Links to the News Stories as follows:

• Tunisia and the Archives of the Secret Police
• Preserving Government Files Documenting Abuses in Tunisia
• In Tunisia, where record keeping is good, some seek to preserve documents of tyranny

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Korea establish its first archive of human rights abuses in the North.  The North Korea Human Rights Documentation Center and Archive was designed to mirror West Germany’s Salzgitter Center that was opened in 1961 and recorded cases of human rights abuses in East Germany during the Cold War.  The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) of Korea in a plenary session passed the motion to establish the archive.  The archive will subsequently be housed in the headquarters of the NHRC.

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Recording the past should primarily serve to question the present and look into the future, archivist Verne Harris said.

Harris, head of the Memory Programme at the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory and Dialogue, spoke to approximately 30 people in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library Monday evening. Sponsored by Duke Libraries and the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, the event focused on what archiving has done for the wounded since apartheid in South Africa and what archiving can do for equality in the future. Harris previously served as the director of the South African History Archive, an independent human rights nongovernmental organization.

“The discourses of modernity too readily assume that constructions of the past are about learning from the mistakes of that past,” Harris said. “Societies, and individuals possibly as well, very much learn not from the past but from the future—what we perceive to be the future opening for us, what we experience as our participation in the making of that future.”

Harris said the function of the Memory Programme is to properly document and secure all relevant historical information in South Africa and, most importantly, make it accessible to South Africa’s people. This will allow South Africans to preserve the memory of Nelson Mandela, the first South African president elected in a full democratic election, Harris added.

South Africa still has a lot of healing to do from the damage of apartheid and its aftermath, he noted.

“South Africa, by most measures, remains one of the most unequal societies on earth,” Harris said. “Liberation has reached too small a population of South Africans.”

Harris mentioned Mandela’s permanent retirement and weakening physical condition, emphasizing the urgency of preserving the memory of Mandela in constructing a future for South Africa.

“How do we learn to live without Nelson Mandela?” Harris said at the event.

Harris said this is a question that has not yet been answered. He spoke about the role of archiving and the Memory Programme in encouraging thoughtful dialogue rather than producing concrete answers to present problems.

Mandela requested that the Memory Programme not depend on him, Harris said, adding that Mandela asked not to be protected or sanctified by the archives.

“People feel that [Mandela] is already gone,” Harris said. “If we look to the future, the past will look after itself.”

Harris’ notion of a folded timeline through archiving struck a chord with Ariel Dorfman, distinguished professor of literature at Duke.

“We are privileged to have an extraordinary library here at Duke,” Dorfman said. “Those who do not know the past well are not only condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, but they will not befriend it. To befriend the past, in some sense, is to create the future.”

Jennifer Thompson, research services and collection development librarian at the John Hope Franklin Research Center, noted the variety between archives.

“No collection is the same. You have to treat them differently and with different care,” Thompson said, adding that the diversity of archives primarily facilitates informed decision-making for the future.

Dorfman said the need to preserve the past is an act of self-preservation.

“If past papers are dead,” he said, “the papers that we are writing now will be dead tomorrow.”

Copyright: The Daily Texan

New from The Daily Texan, produced in conjunction with the University of Texis at Austin detailing the launch of an important new digital archive concerned with the National Police of Guatemala.

Link to Full Article on The Daily Texan – Digital archive of Guatemala’s police force launched at conference

Full Text of the Article:

A digital archive featuring millions of images and documents from the National Police of Guatemala could help people searching for family and friends who have disappeared, said Karen Engle, law professor and co-director and founder of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.

The Rapoport Center, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and UT Libraries hosted a conference where panelists discussed a wide-range of topics, such as how the use of the archive has helped with the progress of human rights cases and research in Guatemala.

Engle said the information in the archive became public in 2009 when Guatemala passed a freedom of information law, and on Friday the UT Libraries made much of the archive available online.

The archive’s coordinator, Gustavo Meoño, created the archive from a warehouse of decomposing documents at the national police headquarters that was found more than six years ago in Guatemala City. The warehouse’s existence had been denied by the country’s government and police force, according to UT’s website.

Now, Meoño and his team have transformed these documents into a world-class archive that chronicles the history of the national police for the past 100 years.

He said this archive has helped and will continue to help uncover the history of Guatemala, specifically the time period of 1975-1985, when the majority of human rights violations were committed during the country’s civil war.

“The archive is fundamental for criminal investigations and persecutions in Guatemala,” Meoño said. “Historical, cultural and sociological investigations can all be stemmed to the archive and can advance the transition of justice.”

The archive is currently comprised of approximately 80 million images and documents, and about 13 million are already digitized and available on the archive’s website.

Christian Kelleher, archivist for the Benson Latin American Collection and project manager for the Human Rights Documentation Initiative, led the presentation of the website.

Kelleher navigated the audience through the website’s structure and discussed how to go about searching for documents and viewing them.

“We tried to make the experience of using this online archive as close to the experience of someone using the original archive itself.” Kelleher said. “There’s very limited indexing that can lead to direct access to the document, so identifying any material or looking for any document takes a lot of work to find.”

Charles Hale, director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and Benson Latin American Collection, said students could find the archive valuable for many purposes.

“Students can learn how to navigate large data sets, explore the complexities of Guatemalan history — deeply intertwined with that of our country — and work in support of initiatives in Guatemala to protect human rights, bring perpetrators to justice and build a more just and democratic society,” Hale said.

ICA Human Rights Working Group

The International Council on Archives Human Rights Working Group has recently published the December 2011 edition of their newsletter on their website.  The December 2011 can be downloaded – [here].

The Human Rights Working Group disseminates information on the importance of archives to defend human rights and the use of archives in protesting the violations of human rights. It issues a monthly newsletter on archives and human rights, it develops projects to increase the cooperation between ICA and archival services and administrations in the field of human rights, and it supports better and wider use of the archives in the defense of human rights.

An archives of newsletters from April 2008 is also available from the website – [here].

The Audio-Visual Record of a Brutalized nation

Rwanda has been far from alone in experiencing the horrors of genocide during the last several decades. The world has often turned away from sights almost too horrendous to contemplate or imagine.

But in the African nation, citizens have been unable to close their eyes to what surrounded and assaulted them during the brief, brutal genocide of 1994.

That year, thousands of members of the majority Hutu ethnic group perpetrated vast massacres, targeting minority Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus. The killings were the bitter harvest of many years of tensions that governments and other powerbrokers within both ethnic groups had fomented. Also implicated, of course, were European colonizers, particularly Belgium, which by policy exacerbated ethnic divisions during the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Full Article :

• http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org/the-audio-visual-record-of-a-brutalized-nation/

When Mia Farrow first suggested that she videotape the traditions and rituals of the peoples from the Darfur region of the Sudan, refugee camp leaders were skeptical.

She said they asked her: “Will this bring us more food? Make the water cleaner? Bring us health care? Help us get home? … What good is this?”

But Farrow, the actor, humanitarian and Connecticut resident, promised to stand on the edge of the refugee camp every day for a month, ready to videotape a song or dance or any other custom if anyone was interested. At first it seemed that no one was.
“And then we heard the sound of drums beating and ululating. … We heard before we saw, maybe 2,000 people approaching, and they didn’t understand the concept of the limits of the camera, that we could only photograph within 6 feet,” Farrow said Monday in an interview. “They began setting up all around us.”

Farrow created 35 hours of video, documenting a culture that was in danger of being lost as the refugees — the victims of genocide, displaced from their homelands for years and suffering severe deprivations and illness in the camps — no longer performed rituals tied to the land or to celebration and joy.

Farrow taped demonstrations of farming methods, dances and song, children’s stories and wedding ceremonies, giving children who are growing up in the camps a chance to learn about their own heritage.

“Thank you for reminding us to remember,” Farrow recalled one camp leader telling her as the videotaping progressed.

“In my whole life, nothing struck my heart deeper,” Farrow said Monday, “than that one unadorned sentence.”

In early 2010, Farrow called the University of Connecticut to see if it might be interested in artifacts that had been given to her on her numerous trips to the Sudan, to Chad and to the region.

Valerie Love, who was then a human rights archivist at the university’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, remembers telling Farrow that the center wasn’t the right place for artifacts but that it would be very interested in her videos, photographs and journals.

An agreement was struck, and the Dodd Center now houses the collection of Farrow’s work related to her advocacy in Africa, especially in Darfur. It includes her documentation of the cultural traditions of the Darfuris and also personal stories of Darfuri people since the genocide began in 2003.

Farrow said that a visitor to a refugee camp first hears about deprivation — how much has been lost, how people haven’t had cooking oil or soap for months or years.

“The plastic sheeting that once covered them is now torn to shreds by the baking sun and the rains,” she said. Then they move on to describe how their lives have changed “dramatically and horrifyingly.”

Beyond that, though, are the recollections of what Darfuris’ ordinary life used to be like.

In a written account of her experience, Farrow said one community leader told her: “You know us very well. You know we are in mourning. We are suffering. We do not do these celebrations in the camps.”

This week, UConn posted a short video on YouTube, culled from Farrow’s collection, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN0CNcx4LDQ. A website, sudan.uconn.edu, also includes Farrow’s materials, as does Farrow’s own website, miafarrow.org.

Asked why she chose UConn, Farrow said Monday that she approached UConn on the advice of a friend who noted that she lives in Connecticut and asked, “Why wouldn’t you go there?”

Love, who no longer works at UConn, said, “She’s a Connecticut resident, she has a son who currently attends UConn, and we have a strong human rights program, so I think it was just a good fit.”

When she talked to Love, Farrow said, she was convinced that UConn’s Dodd Center was “absolutely the right place to put the archives,” partly because it would make the work available to many online.

Farrow said she wants people everywhere to be able to learn about this culture, but that she also especially wanted to create an archive so that Darfuris in the future can learn about their own heritage.

Betsy Pittman, university archivist at the Dodd Center, said that Farrow’s donation was “significant particularly … because this is an individual viewpoint of the atrocities and what’s going on in Darfur and Sudan in the hope of attracting attention. … We do have photojournalists’ collections, but she’s not a photojournalist. She’s not a documentary filmmaker. She is doing this because she is passionately concerned and she thinks others should be as well.”

Pittman said that Farrow’s work allows people to “go online and see some of these dances and conversations and songs, as well as stories of individual people. … It’s fabulous.”

The Archivists Watch posting states :

“The Wilson Center ON DEMAND posted a video of Trudy’s appearance.  In it Trudy filters her expansive experiences in constructing, examining and improving archives all over the world with post-conflict trauma and regime change, largely related to cases in Egypt where destruction of archives has definitely occurred.  Trudy readily admits she is not so optimistic about reconciliation but believes in transformation and institutional reform.  She shares her views on the involvement and sometimes ostensible role of state archives in protecting violations of human rights and humanitarian law.  Trudy also discusses the different bodies of justice and courts which are currently supported by the work of archives worldwide.”

Relevant Links :

• Archivists Watch Posting
• Wilson Center Video

Sada Mire : Uncovering Somalia’s Heritage

Sada Mire fled Somalia’s civil war as a child, and lived as a refugee in Sweden. But now she is back in the Horn of Africa as an archaeologist, making some incredible discoveries.

Sada Mire is only 35, but she has already revealed a dozen sites that could be candidates for Unesco world heritage status.

She has a fellowship in the department of art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is head of the department of antiquities in the breakaway territory of Somaliland, in the north-west region of Somalia. She is the only archaeologist working in the region.

Full Story :  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14592866

Links :

• Al Jazeera – Tunisians discover secret archive Paris
• The Archival Platform – Tunisians discover secret archive Paris

Tunisans discover secret archive in Paris
Yasmine Ryan
Posted 27 June 2011

In their quest to find a refuge from the streets of Paris, a group of Tunisian migrants have unwittingly become the centre of controversy.

They were amongst the thousands of Tunisians who fled economic and political uncertainty in their homeland early in the year, in the heady days after an uprising forced Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the country’s former president, from power.

There are an estimated 600 Tunisians now living on the streets of the French capital, mostly from southern Tunisia, with little assistance from either the French authorities or their own government.

The French government has taken a hard line against these children of the revolution, with police playing cat-and-mouse, chasing them from camp to camp.

Angry migrants

A 30 year old man from the southern Tunisian town of Zarzis, who preferred to go by the name of Karim, told Al Jazeera how he took a boat to the Italian island of Lampadusa on February 10, then took a train to Paris after five days.

Since then, Karim says, he has not stopped moving from place to place in search of somewhere to spend the night.

“Now we are really in the sh*t,” he said.

Disillusioned, many want to return home, but have no way to buy a ticket back.

“There are many people who want to go back to Tunisia but have no support,” Ali Gargouri, a French-Tunisian activist who has lived in France for many years, told Al Jazeera. “The Tunisian embassy is doing nothing to help them.”

One particular group of recent migrants turned to what they thought would be a legitimate sleeping place. On May 31, around 30 Tunisians took up camp in an abandoned building that had been officially known as the Tunisian Cultural Centre.

They quickly discovered that the site at 36, rue Botzaris, in a northeastern neighbourhood of Paris, had in fact belonged to Ben Ali’s now disbanded political party, the Rally for Constitutional Democracy (RCD).

They had stumbled across thousands of pages of archives from the former ruling party.

The migrants found two rooms filled with photos, correspondence, financial records, lists of RCD members in France, information on Tunisian dissidents, along with files on French political figures and journalists, sources told Al Jazeera.

The documents, activists promise, could contain many explosive scandals, particularly when it comes to French politicians.

Gargouri told Al Jazeera that a committee has been created to decide on what should be done with the documents, which are drawing considerable interest from media. For now, their contents remain a mystery.

A week later, the French police evicted them – at the request of the Tunisian embassy. With nowhere else to go, the group returned to the former “Cultural Centre” a few hours after they had been forcibly removed.

Yet the Tunisian authorities, who had paid little attention to this building until the migrants moved in, persisted in their efforts to assert their ownership of this building, which had been owned privately.The state has effectively taken over RCD properties elsewhere, after a Tunisian court dissolved the former ruling party and liquidated its assets and funds in March.

According to a statement from the Tunisian embassy in Paris on June 9, the decision to expel the migrants was made because of acts of vandalism, violence and complaints from the neighbours.

Then, on June 16, French police officers returned, forcing the Tunisians out definitively.

The statement adds that, with its annexation of the building, it “benefits henceforth from the cover of diplomatic immunity”.

Embassy officials refused to offer further comment to Al Jazeera.

Knowledge could be power

Paul Da Silva, a French activist who lobbies for freedom of information, says that the documents contain explosive revelations about French ties with the former regime’s leading figures.

“That’s why we’re here, to remind everyone that French politicians have been complicit with Ben Ali,” he said.

Much of the RCD’s official records disappeared in the chaos that followed Ben Ali’s fall from power on January 14, with document-burning sprees reported in public buildings across the country.

For lawyers and activists, the document stash in Paris gives them a second chance to comb through the RCD’s activities.

There have been reports in French media that some of the files were sold, and commentators note that some of those aware of the archive have had months to remove sensitive material. Al Jazeera is unable to confirm these reports.

The only major French political party to speak out about the episode is Europe Ecology (EELV), which condemned France’s failure to support the migrants at a time when Tunisia has itself offered refugee to some 500,000 migrants fleeing the conflict in Libya.

“It’s surprising that the French authorities have devoted so many resources to the protection of buildings and archives belong to the old [Tunisian] regime and have showed so little concern about the lack of any humanitarian reception for the Tunisians,” Cécile Duflot, the Ecology party’s national secretary, said.
The discovery of the alleged archives has coincided with the opening of an investigation into Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s assets in France.

With questions hanging over just how deep Tunisia’s political class is willing to dig into the alleged abuses and corruption that was so rife under the former regime, the documents could be a means for independent lawyers and activists to push for justice, whether in French or Tunisian courtrooms, on their own terms.

Ben Ali and his wife, Leila Trabelsi were found guilty in absentia of theft and of charges relating to the illegal possession of arms and jewelry a week ago. The former president and those close to him will face many more trials over extensive allegations in the weeks and months to come.

Complaints filed

Yet critics of the legal process say it is not going far enough, noting that the court dealt the first conviction during the trial in absentia lasted a mere 24 hours, leaving little opportunity for investigators to lay bare the bones of the regime. Activists argue that corruption extended well beyond the former president, and that knowing the truth is essential if Tunisia is to successfully make the transition to democracy.

“The Tunisian judiciary system is still not independent or unbiased,” Gargouri said. “People are focusing on the Ben Ali trial rather than looking too closely at the government that’s in power now.”

A judicial investigation targeting Ben Ali and the former Egyptian president, Hosni Moubarak, for money laundering allegations was opened in France on June 14.

As early as January 17, three organisations – the Arab Commission for Human Rights, SHERPA and Transparence International France – filed a complaint with the French public prosecutor urging a judicial inquiry into the assets held by the Ben Ali and Trabelsi families in France.

Myriam Svy, head of research at Transparency International France, told Al Jazeera that the French judicial authorities opened the investigation on June 9.

“Our objective is that a deep investigation is carried so that all the properties, all the money, can be returned to the Tunisian people,” Svy said.

The former Tunisian leader has issued a press release claiming he owns no property or bank accounts in France or any other foreign country.

Habib Essid, the Tunisian interior minister, visited Paris on June 15, the evening before the French authorities forcibly evicted the migrants from the former RCD property. No official reason was given for the visit and the Tunisian interior ministry did not respond to Al Jazeera’s queries regarding the reason for trip.

Since the eviction, the building – along with all the remaining documents – is under guard by a private security company 24 hours a day.

The Tunisian embassy chose to legally annex the building at 36, rue Botzaris on June 17 – a decision which throws a cloak of diplomatic immunity over the building, which means any remaining documents are effectively beyond the reach of the French legal system.

Ahead of the eviction, Gargouri and Soumaya Taboubi, French-Tunisian lawyer, transferred one-third of the documents to a “secure place”.

The activists removed well over 1,000 documents, Gargouri said, after some documents began disappearing.

Tip of the iceberg

As for the Tunisian migrants, they have been forced to scatter under continuing police pressure.

After their eviction, the group moved to the Buttes Chaumount Park across the street from the building. There, they faced daily visits from the police.

“The police are coming daily in unmarked cars to try to scare them,” Gargouri said. “It’s a question of intimidating and pressuring migrants.”

One night, it was teargas. Then their camp was destroyed by a squad of 50 police. On Wednesday, 22 Tunisians were arrested, only to be released within 24 hours.

A handful of French activists visited them daily, with some, including Paul Da Silva, spending several nights in the park.

Their case is but one example of how the French government’s approach to the unprecedented influx of migrants has been to turn up the repression, activists say.

According to the EU’s Frontex agency, more than 22,000 people were intercepted crossing into Italy from January to March, a 99 per cent increase on the number taking the same route in the same period last year.

In many ways, groups living on the streets are the lucky ones. Some 1,387 Libyan and Tunisian migrants drowned trying to make the trip to Europe between January and March, UNITED, a European NGO, told Al Jazeera.

Pascale Boistard, associate for integration and foreigners from outside the EU for the Paris city council, told Al Jazeera that France’s national government was neglecting its legal responsibility to assist the migrants.

Boistard argues that the Socialist-controlled city authorities are doing everything they can to help thousands of Tunisian migrants who travelled to France, including providing food and assistance to many of them.

The municipality has provided housing to some 310 of the recent Tunisian migrants, Boistard said, even though this is something the national government should be dealing with.

“It’s the state and the government that is doing nothing,” Boistard, a member of France’s Socialist Party, said.

“On April 22, we wrote to Claude Gueant [France’s interior minister and immigration minister] to alert him of the humanitarian situation. His response was to say that we should arrest the Tunisians.”

Gueant told the Paris municipal authorities that no assistance should be offered to the Tunisians migrants, because, according to him, they were in France illegally – including those who had been issued with temporary residency permits by the Italian authorities.

“We are in a situation where the migrants are constantly being arrested, then released immediately after,” Boistard said.

Boistard added that the government was ignoring an agreement President Nicolas Sarkozy had signed with Ben Ali in 2008, under which France agreed to offer assistance to 9,000 Tunisian migrants a year to help them return home.

Since January, the government has frozen the processing of repatriation requests, a move which is further exacerbating the humanitarian situation, Boistard told Al Jazeera.

In the interest of maintaining the government’s image as being “tough” on immigration, nothing is being done to help the migrants, she argued.

In the case of the Botzaris group, she denied that the municipal authorities had anything to do with the request to evict them. The decision was made either by police, or came via the interior ministry, she said.

“The Tunisians in the building were evicted at the request of the [Tunisian] embassy. We weren’t informed by the police that the eviction was going to take place.”

“I find that France is not living up to its history, and the values that it embodies,” she said.

Neither the immigration ministry or the interior ministry, both run by Gueant, responded to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment. The Paris police department also refused to comment.

Bertrand Delanoë, Paris’ Socialist mayor, has set aside $1.2mn for Tunisian migrants in Paris. Activists working with the Botzaris group, however, say they have yet to see this any of this emergency fund go towards supporting these migrants.

At the time of writing, no solution for accomadation has been found, and few French NGOs working with the homeless had showed up to offer assistance.

“The organistions say there’s still a problem and that the money is not enough,” explained Da Silva.

Politicians in Tunisia, busy preparing for the October election, have largely been silent on the plight of their compatriots.

“These political parties, they’ll be governing the country in a few months. Normally, they should be intervening with the French authorities on behalf of these migrants,” Gargouri said.

The Democratic Forum for Work and Freedoms (Ettakatol-FDTL), a leftwing Tunisian opposition party, questioned this explanation, calling on the Tunisian embassy to publically clarify “the real reasons for its eviction request”.

Mustapha Ben Jaafar, the party’s general-secretary, wrote to Sarkozy, saying that is was hard to understand why the young people, “neither delinquents or terrorists … should be hunted down like criminals and abuses simply because of their nationality, in a friendly country that has also told them that it was the birthplace of the Declaration of Human Rights”.

In contrast to the official indifference, a vibrant social media campaign has emerged in support of the “Botzaris” migrants.

Thanks to a handful of devoted activists, supporters have been able to follow Twitter and a website set up for the group for constant news, photos and video of the group’s difficulties and to respond to calls for solidarity or advice.

The conversation taking place on Twitter, under the hashtag #Botzaris36 was the second highest trending topic in France within days of the group’s eviction.

The nightly police raids have had their effect, however, and most of the group have abandoned their attempts to sleep in the shelter of the Buttes Chaumount Park.

“We’ve suffered many difficulties: with the police, the French state, even with the Tunisian state,” Karim said. “Now we must keeping going until the end, that’s all we can do. What other choice is there?”

Source: Al Jazeera