ical commission on the conflict and its victims and this was a really interesting experiment because it was established last year the commission presented its report last February I was in Havana and heard the presentation of this report the report was established in a similar vein the party selected who would be the commissioners to write the report and they got 12 academics who were each charged with writing their own interpretation of the conflict the causes of the conflict what perpetrated the conflict the impacts and damages of the conflict but what happened and there were two rapporteurs that were supposed to synthesize these 12 reports and produce a single report for Colombian society that pretty much gave a definitive account what ended up happening 12 academics produced 12 reports two rapporteurs produced two additional reports and there was no there was no success in defining what the areas of consensus and where the areas of disagreement were about the conflict and these are a lot of different areas when does the conflict start it's a very political question you know who's conflict which conflict are you looking at who are the perpetrators of the conflict who are the victims of the conflict who can be counted as a victim who can't be included as a victim it was incredibly polemical I think it has served the reports which totaled more than 800 pages have served a role in that they have made it clear how wide the differences are and how polarized the society is in their understanding of what the conflict is and who the victims are so this is a huge area that's going to require a lot of public debate as Lisa mentioned these debates about memory about who's memory are incredibly important and they're going to pave the way for maybe a learning to listen to each other and a learning to respect that we have differences and we see differences that's not to say that there aren't some truths that are more fictitious than others I think those will come out in the course of the discussions but it's to say that the debates themselves are really important I think the deep divisions are also a consequence of war people have fixed ideas about what happened because that's how they've survived the war they've been able to parse out and say these people are enemies and these people are friends and I think in this next period Colombians are going to have to say we're all part of the same society even if we're in different positions within that society we need to learn to live together and it's going to be a huge challenge in the future so let me open up to I think Michael and I don't know if anybody else had a final comment at this stage or if we'll go to the floor after Michael just very quickly I did address this in my talk I did want to emphasize something and I think for those of you that are just coming to Colombia I think that decades and decades of violence and particularly the insurgent counter-insurgent logic at least the last 30 to 40 years has been very very clear in Colombia and that also has done that at least in rural Colombia where the conflict is very very present violence and coercion have been normalized communities, entire communities live with distrust of their neighbor and under fear permanently and I think we've underestimated or even not even considered what those levels of violence and exposed to permanent coercion have done for the freedom of thought and the oppression. The first is an issue of self-protection and therefore I won't say anything but the other are the collective implications and I'll take you to a collective implication of the disappearance of associations of communities the fights amongst neighbors because do remember that both paramilitary guerrillas and the state have gotten involved in the social fabric of the community the communities have not disappeared and those structures, those associations those organizations have been manipulated and used. So what is said and not said, what is thought of and not thought of has been controlled for decades in Colombia so we're conducting truth seeking exercises when we know that people are not willing to give up the information or what is worse, they're willing to accept the consequence of death for saying what it is that they have inside. Let me give you another collective dimension to understand. Look at the toll that violence has had on the labor union movement in Colombia. We're right at the side of the disappearance of labor unions in their contentious collective manifestations throughout all of Latin America. I think that's very important. Two very quick comments. One, in war polarization is necessarily created and fabricated therefore black and white is what we know and therefore correct and incorrect positions is also what we know fighting that statute is very difficult. Truth is all about psychological warfare and it is very clearly crafted and thought out by the opposing sides. Obviously society is in the middle. Here the statute of truth and the truth itself is up for grabs in the midst of war. Remember what I said truth is only understood in the logic of denunciation and in doing harm to somebody else based on the versions that I might have or posit. And lastly, look at the implications of truth telling when such a transition is not very clear particularly from the official denial side if I'm talking about war or repression on behalf of the state. It is very difficult for Colombians and particularly the government to talk about the repression that we all know took place in 1978. It is very difficult to talk about the violence that took place in the context of the 1985 Palace of Justice I'm talking decades ago. Can you imagine what it is like to talk about accountability and levels of responsibility for some of the most severe state sanctioned violations that took place in 2007 that are termed to be the false positive. We're at the height of those violations those people that were civilians that were in a position of responsibility are currently the president and the high commissioner for peace as vice minister and minister of defense. So look at the implications of talking about truth in the midst of war and the destabilizing effects that it can have. Thank you. Great. Thanks. Now we'll turn to the floor. I think first question over here Jim. My name is Jim Jones. I've been variously involved in Colombia since the 1960's the Alliance for Progress years. More recently I had the opportunity to work with a defense attorney okay in the trial of Simone Trinidad here in Washington and there were three trials finally before a conviction was reached and I can tell you as somebody who was intimately involved with all the information that those were indeed political trials first off it wasn't the individual who was on trial it was the FARC. Truth was the casualty in many many ways. So with that in mind and knowing that the profound influence that the U.S. has in Colombia and on Colombia my question to you is this what is the capacity of the criminal justice system in this country and by extension U.S. policy vis-à-vis Colombia to accommodate any variant of transitional justice that might be viable in Colombia. Thank you. Okay why don't we take two or three questions and then we'll turn back to the panelists. Good afternoon my name is Rafael Barrios I'm from the community of lawyers I'm from Colombia and I want to reflect on two questions that the first Michael Reed has referred to the context and the challenges that are being created with reading the report is a super court that takes the competition to the National Prosecutor General to all judges including the Supreme Court of Justice to the Prosecutor General of the Nation and the Constitutional Court recently there was a reform of justice and some part of justice was against because the Supreme Court of Judiciary was eliminated and for example this reform in order to conclude the court has to go through a constitutional reform through legal reforms and then reviewed by the Constitutional Court then there is a latent risk and as Michael likes the risk I will direct the question to him about 20 years 20 years until now we do not know who to wait but if it is 20 years 20 years that is equivalent to 60 years that is if there are no casualties that is equivalent to 60 that was thank you very much another question thank you one of the panelists mentioned earlier that the victim's participation in the Colombian peace talks was unique and generally positive as compared to virtually no victim involvement in other peace processes as you know within Colombia there are various doubts about how the government in FARC chose the victims that actually got to talk in Havana and several observations were made regarding some sort of picking truths based on their political views and willingness to forgiveness what is your comment on that maybe we will go to the table Lisa do you want to I can comment on the last question not the first two questions I think the whole issue of victim participation is a pretty key issue in these processes in particular speaking from my experience in Peru part of the issue is figuring out who represents the victims in my time in Colombia which was much briefer than when I was in Peru I was aware of great division among the victim groups and so right away you have the question of who is representing the victims and then secondly which of the victims has the capacity to engage in that kind of process a lot of times what I found is that victim groups had a lot of not only division among themselves so they lack the conflict resolution skills to come to a common platform but some of them simply didn't have the skills to actually engage with the government in a discourse that arguably maybe they shouldn't have to but their voices weren't heard so in terms of who they chose I don't know because I'm not that closely linked to it but I would suppose that in part for someone who could maybe handle that experience but also to maybe be more generous with the government than it deserves maybe it's hard to figure out who represents the victims and so how do you actually figure out who that person is I think is a difficult question in all these situations I'd like to just follow up on that last question as well and maybe we can get a few of us kind of debating the issue I think as I alluded to in my talk when you have 7.6 million victims trying to get any representative anything to the table to give their inputs is very difficult I think in some ways the sole act of participation of engaging the fact that the parties are asking for engagement is a kind of reparation without even thinking about the representativeness if you could possibly have that I think it's interesting that the parties actually didn't try to select make the selection themselves they outline certain selection criteria there was a request for diversity of region of ethnicity of gender of different kinds of typologies of the victimization which would mean you know disappearances, torture variety of different kinds of victimization that have occurred variation among who the perpetrators were there were a whole range of criteria and basically the parties tasked the United Nations the Conference of Bishops the Columbian Conference of Bishops and the National University with trying to come up with more specific you know identification of who would fill the criteria that had been outlined to make sure you got a representative sample it was not perfect but it was a good try and it may be that more forums are needed I think in addition to having the victims going in delegations there were five delegations of a dozen victims each in addition to having those the UN and the National University were also asked to set up forums around the country they had three sub regional forums on victims for victims to present proposals that were open to a wide variety of organizations they had one national forum for victims in Cali these forums had processes with facilitation where victims were asked basically to present their proposals in the different areas of truth reparations truth justice reparations and non repetition and all sorts of interesting and innovative ideas came out of that now I think the question of selection criteria the question of representativeness you're not going to get a perfect answer I think they did the best that they could under the circumstances that they were given and they were given the task with a month to prepare to get these delegations going to Cuba everybody around them was complaining that the process was taking too long in fact some commissioners said to me you know everybody wants us to move faster how can we move faster when we have all these victims who all the time and I think my reply was this is an investment in the future I mean if victims give their inputs you're going to have a stronger agreement and you'll also have more credibility and legitimacy among the victims who really are the key focus for the piece accord in the end anyway so I don't know if other people want to make comments on the victims issue in particular I'm going to say a couple of things you mentioned earlier the instrumentalization of transitional justice mechanisms there's also crassly put an instrumentalization of victims when they become political capital for certain NGOs versus other and I can't help but think about Peru and the Audiencias Públicas and there was a tremendous amount of lobbying among NGOs that your victim was going to be one of the people who was placed there how you avoid this I think it's something to continue to talk about because it is absolutely part of the politics of victimhood and certainly for people I agree with you about obviously I agree about the importance of the participation but participation also raises expectations and I think here we are all these years out in Peru and when I talk with a lot of people about the reparations process all the expectations raised because there this would be the first time the state actually sent the mobiles out to rural areas to collect testimonies so this was huge it wasn't our 43rd time this was a new thing in Peru these expectations that are not met the reparations programs have been poorly implemented so it's un engaño mas and so that is not helpful in terms of how people see the state and their relationship with it secondly going back to your you make me think of Hanna Rent like when in Jerusalem you can't try anti-Semitism you can try that man the shortcomings of trials do they yield individual guilt collective innocence what can you try what can you not I think we're coming up against the shortcomings and I think many of us have said it of the criminal approach to framing these problems that I think we shouldn't oh I'm going to say this I can't resist we shouldn't lead this to lawyers lawyers have a role to play there's been too much that's okay I'm with you but there has been too much of a monopoly of a legal approach in all this and then finally you're getting the real politic of the world which is when I think about the transitional justice mechanisms I know in final reports they probably do a better job if they're going to do a good job on domestic actors and they do it getting out to the international actors who have played perhaps a very very important role in these what are you know it's termed a civil conflict well how did the international didn't just derive with the humanitarians they didn't just derive with the surveys from Icete Jota they were there all the time in the first place so the US I mean look at the politics of who's a war criminal who's not and how far is the reach of these transitional justice mechanisms moving up the line against very powerful nation states very tricky any other comments in response to the other two questions yes you go first well since I was directly alluded to by Rafael I'll try to take on his question I suppose what is most important to me is the fact that before discussing the mechanics of the justice agreement we failed to conduct the strategic discussion as to what it is that we want from criminal law I think it is really important to recover the questions that to be socially and politically discussed in Colombia about what needs to be accomplished what it is that we want to accomplish through criminal law understanding the limits of criminal law and not holding it as a panacea I think very unfortunately the discussion on all sides has been limited to whether we satisfy what the realm statutes or what the American convention says I think it's fantastic for those of you who know me I very much defend the standards of international criminal law as well as human rights law and I'm pretty much known as a hardliner as far as justice is concerned but it is really sad that a national discussion, a social discussion is answered in terms of the norms at the international level and whether the ICC is satisfied I think it's more an issue of whether the ICC is satisfied whether sectors of society are satisfied whether private and public and collective interest groups in Colombia are satisfied that discussion I think would be a lot greater to have secondly I am not going to do what happened after the 23rd of September and that is to start speculating on what the very short two page communique says or does not say I think it's been quite unfortunate all the reign and all kinds of interpretation and additions and footnotes and everything that we've had to the communique I think we have a formal mechanism of communication that has outlined or sketched at the very least the material jurisdiction of this tribunal, the personal jurisdiction of this tribunal we have some understanding that the law to be applied will be national with a reference for purposes of gravity to international codification of these crimes it is probably understood that procedurally we will have three different types of procedures depending on how the people decide to go the mechanism and substantively as I said some sort of mixture of the law. The biggest discussion has been around your second question Rafael and that is paragraph number seven. I'm going to leave paragraph number seven alone because if anybody remembers how they communicate logic and relationship to the peace and justice equation on how math in prison sentences gets add up you'll remember that I forget the exact dates but you'll remember that on the 16th of May a communique was put forth where even a mathematical example added up to a greater penalty and immediately the next day the president of the constitutional court announced that his math was wrong and that actually it was less and that the top and the max of the sentences were eight. Right now all we have is the paragraphs the ten paragraphs that all of you know that is what we have and I think we should leave it at that. I would piggyback on the comments that were made because I think it is really important that in Colombia we start understanding that law offers answers but the law at this stage needs to be very much put in play into strategic goals that are sought under the respect of the real law and that implies the constitution and the treaties but that as lawyers we really are not that important and that unfortunately many of us go to school to try to figure out how we can say something without saying it and that we're full of that continually and if you just look at all the jurisprudence that refers to transitional justice it is very messy, it is very sloppy and I don't care if it has been the supreme court of Colombia that has said it or the constitutional court that have said it they have gotten the law wrong and it is not my opinion it is just that the law is not a bunch of truths that are set up there and I think it is time for the law to serve greater strategic purposes in the moment that we're seeking right now. Whether this system interacts with the ordinary justice system, well the prosecutor general himself has given his opinion it's his, he only is going to be in power until March of 2016 let's see what the next one has to say and let's hope that in Colombia personalities don't take over strategic discussions and that rather we have constitutional designs that are solid enough to go beyond personal wills at this stage. One last question in response to Rafael's question I presume that there will be challenges to the legality of this special jurisdiction before the constitutional court and I would also assume that the government negotiators contemplated that scenario and felt confident that what they were putting in the transitional justice accord would be considered legal within and in compliance with the Colombian constitution but I fully expect that opponents of this whole process, whether they oppose it because they think the penalties are too minimal or whatever will formally place this issue before the constitutional court which has proved itself to be very independent and even though the fiscal is in favor of this and has justified it and said that the fiscalia is working hand in glove with the process of this special jurisdiction who knows what the constitutional court will say. Just without a conclusive opinion I think we're overlooking the role of the international criminal court and all of this and that Colombia has been under the microscope with regard to whether to comply with the obligations and that's very different than probably any other Latin American country with regard to their transitional justice process. Let's take a few more questions. Can I add one thing? Let's go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead David. Okay now I'm a little cautious about taking the floor when lawyers say something without saying anything. Michael's probably right about that. But I do think it might be useful to just understand a little bit to frame the criminal justice aspect a little bit more and put it in some history. Basically when and if we look at the agreement as well at the end of the day what has evolved in international criminal law is that those who will be accountable will be those who are most responsible for the most serious crimes. It's clear in a context like Colombia, like it was in Bosnia where when I served as Deputy Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslavia Tribunal that the courts in these extraordinary times and this goes a little bit back to Jenny's question about the criminal justice and transitional justice that the capacity and the political will are both very much in question and countries that have gone through massive conflicts are going through transition. And if I look at our experience in Bosnia we had 10,000 perpetrators and the Yugoslavia Tribunal which is seen as a highly successful Tribunal at least till a couple of years ago prosecuted 121 individuals maybe a couple of hundred were prosecuted in the national courts. So what was developed is this idea of who's most responsible and therefore you're looking at leadership you're looking at the political leadership and the military leadership and at the end of the day those who are the foot soldiers are probably not going to face the part of justice and if they do something's probably off because if you're holding the foot soldiers liable but not the commanders then you're not you're really not in line with the principles of transitional justice. So I think what we're really trying to wrestle with is to have accountability some amount of criminal accountability for those who are really really planned who ordered these crimes to be committed and if we look at the agreement and the devil's in the details I don't want to opine too much but the agreement does provide for an amnesty but it provides for an amnesty that's allowed by international law protocol 2 of the Geneva Conventions calls for liberal amnesties not for the most serious crimes obviously not for war crimes not for crimes against humanity genocide is not really a question in Columbia but not for these crimes but those of the foot soldiers and so this seems to be a pretty good starting point the question really then is and we'll have to see what the ICC says and Fatou Bensouda did make a pretty mild statement rightly so because we need to see what happened and how this plays out but the question then is how is this really going forward now there are a couple of interesting things it looks like international judges will participate in the kind of minority kind of way that I think has happened in a number of countries in Bosnia and Sierra Leone and so forth more to give credibility to the process you don't really need the expertise to be honest you've got very good judges in Columbia but the real question is I don't find the real question to be about the putative lengths of sentences it's really about the issue of how those sentences will be served now what's a little bit unclear is how the sentences will be served I would make the argument and some would make the argument that actually the most important aspect of the criminal justice process is the condemnation of the actions that is the crimes that were committed that if you have a public trial this is the most important aspect of the criminal justice process because the leaders who planned and committed these crimes are condemned in public and those are identified and called out now the secondary question is then to me how that sentence is played out we don't know what the ultimate view of the ICC prosecutor is but it does look like to me and certainly ICTJ has taken this position that alternative sentences is a way to address this issue as long as we have a process where the illegal activity and the terrible things that happened are vetted in a proper criminal justice process the primary purposes of the process is not the actual punishment imposed it is the public nature of the process so that's really what we're focused on and I think alternative sentences again it's not very clear what those alternative sentences are it looks like not prison but some kind of confidement so the devil is in the details but that seems to me to be consistent with the overall purposes of criminal justice and the condemnation, the identification of the crimes and some punishment so I think that's where the focus should be rather than on punishment we've written a lot of papers on this you can go read it on the ICTJ website and Michael and I probably could have a good debate about this and others as well but I thought it might be useful to outline how the process works and how this has evolved and making those decisions when I was a prosecutor at the Yugoslavia Tribunal is to be honest with you as much art as science are there questions from the floor? Hi, my name is Moira Burce with Peace Brigades International a number of the panelists mentioned the fact that a lot of these questions are being debated and some things may well be implemented while there still is conflict and violence in Colombia and part of this one of the sources of that of course is from these paramilitary successor groups that are still very active in the country and one of the forms of violence that we paid most attention to at Peace Brigades is around the threats and attacks and killings of human rights defenders and victims advocates that continue in fact just on Monday a pamphlet was distributed amongst a number of organizations in Bogota including Rafael's organization that threatened human rights defenders and victims advocates with death signed by one of these paramilitary successor groups and so I wanted to hear from some of the panelists, particularly those who have experience in other countries with these kinds of processes but others as well if you have thoughts what kind of mechanisms and policies and practices can be helpful for protecting the victims themselves for protecting witnesses and their advocates and supporters in these processes and avoiding retaliation, thanks. Good afternoon, my name is Jania Aguilera I'm a student from Bogota University and also here in American University I would like to ask my question Spanish given the fact that we're now in a conference about Colombia So muchísimas gracias primero que todo muchas gracias por haber estado acá por sus comentarios porque para nosotros los colombianos es muy importante que hace como las armas y la violencia traspasó las fronteras también el conocimiento y las ganas de construir la paz traspasen las fronteras entonces muchas gracias por estar acá mi pregunta va dirigida para Michael pero si otros panelistas quisieran contribuir a la respuesta están bienvenidos me parece que uno de los desafíos más grandes que están enfrentando ahorita Colombia es el hecho de que la seguridad ciudadana y la seguridad como tal en las calles de Colombia está dependiendo y siempre ha dependido de la rama del ministerio de defensa, lo que quiere decir que como llevamos 60 años en guerra el ministerio se ha enfocado en prácticamente la defensa nacional y no le han dado un lugar grande a la seguridad y la convivencia ciudadana sabiendo que en el caso del Salvador vimos que después de el peace building y después del peace agreement lo que pasó fue que el sistema de seguridad ciudadana no estaba listo para un post conflicto entonces la violencia se traslado a las calles haciendo crímenes comunes y los excombatientes no estaban listos, no fueron educados de la manera correcta para de hecho ir a buscar trabajo sino que siguieron delinquiendo desde las calles y la policía no estaba lista para recibir este tipo de delincuentes y para atender este error que se cometió en el peace agreement entonces es esto este problema en la estructura colombiana un desafío para la paz sostenible y como vamos a como que cambia se tiene que hacer para que esto lo que pasa en el Salvador no ocurra en Colombia y para terminar quisiera hacerle una pregunta a Kimberly sabemos todos los esfuerzos internacionales que se han hecho para hacer que las mujeres hagan parte del peace building incluso Liberia es un caso muy bueno para expresar por qué la participación las resoluciones de las Naciones Unidas como por ejemplo la 1888 1889, 1920 la 1325 que usted nombró han sido esfuerzos internacionales muy importantes para las mujeres y para las víctimas sin embargo en el caso de Perú vimos que de 6000 casos 538 fueron registrados a rape o violencia o violaciones a las mujeres pero de esos 538 solamente fueron investigados y solamente tres, no 16 fueron investigados y tres fueron condenados de 538 casos tres fueron condenados en Perú lo que eso sucedió según lo que sea hasta ahora es porque la definición que hay de violación en el en el estatuto de Roma de 1998 lo que hace es definir violación con un elemento de conciencia la conciencia de la víctima la inconsciencia de la víctima tiene que demostrarse en Perú, después de que se acabó el conflicto había mucha violencia doméstica y todas estas mujeres que siguieron que siguieron viviendo esta violencia mujeres de excombatientes también no podían denunciar y no pudieron llevar sus casos a las cortes porque no podían probar el elemento de inconsciencia porque son mujeres casadas pero todos sabemos acá que después de un conflicto armado la violencia contra las mujeres la siguen viviendo las mujeres de casa que son mujeres de excombatientes o que son mujeres de exmilitares o de personas que estuvieron en el ejército entonces como hacer para que esto no vuelva a pasar en Colombia para que eso no pase en Colombia si sabemos que la última igual Juzgar sigue siendo la responsabilidad del Estado Nacional a pesar de todos los esfuerzos internacionales y en Colombia no se ha podido resolver ni en el Estatuto de Roma esa definición de inconsciencia como hacemos para que las mujeres que van a seguir viviendo además que Colombia es un país que tiene demasiada violencia doméstica como hacemos para que esto no se mezcle y para que las mujeres no sigan teniendo esta barrera a la justicia y realmente los casos que se tienen, que juzgar se juzguen y no pase lo que pasó en el Perú muchas gracias I'm afraid we're out of time and lunch awaits us so I would ask those of you who had some very good questions to please feel free to approach the panelists during the lunch hour and that we might continue our conversation over food and coffee thank you very much for your attention this morning thank you to all our panelists and commentators for very exciting intellectuals and we'll meet back here at Toon welcome back I hope you all enjoyed your lunch and got plenty of coffee to get us through the rest of the day because I don't think we have a coffee break anticipated during the afternoon session I'm just going to say a few words about the historical memory group now center it was a great opportunity to talk to you about the historical memory group now center it was set up by the national commission on reparations and reconciliation which was created by law 975 the justice and peace law back in 2005 so this is a process that anticipates the peace process and began much earlier than the peace process itself the law mandated the national commission on reparations and reconciliation which was also created at the time to produce quote a public report on the reasons for the illegal armed actors creation and evolution from 1964 onwards the national commission on reparations and reconciliation in turn tasked an independent academic group the historical memory group to produce the report to dignify the memories of the victims as a form of symbolic reparations to ensure attention to traditionally excluded including gendered interventions of the violence into foster long term reconciliation the group included a dozen well respected academics known for their intellectual integrity as well as teams of talented students and colleagues the historical memory group sought guarantee it's actually a very interesting story and I think it's a good example of how academics have engaged for how many of you are either from universities here just quite a few of you so you can think about the role of the university in a conflict and post conflict setting and even a pre negotiation period but the historical memory group the first thing they did one of the first things was seek some sort of protection of their autonomy and independence which I think was a really smart move this was a committee that was established by a government mandate I remember talking to some of the people that had participated and they talked about how they made sure that they would have that the university that they came from would guarantee their return to the university so they would have a job to go back to they asked for guarantees that they wouldn't have to submit anything to prior censorship by the government before they could publish it I think this question of autonomy when we think about truth and truth commissions is a really key one to make sure that the institutions that are created oftentimes by the state or at least with the support of the state don't become just vehicles for the state but they do have an independent kind of moral and ethical position within the society so I was really privileged to work with this extraordinary team of public intellectuals as they sought to shed light on the columbian conflict and to create public policy recommendations to ensure that the violence would not be repeated these academics had produced some 20 books documenting exemplary cases that fed into the production of the Basta Ya which is the comprehensive work that tried to go back to each of these exemplary cases I think Andrés will be talking to us a little bit about the methodology so I won't detail that but I think if you think about it having teams of independent scholars working independently but also working together and collectively and finding a process where you can somehow integrate all this knowledge into a final report was a tremendous challenge and I think they rose to the challenge beautifully today they now have some between 40 and 50 books that are case studies of research as well as a really prolific audio visual project that's turning many of the tomes into material that can be appreciated through films radio shows and curricular materials for the classroom the historical memory center has contributed also to the theoretical underpinnings of the field of historical memory with all sorts of practitioner guides on how to construct historical memory how to engage communities in constructing historical memory gender dimensions of historical memory some of them are very interesting for those of you in academia thinking about PhDs or writing projects there's really just a treasure trove waiting to be explored and analyzed and full of lessons for the rest of the world I think many of their products some of their products have been translated into English and few in French but the language barriers continue to be pretty high between Columbia and the rest of the world in terms of the fluid sharing of knowledge across the linguistic barrier I think it's been one of the challenges in our field I think to make sure that the Columbian experiences are shared but also that the experiences outside of Columbia are shared with the Columbians and I think in the academic world this is particularly true because of the language barriers the historical memory centers and groups strategies were inclusive participatory multi-sectoral and they really have sought I think consciously to contribute to the deeper democratization and practice that most agree is needed for the sustainability of peace in Columbia I just say a last word that conflict violence by its nature is often hidden and it frequently stigmatizes the victims the historical memory group and then center really took a very strong political position that their project would be focusing on the rights of victims and I think this was quite a controversial position there's no evidence that this is the way that it has to be I think it's debatable it's one of those debates that I think the public needs to engage in it goes back to the question of whose memories and who are you working for if you're doing a historical memory project but I think that recovery for victims and for societies at large do call for the development of truth-telling mechanisms that can restore dignity to the victims and that protect their rights to truth justice reparations and guarantees of non-repetition and with that as an introduction I'll now introduce Andres Suarez who is the lead investigator at the National Center for Historical Memory in Bogota, Columbia he holds a degree in sociology and a master's in political science political studies from the National University of Columbia previously Suarez was a consultant for the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences he's consulted for the Ombudsman and the National Program for the House of Justice he's a researcher at the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations and was one of the chief investigators for the historical memory group so I'll turn it over to Andres thank you for being here Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you I want to thank Andres I think that's one of the the most sophisticated analyses of a very complicated conflict that I've heard in a long time and I should just say there was a little negotiation that was done that this hour would be split where Andres would have the bulk of the hour so those of you who are watching me send signs I was asked to let him know that he wouldn't overstep his time now I'd like to introduce Martha Nuvia Bello she's the current director of the project to create, design and construct the National Museum of Memory in Colombia which will be based in Bogota for over 20 years she's been recognized as a spokesperson on topics related to memory and the armed conflict in Colombia she's made significant contributions to conceptualizing and positioning historical memory to understand the impacts and the damages of the armed conflict and to contribute to reconciliation and peace building in Colombia with the National Center for Historical Memory she's led academic and research processes including the coordination of the huge comprehensive Tom Bastella Columbia Memories of War and Dignity and a various regional research projects as well in Bojaya Comuna Trece in Medellin and San Carlos in Antioquia she's been a researcher and commentator on national research projects on displacement force disappearances kidnappings and forensic anthropology we're delighted to welcome you here today Martha Nuvia you now have the stand and we're going to talk a lot of them were not only referring to the facts what happened but most of them insisted on how their life was transformed they were talking about their memory not only was it a memory of victimizing facts but it was the memory of despair the memory of loss the memory of suffering and they asked to be registered that has to do with the pain with devastation but also a good part of their demands were we don't want to be shown only as suffering as being exposed as being victimized but also as actors political actors as being resistant and that even in the report we made a very special effort to transform the language of many practices particularly of women we were allowed to talk about other heroines heroic actions really heroic and that this also deserved to be told as the correlator of the war and that this also deserves to be part slowly that this also deserves to be part of the collective memory then these two chapters particularly about the damage we talked about something very notorious, the moral damage and the moral damage not only we made a typology that you as academics may be interested in a typology of damage but it came out with a lot of force the moral damage product of humiliation experiences and it was also talked about in a very strong way of the affection of the good name and the affection of that condition that makes us humans of dignity and why it is so important because these damages draw very important actions in a reparation agenda and because precisely part of the claim of the victims was that hopefully in a report the things are named by its name it is called something that the armed actors who wanted to call combat are named as a massacre like what it was it is called a victim as a victim and a perpetrator as a perpetrator talking about the damages it was in some way to recognize the symbolic force that has to put things in its place and call things as they should be and in the reparation agenda a lot of what the victims today claim is precisely that that things are named as they occurred that it is recognized and that as it is recognized restitutes the good name of the people and it is a good name that is not but it is a good name in a lot of collective cases of a community in the report that my colleague Andrés, one of the strongest claims was to break with that stigma of the Salado as a guerrilla people in the case of the communities of Bahia Portete it was insisted in a very important way that it is clear to the world that it is very clear to the country that there was no confrontation between tribes it was not a confrontation between clans for military the issue of resistance is also very important to us not only to show what the people did to survive the war but also to show how in the middle of the war they made and flourished experiences of peace and to many academics it surprises that in the middle of a war map it can be a cartography of peace and that it remains in the middle of the war a cartography of peace and that speech of resistance was not only to show heroic actions that speech of resistance intended also to show what the violence wanted to destroy as Andrés said, this was not casual these were not mistakes there were things that wanted to destroy political projects life bets including sexual options religious options that wanted to destroy or subversives or transgressors or because they intervened in certain interests I want to highlight this because perhaps in a commission of truth those who join this commission are lawyers to what to do as the victims said what they are going to do with our word what they are going to do with our testimony it is not only about telling the story of what happened and who were the responsible for this this testimony that is so important to generate perhaps the shame that society has to generate in front of the war and now I would like to refer to something that they asked me to talk about the criticism to Bastalla for us it is very important to recognize those criticisms some of those criticisms we have wanted to assume in our own work to incorporate to be part of our agenda some of those criticisms that have to do with vacuums that have to do with weaknesses hopefully you can assume them in a way much more active to a commission of truth and in the first place I would like to refer to the weaknesses or evils that are presented to the inform Bastalla one of the strongest criticisms has to do with the date of origin the fact that our data take as date of the start of 1958 we want to make it clear that the war begins or violence begins in 1958 but the data we took in 1958 for many reasons that perhaps now we could explain if the questions do not allow them insisting that the date of origin still being a very controversial point because of the consequences of inclusion and exclusion that can take one or another date of origin is the issue of responsibilities and with great reason I think these criticisms are all well-planned and it is because not to go beyond the responsibility of the armed actors clearly with the data we talk about responsibility of guerrillas paramilitaries agents of the state but it is clear and we all know that the responsibility transcends the armed actors responsibilities of the politicians that even there are some ways to explain the war that would have to be much more related to the economic models that is to say that the informant is weak in articulating that relationship between politics, economy and war and surely this is this is one of the criticisms I think that has been raised with greater insistence a third critical characteristic that has been formulated is the absence of the analysis of the North American intervention in the armed conflict for some criticisms it is not about a factor more that is to say that the outside politics of the United States is a factor more in the war but it should be analyzed as an actor more of the war we are criticized not to have unclassified information even that is already available that we would have been able to use in a much more intensive way in the analysis of the armed conflict Colombian a fourth point of criticism has to do with the relationship between the State and the paramilitaries although in the informant the multiple relations the various relations in the time and territorial that were established between State and paramilitaries when we talk about the responsibility paramilitary differentiated from the responsibility of state agents some think that the paramilitary violence is a state strategy this is a debate point even more of the omissions of the complicities for some paramilitary violence is state responsibility and this is a point that is worth still discussing a fifth point of criticism has to do with the little weight that in the informant of the drug we did not want to drug the conflict let's say in front of the thesis very strong that the drug explains our war we wanted to distance ourselves from there but it is perhaps true that it deserves a greater deepening of the drug and a sixth point that I would like to mention are much more I here only take some of the criticism because luckily I can name them all it has to do with the absence of the responsibility of the media of communication in the armed conflict and this is a matter of interest as to how the media have contributed to intensify the war to diversify the war to decontextualize the war and surely a serious analysis of our conflict also goes through the participation of the media now I would like to focus on a very important point and these are criticism more of the academic world of the world of human rights organizations in these five minutes that I would like to talk about the criticism that comes more of the victims that for us are supremely valuable and these criticism one could receive more as a complaint of the victims to the extent and these complaints have to do with the absence the victims are sought in the inform when they read the inform they are sought there many are indignant when they are named in a paragraph with reason or even more when they say you have two pages in which they refer to a topic as serious as, for example, the syndical violence or how it is possible that in its report the sexual violence has about five pages in an inform that has four hundred I don't know how many pages are much more indignant because they are not in the inform and I would like to present very quickly where are these absence because maybe a commission of the truth will have a huge responsibility to answer these these requirements that are facing the victims are territorial absence, that is, we did a very strong work in Costa Caribe, something on Pacific Coast, we worked but the victims of the south of the country have told us you have not gone, you have not done a job, we did two important jobs but surely they were required more, you have not been in Kazanare, you have not been in Arawka, you have not been in San Andres and Providencia, that is also Colombia, then that territorial complaint that we are trying to remedy with regional supply is very important not only we are not but a national inform hides some regional peculiarities so that is a very important point the second absence has to do with population groups and it is population groups, for example indigenous communities, Afro-descendants, Afro-Colombians not because they do not figure in the inform, they figure and for us it was very important we made cases, we approached Afro-Colombian and indigenous but the complaint is in terms that these groups, these important sectors of the Colombian community ask for their own inform if we do not feel collected in a national inform it must be an inform on the violation of human rights of Afro-Colombian communities there must be an inform one separated on the case of indigenous populations and to name the strongest but also, for example the population LGBTI we named and it is that they planted a complaint also in the framework of the armed conflict the LGBTI population was victimized and in very particular ways of victimization and there are complaints of the Colombians in the exile, Colombians and Colombians with the exile and their demand that their voice as exiled also be part of the historical narrative and I could continue mentioning other more specific complaints but these groups must be particularly considered there are also complaints of absence for violence modalities I would like to mention four in particular could be more sexual violence is one of the violence modalities women in Havana have left it clear the need to make a specific document a specific process that allows and document the issue of sexual violence due to the delicacy that it has the issue requires particular methodologies, it requires particular research mechanisms about indical violence as I said it is another violence modality there is one that is very important and that we believe that for a commission surely it will be that it is very linked to the issue of forced displacement but in particular it has to do with the magnitudes of the lands in Colombia a lot of us have thought it is necessary to have an information that is clear about the magnitude of the displacement of the land but that goes further not only that I thought how much land was disposed of but who has the lands today in Colombia what has been done with those lands who use their fruit in those lands today in Colombia and that is a very concrete demand and although the historical memory has had a whole line in the issue of investigation and some access to information that we we have not told it is of course the demand of the families of the victims of forced displacement that it counts with an information that has been declared a commission of the truth for forced displacement in Colombia in particular for being a violence modality not only so devastating but for the occultation and the difficulty to document in this case I would say that those are the claims, demands, critiques stronger, I would like to take a minute I think I have to think we have been asked Andrés and me to take advantage of this space precisely to be able to put to you the difficult situation that is going through the entire Pacific Colombian coast in Chocó and I feel very responsible for the region and the victims they tell us, you in the forums you in the university world spend hours discussing what would be the perfect justice model, we do not want a perfect justice model there is even a motto that has been put in graffiti on the walls in Colombia that says we prefer an imperfect peace to a perpetual war that is circulating very strongly and maybe as we discuss the bullets there continue to pass this year have been murdered 69 human rights defenders in Colombia, then there is a certain urgency and that urgency made us feel deeply excited in the last Wednesday when there was an agreement then he said optimistic moderate I at least could not be moderate in my optimism because if we think that these samples that it is possible to reach some agreements with all the imperfection can mean the possibility to stop the war that I think is the real urgency that we have in this context Colombian. Thank you Marta. There is so much that can be said and I am hoping that all of you are keeping your questions alive after our next set of panelists we have asked four colleagues to comment on the presentations and on the report I would like to introduce Anthony Huena St. John who will be our commentator. He is the director of the International Peace and Conflict Resolution MA program at American University. He researches international negotiation especially military negotiations ceasefires, humanitarian negotiations and peace processes. He has created several advanced courses on negotiations ranging from interpersonal skills and analysis to more complex multilateral challenges for AU's School of International Service. He has also done some really interesting research on the role of civil society in peace processes that I think has opened new terrain for other researchers to get in and add new case studies and so forth but he was one of the pioneers in that field so I would like to turn the podium over to Anthony. Gracias, Gini. I would like to place my comments in the context of the discussion this morning as well as the discussion that we had this afternoon. This morning was more on transitional justice with regard to the Basta Ya project and my own expertise is more in peace processes in civil wars than it is in Colombia more deeply and properly understood but having gone through the report and having thought deeply about transitional justice and how it works with peace processes I hope to offer some useful comments this afternoon. Transitional justice is supposed to be a transition from one thing to another and that thing that we're going towards is either the restoration or the building of stability if there was stability in a previous period or epoch it's the transition to stronger institutions for resolving society's numerous daily small and large conflicts. It's for the restoration of a cycle of peace rather than a cycle of violent conflict in which people resolve their differences by perpetrating acts of violence on each other. It's for the restoration of a society's sources of resilience that will probably have been exhausted by violent conflict. And maybe it's also the foundation for cultural change and the theme to which I will return a couple of times this afternoon. But in times of transition conflicts as we've heard today often revert to violence conflicts that are in the process of being de-escalated which may have reached a formal ceasefire or state of exhaustion between the belligerents will frequently see a resurgence of violence. There's empirical evidence that violence doesn't really go away after an armed conflict it finds new forms and returns especially if we don't clear out the weapons and find people other things to do. The Central American cases are stark reminders of this sort of transitive quality of violence that reasserts itself even if the motivations for it change over time. Institutions are weak or non-existent in transitional times societal resilience may have been overwhelmed as stated but there's still a need for the beginning of both individual and societal healing and transitional justice can play only a small and limited role in doing those things. I think one of the mistakes that peace builders make is to try to bet everything on transitional justice to expect that it will heal all wounds individual and collective that it will reset all injustices and start society from zero and that is probably an impossible aspiration level for it. I think there are three tensions I'd like to mention in transitional justice as additional backdrop the balancing of justice understood as punishment and accountability with restoration in terms of restitution and equity that's one tension that I see has played itself out in various ways across the many cases of civil war and transition. Balancing truth telling which is almost necessarily a past looking backward looking exercise with forgiveness and rebuilding which are sort of by definition forward looking and as part of that tension I think there's the question of whether we just need to know or do we have an obligation to act on what we know. Bastaya has I think served an enormous purpose in saying this is what we should know that has been sort of a hidden series of truths that have been secreted in different parts of the population in different parts of the country but there's that separate question of what are our obligations to act when we have knowledge of atrocity, of injustice of tremendous acts of violence on a large scale as well as who the perpetrators and the victims are. The third tension is the balancing of local and international engagement we've seen a lot of the past two decades transitional justice mechanisms have been almost externally imposed because of the insufficiency of local institutions and over time there has been a sort of reaction to that as it's been critiqued as the sort of disparagingly as the liberal peace building project by the critical peace building school of thought who have at first proposed local indigenous mechanisms and then later said well none of them work anyway so that's what the critical schools like to do but there will continue to be a need for hybridization for rescuing what is local and what can be used to really bring healing and closure to people as well as some use of international mechanisms and norms so that they do at a larger global scale reduce impunity a couple of tests I think at any transitional justice project should pass especially one that is focused on the narrative dimensions and these are just my own nobody has said that they're important or anything except me is transitional justice one component of a fuller set of post-conflict peace building actions or is it a standalone project in my mind it should be a component of a fuller set of actions or lead or have connections to in this case Bastaia obviously has a number of different connections does it as the Spanish verb asks us to do esclarecer does it clear things up does it make does it bring to light what has been in the dark Bastaia certainly does that in terms of both victims and perpetrators or perhaps even those who have moved between those two categories as can sometimes be the case in the wars that we have today Bastaia does that very clearly does it dispel myths and propaganda narratives with data does it help us to reinterpret our own partisan historical narratives in a new way it seems clear to me that Bastaia certainly does that as well three other tests does it give a voice to those who have been voiceless or who have felt that their narratives were untold for one reason or another we've heard our colleagues Martha take on a number of the criticisms that have come out probably there will be a lot of people who say well my narrative wasn't heard enough but certainly I think that there has probably never been a more comprehensive telling of truths than this one does the transitional justice project connect to reconciliation and healing so that it is not mere catharsis and narrative building that's probably something that remains to be seen by the nature of the Bastaia project which anticipated rather than followed a peace agreement finally is it seen as legitimate across society and that's problematic that's always going to be problematic in anything that has public visibility there will be contention over the question of legitimacy for such an activity I'd like to say a couple of things about memory if I have a little bit of additional time memories as we carry them as individuals are sacred but they're also frail faulty and subject to distortion and biases at the psychological level I am constantly being reminded on a daily basis of how my memories are I'm so certain of them and yet when I'm confronted with facts when I read what I thought I remembered when somebody reminds me of something that happened we remember it very very differently than perhaps it did happen collective memories are also critical components of collective identities but they suffer some of the same weaknesses as individual memories except that those weaknesses are scaled up to a collective level so collective memory probably has some problematics that are worth exploring based on what we know about the way individuals process memory how we remember things acknowledgement forgiveness coexistence all of these are different activities but they are somehow overlapping and interrelating with each other it's hard for me to forgive without acknowledgement of somebody who wronged me right it's also hard for me to forgive when the act that I'm supposed to be forgiving for continues forgiveness tends to happen when the act itself has stopped and some acknowledgement is made by the perpetrator so truth telling can only be a start it may not be leading directly to forgiveness but it certainly we have to start with getting the story out forgiveness is not the same thing as convivencia as living side by side as returning to live as neighbors again that's a more difficult task that we didn't think about 60 70 years ago in the aftermath of the Second World War forgiving is probably a precursor to living side by side but it will still be I think there will still be local preferences as to who with whom one may choose to want to live after having lived through violence on the scale of the wars that we see today moving on beyond a sense of shared grievance should probably be accompanied by some at least modicum of a view towards altering the structural violences that gave rise to the situations that we have today in plain English what I want to say there is that we need to question ourselves as societies why things happened and why we did what we did a lot of narratives that we have in political discourse in the United States around the world are discourses of blame there are rarely discourses of contribution this is what we contributed to our problem or this is how we participated in the acts that we suffered through and lived through and we heard a little bit of that this morning that that blame is certainly the prevailing currency in discourses and narratives but it begs the question let's a society degenerate into so many people being willing to kill so many other people where we all forced to do what we are saying happened or are there additional factors that facilitated them that we are as yet unable to explore and I would ask that as we explore building peace as we explore peace process as we explore transitional justice at least a view be given to some of the more invisible structural and cultural norms of violence that persist the deeper change is probably in the unwritten norms a society lives by transitional justice can't fix that alone but it can at least do as Basta Yadid which is to start conversations about where we have gone to make sure that we are not going to stop at just institutional fixes as essential as they are but try to find a way to resort to other means of resolving differences than violence a couple of thoughts to conclude on Basta Yadid's sequencing in terms of the peace process in Colombia I've heard it both ways as they say it should have come after an accord it's fine to come before an accord I'd like to say a couple of things about the beauty before an accord and I'm surprising myself as I say this because I've traditionally thought that this sort of an exercise should come after a peace agreement is finalized having it stand alone has probably meant that it was not held hostage to the bargaining between government and armed groups it stood alone and was free to do its work without being traded away its mandate was stood up and then let to exist had it been part of a negotiated process and I believe in negotiated processes something would have been given up for something or at least there would have been demands made yes you can do your truth telling but we want to make sure certain of our people are not mentioned or certain acts are sort of covered up so it is a it is a possible there are many ways to look at this but it seems to me that there is a hidden advantage in having this stand alone and in anticipation of rather than the follow-up to a negotiated accord and I think I'll end my comments there and thank you all very much this afternoon. Thank you Anthony. We'll turn now to my colleague Lily Cole who is the guru on themes of reconciliation and also the role of history and teaching of history in post-conflict or post accord context around the world. Thank you Lily. Thank you very much. Ginny do I have ten minutes? You have ten minutes. Okay. I have to say I don't know if I'm going to be presumptuous enough to try to comment on the report and the project directly and I've pulled together just two themes to mention and I'm not sure whether or not they're going to be directly useful. I hope so. First of all, the stakes are very high when we're talking about the period of recovery after a conflict of course that implies a sequence here that we've all been questioning but I'm talking about reconciliation is usually post-conflict recovery. We know from empirical studies that the best predictor of violent conflict in the future is having had violent conflict already in your society and it's the same thing for atrocity for atrocities as well. So in fact measures of reconciliation are really very important as a form of prevention and as far as our studies of reconciliation here at USIP we've been working on how basically to evaluate and measure reconciliation practices and their impact which is very difficult to do. It hasn't been done very much yet that's why I can't actually give you many sort of findings or guidance at the moment just some thoughts based on those based on our research so far and I will say as far as the great importance of getting these processes of what we're calling reconciliation between groups in the society, between citizens in the state getting them right we are carrying out another project which is trying to assess reconciliation projects that also took place before there was really a major political transition in another country that had many atrocities and that's Sri Lanka and part of our research we'll be looking at trying to measure the success of reconciliation events or procedures both at the national level like some of the commissions we've we're talking about here and also at the grassroots level and how their evaluations measure up against the indicators for possible reoccurrence which is certainly a danger in Sri Lanka I will say related to that we've mostly been documenting reconciliation practices in the last year and we've documented many mainly at the grassroots level and here today we've been talking about a national level project started with the support of the state and based in a law but I'm sure I know from Ginny's work and everything I've learned from her the people I've met through here at her that there's a very vibrant world of practices at different levels of Colombian society going all the way to very local and grassroots what we don't know very much about yet is the relationship between reconciliation activities including what we think of as transitional justice at these different levels and it will be very interesting to see what are the connections between commissions and inquiries like the Bastilla and the future ones and what is also of course happening including many local historical memory projects and that's the reason we've chosen to be very ambitious in our study in Sri Lanka and try to look at two different levels the results of two commissions that they held in Sri Lanka which looking at disappearances particularly which we're very thorough reporting but we're thoroughly overlooked by the government at the time which is now willing to reopen the work of those organizations and some of the grassroots activities which were very controlled much more controlled and repressed in Sri Lanka but it's very ambitious to try to link together the effects of these different levels and I think this is something I am basically calling for a lot of research to accompany the work of building a post-conflict Columbia because I think there's so much to be learned in Columbia so I wanted to just go to one other subject which I'm actually not working on directly at USIP now but a couple of people asked me to comment on it because the question of education a formal education came up and how the work of the media and other reports and projects would be present in the formal education system and it is incredibly common to hear people call for changes in the way our history is taught i.e. changes in how we form our social and political identity and that usually happens especially at the school level and I have a few things to say and unfortunately they're not actually very optimistic so I'm going to maybe just throw out a few ideas and challenges to which I actually think Columbia is up to this challenge and I've been working on a project with International Center for Transitional Justice looking at the connections between transitional justice and education both formal and formal but I've followed formal education and mostly below the university level so to the level that's usually more covers most of the population and to tell you the truth I haven't carried out empirical research myself but I've seen a lot of projects and heard reports on a lot of projects and have heard a lot of reports on the outcomes of truth commissions when they've made recommendations for transformation of the schools for school reform for teaching the materials of the truth commissions and the reports and the results have been incredibly negative I mean we just don't see a lot of really visible impact in the schools there have been small projects that have been impressive and really affected those involved they have been neither sustained nor have they been scaled up no one really has a coherent theory or evidence of how out of school and in formal education projects can have a wide effect frankly the schools are very difficult institutions to influence you all may know by the way because of the Peruvian Truth Commission and its report were mentioned here and like a number of other countries recently including Sierra Leone they had they I think that they set up a partnership with the schools they made they looked at the education system they made very interesting recommendations to improve their education and teaching of history also like the Sierra Leoneans created a students version of the truth commission report they had plans to train teachers and my understanding from Peruvians is that this has really gone nowhere the Peruvian education people I've met where they are incredibly depressed and pessimistic and this has been repeated in most places Germany is not a very good example I really do think they've done amazing things but it's just not an example that's going to be picked up in such a different context in such a different geopolitical context this kind of very thorough and conscious affecting of the teaching of World War II and national socialism and the Holocaust in the schools since the 60s just doesn't seem to be equal by any other country that I really know of and I should say that there was a lot of a long story that seemed very positive in South Africa my understanding is that the apartheid period is required teaching together with a module on the Holocaust to make interesting comparisons in high schools in South Africa and we just had the premier social scientist who's done polling and surveying on the after effects of the truth commission in South Africa and on this topic understanding of the past ever since just complaining bitterly that he was interviewing young people around Cape Town and he said they're not learning about apartheid in schools they know nothing about it's not taught in the schools and they claim reconciliation is impossible. Well that's actually pretty depressing because again I don't know exactly who he was polling maybe it was impoverished youth who are not getting a formal education but theoretically this is supposed to be taught in the schools so we don't know are the students just not listening which is very possible because history itself has been shown repeatedly to be an unpopular and boring topic so the history textbooks are symbols for the political elites they are not meaningful or memorable to students from anything we can discover. Education has its own limitations and its own tasks especially in a resource challenged countries it really gets into development issues well beyond justice about the capacity of the classroom the size of the classroom especially the capacity of the teachers to teach this difficult and contested material. So I think what I would just say in conclusion is that actually first of all Columbia my understanding is Columbia has a very impressive record in experiments very again echoing the line that Columbia is a very creative country in many social institutions and I've heard of very impressive pioneering programs in their school system including the civic competencies the competencies program which was very thoroughly and very well thought out though I understand that it's been de-emphasized and I think as I understood from the person who created it that's not for political reasons but because a new ministry of education came in with new priorities which is a very common situation and the other thing in Columbia that's been very striking is the creation of alternative schools for people who lost the opportunity to go to regular schools one that I was created by the Jesuits I believe with the support of Jesuits in a coastal region much targeted and excluded the population was very excluded from formal education with very impressive results and also in encouraging a lot of thinking about social issues not just a technocratic education so I really have to throw out the challenge to Colombians working in human rights and transitional justice and education I know there's already been discussions about very innovative projects that are being considered if the creators of La Stéja and the Historical Memory Center actually have educational plans to follow up with educational projects we would love to hear about it because I think this is kind of virgin territory that needs a lot more work and the one other thing I'll say in closing is maybe the key doesn't lie as much as it pains me to say this given how incredibly important formal education is and how much it's been overlooked in social reform reform after or after violent conflict maybe the key really lies in the arts especially in film theater maybe even social media campaigns like the apology campaigns online that were carried out in Australia towards indigenous people and then by Turks towards the Armenians maybe these are much better ways of touching young people and getting around some of the political blockages as well but I'm really looking for ideas actually from the Colombians so that we have a more positive story to tell thanks so much Lily and we will give our guest speakers who presented from the Historical Memory Center an opportunity to address some of the questions that are coming up from our discussants. Our next discussant probably needs no introduction in this room it's Adam Isaacson he's been following the Columbia beat for many many many years he's currently the senior associate for regional security at the Washington office on Latin America and a leading expert on defense civil military relations and US security assistance to the Americas welcome Adam I will turn the podium over to you many thanks Janie congratulations for putting this together it's been a fantastic day so far although a very serious day and Columbia is in a pretty serious moment I mean if there is a peace accord in six months it's going to be a very challenging panorama for everybody but especially for victims in the country think about it you're going to enter a phase in which there is no longer a national insurgency a national political armed group instead the big challenge and it could be a generator of more violence than what we're seeing now is organized crime and the overlap between organized crime in the state which continues at a local level and even a national level in many parts of the country similar to the problems we see in many parts of Mexico and Central America you're going to see a moment in which a lot of power centers let's call them that are feeling cornered where people who have long gotten away with almost everything with impunity be it corruption be it sponsorship of paramilitaries other human rights abuse are suddenly going to be held more accountable than before so far it's been the paramilitaries and a few politicians who helped them but it could be broader this to me may be one reason why we're seeing human rights defenders under more threat already it's also going to be a moment when people in many parts of the country who for decades have been quietly burying their dead and not saying a word about what happened because if you're they're going to be coming out in many parts of the country talking to they maybe not it wouldn't have talked to the commission before or the center before but will now coming forward it's also and we're already seeing it in the courts it's a time when big promises are being made and Michael Reed and others have talked already about the difficulty often of seeing these big promises actually get fulfilled and implemented so I mean what does that mean for the center what's next for the center how do we evaluate the work that the center's been doing I mean I don't really know my experience actually this month 20 years of working in the NGO sector in Washington I'm not proud of that but it does give me at least some yardsticks by which to talk about maybe what has been successful and what hasn't in my sector and you know obviously the national center for historical memory is not non-governmental it is officially governmental which I think makes its job harder in some ways because it is imputing institutional responsibilities but you know by these yardsticks that we use I mean what had they done right what has some characteristics of the good NGO that perhaps we can say the center has had one big one is rigor and credibility as a member of the international advisory community with Ginny we did have a great look at how they did their work we saw iterations of the drafts we saw what they argued about we saw the high standard to which they held any facts they were presented how they preserved the identity of witnesses the language the care and the language that they used there is no tossed out phrase in that Vasta Ya report if they say there's institutional responsibility for a type of crime that's what the evidence led them to believe as far as rigor goes hey look after the report came out they had the right people angry with them the FARC were angry because they made it clearly say that there was a state sponsorship of violence or of a climate that made armed that would thereby somehow justify the choice of using armed force the armed forces were angry because of what Andreas was talking about that language about institutional and not just individual responsibilities if you get both sides mad at you that's probably a good sign about your credibility about your rigor and another key source of credibility is compliance they did what they promised which I had somebody joke to me recently and I hate this stuff but we see Columbia has a real knack governmentally and elsewhere of making very ambitious plans very good power points but often what happens in practice doesn't pan out one friend made a joke recently that Columbia is one of the places where they'll have a ceremony to celebrate the building of a bridge before the bridge is built yet these guys built the bridge the center of historical memory has actually completed 43 reports and their work does continue and just having kept their word and having done it in a way that is widely regarded to be a quality job is a big deal with the main target audience probably which is the victims of the conflict a second aspect of an effective NGO is simply inclusiveness this is including particularly the target audience again the victims in how they did their work ultimately it's a multidisciplinary group but it is ultimately in the eyes of many a bunch of pointy headed academics and Bogota's ivory tower the members of the center I think were very aware of that from the beginning and they sought to get out of the Bogota bubble and give voice to victims and they are now opening centers and facilities out in some of the most conflict hit areas in the country and that I think was a big boon to the success of their work so far another third element I think that has been crucial these initiatives are often only as effective as the leadership they have and they were lucky enough to have some strong personalities and some creative leadership along the way if you look at the law 975 which created them and then the regulations were drawn up to implement law 975 they're not very specific it's a couple paragraphs there will be a center for historical memory or group of historical memory at first they did kind of make up a lot as they went along they fight from the very beginning to guarantee that they had autonomy and therefore credibility was all part of the effort of that leadership from the very beginning leadership credibility inclusiveness individual NGO work that could use some improvement one has already been touched on it's in Spanish marketing getting the word out to many audiences they were very effective at getting the word out to victims getting the reports in the hands of victims the reports about individual cases are closely held and completely read and shared by victims communities however in this 70-80% urban country that probably has not where people really haven't felt the impact of the conflict very directly for a long time except that it's something you see on TV these reports probably haven't had the impact that they should ultimately they are they're written in a journalistic style not a very jargon filled academic style but still for your average reader it's a bit like eating your vegetables even if all 43 of them are available for free online at an easy to navigate website I think getting it in front of sort of a mainstream audience continues to be a challenge getting beyond that highly educated urban core or people who already live in spaces of Columbia that are already democratic and open enough that they can have such an open discussion so getting beyond that first sector of the bell curve and I don't have great great suggestions about schools I know some work has been done on high school curricula and that should be a greater focus you know I grew up in the 1970s I was a little kid in the 1970s in the Carter administration you required that the 6 TV networks that existed at the time put more educational content in the Saturday morning cartoons and some of you who grew up here maybe remember Schoolhouse Rock I tell you over my whole life people my age in college in grad school most of what they know about the U.S. legislative process and how a bill becomes a law comes from that 5 minute cartoon about the bill on Capitol Hill I'm not suggesting that the Center for Historical Memory make cartoons and comic books but maybe that's one way to get I know they've done a lot of creative work with videos with close cards but getting into mainstream audiences in that way is something to continue to work on especially as people are getting their information in much newer ways too the social media presence in particular is important and devoting more budget resources to a really sophisticated communications team is crucial another element that we always need more of is simply protection this is going to be badly needed because even though the center is part of the state it is a part of the state that is contesting space on behalf of victims with other parts of the state you know and that contestation is not between the government and guerrillas as much it is between those who hold a lot of defacto power in Colombia those who have a lot of resources probably have done some bad things in the past can still have a great ability to get out the vote on election day but who want to deny memory and on the other side the victims and those who are advocating for them in the center in the justice system in the victims unit and in the congress and elsewhere those who are on that second side need a lot of protection even maybe especially during the post accord period which will be a very tense moment for a while especially in between when you've got an accord and when you actually have the beginning of implementation it's not just physical security it's securing against attempts to discredit their work often those attempts may involve hacking or wiretapping and it requires a lot of open unabashed support from the international community in particular especially the U.S. government whose word does have a lot of weight in Colombia whenever there is an episode, such an episode arising against the center or similar groups just making clear that they view their work as credible a side note another way that the United States government can in particular help the work of the center and the future truth commission is opening our archives we have a lot the state department but of course other agencies as well which have been less reticent in the past have a lot in our cable traffic and other documents that could help the research into the conflict and its causes and responsibilities and a final element of effective NGO work that will probably be relevant to the center as well is mission relevance circumstances change an effective NGO either becomes irrelevant because they've completed their mission because time simply passed them by and that's a constant challenge now the center for historical memory their mandate expires in the year 2021 could be renewed who knows that's very far off but right now I mean they're going to have an identity crisis of some kind in a period in which there is a truth commission operating and you're in a post-conflict situation just think about it if you're a victim who wants to come forward in the year 2017 after the peace accord now who are you going to go to? Are you going to go to the special peace jurisdiction and its viscades? Are you going to go to the new truth commission? Are you going to go to the defensoria or your local personero? Are you going to go to the victim's unit? Are you going to go to the center the national center for historical memory? You know we have to testify before several of them separately because they may be by law can't share information with each other there's going to be a need to adapt alongside the new truth commission but also how to be the place that tells victim's stories that helps sustain their dignity and that provides them with safe and credible spaces within the state which is really novel that it's within the state to continue to tell their story and seek the reforms that they need now NGOs we do advocacy you know we try to do it based on really rigorous work but we do advocacy of the center advocacy I say yes to some extent even though they're part of the state and they're part of the presidency to the extent that Columbia's victims need advocates and will need advocates boy will they ever the center is a key node for advocacy on their behalf before the rest of the state and I think that's one thing that's been very striking about the experience of the center so far and it's been an honor to be able to follow them and to work and to know them and I thank you thank you Adam now we'll turn to our last speaker Juan Mendez Juan is a professor of human rights law in residence at American University in Washington College of Law and since 2010 has been UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel and human-integrating treatment or punishment he's also been the special advisor on prevention to the prosecutor a very long history as a human rights defender and someone with my tremendous respect and the respect of those who've been working in human rights issues in Washington and around Latin America in particular thank you Juan thank you very much Jenny for those kind words I also want to thank the US Institute of Peace for inviting me to talk to you about this and particularly to share the panel with this very distinguished group of very knowledgeable people I wish I was as current on events in Colombia as I once was I don't care to say how long it was but I am Latin American and I am a human rights activist and so Colombia is never very far from our views and our thoughts I was in Cartagena the India's in May the major major event about the peace process and justice organized by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights and with the presence of President Santos and I took when my turn came I criticized the concurrent opinion by Diego García Sallán in the case of Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the case again called el mozote versus El Salvador he tries to distinguish legacies of human rights violations by dictatorships from legacies of human rights violations by in the context of peace processes and conflicts armed conflicts and I very forcefully said that his opinion was wrong on the law and also did not set precedent and I was very embarrassed to see hours later when almost the same verbatim arguments were made by the Procurador Nacional Dr. Ordonez but I think the audience was a large audience but because they were Colombians they could tell the difference of when someone criticizes a peace accord from the perspective of supporting it and when one criticizes it because they want to destroy it and to make peace impossible Colombians are sophisticated that way and they are sophisticated in that they know what transitional justice is they know what the international law presidents are they know what are the obligations of the state more so than any country that I have seen and visited in the course of my work on transitional human rights law and particularly with transitional justice and that's why that sophistication leads all Colombians to understand that transitional justice is first and foremost about justice it's not obviously some of us in the field put more emphasis on the transition and some of us put more emphasis on justice but I want to stress that transitional justice is not a justice light it's not a kind of a poor relative of justice it's the justice that can be achieved in a moment of transition and transitions from dictatorship to democracy and transitions from conflict to peace are no different from the perspective of the obligations that states have to fulfill so in that sense Colombia has made contributions to transitional justice that even before reaching a final agreement on the conflict are are very welcome and very important for the future of international law and not the least of that in the area of truth telling because the project of historical memory is showing the way to how we can improve on the experiences of other societies in truth telling as one aspect of transitional justice by on the one hand being very rigorous about social science research and field research and second making a big effort to unearth all the unreported human rights violations that unfortunately in conflicts as we heard a little while ago that happened mostly in rural and marginal areas of the country they do go unreported and also and most importantly for trying to represent the voice of the victims in a much more educated setting than a truth commission that holds a hearing and invites people to listen to it important as those efforts have been in different countries around the world I think this effort at truth telling that the project of memory historical has conducted is a step above and possibly an example for other people to do it the important thing is that the project itself sets the bar very high for truth telling if there is going to be in the in the peace process a truth commission the truth commission is not going to be able to water down the strong conclusions and strong evidence that the project of historical memory has brought about and just like in the southern cone in Argentina and Chile the the justice phase was made possible by the truth telling that happened before by the reddit commission in Chile and the sabato commission in Argentina without those early exercises the prosecutions would have been very different in those countries as well because they turned public opinion on the one hand the need for justice because the more you know about what really happened the more that you understand that there are some injustices that cannot be left unpunished and also turned public opinion towards making justice in the sense of criminal prosecutions inevitable and to break down the obstacles to those prosecutions so my next point is reconciliation I mean in Latin America the word reconciliation has had very bad connotations because it has mostly been used by people who almost use it as a substitute for impunity and it is telling the victims you can't ask for justice and you can't ask for truth and you can't ask for aspirations because we are reconciled you are reconciled with us so that is the kind of thing that we among those who work on transitional justice have had to contend with telling victims that when we say reconciliation we don't mean you are reconciled we mean we will get through a process in which the society will be reconciled and it is important to insist on reconciliation between war infactions as something different from imposing reconciliation between the torturer and the tortured person between the person who conducted a massacre and the families that were left without their livelihood and their loved ones that's not the reconciliation that international law and transitional justice require but if we distinguish reconciliation of course reconciliation between the war infactions of course reconciliation in the sense of overcoming long conflicts of an ideological or political nature and letting the conflict be resolved by peaceful means by participation in the democratic process because we are all for that reconciliation and that is what should be pursued after all we are talking here about war crimes and crimes against humanity when it comes to war crimes there is no question that international law the law of armed conflict requires an amnesty at the end of the conflict that's in protocol 2 of the Geneva Conventions article 6 paragraph 5 but we have to be reminded at this time that that amnesty is not amnesty for war crimes it's amnesty for the crime of rising up in arms against the state the crime of sedition or rebellion or treason however it's called in the domestic jurisdiction is eminently subject to amnesty at the end of a conflict not only that it's possible and legal to do it we should forcefully propose it amnesty for those who participated in the conflict but didn't get their hands dirty with the blood of innocent people but at the same time we should make it clear that the limit to that amnesty is that war crimes are not included in the amnesty and that crimes against humanity are not included in the amnesty I don't have to tell you I don't think what are war crimes and what are crimes against humanity just refer you to the Statute of Rome for the most clear definition of them but I do want to stress that when it comes to certain human rights violations like war crimes and crimes against humanity but also single episodes of torture or forced disappearances international law requires that the state investigate, prosecute and punish the act and the perpetrators and this is an absolute obligation one that unfortunately in the case of torture especially is not fulfilled even by very powerful nations like the United States and that unfortunately is more observed in the breach by all around the world but nevertheless it is an obligation and it's a clear standard that many countries have adopted and I would submit to all countries because it's a customary international law that goes beyond signing and ratifying a treaty which by the way Colombia is a party to the convention against torture for example what does it mean that something is a war crime or a crime against humanity it means one that there is that obligation to prosecute and punish that means also that amnesties that have the effect of preventing that obligation and also other obstacles like the inter-american court said in Almonacida de Janeiro versus Chile other obstacles like statutes of limitation like pardons like just prosecutorial discretion all have to be removed there has to be investigation, prosecution and punishment but the category of crimes against humanity and war crimes also requires certain other actions by the state and we mentioned already truth-telling but also reparations to the victims and measures of non-repetition by way of institutional reform it's in all of these areas where one has to be optimistic about what has been announced but also carefully cautious about what the end result will be as we heard this morning the devil will be in the details and so we don't know where it's all going but in the course of supporting the peace process and the agreements that have already been tentatively reached we should remind ourselves of this that it is possible in Colombia as it is possible elsewhere to prosecute those bearing the highest responsibility to do so with utmost respect for fair trial guarantees and for due process of law and to do so by giving the victims an opportunity to see justice done that is what is the requirement of international law and it's not impossible to obtain I have a few more things to say but I know we're running out of time I just want to say that it's important for us in the human rights movement and I consider myself as looking at these issues from a human rights perspective not to allow ourselves to be painted into the corner of being the spoilers to a peace process the fact that we insist on justice doesn't mean that we oppose peace on the country it does mean that Colombians now have an opportunity perhaps the most important opportunity that we'll see in a long time to make to find ways in which peace does not trump justice but that peace and justice nurture each other and support each other and that we like Colombian victims are in favor of peace but a peace that will be lasting and will be enduring because it is a just peace thank you very much thank you Juan I'm going to turn the floor over to Andrés and Marta and see if you want to respond to any of the questions and comments that were raised by the commentators that one of the strongest challenges that the Center has is the diffusion of its reports and the capacity that these reports can have to go through the curriculum, the training of the children in Colombia this requires very strong allies like the Ministry of Education the Ministry of Culture and there is a challenge we have done very important things it is forming, it is contributing to the training of teachers and teachers so that they also build historical memory and tools so that they can work with their students the texts that produce the historical memory center but really there are many things to learn I would say that maybe communities are much more creative than we are I would like to put an example since Lili asked us for examples there are many at the local level the community of San Carlos used the report of San Carlos they made the curriculum taught in the local history based on the report of San Carlos they worked on all the competences that the Ministry of Education established based on that report they produced radio programs since there is a high consumption of radio in this region of the country and I believe that these are local examples that can be very useful for the national context the victims of Buenaventura in Colombia accompanied by a production of a written report with a theatrical work the theatrical work is called Touching the tide and it is a theater script that in some way collects the most determinant of the report in that artistic language so I think that there are many examples where it is sought to educate not only in the classroom but also outside the classroom to educate with art there are things to learn but yes, the victims have told us many times if our memory is not public it will not be a historical memory and we know that there this is a huge challenge in front of the issue of reconciliation I would like to point out that obviously Colombia is a country with a huge territorial heterogeneity huge and there are experiences of supremely interesting reconciliation in some Colombian municipalities a lot happens if the armed actor or perpetrators were from the region or were not from the region when they are from the region they generate interesting experiences a mother specifically in San Carlos Antioquia told me what we do with them we tell them to leave or they are the children of my neighbor or we try to do some process of living together so I think that locally we also have to learn from the experiences of reconciliation I would finally say that there are many victims that have told us in a very conclusive way I do not know the victim no one has asked me for forgiveness with whom I reconcile and I think this is massive in the Colombian case there are hundreds of victims who do not know who they are then it is a forgiveness trap it is forgiveness to whom it is forgiveness to the Colombian state it is forgiveness to whom no one has asked me for that public forgiveness it is important many victims have left us clear the lesson that more than a policy of reconciliation requires conditions for coexistence coexistence more than reconciliation coexistence conditions sometimes allow me to live to be able to coexist allow me to live without fear educate my children and then I can think to coexist with others but it is still a very abstract word with a very strong moral and religious charge that sometimes becomes another form of depression about the victims than a condition for the construction of peace I would complement what Marta proposed that Adam proposed the history and I must say that graphic history is a tool pedagogical that you are exploring the National Center of Historical Memory because we know that they are the types as we can reach the young people then it is exploring that option not with the purpose of caricaturing but it is a communicative way to reach the young people it has been very important in the work of diffusion I would say in that we as academics we have recognized that we have a deep attachment to a book then you have to diversify the languages play a very important role in photographic expositions in fact this report already has a photographic exposure that we have taken to different places then the capacity of photography to communicate the report itself there are people who read it only from the photos and see the photographic experience and rebuild and generate awareness about what you are seeing has also helped us a lot in diversification of the documentary videos in fact this report has a documentary video that is called there was no time for sadness and it is in the narrative of the victims that is, it is not the documentary video version it is the narrative of the victims who participated they are voices, they are faces with deep reflections because the communicative capacity of the victims is very powerful in the way the victims are able to communicate what they have lived how they have faced the armed conflict and second I would say that on the pedagogical issue one of the challenges that we have about the particularities of the work we develop is that we have a public that is very interested in knowing the products of the center but this excessive attachment to the book makes unfortunately not all those who are interested in the products of the center consume, let's say, sorry, the expression if or read the total production of the center and that is paradoxical because the victims in exchange many of them of marginal communities with limitations even in their reading and writing if they read the report with a passion and the victims when we return to the communities they complain chapter, you have to do the second version because there is not everything but they read it deeply and with time we learn to understand that anyway the book for the victims has a dimension of symbolic recognition very important as if the victims said if it is not written in the book we do not exist I mean, despite the verbal language artistic language I think none of them would replace if today we offered an audiobook would not replace the idea of the book itself there is a dimension of recognition very important of the feeling that only this can be lost in history so it is very important for them the work of the book and the second theme of reflection that I wanted to think is that there is something in the agreement of the commission of the truth it is not minor and it is that it collects a lot of what the victims many times have told us when we reflect with it about the existence of a commission of the truth and they said we do not imagine in the work of a commission of the truth something equal to what you did and that with that they wanted to say we believe that the commission of the truth should point more to recognition than to clarification we all know there are some consensus that we all share what we need is a symbolic field like the one that can give a commission of the truth to report they are there, they are latent we tell them under the table when we will report them even when we will report the descendants it is more that level of claim we do not want again we were told some victims what are the truths about which we will sit and what are the recognitions about which we will find who in the future how it will be there is a production a very important accumulation to give that kind of step and we need that symbolic space act as that place of denunciation of those recognitions great part of what has happened with raising the demands of justice, part of the victims the little offer of truth or the type of truth that is offered it has to do with that dimension when the victim faces that limit and does not find recognition of what has happened of the truths that also opens the way to say, well if you do not want to say the truth then justice falls all the weight of the law on you because you are not even giving me the plan of recognition but then the same victims experience that even though there is a criminal act if there is no recognition of a significant truth remains something many of them, that was an experience of justice and peace that had an effective privation of the freedom of paramilitaries up to eight years the victims said I come to these audiences and what I hope is a significant truth not a stigmatizing truth for this, for the scenario that comes to us and is I want the victim to morally subordinate to me because I have chosen the path of the word to confront it I could have become a victim I could continue the cycle of violence and I complain from the word it is perhaps the greatest contribution to the reconciliation that the victims do so I hope an act of moral subordination that you are able to tell me you killed me in a state of indefension to my family that is the supreme act of condemnation that people want then it will be very important in the commission of the truth what is spoken of the spaces where the victims can speak and that the victims understand that in the transition the condemnation over the means of violence is very important because over it the transition is founded perpetrators always live with the pretension to say to society it does not matter what has been done the important thing is why I did it no wait, it does matter what you did that is important because the post-conflict or reconciliation in the new democratic bases we have to fund an explicit condemnation to the means you used because the purposes, your speeches you will be able to make them in the political arena but the actors will have to understand not to give explanations that become justifications is to recognize in a simple way but with a great moral power if I killed someone in a state of indefension and not resort to speeches eventually justificators but all this is for the issue the important thing is the recognition about a knowledge already accumulated and that is why it was very important that in the commission's mandate it will be spoken not only about the recognition but also about the conditions for the commission great thank you Andrés and Marta there are several themes that I just want to kind of put in conversation with each other and then open it up to the floor I think one question has to do with something that Anthony mentioned about the myths that are created and I'm wondering if Andrés or Marta could speak to what are the myths that Basta Ya is trying to dispel that would be one question another question thinking about the presentations by both Carlos and Kimberly today how do you think that Basta Ya has dealt with the questions of the continuum of discrimination and violence and invisibilization against certain sectors of the population or Afro-Columbian communities or Indigenous communities I think we think of if we're thinking about how words define the subject matter that we're looking at how do you define conflict violence in a way that understands that the conflict violence against these sectors is actually part of a continuum that's not just specific to a particular period of time of the conflict and then one last question that educational plans you've already addressed one last question that I have is I know that in Basta Ya there were pages and pages of very detailed policy recommendations and within the individual tomes as well the Casas Ejemplares there were specific naming of crimes and responsibilities for those crimes what kinds of outcomes have you had I know there were detention orders for example issued right after the Trujillo report came out was there follow through on that were people prosecuted were they given punishments what kinds of consequences have you seen on the ground of the Basta Ya and all of the segments that contributed to the Basta Ya report well I I'm going to refer to three myths that I think I think I tried to treat the report one mentioned Andrés the issue of violence in the March of the Dead because of the violence in the March of the armed conflict there were marginals one more violence is one of each 10 deaths there are other more important violence of course it's difficult to say but what we can show is that it's not a marginal violence it's that one of each three deaths in Colombia is caused in the March of the Armed Conflict and that also gives more importance to the issue of peace if we could stop that violence we would be removing one of the factors that causes the most deaths in Colombia a second myth is that all the armed actors are the same I think we worked very hard to show that as Andrés said they all did everything but they are not the same they are not the same neither in their purposes nor in their methods they are not the same in their responsibilities and there we try to show not only that the responsibility in terms of what could be argued quantitatively but the responsibility that fits to each one depending on the place that the society occupies I think this is a very important point from that myth I would say that we are all guilty that someone mentioned this it's the most I think it's one of the most effective ways of impunity we are all guilty what we tried to argue in the report we are all responsible undoubtedly but we are not all guilty and the guilt has to be pointed out in a clear way in a concrete way in a specific way so that there can be justice action I would initially refer to those three myths I don't know Andrés I would complement one of the myths that I think Elvastaya tried to contradict has to do with a criticism which is the issue of the role of drug trafficking that we as Marta said wanted to desnarcotize the armed conflict because the interpretation about the role of the conflict of drug trafficking in the armed conflict was put first much in economic terms very strong the idea of drug trafficking is the fuel of the armed conflict carried in Colombia interpretations that put us in the field that there is no political nature that there are a lot of criminal companies that are feeding the conflict and what we wanted to show in the report there is an important weight of drug trafficking but it is not the only one and you have to be careful that drug trafficking does not invisibilize other responsibilities I always like to give a concrete example around it it is always associated with drug trafficking with paramilitarism and of course there is an important influence with paramilitarism and it is said that when drug trafficking breaks paramilitarism emerges what worries us for example with bets like that is that other types of responsibilities are invisibilized as for example drug trafficking does not explain to me the existence of a legal framework that allowed to form groups of self-defense in the that was a norm that existed since the end of the 60's and that in the 80's the strategy of insurgent in a decided way does not explain to me the creation of drug trafficking to live in the 90's without legal framework I cannot understand the expansion of paramilitarism first point second, if I only see drug trafficking I can have a great temptation to only see a criminal dimension that in relation to a phenomenon like paramilitarism I hide responsibilities of other social, economic and political actors that arrived at drug trafficking not necessarily associated with drug trafficking there is a dimension of the alliance against insurgent that is much more than simply drug trafficking and another dimension that we find very important is that we always see drug trafficking in a single direction we always think of drug trafficking as an externality and we say how it impacted the armed conflict and we almost never ask the question and how the armed conflict favored drug trafficking or what conditions that gave origin or invented the armed conflict favored drug trafficking that is why when one talks about the possibility of the finalization of the armed conflict drug trafficking that will surely continue if a different situation is faced or the criminal company drug trafficking will live a different situation and is no less let's say one cannot recognize that an important issue that has occurred in the armed conflict such as the issue of the agrarian problem the issue of the opening of the agrarian border areas of the territory where the armed actors managed to establish that the agrarian problem was exploited by drug trafficking to grow and the existence of the armed conflict in the periphery helped drug trafficking to consolidate those bastions and drug trafficking had a growth type a very different dynamic also that when we talk about drug trafficking we cannot just stay in the dimension of the resources we also have to recognize that behind drug trafficking there is a set of emerging elites that they found in paramilitarism and in the armed conflict a route in which they sought social and political was one more of the means that they could use I think that the issue of drug trafficking had to be removed from the simplification that was left to analyze the armed conflict in Colombia a second myth that I think was important is that there is a tendency in the Colombian academy very marked since the 90's and forward to want to see the violence of the actors in Colombia there was always the tension between if we attributed objective causes of the conflict or not and then we moved to a tendency in which we put a lot of emphasis on the actors and when we put the emphasis on the actors we arrived at a given moment to think that the actors could sustain themselves without any kind of anchoring in the context and we said that the war or the violence are explained by actors that were organized that have strategies and implement them and it's as if there were no conditions and I think that that's enough when we see it in the long run the question of an armed actor can want to make the war and design his strategy but one thing that I want is that he can sustain me that they are required so that those strategies can be implemented I think that's enough the discussion was let's look at those conditions that made possible the deployment of those strategies and I think it's important it's not a minor issue it's the issue of what are the conditions that we need to transform the armed conflict to reach peace Gonzalo Sánchez clearly says we fall in a given moment in the totalitarian pretension that the conflict was over when we destroyed the armed actor or we fell in the simplification of saying we don't need to change something to end the violence and I think that's enough to show that there are political roots there are social roots there is a set of different it can be only a matter of volunteerism of the actors or strategies if there is no armed actor he can't keep in a conflict if he doesn't find political opportunities if he doesn't have economic resources and if he doesn't find social anchorages in which he can develop his armed activity and that applies to all the actors of the armed conflict I think it was important the report because it brought back the need for changes and that it wasn't just a matter of relationship with actors that depended only on volunteers I think another important myth that can be interpreted as Marta says was the issue of breaking the idea of the marginality of the armed conflict or to consider that it was over dimensioning in the political agenda I think that when we advance to the post-conflict there will be dimensions that this conflict actually had and its true incidence that it wasn't a minor issue and I would like to add a fourth point that more than having to do with the myths I would like to pick up some of the critiques that Marta raised and it's a very big challenge that we have in the historic center and that leaves us with the critiques of the bastallà with the bastallà there was a reaction when the whole discussion around the origins and they even want to put those origins before 1958 or before the national front I recognize in that critique an important fact just now that we're talking about recognitions and that it's a challenge for the center, we can't do memory of the armed conflict about the forget of violence of the violence of bipartisan I think what is behind that criticism to say beyond if the armed conflict originated there or not I think society is also claiming that we have a pending debt with the bipartisan violence because what we're facing today with the issue of recognitions was a issue that we didn't face when we saw the transition of the bipartisan violence when we were finishing it when the national front pact was made because a lot of people say it was a pact of forget of not recognizing responsibilities and part of returning to that and that's a challenge that Marta who is the director of the National Museum of Memory will have in the need to recognize not only the armed conflict but the violence of bipartisan and the dimensions that she herself acquired by the voices that she silenced after the national front pact and what else to ask about the recommendations of politicians recommendations, yes we have been thinking about 30 recommendations of public policy and we have to say that in them the first recommendations are founded or were planned according to the recognition in fact the first recommendation of the Bastalla was to ask the republic to recognize the state's responsibility in the armed conflict and we have to say that the president we gave the information on July 23, 2013 he said to Gonzalo I'm going to comment that an incidence he says when they are before the recognition I saw the first recommendation he said to Gonzalo Sánchez and he says I'm going to fulfill it we said it's a shame that I'm going to receive it but the decision that the president took was to recognize to apply the recommendation to the next day the next day that happened in Colombia the president went to the constitutional court to defend the legal framework for peace that the legal framework for peace is the framework from which he can work the issue of peace negotiations and the president recognizes at that moment the responsibility of the state what happens when you are in the middle of the peace process these early events that have a great force are losing their symbolic efficiency because they start to be in the middle of what happens with the peace process and in fact there is going to be the challenge only when we are in the commission of the truth when it ends that has already been forgotten we have to rescue it and I think for the same fragmentation that I mentioned and the internal tensions inside the state it's going to be very important that not only the president but other high officials of the state recognize it in a broader way and that can include for example the Ministry of Defense military forces people are waiting for the announcement in that sense in that first package of recommendations in the first part we told the armed and legal groups do an act of recognition of their responsibilities because it was part of the claim of the victims all the time of that symbolic dimension of the recognition we made a wide set of recommendations these are two of the 30 but it was a very wide spectrum that recognized, some have not been implemented recognized the need for example in the issue of the damages of the psychosocial damage that we had to recognize that by the scale and by the dimensions of the affections that caused the armed conflict we proposed to create regional centers of psychosocial attention exclusively for the issue we needed a political psychosocial attention for the victims let's say that is a part of the work that in the issue of reparation has not been worked systematically or with a political properly said so that is one of the recommendations that have not been implemented we have said something that may be relevant now maybe those who saw the report will remember it and it is that in the issue of justice we said there must be a special court there will have to be because in the complaint of justice can not be signed or simply pass the page we must generate an eventual court ad hoc but there must be a dimension of the sanction people wait a dimension of the sanction when people talk about justice not only is waiting the dimension of the penal sanction in the sense of freedom, of a punishment of that nature wait the symbolic act of denunciation of the sanction of the sanction itself so the jurisdiction that is now proposed for us generates a lot of expectation because we know that it is a very important complaint of the victims and because it has to leave the public opinion and in all that is being sanctioned and hence the importance of the moral subordination of the perpetrator to recognize to catch the head of the victim and to recognize the the crimes that have been perpetrated we also made recommendations because we know that these process of demobilization are complicated about having to make a balance of all the demobilization policy that has been used in previous steps there is a very important issue because in these hierarchized structures the weak point or the weak point is usually in the means, for example how do you guarantee that these processes of demobilization are successful when, as they did not tell some of the demobilized for example in Urabaya they said look, the structures or policies have always been thought in the head or those who are in front of the organizations go to the policy and they have a place in the policy the bases are replicated in their families but the medium command needs something that allows to reproduce the position occupied by the structure in society and how they solved it in a region like Urabaya many of the businessmen gave them work as farm administrators and the process worked let's say more or less no, it was successful with the demobilization of the EPL that is a very important question the issue of how do you guarantee replicas in some way the structures so that the actors can integrate in society because in a conflict so prolonged for many the war is the office that learned and they will not relegate a position of command if they cannot occupy it socially that is what has happened to us in