Symposium on Advancing Effective and Comprehensive Reparation for Victims of the War in Ukraine: Towards Effective and Comprehensive Reparations in Ukraine – A Survivor-Led Perspective from The Gambia

[Sirra Ndow is Country Director of ANEKED (The Gambia). ANEKED is a victim/survivor-led organisation advancing transitional justice, reparations, and human rights advocacy through survivor-centred initiatives, and contributes to global narratives on reparative justice from a survivor perspective]

Too often, reparations processes focus on compensation, prosecutions, and institutional reforms while neglecting the lived experiences, dignity, and recognition of victims. In doing so, they risk reproducing a textbook model of justice: solid on paper, but hollow in substance.

As efforts to operationalise reparations for victims of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine begin to take shape, it is critical to examine what effective and comprehensive reparations should look like in practice. This contribution approaches that subject through the experiences of survivors in The Gambia. In a context marked by decades of human rights violations under authoritarian rule, victims and their families have had to confront not only the harms they suffered, but also the silence, delays, and structural gaps that often characterise transitional justice processes.

The experience of The Gambia’s transitional justice process, particularly through the work of victim organisations such as the African Network against Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances, (ANEKED), demonstrates that reparations must go beyond financial compensation and accountability to include recognition, memory, and victim agency. Three interconnected lessons are highlighted for Ukraine in this piece:

1. Memorialisation must be treated as a core form of reparation;
2. The importance of interim reparations, including adaptive approaches such as virtual memorialisation; and 
3. The institutionalisation of victim/survivor organisations as co-designers of the reparations process.

Memorialisation as a Core Component of Reparations, not an Afterthought

In 2018, following the end of Yahya Jammeh’s 22-year rule marked by widespread enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and other gross human rights violations, the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) was established to investigate abuses during the regime and recommend reparative measures. In its 2021 report  (Vol. 16) acknowledged the importance of memorialisation. However, it did not fully articulate how this should be implemented, nor did it prioritise its early development.

Recognising that memorialisation is often a neglected aspect of transitional justice, ANEKED initiated The Duty to Remember, the country’s first memorialisation project designed and implemented by victims themselves. The project, housed at Memory House, began even before the TRRC completed its work. 

The project is more than an exhibition. It provides a space for: recognition, where victims’ experiences are publicly acknowledged; mourning, where families of the disappeared and killed can grieve; education, where society confronts its past to promote respect for human rights and non-recurrence; and narrative ownership, where victims reclaim the power to tell their own stories.

Through visual storytelling, testimonies, and curated narratives, the project presents the collective right to know the truth not merely as a legal principle, but as a lived necessity. As one victim of enforced disappearance reflected: “For me, seeing my story here for people to see, for generations to come, makes me happy and satisfied.” This shows how recognition operates not as symbolism, but as a tangible form of satisfaction.

One of the clearest lessons from The Gambia is that memorialisation is often underestimated precisely because it is misunderstood as symbolic. For victims, however, recognition is not symbolic, it is fundamental.

For Ukraine, where the scale of harm is far more extensive and ongoing, the early integration of memorialisation into reparations frameworks would ensure that victims are seen and heard now, not only compensated later; anchor legal processes in human experience; and contribute to building a shared, evidence-based historical record.

A second lesson learnt from the Gambian example concerns the importance of interim reparations, measures that provide immediate relief and recognition while comprehensive programmes are still being developed. 

Interim Reparations and the Urgency of Recognition

In The Gambia, delays in the implementation of reparations have highlighted the risks of deferring justice. While financial compensation and institutional reforms are essential, they often take time. In the interim, victims continue to live with the consequences of harm, frequently without acknowledgment or support.

Memorialisation initiatives such as The Duty to Remember demonstrate that reparations need not be postponed until all mechanisms are in place. By providing families of victims with immediate recognition, visibility, and spaces for mourning at a time when formal reparations remained delayed, the initiative demonstrated that acknowledgment itself can serve as an urgent and meaningful form of reparation.

For Ukraine, while some initiatives have been taken such as the Bardina Law to provide support to victims of conflict related sexual violence, interim reparations should also include public acknowledgment initiatives, community-based memorialisation projects, psychosocial support programmes linked to remembrance spaces, and digital platforms for documentation and storytelling.

These measures do not replace comprehensive reparations. However, they play a critical role in preventing a harmful gap in which victims are left waiting—unrecognised and unsupported.

Virtual Memorialisation as an Adaptive Reparation in Ongoing Conflict

In Ukraine’s current context marked by ongoing hostilities, mass displacement, and damaged infrastructure, virtual memorialisation is not only innovative, but a necessity. ANEKED’s experience with the digital and storytelling components of The Duty to Remember demonstrates how memorialisation can be decentralised, accessible, and survivor-led, even in resource-constrained and unsafe environments.

First, virtual platforms enable immediate and almost borderless recognition. Victims’ stories can be shared in real time and accessed by displaced populations, diaspora communities, and the international public.

“Through the power of technology, we are preserving our collective stories, the story of Gambians and other West African victims during the Yahya Jammeh regime. By doing so, we ensure that as many people as possible know what happened in Gambia and that the injustices are not erased from collective memory”,

said Nana-Jo N’dow, Founder and Executive Director of ANEKED. Recognition, in this sense, does not have to wait until after the end of hostilities.

Second, virtual memorials support survivor-led storytelling. By allowing victims and families to upload testimonies, photographs, and narratives, such platforms shift control over memory away from institutions and towards those directly affected. This is particularly important in Ukraine, where competing narratives heighten the risk of distortion and erasure.

Third, virtual memorialisation can be integrated with existing reparations mechanisms. It can provide a human-facing dimension to technical processes such as claims registration, linking documentation with personal narratives, with appropriate safeguards and consent.

Fourth, digital spaces can contribute to psychosocial support and community-building. Virtual remembrance walls, commemorative events, and storytelling platforms can foster solidarity among victims and provide entry points to support services. ANEKED achieved this through the virtual version of The Duty to Remember, which enabled survivors and families in the diaspora to connect with and engage in one another’s stories, expanding the community of remembrance and solidarity beyond national borders.

Finally, virtual memorialisation offers flexibility and scalability. It can evolve over time, expand to include new categories of harm, and serve educational purposes across different audiences.

Practical models for Ukraine could include a national digital memorial platform hosting verified and community-submitted testimonies; interactive memory maps linking stories to specific locations and incidents; thematic digital exhibitions (e.g., enforced disappearances, attacks on civilians); virtual “memory rooms” inspired by physical spaces (such as Memory House in The Gambia); and hybrid approaches linking digital initiatives to future physical memorials.

Virtual memorialisation should not be viewed merely as a temporary substitute for physical sites. Rather, it offers a strategic complement—one that can expand participation, democratise memory, and ensure continuity of recognition in both conflict and post-conflict settings. At the same time, such initiatives must be designed with safeguards against disinformation, manipulated content, and digital exclusion, particularly for older victims and those in rural communities who may face limited access to internet connectivity and technology. 

The Institutionalisation of Victim/Survivor Organisations as Co-Designers

A final and perhaps most critical lesson concerns who drives the reparations process. In The Gambia, memorialisation initiatives were not conceived by the state or external actors. They were designed and implemented by victims themselves through ANEKED and other victim organisations. This demonstrates how victims can move beyond being passive beneficiaries of reparations to becoming active designers and implementers. ANEKED’s leadership illustrates the importance of institutionalising victim/survivor organisations as co-designers of the reparations process. This is not merely about consultation: it is about embedding victims within the structures that shape decisions.

This approach offers several advantages. First, victim-led organisations are trusted by their communities and have a deep understanding of survivors’ needs and priorities, ensuring that reparations are grounded in their lived realities. Second, it enhances legitimacy and trust in transitional justice mechanisms. Third, it enables innovation, including the development of initiatives such as memorialisation that may fall outside formal state processes but are essential to victims.

In The Gambia, ANEKED did not only advocate for memorialisation, it implemented it. This demonstrates that victim organisations can serve not only as stakeholders, but as partners in delivery.

In Ukraine, where civil society has already demonstrated significant capacity in documenting violations and supporting victims, there is a strong foundation for adopting a similar model; however, this requires moving beyond consultation towards formalised roles. Institutionalising this approach would involve including victim/survivor organisations in governance structures, providing funding and support, and creating formal mechanisms for co-design and implementation.

Without such measures, participation risks remaining consultative rather than transformative. By contrast, institutionalisation ensures that reparations are not only delivered to victims, but shaped with and by them.

It is very important to highlight that victims as partners in memorialisation can present challenges for certain categories of victims such as perpetrators turned victims that usually emerge in protracted conflicts. How would a victim feel about the story of their perpetrator becoming a victim themselves? This is a difficult question that we are still trying to answer in The Gambia. Victims in Ukraine need to prepare and recognise they may not necessarily be a homogeneous group.

Measuring Reparations Through Victims’ Experiences

The experience of The Gambia suggests that the effectiveness of reparations cannot be measured solely by the number of claims processed, amount of compensation distributed, or how sophisticated the legal frameworks are. They must also be assessed through the experiences of victims – Do they feel recognised and included in shaping the process? Do they see their stories reflected? Are they experiencing a sense of progress? Memorialisation, interim reparations, and survivor-led approaches all contribute to answering these questions in the affirmative.

What has emerged in the Gambian context demonstrates that reparations are most effective when they are holistic, inclusive, and based in the lived realities of victims. Memorialisation must be recognised as a core component of reparations. Interim reparations must be prioritised to ensure that recognition is not delayed. And victims’ organisations must have a seat at the design table.

For Ukraine, the challenge is not only to build robust institutional mechanisms, but to ensure that these mechanisms are meaningful to those they are intended to serve. As ANEKED’s work illustrates, reparations do not begin with compensation or the construction of monuments. They begin with recognition, by preserving victims’ stories and ensuring that their experiences actively shape the justice landscape.

Photo attribution: “A scenic view of a city with a river running through it” is by “Wolfgang Hasslemann“