This was my final day of the 2005 AAA conference. It was a Saturday and I didn’t get downtown until lunchtime. I went to Remembering Violent Pasts: Genocide, Truth, and the Politics of Representation. I wanted to see this talk since it was one of the topic of my thesis. Plus, I used the disseration of one of the speakers, Victoria Sanford, for my own thesis. The session began with Sharon Hutchinson discussing how international monitoring missions can sometimes perpetuate or exacerbate military violence. As a case study, she used her own experience on a 2003 monitoring team in Sudan. The team was called the Civilian Protection Monitoring Team. She was working on the North/South civil war, not on the Darfur situation. In this case, the international intervention actually increase the violence against civilians. Plus, it helped legitimize the Sudanese response to the southern rebels since the international community was impressed that there was a monitoring team in place. I discussed similar themes in my own thesis, in particular, how truth commissions and tribunals work to render state-sponsored violence invisible and support the newly empowered state apparatus. In concluding her talk, she noted several themes that undermine such monitoring missions, including decontextualizing acts of violence so that they appear as disconnected events not a system of state-sponsored violence and the use of the passive voice in reporting that creates a feeling of no-faultviolence.

Alex Hinton then talked about his experience with politics and memory in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. He discussed how the Vietnamese-backed group that defeated the Khmer Rouge posited that all violence, including the killing fields and violence during the war between Cambodia and Vietnamese-backed forces was a result of the Khmer Rouge. It reminded me of my own thoughts about the Rwanda Patriotic Front/Army that stopped the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Post-genocide, discussion of any violent acts committed by the RPF/RPA was considered taboo. He also noted how the post-Killing Fields government turned death sites (prisons, torture facilities, etc.) into museums and made residents visit them. For the future, he feels that the international tribunal being put in motion to try Khmer Rouge atrocities is going to be a farce.

Kamiri Clark then talked about the intersection of understandings between Western liberal traditions of the law and local/religious interpretations. It was a fascinating talk and I would have enjoyed hearing her speak more. This tied in with some thoughts from my thesis about the difficulties of understanding extreme state violence within a Western legal framework. I was excited that she noted that human rights and international law are not free of social constructions and manipulation by powerful actors.

Next up was Victoria Sanford, who’s dissertation was a source for my thesis work. She talked about how survivors and witnesses relate their stories of extreme violence. She noted how stories might seem both surreal and obscense, and that this is often a person’s way of trying to comprehend such heinous acts. I was glad to here her say that we have to fight and struggle against meta-narratives that subvert subaltern understandings of their experiences during the genocide. In response to international law proponents, she noted that in April 2005, the Inter-American Court for Human Rights cited Guatemala for committing and participating in the genocide in one of the cities torn apart during that country’s civil war. The Guatemalan government was told to pay reparations. When Sanford told community members about the decision and asked what they felt about the outcome, the leaders said that they didn’t want money, they wanted justice.