AA 2015 Volume 47 Issue 1
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing AA 2015 Volume 47 Issue 1 by Subject "Human rights abuses"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Catholic voices of the voiceless: the politics of reporting Rhodesian and Zimbabwean state violence in the 1970s and the early 1980s(University of the Free State, 2015) Scarnecchia, TimothySome of the worst atrocities of state violence perpetrated by the Rhodesian state were published and disseminated around the world in 1975 thanks to the Rhodesian Catholic Bishops’ and the Catholic Commission on Justice and Peace’s links to human rights organisations in London. In contrast, when the Zimbabwean state carried out similar atrocities against civilians in 1983, the Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Commission on Justice and Peace decided to cooperate internally with a Government of Zimbabwe (GOZ)-led commission announced to investigate claims against government soldiers rather than press the case internationally. The Catholic Bishops and the Catholic Commission on Justice and Peace also interacted with foreign diplomats to help assuage their concerns over the security situation – most notably media reports of civilian massacres and torture – from the Midlands and Matabeleland provinces during Operation Gukurahundi. This article investigates some of the rationale for a different approach in the early 1980s based on changing alliances and allegiances of these Catholic organisations with the Rhodesian and then Zimbabwean state. This article forms part of a series of articles exploring how Zimbabwean and non-Zimbabwean actors rationalised the Gukurahundi period.Item Open Access SADF soldiers’ silences: institutional, consensual and strategic(University of the Free State, 2015) Baines, GaryThis article treats silence as a collective phenomenon. Silence can be proscribed and enforced, socially conditioned and sanctioned, or voluntarily embraced. All forms were evident in the case of soldiers who served in the South African Defence Force (SADF). First, they acquiesced to an institutional silence imposed upon them regarding their role in waging a war in Angola/Namibia, as well as suppressing the struggle against apartheid. Secondly, SADF veterans were complicit in a self-imposed and consensual silence about human rights abuses following the country’s democratisation. This was partly enabled by a ‘pact of forgetting’ struck by the political elites and leaderships of the statutory and non-statutory forces. Finally, SADF veterans have employed silence as a strategy of control; they have invoked their experiential knowledge of the ‘Border War’ to assert their authority to tell the ‘truth’, thereby constructing a narrative of the conflict that remains largely unchallenged in the public domain. Consciously or unconsciously, SADF soldiers contributed to the public construction of silence following the violence of the apartheid wars.Item Open Access Two modes of amnesia: complexity in postcolonial Namibia(University of the Free State, 2015) Kössler, ReinhartPublic commemoration of past atrocity, mass crime and particularly genocide has drawn attention both in the public realm and in scholarly debate, meeting general acceptance in recent years. However, the seeming opposite has also been advocated – forgetting. Variously, such forgetting is presented as a wiser approach in contradistinction to painstaking and evasive truth-seeking. Taking this tendency as a point of departure, I discuss here two cases that seem relevant to what might be called a strategy of amnesia, both relating to Namibia: (1) reference to the genocide perpetrated by the German colonial army in 1904-08, both in post-World War II (West) Germany and in the independent postcolony, and (2) the debates and conflicts within Namibia around the gross violations of human rights committed under the auspices of SWAPO during the 1980s. Without suggesting that these cases are in any way equivalent, I contend, however, that they are related in the minds of a fair number of Namibians and further, that there are certain connections in the ways both cases have been and are addressed within the public spheres of the two countries concerned. I argue that in both cases, debate on how to ‘work through’ or otherwise pass over in silence violent acts and large-scale crime arose only with the Namibian independence process in 1989/90. In the first case, we can observe a transnational dynamic, which has resulted in shifts in the positioning of both governments concerned, but at the same time refers back to more long-term official images of history. This concerns in particular the construction of national identity as a decisive framing of the transition process, which, in Namibia, was intertwined with achieving independence. In the German case as well, memory politics are closely related to transition to democracy, even though this transition was the result of the cataclysmic defeat of Nazism. In such contexts, strategies of amnesia or of repressing memory appear fragile in face of the ever-present possibility that interested or concerned actors may raise seemingly forgotten issues. Precisely because of their relative volubility, such strategies also pose questions about political culture. In a closing section, I therefore consider the societal power relations that influence the prospects of enduring amnesia in the cases discussed.Item Open Access ‘We have moved on’: human rights and intersubjectivity in post- 2007/2008 violence in Kenya(University of the Free State, 2015) Akoth, SteveIn September 2010, the International Criminal Court Prosecutor, Moreno Ocampo, issued summons against six Kenyans suspected of bearing the greatest responsibility for crimes against humanity committed in Kenya after the bungled 2007 general elections. Immediately after the list of inductees was released, the political elites and their courtiers launched a campaign for Kenyans to reverse the human rights movements’ call for ‘truth-telling’ that had persisted since after flag independence. Using the notion of ‘our people’, those who had been named suspects and their supporters effectively reformulated the quest for ‘truth-telling’ to a silencing rhetoric captured by the political elites’ and victims’ declaration as “we have moved on”. I argue that this notion of ‘moving on’ is part of Kenya’s political culture that has for long enveloped gross human rights violations and stifled discussions and quests for any form of justice in Kenya’s post-conflict environment. This article gives an account of how postcolonial subjectivities interrupt and complicate the discourse of ‘moving on’ in Kenya.