{"id":184,"date":"2016-09-19T13:55:48","date_gmt":"2016-09-19T11:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/?page_id=184"},"modified":"2017-03-20T10:54:56","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T09:54:56","slug":"wp-3","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/work-packages\/wp-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Mass Grave Exhumations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Work Package “Mass Grave Exhumations” examines heritage and memory practices and narratives in recent exhumations of mass graves of civilians killed during WWII and two 20th Century intra-state conflicts, both before and after WWII. For WWII (1939-1945), the case study is Poland; for the intra-state conflicts, Spain (1936-1939), and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995). This work package draws on the growing scholarly debate in social anthropology, the archaeology of conflict, forensic science, history, memory studies and media\/cultural studies about the meaning of the exhumation of unmarked graves related to mass violence and genocide in the contemporary world (Crossland 2013, Ferr\u00e1ndiz 2013 and 2014, Ferr\u00e1ndiz and Robben 2015, Luckhurst 2015, Wagner 2007). It also interrogates its function as an increasingly important, if problematic and controversial, tool for the pursuit of human rights and the entitlement to reparations in post-conflict situations, in terms of transitional justice. In turn, they may also often operate to deepen fractures between memory communities and agents. In all cases, such mass graves are unsettling heritage, as defined in UNREST.
\nThis proposal is innovative in investigating contemporary mass grave exhumations as particularly troubling, delicate, dynamic and contradictory memoryscapes (Phillips and Reyes 2011), with a potential to promote both antagonistic and agonistic modes of remembering. Also, the increasing prevalence of exhumations and the corporeal epistemology they elicit \u2013the transnational consolidation of dead bodies as \u2018the site and surface of essential but otherwise obscured social truths\u2019 (Klinenberg 2002)\u2014 may question the continuing influence of cosmopolitan memory frames rooted in the Holocaust. As exhumations expose the violent past in a blunt, material and initially unmediated way, they are a privileged ground to test UNREST hypotheses, in deep contrast but analytical cross-fertilization with the highly elaborated and institutionalised museums under study in work package “War Museums”<\/a>.
\nAlthough the three cases selected hold some similarities (contemporary exhumations and reburials as a tool for truth and more or less limited forms of reparation for war crimes), UNREST will mostly explore the different ways in which they elicit agonistic, cosmopolitan and agonistic memory frames within Europe. They do so in direct connection to the nature of the killings in each case, as well as to the conditions in which they take place: international judicial umbrella in the Balkans (Wagner 2007), administrative subcontracting system in Spain (Ferr\u00e1ndiz 2013), and institutionalised memory politics in Poland.<\/p>\n

CASE STUDY 1: SPAIN. 21st Century exhumations in Spain mostly refer to rearguard repression by the Nationalist army during the Civil War (1936-1939). The number of civilians executed under Francisco Franco\u2019s orders during this period goes up to 150,000, according to recent historical research (Preston 2014). Contemporary diggings are different from the former Civil War exhumation cycles in the country in that (1) they take place in the context of the information age and have been exposed to widespread media attention both in traditional media and in the new digital social media; (2) they have been carried out by technical teams under the request of relatives and memorial grass-roots associations; (3) there has been a certain institutional coverage, including a 2007 Memory Act approved in the Parliament and over \u20ac20 million in governmental funding in the period 2006-2012; and (4) as part of a transnational drive to exhume past violence, also affecting other European countries, they have borrowed memory practices, styles and iconographies from an emerging global pool. In all, since 2000, around 300 exhumations of mass graves containing civilians have taken place, recovering a total of 6,000 bodies.
\nWhereas recent studies have attempted to trace some features of the cosmopolitan mode of remembering in the Spanish exhumation process (Baer and Sznaider 2015), this particular case has mostly given rise to both antagonistic and agonistic modes of remembering. While the controversy over the feasibility and opportunity of these exhumations has created considerable public scandal, the diggings have also opened new avenues for reflective, contextual and multi-perspectivist agonistic modes of interpreting and recycling them in the public sphere.<\/p>\n

CASE STUDY 2: POLAND. There is a long history of exhumations in Poland since WWII. The best known case is Katyn in 1943, representing the complex memory politics regarding the traumatic past in Central Europe. As to contemporary diggings in this same area, in 1991 some exhumations took place in Piatykhatky (near Charkiv, Ukraine) and Miednoye (near Tver-Kalinin, Russia), two of the many places where the victims of the Katyn massacre where shot and buried. Further exhumations in other killing sites followed. In 2001, still more diggings took place in Jedwabne, related to mass graves containing at least 340 Polish Jews killed by their Polish neighbours in a pogrom on 10th July 1941, only a few days after the German invasion. This exhumation ran into problems when Jewish Rabbis objected to the further manipulation of the buried bones by technical teams, which contradicted religious belief.
\nOther contemporary exhumations, carried out in many places in Poland, mostly relate to cases of Poles killed under German occupation and of members of the anti-communist resistance movement killed by the Polish militia, army or secret service in the years 1944-1953. Some of the exhumations \u2013if the victims concerned were Polish citizens- are carried out, with the consent of local authorities, on the territory of neighbouring countries. Exhumations are mostly conducted by state institutions: The Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (Rada Ochrony Pomnik\u00f3w Walki i M\u0119cze\u0144stwa) and The Institute for National Remembrance (Instytut Pami\u0119ci Narodowej, established in 1999). In May 2014 a special Council for the Project of the Search for Burial Places and Identification of Victims of Totalitarian Regimes (Rady Projektu Poszukiwa\u0144 Miejsc Poch\u00f3wku i Identyfikacji Ofiar Totalitaryzm\u00f3w) was established to supervise the process.<\/p>\n

CASE STUDY 3: BOSNIA. Bosnia and Herzegovina offers a rather different case, heavily tainted by its legal and forensic profile and a top-down approach, which has resulted in serious frictions with relatives and local populations (Nettlefield and Wagner 2014). In the Balkan war, Srebrenica was a UN \u2018safe area\u2019 hosting several thousand Bosnian Muslim refugees. In the summer of 1995, over eight thousand men and boys were executed there by members of the Bosnian Serb army. In an attempt at erasing the evidences of the killing, the mass graves were later partially dismantled by the Bosnian Serb army with big machinery and the remains partially reburied in secondary mass graves, scattered across eastern Bosnia.
\nThe opening of mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the recovery and identification of the missing started soon after the war and, due to the comingling of remains in primary and secondary mass graves, run into serious technical problems. With the support of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia and the International Commission of Missing Persons, an international DNA-based identification structure was set in place. Thus, as opposed to Spain, exhumations in Bosnia are dominated by the forensic search for criminal evidence and global justice, and the process of returning the bodies to relatives and communities faced with troubling questions about the integrity of the remains and \u2018how much body\u2019 was considered \u2018acceptable\u2019 by relatives to bury (Nettlefield and Wagner 2014). Thus, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, relatives have to face both the exposure of painful violence and the logic of forensic recovery and identification, and negotiate and reconcile the scientific practice with their religious beliefs and funerary practices derived from the Sharia law. The Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery, where an annual celebration takes place each 11th July, is the monumental expression of all these frictions amongst international law, forensic practice and religious belief, and will be one major research site.
\nIn these three different scenarios, UNREST will contribute new data to the testing of its main theoretical hypotheses on antagonistic, cosmopolitan and agonistic memory styles of remembering. The CSIC-based team is a world reference in the comparative analysis of contemporary exhumations in the world, as proven by the recent volume Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights<\/em> (U Pennsylvania Press, 2015), co-edited by the WP leader. The interdisciplinary team assembled in WP3 is composed of social anthropologists (Ferr\u00e1ndiz, Mart\u00edn), social historians (de Kerangat, Axboe), literary Critics (Hristova) and archaeologists (Jugo). As each of the case studies has different features and academic research traditions, the methodological strategies will be specifically designed. In the three cases, extensive literature review will be carried out and researchers on the ground will carry out a minimum of 5 semi-structured interviews with each of the following stakeholders: (a) victims\u2019 associations; (b) technical teams; (c) state institutions. Besides this, in CASE 1, ethnographic research on a minimum of three contemporary Spanish exhumations will be based on the ongoing fifteen-year-old field research by the local UNREST partner, and will be carried out by two pre-doctoral students under contract with CSIC until 2018, writing dissertations on the topic (de Kerangat, Mart\u00edn). This methodology involves in-depth participant observation before, during, and after the exhumations, extensive video recording and photographing of all aspects of the process, and the systematic compilation of press and Internet impact. In Poland (CASE 2), where there has been much less empirical research conducted, equal on-site ethnographic fieldwork on a minimum of three exhumations will be carried out during one year by the CSIC-based postdoctoral researcher (Hristova) under the supervision of the WP leader and the advice of the Polish research team, which has links with archaeologists who participate in such unburials and will facilitate connections with the institutions involved and other local stakeholders. In Bosnia (CASE 3) UNREST research by both the CSIC-based postdoctoral researcher and the CSIC based Bosnia pre-doctoral student (Jugo) will rely on the extensive secondary sources focused on the well-studied case of Srebrenica, at least three contemporary exhumations, as well as the cooperation of experts participating in the CSIC-led research project on Spanish exhumations in comparative perspective (Wagner 2008 and Nettlefield and Wagner 2014) and Aarhus\u2019 Balkan expert Christian Axboe Nielsen. The ethnographic field research will focus on ongoing exhumations (Jugo) and the ceremonies around the Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial and Cemetery on 11th July (Hristova).<\/p>\n

See also: http:\/\/www.politicasdelamemoria.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Work Package “Mass Grave Exhumations” examines heritage and memory practices and narratives in recent exhumations of mass graves of civilians killed during WWII and two 20th Century intra-state conflicts, both before and after WWII. For WWII (1939-1945), the case study is Poland; for the intra-state conflicts, Spain (1936-1939), and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995). This work package draws … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":136,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/184"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/184\/revisions\/746"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.unrest.eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}