126. I already referred to the necessary fight for the primacy of the memory of the
victims over human cruelty.93 Underlying all this defiance, is the unfathomable
mystery that surrounds human existence: the passing of time. Memories cannot be
prevented (destroying memorials, temples, libraries, works of art), it is a real human
need, in the unpleasant, but ineludible, fights against the effects of the passing of
time. This concern is present in all different cultures. In the Swahili culture, for
example, the dead remain in the memory of their survivors as “living-dead, who only
die completely when the last one in conditions to remember them disappear."94 This is
a concern expressed both in individuals and collectively.
127. In an anthology of the Universal Academy of Cultures named “Why
Remember”, it was stated that, in many societies, the victims of violence (in general,
the poor and the most vulnerable) disappear in the “institute of obscurity”, and this
regretful attitude of disdain toward human suffering “leaves” us all “on the fringes of
any law."95 Jacqueline de Romilly considered that one of the purposes of the duty to
cultivate memories is to seek to guarantee that the same horror does not happen
again.96
128. At a collective level, the traumas produced in the social means most affected
by human brutalities have led the consciences to confront cruelty; said collective
tragedies leave deep traces, since, even after the cycle of violence has been overcome
“the past keeps on resounding in the consciences;” we have been warned that “the
dehumanization we inherit threatens our survival."97 Remembering the dead, the
victims of human violence, all victims of terrorism (perpetrated both by extermination
groups and by the State itself) is a vital need.
129. Similarly, we must not minimize the strength of memories. After decades of
silence and apparent “obscurity”, never before have the victims of the massacres of
the Armenians (of 1915) been as remembered as in our times, more than nine
decades after they happened.98 Another example of the strength of memories can be
.
93
Para. 98, supra.
.
P. Rossi, El Pasado, la Memoria, el Olvido, Buenos Aires, Ed. Nueva Visión,
2003, p. 222, and cf. p. 27.
94
.
J. Tonglet, "Tienen Historia los Pobres?", in Academia Universal de las Culturas,
Por Qué Recordar? (Foro Internacional de Paris [UNESCO/La Sorbonne] de 1998),
Barcelona, Granica, 2002, pp. 53-55.
95
.
She added that she would like “to see history closely linked to literature so that
collective memories can be conserved and gather new life and energy, because
without it our desires become inconsistent and our life becomes completely insipid;" J.
de Romilly, "La Historia entre la Memoria Individual y la Memoria Colectiva", in ibid.,
pp. 45-46.
96
.
Th. Delpech, El Retorno a la Barbarie en el Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, Ed. El
Ateneo, 2006, pp. 21-22 and 280.
97
.
Cf., v.g., B. Bruneteau, Le siècle des génocides - Violences, massacres et
processus génocidaires de l'Arménie au Rwanda, Paris, A. Colin Éd., 2004, pp. 48-72;
G. Chaliand and Y. Ternon, 1915, le génocide des Arméniens, Bruxelles, Éd.
Complexe, 2006 [réed.], pp. 15-198; J.-B. Racine, Le génocide des Arméniens Origine et permanence du crime contre l'humanité, Paris, Dalloz, 2006, pp. 3-160; E.
Staub, The Roots of Evil - The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence,
98