Horrifying tragedies of history await closure

On April 24, the US President, in a historic move, issued a statement that finally recognised the 1915 Ottoman-era large-scale massacre of the Armenians as ‘genocide’. “We honour the victims of the Meds Yeghern so that the horrors of what happened are never lost to history. And we remember so that we remain ever-vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all its forms,” President Biden said.

The statement sets the stage for catching up with the 106-year-old horrific crimes committed against the Armenians by the Turks at the start of World War I. The statement is full of positivity as it seeks to honour the story of the Armenians, acknowledge their pain and affirm the history. As it happens in all cases wherein crimes were committed in the distant past, the present generation is called upon to work for a decent closure of the past chapter.

The significance of such crimes could be understood from our own painful colonial-era chapter of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on April 13, 1919, that still awaits, after 102 years, an acknowledgement, apology and reparation by the British Government.

The US recognition has brought to the fore the memories of April 24, 1915: the arrest of Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Constantinople by the Ottoman authorities. It led to 1.5 million Armenians being deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination. Those who survived were forced to leave and find shelters around the world, including in the US. This US action is decisive as regards placing the successor state of Turkey in a quandary to come out decisively by acknowledging the wrongs of the Ottoman Empire. Hopefully, a Turkish apology to the Armenians would come soon.

In recent times, sovereign states have been proffering apologies and acknowledging remorse over the past wrongs. Their heads have sought to tender an ‘apology’ for the past wrongs that had traumatised scores of peoples. They include an apology tendered to indigenous populations (2008) by Australia; to Native Hawaiians (1993) by the US; the regret expressed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997) for the inaction of the British Government during the Irish potato famine. Several states have apologised for wrongs committed during World War II, such as East Germany’s apology (1990) to Israel and Jews for the Holocaust, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s apology (2020) for the persecution of Jewish victims and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s apology (2019) to Poland.

The tendering of an apology is not limited to states. A sweeping apology was issued by Pope John Paul II (2000) for the Catholic Church’s 2,000 years’ history of violence and persecution against Jews, heretics, women, gypsies and native peoples. In 2015, Pope Francis delivered an apology for the role played by the Roman Catholic Church “in the oppression of South America during the era of Spanish colonialism.”

The Japanese Government expressed ‘most sincere apologies and remorse’ on December 28, 2015 to the Republic of Korea for the abuse of ‘comfort women’ in World War II. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau did it (2016) for the 1914 Komagata Maru incident wherein 376 immigrants from Punjab were denied entry. In a dramatic move, the US President visited (May 27, 2016) the Hiroshima bomb site after 71 years.

Apology is a time-tested remedy of international law. Every wrongful act of a State which constitutes a breach of its obligations entails international responsibility of that State. In 2001, the International Law Commission adopted articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts. They call upon the States to make full reparation for the injury caused by their conduct. The modes of reparation could include restitution, compensation, or satisfaction, either singly or together.

The law recognises apology as a formal remedy for its violations under the overarching criteria of satisfaction. Article 37 provides that the State responsible for an internationally wrongful act is under an obligation to give satisfaction for the injury caused by that act. Any such satisfaction may consist in “an acknowledgement of the breach, an expression of regret, a formal apology or another appropriate modality.”

Interestingly, time and again, states have joined the chorus of ‘apology’ through the use of words such as ‘regret’, ‘shame’, ‘remorse’, ‘sorry’ and ‘failure’ for the past wrongs. They seek rapprochement by conveying a feeling of remorse. It could lead to full attribution of state responsibility.

What do we make of these efforts by a State wherein the present generation seeks to come to terms with the actions of the past generation? It shows that though the past cannot be re-written, at least a verbal or written expression of regret could be employed to heal the festering wounds. The fact, however, remains that such feeble effort cannot completely erase past memories. Still, it would provide a means to rationalise the process of forgiveness and, eventually, closure of the past wrong.

In view of this, a State could tender an apology to diffuse the diplomatic-legal row. Does it constitute an effective means of redress for historic injustice or wrongful actions? Whenever someone seeks to “claim the advantages created by previous generations (they) must also accept a responsibility to offer redress for the injustices they inflicted.” Historical wrongs have no straightforward solution as they are dependent on the trust quotient between the apologiser and to whom the apology is tendered. Ironically, apologies have often been mere ‘tokenism’. In some cases, they could lack genuineness due to failure to acknowledge the full extent of the harm caused or use of evasive language. Such an apology could be rejected by future generations as being inadequate and inappropriate. In the case of ‘comfort women’, the compensation and ‘most sincere apologies and remorse’ expressed by Japan was rejected by many survivors and the Korean government as being ‘not enough’.

Thus, even if history cannot be re-written, a formal apology can heal festering wounds left from the past wrongs. Closure for the past incidents is essential for allowing people to move on without recriminations. A sincere apology, to a large extent, helps to achieve this goal. This is more so in the case of historical injustices wherein the passage of time may have closed other conventional modes of achieving justice. “In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people,” Nelson Mandela said.

We can only hope that the US move on the Armenian genocide will help in moving the British Government to come out to acknowledge and formally apologise in the House of Commons for the 1919 massacre.