 So three, two, one, obviously wait for the guests to arrive. There's often a few seconds and stuff, Gap. Three, two, one, start. Hello everyone, and welcome to another amazing event by King's College London and I guess as Verona. Me like, we are going to be waiting for a couple of more people like me to show up. But that said, let me just take this opportunity to welcome you all and to thank our team at the School of Security Studies, in particular Lizzie and Danny from the Defense Studies Department, where I am a lecturer. My name is Michele Gropi. I am a lecturer, as I was saying, at the Defense Studies Department and I'm the president of the International Team for the Study of Security Verona. Tonight, we have an unprecedented opportunity arguably to talk about something which has been, I'd probably say like fairly disregarded. And so, as we say, as we wait for more people, but let me just once again, I say thank you. Thank you so much to Amelia Hulia-Hodgins, Ogins, who I will obviously, Amelia, introduce in a little bit to our guests from Canada and Peru, our distinguished panelists and our students from King's College London and the Defense Academy and elsewhere in Europe and the world. So without any further ado, you know, like in international relations, sometimes we tend to forget that emotions are also important. If we go back to major theories of international relations, international security, we talk about realism. We talk about liberalism. And so no matter how you look at it, the measure of the international system, the unit of the international system ends up being the state. And therefore we're talking about power. We're talking about great power competition. We're talking about the kinetic side of military force. All that is good, absolutely. I mean, no question about it. That is going to shape international security. Nevertheless, nevertheless, as experts, scholars, students, observers of international security, we shouldn't, we should not minimize other aspects, other elements of society that can be as instrumental. And tonight, as we're saying, we have a great chance, a great opportunity to delve deep into something which, let's be honest, sometimes I'm not going to say that it bothers us, but maybe it scares us, it shames us or something that might make us feel uncomfortable, especially in societies, in countries around the world that have undergone colonization, major structural societal reshaping, and now they're trying to carve an identity out of it. And so, I mean, without any further ado, I think I have bleddered way too much. I would like to present to you the mind behind all this who is Julia Huggins. Julia is a student at King's College London in the International Affairs MA. She previously earned her BA with honors. So, I mean, a congratulation to Julia in Sociology at the University of Fraser Valley in Upsford, Canada. She's also one of our research interns at ITS's Verona for the Cultural Society and Security Team. Her interest in social restoration, collective memory, human rights motivated to propose the topic of this evening that she's about to introduce along with our distinguished panelists. So, once again, Julia, without any further ado, wherever you want, the floor is yours, and thank you very much again to everyone. I really hope this is going to be an amazing event. Apologies, one thing that I forgot. Please team, keep in mind this is, you know, like it's been recorded. Let's be very respectful of other people's opinions. We can absolutely challenge, but always with respect and in a constructive manner, at the end of the presentation, we're gonna welcome Dr. Andrea Elners from King's College London and her final remarks. And then I'm gonna be doing the Q&A so that please do feel free. I, we do encourage you to ask questions to our distinguished panelists. Julia, whenever you want, floor is yours. Thank you very much. Dr. Gropi, thank you especially for your support. I want to welcome our guests, shared indigenous memory, persecution, and divided society's path towards healing and reconciliation. Narratives behind traumatic events that impact specific groups in a country permeates mental and emotional layers, as Dr. Gropi was saying, thriving discussions, beliefs, attitudes, and sometimes those legitimate policy decisions, what results many times intended, intentional, or not in social fragmentation. The cases discussed tonight, Canada and Peru, have not been exhausted within the International Relations Academic Debate as pointed out earlier, while both underwent processes of truth and quality, a social reconciliation is still to be reached. Recent developments nevertheless, invite to further explore them with academic rigor. Today, our guests will discuss the recent discoveries of unmarked gravesites in premises of former indigenous residential schools in Canada, something that we all heartfelt, and the forced sterilizations of more than 270,000 indigenous women from rural communities disadvantaged during the 90s in Peru, another big heart-perting event. Our guests tonight have conducted which academic works in those matters, the discussion will focus in four research topics that each speaker is going to address like in another interview after I pose a question. First, Mr. Frogner, and after Dr. Ruiz, the arrangement is just the alphabetic order of the countries, Canada and Peru, that's all. Around Canada, let me welcome Mr. Raymond Frogner, currently the head of the archives at the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation and co-chair of the International Council for Archives Committee on Indigenous Matters. Raymond holds a master of arts in history from the University of Victoria and a master of archival studies from the University of British Columbia. He was archivist at the records in the University of Alberta and he taught classes in archives and indigenous records. He is the principal author of Dandenya Adelaide Declaration concerning indigenous self-determinations and archives. His two articles in archivarian discussing archives in indigenous rights have won the prize WK LEM. From Peru, we have Dr. Ines Ruiz, academic coordinator of the Communication and Advertising Bachelor in the Universidad Científica del Sur and teaches communication subjects in Pontificio Universidad Catolica de Peru. She obtained her master's in PhD in Hispanic Studies at the Kent University where she also taught for a while. In Peru, she has collaborated with diverse non-profit organizations. Both her last documentary title is Serral Voice and her last book, Midnight Birds, studying the case he is discussing today. Also, let me introduce our keynote speaker, Dr. Andrea Elmer, lecturer in defense studies at King's College London and in the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom. She's a multidisciplinary researcher combining historical and contemporary political societal and cultural perspectives, mostly focused on gender, security, human rights, moral injury, Andrea designs and delivers subjects. Currently, she teaches women peace and security that I would take with her in November. She has written and published multiple policy papers, articles, book chapters and she has co-authors the book when soldiers say no. I am honoured to have her as my dissertation supervisor and I will have to work a lot. Welcome Dr. Elmer. Michele, you wanted to say something, Dr. Verp? No, no, no. Dr. Elmer, please give us your keynote speech. Welcome to the public. Thank you very much. And, first of all, apologies for being a bit late. I had a prior appointment and it overran and I couldn't stop it and I had to drive at very high speed along very narrow lanes without having an accident. I managed and I'm really pleased to be here. I gave me a great excuse to drive fast, so what's not to like? Ground yourself. I am so pleased to have been asked to deliver some keynote just remarks to start this event today because it's a hugely important event that Julia and Michaela have put together and I'm very pleased to have two speakers who will, I think, really give us a lot of food for thought. When I thought about how to frame this, I thought, well, the theme includes memory and I need to go to a very high abstract level because I've got five minutes, I probably will have seven minutes, but therefore I need to frame your specific discussions on transgressions, on crimes against humanity, on just state brutality in effect in a wider context. And because there's the word memory in the title, I thought memory is codependent on forgetting. So I think I'll set this up by looking at forgetting. We can forget in many different ways. Forgetting is as identity building and as history writing as remembering. Remembering can be integrative, it can be divisive, it often implies power and power hierarchies depending on who sets the parameters of what is remembered and what is forgotten, how much society can shape and different parts of society can shape what is remembered and what is forgotten. Whether this forgetting is an instruction so that people have to remember to forget or that people need to not forget to remember. I have a German half of my heritage, as a German growing up going to school in Germany, you do remember to remember and my generation very much had to remember to remember and I still do. Memory and forgetting also have a lot to do. So this is partly history writing, identity forming but memory and forgetting or remembering and forgetting are also part of knowledge construction. So what knowledge counts as acceptable knowledge? What is the dominant narrative? Who gets to contribute to this narrative? Who is allowed, whose voice is allowed to be heard? And there's the power relationship again, there's the politicization of memory and forgetting. If we're taking the view of the state, the state with a part of society that I would call a co-opted part of society that dominates the narrative, that co-opted part of society and the state can together through structural and systemic conditions which enable personal expression of disruption and denigration. Together they can exercise a great deal of violence on people who are not part of that dominant narrative. So that experience of violence then is harmful not only to the way in which people feel they are part of the overall society but it's also harmful to them as individuals and to them as collectives. As a collective they might find shared memories which then are identity forming which may be identity forming in a very, very negative way which then can potentially be turned against them as well they're just professional victims and we have this discourse at the moment over the Black Lives Matter in the US and in the UK but I'm not so interested in that particular discourse. I'm more interested in what happens when you deny people access to what makes their memories and archivists are very important in allowing access to those memories. If we don't have written memories then maybe rituals can tell us where the past lies and we are indigenous communities can see can write their own histories because through rituals they write a history of sorts in different ways not necessarily in written form. But the point is if you're not allowed to write your history and if you're not allowed to contribute your history then you're denied the right to exist to be acknowledged as a life worth living which means your past you can never really have a past which identifies you as you because you have not told your story in the shape of his story or her story or a collective story. So this denial to have a voice or to research one's own history and can have all sorts of educational implications as well but it's also a denial of agency and of human dignity and that part, the denial of a past then becomes a denial of a present and the denial of the present then spills over into the future because you're also excluded from imagining a future in which you are part of the whole and I think because my time is pretty much up now I hope that this sets up our two speakers to talk about how we might break this cycle because what we need to do, what I think we need to do to break this cycle in big bold parts or steps is to remember, to think about different ways of remembering and putting together histories but remembering is not the only thing, you have to be heard and that then can translate into political and cultural agency through educational systems through societal discourses through engagement with governments and then hopefully the healing can start. I hope this builds a stage on which the two speakers will feel comfortable and I look forward to hearing your presentations and then to the Q&A session and the discussion. Thank you Dr. Elner for such thoughtful opening remarks and I'm going to proceed with the first question. Please, Dr. Ines and Mr. Raymond describe briefly the justification narratives that frame the events, the regime groups or the perpetrating the actions and the modus operandi if you could. Are there other events impacting the survival of the same population? If so, what are the common sense between them? Mr. Raymond? Okay, that's a very broad question but let me begin by just saying that the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation was a child of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was struck in 2007 and the mandate of that commission was to investigate as completely as possible the history of the residential school system in Canada and its legacies on Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state and the Canadian society, I should say. But essentially writ large, what the question was is what the hope we can move towards is how do we reimagine belonging in a society of diversity? And so in the mandate of the TRC it was really the culmination of a couple of decades of manifestations by Indigenous peoples to be recognized within the Canadian constitution and by Canadian society. And just to situate us a little bit further the Canadian residential school system because I'm recognizing this as an international audience began in the 1880s with a mandate that was essentially to assimilate and produce a kind of cultural erasure of all the identities of Indigenous societies and communities across the country. And then by the time it ended in 1996 which was approximately seven generations many of these communities had been deconstructed. Languages were lost, social practices and customs had been destroyed and outlawed and in many cases even made illegal to be practiced. So the social identity of these communities was successfully dismantled by removing forcefully children from those communities and then removing them in residential schools where they were remodeled as what was thought to be appropriate citizens to become part of the Canadian state as it was understood by settler society. So with all that said and done the mandate of the TRC was really a truth commission. It had no subpoena powers it couldn't cause anyone to be charged it was essentially a mandate to discover and create a body of knowledge on the history of the residential school system in Canada and its consequences, its legacies. So as a result of its research the TRC collected over four million documents from almost 150 different cultural repositories religious as well as government provincial and federal and over the six years of its investigations it visited slightly over 200 different indigenous communities and held events there where over 7,000 survivors and intergenerational survivors gave testimonies on the impact of the residential school system which was essentially a contemporary legacy of what had happened to those communities as a result of the residential schools. So the NCTR in 2015 ingested all of that information in the process of trying to create what we're calling a decolonizing archive an archive that makes it possible to actually interrogate oppression to make the records understandable for researchers in a way that they can be used to heal to reconcile and to educate on the topic of this kind of colonial oppression. So moving forward to today I should have begun my speech by just saying that the center as an indigenous research center is currently in a state of mourning as you've mentioned there have been four dramatic discoveries of unmarked burial sites across Western Canada most of them number in the hundreds including the Penelokit the Tekemlaumstays Aquapam the Konexus and the Colossus and in all of these cases these unmarked burial sites are located near residential schools and are thought to include or thought to hold the remains of children that attended those schools in many of these cases these burials occurred without the families being notified that the children were lost and in fact in 2017 sorry in 2017 we did a documentary at the NCTR on one of these schools not one of the four that I just mentioned but Muskalgan residential school where we investigated and did a five to six minute documentary interviewing survivors and walking through the areas indicating where it was thought that unmarked burial sites are located around this school and it's known that human remains have due to soil erosion being found in those fields so that site is currently also under investigation I only mentioned this to say that in 2017 when we released this documentary received absolutely almost absolutely no response by the media or any kind of popular research whatsoever it's only this year with the dramatic discoveries the sheer scale of the loss that it's finally hit home so we remain with the same mandate to understand the impact to heal from it to educate and building on the idea of memory we are what we choose to remember but we are also what we choose to forget and this is a moment in time where Canadians are beginning to remember exactly what has happened and to recognize that and hopefully over time to reconcile and perhaps remodel this relationship between settler and indigenous peoples on a platform of equality dignity and human rights Thank you very much Mr. Frogner Dr. Ruiz, please Thank you very much for the invitation Can you hear me well? Yes? Okay, thank you very much First I want to start explaining what was the campaigns the contraception campaigns that were held on the Peruvian government in 1995 So during 1995 the Peruvian government took the drastic decision to reduce the rate of natural population grow to a level no greater than 25 per annual and put in a place series of campaigns to promote it by the Alberto Fugimori Regiment. These campaigns they were so called campaigns of voluntary surgical contraceptions and the Concepción Quirúrgica Voluntaria focus on groups of men and women on reproducing capacity especially those living in the poorest areas of the Andean highlands of the Andean, Amazonian lowlands of Peru they were sterilized for contraception purposes These sterilizations campaigns led of thousands of complaints the data collected during those years by the hospital's office included some 2000 to 2074 women sterilized against their will of which then die now more than a decade actually it has passed 25 years since the complaints began new cases have emerged and there is talk about 300,000 victims many women express in different testimonies their central certainty of having been misformant treated and abused by the medical services responsible for the sterilizations so these mass sterilizations campaigns were carried out during the second half of the Regiment of Fugimori it's 1995 to 2000 and aimed to include the surgical sterilization made on free of charge with family planning programs as I said before more than 25 years has passed since the complaints about the poor execution of the campaigns began between 1996 and 2000 the complaints made by feminist groups and human rights organization and even by the office the campaigns were unsuccessful only in 2001 the case of Maria Mameda Mestanza who died on April 4 in 1998 due to medical negligence during the surgical sterilization operation was a pure friendly settlement agreement was agreed as a majority of the sterilization were practices of women of the Andean and the Amazonian extraction and the the the public health law has not been equal for everyone on the investigation I explored the way in which these women see their fertility and the place it occupies in the world so was personal fertility related to fertility in the land did they understand these procedures were irreversible was their link to the land broken was they discovered they were no longer fertile what were the consequences to these individuals did it result in migration, marital breakdown or other procedures how did they face a surgical procedure when their sense of modesty and lack of familiarity with medical procedures was absolute how did the woman for the Highlands province involuntary in this program constructed their memory and here is the part that is very interesting how is memory in this program what do they remember along the research I also researched some interviews and testimonies of citizens from Lima Lima is the capital of Peru and it was very interesting to understand how do they understand and see this program how was the memory construct about the program so the aim was to provide evidence of how memory was created by the incorporating these events into a hemoonic racist social discourse that allows them to disregard the rights of the population affected by these policies and here is how race and class intersected with these historicization campaigns I don't know if I have time enough or should I continue should I continue maybe you can go ahead and wrap up okay I continue yes yes you can continue I didn't hear you so I was saying how does race and class intersect with these historicization campaigns and here we have to look very careful for the actors who participate in these anti-conception quirúrgica voluntaria programs the ACUE so they were Fujimori his former ministers the Cerubist which are the practice of medicine, feminist groups charge also international and non-government organization and lastly the media this affected the execution of the campaigns and their consequences but one of the reasons why more than 20 years have passed and the cases still awaiting for justice is the great silence of the citizens who have not no response or confront the complaints that for years women for the poor sectors of Peru has been making this silence is related to the great inequalities of my country of Peru which such aspects such race, gender and poverty so in this sense I propose two fundamental reasons that sharp the rejection and indifference toward the case in the first place the races in all socio-economic classes in the city of Lima we have to remember that Lima is a very big city most of the population in Peru live in Lima so this is related to the paternalistic discourse not only on the population but also in terms of health policies and this is here when the government work together with the paternalist discourse of the people that live in Lima secondly the misformation that there was on the subject for a long period this misinformation caused of course by the lack of interest of the media during the electoral campaigns of the democratic period that begin in 2000 as well as the media and this is important also manipulation in the era of Okimori these two subjects aggraved the rejection and lack of interest of the cases of women who claim to have been sterilized against their will thank you very much the second question is what was the impact in terms of do we have a death toll is there a relevant geographic pattern was there also a linguistic genocide or other harmful effects from the tribal's witnesses and society so now we move from the context to the effect doctor excuse me Mr. Rodner please sure in terms of a death toll there is an understanding reality that there is a certain amount of missing children from attending residential schools the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began to look into this and quite interestingly when the Indian residential school settlement agreement was first struck in 2007 the question of missing children was actually not part of the agreement this agreement was struck between church groups as I said church groups indigenous groups as well representatives and the government and it was only after an MLA an indigenous MLA raised this in the House of Commons that the question of missing children was added to the investigations preliminary investigations done by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission came up with a number of several thousand slightly over 3,000 but due to the amount of time enormous amount of research because these are issues that had never really truly been formally researched before in a collective way they never completed their research so in 2015 we picked up on that work verified the incomplete research and created what has been known as the death register when the TRC completed its research in 2015 they put out 94 calls to action these were recommendations that they thought would be appropriate in order to address the broken relationship between indigenous and settler communities so call to action number 72 was to create a death register as they called it a database of the missing children so we did that we created the death register with profiles every missing child with 15 fields of information gender, cause of death home community, etc because many of the records that we found didn't record these things in over half the cases of recorded loss of children the cause of death wasn't recorded in almost 30% of the records the gender of the child was not recorded many of the losses went without even a formal identification of the name of the child sometimes it's only a number so the death register is the first it's still in the first days of going through all the details of the losses that we've identified and to this point we've identified 4,118 children documented as having been lost while under the responsibility of residential school authorities we've included in this sent away due to illness and died within a year of being sent away that's also included in our category of lost children but having said all that that's only going through we've only gone through about a third of our records of the over 4 million documents that we hold we've done approximately a third to get to that number to honor that loss and to commemorate that loss for indigenous communities a memorial site a memorial website nctr.ca where we list the name of each child and the school they attended and the date of their death this was done after 6 months of consultation with indigenous communities around the country to ensure that there was no information that we would release that would have been a violation of a cultural protocol or have been somehow harmful to the home community or the family who lost the child so for that reason the memorial site does have a limited amount of information but the death register itself is very comprehensive however it should be stated only families have access to the death register any other access to this database is by special consideration and nctr has what is known as a survivor circle 7 survivors of residential school from around the country and we consult with them on policies such as this kind of access to a death register so to answer your question to this date 4118 children having identified as lost we anticipate this would be much higher and in terms of unmarried grave sites there was 139 schools and it's thought in each each school has its own unique context and narrative but almost every school is expected to hold some form of an informal burial site near the school where children will be found that's been in discussions of those communities since before the TRC was created it's only since the news has broken that this reality is entered into the national consciousness in the popular sense so we will continue to pursue the unmarried grave sites question originally we thought the plan was that we would identify as much as we could the loss of children who were lost and then looking to their destinies that is to try and determine if we could discover where they were entered but then because of these discoveries that happened this year we find that we're now doing both research projects at the same time thank you Mr. Frognett, Dr. Whis please thank you well as I said before the justice for these women that were historicized is still in process they the the free ministers that were involved in the process in the program and for Himori they are still being accused by these crimes but the big question is can we consider genocides can we accuse Alberto of Himori of genocides in order to qualify as a cream of genocides it's necessary to analyze whatever the sterilization will carry out with a specific intention of destroying or annihilation a whole part of the determination social group okay so the state of the question evidence that has been taken into account so far no evidence has been found that the human acts were accompanied by the necessary and specific intention to annihilate all defined social group of people characterized by carrying on our field work being ending or indigenous or sorry rural areas as to be able to qualify them as genocides thus it is almost impossible to prove that the sterilizations were directed towards a specific specific social group since the Fujimori regiment promote these campaigns throughout the Peruvian territory and carry out the implementation of responsibility towards health service workers so in this point is very difficult to access Fujimori and the three minors as genocides but they are accessed for another crimes for human rights because this program was focused on the indigenous women and the poor population in Peru which mean these five years that last the program the poor's harvest of Peru and the women who were elitrated or just doesn't speak Spanish the first language was Quechua doesn't understand why they are doing this procedure no also when I start the research I found that in the health service and the community of Juan Cabamba when the women started complaints in 1996 this health center disappear all the paperwork that proof that these has been done to these women so in other words is very difficult to prove with paperwork that these women has been exercised by forces but the proof that we have is the testimony of thousand of women that claim that they were exercised by coercive methods they promise to give them food if they sterilize her or give them medicine no so it is very difficult your question to justify or to accusate this crime as a genesis but we have another ways to prove it thank you very much Dr. Luis our third question today is there a way that the government or international law organizations could have prevent these events to happen would that be possible Mr. Frofner please given this was a national program the residential school was a national program that was embodied in what is known as the Indian Act which was a federal legislation that concerns pretty much all the life events of indigenous peoples from birth to death including education which was the titular purpose of the residential school system it is difficult to see how this could have been prevented in law however having said all that it should be noted that it was only due to a supreme court decision that the truth and reconciliation was created to investigate what had happened so I mean if the government had been left to their own devices there would have been no truth and reconciliation commission this was a decision by the federal government to create a commission to investigate this history and this loss so although the law did not prevent the events from occurring the supreme court did create the truth and reconciliation commission to formally investigate the history of residential schools thank you Mr. Frofner please Dr. Ruiz well the same in Peru there were not a group of true unconciliation included the case of this woman so it was a government program so it's very very difficult that international law can work and can prevent this event actually the finance of this program was with international programs of fertility so it's very tricky because they financed the Peruvian government finance the program during five years with international help money from another organizations but there is no international law that can prevent this when the complaints start thank you very much Dr. Ruiz our last question for tonight as you both have mentioned that there are truth and reconciliation efforts that happen in the countries in one case started in Canada in the other case did not include the cases discussed tonight however at that point and in what way have those reconciliation efforts reached any social reconciliation within each country despite the pitfalls and the bumps in the road how they have to ascend in terms of the way towards social inclusion social healing please Mr. Frogner well as I've mentioned before in its closing reports the truth and reconciliation commission actually published what they called 94 calls to action and since since that time people have been kind of measuring society measuring the performance of the federal government by those 94 calls to action if they'd actually accomplished any of them and the number of the calls to action that the federal government have completely addressed to the point where you could say it has been a success is quite low there's but turning that on its head for a moment I should point out that former Senator Murray Sinclair who is one of the three commissioners for the TRC an indigenous lawyer from Manitoba made the observation during the TRC's investigations that the residential schools took seven generations to dismantle indigenous communities across the country and they could potentially take another seven generations to revitalize and rebuild those communities the reconciliation is an ongoing conversation that's going to last beyond our lifetimes and into the future we can only hope that we can establish a strong foundation so that these relationships can continue to grow based on what we've learned acknowledge and maybe heal from to go forward with so Thank you very much Mr. Frogner Dr. Ruiz please Yes I think we cannot talk about reconciliation at the moment in Peru because there are still groups in Lima especially that think that this program was right because this woman this Andean woman doesn't know about the fertility program and then well it's okay but we need to so we don't need more children in Peru especially poor children so this is the most of the people the citizens from Lima they still think in that way and the other part is the state the state haven't recognized understand why this woman is still fighting for justice so since I started this investigation in 2012 the path of a woman in their search for truth, justice, and reparation has been lost because many of the women I interviewed in this year and so on has the wrong idea also of what has been done to them, some understand that this investigation was reversible later I found this because the term of legation is legacion in Spanish and in addition of that many thought that the campaigns were a government other than they had to be followed other women felt that it not matter to report these cases because the government always decide them sometimes understandable if one takes in account the trauma we have to take in account and this is important the trauma experienced by this woman and men, especially in poor areas in Peru in Juan Cabamba and they were classified as extremely poverty and also during the time of great violence perpetrated by the shiny path for Sandero Luminoso so these people, this person indiginal woman has passed the terrible moment of the Sandero Luminoso the terrorism then when this finish started program sterilizations many women were accussed from being a terrorism and then the program start, sterilization start and they were sterilized so they don't want it to speak or denouncing this terrible thing so I think we put together the history it's essential to understand why the silence is the complicity of the state and citizens are due to the case of forest sterilization that would carry out during the government of Almerdo Pujimori our citizens also actors in these campaigns is the Peruvian state the main promoter of the great inequalities that exist in society silence is a complice of the indifference with which the complice has been present all these years and how far have we advanced in equal rights from citizenships in the state these questions were a constant and I think if we can think about reconciliation first we need to answer these questions first the cities of Lima why are they indifference of this first secondly the state and then the women can wear the victims but at the moment the case is still open thank you to the well thank you to the internet we can now be part of the process online so we can listen to the testimony of these 2074 women that are denouncing Fujimori and the three ministers but still the process has a lot of political interest so they have been close and close and close they are still waiting thank you very much Dr. Ruiz and I appreciate all the learning from both Mr. Frogner and Dr. Ruiz having right on us we would like to invite Dr. Elner if she has comments, remarks after this thank you Andrea thank you very much I found a trailer of Dr. Ruiz's film and saw a snippet with one woman an interview with a woman from Lima and I was shocked to hear her say well yes I mean if it contains further pregnancies and these people are poor anyway then yeah I am foreign she was a young woman who may be thinking about having children herself at the time I found that quite shocking which brings me to a question I have a few questions because some of the accounts that we heard about today are familiar from other contexts as well and I wonder whether there is read across or whether there is a possibility of maybe working together to try to find ways of breaking through state especially with regard to Peru state reticence and the government feeling well we don't much to lose because these people are poor they're rural we don't really care very much about them they're not our cool voters we don't need to do anything of course what this might do is breed another form of resentment and at some point someone might feel moved to protest and protest perhaps with a greater chance of attracting attention I don't know whether that might be violence but then of course you would have to have indigenous communities standing by their women and defending them which might involve men also standing up and trying to move things forward the question I had whether there might be a reader cross or it might be it's not a direct comparison the mothers who protested in Argentina against the disappeared of the 5th of May I wonder whether they had also a very long journey and they also faced partly hostility obviously from the regime but also partly hostility from women who when the military junta was in power were on the right side because they complied with an image of womanhood which the junta promulgated so they were the co-opted and they did not necessarily see the same they didn't feel solidarity with the women who protested and I wonder whether there are any links whether there are Peruvian women maybe those who have had the opportunity to organize a little better because they had the funds and education whether they might have tried to start connecting with other groups who had a similarly horrific experience well it's very interesting what you're putting on the table sorry my English I have to practice but I will try to explain first of all we have to understand but that nine years ago when I started the investigation was eight years ago I found that they most of the women don't understand what was happening to her body so they think okay this is the law nobody's going to hear me you know and then Ollanta Omala the last two presidents promised some justice for this woman so they start to organize them so we have women from Cusco south and women from the north and they started to organize groups and I was it was very interesting because when I was doing the research I can see how these groups started to work together and it was the first time they meet in Lima because they want to take the complaints to the Minister of Justice and in this first meeting that they have it was very interesting because the groups from and I speak just Quechua and the groups from the north of Lima sorry the north of Peru but they started to talk trying to speak together and they found that the same path have they made in this historicization for them so they left like they told me that I have too many kids I have too many children I have nine children so I am like a guinea pig and I need to be historicized and the women said they told me the same thing it was shocking to see how it was a pattern you see and I think in that moment they understand that they have the power they are not alone they are groups starting to put in together and there was the justice says okay but they are not just two or three or four or five women looking for justice they are thousand so we can silence this anymore and also we have the media the networks Facebook and the things that another groups of citizens Lima researchers feminist and this organizations group of human rights are starting to support this woman so they started to be activism and I also started to be more active with them actually I take a travel with Esperanza who was one of the victims of this program she was when she was pregnant the doctors didn't tell her that she was pregnant they historicized her and she lost her baby when she was nine months pregnant so it was shocking and her testimony it was very powerful for this this program so thank you to the university in UK I have the opportunity and to Natalia Sobrevia who was the person who was along with us I we fly to UK and we can take this to Amnesty Internacional to university we went to BBC London and also we went to the parliament and they can hear the testimony of this woman she was I can say she was shocking to see how the people from the other world you know was interested in hear her testimony and how important was that they made this to her and to the a lot of women and I think this gave her a lot of power to understand that she had support we went to the BBC radio and everything and when she came back we had the group of women so I think I try to be positive in this and I think that this small how can we say actions works that they start being together more and more and more yeah I'm pretty sure it will it may take a while if the case of Bosnian women who have tried to get at least their experiences of rape and very serious violations acknowledged as a war wound that took a long time if that's anything to go by that might take a while but what you are already doing and what actually in the end was one of the moments of apparently one of the moments of breakthrough in Bosnia was when a young filmmaker I think it was a drama she had had experience of this and had a child and that child's story was filmed and that started creating much wider awareness both within Bosnia and internationally of course the voices of the women had been heard but the other lesson from that is of course also that if you haven't got documents of those witnesses and that clearly has happened in Peru as well if thousands of women testify the same thing then nobody can say well they've all made it up they've aligned their story it's then the volume is really important if the same story comes up again and again and again then that is another form of credibility so thank you very much that was terrible and sad it's extremely interesting and it's such an indictment of our societies that this is still happening and that women are still being violated in this particular way and men were as well but not in the same numbers partly because the woman is seen as the repository of the future of the tribe or the society Yes Andrea and just one addition for the other visual I forgot to tell that along the research I start filming and the the product I made a documentary film which you can find on YouTube is A Foothill Boys and this was a very powerful tool not for the citizens but for the for the woman, for the victims because when they, when I show them the film I say that I won't show the film to the public as I want first to have the permission to show the film to the public so first I show them the film and when they see a lot of testimonies and also there is a very shocking part when I can find some when the nurses do the surgery and they were laughing and was disturbed they were shocked and they started to talk so yes the audiovisual is a powerful tool also to take the case outside Thank you I am muted yes I think both cases have that in common and often oppressed minorities and severely violated minorities or just generally minority or parts of society that are being held at a lower level of the power hierarchy what helps in finding your power is if you start comparing notes because one way of marginalising and one way of oppressing is to separate people from each other so they have no chance of identifying that there is a systematic and a systemic issue going on and I would have thought that that probably happened in Canada as well because I don't know how much how much parents actually shared the experience of having their children taken away in a similar way that seems to have happened in the US as well that children were just taken away and then confined to reeducation camps in a horrible way I don't know Raymond or Mr Frogner, I don't know what you prefer to comment on this right well first just addressing what Dr Ruiz has said Canada did also have murdered and missing indigenous women and girls inquiry that just wrapped up with a final report that pointed out that between 1960 and I think it was 2010 there was a 586 unaccounted for murdered and missing women in Canada indigenous women and girls in Canada that required further investigation so that commission also showed that there was a strong identification of indigenous women as being kind of not just marginalized but I wouldn't say targeted is maybe too strong a word but the basic lack of human rights fell very heavily on that portion of society and in addition to that there was also a program of eugenics in Canada that was particularly pursued by the province of Alberta actually until the 1960s and it's been my own investigations and others have shown that there was a disproportionate amount of indigenous children that were sterilized boys and girls in that program so there was some similarities there but speaking more broadly I think on an international level the means of interconnecting these kinds of indigenous struggles for human rights is referenced to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples you know in international forums indigenous people spent 25 years arguing for that declaration and so and those were representatives from indigenous communities from around the world Ainu, Maori from Southern Central America as well as North America and even the Scandinavian states so there is a platform of discussion that could be pursued as well as there are some other UN bodies that the problem with these bodies is that you know they can pass the international law but the states can choose whether or not they want to implement what's passed and in fact in the UN DRIP article 46 the final article declares that nothing in that article shall impinge on the territorial definition of the states that are signing on to that declaration so there is kind of a fireproof state guaranteed exit strategy for any state that wishes to endorse it although Canada has now passed a bill just this year that states that they will implement the UN DRIP in our future legislation so it remains to be seen but there's been sort of a slow and clotting recognition since 2007 when UN DRIP was passed by governments in Canada to begin to recognize and implement the UN DRIP's principles in legislation and maybe that's something that could be discussed on an international venue That brings me to my concluding remark before we hand over to the audience for questions it is really quite shocking how long it is taking us to learn from the Nuremberg Trials and from the digestion of what happened in a few years in Germany during the Nazi era because so much of what you have been talking about happened then and it carried on or it was instituted as a new policy in different countries in slightly different guises but it's the violation the crime against humanity is just as terrible and it's shocking that the path to learning can be so incredibly steep and often going backwards now on that rather depressing note I will hand over to the audience because I know we already have two questions and I'll hand over to Julia to moderate the Q&A session Thank you very much Dr. Kremer and I'll hand it out Michele Grofi, doctor he is going to moderate Thank you very much everyone for a fascinating discussion we do have a couple questions from the audience before we wrap it up and we say bye and we thank all of our splendid panelists properly so the first one from Mr. Eduardo Franco so many atrocities then and now, what does reconciliation actually mean it's impossible Mr. Frauner, why don't you start and then Dr. Ruiz would also like to hear from you and then we will hop on to the following question Thank you That's a very interesting question the Truth Reconciliation Commission in their final reports in 2015 they released a series of final reports and they actually released Volume 6 an entire study on what does reconciliation mean and examples from around the world trying to come to terms with it and essentially they came to the conclusion that reconciliation was basically just to create sustaining respectful relationships across communities over time and any further elaboration beyond that is cultural and regional and somehow a subcategory of that kind of meaning but even in the discussions in Canada now today reconciliation is thought of as almost antique or antiquated term more and more people are talking about simply revitalizing indigenous communities and revitalization has become a word that's almost superseded reconciliation in some circles but I think they go parallel or so interrelated that it's difficult to say one is to choose one over the other but self-determination and sovereignty of some form or protected sovereignty is one of the offers of the undripped has put it those kinds of self-determined abilities to decide their own destiny for these communities is really where we're heading towards and as those communities become more self-possessed and more capable of making decisions that defect their own destinies in life and in parallel with relationships with the state they live in and I think going forward that's how reconciliation will evolve Thank you very much Mr. Frauner Dr. Ruiz what does reconciliation mean in Peru, to you Flo is yours, thank you Thank you, it's a very hard question because all the time I think about reconciliation but we have to think about which groups includes the reconciliation we are going to reconciliation between the indigenous groups and the city of Lima the people who live in Lima reconciliation between the indigenous people from Peru and the government so we need to think that in the last years Peru has been part of very traumatic events we have Sandero Luminoso, the terrorism we have the the dictator Alberto Fujimori we have these historicization programs this is still looking for justice so I think we are this generation my generation is with the open what to say Erida it still hurts wound thank you so we are still open and every time we want to close there is someone in the history that they are touching it so until we all the government the citizens understand what this has been made to our people I think it is very difficult to talk about reconciliation but when I have the opportunity to share with the woman who was in this program and I asked them what do they want a part of justice what do they want and they want public forgiveness they want that the citizens special of Lima understand that this thing that they were made to hurt bodies affect them all her life there is nothing that they can make to repair them because it was already made to their bodies so I think we are in the way to our reconciliation we need to work together but you are going to take years maybe the next generation can't find this finally we can reconciliation each other thank you very much Dr. Ruiz especially for the comment as for reconciliation has many layers and it is not easy in some cases it is not even achievable and therefore it takes time so it is not just a word that we throw out there it actually has serious implications so thank you very much for that Mr. Frogner we have another one for you given the question is about Canada Joseph McLean asks how many of the 94 calls to action has the Canadian government fully addressed thank you many have been fully addressed some of them are very simple like providing identification that recognizes the indigenous name of the citizen rather than the southern name that was assigned to that person some of those are very easily done others are redesigning a curriculum to incorporate residential school histories into provincial curriculum for K-12 students really it's still barely 10 I would say there is a the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation actually has as part of their website a sort of a barometer measuring the 94 calls to action which ones are actually being met and how close they are being met by it's a moving target and as I said in terms of reconciliation it's a question of ongoing respectful relationships so I don't know if they will all ever be completely successfully done but it's very slow very plotting and so far more care needs to be given to them that's for sure thank you very much for this actually we have another follow-up question always by Eduardo Franco going back to the concept of sovereignty or the power to choose the word destiny that you were mentioning in a very interesting way Eduardo asks well actually wouldn't that cause the exact opposite that is separation it almost sounds as if we create two separate peoples I'm reading from the chat would you like to expand on that point well I think this goes back to the very first comment I made at the start of the talk which was how do we reimagine belonging in a society of diversity that in these colonial societies there is a very large number of groups that claim some sort of quasi-independence in some level or another I mean Quebec is another example but I mean even the Prime Minister made the observation that if Canada is divisible so is Quebec because there's many indigenous communities within Quebec as well so I think the question is not whether or not sovereignty means independence I think the question is more in choosing your own life paths and having the ability to have control over your destiny what does that mean in terms of the relationships with other communities that you exist beside because nobody exists in a vacuum Thank you very much for that Mr. Progner anybody else any question for our panelists any questions for Dr. Ines Ruiz-Julia do you have any questions please go ahead Yes this question is for Dr. Ruiz Dr. Ruiz it is true that there is no enough documentation to let's say put together a complaint for genocide however given the size of the number the large number of women almost 300,000 we're talking a lot considering that there is underreported that many of them die and this was portrayed or excuse me perpetrated without their will without even being able to understand what was done to them isn't it possible to let's say argue to elaborate the push to include this as a genocide or a Holocaust or some sort of plings because the fact of sterilizing people is a definitely call to not have them and to do it a specific group evidently as a place so can we just maybe push the envelope in that regard do you think it's possible doctor how could we do it well yes this is a question that a lot of lawyers have made I'm not a lawyer so it's difficult for me to explain but I know that yes it's it's it's evidence that it with this was this program has made for a specific group indigenous women poverty the problem is not only that we don't have enough documentation the problem is that it's still the person that are acoustic and their ministers they reject the accusations and say that they actually claim that this one is isolated claims that there was this two or three women that have these and this was a part of the program and they are not responsible eyes for these events just the medicals or the practices practices so they are continue to deny the evidence so it's very difficult but I know that there is a group of families lawyers that are looking for this so we will see the process is still open we will see what happens thank you very much well on the note then at this point let me reiterate thanks to to our splendid guest so in order Mr Raymond from Canada Dr Ines Ruiz from Peru and our colleague Dr Andre Elner from DSD King's College London and to our moderator Julia Hodgins thank you thank you very much everyone for an enlightening discussion on I must say like pretty disturbing but at the same time much needed topic so huge, huge thanks we need more of these discussions within the realm of international security, emotions, people collecting memories and looking forward the reconciliation societal restructuring these are all important elements of international security, international relations and hopefully thanks to your hard and dedicated work our societies will grow stronger and more cohesive so from the bottom of my heart huge appreciations to all of you and to our guests and last but not least to our school security study Lizzie, Dani also for making this happen thank you very much and have a good night or rest of the day in the western hemisphere take care thank you very much very very interesting take care, thank you bye