Each context brings with it different lessons about the fight for justice and accountability and for ending impunity. Each INOVAS member brings with them their own skills, experience and expertise about how that can be done, to be shared with existing and new generations of victims and survivors around the world. 

Demonstration of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – Spanish Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Buenos Aires Argentina

On 30 April 1977, Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo (the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) went out into the square in the heart of the Argentinian capital, Buenos Aires, and demanded information about the whereabouts of their missing loved-ones, the desaparecidos.

It was unheard of. Argentina had been under military dictatorship since January 1976: tens of thousands were disappeared and tortured, and many summarily executed, for perceived ‘subversive activities.’ The regime had also banned mass assemblies in public spaces, which ‘the mothers’ were now ignoring. 

Their vigils would become a regular fixture in the Argentinian capital, resistance in plain sight. Some of the movement were themselves disappeared and then killed. But the mothers kept going. 

According to INOVAS founding member Alicia Partnoy, who was being held incommunicado as a political prisoner at the time, “the mothers started to march when I was disappeared…so they called a lot of attention to what was happening in Argentina.”

“It was really thanks to them, as well as all the people in the human rights movement who denounced what was happening, that I survived.”

“When the mothers and grandmothers first started in Argentina, they were said to be crazy…that they were totally out-of-place for doing what they were doing, knocking on the doors of the bishops…” remembers Partnoy. “As survivors, we are not bound to respect bureaucracies. We have this urgency, because of our own experience.”

Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo

The story of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is world-famous by now, one of the best-known examples of victims of serious rights violations taking matters into their own hands and pushing for justice and accountability. One of the key successes of the mothers was their emphasis on network-building and challenging gender stereotypes in Argentina; together with the coordinated, grass-roots efforts of human rights organisations and civil society groups, the dictatorship was eventually held to account on an individual and collective level. 

In other cases, victims and survivors are fighting impunity and calling for justice and accountability in contexts with less institutionalised societies (whereby institutions and bodies have to be established, or reformed, to address past crimes) or less of a change in attitudes after a conflict or regime ends (whereby the majority of the population may not initially want to see perpetrators held to account). In some cases, survivors may be calling for accountability in the face of government or military officials who perpetrated those crimes, and yet remain in power. 

And yet there are similar examples around the world that demonstrate the different ways that victims and survivors have laid the ground for justice processes, or put pressure on those processes to do more for victims of systemic repression, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other gross human rights abuses. 

In white-ruled South Africa, black people are denied their basic human and political rights. Their work is exploited and their lives are segregated. In 1982 almost one million of them were forced to immigrate to Swaziland without option. That is the tyranny of apartheid, of racism made law, of a system under which a small white minority holds all economic and political power, and dictates how and where the large black majority lives, works, and dies. It is this system of institutionalized racial discrimination which defies the principles of the UN Charter and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that has set South Africa on a collision course with the rest of the world.
The bench is empty but this young black woman in a Johannesburg railway station would be breaking the law if she sat on it. There has been much talk recently about desegregating racially segregated public facilities. The reality defies the rhetoric.

The Khulumani Support Group, a “self-help survivor support group” founded in the immediate aftermath of Apartheid in 1995 in South Africa, has developed into something of a mass social movement by prioritising victim-centred approach to giving victims and survivors better access to transitional justice processes. One of the group’s slogans, “transforming Apartheid victims into victors,” exemplifies this approach. Formed in the anticipation of a transitional justice process in South Africa, which happened with the government’s formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Khulumani has always prioritised the involvement of empowered victims rather than professionalised bureaucrats—as INOVAS founding member Marjorie Jobson recalls, “at the time [immediately after the fall of Apartheid], the slogan that was adopted was: ‘Nothing for us without us’, a practice that has continued to the present.” Even so, the marks of serious crimes leave indelible marks on societies that can take many more decades afterward to heal: one of the reasons why Khulumani prioritises topics such as economic empowerment of survivors and trauma-informed models of community empowerment, in an attempt to address the many mental and traumatic scars within a society left behind by serious, collective rights abuses of which Apartheid is just one pertinent example.

In Guatemala, the end of conflict actually paved the way for a transitional justice process that included reparations payments to victims and survivors. However, this can mean the end of one struggle and the beginning of another. While some 40 percent of victims nationwide have, until now, received some form of reparations, the process has been slow. Attempts by national authorities to close bodies responsible for monitoring compliance, as if the case of decades of war was all but closed, have led human rights defenders, campaigners and others to continue the fight for justice and accountability. INOVAS founding member Miguel Itzep has been central to that struggle, calling for commitments from the government to maintain its reparations process and address systemic discrimination against indigenous populations (one of the defining features of Guatemala’s conflict), to ensure that true justice and accountability is achieved.

Guatemala, National Day for Victims, February 2020

Banner Photo Credit: Impunity Watch