Organizing caravans to overcome militarization

ahorwart — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:46:15 -0500

Since 1996, the Ruta Pacifica, a feminist, pacifist, anti-military organization, has been organizing caravans of housands of women from all over Colombia to the regions hardest-hit by conflict. Each caravan is a symbolic gesture against the war and a practical opportunity for women to come together to exchange ideas and demand an end to human rights violations. As a result of the ongoing civil war in Colombia, different areas of the country have become increasingly isolated from one another, as the roads and borders between them are frequently controlled or blocked by the various armed groups. By traveling these roads, the caravans of women break through not only the physical roadblocks, but the psychological barriers of despair and isolation that allow the war to continue.

Ruta Pacifica has achieved ten national mobilizations in the states of Antioquia, Chocó, Putumayo, Magdalena Medio, Bogotá, Cauca, and Bolívar with the participation of close to 20,000 women and a distance of more than 1,700 kilometers. One caravan, to the region of Putumayo, included 100 buses carrying 3000 women who, along with the residents of the area, marched in the streets of the main city and held a convocation about the effects of the war. In order to ensure the safety of the travelers, Ruta Pacifica carefully planned all stages of the mobilization. Before the group left, they developed a map of possible risks, and a contingency plan to deal with those risks.

This notebook shares how Ruta Pacifica implemented the mobilizations and involved the women in training sessions to learn about logistics, protection plans, and to clarify the political ideology they were marching to represent. Equally important in their plan of action was the evaluation and documentation of the marches. For the media and for its own assessment purposes, Ruta Pacifica compiled and archived physical, photographic and audiovisual evidence of each event. Among the results of this evaluation process were the development of an organic and systematic method of mobilization, a more cohesive ideology within the movement, and an improvement in regional and national communication. Ruta Pacifica found that after the caravans, its members had a better collective and individual understanding of what it means to be a pacifist and a feminist and created a more stable network of international connections.

Public Audiences

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:11 -0500

Public Audiences: Creating Space to Recognize Victims of Internal Conflict in Peru

By Sofia Macher, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Peru

Download full notebook below. [*note]

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Peru is one of the most recent experiences of processes of transitional justice, institutionalized with the aim of exploring the truth hidden behind a past characterized by massive abuse of human rights. One of the central activities in this process is the Public Audiences, created with the aim of legitimizing and dignifying the personal experiences of the victims in order to support the therapeutic and recuperative work on their behalf.

The TRC was created by the President of the transitional government in June of 2001. It was made up of 12 commission members, all Peruvians, and duration of two years. It did not count on jurisdictional powers: its mandate was to document the grave violations of human rights committed during the twenty years (1980-2000) of the internal armed conflict. However, the Public Audiences were formal sessions in which a victim or family member of a victim would give an account of what had happened before a group of people that had the ethical authority stemming from the State to listen and express their solidarity and acknowledgement. Unlike other Truth Commissions, the purpose of these sessions was not for investigation, but instead an audience for the restitution of rights, of citizenship, and of dignity for the victim, an audience to listen in respectful silence, lending ears to and giving voice to those who had never before been given such things. All these people were assaulted by the State that had the obligation to protect them, and were later rejected by society. Many of them were displaced to other areas, condemned to fear, to silence that broke with the social support of their own communities. The Public Audiences are, so to speak, a step towards the restitution of this so necessary support. But the audiences also had an effect on society itself. Knowing a personal history, one that is parallel to the official history -- that until that moment everyone had believed and known -- had a much greater impact than the Commission’s final report could have ever had. Having heard hundreds of testimonies from different areas of the country, it put on the table the horror to which no Peruvian could feel unconnected.

This notebook shares the way in which the TRC in Peru implemented its Public Audiences in order to dignify the victims, contributing to the general recuperation of society. Certainly there are similarities with other processes and experiences (South Africa or Nigeria, for example), but there are also new aspects that are important since a new format was created that permitted Peru to begin a process of laying the foundations to generate change in the interior of the State, and also in society itself. The lessons of this experience can be useful for any focused process, more so in reconstructing the psychosocial fabric of the people and the victimized society, than in blaming the perpetrators. It is also helpful here to emphasize the effort of the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) to support these learning processes.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Mediation, Spanish

Organizing caravans to overcome militarization

Public Audiences

Public Audiences: Creating Space to Recognize Victims of Internal Conflict in Peru