Building Trust for Truth-Telling Among Former Child Soldiers: Animation for Inclusion and Peacebuilding in Colombia

Building Trust for Truth-Telling is an arts-based project which facilitates the inclusion of former child soldiers, and guarantees the representation of their voices, in Colombia's official narrative of the civil war. It is a collaboration between the Colombian Truth Commission, universities, grassroots civil society organizations and artists from the UK and Colombia. The Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Coexistence, and Non-Repetition in Colombia (the 'Commission') has recognised it has an urgent evidence deficit. The Commission has asked us for help to approach former child soldiers, in particular, and has asked us to work with this group, using co-production techniques, to capture their history, to elicit testimony and provide concrete recommendations for the non-repetition of conflict. This project is therefore intended to build trust and foster the inclusion of the marginalised voices of these former child soldiers through creative methods. Specifically, our aim is threefold:

(a) to provide the Commission with testimony based on life-story narrative exchanges/interviews for inclusion in its official report and in so doing also capture the history of an important event ('Operation Berlin' see below), largely ignored in the historical archive to date.

(b) to reflect upon the efficacy of co-production techniques to engage with the legacy of sensitive historical moments in, and ultimately beyond, Colombia.

(c) to use these reflections to inform an animation based on the collected testimonies and build a tool for peace-building education purposes, on which recommendations for non-repetition reconciliation can be made, promoted and consolidated more widely.

Testimony will be elicited via a series of arts-based workshops in which participants will both interview and be interviewed among themselves. By encouraging participation in these exchanges, we will create a safe space in which confidence and resilience can be built with others, who share similar stories.

The project will give special attention to testimony on 'Operation Berlin.' In 2000, the Colombian army launched an attack against the Arturo Ruiz column of the FARC outside the town of Tibú in the north east of the country. More than 20 child soldiers were killed in the attack, but the facts about what happened remain unclear, and the army has been accused of covering up the atrocity. At least 10 survivors of this incident have committed to taking part in our project. These participants will be sharing their stories at an official level for the first time.

Colombia's sustained violence 'shapes not only how external actors perceive Colombia, but how individuals and communities perceive themselves, construct memories and identity, and create and share beliefs and values' (Dancey and Morrison, 2019, p.34). It has created what Steiner (2005) terms a 'negative identity' and not only causes trauma in individual lives, but also restricts the Colombian people's ability to 'imagine a different future' (Sanford, 2006, Dancey et al, 2019).

Artistic and cultural interventions seek to engender peace and reconciliation through encouraging the creation of 'new imaginaries', of new ways for groups of people to think about society, captured in images and stories (Taylor, 2004).

The focus of peace-building projects, particularly those working with young people, often aims to place an emphasis on the importance of new narratives, which stay close to the participants' voices and offer strategies for resilience, whilst also acknowledging the legacy of violence. Our intention in the project is to stay as close to the participants' voices and stories of lived experience as possible, whilst also creating a safe space for critical reflection on the legacy of the past for participants today. In so doing, our research will make an urgent, and necessary, contribution to Colombia's peace process, and research on arts-based coproduction in peace-building.