Conference on transitional justice in Southasia
23-25 January, Kathmandu | Hosted by Himal Southasian and the International Center for Transitional Justice
Across Southasia, social movements have worked to demand justice and accountability during the region's darkest hours – involving pogroms against minorities; human-rights abuse in the context of armed conflict; abuse and impunity by entrenched economic elites; violence against Dalits, indigenous communities and migrants; violence against women; militaries operating with state-sanctioned impunity within and across borders; violations by armed opposition groups with little accountability to local communities; the global 'war on terror' and its perverse dynamics in the region; and forced evictions of communities by dams and mines, urban real-estate mafia, or feudal landlords.
The demand for justice is a persistent feature of the Southasian public realm. In Bangladesh, families of those killed in the Liberation War still call for acknowledgment and 'memorialisation'. The struggle against the impunity enjoyed by the masterminds of the Gujarat carnage of 2002 continues in courts in Ahmedabad and Bombay. Victims of the excesses of the long sequence of autocratic regimes in Pakistan have been calling for fundamental institutional reform of the state. Survivors of the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 in Sri Lanka continue to demand accountability and reparation. At the same time, there have been atrocities which have been neglected, such as the killing of thousands in the Assamese hamlet of Nellie in 1983.