Pain & Death: Politics, Aesthetics and Legalities

Thematic narratives of political protest, pain and death
within contemporary Palestinian cultural expression

The experiences, beliefs and emotions of the Palestinian reality (exile, occupation, dispossession, diapora, loss, resistance, right of return) form the foundations of contemporary Palestinian cultural and artistic expression. Transformed into thematic narratives and infused with metaphoric meaning, Palestinian art today documents and defines Palestinian experience and identity in both the Palestinian region and the scattered communities of the Palestinian diapora.

Aware of art’s importance as a vehicle for political protest, since 1948 (when the State of Israel was declared) Palestinian artists have always chosen their subject matter with care. While some iconic artists (such as Ismail Shammout and Suleiman Mansour) chose to evoke the past via representational imagery of pre 1948 rural Palestine, other Palestinian artists prefer harsher post 1948 Palestinian realities, often including their own experiences – of which pain and death are central - within their works. Some focus on actual historical events (such as Abdel Tamam’s paintings and ink drawings of the Kafr Qasem Massacre which took place in his home town and in which his mother lost her life) while others depict daily life and death within refugee camps (seen in works by Tayseer Barakat, Khalil Rayan and Adnan Yahya). Martyrdom has become an important subject for Palestinian artists, one that has become an external cultural folk art in its own right. The (secretly collected and exhibited) artworks of political prisoners have also become important political documents, their thematic narratives of imprisonment, torture, death, confinement, resistance and freedom (such as Abdel Taman and Hani Zurub) reinforced by the materials utilized, which often reflect the circumstances of their creation (Zuhdie al Adawi’s works on handkerchiefs and Muhammad al-Rakoui’s crayon works on cloth from cut up pillowcases).

In examining these and similar works, this paper explores how Palestinian artists have utilized the complex cultural symbology at their heart to counter severe state imposed censorship and personal trauma, whilst maintaining an active political voice and a sense of national identity.

Sexed Violence, 1860-1960

In the presence of the violent sexed body, the state confronts a dramatic challenge to its power. Through the obscene conflation of private and public, mediated through theatrical strategies of display, the rapist incites particularly anxious responses from judicial and psychiatric authorities. This paper explores the diverse strategies of punishment and pain inflicted upon the sexual predator’s body in the modern historical context.

Re-Living the Liberation of Laos: Death and Music Karaoke

On December 2nd 1975 the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party took power in Laos, establishing the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and plunging the country into a decade-long experiment with socialism that ultimately failed. During this period attempts were made to produce a pure Lao socialist culture that celebrated the achievements of the thirty year struggle leading up to the liberation of 1975 and reinforced the Party line in the national reconstruction following liberation. Traditional vocal music and popular music played a prominent role in this new socialist culture. Receiving a mixed reception at the time, this overt propagandising through music has largely faded from earshot since the mid-1980s when the government began to relax its tight economic and social controls.

A selection of revolutionary songs was released on karaoke VCD format at the end 2004 as part of the lead up to this year’s thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Lao PDR. Most songs in this compilation are standard socialist fare, praising the wise leadership of the Party and the natural beauty of the country. However, two songs, and their accompanying video clips, explicitly address the fighting that took place between the Lao communists and the Americans who backed the Lao royalists. This paper explores the celebration of pain and death in the struggle for liberation expressed in these song lyrics and images that accompany them and asks why the Lao government feels the need to invoke bitter conflicts of the past at a time when it seeks closer relations with its former foes.

US and Australian scholars have argued recently for legal recognition
of the justifiability of torture on the basis that it is inevitable and
morally justifiable in certain circumstances. This paper will respond
to these claims. It will examine the development of the international
prohibition of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The paper will consider the way international and national courts have
analysed the prohibition and then the recent attempts by the US
administration to redefine the concept of torture. It will argue for the
retention of an absolute prohibition of torture.

Betty Churcher

From Uncritical Pride to Stark Realization: Artistic Renderings of War

My session opens with an eight-minute segment from the SBS series ‘Art of War.’ This looks at the work of four artists: Ivor Hele, who painted atrocities committed at the close of the Second World War in New Guinea, while he was serving as an official war artist: Bernard Slawik, a Jewish intern who drew images of Janovska concentration camp in Poland: Alan Moore whose paintings depicted the liberation of Belsen: and Murray Griffin, who painted while in Changi Prisoner of War Camp.

My paper traces changing attitudes to the horrors of war through these artists of the Second World War. The official acceptance of subjects that would have been inadmissible in the First World War reflects a swing in public opinion, from the uncritical pride in nationhood and the British Empire, which marked the writings and images of the First World War, to the stark realisation of the damage inflicted by war.

By referencing the work of Margaret Preston, Albert Tucker, and Noel Counihan and Sidney Nolan (particularly his Gallipoli Series, which pictures soldiers as Trojan warriors and as vulnerable ‘diggers’ in a strange land) I will touch on the effect of the Second World War on the civilian population in Australia.

Genocide, Humanity, and World History

Genocide is one of those rare concepts whose coming into the world can be precisely dated. Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) coined it in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Lemkin’s views on humanity and violence were double-edged. He argued that genocide has followed humanity through history, that it occurs in relations between groups with a certain regularity; yet he also hoped that international law could restrain or prevent genocide. In 1948 he was instrumental in the passing of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The concept also inspired the expansion in latter-twentieth century international law concerned with crimes against humanity, as in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

In analysing the history of genocide, Lemkin insisted on a wide-ranging definition where genocide signifies a coordinated plan of different actions (including but not necessarily mass killing), which aim to destroy the essential foundations of life of a group. Lemkin identified genocide as sometimes a highly destructive event or episode, sometimes as a process that might also involve highly destructive events and episodes, and he constitutively linked genocide with colonization, whose recurring genocidal features were evident in European imperialism from 1492 around the world.

This paper will address some difficult questions in contemporary genocide theory through Lemkin’s seminal work. Are there forms of genocide which do not involve mass killing? What are the criteria for intention in genocidal events and processes? Do genocides necessarily involve the state? Should mass killing based on political categories (politicide) be called genocide? What is meant by cultural genocide?
Genocide has proven to be a concept at once provocative, controversial, and protean. It inspires thought at the limits of what humanity as a species might be. To consider these questions is thus to place a question mark over humanity. From this position, we will explore recent ‘world’ history notions of genocide (in Jared Diamond’s and Hugh Brody’s work), particularly in relation to their analysis of hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies.

Helen Ennis

Triumphal Portraits and Colonial Narratives: Post-mortem Photography

In Australia between c.1865-1900 a small group of postmortem photographs of bushrangers were produced to serve the dual purposes of the state and of commerce. They remain the most graphic representations of death in nineteenth century Australian photography and have as their visual counterparts numerous triumphal group portraits of policemen and civilians involved in the bushrangers’ capture. The great majority of these photographs are in public collections but have not previously been placed together as a group.

This paper will examine the postmortem photographs with a particular focus on A. F. Saunders’ portrait of Joe Governor from 1900. The aim is to provide an historical context for the photographs – for example, in relation to notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ death prevalent at the time, but also to account for the photographs’ unsettling presence and contemporary relevance. I will argue that these inherently violent images do much more than undermine the confidence of colonialist narratives and will speculate on ways in which we might we now speak of and about them.

In the Name of Honour : Viewing Honour Crimes beyond the Cultural and Gendered Divide

Reporting on the proliferation of honour killings in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, Ziyad Khalaf al-Ajely, a Baghdad based trainee of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, narrates how the director general of Baghdad’s Institute of Forensic Medicine often writes “killed to wash away her disgrace” in the many autopsy reports and investigations that cross his desk. As part of her report, she states: “Iraq is a tribal society where honour killings are an accepted practice, but cases have been increasing because conservative attitudes have grown.” The UNICEF defines honour crimes as “an ancient practice in which men kill female relatives in the name of family ‘honour’ for forced or suspected sexual activity outside marriage, even when they have been victims of rape.” The United Nations Population Fund estimates that the annual worldwide toll of honour killings may be as high as 5,000 women.

The above cited examples portray honour “cleansing” crimes as culturally and religiously endorsed atrocities committed against women, a marginalised group in certain societies. However, I question the common impression that honour crimes are indeed an exclusively misogynist practice, culturally and religiously sanctioned by patriarchal tribal traditions

In this paper I ask, what role has Western colonial jurisprudence played in deterring the eradication of honour crimes? What legal provisions exist in different societies to sanction, exonerate or punish the perpetrators of honour crimes? Extricating this act of violence from its closed spatio-temporal-gender based frame of reference, my paper will endeavour to address the issues evoked above and to challenge reductionist discourses, orientalist stereotypes and certain Western feminist readings concerning honour crimes, drawing upon real cases and testimony discourses (textual and visual) from different communities.

The survival of the death penalty as a reality in a wide variety of countries reminds us of the achievement of its abolition in many others.

In this paper I explore the history of abolition in Australia. I do so through examining the public and private responses and dispositions of two premier abolitionists who campaigned from their different institutional positions. As a young criminologist but already Dean of Law at Adelaide, Norval Morris took on the critical responsibility as Chair of a Commission examining the death penalty in Ceylon. His mentor and friend John Barry, judge, historian, criminologist and civil libertarian was as public in his opposition to the death penalty at the end of his career as at the beginning when his involvement in a capital case as a 21 year-old Melbourne defence lawyer shaped his views decisively.In examining how abolition can be achieved this paper considers the different rhetorical strategies ? satiric, rationalist, pragmatic, ethical ? deployed over the decades of the successful attrition of the death penalty in Australian penology.

100 Days in Rwanda: Choreographed Killings in Image, Text and Real Time

In April 1994, when South Africa was celebrating the end of apartheid with the election of ANC to power, Rwanda, a tiny central African state was awash with the blood of one of its ethnic minorities, the Tutsis. In 100 days, from April to June 1994, the country’s Hutu paramilitary, Interahamwe, fattened and armed by its deceased President, Habyarimana, butchered about a million Tutsis. The decade since has witnessed a proliferation of creative representations of this genocidal horror in multiple media – in fiction, feature films, documentaries and art exhibitions. These include Gil Courtmanche’s and Andrew Miller’s novels, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and The Optimist respectively, Terry George’s feature film, Hotel Rwanda, and at least two powerful documentaries, General Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, and Michael Caton-Jones’ and David Belton’s Shooting Dogs.

This paper seeks to analyse some of these works and, in the process, address the aesthetic and ethical questions that have emerged in the wake of these cultural productions. Are they ‘obscene’ and do they promote ‘atrocity tourism’, as a journalist from the Independent, recently opined? Or do these creative works, in etching the massacres indelibly in the hearts and minds of a global audience, ‘stop Rwandans from feeling abandoned all over again’, as Rwanda’s current Minister of Culture, Joseph Habineza quietly states, in a sombre reminder to the world that it knowingly did nothing during the actual carnage. Is creativity after catastrophe redemptive, or is it too much too soon, a voyeuristic violence? The paper attempts to address these aesthetic-ethical issues in the context of larger contemporary theoretical debates about the implications of ‘real’ framing and staging of horrific spectacles in this late modern age of instant verbal and visual imaging and imagining of gratuitous human violence.

Barbara Ann Hocking

Projections from To Kill a Mockingbird: Fiction, History and the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY)

The book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1997) carries this preface by Charles Lamb: "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once". The book portrays the American Deep South of the 1930s through the eyes of children Scout and Jem Finch, the children of Atticus Finch, a defence lawyer. After Finch takes on the case of a young, black man accused of raping a white woman, the story moves inevitably to the point where his client is found guilty. Before Finch can appeal the guilty verdict, the young black man dies, shot by prison guards as he tries to escape from the exercise yard. It was a capital offence for which he was tried but he died in any case, whether guilty or innocent.

The book’s title tells us that he was not guilty as it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. Through the innocent eyes of the lawyer’s children, the attitudes of adults to race and class are exposed, but the book also makes the point that law is best seen and understood through “the weight of history”.

In this paper I develop a similar argument about emerging international criminal justice institutions. Drawing upon To Kill a Mockingbird, I will look back at the ‘weight of history’ that was brought to bear in the creation of one particular new international criminal justice institution: the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). I draw in particular upon the arguments of Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia, who has strongly advocated the teaching of legal history as a necessarily compulsory unit in the modern legal curriculum.

Rosemary Hollow

What’s in a name? Memorialization, punishment, and perpetrators of crime

In April 1995 a bomb exploded outside the Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, killing 186 people. An American, Timothy McVeigh, was tried for his role in the bombings. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and executed. The Oklahoma City National Memorial includes information on his trial, and details of his name and date of execution.

In April 1996, a single gunman killed 35 people at or near Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania. Three days later he was captured by police. He was tried, and sentenced to life imprisonment for each of the thirty five murders. Australia does not have capital punishment. He will not be eligible for parole, so will end his life in prison in Hobart. He is referred to only as ‘the gunman’ in the memorial at Port Arthur Historic Site, and the accompanying signs and brochures. There is no reference to his trial.

What impacts have the trials and sentences of the perpetrators of these crimes had on the memorialization of these horrendous events? Should they even be mentioned? Has capital punishment in the United States resulted in a differing response to the perpetrator of the crime? Why is the name of the Port Arthur gunman never mentioned?

With a focus on the tragedies at Oklahoma City and Port Arthur, I will explore the differing community and cultural responses to the role of the perpetrator in memorialization of tragedies, in the context of studies on history, memory and memorialization. I will argue that the trials and the sentences do impact on how the perpetrator is portrayed in memorialization of the tragedy they caused, and this in turn will impact on the long term memory of how people responded to these events.

Waiting for Stalin not Godot: Terrorism and the Re-membering and Dis-membering of Pain

As Post-Soviet Russia was celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and commemorating grief, pain and sacrifices of the ‘Soviet’ people, a sculptural composition executed by Zurab Tsereteli, the Georgian sculptor, was being hauled from city to city in search of an appropriate site. The composition shows Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, the three ‘great’ war-time leaders, at the Yalta Conference. Tseretteli was interviewed on the Russian television about the controversy. His reply was simple: “I am not worried at all. If they don’t want Stalin in it, I’ll remove him and call the piece, Waiting for Stalin.”

Waiting, however, at the same time, were the villagers in Beslan for a monument to be placed in front of the ruins of the school building. What will that ‘monument’ be and how long the villagers will have to wait for it? Will Tsereteli be asked to design it? Will he agree? Will the villagers consent to have a memorial designed by him installed in front of the school-building?

In this paper I want to discuss the way collective pain in post-Soviet Russia is re-membered and dis-membered, and how the embodied within public spaces the collective pain becomes involved in the contested narratives of nationhood, ethnicity and national identity. The contingency of these narratives often determine the event and the ‘pain’ that are deemed to be appropriate for being remembered. Perhaps that is why in Putin’s Russia there is as yet no place for remembering the victims of Stalin’s gulags.

The Haunting of Edith Thompson: Sentimentality, Abjection, Innocence

In 1922 Edith Thompson and Fredrick Bywaters were jointly tried at the Old Bailey, before a crowd of curious spectators, for murdering Edith’s husband. Although Bywaters confessed, the case against Edith was less clear. Nonetheless, they were both convicted, and on Jan. 9th, 1923, after the Home Secretary refused to grant mercy, they were hanged. She was the first woman to be executed in England in fifteen years. Disturbing reports of her final moments – that she was carried to the scaffold, and that her insides fell out -- added to the controversy over her execution. Almost immediately, the case became a classic in the canon of notorious British trials. From 1923 to as recently as 2003, it has been the subject of newspaper coverage, Home Office correspondence, novels, plays, films, death penalty debates, popular criminology and more recently, academic criminology.

In this paper, I examine London newspapers, Home Office records, and abolitionist literature to analyse the rhetoric surrounding Edith Thompson’s execution, both in 1923, and in the 1950s. Drawing on the concepts of abjection and catharsis, I analyse the recuperation of Edith Thompson from a ‘little piece of rubbish’ to an ‘innocent victim’ of state execution, and as such, an exemplary icon for the abolitionist movement in the 1950s. I also consider the significance of the gendered body in representations of her execution.

Dealing with death: Indigenous Representations of settler-colonial violence

In his book Provincialising Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty calls for histories that draw attention to the tragedies, tensions and contradictions that lie at the heart of the modern nation state. That rhetorical claims to egalitarian values and democratic rights have enabled minority groups to achieve self-determination is undeniable. However what is effectively overlooked is the part played by repression and violence in the victory of modernity.

In this paper I take up these issues in relation to Indigenous representations of settler violence inflicted with state complicity. Landscape lies at the centre of an Aboriginal subjectivity embodying both spiritual and historical dimensions. In a dynamic process of social formation, Aboriginal people mapped a new cognitive territory recording their historical experiences of violence and repression in art, song, dance, ceremonies and oral history.

A postcolonial era offers new times and spaces in which to reflect upon these events and the opportunity for the expression of grief in a public context. A period of radicalism in the 1970s drew attention to the fundamentally ruptured relationship between the force of the state and the right to humanity and equality before the law: just as Aborigines won rights to citizenship and self-determination, Aboriginality itself was criminalized. Initially the site of the prison instrumentalised artistic, literary and theatre productions in the work of Kevin Gilbert, Gordon Syron and Jimmy Pike. More recently we have seen communities in East Kimberley, the Central Desert and northeast Arnhem Land engage in intercultural performances as a form of social action where memorialising tragedy becomes a means of reconciling past injustice and restoring equilibrium.

This paper enquires into the relationship between the shape of fortifications and the emotions of those who inhabit them or view them. Using Sternes uncle Toby as a model, I argue that siege architecture is a weird fractal geometry of ruin, or ruin figured as repair i.e. as restoration and as a retreat from pain (rather like the artificial ruins that adorned eighteenth-century gardens). Sebald himself at least twice recalls the remains of the siege architecture at Breendonk near Antwerp, where Jean Amery was tortured. Yet in his novel Austerlitz, the structure of fortifications is associated with intense pleasure as well as pain.

How is this transformation accomplished? Well, by figures as shapes, and by figures that personify pain as a force capable of producing its opposite. I will end by considering personification in the literature of pain, and to ask if it plays a part analogous to that of siege architecture in the work of Sterne and Sebald.

The term sovereignty is without doubt a key term of modernity. Sovereignty functions as the both real and symbolic center of gravity of the social and provides to the state the monopoly on and legitimization of violence. Sovereignty thus appears to be the conditio sine qua non not just of statehood but of the social as such. Thus, sovereignty is not per se an autocratic concept, since democratic ideas of state and community also imply at least a basal notion of sovereignty, which conceives and protects one central authority for the citizens’ claims and appeals. Must therefore the critique of sovereignty a priori be a foolish venture since sovereignty is a necessity of every form of community? How could a world without sovereignty be possible or even desirable?

Over and over again, theoretical enterprises emerged which claim to expose the problematic implications of sovereignty as such. The paper wants to present three of these approaches - ideology critique, genealogy and deconstruction - which share at least one central effort: to pose the urgent question how a democratic community would have to be built which does not produce pain and death but rather decreases or even abolishes bio-political exclusions and disciplinary violence. Here lies a strong affinity of philosophical strategies to both artistic and activist practices: Even if these interventions might not have a good answer to the demand for alternatives, they enable people to take a view from the distance on their everyday-life practices, denaturalize the implicitness of political routine, irritate and subvert normalities and let our ordinary experiences suddenly appear strange.

The bodies are gone. Only the shoes remain.

Doris Salcedo’s work Atrabiliaros (Defiant) (1992–2004), refers to the women who have been disappeared in her homeland of Colombia. Over forty boxes are recessed in the walls of the gallery. Each box contains one or two shoes, sometimes a single shoe, sometimes a pair, sometimes a mismatched pair. Each recessed box is covered with a membrane, described as a layer of cow bladder, bordered with black stitches of surgical thread. The backlit cow bladder evokes human skin. The black, white, brown and ivory shoes are visible through the skinlike surface. There is a chain of signification which links the leather of the shoes displayed in lighted boxes, the puce cow bladder which covers the boxes, and the melancholy remembrance of the bodies of the disappeared.

The shoe is the classic fetishistic object. But this usually involves the shoe as a displacement, a disavowal of castration: with the shoe as a sheath for something else. Here, however, the shoe reminds us rather of the missing body of the woman who has been subject to the violence of the state. The most poignant are the single shoes, suggesting someone so intent on escape that a shoe has been lost. This reminds me of the exhibition of the Petrovs, held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in 2004, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘Petrov Affair’. My souvenir of the exhibition is a cheap brooch in the shape of the shoe that Evdokia Petrova lost at Mascot airport before her defection.

Anyone who encounters shoes in a museum or other display can not help but be reminded of the glass cases in Auschwitz–Birkenau. There, a huge glass case holds so many shoes that the scale is numbing, distracting us from any sense of the age, class or gender of the wearers of the shoes.

In her book on shoes for women with bound feet, Dorothy Ko has explained, “Most of the bodies are gone. Only the shoes remain.” I take this as a starting point for a discussion of the museum and art gallery as spaces for the memorialisation of those lost through violence. In this paper I focus on the shoe as a figure of fetishism, mourning and melancholy, and consider the ethics of display and looking.

Of all the police units in South Africa, the unit responsible for public order policing undertook the most comprehensive reform programme. This unit was renowned as one of the most brutal of the South African Police. Following the transition to democracy in South Africa the unit changed its insignia and all members were retrained and presented with a set of new policy documents and legislative frameworks. Retraining and new policy was aimed at refashioning the unit to work within a human rights framework and to operate within internationally accepted norms for policing public order. For the most part, the unit did reinvent itself. However, there have been numerous accounts of the unit regressing to previous (violent) ways of behaving.

This paper tries to provide an explanation for this reversion to violence through an examination of deep seated organisational culture. The paper then presents a set of suggestions for what police organisations themselves should be doing to bring about desired cultural and behavioural change in line with human rights based policing.

Darkness: The Politics and Aesthetics of Pain and Death at Contemporary Holocaust Museums

This paper examines the point at which issues of pain, death, politics and aesthetics intersect in the contemporary display strategies of Holocaust Museums. These museums engage visitors in what Dipesh Chakrabarty terms ‘a politics of experience’. Chakrabarty notes that “the politics of experience orients us to the realms of the senses and the embodied”; these museums aim to interpret historical events for visitors at psychologically and emotionally affective levels. In recent years, this aim manifests in certain aesthetic strategies, such as deploying the psycho-symbolic resonance within western culture, but it can also function as a powerful affective mode of interpretation. In the context of Holocaust museums, dark space can lead us to understandings of pain and death that go beyond comprehension at a straightforward cognitive level and powerfully engage the empathy of visitors.

"The political uses of pain and violence: Terrorism in Spain"

This talk will focus on the difficulties in defining the victim, on the mechanisms of social cohesion triggered by the pain of others, and, more generally, in the political uses of pain. I will take the Spanish example of the terrorist attacks of March 11th as a case study to shed light on the production and management of information regarding pain, on the social responses to the pain of others, and, finally, on the mechanism by which social sympathy towards suffering has both a political and a market value. Though my case study is political in nature and highly contemporary, I will argue that most of its social, cultural and even aesthetic ramifications form part of a longer tradition in the understanding and representation of pain. The social space in which pain may occur or be spoken about forms part of a complex process of asserting evidence and constructing identities.

Two different manifestations took place after the Madrid bombing. On the one hand, were the popular, and massive, mourning rituals that came about spontaneously in the whole country for days, and even weeks and months, after the explosion of the three bombs that took the life of almost 200 citizens in the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history. These popular expressions of grief and sorrow have an anthropological dimension and came to express a cultural response to indiscriminate violence and pain. On the other hand, three months after the attack, the survivors and relatives of the dead and wounded formed the March 11th Association, to defend the victims’ rights. These two forms of social cohesion collapsed after the defeat of the Spanish Conservative Party (PP) in the General election of March 14th, and above all, during the Parliamentary Commission of investigation formed, at least in principle, to implement administrative and security policies for the prevention and management of these types of crisis.

To begin with, the March 11th Association confronted the main political lines of the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT), an association founded in 1981 to defend the rights of the victims of the Basque separatist terrorists, the only victims of terrorism known in Spain until the Moslem extremist attack of March 11th. During the Commission of Investigation both organizations maintained different positions regarding political responsibilities in the management of the crisis and in the use that each one could give to their pain, as a political weapon. Their disagreement added perplexity to the popular sorrow, as it became apparent the difficulties in the definition of “the victim”, on the hand, and, in the political uses of pain and violence, on the other. “What are you laughing at?” was the rhetorical question the President of the March 11th Association, Pilar Manjón, sprang in tears on the conservative members of the Commission during her moving commission appearance.

War as the confrontation of the armed forces of different nations or alliances between nations inevitably confronts soldiers with violence, pain, and death. This confrontation potentially has severely traumatising consequences. Army physicians and psychiatrists have attempted to treat the consequences of these confrontations, deflect their importance by providing interpretations of their significance, and interpret their meaning both to soldiers and to citizens back home. There is only so much physicians and psychiatrists can do; however, their employment by the armed forces indicates that governments acknowledge the traumotogenic nature of warfare and wish to reassure the public that everything is being done to counteract it.

This paper discusses psychiatric theories and treatment practices developed in the American Army during World War II. During the war, psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists developed methods of short-term psychotherapy which were administered near the front lines. They claimed that war neurosis, battle fatigue, or nervous breakdown did not indicate a predisposition to mental illness but a normal reaction to extraordinary stress. They characterised this stress as the loss of “buddies” in battle by enemy fire or a graphic encounter with death. In their writings, engaging in acts of killing are hardly ever mentioned as potential causes of trauma, which is remarkable.

During the same war, S.L.A. Marshall, army historian, asserted that most soldiers deliberately fire in such a way that they cannot possible hit enemy soldiers. According to him, this was based on a strong aversion against killing. Marshall argued that Army training needed to be modified in order to make the Army operate more efficiently. In a later reflection on this work, Dave Grossman asserted that revised Army training practices had indirectly contributed to the high rate of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the American army after the Vietnam war. His critique reflects the ideas of the psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, who explicitly addressed perpetrators and their psychological profile.
In this paper, I will discuss psychiatric views on the nature of war trauma and the relation they viewed between trauma, experiencing threats to life, and engaging in killing.

One of the Stolen Aboriginal Generations, Pauline, in 1986 recounted a searing narrative of removal, alienation and sexual assault. Her story was published two years later in my co-edited collection, The Lost Children. Nearly twenty years later her words still quiver and burn.

Do I still have responsibilities to Pauline and to her story, which she told me so long ago? What do I make of Pauline's implied message to posterity: Be true to me and my story?

As I now reflect on my translation from terror I see that haven't captured Pauline's sense of fun, because she didn't reveal it that night in which she unburdened herself. I haven't been able to convey her brilliant catchy singing, her clever way with words, the passionate and didactic way she embraced her Indigenous culture.

Nor her poems. One of them, ''The Yearning of My Soul', became the watchwords for twenty five years of our Link Up organisation:

To become a person complete
A woman becoming whole
Black and Beautiful, for the first time I listen
To the Yearning of My Soul

Be true to your story? Pauline, I can't. You're far too complex. But I can, I hope, be true to the story that you told us that terrible night. Keep it simple. Give them some context. Tell it powerfully. Tell it straight.

Putting the Peace back into Peacekeeping

The post-cold war period has seen a dramatic increase in the number of failed and collapsing states where militias react against the structural and physical violence of disintegrating regimes. These wars become characterised by a level of savagery that spurs the wider community of nations to intervene, usually with United Nations mandated, military responses. Yet the ‘peace operations’ that ensue can easily become a fillip for increased violence and even an opportunity for criminal behaviour by peacekeepers. Often there is a disproportionate level of civilian suffering. Somalia is the exemplar. It is a truism that many militaries do not have the skills sets necessary to conduct the community-oriented policing and mediation tasks often required in such circumstances. This is further complicated when there is a reluctance to engage in activities that are not seen as the ‘core business’ of armies. So, encountering the stressors of uncertain circumstances, soldiers rely on what they have been trained to do, and that is to fight wars.

But there is a growing acknowledgement that the most common kinds of deployment for contemporary forces are peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions – operations that require deliberative preparation, selective personnel choices, judicious application of contact skills, and approaches that positively engage with most players across the divided society. This paper argues that when peacekeepers work in concert with sources of amity that exist in all communities in turmoil, greater chances of lasting peace follow. Forces that are tailored to the circumstances, with missions, structures and skills more responsive to the social and political environment, will more likely be successful in the diminution of violence and the enhancement of peacebuilding.

Regarding the Pain of Women

In the summer of 1991, the world watched on in horror as war erupted in the former Yugoslavia. As the war escalated, news began to filter out about the widespread systematic rape and sexual assault of women by the Serbian army. However, this was not an aberration peculiar to the conflict in Bosnia. History is replete with stories of women being abused during armed conflict. History also shows that the international community has rarely acted to prevent, mitigate, or redress such abuse; treating it as an inevitable or incidental by-product of conflict.

State-sponsored military prostitution during World War II is a case in point. Despite the Allies knowing of its existence and evidence being submitted, large scale enforced prostitution committed by Japanese forces did not feature in the proceedings of the post-war Tokyo war crime tribunal. Such neglect has led analysts to describe women as among the forgotten victims of war. The ordeal of the so-called Japanese comfort women began in 1931 with the Manchurian incident in China and between then and the end of the Second World War approximately two hundred thousand Asia-Pacific women and girls were forced or tricked into military prostitution. Variously referred to by the Japanese state and military personnel as imperial gifts, military supplies, and public toilets, they suffered immense physical and psychological pain as a result of their traumatic experiences.

Susan Sontag argues that the appetite for pictures showing the body in such pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. She goes on to argue that perhaps the only people with the right look at images of extreme suffering and pain are those who can do something to alleviate it or those who can learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

This paper draws on the art of Sarina Lirosi to examine the extent to which gazing at aesthetic representations of the pain and suffering of others is exploitative. The paper also examines the wider question of the ramifications of states failing to confront their responsibility for past injustices committed against women.

In the context of state-sanctioned violence and death, the works of three German artists, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, are each significant. Kollwitz had a life-long obsession with human suffering, pain and death and her militant anti-war sentiments, expressed through highly graphic posters, prints and drawings, defied the politicians and government leaders of the day in their failure to address poverty and suffering as a result of war. After her son was killed in action during the first days of fighting on October 1914, she began producing fierce anti-war posters and prints. Her works spoke truth to power, profoundly challenging Germany’s condonement of war and its casting of suffering as noble, necessary and heroic.

During the post-war Weimar Republic, 1919 to 1933, Dix and Grosz also produced works protesting war and its effects on society, though in style less expressly personal modes than Kollwitz’s. Dix’s series of fifty chilling etchings, entitled Der Krieg (War), based on his experiences serving as a soldier in the trenches during the First World War, indicted the horrors that he had witnessed. He told of a recurring nightmare in which he was crawling through destroyed houses. Like Kollwitz’s work, Dix’s art was considered degenerate, because it exposed the grim realities of pain and death.

Similarly Grosz’s postwar paintings show soldiers and veterans as invisible members, the forgotten heroes, dramatically exploding the myth of heroism. Grosz also fought in the trenches but was invalided out to a mental hospital, suffering serious psychological effects from his experiences. Bitterly anti-Nazi, he exposed the immorality of post-war society through his frenzied caricature-style images of disgusting businessmen, disfigured soldiers, prostitutes and sexual orgies.

In the same historical context composers Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill, while not specifically exploding the myth of heroism, rebelled as these artists did, against the status quo and the Nazi regime. In this paper I connect these two art media through a complementary audio and visual presentation.

The use of canes, straps and other weapons to inflict physical pain on schoolchildren were once a part of everyday life in the classroom, sanctioned by state authority. Within a generation this form of discipline not only disappeared, it became criminalised, and became seen as a form of child abuse. How then do those who experienced the practice, either as direct victims or onlookers, talk about it to those for whom it is almost unthinkable? This paper reports oral histories of older people talking to their grandchildren about corporal punishment at school. It explores the way teacher-inflicted violence is remembered and discussed, how it infuses narratives of identity and how it is justified as a legitimate exercise of authority. The paper reflects on other contexts where torture has again become thinkable, and explores the implications for regulating state violence.

Counter memory and The Irish Linen Memorial: (re)imagining Northern Ireland after the troubles, 1969 – 1998

The Irish Linen Memorial (The ILM) is a public needlework commemoration to those killed in the troubles as well as an anti-violence protest piece. At this conference, the artist and musician-composer will present an explanation of the artwork/sound-scape and contextualise this contemporary creative project.

The ILM explores non-hierarchical definitions of public commemoration which are controversial. The memorial names are drawn from a book entitled Lost Lives, the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles (McKittrick et al., 2000). The artists will focus on narratives from the book of persons murdered at the hands of the British state. The composer will perform on the electric violin and explain his symphonic composition and lament for the dead. The names have been transferred on to an embroidered memorial in Irish linen; metaphors of mending and fragile connectivity are explored; further, issues about the parity of esteem/plurality of difference in Northern Ireland are examined.

As artists, we engage with, rather than present an argument about the wide-ranging politics, causes or consequences of the Northern Ireland troubles: a fraught period with various historical and political roots, involving wide-spread violence and trauma.

Trouton, born in Belfast, 1967, and Fitzgerald, the second generation of an Irish migrant family (County Clare) to Victoria, Australia, began a collaborative dialogue addressing their Irish identity and trauma while doctorate students at the University of Wollongong, 2003.

This presentation is concerned with the ways in which death and the institution of bureaucracy are bound up with problematic forms of representation. It considers the function of representation in deferring and displacing the object of institutionalized violence and death. That is, both violence and death involve deferral, absence, and repression. The modern bureaucratic institutions of capital and state displace and conceal specific violent and ethically questionable aspects of society by selectively excluding those subjects in state and media machinery.

Zygmunt Bauman typifies today’s response to the Holocaust as an unspoken terror. The Holocaust constitutes a fear of having to recognize the close relation between those aspects of modernity which we admire and the continued practice of state sanctioned genocide. Bauman describes the mechanism of modern mass genocide as the consequence of the bureaucratic institution’s mediation of action, the process of distancing the individual subject from the violent consequences of his or her actions.

In this paper I argue first that the “free-floating responsibility” of contemporary institutional organization resembles modern attitudes towards death. That is, both the structure of institutional organization and the perception of death are typified by the repression of fear and the deferral and absence of representation. A strong correlation exists between the repression of the fear of death common to modern forms of representation, on the one hand, and the silence and absence surrounding institutional violence and state sanctioned atrocity on the other.

Secondly, I suggest that in order to recognize the invisible, often subterranean connections between the subject and the institution, our response ought to emphasize alternative forms of representation. In practical terms, this would involve forms of media representation that return to attributing significance to witness accounts and documentary evidence while recognizing the pitfalls inherent in witness testimony. Precisely because such forms are capable of capturing those repressed and deferred aspects of society that normally remain hidden, they constitute a means of ethically depicting violence and death, and, ultimately, of better understanding the nature and context of contemporary atrocity.

The ongoing global crisis of insecurity for individual citizens in regimes that oppress on the basis of race, religion, gender and politics has hit Australia hard. We have been drawn, again, in the past decade, into this crisis of political and humanitarian importance and out of our splendid isolation by the arrival of boats carrying asylum seekers to our vast coastline.

My presentation will be a work of fiction taken from my current writing project that explores ways we become ‘exiled’ from our own living arrangements, landscapes, allegiances, standards, and memories—from what we know intimately—when events such as our current ‘refugee crisis’ and state policies of detention take place in our own neighbourhoods. The project is framed more broadly than this absorbing, and transforming, crisis; but there is much more to be said about the experiences of the last few years and what they have taught us about contemporary Australia.

The strategies and practices of public policing in Argentina reflect a ‘punishment mentality’ whereby state-inflicted violence is regarded as the most effective means of promoting order and security. The practical application of violence is guided by a ‘criminology of the other’ whereby shantytown dwellers, for example, are constructed as ‘pre-criminals’ in need of ‘preventative’ interventions. Academic research and human rights reports continue to demonstrate that with very few exceptions, governments, legislatures, and the judiciary enable human rights infringements not only through their lack of will to use or enhance (weak) mechanisms of accountability, but through their inability to introduce and sustain changes in existing mentalities and practices of policing.

As Canadian Coordinator of an international development project aimed at deepening democracy in policing, and more generally, the ‘governance of security’ in Argentina, I have been working with a network of Canadian and Argentine scholars, practitioners and activists involved in developing a normative agenda for promoting peace and constraining violence that seeks to advance change both from within as well as beyond the institutional boundaries of the police. This approach has three main components:

1. identifying, enhancing and releasing the knowledge and capacity of currently weak actors (namely shantytown residents) within new ‘microgovernance’ structures designed to support deliberative processes for identifying, analysing, and acting upon threats to ‘human security’ in ways that protect and promote human rights norms.

2. working with strong actors, namely state institutions and in particular the institutions of criminal justice, to enhance their capacity to protect and promote security through non-violent means, and to develop preventative and non-punitive forms of governance within a human rights framework.

3. linking up these micro-level and more macro-level processes with the innovative regulatory activities of human rights organizations and networks involved in naming, shaming, sanctioning and educating perpetrators of state institutional violence.