Exhumation Of Mass Graves Research Articles

Transitional Justice and Human Rights in Zimbabwe's Gukurahundi Mass Grave Exhumations

ABSTRACT: Transitional justice requires a multi-stakeholder as well as a multidimensional approach. In Zimbabwe, the issue of atrocities committed by the state (now commonly referred to as Gukurahundi) is a topic that evokes emotive debate, especially around the process of exhuming the remains of those who were buried in mass graves. One controversial issue surrounding the exhumation of mass graves is the idea of letting "by-gones be by-gones." This political strategy potentially allows perpetrators to circumvent the human rights issues that arise after mass graves are exhumed. It also denies the victims proper burial and closure for their families. Using an analysis of data in the form of legal reports, international laws, and case law, among other literature, this article examines the international norms on exhumation and the politics inhibiting exhumation of the Gukurahundi mass graves in Zimbabwe .

Enduring violence and commemoration: Korea’s Cheju April 3 Incident

Post-atrocity survivors construct spaces of being through various levels of visibility and stages of construction. Those with inherited memories of their ancestors from mass atrocities share the ability to exert their postmemories that mediates the past memory in its affective force to restore their sociability with their relatives, neighbors, community, and nation. A central medium of postmemory typically comes in the form of commemorative ritual practices that contain a mixture of mourning and re-creation of family and community. Ritual engages informal sociocultural processes outside the purview of the state. Commemoration rituals reflect ordinary people’s attempts to seek moral renewal and social repair to promote social reconstruction and recovery of humanity. This essay considers feminist interventions of intimate memorial scales, enabling us to envision potential alternative historical trajectories in post-massacre commemorations, memorials, reburials, and as mnemonic locations for agonistic testimonies to emerge around a mid-century massacre in South Korea called the “Cheju April 3 Incident.” We take into consideration how the postmemory of the Cheju April 3 Incident is intergenerationally transmitted and ritually re-enacted through family ancestor worship, and the reburial of remains after the exhumation of mass graves. The lessons of postmemory practices are crucial to the foundation of humanity after atrocity.

African Spirituality and the Gukurahundi Mass Grave Exhumations in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT: The mass killings in the southern part of Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1987, which are commonly known as the Gukurahundi massacres, raise a number of issues, including the need to exhume bodies of those killed in order to bury them in a proper way. This article contributes to the debates on exhumations of mass graves in an African context by examining the connection between avenging spirits and transitional justice through a detailed discussion of Bantu cosmology. The article argues that though the exhumation of the graves of those killed during the Gukurahundi massacres is resisted by those in power, exhumations are pertinent and in line with the Bantu traditions of properly re-burying the dead. Doing so fills a need to appease avenging spirits in order to achieve proper transitional justice and closure .

Holocaust victims, Jewish law and the ethics of archaeological investigations

Dead bodies – and the graves in which they are interred – are often highly contested within Holocaust campscapes. Although photographs of bodies at places like Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Ohrdruf emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the exhumation of mass graves of Holocaust victims for either judicial or humanitarian reasons has become something of a taboo subject. Whilst some see dead bodies in these environments as evidence of a crime, others view them as relatives, friends, and loved ones who require a proper burial, a marked burial site, or should be left undisturbed. Disputes arise between governments, communities, individuals, and religious groups when accounting for Halacha (Jewish Law) and the dead. This paper highlights how a non-invasive methodology, derived from archaeology and other disciplines, offers one way of locating and classifying graves whilst respecting the ethical sensitivities involved in their investigation. This is a growing field of research and one which has proven ability and future potential to shed new light on the crimes perpetrated across the European Holocaust landscape.

A Return to Monuments: Overcoming the “Forensic Turn” in Contemporary Spain

In the year 2000 thirteen people were exhumed from a mass grave in Priaranza del Bierzo. This event has been established as the founding act of the movement called “Historical Memory” in the Kingdom of Spain. A movement which, despite claiming the recovery of the past within the framework of Human Rights rhetoric, has been marked by the exhumations of mass graves as its primary and most visible activity. These exhumations have always been portrayed positively by the media. This is framed within the so-called “forensic turn,” as a process in which scientists have been incorporated into the investigation of mass violence.However, this account has not addressed a number of issues, one of which is fundamental and relates to the fate of the bodies after exhumation. Another omission is the question of what to do when the graves are not found where they were believed to be. In this sense, the subject has been approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, starting from the history of art, making use of ethnographic techniques and taking samples from a qualitative-quantitative study which has been carried out over the last 4 years throughout the country. Therefore, the materials used to address the problem are organized into the following three parts. Firstly, the limitations of the forensic model and exhumations are discussed in detail. Secondly, monuments built after the exhumation of mass graves are examined. Thirdly, monuments constructed when the grave remained undiscovered, and the bodies could not be exhumed are also considered.In this regard, the experiences analysed have firstly clarified the limitations and dissatisfactions that have arisen around the “forensic turn.” The low rate of identifications, the lack of symbolic mediators and the lack of social recognition, lead to the fact that exhumations in themselves do not offer answers and that, on the contrary, they do not necessarily modify the meaning of the graves as tools of terror. Therefore, in the second section, some initiatives have been employed to illustrate the need to bury the bodies after exhumations, both for pragmatic and symbolic reasons. These monuments could also be the solution for those unable to locate the mass graves, as explained in the third section. The conclusion focuses on the origins of these “memorial monument solutions,” which have transcended the “forensic” model. Therefore, it is suggested that it would be relevant to continue researching these practices in the future, and not to see them as mere solutions to a technical problem, but as a new stage of memorial practices.

Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar

AbstractBased on long-term ethnographic research on contemporary exhumations of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), as well as analysis of the exhumation of Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, this paper looks at the ways in which the dictator’s moral exemplarity has evolved over time since his military victory in 1939. During the early years of his dictatorship, Franco’s propaganda machine built the legend of a historical character touched by divine providence who sacrificed himself to save Spain from communism. His moral charisma was enriched by associating his historical mission with a constellation of moral exemplars drawn from medieval and imperial Spain. After his death, his moral exemplarity dwindled as democratic Spain embraced a political discourse of national reconciliation. Yet, since 2000, a new negative exemplarity of Franco as a war criminal has come into sharp focus, in connection with the exhumation of the mass graves of tens of thousands of Republican civilians executed by his army and paramilitary. In recent years, Franco has reemerged as a fascist exemplar alongside a rise of the extreme right. To understand the revival of his fascist exemplarity, I focus on two processes: the rise of the political party Vox, which claims undisguised admiration for Franco’s legacy (a process I call “neo-exemplarity”), and the dismantling in October 2019 of Franco’s honorable burial and the debate over the treatment that his mortal remains deserve (a process I call “necro-exemplarity”).

Seeing like a scientist: subjunctive forensics and shared ways of seeing in the Spanish forensic archive

For two decades, Spaniards have turned to forensic science as a mode of unearthing diverse forms of evidence that shed light on the mechanics of fascist repression that emerged during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship that followed it. Due to the lasting effects of Spain’s Amnesty Law, which prohibits defining Franco’s victims as victims of crime, these exhumation projects exist at the unruly boundaries of legal procedure. In the absence of courts equipped to manage the evidence exhumed and produced in these endeavors, photographs documenting the forensic process are not sequestered by the law. Instead, they are made to be seen. Drawing on what the author describes as subjunctive forensics, she analyzes the emergence of new bodies of knowledge —or what could be called the forensic archive— in order to understand how visual evidence that straddles the scientific and the political, particularly photography, is produced, circulated and safe-guarded in contemporary Spain. Drawing on ethnographic research and the experience of photographing mass grave exhumations, the author explores how shared forms of seeing are produced, acquired, and shared among the community of practice surrounding historical memory work. By focusing on how professional and skilled visions are constituted, the article argues that it is in the production, circulation, and display of forensic photography that Spaniards visualize an uncomfortable past while also imagining alternative political futures.

Antonio Altarriba’s El ala rota: remembering a woman hidden in ‘the back room of history’

ABSTRACT This paper examines Antonio Altarriba’s presentation of his deceased mother’s life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author’s personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain’s 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender.

Mass grave exhumations as patriotic retreat

Between 2012 and 2017, at the Ł-section of Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery, or ‘Łączka’, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance exhumed a mass grave containing the remains of post-war anti-communist resistance fighters. Being referred to as the ‘cursed soldiers’, these fighters have become key figures in post-2015 Polish memory politics. In this article we focus on the role of the volunteers at these exhumations in the production of the ‘cursed soldiers’ memory. Following the idea of community archaeology as a civil society-building practice, the observed processes of sacralisation and militarisation show how the exhumations create a community of memory that promotes the core values of the currently governing national-conservative PiS party. We found that tropes related to forensic research and typically identified with cosmopolitan memory paradigms are used within a generally nationalist and antagonistic memory framework.

Unrecovered objects: Narratives of dispossession, slow violence and survival in the investigation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was triggered by a military uprising against the democratically elected Popular Front government. Away from the battlefield, this war was characterized by the politically-motivated murder of thousands of civilians, many of whom were buried in clandestine graves throughout Spain. Following Franco’s victory and subsequent dictatorship, there were strong prohibitions on commemorating the Republican dead. A radical rupture in Spain’s memory politics occurred from 2000 onwards with the founding of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory and other similar pressure groups that have organized the exhumation and reburial of the Republican dead. This article is based on fieldwork conducted in communities in Castile and León, and Extremadura as they underwent mass grave investigations. It examines the experience of theft and dispossession that occurred as part of the Francoist repression of Republicans. Accounts of these episodes focus on stolen and looted objects robbed from the dead during the killings, from the graves’ post-mortem, or from surviving relatives as part of the systematic dispossession of Republican households that occurred during the war and immediate post-war period. These narratives surface with frequency during the investigation and exhumation of mass graves. Despite the fact that many are lost forever, these stolen possessions can function as powerful mnemonic objects with a strong affective and imaginative hold. The narratives of dispossession explore themes of survival, the experiences of women and children, and the impact of slow violence. By invoking theft and stolen objects, these stories highlight forms of trauma and forms of memory that may not be represented fully by the dominant investigative paradigm of the mass grave exhumation with its inherent focus on death, cataclysmic violence and the tangible, physical traces of the past.

From Dignified Burial to ‘Terrorist Mausoleum’: Exhumations, Moral Panic and Mourning Policies in Peru

In this article, we examine mourning policies with respect to exhumations of mass graves from the Peruvian armed conflict. By reflecting on a case in which the exhumed dead, and their relatives, do not conform to the model of legitimate victims, we explore the limits of reparation policies and their effect on reconciliation. We investigate how the ‘terrorist mausoleum’ led to a significant episode of ‘moral panic’. We then analyse the normative perspective on mourning, as implemented in the public sphere, and how mourning, citizenship and nation are related when burying unwelcome dead associated with the figure of the ‘terrorist’.

Applicability of pulp/tooth ratio method for age estimation.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability of the tooth/pulp ratio method in the process of age estimation at the moment of death in a forensic context and compare it with standard anthropological methods. After the exhumation of mass graves located in sites in Batajnica, Serbia, in 2002 and 2003, skeletal material was thoroughly analyzed by a group of anthropologists and pathologists. As a part of the investigation, orthopantomography (OPG) was performed for each individual. During 2018 these OPGs were reexamined for scientific purposes. Age-at-death was assessed by means of the pulp/tooth ratio method applied to all available lower premolars. Estimated age following standard anthropological methods and chronological age (obtained after DNA identification of victims) was taken from the records. Age estimation using the pulp/tooth ratio and standard methods was compared with chronological age. The pulp/tooth ratio method was accurate in 81.25% of all cases and the standard method was accurate in 56.25% of all cases. The pulp/tooth ratio method of age estimation was found to be applicable and accurate. However, age estimation should be based on all available methods.

Contested archaeological approaches to mass grave exhumations in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACTWithin the last 50 years, present day Zimbabwe, (Figure 1), formerly Rhodesia, a Southern African country, has gone through various pogroms resulting in the death of over 50,000 people in total both within and outside the country. The massacres consist of the Liberation War (1966–1979); political violence characterized by every election since 1980; the Matabeleland Democide (1982–1987); and the diamond conflict in Marange, Eastern Zimbabwe (2006–2018). These various episodes of violence have produced a myriad of human body depositional sites which include mine shafts, mass graves at schools and hospitals, burials at detention centres, pit latrines, and caves. This paper will analyse the disagreements and antagonism between professional archaeologists and vernacular exhumers that emerged during various limited exhumation of mass graves within the country. The paper will conclude by offering avenues of approaches to mass graves exhumation as the material evidence might in future, subject to judicial inquiries, contribute towards truth telling and peace and reconciliation.

Pervivencia de las fosas comunes de la guerra civil española en el siglo XXI. Evidencia cultural, particularidad académica

En el presente artículo se desarrolla una aproximación a las diferentes formas de producción cultural e histórica que se han realizado en España en torno a las fosas comunes de la guerra civil española en el siglo xxi. Se realiza una breve descripción de las diversas producciones culturales aparecidas en relación con este tema y se expone la incidencia que han tenido las exhumaciones de fosas en los estudios académicos, sobre todo en el ámbito de la historia. Se numeran las universidades e investigadores que han trabajado las fosas comunes como unidad de análisis y se reflexiona respecto a la contribución al conocimiento que los datos históricos de las exhumaciones pueden aportar para la comprensión de los procesos represivos franquistas.

Unburials, Generals, and Phantom Militarism

This paper is based on a 16-year-long ethnography of mass grave exhumations in contemporary Spain and deals with the tortuous, painful, much-disputed, and incomplete unmaking of a concrete and mass...

At the Foot of the Grave: Challenging Collective Memories of Violence in Post-Franco Spain

Understanding the development and meaning of collective memory is a central interest for sociologists. One aspect of this literature focuses on the processes that social movement actors use to introduce long-silenced counter-memories of violence to supplant the “official” memory. To examine this, I draw on 15 months of ethnographic observations with the Spanish Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) and 200 informal and 30 formal interviews with locals and activists. This paper demonstrates that ARMH activists, during forensic classes given at mass grave exhumations, use multiple tactics (depoliticized science framing, action-oriented objects, and embodiment) to deliver a counter-memory of the Spanish Civil War and Franco regime and make moral and transitional justice claims. This research shows how victims’ remains and the personal objects found in the graves also provoke the desired meaning that emotionally connects those listening to the classes to the victims and the ARMH’s counter-memory.

Caring for the Missing: Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Responses to Disappearance and Enforced Disappearance

Enforced disappearance in Latin America is simultaneously an ongoing reality; an emblematic crime of past authoritarian regimes, and a significant component of the human toll of internal armed conflict in some Central American and Andean countries. Recent accountability developments in Latin America and beyond have called on forensic science to trace, unearth and restore the remains of the disappeared: as part of a judicial process, or as a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Some consider that a distinctive Latin American approach to forensic work as human rights work has emerged, with experts from the region increasingly called upon to assist international tribunals or perform exhumations of mass graves. Technical-scientific forensic interventions are however only part of the story. Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice require exploration of the intersection between international legal norms, regional human rights systems, and domestic criminal justice. While Latin America was a pioneer in originating a regional Convention against Enforced Disappearance, and the Inter-American Human Rights system has been active around the issue since the 1970s, the tensions inherent in retrospective application of those principles to historic crimes have been addressed in varied ways around the region. Activists, relatives’ associations, and cause lawyers have been key actors in navigating domestic impunity, reinterpreting domestic amnesty legislation, and attempting to establish individual accountability for collective, institutional criminality. Meanwhile, democratization and legal reforms have produced state structures at least theoretically more open to complying with ex officio duties in truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. Prosecutions of past perpetrators, both military and civilian, have however provoked social and political controversy. The entire enterprise of seeking remains is meanwhile inimical to historical demands for ‘aparicion con vida’. Some relatives’ associations, and associated political groups, accordingly refuse to recognize the search for remains or certification of death, whether by state or non-state actors. The existence in some countries of a generation of appropriated children, stolen from their forcibly disappeared parents and brought up under false identities, has added weight to these refusals and produced specific scientific innovation in the use of DNA mapping to trace even indirect biological relationships. Cultural, ethnic and religious cleavages that were often at the heart of conflict dynamics of conflict moreover complicate processes of truthtelling, reparation, and even physical identification. Attempts to trace and identify the disappeared therefore give rise to conflicts between ‘civic trust’ and scientific certainty, compounded by a legacy of mistrust between citizens and previously collusive or directly repressive states. This working paper collates and synthesises the results of three events stimulating dialogue between law, social science and forensic (natural) sciences around the issue of disappearance and enforced disappearance in contexts of past political violence. This dialogue, focused principally on Latin American experiences, took the form of two workshops and a set of academic panels carried out in January and April 2017, in Santiago de Chile and Lima, Peru. The events were designed, timed and targeted to contribute to ongoing policy processes in Chile and Peru, as both countries are in the process of designing national mechanisms or search plans in accordance with the terms of the 2006 International Convention against Enforced Disappearance. They also sought to inform ongoing academic and policy debates in and about El Salvador and Sri Lanka, to provide a platform for interaction with relatives’ associations - whose participation is key for successful national design processes - and to highlight the potential resource represented by key international and regional actors such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Latin American Forensic Anthropology Association (ALAF), and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH). The events, and subsequent academic and policy publications, were supported by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) through the LASA-Ford Special Grant ‘Caring for the Missing: Respuestas Humanitarias, Juridicas a la Desaparicion de Personas’, 2017; and in part through the Ulster University Research Challenge Fund project ‘Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance – Scoping Study’ (2017).

Working Paper Caring for the Missing: Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Responses to Disappearance and Enforced Disappearancee

Enforced disappearance in Latin America is simultaneously an ongoing reality; an emblematic crime of past authoritarian regimes, and a significant component of the human toll of internal armed conflict in some Central American and Andean countries. Recent accountability developments in Latin America and beyond have called on forensic science to trace, unearth and restore the remains of the disappeared: as part of a judicial process, or as a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Some consider that a distinctive Latin American approach to forensic work as human rights work has emerged, with experts from the region increasingly called upon to assist international tribunals or perform exhumations of mass graves. Technical-scientific forensic interventions are however only part of the story. Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice require exploration of the intersection between international legal norms, regional human rights systems, and domestic criminal justice. This working paper collates and synthesises the results of three events stimulating dialogue between law, social science and forensic (natural) sciences around the issue of disappearance and enforced disappearance in contexts of past political violence. This dialogue, focused principally on Latin American experiences, took the form of two workshops and a set of academic panels carried out in January and April 2017, in Santiago de Chile and Lima, Peru.

Liminal Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Researching, Writing and Disseminating an Archival Novel about the Violent Past

This article explores the concept of liminal fiction, a new literary genre that takes on the challenge of narrating human rights in the sphere of transitional justice. Liminal fiction makes porous the boundaries between literature, law, history, art, and the archive. Using the work of contemporary visual artists who explore the art of forensics, and ground-breaking research methodologies adopted by social and forensic anthropologists, this article analyses the idea of researching and fictionalising a new memory paradigm, one rooted in the visual imagery of disinterred remains. It suggests that establishing a creative synthesis between interdisciplinary research and writing a work of fiction is a means to open up new avenues for narrating the history of the missing. This is partly achieved through a re-configuration of the role of writer and reader as co-curators, charged with the task of shifting through a multi-layered narrative that links the exhumation of mass graves in Spain in the 2000s with experiences in the country's postwar diaspora and the 'Indignados' demonstrations and occupations of 2011. Further, it becomes possible to consider alternative methods of 'publication' and dissemination of a work of liminal fiction — part-archive, part-book, part-installation — in creative collaborations with 'new musuems of space and emotion.'**This refers to a term used by economist and campaigner Susie Symes to evoke the significance of memory sites such as 19 Princelet Street, London, where she is Chair of Trustees.

Restoring the dignity of the wars disappeared? Exhumations of mass graves, restorative justice and compassion policies in Peru

In recent years, exhumation campaigns of mass graves resulting from the armed conflict (1980–2000) between the Maoist guerrillas of PCP-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) and the States armed forces have increased in Peru. People in rural Andes, the most marginalised sectors of national society, which were also particularly affected by the war, are the main group concerned with exhumations. This article examines the handling, flow and re-appropriation of exhumed human remains in public space to inform sociopolitical issues underlying the reparation policies implemented by the State, sometimes with the support of human rights NGOs. How do the families of victims become involved in this unusual return of their dead? Have the exhumations become a new repertoire of collective action for Andean people seeking to access their fundamental rights and for recognition of their status as citizens? Finally, what do these devices that dignify the dead reveal about the internal workings of Peruvian society – its structural inequities and racism – which permeate the social fabric?