Introduction
‘Everyone has a story of suffering.’ She paused, ‘Everyone.’ As a Rwandan who survived the 1994 genocide, Josephine should know. Working as a reconciliation expert for an American non-governmental organisation based in Rwanda, Josephine observed that sharing stories of suffering could bring together survivors and perpetrators when they realised that ‘pain is pain and suffering is suffering’.Footnote 1 She had listened to hundreds of those stories, each with its own particular details of agony, degradation, and horror. Add to the Rwandan narratives the individual stories from the dozens of other genocides, mass killings, and human rights atrocities perpetrated in contemporary history: the Holocaust, Cambodia, Congo, Guatemala, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Syria, and on and on. Each person, each traumatised group, each devastated country has a story, each of which contributes to the contentious public discourse about remembrance of atrocities.
Social anthropologists explain that ‘Story-telling in itself, as a way for individuals and communities to remember, bear witness, or seek to restore continuity and identity, can be a symbolic resource enlisted to alleviate suffering and change their situation.’Footnote 2 Some trauma survivors find healing by sharing their stories in a supportive environment; the necessary conditions for that include the power to speak and the gift of being heard. More ominously, though, storytelling can be used to minimise or deny past suffering. Sociologist Barbara Miztal reminds us that ‘remembering is more than just a personal act and the nature of political power can influence the content of our memories’.Footnote 3 To begin recovery after genocide, a ravaged society requires the restoration of political order; would-be leaders compete to fill the postwar power vacuum and establish control. Filling the narrative vacuum, and solidifying the story of the genocide, provides a cornerstone of political power. The dominant public narrative determines the plotline; it labels victims and perpetrators, interprets history, assigns meaning to suffering, and sets the post-atrocity political agenda.Footnote 4 Therefore, ownership of the past, in terms of the public account, is deeply contested, even to the point of resuming violence. The storyteller becomes the power-broker in environments of abuse and atrocity. Commemoration and remembrance, including through memorials, are essential tools for the postwar government.Footnote 5 Political power deeply affects memorial planning about site location, display of objects, and the accompanying contextual narrative.
Although many factors affect the emergence of a dominant atrocity narrative, my research highlights the role of international influences on memorialisation, particularly how Western visitors, funders, and consultants interact with the postconflict government's narrative. Based on field research in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, I make two related arguments about how Western interaction with memorials affects dominant government narratives. First, I argue that Western visitors’ consumption of genocide memorials reinforces the dehumanising aspects of tourism that prioritise an exclusionary version of the past.Footnote 6 Second, I find that funding and consultation by Western organisations – while offering distinct benefits in preserving memory and evidence of the genocide – tends to encourage a homogenised atrocity narrative that reflects the values of the global human rights regime and existing standards of memorial design rather than privileging the local particularities of the atrocity experience.
The effect of international tourism on atrocity narratives has gained strength over recent decades as foreign visitors increasingly interact directly with the genocide story through international tour groups, mission trips, study abroad programmes, eco-travel, and academic conferences. Historian Jay Winter observes how a rise in disposable income, in tandem with education levels, has encouraged ‘the industry of culture’. He explains, ‘Affluence has helped turn identity into a commodity, to be consumed by everyone during her (increasingly ample) leisure time.’Footnote 7 The visitors pay admission, purchase souvenirs, post photos, blog, and review their experiences on travel sites, thus enticing more visitors from abroad. Critical International Relations scholar Debbie Lisle writes about the interaction between war and tourism, noting that tourists play the role of coloniser ‘at the expense of local subjects whose rich, multiple, and varied lives are preemptively reduced to either enemies or exotic Others’.Footnote 8 Narrative preferences based on Western cultural values and the problematic consumption of exotic suffering indirectly encourage an easily digestible and oversimplified narrative.Footnote 9 In general, the most popular stories include easily identifiable good and bad guys; innocence violated, particularly that of children; and explicit displays of evil such as human remains and graphic photos. Through tourism to atrocity sites, visitors are able to ‘write or rewrite the history of people's lives and deaths, or to provide particular (political) interpretations of past events’.Footnote 10 Financial dependence on international visitors can lead to a memorial narrative shaped to their tastes, rather than the preferences of the survivors.
The concept of dark tourism describes the extent to which such visitors are motivated by a fascination with the death and suffering of distant others.Footnote 11 Lisle's critique of the dark tourism literature advances the idea that tourism and conflict are not mutually exclusive in the post-Cold War security situation. Drawing on critical International Relations theory, she argues that many scholars analyse dark tourism using the outdated template of Cold War geopolitics, rather than the current transnational configuration of global politics. Lisle maintains that tourists nowadays have a strong interest in ‘encountering the remnants of recent conflict’, even during volatile times of postconflict transitions.Footnote 12 Lisle's critique points out the weaknesses in tourism studies literature, and refocuses attention on the political power relationships inherent in memorialisation pointing out that ‘monuments, memorials, exhibits and installations about conflict always project backwards into the time they are commemorating, but their construction is determined largely by present-tense geopolitical concerns’.Footnote 13
My research takes Lisle's analysis further by moving from her global-level evaluation of international interaction with sites of tragedy to a ground-level investigation of the power mechanisms that shape the specific messages produced at specific sites – by asking who has actually produced the narratives and for what purpose. Her Holidays in the Danger Zone primarily analyses ‘the global nature of the structures shaping war-tourism encounters’ and deconstructs the dominant narrative that tourism acts as a tool for peace and reconciliation.Footnote 14 For example, in Lisle's example of Robben Island in South Africa, she discusses the unremitting message of reconciliation, forgiveness, and the righteous innocence of the ANC prisoners that assails tourists to the prison. I want to know the internal process by which reconciliation, unity, and innocence became the government's official story. What political struggles silenced both the ANC's opponents and the South Africans who have more interest in justice than reconciliation? How has memorialisation become a tool in the fight for narrative dominance? What international influences strengthened the South African government's position? I build on Lisle's finding that foreign tourism affects global and domestic power relations in problematic ways, often entrenching the supremacy of Westerners’ culture and knowledge.Footnote 15 Then, moving beyond the theoretical model of interaction, I gather evidence through observations at numerous memorials, archival research, and talking with genocide survivors, NGO workers, exhibit curators, perpetrators, international visitors, government allies, and local residents. From this, I draw a detailed picture of how postconflict narratives remain central to political power and legitimacy in the current day.
Unlike the relatively well-studied dark tourism phenomenon, the second strand of my argument focuses on the international organisations that provide essential resources to contain and display the past, although I argue that they also impose Western structures and values on the atrocity narrative. An example of such an organisation is the British charity Aegis Trust, which plays a critical role in designing and running the main Rwandan memorial in Kigali. Fewer scholars have looked specifically at the role of these foreign interactions. A major strand of research on transnational advocacy networks is that of Kathryn Sikkink and Margaret Keck, who point to the positive effects of international human rights groups.Footnote 16
In the specific case of genocide memorials, however, the globalised approach of groups like Aegis Trust leads to less conciliatory outcomes. Commenting specifically on transnational networks and memorialisation, anthropologist Lea David points out that the global human rights regime mandates ‘normative standards that de-historicize and de-contextualize local knowledge that not only disables different patterns of dealing with a traumatic past but also perpetuates societal divisions on the ground’.Footnote 17 Often the external organisations want to emphasise the framework of the Western-inspired human rights regime so that the memorial speaks to the larger issue of worldwide atrocities, reconciliation, and healing. Such emphases are not intrinsically harmful, unless they silence or contradict the local narratives. For example, the Rwandan government narrative centres around the concepts of forgiveness, reconciliation, and the erasure of ethnic identity – all very enticing to potential funders. Outsiders may not realise that the government narrative contradicts and imposes on local narratives by publicly pressuring survivors to declare themselves reconciled with often unrepentant perpetrators.Footnote 18 Such patterns are self-reinforcing; narrative power accrues with the result of silencing or discrediting alternative voices.
Studies of narrative and memory have proliferated in recent years, with scholars from multiple disciplines recognising the political importance of how we speak about past events in the public square. My research draws on those literatures, applying them specifically to the politicisation of remembrance in postgenocide societies. Unlike most studies, however, I delve deeply into the role of foreigners in the development of a dominant atrocity narrative. This allows a much closer analysis of the combined influences of Western visitors and funders, as well as the interaction between foreign and domestic factors in postgenocide politics.
The role of societal trauma is integral to understanding public memory after atrocity. My argument both draws on and departs from existing literature on trauma and remembrance such as Emma Hutchison's discussion of ‘how traumatic events can constitute forms of community in world politics’.Footnote 19 In examining how individual experiences of trauma acquire larger social and political significance, Hutchison concentrates on the role of emotions in constructing meaning, arguing that collective representations of trauma can form ‘affective communities’ in which trauma survivors come together through shared emotional understandings.Footnote 20 Contrary to the conventional wisdom that trauma remains a private, individual experience, she argues that events as disparate as the 2002 Bali bombing of Australian citizens, the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami, China's history of colonial domination, and the legacy of apartheid in South Africa occurred in specific social and political contexts, which have the potential to promote community bonding and healing.Footnote 21 From her analysis, Hutchison concludes that under conducive circumstances, such as empathetic acceptance of public grieving, traumatic events can strengthen community bonds. Her research expands the frontiers of international relations beyond traditional rational-actor realist models by integrating the role of emotion in shaping political communities.
My argument and findings branch off from Hutchison's analysis due to my more narrow focus on human rights atrocities committed within a state. With the exception of the case study on South Africa, her case studies examine very different types of trauma – mostly external shocks to the nation rather than internally inflicted trauma. The dynamics of various types of trauma require more specialised frameworks for understanding. Consider, for example, the different patterns of trauma experienced by a child if an armed burglar attacks the family compared to if her parents are abusive alcoholics. Family dynamics and healing processes look vastly different for those two harrowing scenarios and, I would argue, the longstanding domestic abuse has a much lower chance of transitioning to a healthy family community. The trauma of genocide and mass killing among people who are expected to continue living together scales up the abusive family scenario and makes it far less likely that Hutchison's conditions for a positive outcome will hold. Thus, my more minimal goal seeks to minimise the potentially toxic domestic rifts that continue long after the genocidal violence has ended by developing inclusive stories of the past.
The remainder of this article draws on my field research in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia to assess the creation of atrocity narratives expressed through genocide memorials and how international interactions shape those stories. In the following section, I explore the development of a dominant genocide narrative and the contributions of visitors, consultants, and funders in creating public memory. Moving specifically to memorial construction, I analyse how memorials reflect the dominant government narrative and also shape it through choices in location, display, and context. In particular, I pay attention to the impact on the narrative of visitors, especially those engaged in dark tourism, and the states and organisations that fund and help design the memorials. The following sections evaluate my arguments in the cases of Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. The findings confirm the importance of public memory in consolidating political power after genocide and the potential negative effects on the narrative due to Western interaction with genocide memorials.
Constructing public memory
I, Chea Sophon, Khmer immigrant from Canada, visited detention center and saw the victims tortured under the genocidal regime. We are so shocked that we cannot write more.
Visitor comment book, Tuol Sleng memorial, 30 November 1989Footnote 22Across all cultures, remembering and retelling plays a central role in shaping the identity of a society. The ubiquity and importance of memory, however, has not led to a universally accepted definition of the concept. Jay Winter, whose work is central to theorising the current ‘memory boom’, acknowledges ‘there is one certainty on which we can all agree: no two people invoking the term “memory” use it in the same way’.Footnote 23 Considering the complexity of individual memories, it is no surprise that so-called collective memory offers even greater challenges. Merely naming the phenomenon creates controversy: terms include collective memory, public memory, public remembrance, and historical memory.Footnote 24 Sociologist Victor Roudometof concisely explains the points of divergence: ‘Rival conceptualizations center on whether memory should be conceived as a primarily psychological or individual property or whether social or collective memory should be conceptualized as a group property.’Footnote 25 Following Winter's understanding of memory as individual rather than social, I use the term public memory to describe the public story of the past that emerges from individual memories and experiences. Memory, discourse, and power coalesce to create public memory, generally expressed as a dominant narrative. We see that narrative shaped by and reflected in memorials, government discourse, educational curricula, mainstream media, and public speech. A major purpose of public memory is to instill a narrative in people who never actually experienced the past atrocities, such as children and outsiders.
In terms of gathering and acknowledging stories of the past, creating public memory after genocide ranges on a scale of inclusivity to exclusivity. Consensual public memory occurs when individual memories converge on a jointly agreed upon version of the past that then dominates public discourse. Hutchinson articulates the ideal outcome where political power works to strengthen traumatised communities: ‘Recognizing the political power and potential of representations and narratives is, therefore, key to understanding how traumatic events can pave the way for the restoration or reconstruction of social cohesion and community.’Footnote 26 Too often, however, the powerful impose public memory in the form of government-sponsored narratives that dictate the preferred story. Analysing the negative potential of government involvement, Jenny Edkins observes, ‘The modern state … is a contradictory institution: a promise of safety, security and meaning alongside a reality of abuse, control and coercion.’Footnote 27 A forcefully imposed state narrative can result in social ostracism or even imprisonment of individuals who contradict the public narrative. Memory projects that exclude or distort individual stories create resentment, although as Dacia Viejo-Rose notes, they ‘rarely manage to impose amnesia’.Footnote 28 An exclusionary dominant narrative can quickly displace the truth and silence the traumatised.
Remnants of suffering
A memorial tells the atrocity narrative through choices designers make about site location, objects displayed, and contextual information provided. The first choice is where to locate the memorial, either the actual site where the atrocity occurred or a new space constructed elsewhere. Using the atrocity site has the benefit of silencing doubters and heightening emotional impact. If one can view the bullet holes, bloodstains, and even bones, one can less credibly deny the genocide. Alternatively, construction of new space can indicate government attention and willingness to devote resources to remembrance. Williams observes, ‘Centrality and marginalization are related through the relative attribution of space.’Footnote 29 In contrast, the absence of a memorial often signifies the powerlessness of the victimised group.
Memorials rely primarily on inanimate objects to tell the story of atrocity. In effect, the objects speak for the dead – collectively and individually. The chosen item, whether a torture implement, bone fragment, identity card, or a more mundane article such as a hairbrush or child's toy, gains meaning from its surroundings rather than its intrinsic value. Relying on things to tell the story – bloodstained clothes in Rwanda, a battered cigarette lighter in Bosnia, rusty shackles in Cambodia – means that the living interpret the signifiers of genocide. The voices of the dead remain cryptic and symbolic, increasing the risks that their stories get manipulated or misinterpreted.
The display of human remains provides the starkest example of the narrative tension between shock and sacredness. Memorials displaying human remains provoke strong emotional reactions: standing six inches from a pile of skulls, including tiny child-size ones, prompts an unfocused but burning desire to do something. A carefully constructed memorial can harness that emotional reaction, channelling the response against whoever is labelled a perpetrator. One commentator notes, ‘The current Rwandan government, for example, does not shrink away from exploiting the strong empathy of genocide tourists.’Footnote 30 Despite their strong impact, human rights advocates worry that such displays depersonalise the victims, even as they convey horror to the observers.
The presentation of photographs creates another source of emotional impact for memorial visitors.Footnote 31 Such photos raise moral dilemmas about invasion of privacy, voyeurism, and respect for the dead.Footnote 32 Susan Sontag critiques the ethical double standard often applied to atrocity images: ‘The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying … these sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place.’Footnote 33 Rather than creating empathy among viewers, photos can create distancing. Susie Linfield theorises that photographs bring us close to ‘experiences of suffering’, yet at the same time, they also ‘illuminate the unbridgeable chasm that separates ordinary life from extraordinary experiences of political trauma’.Footnote 34 In terms of photos, Debbie Lisle argues that they ‘must be understood within a wider context of production (i.e., who is the photographer and who or what is the subject? Who or what is in the frame and who or what is outside it? What are the power relations generated by this field of vision?’Footnote 35 In the case of Cambodia, we will see that the iconic headshots displayed at Tuol Sleng were taken by Khmer Rouge cadres at the moment the prisoner had her blindfold whipped off. The ubiquity of photo displays, especially in memorial museums, demonstrates the presumed power of images to shape viewer response.
The narrative that surrounds the display tells an official story and imprints that story on the visitor. Overall, providing accurate historical context for a display encourages engagement that supports an inclusive narrative and provides previously uninformed visitors with a deeper understanding. Displays that rely purely on emotional impact more easily manipulate the observer's reaction (and are also less likely to encourage sustained engagement). Memorials may encourage empathy through the depiction of suffering but they often lack accurate historical and political context. In 1994, apocalyptic photos of the postgenocide Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire moved many Westerners to donate; they were under the impression (as were some of the camp's aid workers) that the refugees were Tutsi genocide survivors, not the Hutu civilians forced by their genocidal leaders to flee the country. In such cases, observers of horrific images motivated to help may lack sufficient background information for effective action. In the worst case, biased contextual information misleads visitors and stokes local divisions.
The modern ‘memory boom’ has spawned a slew of memorialisation policies and templates created by Western governments, the United Nations and human rights NGOs.Footnote 36 Lea David warns that such generalised policies become problematic when they ‘compel states with difficult pasts to adhere to the prescribed standards of memory’ and presume that ‘nations are like individuals, and need to face the past in order to “heal” or “work through” their traumatic experiences’.Footnote 37 Such homogenisation leads to a shallow, two-dimensional understanding of both victims and perpetrators, which can serve to ‘depoliticize victims and define them as ahistorical, universal humanitarian subjects’.Footnote 38 Paradoxically, the well-intentioned human rights-centred approach can silence individual stories, just as authoritarian rulers employ their own strategy of silencing. Brigitte Sion, researcher on cultural history concurs, ‘Just as tourism is available to the masses, memory and memorialization are becoming globalized, inspiring the same emotions, standardizing architecture, and curatorial practices, and blurring the uniqueness and specific historical context of each tragedy.’Footnote 39 Tourism studies scholar Sabine Marschall emphasises the social and political implications of international interaction with memory sites. She argues that the images on display: ‘can also have far-reaching impacts on potential investors, funding agencies, or international political decision-makers … and it is no co-incidence that a visit to symbolic historical sites is often the standard protocol for touring diplomats and political officials’.Footnote 40
Dark tourism
It's a balancing act for memorial sites: How to teach the cruel facts of tragedy to an audience that is often on vacation.
Katia Hetter, CNNFootnote 41One result of international publicity is the phenomenon known as death tourism or dark tourism.Footnote 42 Most visitors would recoil from labelling their travel as thanatourism, defined by A.V. Seaton as ‘travel to a location wholly, or partially, motivated by the desire for actual or symbolic encounters with death, particularly, but not exclusively, violent death’.Footnote 43 Philip Stone, founder of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, offers his perspective on those attitudes: ‘Dark tourism simply provides a modern means in which the death of others can be consumed at a distance and in safe and socially sanctioned environments. This, combined with increasing academic and media spotlights on the commercialization of death, is why dark tourism might be so popular.’Footnote 44 Some critics speak of this rapidly rising trend, labelled ‘dark tourism’ or ‘thanatourism’, as a morally disturbing consumption of distant pain.Footnote 45 Debbie Lisle suggests that scholars of dark tourism fall short by ignoring the global power relations that fuel the phenomenon of exploitation and commodification of suffering, reproducing the problematic relationship of enlightened Western society and the backward, violent societies that need guidance.Footnote 46
As the global tourism industry increasingly caters to middle-class Americans and Europeans, travellers find that their destinations seem less and less authentic; iconic places such as Venice's Grand Canal now resemble theme parks from which local residents have fled. Discerning travellers want to boast of their intrepid encounters with the ‘real’ as a way to set themselves apart from the touristic masses swarming off their cruise ships. In postconflict countries, wealthy foreigners seek to demonstrate their social conscience and travel savvy through visits to recent war zones, killing fields, genocide memorials, and other scenes of suffering.Footnote 47 The dark tourists in search of an authentic, unmediated encounter with past suffering will remain unfulfilled, however. Ironically, many visitors do not realise that the ‘real killing fields’, for example, have been carefully curated and publicised to promote the chosen government narrative. The authenticity of human bones is not in dispute. Foreigners may find it difficult to honour the authenticity of piles of human bones while simultaneously questioning the authenticity of the surrounding narrative.
Critics of commercialised marketing schemes, including genocide survivors, express concern that the objectification of human suffering oversimplifies the atrocity narrative and reduces empathy for the victims. For example, numerous publications on Rwanda feature photos of the skulls ranged on shelves in Ntarama church; most serve as shocking attention-grabbers rather than reverent remembrances.Footnote 48 And surely a deficit of empathy afflicts the visitor to Cambodia's Tuol Sleng torture centre, who purchases in the museum shop the t-shirt emblazoned with an image of the sign used to alert Cambodians to landmines: ‘Danger Mines!’ complete with skull and crossbones.Footnote 49 Back home, in absolutely no danger of encountering a landmine, this tourist boasts of an exotic encounter with death in a country with the highest per capita number of amputees.
Among Westerners, in particular, one observes a paradoxical attitude towards death. Seaton's comments on Britain also apply to the United Sates:
[Britain] has tended to conceal death and to regard any dwelling on it as morbid and even pathological. Yet death continues to exert a fascination and motivate travel in ways which are rarely openly admitted. The central paradox of Dark Tourism is that, like much popular journalism, it addresses desires and interests which are not supposed to have a legitimate existence within the secular, moral discourse of the 20th century.Footnote 50
Paul Williams adds that ‘foreign tourists appear especially fascinated by events where the state has inflicted harm on its own citizens’.Footnote 51 Local residents may prefer to focus on their daily lives and the future, however, they also rely on the economic benefits of tourism, which continually replays past atrocities. Visitors imprint their own version of the narrative and locals may accept it (on the surface) as a way to profit from the foreign consumption of local misery. Seaton suggests providing further context and information as a remedy since ‘the more differentiated and comprehensive the traveler's knowledge of the dead, the weaker is the purely thanatouristic element’.Footnote 52 Dark tourism certainly proliferates in Cambodia, where the authoritarian government encourages commercialisation of its gruesome past.
Cambodia: That was then, this is now
When you run out of story, it is the time for execution.
Cambodian genocide survivor Youk ChhangFootnote 53I am terribly sad Auschwitz came to Cambodia. I hope it never returns.
Jacques S., Visitor comment book, Tuol Sleng memorial, 12 November 1979Footnote 54In the mid-1970s, as Western nations lost interest in Southeast Asia, the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia attempted to outdo Mao in its Maoist zeal. The result transformed the country into a vast slave labour camp and torture centre. Around 20 per cent of the population died in the 1975–9 period of Khmer Rouge rule. In recent years, the number of foreign visitors has increased dramatically and many explore the two main genocide memorials in the capital Phnom Penh. The Cambodian government, corrupt and oppressive, continues to rely on the evils of the Khmer Rouge narrative as a distraction from current problems.
Public memory in Cambodia is limited to officially sanctioned narratives. One Cambodian scholar explained that the government publicly commemorates the past on holy days such as the inauguration of a pagoda. At that time the government reminds people of the evils of the past in comparison to the so-called ‘glorious present’.Footnote 55 This does not mean that individuals are literally silenced; many survivors share their stories of suffering under the Khmer Rouge. It is rather that those personal stories are disconnected from the official story. A recent observer noted, ‘Cambodia is still struggling to deal with its history, where personal memory is politicized and the specter of the Khmer Rouge is ever-present but often willfully ignored.’Footnote 56 Discussing the current government's activities, Helen Jessup, Director of the Friends of Khmer Culture, finds that ‘memory is being manipulated’ by top-level leaders and the government is rewriting history to indoctrinate Cambodians born after 1979 (about 60 per cent of the population).Footnote 57 The joint United Nations-Cambodian hybrid tribunal (known as the Extraordinary Chamber of the Courts of Cambodia) – at great expense of time and money – conducted trials of perpetrators, however President Hun Sen (himself a former lower-level Khmer Rouge cadre) restricted the number of prosecutions to a mere handful of Khmer Rouge top leaders. International pressure and funding did induce some semblance of accountability in the trials, although it reinforced the narrative of elite responsibility for the genocide.Footnote 58 For decades, Cambodian schools did not have a curriculum that dealt with the Khmer Rouge period. In 2007, the independent, non-partisan Documentation Center of Cambodia published the first textbook on the period, which is reportedly widely used around the country and offers a more nuanced narrative than official propaganda. Schoolchildren were bussed in daily to observe the tribunal as well, although they had no personal memory of the events which preceded it.Footnote 59
Public narratives of the Khmer Rouge period concur on the crimes perpetrated by the revolutionary regime. The narrative ambiguity emerges with the problematic use of the past as a shield for current leaders, a strategy similar to the abuse of memory begun by the Vietnamese occupiers in 1979. Practically before the blood had dried on the floor, the occupiers developed the Tuol Sleng prison as a memorial, displaying genocide in situ. With an eye towards posterity, the Vietnamese invaders meticulously photographed the tortured and bloated corpses found in the prison. The intended message was that the foreign occupiers, however unpopular, presented a vast improvement on the defeated Cambodian regime. Rachel Hughes observes, ‘The central aim of commemoration was to activate memories of the genocide, precisely to invigorate popular support for the war against the Khmer Rouge perpetrators still threatening the nation.’Footnote 60 Thirty years after the Khmer Rouge declared Year Zero, and over two decades since the UN-sponsored attempt at a democratic transition, the government continues to support atrocity stories that sequester current politics from the horrors of the past.
What is the impact of this artificial and imposed historical cut-off point? It separates the sorry state of current politics from the timeline of modern Cambodian history while avoiding hard questions about justice and inequality. Tourists come away with an experience of two distinct historical periods: the glory of the ancient Angkor civilisation and the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. Casual visitors are often unaware of the current government's vast corruption and injustice related to land rights and natural resources. Although memory seems unrelated to the issues that grip present-day Cambodians, ‘memorialization stands at the center of conflicted interests – the government's politics of reconciliation, Buddhist beliefs in karma, economic development, mass tourism opportunities, international law, and national historic narratives’.Footnote 61 The government of the longstanding dictator Hun Sen has continued, in effect, the implied message sent by the Vietnamese military: any government should be considered an improvement when compared to the Khmer Rouge.
A few days in Phnom Penh allows international visitors to access the two major genocide memorials, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and Choeung Ek Genocidal Center (aka ‘the killing fields’), before heading 300 kilometres north to the magnificent ancient temples of Angkor Wat.Footnote 62 Tuol Sleng functioned as a school before the Khmer Rouge commandeered it as Security Prison 21 (S-21), a torture centre from which fewer than a dozen of the 14,000 prisoners survived. Similar to the churches turned slaughterhouses in Rwanda, part of the revulsion stems from a safe and benign place being perverted for evil. Choeung Ek Genocidal Center, a nondescript tree-shaded area formerly used as an orchard, lies about 12 kilometres south of Tuol Sleng; the location served as the execution centre and burial ground for thousands of Tuol Sleng prisoners, including infants. As visitors wander the uncurated dusty grounds, small wood signs implore: ‘please don't walk through the mass grave!’Footnote 63
Gruesome displays also await the visitors to Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial, as I quickly realised upon entering the former schoolyard for the first time. As I stood before a high wooden structure, consisting of two tall vertical beams and a cross beam, the tour guide explained that when it was a school, this structure had swings or bars for exercise. In the prison, it functioned as a torture device. Pointing out the large clay pots near the base of the gallows, the guide noted that when the prisoner fainted from pain, he or she was doused headfirst in one of the water jars to be revived for further abuse. Various rusty torture implements scattered the bloodstained floors of the former detention cells, just as they were found in 1979.Footnote 64
At Tuol Sleng the exhibits include descriptions or photos of atrocities, with little accompanying text. An exception is the film Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, directed by the award-winning Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh in 1996. At the time of my visit, the film was shown twice per day. Bophana tells the story of a couple, Bophana and her husband Sitha, who were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng and then executed. The narration is in English and the filmmaker included English subtitles when an interviewee speaks Khmer. Bophana uses footage from the Khmer Rouge period, interviews with Bophana's mother and other survivors, and letters written by Bophana and Sitha. In this way, the film gives the dead a voice, humanising the victims and showing Bophana's acts of resistance to the Khmer Rouge. One jarring note is the chairs in the movie room, formerly a mass detention cell. Each chair has been donated by the travel agency emblazoned on the chair back.Footnote 65
Human remains form an essential part of the display at Cambodian memorials, including the ‘killing fields’ memorial at Choeung Ek. At the centre of Choeung Ek rises a glass stupa, described by the audio guide as a ‘magnificent memorial structure’ built by the Cambodian government in 1988. There are 17 levels of bones, including 9,000 skulls, arranged in categories and labelled by gender and age.Footnote 66 The visitors stand inches away from the skulls, craning their necks at the tower of bones. Rachel Hughes critiques the stupa as a tourist-oriented display which violates Cambodian customs of cremation, claiming that ‘Cambodians consider Choeung Ek a highly dangerous place and refuse to visit the Memorial.’Footnote 67 A survey of foreign visitors revealed perhaps the most thanatouristic experience possible: ‘A few respondents said their guides dug up bone fragments or teeth and gave them as grim mementos.’Footnote 68
Unlike the tourist-oriented memorials, the many smaller memorials I visited in the countryside were unattended and unlabelled collections of bones.Footnote 69 A sugarcane seller at Wat Chapuh Ka-Ek explained that monks gathered up the bones after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge and performed the traditional prayers and rituals for the dead. A Cambodian scholar confirmed that the performance of Buddhist rituals held more importance than the bones themselves.Footnote 70
In general, Cambodian attitudes towards the display of human remains at genocide memorials varies. The role of Buddhist monks in maintaining some sacredness for the victims is important, and most memorials are located on monastery grounds. At a beautifully elaborate pagoda, an elderly man explained that he came to the remote place in 1982, after the end of the Khmer Rouge regime. The man, a lay member of the religious community, gathered the bones which are now displayed in the open-air memorial.Footnote 71 A guide at the Siem Reap genocide memorial, which includes a small glass stupa filled with bones and clothing, explained that if bones are not cremated the deceased cannot rest at peace and move on.Footnote 72 At a fancy pagoda funded by President Hun Sen, a Cambodian man expressed minimal concern about the ramshackle memorial with bones piled haphazardly behind cracked glass: ‘The memorial is not as important as the way we were killed.’ Regarding the weeds and litter around the stupa, he stated that the memorial and its upkeep was the responsibility of the government, not the local Cambodians.Footnote 73 He implied that the people already have too much to worry about in their daily lives.
The touristic gaze is the obvious audience at both Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek. Paul Williams contends that: ‘At present, Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek are arguably more closely tied to Cambodia's nascent tourist industry than to its hesitant reconciliation.’Footnote 74 At Choeung Ek I benefited from the recent addition of an audio guide (available in 15 languages), which gives survivors a voice and also explains the political history relating to the location.Footnote 75 A survey of English-speaking visitors in 2007 reveals that prior to the audio guide most respondents ‘felt disoriented and lost within the site’.Footnote 76 Brigitte Sion condemns Choeung Ek as the ‘commodification of genocide’.Footnote 77 Indeed, in 2005 the government sold the site to a Japanese company, which partners with the government to run the memorial. This transaction ensured that the ‘killing fields are a source of profit whose beneficiaries are neither survivors nor relatives of victims’.Footnote 78 At the gift shop at Choeung Ek, the visitor can purchase a child-sized Khmer Rouge costume and t-shirts pictured with landmines, or bones superimposed on a Cambodian map. Savvy taxi drivers cash in on foreigners’ fascination with atrocity; the constant refrain of tuk tuk drivers is ‘You see killing fields? I take you to killing fields.’Footnote 79
In Cambodia, many memorials created strong emotions without offering a visitor much context for processing those feelings. A content analysis of TripAdvisor reviews of Tuol Sleng revealed that Western tourists’ most frequent comments included terms related to ‘horror, sadness, shock, depression, terror and fear’.Footnote 80 The analysis by Isaac and Çakmak also showed that many Western visitors considered Tuol Sleng memorial as their essential (and sometimes only) source for recent Cambodian history. At the exit of Choeung Ek, English-speaking survey respondents used words such as ‘shocking’, ‘disturbing’, and ‘raw’ to describe their experiences.Footnote 81 They did not report feelings of compassion, empathy, outrage, or anger – emotions that tend to spur action.
The effect of international funding and consultation differs in the Cambodia case from Rwanda and Bosnia, who received primary assistance from Western nations, although Cambodia's Vietnamese and Japanese funders have also fostered globalised atrocity narratives. Tuol Sleng was developed by the Vietnamese invaders in 1979, in particular by Mai Lam, a Vietnamese colonel who was an expert in museology. His prior experience included organising the Museum of American War Crimes (now called the War Remnants Museum) in Ho Chi Minh City. Mai Lam wanted Tuol Sleng to serve the needs of the new Vietnam-backed government in Cambodia, which included encouraging visitors to make a connection between Tuol Sleng and Auschwitz, with the implicit connection between the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis. In service of this globalised narrative, Mai Lam travelled to France, the USSR, and Eastern Europe to visit Holocaust memorials.Footnote 82 At Choeung-Ek, the memorial is run by a Cambodian government partnership with a Japanese firm as a for-profit enterprise. Without the recent contributions from the non-profit Documentation Center of Cambodia, especially the audio tour, foreign visitors would leave the memorial horrified, sickened, and not much more informed than when they entered.
Cambodia's dominant narrative of the past serves many purposes – none of which seems to be healing, justice, or reconciliation. As we will see when compared with Rwanda and Bosnia, the two main Cambodian memorials are the most oriented towards international visitors and commercial profit. The blatant gruesomeness of bloody floors, bone fragments, and rusting chains creates an atmosphere conducive to dark tourism. The lack of context and continuity in the displays reinforce the government narrative of the Khmer Rouge period as a long-past aberration. Much of the Western funding has come through contributions to the international tribunal rather than specific memorialisation projects. By far, the most positive contribution to an inclusive narrative comes from the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) which began as a project of Yale University. In 1997 DC-Cam became an independent Cambodian NGO, giving it the independence and the ability to modify globalised templates to fit local needs and circumstances. That has not often been the case with international funding in Rwanda.
Rwanda: Remembering ‘the genocide against the Tutsi’
Possibly the darkest, starkest, grimmest, most shocking site it is possible to visit as a dark tourist on planet Earth.
Review of Murambi memorial in Rwanda by www.dark-tourism.com Footnote 83Fifteen years after the Cambodian genocide ended, and a continent away, Rwandan Hutu soldiers, militias, and citizens murdered up to 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu during a 100-day period in 1994. The killing ended with the victory of a Tutsi exile-based army led by the current president Paul Kagame. Kagame's regime tightly controls public discussion of the past, repressing any dissenting stories. Sociologists Hollie Nyseth Brehm and Nicole Fox find that ‘the government of Rwanda is invested in the memory of the atrocity and thus engages in numerous efforts to shape this memory’.Footnote 84 The state established multiple memorials, many at massacre sites such as churches, which have stirred controversy with exhibits of human remains. Part of the government efforts included the 2007 ‘formation of the National Commission for the Fight against Genocide to centralize memorial construction and maintenance throughout Rwanda’.Footnote 85 Susan Thomson finds that ‘the policy of national unity and reconciliation is built on a bedrock of structural violence and economic equality’.Footnote 86 Western visitors and donors, dazzled by Rwanda's economic recovery, generally encourage the propagation of the dominant narrative told by the government, even while ordinary Rwandans remain terrified of the near-totalitarian power of the state.Footnote 87
Western governments and NGOs are deeply involved in the memorialisation projects and foreign visitors seem continually fascinated by the tales of slaughter and rape. The postgenocide period has seen dozens of memoirs, novels, commercial movies, and documentaries that appeal to Western publics in levels disproportionate to any strategic or cultural relationship with Rwanda.Footnote 88 Most people have no idea that the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front, made up of Tutsi exiles, displaced and murdered thousands of Hutu civilians.Footnote 89 Part of the government's dominant narrative suggests that giving voice to any other perspective makes one guilty of diminishing the evil of the genocide and committing the error of moral equivalence. When confronted with these nuances of ethnic identity, many Westerners dismiss them since they do not fit into the template of evil Hutu killers, innocent Tutsi victims, and salvation through the military victory of the Tutsi-led government.
Although the government forbids any discussion of ethnicity, the official term for the genocide is ‘genocide against the Tutsi’. The first annual genocide commemoration in April 1995 ‘promoted the ideology of national unity through its representation of both Tutsi and Hutu as victims of the genocide’.Footnote 90 This representation quickly changed; by 1996 the commemoration graphically legitimised the Tutsi as victims and Hutu as perpetrators. The ceremony took place in Murambi with the highlight being the exhumation of thousands of bodies, some of which were ‘petrified in lime as a permanent display of Tutsi agony’.Footnote 91 This deliberate exclusion of the thousands of Hutu moderates that perished makes clear that only Tutsi belong in the category of victim. The role left for Hutu citizens is perpetrator.
A major strand of the government narrative is the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Centre, a modern structure located in Kigali, which sits on a hill overlooking the capital city. The memorial begins in a garden where a flame burns to commemorate the 100 days of the genocide (April to July). Shallow steps lead to the mass graves of the murdered Tutsi, unremarkable large slabs of concrete surrounded by the garden. I experienced the memorial in April 2009, during the commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the genocide. As I stood among those unimposing graves, about fifty or sixty Rwandans passed by me, all dressed formally, some carried flowers, others pinned purple ribbons on their chests. Most of the women wore traditional African dress. I assumed it was some sort of special VIP tour group. Then down another walkway I saw a young man carrying a cross and behind him six other men carrying a coffin draped in a purple cloth. More people followed the coffin. They were heading down some steps towards a wide dirt field. My own story of visiting the memorial includes witnessing a mass grave in progress.
The Rwandan government, through its policy of reinterring genocide victims’ remains at the central memorial, has created a site of pilgrimage as well as a museum to educate tourists and school children. The government has imposed its narrative, even over the voices of survivors and family members of the deceased. The day after my visit to the memorial, a UN organisation staffer informed me that the government, aware of the impact of the mass graves, strongly encouraged people to disinter their loved ones, buried in their home villages, and reinter them in the mass graves in Kigali.Footnote 92
Similar to memorial structures in Cambodia, foreigners attracted by death tourism will find plenty of dark experiences; most memorials in Rwanda are situated at actual killing sites, often displaying the exposed remains of victims. I visited Ntarama church about thirty miles south of Kigali, where the battered sign out front announced that Hutu killers had massacred around five thousand Tutsi. People had flocked to the Catholic church for sanctuary but their killers had not respected that time-honoured tradition. The small church offered grim testimony to the carnage. Inside, light dimly filtered in through small, high windows, illuminating the bloodstained, tattered clothes of the victims that hung on the walls. Ranged on shelves were their bones – rows and rows of skulls predominated. Above the bones, a purple banner in Kinyarwanda read ‘If you knew me, and you knew yourself, you would not kill me.’Footnote 93 Household implements, cooking pots, and blankets signified genocide by their proximity to human remains and bloodied garments. The space lacked interpretive signs and the guide spoke little English. My companion translated my many questions, yet the answers were brief and gave little context to the scene. The main effect of Ntarama church, at least on this foreigner, was to invoke a perpetual primal horror at the crimes committed. A visceral emotional reaction predominated, which short-circuited context and analysis.
In both Cambodia and Rwanda, using atrocity sites as memorials creates a powerful emotional experience for the visitor. A place like Ntarama church, as I experienced it, conveys the profane horror of the genocide. At the same time it depersonalises the perpetrators as simply ‘Hutu’; arguably, it also depersonalises the victims as unidentified ‘Tutsi’. For the local community, which continues to suppress deep ethnic divisions and tensions, the numerous sites like Ntarama keep alive the reality of the genocide in a way that fosters blame rather than reconciliation. Preliminary research by the Harvard University project ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, suggests that small informal memorials ‘may often be more meaningful to Tutsi survivors than the centralized, formal structures because they are more easily accessible to them’.Footnote 94 Local Rwandans may prefer to avoid the centralised narrative of the main state-sponsored memorials.
In Rwanda, the most gruesome memorial commemorates the massacre at Murambi, a town approximately two hours south of Kigali. A survivor whose family perished in the massacre told his story, explaining that as the genocide began, the government requested Tutsi villagers to congregate at the Murambi Technical School for protection. During the night of 21 April 1994 the military, supported by Hutu locals, attacked the school with guns and grenades. All who tried to escape were hacked to death. According to the Rwandan government, 27,000 Tutsi were murdered. The following day, the government brought in bulldozers to pile up the bodies and bury them, a cleanup operation that created a mountain of corpses, most of which were left basically intact. The Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, located in the vacated school, has preserved 800 of the bodies with lime, keeping them untouched in the exact position in which they died – for example, warding off a blow.Footnote 95
The Murambi memorial exhibits the dead in all their shocking vulnerability, creating an anonymous tableau of death. Susan Cook remarks on the ‘monotony of room after room filled with the bodies of now faceless, nameless victims, as well as the enormity of the simultaneous deaths of so many innocent people’.Footnote 96 That anonymity is reinforced by ‘the lack of a coherent narrative about the events that took place at Murambi, whether in a booklet or on a plaque or just a coherent guided tour’.Footnote 97 Many groups have found this display controversial, including survivors’ organisations.Footnote 98 Jennie Burnet explains that ‘by tradition Rwandans are horrified by cadavers’ and that ‘for many Rwandans the absence of religious consecration constituted further violence against the dead’.Footnote 99 Observers have noted that the orientation of the two memorials with the most international visitors – in Kigali and Murambi – have a target audience that is ‘beyond doubt international’.Footnote 100 Recent additions to Murambi memorial include increased contextual material planned and funded by the British organisation Aegis Trust.
Gruesome displays at other genocide memorials have also proved divisive. During interviews with Rwandan genocide survivors in 2006, Rachel Ibreck found that many expressed unease with the display of bones at the Ntarama church memorial, particularly with the way the remains were strewn around the church. Survivors told Ibreck that unburied bodies of relatives could haunt the living.Footnote 101 She quotes Vidal's critique that the government adds ‘to the past horror through the voyeurism of the corpses’.Footnote 102 Three years later, in 2009, the Ntarama display had been changed; bones were sorted and stacked on open shelving in the church. The attendant encouraged me to take photographs, a practice later strictly prohibited at most Rwandan memorials. Additionally, a few improvements were made since then including a protective roof over the church paid for by the British.Footnote 103 Extensive changes drawn up by a London landscape architecture firm in 2004, including a prayer chapel on the grounds, have not been implemented, leaving the site open to environmental decay.Footnote 104
Unlike the walls plastered with nameless headshots of the soon-to-be killed at Tuol Sleng, the Children's Room at the central Rwandan memorial museum uses photos in a way that humanises the subject, closing the emotional distance between viewer and victim. As Linfield notes, ‘the ability of photographs to conjure deep emotion is one of their great strengths. But this power – precisely because it is divorced from narrative, political context, and analysis – is equally a danger’.Footnote 105 Entering the Children's Room one observes large colour photos of around a dozen children, with the child's name above his or her photo. These are clearly family photos of happy toddlers and schoolchildren. Each one lists some identifying details, obviously provided by relatives. For example – Agathe, age five, favourite food: chocolate; best friend: her older sister; last memory: seeing her mother killed; method of death: hacked to death. They are all heart-rending. Some of the victims are siblings who died together, for example, killed by a ‘grenade thrown in their shower’ where they were hiding. With the inclusion of normalising details, the Children's Room seems more likely to evoke empathy rather than the shock and nausea induced by the display of nameless dismembered skeletons.Footnote 106 Photos of the suffering and death of anonymous victims provokes painful feelings – Susan Sontag described seeing the Tuol Sleng photos as a ‘sickening’ experience – but the viewer finds little to identify with in the image of a mutilated corpse.Footnote 107
Many of the Rwandan genocide memorials lack adequate information about the political and historical context of the atrocities, although this is slowly changing over time.Footnote 108 Scott Straus observes that ‘the authorities have collected, cleaned, and disinfected the skulls and skeletons of the dead, and arranged the bones in neat rows on tables and on floors. Such are Rwanda's primary memorials of the genocide: carefully collected and organized bones.’Footnote 109 He aptly notes that those memorials ‘scare and haunt those who would enter them. They do not stimulate reflection; they purvey shock and horror and thus paralyze thought. So do the standard images of genocide: pictures of corpses, machetes, and suffering survivors do not encourage their viewers to think.’Footnote 110 Straus's analysis was borne out by my experience of the memorials; the bones haunted my sleep, but did not clarify my questions. Overall, much like the Cambodian memorials, Rwandan sites emphasise the disconnect between past atrocities and present-day politics.
Dark tourism is on the rise in Rwanda, in tandem with ‘regular’ tourism. Encouraged by publicity, international visitors to Rwanda target the memorials at Ntarama and Nyamata churches, as a ‘must-see’. One tour company even offers a ‘genocide package’, which promises visits to the memorial sites followed by a gorilla-tracking safari. According to the website, the highlight of the experience promises to be Ntarama:
Ntarama Memorial Site contains a church where most brutal killings of the 1994 Rwandan genocide took place. The floor of the Church at Ntarama has not been completely cleaned since the massacre. There are more bones, intermingled with bits of clothing, shoes, pots, wallets and Identity Cards among others. The low pew-benches are used to avoid stepping on the bones and detritus. One can easily identify parts of skeletons: vertebrae, mandibles, fibulas, and ribs.Footnote 111
The tour company has apparently calculated that dramatic references to scattered ‘bones and detritus’ will appeal to customers. A website promoting dark tourism describes the Murambi memorial in Rwanda as ‘Possibly the darkest, starkest, grimmest, most shocking site it is possible to visit as a dark tourist on planet Earth … The experience is heart-stopping, gut-wrenching but awesome at the same time.’Footnote 112
Another type of international engagement comes through external funding for memorial design and construction. Western governments and foundations poured money into the Kigali national memorial. This was likely partly as a guilt offering for past inaction; the Belgian government gave over a million dollars and the Clinton Foundation donated $250,000.Footnote 113 In addition to cash, international organisations provide consulting services, which greatly influence the narrative told by the memorial. Although there is already much documentation about the positive aspects of international funding and consulting for genocide memorials, my research highlights the more problematic effects, such as a Western-oriented narrative and a focus on creating a welcoming environment for tourists at the expense of locals affected by the genocide.Footnote 114
The British NGO Aegis Trust constructed the Kigali memorial with the aim ‘to create links between local politicians, aid workers dealing with the social and psychological consequences of genocide, academics that document and analyze it, and members of the public who seek answers’.Footnote 115 In its stated effort to become ‘a site of learning highly relevant to the international community’, the Kigali memorial offers more information than Ntarama or Murambi, such as a comparative exhibit on genocide through history. Aegis has also delved into what it calls ‘social enterprise’, and website visitors can now book a room at its Discover Rwanda youth hostel near the memorial; the website brags about the hostel's high ratings on TripAdvisor and that it has now been country winner of the annual Hostelworld ‘Hoscars’ three times in a row’.Footnote 116 Perhaps Aegis is a forerunner for non-profit ventures that attempt to combine local genocide narratives, international human rights advocacy, and fundraising from dark tourism, all while staying in the good graces of an authoritarian regime. Responding to concerns about the Rwandan government's politicised, and exclusive, genocide narrative, Williams optimistically asserts that Aegis Trust is able to function in a political space free from government domination.Footnote 117 Even so, when leaders impose a preferred narrative that ignores or contradicts the experiences of ordinary people, outside organisations and funders can get pulled into supporting an exclusionary version of the past.
The case of Rwanda demonstrates the complexity and dilemmas of international interaction with a rigidly controlled government narrative. Unlike Cambodia's government, which doesn't have the inclination or capability to police its citizens’ every utterance, Paul Kagame's Rwanda follows a more totalitarian model of governance. Citizens and visitors alike risk consequences for questioning the government's genocide narrative.Footnote 118 The remarkable success of Kagame's efforts is evidenced by the widespread foreign reliance on the government narrative, and the willingness to overlook stories that contradict it. Such totalitarian narrative authority is not found in Bosnia, where survivors’ versions of the past greatly inform the dominant narrative.
Bosnia: Srebrenica's women speak
Never forget. Isn't that what you say?’
Museum guide, Potočari memorial in SrebrenicaFootnote 119The Rwandan violence was not the only genocide clamouring for global attention in the early 1990s; the Bosnian civil war raged from 1991 to 1995. A hallmark of the violence was ethnic cleansing among Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (formerly called Bosnian Muslims), with the Bosniaks suffering the greatest amount of death and displacement. The particular case of the Srebrenica genocide occurred over a period of days in July 1995. After four years of conflict, the United Nations had established Srebrenica town as a civilian safe area, protected by an under-armed Dutch peacekeeping battalion. As the Bosnian Serb forces slowly closed in on the panicked inhabitants, the peacekeepers frantically, and fruitlessly, radioed for NATO airstrikes against the Serbs. Once the Dutch soldiers relinquished control of the enclave, the Bosnian Serb fighters systematically killed eight thousand men and boys, pursuing escapees deep into the forests. This slaughter finally prompted more effective intervention from the West. Currently, Srebrenica is a Serb-controlled town in which minority Bosniaks struggle to ensure their story defines public memory. A memorial to the genocide opened in 2003, inaugurated by former US President Bill Clinton, which includes a cemetery, wall of names, and exhibits in the old factory where the peacekeepers were stationed.Footnote 120
Overall, the Bosnian government's narrative of Srebrenica dovetails significantly with the survivors’ narratives. The Serbs had committed an unprovoked, brutal massacre of innocent Bosniak civilians; a genocidal act that attempted to eliminate the Muslims by exterminating men and boys.Footnote 121 The narratives place guilt on NATO forces, the UN peacekeepers, and the EU for a failure to intervene as Srebrenica was overrun by Bosnian Serb militants. All parties, including Westerners, agree that the massacre represented a turning point in international intervention that led to much more robust NATO action and, later that year, the Dayton Peace Accords.
More than survivors in Rwanda or Cambodia, the mothers, sisters, and wives of the massacred men have managed to command narrative authority in the decades after the genocide. Klejda Mulaj notes, ‘Ever since the occurrence of the genocide, victims have demanded recognition of their ordeal. They have engaged in acts of commemorations – most prominently those at the Memorial and Cemetery Centre at Potočari, the Peace March (Marš Mira), and mass burials – acts that exert public recognition of war and suffering, and enhance collective memory and national identity.’Footnote 122 It was survivors who demanded the burial of the victims and their identification, if possible. In addition to a place for mourning, the memorial functions in the political realm. Craig Evan Pollack quotes a local Bosniak official who admits, ‘I will tell you now as a politician, we have no intention just to rebury these people down there in Srebrenica and Potočari. We are trying to use this situation with the burial in Srebrenica to somehow get special status for Srebrenica already decided by the resolutions of the United Nations.’Footnote 123
Perhaps for those reasons, the memorial, officially called the Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial and Cemetery for the Victims of the 1995 Genocide, appears oriented more towards Bosniaks than international tourists. It is not an easy journey from Sarajevo to the small town in Republika Srpska. Any visitors who arrive have made an effort, rather than sandwiching in a visit between other attractions. The museum guest book is filled with signatures, the vast majority Bosnian names. Many student groups across the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina make field trips to the memorial. Footnote 124
Entering the memorial the visitor overlooks a vista of identical rows of grave markers spread over a grassy plain. Despite the seemingly endless rows of markers, the memorial is far from complete: as of 2018, DNA testing has identified 6,940 victims out of over 8,000 missing persons.Footnote 125 Like the mass graves in Kigali, this memorial is a work in progress. In front of the cemetery, one can read the names of the dead carved into a curving expanse of smooth granite. The variety of birth dates indicate that the victims ranged from old men to young teenagers; all the death dates are July 1995. An open-air mosque sits to the left of the main entrance. During my visit, two men entered the covered area, removed their shoes and knelt in prayer, prostrating then rising, over and over. In the distance, a woman in a hijab walked among the graves.Footnote 126 Across the road from the cemetery stands the old car-battery factory where the UN Dutch Battalion stationed itself. As the Serbs approached in summer 1995, the warehouse became a shelter for nearly five thousand Bosniak refugees. Acquiescing to the demands of the Bosnian Serb leader Ratko Mladik, the Dutch expelled the refugees, watching as Serb soldiers gathered the men and boys. Nearly two decades later, the site seems haunted – dank and dirty with broken ducts hanging from the ceiling. The echoing factory stands as a monument of shame to the United Nations. The latest stage of construction for the museum centre is funded by the Dutch government and plans to recreate the exact look of the factory in 1995 when it served as the Dutch battalion HQ.Footnote 127 Using the site of the genocide for the memorial provides an effective emotional jolt to international visitors, and a place of pilgrimage for others.
Remembering the commodification of the Cambodian memorials, I experience some trepidation as I approach the hut that sells ‘souvenirs’. It is not as bad as I feared. The shop is privately run by an elderly woman who lost her husband and son in the massacre. She wears the hijab and cheerfully invites us in. Most items for sale are clearly meant for a local audience: books written in Bosnian, a few in English, prayer beads, scarves crocheted by survivors, cigarette lighters, video cassettes, a few t-shirts with Bosnian writing.
The Western gaze is less overt at the Potočari memorial than at Rwandan and Cambodian memorials. A small plaque at the entrance credits the Imperial War Museum in London as the historical consultant. International donors paid over $5 million towards the costs of construction.Footnote 128 As in Rwanda, guilt and culpability likely motivated the largesse. Unlike the haphazard display of human remains in Rwanda and Cambodia, remains of Srebrenica's victims receive painstakingly reverent treatment. A display at the memorial explains that forensic testing helps identify the victims and that relatives are consulted about the process. Each year newly found remains are buried in caskets at the memorial, with appropriate religious ceremony, as well as a contingent of media and politicians.
Some Bosniaks argue that the government has over-politicised remembrance of Srebrenica. During the annual remembrance on 11 July, the cortège of recently found remains winds through Sarajevo and there is heavy news coverage. Scholars claim that ‘the framing of Srebrenica is conditioned not only by the tragedy and suffering incurred in the past but also by current internal power relations and political circumstances of the present’.Footnote 129 Critics argue that this publicity keeps ethnic divisions from healing by a constant reiteration of the victim status of the Bosniaks. Defenders of the memorialisation note that maintaining the narrative in the public sphere becomes even more important as some Serb leaders continue to deny the genocide occurred.
Upon taking office as Serbia's President in May 2012, Tomislav Nikolić contradicted multiple international findings and declared that there was no genocide in Srebrenica. The president of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik echoed the leaders in Belgrade.Footnote 130 Such statements cause shock and anger among Bosniaks, but the genocide denial narrative gets no wider traction beyond nationalist Serbs (and sympathetic Russian leaders). Responding to continuing genocide denials by Serbian politicians, the European Parliament in November 2018 adopted a resolution that states that it ‘regrets the reiterated denial of genocide in Srebrenica by some Serbian officials’.Footnote 131
Are there additional explanations for the more respectful treatment of the Srebrenica victims by Western funders and tourists? Perhaps this reverence is simply more feasible due to the number of the dead – 8,000 as opposed to 800,000. Additional research could examine how the differences in ethnicity and culture affect those interactions. Western stereotyping likely seeps into the response to the genocide narrative, for example increasing the tendency to dehumanise non-white victims. There is little doubt that racism influences levels of humanitarian aid provided in a crisis. For example, ‘the European Community (ECHO) spent more money in 1999 on humanitarian assistance in Kosovo than on the rest of the world put together’.Footnote 132 Although it is outside the scope of this article, one can make a plausible argument that Western bystanders feel greater empathy for European genocide victims, rather than viewing their suffering as exotic or barbaric.
Conclusion
The ability to communicate a convincing story to a broad audience – and to stifle dissenting storytellers – is a foundation of political power. Public narratives of past atrocity rely on memorialisation as an integral part of the storytelling process. Memorials outlast the lives of the survivors and perpetrators, affecting the way new generations will interpret the past. For a postgenocide government a great deal of legitimacy rests on claiming the identity of either ‘victim’ or ‘liberator’ – and avoiding the label of ‘perpetrator’. Thus, owning the dominant narrative offers the benefit of entrenching power at home and increasing legitimacy on the international stage.
Authoritarian leaders use numerous tools to control, and manipulate, the accepted version of past atrocities, including developing a story that appeals to Western audiences. I have argued that Western visitors’ consumption of genocide memorials reinforces the dehumanising aspects of tourism that prioritise an exclusionary version of the past. And that funding and consultation by Western organisations – while offering distinct benefits in preserving memory and evidence of the genocide – tends to encourage a homogenised atrocity narrative that reflects the values of the global human rights regime and existing standards of memorial design rather than privileging the local particularities of the atrocity experience. Paul Williams warns that ‘memorial museums can only support reconciliation if they operate under political conditions that lead to understanding rather than ongoing recrimination and conflict’.Footnote 133 Sabine Marschall finds that ‘globalization has … led to the international sharing and transportability of memory’.Footnote 134 The resulting overarching conflict narratives – reinforced, created, accepted by international audiences – may unintentionally support a postconflict power structure that disregards reconciliation.
In Rwanda and Cambodia the dominant, government-sponsored narratives have excluded many voices, even as they gained international support. In Rwanda, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) emerged with political power after its exile army defeated the genocidal Hutu forces. Under President Paul Kagame, the RPF solidified the victim (and victor) identity of the Tutsi in public narratives, to the extent of silencing even the smallest point of difference. The memorials are tightly scripted and include horrifying exhibits such as petrified corpses that have been hailed as the apex of the dark tourism experience. International funders have made possible the preservation of genocide evidence, yet they usually uncritically accept the biased government narrative. The official story excludes or obliterates many individual memories of suffering, creating deep resentments and divisions that impede peacebuilding.
Unlike the Rwandan government's unrelenting narrative of the genocide, the Cambodian government has selective amnesia regarding the Khmer Rouge period, and confines the atrocity narrative to the decades before President Hun Sen took power. This amnesia conveniently excludes the complicity of many current officials in the Khmer Rouge regime. Most international visitors have little background knowledge about Cambodian history and politics; they consume the gory stories told by the memorials without understanding the larger context or current relevance. The outcomes in Cambodia and Rwanda illustrate the multilayered interaction between political power, atrocity narratives, and international audiences.
The construction of public memory around the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia developed in a less exclusive manner than either Cambodia or Rwanda. The official narrative of Bosniak victimhood was willingly adopted by the survivors of mass killing and ethnic killing. Additionally, international organisations, media, and governments embraced and perpetuated that narrative.Footnote 135 The portrayal of victimhood at Srebrenica differs from the Tutsi in Rwanda because it is able to humanise the Bosniaks through forensic testing and individual grave markers, whereas many Rwandan memorials offer an anonymous portrait of genocide. Overall, the survivors of Srebrenica organised themselves and successfully influenced the political process of memorialisation.
As shown in the cases of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, Western involvement in public memory projects – as funders, designers, and visitors – often strengthens the power of government narratives, which control the present by controlling the past. The problems highlighted here will not be solved by a blanket condemnation of international involvement in memorialisation, however. As Debbie Lisle reminds us, ‘the reconstruction, preservation, and display of sites of atrocity and conflict is a multi-billion-dollar industry that is incredibly lucrative for local communities. So the question is not whether tourism should be present in the aftermath of atrocity … but rather how and in what form tourism can operate sensitively, ethically, and reflexively in sites with a contentious past’.Footnote 136 Based on her research in Rwanda, Erin Jessee cautions outsiders to be ‘mindful about eliciting and reproducing dominant narratives that, while seemingly innocuous, are constructed in a manner that furthers political or ideological agendas, particularly those that might enhance divisions within a population, for example’.Footnote 137 On a less cautionary note, Emma Hutchinson discusses the community-building potential inherent in trauma recovery and suggests ‘that the process of representing trauma can help to constitute new, possibly more inclusive communities’.Footnote 138 The manipulative effect of power is not a foregone conclusion in memory projects such as memorials. My analysis of memorialisation provides an interpretation of existing structures and suggests ways to humanise and include all members of society. Peace, reconciliation, and social healing cannot occur when the powerful silence the weak. Although a tenuous stability may prevail, it is dangerous to mistake a lack of violence for the presence of peace.
Acknowledgements
For their generous support of my research, I am grateful to the Berghof Foundation, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Wake Forest University Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Research Fund, and the WFU Office for Global Affairs. I received many thoughtful comments on my work, particularly from participants in the Notre Dame International Security Program Speaker Series, the Wake Forest University Department of Politics and International Affairs Faculty Research Seminar, and the IES Abroad Faculty Development Seminar on Conflict Transformation.
