Saying Sorry - States' (Non)Recognition of Violence

Our age has been deemed one of Apology by Roy L. Brooks, given the number of apologies offered by contemporary world leaders to various groups. In an academic context, Melissa Nobles has identified seventy-two public apologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (until 2007) from around the world.

Public apologies are a historically specific response to past and present violence and injustice. Elazar Barkan has identified morality and justice as exerting a strong presence in national politics and international diplomacy since the conclusion of World War II, and increasing since the end of the Cold War. What has followed is a ‘demand that nations act morally and acknowledge their own gross historical injustices'. Truth commissions, inquiries and investigations have a common focus on ‘stressing personal suffering and feeling'. In this political context, apologies have been offered, and Rhoda Howard-Hassmann and Mark Gibney suggest that, through them, states and social institutions showed ‘empathy to those they had harmed'. From the end of the twentieth century, Judith Brett classifies government apologies as being made ‘directly to the victims of state actions' rather than used as instruments of international diplomacy and peacekeeping. The possibility of a state apologising and assuming a moral persona is identified by Mark Finnane as a novel function of national governments since the 1960s.^[1107]

In addition to apologies offered, demands made for formal apologies also require attention.

Theorising apologies is a recent topic of scholarly attention. Melissa Nobles sees public apologies as future-focused symbolic gestures about the past, with implications for shaping politics. Jason Edwards has examined collective apologies as a rhetorical genre. Judith Brett identifies apologies as a government technique ‘to restore civic harmony at those moments when the wrongs of the past erupt into the present'.^[1109] Public apologies, and demands for them, reanimate the past at specific points, and while formal public apologies are a global trend (at times for global audiences) the meaning and impact of them are strongly tied to local and national contexts.^[1110] Examining specific apologies is vital to interrogate the meanings made of violent pasts through the apologies offered and the basis for them being offered at particular times.

There is currently widespread public remembering of historical abuse of children. One significant case is the over 170,000 children committed to the Irish industrial schools system between 1936 and 1970 due to poverty. Lindsey Earner-Byrne argues that the 1999 apology by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern to the children abused in these schools placed attention on responsibility and national narratives, rather than nuanced historical interrogation. Earner- Byrne argues the apology and debate functioned to compartmentalise blame, first with the Roman Catholic Church and then the state, and failed to open space for examining publicly and holistically the Irish society that facilitated the large-scale abuse of children within these institutions.^[1111] While there had been pressure to examine institutions like the industrial schools since the 1940s, alongside formal inquiries, it was not until the 1990s when widespread sexual abuse within the Catholic Church was being revealed and believed, accompanied by popular television documentaries revealing the abuse, that public interest created the political context for the state to respond with an apology.

Personal experiences of childhood abuse have not always found a receptive public space to be heard. Peter Tyrrell wrote a survivor memoir of his time in industrial schools in the early 1960s but was unable to secure publication. His campaigns to have his experiences recognised were ignored, disbelieved or thought of as blackmail. Tyrrell's death in 1967 was deemed a suicide and the memoir was published in 2006 after it was found amongst someone else's personal papers. His experiences and reporting of physical and sexual abuse were also included as evidence in the Child Abuse Commission in 2009. As Earner-Byrne notes, Tyrrell's ‘ability to write about this experience meant that he posthumously became a central witness to the realities of the system that has so damaged him'.^[1113] In this case we see the contingent nature of when victims of violence are listened to, and correspondingly spaces that emerge for violence to be heard and remembered rather than forgotten.

Johanna Skold and Shurlee Swain suggest that an increased emphasis on children's rights had played an important role in shaping apology politics. The 1990s was when Western political attention began to focus on historical abuse of children in out-of-home care. This interest saw formal avenues employed to document, collect testimony and make future focused recommendations about historical violence based on adult memories.

The limits of public apologies reveal how violence at the heart of settler colonial projects is (and is not) acknowledged. In Canada in 1998, ten years before the formal apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools was offered by the prime minister, a ‘Statement of Reconciliation' was made in Ottawa, in response to the abuses of Indigenous children in residential schools. Jeff Corntassel and Cindy Holder note the ‘nondescript and guarded language' in this statement that described residential schools' legacy. The only explicit apology offered was ‘to those individuals who experienced the tragedy of sexual and physical abuse at residential schools'.^[1115] No apology was given for impacts of a cultural, political, economic or psychological nature.

The language used to describe historical violence in apologies reveals the significance placed upon that violence. On 26 May 1997, the day the ‘National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families' was tabled in the Australian Federal Parliament, Prime Minister John Howard spoke at the opening of the Australian Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne. He expressed his personal ‘deep sorrow for those of my fellow Australians who suffered injustices under the practices of past generations towards indigenous people' and for the ‘hurt and trauma many people...

Official apologies produce a public discursive space within which meaning is made. Ruth Rubio-Marian, examining responses to sexual and reproductive violence committed against women, argues this interpretative context is vital to provide victims with ‘due recognition and some form of repair'.^[1117] One example of historical sexual violence in which continued demands for apology have been made is the case of survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II. While evidence of the system of military prostitution had been available since the late 1940s, Vera Mackie notes a new discursive context was required for public debate. This came from the intellectual framework developed by feminist analysis of violence against women. From this, forces of gender, class and ethnicity were understood within the internationalised industry of prostitution, which included the military. This, Mackie argues, transformed activism around women's rights as human rights and developed a discursive space for past experiences of sexual violence to be recognised.^[1118] From the early 1990s survivors ofJapanese military sexual slavery from Korea (and later from China, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Indonesia) actively demanded an apology and compensa­tion.