War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (17 page)

“The struggle of man against power,” wrote the novelist Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
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I walked one afternoon over the cavernous pits and gorges scattered throughout the hills above the Italian port city of Trieste. These hold dark secrets from the twilight days of World
War II, secrets that still disturb Italy and its Balkan neighbors. The pits, covered with tons of debris, are believed to contain hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses. The bodies are those of Italians and Yugoslavs who opposed the Yugoslav Communist takeover of the city in May 1945, along with scores of captured German soldiers. But attempts to investigate, even after five decades, have gone nowhere.

Trieste is a port city that for most of the twentieth century sat on the edge of the volcanic upheavals that tore apart the European monarchies and made up the front lines of the Cold War. It changed hands a half dozen times. James Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke lived here. The notorious commander in the Spanish civil war, Commandante Carlos, came from Trieste, as did the writer Italo Svevo. The city, seedy, neglected, is no longer of any geopolitical significance. But the scars of its past infect the air. Old men with sad stories gather every afternoon in the seaside coffee shops.

In May 1945, Tito's Communist Partisans in Yugoslavia, after a bitter guerrilla war against the German and Croatian fascists, pursued the retreating forces toward Italy. The Partisan army seized the Istrian Peninsula, in the northern Adriatic, and raced on toward Trieste. The Partisans' forty-day occupation of Trieste and their hunt for German soldiers, Italian and Croatian fascists, and suspected opponents of Communism nearly led to a clash with Allied forces. In June, the Yugoslavs withdrew to the hinterlands, but Trieste was not handed back to Italy until 1954. Today the city has 230,000 people, many of them from Italian families who were forced out of Yugoslavia after the war.

Trieste in May 1945 was a chaotic city filled with cornered German, Croatian, and Italian soldiers who continued to fight despite Italy's capitulation in 1943. Scores of accused fascists were paraded daily by the Partisans through the cobblestone
streets to Yugoslav military courts. Most were quickly condemned to death and shot, or thrown alive into gorges and pits around the city.

Many Slovenes in Trieste at the time, ecstatic at the downfall of Italian fascism, greeted the Partisans as liberators and assisted in manhunts by the Yugoslav secret police. During the occupation, at least 3,500 residents of Trieste, along with an unknown number of Yugoslavs, Italians, and Germans who were trapped in the city, were shot and thrown into the fissures, or
foibe
, of the Carso mountain range, the eastern end of the Italian Alps. Thousands more were deported, and many perished in Yugoslav detention camps.

A secret British-American intelligence report of September 1945, made public just a few years ago, is filled with accounts by witnesses to partisan atrocities. A Roman Catholic priest, Don Sceck, told the investigators that on May 2,1945, a group of 150 fascists were swiftly sentenced and then mowed down by partisan troops with machine guns in Basovizza, a small Slovene-speaking village just outside Trieste. The corpses, he said, were thrown into the huge Basovizza caverns, now a memorial to the victims. The next day he saw a group of about 250 prisoners at the mouth of the Basovizza pit.

“These persons were questioned and tried in the presence of all the populace, who accused them,” the priest said in the report. “As soon as one of them was questioned, four or five women rushed up to them and accused them of having murdered or tortured one of their relatives, or of having burned down their homes. The accused persons were butted and struck, and always admitted the crimes ascribed to them.”

In war, death is often anonymous. When it is impossible to find out whether someone is dead or alive there is no closure, no way to fix the end of a life with a time and a place. The
atrocity is compounded by the atrocity committed against memory. The lack of closure tortures and deforms those who wait for an answer. This sacrilege against memory gnaws at survivors. Regimes use murder and anonymous death to keep their citizens off balance, agitated, and disturbed. It fuels war's collective insanity. But it must be rectified if healing is to take place.

The misery often spawns predators. Families in Iraq pay huge bribes to find out whether relatives are dead or alive. Occultists promise to put people in touch with those who are missing, often stringing families along for weeks as they pass on supposed messages from prisons, mines, or work camps. I have sat in on such encounters in El Salvador and Algeria, watching as tearful women struggle to believe that they are communicating with missing sons or husbands. These women, repeatedly rebuffed by the security forces and government bureaucrats, find comfort in mediums, although most realize after a few months that they have been had. Memory, even manufactured memory, seems better for a while than silence. Hope, however farfetched, is prolonged. But the ache over the missing eventually evolves into a single need—the recovery of the body.

A film by the French director Bertrand Tavernier,
Life and Nothing But
(1989), captured this need, with two women combing the remains of an old battlefield, looking for the same corpse. The Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman touched on the same theme in his novel
Widows
. He wrote of a village in Greece during World War II where a body is discovered washed up on a riverbank. It is battered beyond recognition. An elderly peasant woman, who has lost her two sons, her husband, and her father, claims the body and refuses to give it to the authorities. Soon thirty-seven women who have lost relatives also claim the body, setting off a struggle over the corpse and the military dictatorship that thought it could erase history.
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The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary. This leaves psychological wounds among survivors as well as veterans. Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam must grapple with the realization that there was no higher purpose to the war, that the sacrifice was a waste. It is easier to believe the myth that makes such loss noble and necessary, despite the glaring contradictions.

In Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s most of the 20,000 “disappeared” in the Dirty War were not armed radicals but labor leaders, community organizers, leftist intellectuals, and student organizers. Few of them had any connection to guerrilla campaigns. Indeed, by the time of the 1976 Argentine coup the armed guerrilla movements, such as the Montoneros, had largely been wiped out. They had never been a threat to the state, but the abductions spawned a vast underground prison system that soon existed mostly to extort money from the victims' families.

In Marguerite Feitlowitz's
The Lexicon of Terror
, she writes of the experiences of one Argentine prisoner, a physicist named Mario Villani.
³
The collapse of the moral universe of the torturers is displayed when, in between torture sessions, the guards take Villani and a few pregnant women prisoners to an amusement park. They make them ride the kiddie train. A guard, whose nom de guerre is Blood, brings his six- or seven-year-old daughter into the camp to meet Villani. Villani runs into one of his principal torturers a few years later, a man known in the camps as Julian the Turk. Julian recommends that Villani go see another of his former prisoners to ask for a job.

Julian the Turk was free because military pressure put a stop
to the post-junta trials. After the convictions of five of the nine commanders, repeated military uprisings persuaded President Raúl Alfonsin to propose laws setting a time limit on prosecutions and exempting all men below a certain rank from any prosecution. The Argentine congress quickly passed both laws. Alfonsin's successor, Carlos Saúl Menem, then pardoned the commanders who had been convicted, along with several dozen other prisoners. In neighboring Chile, General Augusto Pinochet sits protected in his lifetime Senate seat, immune from prosecution.

Until the lie is discredited and history is recovered, societies continue to speak in euphemisms. They use words to mask reality. It was the Argentine junta that gave us words like
desaparecido
(disappeared person, almost always a euphemism for someone who had been secretly executed),
chupado
(sucked up, or kidnapped) and
trasladar
(transfer, a euphemism for take away to be killed). Terms like these blunt the campaign of terror. On the battlefield it is much the same. Soldiers get “waxed” rather than killed. Victims who are burned to death are “toasted.”

The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman's novel
Life and Fate
was about the fight to remember and defeat anonymous death. The mother in the novel, based on Grossman's own mother, was massacred along with 30,000 other people, most of them Jews, by the Nazis in his native town of Berdichev in Ukraine during World War II. In one chapter he wrote the letter he believed his mother would have written to him before she was executed, a final message to her only child. The letter revealed the gaping wound that Grossman, who was unable to communicate with his mother before her execution, must have endured.

Describing neighbors who, given license by the Nazi occupiers, have turned her into a pariah, the mother wrote dispassionately
“I really don't know which is worse,” she said, “gloating spite, or these pitying glances like people cast at a mangy, half-dead cat.”

Then she wrote: “But now I've seen that the people who shout most loudly about delivering Russia from the Jews are the very ones who cringe like lackeys before the Germans, ready to betray their country for 30 pieces of German silver. And strange people from the outskirts of town seize our rooms, our blankets, our clothes. It must have been people like them who killed doctors at the time of the cholera riots. And then there are people whose souls have just withered, people who are ready to go along with anything evil—anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever's in power.”
⁴

When
Life and Fate
was completed in i960, four years before Grossman died, the K.G.B. seized the manuscript. He was never allowed to publish again.

It is rare that we are able to expose the crimes of a regime while it is still in power. This is usually part of the long recovery process once the killers have been ousted. But in Iraq we had the unique opportunity to peer inside the guts of Saddam Hussein's regime and confront a regime with its crimes.

After the Gulf War, the Kurds in northern Iraq were given a safe area that was under the protection of NATO warplanes. With the Iraqi military gone from the area, it became possible to investigate the crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime even as he remained in power. Mass graves, torture chambers, elaborate prison systems, and secret police files attested to the inner workings of one of the region's harshest dictatorships. Gravesites regularly contained hundreds of bodies of men, women, and children. I stood one afternoon as diggers uncovered the remains of 1,500 soldiers who had apparently been executed
after refusing to fight in the war during the 1980s against Iran. Until the bodies were identified, the dead had “disappeared.”

Kurdish leaders estimated that more than 180,000 Kurds had vanished at the hands of the Iraqi secret police. The Iraqis killed anyone, including young children, whom they believed supported the outlawed Kurdish guerrilla movement or belonged to a family that had ties with the Kurdish rebels. More than 4,000 villages—primarily those near the Turkish or Iranian borders that were regarded by the Iraqis as sanctuaries for Kurdish rebels—were demolished under the program, which reached its peak of intensity in 1987 and 1988, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war.

The killing sites are often found a few feet from the mass graves. On Kalowa Hill, five tires filled with cement were all that remained of the spot where many people were shot to death. Earthen embankments bordered the site. Prisoners, blindfolded with their hands tied behind ten-foot metal poles, had their feet planted in the cement and were shot.

Of course those who lived nearby knew that something was happening. When I spoke with those in the vicinity of Kalowa Hill, they said they often heard screams and volleys of shots, but were threatened if they tried to peer into the high-walled compound. Stray dogs used to trot back with human bones or a fleshy limb, after getting inside the compound. The Iraqi guards began to shoot the dogs.

At Kalowa Hill I stood with my seven bodyguards. The Iraqi regime had put a price on the heads of all foreigners who worked in the Kurdish-controlled areas. Several had been shot and killed, including a German photographer I worked with. We watched a Kurdish woman, Pershan Hassan, clamber quickly up the dirt track leading to the site. As she hurried forward,
she clutched to her chest a framed black and white photograph of a young boy. At the top of the rise, a crowd that had gathered parted silently as she stumbled forward.

She suddenly stopped and let out a gasp of pain and recognition. Before her, nine years after he had disappeared from a schoolyard, lay the skeletal remains of her thirteen-year-old son, Shafiq. A faded blue blindfold was tightly wrapped around his skull and spent bullets were scattered among his now dark-brown bones.

“I know him by his clothes,” she whispered, her voice breaking as she lifted the garments and kissed them. “I raised him without a father.”

In all such scenes there is grief. But there is also a palpable sense of relief. The lost son or husband is recovered. The salutary effect makes it possible to go forward in life. It took the efforts of Iraq's leading dissident, Kanan Makiya and Human Rights Watch, to make sure that truckloads of documents, including photographs and videotapes of executions, were transported out of northern Iraq to safety.