Remarks on meeting with Joan Turner Jara
Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile, 5th October 2012
Señoras y Señores, Amigos.
Muchas gracias por estar hoy aquí.
Ladies and Gentlemen and, in particular, Joan Turner Jara. It is a privilege to be with you today at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights.
The music and words of Victor Jara have long moved me as they have moved millions throughout the world. So too have the experiences of the people of his beloved Chile of which he sung – celebrations of love and loss, marriages, births and passing on.
Returning to Chile as President of Ireland is very special to me. I have long followed closely unfolding, historic events here. And interwoven through my memories and, I would suggest, the collective memory are the songs and the poetry of this land. There is a powerful connecting sensibility that flows from common values, ideals and a shared appreciation of the soaring human spirit of individuals who touch us through their conviction, their passion and their creativity, and their courage too which I witnessed at first hand during the Plebescito in November, 1988.
Such a spirit was Victor Jara that consumed the life and the song. The power of song and of poetry to speak for the powerless, to give voice to local concerns and to move a universal audience is his legacy. We heard his song far beyond Chile.
In the Estadio de Chile, in September 1973, surely by then certain that he was facing death, Victor Jara wrote these words:
“There are five thousand of us here
in this small part of the city.
We are five thousand.
I wonder how many we are in all
the cities and in the whole country?
Here alone
are ten thousand hands which plant seeds
and make the factories run.”
Reading these words, I thought of his own beautiful hands, hands that had touched his beloved, his children, his friends; hands that had brought the mystery of music from his guitar, hands that were shattered by then. And yet when he looked about him, he thought first of all those others imprisoned with him, and his imagination soared to imagine all those others throughout Santiago, and all over Chile, who feed us and build our world with the work of their hands.
I have come here today to pay my respects to Victor Jara, but to remember too the many Chileans who inspired his songs. I also want today to commend the people of Chile for their courageous commitment, in words and deeds, to such a reconciliation as requires no amnesia on what should never be forgotten but sees even more the need for such an amnesty on events as will enable the present to be a healing one, allowing all the possibilities of the future to be realized.
In establishing Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation in 1990, the then President Aylwin said that it is “only on a foundation of truth will it be possible to meet the fundamental demands of justice and create the necessary conditions for achieving true national reconciliation.” Reconciliation, like peace building, is a process, not an event and it is a process that needs to be tended with truth and trust.
Commitment to human rights must not be allowed to become a dry statement of political aspirations, focused externally; it must be a process lived where principles are put into practice at home, and encouraged abroad. Promotion of human rights while constituting an act of solidarity also requires, in order to have authenticity, a strong and enduring commitment to turn these aspirations into guarantees.
We need a culture where respect for human rights is deeply rooted not only because these rights have an intrinsic value, but also because vindicating human rights is a critical building block to the achievement of a decent, just and stable society. There can be no room for complacency. Within all of our societies exists the challenges to reach the margins, to ensure that economic growth is an instrument for a society that is equitable and within which the interests of the most vulnerable groups are protected and promoted.
Sadly, in current times we are also reminded that in unstable political and security environments, the protection of basic human rights is at greatest risk. We see that in the plight of the people of Syria at the present time with appalling loss of life and assaults on human rights.
Chile, like Ireland, plays an active role on the international stage on human rights. Chile, like Ireland, is attached firmly to the promotion and realisation of human rights and democratic values. Chile, like Ireland, embraces fully the principles of the community of nations working together to advance the values which lie at the heart of the UN Charter.
Standing here today, and recalling the sequence of events leading to the death of Victor Jara and so many others, we commemorate the lost, the disappeared, the damaged but we also join in the call of “nunca más”, never again.
In a moving testimony to his last days, Joan Jara writes of a song that Victor was writing:
“Although it was a very beautiful song, my heart contracted as he sang it to me. I knew that Victor was writing his testament.”
Shortly before his death in September 1973, Victor Jara wrote his last poem. In a description of painful poignancy, he wrote:
Canto que mal me sales
cuando tengo que cantar espanto!
Espanto como el que vivo
como el que muero, espanto.
De verme entre tanto y tantos
momentos del infinito
en que el silencio y el grito
son las metas de este canto.
[“How hard it is to sing
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.”]
We now know that Victor’s song was not sung in vain. It was not the end of his song. I have come back here to express my gratitude to Chile for the gift of Victor Jara. I have come here as President of Ireland to say to his wife, his children and his friends, to the people of Chile: gracias for Victor Jara, gracias for the undying gift of his presence among us, gracias for the inspiration, gracias for the unquenchable songs.
And I, too, wherever the name of Victor Jara is raised, I too wish to add my voice to all those thousands who answer, with firm and unshaken hearts: Presente!
Muchísimas gracias.