On 2 June 2007, Tony Blair offered an apology for the role
of the British government in the Irish Potato Famine 150 years earlier. To some it seemed strange that Blair should
be holding himself and his government accountable for the actions of long-dead
politicians wholly unconnected with him.
If I bump into someone in the street, it is only right that I should
apologise to them. But no one would
expect me to apologise to them on behalf of someone I’d never met who happened
to bump into them the previous week.
The question of how states should address past wrongs is a
thorny one. Issuing a formal apology is
a popular recourse, but the empty symbolism does little to alleviate the suffering of
victims. Financial compensation is another option, but it can become costly and open too many
long-buried cans of worms. Who should be
paid and is it possible to place a monetary value on their suffering? How far should we delve back into history
when requesting reparations? Should the
French start paying us for the trauma inflicted by William the Conqueror? And should governments be paying at all? Should not the individuals responsible be
held to account for their actions?
Individual culpability has been the approach favoured in the case of the
Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Serbia's membership of the European
Union has even been conditioned on the arrest of war criminals indicted by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The arrest of Bosnian Serb military leader
Ratko Mladić in May 2011, followed by that of Croatian Serb fugitive Goran
Hadžić in July of the same year, the last indictees still at large, removed the final barriers to Serbia’s EU accession and their membership is expected in the near future. But these arrests of high profile
war criminals such as Mladić and Radovan Karadžić have done little to bring
closure to Bosnia. Nor have the arrests
and sentences by the ICTY of many other Bosnian military commanders.
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Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić at his trial in
The Hague. A verdict is expected in October 2015.
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The ICTY is the largest and lengthiest attempt to
bring individuals involved in war to justice, far surpassing the Nuremberg
Trials of the 1940s, but it has been plagued by controversy since its
establishment in 1993. Long trials,
endless bureaucracy and allegations of bias from all sides mean that the
judgements, when they are reached, are viewed with suspicion, and the Tribunal
has done little to heal the deep wounds of the Yugoslav successor states. Many are still smarting from the death of Slobodan Milošević, Serbian President during the 1990s, in his cell in The
Hague in 2006, before a verdict could be reached. The ICTY acquitted Bosniak military leader Naser
Orić of war crimes in 2008, only for him to be re-arrested earlier this month
by Swiss forces on a warrant issued by the Serbian Justice Department, timed to
coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica Massacre by Serb
forces and signalling that any sort of resolution to the tensions in Bosnia is
a long way off.
In a country similarly troubled by historic divisions and simmering tensions, there have been calls for an amnesty on criminal prosecutions. In 2013, Northern Ireland’s Attorney General,
John Larkin, proposed that there should be no more prosecutions for Troubles-related murders, stating that “the prospects of conviction diminish, perhaps exponentially, with each passing year” and therefore “the time has come to think about putting a line, set at Good Friday 1998, with respect to prosecutions, inquests and other inquiries.”
He denied it was amnesty, since the crimes
would still be considered crimes, but that no criminal proceedings could take
place with respect to them, yet his views were still contentious. Those opposed protested that victims are
entitled to justice regardless of the passing of time. This may be true, but will long, drawn-out
criminal proceedings and digging through the ghosts of the past really bring
justice, or any sense of peace to Northern Ireland? Perhaps there is a time to draw
a line under the past and start anew.
Or perhaps money cures all ill. The British government set a strange
precedent back in June 2013 when it paid out £20 million to Kenyans tortured by
British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s, with William
Hague telling the House of Commons: “The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.” Despite paying out around £3000 to each
living victim, Hague stated firmly that “Britain still did not accept that it was legally liable for the actions of what was a colonial administration in government.” Instead, and interestingly, he conferred the
legal liability onto the Kenyan Republic, who inherited it from the colonial
administration upon independence in 1963.
All of which seems like an easy get-out clause – has Britain gifted all
responsibility for its oppression of native populations during the Age of
Empire to the successor states? How
convenient. Soon the Indian government
will be able to pay themselves back for their suffering under British rule. But all this masks the question of whether
we, the British tax payers, should be held responsible and made to pay for
events which happened before many of us were born and in which we played no part?
It’s a question that often rears it head in the USA with regards
to the issue of slavery reparations. The
economic status of many African Americans and the telling statistic that white Americans earn on
average 22% more than them, is said to be a lingering financial impact of
slavery and is used to support the argument that descendants of slaves deserve
financial compensation from the US government.
It wasn’t until July 2008 that the US House of Representatives even
bothered to apologise for the travesty of slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow
laws. It was nearly a year before the
Senate passed a similar resolution, in June 2009, apologising for the
“fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery.” However, the resolution offered little more
than hollow platitudes since it also explicitly stated that the the apology
could not be used as a basis for restitution claims. Opponents of reparations argue that the
historic wrong of slavery is beyond repair since the actual slaves are now
dead. Others argue that the sheer number
of African Americans, which at 42 million represents 14% of the US population, makes paying reparations unfeasible, and the money could be more usefully spent on funding state
welfare. And others are worried about
setting an expensive precedent. Native
American peoples also have a strong case for reparations, as do many other minority
groups.
In Australia, the government has had similar concerns in relation
to its Aboriginal population. In
February 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, apologised “for the past wrongs caused by successive governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population.”
His apology particularly singled out the
‘Stolen Generation’; the thousands of children forcibly removed from their
families. However, the refusal to
accompany the apology with compensation angered many Aboriginal leaders. The 460,000 Aborigines living in Australia
make up 2% of the population, but they experience far higher rates of infant
mortality, drug abuse, alcoholism and unemployment than the rest of the
population. As with the African American
population, this is a financial and social hangover from previous
discriminatory policies, for which many feel they deserve financial
reimbursement.
When it comes to rehabilitation and reparations, there is no
better case study than Germany. Both
East and West Germany were forced to pay reparations to Israel and the World
Jewish Congress for property confiscated under the Nuremberg Laws, for forced
labour and for persecution (though no compensation was paid to the relatives of
those Jews killed during the Holocaust).
Yugoslavia was paid $8 million for forced human experimentation and given
$36 billion in industrial equipment, and Poland received DM1.3 million in 1975
as recompense for Nazi oppression and atrocities.
German reparations to the Soviet Union, on the other hand,
were paid in the form of forced labour, which returns us to the matter of
whether it should be individuals or states that are held accountable for atrocities. The Nuremberg Trials brought individuals
within the Nazi high command to justice, but lingering hostility existed
towards the majority of the German population who had colluded with and served
the Nazi regime. Germans have had to work hard to distance themselves from Nazi connotations. Even now, 70 years
after the end of the war, Germany is making an effort to hold the Nazis to
account for their actions, as demonstrated by the ongoing trial of former
Auschwitz prison guard Oskar Groening.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel speaks with
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during recent
talks in Brussels
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In terms of its international reputation, Germany has made a
miraculous recovery. It has paid its
debts and gone from an internationally administered, fractured state to a
European economic powerhouse in just two and half decades. Taking the lead in the Eurozone crisis and
offering a strong, stable economy in the heart of Europe, it is fair to say
that Germany has been fully rehabilitated, making a strong case for the payment of reparations and a commitment to bring individual war criminals to justice.
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