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The 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland (sometimes called “The Troubles”) officially ended with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) on April 10, 1998. On its opening page, the GFA says:

We must never forget those who died or were injured, and their families. But we can best honor them with a new beginning, in which we are firmly dedicated to achieving reconciliation, tolerance and mutual trust, and to protecting and defending the human rights of all.

However, as widely reported The Canary, Britain’s clandestine role in this conflict and its reluctance to accept responsibility for its actions made “reconciliation” and “a fresh start” virtually impossible. Additionally, in July 2021, the UK government announced a command document that proposed a statute of limitations. If approved, it would mean amnesty from criminal prosecution for British military personnel as well as loyalist and Republican paramilitaries who fought in the conflict. Victims’ activists from all political walks of life have condemned such an amnesty. The Irish government thinks it could even ‘re-traumatize’ victims of the conflict

As the GFA’s 24th anniversary approaches, The Canary is aimed at people from different northern communities. They are campaigning for justice for the victims of this conflict, and they are determined that the British government’s command document will not take away their right to truth or justice. So over the next few weeks, representatives from the South East Fermanagh Foundation (SEFF), Pat Finucane Center (PFC), Paper Trail, WAVE Trauma Centre, victims activist Raymond McCord and Relatives for Justice will speak to The Canary. They will tell us what they think went wrong and how they would like to see the victims of this conflict honored from now on.

Have we honored the victims?

Paul O’Connor, head of advocacy at the PFC, believes the victims have not been honoured. Instead, according to O’Connor, honoring the victims of conflict is:

one of the many broken promises of the Good Friday Agreement… what we have seen is various UK administrations just kicking the can. They don’t want to deal with it. It could have been treated many years ago.

He believes that through their command document, the British are:

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make a very determined effort, at this point, to close it completely [legacy resolution] down.

Kenny Donaldson is director of services at SEFF. Commenting on how the GFA honored the victims of the conflict, Donaldson said:

for all the difficult aspects that were in this agreement, at least it was open and transparent about what people were voting for, in a sense.

However, he believes that since then a lot has happened without the approval of the people. There have been a lot of “secret things done under the table to keep people bought into a so called process”. Thus, the victims and survivors have become the “collateral damage” of the conflict. As a result, it was the victims who made compromises and had to deal with the pain. Donaldson added that in 1998, people who stopped the violence received praise. While the victims had to bear the injustice of what had not been resolved. As a result, we had:

two Northern Ireland grow, since that time.

Victims want to know

Donaldson opposes the British government’s proposals for a statute of limitations, regardless of the role played by anyone on either side in the dispute. Instead, Donaldson believes these people should be subject to the law. He believes it would be “very dangerous” to erase respect for the law and “replace it with a process of truth and information retrieval” (as the UK government is proposing), when we don’t know exactly what this process would entail. He says that what many victims want from a truth and information process is:

find out who pulled the trigger or detonated the bomb. And the likelihood of this being possible in any truth and information process is small. So what are you actually doing? You are once again defrauding these victims and survivors. And their desire for more will continue. We want justice to be on the table, but not symbolically or opaquely.

What is the problem here?

Donaldson thinks part of the problem could be that:

we are almost systemic liars, in Northern and Southern Ireland, or certainly systemic suppressors of information. And this at the institutional and organizational level, the Churches, throughout the period.

People don’t really see the benefit of being open and transparent about situations and really getting their dirty laundry out and dealing with it and then moving on and building again.

It’s almost like protecting the institution or protecting the organization at all costs, I think it’s built into the DNA of this place. Maybe it’s unfair, but I think there’s a thread running through it.

He thinks we need a culture change here, and that’s why SEFF found the Stormont House (SHA) agreement objectionable. It was filled with “constructive ambiguity and a level of choreography”, according to Donaldson. He said the SHA wanted to put “recognition statements” from the state and paramilitaries at the end of the process. While he felt it should have been “front and center at the start of the process”. By this he means:

no matter what human grievance, injustice or hurt one of us may feel, it never justifies resorting to violence and killing our neighbour.

Donaldson thinks the mentality of rejecting violence has still not been fully accepted in Ireland. And as long as that mentality exists, the potential for relapse into violence is there. He thinks that even though the weapons have been downgraded, the mindset has not.

O’Connor stated that a mechanism was needed that could achieve:

rigorous, independent, article two [of the European Convention on Human Rights] investigation of conflict-related deaths and provision of information to families. And it has to be a mechanism that has trust at all levels in various communities… It’s been proposed a number of times and then it’s been proposed in the Stormont House agreement… and a number of times we have agreements that are made , then the chords are broken.

He added:

It’s not rocket science, it’s actually not that hard to solve a lot of these problems… It can be solved if there is a will. I no longer believe that there is any will on the British side.

Additionally, he said successive UK governments have ensured there is no accountability for their actions. Whether it’s the British massacre in Malaysia, the Mau Mau detention camps in Kenya, the torture in Cyprus or the policy of hooded men and shooting to kill in Ireland:

They [the British government] have been absolutely consistent in ensuring there is impunity in effect

And the Irish government?

Donaldson wants the Irish government “to rise to the occasion”. For too long, according to Donaldson, he took the position of a “neutral observer”. He says it was not:

The Troubles in Northern Ireland…it was a problem across these two islands and the breakdown of relationships between people.

He added “if Dublin were serious about strongly opposing the [British government’s] amnesty issue,” he could start by creating a well-resourced legacy unit within An Garda Síochána (Irish Police). This would show what the Irish state is prepared to do, rather than simply:

sitting around and just waiting to see what comes from the UK. And I sometimes wonder… is there also a private stance, ‘we need to set up the mock fight guys but really there are some things that we don’t want to come to our door either’?

O’Connor believes:

the most important thing the Irish government could do is to unblock this bizarre situation in which An Garda Síochána and the Ministry of Justice do not share the information they have on the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and to other attacks in the Republic of Ireland, with the Operation Kenova team led by Jon Boutcher.

This sharing of this information was supposed to happen, but for some reason according to O’Connor, it was stopped “at the last minute”.

A de facto amnesty

O’Connor believes there has been a de facto amnesty for some time. He said the work carried out by the PFC had revealed “a secret and illegal agreement” between the British Army command and the chief constable of the RUC (the former name of the PSNI – the police service of North Ireland). This agreement ensured that the RUC would not investigate the killing of civilians by the army. The intention was for the RUC to interview civilian witnesses and for the army to interview military witnesses. But, according to O’Connor, the RUC did not interview the civilian witnesses. And when the Royal Military Police questioned soldiers after fatal shootings, they did so for administrative purposes. But they didn’t do it for criminal purposes. This therefore meant that none of these cases had been properly investigated.

He added that Brandon Lewis, the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, is the only secretary in perhaps 25 years that they have not met. He said it came from the British government’s insistence that the vast majority of killings by security forces were lawful. But the PFC points out that these killings weren’t even investigated, so they can’t say whether they were legal or not.

He believes there is now a dilemma for the British, as statements made by paratroopers about the killing of civilians have been ruled inadmissible in court because they were made without the presence of a lawyer. But this same right was not extended to the greatest number, in the 1970s:

when admissions was beaten in Castlereagh or Ballykelly… They just weren’t believed or maybe they were believed and the judge really didn’t care.

This creates a “circle of inequalities, a circle of injustices”. English:

deliberately failed to gather evidence and deliberately failed to enforce the rule of law when it came to their own actions. And they are now using their willful defaults and these illegal agreements to say that these statements cannot be used.

Could these proposals become law?

Neither O’Connor nor Donaldson believe that the British government’s amnesty proposals will go forward as outlined in the command document. In addition, US politicians oppose the proposals and Amnesty International has urged US President Joe Biden to make human rights the “cornerstone” of US-UK trade deals.

But it is clear that the British proposals have already damaged the relationship with victims’ activists. More importantly, it is clear that it has increased the suffering of people who have been waiting for justice for decades. The Canary will speak with two other activists next week.

Featured Image via On Demand News – YouTube Screenshot

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