It doesn’t take much to say sorry, and yet sorry seems to be the hardest word. Ask world leaders, or just Dear Leaders everywhere. It takes a lot, politically, legally and morally, to admit mistakes, misjudgments, errors, arrogance, cruelty and guilt, especially when the consequences of such errors are the loss of so many human lives.
This is October, and every October we’re reminded of the cruelty (you can twist it around so it becomes errors or blunders, but we won’t buy it) of the incidents in Oct 6, 1976 and Oct 14, 1973. This month the terror of the insane killings of protesters and students four decades ago returns to haunt us, with the vividness fading by the year, especially now when forgetfulness is the order of the day. And if any of the survivors, families of the victims and society at large still dream of someone showing responsibility — or at least apologising — maybe they just have to keep dreaming.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama personally apologised to the head of Doctors Without Borders for the airstrikes that hit a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, and killed at least 19 doctors and patients. It was a horrible mistake (the whole Afghanistan and Iraq fiascoes are also mistakes, but that’s another story), and the US once again looks like a heartless bully whose high-tech war machine is futile when it struck, of all places, the most innocent target. Mr Obama did the least of what he could do: as head of state and as a human being, he said sorry. Not that this is enough, not that this is acquittal of guilt and responsibility. The White House said its Defence Ministry will conduct a “fair investigation” of what happened — this sounds very much like Thailand, when the authority responsible for civilian deaths is in charge of investigating themselves.
Mr Obama will have to pay the political price for saying sorry; he knows it and yet he said it. Before this Kunduz calamity, he had already been branded a sorry guy, a “serial apologiser”, by his opponents, dating back to 2012 when he apologised for the burning of the Koran by American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Apparently to some politicians, not to mention military leaders in charge of pulling the trigger, “sorry” is a sinful term. To them, to apologise means to admit that you’re weak. In fact, when you really mean it, it often means you’re strong.
Sometimes it takes decades to muster that strength to express regret. Confessional hindsight requires the pathos of time and age, for the arrogance and blindness to be taken over by the bitterness of reality, or by the irrevocable weight of sin. In 2013, two Khmer Rouge top lieutenants Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan said they felt “deepest remorse” and, to one of the kin of the victims, “extremely sorry for the disappearance and extremely brutal killing of your father”. This came nearly 40 years after the atrocities they helped commit in Cambodia in the 1970s, which resulted in at least 1.7 million deaths.
At other times, regret comes with the knowledge that the speaker no longer has to bear any responsibility. Architect of the Vietnam War Robert McNamara, in a carefully worded interview in the 2003 documentary Fog of War, said he was “very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I’ve made errors”. Those errors meant the smell of napalm in the morning along with trails of Vietnamese and American deaths. Again, McNamara said it nearly 40 years after the terrible war, when such a Catholic confession entails only moral ramifications and not legal or political ones. He died six years after that.
If the perpetrators of such atrocities managed to say sorry, either sincerely or cynically, should we in Thailand still nurture some hope of hearing the hardest word? Some of those who tortured corpses and made a grotesque theatre out of the lifeless bodies on Oct 6, 1976 are still out there, as well as their commanders, snuggling in the warm clothes of national amnesia. Likewise, those who committed the terror of Oct 14, 1973; May 1992; Tak Bai and Krue Se in 2004 (some of them were promoted later); and Ratchaprasong in 2010, to name just a few.
But I don’t have much hope of hearing anything remotely remorseful. Actually, I have none. To expect an apology, we at least have to know from who. One of our great tragedies is the perpetual fog that still covers most of our historical events, the fog that blankets the crimes and also the corpses. Then you have the military machismo, the pompous ideology, and the moral arrogance of those in the seats of power — all of this seems only to grow more and more intense in our present climate rather than less. To say sorry doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you’re human. Do we have some of that around here?
Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.