MEXICO CITY (Process).- In Hiroshima, from May 19 to 21, the G7 met, made up of Japan, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States. Apart from the political agenda addressed, the cultural issue was relevant: the heads of state and government visited the Peace Memorial Park, which is located in the center of that city, where the structure of an old administrative building stands it survived August 6, 1945, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped. This is the Genbaku Dome (a word that means precisely “atomic bomb”), the only building that remained standing after that abominable act.
The park was erected pursuant to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial City Construction Law, promulgated in accordance with Article 95 of the 1949 Constitution of Japan, and was declared a world cultural heritage site in 1996 based on the Convention from Unesco in 1972 for its meaning and not for its aesthetic or architectural qualities. For this, the reasoning of the World Heritage Committee (CPM) was that the site is a powerful symbol of universal peace and a reminder of the ominous use of a weapon of destruction whose lethality had hardly been imagined by humanity.
However, this declaration was rejected by the People’s Republic of China on the grounds that the registration of the site minimized other equally or more repulsive events, such as the severe damage inflicted by Japan on the Chinese population during World War II.
The United States did not react to a lesser degree: it maintained that the inscription of the park and the Genbaku Dome in the world heritage pondered the suffering of the Japanese population and minimized the vileness of the true initiators of the war conflict. The US position thus emphasized that remembering this victimization sent the atrocities of the provocateurs of the Second War to the arcane and turned them into an abstract notion.
A similar case corresponds to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, built on Polish territory for the extermination of the Jewish community: in 1979 it was registered as a cultural heritage of humanity. During the communist regime in Poland, the narrative was different; it accentuated the victimization and martyrdom of the Polish people, as well as the socialist victory over Western fascism. Now the CPM changed the rationale in a substantial way; linked Auschwitz to the Holocaust and considered it evidence of cruelty and systematic efforts to degrade human dignity; the testimony of a methodical annihilation for racist reasons. Poland, however, does not share that interpretation, whose emphasis – consistent with its internal legislation – resides in the Nazi villainy displayed against Polish society.
The specific difference between the events in Japan and Poland is clear: Hiroshima faces a troubled human past, but simultaneously preserves the site. Now the G7, for political reasons, emphasizes the execrable use of atomic bombs. Furthermore, it reaffirms that in armed conflicts the political exception is unacceptable. According to these arguments, the argument of the destruction of the cultural legacy as a consequence of political actions is totally invalid. The deliberate destruction of cultural heritage, like the iconoclasm of the so-called Islamic State, must be classified as ethnocide. The political effect is more than evident: it contributes to the sacralization of the cultural legacy in war conflicts.
Auschwitz, for its part, develops a narrative that recalls and condemns the atrocities committed for racist reasons, and does so with an educational and illustrative intention. It also sacralizes victimization within a perpetrator-victim binary scheme. Both sites share a common denominator: they adopt victimization as an element of social identity, which in itself represents a political act.
the common thread
The cultural legislation (LC) covers monuments, museums of memory and reconciliation, and sites of remembrance, among other elements. In Hiroshima and Auschwitz it is very evident how social movements constitute the ferment of societies in transition, closely linked to their culture and cultural legacy. The repercussions of this in subsequent societies are substantive, since they shape the way in which peoples associate with their collective memory.
The LC determines what is the possible cultural heritage, and is an ideal means to create collective memory. Its function is clear: to conjugate the past tense in the present tense, and, simultaneously, to give meaning to the present tense in the past tense. The LC is therefore imbued with a symbolic character, since it is a secular ritual of political passages with a highly complex and ambiguous memorial narrative. As a producer of power and identity, LC refers, like a palimpsest, to a constantly changing cultural legacy.
The Palestinian remembrance of the Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic) is particularly illuminating. The Nakba is the name given to the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and is a conflict from which the State of Israel was created, a commemoration that is a disturbing act since it tries to reconcile the present with a colonial past, this last impregnated with serious questions.
The way in which the LC deals with a gruesome past is an area that it shares with transitional justice (TJ). Thus the JT, for its part, tries to get rid of a specific past to propel the future. His diligence consists in the delicate task of safeguarding the past for the benefit of the future. In this way, memory in the TJ is decisive, since it creates and recreates narratives of the past.
Indeed, in the TJ, collective memory has a double function: the recovery of the truth and the commemoration as a means to achieve restorative justice through symbols, monuments and sites. The conclusion is clear: the LC creates, recreates, revives, and preserves specific narratives that impact national identity and designs the paths of the TJ.
The TJ movement began in the eighties and nineties of the 20th century, as a result of various resolutions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and had great resonance at the universal level, including in the United Nations (UN) forum. In the report of the UN Secretary General of August 2004, it came to be defined as a variety of associated processes and mechanisms resulting from social efforts aimed at resolving cases of large-scale abuses committed against society, so that the perpetrators render accounts of their actions before the jurisdiction, a mechanism that is considered viable to achieve reconciliation.
TJ can be as broad as prosecution of persons, redress, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting, removal of officials from public office, or combinations of all of these.
The perimeter for the cultural effects of TJ is determined by the following categories: systemic social inequality; acts of vileness, whether collective or political, that have been normalized; existential uncertainty of a society, and uncertainty of an authority.
In societies in transition, the centrality of the cultural legacy is transcendent due to its incidence in social and economic processes, and this leads to social cohesion.
places of memory
The CPM has considered more than 1,100 sites for registration as World Cultural Heritage, but it only lists those that it considers to be of Outstanding Universal Value (OUV), such as those that are relevant for their links with nature, with the culture or a combination of both.
Many of these sites refer to the collective memory, whose narratives are typical of the TJ; This is the case of cities like Kigali, Nyamata, Murambi and Gisozi, which commemorate the Rwandan genocides, or the former Argentine Navy Mechanics School, which between 1976 and 1983 housed the infamous clandestine detention, torture and extermination center operated by the civic-military dictatorship.
In short, OUVs must transcend national confines and be distinguished by their high importance for present and future generations, since this singularity contributes to ensuring the interest of the international community.
For these purposes, two characteristics must be satisfied: communality and neutrality (Lucas Lixinski). The first implies that the site must transcend the parties involved, especially their nationalist arguments or recent disputes, while the second must prevent the cultural heritage of humanity from being used as an instrument to settle disputes between the contending parties and impose a partial view of history.
Another feature of singular importance is authenticity; without it, the classification as cultural heritage of humanity was not viable. However, recent events have forced a reconsideration of this category. This is the case of what happened to the Mostar Bridge in the ancient city of the same name, in Herzegovina. Located on the banks of the Neretva River, it was intentionally destroyed in 1993 during the Balkan War and was registered as a World Heritage Site in 2005 after being rebuilt. This reconstruction suggests an apothegm that could be summarized as follows: A person who has been murdered is one of us; the Mostar Bridge we are all.
Another precedent: Warsaw’s historic center, destroyed in August 1944 by the Nazis in retaliation for the heroic resistance of the Polish people, was meticulously rebuilt. This site has a significant historical charge, as it housed buildings from the 13th to the 20th century, and it was registered as a World Heritage Site in 2011.
For this, the Warsaw Recommendation on the Recovery and Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage in May 2018 was necessary, as an attempt to reconcile the loss of authenticity of cultural heritage based on the need for international recognition of a social recovery effort. Furthermore, it is an initiative aimed at recognizing the legitimate aspiration of cultural communities to overcome traumas derived from conflicts, wars and disasters through reconstruction, and thereby reaffirm their identity.
The characteristic of authenticity proposed by the CPM must therefore be situated in this perspective and incorporate the narratives of destruction, reconstruction and reconciliation in regards to its cultural legacy.
Epilogue
LC is a powerful medium for creating collective memory. Its purpose is not to peer into the past or to identify the accuracy of historical events and interpret them; it is designing the mirror in which society can contemplate itself, and the way in which it wants to reflect itself; but, above all, its objective is to remember and resurrect events in the present tense.
The cultural legacy and its memorial processes are unavoidable in transitional societies, since they provide the necessary elements to overcome traumatic events and lacerating social ruptures. In this way, they act as an unfailing supporter of transitional justice.
