A buried past
埋葬过去

NGOs in Lebanon want to dig up mass graves from the civil war
黎巴嫩非政府组织要求挖掘内战时期的集体坟墓

Will their efforts heal or reopen old wounds?
此举会愈合，还是重揭旧伤疤？

Jul 5th 2018 | BEIRUT
2018年7月5日  贝鲁特

LINA MAHFOUZ was six years old when Lebanon’s civil war began. She remembers hearing screams outside her bedroom window. One evening she saw a man in black carrying what looked like a dead body into the orange grove behind her home. “Years later I realised what they were doing. They were torturing and then burying people in the orchard,” she says. “The bodies are there.”
据英国《经济学人》7月5日的消息：黎巴嫩内战爆发时，莉娜•马哈福兹才6岁。她还记得从卧室窗外传来的尖叫声。有天晚上，她甚至看见一名黑衣男子好像拖着一副尸体走进她家后面的柑橘园。“多年之后，我才明白他们当时的所作所为。他们在果园中拷打并活埋他人，”她说。“尸体就在那儿。”

It has been nearly 30 years since the civil war ended. But thousands of people are still missing. Most are probably dead: killed in Syrian prisons, dumped in the Mediterranean or buried in one of more than 100 mass graves dug by sectarian militias. The men who started the war also negotiated the peace, granting themselves amnesty for their crimes. Many are still in power. The government has had scant interest in digging up the past.
尽管内战结束已将近30年，但仍有成千上万人下落不明。大多数人应该是丧生：受害者在叙利亚监狱内被杀害，而后被丢在地中海或埋在由教派民兵挖掘的百余座集体坟墓中。内战的发起者，同样是缔结和平条约的谈判者，对自己所犯的罪行已进行了特赦。许多人仍大权在握。政府对重翻旧帐的兴趣不大。

But several Lebanese NGOs think bringing up the bodies will provide closure to the families of the missing. They support a bill that would establish an independent commission to investigate the fate of the missing, protect and exhume mass graves, and return the bodies to their families. One of the NGOs, Act for the Disappeared, has found 111 burial sites, 23 of which are in Beirut. The International Committee of the Red Cross has begun collecting samples of saliva from relatives to identify bodies.
但黎巴嫩数家非政府组织认为，对下落不明者的家属而言，找到尸体才算是“善终”。一项法案法案提议建立一个独立委员会来调查失踪人口的下落，保护和挖掘集体坟墓，并将尸体归还给下落不明者的家属。这项法案受到了黎巴嫩数家非政府组织的支持。一个名为 “为失踪者行动”的非政府组织发现了111个埋葬点，其中23个位于贝鲁特。红十字国际委员会已开始从受害者亲属那里收集唾液样本，以确定尸体身份。

Finding the bodies is becoming harder, as memories fade, and graves are not always protected. The orange grove next to Ms Mahfouz’s home was chopped down to make way for apartment blocks. Building firms often burn human remains when they stumble on them or bury them under building foundations. Some militias dumped bodies in cemeteries, mixing them with the bones of others. Religious authorities that control the cemeteries don’t want to reveal atrocities committed by their own side. When the police get their hands on bodies they sometimes rebury them in unmarked graves, for lack of space in morgues.
由于记忆的淡去和集体坟墓并未一直处于被保护状态，寻找尸体正变得越来越困难。为建造公寓小区，马哈福兹家附近的柑橘林已被砍倒。在意外发现尸骨后，建筑公司往往直接把它们烧毁或埋在地基。一些民兵将发现的尸体混同他人的一起丢弃在公墓。控制墓地的宗教当局不希望将自己曾犯下的暴行公布于众。即便警察是处理尸体，他们也往往只是把它们重新埋葬在没有标记的坟墓里，因为停尸房没有足够的空间。

Politicians argue that digging up the dead will reopen old wounds. Many fear being called to account for past crimes so the draft law does not mention justice. Assad Chaftari, once head of intelligence for a Christian militia, sees the benefit of exhuming the bodies. “If we don’t speak of the wounds of the past then we are passing the suffering, the pain and the anger to the next generation.”
许多政府官员认为，挖出逝者会重揭旧伤疤。许多人害怕的是，他们被指出来要对过去的罪行负责，所以法律草案并没有提及到审判。一个基督教民兵组织情报部部长阿萨德•查法塔利（Assad Chaftari）提到了挖出尸体的意义。“如果我们不谈及过去的创伤，那么我们将把灾难、痛苦和愤怒留给下一代。”（译：龚嘉诚）

https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21745578-will-their-efforts-heal-or-reopen-old-wounds-ngos-lebanon-want-dig-up-mass