Reuters
COPENHAGEN, March 9 – Denmark’s prime minister on Wednesday delivered a face-to-face apology to 6 residing victims of a Nineteen Fifties social experiment by which 22 Greenlandic kids had been taken from their households and despatched to Denmark to be built-in into Danish society.
The Inuit kids had been between 4 and 9 years previous once they had been shipped to Denmark, then the colonial energy, in 1951 to attempt to re-educate them as “little Danes”.
The kids had been presupposed to return to Greenland and be a part of a brand new Danish-speaking elite that may assist modernize the Arctic island’s Inuit inhabitants.
The experiment was a part of a broader effort by Denmark to persuade the United Nations that Greenland, a Danish colony till 1953, was an built-in a part of Denmark.
Denmark and different colonial powers had pledged to work in the direction of decolonization when becoming a member of the world physique in 1945.
“Your stories have touched us deeply and this is why Denmark today says the only word that is right to say: Sorry!,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen advised an viewers, which included the six survivors at a ceremony on the National Museum of Denmark.
“What you were exposed to was wrong. It was inhuman, it was unreasonable and it was heartless,” she mentioned.
The kids had been by no means despatched again to their households however had been both adopted by Danish households or despatched again to Greenland to be positioned in an orphanage, the place they had been pressured to talk Danish and had little or no contact with their kin.
“Our parents said yes to the trip but were hardly aware of what they agreed to,” mentioned Eva Illum, who was taken from her household again in 1951.
The grim experiment is a sore level within the relations between Greenland and Denmark.
“This is part of our common history … The truth has emerged and it is a truth which hurts to look back on,” Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede mentioned.
The overwhelming majority of Greenland’s 57,000 individuals are of Inuit respectable, thinly unfold out throughout the huge, barren North Atlantic island that may be a quarter the scale of the United States. Greenland stays a proper a part of the Kingdom of Denmark however has since gained huge autonomy and holds the fitting to declare independence.
Frederiksen despatched a written apology in December 2020 however delivered the apology to the six survivors in particular person for the primary time on Wednesday.
The post Denmark apologizes for taking Greenland kids for Nineteen Fifties social experiment first appeared on Umorr.
