Brussels, 18-19 May 2015
On 18 and 19 May 2015, in Brussels, the Belgian organisation RCN Justice & Démocratie held an exchange seminar with different stakeholders working on memory and dealing with the past. The title of the seminar was “How do we deal with the competition, confrontation and confusion of memories?”. We were invited to present our work with veterans. A number of other organisations also presented their activities: Documenta from Zagreb, Healing through remembering from Northern Ireland, Sustainable Democracy Centre from Lebanon, MemoriaLAB from the Basque Country/Spain and Music Action International from the UK. There were some 30-35 participants from a number of European countries, mostly from Belgium.
We discussed ways of addressing conflicting memories, about how memory activities can contribute to dialogue and peacebuilding, and about who, why and when should initiate memory activities, i.e. when is it too early, and when is it too late to start working on official interpretations of the past, why, or for whom do we work when we are dealing with the past, who do we not manage to reach, what about those whose voices are not heard, how to deal with trauma, and many other issues. The seminar was short given the number of topics. Still, meetings such as this one are very valuable, because opportunities for exchange with people who work in the same field, but in different contexts are quite rare.
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