Op-ed day 3: Finding Space to Heal --by Rachel

I immediately start to feel the muscles in my forehead contracting and my jaw tightening.  Almost without fail, when I visit a site where an unspeakable atrocity has occurred, I leave with a headache that sticks with me for the rest of the day.  It seems as though our visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum today may not be an exception.  During the Khmer Rouge regime, this former Phnom Penh high school was transformed into a detention and interrogation center where approximately 30,000 individuals were held and tortured between 1975 and 1979.  All but seven prisoners were eventually killed. 

Every individual who visits this site, or any other memorial anywhere the world, may have an entirely unique experience.  For those with personal connections to the preserved atrocities, these memorials have the potential evoke reactions with serious implications in their personal lives, as well as for the larger community.  This is particularly relevant in the context of justice, reconciliation, and genocide prevention.  The obvious question is the kind of effect memorials may have on survivors or relatives of victims.  In a Ugandan refugee camp not far from the Rwandan border, I was forced to reexamine this question from a different perspective for the first time.  Rwandan Hutus living in the camp explained that one of the factors keeping them from returning to Rwanda was the lack of a space in which to honor their family members killed by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) forces, as part of the civil war that coincided with the genocide.  Although I was horrified by some of the incredibly factually incorrect opinions regarding the existing memorials to genocide victims that I heard that day, and I also was uncomfortably aware that many of these men were likely involved in killings themselves, their pain and frustration at their inability to gain closure on the losses they suffered was undeniable.  I was left with these questions: How do perpetrators begin to heal in the aftermath of a conflict?  Should they be allowed to?  Can true justice and reconciliation be achieved if they are not allowed to and their narratives are not heard (however infuriatingly factually incorrect)?  And finally, what would this process of healing look like?

This evening, Theary Seng reinforced that these questions are as relevant in Cambodia as in any other post-conflict society.  Often, she said, the perpetrators should also be considered victims.  However, unlike the victims defined in more conventional terms, the perpetrators are not provided any outlet or support for what they went through, and so their narratives are often suppressed.  To suppress these voices is to suppress half the truth of a conflict.  “Truth,” Seng reminded us, “is a precondition for justice.”  In order for any post-conflict society to move toward true reconciliation and justice, a meaningful space must be created in which all relevant narratives are heard.