“I don’t believe we can achieve the more equal and proper relationship that many of us desire unless we dare opening even the darkest chapters,” Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, dressed all in black, said at a ceremony in Greenland’s capital Nuuk.

Between the late 1960s and 1992, Danish authorities aimed to reduce the Inuit birth rate by forcing around 4,500 women to wear an intrauterine device without their consent. Source: AP / Mads Claus Rasmussen

The ceremony marks another step in Denmark’s accelerated efforts to repair ties with Greenland, following United States President Donald Trump’s recent vows to assert control over the vast, resource-rich Arctic island for security reasons.

“Therefore, the apology I offer today is not only about the past. It is also about our present and our future. About the mutual trust that must exist between us,” Frederiksen told victims, some of whom wiped tears from their faces.

Physical and psychological scars

“Receiving an apology does not mean that we accept what has happened. We are here today because we do not accept what has happened,” Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, who also wore black.