In May 2013, Argentinian journalist Jorge Kostinger sent the following letter to the Videla family:
To the Videla family,
Here is the body. Without filing a request for habeas corpus, you have the body. A few forms to fill, and it is yours, you can take away your relative’s mortal shell. You have a body. You will notice that it is delivered to you without any burns or bruises. We could at least have given it a richly deserved beating. We, however, prefer not to do the things that the body that you are going to bury did. We did not throw it out of a plane, we did not encourage it to “squeal” using electric shocks. To squeal, for example, about where our bodies, those of our comrades, are. We did not rape it. We did not put its child on its chest while we cranked the generator. We did not shoot it in order to pretend that it died in a stand-off. We did not encase it in concrete. We did not bury it in an unmarked grave somewhere. We did not steal its grandchildren. Here, the body is yours. (cited by Sévane Garibian)
The body belonged to General Jorge Rafael Videla, notorious Commander in Chief of the Argentinian army and de facto dictator between 1976 and 1981, during whose reign of terror upwards of 20,000 persons, by one estimate, mostly politically active people, were ‘disappeared’. At least 10,000 of these [people] have never been found, even as skeletal remains, and these are the subject of the famous Mothers of the Plaza campaign since the 1980s.
Kostinger’s letter shows barely controlled anger. Referencing all the horrific modes of torture performed on thousands of Argentinian citizens, Kostinger tells the Videla family that the dictator’s body was never defiled, never desecrated: the body is intact, possesses its own integrity still, unlike the many victims of Jorge Rafael Videla. It is ready for memorialisation – an honour not available to his victims.
While much has been said and written about the mourning and memorialisation for the victims, the question arises, how does one memorialise perpetrators?
The perpetrator here is not a serial killer or everyday offenders of civil or criminal law, but, in the words of Antonius C.G.M. Robben and Alexander Laban Hinton, “active participants in state institutions and repressive organisations or informal associations and networks who carry out genocide, mass killings, or violent acts for the presumed greater good of the state, a people, or an ideology.”
While much has been said and written about the mourning and memorialisation for the victims, the question arises, how does one memorialise perpetrators? Photo: Unsplash
Also read: How to Indict Perpetrators – Nuremberg’s History Lessons
In the absence of Corpus delicti
In Videla’s time, there were very few corpus delicti (evidence of a crime committed, particularly in the form of a corpse). Both the living and the dead were ‘disappeared’. As stated in the official report on the Argentinian disappearances, Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared (1986):
“[The] absence giving hope to the relatives that the kidnap victim would be freed and return; then the concealment and destruction of documentation, which undoubtedly existed in every case, prolonging the uncertainty about what had happened; and finally, the nameless bodies, without identity, driving people distraught at the impossibility of knowing the specific fate of their loved one. It was a bottomless pit of horror.”
The thousands killed in the S-21 prison of the Khmer Rouge during the years of terror were indexed in the form of a photographic archive, at least.
In a context where families and communities mourn the very absence of bodies – and the absence is, oddly, evidence that something is rotten in the state – the debate around the rights of dictators’ families or the state itself to commemorate, memorialise, and thereby ‘honour’ the dictator becomes a thorny issue. Take for instance, the case of Talaat Pasha, often seen as the man behind the Armenian massacres. After his assassination in 1921, he was given a grand burial in Berlin. Later, Adolf Hitler transferred the remains to Istanbul, and it is now in a mausoleum built in the memory of the ‘heroes of the fatherland’.
The Nazis convicted at Nuremberg were not subject to public executions, although the photographs of their dead bodies were released. Hitler’s body, at his own orders, was burnt immediately after his suicide in the Berlin bunker. The subject of where Spain’s Franco should be interred – in the tomb in the Valle de los Caídos or in the cemetery near his former residence in the palace of El Pardo – has been the subject of controversy. The same applies to the body of Pol Pot and the other leaders of the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge reign.
When the many massacred or disappeared do not have a topography of remains – the body, a grave, a tombstone, an annual prayer/ritual – how does the national or community mourning of the principal human cause(s) of the massacre operate?
For many survivors, the tyrants by dying, escaped the processes of justice at the hands of the law. For example, Pol Pot’s trial was underway when he died and for many families of his victims, he had ‘got away’ by dying. That is, the impunity with which they operated in massacring and maiming thousands when alive, extended to them even after their reign and to their deaths.
Should the corpses of the perpetrator be treated as corpus delicti? Does this corpse, of the perpetrator, bring about closure for survivors of those s/he had executed? Or does the very presence of the perpetrator’s corpse, often interred grandly, mark the transformation of the villain into a hero?
Exterior of the Führerbunker shortly before its destruction. Hitler and Braun’s remains were burnt in a shell crater outside the emergency exit at the left. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744/CC-BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons
Trying memories
The judicial process operates as not just an occasion for remembering the horrors – many victims break down, as occurred in the Cambodia/Khmer Rouge trials and even at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings – but also as a means of bringing the perpetrators to public account. This involves questions, practices, and the ethics of memory-making.
When the perp is put on trial – from Nuremberg 1945 to Cambodia 2009 – what is being made public is a memorialisation of their victims, but in the presence of the perpetrator. The testimony of witnesses – though this was not the procedure at Nuremberg, which relied on documentary evidence – against the perpetrator in the latter’s physical presence marked the verbal corpus delicti of and from the times of horror.
But the trial is also a spectacle where the survivors’ memories go up against those of the perps.
For instance, the testimony of Vann Nath, who survived S-21, gave the lie to the denials and evasions of Kaing Guek Eav, aka ‘Duch’, the commandant of S-21, at the Khmer Rouge trials. The defence stated:
“Duch was just a minor Secretary who had no real authority to make decisions or to do anything contradictory to the directions from or the orders from the upper echelon. Therefore he could not be considered the most responsible person.”
In his own apology, Duch said:
“As the director of S-21, I did not dare to seek any alternatives to obeying the orders from the upper echelon, despite knowing that carrying them out would lead to the loss of thousands of lives.”
He also claimed that he was not present at the tortures, and did not even hear the screams of the tortured. But survivors like Nath testified to his presence, and thereby pointed to the manipulation of chronology, cause, and memory by the accused.
Here, what is also on trial in the form of the victims’ testimony is the public secret of murders, kidnappings, and disappearances. Cross-examinations, as in the case of the Cambodia trials, bring together private victim testimony, perpetrator testimony, and historical records. The trial gives the public secret, available to many as personal or even shared memories, a visible form with images, documentation, interviews, etc. This transforms the public secret into public archivisation – a process in which the perp is present, although s/he may have been behind the scenes, ‘merely’ ordering the heinous acts when they were undertaken. The public archivisation project is often framed within the principles of law, memory, and accountability.
There are two aspects to this public archivisation.
First, common sense tells us that perps on trial minimise their role in the genocides and massacres, and claim to be either simply following orders. In other words, can we call what the perpetrator states in court ‘testimony’ or is s/he manipulating the memories to provide a different genealogy of the events – one in which s/he had little or no role? Anneleen Spiessens has argued that ‘the very possibility of the killer’s testimony is disquieting. How can a person be capable of telling this kind of story and voicing the ultimate transgression?’
Second, when the perpetrators die before such a public archivisation process where, very often, they are called upon to confess, many like Videla carry their dark secrets to the grave and thus resist publicisation. For critics like Michelle Caswell and Anne Gilliland, the deaths of the perpetrators means they escape this process entirely.
“The accused become forever-from-now-on unavailable and thus unassailable evidence – in essence; they are transformed into imagined documents that can never be cross-examined. In this construction, the would-be testimony of perpetrators is given epistemological validity over that of victims, offering up the false and unfulfillable promise of establishing a singular truth.”
The victim testifies while the perpetrator confesses, writes perpetrator-and-film-studies theorist Raya Morag. But what happens where there is no confession, she argues. Caswell and Gilliland note that with their deaths, no cross-examination of the perp is possible, and one can only speculate on their intentions and psychological make-up. We imagine them as documents that provide a certain historical memory.
But perhaps, there is a third way of looking at the public archivisation and memorialisation of perpetrator testimonies. Sibylle Schmidt argues that the perps are auctor delicti, the author or originator of an act, in this case, of murders and killings. Schmidt writes:
“This person is the author of a violent transformation of the state of the world, be it through his or her actions or omissions. The deed carries, so to speak, his or her fingerprint. Perpetration has to do with authorship – even if structural political violence seeks to deny and conceal individual responsibility.”
Schmidt brings together both testimonial narrative and memorialisation as-public archivisation here. Some, like Eichmann, Pol Pot, or Himmler may have been desk-murderers, issuing kill orders. Others like Duch were physically instrumental in carrying out the heinous acts – which the survivors recall at the trial. But both categories of perps are auctor delicti – they authored the acts.
The third aspect is precisely why the bringing-to-trial – although it may not result in justice – is important. The trial, a public spectacle, is an act of public archivisation of the worst memories of a community, culture, and state. It points to the authorship of such acts that produced the various corpus delicti, even when the corpus is conspicuous by its absence. The public archivization of both corpus delicti and the more troubling auctor delicti is crucial not just for the past but also for the future, as illustrated by all such genocide trials.
To bring in and retain perp memories in the public eye is not about honouring them but to point to questions of authorship, of genealogy.
The ‘never again’ slogan can only make sense when aligned with ‘never forget’.
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the University of Hyderabad.
