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Timothy Williams, "Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape" (Bristol UP, 2025)
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Podcast Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Kelly McFall
Hi, and welcome to New Books in Genocide Studies, part of the New Books Network of podcasts. My name is Kelly McFall from Newman University and I'm a host on the show and today I'm thrilled to welcome Timothy Williams. Tim is junior professor of Insecurity and Social Order at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich and the second Vice President of the International association of Genocide Scholars. He's the author of a terrific new book, Memory Politics After Mass Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape. His earlier work focused on analyzing perpetrators and their actions, and he's written a book and edited books about this. This one turns to the issue of memory and about memory politics. It's a terrific book. I'm excited to talk with him about it. So, Tim, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us on new books and genocide studies.
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Timothy Williams
Thank you so much for having me.
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Kelly McFall
So we always start the same well, you've been on the network before, but it was a while back. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you become interested in writing about mass violence as a profession, and how does that fit with how you see yourself as a person?
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Timothy Williams
I wrote my first book, like you said, on perpetrators. I did my PhD on why people participate in genocide. I think that came out of my studies. I'm a political scientist by training interested in conflict studies, and I felt that one of the biggest puzzles is why do people participate in these things where they I normally stand little to gain, but while I was doing my PhD research, I was very struck during my field research, how people talk about the past in different places and where I did my field research in Cambodia and almost all the former Khmer Rouge. So the perpetrators of that genocide portrayed themselves as victims to me. And so when I finished my PhD and I was working on a new postdoc project, I thought this would be. This could be interesting. So I started looking at Cambodia and then expanded to also look at Rwanda and Indonesia to try and understand how do these mass violence events which have happened in the past really figure in today? What does it mean to individuals, but particularly what does it mean politically, and how are they used today? So it was a natural continuation, even if it's a slightly different take, really on what the past means.
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Kelly McFall
Yeah. So maybe we'll start with a simple question. What's the thesis of your book?
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Timothy Williams
Fundamentally, I suggest with the book that what is relevant about the past is not what actually happened. So historians probably don't love that bit. But what is really relevant is what is made of it today. And that any history or any rendition of the past also serves political interests today. And so we see that political actors, activists and so on and so forth will try and tell different versions of the past which serve their own interests, which bolster their legitimacy or delegitimize others. And within that, I suggest that the main way that people talk about the past, which has political ramifications today, is the way they attribute roles. So what I mean by that is who. Who do they narrate as a perpetrator? This serves to delegitimize people or people associated with them, who is remembered as a victim. There's a certain moral superiority afforded to victims, and much is done to serve victims after mass violence. And so there's something to be said that that is a category which people want to be associated with, who's remembered as a hero? There's a lot to be said that heroes are legit. They're the people who saved people, and so on, so forth. And so the main idea of the book is to say the way that these different roles are remembered in the past serve very real functions today. And thus there are conflicts about how to remember the past, which work in political arenas, but also in transitional justice processes, in memorial spaces, in places which are seen as neutral or as normatively positive, that they're seen as good places, because that's where we remember the past and where we learn from the past. But really there are also. Well, I'm not disputing that they are important and normatively important. I'm also saying that there are political interests interlaced with that. And what is told and what is not told in these spaces is relevant.
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Kelly McFall
So I'm just going to take a break. For the listeners who may have heard the rumbling in the background that has started. We are taping in my office and there are thunderstorms in the neighborhood. So forgive us if there are occasional. If the weather is commenting on Tim's answers. So maybe we should start then from that really nice summary of the book. Let's start with some terms you use. So talk to us about the term memoryscape and what that means and why it's important.
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Timothy Williams
So a memoryscape you can imagine it's like a landscape. We look out of a window and we see the horizon. We see buildings on it. We might see some nice fields or some woods and. And so forth, which a topography of what we see in the landscape. And the memory scape is very much the same, but what we perceive in terms of the past. So within the memory scape, we'll have both actual material buildings. We'll have memorials, we'll have museums, we'll have monuments. We'll also have other spaces which are maybe not marked as spaces of the past, but which some groups, maybe victim groups, know that it was a torture site, even if it's not marked as such. And it'll have meaning for certain parts of the society. So there are all these material things which create a topography of memory of the past. But into that we also have social aspects of memory, commemoration events, plays, films, books, and so on and so forth, which I would also say is part of this memory scape. So it's basically when someone looks at how a society remembers the past, that is the memory scape. And what I love about the idea of it being a scape like a landscape is that depending on where I look at it from, I will be seeing the same things, but they'll have different meanings to me, or I'll be seeing them in a slightly different perspective. So if I'm on one side of a tree, I will see it in a different way than someone else will see it from a different perspective. And that's the same. If we go to a memorial, different people who have different personal background, political affiliations, and so forth will be engaging with these spaces in ways that may be different. And they will hear maybe similar stories and they'll mean different things.
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Kelly McFall
And although you commented on this already a little, you didn't use this term. So I'll just ask you to introduce the term mnemonic role attributions.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah, I guess I avoided the term because it's a bit. It doesn't sort of just slip off the tongue. It's very much. It is exactly what it says it is, but it doesn't always make it the most attractive of terms. So mnemonic role attributions, I mean mnemonic meaning related to memory and how these roles are attributed. So in the book, I define them as categorizations of actors, roles, culpability and suffering as they're remembered for a specific period of time. And so it really is this idea of who's a perpetrator, who's a victim, who's a hero, but maybe also in some contexts, who's a bystander. And what do these categories mean? So particularly the category of victimhood is often connotated with suffering, but it can have different meanings in terms of how much agency someone has. Perpetrators are often seen as culpable and it will be delegitimizing to them, but there are lots of different connotations with that. And so that's all wrapped into what do these roles mean regarding the past.
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Kelly McFall
And the last part of our vocabulary lesson, you talk about ambivalence and give it a particular kind of meaning and importance in your book. So can you talk about how you use that idea?
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Timothy Williams
Yeah. So ambivalence is the second concept which I became intrigued with while doing my research, that you can have societally, you can have opinions about things or actions, attitudes towards specific issues which are contradictory within each other. So ambivalence basically means it comes from psychology that you have two opposite attitudes simultaneously towards something, so you find something good and bad at the same time, basically. And what I try to do is take this term from psychology and make it applicable to both memory and to collective processes. So what I'm interested in, ambivalence is to try and understand when there are memories of the past which really conflict with each other, where really there are different things being remembered, but they don't actually conflict societally. They somehow manage to coexist in a way which works where it's both acceptable to think the one thing and the other. And they don't really. They don't mesh, they don't become one, but they don't contradict each other and they don't create political conflict. And the idea is that with these different instances of ambivalence, that it allows societies to hold multiple perspectives on the past and specific political interests. Can be foregrounded in one part of that memory without inherently contradicting other parts, which would be problematic to some groups within the population, for instance.
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Kelly McFall
So we're going to talk in a second about how these play out in your case studies. But first I'd love it if you would share a little bit about the research you did about when you got to these countries, about what you decided to see and how you tried to wrestle with some of the ethical challenges in those. And perhaps, if you choose, about how you felt while you were doing that research.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah, absolutely. So what I did, like I said, I started in Cambodia because it was a context I'd already been working on. And I was actually working on a larger project with a couple of colleagues where we were trying to understand how victims perceive transitional justice. We wanted to see does justice, the tribunal in Cambodia and lots of civil society projects which were supported. How did that contribute to people's perceptions of justice and reconciliation? So we did a large nationwide survey and lots of in depth interviews. And I then, in that context, started talking to the people implementing the transitional justice process and became very intrigued to visit the memorial sites, to visit the spaces of transitional justice, to try and understand what they perceive to be the work they're doing, how they hope to be contributing to society, but also how it's embedded politically. And from there, this is where the interest for this book then emerged, to really try and see how they're talking about the past, what the work that they're doing. So I spent a lot of time hanging out in memorial sites, speaking to various different actors. And I mean, I think it's from there I went to two very different contexts, to Rwanda and Indonesia. And I think for me, I spent a lot of time in Cambodia already prior to this project. So I felt very comfortable. I already knew the spaces, I knew what they meant culturally. And while they're obviously very sad spaces, also it's quite hard speaking to victims about. I was never speaking to them about their experiences of the past, but what it means for them today. But still, that's not always easy. But in Rwanda and Indonesia, the political systems are such that it's also quite dangerous to do research there. In Rwanda, I had another project with a colleague where we weren't able to get a research permit. And so a lot of these things happened in more informal spaces, which I was much less comfortable with, where I wasn't doing interviews, but more participant observation and things like that. And in Indonesia, similarly, it's a space which made me feel quite nervous because the research was not what the government would like, making me slightly insecure in those spaces and also having to then think through what does this mean for possible interview partners and talking that through with them and making sure that I keep myself and everyone else safe. But that's also a good distraction from, I guess, the psychological difficulty of looking at these past spaces because it very much roots it in the issues and the problems that memory actors have today as well, which are also very real. It's not just the suffering of the past, but also the suffering of how they're allowed to do memory. Yeah.
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Kelly McFall
Well, let's talk about, sorry, Cambodia. And you roughly divide Cambodian memory into two parts. And I understand that's a gross simplification of what you say, but we'll start there. And so maybe you could talk just to get us started about how perpetrators and victims were identified and understood broadly over time in this Cambodian context.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah. So the genocide that is relevant in public memory of Cambodia happened from 1975 to 1979. And when the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power through invading troops, a new communist regime was set up, supported by Vietnam. And basically the Khmer Rouge pulled back to the Thai border to very well prepared bases and launched a civil war. And so in the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, the new government was primarily fighting for its survival and to keep the Khmer Rouge at bay, so they didn't return to power. So a lot of the way that the Khmer Rouge period had to be remembered was in this context of an ongoing civil war. So it was of the utmost priority to delegitimize the Khmer Rouge, to demonize them and to. To remind the population of the terrible violence which they had wreaked on the population. And at the same time, if we put the timeline, 1979, supported by the Vietnamese army, did not give the Cambodian government a lot of space to maneuver on the international field because supported by Vietnam, who was Persona non grata after expelling the US in the Vietnam War, meant that they had very little international support. So part of the memory regime also had to be to delegitimize the Khmer Rouge and show we're actually the good ones here. And so memorial sites were opened up around the country, particularly the largest one in Tall Sling Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh in the capital, which really were there to show the horror of the system. Skulls were presented, bones were presented, which goes very strongly against Cambodian religious conventions where bodies have to be cremated to release spirits for rebirth. And these spaces became places of horror, really to try and remind the population and the international community of what had happened. And this demonization obviously meant that the victims were clearly anyone who was not Khmer Rouge. But all Khmer Rouge was seen as problematic, as demonized. And the Hun Sen who became prime minister in 1984 and the people who saved the country through the Vietnamese invasion with them were the heroes for ending the regime. And all this shifted a little bit in the 1990s when in order to not go into the details of it, but there was a lot of political vying between different parties. And to secure his political power, Hun Sen came up with what he called the win win policy to end the civil war in which he offered Khmer Rouge and others incentives to defect. So they got land, money, power to defect. It was very effective. And what they did is bit by bit, battalion by battalion, they defected to the government. And in the end there was only very few Khmer Rouge left who could then be beaten. And it necessitated a new way of looking at the past because you could no longer demonize these tens of thousands of people who you were trying to integrate. And at the beginning, Hun Sen said he'd like to dig a hole and bury the past and forget about it. And he didn't really fulfill that strategy. What instead happened is that responsibility was always pinned on those who were Silkhumor Rouge. And basically in the end, it was only those who were most responsible, only really the highest. So that would be Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge at the time, and Yang Sa Ri, one of the very high ministers. And these people were seen as ultimately responsible and everyone else could then claim victimhood for themselves. So this is what I was saying earlier when I was interviewing former Khmer Rouge for my first project in Cambodia. They all identified as victims. And that is societally, for the most part, also external accepted. And so we get this new narrative from the mid-1990s onwards of universal victimhood where really anyone can be a victim. And we've got a double heroism around Hun Sen, who both freed the country from the Khmer Rouge in 1979 but also brought peace by ending the civil war. Spring of Wynn went and this narrative kept him in power until today. He stepped down as prime minister two years ago in 2023, handing over in true democratic fashion to his son. But he is still a very powerful or the most powerful political player in Cambodia today.
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Kelly McFall
Experian yeah, I'm going to guess many of our audiences have heard of Pol Pot but never heard of him. So can you say a little bit of Hun Sen? And what about his background makes him particularly interested?
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Timothy Williams
Yeah, Hun Sen is indeed like I said until two years ago and from 1984 he was prime Minister but he was part of this group that freed the country in 1979. Prior to that, he and all the people who were free in the country were actually Khmer Rouge themselves. They defected to Vietnam and then returned with the Vietnamese army to free the country. But this is also part of the reason why in the 1990s it became a lot easier rather than to deal with who had what responsibilities for what exactly to really say actually anyone who's mid or low ranking, they're all good to go, we're fine, they're victims and only the highest people are actually most responsible. And this, it works. And I think there's a lot of legitimacy also to this narrative in the sense that it was an ex totalitarian regime like we've really never seen before. The the private sphere was completely abolished by the Khmer Rouge family, was abolished education, people lived collectively, they ate collectively. There was no, there was no real space for any resistance or criticism to be able to be voiced. So in that degree it was a totalitarian regime and many of the low ranking Khmer Rouge had absolutely no say in what they were doing. But it's still interesting how history is told and how the past is remembered. It could go either way. And in this sense there is the people are willing to accept it because they see that they were also within this totalitarian regime. And at the same time all former Khmer Rouge or all Khmer Rouge also lost family members. Two million out of 8 million people died in those two years or were killed. And so from that sense there are a lot of the characteristics of victims which they can appeal to in which they are no different from the rest of the population.
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Kelly McFall
Now I filed a note in the back of my head to remember the exact phrase you used and of course it has zipped out of my head. But you said something like the relevant genocide or the relevant conflict, what are the Silences that are part of this policy about other kinds of conflicts or violence that Cambodia experienced.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah, so 1975 to 1979, the three years, eight months and 20 days, that's a number which is sort of ingrained in Cambodian discourse, is the central topic. But like I said, there was a civil war which raged for a decade and a half afterwards. And there was also a four year civil war which happened before that. There was involvement in the Vietnam war when in 1970 the Cambodian government allowed US planes to start bombing Viet Cong who had pulled back into Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying a lot of land. So there are lots of other violent and traumatic events which could be part of the memory scape, which could play an important role. There could have also been a tribunal on war crimes which were committed during the civil wars. American involvement in bombing Cambodia, all these topics could also have been prominent within the memory scape. But it's a political decision also to focus on the genocide. And when I say genocide also, this encompasses lots of different things. In Cambodia, when people talk about genocide, they really mean the ethnic majority Khmer population being killed within this totalitarian regime. But there were also ethnic minorities who were killed for being ethnic minorities, which actually fits much better with the legal definition of genocide.
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Kelly McFall
So I'm interested in the mechanics of how this happened, so I'll just ask you to talk about a couple of examples. One is I was surprised is maybe an understatement to learn about ways in which former members of the Khmer Rouge could apply to be a civil for civil party status at the tribunal. So say something about that, please.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah. So this was at the time, the first time that in an international setting any victims could sign up to be civil parties and to be parties to the process, which was very exciting for international lawyers, but also particularly for the victims. And anyone could become a civil party if they had been harmed by one of the crimes being tried. This is what is standard within criminal practice. But this also meant that many former Khmer Rouge who had also been harmed because they'd lost family members because they had themselves been incarcerated for being disobedient or being suspected as being disobedient or similar had also experienced harms. And so very quickly it became clear that also some former Khmer Rouge was signing up. It's not clear. There was no box on the civil party form to say, am I a former commerce? So we don't know how many it was. But in case two, there were almost 4,000 civil parties. And my esteemed colleague Julie Bernard estimates that about 10% of them were former Khmer Rouge. Others have estimated that it could be a little bit higher than that even. And I think what's interesting about that is not only are these people who were part of the system, they were the people who in part were maybe also killing other people, implementing the totalitarian regime and the genocide itself, and they experienced the harm. So they're what people would call complex political actors. They're both perpetrators and victims. I think particularly interesting is how this was negotiated within Cambodia. And for the most part, no one batted an eye. It was seen as clear that these people were victims and could apply. I did speak to some civil party lawyers who said that within some of the groups, some of the non former Khmer Rouge victims expressed their discontent that they were also being afforded these rights and being legally seen as victims. But normally this would then be discussed and ultimately it would be decided that it's okay. And so this is something which I've seen again and again that sometimes these narratives get broken open. There was a great example at Toll Sling Genocide Museum when there was going to be a monument erected to all those who were imprisoned there. It was the highest security center of the country, S21. And so because it was the highest security standard, it was those who are most threatening and who are those most threatening to a regime. It's those within the system who've become traitors. And so about 60% of those incarcerated at S21 were Khmer Rouge, which means that this monument, which by the way, is the only one where any names have been listed, nowhere else is there a list of victim names on any other monument. Most of those being remembered were then also formula Khmer Rouge. And so one victim representative said, this isn't right. We should just be putting those who were not formal Khmer Rouge. And there was a very brief. There was about a week or two where there was a debate about this. And very quickly, though, everyone then agreed, no, actually, they are victims. So even when it does break out where this discussion starts, the societal discourse becomes dominant again very quickly.
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Kelly McFall
And I'll just point out to listeners, if you're interested in that trial, you can go back in the archives and find an interview I did with Alex Hinton, who wrote books about this as well, or just go get his books, which are wonderful. I guess the second part of this question then, in terms of mechanics, I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about the way in which where, as I understood your book, where a member of the Khmer Roos, I guess, served as the right place during the conflict impacts the way he is perceived after the conflict is or she is perceived after the conflict is done.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah, yeah, the he or she is really important in this context because as part of the communist ideals of the Khmer Rouge, they also great supporters of recruiting women, which I don't think is the best service to women to be recruited into a totalitarian genocidal regime. But in terms of equality, that was one of the things that the Khmer Rouge did do. Yeah. So this is something which definitely plays into supporting this victim narrative that in many cases, like Rwanda, a lot of the violence was localized, so perpetrators knew their victims and survivors know who the perpetrators were in Cambodia because it was within it was all much more organized and systematic people were when they were recruited to the Khmer Rouge, they were immediately sent away for training. And so they were always sent to a different part of the country. Sometimes it was just a neighboring region. Region. But they were never where they were recruited from. And while sometimes they will have met someone who they knew because there were lots of forced labor groups which were mobile and being sent all over the country, for the most part, people didn't work where they were from and serve as Khmer Rouge where they were from. Which meant that in 1979 when the country was liberated, many Khmer Rouge were terrified of what would happen to them and fled to the borders with the Khmer Rouge. And many then also still live there. So they also didn't return to their home communities, but many also did return to their home communities, but so did millions of others who were in mobile working groups and people came home. And so many people don't even know that they were Khmer Rouge people in their community. And even if they do know that they were from Mukroj, they don't know what they did. And I think this is important, that saying that someone is a Khmer Rouge, it's not the same as saying they were in the Schutzstadt, in the ss, Right. During Nazi times, Khmer Rouge were responsible for everything. Local commune leaders were Khmer Rouge and they were important. They, for instance, signed off on death warrants. But also cooks were Khmer Rouge. And while the cooks maybe didn't distribute rations fairly, and so maybe some people survived because of cooks giving them extra food or less. They had a lot less agency in this. And so there were, I mean, a colleague of mine and I, Kiao Duong and I have estimated that about half a million people were Khmer Rouge. And many of these were not in prisons, they weren't in execution squads and so on.
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Kelly McFall
Well, that's a Nice transition. Maybe to invite you to say a little bit about how the memoryscape and the kind of role attributions in Rwanda were different from what you laid out for Cambodia.
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Timothy Williams
Yeah. So we see a very different context in Rwanda in which there's a very clear attribution of perpetrators to the Hutu group who conducted the genocide and very clear attribution of a victim or survivor to the the Tutsi group. And what I think is interesting here is that the groups become very ethnicized beyond the actual context of who actually did what. So the way that Rwanda after 1994, when the genocide was stopped by the invading RPF, has decided to deal with the genocide is by trying to prosecute absolutely everyone who was somehow involved. So very different to Cambodia, where it really only targeted the very highest leaders. So anyone who had any involvement. And this was done through Gacaca, a very community based judicial process. What it did is by processing so many people. It didn't really, what trials often do, individualize the guilt. But it also had the suggestion that really almost anyone within the Hutu population was somehow culpable, not least for not stopping it, stopping the violence. And so really, Hutu becomes almost synonymous with perpetrators and survivors are Tutsi. This excludes people who, for instance, have mixed parentage and are themselves Hutu, but lost family members as well. They won't be seen as survivors because they have the wrong ethnicity. But Tutsi, who, for instance, were not living in the country at the time, will be seen as survivors, even though they maybe only came back with the invading army. So it makes much more black and white categories. These also serve the political interests of the government. Still in power today is the RPF, who liberated the country in 1994 with President Paul Kagama, who is absolutely in the saddle of power. And he benefits from this in that he legitimizes his rule by having freed the country from genocide, which he did. But the danger that if he loses power, somehow hostility will break out again. What's also probably important to mention again here is like you asked, I said, the genocide, which is remembered in Cambodia. Also in Rwanda, it's the hundred days in 1994 in which Hutu massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, which is remembered, which is clearly the most violent part of. Of Rwandan history. But other parts of violent history are more forgotten. For instance, the four years of civil war prior to 1994 don't play such a role, in which the RPF invaded the country to return, creating a lot of insecurity. And it's in these four years which many of the Hutus radicalized and the discourse became even imaginable that the genocide would happen, and also that the RPF itself is engaged in mass atrocities against Hutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in refugee camps, and in other ways securing the country. And these are topics which are absolutely unspeakable in Cambodia, let alone, sorry, in Rwanda, let alone being able to be commemorated in any particular way. And Kagane and the Rwandan government is very savvy at using their role as heroes to counter to. To juxtapose that with the international community who had a UN mission in Rwanda at the time and wasn't able to. They didn't have a robust mandate, they couldn't have done anything, but they didn't stop the genocide. And the international community looked away for much too long. And it was the RPF that saved the country. And so playing into international guilt around this also allows the RPF crimes to be silenced and not be brought to court. And the past is used very, very strongly in the authoritarian regime of Rwanda today. And crimes of genocide ideology or genocide denial are used sweepingly for anyone who's critical of the government to crack down on opposition politicians or activists and even people fighting to remember. People remember in ways which just slightly different. Saying that other people also lost family who aren't Tutsi is a highly controversial statement in Rwanda and can get you disappeared or imprisoned.
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Kelly McFall
So I warned Tim that we were going to move quickly through Rwanda because we had had a number of other people on the show. So for listeners who are intrigued, I'll point you to past interviews with Jenny Burnett or Susan Thompson or a variety of other people who look at this specifically in the context of Rwanda. Why is Indonesia one of your case studies?
- [38:31]
Timothy Williams
Indonesia is a case study because they have a very different, again, a very different way of dealing with the past, namely, not to deal with the past. What past? You could ask. It's not quite true. There is this assumption within the literature that there's a silence about. About the past in Indonesia. And in the book, I try and push back against that a little bit, because the genocide against the Communists in 1965 and 1966 and the continued clampdown against communists throughout the rest of the 60s and 70s is very important within Indonesia. But it's not remembered as a genocide. It's not remembered as something bad, but it's remembered as the time in which General Suharto saved the country from the Communists threat. And so the violence is valorized, it's legitimized in ways that mean that 65, 66 is a buzzword for threat, for communist agitation and for legitimizing security policies. Whereas the communists, and still today, labeling someone as a communist is to try and tarnish them with the most negative of reputations and to try and discredit them and to also legitimize violence against them in some cases. And within Indonesia, I think what's interesting is, I mean at the end of the 70s, all the political prisoners, there were almost a million political prisoners, about half a million communists were killed, suspected communists or people who maybe donated once to the Communist Party or whatever anyone perceived as a communist party. About half a million were killed and a million incarcerated. But even when they were released from political prison, they had a. Their identity cards carried the trait extapot former political prisoners, which disqualified them from working for the military, working for the state in different ways from further education, and also their children. And I think it's really interesting that this political categorization is handed down almost like an ethnicity. I mean, it's not seen as an ethnicity, but the children are also seen as this danger inherited, the danger of communism. And so until today, if you have an ancestor who was suspectively communist, you will not be allowed to work for the military or similar. And there are sort of background checks on people. And so they continue to be marginalized until today. And this is significant because Suharto created an authoritarian regime in 1966 off his defeat in communism. And throughout the 70s and 80s cracked and 90s cracked down on various other groups. We can think of ace, East Timor and so on and so forth. But in 1998 he was toppled from power and there was Rafa Massey, there was a democratic reformation, but still these narratives about the communists being dangerous, the military and nationalistic and Islamic groups having combated this and being heroes in that sense, still lives on. And you could have imagined a scenario which with democratization comes a problematization of the past and where you reevaluate that. But it was more of a pacted transition where to stabilize democracy. The military, because it was a military regime, was not put on trial. They were co opted and many of them still remain quite powerful. And indeed now the president is a former general, so we see a strong backsliding in this regard. So over the years since democratization, there have been pushes by civil society actors to try and have some kind of transitional justice process, to have some kind of memorialization. But. But whenever there's One step forward, there'll be two sets back. There'll be mass pushback by the military, by the government. And if there are events, groups of thugs will come and beat the people up or try and undermine it. And what I think is interesting in Indonesia because so there is a science. There's nowhere. There's no memorial. There are memorials and museums about 65, but they all tell this story of communist threat, communist treachery, that's in the name of one of the museums. And there's only one place in Indonesia where you see any material trace of the genocide which is acknowledged, which is also the COVID of the book. It's a list of 10 people in a mass grave in one locality in Indonesia. And what we see here is there are small spaces where people, where victim groups, survivor groups, can speak about the past, but they're normally very private settings. Digital spaces have been spaces where people have maybe been able to come together. Art, cultural projects have been more. What has worked better than bigger transitional justice projects, political recognition and so on and so forth.
- [44:02]
Kelly McFall
So a couple of kind of broader questions about all the conclusions of all the three, three case studies. One is you focus mostly on actors who are political or military figures at the national level. I wonder to what extent is, if any, do local.
- [44:23]
Timothy Williams
What.
- [44:24]
Kelly McFall
What role do local actors play in this? Are they simply recipients or are they cooperate? How does this interaction between the national level and the local level work?
- [44:38]
Timothy Williams
It's very complicated because I think that's exactly where it becomes interesting. So Indonesia, I think, is a great example within a national context in which victimhood around 1965, 66, is absolutely not speakable. That doesn't mean that there aren't also actors who even members of the perpetrator groups may be sympathetic to that. So, for instance, the youth organization of one of the Islamic groups that had its militia was very important in the commission of the genocide. The youth organization had a couple of projects where they interviewed survivors and tried to push for a reconciliation process. But the larger part of the group sort of the pushes back against that. But there are spaces where these kinds of things can happen. Or you might have a local mayor sympathetic to the cause. And they won't be able to do a reparations project for victims, but they might be able to do a social program for the elderly where they get healthcare, which it will be labeled as something for the elderly. But the way it's designed is that it'll particularly help former political prisoners who have been marginalized. So you can see how sort of people Find spaces in which they can develop agency or I think it was really telling how many of the people I spoke to in Indonesia stressed that political action is not possible, but cultural action is. And you see that there's a choir called Dialita. It's formerly imprisoned women and many of their daughters as well singing songs that they wrote while they were imprisoned. And this, this works, it's. And they, and somehow it coexists, it doesn't threaten the, the Islamic groups or. I spoke to several artists who they said they, they advertise their, their exhibitions without buzzwords. You wouldn't write 1965 or communism in it. But you can say, have an exhibition about memory or the past or you can advertise in English, which is banal. But the Islamic groups don't seem to follow posters which are written in English. So it's these small strategies where safer spaces can be created to allow for some meaningful dealing with the past.
- [47:22]
Kelly McFall
And then the flip side of that question, which is to say there has emerged perhaps maybe global, maybe international. I don't know what the right word is. Civil society thinking about transitional justice and memory. How did these governments try and interact with or resist or whatever the appropriate verge is this kind of international assumptions about memory.
- [47:45]
Timothy Williams
Yeah, in all three cases the international community is important. So maybe I'll. Very briefly, sweetheart, I mean Cambodia has very much, much, I would say co opted the international community. Prime Minister Hun Sen agreed to a transitional justice process with the hybrid tribunal, very much on Cambodian terms. In the end, only three people were sentenced, only the very highest. The UN parts of the tribunal pushed really hard to expand the amount of people being tried and failed. And this was a success for Hun Sen and his government because it really, really solidifies the narrative of very few being responsible and everyone else being a victim. At the same time. The international community paid for almost all commemoration that's happened in the last 90 years in Cambodia. So it's a big win I think from the Cambodian government in Rwanda. The Rwandan government has a much more difficult relationship with International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, cooperated with it, but was very adamant that the local processes would be Rwandan driven. Also that nothing to do with the RPF would be tried also at the ictr. But President Kagame is very adept at reminding the international community of their co responsibility for the genocide and using that for the financial and political gain of the country. So here again the international community plays a very different role in Rwanda, but is also the past. And the international community are very important. And in Indonesia, I think it's really the silences are also welcomed by international community because Suharto was also supported in his anti communist policies by many of the Western states who, who thought him clamping down on communists was a good thing. And also there's a lot of research still to be done on that. But the way different security organizations supported that is now coming to light as well. And I think also important is that international actors can sometimes help marginalized communities within Indonesia. So there was for instance, an international people's Tribunal which is a non judicial mechanism, but it's part of memory making process, process which happened in the Hague. And here it was international actors who were able to do that.
- [50:27]
Kelly McFall
And here I'll just point out that if you go back into the archives again, you can look for Jess Melvern or Kate McGregor or people like that who have written about that and who were on the show. So you have some takeaways and I'm not going to ask you to go through online. We'd be here for a while but, but I wonder if you could pick out one or two that you think the audience shouldn't, that you want the audience to know about in terms of lessons from your research.
- [50:55]
Timothy Williams
Yeah, I think my main takeaway that I hope that people have from the book, which is maybe not my unique takeaway, but is that memory is political, that there isn't any neutral way of remembering the past, even if people agree it's terrible what happened and that it should never happen again. I think most people can agree on that for all the cases that I've looked at. But the way the past is remembered is deeply political and it means something today. It's used today as well. And I think practitioners need to also understand that when they're working in these contexts. And I think the unique takeaway from the book that I've contributed to that is to really nail this down to the roles which are attributed. But I think, think that while history is extremely complex, memory is somewhat less complex, but also quite burgeoning. I believe that really what we need to look at to understand how the past is made politically relevant today is by looking at the way that roles are attributed and the way that that is framed. And I think that that's, I hope that that's a useful analytical tool for others to also use in other contexts.
- [52:07]
Kelly McFall
And that's a wonderful summary of a complicated topic. And I would encourage people to go off and get the book and look at all nine of them and kind of pick them apart and think about them. And I'll just apologize. It's early in the morning, Jess, but it's just Melvin, not Mel Verne. If you're looking for it in the archive. My apologies. All good research drives or raises new questions or new approaches. So I wonder if you're talking without asking you to kind of betray your own interests, if you have graduate students or people listening. What questions come out of this book that you would like to see explored more either by yourself or others?
- [52:45]
Timothy Williams
That's a really great question. I think what I would like to look at more is how this manifests beyond the political spaces that I'm looking at. So I've already been looking at civil society actors and cultural spaces and so on and so forth. But I think there is a little bit of research emerging there now also looking at how does this resonate into more private spaces. And I would like to see how maybe the ambivalences that we see at the collective level, how are these then negotiated by people within families? What does this mainly mean? I think that would be a really interesting space, particularly in repressive settings like Rwanda, where public speech is very limited. In Indonesia as well. What does that mean for how people actually remember were themselves? And it might not have the same political connotations, but it will possibly down the line still have political ramifications when widespreads in the population maybe don't share the collective memory. And I think that that would be really interesting. And I also think that I would like to look at some other cases as well, because I think that while these three cases are very different, I think think the ideas can be applied and I do think we'll learn other things. For instance, I have a close colleague of mine, Kirsty Campbell, works on Namibia and we started talking about how the Namibian memory scape is very differently structured and what the ideas that I develop in the book maybe mean in that kind of context in which there is not a hegemonic memory where there are different competing sort of three different groups competing with each other.
- [54:27]
Kelly McFall
Java, It's a great book. I look forward to reading more exploration in the topic. I always end with the same question and that's asking you to recommend a book or two or something, a movie, artwork, whatever you think is appropriate. Recommend to the audience something that was important to you as you've been thinking about this or other topics surrounding this. What should I read this weekend when I don't want a grade?
- [54:55]
Timothy Williams
Okay, I'm going to give a very cheeky answer to that and then I'll give an honest answer afterwards. My cheeky answer is you should read Peace in the Politics of Memory, which is a different book which I co authored last year together with four very dear colleagues of mine out of a large comparative project which we worked on together, which really provides a methodology for looking at a memory space is but in more earnest or I mean, also do read that book. But I think I'd like to maybe recommend one book for each of the three cases that I looked at to highlight some of the really three scholars who inspired me while I was working my book. So in Rwanda, I would recommend Erin Jesse's Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda. It's a phenomenal book that looks at how history is told from different political and ethnic perspectives. In Cambodia, I would highly recommend Julie Benat's the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Powers Politics and Resistance and Transitional justice, which is a really close analysis of how the Khmer Rouge Tribunal worked and the political interests and influence which was infused into that. And in Indonesia, I would maybe recommend Sri La Stary, where Yunningrum's book Transitional Justice From State to Civil Society Democratization in Indonesia, because this sort of highlights another aspect of the book which looks at how the larger political context shapes the forms of transitional justice, whatever, or dealing with the past that are even thinkable. And within these contexts, then memory is then made.
- [56:38]
Kelly McFall
So what's your next project, Tim? No Rest for the Wicked.
- [56:43]
Timothy Williams
Yeah, there is indeed no rest for the wicked at the moment. I'm spending most of my time working. I just finished a project on anti Roma discrimination and resilience in, in Germany because I've tried to take some of the expertise that I've gathered in other countries and work with with Roma communities in Germany to see. And one of the things here is also that we look at how memory and the politics of memory in Germany also shape their perceptions of discrimination and how really actually it's part of the marginalization that they continue to experience today.
- [57:20]
Kelly McFall
That sounds like a valuable project. I take students to Europe and I, I have taken them to the memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe and watched the memory escape around that grow. And so, so I would, I hope that we'll have a chance to talk about that or further things as you go in the future. We've been talking with Timothy Williams, the author of Memory Politics After Mass Attributing Roles in the Memory Skate. Tim, thanks so much for being with us. I appreciate your time and I hope we'll get a chance to talk again.
- [57:52]
Timothy Williams
Thank you so much for having me. That's wonderful.
- [58:09]
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- [58:29]
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- [58:31]
Timothy Williams
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