war Archives - annabel smith

Within 48 hours of arriving in Guatemala I had learned more about justice, genocide and journalism than all my English education had taught me. You bet I was cheering last week when the former dictator was jailed for 80 years.

There was chaos in Guatemala City when I landed in July 2003 – streets crowded with demonstrators and traffic at a standstill. The radio in my hotel told me the crowds were supporters of Efrain Rios Montt – former President, military dictator and commander of the government forces responsible for the worst excesses of Guatemala’s thirty-six year civil war.

What? A man accused of genocide – why would anyone want him back?

Heading out of town I saw posters, slogans and flags of rival political parties festooned across streets and painted on the road. Buses roared past on their way to the city to register candidates for the upcoming local elections. Perhaps the same buses that had carried the angry mobs into the capital the day before?

In 2003 Guatemala was still off the main tourist track. Guide books made scant mention of the civil war and few people strayed into the indigenous communities that were targeted in the genocide. My guide Ruben showed me things I would have missed, like the small crosses scattered across the cemetery, marking the civil war graves. Many more bodies lay in unmarked mass graves, their location still secret 10 years after the end of war.

I asked Ruben if the war had been in his village. He said yes: his people had supported the rebels and so US-backed government forces had moved in with helicopters and small planes and carried out a scorched earth campaign. Unable to defeat the rebels, the army simply targeted the communities that sustained them. Witness testimonies record villagers being terrorized, raped, tortured and killed indiscriminately.

He came home from school one day to see a truck full of boys from his village being taken away. He ran. His friends were forced to join the army and become executioners of their own people.

When the peace accords were signed in 1994 two international commissions were established to investigate the truth of the struggle between successive military regimes and leftist guerillas. Both reports held government forces responsible for over 89% of the 200,000 deaths and 45,000 disappearances.

In 2003 the generals were still in prison, but not for much longer. I arrived just as many peoples’ worst fears seemed to be being realized and the past, in the form of Rios Montt, looked set to return.

When I asked Ruben about the demonstration in the capital he smiled patiently. They were paid. Most of the demonstrators did not even know why they were there. It was true, though, that in many rural areas, including those where the terror had been worst, Montt was the candidate of choice.

His political party, the Columbian drug cartel-funded FRG, was the only one that identified with the poor. Eight million Guatemalans lived in the countryside, 60% below the poverty line. Widespread illiteracy, no media and an almost passionate determination to bury the past meant that most people knew nothing of Montt’s history. What they did know was that he promised cheap fertiliser, free health care, new schools and land reform. None of the other parties even pretended to care about the poor. Of course the stakes were lower for them – without Presidential immunity, Montt knew that his crimes would catch up with him. As they did, last week.

I saw the poverty. Six and seven year old boys in orange wigs and face paint juggling fruit at intersections in hope of winning a few quetzales from hard-faced motorists who wound up their windows against them. Tiny children who made toys out of garbage; teenagers who risked their lives taking dares from passers-by. There were 6,000 children living on the streets of the capital in 2003 and persistent rumours that private security groups were hired to shoot them because they were bad for business.

I never ‘did’ Latin America, presumably because it was never ‘ours’. When I left school I could not even have found Guatemala on the map. Without time on the ground, Ruben, the writings of Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu and considerable research I would still have no idea why last week’s verdict was historic and monumental.

I also never once considered that the BBC could simply be wrong.

School trips are often memorable for the wrong reasons, but sometimes chance encounters bring lessons that could never be learned in a classroom.

History is full of wars. Sometimes I felt that I dispatched thousands to their deaths before break, then thousands more after lunch. I used poetry, photographs, music and diaries to try to bring soldiers to life, but as my students continued to write sentences such as “unfortunately 6 million people died” I knew I’d failed.

I had no experience of war, but I had studied many. The first World War always seemed different. My grandfather fought first to last but never spoke of it, instead bringing home a puppy from one of the smashed French farms, a tiny creature forced to stand symbol for all that could not be said. My father used to tell me about walking past the Star and Garter Home in Richmond as a boy, and seeing the old soldiers, many of them in their twenties and thirties, staring and gently rocking.

When my father died, it was the First World War I couldn’t teach: weeks later I was unable to speak of the futile deaths and wasted lives without facing the window, tears running down my face. There was something utter about the loss of humanity that allowed that pointless war to continue. I am not saying that it was a worse war than the Second World War, or any subsequent or previous wars, but for me, blessed with the infinite privilege of not having lived through one in my country, it was the war that taught me about war.

In fact it was a school trip to the war graves that taught me what even the best book could not, and taught my students too.

July, skylarks, a perfect, timeless summer day. We set off from London early, by bus and channel tunnel, my mind on lunches, lists and toilets. We took all of Year 11 who had ‘done’ the war, but were mostly excited by a day off school. Our first stop was the cemetery at Tyne Cot, Belgium, close to where the three battles of Ypres had been fought.

The visitor centre was yet to be built, so once everyone was off the bus I was suddenly able to take in my surroundings: more than 10,000 identical white headstones, row on row, each planted with a single rose, framed by manicured grass and an unbroken blue sky. It was impossibly beautiful.

My students walked round solemnly, reading inscriptions – thousands ‘known only to God’ – and talking in whispers. The air was still and heavy; there was something of church about it.

Suddenly a bus pulled up and tens of tiny Belgian children tumbled out and started zooming around across the grass. They shouted and screamed, ran around, pushed one another, and pretended to be airplanes. My students were horrified. They rushed to me, begging me to do something – I didn’t need to be told twice! I too was appalled that this sacred place had been so violated and was ready to give the children’s teachers a piece of my mind.

Before I had the chance they approached, smiling, and said, in perfect English: “We hope you will understand: these children live in the villages and we bring them here so they aren’t afraid of all the graves and dead people.

So many of the men buried here were so young that they died before they were married; we think they would like to hear the children’s voices.”

Later in the day we saw the small piles in the corners of the fields where the farmers place the unexploded ordinance they still turn up. Here, where Passchendaele’s mud devoured more men than both sides’ bullets, bodies still sometimes rise to the surface.

The German cemeteries tell their own story. No flowers, few individual gravestones, dark, shady trees providing cover. How much courage it must have taken to visit your son or husband buried deep in enemy soil.

There may be no more important work a teacher can do than help their students understand the reality of war, whether by letting those with first hand experience tell their stories, or by going to the places where wars are not History yet.

So don’t lock down the curriculum, force everyone through assessment hoops and slash budgets: make space and time for us to stand back, so war can teach itself.