Voices silenced: violent societies and the destruction of language

Many transitional governments – in their quest to find expeditious rather than inclusive legal and political settlements – fail to recognise that merciless campaigns of murder, torture, detention and other forms of physical and emotional brutality carried out by repressive regimes or groups have resulted in the nearly complete destruction of language amongst victims. Violent repressors in many contexts have sought to silence the voices of those whom they have subjugated through the use of violence that has structural, symbolic and ‘everyday’ dimensions, and that involves as its core a deep-seated desire to eradicate victims’ capacity for self-expression and articulation (cf. Bourgois, Reference Bourgois2001). The ‘snares’ of such violence contribute to the destruction of language and make it extremely difficult (if not impossible) for victims to narrate alternative versions of the past that challenge effectively the ideological distortion and manipulation propagated by perpetrators of political violence (Hinton, Reference Hinton2002). Victims are thus pushed into occupying a liminal social space, unable to communicate their despair. Denied the opportunity to talk about their suffering, victims are forced into complex states of self-recrimination and shame by violence (Das et al., Reference Das, Kleiman, Lock, Ramphele and Reynolds2000). The desire of oppressive regimes to eradicate language also has a particularly sinister dehumanising and macabre political logic, in addition to its primordial barbaric dimensions. The silencing of victims serves a contemporary ‘here and now’ political purpose, negating any opportunity the victims might have to maintain any form of dissent or seek any legal redress within the autocratic or violence-ridden context. In the longer term, having stripped victims of dignity and numbed them psychologically, it prevents them from engaging in retrospective narration of terrible events, reducing the prospects for the creation of an alternative ‘victims’ history’.

Victims of political violence therefore have often experienced an almost complete loss of narrative function and capacity. This breakdown of narrative facility is a key indication that they have entered a period or state of crisis. As White has noted (Reference White1987, p. 149) ‘with any weakening of narrativising capacity, the group loses its power to locate itself in history’. Perhaps one of the most well-known analyses of the ways in which language is destroyed by pain is that offered by Elaine Scarry (Scarry, Reference Scarry1985). Scarry describes the myriad ways in which torture by violent or oppressive regimes acts to suppress and eradicate a victim’s capacity for speech; and how acts of violence and physical repression are central to perpetrators’ desire to excise the identities of their victims. Recourse to protracted and systematic physical brutality to mute those who dare to ‘dissent’ is not uncommon in authoritarian, autocratic or violent societies. It is a precedent of harm well established (Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Argentina, Chile) and well understood by those seeking to impose tyranny and suffocate genuine political debate. Very often, active dissent is not even a prerequisite for being selected for assassination, detention or torture. Simply belonging to the ‘wrong’ ethnic or political group (or being merely suspected of ‘crimes against the regime’) is often motivation enough for despotic groups or governments to enact brutal campaigns of violence against civilian populations. As recorded in the report (Nunca Mas) of the Argentinian Truth Commission: ‘to have a person suspected of subversion in the family was more than sufficient reason for punishing the family as a group or individually. To show any solidarity, however minimal, was reason enough for torture, suffering and even disappearance’ (Report of Conadep (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons), 1984: Part 2, section C).

In such circumstances, the state, the normal duty of which ordinarily is to protect its citizens from harm, either becomes an agent of violence and persecution or is unable to prevent campaigns of violence between groups under its supposed control. This causes acute trauma, exacerbating the victims’ feelings of loss, and shattering their beliefs in the supposed innate goodness of political and legal systems (Edkins, Reference Edkins2003). In the chaos of violent conflicts, or the autocracy of systems in which human rights abuses frequently or routinely occur, legal power can be another instrument used by oppressors to persecute all those perceived to be ‘enemies’. In such contexts the law, far from being a neutral arbiter and an inherently procedural and fair mechanism for settling disputes, protecting citizens and upholding rights, can become a tool that totalitarian governments use to shield themselves from future accountability for their nefarious activities (cf. Paris, Reference Paris2001). This means that the capacity of victims to ‘bring perpetrators to justice’ via traditional retributive legal mechanisms that involve victim storytelling is negated. As noted by Conadep in Argentina:

The law was also used in Chile as a mechanism by which perpetrators of political violence could protect themselves from any form of accountability. General Pinochet, head of the military junta from 1973 until 1990, made various attempts to ensure during his tenure as President that, whatever the political circumstances in the future, both he and his followers would be immune from any possible prosecutions for human rights violations for which their administration was responsible. Upon retiring from his position as commander-in-chief of Chile’s armed forces in 1998, he declared himself a ‘senator for life’. He also had an amnesty law passed in 1978 that blocked the prosecution of any crimes against persons that had been committed by the government between 1973 and 1978 (the Aylwin government elected to replace Pinochet had no power over the Chilean senate, and thus no opportunity to revoke or amend this amnesty law). It has been estimated by the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Reports of 2004 and 2005 (‘Valech Report’) that Pinochet’s adminstration was responsible for over 3,000 killings and 27,000 cases of incarceration and possible torture. The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report (‘Rettig Report’) of 1991 had originally suggested that the regime was responsible for 2,095 killings and 1,102 ‘disappearances’. While Chile retained faith in the idea that offical state-sanctioned inquiries into the history of political violence were required to engineer social and political solidarity, they dispensed with the crucial need – largely due to political expediency and post-conflict nation democractic rebuilding – to construct mechanisms of victim storytelling by which they could bestow those inquiries with any semblance of legitimacy, most notably the capacity to hold human rights abusers legally and morally accountable for their crimes. This was an important indication of the ways in which the ‘language of the law’ was used cynically by a repressive regime to ‘make legal’ that which was previously not. However, in 2004, the legal authorities in Chile were finally able to wrestle some measure of control back from Pinochet, when the Chilean Supreme Court stripped him of his legal immunity and he was charged with human rights offences.

As Edkins (Reference Edkins2002) has argued cogently, those in positions of such power as the Chilean or Argentinian military juntas extend their grip so far that they begin to exclude all forms of political life – ‘all forms of life become nothing but bare life’ (Edkins, Reference Edkins2002, p. 247). This Rubicon was reached and crossed during the Nazi period (particularly between 1940 and 1945), for example, when the lives of prisoners in concentration camps became nothing but ‘bare life’ – something that could be disregarded casually and contemptuously, to be used instrumentally in hideous, twisted medical experimentation, for slave labour, or for execution (cf. Rees, Reference Rees2005). It is possible to argue that the mindset in which certain groups became regarded as ‘sub human’ has taken hold in other violent and authoritarian contexts (Guatemala, for example (Grandin, 2004)), and led to acts of unspeakable political terror against innocent civilians. The typical desire of those who inflict torture and brutality for political purposes is to make victims aware that there is not any form of agonising or compassion over their treatment (cf. Levi, Reference Levi1991; Conroy, Reference Conroy2000; Vrba, Reference Vrba2006). Rather, the capriciousness of widespread assassinations is used by repressive regimes or groups as an enabling and facilitating mechanism for systematised violence. Importantly, victims in such contexts are left with no sense of ‘why’. By removing this very fundamental concept of self-identity, repressors attempt to reach the ultimate point in the destruction of victims’ language. They recognise the critical truth that taking away language – removing the capacity to articulate or formulate sense of self or to forge relationships (and latterly even the ability to speak of their experience) – is a key factor in establishing the long-term marginalisation of particular groups and the total eradication of social and political dissent. As Vignar argued, torture tells its victims ‘Go ahead, scream, scream all you like, scream your lungs out – nobody can hear you, nobody would dare to hear you, nobody cares about you’ (quoted in Weschler, Reference Weschler1990, p. 242). Even long after a tyrannous regime has collapsed, the devastating effects of violence can be reproduced in the refusal by many to countenance or acknowledge histories of suffering, and the desire of new regimes to suppress alternative versions of the truth or isolate and quarantine victim storytelling so that peaceful and pragmatic political transitions can occur (Paris, Reference Paris2001).

Voices silenced: the marginalisation of victims’ voices

One of the key problems that transitional administrations consequently confront is how best to design a process that can re-establish the personhood and citizenship of victims and enable them to rediscover language and narrate their stories, guaranteeing them and their suffering a place in the reconstructed tale of the past. This is made more complex by the dangers inherent in rapid transitional processes in which the imperatives of political and legal compromise and state or administration building can dictate that there is undue haste in the creation of a new, official, reconstructed collectivity. This ‘shared future’ is often composed out of the rubble and detritus of a shattered past (Rotberg and Thompson, Reference Rotberg and Thompson2000; Bell, Reference Bell2004). Interim or new democratic regimes seek to fashion ‘master narratives’ of the past (and, crucially, of the future too) that will be able to withstand (perhaps even repress) the dissent of those who do not share in their conclusions or sympathies. The creation of master narratives can further reinforce liminal barricades through the deliberate or inadvertent use of ‘neutral’ language and the expectation of a transmutation of victim emotions from grief and despair to peace and reconciliation. Master narratives are in many cases incapable of giving exposure to the divergent stories of marginalised groups, particularly victims of violence (cf. Bakhtin, Reference Bakhtin1981; Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984). Whilst the ‘unified voice’ of new administrations speaks either in hushed or ambiguous tones of a chaotic past, or triumphantly in the case of a successful political revolution, it acts simultaneously (whether inadvertently or consciously) to marginalise those who reject the imposition of an historical narrative in which their story is improperly recorded, reflected, or omitted altogether. Often, as in the case of El Salvador (cf. Arnson, Reference Arnson1999) and Chile (cf. Brown, p. Reference Brown1991), the reports of truth commissions in which master narratives are enshrined distill the violence of the past into what Grandin has described as ‘a manageable, lucid story, one that portrays terror as an inversion of a democratic society, a nightmarish alternative of what lies ahead if it does not abide by constitutional rules’ (Grandin, Reference Grandin2006, p. 2). This can be a matter of pragmatism – difficult, and particularly volatile, political situations ostensibly demand that crucial and often difficult decisions are taken in order to protect citizens from further conflict. However, it is not necessarily theoretically correct to assume that catch-all political or legal solutions, even those predicated upon quick and incisive decisions calculated to inflict least harm upon an unstable citizenry, are best for everyone. In parts of Latin America, for example, the transitional dynamics of pragmatic post-conflict nation-building have resulted in the terror and violence that occurred during the tyrannous rule of oppressive regimes being portrayed within truth commission reports as a breakdown of social relations, an example of the political, social and cultural ‘aberrations’ to which the region has allegedly been prone since countries there had achieved independence in the nineteenth century (cf. Nino, Reference Nino1996). Such an argument – framed as it is in a detached, sometimes third-person narrative (as it is in parts of the truth commission reports of Chile and Guatemala (cf. Schirmer, Reference Schirmer1998)) – strikes the outside observer as fatuous in the extreme, and does little to interact with the complexities of a situation in which violence was conducted in the name of ‘protecting the state’ (cf. Cuevas et al., Reference Cuevas, Rojas and Baeza2002). The creation of a ‘single voice’, a unitary narrative, further silences those peripheral groups who have already found that their history – and their very ability to formulate and articulate language to communicate their stories – has been destroyed by violence.

The failure of transitional societies appropriately to address this problem, and ensure that the accounts of victims are officially acknowledged, constitutes another form of violence against them (Cavell, Reference Cavell1997; West, Reference West2003). Continued violation of this kind, for example, occurred in Argentina, where Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (mothers of those who ‘disappeared’ – kidnapped and presumably murdered – at the hands of the Argentinian military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983) campaigned for the release of information pertaining to the disappearance of their children, and refused to accept monetary reparations from the government in the post-authoritarian era (for an in-depth discussion of this phenomenon, see Taylor, Reference Taylor1997). To relegate victims to the periphery of transitional reconstruction exacerbates their feelings of isolation and alienation and acts once again to silence rather than amplify their narratives, reducing their ability to formulate coherent recollections of their experience and ensuring a further destruction of their narrative capacity. Whilst we might accept that all witnesses to terror serve as unwitting vehicles for its transmission, it is nonetheless unacceptable to use this as reason or rationalisation for the exclusion of victims’ groups from mainstream legal and political reconstruction. Human rights abusers recognise the centrality of language and discourse and their desire is to deny victims the ability to ‘speak out’. Transitional governments are thus colluding in this desire if they act to exclude victims’ stories of violence. If a state fails to offer proper fora in which victims can publicly recollect their experiences, there is a clear imbalance which reflects an elementary sense of injustice (cf. Wilson, Reference Wilson2003). Aggregation is often the resultant phenomenon of the manufacture of master narratives of the past which are presented (and solidified) as the ‘authentic’ product of widespread processes of political change, and the first repositories for those seeking to understand the society (and its history) in question. This is a form of ‘managed change’, in which unitary versions of the past are provided as mechanisms by which new administrations can gain support for the new social order.

The ways in which ‘history’ is created and articulated by oppressive regimes, and subsequently ‘managed’ by incoming transitional administrations, therefore has particular impact for victims of political violence whose own stories can result in dissonance and incongruity with the dynamics of transitional legal and political change, and subsequent exclusion from political reconstruction. For victims within societies emerging from the wreckage of conflict – particularly if such conflict has resulted in genocide, human rights abuses or ethnic cleansing – the notion of a simplistic process of ‘moving on’ obviates the need to discover the truth. In a therapeutic age, ‘closure’ has become one of the predominant political and legal dynamics (Ochberg, 1988; Bandes, Reference Bandes2000; Humphrey, Reference Humphrey2003; Reference Humphrey2005). However, this imperative often acts as a direct or indirect instruction to victims of violence to abandon their pursuit of the truth, and to relinquish their right to reclaim language and retell their stories publicly.

The logic of unduly rapid processes of transitional reconstruction that seek to hermetically seal the past (either though a refusal to countenance truth recovery proceedings at all or via the imposition of a unitary narrative of the past that essentialises victims) is that new democratic governments might more easily cement their power without the spectre of public trial, lustrations or truth recovery projects which could expose the evils of the past or apportion blame for human rights abuses (this is particularly relevant if members of the new administration are concerned that their culpability in human rights abuses might be uncovered). Whilst there is an obvious rationale in this, especially in volatile political contexts (cf. Biggar, Reference Biggar2001), it is also an abrogation of the duty of those societies with a traumatic past to ensure that such violence can never occur again. In effect, unduly swift political and legal transitions can mask and mute the reality of past suffering and deny victims the opportunities to reclaim language and rediscover their voice via the public articulation of their personal stories and alternative histories. The language of psychotherapy (‘moving on’; ‘bringing closure’) can be used to disguise unsavory legal ‘bargaining’ with perpetrators of violence (such as amnesty provision), or acts of political expediency designed to fortify weak post-conflict democracies. This demand also feels to many victims of violence like an insensitive desire to elide ‘their history’ unless ‘moving on’ is an essential and intrinsic part of a much wider, carefully choreographed and appropriately supported legal and political process (cf. Bell, Campbell and Ní Aoláin, Reference Bell, Campbell and Ní aoláin2003). Indeed, the sheer banality of such simplistic sentiment obfuscates the gravity of the issue of truth recovery (cf. Weschler, Reference Weschler1990). The consequence can be ambivalence, if not outright tension, between the architects of transitional legal and political arrangements and procedures (and the majority of the ‘directly unaffected’ general public), and those victims groups (or indeed individuals) who refuse to countenance expeditious legal or political ‘solutions’ that require them to make further sacrifices in the interest of an amorphous ‘greater good’, and that can result in processes of truth recovery that are appropriated by governments so that value-laden conformist accounts of the past can be fabricated. Victims are suspicious of such solutions because they often involve political decisions which are calculated to ensure that no processes of truth telling and accountability are instituted, or that any truth recovery processes that are created by transitional governments involve only the ‘controlled’ release of information by new administrations.

There is potential for transitional collapse – and at worst ensuing social and political catastrophe – inherent in the systematised exclusion of the voices of victims (cf. Grandin, Reference Grandin2006). Political and legal transitions that rely on the production of exclusive unitary totalising narratives of the past can mean that the atomised impact of individual violence is often ‘explained away’ with recourse to an essentialising analysis of victims as belonging to a uniform ‘collective’. Post-conflict democracies must rebuild social and political relationships according to a legal framework that allows for the retelling of individual victims’ suffering, and that is robust enough to accommodate competing perspectives that might not necessarily fit ‘paradigmatic’ templates established by new administrations (cf. Ní Aoláin and Campbell, Reference Ní aoláin and Campbell2005). Yet for governments and policy-makers, it can often be of paramount importance to try to strengthen a new regime with recourse to the manufacture of an inclusive ‘catch all’ official history to which the majority of citizens can subscribe (Hamber and Wilson, Reference Hamber and Wilson2002; Phelps, Reference Phelps2004).

Arguably, since one of the first truth commissions was instituted in Bolivia in 1982 (the relatively small-scale Comision Nacional de Desaparecidos) state-sanctioned and state-managed investigations into the history of political violence have become a customary part of the transitional agenda for societies seeking to cultivate a notion of liberal citizenship that concretises the idea of the state as the arbiter of legal disputes and the protector of individual rights (cf. Hayner, Reference Hayner1994; Kritz, Reference Kritz1995; Bell, Reference Bell2003). However, as transitional governments can also be the direct result of an ancien régime having been toppled, its figureheads deposed and its symbols destroyed, new regimes can also become creators, or at the very least sponsors, of a process of social engineering, creating a history and identity of ‘the victor’. It might be argued by some that this kind of triumphalist political posturing helps shore up single-identity support in periods of uncertainty, but it makes no genuine attempt to recover truth or to understand the suffering of minority groups. In these situations, it is the victims of violence who are often forgotten, their voices silenced, their tragedy dismissed either as a difficult and disconcerting encumbrance to be ‘solved’ (often through the offer of financial reparation) as quickly as possible (as with the Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina (cf. Taylor, Reference Taylor1997)); or their suffering treated unsympathetically, if not callously, as being the inevitable consequence of being members of the ‘wrong’ ethnic group (‘they deserved it’ – as was the case in many anti-colonial transitions, including, for example, Algeria). Should transitional societies seek to erase aspects of their past, no matter the apparent ‘greater’ political aim, the result will be the establishment of a distasteful precedent in which any form of dissent or minority voice will be subjugated. Indeed, the political and legal dynamics of transitional reconstructions that are founded upon processes that are designed to engineer an ill-defined concept of ‘closure’ do a huge disservice not only to those victims who voices continue to be excluded, but also to the emergent post-conflict civil society which is denied the chance to create a vibrant public sphere (Habermas, Reference Habermas1996).

I argue that no political and legal process that determines only to ‘draw a line under the past’ can capably achieve the reclamation of language amongst those who have been returned to a ‘non-’ or ‘pre-’ language state by the nefarious acts of perpetrators of political violence. Without rediscovery of victims’ voices, the idea of an inclusive process of truth recovery (essential to an effective legal and political transition) remains a chimera. Policy-makers should recognise that they are not only required to construct processes of truth recovery that afford the opportunity for dialogue and public storytelling, but that they must endeavour to rebuild the ‘shattered voices’ of victims of conflict in order that such the potential for such processes to achieve reconciliation might be realised (Phelps, Reference Phelps2004). A continuation of victims’ exclusion from mainstream social reconstruction in the post-conflict phase denies them this opportunity, and ensures that the ‘present serves as the repository of a deadening past’ (Daniel, Reference Daniel1996, p. 354). In addition, if transitional truth recovery processes fail to take account of the need for language reclamation, then discordance will continue to obtain between victims’ self-identity and the identity afforded to them by the state. In their inflexibility, master narratives alienate victims from their rigid frameworks for analysing and understanding the past (Daniel, Reference Daniel1996). It is important to acknowledge that in countries or societies that have experienced campaigns of violence or brutal and systematic human rights abuses, the language and voices of victims have been marginalised or destroyed. Processes of meaningful truth recovery therefore require that an acknowledgement that empowering victims to recover language and to formulate and articulate stories is a crucial facet of the transitional rebuilding project.

Voices rediscovered: storytelling and the reclamation of language

Acknowledging, therefore, that the political and social reconstruction that occurs during transition should allow for the reclamation of language and the recovery of victims’ voices, it is important to recognise that the perpetrators of political violence have attempted to remove entirely the political, social and legal presence of victims, and the cultural context from which they came (cf. Trouillot, Reference Trouillot1995). The self of victims has often been deconstructed by the brutality and violence of despotic or tyrannous regimes or groups. This has lasting symbolic and practical consequences. A process of public storytelling and communicative dialogue can allow for victims to ‘take back’ their self-pride, their self-worth, and assume their place as an intrinsic part of the new post-conflict political order. This is in effect, is a critical act of legal and political rebalancing that empowers victims. Recounting experiences of suffering provides victims with a reconnection with time and space, enabling them to relocate themselves within the new political and social mainstream (cf. Ricoeur, Reference Ricoeur1984).

Yet simply encouraging victims to break their silence is one thing; empowering and enabling them to do it quite another (De Brito et al., Reference De brito, Gonzalez-enriquez and Aguilar2001). New administrations might pay lip service to the idea of ‘hearing’ victims’ testimony, but the imperatives of political resettlement can dictate that beyond the surface level, little is sometimes done to create a framework which can support the public retelling of stories, and the intersubjective interchange of dialogue between victims and perpetrators of political violence. Victims have experienced a loss of their personal history on two levels. They have been silenced, their narratives suppressed and their capacity to articulate their experiences destroyed by brutality. They have also had to contend with widespread dissemination of malevolent messages about their worth by the authoritarian regime, their supposed ‘crimes against the state’, and the systematic degradation of their identities (cf. Irwin-Zarecka, Reference Irwin-zarecka1994). The ‘false narrative’ of oppressive regimes is designed to instill fear, and also to fragment and fracture the social systems from where the victims have been taken, so that no serious networks of opposition can emerge. In this way, false narratives are preserved and the secrecy with which oppressive regimes operate protected. The objective of oppressive regimes is to create an atmosphere of ‘misinformation’; to confuse and bewilder so that subjugation of the general populace – and in particular those perceived to be enemies of the state – is more easily accomplished. Central to the achievement of this objective is the complete subversion of language. Victims and opposition groups are denied opportunities to speak and narrate their stories, and those who might potentially constitute an audience are frightened into a state of denial or ambivalence (cf. Janof-Bulman, Reference Janof-bulman and Filgley1985).

The recovery of language and a process of public storytelling amongst victims, however, can lead to a destruction of the false narratives that tyrannous administrations have created so that they could justify and continue to engage in malicious activities. Once victims begin to tell their stories the blanket of silence that has served to hide and facilitate violence and human rights abuses can be removed (cf. Bronkhorst, Reference Bronkhorst1995). The rebalancing of transition therefore requires not only the rediscovery of language amongst victims, but also the removal of the threat of retaliation from those who might be prepared to help victims tell their stories, or at the very least be prepared to listen to them and acknowledge the veracity of their accounts. Victims must be provided with opportunities to attempt to counter the lies of those who have sought to dehumanise them (and be equipped with the appropriate help to do so).

Reclaiming and using language as a form of legal and political redress through a process of meaningful truth recovery is therefore an obvious, necessary and logical step for new regimes to take. The physical pain of the past has actively destroyed victims’ capacity to narrate their experiences, making the articulation of coherent histories increasingly difficult (Scarry, Reference Scarry1985; Jackson, Reference Jackson2002). Transitional societies should not attempt to marginalise victim narratives because of anxiety about the potential for such dissonance to create legal or political disruption, because in doing so they can appear to agree with the logic of those groups who seek to obscure the truth of their violent activities (Phelps, Reference Phelps2004). Allowing victims to reclaim language and narrate their experiences is a fundamental aspect of the ‘rebalancing project’ necessary in transitional societies to right the wrongs of the past. Such rebalancing is centred on the reclamation of language and the subsequent telling of stories. As Scarry has noted (Reference Scarry1985, pp. 172–3) ‘to be present when the person in pain rediscovers speech and so regains his powers of self-objectification is almost to be present at the birth, or the rebirth, of language’.

Voices rediscovered: the interpretive dimension of storytelling

The importance of the interpretive dimension in language reclamation and victim storytelling cannot be understated, for stories are retold not only according to subjective perceptions but also local legal, cultural and political contexts and the conventions and customs of situated narrative structures. As Antze and Lambek (Reference Antze and Lambek1996, p. viii) have noted, ‘memories are not simply records of the past, but interpretive reconstructions’. It would be naïve to assume that the assimilation of multi-dimensional ‘versions of the past’ is easily achievable, especially in unstable transitional contexts. The theoretical basis for change, which can facilitate genuine language rediscovery in post-conflict societies, should be beyond the mere processes of change, the content and form of which have been institutionalised in many contexts as either retributive legal proceedings (examples of which include the Nuremberg trials; and the trials in post-authoritarian Greece) or truth commissions (as in Chile, South Africa or Uruguay (cf. Hayner, Reference Hayner1994)). There is no general rebuttal here of the mechanisms that are currently available for the purposes of truth recovery. Rather, there is an acknowledgement that they are often theoretically unsound, designed to codify, essentialise and marginalise. In order to assist the process of nation-building in societies emerging from conflict, truth commissions have often concretised the production of official, collective narratives of the past as opposed to provoking meaningful public storytelling that signals the reclamation of language and, as such, a critical act of political and social rebalancing that can help fortify newly established democracies. The reclamation of language through a public process of post-conflict storytelling cannot simply be measured according to who ‘shouts the loudest’, or according to which group (ordinarily post-conflict transitional administrations, sometimes in collaboration with outside international agencies) has monopoly on the textual and political resources that enables it to ‘manufacture’ history. The incorporation of genuine polyphony in transitional truth telling, and the standard of what is ‘acceptable’ in terms not only of the past, but in terms of how the past is told in the future, is reliant upon some form of acceptable, consensually negotiated version of history, and not just upon an aspirational notion of ‘objective’ evidence. Victims must be able to enter processes of dialogical interchange already equipped to narrate their own story (‘communicatively competent’ in Habermasian terms (Habermas, Reference Habermas1984)), permitted by new administrations to retell their version of history publicly in the hope of achieving reconciliation and relocation within society. Upon the cessation of conflict, as has already been noted, victims are not always immediately capable of this. It is therefore of key importance to ensure that victims are empowered to tell their story. This demands that transitional regimes do not set about trying to create master narratives that allow little or no room for dissenting voices, but instead recognise the value of inclusive discourse and the value of a process of public storytelling. It is still crucially important, however, that even in this context, the transitional state is offered a means by which it, and its citizens, can ultimately begin to distinguish what stories can legitimately be regarded as ‘historical accounts’ which illuminate the past and assist democratic administrations to access complex social and political ‘truth’ or ‘truths’.

A genuine historical account – that which might be accepted by the citizens of transitional societies, within the context of legally mandated and controlled dialogical truth recovery, as representing the ‘truth’ of the past – is not just a ‘story’. In his analysis of storytelling and history, Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur1984; Reference Ricoeur2004) argued that it is not enough simply for people to tell a story of the past, to recount the contingencies of a given situation according to subjective perspective or even some concept of objective fact. Hypothetically, any number of stories could be recollected and articulated by victims and perpetrators of political violence, and all could appear to be equally plausible versions of the past. In order to avoid an unworkable and unacceptable form of relativism, however, transitional societies are required to perform a fine balancing act in their pursuit of the truth. They must avoid the creation of unitary ‘master narratives’ that repress dissent, yet also be careful not to credit all versions of the past as being of equal value. The notion of ‘equality of histories’ is a concept that is potentially as destabilising for transitional societies as the imposition of single, conformist narratives.

In making the case for language reclamation, it is crucial not to lapse into an unduly relativist position. I have argued instead that victims and peripheral groups in transitional contexts must be allowed to rediscover their voice, to articulate their stories in public and to engage with the dynamics of transitional political reconstruction. Such public dialogue is crucial not only to removing the liminal status of victims of political violence, but also a valuable act of political and social rebalancing. This is not to suggest, however, that all recollections of the past are recorded as necessarily ‘true’ or ‘accurate’; or that these accounts compel transitional governments to inscribe them as legal ‘historical fact’. Rather, the onus is on transitional governments to create a safe public space in which the voices of those who have been marginalised can be acknowledged, their stories heard, and their place as a central part of the new legal and political order established.

The reclamation of language and the act of storytelling therefore represents a key step within the transitional process. It is important, however, to find a way to connect the process of storytelling and victim narratives to the creation of ‘historical accounts’ which can be recorded and recognised as types of social and political ‘truth’. Ricoeur’s (Reference Ricoeur1984; Reference Ricoeur1985) distinction between ‘chronicle’ – a recounting of events in which the storyteller has attempted to make sense of past events – and ‘historical account’ is a useful one for transitional societies struggling to come to terms with competing narratives. Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur1984; Reference Ricoeur1985; Reference Ricoeur1988) argued that ‘chronicle’ must not be confused with ‘historical account’, primarily because chronicle lacks the ‘secondary referentiality’ that distinguishes legitimate historical accounts from mere stories of the past. Secondary referentiality is an indirect reference to the structure of temporality that provides events in stories with what Ricoeur described as ‘historicality’ (Geschichtlichkeit). Without the secondary referent, stories – however captivating, illuminative or informative – remain chronicle, and are incapable of providing transitional societies with ‘legitimate’ versions of the past that can be written into narratives of the past by legal technicians. The kind of discursive stories that can be accessed through dialogue and which can be transformed into polyphonic histories of a violent past are characterised by their possession of plots. To emplot events of the past helps to locate them within an inclusive narrative that can incorporate different perspectives. By emplotting stories, the past is ‘configured’ so that it represents, in symbolic terms, that which would be otherwise inexpressible in language (White, Reference White1987). The resultant historical discourse and narrative is an important commodity for those liminal groups who had previously been silenced, and enables them to discover and emplot their own stories, and to insert their recollections within ‘truth-based’ narratives of the past. The potential outcome of this is ‘Historicality’, an idealised end point of dialogic truth recovery in which events and stories of the past can be embedded legally within a multi-dimensional narrative of the past. According to White (Reference White1987, p. 177):

For Ricoeur (Reference Ricoeur1984; Reference Ricoeur1985; Reference Ricoeur1988), narrative discourse does not merely reflect a world that has already been made. Rather, it synthesises competing perceptions and reformulates them, producing something new and inclusive. However, in order for this to occur, communicative and emotional capacity building would have to be encouraged, moving victims out of the ‘quarantine’ of silence and preparing them for involvement in quasi-legal procedures that would require them to articulate their remembering.

The logical end point of this type of ‘preliminary phase’ of language reclamation and communicative capacity building would be evidence of the ability amongst victims of violence to narrate historical accounts, eventually within public fora, that might be accepted by the citizens of transitional societies, within the context of legally mandated and controlled dialogical truth recovery, as representing the ‘truth’ of the past. Victims and peripheral groups in transitional contexts must be allowed to rediscover their voice, to articulate their stories in public and to engage with the dynamics of transitional political reconstruction. Such public dialogue is crucial not only to removing the marginal status of victims of political violence, but also represents a valuable symbolic and practical act of political and social rebalancing.

Voices rediscovered: support for victims

New democratic administrations must therefore try to ensure that victims’ stories are acknowledged publicly, and documented adequately for legal and historical record (Elster, Reference Elster2004). This can bring new regimes into conflict with ‘vested interests’ – those who have much to lose if their involvement in past human rights abuses is made known. It can also lead to a more general conflict with an ambivalent or apathetic general public who cling to the idea of ‘moving on’ as the best panacea for the problems of a divided society. Combating the reluctance of the public to recognise the stories of victims requires a firm commitment on the part of the new regime to laying down boundaries for the reconstruction of society along robust democratic lines. Those who argue for a pragmatic approach – marginalising and quarantining the rediscovery of the past as potentially dangerous and destabilising – as the best method of avoiding descent into further conflict, hide from the possibility that in order to prove durable in the longer term, a democracy that claims to be free and fair must engage with the conflicting histories of its people, and must illuminate, rather than conceal, the wrongs of previous regimes (cf. Humphrey, Reference Humphrey2002; Reference Humphrey2003). Without such reflection, the new state risks being consigned to a situation in which the mistakes and abuses of the past are repeated. Pertinently, it can result in an unenviable state of affairs in which those who have suffered are relegated irretrievably to the periphery of the social and political mainstream; and in which effective transitional legal and political reconstruction is made extremely difficult. As Crocker (2004, p. 9) has argued persuasively: ‘victims and their descendants have a moral right to know about the truths of human rights abuses. Moreover, without reasonably complete truth, none of the other goals of transitional justice. . .are likely to be realized.’

The recovery and reclamation of language also means, in practical terms, that victims’ groups are offered the necessary financial and legal support to engage critically in truth recovery processes and the telling of their alternative histories (cf. Bloch, Reference Bloch and Bloch1998). This requires that what has happened to victims of violence during the course of a conflict be ‘spoken of’, yet it is with great difficulty that victims approach such a narrative process with any semblance of confidence. Whilst repressors might not have succeeded in completely erasing the victims’ ability to engage in dialogue, they have been effective in inhibiting both the desire and the capacity of victims to narrate their versions of the past. Trauma has a stultifying effect on victim narratives, and it stigmatises sufferers (Humphrey, Reference Humphrey2002). Victims of political violence are indelibly marked by their experience, and unless appropriate measures are taken by incoming governments or administrations to accommodate their perspectives on the creation of the histories of the past, their suffering can mean that they are also objectified by new regimes as being ‘outside’ of the main rebuilding process (however much political rhetoric might indicate otherwise). Their trauma has been outside the typical realm of experience of the majority of the citizenry, even in conflicts which have been comparatively widespread. It has therefore evaded easy definition (Hastrup, Reference Hastrup2003). This has often rendered it an uncomfortable reminder of the wrongs of a previous regime, forcing those unaffected people whose primary desire is to ‘move on’ into an unwanted confrontation with a visceral, graphic and shockingly violent past. Such violence has dislocated victim narratives and upset the trajectory of their experiences, so that they are not bound by the normal linear conventions of storytelling to which people are so accustomed. Clearly, imposing a beginning, middle and end (standard ‘three act’) structure upon experiences of violence so disruptive and damaging that they defy description and articulation has often been a priority for the builders of transitional administrations, ostensibly in order that such experiences might be intelligible to the wider public (cf. Jackson, Reference Jackson2002). However, worthy as this might be, this has often been done in a cynical manner to relegate victims’ issues and the legacy of the past; or to facilitate truth recovery processes in which victims’ stories are made digestible for the purposes of satisfying wider political objectives. There must instead be a method by which chaotic and fractured narratives of the past can be incorporated into mainstream discussions about the future, even if they do not chime with the particular political atmosphere of the transition. Conceptually, this might seem elementary, yet finding an inclusive procedure or set of procedures in the long term through which even those ‘truths’ and stories which seem utterly incompatible or incongruent with the dynamics of peace and reconciliation (as defined by new regimes), and which often stretch into the unknown territory of the as yet unspeakable, is arguably crucial to the long-term prospects of a stable democratic government.