as the familial and political aspirations of living relatives. In the project, indi- vidual desires were often at odds with group decisions, exemplifying the complexi- ties at stake in making collective commemorative practices.

Conclusions In Spain, the predicaments faced during exhumation processes have made the inhumation and commemoration of human remains a context specific activ- ity, linked to the social, scientific and political particularities of each case. Over the years, family burials have coexisted with collective interments, elucidat- ing the myriad approaches to reburying the Republican dead and the decentralised character of their commemoration. The scarce involvement and commitment of the central government in the organisation and endorsement of these acts has turned them into independent civil society endeavours in localised scenarios. As opposed to state-driven forms of commemoration – for instance, those docu- mented after World War One – where rituals and performances reclaimed national identity from the top down, the reburial acts discussed in this article reflect the way in which the commemoration of the civil war dead is negotiated between families, scientists and political members in their communities. Far from happening in isolation, however, these reburial acts are informed by an emerging aesthetics of commemoration – marked by the enactments and physical constructions that emerge from shared reburial experiences around the country. These practices constitute a ‘bottom-up reparation model’ of commemoration in which the central Government has become a mere facilitator.43 Such collective acts are critical reminders of the Spanish Government’s long-eluded responsibility for redress. They are also, however, examples that remind us of the important role grassroot demands and desires can play in official commemorations and repara- tion programmes. At a time when state-led programmes and international tran- sitional justice models have also received strong criticisms elsewhere – for what some consider as lacking in engagement with local scenarios, practices, and priori- ties44 – these localised commemorations can be valued for the manner in which they encompass the particular interests of families, associations and local political actors. Fraught with disparate views, these commemorations also elucidate the

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE ways in which social disagreements and collective action are negotiated in intimate yet translocal contexts.

Acknowledgements I thank the Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory of Extremadura (PREMHEx) and especially Laura Muñoz Encinar for the constant insights and collaboration in this research. I am deeply grateful to the families from the Agrupación de Familiares de Puebla de Alcocer for allowing me to take part in the exhumation and reburial process and for sharing their experience with me, and I likewise acknowledge the financial support for this research from the European Research Council received as part of the project ‘Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts’ with Dr Sari Wastell as the Principle Investigator (grant no. 241231).

Notes

1 See S. E. Wagner, ‘The Making and Unmaking of an Unknown Soldier’, Studies of Social Science 43:5 (2013), 631–56. 2 T. W. Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in J. R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 150–67; J. R. Gillis, ‘Memory and Identity: The History of a Relationship’, in J. R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3–25; J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3 S. E. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (Berkeley/London, University of California Press, 2008); S. Wagner, ‘The Social Complexities of Commingled Remains’, in B. Adams & J. Byrd (eds), Commingled Human Remains: Methods in Recovery, Analysis and Identification (New York, Academic Press, 2014); Wagner, ‘The Making and Unmaking of an Unknown Soldier’. 4 M. Weiss, ‘The Body of the Nation: Terrorism and the Embodiment of Nationalism in Contemporary Israel’, Anthropological Quarterly, 75:1 (2002), 37–62; Wagner, To Know Where He Lies. 5 H. Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (Berkeley/London, University of California Press, 2006); H. Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6 Kwon, After the Massacre; Kwon, Ghosts of War; A. Klima, The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre and the Exchange with the Dead in Thailand (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002); V. Schwarcz, ‘Strangers No More: Personal Memory in Interstices of Public Commemoration’, in R. Watson (ed.), Memory, History and Opposition Under State Socialism (Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, 1994). 7 M. Petrović-Šteger, ‘Mobile Sepulchre and Interactive Formats of Memorialisation: On Funeral and Mourning Practices in Digital Art’, Journeys 13:2 (2012), 71–89.

18 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 5–20

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Negotiating identity HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 8 S. Jasanoff, States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order (London, Routledge, 2004). 9 Wagner, To Know Where He Lies; Wagner, ‘The Social Complexities’. 10 Wagner, To Know Where He Lies, p. 255. 11 Ibid. 12 In Spanish, Ley de Memoria Histórica, or in its full legal definition: Ley 52/2007, de 26 de diciembre, por la que se reconocen todos los derechos y se establecen medidas en favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la guerra civil y dictadura (Law 52/2007, from 26 December, that recognises all rights and establishes measures in favour of those who experienced persecution or violence during the Civil War and dictatorship). 13 F. Ferrándiz, ‘Exhuming the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st Century Spain’, American Ethnologist, 40:1 (2013), 38–54. 14 URL: http://leymemoria.mjusticia.gob.es/cs/Satellite/LeyMemoria/es/inicio (accessed 8 April 2015). 15 F. Ferrándiz, ‘Autopsia Social de un Subtierro’, Isegoría: Revista de Filosofía moral y Política, 45 (2011), 525–44, 541. 16 Ibid. 17 L. Rios, J. I. Cardoso & J. Puente Prieto, ‘Identification Process in the Mass Graves from the Spanish Civil War’, Forensic Science International, 199 (2010), E27–E36. 18 Ibid., E27. 19 Ibid. 20 Personal communication with Berta Silva. 21 This was conducted by scientists from Aranzadi at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and with the support of the National Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory. 22 URL: http://exhumacionvaldenoceda.wordpress.com (accessed 16 April 2015). 23 Excerpt from the ‘Exhumation Practice Protocol’, Boletín Oficial del Estado (Madrid, Ministry of the Presidency, 2011), pp. 101917. 24 Ferrándiz, ‘Autopsia Social’; J. Montero, ‘Exhumando el Legado Material de la Represión Franquista: De la Percepción Social a la Encrucijada Jurídica y Patrimonial’, in J. Almansa Sánchez (ed.), Recorriendo la Memoria (Oxford, Archaeopress, 2010); As Juan Montero has further argued, many of these protocols have failed to engage with a treatment and definition of mass graves that relates to the vision shared by the scientific teams and associations that work on them. See ‘Exhumando el Legado’. Many of these protocols describe mass graves as archaeological sites, on some occasions regulated by regional laws of patrimony. This is critiqued by some archaeologists who deem that the treatment of mass graves as archaeological sites under patrimony laws entails their excavation with the same protocol as, for instance, pre-historic sites. Others believe that these laws are instead needed to regulate exhumation practices. Further, still, there are archaeologists who do not provide any definition that addresses the particular requirements of the Civil War exhumations. 25 Ferrándiz, ‘Exhuming the Defeated’. 26 In regions such as Extremadura, the example discussed here later, mortal remains

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 Zahira Araguete-Toribio HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE are returned to families or the associations that promote the exhumation and reburial. As an activity regulated by the Law of Patrimony in the region, however, the outcomes of these exhumations are also overseen by the administration. Contrary to what is advised in the national protocol, bodies in the region are usually buried without their belongings. Following the article 53(e) of the Law of Patrimony, and as a measure to secure their protection, objects should be kept at the ‘pertinent provincial museum’, or regional museum, in the absence of direct relatives that can recover them. 27 Wagner, ‘The Social Complexities’. 28 Not all regions have an institutional agreement for the historical study and exhumation of mass graves (see the case of Castilla y León addressed by Ferrándiz [2013], among others). In Extremadura, the university project supported by regional and provincial administrations has been running since 2003. 29 Interview with José Sánchez-Paniagua, Puebla de Alcocer, 11 June 2012. 30 Ibid. 31 Interview with Pablo Trenado, Puebla de Alcocer, 14 August 2012. 32 Interview with Esperanza Muga Blasco, José Sánchez-Paniagua, and Cosuelo Sánchez-Paniagua Puebla de Alcocer, 11 June 2012. 33 L. J. Foltyn, ‘Dead Famous and Dead Sexy: Popular Culture, Forensics, and the Rise of the Corpse’, Mortality, 13:2 (2008), 153–73. 34 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, Verso, 1983). 35 Ibid., p. 11. 36 Ferrándiz, ‘Exhuming the Defeated’. 37 Kwon, After the Massacre. 38 Kwon, After the Massacre; Kwon, Ghosts of War. 39 F. Ferrándiz, ‘The Return of Civil War Ghosts: The Ethnography of Exhumations in Contemporary Spain’, Anthropology Today, 22 (3), 7–12. 40 Ibid., 9. 41 Interview with Manuel Moreno Delgado, Puebla de Alcocer, 11 June 2012. 42 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 72. 43 Ferrándiz, ‘Exhuming the Defeated’. 44 R. Shaw & L. Waldorf, Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities After Mass Violence (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2010).

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:22:56 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60

HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Jean-Marc Dreyfus University of Manchester [email protected]

Abstract From 1945 until around 1960, ceremonies of a new kind took place throughout Europe to commemorate the Holocaust and the deportation of Jews; ashes would be taken from the site of a concentration camp, an extermination camp, or the site of a massacre and sent back to the deportees’ country of origin (or to Israel). In these countries, commemorative ceremonies were then organised and these ashes (sometimes containing other human remains) placed within a memorial or rebur- ied in a cemetery. These transfers of ashes have, however, received little attention from historical researchers. This article sets out to describe a certain number of them, all differing considerably from one another, before drawing up a typology of this phenomenon and attempting its analysis. It investigates the symbolic function of ashes in the aftermath of the Second World War and argues that these transfers – as well as having a mimetic relationship to transfers of relics – were also instru- ments of political legitimisation.

Key words: Holocaust, deportation, memorials, WWII (aftermath), human remains, ashes

Introduction1 The Israelite cemetery in Obernai is not the oldest in Alsace, a region in which the Jewish presence dates back to the High Medieval period. In accordance with Jewish tradition, the cemetery was built outside the town, and today it is situated in the middle of an industrial estate. One of the graves bears the following inscription: ‘In memory of beloved and much missed parents Moïse and Ernestine Levy and of our dear brother Ernest deported to their deaths during the 1939–1945 war. Here lie some ashes brought back from Auschwitz for them. Perhaps they are theirs.’ This is followed by the traditional wording, in the form of an acronym, placed on Jewish may his soul be bound up‘) תנצב״ה tombs since the Middle Ages: ‘here is buried’ and in the bond of life’). Meanwhile, in the Jewish cemetery of Rosenwiller, not far from Obernai, a cemetery that dates back at least to the thirteenth century, one finds a stone appendix on the grave of Bernard Zolty (15 May 1927 – 21 May 2005), clearly

Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 21–35 © Manchester University Press 21 http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.4 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE placed at the same time as the headstone, bearing the inscription ‘In memory of his father Moszeck, who died in 1943 in Mauthausen Concentration Camp and of All Our Dead who have no Grave’. In the same cemetery in Rosenwiller, one can also see a double grave with the inscription: ‘Jeanne Fisch née Moïse, Marx Fisch of Rosheim deported to their Deaths’, which seems to suggest that the grave is sym- bolic, just a headstone with no bodies underneath. This little walk through two Jewish cemeteries in Alsace reveals the moving desire of survivors from small rural communities to make a gesture of remem- brance to the dead. They were able to do so in spite of the absence of any ritual prescriptions in Judaism at the time concerning the treatment of dead bodies en masse, and especially regarding a new phenomenon created by the Holocaust: the absence of bodies. Here one can see a collective attempt to create monuments to the dead who could not be buried within the cemetery, along with an individual attempt to create a grave in traditional form (sober, with a standing headstone, as is the tradition among Ashkenazi Jews).2 The burial of ashes taken from Auschwitz is also significant, a moving attempt at substitution in the absence of a funeral. These two examples of the transfer of ashes may serve as an introduction to the subject of this article, an extremely widespread phenomenon, yet one that has until now been neither described nor studied, namely the transfer of ashes (and, to a lesser extent, of human remains) in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Nazi extermination camps. Faced with the scale of the Jewish catastrophe and the destruction in Europe, and the extreme dehumanisation of the victims of National Socialist persecutions, numerous initiatives were undertaken to help with the grieving process, suggest possible reparations and find suitable means of com- memoration given the enormity of these crimes. The content of this article is the fruit of much sustained research and observa- tion carried out by the author over a number of years. As its subject does not fall within existing categories of research into the consequences of deportation and the Holocaust, it is based on a range of somewhat disparate sources: archival research has yielded some results, in particular the archives of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and those of the official Jewish community in Berlin (Centrum Judaicum). It draws on examples from across the whole of Europe, according to whatever information has been available; however, this article does not claim to be in any way exhaustive. Rather, it seeks to put forward hypotheses and consider paths for further research into the social, political and religious history of the memorialisa- tion of ashes. To this end, it sets out some preliminary data for future thinking on a phenomenon that has, perhaps surprisingly, been neglected by the large number of historical studies devoted to the problems of the aftermath of the war and of the Holocaust. This is a history article, rather than a piece of historical anthropol- ogy, although it does refer to some notions drawn from religious anthropology in order to set out certain interpretative and explicative hypotheses. The methodology employed has involved the collection of numerous examples and their documen- tation, along with the selection of significant case studies which make analysis through analogy and comparison possible, given that no centralised archives dealing with this subject exist. A considerable quantity of data has been collected

22 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE during visits to the sites mentioned. This article will therefore attempt to establish a classification of the different forms of ash transfer, along with a chronology of these transfers. Not all of the transferred ashes came from Auschwitz-Birkenau, although the latter quickly became a symbol of the Holocaust; some, as we shall see, were taken from concentration camps within the Reich, namely Dachau and Buchenwald. In the 1950s, the memory and representations of the two events linked to these sites – the persecution and deportation of anti-Nazi resistance fighters on the one hand and the destruction of European Jews on the other – were not entirely separate and were involved in constant dialogue and exchanges of references, if not active com- petition, with each other. This article will focus mainly on those instances of the transfer of ashes that were organised by collectives, namely survivors’ associations or Jewish communities. After describing several cases of such transfers, I will try to explain the difficulties involved in inscribing this movement of remains within Jewish tradition and history, comparing it with the transfers of ashes carried out by resistance organisations. Lastly, I will attempt to give an explanation for this phenomenon which contravenes both the spirit and the letter of Jewish law (the Halakhah). In doing so I will reveal the sheer diversity of the actors involved in these transfers of ashes and human remains: these include families, individuals, survivors, families’ and survivors’ associations, various administrations (in par- ticular those dealing with deportees or the victims of war) and diplomats. Many of these were new organisations, born out of the war and the German occupation (such as resistance organisations or victims’ associations); others predated the Nazi period, such as the official Jewish communities. The latter, however, came out of the war severely weakened, their members in many countries having been mur- dered en masse (albeit with extremely varied survival rates), and their leadership was to a large extent rebuilt from scratch since most of the pre-war Jewish leaders had been killed.3 New organisations, some confessionally based, were also created following the liberation with the exclusive aim of perpetuating the memory of the victims. They played an important part in the phenomenon described here.

Ashes of Jewish deportees and Resistance fighters One of the first Italian monuments to the deportation was inaugurated in 1946. It is situated at the entrance to the monumental cemetery of Milan (cimiterio monu- mentale di Milano).4 The monument was commissioned by an anti-Nazi resist- ance association, the National Association of Italian Antifascist Political Victims (ANPPIA). The task of constructing it was given to the architecture and design firm BBPR (the initials of the firm’s four associates: Banfi, Belgiojoso, Peressutti and Rogers), one of whose founders, Gianluigi Banfi, had been deported and mur- dered. The monument is modernist in form; at its centre is a glass cube containing earth brought back from Mauthausen camp. The fact that the content of the cube is described as ‘earth’ is an important point; in many examples studied here rather vague descriptions were given to the material that was transported and memori- alised, including ashes, earth and crushed fragments of human bone. Given the

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35 23

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE context of the liberation of the camps (such as the destruction by the SS of the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau) this is hardly surprising.5 Even the ashes from the crematoria were systematically placed in rivers or reservoirs as part of the process of ensuring the complete destruction of bodies implemented by the Nazis.6 The glass cube in the monumental cemetery of Milan also underwent numerous modifications over time, up until the end of the 1950s; deportees’ families wanted to add named plaques to this predominantly conceptual monument.7 The symbol represented by this ‘earth’ brought back from the camp – just one camp – was sup- posed, in the eyes of the architects, to stand for the human remains of all Italian deportees, or at least the place where their ashes were scattered. This glass cube also had a companion piece in the same Milan cemetery, but was this time placed in the Jewish section and built one year later. This second monument was inaugurated on 13 July 1947. The architect Manfredo d’Urbino designed a seven-branched cande- labra looking over a crypt containing twelve Jewish tombs of Jewish fighters killed, for the most part, inside Italy.8 At the centre of the monument were placed some ‘ashes’ from Dachau. They symbolise the corpses of those who are absent and of the Jewish deportees more generally. Yet Italian Jews were not deported to Dachau, which was a concentration camp for political opponents, but to Auschwitz. Another feature of the Milan monument which is typical of monuments to the deportation of the Jews constructed soon after the liberation is that it is located within the Jewish cemetery. This symbolism of earth and ashes was also employed in Eastern Europe in par- ticular. In September 1945, the actor and director of the Yiddish theatre Salomon Mikhoels, the president of the Soviet Jewish Antifascist Committee, appeared in public in Kiev’s Jewish theatre. He arrived bearing a crystal vase, ‘but there were no flowers in the vase – it was filled with a yellow and black substance’, one observer reported. Mikhoels explained in Yiddish that, before coming, he had gone with some friends from the Jewish theatre in Moscow (which he ran) to a shop to buy the crystal vase. From there, they had gone straight to Babi Yar – the site of the massacre of the 33,771 Jews of Kiev on 29 and 30 September 1941, and had filled the vase with earth that ‘held the screams of mothers and fathers, from the young boys and girls who did not live to grow up, screams from all who were sent there by the fascist beasts’. Holding up the vase, Mikhoels declared ‘Look at this. You will see laces from a child’s shoes, tied by little Sara who fell with her mother. Look carefully and you will see the tears of an old Jewish woman … Look closely and you will see your fathers who are crying “Sh’ma Israel” and looking with beseech- ing eyes to heaven, hoping for an angel to rescue them.’ And to conclude: ‘I have brought you a little earth from Babi Yar. Throw into it some flowers so they will grow symbolically for our people … In spite of our enemies, we shall live.’9 I have underlined the colour of this earth: ‘yellow and black’. It does sound like this vase contained a mixture of earth and ashes. Mikhoels’ speech is emblematic of these transfers of ashes that I seek to describe here; earth and ash are in this case sub- stitutes for memory, but also represent the victims as a collective whole. They are seen as an essential basis for the reconstruction of the Jewish people, as the end of his speech suggests. On his return to Moscow, Mikhoels launched a campaign

24 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE for the construction of monuments to the Soviet Jews who had been murdered. The sequence of events here is important; the ashes appear first, recovered from the site of a massacre. Once displayed in public, they become a relic imbued with a meaning – even if this is not unequivocal – and it becomes necessary to find a resting place for them. Monuments were thus constructed because these ashes were in people’s possession. This was certainly the case in France; on 30 June 1946, the National Federation of Deported and Imprisoned Resistance Fighters and Patriots (FNDIRP), the great communist-allied federation for surviving deportees and their families (with a mass-membership in France at the time), chose a spot in Père-Lachaise cemetery, near the Communards’ Wall (Mur des Fédérés)10 in the 97th division, to place an urn containing ashes taken from near to one of the crematoria at Auschwitz. Five speeches were given.11 This was before the creation of the Auschwitz memo- rial on this site. The memorial, sculpted by Françoise Salmon, herself a member of the Resistance, a Jew and a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, would only be inaugurated in June 1949. Here one can see an interesting instance of the transfer of ashes preceding the erection of a memorial. The urn, having been ‘sanctified’ by these ceremonies, needed to be accommodated. The present plaque is more recent, having been changed after the precise figures for deportations from France to Auschwitz were published in 1978. It bears the inscription ‘A small quantity of earth and ashes from Auschwitz placed here perpetuate the memory of their martyrdom.’12

The symbolism of ashes following the Second World War As early as 1946, pilgrimages took place to the sites of certain major concentra- tion camps. These were organised by the larger European survivors’ federations. Survivors of the camps grouped into national associations took part in these, occa- sionally alongside family members – widows, widowers and orphans. These events had political overtones, allowing survivors to commune in the cult of remem- brance of their dead comrades, families to have a place and occasion for contem- plation and associations to proclaim their political role. The East-West conflict was also played out in many ways during these events, with a clear division between communist and non-communist federations.13 National delegations brought back earth from the camps to their countries and, in rarer cases, fragments of bone that could still be found around the crematoria before the soil had been washed away by rain or sifted through by the ‘panners’14 – Polish locals who, in groups or individu- ally, dug over the sites of the extermination camps in the hope of finding valuables buried by the victims before they were murdered. While the political significance of the transfer of the ashes of deported Resistance fighters is clear, and was explained in public discourse (namely the return of the ashes of combatants to the soil of the country for which they fell), this is anything but obvious in the case of the move- ment of the ashes of Jews deported on racial grounds. What is the symbolism of the ashes from Birkenau, in particular within Jewish tradition where rituals of mourning and burial, not to mention laws of impurity

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE surrounding corpses, are complex and codified in great detail? In Jewish bibli- cal culture, known in the West from the Renaissance and the age of humanism onwards, ashes symbolise death. Jewish funerary practices have retained this symbolic meaning to this day; the person returning in mourning from the cem- etery symbolically tears off a piece of their clothing and marks their forehead with ashes.15 In the Old Testament, ‘covering one’s head with ashes’ is a sign of mourn- ing. Ashes are at once what is left behind but also what marks the beginning, for Man was created by God in His image out of dust from the ground. It is written in Genesis that ‘God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being’.16 In some Jewish com- munities, on the eve of Tisha B’Av, the fast which, in the summer, commemorates the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, ashes from burnt food are consumed. However, the ashes and dust in question are categorically not material derived from corpses. Cremation remains strictly forbidden by Judaism. The body must return to the earth from which, according to the verse from the Bible, it originally came. Individuals do not own their bodies, and these must return to God. Because of this tradition, tattoos, scarification and self-mutilation have all been forbidden. It is therefore difficult to place the transfers of human ashes described here within an historical anthropology of Jewish funeral rites, even if the latter had undergone some modifications owing to the pressure of political and social developments in Europe since the Emancipation.17 Yet, alongside the gas chambers, descriptions of crematoria – which had been known since the 1930s when they were first built in the concentration camps – were a central representation of the ‘revelation’ of the Jewish genocide in 1945. One of the images from 1945 that had a particularly pow- erful effect on world opinion – and within the Jewish world – was the description of the mass cremation.18 It is undeniable that the most shocking visual images were those from Bergen-Belsen, with its piles of emaciated corpses, yet the first accounts by survivors of Auschwitz helped to fix this image of bodies reduced to ashes at a time when post-mortem cremation was still most uncommon in Europe. The use, from a very early stage, of the term ‘Holocaust’, a Greek word referring to a sacrifice that has been burned completely (as opposed to the thyesthai, at least part of which was eaten by the priests and their table-companions) is indicative of the analogies at work here and the symbolic role of human ashes in a vaguely conscious shift towards religious vocabulary. This distinction between burnt and unburnt sacri- fices is also present in the Old Testament. This new imagery of destruction focusing on human ashes was the product of a representation of the destruction of European Jews – and of the members of the Resistance who died in the camps – which centred on the deportations from Western Europe. The ‘Holocaust by bullets’, as Father Patrick Desbois has recently described it, had yet to enter people’s memo- ries, in Western Europe at any rate.19 The bodies of the 1.5 million Jewish victims of this latter massacre were put in mass graves. This representational bias has been examined by the historian Timothy Snyder, who underlines how a narrative of the Holocaust was primarily constructed through reference to the testimony of Jewish survivors from Western Europe. The voices of these assimilated Jews – such as Primo Levi – who were far removed from Yiddish culture, were the only ones that

26 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE could be heard in the early post-war years,20 and frames of memory, along with official or community-based practices of commemoration, varied widely from one European country to another. It is very likely that these transfers of ashes were conceived of and understood in different ways according to the country in ques- tion, yet the fundamentally invariable nature of the act – taking ashes from the ground, transporting them, burying them again – is interesting, precisely because it responds to similar commemorative needs in such widely differing contexts. It is possible to find accounts of transfers of human remains from the Holocaust carried out – as a form of reappropriation – by individuals and families, rather than associations, but these are rare. Does this mean that they only took place very rarely, or simply that they have not remained in the collective memory? It would seem in any case that a shift in sensibilities around ashes and human remains from the Holocaust took place at the end of the 1950s, as these practices of transfer stopped at this time. Nevertheless, I can cite my personal experience of at least one case, namely that of pieces of human bone and ashes collected by Professor Robert Waitz, the French head doctor of the Revier (the detainees’ infirmary) at Auschwitz III- Monowitz. On 27 March 2005, during my fellowship at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, Francine Lévy-Waitz, Robert Waitz’ daughter, sent me, via mutual friends, a small, carefully wrapped package. It con- tained round plastic medical sample jars filled with ashes and fragments of human bone. Mrs Lévy-Waitz wanted to pass on these remains, found among her father’s effects after his death, to Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial in Israel. I have been able to find evidence of another case of this type: Mme Anne Schuchman has told how, among the affairs of her grandfather, a Polish Jew who had emigrated to France in the 1930s, she found a human bone, probably a femur. Leibl Azen had gone back to Poland in 1957 to visit Zaremby, the village of his birth. A friend took him to the place where 3,000 Jews from the village and surrounding country had been massacred. Bones lay scattered on the surface of the soil. Azen took one and placed it in the glove compartment of his car, where it remained for many years.21 After the death of their grandfather, the family decided to bury the bone beneath an olive tree in their holiday home in the Yonne region of Burgundy.22 Were these transfers of remains from victims of the Holocaust inspired by the transfers of the ashes of the Resistance’s deported members? The chronology seems to suggest that they were. This was the case in Milan where, as we have seen, the first memorialisation involving earth from a camp was performed by an anti-fascist resistance association. It was only subsequently, soon after this first inaugura- tion, that the Jewish community in turn brought back soil from the same source. A similar pattern was visible in France. After the symbolic return of ashes from Auschwitz organised by the FNDIRP, the various organisations representing the French Jewish community followed suit. This process even used the official chan- nels of French diplomacy. In May 1947, Léon Meiss, the president of the Central Jewish Consistory, wrote to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at the quai d’Orsay:

Numerous Jewish cultural associations have expressed to us their desire to seal within the monument that they are erecting in memory of our coreligionists who fell

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE victim to the German occupation an urn containing ashes taken from the crematoria at Auschwitz. This act would constitute a symbol somewhat analogous to that of the Unknown Soldier and would enable families who cannot come to meditate upon the tomb of a loved one to evoke the memory of those whom they mourn.23

In this same period, the Central Consistory instructed these communities to place plaques inside their synagogues bearing the names of the faithful who had been deported beneath the heading ‘Fallen for France’ (‘Morts pour la France’). Léon Meiss’s request was immediately passed on to the French embassy in Warsaw.24 On 25 October 1947, the ambassador, Roger Garreau, was able to announce that the Polish authorities had provided him with an urn filled with ashes and that he would send it to Paris by diplomatic bag. The general secretary of the Consistory picked it up at the quai d’Orsay. It is interesting to note that, in addition to the practical aspects of Léon Meiss’s request – which spared the Jewish authorities from making a trip to Poland – having the urn sent by diplomatic bag constituted a form of legitimisation by the State of the demands for memorialisation coming from offi- cial French Judaism. The monument to deportees in the Great Synagogue of Paris, on rue de la Victoire, had been inaugurated in the presence of the President of the Republic, Vincent Auriol, on 27 February 1947, without the ashes.25 Their addition was, in a way, a testimony to the inadequacy of a monument that was nevertheless imposing, although not entirely public, being situated in the building that symbol- ised official French Judaism. The reference to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, meanwhile, seems extremely significant in this context.26 The deportation of the Jews of France was in this way ‘militarised’; the wording ‘Fallen for France’ was routinely added to the plaques placed in synagogues in this period, copying the plaques engraved after the First World War. The tomb of the Unknown Soldier, built beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on 11 November 1920, had been inau- gurated by the Minister of War at the time, André Maginot. The body buried in it had been chosen from among eight bodies recognised as being those of French soldiers – each exhumed from one of the eight military regions of the First World War – whose identity it had not been possible to establish. In a similar manner, the grand project for a memorial to the deportation of France’s Jews was based from the outset on ashes brought back from the camps. The memorial was driven forward by the dedication and energy of Isaac Schneersohn, a Russian-born Jew with a scrap metal business in France who, on 28 April 1943, had secretly set up the Centre for Contemporary Jewish Documentation (Centre de documentation juive contemporaine) in Grenoble. The idea of transferring ashes and human remains was present from the very beginning of the project for the memorial, which caused some controversy within the established French Jewish community. From the very start, this transfer ran into opposition from the rabbinate. The Association of French Rabbis published a communiqué in which it declared that it ‘cannot give its approval to the burial outside a cemetery of the sacred ashes [of the] martyrs’ and added that ‘the presence of such ashes in a crypt runs the risk of giving rise to ceremonies of a more or less religious nature liable to take on a character that is more often pagan than Jewish’.27 The ashes

28 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE arrived in Paris before the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr (Mémorial du martyr juif inconnu) had even been inaugurated. They were temporarily placed in a grave in the Jewish section of Montparnasse cemetery. Ashes taken from the various different camps would, despite all these problems, be placed in the crypt of the Memorial when it was at last completed on 24 February 1957. The crypt was inaugurated in the presence of the chief rabbi of France Jacob Kaplan, in spite of the firm opposition to the use of these ashes that he had pronounced one year previously. It is true that, in the meantime, the chief rabbi of Israel, Isaac Herzog, had given his approval for the burial of ashes, and such ceremonies had taken place in Israel itself, under the auspices of the Ministry of Religious Affairs (see below).28 Soil from Israel had been added to the soil of the camps. In Alsace, too, ashes brought back from Auschwitz were buried, and the burial was performed in front of the memorial to Jewish deportees in the Jewish cemetery in Cronenbourg.

The transfer of ashes as a tool of political legitimisation However, the interpretations placed upon these transfers of ashes in the aftermath of the Holocaust went beyond the simple notion of their being substitute graves. These ashes were becoming instruments of political legitimisation at a time when the exact form public policies of memory should take had yet to be decided. The conflicts surrounding ashes and human remains grew in number; in France, for example, the Réseau du souvenir (‘Remembrance Network’, a small but highly influential Catholic organisation for deported resistance members), which in 1954 succeeded in having a National Day of Deportation (on the last Sunday of April) recognised by the French parliament, arranged the transfer of ashes from various camps to Fort Mont-Valérien in western Paris, the focal point for Gaullist memory of the Second World War.29 This was interpreted by the FNDIRP, at this time closely aligned with the communists, as a provocative declaration of Gaullist alle- giance by its competitors in the field of political legitimisation. Within the Jewish world, movements of ashes were also tied up with similar political struggles; exam- ples of this are to be found in Israel where, while the approach was always Zionist, tensions existed between different political leanings, in particular between secular and religious Zionism. Zionist ideology or, rather, the dominant currents within Zionism in the post-war period, imagined that once the Jewish State was created, all the world’s Jews would emigrate to Palestine. The question of confronting the Holocaust politically – and in particular of the place it should be given within the narrative of the construction of the State – divided the various political parties after 1945. Since the State of Israel was seen as the culmination of Jewish history, it was, de jure, the place where the remains of the vanished Jewish communities were to be held.30 These ‘remains’ therefore had to be moved there regardless of the form they took. The representatives of the National Religious Party, part of the governing coalition until the 1970s, pressed for the transfer to Israel of the ashes of Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, along with the ashes of the victims of the Holocaust, as well as the Torah scrolls that had been profaned in Europe. This pro- posal was made in the Knesset by Hillel Kook, then a member, in June 1949.31 At

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE the same time, rabbi Shmuel Zanwil Kahana, the unmoveable director general of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, was busy developing religious sites, in particular Mount Zion, which was considered to be the place where King David had been buried. An underground place of worship and commemoration was built there and inaugurated on the 10th day of the Jewish month of Tevet, a day of fasting and also the day of commemoration of the Holocaust (at this time at least) within orthodox currents of Judaism. During the inauguration ceremony, in August 1950, individu- als brought in urns containing ashes and pieces of bone that they had in their pos- session. Throughout the 1950s, new material was regularly added to this ‘Holocaust cellar’, as it was called: shofars (ram’s horns) found in Bergen-Belsen, Torah scrolls brought from Worms in Germany, etc. These objects were not all buried, and in fact many were displayed in a sort of museum.32 The ‘cellar’ became an important place of pilgrimage, at a time when access to the Jewish holy sites in the old town of Jerusalem was forbidden owing to the partitioning of the city.33 The National Religious Party fought for a number of years to maintain exclusive control over commemorations held on this site, in spite of repeated criticisms from across the ideological spectrum in the new State. In particular, rabbi Kahana forbade the burial of ashes and human remains which survivors might have in their possession anywhere other than in the Mount Zion cellar.34 The quasi-monopolistic position of the ‘Holocaust cellar’ was soon challenged. In point of fact, it would appear that the way in which rabbi Kahana went about collecting ashes from the Holocaust was itself a reaction to a previous highly-­ publicised event: the arrival in Israel of a glass casket, one and a half metres in height, containing thirty porcelain urns in the colours of the Jewish State.35 The transfer in question had been organised by Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi- hunter, who was himself a survivor of the camps. This was his first media coup, in June 1949. Wiesenthal wanted to force Israelis to face up to the memory of the genocide. The ashes were temporarily buried in Sanhedria Cemetery, in Jerusalem, until a final resting-place could be found for them. The creation of the ‘Holocaust cellar’ was thus a conscious parallel to these ashes as they waited for a permanent home. The need to find one for them was one of the reasons, among others, for the creation of Yad Vashem by a law passed in the Knesset in 1953. The ashes were placed beneath the crypt in a site, which in fact consists of a series of memorials on a hillside. Again, in 1957, ashes were brought to Israel from Poland. This led to conflict between the authorities at Yad Vashem and the rabbis in charge of reli- gious affairs. Both groups wanted to claim possession of the ashes, which were a means of legitimising their authority over the memory and commemoration of the massacres. Yad Vashem, which is a secular institution, finally emerged victorious from this argument.36 Lastly, and at the risk of appearing iconoclastic, it is possible to suggest an expla- nation for these post-Holocaust transfers of ashes through reference to the Christian cult of saints’ relics. Of course, religious Judaism would discount the presence of any Christian references, yet their impregnation within the culture of a minority group that had lived for so long in Europe and, following the Emancipation, had undergone such a high degree of acculturation to the majority culture is undeni-

30 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE able. This said, at no point during this research have we seen the ashes of the victims of National Socialism being credited with supernatural properties, usually the hall- mark of Christian relics. Nevertheless, from the 1930s to 1960s, Jews did draw on Christian representations of suffering (particularly from Catholic sources) in order to express their sorrow in the face of persecution. The visual register in particular was enriched by such references. One could, among many other examples, cite Marc Chagall’s painting The White Crucifixion from 1938.37 It shows Christ on the cross, his lower body covered by a Jewish prayer shawl. Around the cross a syna- gogue burns, a ship carries away refugees, a mob attacks a village. From the very beginning, saints’ relics were a crucial part of Christian religious life. They carried a variety of meanings; as miracle-working objects offering a path to transcendence, they were kept in churches. They even became necessary for the performance of worship within Catholicism. Their symbolic significance resided in their capacity for multiplication; one relic could be divided up infinitely to produce more relics. They also carried a powerful eschatological charge, leading the living to wish to be buried ‘ad sanctum’, as close as possible to the saint or saints. Similar motives lay behind the burial of the ashes of deportees within existing cemeteries, as was the case in Père Lachaise in Paris. Relics circulated widely, being in turn presented as gifts, stolen, or transferred for their protection. Through them, the story of the networks of the symbolic legitimisation of religious and political power may be traced, as is the case in the second half of the nineteenth century which saw a resurgence in the cult of relics.38 The anthropologist of religion Alfred Dupont defined a phenomenon that he termed ‘sacral recharging’ which involves the restoration of relics following a period of crisis, such as the Reformation or the French Revolution.39 In particular, this sacral recharging saw the transfer of new relics at the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to the renewal of Christian archaeology, and these relics were often from saints described as young and vigorous. This concept may help us to understand the transfers of ashes after the Holocaust and deportations. Some of the strength of the dead was being appropriated by the organisers of these ceremonies and the builders of these memorials. At the same time, these human ashes legiti- mised the commemorative discourse regarding the catastrophe, at a time when this was far from being fixed or unified. A final illustration of the fascinating polysemy of these movements of ashes is given by the transfer to a chapel in the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris. Within the very walls of the chapel have been sealed earth and ashes from the principal concentration camps. The chapel was opened on 21 November 1953.40

Conclusion These transfers of ashes and other remains of the victims of National Socialism were all carried out in the fifteen years following the Second World War. There was only one exception; in the Jewish cemetery of Berlin-Weissensee, the grand historic cemetery built in the nineteenth century, a memorial to the deportations was built following German reunification, the cemetery having been situated in

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE East Berlin during the communist period. The memorial is situated on the small esplanade in front of the chapel, but inside the boundary of the cemetery as marked by its wrought-iron railings.41 Around a plaque in the form of a headstone, which bears an inscription in memory of the victims of Nazism, twenty or so smaller plaques are placed in a circle. Each of these bears the name of a concen- tration or extermination camp. In front of the monument, a flat stone decorated with a Star of David has been laid into the ground. It protects an urn containing ashes taken from Auschwitz. This document shows the need, in 1991, to display a public explanation for the removal of these ashes, a sign of a change in sensi- bilities since the 1950s. This late transfer is unique, as all the other instances of the transfer and memorialisation of victims’ ashes took place between 1945 and 1957. The dominant discourse in these post-war years regarding the transfer of ashes was one of substitution. These ashes were the remains, the only remains, of the dead. They represented the bodies that had not been buried. The temptation to renationalise the bodies of deportees felt by Resistance associations and states was offset by the symbolism of what were, essentially, religious or even private burials. The ashes taken from beside the crematoria, the earth surrounding them, were buried in Jewish cemeteries, in individual tombs. This constituted a measure of reparation, a religious act in spite of everything, albeit one that fell outside the accepted canons of Jewish or even Christian ritual – a desperate attempt to give normality and dignity back to bodies whose death had been taken from them so completely that even the simplest burial rites had been refused. The ashes were meant to function as a part symbolising the whole, standing for all those dead bodies that should have been repatriated and buried in the soil of their countries of origin. Looking beyond the internationalism that often presided over the ceremo- nies during which ashes were removed, it is possible to discern a renationalisation, and also a remilitarisation of these bodies; in certain ceremonies, the bodies of completely helpless detainees were given military honours; resistance members thus became soldiers, but so too did murdered Jews. These transfers of ashes answered a particular need in the aftermath of the war. Through them, a certain form of commemoration took place, a policy towards the dead which was part of a wider approach to the treatment of bodies from the Second World War in the face of a new phenomenon: the absence of a great number of these bodies. The exchanges of experiences between various political and ideological movements and between different religious groups – often opposed to one another – show the extent to which these transfers of ashes were polysemous, even if they all responded to the same needs.

Notes

1 A preliminary version of this chapter was presented at the biennial ‘Lessons and Legacies’ conference (no. XII) held in Chicago on 1 November 2012 during the panel jointly organised by the author and Élisabeth Anstett, entitled ‘Ashes and human remains during and after the Holocaust’.

32 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 2 On the fate of Alsatian Jews in the Holocaust, see J.-M. Dreyfus, ‘Elsass- Lothringen’, in W. Gruner & J. Osterloh (eds), Das ‘Grossdeutsche Reich’ und die Juden: Nationalsozialistische Verfolgung in den ‘angegliederten’ Gebieten (Frankfurt & New York, Campus Verlag, 2010), pp. 363–82. 3 I have not found evidence of any central, international decision taken by the executive organs of Jewish communities that called for the transfer of ashes with a view to memorialisation, and my initial hypothesis is that it was the result of an exchange of experiences and a process of mimetism between various actors with no central coordination. Future research, however, may well reveal the existence of an official recommendation within a federation of communities. The patchy nature of the archives – those belonging to social and cultural associations – have not always been kept well and makes it impossible to describe with any precision the processes behind these decisions. This work concerns a neglected aspect of the material culture of the aftermath of deportation and extermination and is unable to proclaim these ashes and human remains as a ‘lieu de mémoire’ as defined by Pierre Nora. Quite the opposite; it is striking how limited an impact these transfers have had on the memory and representations of this period. 4 The information on this monument is taken from R. S. Gordon,The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 41–3. 5 At Auschwitz, the first crematory oven was moved as early as 1945 from Birkenau to Auschwitz I, in order to be shown to the first visitors. See A. Wieviorka, Auschwitz, 60 Ans Après (Paris, Robert Laffont, 2005), p. 48. 6 For example, at Brandenburg, in the euthanasia centre for patients with mental problems used in the T4 programme, the ashes produced from the cremation of the corpses in two mobile crematoria were taken by wheelbarrow and dumped in the river Havel, which ran behind the building. See A. Ley, Die Euthanasie- Anstalt Brandenburg an der Havel: Morde an Kranken und Behinderten im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, Metropol Verlag, 2012), pp. 45–6. 7 Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, p. 43. 8 Ibid., pp. 116–18. 9 J. Rubenstein & V. P. Naumov (eds), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven & London, Washington D.C., Yale University Press, USHMM, 2001), p. 38. Here the authors quote from N. Levin, Jews in the Soviet Union Since 1917, vol. I (New York, New York University Press, 1988), pp. 421–2, who was in turn quoting an article from the Parisian Jewish newspaper Naye Presse written by Shimon Kipnis and published on 29 September 1979. 10 On the political significance of the mur des Fédérés (where hundreds of communards were shot and buried in a mass grave in 1871) and the post-war transformation of this Parisian site into a memorial to deported communists and members of the resistance, see D. Tartakowsky, Nous Irons Chanter sur vos Tombes: Le Père-Lachaise, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris, Aubier, 1999). 11 F. Azouvi, Le Mythe du Grand Silence: Auschwitz, les Français, la Mémoire (Paris, Fayard, 2012), p. 70. 12 Noted during a visit to Père Lachaise, 23 April 2012; see also Mairie de Paris,

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35 33

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Jean-Marc Dreyfus HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Père Lachaise Monuments à la Mémoire des Déporté(e)s Victimes des Camps de Concentration et d’Exterminations Nazis (Paris, Mairie de Paris, 2005). 13 On the major deportees’ federations and their confrontations during the Cold War, see P. Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 237ff. 14 On the panners of Treblinka, see J. Gross, with I. Grudzińska Gross, Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust (New York, Oxford University Press, 2012). 15 For a description of contemporary rituals and regulations concerning funerals and mourning (in Orthodox Judaism), see I. Klein, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (New York, The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1972), pp. 269–300. 16 Genesis 2:7 (King James Version). 17 Concerning these changes in France, see P. Hidiroglou, Rites Funéraires et Pratiques de Deuil Chez les Juifs en France, XIXe-XXe Siècles (Paris, Les belles lettres, 1999). These developments concerned the use of coffins – foreign to Jewish tradition, which sought to return to the body-as-dust to the earth – and the disappearance of exclusively Jewish cemeteries, which were turned into Jewish sections within municipal cemeteries. 18 A relatively small number of studies deal with what Susan Sontag called this ‘negative epiphany’. They include S. Bardgett & D. Cesarani (eds),Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2006); and O. Wormser- Migot, Quand les Alliés Ouvrirent les Portes: Le Dernier Acte de la Tragédie de la Déportation (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1965). 19 His account of this search for memory is given in P. Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 20 T. Snyder, ‘Holocaust: The Ignored Reality’, New York Review of Books, 56:12, 16 July 2009. 21 Interview with Anne Schuchman (Leibl Azen’s granddaughter), Paris, 22 July 2014; e-mail from Mme Jacqueline Schuchman (Leibl Azen’s daughter), 2 December 2014. 22 I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Anne and Jacqueline Schuchman for their testimony. 23 Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve, France, Y Internationale, no. 45, International Law, Law of War, December 1944 – April 1949, letter from Léon Meiss to M. Brousta, 27 May 1947. 24 Ibid., pièce 158. 25 A. Wieviorka, ‘1992: Réflexion sur une Commémoration’,Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 48:3 (1993), 703–14, 705–6. Annette Wieviorka bases her description of the ceremony on a brochure published by the Paris Consistory. The ashes from Auschwitz are not mentioned in her article. 26 On the ‘invention’ on the Unknown Soldier, see J. F. Jagielski, Le Soldat Inconnu: Invention et Postérité d’un Symbole (Paris, Imago, Ministère de la Défense, 2005); J.-Y. Le Naour, Le Soldat Inconnu: La Guerre, la Mort, la Mémoire (Paris, Gallimard, 2008).

34 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 The transfer of ashes after the Holocaust in Europe, 1945–60 HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 27 On the transfers of ashes to the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr, see S. Perego, Histoire, Justice, Mémoire: Le Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine et le Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu, 1956–1969, master’s dissertation supervised by Claire Andrieu, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2007, pp. 232–7. Simon Perego quotes the declaration that ‘the rabbinate is opposed to the project of the Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr’ (‘Le rabbinat s’oppose au projet du Tombeau du martyr juif inconnu’), copy of a communiqué published 29 June 1955 in Nouvelles Juives Mondiales, document dated 30 June 1955; see also here p. 233. 28 It should nevertheless be noted that traditional Jewish law, as set out in the Shulkhan Arukh, prescribes mourning rituals in the absence of a body. Observant Jews could thus refer to a tradition, but during my research I have not encountered any instances of these rituals being put into practice. This may be explained by the fact the majority of cases examined here concern new collective, community-centred or political rituals, and not private mourning rituals. 29 S. Barcellini, ‘Réflexions Autour de Deux Journées Nationales’,Bulletin Trimestriel de la Fondation d’Auschwitz, 38:9 (1993), 25–43, 29. 30 Attempts were even made to claim the proceeds from the uninherited property of murdered Jews back from Germany. These plans were not followed through. 31 See the report in the magazine of the religious Hatsofeh party from 7 June 1949. Quoted in D. Bar, ‘Holocaust Commemoration in Israel during the 1950s: The Holocaust Cellar on Mount Zion’, Jewish Social Studies, New Series, 12:1 (2005), 16–38, 17. 32 Ibid., 19–20. 33 R. Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: Ideology and Memory (London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), pp. 99–100. 34 Bar, ‘Holocaust Commemoration in Israel’, 20. 35 T. Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: L’homme qui Refusait d’Oublier (trans. K. Wechowski) (Paris, Liana Levi, 2010), pp. 7–13. 36 Bar, ‘Holocaust Commemoration in Israel’, pp. 29–30. The ‘Holocaust cellar’ gradually fell out of use after 1967, when access to the holy sites of the Old Town became possible once more. Commemorations were nevertheless held there until the end of the 1980s. 37 The painting is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. 38 For more on this subject, see a recent overview which extends its analysis through to the end of the twentieth century. P. Boutry, P.-A. Fabre & D. Julia (eds), Reliques Modernes: Cultes et Usages Chrétiens des Corps Saints des Réformes aux Révolutions (Paris, EHESS, 2009). 39 In particular, see P. Boutry, ‘Une Recharge Sacrale: Restauration des Reliques et Renouveau des Polémiques dans la France du XIXe Siècle’, in P. Boutry, P.-A. Fabre & D. Julia (eds), Reliques modernes: Cultes et Usages Chrétiens des Corps Saints des Réformes aux Révolutions (Paris, EHESS, 2009), pp. 121–73. 40 Visited by the author, 13 July 2014; Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation, p. 238. 41 Visited by the author 27 August 2013.

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 21–35 35

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:23:16 Powerful remains: the continuing presence of victims of the Khmer Rouge regime in today’s Cambodia HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Helen Jarvis Permanent People’s Tribunal, UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme [email protected]

Abstract The Khmer Rouge forbade the conduct of any funeral rites at the time of the death of the estimated two million people who perished during their rule (1975–79). Since then, however, memorials have been erected and commemorative cere­ monies performed, both public and private, especially at former execution sites, known widely as ‘the killing fields’. The physical remains themselves, as well as images of skulls and the haunting photographs of prisoners destined for execution, have come to serve as iconic representations of that tragic period in Cambodian history and have been deployed in contested interpretations of the regime and its overthrow.

Key words: Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, memorialisation, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, dark tourism

Introduction A photograph of a human skull, or of hundreds of skulls reverently arranged in a memorial, has become the iconic representation of Cambodia. Since the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime on 7 January 1979, book covers, film posters, tourist brochures, maps and sign boards, as well as numerous original works of art, have featured such images of the remains of its victims, often coupled with the haunting term ‘the killing fields’, as well as ‘mug shots’ of prisoners destined for execution. Early examples on book covers include the first edition of Ben Kiernan’s seminal work How Pol Pot Came to Power, published in 1985, on which the map of Cambodia morphs into the shape of a human skull and Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death, edited by Karl D. Jackson and published in 1989, which shows a black-and-white photograph of blindfolded skulls and bound bones laid on the edge of a grave. The trope continues in this century: in 2004, on the cover of Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal written by this author and Tom Fawthrop; and as recently as 2014 in Michelle Caswell’s Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia and on UNESCO’s web site for Memory of the World.1

36 Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 36–55 © Manchester University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.5 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE To reflect on how the remains of the Khmer Rouge’s victims have been treated and how they are viewed both by Cambodians and foreigners, I examine the offi­ cial/national/public narratives alongside sometimes quite different unofficial/local/ private narratives as they have developed over the past thirty-five years. For the purposes of this article, I have extended the term ‘remains’ beyond physical bones or ashes to include photographs and various artistic representa­ tions of those physical remains as well as the names of the victims, providing a wider frame through which to view and assess their power. Appearing on an almost daily basis, hauntingly ever-present, emotionally affective and deployed for various political, judicial or ethical purposes, these transportable/transmissible representa­ tions provide a vehicle for the remains to emit a continuing ‘presence’ well beyond memorial sites and graves.2

Contested interpretations The ineluctable link between the graves and the crimes that led to them gives rise to sharply differing attitudes towards the remains found therein and to polemical arguments about their treatment. Attitudes towards the graves reflect the polarised attitudes to the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia after 1979 – seen on the one hand as a force of national liberation from genocide conducted in solidarity with Cambodia, and on the other as an opportunistic invasion and occupation by an historic enemy-neighbour. The geopolitical underpinnings and the effects of these contested interpreta­ tions are the central theme of Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal written by British journalist Tom Fawthrop and myself, whose perspective has derived from research and observations in Cambodia since 1987, principally as Documentation Consultant for Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Program, member of the Secretariat of the Cambodian Government Task Force on the Khmer Rouge Trials, Chief of Public Affairs and Chief of the Victims Support Section of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC).

Cambodian funerary traditions A necessarily brief introduction to Cambodian funerary traditions may elucidate some aspects of this discussion. As my own research and experience in Cambodia on this issue have related mainly to the public narrative, I wish to acknowledge my reliance on important insights into private and traditional narratives by French anthropologist Anne Yvonne Guillou, drawing not only on her direct observations and interviews from 2006 but also those by the Cambodian historical anthropolo­ gist Ang Choulean and French scholars from earlier times.3 In the traditions of Khmers, Cambodia’s majority ethnic group, the bodies of deceased persons are nearly always cremated in a ceremony performed by Buddhist monks and lay preachers. The bone fragments remaining after the cre­ mation are normally collected by the family and placed inside an urn placed on an

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE altar inside a house or in a stupa (Buddhist shrine). The remaining ashes may be ceremonially scattered, usually in a river. Khmer customs and ceremonies surrounding death and funerals also include aspects of pre-Buddhist and animist traditions, including distinctions between treatment accorded the remains of those who have died ‘good’ or ‘bad’ deaths (such as through violence). The spirits of deceased persons who were not accorded proper rites may be considered ‘lost souls’ not yet reincarnated but condemned to wander the earth. Funeral ceremonies do not necessarily involve the physical pres­ ence of the dead, and specific rituals are followed in such cases, normally involving pronouncing the name of the deceased.4

The remains of the genocide During the three years, eight months and twenty days that the Khmer Rouge held power (17 April 1975 to 6 January 1979), it is estimated that around two million people perished, over one quarter of the total population. Some died from brutal torture or execution, others of starvation, overwork and untreated illness. The number of those who perished remains a matter of heated debate, with estimates range from 740,000 to 3,314,000. Recent studies seem to be converging in an esti­ mation of ‘between 1.5 to 2 million’.5 Whether or to what extent these deaths are correctly described as ‘genocide’, the term most widely used in Cambodia, is debated.6 But regardless of the legal, scholarly, political or sociological terminology, the legacy of this period still crip­ ples Cambodia.

Mass grave sites Despite the atomised state of society and paucity of resources in 1979 and the early 1980s, all over the country, mass graves were located and many remains exhumed. While villagers throughout the provinces gathered bones and skulls in makeshift shrines, the new Government conducted official exhumations to provide evidence of the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, especially for presentation to the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal held in Phnom Penh in August 1979 (see Forensic Analysis section below). The best known of these mass graves is Choeung Ek, on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, where it is believed more than 20,000 people, chiefly prisoners from the S-21 security centre known as Tuol Sleng, were killed. Both sites were curated as public memorials in 1979–1980.7 Initially, S-21 prisoners who died were buried in and around that complex, but the sheer number of bodies made this impractical to continue and, from 1977 Choeung Ek, a former Chinese cemetery, served as S-21’s execution and burial site. Some eighty-nine of the estimated 129 Choeung Ek mass graves from this period were excavated in mid-1980, and the remains of 8,985 victims were exhumed. At Tuol Sleng, several individual and mass graves were found and excavated in and around the prison in the early 1980s, and construction work even today exposes others.8

38 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Throughout the country during the early 1980s, many exhumations were under­ taken by village, district or provincial authorities or unofficially by local people – not only to provide evidence of the crimes and to retrieve and display the skulls in acts of commemoration of the deceased but also to find small precious items such as jewellery, money or gold, even gold teeth, that could help the finders rebuild their shattered lives.9 An extensive mapping project undertaken during the 1990s by the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) iden­ tified 19,471 mass graves, estimated to contain the remains of more than 1 million people.10 In recent years, efforts have been made to identify and rehabilitate mass graves and memorials in conjunction with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid Cambodian court with international assistance and participation, established in 2006 and still under way at the time of writing.11

Memorials Tuol Sleng Soon after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, the first official memorial, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, was established. In 1980, the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center followed, and these two memorials have been continually maintained and used for various memorial activities and exhibitions while also becoming primary tourist destinations, each receiving more than 200,000 foreign visitors annually. Tuol Sleng, a three-storey former high school built in the 1960s, known during the Khmer Rouge regime as S-21, was the apex of the prison system that pervaded the country. So quickly had the prison been abandoned by its fleeing staff that fourteen bloodied bodies were left shackled to iron bed frames, and thousands of documents, including forced ‘confessions’, lists and biographies of prisoners and staff, prison regulations and photographs of the prisoners were found – showing what had taken place there and providing information about victims that has helped many to discover the fates of their relatives and friends. A dramatic instance was when Civil Party Kim Vun found out that his wife had been held at S-21 and executed from a list shown during his testimony at the ECCC.12 The new Government quickly saw the role that S-21 could play in providing graphic evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes. A group of journalists from social­ ist countries were brought to the site on 25 January 1979 and, within weeks, Vietnamese experts were brought in to oversee the conversion of S-21 into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The work was led by General Mai Lam, the curator of what was then called the Museum of American War Crimes (now known as the War Remnants Museum) in Ho Chi Minh City. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was inaugurated on 17 April 1980 (the anniversary of the 1975 Khmer Rouge con­ quest of Phnom Penh), with Ung Pech, a survivor from S-21, appointed as the first director. The curation strategy was one of minimal intervention, resulting in a stark and confronting site, described by one contemporary observer as ‘a museum of

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE the Cambodian nightmare’ rather than a manicured museum.13 Undoubtedly, the curation was inspired by the approach followed in the Holocaust memorials established in former concentration camps in Eastern Europe, which Mai Lam and Ung Pech both visited. Some critics have charged that the display was fabricated to emulate ‘the sinister charisma of Auschwitz’,14 while others go further to cast doubt on the very authenticity of the prison itself.15 In response to such questioning, a considered comment was penned by David Chandler in 2013:

The Vietnamese organized S-21 into a museum, using the massive documentation that had survived at the site. Similarly, they turned Choeung Ek into a tourist desti­ nation after exhuming thousands of bodies there. In neither case did the Vietnamese invent an institution. Instead, the documents from the S-21 archive, the photographs of prisoners, the interviews that have been conducted with survivors and former workers at the prison and the overwhelming evidence presented at the ECCC trial of Duch [the director of S-21] all convince me that between mid- 1976 and January 7, 1979 S-21 was a completely Cambodian institution, serving the purposes of the terri­ fied and terrifying leaders of a terrified and terrifying Cambodian regime.16

Duch himself testified at the ECCC: ‘I know the real history. How could anyone say that S-21 was a Vietnamese invention?’17 Recent events illustrate the persistence of such denials as well as the continuing explosiveness of the remains of the Khmer Rouge victims. Recordings of a speech allegedly made by Kem Sokha, a leader of the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), on 18 May 2013, became an issue in that year’s national election campaign. It was reported that in one recording,

Mr. Sokha says: ‘The Vietnamese created this place with pictures [of the victims]. If this place is truly Khmer Rouge, they would have knocked it down before they left’ and in another: ‘Why would the Khmer Rouge be so stupid as to keep Tuol Sleng after killing many people, and keep it as a museum to show tourists? This is just staged. I believe it is staged, isn’t it?’18

Although Kem Sokha claimed that the recordings had been fabricated,19 Chum Mey, the president of the most prominent Khmer Rouge victims’ association (Ksaem Ksan, founded by Civil Parties in the ECCC) demanded an apology and organised demonstrations.20 The subsequent outcry resulted in the hurried adop­ tion by the National Assembly on 7 June 2013 of a law banning genocide denial.

‘Not recognizing the crimes constitutes an insult to the souls of those who died during the (Khmer Rouge) regime and brings suffering to the surviving family members of the victims,’ government lawmaker Cheam Yeap told the National Assembly, saying the law would help people recall their bitter history, bring justice for the victims and help prevent a repetition of the events.21

Four S-21 survivors, led by Chum Mey, sued Kem Sokha for defamation in the Phnom Penh Municipal Court. The Cambodia Daily quoted Chum Mey as saying:

40 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE The money is to be used to pay for a Buddhist ceremony to bless the spirits of those who died at the Khmer Rouge security center … We have suffered pain because we are the victims who were detained and tortured at Tuol Sleng during the Khmer Rouge … If Mr. Sokha had initially agreed with my plan to just light only three incense sticks to apologize in front of the souls of the victims at Tuol Sleng, then the defamation lawsuit wouldn’t have been brought against him.22

In Tuol Sleng, the iron bed frames to which ‘special’ prisoners were shackled are still in situ alongside photographs taken on the day of discovery, and some indi­ vidual cells have been left intact. Hundreds of photographs are displayed in former cell blocks that had once been classrooms, chiefly depicting mug shots as well as dead and tortured bodies and a few staff activities. These are alongside heaps of prisoner clothing, shackles and iron rods, instruments of torture and paintings and sculptures of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot produced by S-21 prisoners, includ­ ing paintings of the horrors that took place created by former prisoner Vann Nath after 1979.23 In 1987, a wooden stupa was built in one of the courtyards and used as the focal point for ceremonies until it collapsed in the early 2000s. In 2005 a memorial stele was erected in the same location for the same purpose,24 and in 2011 a proposal was made by Ksaem Ksan for construction of a new stupa. A simple but imposing design was floated (attributed to S-21 survivor Vann Nath, shortly before he died on 5 September 2011) of a stupa soaring to the top of the buildings, surrounded by circles of plaques inscribed with the names of all the prisoners of S-21.25 Reconstructing the stupa was approved in principle by the Royal Government of Cambodia, and funds were pledged by the German Government as part of the ECCC’s program of non-judicial measures designed to benefit victims. A memo­ randum of understanding between the ECCC and the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts was signed on 10 July 2014, and the new memorial was inaugurated on 26 March 2015 after consultation with various stakeholders on its design, size and location, and whether or not to inscribe victims’ names as part of the memorial (see Names of the Victims section below). The only explicit display of remains included in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum provoked passionate controversy. This was the ‘map of skulls’ – from at least 1980 until 2002 the final exhibit seen by visitors as they left the museum. It comprised 320 skulls forming the outline of Cambodia with major rivers and lakes painted in blood red.26 This finale left many visitors in high distress. Paradoxically, it more often provoked criticism of the museum for its lack of respect and sensitivity to both victims and survivors, rather than its intended effect of outrage at the killing and opposition to the continued recognition of the Khmer Rouge as the official rep­ resentatives of the Cambodian people by the United Nations. In October 1991, the Paris Peace Agreements were signed by the State of Cambodia and the three resistance factions, including the Khmer Rouge. Elections were held in May 1993 and a new constitution was adopted, establishing a constitutional monarchy and reinstating Norodom Sihanouk as King. The following year, the King requested the

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55 41

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Government to dismantle the map of skulls at Tuol Sleng and cremate the remains, arguing that this would honour the dead and allow their spirits to be reborn, in accordance with Cambodian Buddhist tradition.27 But after the Government acceded to his request the King abruptly announced it would be dropped, ‘in response to a plea from the Central Committee of the CPP [to] keep the bones as evidence of the genocidal regime’.28 In 2001, Prime Minister Hun Sen said he was willing to hold a national referendum on what to do with the skulls, but only after the conclusion of the trial of former Khmer Rouge senior leaders then being negotiated between the Cambodian Government and the United Nations. In any event, the map was dismantled in a Buddhist ceremony on 10 March 2002, officially announced as necessitated by the deteriorating condition of the skulls,29 which were later placed more reverently in a glass case in the same room with regular religious offerings made. It was replaced by a large colour pho­ tograph of the map that has not aroused the same opposition. Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is owned and managed by the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts through its Department of Museums. In 2008, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archives were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Asia-Pacific regional register and, in 2009, on the international register.30

Choeung Ek At the time the Choeung Ek mass grave site was opened as a memorial in 1980, the skulls and long bones of some of the 8,985 victims exhumed from eighty-nine of the 129 graves were placed on wooden shelves under cover of simple roofs. By the mid-1980s a number of sign boards had been erected giving details about the exhu­ mation as well as strong political messages and appeals against genocide. In 1988 a significant memorial stupa was constructed, designed by the Cambodian architect Lim Ourk displaying the thousands of skulls behind glass, as well as some long bones and clothes found in the graves. There is space for prayer and the placing of incense and flowers or wreaths, while one side faces a large field used for remembrance ceremonies.31 Memorials have also recently received renewed focus as accountability for the crimes has finally come on to the agenda. On 19 March 2000, as leader of a United Nations delegation negotiating the establishment of the ECCC, Hans Corell, the Under Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, laid a wreath in front of the remains houses in the Choeung Ek stupa, saying: ‘We have come here to remember … the atrocities that visited the people of this country in the ’70s. This must not be forgot­ ten … We can of course all ask ourselves where we were when all this happened. Our hope is that the United Nations today is different from what it was in those days.’32 A number of memorials were proposed as reparations to the ECCC Trial Chamber on 31 March 2014 by the Civil Party Lead Co-Lawyers and the Victims Support Section. While most are currently pending due to lack of funds, at least one memorial was specified in the Trial Chamber’s judgment of 7 August 2014: a modern sculpture by Cambodian-French artist Ing Séra entitled ‘For those who are no longer here’ to be placed in a public street in Phnom Penh. Further

42 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE ­memorials in various provinces are among future reparation projects currently under discussion.33

Local memorials The mapping project carried out in the 1990s by the Cambodia Genocide Program and DC-Cam identified seventy-seven memorials in various provinces.34 Most of these were simple wooden structures, resembling shrines or huts, in which several skulls were placed, while others were dedicated spaces in existing buildings such as former prisons.35 Many were already dilapidated, while others had entirely disappeared due to ravages of nature. The difficulty of maintaining so many memorials indefinitely was very real, as was anxiety about the wisdom of being seen to maintain them. Reportedly many memorials, as well as documents from Khmer Rouge prisons, became casualties of the complicated political situation surrounding the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements, as custodians of such evidence feared retaliation from the returning Khmer Rouge if identified.36 At the same time, Cambodia was undergoing a revival of Buddhist practices and a relaxation of official attitudes towards religion, culminating in the renewed designation in 1989 of Buddhism as Cambodia’s state religion. Many remains were moved from individual memori­ als close to graves onto the sanctified grounds of wats (Buddhist temples). The abandonment of local memorials sometimes coincided with the sale of state land on which memorials had been constructed, as part of Cambodia’s turn to a free- market economy.37 A compelling alternate reading of the physical deterioration of the local memo­ rials, by Rachel Hughes and Anne Guillou, is that they may be morphing into traditionally sacred places dedicated to neak ta (local land spirits), in which natural and human-made objects become one and are left to nature. In Guillou’s words:

Energy is believed to emanate from the places where powerful neak ta dwell. Such places are said to be ‘powerful’… and to be full of ‘energy’ … The same energy radi­ ates from some mass graves and killing fields … Alain Forest argues that the neak ta is a spirit which, for some reason, has not been transformed into the spirit of a dead person sent to the island of the dead, and therefore cannot be reborn. In this way, it is similar (but not identical) to those who have died a bad death.38

Hughes argues, ‘Given that some genocide memorial sites are also neak ta sites (or occur near to them), it is possible that there has been a transference to the local memorials of cultural understanding and practice that was once proper to neak ta worship’.39 Some neak ta were historical personages who died a ‘bad’ or violent death. Such a transformation may also be happening to the remains of Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, who died on 14 April 1998. His body was unceremoniously placed on a pile of discarded furniture and rubber tyres and set alight, and his ashes were placed in a rudimentary memorial shrine. Despite the widespread condemnation

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55 43

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE of the miseries Pol Pot wrought upon the Cambodian people, his grave attracts many visitors. In 2006 The King Father, Norodom Sihanouk observed in his char­ acteristically ironic style:

Pol Pot (who died quietly in his bed) has become, in his grave in Anlong Veng40, a ‘saint’. In front of this grave, his compatriots queue every day, lighting candles and incense sticks. Thus, the worshippers of Saint Pol Pot can win the lottery and other gambling games (in casinos or elsewhere). True.41

Forensic analysis The remains of Khmer Rouge victims at Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng have under­ gone several rounds of forensic analysis. At Choeung Ek, immediately after exhu­ mation in 1980, the skulls were reportedly cleaned and a chemical preservative was applied. In 1988–89 a team of forensic scientists from Ho Chi Minh University, led by Professor Quang Quyen, undertook an analysis commissioned by the Phnom Penh Municipality Department of Culture. The skulls were again coated with a preservative, and they were measured and classified by age, sex, ethnicity and, in some cases, cause of death.42 In 2002 a preliminary investigation for a forensic study project on skulls from Choeung Ek carried out in collaboration between the Coalition of International Justice and DC-Cam reported that the skulls demonstrated ‘blunt-force trauma, sharp-force trauma and gunshot wounds’.43 Although originally designed for public exhibition at Tuol Sleng, in deference to sensitivity about exhibiting remains, the skulls and pedestals are currently housed in a separate room at Tuol Sleng. According to the exhibit notes, ‘Spaces have been left between slats so that air can reach the skulls, thus allowing the spirits to come and go as they wish’.44 In 2006 a study of eighty-five skulls from the stupa at Choeung Ek was carried out by the United States Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and Cambodia; the report describes a pattern of systematic execution through blows to a specific area on the back of victims’ heads.45 In 2013 the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts launched a three-year project to preserve and prepare documentation on all the remaining Choeung Ek skulls.

Commemoration ceremonies Each year, commemoration ceremonies for the victims of the Khmer Rouge are twice held – one modern, fixed and public at designated memorials (20 May) and one traditional, somewhat movable and oriented to commemoration of one’s ancestors (Pchum Ben).

20 May On 18 August 1983 the National Assembly voted to establish 20 May as the date for formal, official commemorations of the victims and, when instituted in 1983,

44 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE this day was named T’veer Chong Kamhaeng – literally the ‘Day for Tying Anger’. While often translated into English as ‘Day of Hatred’, the Khmer words are more accurately rendered as ‘Day of Maintaining Rage’. The twentieth of May was com­ memorated throughout the 1980s and, after a hiatus following the Paris Peace Agreements, was revived in 1999, becoming the ‘Day of Paying Tribute to the Spirits of the Deceased’. In 2003 and 2004 it was termed the ‘Day of Victory over the Genocidal Regime’ before its current manifestation as the ‘Day of Remembrance’.46 In response to a request by the ECCC’s Co-Lead Lawyers for Civil Parties, in June 2013 a National Day of Remembrance was endorsed as reparation by the Trial Chamber.47 The Government informed the Court that it will designate 20 May as an annual official public holiday.48 Every year survivors and their descendants flock to Choeung Ek to attend solemn ceremonies, officially organised by the Phnom Penh Municipality and usually presided over by the Governor of Phnom Penh, while similar events are held in some other provincial capitals. At Choeung Ek the program features Buddhist prayers, short speeches, songs and a dramatic pageant re-enacting Khmer Rouge crimes and their overthrow by victorious Cambodian soldiers. Dignitaries, dressed in traditional mourning colours of black and white, remove their shoes and ascend the steps of the stupa to place incense and flower offerings to the spirits of the victims whose skulls are displayed on shelves, with the glass doors open.49 In spite of the recognition of Khmer Rouge crimes by all political parties and their asserted commitment to national reconciliation, the non-government parties have shown little interest in what they see less as a national day of mourning than an event promoting the ruling CPP and prefer to hold their own commemoration ceremonies on 17 April, the date on which Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.

Pchum Ben Pchum Ben is a fifteen-day festival in September to October during the lunar month of photrobot, the traditional period for mourning and making offerings to transfer merit to the dead, especially one’s own ancestors. Families visit different wats during Pchum Ben, often in far-flung parts of the country where their ances­ tors may have died. The ceremonies feature pre-dawn prayers and placing bay ben (rice balls) around the wat, stupas and graves. It is believed that the wandering spirits of those who suffered ‘bad’ deaths may be afraid to face the light of day, but can receive the offerings in the darkness. The traditional Pchum Ben ceremonies have heightened significance today. During the Khmer Rouge period, families were dispersed across the country, and bodies of those who died were discarded without ceremony. Most people lost rela­ tives and friends, but do not know where they died, and thus have never been able to perform proper funerals for them. Accordingly, people visit wats near where they suppose their relatives may have perished in hope of connecting with their spirits. These ceremonies are also performed at Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng.50 The Cambodian artist and art historian Ly Daravuth makes the following perceptive observations:

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55 45

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE The gathering (pchum) of all the bay ben on the last day is a symbolic act of reassem­ bling all that has been scattered – bodies and souls, family members and community – in order to reshape and reenergize the collective. In Pchum Ben, the act of remem­ bering those who have passed away is inclusive … It is the idea of death itself that is acknowledged, rather than the memory of any particular deceased person. Although people perform the Pchum Ben each year as a way to pay respect to the deceased, it is also a way for them to reaffirm the ethical relationships among the living. The act of gathering together (the act of pchum ben) helps to weave the threads of the social and cultural fabric.51

Beyond the bones: representations of the victims Names of the victims Inscription of the names of victims is a common feature of memorials around the world (except explicitly in memorials to the ‘unknown soldier’), and such naming is considered to restore to these victims some dignity and individual identity.52 But victims of genocide mostly remain unrecorded and unrecognised, due to their sheer number and the social disorder that necessarily accompanies such catas­ trophes. In Cambodia, among the 19,471 mass graves recorded, documentation enabling such identification survives only in execution lists at Tuol Sleng, and even there the names of all victims are not known. A concerted effort by the Office of the Co-Prosecutors of the ECCC to combine all the surviving lists and registers of prisoners at S-21, including those sent for execution at Choeung Ek, has resulted in 12,273 names53 – perhaps only two-thirds of those who endured that fate. Several documents, including some lists of prisoners from Kraing Ta Chan in Takeo, were also found and are being used as evidence in Case 002/02 being tried at the ECCC in 2015, while I was informed in 1992 that similar documents from the main Siem Reap prison had been recently destroyed, around the time of the Paris Peace Agreements. It would not be too surprising if more lists are eventually located, whether now held in personal or official hands in Cambodia or elsewhere. In 1995 the Cambodian Genocide Program posted the mug shots from Tuol Sleng on the Internet, giving names and other information where known and appealing to the public to provide them for anyone who was recognised from the photo.54 DC-Cam has two projects that relate specifically to the collection of names of victims. Its Family Tracing Project has led on to the more recent Book of Memory project, aiming to collect names of victims and publish them in volumes, each with twenty thousand names.55 In 2009, when I was head of the Victims Support Section of the ECCC, I pro­ posed the establishment of a Victims Register. Dr Gregory Stanton was commis­ sioned to prepare an options paper, which highly recommended such a register and exploration of the various options (whose names would be included, who would be responsible for the register, where it would be located). One idea was to house copies in local wats (where they might be known as Kraing Meas or Golden Books), linking the project to Pchum Ben ceremonies.56 Unfortunately, funding for this proposed project has not yet eventuated.

46 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Despite the general long-standing intention to inscribe the names on the pro­ posed new stupa at Tuol Sleng, consistent with the common worldwide practice of recording victims’ names on memorials, as well as the Cambodian practice of uttering names of the deceased to represent them in funeral ceremonies, a public controversy recently erupted on the issue. In May 2014, S-21 survivor and President of Ksaem Ksan, Chum Mey, expressed new-found opposition:

Initially he agreed with the inscription … But after reflection and consultation with the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), he came to oppose the idea, believing that relatives of victims might be upset reading the names of Khmer Rouge cadres along with their family members. His own wife and children were killed.

But Bou Meng, the deputy president of the Victims Association of Democratic Kampuchea, said he would regret if the names were not inscribed: ‘I feel disap­ pointed because they just eliminate the names of the victims’.57 At a stakeholders’ meeting on 23 January 2015, following extensive consultation with Civil Parties by the ECCC’s Victims Support Section, and with the explicit support of both Bou Meng and Chum Mey, it was finally decided that the names of all prisoners known to have died to Tuol Sleng be inscribed at Choeung Ek or the Prey Sa prison farm known as S-24 on marble plaques surrounding the stupa at Tuol Sleng’s new memorial.

Photographs of the victims The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum archive contains photographs of more than 5,000 men, women and children – around one-third of the total number of prison­ ers incarcerated there and only a handful of whom survived the ordeal. Prisoners were routinely photographed on arrival. Additional photographs were taken of prisoners following death from torture, to prove that they had been ‘smashed’ (in Khmer Rouge terminology), and a small subset of photographs record staff and their other activities.58 Several hundred have been enlarged to A4 size or larger and mounted on display boards in eight former classrooms. The images of the victims arrest the gaze of all visitors and provide the main subject for almost all their reactions and descriptions of Tuol Sleng in social media, journalistic and research accounts alike. Not infrequently, a Cambodian visitor finds among them the face of a long-lost family member or friend. In such cases the staff of the museum will attempt to find out if there is further information, such as the date of their arrest or execution and their forced ‘confessions’, and will make a copy of the image for them to take away. Sometimes these photographs are used as surrogates for the physical body of the deceased in funerary rites. Michele Caswell observes, ‘The mug shots, once used as instruments to stream­ line mass murder, have now come to embody the dead and serve as tools to honor them for the living’.59

Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55 47

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Conclusion: dark or dutiful? The physical remains of victims of the Khmer Rouge period, together with lists of their names and photographs, have provided critical evidence in the two main trials of Khmer Rouge crimes – the August 1979 People’s Revolutionary Tribunal (PRT) and the ongoing ECCC. In the PRT, held within months of the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, field investigations conducted at seven grave sites in four provinces (Siem Reap, Kampong Cham, Kampong Speu and Kandal) as well as in Phnom Penh provided evidence.60 The ECCC’s Co-Prosecutors and the Co-Investigating Judges have examined a number of mass grave sites. The written reports and photographs of the graves, as well as the remains and the names and photographs of the victims, are crucial evidence for the Co-Prosecutors and provide support for the testimony of the Civil Parties.61 In his trial, Duch frequently tried to deny that certain persons were imprisoned, tortured or executed at S-21 but, when confronted with documentary evidence such as lists of names or photographs, he immediately conceded that the account must be true. If such ‘proof’ was not provided he continued his denial. For Duch, the paper traces are the only true records.62 The mug shots from S-21 and the skulls from the mass graves have become ubiquitous icons, consistently attracting attention and providing the strongest and most enduring images of the Khmer Rouge regime and forming the basis for for­ eigners’ and new generations of Cambodians’ understanding. While Michelle Caswell says that some appear to be drawn to Cambodia pre­ cisely because of its reputation for what is known as ‘dark’ or ‘thano’ tourism, ‘offering up a slice of the extreme for consumption’, she goes on to say, ‘[t]he majority I observed behaved with reverence, quiet reflection, an explicit desire to know more about the Khmer Rouge, and bewilderment at the lack of interpretive information available at the site’.63 This echoes observations made a decade earlier by Rachel Hughes, including of visitors’ books from 1979–82, when she identified ‘the dutiful tourist’.64 In very few sites is there sufficient information provided to permit an under­ standing of the political and historical context, often leaving visitors distressed, horrified and perplexed. Recently some moves have been made to rectify this lack of interpretation. Since 2012 an audio tour in fifteen languages has been offered at Choeung Ek, providing more than one hour of narration, interviews, song and music, while at Tuol Sleng an audio tour is scheduled to be introduced in 2015.65 Hughes has noted the paradox of a memorial site being on the one hand ‘a place that illuminates universal humanitarian concerns’, exemplified by foreign and United Nations delegations laying wreaths, while on the other hand symbolising ‘a specific … “uncivilised” and even “unspeakable” – horror’.66 Some presentations and exhibitions of the photographs from Tuol Sleng have been criticised for just such morbid ‘thano’ fascination. The US photographers Chris Riley and David Niven, who made a valuable contribution to the preserva­ tion of the negatives in the early 1990s, went on to reproduce a number of the images in blown-up art-format prints, exhibiting them in art galleries around the

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1997, with little or no context, and publishing seventy-eight of them in a glossy coffee table book by the art publishers Twin Palms.67 Inside Cambodia, over the past fifteen years, the images from Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek have persistently formed the focus of artistic efforts to recall and memorialise the victims, but also to interrogate and even challenge the notion of victimhood, as in Ly Daravuth’s questioning work Messengers from the 2000 show The Legacy of Absence: a Cambodian Story at Reyum in Phnom Penh. Even as I was writing this article, I came across several very recent works by Cambodian artists interpreting those Tuol Sleng images – a sharp, modern black- and-white graphic displayed in the foyer of the circus tent of Phare Ponleu Selapak; a soft reworking of the often reproduced haunting photograph of Chan Kim Srun holding her newborn baby, which the artist Theam has reverentially placed together with a meditating Buddha image in his private gallery, both in Siem Reap; and in Phnom Penh a collage and hand-coloured stamp on paper by Chath PierSath and a whole exhibition by Em Riem at Chinese House.68 Em Riem explains: ‘In the peace of mind of my workshop, these faces do not haunt me; I just collect their suffering with love. I tell them: “You can see well that you are not forgotten!” I also tell them: “Each of you appears in the plenitude of your dignity. The numbers that were inflicted on you to deprive you of your human identity now serve to exalt it.’69 The remains of victims of the Khmer Rouge are a constant presence in Cambodia – as a focus for commemoration and memorialisation; as evidence of the crimes; inspiring artistic works in many different genres; and as instant symbols of the genocide. Their treatment continues to be highly controversial, as discussed in many episodes above, revealing their continuing potency even more than thirty- five years after the victims died.

Notes

1 B. Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power (London, Verso, 1985); K. D. Jackson (ed.), Cambodia 1975–1978: Rendezvous with Death (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989); T. Fawthrop & H. Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide? Elusive Justice and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (London, Pluto, 2004); M. Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2014); and UNESCO’s web site for Memory of the World. URL: www.unesco.org/new/en/communication- and-information/flagship-project-activities/memory-of-the-world/register/ full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-8/tuol-sleng-genocide- museum-archives/#c188357 (accessed 21 March 2015). 2 As argued by Caswell in Archiving the Unspeakable. 3 See especially Anne Y. Guillou, ‘An Alternative Memory of the Khmer Rouge Genocide: The Dead of the Mass Graves and the Land Guardian Spirits (neak ta)’, South East Asia Research, 20:2 (2012), 207–26. 4 Ibid., 216–18. 5 740,000 asserted in M. Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1992 (Boston, South End,

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 1984), p. 18; the Research Committee of the Salvation Front in 1983 claimed 3.314 million and this figure is still used by the Cambodian government; for estimates around 1.7 million see B. Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996), p. 458; M. Sliwinski, Le Genocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (Paris, L’Harmattan, 1995), p. 57; P. Heuveline, ‘Between One and Three Million’: Towards the Demographic Reconstruction of a Decade of Cambodian History (1970–79), Population Studies, 52:1 (1998), 49–65, 56. 6 For a summary of the arguments see H. Jarvis, ‘Cambodian Genocide Overview’, Modern Genocide: Understanding Causes and Consequences, ABC-CLIO, 2014. URL: http://moderngenocide.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/3 (accessed 26 March 2015). 7 R. Hughes, ‘Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials’, in S. Cook (ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (New Haven, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 2004), pp. 269–92; R. Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide: Post-1979 Cambodia and the Geopolitics of Memory’, PhD dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2006. 8 On 2 June 2000 a grave of eight people was unexpectedly unearthed about two blocks away from the main prison buildings at Tuol Sleng. See H. Jarvis, ‘Mapping Cambodia’s “Killing Fields”’, in J. Schofield, W. G. Johnson & C. M. Beck (eds), Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of 20th Century Conflict (London & New York, Routledge, 2002), pp. 91–102, 99; and in September 2014 another body was found inside the perimeter fence. 9 Hughes, ‘Memory and Sovereignty’, Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’; Guillou, ‘Alternative Memory’. 10 Pheng Pong Racy, Phat Kosal, Chhang Youk, Sin Khin & Ouch Sam-Oeun, Mapping the Killing Fields of Cambodia 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, Phnom Penh, Documentation Center of Cambodia, 26 May 2003. The author was closely involved in initiating this mapping program within the framework of the Cambodian Genocide Program, securing partial funding from the Australian Government and designing and implementing the Cambodian Geographic Database in which to record its results. For more detail see Jarvis, ‘Mapping Cambodia’s “Killing Fields”’, pp. 91–102. 11 See the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)’s web site. URL: www.eccc.gov.kh; and Fawthrop and Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?; for a discussion of victim participation in the ECCC, including the issue of reparations, see H. Jarvis, ‘Justice for the Deceased: Victims’ Participation in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 8:2 (2002), 19–28. 12 J. Freeman, ‘Khmer Rouge Court Witness Learns of Wife’s Fate’, Phnom Penh Post, 23 August 2012, p. 1. 13 D. Hawk, ‘Cambodia: A Report from Phnom Penh’, New Republic, 15 November 1981, cited in D. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Chiang Mai, Silkworm Books, 2000), p. 5. 14 S. Thion, Watching Cambodia: Ten Paths to Enter the Cambodian Tangle (Bangkok, White Lotus, 1993), p. 181. ‘In the West, the paradigm of genocide is

50 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 36–55

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE still very much centred on Auschwitz. So true is this that, in an effort to attract part of the sinister charm of Auschwitz, the masters of the new Cambodian regime, in early 1979, commissioned some Vietnamese experts trained in Poland, to refurbish the interrogation centre called Tuol Sleng’. In the same book (p. xix) Thion states that ‘a conscious attempt was made to introduce images drawn from the German concentration camps, like the mountain of clothing seen in so many 1945 pictures. Later, some of this reconstructed evidence … was removed’. 15 ‘In 1997, when questioned by the journalist Nate Thayer, Pol Pot denied any knowledge of “Tuol Sleng”: “I want to tell you – Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition. A journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng … When I first heard about Tuol Sleng it was on the Voice of America.” Extract taken from Chandler, Voices from S-21, p. 8, citing N. Thayer, ‘Day of Reckoning’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 13 May 1999. During the Khmer Rouge regime, the prison was known by its code name S-21, not Tuol Sleng. 16 D. Chandler, ‘The Effort to Invent S-21 Would Have Been Far Too Costly for the Vietnamese’, Searching for the Truth, Magazine of Documentation Center of Cambodia, (Special English Edition, Second Quarter 2013), p. 46. 17 T. Cruvellier, The Master of Confessions: The Making of a Khmer Rouge Torturer (New York, HarperCollins, 2014), p. 210. 18 Eang Mengleng & Zsombor. Peter, ‘Kem Sokha Says S-21 was Vietnamese Conspiracy’, Cambodia Daily, 27 May 2013. URL: www.cambodiadaily.com/ archives/kem-sokha-says-s-21-was-vietnamese-conspiracy (accessed 23 March 2015). 19 Chhorn Chansy & Zsombor. Peter, ‘CNRP Accuses Government of Misrepresenting Comments’, Cambodia Daily, 30 May 2013. URL: www. cambodiadaily.com/archives/cnrp-accuses-government-of- misrepresenting- comment (accessed 23 March 2015). 20 This resulted in a public schism between S-21 survivors Chum Mey and Bou Meng, who had both previously worked closely together in the establishment of Ksaem Ksan (Victims Association of Democratic Kampuchea). See Meas Sokchea, ‘Bou Meng distances victims from scandal’, Phnom Penh Post, 4 June 2013. URL: www.phnompenhpost.com/national/bou-meng-distances-victims-scandal (accessed 21 March 2015). 21 Sopheng Cheang, ‘Cambodia passes bill against genocide denial’, Associated Press, in Northwest Asian Weekly, 15 June – 21 June, 2013, pp. 5, 15. URL: issuu.com/ nwasianweekly/docs/layout25/15 (accessed 23 March 2015). 22 Kuch Naren, ‘S-21 Survivor Sues Kem Sokha for Defamation’, Cambodia Daily, 15 June 2013. URL: www.cambodiadaily.com/elections/s-21-survivor-sues-kem- sokha-for-defamation-31066/ (accessed 12 March 2015). 23 See Vann Nath, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 (Bangkok, White Lotus, 1998). 24 Dates provided by Chhay Visoth, Director of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, private email to the author, 28 July 2014. 25 ‘Proposal by the Ksaem Ksan Victims Association for the Construction of an S-21 Victims Memorial at the Tuol Sleng Museum’ (undated but recorded by the ECCC

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE as Document F25.1, English translation placed on the Case File on 1 April 2011). 26 W. Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience (Glasgow, Fontana, 1985), p. 44; the number of skulls provided by Chhay Visoth, Director of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in email correspondence, 28 July 2014. 27 G. Peters, ‘Restoration Project Immortalizes Haunting Images of S-21’, Cambodia Daily, 12 October 1994, p. 16, cited in Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’, 143. 28 Agence Khmer de Presse, 19 January 1995, p. 2, cited in Hughes ‘Fielding Genocide’, 148. 29 Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’, 149–50. 30 See UNESCO’s web site for Memory of the World. The author was involved in preparing the nomination dossier for the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archive. 31 The Choeung Ek Genocidal Center is under the Municipality of Phnom Penh, although management of the site was contracted to a private company in 2005. Some sharp public opposition was expressed at the time. See Hughes, ‘Memory and Sovereignty’, p. 274; since then the site has been considerably improved, including a small museum and film screening room, an interpretive audio tour, rest areas and toilet facilities. 32 K. McEvers & P. Sisovann, ‘UN Delegation Lays Wreath at Killing Fields’, Cambodia Daily, 20 March 2000.URL: www.cambodiadaily.com/archives/ un%E2%80%88delegation-lays-wreath-at-killing-fields-15801/ (accessed 23 March 2015). 33 ECCC Press Release, ‘Wide Ranging Support Secured for the Reparations for Victims of the Khmer Rouge’, issued 21 April 2014 with Annex ‘Overview of Civil Party Reparation Requests in Case 002/01’, 4 April 2014; and ECCC Trial Chamber, Case 002/01 Judgment, 7 August 2014, E313. Séra’s original design depicted figures with severed heads and limbs, but he has subsequently modified it in response to criticisms that such treatment would cause further affront to the victims. 34 Racy et al., Mapping the Killing Fields. 35 Fawthrop & Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, pp. 72–3; Hughes, ‘Memory and Sovereignty’, p. 277. 36 As reported to the author by local informants interviewed during the mapping project. 37 Guillou, ‘Alternative Memory’, 214. 38 Ibid., 221–2, based on her own research in Pursat, acknowledging the work of Eveline Porée-Maspero, Ang Choulean, Alain Forest and Francois Bizot. 39 Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’, p. 124. 40 Anlong Veng, a town in in northwest Cambodia, was the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. 41 N. Sihanouk, ‘Les Ames Errantes des Victimes des Khmers Rouges Polpotiens’, Bulletin Mensuel de Documentation, 25 July 2006, cited in Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’, 224. 42 Interview of Quang Quyen by Tom Fawthrop at Choeung Ek Genocide Memorial

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Site, December 1988, cited in Fawthrop & Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 113. 43 M. Klinkner, ‘Forensic Science for Cambodian Justice’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2 (2008), 227–43, 234. 44 Website: Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), URL: www.d.dccam. org/Projects/Forensic_Study/Forensics_Exhibition.htm (accessed 23 March 2015). 45 Klinkner, ‘Forensic Science’, 234. 46 Fawthrop & Jarvis, Getting Away with Genocide?, p. 74; For an overview of the origin and development of this anniversary see R. Hughes, ‘Remembering May 20 – Day of Anger’, Searching for the Truth, magazine of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, 12 December 2000, pp. 39–42. 47 ‘Overview of Civil Party Reparation Requests in Case 002/01’. 48 Letter from Hing Thoraxy, Secretary of State of the Office of the Council of Ministers to the Lead Co-Lawyers, 11 June 2013. 49 As witnessed on a number of occasions by the author and reported by Seth Mydans, ‘Choeung Ek Journal – A Word to the Dead: We’ve Put the Past to Rest’, New York Times (International), 21 May 1999, A4. 50 Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’, 114–16; Guillou reports that the Pchum Ben festival was not re-established after the Khmer Rouge period until the early 1990s. See ‘Alternative Memory’, 218. 51 L. Daravuth, ‘Notes on Pchum Ben: A Working Paper of Recasting Reconciliation through Culture and the Arts’, Brandeis University, 2005. URL: www.brandeis. edu/ethics/pdfs/Pchum_Ben.pdf (accessed 23 March 2015). 52 Indeed, the names themselves form the central focus of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, DC, designed by Maya Lin, URL: http://thewall- usa.com/ (accessed 23 March 2015) and of the ‘Naming Memorial’ closing event of The Vienna Project, directed by Karen Frostig held on 18 October 2014. URL: www.theviennaproject.org (accessed 10 March 2015). 53 ECCC Trial Chamber, Case of Kaing Guek Eav 001, 18-07-2007, ‘Revised S-21 Prisoner List’, E68.1, 19 May 2009. 54 See H. Jarvis, in collaboration with N. Cross, ‘Documenting the Cambodian Genocide on Multimedia’, Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar Series, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1 October 1998. URL: www.yale.edu/cgp/ publish/documenting.html (accessed 23 March 2015). 55 DC-Cam Work Plan 2013–2014. URL: www.d.dccam.org/Abouts/Annual/pdf/ DC-Cam_2013-2014_Work_Plan.pdf (accessed 23 March 2015). 56 Gregory H. Stanton ‘Creation of a Victims Register’ (Phnom Penh, Victims Support Section of the ECCC, 2010). See URL: www.genocidewatch.org in ‘About Us’ section under ‘By Dr. Gregory Stanton’ (accessed 23 March 2015). 57 P. McPherson, ‘Memorial Plan Prompts Debate about Victims and Perpetrators of Genocide’, Phnom Penh Post, 9 May 2014; See also K. Naren, ‘Survivor against Inscribing Names of All S-21 Victims’, Cambodia Daily, 7 May 2014. As alluded to in the quotation from Chum Mey, the majority of victims at Tuol Sleng were themselves Khmer Rouge cadres who had been purged. However, it would be

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Helen Jarvis HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE virtually impossible to determine exactly who among them were responsible for killing people or for committing other crimes, and, furthermore, even whether such perpetrators had themselves become victims of incarceration and subsequent execution. Other reasons given to oppose the inscription of names included that this is not part of Cambodian tradition and that it would be unfair to other victims whose names are not known or similarly recognised. 58 Chandler, Voices from S-21; and Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, especially Chapter 1 ‘The Making of Records’. 59 Ibid., p. 121. 60 H. J. De Nike, J. Quigley & K. J. Robinson (eds), with H. Jarvis & N. Cross, Genocide in Cambodia: the Documents of the Trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 61 The ECCC uses civil law procedure that permits victims to apply for recognition as Civil Parties in a criminal trial, giving them full rights to legal reparation, testimony and to seek reparation. For more details on victim participation in the ECCC, see H. Jarvis, ’Justice for the Deceased: Victims’ Participation in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, 8:2 (2013), 19–27. 62 See the ‘transcripts’ of the ECCC Trial Chamber hearings in Case 001. URL: http:// www.eccc.gov.kh/en/case/topic/1 (accessed 23 March 2015); and video recordings of each session; See also URL: www.cambodiatribunal.org/multimedia/case-002- trial-footage/ (accessed 19 March 2015), the web site of the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor, and as described dramatically at several places in Cruvellier, Master. 63 Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, p. 146; the term ‘thanotourism’ seems to have been first used by A. V. Seaton in 1996, ‘From Thanotopsis to Thanotourism’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2:4 (1996), 234–44. 64 R. Hughes, ‘Dutiful Tourism: Encountering the Cambodian Genocide’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49:3 (2008), 318–30. 65 The author has participated as a consultant in the development of content for these two audio tours by Narrowcasters. 66 Hughes, ‘Fielding Genocide’, 117–18, 151–61. 67 Ibid., 196–214; Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, pp. 71–7; C. Riley & D. Niven, The Killing Fields (Santa Fe, Twin Palms, 1996), which sold for $200 a copy. Particular criticism focused on the fact that Riley and Niven claimed copyright for the images and reportedly sold a number of prints to US museums. 68 Ben Thynal, ‘Time’, 2014. Website: Angkor Art Explo, URL: angkorart.weebly. com/cambodian-artists.html (accessed 23 March 2015); Lim Muy Theam, ‘Mother and Child’, 2014. URL: theamshouse.com/the_story (accessed 23 March 2015); Chath PierSath, ‘A Page of an Art Book’, collage and hand-coloured stamp on paper, 2013, reproduced on the cover of T. De Langis, J. Strasser, T. Kim & S. Taing, Like Ghost Changes Body: A Study on the Impact of Forced Marriage on Victims of the Khmer Rouge Regime (Phnom Penh, Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation, 2014); and Em Riem, ‘Glorious Numbers’ exhibition, reported by Aria Danaparamita, ‘On Burlap, Em Riem Paints the Tormented Faces of Tuol Sleng’, Cambodia Daily, 20 November 2014. On the opening night young

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Powerful remains HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Cambodians were seen taking ‘selfie’ photos of themselves standing in front of the paintings. 69 Notes on Em Riem’s ‘Glorieux Numeros’ exhibition translated from French by the author.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:18 Mobilising the dead? The place of bones and corpses in the commemoration of the Tutsi HUMAN genocide in Rwanda REMAINS & VIOLENCE Rémi Korman EHESS [email protected]

Abstract1 Representations of Rwanda have been shaped by the display of bodies and bones at Tutsi genocide memorial sites. This phenomenon is most often only studied from the perspective of moral dimensions. This article aims in contrast to cover the issues related to the treatment of human remains in Rwanda for commemorative purposes from a historical perspective. To this end, it is based on the archives of the commissions in charge of genocide memory in Rwanda, as well as interviews with key memorial actors. This study shows the evolution of memorial practices since 1994 and the hypermateriality of bodies in their use as symbols, as well as their demobilisation for the purposes of reconciliation policies.

Key words: commemoration, human remains, memorial policy, Rwanda, symbol of memory

For the Government of National Unity, established on 19 July 1994, the memory of the Tutsi genocide was far from a priority. Confronted with considerable political challenges, it struggled for recognition and military survival at the international level. These challenges included issues over its prison population (of such great magnitude that the situation proved impossible to manage);2 the question of the millions of refugees inside and outside the country; and the return of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis who had been in exile since the beginning of the 1960s.3 Because of the genocide, but also because of its partly exiled population, there was a shortage of everything – administrators, parties, associations and religious officials – in post-genocide Rwanda. The Front patriotique rwandais (Rwandan Patriotic Front; FPR) continued to be the only organised institution, along with the Catholic Church. Despite all these difficulties, the Rwandan State organised com- memorative ceremonies at the national level as early as 1994. Although many commemorations were initiated after Rwandan independence in 1962, these rarely mobilised the dead, with the exception of two state funerals held in 1986 in honour of the former bishop of Nyundo, Aloys Bigirumwami, and the first president of the republic, Dominique Mbonyumutwa.4 Similarly, before

56 Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 56–70 © Manchester University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.6 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 1994 Rwanda did not have any monumental tradition and tangible heritage was mostly colonial or religious. The display of human corpses and remains at genocide memorial sites, and during commemorations, therefore represents a twofold break which has itself been the subject of many publications. These works for the most part present an analysis of the moral dimension of these phenomena.5 In contrast, this article aims to present the place of and the issues related to the handling of human remains in Rwanda from a historical and non-normative point of view. Its goal is, in particu- lar, to recall the role of bodies and their mourning in commemorative practices, as well as the evolution of these practices over the past twenty years.6 What meaning has therefore been given by Rwanda’s new leaders to these prac- tices of exhibiting and preserving bodies? In the definition of this new memory project, what relationships were established between the State and other actors, such as the Catholic Church or the survivors? Was the Rwandan Government ultimately inspired by traditional cultural practices, and did it develop a unique memory model or instead borrow from others? Above all, how can the evolution of the place accorded to human remains in the commemoration of the genocide between 1994 and 2014 be explained?

Commemoration through bodies The burial of victims of the genocide On 13 November 1994 – that is, four months after the end of the genocide – an important official ceremony took place at Muyumbu, a commune of Bicumbi in the Kigali prefecture.7 The event was not so much a commemoration of the war or of the genocide, but an official burial of the victims’ bodies from this geographic area. This ceremony was carried out as part of the programme of emergency dignified burial that was managed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (Minitraso). Although in the first months after the genocide there were corpses strewn across the country, many victims remained untraceable. The search for their bodies involved both the survivors of genocide and Tutsi refugees from 1959 and 1973 who returned to the country in order to find out what had happened to their loved ones.8 However, it proved difficult to find information on the location of mass graves; perpetrator testimonies were scarce after the genocide. In the event corpses were found, and positively identified, families tried to organise traditional funeral rites,9 and the dates of funerals were broadcast on the radio. Friends were invited to a vigil and to the burial, which would most often be accompanied by a religious ceremony. Individual funerals organised after 1994, which are not well known or documented, amounted to a large number of micro- and local-level commemorations of the genocide. Remains were buried on family plots, as tradi- tion dictated.10 This signified respect for the victims, but was also a way of reap- propriating locations that had been desecrated by the killers. As a result, a new expression appeared after the genocide: ‘dignified burial’ (gushyingura mu cyubahiro). The notion of dignity is linked to the concept of the victims’ ‘malicious death’. Both ‘malicious death’ (urupfu rubi) or ‘dying mali-

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE ciously’ (gupfa nabi) implicitly refer to the cruelty applied to the bodies of the victims during the genocide.11 A new funerary ritual therefore appeared alongside this process of dignified burial. The search for bodies and their consequent exhumation (gutaburura) were its first steps. Wherever possible, the survivors then tried to collect body parts (gushyira hamwe umubiri). However, this was often impossible due to the bones being mixed together. The remains of the victims’ bones were then washed and cleaned, leaving those that were still made up of flesh and naturally preserved in graves. This process was rooted in the way the body is cared for in traditional funeral rites. Accordingly, ‘the act of cleaning (gukarabya) replaced ordinary rites vis-à-vis the body, such as posing (gupfunya), embalming (gusiga) or clothing the body (kwambika)’.12 In practice, these individual and family funerals became very difficult after the genocide for logistical reasons.13 The State itself lacked funds at that time. The program of dignified burial, led by the Minitraso’s employee Silas Sinyigaya, was only possible from October 1994 because of international financial assistance. The leaders of UNICEF decided to grant 150,000 dollars to the burial programme after repeatedly observing children playing soccer with skulls,14 and the World Health Organisation (WHO) contributed to the purchase of a car. Many genocide sites were visited with this vehicle, which helped to establish a ‘methodology for mass burial of the genocide victims’. The methods for collective funeral arrangements varied by location. In some places bodies were placed in coffins, whereas in others they were simply placed at the bottom of graves whose bottom was itself covered in the multipurpose tarpau- lins that were widespread in Rwanda after the genocide. Some of these ceremonies, such as those for the communes of Mugina and Ntongwe in 1994, were organised at the national level.15 When the state could not take a role, exhumation and reburial ceremonies were undertaken by the survivors themselves, aided in some places by the Catholic Church. In Butare, a group of religious and lay people brought together through the Commission de relance des activités pastorales (Commission for Relaunching Pastoral Activities) paid particu- lar attention to these mourning ceremonies.16 Finally, the first dignified-burial program ended in early 1996, at the same time as the ceased funding from UNICEF and the WHO. It was then taken up by the Commission mémorial du génocide et des massacres (Genocide and Massacres Memorial Commission). This was the first memorial institution for the genocide; it was established in October 1995. Following this first dignified burial program, the Minitraso was called on to organise the first official commemoration of the genocide in April 1995.17 The ceremony at the Rebero-l’Horizon site respected the spirit of national unity, based on power sharing between Tutsis and Hutus. The term ‘genocide and massacres’ (Itsembabwoko n’itsembatsemba) that became established during this period indi- cates the equal emphasis given, for political reasons, to the genocide committed against the Tutsis and to the Hutu massacres, the two being considered as insepa- rable.18 The first Hutu Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was murdered

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE on 7 April 1994 by the presidential guard, was buried alongside an anonymous victim of the genocide committed against the Tutsis. The burial of victims therefore constituted a key moment of the first commemo- ration. Large graves were dug beforehand at the Rebero site, awaiting the coffins of anonymous victims exhumed from the graves around the Centre Hospitalier de Kigali (CHK), as well as the politicians assassinated in 1994. Despite the presence of republican symbolism, the first commemoration primarily followed a religious protocol. Four masses were held during the ceremony. Catholic hymns punctuated the commemoration, and political speeches played only a relatively limited role. Indeed, this first commemoration was centred around the burial of bodies.

The display practices of human remains The Genocide and Massacres Memorial Commission (or simply the Memorial Commission) was created in October 1995. Originally an interministerial body, it aimed to identify the main mass graves across the country in order to provide dig- nified burials. Where possible during its investigation, human remains that were sometimes scattered were gathered together, whether in classrooms or city offices. In some places bean storage facilities were even put to use for the ‘storage’ of bones for commemorative events. The report officially published by the commission in March 1996 clearly aimed to guide genocide memorial policy in Rwanda and in particular to organise future commemorations.19 This same memorial commission was responsible for the second commemora- tion of the genocide in 1996, which represented a break in two respects. Firstly, the preparation for the day of remembrance was characterised by a competition between the Catholic Church and the State over their legitimacy to ‘mobilize the dead’.20 The commemoration of 7 April 1996 was secular, the Rwandan Government having refused to postpone its date as requested by the Church. It just so happened that the 7 April commemorative date coincided with Easter Sunday that year. This commemoration, held at the Murambi site, was consequently defined by the public displaying of the victims’ bodies. In December 1995 and January 1996, more than twenty thousand bodies were exhumed by the Amagaju local association of survivors, in conjunction with the Comité d’initiative pour l’enterrement des victimes de Murambi (Murambi Initiative Committee for the Burial of Victims; CIEM). After the site had been chosen as the venue for the second commemoration, it was decided that the burial be postponed, and lime was spread over several thousand corpses for preservation purposes. The majority of the bodies were buried on the national day of mourning, but about two thousand were kept for display and stored in the classrooms of the Murambi Ecole Technique Officielle (Official Technical School; ETO). How can the emergence of this new practice be explained? Some researchers have seen a similarity with the displaying of bones after the Luwero War in Uganda in the 1980s, a conflict in which many Rwandan Tutsis participated before the FPR had been created.21 Others have mentioned, without establishing a direct link, the mummification practices for kings in the precolonial period.22 Studying archives relating to this subject reveals that, rather than stemming from a politi-

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE cal programme, the preservation and displaying of human remains was theorised and implemented by academics from Butare in southern Rwanda. Following the reopening of the Université Nationale du Rwanda (National University of Rwanda; NUR), a group of researchers from the Tutsi diaspora met in an informal group to work on the memory of the genocide. This group was led by the archaeologist Célestin Kanimba Misago and was comprised of historians such as Joseph Jyoni wa Karega and Aloys Rufangura. It also contained some members of the Memorial Commission, such as Louis Kanamugire, Christophe Muhoza and Mario Ibarra, a Chilean who worked for the Rwandan Government for a year on the issue of bone preservation and from 1995 began producing reports for the Rwandan Government on the preservation of bodies.23 In January 1996, three months before the second commemoration of the genocide, he wrote a report on the conservation of bodies exhumed in Murambi.24 When Kanimba Misago was appointed director of the National Museum of Rwanda in 1996, he became responsible for the preservation of genocide memo- rial sites and bones at the national level.25 The preservation of bodies and bones became an integral part of a heritage- or even museum-based logic. Preservation entailed work on the very materials of the bodies, so that the human remains could be displayed. Pharmaceutical products were applied to slow the decomposition of flesh. The decision was made to sort and present the bones at memorials according to categories, with the most visible traces of violence being displayed. This logic of commemorative conservation and display needs to be placed in context of the small number of significant forensic investigations in Rwanda and the persistent denial about the reality of the massacres.26 For the Rwandan authori- ties, bodies were the main evidence of the genocide and it was therefore important to be preserved and displayed.27 Within the body of legislative reports and texts, they are referred to as ‘material evidence of genocide’ (ibimenyetso bya jenoside). It should be noted that this strategy of displaying images of bones and corpses in response to the denial of the reality of the massacres was also used as evidence in the majority of the genocide trials that were being held outside Rwanda.28 In addition to their onsite presence at memorials, bodies also appeared in politi- cal speeches, witness accounts, such as during commemorations, and memorial songs. Accordingly, images of extreme violence were aired on national television during the commemorative period between 1995 and 2009. The same could be said for the very explicit nature of the song lyrics broadcast on public radio.29 Indeed, bodies quickly came to symbolise the memory of the genocide. All the major official visits to Rwanda during 1994 and 2000 were to memorial sites, where the story of the genocide was primarily told through skeletons and human remains. Among others, there were visits by the Secretaries-General of the United Nations: Boutros Boutros-Ghali to Nyarubuye on 15 July 1995 and Kofi Annan to Mwurire and Nyanza de Kicukiro on 8 May 1998. The most striking example, however, is Bill Clinton’s visit to Rwanda on the eve of the fourth com- memoration. When his visit was announced, the US State Department warned that the president would only stay in Rwanda for a few hours and would not leave the airport. The Rwandan Government responded by building a ­monument

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE right on the tarmac.30 Themummified ­ bodies and bones were transferred for the occasion from the Murambi and Nyamata sites to be displayed. In the end, Clinton did not leave the airport terminal and did not even visit the monument, which became the subject of much criticism.31 Beyond words, coming face to face with bodies and bones emerged as the political ritual for recognising the genocide. Two years later, as the sixth commemoration of the genocide approached, tens of thousands of bodies would be exhumed in the city of Kigali. Mass graves were located mainly in the Nyamirambo sector, bodies having been buried there during the genocide as part of a ‘public-health’ operation.32 This massive exhumation process arose through the Kigali prefecture, led at that time by Marc Kabandana, who, inspired by a visit to the Yad Vashem memo- rial site in 1998, wanted to create a major genocide memorial in Kigali. The place designated for the memorial was located in Gisozi, a hill in the capital. From the sixth commemoration of 7 April 2000, the site became the largest cemetery of the genocide in Rwanda and thereafter the main museum-memorial. This com- memoration was the first to take place in the presence of an important foreign dignitary – Guy Verhofstadt, the prime minister of the Kingdom of Belgium. At the occasion Verhofstadt apologised for his country’s inaction and that of the interna- tional community during the genocide. Soon after this international recognition of the genocide’s memory began, criticism quickly followed. In 2000 and 2001, the Rwandan Government was repeatedly accused by political opponents, as well as foreign observers and academics, of using the genocide and human remains for political purposes. Various concepts were then developed to name this political use of memory: corpse voyeurism33, instrumentalisation of genocide34 and even geno- cide credit.35 The Rwandan Government was therefore accused of using the dead to hide its own crimes committed during the civil war and of dismantling Hutu refugee camps in Zaire, and Western countries were accused of silence over these crimes due to their ‘shame’ at not having been able to stop the genocide. To address these critical discourses on the Government’s way of dealing with memory, bodies were further mobilised. In 2001, at the seventh commemoration of the genocide, President Paul Kagame declared:

There are people who spend time … people who like to say we are trading off the genocide … Trading? … They dare to say that we are treating the genocide like a business. What business can you do from genocide? What can you sell with this genocide? What is the product in the genocide that can be monetized? What is there in the genocide that we can sell? Tell me, what we can sell from the genocide? These bodies of people that we have before us? . . . Whoever does not believe that genocide happened or believes that it is a business should take a moment to take in the smell in this [he fails to find the words and prefers to point to the graves] … in these coffins … he should look at and feel what is in them. When people say that we are selling the genocide, I ask myself: What can we sell in this?36

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE The beginning of the twenty-first century marked an evolution in commemora- tive practices with the arrival of foreign actors to help with the management of the genocide’s memory. Various reports were produced by foreign-aid services on the management of bodies, and memory issues were partly managed in Rwanda by the AEGIS Foundation until their management was taken over by the Rwandan Government once more in 2008.37

Towards a symbolic commemoration of the genocide? Memorial policy and the internationalisation of memorial practices Provided for under the constitution passed in 2003, the Commission Nationale de Lutte contre le Génocide (National Commission for the Fight against Genocide; CNLG) was established in 2008. This body would quickly promote new memorial practices. Its stated aim was to complete the process of dignified burial. Indeed, since 1994, bodies had not stopped being exhumed and buried or rebur- ied. This logic of repeated burials and exhumations can be explained in several ways. Firstly, we must remember the context in which the first dignified burials in the years following the genocide occurred. Funding was inadequate at that time, which caused constant delays to the work’s progress, and eventually weakened the structures in place. The materials used were of a low quality and corruption was not uncommon. Added to this was the lack of an architectural plan that took climatic effects into account. After a few years, water infiltrated the cement graves, and these eventually subsided. The poor state of the graves meant that they needed to be rebuilt, which in turn necessitated further reburials. Other exhumations then took place because of the administrative reforms of 2001 and especially 2006, which were accompanied by the practice of decentralis- ing memorials. Each of the thirty districts were henceforth expected to manage a main memorial. Bodies were transferred from one site to another and from smaller local memorials to sector, district or national memorials, depending on the loca- tion. Finally, the concept of dignity evolved from 1994. Graves dating from 1994 or 1995 were subsequently exhumed in order to clean the bodies and separate the human remains from clothes and objects and bury them in coffins. Rwanda’s improving economic situation also explains further exhumations in the years immediately before 2010. In the end, however, some bodies were buried and then exhumed one, two, three or even four times because of these multiple logics. They were buried once on a family plot, a second time in a local cemetery and a third time when the local cemetery was transferred to a central cemetery, and so on. All this would take place with each commemorative period, which runs from April to July. This painful process for families was what the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide wanted to change, focusing in particular on building sus- tainable structures. In recent years, the CNLG has organised the installation of, for example, impressive rain-protection structures at the main genocide memorial sites and cemeteries. Similarly, the leaders of the CNLG wished to permanently preserve the human remains on display at the memorials. Therefore, with the

62 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 56–70

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE ­sixteenth commemoration of the genocide approaching, an international confer- ence on the conservation of the victims’ bodies of the genocide was organised in Kigali under the auspices of the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide and Cranfield University.38 As we can see, the CNLG’s first priority focused on the question of the geno- cide’s material memory: cemeteries, memorials and bodies. Rwanda’s first memory law focused on this very theme. It was passed by the Rwandan Parliament in 2008.39 The law repeatedly mentions the issue of bodies. Articles 4 to 6 of the law concern the dignified burial of victims. The law states that districts should look for poorly buried bodies (imibiri yashyinguwe nabi) and also deals with unburied bodies, especially those kept for evidence or bodies that were displayed but damaged. Article 3 of the law enforces the public nature of memorials and therefore of bodies that are displayed or buried at them. This last point was the subject of much debate. If bodies were state property, what are the rights of victims’ families over them? Although this law did not lead to official controversy, the CNLG proposed amend- ments.40 Finally, the law covered the case of victims’ bodies of the genocide that had not yet been buried (imibiri y’abazize jenoside itarashyinguwe, article 12) and people who had drowned (abantu baguye mu mazi, article 13). It also punished the destruction of bodies (kwangiza imibiri y’abazize jenoside, article 21) and their theft (kwiba imibiri, article 23). One year after the law’s publication, the issue of body stealing was the subject of much debate. A report issued on the eve of the fifteenth commemoration by Deputy Evariste Kalisa, President of the parliament’s human-rights committee, said that victims may have been exhumed from genocide memorials in Uganda for the purposes of witchcraft.41 Deputies then asked Joseph Habineza, the minister of culture, to intervene. These debates show the international dimension of the genocide’s memory. After being thrown into rivers during the genocide, tens of thousands of bodies ended up in Uganda and Tanzania. There were special commemorative practices for these victims and memorials were built in Uganda. At the same time, it should be noted that the ‘scenographic specificity’ of genocide memorials also became internationalised. In April 2007 a memorial project to be located in a space adjoining Southwark Cathedral in London was launched. Reverend Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, and the financier Sigmund Sternberg promised to help fund the memorial, in conjunc- tion with the Rwandan embassy.42 Officially, the memorial was intended to be a place of memory and show, in a literal sense, the reality of the genocide. Two British artists, Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, were selected to carry out the project. They had previously designed memorial works that had been commissioned by the Imperial War Museum.43 They visited Rwanda in February 2009 to meet with representatives of the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide and to visit the memori- als. Following this visit, the minister of culture, Joseph Habineza, explained that ‘experts have wished to have some art crafts made in the form of human limbs while others have thought of airlifting some remains from here to the London

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE memorial but we intend to maintain the originality’.44 This project was later abandoned.

Euphemising commemorative practices The year 2010 was marked by many ruptures in the memorial process and the role afforded to human remains in the memory of the genocide. Firstly, the sixteenth national ceremony took place at the Amahoro national stadium in Kigali without any dignified burial. In other words, bodies did not take centre stage at the event. It seems that this can be explained by the special emphasis placed on the issue of trauma that year. From 2004 there was a significant increase in trauma crises and public demon- strations of suffering in the course of national commemorations.45 The increase in the number of cases, the violence of the crisis and its spread to populations that had not experienced the genocide led the Rwandan Government to look for new commemorative forms that would limit the occurrence of such disquiet. In 2009, the Association rwandaise des conseillères en traumatisme (Rwandan Association of Trauma Counsellors; ARCT-Ruhuka), an NGO based in Kigali particularly concerned with the rape of women during the genocide, indicated that a significant portion of psychiatric disorders could be explained by the fact that survivors were traumatised by the memory of their ‘still unburied relatives, not knowing where their bodies were thrown’.46 The consideration given to the issue of psychological trauma can be discerned in the sixteenth commemoration’s official theme: ‘Let us commemorate the Genocide against the Tutsi, uniting more closely against its trauma’. The issue of trauma and of its causes and consequences was mentioned during the commemorations and became the subject of numerous publications in the press. The situation further accelerated after the election in February 2011 of a psychologist, Jean-Pierre Dusingizemungu, as the head of the Ibuka association of survivors. During the sixteenth commemoration it was possible to see new memorial prac- tices. In the media and during the commemorations, violent images of bodies that had been cut with machetes gave way to documentaries that spoke of forgiveness and reconciliation. The violence was in fact euphemised. From 2010, new memo- rial songs, mostly commissioned by the survivors’ associations or the State, were inspired and influenced by the new Pentecostal religious movements that emerged in Rwanda after the genocide. Music videos for the old songs were reshot so as to bring less violent images to the fore.47 In general, the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide encouraged artists to find new aesthetic forms to symbolise the memory of the genocide without showing the bodies of victims. The memorial project by the artist Bruce Clarke provides the most striking example. Genocide victims were represented as ‘upright men’ (hommes debout) – as silhouettes of their past lives and not as dead bodies.48 Finally, CNLG adopted an official symbol of the genocide which would henceforth appear on all communication: the flame of hope (urumuri rw’icyizere). A new political discourse was then brought to the memorial process. It was based around the concepts of healing,49 reconciliation and, indirectly, resurrection.­

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Evidence of the genocide and the remains of the victims became proof of the rebirth of the new Rwanda (Rwanda rushya). The bodies of the victims were likened to the body of Rwanda, thus, during the seventeenth commemoration of the genocide in 2011, President Paul Kagame declared: ‘The body of Rwanda was tortured, assaulted, and succumbed but the spirit never died. It is that spirit that should fight on, that spirit will never and should never be defeated. Defending Rwanda’s spirit is within our reach and means.’50 This psychological transformation of the Rwandan nation – described as resilient­ – is reflected in the official song of the nineteenth commemoration, enti- tled ‘Umujinya mwiza’ (‘Good Anger’). For the fiftieth anniversary of independ- ence in July 2012, the song A Journey to Resilience (Chemin vers la résilience) was celebrated as having been made since the genocide. This rebirth of the body of Rwanda was also extended to the imagining of a vital resurrection in Rwandan society – even more relevant as the genocide commemorations were taking place in April and during the Easter period. This synthesis of rebirth and resurrection can be found in part of the seventeenth commemoration’s official song’s chorus: ‘The genocide is Rwanda’s cross’.51 Finally, political control over the issue of bodies can also be observed through the attempt to control memorial language. In its annual reports published since 2004, the Haut Conseil des Médias (Media High Council) has listed journalists’ errors and abuses of language. In 2011, it published a new report calling for the use of ‘more appropriate’ words to speak of genocide.52 There was a desire to mention that the genocide was committed against the Tutsis and to fight against the ‘traumatic words’ used by some in Rwanda or the diaspora to speak of human remains.53 Expressions such as ibisigazwa (remains, in a general sense) or intumbi (the human or animal body) were prohibited. Similarly, the committee urged people to stop using the word amagufa (human or animal bones), which was used by the majority of Rwandans and survivors. It proposed the use of the term imibiri y’abazize Jenoside yakorewe Abatutsi (the bodies of the people killed during the genocide committed against the Tutsis). This desire for memorial language to evolve has an ethical dimension, aiming to restore dignity to those who disappeared. In the case of natural deaths in Rwanda, people continue to use the term corpse (umurambo) and not body, used in referring to the genocide’s victims (umubiri). In the same way and in relation to the exhuma- tions, the verb gutaburura (dig up) was replaced by gushakisha (search for). But this evolution of memorial language is also an indicator of a political will to pacify the genocide’s memory. This progressive euphemisation of the memory of the genocide was ultimately seen at the twentieth commemoration of the genocide in 2014. Firstly, the geno- cide commemorations were preceded by a ‘precommemorative’ period of almost three months. From January to April 2014, a flame of hope circulated in each of Rwanda’s thirty districts. It was accompanied by political speeches, witness accounts and songs, but never burials. The day of mourning organised at the Amahoro national stadium in Kigali on 7 April 2014 was likewise supposed to be symbolic. The stadium is not a massacre site and no burial was organised for the

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE event. Although dignified burials took place at local commemorations in 2014, particularly in Bisesero and Rubavu, new commemorative forms also emerged. Survivors’ associations organised commemorations that were no longer centred on memorial sites or the materiality of the bodies. They suggested ceremonies in memory of people thrown into Rwandan rivers, raped and murdered women and families that had entirely disappeared (Imiryango yazimye muri jenoside yakorewe abatutsi). Commemorations were finally organised for people whose bodies have not been found.54

Conclusion: towards a commemoration without corpses or remains? Studying the commemorative practices over the past twenty years sheds light on the evolution of the role given to human remains. Their public exhibition from 1996 is part of a multifaceted set of wishes. First of all there was the desire to keep alive the memory of the genocide; in a context of a civil war that continued until the start of the twenty-first century, and in the context of the Congo wars, the bodies echoed the risk of destruction. The exhibition of human remains was part of an effort to fight against genocide denial.55 In the absence of financial means, human remains were the genocide’s most concrete physical evidence. How can the euphemisation of memorial practices since the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century be explained? It is the product of political evolu- tion, the source of which was the re-election of Paul Kagame as President of the Republic in 2010 for a second term. From this moment on, there was a willingness to make the genocide a thing of the past. The judicial process has been changing, with the closure of the Gacaca system in 2012, and the memorial process has fol- lowed a parallel path; the CNLG wishes to bring a close to the dignified burial process and find a permanent storage solution for the displayed human remains. Genocide is no longer presented as part of the present; it has become a found- ing element of the Rwandan nation. Fragmented bodies of victims are no longer mobilised in the commemorations and have given way to speeches on the unified body of the new Rwanda. More so than the memory of the genocide, reconciliation is now at the heart of the memorial process. The demobilisation of the dead indi- cates the political will to ‘emerge from the genocide’56 but the decision to close the memorial and legal processes has come up against the demands of many survivors who fear a trivialisation of the genocide’s memory.

Notes

1 Translated from the author’s French by Cadenza Academic Translations. 2 M. Wagner, ‘The War of the Cachots: A History of Conflict and Containment in Rwanda’, in F. Bernault (ed.), A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, Heinemann, 2003), pp. 239–70; C. Tertsakian, Le Château: The Lives of Prisoners in Rwanda (London, Arves, 2008). 3 See A. Guichaoua (ed.), Exilés, Réfugiés, Déplacés en Afrique Centrale et Orientale (Paris, Karthala, 2004).

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 4 Little has been written so far on commemorations held during the first two republics. See, however, R. Nkaka, ‘Commémorations Nationales et Ethnicisation/ Racialisation de la Société Rwandaise’, Dialogue, 199 (2012), 99–122. 5 On this point see the research of Claudine Vidal, which makes use of Paul Ricoeur’s work on ‘just memory’, and also the works of Sarah Guyer, Jens Meierhenrich and Anna-Maria Brandstetter. See C. Vidal, ‘La Commémoration du Génocide au Rwanda’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 175 (2004), 575–92; S. Guyer, ‘Rwanda’s Bones’, Boundary, 36 (2009), 155–75; J. Meierhenrich, ‘Topographies of Remembering and Forgetting: The Transformation of Lieux de Mémoire in Rwanda’, in S. Straus & L. Waldorf (eds), Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Madison, University of Wisconsin, 2011), pp. 283–315; A.-M. Brandstetter, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Remembrance in Post- Genocide Rwanda (Wassenaar, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2010), pp. 6–22. 6 There are similarities in this sense with the approach developed by Rachel Ibreck. See R. Ibreck, ‘A Time of Mourning: The Politics of Commemorating the Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda’, in P. Lee & P. N. Thomas (eds), Public Memory, Public Media and the Politics of Justice (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 98–120; R. Ibreck, ‘The Politics of Mourning: Survivor Contributions to Memorials in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Memory Studies, 4 (2010), 330–43. 7 This passage is a revised translation of a published article on this question. See R. Korman, ‘Le Rwanda Face à ses Morts ou les Cimetières du Génocide comme Lieux de Mémoire’, Génocides et Politiques Mémorielles (2012). URL: http://chs. univ-paris1.fr/genocides_et_politiques_memorielles/?Le-Rwanda-face-a-ses- morts-ou-les (accessed 15 March 2015). 8 On the application of this approach to Bosnia, see É. Claverie, ‘Réapparaître: Retrouver les Corps des Personnes Disparues Pendant la Guerre en Bosnie’, Raisons Politiques, 41:1 (2011), 13–31. 9 In Rwanda there has been no DNA identification of bodies. Identification was made possible through carried identity cards or even clothing worn by the victims. 10 It should be noted that literature on funeral rites in Rwanda is fairly sparse. Above all, along with other work on Rwandan culture, it is presented in an ahistorical and ageographical way. It also focuses on deaths through natural causes. See, however, G. Spijker, Les Usages Funéraires et la Mission de l’Église: Une Etude Anthropologique et Théologique des Rites Funéraires au Rwanda (Kampen, Kok, 1990). 11 See F. Baillette, ‘Figures du Corps, Ethnicité et Génocide au Rwanda’, Quasimodo, 6 (2000), 7–38; K. Krüger, ‘The Destruction of Faces in Rwanda 1994: Mutilation as a Mirror of Racial Ideologies’, L’Europe en Formation, 357:3 (2010), 91–105; R. Korman, ‘The Tutsi Body in the 1994 Genocide: Ideology, Physical Destruction and Memory’, in É. Anstett & J.-M. Dreyfus, Destruction and Human Remains (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 226–42. The question of malicious death also relates to evil spirits. On this point see M.-O. Godard, Rêves et Traumatismes ou la Longue Nuit des Rescapés (Toulouse, Erès, 2003). 12 See D. Gishoma & C. Kanazayire, ‘Les Commémorations du Génocide au Rwanda:

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Un Espace Transitionnel pour Métaboliser le Passé Qui ne Passe Pas?’, in J.-L. Brackelaire, M. Cornejo & J. Kinable, Violence Politique et Traumatisme (Louvain La Neuve, Editions Academia, 2013), pp. 317–37. 13 From the mid-1990s, individual exhumations were subject to authorisation and then prohibited, thereafter needing to be organised by the administration. In the early 2000s, the choice was made by the Rwandan State to organise exhumation and dignified reburials in the month of April only. 14 ‘Unicef Plans to Help Rwanda to Bury Dead’, The New York Times, 10 December 1994. 15 Regarding dignified burial in Mugina, see F. Rutembesa & E. Mutwarasibo, Amateka ya Jenoside yakorewe Abatutsi muri Mugina (Kigali, CNLG, 2009), 110–20. 16 Vidal, ‘La Commémoration du Génocide’, 577–8. 17 These reflections are from R. Korman, ‘L’État Rwandais et la Mémoire du Génocide’, Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire, 122:2 (2014), 87–98. 18 On the evolution of terms for the genocide, see Assumpta Mugiraneza, ‘Les Écueils dans l’Appréhension de l’Histoire du Génocide des Tutsis’, Revue d’Histoire de la Shoah, 190 (2009), 153–72, 160–2. 19 MINESUPRES, Rapport préliminaire d’identification des sites du génocide et des massacres (Kigali, 1996). 20 In discussing the period after World War One, Jay Winter mentions the Catholic Church’s desire to demobilise the dead. See J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 26. 21 M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 3. 22 See Vidal, ‘La Commémoration du Génocide’. 23 R. Korman, ‘Burial or display?: The Politics of Exhumation in post Genocide Rwanda’, in É. Anstett & J.-M Dreyfus (eds), Human Remains and Identification: Mass Violence, Genocide and the ‘Forensic Turn’ (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015), pp. 203–20. 24 Archives of the Genocide and Massacres Memorial Commission, Kigali. Preliminary report on the possibilities for conserving the Murambi (Gikongoro) site, by M. Ibarra, 7 January 1996. 25 Personal archives of Célestin Kanimba Misago, Butare: report entitled ‘Actions de Sauvetage des Ossements et Objets pour les Musées du Génocide et des Massacres’, by Célestin Kanimba Misago, 1996. 26 Two forensic inquiries were conducted in 1996 as part of the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), at Home Saint-Jean in Kibuye and at the Amgar garage in Kigali. Because of the poor relations between the Rwandan State and the Arusha tribunal, no further investigation of this type has been held since. 27 In fact the absence of records must be qualified, in view of the Rwandan sources used at the ICTR. However, these remain largely unknown in Rwanda, especially after the genocide. They are also more abstract.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Mobilising the dead? HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 28 On this point, see Marie-France Collard’s film Bruxelles-Kigali. In it, speeches by a witness claiming never to have seen corpses in Kigali during the genocide is juxtaposed with a video found in the Orinfor archives. Filmed in April 1994 by Rwandan journalists, it shows the pervasiveness of bodies in the streets of Kigali. M.-F. Collard, Bruxelles-Kigali, Brussels, Cobra Films, 2011. 29 D. Gishoma, ‘Crises Traumatiques Collectives d’Ihahamuka lors des Commémorations du Génocide des Tutsi: Aspects Cliniques et Perspectives Thérapeutiques’, PhD dissertation, Université catholique de Louvain, 2014, 71. 30 A work by Jean-Baptiste Sebukangaga was installed on the monument. 31 J. Chatain, ‘Clinton inspecte les Grands Lacs’, L’Humanité, 25 March 1998. 32 N. Eltringham, ‘Exhibition, Dissimulation et “Culture”: Le Traitement des Corps dans le Génocide Rwandais’, in É. Anstett & J.-M Dreyfus (eds), Cadavres Impensables, Cadavres Impensés: Approches Méthodologiques du Traitement des Corps dans les Violences de Masse et les Génocides (Paris, Éditions Petra, 2012), pp. 93–105, 100–2. 33 Vidal, ‘La Commémoration du Génocide’, 582–6. 34 R. Brauman, S. Smith & C. Vidal, ‘Politique de Terreur et Privilège d’Impunité au Rwanda’, Esprit, 8 (2000), 147–61. 35 This term very soon appeared in the writing of the Belgian academic Filip Reyntjens. See F. Reyntjens, ‘Rwanda: Genocide and Beyond’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 9:3 (1996), 240–51. 36 Gishoma, ‘Crises Traumatiques Collectives’, 69. 37 See, for example, S. E. Cook, ‘The Politics of Preservation in Rwanda’, in S. E. Cook (ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (New Haven, Transaction Publishers, 2004), 293–311; R. Ibreck, ‘International Constructions of National Memories: The Aims and Effects of Foreign Donors’ Support for Genocide Remembrance in Rwanda’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 7:2 (2013), 149–69. 38 G. Muramira, ‘Genocide Experts Meet in Kigali’, The New Times, 2 June 2010. 39 Official gazette of the Republic of Rwanda, ‘Law Governing Memorial Sites and Cemeteries of Victims of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda’, No. 56, 2008, 62–77. 40 G. Kanzayire, ‘Ibitekerezo ku ihindurwa ry’itegeko no. 56/2008 ryo kuwa 10/09/2008 rigena inzibutso n’amarimbi by’abazize jenoside yakorewe Abatutsi mu Rwanda’ [‘Propositions with a view to changing law no. 56/2008 of 10 September 2008 on genocide memorials and cemeteries for the victims of the genocide committed against the Tutsis in Rwanda], Icyizere Newspaper, 15, Kigali, CNLG, 2011, 9, 13. 41 E. Rugirigiza, ‘Une Sépulture Digne pour les Corps Échoués en Ouganda en 1994’, Agence Hirondelle, 24 March 2009 ; See also T. Munyaneza, ‘Coup d’Œil sur le Rapport des Victimes du Génocide commis contre les Tutsi Jetées dans des Rivières Rwandaises vers le Lac Victoria’, Dialogue, 190 (2010), 27–34. 42 I. Mugabo, ‘Genocide Memorial Site to be Erected in London’, The New Times, Kigali, 12 April 2007.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Rémi Korman HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 43 See in particular their work ‘The House of Osama Bin Laden’. URL: http://www. langlandsandbell.com/ (accessed 18 March 2015). 44 E. Musoni, ‘Genocide Memorial Site to be Constructed in London’, The New Times, Kaigali, 29 April 2009. Translated quote taken from UK Africa Post. URL: http://uk-africa.blogspot.ca/2009/04/genocide-memorial-site-to-be.html (accessed 18 March 2015). 45 S. Audoin-Rouzeau & H. Dumas, ‘Le Génocide des Tutsi Rwandais Vingt Ans Après’, Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire, 122:2 (2014), 3–16, 12–16; As explained by Rachel Ibreck, ‘[w]hile some participants are provoked to tears and distress as survivors recount their testimony, others appear to be transported back to the moment of the genocide and begin crying or trying to flee’. See R. Ibreck, ‘A Time of Mourning’, 109. 46 E. Rugirigiza, ‘Augmentation des troubles psychiatriques liés au génocide’, Agence Hirondelle, 18 February 2009. 47 The CNLG website banner was also redone, the latter previously made of bones. 48 See http://www.uprightmen.org/ (accessed 25 March 2015). 49 Research could be conducted on the mobilisation of the ubiquitous concept of ‘healing’ in Rwanda, covering medical and religious vocabulary. 50 Speech available on the following website: http://www.paulkagame.com/index. php/speeches/314-president-kagame-speech-at-the-17th-commemoration-of-the- genocide-against-the-tutsis-kigali-7th-april-2011 (accessed 25 March 2015). 51 This line, Jenoside yakorewe abatutsi niwo musaraba w’uru Rwanda, appears in the Kizito Mihigo song entitled ‘Twanze gutoberwa Amateka’ (‘We Reject the Falsification of History’). 52 J.-P. Uwimana, P. Mfurankunda & P. Peacemaker Mbungiramihigo, Appropriate Journalistic Language in Relation to Genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda: Key Guidelines (Kigali, Media High Council, 2011). 53 É. Ntakirutimana, ‘Les Paroles Traumatisantes: Un Défi Langagier à Relever’, in 16 Ans après le Génocide Perpétré contre Les Tutsi (1994–2010): Gestion de Ses Conséquences (Kigali, CNLG, 2011). 54 Gishoma, ‘Crises Traumatiques Collectives’, 81. 55 This effort was also accompanied by various laws in the first decade of the twenty- first century (the 2003 law against the crime of genocide and the 2008 law on genocide ideology). See S. Kazuyuki, ‘Beyond Dichotomies: The Quest for Justice and Reconciliation and the Politics of National Identity Building in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, PhD dissertation, University of Bradford, 2009. 56 While there has been a lot of reflection on emerging from war, the issue of emerging from the genocide is still a field of study to explore.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:34 Traces, bones, desert: the extermination of the Armenians through the photographer’s eye HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Anouche Kunth Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique [email protected]

Abstract1 Braving the Ottoman’s ban on capturing any images of the persecuted Armenians, witnesses dodged censorship and photographed pictures that would later be branded as proof at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–20. Despite the challenge of these images to representations of the Armenian genocide, they were soon forgotten after the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne erased the Armenian Question, while time took care of destroying the corpses abandoned in the desert. This article will examine the image-disappearance dialectic through distinct temporalities of remembrance and commemoration, each of which mobilises its own specific, iconographical semantics. In response to contemporary challenges, the repertoire of images has not remained sealed; over the last decade it has been reopened through depictions of bare landscapes and stretches of desert and bones that sud- denly pierce through the earth. The article will show how these images implicitly speak of the disappearance and seek meaning through emptiness.

Key words: Armenian genocide, denial, image, icon, erasing memory

The ‘cloud of denial and unknowing’2 that has long prevented the world from knowing clearly about and comprehending the genocide of the Armenians was, and still is, a challenge to its representation. Photography strove to meet this challenge right from the perpetration of the crime when, braving the official ban on capturing any image of the persecutions that were taking place, eyewitnesses took rare pictures that would be held up as proof after the First World War. These images added to the abundant written documentation that the Armenian delegates presented at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–20. In return, they received the promise that the leaders of the Young Turks would be forced to answer for their crimes. However, as a result of political inconsistency, the Armenian Question slipped off diplomatic agendas before a fitting solution could be given. As a consequence of this political erasure, the narrative and iconographical material on the extermination of the Armenians almost disappeared from circulation, while time took care of destroying the corpses abandoned in the desert. This triple disappearance, swept into the dark corners of history, draws our

Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 71–87 © Manchester University Press 71 http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.7 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE attention to the place of photography in the remembrance of genocide. In truth, this study owes much to a whole body of works. Some of these have studied the photographic corpus and its uses,3 and others have proposed a semiology of the image.4 Building on these advances, this article aims to look more closely at the historical progression that has by turns placed images in the position of powerless mediators, icons subject to manipulation and symbolic sanctuary for the last traces. From photo-document to artistic image,5 the article will detail the temporalities specific to the different roles of photography so that we can better observe the particular importance that each period attaches to images, to the point where there is a desire to create new ones. Thus, the question of the articulation of collective memory with the photographic image requires us to historicise the paths taken, be they militant or aesthetic, in order to fight the negation and forgetting of a crime with a clear representation of destruction.

Rare images, escaping censorship ‘The order is given to destroy all the photographs that have been taken, which proves the extent of the fear that it will come to light.’6 This was the comment made in 1919 by the author of the Livre Rouge, Grigor Tchalkhouchian, an Armenian from Russia who wanted to help denounce the crimes perpetrated by the Union and Progress Committee.7 He writes ‘[W]hat Turkey will say in response at the tribunal, I do not know, but I speak for Armenia’, explicitly offering himself as a spokesperson for an Armenia soon to be heard at the ‘Tribunal of the Great Peoples’ at the 1919–20 Paris Peace Conference.8 The photographic act, as these words remind us, is inseparable from certain expectations: in this case, a quest for truth and justice. During the war, circumstances greatly discouraged images being taken of the Armenians’ persecution. This was firstly because eyewitnesses knew that any attempt to break measures to hide the crime meant risking their lives.9 Secondly, they did not always have the necessary equipment, not to mention the fact that, until the invention of lightweight equipment, technical constraints made it difficult to transport heavy and cumbersome apparatus to the remote places where the Armenian deportees were taken.10 Against all odds, some succeeded, undoubtedly confident that the scenes photographed would one day becomeproof .11 The moti- vation to record images as part of a witnessing process grew even stronger when, on 24 May 1915, the Entente Allies solemnly warned the Ottoman Government that it would be held responsible for the ‘new crimes against humanity and civili- zation’ targeting the Armenian population.12 It was time for justice to be done.13 Thirty-two images on glass plates escaped Ottoman censorship.14 This is the inestimable legacy of Armin Wegner (1886–1978), author of the main pho- tographic collection on the extermination of the Ottoman Armenians.15 This volunteer nurse secretly brought back the majority of the photographs taken in Syro-Mesopotamian concentration camps16 following his nursing work alongside the Sixth Ottoman Army.17 Unable to take many of the images of the atrocities himself, he thought it essential to obtain them from German officers.18 These

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE images showing the emaciated bodies of the dead and the suffering are some of the most famous in the Wegner Collection, which is now kept at the Deutches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany. Another means of access to the entrenched space of the massacres was opened up from the Caucasian front, after the Russian’s January 1916 military offensive par- tially liberated the way to Ottoman Armenia. The Tsarist troops here photographed ruins and the mass graves.19 Following in their footsteps, Henry Barby, a French journalist working as a war correspondent for Le Journal, arrived in Erzurum. His expedition gave rise to an account, Au Pays de L’épouvante [In the Land of Terror], published in Paris in 1917.20 The work is accompanied by photographs, not all of which are Barby’s own. In fact, struck by the sight of starving children, Barby published three of his own photographs taken in Armenian orphanages in Tiflis.21 With the full-length portraits of Armenian resistance members, these pictures of orphans make up the majority of the iconography among the accounts of suffering. Barby only tells of death in words and not in any other form. This visual omission is made even more striking by the fact that the journalist himself describes ‘the startling eloquence [of the] infinite ruins, devastation and death’ without providing any pictorial representation of this atrocious landscape.22 The essential remains out of shot. We will return to this observation later. In October 1916, with the Russians still occupying certain Turkish provinces, a Georgian journalist, Levan Kipiani, went to the site of a massacre perpetrated in Baskane in June 1915.23 With a local citizen as his guide, Kipiani took the path trodden by 1,700 Armenian families before him (in their case, never to return). Beginning his journey, he must have quickly noticed the care taken to erase the traces of the crime – the removal of corpses, taken ‘as far away as possible’ and thrown into ravines and holes where nobody could see them.24 ‘However’, he goes on, ‘as the road climbs, we increasingly start to see dried bodies, lying in the yellow grass’. He then turns his attention to the human remains encountered, giving an almost clinical description. Notably, Kipiani looks at the bodies to see how they died.

Particularly well preserved are the hands and feet. By their position, the form of their convulsively clenched and swollen fingers, they speak so eloquently of the tragedy that took place here fourteen months ago! The crossed legs of the women and their fingers clutching at their arms are so telling of the abominations that took place here! The marks of blades and firearms are obvious on the corpses.25

As Kipiani states here, the bodily mutilations tell the manner of death. They tell us what the killer did. For this very reason, and by way of comparison, the exhibi- tion of the bleached bones and limed bodies in Rwanda’s Tutsi genocide memorials is part of a radical educational choice to ensure that the genocide is remembered by the physical fact of the tortured bodies.26 This demonstration is the result of a policy of seeking out and opening mass graves not only to exhume and identify the bodies before giving them a dignified burial, but also to analyse the bodies as a source, a way of understanding the massacre. In Rwanda, the establishment

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE of criminal courts operating both at the local level (the gacaca27 tribunals) and at the international level (the ICTR28) was decisive in making the bodies a subject of investigation in themselves. However, at the time when Kipiani was examining the corpses, it was not self- evident that mass crimes could be comprehended via bodies. The official organi- sations that took charge of the Armenian case from 1918 gave priority to written material.29 The important consideration was to prove criminal intention, where efforts were focused on collecting directives, circulars and telegraph orders that had not been hidden or destroyed, and on collecting and publishing the state- ments of Armenian escapees, foreign people present in the Ottoman Empire at the time when the events took place30 and even Turkish state agents.31 In the Russian Caucasus, where over three hundred thousand Armenian refugees were sheltered, efforts focused on transcribing initial statements. What of the over one million corpses during this first phase of understanding the genocide? They haunt the testimonies – they are bundles drifting in the waves of the Euphrates, or shapeless mounds at the bottom of precipices. However, there were too many obstacles for them to be either captured in photographs or fully perceived by contemporaries. This was because although the provinces of Ottoman Armenia were partly visible during the period of Russian occupation, they once again became inaccessible when they came back under Turkish control. The zone was closed to any attempt to look for graves, while the opposite was true of the Syrian provinces placed under French mandate after the war.32 Thus, on the Turkish side, the remains decomposed out of sight, some in quicklime,33 others in the open air, abandoned to the weather and animals.34 As already stated, there were eyewitnesses to take photographs. During the war, some of these photographs were published in the Western press for propaganda purposes against the central empires. The peace settlement then required that their publication be stopped. Lost in limbo, they remained the prisoners of a political temporality, which we must now consider in order to understand the resurgence of shock images after decades of erasing and forgetting.

From erasing to remembering The unclear, not to mention underground, journeys that the photographs of the Armenian genocide underwent before they re-emerged make it necessary to examine the time lag during which the event remained underexposed – outside history’s door and on the wrong side of the threshold, at which the past acquires a status in collective memory. It may initially seem astonishing that the Armenian delegates themselves did not include the photographs in the publications that they officially submitted to the Paris Peace Conference.35 However, at the end of 1918, the Armenian writer Zabel Essayan (1878–1943)36 – who, in the words of Marc Nichanian, became ‘secretary of the survivors’37 – transported abundant documentation destined for the confer- ence from the Caucasus to Paris. We know that it included photographs, most likely taken by Russian officers.38 However, it is impossible to say exactly which

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE photographs this concerned, because the material fate of the file is still unknown today, and the publications of the time do not allow us to retrace its appear- ance. During this same period, one of high political and judicial stakes for the Armenians, the documentation published in Paris by Aram Andonian, contained a small series of photographs. However, these show no scenes of violence directly linked to the genocide.39 Nevertheless, we should avoid interpreting this poor circulation of the images of violence immediately following the war as indicating a trend of the genocide’s political negation. Leaving aside the primacy of written sources at this time, the phenomenon actually seems to indicate that there was, at the time, no mystery about the event.40 Moreover, as long as the Peace Conference was still going on, the Armenian Question seemed destined to receive the most dignified solution pos- sible. Thus, by stipulating the creation of an Armenian State separate from Turkey – which would be free and independent – the Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) sought to satisfy Armenian national demands; Sèvres also followed the recommen- dations of the Committee of Fifteen at the Peace Conference, advising the creation of an international criminal tribunal to judge those responsible for the crimes against the Armenians.41 However, after the Allies took the side of the Turkish National Movement, none of this came to pass. Although we are not attempting here to explain the reasons for such a turnaround, it is important to emphasise that it accelerated the eviction of the Armenian Question from the international scene. Two points are sufficient to illustrate this: firstly, the abandonment of the inde- pendent nation-state project – with the peace negotiated in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 actually exiling and scattering the Armenians – leaving them stateless;42 and secondly, the Allies’ renunciation of their desire for justice, with an appendix to the Lausanne Treaty proclaiming a general amnesty for all the crimes committed by the Turkish leaders from 1914 to 1922.43 In other words, without the political will to move the lines of international law to encapsulate the specificity of crimes against humanity, the assassination of the Armenians would soon be forgotten. However, the fate of Armenia continued to cause agitation in pro-Armenian circles, in which the most eminent figures put pen to paper in order to denounce the attitude of the powers, although, once again, the examination of a sample of the memoirs published in France and Switzerland in the interwar period shows a striking absence of shock images (as we might call the photographs which later became emblematic of the Armenian’s extermination).44 By contrast, in America, images of lifeless bodies had soon appeared in the press.45 Moreover, the rise of the young cinematographic industry had opened up new per- spectives for American screenwriters, who seized upon the testimony of a young female escapee in order to offer the public a sensationalist film, Ravished Armenia (1919), in which the (toned down) scenes of violence were played by the victim herself.46 Nevertheless, as observed by Sévane Garibian, the ‘mysterious disappear- ance’ of the film in the 1920s coincides with the abandonment of the Armenian case by the Allies and the implementation of a negationist state policy in Turkey.47 This quick introduction to the images’ entry into circulation has not yet done justice to the German networks. From 1922 it was, in particular, German army

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE officers who made it possible for Father Balakian to accompany his testimony with images clearly showing the tortured bodies.48 Germany did not welcome the Armenians on the scale of France, where over sixty thousand refugees went to live during the 1920s. However, it was in this country, a former ally of the Ottoman Empire, that early imaginings of the tragedy suffered by the Armenians crystal- lised. Several factors contributed to this, including the aggressive campaign of denunciation from 1915 by the pastor Johannes Lepsius, who had returned from Constantinople with precise information on the deportations that were taking place.49 We must also look again at the work of Armin Wegner, a major witness to the extermination of the Armenians who, faced with this horror, became an impro- vised photographer against all odds. After the war, he made a point of denouncing the horrors committed by the allies of the Reich to his compatriots. He also held ‘illustrated conferences’,50 where the photographs he had brought back from the Ottoman Empire were projected. Then, in June 1921 at the time of the (momen- tous) trial of Soghomon Tehlirian,51 Wegner was called upon to act as an eyewitness to the genocide. He even offered to present to the jurors photographs he possessed, in support of his statement, but in the end the tribunal had enough proof to make its judgment, so it seems this never occurred. Wegner did not even appear.52 After the Armenian Question was abandoned in Lausanne in 1923, macabre pictures of the Armenians were still being exhibited in Germany, this time on the initiative of a committed conscientious objector who was attempting to demystify the war. To this end, in 1924, Ernst Friedrich published a collection of photo- graphs, aptly entitled Krieg dem Kriege! [War against War!].53 Produced in four languages,54 the work offers ad nauseam the rawest images of the battlefields, in the hope of dissuading people from this murderous choice. This is the ‘true face’ of war, the author emphasises, bombarding readers with photographs that were mostly taken from the German military and medical archives that had been selected for their revulsion value.55 All are accompanied by a caption – or rather a caustic comment – that strongly denounces the manipulation of minds. As the work goes on, the bleak images of the military front give way to the violence inflicted on civil- ians. Three photographs taken from Armin Wegner’s collection offer new visual variations on this aspect of the brutality.56 The chosen images show corpses that are naked or in rags and alone or in groups. In two of the photographs, the victims are children; the caption proclaims that they died of hunger. Such a tragedy might have been attributable to the disturbance of economic circuits in times of war, had the author not identified them as ‘Armenians robbed of their homeland and left to perish from hunger and fatigue by the wayside. Hundreds of thousands were to die in this way (pay attention here: hundreds of thousands!).’57 In spite of these expectations and the publication in 1933 of a German-language historical novel that was inspired by a feat of Armenian resistance,58 Adolf Hitler dismissed the doubts of his generals, asking: ‘Who still talks nowadays of the exter- mination of the Armenians?’59 This simple phrase, pronounced shortly before the invasion of Poland, speaks volumes about how the event occurred without finding a full place in the minds of people at the time.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE On the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide, which fell on 24 April 1965, the sons and daughters of the survivors took to the streets of Yerevan (the capital of Soviet Armenia), Paris and Montreal, among others, to demand justice, after decades of discreet commemoration and apparent resignation.60 At the end of the First World War, the Armenian representatives faced something never before considered in the juridical world. Now, however, mobilisation could hinge upon the concept of genocide, whose status as a criminal offence was established on 9 December 1948 in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations.61 This new age of combat for recognition of the genocide would also draw on iconographic material. In fact, during the April 1968 commemorations, the revitalisation of the Armenian movement drove Armin Wegner to place some of his historical photo- graphs in the Casa Armena in Milan and to authorise their reproduction.62 Then, in 1975, this time marking the sixtieth anniversary of the genocide, a pioneering work was published: Jean-Marie Carzou’s Un Génocide Exemplaire, Arménie 1915 [An Exemplary Genocide, Armenia 1915], which was accompanied by a booklet of photographs.63 Instead of this booklet providing rigorous captions to accompany the photographs, there are comments that take the same accusing register as that used fifty years earlier by the author of Krieg dem Kriege!. Here, the photographs act as emblems. Such a use of photography allowed for approximations, if not errors in dates and attribution.64 What mattered was that the images of the past formed a pillar of collective representations that were indispensable to the public’s remembrance of an event that history had forgotten. In 1995, the organisation by a French diaspora association of an exhibition devoted to images of the genocide marked the peak of this process.65 Still, we are left with an ontological question: how do we give a tangible incarna- tion to an immeasurable crime, one that for this very reason is irreducible to any attempt to fully capture it in photography? We are forced to admit that its mass extent rarely comes across. The technical means of the period and the reign of secrecy did not allow contemporaries to capture the massacres. Nor could they take panoramic shots of concentration camps or mass graves.66 Remembering therefore took place at another level, favouring photographs of vulnerable people: emaciated women and children who became symbols of suffering that the Western spectator can easily associate with the classical repertoire of Christian iconography. In one photograph, a Mater Dolorosa holds her child out in front of her. In another, we see a further massacre of the Innocents.67 Consequently, in images, it is the register of brutality that comes across, rather than genocidal rationality.

The new aesthetic frameworks of memory In a world where violence is constantly broadcast on our screens, thereby con- demning the event to exist only through the spectacle of information, a need has arisen to renew the visual language on the events of 1915.68 In order to maintain links with an increasingly distant past, it becomes necessary to go beyond the invariable reproduction of original images. The past needs to be expressed in forms

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE that the people of the present could understand. In other words, the missing images need to be created.69 Time, which sweeps away the remnants and the survivors, is not the only driver for this aesthetic reworking. The persistence of the Turkish State in denying the facts and, in the same move, escaping the international obligation to shed light on crimes against humanity (for example by looking for the mass graves), created a need for a reflective approach to images. This approach would play on the bounda- ries between the visible and the invisible, the real and the allegorical, in order to address the annihilation of the Armenians. Faced with the multiplication of perspectives, the analysis is necessarily limited to a few photographic proposals. Three main directions emerge, though they are not mutually exclusive. The first searches the bare landscapes and embraces stretches of desert, seeking meaning through emptiness. In contrast, the second is reminiscent of the project of microhistory.70 It shares the same taste for detail, looking at the physical environment for the traces of a silent legacy. In this quest, photography succeeds in capturing bones that have come back to the surface, making the medium more than a mere receptacle: it is a refuge for abandoned remains. Finally, the third approach focuses on the living, using them to better grasp the presence of the disappeared. In all cases, the authors use photography as a means of understanding the catastrophe in the present. Of the three enigmas facing photography, the enigma of the void is closest to the intimate link between genocidal mechanics and space. It is important to remem- ber that the elimination of the Armenians drew very concretely on topography by using gorges, rivers and ravines to kill and as a place to dispose of or pile up the bodies. During the second phase of the genocide, the deportees who survived the death marches were abandoned to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia.71 Here, they were kept in death camps, where hundreds of thousands died. The slowest to die (tens of thousands of prisoners) were massacred away from the camps in remote and expansive terrains or taken to be burned alive in underground caves, where natural-gas fumes helped the flames to catch. As already stated, there are only a few rare images of these events, taken par- ticularly in concentration camps. What is striking in comparison to the images of Nazi or Soviet camps are the frail installations: simple tents clumsily set up on the sandy soil. There is no material or permanent construction that symbolises oppression in the way that barbed wire did in the totalitarian era.72 Instead, the photographs give an impression of anarchy, or even amateurism, allowing doubt to be cast on the criminal’s intention: were they really seeking to commit mass murder with such poor means? The cogs of the genocidal machine are therefore unclear, unless we understand that, in part, they are here before our eyes in the infernal desert surroundings. But disappearing this way, in the heart of wild nature, creates a risk that their status as victims of a state crime will itself become denatured through the appearance of a non-human instigated death, such as, for example, being victim to an unfortunate drought. ‘So? Did we dream this geno- cide?’ Carzou asked, echoing the silence surrounding this page of history in the 1970s.73

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE It is significant to note that immediately following the genocide the Jesuit Antoine Poidebard was addressing the extermination of the Armenians through emptiness, publishing a photograph called ‘Panorama des Montagnes d’Arménie, lieux de Massacres’ (‘Panorama of the Armenian Mountains, the Sites of Massacres’).74 It shows nothing other than the bottom of a mountain chain rising up in the loop of a river. In the foreground is a man (undoubtedly Poidebard’s guide) who is holding horses. In short, the major themes that would later be used to address the Armenian genocide are already present: invisibility of the bodies, hiding by nature, and memory dismissed for lack of evidence. Judging by the works of the generation of photographers born in the 1960s and 1970s, it is clear that the landscape is at the centre of an exploration attempting to establish a dialogue with history.75 The disappearance of the last survivors is certainly no stranger to this approach to genocide via its spatial footprint. The same goes for other genocides besides the one examined here. Poland’s rich, green, natural palette of damp forests and plains is shown in the photography of Roberto Frankenberg, who visited the places to which his ancestors were deported and assassinated. Consequently, the names Majdanek, Sobibor and Auschwitz- Birkenau are associated with visions of mosses, grasses and ferns. ‘The silent vegetation sends me images and sounds’, the artist emphasises,76 finding in pho- tography an appropriate language to tackle the domain of the invisible. In Pascaline Marre’s work,77 the waves of the Black Sea wash peacefully over the surface of a photograph that at first glance conceals its secret. However, her image, dedicated to a survivor called Lussaper, suddenly reveals an intention: the quest for recognition of the places where the Armenians were swallowed up. The dedica- tion to Lussaper reminds us that the Black Sea’s waters belong to the history of the genocide, having closed over the deportees of the coastal regions. The photographic work of Bardig Kouyoumdjian similarly questions the deadly turn of places against the population. Rather belatedly, this grandson of an escapee was led by his search to the Syrian Desert. He brought back a series of photographs published by Actes Sud in 2005, the year commemorating the ninetieth anniversary of the genocide.78 All are born of an encounter with nothingness. ‘For five hours by motorbike, off the beaten track, the landscape is the same’, he notes under one of the pictures. ‘No trace of life, you are surrounded by horizon’.79 The infinite empty space gradually disorients the spectator. Nevertheless, by capturing the desert, by placing it in the rigorous framework of an image, the photographer has also channelled its influence: ‘boxed up’, the vastness is submitted to reflection. The gaze can now consider what was once the ultimate crime scene, burning and endless. Divided up in this way, space becomes an intelligible site for history. The desert finally calls us to reflect upon the secrecy in which mass crimes veil themselves in order to succeed. Thus, it becomes an allegory for the perfect crime, as also seen in a poster against Turkish negationism by Ruben Malayan80 that shows a desert expanse surrounded by mountains, with a barely visible skeleton lying at the foot of a dead shrub.81 Using this montage, the author plays on the reg- isters of absence (‘There were no concentration camps in 1915’, reads the caption)

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE and of the invisible (‘There was the Syrian Desert’), to denounce the lie that the State is still getting away with perpetration. The images of the desert have therefore replaced the brutality with another theme, touching upon the paradoxical modernity of this mass murder. To end up here, they suggest, a political view of space had to be applied to the Ottoman Empire, leaving nothing to chance. In fact, a new generation of historians have demonstrated the mathematical operation of a social and territorial ‘engineering’ designed to get rid of the undesirables there, with their disappearance allowing the Turks here to create a nation-state.82 Bardig Kouyoumdjian’s work is of further interest owing to a change of focus that leads it to look ‘close to the ground’, as said by the advocates of microhis- tory. This is where we find the second enigma: that of the material traces of the genocide, a matter of obsession for all those studying the region. By exploring the immenseness of North Syria in this way, Kouyoumdjian found bones that had been brought back to the surface by water and agricultural ploughing. The photog- rapher inscribed these fragile remains in two ways. The first was an ersatz tomb; a ‘cardboard box, wrapped in a black cloth’, was taken back to the Parisian pho- tographer’s home as a sign of personal appropriation of a symbolic ascendance.83 The second was the photograph that rescued the bones from the void and offered them up to collective memory.84 Although still very little in view of the multitude of skeletons buried under the earth for a century, these fragments are nevertheless the parts representing the whole, tangible traces of a world of graves that forms the substructure of contemporary Turkey.85 The bones are tightly framed in the shot, yet this treatment has allowed human remains to be saved by a displacement to an aesthetic space, where they are finally freed from their servitude to a physical place that condemned them to dust. The civil war that has been ravaging Syria since March 2011 did not spare the old Armenian bones, which have been repeatedly destroyed by the conflict’s bombs. The Deir-es-Zor Memorial, which was dyna- mited in September 2014 by the jihadist forces of the self-proclaimed Islamic State of the Levant, was a target for those still disturbed by the fragments of truth. The photographic act becomes a retroactive rescue operation, a way of sheltering a few bones in portable spaces of memory. The enigma of traces led Pascaline Marre not to the bones but to living people in Anatolia today. By walking the streets of the old Armenian quarter, by scruti- nising the urban buildings, by stepping inside domestic interiors, her detailed art questions a strange closeness: the day-to-day proximity of the citizens with their neighbours from the past, victims of mass murder who were swallowed up in the darkness of lies. The wings of daily existence are filled with absent lives: rooms invaded by debris, crosses etched in the stone, unclear shapes in the corners of houses. How can anyone therefore believe in the undivided reign of a unified memory in Turkey, when the signs of an abolished otherness are still visible every- where? Or does the power of the negationist siphon lie precisely in engulfing a world of signs and meaning? It seems everything is there, visible and familiar, but there is no way of getting to the truth of the older layers. It is like looking at a palimpsest.

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Finally, the living themselves sometimes find that their bodies carry traces. This is the last enigma posed by the memory of the genocide that I wish to evoke. It shifts the focus onto the men and women of Turkey who, despite themselves, find that the imperious resurgence of the truth is catching them up. To understand this, we must remember that the destruction of the Armenian community took place via the forced integration of tens of millions of women and children into Muslim households after they were kidnapped, sold and soon dispossessed of their first identity. After Lausanne, the League of Nations stopped demanding that the Turks free the Armenians they were still holding.86 It thus considered the matter closed. Yet with the situation becoming a taboo, a memory managed to survive in private within families, resolutely mute for decades, until the passage of time finally allowed the ancestors to whisper their stories to their grandchildren. InMy Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir,87 Fethiye Çetin gives an account of this revelation; it created astonishment in Turkey, where many of her fellow citizens began looking at their own bodies as the troubling receptacle of hidden violence – the human legacy in flesh and blood of a major event ignored by their national history. The photographic corpus on the Armenian genocide was long limited to rare images that were taken by non-professionals. Held up as proof after the war, they evaporated after the Armenian Question fell off diplomatic agendas. Later, they provided the heirs of the catastrophe with a pillar of tangible representations on which they could base their demands for international recognition of the genocide. Every fight needs its icons. These photographs were invariably reproduced because of their supposed capacity to record the past and to authenticate it by saying: ‘That, there it is, that’s it!’88 However, the time came for the images to be renewed. To achieve this, profes- sional photographers and artists visited the sites to tackle the question of after- wards. Walking through the desert or stepping inside homes, the photographers saw space as a problematic stage: a palimpsest-place, where the signs of an abol- ished otherness remain highly visible – for those who know how to look. Placing the enigma of traces and remains at the heart of the mission, they provide memory with aesthetic frameworks, allowing it to metabolise the void to create collective landmarks.

Notes

1 Translated from the author’s French by Cadenza Academic Translations. 2 P. Pachet, ‘Indifférence, Fabulation et Negation’, in C. Coquio (ed.), L’histoire Trouée: Négation et Témoignage (Nantes, L’Atalante, 2003), 249–55. 3 T. Hoffmann & G. Koutcharian, ‘Images that Horrify and Indict: Pictorial Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of Armenians from 1877 to 1922’, Armenian Review, 45 (1992), 53–184; D. Kévonian, ‘Fotografie del Genocidio Degli Armeni e Poste in Gioco della Storiografia’,Memoria e Ricerca, Rivista di Storia Contemporanea. Fotografia e Violenza: Visioni della Brutalità dalla Grande Guerra ad Oggi, 20 (2005), 93–110; D. Kévonian, ‘Photographie,

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Génocide et Transmission: L’exemple Arménien’, Les Cahiers de la Shoah, 8:1 (2005), 119–49; B. Guerzoni, Cancellare un Popolo. Immagini e Documenti del Genocidio Armeno (Milan, Mimesis, 2013). 4 Looking purely at the question of the Armenian genocide, see in particular S. Rollet, Une Éthique du Regard: Le Cinéma Face à la Catastrophe, d’Alain Resnais à Rithy Panh (Paris, Hermann, 2011); M.-A. Baronian, Mémoire et Image: Regards sur la Catastrophe Arménienne (Lausanne, L’Âge d’Homme, 2013). 5 According to the distinction that guides André Rouillé’s reflection in La Photographie: Entre Document et Art Contemporain (Paris, Gallimard, 2005). 6 G. Tchalkhouchian, Le Livre Rouge (Paris, Veradzenount, 1919), p. 38. 7 This is the name of the Turkish revolutionary and nationalist political organisation that governed the Ottoman Empire from 1908 (also known as the Young Turk Party). The most extremist wing of the organisation occupied key posts in government during the First World War and planned the Armenian genocide. 8 Tchalkhouchian, Le Livre Rouge, pp. 105–7. 9 Two decrees (from 28 August and 10 September 1915 respectively) forbade photographs of the deportees. See Kévonian, ‘Fotografie del Genocidio’, 94. 10 As Susan Sontag emphasises, it was not until the availability of lightweight equipment and the replacement of plates by film that cameras were able to enter the battlefield. The Spanish Civil War was the first conflict caught live in photographs. See S. Sontag, Devant la Douleur des Autres (Paris, Christian Bourgois, 2003), p. 28. 11 With reference to G. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2003). The production context for photographs of the genocide is analysed in Guerzoni, Cancellare un Popolo, pp. 133–207. 12 On this solemn note of protest from France, Great Britain and Russia, see S. Garibian, Le Crime contre l’Humanité au Regard des Principes Fondateurs de l’État Moderne: Naissance et Consécration d’un Concept (Brussels, Bruylant, 2009), p. 82 onwards. 13 Importantly, the great eyewitness of the genocide, Armin Wegner, speaks of ‘images of terror and accusation’ with reference to the photographic plates that he hid in his belt. See Anna Maria Samuelli et al., (eds), Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia, 1915: Immagini e Testimonianze (Milan, Guerini e Associati, 2005), p. 71. 14 According to the estimates of the authors, thirty-two out of two hundred images directly concern the genocide. See Hoffmann & Koutcharian, ‘Images that Horrify and Indict’, 55. 15 The Armenian National Institute (Washington, DC) has put part of the Wegner Collection online. URL: http://www.armenian-genocide.org (accessed 15 March); for an in-depth presentation of the different photographic collections, refer to the works listed in note 2, as well as the website of the Armenian Genocide Museum. URL: http://www.genocide-museum.am (accessed 15 March). 16 It is important to remember that during the first global conflict there was a military alliance between the Reich and the Ottoman Empire. 17 Wegner published several works on the subject, in particular see A . Wegner,

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE Der Weg ohne Heimkehr (Dresden, Sibyllen Verlag, 1919); and Im Hause der Glückseligkeit: Aufzeichnungen aus der Türkei (Dresden, Sibyllen Verlag, 1920). 18 Samuelli et al., Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia, p. 37. 19 For a photo album showing mass graves, published in 1917 in Tiflis, where there was a large and influential Armenian community see Kévonian, ‘Fotografie del Genocidio’, 97; the reproduction of a photograph taken on the Russian front can be found in Hoffmann and Koutcharian, ‘Images that Horrify and Indict’, 90. 20 H. Barby, Au Pays de l’Épouvante: L’Arménie Martyre (Paris, Albin Michel, 1917). 21 The place is now called Tbilisi, the current capital of the Republic of Georgia. 22 Barby, Au Pays de l’Épouvante, p. 89. 23 A subject of the Russian Empire, this Georgian published an article on Baskane in the periodical Armenia i Voïna, 10 (1916); it is used by Tchalkhouchian in Le Livre Rouge, pp. 47–50. 24 These are Kipiani’s words, cited by Tchalkhouchian in Le Livre Rouge, p. 49. 25 Ibid. 26 See H. Dumas & R. Korman, ‘Espaces de la Mémoire du Génocide des Tutsis au Rwanda: Mémoriaux et Lieux de Mémoire’, Afrique Contemporaine, 238:2 (2011), 22–3. 27 H. Dumas, ‘Histoire, Justice et Réconciliation: Les Juridictions Gacaca au Rwanda’, Mouvements 53:1 (2008), 110–17; Dumas, ‘Gacaca Courts in Rwanda: A Local Justice for a Local Genocide History?’, in C. Delage & P. Goodrich (eds), The Scene of the Mass Crime: History, Film and International Tribunals (London, Routledge, 2012), 57–74. 28 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established in 1994 in Arusha, Tanzania. 29 During late 1918, in the conquered Ottoman Empire, these were the Administrative Investigation Commission or ‘Mazhar’ and the courts marshal. See V. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York, Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 317–43; V. Dadrian & T. Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials (New York, Berghahn Books, 2011). There was also the Peace Conference in Paris from January 1919 to August 1920; finally, it is necessary to mention the key role played in the collection of documents by the Information Bureau, created in 1919, on the initiative of the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople. See R. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (New York, I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 4. 30 The first testimonies of this type were published from 1916 in theBlue Book by the British Government entitled The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1916. There were documents presented in 1916 by Viscount James Bryce and Arnold J. Toynbee. Also in 1916, the Bericht über die Lage des Armenischen Volkes in der Türkei (Report on the Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey) was published by the pastor Johannes Lepsius in Germany. This document will be examined later. 31 See for example the memoirs of Naïm Bey (chief secretary for the administration

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE of deportees in Alep), transcribed and published by Aram Andonian in The Memoirs of Naïm Bey (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1920). 32 The North Mesopotamian sectors of Syria, having contained concentration camps, were searched by the Armenians. See Kévonian, ‘Photographie, Génocide et Transmission’, 127. 33 The doctor Tevfik Rüştü, a member of the Supreme Health Council, was charged with locating the main graves and pouring quicklime into them to speed up the decomposition of the bodies. See T. Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2006), p. 363. 34 Faced with limbs that had been scattered and ripped apart, Kipiani commented that: ‘During the winter, dogs and wolves devoured many of the corpses. This is proven by the scattered hands and feet all across Tchapane.’ Kipiani is cited by Tchalkhouchian in Le Livre Rouge, p. 50. 35 See Armenian National Delegation, Mémorandum sur la Question Arménienne (Paris, Imprimerie M. Flinikowski, 1918); Armenian Delegation integral to the Peace Conference, La Question Arménienne devant la Conférence de la Paix (Paris, Imprimerie de P. Dupont, 1919). 36 She herself escaped the roundup of 24 April 1915. 37 She collected the testimonies of this roundup. See the afterword by Marc Nichanian in H. Toroyan & Z. Essayan, L’Agonie d’un Peuple (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2013), p. 156. 38 M. Nichanian, Entre l’Art et le Témoignage: La Révolution Nationale, vol. 1 (Geneva, MētisPresses, 2006), p. 258. 39 Andonian, The Memoirs of Naïm Bey. They show photographs of orphans and captives gathered prior to execution. A journalist arrested in Istanbul during the roundup of 24 April 1915 (specifically targeting the Armenian elites of the Ottoman capital), Andonian survived deportation, then, as a refugee in Paris, spent the rest of his life collecting documentation on the genocide, kept in the Nubar Pacha Library. 40 Kévonian, ‘Fotografie del Genocidio’, 103–4. 41 Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, pp. 304–5; S. Garibian, ‘From the 1915 Allied Joint Declaration to the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres: Back to an International Criminal Law in Progress’, Armenian Review, 52:1–2 (2010), 87–102. 42 On this, see D. Kévonian, Réfugiés et Diplomatie Humanitaire: Les Acteurs Européens et la Scène Proche-orientale pendant l’Entre-deux-guerres (Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004). 43 Garibian, Le Crime contre l’Humanité, p. 98. 44 See for example the many publications of the Swiss pastor Antony Krafft-Bonnard or Frédéric Macler’s La Nation Arménienne: Son passé, ses Malheurs (Paris, Librairie Fischbacher, 1924); finally, even Aram Turabian’s opus follows the same model as preceding publications, only showing the crime through groups of orphans left in the care of the American charity Near East Relief. See A. Turabian, L’Éternelle victime de la Diplomatie Européenne (Marseille, Imprimerie Nouvelle, 1929).

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 45 For an analysis of the American publications, see Kévonian, ‘Fotografie del Genocidio’, 99–102. 46 A. Slide (ed.), Ravished Armenia and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian (London, Scarecrow Press, 1997), p. 5 onwards. 47 Sévane Garibian studied this film in ‘Ravished Armenia (1919): Bearing Witness in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Some Thoughts on a Film-Ordeal’, in J. Chabot, R. Godin, S. Kappler & S. Kasparian (eds), Mass Media and the Genocide of the Armenians: One Hundred Years of Uncertain Representation, (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2015), pp. 37–54. 48 K. Balakian, Hay Goġgot’an [Armenian Golgotha] (Vienna, Cong. Mekhitariste, 1922); Guerzoni, Cancellare un Popolo, p. 215. 49 In summer 1916, Pastor Lepsius, President of the Deutsche Orientalische Mission and the Deutsche Armenische Gesellschaft, published twenty thousand copies of Bericht über die Lage des Armenischen Volkes in der Türkei (Report on the Situation of the Armenian People in Turkey). 50 Guerzoni, Cancellare un Popolo, p. 232 onwards. 51 An Armenian student and orphan of the genocide, Tehlirian killed Talaat Pacha, the former Ottoman minister of the interior and the main planner for the extermination program, on the street in Berlin. He was not acting alone, but as part of an operation called Nemesis (the name of the Greek goddess of revenge or righteous anger), piloted by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. 52 The author wishes to thank Sévane Garibian for this point. See S. Garibian, ‘Ordonné par le Cadavre de ma Mère: Talaat Pacha, ou l’Assassinat Vengeur d’un Condamné à Mort’, in S. Garibian (ed.), La Mort du Bourreau: Justices et Vengeances Face aux Crimes de Masse (Paris, Petra, forthcoming); the shorthand minutes of Soghomon Tehlirian’s trial were published in full in 1921 by German publishers and appeared in French in Justicier du Génocide Arménien (Paris, Éditions Diaspora, 1981), p. 212, in relation to Wegner; see also Frédéric Macler’s article on the subject at the time, ‘Le Procès de Talaat Pacha’, Revue des Études Arméniennes, 3:1 (1922), 139–45, which hardly addresses the photographic proof that Wegner supposedly presented to the tribunal, contrary to the affirmations of Kévonian, ‘Fotografie del Genocidio’, 103n34. 53 E. Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege! (Berlin, Verlag, 1924; Munich, Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 2004). 54 German, French, English and Dutch. 55 As stated in Sontag, Devant la Douleur des Autres, p. 22. 56 Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege!, pp. 152–4. 57 Ibid., p. 152. (Translator’s note: Quotation back-translated from the French- language version of this article.) 58 The novel in question was Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, first published in Vienna in 1933. 59 On these words from Hitler, see Y. Ternon, ‘La Qualité de la Prevue: À Propos des Documents Andonian et de la Petite Phrase d’Hitler’, in CDCA (ed.), Actualité du Génocide des Arméniens (Paris, Édipol, 1999), pp. 135–42. 60 On the effervescence of this commemoration in Soviet Armenia, see

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Anouche Kunth HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE C. Mouradian, L’Arménie: De Staline à Gorbatchev: Histoire d’une République Soviétique (Paris, Ramsay, 1990), p. 284. 61 Garibian, Le Crime contre l’Humanité, pp. 101–2. 62 Samuelli et al., Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia, p. 219. 63 J.-M. Carzou, Un Génocide Exemplaire, Arménie 1915 (Paris, Flammarion, 1975). 64 It was not until 1992 that two researchers conducted a critical examination of the available corpus. The work was indispensable in elevating images to the rank of historical sources. The article in question was that cited above, Hoffmann & Koutcharian, ‘Images that Horrify and Indict’. 65 See the analyses in Kévonian, ‘Photographie, Génocide et Transmission’, 122–3, 141–2, on this event (Images du XXe Siècle: Le Génocide des Arméniens) held by the organisation Terre et Culture. 66 This trait is remarkably different to the possibility of using a telephoto lens to film scenes of the massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda. For example, a short video extract was shown at the Rwanda – 2014 exhibition at the Mémorial de la Shoah (Paris’s Holocaust memorial), upon the twenty-year commemoration of the genocide. 67 On representations of victims in the Christian interpretive framework, see J. Hanrot, La Madone de Bentalha: Histoire d’une Photographie (Paris, Armand Colin, 2012), p. 69 onwards. 68 On this subject, see Baronian, Mémoire et Image. 69 Rollet’s analysis of Atom Egoyan’s filmed images provides useful reading on this. See Rollet, Une Éthique du Regard, p. 120 onwards. 70 This historiographical current was born in Italy at the end of the 1970s and proposes to reduce the scale of analysis to draw attention not to structures but to individuals seen ‘through the magnifying glass’. 71 Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, p. 625 onwards. 72 O. Razac, Barbed Wire: A Political History (London, Profiles Books, 2002). 73 Carzou, Un Génocide Exemplaire, p. 210. 74 A. Poidebard, Carnet de Route d’un Aumônier de Cavalerie: D’Arménie au Front Français, Mai 1914-décembre 1917 (Paris, Payot et Cie, 1919), p. 1. 75 Here I refer readers to an article on the relationships between mass murder and the landscape. See A. Kunth, ‘De la Catastrophe au Chaos: Mémoires Paysagères de l’Arménie’, Théorème 19 (2014), 56–67. 76 Artist’s words on his work, ‘Traces 1’, displayed at the Maison de la Culture Yiddish, Paris, winter 2014–15. 77 P. Marre, Fantômes d’Anatolie: Regards sur le Génocide Arménien (Pascaline Marre, 2014). See the photographer’s personal site. URL: http://www. pascalinemarre.com (accessed 14 April 2015). 78 B. Kouyoumdjian & C. Siméone, Deir-es-Zor. Sur les Traces du Génocide Arménien de 1915 (Arles, Actes Sud, 2005). 79 Kouyoumdjian & Siméone, Deir-es-Zor, p. 94. 80 Ruben Malayan is a founding member of ‘Armenian Genocide in Contemporary Graphic & Art Posters’. URL: http://www.armeniangenocideposters.org (accessed 14 April 2015).

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:45 Traces, bones, desert HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE 81 Poster entitled ‘Syrian Desert’, created for the ninety-first annual commemorations of 24 April 2006. 82 See the works of Fuat Dundar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878–1918) (New Brunswick, Transaction Publishers, 2010); U. Ü. Üngör, ‘Seeing Like a Nation-State: Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913–1950’, in D. Schaller & J. Zimmerer (eds), Late Ottoman Genocides: the Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies (London, Routledge, 2009), pp. 9–33. 83 Kouyoumdjian & Siméone, Deir-es-Zor, p. 113. 84 Ibid., pp. 111–12, 117. 85 As emphasised in Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, p. 1. The physical destruction of the Armenians was seen as the necessary condition for the construction of a Turkish nation state. 86 J.-M. Chaumont, Le Mythe de la Traite des Blanches: Enquête sur la Fabrication d’un Fléau (Paris, La Découverte, 2009), pp. 205–18. 87 F. Çetin, My Grandmother: An Armenian-Turkish Memoir (London, Verso, 2012). 88 R. Barthes, La Chambre Claire: Note sur la Photographie (Paris, L’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1980), pp. 15–16.

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José López Mazz & Mónica Berón (eds), Indicadores Arqueológicos de la Violencia, Guerra y Conflicto en Sudamérica (Uruguay, University of the Republic and the Sectorial Commission of Scientific Research, 2014, 219 pp.)

Indicadores arqueológicos de la violencia displays archaeology’s historical interest in different forms of physical conflict and establishes something of a literary magnitude through its analysis of different types of intra- and inter-group violence. The causes and consequences of these conflicts, including wars, are interrogated from many perspectives and theoretical approaches, studied through the analysis of different material remains to enlighten the shapes and patterns of violence in historic societies. Since the publication of works within the discipline’s materialist trends in the early 1970s, which widely discussed the romantic idea of the ‘noble savage’, we have seen exponential progress in the investigation and interpretation of different types of archaeological records that tackle an analysis of social conflict throughout history. Mazz and Berón’s book, dedicated to the South American context, success- fully demonstrates this great evolution and the development of the archeology of conflict in over four decades of its thought and research. Consisting of nine chapters, the book covers this development through a wide range of examined chrono-cultural diversity and demonstrates how archaeologi- cal and anthropological indicators can be used to infer and analyse violence and social conflict in the South American context. The chapters raise the need for understanding the different modes of violence and the social, economic and politi- cal relationships of which conflict is a part. This is achieved through the volume’s compilation of papers presented at the Symposium ‘Archaeological Indicators of Violence, War and Conflict in pre-Hispanic Societies’, as part of the XV National Archaeology Conference of Argentina, which includes papers from researchers working across the Southern Cone. As a result, there is discussion over a range of phenomena across a wide geographic and temporal spectrum, including the con- sideration of violence’s contemporary forms. This inclusion of a wide territorial range enables a thorough grasp of different conflicts’ type and scale: from the study of small-scale societies such as northeastern Patagonia in Chapter 5 to a systematic analysis of the types of conflict at regional and macro-regional levels, including a study of violence among hunter-gatherers in the western part of the Argentinean Pampa in Chapter 4.

88 Human Remains and Violence, Volume 1, No. 2 (2015), 88–96 © Manchester University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/HRV.1.2.8 Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE The volume also presents a broad representation of work in different contexts of the Southern Cone’s prehistory, ranging from the end of the Middle Holocene to the Late Holocene period (3500–300 BCE). The first seven chapters analyse differ- ent contexts where the archaeological record of violence (whether direct or indi- rect) is understood as evidence of conflict. In this regard some authors engage with important discussions about the complexity of interpreting the material record within these contexts. This is the case, for instance, in Chapter 1, where López Mazz and Moreno explore the archaeological visibility of the conflict in Uruguay. Other contributions examine issues connected to cases of ritual violence or the symbolism of archaeological evidence – as shown by the work of Lessa and Gaspar in Brazil and Pacheco and Retamal in Chile in Chapters 3 and 7 respectively. The inter- pretation of different evidence allows the authors to contrast the violent contexts described by ethnographic sources and to provide empirical data in order to delve further into an understanding of conflict’s processes in the distant and recent past. Other chapters consider the role that conflict played in the development and reaffirmation of identity (see, for instance, Chapter 6) or the intercultural violence that took place at the time of European colonisation (discussed in Chapter 2). Additionally, Chapter 8 provides an interesting theoretical approach to the study of violence’s historical materiality. The final chapter, written by López Mazz et al., presents an investigation into Uruguay’s recent traumatic past, analysing how the material remains of political violence are considered forms of evidence or proof of human rights violation during the civil-military dictatorship that occurred between 1973 and 1985. This volume superbly reflects how archeology enables the reconstruction of his- torical events associated with violence and conflict in order to interpret complex cultural processes alongside other disciplines over time. It is consequently one of the most complete works to have appeared on the archeology of conflict and vio- lence in the Southern Cone to date, essential reading for understanding the nature of the region’s conflict from its origins to the contemporary period. Laura Muñoz Encinar, Universidad de Extremadura

David D. Caron, Michael J. Kelly & Anastasia Telesetsky (eds), The International Law of Disaster Relief (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 412 pp., £65.00 hardback).

The International Law of Disaster Relief is, perhaps surprisingly, an intriguing title. Surprisingly because, although disasters strike at a regular – if not seemingly increasing – pace and understandably trigger humanitarian relief and responses, international disaster law is, as pointed out by Kelly in the introduction to this collection of essays, ‘yet to be fully articulated’. This remark rightly mirrors the position taken by Caron in his preface:

Few aspects of the future are certain. Yet, it is certain that catastrophes, attended by widespread suffering, are a part of our collective future … Curiously, however, the

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE international legal order addressing this certain future is, in comparison to other far less certain areas of international affairs, both relatively undeveloped in practice and unexamined in the academic legal literature.

By aiming at bridging the gap between (public) international law on the one hand and disaster relief on the other, this volume is undoubtedly a welcome and much- needed addition to the (non)existing literature in this specific area of international law. As such, it is hoped that it will constitute a stepping stone towards further academic reflection on, and practical elaboration of, international legal norms in this field. Such legal development will require terminological and normative precision and, in this respect, this volume could have benefited from further semantic clari- fications, if not clarity. One such example lies in the use of the term ‘disaster’. In his introduction, Kelly points out that ‘human activity can also contribute to the occurrence of disasters’, thus suggesting the inclusion within the notion of dis- asters of state-generated and/or human-induced events. Kelly and other authors also refer to ‘catastrophes’, thereby prompting the question of whether the two terms are to be employed interchangeably. Others refer to ‘natural disasters’, an expression which is however problematic and controversial. As Smith points out, ‘[i]t is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster’.1 That the volume chooses not to engage with inter- or multi-disciplinarity analysis in favour of focusing solely and exclusively on the law is in itself not a problem. To the contrary, it is about time legal scholars explore the law of disaster relief. Yet, if international law and disaster relief are to be both fully understood and grasped, a purely legal standpoint might well be too restrictive. In this sense, the specification made by Clement at the very beginning of her contribu- tion (Chapter 5) is a useful clarification that ‘[f]or the purposes of this paper, the term “disaster” is defined as in the Guidelines for the Domestic Facilitation and Regulation of International Disaster Relief and Initial Recovery Assistance’, that is: ‘a serious disruption of the functioning of society, which poses a significant, wide- spread threat to human life, health, property or the environment, whether arising from accident, nature or human activity, whether developing suddenly or as the result of long-term processes, but excluding armed conflict’. Whether this is the overarching definition of the term employed throughout the volume is however not entirely clear and, although admittedly not an easy task, delineating the con- tours of the notion of ‘disaster’ would have contributed to delimiting the scope of application of the law of disaster relief. Another such example is in the use of the term ‘relief’. While the lack of general definition might not be as problematic insofar as each contributor addresses the notion and thus participates in the debate of what actually constitutes relief, it may still lead to some confusion. For instance, while the volume’s final part title – ‘Disaster Prevention and Relief’ – suggests that ‘relief’ and ‘prevention’ are therein equatable, the framework of the ‘disaster cycle’, as explored by Farber in Chapter 1 and which includes both ‘pre-disaster preparation and post-disaster reconstruc- tion’, appears to contradict such equivalence. These definitional issues aside, the

90 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 88–96

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE ­contributions all participate in making this book an insightful and thought-provoking read. The first part of the volume – devoted to the legal theory of international dis- aster relief – is a welcome localisation of disaster relief within the realm of public international law. Arguably the most theoretical part of the book, it addresses the current state of international law, proposes frameworks for thinking about disaster relief and develops suggestions for its evolution. The second part adopts a more practical standpoint by focusing on different case studies; the choice of which however remains slightly obscure. While Clement offers an illuminating analysis of the above-mentioned IDLR Guidelines and of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, Nakjavani Bookmiller innovatively explores the role and work of the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG). Yet, this part of the volume could arguably have benefited from a more holistic approach, giving attention to the status and role of other organisations which operate with the mandate of intervening in the wake of disasters. One can think for example of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). Instead, there is an interesting – but perhaps misplaced – analysis of nuclear dis- asters in Japan. Considering that it deals with the ‘release of radioactive substance into the sea’ (Chapter 6), and thus partly with the law of the sea, this contribution could have been presented in parallel with the discussion on outer space (Chapter 12) located in the fourth part of the volume on the prevention of disaster by state actors. The use of the sea in the context of international law and disaster relief is a question that has recently become all the more pressing in light of the recent disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 370 on 8 March 2014 and the ensuing investigations. In this sense, one could regret that investigations per se are not really addressed in this volume. But it is probably the third part of the volume on ‘the right of access to international disaster relief’ that would have benefited the most from a more all-encompassing and complete approach. It addresses the vulnerability of both states and individuals in the face of disaster relief. In doing so, however, it problematically omits some extremely vulnerable groups and, in particular, women and children. The two-fold strength of this book lies in its theme and ambition. It addresses an under-researched topic in international law and chooses to do so by exploring a wide range of different issues. To some extent, its strength may also be its weak- ness, not due to the lack of quality of its contributions but simply because each of the volume’s five constitutive parts would deserve – at least – a monograph. This cannot of course be held against the book which will ultimately be of great interest to a fairly heteroclite readership; the impact of the reflections contained therein go beyond international law and disaster relief studies stricto sensu and into mass vio- lence studies. Caron’s mention of the ‘ad hoc incoherence of legal and institutional responses’ may therefore resonate strongly with anyone dealing with international criminal law and/or post-conflict justice.

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1 See for example N. Smith, ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster’, SSRC, 11 June 2006. URL: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/ (accessed 4 June 2015). Caroline Fournet, University of Groningen

Mary H. Dudley, Mass Fatality Management: Concise Field Guide (Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2014, 168 pp., £39.99 paperback).

The unpredictability of mass fatality incidents, whether natural or manmade, makes a planned response one of the greatest challenges for local, national and international agencies. The scale of the incident, its cause and therefore the number of personnel required to respond, often entails a management plan is essential for a controlled and methodical approach to the operation. Consequently, a management field guide to assist in developing such a plan and the training of multiagency responders, as pioneered here by Dudley, is a potentially valuable resource for co-ordinating the rescue and treatment of survivors, facilitating the repair and maintenance of basic services and initiating the recovery and management of bodies. While Mass Fatality Management is intended to provide this assistance, content is heavily driven by the author’s respected role as a pathologist and detracts from the book’s potential to exist as a complete management field guide for all personnel attending a mass fatality incident. From the outset, Dudley introduces the field guide as a manual to help develop a mass fatality plan with local agencies in mind. The chapters – Management Overview, Administration Operations, Incident Site, Morgue Operations, Family Assistance Centre, Weapons of Mass Destruction and Mass Burial – cover the major elements of a mass fatality incident response, each laid out in bullet point format with corresponding diagrams and forms likely to be used at every stage, suiting the books objective to deliver a concise field manual. However, the chapter’s logical sequencing is at odds with the approach to planning a mass fatality response from a field perspective where the level and type of response is dictated by the type of incident; the assessment of an incident site is therefore paramount, yet this is not approached until Chapter 3. Discussing the scene type first would have helped contextualise the book’s chapters and been beneficial to personnel intending to use the book as a training aid. The front loading of management and administrative content sets the tone for the guide as one more suitable for agency managers rather than personnel responding to the incident on the ground, as set out by the author. While the Management Overview and Administration Operations chapters are comprehensive in covering the necessary equipment, resources and personnel required, the rationales for each element and how it contributes to the rescue and treatment of survivors and the repair and maintenance of basic services does not come to the fore. The author does, however, deliver a comprehensive overview of the recovery and management of bodies, and here Dudley’s field of expertise becomes evident.

92 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 88–96

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE The layout of the Morgue Operations chapter is in this regard systematic and well considered for the planning and training of mortuary staff, covering workflow and each work station’s operations, including radiography, odontology, fingerprinting and DNA, its overall purpose and the personnel in attendance. However, content is heavily biased towards the role of mortuary staff and arguably too specialised for local agency personnel looking to the manual for guidance. The inclusion of administrative forms throughout the book is a helpful addition but some forms, such as those on external and internal body examinations, dental recording and post-mortem radiography, are themselves specific to the responsibilities of spe- cialised staff who operate within a mortuary and are perhaps beyond the book’s intended scope. Despite this chapter’s clarity and concision, the remaining chapters have not been afforded the same approach and hinder the field guide’s user from being able to make informed decisions about the best plan to adopt during different mass fatality scenarios. The occasional lack of content development discourages the user from rationalising aspects of incident response with which they are unfamiliar, defeating the secondary purpose of the book as a training manual for all personnel. Regardless of these drawbacks, the book offers a practical and comprehensive checklist of operational procedures that responders can cross-reference during a mass fatality incident and use to engage discussions. The extensive appendices provide form templates that local agencies can effectively utilise and adapt to suit their individual operational needs. For example, considerations of personnel liabil- ity, timesheets, waivers and confidentiality are beyond the requirements of some specialists operating on the ground, but are nonetheless necessary for working operations. From a training perspective the book provides a basic overview of operational procedures, and first time responders would benefit from reading the guide as a means of familiarisation with the whole operation while working within their expert sphere. Overall this book has a place within the spectrum of mass fatality response literature, but perhaps not in the manner in which the author intended. Patricia Furphy, Liverpool John Moores University

W.J. Mike Groen, Nicholas Márquez-Grant, Robert C. Janaway (eds), Forensic Archaeology: A Global Perspective (Chichester, Wiley, 2015, 616 pp., £90.00 hardback).

Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Forensic Archaeology: A Global Perspective provides an opportunity for reflection over the past, present and future of forensic archaeology. Editors and contributors Mike Groen, Nicholas Márquez-Grant and Robert Janaway individually possess a wealth of experience within the discipline and have, collectively, produced an essential framework for the investigation of buried remains. Encompassing the collaboration of 127 contributors, and comprising six continents, the literature firmly establishes a current, original and definitive collection of archaeological

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE frameworks within and beyond global and legal perspectives. Presenting this context, information is facilitated by digestible diagrams, example case studies and images, allowing a broader appreciation of the complex nature of this emerging discipline. Structured through the presentation of ‘key questions’ posed to its contributors, each chapter provides content on the current forensic archaeological status of par- ticular regions, including an examination of medico-legal frameworks, techniques applied to individual and mass graves, historical context, government and regula- tory practice, applied methods and techniques, involved organisations, potential training opportunities and future trends. The intricacy of forensic archaeology is highlighted through contrasting various countries’ techniques, methods and approaches, rapidly providing the reader context region by region. Through the amalgamation of its contributors, the various stages of forensic archaeology’s evolutionary progress are clearly outlined among the range of incor- porated countries. Despite much deliberation over defining disciplinary categories (from Anthropology to Pathology), the collection of literature displays techniques and practices implemented worldwide. Furthermore, the book demonstrates how success in applied methods demands the subject’s awareness of cultural differences and sensitivities. Identifying areas of significance, certain chapters acknowledge inaccuracies within former methodologies and the mistakes learnt and rectified through government policy (for example see Croatia’s Ministry of Defence). From digging to the digital, an immense amount of material is covered, exhibit- ing how forensic archaeology has incorporated suitable methodologies to unique circumstances. Currently, there is no alternative resource regarding the contemporary status of forensic archaeology from a global perspective. While other sources such as Forensic Approaches to Buried Remains (Hunter, Simpson & Sturdy Colls, 2013) and Forensic Archaeology: Advances in Theory and Practise (Hunter & Cox, 2005) focus on specific methods and techniques utilised within the field, this book com- prises an essential point of reference to (forensic) anthropologists, archaeologists, scientists, police officers, humanitarians, human rights investigators and other persons of interest within scenes of international crime. Furthermore, the easily developed narrative can allow a reader with no prior knowledge to easily attain an understanding. The body of text includes current references and refers to literary works from renowned specialists, some of whom have provided written contributions, dis- playing the desire to enhance and promote the field’s abilities in a legal context. While the book centres on forensic archaeology, a wider context in which this information can be used has been subtlety interwoven. Intelligently consolidat- ing information from its global standpoint, the editors also grant appreciation of forensic archaeology through alternative landscapes. From the rocky mountains of Switzerland to sandy subsurface compositions in Panama, the book provides an understanding of the discipline’s ‘modified’ approaches to unique terrains and its flexibility and adaptation across varying situations. Forensic archaeology is and continues to exist as a worldwide necessity. Specific chapters are dedicated to demonstrating the collaboration of certain countries,

94 Human Remains and Violence 1/2 (2015), 88–96

Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE their exchange and integration of policies and guidelines developed through case by case instances. The majority of chapters detail applied forensic archaeological techniques alongside further acknowledgment of alternative methods that can and should be applied. A wider context for understanding the emerging disci- plinary is displayed through the inclusion of non-governmental organisations, describing independent bodies’ procedures and developments and their interac- tion with governmental regulations. This book displays ‘gaps’ in countries where increased knowledge of the subject could enhance criminal prosecutions involv- ing the discovery of buried remains and provide further understanding of past atrocities. The structure of the book allows the user to observe similarities between global methods applied to forensic archaeology and successfully highlight areas of improvement within current systems. This is supported by the inclusion of back- ground context at the beginning of each chapter. Written in a clear and digestible manner, the literature supplies an ultimate resource for forensic archaeologists and should sit on the bookshelf of anyone connected to the field. Janos Kerti, Staffordshire University

M. Cox, A. Flavel, I. Hanson, J. Laver, R. Wessling (eds), The Scientific Investigation of Mass Graves: Towards Protocols and Standard Operating Procedures (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, 594 pp., £39.99 paperback).

The Scientific Investigation of Mass Graves was first published in 2008, and the fact that it has since been reprinted twice, including as a paperback, demonstrates its importance and usefulness. The book seeks to provide a means of standardising the work that occurs during the investigation of mass graves. This is an important goal, especially when we consider the large range of contexts in which forensic archaeology and anthropology are practiced, the varied backgrounds of the practitioners and the different legal systems in which they operate. When the book was first published, the ideal of international standards was at the forefront of the discipline – something that was born out of the rapid rise in forensic archaeology and anthropology in Europe and the increased awareness of the discipline in the public and judicial eye. The global context is a little different now, and while the issue of standardised and comparable practice has not gone away, the notion of international standards is being interestingly critiqued.1 Arguably part of the reason for this slight shift is due to the rise in the number of voices originating from Latin America and an associated gradual cessation of the paternalistic European view of forensic archaeological and anthropological practice. When the book is viewed through this new lens, it is worth asking the question: is it still relevant? The book is comprised of ten chapters split into two sections. In the shorter, first section, methods of grave location and excavation are discussed and then related to the vast number of recording forms provided. The second section presents a series of standard operating procedures which focus on activities at the grave site, in the mortuary and the application of the forensic sciences more

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58 Book Reviews HUMAN REMAINS & VIOLENCE broadly. The discussions in these chapters tend to be a little superficial, but that is because the contributors clearly want to focus on their recommended methodolo- gies and techniques. While there is much interesting content and useful pointers are presented throughout, it is here where the book has real strength. Thus it pro- vides a useful companion to those who intend to examine skeletal remains from forensic contexts or indeed during teaching sessions in universities. The signifi- cance of having all of this information in one place should not be underestimated, and it is a testament to the efforts of the authors that this has worked here so well. From this perspective, the book still has relevance to the community. The volume has many useful figures and tables, generally designed to help the reader work through the processes and techniques involved in the recovery and examination of human remains from grave sites. Photographs are also present, giving case-based examples of the issues being discussed; however, given they are published in greyscale, they are often less useful than the figures or tables and at times poorly reproduced. The reference list is impressive, although starting to become a little out-of-date (an inevitable function of the book’s republishing rather than its rewriting and updating). Overall, and despite its very British emphasis, this is nonetheless a useful book which will help with the technical aspects of investigating skeletal remains in foren- sic contexts. Although it is also recommended for use in teaching laboratories, the reader is only advised not to make it the subject’s only book on the shelf.

Note

1 See for example G. Fowler & T. J. U. Thompson, ‘A Mere Technical Exercise? Challenges and technological solutions to the identification of individuals in mass grave scenarios in the modern context’ in É. Anstett & J.-M. Dreyfus (eds), Human Remains and Identification: Mass Violence, Genocide and the ‘Forensic Turn’ (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015); See also many of the chapters in Z. Crossland & R. Joyce, Disturbing Bodies (SAR Press, forthcoming). Tim Thompson, Teesside University

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Delivered by Ingenta to: Graduate Institute IP: 129.194.8.6 On: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:26:58