Impunity and Paranoia: Writing Histories of Indonesian Violence

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511657511.013

11 - Impunity and Paranoia: Writing Histories of Indonesian Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2010

Elizabeth F. Drexler

Edited by

Kamari Maxine Clarke and

Mark Goodale

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Kamari Maxine Clarke: Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Mark Goodale: Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia

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Summary

Historical narratives play important roles in institutions designed to address the legacies of mass violence. Truth commissions are explicitly designed to provide public and official contexts for narrating the unspeakable and locating responsibility for crimes against humanity. The assumption that “revealing is healing” (Adam and Adam, 2001) underlies many strategies for addressing the legacies of massive violence: Expressing or exposing previously denied, secreted, or silenced truths about state violence is said to provide victims with dignity and closure (du Toit, 2000; Hayner, 2001; Minow, 1998; Popkin and Rhot–Arriaza, 1995), as well as to reconcile former enemies and resolve the lingering community-level conflicts that follow violent regimes and armed resistance movements. Trials and international tribunals that identify perpetrators and hold them judicially accountable also produce and authorize new narratives about past atrocities, assigning responsibility for creating conditions that made massive violations of human rights possible. Providing a secure foundation for the rule of law, many advocates agree, requires a comprehensive accounting for the past. Lively legal and academic debate has turned on the role of war crimes trials in documenting systematic atrocities, creating historical memory, and raising public awareness of offenses against human rights (Douglas 2001; Osiel 1997), as distinct from adhering strictly to the requirements of the judicial process for determining culpability (Arendt, 1964; Buruma, 1994). Both tasks are essential, but it is difficult to accomplish both in a single body while upholding notions of historical documentation and institutional responsibility, on the one hand, and standards of due process and individual rights, on the other (Landsman, 2005).

Type: Chapter
Information: Mirrors of Justice
Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era
, pp. 229 - 247

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511657511.013 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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