On March 19, 2013, the genocide trial against General José Efraín Ríos Montt and Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez began in Guatemala. Ríos Montt led a coup d’etat that brought him to power from March 1982 through August 1983, and Rodríguez was his chief of military intelligence during the same period. This was an historic trial, not only for Guatemala, but for all of Latin America. It was the first trial for genocide to take place in the region, which was plagued by repressive military dictatorships that committed all number of crimes against the populations of their respective countries, with the most intense years between 1960 and 1990. On May 10, 2013, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt was convicted of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison; Rodríguez was acquitted. Montt’s is the first conviction for genocide in Latin America and the first in the world issued by a local court.

Guatemala is a small country (108,000 km2) located in Central America that borders Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize. At the time of Ríos Montt’s dictatorship, Guatemala had a population of about 8 million. Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez were specifically accused of massacres committed against the Maya-Ixil population that left thousands of men, women and children tortured or killed, hundreds of women subjected to sexual slavery to the soldiers, and thousands more internally displaced or expelled outside the borders of Guatemala. The crimes being tried in this historical process make up just a fraction of the terror that overwhelmed Guatemala in the 36 years of armed conflict and repression (1960-1996). According to the information gathered by the Commission of Historical Clarification of the UN (CEH) and the report of the Recovery of Historical Memory by the Archbishop of Guatemala (REMHI), those 36 years of repression left a total of 200,000 victims – including 45,000 disappeared – in addition to one million internally and externally displaced people. 85% of all victims were indigenous and 93% of total deaths and disappearances were caused by state security forces.

The trial was prepared and conducted by the Center for Legal Action (CALDH), who had already presented the case to the National Court in Spain in 1999. The trial was carried out thanks to those that have worked tirelessly for over 30 years in search of truth and justice: survivors of massacres and repression, victims’ relatives, exiles, lawyers and human rights defenders, religious organizations, international institutions, and organizations dedicated to the exhumation of mass graves and research in police files. Among these are two members of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience: the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) and Memorial para la Concordia. AHPN has digitized, in the past seven years, more than 15 million documents dating from 1975 to 1985, which was the period of greatest intensity of the repression in Guatemala. These documents have been indispensable in many trials – including the Ríos Montt case – to strengthen the evidence against those responsible, but also for a greater collective knowledge of the truth. Memorial para la Concordia aims to recover the memories and the dignity of all victims; it also works for the development of spaces and opportunities for dialogue and peaceful resolution of ongoing conflict. At present this is particularly necessary given the increasing polarization in the country.

Although this trial took years to materialize, and although the vast majority of crimes committed have not been tried – nor those responsible punished – this historic conviction is of enormous significance. Others will follow. Guatemala needs to confront its past, acknowledge the truth, and prosecute those responsible for the crimes committed. Only then can peace be constructed and justice promoted to fight inequality and racism for a less violent and polarized society with freedom, the rule of law, and respect for the dignity and human rights of all.

Julio Solórzano Foppa is a historian, artistic producer, and promoter of human rights. He is the son of poet and feminist Alaíde Foppa and brother of Mario and Juan Pablo Solórzano Foppa, all victims of repression in Guatemala.

The Liberation War Museum opened on March 22, 1996, coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the struggle for freedom in Bangladesh – 42 years ago today – on March 26, 1971, now celebrated as Independence Day. It sought to fill in the gaps created by contemporary political crisis and social vacuum by collecting, preserving, and disseminating information, personal stories, documents, photographs, objects, and artifacts related to the nation’s defining moment, the Liberation War. In the process of this work, we the trustees became aware of hundreds of mass graves and evidence of unspeakable crimes and atrocities. Thus we expanded our terms of reference to include investigative and activist pursuits of justice for crimes against humanity and genocide committed in 1971.

In one of our galleries, for example, on display is a beautiful but faded turquoise short sleeve shirt. It belonged to a 4 month old baby girl named Rehana. She was the daughter of valiant freedom fighter Abdus Salam Khan, the commander of a group of freedom fighters in Digholia, Khulna. The Pakistani Army and their collaborators had put a price of 1,000,000 Taka (about $12,500 USD) on his head. But he paid a much higher price when his first born baby girl fell prey to the Pakistani Army, just as millions of other women and children whose husbands and fathers had gone off to fight for their motherland: In April 1971, Rehana was crushed to death by the boot of a Pakistani Soldier in nearby Senhati. She was wearing this shirt at the time of her death. Her story embodies the death of innocence the hands of the ruthless in Bangladesh in 1971. We are yet to be free from the shackles of fear.

Justice for these crimes committed by the Pakistan military and their local agents in Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War has been denied for the last 42 years. It is a sad reality that Bengalis who suffered such atrocities, genocide, and crimes against humanity had to remain in waiting for almost 40 years. Uncovering the truth of this history is important not only for the war generation, but also for future generations to understand the pain and sacrifice endured for the birth of our nation. It is also a tool to help young people relate to the past and draw connections to lingering contemporary issues. The Liberation War Museum believes that future generations, if enriched with the heritage of their Motherland and able draw inspiration and pride from the spirit of the Liberation War, will contribute to nation-building to create a better future.

This blog post first appeared on UpNext, the official blog of the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services.

I’m married to an immigrant.  My two children have Arab names, eat hummus and baba ghanoush, and—if my husband and I can do a better job using Arabic in our home—will speak two languages.  I consider myself relatively well-informed, well-read, and, through my work coordinating the Immigration and Civil Rights Network of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, engaged in the current immigration reform efforts being proposed by the President and members of Congress.

But in my household, around the dinner table, we don’t talk about immigration.   Though my husband and I both have strong feelings about the debate, our experience often feels like that of a typical museum visitor: through the constant stream of media coverage, we are listening to an immigration audio tour, isolated in our separate experiences and never pausing to speak with each other.

Civil Rights and Immigration Sites of Conscience gathered at the Atlanta History Center in 2012 to model and critique their immigration dialogue programs.

But over the past two years, museum professionals from twenty museums across the country have committed to developing new approaches to immigration by making their museums safe places for visitors to explore and discuss the historic context and contemporary implications of immigration with other visitors.    Their staff received training in designing and facilitating dialogue programs to address immigration issues in their regions and have offered on-site programs to help their communities define the path forward.

Though the lessons have been many, a few stand out:

• Even if your site does not specifically address immigration history, you may be surprised at how your audience views your role within today’s debate.  In a front-end evaluation completed at the National Civil Rights Museum (Memphis, TN), over 80% of visitors agreed that the NCRM was a good place to discuss immigration.

• Programs aren’t one size fits all, and the most successful programs are those that use the unique resources of your staff, site, and community to find an entry point into the debate.  At the Arab American National Museum (Dearborn, MI), the Patriots & Peacemaker Dialogue Project uses an exhibit on Arab and Muslim-American civil and military service to explore questions of patriotism, immigration, and citizenship—asking participants to consider questions such as, “Can someone be patriotic to more than one nation at the same time?”

• Those most successful sites and programs have embraced ongoing dialogue with and between their visitors as an institutional philosophy.  After committing senior staff to the project and hosting separate dialogue trainings for all of their education and interpretive staff, the Atlanta History Center (Atlanta, GA) is currently redefining its entire interpretation strategy and has already implemented dialogue efforts beyond this project, addressing ongoing issues of race in their community.

This week, against a backdrop of increased government and public attention toward immigration reform, these and other sites will gather in New Orleans to complete their training and explore how to continue their work together. We will sit around tables and engage in dialogue with our colleagues about immigration issues in our communities.  When we return home, I hope we’ll do the same at our break room tables, our conference room tables, and even around our dinner tables – because I’m tired of having a solitary experience, just me and my audio tour.  I want museums to be a community “dinner table,” a place of civil discourse, a place where we examine the challenges that lie before us and take that all-important first step of listening to each other.

Sarah Pharaon is the Program Director for North America with the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a worldwide network of  historic sites and museums specifically dedicated to remembering past struggles for justice and addressing their contemporary legacies.  Previously, she worked as Director of Education at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and as the founding curator of the Arab American National Museum. Ms. Pharaon is a consulting trainer on dialogue and community engagement for the National Park Service, and adjunct instructor with Johns Hopkins University. She is the curriculum designer for the American Association for State and Local History training program, “Strengthening Interpretation through Compelling Stories.”

The impact of this Site of Conscience is clear as new generations are staging massive protests demanding justice for the crimes of the past. Just as youth movements from Egypt to Brazil, Russia to the U.S. are serving as catalysts for broad change,  these young Bangladeshis are taking the lessons of history to build a culture of justice and accountability as they begin to shape a very different  future for their country.

“The youth have awakened, risen and proven they can hold on to their commitments and I am sure, if given the responsibility, can deliver a better and brighter future to us all and most importantly to the nation. They are surely clear of their want and they want a Bangladesh that is free from religious, social, cultural, and political prejudices.” – Akku Chowdhury, Trustee, Liberation War Museum, February 17, 2013

Please stay tuned to continuing news coverage of the struggle in Bangladesh:

• Bangladesh Gen Y turns into voice for the generation that sacrificed
  Times of India, March 11, 2013
• A Lesson for All 
  Bangladesh Daily Star, March 5, 2013
• At Least 19 Killed as Unrest Persists in Bangladesh
  New York Times, March 3, 2013
• The Female Factor: Bangladesh Protests Break Boundaries
  Forbes, February 12, 2013
• Politics in Bangladesh Jolted by Daily Demonstrations
  New York Times, February 12, 2013
• Laws of Passion: the Shahbag Protests of Bangladesh
  The Platform, February 11, 2013
• The Spirit of Shabagh
  Alal o Dulal (blog)

2:00pm: NCRM talks with  Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

3:30pm:  NCRM talks with Levine Museum of the New South

Share your questions for the panelists on Twitter to @SitesConscience with #MLKquestions before 2pm EST Monday. We’ll be live-tweeting the event from @SitesConscience and posting video of the conversation to YouTube and Facebook on Monday afternoon.

You can join the conversation from anywhere in the world at any time!

Photo courtesy of the National Civil Rights Museum

The Russian School of Museology, hosted by the Gulag Museum at Perm-36, helps museum professionals from across Russia and the former Soviet Union consider these questions and the contributions that small museums can make to local culture and historical discourse. The School of Museology was started in 2009 as an activity of the Russian Sites of Conscience Regional Network in an effort to provide professional development and opportunities for collaboration to all types of museums from around Russia. Each year Perm-36 hosts two sessions – a mid-summer workshop brings in participants from across the former Soviet Union, while a fall session unites museum professionals from the local area. Many groundbreaking collaborative exhibits have emerged from the School in past years, including  Vishlag-Vishlon, an exhibit of artifacts from many different collections telling story of Russia’s first labor camp.

In November 2012, twenty-one participants came from large cities and tiny towns across Central Russia to consider the contentious and often unexamined history of the Russian Civil War.  While millions died in battles, famines, and mass executions committed by both sides in this early twentieth-century war,  its ultimate result – victory by the Bolsheviks – meant that generations of Soviet citizens were offered a one-sided view of these events in textbooks, popular culture, and museums.

Participants in the School of Museology were challenged to take a new look at this history and its lasting impact on the region. The workshop gave students the opportunity  to engage with primary source materials and with each other to examine the mythology – propagated by both sides of the war – that they had encountered in school, films, music, and even advertising.

Most of the museums participating in the program lack the funding, space, and personnel to mount exhibitions that offer new perspectives on these  long-established versions of history. But Mikhail Melnikov, a professor of Eastern European Studies at Germany’s Fredrich Schiller University and a participant in the Brussels-based Museum of Europe, addressed the participants to challenge their very notions of what a museum is and what it can accomplish: By  contributing expertise, archives, and collections to collaborative projects, these museums can achieve a more thorough interpretation of history. Working together over time, these small museums can have a big impact, bringing new discoveries and new questions to their own visitors and to a wider public across Russia.

Personal stories from Cambodia’s four-year genocide under the Khmer Rouge rarely make their way out of local fields strewn with bones and stray landmines to reach a global audience.  As in many communities so deeply affected by atrocity, these stories of suffering are held close, kept in tightly knit social circles in small geographic areas. A new Coalition partnership between Cambodia’s Youth for Peace and the internationally renowned Global Arts Corps will help share these stories with the world for the first time through film and theater.

Coalition member Youth for Peace (YFP) works with Cambodian students to gather personal stories from survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s genocide from 1975–1979. In rural communities of Cambodia’s Takeo and Battambang provinces, youth meet with their elders to memorialize the 2 million killed under the Khmer Rouge regime, to excavate bones by hand from thousands of mass graves, to support struggling local families through charitable drives and home visits, and to share in local Buddhist healing rituals.

Through these interactions, young people build relationships with their elders and gather their stories in a setting that is both personal and deliberate. By the end, the generations are embracing in shows of sympathy, support, and strength. “I was uncomfortable at first,” said one elderly survivor who took part in a YFP art therapy program. “But by the end, something clicked; I was happy to tell my story.”

The youth participants work with elders to turn their personal stories into works of art honoring the struggle of their elders and paving the way for reconciliation. Their paintings line the walls of local community centers built by youth and their families as a space for learning and dialogue where once thousands lost their lives in the notorious Killing Fields.

With the help of the Coalition, YFP is partnering with Global Arts Corps (GAC), a theater arts group that uses personal stories from post-conflict societies to bring the lessons of the past into the present. GAC’s work started in South Africa, where they interviewed translators from the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, who had to internalize the stories of victims and perpetrators to translate them in the first-person, to develop the acclaimed theatrical production Truth in Translation. Now the prototype for all GAC’s productions, Truth in Translation has toured 11 post-conflict countries, including Rwanda, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. At each performance, the group poses the stark and relevant question, “Can we forgive the past to survive the future?”

Through this partnership with the Coalition, Global Arts Corps will work with YFP to transform the powerful stories of survival under the Khmer Rouge into a live performance and film that can bring the experiences of Cambodians to the world. Over the coming weeks, artists from GAC will observe the interactions between survivors of the Cambodian genocide and the young people who share in their stories. From these stories − many of which have not been heard in more than 30 years − GAC will develop a script to be performed by the Phare Circus Troupe of Cambodia. Like Truth in Translation, the performance can then travel the globe, bringing the lessons of Cambodia’s dark past to the communities most in need of their experiences in the ongoing commitment to ‘Never Again’.

• The Girl Ambassadors for Human Rights, launched this year with member sites in Sri Lanka, Chile, and the US, was inspired in part by the powerful youth dialogues that we witnessed during Navigating Difference in 2011. As part of this new program, girls will interview female mentors – mothers and grandmothers, teachers and community leaders – to access and record personal accounts of women’s activism often missing from official histories.

• Last month, the Latin American Sites of Conscience Network hosted its 2012 Regional Workshop at Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro to harness the energy and idealism of college students in Brazil’s Amnesty Caravans. This and other successful youth programs in Chile El Salvador, Uruguay, and Argentina have contributed to a body of educational material available for other Sites around the world to use in developing their own programs for students.

• The Asia Sites of Conscience Regional Network will bring together nearly 30 teenagers and young adults this week from across Asia for its annual Youth Camp. Youth participants from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka will explore the history of tolerance and non-violence in Asia through the writings of activists like Tagore, Gandhi, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Sites of Conscience leaders will then guide the participants in developing projects that apply the lessons of this history to today’s rising international and inter-ethnic tensions in the region.

The lasting impact of these innovative youth programs is felt by both the participants and their communities, from Italy to Sierra Leone and Thailand to the US. As one student at the Liberation War Museum in Bangladesh noted, “We had prior ideas [about prejudice], but after attending the program we saw the immense suffering and sacrifices. We are inspired to do something for our country. Learning should be our first priority.”

VISHLAG – VISHLON debuted at the Pilorama festival in Perm from July 27-29, 2012. The traveling exhibit includes five displays which can be used separately or together to engage audiences with this vital chapter of Russian human rights history.

Exhibits by members of the Russian Network show life in the Gulag system of labor camps in Russia from the 1930s-60s

The project also played a crucial role in preserving local histories of political repression: as participating museums retrieved relevant artifacts for the exhibit from their collections, a number of priceless objects associated with state terror were discovered and preserved, such as a newspaper published by the labor camp and original camp currency, or “bon.” For many participating museum professionals, the project has provided the research training that is critical for creating exhibits that educate the public on past and current threats to human rights.

On August 17, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience will join the Amnesty Commission of the Ministry of Justice of Brazil for the 61st Caravana de Anistía. The Caravanas are an Amnesty Commission initiative to acknowledge human rights abuses committed during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship and to offer reparations to victims. A panel of Brazilians from all walks of life – teachers, government officials, activists, and more – will hear victims’ testimonies alongside community events designed to build public memory: a book release of literary works on the dictatorship, a film festival, and a visual exhibition of period objects, artworks, and photographs.

An international conference on memory initiatives in Latin America, including the Caravanas, takes place August 14-17 in Rio de Janeiro. Arranged by Latin American Regional Network Coordinator Memoria Abierta, the conference will feature panels of international experts from the Coalition’s Board of Trustees, Sites of Conscience around the world, and the Brazilian Ministry of Justice to provide a comparative framework for memorialization and its potential to contribute to social change. The Coalition’s mission to Brazil at this time highlights the importance of building public memory in order to forge new futures. In May 2012, Brazil inaugurated a Truth Commission to investigate human rights violations from 1946 to 1988, focusing on the military era from 1964 to 1985. The reconciliation process has been delayed in part by a controversial 1979 Amnesty Law that freed political prisoners and allowed exiled activists to return, with the consequence of protecting former torturers and major violators of human rights from prosecution. Facing many obstacles including resistance from the military, the Truth Commission is tasked to thoroughly investigate the crimes of the past and “name names” to provide a greater degree of accountability in Brazil. The Commission will have unprecedented access to archived documents—many of which are believed to have been destroyed in the final years of the dictatorship— and survivor testimony, highlighting the crucial role of memory initiatives, archives, and oral histories in the truth-seeking process.

Brazil now faces a societal schism as citizens vie for different objectives and outcomes from the Truth Commission in coming to terms with their collective and individual pasts. Sites of Conscience like the Center for Preservation of Political Memory and the Memorial of Resistance in São Paulo provide the much-needed spaces for people of all ages to come together, share, and learn from the past. “This meeting in Brazil comes at the right moment. By sharing the rich experience of the Coalition network, we are sure that we will have in Brazil more concrete incentives to continue the fight to consolidate the democratic values and principles that are universally accepted,” says Maurice Politi, director of the Center for Preservation of Political Memory. The international makeup of the Coalition, as reflected in the Coalition’s Board of Trustees and Sites of Conscience representatives present at the meeting, will provide a diversity of experiences – from Chile to South Africa and beyond – to support Brazil’s efforts to open places of memory as new centers for civic engagement that invite the public to unite for social change in the present.