Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. Collective memory seeks, instead of vengeance, the realization
of justice, in honor of the victims.102 The preservation of memories requires awareness
and determination. The entire debate originated by the monument “The Eye That Cries”
has revealed that there is still a long way to go, before the deep wounds of the tragedy
lived by the Peruvian people can heal.103
126. I already referred to the necessary fight for the primacy of the memory of the
victims over human cruelty.104 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."105 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."106 Jacqueline
Una Indagación Filosófica, Ed. Lilmod, Buenos Aires, 2005, pp. 15-327) así como
teológico (cf., inter alia, M. Neusch, L'énigme du mal, Paris, Bayard, 2007, pp. 7-193).
.
C. Fournet, The Crime of Destruction and the Law of Genocide - Their Impact on
Collective Memory, Aldershot, Ashgate Publ., 2007, p. 148, and cf. pp. 75-81 for the
substantiation of the author on the existence of State crimes.
102
.
What is the solution to the "impasse" of the identification of the victims to be
honored in the monument “The Eye That Cries”? Is there any what to solve it? To this
question, Mario Vargas Llosa responded: -"Yes. Turn around the rounded stones with the
names that appear on them, hiding them temporarily from the public light, until time has
healed the wounds, calmed the spirits, and has at some time established that consensus
that allows one and another to accept the horror lived by Peru due to the criminal
attempt of Sendero Luminoso (...) and the terrible abuses and injustices that the State’s
forces committed in the fight against terror, they did not leave any innocents, they
stained us all, by action and by omission, and it will only be as of that acknowledgment
that we will be able to start building a democracy worthy of that name, where ignominies
like those that stained our eighties and nineties are no longer conceivable." M. Vargas
Llosa, "El Ojo que Llora", El País - Madrid, 14.01.2007, p. 2. – And this is not an isolated
case; in another continent, debate with regard to the victims whose memory must be
honored in the memorial at the cemetery that holds the remains of those murdered in the
massacre of Srebrenica in July of 1995 has continued up to this date; cf., v.g., E.
Suljagic, Postcards from the Grave, London, Saqi/Bosnian Institute, 2005, p. 196
(afterword de E. Vulliamy).
103
.
104
Para. 98, supra.
.
P. Rossi, El Pasado, la Memoria, el Olvido, Buenos Aires, Ed. Nueva Visión, 2003,
p. 222, and cf. p. 27.
105
.
J. Tonglet, "Tienen Historia los Pobres?", in Academia Universal de las Culturas,
Por Qué Recordar? (Foro Internacional de Paris [UNESCO/La Sorbonne] de 1998),
106
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