| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Shari Eppel Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by Jane Scherr |
Page 5 of 6
Do you think that DNA, which we now see becoming a tool of human rights work to identify victims and so on, do you think that kind of examination of the bodies and bones will ever contribute to a broader political process in your country?
Absolutely. I think it could be really essential for us. At the moment exhumation activities are limited, because they have to be -- I wouldn't say clandestine, because obviously you need certain kinds of authority, although that's a very gray area and we've managed to find all the grayest parts that we can in order to exhume some of these murdered dead -- but basically, once we have a new government, which I would like to believe is no more than a year away, then it will be open house. We will have much more scope in terms of being able to exhume much bigger mass graves, and then we will need more sophisticated forensic techniques, like DNA matching, in order to be sure of giving the right bones back to the right families for reburial.
What about evidence in possible truth and reconciliation or tribunals in your country?
I'm longing for that day. I think we've had a hundred years of impunity in Zimbabwe, and it's time that it's stopped. The incoming government had planned on their agenda to have a truth and justice commission. They've already approached us, in terms of how could we play a role. And, in fact, Amani is hosting -- I'm putting together at the moment -- a four-day workshop in August called "Truth, Justice, and Reparation: Planning the Way Forward for Zimbabwe," which is, again, probably a bit premature, to be planning what we're going to do with this government while they're still incumbent. But I think it is an important process. And certainly forensic evidence will be very important.
Are there cultural reasons which would be given to oppose the extracting of DNA, or is this not a concern of the people that have been victims, once they know that this restoration and healing will be the aim?
It's very simple to extract material for DNA. We have started doing it already; we already have a blood bank which we have started against the day when we may need it, where the Argentineans have shown us a very simple process, which is basically to prick somebody's finger and collect blood on three bits of sterile photo paper, and just put that away in a brown envelope, and you've got your DNA material for the next couple of decades. You don't even have to refrigerate it, you don't need masses of blood or anything like that, it's a very, very simple procedure. And we find that we have a high level of tests in the communities where we've worked, and people have been more than happy to have a prick on the finger if they think it means that in due course they can be sure of having the right bones back.
So with a change of government, there is a real possibility of moving forward in a broader way, with DNA evidence playing a critical role, both in helping families know what happened to relatives or ancestors, and, on the other hand, as possible evidence in some sort of a tribunal, to demonstrate that there was a systematic effort to control and bear down on this population.
Yes, I think that it will be crucial. But what I try to make sure of is that this process doesn't ever go ahead without some kind of emotional monitoring and support for families. Because what I see around these dead, these murdered dead, is enormous amounts of energy, anger, and pain, and the potential for that to get out of hand and be destructive rather than healing.
We have also seen in a few cases where we didn't do very much work prior to reburials. We've actually seen that reburials are not necessarily in and of themselves healing, and they can be destructive, and they can actually even serve to hide the truth, and can become just a further act of denial. We had this experience last year in November, when we reburied some washed-up remains in the Lagi Camp, which was a detention and murder center in 1994. Because these remains were kind of fortuitously there (it wasn't a community we had worked in), and the Argentineans were fortuitously there, we analyzed the remains and helped them to be reburied. But at the funeral, all the speeches were denial, denial, in the way treated the past. People were very afraid. It was in November last year, there was still a lot of post-election violence in Zimbabwe, and people were saying, "We don't know who these people are, and you have no idea how they died."
They were being buried in the shadow of the Lagi Camp, where there had been murders and where the remains had been found, and nobody referred to that. This was in sharp contrast to some of the other funerals where we had worked with the community for a long time, six or nine months prior to exhumation. In those funerals, what we have seen is massive denunciation of the government, people standing up and saying, "These people were murdered by the angels of Satan. They thought it was a town of darkness, but God could see what they were doing. And now we can see this great evidence. We are here, we are gathered here as a community, and we can witness the truth of those massacres." So it's put in sharp contrast.
Emphasize for us again what the difference is between the successful and the not successful exhumations?
I think for the successful one, you need a slow process of breaking the silence in a community where they've seen so much death for so long, and where we're still working in a state where the truth is suppressed, and to talk about it is subversive. So we will have many community meetings over many months prior to exhumation, and during that time people will gradually stand up and say, "I was beaten. Here are my wounds." "My son was crucified on that tree over there." The stories will start to come out. And so the exhumation and reburial becomes the culmination of a long process of breaking of truths, and it can, therefore, be a really, truly healing experience. As opposed to this other experience, where it just became one more further denial of the truth.
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