Grassroots Truth-Telling

While formal truth-telling processes are an important step towards redress and reconciliation, they are often limited in their scope, timeframes and resources.  In every context, whether an active political transition with a truth commission, or cases of cyclical changes of regimes with protracted conflicts, and even in societies deemed ‘post-transition’ and politically stable, victims and the families of victims remain in need of having their stories heard and continue to call for recognition of the past and present injustices faced.

Heeding this call, GIJTR draws on various modes of truth-telling, remaining cognizant to the needs of communities, the types of violations suffered, and social and cultural stigmas faced by victims. Driven by innovative and non-prescriptive approaches, GIJTR works to incorporate truth-telling practices that are local to a community as well as introduce complementary practices that can offer alternative avenues, all while prioritizing the need to capture the complexities of multiple narratives in societies marred by injustice and impunity across generations.

These modes of truth-telling range from body maps that illustrate the life stories of survivors and victims from Sri Lanka to Guinea to craft-based art projects, including mochilla bags and hand-made dolls that capture the stories of marginalized communities in Colombia. Each of these exhibition items challenge us to understand the multiple dimensions of how violations and harm can be told and more powerfully, how stories that would otherwise be left untold or actively silenced and erased must be centered.

This section of the exhibition illustrates the value of cultivating and preserving truth-telling platforms that are not only victim-centered but also led from the ground up by communities. In contexts where a state-led transitional justice process is underway, such as in Colombia, The Gambia and Guinea, local CSOs supported by GIJTR have had profound impacts on the direction and performance of these processes by making truth-telling platforms more accessible to and empathetic towards victims.

Below are a list of items featured in this thematic area.

Transitional Justice Tools to Address Violent Extremism and Radicalism

On August 30, 2023, marked as the International Day of the Disappeared, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) in Bosnia and Herzegovina conducted an online campaign sharing stories of ten people who are still searching for their loved ones. There are still more than 7000 missing persons after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995, including over 300 children whose remains have yet not been found. Considering the fact that just a few mass graves have been found in the past few years and that less funds are allocated to the Bosnian Missing persons institute, the aim of the project is to raise awareness of the issue and provide support to affected family members. Also, by giving public space to war crime victims and their family members to share their stories and advocate for their rights, BIRN BiH continues to fight war crime denial and disinformation in public space, challenging harmful narratives used by right-wing organizations to recruit members and spread their ideology.

Produced by Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIRN BiH)

Supporting Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Colombia

With support from GIJTR, a group of women, all victims of the armed conflict from the El Castillo region of Colombia, organized handcrafting workshops to create 10 cloth dolls resembling victims of the armed conflict. Testimonial accounts from the victims were recorded into MP3 players to accompany the dolls in an exhibition. This exhibition travel through villages in the Ariari region as well as other regions to raise awareness, particularly among youth, of the conflict and its legacies.

Supporting Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Colombia

The Fuerza Mujeres Wayúu, a women’s organization in the Wayúu ethnic community created several large bags following the traditional technique of “Wayúu mochilas,” each containing 36 smaller mochilas with recordings of families of the missing and disappeared speaking about their missing loved ones and sharing the stories of violence, killings and resistance experienced by villages of the Maicao and Hatonuevo regions. The mochilas were then taken to different villages, where community members could add their own stories about the armed conflict and their community’s resistance.

Supporting Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Colombia

Stories in Common is a podcast series that explores the resistance of those who live in various corners of Colombia. In nine episodes, the podcast travels to Buenaventura, La Macarena, Antioquia, Amazonas, Chocó, Palenque, Cereté and El Cauca to feature a diverse set of testimonies of communities in these outlying areas of Colombia.

Galvanizing Guinea’s Quest for Truth-Truth Telling and Violence Prevention in Guinea

Body mapping is an avenue to share truths and life stories. Where words fail to describe the trauma of a past experience, art can be an alternate way for survivors to express their story. Body maps show the whole life history of a person – not just the painful and traumatic parts, but also joyful memories, sources of personal strength and dreams for the future. In 2023, GIJTR led body mapping workshops for survivors of human rights violations in their communities in Guinea. A total of ten workshops were carried out across the country, with the resulting body maps used in advocacy campaigns to raise awareness.

Supporting Local Capacities for Truth, Justice and Social Cohesion in The Gambia

Following a series of body mapping workshops with 27 men and women in 2021, an exhibition was held at Memory House, which remembers the victims of the country’s recent 22-year dictatorship. As a form of memorialization, these body maps portray a range of experiences of violence and violations under Yahya Jammeh’s regime. Some of the violations depicted, such as economic exploitation of women and destruction of property, have not yet been widely discussed or acknowledged as part of The Gambia’s transitional justice process. In GIJTR’s experience, no single formal truth commission can capture all of the thousands of stories that exist, no matter how well-intentioned it is. There is, consequently, a need to create new opportunities for victims and survivors to share their experiences for years to come.

Promoting Social Cohesion, Justice and Violence Prevention in Sri Lanka 

Through the long-term GIJTR project in Sri Lanka, body maps were created with Sihalese and Tamil women in Sri Lanka in 2017 and culminated in an exhibition and roundtable discussion with the women, entitled ‘The Body Remembers.” As a collection, these body maps tell the silenced and overlooked stories of women’s daily experiences of war in a way that is creative, cathartic and hopeful. This project sought to provide the imperative space that is needed to share the truths about the past as well as provide a platform for Sri Lankans to reflect on their history, acknowledge the experiences of others, and build empathy across the various divides that still exist.

Developed as part of GIJTR’s Media and Transitional Justice Academy, the documentary film “TRACE” highlights the enforced disappearances of demonstrators in Sudan following the October 25 coup. The documentary features stories of families whose loved ones were disappeared following the coup in Sudan in 2021. It was produced by Mohamed Yousif, a MENA and TJ Academy participant, in 2021 and subtitled in English.

Initially supported by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, this project arose in 2011 out of the need to provide a space for the victims of Afghanistan to finally tell their stories of loss and resilience in the face of the country’s violent history, political upheaval and failed national transitional justice process. The Memory Boxes aspires to make the victims of Afghanistan’s wars, the main protagonists in the creation of public memory about the country’s long history of violence and human rights abuses. The boxes are an invitation to reflect upon one’s past life and express one’s feelings and memories in a powerful visual form. Memory Boxes offer a window into the lives of victims, exploring personal histories through a reflective and aesthetic creative process that results in the appearance of physical spaces of remembrance entirely produced by the victims or families of victims themselves. In addition, the Memory Boxes promote the notion of peace as a basic human right, the institutionalization of the victim’s memories as a key element of any peace-building process, and the request not to forget the past to prevent further bloodshed in the future.