US Apologies: Not an Easy Thing

Sometimes the contrition is clear-cut, as in President Bush`s letter of apology for the sinking of a Japanese fishing boat in February. Other expressions are more muted, as when former President Clinton told Africans that America`s history of slavery was wrong, without directly apologizing.

Now, Beijing is demanding an apology for the Navy spy plane that made an emergency landing in China after a collision with a Chinese fighter jet.

Secretary of State Colin Powell insists the United States has done nothing to warrant an apology, but he voiced "regret" Wednesday that the Chinese pilot died in the incident.

The dynamics of contrition were far different two years ago, when the United States rushed to apologize after NATO planes mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia.

Just hours after the bombs fell, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright paid a midnight visit to the Chinese Embassy in Washington to express "sincere apologies and condolences" for the attack, and to ask Chinese authorities to ensure the safety of Americans in China. But violent protests continued there as state media withheld reporting on U.S. and NATO apologies for four days.

Clinton offered his own condolences a week later when Chinese President Jiang Zemin finally agreed to speak with him.

The Chinese place a particularly high premium on apologies, especially from the West, said Peter Krough, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"They feel that historically they have been mistreated by the West, exploited by the West and humiliated by the West _ and they have," said Krough.

All around the world, though, apologies take on enormous importance in international affairs and carry huge political implications.

In 1968, it took an apology _ hollow, it turned out _ to win freedom for the crew of the USS Pueblo, a spy ship that had been captured and held by North Korea for 11 months.

The 82 crewmen were released only after the chief U.S. negotiator signed a statement saying the United States "solemnly apologizes" for allowing the ship to intrude into North Korean territory. Even before he signed the statement, Maj. Gen. Gilbert H. Woodward repudiated it, saying he was signing it "to free the crew and only to free the crew."

In some cases, the United States has balked at offering an outright apology while acceding to softer statements of regret.

Clinton, for one, offered a number of limited statements of contrition on matters of international affairs.

On a 1998 trip through Africa, he told schoolchildren in Uganda that "before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade, and we were wrong in that."

A day later, in Rwanda, Clinton told genocide survivors that, "We in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred in Rwanda in 1994."

The semantics of contrition can make all the difference.

Such was the case after the Army acknowledged this year that American soldiers shot and killed Korean refugees early in the Korean War.

Clinton issued a statement saying, "On behalf of the United States of America, I deeply regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri in late July 1950."

Some survivors complained that he hadn`t really apologized.

"I don`t think there`s any difference in the two words," Clinton responded. "They both mean that we are profoundly sorry for what happened and that things happened which were wrong."

But he still didn`t use the word "apologize."

(Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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Author: 6 ABC - Action News (AP)