Two former members of the defunct international human rights organization “Memorial” have commended Taiwan’s work in the field of transitional justice, saying that Taiwanese reflections on the issue have been “inspiring.”
Nicolas Werth and Alexandra Polivanova, who are now chairperson and representative, respectively, of the International Memorial Association — successor to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Memorial organization — praised Taiwan’s transitional justice efforts during a recent visit to the country.
In an interview with the Central News Agency, Werth and Polivanova spoke about their observations during their visits to some of Taiwan’s prominent historical exhibitions.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
Werth, a French historian specializing in Soviet history, cited two permanent exhibitions he visited at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
One of the exhibitions — Taiwan’s Long Walk to Freedom of Speech — chronicles key events from the 1940s to the 1990s.
The other — Chiang Kai-shek [蔣介石] and the Republic of China (Taiwan) — details the life of Chiang, a figure widely considered to be associated with the White Terror era (1949 to 1987).
“The juxtaposition of these two is in itself quite remarkable,” Werth said.
The plurality of interpretations demonstrates the huge work that Taiwanese society has undertaken to achieve transitional justice, he added.
Polivanova, a Russian human rights advocate, shared some of her observations from her visit to the National Human Rights Museum.
Polivanova said that on her guided tour a visitor asked whether the museum should be preserved in its original state as a detention center for political prisoners or converted into a multimedia display facility to better promote transitional justice education.
“It’s a non-stop question and reflection, and this is very interesting for me — that it’s not like [a] frozen decision,” she said.
Werth said that transitional justice never occurred in Russia, even during the early 1990s — a period often regarded as the freest in modern Russian history, which was marked by political and social openness following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“We really pay the price of it now because nothing has been done — no education, no critical assessment of the past,” said Werth, 74, whose father was from Russia.
Without such historical reflection, “the past can come back,” he said, citing the wars initiated by the Soviet Union and Russia’s ongoing war with Ukraine.
While civil society can influence government decisions, the authorities’ suppression can occur “pace by pace,” Werth said.
Using Russia’s experience as a reference, civil societies worldwide should be “careful” of restrictive measures, he said.
Expanding on that aspect of Russian history, Polivanova said that although civil society in Russia played a crucial role in pressuring the government to end the first Chechen war in 1996, it has been systematically dismantled over the years.
In 2012, Russian authorities enacted the Foreign Agents Law to “limit the possibility of civil rights organizations to collaborate with the world,” she said.
Russian authorities also imposed a law targeting “non-desirable organizations” to further crack down on civil society, including the now-disbanded international human rights organization Memorial, she said.
Established in Russia in 1987, Memorial researched political repressions during the Soviet Union era and in modern Russia, and promoted human rights. It was shut down by the Russian government in December 2021 under the country’s Foreign Agent Law.
The International Memorial Association was founded last year to continue the study of political repression in the Soviet Union and present-day Russia and to promote moral and legal rehabilitation of people subjected to such repression.
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