60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

48 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
taken up with much more continuity. This is the case with the Cambodian
villagers described by Ebihara and Ledgerwood (2002): even
though problems, including physical and psychological pain, persist,
the community here seem to have taken up their lives again without
much apparent change. A similar experience is reported by Manz
(2002) from another peasant community. However, in the Maya village
of Santa Maria Tzejá in Guatemala, more elaborate ways of dealing
with the past are evident. They range from silence to testimony,
from enactment to healing practices. In this way, we are reminded
of the complex and manifold ways and processes involved in ‘coping’
with the consequences of mass violence. Signifi cantly, the enactment
of the peasants’ experience, in the form of a play staged by village
teenagers, took its title from Matthew 10, verse 26: There is Nothing
Concealed That Will Not Be Discovered (Manz 2002: 393).