This chapter examines the memorialisation of women in a transitional society using commemoration of women through memorials of the most recent Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ as a primary case study. In divided societies, such as Northern Ireland, memorialisation not only incorporates notions of mourning and symbolic reparation, but is intimately related to the partisan construction of communal political identities and the creation of narratives that seek variously to legitimate prior conflict and underwrite peace. Furthermore, it has been argued that representation and memory making associated strongly with ethno-national identities tends to squeeze out narratives and claims making based around gender. This chapter will interrogate these processes of commemoration and memory making along two axes; the description and conceptualisation of symbolic tropes and motifs depicting women; and the role and representation of women in memorial practice. It is also engaged with constructed hierarchies of victimhood and lionisation as projected by the physical memorials, which may meld notions of masculinity with a martialised femininity, and offer insights into processes of deliberate or indirect amnesia in the memorialisation of women in a divided society. A central argument will be that in contrast to many other regions, a fairly prolific and nuanced memorialisation of women has taken place in Northern Ireland, albeit within the compartmentalised sector of Irish Republican political or paramilitary activism. Processes of amnesia and exclusion however still apply in the representation of women who do not easily fit these roles.

This chapter will address the ideological values and social purposes behind the memory sites; the degree to which language and symbolism attached to the memory sites are traditional, innovative or problematic, and the ritual use of sites as a means of connecting audiences to their particular narratives. An overarching question will consider the degree to which memorialisation of this type aids or impinges processes of transitional justice in a divided society – specifically how it can help memorialisation engage with issues of gendered experience and the politicisation of the private sphere. There is a tension within this form of memorialisation – between the vernacularised representation of notions of rights, equality and political agency on one hand and the reproduction of a memorial template which traditionally privileges partisan, nationalistic and often militaristic forms.

In January 2012, the African Union Human Rights Memorial (AUHRM) was unveiled as a part of the new African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Abba, Ethiopia. The memorial forms a part of the new AU precinct built at the site of a former prison, Alem Bekagn, which gained notoriety as a site of massacre and detention during the period of the Italian occupation in 1936, and the Red Terror period from 1977 to 1979. The AUHRM, initially built with the goal to commemorate the Ethiopian Red Terror, the Rwanda Genocide, Apartheid in South Africa, colonialism and the slave trade aims to, in the future, expand to include and acknowledge mass atrocities in other countries on the continent. At the inauguration of the memorial, Professor Andreas Esthete, Chairman of the Interim Board of the AUHRM, noted

The AUHRM is just one example of the increased role that memorialisation has begun to play in post-conflict societies. Not only does the AUHRM exemplify the increased political recognition of, and commitment to use, memorialisation as a means to recognise victims of mass atrocity at a regional level but it also highlights the increased role of memorials in broader transitional justice processes where memorialisation has come to fill in some of the gaps that cannot be fully addressed by formal transitional justice mechanisms such as prosecutions. While memorials have almost always been a part of the public landscape, the role of memorialisation as a symbol of recognition of suffering and a form of reparations for victims gained political and social capital following the Holocaust as the world attempted to come to terms with mass atrocity, the scale of which was never before seen in modern times.

Settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada are undergoing “profound renegotiations of their histories” and are increasingly acknowledging the violence, trauma and dispossession of colonisation. As part of this process, a new generation of state-sponsored public memorials marks genocidal actions such as the systemic removal of Aboriginal children from their families in 20th Century Australia (a group now known as the Stolen Generations). These contemporary settler colonial memorials reflect the global post-war rise of public memorials that acknowledge instances of trauma, genocide and state violence. They invert traditional nation-building monumental forms, aiming to be interactive rather than pedagogical, fragmented rather than unified and evolving rather than completed. Their abstract aesthetic reflects absence and seeks to make space for multiple perspectives. This chapter explores the political complexities of Australian settler colonial memorials and their relationship to these broader global processes of memorialisation and post-conflict transformation. In particular, it examines the official central state memorial complex in the national capital Canberra, named ‘Reconciliation Place’, which is intended to both mark and bring about a newly integrated post-colonial society.

Settler colonial memorialisation efforts are often understood in the framework of transitional justice or reconciliation, that is, as part of the political and social rebuilding which must come after divisive internal conflicts. Public, communal acknowledgement of the full ‘truth’ of traumatic events through memorialisation is now widely accepted as central to the establishment of a new peaceful and just order. Settler colonial memorials share many characteristics with these international post-conflict memorials: they seek to acknowledge the violence and injustice of the past in order to facilitate a new political beginning; they accept the culpability of state institutions in much of the violence; they seek to create a single space where both victims and perpetrators can come together to build a shared and unifying historical narrative. This involves an attempt to break down rigid conflict-based group identities (in the settler case, coloniser and colonised) and to build diverse but integrated new communities. In recent decades, Australia has taken up many of the tools of transitional justice – official apologies, truth commissions and memorialisation – and in doing so has consciously connected itself to the political narrative of post-conflict transformation.

In January 2011, a small delegation of Rwandans travelled to Germany to meet with representatives and curators of the most significant Holocaust memorial sites. The group, comprised of representatives of victim organisations, the Kigali Memorial Center, the Commission for the Fight against Genocide as well as peace initiatives, had ventured on this journey to learn about the German experience with remembrance and commemoration in order to draw lessons for their own memory work. For despite all differences, what both countries have in common is a past marked by extreme violence, by genocide. And both seek to redress the past by means of building or conserving physical structures as sites of memory: memorials.

This is by no means an isolated scenario. Since the 1960–70s, we can see a worldwide upsurge of memorial projects that address the violent histories of recent wars, genocides and systematic human rights abuses. They include the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) in Argentina, the Robben Island Museum in South Africa, as well as many others some of which shall be investigated more closely in the context of this volume. Such interventions often employ a common architectural language and are informed by a set of political and ethical claims in regard to what role commemoration can and/or should play after large-scale violence: providing public sites of mourning, putting past wrongs right, holding perpetrators accountable, vindicating the dignity of victims-survivors and contributing to reconciliation.

Dealing with the legacy of the past is subject to transitional justice, a concept which has gained in popularity since it was first coined in the 1990s and which refers to ways and means of providing justice for past abuses in times of transition from violence to, at its most basic, peaceful coexistence. Conventionally, it incorporates a number of mechanisms such as truth commissions, tribunals, lustrations, reparations and more recently also memory work – including memorials – in order to deal with past injustices. It is based onthe assumption that any form of transition from violence to peaceful coexistence requires the disclosure of past events and the establishment of some form of justice for the victims in particular and the society in general.

When visiting Santiago de Chile in 2010, I encountered a new dimension to memorialisation efforts related to the military dictatorship: photo books of monuments and memorials. In a café close to La Moneda, an interviewee pointed out to me that a book had been published on monuments and memorials in Chile. I thought she was referring to a book published in 2007 by the Ministry of National Property, Memoriales en Chile. Homenajes a las Víctimas de Violaciones de Derechos Humanos. On the contrary, she was referring to a book from the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism published in October 2009, entitled Memorias de la Cuidad. Registro de Memoriales de Detenidos Desaparecidos y Ejecutados Políticos, Región Metropolitana; a full colour, hard back publication, full of pictures and explanatory texts. A few days later a friend offered to show me “a new book on monuments and memorials”. To my surprise she presented yet another book, this time published in January 2010 by the Program of Human Rights of the Ministry of Interior, entitled Geografía de la Memoria; also a full colour hardback with images of memorials.

The books differ somewhat in approach and focus, yet their introductions all refer to a culture of human rights, to the dictum ‘never again’, to democracy and a just society, and crucially, to the importance of memory in each of these. The series of images depict monuments and memorials in Chile, especially in its capital Santiago – some well-known and used as active memory places, others less known and half-forgotten. These monuments and memorials were created at different points in time by a wide variety of actors, and invite to reflect on the dynamics behind the memory landscape of Santiago: who undertakes these memory initiatives? What narratives do they want to convey? What are their struggles? Or more generally: how should we understand processes of memorialisation?

The comments in the epigraph which refer to the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial to remember state repression during the German Democratic Republic (GDR) could not be more graphic. Reflecting the diverse interpretations and perceptions of the site they point to a colourful memoryscape in Germany regarding the former socialist state. Yet how does the way the memorial space is conceptualised and presented relate to the wider social dynamics of dealing with the past? This is the subject of the present chapter.

The former Stasi remand prison in the north-eastern area of Berlin Hohenschönhausen was turned into a memorial in 1994 and is now a substantial part of the city's memoryscape as well as a popular destination for school classes, leisure tourists and local dwellers. In 2010, the annual number of visitors was 332,000 and in October 2010 the total number of visitors reached two million. Unsurprisingly, numbers rocketed after the release of the Academy Award winning film ‘The Lives of Others’ in which the prison features prominently, as well as after an incident with former Stasi officers in 2006 (see below), a fact which only confirms the view that sites are particularly interesting if they were notorious for death and pain, if the regime that perpetrated the abuses is considered to be unjust, and if the victims of the cruelties were likeable. This has also been referred to as Dark Tourism.

Memorials have become an important aspect of transitional justice discourses and practise. In addition to the immediate aspirations of serving as symbolic reparation – acknowledging guilt and responsibility, and vindicating the dignity of victims – debates around memorials serve as seismographs for assessing tendencies within societies regarding how the past is being remembered. In this sense, they are not merely measures to promote transitional justice in and of itself, but they also provide insights into the dynamics of dealing with the past in a society.

Therefore, this chapter pursues two objectives: first, it seeks to analyse the historical narrative about the Stasi as evoked and endorsed by the memorial Hohenschönhausen; second, and closely related, it situates this narrative in the wider social context of dealing with the GDR in current day Germany.

Over the past decade, memorialisation has become linked to the emerging field of transitional justice. Focused on “facilitating a transition to democracy”, transitional justice encompasses a range of interventions promoting truthseeking, justice and reparations for victims, including symbolic reparations in the form of memorials, public apologies and other public memory initiatives. Increasingly, transitional justice and memorialisation involve outside actors – individuals from other societies who provide specialised expertise through organisations operating at the regional and international levels. Some ‘outsiders’ also get drawn inadvertently into memorialisation through their work as peacekeepers or development practitioners involved in post-conflict peace building or reconstruction initiatives, as central to this chapter. But, despite growing interest in the role of historical memory in societies experiencing conflict and undergoing transitions, the contribution of memorialisation to transitional justice remains under-studied, especially the impact of outsiders involved in memorialisation. This gap reflects the fact that efforts to assess the impact of transitional justice more broadly are relatively recent and inconclusive.

In 2006, the United States Institute of Peace organised the Memorialisation Working Group to engage practitioners in reflective examination of the challenges they have faced with respect to memorialisation. This chapter shares insights from those discussions, as well as perspectives from other practitioners engaged in memorialisation since then. It focuses on practical questions with which practitioners continue to grapple: what is memorialisation, and what forms does it take? Who is involved and what are their motivations? How do different forms of memorials reflect different types of conflict? How is memorialisation connected to transitional justice? What specific roles can and do outsiders play in memorialisation, and what pitfalls should they anticipate?

DEFINING MEMORIALISATION: FORMS, TIMING, INITIATORS AND INTENTIONS

The urge to remember violence and repression is as prevalent as the impulse to eradicate terrible memories and move on. Memorialisation encompasses a wide range of forms and processes to honour and commemorate victims and survivors. While some initiatives are designed to reduce conflict and promote reconciliation and social reconstruction, others aim at the opposite effect by valorising polarising figures and historical narratives.

After the experience of mass violence communities and individuals alike have to come to terms with these violent histories which reverberate into the present and future. On the societal and political level, mechanisms commonly referred to as transitional justice are being deployed to deal with the legacy of repressive regimes and violent conflicts. Memorialisation – understood as the practice of remembrance such as through commemorations, the writing of history text books and the establishment of memorials – has become part of this wider transitional justice tool-box, although it has garnered much less attention than legal and truth-telling mechanisms. Memorials as one form of memorialisation can be understood as symbolic reparation for the victims and survivors of mass violence since they acknowledge their suffering and grief and pay respect to the dead. Therefore, after mass violence memorials can be understood as physical loci of recognition and the imperative not to forget the atrocities of the past.

Memorials to mass violence restore the violent past in the present moment and try to rewrite it by making the event intelligible to the onlooker. For the society which suffered the violence it is a steady reminder of its past and thus also forms a ‘point of connection’. In this sense, memorials move remembrance as a cultural practice beyond the boundaries of the individual, or as William Booth calls it, beyond the personal “thick memory” of one's mind. As a ‘point of connection’ memorials serve as a focal point for remembering the past, for the fight against the oblivion of injustice and inhumanity. At the same time, memorials constitute a medium to conserve the past (Speichermedium) and to ensure that personal memories are bonded to the cultural memory practices of the community. Thus, according to Maurice Halbwachs, memories must be tied to a physical presence in the world in order to recall the past and to contextualize it in the present. Memorials therefore serve to preserve that which might otherwise be at risk of being forgotten and eradicated from a community's memory.

The end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina marked the beginning of a transition from a society at war to a peaceful multi-ethnic society, a transition that is still on-going. One aspect of this transition is the question of dealing with the atrocities committed in the war of the early 1990s. How can a divided society address the massive human rights abuses in a manner that supports its transition to a future without violence?

In the context of an increased global emphasis on reckoning with past wrongs, post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina has witnessed the implementation of many transitional justice mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, international lustration measures or the vetting of state employees, just to name a few. Moreover, a number of memorials have been erected to commemorate the dead, which is in line with a tendency to include memorials in the toolkit of transitional justice, even though they are sometimes seen as instruments that promote narratives of enmity and revenge.

To understand the nexus between transitional justice in divided societies and memorials the town of Srebrenica serves as a good example, as it witnessed massive human rights violations during the war (1992–95) and today hosts the largest memorial in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The town's population consists of two dominant ethnic groups and former enemies, the Serbs and the Bosniaks which, today, live together without physical violence and at a first glance in harmony. However, if one stays in town longer, tensions between the groups become apparent, with the ethnic division rooted in the recent – and some will say the overall – history of Srebrenica. The war reached its climax in this little former tourist town when, in 1995, the Serb army of the so-called Republika Srpska committed genocide against the local Bosniaks and refugees who had sought refuge under the protection of the UN peacekeepers in a ‘safe area’. Approximately 40,000 Bosniaks were expelled and 8,500 killed. These incidents which happened in the context of the fall of the town in July 1995 made Srebrenica infamous throughout the world.

Today, only around 3,500 of previously 8,000 inhabitants remain in the town. As a consequence of the war the ethnic composition of the town has changed. Before, one third of the population was Serb and two-thirds Bosniak; during the war, while it was a Bosniak enclave, the number of inhabitants rose up to 70,000, due to a refugee influx from other parts of eastern Bosnia.

The Great Famine of 1932–33, also known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, is one of the most tragic pages in the country's modern history. Mass starvation caused by Stalin's policy of forced collectivisation took the lives of almost four million people in less than two years. Draconian requisitions of grain were followed by repressive measures which prohibited starving peasants from leaving their villages. The Famine was silenced by Soviet officials, but is remembered in many Ukrainian families. It was only since the end of the 1980's that this tragic event has become a subject of open discussion and public commemoration. This upsurge in the memory of the Famine contributed to the delegitimation of Soviet rule in Ukraine and helped to mobilise public opinion in favour of national independence. With the collapse of the Soviet Union the narrative of the Great Famine as one of the biggest crimes of Stalin's regime, i.e. the deliberate policy of ‘terror by hunger’ with the aim of suppressing the national aspirations of the Ukrainian peasants and their resistance to Sovietisation, became an important pillar of nation building. To the end of the 1990s, despite the resistance of the Ukrainian Communists, the Holodomor entered the official canon of national memory. However, compared to other post-communist countries Ukraine's record of coping with its difficult past is rather ambivalent. The former KGB archives have remained under the control of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), until 2010 no legal qualification was given to the crimes of the former regime, and no lustration law has been adopted. Although there were some civic initiatives aimed at documenting communist crimes and memorialising their victims (most notably, the Memorial association), Ukraine until recently had no national memorial or national museum devoted to the Famine and mass political repressions of the Stalin's era.

The Orange Revolution in 2004 marked a new era in Ukrainian politics of memory. President Viktor Yushchenko, elected on a pro-European platform, declared a break with the Soviet past and made national memory his top political priority. It was during his presidency that the commemoration of the Holodomor entered a new dimension.

THE LEGACY OF EARLIER EXPERIENCES

Since France experienced almost fifteen regimes between 1789 and the effective installment of a parliamentary Republic some 90 years later, she got used to political/military coups, purges, successive and always betrayed oaths and the rest – such as criminal punishment of followers of the fallen regime. So it happened during the French Revolution, when the guillotine was invented and much used, as it did after the revolution of July 1830 (High Court trial of Charles X's ministers in 1832), in 1852 following Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup or in the bloody spring of 1871 aft er the decimation of the Paris’ Commune.

In this respect, the period of WWI may seem quieter. Certainly, real or supposed spies were executed, as were soldiers accused of cowardice, desertion or mutiny. In 1917, Clemenceau's government decided to have former Premier Caillaux and former Home Secretary Malvy judged by the Senate meeting as a High Court for having expressed defeatist – i.e. pacifist – opinions. What happened after the end of the war, including trials for “collaboration” in occupied northeastern France or départements of Alsace and Moselle that had belonged to the German Reich since 1871 is not sufficiently known to the larger public to demonstrate any kind of collective trauma.

If we search for the influence of earlier experiences on post-WWII transitional justice, we should therefore not look at the aftermath of the preceding conflict. It has both older and newer predecessors. As has been magnificently shown by Anne Simonin in her habilitation thesis, the main “innovation” of France's TJ after 1945, National Indignity (Indignité nationale, NI) has a long history in French criminal law, stemming from both revolutionary political justice of the 1790s and the Revolution of 1848 – and even further from Roman law civil death (civiliter mortuus). It should be remembered – as it was, for instance, by the public prosecution during the High Court trial of Vichy Premier Pierre Laval – that civil death could lead to actual death, since anyone could kill or injure such an ex-felon with impunity.

THE ANTECEDENTS: THE AUTHORITARIAN REGIME

Portugal experienced a right-wing dictatorship that lasted from 1926, the year in which a military coup d'etat overthrew the First Republic, until 25 April 1974, when the dictatorship was overthrown by another military coup. There were two different political regimes during this long experience of authoritarianism. Crises and movements calling for the restoration of liberal order blighted the Military Dictatorship established in 1926. Having failed to institutionalise itself, in the beginning of the 1930s, the Military Dictatorship gave way to Salazar's “New State”. António de Oliveira Salazar was a conservative Catholic politician and university professor who remained Portugal's dictator until he was incapacitated in 1968. His replacement was one of his disciples, the law professor Marcello Caetano. After a brief period of “liberalisation”, the New State was overthrown by the military coup that set Portugal on the path to democracy.

With the restoration of democracy, political scientists found themselves divided between those who classed the New State as “authoritarian”, based in the typology developed by Juan J. Linz, or as a type of “fascism without a fascist movement”. The Salazarist institutions, created by the 1933 Constitution, formally maintained fundamental freedoms; however, they were successively eliminated by decree. The Constitution retained a directly elected head of state and a parliament (AN – Assembleia Nacional) to which deputies were elected from a single list prepared by the single-party, the National Union (UN – Uniao Nacional), as well as a corporatist chamber (Camara Corporativa).

According to the 1933 constitution, political crimes were excepted from the prohibition of imprisonment without trial (Article 8); it also permitted “security measures”, that is, the extension of prison sentences by administrative decision. With the dictatorship's consolidation, political repression came under the auspices of the regime's political police, the Vigilance and State Defense Police (PVDE – Policia de Vigilancia e Defesa do Estado), which was created in 1933 out of the unification of police forces inherited from the Military Dictatorship. Despite two name changes, Salazar's political police maintained a constant presence, and was not abolished until the restoration of democracy in 1974. While formally under the control of the Interior Ministry, its independence increased, dominating throughout the investigation and presentation of cases to the political courts. The PVDE became the spine of the system of repression, arresting, torturing and, occasionally, murdering opponents of the regime.

THE CENTRAL PHASE OF TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE POLICIES (1944–1951)

Belgium experienced transitional justice from September 1944 to 1951, after the country had been occupied by the Germans. Belgium had also experienced the punishment of collaboration after the First World War, when the country lived almost completely under German occupation and was split up politically and administratively on linguistic lines (in the northern part, Flanders, most people spoke Dutch, Wallonia, the southern part, was French-speaking; French was also the high status language throughout the country). Legislation, jurisprudence, judicial doctrines as well as the experience with this first punishment of collaboration have left their mark on transitional justice after 1944. In order to facilitate the comparison with the other countries under review in this book, and to be able to point out what is to be considered as a “judicial innovation”, we will start with transitional justice after the Second World War and then indicate where and to what extent the punishment of collaboration after the First World War has had an impact on the post-1944 transitional justice process and to what extent measures taken for the post-1944 period were judicial innovations.

THE OCCUPATION REGIME

Belgium was invaded by Nazi Germany on 10 May 1940. The entire territory was occupied by German troops, except a small German-speaking part in the East (received as compensation from Germany after 1918), which was annexed to the Reich. Belgium was ruled by a military government (Militarverwaltung) until July 1944, when a civil government (Zivilverwaltung) took over until the Liberation in September 1944. The King preferred to stay in Belgium, officially as a POW (he was the commander-in-chief of the Belgian army), but tried to play a political role, without much success. The government left the country, established itself in London and was considered by the Allies as the legitimate Belgian government. With the invasion, the Belgian parliament delegated powers of the ministers within the occupied territory itself to the highest-ranking civil servants, the secretaries-general. They formed a committee, governed the country and became the political interlocutors of the German authorities.

In an 2007 article Elizabeth Cole wrote that “history is still to some extent a missing piece in the planning for transitional justice processes”. This statement surprises for several reasons. History, both as an academic discipline or in its broader sense, seems to hold an obvious value for the field of Transitional Justice (TJ). To look at past cases and see what policies have (not) achieved the desired effects seems unavoidable for any kind of efficient policy evaluation. Many post conflict societies today struggle with questions on the intergenerational consequences of certain policies, on the long-lived effects of the sequencing of measures or how and when certain challenges recur. The broad temporal space is precisely what is oft en lacking in policy evaluation. Many key works in the field are explicitly historical in their approach. The work of sociologist Luc Huyse, this project's initiator, is a prime example. The two volumes edited by Neil J. Kritz offer national historical case studies, not unlike the ones presented in this volume, while the report edited by C.M. Carlos also uses a systematic comparative framework of historical European cases. Jon Elster explicitly writes in his reference work Closing the Books: “The main task of this book is to discuss why processes of transitional justice have taken different forms in different transitions and why they have sometimes been absent altogether”. Comparative pattern seeking – sometimes labelled “transitology” – or longer term outcome evaluation by definition needs a historical dimension. Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) and memorial policies (commemorations) are today considered essential parts of the TJ toolkit. Increasingly, historians are engaged as experts in different types of “truth finding” initiatives.

Nevertheless, Cole's statement rings true. Although in her article, she specifically referred to the absence of history education as a part of the TJ field, her analysis is transferable to the historic profession (from now on, “history” in this introduction refers to the profession and academic discipline). Arguably the most essential developments of the TJ field in the last decades have been its remarkably successful interdisciplinarity – law, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, psychology – and its integration of many different angles (democratisation, legal approaches, victim reparation etc.).