First-Hand Reflections

by Liz Sevcenko Liz Sevcenko is vice president of interpretation at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and secretary general of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. She and her colleagues from the coalition, Donald Parenzee of the District Six Museum, Sara Zaker of the Liberation War Museum, presented tactics they have used at the Symposium. She sent this report on outcomes from the Symposium. The District Six Museum, Liberation War Museum, and the Coalition Secretariat were featured in a session training leaders from diverse regions -- including Turkey, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa - on how to activate places of memory as centers for dialogue on contemporary human rights and democracy issues. Participants were extremely inspired by the session, both to develop their own projects and to sign up as members of the coalition.

Project I: A national network of sites of conscience in Turkey

A group of five activists from far-flung regions of Turkey, who stated they did not have many opportunities to collaborate on human rights issues, developed an idea for a national network of sites of conscience in their country. In Ankara, there is an old factory that could house a museum of Turkish political history, focusing on human rights issues. The factory encapsulates histories of labor, as well as environmental issues. We could use recordings from the radio from different events in Turkish history describing human rights issues, overlaid with oral histories of people who experienced those events. The factory could serve as the central museum, but we could also have satellite museums in different cities using different important sites. For instance, there is a prison that was a center for torture, as well as a courthouse that raises issues about justice. In developing these sites, we would work with local populations in each town, asking for contributions of stories and artifacts, as well as their feelings about what the museum should look like. All the satellite sites would be linked together in a network with the central museum, and we would create traveling exhibits that went from one site to the other. In this way we would be creating a national conversation about human rights in Turkey.

Project II: Mapping sites of torture in the Philippines

A representative of an organization working with torture victims and survivors in the Philippines developed an idea for making a memory project an important instrument for recovery and healing. She had already planned to map centers of torture, but had imagined it as a data-gathering project that she would conduct alone or with one additional staff member. Inspired by the District Six example, she decided to

• make the mapping project an ongoing, community-developed project in which she would take a map from place to place, or invite people to come to a central place, and ask people to contribute their stories of sites of torture to the map. The process of identifying sites and contributing stories about them would form part of the healing process and would build a supportive community of victims.
• locate the map of the larger region and its torture centers in a single site that evokes the broader conflict (just as the District Six Museum located its map of the entire neighborhood in a single building from that neighborhood). There was a "safe house" where victims were buried that would serve as a perfect central site.
• Reimagine what "recovery" means: in traditional human rights terms, recovery means human remains. When human rights workers are doing "recovery," they should include the recovery of memories, stories, and places as well.

Potential New Members

We were able to sign up several new members during the symposium. These included:

• Kenya National Human Rights Commission: A planned Museum of Shame in abandoned torture cells, as well as sites related to freedom fighters in the 1950s.
• University of Sarajevo Human Rights Centre: for a proposed "silent museum" of the Bosnian conflict.
• Sabanci University (Turkey): for the proposed national network of historic sites associated with human rights issues.
• Peace Advocates for Truth, Justice, and Healing (Philippines): for the mapping project of sites of torture, and the preservation of the "safe house."