Suddenly, we are Australians at war on the Western Front in 1918: Shells fly overhead with flashing lights, while the room shakes with the kaboom of bombs and machine guns. Actors shout and fall across the screens, their blood flying out in cartoonish spatters. The surround screens position us in the center of the action, a soldier in the trenches. Over on the right, a man fires off his prop machine gun, his face contorted like a boy playing soldiers.

A booming voice comes over the speaker, warning us about the unequaled horror of gas attacks. Darkness — then a fixture opens up on the floor, filling the room with smoke. It rapidly clears, and soon we are watching the brave Australian soldiers defeat the Germans, guided throughout by the military genius of the handsome Australian general John Monash. After an upswell in the music, the French prime minister is congratulating those brave Aussies for turning the tide of the war. We knew that you would fight a real fight, the heavily-costumed Georges Clemenceau declares, but we did not know that, from the very beginning, you would astonish the whole continent. The lights come back on and the doors slide open. The Aussies have won the war, saving the whole of Europe, and perhaps the world, from tyranny.

The Monash Centre is more than just a vivid historical fantasy. It is the culmination of a decades-long, state-sponsored conservative campaign to reorient Australian national identity — one aimed at shifting Australian public memory towards a triumphant set of narratives about war. 

The Centre isn’t a popular destination. It’s hard to get to. Almost all professional historians have disavowed it. And it cost the Australian government a fortune to build. Naturally, I decided I would have to go and see it.

Buying history

When the renowned military historian Bruce Scates was invited to advise on the Monash Centre, he was cautiously hopeful. Scates had published widely on WWI and advised the Australian government on numerous projects. The government at the time had been dedicating increasing sums of money to the commemoration of WWI, loosely timed around the centenaries of Australia's involvement in battles at Gallipoli (now in Turkey) and on the Western Front — particularly at the French town of Villers-Bretonneux.

Villers-Bretonneux is important to Australians. In April 1918, all five Australian divisions — alongside forces from Britain and the French Empire, most notably Morocco — successfully recaptured the town in order to help slow Germany’s spring offensive. In the years following the war, an Australian connection remained in Villers-Bretonneux. Australian school children donated money to the rebuilding of the war-damaged town, while family members of deceased Australian soldiers — many of whom were buried in nearby cemeteries — came to pay their respects. Villers-Bretonneux became Australia’s European war commemoration hub. An Australian National Memorial was erected there in 1938 and expanded in 2014 with a massive budget and a crack team of advisors — Scates plus six other top historians.

“I thought the possibilities were enormous,” Scates told me. “Firstly, this was the most literate fighting force in the world: These men and women have left behind an extraordinary testimony. And I hoped, given the amount of money that was spent on the Centre, we’re talking about 100 million Australian dollars [roughly $67 million], we could do a lot with those stories throughout the exhibition and make a really powerful statement about the human cost of war. But that didn’t happen.”

Gradually, Scates realized that the parts of the Australian government responsible for designing the Monash Centre were uninterested in presenting a realistic version of Australia’s involvement on the Western Front. “They were working to manufacture a certain view of the war, one that was seen as politically desirable and had nothing to do with the actual telling of history,” he said. Suggested material about the causes or costs of war was continually edited down or removed. In meeting after meeting, Scates watched government officials steer the museum towards jingoism. “The assumption was: ‘We’re paying for this museum, so we will buy the kind of history that we want to hear,’” Scates said.

Scates and three other historians resigned in protest, but the Centre carried on, eventually opening in 2018 to great fanfare, boasting that it uses extensive “immersive and emotive elements” to “deliver a compelling visitor experience.” This appears to be accurate. According to one of the Centre’s contracted designers, Russell Magee, “We’ve observed people walking out crying on a daily basis and that’s what we wanted to achieve.” 

The Monash Centre may have missed its projected visitor targets by around 50% in the first year, but it has become a touchstone for conservative cultural politics in Australia. And it remains a monumental presence in the cold, rainy countryside of northern France. It is a lasting tribute to the chauvinism and steady militarization of Australian public memory over the last two decades and a clear articulation of the right-wing project — driven, above all, by the Australian Liberal Party and Australia’s Department of Veteran Affairs — to reshape Australian memory politics and national identity.

Celebrating war

I came to Villers-Bretonneux on a rainy spring day to see for myself this monument to the memory culture that has dominated Australian public life since I was a child. That culture has tended to center on Anzac Day, the national public holiday on April 25 that takes its name from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac), which, despite both nations having recently acquired independence from Britain, supported the British army in WWI. 

The date was chosen to reflect the anniversary of the 1915 landings at Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey, when Anzac soldiers joined British and French Imperial forces in a combined attack on the Ottoman Empire. Although the campaign was a disaster in military terms, with the Anzacs withdrawing after months of terrible suffering, the bravery and togetherness shown in defeat inspired Australians in the latter half of the 20th century to claim Gallipoli as an emblem of the young nation’s identity. Since the 2000s, state-sponsored commemoration has been moving away from the losses at Gallipoli and toward Australian victories on the Western Front, including the battle at Villers-Bretonneux that also happened to occur on April 25.

The Monash Centre is located about a mile and a half outside Villers-Bretonneux, a quiet town that still wears its Australian connection with pride. The town hall has kangaroo decals on its facade and an Australian flag alongside the French tricolor. 

I walk north among stony green fields until the Australian National Memorial looms into view. The Monash Centre has been dug into the hillside so as not to disturb the view of everything else. There are hardly any other visitors, but the grounds are crowded with half-erected marquees, portable toilets and half-unpacked tables and chairs. Workers shout to each other as they prepare for a massive Anzac Day ceremony, which will be broadcast live to Australia in 10 days.

During the interwar period and after World War II, Anzac Day was a relatively somber affair, primarily aimed at people who lost loved ones in the conflicts. As the 20th century proceeded, WWI commemorations shrank as ever fewer veterans were alive to participate. But it also retreated on account of the cultural shifts, beginning in the 1960s, that saw progressive Australians looking to distance themselves from a military history with Britain and instead to rally more around multiculturalism.

This cultural shift, however, began to reverse course in the late 1990s, when the incoming conservative prime minister, John Howard, made WWI commemoration the focus of his cultural program. Opposed to recognizing Australia’s history of colonial violence and dispossession, Howard rejected what he called the “self-laceration” and “guilt” of prior governments. “In the Anzacs can be found the model and inspiration for the nation’s own self-esteem,” boasted an editorial in the conservative newspaper The Australian on Howard’s first Anzac Day. The federal government initiated a wave of massive state funding for education and memorialization programs, all of which focused not on independent Australia's successful defense against fascist Japan in WWII but on the country's achievements while fighting for the British Empire in a distant war that is widely considered avoidable and wasteful.

Howard also injected a celebratory tone into WWI commemorations, which had previously prioritized sober mournfulness. The idea that Anzacs had been fighting to defend democracy and freedom became commonplace in political speeches, in the media and in classrooms. “It is about the celebration of some wonderful values of courage, of valor, of mateship, of decency, of a willingness as a nation to do the right thing, whatever the cost,” Howard said on Anzac Day in 2003, two months after Australia had joined the Iraq War. “They went in our name, in a just cause, to do good things to liberate a people.”

Anzac Day is now Australia’s de-facto national day. Politicians of both major parties, the right-wing Liberals and the center-left Labor, give speeches — often at the sites of overseas battles like Villers-Bretonneux — about how Anzac values of courage, camaraderie and sacrifice helped “forge” the young Australian nation. Anzac-themed football games draw large crowds. Pubs host parties involving the wartime betting game “two-up.” Throughout, the word Anzac has come to mean not just Australians who served in WWI but also, by association, that wartime generation and Aussie soldiering generally. And a specific set of images and stories about WWI — those battlefield values, red poppies and muddy trenches, the melancholy silhouette of a lone mourning infantryman — have coalesced into a quasi-mythological national narrative that Australians refer to as “the Anzac legend.”

Any critical voices are accused of disrespecting the suffering soldiers and, by extension, Australia itself. The sports journalist Scott McIntyre was fired from his public broadcaster job after tweeting critically about Anzac’s role in public life. The Sudanese-Australian media presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied left Australia after being harassed by right-wing media and politicians for making a Facebook post one Anzac Day that referred — using the standard Anzac commemorative phrase “lest we forget” — to armed conflicts in Syria and Palestine and to Australia’s scandal-ridden offshore refugee detention centers.

According to Frank Bongiorno, the president of the Australian Historical Association, the 21st century resurgence of interest in WWI history was not a revival of earlier Anzac narratives but rather a total reinvention of them. By the 1960s, Bongiorno explained, Anzac had come to seem “irredeemably identified with conservative values of the old imperial white Australia” but has, in recent decades, been reinvigorated to emphasize the involvement in WWI of women, migrants and Aboriginal Australians. To Bongiorno, however, this newfound inclusiveness is only superficial, eliding the real diversity of Australian wartime experience while insisting on the privileged status of British (and occasionally Irish) Australians.

The new variation on Anzac has become a robust point of political consensus. Successive Liberal and Labor governments have continued to bolster Anzac’s profile by committing huge sums to commemoration activities. By 2015, it was estimated that over 500 million Australian dollars (about $336 million) of taxpayer money had gone towards the centenary, including over $67 million for the Monash Centre. “It’s said that Australia’s spending on the WWI centenary was greater than all the other countries combined,” Bongiorno said. “And since then, we’ve seen further spending.”

All in the family

I walk across the cemetery toward the Australian National Memorial, which lists the names of roughly 10,700 graveless Australian soldiers who died in France. My phone buzzes with a notification from the Monash Centre app, which I was instructed to download upon arrival. Brief stories about dead soldiers have been loaded into the app and geotagged, with an actor’s reading designed to begin as users approach the relevant grave. The app invites me to try looking up a name on the walls, perhaps that of an ancestor. I decline.

At the entrance to the memorial, I encounter a series of wreaths and one laminated card:

In loving memory

Of my great great great uncle

Gone but never forgotten

I thank you all for that you

Sacrificed for my freedom

The geographer Shanti Sumartojo, who has researched Australian commemoration sites in Western Europe, describes Villers-Bretonneux as the “jewel in the crown” of a curated set of experiences marketed together as the Australian Remembrance Trail. To her, the emotional impact of the memorial lies in how it combines personal and collective elements, making individual visitors feel physically humbled by the monumental architecture and the massive accumulation of soldiers’ names. It is no coincidence that Villers-Bretonneux and other Remembrance Trail sites are advertised using explicitly Christian language: Visitors are called “pilgrims,” cemeteries are referred to as “hallowed ground” and “sacred sites.”

The memorial also serves in the construction of a national narrative. Above all, according to Sumartojo, the emphasis on family names — coupled with the language of inheritance and the close focus on WWI — reinforces a national identity based not in civics and democracy but in ethnic kinship. This national kinship is, of course, slanted in favor of those whose family histories in Australia go back past 1918. “As an immigrant to Australia, and as a biracial person myself, that's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by Anzac: It's this really powerful narrative, but I don’t think it actually holds space for contemporary Australia very well, because it's so masculine and settler-colonial and white,” Sumartojo said.

At Villers-Bretonneux, memory follows the logic of inherited valor. I happen to have my own family connection here, although it’s not listed on the wall. My great-grandfather served Australia as a stretcher-bearer on the Western Front, where he was injured — so the family story goes — by a shell explosion that buried him, rendering him mostly amnesiac, left for dead and wandering lost. Eventually, he found his way to a company of Canadians who, recognizing his accent, passed him on to Australian forces in Belgium. From there, he was sent home to Australia where, gradually working off his trauma, he became gainfully employed and started a family — our family.

For most of my life, my family’s wartime history did not interest me at all. (My grandfather was in the army, too, having served in the Pacific against Japan.) Growing up in Australia of the 2000s, being descended from Anzacs meant occupying a privileged position in the national narrative — but I never felt comfortable accepting it. For one thing, this badge of honor felt like something I had done nothing to earn. For another, the way Anzac was discussed under the Howard government did not at all match the diverse Australia I knew.

Only recently did I discover the urge to learn more about my great-grandfather and his life. I had only ever known two things about him. He had been anti-war, hence his decision to enlist as a stretcher-bearer rather than a soldier, and he had been blown up on the Western Front. It suddenly struck me as a terrible irony that this man, who hated war so much that he cried when his son enlisted for WWII, would be remembered by his descendants only for being a soldier. Peppering my mother with questions, I learned that my great-grandfather was a man of remarkable gentleness. He loved birds, especially magpies. He was a whiz at fixing radios. And he was a committed pacifist.

My previous incuriosity is nobody’s fault but my own. Still, I cannot help but think that the Anzac legend offered me no viable narratives for thinking about my ancestors except the one that centered war. My pacifist great-grandfather, who never participated in Anzac Day, didn’t fit into the narrative, so I scarcely thought about him. 

What happens to a society when war stories — even gruesome and sad ones — dominate its self-image? I wonder this as I follow the signs out of the National Memorial and toward its 21st century extension, the Monash Centre. These signs lead me down into a series of trench-like walkways, where bits of retro Aussie slang (cobbers, diggers, mates) are carved into the walls and speakers blaze with noises of gunfire and shells. This place, it seems, is at once a cemetery, a museum, a monument and a reenactment experience — a reflection, perhaps, of the Anzac legend's own crossed purposes.

Entering the Centre, I am greeted by a friendly Australian docent. She recommends hurrying so I have time for The Experience, which, she assures me, is very immersive and very moving. The interactive app guides viewers through the exhibits, triggering massive screens that show historical photographs and ultra-high-definition reels of actors who, dressed in WWI garb, either reenact key moments from the war or deliver quotes taken from soldiers’ letters and published testimonies. These screens, interspersed with boxes of objects, tell a version of the Anzac experience that heavily emphasizes Western Front victories. Hardly any space is dedicated to Australia’s decision to enter the war. No space at all is allotted to the vigorous peace movement — or, indeed, the two tremendously divisive conscription referenda that were voted down during the war. One follows the Anzacs’ narrative arc from excitement and confusion through the shock of gory early battles to the Aussies’ triumphant mastery of trench warfare. When it is suggested that Anzacs were defending the democracy and freedom of Australia and its allies, I begin to wonder if the Centre’s organizers have got their world wars mixed up.

Bongiorno has described how images of Anzac changed during the postwar decades, from the celebration of successful warriors toward the increasingly funereal tones of the 1980s and 1990s, when Anzacs started being represented primarily as sufferers. This mournful tone — and the accompanying gruesome portrayals of war — has been offered as a defense against accusations that Anzac’s prominent role in Australian memory culture is essentially militaristic. Yet, at the Monash Centre, battles are referred to as being among “the greatest” on the Western Front, with John Monash branded the “greatest” general. War is where nations are forged, where men are made and where a community’s heroic status can be secured for eternity. As William James once wrote: “War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” If all the focus is on how the war was “won,” not on why it was fought — and who tried to stop it — then military engagement becomes the only viable form of courage.

As I enter the Centre’s middle chamber, and the video-game jingoism of The Experience gets underway, it becomes clear how easily the ostensibly anti-war strains of earlier Anzac memory culture can slip into the full-on glorification of violence. The French-Australian military historian Romain Faithi has been an outspoken critic of the Centre’s lurch toward national chauvinism. “Sometimes I just wonder what the men who are under would think about it,” he told me. “Would they be touched that thousands of people remember them, or would they be like, ‘You are so wrong. Fighting this war served no purpose except killing millions of people.’”

The Monash Centre reflects the broader imbalance of war and peace in Australian public memory. Throughout the 2010s, former Prime Minister Howard’s opposition to historians and the arts was taken up by successive Liberal governments, which inflicted crippling austerity on national cultural institutions and the main public arts funding bodies. To the academic and journalist Ben Eltham, this represents a kind of “implicit cultural policy” whereby arts budgets are cut while comparatively massive waves of funding are directed towards Anzac-style war commemoration.

Eltham also emphasized the war memorial’s enthusiastic courting of corporate sponsorships from defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing. (The ex-Liberal leader Brendan Nelson, who ran the National Memorial from 2012-2019, was chosen as the president of Boeing Australia in 2020.) I asked Eltham if it was surprising that military contractors were eager to contribute to a cultural mythology that still emphasized the goriness of wartime suffering. “I think it makes perfect sense,” he said. “In every nation, there seems to be a pretty direct relationship between the veneration of these old dead young soldiers and the glorification of future conflicts.”

The Monash Centre, and Australian memory culture more broadly, offers a warning for the United States. The U.S. author and former Marine Phil Klay has written eloquently on the limitations of a culture that offers veterans showy rituals of gratitude but remains essentially indifferent to the soldiers themselves and to the emotional and physical costs of war. James Fallows has noted in The Atlantic that politicians and the press typically discuss the military with “overblown, limitless praise,” while pop culture emphasizes the “suffering and stoicism” of the troops without ever venturing to learn about them. Outsiders, Fallows concluded, view the military “both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions.” One example of the funereal turn in American military memory culture came in the debates over Colin Kaepernick’s NFL protests. When commentators accused Kaepernick of “disrespecting the troops,” they typically pointed not to U.S. military successes but to the immensity of the veterans’ sacrifice and suffering. His then-teammate Alex Boone said that Kaepernick "should have some fucking respect for people who served, especially people that lost their life to protect our freedom.”

A national soldier cult, it seems, serves nobody — not even the soldiers. And an iconography of suffering offers no protection against militarism. Leaving the Monash Centre, I remember the story Romain Faithi told me about Alec Campbell, the last living Anzac who experienced the battle at Gallipoli. Campbell was a socialist and trade unionist. He warned against the glorification of Gallipoli and was bemused by the frenzied media attention he received in old age. “When he was the only one left,” Faithi said, “the government approached him for a national funeral and he said, ‘Heck no, I used that part of my life. Don’t go to war!’ But of course it was bigger than him. So when he died, the government used him anyway.” Alec Campbell’s state funeral took place in 2002. His casket was placed on a two-piece gun carriage and led by a military Dodge truck, preceded by four riders on horseback wearing WWI uniforms.

The post Australia searches for national identity in the trenches of WWI appeared first on Coda Story.

Near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, in a two-story home, a group of teenagers watched a black-and-white video projected onto a screen. It was only 8 a.m. on a gray Sunday morning, but the kids, clad in flip-flops and jeans, were rapt with attention.

The video flashed images of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. The classroom walls were decorated with photos of figures from the era. A row of filing cabinets held thousands of pages of Khmer Rouge documents from the surrounding district.

In Anlong Veng, it is widely understood that Vietnamese people — not the Khmer Rouge — were behind the worst violence that devastated Cambodia and that Khmer Rouge war heroes tried to stop them.

When the video ended, the soft-spoken workshop leader Ly Sok Kheang asked the kids: “Do you think Cambodian people could have killed other Cambodians?”

A girl sitting in the back stood up. “No, it’s probably not true,” she said. “I’ve heard that people took on fake identities to kill innocent Cambodian people.” A tall boy in the row behind her agreed: “The Vietnamese faked their identities as Cambodian people. But the journalists all broadcast that Cambodian people killed other Cambodians.”

The journalists had it right in this case. When the Khmer Rouge officially ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, its leaders orchestrated the genocide of roughly a quarter of the country’s population of 7.8 million people. Regime leaders were hyper-focused on exterminating educated people and minorities, leading to mass atrocities that politicians and historians today still struggle to make sense of.

Although the Khmer Rouge movement was considered the “younger brother” of Northern Vietnamese communists and initially received their support, the reality was more complicated. Fearful that Vietnam — a historical enemy — intended to gobble up their land, Khmer Rouge leaders officially broke diplomatic relations with the larger neighbor in 1977 as border disputes escalated.

In most of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 when Vietnamese troops toppled the regime. The Vietnamese occupied most of the country throughout the 1980s, hailed by some as liberators and others as oppressors. But in this remote, 60,000-person district called Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge retained its political power for nearly 20 more years. Today, most families still include former cadres for whom guerilla warfare is a not-so-distant memory. And anti-Vietnamese sentiment, handed down from Khmer Rouge leaders over decades, remains strong.

“It helps to compartmentalize the idea that somehow we screwed up and we did this to ourselves,” said Sophal Ear, a political scientist at the Arizona State University whose family fled the regime when he was a child. “It’s the narrative that permeates anti-Vietnamese sentiment and re-appropriates the whole Khmer Rouge episode of Cambodia as like, ‘No, no, no, this was all Vietnamese-done. We were victims. The genocide was Vietnamese killing Cambodians.’”

Anti-Vietnamese racism is nothing new in Cambodia, where many resent both France, for ceding contested land to Vietnam in 1949, and the Vietnam-installed government that took over Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. Opposition leaders have long relied on anti-Vietnamese rhetoric for support, even when it has led to violence.

On a national scale, the country has struggled to confront the genocide that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, and formal education about the regime was practically nonexistent for decades. Current Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself who defected to Vietnam, famously said that Cambodians should “dig a hole and bury the past” and has been accused of interfering with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

In Anlong Veng, aging troops aren’t a political party or even a re-emerging insurgency looking to launch a new movement. But their ahistorical telling of the genocide plays into Cambodia’s worst tropes about its old enemy, exacerbating tensions and pushing a confrontation with the country’s own past further out of reach.

But some are trying to provide a counterweight. Ly Sok Kheang works for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an organization that serves as the main keeper of the country’s Khmer Rouge documents and archives, with support from Yale University and both the Cambodian and U.S. governments. A few years ago, the Center launched a program teaching kids in Anlong Veng about the genocide, hoping to spur a more candid reckoning between generations.

When the teens cast doubt on what they saw in the video of the Tuol Sleng Prison, Kheang didn’t correct them. Instead, he gestured towards the thick history booklets he had passed out. It was time to read.

A small country nestled between Vietnam and Thailand, Cambodia spent most of the 20th century mired in a series of power struggles. It was a French protectorate for nearly a century until 1953, when Prince Norodom Sihanouk led a successful bid for independence. Then in 1970, a U.S.-backed military leader overthrew Sihanouk, and American troops invaded the country to fight against alleged Vietnamese strongholds.

Those chaotic years set the stage for the Khmer Rouge to take over in 1975. The movement — led by a Paris-educated man known as Pol Pot — claimed to return Cambodia to “Year Zero,” an agrarian society free from colonialism and foreign influence, which had dominated for decades. 

In reality, well-educated and middle-class people were targeted for torture and killing. Troops ordered everyone out of Phnom Penh and sent them to forced labor camps in the countryside for “re-education” where they dug ditches and toiled in rice fields. Some died from starvation and disease. Others were simply executed.

A zone leader called Ta Mok ruled the country’s southwest. Although he wasn’t in Pol Pot’s inner circle, Mok was both ruthless and charismatic, with a kind of “earthiness” that won the loyalty of farmers, said Andrew Mertha, a Khmer Rouge historian and director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Mok’s troops were responsible for “cleaning up” other zones after purges, including hauling off, interrogating and killing so-called traitors — which came to include just about anyone as the regime became increasingly paranoid and violent. 

“He had a reputation for burning people alive in ovens,” Mertha said. “When he was tasked with eliminating a group of people for a political or material incentive, he was more than happy to do it.”

Mok also hated Vietnam with a passion. In the only known interview with Mok, conducted in 1997 by American journalist Nate Thayer, he defended the murder of another zone leader and his thousands of followers on the grounds that they were secretly Vietnamese. "I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us," he said.

After the regime fell and a new Vietnam-backed government was established in 1979, Mok fled north to the Thai border and led guerilla warfare in Anlong Veng, then a thicket of jungle at the base of a mountain range. Now, a roundabout marks the town’s center at the junction of two country roads, surrounded by cassava and rice fields that glowed green from rain when our team visited in July.

After Vietnamese troops exited Cambodia in 1989, Ta Mok assumed full political control over Anlong Veng. Even today, his fingerprints are all over the town. Up the street from the roundabout is the town bridge, constructed over the river where tuk-tuks and motorbikes stream toward the central market. Here, Mok oversaw construction of a damming system that feeds into an amoeba-shaped lake — a plentiful source of fish. 

Nearby, the red-roofed hospital and local school were also built under his watch. His grave is marked with a giant glittering mausoleum, and a guesthouse bears his name. 

Residents’ stories about Mok evoke a different leader: Kind, generous and hardworking. One woman remembered knocking on his door when she was heavily pregnant and walking away with fistfuls of cash. Another man said Mok liked to sit with his legs dangling over the riverbank as he directed soldiers in construction projects. Anyone passing by his compound hungry got rice, salt, fish or sugar, no questions asked.

“Everyone here in Anlong Veng thought of Ta Mok as a second father,” one former soldier told us. “He took very good care of them.”

Mok was finally arrested in 1999 and the district was reunited with the rest of Cambodia. When he died in 2006 — before he could be tried for war crimes — hundreds poured into the streets of Anlong Veng to mourn. “He was a direct person and did everything himself,” said another soldier’s son. “That’s why most people in Anlong Veng really love him.”

Out of the roughly 15,000 people held in the Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison in Phnom Penh — now home to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum — only about a dozen survived. Prisoners were electrocuted and waterboarded. They were tortured with metal rods and pliers. They had their fingernails and toenails ripped out and their wounds doused with acid.

Norn Chantha discovered Tuol Sleng for the first time in 12th grade. On a whim, he opened a history book a nonprofit had given his school. “I wasn’t really interested in reading the book because I thought that since I was a Khmer Rouge soldier’s kid, I’d already heard quite a lot about the Khmer Rouge story,” said Chantha, now 29, from the office of the Anlong Veng high school where he teaches English. The book was lined with photos of victims being maimed with long metal wires — the first inkling there might be more to the story than what he had been told. 

“It shocked me,” he said.

Until 2011, the same year that Chantha graduated, Cambodia’s Ministry of Education avoided teaching Khmer Rouge history in schools, in part to skirt criticism from Prime Minister Hun Sen, who ordered that 12th grade social studies textbooks be withdrawn from classrooms in 2002 on the grounds that Khmer Rouge sections needed to be “rechecked.” After defecting from the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese-installed government and has resisted a public reckoning with the regime during his 37 years as prime minister. He has even gone so far as to say that trying Khmer Rouge leaders would lead to civil war. For kids in school today, curricula about the regime are based on a short history volume produced by DC-Cam and vary greatly in their thoroughness.

Many families have come to see their personal histories as the whole truth of what happened. In Anlong Veng, where people still live in villages known by their Khmer Rouge-era numeric military names, those histories are often inverted versions of what other Cambodians believe, with Khmer Rouge soldiers presented as protagonists instead of perpetrators. Until 12th grade, Chantha never thought twice about his parents being soldiers. “It was normal in Anlong Veng,” he said.

Now as an adult, a combination of internet searches and the school’s teaching materials have led Chantha to believe “the entire regime was horrible, because so many people were killed.” But his north star is still his mom’s stories — which tend to come back to the same refrain about why some people suffered while others were spared.

“She said in any places where the Vietnamese were secretly involved, the food and the living situation in that area would be difficult,” Chantha said. “If there were no Vietnamese masquerading as Khmer, people living in the area would live a normal life.”

One example goes like this: In 1977, his mother was helping to build a dam near the Vietnamese border. At a nearby Khmer Rouge hospital that she often passed by, patients were dying so often that it was considered a local mystery among soldiers. Once, when Chantha’s mother visited herself, she saw patients so thin “they didn’t even look human,” she told him.

The deaths were so frequent because the doctors were secretly Vietnamese, she said, and they were injecting Khmer patients with poison or water on purpose to make them sick. When Khmer Rouge leaders “discovered” the charade, they killed or disappeared the doctors for re-education, and the hospital was shut down.

“I think what my mother told me seemed reasonable,” Chantha said as he recounted the tale. “There were spies, and that’s why patients like soldiers and civilians were killed.”

Khmer Rouge hospitals were notoriously plagued by starvation and disease and lacking in basic care. Historian Stephen Heder, who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and is now a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said that while it’s plausible that incompetent medics killed patients either inadvertently or on purpose in some instances, there is “zero evidence” of Vietnamese spies having been involved.

When we asked how Chantha squares his mom’s viewpoint with the facts he’s picked up elsewhere, he said he has decided not to view the regime as entirely good or entirely bad.

“If people weren’t lucky, and they lived in an area that wasn’t good, they experienced bad things,” he said. “For me personally, I can’t differentiate whether Ta Mok was a good or bad person because my parents’ experience was good compared to other people’s.”

But he’s certain of one thing: “If any unit had a Vietnamese spy, people would definitely be massacred.”

Chantha’s mother Mong Tim first met Ta Mok in 1993, when he invited a group of soldiers’ wives to his home. Cambodia had just hosted its first general elections under the United Nations, and the rest of the country was moving on from the Khmer Rouge — but Ta Mok was determined to keep control of the district.

As the women sat in a big circle around him, Ta Mok paced around the living room and drew up  plans to protect Anlong Veng’s borders on a blackboard. He wore a simple cloth and addressed the women in a quiet voice. Afterward, the group ate a lunch of beef and pork together at long tables, sharing tips on how to raise chickens and cows. 

In all, the women spent 10 days like this at Mok’s home, the daily blackboard sessions only interrupted for big meals prepared by a chef.

“He said if we didn’t do our best to protect our land, the Vietnamese would take our land and it would end in misery,” Mong Tim recalled. “What he told me inspired me to survive for my children’s future. I didn’t want to lose our land or have another government to govern us. If we lost the battle with the Vietnamese, they would abuse us.”

We spoke with Mong Tim, now 63, in the living room of her wooden home, where framed photos displayed her six adult children along the mantle and a talking bird screeched out Khmer greetings in the garden. The wives’ meeting sparked a yearslong friendship: Ta Mok regularly gifted her rice and seasonings and even taught her to sew.

In the early 1990s, Khmer Rouge soldiers flooding into Anlong Veng were pulled into his system, working together to raise farm animals and sharing goods amongst themselves. Many soldiers had lost their own parents or families. “Cambodians relocated from every part of the country. We learned to love each other like a family in order to help each other and to survive,” Tim said.

It was a big improvement from her life before. During the 1980s, when Vietnam occupied Cambodia, fighting dragged out in Anlong Veng, even though the Khmer Rouge movement was effectively dead. Tim moved daily between different parts of the jungle, and while she tried to seek refuge in Thailand, “people didn’t allow us to enter their village,” she said. Instead, she built a hut and lived there for a year, surviving off bitter roots. She lost all her hair.

Still, she doesn’t blame Ta Mok or other Khmer Rouge leaders for refusing to capitulate.

“I felt pain when thinking that the Vietnamese invaded us​​ and abused us. I felt pain because we could not settle anywhere,” she said. “We kept running because the Vietnamese army kept chasing us. We ran all the time, and we ran while exhausted and starving. We slept mostly on the ground, anywhere we could.”

“I didn’t suffer with Ta Mok, but I did with the Vietnamese invasion,” Tim said. 

In recent years, Tim has come across Facebook and YouTube videos that say Ta Mok murdered people in the country’s southwest, but that was before she knew him. Under his rule, she told us, people had rice and fish. The forest was protected. He even traded small bits of gold at the Thai border to bring back noodles and rice. 

We asked if her feelings about him have changed at all since they first met, and she said no.

How Anlong Veng residents should grapple with the past has been a point of debate for years. Back in 2003, the government said it wanted to memorialize the district as a tourist destination, prompting local outcry and a slew of articles stereotyping it as the “Wild West” of Cambodia. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia where Kheang works, rejected the plan on the grounds that it would commercialize memory.

Complicating matters was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal that sought to try war criminals through a joint Cambodian and international court. Although the tribunal was only meant to focus on high-level architects of the genocide — and struggled to even do that — it had a chilling effect in Anlong Veng. One researcher recalled villagers physically running from his white car during a visit, scared that a U.N. vehicle had arrived to take them away.

By 2015, the tribunal had stalled, and Youk established the program in Anlong Veng to teach kids about Khmer Rouge history. The sessions bring 15 kids from local high schools to a day-long workshop — led by Kheang — to explain the basic history of the regime and visit historical sites like Ta Mok’s compound and Pol Pot’s grave.

In a Zoom call, I told Youk about Chantha and his mother and asked how he saw the organization’s role in interpreting the older generation’s narratives for young people.

Youk himself straddles seemingly contradictory positions. As a child, he survived being tortured in a Khmer Rouge work camp and eventually fled to the United States. His extended family is from Ta Mok’s home province of Takeo and lost all but two relatives there. And yet to do his work effectively, he must defend the humanity of Anlong Veng to outsiders.

In 2011, researchers found that both soldiers and high schoolers in Anlong Veng tended to view themselves within a victim-hero mindset against the Vietnamese, bolstered by poverty, intergenerational trauma and isolation. All told, this led to “difficulty in observing the emergence of coherent narratives,” they wrote.

That lack of cohesion, along with omissions or outright lies, doesn’t matter, Youk told me, so long as people are talking in the first place. “I don’t expect one narrative,” he said. “The more complex the history, the more we learn.”

Historians themselves are not settled on much of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime and the precise role Ta Mok played. While it is clear that he would have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, his reputation for having orchestrated huge massacres has been exaggerated over the years, Heder, the historian who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, said.

“What we know among us about what happened under this regime is not one thousandth of one percent of what we know about the Holocaust, maybe one percent of what we know about what happened in the Soviet Union, and a hundredth of one percent of what we know about China under Mao,” Heder said. “We’re all wandering around in the dark grabbing onto little beams of light trying to put together a coherent picture.” 

Youk said his long-term goal isn’t to adjudicate specific beliefs or memories in Anlong Veng. Eventually, he’d like to see the district reconnect culturally with the rest of Cambodia — but first that means helping kids talk to their parents and grandparents about why they think what they do. “They have to reconcile within their own family first before they can reconcile with their neighbors, the community, outside,” he said.

Youk said he doesn’t expect that to happen right away, especially through a single workshop.

“In the beginning, I only expect them to learn the word genocide, that’s all,” he said. “If you can just say that, that’s fine.” But when kids grow up, “they have the responsibility to find their truth.”

Not everyone in Anlong Veng is nostalgic for Ta Mok’s rule. An Horn, a slight, wiry cassava and rice farmer who we met outside his wooden home on a winding dirt road, quickly brushed aside the idea that the leader was anything special.

In fact, only the higher-level Khmer Rouge benefited from the food and unlimited handfuls of money that other residents had ascribed to Ta Mok. “I never dared to go near him,” Horn said with a shake of his head. “He was one of the top leaders and I was a low-ranking soldier. I wouldn’t go near him.”

Horn was around 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge swept into his rural province. Troops separated him from his parents and forced him into a camp with other kids, where he was trained as a child soldier. His first job was carrying older boys’ food and drink and then hauling soil to construct dams. “We didn’t have any freedom at all. They forced small kids to work as hard as elders,” he said.

As he became a teenager and started moving between provinces in a mobile unit, Horn’s life consisted of staying up for hours on night watch and stealing sleep on the ground “like an animal.” By 1980, he was sent to the mountain range above Anlong Veng, where soldiers had more clothing and food than he’d ever seen before. But the luxuries didn’t win him over. 

“At that point, I just prayed that the war would end,” he said. “I was so scared I would die.”

Horn remains unimpressed with the things that people often point out as generous acts by the Khmer Rouge regime. Leaders built roads to connect Anlong Veng’s villages and the mountain to move their own supplies, not help residents, he said. And bridges and schools are simply what should be expected from any government. In his own village, “the majority of people prayed the war would end so we could live a normal life, reunite with our family, make a living.”

If that was the case, we asked, why did some people in the district remain so loyal to Ta Mok? “You supported [the] group to which you belonged,” Horn said. “If you were under the shade of a tree, you admired that tree.” 

Sorpong Peou, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who likewise survived the Khmer Rouge, calls this mentality the “politics of survival” that still plagues Cambodia today. Opposition leaders, frustrated with Hun Sen’s longtime authoritarian rule, have continued to trot out anti-Vietnamese racism, using the slur yuon and accusing the prime minister of being a Vietnamese puppet. 

“Cambodian politics is very deeply personalized, not institutionalized. Everything is personal,” Peou said. “The court is Hun Sen’s court, the armies are Hun Sen’s armies. Everything is personal, and because of that, personal attacks are the norm, demonizing your opponent is the norm.”

But it’s also “self-defeating,” he said. “You destroy your country by not being able to move toward reconciliation.”

As the house across the street from Horn’s kicked off an evening karaoke session, we realized it was too late to call a motorbike back to town. Horn said he couldn’t ask his neighbors for a ride because people in the village still don’t trust each other after dark.

We made small talk while waiting for another pickup. Had Horn visited any of the local sites the memory organization was fitting with plaques and guides, like Ta Mok’s old compound? Horn said he hadn’t. He wants kids to know what happened, but the places from the past don’t interest him.

By the end of the Ly Sok Kheang’s workshop, the high schoolers were getting antsy. We had watched them sit through Kheang’s morning talk, a movie and history tour on the mountainside, plus a break to take selfies on the cliff overlooking Anlong Veng’s lush farmland.

Now we stood in a small muddy clearing, where under a mound of dirt, protected by a rusting roof and a sagging wire fence, lay Pol Pot’s remains.

It was an unassuming resting place compared to Ta Mok’s towering shrine. Across the street, a casino with a busted-out window and a graying facade loomed over the mountaintop. As the kids stood around the grave, an elderly woman who works as its unofficial cleaner tottered up the path and started talking. She joined the Khmer Rouge, she told them, because she “believed that it was a good thing to do.”

“If you all persist both mentally and physically to do something like I did in the past — if the next generation persists in expanding and protecting our land from the neighboring countries — I believe we will have a sustainable country,” she said, a hand resting on the wire fence. “If we’re all weak, the neighboring countries will interfere, and we will lose our land bit by bit until it is all gone.”

The kids tossed out questions: How long have you looked after the grave? “Twenty years.” Do people celebrate here? “Sometimes.” As is their custom, the workshop leaders didn’t try to intervene, letting the kids take in as much or as little as they wanted: Kheang, who had swapped his button-down for a T-shirt during the mountainside excursion, said that the cleaner always makes an appearance during visits. “Kids can feel the narrative themselves,” he told me later.

We rode down the mountain to our final destination, Ta Mok’s compound. Overlooking the lake dotted with lilypads, we sat near the storerooms where the Khmer Rouge had once squirreled away records and artifacts, talking to the 17-year-old Phal Rampha as the other kids crowded around.

His grandpa sells palm cakes to make a living, but before that, he was a bodyguard to one of Ta Mok’s right-hand men. Sometimes, a bite of palm cake reminds him of a specific story: Once, Rampha said, his grandpa dodged a bullet that bent the tree behind him all the way back. 

“Before, I thought that the Khmer Rouge regime was rescuing the nation from war,” he told us. “From today’s session I learned that there was torture, which made me sad. It seemed atrocious.”

Rampha said that didn’t think his grandpa would have lied about Ta Mok being a kind person who gave people everything he had to help them. His eyebrows knitted together as he spoke.

“I think he couldn’t have been the one who did all of those brutal things to people,” Rampha said. “I believe there were spies in the government.” But it also seemed clear that Ta Mok and other Khmer Rouge leaders had caused internal fighting and divided people into groups.

“I want to know more,” he said. “How cruel was it? Where were the mass graves?”

I asked if he had specific questions for his grandpa. Not yet, he said. “But I want to tell my grandpa that the Khmer Rouge regime was more horrible than what he told me,” Rampha said.

How would he feel bringing that up?

“Hean,” Rampha said, using the Khmer word meaning “brave enough.” “Hean. Hean.”

The post In the Khmer Rouge’s last stronghold, myths from the Cambodian genocide still reign appeared first on Coda Story.

Alderney itself was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.” 

On this deserted island, the Germans left a fingerprint of the Holocaust: SS concentration camps run on U.K. soil.

Today, residents are finally asking: Why has the British government done nothing, when it has evidence of German war crimes on its soil?

Battling History

The Nazi concentration camps on British soil the UK government tried to forget

Most years, when the Channel Islanders of Alderney come together on May 22 to memorialize the victims of the Nazi occupation, it rains. A chilly wind whips up from the sea as a congregation gathers to pay tribute to the thousands of people who toiled and died in forced labor camps on this tiny island.

But today, it’s bright and clear.

Fluttering above us, with the sea and the sky beyond, is a blue-and-white striped flag. It represents the uniforms of the prisoners. There are plaques in Russian, Hebrew, French, Polish and Spanish to commemorate the victims of the German occupation of this island in the English Channel between 1940 and 1945. The Channel Islands, an archipelago belonging to the British Crown, were the only piece of British territory Adolf Hitler managed to conquer during the Second World War. And on Alderney, the Nazis built a series of labor camps — including two concentration camps run by the SS.

In the U.K., this story is far from common knowledge, confined to the obscure recesses of the British collective memory. Even when I ask other Channel Islanders from the nearby island of Jersey if they knew Nazi camps existed on British soil, they’re hazy on the details.

In recent months, the British Home Secretary Priti Patel declared the government’s plan to transfer asylum seekers arriving in the U.K. on small boats to detention centers in Rwanda. But before this policy was introduced, Alderney was floated by a right-wing think tank as a possible destination for detainees. “Its location and topography make it suitable in many respects,” the report read, before noting that the island was “gravely misused during World War II by the Nazis.” The think tank’s authors added that while the difficulty of the island’s tiny airfield might be overcome, “the problem of bad associations may be less tractable.”

The suggestion was quickly squashed — perhaps, some islanders thought, because international attention on Alderney would open an enormous Pandora’s box.

Now, as a £100million ($120 million) Holocaust Memorial is planned to be built next to the Parliament building in London, there’s a fight underway over precisely what happened in Alderney, and how Britain should face up to the Nazi atrocities that occured on its territory.

When the British began their investigations on the island after the war it gradually dawned on them that the scale of atrocities could warrant full-scale war crimes trials. As this realization took hold, there was a shift in the tone of the investigations, says Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist at Staffordshire University who has studied the island for more than a decade. The official narrative changed, skating over the fact that 27 different nationalities were thought to have been brought to the island, among them hundreds of French Jews. Instead, the Foreign Office simply said that “for practical purposes Russians may be considered to be the only occupants of these camps.”

“That enabled the British authorities to hand over the investigation to the Soviets. And that meant they could wash their hands of the whole cost and everything else of war crimes trials,” said Sturdy Colls. It was cleaner and easier to say the prisoners were Russian, and the Soviet Union’s responsibility. The enduring legacy of that decision was that the stories of other prisoners — Jews, other Europeans, North Africans — were largely erased from the official history of Alderney. 

At the service, the self-governed island’s President, William Tate, hit back at those who said the island of Alderney was not facing up to its past. “There are those who say that we don’t do enough. I take issue with that. I think we all live with the responsibility of ensuring that the lives of those people that were lost during that period do not go unremarked.”

Alderney is a three-mile-long slither of land that is home to some 2,000 people. Wildly beautiful, surrounded by the seething, white-crested Atlantic, the island is fringed with sandy crescent-shaped beaches. Alderney’s capital, St. Anne, a postcard-perfect, cobbled town, is covered in banners to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee when I visit. Though it’s just ten miles off the coast of France, this is unmistakably British soil.

Unlike the other islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, where British residents lived under German occupation, the people of Alderney collectively decided to evacuate their homes in June 1940, when the fall of France was imminent. They did not return until December 1945. On this virtually deserted island –– a mere handful of islanders remained –– the German occupiers acted with impunity, building labor camps and SS-run concentration camps.

The camps operated under the system of “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” — extermination through hard labor — and hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners died here. They were worked to death, forced to build a vast network of fortifications as part Adolf Hiter’s “Atlantic Wall,” a system of defenses along the coast of continental Europe designed to deter allied invasion. The Channel Islands were a key part of this defense structure and Alderney was such a prized strategic possession, it was nicknamed “Adolf Island.”

Eighty years later, and the island is still disfigured by concrete bunkers, firing ranges, batteries, and cement fortifications — relics of the darkest chapter of Alderney’s history. Threading through the rock deep below the island, a vast network of tunnels have been gouged out by forced laborers.

What precisely happened here, how many died here, and how they should be remembered are subjects of fierce contention. The British government has been accused of covering up Nazi atrocities on its own soil, of refusing to face up to or reconcile with the horrors of Alderney’s past and keeping it a secret for decades.

“How can Britain, in good conscience, build a £100 million memorial and education center, and become head of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2024, if we can’t come clean about one little fingertip of the Holocaust on British soil?” said Michael James, a local resident who was in attendance at the remembrance service. “It’s just wrong. It reeks.”

James believes the number of people who died in Alderney during the war is well into the thousands. “It’s staggering that we’re having to fight to get the truth. If you had died here wouldn’t you want your children to know you had died here? How many hundreds of relatives are out there that don’t know their family members died on this island?”

The islanders were told that there were four camps on Alderney. That slave laborers had worked here and built the island’s fortifications. That these laborers were Russian. That 337 of them had died. But recent studies have identified as many as nine camps and that alongside the Russian prisoners, there were also Europeans, North Africans and Jews.

In contrast to the official number of 337, the highest estimates for the number of deaths on Alderney run to 70,000. Many islanders believe the real number is somewhere in the thousands rather than the hundreds.

When the people of Alderney returned to their island after the war, they said the birds didn’t sing. The island was covered with barbed wire and concrete, and the silence suggested that something terrible had happened. The islanders were told little and asked few questions. Children knew that the gravesites were where “slave laborers were buried.” But, said Sally Bohan, who returned to Alderney after the war as an infant, she didn’t truly absorb what that meant until her late teens. “We didn’t realize the severity and — just the awfulness of it. And there was nothing here to say what had happened.” 

People relied on hearsay. Witness testimonies were routinely recounted of bodies being tipped off the breakwater, of people dying while building a vast anti-tank wall running along one of the island’s pristine beaches, their bodies simply folded into the cement. Islanders talked about finding bones on the beaches. About seeing ghosts: juddering forms dressed in the forced laborers’ distinctive striped uniform, up by Lager Sylt, the S.S. concentration camp near where the airport is now located. 

John Dalmau, a Spanish forced laborer who was taken to Alderney by the Nazis after fleeing Franco's regime, recounted being sent down as a diver in Alderney's Braye Bay to disentangle an anti-submarine net.

"Among the rocks and seaweed there were skeletons all over the place. Crabs and lobsters were having a feast on the bodies which remained intact," he wrote in the years after his release. "I watched the blown-up bodies moving with the tide."

Talk of a cover up by the British government has been rife on the island for many decades. A question has always hung in the air. Why did the British government let evidence of German war crimes on its soil — the concentration camps and those who suffered in them — remain in obscurity? Why was no one prosecuted?

Different islanders have different answers. Because Britain had other things to be getting on with — a country to rebuild. Because the atrocities weren’t significant enough to require Nuremberg-style trials. Because no one wanted to reflect on how much cooperation there was by Channel Islanders in German crimes. Because there was a collective sense of shame about letting the Channel Islands fall into enemy hands. Because no government wanted talk of Jewish murders on its soil.

In 2016, when the then-Prime Minister David Cameron announced that a Holocaust Memorial would be built in London’s iconic Victoria Tower Gardens on the banks of the Thames, right next to the Houses of Parliament, he described it “as a permanent statement of our values as a nation.”

At the outset of the Ukraine crisis, U.K. politicians praised the country’s “long, proud history of welcoming refugees.” A government cabinet minister, Tom Pursglove, cited the British 1930s “Kindertransport” policy as an example, when almost 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children were brought to Britain in the lead-up to World War II. At London’s Liverpool Street Station, a bronze statue of Jewish children arriving with their luggage silently watches over commuters.

The story of the Kindertransport is widely taught as part of the British school history curriculum. But few ask why only children — “kinder” — were given sanctuary, why their parents were left to be murdered by the Nazis.

“The thing is, if we reveal that the Holocaust happened on Alderney, and that quite a number of Jews died there, and that the government covered it up and prevented French Jews in particular getting justice, then where does it leave our program of teaching British values through the Holocaust?” said Marcus Roberts, founder of an Anglo-Jewish heritage organization called Jtrails, who has been studying the German occupation of Alderney for over a decade.

In a fiery meeting in Alderney last July, Lord Eric Pickles, Head of the UK Delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said the time had come for Britain to face up to its history during the Holocaust, “warts and all.” Following a presentation by the Alliance, laying out proposals for how Alderney could better safeguard the memory of the camps and grave sites dotted around the island, Lord Pickles told Alderney residents that they needed to face up to what had happened on their land.

“We can’t pretend everything was just rosy,” he said. “This is about telling the truth, the unvarnished truth, not for the titillation of others, but because you own it. It’s yours. You didn’t ask to be the custodians of the most important Holocaust site in the British Isles. It’s not what you asked. But you are the custodians and we want to support you.” The Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s eight recommendations included tasks like improving the mapping, signage and listing of the camp sites and grave areas.

The first person to stand up was Susan Allen, 77, a retired Alderney resident who had worked for the British Foreign Office for several decades. “I’m appalled by all this,” she said. “You are talking about taking over the whole island and turning it into a Holocaust — almost a Disneyland. And I’m sorry, I don’t go along with that.”

Another resident, a former Alderney politician named James Dent, said the memorialization should not be principally focused on Jewish memory. “In Alderney the prisoners were of all faith and no faith,” he said, echoing Allen’s concern that the island shouldn’t become “some macabre theme park for Holocaust tourists.”

Pickles seemed struck by the virulence of the opposition he faced at the town hall. “We’re merely suggesting there should be some small stones, just to be able to give an approximate idea of where things are,” he said a half hour into the impassioned meeting. When I spoke to him on a call last month, he said that he understood why people didn’t want their paradise tainted even by “merely improving the signage.”

“If you move to paradise, you want to see it in those terms. And I don’t think we should look down our noses at people who move to this lovely place that they’ve chosen to live in, and they don’t want to engage in its darker secrets,” he said. “Maybe I’m a little bit too tolerant by nature,” he added, after a pause.

During the town hall meeting, Dr. Gilly Carr, a Cambridge archeologist with a specialism in Holocaust heritage, suggested that the stones could simply have QR codes on them, rather than any text, so that people could find out more information about the gravesites and concentration camp remains only if they wanted to. “The beauty of an online site,” she told the Alderney residents, “is that it’s invisible.”

A spokesperson for the States of Alderney, Alistair Forrest, said the Alliance's suggestions were currently being worked through. “We pay our respect to those who suffered and died in the slave camps on our beautiful Island,” he said.

A debate over the number of people who died in Alderney has soured. “We seem to have become engaged in what I think is possibly a slightly bizarre competition,” Dent, the former politician, said during the meeting, describing how people were constantly trying to “top” each other by quoting ever-larger death tolls. “It doesn’t matter if it was 400, or 4,000, or 40,000 people who died here,” he said, adding that the victims should be memorialized “quietly, and with dignity.”

Knowing just how many died on their island, believe others on Alderney, is essential. The official number of 337 was arrived at back in the 1940s, when Britain commissioned an investigation into atrocities on the island in the aftermath of the war.

In May 1945, after Britain had taken back the island from the German occupiers, Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff was dispatched to Alderney to conduct an investigation on behalf of British intelligence. The young captain was just 24 at the time, but not inexperienced. He had been a star investigator at the London Cage, British intelligence’s secret interrogation facility during the war years. He was fluent in both German and French and — a bonus — had vacationed on Alderney as a child.

Pantcheff canvassed the experiences of some 3,000 witnesses. He produced a harrowing report, detailing what had happened at Alderney’s various concentration camps.“Crimes of a systematically callous and brutal nature were carried out — on British soil — in the past three years,” he wrote at the outset of the report, before detailing how forced laborers were tortured, starved, and worked to death.

"Workers were beaten for the most trivial offences against the harsh regulations, such as failure to execute a drill movement properly or endeavouring to acquire food from the garbage pail. On occasions workers were beaten for no reason at all."

Theodore Pantcheff, 1945

By counting the number of graves on the island, Pantcheff stated that he knew for certain that 337 people had died there, admitting that “it is impossible to say with any exactitude that the general figure of 337 could represent the full number of deaths on the island.” Pantcheff, his sons explained, was looking for bodies so that prosecutions could be made.

But no prosecutions were ever made –– an outcome that still haunts this island. Instead, the British government packaged up Pantcheff’s report, and sent it over to the Soviet Union, to, as Sturdy Colls put it, “wash their hands of it.” But as British-Soviet relations broke down in the postwar years, the chances of the two governments cooperating and sharing war crimes witnesses began to dwindle, and trials became an impossibility.

In 1947, the French War Crimes authorities requested a copy of the investigation. The British said it “was found that the majority of internees were Russians” and that the reports had been handed over to the Soviet Union. “I regret that the only information we can give you on this matter is the general statement that the Russians were treated with great cruelty,” the British letter to the French authorities read. The letter neglected to mention that held alongside Russian, Polish and Ukrainian prisoners, as well as German, Spanish, and North African inmates, were hundreds of French Jews.

Bunny Pantcheff’s report remained a secret for decades.

His son, Andrew Pantcheff, 67, said his father had dearly wanted to see those guilty of crimes against humanity on Alderney brought to justice. “Even if it’s only one,” Pantcheff pleaded to his higher-ups, according to his son. “Even if it’s only one, so that somebody who tries to do this again won’t be entirely sure that they can just walk away.” 

Perhaps the most important prosecution that never happened was that of Major Carl Hoffman, the brutal, relentless commandant in charge of coralling forced laborers into building the island’s massive fortifications.

After the war, the story ran that Hoffman had been hanged in Kyiv in 1945. But in reality, he walked free. He was held in British custody until 1948 before he was allowed to return to Germany, where he lived out the rest of his life, dying peacefully in Hamburg in 1974. It was not until the 1980s that the British Foreign Office admitted this.

In the early 1980s, Solomon H. Steckoll, a South African journalist, attempted his own investigation. “A mass of obstacles had been placed in the path of the truth,” he wrote in his book, “The Alderney Death Camp,” published in 1982. “For over three decades now,” Steckoll wrote, “the silence has rested like a heavy blanket of impenetrable fog over what took place on Alderney.”

Pantcheff wrote his own account of what happened, titled “Alderney, Fortress Island,” published ahead of Steckoll’s book, setting out “to put flesh on the concrete skeleton and try to breathe life into it.”

The blurb reads: “There was no extermination camp, no Auschwitz, nor any ‘cover up.’” In the book, Pantcheff describes how he wants to dispel speculation: “If it does nothing else, at least it may help some of the more fantastic ghosts so far raised — for example the stories of gas-ovens in the concentration camp or bodies thrown in the cement mixer.”

But the book also criticizes those who “shirk the concept of blame or feel that it all happened a long time ago and is no business of theirs. If this book has a purpose, it is to make it as hard as possible to follow any of those easy options.”

According to his sons, Pantcheff hoped to lay bare the catastrophe that had happened on Alderney, and tell the stories of those who toiled and lost their lives there. “It might have been a very small tragedy compared to Auschwitz,” his younger son Richard Pantcheff, 63, said. “But it was a tragedy nonetheless. It was appalling. He didn't want it to be sensationalized. And he didn't want it to be minimized.”

“Alderney, Fortress Island” was the first time Pantcheff’s own account of what had happened on the island was put before the public. 

For many years, the official British government line ran that the U.K. copy of the original Pantcheff report had been destroyed to create “shelf space.” Many of Pantcheff’s papers were kept in the Alderney Museum files until the early 2000s, when MI6, the British intelligence agency, requested the files back, according to the museum director Trevor Davenport. “I personally bagged them up and sent them off,” Davenport said, adding that MI6 promised to send back copies. “When we sent them, I said to the council — ‘we’ll never see them again.’ And of course we haven’t.” Davenport said MI6 simply sent back a summary.

In the late 2000s, many of the materials from Pantcheff’s report became accessible at the British Archives. There are, however, files that are not included in the papers –– particularly the full statement by George Pope, one of the only islanders who remained in Alderney during the occupation. Pope said he had seen almost 1,800 Ukrainians die, and witnessed as many as 400 Jews thrown into mass graves. His account was regarded as unreliable by Pantcheff, who suspected Pope of collaborating with the Germans. “The Pope testimony could be the key document,” said Alderney resident Michael James. 

The sheer number and size of the fortifications built in Alderney between 1940 and 1945, some argue, make the official death tally dubious.

Soviet citizens who worked on Alderney were rarely prisoners of war. Marcus Roberts, the Anglo-Jewish heritage historian, described how they were mostly press-ganged or kidnapped civilians and were described by the Germans as “volunteers.”

“You have to ask yourself realistically, what size of labor force would you have needed to complete such constructions?” said Roberts. “I can say with a high degree of certitude that at least 15,000 died there,” he said, describing how it was important to factor in the prisoners’ living conditions, and their ultra-low-calorie diet of thin cabbage soup and bread. “I wouldn't be surprised if that number could be as high as 30,000.”

Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls said her investigations gave her an estimate of between 701 and 986 deaths, but that the true number is undoubtedly higher, due to the Nazis attempts to cover up their crimes.

Two military authors, Colonel Richard Kemp and John Weigold, wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper in 2017 that they believed a minimum of 40,000 slave workers died on Alderney — and “perhaps as many as 70,000.” They said Alderney had been turned into “a secret base to launch V1 missiles with chemical warheads on the South Coast.” 

These staggering numbers dwarf even the largest estimates made by other historians, causing considerable consternation in Alderney. Trevor Davenport, the director of the Alderney museum, is incensed by the number. “Rubbish! I mean rubbish. I don't even give it any credence at all,” he said.

Davenport does not believe the word “holocaust” pertains to Alderney, and prefers to discuss the island’s wartime past without the mention of forced laborers. He spoke to me on the condition that there would be absolutely no discussion of slave labor. Davenport said the islanders were fed up of listening to “utter tripe” produced by academics parachuting into the island.

The Alderney museum has a single cabinet devoted to the laborers, featuring a sandal worn by the workers along with archival photos. Among the IHRA recommendations described to residents by Lord Pickles, was the suggestion that more be added to the museum’s on-view collection about the island’s prisoners and that a new exhibition should be put together.

In early 2016, two drill rigs arrived on Alderney. One was stationed just off shore. The other was on the fields where forced laborers’ graves are known to be.

The Alderney government had been consulting with a multi-million pound scheme to build an underground electricity link between France, Alderney and Britain, known as the “FAB project.” The cable would span the island of Alderney — and potentially carve right through Longis common, where hundreds of forced labor victims are buried. 

Alderney Renewable Energy, the energy developer behind the project, told reporters that the drilling was part of a non-intrusive geophysical survey, intended to “detect any areas of unknown archeology” in the area. Residents said that the Alderney government did not engage with them about the plans, so that when the drills arrived, many didn’t know what they were doing there.

One resident contacted the police on the neighboring island of Guernsey to report that a site of mass murder was being plundered. Britain’s Chief Rabbi, alongside academics and local historians, all aired concerns that mass graves, including those of Holocaust victims, would be disturbed by the project. After being lobbied by one onlooker, the Russian Embassy got involved, issuing a statement saying that any remains of Soviet Citizens found during construction should be identified and given a proper burial. “The Embassy has also offered help with the identification of the said remains,” the statement read.

A group of 32 islanders took legal action, requesting that the British Ministry of Justice conduct a public inquiry. They alleged that the island's government had acted corruptly in its dealings with FAB, and that people within it had a significant conflict of interest in ushering forth the project while standing to financially gain from it. The Guernsey police dismissed the matter, on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to prove the group’s allegations.

FAB Director James Dickson said FAB had “adhered to the strictest standards of professional conduct” and kept residents extensively informed about the project prior to the rigs arriving, through door-to-door flyers and public meetings. 

The States of Alderney chose not to respond to questions about FAB. 

Last week, FAB announced that the interconnector was no longer slated to run through Alderney, and would instead bypass the island. “This gives us more certainty, as we need to work with fewer permissions, approvals and licenses,” Dickson said in a statement. 

He told me FAB hoped to start construction in 2025.

The drilling was the match that lit the fire. “That’s what brought it all back up for me,” said Michael James, who grew up on the island and has spent the past four years intensively researching Alderney’s past. He described how the FAB project woke many islanders — including him — up to the pressing question of what had really during the war years and how many really lay buried on the island.

Among those to critique the project at its outset was Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls, who submitted a report about the location of the graves and which areas needed to be avoided. “I voiced my deep, deep concerns that it was going through the site of a former cemetery,” she told me.

The forensic archaeologist’s distinctive, six-syllabled name trips lightly off the tongue of almost every islander I talk to within a matter of minutes. Her work is divisive.

In 2019, Sturdy Colls released a documentary called “Adolf Island.” The film followed her efforts to try to find out precisely how many people were buried in Alderney’s mass graves, using different state-of-the-art, non-invasive techniques, including ground-penetrating radar, laser technology and drones.

But before the film was made, a leaked pitch for the documentary appeared to show another motive: to dig up Holocaust graves. “Caroline negotiates with the States Council to excavate the site. The evidence is too strong to ignore. It will be an emotional axis for everyone involved in the story,” the pitch read. Marcus Roberts of JTrails wrote to her university that her film constituted the “exploitation of Jewish human remains for commercial gain and public entertainment.” The university chose not to uphold the complaint, according to Roberts.

Sturdy Colls said the pitch had been leaked when the TV production company’s website was hacked and should never have been in the public domain. She called Roberts’s allegations unfair and unfounded. “There was no suggestion that I was ever going to go and dig without any of the permissions being in place,” she said. “My understanding of Jewish law is very thorough.”

When it was released, Sturdy Colls’s documentary dwelt on local opposition to her research. “Shrouded in decades of silence amid attempts by local authorities to prevent examination and the search for missing victims of Nazi atrocities, the team must turn to state-of-the-art technology to get the answers they seek,” read the press release for the film, released on the Smithsonian Channel.

Sturdy Colls encountered vehement opposition from some islanders, even to her non-invasive techniques. “They want to encourage all ghouls, weirdos and anybody with twisted minds to come to Alderney,” wrote one angry resident to the local paper, “to see and worship the wonderful Nazi achievements, so that they can probe with modern gear, excavate slave labor camps, and fly their little spy planes. Well, not if I can help it.”

Sturdy Colls said she has never in her career experienced the hostility she faced in Alderney. “All because they want to forget the memory of people who were brutalized and murdered on this island,” she said in her documentary. At one point, she told me, residents threatened to shoot down her drone equipment.

Nigel Dupont, 63, a lifelong Alderney resident whose family have lived on the island for six generations, does not want to forget. He believes wartime events were “all hushed up” once Britain took back the Channel Islands. We drink tea in his light-filled kitchen, which looks out across Longis Bay. An anti-tank wall the Germans built, known as the “wall of certain death” — where witnesses said they saw bodies thrown into the cement — can be seen in the distance. 

“Lots of dark things happened here,” Dupont said, remembering how he grew up in a culture of collective silence. “Local families wouldn’t sit around the table and talk about what happened.” 

In the 2000s, that attitude began to change. “As people started to die, there became more pressure to talk,” he said, referring to the passing of the last generation with a living memory of the war.

Dupont said he paid scant attention to the significance of the architecture dotting the island as a young man. He used to throw epic parties in the German bunkers — “the acoustics were fantastic.” But as he got older and became a building contractor, he began to see the architecture of the island differently. “Over the years, the more I’ve read and the older I’ve gotten, I’ve begun to look around and do the math myself,” he said. He described how real Alderney natives — who have lived there a long time — were all keen to understand what really happened during the years they were forced to leave their island home.

 “My generation is ready to know the truth.”

In 1947, two years after he visited Alderney to conduct his investigation into German atrocities, a 26-year-old Captain Theodore “Bunny” Pantcheff wrote a memorandum to himself. It was a list of sentences, written in black fountain pen, each starting with the same four, underlined words: “I must not forget.”

“I must not forget the dead who were murdered,” he wrote. “Nor the face of a corpse that has been maimed and buried alive.”

“Humanity has been and is being outraged; only the few who are whole-heartedly persuaded of that, who know, will be prepared to do anything about it.”

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For Lithuanians, their country’s medieval history has been a source of pride, pageantry and identity. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, multilingual state that sprawled across swathes of the Baltics and eastern Europe, including modern-day Lithuania, Belarus, and parts of Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. 

Its heyday, historians agree, was in the late 14th century and through much of the 15th century before the Union of Lublin in 1569 formalized a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 

Small as Lithuania is, compared to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it considers itself, and has broadly been considered to be the keeper of the Grand Duchy’s historical legacy. Lithuania’s coat of arms and its euro coins feature its iconic knight mounted, sword aloft, on a charging warhorse.

The Lithuanian journalist Vaidas Saldžiūnas remembers going into a souvenir shop on a trip to neighboring Belarus and seeing what looked like a Lithuanian mounted knight emblazoned across stationery, mugs and wallets. He was surprised that he felt a little indignant, as if a part of his country’s history had been appropriated.

“It’s like someone is studying the layout of your home,” says Saldžiūnas about his own response in the souvenir shop, “and nonchalantly saying, ‘here, that’s my bed, that’s my restroom, and this is where I cook.’” In other words, it was as if the Belarusians were squatting in a house long owned by Lithuanians.

He was not alone. 

In 2013, Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defense announced that the efforts to appropriate medieval monarchs as Belarusians were an example of information warfare. “The conflict with the Belarusians is pre-programmed,” said Valdas Rakutis, a Lithuanian historian who is now a ruling party politician. He was speaking to the public broadcaster and appeared to be suggesting a deeper conspiracy to foment conflict.

The Lithuanian government had initially taken a less strident tone in its response to Belarus’s growing interest in reclaiming their shared medieval history. After all, it was mainly the pro-western Belarusian opposition that used the symbols to refer to a pre-Soviet history and culture and they had Lithuania’s support.

But this tolerant attitude changed when “Lithuanian” symbols began to be used by the government of Belarusian autocrat Alexander Lukashenko. In 2012, Belarus sponsored the staging of a ballet honoring Grand Duke Vytautas, who ruled the Grand Duchy of Lithuania for close to 40 years from the late-14th century. 

Vytautas became a much romanticized figure during a 19th-century Lithuanian revivalist movement that paved the way for independence from the Russian Empire. And news of the ballet caused consternation in Lithuania.

Many Lithuanians were now resentful that Belarusians, over the last decade or so in particular, had begun to claim for themselves what Lithuanians had unquestioningly grown up to believe was their history. 

“Eventually a generation will grow up — or maybe it already has — which will think that Lithuania is a misunderstanding and that Vilnius should be annexed to Belarus,” Rakutis told Lithuanian media. 

Rūstis Kamuntavičius is an academic, an expert on the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His style is teasing and informal, often sarcastic. Kamuntavičius has little patience for the growing rancor in the competing claims and interpretations of the Grand Duchy’s history and what it means to the identity of present-day Lithuania and Belarus. 

He thinks, for instance, that the Lithuanian fear of Belarusians appropriating Lithuania’s knight is both “hysterical and ignorant.” 

“I’ve had fights with Lithuanians about it,” says Alex Smantser, a Belarusian expat in Canada, on the use of medieval symbols. “This [rift] emerges at various history gatherings — when they see the mounted knight symbol, they say, ‘he’s ours’ and I say ‘he’s ours’. And so it begins.” 

Smantser felt so drawn to the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that he started identifying as a pagan and a Litvin rather than as Belarusian — the latter, he says, doesn’t roll comfortably off his tongue. According to academics, “Litvinism” is the ideological position that Belarus is the true heir of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. 

“I can read [medieval documents] with my Belarusian language. Can they [Lithuanians]?” asks Smantser. The ruling elite of the Grand Duchy had Lithuanian names but wrote in a Slavic language historians call “Chancery Slavonic.” The large Slavic population of the Grand Duchy spoke Ruthenian, a  predecessor of modern-day Belarusian and Ukrainian.

“There used to be robbers, bandits,” Kamuntavičius says, only half-joking. “They convened into groups and went to kill and pillage neighbors. What difference does it make what language they spoke?” He adds that “there are few [primary] sources from the 13th century, so we’re mostly speaking about interpretations and re-interpretations. Historians construct the past, and these constructs then compete.” 

In the Soviet period, Belarusian schoolchildren were taught that in the Middle Ages Lithuanian and Polish nobles oppressed Belarusian and Ukrainian serfs. As a result, few Belarusians and Ukrainians felt they could identify with the Grand Duchy’s elite and take pride in its military and cultural glories.

Even the Encyclopedia Britannica describes the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as “essentially an international or nonnational formation led by a foreign dynasty (of eastern Lithuanian pagan origins) ruling over predominantly Belarusian and Ukrainian populations.” 

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, the grand dukes have always been important cultural icons. Even under Soviet rule, when national identity was suppressed, over 1,500 babies born in 1958 were named after Vytautas. Off the top of my head, I can think of a political leader, an actor, and a former classmate of mine named Vytautas. 

Today, in a country of fewer than three million inhabitants, over 28,000 men owe their names to a 15th-century grand duke. Vytautas is the second most-popular name in Lithuania, after Jonas (the Lithuanian version of John).

Maryia Rohava, who researches contemporary Belarusian identity politics at the University of Oslo, says that, unlike Lithuania, Belarus has not incorporated any memorial days related to the Grand Duchy into its official calendar, and that the state tolerates rather than actively promotes identification with that period. “When I conducted my focus groups and was asking people about different periods, some did mention [the Grand Duchy] as a way of saying that we did have some proud moments, but they still didn't know how to connect it into one coherent story,” she says.

Before 2020 — when thousands of Belarusians filled the streets to protest rigged elections — the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not seen as problematic, Rohava says. Indeed, Lukashenko was warming to medieval imagery as a means to distinguish Belarus from Russia.

Kamuntavičius traces Minsk’s efforts to claim the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s history as its own to 2005, when the Lukashenko regime started to rebuild palaces and redraw historical maps. At the time, Belarus feared being reabsorbed into Russia and also wanted to take advantage of opportunities offered by the European Union’s “neighborhood policy,” intended to foster closer economic ties in the south and the east and catalyze development. 

Born and raised in Belarus, Smantser moved to Canada to escape the country Belarus had become under Lukashenko. He argues that Lukashenko should not be allowed to hijack a discussion about history. He says Lithuania’s exclusivism and its protectiveness about its medieval history is disappointing. This history, after all, is shared across several countries in the region. 

The Grand Duchy’s history was rich in “memorable events and personalities,” write Belarusian researcher Marharyta Fabrykant and U.S. researcher Renee Buhr in the academic journal “Nations and Nationalism.” So locating and identifying with these icons helps small nations feel “destined for greatness, yet victimized by enemies on all sides.” 

Some Lithuanian historians argue that if Slavic culture and the Duchy’s cosmopolitan heritage was given short shrift in the past it was because Lithuania was seeking to forge a national identity. They say Belarusians are dealing with a similar process of national reckoning, albeit a century later. 

Fabrykant and Buhr have compared Belarus to countries like North Macedonia, with its ubiquitous statues of Alexander the Great — a historical figure claimed by the Greeks. Grand Duke Vytautas (Vitovt in Ruthenian) is also called the Great, and his baptismal name was Alexander. To celebrate him, Belarus has named its bus brand “Vitovt Electro.”

For many years, Lithuanian academics such as Kamuntavičius explored and debated these competing interpretations of histories with fellow specialists. Indeed, Kamuntavičius was better known in Belarus, where these debates had currency, than in Lithuania. But in 2013, he came to the attention of his compatriots.

That May, Kamuntavičius gave a talk to Belarusian academics in his signature playful style. Instead of glorious victories, he spoke of fear and chaos. He tried to complicate the romanticization of Vytautas, the great hero of Lithuanians. A few months later, Lithuanians became aware of the contents of Kamuntavičius’s talk. “I was called a traitor on [prime-time news],” he says. 

“This person is being used as part of information warfare, a cog. Doesn’t he understand this,” asked the news show’s host, Nemira Pumprickaitė. A well-known far-right blogger wrote about Kamuntavičius that it is “difficult to believe that this is not some Kremlin propagandist speaking.” 

He added that by employing Kamuntavičius, Vytautas Magnus University (yes, named after the grand duke) was revealing itself to be an “asylum of spiritual paupers.” The right-wing youth movement Pro Patria designated Kamuntavičius as an “anti-state actor,” who hides behind slogans of academic freedom and democracy. “Is [the university] a hotbed of anti-state activity,” the website’s editors asked. 

“It was stressful, I received a ton of emails,” Kamuntavičius remembers, “and everyone was saying, ‘you’ve sold yourself to the Russians.’ It was the first time I felt attacked for doubting.”

In 2020 Belarusians from all walks of life took to the streets to protest the allegedly rigged elections. Police violence and arrests followed, only encouraging more people to attend mass rallies. Lithuania offered support to protesters and sheltered fleeing opposition activists, including Lukashenko’s main challenger Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Protests kept flaring up well into 2021, and repression followed.

The protests were marked by the use of the country’s “white-red-white” flag (a century-old flag adopted by the democratic opposition to Lukashenko) and a medieval knight symbol, after repressions against Belarusian Grand Duchy heritage activists became known to the protesters. 

“These symbols were familiar to people from school,” says Vilija Navickaitė, who works at the Swedish International Liberal Center, “but they were lifeless and mostly theoretical.” She adds that for “some young people both the flag and the medieval symbols were a completely new discovery. Now they signify their struggle for freedom and change.” 

“We have different languages, but a single history, and it shouldn’t be divided,” says Smantser, the Belarusian who now lives in Canada and strongly identifies with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. He tells me that he empathizes with the Lithuanians’ attachment to their history more than he once did. “But the stance ‘it’s us, only us and no one else’ is a sign of weakness.” Living in Canada makes him believe that a multilingual state that is proud of its shared heritage is not a pipe dream.

Kamuntavičius says he has found there is now an appetite for his work in Lithuania. No one calls him a traitor or a cog in the Russian propaganda machine any longer. But it’s hard to tell what will become of this new-found willingness to explore their shared history if Belarus continues to grow closer to Putin’s Russia.

Media outlets in both Lithuania and Belarus reported earlier this month that statues of Vytautas and his cousin Jagiello, who became King of Poland in 1386, were removed from a national museum in Minsk. This suggests, as one opposition figure put it, that “Russification is underway in Belarus.” 

With Lukashenko moving ever closer to Putin – a closeness that grew in part as a result of Lukashenko’s post-protests paranoia and that has culminated in his steadfast support of Russian aggression in Ukraine – perhaps the time has again come for him to play down or altogether ignore Belarus’s medieval ties to both Lithuania and Poland, not to mention Ukraine.  

Will the Grand Duchy of Lithuania be a symbol of solidarity once more for only the Belarusian opposition? And will that make it easier for Lithunanians to share the symbols of a medieval history of which they believed they were the sole custodians?

Belarusians are making intriguing contemporary art, Kamuntavičius asserts, because they have learned to “live with contradictions.” 

Lithuanians too must conclude, he says, that answers that were once comforting no longer apply, that history is messy and subject to interpretation.

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The post Medieval history powers a crisis of identity in Lithuania and Belarus appeared first on Coda Story.

Northern Ireland

Today’s conflict isn’t waged with submachine guns. But the lack of accountability has allowed the wounds inflicted by the Troubles to fester.

Northern Ireland

The country’s failure to address its past has left room for permissible lies.

Northern Ireland

Families who lost loved ones during the conflict have pushed for answers for decades. Now, the British government may shatter any hope of justice.

Battling History

Unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities threaten Northern Ireland’s precarious social peace

On January 3 in 1976, two Catholic brothers — John Michael and Brian Reavey — and two Protestant brothers — Reggie and Walter Chapman — were playing pool at a pub in a small town in South Armagh, Northern Ireland.

The men, all in their early 20s, had been friendly for years. They played soccer together. Amicable relationships between Catholics and Protestants had become increasingly rare, even in a small rural town.

The Reavey brothers went by fake names in the soccer league because they also played sports with the Gaelic Athletic Association, an Irish cultural group that prohibited its members from playing non-Gaelic sports until 1971. 

The Troubles had been raging for several years, and this area, south of Belfast and a short distance from the border with the Republic of Ireland, had been especially hard hit. About 400 people in South Armagh were killed over 30 years — a higher death toll than any other part of Northern Ireland aside from Belfast. 

It’s hard to imagine the violence that plagued South Armagh during the sectarian conflict that lasted from the late 1960s until peace was brokered by the Clinton administration in 1998. Northern Ireland is still segregated. Only 7% of children go to schools attended by both Catholics and Protestants. In Belfast, gates in towering walls topped with barbed wire close every evening. The deep wounds left on society by the Troubles still fester, represented by neatly kept memorials on roadsides. If you know where to look, each turn in a narrow country road, each old farmhouse at the top of a rolling hill tells the story of a dark moment in a traumatic history.

On that night in January 1976, the Reavey brothers were having a drink at the local pub when they bumped into the Chapman brothers. At one point, a bomb rolled into the bar, but it failed to go off. So once the police and the army had removed the threat, the men carried on with their game of pool. 

Within 48 hours, all four of them were murdered. 

The next day, on January 4, John Michael and Brian Reavey were at their farmhouse watching the comedy game show Celebrity Square with their 17-year-old brother, Anthony. A gunman barged through the front door and opened fire. John Michael was nearly cut in two by a spray of bullets from a machine gun. Brian was shot in the back trying to get upstairs to hide. The bullet came out through his heart. Anthony hid under the bed, but the gunman found him and filled his abdomen with 17 bullets. 

Somehow, Anthony managed to drag himself up the street to a nearby farmhouse. When the neighbor saw the boy, she called for the ambulance, the police and the priest. Anthony was making a miraculous recovery when he died suddenly 26 days later on January 30 in what the family maintains are suspicious circumstances.

The murder was meticulously planned. Gunmen drove from a farmhouse a mile away. Army checkpoints at both ends of the road ensured nobody saw them coming. After firing off the fatal rounds from a 9 mm Luger pistol, a .455 Webley revolver, a 9 mm Parabellum and a Sterling submachine gun, the gunmen sped away, switching cars, handing off the guns and burning the vehicle they drove to the attack. It took 12 minutes.

“I have done this journey at speed many, many times,” said Eugene Reavey, the older brother of John Michael, Brian and Anthony, as we drove the narrow country roads lined with tall brushes that the gunmen took to carry out the attack. In pursuit of justice for his brothers, Eugene has taken investigators on this route several times in recent years.

The gunmen “traveled these roads with impunity. They were never going to be stopped. Because it's all Protestant country here. So the police would have recognized all these people, and they just waved them on,” Eugene said, pointing across the fields to the road where an officer would have been standing, shining a light to give the gunmen the go-ahead.

Eugene Reavey, who was 28 in 1976, is now in his mid-70s.

He still gets angry when he talks about how a British soldier harassed his grieving mother at a checkpoint on her way home from the hospital. Or how the soldier dumped his brothers’ bloodied clothes on the road. 

Mr. and Mrs. Reavey never lived in that house again. Their son who discovered the carnage didn’t speak for a year after the attack. Eugene Reavey has known who killed his brothers for 41 years. A friend of his father’s overheard someone boasting about the murder in a local pub. 

Nobody has ever been held accountable. Eugene has dedicated his life to changing that. It has put him on the frontlines in a fight between survivors who want the truth and those who have something to lose from it coming out.

“I want the truth, if I can get it. Then I want justice, but there's no such thing,” said Eugene.

The small community was still reeling from the violence at the Reavey’s when tragedy struck again the next day. On January 5, 1976, Walter and Reggie Chapman were on their way home from work at the Kingsmill plant when their bus stopped suddenly on a secluded country road. Armed men forced the brothers and 10 others off the bus. The gunmen asked if there were any Catholics among them, and as one man went to step forward, the others pulled him back, thinking he was the target. The Catholic man was allowed to walk away. Eleven Protestants, including Walter and Reggie, were shot in their tracks, left to die on the pavement. Only one man survived. 

The South Armagh Republican Action Force, found to be a cover name for the Provisional IRA, claimed responsibility for the fatal ambush. Many believed it was retaliation for the murders the day before of the Reavey brothers and members of another Catholic family — the O’Dowds — who lived about half an hour away.

The killings at Kingsmill put the Protestant community on edge. Neighborly tolerance turned to suspicion. The carnage of those 48 hours in the early days of 1976 stained South Armagh for decades.

Everybody in Northern Ireland has their own version of what happened during the Troubles. 

The Good Friday Agreement ended the bloodshed. But it did not offer a way to grapple with the history of violence. No one was appointed to look into the killings. The past festered. Later, there were attempts to create a framework to get at the truth of what happened and hold people accountable for their violence. All have failed.

The result is a system where the burden falls on families to push for answers.

Now, even this is under attack. In May, the British government introduced a piece of legislation that would effectively “draw a line under the Troubles,” as outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it, granting qualified immunity to perpetrators of crimes committed during the conflict. For many, this would slam the door on any hope for justice.

Raymond McCord has come to blows with loyalist paramilitaries quite a few times. More than once it nearly cost him his life. 

He grew up in a notorious Protestant neighborhood in North Belfast that is intimidating to walk around to this day. Murals of men with balaclavas and machine guns tower over neatly kept houses. “UDA” is freshly spray-painted in red on a utility box, a reference to the Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist paramilitary. All the lamp posts are painted in the colors of the Union Jack — red, white and blue. 

But Raymond has never been one to fall into sectarian divides. When he was a kid, he played soccer on a Catholic team. As the Troubles picked up, Raymond was the last Protestant to stay on it, which counted Bobby Sands, the famous hunger striker, as a player. 

Raymond didn’t join the paramilitaries; he confronted them.

Once, the UDA severely beat him and left him to die with cement planks on his limbs. When he got out of the hospital, Raymond, hobbling on crutches with two broken legs, confronted the brigadier of the UDA at his house.

Raymond’s story, however extraordinary for his resistance, is also typical of the Troubles: a parent robbed of their child. His son, Raymond Jr. was found dead in a quarry beaten to death on November 9, 1997, just months before the Good Friday Agreement.

“People say as time goes by…” Raymond trails off. “It doesn’t get any better. It gets worse.” 

People were arrested for Raymond Jr.’s murder, but they were quickly released and nobody was ever charged. Raymond has blamed a loyalist paramilitary in the Ulster Volunteer Force who was a police informant for his son’s death, and he accused police of protecting him.

“The only thing the police wanted to do was cover Raymond's murder up,” he said. So Raymond Sr. took the case to the police ombudsman, the watchdog body in charge of investigating allegations of crimes committed by police in the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

After a three and a half year investigation, the police ombudsman determined that Raymond was right: a UVF man who was a police informant was indeed a suspect in his son’s murder, but he was never charged.

“I want to see the people charged. I want to see the policemen charged that covered it up in Raymond’s murder too, who were paying these people that were killing,” Raymond told me.

So he sued the chief of staff of the UVF and the men who killed his son in civil court. Days after he launched his lawsuit, police informed him there was a credible threat on his life. He refused to withdraw it.

Raymond McCord may be one of the last people to be able to file a private lawsuit for a murder that occurred during the Troubles. For many victims and survivors seeking truth, justice or accountability, the U.K. is about to pull the rug from underneath them.

The divide feels particularly vast this year. In elections in May, Sinn Fein, the republican party that was the political wing of the IRA during the conflict, won the most seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in history. The prospect of a united Ireland seems closer than ever, something unionists are dead set against.

It is in this context that the U.K. government came up with a plan to close the book on the Troubles. Almost nobody in Northern Ireland — Catholic and Protestant — supports it. Instead of burying the conflict in the past, it’s bringing the anger to the surface.

In July 2021, the British government released the outline for the bill to deal with the legacy of the Troubles which included an amnesty for crimes committed during the conflict. The uproar was immediate and came from all sides. All five major political parties in Northern Ireland came out against it.

The opposition to this bill has become a rare unifying force for groups who still hold a grudge against each other. But there’s perhaps nobody who despises this legislation more than Raymond McCord.

He was already two decades into fighting to bring his son’s killers to court when he heard the news last summer about the U.K. government’s amnesty proposal. He rang a friend whose father was killed in 1992. The two headed to London to protest at Downing Street. Then he gathered nine other victims to form the Truth and Justice Movement. They started calling politicians.

Just a month after the U.K. announced its plans, the group sat down in the Belfast City Hall across the table with politicians from every major political party in Northern Ireland and in Ireland. Raymond circulated a document pledging to reject the U.K.’s amnesty proposal. Every politician signed it. They did the same thing at Westminster. Every political party except the Tories promised to oppose the legislation.

A revised version of the bill was introduced, and it includes substantial changes from the original proposal. Instead of a blanket amnesty, there will be a qualified immunity. The door remains open to prosecution of anyone who does not cooperate with an investigation. The bill creates a commission which will have the power to compel witnesses. There’s also an oral history project that “will allow people to tell their stories and share their experiences.”

Under the new proposed legislation, inquests that have reached a certain point will carry on, and civil action filed before the introduction of the law, like Raymond McCord’s case against paramilitaries in the Ulster Volunteer Force, will be allowed to continue. But other families won’t be able to file new civil lawsuits.

The bill is trying to walk a thin line between aging veterans of the security forces living in fear that they will be the next target of a spurious investigation and the families of victims long denied justice. But to Raymond McCord, the changes don’t make much of a difference. He’s planning to file a legal challenge if the bill does become law.

Francie McGuigan was the first person to break out of Long Kesh, the notorious prison where suspected paramilitaries, the vast majority of whom were Catholic or republican, were held without trial as political prisoners during internment from August 1971 to December 1975. 

He escaped dressed as a priest with an unsuspecting soldier in the passenger's seat. Francie was driving someone else’s car that he didn’t know how to put in reverse, so he had to ask the soldier to back it up for him as they pulled out of the prison.

Francie grew up in a prominent republican family in Ardoyne, a Catholic working class neighborhood in North Belfast. Nearly every member of his immediate family was interned at one point or another. Francie himself was in the IRA.

In 1971, Francie was sent to prison where he and 13 other men were subjected to “interrogation in depth.” Later, it would be called torture. The 14 prisoners became known as the Hooded Men.

The men were forced to hold stress positions, a hood over their heads, their legs spread apart, fingertips touching the wall supporting their body weight until they collapsed. They were deprived of sleep, food and water. They were taken up in helicopters, told they were hundreds of feet in the air, then pushed out the door, only to learn they weren’t far off the ground.

“There's no way they let me out of here alive because they're not going to let me tell the world what they've done,” Francie thought at the time.

It was during one of the numerous interrogations that he realized the toll the experience was taking on him. The interrogator asked him to spell his name. He couldn’t spell McGuigan.

The torture lasted seven days. Eventually, the Hooded Men were transported to the jail with other interned prisoners where they wrote down their stories. Francie didn’t think it would make a difference.

“We had no faith or nothing in British justice. We didn't believe in it, and we didn't believe it existed. We've since proved that we were right,” Francie said.

The Irish government filed a case against the U.K. at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasburg. There were signs the British would be condemned on an international stage for their treatment of the Hooded Men. The European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, issued a report accusing the U.K. of torture.

But optimism that there would be accountability was shattered when in 1978 the European Court of Human Rights did not rule that the Hooded Men had been tortured. Instead, the court called the interrogation tactics “inhuman and degrading treatment.”

The United Kingdom was able to wipe its hands of the accusation that officers tortured political prisoners on its own soil. 

When a RTÉ Investigates documentary in 2014 showed new evidence of torture that had not been presented before the European Court of Human Rights, Francie joined forces with the daughter of Seán McKenna, one of the other Hooded Men who was so severely affected that he lived out the rest of his days in a psychiatric hospital before he died in 1975.

They went to court to ask a judge to decide if the police should have investigated allegations of torture by British security forces. After years of appeals all the way up through the highest levels of the U.K.’s legal system, they were vindicated.

On December 15, 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the tactics used against the Hooded Men were “deplorable” and had they happened today, it likely would be considered torture. The court ordered an investigation into the allegations of torture, but crucially, one that was not conducted by Northern Ireland's police force. The judge in the case did not have faith the police force could be impartial.

When I met Francie in the spring of 2022, the Hooded Men were still in limbo. An investigation hasn’t been opened. The future of that investigation is now even more uncertain.

For days after the murder of his brothers, Eugene Reavey waited for the police to come talk to the family, but nobody did.

“I was expecting something. We got nothing,” he told me.

Decades went by, and the Reavey family tried their best to heal. Along the way, a picture started to form of a secretive murder squad in South Armagh operating in the 1970s. International investigators started to look into evidence that security forces in the army and police had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries. Known as the Glenanne Gang, they were responsible for more than 120 murders.

An investigation into the Glenanne Gang in the mid-2000s was never completed. Efforts to give victims’ families answers were stalled until, in 2019, a court in Belfast ruled there should be a full report on how the gang operated.

The road to accountability for crimes committed during the Troubles is long, complicated and often stymied by people who have something to lose from the truth coming out. 

For Francie McGuigan and Eugene Reavey, the only way to get closer to that truth has been through the courts, relying on judges to order transparency and accountability that otherwise rarely exists.

There’s a view that “litigation and courts are used as a solution to the problem. And the reality is they’re not. They’re far from a solution, but they are the only solution at the moment,” said Darragh Mackin, a human rights lawyer in Belfast who represents both the Hooded Men and the families of the Glenanne Gang victims.

After the court ruling, the task of investigating alleged collusion by the Glenanne Gang fell to career detective and anti-terrorism expert Jon Boutcher. His team has taken on some of the most politically contentious cases from the conflict, and it has become the gold standard for inquiries into Troubles-era crimes.

“Somebody told me you’re rewriting history,” Boutcher said. “Actually, nobody knows what happened in Northern Ireland because it’s kept behind this curtain of secrecy. I’m setting out what happened.”

For many, Jon Boutcher feels like their last chance to correct the record on what happened to their loved ones. But the future of Operation Kenova may be short-lived. Under the proposed federal legislation, criminal investigations related to the Troubles can only be carried out by a newly created reconciliation commission; its leadership will be appointed by the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland. The work of Operation Kenova would cease. It’s not clear yet whether the new investigative body would take on the Glenanne Gang case.

The door that people like Eugene Reavey fought so hard to open could be slammed shut.

The torture of the Hooded Men and the murder of the Reavey brothers get at one of the most contentious features of the bloody conflict: the role security forces played during the Troubles. Were the army and police keeping the peace, protecting society from terrorists? Or were they active participants? Was it just a few bad apples? Was there a system of impunity or are veterans now the target of a witch hunt?

Tensions have far from disappeared. People on different sides seem to be living in completely different realities, convinced to their core that they are in the right and the other side is evil.

The pervasive narrative throughout the Troubles and into the present is that republican paramilitaries were responsible for the vast majority of violence. You hear the same numbers repeated: 60% of killings were committed by republican paramilitaries, 30% by loyalists and 10% by state security forces. Over half of the people killed were civilians. More than 250 were children under the age of 18.

Brandon Lewis, who was the U.K.’s top official in Northern Ireland until his resignation in July, has doubled down on this, claiming that “the vast majority of those state-related killings were lawful.”

The breakdown has significant political weight. It has been used to undermine the argument that the British fought a dirty war in Northern Ireland and to bolster the narrative that investigations into state killings are rewriting history in favor of republican paramilitaries by creating the illusion that security officers in uniform were responsible for violent acts to the same degree as groups like the IRA.

Being a policeman or a soldier in Northern Ireland was a dangerous job. I spoke with veterans who were blown up in car bombs and lost limbs or were ambushed and shot, narrowly escaping with their lives. I met one man now in his 80s who drove a school bus and served part-time in the Ulster Defense Regiment, which was part of the British army. He had to be followed by a police car on his bus route because of threats on his life. One day, a bomb under his seat went off. He and the students all survived, but his son later committed suicide due to the trauma.

In all, 1,441 members of the British armed forces, including 197 serving UDR soldiers, were killed during Operation Banner, the deployment that lasted from 1969 to 2007. Another 319 members of the RUC were also killed. Many still live with the scars, either physical or psychological.

But there is a growing body of evidence that there was collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the police ombudsman, the watchdog body tasked with investigating police killings, has found that RUC officers protected members of loyalist paramilitaries and turned a blind eye as those groups armed themselves with weapons later used in sectarian killings.

In 2001, the RUC was dissolved and replaced with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Many of the former officers or soldiers I spoke to see the investigations into members of security forces as a witch hunt coming decades after they risked their lives to keep the peace.

“All the legacy structures are either being designed or are being subverted for the purpose of introducing a false narrative to demonize the police and the security structures and the work that they did,” said Chris Albiston, a former chief constable of the Ulster police.

Albiston is particularly enraged by allegations of widespread collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. Together with his colleagues at the Northern Ireland Retired Police Association, a welfare and lobbying group for former officers, they are using the courts to curtail the power of the ombudsman to release reports concluding collusion occurred.

The police didn’t talk to any witnesses of Paul Whitter’s murder. On April 15, 1981, the 15-year-old boy was walking past a bakery when he was shot in the head by a plastic bullet fired out the window of a tank by the Ulster police in the city that most Protestants call Londonderry and Catholics call Derry. He died 10 days later.

I met his mother, Helen Whitters, exactly 41 years later, around the corner from where he was shot.

“I’ve never spoken to an RUC man. They have never spoken to me, ever, ever, ever,” she said of the government police.

Only once did an officer come to the Whitters’ house.

"They had a black bag with Paul’s clothes, bloodied clothes, and they handed them in and that was it. That was it. Nothing. To this day,” Mrs. Whitters told me.

Paul Whitter’s family is still waiting for answers. The records on his death were sealed until 2059. When the family tried to request them, they were sealed for an additional three decades. The British government released partial files on Paul Whitters’ murder in June, but the rest remain sealed until 2084 — over 100 years after Paul died. Everyone who knew the boy will be gone before the information his mother wants becomes public.

People who are opposed to investigations into crimes that happened during the Troubles sometimes accuse victims of trying to rewrite history. But for decades, the truth was unattainable for many families. Large parts of history were never written.

During the Troubles, there was a system in place to ensure killings by security forces were not investigated. Crimes committed by the army were not handled by the police. Instead the Royal Military Police did an internal review.

Investigations into atrocities committed by paramilitaries were dangerous and difficult. Violent groups were adept at picking up shells and covering their tracks. Authorities risked their lives to go through paramilitary-controlled neighborhoods to examine the scene.

Overall, the rate of investigations and prosecutions during the conflict was dismally low. Only four soldiers were convicted during the Troubles. Even now, only six have been charged.

Investigations that did occur were often heavily flawed. Take, for example, the Widgery Report into Bloody Sunday when British paratroopers opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry on January 30, 1972. Conducted in the immediate aftermath, the report found that soldiers were fired upon first. This was later proven to be false by a public inquiry released in 2010 that took 12 years to complete and cost £195 million, roughly $280 million.

Things only started to change in 2010 when Northern Ireland began to build a judicial system that was not governed by the British one. As Northern Ireland’s first director of public prosecutions that was truly independent from England, Barra McGrory has had a front seat to the decades-delayed effort to write those chapters into history books.

“​​Specifically these British army shootings were never really scrutinized. The odd one was. But by and large, they were never properly investigated. And then all of a sudden, there was a focus on them. And files started to come in,” McGrory said.

Still, the system was overly complex and under-resourced. At the current rate, it will take investigators 20 years to get through the cases in the queue.

For some, transparency would go a long way. As Paul Whitter’s mother told me, “a wee bit of honesty on their part would help, wouldn’t it.”

Eugene Reavey was on his way to the hospital to pick up the bodies of his brothers, John Michael and Brian, on January 5, 1976, the day after their murder at the family’s home.

“And I was coming up that hill. There was a fellow waving his arms frantically,” Eugene told me as we retraced his steps one morning this May.

“I put the window down and he says, ‘Come on up here, quick. There's been an awful slaughter.’”

Eugene got out of his car and started walking up the hill when he saw it. At first, he thought there had been an accident and a neighbor’s cows were lying on the street. “There was steam rising out of these bodies, you know,” he said. “It was raining.”

It’s as if Eugene can see the bloodied street in his mind’s eye as he described “the smell of death” to me. “It haunts me to this day. And such carnage.”

Almost immediately, the accusations started flying. None of the Reaveys were involved in any paramilitary. But police told people the IRA shot the Reavey brothers because they wouldn’t go along with a plot to kill security forces. Or that Eugene was responsible for the murders at Kingsmill.

“It was the next morning. ‘Eugene Reavey was in the IRA.’ Eugene Reavey was never in the IRA in his fucking life. Or had anything to do with them. And that’s the sort of shit and nonsense that they were coming out with. So we had to put up with that every time they stopped us at a checkpoint,” Eugene told me over breakfast, sipping the second cup of coffee that had gone cold as we talked.

Northern Ireland’s failure to address its contested history has left room for what some historians call permissible lies. In the absence of truth, people fill in their own narratives.

For Eugene, things got worse. For four days after his brothers’ death, police stopped him driving to work, pulled him out of his car and down into a field where they held him on his knees in the river at gunpoint.

“And the water was up to there,” he said, pointing to his chin. “And the big guy takes out a gun and puts it to my head and he says, ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ I say, ‘I don’t fucking know, you needn’t be asking me.’ ‘Who shot the people at Kingsmill?’ And that went on five times.”

The rumor that Eugene Reavey was responsible for the Kingsmill killings in which his murdered brothers’ friends, the Protestant brothers Walter and Reggie Chapman perished, persisted for decades.

Twenty-five years later, he was driving home from work when he heard on the radio that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, the Protestant political party, was going to reveal the killers at Kingsmill on the floor of the House of Commons. Eugene didn’t think much of it until he learned that Paisley had named him as the mastermind of the attack.

“I nearly died. And my wife, god help her, she was nuts.”

Eugene spent years trying to clear his name. It was later proved, after a lengthy legal battle and an investigation by the Historical Equires Team at the Police Service of Northern Ireland, that Eugene Reavey had nothing to do with the murders at Kingsmill.

But the damage had been done.

“People I had known for years just turned their back, walked away. Neighbors wouldn't speak to me,” Eugene said.

“Because no matter where you went. See that man, that's the man that shot the people at Kingsmill. That went on for years and years and years.”

The area along the Shankill Road in North Belfast, just a few blocks from a peace wall gate that closes at 6pm, is unmistakably Protestant. You don’t have to look hard before you spot the red hand of Ulster, red poppies, the Union Jack.

On one corner, behind a black metal gate, there’s a memorial that has a very different tone from the others that dot the city. It’s not about tradition, history or the bravery of those who fought on one side or another. It’s just angry.

On the walls, there are photos of young children with the captions like “murdered by Sinn Fein/IRA for being Protestant,” or “Sinn Fein/IRA’s slaughter of the innocents.”

Violent images of carnage caused by bombings are intermixed with photos of IRA members who are now in government. I can’t pull my eyes away from one block of photos of terror attacks in Paris in November 2015 and an IRA bombing in London: “IRA — Sinn Fein — ISIS no difference,” reads the caption.

The monument is graphic, inflammatory. But it’s only one symbol of the embers of the Troubles that are still burning today.

In Derry, there are indications of the same anger coming from the opposite side. In one mural, two men wearing balaclavas point machine guns. If you stand directly in front of the wall, one of the guns is pointed straight at you. “Unfinished revolution” is written across the top in block letters. Around the city, there are symbols of modern-day paramilitaries, like a sign for the fringe republican group Saoradh with the slogan “salute the men and women of violence.”

These memorials represent the margins. The vast majority in Northern Ireland support the Good Friday Agreement and do not want a return to violence. But these symbols contribute to an ever present uneasiness in the air, a fear that peace is tenuous.

Failing to grapple with the past has kept this anger alive.

“It's still raw. Every fifth person you stop on that road will know somebody who died, possibly a relative. And that still hurts people,” said Danny Morrison, a former republican political prisoner and former Sinn Fein director of publicity.

“We are, in a sense, captives of the dead.”

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Many Poles wrestle with 80 years of myths about the legacy of Nazi occupation, believing the country’s “good name” has been betrayed by hostile historians

While the conservative government promotes Polish virtue during World War II and sidelines Jewish victims, some Poles want to see Poland finally reckon with the realities of its 20th century history

Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust

For years Olympic slalom canoeist Dariusz Popiela, 36, trained on the Dunajec river in southern Poland. During his twenties, he paddled every day on a churning stretch between two bridges in his hometown of Nowy Sacz. He never thought that this place so familiar to him would become the source of what can be called his memory rebellion. Popiela has always been fascinated by history. He grew up quizzing his grandfather about his childhood memories of life in Nazi-occupied Poland.

But there was an enormous chapter that his grandfather had ripped out of his mental storybook of recollections: the nearly 12,000 Jews who lived in Nowy Sacz before 1939 — about a third of the town’s pre-war population. They had disappeared from the town’s memory. Absent from lessons at school, it wasn’t until Popiela began his own research that he learned about the scale of Jewish life in Nowy Sacz and in Poland. With a thousand years of Jewish history, the country was home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of the United States at the start of World War II.

Popiela was floored when he read the details of how Jewish residents from his town were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp. Many spent their final night in Nowy Sacz huddled on the riverbank exactly between the two bridges where he had paddled in his canoe so often.

“They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds,” Popiela said when we stood by the riverbank this past May. Running through some of the most picturesque scenery in southern Poland, the Dunajec river flows through steep gorges, pine forests and fields of tall grass growing right up to its fast-moving waterline. Popiela pointed to families cycling by and couples walking along the river path. “Half of the city disappeared and you have no memory,” Popiela said, shrugging his shoulders. “How is that possible?”

Since his discovery, Popiela has led dozens of commemorations to Jewish life across Poland through his foundation “People, Not Numbers.” Popiela is part of a new generation of Polish citizens, historians, writers and educators pushing for a more honest confrontation with Poland’s 20th century history.

For decades, Polish-Jewish history was kept in what scholars call “the communist freezer.” Around three million Polish Jews were murdered by the Nazis. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Polish communist authorities tolerated much discussion of the genocide. When they did — such as during an anti-semitic purge of the party in 1968 — it was to blame Jews for not showing enough gratitude towards ethnic Poles who tried to save them.

After the fall of communism, some of that silence was broken. More recently, the country’s ruling right-wing government has been consolidating a nationalistic narrative about the past that emphasizes pride over what they say are a politics of shame. It has been effective. Recent surveys show Polish people believe that more than half of Poles directly helped or hid Jews in their homes during Nazi occupation, an absurd overestimate. Those like Popiela who work to commemorate Jewish victims are accused of promoting what’s been coined by the government as a “pedagogy of shame.” The term is used as a political slur by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and members of the party he leads, the ruling Law and Justice party. It has come to mean a liberal historical agenda that exaggerates dark facets of Polish history.

At the center of these competing historical narratives is Poland’s ministry of memory — called the National Institute of Remembrance, IPN in Polish, which was created in the early 2000s to deal with the country’s communist legacy, manage the historic archives of the secret police and prosecute crimes committed under communism. Today the Institute also largely deals with the legacy of Nazi occupation and is charged with defending the country’s “good name.” The IPN was at the center of international fury in 2018 when the government passed a “Holocaust law,” known as the "IPN law" within Poland, making it a criminal offense to “defame” the Polish nation by claiming Polish people had responsibility for Nazi crimes.

The IPN is one of Poland’s most powerful institutions, with its budget making it the largest institute of historical research in the country, eclipsing university history departments and independent research institutes. A one-of-a-kind bureaucratic creation, it is the country’s most prolific publisher of historical texts, a prosecutor’s office, a production house of historical films and games, and a major authority shaping what students across the country are taught about history in school. The Institute of Remembrance’s budget has nearly doubled under the Law and Justice Party, which has been in power since 2015. Today it has an annual budget of 430 million PLN ($105 million), a staff of about 2,000 and 11 regional branch offices.

With its leadership appointed by parliament, the Institute is controversial in an already highly polarized political environment. There is demand from a number of leading historians for the Institute to be dismantled or reformed. Far more widespread opposition comes in the form of local level initiatives like Popiela’s that are trying to change memory culture in Poland.

A memory rebellion

When Popiela learned about the deportation site on the banks of the Dunajec, just steps away from the beautifully preserved town square in Nowy Sacz, his first feeling was in fact shame.

Each new detail that emerged felt personal: the dam further up the Dunajec river was built by forced Jewish labor, he discovered; and he later found slabs of 17th century matzevot, or Jewish gravestones, used in the construction of town infrastructure, their Hebrew script just barely still legible off the curb of a busy roadside.

“But the shame was something that gave me power,” said Popiela. “It gave me rebellion and the power to do something.”

For the past ten years, Popiela has devoted the time he has outside of his sport to commemoration work. With just a handful of members, his foundation, People, Not Numbers, has researched archives and interviewed older residents to identify the name, surname and age of Jewish victims across rural Poland. They’ve installed 10 monuments and discovered 10 mass Jewish grave sites. Volunteers maintain a number of Jewish cemeteries that were abandoned. Popiela self-publishes what he calls — with a wink — his “underground” monthly newspaper about Jewish history in Nowy Sacz. He leaves out stacks at local coffee shops and in the town hall.

When we meet in May, Popiela is about to break ground on his most recent project: a memorial park in Nowy Sacz located within what had been the town’s Jewish ghetto along with the installation of a plaque along the Dunajec river bank at the site of the former camp. All of the efforts are crowdfunded by Popiela. I asked him, why is he — an Olympic canoeist about to compete in the European Championships — doing this in a country that’s created an entire state bureaucracy to deal with historical remembrance.

“They are caring about other stories,” he said. I push him to elaborate and he gives an example. A few years ago the foundation tried to team up on the commemoration of a Jewish family of eight, murdered in 1944 after being turned over to the Gestapo by their neighbor. The Institute’s local branch said the memorial plaque must say that this family was killed by the Nazis. Popiela refused.

“Do you put the name of the murderer of your family on their grave?” asked Popiela. It’s the same demand he’s just recently received in an open letter from several local, patriotic organizations in opposition to his plan for building a monument to Jews killed in Nowy Sacz. “They don’t have the point of view of the victims. The most important part for them is the sign that the Germans made the Holocaust.”

“It is vital that such a description and the narrative of the events of German occupation in Nowy Sącz includes an unambiguous identification of the perpetrators of the crime, so that it does not allow for false and inconsistent interpretations.

These expectations are not exaggerated and unfounded, as we, Poles, have been facing attempts to shift the responsibility for German crimes onto the Polish people. Such attempts are particularly disgusting and unjust, taking into account our tragic war and occupation experience in the period of 1939-1945.”

Poland has long tried to police language around the Holocaust. When former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Polish death camps” in 2012, the White House was compelled to apologize. Right-wing lawmakers made several attempts to introduce a three-year prison sentence for using the term.

A widely shared perception among Poles is that the rest of the world underappreciates Polish suffering during Nazi occupation. “They have this obsession that starts when people say that Polish people are responsible for the Holocaust. Now the narrative of the IPN is that nearly all Polish people had a Jew hidden in their basement,” said Popiela. “They are saying that we were all heroes. But from the archives, it doesn’t look so nice.”

I took a ride with Popiela over to the neighboring town of Grybow where in 2019 he and his team of volunteers had installed a memorial in a Jewish cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. Abandoned for 80 years, the cemetery was a fenced-in jungle. Today, it’s a peaceful, wooded plot with several informative plaques displaying photographs of victims installed by the foundation. The centerpiece is a large granite monument of a splintered matzevah, with slabs on either side listing the name and ages of the nearly 2,000 Jewish victims killed in Grybow during the occupation, nearly a third were children under the age of 13.

Further uphill, Popiela crouches down and starts pulling the weeds coming up over a mass grave site they had discovered using a drone and geo-radar. He tells me about some of the online hate he gets for his work, people accusing him of working for George Soros or telling him he’d be better off spending his time cleaning up Catholic cemeteries. When seeking funding, he’s often told to find some “rich Jew” to pay for the memorial. 

We drive back down the hill from the cemetery to town and pass the local Grybow church. It’s Sunday afternoon and the red brick church is packed, with dozens of people crowding at the doors and even standing in the square outside. Just a few steps away from the towering basilica stands Grybow’s Jewish synagogue, abandoned and with its windows knocked out. There are no Jewish people in Grybow. Across from the synagogue an artist has recently painted a large mural in sepia tones. The mural is based off of a 1922 photograph showing three generations of Grybow’s lost Jewish residents.

The Ghosts are coming back

“We are the main enemies of the Institute of National Remembrance,” said Agnieszka Haska, a cultural anthropologist at the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw. It’s one of the first things she tells me when we meet.

Much of Haska’s work focuses on questions of collaboration and Jewish escape from occupied Poland and she says the IPN has put her publications and other writings from the center constantly under the microscope. The institutes’ team of fact checkers flags perceived mistakes, sometimes even a footnote, and publishes lengthy rebuttals. The vice president of the IPN told me it’s part of an “ongoing academic debate.” Called traitors on public TV channels, Haska said “it feels much more like an ongoing war.”

It can also get petty. Haska says she’s called the IPN numerous times asking them to stop their regular deliveries of the latest IPN volumes of historical research to the Holocaust Research Center’s office. The institute’s historians are prolific, publishing up to 300 titles a year. The publications flood national bookstores and are subsidized, making it even harder for non-IPN authors to sell their titles. “They are trolling us!” Haska said.

Some of Haska’s recent writing looks at Polish antisemitic science fiction, a popular genre during the 19th century. Writers could pass off their anti-Jewish texts as “fantasy” books to get by the Russian empire’s censors. Haska is focusing on one novel written by Tadeusz Hollender in 1938 called “Poland Without Jews.” Largely lost to history, Hollender’s fantasy fiction was meant as a critique of Polish antisemitism. In Hollender’s satire, the Jews of Poland finally decide they’ve had enough. Families across the country pack up their belongings and begin a long journey to a new land, settling on Madagascar. Suddenly, Christian Poles find that they have no more Jewish neighbors, no one to beat up or to blame for their misfortunes. It turns out that life in Poland without Jews isn’t what they had hoped. So the characters in Hollender’s fiction summon a delegation that sets off for Madagascar and begs their Jewish compatriots to return back home with the words, “We don’t know who we are without you.”

Just a few years after Hollender’s book was published in 1938, the German army retreated from Poland. The Jews had been almost entirely exterminated. Close to 90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. About 20% of Poland’s total population died of war-related causes, including author Tadeusz Hollender who was shot by the Gestapo in 1943 for his role in the Polish underground. After the war, many of the Jews who managed to survive emigrated to Israel or the U.S. 

Writing about the Second World War in Poland, the country’s most well-known historian Jan Gross quoted a Holocaust-era memoir: “This was a war which no one quite survived.” Nearly six million Poles perished during the six years of Nazi occupation. Gross gives some numbers to describe the utter devastation of Polish urban life: nearly a third of all urban residents missing following the war, 40% of Polish doctors killed, 30% of university professors and Catholic clergy and 55% of lawyers dead by the end of the war. Soviet occupation brought its own brutality, with the massacre of 22,000 military officers and Polish elite by the Soviet Army in 1940 in Katyn and campaigns of terror waged across the country by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. 

To this day, many in Poland remain bitter, believing they had been sold out to the Soviet Union by the West at the end of the war, condemned to 50 years of communist authoritarianism. “Eighty years on, the Second World War still dictates our present,” said Haska. “It’s really scary if you think about it, but the world really ended on the first of September 1939.”

Haska then tells me about one of her first trips to Israel years ago. She remembers her shock, and shame, when people across the country immediately recognized the name of her hometown of Ciechanow in northwest Poland, population 43,000. She got a history lesson from the Israelis she met about how the town used to be nearly half Jewish and about Roza Robota, one of the four women who led an uprising in Auschwitz in September 1944. She was from Ciechanow.

“Everybody knew where Chiechanow was and everybody knew her name,” Haska remembers. “I grew up 50 meters from a Jewish cemetery in Ciechanow and I had no idea.”

The only trace of Robota’s life in Ciechanow is a street named after her, stretching for three blocks on the outskirts of town. Three short blocks that reflect the preference for certain historical narratives by the Law and Justice party and the IPN. Jewish victims of the Holocaust are commemorated as a backdrop for a sweeping story of Catholic Polish heroism and resistance. Little to no space is allowed for one of the cruelest truths of 20th century authoritarianism: People became complicit in their own subjugation.

This truth is one of the opening observations in Jan Gross’s book “Neighbors,” which rocked Poland on publication in 2000 and is still highly controversial today. The book details the previously unstudied July 1941 massacre of Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. During the pogrom, Gross writes that German involvement was limited to standing by and taking photographs. In the early 2000s, the newly created IPN confirmed that it was the Polish residents who killed their neighbors. A year after the book was published, at a ceremony in Jedwabne, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski publicly begged for forgiveness.

More recently there’s been backlash. There is an ongoing campaign to exhume the bodies of the Jewish victims in order to prove that they were killed by German soldiers, and not their neighbors. Commenting about Jedwabne and the Kielce massacre, led by Polish residents in 1946 in a northern town after the war, the country’s minister of education refused in a 2016 interview to acknowledge that Polish people were responsible, saying that this “has been misunderstood many times.”

Overnight in Jedwabne, an entire town learned that their grandparents either took part, or stood by, in the brutal massacre of Jews, many of whom were burned alive. There are a number of historians studying historical backlash in Poland. Social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has looked at how people who have experienced historical trauma are more prone to believe in conspiracy theories as an adaption to the trauma, and how educational programs about the Holocaust have in some cases caused symptoms of PTSD in Polish participants or fueled disbelief and a rejection of the facts.

During our meeting in Warsaw, Haska told me a story about her aunt who a few years ago got a knock on the door of her home, a beautiful villa built in the 1930s. The woman at the door was German and she had come to see if her old family home was still standing. She had grown up there as a little girl when the territory was part of Germany. In January 1945, the family fled as the Soviet Army advanced across Poland. The women spoke to each other in German. Haska’s aunt told the visitor how her two brothers were killed by the Gestapo in 1943. The German woman shared her memory of her little brother dying as the family escaped their home in the winter of 1945.

“Half of Poland is living in someone else’s home, not only Jewish but German too,” Haska said. “But the ghosts are coming back.”

Patriotic Blackmail

Across Poland, there’s a history museum boom. Over the past fifteen years, nearly a dozen new history museums have opened. In pre-covid years, museums in Poland — a country of 38 million — had 38 million visitors, topping ticket sales for the national soccer team. A number of these new museums have also ushered in scandals and embarrassing international headlines.

In 2020, the director of Warsaw’s renowned POLIN Museum, historian Dariusz Stola, was pushed out by the government. In 2017, the Minister of Culture replaced the director of Gdansk’s new World War II Museum with a more friendly candidate — historian Karol Nawrocki, who today serves as President of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hasn’t even opened yet but is already drawing accusations of politicizing history. Another museum, the Warsaw Uprising Museum which opened in 2004, found itself again in the media spotlight after unveiling a new “Room of the Young Insurgent” exhibition, filled with stuffed animals, crayons and the “inspirational” stories of young child combatants in WWII, along with a statue of a Polish child soldier holding an automatic weapon.

While the IPN is not tied to any of these museums, the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews is perhaps the best brick and mortar representation of the institute’s politics. Opened six years ago, the Museum was curated by the IPN’s current vice president, Mateusz Szpytma.

Polish President Andrzej Duda attended the opening ceremony of the museum — located two and a half hours outside Krakow in the village of Markowa, population 4,000.

"The world does not know the reality that prevailed in Poland during the years of occupation, and it is this ignorance that hurts the good name of our country," read a statement from Polish parliament on the opening of the Markowa museum.

In photos from the opening day, Duda is lit up by some of the courtyard’s thousands of glowing plaques, each carrying the name of a Polish citizen murdered for helping Jews during the war. Many of them have received Israel’s esteemed designation of the Righteous Among Nations given to people who undertook extraordinary risks to help Jewish people during the war. Poland has the largest number of Righteous internationally: over 7,000 Polish citizens, many of whom were killed for their actions.

The museum tells the story of the Ulma Family who sheltered eight Jews in Markowa during German occupation. After being denounced, the entire Ulma family along with the Goldman, Didner and Grunfeld families were shot to death, seventeen people including children and an unborn child.

Walking through the courtyard to the museum entrance, visitors first see a large illuminated photograph of the Ulma family, taken by the family’s father, Jozef Ulma. Ulma was by all accounts a renaissance man who took dozens of photos of his family with his camera, a rare and prized possession in a Polish village in the 1930s.

The exhibition, housed in a minimalist, modern metal and glass structure, features many photos he took of his family, neighbors and surrounding landscape, some still stained in the family’s blood. The Ulma Family Museum highlights the cruelty of the war, that 20% of Markowa’s Jews survived the war in hiding — an unusually high survival number — and the intense pressure villagers faced to collaborate and inform.

“I would like every visitor to this museum, among others, to know the drama that befell the Jewish people during World War II,” said the IPN’s Vice President Mateusz Szpytma who was the first historian to lead the investigation into the Ulma story. He estimates that tens of thousands of Jews survived in Poland thanks to help from non-Jews. “I would like them to know that even in the most difficult moments of totalitarianism there is the possibility of helping people in need. It is up to us individually how we behave, whether we stand with traitors, whether we are heroes, whether we risk our lives for other people.”

Outdoors there’s a large memorial grave to the family with a Polish coat of arms, a cross and on the ground, a fresh bouquet of red roses. Nine urns with the remains of the Ulma family are displayed. The Jewish victims who were hiding at the Ulma family home are buried elsewhere, in a military cemetary about 15 miles away. Golda Grunfeld, Lea Didner and her child as well as five men by the name of Goldman are not listed. They are memorialized collectively with some of the three hundred nameless Jewish Poles murdered during the war and buried there.

Some of Poland’s most prominent historians, Jan Grabowski, Agnieszka Haska at the Holocaust Research Center among others, have been vocal critics of the framing of the exhibition. The Ulma Museum in some ways is an important break with the past. For decades in Poland, people given the Righteous designation hid it from their neighbors and family members out of fear of stigmatization and persecution. Honoring them on a national level has been long overdue, but critics say this is being done at the expense of the Jewish people they saved who are reduced to vehicles for Polish heroism.

“As a Polish citizen, a Polish researcher, I’m totally into commemorating these rare exceptions of noble Poles who were brave enough to somehow oppose this wartime reality. But at the same time these biographies are being used as a kind of patriotic blackmail,” said Maria Kobielska, who co-founded the Center for Research on Remembrance Culture at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She has been researching new history museums and has written about the Ulma Museum.

“The general message is that this was the typical attitude of Polish people, to act as Jozef and Wictoria Ulma. If you oppose this narrative and this museum you somehow oppose the memory of the Ulmas,” Kobielska said. “These people are used as an alibi for anyone who is Polish.”

Maria Babinska at the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University has been running social psychology surveys over five years. “We asked people to imagine — since the specific historical percentages are not known and will never be known — their estimate of how many Poles collaborated with Germans and the percentage who were indifferent,” said Babinska.

The study showed that Polish people believe that close to 60% of Poles selflessly helped Jews during World War II, but also believe that 25% of Poles collaborated with Nazis.

The results were highly polarized, a split based on which political party respondents voted for but also by factors such as expressing antisemitic views or supporting the IPN Holocaust law. 

I asked the IPN’s vice president Mateusz Szpytma what he made of these numbers: "I don’t think Poland is an exception here, people misperceive history,” said Szpytma. “It’s important to show history as it was, what you have to be proud of and the things that were bad, you have to be ashamed of them. These two sides are strongly present in our work at the Institute of National Remembrance.”

Babinska attributes the results of her research to basic human psychology: members of a community often overestimate the morality of their group. 

Morality, identity, being part of an ingroup have all been powerful themes in the Law and Justice party’s electoral campaigns. Campaign slogans and speeches reinforce the country’s Catholic and Polish identity, patriotic resistance to Nazi occupation and communism.

“Memory policy is a substitute for ideology that legitimizes the party,” says Dariusz Stola, the deposed director of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum and a historian at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Since 2015, the Law and Justice party has crafted an official party “strategy” for its historical policy with President Duda saying that “conducting historical policy is one of the most important activities of the president.”

People’s history

Maciej Sanigorski and Jeremi Galdamez are guarding a different kind of memory that is even more unpopular in the country than Jewish-Polish history — the history of Polish communism. Since 2017, the IPN has reinvergerated the country’s decommunization efforts of the 1990s, changing street names and removing over 200 monuments across Poland which “symbolize or propagate” totalitarianism. It’s the most public-facing work of the IPN, with the Institute’s current president holding video press conferences as workers drill and demolish monuments behind him in the shot.

Sanigorski, who works in transport for the Polish post office, and Galdamez, who writes for a history magazine and whose father was a member of Chile’s communist youth and fled political persecution for Poland in the 70s, are both left-wing organizers in Warsaw and have led a campaign to preserve the memory of Polish volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Poland had the second largest group of international volunteers fighting in Spain against Franco’s fascists.

So far, their biggest victory was gathering over a thousand signatures necessary to oppose an IPN order to change a street name in Warsaw named after the Polish brigade. It was a considerable undertaking in a post-communist country where anything related to socialism remains toxic. 

Sanigorski and Galdamez took me past the sites where some of Warsaw’s communist monuments have disappeared overnight. Along with holding discussions about historical policies, they organize an annual memorial service for Poland’s fighters in a military cemetery in Warsaw, with delegations from Spain, Germany and Italy joining this year.

“I always say if I lived in communist times I would fight for the memory of the anti-communist resistance because you have to fight for the things that are being thrown away from history,” said Sanigorski.

Valentin Behr, a political scientist at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, says the group is one of dozens of grassroots initiatives in opposition to the decommunization of public space and demonstrates that sometimes national memory politics can end up backfiring.

“It’s a way to produce a counter narrative to the official narrative and to show that there is another Poland that is not conservative, not fascist, which is progressive and that is forgotten most of the time in collective memory.”

Both Sanigorski and Galdamez object to the historical policies of the IPN — which they call an Orwellian ministry of truth, enforcing memory politics down to street names in small towns all across the country. However, both said it would be complicated to do away with it completely. Nearly everyone I asked had a different take on what to do with the IPN. While there’s no indication of the Institute going anywhere under the current government, there is an ongoing debate on how it could be reformed, or even dismantled if the opposition regains the majority.

Guardians of Memory

Adam Musial, a high school history teacher in Krakow for 22 years, quit his job in 2019 after finding it increasingly difficult to teach the Holocaust. “The general atmosphere in Poland surrounding memory simply reinforced my decision,” he said.

As part of a research grant he has been interviewing about 20 teachers across the country. They tell him it’s become more difficult for them to work. “The atmosphere is stifling,” he said.

He offered an example of a teacher who had tried to bring a Jewish Holocaust survivor to the school. During a faculty meeting, another teacher suggested that if they go ahead with the visit it would be best to bring in more than one speaker to offer students different perspectives on the subject. “So what, I should invite a Nazi?” the teacher quipped, eventually dropping the idea altogether.

For the past year, lawmakers have debated a new Polish law that would make it even harder for teachers to bring in outside speakers or participate in extracurricular programming. Right-wing politicians have rallied against “moral corruption” in schools — largely code for sex education — and pushed through a law that would make teachers seek written permission to bring in any outside speaker or organizations that aren’t on a selective, pre-approved government list. Along with sex education, this would shut down the majority of in-school Holocaust education activity. However, after passing through the Polish parliament, the law was vetoed by President Duda who asked lawmakers to ”postpone it,” citing the ongoing war in Ukraine. It appears the law would complicate integrating the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugee students into Poland’s schools.

But the year of uncertainty has already left a mark: Poland’s largest and oldest non-profit organization dedicated to Jewish-Polish communication has been restructuring their programming, orienting away from schools to be more resilient to politics. Since 1998, the Forum for Dialogue has brought Holocaust survivors and educators to nearly 10,000 students in 400 schools across Poland, focusing on programming in small towns and villages that once had a Jewish community. A core part of the program — known as the School of Dialogue — has students at partner schools lead independent research on their community’s Jewish history, which culminates in a student-led public walking tour for local residents.

Now, the Forum is leaning into their other programs such as directly educating teachers and growing their existing network of over a hundred local historical activists across Poland. The Forum calls them “guardians of memory” — Dariusz Popiela from Nowy Sacz is one of them.

Backfire

Back in Nowy Sacz, Popiela tells me about how he got lunch with his grandfather a few years ago. Popiela had already started his commemoration work at that point and they were discussing a project. At one point he noticed tears in his grandfather’s eyes. For the first time he told Popiela about a memory he had as a young boy. The town’s ghetto had been liquidated and the walls separating the ghetto from the rest of the town had come down. 

His grandfather told him how he walked through the empty ghetto streets and then saw a few boys his age hiding in one of the buildings. Books, some even with gold Hebrew lettering, were scattered across the pavement. He told Popiela how stupid he felt that his family and others had gathered and burned the books because they had nothing left to make a fire with. And then he started to cry.

While his grandfather and father both support the ruling party, he says they’ve come around to his work and today the entire family pulls together on the commemoration efforts including Popiela’s young children.

Popiela says he will move out of town when his daughter turns 18 if there’s still no monument dedicated to the Holocaust in Nowy Sacz. When we met in May, he was still waiting on authorization to start building the memorial. The day before, he had been cheering on his 11-year-old daughter in her first canoeing competition down on the riverbank between the two bridges where he plans to build the second part of his commemoration. 

In the weeks since, construction was greenlit. There’s an opening ceremony planned for mid-August.

[CORRECTION 08/02/2023 10:00 AM EDT]: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed former President Barack Obama's statement about "Polish death camps" to a 2012 visit to Warsaw. The comments were made in Washington, D.C. in 2012 at a ceremony posthumously honoring Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.]

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Fury and grief for Spaniards in fight to remove Franco’s murdered victims from the Valley of the Fallen

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The post Poland’s ministry of memory spins the Holocaust appeared first on Coda Story.

Spain

The Valley of the Fallen holds the remains of more than 33,000 soldiers from both sides of the Spanish Civil War

Spain

Today, family members are fighting to exhume the remains of Franco’s victims buried together with the dictator

Spain

While fascist groups oppose any changes to the mass grave

Spain

The Valley of the Fallen is at the center of Spain’s ongoing national reckoning with its past

Battling History

Fury and grief for Spaniards in fight to remove Franco’s murdered victims from the Valley of the Fallen

On the 46th anniversary of the death of Francisco Franco, I boarded a bus with an assortment of representatives from Spain’s fringe far right. In their pockets, they had Spanish flags emblazoned with the symbol of Francoism, the eagle, now a banned image in Spain’s public places. They intended to pray for “El Caudillo” — “the supreme leader” — in a special Mass to commemorate his death.

It was a gray and chilly late November day and we were headed for the Valley of the Fallen, an enormous basilica — technically larger than St. Peter’s in Rome, though part of it was left unconsecrated so as not to compete with the Vatican — hewn out of a rock face 2,000 feet above Madrid. Its 500-foot stone crucifix marks one of the largest mass graves in the world. 

The Valley of the Fallen is an unavoidable totem of the fascist dictator who overthrew Spain’s republic during the Spanish civil war and ruled over the country for more than three decades. And it is a gauge by which memorializing and forgetting that brutal period of Spanish history is measured. 

And it is where, after decades of deferment, Spain’s national reckoning with its own history is convulsing. “We don’t have things settled. You can feel it in your family, you can feel it in your school, you can feel it everywhere,” said the Mallorcan artist Toni Amengual. He had exhibited a series of photos documenting the Valley of the Fallen in an exhibition called “Flowers for Franco” at Palma’s Museum of Contemporary Art this summer. “If you don’t want to fight, you don’t talk about Spanish history,” he said.

The bus began wending our way out of Madrid, shrouded in mist. Fascist civil war songs blasted over the coach speakers. 

We passed the 160-foot triumphal Arch of Victory, built by Franco to commemorate the 1936 Battle of the Ciudad University, one of the most prolonged and bloody battles of the Spanish Civil War. After a stretch on the highway, the coach drove by a cordon of Guardia Civil police officers and finally passed through the Valley of the Fallen gates, beneath another double-breasted eagle, wrought into the iron.

The Valley of the Fallen holds more than 33,000 bodies within its eight crypts, civil war dead from both sides. The graves are unmarked except for Jose Primo de Rivera, the leader of the fascist Falange party. Until 2019, there was one other marked grave at the altar of the basilica: the resting place of Franco himself. 

Built in the full fervor of Francoism in the 1940s and 50s, the Valley of the Fallen is a symbol of how Spain has negotiated its history of dictatorship, fascism and civil war. Built by Republican prisoners under slave labor conditions, the enormous, silent grave buried beneath the surface bears no explanation anywhere to describe what happened, who lies there, and why. In his exhibition catalog, Amengual, the Mallorcan artist, described the Valley as “a perfect metaphor for how all that part of Spanish history has been hidden.”

Until the 2000s, many families did not know they had relatives buried in the basilica. Every year, more people find out their family members are entombed there.

Now, a clash is underway. On one side are relatives of those buried in the grave, nominally backed by the political party of Pedro Sanchez, who has been Spain’s prime minister since 2018. For these Spaniards, remembering their relatives with dignity means finding, confirming by DNA testing, and reinterring their relatives’ remains –in a grave of their choice.

They are opposed by activists on the right, who believe the fight to disinter the bodies is a propaganda tool to distort the past for political ends. They’re backed by the Benedictine monks who live in the adjacent Abbey of the Holy Cross, who claim the exhumations are not only impossible but an affront to God’s will. And, like those on the bus, they believe the legacy of Franco should not only be remembered, but prayed for.

After the memorial Mass, the busload of Francoists assembled on the steps of the basilica’s enormous esplanade to take their annual photo. Looking out into the mist, several dozen of them do the fascist salute in unison.

Since Franco’s death in 1975, many Spanish families have lived under a code of silence — a code enshrined in an amnesty law called the “pact of forgetting.” Passed by politicians across the ideological spectrum, it prohibited any formal investigation into crimes against humanity during the civil war or under the ensuing regime. The aim was to help the country move on.

The law’s enforced forgetting has become, over the years, a way of life. The pact was intended as a means to “reconciliation” — and that’s a word that’s still used today by those who believe the darker side of Spain’s past should be left right there: in the past, and its implications forgotten and forgiven. 

In recent years, forgetting and forgiving have been reconsidered. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the socialist prime minister of Spain from 2004 to 2011, tried to usher in legislation called the “Historical Memory Law” to formally recognize the victims of the Civil War and the Franco regime. When Pedro Sánchez came to power in 2018, he took up the cause of the memory laws and in 2020, approved a draft bill of a new “democratic memory law” to address Franco’s legacy. The bill called for history lessons to teach high school students about the dictatorship, the removal of Francoist symbols from around the country, and the exhumation and creation of a DNA database of the civil war’s victims — including those buried in the Valley of the Fallen. 

Silvia Navarro’s great uncle is buried in the Valley of the Fallen. She has been fighting to get him identified and removed for more than a decade. "In Spanish society, we are accused of reopening wounds. But those wounds have never been closed,” she told me, over coffee in her Madrid apartment. “They have always been there and continue to be there.”

Navarro, 51, a chief flight attendant, grew up in Germany, where symbols of fascism are illegal. She never understood why there was such a huge monument to Franco in Spain. Beyond that, she said, “I had not confronted myself with the issue of the Valley of the Fallen.” 

That is, until she discovered her great uncle was buried there. José Antonio Marco Viedma was kidnapped from his family home and shot by a fascist mob in 1936 in the town of Calatayud. For years, Navarro’s family believed him to be buried in the town’s mass grave, though they weren’t sure exactly where. But the introduction of the Memory Law in 2007 opened the way for them to begin looking, giving them a grant to begin archeological work on the grave. The following year, a local historian told her that they were half a century too late. Viedma’s body, along with the remains of the others buried there had been moved in 1959 — to the Valley of the Fallen.

“We never knew that those remains had been transferred, nor did we give our consent,” Navarro said. From that moment, her life changed: she began a campaign lasting over a decade to find her great uncle, and to get him out. 

“I didn’t expect to discover how divided and polarized society is,” she said. She thinks about the mass grave every single day. “It feels like bashing my head against a wall.” 

Navarro leads a group of 16 families, all hoping to retrieve their relatives’ remains from the Valley of the Fallen. In total, there are around 100 families calling for the same thing. 

She has visited the Valley of the Fallen many times during her search for her great uncle. She describes the stone reliefs on the esplanade outside the basilica, each depicting a perched eagle, the symbol of Francoism and of other Fascist movements across Europe, including Nazism. “They say this is a place of reconciliation. I don’t see reconciliation anywhere. You go in, you walk in and see two avenging angels with swords. That’s not very peaceful either. When Franco was buried there, there were so many masses held in his honor. But he was the mastermind behind the deaths of thousands of people in this country. There were always fresh flowers on his grave. But we’re not allowed to bring flowers for our relatives.”

In October 2019, sixteen months into Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s tenure, Franco’s remains were exhumed from the Valley of the Fallen. Sánchez’s party had campaigned for this for years, arguing it stop it from becoming a pilgrimage site for the far-right, and reframe it as a place where Spaniards could come to be educated, learn, and remember. And a place where a dictator would not lie next to his victims. 

The exhumation is still a fresh memory in Madrid — it happened six months before the pandemic first hit the city. The prior of the Basilica, Santiago Cantera, blessed the coffin as it was lifted out of its tomb. Franco’s relatives carried it out of the basilica’s altar and loaded it onto a helicopter where it was flown to Mingorrubio-El Pardo municipal cemetery, north of Madrid. For Navarro, the ease and speed at which the dictator’s body was removed was painful; the fight to exhume her own relatives had taken so long, and had been so fruitless. 

Franco supporters hated the removal of the dictator’s body. The Francisco Franco Foundation expressed the most virulence. “They are trying to erase the whole history of Spain from ’36 to ’75,” said former general Juan Chicharro, the foundation’s president. His 2,000 members, he said, are angry and mobilized. 

I met Chicharro at the headquarters of the Francisco Franco Foundation in Madrid.The walls around us were adorned with multiple portraits of Franco, old street signs, and busts of the Caudillo. “We have a whole basement full of street signs,” he told me as we toured his office.

Chicharro argued that the current government is using the specter of Franco to distract the public from today’s issues, such as unemployment, national debt and a floundering economy. “Spain has very serious problems at the moment. And they’re talking about Franco. Franco died fifty years ago,” he said from behind his desk, as two large portraits of the general stared down on us. I pointed out the portraits. “Yes, that is because we’re in the Francisco Franco Foundation,” he said. “But you must leave history to the historians. You can’t really look at the past from today’s point of view. For example, shooting someone dead today — it’s horrible. But forty years ago — it was normal.”

Along with the monks of the basilica and others who are opposed to the exhumations, Chicharro also has a practical argument against removing family’s bodies from the Valley of the Fallen. “It’s completely impossible. And they know that. After eighty years the bodies are starting to mix together.”

Those who are fighting against the families’ campaign to get their relatives out of the Valley argue it is a dignified, beautiful resting place for their loved ones. Yet they also claim, like Chicharro, that exhumations would be impossible, because of the poor state of the crypts and the boxes within.

Navarro described how the monks, who live in the Valley, talk about the bodies entombed there. “They speak in these terrible, mystical terms, about the fusion of the bodies and souls of our relatives with the Valley of the Fallen. It's just so humiliating,” she said. 

I heard these ideas expressed — often in the same breath — over and over again from the Franco supporters on the bus to the Valley of the Fallen and during the celebratory lunch afterwards. The lunch was at Una Grande Libre, a restaurant with its walls entirely covered by Franco portraits and fascist paraphernalia. It is owned by Xianwei Chen, an immigrant from Qingtian, China, who moved to Spain in 1999 and began to learn about Franco. His restaurant, which he began devoting to the dictator in 2013, is a favorite hangout for Spain’s far-right. “I have three children, and named one of my sons Franco. I want him to grow up to be important like Franco, and for Spain to return to his former glory,” Chen told me. “I know what it is to live under communism. It’s the worst regime in the world.” 

On the anniversary of Franco’s death, the restaurant was packed with patrons, eating ensaladilla rusa, grilled pork and jamon, and singing Francoist anthems, doing the salute and chanting:

The Franco regime began its vast project to bring bodies buried across the country to the Valley of the Fallen in the 1950s. It meant they had to disinter the mass graves that were littered all over Spain. The undertaking was so comprehensive that graves from as far afield as the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, were dug up and shipped back to Spain. Of the estimated 33,000 people buried there, around 18,000 graves are thought to be that of Republican fighters — those who battled against Franco and Fascism in the Civil War.

María de los Ángeles Méndez Sandamil, 70, always thought her uncle, José Luis Sandamil Penas, who died in 1939 in the Battle of Brunete during the defense of Madrid, was buried in a site just outside the capital, in the town of Collado Villalba. But she didn’t know for sure and decided when she retired to spend her time finding out what had happened to his remains. When she visited the town and its cemetery, she found nothing. “Nobody knew anything.” 

Eventually, she found a lead: an old man, who ran a grocery store in the town, remembered something. “He told us that when he was little, he saw bodies being taken out of the grave and being loaded onto a truck. He said to us “surely your uncle is in the Valley of the Fallen.” 

Méndez Sandamil went back to the city hall, this time with Navarro, who has been helping families look for their relatives. Only when Navarro posed as a student doing research did city hall give them the documentation showing that in May 1961, her uncle had been dug up and taken to the Valley of the Fallen.

Fausto Canales, 87, can remember fragments of the Spanish Civil War. “I remember the sound of bombs,” he said. “I remember planes passing over; explosions. Yes, I have memories of it.” He was five years old when he first became conscious that he didn’t have a father.

His father, Valerico Canales Jorge, was shot and killed in August 1936, when Canales was two. After decades of searching, Canales found out that his father’s body had been dumped in a well, before being removed and taken to the Valley of the Fallen in the spring of 1959. Canales now knows exactly where he lies in the building. He showed me a photograph, taken in 1959, of the boxes from all over Spain being loaded into one of the basilica’s crypts. On the side of one box, is the name of the place where his father’s remains were disinterred. “I don’t want him in there for another minute,” he said.

At the Madrid apartment of artist and filmmaker Manuel Correa, I watched as he navigated through a 3-D model of the Valley’s crypts. The real crypts are sealed off to the public, and the monks of the basilica guard them rigorously. Exploring the crypts virtually is the closest we can get to going inside. 

Correa works in conjunction with Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of Goldsmiths, in London, that uses architectural techniques to investigate state violence and human rights violations around the world. 

I had imagined a great, terrible pit — a mass of bones. What Correa shows me is more organized: a five-story crypt, with staircases linking each floor, and stone rooms where the boxes are stored. There are eight of these crypts, each leading off the chapel on either side of the basilica. “So it’s not underground, then?” I ask — before remembering that the Valley of the Fallen’s entire basilica is all underground, hacked out from a rock face. What the model also doesn’t convey is scale. Each of its enormous crypts contains thousands of bodies. 

Exhumations, Correa explained, are complicated, but not impossible. He described how while crypts the lower levels, where conditions are more damp, are thought to be in bad condition, but that higher up, the boxes are intact, and though exhumations wouldn’t be simple, they were practicable. 

Along with a team of forensics and a small group of families, Navarro herself has been down to the crypts in 2010 and 2019. On the first trip, the forensics teams cut a window into the wall of one of the lower crypts. The families were greeted with a grisly sight. 

“What did you see?” I asked. 

“Boxes. Broken boxes. Bones coming out of the boxes. Human remains mixed in with the boxes.”

She showed me photos of that first visit. A dark space, in which bones were spilling out of flimsy, half-decomposed plywood boxes. 

The sight of those bones brought home for Navarro the enormous difficulties involved in trying to get a single person’s remains out of a sixty-year-old mass grave containing 33,000 skeletons. When they returned in 2019, the forensic team opened a window onto one of the higher levels, where the families were relieved to see the boxes there were intact. “Nothing is impossible,” Navarro said. She described the bigger obstacle she is battling: “lack of political will.”

Several days before the 2021 anniversary of Franco’s death, a Madrid court blocked the process of the exhumations from beginning, thereby suspending an agreement reached in June by the government to start accessing the tomb. 

“The truth is, we have learned to expect little or nothing,” said Navarro. 

Long after wars, atrocities and terrorist attacks, DNA testing of human remains has been crucial in helping find closure and justice for families after their relatives were killed – and helping countries collectively come to terms with what happened: In Argentina, DNA testing has been rolled out in an effort to identify some 30,000 disappeared victims of the country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and 80s. In the United States, 9/11 victims are still being identified from the remains recovered from the wreckage at ground zero. Identifying the DNA of victims of Bosnia’s genocide was a key part of the investigations into its perpetrators.

But while countries have embraced DNA testing of bodies as a national project to help victims’ families, in Spain the process has been fraught with stalling and sustained opposition. 

That opposition may be able to run out the clock. Many of the relatives pushing for a dignified transfer of bodies out of the Valley of the Fallen are in their twilight years. 

Méndez Sandamil, the woman who is spending her retirement looking for her great uncle’s remains, still keeps hair and blood from her late mother, in the hope that one day, it might be used to identify her uncle. 

When I met Canales, his elder brother, and last living relative to remember his father, was gravely ill in hospital. When I asked him last week how his brother was doing, Canales told me: “we buried him last Sunday.”

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The post Fury and grief for Spaniards in fight to remove Franco’s murdered victims from the Valley of the Fallen appeared first on Coda Story.

My former colleagues are in prison. For many months my friends and I have found it difficult to get any attention from world media. Now something has happened that caught the attention of the biggest news agencies — but I wonder how long it will last. Is there any way to hold the attention? I feel like we’re all hostages here — and it’s scary. Now everything, any crime, has become possible here.”

I received this message from a friend in Belarus this summer, a couple of days after the nation’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko used a MiG fighter jet to ground an international commercial flight as it crossed "his" airspace and hauled off a Belarusian journalist and his girlfriend who had been living in supposed safety in Lithuania. A few days later the captured journalist, Roman Protasevich, appeared on state-run TV with visible marks of torture and confessed to treachery in scenes reminiscent of Stalinist show trials.

There was some outrage in what we like to call the international community; the words "hijacking" and even "terrorist act" were used. And then, as my friend feared, all was forgotten. Lukashenko faced mild consequences, such as a ban on the Belarus state airline flying into Europe. His message to anyone who dared to oppose him was more potent: I can do what I want to you, anywhere you might be.

I struggled to answer my friend’s plea. For a single event to be remembered it needs to be sustained by a bigger story that it flows into. Anyone who has played a memory game will know that you remember discrete things by putting them into a sequence where they take on significance as part of a larger whole. Likewise in media and politics, one scene only has power as part of a larger narrative.

But Lukashenko’s outrageous crimes haven’t clicked into a greater chain of meaning. And it’s not just Belarus. From Burma to Syria, Yemen to Sri Lanka, we have more evidence than ever of crimes against humanity — of torture, chemical attacks, barrel bombings, rape, repression, and arbitrary detention. But the evidence struggles to compel attention, let alone consequences. We have more opportunities to publish; we aren’t limited by geography; our audience is potentially global. Yet most revelations or investigations fail to resonate. Why?  

A connected narrative breaks apart

The collapse of the Soviet Union should have spurred introspection and encouraged us to exclude no one from the greater story of human rights against political repression. And, for a moment in the 1990s, this seemed possible. As the wave of democratization overturned both pro-Soviet and pro-American dictatorships across the world; as the International Criminal Court was set up in The Hague in 1998; as humanitarian interventions were waged successfully from the western Balkans to East Africa, it seemed that justice would be meted out more equitably. 

But then something different happened. Instead of letting more characters into the human rights story, the whole story collapsed. A situation where some victims got more attention than others was replaced by a situation where no victims got any sustained attention. The horrors of World War II had compelled the world to adopt the UN Declaration of Human Rights, at least in principle, and the post-Cold War catastrophes in Srebrenica and Rwanda had encouraged humanitarian interventions and created a momentum towards a “right to protect.”

In previous crimes against humanity, ignorance was always an excuse. From Auschwitz to Srebrenica to Rwanda, leaders could claim that they were either unaware of the facts, the facts were equivocal, or that events unfolded too quickly for them to act. But now we have access to omniscient media that often brings us abundant and instantaneous evidence — yet it means less than ever before. The tableau of crimes remains a mess of broken images.

This felt different in the Cold War. Then there seemed a connection between the arrest of one, single Soviet dissident and a larger geopolitical, institutional, moral, cultural, and historical struggle. Media, books, and movies of that time told the stories of discrete political prisoners and human rights abuses as part of a larger, joined-up tale in the great battle of freedom versus dictatorship, a battle for the soul of history. And the whole story made the public in democracies feel better about themselves, was part of an identity: we are on the side of freedom versus tyranny. There were institutions that supported this narrative and identity. Political prisoners would feel less vulnerable when information about their arrest was announced on the BBC or Radio Free Europe, taken up by Amnesty International, announced at the UN, raised by U.S. presidents in bilateral summits with Soviet leadership.

Together all these elements sustained attention. And when the West’s own sins were revealed, such as the CIA’s program of Cold War covert assassinations and coups in the 1970s, it meant there was an existing framework through which to capture the attention and outrage of the Western public.

There was what one might call a "grand narrative" that informed and enveloped everything from the behavior of states to literature and art to how people understood themselves. It was bound up with enlightenment ideals of "progress" and "liberation," where facts and evidence were something to be respected, confirmed or refuted by rational argument or verifiable evidence. Even the Soviet regime was locked into a language and worldview where rights – the rights of colonized peoples and the economically oppressed primarily — could at least matter theoretically. They even signed human rights pledges, which allowed Soviet dissidents to demand the Kremlin’s leaders "obey their own laws."

In this contest of grand ideas, with each side proclaiming its ideals as superior, space was opened for dissidents to demand that the powers live up to the ideals; in the periphery, these ideals were invoked to demand support by liberation movements, colonized by one camp or the other.

The grand narratives, of course, had their problems. They often privileged victims of rival ideologies while leaving continent-sized blind spots. Priests murdered in Poland by the Communists would get more attention in Western media than priests killed by U.S. allies in El Salvador. The Red Army crushing rebellions in Budapest and Prague was covered with infinitely more intensity than the crushing of British anti-colonial rebellions in Kenya.

Yet, “the checks written out in 1945 to the most vulnerable people in the world —marked 'international humanitarian law' — are bouncing” says David Miliband, the former British foreign minister and present head of the International Rescue Committee. We have entered what he calls the Age of Impunity: “A time when militaries, militias, and mercenaries in conflicts around the world believe they can get away with anything, and because they can get away with anything, they do everything.”

The collapse came partly from within. The language of rights and freedoms was hollowed out by leaders who misused it, leaving husks empty of meaning. The Soviet regime shredded the language of economic justice and equality — so that even today the mere mention of the term "socialist" is anathema to many in the former Communist bloc. In the West the lofty language of freedom and tyranny was deployed in the service of unprovoked wars and was sullied by war’s inevitable consequences. In 2003, President George W Bush had deliberately connected the battles of the Cold War with his vision for the Middle East ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq promising that “democracy will succeed” and “freedom can be the future of every nation.” Instead, the invasion brought civil war and hundreds of thousands of deaths; it enhanced Iran’s power and turned Syria into the fulcrum of a new authoritarian axis. Among people in rich democracies, it engendered cynicism, souring them on their own self-identity. Words imbued with powerful meaning in East Berlin and Prague lost their purpose in Baghdad. Images did too.

Along with this rot from inside was the attack from outside. The great leitmotif of contemporary Russian and now Chinese propaganda is that the desire for freedom and the fight for rights leads not to prosperity but to misery and bloodshed. Russian propaganda channels like to splice shots of people-powered revolutions in Syria or Ukraine together with images of the ensuing conflicts in those countries, as if the war was the inevitable product of revolts, rather than the response by dictatorships to crush them. Unlike democracy — the not-so-subtle message goes — dictatorship is strong and stable.

From grand narrative to a cohesive story

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was shared by two journalists: Maria Ressa, the editor of Rappler, in the Philippines, and Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, from Russia. And if we look at their work closely, we see something interesting emerging.

Maria Ressa’s plight could have been utterly esoteric to the world. She is a journalist under attack from the Philippine government for criticizing the extrajudicial murders committed under President Rodrigo Duterte. Journalists are attacked every day across the world, and in the Philippines are regularly killed without drawing much attention overseas. Even the mass killings Maria (who serves on Coda Story’s board of directors) reported on, with thousands killed by pro-government gangs, rarely merit a global headline. Yet Maria’s story held attention. How?

When she dug into what was happening to her, Maria saw that there was something in the form of Duterte’s attacks, his use of troll armies and cyber militias to intimidate, besmirch, and break his opponents, that was both new and universal. He was not merely imposing censorship, he was overloading social media with noise, so the truth was blotted out, distorting reality. Maria made the issue not just about the Philippines but also about Facebook, the harms of social media, the lawlessness of digital disinformation. Her campaign, and the way she told her story, led not just to the Presidential Palace in Manila, but also to Silicon Valley, to every election distorted by online manipulation, to every conflict fueled through digital hate campaigns, to every woman or minority bullied or harassed on social media, to any parent worried about what’s happening to their kids online. Her story became vital for any lawmaker and civil servant thinking about how to regulate this new frontier. It updated how we think about freedom of expression in the digital dimension, forcing tech companies to at least admit that inauthentic coordinated campaigns were not legitimate speech but a form of censorship. One real person saying one unpleasant thing is fine. But when a handful of trolls pretend to be thousands of non-existent people saying the same thing, that is something different.

And Maria’s research joined up countries that had never been put into the same sequence. No one has ever thought about Russia and the Philippines together. Their dissidents don’t meet. They were on different sides in the Cold War. But now these two capitals of online manipulation became part of one coherent story. Maria looked to investigations by Russian journalists to understand what was going on in her own country, began to see Russia and the Philippines as one frontline of digital authoritarianism.

And Russia was one of the birth places of another seemingly local issue that became a global narrative. When Russian activists and journalists first tried to tell the world, in the early Putin era, about how their regime was based on stealing money from state assets and laundering it in Western countries, most shrugged. Who cares? It might be bad for Russia, but it made London and New York richer, and the Kremlin weaker. It took a decade of slow, painful arguments and evidence-gathering to show that corruption in Russia and Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East was not just a local tragedy. It affected us too. It was also a way to infiltrate and undermine democracies, compromise our foreign policy, suborn politicians, fund far-right politics. It created an elite that used the influence and leverage to start wars and get away with it, because Western countries were now dependent on the corrupt investments. It was creating a world where the global rich were living with another set of rules, free of domestic justice anywhere, and that, in turn, was fueling the inequality and anger that undermined people’s faith in democratic institutions. And the enemy was not just in the Kremlin, but also among the middlemen and money launderers in respectable offices in New York and London.

It was a challenge to show that the tragedy of a hospital in northern Russia, pillaged by bureaucrats buying property in London, was also something that people in the Pentagon should care about. Today corruption (or to be more precise kleptocracy and money laundering) has become a central security agenda for the new U.S. administration. But it took years of work to unearth the links that lie buried beneath the noise of news and the narcissistic gaze of social media, and to make something seemingly tangential a story that runs through all our lives. 

So that is the task: to unearth the interconnecting tendrils of issues, intertwining roots of problems that crisscross the world more intensely than ever, and whose larger significance is yet to be discovered. Before, the grand narrative of democracy used to pass over us, like a plane that you could board from a platform called "human rights." Now we work with shovels. Prodding on a mound that seems just an anomaly in one corner of the garden, but upon excavating and pulling, its rhizomes lead us to the garden next door. This is a new mission for journalism. To work out why an issue in Manila is also about Silicon Valley and about Moscow and about you. To find the sudden intersection between countries no one ever thought about as part of a single map before. Because these new lines are there, they don’t need to be created — they need to be unearthed. And then one discrete event can have meaning for many, one newspaper article can resonate across borders. New publics, who never even thought of each other as having anything in common, can be brought together. And this new journalism needs to do more than just draw new lines and connect new audiences — it needs to dig out the contours of the discussion which offers the solution to the issues it unearths, offering its audiences a chance to transform from passive players to participants in the formulation of a future.

For though the old story of "waves of democratization," of easily defined and relatable "declarations of human rights" has faded, people still risk their lives and livelihood to protest and fight for….well, for what? We have had, in recent years, seen more protests across the world as at any time for decades. From Hong Kong to Tbilisi, Sudan to Chile. And, of course, Belarus. Belarus which was always dismissed as happy with its degenerate dictator, satisfied with the compromise between stability and rule of a single man. And then suddenly, impossibly, the whole country rose up. Not just urban liberals but pensioners and factory workers. 

But unlike in 1989, we don’t think of all these protests across the world together. Don’t see them as part of one inevitable, coherent History. The rights they demand are very different. The regimes they fight against don’t necessarily abide by old distinctions between democracies and dictatorships. And yet something still itches away at people. Some sort of underlying urge, a need that can’t be satisfied. What connects all these different movements? What will we find in our process of excavation? Maybe, lurking underneath is something coherent, all the tendrils leading to a whole, something alive, huge, all-remembering, global, terrible — preparing to give the epic troves of evidence, the terabytes of data recording crimes against humanity and abuse, a purpose, and a meaning.

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