Transitional Justice in Afghanistan
Transitional Justice in Afghanistan
Barnett R. Rubin (Director of Studies and Senior Fellow, Center on International Cooperation, New York University)
Date: 3 February 2003Time: 6:00 PM
Finishes: 3 February 2003Time: 7:00 PM
Venue: Brunei GalleryRoom: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre
Type of Event: Lecture
Series: Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture
Lecture Notes by Barnett R. Rubin
As I look around the room today, I see many faces that are both familiar and unfamiliar. Familiar, because, for most of those I know here, our common engagement with the agonies and hopes of the people of Afghanistan first brought us together, and, through long periods of separation and even at times, disengagement, has repeatedly thrown us back together. Unfamiliar, because the faces I first met, if I may put it tactfully, are not precisely those I see today. Nearly half my life has passed since the Sawr Revolution of April 1978, and it has been twenty years since I first interviewed an Afghan refugee, a defecting police colonel, about violations of human rights in that country, and sent the transcript to the research department of Amnesty International.
As time passes, so do all living beings, men and women among them, some by age, some by the gun or the bomb, as in the case of Sayd Bahauddin Majrooh, assassinated in Peshawar fifteen years ago this month, and some, like our friend Anthony Hyman, by premature illness that robs us of the time whose passing so many of us see in each other here this evening. It honors me, and I am grateful, that those who knew him best, most of all Hillary, his wife, Elizabeth Winter, his friend, whom I first met at his house, and David Page of SOAS, his long-time friend, whom I met at Lyse Doucet’s home, have asked me to deliver this lecture in his honor, at this institution, where Anthony and I met for the first time, and where I attended his memorial service in February 2000. Meeting in such a place and on such an occasion we miss his insight, his hesitant eloquence, his irony, and his friendship. We wish we could know what Anthony might contribute to our thoughts on the subjects we are to address tonight. But we may also speculate that if Anthony or some transformation of him knew of our assembly, he might take some comfort from the fact that, without his memory and what it has inspired in us, there would be no such occasion to consider these matters...
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