Denmark's prime minister on Wednesday delivered a face-to-face apology to 6 dwelling victims of a Nineteen Fifties social experiment during which 22 Greenlandic kids have been taken from their households and despatched to Denmark to be built-in into Danish society.
The Inuit kids have been between 4 and 9 years outdated after they have been shipped to Denmark, then the colonial energy, in 1951 to attempt to re-educate them as "little Danes."
The youngsters have been imagined 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 tales have touched us deeply and for this reason Denmark right now says the one phrase that's proper to say: Sorry!," Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen advised an viewers that included the six survivors at a ceremony on the Nationwide Museum of Denmark.
"What you have been uncovered to was unsuitable. It was inhuman, it was unreasonable and it was heartless," she stated.
The youngsters have been by no means despatched again to their households however have been both adopted by Danish households or despatched again to Greenland to be positioned in an orphanage, the place they have been pressured to talk Danish and had little or no contact with their family.
"Our dad and mom stated sure to the journey however have been hardly conscious of what they agreed to," stated 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.
"That is a part of our widespread historical past … The reality has emerged and it's a reality which hurts to look again on," Greenland's Prime Minister Mute Egede stated.
The overwhelming majority of Greenland’s 57,000 persons are of Inuit descent, thinly unfold out throughout the huge, barren North Atlantic island that may be a quarter the scale of the US. Greenland stays a proper a part of the Kingdom of Denmark however has since gained vast autonomy and holds the appropriate to declare independence.
Frederiksen despatched a written apology in December 2020 however delivered the apology to the six survivors in individual for the primary time on Wednesday.
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