 Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Let me welcome you here to the Columbia Peace Forum. We're very pleased to have you here. Little rain this morning, didn't keep you from coming here, and it's because of the interest of this topic. It couldn't be more timely. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the Executive Vice President here at the United States Institute of Peace. We're very pleased to be able to sponsor this forum. As I say, timely in the agreement on transitional justice and setting of a date to reach the final peace deal that will put an end to the conflict in Columbia is on all of our minds, and is the topic of today on how we move forward. Settling disputes, settling problems, looking at how societies deal with conflict both during and after the conflict is a fascinating area, one that you all will discuss here today, one that we at the Institute of Peace have had some discussions of as well, some right here in this room on this stage. Ashraf Ghani, the new President of Afghanistan, was here earlier this spring, and we had this exact conversation with him. Different countries and different leaders and different governments deal with these issues in different ways. When President Ghani was asked how he was going to deal with this, he said, we're trying to look forward. Others will try to learn lessons and remedy problems and deal with violations of human rights, of individual rights in ways that try to heal the society, as well as individuals. Those lessons, both looking forward and looking backward, are very important for conflict resolution, which is what Institute of Peace does. That's why we are here. We've been here, by the way, for 30 years now. We're celebrating our 30th anniversary this year. And some of you, I was talking to several of our panel members. This is the first time in this building, so we're glad to have you in this building as opposed to the one downtown where some of you may have joined us at first. The Columbia Peace Forum is run by... Everyone knows the person to my left, Jenny Bouvier, here at the Institute. I've been working on Columbia peace processes for a long time and has been deeply involved. Down there, up here, the Washington Forum, the Peace Forum here is an example of the kind of work that Jenny has sponsored and has put together. It's a great opportunity to hear new voices, to hear established voices, to talk to the administration, to talk to civil society, to bring all these people together in order to forge a solution that we see coming. Today's Columbia Peace Forum, the leaders of the National Historical Memory Group and Center will present for the first time their report on conflict violence, Bastilla, Columbia, Memories of War and Dignity. We'll hear about this report for the first time right here this morning. This event was designed in collaboration with them and is being co-sponsored by USAID, by the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Washington Office on Latin America. We are very pleased to be able to host, but we are also happy that our co-sponsors are here with us today. As I say, this is a very timely event and timely discussion, and I'm pleased to welcome you here again, and I'm also pleased to hand it over to Dr. Ginny Bouvier. So welcome, thank you very much. Ginny, over to you. Thank you, Bill. Just a few quick logistical notes before I add my own welcomes and comments. There are headsets available for interpretation in the back of the room if you need them. Panelists will all speak, each speak in their native language. Spanish translation will be available, I believe, on channel three, and English translation on channel one. Today's program is on the record and is being live-streamed at the USIP website in the languages in which our presenters will speak. Audio streaming in English and Spanish will be posted later on the USIP website after the event. For those who are tweeting, you can follow us on Twitter using the hashtag Columbia Peace Forum. You should have received also when you came in evaluation cards when you registered. Please do fill these out and return them to Tonus. Tonus, where are you? Up in the corner. Before you leave today, your feedback is really critical to us as we develop and seek to improve our programming. So any feedback that you have of things that you'd like to see, improvements that might be made is very welcome. Now let me add to Ambassador Taylor's words of welcome my own special welcome to Marta Nubia and Andres Suarez, our colleagues and friends here from the Historical Memory Center. I was fortunate to be one of eight internationals to serve on the International Advisory Council of the Historical Memory Group under the leadership of Mowbleaker of the Swiss Foreign Ministry. It's been a real privilege to work with these public intellectuals and their researchers since they first formed the Historical Memory Group, which is now the National Historical Memory Center. And I should just say, this isn't the first time this report Bastilla is being presented. It's the first time that it's being presented in the United States, and it now has an English version of the English-speaking public. I'd like to thank all of our panelists and commentators for joining today's Columbia Peace Forum on Historical Memory and Transitional Justice. They represent individually and collectively some of the sharpest minds outside of Columbia and a few within, dealing with the issues under discussion today. We will be enriched by their vast knowledge and experience. Similarly, I'd like to welcome members of our on-site audience, which includes members of the diplomatic community, including representatives of the embassies of Columbia and Salvador, Mexico, Venezuela, Russia, and Italy, as well as the OAS, IOM, and the UN. Many sectors of the U.S. government, including Congress, the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, the broader policy communities and the development and human rights communities, and students and faculty who registered from 20 different universities and law schools throughout the United States and far beyond the United States. We also welcome members of the media. Many of you in the audience are experts in your own right on themes of truth and justice in other countries in regions where conflict violence or brutal dictatorship has flourished or is active. Your global experiences of historical memory processes and transitional justice formulas with their successes and shortcomings are sure to enrich our discussions, and we've booked into the program ample opportunity for these public discussions. I'd also like to say a word of welcome to our virtual audience to today's Columbia Peace Forum. Finally, as in last but not least, I'd like to recognize and thank our co-sponsors, in particular Gianna Lello and Angela Suarez from USAID, Adam Isaacson from WOLA, David Tolbert from ICTJ, and Maria Antonia Montes, who I pointed out earlier, the program assistant for the Columbia work here at USIP. This and a capable team of supporters throughout USIP have provided indispensable support for today's event. Now, on the agenda, a few words of what to expect. We'll begin with this morning's opening panel on transitional justice and historical memory. This panel seeks to do three things. First, situate today's debates around transitional justice and historical memory against the context of the peace talks in Havana that have been underway for the past three years in recent agreement last week on transitional justice. Secondly, situate these same debates within Columbia's own legal and normative frameworks. And third, provide the broader global framework within which Columbia's experience fits. We'll pause for coffee at 10.30, at which time we'll recess for half an hour and then return to hear remarks from commentators before opening discussion to the floor. Lunch and coffee will be served at 12.45 in the Great Hall just outside this room, and you're all cordially invited to join us. The program will resume promptly at 2 o'clock back here. Speakers on the second panel will talk about the historical memory groups report Bastilla, Columbia Memories of War and Dignity. This will be the first presentation of the report to a US audience. In addition to informing us about its methodology and findings, the authors are keen to hear critiques and comments about their work as they prepare to contribute to the commission for the clarification of truth, convivencia, which doesn't really translate, but something like harmonious living or well-being, and non-repetition that's been mandated by the parties in the peace talks in Havana to begin once the final peace accords are signed. These presentations will then be followed by a round of initial remarks from our commentators before we open the floor to more discussion. We'll conclude the program sharply at 5 today. Let me now turn briefly to update you on the status of the Colombian peace process in the intersections with today's conversations. This is a propitious time to be talking about peace in Colombia. Last week, following a warning by Pope Francis that, quote, we have no right to allow another failure in the path to peace and reconciliation, we saw an agreement on transitional justice emerge in Havana. President Juan Manuel Santos and Timo León Jiménez, also known as Timochenco, announced that a peace deal would be reached within six months and the FARC agreed to begin the process of laying aside their arms within 60 days of reaching a final agreement. These events have provided a much-needed boost to the peace process and inspired hope at last to an impatient population that has been rather skeptical about the peace process from the get-go. There are still hurdles in the path, namely finalizing the agreements on the terms of ending the conflict, bilateral ceasefire and the reintegration of ex-combatants, security provisions, and following the signing of an accord, the endorsement of that accord through some mechanism as yet to be determined. We know only too well that a peace accord marks the beginning of a new process. The first five to 10 years after signing the agreement is the most critical time for real change to be possible, and it is also the period when many countries return to war. Successful implementation of the terms of the accord is probably the single most important factor in ensuring that Columbia will not return to war. While there are still many questions and details to be worked out, peace, or at least a peace accord with the FARC, has not been this close for three decades. Formalization of talks with the second-largest guerrilla group, the ELN, is urgently needed if a comprehensive peace is to be achieved. As we gather here today, the Colombian government and FARC negotiators have just resumed their 42nd round of peace talks in Havana. In three years of steady talks, they've created a model for dialogue that has allowed them to reach agreements on four of six agenda items, agrarian development, political participation, illicit crops and drug trafficking, and just one week ago today, justice. The latest accord on transitional justice is unique in its privileging of truth-telling as an essential component of justice. It gives priority to truth-telling but does not supplant the need for justice. The model is innovative in its inclusion of restorative justice and its focus on repairing the damages inflicted on individuals and communities through a process of dialogue and healing. The solution provided opens new terrain in the debates that piece against justice. The implementation bears watching as it could provide new models for other conflict zones seeking to find a way out of war. The Colombian peace process has been unique also in the role that victims have played. There are 7.6 million registered victims in Colombia created during half a century of conflict that has touched most households throughout the country. Over time and in part due to their own advocacy, victims have become an increasingly integral part of the peace process. The latest agreement is a clear example of how process affects outcome, how inclusion of marginalized sectors can improve agreements. The talks included visits by delegations of dozens of victims over the course of a six-month period. The United Nations and the National University created forums at the behest of the peace table for victims' voices to be heard. Some 24,000 victims presented proposals to the talks, a large number of which related to the issue of truth. In addition, women's organizations and LGBTI organizations have made their proposals known through a gender sub-commission and through direct participation at the peace table. Other sectors, Afro-Columbians, indigenous workers, youth and campesinos continue to seek direct channels of engagement in the process. These inputs, in no small part, have shaped the commitment of both sides to accept responsibility for damages inflicted and to promote the rights of victims to truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. How these acknowledgments of wrongdoing, which have already begun on both sides and which really were sparked with the presentation of the historical memory groups, in the last Iyá report, how this will translate into real reparations we don't really know yet, although the parties tell us that they have reached important agreements on the issue of reparations that will be disclosed soon. Yet it is important to note that the opportunity for victims to tell their stories and to be truly heard and acknowledged is a form of reparations in and of itself and it can contribute to healing as well as better agreements and improved implementation. While delegation visits and occasional forums have not been perfect mechanisms, how could 60 delegates possibly represent adequately the demands of 7.6 million victims? They do offer an innovation and process design that is likely to be improved upon perhaps within this peace process but most assuredly in other peace processes around the world. Many truth-seeking mechanisms have been sought by the parties as part of their search to understand the roots of war and the factors that perpetuated it to identify the harms inflicted and to identify those responsible. Public opinion polls in Columbia have long shown a widespread desire for the FARC to serve jail time, demands for the FARC to disarm, and resistance to the FARC's incorporation into political life. But it has been clear for example that the FARC were unlikely to sign a peace deal that would land them in jail. In the joint communique announcing the new justice structures for peace, we see a solution that shows important compromises and commitments from both sides. Contrary to popular media interpretations, the agreement does establish jail time for up to 20 years for those found not to be telling the truth or delaying their acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Those who come clean with their crimes on the other hand can see reduced sentences of 5 to 8 years under as yet to be defined conditions that will restrict the ex-guerrillas movement and engage the defendants in a restorative justice process that puts victims at its center and promotes a dialogue between the perpetrator, government authorities, and communities on how amends can be made. The latest agreement proposes elements of a broad integrated architecture for truth, justice, and guarantees of non-repetition. The agreement underscores the commitment of both sides to meet fully Columbia's commitments to national rights and international humanitarian law standards and proposes a special process for justice that includes justice courts and a peace tribunal in conjunction with other still undefined structures. It underscores that there will be no pardon or amnesties for crimes against humanity, genocide, or war crimes. These are specified in the agreement to include the taking of hostages, torture, forced displacement or disappearance, extrajudicial executions, and sexual violence. These will be investigated, prosecuted, and punished. At the same time, there will be generous amnesties for political crimes and related activities. Political crimes in Columbia include sedition or rebellion and the connected crimes are in the process of being specified but could easily include drug trafficking and money laundering when they occur in relation to a covered political crime. The process is historic for the role that it has given the victims in the peace process and the concomitant role of truth-telling that this implies, and we can see how this inclusive process is already affecting the outcomes. We know that memory is a contested field, and truth-telling is an act that occurs within a particular historic, social, and highly political context. Today's event will explore this relationship between truth memory and justice. We have a range of competent speakers to guide us through this land-mined terrain before we turn to the Basta Ya report this afternoon. Let me now turn to introduce, if I can find him. My first speaker is Michael Reed Ortado. Michael is a professor and researcher at Yale University on issues related to the etiology of atrocities, collective violence, and international crimes, and the response of the law. Between April 2012 and December 2013, Reed served as coordinator of an initiative that promoted accountability for serious human rights crimes in Columbia's United Nations office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. He's a columnist for El Colombiano and an analyst for La Razon Pública Punto Com. He writes on public safety, justice reform, prisons, armed conflict, and the rights of victims, among others. He's worked in various non-governmental and governmental institutions inside and outside of Columbia during the last 20 years, and we are delighted to have him here with us today. Thank you. I'll turn the podium over to Michael. I'm going to ask the speakers to speak at the podium for purposes of our webcasting. Thank you, Jenny, and thank you to all the organizers and the U.S. Institute for Peace. It's a very opportune event in discussing all the matters that are developing in the context of the peace process and in Columbia. So time is very short, so I'll get straight to it. I've been asked to sort of put TJ in context in Columbia and provide some elements of the recent past that without a doubt impact the way transitional justice mechanisms actually get implemented in Columbia. Without a doubt there's a desire to sort of make a break with the past. However, unfortunately, repetition of the past and in fact the past is probably the best predictor of what transitional justice mechanisms are going to look to the future. There's a lot of things we need to overcome, a lot of things we need to change, but unfortunately that inertia in institutions, in people, are likely to import many of the problems that we see in some of the mechanisms that have been called transitional justice. So let me do a quick review of the past, and again it's a matter of 10 or 15 minutes so I'll do this in three different moments. The first I want to address an issue of having transitional justice everywhere, but at the same time transitional justice not being anywhere in Columbia at this current stage. And that is related to the fact that starting in 2005 in the context of the paramilitary deal of immobilization and surrender to the Colombian authorities with a fairly beneficial criminal deal with them, transitional justice talk started inundating the Colombian policy debate. So the talk was very important, but it also offered a disguise to many of the initiatives and there were also some bonafide initiatives that were intended to generate some sort of transformation. The fact of the matter is that we did have transitional justice under fire and actually we continue to have transitional justice under fire, as was coined by the Justizia, transitional justice without transition as well. This became not only non-official discourse, it became part of the official discourse in a part of the policy as expressed by the Ministry of the Interior and the different planning mechanisms as well as congressional leaders in Congress. Just to put everybody up to speed, I do think we have a concept that is vague and not so well defined and I think just going back to the basics and reminding everybody of a good and a sufficiently good definition offered back in 2004 in the context of the UN Secretary General's report on post-conflict and the rule of law. At that moment, TJ was defined as a default range of processes and mechanisms associated with the society's attempt to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation. We have many different definitions that are as worthy. I like to base a lot of the comments on this one. So TJ did appear in Colombia very strongly in that framing of TJ in 2005 in the context of the deal with the paramilitaries. Initially it was a way to face alternative penalties and a very diluted criminal law in a relationship to those mechanisms and introduce more elements of truth justice and reparations which has been a social claim and a collective claim of victims throughout Latin America and in Colombia as well. Very quickly what it did become unfortunately was the legitimizing of a very bad deal of an awful design mechanism. For those of us that sustained that the mechanism was poorly designed in 2006 and 2007 we're almost seen as opposers of the Colombian nationality and of that supposed peace process with the paramilitary. Very strangely today, the official voices including the High Commissioner for Peace himself, the Ministry of Justice, those in charge of transitional justice within the Ministry of Interior are actually critical of the design process. Transitional justice unfortunately also served to institutionalize a form of exceptional and extraordinary form of government but particularly an exceptional form of criminal justice not just limited to specific subjects. It started extending to everybody and here we had the Supreme Court very conveniently using the notion of transitionality of transitional justice as a special type of justice that could lead to the evaluation of standards and due process, to modification in the rules of the game and the criminal process and unfortunately that was extended not just to the process with the paramilitaries but to all of criminal procedure in Colombia and that continues to be the case. Lastly I think we also took in the notion of transitional justice as a form of hyper politicized type of justice where in fact what we have is whatever can come out of that political transaction that is probably more should be spoken the reference should be to transitional politics but unfortunately that notion of whatever is possible under the particular transaction has also permeated the way some people and a huge amount of people and very influential people conceive what transitional justice is. With the proliferation of transitional justice discourse in Colombia what we see was not only the scope of application in contests that were not related to the particular transition to a democracy or from a kleptocracy or authoritarianism to democracy but rather being applied in peace deals and being applied in peace deals that were absolutely incomplete. In addition to that what we now started seeing in Colombia was also the amplification of the mandate of transitional justice and I think this has been really nicely developed in academic works as well as his regular work as special interpreter by Pablo de Greif and here we just started putting all kinds of things so for those of you that are familiar with Colombia it just became like a chiva so this bus were very colorful we started hanging things on top of it and they were fairly irregular on what started moving and what initially looked like a bus at the end has all kinds of adornments hung on to it without much reflection and I think it is very important to consider whether we can in fact transpose and mimic what took place in South Africa to the context of Colombia. Obviously social, political, cultural situations were very different the logic of transformation the power balances in the transactions were absolutely different. I think that is a direct no. However without much reflection we have in fact transposed again with a very recent conversation with Pablo it came up that we sort of ended up going from Santiago to Kinshasa, hopping over somewhere else and all of a sudden ended up in Bogota and all in one we are talking about what happened in Kinshasa and Santiago without having much sense that it is probably not the best practice to just transpose and reason by analogy in things that are not alike. Without a doubt if there is something that we know about TJ and the processes recovering that notion of social process is that they are very culturally sensitive and I speak of culture in trying to get to the mentalities and sensibilities that are at stake in a particular moment in society at the macro level as well as at the micro level again here this is another argument to not transpose mechanisms that have been effective for example in South Africa necessarily to the context of Colombia simply imagine the notion of state that was held in Kinshasa or in Congo widely ten years ago and can we compare that to the notion of state and to the actual manifestations of states in Colombia ten years ago again the answer is a very direct and empirically based no in addition to that TJ has said very very little about what needs to happen in peace deals we get stuck with true justice and reparations but if TJ is going to have an effect that has to deal with the reincorporation of warriors into society again and there again TJ has some relationship with DDR but that just continues it's still to be developed both theoretically as well as empirically and I think those are challenges to the future and challenges to Colombia this is not just abstract debate it is very concrete in the law of peace and justice law 975 of 2005 it is very concrete in the law of victims 1448 it is very concrete in the modification of the constitution which was called the national framework for peace and I'll give you examples of exact rhetoric for example the person in charge of the justice and peace initiative within the fiscal stated very clearly before the law of justice and peace the office of the prosecutor general the fiscalia did not investigate that is a manifestation coming from an official representative of the office of the prosecutor general saying before we did this when the mechanism was still light we didn't investigate in the past it's like all of a sudden we've discovered as we say in Spanish that water will get you wet another statement coming from who headed the national commission for reparation and reconciliation under the law of justice and peace this is the comparative mechanism Colombia does more than Congo or Sri Lanka put together well yeah great where does that get us as far as Colombia is concerned manifestation of the person in charge of TJ within the ministry of justice we are doing what we can we're just putting the puzzle together and this is a show of public responsibility and I think the last one and very very telling the day that the regs for law in 1948 were being put out Manuel Santos officially stated and I quote these legal tools will transform a past of pain and suffering into a future of hope and prosperity this was more or less two and a half years ago that future is still to be seen the criticisms to the way the law of victims is being implemented clearly have not done that type of transformation of hope and prosperity especially from the victim side but remember that same day in Putumayo at the south of the city Alex Agomes Polania and IDP leader fighting for restitution of land was assassinated now that continues to permeate the debate today and that's why revising history is very important because now we're talking of a different type of TJ a new deal something future however that inspirational rhetoric that is used by politicians continues to merge aspirations with reality we have all kinds of extraordinary expectations but still no mechanisms to meet or fulfill the promises that are being made the same language was used at the outset of the law of justice and peace 10 years later and counting all those have not been met transitional justice is a discourse about faith and it's about making promises of change when that discourse has been used for a decade it is very difficult to have people jump on the boat or jump on the new train to say that it's something new and I think that's going to be a particular challenge in Colombia with these new mechanisms that start TJ has been limited to this vision of them being gifts or benefits to perpetrators and that's something that we need to definitely get away from it has introduced a form of flexibility and exceptionalism that both government and justice officials just love and I think that's something easier unfortunately that has a huge toll on the regular notion of rule of law and as I said before the discourse is absolutely extended to ministries social works entities the prosecutors, judges and I must be fair to society as a whole so as far as challenges are concerned I think it is really important to recover the strategic purpose of transitional justice what are those changes achieved and answer those strategic questions before we put in place mechanisms it is basically and put in a nutshell the need to overcome the toolkit approach to transitional justice we also need to recover the link between transitional justice and promoting rule of law as of right now transitional justice is a way to devalue the exigencies of the rule of law in Colombia and lastly and very importantly it is culturally stuck in us we need to transcend the paradigm that criminal law will set us free now let me pass on to the second point and this will be shorter there are three objectives that should not be forgotten especially in the context of Colombia the first one is to confront denial and promote acknowledgement of atrocity literal interpretive and implicatory denial are very much alive in all of Colombia in fact literal denial has reduced its possibility principally because of efforts such as the central memory historical and reports like the Bastalla and the regional reports some of the issues regarding the existence of paramilitaries which for some of you will not be a surprise that if you talked about paramilitaries about 20 years ago you could basically be met with a fairly solid argument of saying no you're inventing it that's not true again literal denial has been reduced a little bit however we're still dealing with very serious issues of implicatory and interpretive denial that are very tough to deal with for example take justice and peace law justice peace law is based on the fact that the paramilitaries that demobilized were a third actor the implication of that is in fact that state responsibility disappears or might be brought in as much as there was a mission on behalf of the state but the discussion that paramilitarism was in fact a direct link to active operation of the state is something that is off the tables right now it is very much subject to implicatory and interpretive denial the same thing happens with the levels of responsibility and accountability without a doubt the government in 2008 recognized that there were a problem with false positives and it was an issue of procedure and administration and a few bad apples that discourse continues alive and well and everything in the official discourse regarding accountability is about denying collective levels of responsibility organizational responsibility and organizational criminality which is termed as system crimes regarding the fact is the same bit for one side we have a denial that is related to constructing the perfect enemy and therefore the fact are at the core of all evil and they're the devils of everything seen from a subjective perspective the fact will probably say we're not responsible for anything in as much as we were justified to use the violence and they will try to appeal to a collective sense of responsibility that gets rid of any individual reflection as to who did what and that's also something that culturally and socially will have to be addressed second challenge it's an issue of promoting a sense of responsibility that gets away simply from the passive notion of responsibility of attributing responsibility for the bad deeds that somebody did this is a contested and abstract concept it is by nature a polysemic concept in as much as all of us have different meanings and attribute different meanings to responsibility secrecy and surreptitious action continue to determine public life in Colombia we always have the problem of many hands so it's a lot easier to say all of us are responsible and therefore nobody's responsible antagonism and accusation without consequence is a part of daily life in Colombia and we have responsibility as what was termed by responsibility as the Sunday concept everybody embraces it loves it prays about it but from Sunday to Sunday during the week there is nothing to be discussed I think we need to get to a richer sense of responsibility that also sees responsibility as moving forward again boven sets out five categories that I think are useful responsibility is cause responsibility is accountability responsibility is capacity responsibility as task and responsibility as virtue and I think the third issue that we cannot forget about transitional justice is recovering the notion of the rule of law this is not you in Colombia we have a very strong and sophisticated state this is not the first time that we've thought about how to get the state out to vallecito tu piñuña negra, tu río huejar that is how to get the state out there and in even in recent past if you speak to some of those that were activists, art attacks as well as implementing the Plan Nacional de Colombia they all believed it and the mystique was there probably even more so than today this is not the first time that we attempt to do this this is not the first time that we roll out incredible amounts of resources I may be critical of the Plan Colombia but trust me what was attempted to do under the Pastrana administration was just that and you saw it with the Reda Solidaria Social having greater presence you saw it with the rolling out of something that was kind of strange which was Empresa Colombia you saw it rolling out of the social works we know what it takes to build a road four times and though it's still not paved this has happened before and I think we need to pay attention to the dynamics of power and the shifting balances that continue to exist and will continue to play and let me just finish yes I'm okay whoosh I'm very dangerous I hadn't seen this let me just let me just finish with a couple of challenges and a word regarding that's what's getting us together so the first on on truth seeking and truth telling truth seeking and truth telling in Colombia continue to be framed in the logic of denunciation and polarization it's about doing damage to the enemy or doing damage to somebody else and we definitely need to transcend that logic and again I want to emphasize this isn't necessarily the objective intention of truth telling or truth seeking purposes it's the way it's perceived when things are revealed it is dominated still by coercive violence and thus fear and danger and something because of its level of abstractness that isn't addressed too much is the level of realization of the freedom of thought and the freedom of expression in all of Colombia I think Bastadia does a really nice job to bring in what fear does in a society and how difficult it is to talk about truth contending that's what I want to emphasize is when everybody is afraid and when that fear is very present because the levels of coercive violence that are being exercised are huge one of the greatest mistakes that we continue to do is try to measure the levels of violence submission and control by determining whether the homicides rates went down in fact that is something we need to get away from and actually perceive the other mechanisms that are used in order to control society here I think again in the prologue for Bastadia and the prologue very much emphasized that the report was not about pretending to erect a corpus of established truths the report wants to contribute as an element of reflection for an open social and political debate it's about promoting a social process that confunds denial and bystander passivity it engages social responsibility in the confrontation of truth the elaboration of a contended narrative and the ongoing dynamics of violence I think this was something that was nicely set by the report as a challenge to what is facing us in the future I think a very important matter also that is brought up not by the Bastadia but rather the very rich narratives that continue to be produced by the Centro de Memoria Histórica for example on displacement next week I think Tibu and La Gavarra are going out it's the issue of finding links between micro realities and those macro level discourses that we all know about that connection at the meso level is something that in Colombia has not been explored secondly though we know very much what we've been studying and that's why we have violentologists and all kinds of stuff in Colombia there are still some things that we don't know what they're studying about there's some cases that we have documented and that we know very well in massacres there are others that we don't for example sexual crimes and sexual violence is something that we still have no idea how it transform there are very good qualitative studies but we still do not know the implications of sexual violence in the context of war we also continue to draw a bright line separation between conflict related and not conflict related violence I think this is going to be a challenge to the future I think that bright line does not exist and all you have to do is look at active protection rackets and the levels of violence to see that in fact whatever we term conflict related violence isn't so easy to stick in there and my last thought it's related to Bastalla Bastalla is an amazing tool to get the things right it offers a preliminary planning a preliminary mapping exercise that has had access to all kinds of databases the report but all that was done in order to get those numbers right numbers are imperfect the quantitative dimensions are imperfect but mapping would allow to have proper planning of both the prosecutorial initiative as well as the truth seeking initiative in order to see the shape and the dynamic that need to be instituted for the truth commission and the upcoming special jurisdictional initiative thank you very much thank you Michael I think there are many areas that we can move forward with thinking about some of the challenges that Michael's planted in terms of transitional justice and regular justice and criminality let's move on now to Kimberly She'll be talking with us about gender dimensions of transitional justice and historical memory she's a medical anthropologist who's worked many of you probably know she's focused on Latin America her interests include gender based and sexual violence, transitional justice reconciliation and the politics of post-war reparations she's author of a prize winning book entre progimos el conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú as well as it also available in English intimate enemies violence and reconciliation in Peru and she's working on a number of very interesting book manuscripts that she can tell us about if someone asks her let me, you should all have the bios so I think I'm going to just to save time I'm going to cut short some of the introductions from here on in and refer you to the written biographies that you have available to you thanks, thank you well first of all there's this great big clock down here so you can't pretend you don't know when you're running over there's no plausible deniability built into this I have to assure you but thank you so much I'm delighted to be here bigger pardon I can't deny this it's a threat so I had the pleasure of being in Bogotá last month for the second meeting of the cycle women's rights transitional justice construction of peace, commission of truth so it was convened by one woman it was women's organizations as they say from all the territories and the question posed to us is what might the future truth commission do and we read through the acuerdo de Havana the fact that what was being included in that mandate was the need to offer a wide explanation about the conflict and those aspects less known well we have many informes in Colombia and Bastilla is a particularly wonderful one which is rich with information and yet at that meeting and there were several hundred people there folks kept insisting on the need to fill those deficits de verdad and this idea of truth deficits has stayed with me since I came back from Bogotá I can't stop thinking about the term Michael talked about some of them I might echo a few but I want us to think what are those deficits of truth after all of these different reports that have been done these massive compilations of national and regional informes what is it that people feel they still don't know and at the end of our time together in Bogotá I began thinking of the ways in which these truth deficits reflect in part certain silences absences and erasures in the women peace and security agenda itself as currently conceived thus I want to situate efforts in Colombia as one thinks ahead to what that truth commission might do I want to situate it within a global framework the one in which all of us do this work and as you know from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 the centrality of women to peace negotiations in peace building not reflected in the photos from Havana but that's my editorial comment but if we look at that you can see all the way through more recent resolutions that the women peace and security agenda is certainly a hard one feminist victory I'm going to argue it's also an ambivalent one to what extent does the women peace and security agenda reflect the mainstreaming of more radical feminist demands and a broader sense of social justice shifting the focus from gender equality to a more protectionist scaffolding to their hyper visibility and focus on conflict related sexual violence against women and girls which almost appears as one word what understandings of sex gender and gender regimes infuse the UN Security Council Resolutions and in turn our work within transitional justice and historical memory what does that agenda bring into focus and what might it obscure briefly over the past 20 years as you know we've seen an increased attention in conflict related rape and sexual violence it's come to occupy I would argue most of the airspace when people think gender they think women, when they think women they think rape and sexual violence in part again hard one victory think about the tribunal Yugoslavia Rwanda think about the ICC obviously I think most of us would say it's a good thing that rape and other forms of sexual crimes are increasingly seen as crimes against humanity and war crimes no longer just insults to dignity and honor as they were for so many years so first we have those developments coming out of tribunals in the ICC you also have a whole series of UN Security Resolutions that are focused both on the important role women play in conflict prevention, resolution and peace building efforts while simultaneously denouncing the use of rape and sexual violence against women and girls in situations of armed conflict that's what I'm referring to are those UN Security Resolutions collective will be called women, peace and security and of course each of the resolutions lament the use of sexual violence and how slow the progress to eliminating it has been my point and I think here I'm going to echo some of what Michael said the UN resolutions well intentioned to be sure have overwhelmingly focused on women and girls as victims of sexual violence during armed conflict strikingly absent in the agenda which in turn begins to influence the kinds of truths that we seek and the kind of narratives we look for strikingly absent are men and boys as victims of sexual violence not just perpetrators hovering in the margins looking to do evil deeds men and boys as victims women as perpetrators of violence one of the implicit understandings of that agenda is that women are gnash just intrinsically peace seeking creatures have womb ergo look for peace and yet if we think about it I work with former shining path militants I work with former Fark militants there's a lot of women and they don't all see themselves as duped oh he fell she fell madly in love with the Gerdiardo you know men in uniforms that's very offensive to a lot of the women who thought they had a revolutionary project and fought for it there's nothing intrinsically violent about women so when we begin to think about a broader tooth telling effort we might want to know what all these women thought they were doing in El Monte we also don't know virtually anything about children born as a result of wartime rape and sexual exploitation and I would argue that the women peace and security agenda fall short on a broader goal of gender equality the focus on conflict related sexual violence has both temporal and geographical consequences it focuses our attention to the front lines of war to extraordinary forms of sexual violence bracketed in time which may result in obscuring the less dramatic yet everyday forms of gender based violence that distort the lives of women and girls men and boys it also leaves as I have said men and boys as margins as perps or and I quote here from resolution 2106 men and boys as those secondarily traumatized as forced witnesses of sexual violence against family members in other words even when they do appear they're only a secondary victims they've been forced to watch horrible things done to the women that they love so the longer paper from which I draw today is going to draw on work I've done in Peru and Colombia it draws on the final report of the Peruvian Tooth and Reconciliation Commission I always say I'm a member of the loyal opposition I worked with the truth commission so there's an autocritica I also want to look at some of the relevant comparative literature to explore four themes I'll get as far as I can in the time I have today I want to look at how the TRC in Peru implemented a gender focus there were three of us invited to that all of us had worked with the Peruvian TRC it was considered a gender sensitive commission that got it right with the passing of time we're able to reflect a bit on what I think we did and did not do so well one of the things and I've written about this elsewhere I mean there was an absolute obsession with getting first people women's testimonies at rape right that was the prize an emblematic narrative when women were called forth to speak and yet women had a whole lot of other things they talked about which tended to be overlooked and relegated to footnotes in the final report among those were the systematic violation of socio-economic and cultural rights women talked over and over again about that they also talked tremendously about enforced sterilizations some 270,000 women were forcibly sterilized in Peru in the second half of the 1990s it was not included again think about the consequences it was not included in the truth commission's mandate it was not considered conflict related it happened at hospitals so to speak makeshift wards and it also wasn't considered to be counter insurgency it wasn't considered to be a political crime it was not included has tremendous consequences now as those women seek some kind of reparations also overlooked and I hope I have time to get to it was how many times women spoke about rape related pregnancies but in the voice of the witness rather than the victim and when I went back again becoming so interested in the children I was struck by how many times women wanted to tell you about all these kids and if you were to ask me today after all of our efforts I really would have to tell you I don't know what happened to all those babies I'm trying to figure it out so that's one of the things I want to look at I also want us to contemplate the ways that rape between men was a form of establishing relations of power and domination at the nexus of gender ethnicity and social class as you probably know the literature on male dominant environments such as armed groups indicates that these groups utilize elaborate socialization mechanisms that are relevant to understanding the roles that some men will assume during times of our own conflict and frequently these rites of passage the socialization mechanisms are highly sexualized so that we begin to think about the other truths we might want to include one of the things I would want to know is what happened in the barracks and talking with former soldiers in Peru one of the things I can tell you is the systematic use of sexual violence against young recruits as part of teaching them that you will go out and you will be a brutal person so we would want to think about that so we would want to think about that and I think when we begin to look at the internal dynamics that forces us to reconsider militarized masculinity I bet we've all used it I've used it myself and yet when we think that that explains everything it does not militarized masculinity is some kind of uniformly shared identity it's explanatory power falls short we need to understand much more all the hierarchies and differences between men even within these all male organizations and I think that helps us to look at the other kinds of gender based violence that men suffer last week in one of my classes I said what's gender based violence in hands it's when women are armed somehow men don't have gender which is one of the critiques we've been launching for a long time but sometimes falls on deaf ears I then again want to look at what conflict related sexual violence means we look for and what we do not even when people are telling us about it and so I think we want to understand the richness of people's narratives and I think that could help us hold perpetrators more accountable and of course one of the things I'm thinking about is the forced sterilization campaign and how that all those testimonies fell on deaf ears and I conclude hopefully by considering children born of wartime rape and sexual exploitation during the last decade alone it's estimated that tens of thousands of children have been born worldwide as a result of mass rape campaigns or wartime sexual exploitation what do we know about these children one component of the women peace and security agenda is resolution 2122 it insists on the need to protect children from rape and sexual violence and it also notes quote the need for access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services including regarding pregnancies resulting from rape without discrimination there's nothing more said about the outcome of those pregnant sneeze nor about their meanings for the mothers and their children and as with all respect because we didn't do a better job in Peru either you generally get the one paragraph that men can also be victims of sexual violence in a footnote or some kids that are born of rape and that's the paragraph in the footnote we did it too I'm just trying to think how can we do this better in the future it has tremendous implications when people try to seek some kind of justice so taken together it's my hope that these reflections contribute to our collective call to think further about research and analysis on gender memory justice in the state how am I two more minutes sure yes let me just say I think it's time for me to wrap it up too I really want to emphasize something as we go out with this will happen with the truth commission I know there is going to be an absolute desire to start registering sexual violence against women it has tremendous valiance it matters in the international agenda as I've said and yet what we find is at the end of the day most women don't produce those testimonies so in Peru out of all 20 years of an armed conflict 17,000 testimonies 538 rapes doesn't sound like a plausible number whatsoever look at the statistics in Colombia once again we see that overwhelmingly when we place the narrative burden for sexual crimes on women they don't produce those stories I think they have a right not to so part of what I would hope is we think about how are we going to do things differently in Colombia what if we think about other ways of studying this not just studying sexual violence to be sure but to come up with more ethical methods of going about doing this kind of research rather than place the narrative burden on survivors who frequently have the most to lose by speaking out aren't there other evidentiary measures I think about the paramilitary with their own vision is libre is right you had men standing up talking about I think I killed 1800 it might have been 2000 how many rapes were these people willing to own up to and why don't we do a little more work about figuring out how to make other people bear some kind of responsibility for talking about these things that's one thing I'd like to see the other let's figure out what happens to men as part of military socialization whether it's illegal armed groups or state sponsored militaries I think we want to know a lot more about what goes on in the barracks and what kind of violence is practiced upon recruits in the name of making them more capable of performing those kind of acts on the civilian population perhaps during the discussion section we can talk more about the kinds of horrific stories I have heard about young men who were forcibly conscripted into the army in Peru when we think about gender based violence certainly forced conscription falls more heavily on the shoulders of young frequently darker skinned less educated men I'll conclude with one last thing and again as a caution for how we think about how we'll do this work in Colombia very striking to me is the work of Michelle Lebe a colleague of mine who went back over a subset of testimonies given to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission keeping in mind 17,000 testimonies 538 reported rapes 11 to men she went back over a subset of 2,000 testimonies with native Kishwa speakers we talked about some of the terms you want to look at veiled speech the ways people talk about experiences that have been painful and humiliating so going back with a really trained set of Kishwa speakers she went back over what did the men actually say and what were they coded for and what you begin to realize is what determined whether something was understood as a sexual crime was not the crime itself but the body upon which it was performed so if a woman pardon the example but if a woman came forward and had been anally assaulted with a police bet on if a man came forward he was tortured now my point in both cases it's tortured in both cases right but we systematically erase one other side we essentialize categories victims or women perpetrators or men we essentialize these categories in powerful ways when we code these things out so even when men were willing to come forward and speak about this it was coded out hence my insistence on the sorts of erasures that come into the process which certainly leave these men without access to reparations either when they now come forward to the victims registry offices and I'll stop there. Thank you Kim. I think these are exactly the kinds of comments and insights that we're hoping to be able to collect for our colleagues from the Historical Memory Center that might give them some ideas as they're moving forward in their truth commission process. I'd like to invite to the stand now David Tolbert he's president many of you know him of the International Center for Transitional Justice he previously served as the registrar for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and previously was assistant secretary and special expert to the UN Secretary General on the United Nations assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trial he has many other experiences that I could go into but I'll just say that it was a delight he served here as a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and I got to know him as a colleague and friend and I'm delighted to welcome back to you welcome him back to USIP Thank you Thank you Jenny for the kind introduction and it's nice to be back in USIP and the facilities are a bit better than when we were on 17th Street I think but it's good to be in this audience and to talk about this important subject and ICTJ is very pleased and honored to be a co-sponsor of this event the subject I am supposed to tackle today is transitional justice and historical memory and the global contacts and I will do that although part of me wants to toss my notes aside and get into a debate with my co-panelist over a number of issues I have a somewhat more positive view on some of these on the approach in Columbia I think Michael and I could probably go back and forth on a few points and okay and join your table perhaps but I will stick to the subject at hand I do think it's also when we think about the Columbia situation and as we try to make comparisons with other countries and transitional justice processes around the world and we are now talking about dozens and dozens and dozens of countries there have been some 40 truth commissions around the world just to give you one example this process of course and the recent agreement is coming through a peace process which is somewhat stands the traditional or approach that we see in transitional justice where we are looking for a deep consultation process and if I look around the other countries we are working in it's very much a bottom up process where we are talking with victims groups and eventually putting pressure on governments to do the right thing so a peace process ends up with transitional justice mechanisms or measures or approaches coming out of a peace process poses some particular challenges that maybe we can take up in discussion you might be interested particularly with respect to the truth commission the ICTJ and the Kofi Nan Foundation did a major study on this looking at the experiences of truth commissions created by peace processes and there were some good examples but more bad examples to be honest with you however I do think that the process coming out of the mechanisms and the measures and the approach coming out of the peace process in many ways very innovative and I think puts frames transitional justice in ways that I think will be will be very important for the country to deal with the past and ultimately that's what we're talking about in an effective way I think we could I could comment extensively obviously on the agreement that has just been announced obviously the devils and the details but I think that it is within the confines of international law and is approaching some really difficult issues in a very creative and constructive way and I would note that the ICC prosecutor Fattu Ben Sudo perhaps cautiously welcomed that staff and her statement as well what I did I will Jenny stick though to the topic that you asked me to this is a after all a conference on historic memory and try to talk about and try to put this in the global context and some other experiences which I think are useful for us to to look at one of the things that I think I would note in the beginning and Michael refer to the secretary general's 2004 report which ICTJ had a lot to do with and what sometimes is referred to the four pillars of transitional justice truth and memory reparations criminal justice and reforms I do think sometimes and if you look at our strategic plan we look at this too mechanistically because transitional justice is a process and I think is driven from the ground by what we sometimes refer to as active social forces, civil society victims groups women's groups as we we've just heard about also depending on the context we see the process driven in Tunisia for example by trade unions play a really important role in Latin America and eastern Europe the church. I like the term active social forces because it's broader than civil society and it's it's not a top down kind of process and it's not necessarily going to be sequenced in any particular way and we see some countries adopt one or two measures and some adopt all Columbia being a very good student has adopted all the ones and various sequences which makes it a very interesting and complex discussion but I think there are real limits to talking about transitional justice simply in terms of the four measures or mechanisms however to address the subject that I'm going to talk about today I'm going to fall back on that and talk a bit about the approach of the subject from the perspective of the four measures and look at how they contribute globally and have contributed in a number of context to historic historic memory because I do but I would stress that I think that all transitional justice processes are to some extent about memory and historic memory establishing the truth if you will, establishing the history of the country the history of the conflict, the history of the abuses in an effort to ensure that we don't see a repetition of that of that history so I think if we look at if we look if we look at memorialization I think is important and sometimes really under under reported and we don't look at this as much as we should I think, I'm thinking particularly of a couple of experiences that I've had Jenny mentioned that I spent some time working on the Coomeroos trials which I think were important but ultimately I think if we look at it in the context of memory I don't know how many of you have been to the S21 camp but I think in a way the photographs of course of all the 14,000 people who were tortured, executed, killed I believe there were 13 survivors out of the 14 14,000 people their pictures are on the wall and each one of those pictures I think tells an important story we don't have all of the details but that kind of memorial I think is very important for historic memory and there have been some very interesting films I don't know if you've seen Enemies of the People which I think is a very interesting film about about S21 and it actually begins to tell the stories of the those individuals that are behind some of those pictures so I think the use of memory projects and obviously connected with films in some case or artistic representations can be very powerful and important element of historic memory Germany is another place where we've seen some great work done and if you've been in Berlin you'll see a number of memorials and they're German activists now, very interesting article in the New Yorker who are marking the last place where victims of the holocaust were snatched or taken and taken off to their deaths off the streets of various cities in Germany and they're creating a small silver marker that's actually the pavement or wherever they were taken from so I think that memorials and efforts on these efforts are a very important element of transitional justice that's under recognized and addressing historic memory in a very tangible way I would also say of course that we must bear in mind that sometimes we see transitional justice measures instrumentalized for nefarious purposes and actually to go against exactly what we're trying to achieve one of the most recent incidences and one that I joined a letter on and it's quite close to I spent nine years working at the Yugoslavia tribunal and a lot of time in Bosnia which one of the reasons perhaps I see particularly after spending so much time working in Bosnia but in the town of Priyador which saw some of the worst atrocities in the Bosnian conflict the mayor put a number of the Serb dominated town and the Serb mayor put monuments up to Serb victims but disallowed prevented and actively destroyed monuments to Bosniaks and to Croats so again we memorialization like other transitional justice measures can be utilized for for nefarious purposes and we have to guard against that and I think this is as a cautionary tale I'm always struck before I leave memorialization and monuments I'm always struck when I come to Washington both when I was here at USIP but every time I come as I look at the memorials around this city I see many former slave owners I see many war criminals who have monuments to them I won't name them USIP goods funding from the US government so I guess I should be careful here but I don't see many monuments I'm always struck particularly I know that the Smithsonian Institute has recently opened a wing on African American devoted to African Americans and slavery but we had the Holocaust Museum long before we had a museum that addressed slavery and particularly when we think about the issues that face this country today in terms of race and race relations I think this failure to acknowledge slavery symbols of the Confederate flag the US is hardly alone in that one needs only to go to Northern Ireland to see some of the issues around these symbols so I would stress that I think that memorialization and memorials can be a very important element regarding historical memory obviously along with archiving collection of materials a number of organizations have done very good work truth commissions obviously are quite key to questions of historic memory obviously in Columbia we'll be having a truth commission and I think that's an important element of the process truth commissions have as I say we've had over 40 truth commissions and reports frequently tell a much deeper story than trials do they can get at some of the root causes and discuss what really happened and I think actually can form a basis for dialogue in society about the abuses and the crimes of the past and also create a pathway for the future one of the more important elements I think that we don't think about enough in terms of transitional justice is education and how the narratives that are passed down from generation to generation get incorporated in the curriculum ultimately I think that transitional justice processes really should have the aim of changing the curriculum so that a much more accurate and truthful story of what happened I think for example in Germany this has happened I remember growing up in the south in the US and I can remember what my history book said which reflected nothing related to what really happened vis-a-vis slavery or vis-a-vis vis-a-vis race relations truth commissions I think for example in Guatemala where I can remember at USAP we had a long discussion on the commission of historical clarification which I think was groundbreaking and seismic and I think if you look at what's going on in Guatemala today with the president's resignation last week there's a fairly clear path between the commission's work CSIG, a number of other very important efforts but this this the work of the commission I think in addition to its recommendation really established memory or established the history of the country in an important way so I think this is this is in terms of transitional justice processes truth commissions can play and should play a really important role in historic memory and I think we see this in many many contexts trials I haven't talked about I spent much of my careers I'm noted working on trials in terms of criminal prosecutions for massive crimes crimes against humanity genocide war crimes torture and frequently I think we tend to think of trials as being much more limited in terms of their scope for historic memory in the sense that they are limited to the testimony in the courtroom and I think that's right I think Richard Wilson at University of Connecticut has actually done a very interesting book and study on memory and trials that I would recommend to you but I do on the other hand I think there's some very important instances where trials have established facts that then become irrefutable we can think of the Nuremberg trials I think we can also think of we can also think of the case of Severinica and Rwanda the work of the Yugoslavia trials and other national contacts I think it's a more blunt instrument perhaps than the reports of truth commissions and we're talking about memory but it does I think serve as a bulwark against revisionism I think particularly of the trials in the 60s and Frankfurt regarding Auschwitz which I think changed the entire approach to history and to memory in Germany so I think trials can play an important role although obviously the method of obtaining the evidence and the law's circumscription of those of what's reported is much more limited and I think truth commissions have a broader approach but I don't think we should put that to one side in the area of reforms I think we see less relationship with historic memory but reforms such as vetting, security sector reforms other steps do I think address memory in a more perhaps a more indirect way by ensuring that those who have been human rights abusers are no longer on the front lines and the stigmatization that may occur and the signal that wrongs have been done and the processes that are followed I think can also be an important element with respect to historical memory so my argument would be that historic memory is and transitional justice are really linked twins that transitional justice by transitional justice processes not just the four mechanisms or the four measures but also the processes of consultation and the effects of transitional justice in society are really a key element of ensuring that historical memory is framed in a way that is both historical and can be remembered and ultimately become part of the national dialogue the national narrative and ultimately I think the goal is and I think we see this in a number of countries and of course I point to Germany and other places not so much but curriculum and part of the education so that ultimately forms part of the part of the history in the history books of the respective countries so in the Colombian context we obviously have a very strong debate or very fractured agreement on what history is and therefore I think the fact that we have a truth commission coming out of this process coming out of the peace process obviously the how it's carried out and I did take Michael's point that the Colombian approach can be very complex so hopefully it is not as complex as some of the other processes that we see I think can ultimately be a clear of the issues and contribute to historic memory it's interesting with respect to the new agreement on justice where that will end up but the as Jenny outlined the possibility or the more than a possibility the likelihood that many people will be coming forward to give truthful testimony to this is part of the bargain so to speak but this can also contribute to historic memory as well as the other processes and projects that we are all engaged in in Colombia. Jenny I think I'm two minutes over so thank you for your indulgence I have a lot more to say but maybe we'll get to talk about these issues later thank you very much thank you we're going to take a coffee break for half an hour and then come back and I hope launch into some of this really meaty discussion and topics that we've been set out with just meet back here in half an hour you'll hear a xylophone tone to indicate that it's time to come back Jenny I'm sorry I was late and I walked Hello we're returning for comments on the first set of panelists and I just like to flag a couple of areas that we've heard this morning in terms of how language defines the scope of what we look at. I thought there were some really interesting comments along these lines particularly from Kim in talking about the Peruvian Truth Commissions mandate and how they defined what they would be looking at. Michael had some comments about transitional justice that made me think about questions about the difference between ordinary justice and transitional justice particularly since David underscored that in many of these cases there's no transition to anything so if there's no transition to anything then what in fact how would we differentiate ordinary justice between transitional justice and why wouldn't ordinary justice serve just as well. David also brought up I think a really interesting point about the mechanistic approaches to truth justice reparations and non-repetition really being insufficient in the need to engage what he called active social forces that have not only a truth deficit but a language deficit. How do we talk about people who have been abused? Victims seems to be really unsatisfying in many ways. I think the discourses about gender that leave women and children as victims but not as participants, active participants in a broader political process is really the reality becomes shaped by the language we use and finally just a general question that I think came out of many of the presentations about whose memories are privileged and whose are not. The difficulty when you have a historical memory commission looking at victims or talking to victims how do you define which victims you'll listen to? It's impossible to go into a village and hear every single story so what does that mean for the victims who don't get to tell their stories and the damage that might be done in the not telling. So I think a lot of really interesting information, analysis and ideas I think have come out of the first panel. I'm looking forward to hearing what our commentators have to say about them. We'll start with Cynthia Arnson to my right who is the director of the Latin America program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She's a known quantity in downtown. She's been working on Latin American issues and US policy issues of democratization, democratic governance, conflict resolution, citizen security, organized crime. If you want to know something about what's happening in Latin America and policy dimensions to that experience and that reality, Cindy is the go to person in Washington so I'll turn it over to you. Jenny thanks for that warm introduction and thank you for the role that you have always played at USIP in keeping Columbia and the questions of the peace process front and center for all of us. I had a talk that I was prepared to or some remarks that I was prepared to give but I think after listening to the first panel I'm doing away with them and I'm going to start sort of in a different vein and I come at this issue not from uniquely the perspective of truth telling or the perspective of transitional justice but rather from a perspective of comparative peace processes and how internal armed conflicts, particularly in Latin America, have been and can be brought to an end through political negotiations. So I'll be mentioning certain things that are unique to Columbia but also that are more generically applied to peace processes. The first observation is that peace is always declared over the ashes of many victims so what to do with perpetrators both for the issues of justice, for the issues of truth telling and for the issue of non-repetition which has intrinsically an element of institutional reform embodied in it is an issue in settling all internal armed conflicts. There is a political and moral as well as a legal obligation to investigate and prosecute and punish and one can accept that at the same time that you can observe as a practical matter that there is a dilemma involved that's central to all peace processes which is that parties to the conflict, particularly insurgent movements or non-state actors will not lay down their weapons if what is offered on the other side is a jail term. So the balancing act in any peace process and it's not, I don't see this as a trade-off between peace and justice, anything but but the question really the task for negotiators is to balance out this carrot in which insurgents are offered the opportunity to participate politically in the life of the country versus on the other hand what you could consider the stick but is really the scale of justice and how do you create an incentive structure that balances the overall sort of moral ethical legal obligations against the need to demobilize combatants. There are many aspects of the Colombian peace process that are unique and I think Colombia has always been this enormous laboratory of creativity and innovative thinking and those of us who have followed Colombia for a long time are just never cease to be amazed by the kinds of ideas and ferment that comes out of Colombian society. One unique aspect was as many have mentioned but I think it's important to make it explicit that the process of truth telling and the education and work around reconciliation has begun long before the conflict ended and before even there was a real peace process underway that had any kind of possibility of leading to a final settlement. I participated in forums organized by the Center for Historical Memory in Colombia where there is an attempt to sort of bring these issues to various audiences including the military, not just civil society, to have these discussions. One very unique opportunity at a conference about a year ago between the Superior War College and the Center for Historical Memory to begin to deal with all of the actors that had to wrap their minds around what could be down the line. Another unique aspect is the victims and land restitution law that was passed in 2011. The work behind that actually went on for almost four years beforehand and this is I think again we should not lose sight of the fact that this is the first time with or without a peace process that victims of our conflict are seen as an object of state action in the midst of conflict that the law would be applied whether or not that there was a peace accord and it recognized not only victims of the non-state actors, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries but also people who were victims of the state. I think I'm correct in saying that there are something like 7 million people that have come forward to 7.6 have come forward to register under that process. It's completely unique and obviously we'll need to be deepened if and I assume when a final accord is signed. So let's see there's also I think a novel part of the negotiations themselves. There have been instances certainly in Latin America where civil society has played a role in providing proposals to the parties that are negotiating Guatemala is the most I think striking example where there was a civil society assembly that prepared background documents on all of the issues that were on the negotiating agenda but Columbia is the first time that victims of the armed conflict of various actors have been invited to the peace talks to talk to the parties about what it is that they want and need and foresee as restitution for what happened to them and there is no one answer to any of this but I think that one cannot underestimate the significance of this process in changing the thinking of the FARC that made the accord on transitional justice that was announced on September 23rd a possibility. The FARC was forced to accept that it is not just a victim which is the way it saw itself a victim of state violence a victim of when it tried to form a political party during the conflict the UP the patriotic union which was decimated in a campaign of dirty war and assassination the FARC saw itself as victims did not see itself as perpetrators and was forced to listen to people who were describing their the suffering that they had that they had gone through themselves or their families at the hands of the FARC so I think that that change in thinking if you remember too that initially the FARC had been opposed to the whole notion of bringing in victims because they were seen as something that would legitimate the discourse of people who were against the peace process so that was an enormous process of evolution in their thinking which went on during the negotiations I think that the Accord has many promising mechanisms novel ones but also quite impressive including this special tribunal that will be set up that will have input from the Fiscalia from the Attorney General's Office to investigate to prosecute, punish and offer alternative sentences those that confess will be subject to reduced sentences again the sort of formula that was used by the Justice and Peace Law for paramilitaries was repeated here and it would include a privation of liberty not in a prison but in an area that would be restrictive that it would that the these alternative penalties would be available to not just gorillas but also to members of the state because one of the sticking points with the armed forces was that you have people including those who are in jail for the false positives for having committed terrible abuses of human rights and why was the FARC supposed to get more generous treatment than the people who had already faced the hand of Colombian justice so the fact that those cases will be reopened is to some including my dear friends and colleagues at Human Rights Watch where I used to work is considered a travesty of justice and I actually think it's something that one of the only things that will bring the armed forces along to support this process and if you think back to all of the transitions not just from internal armed conflict to peace but also from authoritarianism to democracy you have to deal with the power of the enemies of what you're trying to do to sabotage what it is you're trying to do and the kind of agreement the kind of transition always reflects the balance of forces I also think that there is a novel actually not so novel but the incorporation of a sense of amnesty not for people who have committed war crimes but for rank and file members of the guerrilla movement whose principal crime is to have taken up arms against the state so that that is something that will allow for a process and hopefully an orderly process of demobilization and reintegration there are many risks ahead and here I probably would agree less with my friend from ICTJ than with Michael one is incomplete and faulty implementation Columbia is a country of laws and of great institutional design sometimes with a lack of thorough and proper implementation I don't have the current figure but I know that in 2013 after eight years of the justice and peace process with the paramilitaries there had been a total of 14 sentences so there is a there are 33 today so that but you know when you think about the tens of thousands that demobilized as members of the AUC versus the number of sentences it is quite astounding I'm also not thrilled that the selection of people that will serve on this special tribunal is left to the parties is left to the FARC and left to the government there is a question as to whether or not those particular figures will be seen by Columbia and society in general as those with the competence and the moral authority to judge these crimes Columbia also has seen over a period of decades other forms of violence are recycled into other forms of violence the demobilization of the AUC the formation and incorporation of the bandas criminales the so-called backcrime and some of the actually I don't think that this is because of the lack of justice in the demobilization process I think it has to do principally with two other things one the lack of real opportunity for people who leave a life sometimes the only life they know in an armed movement and cannot find meaningful a meaningful existence in civilian life but also because of the enormously perverse opportunity structure of organized crime the FARC is deeply involved in drug trafficking that's no secret as was the AUC there's lots of money to be made and it's just not plausible to think that people will simply lay down weapons and enter civilian life another and every time I see Ginny's hand moving I'm afraid that I'm gonna I don't have the advantage of height so unlike Kimberly I actually can't see the clock which is good two final points one is that President Santos has promised repeatedly that there would be a public referendum on the peace process I don't see this as a foregone conclusion even if there is a final accord it is reached first of all Colombian vote turnout in elections in general even presidential elections is not robust there have been examples of referenda that have failed because there is not the required constitutional number of voters and there will be enormous incentives mostly by the opponents of the accord to turn out their voters as opposed to those who are willing to accept but are not enthusiastic about the conditions that are laid out in the accord and there has also been I think overwhelming polling data over these years of the peace process that show that people are not terribly interested in the political participation of the FARC and they are also opposed to the notion of sacrificing justice in favor of peace so all of these things are going to be played out in very sort of loud dramatic ways in coming months and then just a final note which I think is an important observation that tempers both the optimism and the amazement that people felt when the transitional accord was announced is that peace accords are never panaceas as much as an agenda tries to be comprehensive and deal with root causes of conflict in the Salvadoran case and the structure of internal security in the role of the armed forces in the case of Colombia land has been a central land and drug trafficking have been central components but these are better understood as important significant factors in the political evolution of a country they create opportunities that can be seized or discarded but they are never in and of themselves in the problems that a country faces so I'll end there and that's I think probably not an optimistic or pessimistic note but a realistic note and thank you for this opportunity Thank you Cindy next we'll have Carlos Quezada give comments Carlos is the executive director of the international institute on race equality and human rights formerly he was the global rights director of ethnic and racial equality program and advisor on the rights of LGBT people and I should note we haven't mentioned it here but another innovation in the Colombian process is that the LGBT community has also had its hearing in Havana at the peace talks and has been participating in consultations with the gender subcommission that was established specifically for the purpose of reviewing all of the agreements that were reached in terms of their gender the gender dimensions Carlos is trained as a journalist and a lawyer he's worked on racial discrimination in Colombia Peru Cuba and Brazil for more than two decades he has worked with a lot of international institutions looking for ways to ensure that discriminatory practices are not allowed and are built into the different structures that exist for monitoring those areas and I will turn it over to Carlos thank you very much I'm bringing my own clock so I hope it's going to work okay well thank you very much when I was invited here I really wanted to talk about the ethnic dimension of the conflict and I'm going to just you know maybe more than a comment of what you just said maybe to add something that can contribute in Colombia we are convinced that in Colombia the conflict has an ethnic dimension and structural ethnic dimension and we have to say it out loud and we have to document it also there is a historical responsibility of the Colombian society and especially of the current government and the FARC and recognize that racial discrimination has played an important factor in the last two decades of the internal conflict in Colombia facing that truth maybe the hardest task for a Colombian society when attempting to come face to face with itself once the conflict ends we're starting to document racial discrimination in Colombia back in the early 2000s when few organizations were interested in paying attention to the ethnic dimension of the conflict we when I was at global rights decided that we needed to prove the existence of racial discrimination and for those of us working to combat racial discrimination even in this country we faced two issues one is the denial of the existence of racial discrimination and then to prove that there is racial discrimination so what we did in Colombia based on the Brazilian model and the US model was to try to document from an Afro-Columbian perspective the racial discrimination and in fact I'm very happy to mention that one of the first organizations that helped us was USIP the USIP helped us actually to document one of the first reports back in 2003 so thank you very much for that anyway so we started to work with organizations like the National Association of Afro-Columbians Displaced, Afro-Lez Afro-Medica 21st, Colombian Chapter or the Black Communities Process our partners started to produce reports that started to show how Afro-Columbians were discriminated in general and how the internal civil war had affect their communities numbers are important we're talking about racial discrimination and especially in the case of Colombia because of the disproportionate impact of the civil war in Afro-Columbian and indigenous communities so I know that next year there's going to be a census in Colombia but the last official data that we have is from 2005 and basically the National Democratic Department of Statistics in 2005 established that almost 1.4 million people in the country I'm speaking too fast that's it, yeah I know I'm sorry Spanish and English I speak very fast for those who know me so let's see thank you so the 2005 census established that 1.4 million people in Colombia self-identified as members of an indigenous group accounting for 3.4% of the total population of Colombia and 4.3 million people self-identified as Negros, Afro-Colombianos, Palenqueros or Raizales around 10% of the population however they were present around 30 to 35% of the internally displaced in Colombia so we're talking here about an ethnic dimension of the internal conflict in Afro-Columbian communities yes we had law 17 in Colombia which was great but as a community leader once said it was maybe the best curse we ever had why? because it recognized the ancestral land as collective rights but it was not a coincidence that just a few days after collective titling began in the exact place where it began the municipality of Riosucio in the Atrato River Basin in 1996 the Elmer Cardenas paramilitary unit entered the area assassinating and displacing the Afro-Columbian population and others who had lived in those territories for hundreds of years the situation worsened on January 14th 1997 with the arrival of the armed forces to the Afro-Columbian collective ancestral territories and the indiscriminate bombing of the Salaki through Ando and Cacarica river basins resulting in the immediate displacements of more than 20,000 Afro-Columbians in a very short period of time thus began the armed conflict offensive to dismantle Afro-Columbians rights to their ancestral territories as recognized by law 17 this strategy was principally supported by the indiscriminate use of force brought to bear thanks to the lack of state protection that has kept marginalized Afro-Columbian communities in a condition of extreme vulnerability the enactment of laws that violate the rights of the Afro-Columbian communities and as always the discourse of development or undevelopment aimed at supporting the very mega projects which put at risk the survival of black as cultural group in the Pacific as one of the ecosystems with the greatest degree of biodiversity in the planet I'll just give you exact days of back time because for those of us working on internal displacement in Colombia especially talking about those days actually were very important in terms of the mass displacements later on of Afro-Columbian communities this complex range of factors has profoundly ruptured in the communities and organizational processes in Colombia as well as resulted in a strong impact with their cultural methods related to land or the ancestral production of the ecosystem I would like actually to also mention two things there was a decree 005 of 2009 in Colombia that you know that recognize so to speak that the impact of internal displacements for Afro-Columbian communities and how the government should react to those internal displacement there the collective Afro-Columbian territories have not the collective Afro-Columbian territories have not only been at the center of a massive expulsion of displaced persons but had also received at least 500,000 displaced persons so the Afro-Columbian territories have been not only a place to displace but also a place where people have to be displaced again to a different Colombian territory Afro-Columbian territory this complex situation increases the degree of vulnerability of Afro-Columbian communities if we consider that displaced persons who go to collective territories are going to places where the chances are low that the same situation would not repeat itself as is manifest by the fact that more than half a million displaced persons have left there the impact of forced displacement on ancestral Afro-Columbian territories becomes even more concerning if along with the collective territories we add the municipalities municipalities with a major Afro-Columbian population and why is this because you know like in Colombia we have a real problem in terms of registering internally displaced Afro-Columbians a lot of Afro-Columbians who have been displaced and they ended up in Afro-Columbian territory they don't register or they haven't been registered as internally displaced so some groups some Afro-Columbian groups have actually said that probably the internal displacement within the Afro-Columbian community is probably more than 35% 35% this excessive strategy of expulsion would not appear to make any sense if we consider that the Afro-Columbian population has been historically marginalized from political participation in the country ruling out possible political goals with them they have been excluded from the distribution of socioeconomic benefits and it is the poorest of the poor we must therefore ask how to explain this the territorialization I cannot even say that in Spanish an excessive violence against the Afro-Columbian communities the Afro-Columbians communities and their organizations have analyzed this question and feel it has at least two possible answers first and most obvious it is behind the strategy of Afro-Columbian displacement is none other than a plan to seize their rich lands since most of them live in the Pacific basin and since the Pacific is one of the richest regions in the country as well as the world in terms of biodiversity oil, mines, timber etc nonetheless they consider that this has been one of the main reasons why they have been internally displaced we actually since I have five minutes left and I'm going to do what Cynthia actually did makes in general comments now on two important things one is the fact that the Afro-Columbians want to be part of the peace process and recently the Afro-Columbian peace council was created and the whole idea is that they wanted to be heard as victims in the peace process things now we are kind of in a fast track of each peace very soon I don't know if that's going to happen but I think it's going to be very important as I mentioned at the beginning since there is a structural ethnic dimension that they should be considered hopefully in the last stages of the peace process the other thing that I would like to highlight here is that we are a capacity-building organization so what we are doing basically is developing the capacity of our partners to use either the inter-american system or the UN system Colombia was reviewed at the beginning of August under the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination and the recommendations of the committee just came out at the end of August and I would like to highlight three recommendations that the committee has set the committee, not even civil society is, was that the lack of effective participation of Afro-Colombians and indigenous in the peace process as a matter of concern and it recommended that among other things to guarantee the participation of Afro-Colombians and indigenous including women in the peace negotiations in order to the process of truth, justice and reparation take into account their legitimate interests it also actually stated that there is still structural discrimination in Colombia against Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities and the concluding observations and recommendations highlighted even concrete examples mentioned the example of Buenaventura for instance and how Afro-Colombian youth have been the violence that have been impacted by Afro-Colombian youth in Buenaventura and also mentioned that still as we speak there is still forced displacement in Colombia I just wanted to end saying that when I was there, I mean we were in Geneva at the beginning of August when Colombia was being reviewed Genado Garcia, the head of one of the community councils of Al-Tomira was assassinated in Tomaco by the FARC we made a press release meaning like are the Afro-Colombian organizations and finally the FARC admitted that the assassination of Genado Garcia so in the context of a peace process right now I mean we have to take into account that for Afro-Colombian communities the conflict has not ended yet I mean as of today people have been displaced as of today people have been killed, are being threatened by the different illegal groups in the country so that's why it is very important that in the whole peace process we need to recognize the structural dimension of the internal conflict in the country and finally I mean since I just talked about Afro-Colombians I think I'm not an expert on indigenous rights or the situation of indigenous peoples in Colombia but it almost applied everything I just said to the indigenous communities so thank you very much I would like to hear back from you guys Thank you Carlos we'll turn now to Lisa LaPlante who joined the New England law faculty in 2013 and 14 she teaches business and human rights, public international law torts and transitional justice she spent almost six years as a human rights lawyer and researcher in Peru providing legal counsel to victims bringing complaints to the inter-American human rights system as well she was also a researcher with the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a grantee of the Notre Dame University transitional justice program we're delighted to have her here with us and I'll turn the floor over to her good morning everyone so I'm really excited to be here today to celebrate the important work of the National Center for Historical Memory and I jumped at the invitation to be here since writing about law 975 with my co-author Kimberly Titan and really over the years finding the Colombian experience to be one of the most complicated and complex with more laws than I am ever going to claim to have even had a chance to read and reports it's amazing as a case study but I'm not going to pretend that I have as much knowledge on it as my co-panelists and instead I'm going to share some of the knowledge that I've gained about studying Peru and more recently Guatemala in part thanks to a grant from USIP in 2005 which really jump started a lot of what I have to say today so I did prepare some remarks and fortunately they are responsive to what was said in the morning because there was so much said and I think I'll be able to touch upon a particular aspect which is I'm not so sure that I'm challenging David's account of these pillars and how they create historical memory as much as presenting the idea that it's not just historical memory but it's the collective memory that may result from that historical memory that we really need to pay attention to especially because it's often that collective memory that sets the context for the types of outcomes that we seek in transitional justice projects so I'm really going to talk about my experience in terms of research I started off with this agenda to look at the implementation of reparations after the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded its work in 2002 I thought it was going to be pretty technical watching how it happened and I kept running into the idea of memory it was really everywhere it was in the political discourse it was in the media accounts the political agendas especially with the victims their platforms and their protest but I found that it wasn't just the factual memory that was at stake it was the interpretation of this factual memory that really stood out to me and I think to add probably the as Kimberley calls it the truth deficits that I probably didn't see articulated but I realize they were there from my many interactions with victims and possibly other constituencies as well and so I began to question the expectation that transitional justice naturally leads to just one collective memory and looking at some of the early theoretical writings it really is an assumption and instead I saw that there were many different collective memories to my dismay some of these collective memories were quite vocal in the Peruvian Society not only denied what happened or justified what happened but also often gained a lot of legitimacy within society and even dominated the discourse but their victims also had a response in one of my early articles I looked at how the TRC created a space for many of these formerly silent victims to appropriate the space to tell their own stories and they even rejected passive storytelling such as to a truth commission and they had their own books and their own theater and their own art and often their own teachings and their own seminars and so what I argued was it's not so much it's also the process of truth telling and not as much or equally as important to the product of memory the product of memory is important that goes along with it even after a truth commission concludes its work and that that process of transforming the formerly silenced to become protagonists in a human rights movement is such an important part of this endeavor it hopefully in the case of Peru many through the truth commission process were able to overcome some of their fear which we've heard about today is one of the issues in Colombia although arguably in Peru there wasn't the same kind of active conflict there was still a lot of fear from the conflict and I saw victims in Bolden to become truth tellers to change their status as personal and political activists in this context but despite these positive outcomes with victims becoming empowered I wondered why were they the ones that had to carry forth the implementation of the reparations especially the ones who suffered so much and yet they were the ones who really it fell on them to keep the process active and what I saw was despite the fact that the Peruvian government enacted a great law very quickly had some problems but it did embody many of the truth commission recommendations there was not a smooth path to its implementation and I concluded that in part some of this was because of the collective memory that had been developing alongside the TRC's work some of which planted questions that created societal unease which also undermined the political will to do something so questions like was the violence justified because of a war on terrorism was it even an internal armed conflict who was innocent who was guilty what were the causes of atrocity and who was responsible did you dishonor the military by recognizing that it contributed to this atrocity and did you empower the state enemy by recognizing them as victims so these questions all relate to interpretation and I came to see how the struggle over interpretation of memory in itself is a critical step to the formation of collective memory and that ultimately we need this collective memory to reach the long term goals of transitional justice such as reparations peace culture of rights and yes rule of law it is in this brew of memory making that the government struggles to implement the letter of the law it is the political context and cultural context that shapes and is shaped by this process of memory contestation so coming to this realization I felt that the field in studying the field of transitional justice doesn't always understand the memory making process as well as it could nor the long term consequences upon the success of transitional justice although the topic of memory gets a lot of attention in the field certainly most countries adopting transitional justice look at their truth commissions as that very as having that very aim of gathering memory and truth and even historical memory collective memory but again I challenge the assumption that this process neatly leads to one dominant collective memory that helps set the context to redress past harms but we do strive for one dominant collective memory that is serious human rights occurred and they were wrong and they were not justified but my empirical research in that of others has helped to reveal that despite the fact that we want that dominant viewpoint it's not always the viewpoint that is picked up by society again memory makers follow along different groups of opinion makers you've got those who deny or suppress and want to move on often the perpetrators and their supporters fit into this group I think Michael pointed that out that that is very much a part of Colombian society today others who want to reveal the truth and ensure accountability and recognition these are often the victims and their supporters and so the tension of this contestation doesn't end with the creation of transitional justice mechanisms that's really when it starts to increase and especially when the political stakes are very high in a case of Colombia where there is the prospect of criminal trials in Peru that was also built into the model that sets up a different context what's interesting is sometimes the terms of that debate can change with these mechanisms I saw that while observing the trial of Rios Mont in Guatemala that the evidence brought forth by so many victims providing the same testimony over and over made it harder for society to deny that there had been atrocity they actually had denied that for many years but what they did instead was debate whether or not it was a genocide I saw that as a positive outcome with regard to at least acknowledging the atrocity although a bit worrisome with the way that the other debate went on saw the same thing while directing a trial monitoring blog of the Fujimori trial former president of Peru that did result in a conviction with regard to the way that this debate went on I've come to call this a memory battle and in fact I have so much less time than I thought I had okay I am tall and I can't see that okay so I'm going to sum it up the question with this memory battle is who wins and it's not always clear who will win what's important is that this memory battle takes place in the media social media, TV, radio printed media and that this is the filter for these memory battles and that the media is often overlooked in transitional justice projects they are a subject and they are an object of this process and yet they are never neutral arbitrators of this memory battle and actually can be quite divisive and so really quick in the remaining time that I have this sets up a paradox for transitional justice on one hand we want to promote different opinions that's democracy an open debate but the problem is is what if some of those opinions are denying the atrocity or getting in the way of the implementation of this process this can undermine the other goals of transitional justice rule of law a culture of rights and that is where I get to the point of what we're aiming for is a conscience such as that thought of by Neil Durkheim that it's not just the collective memory it's the conscience of the past and we talked about education in schools generations passing on understandings of the past but ultimately if we don't figure out how the law is used to shape that conscience and we don't figure out who is shaping that conscience who in this memory battle we may not get that far with the transitional justice mechanisms that we've set up so ultimately I come out saying that it is the process of internalizing the message that is produced by these transitional justice mechanisms and to some extent it's an imposition of one dominant collective memory I've gotten into trouble with this especially with those who say free speech should be absolute and I say no it's balanced with certain other human rights considerations and we have seen these in countries such as Germany that have tried to balance those two competing aims so other things I could have said but I'm sure I'm out of time by now so I welcome any questions with regard to my comments thank you very much Thanks Lisa you give us a nice segue with the idea of the need for a conscience of the past because we're going to turn now to David Crocker who's a senior research scholar in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland College Park and he realizes in international development ethics sociopolitical philosophy transitional justice democracy and democratization he's offered graduate courses in ethics development foreign aid democracy and human rights and established and helps direct the school's specialization in international development I'll turn the floor over to David thank you for being here Thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here and participate in this important event I'm a relative newcomer to Colombian issues 2002 in a seminar in Rosario on forgiveness and transitional justice and this summer I was privileged to teach in the Universidad de los Andes of course on ethics of development and transitional justice and was aware of the complexity and the importance it seems to me that is now at a crossroads in Crucijana and it's a great time for those outside the country and those inside the country to deliberate about the purposes and the mechanisms of transitional justice I want to indicate that there are two real challenges that must not be forgotten as we're trying to take into account this new report the commentaries on it and the attempts to implement it one is a moral challenge and the other is a political challenge it seems to me that what I know now about the report is there's something exciting about it in recognizing the normative pluralism that is important there are several different norms that seem to me to have emerged in the international experience in the last 50 years and the report does justice in its own way to many of them one is the issue of truth the complexity of truth and how it's important to overcome some of the dichotomy such as perpetrator and victim and I agree with Kimberly that this is in a sense an ethical issue of the choice of categories itself brings ethics right into the heart of transitional justice the rights of the victim are front and center right to truth the right to justice the right to reparation the right to acknowledge there are guarantees that these things won't be repeated at any time in transitional justice we played off peace or reconciliation on the one hand and justice on the other this report and the discussion that we've heard today overcomes that that's simplicity justice is important in many respects but there's a retributive dimension here that doesn't often get its do what does retribution mean other things it means that the innocent should not be found guilty and the guilty should not be found innocent there is something about being found guilty that's important because somebody deserves some kind of sanction only the guilty should receive that sanction and those that are more guilty should receive more sanctions than those that are less guilty those that lie sanctioned more than those that tell the truth and those that tell the truth may be sanctioned in different ways depending on when they tell the truth and here are the notion of alternative sanctions imprisonment is one kind of sanction but there's other kinds of sanction which limit people's freedom in various kinds of ways and one of the challenges I think of the report is to be more specific about what those alternative kinds of limitations on freedom might be I agree with Michael the importance here as a part of the notion of justice of rule of law of treating equals equally and unequals unequally and this implies that all sides of abusers abusers on all sides would be sanctioned not just the gorillas not just the government but the paramilitaries as well and yet recognizing the complexity and ambiguity of these investigations decisions and sanctions or punishment and the larger question of who is going to be judging these who should be judging the new jurisdictional responsibilities how do they relate to the ongoing ones within the country another norm that seems to me to be important here a part of the normative pluralism is that of reparations perhaps due to some of the work of Pablo de Graef the importance of reparations in relation to good development compensations to victims by the perpetrators and not just by the society or by the government perhaps the most contentious notion is peace or sometimes reconciliation although it's interesting that convivencia is used often as a replacement for reconciliation because reconciliation has become so contested and so much identified say with Desmond Tutu when there's other notions of reconciliation what I would like to propose is something in between thick and thin reconciliation which would be a kind of political reconciliation in which people who used to be enemies are at least able to view themselves as fellow citizens building a society together this means FARC and others to be political actors it also has a notion of reciprocity where we don't have to love each other or even forgive each other but treat each other as members of a society building together for the future there's also of course here an ethical issue of responsibility to not just articulate a vision of the future but to find ways of implementing it that are effective and themselves fair and that leads us now to the political challenges the political challenge it seems to me is one finally of a kind of democracy where peace by itself is not enough this has got to we've got to return to this notion and I see this in much of what's been said today return to the notion it's transition from often authoritarianism often discrimination often unequal treatment to a society in which could be called democratic in a rich and inclusive sense here are the notion of public deliberation we're having here today that will take place in other international fora finally will be something that will be taking place within Columbia itself a public deliberation that takes these norms that we talked about earlier and ask what can and should they mean in our context how should they be balanced how should they be sequenced there's no algorithm for this there's no recipe for it I think the ethnography and the anthropological communities have alerted us to the dangers of a kind of mechanical universalism on the other hand there's also a danger of too much localism and we've got to find a balance here and one way is to affirm a kind of democratic approach which has several dimensions one would be inclusiveness and I think one of the things that we've heard here is how important in the Colombian situation has been the many voices many that had not been heard in the past but are now being heard and not just heard in a temporary sense but in an ongoing sense where their voices can be institutionalized and part of the national experience another dimension here would be scope where the question of who should be making these decisions becomes part of the public debate within the country but I think another dimension that has to be emphasized is the importance of depth with respect to democracy and here the notion of a contested memory is important but here reason giving is important to sort out what kind of memories are justified, what are distortions, what are falsehoods and that needs to go on also finally I think the notion of checks and balances is extremely important here the rule of law comes in but also checks and balances with respect to the different dimensions of civil society which provide a check and balance on the government and on international organizations so there's going to be a lot of discussion in the future about the report whether to accept it, whether to modify it, whether to reject it and that's well and good with respect to the transition from an authoritarian society to a democratic society what role a referendum should play, a parliament should play the courts should play and civil society especially the mass media should play that itself is a democratic theme to be debated there's a lot of obstacles in the way of realizing these kinds of norms in and through the give and take of public deliberation some of my own work recently on Peru has been excited about what Peru has accomplished and yet also recognizing the deep obstacles in the way of anything called convivencia let alone reconciliation the deep polarization which can't be ignored of hostility and animosity that goes deep into the fabric of the society I drove over the weekend from Maryland to Virginia I got into Virginia two miles in and a community called New Church and the gas station attendant had a confederate flag on his t-shirt that said the south begins here and I know what that means we still have after 150 years deep ethnic division in this country on issues of race, issues of gender as well also an obstacle in Peru which I think will be apparent in Colombia as well is the lack of confidence in the government itself and here I think the issue of corruption cannot be avoided one of the things that the freedom house has been doing in the last couple of years is to connect the issue of transitional justice and corruption there are two kinds of impunity and they need to be confronted and fought together another dimension here is inadequate leadership that's a problem for any kind of movement to the future and here I think we can say and some of those colleagues on the stand here would agree with me that Peru has been blessed with Salomon Lerner on the one hand and Javier Reginas on the other hand in different ways dealing with the past in an open and courageous way but also trying to identify goals for the future one of the important things that Javier Reginas has contributed is the notion of Aquero Nacional a long term fora in which people from various kinds of ideological stripes can meet together to some extent in closed doors so that their views will not be overly dramatized in the press in an early way this could be an important role to play recognizing that without adequate institutions reconciliation or conviviencia or peace is at best short term and not durable and finally I'd like to say that all of us who are working on these issues need to remember to keep our eye on the goal, on several goals on the plurality of goals and the moral commitments to truth to reparations to justice to the rule of law these are commitments that we have they mean different things in different contexts and yet there's a kind of commonality of meaning that should be galvanizing us whether we're in an international fora or in a national fora trying to deal with a past that leads to a just and better future, thank you Thank you very much David I think I'll start with a question to all the panelists while folks get lined up we'll have microphones on either side with runners who will pass you the microphone I would just start with a very basic question and maybe not everybody will want to answer it I think it's important to remind ourselves that these debates are taking place while active conflict continues in Colombia and Carlos referred to what that means for the Afro-Colombian communities in particular but I think it's a broader issue in that usually you have a truth commission that is established after you have a peace accord in the Colombian case all of these historical memory processes have been happening while conflict has been going on and even this latest transitional justice agreement is being put to the test while the conflict occurs so I would just throw that out to our group of panelists and commentators to see if any of you have any comments about that and then we'll go to the floor and start with maybe over there as people come to the mic I would ask them to identify themselves what are the questions though Jim does anybody on the panel want to speak to the question of the transitional justice historical memory debates taking place within a context of armed conflict I have about 10 points I wanted to ask from them I particularly liked David's can you press the mic can you hear me now sorry I was saying I had lots of comments from the interventions before I answer the question I did particularly like a couple of things that David said particularly around reconciliation because I think it is perhaps the most misunderstood misused term in our field and you're putting your finger on reconciliation as political and long term between states and between political actors rather than a kind of kumbaya moment that it's often portrayed as I think is really important to underline you had four or five other points that I would like to talk about later well with respect to this difficult situation that we face in Colombia where we have processes going on during the actual well we have a conflict situation is hardly ideal it it makes the implementation much more difficult ideally we would like to see a much more advanced transition rather than trying to implement measures which are trying to bring people together and get to the truth while the conflict is going on it is particularly difficult I think to try to do criminal justice when you have an ongoing conflict because it can add fuel to the fire of that conflict it can be seen as one-sided justice instrumentalizing justice to achieve political means having a truth commission in the middle of a conflict is extremely difficult because how do you get the other side's views on the table so I think this is there are a number of criticisms that Michael made this morning that I think were right and part of that I think evolves from the fact that you are trying to do take these steps while you have an ongoing conflict so I think that increases the challenge pretty immensely but I do think that Columbia actually is representative of a trend that we will see in this field the other Latin American experiences the Eastern European experiences we have this transition from authoritarianism to democracy much less so we are dealing with Tunisia is the only one that perhaps meets that criteria we are being called on in the midst of conflict much more serious than Columbia open conflict international actors the UN are asking for advice how do you do transitional justice in the midst of an open conflict or where there is only agreement one idea perhaps a commission and that this is supposed to be able to resolve a deep conflict that is going on in the midst of its own fire so I think the Colombian situation is actually somewhat less difficult than what we are asking for transitional justice processes to undertake a number of African countries and so there is a great deal of misunderstanding and perhaps misuse of transitional justice and the processes because classically they have worked much better when they have been sequenced over time when perhaps you start with the truth you actually begin to settle the conflict perhaps you start with the truth commission of reparations programs and ultimately criminal justice I think this is a big challenge I guess the more positive side is that this is not nearly as challenging as some of the other conflicts that are much deeper and ongoing than in Columbia, thanks Can we pass it to Cindy Ornson? Sure I think that is on Thanks for the question I think at least my perception of having a truth commission before the conflict has ended is that its findings and conclusions have been drowned out for the most part it has not fostered this broad national debate that is possible when the conflict has ended and a group of people strives to determine what it is that happened and I don't think that this is a question of seeing it as biased or one-sided or whatever but simply that the experience of most people at least intellectually if not in practice in the places where they live is that the conflict is ongoing so there is a certain perplexity about why this is going on and as a result the media and all of those transmission mechanisms that serve to amplify the findings have not been called into play I have another concern actually about not the CNNR but the new truth commission that is being formed as to whether or not it will be able to come up with a consensus view of what took place or whether it will be a sort of cobbling together of various realities which is a reflection I think of the way the war and the conflict is viewed in Colombian society depending on where you live and who you ask urban and rural but it is sort of what size city and where in the city and what socioeconomic status whatever so I see a potential given the way members of the truth commission have been named that it will serve simply to reflect the fragmentation and polarization of discourse that exists in the country let me just clarify quickly too I think we are talking about a number of different things here and we are mixing them up as though they belong together but in a sense they don't I think the Basta Ya report is a general documentation report that was part of a national commission process to get at the truth of what happened in the Colombian conflict what the origins were what the impacts were that is a report that came out two years ago in Colombia and there are also discussions today about a truth commission that would be established once the conflict ends but the discussions about this truth commission are already permeating the public realm there have been several efforts to establish truth telling reports another one that was commissioned by the table by the negotiators at the peace table was the historical commission on the conflict and its victims and this was a really interesting experiment because it was established last year the commission presented its report last February I was in Havana and heard the presentation of this report the report was established in a similar vein the party selected who would be the commissioners to write the report and they got 12 academics who were each charged with writing their own interpretation of the conflict the causes of the conflict what perpetrated the conflict the impacts and damages of the conflict but what happened and there were two rapporteurs that were supposed to synthesize these 12 reports and produce a single report for Colombian society that pretty much gave a definitive account what ended up happening 12 academics produced 12 reports two rapporteurs produced two additional reports and there was no there was no success in defining what the areas of consensus and where the areas of disagreement were about the conflict and these are a lot of different areas when does the conflict start it's a very political question you know who's conflict which conflict are you looking at who are the perpetrators of the conflict who are the victims of the conflict who can be counted as a victim who can't be included as a victim it was incredibly polemical I think it has served the reports which totaled more than 800 pages have served a role in that they have made it clear how wide the differences are and how polarized the society is in their understanding of what the conflict is and who the victims are so this is a huge area that's going to require a lot of public debate as Lisa mentioned these debates about memory about who's memory are incredibly important and they're going to pave the way for maybe a learning to listen to each other and a learning to respect that we have differences and we see differences that's not to say that there aren't some truths that are more fictitious than others I think those will come out in the course of the discussions but it's to say that the debates themselves are really important I think the deep divisions are also a consequence of war people have fixed ideas about what happened because that's how they've survived the war they've been able to parse out and say these people are enemies and these people are friends and I think in this next period Colombians are going to have to say we're all part of the same society even if we're in different positions within that society we need to learn to live together and it's going to be a huge challenge in the future so let me open up to I think Michael and I don't know if anybody else had a final comment at this stage or if we'll go to the floor after Michael just very quickly I did address this in my talk I did want to emphasize something and I think for those of you that are just coming to Colombia I think that decades and decades of violence and particularly the insurgent counter-insurgent logic at least the last 30 to 40 years has been very very clear in Colombia and that also has done that at least in rural Colombia where the conflict is very very present violence and coercion have been normalized communities, entire communities live with distrust of their neighbor and under fear permanently and I think we've underestimated or even not even considered what those levels of violence and exposed to permanent coercion have done for the freedom of thought and the oppression. The first is an issue of self-protection and therefore I won't say anything but the other are the collective implications and I'll take you to a collective implication of the disappearance of associations of communities the fights amongst neighbors because do remember that both paramilitary guerrillas and the state have gotten involved in the social fabric of the community the communities have not disappeared and those structures, those associations those organizations have been manipulated and used. So what is said and not said, what is thought of and not thought of has been controlled for decades in Colombia so we're conducting truth seeking exercises when we know that people are not willing to give up the information or what is worse, they're willing to accept the consequence of death for saying what it is that they have inside. Let me give you another collective dimension to understand. Look at the toll that violence has had on the labor union movement in Colombia. We're right at the side of the disappearance of labor unions in their contentious collective manifestations throughout all of Latin America. I think that's very important. Two very quick comments. One, in war polarization is necessarily created and fabricated therefore black and white is what we know and therefore correct and incorrect positions is also what we know fighting that statute is very difficult. Truth is all about psychological warfare and it is very clearly crafted and thought out by the opposing sides. Obviously society is in the middle. Here the statute of truth and the truth itself is up for grabs in the midst of war. Remember what I said truth is only understood in the logic of denunciation and in doing harm to somebody else based on the versions that I might have or posit. And lastly, look at the implications of truth telling when such a transition is not very clear particularly from the official denial side if I'm talking about war or repression on behalf of the state. It is very difficult for Colombians and particularly the government to talk about the repression that we all know took place in 1978. It is very difficult to talk about the violence that took place in the context of the 1985 Palace of Justice I'm talking decades ago. Can you imagine what it is like to talk about accountability and levels of responsibility for some of the most severe state sanctioned violations that took place in 2007 that are termed to be the false positive. We're at the height of those violations those people that were civilians that were in a position of responsibility are currently the president and the high commissioner for peace as vice minister and minister of defense. So look at the implications of talking about truth in the midst of war and the destabilizing effects that it can have. Thank you. Great. Thanks. Now we'll turn to the floor. I think first question over here Jim. My name is Jim Jones. I've been variously involved in Colombia since the 1960's the Alliance for Progress years. More recently I had the opportunity to work with a defense attorney okay in the trial of Simone Trinidad here in Washington and there were three trials finally before a conviction was reached and I can tell you as somebody who was intimately involved with all the information that those were indeed political trials first off it wasn't the individual who was on trial it was the FARC. Truth was the casualty in many many ways. So with that in mind and knowing that the profound influence that the U.S. has in Colombia and on Colombia my question to you is this what is the capacity of the criminal justice system in this country and by extension U.S. policy vis-à-vis Colombia to accommodate any variant of transitional justice that might be viable in Colombia. Thank you. Okay why don't we take two or three questions and then we'll turn back to the panelists. Good afternoon my name is Rafael Barrios I'm from the community of lawyers I'm from Colombia and I want to reflect on two questions that the first Michael Reed has referred to the context and the challenges that are being created with reading the report is a super court that takes the competition to the National Prosecutor General to all judges including the Supreme Court of Justice to the Prosecutor General of the Nation and the Constitutional Court recently there was a reform of justice and some part of justice was against because the Supreme Court of Judiciary was eliminated and for example this reform in order to conclude the court has to go through a constitutional reform through legal reforms and then reviewed by the Constitutional Court then there is a latent risk and as Michael likes the risk I will direct the question to him about 20 years 20 years until now we do not know who to wait but if it is 20 years 20 years that is equivalent to 60 years that is if there are no casualties that is equivalent to 60 that was thank you very much another question thank you one of the panelists mentioned earlier that the victim's participation in the Colombian peace talks was unique and generally positive as compared to virtually no victim involvement in other peace processes as you know within Colombia there are various doubts about how the government in FARC chose the victims that actually got to talk in Havana and several observations were made regarding some sort of picking truths based on their political views and willingness to forgiveness what is your comment on that maybe we will go to the table Lisa do you want to I can comment on the last question not the first two questions I think the whole issue of victim participation is a pretty key issue in these processes in particular speaking from my experience in Peru part of the issue is figuring out who represents the victims in my time in Colombia which was much briefer than when I was in Peru I was aware of great division among the victim groups and so right away you have the question of who is representing the victims and then secondly which of the victims has the capacity to engage in that kind of process a lot of times what I found is that victim groups had a lot of not only division among themselves so they lack the conflict resolution skills to come to a common platform but some of them simply didn't have the skills to actually engage with the government in a discourse that arguably maybe they shouldn't have to but their voices weren't heard so in terms of who they chose I don't know because I'm not that closely linked to it but I would suppose that in part for someone who could maybe handle that experience but also to maybe be more generous with the government than it deserves maybe it's hard to figure out who represents the victims and so how do you actually figure out who that person is I think is a difficult question in all these situations I'd like to just follow up on that last question as well and maybe we can get a few of us kind of debating the issue I think as I alluded to in my talk when you have 7.6 million victims trying to get any representative anything to the table to give their inputs is very difficult I think in some ways the sole act of participation of engaging the fact that the parties are asking for engagement is a kind of reparation without even thinking about the representativeness if you could possibly have that I think it's interesting that the parties actually didn't try to select make the selection themselves they outline certain selection criteria there was a request for diversity of region of ethnicity of gender of different kinds of typologies of the victimization which would mean you know disappearances, torture variety of different kinds of victimization that have occurred variation among who the perpetrators were there were a whole range of criteria and basically the parties tasked the United Nations the Conference of Bishops the Columbian Conference of Bishops and the National University with trying to come up with more specific you know identification of who would fill the criteria that had been outlined to make sure you got a representative sample it was not perfect but it was a good try and it may be that more forums are needed I think in addition to having the victims going in delegations there were five delegations of a dozen victims each in addition to having those the UN and the National University were also asked to set up forums around the country they had three sub regional forums on victims for victims to present proposals that were open to a wide variety of organizations they had one national forum for victims in Cali these forums had processes with facilitation where victims were asked basically to present their proposals in the different areas of truth reparations truth justice reparations and non repetition and all sorts of interesting and innovative ideas came out of that now I think the question of selection criteria the question of representativeness you're not going to get a perfect answer I think they did the best that they could under the circumstances that they were given and they were given the task with a month to prepare to get these delegations going to Cuba everybody around them was complaining that the process was taking too long in fact some commissioners said to me you know everybody wants us to move faster how can we move faster when we have all these victims who all the time and I think my reply was this is an investment in the future I mean if victims give their inputs you're going to have a stronger agreement and you'll also have more credibility and legitimacy among the victims who really are the key focus for the piece accord in the end anyway so I don't know if other people want to make comments on the victims issue in particular I'm going to say a couple of things you mentioned earlier the instrumentalization of transitional justice mechanisms there's also crassly put an instrumentalization of victims when they become political capital for certain NGOs versus other and I can't help but think about Peru and the Audiencias Públicas and there was a tremendous amount of lobbying among NGOs that your victim was going to be one of the people who was placed there how you avoid this I think it's something to continue to talk about because it is absolutely part of the politics of victimhood and certainly for people I agree with you about obviously I agree about the importance of the participation but participation also raises expectations and I think here we are all these years out in Peru and when I talk with a lot of people about the reparations process all the expectations raised because there this would be the first time the state actually sent the mobiles out to rural areas to collect testimonies so this was huge it wasn't our 43rd time this was a new thing in Peru these expectations that are not met the reparations programs have been poorly implemented so it's un engaño mas and so that is not helpful in terms of how people see the state and their relationship with it secondly going back to your you make me think of Hanna Rent like when in Jerusalem you can't try anti-Semitism you can try that man the shortcomings of trials do they yield individual guilt collective innocence what can you try what can you not I think we're coming up against the shortcomings and I think many of us have said it of the criminal approach to framing these problems that I think we shouldn't oh I'm going to say this I can't resist we shouldn't lead this to lawyers lawyers have a role to play there's been too much that's okay I'm with you but there has been too much of a monopoly of a legal approach in all this and then finally you're getting the real politic of the world which is when I think about the transitional justice mechanisms I know in final reports they probably do a better job if they're going to do a good job on domestic actors and they do it getting out to the international actors who have played perhaps a very very important role in these what are you know it's termed a civil conflict well how did the international didn't just derive with the humanitarians they didn't just derive with the surveys from Icete Jota they were there all the time in the first place so the US I mean look at the politics of who's a war criminal who's not and how far is the reach of these transitional justice mechanisms moving up the line against very powerful nation states very tricky any other comments in response to the other two questions yes you go first well since I was directly alluded to by Rafael I'll try to take on his question I suppose what is most important to me is the fact that before discussing the mechanics of the justice agreement we failed to conduct the strategic discussion as to what it is that we want from criminal law I think it is really important to recover the questions that to be socially and politically discussed in Colombia about what needs to be accomplished what it is that we want to accomplish through criminal law understanding the limits of criminal law and not holding it as a panacea I think very unfortunately the discussion on all sides has been limited to whether we satisfy what the realm statutes or what the American convention says I think it's fantastic for those of you who know me I very much defend the standards of international criminal law as well as human rights law and I'm pretty much known as a hardliner as far as justice is concerned but it is really sad that a national discussion, a social discussion is answered in terms of the norms at the international level and whether the ICC is satisfied I think it's more an issue of whether the ICC is satisfied whether sectors of society are satisfied whether private and public and collective interest groups in Colombia are satisfied that discussion I think would be a lot greater to have secondly I am not going to do what happened after the 23rd of September and that is to start speculating on what the very short two page communique says or does not say I think it's been quite unfortunate all the reign and all kinds of interpretation and additions and footnotes and everything that we've had to the communique I think we have a formal mechanism of communication that has outlined or sketched at the very least the material jurisdiction of this tribunal, the personal jurisdiction of this tribunal we have some understanding that the law to be applied will be national with a reference for purposes of gravity to international codification of these crimes it is probably understood that procedurally we will have three different types of procedures depending on how the people decide to go the mechanism and substantively as I said some sort of mixture of the law. The biggest discussion has been around your second question Rafael and that is paragraph number seven. I'm going to leave paragraph number seven alone because if anybody remembers how they communicate logic and relationship to the peace and justice equation on how math in prison sentences gets add up you'll remember that I forget the exact dates but you'll remember that on the 16th of May a communique was put forth where even a mathematical example added up to a greater penalty and immediately the next day the president of the constitutional court announced that his math was wrong and that actually it was less and that the top and the max of the sentences were eight. Right now all we have is the paragraphs the ten paragraphs that all of you know that is what we have and I think we should leave it at that. I would piggyback on the comments that were made because I think it is really important that in Colombia we start understanding that law offers answers but the law at this stage needs to be very much put in play into strategic goals that are sought under the respect of the real law and that implies the constitution and the treaties but that as lawyers we really are not that important and that unfortunately many of us go to school to try to figure out how we can say something without saying it and that we're full of that continually and if you just look at all the jurisprudence that refers to transitional justice it is very messy, it is very sloppy and I don't care if it has been the supreme court of Colombia that has said it or the constitutional court that have said it they have gotten the law wrong and it is not my opinion it is just that the law is not a bunch of truths that are set up there and I think it is time for the law to serve greater strategic purposes in the moment that we're seeking right now. Whether this system interacts with the ordinary justice system, well the prosecutor general himself has given his opinion it's his, he only is going to be in power until March of 2016 let's see what the next one has to say and let's hope that in Colombia personalities don't take over strategic discussions and that rather we have constitutional designs that are solid enough to go beyond personal wills at this stage. One last question in response to Rafael's question I presume that there will be challenges to the legality of this special jurisdiction before the constitutional court and I would also assume that the government negotiators contemplated that scenario and felt confident that what they were putting in the transitional justice accord would be considered legal within and in compliance with the Colombian constitution but I fully expect that opponents of this whole process, whether they oppose it because they think the penalties are too minimal or whatever will formally place this issue before the constitutional court which has proved itself to be very independent and even though the fiscal is in favor of this and has justified it and said that the fiscalia is working hand in glove with the process of this special jurisdiction who knows what the constitutional court will say. Just without a conclusive opinion I think we're overlooking the role of the international criminal court and all of this and that Colombia has been under the microscope with regard to whether to comply with the obligations and that's very different than probably any other Latin American country with regard to their transitional justice process. Let's take a few more questions. Can I add one thing? Let's go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead David. Okay now I'm a little cautious about taking the floor when lawyers say something without saying anything. Michael's probably right about that. But I do think it might be useful to just understand a little bit to frame the criminal justice aspect a little bit more and put it in some history. Basically when and if we look at the agreement as well at the end of the day what has evolved in international criminal law is that those who will be accountable will be those who are most responsible for the most serious crimes. It's clear in a context like Colombia, like it was in Bosnia where when I served as Deputy Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslavia Tribunal that the courts in these extraordinary times and this goes a little bit back to Jenny's question about the criminal justice and transitional justice that the capacity and the political will are both very much in question and countries that have gone through massive conflicts are going through transition. And if I look at our experience in Bosnia we had 10,000 perpetrators and the Yugoslavia Tribunal which is seen as a highly successful Tribunal at least till a couple of years ago prosecuted 121 individuals maybe a couple of hundred were prosecuted in the national courts. So what was developed is this idea of who's most responsible and therefore you're looking at leadership you're looking at the political leadership and the military leadership and at the end of the day those who are the foot soldiers are probably not going to face the part of justice and if they do something's probably off because if you're holding the foot soldiers liable but not the commanders then you're not you're really not in line with the principles of transitional justice. So I think what we're really trying to wrestle with is to have accountability some amount of criminal accountability for those who are really really planned who ordered these crimes to be committed and if we look at the agreement and the devil's in the details I don't want to opine too much but the agreement does provide for an amnesty but it provides for an amnesty that's allowed by international law protocol 2 of the Geneva Conventions calls for liberal amnesties not for the most serious crimes obviously not for war crimes not for crimes against humanity genocide is not really a question in Columbia but not for these crimes but those of the foot soldiers and so this seems to be a pretty good starting point the question really then is and we'll have to see what the ICC says and Fatou Bensouda did make a pretty mild statement rightly so because we need to see what happened and how this plays out but the question then is how is this really going forward now there are a couple of interesting things it looks like international judges will participate in the kind of minority kind of way that I think has happened in a number of countries in Bosnia and Sierra Leone and so forth more to give credibility to the process you don't really need the expertise to be honest you've got very good judges in Columbia but the real question is I don't find the real question to be about the putative lengths of sentences it's really about the issue of how those sentences will be served now what's a little bit unclear is how the sentences will be served I would make the argument and some would make the argument that actually the most important aspect of the criminal justice process is the condemnation of the actions that is the crimes that were committed that if you have a public trial this is the most important aspect of the criminal justice process because the leaders who planned and committed these crimes are condemned in public and those are identified and called out now the secondary question is then to me how that sentence is played out we don't know what the ultimate view of the ICC prosecutor is but it does look like to me and certainly ICTJ has taken this position that alternative sentences is a way to address this issue as long as we have a process where the illegal activity and the terrible things that happened are vetted in a proper criminal justice process the primary purposes of the process is not the actual punishment imposed it is the public nature of the process so that's really what we're focused on and I think alternative sentences again it's not very clear what those alternative sentences are it looks like not prison but some kind of confidement so the devil is in the details but that seems to me to be consistent with the overall purposes of criminal justice and the condemnation, the identification of the crimes and some punishment so I think that's where the focus should be rather than on punishment we've written a lot of papers on this you can go read it on the ICTJ website and Michael and I probably could have a good debate about this and others as well but I thought it might be useful to outline how the process works and how this has evolved and making those decisions when I was a prosecutor at the Yugoslavia Tribunal is to be honest with you as much art as science are there questions from the floor? Hi, my name is Moira Burce with Peace Brigades International a number of the panelists mentioned the fact that a lot of these questions are being debated and some things may well be implemented while there still is conflict and violence in Colombia and part of this one of the sources of that of course is from these paramilitary successor groups that are still very active in the country and one of the forms of violence that we paid most attention to at Peace Brigades is around the threats and attacks and killings of human rights defenders and victims advocates that continue in fact just on Monday a pamphlet was distributed amongst a number of organizations in Bogota including Rafael's organization that threatened human rights defenders and victims advocates with death signed by one of these paramilitary successor groups and so I wanted to hear from some of the panelists, particularly those who have experience in other countries with these kinds of processes but others as well if you have thoughts what kind of mechanisms and policies and practices can be helpful for protecting the victims themselves for protecting witnesses and their advocates and supporters in these processes and avoiding retaliation, thanks. Good afternoon, my name is Jania Aguilera I'm a student from Bogota University and also here in American University I would like to ask my question Spanish given the fact that we're now in a conference about Colombia So muchísimas gracias primero que todo muchas gracias por haber estado acá por sus comentarios porque para nosotros los colombianos es muy importante que hace como las armas y la violencia traspasó las fronteras también el conocimiento y las ganas de construir la paz traspasen las fronteras entonces muchas gracias por estar acá mi pregunta va dirigida para Michael pero si otros panelistas quisieran contribuir a la respuesta están bienvenidos me parece que uno de los desafíos más grandes que están enfrentando ahorita Colombia es el hecho de que la seguridad ciudadana y la seguridad como tal en las calles de Colombia está dependiendo y siempre ha dependido de la rama del ministerio de defensa, lo que quiere decir que como llevamos 60 años en guerra el ministerio se ha enfocado en prácticamente la defensa nacional y no le han dado un lugar grande a la seguridad y la convivencia ciudadana sabiendo que en el caso del Salvador vimos que después de el peace building y después del peace agreement lo que pasó fue que el sistema de seguridad ciudadana no estaba listo para un post conflicto entonces la violencia se traslado a las calles haciendo crímenes comunes y los excombatientes no estaban listos, no fueron educados de la manera correcta para de hecho ir a buscar trabajo sino que siguieron delinquiendo desde las calles y la policía no estaba lista para recibir este tipo de delincuentes y para atender este error que se cometió en el peace agreement entonces es esto este problema en la estructura colombiana un desafío para la paz sostenible y como vamos a como que cambia se tiene que hacer para que esto lo que pasa en el Salvador no ocurra en Colombia y para terminar quisiera hacerle una pregunta a Kimberly sabemos todos los esfuerzos internacionales que se han hecho para hacer que las mujeres hagan parte del peace building incluso Liberia es un caso muy bueno para expresar por qué la participación las resoluciones de las Naciones Unidas como por ejemplo la 1888 1889, 1920 la 1325 que usted nombró han sido esfuerzos internacionales muy importantes para las mujeres y para las víctimas sin embargo en el caso de Perú vimos que de 6000 casos 538 fueron registrados a rape o violencia o violaciones a las mujeres pero de esos 538 solamente fueron investigados y solamente tres, no 16 fueron investigados y tres fueron condenados de 538 casos tres fueron condenados en Perú lo que eso sucedió según lo que sea hasta ahora es porque la definición que hay de violación en el en el estatuto de Roma de 1998 lo que hace es definir violación con un elemento de conciencia la conciencia de la víctima la inconsciencia de la víctima tiene que demostrarse en Perú, después de que se acabó el conflicto había mucha violencia doméstica y todas estas mujeres que siguieron que siguieron viviendo esta violencia mujeres de excombatientes también no podían denunciar y no pudieron llevar sus casos a las cortes porque no podían probar el elemento de inconsciencia porque son mujeres casadas pero todos sabemos acá que después de un conflicto armado la violencia contra las mujeres la siguen viviendo las mujeres de casa que son mujeres de excombatientes o que son mujeres de exmilitares o de personas que estuvieron en el ejército entonces como hacer para que esto no vuelva a pasar en Colombia para que eso no pase en Colombia si sabemos que la última igual Juzgar sigue siendo la responsabilidad del Estado Nacional a pesar de todos los esfuerzos internacionales y en Colombia no se ha podido resolver ni en el Estatuto de Roma esa definición de inconsciencia como hacemos para que las mujeres que van a seguir viviendo además que Colombia es un país que tiene demasiada violencia doméstica como hacemos para que esto no se mezcle y para que las mujeres no sigan teniendo esta barrera a la justicia y realmente los casos que se tienen, que juzgar se juzguen y no pase lo que pasó en el Perú muchas gracias I'm afraid we're out of time and lunch awaits us so I would ask those of you who had some very good questions to please feel free to approach the panelists during the lunch hour and that we might continue our conversation over food and coffee thank you very much for your attention this morning thank you to all our panelists and commentators for very exciting intellectuals and we'll meet back here at Toon welcome back I hope you all enjoyed your lunch and got plenty of coffee to get us through the rest of the day because I don't think we have a coffee break anticipated during the afternoon session I'm just going to say a few words about the historical memory group now center it was a great opportunity to talk to you about the historical memory group now center it was set up by the national commission on reparations and reconciliation which was created by law 975 the justice and peace law back in 2005 so this is a process that anticipates the peace process and began much earlier than the peace process itself the law mandated the national commission on reparations and reconciliation which was also created at the time to produce quote a public report on the reasons for the illegal armed actors creation and evolution from 1964 onwards the national commission on reparations and reconciliation in turn tasked an independent academic group the historical memory group to produce the report to dignify the memories of the victims as a form of symbolic reparations to ensure attention to traditionally excluded including gendered interventions of the violence into foster long term reconciliation the group included a dozen well respected academics known for their intellectual integrity as well as teams of talented students and colleagues the historical memory group sought guarantee it's actually a very interesting story and I think it's a good example of how academics have engaged for how many of you are either from universities here just quite a few of you so you can think about the role of the university in a conflict and post conflict setting and even a pre negotiation period but the historical memory group the first thing they did one of the first things was seek some sort of protection of their autonomy and independence which I think was a really smart move this was a committee that was established by a government mandate I remember talking to some of the people that had participated and they talked about how they made sure that they would have that the university that they came from would guarantee their return to the university so they would have a job to go back to they asked for guarantees that they wouldn't have to submit anything to prior censorship by the government before they could publish it I think this question of autonomy when we think about truth and truth commissions is a really key one to make sure that the institutions that are created oftentimes by the state or at least with the support of the state don't become just vehicles for the state but they do have an independent kind of moral and ethical position within the society so I was really privileged to work with this extraordinary team of public intellectuals as they sought to shed light on the columbian conflict and to create public policy recommendations to ensure that the violence would not be repeated these academics had produced some 20 books documenting exemplary cases that fed into the production of the Basta Ya which is the comprehensive work that tried to go back to each of these exemplary cases I think Andrés will be talking to us a little bit about the methodology so I won't detail that but I think if you think about it having teams of independent scholars working independently but also working together and collectively and finding a process where you can somehow integrate all this knowledge into a final report was a tremendous challenge and I think they rose to the challenge beautifully today they now have some between 40 and 50 books that are case studies of research as well as a really prolific audio visual project that's turning many of the tomes into material that can be appreciated through films radio shows and curricular materials for the classroom the historical memory center has contributed also to the theoretical underpinnings of the field of historical memory with all sorts of practitioner guides on how to construct historical memory how to engage communities in constructing historical memory gender dimensions of historical memory some of them are very interesting for those of you in academia thinking about PhDs or writing projects there's really just a treasure trove waiting to be explored and analyzed and full of lessons for the rest of the world I think many of their products some of their products have been translated into English and few in French but the language barriers continue to be pretty high between Columbia and the rest of the world in terms of the fluid sharing of knowledge across the linguistic barrier I think it's been one of the challenges in our field I think to make sure that the Columbian experiences are shared but also that the experiences outside of Columbia are shared with the Columbians and I think in the academic world this is particularly true because of the language barriers the historical memory centers and groups strategies were inclusive participatory multi-sectoral and they really have sought I think consciously to contribute to the deeper democratization and practice that most agree is needed for the sustainability of peace in Columbia I just say a last word that conflict violence by its nature is often hidden and it frequently stigmatizes the victims the historical memory group and then center really took a very strong political position that their project would be focusing on the rights of victims and I think this was quite a controversial position there's no evidence that this is the way that it has to be I think it's debatable it's one of those debates that I think the public needs to engage in it goes back to the question of whose memories and who are you working for if you're doing a historical memory project but I think that recovery for victims and for societies at large do call for the development of truth-telling mechanisms that can restore dignity to the victims and that protect their rights to truth justice reparations and guarantees of non-repetition and with that as an introduction I'll now introduce Andres Suarez who is the lead investigator at the National Center for Historical Memory in Bogota, Columbia he holds a degree in sociology and a master's in political science political studies from the National University of Columbia previously Suarez was a consultant for the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences he's consulted for the Ombudsman and the National Program for the House of Justice he's a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations and was one of the chief investigators for the historical memory group so I'll turn it over to Andres thank you for being here Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you I want to thank Andres I think that's one of the the most sophisticated analyses of a very complicated conflict that I've heard in a long time and I should just say there was a little negotiation that was done that this hour would be split where Andres would have the bulk of the hour so those of you who are watching me send signs I was asked to let him know that he wouldn't overstep his time now I'd like to introduce Martha Nuvia Bello she's the current director of the project to create, design and construct the National Museum of Memory in Colombia which will be based in Bogota for over 20 years she's been recognized as a spokesperson on topics related to memory and the armed conflict in Colombia she's made significant contributions to conceptualizing and positioning historical memory to understand the impacts and the damages of the armed conflict and to contribute to reconciliation and peace building in Colombia with the National Center for Historical Memory she's led academic and research processes including the coordination of the huge comprehensive Tom Bastella Columbia Memories of War and Dignity and a various regional research projects as well in Bojaya Comuna Trece in Medellin and San Carlos in Antioquia she's been a researcher and commentator on national research projects on displacement force disappearances kidnappings and forensic anthropology we're delighted to welcome you here today Martha Nuvia you now have the stand and we're going to talk a lot of them were not only referring to the facts what happened but most of them insisted on how their life was transformed they were talking about their memory not only was it a memory of victimizing facts but it was the memory of despair the memory of loss the memory of suffering and they asked to be registered that has to do with the pain with devastation but also a good part of their demands were we don't want to be shown only as suffering as being exposed as being victimized but also as actors political actors as being resistant and that even in the report we made a very special effort to transform the language of many practices particularly of women we were allowed to talk about other heroines heroic actions really heroic and that this also deserved to be told as the correlator of the war and that this also deserves to be part slowly that this also deserves to be part of the collective memory then these two chapters particularly about the damage we talked about something very notorious, the moral damage and the moral damage not only we made a typology that you as academics may be interested in a typology of damage but it came out with a lot of force the moral damage product of humiliation experiences and it was also talked about in a very strong way of the affection of the good name and the affection of that condition that makes us humans of dignity and why it is so important because these damages draw very important actions in a reparation agenda and because precisely part of the claim of the victims was that hopefully in a report the things are named by its name it is called something that the armed actors who wanted to call combat are named as a massacre like what it was it is called a victim as a victim and a perpetrator as a perpetrator talking about the damages it was in some way to recognize the symbolic force that has to put things in its place and call things as they should be and in the reparation agenda a lot of what the victims today claim is precisely that that things are named as they occurred that it is recognized and that as it is recognized restitutes the good name of the people and it is a good name that is not but it is a good name in a lot of collective cases of a community in the report that my colleague Andrés, one of the strongest claims was to break with that stigma of the Salado as a guerrilla people in the case of the communities of Bahia Portete it was insisted in a very important way that it is clear to the world that it is very clear to the country that there was no confrontation between tribes it was not a confrontation between clans for military the issue of resistance is also very important to us not only to show what the people did to survive the war but also to show how in the middle of the war they made and flourished experiences of peace and to many academics it surprises that in the middle of a war map it can be a cartography of peace and that it remains in the middle of the war a cartography of peace and that speech of resistance was not only to show heroic actions that speech of resistance intended also to show what the violence wanted to destroy as Andrés said, this was not casual these were not mistakes there were things that wanted to destroy political projects life bets including sexual options religious options that wanted to destroy or subversives or transgressors or because they intervened in certain interests I want to highlight this because perhaps in a commission of truth those who join this commission are lawyers to what to do as the victims said what they are going to do with our word what they are going to do with our testimony it is not only about telling the story of what happened and who were the responsible for this this testimony that is so important to generate perhaps the shame that society has to generate in front of the war and now I would like to refer to something that they asked me to talk about the criticism to Bastalla for us it is very important to recognize those criticisms some of those criticisms we have wanted to assume in our own work to incorporate to be part of our agenda some of those criticisms that have to do with vacuums that have to do with weaknesses hopefully you can assume them in a way much more active to a commission of truth and in the first place I would like to refer to the weaknesses or evils that are presented to the inform Bastalla one of the strongest criticisms has to do with the date of origin the fact that our data take as date of the start of 1958 we want to make it clear that the war begins or violence begins in 1958 but the data we took in 1958 for many reasons that perhaps now we could explain if the questions do not allow them insisting that the date of origin still being a very controversial point because of the consequences of inclusion and exclusion that can take one or another date of origin is the issue of responsibilities and with great reason I think these criticisms are all well-planned and it is because not to go beyond the responsibility of the armed actors clearly with the data we talk about responsibility of guerrillas paramilitaries agents of the state but it is clear and we all know that the responsibility transcends the armed actors responsibilities of the politicians that even there are some ways to explain the war that would have to be much more related to the economic models that is to say that the informant is weak in articulating that relationship between politics, economy and war and surely this is this is one of the criticisms I think that has been raised with greater insistence a third critical characteristic that has been formulated is the absence of the analysis of the North American intervention in the armed conflict for some criticisms it is not about a factor more that is to say that the outside politics of the United States is a factor more in the war but it should be analyzed as an actor more of the war we are criticized not to have unclassified information even that is already available that we would have been able to use in a much more intensive way in the analysis of the armed conflict Colombian a fourth point of criticism has to do with the relationship between the State and the paramilitaries although in the informant the multiple relations the various relations in the time and territorial that were established between State and paramilitaries when we talk about the responsibility paramilitary differentiated from the responsibility of state agents some think that the paramilitary violence is a state strategy this is a debate point even more of the omissions of the complicities for some paramilitary violence is state responsibility and this is a point that is worth still discussing a fifth point of criticism has to do with the little weight that in the informant of the drug we did not want to drug the conflict let's say in front of the thesis very strong that the drug explains our war we wanted to distance ourselves from there but it is perhaps true that it deserves a greater deepening of the drug and a sixth point that I would like to mention are much more I here only take some of the criticism because luckily I can name them all it has to do with the absence of the responsibility of the media of communication in the armed conflict and this is a matter of interest as to how the media have contributed to intensify the war to diversify the war to decontextualize the war and surely a serious analysis of our conflict also goes through the participation of the media now I would like to focus on a very important point and these are criticism more of the academic world of the world of human rights organizations in these five minutes that I would like to talk about the criticism that comes more of the victims that for us are supremely valuable and these criticism one could receive more as a complaint of the victims to the extent and these complaints have to do with the absence the victims are sought in the inform when they read the inform they are sought there many are indignant when they are named in a paragraph with reason or even more when they say you have two pages in which they refer to a topic as serious as, for example, the syndical violence or how it is possible that in its report the sexual violence has about five pages in an inform that has four hundred I don't know how many pages are much more indignant because they are not in the inform and I would like to present very quickly where are these absence because maybe a commission of the truth will have a huge responsibility to answer these these requirements that are facing the victims are territorial absence, that is, we did a very strong work in Costa Caribe, something on Pacific Coast, we worked but the victims of the south of the country have told us you have not gone, you have not done a job, we did two important jobs but surely they were required more, you have not been in Kazanare, you have not been in Arawka, you have not been in San Andres and Providencia, that is also Colombia, then that territorial complaint that we are trying to remedy with regional supply is very important not only we are not but a national inform hides some regional peculiarities so that is a very important point the second absence has to do with population groups and it is population groups, for example indigenous communities, Afro-descendants, Afro-Colombians not because they do not figure in the inform, they figure and for us it was very important we made cases, we approached Afro-Colombian and indigenous but the complaint is in terms that these groups, these important sectors of the Colombian community ask for their own inform if we do not feel collected in a national inform it must be an inform on the violation of human rights of Afro-Colombian communities there must be an inform one separated on the case of indigenous populations and to name the strongest but also, for example the population LGBTI we named and it is that they planted a complaint also in the framework of the armed conflict the LGBTI population was victimized and in very particular ways of victimization and there are complaints of the Colombians in the exile, Colombians and Colombians with the exile and their demand that their voice as exiled also be part of the historical narrative and I could continue mentioning other more specific complaints but these groups must be particularly considered there are also complaints of absence for violence modalities I would like to mention four in particular could be more sexual violence is one of the violence modalities women in Havana have left it clear the need to make a specific document a specific process that allows and document the issue of sexual violence due to the delicacy that it has the issue requires particular methodologies, it requires particular research mechanisms about indical violence as I said it is another violence modality there is one that is very important and that we believe that for a commission surely it will be that it is very linked to the issue of forced displacement but in particular it has to do with the magnitudes of the lands in Colombia a lot of us have thought it is necessary to have an information that is clear about the magnitude of the displacement of the land but that goes further not only that I thought how much land was disposed of but who has the lands today in Colombia what has been done with those lands who use their fruit in those lands today in Colombia and that is a very concrete demand and although the historical memory has had a whole line in the issue of investigation and some access to information that we we have not told it is of course the demand of the families of the victims of forced displacement that it counts with an information that has been declared a commission of the truth for forced displacement in Colombia in particular for being a violence modality not only so devastating but for the occultation and the difficulty to document in this case I would say that those are the claims, demands, critiques stronger, I would like to take a minute I think I have to think we have been asked Andrés and me to take advantage of this space precisely to be able to put to you the difficult situation that is going through the entire Pacific Colombian coast in Chocó and I feel very responsible for the region and the victims they tell us, you in the forums you in the university world spend hours discussing what would be the perfect justice model, we do not want a perfect justice model there is even a motto that has been put in graffiti on the walls in Colombia that says we prefer an imperfect peace to a perpetual war that is circulating very strongly and maybe as we discuss the bullets there continue to pass this year have been murdered 69 human rights defenders in Colombia, then there is a certain urgency and that urgency made us feel deeply excited in the last Wednesday when there was an agreement then he said optimistic moderate I at least could not be moderate in my optimism because if we think that these samples that it is possible to reach some agreements with all the imperfection can mean the possibility to stop the war that I think is the real urgency that we have in this context Colombian. Thank you Marta. There is so much that can be said and I am hoping that all of you are keeping your questions alive after our next set of panelists we have asked four colleagues to comment on the presentations and on the report I would like to introduce Anthony Huena St. John who will be our commentator. He is the director of the International Peace and Conflict Resolution MA program at American University. He researches international negotiation especially military negotiations ceasefires, humanitarian negotiations and peace processes. He has created several advanced courses on negotiations ranging from interpersonal skills and analysis to more complex multilateral challenges for AU's School of International Service. He has also done some really interesting research on the role of civil society in peace processes that I think has opened new terrain for other researchers to get in and add new case studies and so forth but he was one of the pioneers in that field so I would like to turn the podium over to Anthony. Gracias, Gini. I would like to place my comments in the context of the discussion this morning as well as the discussion that we had this afternoon. This morning was more on transitional justice with regard to the Basta Ya project and my own expertise is more in peace processes in civil wars than it is in Colombia more deeply and properly understood but having gone through the report and having thought deeply about transitional justice and how it works with peace processes I hope to offer some useful comments this afternoon. Transitional justice is supposed to be a transition from one thing to another and that thing that we're going towards is either the restoration or the building of stability if there was stability in a previous period or epoch it's the transition to stronger institutions for resolving society's numerous daily small and large conflicts. It's for the restoration of a cycle of peace rather than a cycle of violent conflict in which people resolve their differences by perpetrating acts of violence on each other. It's for the restoration of a society's sources of resilience that will probably have been exhausted by violent conflict. And maybe it's also the foundation for cultural change and the theme to which I will return a couple of times this afternoon. But in times of transition conflicts as we've heard today often revert to violence conflicts that are in the process of being de-escalated which may have reached a formal ceasefire or state of exhaustion between the belligerents will frequently see a resurgence of violence. There's empirical evidence that violence doesn't really go away after an armed conflict it finds new forms and returns especially if we don't clear out the weapons and find people other things to do. The Central American cases are stark reminders of this sort of transitive quality of violence that reasserts itself even if the motivations for it change over time. Institutions are weak or non-existent in transitional times societal resilience may have been overwhelmed as stated but there's still a need for the beginning of both individual and societal healing and transitional justice can play only a small and limited role in doing those things. I think one of the mistakes that peace builders make is to try to bet everything on transitional justice to expect that it will heal all wounds individual and collective that it will reset all injustices and start society from zero and that is probably an impossible aspiration level for it. I think there are three tensions I'd like to mention in transitional justice as additional backdrop the balancing of justice understood as punishment and accountability with restoration in terms of restitution and equity that's one tension that I see has played itself out in various ways across the many cases of civil war and transition. Balancing truth telling which is almost necessarily a past looking backward looking exercise with forgiveness and rebuilding which are sort of by definition forward looking and as part of that tension I think there's the question of whether we just need to know or do we have an obligation to act on what we know. Bastaya has I think served an enormous purpose in saying this is what we should know that has been sort of a hidden series of truths that have been secreted in different parts of the population in different parts of the country but there's that separate question of what are our obligations to act when we have knowledge of atrocity, of injustice of tremendous acts of violence on a large scale as well as who the perpetrators and the victims are. The third tension is the balancing of local and international engagement we've seen a lot of the past two decades transitional justice mechanisms have been almost externally imposed because of the insufficiency of local institutions and over time there has been a sort of reaction to that as it's been critiqued as the sort of disparagingly as the liberal peace building project by the critical peace building school of thought who have at first proposed local indigenous mechanisms and then later said well none of them work anyway so that's what the critical schools like to do but there will continue to be a need for hybridization for rescuing what is local and what can be used to really bring healing and closure to people as well as some use of international mechanisms and norms so that they do at a larger global scale reduce impunity a couple of tests I think at any transitional justice project should pass especially one that is focused on the narrative dimensions and these are just my own nobody has said that they're important or anything except me is transitional justice one component of a fuller set of post-conflict peace building actions or is it a standalone project in my mind it should be a component of a fuller set of actions or lead or have connections to in this case Bastaia obviously has a number of different connections does it as the Spanish verb asks us to do esclarecer does it clear things up does it make does it bring to light what has been in the dark Bastaia certainly does that in terms of both victims and perpetrators or perhaps even those who have moved between those two categories as can sometimes be the case in the wars that we have today Bastaia does that very clearly does it dispel myths and propaganda narratives with data does it help us to reinterpret our own partisan historical narratives in a new way it seems clear to me that Bastaia certainly does that as well three other tests does it give a voice to those who have been voiceless or who have felt that their narratives were untold for one reason or another we've heard our colleagues Martha take on a number of the criticisms that have come out probably there will be a lot of people who say well my narrative wasn't heard enough but certainly I think that there has probably never been a more comprehensive telling of truths than this one does the transitional justice project connect to reconciliation and healing so that it is not mere catharsis and narrative building that's probably something that remains to be seen by the nature of the Bastaia project which anticipated rather than followed a peace agreement finally is it seen as legitimate across society and that's problematic that's always going to be problematic in anything that has public visibility there will be contention over the question of legitimacy for such an activity I'd like to say a couple of things about memory if I have a little bit of additional time memories as we carry them as individuals are sacred but they're also frail faulty and subject to distortion and biases at the psychological level I am constantly being reminded on a daily basis of how my memories are I'm so certain of them and yet when I'm confronted with facts when I read what I thought I remembered when somebody reminds me of something that happened we remember it very very differently than perhaps it did happen collective memories are also critical components of collective identities but they suffer some of the same weaknesses as individual memories except that those weaknesses are scaled up to a collective level so collective memory probably has some problematics that are worth exploring based on what we know about the way individuals process memory how we remember things acknowledgement forgiveness coexistence all of these are different activities but they are somehow overlapping and interrelating with each other it's hard for me to forgive without acknowledgement of somebody who wronged me right it's also hard for me to forgive when the act that I'm supposed to be forgiving for continues forgiveness tends to happen when the act itself has stopped and some acknowledgement is made by the perpetrator so truth telling can only be a start it may not be leading directly to forgiveness but it certainly we have to start with getting the story out forgiveness is not the same thing as convivencia as living side by side as returning to live as neighbors again that's a more difficult task that we didn't think about 60 70 years ago in the aftermath of the Second World War forgiving is probably a precursor to living side by side but it will still be I think there will still be local preferences as to who with whom one may choose to want to live after having lived through violence on the scale of the wars that we see today moving on beyond a sense of shared grievance should probably be accompanied by some at least modicum of a view towards altering the structural violences that gave rise to the situations that we have today in plain English what I want to say there is that we need to question ourselves as societies why things happened and why we did what we did a lot of narratives that we have in political discourse in the United States around the world are discourses of blame there are rarely discourses of contribution this is what we contributed to our problem or this is how we participated in the acts that we suffered through and lived through and we heard a little bit of that this morning that that blame is certainly the prevailing currency in discourses and narratives but it begs the question let's a society degenerate into so many people being willing to kill so many other people where we all forced to do what we are saying happened or are there additional factors that facilitated them that we are as yet unable to explore and I would ask that as we explore building peace as we explore peace process as we explore transitional justice at least a view be given to some of the more invisible structural and cultural norms of violence that persist the deeper change is probably in the unwritten norms a society lives by transitional justice can't fix that alone but it can at least do as Basta Yadid which is to start conversations about where we have gone to make sure that we are not going to stop at just institutional fixes as essential as they are but try to find a way to resort to other means of resolving differences than violence a couple of thoughts to conclude on Basta Yadid's sequencing in terms of the peace process in Colombia I've heard it both ways as they say it should have come after an accord it's fine to come before an accord I'd like to say a couple of things about the beauty before an accord and I'm surprising myself as I say this because I've traditionally thought that this sort of an exercise should come after a peace agreement is finalized having it stand alone has probably meant that it was not held hostage to the bargaining between government and armed groups it stood alone and was free to do its work without being traded away its mandate was stood up and then let to exist had it been part of a negotiated process and I believe in negotiated processes something would have been given up for something or at least there would have been demands made yes you can do your truth telling but we want to make sure certain of our people are not mentioned or certain acts are sort of covered up so it is a it is a possible there are many ways to look at this but it seems to me that there is a hidden advantage in having this stand alone and in anticipation of rather than the follow-up to a negotiated accord and I think I'll end my comments there and thank you all very much this afternoon. Thank you Anthony. We'll turn now to my colleague Lily Cole who is the guru on themes of reconciliation and also the role of history and teaching of history in post-conflict or post accord context around the world. Thank you Lily. Thank you very much. Ginny do I have ten minutes? You have ten minutes. Okay. I have to say I don't know if I'm going to be presumptuous enough to try to comment on the report and the project directly and I've pulled together just two themes to mention and I'm not sure whether or not they're going to be directly useful. I hope so. First of all, the stakes are very high when we're talking about the period of recovery after a conflict of course that implies a sequence here that we've all been questioning but I'm talking about reconciliation is usually post-conflict recovery. We know from empirical studies that the best predictor of violent conflict in the future is having had violent conflict already in your society and it's the same thing for atrocity for atrocities as well. So in fact measures of reconciliation are really very important as a form of prevention and as far as our studies of reconciliation here at USIP we've been working on how basically to evaluate and measure reconciliation practices and their impact which is very difficult to do. It hasn't been done very much yet that's why I can't actually give you many sort of findings or guidance at the moment just some thoughts based on those based on our research so far and I will say as far as the great importance of getting these processes of what we're calling reconciliation between groups in the society, between citizens in the state getting them right we are carrying out another project which is trying to assess reconciliation projects that also took place before there was really a major political transition in another country that had many atrocities and that's Sri Lanka and part of our research we'll be looking at trying to measure the success of reconciliation events or procedures both at the national level like some of the commissions we've we're talking about here and also at the grassroots level and how their evaluations measure up against the indicators for possible reoccurrence which is certainly a danger in Sri Lanka I will say related to that we've mostly been documenting reconciliation practices in the last year and we've documented many mainly at the grassroots level and here today we've been talking about a national level project started with the support of the state and based in a law but I'm sure I know from Ginny's work and everything I've learned from her the people I've met through here at her that there's a very vibrant world of practices at different levels of Colombian society going all the way to very local and grassroots what we don't know very much about yet is the relationship between reconciliation activities including what we think of as transitional justice at these different levels and it will be very interesting to see what are the connections between commissions and inquiries like the Bastilla and the future ones and what is also of course happening including many local historical memory projects and that's the reason we've chosen to be very ambitious in our study in Sri Lanka and try to look at two different levels the results of two commissions that they held in Sri Lanka which looking at disappearances particularly which we're very thorough reporting but we're thoroughly overlooked by the government at the time which is now willing to reopen the work of those organizations and some of the grassroots activities which were very controlled much more controlled and repressed in Sri Lanka but it's very ambitious to try to link together the effects of these different levels and I think this is something I am basically calling for a lot of research to accompany the work of building a post-conflict Columbia because I think there's so much to be learned in Columbia so I wanted to just go to one other subject which I'm actually not working on directly at USIP now but a couple of people asked me to comment on it because the question of education a formal education came up and how the work of the media and other reports and projects would be present in the formal education system and it is incredibly common to hear people call for changes in the way our history is taught i.e. changes in how we form our social and political identity and that usually happens especially at the school level and I have a few things to say and unfortunately they're not actually very optimistic so I'm going to maybe just throw out a few ideas and challenges to which I actually think Columbia is up to this challenge and I've been working on a project with International Center for Transitional Justice looking at the connections between transitional justice and education both formal and formal but I've followed formal education and mostly below the university level so to the level that's usually more covers most of the population and to tell you the truth I haven't carried out empirical research myself but I've seen a lot of projects and heard reports on a lot of projects and have heard a lot of reports on the outcomes of truth commissions when they've made recommendations for transformation of the schools for school reform for teaching the materials of the truth commissions and the reports and the results have been incredibly negative I mean we just don't see a lot of really visible impact in the schools there have been small projects that have been impressive and really affected those involved they have been neither sustained nor have they been scaled up no one really has a coherent theory or evidence of how out of school and in formal education projects can have a wide effect frankly the schools are very difficult institutions to influence you all may know by the way because of the Peruvian Truth Commission and its report were mentioned here and like a number of other countries recently including Sierra Leone they had they I think that they set up a partnership with the schools they made they looked at the education system they made very interesting recommendations to improve their education and teaching of history also like the Sierra Leoneans created a students version of the truth commission report they had plans to train teachers and my understanding from Peruvians is that this has really gone nowhere the Peruvian education people I've met where they are incredibly depressed and pessimistic and this has been repeated in most places Germany is not a very good example I really do think they've done amazing things but it's just not an example that's going to be picked up in such a different context in such a different geopolitical context this kind of very thorough and conscious affecting of the teaching of World War II and national socialism and the Holocaust in the schools since the 60s just doesn't seem to be equal by any other country that I really know of and I should say that there was a lot of a long story that seemed very positive in South Africa my understanding is that the apartheid period is required teaching together with a module on the Holocaust to make interesting comparisons in high schools in South Africa and we just had the premier social scientist who's done polling and surveying on the after effects of the truth commission in South Africa and on this topic understanding of the past ever since just complaining bitterly that he was interviewing young people around Cape Town and he said they're not learning about apartheid in schools they know nothing about it's not taught in the schools and they claim reconciliation is impossible. Well that's actually pretty depressing because again I don't know exactly who he was polling maybe it was impoverished youth who are not getting a formal education but theoretically this is supposed to be taught in the schools so we don't know are the students just not listening which is very possible because history itself has been shown repeatedly to be an unpopular and boring topic so the history textbooks are symbols for the political elites they are not meaningful or memorable to students from anything we can discover. Education has its own limitations and its own tasks especially in a resource challenged countries it really gets into development issues well beyond justice about the capacity of the classroom the size of the classroom especially the capacity of the teachers to teach this difficult and contested material. So I think what I would just say in conclusion is that actually first of all Columbia my understanding is Columbia has a very impressive record in experiments very again echoing the line that Columbia is a very creative country in many social institutions and I've heard of very impressive pioneering programs in their school system including the civic competencies the competencies program which was very thoroughly and very well thought out though I understand that it's been de-emphasized and I think as I understood from the person who created it that's not for political reasons but because a new ministry of education came in with new priorities which is a very common situation and the other thing in Columbia that's been very striking is the creation of alternative schools for people who lost the opportunity to go to regular schools one that I was created by the Jesuits I believe with the support of Jesuits in a coastal region much targeted and excluded the population was very excluded from formal education with very impressive results and also in encouraging a lot of thinking about social issues not just a technocratic education so I really have to throw out the challenge to Colombians working in human rights and transitional justice and education I know there's already been discussions about very innovative projects that are being considered if the creators of La Stéja and the Historical Memory Center actually have educational plans to follow up with educational projects we would love to hear about it because I think this is kind of virgin territory that needs a lot more work and the one other thing I'll say in closing is maybe the key doesn't lie as much as it pains me to say this given how incredibly important formal education is and how much it's been overlooked in social reform reform after or after violent conflict maybe the key really lies in the arts especially in film theater maybe even social media campaigns like the apology campaigns online that were carried out in Australia towards indigenous people and then by Turks towards the Armenians maybe these are much better ways of touching young people and getting around some of the political blockages as well but I'm really looking for ideas actually from the Colombians so that we have a more positive story to tell thanks so much Lily and we will give our guest speakers who presented from the Historical Memory Center an opportunity to address some of the questions that are coming up from our discussants. Our next discussant probably needs no introduction in this room it's Adam Isaacson he's been following the Columbia beat for many many many years he's currently the senior associate for regional security at the Washington office on Latin America and a leading expert on defense civil military relations and US security assistance to the Americas welcome Adam I will turn the podium over to you many thanks Janie congratulations for putting this together it's been a fantastic day so far although a very serious day and Columbia is in a pretty serious moment I mean if there is a peace accord in six months it's going to be a very challenging panorama for everybody but especially for victims in the country think about it you're going to enter a phase in which there is no longer a national insurgency a national political armed group instead the big challenge and it could be a generator of more violence than what we're seeing now is organized crime and the overlap between organized crime in the state which continues at a local level and even a national level in many parts of the country similar to the problems we see in many parts of Mexico and Central America you're going to see a moment in which a lot of power centers let's call them that are feeling cornered where people who have long gotten away with almost everything with impunity be it corruption be it sponsorship of paramilitaries other human rights abuse are suddenly going to be held more accountable than before so far it's been the paramilitaries and a few politicians who helped them but it could be broader this to me may be one reason why we're seeing human rights defenders under more threat already it's also going to be a moment when people in many parts of the country who for decades have been quietly burying their dead and not saying a word about what happened because if you're they're going to be coming out in many parts of the country talking to they maybe not it wouldn't have talked to the commission before or the center before but will now coming forward it's also and we're already seeing it in the courts it's a time when big promises are being made and Michael Reed and others have talked already about the difficulty often of seeing these big promises actually get fulfilled and implemented so I mean what does that mean for the center what's next for the center how do we evaluate the work that the center's been doing I mean I don't really know my experience actually this month 20 years of working in the NGO sector in Washington I'm not proud of that but it does give me at least some yardsticks by which to talk about maybe what has been successful and what hasn't in my sector and you know obviously the national center for historical memory is not non-governmental it is officially governmental which I think makes its job harder in some ways because it is imputing institutional responsibilities but you know by these yardsticks that we use I mean what had they done right what has some characteristics of the good NGO that perhaps we can say the center has had one big one is rigor and credibility as a member of the international advisory community with Ginny we did have a great look at how they did their work we saw iterations of the drafts we saw what they argued about we saw the high standard to which they held any facts they were presented how they preserved the identity of witnesses the language the care and the language that they used there is no tossed out phrase in that Vasta Ya report if they say there's institutional responsibility for a type of crime that's what the evidence led them to believe as far as rigor goes hey look after the report came out they had the right people angry with them the FARC were angry because they made it clearly say that there was a state sponsorship of violence or of a climate that made armed that would thereby somehow justify the choice of using armed force the armed forces were angry because of what Andreas was talking about that language about institutional and not just individual responsibilities if you get both sides mad at you that's probably a good sign about your credibility about your rigor and another key source of credibility is compliance they did what they promised which I had somebody joke to me recently and I hate this stuff but we see Columbia has a real knack governmentally and elsewhere of making very ambitious plans very good power points but often what happens in practice doesn't pan out one friend made a joke recently that Columbia is one of the places where they'll have a ceremony to celebrate the building of a bridge before the bridge is built yet these guys built the bridge the center of historical memory has actually completed 43 reports and their work does continue and just having kept their word and having done it in a way that is widely regarded to be a quality job is a big deal with the main target audience probably which is the victims of the conflict a second aspect of an effective NGO is simply inclusiveness this is including particularly the target audience again the victims in how they did their work ultimately it's a multidisciplinary group but it is ultimately in the eyes of many a bunch of pointy headed academics and Bogota's ivory tower the members of the center I think were very aware of that from the beginning and they sought to get out of the Bogota bubble and give voice to victims and they are now opening centers and facilities out in some of the most conflict hit areas in the country and that I think was a big boon to the success of their work so far another third element I think that has been crucial these initiatives are often only as effective as the leadership they have and they were lucky enough to have some strong personalities and some creative leadership along the way if you look at the law 975 which created them and then the regulations were drawn up to implement law 975 they're not very specific it's a couple paragraphs there will be a center for historical memory or group of historical memory at first they did kind of make up a lot as they went along they fight from the very beginning to guarantee that they had autonomy and therefore credibility was all part of the effort of that leadership from the very beginning leadership credibility inclusiveness individual NGO work that could use some improvement one has already been touched on it's in Spanish marketing getting the word out to many audiences they were very effective at getting the word out to victims getting the reports in the hands of victims the reports about individual cases are closely held and completely read and shared by victims communities however in this 70-80% urban country that probably has not where people really haven't felt the impact of the conflict very directly for a long time except that it's something you see on TV these reports probably haven't had the impact that they should ultimately they are they're written in a journalistic style not a very jargon filled academic style but still for your average reader it's a bit like eating your vegetables even if all 43 of them are available for free online at an easy to navigate website I think getting it in front of sort of a mainstream audience continues to be a challenge getting beyond that highly educated urban core or people who already live in spaces of Columbia that are already democratic and open enough that they can have such an open discussion so getting beyond that first sector of the bell curve and I don't have great great suggestions about schools I know some work has been done on high school curricula and that should be a greater focus you know I grew up in the 1970s I was a little kid in the 1970s in the Carter administration you required that the 6 TV networks that existed at the time put more educational content in the Saturday morning cartoons and some of you who grew up here maybe remember Schoolhouse Rock I tell you over my whole life people my age in college in grad school most of what they know about the U.S. legislative process and how a bill becomes a law comes from that 5 minute cartoon about the bill on Capitol Hill I'm not suggesting that the Center for Historical Memory make cartoons and comic books but maybe that's one way to get I know they've done a lot of creative work with videos with close cards but getting into mainstream audiences in that way is something to continue to work on especially as people are getting their information in much newer ways too the social media presence in particular is important and devoting more budget resources to a really sophisticated communications team is crucial another element that we always need more of is simply protection this is going to be badly needed because even though the center is part of the state it is a part of the state that is contesting space on behalf of victims with other parts of the state you know and that contestation is not between the government and guerrillas as much it is between those who hold a lot of defacto power in Colombia those who have a lot of resources probably have done some bad things in the past can still have a great ability to get out the vote on election day but who want to deny memory and on the other side the victims and those who are advocating for them in the center in the justice system in the victims unit and in the congress and elsewhere those who are on that second side need a lot of protection even maybe especially during the post accord period which will be a very tense moment for a while especially in between when you've got an accord and when you actually have the beginning of implementation it's not just physical security it's securing against attempts to discredit their work often those attempts may involve hacking or wiretapping and it requires a lot of open unabashed support from the international community in particular especially the U.S. government whose word does have a lot of weight in Colombia whenever there is an episode, such an episode arising against the center or similar groups just making clear that they view their work as credible a side note another way that the United States government can in particular help the work of the center and the future truth commission is opening our archives we have a lot the state department but of course other agencies as well which have been less reticent in the past have a lot in our cable traffic and other documents that could help the research into the conflict and its causes and responsibilities and a final element of effective NGO work that will probably be relevant to the center as well is mission relevance circumstances change an effective NGO either becomes irrelevant because they've completed their mission because time simply passed them by and that's a constant challenge now the center for historical memory their mandate expires in the year 2021 could be renewed who knows that's very far off but right now I mean they're going to have an identity crisis of some kind in a period in which there is a truth commission operating and you're in a post-conflict situation just think about it if you're a victim who wants to come forward in the year 2017 after the peace accord now who are you going to go to? Are you going to go to the special peace jurisdiction and its viscades? Are you going to go to the new truth commission? Are you going to go to the defensoria or your local personero? Are you going to go to the victim's unit? Are you going to go to the center the national center for historical memory? You know we have to testify before several of them separately because they may be by law can't share information with each other there's going to be a need to adapt alongside the new truth commission but also how to be the place that tells victim's stories that helps sustain their dignity and that provides them with safe and credible spaces within the state which is really novel that it's within the state to continue to tell their story and seek the reforms that they need now NGOs we do advocacy you know we try to do it based on really rigorous work but we do advocacy of the center advocacy I say yes to some extent even though they're part of the state and they're part of the presidency to the extent that Columbia's victims need advocates and will need advocates boy will they ever the center is a key node for advocacy on their behalf before the rest of the state and I think that's one thing that's been very striking about the experience of the center so far and it's been an honor to be able to follow them and to work and to know them and I thank you thank you Adam now we'll turn to our last speaker Juan Mendez Juan is a professor of human rights law in residence at American University in Washington College of Law and since 2010 has been UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel and human-integrating treatment or punishment he's also been the special advisor on prevention to the prosecutor a very long history as a human rights defender and someone with my tremendous respect and the respect of those who've been working in human rights issues in Washington and around Latin America in particular thank you Juan thank you very much Jenny for those kind words I also want to thank the US Institute of Peace for inviting me to talk to you about this and particularly to share the panel with this very distinguished group of very knowledgeable people I wish I was as current on events in Colombia as I once was I don't care to say how long it was but I am Latin American and I am a human rights activist and so Colombia is never very far from our views and our thoughts I was in Cartagena the India's in May the major major event about the peace process and justice organized by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights and with the presence of President Santos and I took when my turn came I criticized the concurrent opinion by Diego García Sallán in the case of Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the case again called el mozote versus El Salvador he tries to distinguish legacies of human rights violations by dictatorships from legacies of human rights violations by in the context of peace processes and conflicts armed conflicts and I very forcefully said that his opinion was wrong on the law and also did not set precedent and I was very embarrassed to see hours later when almost the same verbatim arguments were made by the Procurador Nacional Dr. Ordonez but I think the audience was a large audience but because they were Colombians they could tell the difference of when someone criticizes a peace accord from the perspective of supporting it and when one criticizes it because they want to destroy it and to make peace impossible Colombians are sophisticated that way and they are sophisticated in that they know what transitional justice is they know what the international law presidents are they know what are the obligations of the state more so than any country that I have seen and visited in the course of my work on transitional human rights law and particularly with transitional justice and that's why that sophistication leads all Colombians to understand that transitional justice is first and foremost about justice it's not obviously some of us in the field put more emphasis on the transition and some of us put more emphasis on justice but I want to stress that transitional justice is not a justice light it's not a kind of a poor relative of justice it's the justice that can be achieved in a moment of transition and transitions from dictatorship to democracy and transitions from conflict to peace are no different from the perspective of the obligations that states have to fulfill so in that sense Colombia has made contributions to transitional justice that even before reaching a final agreement on the conflict are are very welcome and very important for the future of international law and not the least of that in the area of truth telling because the project of historical memory is showing the way to how we can improve on the experiences of other societies in truth telling as one aspect of transitional justice by on the one hand being very rigorous about social science research and field research and second making a big effort to unearth all the unreported human rights violations that unfortunately in conflicts as we heard a little while ago that happened mostly in rural and marginal areas of the country they do go unreported and also and most importantly for trying to represent the voice of the victims in a much more educated setting than a truth commission that holds a hearing and invites people to listen to it important as those efforts have been in different countries around the world I think this effort at truth telling that the project of memory historical has conducted is a step above and possibly an example for other people to do it the important thing is that the project itself sets the bar very high for truth telling if there is going to be in the in the peace process a truth commission the truth commission is not going to be able to water down the strong conclusions and strong evidence that the project of historical memory has brought about and just like in the southern cone in Argentina and Chile the the justice phase was made possible by the truth telling that happened before by the reddit commission in Chile and the sabato commission in Argentina without those early exercises the prosecutions would have been very different in those countries as well because they turned public opinion on the one hand the need for justice because the more you know about what really happened the more that you understand that there are some injustices that cannot be left unpunished and also turned public opinion towards making justice in the sense of criminal prosecutions inevitable and to break down the obstacles to those prosecutions so my next point is reconciliation I mean in Latin America the word reconciliation has had very bad connotations because it has mostly been used by people who almost use it as a substitute for impunity and it is telling the victims you can't ask for justice and you can't ask for truth and you can't ask for aspirations because we are reconciled you are reconciled with us so that is the kind of thing that we among those who work on transitional justice have had to contend with telling victims that when we say reconciliation we don't mean you are reconciled we mean we will get through a process in which the society will be reconciled and it is important to insist on reconciliation between war infactions as something different from imposing reconciliation between the torturer and the tortured person between the person who conducted a massacre and the families that were left without their livelihood and their loved ones that's not the reconciliation that international law and transitional justice require but if we distinguish reconciliation of course reconciliation between the war infactions of course reconciliation in the sense of overcoming long conflicts of an ideological or political nature and letting the conflict be resolved by peaceful means by participation in the democratic process because we are all for that reconciliation and that is what should be pursued after all we are talking here about war crimes and crimes against humanity when it comes to war crimes there is no question that international law the law of armed conflict requires an amnesty at the end of the conflict that's in protocol 2 of the Geneva Conventions article 6 paragraph 5 but we have to be reminded at this time that that amnesty is not amnesty for war crimes it's amnesty for the crime of rising up in arms against the state the crime of sedition or rebellion or treason however it's called in the domestic jurisdiction is eminently subject to amnesty at the end of a conflict not only that it's possible and legal to do it we should forcefully propose it amnesty for those who participated in the conflict but didn't get their hands dirty with the blood of innocent people but at the same time we should make it clear that the limit to that amnesty is that war crimes are not included in the amnesty and that crimes against humanity are not included in the amnesty I don't have to tell you I don't think what are war crimes and what are crimes against humanity just refer you to the Statute of Rome for the most clear definition of them but I do want to stress that when it comes to certain human rights violations like war crimes and crimes against humanity but also single episodes of torture or forced disappearances international law requires that the state investigate, prosecute and punish the act and the perpetrators and this is an absolute obligation one that unfortunately in the case of torture especially is not fulfilled even by very powerful nations like the United States and that unfortunately is more observed in the breach by all around the world but nevertheless it is an obligation and it's a clear standard that many countries have adopted and I would submit to all countries because it's a customary international law that goes beyond signing and ratifying a treaty which by the way Colombia is a party to the convention against torture for example what does it mean that something is a war crime or a crime against humanity it means one that there is that obligation to prosecute and punish that means also that amnesties that have the effect of preventing that obligation and also other obstacles like the inter-american court said in Almonacida de Janeiro versus Chile other obstacles like statutes of limitation like pardons like just prosecutorial discretion all have to be removed there has to be investigation, prosecution and punishment but the category of crimes against humanity and war crimes also requires certain other actions by the state and we mentioned already truth-telling but also reparations to the victims and measures of non-repetition by way of institutional reform it's in all of these areas where one has to be optimistic about what has been announced but also carefully cautious about what the end result will be as we heard this morning the devil will be in the details and so we don't know where it's all going but in the course of supporting the peace process and the agreements that have already been tentatively reached we should remind ourselves of this that it is possible in Colombia as it is possible elsewhere to prosecute those bearing the highest responsibility to do so with utmost respect for fair trial guarantees and for due process of law and to do so by giving the victims an opportunity to see justice done that is what is the requirement of international law and it's not impossible to obtain I have a few more things to say but I know we're running out of time I just want to say that it's important for us in the human rights movement and I consider myself as looking at these issues from a human rights perspective not to allow ourselves to be painted into the corner of being the spoilers to a peace process the fact that we insist on justice doesn't mean that we oppose peace on the country it does mean that Colombians now have an opportunity perhaps the most important opportunity that we'll see in a long time to make to find ways in which peace does not trump justice but that peace and justice nurture each other and support each other and that we like Colombian victims are in favor of peace but a peace that will be lasting and will be enduring because it is a just peace thank you very much thank you Juan I'm going to turn the floor over to Andrés and Marta and see if you want to respond to any of the questions and comments that were raised by the commentators that one of the strongest challenges that the Center has is the diffusion of its reports and the capacity that these reports can have to go through the curriculum, the training of the children in Colombia this requires very strong allies like the Ministry of Education the Ministry of Culture and there is a challenge we have done very important things it is forming, it is contributing to the training of teachers and teachers so that they also build historical memory and tools so that they can work with their students the texts that produce the historical memory center but really there are many things to learn I would say that maybe communities are much more creative than we are I would like to put an example since Lili asked us for examples there are many at the local level the community of San Carlos used the report of San Carlos they made the curriculum taught in the local history based on the report of San Carlos they worked on all the competences that the Ministry of Education established based on that report they produced radio programs since there is a high consumption of radio in this region of the country and I believe that these are local examples that can be very useful for the national context the victims of Buenaventura in Colombia accompanied by a production of a written report with a theatrical work the theatrical work is called Touching the tide and it is a theater script that in some way collects the most determinant of the report in that artistic language so I think that there are many examples where it is sought to educate not only in the classroom but also outside the classroom to educate with art there are things to learn but yes, the victims have told us many times if our memory is not public it will not be a historical memory and we know that there this is a huge challenge in front of the issue of reconciliation I would like to point out that obviously Colombia is a country with a huge territorial heterogeneity huge and there are experiences of supremely interesting reconciliation in some Colombian municipalities a lot happens if the armed actor or perpetrators were from the region or were not from the region when they are from the region they generate interesting experiences a mother specifically in San Carlos Antioquia told me what we do with them we tell them to leave or they are the children of my neighbor or we try to do some process of living together so I think that locally we also have to learn from the experiences of reconciliation I would finally say that there are many victims that have told us in a very conclusive way I do not know the victim no one has asked me for forgiveness with whom I reconcile and I think this is massive in the Colombian case there are hundreds of victims who do not know who they are then it is a forgiveness trap it is forgiveness to whom it is forgiveness to the Colombian state it is forgiveness to whom no one has asked me for that public forgiveness it is important many victims have left us clear the lesson that more than a policy of reconciliation requires conditions for coexistence coexistence more than reconciliation coexistence conditions sometimes allow me to live to be able to coexist allow me to live without fear educate my children and then I can think to coexist with others but it is still a very abstract word with a very strong moral and religious charge that sometimes becomes another form of depression about the victims than a condition for the construction of peace I would complement what Marta proposed that Adam proposed the history and I must say that graphic history is a tool pedagogical that you are exploring the National Center of Historical Memory because we know that they are the types as we can reach the young people then it is exploring that option not with the purpose of caricaturing but it is a communicative way to reach the young people it has been very important in the work of diffusion I would say in that we as academics we have recognized that we have a deep attachment to a book then you have to diversify the languages play a very important role in photographic expositions in fact this report already has a photographic exposure that we have taken to different places then the capacity of photography to communicate the report itself there are people who read it only from the photos and see the photographic experience and rebuild and generate awareness about what you are seeing has also helped us a lot in diversification of the documentary videos in fact this report has a documentary video that is called there was no time for sadness and it is in the narrative of the victims that is, it is not the documentary video version it is the narrative of the victims who participated they are voices, they are faces with deep reflections because the communicative capacity of the victims is very powerful in the way the victims are able to communicate what they have lived how they have faced the armed conflict and second I would say that on the pedagogical issue one of the challenges that we have about the particularities of the work we develop is that we have a public that is very interested in knowing the products of the center but this excessive attachment to the book makes unfortunately not all those who are interested in the products of the center consume, let's say, sorry, the expression if or read the total production of the center and that is paradoxical because the victims in exchange many of them of marginal communities with limitations even in their reading and writing if they read the report with a passion and the victims when we return to the communities they complain chapter, you have to do the second version because there is not everything but they read it deeply and with time we learn to understand that anyway the book for the victims has a dimension of symbolic recognition very important as if the victims said if it is not written in the book we do not exist I mean, despite the verbal language artistic language I think none of them would replace if today we offered an audiobook would not replace the idea of the book itself there is a dimension of recognition very important of the feeling that only this can be lost in history so it is very important for them the work of the book and the second theme of reflection that I wanted to think is that there is something in the agreement of the commission of the truth it is not minor and it is that it collects a lot of what the victims many times have told us when we reflect with it about the existence of a commission of the truth and they said we do not imagine in the work of a commission of the truth something equal to what you did and that with that they wanted to say we believe that the commission of the truth should point more to recognition than to clarification we all know there are some consensus that we all share what we need is a symbolic field like the one that can give a commission of the truth to report they are there, they are latent we tell them under the table when we will report them even when we will report the descendants it is more that level of claim we do not want again we were told some victims what are the truths about which we will sit and what are the recognitions about which we will find who in the future how it will be there is a production a very important accumulation to give that kind of step and we need that symbolic space act as that place of denunciation of those recognitions great part of what has happened with raising the demands of justice, part of the victims the little offer of truth or the type of truth that is offered it has to do with that dimension when the victim faces that limit and does not find recognition of what has happened of the truths that also opens the way to say, well if you do not want to say the truth then justice falls all the weight of the law on you because you are not even giving me the plan of recognition but then the same victims experience that even though there is a criminal act if there is no recognition of a significant truth remains something many of them, that was an experience of justice and peace that had an effective privation of the freedom of paramilitaries up to eight years the victims said I come to these audiences and what I hope is a significant truth not a stigmatizing truth for this, for the scenario that comes to us and is I want the victim to morally subordinate to me because I have chosen the path of the word to confront it I could have become a victim I could continue the cycle of violence and I complain from the word it is perhaps the greatest contribution to the reconciliation that the victims do so I hope an act of moral subordination that you are able to tell me you killed me in a state of indefension to my family that is the supreme act of condemnation that people want then it will be very important in the commission of the truth what is spoken of the spaces where the victims can speak and that the victims understand that in the transition the condemnation over the means of violence is very important because over it the transition is founded perpetrators always live with the pretension to say to society it does not matter what has been done the important thing is why I did it no wait, it does matter what you did that is important because the post-conflict or reconciliation in the new democratic bases we have to fund an explicit condemnation to the means you used because the purposes, your speeches you will be able to make them in the political arena but the actors will have to understand not to give explanations that become justifications is to recognize in a simple way but with a great moral power if I killed someone in a state of indefension and not resort to speeches eventually justificators but all this is for the issue the important thing is the recognition about a knowledge already accumulated and that is why it was very important that in the commission's mandate it will be spoken not only about the recognition but also about the conditions for the commission great thank you Andrés and Marta there are several themes that I just want to kind of put in conversation with each other and then open it up to the floor I think one question has to do with something that Anthony mentioned about the myths that are created and I'm wondering if Andrés or Marta could speak to what are the myths that Basta Ya is trying to dispel that would be one question another question thinking about the presentations by both Carlos and Kimberly today how do you think that Basta Ya has dealt with the questions of the continuum of discrimination and violence and invisibilization against certain sectors of the population or Afro-Columbian communities or Indigenous communities I think we think of if we're thinking about how words define the subject matter that we're looking at how do you define conflict violence in a way that understands that the conflict violence against these sectors is actually part of a continuum that's not just specific to a particular period of time of the conflict and then one last question that educational plans you've already addressed one last question that I have is I know that in Basta Ya there were pages and pages of very detailed policy recommendations and within the individual tomes as well the Casas Ejemplares there were specific naming of crimes and responsibilities for those crimes what kinds of outcomes have you had I know there were detention orders for example issued right after the Trujillo report came out was there follow through on that were people prosecuted were they given punishments what kinds of consequences have you seen on the ground of the Basta Ya and all of the segments that contributed to the Basta Ya report well I I'm going to refer to three myths that I think I think I tried to treat the report one mentioned Andrés the issue of violence in the March of the Dead because of the violence in the March of the armed conflict there were marginals one more violence is one of each 10 deaths there are other more important violence of course it's difficult to say but what we can show is that it's not a marginal violence it's that one of each three deaths in Colombia is caused in the March of the Armed Conflict and that also gives more importance to the issue of peace if we could stop that violence we would be removing one of the factors that causes the most deaths in Colombia a second myth is that all the armed actors are the same I think we worked very hard to show that as Andrés said they all did everything but they are not the same they are not the same neither in their purposes nor in their methods they are not the same in their responsibilities and there we try to show not only that the responsibility in terms of what could be argued quantitatively but the responsibility that fits to each one depending on the place that the society occupies I think this is a very important point from that myth I would say that we are all guilty that someone mentioned this it's the most I think it's one of the most effective ways of impunity we are all guilty what we tried to argue in the report we are all responsible undoubtedly but we are not all guilty and the guilt has to be pointed out in a clear way in a concrete way in a specific way so that there can be justice action I would initially refer to those three myths I don't know Andrés I would complement one of the myths that I think Elvastaya tried to contradict has to do with a criticism which is the issue of the role of drug trafficking that we as Marta said wanted to desnarcotize the armed conflict because the interpretation about the role of the conflict of drug trafficking in the armed conflict was put first much in economic terms very strong the idea of drug trafficking is the fuel of the armed conflict carried in Colombia interpretations that put us in the field that there is no political nature that there are a lot of criminal companies that are feeding the conflict and what we wanted to show in the report there is an important weight of drug trafficking but it is not the only one and you have to be careful that drug trafficking does not invisibilize other responsibilities I always like to give a concrete example around it it is always associated with drug trafficking with paramilitarism and of course there is an important influence with paramilitarism and it is said that when drug trafficking breaks paramilitarism emerges what worries us for example with bets like that is that other types of responsibilities are invisibilized as for example drug trafficking does not explain to me the existence of a legal framework that allowed to form groups of self-defense in the that was a norm that existed since the end of the 60's and that in the 80's the strategy of insurgent in a decided way does not explain to me the creation of drug trafficking to live in the 90's without legal framework I cannot understand the expansion of paramilitarism first point second, if I only see drug trafficking I can have a great temptation to only see a criminal dimension that in relation to a phenomenon like paramilitarism I hide responsibilities of other social, economic and political actors that arrived at drug trafficking not necessarily associated with drug trafficking there is a dimension of the alliance against insurgent that is much more than simply drug trafficking and another dimension that we find very important is that we always see drug trafficking in a single direction we always think of drug trafficking as an externality and we say how it impacted the armed conflict and we almost never ask the question and how the armed conflict favored drug trafficking or what conditions that gave origin or invented the armed conflict favored drug trafficking that is why when one talks about the possibility of the finalization of the armed conflict drug trafficking that will surely continue if a different situation is faced or the criminal company drug trafficking will live a different situation and is no less let's say one cannot recognize that an important issue that has occurred in the armed conflict such as the issue of the agrarian problem the issue of the opening of the agrarian border areas of the territory where the armed actors managed to establish that the agrarian problem was exploited by drug trafficking to grow and the existence of the armed conflict in the periphery helped drug trafficking to consolidate those bastions and drug trafficking had a growth type a very different dynamic also that when we talk about drug trafficking we cannot just stay in the dimension of the resources we also have to recognize that behind drug trafficking there is a set of emerging elites that they found in paramilitarism and in the armed conflict a route in which they sought social and political was one more of the means that they could use I think that the issue of drug trafficking had to be removed from the simplification that was left to analyze the armed conflict in Colombia a second myth that I think was important is that there is a tendency in the Colombian academy very marked since the 90's and forward to want to see the violence of the actors in Colombia there was always the tension between if we attributed objective causes of the conflict or not and then we moved to a tendency in which we put a lot of emphasis on the actors and when we put the emphasis on the actors we arrived at a given moment to think that the actors could sustain themselves without any kind of anchoring in the context and we said that the war or the violence are explained by actors that were organized that have strategies and implement them and it's as if there were no conditions and I think that that's enough when we see it in the long run the question of an armed actor can want to make the war and design his strategy but one thing that I want is that he can sustain me that they are required so that those strategies can be implemented I think that's enough the discussion was let's look at those conditions that made possible the deployment of those strategies and I think it's important it's not a minor issue it's the issue of what are the conditions that we need to transform the armed conflict to reach peace Gonzalo Sánchez clearly says we fall in a given moment in the totalitarian pretension that the conflict was over when we destroyed the armed actor or we fell in the simplification of saying we don't need to change something to end the violence and I think that's enough to show that there are political roots there are social roots there is a set of different it can be only a matter of volunteerism of the actors or strategies if there is no armed actor he can't keep in a conflict if he doesn't find political opportunities if he doesn't have economic resources and if he doesn't find social anchorages in which he can develop his armed activity and that applies to all the actors of the armed conflict I think it was important the report because it brought back the need for changes and that it wasn't just a matter of relationship with actors that depended only on volunteers I think another important myth that can be interpreted as Marta says was the issue of breaking the idea of the marginality of the armed conflict or to consider that it was over dimensioning in the political agenda I think that when we advance to the post-conflict there will be dimensions that this conflict actually had and its true incidence that it wasn't a minor issue and I would like to add a fourth point that more than having to do with the myths I would like to pick up some of the critiques that Marta raised and it's a very big challenge that we have in the historic center and that leaves us with the critiques of the bastallà with the bastallà there was a reaction when the whole discussion around the origins and they even want to put those origins before 1958 or before the national front I recognize in that critique an important fact just now that we're talking about recognitions and that it's a challenge for the center, we can't do memory of the armed conflict about the forget of violence of the violence of bipartisan I think what is behind that criticism to say beyond if the armed conflict originated there or not I think society is also claiming that we have a pending debt with the bipartisan violence because what we're facing today with the issue of recognitions was a issue that we didn't face when we saw the transition of the bipartisan violence when we were finishing it when the national front pact was made because a lot of people say it was a pact of forget of not recognizing responsibilities and part of returning to that and that's a challenge that Marta who is the director of the National Museum of Memory will have in the need to recognize not only the armed conflict but the violence of bipartisan and the dimensions that she herself acquired by the voices that she silenced after the national front pact and what else to ask about the recommendations of politicians recommendations, yes we have been thinking about 30 recommendations of public policy and we have to say that in them the first recommendations are founded or were planned according to the recognition in fact the first recommendation of the Bastalla was to ask the republic to recognize the state's responsibility in the armed conflict and we have to say that the president we gave the information on July 23, 2013 he said to Gonzalo I'm going to comment that an incidence he says when they are before the recognition I saw the first recommendation he said to Gonzalo Sánchez and he says I'm going to fulfill it we said it's a shame that I'm going to receive it but the decision that the president took was to recognize to apply the recommendation to the next day the next day that happened in Colombia the president went to the constitutional court to defend the legal framework for peace that the legal framework for peace is the framework from which he can work the issue of peace negotiations and the president recognizes at that moment the responsibility of the state what happens when you are in the middle of the peace process these early events that have a great force are losing their symbolic efficiency because they start to be in the middle of what happens with the peace process and in fact there is going to be the challenge only when we are in the commission of the truth when it ends that has already been forgotten we have to rescue it and I think for the same fragmentation that I mentioned and the internal tensions inside the state it's going to be very important that not only the president but other high officials of the state recognize it in a broader way and that can include for example the Ministry of Defense military forces people are waiting for the announcement in that sense in that first package of recommendations in the first part we told the armed and legal groups do an act of recognition of their responsibilities because it was part of the claim of the victims all the time of that symbolic dimension of the recognition we made a wide set of recommendations these are two of the 30 but it was a very wide spectrum that recognized, some have not been implemented recognized the need for example in the issue of the damages of the psychosocial damage that we had to recognize that by the scale and by the dimensions of the affections that caused the armed conflict we proposed to create regional centers of psychosocial attention exclusively for the issue we needed a political psychosocial attention for the victims let's say that is a part of the work that in the issue of reparation has not been worked systematically or with a political properly said so that is one of the recommendations that have not been implemented we have said something that may be relevant now maybe those who saw the report will remember it and it is that in the issue of justice we said there must be a special court there will have to be because in the complaint of justice can not be signed or simply pass the page we must generate an eventual court ad hoc but there must be a dimension of the sanction people wait a dimension of the sanction when people talk about justice not only is waiting the dimension of the penal sanction in the sense of freedom, of a punishment of that nature wait the symbolic act of denunciation of the sanction of the sanction itself so the jurisdiction that is now proposed for us generates a lot of expectation because we know that it is a very important complaint of the victims and because it has to leave the public opinion and in all that is being sanctioned and hence the importance of the moral subordination of the perpetrator to recognize to catch the head of the victim and to recognize the the crimes that have been perpetrated we also made recommendations because we know that these process of demobilization are complicated about having to make a balance of all the demobilization policy that has been used in previous steps there is a very important issue because in these hierarchized structures the weak point or the weak point is usually in the means, for example how do you guarantee that these processes of demobilization are successful when, as they did not tell some of the demobilized for example in Urabaya they said look, the structures or policies have always been thought in the head or those who are in front of the organizations go to the policy and they have a place in the policy the bases are replicated in their families but the medium command needs something that allows to reproduce the position occupied by the structure in society and how they solved it in a region like Urabaya many of the businessmen gave them work as farm administrators and the process worked let's say more or less no, it was successful with the demobilization of the EPL that is a very important question the issue of how do you guarantee replicas in some way the structures so that the actors can integrate in society because in a conflict so prolonged for many the war is the office that learned and they will not relegate a position of command if they cannot occupy it socially that is what has happened to us in part with the demobilization of the paramilitaries in the medium commands and the threat with the FARC can be effectively in the medium commands that they will not find a way of integration or efficient there we have a point of important vulnerability we also ask in the recommendations that there are experiences of public policy that we will have to review again in Colombia and at the beginning of the 90s many victims have a very positive memory of the National Rehabilitation Plan which was an attempt of public policy that recognized the need to develop investments of economic type infrastructure of social type of community organization for the territories that were more abandoned or disintegrated that experience even people feel today because it says it lasted very little and also was part of the interlocution with the state that we lost the Colombian rural country claims that after 1990 when the economic opening began the state dismantled all the institutionality that it had to dialogue with the rural country we had a very strong institutionality around the National Rehabilitation Plan there was a series of institutions that people said I know I have an interlocutor there and after the economic opening all of that was dismantled and the rural country was abandoned so that is part of the wide range of recommendations we do self-criticism and we made the recommendations we need more productivity to follow them because the victims tell us at the end of the testimony and it is about the follow-up and the implementation of them that we consider that our testimony has value thank you let's open it to the floor yes back and then in front thank you Santiago I'm going to make this question in Spanish since it's directed to Marta Nubia previously you spoke of that clamour of the victims of calling things by their names the attack along with the preparation of the report and the attack of course do you think that the director of President Juan Manuel Santos called the language contradicts it in some way for example the idea to stop calling international, conventional acts of terrorism as a terrorist let's do several Natalia or do you have one over there Toni's on that side while she's going down Natalia Tejada from the World Bank since the question is for Marta Nubia and Andrés I'm going to formulate it in Spanish we've talked about a type of justice a particular type of justice that's why we call it transitional that definitely looks for something looks for something beyond the punishment looks for something beyond the punishment and looks to give clearly a reparative intention to that justice that satisfies the victims and that allows us to deal with the past to leave it in the past and in that apparently reconciliation and all the mechanisms of transitional justice existing and reconciliation as if they didn't take very well that word that almost didn't like within the context of the scenario for all the difficulty of defining it to put it into practice but it's so necessary to name something that the country also asks and then I wanted to suddenly that you commented about what is that potential because evidently apparently what we've touched on so much is that there is a potential to create conditions of coexistence call that political reconciliation national, interpersonal there are some potentialities in the mechanisms of transitional justice what we've talked about here of the real commissions how to potentialize the possibility of reconciliation in the practices of the mechanisms of transitional justice what happens there what would we have to do in terms of speeches what type of communication what type of interaction what type of relationship allows us to increase that potential for coexistence and reconciliation of transitional justice Thank you Thank you for the question I think that when we talked about the symbolic force of naming things and the power of some kind of moral justice that it has we attended a clamor of the victims to confront the deep stigmatization of the victims and I think that was basically the search In the process of mobilization of the paramilitaries a lot of things are worth having as an example of the power of language I remember in an audience in a free version that there was a judge one of the paramilitaries said down to the bandit and the judge forced him to say I murdered a person in a state of indefense very, very important when I talk about the power of naming things by their name is forcing them to recognize that there was violence forcing them not to justify themselves or to blame the victim and that is a huge effort sometimes the same mobilized need to say it, repeat it so that they fall into account of what they are doing in a sexual way with, for example, the declarations of Hernán Giraldo in Magdalena he did not admit that they called rape to the sexual practices that he committed with nine years, eleven years and he did not admit that they called rape because the children had been recognized by him so it was hard to admit it these are cultural patterns of a long time we all have fallen in justifications in banalizations we do not condemn a murder but depending on who is the victim there is no radical condemnation if I condemn death I condemn murder if it depends on who killed him and why he killed him then I pronounce or I shut up and I think that is what we refer to the language the specific question that you I think it has to do with try to decrease the social polarization with try to decrease at this moment also the exacerbation that has the use of certain terms towards violence and I think it is necessary and that does not imply to disguise things that does not imply false languages I think it is necessary in this country and it is necessary for me for teachers, for all citizens for the armed actors we have a deeply warrior language we have a deeply polarizing language so that call not only for the armed actors it is for all of us who are involved in the war and I would say a little bit in front of your question that seems so important to me communities give us impressive lessons if you really have the capacity the possibility to open your ears to lower the arrogance that sometimes gives us the academy the measures we go to the communities saying that's how it was done in South Africa that's how it can be done here the communities propose not only the video that was invited to see Andrés the wisdom that is there in the proposals of coexistence because the people in the last identify the suffering that they have lived and in the fan as I say to live to be able to live I would say that in Colombia there is the treatment of the past that the indigenous communities do they tell us that the past is gone to close to close and to heal sometimes we don't even think about it so this possibility of opening to listen in a society that is deeply diverse in the cultural avoid importing un-contextualized proposals I mean a proposal if you don't recognize the cultural marks then listen with a certain sensitivity also all in perspective of that cultural characteristic can be very useful to think of a transitional justice to the Colombian as such I would know what to think sorry I would add about the concern that we have about the language I would say that we have to have some considerations the euphemisms not only have been used by the paramilitaries or state agents, they have also been used by guerrillas it is clear that a kidnapping is a kidnapping and a retention for example that when there is an interpellation because the guerrilla says I used the cylinder bomb and my intention was not to give it to the community but to reach the objective that it was a police station then I call it collateral we say those are issues when you name something as collateral you are saluting the responsibility or the intentionality and you can interpell saying the use of a non-conventional weapon that had precision problems is enough to tell you you can't tell me that in your calculation it wasn't that that could happen it could be that that wasn't your objective but you can't deny me for having made use of the medium that wasn't my final objective when we made the Bojaya report what we noticed with great horror was to realize that it wasn't a pipeta that falls in the wrong place but had been launched two before and after that other and the interception of the communications the guerriller that was with the platform was telling the commander commander, if you are in the middle of the civil population it doesn't matter the priority is the military the priority is keep doing it so even in those cases those are the examples for the collateral damage that you can't hide in terms of recognition of responsibility the same thing that happens with the retention when mentioned I say retention instead of kidnapping I'm hurting the dignity of the victim because they are making me they are decorating me something that doesn't have to do with what happened with the issue of terrorism in the great difficulty that we found is that when I think in the way in which the general situation of the violence of the armed actors in the year in the 2000s when they called a terrorist threat what happened in Colombia instead of armed conflict the practical effect that occurred was that there were only victims of the guerrilla and there were no victims of the others and the notion of terrorism also ended up having a use more than to capture concrete phenomena of reality to escalate, because someone told us with all reason, terrorism is also a massacre and terrorism are also other forms of violence so the political use of the concept of terrorism itself has contributed the same to draw situations or capture situations and that specific effect in the 2000s of the denial of a fact that we later recognized that it is the fact that in the conflict there is the state that there is the military group that there are the guerrillas so about that topic of language those are my considerations about what you propose of reconciliation with the topic of reconciliation it happens that the expression has been very immediate by the religious topic so the religious topic puts a load that links a lot the reconciliation to forgiveness and it links it in a way in which the load ends up in the victim in what sense? in the sense that the religious construction that is made of the term makes the victim two things one, when they ask you for forgiveness your act of generosity is to give it so the victim should be able to do what he wants forgive me the expression and decide because what is forgiven are crimes it is a family that lost it is a missing there is something in forgiveness when you have that religious connotation is that when they put the load as a victim it is impossible or in some way they force you to renounce something that is normal you can already feel anger pain there is a series of emotions that contain you when they ask you for forgiveness and the second is what Marta said who better to ask for forgiveness that's where it starts and the third very important with reconciliation is that many times it has been founded if we do not recognize what has happened and the idea of reconciliation is very impregnated by the idea of having to go through that violent past to overcome it without recognizing it and there is a dimension of invisibilization that is also a very hard path to travel for the victim because sometimes in the notion of reconciliation you forget that the human drama that is behind and to deny to the victim the expression of a set of emotions to which he has the right I think the subject we like to talk more about coexistence because as Juan said in his intervention Juan Mendes with a lot to be true reconciliation is not that we all love each other it is the possibility that the perpetrator can recognize the facts that the perpetrator should do something of the importance of the perspective of restorative justice to prepare the damage and that we can continue in the social scene dialogando sin matarnos but do not ask the victim an act let's say of detachment because the victim is the one who has lost everything in fact one in many spaces with reflection we said the surprising that it is often to see how the victims are able to pass the fastest page of what the victims do someone said but how can they do it and for me the answer is obvious someone heard him fighting and it seemed obvious to me at the end of the day he gave me a blow and I gave him another we were hit in the war both of us we washed our sins with blood the victim does not have how to return the blow he received then the victim what he expects is a symbolic gesture and his great bet is precisely when I talk about recovering the word and there is the importance and how do you pray? if I do not return the blow with blood I return it with the word what is your gesture? it has to be the word it has to be an act of moral subordination so that we can continue then I think all those elements are marked around the subject of that's why we talk about coexistence it seems a little better than reconciliation the subject of memory and in fact part of our challenges as a center have been to make the Colombian society understand that memory is an ally for peace we can not find peace about negation or the occult but it has to be about recognition in some dialogue that we had about the Bastalla in Switzerland a French academic said something that seemed very revealing to us and he said try to hide the memory and she will return then face it because she will return she will return sooner or later then there is in it a work of the expression of recognition if one manages to take the component of forgiveness the notion of reconciliation or of oblivion I think it opens a different path but those charges are already part of the assumptions let's say how the society moves and the Colombian society as it has shown many of its work Gonzalo Sánchez always resolved many of those violent conflicts from the idea of very broad mystias and very broad oblivion I think that is also in the political culture in the Colombian culture it remains and installed in a very strong way an autobiography and she wrote I think that the power of memory to create change is kind of laid out in that quote so I just wanted to read that I'm going to try and this is a very to try, and this is a very humble attempt, to summarize just a few of the challenges that have come out during the day today. And what I would ask is that you each think about what the takeaways are that you found in today. And I'll start out and then I'll open it to the floor and maybe just do a quick round of what are the challenges that you see, and I'm sure I'll have missed a lot of them so there'd be a lot left for you to say as well. I think one challenge we've heard is truth telling is that truth telling in Columbia has been an experience of denunciation and polarization and the need to rethink the conceptualization of truth telling as something, there was a book I remember that was called Memoria Consentil de Futuro. How do you channel these memories and these truth telling efforts toward the future? Toward a future that the word reconciliation we've talked about is very debatable. But how do you think about it in a positive frame as leading the society toward a place where violence is not going to return? The importance of language and words, that's come out, the inadequacies of the categories that we have to describe victims, to describe descapacitados. I mean all the kind of negative images that we have, the negative words that we have to describe people whose rights have been violated. But somehow the words that we have leave the person to blame and we need new language for these things. We need to be aware of our blind spots and I think this is a real challenge and the willingness to engage in public debates and to hear critiques is one way that we can come to recognize what our blind spots are and I really admire in that sense, the work and the approach of the historical memory group and center in their willingness, in their seeking out actively constructive criticism. I mean they don't just say okay we have blind spots and keep going, they say okay here it is tell us where the blind spots are and I think they invite the academic community in particular to assist them in seeing where they're not getting it right and trying to do better. I think the erasures that Kimberly talked about are a major challenge. The violence against men, the violence against women and children, the next generation of children that have been completely absent from all of the discussions around transitional justice. The question of coding, as you think about a truth commission's work, how do you make sure you're coding it in a way that you can recapture what those trends are? The question of protections, we had a wonderful question and I would have loved to have more time to get answers from the audience about what protective measures have been set up in other contexts for human rights defenders, for people who come forward to testify, for those who try to claim their rights or their lands. The challenge of how to keep transitional justice from being just a legal mechanistic process, how do you integrate what David called active social forces into the process from the beginning? In memory projects, monuments, memorialization, truth commissions, education, culture in the arts as well as trials. The challenge of whether you might need different kinds of truth telling processes for different kinds of crimes and I think the issue of sexual violence and gender based violence as well are areas where perhaps the public scenarios to tell your story may not be adequate, they may not do anything for the victims, they may create new victimizations. It may be that the kind of reconciliation as well will need to be different for different crimes. Who needs to be reconciled with whom? I think that's often a really big question for women victims of sexual violence. It may be that they need to be reconciled with their families because the stigmatization against them is so strong and so powerful that it really has less to do about confronting a perpetrator and more to do about how can I recapture my life and my dignity and move forward. I think the challenge of raised expectations is one that we're going to be seeing emerge more and more as those who are invited to share their testimonies believe that maybe they're being heard sometimes for the first time and have certain expectations of what that means in terms of practical reparations or some sort of remedy for what they've been through. A huge challenge for Columbia is the implementation in general. Implementation of recommendations and follow-up we've seen with the victims and land restitution law has been far from successful. Recommendations made in the Bastilla, the lack of follow-through, the lack of mechanisms for advocacy to make sure that follow-through takes place, the lack of monitoring to see where progress is being made. I think that those are very worrisome indicators for what we have to expect from a peace accord. Implementation of a peace accord, if we haven't been able to get it on the victims and land restitution, we haven't been able to get it on the different historical memory projects, how can we expect that magically we're going to get it on peace accords? That's an area that really needs to be worked and civil society groups need to really get themselves together. It's rather ironic because for the last three years, society has been saying it's not going fast enough. We need an accord and now we find ourselves potentially at six months from having an accord and people are not ready. There's so much work to be done to get ready for the accord and to be ready to make sure that it's implemented. I think also a challenge is for the Truth Commission, maybe a lesson learned from the experience of the Historical Memory Center is the importance of having some sort of a plan of distribution and thinking about organizational advocacy structures that can help move those recommendations but also get the information and the analysis out into the public more quickly and more deeply. And that raises I think another challenge that we haven't talked about today which is the challenge of saturation. How do you ensure that these stories are heard and that people don't either move and you may be able to move past denial but how do you make sure that people don't just close their ears to it because they've heard it all before. So you wanna maintain the integrity of the stories, maintain the dignity of the particular victims but you also, if you have 7.6 million victims whose stories need to be told, how do you carry on with that if you're a sensitive person and it moves you? You can't be moved over and over and over and over and over again without it having some impact. So how do you deal with the psychological impact of just the vastness of the violations that have been committed? And I think David also laid out a number of political and moral challenges of public deliberation and a number of our speakers today have underscored the importance of having spaces where people can talk about these things. And this also has to do with I think one of Michael's points that there's a certain self-censorship that has taken place because of fear. How do you begin to get people to allow themselves to think more freely and then express themselves as well? And some of that is creating a safe environment. And I think Juan's comments about the integral nature of human rights and peace kind of speak to that point. If you have an environment where people aren't afraid that they're going to be carted off to jail or attacked or killed or receive death threats for speaking out when something's not right, you need that kind of environment to be able to sustain the peace. So I would like to maybe open it to gaps that I've left out or other comments that anyone would like to make about takeaways that you have or new things that you've heard today that you haven't heard before that have either changed your thinking process or given you something new to think about. Actually, I'm afraid I have been instructed that we go into overtime at five o'clock and we don't have a budget to pay for the overtime. So with that, I think I will call that the closure for the day and invite you to go out in the halls and talk out there. I'd like to really thank all of our speakers and particularly our guests from the Historical Memory Center for a really stimulating day. And I'd like to thank all of you who have been here for hours throughout the day listening and asking questions and thinking for your presence here and your participation. And we all hope that the Peace Accord in Columbia is signed soon and that it actually translates into real change on the ground. Thank you very much for coming.