Birgit Schwelling (ed.) Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory Erinnerungskulturen | Memory Cultures Volume 2 Birgit Schwelling (ed.) Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative ini- tiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 (BY-NC-ND). which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. 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No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or uti- lized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any infor- mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Proofread by Birgit Schwelling Typeset by Hendrik Woicichowski Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-1931-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-1931-1 Contents Transnational Civil Society’s Contribution to Reconciliation: An Introduction Birgit Schwelling | 7 RECONCILIATION AFTER THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE “A Question of Humanity in its Entirety”: Armin T. Wegner as Intermediary of Reconciliation between Germans and Armenians in Interwar German Civil Society Charlton Payne | 25 Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the “Apology” of Turkish Intellectuals Ayda Erbal | 51 RECONCILIATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS Soldiers’ Reconciliation: René Cassin, the International Labour Office, and the Search for Human Rights Jay Winter | 97 “A Blessed Act of Oblivion”: Human Rights, European Unity and Postwar Reconciliation Marco Duranti | 115 RECONCILIATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR II Franco-German Rapprochement and Reconciliation in the Ecclesial Domain: The Meeting of Bishops in Bühl (1949) and the Congress of Speyer (1950) Ulrike Schröber | 143 A Right to Irreconcilability? Oradour-sur-Glane, German-French Relations and the Limits of Reconciliation after World War II Andrea Erkenbrecher | 167 From Atonement to Peace? Aktion Sühnezeichen, German-Israeli Relations and the Role of Youth in Reconciliation Discourse and Practice Christiane Wienand | 201 RECONCILIATION IN POSTCOLONIAL SETTINGS Apologising for Colonial Violence: The Documentary Film Regresso a Wiriyamu, Transitional Justice, and Portuguese-Mozambican Decolonisation Robert Stock | 239 Facing Postcolonial Entanglement and the Challenge of Responsibility: Actor Constellations between Namibia and Germany Reinhart Kössler | 277 INSTRUMENTS OF RECONCILIATION: COMMISSIONS IN EUROPEAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE Political Reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the Bloody Sunday Inquiry Melinda Sutton | 315 From Truth to Reconciliation: The Global Diffusion of Truth Commissions Anne K. Krüger | 339 About the Authors | 369 Transnational Civil Society’s Contribution to Reconciliation An Introduction BIRGIT SCHWELLING The idea for this book has emerged out of the unease with developments in a field that since the 1990s we have become known to summarize under the neologism ‘transitional justice’. Within a relatively short time, transitional justice became the standard formula for a broad range of concepts, instru- ments, and measures dealing with atrocities such as genocide, torture, civil conflict, disappearances, and other human rights violations.1 Originally a label for legal instruments and mechanisms applied in transitions from au- thoritarian rule to democracy, the term by now is applied to fields beyond law, and therefore it covers a much broader terrain of attempts to deal with past violence. While transitional justice initially covered mechanisms such as trials, commissions of inquiry, vetting, restitution or reparation, the field 1 A burgeoning scholarly literature has emerged on the subject of transitional jus- tice. For a sampling, see Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitutions and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000); Priscilla B. Hay- ner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Com- missions, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011); Martha Minow, Between Ven- geance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democra- cies Reckon with Former Regimes, 3 vols., ed. Neil J. Kritz (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). 8 | BIRGIT SCHWELLING now also includes non-judicial instruments such as apologies, healing cir- cles, or forms of collective remembrance and commemoration. What is par- ticularly striking about this development is the speed with which this de- velopment took place. As Christine Bell notes, the term ‘transitional jus- tice’ “only came to be used in the mid-1990s” but already sometime after 2000 it was consolidated as a field of study and a set of practices.2 One rea- son for what Elazar Barkan has called the “tidal wave of apologies, truth commissions, reparations, and investigations of historical crimes”,3 can be found in the establishment of a network of experts, international founda- tions, and non-governmental organizations, including the International Cen- ter for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), the Institute for Justice and Reconcilia- tion (IJR), and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral As- sistance (IDEA). These experts and institutional bodies became quite pow- erful actors in the transitional justice process. As James Campbell notes, al- ready their sheer number suggests “a fundamental shift in international po- litical culture [and] an emerging consensus on the importance of confront- ing atrocious pasts”.4 An example here is the emergence of truth commis- sions. In her contribution to this volume, Anne Krüger convincingly argues that an “epistemic community” has developed that consists of practitioners in the field as well as academics, politicians, and policy consultants. Some of the members of this network are active in truth commissions, thereby contributing to the institutionalization of transitional justice as “a widely shared expectation in the context of regime transitions”. With the adoption of the United Nations’ “Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian 2 Christine Bell, Transitional Justice, Interdisciplinarity and the State of the ‘Field’ or ‘Non-Field’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice 3 (2009), 5-27, here: 7. 3 Elazar Barkan, Introduction: Historians and Historical Reconciliation. AHR Fo- rum Truth and Reconciliation in History, American Historical Review 114 (2009), 899-913, here: 901. 4 James T. Campbell, Settling Accounts? An Americanist Perspective on Histori- cal Reconciliation, American Historical Review 114 (2009), 963-977, here: 965. INTRODUCTION | 9 Law”,5 the codification affirming the importance of confronting past atroci- ties and recalling the resolutions of the International Humanitarian Law by the Commission on Human Rights in 2005, indicates that a global regime of transitional justice has been successfully established setting an interna- tional norm for dealing with past atrocities all around the globe. Or, as Su- san Dwyer points out, “there appears to be a global frenzy to balance moral ledgers. Talk of apology, forgiveness, and reconciliation is everywhere”.6 To be sure, the unease about this development that inspired this book does not root in a fundamental scepticism when it comes to prosecute and punish perpetrators, restore the dignity of the victims of atrocities or ‘re- pair’ the injuries suffered by them. It is not arguing in favor of a politics of forgetting, of amnesties and silence. Although it cannot be denied that there are possible dangers when past injustices are excavated, sometimes leading to even more conflict and violence, confronting past atrocities does lead to more balanced justice. It is a not only a politically, but even more so an eth- ically defensible position that the notion of transitional justice and the recognition of past suffering are given more serious consideration today. Fact is that perpetrators nowadays run a much greater risk of becoming sub- ject to legal prosecution, and victims often are given a greater chance of ha- ving their suffering acknowledged and of being compensated for their loss- es. Moreover, it is more likely that their testimonies are being heard and recorded. The unease about the developments briefly described above has other reasons. It is based on the impression that the current developments in tran- sitional justice, both as a field of practice and research, tend to narrow the horizon and restrict the view of what coping with past atrocities means and contains. There is for instance a certain tendency to conflate democratiza- tion and transitional justice. Relevant research contends that coping with the