The Role Of Victims In the Prevention Of Radicalization And Memory Policies

 Seminar under the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU. I’ve been panelist in round table on the role of victims in the prevention of radicalization and Memory policies.

Extracts form my speech:

In my experience of a quarter of a century, I have observed how the timing of memorialisation processes have shortened. For decades the victims of the past seasons of terrorism in Italy, Spain, England, Germany and France were removed and forgotten. In Spain the rise of the civic movement known as Espíritu de Ermua, at the end of t of the XX century, is probably the turning point that allowed to change the social perception of the victims of terrorism. In Italy something analogue occurred a few years after, at the beginning of the XXI century. Up until sixteen years ago, most of commemoration activities around terror facts in Europe arose in a bottom-up movement often carried out only by the victims’ organisations. (...)

In the last decades, the sensitivity towards the victims of terrorism on the part of public opinion and decision-makers has increased and the commemoration processes of the most recent attacks, from 9 11, have accelerated. This means, for instance, that some of the US association of victims of September 11, in the space of about ten years, went from dealing with trauma care to peace education in schools, as main goal activity. (…)

The consequences of this acceleration of memorialization, however, are not all positive, especially when the owner of the memory is the state. The 9/11 memorial and museum, inaugurated in New York in 2011, shows how some memorials take advantage of the emotions fear and anxiety “to persuade Americans to support government policy that appear to provide security” (Erica Doss, 2010, pp. 146–148). The alternative approach by the Norwegian government to design memorial sites a few months after the attacks in Oslo and Utoya, is rather paradigmatic: the discussion brought to no conclusion or consensus and the plan was abandoned, but in 2005, the local authority of Olso, and then the Ministry of Education, created a Centre that is a learning space that works with the mediation of memory and knowledge about the terror attacks. That’s exactly have sense: beyond commemoration, as an official “duty of memory” carried out top-down by the states, memorial centers or museums should be an open forum in an always ongoing work in progress. The only way to avoid that the conflict memory may be exploited by the political agora, creating polarization, and to allow the development of both prevention (PVE) and historicization activities.