An apology for Australia’s aborigines

Aboriginal leaders welcomed on Thursday a new era of indigenous relations in Australia...

Aboriginal leaders welcomed on Thursday a new era of indigenous relations in Australia with a Government that plans to acknowledge their traditional land ownership and apologise for past injustices.

The first act of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s new Government will be to ask Parliament on February 13 to pass a motion apologising for past policies of removing mostly mixed-race children from Aboriginal mothers in a bid to make them grow up like white Australians.

A national inquiry into the so-called “stolen generations” found in 1997 that many children taken from their families suffered long-term psychological effects stemming from the loss of family and culture, and recommended that Parliament apologise.

A look at other formal apologies issued by governments to oppressed populations.

APOLOGIES

1998: Canada apologises to its native peoples for past acts of oppression, including decades of abuse at federally funded boarding schools whose goal was to sever Indian and Inuit youths from their culture and assimilate them in white society

1992: South African President F W de Klerk apologises for apartheid, marking the first time a White leader in the country expressed regret for the system of legalised segregation that allowed 5 million Whites to dominate 30 million Blacks

1990: The Soviet Union apologises for the murder of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers shot during World War II and buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest

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1988: The US Congress passes a law apologising to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II and offering US$20,000 payments to survivors

1951: West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer acknowledges the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust and the following year, Germany agrees to pay reparations to Israel. In 1990, the then East German Parliament issues an apology to Israel and all Jews

NO APOLOGIES

• The US has never issued a formal apology for the African slave trade or paid reparations to slave descendants. In 2007, Virginia became the first state to apologize for its involvement, followed by Alabama, Maryland and North Carolina. No state has offered reparations.

• The U.S. has never apologized to American Indians for past actions, including forced relocation and broken treaties and promises. American Indians have received compensation for their lands over the years, but no formal apology

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• Armenia has repeatedly requested an apology from Turkey for the killings of what historians estimate was up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I. Turkey maintains the toll has been inflated and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest

• China has accused Japan of not fully atoning for its invasions and occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s, including wartime atrocities like the Rape of Nanjing, in which Japanese troops massacred 300,000 people while taking the Chinese city in 1937