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Vancouver, BC: Tri-part panel on reconciliation - June 5

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  • Vancouver, BC: Tri-part panel on reconciliation - June 5

    Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences
    UBC
    May 31-June 8, 2008
    Vancouver, BC
    http://www.fedcan.ca

    Tri-Part Session sponsored by the
    Society for Socialist Studies
    http://www.socialiststudies.ca

    Thursday June 5, 2008, 9:00-10:30, 10:45-12:15, and 1:00-2:30
    Anthropology & Sociology Building Room 205
    University of British Columbia
    Vancouver, B.C. Canada


    In Search of a Language of Reconciliation

    Session organizer: Sima Aprahamian, Ph.D. ([email protected])
    Sociology-Anthropology & Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia
    University,Montreal, Quebec, Canada


    Papers are based on studies of alternatives to the conflict-resolution
    model now being used. In particular papers were sought that have a
    critical view on the current attempts by international bodies & the U.S.
    in particular to situate genocide in the context of conflict resolution.
    Papers were also sought that explore paths or ways to bring closure and a
    sense of justice, as well as explorations of possibilities of
    communication and dialogue between or among ethnic, religious, national or
    other groups in contexts of post-war, post-conflict, post-genocide
    situations. Also papers that explore the applications (and
    mis-applications) of Truth and Reconciliation commissions.



    PANEL ONE

    Discussant: Dorota Glowacka, Ph.D. (Kings College, Dalhousie, Halifax. NS)



    Barabara Coloroso and a new possible language of reconciliation

    Sima Aprahamian, Ph.D. ([email protected]) Sociology-Anthropology
    & Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec,
    Canada



    The paper examines the current language used in post-conflict,
    post-genocide contexts. The idea for the paper and panel emerged after a
    discussion with a Ethiopian of C. Gibbs novel, Sweetness in the belly. The
    reaction in Ethiopia was that it only presented the Harare perspective.
    This paper will explore the possibility of a language of reconciliation
    that Barbara Coloroso, the educator, provides.



    Rupture and Redress: The Geopolitical barriers to Genocide Reparations

    R.S. Ratner ([email protected]) Sociology, University of British
    Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    and Andrew Woolford ([email protected]) Sociology, University
    of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MN, Canada



    This paper will examine some of the conceptual and empirical obstacles to
    obtaining genocide reparations, cross-culturally and in individual cases,
    including those instances in which the application of the term `genocide
    is moot. Emphasis will be placed on the ways in which globalization and
    neoliberal rationalities of governance have created new opportunities for
    pursuing reparations (e.g., by spreading the
    actuarial and juridical logic of compensatory justice), while
    simultaneously placing limits on the form reparations might take (e.g., by
    discouraging reparative payments that might disrupt national or global
    economies). We end the paper by evaluating the
    possibilities for "transformative" reparations within current geopolitical
    contexts.


    PANEL TWO:

    Organizer: Sima Aprahamian


    Tricks or Treaty? An Examination of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace
    Accord

    Aditya Dewan, PhD. ([email protected]) Sociology-Anthropology, Concordia
    University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    The Government of Bangladesh made a peace treaty with the Jana Samhati
    Samiti (JSS) and signed the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord December
    2, 1997. The JSS, a political organization (or party), represents a dozen
    indigenous peoples' groups in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of eastern
    Bangladesh. The Shanti Bahini, armed wing of the JSS, waged guerrilla
    warfare1972-1997 against the army for regional autonomy, land and human
    rights. The CHT peace accord brought no peace for the indigenous people in
    the CHT. The government violated its own promise by not implementing the
    peace accord until today. Instead, the peace accord helped the government
    suppress indigenous peoples' rights through continuous settlement of
    Bengalis from the plains and displacement of native villagers from their
    ancestral lands. This paper will survey the post-peace Accord social,
    economic and political situation in the CHT.



    Attitudes towards Reconciliation in Iraq

    Aysegul Keskin ([email protected]), Kent State University,Kent, OH, USA


    Post-Baathist Iraq seemed to provide a unique case study for Truth and
    Reconciliation Commisioins to settle differences between former members of
    the Party and communities affected by its policies. Despite TRC plans
    based on the South African model, the Coalition Provisional Authority
    (CPA) instead embarked on a policy of De-Ba.athification and disbanding
    the Iraqi military. The Arab League efforts to hold a reconciliation
    conference in 2005 failed as .reconciliation., for the Kurdish and Shi.a
    parties in power meant negotiating with the Ba.athists. Prime Minister
    Maliki later adopted a plan for .National Reconciliation,. opposed by the
    Ba.athists and insurgency groups. Reconciliation in both cases ultimately
    failed. This paper examines literature on TRC and reconciliation in the
    Middle East, and how it could still function in an Iraqi context.



    Individual Autonomy and the Kurdish Question: De-Politicizing National
    Cleavages

    Erol Ulker ([email protected]) History, University of Chicago, Chicago,
    IL, USA

    For Austro-Marxist intellectuals Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, the
    individuality principle is a radical critique of the conviction that every
    nation should form its own territorial state - an unnecessary condition
    for the existence of nation whose realization as a cultural community is
    part of emancipation in a classless society. Implications of this critique
    for today.s ethnic conflicts bear in particular on the Kurdish question of
    Turkey, in search of a new discursive field that may integrate struggles
    for Kurdish rights with justice and emancipation. Fixation on territorial
    claims is an obstacle to achieving integration. Recognizing and promoting
    Kurdish national claims, the individuality principle has the potential to
    constitute a new reference point for cooperation and solidarity among the
    Kurds and the Turks in their struggle for justice.


    PANEL THREE:

    Compassionate Listening: Building Trust One Oral History at a Time

    Marion Gerlind, Ph.D. ([email protected]) Gerlind Institute for Cultural
    Studies, Oakland, CA, USA

    While conducting oral histories with female working-class and rural Jewish
    survivors of the European Holocaust, I had to face my role as a child of
    the generation of German perpetrators and collaborators. This presentation
    discusses the process in which narrators and interviewer are able to
    overcome mistrust and engage in (im)possible conversations. I reflect on
    the significance of mindful listening which I am currently exploring in
    interviews with working-class and rural German Christians who have not
    recorded their war stories. My aim is to integrate legacies of
    victimization and collaboration into a complex, gender- and
    class-conscious analysis of genocide.


    Confronting the parts torn apart: Armenian pilgrimages to Anatolia

    E-mail: Carel Bertram ([email protected]) University of California

    Armenian pilgrims are "returning" to Turkey in search of the houses,
    villages and towns of their families, bringing back stories of Armenian
    daily life to their place of origin. This adds a focus of what was lost
    to a focus on how it was lost. Unexpectedly, by meeting residents of
    their old homes and towns, pilgrims help overcome a collective Turkish
    amnesia. For when locals understand that these are shared stories of a
    shared culture, the success of genocides, with their goal of erasing not
    only a people, but the normalcy of their past, is interrupted.



    Attempts to Resolve Ethnic Conflict in the Canadian Multicultural Context

    Nellie Hogikyan, Ph.D. ([email protected]) ([email protected]) Centre
    Interuniversitaire d.tudes sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions,
    CLAT, UQM Montral, Qubec, Canada

    Recent minority cultural productions, in the context of the post-genocide
    traumatic transmission, are trying to understand and re-appropriate such a
    heritage to bring closure to a troubling question that has haunted four
    generations. Focussing on Araz Artinian.s The Genocide in Me (NFB, 2005)
    and Atom Egoyan's Ararat (Alliance, 2002), I will offer an analysis of the
    strategies that the third and fourth generation Canadians of Armenian
    origin use in an attempt to create a dialogue with the inheritors of the
    Turkish Ottoman legacy of denial, holding the current generations of
    Turkish men and women as being responsible, but not guilty for the history
    of their nation.
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