Power of Apology – Righting Wrongs

On a summery February morning this year, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged an apology to the 'stolen generations' of his country's aboriginal population. And the world sat up and listened.

The Prime Minister addressed the blemished chapter of his nation's history that practised social engineering through the forcible separation of aboriginal children from their families and their assimilation into the white society. "We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians," he said. By reflecting on the past of a wronged people, Kevin Rudd renewed his nation's future and chalked out a new road to reconciliation. The visuals of a teary-eyed elderly aboriginal woman embracing the Prime Minister, after his poignant apology, struck a telling point to the world riveted in conflicts from the past and the present. It required a great deal of moral courage to apologise for a historical wrong on behalf of an entire nation, and Rudd did.

A few months later, in July 2008, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, after sustained reportage on the Bosnian concentration camps in the early 1990s, revisited Bosnia in the wake of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the man who orchestrated the Bosnian War crimes. Vulliamy recounted his meeting with Fikret Alic, the survivor from the Tronopolje concentration camp, in his Guardian article "I am waiting, No one has ever said sorry". It was the emaciated picture of Fikret Alic that became the iconic image of genocide and served as a wake up call to the world to end the pogrom in Bosnia. Vulliamy quotes Fikret Alic in the article: 'No one has ever said sorry for what they did. I don't know what it is about these people - I can show you five killers any time we go to Prijedor. Either they are proud of what they did, or pretend it did not happen. I am waiting for someone to admit what they did, or apologise, but they do not, they never will.'

When Kevin Rudd proclaimed "We say sorry" to Australia's aborigines, half way around the world, Fikret Alic, like other survivors and victims, yearned for an apology, to vindicate their suffering.

And somewhere in Turkey, a writer wanted his country to apologise for the massacre of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Orhan Pamuk, the writer, was persecuted for "insulting Turkish identity." He was branded an enemy of the State.

Every grave, human-inflicted misery has carried with it an iconic image of suffering. Though these sufferings are spatially and temporally disconnected, the humiliation and pain they inflicted is essentially the same. Putrid memories of victim hood invariably carry with it burning memories of humiliation. Be they the terror-stricken image of Qutubuddin Ansari with folded palms, pleading for life during the Godhra riots in India, or the image of a naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc with a burnt back running hysterically after the Napalm attack in South Vietnam or the image of an emaciated Fikret Alic standing behind a barbed fence in a Tronopolje concentration camp in Bosnia ---- they are the images of terrible crimes against humanity that should not have happened.

It is the time of the year when we revisit the checkered history of human rights with its human wrongs. At the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a retrospection of the traversed path tempts us to reckon the number of unuttered apologies that may have healed scarred memories. Human rights are not just commemorative rights. They are not about covenants and conventions. They are also about acknowledging historical wrongs. That would be the first step towards reconciliation.

No apology is intense enough to undo the scars of the wrongs done. But every apology is powerful enough to secure the present and the future, by making it inclusive for the survivors. For them, it is an exercise in reclamation of a hijacked past and an obscure future.
"When there was everything to be done, we pretended to know nothing. Today, when there is so little left to do, we want to know everything" wrote Ed Vulliamy in his accounts on the Bosnian genocide.

The survivors are indeed waiting, in the submerged river valleys, behind the battlefronts, and in bunkers, for someone to say sorry.

Power of Apology – Righting Wrongs

On a summery February morning this year, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged an apology to the 'stolen generations' of his country's aboriginal population. And the world sat up and listened.

The Prime Minister addressed the blemished chapter of his nation's history that practised social engineering through the forcible separation of aboriginal children from their families and their assimilation into the white society. "We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians," he said. By reflecting on the past of a wronged people, Kevin Rudd renewed his nation's future and chalked out a new road to reconciliation. The visuals of a teary-eyed elderly aboriginal woman embracing the Prime Minister, after his poignant apology, struck a telling point to the world riveted in conflicts from the past and the present. It required a great deal of moral courage to apologise for a historical wrong on behalf of an entire nation, and Rudd did.

A few months later, in July 2008, Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian, after sustained reportage on the Bosnian concentration camps in the early 1990s, revisited Bosnia in the wake of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the man who orchestrated the Bosnian War crimes. Vulliamy recounted his meeting with Fikret Alic, the survivor from the Tronopolje concentration camp, in his Guardian article "I am waiting, No one has ever said sorry". It was the emaciated picture of Fikret Alic that became the iconic image of genocide and served as a wake up call to the world to end the pogrom in Bosnia. Vulliamy quotes Fikret Alic in the article: 'No one has ever said sorry for what they did. I don't know what it is about these people - I can show you five killers any time we go to Prijedor. Either they are proud of what they did, or pretend it did not happen. I am waiting for someone to admit what they did, or apologise, but they do not, they never will.'

When Kevin Rudd proclaimed "We say sorry" to Australia's aborigines, half way around the world, Fikret Alic, like other survivors and victims, yearned for an apology, to vindicate their suffering.

And somewhere in Turkey, a writer wanted his country to apologise for the massacre of Armenians and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire. Orhan Pamuk, the writer, was persecuted for "insulting Turkish identity." He was branded an enemy of the State.

Every grave, human-inflicted misery has carried with it an iconic image of suffering. Though these sufferings are spatially and temporally disconnected, the humiliation and pain they inflicted is essentially the same. Putrid memories of victim hood invariably carry with it burning memories of humiliation. Be they the terror-stricken image of Qutubuddin Ansari with folded palms, pleading for life during the Godhra riots in India, or the image of a naked Phan Thi Kim Phuc with a burnt back running hysterically after the Napalm attack in South Vietnam or the image of an emaciated Fikret Alic standing behind a barbed fence in a Tronopolje concentration camp in Bosnia ---- they are the images of terrible crimes against humanity that should not have happened.

It is the time of the year when we revisit the checkered history of human rights with its human wrongs. At the 60th anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a retrospection of the traversed path tempts us to reckon the number of unuttered apologies that may have healed scarred memories. Human rights are not just commemorative rights. They are not about covenants and conventions. They are also about acknowledging historical wrongs. That would be the first step towards reconciliation.

No apology is intense enough to undo the scars of the wrongs done. But every apology is powerful enough to secure the present and the future, by making it inclusive for the survivors. For them, it is an exercise in reclamation of a hijacked past and an obscure future.
"When there was everything to be done, we pretended to know nothing. Today, when there is so little left to do, we want to know everything" wrote Ed Vulliamy in his accounts on the Bosnian genocide.

The survivors are indeed waiting, in the submerged river valleys, behind the battlefronts, and in bunkers, for someone to say sorry.