... El eterno de los muertos. (1) Roads crossing Along this road Came the ones who were persecuted. Along this other one Came the persecutors. Here, here, where your feet Bite the dust The encounter happened. We must keep silent: a minute of silence. Give me your hand: let's breathe The eternal smoke of the dead.

When we speak of dealing with the past, we have first to agree what we understand by it. Working with the relatives of victims of political repression, and having lived it personally, has led me to the conclusion that dealing with the past means `learning to live/coping/struggling' with it in the present. Our own personal and social lives have been marked by repressive events we did not choose, want or provoke. We also have to deal with the fact that other human beings inflicted these abuses, most of the time deliberately. Reszczynski, Rojas and Barcelo, three women psychiatrists, were political exiles working in France with other exiled Chileans who had been imprisoned, tortured and expelled from the country for their political ideals or their resistance to Pinochet's dictatorship. Two of the women had themselves undergone the same experience and all three had been persecuted for their assistance to victims of human rights violations, as well as for their political ideas and commitment to human rights. In their book, Tortura y Resistencia en Chile, they capture the moment of terror for seventy-five prisoners who `faced the specific act of torture. In that moment they were alone in front of the ones who questioned and tortured them. They were absolutely certain that their moment had come, that they would be exposed to torture.' (2) After a few years, the women were able to return to Chile and, ever since, have worked in the same field. Their work has gone beyond clinical practice; they have carried out research, documented cases, published books on the impact of the experience of torture on individuals, the family and society, and have challenged the dictatorship and also the new government.

Their work is far from complete, even though the dictatorship has ended. It is this scenario which leads me to state that the present in which we live is determined by the past and has a direct impact on the future--not only in terms of what can or will happen, but also as regards the ways in which we can create meaning from the past in the present. We have to learn to handle the past in the present and connect it to the future. One problem in doing so is graphically raised by Dorfman: `How can those who tortured and those who were tortured co-exist in the same land? How to heal a country that has been traumatised by repression if the fear to speak out is still omnipresent everywhere?' (3) Fear as a mechanism of survival makes sense, for people have to face the fact that the ones who perpetrated human rights violations are ordinary people, men and women who work, love and move in the same world, and sometimes even the same spaces, that we do.

At a preparatory conference in South Africa to discuss the ways to deal with truth and reconciliation, Neier stated that:

as a civilised society we must recognise the worth and dignity of those victimised by abuses of the past. If we fail to confront what happened to them, in a sense we argue that those people do not matter, that only the future is of importance. We also perpetuate, even compound, their victimisation. (4)

But the word `victim' is not acceptable to all those who have had to endure violations. It puts the person in a position of having to receive pity, mercy, comfort from others who have more strength or power. And who is there to judge this? When travelling once in Palestine I walked along the streets and, in front of some houses, I could see a flag, a bunch of flowers, a banner with a name and/or a photo. I stopped. I asked what it meant and was surprised to find out that, in each case, it was a family honouring a member who had died, often in a non-violent action, sometimes just by chance and sometimes defending through armed struggle the principles that that person believed in. For these families, their relative was a hero, not a victim. The same point was made by Vladimir, a 19-year-old student and the son of a detained disappeared trade unionist from a small town in the south of Chile. `What can I tell you? My father is a hero, not a victim. He is my north [star] and I do not want people to see him for what he suffered at the hands of a bunch of cowardly criminals, but for the ideals he struggled for. If the people who killed him had had those ideals, we would not be where we are now'. (5)

In May 2000, I attended a discussion in one of the sessions of a health and human rights course organised by Physicians for Human Rights-UK on the topic, `Doctors as victims of and participants in torture'. Thus the use of the word `victim' came up once again. Some of those present were uneasy at the way it portrayed people as merely in a weakened state, suffering from a medical or psychological condition. Then the word `survivor' was raised. It provoked lots of thoughts in me. To my mind came characters like Primo Levi, the Jewish doctor who survived Auschwitz and, years later, committed suicide, tormented by feelings of guilt at being a survivor. He just could not cope any more. His is not the only case; the guilt of being a survivor has been an extra burden added...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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