‘The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting.’
Theodor Adorno, German philosopher

'From the very outset, three areas of work assumed top priority: the establishment of a list of the names of all victims and the publication of these names; the clarification of the places of burial of the deceased, and the establishment of memorial signs on these burial places.'
Memorial, the Russian human rights group:

MEMORY, RECOGNITION AND HEALING

Memorials for instances of gross human rights violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity or other victimization in war and peace are set op with the aim of commemoration and recognition. As such, in their positive aspect (that is, if not set up or used mainly or only for reasons of continuing group division or a distorted interpretation of history) they are part of a process of ‘redress’, or healing.

Such methods of healing through memory include:

• Official recognition, as through the work of a truth commission. 
• A reburial, either of identified individual bodies or of the remains found in mass graves. 
• Monuments and memorials. 
• ‘Naming names’, a public register or book documenting the victims. 
• A park or other public place specifically named and designed for commemorative purposes. 
• Religious and ritual services, community events, demonstrations, memorial days etc. 
• The setting up of a solidarity group or human rights NGO.. 
• Articulation of memories and feelings in literary writing and other artistic expression. 
• Confrontations with perpetrators.

TYPES AND FUNCTIONS OF MEMORIALS

Remembering a historical period of repression gives rise to powerful forces. A memorial constitutes a warning about hazardous developments in the here and now or in the future by means of referring to the past. A memorial is a means to (re)write history – which has often been distorted or denied. A memorial may be an important element in preventing future violations of human rights. This preventive warning function, however, is not the only objective nor the only way of remembering. In addition to remembering certain periods of history, the persons victimized by this period in history are also remembered.
People who after a period of repression are forced to live on with an unsolved past are often confronted with misunderstanding by their environment. People who have not suffered under the regime and people responsible for this regime may wish to forget this period in history as soon as possible. Relatives are often told that their country has no record of those killed or disappeared. And if society does acknowledge the facts of such killings, disappearances and other gruesome acts, it is often argued that the victims were to blame: that they were terrorists, for example, or combatants who just happened to be at the losing side of the battle. During the oppressive regime they might have been called communists, capitalists or terrorists and this was the cause for their persecution. A memorial also serves as a means for recognition, acknowledgement and comfort.
A monument or material memorial, often in stone, may contribute to the relatives' recognition and rehabilitation which they have been denied for so long. A monument is intended for the victims, relatives, passers-by – but also for the perpetrators responsible for a disappearance. If the monument is centrally located, it presents a daily confrontation with the horrid past. For the relatives the monument has special significance. In addition to rehabilitation, it also has a humanizing function. Victims of human rights violations from the past are often anonymous: the dead, the 'disappeared' person. A monument turns this abstract category into concrete and personal victims. The victims become people of flesh and blood.
Memorials come in many forms, material and non-material. They can be established in stone or wood or iron, they can take the form of special days and events, they are museums and the sites of former places of detention or massacres, they can be lists of names in books or reports or on internet sites, they can be video or audio collections, etc.
Memorials may take a very long time to be established. For example, the slave trade of the Netherlands was abolished in the 1860s but the first statue to commemorate that practice was not unveiled unto 2003, in an Amsterdam park.

To summarize, two characteristics are essential of any memorial.
First, it establishes a ‘reading’ of historical facts. It brings together, mostly by reference to a group of victims or even by naming these victims by their individual names, the memories of all those who suffered in a particular instance of gross violence or human rights violations – an international or civil war, a period of dire repression, a massacre, a concentration or detention camp, the location of a torture centre.
Second, it serves to keep particular memories and their underlying interpretation of historical facts alive – for years or decades, or even for generations to come. As such, a memorial may play a part in the process of redress and reconciliation. In some cases however a memorial may also become a ‘stone of contention’, when the historical reading is too distorted or is seen as the articulation of partisanship rather than a broadly shared concept of just society.

The following paragraphs give examples of monuments, memorials and museums.

MONUMENTS (NOT ‘ON-SITE’) 

• The Armenian National Institute has identified 135 memorials in 25 countries. ‘In Yerevan, Armenia, since April 24, 1968 there are several freestanding architectural & sculptural works erect in a large park on a hill, which also houses other cultural and social building complexes. The specific genocide monument consists of an underground museum with library & archive sections; an axial path leading to the central area of the monument that is paralleled with a 100 meters by 3 meters basal wall with inscriptions of the names of the regions, towns and villages of Historic Western Armenia (the regions where the genocide occurred). From 1988-1990 cross-stones (khatchkars) were mounted in the vicinity of the Genocide Monument to commemorate the Armenians who were massacred in the 1980s in the Azeri cities of Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku. The central memorial structures consist of a circular area that shelters the eternal flame memorizing all the victims of the Genocide; it stands as the Memorial Sanctuary. The eternal flame is housed under 12 tall, inward-leaning basalt slabs forming a circle.’ In Paris, a monument was inaugurated in 2003 on the banks of the Seine River. The French parliament officially recognized the killings as a genocide in 2001. In Assen, The Netherlands, a ‘Khatchkar’ brought from Armenia was placed as a freestanding sculptural work in a cemetery, in 2000. 
• WW I monuments and commemorative stones can be found in even the smallest villages in Belgium, France and other countries of Western Europe. A New Zealand register lists 453 public WW I memorials in the country. 
• The persecution of gays in Nazi occupied countries is recalled at places spread over the world. There is a Commemorative Memorial plaque at Nollendorfplatz, Berlin-Schöneberg, on the wall of the Underground Station; a memorial to homosexual victims at Neuengamme concentration camp, where one hundred homosexuals were imprisioned; the ‘Homomonument’ at Westermarkt, Amsterdam, where three triangles define a large triangle (a triangle is raised up from the ground, a second triangle is level with the ground, a third triangle is at a lower level jutting out into the adjacent canal). 
• In Russia, the network of human rights groups, Memorial, has initiated many memorial sites. Among them is the Solovetskii stone on Lubianka Square in Moscow, placed across from the KGB headquarters on 30 October 1990. 
• In the Czech Republic, a full twelve years after the fall of Communism, Prague erected a memorial to its victims. It's the work of renowned Czech sculptor, Olbram Zoubek, who created ‘a deceptively simple flight of oversized concrete steps topped with decaying bronze figures. A metal ribbon running up the centre of the steps tallies the victims: 205,486 arrested, 248 hanged or beheaded, 4,500 died in prison, 327 shot crossing the border, 170,938 driven into exile.’ 
• The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation strives to set up, in Washington DC, a memorial to the many millions who died under communist tyranny. ‘Under Public Law 103-199, our Foundation has been authorized to design, construct and maintain an international Memorial to the more than 100 million victims of communism. For the past 18 months, we have appeared before federal and city commissions seeking approval of a site for our Memorial. We now report, with a sense of pride and elation, that we have received official approval of a wonderful Capitol Hill site for our Memorial.’ 
• In Manila, the Philippines, a monument named the Flame of Courage was established to remember all those who have disappeared since 1972. It was initiated by the committee of relatives, FIND. This committee emphasizes the importance of the monument by stating that this is the only place for relatives and survivors where they can visit their disappeared relatives and meet with fellow-sufferers. The number of names on the Flame of Courage is around 1,600.

MUSEUMS (NOT ‘ON-SITE’) 

• The Israel Science and Technology Homepage lists 57 holocaust museums worldwide, of which 23 are in the US and 7 in Germany. In Israel, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, was established in 1953 by an act of the Israeli Knesset. Since its inception, Yad Vashem has been entrusted with documenting the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust period, preserving the memory and story of each of the six million victims, and imparting the legacy of the Holocaust for generations to come through its archives, library, school, museums and recognition of the Righteous Among the Nations. The Archive collection, the largest and most comprehensive repository of material on the Holocaust in the world, comprises 62 million pages of documents, nearly 267,500 photographs along with thousands of films and videotaped testimonies of survivors. 
• South Africa’s Apartheid Museum ‘has become one of Johannesburg's most important tourist attractions. The Museum, with its large blown-up photographs, metal cages and numerous monitors recording continuous replays of apartheid scenes set in a double volume ceiling, concrete and red brick walls and grey concrete floor, is next to the Gold Reef City Casino, five kilometres south of the city centre. The Museum occupies approximately 6 000 square metres on a seven-hectare site which consists of natural recreated veld and indigenous bush habitat containing a lake and paths, alongside its stark building.’ 
• The Kigali memorial centre in Rwanda is ‘set up by a UK-based charity called the Aegis trust, who in their own words works towards the prevention of genocide with survivors, decision-makers and the next generation through commemoration, education, awareness-raising and research’, after a request from the Rwandian Governement. The memorial centre will house exhibitions on the genocide in Rwanda as well as general exhibitions on the issue, a special memorial for the children who were killed, and a National Genocide Documentation Centre.’

MEMORIALS AND MUSEUMS ‘ON-SITE’ 

• Memorial [a major NGO in Russia] is, according tot its website, ‘a great number of different memorials reaching to the far corners of the former USSR - from the gigantic monument of Ernst Neizvestnii close to Magadan to the modest memorial signs at mass burial sites of the victims of terror near Moscow. It is also a unique museum, established on the ground of the last Soviet political camp close to the town Chusovii in Perm province.’ In researching her book Gulag, Anne Applebaum found the old brick punishment block from camp No. 7 of Ukhtpechlag that an Armenian car mechanic was using as a workshop. She also discovered a few memorials, in the outskirts of Petrozavodsk (Karelia), Tomsk (Siberia), and Kiev (Ukraine); crosses at the Vorkuta (Arctic Circle) coal mines; a modest exhibition room at Solovki (Russia's far Northwest); and a commemorative chapel in Syktyvkar (Komi). Only Perm-36 proved to have a full-scale Gulag museum in the barracks of an actual camp, which local historians rebuilt, establishing camp-reminiscent logging operations to defray reconstruction costs. No national Gulag museum exists. Perm-36 is on the World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites. 
• There are many on-site memorials and museums devoted tot the holocaust. Examples: Berlin hosts the Topography of Terror Museum. Within the cellar-prison remains of the Nazis' Reich Security Main Office, photos and documents explain the police and intelligence organizations that planned and executed Nazi crimes against humanity. Terezin (Theresienstadt), now a museum, is a fortress located about 60 km north of Prague. Some 35,000 Jews died in Terezin of starvation, disease, murder or suicide. At Auschwitz/Birkenau, located in southern Poland, the camp museum has welcomed over 25 million visitors, making it one of the most visited historical places and museums of the world. The Concentration Camp Memorial Neuengamme near Hamburg, Germany, was initiated by French concentration camp survivors. A memorial column was inaugurated in 1953 located on the site of the former concentration camp nursery, where the SS ordered the ashes from the camp's crematorium to be scattered as fertilizer. In 1965 the concentration camp was transformed into a memorial site with a commemorative column, national plaques, a memorial wall and a sculpture. The State Museum at Majdanek near Lublin, Poland, was established in the autumn of 1944 on a part of terrain that belonged to the concentration camp. The Museum was granted its legal status of a central state institution in 1947. The Museum has over 294,500 exhibits. 
• The number of memorials, monuments and museums in commemoration of the victims in East Germany during the German Democratic Republic victims is over 350. Some of there are on-site, as at the former locations of the Berlin Wall and the Stasi offices and prisons, and the places where people where killed during the 1953 strikes. [see also ‘Memorials and museums’ in Case I - Germany] 
• Hungary: Budapest's controversial ‘House of Terror’ has emerged as one of the capital's most popular destinations. The museum's location at 60 Andrassy Street was chosen because it was headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis between 1944 and 1945, then was taken over by the Communist secret police once Soviet troops liberated, then occupied, Hungary. It deals mainly with the ‘victims of Stalinism’ and includes a picture gallery of some 1,000 individuals held responsible for the oppression. 
• In the former ‘Prison of the Ministers’ in Sighet, Romania, the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and Anticommunist Resistance comprises a museum and an International Study Centre. The prison, which was active from 1897 until 1977, takes its name from the period during the 1950s when it held many political prisoners (former government ministers, generals, academicians, and religious leaders - the cultural and political elite of Romania) in terrible conditions - brought here because it was thought to be particularly secure since the town was just 2km from the Soviet frontier. 180 prisoners were held in 72 cells. 
• There is a memorial for the victims of the 2 October 1968 massacre at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, in the capital of Mexico, where most of the killings of student demonstrators took place. 
• There are various on-site monuments and memorials in Chile. Among hem is the memorial for the detained disappeared and executed in the 'Park for Peace'. During the military dictatorship this was a torture centre in Santiago, known as 'Villa Grimaldi'. Another is a plaque memorialising the 65 detained disappeared workers of the Complejo Forestal Maderero Panguipulli, a forestry project that had been run successfully by the workers themselves. It is in one of the main streets of Neltume, next to a statue also in honour of these workers. Another is the memorial built in 1992 by the relatives of disappeared and executed people and the Association of Disappeared and Executed of the Osorno province.
• Tuol Sleng Museum, also known as the Museum of Genocidal Crimes is located in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. A former high school, it was known as the S-21 prison during the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979. Several rooms of the museum are lined, floor to ceiling, with black and white photographs of some of the estimated 20,000 prisoners who passed through the prison. Only seven survived. Other rooms preserve leg-irons and instruments of torture. The museum is perhaps best known for having housed the ‘skull map’, composed of 300 skulls and other bones found by the Vietnamese during their occupation of Cambodia, to serve as a reminder of what happened at S-21 prison. The map was dismantled in 2002, but the skulls of some victims are still on display in shelves in the museum. 
• Robben Island, South Africa, is the place where Nelson Mandela was held. ‘The three and a half hour tour includes a return trip across Table Bay, a visit to the Maximum Security Prison, interaction with an ex-political prisoner and a 45 minute bus tour with a guide providing commentary.’ 
• On March 12, 1995 a memorial was unveiled in Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala, on the 13th anniversary of the 1982 Rio Negro Massacre. On that date, 177 women and children were raped, tortured, mutilated and dumped in a mass grave. It was constructed by the survivors of the Rio Negro massacre as a testimony to the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army and civil defense patrollers against their family members. Built before the 1996 Peace Accord, the steel and cement monument (three meters thick, four meters wide, five meters high, sunk two meters into the ground) was built to prevent its destruction. A previous Monument to Truth, unveiled in April 1994 was destroyed two weeks after it was erected. On March 1, 1995, a second plaque that was being readied for the March 12 unveiling was destroyed in a Guatemala City workshop. 
• In Bosnia in September 2003, Bill Clinton, who was US president when the Bosnian war ended in 1995, unveiled a memorial cemetery for more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys who died in Srebrenica. The Srebrenica memorial site is shaped like the petals of a flower. The memorial , which took a year to build and cost about $5m, lies just across the road from the old UN base where thousands of Bosnian Muslims sought sanctuary in vain. Ten thousand white tombstones will eventually stand there.

CEMETERIES AND BURIAL GROUNDS 

• A monument has been erected in Santiago's main cemetery, Chile, a huge wall inscribed on the left with the names of all the `disappeared', and on the right the names of those murdered. In the centre is the name of the assassinated president, Salvador Allende. On either side of the wall spaces have been set aside for the bodies of the `disappeared' who have yet to be found. Some are now already occupied. Since the publication of the Truth Commission's report in Chile, between 20 and 25 percent of the disappearance cases have been solved, mainly through forensic investigation. Other cemetery memorials in Chile include a mausoleum in the Liquiñe cemetery, erected in 1995 by a relative of one of the 15 disappeared in the area. The statue of a hand cradling a dove was erected in Valdivia's Cemetery in December 2001 as a memorial to the detained disappeared. It is inscribed For Life and Justice’.
• In April 1998, a national monument has been unveiled in Rwanda to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the country's 1994 genocide. The ceremony was held on a hill in the west of the country and attended by President Pasteur Bizmungu. ‘At the Gisozi Genocide Memorial, the sight of bones and skulls preserved on shelves told haunting stories of Rwanda's darkest hour.’ A bed of skeletons is part of the Murambi Genocide Memorial in southern Rwanda. It is the site where 45,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in Gikorpgoro Province, south of the capital Kigali, between April and November 1994. The skeletons have been preserved by the Rwandan government.
• In Bosnia in April 2006, survivors and relatives circulated a petition on the Omarska Memorial Project – in 1992, Omarska was one of most brutal Serb-run prison camps. They asked the present owner of the site, Mittal Steel, ‘to offer a lease over the main camp buildings to a Foundation led by survivors and families of the dead and missing, for the purpose of establishing a memorial to the Omarska camp. It makes no sense for a commercial company to own and manage its own memorial to the camp. Mittal Steel urgently needs to make a public commitment to support investigations by internationally-recognised bodies into mass graves on the Mine's land. This commitment should also include sharing information about the existence of any graves with local organisations representing survivors and families of the missing.’

NAMING NAMES 

• The NGO Memorial in Russia reports: ‘Already in 1988-89, many Russian newspapers began to publish lists of victims of Soviet repression. Unfortunately, the wave of social enthusiasm for this dissipated in the beginning of the 1990s. Today the publication of such lists is a rarity. Therefore, the NGO Memorial has taken the initiative and begun preparing ‘Books of Memory’ in many regions. These are special publications, in which one finds not only the names, but also short biographical descriptions of the victims, and sometimes even photographs. Unfortunately, the work on establishing the ‘Books of Memory’ has not proceeded equally quickly in all regions. At the present time, the published books contain only several hundred thousand names. By comparison, even official figures reveal that, by the time of Stalin's death, at least 4 million individuals were convicted by the executive organs VChK and MGB. Moreover, besides those convicted ‘in criminal cases,’ millions were affected by administrative decisions (collectivization, the deportation of nations, etc.), or were victims of extra-judicial punishments. In some regions, the problem has been resolved by including only information on victims of execution in the ‘Books of Memory’.’ 
• In Israel, Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names is a tribute to the victims by remembering them not as anonymous numbers but as individual human beings. The Pages of Testimony are symbolic gravestones, which record names and biographical data of millions of martyrs, as submitted by family members and friends. To date Yad Vashem has computerized 3.2 million names of Holocaust victims, compiled from approximately 2 million Pages of Testimony and various other lists.
• The Parque de la Memoria is a memory park on the banks of the La Plata in Buenos Aires, Argentina, within striking distance of the military torture chamber during Argentina's ‘dirty war’. The designs for the ‘Monumento a lasVíctimas del Terrorismo de Estado’ were by Baudizzone, Lestard, Varas Studio and the associated architects Claudio Ferrari and Daniel Becker. ‘What I have described as a wound cut into the earth is framed along its zig-zag trajectory by four non-continuous walls which will carry the names of the disappeared. There will be 30,000 name plaques, sequenced alphabetically and by year. Many name plaques will remain empty, nameless, thus commemorating, if indirectly, the voiding of identity that always preceded disappearance.’

MEMORIAL MEETINGS, EVENTS AND SPECIAL DAYS

• In Guatemala, February 25 is the National Day of Dignity of the Victims of the Violence. On this day in 1999, the Commission for Historical Clarification presented its report, Guatemala, Memory of Silence, finding acts of genocide were committed between during 1981 and 1982 in four regions of Guatemala
  - Until early 2006, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina came together each week at the Plaza de Mayo, the main square in the capital Buenos Aires, and many people have followed their example. The mothers did not need a memorial or a monument: the Plaza is their monument. In a very direct manner they included those who have disappeared in their meetings. Each mother carried a pole with a photograph of a disappeared child.

INTERNET AND OTHER VIRTUAL MEMORIAL SITES 

•  According to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, ‘about 30,000 people were “disappeared” during the “dirty war”. They were thirty thousand individual human beings, each one with his/her own story, dreams and hopes, with friends, parents and children who love them, remember them and clamor for the truth and justice they deserve. Thirty thousand people to whom all Argentinians owe the minimal homage of memory. The online Memorial to the Disappeared presents homepages for some of them, about 600 so far, with pictures and other information about them.’

LITERATURE AND WEBSITES

Argentina online memorial at www.desaparecidos.org/arg/victimas.
Armenia genocide memorials at www.armenian-genocide.org/memorials.
Bevan, Robert (2006). The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books.
Bosnia Omarska memorial project at http://headgroups.com/display/om/welcome. 
Connerton, Paul (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Huyssen, Andreas (2003). Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kaminsky, Annette (2004). Orte des Erinnerns. Gedenkzeichen, Gedenkstätten und Museen zur Diktatur in SBZ und DDR. Leipzig: Forum Verlag.
Knegge, Volkhard & Norbert Frei (2002). Verbrechen erinnern: die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord. München: Beck.
Minow, Martha (2003). Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Russia Memorial organization at www.memo.ru/eng.

>> to case II
>> back to introduction