When An Authoritarian State Victimizes The Nation

When an Authoritarian State Victimizes the Nation: Transitional Justice, Collective
Memory, and Political Divides

Author(s): Jane L. Curry
Source: International Journal of Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 1, Aggressors, Victims, and
Trauma in Collective Memory (Spring, 2007), pp. 58-73
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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Internationaljournal of Sociology, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 58-73.
? 2007 m.e. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 0020-7659/2007 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/IJS0020-7659370104
Jane L. Curry
When an Authoritarian State

Victimizes the Nation
Transitional Justice, Collective Memory,
and Political Divides
abstract: In this article, the author uses the concept of "transitional justice"?
defined as the way societies or groups elect to deal with the past as they establish a
new system?to examine the manner in which political behavior in postauthoritarian
states both manifests and modifies aggressor-victim memory. Comparing the cases
of transition from authoritarianism to democracy in South Africa, El Salvador, and
Poland, she contrasts the positive outcomes of the open confrontation with "silent
memory" in South Africa with the failure of Poland and El Salvador, in different ways,
to deal conclusively and consistently with the past. In the case of Poland, the initial
silence turned the past into a political football that soured the citizenry on political
participation. In the case of El Salvador, the author posits that "boomerang justice"
stimulated by outside interests has split the population and alienated both sides from
effective political action. The article thereby advances an interpretation of political
behavior as a locus for collective memory in nation-states, with the conclusion for
postauthoritarian states that transitional justice can free political behavior from the
trappings of the past, but only if aggressors and victims confront one another and move
toward reconciliation.
In a state context, the relationship between victim and aggressor define authoritar
ian rule. No matter what the institutional change and how much turnover there is
Jane L. Curry is a professor of political science at Santa Clara University. She is the
editor of volumes including The Left Transformed (2003), Poland's Permanent Revolution
(1995), and Democracy, the Market, and the New Europe (2006). Address all correspondence
to: Jane L. Curry, Department of Political Science, Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino
Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053; e-mail: jcurry@scu.edu.
58
SPRING 2007 59
in leadership and control, these lines remain debilitating scars in fledgling demo
cratic systems working to transition out of authoritarianism. Indeed, whatever the
history of social and political repression, dealing with these scars?the collective
memory of aggressors and victims?is far more difficult for states in transition than
any aspect of institution building. How democratizing systems elect to deal with
remembrance, reconciliation, and revenge has proven critical to their transitions.
The mode of "transitional justice" adopted by a given system is the key determinant
of the degree to which collective memory does or does not exercise a stranglehold
over the community of citizens in a given nation-state. Collective memories, in
turn, define key group identifications and political cleavages; attempts at political
instrumentalization of memory are virtually endless. And, since the past cannot be
replayed, the persistence of such cleavages frustrates attempts to meld new social
groups and develop a rational political discourse that is both inclusive and based
on compromise.
"Transitional justice" and "memory" are not simple concepts. They are also not
areas of system transition that have been well studied. "Memory," in this context,
is not the same as the facts on which "history" as written by professional historians
is based. Instead, social "memories" reflect the following: "both the substance of
that memory (recall of specific historical events) as well as values associated with
their evocation (historical lessons and learning), which are modified, very often
by the vicissitudes of the present" (Aguilar 2002: 3).
Transitional justice, in turn, is not simply "justice" in the usual sense of settling
accounts and meting out punishment. Instead, it is the way societies or groups elect
to deal with the past as they establish a new system. The basic goals set out by
proponents of "transitional justice," in addition to the punishment of wrongdoers,
are as follows: (1) to "teach lessons" about the past; (2) to reassure the public that
the past will not be repeated; and (3) to remove those implicated in the abuses of
the old system from the new.
The options that societies have used to achieve these goals range from "draw
ing a thick line" (i.e., choosing not to deal with the past in any official fashion) to
actual trials of individuals responsible for abuses. Within that spectrum, in post
war transitions, "transitional justice" has been carried out in the following cases:
domestic and international trials of individuals guilty of carrying out abuses or of
ordering them; "lustration" proceedings of individuals who were in a given political
organization (such as the Nazi Party or the Communist Party) or state apparatus
(secret police and its agents); truth commissions in which an international or do
mestic group reviews the evidence and compiles a public record of what happened
during the period of abuse as well as who the abusers were (South Africa); and the
opening of historical institutes to research the period of repression, and, in most
cases, to handle the remaining records (such as Poland's Institute of National Re
membrance [IPN]). In many cases, societies and advocates either try a succession
of these methods, or they use more than one method simultaneously. The process
and the mechanisms teach very different lessons about the past, its potential to
60 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
return, and what lessons are to be learned from it. These lessons, like those of more
traditional "history" (as propagated not merely by professional historians but also
through popular history and the media), are both a reflection of and a determining
factor in the social positioning of different groups, the nature of the scars, and the
significance of the past.
Cases: South Africa, El Salvador, and Poland
The cases of South Africa, El Salvador, and Poland are particularly telling. In all
three states, the past remains the clear and unhealable scar that divides society.
Although the level of personal violence in the "past abuses" carried out by the
state differs significantly, there are strong similarities. All of these cases combined
government or bureaucratic oppression with individual arrests, punishment, or
surveillance, all done largely in secret. Moreover, although Poland's repression
never involved the violence against individuals that El Salvador and South Africa
experienced, the drama of the memories of martial law (1981-83) and the secretive
nature of the surveillance of individuals constitute an analogous case for comparison.
Whatever the mechanism of state aggression against politically repressed victims,
the workings of the government as well as who did what to whom, how, and for
what reason were not made public in the era of repression. This "secret past" has
made revelation and establishing "truth" the cornerstone of the transitional justice
process.
All three states had long-standing conflicts tied to control held by a small elite
over both material resources and political power. In each case, a popular move
ment emerged in opposition to the respective elite, with a national constituency
battling for access and equality. This battle was built on memories of earlier battles
for resources and power in which the victims and aggressors "remembered" being
involved as a society. These common practices of remembrance occur even though
the populations of all three countries are increasingly dominated by men and women
who were not born or politically aware when the repression occurred. For instance,
Polish youth access World War II and the communist past through collective memory
and reference that past to explain Poland's problems; similarly, in South Africa,
apartheid remains the dominant strain of collective consciousness.
In Poland, there was a long history of resistance to foreign occupation that
conflated the Nazi slaughter or loss of over a quarter of the Polish population and
Underground resistance to Nazi occupation with political opposition to commu
nism (Davies 2001). For instance, the Polish dissident Committee for Workers'
Defense (KOR) adapted World War II symbols and the "Flying University" title
for independently run clandestine education courses that had been used in World
War II by the Polish Underground. In addition, current commemorations of the
Warsaw Uprising make reference not only to the Nazi killings but also to the fact
that communists in postwar Poland did not allow any discussion of the Uprising
SPRING 2007 61
that might place it in a positive light (Bartoszewski 2004). In the Stalinist period,
the state apparatus jailed or even killed members of the Uprising "army." This
tradition of opposition and resistance resurfaced with the creation of the KOR in
1976 and the crystallization in 1980-81 of Solidarity, an independent trade union
whose growth was eventually brought to a halt when the state imposed martial
law and interned the leaders as well as many rank-and-file members of the union
(GartonAsh 2002).
The other cases suggest similar combinations of cyclical and sustained resistance
movements fueled by collective memory. In the El Salvadoran case, there was an
initial nonviolent movement in 1948. Throughout the 1970s, civil unrest resurfaced,
exploding in the 1980s, when 1-2 percent of the population was killed, largely
outside the major cities (LAPOP 2004; Sieder 2001). Meanwhile, in South Africa,
the African National Congress's fight against the apartheid government combined
both nonviolent and violent protest throughout the four decades of independent
statehood during which the Afrikaner minority controlled the rest of society. The
Afrikaners perceived their use of the state apparatus to systematize mechanisms
of social and political repression as legitimate in part because they themselves had
been victims in the British aggression represented by the Boer Wars (1880-81,
1899-1902). For Africans, a collective memory of tribal conflict and aggression
(from the Zulu to the Xhosa, ranging from small battles to enslavement of fellow
Africans) both problematized and made more universal the phenomenon of self
imposed victimology in South African society (for detailed examples, see Ranger,
Alexander, and McGregor 2000).
Beyond the historical conflation with earlier battles, these periods of social strife
and repression impacted more than one generation. Aggressors (those with power)
schooled victims (those without power) to live in an authoritarian system. There were
variations in the nature and extent of the repression over the decades of authoritarian
rule. And, near the end, there were clearly elements in the aggressor class that began an
active campaign to end their respective group's repression of society (insofar as such
an advocacy would not undermine their own privileged position).
In these cases, the underlying issue was unequal access to resources, both
ideological and material. The aggressors turned to violence, a nontransparent legal
framework, and surveillance of "enemies of the state" in order to preserve their
power over ideology and resources. The transition, in all these states, changed the
rules and leadership of politics but did not result in the kinds of gains and transfer
of real power that citizens (on both sides) expected. The "remembered" divisions
between aggressor and victim remain central in postauthoritarian societies even
when boundaries of real economic inequality begin to dissolve. At the same time,
although success in meeting popular demands wins legitimacy for new governments
and systems, its reception is usually colored by the past.
The battles that brought the transitions were asymmetrical and long term. All
three involved a core leadership of rulers who had at least the tacit support of
those in the class, ethnic, or political group that reaped benefits from systematized
repression of the rest of the society: the Polish communist rulers who promised
and provided social welfare; the Afrikaners who gained from Africans' and Asians'
exclusion from political and economic roles; and the El Salvadoran middle and
upper classes, who benefited from the junta's repression of peasants.
The end of the period of repression and social inaction in each of these cases
was not a categorical defeat of one side and victory of the other. Instead, in all
three, there were long roundtable negotiations in which leaders of both sides came
together and crafted new rules and structures for democratization. While the top
leadership changed, agreements and the political processes that were set in motion
did not replace bureaucrats at the middle and lower levels. In fact, former victims
feared that, if they challenged the "henchmen" and aggressors on their past actions
or their position in the new system, the rulers and their "henchmen" would halt the
transformation. As a result, the question of what would be done about past abuses
(if anything) remained intensely problematic. In these three cases, the initial deci
sion was a minimalist one: issues of the past were to be set aside and, instead, new
institutions were to be built. In most cases, this did not last.
Democracy and Transitional Justice
The roundtables and the institutions that they established did not result in the rep
lication of Western democracies (and popular behavior in those democracies), or
for that matter the immediate improvement in material and political conditions that
people expected. The accepted paradigm for democratization involved the estab
lishment of new institutions on the assumption that the population would instantly
use those institutions rationally to further its interests. What has become clear in
the two decades since these democratization processes actually began is that the
citizenship lessons of repression last far longer than the repression itself, passing
through collective memory from one generation to another even for postauthoritarian
generations. Democratic institutions do not work without active citizens who have
not only positive perceptions of democratization and democracy as a general concept
but also a sense that they will be heard in politics, that the rulers are controlled,
and that they are safe to participate in the electoral arena and in public discussion
and can trust their rulers (e.g., Gutmann and Thompson 1996).
For this to happen, clearly, the learned behaviors of authoritarian systems must
be changed. Individuals must unlearn their fear of speaking out and reject the
Manichean divisions promoted by authoritarian systems ("otherization" and "us"
vs. "them," see especially Arendt 1951), including the aggressor-victim division
itself. Social divisions in democratic, pluralistic societies need to be cross-cutting
and negotiable (see, e.g., Laski 1919). The public must have the sense that politics
and politicians are understandable and accountable to the rule of law. They must also
have a sense of their own autonomy, that they too share in the exercise of power.
SPRING 2007 63
Modes of Transitional Justice
Initially, all three states avoided dealing officially with the issues of the past. The past
was the territory of the media and of increasingly open and spontaneous individual
discussions. The security forces and their files remained essentially untouched.
All, though, ultimately turned back and dealt with the past, confronting collective
memory with the documentation of the formerly repressive apparatus. The ways in
which they did this clearly had a significant influence on the new democratic political
culture of each nation-state. Key variations appear not to have been whether or not
institutional change and transitional justice happened simultaneously or whether
individuals were actually removed and replaced. Instead, the factors that appear to
have been significant were (1) affording the public a sense of an acceptable level
of "knowledge" about the past and (2) assuring that the repression would not be
repeated.
Because the cases are multidimensional, a lack of commensurable data limits
our ability to draw direct conclusions as to what determined what. What is crucial,
however, is that all sides were represented in the process and that the process em
phasized individual responsibility and repentance to victims as well as recognition
by the majority of the society that abuses happened and should never happen again.
Victors' justice done either domestically or internationally allows for a denial or
shifting of blame from individuals to the system (Ricoeur 2004). It also allows
for individuals who benefited or tolerated the system to deflect responsibility. The
process needs to be terminal, not one in which transitional justice boomerangs and
groups and politicians periodically reproblematize collective memory and seek
"justice" in new ways. Without a stable relationship between past and present,
memory and representation, new patterns cannot be set, and no comprehensive
framework can be implemented that will safeguard the political interests of all
social groups. It is important, therefore, that those involved have the sense, when
transitional justice is completed, that the issue will not return. Without such a sense
of closure, individuals do not get the sense that they now know the "truth" (Ricoeur
2004; see also Derrida 1999). After all, if there are constant changes in what is
done and the issue is periodically reopened, politicians can return to the past as a
metaphor or element in present politics and people assume that the "truth" of each
process is distorted. These cases show that the transitional justice process needs
to be inclusive, conclusive, and "ours."
South Africa
The South African case fits this "best option" model. Deferring transitional justice
was built into the negotiations (Waldmeir 1997). Both sides agreed that, for those
who were invested in the old system, it was necessary to defer the process until the
new system had proved that it could and would work for all. In addition to assuring
the Afrikaner population that they would not be ousted materially or politically,
the focus of the African National Congress (ANC) was on personal agency for the
former victims. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
began operating only after there had been free and fair elections, a transitional
system put into place, and an inclusive preparation of a permanent constitution.
Both sides were thus involved in the construction of democracy, and risks were
taken only after people had the experience of the new system holding.
Individuals were called to testify about what they had endured or done, why,
and with whom. This was public testimony. The victims were honored, the perpe
trators treated with careful attention to the "rule of law." No group was allowed to
take responsibility by paying reparations. Collective memory and present justice
were maintained on a level playing field as the responsibility of the entire society,
including both aggressors and victims (Meiring 1999; Orr 2000).
The entire Truth and Reconciliation Commission was both domestic and inclusive
of all groups in society. The commission included no foreign arbiters. No domestic
group was excluded from the commission: there were commissioners deliberately
nominated even from the remaining pro-apartheid parties, from all religions and
nationalities, and there was a conscious effort to include equal representation of
both genders. Because the focus was on the exchange of truth for amnesty for the
perpetrators of domestic crimes, there was no reference to international law (which
indeed would have required the use of more traditional justice).
Finally, there were potential sanctions for those perpetrators who did not give
full and complete testimony and objections from some victims and their families
to amnesty for "aggressors." However, the new court system and both of the key
groups in the struggle over apartheid recognized the weakness and potential injustice
of the amnesty but also the necessity of "healing the wounds" and getting closure
for democracy to work (Brooks 1999: 443).
The present political culture in South Africa is at least a partial result of the
South African model of transitional justice. No political agents can claim not to
have been involved in the process or dispute its validity; the past ten years have
thus seen a consolidation of cohesive democratic behavior. This cohesive and
democratic behavior exists in spite of the fact that, while there is no longer any
legal separation or isolation of the four "racial" groups and equality is stressed in
political discourse, there is a larger economic divide between blacks and whites
than appeared in the apartheid period. There is also a higher degree of crime and
violence. Yet, politically, the groups, on the whole, see themselves as a unit and are
not playing out historic divisions, even though the economic divisions are consistent
with the historical division between "aggressor" and "victim" groups. The election
results from the first election after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had
produced its final report demonstrated that consolidation. High levels of partici
pation demonstrated support for the system: South Africans in the 1999 elections
voted in large numbers (71.8 percent of the voting age population, 81.3 percent of
SPRING 2007 65
registered voters). The political losers in the South African system?Afrikaners?did

not exit the system. Rather, they voted in slightly higher numbers than Africans. More
significantly, they did not vote against the new status quo of ANC rule (Reynolds
1999: 179). What makes this vote so significant is not that a large portion of the
population voted but that there was not enough support for the National Party or any
other Afrikaner party for it to have a place in the new parliament. It was the ANC
that drew the bulk of votes from all the racial and ethnic groups in the population.
Economic inequities aside, the resolution of the conflicts of the past clearly had
brought the population together.
That Truth and Reconciliation model and the fact that all the players and in
stitutions involved respected it as the end of the transitional justice process were
major factors in establishing a highly participatory and conciliatory population. In
a survey done in 2000-2001, there was a significant correlation between a group's
level of awareness of the TRC and its results (Gibson and Gouws 2003). Indeed,
interviewees all noted in 2003 that Afrikaners may have participated in or watched
small segments of the hearings that were broadcast; it was an important topic for
them. Public interest and interest among groups that felt that they were not the
central "victims" was far lower than among blacks.
There was also a remarkable agreement on critical aspects in the practices of
remembrance that developed out of the TRC. Among Africans, Afrikaners, and
Asians, the "struggle to preserve apartheid" was perceived as just by one-third of
those surveyed. In addition to this recognition of the rights of the supporters of
apartheid, there was a more universal (76.1 percent Afrikaner and 73.8 percent
African) agreement that "Those struggling for and against apartheid did unforgiv
able things." Finally,
a plurality of blacks, whites, and those of Asian origin are willing to attribute
the abuses to individuals, not to state institutions themselves. This is consistent
with the finding that many view apartheid as a good idea poorly implemented
perhaps because ... a handful of individuals did horrific things in the name of
apartheid. (Gibson and Gouws 2003: 84)
There was thus little evidence of nostalgia for the old system and no search for
villains in the failings of the new system. Because the perpetrators had to testify
publicly and bear the public onus, even though they kept their jobs, there has been
no sense that they could be working "in secret" or that they are lurking enemies of
democracy and equality that threatened the new system. Thus, the post-transitional
state apparatus could not itself become a locus for practices of remembrance bred
of social discontent.
El Salvador
Transitional justice has been most opaque in El Salvador. The entire process has
been a contested one but also one in which many of the acts and actors are from
outside the society itself. First, the two sides, ARENA (National Republican Al
liance [Alianza Republicana Nacionalista], the political branch of the military
rulers) and FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front [Frente Farabundo
Marti para la Liberacion Nacional], the guerrilla force), were only able to agree on
a Truth Commission in an agreement brokered by the United Nations. That Truth
Commission was thus external, charged with assessing blame and making legally
binding recommendations for changes in the structures of the justice system that
would ensure that the military could not reinstitute a repressive apparatus. Sepa
rately, there was an agreement for a temporary commission of three prominent
Salvadorans to investigate top military officials (LAPOP 2004).
Both of these placed the vast majority of blame for human rights violations on
the military, as well as a handful of guerrilla officers. The sanctions proposed were
different: 100 military officials, including the entire military high command, were
to be dismissed and the guerrilla leaders merely banned from public life for ten
years. Neither of these sanctions was implemented. Instead, since there had not
been a new government or a shift in power, the junta government stonewalled. In
the words of the LAPOP report, "Five days after the publication of the amnesty, a
broad general amnesty law was passed, ensuring that none of those named would
be tried" (2004: 84). In the ten years that have since passed, although Salvadoran
political actors have not dealt directly with the past, it has boomeranged back
into people's lives and politics due to the efforts of the Catholic Church and some
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These third parties have refused to accept
the Truth Commission as a "done deal" and have created a sense of distrust among
those who were from the strata of ARENA supporters that the political system will
ever stabilize and that the issue of the past will ever be put to rest.
The process initially stopped here. Although there was dissatisfaction among
victims' families, neither side made any moves toward reconciliation. Indeed, nei
ther side responded to charges with apologies or even acknowledgment. Repressed
events of the past turned into "silent memories" (Pennebaker and Banasik 1997),
and the Church and NGOs slowly began to fall silent as well.
There was thus no "honeymoon" period of hope and satisfaction in the El Sal
vadoran transition. In 1994, when a national survey was done, 58.7 percent of de
clared ARENA supporters reported being satisfied in comparison to 36.5 percent of
FMLN supporters. These levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction did not, however,
translate into an attempt to address collective memory through modification of state
institutions such as courts or the electoral commission. People had little or no faith
that their rights would be protected: 3.4 percent in the period up to 1995 thought
human rights were protected, and 3.0 percent had faith in the courts (Seligson and
Macias 1995: 51). The silencing of memory bred a retreat from national politics
and formal institutions.
At the same time, this lack of faith in the post-civil war period appears to have
played out in attitudes that restrain both the former "aggressors" and the former
SPRING 2007 67
"victims" from engaging actively and directly in political action and conflict. Es
sentially, the political system has fragmented into two groups, one distrustful of
others but active in national politics (the upper classes) and the other (the poor rural
populations who suffered most in the civil war), more trusting and active only in
local politics. This "freezes" the old conflicts in place. This is the case even though
ARENA supporters are more satisfied with the system: 50 percent in 1999 to 36.5
percent among FMLN supporters in 1994 and 64 percent in 1999 (but only 40.4
percent of professionals) to 50 percent in 1994 (LAPOP 2004: 35,61). The picture
painted by available data is thus complex.
The United Nations Truth Commission and the minor changes in state-level
institutions were, clearly, enough to engender at least limited trust and tolerance
of others among those who suffered in the Civil War, yet a real turnover of power
has not occurred. For the ARENA group, holding power allowed a majority to be
satisfied with the system, yet they are also less trusting and tolerant because they
have experienced "boomerang" transitional justice. Their attitude is best explained
as the result of actions by the Catholic Church and foreign NGOs. Since the end of
the civil war and the military's declaration of amnesty, these groups have sought
every alternative remedy possible to "get justice" from domestic courts to interna
tional publicity and trials. Thus, decisions have been appealed through international
courts and are now under the "universal jurisdiction" provisions in American and
European law that allow foreigners to be tried abroad for crimes they committed
in their own countries. The ARENA'S simultaneous legal culpability as an aggres
sor group and standing as a victim group in an international context has decreased
their ability to trust the system or their future, leaving them out of discussions and
compromise.
Nonetheless, there has been a striking divide in the nature of political involve
ment that is not seen elsewhere. The FMLN supporters focus on local governance
while the ARENA supporters, even though they live in communities, have little
interest in local society and focus on citizens exclusively at the state level. It is
not, then, the typical dichotomy in terms of tolerance and trust between those who
hold power (ARENA still dominates the government) and those who are politically
weak?the wealthy, urban, and educated population versus the poor, uneducated,
rural population where competition for scarce resources is greatest. The level of
tolerance expressed in these once-guerrilla areas also is not "normal." After all,
the experience of pervasive aggression should have taught them to distrust all but
their immediate family groups.
The key factor seems to be that the FMLN supporters were satisfied with the
truth commission and relatively unconcerned by its lack of concrete action. Their
democratic attitudes of trust and tolerance have increased even though they have
not been able to unseat the former military from its dominance in the govern
ment and have not seen real changes as a result of the truth commission since the
military party, ARENA, has maintained a bare majority and control of both the
economic sector and the governmental sector. In addition, there has not been any
real economic change in the lives of the peasantry. They have grown increasingly
impoverished as the international coffee market has declined. Knowledge and
recognition of the suffering?confrontation of collective memory without reso
lution and forgiveness?were, it would seem, enough for them. However, the
lack of acknowledgment by the other side and its continued dominance of national
politics has meant that FLMN groups have retreated from trusting third parties like
the Church and NGOs, which remain strong in local areas. Despite appearances,
a silenced past is not allowed to be merely the past.
Poland
The Polish case is, in many ways, the most complex of all. Not only was there
a shift in leadership from the former communists to the former dissidents as the
transition began but both the old opposition and regime, "victims" and "aggres
sors," were weakened and then replaced by "newcomer" parties. These new parties
have identified themselves, first and foremost, in opposition to the "secret agents
of the evil communist system" even as they have promised similar social welfare
benefits to those with which communist rule was identified in the past (especially
the Law and Justice party dominating the current ruling coalition). Both prongs
of the newcomers' approach thus reflect a direct appeal to collective memory: on
the one hand, a post-traumatic confrontation with the "Other," and, on the other,
retention of what was best in the past. Both former communists and former dis
sidents have refashioned themselves to be "noncommunist" both symbolically and
structurally. Discussions of protecting the working class have been dropped. This
has been one of the factors in the cyclical development, dissolution, resurrection,
and reconstitution of political groups and affiliations since 1989.
As in South Africa, a perceived need not to trigger opposition to the transition
from the state apparatus and not to lose their expertise led the initial transitional
government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and other "victims" of the communist era to
"draw a thick line" between the new system and the old, leaving the past to the
public and the media (Walicki 1997).
This also left the door open, since there had been no acknowledgement of the
realities of the past, for a newer, post-transitional generation of politicians to identify
themselves as people who would make the system safe by purging it of former secret
agents. Because most of their evidence came from former secret agents who had reported
on others, the message they conveyed was that "what you see is not what there is" and
that politicians and politics were the source of secret deals and immorality. Initially,
these condemnations were made with little or no evidence. And, for former dissidents,
there were high risks that the attacks on individuals as agents would not be limited to
former communists (who, in reality, had been exempted from recruitment by secret
police regulations) but would undercut former dissidents' legitimacy since it was the
SPRING 2007 69
dissident groups that communist rulers needed to infiltrate to get information on who
was in the opposition and what they planned.
The two groups, to prevent "wild lustration" of the former secret police files
and to protect their own standing, passed a lustration law ten years after the fall
of communism. It provided for an Institute of National Remembrance to transfer
secret police files from the police to a safe, neutral archive employing historians
to perform research on the communist period using these files. It also provided
for the lustration of people in a wide range of public offices: ten years after the
fall of communism, politicians and public officials who had been agents of the
secret police could hold office if they admitted having been agents. If they did
not, and they were subsequently found to have lied, they had to resign or un
dergo sealed trials to establish their guilt or innocence. The decision of whose
file to investigate out of the thousands of individuals covered by the lustration
law was in the purview of the ombudsman for the Public Interest. This system
was focused on informants, not leaders in the communist party or even secret
policemen themselves. Indeed, it legitimized the secret police even as it made
the history of communist Poland the history of the secret police rather than of
the social, economic, and political realities of most people's lives. As a result,
people learned that the old system was all-powerful (see any of a string of pub
lications by the Institute of National Remembrance's publishing house: Kura
2006; Terlecki 2005; and more).
This lustration became increasingly significant as a political tool. But, at the
same time, its "fit" with public opinion was a difficult one. In the first decade after
communism, most people felt that "more bad than good had happened under com
munism" (Cybulska et al. 2000). They also said, in public opinion surveys, that
it would be better if the system were cleansed of agents. At the same time, when
candidates did admit their complicity as agents of the secret police, they most often
were not defeated. Moreover, the public expressed a nostalgia for the communist
past, and public assessment was higher of men like former communist turned Social
Democrat Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was elected twice to the presidency, than
of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.
At the present time, the conservative government of Law and Justice has inten
sified its rhetoric and is in the process of pushing through a law opening all files
to the public and forcing individuals, from school teachers to top politicians, to
undergo a potentially public review of any secret police files they have as victims
or agents (the newest incarnation of "aggressor" status). The law will, as it now
stands, encompass even the secret police.
As the conflicts about the communist past have focused on secret agents and
Poland's few instances of police violence to stop demonstrations against communist
rule, those in power have not been responding to popular interest but have instead
attempted to generate support for themselves by stirring public outrage against their
predecessors. In the process, the impact has been that they have taught lessons that
undercut the potential for a functioning democracy in Poland. Their emphasis on

communism as a cabal of agents must be seen as one of the major factors in the
ever-increasing lack of faith in politicians. This is presented explicitly by the high
number of survey respondents who regularly say they have no faith in politicians
as they do not have anyone to represent their own interests and also the extremely
low public support for elected officials and institutions (Cybulska et al. 2000). The
conflation of agents with those who disagree with the current government and of
former communist officials and their supporters with corruption cannot help but
further lower the legitimacy of the system.
Moreover, the lack of an open truth commission and the focus of communist his
tory on who reported what on whom has little resonance with the Polish population.
After all, they lived in one of the freest if not the freest communist country in the
Eastern bloc. Without paying attention to the realities?positive and negative?of
communist life, at a time when people are still smarting from the economic losses
of the initial transition, people can only rely on their memories of the part of com
munism they experienced. The lesson is clearly that citizens can never understand
or know the truth about the system or the people around them. This is a powerful
demobilizing factor.
Until the position was abolished by new legislation in September 2006, the
ombudsman focused on investigating former communists even though they were
less likely to be recruited as agents (Curry 2003). In spite of widespread popular
nostalgia for "the old days," this linking of communists with agents has been
documented as the single most important determinant in recent elections: collective
memory literally trumps the present. The most telling cleavage in Polish politics
is thus between those who were party members or supported the old regime and
those who were in opposition, as symbolized by their commitment to the Catholic
Church (Grabowska 2004). There is little to explain the power of this division other
than the reinforcement given it by Poles' singular form of transitional justice and
its focus on the evils of communism.
The test of this may now come in the switch from closed files and limited
lustration to open files and broad, public lustration. Because agents were more
needed and recruited among dissidents and religious actors, opening the files
to public scrutiny in Poland has the potential for changing the message. Instead
of communists being the "bad ones," the new process is likely to implicate the
opposition as being secret agents. Already, iconic figures?from the much-loved
late Solidarity activist Jacek Kurofi to the late poet Zbigniew Herbert?have been
impugned by the publication of their IPN files (Zycie Warszawy 2006), and an
entire genre of "secret files" literature is being marketed by Polish bookstores,
one of the leading recent examples of which is a book documenting the secret
police's surveillance of John Paul II while he was still Karol Wojtyta (Lasota
2006). We will likely see a further drop in the legitimacy of public officials as
the message conveyed will be that anyone and everyone could lead a double
political life. Rather than confronting and reconciling with collective memory
SPRING 2007 71
in the present, Poles have openly and fervently begun to reconstruct their pres
ent through the lens of the unresolved past.
Conclusions
This analysis has looked at how the way a polity officially deals with past aggression
perpetrated through the state apparatus interacts with collective memory, which, in
turn, dictates the culture of political behavior and public perception of the success
or failure of transitions out of authoritarianism. The transformation of political
culture into a locus of collective memory has made memory a multigenerational
phenomenon: in El Salvador, Poland, and South Africa, this memory grips not
only those who experienced authoritarian repression firsthand but also?often
more strongly?those who were children or even unborn when authoritarianism
was at its height.
The ironies are clear. The old perception of what could be were it not for au
thoritarianism coupled with the political process of transitional justice creates a
whole new set of experiences with the past, ranging from coping with the past to
lashing out in the present. As societies move further from their authoritarian past,
political behavior commemorates not its structure or its harsh everyday reality but
rather its persistent collective psychological dimension. It is this dimension that in
the social aggregate becomes a determinant of nation-state politics.
The past distorts the present in this process. As politicians and activists, victims
and aggressors, instrumentalize the past, new forms emerge. The past becomes the
dividing line of present-day politics. The most politically healthy of the three cases
examined in this article is South Africa: the transitional justice process moves fault
from the system to individual aggressors, making the victims' and aggressors' nar
ratives a permanent part of the public record and facilitating a common resolution.
Knowledge is public; repetition of the past is sworn off, and silent memories cease
to haunt the repressed and their children.
In contrast, in El Salvador and Poland, the past remains a political football for
politicians and activists. No act of transitional justice has been sufficient, and the
focus has been on the powerlessness of the individual and the mysterious power
of the system. The message seems to be that truth remains elusive and that the past
dictates the present. The instrumentalization of memory blocks reconciliation and
demobilizes society from political participation, increasing the likelihood of policy
compromises that make fledgling democracies progressively less democratic.
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When An Authoritarian State Victimizes The Nation

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When an Authoritarian State Victimizes the Nation: Transitional Justice, Collective

Memory, and Political Divides

When an Authoritarian State

Cases: South Africa, El Salvador, and Poland

Democracy and Transitional Justice

Modes of Transitional Justice

registered voters). The political losers in the South African system?Afrikaners?did

undercut the potential for a functioning democracy in Poland. Their emphasis on

Aguilar, Paloma. 2002. Memory and Amnesia. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Politics of Memory, ed. Alexandra Barahona de Brito, Carmen Gonzalez-Enriquez,

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