ing the significance of rights in general, including, of course, the rights of victims, thereby strengthening the status of victims not just as victims but as rights holders).45 Collective reparations are not only symbolic; some are material, as when a school or a hospital is built as reparations, and for the sake of a particular group.46 Collective material reparations are constantly at risk of not being seen as reparations at all or of having minimal reparative capacity. Part of the problem is that they do not target victims specifically. Collective programmes that distribute material goods frequently concentrate on “non-excludable goods,” i.e., goods that, once made available, it is difficult to keep others from consuming. If a collective reparations programme builds a hospital or a road, it is clear that victims and non-victims alike will use them. Non-victims cannot be excluded. It is not obvious how these goods can enhance the victims’ sense of recognition. Why would they think that they are getting these goods in recognition of the fact that their fundamental rights were violated? The problem is compounded by the fact that such collective programmes tend to distribute goods that are not only non-excludable, but also basic, as happens when reparations programmes become folded into development programmes. Governments in developing countries facing demands for reparations are strongly inclined to argue that development is reparation.47 Even when this is not in fact a ploy to call existing development programmes “reparations” and a means not to spend any resources on reparations, it warrants close scrutiny. Most development programmes concentrate on the production and provision of basic goods, which all citizens are entitled to as citizens. Making them available to victims is an ordinary obligation and function of the State that cannot count as reparation. Beneficiaries perceive them, correctly, as programmes that distribute goods to which they have rights as citizens, and not necessarily as victims. It may be argued that the benefits provided by these development/“reparations” programmes in contexts of deprivation are not accessible to many citizens, and that making them available, say, in areas formerly affected by violence constitutes a benefit. As a result of prioritizing investment in these areas, the argument goes, victims have access to basic services before other citizens. This is true. The lingering challenge, however, is that since the benefit is not the goods themselves, but the temporal ordering of their distribution, once the ordering becomes irrelevant, as when the goods in question become generally available, the benefit dissipates. 45 46 47 See Pablo de Greiff, “The role of apologies in national reconciliation processes”, in The Age of Apology, Mark Gibney and others, eds. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, for example, in the Case of Aloeboetoe et al. v. Suriname, ordered the Government of Suriname to reopen and staff a school and to make a medical dispensary operational as an act of reparation for the attack on 20 members of the Saramaka tribe. Judgement of 10 September 1993, Ser. C, No. 15. This was the case in South Africa and in Peru. See, for instance, Christopher Colvin, “Overview of the reparations program in South Africa”, in The Handbook… 26