The Ungrateful Dead:
In Search of International Justice
Narrated by Peter Gabriel
Director's Notes
Throughout my years as a documentary filmmaker, I have often focused my camera on corners of the world where citizens live in daily dread of tyrants. Consequently, I have been witness to many crazy worlds - where people are dropped from helicopters (Argentina: the Dirty War); where breasts and testicles are cut off, and unborn babies hacked from their mothers' bellies (Guatemala); and where new forms of atrocity are invented ('The Disappeared in Chile, and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Kosovo).
During those years the idea of justice seemed just a dream. Dictators were not held accountable for their crimes. Impunity was the order of the day. The concept of international justice had died after the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials, and for the next 50 years Cold War politics would stymie all efforts to resurrect it. Powerful nations were unwilling to yield their sovereign rights.
It was dangerous work and I too learnt how it feels to live in fear - to have a gun at your head, to receive death threats, to be tailed and to be arrested. I took risks because I thought it was important to bring back the voices of the voiceless - to tell the stories of the repressed, the tortured and the dead. It was not much, but it was all that could be done in those years.
Little did I know how resilient and ceaseless these voices would prove.
They became a 'choir from the mass graves' that would not stop calling. Thousands of 'voices' echoing down through the decades. Victim's choruses - from many parts of the world - refusing to be silent, even in death. Joined by other voices - those of relatives unable to give up their searches, unable to move on until they found out how their loved ones died. Different languages, but echoing the same universal theme: begging to be delivered from the torment of living somewhere between life and death. Telling us that they will finally rest when we find out how they died. Insisting we listen.il
It is because of these 'voices' that international justice has been reborn.
In 2002 the International Criminal Court was established in the Hague, to try war criminals everywhere. So far 100 countries have ratified the Court's mandate. In October 2005 the Court issued its first indictments - against leaders of a brutal cult, the Lords' Resistance Army, who force children to fight and terrorize the people of Northern Uganda. In March 2006 warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo from the Democratic Republic of Congo was brought to the Hague and charged with recruiting children and forcing them to fight.
Finally, tyrants will no longer free to commit atrocity at will. Now they will be haunted by the voices of the victims. Now they can no longer escape those voices that have refused to be silent until justice is obtained for crimes against humanity.
Many of those who suffered feel that we are truly entering a brave new world.