For the past decades, Lebanon has witnessed recurring episodes of violence. The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and post-war period induced numerous Human Rights violations. A general amnesty law for war crimes issued in 1991, granted amnesty to the majority of Lebanese war protagonists leaving most of the Human Rights violations unaddressed. In this context, civil society actors have been inaugurating several initiatives addressing the contested past. Nevertheless, implementing organisations and activists frequently are not aware of each other’s projects and rarely work together. An overview and mapping of past and present projects of dealing with the past in Lebanon is missing.
In 2015, with the support of AUB’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies, forumZFD begun a mapping of initiatives addressing the past in Lebanon, which was concluded by Lebanon Support in 2018. Using a coding framework based on the swisspeace’s Conceptual Framework for Dealing with the Past adopted to fit the Lebanese context, a total of 156 initiatives between 1990 and 2017 have been mapped, 47 of them still ongoing. The resulting database is easily accessible online, and serves as a tool for various actors to get an overview of efforts and initiatives that have already taken place in Lebanon.
On the 18th of September 2018, alongside the database, an infographic (also available in Arabic) and a report (also available in Arabic) summarising the key findings was launched, making the information even more easily accessible. The event brought together Dealing with the Past practitioners and activists, and served as an outreach to raise awareness of existing as well as lacking efforts in the process of Dealing with the Past in Lebanon.
To find out more about this project, please find the forumZFD one-pager here!