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[quote=JCNILE123,270100]'Britain should apologise to Aborigines'
By Nick Squires in Sydney
Last Updated: 2:19pm GMT 13/02/2008
Britain is facing demands to join Australia in apologising to Aborigines who were snatched from their families as children, after Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, spoke of removing a "great stain from the nation’s soul".
In a speech in parliament in Canberra, Mr Rudd delivered an historic apology to the tens of thousands of Aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their parents under an official policy of racial assimilation from the 1880s to 1970.

Using the word sorry three times in his address, Mr Rudd apologised for "the indignity and degradation inflicted on a proud people" and spoke of "one of the darkest chapters in Australia's history".
As the former colonial power until the Australian colonies came together as a federation in 1901, Britain should also apologise for Aboriginal children being sent to foster families and institutions, said prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC. 
Mr Robertson, an Australian based in London, said Britain bore a "heavy historic responsibility" because colonial authorities had created an office known as the Protector of Aborigines, which oversaw the removal of mixed-race children. 
The policy was based on the belief that "full-blood" Aborigines would eventually die out and that "half-caste" children could be integrated into white society. Aboriginality would be bred out over successive generations by pairing indigenous women with white men. 
"The point I make in calling on the British government to endorse the apology is not only were the British responsible, for example, in wiping out the Tasmanian Aborigines, which was the worst form of genocide, but [so were] English intellectuals who inspired the assimilation policies that led to the Stolen Generation," Mr Robertson told Australian Associated Press.
He said the fate of Aboriginal children wrenched from their families should "touch a guilty nerve" in the UK. 
Aboriginal leaders supported the call for British atonement. 
"It’s something we would welcome. The British should acknowledge the role they played in the dispossession of Aborigines and in the policy of removing children," said Michael Mansell, a prominent Aboriginal lawyer and activist from Tasmania. 
"The English have certainly got blood on their hands and owe Aborigines an apology for the way they treated them. They shot our people and hunted them on horseback. A country is all the richer if it can face up to the wrongs of its past."
He said stories of children being forcibly taken from their sobbing mothers, as documented in an official report in 1997, were deeply poignant. 
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