“I needed him to tell the world”: People’s evaluation of political apologies for human rights violations in El Salvador, the Republic of Korea, and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Across the world, an increasing number of states or state representatives have offered apologies for human rights violations, particularly since the 1990s. There is debate, however, on how valuable such gestures are and what impact they have. To address this, we examined what the perspectives of victim community members and the general public are in this regard, in different parts of the world. We focused on the apologies for the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the Jeju 4.3 events in the Republic of Korea, and Bloody Sunday in the United Kingdom, whereby we conducted 127 in-depth interviews with members of victim communities and the general public in these countries. Using thematic analysis, we found across these three countries that participants from the victim group and the general public saw the apology as a meaningful event because it acknowledges the suffering of the victims and breaks the silence about past atrocities. This suggests that apologies may answer to a broadly shared need for recognition. Nevertheless, the apologies were also regarded as limited in terms of their overall role in reconciliation processes and the further changes that they generate. The article concludes by discussing this ambivalence, present in both the apology literature as among our participants’ responses across the world.