German president Joachim Gauck was visiting Peru, although his visit was cut short by news of the plane crash in France. With that in mind, I've been reading some of the German media coverage. Below is my translation of an article from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on memory of the Peruvian conflict.
An empty
place of memory
Peru has
set up a place of memory for the victims of terrorism with German help – but powerful
people are still struggling with the past.
There is a
memorial at the gate of the presidential palace on the Plaza Mayor in the heart
of the Peruvian capital, Lima. It is a marble obelisk about four meters high on
a black base. Then-president Alan García inaugurated it in May 2009. It is dedicated
to the “4,357 defenders of the fatherland and democracy” who became “victims of
terrorist crimes” – members of the armed forces and the police, politicians and
officials. Every day around lunchtime, the colourful changing of the guards
takes place in the space in front of the neo-baroque state building.
The obelisk
for the victims of terrorism is to a certain extent part of a ceremony which
the Republic of Peru uses each day to reiterate its history –from independence
won in 1821 from its Spanish colonial masters through to the stable and
flourishing democracy of the present. The memorial in front of the presidential
palace does, admittedly, not do justice to the painful era of terrorism from
1980 to 2000. In the years of the terror caused by the Maoist guerrillas of the
Shining Path and the MRTA, it was not just the 4,357 military and state
officials who lost their lives. Most of the about 70,000 victims of the bloody
conflict between the leftist terror groups and the Peruvian armed forces were
civilians, and the mother tongue of three quarters of these civilian victims
was the indigenous language Quechua.
Unlike the
4,357 victims of terror from the security forces and authorities, the much
larger number of murdered and disappeared people from the mostly indigenous civilian
population do not have a national monument, unless you count the various
documentation and memory centres that have been set up in the particularly
affected Andean region of the South by victims’ associations. Yet this gap in
the national healing process of the now-secure Peruvian democracy could have
been closed long ago.
The
impressive building of the “Lugar de la Memoria” (place of memory) has been
ready for use in the district of Miraflores for nine months now and is waiting
to be filled with content and life. Germany contributed EUR 4.5 million to the
construction of the memorial, with Sweden also helping. But the design of the
planned permanent exhibition is still politically highly controversial.
Concepts developed by independent experts which are supposed to explain the
crimes committed and experienced by both sides equally, have become bogged down
in the bureaucracy of the ministries.
There are a
lot of indications that president Ollanta Humala, in office since July 2011,
wants to have his say in how Peru will present its recent, bloody history in
the national place of memory. After all, Humala is a former army office and in
1992 he was stationed at the Madre Mía base near Pacayacu in the Andes, from
where soldiers are said to have committed human rights violations during
actions against the civilian population, which was supposedly linked to the
Shining Path. Former president Alan García, whose first term in office from
1985 to 1990 saw notorious massacres of the indigenous population by the armed
forces, is also said to be doing his best to torpedo the exhibition plans.
The visit
of German president Joachim Gauck comes during this sustained phase of
sometimes heated national debate. It is the first time a German president has
visited Peru since 1964. On Saturday, Gauck opened a temporary exhibition on
the history of the conflict from 1980 to 2000 in the presence of Nobel
prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa, who has provided considerable support to the
Lugar de la Memoria project in his role as intellectual mentor. “Germany has
been a role model for overcoming the rule of violence by being open about it
instead of hiding it,” said Vargas Llosa with a view to the situation since the
reunification of Germany in 1990.
Certainly, the display boards put up for Gauck's visit and the museum opening were not able to fill the exhibition rooms - in terms of space or content. In the museum auditorium, Gauck made an almost imploring speech on the subject of "No future without the past" to the overwhelmingly young audience. As he did during his visit to Colombia in 2013, Gauck offered Peru Germany's help in working through the trauma of a period of history characterized by violence and injustice. The desire to repress the past and "look forward" is understandable, said Gauck, but what is buried will resurface, at the latest in the next generation. "A nation does not lose itself when it admits its guilt," said the German president.
The leftist terror, as well
as the retaliatory terror of the army and police, were primarily directed at
the Andean region of Ayacucho in the south of the country. In the capital,
Lima, on the Pacific coast, terrorism made itself felt with occasional bomb and
other attacks, but it did not come to the “war of liberation” in the cities
which the student sympathisers of the guerrillas hoped and worked for. In June
and September 1992, the Peruvian security forces achieved two decisive strikes
against the terrorists when they captured Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining
Path, and Víctor Polay Campos, leader of the MRTA. It would take another eight
years for the era of terror to come to an end in 2000. Guzmán and Polay Campos
are now 80 and 63 years old, respectively. They have been sentenced to long
prison terms and are both held in the high-security jail at Callao, in the port
region of Lima – incidentally, the same prison where the notorious former
secret service chief Vladimiro Montesinos is also held. He was responsible for
many massacres committed by the State and ultimately toppled due to his
connections to drug cartels and widespread bribing of politicians, military
officials and the media.
The independent truth and
reconciliation commission was founded in 2001. Its exemplary work, including
listening to about 16,000 witnesses, is regarded as a milestone in Peru’s
process of dealing with its past. The commission found that 54% of the victims
were killed by the Shining Path, while the Peruvian military and paramilitary
groups were responsible for 42%.
Victims become gracious
when perpetrators admit their guilt, said Gauck during his speech at the
opening of the museum. He also stressed this belief during his private
conversations with president Ollanta Humala. Whether his advice was taken on
board remains to be seen, not least in the Lugar de la Memoria. The consensus
about dealing with the past in Peru was stable enough to build a place of
memory, but so far, it has not been strong enough to fill it.
Ein leerer Ort der Erinnerung (FAZ.net)
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