Soldier Repatriation by Martinsen Kaare Dahl;

Author:Martinsen, Kaare Dahl;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Memory Activists

A major difference among the three countries has been the role played by pressure groups seeking to have the war dead officially recognised. The groups consist of what’s been called memory activists: men and women bonded by a common experience (Winter 2006: 136). They have had a clear agenda: to gain official recognition for those killed in Afghanistan. Their ability to succeed has depended on several factors. First and foremost is the extent to which they receive official support, and next is whether their agenda corresponds with the official framing of the war. Any gap between those who have served in the war and the politicians in charge makes it difficult to agree on a suitable form of commemoration. Conflicting views on the overall war aims are not the main problem. More vexing is the potential for disagreement over reality on the ground in Afghanistan.

In Britain, there has been little such discord. Points of contention have included the lack of adequate military equipment and the failure to invest sufficiently in Afghan. But all these issues were debated in Parliament and the media, and none was sufficiently potent to derail the official version of the war as a necessary and justifiable response to al Qaida, or the need to honour the dead. In the official frame of view, the soldiers killed in Afghanistan dead are no different from the men and women in service who died in wars before them. Therefore, the main tenet of commemoration ceremonies has been continuity. The inscription on the Cenotaph – ‘The Glorious Dead’ – applies no less to the Afghanistan dead than to those who fell in Flanders almost a century ago.

In Denmark, by contrast, the early years of the Afghanistan war passed with no official commemoration of the dead – no memorial day, no monument. The Blue Berets, the Danish organisation for international operations veterans, has pressed since the Iraq War for some sort of public recognition of Danish fatalities sustained abroad. It cannot have been an arduous task, since the group’s wish corresponded to the political agenda of the government. Danish officials have long understood the importance of a highly visible armed forces to make plain the country’s change in security policy. When the Blue Berets proposed a memorial for those killed in international operations in 2002, the Minister of Defence included them in the planning process (Jensby 2002). As the war ground on, Denmark would establish both a memorial day and a monument, as we shall see.

Germany was a different case in that the pressure for recognition not only failed to correspond with the official version of the war, but actually contradicted it. The original German memory activists were the soldiers on active duty in Afghanistan who created their own makeshift memorial. Unlike the Danish soldiers, however, they played no coherent or visible role in efforts to have a memorial erected at home. That process, as will be shown, was conducted within the Ministry of Defence, and mainly behind closed doors. There are two veterans’ associations in Germany.

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