Sorry, Elton John would have it, seems to be the hardest word. Not least for political leaders righting painful historical wrongs. David Cameron’s 2010 apology for Bloody Sunday took 38 years to come, but in the end, to the British prime minister’s credit, was generous and unequivocal and provided considerable comfort to families of survivors.
And on Thursday in the Commons Foreign Secretary William Hague, 60 years on, produced another remarkable apology, expressing "sincere regret" to torture survivors of the vast network of prison camps that the British established in Kenya during the bloody 1950s Mau Mau insurgency. He announced compensation of €16.3 million to 5,228 claimants.
Both apologies were particularly difficult admissions that the British government and its army had behaved appallingly badly. The Kenyan award is the first major compensation payment arising from official crimes committed as Britain withdrew from empire, and both apologies set precedents that will raise expectations for more of the same in countries like Cyprus and Guyana where British anti-insurgency operations raised serious human rights issues.
The Kenyan apology came on the foot of hard-defended legal action and a landmark London High Court ruling last October which gave three torture victims the right to sue. Claimants accused British forces of beating, torturing, raping and even castrating people in custody, abuses which were known of and, implicitly, sanctioned at the highest levels of the British government. Significant numbers were murdered whiele there are accounts of some prisoners being roasted alive.
The eight-year conflict, a brutal rearguard action against decolonisation, saw up to 90,000 killed or injured. Some 100,000, mainly Kikuyu, were detained, and while some were supporters or members of the "terrorist" Mau Mau, many were victims of collective punishment imposed by the authorities on large parts of the country. Among those who suffered severe abuse was Hussein Onyango Obama, grandfather of Barack Obama. And one of the three claimants, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, gave evidence of being held for nine years, much in manacles, and beaten unconscious during notorious massacre at a camp in which 11 died.
“The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,” Mr Hague said. “The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and they marred Kenya’s progress toward independence.”
In Nairobi on Thursday a group of 200 elderly Kikuyu survivors heard the British high commissioner read the Hague apology. Many were in tears. and it is reported some gasped in surprise and cheered. Others burst into song. Belatedly, right was being done. Closure at last.