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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/95412
- Title
- Justice, reconciliation and memory: a tale of two grandsons
- Author(s)
- Tumarkin, Maria
- Abstract
- At the funeral of General Augusto Pinochet in December 2006, Francisco Cuadrado Prats, the grandson of the former commander-in-chief of the Chilean army assassinated on Pinochet's orders, walked up to the coffin and spat on the General's slowly decomposing face. Later during that same funeral in an unscheduled appearance, Capt. Augusto Pinochet Molina, an officer in the Chilean army and Pinochet?s grandson, defied all military regulations to make an impassioned speech defending his grandfather's honour and legacy. Reflecting on the high drama of the funeral, Chilean-American writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman noted that for reconciliation to occur in Chile, either the grandson of General Carlos Prats would have to forget the death of his grandfather or the grandson of General Augusto Pinochet would have to publicly acknowledge that his grandfather was a murderer. 'Neither of these grandsons will ever able to do this', wrote Dorfman. Maria Tumarkin draws on a variety of contexts - from Chile and Bosnia to Rwanda and Russia - to reflect on the heart-breakingly difficult pursuit of justice and reconciliation in a range of post-genocidal and post-dictatorial societies.
- Publication type
- Seminar, speech or other presentation
- Source
- Paper presented at the ISR 2010 Seminar Series, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia, 17 November 2010
- Publication year
- 2010
- Keyword(s)
- Dictatorship; Genocide; Justice; Memory; Reconciliation; Society
- Publisher
- Institute for Social Research, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology
- Publisher URL
- http://www.sisr.net/events/10isrseminars.htm
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2010.
