Chilean Refugees and the World University Service (HN)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

General Pinochet's aerial bombardment of the Presidential Palace, La Moneda, in the centre of Santiago de Chile on 11 September 1973 was an iconic moment in contemporary Latin American history. It resonated around the globe, signalling a brutal end to Salvador Allende's proposed democratic road to socialism. Pinochet's regime was one of a series of violent dictatorships in the region. In 1976 a coup in neighbouring Argentina led to a military dictatorship where many fleeing Chileans again found themselves persecuted. The images of Pinochet's bombing of the Moneda Palace shook left-wing hopes to the core not only in the Americas but also in Europe. Between the mid 1970s and the mid 1980s, a significant amount of effort and financial support was dedicated by UK organizations to the rescue of Chileans from political persecution in Pinochet's Chile. The World University Service (WUS) was central to this process. Its actions, in conjunction with a number of related organizations, can now be seen as the beginning of co-ordinated refugee policy in the UK.This project aims to establish a network to investigate the role of the World University Service (WUS) in assisting Chileans fleeing political persecution, to analyse a representative sample of WUS exile experiences, and to evaluate the lessons of the program for refugee and exile policy today. Working with the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, or Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMDH), in Santiago de Chile, we shall record and analyse the experiential memories of these exiles, now in their sixties, seventies and even eighties, before it is too late to do so.Our goals are:1. to assist the MMDH in expanding their collection of exile memories by enhancing a currently understudied Chile-UK dimension;2. to assist the MMDH in promoting peace and tolerance via greater social awareness of exile testimony and experiences;3. to establish a network able to design and deliver a larger, oral history project on Chilean exiles in the UK;4. to draw out potential policy reflections relevant to the present moment.Most refugee initiatives are evaluated within the relatively short time frame of five years. In the case of Chileans fleeing the Pinochet coup, however, a unique opportunity presents itself to examine their experiences of up to four decades of exile, as well as the experiences of those exiles who returned home. We thus have a chance to examine and reflect on long-term strategies for countries that have lost or are losing citizens to exile. Our project demonstrates how they might publicly recognize such experiences, incorporate them into a more cohesive society, and acknowledge them in national memory narratives.