Most of them did not hear the apology
By Bouthaina Shaaban
7 July 2008
After two long centuries of a war of genocide against the indigenous people in both Australia and Canada through which their language and culture, and even their physical existence, was liquidated, and after few months of the apology of the Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd from the Aborigines (Feb. 2008), the Prime Minister of Canada Stephen Harper followed suit and apologized from a very small remnant of the native Indians who are still alive, though scarred for life. In his address to the Canadian Parliament Harper said: "the burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too long". But what Harper did not say is that hundreds of thousands of the Aborigines will not hear this apology and that their languages, cultures, arts and ways of lives are impossible to retrieve. Mr. Harper said: "Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominate culture. These objectives were based on the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal… tragically. (Some of these children died while attending residential schools and others never returned home" indeed some sought as it was infamously said 'to kill the Indian in the child'. Although torture and killing of the indigenous people lasted for two centuries under misleading terminology such as "special residential schools for native children "the apology came too little, too late, after it became certain that languages, culture and the historical identity of the aborigines were all destroyed.
Those glowing apologies which are highlighted to show the civilized entity of the state cannot hide the fact that Canada, Australia and the United States of America were founded on the remnants of spiritual and rich cultures which were present on these lands for thousands of years before the arrival of white settlers. The strategy of settlers was in essence a racist strategy that considered the native Indians and Aborigines as inferior and unequal, hence the legitimate acts to liquidate them and kill their language, history and cultures.
The same scenario is adopted today by the Israeli settlers against indigenous Palestinian people with the same racist attitude and the same focus on killing children, destroying families and partitioning villages, fields and cities, and causing, in the process, an immense human suffering. If the Canadian, Australian and the U.S governments (although the U.S did not apologize yet) are truly serious in their apology to the native aborigines, they should express their sorrow in a determined act not to allow this to happen again anywhere in the world, and to take the avant-garde stand against genocide and collective punishment. In this case, they should pay a visit to Gaza and the West Bank and to the Palestinians of 1948 to see their measures and policies revisited in Palestine and try to stop them before it become too late and useless to apologize because the people for whom the apology is offered had already been totally destroyed,. As Uri Avnery said: "Apologizing for past wrongs has become a part of modern political culture" (The first step towards lasting peace? An Apology, Counterpunch, June 17, 2008). In order to be real and effective, an apology should be made to people who could still benefit from it and redeem their situations. The Aborigines are almost wiped out. May the sense of regret, if it is genuine, be translated into action to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people. Here the apology may be useful to a people who are still able to reconstruct their lives, not to support Israeli settlement and policies of transfer and genocide and then apologize when the Palestinians are no more!!