Like many teenagers, 15-year-old Arnaq took a part-time job in a local shop to earn some money.
Appallingly, though, the store manager sexually assaulted her six times over the next two years – and then she became pregnant.
She had an abortion
Then, chillingly, after she had an abortion, doctors secretly inserted a contraceptive coil as part of a brutal, state-organised campaign by the Danish government to control the population in Greenland, its former colony.
The device, also known as an IUD, remained inside her for five years until it was discovered when – mystified by her inability to become pregnant – she went to see a doctor in 2002.
Her internal organ is damaged
Then, after its removal, she found to her horror that she could no longer have children due to damaged internal organs.
‘I still feel empty today – it’s like a bad dream,’ said Arnaq.
‘It really hurts that I feel I cannot become a full woman by giving birth to a child. It has taken me years to get over this. It’s only now that I am starting to realise why I have been so angry.’
She got emotional
No wonder this 41-year-old Greenlander is close to tears as we talk in a flat overlooking the harbour and snow-covered hills of Nuuk, capital of the world’s biggest island.
She suffered a terrible triple trauma: rape, forced birth control and then infertility.
Yet her tale, which defies belief considering Denmark’s reputation as one of the world’s most civilised and egalitarian nations, is far from unique.
Thousands more Greenland women were shockingly abused in this clandestine campaign that rode roughshod over medical ethics and human rights to slash the indigenous Inuit population, reduce teenage pregnancies and cut costs of ‘modernisation’ in a sordid saga of enforced development.
The grotesque practices
Now these grotesque practices – which started in the mid-1960s, ensnared half the child-bearing women at one point and continued with cases reported as recently as five years ago – are sparking outrage as the horrific scale of them emerges.
‘I use the word genocide,’ said Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam, one of two Greenland MPs in Denmark’s parliament, who says her people were targeted due to racist concerns that the costs of a generous Nordic welfare system were spiralling out of control on the island.
She accuses Denmark of trying to eradicate their Inuit culture and language – much like China’s brutal repression of Uighur minorities.
‘They said in parliament one of the primary goals was to save money and reduce the population. There’s no doubt the population has been reduced a lot.’
