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Showing posts from March, 2010

Saying Sorry in Turkey and Armenia

Apologies have become a popular way of addressing historical wrongs in Australia and in other places. It's just over two years since the Australian Prime Minister issued his formal apology to the stolen generation , those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forcibly removed from their families and communities. Since then there's been an apology to people brought up in State institutions. The British government recently apologised to people forced to emigrate to Australia as children and live in awful, exploitative "orphanages" even though most weren't orphans. These apologies don't necessarily change people's situation, but they make them feel vindicated, acknowledging publicly the wrong they knew had been done to them. Apparently apologies aren't so popular in Turkey. A festering sore in that part of the world has been publicised this week, bizarrely, by a resolution of the US Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs , calling on the US