Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy Rodolfo Palominos.
Chile finally has a museum dedicated to the victims of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, and unsurprisingly, the timing of its opening--before an election--and whether the museum is doing an appropriate job of speaking for the victims and their families are both the subjects of debate. I visited Santiago in 2004 and the fact that the only exhibit I could find on Pinochet's regime at the time was tucked away in an anteroom at the Estación Central. I learned as much about the dictatorship from that small display as I did from listening to an astronomy professor who'd spent much of the dictatorship abroad on what he called a "Pinochet fellowship," an academic position created to enable him to stay out of Chile during a time when it was dangerous to be there. It seemed an odd omission to me, but then, it's a country where during the 1989 Presidential elections, some of the hot campaigning took the form of folks scrambling to spray-paint messages on strategically placed rocks along the highway. The conversation is elliptical rather than direct.
The whole uproar makes me consider to what extent museums of atrocities exist for people like me, who want to learn, and to what extent if any they offer comfort to the people who were victimized by regimes gone far enough away that their crimes can be documented and displayed. Certainly, I think the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, serves some of the latter function: Jews are sufficiently dispersed that it makes sense to have multiple sites for education, remembrance, and mourning. I didn't get a chance to really discuss with any Cambodians whether Tuol Sleng, founded as a museum by the invading Vietnamese army as a way to discredit the regime they were ousting, was remotely useful for them. And ultimately, I'm not sure whose concerns should be weighed more. I think it's probably much better to have sites open where tourists can learn more in formerly traumatized countries, and to have those sites feel like compulsory stops on any tour, rather than to have folks wiffle through completely unaware. But I do think it's important that those exhibitions be good, and that relevant, and representative groups be consulted in their design and maintenance. I don't think not trying to tell the truth is an option.